The aim of this study is to describe how hermeneutic photography and one application of hermeneutic photography in particular, namely the photo-instrument, can be used as a health care intervention that fosters meaning (re-)construction of mental illness experiences. Studies into the ways how patients construct meaning in illness narratives indicate that aesthetic expressions of experiences may play an important role in meaning making and sharing. The study is part of a larger research project devoted to understanding the photostories that result (...) from groups of psychiatric patients using the photo-instrument. Within a focused ethnography approach we employed a qualitative design of a single case study. Text analysis of photostories was combined with observational data. Data were analyzed using hermeneutic theory. Participant observations were used for triangulation and complementarity. The interaction and collaboration between health care professionals and patients in the context of a photo group emerged as core concept that underlies the photo-instrument. The interaction triggered a reframing of meaning in the patient’s illness narrative that offered new perspectives on positive identity growth. The role of visualizing meaning in images was found to lend a dynamic power to the process and triggered a dialectic between real life circumstances and imagination played out in the context of situated action. The findings suggest that a positive reframing of meaning in illness narratives is facilitated by the photo-instrument. (shrink)

Descartes's works are often treated as a unified, unchanging whole. But in Descartes's Changing Mind, Peter Machamer and J. E. McGuire argue that the philosopher's views, particularly in natural philosophy, actually change radically between his early and later works--and that any interpretation of Descartes must take account of these changes. The first comprehensive study of the most significant of these shifts, this book also provides a new picture of the development of Cartesian science, epistemology, and metaphysics. No changes in Descartes's (...) thought are more significant than those that occur between the major works The World and Principles of Philosophy. Often seen as two versions of the same natural philosophy, these works are in fact profoundly different, containing distinct conceptions of causality and epistemology. Machamer and McGuire trace the implications of these changes and others that follow from them, including Descartes's rejection of the method of abstraction as a means of acquiring knowledge, his insistence on the infinitude of God's power, and his claim that human knowledge is limited to that which enables us to grasp the workings of the world and develop scientific theories. (shrink)

This paper explores The New Rhetoric’s concept of universal audience in the contexts of philosophical and traditional rhetorical discourse. It argues that, since Perelman’s final English-language article, published in 1984 to clarify misunderstandings among rhetorical scholars about his theory, rhetorical scholars have persisted in three primary misconceptions of the concept of universal audience: appeals to the real are made only to universal audiences, only universal audiences are qualified to establish the reasonableness of arguments, and only universal audiences prevent The New (...) Rhetoric’s rhetorical theory from degenerating into relativism. It explains why each of these misconceptions is inaccurate and provides a corrected view of universal audience that places it exclusively in the province of philosophical discourse. Finally, it questions whether constructed audiences in general add explanatory power to rhetorical analyses or are merely unnecessary constructs that should be dispensed with for the sake of theoretical parsimony. (shrink)

This book presents a wide range of thinking about how the discipline of philosophy has engaged and might in the future engage with the profound questions raised by rapidly shifting methods of communication. Although social media and telecommunications have dramatically altered the daily lives of people, and no technology has enjoyed the same rapid success as that of the mobile phone, the philosophical underpinnings and consequences of these changes have been insufficiently explored. Clustered in six sections, this book addresses major (...) questions of interest to the thoughtful professional. Section I considers ontology: How should we consider emerging media and what are the categories through which we can organize and understand this new realm of social reality. Section II investigates human nature and its relationship to the social transformations that are occurring through new media. It also considers and compares historical methods of communication such as paper. In Section III, questions of time, narrative voice, and emotions are assessed in relation to emerging media. General issues concerning emergence of meaning, philosophy of mind, artificial intelligence, and agency are the focus of Section IV. Symbols and speech acts—including the philosophical ramifications of the communication process itself as viewed through emerging technologies—represent the key concerns of Section V. Section VI probes various interpersonal, institutional, and political/power dimensions stemming from new systems of communication. A coda points forward to outstanding open questions, calling for further research to be done. The book represents a seminal contribution assembling original thoughts from both leading and rising scholars of the field. (shrink)

The intent of this work is to examine the relationship between the divine "Yes" and "No" as they appear in Barth's thought. Berkouwer maintains that Barth sees in God's "No" to the nature of sinful man only a powerful re-affirmation of what is most important to Barth--the inexorable triumph of divine grace. The implications of this thesis are thoughtfully and critically set forth. --J. E. B.

