To become old means to become frail. The human body ages in ways that depend on genes, environmental-, and chance-factors, but if we do not end our lives as a result of a deadly accident or sudden onset of a lethal disease, we will all face a final phase of frailty before we die. Frailty may be caused by way of disease processes, but it can also consist in an increased sense of fragility, weakness, fatigue, and dizziness without a detected disease, which makes a person more likely to fall ill and make it harder to recover from illness. Neither phenomenologists nor existentialists have spent much time analysing frailty, except, perhaps, in the latter case, as a feature of human life to be avoided and resisted by way of a strong will and brave choices. The primary example would be Jean-Paul Sartre, but also Simone de Beauvoir is guilty of a certain contempt for bodily fragility. Arguably, the theories of some phenomenologists, such as Emmanuel Levinas and Paul Ricoeur, do a good job of rehabilitating human vulnerability in general, but not in the sense of a specific frailty related to illness and ageing. Despite this lack of a phenomenology of frailty in phenomenological-existentialist philosophy there are resources in this tradition to be exploited in developing such a subject. A phenomenology of frailty could be of importance not only for philosophers and empirical researchers, but also for old people and their care takers in attempts to make frail lives more bearable. The chapter develops a phenomenology of frailty by making use of concepts and arguments developed by existentialist thinkers, but also by scrutinizing them further and turning them against their fathers and mothers.

This text explores Search and Rescue (SAR) dog work, examining the interplay of Umwelt, semiosis, and behavior in both dogs and humans. Drawing on Uexk & uuml;ll's notion of Umwelt, the discussion unfolds across two semiotic levels: endosemiosis, involving the constitution of species-specific Umwelten through non-mimetic processes, and exosemiosis, reflecting semiotic interactions within the established Umwelt. Emphasizing the Kantian influence on Uexk & uuml;ll, the text parallels the concept of transcendental schematism with monogram drafting, illustrating how organisms constitute their Umwelten. The exploration extends to Merleau-Ponty's interpretation of the monogram in Kant and the Umwelt in Uexk & uuml;ll, framing behavior as melodic and underscoring the reciprocal influence between an organism and its Umwelt. Shifting focus to SAR dog teams, the essay elucidates the melodic teamwork between human handlers and dogs. It discerns the convergence of distinct search tones-human-driven rescue tones and dog-driven reward tones-harmonizing in a dynamic inter-species melody. The melodic metaphor, inspired by Merleau-Ponty, illuminates the shared behavioral space where humans and dogs contribute tonalities to the melody of SAR searches. The exploration underscores the handler's role in facilitating this melodic collaboration, requiring interpretation deeply immersed in the movements of the dog, and a balance between guidance and trust in the dog's autonomy during the search.

A professional education always has the student’s future profession in sight. In almost all aspects, there is a connection between what is studied and practiced, and what the forthcoming professional guild does on a daily basis. Practitioners in the making in the so-called interpersonal field – as for example teachers, police officers or professionals in healthcare – study what they need to know theoretically and practically to manage their future profession. But how is the very important task to develop the student’s professional judgement conducted? How is the professional gaze, or the sensibility for making sense of complex situations developed in university? Where in the educational setting does this take place? This essay describes the reflective seminar as a way to practice professional judgment. The starting point is a phenomenologically colored understanding that the student’s lived experience of being a person amongst persons offers great opportunities to work on the development of professional judgment. Moving from the theory of practical knowledge we investigate the possibilities that a “as if ” context gives the seminar. This we do to examine and reflect on the interpersonal challenges that the student’s future profession might harbor.

Empathy is an everyday phenomenon and a basic moral capacity, and it is also the most central professional skill and ethical guiding tool of nursing care. To be empathic as a nurse means to be able to feel and see things from the point of view of the patient and act in accordance with this knowledge when caring for his/her good and attempting to relieve his/her suffering. Nurses need to be dedicated but still humble when it comes to empathy: to endeavour the step into the perspective of the patient does not mean that this is possible in any total or infallible sense; only the patient feels and knows what it is like to experience this particular suffering as this particular person at this particular time. If or when empathy is complemented by a dialogue with the patient, it becomes possible to reach a more complete and confirmed understanding of his/her predicament. The chapter offers a phenomenological theory of empathy in nursing, inspired by Edith Stein, which brings out the emotional aspects of the phenomenon in concordance with its cognitive features.

