Bred to provide human companionship, dogs eclipse all other species when it comes to reading the body language of people. Dog owners hunger for a complete rapport with their pets; in the dog the fantasy of empathetic resonance finds its ideal. But cross-species communication is never easy. Dog love can be a precious but melancholy thing. An attempt to understand human attachment to the _canis familiaris_ in terms of reciprocity and empathy, _Melancholia’s_ _Dog_ tackles such difficult concepts as intimacy and (...) kinship with dogs, the shame associated with identification with their suffering, and the reasons for the profound mourning over their deaths. In addition to philosophy and psychoanalysis, Alice A. Kuzniar turns to the insights and images offered by the literary and visual arts—the short stories of Ivan Turgenev and Franz Kafka, the novels of J. M. Coetzee and Rebecca Brown, the photography of Sally Mann and William Wegman, and the artwork of David Hockney and Sue Coe. Without falling into sentimentality or anthropomorphization, Kuzniar honors and learns from our canine companions, above all attending to the silences and sadness brought on by the effort to represent the dog as perfectly and faithfully as it is said to love. (shrink)

Interdisciplinary exploration of the scope and impact of Teresa Brennan’s lifework.

Hospitals long ago shed their role as alms houses for the poor. What vestiges remain of the early American hospital are the tax-exempt, nonprofit hospital form and a general perception that hospitals, as charitable institutions, owe a duty to their communities. The appropriateness of the nonprofit hospital tax exemption has long been debated, and many theories have been advanced to justify the tax exemption of nonprofit hospitals. In a growing number of jurisdictions, however, state and local authorities have gone beyond (...) the theoretical debate and are challenging the tax exemption of their nonprofit hospitals. For various reasons, efforts are afoot to capture greater community benefit from nonprofit hospitals.At the heart of such challenges is the debate over the nature and extent of the duty charitable institutions owe to their communities. A demand is growing for nonprofit hospitals to earn their tax exemptions by benefiting their communities in concrete ways. Some have been stripped of their tax-exempt status by local authorities or pressured to make payments in lieu of taxes. A number of states have recently implemented initiatives in an attempt to make hospitals more accountable for their community benefits. Many hospitals are responding to this heightened scrutiny in a proactive way, by voluntarily documenting community benefits. A number of nonprofit hospitals and hospital associations are cooperating with—or even sponsoring—state legislation in this area. (shrink)

