Epistemic humility has garnered increased attention in recent years, including within the realm of clinical ethics and is increasingly accepted as an important part of patient-centred practice and clinical care. However, while literature on the topic often states what epistemic humility isnot, there have been few positive definitions given for the term. Further, these few positive definitions downplay the relational nature of epistemic humility, in other words, the ways in which epistemic humility is developed within the clinical encounter through the (...) relationship between doctor and patient. In this paper, we will present a positive account of epistemic humility, situated in ethical medical education and practice, and show how it can be identified, modelled and cultivated. We provide a character-based account of epistemic humility that emphasises the relational nature of epistemic humility, that is, that views epistemic humility as formed through relationships rather than solely inhering in an individual’s internal mental processes or external presentation and which is embedded in a social context such as a clinical encounter. (shrink)

Cognitively engaging physical activity has been suggested to have superior effects on cognition compared to PA with low cognitive demands; however, there have been few studies directly comparing these different types of activities. The aim of this study is to compare the cognitive effects of a combined physically and cognitively engaging bout of PA to a physical or cognitive activity alone in children. Children were randomized in pairs to one of three 20-min conditions: a cognitive sedentary activity; a non-cognitively engaging (...) PA; and a cognitively engaging PA. Executive function was assessed using a modified Eriksen flanker task immediately before and 10–15 min following the experimental condition. Children ages 6–8 years were included in the study. A repeated measures ANOVA found no significant difference between groups with respect to scores on the flanker task. The results do not support the hypotheses that a cognitively engaging bout of PA enhances cognitive performance over non-cognitively engaging PA or sedentary activities. Possible explanations for our findings include overexertion during the acute bout of PA and depletion of positive affect prior to performing the post-intervention EF tasks. (shrink)

Implicit biases involve associations outside conscious awareness that lead to a negative evaluation of a person on the basis of irrelevant characteristics such as race or gender. This review examines the evidence that healthcare professionals display implicit biases towards patients. PubMed, PsychINFO, PsychARTICLE and CINAHL were searched for peer-reviewed articles published between 1st March 2003 and 31st March 2013. Two reviewers assessed the eligibility of the identified papers based on precise content and quality criteria. The references of eligible papers were (...) examined to identify further eligible studies. Forty two articles were identified as eligible. Seventeen used an implicit measure, to test the biases of healthcare professionals. Twenty five articles employed a between-subjects design, using vignettes to examine the influence of patient characteristics on healthcare professionals’ attitudes, diagnoses, and treatment decisions. The second method was included although it does not isolate implicit attitudes because it is recognised by psychologists who specialise in implicit cognition as a way of detecting the possible presence of implicit bias. Twenty seven studies examined racial/ethnic biases; ten other biases were investigated, including gender, age and weight. Thirty five articles found evidence of implicit bias in healthcare professionals; all the studies that investigated correlations found a significant positive relationship between level of implicit bias and lower quality of care. The evidence indicates that healthcare professionals exhibit the same levels of implicit bias as the wider population. The interactions between multiple patient characteristics and between healthcare professional and patient characteristics reveal the complexity of the phenomenon of implicit bias and its influence on clinician-patient interaction. The most convincing studies from our review are those that combine the IAT and a method measuring the quality of treatment in the actual world. Correlational evidence indicates that biases are likely to influence diagnosis and treatment decisions and levels of care in some circumstances and need to be further investigated. Our review also indicates that there may sometimes be a gap between the norm of impartiality and the extent to which it is embraced by healthcare professionals for some of the tested characteristics. Our findings highlight the need for the healthcare profession to address the role of implicit biases in disparities in healthcare. More research in actual care settings and a greater homogeneity in methods employed to test implicit biases in healthcare is needed. (shrink)

Background Implicit biases are present in the general population and among professionals in various domains, where they can lead to discrimination. Many interventions are used to reduce implicit bias. However, uncertainties remain as to their effectiveness. -/- Methods We conducted a systematic review by searching ERIC, PUBMED and PSYCHINFO for peer-reviewed studies conducted on adults between May 2005 and April 2015, testing interventions designed to reduce implicit bias, with results measured using the Implicit Association Test (IAT) or sufficiently similar methods. (...) -/- Results 30 articles were identified as eligible. Some techniques, such as engaging with others’ perspective, appear unfruitful, at least in short term implicit bias reduction, while other techniques, such as exposure to counterstereotypical exemplars, are more promising. Robust data is lacking for many of these interventions. -/- Conclusions Caution is thus advised when it comes to programs aiming at reducing biases. This does not weaken the case for implementing widespread structural and institutional changes that are multiply justified. (shrink)