Phenomenological analyses of ageing and old age have examined themes such as alterity, finitude, and time, not seldom from the perspective of “healthy” aging. Phenomenologists have also offered detailed analyses of lived experiences of illness including lived experiences of dementia. This article offers a phenomenological account of what we label as entering the grey zone of aging between “healthy” aging and aging with a disease. This account is developed through a qualitative phenomenological philosophy analysis of elderly persons’ lived experiences of being tested for dementia through primary care in Sweden, i.e., within a cultural context where dementia commonly is understood as a frightening a loss of self even though this understanding also is questioned. To enter this grey zone of aging, we argue, does not dissolve dynamic self-becoming but can involve an experience of oneself as being old. Further, in the grey zone, the self experiences itself as neither fully healthy nor as having a disease, and as needing to negotiate and live this ambiguity. To enter this grey zone is to enter an affectively charged, sociocultural and medicalized zone, and while the self can still act in different ways within it, staying in the grey zone can result in a re-orientation in the self’s mode of being, in ways that are thoroughly beyond its control. To stay in the grey zone can have detrimental effects on the self, even though the self does not have a disease: the self can become “stuck” in a reflective mode of attending to embodiment, aging, health, and disease.

Exploring Practical Knowledge investigates professional practices from a hermeneutic perspective. The book presents, discusses and applies notions such as practical knowledge, practical wisdom, tacit knowledge, and normativity to the professional lifeworld. These contributions focus on both specific practices and more general questions concerning theories and investigations of practice.

This volume comes as the result of a cooperation of three research centres: The two Centres for Practical Knowledge in Bodø, Norway and in Södertörn, Sweden, as well as the Research Group Value-Oriented Professionalisation at the University of Applied Sciences in Utrecht, the Netherlands. It offers empirical studies of professionals as well as discussing the underlying theories, approaches and methods of exploring practical knowledge – including the limits to any articulation of these aspects of professional action.

In contrast to the objectivist paradigm that otherwise dominates professional studies, each chapter presents central perspectives and possibilities drawing from humanistic and interdisciplinary research traditions. The book explores professions in a style accessible to scholars and practitioners alike. It is interesting for those studying practices within these professions and for vocational studies in education, social work, health care, police work, journalism, etc.

This paper explores the process of aging from a phenomenological perspective. Supplementing the model of becoming old found in Simone de Beauvoir’s work with a phenomenology of human suffering and flourishing, it asks whether it is possible to lead a good life in the process of becoming old. Is it possible to flourish while experiencing bodily waning? Is it possible to flourish while experiencing the shrinking of one’s everyday world and the passing away of close others? Aging, at least in its protracted phases, appears to become full of suffering rather than flourishing. What are the prospects of finding meaningful life projects despite old age? By making use of insight found in Heidegger and other phenomenologists the paper tries to develop a slightly different view on aging than the one found in Beauvoir, stressing the importance of embodied experiences and life choices, which not only depend upon societal oppression and being objectified by others, but also upon processes of nature and the possibilities of an intergenerational intersubjectivity. Resources for this project is found in the philosophy of affectivity developed by Heidegger and other phenomenologists of facticity, such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Charles Taylor, Helmuth Plessner and Hannah Arendt.

Starting from excerpts of practioners’ accounts of alienated processes in their work life, this chapter investigates the notion of alienation in the era of neoliberalism and New Public Management. Drawing on Rahel Jaeggi’s retreatment of Marx’s theory of alienation, and elaborating upon Wendy Brown’s account of neoliberal rationality, I claim that the contemporary focus on measurability and control can be viewed as alienating the practical knowledge of the professional. I go on to explore how professionals’ reflective narratives might serve as a way of critiquing contemporary forms of alienation.

