Purpose – To review and discuss Luciano Floridi’s 2019 book The Logic of Information: A Theory of Philosophy as Conceptual Design, the latest instalment in his philosophy of information (PI) tetralogy, particularly with respect to its implications for library and information studies (LIS). Design/methodology/approach – Nine scholars with research interests in philosophy and LIS read and responded to the book, raising critical and heuristic questions in the spirit of scholarly dialogue. Floridi responded to these questions. Findings – Floridi’s PI, including (...) this latest publication, is of interest to LIS scholars, and much insight can be gained by exploring this connection. It seems also that LIS has the potential to contribute to PI’s further development in some respects. Research implications – Floridi’s PI work is technical philosophy for which many LIS scholars do not have the training or patience to engage with, yet doing so is rewarding. This suggests a role for translational work between philosophy and LIS. Originality/value – The book symposium format, not yet seen in LIS, provides forum for sustained, multifaceted and generative dialogue around ideas. (shrink)

I explore some of the ways that assumptions about the nature of substance shape metaphysical debates about the structure of Reality. Assumptions about the priority of substance play a role in an argument for monism, are embedded in certain pluralist metaphysical treatments of laws of nature, and are central to discussions of substantivalism and relationalism. I will then argue that we should reject such assumptions and collapse the categorical distinction between substance and property.

Causation is at once familiar and mysterious. Neither common sense nor extensive philosophical debate has led us to anything like agreement on the correct analysis of the concept of causation, or an account of the metaphysical nature of the causal relation. Causation: A User's Guide cuts a clear path through this confusing but vital landscape. L. A. Paul and Ned Hall guide the reader through the most important philosophical treatments of causation, negotiating the terrain by taking a set of examples (...) as landmarks. They clarify the central themes of the debate about causation, and cover questions about causation involving omissions or absences, preemption and other species of redundant causation, and the possibility that causation is not transitive. Along the way, Paul and Hall examine several contemporary proposals for analyzing the nature of causation and assess their merits and overall methodological cogency.The book is designed to be of value both to trained specialists and those coming to the problem of causation for the first time. It provides the reader with a broad and sophisticated view of the metaphysics of the causal relation. (shrink)

Книга предназначена для исследователей, специалистов, преподавателей, аспирантов, студентов, а также всех тех, кто интересуется вопросами философии.

Background: Clinical genomic implementation studies pose challenges for informed consent. Consent forms often include complex language and concepts, which can be a barrier to diverse enrollment, and these studies often blur traditional research-clinical boundaries. There is a move toward self-directed, web-based research enrollment, but more evidence is needed about how these enrollment approaches work in practice. In this study, we developed and evaluated a literacy-focused, web-based consent approach to support enrollment of diverse participants in an ongoing clinical genomic implementation study. (...) Methods: As part of the Cancer Health Assessments Reaching Many (CHARM) study, we developed a web-based consent approach that featured plain language, multimedia, and separate descriptions of clinical care and research activities. CHARM offered clinical exome sequencing to individuals at high risk of hereditary cancer. We interviewed CHARM participants about their reactions to the consent approach. We audio recorded, transcribed, and coded interviews using a deductively and inductively derived codebook. We reviewed coded excerpts as a team to identify overarching themes. Results: We conducted 32 interviews, including 12 (38%) in Spanish. Most (69%) enrolled without assistance from study staff, usually on a mobile phone. Those who completed enrollment in one day spent an average of 12 minutes on the consent portion. Interviewees found the information simple to read but comprehensive, were neutral to positive about the multimedia support, and identified increased access to testing in the study as the key difference from clinical care. Conclusions: This study showed that interviewees found our literacy-focused, web-based consent approach acceptable; did not distinguish the consent materials from other online study processes; and valued getting access to testing in the study. Overall, conducting empirical bioethics research in an ongoing clinical trial was useful to demonstrate the acceptability of our novel consent approach but posed practical challenges. (shrink)

Monists about material constitution typically argue that when Statue is materially constituted by Clay, Statue is just Clay. Pluralists about material constitution deny that constitution is identity: Statue is not just Clay. When Clay materially constitutes Statue, Clay is not identical to Statue. I discuss three familiar puzzles involving grounding, overdetermination and conceptual issues, and develop three new puzzles stemming from the connection between mereological composition and material constitution: a mereological puzzle, an asymmetry puzzle, and a structural puzzle.

