IntroductionA symptom cluster is very common among oncological patients: cancer-related fatigue, emotional distress, sleep difficulties, pain, and cognitive difficulties. Clinical applications of interventions based on non-ordinary states of consciousness, mostly hypnosis and meditation, are starting to be investigated in oncology settings. They revealed encouraging results in terms of improvements of these symptoms. However, these studies often focused on breast cancer patients, with methodological limitations. Another non-ordinary state of consciousness may also have therapeutic applications in oncology: self-induced cognitive trance. It seems (...) to differ from hypnosis and meditation, as it involves the body more directly. Thus, investigating its clinical applications, along with hypnosis and meditation interventions, could improve available therapeutic options in oncology. This article details the study protocol of a preference-based longitudinal controlled superiority trial aiming to assess the effectiveness of 3 group interventions to improve oncological patients’ quality of life, and more specifically CRF, emotional distress, sleep, pain, and cognitive difficulties.Methods and analysisA power analysis required a total sample of 160 patients. Main inclusion criteria are: cancer diagnosis, active treatments completed for less than a year, no practice of hypnosis, meditation, or SICT, and presence of at least one of these four symptoms: fatigue, sleep difficulties, depression, or anxiety. Each participant will choose the intervention in which they want to participate. To test the effectiveness of the interventions, data will be collected by questionnaires and neurobiological measures and directly from the medical record at four time points: before inclusion in the study ; immediately after the intervention; and at 3- and 12-month follow-up. The longitudinal data in each group will then be measured.DiscussionIn addition to standard cancer therapies, there is a growing interest from patients in complementary approaches, such as hypnosis, meditation, and SICT. The results of this study will be useful to increase knowledge about short- and long-term effectiveness of 3 group interventions for CRF, emotional distress, sleep, pain, and cognitive difficulties in patients with different cancers.Clinical Trial RegistrationClinicalTrials.gov/. Retrospectively registered on the 29th of April 2021. url: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04873661. (shrink)

Entropy is ubiquitous in physics, and it plays important roles in numerous other disciplines ranging from logic and statistics to biology and economics. However, a closer look reveals a complicated picture: entropy is defined differently in different contexts, and even within the same domain different notions of entropy are at work. Some of these are defined in terms of probabilities, others are not. The aim of this chapter is to arrive at an understanding of some of the most important notions (...) of entropy and to clarify the relations between them, After setting the stage by introducing the thermodynamic entropy, we discuss notions of entropy in information theory, statistical mechanics, dynamical systems theory and fractal geometry. (shrink)

This article is about nursing theories, the development of nursing knowledge and the underlying, hidden epistemology. The current technical–economical rationality in society and health care calls for a specific kind of knowledge based on a traditional Western, Socratic view of science. This has an immense influence on the development of nursing knowledge. The purpose of the article was therefore to discuss the hidden epistemology of nursing knowledge and theories seen in a broad historical context and point to an alternative epistemology (...) for a future context. It is a question about which nursing theories and what nursing knowledge should be developed in order to benefit patients and relatives of the future. We suggest that future knowledge development in nursing be developed in an interchange between theory and practice and guided by philosophy like a kind of pendulum where all three elements are treated as equals. We suggest a framework for the development of nursing knowledge based on a caring‐ethical practice, a theory on life phenomena in suffering and relationship‐based nursing, and thereby, we may be able to help patients to be cured, to recover, to be alleviated or comforted when suffering. (shrink)

Dementia is a growing issue at the end of life that presents unique challenges for advance care planning. Advance directives are a useful and important component of end-of-life planning, but standard advance directives have less utility in cases of loss of capacity due to dementia. An advance directive designed to specifically address end-of-life issues in the setting of dementia can provide patients with increased autonomy and caregivers with improved information about the desires of the individual in question. The Dartmouth Dementia (...) Directive is a dementia-specific advance directive, available online, that seeks to address common concerns of individuals who are planning for dementia-related end-of-life care. This directive was piloted in a community-based workshop, which provided important details and perspective on the best use of dementia-specific advance directives in the greater population. (shrink)

Review of Substance and Essence in Aristotle: an Interpretation of Metaphysics VII-IX, by Charlotte Witt (Cornell University Press: 1989).

