Mindfulness can benefit athletes’ mindset and performance. These benefits may be enhanced by sport-specific mindfulness interventions. Accordingly, our objectives were 2-fold: first, to develop a rowing-specific mindfulness intervention, and second, to investigate its effects on mindfulness, flow, reinvestment, and rowing performance. Rowers were randomly assigned to either a 6-week rowing-specific mindfulness intervention, which included generic and rowing-specific practices, or a control group. Rowers completed pre-test and post-test measures of performance, mindfulness, flow, and rowing-specific reinvestment. Lastly, rowers completed an evaluation form (...) following the intervention. The results demonstrated that the intervention group increased flow, mindfulness, and improved performance, additionally conscious motor processing decreased from pre-test to post-test. However, the intervention did not preferentially change mindfulness or reinvestment compared to control. Participants provided favorable feedback and evaluated the intervention positively. Our 6-week rowing-specific mindfulness intervention promoted flow, encouraged mindfulness, and aided performance. Thus, we provide preliminary explorative evidence that a sport-specific mindfulness intervention can benefit athletes. We recommend that future research, with large sample sizes and improved home practice, should examine mediators and moderators of the mindfulness-performance relationship. (shrink)

Efforts to address child trafficking require intensive collaboration among professionals of varied disciplines. Healthcare professionals have a major role in this multidisciplinary approach. Training is essential for all professionals, and policies and protocols may assist in fostering an effective, comprehensive response to victimization.

Biomedical research is increasingly globalized with ever more research conducted in low and middle-income countries. This trend raises a host of ethical concerns and critiques. While community engagement has been proposed as an ethically important practice for global biomedical research, there is no agreement about what these practices contribute to the ethics of research, or when they are needed.

Potential conflicts between the roles of physicians and researchers have been described at the theoretical level in the bioethics literature (Czoli, et al., 2011). Physicians and researchers are generally in mutually distinct roles, responsible for patients and participants respectively. With increasing emphasis on integration of research into clinical settings, however, the role divide is sometimes unclear. Consequently, physician–researchers must consider and negotiate salient ethical differences between clinical– and research–based obligations (Miller et al, 1998). This paper explores the subjective experiences and (...) perspectives of 30 physician–researchers working in three Canadian paediatric settings. Drawing on qualitative interviews, it identifies ethical challenges and strategies used by physician–researchers in managing dual roles. It considers whether competing obligations could have both positive and adverse consequences for both physician–researchers and patients. Finally, we discuss how empirical work, which explores the perspectives of those engaged in research and clinical practice, can lead the way to understanding and promoting best practice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Full Collection of Personal NarrativesJake Beery, Neethi Pinto, Marcia King, Laura Wachsmuth, Alisha, Katie L. Gholson, T.S. Moran, Calvin R. Gross, Joanne Alfred, Cindy Bitter, Jenna Bennett, Nadia Khan, Clarice Douille, Kristen Carey Rock, Adrienne Feller Novick, Andrea Eisenberg, Japmehr Sandhu, Katherine Bakke, Heer Hendry, Karan K. Mirpuri, and Katerina V. Liong• Being the Difference• Grieving One More Time• Echoes of Grief: Tales from an Emergency Medicine and (...) Critical Care Nurse• Searching for Peace in Death• “I’d Love to go Off the Grid and Never Come Back”• “A Mother’s Love”• Tiny Person, Big Impact• Night Shift• Cracked Armor• Who Tells the Story• Navigating Hard Situations that Medical School Cannot Prepare You For• The Wish• Break• Five More Minutes• I Saw My Reflection• The Aftermath• Where the Journey Begins• Lessons Learned in Room 208• Joint and Grief Aches• My First Loss: Carrying His Legacy• Grieving the Loss of What Medicine Was Supposed to BeCopyright © 2024 Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

In his paper in the same volume, Sider argues that, of maximalism and quantifier variance, the latter promises to let us make better sense of neo-Fregeanism. I argue that neo-Fregeans should, and seemingly do, reject quantifier variance. If they must choose between these two options, they should choose maximalism.

