William James once replied to the critics of the new pragmatic philosophy with the caution not to be too sharp or logic-chopping but to evaluate pragmatism as a whole, and especially weigh it against its possible alternatives. This is fair advice indeed. All too often the opponents of pragmatism have seized upon one of its formulations and, oblivious of its context and surrounding qualifications, have proclaimed the absurdity of the whole enterprise. James himself admitted that some of his expressions were (...) infelicitous and misleading, but he believed that the intelligent and indulgent reader would grasp his meaning and not impute to him doctrines he never held. Indeed, the reader of James soon comes to realize that he cannot stop at any one formulation of pragmatism but must hurry on to the next in order to see it in a broader and fuller context. He is aware, then, that pragmatism in James’s view is not a doctrine or system but a method and spirit of philosophizing, or, as we would say today, a way of doing philosophy. It is this spirit and perspective that must be appreciated if one is to do justice to the pragmatism of William James. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and (...) made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Background: The factors influencing parents’ willingness to enroll their children in biobanks are poorly understood. This study sought to assess parents’ willingness to enroll their children, and their perceived benefits, concerns, and information needs under different consent and data-sharing scenarios, and to identify factors associated with willingness. Methods: This large, experimental survey of patients at the 11 eMERGE Network sites used a disproportionate stratified sampling scheme to enrich the sample with historically underrepresented groups. Participants were randomized to receive one of (...) three consent and data-sharing scenarios. Results: In total, 90,000 surveys were mailed and 13,000 individuals responded (15.8% response rate). 5737 respondents were parents of minor children. Overall, 55% (95% confidence interval 50–59%) of parents were willing to enroll their youngest minor child in a hypothetical biobank; willingness did not differ between consent and data-sharing scenarios. Lower educational attainment, higher religiosity, lower trust, worries about privacy, and attitudes about benefits, concerns, and information needs were independently associated with less willingness to allow their child to participate. Of parents who were willing to participate themselves, 25% were not willing to allow their child to participate. Being willing to participate but not willing to allow one’s child to participate was independently associated with multiple factors, including race, lower educational attainment, lower annual household income, public health care insurance, and higher religiosity. Conclusions: Fifty-five percent of parents were willing to allow their youngest minor child to participate in a hypothetical biobank. Building trust, protecting privacy, and addressing attitudes may increase enrollment and diversity in pediatric biobanks. (shrink)

Objective Having failed to achieve adequate influenza vaccination rates among employees through voluntary programmes, healthcare organisations have adopted mandatory ones. Some programmes permit religious exemptions, but little is known about who requests religious objections or why. Methods Content analysis of applications for religious exemptions from influenza vaccination at a free-standing children’s hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA during the 2014–2015 influenza season. Results Twelve of 15 260 employees submitted applications requesting religious exemptions. Requestors included both clinical and non-clinical employees. All requestors (...) voluntarily identified their religious affiliation, and most were Christian. Content analysis identified six categories of reasons used to justify an exemption: risks/benefits, ethical/political, lack of direct patient contact, providence, purity and sanctity of life. Individuals articulated reasons in 1–5 categories. The most frequently cited category was purity; the vaccine and/or its mode of administration were impure, or receiving the vaccine would make the individual impure. Two individuals asserted that the vaccine contained cells derived from aborted human fetuses. Individuals also volunteered information supporting the sincerity of their beliefs including distress over previous vaccination and examples of behaviour consistent with their specific objection or their general religious commitment. All requests were approved. Conclusions Less than 0.1% of employees requested religious exemptions. Partnering with religious leaders and carefully correcting erroneous information may help address requestors’ concerns. (shrink)