Three major trends in American health policy are intersecting in a fascinating way. First, managed care has grown to become the most dominant form of health-care delivery, leading to reductions in health-care costs as insurers are able to influence health-care providers with financial incentives. Second, the present growth of managed care has slowed, almost to a standstill, largely on account of consumers questioning what effects these financial incentives are having on the care of patients — questioning that has been expressed (...) in particular through lawsuits against managed care companies.Third, we are experiencing a renewed interest in the existence of medical error and how it may be reduced as a result of the Institute of Medicine’s report, To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System. The most important aspect of this renaissance in error reduction has been its emphasis on health care as a system that can be made better through system-oriented change. The most frustrating aspect is that the IOM did not endorse change in malpractice liability, which consistently puts the impetus for reducing medical error on the individual provider rather than the system as a whole. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 23 (2003) 135-137 [Access article in PDF] The 2002 Meeting of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies Alice Keefe University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point "Religious Responses to Violence" was the theme for the program at the SBCS Annual Meeting in Toronto, Canada, on November 22-23, 2002. Speaking from Christian and Jewish perspectives, the presenters in Session I were Harold Kasimow, Professor Emeritus of Grinnell College; Elaine MacInnes, O.L.M.; (...) Sarah Pinnock of Trinity University; and Rebekah Miles from the Perkins School of Theology. Responding from a Buddhist perspective was Virginia Strauss of the Boston Research Center. Session II offered reflections on Buddhist responses to violence from Gene Reeves of the International Buddhist Congregation; Christopher Ives of Stonehill College; and John Makransky, professor of Religious Studies at Boston College and a Buddhist teacher, with a Christian response from Theodore Walker of Perkins School of Theology, noted for his work in Black theology.Opening Session I, Harold Kasimow explored Jewish responses to violence, which he finds similar in many ways to responses to violence in Mahayana Buddhism. Both traditions unequivocally condemn violence. Basic to Jewish reflection on violence is the great commandment that one shall love one's neighbor as oneself, along with the principle that all humans are created in the image of God; therefore, as Rabbi Akiva taught, whoever sheds blood diminishes God's presence in the world. But like Mahayana Buddhism, the Jewish tradition admits to rare cases where violence may be legitimately used in a spirit of compassion when the lives of others are at stake. On this point, Kasimow, himself a Holocaust survivor, cited Abraham Heschel, who said that "indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself." Heschel dreamed of a world rid of evil by human effort, and he suggested that interfaith dialogue serves as a step toward this goal as it works against the evil of demonizing the "other."Sarah Pinnock, who has written on the religious journeys of Holocaust survivors, explored the themes of memory, solidarity, hope, and mystical faith as compelling Christian modes of survival and resistance in the face of evil. Logic cannot solve the problem of evil, but through memory, suffering is not forgotten; through solidarity, we identify and join with the victimized in resistance to evil; and through hope, we find the energy for resistance. Mystical faith discovers divine transcendence in all things, while abandoning egotistical demands that God be the world's puppet master; [End Page 135] in mystical faith, Christians do not look for divine intervention, but for human beings to act for God against evil.Rebekah Miles, a Christian ethicist, offered a lucid outline of three distinct Christian approaches to violence: (1) absolute pacificism, which rejects the use of violence for any reason; (2) the "crusade" perspective, which justifies war when it can be construed as a conflict between good and evil and which calls for the total eradication of evil in the form of the enemy; and (3) the "just war" perspective, which stipulates precise criteria for instances when the use of violence may be justified and places restraints on any exercise of violence. In addition to this helpful overview, she engaged arguments (put forth by Rosemary Ruether, SharonWelch, and ReginaSchwartz) that there is something inherent in the nature of Western monotheism that serves to legitimate and encourage violence, and argued for divine transcendence as undergirding the effective power of the prophetic critique against all forms of idolatry and tyranny.The final Christian presenter was Elaine MacInnes, O.L.M., a Catholic nun and Zen master who is noted for her activist work in prison ministry in the Philippines and in Canada. She reminded us that even as violence brings suffering, it is at the same time a mystery in that it carries a redeeming potential to rid us of all that is false. It is the cultivation of silence that allows the sacred inner life to do its work.Responding from a Buddhist perspective, Virginia Strauss returned to the problem of the human desire for retributory justice and looked to Buddhism... (shrink)

Education should be a continuous process from birth to death. It is essentially a process leading to reconciliation of the human and divine elements in the constitution of a human being. Right relationship between God and man, spirit and matter, the whole and the part, should be a prime objective of educational techniques.

This paper argues that independent auditors have lost sight of their obligation to be truly impartial, and have increasingly adopted an attitude of client advocacy. We argue that auditors have a professional obligation to go beyond merely passing judgment on whether client accounting methods are acceptable under GAAP, and to judge whether the principles adopted are the most appropriate under the circumstances. We then review recent evidence which suggests that auditors have abandoned this objective in favor of advocating client-preferred principles. (...) The results of a survey of public accountants employed by small CPA firms indicates that, in a scenario in which an auditor did not feel that the client's accounting treatment was the most appropriate under the circumstances but it was recognized as an acceptable alternative under GAAP, advocacy of the client-preferred approach is considered appropriate and is very likely to occur in practice. In less subtle cases (e.g., when the auditor did not feel that the client's treatment provided the best reflection of the economic substance of the underlying transactions), survey participants as a group were ambivalent regarding the appropriateness of client advocacy, and felt that subordination of judgment was likely to occur in practice. The results also indicate that engagement risk, or the risk that the firm will be harmed by aggressive behavior, affects judgments of both the appropriateness and likelihood of subordination of judgment. These findings suggest that auditors have adopted an ideology of client advocacy, within the constraints of engagement risk. (shrink)

DNA evidence has rapidly become a significant and routine feature of modern criminal prosecutions. The first introduction of DNA evidence in a U.S. Court occurred in 1987. By 1994, 42 percent of local prosecutors reported that they had used DNA evidence in a felony case at least once. By 2001 that number had increased to 68 percent. Moreover, from a technical point of view, the potential benefits of DNA testing are substantial. Early hurdles to admissibility during trial have been overcome (...) by the adoption of rigorous standards for DNA analysis. Rapid development of identification technology, fueled in significant part by the Human Genome Project, and the resultant development and expansion of national forensic DNA databases, has increased the potential of DNA to play a major role in crime solving. Indeed, over three million offender profiles, collected by state and federal authorities, now reside in the National DNA Index System. This number is likely to increase as more states and the federal government are expanding compelled DNA collections to individuals arrested for certain crimes. (shrink)