__Forging People __explores the way in which Hispanic American thinkers in Latin America and Latino/a philosophers in the United States have posed and thought about questions of race, ethnicity, and nationality, and how they have interpreted the most significant racial and ethnic labels used in Hispanic America in connection with issues of rights, nationalism, power, and identity. Following the first introductory chapter, each of the essays addresses one or more influential thinkers, ranging from Bartolomé de Las Casas on race (...) and the rights of Amerindians; to Simon Bolívar's struggle with questions of how to forge a nation from disparate populations; to modern and contemporary thinkers on issues of race, unity, assimilation, and diversity. Each essay carefully and clearly presents the views of key authors in their historical and philosophical context and provides brief biographical sketches and reading lists, as aids to students and other readers. “Latin American philosophy has a long history of engagement with issues of race, ethnicity, and nationality. To date, however, there has been no volume that focused on the contributions of the major figures in the Latin American tradition, to illustrate their connections, and to illuminate the context in which much of their work occurred. This volume fills that gap and takes an important step in remedying this shortcoming in the existing philosophical literature, and also in the literature of related fields such as Latin American studies, ethnic studies, and the cross-disciplinary work of race, ethnicity, and nationality.” —_Manuel Vargas, University of San Francisco _. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Introduction Meaning and the Copy Principle External Objects Causal Power The Self and Necessary Connection Acknowledgments References.

An expansion and revision of an earlier work, Free Speech and its Relation to Self-Government. The author enters a lucid and dispassionate plea for the inviolability of the First Amendment. His work should awaken philosophers to the need for further analysis in the field of legal and political science.--J. E. M.

Boyer suggests that laws cannot account for ownership intuitions, but there may be situations when intuitions hew to laws almost perfectly. Laws granting governments taxation powers provide an interesting case study. We report data here suggesting that people's intuitions track law very closely, and are unaffected by manipulating a P() tag input. We propose two hypotheses to explain this finding.

Latin America - its people, its politics, its economy - has burst upon the world scene with powerful images that have captured the curiosity of many English-speaking North Americans. The strategic importance of this vast region to the stability of the Wes.

This article argues for two theses. The first is that many of the sociological factors endemic in the philosophical community function as barriers to the recruitment of members of minority groups in the profession and to their functioning as public intellectuals. The division into familial groups, the fights for security and success, and the weakness of the federal organization of the American Philosophical Association all contribute to these barriers. The second is that sociology has a place in philosophy, even though (...) it should not be confused with it. This means that philosophers need to consider social phenomena. (shrink)

George Berkeley's Principles of Human Knowledge is a crucial text in the history of empiricism and in the history of philosophy more generally. Its central and seemingly astonishing claim is that the physical world cannot exist independently of the perceiving mind. The meaning of this claim, the powerful arguments in its favour, and the system in which it is embedded, are explained in a highly lucid and readable fashion and placed in their historical context. Berkeley's philosophy is, in part, a (...) response to the deep tensions and problems in the new philosophy of the early modern period and the reader is offered an account of this intellectual milieu. The book then follows the order and substance of the Principles whilst drawing on materials from Berkeley's other writings. This volume is the ideal introduction to Berkeley's Principles and will be of great interest to historians of philosophy in general. (shrink)

My focus here is on two questions: Does philosophy have a place in contemporary American public life? and should philosophy have a place in American public life? Because my answer to the first question is negative, I also will discuss some of the reasons why I believe philosophy does not play a role in American public life. I suggest that philosophers have been excluded from the public conversation in part because the work of philosophy entails criticism and challenge—activities best accomplished (...) from “outside” of the structures of power. This means that we have a role in public life, but it is an indirect role, as teachers and critics, not as advisers and active participants. (shrink)

From the most prominent thinkers in Latin American philosophy, literature, politics, and social science comes a challenge to conventional theories of globalization. The contributors to this volume imagine a discourse in which revolution requires no temporalized march of progress or takeovers of state power but instead aims at local control and the material conditions for human dignity.

