All lives contain negative events, but how we think about these events differs across individuals; negative events often include positive details that can be remembered alongside the negative, and the ability to maintain both representations may be beneficial. In a survey examining emotional responses to the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, the current study investigated how this ability shifts as a function of age and individual differences in initial experience of the event. Specifically, this study examined how emotional importance, involvement, and (...) self-reported surprise upon hearing about the event related to the tendency to report focusing on the negative and positive aspects of the bombings. Structural equation models revealed that while greater emotional importance and surprise were associated with a greater focus on negative elements, involvement and age were associated with increased consideration of positive aspects. Further, emotional importance was more strongly related to an increased focus on negative aspects for young adults and an increased focus on positive aspects for older adults, highlighting a tendency for older adults to enhance positive features of an otherwise highly negative event. (shrink)

Nostalgia, a sentimental longing for one’s past, can serve as a resource for individuals coping with discomforting experiences. The experience of bereavement poses psychological and physical risks....

During the COVIDicine, many nurses awoke to the ways that the Healthcare‐Industrial Complex (HIC) dictates the care we are able to provide. Using the Foucauldian concepts of pastoral power and governmentality, we explore the ways that nurses participate in upholding power structures within the HIC and reproducing them in our work, contributing to a carceral culture based on hierarchy and power dynamics. We also explore the ways nurses are both agentic in this system and subject to it, reluctant to make (...) waves and lose our place within a system that can offer nurses safety and security in, and most importantly, a paycheck. This paper articulates a prefigurative anarchist approach to nursing praxis. Through the writing of Emma Goldman, we locate a historically founded philosophical basis for practical tactics that nurses can use to actualise this praxis. Both individually and as a collective, nurses can assert their own ethic and power through direct action, micro‐insurgency and solidarity to build the world we know can be. Our only limitation is our imagination. (shrink)

These investigations identify and clarify some basic assumptions and methodological principles involved in ecological explanations of plant associations. How are plants geographically distributed into characteristic groups? What are the basic conditions that organize groups of interspecific plant populations that are characteristic of particular kinds of habitats? Answers to these questions concerning the geographical distribution of plants in late 19th century European plant geography and early 20th century American plant ecology can be distinguished according to differing logical assumptions concerning the habitats (...) of plant associations. Through an analysis of several significant case studies in the early history of plant ecology, Konopka distinguishes a logic of habitats that conceives of plant associations in an analogy to individual organisms with a logic that conceives of plant associations in a reciprocal relation to habitat physiography. He argues that a phenomenological conception of the logical attributes of habitats can philosophically complement the physiographic tradition in early plant ecology and provide an attractive alternative to standard reductionism and holism debates that persist today. This wide ranging and original analysis will be valuable for readers interested in the history and philosophy of ecology. (shrink)

Gilbert and colleagues point out the discrepancy between the limited empirical data illustrating changes in personality following implantation of deep brain stimulating electrodes and the vast number of conceptual neuroethics papers implying that these changes are widespread, deleterious, and clinically significant. Their findings are reminiscent of C. P. Snow’s essay on the divide between the two cultures of the humanities and the sciences. This division in the literature raises significant ethical concerns surrounding unjustified fear of personality changes in the context (...) of DBS and negative perceptions of clinician-scientists engaged in DBS. These concerns have real world implications for funding future innovative, DBS trials aimed to reduce suffering as well as hampering true interdisciplinary scholarship. We argue that the philosophical tradition of pragmatism and the value it places on empirical inquiry, experiential knowledge, and inter-disciplinary scholarship – reflecting diverse ways of knowing – provides a framework to start to address the important questions Gilbert and colleagues raise. In particular, we highlight the importance of expert clinician knowledge in contributing to the neuroethical questions raised by Gilbert and colleagues. Finally, we provide illustrative examples of some of our interdisciplinary empirical research that demonstrate the iterative cycle of inquiry characteristic of pragmatism in which conceptual neuroethics questions have led to empirical studies whose results then raise additional conceptual questions that give rise to new empirical studies in a way that highlights the contributions of the humanities and the sciences. (shrink)