There has long been interest in why languages are shaped the way they are, and in the relationship between sign language and gesture. In sign languages, entity classifiers are handshapes that encode how objects move, how they are located relative to one another, and how multiple objects of the same type are distributed in space. Previous studies have shown that hearing adults who are asked to use only manual gestures to describe how objects move in space will use gestures that (...) bear some similarities to classifiers. We investigated how accurately hearing adults, who had been learning British Sign Language for 1–3 years, produce and comprehend classifiers in locative and distributive constructions. In a production task, learners of BSL knew that they could use their hands to represent objects, but they had difficulty choosing the same, conventionalized, handshapes as native signers. They were, however, highly accurate at encoding location and orientation information. Learners therefore show the same pattern found in sign-naïve gesturers. In contrast, handshape, orientation, and location were comprehended with equal accuracy, and testing a group of sign-naïve adults showed that they too were able to understand classifiers with higher than chance accuracy. We conclude that adult learners of BSL bring their visuo-spatial knowledge and gestural abilities to the tasks of understanding and producing constructions that contain entity classifiers. We speculate that investigating the time course of adult sign language acquisition might shed light on how gesture became conventionalized during the genesis of sign languages. (shrink)

Bioethics scholarship considering the possibility of gestating an embryo to full term in an artificial womb (ectogenesis) often overstates the capacities of current technologies and underestimates the barriers to the development of full ectogenesis. Moreover, this debate causes harm by (1) neglecting more immediate problems in the development of artificial wombs, (2) treating abortion as a “problem with a technological solution,” bolstering anti-abortion rhetoric, and (3) presuming the stability of women’s reproductive rights. The ectogenesis conversation must consider anticipated uses of (...) the technology (neonatal intensive care) and acknowledge the immediate context (recognizing abortion as essential healthcare and existing reproductive inequities). (shrink)

Awareness growth—coming to entertain propositions of which one was previously unaware—is a crucial aspect of epistemic thriving. And yet, it is widely believed that orthodox Bayesianism cannot accommodate this phenomenon, since that would require employing supposedly defective catch-all propositions. Orthodox Bayesianism, it is concluded, must be amended. In this paper, I show that this argument fails, and that, on the contrary, the orthodox version of Bayesianism is particularly well-suited to accommodate awareness growth. For it entails what I call the refinement (...) view, which allows us to capture that awareness growth consists in the increase of one’s capacity of discernment. (shrink)

In 1977 Michel Foucault contemplated the idea of punishing rape only as a crime of violence, while in 1978 he argued that non-coercive sex between adults and minors should be decriminalized entirely. Feminists have consistently criticized these suggestions by Foucault. This paper argues that these feminist responses have failed to sufficiently understand the theoretical motivations behind Foucault's statements on sex-crime legislation reform, and will offer a new feminist appraisal of Foucault's suggestions.

Ethical issues arise in the world’s first population-level treatment of severe lead poisoning caused by small-scale mining for gold in rural Nigeria. Emergency medical intervention and environmental cleanup have reduced the mortality in children younger than 5 years from lead poisoning from over 40 to 2.5 per cent leaving little evidence of the harms caused by lead poisoning. In the absence of obvious sequelae, family adherence to long-term intensive therapy to remove accumulated lead reservoirs in children wanes and some community (...) miners challenge safer mining interventions to prevent recontamination of the environment with lead. This letter raises questions regarding community versus individual rights in public health interventions and patient autonomy. (shrink)

These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions.