© 2015 Elsevier Inc.Postnatal organogenesis occurs in an immune competent environment and is tightly controlled by interplay between positive and negative regulators. Innate immune cells have beneficial roles in postnatal tissue remodeling, but roles for the adaptive immune system are currently unexplored. Here we show that adaptive immune responses participate in the normal postnatal development of a non-lymphoid epithelial tissue. Since the mammary gland is the only organ developing predominantly after birth, we utilized it as a powerful system to study (...) adaptive immune regulation of organogenesis. We found that antigen-mediated interactions between mammary antigen-presenting cells and interferon-γ -producing CD4+ T helper 1 cells participate in MG postnatal organogenesis as negative regulators, locally orchestrating epithelial rearrangement. IFNγ then affects luminal lineage differentiation. This function of adaptive immune responses, regulating normal development, changes the paradigm for studying players of postnatal organogenesis and provides insights into immune surveillance and cancer transformation. Plaks et al. (shrink)

In this innovative study of the relationship between persons and their bodies, E. J. Lowe demonstrates the inadequacy of physicalism, even in its mildest, non-reductionist guises, as a basis for a scientifically and philosophically acceptable account of human beings as subjects of experience, thought and action. He defends a substantival theory of the self as an enduring and irreducible entity - a theory which is unashamedly committed to a distinctly non-Cartesian dualism of self and body. Taking up the physicalist challenge (...) to any robust form of psychophysical interactionism, he shows how an attribution of independent causal powers to the mental states of human subjects is perfectly consistent with a thoroughly naturalistic world view. He concludes his study by examining in detail the role which conscious mental states play in the human subject's exercise of its most central capacities for perception, action, thought and self-knowledge. (shrink)

Introduction , Sophie Gibb 1. Mental Causation , John Heil 2. Physical Realization without Preemption , Sydney Shoemaker 3. Mental Causation in the Physical World , Peter Menzies 4. Mental Causation: Ontology and Patterns of Variation , Paul Noordhof 5. Causation is Macroscopic but not Irreducible , David Papineau 6. Substance Causation, Powers, and Human Agency , E. J. Lowe 7. Agent Causation in a Neo-Aristotelian Metaphysics , Jonathan D. Jacobs and Timothy O’Connor 8. Mental Causation and Double Prevention , (...) Sophie Gibb 9. The Identity Theory as a Solution to the Exclusion Problem , David Robb 10. Continuant Causation, Fundamentality, and Freedom , Peter Simons 11. There is no Exclusion Problem , Steinvor Tholl Arnadottir and Tim Crane. (shrink)

This theory accords to volitions the status of basic mental actions, maintaining that these are spontaneous exercises of the will--a "two-way" power which ...

Thepuzzle of cross‐modal shape experienceis the puzzle of reconciling the apparent differences between our visual and haptic experiences of shape with their apparent similarities. This paper proposes that we can resolve the cross‐modal puzzle by reflecting on another puzzle. Thepuzzle of perspectival characterchallenges us to reconcile the variability of shape experience through shifts in perspective with its constancy. An attractive approach to the latter puzzle holds that shape experience is complex, involving bothperspectivalaspects andconstantaspects. I argue here that parallel distinctions between (...) perspectival and constant aspects of shape experience arise in sight and touch, and that perspectival aspects are modality‐specific while at least some constant aspects are constitutively multisensory. I then address a powerful challenge to the idea that aspects of spatial phenomenology are shared cross‐modally. (shrink)

The power of technology to transform religions, science, and political institutions has often been presented as nothing short of revolutionary. Does technology have a similarly transformative influence on societies’ morality? Scholars have not rigorously investigated the role of technology in moral revolutions, even though existing research on technomoral change suggests that this role may be considerable. In this paper, we explore what the role of technology in moral revolutions, understood as processes of radical group-level moral change, amounts to. We (...) do so by investigating four historical episodes of radical moral change in which technology plays a noteworthy role. Our case-studies illustrate the plurality of mechanisms involved in technomoral revolutions, but also suggest general patterns of technomoral change, such as technology’s capacity to stabilize and destabilize moral systems, and to make morally salient phenomena visible or invisible. We find several leads to expand and refine conceptual tools for analysing moral change, specifically by crystallizing the notions of ‘technomoral niche construction’ and ‘moral payoff mechanisms’. Coming to terms with the role of technology in radical moral change, we argue, enriches our understanding of moral revolutions, and alerts us to the depths of which technology can change our societies in wanted and unwanted ways. (shrink)