Psychedelics such as psilocybin reliably produce significantly altered states of consciousness with a variety of subjectively experienced effects. These include certain changes to perception, cognition, and affect,1 which we refer to here as the acute subjective effects of psychedelics. In recent years, psychedelics such as psilocybin have also shown considerable promise as therapeutic agents when combined with talk therapy, for example, in the treatment of major depression or substance use disorder.2 However, it is currently unclear whether the aforementioned acute subjective (...) effects are necessary to bring about the observed therapeutic effects of psilocybin and other psychedelics. This uncertainty has sparked a lively—though still largely hypothetical—debate on whether psychedelics without subjective effects (“nonsubjective psychedelics” or “non-hallucinogenic psychedelics”) could still have the same therapeutic impact, or whether the acute subjective effects are in fact necessary for this impact to be fully realized.3,4,5. (shrink)

Division III of Being and Time (BT) was supposed to address the question of the sense of being. Being and its sense are in question because while we do understand being, it is also strangely withheld from us. That we understand being is evidenced by the fact that we have access to what and that things are (rather than not); that being is withheld from us is evidenced by the fact that we do not seem to be able to articulate (...) what it is that we grasp in this. Being is both given to us and withheld from us. To be given yet withheld is to be question-worthy—and it is also to be the proper object of phenomenology (BT 35). Being is the phenomenon: that which shows itself (phainomenon) (BT 31) but also needs to be “let be seen” (legein) (BT 32). To make sense of being is to make sense of both how it shows itself and how it hides itself. -/- Division I explains how being shows itself by, first, explaining how we discover entities in their being and, second, explicating the structure of our openness to being (i.e., disclosedness). The next step should be to explain how being hides itself—the phenomenon that Heidegger sometimes calls “falling.” But Heidegger does not do this. He is distracted by a different (albeit related) phenomenon: inauthenticity. By pursuing authenticity and inauthenticity throughout §40 and the so-called existentialist chapters in Division II, Heidegger does give us important insight into the riskiness and fragility of our relationship to being. But he does not capture the finitude that he should be aiming at: the withholding of being. Lacking this, Heidegger does not have our finite openness to being fully in view. As a result, the structure of the temporality that he draws out accounts for our openness to being but not for the finitude of this openness. This finitude is not a mere limitation on our part—it is not just that we don’t fully “get” being. It belongs to how being works that it withholds itself from us and so makes itself question-worthy. So, if Heidegger’s goal in Division III is to show how being makes sense, then he will need to make sense of this fundamental feature of being. It is, if nothing else, the feature that sparked his investigation. But because he lost sight of the withholding of being at the end of Division I, Heidegger is not in a position to make sense of being in Division III. -/- By the time he starts working seriously with the notion of phusis in the 1930s, Heidegger has reoriented himself to the phenomenon of being’s withholding. By approaching BT from the perspective of Heidegger’s work in this period, then, we can see more clearly what BT accomplished and where it veered off course. I will do this by interpreting Heidegger’s reading (in Introduction to Metaphysics [IM]) of the opening strophes of the choral ode from Sophocles’ Antigone. On Heidegger’s ontological reading, these strophes show us the various features of being by speaking of the natural world: being is understood as the sea, the earth, and the living thing. I will argue that BT illuminates being as the living thing and being as the earth, and in this explains how being is given to us. But BT falters when it tries to reach being as the sea. The sea is an image of being’s simultaneous granting and withholding. Because Heidegger has not thought being’s withholding in Divisions I and II, he cannot go on to make sense of this withholding as simultaneous with being’s granting in Division III. In short, Heidegger should have thought being as the sea in Division III, but he cannot. (shrink)

The Armidale State Forest is a pine plantation at the edge of the Armidale city in New South Wales, Australia. In 2000 and 2007 large parts of the forest were destroyed in clear-felling operations. This sparked community outrage which led to the formation of advocacy groups who have begun to restore the forest despite its controversial position as a “conifer invader” in Eucalypt country. In this paper I focus on the way personal memories are embodied in the pine forms to (...) challenge the native/invasive divide in Australian conservation discourse. I argue that the destruction of this devalued ecology caused a traumatic rupture to the Armidale communities’ connection to a forest which preserves their pasts. To heal this environmental and psychological damage, I propose a recuperative approach termed “ecological remembrance” that strives to repair severed connections between people and place. (shrink)