Communicative Understandings of Women's Leadership Development: From Ceilings of Glass to Labyrinth Paths, edited by Elesha L. Ruminski and Annette M. Holba, weaves the disciplines of communication studies, leadership studies, and women's studies to offer theoretical and practical reflection about women's leadership development in academic, organizational, and political contexts. This work claims a space for women's leadership studies and acknowledges the paradigmatic shift from discussing women's leadership using the glass ceiling to what Eagly and Carli identify as the labyrinth of (...) leadership. (shrink)

“Pick a card, any card. This has to be a completely free choice.” the magician tells you. But is it really? Although we like to think that we are using our free will to make our decisions, research in psychology has shown that many of our behaviours are automatic and unconsciously influenced by external stimuli (Ariely, 2008; Bargh & Chartrand, 1999; Newell & Shanks, 2014; Nisbett & Wilson, 1977), and that we are often oblivious to the cognitive mechanisms that underpin (...) our decision (Wegner, 2002, 2003). Magicians have exploited this illusory sense of agency for a long time, and have developed a wide range of techniques to influence and control spectators’ choices of such things as card, word, or number (Annemann, 1933; Banachek, 2002a; Jones, 1994; Turner, 2015). These techniques are instances of what is called forcing. -/- Many forces are extremely effective, illustrating various weaknesses in our sense of control over decisions and their outcomes. Researchers have started to investigate them in various ways (Kuhn, Pailh s, & Lan, 2020; Olson, Amlani, Raz, & Rensink, 2015; Pailhes & Kuhn, 2020b, 2020c; Shalom et al., 2013) and are beginning to obtain valuable insights into decision-making processes as well as a better understanding of the cognitive mechanisms that lead people to experience an illusory sense of free will and of agency. -/- Although magicians have acquired large amounts of knowledge in covertly controlling people’s choices, much of this knowledge is only discussed in the context of individual magic tricks, or in books that are not readily accessible to non-magicans. As we and others have argued elsewhere (Ekroll, Sayim, & Wagemans, 2017; Kuhn, 2019; Kuhn, Amlani, & Rensink, 2008; Kuhn, Caffaratti, Teszka, & Rensink, 2014; Macknik et al., 2008; Olson et al., 2015; Olson, Landry, Appourchaux, & Raz, 2016; Shalom et al., 2013; Thomas, Didierjean, Maquestiaux, & Gygax, 2015), a particularly effective way of making this knowledge more available is via the creation of taxonomies centered around psychological mechanisms (Rensink & Kuhn, 2015). For example, the psychologically based taxonomy of misdirection (Kuhn et al., 2014) helps draw links between misdirection and formal theories of perception and cognition. -/- Our aim here is to apply a similar process to the knowledge magicians have about forcing. The present paper develops a psychologically based taxonomy of forcing techniques with two goals in mind. Firstly, it should help uncover the various psychological mechanisms that underlie forcing techniques. Secondly, it should facilitate knowledge transfer between magicians and psychologists. Among other things, this knowledge will allow researchers to gain new insights into the mechanisms underlying decision-making, and the feeling of free will and of agency over choice. We start by defining the magician’s force and then look at some of the past classifications of forcing. (shrink)

The progression of research and scholarly inquiry does not occur in isolation and is wholly dependent on accurate reporting of methods and results, and successful replication of prior work. Without mechanisms to correct the literature, much time and money is wasted on research based on a crumbling foundation. These guidelines serve to outline the respective responsibilities of researchers, institutions, agencies, and publishers or editors in maintaining the integrity of the research record. Delineating these complementary roles and proposing solutions for common (...) barriers provide a foundation for best practices. (shrink)

