Background Supporting physicians in Intensive Care Units s as they face dying patients at unprecedented levels due to the COVID-19 pandemic is critical. Amidst a dearth of such data and guided by evidence that nurses in ICUs experience personal, professional and existential issues in similar conditions, a systematic scoping review is proposed to evaluate prevailing accounts of physicians facing dying patients in ICUs through the lens of Personhood. Such data would enhance understanding and guide the provision of better support for (...) ICU physicians. Methods An SSR adopts the Systematic Evidenced Based Approach to map prevailing accounts of caring for dying patients in ICUs. To enhance the transparency and reproducibility of this process, concurrent and independent use of tabulated summaries, thematic analysis and directed content analysis is adopted. Results Eight thousand three hundred fifty-eight abstracts were reviewed from four databases, 474 full-text articles were evaluated, 58 articles were included, and the Split Approach revealed six categories/themes centered around the Innate, Individual, Relational and Societal Rings of Personhood, conflicts in providing end of life care and coping mechanisms employed. Conclusion This SSR suggests that caring for dying patients in ICU impacts how physicians view their personhood. To resolve conflicts within individual concepts of personhood, physicians use prioritization, reframing and rely on accessible, personalized support from colleagues to steer coping strategies. An adapted form of the Ring Theory of Personhood is proposed to direct timely personalized, appropriate and holistic support. (shrink)

Sungho Choi has criticised Michael Strevens's counterexample to DavidLewis's final theory of "token" causation, causation as "influence." Iargue that, even if Choi's points are correct, Strevens's counterexampleremains useful in revealing a shortcoming of Lewis's theory. Thisshortcoming is that Lewis's theory does not properly account for*degrees* of causation. That is, even if Choi's points are correct,Lewis's theory does not capture an intuition we have about the*comparative* causal statuses of those events involved in Strevens'scounterexample (we might, for example, intuit that Sylvie's ball-firingis (...) *as much*/*more*/*less* a cause of the jar's shattering as/than isBruno's ball-firing). (shrink)

Does the relation of (actual) causation admit of degrees? Is it sensible to say, for example, that ‘as compared to his consuming the light beer, Clement’s consuming the moonshine was more a cause of his becoming drunk’? Suppose the answer is ‘yes’. Suppose also that country A unjustifiably ignites a lethal war with country B, and you intuit that, while most combatants of A are liable to lethal counterattack, most non-combatants of A aren’t similarly liable. Then, you might support your (...) intuition by reasoning as follows. ‘Perhaps most non-combatants of A causally contribute to A’s unjust, lethal war effort. However, unlike most combatants of A, their causal contributions are not of such a degree that makes them liable to lethal counterattack’. Such reasoning is rejected by Carolina Sartorio. This is due to the recent revealing of a certain puzzle, one which suggests to Sartorio that causation doesn’t come in degrees. Now, one motivation for Sartorio’s reaction to the aforementioned puzzle is her thought that we can, for the most part, ‘explain away’ the ‘illusion’ that causation comes in degrees. I’ll argue that Sartorio insufficiently supports her foregoing thought. Using Sartorio’s resources, we cannot (largely) ‘explain away’ the widespread appearance that causation comes in degrees. (shrink)

There is increasing interest in clarifying how different face emotion expressions are perceived by people from different cultures, of different ages and sex. However, scant availability of well-controlled emotional face stimuli from non-Western populations limit the evaluation of cultural differences in face emotion perception and how this might be modulated by age and sex differences. We present a database of East Asian face expression stimuli, enacted by young and older, male and female, Taiwanese using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS). (...) Combined with a prior database, this present database consists of 90 identities with happy, sad, angry, fearful, disgusted, surprised and neutral expressions amounting to 628 photographs. 20 young and 24 older East Asian raters scored the photographs for intensities of multiple-dimensions of emotions and induced affect. Multivariate analyses characterized the dimensionality of perceived emotions and quantified effects of age and sex. We also applied commercial software to extract computer-based metrics of emotions in photographs. Taiwanese raters perceived happy faces as one category, sad, angry, and disgusted expressions as one category, and fearful and surprised expressions as one category. Younger females were more sensitive to face emotions than younger males. Whereas older males showed reduced face emotion sensitivity, older female sensitivity was similar or accentuated relative to young females. Commercial software dissociated six emotions according to the FACS demonstrating that defining visual features were present. Our findings show that East Asians perceive a different dimensionality of emotions than Western-based definitions in face recognition software, regardless of age and sex. Critically, stimuli with detailed cultural norms are indispensable in interpreting neural and behavioral responses involving human facial expression processing. To this end, we add to the tools, which are available upon request, for conducting such research. (shrink)

When reason leads to doubt -- The bridge of reason -- The foundation theory -- Testing ground -- Eternal power -- Purely actual -- Foundation of mind -- Foundation of matter -- Foundation of morals -- Foundation of reason -- Perfect foundation -- Challenging the bridge -- Removing barriers -- On the other side of the bridge.