This article argues that common intuitions regarding (a) the specialness of ‘use-novel’ data for confirmation and (b) that this specialness implies the ‘no-double-counting rule’, which says that data used in ‘constructing’ (calibrating) a model cannot also play a role in confirming the model’s predictions, are too crude. The intuitions in question are pertinent in all the sciences, but we appeal to a climate science case study to illustrate what is at stake. Our strategy is to analyse the intuitive claims in (...) light of prominent accounts of confirmation of model predictions. We show that on the Bayesian account of confirmation, and also on the standard classical hypothesis-testing account, claims (a) and (b) are not generally true; but for some select cases, it is possible to distinguish data used for calibration from use-novel data, where only the latter confirm. The more specialized classical model-selection methods, on the other hand, uphold a nuanced version of claim (a), but this comes apart from (b), which must be rejected in favour of a more refined account of the relationship between calibration and confirmation. Thus, depending on the framework of confirmation, either the scope or the simplicity of the intuitive position must be revised. (shrink)

In their thoughtful paper, Shen et al. (2024) discuss optimal solutions to address the challenge of returning individual research results from digital phenotyping in psychiatry. Their conclusion to...

The purpose of the article is to elaborate on the scholarly debate on affect. We consider the site of affect to be the activities of embodied, socioculturally and spatially situated participants: “Affective activity is a form of social practice” (Wetherell, 2015, p. 147). By studying affect as a social phenomenon, we treat affect as a social ontology. Social practices are constituted through participation in social interaction, which makes it possible to study affect empirically. Moreover, we suggest that to consider affect (...) a social ontology connects affect to agency. We regard affect as a participants’ phenomenon where emotions and knowledge are not separated, i.e. as a social epistemology. To capture the complexity of affective activity, the study of situated participation requires video data. We collected data at a centre for persons with acquired brain injury (ABI), which highlights research ethics. The International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) framework defines participation as involvement in life situations. ICF focuses on two broader perspectives: the body and the individual in society. We turn ICF’s abstract societal perspective on participation to meaningful local accomplishments in lived social practices. Our focus is, in line with a critical social ontology in disability studies, on how-ability, the communicative abilities of the residents (Hughes, 2007). To get closer to life situations as they unfold, we analyse participation in its details as embodied actions during activities in the material environment of the centre. To conclude, we demonstrate a resident’s competent participation in an occupational therapy session through a fine-grained analysis of affective activity. Interaction, practices and phenomena are complex theoretical and practical issues. In the analysis of the encounters as complex multimodal and -sensorial situations, we use an extended version of Ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis (EMCA) that incorporates the body and material environment with the interconnectedness of interactional episodes. To do this, we enlarge the scope of analysis from the complexity of local occasions of affective activity to connections between consecutive affective entanglements. In the indicated work we draw on theoretical (lamination) and methodological (nexus analysis) suggestions in order to best pursue the sociocultural nature of situated interactions. (shrink)

Selective reproductive technologies, such as preimplantation genetic diagnosis, enable enhanced clinical success rates, create reproductive choices, and produce new commercial opportunities. Drawing upon empirical material acquired during a ten-month period in 2016, this study uses a total of twenty-two in-depth interviews with doctors, CEOs, clinical directors, marketing directors, patient counselors, and embryologists to discuss how traveling for the SRT of gender selection for nonmedical reasons is mediated by fertility clinics and clinicians in Dubai. Multimodal analysis was used to analyze the (...) clinical websites’ key rhetorical and visual features. Meanwhile, interviews and observational studies highlighted the context within which gender selection takes place. Findings revealed that gender selection is promoted as a form of “enhancement” and “family balance,” which, when combined with the ways that Dubai is assembled as a sensory tourist destination, routinize SRTs and lead to an understanding of gender selection as not merely an individualized reproductive journey but an optimization of the family unit. (shrink)