State Medical Boards (SMBs) can take severe disciplinary actions (e.g., license revocation or suspension) against physicians who commit egregious wrongdoing in order to protect the public. However, there is noteworthy variability in the extent to which SMBs impose severe disciplinary action. In this manuscript, we present and synthesize a subset of 11 recommendations based on findings from our team’s larger consensus-building project that identified a list of 56 policies and legal provisions SMBs can use to better protect patients from egregious (...) wrongdoing by physicians. (shrink)

On August 29, 2006, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit held that an injured ERISA plan beneficiary need not be “made whole” by any injury-related recovery from a third party in order for her ERISA plan to assert subrogation or reimbursement rights if the plan's terms either 1) “unambiguously establish a plan priority” to any funds a beneficiary recovers from a third party, or 2) are reasonably interpreted to establish such a priority by an (...) ERISA plan fiduciary clearly authorized to do so.In 1991, appellants William and Judith Moore purchased an ERISA health insurance policy from Blue Cross Blue Shield of the National Capital Area and its wholly-owned subsidiary CapitalCare. On September 10, 1992, the Moores’ daughter Alistaire, a plan beneficiary, was seriously injured in an automobile accident. (shrink)

The 2015 judgment of the Namibia Supreme Court in Government of the Republic of Namibia v LM and Others set an important precedent on informed consent in a case involving the coercive sterilisation of HIV-positive women. This article analyses the reasoning and factual narratives of the judgment by applying Neil Manson and Onora O’Neill’s approach to informed consent as a communicative process. This is done in an effort to understand the practical import of the judgment in the particular context of (...) resource constrained public healthcare facilities through which many women in southern Africa access reproductive healthcare. While the judgment affirms certain established tenets in informed consent to surgical procedures, aspects of the reasoning in context demand more particularised applications of what it means for a patient to have capacity and to be informed, and to appropriately accommodate the disruptive role of power dynamics in the communicative process. (shrink)

1Department of Moral Philosophy, University of St Andrews, Fife KY16 9AL, Scotland, UKTolstoy on Aesthetics: What is Art? H.O. Mounce Aldershot, UK Ashgate 2001 v + 115 Hardback£35.00, $59.95.

Over the past four decades, the paradox of fiction has sparked considerable debate among philosophers. Unfortunately, the most promising solution to this puzzle, thought theory, currently earns its plausibility by way of intuition rather than evidence. I aim to address this by updating thought theory in light of recent empirical findings on affect. I will draw upon a wide range of scientific research—on the cognitive mechanisms driving emotion, the role of affect in counterfactual mind wandering and prospection, and the evolutionary (...) function of affect—to substantiate the claim that fictions can give rise to both real and rational emotional states. (shrink)

The Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, first leaked to the public on 2 May 2022 and officially released on 24 June 2022, overturned Roe v. Wade and thereby determined that abortion is no longer a federally protected right under the Constitution. Instead, the decision gives individual states the right to regulate abortion. Since the Dobbs decision first leaked, our institution has received numerous requests for permanent contraception from individuals stating that their motivation to pursue permanent contraception (...) was influenced by the Dobbs decision and concerns about their reproductive autonomy. Discussions with patients seeking permanent contraception since the Supreme Court’s leaked decision have led us to ask ourselves, is legislative anxiety an indication for surgery? This article presents a case series consisting of a convenience sample of 17 young, nulliparous individuals who sought out permanent contraception in the six months following the leak of the Dobbs decision. Healthcare professionals often feel discomfort in offering permanent contraception to young and nulliparous individuals. Accordingly, we discuss pertinent legal issues, review relevant ethical considerations, and offer a framework for these discussions intended to empower the consulting healthcare professional to center the bodily autonomy of every patient regardless of age, parity, or indication for permanent contraception. (shrink)

