Background/ObjectiveSeveral studies have examined the impact of Parkinson’s disease on the quality of couples’ relationships. To date, few studies have explored how couples experience their relationship dynamic by taking into account the disease stage. The objectives of this study were to understand the experience of each partner and to study the mechanisms that underlie their couple organization in the advanced stage of PD.MethodsSemistructured individual interviews conducted with fifteen patients and their partners were the subject of a dyadic interpretative phenomenological analysis.ResultsThree (...) themes were identified from the analysis: the first, “A Closeness That Separates,” allows the identification of different patterns of interactions that lead to emotional distancing between the partners; the second, “The Adversity Is Not Unbearable, But Going It Alone Would Be,” emphasizes the importance of how the assisting partner provides support; and the third, “Be Prepared for Anything and Facing an Uncertain Future,” reveals the extent and modes of the dyadic regulation of the emotions linked to what the future may hold.ConclusionPsychological support is important to help couples express both their feelings and their respective needs in the evolving context of PD. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kant on the Method of MathematicsEmily Carson1. INTRODUCTIONThis paper will touch on three very general but closely related questions about Kant’s philosophy. First, on the role of mathematics as a paradigm of knowledge in the development of Kant’s Critical philosophy; second, on the nature of Kant’s opposition to his Leibnizean predecessors and its role in the development of the Critical philosophy; and finally, on the specific role of intuition (...) in Kant’s philosophy of mathematics. One of the points that I want to make is that recognizing the importance of these first two issues is essential to giving an adequate account of the third. That is, only by appreciating how Kant uses the example of mathematical knowledge, and in particular the objections he had to previous accounts of such knowledge, can we understand the philosophical role that he ascribes to intuition in his own account of mathematics.I don’t propose to explain the details of Kant’s philosophy of mathematics, but rather to compare his views on mathematics in the pre-Critical Prize Essay of 1764 to those of the Critique of Pure Reason, with the aim of showing how Kant’s doctrine of construction in pure intuition arises out of a combination of two factors: first, his attempt to ground the distinction between the respective methods of mathematics and philosophy, and second, his concern to defend the reality of mathematical knowledge against the views of those he called ‘the metaphysicians.’ The first factor demands an account of the certainty of mathematics, the second requires an account of its content. I shall argue that there is a possible conflict between Kant’s accounts of these features in the Prize Essay, a possibility which is finally ruled out only by means of the Critical doctrine of pure intuition. So I hope to show that there is a significant philosophical role for intuition in Kant’s account of mathematical knowledge (over and above the more logical role attributed to it on readings [End Page 629] such as those of Friedman, Beth, and Hintikka1) in reconciling the content of mathematics and its certainty.2. THE MATHEMATICIANS VS. THE METAPHYSICIANSThroughout his early writings, Kant appealed to the evidence and certainty of mathematics; his attitude towards metaphysics, however, underwent a dramatic shift. In the Physical Monadology of 1756, Kant asked how metaphysics and geometry can be united,[f] or the former peremptorily denies that space is infinitely divisible, while the latter, with its usual certainty, asserts that it is infinitely divisible. Geometry contends that empty space is necessary for free motion, while metaphysics hisses the idea off the stage. Geometry holds universal attraction or gravitation to be hardly explicable by mechanical causes but shows that it derives from the forces which are inherent in bodies at rest and which act at a distance, whereas metaphysics dismisses the notion as an empty delusion of the imagination [1:475–6].2He attempted in this work to reconcile the respective positions of metaphysics and geometry regarding infinite divisibility, thereby demonstrating that “it is neither the case that the geometer is mistaken nor that the opinion to be found among metaphysicians deviates from the truth” [1:480]. But in a series of works from 1762–3, Kant reveals a markedly different attitude towards metaphysics. For example, in “The only possible argument in support of a demonstration of the existence of God,” Kant says:the mania for method and the imitation of the mathematician, who advances with a sure step along a well-surfaced road, have occasioned a large number of such mishaps on the slippery ground of metaphysics. These mishaps are constantly before one’s eyes, but there is little hope that people will be warned by them, or that they will learn to be more circumspect as a result [2:71].In contrast, Kant describes the geometer as uncovering “with the greatest certainty” the most secret properties of that which is extended [2:70]. But the less conciliatory attitude to metaphysics comes out most clearly in Kant’s actual procedure in “The only possible argument.” In the Seventh Reflection, he presents an attempt to explain the origin of... (shrink)

