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.

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.

As you face a life-defining change, you might ask yourself: Who will I become? This can be understood as a question about the nature and character of your future life, asked from your first person, or subjective, perspective. The nature and character of your conscious, first person, lived experience is a defining constituent of what it is like to be you. Framed this way, knowing the nature of your future lived experience is a way of knowing your future self. In (...) this paper, I explore this way of understanding one’s self and its implications for understanding life-defining changes in high-stakes contexts. My exploration of this way of understanding one’s self highlights the role of experience in grasping perceptual truths, and the importance of imagination, empathy, and testimony in self-understanding and prediction. (shrink)

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)

Discussion of the concept of evil in Indian philosophy.

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).

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.).

Prior studies have reported that women outperform men in nonverbal communication, including the recognition of emotions through static facial expressions. In this experimental study, we investigated sex differences in the estimation of states of happiness, anger, fear, and disgust through static photographs using a two-culture approach. This study was conducted among the Tuvans and Mongolian people from Southern Siberia. The respondents were presented with a set of photographs of men and women of European and Tuvan origin and were asked to (...) interpret each of them. They were asked: “What does the person in the photo feel?” We found that the Tuvans easily identified happiness and anger; however, the level of accuracy of fear and disgust recognition was low. No sex differences in the recognition of happiness, disgust, and fear were observed. However, anger recognition was significantly moderated by the perceiver’s sex and the origin of the model. Compared to Tuvan men, Tuvan women were significantly less accurate in identifying anger in male Tuvans. Furthermore, the age effect was found in recognition of fear: older Tuvans were more accurate while recognizing the fearful faces of Tuvan, but not the European models. (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.

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)

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.

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)

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)

The debate over the temporal arrow is a debate over what fundamental ontology is needed for the temporal asymmetry of the universe, which determines the fact that time seems to be oriented or directed from earlier to later. This temporal asymmetry underlies (or, as some might argue, is the same as) the asymmetrical fact that the past is fixed while the future is open, as well as the global asymmetries of counterfactual, causal and agential direction. I explore the metaphysics of (...) the temporal direction within the context of empirical work in psychology and cognitive science. I argue that, in our debate over the metaphysics of the temporal arrow, we need to explore some of the deep connections between our cognitive response to the world and our metaphysical theory of the temporal direction. (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 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)

ObjectivesMany older adults with visual impairment also have significant hearing loss. The aim was to investigate the effectiveness of a newly developed Dual Sensory Loss protocol on communication and wellbeing of older persons with DSL and their communication partners in the Netherlands and Belgium.MethodsParticipants and their communication partners were randomized in the “DSL-protocol” intervention group or a waiting-list control group. The intervention took 3 to 5 weeks. Occupational therapists focused on optimal use of hearing aids, home-environment modifications and effective communication (...) strategies. The primary outcome was the Communication Strategies domain of the Communication Profile for the Hearing Impaired. Secondary outcomes measured in participants were the Low Vision Quality Of Life Adjustment subscale, the Center for Epidemiological Studies - Depression Scale, De Jong Gierveld Loneliness Scale and the Fatigue Assessment Scale. The Hearing Handicap and Disability Inventory - Reaction of Others subscale and the Care-related Quality of Life - 7 Dimensions was measured in communication partners. Measurements were taken at baseline and 3-month follow-up. Linear mixed models were used to analyze effects between groups over time for every outcome measure.ResultsIntention-to-treat analyses showed a significant effect of the DSL-protocol on the use of verbal strategies in favor of the control group, however, this effect was non-significant after adjustment for confounding. Effect sizes of other outcomes varied between −0.23 [−0.57, 0.12] and 0.30 [−0.05, 0.64]. The LMM showed a significant effect on the HHDI-Reaction of others scale in favor of communication partners in the treatment group, however, the effect did not remain significant at a 0.01 significance level and the effect size was very small and non-significant 0.12, 95% CI [−0.27 to 0.51]. Adjusted analyses did not reveal treatment effects.ConclusionThe DSL-protocol did not clearly contribute to the enhancement of communication and wellbeing in DSL-patients. Possible reasons for the lack of effects are OTs not being comfortable giving advice on communication and psychosocial issues or the short-term treatment and follow-up period. Further study is warranted to find out how the protocol may be adapted or whether it is necessary to involve mental healthcare professionals.Clinical Trial Registrationwww.ClinicalTrials.gov, identifier NTR2843. (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)