This paper focuses on eristic in political debate of the forensic, or confrontational, type. First, some findings on the enactment and persuasiveness of hostility in a series of Danish TV-debates 1975–85 are presented, including a list of the clearly hostile debater's characteristics and a subdivision of conspiracy arguments. This presentation serves to illustrate that hostility is less persuasive than argumentation practitioners and theorists tend to assume. Next, the widespread notion of debate as a genre half-way between the quarrel and the (...) critical discussion is challenged in a discussion of Douglas N. Walton's distinction between types of dialogue. It is maintained that the normative model of confrontational debate excludes the quarrel and that debate should not be perceived as second-rate critical discussion. (shrink)

Wem wird geglaubt und wem nicht? Wessen Wissen wird weitergegeben und wessen nicht? Wer hat eine Stimme und wer nicht? Theorien der epistemischen Ungerechtigkeit befassen sich mit dem breiten Feld der ungerechten oder unfairen Behandlung, die mit Fragen des Wissens, Verstehens und Kommunizierens zusammenhängen, wie z.B. die Möglichkeit, vom Wissen oder von kommunikativen Praktiken ausgeschlossen zu werden oder zum Schweigen gebracht zu werden, aber auch Kontexte, in denen die Bedeutungen mancher systematisch verzerrt oder falsch gehört und falsch dargestellt werden, in (...) denen manchen misstraut wird oder es an epistemischer Handlungsfähigkeit mangelt. In diesem Buch wird eine Übersicht über die breite Debatte epistemischer Ungerechtigkeit, epistemischer Unterdrückung und epistemischer Gewalt gegeben, in dem unterschiedliche Theorien, die sich auf der Schnittstelle von Gerechtigkeitstheorie und epistemischen Fragen befinden, systematisch und kritisch diskutiert sowie theoretische Vorgänger dieser Theorien beleuchtet werden. (shrink)

Sex. Die meisten von uns haben ihn. Mal schlecht, mal gut, manchmal phänomenal. Die wenigsten denken lange drüber nach. Oder reden offen drüber. Dabei ist gar nicht so klar, was Sex eigentlich gut macht. Und wann ist Sex schlecht? Oder nicht nur schlecht, sondern sogar moralisch problematisch? Hilkje Hänel zeigt, dass es gar nicht so einfach ist, zwischen (moralisch) problematischem Sex und gutem Sex klar zu unterscheiden und dass es dabei häufig vor allem auf den Kontext und unsere Kommunikation ankommt. (...) Auf der Basis aktueller Wissenschaft und medialer Bewegungen wie #MeToo verteidigt Hänel ihre Ansichten gegen die wichtigsten Einwände und argumentiert für mehr Respekt im Bett. (shrink)

Background Implementing person-centred care (PCC) in nursing homes is challenging due to a gap between theory and practice. Bridging this gap requires suitable education, which focuses on learning how to attune care to the values and preferences of residents and take moral, relational, and situational aspects into account. Staff’s stories about the care they provide (i.e. caring stories) may deliver valuable insights for learning about these aspects. However, there is limited research on using staff's narratives for moral learning. Objective This (...) study aims to provide insight into the perspectives of nursing staff on using their caring stories to learn about PCC. Research design In this qualitative research, we conducted two rounds of interviews with 17 participants working in nursing homes. We wanted to obtain nursing staff’s perceptions of working with their caring stories and the impact on PCC. Ethical considerations Participation was voluntary, and participants provided written consent. The study protocol is approved by The Institutional Review Board of the Medical Ethical Committee Leiden-Den Haag-Delft. Findings Working with caring stories enables nursing staff to provide PCC and improves job satisfaction. It increases awareness of what matters to residents, fosters information rich in context and meaning, and enhances voice and vocabulary. Through in-depth team reflections, nursing staff discussed the significant moments for residents, which centralizes the discussions on the moral quality of care. Discussion Working with caring stories fosters dialogue on PCC and enhances reflection on ethical situations in daily encounters, contributing to the moral development of nursing staff. Putting nursing staff’s narratives at the centre of learning suits their daily practice and intrinsic motivation. Therefore, the outcomes of this study are an addition to the existing literature about using narratives in long-term care. Conclusion Using nursing staff's narratives contributes to PCC and positively impacts nursing staff. We recommend using staff's caring stories as a vehicle for moral learning in the transition to PCC. (shrink)