There is currently intense interest in the question of the source of our presumed knowledge of truths concerning what is, or is not, metaphysically possible or necessary. Some philosophers locate this source in our capacities to conceive or imagine various actual or non-actual states of affairs, but this approach is open to certain familiar and seemingly powerful objections. A different and ostensibly more promising approach has been developed by Timothy Williamson, according to which our capacity for modal knowledge is just (...) an extension, or by-product, of our general capacity to acquire knowledge of true counterfactual conditionals — a capacity that we deploy ubiquitously in everyday life. Williamson’s account crucially involves a thesis to the effect that modal truths can be explained in terms of counterfactual truths. In this paper, I query Williamson’s account on a number of points, including this thesis. My positive proposal, which owes a debt to the work of Kit Fine on modality and essence, appeals instead to our capacity to grasp essences, understood in a neo-Aristotelian fashion, according to which essences are expressed by ‘real definitions’. (shrink)

In the March 1971 issue of Dialogue Professors E.H. Madden and P.H. Hare attempt with much ingenuity and resource to resuscitate a pre-Humean theory of causal connection. Firmly disowning the “epistemological and metaphysical disasters” that have led to “terrible consequences”,, and making only a mildly favourable gesture in the direction of Michotte, they yet claim that the defence of Hume by modern regularists, even when abetted by the weapons of phenomenology, can be refuted by such indubitable facts as that we (...) observe avalanches destroying villages, waves eating away the shoreline and the “wind-bending-the-trees”. (shrink)

John Heil’s new book is remarkable in many ways. In a concise, lucid and accessible manner, it develops a complete system of ontology with many strikingly original features and then applies that ontology to fundamental issues in the philosophy of mind, with illuminating results. Although Heil acknowledges his intellectual debts to C. B. Martin, he is unduly modest about his own contribution to the development and application of this novel metaphysical system. A full examination of the position that Heil defends (...) would require a book in itself, so I shall limit myself to discussing some of its central themes and to explaining a few doubts that I have concerning some aspects of it. (shrink)

We sought to expand on the concept of the moral self to include not just the duty to develop the moral self but the moral duty to develop the self in both moral and non-moral ways. To do this, we focused on how leaders can promote a climate in which individuals feel a sense of duty to develop themselves for the betterment of the team and organization. In our theoretical model, duty orientation plays a key role in determining whether followers (...) will seek performance feedback to develop their work selves. We hypothesized that followers with ethical leaders would experience a greater sense of duty to improve themselves and would therefore be more likely to seek and less likely to avoid leader feedback. Drawing on social learning theory, we hypothesized that duty orientation would mediate the relationship between ethical leadership and feedback-seeking/feedback-avoiding behavior, expert power would moderate the relationship between ethical leadership and duty orientation such that duty orientation would be higher when followers perceived their leader to be both highly ethical and competent, and expert power would moderate the indirect effect of ethical leadership on feedback-seeking/feedback-avoiding behavior through duty orientation. We tested our hypotheses using a sample of 249 followers across two waves of data collection. Results suggest that ethical leadership and leader competence interact to drive followers’ duty orientation, thereby reducing followers’ feedback-avoiding behaviors. Further, ethical leadership had a direct positive relationship with followers’ feedback-seeking behaviors. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: What are Actions? What Are the Identity Conditions of Actions? Agents and their Powers References Further reading.

This article reviews the strengths and limitations of five major paradigms of medical computer-assisted decision making (CADM): (1) clinical algorithms, (2) statistical analysis of collections of patient data, (3) mathematical models of physical processes, (4) decision analysis, and (5) symbolic reasoning or artificial intelligence (Al). No one technique is best for all applications, and there is recent promising work which combines two or more established techniques. We emphasize both the inherent power of symbolic reasoning and the promise of artificial (...) intelligence and the other techniques to complement each other. (shrink)

A distinction is drawn between the "outcome", Or result of a certain exercise of power, And the "act", Or the manner in which that result is accomplished. Omnipotence is then defined solely in terms of its possible outcomes, And the definition used to dispel certain "paradoxes" recently discussed in articles by j l mackie, P t geach and r g swinburne, Among others. Finally, It is argued that god's inability to do certain things, Such as telling a lie or (...) breaking a promise, Is not incompatible with his omnipotence. (shrink)

