The chapter delves into the question of whether medicine is a science, examining arguments that suggest medicine is not a science due to differing aims, progress criteria, and moral commitments (as proposed by Munson 1981; Pellegrino 1998; Miller and Miller 2014). The chapter counters these arguments by challenging assumptions about science’s aims. Rather than simply increasing knowledge, the chapter defends the "Understanding Thesis" (informed by debates in epistemology and philosophy of science with reference to authors such as Kitcher 2001; 2008; 2011; Kvanvig 2003; Bird 2007; 2019a; 2019b; Douglas 2009; Pritchard 2010; Grimm 2014; Potochnik 2017), which holds that science’s aim is understanding, making the world more transparent. This aim is inherently practical, driven by our interest in manipulating the environment and bolstering our agency, thus making scientific inquiry responsive to promoting human agency and autonomy. As such, science, like medicine, is a moral enterprise, and there is no significant difference in terms of aims, progress criteria, or moral commitments that would disqualify medicine from being considered a science. It concludes by discussing the implications of this for scientists’ responsibilities.

The chapter, informed by the Systematicity and Understanding Theses, discusses how understanding in medicine bolsters human agency. Rejecting the initial pathocentric proposal of medicine’s aim (Pellegrino 2001; McAndrew 2019; Hershenov 2020), it advocates the Autonomy Thesis that argues medicine’s goal is not merely treating disease, but promoting health to enhance autonomy (Christman 2009). It adopts a "positive" notion of health that is more than disease absence (Venkatapuram 2013; Nordenfelt 2017) and establishes its relation with well-being and autonomy. The chapter introduces a pluralistic view of health concept difficulties through the lens of "conceptual engineering" and refutes criticisms suggesting the Autonomy Thesis’s permissiveness. The investigation is confined to "mainstream medicine" (Broadbent 2019, ch. 1) and considers the internal morality of medicine (Brody and Miller 1998; Pellegrino 2001). It strives to define a broad yet rigorous aim of medicine that applies to various branches.

The chapter delves into the specific kind of understanding aimed at in medicine, starting from the Understanding Thesis. Drawing on recent work by Broadbent (2019), debates in the epistemology of understanding (Kvanvig 2009; Grimm 2012; Khalifa 2017), and scholarship on the aims of inquiry, the chapter unpacks what it means to understand something, differentiating types of understanding, and using the history of scurvy to explore understanding a disease in medicine. The hypothesis is that biomedical understanding of a disease requires grasping a mechanistic explanation of the disease. This understanding of causal and constitutive relationships draws on an influential account of causation (Woodward 2003; 2010; 2015) and work on mechanistic explanations in biological sciences and neuroscience (Thagard 2003; 2005; Craver 2007; Nervi 2010; Kaplan and Craver 2011; Darrason 2018). However, it argues that biomedical understanding is necessary but not sufficient for clinical understanding, which combines biomedical understanding of a disease with personal understanding of an illness. This chapter revisits the distinction between "understanding" and "explanation" from debates in the field.

This chapter explores the connections between ethics, the phenomenological (and hermeneutical) traditions, and education. It focuses on the idea of the subject, showing phenomenology’s contrast with the modernist picture of the autonomous subject. The chapter first briefly traces the idea of the subject in phenomenology through four representative figures – Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Levinas – and then sketches their approaches to ethics. Then it pivots to four ethical concepts in philosophy of education in this tradition – understanding, risk, subjectification, and responsibility – by connecting them to phenomenological tradition’s broad conception of the subject. The chapter brings into relief the contribution phenomenology makes to envisioning living well together and human flourishing, and education’s role in fostering ethical subjects that would enact such societies.

Chapter 1 begins with a discussion regarding why an exploration of the concept of equity is so greatly needed in education. By developing a foundational understanding of equity, education leadership can move toward truly effective leadership. Case studies provide a relevant and relatable venue for this growth endeavor through the Case Study Analysis Protocol provided.