We examined the relationship between sleep and the affective components of subjective well-being as well as psychological well-being, and between sleep and academic performance, of full-time undergraduate students in a residential college at the National University of Singapore. The aspects of sleep considered were self-reported sleep duration, sleep efficiency, frequency of sleep disturbances, daytime dysfunction, sleep latency and overall sleep quality, as measured by the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index. Academic performance was measured using self-reported cumulative average point scores, typically known (...) as grade point average in other institutions. Psychological well-being and the affective components of subjective well-being were assessed using the Flourishing Scale and the Scale of Positive and Negative Experience, respectively. With the exception of sleep latency, our univariate analysis revealed significant associations between the abovementioned facets of sleep, and the affective components of subjective well-being. The analysis also revealed significant associations between the above sleep variables and psychological well-being, except sleep latency and frequency of sleep disturbances. Only daytime dysfunction was found to be significantly correlated with academic performance in our univariate analysis. In addition, our multivariate analysis shows that psychological well-being, affect balance and academic performance each has a direct effect on overall sleep quality. The relationship between overall sleep quality and psychological well-being is U-shaped, while that between overall sleep quality and affect balance is linear and moderated by psychological well-being. The relationship between overall sleep quality and academic performance is either U-shaped or an inverted-U, depending on the level of psychological well-being, which moderates the relationship. These nonlinear relationships indicate that individuals with the highest levels of psychological well-being are not the best sleepers, neither are the highest academic achievers necessarily the best sleepers. (shrink)

Background: While employers are increasingly considering and implementing COVID-19 vaccination requirements, little is known about the reasons offered by employees seeking religious exemptions.Methods: We conducted a mixed methods analysis of all the requests for religious exemptions submitted during the initial implementation of a COVID-19 vaccination requirement at a single academic medical center in the United States.Results: Five hundred sixty-five (3.4%) employees requested religious exemptions. At least 305 (54.0%) requesters had job titles suggesting that they had direct patient contact. Four hundred (...) ninety-nine (88.3%) of requesters self-identified as Christian, of whom 120 (21.2%) identified as Roman Catholic. Requesters offered 0 to 8 (mean 2.7) categories of reasons for their request. The most frequently stated reasons pertained to the use of fetal cell lines in vaccine development and manufacturing (382, 67.6%), interest in maintaining purity (221, 39.1%), or belief in divine healing (172, 30.4%). Some requesters also volunteered evidence of the sincerity of their beliefs including examples of their religious practices (116, 20.5%), other practices (66, 11.7%), and emotional states (32, 5.7%). One hundred fifty-two applications (26.9%) contained text copied without attribution, primarily from sample religious exemption request letters available on the Internet.Conclusions: Most requesters focused on the use of fetal cell lines in the development or manufacturing of the vaccines as the justification for their request. The development of vaccines that are not reliant on fetal cell lines may increase vaccination rates. Understanding reasons for religious exemption requests may inform vaccine education and vaccination policies. (shrink)

Malgré les déclarations d'intention et les efforts des écologistes, la planète est en danger. Ses ennemis cherchent un profit immédiat à empoisonner l'air, les sols et l'eau, à abattre les arbres et les animaux. Ils trouvent un intérêt à détruire la réalité pour lui substituer un monde virtuel contrôlable. Cet essai invite à établir de nouvelles relations entre la planète et les hommes.

La crise de 2008 est une crise de gouvernance des entreprises, notamment des banques, qui, pour faire des profits élevés, sont allées jusqu’à compromettre leur existence. Comment faire en sorte que l’entreprise ne soit pas seulement préoccupée de maximiser le cours de l’action, alors que jusque dans les sciences sociales, elle est réduite à cela? L’entreprise est apparue à la fin du XIX e siècle pour révolutionner la vie quotidienne grâce aux découvertes scientifiques. L’entreprise est une association de partenaires dans (...) une création collective de modes de vie, dont les partenaires financiers, mais aussi les ingénieurs, les consommateurs, le personnel. Il faut refonder l’entreprise et qu’elle se donne une mission qui exprime son projet à long terme et à laquelle souscrivent les actionnaires. (shrink)