1 The Roots of the Laws Perhaps the most ready assumption of any reader of the Laws-it only because of its title-is that its primary purpose is to provide a ...

There is a thinking animal in your chair and you are the only thinking thing in your chair; therefore, you are an animal. So goes the main argument for animalism, the Thinking Animal Argument. But notice that there are many other things that might do our thinking: heads, brains, upper halves, left-hand complements, right-hand complements, and any other object that has our brain as a part. The abundance of candidates for the things that do our thinking is known as the (...) Thinking Parts Problem. Animalists who endorse the Thinking Animal Argument must solve this problem by giving reasons for privileging the animal over its rivals. In order to meet this challenge, some animalists have argued that the best solution is a biological minimalist one. In what follows, I argue that every extant biological minimalist solution to the Thinking Parts Problem fails. (shrink)

Decision Making Competence (DMC) reflects individual differences in rational responding across several classic behavioral decision-making tasks. Although it has been associated with real-world risk behavior, less is known about the degree to which DMC contributes to specific components of risk attitudes. Utilizing a psychological risk-return framework, we examined the associations between risk attitudes and DMC. Italian community residents (n = 804) completed an online DMC measure, using a subset of the original Adult-DMC battery (A-DMC; Bruine de Bruin, Parker, & Fischhoff, (...) 2007). Participants also completed a self-reported risk attitude measure for three components of risk attitudes (risk-taking, risk perceptions, and expected benefits) across six risk domains. Overall, greater performance on the DMC component scales were inversely, albeit modestly, associated with risk-taking tendencies. Structural equation modeling results revealed that DMC was associated with lower perceived expected benefits for all domains. In contrast, its association with perceived risks was more domain-specific. These analyses also revealed stronger indirect effects for the DMC  expected benefits  risk-taking than the DMC  perceived risk  risk-taking path, especially for risk behaviors that may be considered more antisocial in nature. These results suggest that DMC performance differentially impacts specific components of risk attitudes, and may be more strongly related to the evaluation of expected value of the given behavior. (shrink)

Within the context of the so-called psychedelic renaissance, ketamine (C13H16CINO) has been increasingly used for therapeutic purposes. While ketamine clearly has healing powers, what interests me here is less ketamine for healing than what I will call the possibility of knowledge by ketamine. Drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari's arguments for the centrality of metal and metallurgy as a perspective on matter, I speculate that knowledge by ketamine is not identical with, yet verges on, a kind of becoming-metal of consciousness, and (...) an intuition of what Deleuze and Guattari call a ‘nonorganic life’ proper to matter. Ketamine trips provide vantage, and in some sense experience of that metallic dimension Deleuze and Guattari claim is inherent in all matter, a fluidity and transformability which for them is the basis of a hydraulic as opposed to solid model of matter, and clue to a vitality that supersedes the distinction of life and death. Intuition of the fundamentally hydraulic or metallic nature of matter is essential to what Deleuze and Guattari call a nomadic or ‘minor’ science, one that, because it centres continuous variation rather than discrete form, is capable of challenging the conservative tendencies of ‘major’ or State science. Without making claims for ketamine as in any sense sufficient for a becoming-metal of consciousness, ketamine may be constructively conjugated with other knowledges – knowledge by meditation, by dance, by music, or by martial arts, to name only a few. Such minor sciences of transformation and transmutation remain capable of a negative or corrosive relation to the State, despite the ever-present reality of recapture. (shrink)

Offers an interpretation of neoliberal ideology as a political theology of chance that both justifies and dissembles risk-laden market processes as obscure divination tools used both to determine fate and fortune and yet to deny that such determination is taking place by any accountable authority.