Everything is constantly changing. Our emotions are one of the primary ways we track, evaluate, organize, and motivate responsive action to those changes. Furthermore, emotions are inherently interpersonal. We learn what to feel from others, especially when we are children. We “catch” other people’s emotions just by being around them. We get caught in escalating response–counterresponse emotional sequences. This all takes place in time, generating complex patterns of interpersonal emotional dynamics. This review summarizes theory, empirical findings, and key challenges for (...) future research regarding three processes that contribute to interpersonal affective dynamics: (a) Convergence of social partners’ emotional responses to the external world, (b) emotional reactivity of social partners to each other, and (c) interpersonal emotion regulation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Note on Being Ability–different, Atypically–bodied... Criptastic?Emily HutcheonIn being prompted to write about my experiences with disability [alternatively written: (dis)ability, dis/ability, “disability,” disAbility], I am confronted with more questions than I have answers. Am I to reflect on that small window of time, one so small that I don’t actually remember it, when I did not know that I was different? My mom [End Page 196] has recounted vivid (...) moments where I seem to come to this realization—for example, at the age of three, when I see my twin sister and friends scrambling on a playground and I process that I am unable to join them. Realization of my differentness (my different body, my different way of moving, my different abilities) continued into my youth and adulthood (Can’t skate—check. Can’t ride a two–wheeled bike—check. Usually walk behind others, destined to be the last in a group—check. Was the smart kid in class, aka smartass–in–training—check).Eventually, I realized that my differentness was not contained to my body or my abilities. Were my mind, my self, and my relationships different as well? I seemed to empathize when others didn’t or couldn’t. I saw that certain things were just wrong, and was confused when others didn’t share my concern. I seemed to see, feel, and experience things that others did not. For instance, I had two invasive operations before the age of eleven, a handful of minor procedures and countless physiotherapy sessions. Some memories of these times are horrific. Some I cherish, including the genuine care of the health care staff. Some are hilarious, like being doped–up before invasive surgery at the age of ten and calling my favorite surgeon “So cute!!” But always, there was physical pain, pain, pain. At times, I was completely dependent on others to help me to the bathroom, the shower, to move around, and to recover. I received such tender and exquisite care from my mom during these times. The dependency, which I had no choice but to experience, the dependency that is feared by almost everyone I know (“If I am ever a burden to my family, shoot me”) is something that my mom and I constantly joke about (“Em, I will take care of you now, only if you change my diapers when I’m old, kay?”). I have come to learn that this dependency, along with those other shades of vulnerability, are an inevitable consequence of being human, and to deny this is to relinquish our capacity to connect with others.I had, and continue to have, relationships with strangers, friends and family, which are, in my best estimation, atypical. I am the recipient of staring, laughing, pointing, sympathy, disgust, empathy, tender care, curiosity, hostility, resentment, and ambivalence. While in the gym, complete strangers approach me to say, with all the kindness, enthusiasm, and obliviousness in the world: “Glad to see you out and about. Good for you!” For some, I am to be protected; for others, I am to be tiptoed around; and for others, I am to be congratulated for “overcoming my circumstance” and for being oh–so–valuable to society because of my smarts and productivity.It is a rare few who accept what Cerebral Palsy and epilepsy offer to my life and to their own, with all of their accompanying complexities, possibilities, and contradictions.It is ironic that the excellent health care and services I have received, which have probably changed my life for the better, are only made possible because of the “disability” label, which I have come to heartily dislike. I have always felt ill–at–ease with this word and concept. In my mind, it just does not describe me or others around me. Perhaps more accurately, the definitions and associations that stubbornly accompany the term (e.g., the disabled person as asexual, passive and in need of protection, the disabled person as the conquering hero) would never accurately describe me. Undoubtedly, the term is negative in its connotations. And, of course, the concept of disability relies on certain notions of “normal.” By most accounts in... (shrink)

In the twenty-first century, a widening array of unassuming fruits, vegetables, seeds and grains have been crowned “superfoods.” While many are exotic imports marketed to Western consumers through neocolonial narratives, others are familiar domestically-grown supermarket staples spectacularly rebranded. Why has “superfood” status become so central to the American produce industry? What sort of subjectivities does a superfood cultivate among consumers? This paper charts the ascent of the almond to superfood status as the latest in a series of spatial fixes alleviating (...) the pains of chronic overproduction. The spatial-fix is a material-semiotic process with important psychosocial dimensions often downplayed in the historical materialist tradition. Drawing on historical archives, advertising materials, interviews with current and recently retired almond industry marketing professionals, and observation at the annual industry conference from 2015 to 2018, I show that as almond production surges the industry must constantly work to change the way consumers see almonds and the way they see themselves. While consumers resist and reinterpret the shifts in food meanings fashioned to compensate for overproduction, a century of effective material-semiotic fixes attests to the industry’s influence on foodways. The case of almonds is used here to theorize the broader superfood trend and its imagined “super” subjects as produced through the political economy of industrial agriculture. Understanding the political economic underpinnings of superfoods reveals not only the historical foundation of this contested contemporary food phenomenon, but also sheds light on the metamorphoses of food meanings fundamental to agrarian capitalism. (shrink)

Among the most characteristic motifs in Greek mythology is the sexual union of a god with a mortal woman and the resultant birth of a hero. The existence of hexameter poetry listing the women thus favoured – the famous women in the underworld in the eleventh book of the Odyssey, and above all theEoiai– is evidence of an interest in the women involved, not only in their heroic sons, and suggests that already at an early date the theme was the (...) object not merely of passive reception but of an active consciousness. TheEoiai, indeed, saw such unions as an integral part of an earlier and better age, when mortals and immortals were closer:ξυναὶ γὰρ τότε δαῖτες ἔσαν, ξυνοὶ δὲ θόωκοιἀθανάτων τε θεῶν καταθνητοῖς τ' ἀνθρώπων(fr. 1 Μ–W)But it was not to be supposed that such a potentially rich theme would receive a unitary treatment. Already in their first appearances – at least, the first appearances for us – many individual stories are clearly distinguished by their different circumstances. A common variable is the existence, the kind and the degree of difficulty experienced by the woman as a result of the encounter. Polymele, for instance, mother of Eudorus by Hermes atIliad16.179–92, has seemingly no difficulty in leaving her child to be brought up by her father while she goes on to marry a mortal husband. But suffering of some sort is perhaps more usual, and famous sufferers include Cassandra, punished for spurning Apollo's advances; Danae, first imprisoned by her father in a brazen tower to prevent her pregnancy, and then locked in a chest with her baby and set afloat on the waves; and Semele, destroyed when her lover Zeus appeared to her in his true form. Such different experiences could suggest further multiple versions of the same general theme, diverging especially in the consequences of the union (or attempted union) for the mortal partner. Even the same characters could potentially undergo quite different variants of the story; the chief constant is the unfailing popularity of the mythical motif. (shrink)

Terry Pratchett's writing celebrates the possibilities opened up by inventiveness and imagination. It constructs an ethical stance that values informed and self-aware choices, knowledge of the world in which one makes those choices, the importance of play and humor in crafting a compassionate worldview, and acts of continuous self-examination and creation. This collection of essays uses inventiveness and creation as a thematic core to combine normally disparate themes, such as science fiction studies, the effect of collaborative writing and shared authorship, (...) steampunk aesthetics, productive modes of "ownership," intertextuality, neomedievalism and colonialism, adaptations into other media, linguistics and rhetorics, and coming of age as an act of free will. In all Pratchett's constructed worlds and narratives-from Discworld, to the science-fictional flat planet of Strata, from a parody of Conan the Barbarian's Cimmeria to the comedically apocalyptic Good Omens-questions of identity, community, and the relations between self and other are constantly examined, debated, and reshaped. Pratchett's worlds thus become ethical worlds: fantasies in which language always matters, stories resonate with the past and the future, and choices emphasize the importance of compassion and creation. (shrink)