Tool use research has suffered from a lack of consistent theoretical frameworks. There is a plethora of tool use definitions and the most widespread ones are so inclusive that the behaviors that fall under them arguably do not have much in common. The situation is aggravated by the prevalence of anecdotes, which have played an undue role in the literature. In order to provide a more rigorous foundation for research and to advance our understanding of the interrelation between tool use (...) and cognition, we suggest the adoption of Fragaszy and Mangalam's (2018) tooling framework, which is characterized by the creation of a body-plus-object system that manages a mechanical interface between tool and surface. Tooling is limited to a narrower suite of behaviors than tool use, which might facilitate its neurocognitive investigation. Indeed, evidence in the literature indicates that tooling has distinct neurocognitive underpinnings not shared by other activities typically classified as tool use, at least in primates. In order to understand the extent of tooling incidences in previous research, we systematically surveyed the comprehensive tool use catalog by Shumaker et al. (2011). We identified 201 tool use submodes, of which only 81 could be classified as tooling, and the majority of the tool use examples across species were poorly supported by evidence. Furthermore, tooling appears to be phylogenetically less widespread than tool use, with the greatest variability found in the primate order. However, in order to confirm these findings and to understand the evolution and neurocognitive mechanisms of tooling, more systematic research will be required in the future, particularly with currently underrepresented taxa. (shrink)

Inherent in providing healthcare for youth lie tensions among best interests, decision-making capacity, rights, and legal authority. Transgender youth experience barriers to needed gender-affirming care, often rooted in ethical and legal issues, such as healthcare provider concerns regarding youth capacity and rights to consent to hormone therapy. Even when decision-making capacity is present, youth may lack the legal authority to give consent. The aims of this paper are therefore to provide an empirical analysis of minor trans youth capacity to consent (...) to hormone therapy and to address the normative question of whether there is ethical justification for granting trans youth the authority to consent to this care. Through qualitative content analysis of interviews with trans youth, parents, and healthcare providers, we found that trans youth demonstrated the understandings and abilities characteristic of the capacity to consent to hormone therapy and that they did consent to hormone therapy with positive outcomes. Employing deontological and consequentialist reasoning and drawing on a foundation of empirical evidence, human rights, and best interests we conclude that granting trans youth with decisional capacity both the right and the legal authority to consent to hormone therapy via the informed consent model of care is ethically justified. (shrink)

The Enneagram is like a mirror, reflecting dimensions of ourselves that are sometimes hard to see. In this helpful guide, spiritual director and Enneagram teacher Alice Fryling offers an introduction to each number of the Enneagram, with questions and meditations to lead you into deeper self-awareness and reveal how you can experience God's love more abundantly.

This paper provides and justifies a broader definition of a ‘law-breaking event’ than that adopted by D. Lewis who identifies this concept with the notion of an event that falsifies the laws of nature in his sense of ‘falsification’. It is pointed out that the broader definition is the key to answering C. Ginet’s objection against local miracle compatibilism. It also allows a neutral reconstruction of one of the disagreements underlying the compatibilism debate about the ability to do otherwise, i.e., (...) the disagreement over nomological possibility of alternative action in a deterministic world. Under this reconstruction, neither the incompatibilist nor the compatibilist can take advantage of the concept of a law-breaking event to show that their opponent’s view is false. (shrink)

A recent target article in the American Journal of Bioethics (AJOB) considered the right of transgender (trans) children to access pubertal suppression (Priest 2019). We were concerned by publicati...

Interoception, the ability to feel the body’s internal sensations, is an essential aspect of emotional experience. There is mounting evidence that interoception is impaired in common mental health disorders and that poor interoceptive awareness is a major contributor to emotional reactivity, calling for clinical interventions to address this deficit. The manuscript presents a comprehensive theoretical review, drawing on multidisciplinary findings to propose a metatheory of reinforcement mechanisms applicable across a wide range of disorders. We present a reconsideration of operant conditioning (...) through the co-emergence model of reinforcement, which is a neurophenomenological account of the interaction between cognition and interoception, and its consequences on behavior. The model suggests that during memory processing, the retrieval of autobiographical memory (including maladaptive cognition) is dependent upon its co-emerging interoceptive cues occurring at the encoding, consolidation and reconsolidation stages. Accordingly, “interoceptive reinforcement” during emotional distress is a common factor to all emotional disorders and a major cause for relapse. We propose that interoceptive desensitization has transdiagnostic benefits, readily achievable through the cultivation of equanimity during mindfulness training and can be integrated in cognitive and behavioral interventions to permit a transdiagnostic applicability. We summarize the contributions of this approach into 10 specific and testable propositions. (shrink)