Overall, the deregulation of genetically engineered (GE) crops for commercial cultivation in North America has been a success story. In several cases, however, GE crops have sparked concerns and disagreements among the stakeholders and there are incidences of court lawsuits, including a recent one on glyphosate resistant (GR) alfalfa (Medicago sativa, L.). While GE crops can provide operational benefits to farmers, challenges are looming from commercialization of perennial GE crops. The unique ecology and biology of these crops and GE alfalfa (...) in particular can facilitate adventitious presence (AP) of GE traits and it makes more visible that economic risks for conventional growers and food/feed producers have not been adequately addressed by the GE regulatory system in the United States (US). Asynchronous market approvals and the existence of a number of GE sensitive export markets create uncertainties among the exporters. Policy development in these fields may be helpful for ensuring a broader acceptance and market success of GE agriculture in general. The analysis is focusing on the US, although many diagnosed problems are also relevant to other jurisdictions—in particular if no co-existence policy is in place. (shrink)

It has been 40 years since the seminal papers on pharmacy's status as a profession sparked debate about the pharmacist's role in health care, yet the questions they raised are just as poignant today as they were then. Questions about whether pharmacists are the experts when it comes to drug therapy information can be answered practically by assessing the perception of pharmacists' obligations to patients as being dependent on or independent of physicians' responsibilities. Both options have important implications for pharmacy's (...) status as a profession, the value that pharmacists can add to health care, and a pharmacist's right to deny a patient emergency contraception. (shrink)

Nowadays, there has been an increase in security concerns regarding fingerprint biometrics. This problem arises due to technological advancements in bypassing and hacking methodologies. This has sparked the need for a more secure platform for identification. In this paper, we have used a deep Convolutional Neural Network as a pre-verification filter to filter out bad or malicious fingerprints. As deep learning allows the system to be more accurate at detecting and reducing false identification by training itself again and again with (...) test samples, the proposed method improves the security and accuracy by multiple folds. The implementation of a novel secure fingerprint verification platform that takes the optical image of a fingerprint as input is explained in this paper. The given input is pre-verified using Google’s pre-trained inception model for deep learning applications, and then passed through a minutia-based algorithm for user authentication. Then, the results are compared with existing models. (shrink)

In his new book, Knowledge: The Philosophical Quest in History, Steve Fuller returns to core themes of his program of social epistemology that he first outlined in his 1988 book, Social Epistemology. He develops a new, unorthodox theology and philosophy building upon his testimony in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District in defense of intelligent design, leading to a call for maximal human experimentation. Beginning from the theological premise rooted in the Abrahamic religious tradition that we are created in the (...) image of God, Fuller argues that the spark of the divine within us distinguishes us from animals. I argue that Fuller’s recent work takes us away from key insights of his original work. In contrast, I advocate for a program of social epistemology rooted in evolutionary science rather than intelligent design, emphasize a precautionary and ecological approach rather than a proactionary approach that favors risky human experimentation, and attend to our material and sociological embeddedness rather than a transhumanist repudiation of the body. (shrink)

Traditionally, there have been few legal actions brought against psychotherapists that allege negligent psychotherapy and negligent treatment of psychiatric disorders. However, in the case of Osheroff v. Chestnut Lodge, a patient-physician (Dr. OsheroE) sued Chestnut Lodge, a private psychiatric facility, for negligence based on the staff's decision to apply a psychodynamic model of treatment (through psychotherapy) and not a biological model. The case sparked a heated debate between adherents of the psychodynamic model and those of the biological model. This article (...) explores the implications of the Osheroff litigation for mental health professionals. It is proposed that an interactive informed consent process be used to protect psychotherapists against Osheroff-type litigation. (shrink)

