Background In May 2020, England moved to an opt-out organ donation system, meaning adults are presumed to be an organ donor unless within an excluded group or have opted-out. This change aims to improve organ donation rates following brain or circulatory death. Healthcare staff in the UK are supportive of organ donation, however, both healthcare staff and the public have raised concerns and ethical issues regarding the change. The #options survey was completed by NHS organisations with the aim of understanding (...) awareness and support of the change. This paper analyses the free-text responses from the survey. Methods The #options survey was registered as a National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) portfolio trial [IRAS 275992] 14 February 2020, and was completed between July and December 2020 across NHS organisations in the North-East and North Cumbria, and North Thames. The survey contained 16 questions of which three were free-text, covering reasons against, additional information required and family discussions. The responses to these questions were thematically analysed. Results The #options survey received 5789 responses from NHS staff with 1404 individuals leaving 1657 free-text responses for analysis. The family discussion question elicited the largest number of responses (66%), followed by those against the legislation (19%), and those requiring more information (15%). Analysis revealed six main themes with 22 sub-themes. Conclusions The overall #options survey indicated NHS staff are supportive of the legislative change. Analysis of the free-text responses indicates that the views of the NHS staff who are against the change reflect the reasons, misconceptions, and misunderstandings of the public. Additional concerns included the rationale for the change, informed decision making, easy access to information and information regarding organ donation processes. Educational materials and interventions need to be developed for NHS staff to address the concepts of autonomy and consent, organ donation processes, and promote family conversations. Wider public awareness campaigns should continue to promote the positives and refute the negatives thus reducing misconceptions and misunderstandings. Trial registration National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) [IRAS 275992]. (shrink)

Financial products and options are frequently complex and difficult for consumers to understand, which, alongside positively oriented sales pitches and predatory practices, may lead to uninformed and hazardous financial decisions. While several legal reforms have been implemented to improve consumers’ understanding of financial products, these modifications have only achieved mixed results. An ongoing challenge is the passive nature of such modifications, giving rise to confirmation bias—noticing the information which confirms one’s belief about a product, while ignoring or not paying enough (...) attention to the potential risks. The aim of this study was to test an implementable form of public policy to help older adults successfully navigate these financial decisions. We tested whether a self-evaluation worksheet, involving an active manipulation of financial content, would significantly impact older adult participants’ responses in an experimental reverse mortgage scenario. Forty community-dwelling, healthy older adults were randomized to one of two conditions: Control Condition and Manipulation Condition. In addition to completing a comprehensive neuropsychological examination, participants were administered the Reverse Mortgage Task. Results indicated that a simple yet active manipulation—imparting accurate and understandable information regarding a complex financial product that must be further manipulated—led to the following among participants in the Manipulation Condition: declines in mood; superior understanding of the financial product; and reduced intention of purchasing the financial product. In order for older adults to be well informed about reverse mortgages, policies must be put in place to ensure that adequate and accurate information has been not only provided but also actively processed by the individual. (shrink)

The accurate recognition of emotion is important for interpersonal interaction and when navigating our social world. However not all facial displays reflect the emotional experience currently being felt by the expresser. Indeed faces express both genuine and posed displays of emotion. In this article, we summarise the importance of motion for the recognition of face identity before critically outlining the role of dynamic information in determining facial expressions and distinguishing between genuine and posed expressions of emotion. We propose that both (...) dynamic information and face familiarity may modulate our ability to determine whether an expression is genuine or not. Finally, we consider the shared role for dynamic information across different face recognition tasks and the wider impact of face familiarity on determining genuine from posed expressions during real-world interactions. (shrink)

le statut de l'intersubjectivité comme altérité à soi chez Husserl Natalie Depraz. REMERCIEMENTS À Jean-François Courtine tout d'abord, je tiens à exprimer ma très vive gratitude pour la confiance qu'il m'a témoignée en me donnant ...