Commentary on Montero, B. (2020) What experience doesn’t teach: Pain-amnesia and a new paradigm for memory research, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 27 (11–12).

Over the past decades, mood enhancement effects of various drugs and neuromodulation technologies have been proclaimed. If one day highly effective methods for significantly altering and elevating one’s mood are available, it is conceivable that the demand for them will be considerable. One urgent concern will then be what role physicians should play in providing such services. The concern can be extended from literature on controversial demands for aesthetic surgery. According to Margaret Little, physicians should be aware that certain aesthetic (...) enhancement requests reflect immoral social norms and ideals. By granting such requests, she argues, doctors render themselves complicit to a collective ‘evil’. In this paper, we wish to question the extent to which physicians, psychiatrists and/or neurosurgeons should play a role as ‘moral gatekeepers’ in dealing with suspect demands and norms underlying potential desires to alter one’s mood or character. We investigate and discuss the nature and limits of physician responsibilities in reference to various hypothetical and intuitively problematic mood enhancement requests. (shrink)

I defend a one category ontology: an ontology that denies that we need more than one fundamental category to support the ontological structure of the world. Categorical fundamentality is understood in terms of the metaphysically prior, as that in which everything else in the world consists. One category ontologies are deeply appealing, because their ontological simplicity gives them an unmatched elegance and spareness. I’m a fan of a one category ontology that collapses the distinction between particular and property, replacing it (...) with a single fundamental category of intrinsic characters or qualities. We may describe the qualities as qualitative charactersor as modes, perhaps on the model of Aristotelian qualitative (nonsubstantial) kinds, and I will use the term “properties” interchangeably with “qualities”. The qualities are repeatable and reasonably sparse, although, as I discuss in section 2.6, there are empirical reasons that may suggest, depending on one’s preferred fundamental physical theory, that they include irreducibly intensive qualities. There are no uninstantiated qualities. I also assume that the fundamental qualitative natures are intrinsic, although physics may ultimately suggest that some of them are extrinsic. On my view, matter, concrete objects, abstract objects, and perhaps even spacetime are constructed from mereological fusions of qualities, so the world is simply a vast mixture of qualities, including polyadic properties (i.e., relations). This means that everything there is, including concrete objects like persons or stars, is a quality, a qualitative fusion, or a portion of the extended qualitative fusion that is the worldwhole. I call my view mereological bundle theory. (shrink)

Discussion of the concept of evil in Indian philosophy.

Our best philosophical and scientific pictures of the world organize material objects into a hierarchy or levels or layers- microparticles at the bottom, molecules, cells, and persons at higher layers. Are objects at higher layers identical to the sums of objects at lower layers that constitute them? (Note that this question is different from the question of whether composition- as opposed to constitution- is identity.).

The level of medical care to patients and the success of the implementation of the national project "Health" depend on the health status and doctor's professionalism. Modern healthcare reform is being implemented by optimizing costs, merging medical organizations, closing ineffective hospitals, expanding the use of high-tech care and informatization of the doctor's activities. All this makes it necessary to assess the health of doctors. Scientists have studied the quality of life and identified the professional burnout of doctors in children's clinics (...) in different age groups. Primary care pediatricians have a higher quality of life score when compared to the standard [1]. However, all groups have a high level of professional burnout. The pre-retirement group of doctors has more unfavorable profile. They are highly professional specialists but may experience emotional discomfort because the pension system has been reformed. This situation requires the introduction of preventive work with doctors of this age as a group with great potential and capable of professional longevity. (shrink)

Counterfactual analyses of causation can provide elegant analyses of many cases of causation. However, they fail to give intuitively correct analyses of cases involving a commonplace variety of late preemptive causation. I argue that a small emendation can solve the problem.

