As the coronavirus pandemic continues apace in the United States, the dizzying amount of data being generated, analyzed and consumed about the virus has led to calls to proclaim this the first ‘data-driven pandemic’. But at the same time, it seems that this plethora of data has not meant a better grasp on the reality of the pandemic and its effects. Even as we have the potential to digitally track and trace nearly every single individual who has contracted the virus, (...) we have no idea exactly how many people have had the virus, been hospitalized, or died because of it, largely due to a confluence of factors, particularly active obfuscation and mismanagement by public authorities and misinformation spread through social media and right-wing media channels. But beyond these dynamics, there also lies the less nefarious ways that the everyday, subjective practices of data collection, analysis and visualization have the potential to themselves produce these very same dynamics where data is at once valorized and ignored, preeminent and completely useless. That is, the pandemic has revealed only the general inadequacy of our data infrastructures and assemblages to solving pressing social issues, but also the more general shift towards a ‘post-truth’ disposition in contemporary social life. But, as this paper argues, it would be a mistake to see the centrality of data as being somehow the opposite from the larger post-truth apparatus, as the two are instead fundamentally intertwined and co-produced. (shrink)

Your perspective on life can be your power or your prison. It can serve your anxiety, your stress, and your depression, or it can support your peace, your courage, and your growth. Trent Shelton, one of the most groundbreaking and dynamic teachers of our time, wants to help you chart your path to a new perspective. Protect Your Peace offers tools to reshape your mindset and redefine the meaning you find in your life-tools that he knows can work for (...) you, because he has used them himself to transform his own life. In these pages, Trent outlines nine essential principles to help you: · Protect your energy from the things that drain it · Protect your mind from the things that distract you · Protect your soul from the things that don't fulfill you You'll learn simple strategies for setting clear boundaries, disconnecting from negativity, honing your vision and your focus, and bringing your life into alignment with your true power and purpose-with Trent as your straight-talking, profoundly inspiring guide who's with you every step of the way. Trent lets you know in no uncertain terms that there is a war on-a war for your worth. The toughest battle in it is the one you're fighting within yourself. And Protect Your Peace gives you a road map to victory. (shrink)

THE ARTICLE IS AN EXAMINATION OF THE CLAIM MADE BY\nHUSSERL, AND RECENTLY RENEWED BY M M VAN DE PITTE, THAT\nMORITZ SCHLICK MISREPRESENTED HUSSERL'S VIEW OF THE NATURE\nOF PHENOMENOLOGICAL PROPOSITIONS. IT IS ARGUED THAT SCHLICK\nDID NOT MISREPRESENT HUSSERL'S NOTION OF SYNTHETIC "A\nPRIORI" PROPOSITIONS. THE DISPUTE IS VIEWED FROM SCHLICK'S\nPOINT OF VIEW IN WHICH A FIRM DISTINCTION IS MADE BETWEEN\nINTUITION AND KNOWLEDGE.

Critics often suggest that Socrates’ portrait of the philosopher’s inspired madness in his second speech in Plato’s Phaedrus is incompatible with the other types of divine madness outlined in the same speech, namely poetic, prophetic, and purificatory madness. This incompatibility is frequently taken to show that Socrates’ characterisation of philosophers as mad is disingenuous or misleading in some way. While philosophical madness and the other types of divine madness are distinguished by the non-philosophical crowd’s different interpretations of them, I aim (...) to show that they are not, in fact, presented as incompatible. Socrates’ pair of speeches demonstrates that madness can be divided into harmful and beneficial kinds, and in Socrates’ key discussion of philosophical madness (249c4-e4), I argue that the crowd correctly recognises that the philosopher is mad on the basis of his eccentricity, but wrongly assumes that the philosopher’s madness is of the harmful type because it fails to realise that the philosopher is enthused. Socrates’ second speech provides information about human souls and gods which shows that philosophical madness belongs to the beneficial type and so falls under the heading of divine enthusiasm after all. Importantly, human souls and gods are shown in the speech to be roughly isomorphic. Both philosophical and other kinds of divine madness involve having something divine inside a human body (entheos): in the former a human soul has become godlike; in the latter a human soul has been displaced by a god. Because of this, I propose that philosophy is presented as a genuine form of divine madness alongside the other more conventional examples. (shrink)