Context: Constructivist approaches to cognition have mostly been descriptive, and now face the challenge of specifying the mechanisms that may support the acquisition of knowledge. Departing from cognitivism, however, requires the development of a new functional framework that will support causal, powerful and goal-directed behavior in the context of the interaction between the organism and the environment. Problem: The properties affecting the computational power of this interaction are, however, unclear, and may include partial information from the environment, exploration, distributed (...) processing and aggregation of information, emergence of knowledge and directedness towards relevant information. Method: We posit that one path towards such a framework may be grounded in these properties, supported by dynamical systems. To assess this hypothesis, we describe computational models inspired from swarm intelligence, which we use as a metaphor to explore the practical implications of the properties highlighted. Results: Our results demonstrate that these properties may serve as the basis for complex operations, yielding the elaboration of knowledge and goal-directed behavior. Implications: This work highlights aspects of interaction that we believe ought to be taken into account when characterizing the possible mechanisms underlying cognition. The scope of the models we describe cannot go beyond that of a metaphor, however, and future work, theoretical and experimental, is required for further insight into the functional role of interaction with the environment for the elaboration of complex behavior. Constructivist content: Inspiration for this work stems from the constructivist impetus to account for knowledge acquisition based on interaction. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Knowledge and Faıth in Thomas Aquinas by John I. JenkinsE.J. AshworthJohn I. Jenkins. Knowledge and Faıth in Thomas Aquinas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. xv + 267. Cloth, $59.95.There is a strong tension in the thought of Thomas Aquinas. On the one hand, he is strongly naturalist. He insists that our cognition is rooted in sense-perception and that [End Page 673] it is normally reliable. He insists (...) that our moral life is grounded in our nature both as physical beings, able to feel pain and pleasure, and as social beings, depending on each other for our welfare. But he is also strongly supernaturalist. Human nature by virtue of its cognitive orientation toward the physical is not able through its own powers to know God. Still less is human nature able to achieve moral virtue by its own powers. This is not just because we are cut off from God by original sin; rather, there is a primal lack that was there even before the Fall. To achieve our true end, both cognitive and moral, we depend on God’s free gift of grace which elevates our nature and renders it able both to know God through the beatific vision in Heaven and to respond to God through loving, virtuous action. The gift of faith becomes central to human nature and destiny in a way that was to worry later thinkers such as Duns Scotus, who pertinently asked how our intellect can have the ultimate end of knowing God if it has to be made a different intellect before it achieves that end.Jenkins does not worry about the point raised by Scotus. Instead, he sets out to give an interpretation of the Summa theologiae which will help us understand more deeply the interplay between the natural and the supernatural in Aquinas. He begins by taking advantage of new readings of Aristode’s Posterior Analytics which present Aristode’s account of the demonstration which moves from cause to effect, not just as a pedagogic device for presenting material obtained by moving from effect to cause, but as a recipe for cognitive restructuring. Certainly we have to begin with mere observation, and with the piecemeal discovery of causes, but to achieve true scıentia (to use the medieval Latin term for organized, necessary knowledge) we need to acquire a new vision of how reality is structured and to see how effects flow necessarily from their causes. True demonstration is an expression of this new vision. Jenkins applies this reading of Aristotle to Aquinas. He takes with absolute seriousness Aquinas’s claim at the beginning of the Summa theologıae that theology too is an Aristotelian scientıa, and he sees the work as presenting a recipe for the cognitive restructuring of apprentice theologians (those to whom the work is addressed).The scientıa of the Summa theologiae differs from the scientia of the Posterior Analytics in two ways. First, Aquinas allows the term scientia to have an extended sense, so that God too can have scientia, even though he does not move from principles to conclusions by a process of syllogistic demonstration, but instead grasps all that is knowable in one simple act. Second, the basic principles which are the foundation of theological demonstration are the articles of faith, especially those of the creeds, which cannot be known by us in any naturalistic way. It is through God’s infused light that we assent to these articles as divinely revealed. After a lengthy examination of the role of faith in Aquinas’s account, Jenkins describes the epistemology involved as supernatural externalism.Although Jenkins’s presentation of the relationship between scientıa and faith in the Summa is carefully and lucidly argued, there are two aspects of the book that I would question.First, while it is true that Aquinas does present theology as an Aristotelian scientia, I doubt that this single fact “determines the purpose and structure of the Summa theologiae” (15) in any very detailed way. Jenkins further claims that the structure of the Summa is determined by the structure of God’s knowledge (220), but if God is truly [End... (shrink)