Leibniz analyzes contingency in terms of a range of different notions: hypothetical necessity, per se contingency, infinite analysis, possible free decrees of God, and moral necessity. These have been interpreted as attempts to retreat from the neccesitarian view he adopts in his early work, but I defend the view that Leibniz’s commitment to necessitarianism—the claim that all truths are necessary—is an important and unwavering feature of his system. The core of Leibniz’s modal theory is the thesis that the denial of (...) a necessary truth is contradictory. Leibniz thinks that if we take all necessary truths into account, including the nature of God, God’s understanding of essences, and his will to do what is best, then all things considered all truths are necessarily true. All truths are necessarily true because the denial of any truth contradicts some necessary feature of God. Instead of understanding Leibniz’s subsequent theories of contingency as abandoning necessitarianism, I treat them as attempts to account for distinctions his interlocutors draw. Rather than eschew all talk of contingency, Leibniz offers and liberally invokes proxies for this notion. I trace the development of Leibniz’s various accounts of contingency from his early to mature work in order to illustrate that they are best understood in a necessitarian framework. I develop versions of his various accounts of contingency, including per se contingency and hypothetical necessity (Chapter 1), infinite analysis and possible free decrees of God (Chapter 2), and moral necessity (Chapter 3). The outcome of my project is a systematic treatment of Leibniz’s surrogate or proxy theories of contingency within his necessitarian framework. It also establishes the character of Leibnizian possible worlds, which are key for the grounding of contingent truths in the goodness of God’s will. Instead of representing all logical space, possible worlds represent alternative plans for God’s world creation, and are thus constrained by metaphysical principles informed by God’s nature. (shrink)

This article explores the propensity of Iliadic landscape similes to encourage reflections on human fragility. Landscape in the similes is usually interpreted as a medium which conveys a consistent symbolic value (for example storms as the hostility of nature); however, landscape is often a more flexible medium. By offering close readings of three Iliadic similes (winter torrents at 4.452–6, snowfall at 12.279–89 and clear night at 8.555–9), this article argues that landscape allowed the poet to frame the main narrative in (...) various ways, both helping the listener to imagine described events and interrupting the listener's immersion in the main narrative. While many have analysed how similes offer analogies to the main narrative, the ways in which the same simile can also disrupt and reframe the narrative are less understood. This article observes that shifts in narrative space and time played a key role in changing the perspective of the listener. Taking a broadly phenomenological approach, it proposes that embodied descriptions of space, which recreate the experience of the moving body in landscape, invite the listener to consider the temporal scale of the natural world. By looking at how landscape in select similes shifts the listener's spatial and temporal experience, this article argues that landscape contributes to the wider Iliadic theme of human fragility. In particular, it identifies the potential for landscape similes to minimize the scale of human experience, question the possibility of human agency, and reveal the limitations of human perspectives and knowledge. (shrink)

Brette presents arguments that query the existence of the neural code. However, he has neglected certain evidence that could be viewed as proof that a neural code operates in the brain. Albeit these proofs show a link between neural activity and cognition, we discuss why they fail to demonstrate the existence of an invariant neural code.

The fractious but potentially fruitful dialogue between legal history and legal theory has been the subject of much recent scholarly attention. Despite this, instances of meaningful engagement over the role of history in legal theorising remain scarce. This is particularly true in respect of normative theorising—the difficult but crucial tasks of critiquing and reforming law—where history is frequently considered to play a relativising role that threatens to destabilise strong evaluation. In this article, I argue that in order to advance the (...) dialogue it is essential to look beyond disciplinary differences and instead focus on the divide between immanence and transcendence, which arises within and also between legal history and legal theory. Reorienting our attention in this way discloses important sources of dissonance but also points towards significant opportunities for cooperation; it is therefore an essential first step in the pursuit of meaningful dialogue, either critical or collaborative. (shrink)

The system reachability set is calculated by covering all possible behaviours of the system through a finite number of simulation steps to ensure that the system trajectory stays within a set safety region. In this paper, the theory of the game method is applied to the design of the controller, a very small controller is designed, and good control results are obtained by simulation. The system gradually shows a divergent trend and cannot achieve stable control. A multihop channel reservation Medium (...) Access Control protocol based on a parallel mechanism is proposed. The multihop channel reservation mechanism is proposed based on periodic node sleep, and the node uses the reservation frame to make the reservation of the channel and transmits the data according to the reservation information; the parallel mechanism is used to make the reservation information and data transmission simultaneously. (shrink)

This article shares lessons-learned by the Center for Values in International Development (C4V) over nearly five years. It notes entrenched resistance by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) of any definition of ‘ethics’ beyond legal and regulatory compliance with government financial, procurement, and programming standards. Among practitioner organizations and firms, incorporation of international development ethics is generally viewed as naïve, out of touch with the highly competitive development ‘market’, and hence unnecessary. The article ends with a call to action (...) to coordinate and create mechanisms, provide funding and forums, and significantly improve collaboration between international development ethicists in academic circles, with international development and humanitarian response practitioners. (shrink)

An overview of the philosophical and bioethics literature on conscientious refusals by health care professionals to provide abortion and contraceptive services.