This conceptual paper aims to explore judgment in the context of automated decision-making systems (ADS). To achieve this, we adopt a modern version of Aristotle's notion of phronesis to understand judgment. We delineate seven elements of judgment which provide insights into what humans are better at, and what AI is better at in relation to automated decision-making. These elements are sources of knowledge that guide action including not-knowing, emotions, sensory perception, experience, intuition, episteme, and techne. Our analysis suggests that most of these attributes are not transferable to AI systems, because judgment in human decision-making requires the integration of all which involves considering the contextual and affective resources of phronesis, and the competence to make value judgments. The paper contributes to unpack human judgment capacities and what needs to be cultivated to achieve 'good' AI systems that serves humanity as well as guiding future information systems researchers to explore human-AI judgment further. 

When spontaneous expressions such as smiling or crying have been at issue in Anglophone philosophy of action, the touchstone has been Donald Davidson’s belief-desire account of action. In this essay, I take a different approach. I use Elizabeth Anscombe’s formal conception of intentional action to capture the distinction and unity between intentional action and spontaneous expression. Anscombe’s strategy is to restrict her inquiry to the class of acts to which a certain sense of the question ‘Why?’ has application. Applying Anscombe’s strategy to an area she did not consider other than by contrast, I argue that spontaneous expressions are subject to a different but intimately related why-question. Both questions elicit non-observational knowledge. But where the question posed to intentional actions opens up a means-end order (an order of practical reasoning) this is not true of the corresponding question for spontaneous expressions. Our explanations of our own spontaneous expressions have conceptual and normative dimensions, but they do not display an inferential order. Anscombe, taking a formulation from Aquinas, describes practical knowledge as the cause of what it understands. I conclude by arguing that this formulation also holds true of our understanding of our own smiles and episodes of crying. 

As a discipline, practical knowledge is relatively new. Over recent years it has emerged and grown, but there are still only in two places internationally where you can explicitly study it (Nord University in Norway and Södertörn University in Sweden). On the other hand, the main questions of practical knowledge, as they relate to knowledge, are age old philosophical questions, while other questions dealt with implicate other disciplines (cognitive science, pedagogy, work-life research, etc.). As such, practical knowledge is interdisciplinary and should perhaps be considered a set of questions rather than a discipline. But if it can be considered a discipline, then it needs a principle of unity. Perhaps this is the lived exercise of practice and joint philosophical reflection. In the proposed chapter, this is fleshed out in terms of consideration of (a) who the students and researchers of practical knowledge are – what is it that motivates them to study (participant and field plurality)? (b) what are the key resources of practical knowledge that can allow us to ask these questions (disciplinary plurality) and how is practical knowledge related to philosophy as a discipline? (c) what are the spaces of the study of practical knowledge, what happens here and what is the potential for development? Based on this analysis, we will develop a core idea of practical knowledge as a unity that is based on plurality and put in in a framework of a contemporary debate on the relation between science and lived experience as well as philosophy and practice.

Både nationellt och internationellt ser vi en accelererande utveckling av användandet av okonventionella och ickelinjära tillvägagångssätt hos såväl kriminella nätverk som terrorister och statsaktörer. Exempel på detta syns i hur innovativ teknik såsom krypterade nätverk, drönare, AI och 3D-teknologi, samt biologiska, kemiska och nukleära vapen används. Ur denna utveckling vävs nya arenor, nya fronter och nya vetenskapliga applikationer, vilka skapar kombinatoriska explosioner som ställer både nya och höga krav eftersom de skapar tidigare otänkbara möjligheter. 

Den här texten undersöker hur polisens yttersta resurs på ett systematiskt sätt tar sig an denna oförutsägbara framtid, i ett försök att konstruera ett system i konstant förändring för att hantera problem i hastig förändring. Med hjälp av en reflekterande metod knyts teori ihop med praktik för att ringa in vad ett ickelinjärt problem är och vilka strategier som lämpar sig bäst för denna utmanande domän gällande taktik, metodik, systemdesign, språk, utbildning och utvärdering.