Charlotte Wolff was born in Riesenburg, West Prussia into a middle-class Jewish family. She studied philosophy and then medicine at several German universities, completing her doctorate in Berlin in 1926. Working in various institutions over the next few years, she was also interested in psychotherapy and had a small private medical and psychotherapeutic practice. In 1933 she was forced to leave Germany because of the Nazi regime, and settled for a few years in Paris. As a German refugee she (...) was unable to practice medicine, so she began her research into the correlation between hand traits and personality. In 1936 she went to London to continue her research work and lived there until her death. An active lesbian from an early age, her later research turned to sexology and her writing on lesbianism and bisexuality were influential early works in the field. This is a great opportunity to rediscover her early work, including her first autobiography. (shrink)

In matters of rights, constitutions tend to avoid settling controversies. With few exceptions, rights are formulated in open-ended language, seeking consensus on an abstraction without purporting to resolve the many moral-political questions implicated by rights. The resulting view has been that rights extend everywhere but are everywhere infringed by legislation seeking to resolve the very moral-political questions the constitution seeks to avoid. The Negotiable Constitution challenges this view. Arguing that underspecified rights call for greater specification, Grégoire C. N. Webber (...) draws on limitation clauses common to most bills of rights to develop a new understanding of the relationship between rights and legislation. The legislature is situated as a key constitutional actor tasked with completing the specification of constitutional rights. In turn, because the constitutional project is incomplete with regards to rights, it is open to being re-negotiated by legislation struggling with the very moral-political questions left underdetermined at the constitutional level. (shrink)

On the observational equivalence of continuous-time deterministic and indeterministic descriptions Content Type Journal Article Pages 193-225 DOI 10.1007/s13194-010-0011-5 Authors Charlotte Werndl, Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE UK Journal European Journal for Philosophy of Science Online ISSN 1879-4920 Print ISSN 1879-4912 Journal Volume Volume 1 Journal Issue Volume 1, Number 2.

Attentional bias to threat has been almost exclusively examined after participants experienced repeated pairings between a conditioned stimulus (CS) and an aversive unconditioned stimulus (US). This study aimed to determine whether threat-related attentional capture can result from observational learning, when participants acquire knowledge of the aversive qualities of a stimulus without themselves experiencing aversive outcomes. Non-clinical young-adult participants (N = 38) first watched a video of an individual (the demonstrator) performing a Pavlovian conditioning task in which one colour was paired (...) with shock (CS+) and another colour was neutral (CS−). They then carried out visual search for a shape-defined target. Oculomotor measures evidenced an attentional bias toward the CS+ colour, suggesting that threat-related attentional capture can ensue from observational learning. Exploratory analyses also revealed that this effect was positively correlated with empathy for the demonstrator. Our findings extend empirical and theoretical knowledge about threat-driven attention and provide valuable insights to better understand the formation of anxiety disorders. (shrink)