People sometimes use speech to interfere with other people’s speech, as in the case of a heckler sabotaging a lecture with constant interjections. Some people claim that such interference infringes upon free speech. Against this view, we argue that where competing speakers in a public forum both have an interest in speaking, free speech principles should not automatically give priority to the ‘official’ speaker. Given the ideals underlying free speech, heckling speech sometimes deserves priority. But what can we say, (...) then, about situations in which heckling clearly seems to infringe upon people’s civil liberties, in a way that intuitively justifies intervention? In such cases, we argue, heckling infringes upon people’s associative freedom. We present and defend an ethical framework for the institutional management of ‘Speech Fights’, geared around this insight. (shrink)

Postnatal/postpartum depression (PND/PPD) had a pre-COVID-19 estimated prevalence ranging up to 23% in Europe, 33% in Australia, and 64% in America, and is detrimental to both mothers and their infants. Low social support is a key risk factor for developing PND. From an evolutionary perspective this is perhaps unsurprising, as humans evolved as cooperative childrearers, inherently reliant on social support to raise children. The coronavirus pandemic has created a situation in which support from social networks beyond the nuclear family is (...) likely to be even more important to new mothers, as it poses risks and stresses for mothers to contend with; whilst at the same time, social distancing measures designed to limit transmission create unprecedented alterations to their access to such support. Using data from 162 mothers living in London with infants aged ≤6 months, we explore how communication with members of a mother’s social network related to her experience of postnatal depressive symptoms during the first “lockdown” in England. Levels of depressive symptoms, as assessed via the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale, were high, with 47.5% of the participants meeting a ≥11 cut-off for PND. Quasi-Poisson regression modelling found that the number of network members seen in-person, and remote communication with a higher proportion of those not seen, was negatively associated with depressive symptoms; however, contact with a higher proportion of relatives was positively associated with symptoms, suggesting kin risked seeing mothers in need. Thematic qualitative analysis of open text responses found that mothers experienced a burden of constant mothering, inadequacy of virtual contact, and sadness and worries about lost social opportunities, while support from partners facilitated family bonding. While Western childrearing norms focus on intensive parenting, and fathers are key caregivers, our results highlight that it still “takes a village” to raise children in high-income populations and mothers are struggling in its absence. (shrink)

The world of international relations and law is constantly changing. There is a risk of the systematic undermining of international organisations and law over the next years. Feminist approaches to international law will need to adapt accordingly, to ensure that they continue to challenge inequalities, and serve as an important and critical voice in international law. This article seeks to tell the story of feminist perspectives on international law from the early 1990s till today through a discussion between three generations (...) of feminist international legal scholars: Hilary Charlesworth, who, with her colleagues, contributed to the area in the immediate post-Cold War years, Gina Heathcote, who over the past decade has published extensively on feminist perspectives on the use of force and collective security, and Emily Jones, an early career scholar working on feminist approaches to international law. The conversation, which began as a Skype discussion, considers both the ways in which feminist approaches to international law have changed over the past two decades, as well as the ways in which they have been shaped by global politics, before turning to consider the future for feminist approaches to international law. The impact of feminist approaches to international law has been considerable. However, it seems that feminist approaches still lack legitimacy and credibility in many mainstream circles, remaining on the disciplinary periphery. Charlesworth, Heathcote and Jones discuss potential ways in which to manage some of these tensions, noting both the importance of ‘speaking to ourselves’ as a creative and nurturing space, as well as the need to be seen as a more credible voice in the mainstream. They note the need, too, for further feminist work beyond the realms of sexual violence and women’s representation. While the great amount of work in this area is, indeed, foundational, having achieved many important legal and political outcomes, feminist approaches should now develop beyond these areas. Doing so will not only propel this area of scholarship in new and exciting directions, but it might help feminist scholarship gain further traction by avoiding categorisation only under the umbrella of “women’s issues” and thus ready dismissal as just another specialist area of international law in the era of fragmentation. (shrink)

Children dependent on life-prolonging medical technology are often subject to a constant background risk of sudden death or catastrophic complications. Such children can be cared for in hospital, in an intensive care environment with highly trained nurses and doctors able to deliver specialised, life-saving care immediately. However, remaining in hospital, when life expectancy is limited, can considered to be a harm in of itself. Discharge home offers the possibility for an improved quality of life for the child and their (...) family but comes with significant medical risks.When making decisions for children, two ethical models predominate, the promotion of the child’s best interests or the avoidance of harm. However, in some circumstances, particularly for children with life-limiting and/or life-threatening illness, all options may be associated with risk. There are no good options, only potentially harmful choices.In this paper, we explore decisions made by one family in such circumstances. We describe a model adopted from risk management programmes beyond medicine, which offers a potential framework for identifying risks to the child that are morally permissible. Some risks and harms to a child, not ordinarily permitted, may be acceptable when undertaken in the pursuit of a specified desired good, so long as they are as low as reasonably practicable. (shrink)

This groundbreaking book provides an analytical tool to understand how and why evil works in the world as it does. Deconstructing memory, history, and myth as received wisdom, the volume critically examines racism, sexism, poverty, and stereotypes.

Brian Epstein has argued (in The Ant Trap and ‘Anchoring versus grounding’) that social kinds ‘export’ across worlds. Although the conditions for war criminality are not ‘fixed’ in the Empire, for instance, Darth Vader is a war criminal there. And, according to Epstein, an account of social construction should imply that he is. Ultimately, he argues that ‘grounding-only’ accounts of social construction – like those proposed by Jonathan Schaffer and Aaron Griffith – imply that social kinds do not export across (...) worlds. As a result, he argues that we need more than grounding; in particular, we need both grounding and what he calls ‘anchoring’ to account for it. In this paper, I argue that, once we draw a distinction between what I call ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ social kinds, Epstein’s argument is either invalid or irrelevant. (shrink)

Cognitive niche construction is the process whereby organisms create and maintain cause–effect models of their niche as guides for fitness influencing behavior. Extended mind theory claims that cognitive processes extend beyond the brain to include predictable states of the world. Active inference and predictive processing in cognitive science assume that organisms embody predictive (i.e., generative) models of the world optimized by standard cognitive functions (e.g., perception, action, learning). This paper presents an active inference formulation that views cognitive niche construction as (...) a cognitive function aimed at optimizing organisms' generative models. We call that process of optimization extended active inference. (shrink)

Through a fieldwork study of the practice of methadone substitution at a French addiction clinic, the classic ‘theory of action’ is criticized and an alternative one proposed. A sketch of the debates among French drug specialists, drug users and legislators shows the pertinence for these practitioners of such a theoretical question; further, the ethnographic data suggest that they can be seen as actually trying out an alternative to this ‘theory of action’.

