S. Keller Anders

The doctorate forms the basis for academic careers and the regeneration of academia, and has increasingly become important for other sectors of society. The latter is reflected in efforts on institutional, national as well as supranational levels to change and adapt the doctoral degree to new expectations. As doctoral education is embedded in research, changes in governance and funding of research further affect the doctorate. The evaluation of the doctoral thesis appears, however, to have remained true to the academic tradition: an examination committee exercising their gatekeeping in a ceremonial setting. This study sets out to explore doctoral examination committees’ evaluation practices. Insights were gained through six focus group interviews with experienced examination committee members at three large research-intensive universities in Sweden. Of particular interest is how the object of evaluation is formed, the nature of the boundary-work conducted, and variations in examination practices related to different and changing conditions for research and doctoral education. Our results show how the object of evaluation emerges through a gradual interpretation of the thesis and defence, becoming more complex and nuanced as the process of evaluation progresses from its initial stages to the final closed discussions of the committee. The finalised object of evaluation, only fully present at the conclusion of the closed meeting and hence transient in nature, encompasses the research contribution, educational achievement, and academic competence of the candidate. Furthermore, the boundary-work conducted in this process often transcends the object of evaluation to include also supervision and the local context for doctoral education and research, and hence contributes to upholding, and potential changing, norms in research fields, educational contexts, and academia at large. This extended boundary-work intensified as problems and inconsistencies were discovered during the evaluation process. The ceremonial staging underscored the gravity of the decision and the extended boundary-work. Despite changing conditions for the doctorate, our findings highlight the importance of the practice of evaluation committees, and the disciplinary communities to which they belong, for upholding and negotiating norms in academia.

Background It is a common ethical challenge for ambulance clinicians to care for patients with impaired decision-making capacities while assessing and determining the degree of decision-making ability and considering ethical values. Ambulance clinicians’ ethical competence seems to be increasingly important in coping with such varied ethical dilemmas. Ethics rounds is a model designed to promote the development of ethical competence among clinicians. While standard in other contexts, to the best of our knowledge, it has not been applied within the ambulance service context. Thus, the aim of this study was to describe ambulance clinicians’ experiences of participating in ethics rounds. Methods This was a qualitative descriptive study, evaluating an intervention. Data were collected through sixteen interviews with ambulance clinicians who had participated in an intervention involving ethics rounds. The analysis was performed by use of content analysis. Results Two themes describe the participants’ experiences: (1) Reflecting freely within a given framework, and (2) Being surprised by new insights. The following categories form the basis of the themes; 1a) Gentle guidance by the facilitator, 1b) A comprehensible structure, 2a) New awareness in the face of ethical problems, and 2b) Shared learning through dialogue. Conclusion Incorporating structured ethics rounds seems to create a continuous development in ethical competence that may improve the quality of care in the ambulance service. Structured guidance and facilitated group reflections offer ambulance clinicians opportunities for both personal and professional development. An important prerequisite for the development of ethical competence is a well-educated facilitator. Consequently, this type of ethics rounds may be considered a useful pedagogical model for the development of ethical competence in the ambulance service.

Maxim Fetissenko (2011) argues that the animal rights movement needs a new rhetorical strategy focusing on human health benefits and environmental preservation rather than on moral argumentation. Against this, I claim that the movement has not overused but rather has downplayed moral argumentation. Instead of promoting its real agenda, the movement has often diminished the issue of animal oppression and implicated itself in the reproduction of speciesism. If our goal is to abolish speciesist oppression, we should work consistently to make alternative identities and values available to people rather than opting for illusory shortcuts that do not disturb the speciesist social order.

The book under review offers a novel approach to politicizing the "animal issue." Drawing on liberal citizenship theory, the authors argue that key concepts of international justice such as "citizen," "denizen," and "sovereignty" may be mapped onto human-animal relations in order to protect individual animal rights as well as ecosystem integrity. The ambition is also to overcome some well-known problems of traditional animal rights theory in relation to ecological concerns. Yet the argument that ecosystems, like human states, ought to be seen as sovereign communities entails problematic concept-stretching that may undermine the individual rights it was meant to protect.