Katie Steele and H. Orri Stefánsson argue that, to reflect an agent’s limited awareness, the algebra of propositions on which that agent’s credences are defined should be relativised to their awareness state. I argue that this produces insurmountable difficulties. But the project of relativising the agent’s algebra to reflect their partial perspective need not be abandoned: the algebra can be relativised, not to the agent’s awareness state, but to what we might call their subjective modality.

En tant que pratique religieuse, la prière se révèle dans le monde contemporain comme profondément diverse : comme l’observait déjà Marcel Mauss, ses transformations ont accompagné la sécularisation des sociétés et l’individuation des croyances, et elle est restée au cœur des formes les plus traditionnelles de piété. Cette « plasticité » de la prière lui a souvent valu d’être considérée depuis bien des horizons disciplinaires comme pratique religieuse « par excellence », ou phénomène religieu...

This paper argues that abortion access is an important subject for bioethics scholarship and reflects on the relationship between legal frameworks and access to care. The author uses the example of the United Kingdom to examine the benefits and limitations of abortion-permissive legal frameworks in terms of access. These are legal frameworks that enable the provision of abortion but subject to restrictions. An abortion-permissive regime—first in Great Britain and then in Northern Ireland—has gone some way to improving access to care (...) over time. However, aspects of the regime (that lead to its description as permissive rather than supportive of abortion) have the potential to endanger abortion access in the future and so legal reform is necessary. (shrink)

Building Abolition: Decarceration and Social Justice explores the intersections of the carceral in projects of oppression, while at the same time providing intellectual, pragmatic, and undetermined paths toward abolition. Prison abolition is at once about the institution of the prison, and a broad, intersectional political project calling for the end of the social structured by settler colonialism, anti-black racism, and related oppressions. Beyond this, prison abolition is a constructive project that imagines and strives for a transformed world in which justice (...) is not equated with punishment, and accountability is not equated with caging. Composed of sixteen chapters by an international team of scholars and activists, with a Foreword by Perry Zurn and an Afterword by Justin Piché, the book is divided into four themes: - Prisons and Racism - Prisons and Settler Colonialism - Anti-Carceral Feminisms - Multispecies Carceralities. This book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students, activists, and scholars working in the areas of Critical Prison Studies, Critical Criminology, Native Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Black Studies, Critical Race Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Critical Animal Studies, with particular chapters being of interest to scholars and students in other fields, such as, Feminist Legal Studies, Animal Law, Critical Disability Studies, Queer Theory, and Transnational Feminisms. (shrink)

I examine Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s adaptation of Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World in the comic series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I interpret philosophical aspects of Cavendish’s fictional landscape, including her vitalist materialism and naturalized talking animals, as they appear in series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, rendered through 3-D images and corresponding 3-D glasses worn by readers. Through this world adaptation, Moore and O’Neill onboard themes of naturalness, experimentation, technology-aided perceptual processes, and travel to intersecting worlds to enhance (...) The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’s commentary on the formative influence of fiction on authors and audiences. (shrink)

Ratnayake's interesting paper challenges two claims, that cognitive distortions in depression involve epistemic issues; and that cognitive behavioral therapy can rectify those epistemic issues. We are going to discuss both claims here and offer some reasons not to underestimate the epistemic relevance of CBT. First, there may be epistemic issues underlying cognitive distortions in depression that CBT can effectively address, including blind acceptance of negative automatic thoughts and insensitivity to evidence. But, even if CBT were primarily in the business of (...) enhancing utility as opposed to validity, this would have significant, though indirect, epistemic benefits.All human agents, whether they have a... (shrink)