Michael Hardimon’s new book is a valuable study of Hegel’s social and political philosophy. Hardimon takes seriously Hegel’s intention to offer a social philosophy that can reconcile people to the modern social world. Since Hegel’s own presentation of his philosophy is motivated by a number of competing concerns, Hardimon’s admirable success at reconstructing Hegel’s view in accordance with this fundamental intention offers an important and insightful perspective on Hegel’s project. The focal points of Hardimon’s reconstruction—the aim of reconciliation and the (...) problem of alienation it is meant to overcome—are explained and interpreted with considerable clarity in a way that shows their significance to the tradition of modern political philosophy. Hardimon deliberately resists using Hegel’s technical terminology and engaging in detailed scholarly disputes in a successful effort to avoid obscurity and distraction. The result is a book that should be prized by anyone seeking an accessible presentation of Hegel’s social philosophy, particularly as a vehicle for teaching Hegel’s political thought without having to devote an entire course to the task. (shrink)

In 2004, the agricultural economies of many rural communities in the United States were impacted by the cessation of a price-support and supply-control program for tobacco production. Tobacco was not only an important livelihood, but also was central to social and cultural life. Using a social–ecological systems lens and the adaptive cycle metaphor, we examine the reorganization of agriculture in communities that previously produced tobacco under the program. Specifically, we seek to understand how transitional policy that provided financial support to (...) tobacco farmers interacted with other social, cultural, physical and human capitals to condition system reorganization. We conducted semi-structured interviews with farmers, extension agents, and policy makers in Kentucky as well as examined trends in income and number of farmers before and after the transition as indicators of reorganization. We determined that the financial support was perceived as helpful in supporting the transition and that tobacco farmers reorganized their livelihoods primarily around existing, remnant assets and endogenous capacities. In addition, we determined that though the agricultural system may be reorganizing economically, it is not necessarily supportive of the same social bonds and values that co-existed with tobacco economy. Understanding agricultural economies as part of complex social–ecological systems that consist of interconnected values, identities, ecology and social ties is important for developing policies to support systems and communities through economic transitions. (shrink)

Adaptations can occur at different hierarchical levels (e.g., cells and multicellular organisms), but it can be difficult to identify the level(s) of adaptation in specific cases. A major problem is that selection at a lower level can filter up, creating the illusion of selection at a higher level. We use optimality modeling of the volvocine algae to explore the emergence of genuine group (i.e., colony-level) adaptations. We find that it is helpful to develop an explicit model for what group fitness (...) would be in the absence of group-level relationships between traits and group fitness. We call this “counterfactual fitness,” because in many actual cases of interest there are group-level relationships. Once counterfactual fitness is modeled, the difference between effects that filter up and genuine group selection is explicit and so, therefore, is the distinction between apparent and genuine group adaptations. We call the latter group-specific adaptations. Recognizing group-specific adaptations is important because only group-specific adaptations would cause the lower-level units (cells in this case) to be maladapted if they were to leave the group and enter a global cell-level population. Thus, as group-specific adaptations evolve, they create selective pressure for increased cohesiveness and individuality of groups. This article suggests that group-specific adaptations could be present in the simplest, earliest branching colonial volvocine species, which do not have distinct specialized cells. The article also makes predictions about the kind of empirical evidence needed to support or refute the hypothesis that a particular trait is a group-level adaptation. (shrink)

We describe a virtue ethics approach and its application in a four-year, integrated, longitudinal, and required undergraduate medical education course that attempts to address some of the challenges of the hidden curriculum and minimize some of its adverse effects on learners. We discuss how a curriculum grounded in virtue ethics strives to have the practical effect of allowing students to focus on their professional identity as physicians in training rather than merely on knowledge and skills acquisition. This orientation, combined with (...) a student-generated curriculum, is designed to prepare students to identify and face challenges during their clinical years, further nurturing their professional growth. In short, a four-year integrated ethics and professionalism curriculum intentionally centered on cultivating virtuous physicians may alleviate, and even counteract, the effects of the hidden curriculum in the clinical years of medical training. (shrink)