Art v. aestheticism : the case of Walter Pater -- The importance of T.E. Hulme -- A craving for reality : T.S. Eliot today -- Wallace Stevens : metaphysical claims adjuster -- The permanent Auden -- The first half of Muriel Spark -- The qualities of Robert Musil -- James Fitzjames Stephen v. John Stuart Mill -- The legacy of Friedrich Nietzsche -- The world according to Satre -- The perversions of Michel Foucault -- The anguishes of E.M. Cioran -- (...) The trivialization of outrage -- "The two cultures" today -- Frances Fukuyama and the end of hisory -- Josef Pieper : leisure and its discontents. (shrink)

In recent years, interest in the scientific basis of religious experience has resurged. In particular, research and publications by V. S. Ramachandran and by Eugene d’Aquili and Andrew Newberg have sparked considerable curiosity and debate over the reality and basis of religious experience. This article puts such research into a broader context and examines the extent to which scientific research supports or undermines particular religious and theological claims. I argue that such experiments show that religious experience has some biological basis (...) and is not simply a product of cultural suggestion. At the same time, such experiences are not completely self–interpreting, so that cultural context, including theological claims, are needed to make sense of such experiences. By itself, scientific research does not prove or disprove the reality of religious experiences generally, but it does shape how we think of the possibilities and interpretations of such experiences. (shrink)

Critics of commodification often claim that the buying and selling of some good communicates disrespect or some other inappropriate attitude. Such semiotic critiques have been leveled against markets in sex, pornography, kidneys, surrogacy, blood, and many other things. Brennan and Jaworski (2015a) have recently argued that all such objections fail. They claim that the meaning of a market transaction is a highly contingent, socially constructed fact. If allowing a market for one of these goods can improve the supply, access or (...) quality of the good, then instead of banning the market on semiotic grounds, they urge that we should revise our semiotics. In this reply, I isolate a part of the meaning of a market transaction that is not socially constructed: our market exchanges always express preferences. I then show how cogent semiotic critiques of some markets can be constructed on the basis of this fact. (shrink)

Feminist analyses of gender concepts must avoid the inclusion problem, the fault of marginalizing or excluding some prima facie women. Sally Haslanger’s ‘ameliorative’ analysis of gender concepts seeks to do so by defining woman by reference to subordination. I argue that Haslanger’s analysis problematically marginalizes trans women, thereby failing to avoid the inclusion problem. I propose an improved ameliorative analysis that ensures the inclusion of trans women. This analysis yields ‘twin’ target concepts of woman, one concerning gender as class and (...) the other concerning gender as identity, both of which I hold to be equally necessary for feminist aims. (shrink)

Many take the claim that you cannot ‘get’ an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ to imply that non- moral beliefs are by themselves incapable of justifying moral beliefs. I argue that this is a mistake and that the position that moral beliefs are justified exclusively by non-moral beliefs—a view that I call moral inferentialism—presents an attractive non-sceptical moral epistemology.

Ethical beliefs are not justified by familiar methods. We do not directly sense ethical properties, at least not in the straightforward way we sense colors or shapes. Nor is it plausible to think – despite a tradition claiming otherwise – that there are self-evident ethical truths that we can know in the way we know conceptual or mathematical truths. Yet, if we are justified in believing anything, we are justified in believing various ethical propositions e.g., that slavery is wrong. If (...) ethical beliefs are not justified in these familiar ways, how are they justified? -/- In her widely read, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” and in her short complimentary paper, “On Brute Facts,” G.E.M. Anscombe answers this question with a compelling and unorthodox account of justification in ethics. Because of her polemical tone and because “Modern Moral Philosophy” does so much else besides, this contribution is easy to overlook. But her account is worth taking seriously, since (a) it is an underappreciated yet plausible account that sidesteps traditional controversies, (b) it offers rich conceptual tools for interpreting and critiquing ethical theories, (c) it suggests an appealing account of the place of ethical theory in ethical knowledge and, (d) it provides useful guidance for doing applied ethics. (shrink)