In this paper I challenge the commonly held view that Plato acknowledges and accepts the possibility of akrasia in the Laws. I offer a new interpretation of the image of the divine puppet in Book 1 - the passage often read as an account of akratic action -- and I show that it is not intended as an illustration of akrasia at all. Rather, it provides the moral psychological background for the text by illustrating a broader notion of self-rule as (...) a virtuous condition of the soul (and lack of self-rule as a vicious condition). I examine key discussions in the Laws in order to show how Plato makes use of this broader notion of self-rule throughout the dialogue, and I argue that nothing Plato says in the Laws commits him to the possibility of akrasia. One significant consequence of my interpretation of the puppet passage is that it avoids the need to posit developmentalism in Plato's late views about the embodied human soul, as some recent commentators have done: the moral psychology of the Laws, on my reading, is not incompatible with the Republic's tripartite theory of the soul. (shrink)

Nathan Widder’s Political Theory After Deleuze presents Deleuze’s political work in the context both of Deleuze’s ontology and a broader “ontological turn” in political theory. Contrasting Deleuze with both the “politics of lack” espoused by post-Hegelian and post-psychoanalytical theory, as well as with the “politics of abundance” proffered by pluralists such as William B. Connolly, Widder provides a subtle articulation of the contours and ultimate stakes of Deleuzian micropolitics. The book provides a powerful introduction both to Deleuze’s broader systematic work (...) and to the specifically political dimensions of that perspective. (shrink)

Western Kenya has been a labour-exporting region for over a century, with many households straddling both rural and urban contexts. While the spatial separation of migrants from their rural places of origin represented the first tangible metabolic rift within Kenyan agricultural production systems, that rift is being reshaped as rural families engage in new forms of interconnection with migrant members (“multilocationality”). These changes appear to be driven by the ongoing crisis of agrarian livelihoods and are supported by the advent of (...) cellphone communication and mobile money transfer technologies. Interviews and ethnographic data collected in a western Kenyan community and amongst its out-migrants reveal the role of cellphones in mediating social, financial, and knowledge flows within multilocational households. The increased ease of communicating and sending money is associated with less frequent physical movements between rural and urban settings, with commensurate disruptions in the acquisition and development of agro-ecological knowledge, and a shifting burden of agricultural labour. Gender relations are also put under further stress: migrant men remain (or believe they have remained) involved in rural affairs but appear to be using cellphone technologies to reinvent their household roles, replacing previously social or labour contributions with financial ones and by asserting claims over the on-farm decision-making of rural households previously considered female-headed. (shrink)

This volume takes a multi-disciplinary approach to continental philosophy of religion, engaging with philosophy, theology, religious studies, anthropology, cultural studies, and new religious movements, to explore patterns of mind and mortality, existence and ecstasy, creativity and expression, political possibility and religious matrix.

BackgroundThe process of peer-review in academia has attracted criticism surrounding issues of bias, fairness, and professionalism; however, frequency of occurrence of such comments is unknown.MethodsWe evaluated 1491 sets of reviewer comments from the fields of “Ecology and Evolution” and “Behavioural Medicine,” of which 920 were retrieved from the online review repository Publons and 571 were obtained from six early career investigators. Comment sets were coded for the occurrence of “unprofessional comments” and “incomplete, inaccurate or unsubstantiated critiques” using an a-prior rubric (...) based on our published research. Results are presented as absolute numbers and percentages.ResultsOverall, 12% of comment sets included at least one unprofessional comment towards the author or their work, and 41% contained incomplete, inaccurate of unsubstantiated critiques.ConclusionsThe large number of unprofessional comments, and IIUCs observed could heighten psychological distress among investigators, particularly those at an early stage in their career. We suggest that development and adherence to a universally agreed upon reviewer code of conduct is necessary to improve the quality and professional experience of peer review. (shrink)

Nurture your well-being with the eye-opening beliefs of Indian Spirituality.

The purpose of this article is to outline the viability of a student-directed assignment within collegiate-level STS curricula for the improvement of the utilization of scientific knowledge and technology in society. The assignment, christened the Do Something! assignment, is a novel teaching tool that utilizes students’ individual interests to encourage in-depth learning across disciplines and capitalizes on their personal skills and talents to solve real-world problems. The Do Something! assignment has been utilized in two STS courses at The Pennsylvania State (...) University (STS 100: The Ascent of Humanity and STS 200: Critical Issues in STS). The structure of this assignment allowed students to make small but concrete contributions toward a sustainable future by applying STS principles. Outcomes indicated that (a) students had an overwhelming positive attitude toward the assignment; (b) students developed an in-depth understanding of STS issues outside of their individual fields of study; (c) students perceived a high level of attainment, which resulted in personal fulfillment; and (d) this positive perception encouraged students to attempt similar socially beneficial actions outside of the classroom. (shrink)