Although beef and dairy production in Alberta, Canada, enjoys strong public support, there are enduring public concerns, including farm animal welfare. Evolving codes of practice and animal care councils prescribe changes and improvements to many areas of farm management, and may be seen by farmers as an appropriate response to public animal welfare concerns. However, codes of practice do not address every animal welfare concern, and new concerns can arise over time. Drawing on social practice theory and in-depth field research (...) with 36 cattle and dairy farmers, this paper explores the materials, competencies, and meanings of four animal husbandry practices: branding, dehorning, weaning, and on-farm handling and moving. Findings show that branding and dehorning are evolving slowly with attention to pain management, but remain firmly rooted in ranching tradition and communities of practice. Weaning and animal handling practices are evolving more quickly with attention to changing materials, attitudes, and values that are more prevalent within producer communities. (shrink)

Cette note de recherche prend pour point de départ un certain nombre d’observations empiriques sur les pratiques d’écritures relatives à la « rédaction web ». Son ancrage est celui de l’analyse du discours, envisagée comme discipline interprétative et lecture critique des énoncés mais aussi comme démarche susceptible d’apporter sa contribution à une didactique de l’écrit. Nous y livrons quelques premiers éléments de réflexion pour la caractérisation discursive des textes issus de la rédaction web, prenant en compte pour cela à la (...) fois la composante discursive de ces productions et les discours construisant la rédaction web comme pratique d’écriture. A partir de deux exemples, nous montrons que les normes dominantes de la rédaction web, liées notamment aux contraintes du support et à des enjeux économiques, sont diversement prises en compte suivant la sphère d'activité où sont produits les textes. (shrink)

Cet article s’inscrit dans une réflexion sur le tournant que représente la philosophie politique moderne. Il a pour but de déconstruire la manière dont Michel Villey expose ce tournant : dans des cours professés entre 1961 et 1966 à la Faculté de droit de Paris, ce dernier extrapole, à la pensée juridique moderne, le mythe de l’« augustinisme politique », qui avait été forgé par Henri-Xavier Arquillière pour caractériser la source principale des doctrines théocratiques médiévales. Cette déconstruction montre que la (...) philosophie politique moderne provient certes d’un motif central de la Cité de Dieu, mais ce motif subit une double interprétation qui en modifie la signification : Luther accomplit le passage du motif spirituel des deux cités au problème théologico-politique des deux régimes, tandis que Hobbes fait entrer ce problème en philosophie sur la base des principes de la métaphysique classique. (shrink)

Background To characterize patients dying in a community hospital with or without attempting cardiopulmonary resuscitation and to describe patient involvement in, documentation of, and compliance with decisions on resuscitation. Methods All patients who died in Kalmar County Hospital during January 1, 2016 until December 31, 2016 were included. All information from the patients’ electronic chart was analysed. Results Of 660 patients female), 30 were pronounced dead in the emergency department after out-of-hospital CPR. Of the remaining 630 patients a DNAR order (...) had been documented in 558 patients. Seventy had no DNAR order and 2 an explicit order to do CPR. In 43 of these 70 patients CPR was unsuccessfully attempted while the remaining 27 patients died without attempting CPR. In 2 of 558 patients CPR was attempted despite a DNAR order in place. In 412 patients the DNAR order had not been discussed with neither patient nor family/friends. Moreover, in 75 cases neither patient nor family/friends were even informed about the decision on code status. Conclusions In general, a large percentage of patients in our study had a DNAR order in place. However, 27 patients died without CPR attempt or DNAR order. DNAR orders had not been discussed with the patient/surrogate in almost three fourths of the patients. Further work has to be done to elucidate the barriers to discussions of CPR decisions with the patient. (shrink)

Chora – le «cratère à mélanger» maternel, vannant et secouant de Platon – remplit «l’écart explicatif» entre les paradigmes formels «intelligibles et toujours existants» (48E5) et un monde encosmique «généré et visible». Proclus traite la gamme polysémique des termes utilisés par Platon pour chôra : hypodochê (réceptacle), kratêr (cratère à mélanger), etc., comme désignant des forces actives dans un univers où la sympathie cosmique règne, à partir des plus élevées, jusqu’aux plus basses manifestations de l’ «Un» transcendant. L’univers proclusien est (...) un «hénothéisme», dans lequel une «unité» dominante surgit sur la totalité de l’Être et du Devenir. Chôra permet à la fois au monde immatériel et au monde matériel de recevoir, de manière appropriée à chacun, les mêmes dons transcendants que leurs homologues intellectifs‑intelligibles superieurs. Aucun niveau de la réalité n’est dépourvu de cette donation. La réceptivité (hypodochê), indéterminée, mais toujours active, est présente à tous les niveaux. L’âme reçoit l’Intellect, la temporalité reçoit le temps monadique, la matière reçoit la structure géométrique polyédrique, etc. Chôra n’est pas l’equivalent de la matière, mais permet à la matière d’être imprimée par des paradigmes formels. Dans son rôle de «cratère à mélanger», elle protège la matière de sa potentielle itérabilité et dissolution infinie. Dans l’univers proclusien, le Bien atteint la dernière et la plus extrême de ses limites, il est espace et lieu, recevant à la fois l’expansivité et une capacité à donner place à la forme pour qu’elle puisse s’imposer à la matière. Après tout, les dons lui sont accordés depuis la plus haute hypostase, celle de la Limite et de l’Illimité, premier niveau après l’Un lui‑même. Vitale pour la création, la Chôra est alors la «mère» de tout. Il n’est donc pas étonnant que, comme nous le dit Proclus, la chôra soit, en fait, la déesse Rhéa. En hommage à la littérature révélatrice antique, comme les Oracles chaldaïques, Homère et Hésiode, Proclus fournit une élucidation non seulement philosophique, mais aussi théologique, de la chôra. À la différence de Platon, il théologise la Physique. (shrink)