Ludvig Björklund är före detta officer och arbetar som systemdesigner och huvudinstruktör i taktik och närkamp på en svensk polisiär insatsstyrka. Han är doktorand vid Centrum för praktisk kunskap, Södertörns högskola, och forskar om Counter Terror Intervention Units (CTIU) och liknande enheters praktiska kunskap att handla i ickelinjära domäner, mot okonventionella motståndare.

This article takes its point of departure in Bracha Ettinger's discussion on the "matrixial borderspace": the structure of the experience of "the womb," both from a "mother-pole" and a "fetus-pole". Ettinger describes this borderspace as a place of differentiation-in-co-emergence, separation-in-jointness, and distance-in-proximity. The question this article poses is what kind of logic this experience is an expression of, as there seems to be a discrepancy in relation to the classical Aristotelian logic of identity. As an alternative to classical Aristotelian logic, Nicholas of Cusa's logic of the non-aliud is explored as a paradigm more in line with Ettinger's description of pregnancy specifically and more generally, to an understanding of life as a co-poietic emergence of structures of pactivity and permeability.

Objectification is a real problem in medicine that can lead to bad medical practice or, in the worst case, dehumanization of the patient. Nevertheless, objectification also plays a major and necessary role in medicine: the patient's body should be viewed as a biological organism in order to find diseases and be able to cure them. Listening to the patient's illness story should not be replaced, but, indeed, developed by the physical examination of his body searching for the causes of his complaints. Whereas phenomenologists have so far mainly been identifying the back sides of objectification in medicine, in this paper the aim is to analyze differences between detrimental objectifications and objectifications that do not deprive the patient of his subjectivity but, rather, at least in some cases, may lead the patient to feel more at home with his body.

“Becoming one” with the horse is often understood as a romantic ideal. In this article, we want to explore in which ways human beings and horses in riding can be understood as one body. By means of the phenomenological tradition different aspects of the centaur’s embodiment are analysed. It is argued that the centaur is a merged unit that finds its movements, directions, time, and bodily contours through “pactive” movements, atmospheres, and habits. In this way, it is possible to train the ability to merge into new units. Centaurs do exist. 

This chapter raises the question how theory of practical knowledge can be applied to contribute to the practice and theory of validation (i.e. recognition of prior learning). The focus of the investigation is on a problem that is at the core of validation: how can assessment for validation be, at the same time, reliable and valid. In contemporary research on validation the trustworthiness of assessment is discussed in terms of validity and reliability, two ideals drawn from the social and natural sciences. Research on the recognition of prior learning suggests that the relation between reliability and validity of assessment tends to be inversely proportional. If validity increases then reliability decreases and vice versa. This leads to a problem in the practice of validation. Why? Because it puts practitioners under pressure of satisfying both ideals at the same time. Practitioners try to increase reliability by formalizing assessment procedures, though formalization tends to render invisible and exclude informal knowledge. Using an example of validation from vocational education this chapter shows how this contradiction can be overcome, or at least be eased up, by seeing the problem from the point of view of the theory of practical knowledge.

Ett effektivt totalförsvar är beroende av väl fungerande samverkan mellan olika aktörer. Idag används begreppet samverkan som ett magiskt ord. I visioner och regelverk beskrivs samverkan både som en nyckel till framgång och en lösning på komplexa problem. Men hur går samverkan till i praktiken?

I boken berättar rutinerade aktörer från totalförsvarets olika delar om sina erfarenheter av samverkan. Här finns konkreta exempel där yrkesverksamma beskriver hur de ställts inför svåra utmaningar, överväganden och beslut inom ramarna för olika former av krishantering. Uppdrag Samverkan – om konsten att samarbeta när det gäller bygger på ett forskningsprojekt, ”Erfarenhetsforum Samverkan” som under åren 2019–2022 bedrivits vid Centrum för studier av militär och samhälle.