The concept of identity has become widespread within the social and behavioral sciences in recent years, cutting across disciplines from psychiatry and psychology to political science and sociology. All individuals claim particular identities given their roles in society, groups they belong to, and characteristics that describe themselves. Introduced almost 30 years ago, identity theory is a social psychological theory that attempts to understand identities, their sources in interaction and society, their processes of operation, and their consequences for interaction and society (...) from a sociological perspective. This book describes identity theory, its origins, the research that supports it, and its future direction. It covers the relation between identity theory and other related theories, as well as the nature and operation of identities. In addition, the book discusses the multiple identities individuals hold from their multiple positions in society and organizations as well as the multiple identities activated by many people interacting in groups and organizations. And, it covers the manner in which identities offer both stability and change to individuals. Written in an accessible style, Identity Theory makes, step by step, the full range of this powerful new theory understandable to readers at all levels. (shrink)

Continuous recordings of brain electrical activity were obtained from a group of 176 patients throughout surgical procedures using general anesthesia. Artifact-free data from the 19 electrodes of the International 10/20 System were subjected to quantitative analysis of the electroencephalogram (QEEG). Induction was variously accomplished with etomidate, propofol or thiopental. Anesthesia was maintained throughout the procedures by isoflurane, desflurane or sevoflurane (N = 68), total intravenous anesthesia using propofol (N = 49), or nitrous oxide plus narcotics (N = 59). A set (...) of QEEG measures were found which reversibly displayed high heterogeneity of variance between four states as follows: (1) during induction; (2) just after loss of consciousness (LOC); (3) just before return of consciousness (ROC); (4) just after ROC. Homogeneity of variance across all agents within states was found. Topographic statistical probability images were compared between states. At LOC, power increased in all frequency bands in the power spectrum with the exception of a decrease in gamma activity, and there was a marked anteriorization of power. Additionally, a significant change occurred in hemispheric relationships, with prefrontal and frontal regions of each hemisphere becoming more closely coupled, and anterior and posterior regions on each hemisphere, as well as homologous regions between the two hemispheres, uncoupling. All of these changes reversed upon ROC. Variable resolution electromagnetic tomography (VARETA) was performed to localize salient features of power anteriorization in three dimensions. A common set of neuroanatomical regions appeared to be the locus of the most probable generators of the observed EEG changes. (shrink)

Tarski [5] showed that for any set X, its set w(X) of well-orderable subsets has cardinality strictly greater than that of X, even in the absence of the axiom of choice. We construct a Fraenkel-Mostowski model in which there is an infinite strictly descending sequence under the relation |w (X)| = |Y|. This contrasts with the corresponding situation for power sets, where use of Hartogs' ℵ-function easily establishes that there can be no infinite descending sequence under the relation |P(X)| (...) = |Y|. (shrink)

The most powerful lesson learned from the 2013-2016 outbreak of Ebola in West Africa was that we do not learn our lessons. A common sentiment at the time was that Ebola served as a “wake-up call”—an alarm which signalled that an outbreak of that magnitude should never have occurred and that we are ill-prepared globally to prevent and respond to them when they do. Pledges were made that we must learn from the outbreak before we were faced with another. Nearly (...) five years later the world is in the grips of a pandemic of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 that causes coronavirus disease 2019. It is therefore of no surprise that we are now yet again hearing that the COVID-19 pandemic serves as the “wake-up call” we need and that there are many lessons to be learned to better prepare us for future outbreaks. Will anything be different this time around? We argue that nothing will fundamentally change unless we truly understand and appreciate the nature of the lessons we should learn from these outbreaks. Our past failures must be understood as moral failures that offer moral lessons. Unless we appreciate that we have a defect in our collective moral attitude toward remediating the conditions that precipitate the emergence of outbreaks, we will never truly learn. (shrink)