Reflection in medical education is becoming more widespread. Drawing on our Jesuit Catholic heritage, the Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine incorporates reflection in its formal curriculum and co–curricular programs. The aim of this type of reflection is to help students in their formation as they learn to step back and analyze their experiences in medical education and their impact on the student. Although reflection is incorporated through all four years of our undergraduate medical curriculum, this essay will focus (...) on three areas where bioethics faculty and medical educators have purposefully integrated reflection in the medical school, specifically within our bioethics education and professional development efforts: 1) in our three–year longitudinal clinical skills course Patient Centered Medicine (PCM), 2) in our co–curricular Bioethics and Professionalism Honors Program, and 3) in our newly created Physician’s Vocation Program (PVP). (shrink)

Animal and human studies suggest that parenting style is transmitted from one generation to the next. The hypotheses of this study were that a mother’s rearing experiences would predict her own parenting resources and current maternal mood, motivation to care for her offspring, and relationship with her parents would underlie this association. In a subsample of 201 first-time mothers participating in the longitudinal Maternal Adversity, Vulnerability and Neurodevelopment project, we assessed a mother’s own childhood maltreatment and rearing experiences using the (...) Childhood Trauma Questionnaire and the Parental Bonding Instrument. At 6 months postpartum, mothers completed questionnaires on parenting stress, symptoms of depression, maternal motivation, and current relationship with their own parents. The sample consisted of mostly high socioeconomic status mothers recruited from Montréal or Hamilton, Canada, with an age range from 18 to 43 years. More severe maltreatment and less supportive rearing by the mother’s parents predicted increased parenting stress at 6 months. These associations were mediated through distinct psychosocial pathways: maltreatment on parenting stress through symptoms of depression ; maternal rearing on parenting stress through maternal motivation and symptoms of depression ; and paternal rearing on parenting stress through current relationship with the father. Maternal rearing experiences predict a mother’s own parenting resources though distinct psychosocial pathways, including depressed mood, maternal motivation, and social support. (shrink)

Epigenetic research has brought several important technological achievements, including identifying epigenetic clocks and signatures, and developing epigenetic editing. The potential military applications of such technologies we discuss are stratifying soldiers’ health, exposure to trauma using epigenetic testing, information about biological clocks, confirming child soldiers’ minor status using epigenetic clocks, and inducing epigenetic modifications in soldiers. These uses could become a reality. This article presents a comprehensive literature review, and analysis by interdisciplinary experts of the scientific, legal, ethical, and societal issues (...) surrounding epigenetics and the military. Notwithstanding the potential benefit from these applications, our findings indicate that the current lack of scientific validation for epigenetic technologies suggests a careful scientific review and the establishment of a robust governance framework before consideration for use in the military. In this article, we highlight general concerns about the application of epigenetic technologies in the military context, especially discrimination and data privacy issues if soldiers are used as research subjects. We also highlight the potential of epigenetic clocks to support child soldiers’ rights and ethical questions about using epigenetic engineering for soldiers’ enhancement and conclude with considerations for an ethical framework for epigenetic applications in the military, defense, and security contexts. (shrink)

In this comment on Katherine Dormandy's paper «True Faith», I point out that the clash she describes between epistemic norms and faith-based norms of belief needs to be supplemented with a clear understanding of the pertinent norms of belief. I argue that conceiving of them as evaluative fails to explain the clash, and that understanding them as prescriptive is no better. I suggest an understanding of these norms along the lines of Ross’s (1930) prima facie duties, and show how (...) this picture can make sense of the clash. (shrink)

Social groups—like teams, committees, gender groups, and racial groups—play a central role in our lives and in philosophical inquiry. Here I develop and motivate a structuralist ontology of social groups centered on social structures (i.e., networks of relations that are constitutively dependent on social factors). The view delivers a picture that encompasses a diverse range of social groups, while maintaining important metaphysical and normative distinctions between groups of different kinds. It also meets the constraint that not every arbitrary collection of (...) people is a social group. In addition, the framework provides resources for developing a broader structuralist view in social ontology. (shrink)

This paper outlines Jesse Prinz’s theory that emotions represent values by registering bodily changes, discusses two objections, and concludes that Prinz’s theory stands in need of modification: while emotions do represent values, they do not do so in the first place by registering bodily changes, but by processing information about how things we care about fare in the world. The function of bodily changes is primarily to motivate and prepare us for action.