This paper is addressed to recent theoretical discussions of the Anthropocene, in particular Bernard Stiegler’s Neganthropocene (Open Universities Press, 2018), which argues: “As we drift past tipping points that put future biota at risk, while a post-truth regime institutes the denial of ‘climate change’ (as fake news), and as Silicon Valley assistants snatch decision and memory, and as gene-editing and a financially-engineered bifurcation advances over the rising hum of extinction events and the innumerable toxins and conceptual opiates that Anthropocene Talk (...) fascinated itself with—in short, as ‘the Anthropocene’ discloses itself as a dead-end trap…”. The objective of this paper is therefore twofold: (1) to discuss how the Anthropocene is appropriated to certain ideological discourses (paradoxically) to maintain the hegemony of precisely those systems of production that have most accelerated climate change etc.; (2) to consider how the factography of the Anthropocene is exploited in this process to mask the ideological character of industry-aligned “technocratic” environmental management. The paper is not concerned with specific case studies in terms of government and industry policy, or climate science, but rather with the ways in which the discourse of the Anthropocene has been inflected within the humanities and the broader cultural field—that is to say, ideologically, as a system or logic of meaning. How the Anthropocene “means” is, in this respect, a question of some importance. This paper does not attempt to address all the facets of this question, but focuses upon a central “apocalyptic” strain in the discourse of the Anthropocene drawn particularly from Francis Fukuyama’s millennial posthumanism and centred in the question of “sustainability” as catastrophe management—with the risk that real environmental degradation will become an alibi for a revived neoliberalism. In other words, that the critical Earth system transformations that characterise the Anthropocene are themselves commodities, and that the project of their amelioration is in process of defining a future (opportunistic) “crisis” rhetoric with a global political franchise. The ideological import of the Anthropocene stems precisely from the fact that it is planetary and, while catalysed by human agency, independent in its specific behaviour from it. The Anthropocene objectively presents as the contemporary counterpart of the Cold War doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction and the most compelling argument for a new kind of technological “arms race.” But it also presents as the condition of an emerging ideological discourse which will determine how this race is run. From the discourse on “energy security” to the widespread “security crackdown” on environmental activists across the so-called developed & developing world, the Anthropocene has come to represent the co-option of a scientific factography for the thinly disguised resurgence of “ideological science” of the Fukuyamaesque variety (post-history, post-human). For Fukuyama, the true meaning of “posthuman” is thus the accomplishment of humanity’s historical mission. As the “End of History” designates an end of ideological struggle, so too the dénouement of the Anthropocene and the “ends of man” represent the accomplished purpose of species warfare: dominion, not simply over the world, but over all possible worlds. According to this narrative, science—like technology—must be uniquely at the service of the maintenance of the global order, organised around a universal appeal to “crisis management.” It is precisely for this reason that what calls itself post-human masks the return of an ever-more-apocalyptic Humanism. (shrink)

The contents and structure of semantic memory have been the focus of much recent research, with major advances in the development of distributional models, which use word co‐occurrence information as a window into the semantics of language. In parallel, connectionist modeling has extended our knowledge of the processes engaged in semantic activation. However, these two lines of investigation have rarely been brought together. Here, we describe a processing model based on distributional semantics in which activation spreads throughout a semantic network, (...) as dictated by the patterns of semantic similarity between words. We show that the activation profile of the network, measured at various time points, can successfully account for response times in lexical and semantic decision tasks, as well as for subjective concreteness and imageability ratings. We also show that the dynamics of the network is predictive of performance in relational semantic tasks, such as similarity/relatedness rating. Our results indicate that bringing together distributional semantic networks and spreading of activation provides a good fit to both automatic lexical processing (as indexed by lexical and semantic decisions) as well as more deliberate processing (as indexed by ratings), above and beyond what has been reported for previous models that take into account only similarity resulting from network structure. (shrink)

The American Society for Bioethics and Humanities debated for several years about whether it should adopt positions and, if so, on what range of issues. The membership recently approved an amendment to its bylaws permitting the Society to adopt positions on matters related to academic freedom and professionalism but not on substantive moral and policy issues. This resolution is problematic for a number of reasons, including the lack of a categorical difference between these types of claims and the Society's inability (...) to speak on behalf of patients and research subjects. The implementation of the amendment also raises several issues. The Society will need to refrain from speaking too specifically and to articulate the responsibilities of its members. If the Society fails to address these concerns, it runs the risk of denigrating its public image and that of the profession. (shrink)