Alltför ofta har känslorna genom historien betraktats som en förvrängning av filosofins och vetenskapens objektiva beskrivning av verkligheten. Känslorna blir då något som vi bör sträva efter att befria oss ifrån i stället för det som utgör hjärtat av vår existens. Men det är fel. Verkligheten får i själva verket sin struktur och mening genom känslor som öppnar upp en värld som vi kan dela med andra människor. Det är känslornas skapande kraft som skiljer oss från maskiner och som gör att vi kan erövra kunskap om världen i kontrast till att bearbeta information och göra beräkningar. Boken tar sig an känslornas natur genom att kombinera filosofisk analys med empirisk forskning från biologi, psykologi och antropologi. Resonemangen illustreras med hjälp av erfarenheter av känslors makt och betydelse från vardagen och samtiden. Känslans mellanmänskliga funktion får stort utrymme, alltifrån den känsla av empati och samvaro som är avgörande för ett gott liv, till de mer problematiska gruppkänslor som växer sig starka genom massan och som kan exploateras inom politiken. Vägen går från de allra första till de allra sista känslorna från födelsen till döden och på vägen passeras de viktigaste typerna av känslor i livet, inte minst sådana som är förknippade med kärlek och lycka eller lidande och sjukdom.

This article explores an example of person-centred care: the work of so-called renal care coordinators. The empirical basis of the article consists of qualitative interviews with renal care coordinators, alongside participant observations of their patient interactions. During the analyses of the empirical material, I found that one of the coordinators’ most fundamental ambitions is to get to know who the patient is. This is also a central tenet of person-centred care. The aim of the article is not only to argue for the plausibility of this tenet, but also, and more importantly, to highlight and explore its implications in the context of healthcare, through the example of renal care coordination. By drawing on the philosophy of Hannah Arendt, the article shows that the disclosure of who the patient is that takes place in person-centred care requires speech and action, which are modes of human activity that initiate processes characterized by unpredictability, uncertainty, and irreversibility. This unpredictability, uncertainty, and irreversibility, found to be inherent in person-centred care, is then discussed in relation to the pursuit of certainty characterizing contemporary evidence-based medicine. At the end of the article the conclusion is drawn that, if healthcare is to be person-centred, it must find ways of accommodating the contradictory pursuits of certainty and uncertainty found in evidence-based medicine and person-centred care respectively.

This article examines a population-based opportunistic screening practice for cognitive impairment that takes place at a hospital in Sweden. At the hospital, there is a routine in place that stipulates that all patients over the age of 65 who are admitted to the ward will be offered testing for cognitive impairment, unless they have been tested within the last six months or have been diagnosed with any form of cognitive impairment. However, our analysis shows that this routine is not universally and mechanically applied. Rather, the health care professionals have developed and use an ethico-political judgment, concerning, for example, whom to test, when to offer the tests, and how to explain and perform them. This article explores the role and practice of this form of judgment, emphasising its political and ethical nature. The analysis is based on qualitative interviews with professionals and patients, and draws on the theories of Aristotle and Hannah Arendt. 

In this paper I explore health and illness through the lens of enactivism, which is understood and developed as a bodily-based worldly-engaged phenomenology. Various health theories - biomedical, ability-based, biopsychosocial - are introduced and scrutinized from the point of view of enactivism and phenomenology. Health is ultimately argued to consist in a central world-disclosing aspect of what is called existential feelings, experienced by way of transparency and ease in carrying out important life projects. Health, in such a phenomenologically enacted understanding, is an important and in many cases necessary part of leading a good life. Illness, on the other hand, by such a phenomenological view, consist in finding oneself at mercy of unhomelike existential feelings, such as bodily pains, nausea, extreme unmotivated tiredness, depression, chronic anxiety and delusion, which make it harder and, in some cases, impossible to flourish. In illness suffering the lived body hurts, resists, or, in other ways, alienates the activities of the ill person.

