In this paper, I shall discuss some claims about selves McTaggart makes in The Nature of Existence.

In 2018-2019, at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California, we developed and piloted a narrative-based health systems science intervention for patients living with HIV and medical students in which medical students co-wrote patients’ life narratives for inclusion in the electronic health record. The pilot study aimed to assess the acceptability of the “life narrative protocol” from multiple stakeholder positions and characterize participants’ experiences of the clinical and pedagogical implications of the LNP. Students were recruited from (...) KSOM. Patients and staff were recruited from the Maternal, Child, and Adolescent/Adult Center for Infectious Disease and Virology at Los Angeles County+USC Medical Center. Ten patients, seventeen students, and ten MCA staff participated in the pilot study. Qualitative methods were used to gather data from students’, patients’, and staff’s perspectives. Three themes emerged from the thematic analysis: patients’ life narratives conveyed their unique life experiences and voices; the protocol could result in wide-ranging effects on HIV care; the LNP enabled students to contribute value to patients’ healthcare. Across groups, participants considered the LNP an acceptable intervention. The LNP, its limitations, and implications for HIV care, narrative medicine, and health information technology are presented. (shrink)

Raising a child with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a stressful experience and has been associated with poor maternal mental health and increased maternal emotional distress. However, the experiences of fathers of children with ASD are largely unexplored and the coping strategies these men employ to cope with the challenges they face have received little research attention. This research aimed to explore the phenomenological experiences of fathers of preschool children with ASD by gaining a better understanding of the manner (...) in which these individuals attempted to cope with their situation. A multiple, single-case study design was employed and five participants were recruited via two local paediatric practices. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with the participants and data were analysed making use of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). This analysis yielded three superordinate themes, which were labelled as follows: (a) the experience of fathering a child with ASD, (b) challenges of fathering a child with ASD, and (c) coping with fathering a child with ASD. The results suggest that the fathers of children with ASD experience their parental role as stressful. The participants in the current study related the stress they experienced to a number of challenges associated directly with their children’s behaviour, as well as to the effects that parenting a child with ASD had on their own wellbeing and functioning. The participants reported making use of a number of coping strategies in order to deal with the challenges they faced. The participants used both problem-focussed and avoidant coping strategies. The results are discussed and recommendations made with regard to future research. (shrink)

Since 1992, institutions accredited by The Joint Commission have been required to have a process in place that allows staff members, patients, and families to address ethical issues or issues prone to conflict. While the commission's expectations clearly have made ethics committees more common, simply having a committee in no way demonstrates its effectiveness in terms of the availability of the service to key constituents, the quality of the processes used, or the outcomes achieved. Beyond meeting baseline accreditation standards, effective (...) ethics resources are requisite for quality care for another reason. The provision of care to the sick is a practice with profound moral dimensions. Clinicians need what Margaret Urban Walker has called “moral spaces,” reflective spaces within institutions in which to explore and communicate values and ethical obligations as they undergird goals of care. Walker proposed that ethicists needed to be concerned with the design and maintenance of these moral spaces. Clearly, that concern needs to extend beyond ethicists to institutional leaders. This essay uses Walker's idea of moral space to describe individuals and groups who are actual and potential ethics resources in health care institutions. We focus on four requisite characteristics of effective resources and the challenges to achieving them, and we identify strategies to build them. In our view, such moral spaces are particularly important for nurses and their colleagues on interprofessional teams and need to be expanded and strengthened in most settings. (shrink)

We consider Walker's thorough review in the context of thinking about future research on the relation between sleep and memory. We first address methodological issues including type of memory and sleep-stage dependency. We suggest a broader investigation of potential signaling molecules that may be critical to sleep-related consolidation. A brief review of the importance of the stress hormone cortisol illustrates this point.

Proofs of Prophecy and the Refutation of the Ismāʿīliyya: The Kitāb Ithbāt nubuwwat al-nabī by the Zaydī al-Muʾayyad bi-llāh al-Hārūnī. By Eva-Maria Lika. Worlds of Islam, vol. 9. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2018. Pp. vii + 177, 152. $149.99, €129.95, £106.99.

Upon entering the White House in 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt faced an ailing economy in the throes of the Great Depression and rushed to transform the country through recovery programs and legislative reform. By 1934, he began to send professional photographers to the state of West Virginia to document living conditions and the effects of his New Deal programs. The photographs from the Farm Security Administration Project not only introduced “America to Americans,” exposing a continued need for government intervention, (...) but also captured powerful images of life in rural and small town America.New Deal Photographs of West Virginia, 1934-1943 presents images of the state's northern and southern coalfields, the subsistence homestead projects of Arthurdale, Eleanor, and Tygart Valley, and various communities from Charleston to Clarksburg and Parkersburg to Elkins. With over one hundred and fifty images by ten FSA photographers, including Walker Evans, Marion Post Wolcott, Arthur Rothstein, and Ben Shahn, this collection is a remarkable proclamation of hardship, hope, endurance, and, above all, community. These photographs provide a glimpse into the everyday lives of West Virginians during the Great Depression and beyond. (shrink)

Psychiatry is increasingly dominated by the reductionist claim that mental illness is caused by neurobiological abnormalities such as chemical imbalances in the brain. Critical psychiatry does not believe that this is the whole story and proposes a more ethical foundation for practice. This book describes an original framework for renewing mental health services in alliance with people with mental health problems. It is an advance over the polarization created by the "anti-psychiatry" of the past.