Background: Autonomy is a central concept in both bioethics and rehabilitation. Bioethics has emphasized autonomy as self-governance and its application in treatment decision-making. In addition to discussing decisional autonomy, rehabilitation also focuses on autonomy as functional independence. In practice, responding to patients with diminished autonomy is an important component of rehabilitation care, but also gives rise to tensions and challenges. Our objective was to better understand the complex and distinctive ways that autonomy is understood and upheld in the context of (...) rehabilitation care by reviewing how autonomy is discussed in the rehabilitation literature. Methods: We conducted a scoping review addressing issues of autonomy in the context of mental and physical rehabilitation. Our process followed three sequential steps. We extracted and analyzed bibliometric information. We then examined how autonomy was defined and conceptualized. Finally, we examined how the articles discussed the roles of rehabilitation health professionals in responding to patient autonomy. Findings: The articles include 16 empirical reports, 17 case studies and 30 theoretical papers. The most common conceptual accounts of autonomy drew upon principlism, rights-based and legal analyses, and relational/social approaches. We identified four broad approaches for responding to patient autonomy: supporting, promoting, respecting and advocating. Conclusion: This review helps clarify some of the ambiguities and conceptual distinctions underlying discussions and practices related to autonomy in rehabilitation. It also draws attention to a wide range of activities that health professionals can undertake with the goal of supporting, promoting, respecting and advocating for patient autonomy in rehabilitation care. (shrink)

Acute starvation can have long-term consequences that are mediated through epigenetic change. Some of these changes are affected by the activity of AMP-activated protein kinase, a master regulator of cellular energy homeostasis. In Caenorhabditis elegans, the absence of AMPK during a period of starvation in an early larval stage results in developmental defects following their recovery on food, while many of them become sterile. Moreover, the loss of AMPK during this quiescent period results in transgenerational phenotypes that can become progressively (...) worse with each successive generation. Our recent data describe a chromatin-based mechanism of how AMPK mediates adjustment to acute starvation in the germ cells, however, the heritable aspect of this AMPK mutant phenotype remains unresolved. Here, we explore how AMPK might affect this process and speculate how the initial transcription that occurs in the germ cells may adversely affect subsequent germline gene expression and/or genomic integrity. AMPK protects germ cell integrity during acute starvation by blocking inappropriate transcription. How these aberrant transcripts cause transgenerational defects is unclear. AMPK likely regulates germline integrity at multiple levels through several targets. The authors speculate here how AMPK disruption during starvation could result in the observed defects seen at each generation. (shrink)

Prior to August Weismann’s 1889 germ-plasm theory, social reformers believed that humans could inherit the effects of a salubrious environment and, by passing environmentally-induced modifications to their offspring, achieve continuous progress. Weismann’s theory disrupted this logic and caused many to fear that they had little control over human development. As numerous historians have observed, this contributed to the birth of the eugenics movement. However, through an examination of the work of social scientists Lester Frank Ward, Richard T. Ely, Amos Griswold (...) Warner, James Mark Baldwin, Simon Nelson Patten, Alfred Kroeber, Walter Robinson Smith, and Luther Lee Bernard, I demonstrate that Weismann’s ideas also prompted scholars to create of theories of human progress in which the social environment had a central role and biological heredity had a diminished one. Furthermore, in creating a new theory of social progress based on a concept called “social heredity,” the thinkers surveyed in this article separated biological and social thought and asserted the independence of the American social sciences. I argue that this represents an important moment in the maturation of the human sciences, and I suggest that the germ-plasm theory of heredity deserves a larger place in histories of the development of the American social scientific disciplines. (shrink)

Cet article présente l’esquisse d’une histoire conceptuelle du bien commun, en considérant le tournant que représente la critique moderne des positions d’Augustin et de Thomas d’Aquin, en particulier dans le Léviathan de Thomas Hobbes. Ce tournant n’est pas exposé dans les termes de Michel Villey, qui y voit avant tout l’abandon de l’ontologie aristotélico-thomiste, mais comme le résultat de l’interprétation du bien commun politique à partir du conatus essendi, c’est-à-dire des principes de la métaphysique classique. Par contraste, le bien commun, (...) selon la tradition chrétienne authentique, se caractérise par son statut eschatologique, et non par la domination de l’effectivité se conservant soi-même. (shrink)

Over the last 30 years, representationalist and dynamicist positions in the philosophy of cognitive science have argued over whether neurocognitive processes should be viewed as representational or not. Major scientific and technological developments over the years have furnished both parties with ever more sophisticated conceptual weaponry. In recent years, an enactive generalization of predictive processing – known as active inference – has been proposed as a unifying theory of brain functions. Since then, active inference has fueled both representationalist and dynamicist (...) campaigns. However, we believe that when diving into the formal details of active inference, one should be able to find a solution to the war; if not a peace treaty, surely an armistice of a sort. Based on an analysis of these formal details, this paper shows how both representationalist and dynamicist sensibilities can peacefully coexist within the new territory of active inference. (shrink)

Contexte : L’autonomie est un concept central tant en bioéthique qu’en réadaptation. La bioéthique a mis l’accent sur l’autonomie en tant qu’auto-gouvernance et sur son application dans la prise de décision en matière de traitement. En plus de discuter de l’autonomie décisionnelle, la réadaptation met aussi l’accent sur l’autonomie en tant qu’indépendance fonctionnelle. Dans la pratique, la prise en charge des patients en perte d’autonomie est une composante importante des soins de réadaptation, mais elle engendre aussi des tensions et des (...) défis. Notre objectif était de mieux comprendre les façons complexes et distinctes dont l’autonomie est comprise et maintenue dans le contexte des soins de réadaptation en examinant comment l’autonomie est abordée dans la littérature sur la réadaptation. Méthodes : Nous avons effectué une étude de la portée des questions d’autonomie dans le contexte de la réadaptation mentale et physique. Notre processus s’est déroulé en trois étapes séquentielles. Nous avons extrait et analysé des informations bibliométriques. Nous avons ensuite examiné comment l’autonomie était définie et conceptualisée. Enfin, nous avons examiné la façon dont les articles traitaient du rôle des professionnels de la santé en réadaptation dans l’autonomie des patients. Résultats : Les articles comprennent 16 rapports empiriques, 17 études de cas et 30 articles théoriques. Les récits conceptuels les plus courants sur l’autonomie s’appuyaient sur le principisme, les analyses fondées sur les droits et les analyses juridiques et les approches relationnelles/sociales. Nous avons identifié quatre grandes approches pour répondre à l’autonomie du patient : le soutien, la promotion, le respect et la promotion. Conclusion : Cet examen aide à clarifier certaines des ambigüités et des distinctions conceptuelles qui sous-tendent les discussions et les pratiques liées à l’autonomie en réadaptation. Il attire également l’attention sur un large éventail d’activités que les professionnels de la santé peuvent entreprendre dans le but de soutenir, de promouvoir, de respecter et de promouvoir l’autonomie des patients dans les soins de réadaptation. (shrink)

À la fin du xviii e siècle, le concept de génération se voit progressivement remplacé par ceux de reproduction et de production dans les champs a priori sans rapport que sont les sciences naturelles et les sciences économiques. Après avoir esquissé une restitution de ce déplacement conceptuel, il s’agira d’interroger ce qui se joue aujourd’hui derrière les reprises de ce concept et, plus largement, du paradigme de la génération.