Youth is a critical period in the development of maladaptive eating behaviors. Previous systematic reviews suggest the etiological significance of parent-child relationships for the onset of disordered eating in youth, but less is known about the role of parenting styles. This rapid scoping review aimed to identify whether research supports the role of parenting styles in the development of disordered eating symptoms among youths. Sixteen studies, retrieved from three databases, met the inclusion criteria: original studies, published in English, examined the (...) effect of parenting styles on cognitive and behavioral disordered eating outcomes, among young people up to 18 years of age. Studies supported an association between various youth disordered eating symptoms such as unhealthy weight control behaviors, and experiences of adverse parenting styles characterized by high levels of control and low levels of responsiveness. Associations between adverse parenting styles and youth disordered eating were frequently indirect and differed depending on the sex of the parent and offspring. Synthesis of findings was limited due to variation in the operationalization and measurement of parenting styles, family context and disordered eating across studies. Longitudinal and standardized research is required to better understand the dynamic associations between parenting styles and youth disordered eating. Implications for family-based care in clinical practice are discussed. (shrink)

Although sexual harassment in the workplace is illegal, it often goes unreported. This study employs causal evidence to evaluate one deterrent to reporting: bias against women known to be sexual harassment targets. I theorize about the form this bias takes and test the argument with a national survey experiment run in five waves from October 2017 to February 2018, where participants were asked to propose employment outcomes for an employee with one of four harassment experiences. Participants were less likely to (...) recommend a woman for promotion if she self-reported sexual harassment relative to otherwise identical women who experienced nonsexual harassment or whose sexual harassment was reported by a coworker. The woman who self-reported sexual harassment experienced normative discrimination: that is, the promotion bias was significantly mediated by perceptions that she was less moral, warm, and socially skilled than the woman whose coworker reported her sexual harassment. These results indicate that women may hesitate to report sexual harassment because they rightly perceive that doing so could cause them to experience bias. Yet they also suggest that bias can be avoided if a bystander reports the harassment. Finally, exploratory analyses suggest that in the wake of #MeToo this bias may be fading. (shrink)

C’est en Corée du Sud que le sport électronique est né et s’est développé de la façon la plus spectaculaire, contribuant à la visibilité du pays auprès de la communauté internationale des joueurs. Cet article questionne la catégorisation sportive du jeu vidéo en Corée, en esquissant ses dimensions économiques, les circonstances historiques de sa mise en place, et en la confrontant à la pluralité des discours locaux.Electronic sports first emerged in South Korea, where their development has been the most spectacular, (...) contributing to the country’s notoriety in the international video gaming community. In this article, we investigate South Korea’s classification of video gaming as a sport, discussing its economic dimensions, the historical circumstances in which it emerged and comparing it with the different types of local discourse. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Genealogies of OppressionA Response to Ladelle McWhorter’s Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America: A GenealogyChloë TaylorLadelle McWhorter introducesRacism and Sexual Oppression inAnglo-America with an account of her experiences during the days between the attack on and the death of Matthew Shepard. On sabbatical near Pennsylvania State University in October 1998, McWhorter describes following these events as they were covered by the media and discussed on a Penn State University (...) LGBT listserv. A day and a half after Shepard’s death, McWhorter attended a candlelight vigil organized by Penn State students. It was raining, only thirty people were present, their voices could scarcely be heard over the sounds of traffic, and the event risked being more disheartening than consoling. An attempt was made to salvage the vigil through song, and someone suggested singing “We Shall Overcome,” but none of the students knew the words. McWhorter realized that she was the only person present who could lead the group in a song that might bring a sense of hope and closure to the otherwise depressing gathering. However, as she describes, she was wary of calling “upon the memory and power of African American movements for justice and freedom in order to further the rights and interests, or at least comfort the fearful souls of nonheterosexual people” (10). She writes,It was important for Matthew Shepard to remain Matthew Shepard and Emmett Till to remain Emmett Till, two separate individuals whose living and dying are different events in human history. I believed it was important [End Page 207] to remember the differences between black and queer struggles, subcultures, and experiences of oppression.(9)McWhorter thus did not sing, and thegathering disintegrated without closure. Each one of us wandered away, carrying with us, not a sense that despite the violence and injustice all around us life can go on and love and respect do still exist—which is, I suppose, what the candlelight shining in the darkness at such vigils is intended to instil in us—but rather with that sense of futility and hopelessness that drizzle and senseless death inspire.(5)Despite her decision to not sing, McWhorter goes on to discuss not only the danger of Sameness that prompted her decision—the danger of homogenizing or identifying oppressions—but also the “twin danger” of Difference. As McWhorter argues, “If we maintain radical distinctions between political events, we may fail to see important overarching patterns and as a result miss opportunities to form and consolidate alliances that might counter the networks of power that oppress so many of us” (10–11).Although there are risks involved in emphasizing either Sameness or Difference, McWhorter notes that she had always been more worried by the dangers of Sameness. She attributes this intuition to her attraction to Foucault. The genealogical method is concerned with revealing discontinuities between experiences in diverse historical periods, undermining histories that impose homogeneity on the past. Pointing out historical disparities kindles hope for a different future and is thus an emancipatory task. McWhorter notes that Foucault is a “splitter” and not a “lumper” like Hegel or Plato. Despite her Foucauldian aversion to lumping, McWhorter writes that in the wake of that candlelight vigil and the more general political climate of the late 1990s in which allegiances between civil rights movements were being disavowed, she came to worry about that other danger, the danger of too much splitting. She wonders “whether, despite all the differences in experience and effect, it might not be the case that somehow these things are joined together, part of the same matrix of power, employing the same means, serving the same ends, shaping the same lives” (11). She notes, “It is that other danger and that other set of possibilities that have moved me to write this book, despite the risks such an enquiry inevitably runs” (11).The dangers of Difference are practical but also factual since, McWhorter argues, there are real similarities between the deaths of Shepard and Till that risk being overlooked. Most significant of these is that both young men were murdered for their sexual deviance: one for his homosexuality, the other for his insistence that... (shrink)