Toward the end of the twentieth century, Highland Maya intellectuals and activists in Guatemala began to argue for the recognition of indigenous customary law, rooted in traditional Maya moral and ritual discourse. Such law is often in tension with the Western notion of rights that undergirds national and international treatises regarding indigenous peoples. This essay identifies three distinct but mutually engaged pairs of moral concepts—hot/cold, left/right, and favorable/not favorable—articulated through K'iche' Maya quotidian and ceremonial practices and speech. It also identifies (...) the extent to which they do not necessarily align with Western notions of good and bad. These three pairs of moral terms, specifically as conserved through the high-register of Maya discourse used by traditional ceremonial specialists, illustrate a normative means by which Highland Maya discern understandings of justice, and ground their advocacy for restorative justice. (shrink)

You can trust your friends. You should trust your friends. Not all of your friends all of the time: you can reasonably trust different friends to different degrees, and in different domains. Still, we often trust our friends, and it is often reasonable to do so. Why is this? In this paper I explore how and whether friendship gives us reasons to trust our friends, reasons which may outstrip or conflict with our epistemic reasons. In the final section, I will (...) sketch some related questions concerning trust based on the trustee’s race, gender, or other social identity. (shrink)

“Death” sits at the center of this issue of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy. Each article, in its own fashion, touches on the problems of thinking about the nature of death in the light of contemporary scientific and medical advances. Three articles explicitly center on the ongoing debate over the Uniform Determination of Death Act, and three center on thematic issues surrounding death. Despite the topic, the discussion is lively and thoughtful. After introducing each article and sketching their contours, (...) I offer some closing remarks on a central issue dredged up by these articles: the role of evaluative commitments and other interests in selecting criteria for the determination of death. These articles raise interesting questions about the relationship between the nature of “death” and ethical, epistemic, social-political, and economic values. This further opens up interesting lines of inquiry into medical epistemology. Finally, they broach deep questions about the nature of “function” and the relationship between organic and artificially sustained function. (shrink)

We articulate a view of natural kinds as complex universals. We do not attempt to argue for the existence of universals. Instead, we argue that, given the existence of universals, and of natural kinds, the latter can be understood in terms of the former, and that this provides a rich, flexible framework within which to discuss issues of indeterminacy, essentialism, induction, and reduction. Along the way, we develop a 'problem of the many' for universals.

Voprosy filosofii is publishing V. I. Danilov-Danil'ian's article "Is the ‘Coevolution of Nature and Society’ Possible?" in which he discusses at the same time the problems of sustainable development. It is a well-written, sharp polemic directed against my use of the concept "coevolution of nature and society." The article is reads easily and contains many interesting ideas. I believe it will spark the reader's interest, especially as it contains a number of debatable assertions, and may be regarded as the opening (...) of a debate on the problem of the coevolution of nature and society. A number of my works on this issue have been published and the fullest exposition of my position is contained in the monograph Sovremmenyi ratsionalizm, published in 1995. (shrink)

This is the first book to consider the increasing importance of Jean-Luc Nancy's work, which has influenced key thinkers such as Jacques Derrida. All his major works have been translated into English, yet until now little has been made available on his place in contemporary philosophy. By showing how he situates his work in a contemporary context - the collapse of communism, the Gulf War, and the former Yugoslavia - this outstanding collection reveals how Nancy's engagement with Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, (...) Heidegger and Derrida makes him one of the key contemporary continental philosophers. Providing new perspectives on the issues of sense, art and community, these essays make it impossible to approach philosophy without reference to the work Jean-Luc Nancy. (shrink)

When used clinically, psychedelics may appear unusual or even unique when compared to more familiar or long-standing medical interventions, prompting some to suggest that the ethical issues raised may likewise be exceptional. If that is correct, then perhaps psychedelics should be treated differently from other medical substances: for example, by being subjected to different ethical or evidentiary standards. Alternatively, it may be that psychedelics have more in common with various existing medical interventions than first meets the eye. We argue in (...) favor of the latter position, drawing on parallels from earlier debates around genetic exceptionalism in bioethics. We suggest there are risks to adopting a stance of “psychedelic ethical exceptionalism,” and propose that consistent ethical rules and evidentiary standards should be applied across all relevant areas of clinical medicine. Importantly, this does not preclude the possibility that changes to existing standards should be made; but if so, this should not be justified by appealing to the alleged uniqueness of psychedelics. (shrink)