In the beginning, Rome was ruled by kings. Their expulsion heralded the foundation of the Republic, a political system strong enough to withstand both internal and external threats to the state. Among these internal threats was the possibility of an elite man trying to set himself up as a king. Modern scholarship agrees that there were three such attempts to recreate a monarchy in the early Republic: Spurius Cassius in 485, Spurius Maelius in 439 and Marcus Manlius Capitolinus in 385/4. (...) Theaffectatores regnipurposefully courted the plebs in order to gain supreme power. But Roman virtue was too strong; all three men were caught, tried (either publicly or privately) and executed. Their possessions were seized and consecrated to the gods; their families shunned their memory. These attempts to establish tyranny revealed both the fragility and the power of the Republic. (shrink)

What does it mean to be hopeful? Feeling hopeful is an emotion everybody has! Children will learn how to identify when they are hopeful and ways to manage their feelings. Large, vivid photos help illustrate what hopefulness looks like. A mindfulness activity will give kids an opportunity to explore their feelings.

Family migration often disadvantages women’s careers. Yet, we know little about the decision-making processes that lead to such outcomes. To address this gap, I conducted a longitudinal interview study of 21 heterosexual young adult couples who were deciding whether to move for early career opportunities. Analyzing 118 interviews, I detail how partners negotiate their desired work and family arrangements given structural and cultural constraints. On one negotiation trajectory, partners maintained their egalitarian desires by performing practical labor to make equal work–family (...) arrangements. On another pathway, couples changed their desires by doing emotion work to justify neotraditional roles. On the last pathway, men deferred to women’s desires, unintentionally leaving women the emotional and practical work of coordinating two careers and the couple’s life. These pathways show how couples contest and reproduce gendered work and family roles during the stalled gender revolution. (shrink)

This essay argues that phenomenology is uniquely suited to critique naturalism without lapsing into a romantic, anti-scientific, or dystopian view of modern science. This argument situates Husserl’s retrieval of the environmental relation in the Vienna Lecture between two alternative tendencies in contemporary ecological phenomenology: 1) the rejection of or indifference to the positive sciences, and 2) the adoption of naturalism in phenomenological methodology. On the one hand, the claim is that the phenomenological return to the environment should not imply a (...) rejection of methodological naturalism. On the other hand, while an ecological phenomenology is consistent with naturalistic investigation, there is nevertheless a heterogeneity between the two. In short, phenomenology need not become naturalized in order for it to be ecological. (shrink)

The administration or recognition of religious courts is a form of religious accommodation present in many constitutional states today commonly analysed in legal pluralism terms. This article contributes to the further analysis of the relationship between legal pluralism and rights in religiously diverse societies by examining the status of state religious courts and their interaction with state non-religious courts. In particular, I examine what Cover calls “jurisdictional redundancies” between the courts and conceptualize the allocation of power between religious and non-religious (...) courts as a potentially productive site of interlegality. In doing so, I support concurrent jurisdictional allocations, arguing that exclusive jurisdiction could result in what I call an interlegal gap, whereby instead of inter-penetration of norms and production of reconciliatory principles, there is a justice gap whereby litigants may find themselves unable to obtain appropriate legal recourse including when neither court is willing to assume jurisdiction over the matter. This requires us to see the relationship between religious courts and non-religious courts through the more mundane but more practical lens of jurisdictional overlaps and competition, rather than through the more abstract framing of normative or even civilizational clashes. Accordingly, I argue that concurrent jurisdiction and interlegality have greater potential to strike a balance between individual and group rights and could be more protective of religious diversity. In other words, I argue for a closer, rather than a more separate, relationship between religious and non-religious courts, while denying that a hierarchical relationship where religious courts are subordinated to non-religious courts is the only way to protect rights. (shrink)

