Lisa Cassidy

This paper argues that a post-pandemic return to in-person undergraduate philosophy instruction is an opportunity to have students engage in active learning by taking advantage of the physical classroom space. I recommend having students go to the chalkboard or dry erase board to write and draw together. While this is a decidedly retro active learning activity, going to the board is actually well-suited to the post-pandemic philosophy classroom. This paper outlines pedagogical support for having students go to the board and includes ten suggestions for board activities.

This paper argues that a post-pandemic return to in-person undergraduate philosophy instruction is an opportunity to have students engage in active learning by taking advantage of the physical classroom space. I recommend having students go to the chalkboard or dry erase board to write and draw together. While this is a decidedly retro active learning activity, going to the board is actually well-suited to the post-pandemic philosophy classroom. This paper outlines pedagogical support for having students go to the board and includes ten suggestions for board activities.

Healthcare decision-making within the pediatric population is a complex area to navigate for clinicians, parents and/or legal guardians, and children, and is even more complicated when children require intensive life-sustaining medical treatment (LSMT). Literature has highlighted the key ethical and legal principles that clinicians involved in bioethics committees should follow when making complex clinical decisions for this population, however, it can be unclear exactly where and how these decisions are made in practice. This paper provides an insight into how healthcare decision-making for children requiring LSMT is navigated within the medical and legal environment in Ireland. It uses a unique methodology consisting of a combination of secondary qualitative analysis of interview data obtained from clinicians involved in bioethics committees, and an analysis of Irish case law. The results of this paper highlight how clinicians navigate bioethical pediatric healthcare decision-making in Ireland, in the context of decisions regarding LSMT. The findings illustrate the complex balancing act that clinicians face in recognising and respecting parental autonomy in shared decision-making whilst being responsible for medical care that prioritises the best interests of the child, particularly from a legal standpoint. In some instances, this creates a decisional discord, and further training and professional supports are needed within clinical practice to promote the needs of children and to reduce stakeholder conflict.

Edited by Lisa Cassidy and Mianna Lotz, Philosophies of Adoption: Perspectives and Reflections explores contemporary philosophical analysis of adoption, providing insight into new and underexplored topics in the field. Three scholarly developments are central to the emerging philosophical discourse on adoption explored in this volume: a problematizing of the adoption triangle or "triad", a critique of the so-called “bio-normative family", and an attention to specific issues in transracial and First Nations adoption. The book’s contributors expand on all three of these areas by addressing a range of questions—How does being adopted shape self-knowledge and identity? What challenges arise at the intersection of race and adoption? What can be learned about epistemic justice, identity, and belonging from transracial adoption? What are the narratives told about adoption?—to show how current conditions and lived adoptee experiences give new shape, meaning, and importance to philosophical thinking about adoption. Showcasing a diversity of styles and standpoints, and organized into three core themes—situating adoption, knowing adoption, and telling adoption—this book grapples with the adoption experience, historical and recent developments in adoption practice, and emerging directions in philosophical scholarship.

This paper considers the bioethics of estranged biological kin, who are biologically related people not in contact with one another (due to adoption, abandonment, or other long-term estrangement). Specifically, I am interested in what is owed to estranged biological kin in the event of medical need. A survey of current bioethics demonstrates that most analyses are not prepared to reckon with the complications of having or being estranged biological kin. For example, adoptees might wonder if a lack of contact with biological kin could someday affect their medical care (or affect the medical care of their biological relatives). Estranged biological kin, such as adoptees, present us with a chance to think about human connection. After sketching several organ-donation and adoption tropes, I argue that a feminist analysis of vulnerability and dependency is helpful for understanding the confusing ties of estranged biological kin. I conclude by proposing a medical registry that would put adoptees and others in touch with their estranged biological kin on a medically as-needed basis.

My best friend Bernard died a few weeks ago after a long illness. We worked in adjacent offices teaching philosophy at our public state college for eighteen years. Bernard could simultaneously discuss Descartes's Third Meditation and cook you the perfect souffle while tossing scraps to his miniature poodle. He was a man of deep understanding, empathy, and humor. All who knew him were blessed.But the fact that I was Bernard's colleague, and nominally his chair, means my private grief is public.One of the qualities that made grieving a loved one during COVID-19 uniquely terrible was its total privacy. For many months, what should have been final hospice visits, or hours of sitting Shiva, or boisterous wakes and the...

A few years after feminist philosopher Donna Haraway proclaimed she'd rather be a cyborg than a goddess, the Borg marched across television screens in Star Trek: the Next Generation. The Borg is an organic‐technological hybrid collective that seeks perfection by forcefully incorporating other species into itself. Locutus is fully integrated into the collective Borg consciousness, sharing all of Picard's own knowledge and memories, so that the Borg can more efficiently assimilate humanity. The Picard/Locutus storyline allows to explore one of the core values of the Federation, namely autonomy. Hugh is with a band of Borg who accidentally assimilated his memories of individuality. Seven of Nine is the most developed Borg character in the Star Trek universe. Seven experiences autonomy and individuality as challenges, just as Locutus and Hugh do. In 1985, Donna Haraway published “A Cyborg Manifesto”, an essay that came at the forefront of third‐wave feminism.

A class in informal logic can be an opportunity to do more than just cover the basic material of the subject. Critical Thinking can also foster civic engagement as experiential learning—in the course’s readings, assignments, in-class activities and discussions, and tests. I favor an inclusive understanding of civic engagement: the course theme is engaging with the concerns of the civis. The argument made throughout here is that the civic engagement theme is a way of doing experiential learning in informal logic. I offer nine ideas for instructors here, which could be adopted wholesale or piecemeal, including how to do CSI.

This pedagogical study analyzes and attempts to solve some difficulties of teaching Immanuel Kant’s Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals. Even though there are obstacles to teaching Kant’s ethics, I argue that active learning techniques can overcome such obstacles. The active learning approach holds that students learn better by doing (in hands-on exercises) than just by listening (to a professor’s lectures). Twelve lesson plans are outlined in this article. The lesson plans are activities to explore and learn, then evaluate, and finally reflect and review Kant’s ethics.

This article urges teachers of philosophy to “remember Meno’s slave boy.” In Plato’s Meno, Socrates famously uses a stick to draw figures in the dust, andMeno’s uneducated slave boy (with some prompting by Socrates) grasps geometry. Plato uses this interaction to show that all learning is, in fact, recollection. Regardless of the merits of that position, Socrates’ conversation with the slave boy is an excellent demonstration that understanding is aided by appealing to the different talents or “intelligences” of students. Similarly, I advocate using stories and hand-drawn stick figure cartoons to teach philosophy.

The current state of global poverty presents citizens in the Global North with a moral crisis: Do we care? In this essay, I examine two competing moral accounts of why those in the North should or should not give care (in the form of charity) to impoverished peoples in the Global South. Nineteen years ago feminist philosopher Nel Noddings wrote in Caring that “we are not obliged to care for starving children in Africa” (1986, p. 86). Noddings’s work belongs to the arena of care ethics - the feminist philosophical view that morality is about responding to, caring for, and preventing harm to those particular people to whom one has emotional attachments. By contrast, Peter Singer’s recent work, One World, advances an impartialist view of morality, which demands that we dispassionately dispense aid to the most needy (2002, p.154). Thus this question needs answering: am I obliged to give care to desperately poor strangers, and if so, which moral framework (Singer's impartialism, or feminism’s care ethics) gives the best account of that obligation? I argue that as an American feminist I should care for Africans with whom I will never have a personal relationship. However, this obligation can be generated without relying on the impartialist understanding of morality.