Issue: Expectations of reflection run high in medical practice and medical education; it is claimed as a means to many ends. In this article, the authors do not reject the value of reflection for medical education and medical practitioners, but they still ask why reflection can (potentially) yield so many different benefits, and what that implies for the status of reflection in medical education practice. Evidence: Based on a conceptual analysis of debates about reflection in the philosophical tradition, the authors argue that there are two quintessential gaps that play a role in the proliferation of (potential) benefits. First, reflection deals with bridging the gap between theory and practice; second, it deals with bridging the gap between the individual sense and communal sense. These gaps prevent the systematization of reflection, and they are fundamental to human thinking and experience in any situated environment, which led contemporary research on reflection to list a wide variety of benefits. Implications: The authors argue that if reflection resists systematization, it cannot be learned by following rules or protocols, but only practiced. Then, reflection should no longer be taught and researched as an individual skill one learns, nor as a means to some particular, beneficial end. Rather, one should practice reflection, and experience what it means to be part of a community wherein professionals jump the theory-practice gap constantly in a myriad of situations. Based on their analysis, the authors provide three concrete recommendations for reflection in medical education. First, to give precedence to reflective activities that encompass both gaps wherein situated examples can flourish; second, to use reflective guidelines as sources of inspiration; third, to show reserve about assessing reflection.
As De Angelis, Federici, and others have noted, there are “no commons without community.” The concept of community, however (as, among others, Jean‐Luc Nancy and Roberto Esposito have shown), has a dark history continuing up until today, when extreme right‐wing or even downright fascist appropriations of the concept have understood it as a static and identitarian unity bound to a specific territory or ethnicity. While commons‐scholars try to circumvent this legacy by emphasizing the commons as a “praxis” (Dardot and Laval) or “organizational principle” (De Angelis), they thereby tend to neglect the important cultural and symbolic connotations of the concept of community (which, in part, seem to make right‐wing movements appealing for certain segments of the population). In my article, I want to raise the following question: Do we need a sense of community for a politics of the commons, and, if so, what concept of community should it be? To answer this question, I will refer back to the use of the concept of “common sense” (<em>sensus communis</em>) in Immanuel Kant’s <em>Critique of Judgment</em>. Characteristic of Kant’s use of the term is that it does not refer to an actually existing community, but rather to an imaginary community that is anticipated in our (aesthetic) judgment. Common sense, in other words, involves “acting as if”—with the dual dimensions of <em>acting</em> (i.e., the community is based in praxis) and <em>as if</em> (an imagined, anticipated community bordering between the fictional and the real).
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