In this article, I argue in favor of an intersectional account of religious identity to better make sense of how religious subjects can be treated with epistemic injustice. To do this, I posit two perspectives through which to view religious identity: as a social identity and as a worldview. I argue that these perspectives shed light on the unique ways in which religious subjects can be epistemically harmed. From the first perspective, religious subjects can be harmed when their religion is (...) racialized or when their gender and dress are mistakenly thought to be predictive of their beliefs and practices. As an instance of this, I focus on the epistemic harms facing Muslim women who practice veiling. From the worldview perspective, religious subjects can be harmed when we, by contrast, underestimate the force of the connections between religion, race, and gender. Such connections can give rise to intersectionally rich theologies that can in turn be marginalized and denied credibility. To illuminate the worldview perspective, I focus on Christian abolitionist and feminist Sojourner Truth. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the debate on the accessibility of religious reasons, as it exists within the public reason literature, has insufficiently identified what it is that makes a religious reason for political action accessible. I thus explore a new route of analysis, one that takes seriously how religious reasons can be accessed via emotion. Emotions, I claim, are not only a source of justification for believers, but they allow non-religious citizens to feel the force of religious reasons (...) more than they otherwise would. (shrink)

This chapter reconstructs the account of the organization of unified definite manifolds that Husserl developed in his early logic of parts and wholes. I argue that Husserl’s conception of necessity gets fixed through the logic of fitness that is operative in his account of unified definite manifolds that are organized by symmetrical part/whole relations. Husserl’s logical account of necessity finds its ultimate justification in his theory of intentionality and is operative in his phenomenological methodology generally. Through this conception of necessity (...) of the way in which manifolds are unified and organized, Husserl radicalized and exploded the Kantian conception of the material a priori and distinguished among several kinds of a priori, e.g., the correlational a priori, a priori bound to the empirical, and pure material a priori. Husserl’s phenomenological account of the material a priori further clarifies the important differences with Kant’s approach to the problem of necessity. (shrink)

ObjectiveEfforts to understand why some marriages thrive while others falter are not well integrated conceptually and rely heavily on data collected from White middle-class samples. The Vulnerability-Stress-Adaptation Model is used here to integrate prior efforts and is tested using data collected from couples living with low incomes.BackgroundThe VSA Model assumes that enduring vulnerabilities, stress, and couple communication account for unique variance in relationship satisfaction, that communication mediates the effects of vulnerabilities and stress on satisfaction, and that the predictors of satisfaction (...) generalize across socioeconomic levels. To date, these assumptions remain untested.Materials and methodsWith 388 couples from diverse backgrounds, we used latent variable structural equation models to examine enduring vulnerabilities, chronic stress, and observed communication as predictors of 4-wave, 27-month satisfaction trajectories, first as main effects and then interacting with a validated 10-item index of sociodemographic risk.Results The three variable sets independently predict satisfaction trajectories; couple communication does not mediate the effects of enduring vulnerabilities or stress on satisfaction; and in 19% of tests, effects were stronger among couples with higher sociodemographic risk.ConclusionEffects of established predictor domains on satisfaction replicate in a diverse sample of newlywed couples, and most findings generalize across levels of sociodemographic risk. The failure of couple communication to mediate effects of enduring personal vulnerabilities and stress raises new questions about how these two domains undermine committed partnerships. (shrink)

In this article, we investigate Internet discourses that capture Canadians’ perceptions of the risk of radiation from the 2011 Fukushima nuclear incident. We consider these online discourses of radiation risk in the context of recent Internet-based theories that explore ecological models of communication, and we take a discourse approach to our analysis of the online texts about Fukushima radiation risk. Our analysis reveals that, while government and scientific discourses about radiation risk are framed in terms of public concern and certainty, (...) public discourses are framed in terms of uncertainty and gaps in public knowledge. Members of the public engaged in knowledge-seeking activities conducted their own nuclear risk assessments and disseminated the results to the interested public in street science activities. These public meaning-making activities, we argue, were generated by a desire to fill knowledge niches and attract public attention. They result in a discourse ecology characterized by epistemological rather than affective stances. (shrink)

In this essay I argue that Husserl’s development of the nineteenth century Natur/Geist distinction is grounded in the intentional correlate between the pre-theoretical natural attitude and environing world ( Umwelt ). By reconsidering the Natur/Geist distinction through its historical context in the nineteenth century debate between Wilhelm Dilthey and the Neo-Kantians from the Baden or Southwest school, it is possible to understand more clearly Husserl’s appropriations and novel contributions. One of Husserl’s contributions lies in his rigorous thematization and clarification of (...) the constitutive features proper to the natural and human sciences as they arise from the pre-theoretical experience of an environing world. This ordinary lived experience between the lived body and environing world is presupposed by and forms a unity with both Natur and Geist , thereby acting as the unified ground that is inclusive of naturalized Geist and a geistig nature. This unbuilding ( Abbau ) of the Natur/Geist distinction is necessary, according to Husserl, for the radical clarification of the respective methodologies of the natural and human sciences. (shrink)