Si les animaux d’élevage comme les animaux d’expérimentation intéressent depuis une trentaine d’années de plus en plus de personnes – de chercheurs, de militants –, les animaux dit de compagnie, en revanche, semblent toujours pâtir du préjugé selon lequel, parce qu’ils relèveraient d’une relation privée, ils seraient sans intérêt scientifique ou philosophique. Donna Haraway propose une façon tout à fait singulière de court-circuiter cet arrêt de la pensée afin de pouvoir re-problématiser cette relation à nouveau frais. Ce qui change immédiatement, (...) c’est le caractère non plus privé mais politique de cette co-relation : l’histoire biologique et politique qui nous unit à ces animaux dit de compagnie apparus massivement dans les années 1970 est toute aussi complexe que celle que nous partageons par ailleurs avec nos autres espèces compagnes. Comment raconter cette histoire et hériter des conséquences de cette co-évolution? Comment prendre au sérieux, moralement, politiquement nos relations inter-espèces? (shrink)

Le présent article établit deux résultats distincts mais complémentaires : il montre d’abord que Jan Patočka découvre, dans les années soixante-dix, le primat épistémologique de la donation, à partir duquel la question du monde dans son rapport au problème du donné se pose et se résout – le monde comme donné en totalité, le donné comme avance du monde ; il montre ensuite que cette découverte permet au philosophe tchèque de poser à nouveaux frais la question du sujet et de (...) faire émerger une nouvelle figure du sujet, dont les principales caractéristiques anticipent sur celles de l’adonné – le sujet comme adonné-au-monde. Cet article aboutit ainsi à montrer que les concepts fondamentaux de la phénoménologie de la donation (donné, adonné, contre-expérience, témoin, appel-réponse, etc.), quand ils sont appliqués à la phénoménologie de Patočka, ne fonctionnent pas comme des catégories anachroniques, mais au contraire comme des clés herméneutiques qui révèlent à la fois l’originalité et l’actualité de cette phénoménologie. (shrink)