Increasingly, functional and evolutionary research has highlighted the important contribution emotion processing makes to complex human social cognition. As such, it may be asked whether neural structures involved in emotion processing, commonly referred to as limbic structures, have been impacted in human brain evolution. To address this question, we performed an extensive evolutionary analysis of multiple limbic structures using modern phylogenetic tools. For this analysis, we combined new volumetric data for the hominoid (human and ape) amygdala and 4 amygdaloid nuclei, (...) hippocampus, and striatum, collected using stereological methods in complete histological series, with previously published datasets on the amygdala, orbital and medial frontal cortex, and insula, as well as a non-limbic structure, the dorsal frontal cortex, for contrast. We performed a parallel analysis using large published datasets including many anthropoid species (human, ape, and monkey), but fewer hominoids, for the amygdala and 2 amygdaloid subdivisions, hippocampus, schizocortex, striatum, and septal nuclei. To address evolutionary change, we compared observed human values to values predicted from regressions run through a) nonhuman hominoids and b) nonhuman anthropoids, assessing phylogenetic influence using phylogenetic generalized least squares regression.Compared with other hominoids, the volumes of the hippocampus, the lateral nucleus of the amygdala, and the orbital frontal cortex were, respectively, 50%, 37%, and 11% greater in humans than predicted for an ape of human hemisphere volume, while the medial and dorsal frontal cortex were, respectively, 26% and 29% significantly smaller. Compared with other anthropoids, only human values for the striatum fell significantly below predicted values. Overall, the data present support for the idea that regions involved in emotion processing are not necessarily conserved or regressive, but may even be enhanced in recent human evolution. (shrink)

Two types of variables impact face recognition: estimator variables that cannot be controlled and system variables that are under direct control by the criminal justice system. This article addresses some of the reasons that eyewitnesses are prone to making errors, particularly false identifications. It provides a discussion of the differences between typical facial memory and eyewitness studies and shows that the two areas generally find similar results. It reviews estimator variable effects and focuses on system variables. Traditional facial recognition researchers (...) rarely study system variables but reveal important factors that police and policy makers should consider with regard to eyewitness identification and the courts. It concludes that there is still room for considerable improvement in identification procedures and wants to encourage more system variable research as a means of reducing wrongful convictions. (shrink)

Given its transcendental impulse, Husserl's analysis of the lived body has been considered by many phenomenologists and by most Husserl scholars as unable to account for our everyday intimate relationship with our own embodied self and with other embodied selves. Contrary to such a widespread contention, the author sets out to show that Husserl's phenomenology contains unknown descriptive resources which provide a detailed account of our individual and communitarian lived body at a transcendental level proper.

Parole coupée, bouche bée, yeux grands ouverts, sourcils levés... Plutôt que langagière, l'expression de la surprise serait d'abord le fait du corps. On se propose dans cet ouvrage d'interroger de manière critique, voire de contrebalancer cette tendance habituelle à ranger l'expérience de la surprise du côté du silence et de l'indicible : au lieu de faire signe vers les éventuelles limites du langage et des différentes langues naturelles, la surprise ne fait-elle pas plutôt ressortir la richesse des ressources du langage (...) et la plasticité du fonctionnement des langues? Comment se dit donc la surprise? Dans quelle mesure son expression varie-t-elle d'une langue à l'autre? Le dire de la surprise est-il en lui-même un agir, à son tour producteur d'effets? Ces interrogations nous ont invités à réfléchir tant au lexique de la surprise qu'aux formes d'expression au moyen desquelles la surprise peut être non seulement exprimée mais aussi décrite, racontée, ou bien encore rationalisée, dans la langue courante, dans la logique comme dans la littérature. (shrink)

Introduction J’ai choisi ce titre à la fois énigmatique et évocateur pour attirer votre attention sur un point très précis à l’intérieur de la relation macroscopique entre le langage et l’expérience dans les deux traditions philosophiques contemporaines, la phénoménologie et la philosophie analytique, lesquelles sont souvent appréhendées comme antinomiques : il s’agira ici de s’interroger sur le langage très particulier que requiert une attitude en première personne ; on verra que cette derni...

Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, and psychiatrists examine the will and its pathologies from theoretical and empirical perspectives, offering a conceptual overview and discussing schizophrenia, depression, prefrontal lobe damage, and substance abuse as disorders of volition. Science tries to understand human action from two perspectives, the cognitive and the volitional. The volitional approach, in contrast to the more dominant "outside-in" studies of cognition, looks at actions from the inside out, examining how actions are formed and informed by internal conditions. In Disorders of (...) Volition, scholars from a range of disciplines seek to advance our understanding of the processes supporting voluntary action by addressing conditions in which the will is impaired. Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, and psychiatrists examine the will and its pathologies from both theoretical and empirical perspectives, offering a conceptual overview and discussing specific neurological and psychiatric conditions as disorders of volition. After presenting different conceptual frameworks that identify agency, decision making, and goal pursuit as central components of volition, the book examines how impairments in these and other aspects of volition manifest themselves in schizophrenia, depression, prefrontal lobe damage, and substance abuse. Contributors George Ainslie, Tim Bayne, Antoine Bechara, Paul W. Burgess, Anna-Lisa Cohen, Daniel Dennett, Stéphanie Dubal, Philippe Fossati, Chris Frith, Sam J. Gilbert, Peter Gollwitzer, Jordan Grafman, Patrick Haggard, Jay G. Hull, Marc Jeannerod, Roland Jouvent, Frank Krueger, Neil Levy, Peter F. Liddle, Kristen L. Mackiewitz, Thomas Metzinger, Jack B. Nitschke, Jiro Okuda, Adrian M. Owen, Chris Parry, Wolfgang Prinz, Joëlle Proust, Michael A. Sayette, Werner X. Schneider, Natalie Sebanz, Jon S. Simons, Laurie B. Slone, Sean A. Spence. (shrink)