Can the totality of consciousness be found within the waking state? Can human consciousness be understood in its entirety by only considering the contents presented to us in the waking state? Why is the waking state so privileged? -/- This treatise from Indian author D.B. Gangolli presents the tri-basic method or the method of the three states of consciousness as the principle device or strategy employed in the science of Advaita Vedanta for arriving at knowledge and understanding of Ultimate Reality (...) as expounded in the Upanishadic tradition. This tri-basic method of wisdom inquiry into Pure Consciousness is contrasted with the pervasive mono-basic or waking-state-only method of inquiry common to science, western, and most other philosophical systems wherein explication of the Ultimate Reality is sought solely within waking consciousness. -/- The tri-basic method of the Advaita system takes waking consciousness as only one of three great states of conscious awareness within Intuition or Intuitive experience, the other two being dreaming and sleeping (deep sleep) states. Instead of privileging the waking state, the tri-basic method views all three states from the viewpoint of Intuition and sets about to inquire into the whole of conscious experience giving equal importance to all three states. It helps us to recognize how we are taught to see waking consciousness as predominant, as the sole perspective from within which we discover knowledge of truth and reality, and to see the limitations of the truncated view of consciousness that it is. -/- Advaita Vedanta is the only philosophical system that consciously inquires within all three great states of consciousness in order for the discrimination of Ultimate Reality. “To observe these states and discriminate about them means whatever is witnessed in the states – all that is to be taken en masse (rolled up into one mass) and is to be made an object to one’s Intuition, i.e., the essence of Being as the Witness or the Self, and then discriminate.” . (shrink)

The practice of teaching virtue for pay was typical of the Greek sophists but consistently eschewed by their contemporary Socrates. Plato and Xenophon offer various explanations for Socrates' refusal to take pay, explanations intended not only to reflect favourably upon their teacher but also to reflect negatively upon the sophists. Indeed, Plato and Xenophon have been so persuasive in this regard that the mere fact of accepting pay has become a common source of invective against the sophists. This paper examines (...) and evaluates these passages of Plato and Xenophon in light of the historical information we have concerning sophistic and Socratic pedagogy in general and it reaches two major conclusions: first, that most of the reasons ascribed to Socrates for refusing to accept pay are sufficiently problematic to raise serious doubts about their authenticity and, second, that none of these reasons functions successfully as a general critique of the sophists. (shrink)

Mr. Kubat attributes much of the misinformation about Brentano's theories to the lack of an edition of Brentano's collected writing. If anyone should wish to know more about Brentano's doctrines, he may have been led by this remark to despair of finding them anywhere in print. The three works which Mr. Kubat mentions, Grundlegung und Aufbau der Ethik, Religion und Philosophie, and Die Lehre vom richtigen Urteil, all edited by F. Mayer-Hillebrand and published by A. Francke in Bern, represent no (...) more than a continuation of the Gesamtausgabe of Brentano's writings which was begun by Oskar Kraus and Alfred Kastil after Brentano's death. The volumes in the Gesamtausgabe represent ten numbers in Meiner's Philosophische Bibliothek and are listed under the heading, "Gesammelte philosophische Schriften." They contain not only new editions of much of the work which Brentano published during his lifetime, but a large amount of material which Kraus and Kastil selected from his enormous Nachlass as well. I am sure that Mrs. Mayer-Hillebrand herself would be the first to recognize that the three published volumes she has edited, and the one on esthetics which is soon to appear in print, are part of a whole which also includes the volumes edited by Kraus and Kastil. Taken altogether, the thirteen volumes that have been published by Meiner and by Francke can well be viewed as at least an adequate substitute for a collected edition. Surely they include everything which is necessary to dispel the common misinformation which Mr. Kubat tries to explain by denying their existence. The trouble has not been the lack of a collected edition, but the lack of readers. (shrink)

The question of how to distinguish between science and non-science, the so-called ' demarcation problem', is one of the most high-profile, perennial, and intractable issues in the philosophy of science. It is not merely a philosophical issue, however, since it has a significant bearing on practical policy questions and practical decisions. This essay develops a pragmatic approach to the demarcation problem: it argues that while there are some core principles that we can use in distinguishing between science and non-science, particular (...) judgments and decisions about something's scientific status depend, in part, on practical goals and concerns. (shrink)