Après avoir présenté l’institution récente de la kafâla, qui fut légalisée en Algérie en 1984 et au Maroc en 1993 en faveur des enfants abandonnés et en substitution au modèle prohibé de l’adoption, l’article propose une analyse des données recueillies lors d’une enquête ethnographique menée de 2005 à 2009. Elle révèle que l’enfant illégitime encourt davantage le risque d’être abandonné à la naissance s’il est de sexe masculin. En revanche, s’il est de sexe féminin, il bénéficie de plus de chances (...) de faire l’objet d’un don provisoire, direct et négocié, et surtout d’être adopté ou recueilli en kafâla suite à son abandon en institution. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Rhetoric of Romantic ProphecySara GuyerThe Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy. Ian BalfourStanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Pp. 368. $70.00, cloth; $29.95, paperback.Not insignificantly, Walter Benjamin and Maurice Blanchot are the first two names to appear in Ian Balfour's excellent study The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy. Benjamin and Blanchot are authors of two of the most influential essays on romanticism, essays that, it just so happens, Ian Balfour is (...) responsible for introducing to an English-reading audience. 1 Thus, The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy is not only a long awaited, prize-winning book by a major theorist of romanticism, it is also a book written by the first English translator of Benjamin's and Blanchot's essays. Both Blanchot's "The Athenaeum" and Benjamin's "On the Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism" expose the incompletion of the romantic project and unsettle the relation between the past and the present. They also provide a context for understanding the kind of book that Ian Balfour has written. Like its eminent predecessors, this book focuses on local phenomena, yet its force far exceeds the field that it so thoughtfully treats. In it, Balfour shows how a turn to the past (to a set of historical texts) has the effect of unsettling the present, and he argues that an apparent turn to the future (prophecy) has as its issue the present.The book's introduction, entitled "The Call of Prophecy and the Future (After Benjamin)," alerts us to the fact that Benjamin and Blanchot, who have written extensively on language, also have written compellingly on the prophetic. While the prophetic today most often seems to signify religion's naive or violent claims on the future (and by implication on the present), in Benjamin's and Blanchot's work—and in Balfour's work—"the prophetic" (by which Balfour means not a genre, but a "mode") poses problems of referentiality and interpretation. Benjamin's treatment of messianism and allegory in the "Theses on the Philosophy of History" offers Balfour a clear framework for undertaking this examination. And, in style and approach, Benjamin is the thinker with whom Balfour has the closest kinship. Like Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Balfour's The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy is a historical study that is not historicist, that is, it does not aim to account for a historical phenomenon, but is a philosophical and rhetorical investigation into language.However, it is Blanchot's brief essay "Prophetic Speech"—a review of André Neher's L'essence du prophétisme—that informs Balfour's thinking about the prophetic. Indeed, Balfour's book can be read as a meditation on the rhetorical implications of Blanchot's suggestion that: [End Page 257]Prophetic speech announces an impossible future, or makes the future it announces, because it announces it, something impossible, a future one would not know how to live and that must upset all the sure givens of existence. When speech becomes prophetic it is not the future that is given, it is the present that is taken away, and with it any possibility of a firm, stable, lasting presence. 2With this passage, Blanchot not only recasts the conventional account of prophecy (and, implicitly, the symbolic reading upon which prophecy relies), but also shows that if prophecy turns the future into a referent—and hence becomes history—the present is lost. Balfour's transfer of Blanchot's account of the prophetic to romanticism is broadly explained by the debates within romanticism (and contemporary criticism of romanticism) about referentiality and the primacy of symbol over allegory, debates that today are most well-known to non-romanticists through Paul de Man's "The Rhetoric of Temporality."Balfour offers a lucid account of his project—and its relation to history and historicist criticism—when he explains:If there is a historical force to the analysis here, it lies not in the attempt to show how representative these texts were of some larger, pervasive phenomenon—although they sometimes are—but rather to mark what was possible to be thought and done at a given moment. More than that, the analysis implicitly and sometimes explicitly confronts... (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 136-140. In early 2011, Cow Heavy Books published The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature , a compendium of catalog 'blurbs' for non-existent desired or ideal texts. Along with Erinrose Mager, I edited the project, in a process that was more like curation as it mainly entailed asking a range of contemporary writers, theorists, and text-makers to send us an entry. What resulted was a creative/critical hybrid anthology, a small book in which each page opens (...) to a new iteration of textual desire. These texts explore the material possibilities of the book. Somewhat parallel to the call of N. Katherine Hayles who, in her book Writing Machines , urges literary theorists to take up the practice of Medium Specific Analysis (to account for the way the medium in which it is presented conditions or at least bears on a literary text). I see in the imagined works of The Official Catalog a call for the innovative writers of today to become Medium-Responsive. This would mean thinking through the specific (materially constrained) possibilities offered by the media in which texts are presented, and in thinking of the literary text as a kind of art in the greater context of other arts and the book as a medium situated within the context of many other media. In doing so, the contemporary writer refutes the chorus of critics who lament the death of the book by consistently reinvigorating literary innovation. The following are selections from The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature that show possible paths for (thinking about) new writing that engages with its medium. —Ben Segal, Editor THE CUBE Even the most radical non-linear texts have tended to exploit or subvert only the sequential possibilities of print—from the continuous loop of Joyce's Finnegans Wake to the shuffled cards of Marc Saporta's Composition No. 1 —but The Cube takes such multiplicities to an entirely new level. Set in a grid, the book's words can be read conventionally, across the page, as well as down each column—with either route making complete grammatical sense. But they can also be read as stacked strata and mined like lexical core samples through the layered pages of the book. Each path tells the same story from a different perspective (the narrative, naturally, hinges on the potential outcomes of a throw of cubed dice). By opening up the z-axis to reading in this way, The Cube recognizes the book as a three-dimensional sculptural space. Taking its lead from Armand Schwerner's (If Personal) and Raymond Queneau's Cent mille milliards de poèmes , The Cube reads like a experiment by Christian Bök precision printed by Emily McVarish. Craig Dworkin is the editor, most recently, of The Consequence of Innovation: 21st Century Poetics (Roof Books, 2008), The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound , with Marjorie Perloff (U. Chicago Press, 2009), and Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing , with Kenneth Goldsmith (Northwestern UP, 2010). He teaches at the University of Utah. HE GOES In He Goes , we read notes, letters and e-mails from a scholar father to his novelist daughter. We read of the father's musings on Beckett, on Pinter, on Anne Frank; his description of a woman hanging laundry from a line. We read about his journey toward dying, followed by a brief, third person account of his death, and his obituary. Then a long series of blank pages that demand to be read in real time, non-sentence by non-sentence, blank page by blank page. Finally—and it is here that this peculiar little book begins to soar—the dead father writes to his as-of-yet-still-living daughter. He does not write from death. He does not write from life. The words unprint, unstamp, unkindle. Still, they require no translation. The father "writes" (for lack of a better word) about the serendipitous, the commonplace; he recommends another book. He jokes. He asks his daughter how her stomach is. He says forget about presence in absence, darling; screw words as memorial and the guys in garbage cans and loss as redemption and I can't go on I must go on. He goes, "Love, Fodder." He goes, "incidentally." He goes, "I thought you might like to know." Elizabeth Graver is the author of a story collection, Have You Seen Me? , and three novels: Unravelling ; The Honey Thief ; and Awake . Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories , Best American Essays , and Prize Stories: the O. Henry Awards . She teaches at Boston College. THE PAPER ARCHIVIST A stunning package and a triumph of imagination, The Paper Archivist at times looks to be less a book than an abstract expressionist painting. Softly bound, its contents unfold to a single sheet of uneven thickness and texture—a canvas splattered with colored lines, stickers, broken sentences, and nonsense pictographs. But by following the directions to fold, dip, smell, rub, scratch, and tear the sheet according to the contingencies of the weather and using only the objects at hand, the reader slowly brings the forces hidden in the noise into a glorious sculptural convergence, processing a different story and shape each time. This is the rare book that continues to stir, whirl, and pop on every new reading. Sean Higgins blogs at BOMBlog where he is responsible for the column Volumes and Territories, as well as Ghost Island , a fledgling collaborative intellectual collective. THE SLOW BOOK The Slow Book , written by an anonymous author at the dawn of literacy, on a minor planet (otherwise notable only as the source of that exceptionally hardy, not very tasty grain called “shef” sowed on hostile planets as an early step to colonization), and encoded into a series of punctures on a strip of copper coiled inside a clever device, something between a player piano and an old-fashioned film projector, is being released into print, as was the author’s intention, at a rate of one word per century (local time). Each word is, across the Forty Galaxies, agreed to be uncannily apt for the century in which it appears—even “of,” in a century during which the highest value was attached to fidelity, whether to ideals, worlds, or romantic love; even “the,” which governed two centuries, one extraordinarily materialistic, during which advances in propulsion and navigation accelerated the exchange of exceptional objects between the remotest planets of the Forty, and one in which the central concern, both of philosophers and the common man, was whether, in an age of rapidly proliferating hypothetical worlds, anyone or anything concretely existed at all. Even those words published long before interstellar contact can be seen in retrospect to have transgalactic pertinence. As a result, attempts to abstract the machine from its publishers, Hobson & Hui, in order to “predict the future” for insight or gain by “fast- forwarding” the copper strip have been many and ingenious. While, in centuries of skepticism (“maybe”), or of unrest (“go”) the book has been nearly forgotten, in others it seems to haunt every thought, every deed, despite the fact that the subject of The Slow Book is still unclear. So far only a few sentences exist in print; everyone knows them, can quote them, offer the standard exegeses and assorted heresies; yet certainties are the stuff of adolescence; mature readers are forced to acknowledge that these sentences are probably only a preamble to the main argument. They contain no proper nouns, nor can we identify any definite theme. There is even disagreement about their tone, whether coolly ironic, as some insist, or ardent. The appearance of an unusual grammatical case, sometimes called the future pluperfect continuous, used to describe events that at some future point will have always been true (but are not yet)—hitherto known to appear only in the synthetic dogmas of the Thanatographical Society, and in certain highly circumscribed religious contexts—has suggested to some scholars that the Slow Book was originally intended for ritual use, but the proximity of the usage to a term designating a small hand plow that, as Pott and Mielcke have convincingly shown, would have borne a distinctly obscene double meaning in its culture of origin in the author’s time, argues otherwise. It is likewise unclear whether the situation that seems to be—with teasing incompleteness—sketched out in these few lines is intended as an illustration of general principles, a case study, a dramatic scene, or an extended metaphor. In short, we have no idea what The Slow Book is about. In our own time, we believe that it is almost certainly a work of fiction, but that may be because we live in the century of “if”. In each age, perhaps, we see the book we most need to read. Some have dared to suggest that the metal strip is blank until, with millennial fanfare, it advances into its new position, that no ur-text exists, that the book itself is brought into being—written—by our need. But that is exactly the sort of thing we would believe, in 7645. Shelley Jackson is the author of the story collection The Melancholy of Anatomy , the novel Half Life , and hypertexts including Patchwork Girl . The recipient of a Howard Foundation grant, a Pushcart Prize, and the 2006 James Tiptree Jr Award, she has also written and illustrated several children's books, including The Old Woman and the Wave ; Sophia, the Alchemist's Dog ; and Mimi's Dada Catifesto . Her stories and essays have appeared in Conjunctions , McSweeney's , The Paris Review , and Cabinet Magazine . In 2004 she launched her project SKIN , a story published in tattoos on 2095 volunteers. THE BOOK OF SOUNDS The Book of Sounds is just that: a book of sounds made when letters are construed in new ways to bring forth out of the alphabet new forms of speech. A book meant to be read out loud, The Book of Sounds is not unlike Laurie Anderson's O Superman or Brian Eno's Music for Airports in its attempt to make music out of the most primary and simplest of methods. It breaks language down to its barest bones and makes out of the page a drum that has never before been beaten upon. Peter Markus is the author of a novel, Bob, or Man on Boat (Dzanc Books) as well as two books of short fiction, Good, Brother and The Singing Fish , both of which were published by Calamari Press. A new collection of stories, We Make Mud , is now available from Dzanc Books. PARADISE OF THE BLIND by Celan Solen Although the reclusive Celan Solen published his first and only book in 1963—paying out-of-pocket for a limited edition of the slim collection No One May Have the Same Knowledge Again —he remained in American obscurity for almost three decades. In 1992 a micro-press in Istanbul brought out No One in Turkish. A German translation followed in 1995. Soon it became clear in literary circles Solen was a world-class (if highly unclassifiable) artist—lyrical, dense, enigmatic—who could undo the conventional short story in 397 words by inventing impossible worlds housed in impossible whirls (in “Small Sadnesses,” a single chartreuse tree frog in Borneo unknowingly holds time together by its very presence in the universe, while each letter of its tale refers, not to itself, but to the one preceding it in the alphabet). By his disappearance last year, Solen was considered master by a generation of writers and critics (except, alas, for those gentlemen in the Swedish Academy). Imagine, then, that generation’s delight at the discovery, locked away in the author’s safe-deposit box, of his second and final composition. Had Lynch’s Lost Highway been book instead of film, and had it been penned by Beckett at his least certain, revised by Barthelme at his most formally deranged, and typeset by Derrida at his most semiotically catastrophic, the result might have been something like Paradise of the Blind : interlacing narratives of a man composed of borrowed organs (whose most cheerless and difficult to locate, god, could only have been invented by an empty heart), a nonexistent medieval painting blamed for the ruin of future hope, and the spread of a philosophy that holds earth a mistake constantly recurring in the dream of a fish lying on the floor of the Atlantic (if the fish wakes, our world winks off)—all contained in a text packed with typed-over passages, torn postcards, poems that can be deciphered only when held up to a mirror, pages ornamented with trompe-l'œil paperclips and coffee stains and buzzing houseflies, some busy with illegible runes that dissolve when exposed to light, three that smell like roses or lemons (depending on whether a man or woman is reading), two that stain with the bloody fingerprints of the those who handle them, one that ignites when brushed with breath, thirteen sewn from baby skin, one that moans when touched, and one that screams—yet all without mass, unimaginable, and invisible. Lance Olsen is author of more than 20 books of and about innovative fiction, including, most recently, the novels Calendar of Regrets (2010) and Head in Flames (2009). He teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah. SUPERSTRUCTURE! by Barbara D'Albi As soon as I opened the third drawer of Barbara D'Albi's wooden novel, everything became hopeless. Now in Ithaca, there was no going back. And it wasn't just the intricate series of shelves, hinged doors and locked drawers which D'Albi layered into the book, no, lo, I was constructed anew by the story. Who else but D'Albi to imagine a God who becomes a carpenter and gets killed?! And makes it good! You want stories? D'Albi is a skyscraper, built with planes and levers. Momentarily I wondered where I could shelve this book, and then I thought: no matter; I couldn't put it down. Adam Robinson lives in Baltimore, where he runs Publishing Genius. He is the author of Adam Robison and Other Poems and Say, Poem. 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In evolutionary biology, niche construction is sometimes described as a genuine evolutionary process whereby organisms, through their activities and regulatory mechanisms, modify their environment such as to steer their own evolutionary trajectory, and that of other species. There is ongoing debate, however, on the extent to which niche construction ought to be considered a bona fide evolutionary force, on a par with natural selection. Recent formulations of the variational free-energy principle as applied to the life sciences describe the properties of (...) living systems, and their selection in evolution, in terms of variational inference. We argue that niche construction can be described using a variational approach. We propose new arguments to support the niche construction perspective, and to extend the variational approach to niche construction to current perspectives in various scientific fields. (shrink)

In “A Public Health Ethics Framework for Populations with Limited English Proficiency,” Chipman and colleagues present a valuable framework for addressing health disparities linked to limited Engli...