This chapter contains sections titled: Emotional Trauma The Therapeutic Power of the Blues Three ‘Clinical’ Illustrations ‐ The Role of Lyrics Musical Characteristics of the Blues Concluding Remarks Notes.

The process of bringing the visceral, bodily aspect of emotional experience into language plays a vital role in the working through of painful emotional states. Such visceral-linguistic unities are achieved in a dialogue of emotional understanding, and it is in such dialogue that experiences of emotional trauma can be held and transformed into endurable and namable painful feelings. The blues is a wonderful example of such dialogue. In the unifying experience of the blues, songwriter, performers, and listeners are joined in (...) a visceral-linguistic conversation in which universally traumatizing aspects of human existence can be communally held and borne. (shrink)

The present study investigated how the magnitude the word blindness suggestion effect on Stroop interference depended on hypnotic suggestibility when given as an imaginative suggestion and under conditions in which hypnosis was not mentioned. Hypnotic suggestibility is shown to be a significant predictor of the magnitude of the imaginative word blindness suggestion effect under these conditions. This is therefore the first study to show a linear relationship between the imaginative word blindness suggestion effect and hypnotic suggestibility across the whole hypnotizability (...) spectrum. The results replicate previous findings showing that highs respond to the word blindness suggestion to a greater extent than lows but extend previous work by showing that the advantage for those higher on the hypnotizability spectrum occurs even in a non-hypnotic context. Negative attitudes about hypnosis may not explain the failure to observe similar effects of the word blindness suggestion in less hypnotizable individuals. (shrink)

While stakeholder theory has traditionally considered organization’s interactions with stakeholders in terms of independent, dyadic relationships, recent scholarship has pointed to the fact that organizations exist within a complex network of intertwining relationships [e.g., Rowley, T. J.: 1997, The Academy of Management Review 22(4), 887–910]. However, further theoretical and empirical development of the interactions between stakeholders has been lacking. In this paper, we develop a framework for understanding and measuring the effects upon the organization of competing, complementary and cooperative stakeholder (...) interactions, which we refer to as stakeholder multiplicity. We draw upon three forms of fit (i.e. fit as matching, fit as moderation, and fit as gestalts; Venkatraman, N.: 1989) to develop a framework for understanding stakeholder multiplicity based upon the direction, strength, and synergies of the interacting claims. Additionally, we draw upon the theory of stakeholder identification and salience of Mitchell et al. (1997), which we argue provides a more relevant and significantly more illustrative explanation of the nature and effects of stakeholder interactions upon the organization than the network approach of Rowley (1997). Furthermore, we ground our framework through reference to three stakeholder groups (i.e. governments, customers, and employees) and the stakeholder issue of concern for the natural environment. We propose a hierarchy of the multiplicity strength of influence of these three stakeholder groups. Potential measurement and implications are discussed. (shrink)

What recourse do democrats have if a present generation uses democratic legal procedures to abrogate constitutional essentials, dissolving past commitments and denying future generations the fundamental freedoms and equalities it currently enjoys? In Sovereignty across Generations, Alessandro Ferrara responds to this issue by re-examining key concepts related to democracy, including sovereignty, constituent power, liberalism and constitutionalism. This review analyses Ferrara’s theory of ‘sequential sovereignty’, which reconceives ‘the people’ as a body spanning generations and grounds it in the ideal of vertical (...) reciprocity. Ferrara provides a sound normative framework for understanding transgenerational obligations and the unamendability of constitutional essentials. However, this review also identifies some limits to Ferrara’s approach: his focus on implied unamendability risks creating a dissonance between legality and legitimacy, and his reluctance to fully engage with ‘containment’ creates a blind spot in democracy’s self-defence. The review concludes that explicit unamendability and containment are consistent with Ferrara’s theory of sequential sovereignty and provide a better safeguard for democracy across generations. (shrink)