The article introduces a distinction between weak and strong counterfactual power and shows that as far as the metaphysical aspect of choice is concerned, T. Merricks's examples do not undermine the proposition that strong counterfactual power over a fact suffices for having a genuine choice about that fact. This is relevant to debates about logical fatalism, theological incompatibilism and nomological (determinism) incompatibilism. If strong counterfactual power is sufficient for having a choice, then in each of the main arguments for the (...) mentioned stances, the negation of the argument's conclusion entails the negation of its key premise. It is further argued that those key premises cannot be justified by the fixity of the past because the latter holds only to the extent warranted by the asymmetry of counterfactual dependence between the past and the future. Therefore, the pastness of such facts as that propositions about our acts were true before we were born, and that God believed then that we would perform those acts, does not provide any reason to believe that we do not have a choice about those facts. Fatalists and incompatibilists assume in their arguments something that has yet to be justified. (shrink)

We place agency front-and-centre in the aesthetics of science via an analysis of experimental design and performance. This first involves developing an account of scientific agency relevant to experiment. We do this via an analogy between experiments and games (as understood by Suits and Nguyen): both involve artificial practical environments designed to enable participants to exercise particular forms of agency. Second, we consider how this account of agency might underwrite an aesthetics of experiment. Experiments are well-designed not only when they (...) generate clear, elegant results, but also when they actively confront the experimenter with experimental phenomena, afford the exercise of agency throughout experimental runs and in iterative design and tweaking, and underlie stable, intersubjective experiences across agents. We apply the account to Newton’s optical work, and contrast this with contemporary experimental practices, where significantly more ‘experimental distance’ holds between the experimenter and the result. Taking the agency of experimental practice seriously enables a richer account of the role of aesthetic values, sensibilities, and judgments in science. (shrink)

The Darwinian argument in metaethics can have its memetic counterparts based on the assumption that our moral beliefs were formed in the process of cultural evolution by means of memetic natural selection. Is there any difference with respect to the debunking force of these two kinds of genealogical critiques? In this paper, I argue that there might be such difference. Therefore, it is not true that any possible naturalistically respectable causal mechanism is equally undermining for our moral beliefs. Yet, there (...) is a more profound question to be asked: should we leave the rationality of our deepest moral beliefs at the mercy of the results of empirical investigations into their causal origin? This paper argues that we should not. However, if this approach is to be justified, the autonomy of moral beliefs must be defended in a principal manner. Only then may a different account of knowledge as well as different standards of objective propositional rationality be legitimately adopted for moral beliefs — i.e. different from those proper to non-normative beliefs. It turns out that only expressivists are in a position to claim that the property in virtue of which moral beliefs perform their distinctive practical function confers autonomy on moral discourse. (shrink)

O artigo discute algumas considerações a respeito dos conceitos de vulnerabilidade e proteção, quando relacionados à prática e à pesquisa em psicologia. Estabelece ligações entre conceitos clássicos, principalmente na área da filosofia e demais ciências humanas, como ética, moral e educação e as circunstâncias cotidianas e contemporâneas, como o acesso facilitado às informações, o incentivo à formação de recursos humanos na área da pesquisa e o desenvolvimento tecnológico das últimas décadas. Ao fim, sinalizam-se alternativas práticas e possíveis para operacionalizar a (...) manutenção da pesquisa no contexto da vulnerabilidade e, ao mesmo tempo, para garantir o cumprimento das recomendações éticas vigentes. (shrink)

Is there a role for aesthetic judgements in science? One aspect of scientific practice, the use of thought experiments, has a clear aesthetic dimension. Thought experiments are creatively produced artefacts that are designed to engage the imagination. Comparisons have been made between scientific (and philosophical) thought experiments and other aesthetically appreciated objects. In particular, thought experiments are said to share qualities with literary fiction as they invite us to imagine a fictional scenario and often have a narrative form (Elgin 2014). (...) But philosophical discussions of aesthetics in science have focused mainly on the epistemic role of beauty and elegance when it comes to theories and mathematical proofs, and thought experiments have been widely overlooked. My aim in this chapter is to address how the aesthetic choices scientists make in the design of a thought experiment contribute to its function: to communicate, convince, or explain a theory or phenomenon. A key issue is whether any aesthetic features in science provide anything beyond catching our attention, or are at best, a mere heuristic aid. I respond to accounts that argue this way and show how formulation is important in scientific thought experiments and, similarly to literary fictions, there is more than one way of interpreting a thought experiment scenario. I end by considering which literary examples are most appropriate when making comparisons with thought experiments. As a result, the difference between representations in art and science raised in current discussions is not as stark as it has been made out to be, and science is a more heterogeneous practice than has been allowed. Part of the value of thought experiments in scientific practice includes the qualities they share with literary works. (shrink)