I won’t here sketch out completely the contentions of all phenomenologists about the question of Europe, what would rather refer to a book-project. By taking over some of the statements, I will rather try to situate Max Scheler’s original contention, while showing, to begin with, how he concurs with some aspects of Husserl’s pionneer-conception, but also strongly disagree on some others. As a second step, the map of the contentions of the different phenomenologists on Europe will allow to draw a (...) fairly enough dividing line between euro-centrists or europeo-centrists on the one side and, on the other side, the promotors of an alternative Europe, of an « alter-Europe », of a euro-excentrism, or again, in more contemporary terms, of a « globalisation » or an « alter-mondialism ». Max Scheler is clearly on this latter side of the line, as we will see. But this dividing line becomes still more complex and generates other distinctions, according to the « valence » that is attributed to Europe, positive (its opening future) or negative (its foreseen decline), or, in other terms, if it is its metaphysical meaning (principle, idea, essence, value) that is underlined, or its social, legal, economic and political historicisation. With such a multifactorial configuration in mind, I will seek to place the author of Politisch-pädagogische Schriften and, namely, of « L’idée de paix et le pacifisme » on the chessboard of Europe. (shrink)

Australians responded enthusiastically to the calling of the Synod, though there appears to be a tension between expectations of doctrinal reform and pastoral reform. The Bishops Conference allowed each diocese to consult as it saw fit and submit its findings, in light of which a committee of four bishops drafted the official submission to the Synod. Other materials were also sent to the Synod office, including some directly by dioceses and other Catholic organisations. The dioceses surveyed made the preparatory document (...) and questionnaire available online and in print. There was a high level of frustration expressed with the complexity of many of the questions. The Conference and most dioceses did not publish the findings of the consultation or their submission to the Synod. Nonetheless, these are likely to reveal trends with regard to co-habitation, pre-marital sex, contraception, the treatment of divorced Catholics and same-sex marriage similar to those of other western countries based on an analysis of existing quantitative data from the National Church Life Survey, diocesan reports to which the researchers were given access, and the Catholic media. There is an apparent disconnect between the lived experience of many Catholics and Church teaching in these areas. Moreover, there is a tension between issues of doctrinal confusion, doctrinal rejection, and pastoral care which could have consequences for whether the Synod should consider doctrinal reform or need only focus on pastoral care. Most importantly, the responses demonstrate that Catholics in Australia want to be better informed about Church teaching, want to be consulted about these matters, and want to have a say in the formulation of Church teaching. Not taking these wishes seriously risks further alienating many Catholics from the Church who express a disjuncture between Church teaching and their own life experience in these matters. (shrink)

With this phenomenological contribution to Diadocus of Photicea’s anthropological theology, my main goal is to show how this saint, according to John Meyedorff’s nice words, has been “one of the main popularizers of the desert spirituality in the Byzantine world”. The spiritual experience of the taste of God is then in no way the privilege of the circle of initiates nor is it reserved for monks, who are sometimes idealized as athletes of God. What is at stake is the whole (...) spiritual life, the whole daily journey of life, not only a provisional illuminated prayer-state. Diadochus therefore is still of interest for us today. We understand then how this experimental and experiential way does not include in the end a distinction between divine grace and human effort. Not that the parts played by human beings and God end up in a confusion, but, as we will see, since grace is given to the human being from baptism onward, it keeps on being more and more effective, as the human being practices, exercises (askesis), makes efforts (epimeleia), that is, namely, enters more and more into the invocation of the name of Jesus. So divine grace and human effort literally co-operate, work together, and spontaneously enter into a kind of danse in which they gradually become two in one. (shrink)