How do people learn to talk about the causal and temporal relations between events, and the motivation behind why people do what they do? The narrative practice hypothesis of Hutto and Gallagher holds that children are exposed to narratives that provide training for understanding and expressing reasons for why people behave as they do. In this context, we have recently developed a model of narrative processing where a structured model of the developing situation is built up from experienced events, and (...) enriched by sentences in a narrative that describe event meanings. The main interest is to develop a proof of concept for how narrative can be used to structure, organize and describe experience. Narrative sentences describe events, and they also define temporal and causal relations between events. These relations are specified by a class of narrative function words, including “because, before, after, first, finally.” The current research develops a proof of concept that by observing how people describe social events, a developmental robotic system can begin to acquire early knowledge of how to explain the reasons for events. We collect data from naïve subjects who use narrative function words to describe simple scenes of human-robot interaction, and then employ algorithms for extracting the statistical structure of how narrative function words link events in the situation model. By using these statistical regularities, the robot can thus learn from human experience about how to properly employ in question-answering dialogues with the human, and in generating canonical narratives for new experiences. The behavior of the system is demonstrated over several behavioral interactions, and associated narrative interaction sessions, while a more formal extended evaluation and user study will be the subject of future research. Clearly this is far removed from the power of the full blown narrative practice capability, but it provides a first step in the development of an experimental infrastructure for the study of socially situated narrative practice in human-robot interaction. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show how systematic Charles Taylor’s philosophy is. It rejects two opposite readings: one claiming that Taylor’s thought is too diverse to have real unity; the other, that it is the product of a “monomaniac” (Taylor’s own word). I claim that his thought has a very distinct structure, comprising two levels. On the first, “meta-hermeneutic” level, Taylor defends a thesis about hermeneutics (namely, that it cannot be dispensed with): this unifies his anthropology, epistemology, moral (...) philosophy, philosophy of language and political philosophy. On the second, “hermeneutic” level, Taylor builds an impressive historic construal of modern identity and its dilemmas. More importantly, while these two levels are irreducibly distinct, they relate to each other in interesting ways, giving Taylor’s philosophy its systematicity. I finally confront this view with other readings, and argue that it is the best way to understand Taylor’s work. (shrink)

Marcel Mauss published his essay The Gift in the context of debates about the European sovereign debt crises and the economic growth experienced by the colonies. This article traces the discursive associations between Mauss’ anthropological concepts and the reformist program of French socialists who pushed for an “altruistic” colonial policy in the interwar period. This article demonstrates that the three obligations which Mauss identified as the basis of a customary law of international economic relations served as key references in the (...) French debate about the relationships between metropolises and colonies in the interwar period. Mauss made this relation between colonial policy and the ethnology of the gift explicit in his book, The Nation. Moving beyond Mauss’ interwar writings, the article traces the genealogy of his later reflections to his involvement in prewar debate... (shrink)

The _Turba Philosophorum_ is at the confluence of many Greek traditions, and bears testimony both to the history of the transmission of Greek knowledge, and of its reception in Egypt in the ninth century.

Cet ouvrage est une réédition numérique d’un livre paru au XXe siècle, désormais indisponible dans son format d’origine.

Legislated Rights: Securing Human Rights through Legislation aims to correct certain imbalances in constitutional thought and scholarship that burden the legislature and rights with misconceptions...

Interrogating the relationship of the sovereign power of the nation state to the scientist's expert knowledge as a legitimating--and sometimes challenging- ...

Paternalism has attracted new defenders in recent years. Such defenders typically either downplay the normative significance of autonomy or deny that we are sufficiently rational for paternalistic interventions to be objectionable.1 Both of these argumentative strategies constitute challenges to John Stuart Mill’s influential anti-paternalistic ‘harm principle’, which states that coercive interference with the liberty of competent adults is justifiable only if such interference prevents harm to non-consenting third parties (Mill, p. 23).2 In this journal, Wilkinson has provided a novel, provocative (...) defence of paternalism in the medical context—one that (provisionally) accepts rather than challenges Mill’s harm principle.3 Wilkinson’s argument is complex. But he begins with Parfit’s influential account of personal identity.4 According to Parfit, Alice at T1 can be the same person as Alice at T2, but the extent to which Alice at T1 and Alice at T2 are similar depends on the extent to which there are ‘chains’ of strong psychological connections between Alice at T1 and Alice at T2. Strong psychological connections, in turn, are mental states such as intentions or beliefs, or psychological traits. For example, if Alice at T2 remembers very little about herself the day before, and the day before that, all the way to Alice at T1, Alice at T2 has completely different psychological traits than Alice at T1—for example, Alice at T1 was courageous, whereas Alice at T2 is cowardly—then Alice at T1 and Alice at T2 are distinct persons. If the harm principle is correct and Alice is autonomous, it is permissible to interfere with Alice’s liberty only if it prevents harm to some non-consenting third party. But if we accept Parfit’s view on personal identity, then a novel defence of paternalistic intervention emerges: Alice at T2 may well be a distinct person from Alice at T1. So, …. (shrink)

