Where the ethical action is

It is common to think of medical and ethical modes of thought as different in kind. In such terms, some clinical situations are made more complicated by an additional ethical component. Against this picture, we propose that medical and ethical modes of thought are not different in kind, but merely different aspects of what it means to be human. We further propose that clinicians are uniquely positioned to synthesise these two aspects without prior knowledge of philosophical ethics.

Time Is Money: The Effect of Mode-of-Thought on Financial Decision-Making

The dual-system approach holds that deliberative decisions and in-depth evaluation processes lead people to better financial decisions. However, research identifies situations where optimal economic decisions may stem from a more intuitive decision process. In the current work, we present three experimental studies that examined how these two modes-of-thought affect financial decisions. In Study 1, deliberative processes were indeed associated with better one-shot descriptive-based financial decisions. However, Study 2 showed that when participants were asked to make repeated decisions and were required to learn from their experience, the advantage of deliberative over intuitive processes was eliminated. In addition, when participants employed intuitive processes, the quality of their financial decisions improved significantly with experience. Finally, Study 3 showed that the deliberative processing style may lose its advantage when information is not fully available. Overall, these findings suggest that deliberation may contribute to financial decision-making in one-shot decisions. However, when information is lacking, and decisions are repetitive, intuitive processes might be just as good.

Move, eat, sleep, repeat: Living by rhythm with proactive self-tracking technologies

Proactive self-tracking is a proliferating digital media practice that involves gathering data about the body and the self outside a clinical healthcare setting. Various studies have noted that self-tracking technologies affect people's everyday modes of thought and action and stick to their lifeworlds because these technologies seek to promote “improved” modes of behaviour. We investigate how the specific devices and interfaces involved in self-tracking attract and prescribe rhythmicity into everyday lives and elaborate on how human bodies and technical systems of self-tracking interact rhythmically. We draw from new materialist ontology, combining it with Henri Lefebvre's method of rhythmanalysis and his notion of dressage. We employ a collaborative autoethnographical approach and engage with both of our personal fieldwork experiences in living with self-tracking devices. We argue that rhythmicity and dressage are fruitful analytical tools to use in understanding human–technology attachments as well as a variety of everyday struggles inherent in self-tracking practices.

The Ascetic Ideal

This book develops a reading of Nietzsche’s concept of ‘the ascetic ideal’, through which he tracks the evolution, mutation, and expansion of the system of slave moral values that he associates primarily with Judaeo-Christian religious belief through diverse fields of Western European culture—not just religion and morality, but aesthetics, science, and philosophy. The work of Stanley Cavell and Michael Fried, and its impact in the philosophy of film and literature, is central here, as is J. M.Coetzee’s on the philosophy of autobiography; Martin Heidegger’s critique of science and technology is also addressed. In so doing it also offers an interpretation of his genealogical method that aims to rebut standard criticisms of its nature, and to emphasize its potential for enhancing philosophical understanding more generally. The focus throughout is on developments in those fields which occurred after the end of Nietzsche’s intellectual career, and in particular on influential modes of thought and practice that have a contemporary significance. However, the goal is not simply to argue that Nietzsche’s diagnosis and critique retain considerable merit. It is also to show that Nietzsche is himself significantly indebted to the ideals he criticizes; and that this opens up a possibility of synthesizing elements of his approach with those drawn from its target. Hence, the book also tracks various ways in which the object of Nietzsche’s criticism has further mutated (just as his genealogical method would suggest), and in doing so has generated ways of pursuing the values central to asceticism that avoid Nietzsche’s criticisms.

Justifying Revolution

This work explores the patriot clergymen’s arguments for the legitimacy of political resistance to the British in the early stages of the American Revolution. It reconstructs the historical and theological background of the colonial clergymen, showing the continued impact that Stuart absolutism and Reformed resistance theory had on their political theology. As a corrective to previous scholarship, this work argues that the American clergymen’s rationale for political resistance in the eighteenth century developed in general continuity with a broad strand of Protestant thought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The arguments of Jonathan Mayhew and John Witherspoon are highlighted, along with a wide range of Whig clergyman on both sides of the Atlantic. The agreement that many British clergymen had with their colonial counterparts challenges the view that the American Revolution emerged from distinctly American modes of thought.

ENSAIO PARA O ACIDENTAL: A LOUCURA E A QUEDA EM RANCIÈRE, BAS JAN ADER E DOM QUIXOTE / Essay for the accidental: loucura and fall in Rancière, Bas Jan Ader and Dom Quixote