Many children in the USA are prescribed psychotropic drugs that have not been fully investigated in paediatric clinical trials. The common practice of prescribing psychotropic drugs off-label poses unknown and potentially serious short- and long-term consequences for these children. This paper briefly reviews the factors associated with the lack of paediatric clinical trials. We advocate a shift toward increasing paediatric trials with psychotropic drugs through a combination of adequate safety controls, additional reimbursement/compensation, a more organised and large-scale effort to collate (...) results and outcomes across researchers and studies and additional public education about the importance of this research. In addition, we encourage the re-examination of the ethical standards for children's participation in phase 1 clinical trials as well as argue for longitudinal developmental studies on children who are prescribed off-label psychotropic drugs. (shrink)

Le terme archê dans l’ Éthique à Nicomaque III désigne le « principe » d’une chose au sens de ce qui a pouvoir sur elle, la cause motrice des actions. Ce pouvoir de domination est exprimé par l’expression eph’hêmin, et c’est Aristote qui l’introduit pour la première fois dans le débat sur la responsabilité morale. Les chapitres où il discute le concept d’ eph’hêmin sont clairement de nature dialectique, et son analyse se situe très probablement à l’intérieur d’un débat académique (...) sur ces thèmes, dont on trouve des traces dans les Lois. Les disciples de Platon pouvaient trouver des difficultés à comprendre les thèses de Platon sur le rapport entre action et caractère, et Aristote propose une solution originale, fondée sur sa théorie des quatre causes. Contre Platon, il refuse de rejeter la responsabilité des actions et du caractère mauvais sur la cité et les éducateurs, et place l’origine du caractère dans les actions et les choix de l’individu. Avec ce choix, Aristote élargit le problème de la responsabilité humaine de la question traditionnelle de savoir si les méchants sont responsables de leurs mauvaises actions au problème général de la responsabilité de toutes les actions, bonnes ou mauvaises. (shrink)

Cet article s’attache à deux films représentatifs de l’« esthétique des décombres », Les Assassins sont parmi nous et Entre hier et aujourd’hui, pour analyser, du point de vue du genre, la présentation des objets légués par le nazisme. Les objets à l’écran sont compris comme des « événements tangibles » qui témoignent du bouleversement de l’ordre des choses dans l’Allemagne d’après-guerre, y compris celui de l’héritage de la confiscation et de l’« aryanisation » de l’espace allemand. Dans ces films, (...) un parallèle est établi entre le sentiment de culpabilité éprouvé par les hommes par rapport aux objets arrachés à une femme, victime, et le problème de dépossession (ainsi que son corollaire, le meurtre collectif) qui vient se mêler aux défis des relations de genre dans l’après-guerre. L’activité même de nettoyage et de remise en ordre est représentée comme une forme féminine de travail ; ces interventions physiques de la part des femmes sont aussi chargées de résoudre le problème posé par l’embarrassante présence des restes matériels du Troisième Reich. (shrink)

Dans cette contribution, j’explore la façon dont Jan Patočka et Simone de Beauvoir offrent des ressources complémentaires pour penser une phénoménologie « cosmo-politique », selon l’expression du philosophe Étienne Tassin. L’hypothèse étant que chacun en accentue une dimension, soit suivant l’ébranlement révolutionnaire des sujets agissants en crise, soit selon la situation socio-historique de la différenciation des sujets genrés féminins traversés par leur aliénation corporelle constitutive. À cet égard, la voie de ces deux phénoménologues est spécifique : l’une passe par l’effacement (...) du sujet, même dominé, ébranlé, au profit d’une appartenance profonde au monde, l’autre par une forme d’assomption du sujet au cœur de sa finitude, en lien avec la libération de son aliénation destinale. La question étant : si la cosmo-politique a nourri plus de liens avec la phénoménologie cosmologique de Patočka, n’est-elle pas plus en alliance avec la recherche beauvoirienne d’une pacification des conflits? (shrink)

What is the relationship between the transcendental and the empirical? Thanks to quite a peculiar phenomenon, surprise, I will show how it is possible to shed a new light on the relationship of transcendental philosophy to the empirical. In order to do so, the Kantian anthropological alterity-operator of insociable sociability will be my lever. My leading questions being: under which conditions the empirical as in-sociable for philosophy may be socialized? What is the benefit for the transcendental? How surprise as a (...) phenomenon that is exemplarily un-integrable by transcendental philosophy may play a part in it? (shrink)