Since 2017, opportunistic screening for cognitive impairment takes place at the geriatric ward of a local hospital in Sweden. Persons above the age of 65 who are admitted to the ward, who have not been tested for cognitive impairment during the last six months nor have a previously known cognitive impairment, are offered the Mini-Mental State Examination and the Clock-Drawing Test. This article analyses what the opportunistic screening practice means for patients and healthcare professionals. It combines a phenomenologically-oriented focus on subjectivity and sense-making with a focus that is inspired by science and technology studies on what the tests become within the specific context in which they are used, which allows a dual focus on subjectivity and performativity. The article shows how the tests become several different, not infrequently seemingly contradictory, things: an offer, an important tool for knowledge-production, something unproblematic yet also emotionally troubling, something one can fail and an indicator that one belongs to a risk group and needs to be tested. Further, the article shows how the practice is shaped by the sociocultural context. It examines the role of the affective responses to the test for subjectivity - particularly patient subjectivity - and offers a set of recommendations, if this practice were to expand to other hospitals.

This paper uses the pre-renaissance philosopher Nicolas Cusanus (1401-1464) and his concepts of ratio (calculating rationality) and intellectus (a relation to not-knowing) to assist in understanding the differences between human and artificial intelligence. The intention is to contribute to the ongoing discussions and debate pertaining to AI implementation and use, arguing that philosophy can be of ample use when it comes to understanding different types of intelligence in the digital world. The presented conceptual framework outlines the human and the artificial intelligence in terms of their characteristics in relation to Cusa's ratio and intellectus. This helps to apprehend the different forms of intelligence and, more specifically, their strengths and how they operate.

This is the first monograph to deal with medicine as a form of hermeneutics, now in a thoroughly revised and updated edition, including a whole new chapter on medical ethics. The book offers a comprehensive philosophical argument why good medical practice cannot be curtailed to scientific investigations of the body but is a form of clinical hermeneutics performed by health-care professionals in dialogue with their patients. Medical hermeneutics is rooted in a phenomenology of illness which acknowledges and proceeds from the ill party’s bodily feelings, everyday life-world circumstances and self-understanding in aiming to restore health.

The author shows how the works of classical phenomenologists and hermeneuticians – Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur – may be employed to understand how medical diagnosis is enveloped by professional empathy and clinical judgement and developed by scientific investigations of the patient’s bodily condition. Health and illness are ultimately considered to be ways of feeling at home or not at home in the world, and such experiences are the starting point of medical hermeneutics when aiming to make best use of scientific knowledge. The book is aimed at researchers and teachers in philosophy of medicine and medical ethics, and at physicians, nurses and other health-care professionals meeting with patients in ethically complex and challenging situations. Phenomenology and hermeneutics, most often considered as methods belonging to the humanities, are shown to be of vital importance for the understanding of medical practice and ethical dilemmas of health care.

In this article I aim to bring to the fore a problematic trait of Polish philosopher Stanisław Brzozowski’s (1878–1911) thinking, which is his insistence on the metaphysical importance of human domination of nature through work, technology, and maximization of production. The focal point of the article is Brzozowski’s interpretation of Georg Sorel, with an emphasis on Reflections on Violence and the concept of the social myth. I argue that Brzozowski considers the primary strength of the social myth to lie in its contribution to such domination, because its principal trait is to provide man with a sublime feeling of elevation above nature. Furthermore, this feeling becomes a motive force for struggle against nature. In conclusion, I suggest that the perspective of the sublime is a fruitful path for future critical encounters with Brzozowski’s work. The first part of the article stresses the importance of the sublime in Reflections on Violence. Sorel uses this concept throughout his main work to describe the affective nature of the violence of the social myth, which coordinates the inclinations of the masses towards emancipation. The second part discusses how Brzozowski understands the social myth, law, and nationhood from the perspective of human domination of elemental nature.