Recent work in philosophy could benefit from paying greater attention to empirical results from cognitive science involving judgments about the nature of our ordinary experience. This paper describes the way that experimental and theoretical results about the nature of ordinary judgments could—and should—inform certain sorts of enquiries in contemporary philosophy, using metaphysics as an exemplar, and hence defines a new way for experimental philosophy and cognitive science to contribute to traditional philosophical debates.

Dandruff is a common scalp condition, which frequently causes psychological distress in those affected. Dandruff is considered to be caused by an interplay of several factors. However, the pathogenesis of dandruff remains under‐investigated, especially with respect to the contribution of the hair follicle. As the hair follicle exhibits unique immune‐modulatory properties, including the creation of an immunoinhibitory, immune‐privileged milieu, we propose a novel hypothesis taking into account the role of the hair follicle. We hypothesize that the changes and imbalance of (...) yeast and bacterial species, along with increasing proinflammatory sebum by‐products, leads to the activation of immune response and inflammation. Hair follicle keratinocytes may then detect these changes in scalp microbiota resulting in the recruitment of leukocytes to the inflammation site. These changes in the scalp skin immune‐microenvironment may impact hair follicle immune privilege status, which opens new avenues into exploring the role of the hair follicle in dandruff pathogenesis. Also see the video abstract here: https://youtu.be/mEZEznCYtNs. (shrink)

Introduction: Schools have become a primary setting for providing mental health care to youths in the U.S. School-based interventions have proliferated, but their effects on mental health and academic outcomes remain understudied. In this study we will implement and evaluate the effects of a flexible multidiagnostic treatment called Modular Approach to Therapy for Children with Anxiety, Depression, Trauma, or Conduct Problems on students' mental health and academic outcomes.Methods and Analysis: This is an assessor-blind randomized controlled effectiveness trial conducted across five (...) school districts. School clinicians are randomized to either MATCH or usual care treatment conditions. The target sample includes 168 youths referred for mental health services and presenting with elevated symptoms of anxiety, depression, trauma, and/or conduct problems. Clinicians randomly assigned to MATCH or UC treat the youths who are assigned to them through normal school referral procedures. The project will evaluate the effectiveness of MATCH compared to UC on youths' mental health and school related outcomes and assess whether changes in school outcomes are mediated by changes in youth mental health.Ethics and Dissemination: This study was approved by the Harvard University Institutional Review Board. We plan to publish the findings in peer-reviewed journals and present them at academic conferences.Clinical Trial Registration:ClinicalTrials.gov ID: NCT02877875. Registered on August 24, 2016. (shrink)

The question I want to explore is whether experience supports an antireductionist ontology of time, that is, whether we should take it to support an ontology that includes a primitive, monadic property of nowness responsible for the special feel of events in the present, and a relation of passage that events instantiate in virtue of literally passing from the future, to the present, and then into the past.

The sports world has historically rejected the practice of tanking. I argue that this attitude is unwarranted. To do so, I introduce a concept called strategic suboptimal play (SSP), which is the practice of incurring the risk of a short-term competitive disadvantage to increase the chances of gaining a longer-term competitive advantage. Tanking is just an instance of SSP employed in higher-order games, i.e. games that are at least partially played by other games, like tournaments or seasons. Since SSP is (...) integral to every sport, there are currently no easy grounds for rejecting it outright. As such, the same is true of tanking. I will explore some possible reasons why tanking is wrongly thought objectionable, as well as some objections to and implications of my argument for competitive sports more broadly. (shrink)