In their recent paper, “Practical Knowledge without Luminosity,” Bob Beddor and Carlotta Pavese (2022) claim that the doctrine of essentially intentional actions, or “essentialism,” is false. Essentialism states that some actions are essentially intentional, such that, “whenever they are performed, they are performed intentionally” (2022, p. 926). Beddor and Pavese work to reject essentialism, which figures as a key premise in Juan Piñeros Glasscock’s anti-luminosity argument against the knowledge condition for intentional action (Piñeros Glasscock, p. 1240). Historically, essentialism has received (...) little attention from philosophers since its inception in Elizabeth Anscombe’s Intention (2000, §47). However, I believe that essentially intentional actions can play an important role in an ontology of action. In my paper, I develop and argue for a variety of essentialism in the context of naive action theory, which I call naive essentialism. Naive essentialism is a two-fold thesis, which claims that (1) essentially intentional actions exist, and (2) that essentially intentional actions ground accidentally intentional actions. My paper has four parts. In the first part, I distinguish between essentially and accidentally intentional actions, and unpack the relevant principles of naive action theory. Second, I present the grounding thesis that accidentally intentional actions are grounded in essentially intentional actions. Next, I provide an argument for the existence of essentially intentional actions. Lastly, I briefly respond to a possible objection to my argument. The upshot of my arguments is that essentially intentional actions form the metaphysical and explanatory bedrock in a naive ontology of action, and that there are good reasons for accepting a key premise in Piñeros Glasscock’s anti-luminosity argument. (shrink)

It is shown here that the microcanonical ensemble for a system of noninteracting bosons and fermions contains a subensemble of state vectors for which all particles of the system are distinguishable. This “IQC” (inner quantum-classical) subensemble is therefore fully classical, except for a rather extreme quantization of particle momentum and position, which appears as the natural price that must be paid for distinguishability. The contribution of the IQC subensemble to the entropy is readily calculated, and the criterion for this to (...) be a good approximation to the exact entropy is a logarithmically strengthened form of the usual criterion for the validity of classical statistics in terms of the thermal de Broglie wavelength and the average volume per particle. Thus, it becomes possible to derive the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution directly from the ensemble in the classical limit, using fully classical reasoning about the distinguishability of particles. The entropy is additive—theN! factor of the Boltzmann count cancels out in the course of the calculation, and the “N! paradox” is thereby resolved. The method of “correct Boltzmann counting” and the lowest term of the Wigner-Kirkwood series for the partition function are seen to be partly based on the IQC subensemble, and their partly nonclassical nature is clarified. The clear separation in the full ensemble of classical and nonclassical components makes it possible to derive the classical statistics of indistinguishable particles from their quantum statistics in a controlled, explicit way. This is particularly important for nonequilibrium theory. The treatment of molecular collisions along too-literally classical lines turns out to require exorbitantly high temperatures, although there are suggestions of indirect ways in which classical nonequilibrium theory might be justified at ordinary temperatures. The applicability of exact classical ergodic and mixing theory to systems at ordinary temperatures is called into question, although the general idea of coarse-graining is confirmed. The concepts on which the IQC idea is based are shown to give rise to a series development of thermostatistical quantities, starting with the distinguishable-particle approximation. (shrink)

After a survey of disagreements among Thomists on the nature of mathematical abstraction, the author cites Aquinas's text Scriptum super libros Sententiarum, I, d. 2, a.3 (a late text inserted in an older work). It assimilates the objects of mathematics to those of logic, thus admitting a remote foundation in reality but not the direct one of the concepts of the physical sciences.

Legislation banning gender-affirming medical care (GAMC) for minors is inconsistent with the Consensus Recommendations for Pediatric Decision-Making (Salter et al. 2023). Gender dysphoria is a medical condition, and GAMC promotes adolescents’ health interests. The evidence for GAMC is comparable to the evidence for other types of pediatric medical care. Parents are permitted to consent for similar risks in the treatment of other conditions. Evaluation of the potential benefits, risks, and treatment alternatives is contingent on individual patients’ clinical conditions and adolescents’ (...) and their parents’ values and preferences. Such decisions are within the scope of parental discretion and should be made through shared decision-making with health-care providers. Parents’ declining GAMC does not inherently create a significant risk of serious imminent harm required to justify state intervention. Usurping parental discretion for GAMC is unjust: it treats this medical care differently than other comparable types of medical care without sufficient justification. (shrink)