Advance directives are critically important for capable individuals who wish to avoid the burdens of life-prolonging interventions in the advanced stages of dementia. However, this paper will argue that advance directives should have less application to questions about feeding patients during the clinical course of dementia than often has been presumed. The argument will be framed within the debate between Ronald Dworkin and Rebecca Dresser regarding the moral authority of precedent autonomy to determine an individual’s future end-of-life care plan. We (...) will use a brief analysis of the positions taken in two important papers that come out of the Dworkin/Dresser debate and a hypothetical patient, John, who will be followed from diagnosis of dementia to death, to show how advance directives should apply to key points in the progression of his disease, particularly in relation to food and nutrition. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Filosofi e animali in Roma antica: Modelli di animalità e umanità in Lucrezio e Seneca by Fabio TutroneJo-Ann SheltonFabio Tutrone. Filosofi e animali in Roma antica: Modelli di animalità e umanità in Lucrezio e Seneca. Pubblicazioni della Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia dell’Università di Pavia 126. Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2012. 388pp. Paper, €34.The last decade has witnessed a proliferation, in many academic disciplines including Classics, of research into (...) the relationships between humans and other animals. Classical scholars have investigated the significance of other animals, whether utilized for food, labor, religious sacrifice, or entertainment, or, as Levi-Strauss declared, because they are good to think with. For millennia, we humans have sought to understand ourselves and our culture in large part by identifying both analogy with and the alterity of other animals. Fabio Tutrone, in his book, Filosofi e animali in Roma antica: Modelli di animalità e umanità in Lucrezio e Seneca, examines how two Roman authors explicated their theories of humanitas by references to other animals. There is only occasional discussion of other Roman philosophical writers, particularly Cicero. Tutrone’s main thesis is that both Lucretius and Seneca presented views about the nature and status of animals which differed from the orthodox views of their philosophical schools.The book is divided into two sections of equal length, the first about Lucretius (part 1, four chaps.), the second about Seneca (part 2, three chaps.). Throughout part 1, Tutrone analyzes the eclectic nature of Lucretius’ sources (also included as an appendix is a reprint of an article previously published by Tutrone on Lucretius’ use of Aristotle’s biological theory). Tutrone describes Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura as one of the most astonishing attempts to repudiate traditional anthropocentrism in the history of ancient culture (22). According to Tutrone, in order to persuade readers of the Epicurean doctrine that they, and the universe around them, were entirely material, Lucretius depicted the biological relationship between humans and other animals as one of parity. Comprehension of this parity was, in Lucretius’ view, fundamental to the acceptance of Epicurean physics and thus the attainment of the desired ataraxia. Anthropocentrism and anthropic hierarchy were essential elements in the Stoic and Aristotelian doctrines of teleology which Lucretius was attempting to refute. However, Epicurus, although opposed to teleology, had not renounced anthropic hierarchy. Classical scholars have generally believed that Lucretius presented in his De [End Page 709] Rerum Natura a very orthodox exposition of Epicureanism. Tutrone, however, argues that Lucretius deviated significantly from the teachings of Epicurus in his emphasis on the similarities between humans and animals. In contrast both to his Epicurean predecessors and to his anti-Epicurean contemporaries, Lucretius advocated an ethical theory based on the biological and cognitive proximity of humans to other animals.Tutrone’s insightful examinations of several passages of De Rerum Natura demonstrate their contributions to Lucretius’ advancement of his ethical arguments. For example, on Book 1.244–64, a passage explaining the Epicurean theory that, in the material universe, nothing disintegrates into nothing, Tutrone comments that Lucretius demystifies this process by employing illustrations which remind readers of what they already know: animals acquire nutrients by consuming plants which have in turn gained nutrients from rain water. The picture of contented cows in a lush pasture, providing milk for their calves, brings pleasure to readers even as it helps them comprehend the reality of the material universe. Tutrone contends, however, that animal images in Lucretius’ poem do more than delight, or reveal, by analogy, the correctness of Epicurean physics. Lucretius’ phrase, hinc alitur porro nostrum genus atque ferarum (l. 254), denotes a parity between humans and animals: both groups are nourished in the same ways. Lucretius thereby reveals the status of humans in the material universe: we are parallel to animals.In Tutrone’s view, Lucretius did not limit his attribution of similarities between humans and animals to physical features. In Book 2.352–66, Lucretius creates a scene of a cow searching for her calf who has been killed at a sacrifice. One function of the image is to illustrate a scientific statement about the individual nature of each atomic form. The image also reinforces