This article draws out a potential encounter between Hegel and film studies. Following a line of thought instantiated by Theodor Adorno, it constructs a method of reading Hegel through cinematic formal analysis. In particular, the article argues that the speculative proposition should be thought through the structure of the dissolve. The speculative proposition is a sentence whose subject and predicate rest in uneasy relation to one another, and which is not a proposition of simple identity. Making use of a famous (...) example from The Phenomenology of Spirit, the article elaborates the confused position of the speculative proposition and demonstrates the necessity of explanatory tools that approach the matter obliquely. In the process of making this argument, other attempts to put dialectics and montage together (notably, Eisenstein’s) are situated in relation to the instructional potential of the dissolve. Close reading of a particular dissolve taken from Moby Dick (John Huston, 1956) demonstrates the isomorphism between the mechanism of Hegelian dialectic and this particular unit of film form. The article concludes by returning to a particular speculative proposition in light of the insights gleaned from formal analysis. (shrink)

A whirl surrounds Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed 1.2. He seems to argue, there, that good and evil are merely concerns of the imagination. In the prophetology, Guide 2.32–48, Maimonides never refers to practical intellect or prudence. Recent interpreters have inferred that the imagination takes the place of practical intellect in Maimonides’ practical teaching. This paper seeks to show that, in keeping with earlier works such as Eight Chapters, Maimonides continues to rely on practical intellect throughout the Guide as an (...) integral part of his teaching on true prophecy and the best regime ruled by divine law. (shrink)

Most recent interpreters of Maimonides argue that his ethical views develop from support of the mean in Eight Chapters to support of asceticism in "Laws Concerning Character Traits" and the Guide. This article challenges that interpretation: first, through a reconsideration of Aristotle's views on the mean and the relation of the ethically virtuous life to the contemplative life, and, second, through a reconsideration of Maimonides' texts. One riddle recommends we not jump to conclusions about Maimonides' views: In Eight Chapters he (...) appears to advocate the mean, on the basis of Aristotelian sources. In the Guide he ascribes his most ascetic recommendations to Aristotle. (shrink)

Maimonides's Guide of the Perplexed (pub. 1204 CE) is among the most important and elusive works in the history of Judaism. Among the greatest difficulties has been determining what genre of writing it belongs to. Leo Strauss challenged the contemporary consensus that it is a work of "Jewish philosophy." Rather, the Guide Is first and foremost a defense of the Law, or what his predecessor, whom he praised highly, Alfarabi identified as the art of kalam or dialectical theology. However, It (...) is an unusual sort of kalam, which Strauss dubbed "intelligent kalam." Since Shlomo Pines's 1979 article on the limits of knowledge in Maimonides (as well as Alfarabi and Ibn Bajja), much of Maimonides scholarship has centered on these limits. In his book on the Guide published in 2013, Josef Stern identified two extremes on the limits of knowledge, the dogmatic and the skeptical. He expanded on Pines's skeptical reading. We provide a middle ground between these two extremes. We argue that the limits are intentionally vague, making possible thereby not only a defense of the Law but also a defense of philosophy. The second part concerns the three great themes of the Guide: creation, prophecy, and providence. Maimonides's preferred position on prophecy is that God can will to prevent it. It is unlikely to be coincidental that obstacles, impediments, prevention are also crucial in his accounts of creation and providence. We show that obstacles or privation are a key to these themes and the Guide as a whole"-- Provided by publisher. (shrink)

In the vicinity of the work we were suddenly somewhere else than we usually tend to be.In “the age of commemoration” (Stone 2010), it is ironic that we have developed such an affective immunity to the commemorative artifacts that fill our cities. In downtown Washington, Boston, or Philadelphia, many pedestrians stroll past a dozen or more memorials in a single afternoon, usually failing to pay much attention to the specific historical calling they make. Outside the ritualistic and consumptive settings where (...) tourists encounter a city’s most popular monuments, many artifacts of public memory simply blend into the mundane architectural atmosphere that surrounds them. As John Berger has pointed out, works of art—and .. (shrink)

Many philosophers who do not analyze laws of nature as the axioms and theorems of the best deductive systems nevertheless believe that membership in those systems is evidence for being a law. This raises the question, “If the best systems analysis fails, what explains the fact that being a member of the best systems is evidence for being a law?” In this essay I answer this question on behalf of Leibniz. I argue that although Leibniz’s philosophy of laws is inconsistent (...) with the best systems analysis, his philosophy of nature’s perfection enables him to explain why membership in the best systems is evidence for being a law of nature. (shrink)