Den här boken handlar om nybörjarpolisens första trevande steg ut i yrkeslivet, nämligen tjänstgöringen som polisaspirant. Genom elva aspiranters egna berättelser om och reflektioner över händelser ur aspiranttjänstgöringen framträder en rik bild av polisyrkets olika sidor: utsattheten, otillräckligheten, våldet och den kollegiala sammanhållningen. Boken innehåller även fyra texter av forskare som undersöker frågor som gråzonsproblematik, polishumor, kåranda och polisutbildningens utmaningar. 

In this paper I aim to show with the aid of philosophers Edith Stein and Peter Goldie, how empathy and other social feelings are instantiated and developed in real life versus on the Internet. The examples of on-line communication show both how important the embodied aspects of empathy are and how empathy may be possible also in the cases of encountering personal stories rather than personal bodies. Since video meetings, social media, online gaming and other forms of interaction via digital technologies are taking up an increasing part of our time, it is important to understand how such forms of social intercourse are different from in real life (IRL) meetings and why they can accordingly foster not only new communal bonds but also hatred and misunderstanding.

While the value of early detection of dementia is largely agreed upon, populationbased screening as a means of early detection is controversial. This controversial status means that such screening is not recommended in most national dementia plans. Some current practices, however, resemble screening but are labelled “casefinding” or “detection of cognitive impairment”. Labelled as such, they may avoid the ethical scrutiny that population-based screening may be subject to. This article examines conceptualizations of screening and case-finding. It shows how the definitions and delimitations of the concepts (the what of screening) are drawn into the ethical, political, and practical dimensions that screening assessment criteria or principles are intended to clarify and control (the how of screening, how it is and how it should be performed). As a result, different conceptualizations of screening provide the opportunity to rethink what ethical assessments should take place: the conceptualizations have different ethico-political implications. The article argues that population- based systematic screening, population-based opportunistic screening, and case-finding should be clearly distinguished.

This article engages critically with the theory of expression proposed by Mitchell Green in his Self-Expression (2007). In this book, Green argues that expressions are signals designed to convey information about mental states. By putting pressure on one of the examples Green uses in his book, I will challenge this thesis. I will then deepen this challenge by developing a contrast between two philosophical perspectives on expression, which I name the 'instrumental' and the `descriptive'. I take Green's theory of expression to be an exemplar of the instrumental perspective. Expression, in the instrumental perspective, is a means for transmitting information about mental states from organism to organism. The descriptive perspective I articulate with the help of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Ludwig Wittgenstein. On the descriptive view, expression is (at least a part of) an answer to the question what it is so much as to have mental states and a living body. I suggest at the end of the article that if we remain within the instrumental perspective, we will not be able to use expression to satisfactorily answer this question.

Klimatomställningen går alltför långsamt, trots att vi egentligen har all den kunskapom krisens allvar som behövs för att förstå att läget är akut och handla i enlighet meddet. Vi har också gott om tekniker och idéer som, om de realiserades massivt, skulle kunna leda till kraftigt minskade utsläpp av växthusgaser. En stor del av trögheten ligger i våra beteenden. Vi kommer inte överens, vi kommer inte till beslut, vi ändrar inte beteende i enlighet med det som krävs eller med det som vi kommit överens om i internationella avtal. Vad hindrar oss?

Det finns en hel del forskning om denna tröghet. Mycket handlar om praktiska och sociala förutsättningar. En del handlar om psykologiska eller kognitiva mekanismer, om socialt samspel eller om klimatproblemets natur som avlägset och innehållande målkonflikter. Den här rapporten inkluderar många sådana forskningsinsikter, mentar huvudsakligen ett annat perspektiv: den handlar om tankestrukturer som hindrar omställning och om vad som krävs för att det ska bli fart på oss.

The commonly occurring metaphors and models of the doctor-patient relationship can be divided into three clusters, depending on what distribution of power they represent: in the paternalist cluster, power resides with the physician; in the consumer model, power resides with the patient; in the partnership model, power is distributed equally between doctor and patient. Often, this tripartite division is accepted as an exhaustive typology of doctor-patient relationships. The main objective of this paper is to challenge this idea by introducing a fourth possibility and distribution of power, namely, the distribution in which power resides with neither doctor nor patient. This equality in powerlessness-the hallmark of "the age of bureaucratic parsimony"-is the point of departure for a qualitatively new doctor-patient relationship, which is best described in terms of solidarity between comrades. This paper specifies the characteristics of this specific type of solidarity and illustrates it with a case study of how Swedish doctors and patients interrelate in the sickness certification practice.