Problematic substance use (PSU) among nurses has wide‐ranging adverse implications. A critical integrative literature review was conducted with an emphasis on building knowledge regarding the influence of structural factors within nurses' professional environments on nurses with PSU. Five thematic categories emerged: (i) access, (ii) stress, and (iii) attitudes as contributory factors, (iv) treatment policies for nurses with PSU, and (v) the culture of the nursing profession. Conclusions were that an overemphasis on individual culpability and failing predominates in the literature and (...) that crucial knowledge gaps exist regarding the influence of structural factors on driving and shaping nurses' substance use. (shrink)

Charlotte Sabourin | : Cet article vise à souligner l’importance du rôle joué par la conception kantienne des Lumières dans la Critique de la raison pure. On verra en effet que la connaissance de soi au coeur du projet critique gagne à être comprise en relation avec l’idée de penser par soi-même. Cette connaissance de soi dévoile cependant certaines erreurs tenaces commises par la raison, qui doivent précisément être rectifiées sous peine de compromettre la liberté de penser. La conception (...) kantienne des Lumières nous permettra ainsi de faire sens de la nature réflexive de l’entreprise critique. | : The aim of this paper is to show that the Kantian conception of enlightenment plays an important role in the Critique of Pure Reason. I will show that the self-knowledge central to Kant’s critical philosophy can be better understood by considering it in relation with the idea of thinking for oneself. Moreover, this self-knowledge reveals some deep-rooted errors made by pure reason that must be rectified in order not to compromise freedom of thought. I will thus use Kant’s conception of enlightenment to make sense of the reflexive nature of the critical project. (shrink)

Aristotle's defense of Dunamis -- Power and potentiality -- Rational and nonrational powers -- The priority of actuality -- Ontological hierarchy, normativity, and gender.

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Section I: Introduction -- Section II: Managing organizational pluralism: how individuals navigate moral contradictions and compromise -- Section III: Looking at organizations critically: rhetoric, justification and criticism-as-practice -- Section IV: Reconsidering valuation and evaluation in organizations -- Section V: Pushing the boundaries of pragmatic sociology's theoretical agenda.

La philosophie analytique récente a vu naître d’importants débats de méthode concernant la bonne manière de pratiquer l’ontologie, qui voient s’opposer les partisans déclarés de Quine à ceux de Carnap. Au cœur de ces débats se trouve l’idée que le monde possède une structure ontologique propre, indépendante de notre manière de le conceptualiser ou de l’organiser. C’est cette idée qui est ici plus précisément examinée, dans le but de la clarifier. Cet article défend la thèse que, si le monde possède (...) bien une structure intrinsèque, celle-ci est de nature physique et non ontologique. Quant à cette dernière, elle ne peut être conçue indépendamment d’une subjectivité consciente et constituante. Si cet argument est correct, il donne raison à l’école néo-carnapienne, mais surtout il étaye l’idée qu’il ne saurait y avoir d’ontologie que transcendantale, une idée dont les germes semblent être en train de poindre au sein de l’école analytique. (shrink)

Behavioral evidence for the COVIS dual‐process model of category learning has been widely reported in over a hundred publications (Ashby & Valentin, ). It is generally accepted that the validity of such evidence depends on the accurate identification of individual participants' categorization strategies, a task that usually falls to Decision Bound analysis (Maddox & Ashby, ). Here, we examine the accuracy of this analysis in a series of model‐recovery simulations. In Simulation 1, over a third of simulated participants using an (...) Explicit (conjunctive) strategy were misidentified as using a Procedural strategy. In Simulation 2, nearly all simulated participants using a Procedural strategy were misidentified as using an Explicit strategy. In Simulation 3, we re‐examined a recently reported COVIS‐supporting dissociation (Smith et al., ) and found that these misidentification errors permit an alternative, single‐process, explanation of the results. Implications for due process in the future evaluation of dual‐process theories, including recommendations for future practice, are discussed. (shrink)