Sensemaking is widely seen as one of the most crucial processes in crisis response operations. Frontline responders need an adequate understanding of a crisis situation to implement the appropriate actions. Gaining a better grasp of the situation requires acquiring more cues and avoiding premature commitment to a particular frame of reference. Ideally, operational members need to engage in adaptive sensemaking to achieve a perfect understanding of the crisis. Yet, crises are defined by uncertainty, which hinders a full understanding of the situation. The pursuit of a perfect understanding may also impede a rich awareness of the context and create blind spots. Thus, responders need to embrace some degree of uncertainty in their sensemaking as well, even though this is counterintuitive and demanding. The dilemma for responders is that they need to balance gaining a better understanding with embracing uncertainty. Frontline responders may deal with this sensemaking dilemma by pursuing a plausible understanding. A plausible understanding matches the demands of the situation and helps responders take bold action, but is also treated with an attitude of ambivalence, doubt, and modesty.

One of the most important things we do with writing is to use it as a means of giving expression to our experience. Through writing, our thoughts, our feelings and our imagination are given material form. They can be shared with others, or returned to at a later date. Not only can we clarify our thinking through writing but we can also use it to build complex arguments, to construct elaborate theories as well as to develop fictional worlds that are enriching, entertaining and help us to understand our world better. And because writing acts as an extension of memory, ideas, themes and descriptions can be aggregated in order to propel a complex argument or develop a sustained narrative, and these can be returned to time and again. Writing also opens up worlds of experience that are both similar and different to the ones we are familiar with and this chapter argues that writing is important simply because building and sharing understanding is so important to us. Our capacity to inform each other, to reflect on what we do and how we act, and to pool what we know is one of the most useful technologies at our disposal.

Psychoanalytic work is always under threat of degradation; for example, understanding is replaced by education, or subtle pressure on the patient to function in a different way (that is getting him to think or behave differently, give up his symptoms etc.). One of the most important locations of this degradation of growth-promoting thought takes place at the site of the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next. The supervisee is on the one hand being taught and at the same time needs to discover for herself a way of doing things that truly belongs to her. This chapter discusses these tensions giving illustrative examples suggesting that supervising must join the list of the impossible professions.

Big data has been proclaimed as revolutionary and transformative, and will alter businesses and society in fundamental ways. Such dramatic claims sound suspiciously like prior technological waves which were also promoted as metamorphic. Most of these past ‘revolutionary’ technologies have proved to be more evolutionary than revolutionary, but is the same likely to be true with big data? This chapter examines a number of the underlying assumptions associated with the supposed big data revolution. It highlights some of the fallacies and misconceptions that lie behind big data, and how these assumptions can lead to unintended and dysfunctional consequences. In particular, it explores how these dysfunctions might manifest themselves when it comes to organizational knowledge and practice. The analysis in the chapter leads to the conclusion that while big data offers promise, the hype surrounding it has obscured the potential dangers in its use. The chapter explains that it is important to take a more nuanced view of this new technology, putting safeguards in place to ensure that big data use (including big data analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence and the algorithms they develop) does not lead to dysfunction.

Along with the third chapter, this chapter shows that Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant is informed by the successes and failures of previous interpretations. Heidegger does not bring idiosyncratic concerns to Kant’s text, but rather carries forward an interpretive tradition that began with the German Idealists and continued with the Marburg Neo-Kantians: a tradition that attempted to unify Kant’s dual faculties of sensibility and understanding, and to therefore ground the metaphysical principles that depend on their unification. The Neo-Kantians unify the faculties by insisting that human cognition is understanding through and through; Kant was wrong to think we have a separate faculty of sensibility. This interpretation erases the signature discursivity of Kant’s position, the idea that two qualitatively different faculties are required for us to cognize. This chapter shows that Heidegger’s interpretation does not have this result, even though it prioritizes the faculty of imagination. Heidegger’s central thesis in his Kant book – that, on the best version of Kant’s argument, the imagination has priority as the source of cognition – rests crucially on the claim that the imagination is both receptive and spontaneous. Thus, Heidegger’s interpretation maintains Kant’s discursivity thesis, while inquiring more deeply into the unified receptivity and spontaneity that characterizes the human being.