The paper deals with the position of a scholar in the society, as articulated in the philosophy of J. G. Fichte. It also offers a brief outline of the philosophies of education of the 18th and 19th centuries and their differences. It shows different interpretations of the concept of Bildung in German philosophy, which in that time became almost a “fashion”. The spirit of that time is reflected also in the idealist views of J. G. Fichte, especially those concerning education, (...) upbringing and personality development. (shrink)

Some language encourages essentialist thinking. While philosophers have largely focused on generics and essentialism, I argue that nouns as a category are poised to refer to kinds and to promote representational essentializing. Our psychological propensity to essentialize when nouns are used reveals a limitation for anti-essentialist ameliorative projects. Even ameliorated nouns can continue to underpin essentialist thinking. I conclude by arguing that representational essentialism does not doom anti-essentialist ameliorative projects. Rather it reveals that would-be ameliorators ought to attend to the (...) propensities for our representational devices to essentialize and to the complex relationship between essentialism and prejudice. (shrink)

White Ignorance and Complicit Responsibility addresses the problem of white denial. Rejecting punitive moralities that reproduce white innocence and encourage absolution, Eva Boodman makes the case for a transformative whiteness that dismantles the moral, racial, political, and affective constructs that keep racial capitalism in place.

Current knowledge of the genetic, epigenetic, behavioural and symbolic systems of inheritance requires a revision and extension of the mid-twentieth-century, gene-based, 'Modern Synthesis' version of Darwinian evolutionary theory. We present the case for this by first outlining the history that led to the neo-Darwinian view of evolution. In the second section we describe and compare different types of inheritance, and in the third discuss the implications of a broad view of heredity for various aspects of evolutionary theory. We end with (...) an examination of the philosophical and conceptual ramifications of evolutionary thinking that incorporates multiple inheritance systems. (shrink)

The article develops a theoretical framework that is capable of integrating the biological foundations of emotions with their cultural and semantic formation.

This is the second of a projected trilogy of dialogues, in which an unnamed stranger sets out to satisfy Socrates' desire for an account of sophist, statesman, and philosopher. Focus Philosohpical Library’s _Statesman _includes a faithful, clear, and consistent translation to English, with notes. It also includes an exploratory essay, glossary of crucial Greek terms, supplemental diagrams illustrating diairesis, and an appendix on the paradigm of weaving.

According to orthodoxy, there are two basic moods of supposition: indicative and subjunctive. The most popular formalizations of the corresponding norms of suppositional judgement are given by Bayesian conditionalization and Lewisian imaging, respectively. It is well known that Bayesian conditionalization can be generalized (via Jeffrey conditionalization) to provide a model for the norms of partial indicative supposition. This raises the question of whether imaging can likewise be generalized to model the norms of ‘partial subjunctive supposition’. The present article casts doubt (...) on whether the most natural generalizations of imaging are able to provide a plausible account of the norms of partial subjunctive supposition. (shrink)

Predicate nominals (e.g., “is a female”) seem to label or categorize their subjects, while their adjectival correlates (e.g., “is female”) merely attribute a property. Predicate nominals also elicit essentializing inferential judgments about inductive potential and stable explanatory membership. Data from psychology and semantics support that this distinction is robust and productive. I argue that while the difference between predicate nominals and predicate adjectives is elided by standard semantic theories, it ought not be. I then develop and defend a psychologically motivated (...) semantic account on which predicate nominals attribute kind membership and trigger a presupposition that underpins our essentialist judgments. (shrink)

Among the various human forms alluded to in the Hebrew prayer, mental retardation appears to be one of the most difficult to celebrate. It is the disability that other disabled persons do not want attributed to them. It is the disability for which prospective parents are most likely to use selective abortion (Wertz 2000). And it is the disability that prompted one of the most illustrious United States Supreme Court Justices to endorse forced sterilization, because "three generations of imbeciles are (...) enough." The mentally retarded have at times been objects of pity, compassion, or abuse by their caretakers and society at large. But they have rarely been seen as subjects, as citizens, as persons with equal entitlement to fulfillment. (shrink)

We must reconceive the ethical relationship between mothers and their newborn babies. The intertwinement of mother and baby does not disappear with birth but rather persists in the form of postpartum maternal tethering. Drawing upon three years of ethnographic fieldwork and training in the United States and China, I argue that dependencies associated with postpartum maternal tethering make it extremely difficult for postpartum mothers to act autonomously, even in the relational sense. Breaching this tether opens up new possibilities for thinking (...) about the bioethics of vulnerability, dependency, and care by denaturalizing and desanctifying the mother-baby relationship and diversifying newborn care. (shrink)

We start with an observation about implicit quantifier domain restriction: certain implicit restrictions (e.g., restricting objects by location and time) appear to be more natural and widely available than others (e.g., restricting objects by color, aesthetic, or historical properties). Our aim is to explain why this is. That is, we aim to explain why some implicit domain restriction possibilities are available by default. We argue that, regardless of their other explanatory virtues, extant pragmatic and metasemantic frameworks leave this question unanswered. (...) We then motivate a partially nativist account of domain restriction that involves a minimal view of joint planning around broad shared goals about navigating and influencing our environments augmented with cognitive heuristics that facilitate these. Finally, we sketch how the view can be extended to account for the ways non-default restriction possibilities become available when conversationalists have shared idiosyncratic goals. (shrink)

This is a critical notice of Ladyman and Ross et al's Every Thing Must Go. I argue that they mischaracterise much of so-called 'analytic metaphysics', and that they could have usefully drawn upon the resources of current metaphysics in order to articulate their own views more clearly. The piece appears in a symposium which also includes contributions by Kyle Stanford and Paul Humphreys, with responses from Ladyman and Ross.