This article explores the concept of labour through a diremptive reading of Polish philosopher Stanisław Brzozowski’s essay “Prolegomena filozofii ‘pracy’” (“Prolegomena to a Philosophy of ‘Labour’”) written in 1909. This essay appears as a chapter in his main work Idee: wstęp do filozofii dojrzałości dziejowej (Ideas. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Historical Maturity), first published in 1910. In “Prolegomena,” Brzozowski defines labour as an inner gesture that delineates the duration of life. In the interpretation of this definition the influence of Henri Bergson on Brzozowski’s thought is stressed. Inspired by Bergson, Brzozowski understands labour as the only ground-creating—and therefore metaphysical—activity of humanity, when faced with the absence of transcendent grounds for existence in modernity. Emphasis is placed on Brzozowski’s insistence in “Prolegomena” that labour is irrational in its delineation of the absolutely new. He describes it as the α of the inner gesture of labour that cannot be known until it is performed. This unknown α is interpreted as his way of describing the groundlessness of the ground-creating activity of labour, and that this groundlessness means that labour eludes the control of the subject.

This chapter considers professional practice as a potentially collaborative form of practical wisdom, phronesis. The question to be explored is to what extent “collective phronesis” transcends the individual with a focus on the professions of teaching and policing as examples. Professional identity can be seen as an embodiment that involves both the individual and the social. Practitioners “embody” their profession individually and collectively. How can this be understood? As individuals, professionals often make decisions that use the routines and informal rules provided by the profession, and sometimes groups of professionals may make decisions together. There can be conflicts between these settings that challenge the embodied being-in-the-world of practitioners and their capacity to relate to other subjects in an empathetic way. Examples of such challenges will be explored to critically analyse our understanding of phronesis for the individual and the collective.

Being a “good” doctor nowadays involves more than having virtues and capacities conducive to the content of encounters between physicians and patients. Physicians can and must be able to act on the surrounding conditions of the doctor-patient encounter, in order to keep external interests at bay. Hence, the patient-related virtues, such as compassion, prudence, temperance and the like might not constitute sufficient cause for “good” doctoring. Resistance against the invasion of external interests requires another set of capacities. In this compilation thesis, one such capacity is explored: cunning. While certainly not part of the repertoire of skills in relation to the patient, cunning intelligence is an indispensable “virtue” of good doctoring insofar as doctors must cleverly navigate institutions that block off paths toward the ultimate ends of healthcare. The role of cunning is examined through a particular case, namely, the struggle over social insurance, especially sickness benefits (“sjukpenning”), and the complex relationship between physician, patient and the Swedish Social Insurance Agency (“Försäkringskassan”). In these times of increased austerity, physicians have honed skills, retaining thereby good medical practice, and by extension also maintaining the integrity of the patient-related virtues of medicine. In the empirical material, techniques were identified, particularly with respect to the way in which the sickness certificate is written to ensure approval by the SSIA. Based on these findings, the ambiguities, contradictions and possibilities inherent in the cunning resistance of physicians are analyzed and problematized. Despite its many issues, what doctors do when issuing sickness certificates in this particular way, is certainly motivated and carried out by more than mere ignorance. Cunning intelligence is not merely a defective form of prudence (phronesis), nor is it simply an instance of instrumental reason (techne), but rather an ability that occupies a distinct place among the intellectual abilities generally ascribed to professionals. Finally, I explore if the use of these capacities indicates a change in the doctor-patient relationship. I argue that both doctor and patient are conditioned by an equality in powerlessness—the hallmark of “the age of bureaucratic parsimony”, which can be appropriately described in terms of solidarity between comrades.