A partir de duas figuras que marcam a modernidade – René Descartes e dom Quixote – pensamos como configuram modos de pensamento diversos e opostos. Entre o método que busca o encadeamento causal das coisas e a errância do corpo entregue às aventuras da imaginação, o filósofo e o cavaleiro instauram um embate que não é aquele entre a razão e o sensível, mas sim, entre dois modos da razão. Nosso intuito é pensar, especialmente a partir de Jacques Rancière, como o cavaleiro errante teria aberto um novo campo da experiência sensível que denominamos acidental, cujo gesto é a recusa da lógica do encadeamento causal cartesiano. Damos a ver, ainda, o modo como o gesto inaugurado por dom Quixote será reverberado nos gestos do artista contemporâneo Bas Jan Ader, com seu empenho em buscar a queda tal qual dom Quixote buscara a loucura. O que surgiria com a recusa da causalidade no cavaleiro e no artista, em nossa hipótese, é uma mudança de estatuto da própria noção de acidente ou acidental que, deixando de ser considerado erro a ser evitado, passará a ser experienciado como a única possibilidade para um mundo pautado na contingência da vida.Palavras-chave: Heterogêneo sensível; Experiência acidental; Jacques Rancière; Errância; Modos de pensamento. AbstractBased on two figures that marks the modernity − René Descartes and Don Quixote − we think about how they configure different and opposite modes of thought. Between the method that seeks the causal chain of things and the wandering of the body given over to the adventures of the imagination, the philosopher and the knight establish a clash that is not that between reason and sensible, but between two modes of reason. We think, especialy from Jacques Rancière, how the errant knight would have opened up a new field of the sensible experience that we call accidental, whose gesture is the refusal of the logic of the Cartesian causal chain. We also show how the gesture inaugurated by Don Quixote will be reflected in the gestures of the contemporary artist Bas Jan Ader, with his efforts to seek the fall just as Don Quixote sought madness. What would arise with the refusal of causality in the rider and in the artist, in our hypothesis, is a change in the status of the very notion of accident or accidental that, no longer being considered as an error to be avoided, will now be experienced as the only possibility for a world based on the contingency of life.Keywords: Heterogeneous sensible; Accidental experience; Jacques Rancière; Wandering; Forms of thinking.

Perception in Aristotle’s Ethics

How do Aristotle’s empiricist views bear on the role perception plays for the virtuous? Do they point towards a certain kind of ethical particularism, according to which universal rules could never adequately codify virtuous behavior? I argue they do not. Virtuous agents always need perception to determine what to do, and it is inexpedient for them to articulate general rules of conduct, but this is not because it is in principle impossible to do so, or because virtuous conduct does not admit of theoretical treatment. Still, perception and experience do play an indispensable role in the development and deployment of practical wisdom. For our learning to be virtuous depends on first-hand, personal experience that theoretical modes of thought could not provide. I end by considering what a practically-oriented treatment of virtuous conduct would look like, and how we might conceive of its ethical significance.

How the discourse of albeism functions in Canadian immigration policy: undoing discrimination against persons with disabilities

This paper makes a strong case arguing that Canadian immigration policy discriminates against persons with disabilities and their families due to Ableist modes of thought. Ableism is a discourse that can be understood as humans’ capacity to be productive (El-Lahib, 2015). Immigration policies, such as the excessive demand clause, can forbid persons with disabilities to enter Canada since they may rely on health care or social services. The excessive demand clause does, however, make exceptions to persons and families who can prove they can incur the necessary costs associated with one’s “disability” (Government of Canada, 2016a). Though efforts have been made to make Canadian immigration policy more inclusive, immigration policies still discriminate against persons with disabilities (El-Lahib & Wehbi, 2012; Hanes, 2009). This paper emphasizes how the discourse of ableism hides from view the many ways persons with disabilities contribute to the economy and act as valued members of society. Keywords: Ableism; Disability; Canada; Immigration Policy; Neoliberalism

How the discourse of albeism functions in Canadian immigration policy: undoing discrimination against persons with disabilities

This paper makes a strong case arguing that Canadian immigration policy discriminates against persons with disabilities and their families due to Ableist modes of thought. Ableism is a discourse that can be understood as humans’ capacity to be productive (El-Lahib, 2015). Immigration policies, such as the excessive demand clause, can forbid persons with disabilities to enter Canada since they may rely on health care or social services. The excessive demand clause does, however, make exceptions to persons and families who can prove they can incur the necessary costs associated with one’s “disability” (Government of Canada, 2016a). Though efforts have been made to make Canadian immigration policy more inclusive, immigration policies still discriminate against persons with disabilities (El-Lahib & Wehbi, 2012; Hanes, 2009). This paper emphasizes how the discourse of ableism hides from view the many ways persons with disabilities contribute to the economy and act as valued members of society. Keywords: Ableism; Disability; Canada; Immigration Policy; Neoliberalism

The Places of Early Modern Criticism

What is criticism? And where is it to be found? Tracing the history of the development of early modern thinking about literature and the visual arts requires that one think about various kinds of place—material, textual, geographical—and the practices particular to those places. It also requires that those different places be brought into dialogue with each other. The essays in this volume place criticism in Britain, France, the Low Countries, Italy, and the New World; in letters, sermons, pictures, poems, plays, treatises, manuals, discourses, defences, and manuscript miscellanies; in philosophy, theology, grammar, rhetoric, logic, and poetics; in workshops, theatres, studios, galleries, private houses, city halls, salons, and bedchambers. They explore the hybrid genres, disciplines, modes of thought, lexicons, identities, and practices that emerge when criticism connects or moves between different places. They examine the operations of imagination, empathy, and analogy by which artists might imagine themselves in their characters’ places, or poets and painters, readers, viewers, or audience members might critically and creatively swap places. They interrogate, in various ways, the relationship between the places of learned humanist excavation, the passing of individual judgement, and the gaining of social experience. Often taking polemic as its subject matter, The Places of Early Modern Criticism also argues polemically for the necessity of looking afresh at the scope of criticism, and at what happens on its margins; and for interrogating our own critical practices and disciplinary methods by investigating their history.