Critics of contemporary metaphysics argue that it attempts to do the hard work of science from the ease of the armchair. Physics, not metaphysics, tells us about the fundamental facts of the world, and empirical psychology is best placed to reveal the content of our concepts about the world. Exploring and understanding the world through metaphysical reflection is obsolete. In this paper, I will show why this critique of metaphysics fails, arguing that metaphysical methods used to make claims about the (...) world are similar to scientific methods used to make claims about the world, but that the subjects of metaphysics are not the subjects of science. Those who argue that metaphysics uses a problematic methodology to make claims about subjects better covered by natural science get the situation exactly the wrong way around: metaphysics has a distinctive subject matter, not a distinctive methodology. The questions metaphysicians address are different from those of scientists, but the methods employed to develop and select theories are similar. In the first section of the paper, I will describe the sort of subject matter that metaphysics tends to engage with. In the second section of the paper, I will show how metaphysical theories are classes of models and discuss the roles of experience, common sense and thought experiments in the construction and evaluation of such models. Finally, in the last section I will discuss the way these methodological points help us to understand the metaphysical project. Getting the right account of the metaphysical method allows us to better understand the relationship between science and metaphysics, to explain why doing metaphysics successfully involves having a range of different theories, to understand the role of thought experiments involving fictional worlds, and to situate metaphysical realism in a scientifically realist context. (shrink)

Mary Gentile’s Giving Voice to Values presents an approach to ethics training based on the idea that most people would like to provide input in times of ethical conflict using their own values. She maintains that people recognize the lapses in organizational ethical judgment and behavior, but they do not have the courage to step up and voice their values to prevent the misconduct. Gentile has developed a successful initiative and following based on encouraging students and employees to learn how (...) to engage in communication or action to express their values within an organization’s formal and informal value system. The purpose of this analysis is to examine the Giving Voice to Values approach to empowering the individual to take action to deal with lapses in organizational ethics. We examine the role of Giving Voice to Values in business ethics education, considerations for implementing GVV, and recommendations for business educators and corporate ethics officers. We conclude that while GVV is an effective tool, it is not a comprehensive or holistic approach to ethics education and organizational ethics programs. (shrink)

Издание содержит: теоретические основания субъектного подхода в психологии; основные направления психологического анализа; экспериментальные исследования психологии субъекта и др.

This book is the thirty-third volume in the "Philosophy of Russia of the first half of the 20th century" series. It traces the life and intellectual trajectories of three European thinkers with Russian roots: A. Koyré, A. Kojève, and I. Berlin. It explores their methodological strategies, explains the cultural and existential premises of their thinking styles that enabled them to succeed and gain recognition as European philosophers, traces their intellectual links with Russia, and reflects on the importance of Russian intellectual (...) culture for these thinkers and for twentieth-century European philosophy as a whole. The book is addressed to a wide range of readers interested in philosophy, social and political thought, and the intellectual history of the Russian exiles of the first half of the 20th century. (shrink)

This section will cover (a) definition of business policy: strategic decisions in the enterprise; (b) ethical behaviour above and beyond the requirements of the law: what might this involve e.g. in respect of products and markets in which the business is prepared to operate? (c) does business have a responsibility towards society? For example, should businesses decide without being legally required to do so, to undertake activities which they think are in the national interest even if this may appear to (...) conflict with strictly commercial interests? (d) if ethical/social decisions are required, who is to make them — at what levels of an enterprise — e.g. does the board make them all or are they also expected below board level? This section will also cover: (e) practical examples in the light of changing attitudes towards business and market behaviour in the 1980''s and 1990''s; (f) implications of attitudes towards corporate crime and of behaviour which may not be illegal but which may be regarded as unacceptable: this will be discussed with examples from experience in Australia and other countries. The section will first explain the meaning of the phrase business policy and will briefly outline the kinds of strategic decision which have to be made in business enterprises. It will go on to consider whether there are things a business ought or ought not to do even if they are within the law. The section will illustrate these problems with examples in the light of changing attitudes towards business policy and market behaviour in the 1980''s and 1990''s. It will take into account some recent cases of corporate crime in Australia and elsewhere and also of behaviour which while neither against the law or outside the power of the board, might be thought inappropriate. (shrink)