This chapter focuses on informed consent, the cornerstone of conducting ethical human subjects research. It presents a brief history of the origins of informed consent to research and reviews codes, guidelines, and regulations that have been established in response to ethical violations carried out in the name of science. The chapter reviews the essential elements of consent (i.e., intelligence, knowingness, and voluntariness) and discusses challenges that researchers may encounter within each of these areas. Importantly, it approaches consent as an ongoing process rather than a one-time-event and presents practical and empirically supported strategies that researchers can apply to assess and enhance individuals’ capacity, understanding, and autonomy as it pertains to research participation. Additional topics discussed include assent to research that involves children, electronic and multimedia consent, and consent to research using biospecimens.

In this chapter, I reconstruct the metaphysical deductions that, in my account, Kant presents in the Aesthetic, Analytic and Dialectic, respectively. I read metaphysical deductions as accomplishing the first task of transcendental philosophy as it is established in the Critique of Pure Reason, namely the task of cataloguing pure root concepts (Stammbegriffe) for the cognition of objects and to track their origin. I argue that the metaphysical deductions do not simply assume a distinction between different faculties. Rather, they contribute to establishing this distinction by identifying the origin of the root concepts they clarify and catalogue. Moreover, I show that Kant does not follow a univocal model in the different deductions. Rather, his approach is pluralistic.

Engaging with Indigenous legal traditions brings to light the existence of different forms of legal conscience. The Indigenous legal traditions catalyse both the ontological questioning and its response. And they also offer a response to the critique of law and the evolution of legal practice. Approaching different legal traditions requires, however, a change of perspective. This reflection considers the insights of anthropology, linguistics, literature, translation and semiotics as applied to law. Towards a ‘shared framework’ and ‘common legal sense’, the semiotic approach enables us to visualise the legal landscape, beyond the borders of modern constituted forms, on a wider horizon of legal communication. It allows us to approach the narrative semiotics of different legal traditions, such as the dances, storytelling, artefacts like Wampum belts and protocols for ceremonies in Indigenous law. Furthermore, reconnecting legal traditions contributes to recalling, re-embodying and reconnecting the legal subject with the more-than-human realm – reconstituting the legal experience in its integrity. Beyond the operation of translation, what is at stake in the evolution of the legal language and practice is the constitution of a common semiotic space, a space of legal communication and understanding.

This chapter examines Jacobi’s critique of traditional philosophical theology and what he considered to be its conceptual annihilation of the reality of God. What emerges is that Jacobi had a refined understanding of the seductive workings of instrumental reason, proposing an alternative philosophical theology by which immediate faith in God must be confirmed in reflection.

In Chapter 9, we unfold subthemes within the superordinate theme of relationships. When our participants constructed their narrative identities, they emphasized how mental illness had strained and ruptured relationships, that others did not understand or stigmatized them, and how they withdrew and felt lonely. These subthemes carry toxic identity conclusions, including “I am a burden” and “I am alone” and capture narrative identity processes involved in social alienation and self-stigmatization. Although rarer, storylines of positive impact included empathy with others in difficult circumstances and growth of relationships with adaptive identity conclusions including “I can help others in pain,” which may propel individuals to engage in peer support, one aspect of personal recovery. When our participants narrated well-being into their identities, they expanded on subthemes where other people were depicted as supportive, understanding, and helping. They shared stories about acceptance, feeling valued, togetherness, safety and stability, the possibility of giving to others, and love. These subthemes can give rise to positive identity conclusions, encompassing “I can love, and others can love me” and “I can help and support others,” narrative underpinnings of connectedness and positive identity, which are central to personal recovery.

Chapter 2 describes Kant’s developing views of free beauty and of “form,” a term widely used throughout all phases of his aesthetics. If Kant is a formalist of some kind, which kind is he? The chapter argues that there are strong, moderate, and weak formalisms in Kant’s aesthetic theory, both early and late.