Some healthcare providers regularly intervene in remote and isolated areas to offer various care and services. This situation is often experienced as a hardship as it becomes difficult for them to meet their private needs without compromising their professionalism. We propose a scenario that raises a number of ethical issues surrounding substance use-related privacy. This scenario will be analyzed according to different conceptual frameworks. If the proposed situation raises several ethical issues, we will see that the conceptual frameworks used to (...) reflect and deliberate on the situation pose themselves ethical issues. We will conclude by showing that if the professional aims for the best, there is also a risk of harm. It follows that there is tragedy in ethical life if reflection and deliberation are based on a single conceptual framework. (shrink)

In a 1983 interview, Michel Foucault contrasts our contemporary interest in sexual identity with the ancient Greek preoccupation with diet, arguing that sex has replaced food as the privileged medium of self-constitution in the modern West. In the same interview, Foucault argues that modern liberation movements should return to the ancient model of ethics, of which diet was a prime example, as aesthetics or self-transformative practice. In this paper I take up Foucault's argument with respect to the Animal Liberation Movement (...) and the dietetics of ethical vegetarianism. Contra Foucault, I suggest that diet has not been replaced by sexuality in the modern West, and that food choices, along with and intertwined with sexuality, continue to function as practices of self-constitution in both disciplinary and aesthetic fashions. I then consider the implications of this argument for the Animal Liberation Movement, exploring ways in which it might (and to some degree already does) take on aesthetic rather than moral strategies in order to pursue what Foucault once described as “an ethics of acts and their pleasures which would be able to take into account the pleasure of the other.”. (shrink)

This paper begins with a recognition that questions of climate change, environmental degradation, and our relations to the natural world are increasingly significant and requiring of a response not only as philosophers of education but also as citizens of the planet. As such the paper explores five of the key journals in philosophy of education in order to identify the extent, range, and content of current discussions related to the environment. It then organizes and summaries the articles that were located (...) while seeking to identify the extent, possibilities, and limitations of current discussions relating to the environment in the philosophy of education community. The hope is that ultimately this work is an invitation to anyone, regardless of tradition, orientation, and expertise, to contribute to the expansion and deepening of both theory and practice in the face of this most serious of challenges. (shrink)