Phenomenological resources can be used to develop a nonanthropocentric theory of ecological values that gives rise to an obligation for moral agents. There is logical space in Edmund Husserl’s early theory of value that is inclusive of nonhuman animals and vegetation as members of a life community (Lebensgemeinschaft) possessing ecological characteristics. Within this legal space is a characterization of ecological obligation that is not tied to any single moral law, as it is in deontological ethics and utilitarianism, but founded on (...) the complex value nexus of a given ecological community. Rather than judging the “rightness” or “wrongness” of actions on the law-based and single-rule philosophical theories of normativity found in modern humanism, this Husserlian inspired account locates a conception of ecological obligation that is immanent to the values operative in a given environing world. This particular experience of ecological obligation arises when the valuation of the goods of individual members of the ecological community conflict with one another and the weighing of these competing goods is appropriately accomplished in light of a communal good. (shrink)

This paper identifies the duty to care for the public interest in the commonly valued ecological goods of the Gulf as one of the basic essential features of the moral significance of the federal policies that govern the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. I argue that the Clean Water Act and the Oil Protection Act implicitly provide for a communitarian interpretation of the public and ecological goods of this event that warrants a virtue ethical account of normativity that is ultimately expressed (...) in the duty to care, a duty that is one of the central moral principles that underlies the punitive damages doctrine. (shrink)

This article is an attempt to retrieve phenomenological resources for the purposes of identifying and clarifying the lived situation of embodiment in an environing world (Umwelt). Drawn primarily from Husserlian resources, it identifies several essential perceptual features of the operative intentionality of environed embodiment. Through an engagement with Husserl’s analyses of instinctual experience, I identify an essential feature of environed embodiment: the principle of association governing the nexus among objects in an environing world that are animated toward an instrumental resolution (...) of an embodied tension, a resolution that promotes the maximization of embodied equilibrium that is instrumental for self-preservation and well-being. (shrink)

The article Pragmatismand the Importance of Interdisciplinary Teams in Investigating Personality Changes Following DBS.

Dr. David K. Naugle is widely regarded as a leading thinker in the area of Christian worldview formation. As Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at Dallas Baptist University, he has drawn accolades and admiration. -/- This collection in his honor demonstrates that intellectual pursuits are inherently spiritual, that no area of life is separate from the lordship of Christ, and that true Christian faith is in fact the deep fulfillment of the human experience. On topics ranging from linguistics to gardening and (...) everything in between, these essays represent the depth and breadth of the idea that all goodness is God's goodness, all truth is God's truth, and all beauty is God's beauty. (shrink)

The second wave of devastating consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic has been linked to dramatic declines in well-being. While much of the well-being literature is based on descriptive and correlational studies, this paper evaluates a growing body of causal evidence from high-quality randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that test the efficacy of positive psychology interventions (PPIs). This systematic review analyzed the findings from 25 meta-analyses, 42 review papers, and the high-quality RCTs of PPIs designed to generate well-being that were included within (...) those studies. Findings reveal PPIs have the potential to generate well-being even during a global pandemic, with larger effect sizes in non-Western countries. Four exemplar PPIs—that have been tested with a high-quality RCT, have positive effects on well-being, and could be implemented during a global pandemic—are presented and discussed. Future efforts to generate well-being can build on this causal evidence and emulate the most efficacious PPIs to be as effective as possible at generating well-being. However, the four exemplars were only tested in WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Democratic) countries but seem promising for implementation and evaluation in non-WEIRD contexts. This review highlights the overall need for more rigorous research on PPIs with more diverse populations and in non-WEIRD contexts to ensure equitable access to effective interventions that generate well-being for all. (shrink)