Recently, extremist ‘populist’ parties have succeeded in obtaining large enough democratic electoral mandates both to legally make substantive changes to the law and constitution and to legally eliminate avenues to challenge their control over the government. Extremists place committed liberal democrats in an awkward position as they work to legally revolutionize their constitutions and turn them into ‘illiberal democracies’. This article analyses political responses to this problem. It argues that the twin phenomena of legal revolution and illiberal democracy reveal a (...) latent tension between the constitutional commitments to democracy and liberalism, that is, the equal chance to have one’s political goals enacted into law and individual basic rights. Political extremists make the latent tension real when they use the procedures of democratic legal change to abrogate constitutional commitments to liberalism, among other things. Although the two commitments normally coexist side by side, exceptional times raise an existential dilemma for liberal democracies: is it constitutional to democratically amend liberalism out of the constitution? After analysing the moral legitimacy of both the democratic and liberal arguments, this article concludes that liberal constitutionalism is constitutive of genuine democracy. In other words, it is unconstitutional to abrogate basic liberal commitments and it is legitimate to adopt constitutional mechanisms to guarantee liberalism – even if it means constraining democracy to do so. This article then situates ‘constrained democracy’ within the liberal current as a way to conceive of and respond to this pressing problem. It concludes by discussing four constitutional mechanisms – inspired by the German Grundgesetz – to guarantee liberalism: unambiguous lexically prior commitment to liberalism, limits on negative majorities, the eternity clause and party bans. It concludes that constrained democracy is an important constitutional guarantee of liberal democracy and that the four mechanisms, among others, are essential to enact constrained democracy. (shrink)

We consider the questions of whether or not large language models (LLMs) have beliefs, and, if they do, how we might measure them. First, we consider whether or not we should expect LLMs to have something like beliefs in the first place. We consider some recent arguments aiming to show that LLMs cannot have beliefs. We show that these arguments are misguided. We provide a more productive framing of questions surrounding the status of beliefs in LLMs, and highlight the empirical (...) nature of the problem. With this lesson in hand, we evaluate two existing approaches for measuring the beliefs of LLMs, one due to Azaria and Mitchell (The internal state of an llm knows when its lying, 2023) and the other to Burns et al. (Discovering latent knowledge in language models without supervision, 2022). Moving from the armchair to the desk chair, we provide empirical results that show that these methods fail to generalize in very basic ways. We then argue that, even if LLMs have beliefs, these methods are unlikely to be successful for conceptual reasons. Thus, there is still no lie-detector for LLMs. We conclude by suggesting some concrete paths for future work. (shrink)

Is a devoted Nazi or a zombie bureaucrat a greater moral and political problem? Because the dangers of immoral fanaticism are so clear, the dangers of mindless bureaucracy are easy to overlook. Yet zombie bureaucrats have contributed substantially to the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century, doing so seemingly oblivious to the monstrous qualities of their actions. Hannah Arendt’s work on thoughtlessness raises a dilemma: if Eichmann, the architect of the Nazi Final Solution, truly was a thoughtless ‘cog’, lacking in (...) intentionality, can one really hold him morally accountable for the evil qualities of his acts? This article relates Arendt’s ‘thought’ and Strawson’s and Bilgrami’s discussion of ‘reactive attitudes’ and Sartre’s concept of ‘bad faith’. To find a basis for moral accountable in seemingly thoughtless cases like Eichmann’s. Although Arendt’s Eichmann is an extreme example, finding a basis to hold him accountable is valuable because ‘little Eichmanns’ will persist as long as impersonal forces structure and depress reactive attitudes. (shrink)

Marshall and colleagues (2024) offer a framework for emergency physicians (EPs) tasked with caring for “resuscitated opioid users”—or patients who have recently overdosed on opioids. This framework...

