This article examines religious socialism as an American social movement. It focuses on the most recent iteration of this tradition, the Religion and Socialism Commission, formed in the 1970s as a subgroup of the Democratic Socialists of America. Drawing on concepts from social movement theory such as frame alignment and political opportunity structure, it argues that the Religion and Socialism Commission ultimately failed in its attempt to transition from an organization into a social movement. It then considers various possibilities for (...) the future of religious socialism in the United States, given new variables such as a changing political opportunity structure and the rise of social media. (shrink)

a comprehensive, somewhat Gricean theory of speech acts, including an account of communicative intentions and inferences, a taxonomy of speech acts, and coverage of many topics in pragmatics -/- .

Geron recently announced that it had begun enrolling patients in the world's first-in-human clinical trial involving cells derived from human embryonic stem cells (hESCs). This trial raises important questions regarding the future of hESC-based therapies, especially in spinal cord injury (SCI) patients. We address some safety and efficacy concerns with this research, as well as the ethics of fair subject selection. We consider other populations that might be better for this research: chronic complete SCI patients for a safety trial, subacute (...) incomplete SCI patients for an efficacy trial, and perhaps primary progressive multiple sclerosis (MS) patients for a combined safety and efficacy trial. (shrink)

At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 became a global problem. Despite all the efforts to emphasize the relevance of preventive measures, not everyone adhered to them. Thus, learning more about the characteristics determining attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic is crucial to improving future interventions. In this study, we applied machine learning on the multi-national data collected by the International Collaboration on the Social and Moral Psychology of COVID-19 (N = 51,404) to test the predictive efficacy of constructs from (...) social, moral, cognitive, and personality psychology, as well as socio-demographic factors, in the attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic. The results point to several valuable insights. Internalized moral identity provided the most consistent predictive contribution—individuals perceiving moral traits as central to their self-concept reported higher adherence to preventive measures. Similar was found for morality as cooperation, symbolized moral identity, self-control, open-mindedness, collective narcissism, while the inverse relationship was evident for the endorsement of conspiracy theories. However, we also found a non-negligible variability in the explained variance and predictive contributions with respect to macro-level factors such as the pandemic stage or cultural region. Overall, the results underscore the importance of morality-related and contextual factors in understanding adherence to public health recommendations during the pandemic. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: The New Health Care For Profit: Doctors and Hospitals in a Competitive Environment. Edited by Bradford H. Gray The Healing Mission and the Business Ethic. By Robert M. Cunningham The Medical Industrial Complex. By Stanley Wohl.

The current policy of the National Institute of Health designed to increase the participation of women and minorities is radically different from previous policies designed to protect minorities from abuses in research studies. The principal arguments to support this policy are twofold: 1) Increased representation of minorities and women in research would increase the generalizability of research data and allow for valid analyses of differences in subpopulations; and 2) being in a clinical research study is advantageous to participants regardless of (...) the final research study results. It remains unclear whether minorities find these arguments compelling. Instead of telling minorities that participation in research is good for them, the research community should focus on understanding what minority communities want from clinical research and then tailoring the message to meet this need. Persuasive arguments to promote long-term increased representation of minorities in clinical research must come from within minority communities. (shrink)

Professionalism is demonstrated through attitudes and behaviors. Medical education is concerned with teaching and evaluating it among students. It is often bioethicists who teach professionalism to medical students. Most bioethics curricula use lectures and group discussions to introduce principles and theories, but there is variation in number of credit and contact hours, placement in the curriculum and alongside which courses bioethics is placed), the extent of individual mentoring, and the emphasis placed on any particular philosophical approach. Bioethics curricula also vary (...) in whether and how explicitly and extensively they address topics, including professionalism, cultural competence, medical humanities, spirituality, death and dying, and community service, and in the number and topics of vignettes, controversies, assignments, and course activities. (shrink)

Mohanty, J.N. Understanding Husserl's transcendental phenomenology.--Fink, E. The problem of the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. Operative concepts in Husserl's phenomenology.--Funke, G. A transcendental-phenomenological investigation concerning universal idealism, intentional analysis, and the genesis of habitus: archē, phansis, hexis, logos.--Pentzopoulou-Valalas, T. Reflections on the foundation of the relation between the a priori and the eidos in the phenomenology of Husserl.--Landgrebe, L. Regions of being and regional ontologies in Husserl's phenomenology. The problem posed by the transcendental science of the a priori of the (...) life world.--Wahl, J. Notes on the first part of Experience and judgment by Husserl.--Landgrebe, L. A letter from Ludwig Landgrebe to Jean Wahl.-- Wahl, J. A note on some empiricist aspects of the thought of Husserl.--Toulemont, R. The specific character of the social according to Husserl. (shrink)