Background: Nurses exposed to community health nursing commonly encounter situations that can be morally distressing. However, most research on moral distress has focused on acute care settings and very little research has explored moral distress in a community health nursing setting especially among nursing students. Aim: To explore the moral distress experiences encountered by undergraduate baccalaureate nursing students in community health nursing. Research design: A descriptive qualitative design was employed to explore the community health nursing experiences of the nursing students (...) that led them to have moral distress. Participants and research context: The study included 14 senior nursing students who had their course in Community Health Nursing in their sophomore year and stayed in the partner communities in their junior year for 6 and 3 weeks during their senior year. Ethical considerations: Institutional review board approval was sought prior to the conduct of the study. Self-determination was assured and anonymity and confidentiality were guaranteed to all participants. Findings: Nursing students are vulnerable and likely to experience moral distress when faced with ethical dilemmas. They encounter numerous situations which make them question their own values and ideals and those of that around them. Findings of the study surfaced three central themes which included moral distress emanating from the unprofessional behavior of some healthcare workers, the resulting sense of powerlessness, and the differing values and mindsets of the people they serve in the community. Conclusion: This study provides educators a glimpse of the morally distressing situations that often occurs in the community setting. It suggests the importance of raising awareness and understanding of these situations to assist nursing students to prepare themselves to the “real world,” where the ideals they have will be constantly challenged and tested. (shrink)

Philosophers sometimes hope that our discipline will be transformative for students, perhaps especially when we teach so-called philosophy of the body. To that end, this article describes an experimental upper-level undergraduate course cross-listed between Philosophy and Physical Education, entitled “Thinking Through the Body: Philosophy and Yoga.” Drawing on the perspectives of professor and students, we show how a somatic practice (here, hatha yoga) and reading texts (here, primarily contemporary phenomenology) can be integrated in teaching and learning. We suggest that the (...) course raised questions about the ethics of evaluation as well as about the split between theory and practice, which have larger pedagogical implications. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to compare medical and social sciences students’ outcomes in terms of self-perceived stress, quality of life, and personality traits. We put particular emphasis on external and internal differences in students of specific fields–medicine, nursing, psychology, and pedagogy. In a survey, 1,783 students from Medical University of Gdańsk and University of Gdańsk participated in our study, of whom 1,223 were included in the final statistical analysis. All of them were evaluated using valid and reliable questionnaires–TIPI-PL, (...) PSS-10, and a one-item scale of quality of life. Stress turned out to have a negative effect on quality of life, regardless of the type of field of study. Moreover, students from different fields varied in terms of personality factors: conscientiousness, agreeableness, openness to experience, and emotional stability. In conclusion, many students regardless of their field suffer from high stress and report low quality of life, which potentially further affects their academic performance and social life. (shrink)

This study examined the effect of history of harsh parenting on readiness for aggression in young adults testing the mediating effect of emotional reaction to frustration and provocation that is assumed to arise in the context of a history of physical punishment and psychological aggression. Data were collected from 402 participants including 187 Poles and 215 Americans. Participants reported retrospectively on corporal punishment and psychological aggression experienced during childhood. Based on self-report instruments, sensitivity to provocation and frustration and three patterns (...) of readiness for aggression in adulthood were assessed. Contrary to the US sample, sensitivity to provocation and frustration were mediators in the Polish sample alone. The important role of contextual factors that define harsh parenting circumstances, such as cultural context and sex of the parent, are discussed. (shrink)

The increasing incidence of ‘trafficking’ has added an incontestably disturbing dimension to the contestable nature of a ‘non-trafficked’ UK sex industry. Men who buy sex remain under-researched, though some studies have indicated ambivalence within men's attitudes. This study combines a critical discursive psychology in support of dialogical self theory. Secondary data, from prominent UK media resources, were analysed using Edley's method of combining ‘interpretative repertoires’, ‘ideological dilemmas’ and ‘subject positions’. Contrasting discursive practices indicative of wider ideological conflict were found. Discursive (...) concepts were ‘mapped’ onto Hermans and Hermans-Konopka's ‘I-positions’ to explore how these potentially dilemmatic positions might be understood in terms of identity production. The function of ‘uncertainty’, particularly salient with the increasing complexity of globalisation, was considered a factor in how men's identities might be limited by the current discursive space. A ‘dialogical’ model of self is introduced as a framework for understanding how men who buy sex might take up new, inclusive, positions. A corollary is reflected upon; that researchers, activists and buyers alike, who remain ideologically inflexible, may be sustaining the conditions for coercion through their contribution to the discursive conflict. The synthesis of discursive and dialogical analytical tools is recommended for investigating the production of selves in contested spaces. (shrink)