This article is about professional skill and what happens when work is instrumented with technology. The purpose is to contribute to the understanding of the professional skill, its role and development in an increasingly digitalized working life. The article also argues that more research is needed to understand what is at stake in terms of professional skill in the age of digital technology. The research on which the article is based shows that people adapt their way of thinking and perceiving reality to the technology they use. This means that people are gradually becoming more and more like machines. There is an ongoing intellectual inner mechanization, which can be contrasted with the outer mechanization of human muscle power that the industrial revolution entailed. The intellectually mechanized man observes and describes reality in the terms of technology and loses the ability to discern nuances and make qualified judgments gradually. The concepts of Turing’s man and functional autism capture these phenomena. Tacit engagement is a concept that captures the tacit knowledge that can only be expressed when people share physical space. The concept draws attention to the importance of the physical space and the body and what is at stake in terms of interpersonal knowledge in the wake of digital communication technology. It is not machines with supposedly human abilities and characteristics that we need to pay attention to when working life becomes increasingly digitalized, but people who gradually become like machines. What is required to safeguard the knowledge that is unique to man is bildung, i.e., to see the limits of the technology and the abstract theoretical models one uses. Art, classical literature, and drama, with their more plastic language, can reach areas where mathematics and natural science cannot reach.

The paper challenges the traditional assumption that the fragments of ‘Anonymus Iamblichi’ are best understood and interpreted against the intellectual and cultural background of the so-called ‘sophistic movement’. I begin by suggesting that we can distinguish, in the fragments, between two separate ‘discourses’ concerning nomos and its role in human life: an abstract ‘sophistic’ discourse, centered around the defense of nomos against the antinomian champions of natural pleonexia, and another, less abstract and more polemical discourse on nomos, which is aimed at the author’s contemporary Athens. I argue that the author’s engagement with well-known sophistic ideas is best understood as instrumental to his polemical agenda: it provides him with a powerful intellectual framework in which to articulate his criticism of democratic society, especially with regard to traditional notions of social ‘benefaction’ and the relation between rich and poor.

A common view of politics is that it is reducible to applied ethics. If politics, in a classic phrase, is about “who gets what, when, and how,” then the task of normative political theory would simply be to tell us who is morally entitled to get whatever the “what” is in that statement.This view, however, can easily reduce politics to a dizzying vortex of actions to assess from an ethical perspective. And while the task of moral philosophy may be precisely to articulate principles by which to pass such judgment, the focus of political theory lies elsewhere.To study and assess politics means attending to the institutional frameworks and structural conditions that enable or constrain human action to begin with. The question for normative political theory, in other words, is whether the organizational structure of a given society—embodied in its decision-making procedures, its distribution of power, and its defining patterns of production, reproduction, and distribution—is defensible or not.This question of justice in the institutional makeup of society has not been entirely ignored in animal rights literature. Animal advocates have always been clear about the massive societal ramifications of dismantling the speciesist order. Likewise, rights theorists and activists have often proposed concrete legal measures for improving the protection of animals, be it by piecemeal welfare reform in animal agriculture, by the abolition of specific practices in biomedical research, or by seeking the equivalent of human rights for select species like great apes or dolphins. The field has also seen fierce debate among animal advocates about the appropriate strategies for engaging with the state and the legal system.Nonetheless, most discussions have been about what it means to treat individual animals with respect, and not about what is required of a political order aspiring to just treatment of all species. In fact, it is only in the last decade that the issue of political justice has taken up a place at the center of animal ethics.Though the field is still developing, we may take it as a sign of maturity that it can now sport its first “short introduction” book: Alasdair Cochrane's Should Animals Have Political Rights? (2020). Its appearing as part of the Polity Press series Political Theory Today further attests to the book's timeliness.The starting point of Cochrane's book—and of political animal studies in general—is that political relations between humans and other animals are not optional but inevitable. Other animals live among us, and the way we organize our societies has a massive impact on the lives of other sentient animals both inside and outside the borders of our human communities. Assuming that these creatures possess intrinsic value as experiencing individuals with morally relevant interests, the question seems inescapable: What kind of polity can accommodate for the multispecies character of our communities and embody justice for all sentients? Cochrane's answer is largely the same as the one he offered in his previous book, Sentientist Politics: A Theory of Global Inter-Species Justice (Oxford University Press, 2018), where he laid out his full vision of a postnational and species-neutral “cosmozoopolis.”The present book is much more concentrated and written as an accessible introduction for readers new to the field. Over seven short chapters, Cochrane reconstructs his argument for an interspecies democracy by assessing a series of arguments and propositions drawn from previous literature on the topic.The first notion to be scrutinized is the popular idea that animal welfare legislation is enough to secure respect for animals. Here, Cochrane acknowledges that welfarism goes some way toward safeguarding animal interests, but he also stresses that its historical record has been disheartening. Welfarism protects animals only insofar as their protection coincides with human interests, and this is far from enough to ensure respect for the animals’ intrinsic value.The second line of argument tries to push beyond welfarism by claiming constitutional protection for animals. By this move, reformers hope to place animal interests on an equal footing with human interests and prevent the overriding of the former in the name of human entitlements (to property, artistic expression, freedom of science, and so forth). Looking at real-world cases, however, Cochrane finds that these constitutional provisions tend to be sidelined when they come into conflict with the interests of big agribusiness.Noting that more than constitutional protection is needed, Cochrane turns to a third set of arguments about legal personhood for animals. Winning personhood for animals would certainly constitute a radical step toward equalizing the interests of different species. Nonetheless, Cochrane argues that personhood alone would be insufficient. Intrinsic value, to him, cannot be fully respected unless animals win the political right to have their interests factor into society's articulation of the public good. As sentient beings, we can all make a claim on the political communities we are part of to not only recognize us as members but furnish us with the means to live well.The fourth and final step for Cochrane is to argue that democratic representation for animals is necessary for realizing these political membership rights. Without representation, he contends, political rights risk being watered down, leaving animals with much less than they are entitled to as sentient beings. Cochrane critically discusses several different models for how this representation could be organized. While he is partial to a system where specially trained human representatives are tasked with voicing the animals’ interests in the legislative process, he leaves many of the practicalities open for future experimentation.Readers familiar with the field of political animal studies will find little new in Should Animals Have Political Rights? For students new to the field, however, Cochrane's book does an excellent job introducing the main issues in a very accessible format. Students of “regular” political science will also benefit from the book's fresh challenge to the discipline's understanding of “the political” as well as its important insights into the relationship between individual and political rights.