Efforts to promote gender equality often encourage changes to interpersonal interactions as a way of undermining gender hierarchy. Such programs are premised on the idea that the gender system can be “undone” when individuals behave in ways that challenge prevailing gender norms. However, scholars know little about whether and under what conditions real changes to the gender system can result from changed behaviors. We use the context of a gender sensitization program in the Democratic Republic of Congo to examine prospects (...) for transformative change at the interactional level of the gender system. Over nine months, we observed significant changes in men’s quotidian practices. Further, we identified a new commitment among many men to a more equal division of household labor. However, participants consistently undermined the transformative potential of these behavioral changes through their dedication to maintaining control over the objective, process, and meaning of change, resisting conceptions of equality that challenged the gender system. Because quotidian changes left gender hierarchy intact, they appear unlikely to destabilize the logics that legitimate women’s subordination. (shrink)

This commentary argues the case for developmental psychopathology in understanding social learning. Informed by work on “epistemic disruption,” we have described difficulties with social learning associated with many forms of psychopathology. Epistemic disruption manifests in an inability to move between innovation and conformity, and arises from poor mentalizing, which generates difficulties in identifying social cues that trigger the correct stance.

Although the philosophical systems of G. W. Leibniz and David Lewis both feature possible worlds, the ways in which their systems are similar and dissimilar are ultimately surprising. At first glance, Leibniz’s modal metaphysics might strike us as one of the most contemporarily relevant aspects of his system. But I clarify in this paper major interpretive problems that result from understanding Leibniz’s system in terms of contemporary views (like Lewis’s, for instance). Specifically, I argue that Leibniz rejects the inference that (...) if something is possible, it therefore occurs in some possible world. This discussion highlights how Leibniz’s account of individual substance (with his strict notion of identity) constrains his modal theorizing and produces fatalistic threats. I then make an unexpected connection between Leibniz’s and Lewis’s systems by showing that Leibniz’s treatment of fatalism bears similarities to the response Lewis gives to the fatalist when considering the paradoxes of time travel. (shrink)

The DSM-5 Alternative Model for Personality Disorders dimensionally defines personality pathology using severity of dysfunction and maladaptive style. As the empirical literature on the clinical utility of the AMPD grows, there is a need to examine changes in diagnostic profiles and personality expression in treatment over time. Assessing these changes in individuals diagnosed with borderline personality disorder is complicated by the tendency for patients to cycle through multiple therapists over the course of treatment leaving the potential for muddled diagnostic clarity (...) and disjointed case conceptualizations. Following patient trajectories across therapists offers a unique opportunity to examine the AMPD’s sensitivity to and utility for capturing personality stability and change over time for patients with BPD. This article demonstrates the utility of the AMPD for two clinical cases in three distinct ways: highlighting heterogeneity in BPD between patients, comparing improvements in personality severity and style over time, and elucidating profile change across therapist ratings. We present two patients diagnosed with DSM-5 Section II BPD, crossing between two therapists over the course of 3 years of psychodynamic psychotherapy. Treating clinicians rated patients for their respective treatment phases using the Level of Personality Functioning Scale, capturing severity, and the Personality Inventory for the DSM-5, capturing style. AMPD diagnostic profiles differentiated patients with BPD in both severity and style, and captured within-patient change beyond within-therapist response bias. Results indicated greater improvements in personality severity while personality style remained more stable. Implications for the patients’ treatment progress and associated challenges are discussed, as are considerations for the utility of the AMPD in therapy. (shrink)

Fifth-century authors often invoke the idea that human beings are by nature savage, and that the civilized state of human societies is imposed on them by law and custom. A possible consequence of this idea is a pessimistic anthropological account, according to which pleonexia or greed is a natural characteristic of human beings, and therefore a justified drive of human behaviour. Scholars often attribute this pessimistic account of human nature to the sophists, whose views are considered to be reflected in (...) the speeches of Plato’s characters Glaucon and Callicles. Taking into account the genres and the contexts in which the original sophistic arguments concerning savage humanity appear, as well as the practices for which such arguments were implemented, this paper argues that the pessimistc view of human nature is not a product of sophistic thought, but is rather developed by authors such as Thucydides, who uses it in order to explain the atrocities committed in the course of the Peloponnesian war, and Plato, who uses it as a foil to his arguments concerning the superiority of human nature. (shrink)