In 2009, we celebrated the bicentennial of the birth of Charles Darwin and the sesquicentennial of the publication of his book The Origin of Species. This seems to be a good opportunity to evaluate the importance of Darwin’s work for the social sciences, mainly for philosophical anthropology. The aim of this paper is to discuss the traditional anthropocentric conceptions of man, which consider our biological species to be exceptional – qualitatively higher than other living organisms. Over the course of the (...) 20th century, philosophers have argued for the claim in a number of ways: man is supposed to be the only animal capable of laughter, love, thought or language. It has also been claimed that only members of Homo sapiens have free will, morality or religion. The paper refutes these arguments on the basis of contemporary studies by M. Davila Ross, H. Fischer, K. Arnold, K. Zuberbühler, G. Konopka, B. Libet, F. De Waal, M. Bekoff, P. Boyer, B. Hood, G. Paul and others. The author argues that the only differences between man and other animals are quantitative, and therefore the nature of humans should be studied using the methods of naturalized philosophy, with respect to the natural sciences. (shrink)

The author analyses the problem of the communication from the epistemological point of view, noting that the interest to the theme is obviously determined by the enormous ambiguity and by the disciplinary vagueness of the communication's notion itself. It is argued that it is the philosophical conceptualization of the communication that allows in a certain sense to «save» philosophy itself. The author notes that the philosophical studies of communication as if return the relevance to the classical philosophical problems: to the (...) (communicative) sphere, (communicative) time, (social) causality, (collective) subject and object, filling them with the meaningful characteristics and testing their concepts by the experience of the functioning of real society and communication. He concludes that the epistemological content of the concept of communication is comes together with several aspects of human cognition. The first aspect has to do with the dimensions for defining the adequacy for determination of the statement made by the Other (i.e. the other participant), given that the content of the Other's consciousness is unavailable. The second aspect is related to the principle of a double purpose of any communication: on the one hand, integration and mutual understanding and, on the other, informational description of the subject of the message. The third aspect is that communication is based on the most important epistemological distinction between knowledge and ignorance, i.e. on the predominance of any information to one participant of the communication and of its uncertainty to the other participant, and that such a situation actually conditions the formation of communication systems, as well as of a wide variety of forms of sociality. The author also addresses the problem of whether contemporary media make communication at all possible since they decrease the impact that the secrecy of the Other's consciousness has on communication by triggering a communicative act. (shrink)

Moral education through service learning at post-secondary level is an important but under-researched field. Most existing studies center on its learning outcomes like academic progress, personal development, communication, and leadership skills, with only a few evaluating the moral development of college students participating in service-learning projects. The lack of study on moral development in service learning indicates a need for clarification of the theoretical underpinnings of service learning, John Dewey's ideas on moral growth, in particular his model of moral imagination (...) and the implications thereof, for current service-learning research and practice. We argue that Dewey's work here can help strengthen .. (shrink)

What can--and what can't--philosophy do? What are its ethical risks--and its possible rewards? How does it differ from science? In Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline, Bernard Williams addresses these questions and presents a striking vision of philosophy as fundamentally different from science in its aims and methods even though there is still in philosophy "something that counts as getting it right." Written with his distinctive combination of rigor, imagination, depth, and humanism, the book amply demonstrates why Williams was one of (...) the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century. Spanning his career from his first publication to one of his last lectures, the book's previously unpublished or uncollected essays address metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, as well as the scope and limits of philosophy itself. The essays are unified by Williams's constant concern that philosophy maintain contact with the human problems that animate it in the first place. As the book's editor, A. W. Moore, writes in his introduction, the title essay is "a kind of manifesto for Williams's conception of his own life's work." It is where he most directly asks "what philosophy can and cannot contribute to the project of making sense of things"--answering that what philosophy can best help make sense of is "being human." Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline is one of three posthumous books by Williams to be published by Princeton University Press. In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument was published in the fall of 2005. The Sense of the Past: Essays in the History of Philosophy is being published shortly after the present volume. (shrink)

Women; ethics; religious aspects; ethics.