Taking up the controversial issue of the value of the laws of non-ideal cities in Plato’s Statesman, the paper argues for a modified version of the traditional interpretation, as defended against Christopher Rowe’s influential criticism. The paper agrees with the traditional view that the established laws of non-ideal cities are assumed to be good laws and that the Eleatic Stranger’s justification for this assumption can be found in 300b. But it also argues that this defence of the traditional interpretation must be based on a revised understanding of the role of legislation in the Stranger’s conception of ideal rule. The unique contribution of the expert to good government consists in his distinctive ability to judge what is appropriate in each case, not in his work as legislator, which, on closer inspection, turns out to be based on the very same ancestral traditions that the second best city must resort to.

"A Cultural History of Color presents a history of 5000 years of color in western culture. The first systematic and comprehensive history, the work examines how color has been perceived, developed, produced and traded, and how it has been used in all aspects of performance - from the political to the religious to the artistic - and how it shapes all we see, from food and nature to interiors and architecture, to objects and art, to fashion and adornment, to the color of the naked human body, and to the way our minds work and our languages are created"--

The political outlook of the so-called ‘Anonymus Iamblichi’ has been a subject of controversy in the scholarly literature, with some commentators judging him to be a committed democrat, while others see in him a partisan of aristocracy or even oligarchy. This disagreement is not surprising, for the text contains passages that seem to pull in opposite directions. The article suggests that we move beyond the one-dimensional oligarch-or-democrat model traditionally employed and instead approach the issue from a fresh angle, applying the more nuanced typology for understanding ancient social criticism developed by Josiah Ober.The article begins by situating the author within the social landscape of classical Athens. The resulting characterization presents the author as a representative of a distinctive social type: the Athenian ‘rich quietist’, who prefers private economic endeavours to engagement in public affairs, and who is ideologically committed to democratic government but also highly critical of how democratic society treats its wealthy citizens. This characterization helps make better sense of the seemingly contradictory political indications in the text. In particular, fragments 6 and 7 should be read as a single line of argument, which takes the form of an ‘immanent critique’ of contemporary Athenian democracy. According to ‘Anonymus Iamblichi’, democratic society rightly praises the rule of law as a distinctive democratic value, but it falls disappointingly short of that ideal in its treatment of its own wealthy elite citizens.

The article analyzes the varied meanings historically associated with concepts of voluntarism in relation to social relief as they were articulated by changing moral elites in Denmark from the late nineteenth century until the present. Concepts of voluntarism have historically constituted “normative counterconcepts” that link voluntary practices to desired futures in opposition to alternative modes of organizing. The “proximity” of voluntarism vis-à-vis the “distance” of the state has always been a core meaning, but the concept has drifted across the political spectrum from its first articulation by nineteenth-century conservative Christians to its rediscovery by leftist social researchers in the late twentieth century. Paradoxically, the welfare state helped “proximity” become a core meaning, in contrast to its original social-conservative meaning emphasizing proximity and distance.

The article discusses the relation between political office and the rule of law in Plato’s dialogue Statesman. Taking its starting-point from an observation about the Statesman’s peculiar approach to constitutional analysis, the article argues that what Plato is concerned to show is how the reconceptualisation of the role of law in government proposed in that dialogue has important implications for what we take the role of the institution of office-holding to be. While Greek political tradition held the main aim of archē to be the formal circumscription and control of official power within a constitutional order, Plato insists that it should primarily be understood as ensuring that the exercise of political power approximates, by means of law, the ideal rule by a political expert. The article ends by pointing out how this reading complements another recent discussion of office-holding in the Statesman.