Current knowledge of the genetic, epigenetic, behavioural and symbolic systems of inheritance requires a revision and extension of the mid-twentieth-century, gene-based, 'Modern Synthesis' version of Darwinian evolutionary theory. We present the case for this by first outlining the history that led to the neo-Darwinian view of evolution. In the second section we describe and compare different types of inheritance, and in the third discuss the implications of a broad view of heredity for various aspects of evolutionary theory. We end with (...) an examination of the philosophical and conceptual ramifications of evolutionary thinking that incorporates multiple inheritance systems. (shrink)

This paper proposes and defends the multifactorial view of stereotyping. According to this view, multiple factors determine whether or not any act of stereotyping increases the chance of an accurate judgment being made about an individual to whom the stereotype is applied. To support this conclusion, various features of acts of stereotyping that can determine the accuracy of stereotyping judgments are identified. The argument challenges two existing views that suggest that it is relatively easy for an act of stereotyping to (...) increase the chance of an accurate judgment being made. In the process, it shows why stereotyping that associates black people more strongly than white people with criminality in the United States cannot be defended, and actions to reduce the stereotyping criticized, on the basis that engaging in this form of stereotyping increases the chance of accurate judgments. As each of these important conclusions is supported by results from empirical psychology, the discussion exemplifies and vindicates the naturalistic approach to epistemology, according to which psychological findings provide an important contribution to understanding the epistemic standing of beliefs. (shrink)

A shared presumption among practice-dependent theorists is that a principle of justice is dependent on the function or aim of the practice to which it is supposed to be applied. In recent contributions to this debate, the condition of epistemic uncertainty plays a significant role for motivating and justifying a practice-dependent view. This paper analyses the role of epistemic uncertainty in justifying a practice-dependent approach. We see two kinds of epistemic uncertainty allegedly playing this justificatory role. What we call ‘normative (...) epistemic uncertainty’ emerges from dealing with the problem of value uncertainty in justifying applied principles when our higher-level principles are open-textured, that is, when their content is too vague or unclear to generate determinate prescriptions. What we call ‘descriptive epistemic uncertainty’ emerges from dealing with uncertainty about empirical facts, such as the problem of moral assurance, that is, the problem that the requirements of justice cannot go beyond arrangements that we can know with reasonable confidence that we can jointly establish and maintain. In both cases, practice-dependent theorists conclude that the condition of epistemic uncertainty justifies a practice-dependent approach, which puts certain restrictions on theorizing regulative principles and has wide-ranging practical implications for the scope of justice. Our claim in this paper is that neither kind of epistemic uncertainty justifies a practice-dependent approach. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to offer an interpretation of U. Eco’s hypperrelaity and J. P. Baudrillard’s simulacrum as related to the conceptions of mixed reality and virtua-lity continuum , which have been articulated in the laboratories of communication technology in the early 1990s. The paper tries to show the interference point of the two approaches – philosophical and technical ones, as well as the possibility and necessity of revisiting some traditional philosophical question and categories, such as humanity or (...) reality. (shrink)

Contingent valuation surveys generally elicit stated preferences by asking how much a respondent would be willing to pay for an environmental improvement. By drawing on linguistic theory, we propose that the modal phrasing of this question establishes a particular type of commitment towards a hypothetical payment, namely a subjective want or desire. Based on the idea that beyond subjective desires, considerations about what is morally adequate may guide expressed values and that elicitation of these can be linguistically facilitated, we employ (...) an experimental framework to investigate the effects of different modals ( willing, should and appropriate) in the elicitation question on stated preferences. We find that elicited amounts with appropriate are higher than those elicited with willing and should for environmental improvements more associated with use values, while differences are non-significant for environmental improvements more associated with non-use values. We discuss the implications of our findings for stated preference studies, as well as the potential broader theoretical implications that our study entails regarding linguistic representations of the moral entrenchment of environmental values. (shrink)

The paper deals with the question of religious tolerance in Europe’s past and present. Tolerance within Christianity (and within the other so called “Abrahamitic” or “Biblical” Religions) is one of the main points. However, the reader is also invited to take a brief look at Europe’s pre-christian past. To some extent, the religious situation of the Roman Empire in particular rather seems to resemble our own experiences with pluralistic societies in today’s Europe than medieval and early modern circumstances would do. (...) Even the ancient problems with “religious freedom” can be linked with modern counterparts. So this paper will avoid long retrospectives at the well known facts of Europe’s Christian past such as inquisition and European religious wars in order to deal with some more hidden perspectives of European religious his- tory, which were often obscured by the main historiographical narrative. (shrink)