We report an experiment investigating the “special-process” theory of insight problem solving, which claims that insight arises from non-conscious, non-reportable processes that enable problem re-structuring. We predicted that reducing opportunities for speech-based processing during insight problem solving should permit special processes to function more effectively and gain conscious awareness, thereby facilitating insight. We distracted speech-based processing by using either articulatory suppression or irrelevant speech, with findings for these conditions supporting the predicted insight facilitation effect relative to silent working or thinking (...) aloud. The latter condition was included to investigate the currently contested effect of “verbal overshadowing” on insight, whereby thinking aloud is claimed to hinder the operation of special, non-reportable processes. Whilst verbal overshadowing was not evident in final solution rates, there was nevertheless support for verbal overshadowing up to and beyond.. (shrink)

La surprise est une question qui n’a semble-t-il guère sollicité l’attention des philosophes. Trop ordinaire, trop anecdotique : minimale. À y regarder de plus près, on découvre qu’une foule d’auteurs issus de traditions philosophiques différentes voire opposées s’y sont intéressés, qu’il s’agisse d’Aristote, de Descartes, de Smith, de Peirce, Dewey, Heidegger, Ricœur ou Maldiney, sans compter certaines formules saisissantes des cognitivistes comme Davidson ou Dennett. Bref, il y a un problèm...

In the paper I discuss three theses defended by A. Kenny: in antiquity up to Aspasius or to Alexander of Aphrodisias the EE was considered the most important version of Aristotle’s ethical discourse; the idea that the common books belonged to the one or to the other treatise; the opposition between the theory of happiness of EN I and X and that of EE II and VIII.

This paper explores the assimilation of the flightless dodo into early modern natural history. The dodo was first described by Dutch sailors landing on Mauritius in 1598, and became extinct in the 1680s or 1690s. Despite this brief period of encounter, the bird was a popular subject in natural-history works and a range of other genres. The dodo will be used here as a counterexample to the historical narratives of taxonomic crisis and abrupt shifts in natural history caused by exotic (...) creatures coming to Europe. Though this bird had a bizarre form, early modern naturalists integrated the dodo and other flightless birds through several levels of conceptual categorization, including the geographical, morphological and symbolic. Naturalists such as Charles L'Ecluse produced a set of typical descriptive tropes that helped make up the European dodo. These long-lived images were used for a variety of symbolic purposes, demonstrated by the depiction of the Dutch East India enterprise in Willem Piso's 1658 publication. The case of the dodo shows that, far from there being a dramatic shift away from emblematics in the seventeenth century, the implicit symbolic roles attributed to exotic beasts by naturalists constructing them from scant information and specimens remained integral to natural history. (shrink)

A passage from Michael of Ephesus’ Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, book V (p. 50, 6–10 Hayduck), gives some information on the Anonymous Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, books II–IV. Michael cites a series of ancient annotations to the third book, written by ancient exegetes and which have come down to him. It can therefore be assumed that Michael had the Anonymous Commentary in front of him when he wrote these lines. It is thus possible to assume that it was (...) Michael of Ephesus himself who organised the entire commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics and inserted the Anonymous Commentary on Books II-IV after Eustratius’ commentary on Book I and before his own commentary on Book V. (shrink)

L'ecriture n'est pas l'objet universel de la philosophie, mais ne doit pas non plus etre totalement absente de son champ d'interrogation. La presente recherche trouve par consequent son impulsion dans le souci de restaurer une economie d'ecriture en philosophie en s'interrogeant sur le statut de l'ecriture dans une demarche de pensee.

Intervention studies with developmental samples are difficult to implement, in particular when targeting demographically diverse communities. Online studies have the potential to examine the efficacy of highly scalable interventions aimed at enhancing development, and to address some of the barriers faced by underrepresented communities for participating in developmental research. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we executed a fully remote randomized controlled trial language intervention with third and fourth grade students from diverse backgrounds across the United States. Using this as a case (...) study, we discuss both challenges and solutions to conducting an intensive online intervention through the various phases of the study, including recruitment, data collection, and fidelity of intervention implementation. We provide comprehensive suggestions and takeaways, and conclude by summarizing some important tradeoffs for researchers interested in carrying out such studies. (shrink)

I would like to propose an interpretation of Ricœur’s first phenomenological works in the light of what I call an “experiential phenomenology”, by answeringthree important questions. The first is a factual and historical interrogation: why has Ricœur abandoned his project of a descriptive phenomenology after publishing his first volume of the The Voluntary and the Involuntary and why did he afterwards direct his philosophical research towards the problem of interpretation? The second interrogation is an epistemological and a methodological one: in (...) what way is the Husserlian phenomenology a first-person approach and how does Ricœur’s phenomenology of the will lead us towards an experiential phenomenology in first person? The final question is heuristical: what criteria should we point out in order to establish a phenomenological science that is 1) descriptive and 2) approaching the experience in first-person? (shrink)