Search results for ""author david hunter""

This volume provides a new and innovative overview of the key debates relating to public health policy in the UK at a time when concern over public health has never been greater. Mounting public disquiet over a range of crises, such as foot and mouth, BSE and other food safety issues, public transport, pollution, obesity and the environment have fuelled this renewed interest. Yet, health policy remains preoccupied with health-care services. In this book, David Hunter explains that, while they are important, health-care services are not the principal determinants of health. Why then, do they absorb the bulk of resources and attention of policy-makers? The reasons for the extraordinary difficulties encountered in putting health before health care are multiple and complex. Separate chapters cover a range of issues, including: the relationship between health and health care, health-care management and the powerful interests at work which prevent policy aspiration from becoming reality, attempts in the UK since 1992 to pay greater attention to health issues, and examples from Europe and Canada, where a similar policy imbalance exists. In conclusion, Hunter sets out the policy implications for the future and offers a way forward based on the concept of managing for health. The approach throughout the book is accessible and user-friendly. It will be essential reading for students of public policy, health studies, social policy and sociology, and will also be invaluable to scholars, policy-makers, and health professionals interested in public health policy in the UK.

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Developing original accounts of the many aspects of belief, On Believing puts the believer at the heart of the story. Hunter argues that to believe something is to be in position to do, think, and feel things in light of a possibility whose obtaining would make one right. The logical aspect is that being right depends only on whether that possibility obtains. The psychological one concerns how that possibility can rationalise what one does, thinks, and feels. But, Hunter argues, beliefs are not causes, capacities, or dispositions. Rather, believing rationalises because possibilities are potential reasons. Hunter also denies that believing is a form of representing. The objects of belief are possibilities, not representations, and belief states are not themselves true or false. Hunter defends this modal view against familiar objections and explores how objective and subjective limits to belief generate credal illusions and ground credal necessities. Developing a novel account of the normativity of belief, he argues that voluntary acts of inference make us responsible for our beliefs. While denying that believing is intrinsically normative, Hunter grounds the ethics of belief in attributive goodness. Believing something is to our credit when it shows us to be good in some way, and what we ought to believe depends on what we ought to know, and not on the evidence we have. The ethics of belief, Hunter argues, concern how a believer ought to be positioned in a world of possibilities.

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How have Handel's 'lives' in biographies and histories moulded our understanding of the musician, the man and the icon? To evaluate the familiar, even over-familiar, story of Handel's life could be seen as a quixotic endeavour. How can there be anything new to say? This book seeks to distinguish fact from fiction, not only to produce a new biography but also to explore the concepts of biography and dissemination by using Handel's life and lives as a case study. By examining the images of Handel to be found in biographies and music histories - the genius, the religious profound, the master of musical styles, the distiller into music of English sentiment, the glorifier of the Hanoverians, the hymner of the middle class, the independent, the prodigious, the generous, the sexless, the successful, the wealthy, the bankrupt, the pious, the crude, the heroic, the devious, the battler of ill-fortune, the moral exemplar - and by adding new factual information, David Hunter shows how events are manipulated into stories and tropes. Onesuch trope has been employed to portray numerous persons as Handel's enemies regardless of whether Handel considered them as such. Picking apart the writing of Handel's biographers and other reporters, Hunter exposes the narrative underpinnings - the lies, confusions, presumptions, and conclusions, whether direct and inferred or assumed - to show how Handel's 'lives' in biographies and histories have moulded our understanding of the musician, the man andthe icon. DAVID HUNTER is Music Librarian at the University of Texas at Austin.

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