What did it mean to keep a secret in early medieval England? It was a period during which the experience of secrecy was intensely bound to the belief that God knew all human secrets, yet the secrets of God remained unknowable to human beings. In Bonds of Secrecy, Benjamin A. Saltzman argues that this double-edged conception of secrecy and divinity profoundly affected the way believers acted and thought as subjects under the law, as the devout within monasteries, and as (...) readers before books. One crucial way it did so was by forming an ethical relationship between the self and the world that was fundamentally different from its modern reflex. Whereas today the bearers of secrets might be judged for the consequences of their reticence or disclosure, Saltzman observes, in the early Middle Ages a person attempting to conceal a secret was judged for believing he or she could conceal it from God. In other words, to attempt to hide from God was to become ensnared in a serious sin, but to hide from the world while deliberately and humbly submitting to God's constant observation was often a hallmark of spiritual virtue. Looking to law codes and religious architecture, hagiographies and riddles, Bonds of Secrecy shows how legal and monastic institutions harnessed the pervasive and complex belief in God's omniscience to produce an intense culture of scrutiny and a radical ethics of secrecy founded on the individual's belief that nothing could be hidden from God. According to Saltzman, this ethics of secrecy not only informed early medieval notions of mental activity and ideas about the mind but also profoundly shaped the practices of literary interpretation in ways that can inform our own contemporary approaches to reading texts from the past. (shrink)

Mild and moderate mental illnesses can hinder labor force participation, lead to work interruptions, and hamper earning potential. Targeted interventions have proven effective at addressing these problems. But their potential depends on labor protections that enable people to take advantage of these interventions while keeping jobs and income.

Abstract:Designers whose projects are inspired by a community’s unique sense of spatial identity often focus on a site’s observable context, i.e. historic forms and surface aesthetics. Focus on typological components, however, overlooks generative relationships between the phenomenology of place and human energy investment. Recognizing Kubler’s dictum that material history is an observable continuum then, at its most fundamental level, the history of spatial production is the history of energy use. For most of human history, place was a unique socio-cultural expression (...) because it fused energy expenditure with site-specific conditions, including climate, topography and materials. This paper introduces the concept of burden distance, the distance needed to travel to material sources and bring them back from origin points to their place of use. This proposed concept parallels Walter Christaller’s Central Place Theory idea of “range,” but applied in terms phenomenological implications of energy investment and placemaking. Understanding burden distance and its role in placemaking, is an important step in identifying why built environments have a spatial specificity that contributes to mitigate spatial alienation and instead root people to their built environment. (shrink)

In this paper I hope to show that Geach misunderstands the nature of Plato's argument in the Euthyphro and more importantly the reasoning behind the dialectical strategy adopted by Socrates. Furthermore I shall argue that Geach's reading of the Euthyphro engenders serious difficulties, that stand in the way of understanding the manner in which Plato construes the problem of determining the nature of, and relationship between universal and particulars, which is of great significance because it is precisely this problem, in (...) relation to piety, that is central to the Euthyphro. In the appendix I shall sketch the outline of an argument in order to justify the assumption that the theory of Forms is present in the Euthyphro. (shrink)

In Plato's Lysis, Socrates' conversation with Lysis features logical fallacies and questionable premises and closes with a blatantly eristic trick. I show how the form and content of these arguments make sense if we interpret them from the perspective of Socrates' pedagogical goals. Lysis is a competitive teenager who, along with his friend Menexenus, enjoys the game of eristic disputation. Socrates recognizes Lysis' predilections, and he constructs his arguments to engage Lysis' interests and loves, while also drawing the boy into (...) thinking philosophically about the issues that the arguments raise about love, freedom, and happiness. (shrink)

Este trabajo examina el parecer del obispo y humanista Juan Bautista Pérez , uno de los primeros críticos de las reliquias desenterradas en Granada a partir de 1588. Dada su política morisca bastante progresista en la diócesis de Segorbe, bien habría podido Pérez aprobar la aparición de los plomos, que creaban una historia común para cristianos y musulmanes. Su erudición, por el contrario, le hizo concluir que los plomos fueron una fabricación moderna, y que su veneración pondría en peligro de (...) desviación religiosa al pueblo español. El parecer de Pérez es un ejemplo de rigor, creatividad, y devoción religiosa entre los humanistas de finales del siglo XVI. (shrink)

