In This Section:
A way of thinking Joel Kupperman, philosophy
Ironing out good nutritional habits Ann Ferris, nutritional sciences

Philosopher questions what defines the good life

The nature of a philosopher is to ask questions that have no simple answers. It requires a great deal of thinking to generate questions that will compel others to really ponder the answers.

Philosophy professor Joel Kupperman has been thinking quite a bit about the topics of two books he is writing: Ethics and Qualities of Life, about ethical theory, and Six Mistakes About the Good Life, which centers on simple but misleading ideas concerning what is most desirable in life.

"There are different kinds of good lives," says Kupperman, who has drafted the first chapters of Six Mistakes About the Good Life. "Rather than giving examples of different kinds of good lives, I thought I could say something much more crisp and definite. Obviously, happiness is good generally, but it's not the ticket. You have to look at the context, at whole lives."

Kupperman, who has been at UConn since 1960 and has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in Asian and comparative philosophy and ethics, believes his students leave his class with questions they will continue to think about- "that they might think about something relating to their lives that the average person doesn't think about and have a set of ideas that they use as jumping-off points," he says.

"When I went to college, I had a very conventional idea of what to think about in life - it had to do with success, various kinds of pleasure, certain milestones, having a family," says Kupperman, who received a Chancellor's Research Excellence Award for his work in philosphy. "But there's more to think about, and if you have more ideas that you can get from great philosophers, you have a richer sense of what the possibilities are."

Kupperman's last four books are Character; Value...And What Follows; Learning from Asian Philosophy; and Classic Asian Philosophy: A Guide to the Essential Texts.

Kupperman, whose major work is in ethics, says Asian philosophy meshes well with his sense of the world. He says his research started slowly, "in part because I was searching for approaches to ethical philosophy different from those that were and are still dominant."

Part of that search brought him back to the Chinese philosophy that he had studied as an undergraduate. "It seemed to me that the great classical Chinese philosophers asked questions that had not been asked by most Western philosophers in the last couple of hundred years, and that these led to important insights," he says.

Kupperman says classical Chinese philosophy engages much more directly - and in far greater detail - with problems of everyday life than Western philosophy does, which centers on dramatic one-time choices, the big moments in life when people have to make decisions that will have major consequences. But these moments, for most people, don't come up very often.

Chinese philosophy is more focused on personal style and how people relate to those around them. Relationships with the world begin with how individuals relate to those close to them, Kupperman says.

"What Asian philosophy does much better than many Western philosophies," he says, "is give you a sense of the texture of life in the moments between those major choices, the things that make life worth living, and also helps you prepare for the major choices."

-- Sherry Fisher

Childhood anemia rates are a cause for concern

Searching for a nutritional solution to low red blood cells, Ann Ferris has spent her professional career pursuing unexpected leads.

Professor Ann Ferris meets with families in Hartford to determine why so many chlidren living there have anemia.

A nutritional sciences professor at UConn for the past 25 years and one of the University's top 10 grant-funded researchers, Ferris once wanted to become a pediatrician. Instead, she pursued a career as a nutritionist and followed in the footsteps of her graduate advisor, studying growth differences in breast-fed and formula-fed babies.

Ferris now heads the University's Family Nutrition Program, a cluster of projects that seek to solve nutrition problems through a combination of research and community education.

She is currently examining why children living in Hartford, Conn., have elevated occurrences of childhood anemia, the condition of having low red blood cells.

The project began as an offshoot of a nutritional survey of Latino children that showed an unexpectedly high frequency of the indicator for anemia, low hemoglobin in red blood cells.

In a follow-up review of 300 medical charts selected randomly at three major primary-care centers in Hartford, Ferris confirmed that as many as one in three children in Hartford between the ages of 18 and 36 months have deficient hemoglobin levels. The percentage, akin to rates in developing countries, contrasts with a figure of 7 percent nationwide in the United States.

Ferris says the findings are a major cause for concern. "Anemia has consequences for children," she says. "They're not just tired. The condition affects how well they can learn." The high rate of anemia was not news to the urban community. Ferris says almost everyone in that population has a family member with either anemia or diabetes.

Although anemia has a range of causes, Ferris has established that among Hartford toddlers, it derives primarily from iron deficiency. She says a shortage of iron may adversly affect children long before it shows up as deficient hemoglobin.

Ferris has also documented a preliminary link between iron deficiencies and infections among study participants.

"The primary food for bacteria is iron, and one of the body's first responses to infection is to aggregate iron - collect it as a mass," she says. "This makes the iron unavailable to become part of red blood cells."

The children in the current study have their blood screened for both anemia and iron-deficiency at family resource centers in Hartford. The results are available right away and services, including consultation with a registered dietician, are offered on the spot.

Under basic treatments, a mother whose offspring is anemic is told to give the child more iron; however Ferris found that some children's iron intake might be adequate or even too high. Almost all the iron is coming from cereals, however, and may not be readily absorbed by the body. "We suggest adding a small amount of meat to their diet," she says.

Ferris says she is also learning from the families, who use a variety of traditional remedies, including herbs and certain food combinations, and from health care providers who find that simply adding more iron to a child's diet is ineffective.

"What started out as a lab-based model is not turning out that way," she says. "We're trying to solve the problem together with the families, the health care community, and community support systems."

The approach can be challenging, however. "It's very difficult," says Ferris, "to counsel people without telling them what to do, to bring them through the process so they can make their own decisions about what's appropriate for their children.
-- Elizabeth Omara-Otunnu