In this accessible and comprehensive work, Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins cover the entire history of philosophy--ancient, medieval, and modern, from cultures both East and West--in its broader historical and cultural contexts. Major philosophers and movements are discussed along with less well-known but interesting figures. The authors examine the early Greek, Indic, and Chinese philosophers and the mythological traditions that preceded them, as well as the great religious philosophies, including Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, and Taoism. Easily understandable to students without (...) specialized knowledge of philosophy, A Short History of Philosophy demonstrates the relevance of philosophy to our times, illuminating the impact of the revolutions wrought by science, industry, colonialism, and sectarian warfare; the two world wars and the Holocaust; and the responses of philosophy in the schools of existentialism, postmodernism, feminism, and multiculturalism. In addition, the authors provide their own twists and interpretations of events, resulting in a broad view of the nature of philosophy as an intellectual discipline and its sometimes odd and dramatic consequences. (shrink)

Are similar, or even identical, mechanisms used in the computational modeling of speech segmentation, serial image processing, and music processing? We address this question by exploring how TRACX2, a recognition‐based, recursive connectionist autoencoder model of chunking and sequence segmentation, which has successfully simulated speech and serial‐image processing, might be applied to elementary melody perception. The model, a three‐layer autoencoder that recognizes “chunks” of short sequences of intervals that have been frequently encountered on input, is trained on the tone intervals of (...) melodically simple French children's songs. It dynamically incorporates the internal representations of these chunks into new input. Its internal representations cluster in a manner that is consistent with “human‐recognizable” melodic categories. TRACX2 is sensitive to both contour and proximity information in the musical chunks that it encounters in its input. It shows the “end‐of‐word” superiority effect demonstrated by Saffran et al. (1999) for short musical phrases. The overall findings suggest that the recursive autoassociative chunking mechanism, as implemented in TRACX2, may be a general segmentation and chunking mechanism, underlying not only word‐ and image‐chunking, but also elementary melody processing. (shrink)

The important question is how people process probabilistic information, not whether they process it in accordance with a normative model that we never should have expected them to be capable of following. Experience is not the cure, as widely thought, to problems with utilizing base rate information.

In “Bioethics and the Whole: Pluralism, Consensus, and the Transmutation of Bioethical Methods into Gold,” Patricia Martin identifies themes common to three emerging approaches to clinical bioethics--clinical pragmatism, ethics facilitation, and mediation-in order to develop an “ethical consensus method” that can serve as a “practical, step-by-step guide” for decision making She is to be applauded both for her identification of themes common to these three approaches and for her contribution to what we hope will be a growing literature on practical (...) methods for problem solving in clinical bioethics that take seriously the ideal of consensus. After a few preliminary remarks concerning Martin's working model, we focus the majority of our commentary on the notion of “consensus,” which is at the heart of her “ethical consensus method,” and the three approaches from which it is drawn. (shrink)

This is the first book to offer the best essays, articles, and speeches on ethics and intelligence that demonstrate the complex moral dilemmas in intelligence collection, analysis, and operations. Some are recently declassified and never before published, and all are written by authors whose backgrounds are as varied as their insights, including Robert M. Gates, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency; John P. Langan, the Joseph Cardinal Bernardin Professor of Catholic Social Thought at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, (...) Georgetown University; and Loch K. Johnson, Regents Professor of Political Science at the University of Georgia and recipient of the Owens Award for contributions to the understanding of U.S. intelligence activities. Creating the foundation for the study of ethics and intelligence by filling in the gap between warfare and philosophy, this is a valuable collection of literature for building an ethical code that is not dependent on any specific agency, department, or country. (shrink)

Surgery is an important part of health care worldwide. Without access to surgical treatments, morbidity and mortality increase. Access to surgical treatment is a significant problem in global public health because surgical services are not equally distributed in the world. There is a disproportionate scarcity of surgical access in low-income countries. There are many charitable organizations around the world that sponsor surgical missions to under served nations. One such organization is Operation Smile International, a group with which both authors have (...) volunteered. This paper will describe the purpose and processes involved in Operation Smile and identify some of the key ethical issues that arise in short term medical volunteer work highlighting the importance of sustainability. (shrink)

In celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Beauchamp and Childress’s Principles of Biomedical Ethics, a review is undertaken to compare the lists of principles in various bioethical theories to determine the extent to which the various lists can be reconciled. Included are the single principle theories of utilitarianism, libertarianism, Hippocratism, and the theories of Pellegrino, Engelhardt, The Belmont Report, Beauchamp and Childress, Ross, Veatch, and Gert. We find theories all offering lists of principles numbering from one to (...) ten. Many of the differences can be reconciled, but some critical differences remain. (shrink)

_Minds, Brains, Computers_ serves as both an historical and interdisciplinary introduction to the foundations of cognitive science.