This article critically examines Busk's Democracy in Spite of the Demos, which critiques the “categorical imperative of democracy.” Although Busk effectively challenges the commitment to value-neutral democratic procedures as the foundation for legitimate law, his alternative, curtailing powerful interests ability to manipulate voters using “socially necessary delusions,” risks establishing elite rule. This article instead proposes basic liberal rights as the normative foundation for legitimate public order and militant democracy as its most effective institutional safeguard, arguing that this combination better realizes (...) human emancipation. (shrink)

This article reflects on William E Scheuerman’s The End of Law and the value of the liberal rule of law. It puts Scheuerman’s concerns about Schmitt’s attacks on the liberal rule of law in dialogue with Schmitt’s theory of ‘legal revolution’. It argues that, although Schmitt was neither a liberal nor a democrat, his work on legal revolution can help liberals respond to populist attacks on liberal constitutional essentials.

It is helpful for any enterprise to stop occasionally and examine itself. Science has done this rather infrequently in its long and eventful history, and there has not been, in general, any continuity in these self-examinations. As a result the history of the philosophy of science has been a rather spotty affair. My belief is that the philosophy of science should also, at times, become self-critical. When a study is concerned primarily with methods of other disciplines it tends to underemphasize (...) the role played by the methods which it itself uses. What is the method of the philosophy of science, and is it justifiable? Can there be a satisfactory study of science and can this be scientific? (shrink)

When business organisations become involved in contributing to and resolving social issues, they enter areas traditionally seen as the purview of governments. In doing so, they begin to take on the expectations and responsibilities of government; they become politicised. This politicisation is a product of business’s success and power and appears largely unavoidable. Adopting Matten & Crane’s (2005a) extended view of corporate citizenship, business organisations’ responsibilities extend to the administration of citizens’ social, civil and political rights. We term these areas (...) where business organisations take over the administration of citizenship rights as the social governance gap. Drawing upon the agenda of Margolis and Walsh (2003), we seek to enhance the understanding of how business navigates its responsibilities within the social governance gap, including its function as a significant actor influencing societal development and wellbeing. We do this through an exploration of Rio Tinto’s involvement in the WA Future Fund. This paper forms part of an introductory scoping case study of the Rio Tinto WA Future fund and its function as one of Rio Tinto’s diverse responses to community development issues in Western Australia. (shrink)

Chance both guides our credences and is an objective feature of the world. How and why we should conform our credences to chance depends on the underlying metaphysical account of what chance is. I use considerations of accuracy (how close your credences come to truth-values) to propose a new way of deferring to chance. The principle I endorse, called the Trust Principle, requires chance to be a good guide to the world, permits modest chances, tells us how to listen to (...) chance even when the chances are modest, and entails but is not entailed by the New Principle. As I show, a rational agent will obey this principle if and only if she expects chance to be at least as accurate as she is on every good way of measuring accuracy. Much of the discussion, and the technical results, extend beyond chance to deference to any kind of expert. Indeed, you will trust someone about a particular question just in case you expect that person to be more accurate than you are about that question. (shrink)

Evidential Decision Theory and Causal Decision Theory are the leading contenders as theories of rational action, but both face counterexamples. We present some new counterexamples, including one in which the optimal action is causally dominated. We also present a novel decision theory, Functional Decision Theory, which simultaneously solves both sets of counterexamples. Instead of considering which physical action of theirs would give rise to the best outcomes, FDT agents consider which output of their decision function would give rise to the (...) best outcome. This theory relies on a notion of subjunctive dependence, where multiple implementations of the same mathematical function are considered to have identical results for logical rather than causal reasons. Taking these subjunctive dependencies into account allows FDT agents to outperform CDT and EDT agents in, for example, the presence of accurate predictors. (shrink)