The emergence of the “4th Industrial Revolution,” i.e. the convergence of artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, advanced materials, and bioengineering technologies, could accelerate socioeconomic insecurities and anxieties or provide beneficial alternatives to the status quo. In the post-Covid-19 era, the entities that are best positioned to capitalize on these innovations are large firms, which use digital platforms and big data to orchestrate vast ecosystems of users and extract market share across industry sectors. Nonetheless, these technologies also have the potential (...) to democratize ownership, broaden political-economic participation, and reduce environmental harms. We articulate the potential sociotechnical pathways in this high-stakes crossroads by analyzing cellular agriculture, an exemplary 4th Industrial Revolution technology that synergizes computer science, biopharma, tissue engineering, and food science to grow cultured meat, dairy, and egg products from cultured cells and/or genetically modified yeast. Our exploration of this space involved multi-sited ethnographic research in both the cellular agriculture community and alternative economic organizations devoted to open source licensing, member-owned cooperatives, social financing, and platform business models. Upon discussing how these latter approaches could potentially facilitate alternative sociotechnical pathways in cellular agriculture, we reflect upon the broader implications of this work with respect to the 4th Industrial Revolution and the enduring need for public policy reform. (shrink)

Medical ethics changed dramatically in the past 30 years because physicians and humanists actively engaged each other in discussions that sometimes led to confrontation and controversy, but usually have improved the quality of medical decision-making. Before then medical ethics had been isolated for almost two centuries from the larger philosophical, social, and religious controversies of the time. There was, however, an earlier period where leaders in medicine and in the humanities worked closely together and both fields were richer for it. (...) This volume begins with the 18th century Scottish Enlightenment when professors of medicine such as John Gregory, Edward Percival, and the American, Benjamin Rush, were close friends of philosophers like David Hume, Adam Smith, and Thomas Reid. They continually exchanged views on matters of ethics with each other in print, at meetings of elite intellectual groups, and at the dinner table. Then something happened, physicians and humanists quit talking with each other. In searching for the causes of the collapse, this book identifies shifts in the social class of physicians, developments in medical science, and changes in the patterns of medical education. Only in the past three decades has the dialogue resumed as physicians turned to humanists for help just when humanists wanted their work to be relevant to real-life social problems. Again, the book asks why, finding answers in the shift from acute to chronic disease as the dominant pattern of illness, the social rights revolution of the 1960's, and the increasing dissonance between physician ethics and ethics outside medicine. The book tells the critical story of how the breakdown in communication between physicians and humanists occurred and how it was repaired when new developments in medicine together with a social revolution forced the leaders of these two fields to resume their dialogue. (shrink)

Our primary focus is on analysis of the concept of voluntariness, with a secondary focus on the implications of our analysis for the concept and the requirements of voluntary informed consent. We propose that two necessary and jointly sufficient conditions must be satisfied for an action to be voluntary: intentionality, and substantial freedom from controlling influences. We reject authenticity as a necessary condition of voluntary action, and we note that constraining situations may or may not undermine voluntariness, depending on the (...) circumstances and the psychological capacities of agents. We compare and evaluate several accounts of voluntariness and argue that our view, unlike other treatments in bioethics, is not a value-laden theory. We also discuss the empirical assessment of individuals? perceptions of the degrees of noncontrol and self-control. We propose use of a particular Decision Making Control Instrument. Empirical research using this instrument can provide data that will help establish appropriate policies and procedures for obtaining voluntary consent to research. (shrink)

Philosophers have been debating the nature of folk or commonsense psychology for three decades. We ask: What are the resources that enable us to navigate the social world, anticipating what others do, explaining what they’ve done, and perceiving them--and ourselves--as selves, subjects, persons, with beliefs, desire, perceptions, and feelings? Unlike traditional philosophy of mind, instead of directly confronting the mind-body problem and subproblems such as intentionality and qualia, we step back and look at the resources that give us the concepts (...) that get us into these knots. (shrink)

No one really believes that literally all functions of the entire brain must be lost for an individual to be dead. A better definition of death involves a higher brain orientation.

"M. F. Simone Roberts's A Poetics of Being-Two is animated by a lively and engaging voice, drawing readers in with a sense of serious purpose working (delightfully) in tandem with a sense of humor. Roberts's aesthetics and her close readings of Yves Bonnefoy, St-John Perse, and Jorie Graham clearly demonstrate the literary effectiveness of Irigarayan sexual difference as an analytic trope, even as they emphasize the philosophical and political possibilities sexual difference opens up for feminism, environmentalism, and all levels of (...) contemporary cultural critique and activism."—Gail M. Schwab, Hofstra University -/- In An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Irigaray calls for a new poetics in the sense of both art and life. Rather than a critique from within philosophy, A Poetics of Being-Two tests Irigaray's ethics by extending it to other sites of cultural production. Where Irigaray's method finds stirrings and repressions of sexual difference in philosophy, this project explores that tension in poetics. Building from Irigaray's ethics, the book describes a poetics of being-two as concerns gendered subjectivity in literary poetics and then traces the on-going emergence of a poetics of being-two in the post-symbolist poetic tradition. Irigaray scholars will be interested in the sustained interpolation of Irigaray's ethical concepts as principles for a critical aesthetics and in their hermeneutic application in reading a literary tradition. Readers in comparative literature will find the first sustained feminist engagements with the major French poets Bonnefoy and Perse and an elucidation of their influence on the Pulitzer Prize winning poet Jorie Graham. (shrink)