Lucretius’ criticism... (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated inequalities, including among the healthcare workforce. Based on recent literature and drawing on our experiences of working in operating theatres and critical care in the UK’s National Health Service during the pandemic, we review the role of personal protective equipment and consider the ethical implications of its design, availability and provision at a time of unprecedented demand. Several important inequalities have emerged, driven by factors such as individuals purchasing their own personal protective equipment, inconsistencies between (...) guidelines issued by different agencies and organisations, and the standardised design and procurement of equipment required to protect a diverse healthcare workforce. These, we suggest, have resulted largely because of a lack of appropriate pandemic planning and coordination, as well as insufficient appreciation of the significance of equipment design for the healthcare setting. As with many aspects of the pandemic, personal protective equipment has created and revealed inequalities driven by economics, gender, ethnicity and professional influence, creating a division between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ of personal protective equipment. As the healthcare workforce continues to cope with ongoing waves of COVID-19, and with the prospect of more pandemics in the future, it is vital that these inequalities are urgently addressed, both through academic analysis and practical action. All data relevant to the study are included in the article. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Talking Greeks: Speech, Animals, and the Other in Homer, Aeschylus, and PlatoJo-Ann SheltonJohn Heath. The Talking Greeks: Speech, Animals, and the Other in Homer, Aeschylus, and Plato. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. viii + 392 pp. Cloth, $90.In The Talking Greeks, John Heath has produced a provocative exploration of the significance of language capacity in ancient Greek society. In his Introduction, he investigates how the Greeks came (...) to associate speech—the word he uses to denote language capacity—with rationality and how, correspondingly, logos came to mean not simply the articulation of a thought, but the thought itself. Heath presents three major theses about the Greeks and speech. First, the Greeks believed that the most important difference between themselves and other animals was that humans were capable of speech and animals were not. They thus considered speech to be a defining characteristic of humanity. The dichotomy of the talking man and the speechless animal was established early on and persisted in Greek thought of all periods. Heath contends that the speechless animal Other also became the primary metaphor for Other humans—women, slaves, and non-Greeks, for example—who, though capable of speaking, were considered to be incapable of the effective use of speech. In turn, the seeming inability of these Others to be "fully human" (a phrase that Heath uses frequently) provided Greek men with the justification to relegate them to subordinate positions and, in effect, to silence them. Heath maintains that language capacity was central to all judgments about status, and that the Greeks granted authority to their leaders on the basis of mastery of speech.Second, the Greeks believed that speech enabled humans to create culture and thus evolve away from the bestial. Speech was fundamental to the development of systems of justice and morality and therefore to the rise of the polis.Third, because men in Greece, and in Athens in particular, attached such great value to the mastery of speech, they were keen to engage in debates. Heath asserts that one of the most important legacies of the ancient Greek world is its emphasis on open inquiry about political, social, and cultural traditions. He chides scholars who focus negatively on the Greek construction of dichotomies and hierarchies and therefore fail to acknowledge that the Greeks continually challenged these very constructions. Heath insists that we have inherited from them a pattern of public self-criticism, and that this pattern has brought about progress in the modern western world in improving the status of the "muted" members of the community.These three propositions underlie Heath's discussions throughout the book as he examines the ways in which Homer, Aeschylus, and Plato used the [End Page 603] metaphorical framework of the talking human and the speechless animal to explore the definition of humanity. Heath recognizes that the terms "mastery of speech" and "fully human" resist easy definition, and he devotes the book to illustrating how the Greeks variously employed these terms. Throughout, as Heath develops his own arguments, he draws on and provides extensive discussions of the work of many other scholars in a wide range of disciplines. His arguments are also reinforced by his close philological analyses of the Greek texts.In chapter 1, Heath begins his investigations of speech and human status in Homer. He notes that, in the many animal similes in the Iliad and the Odyssey, Homer attributes to the animals the same motivations for actions as the humans with whom they are being compared. The animals, however, are not capable of communicating their thoughts through speech. Within the human community, it is control over speech that characterizes humans with authority and distinguishes them from men of lower status and from non-Greeks, women, and slaves. The Trojans, when engaged in attack, for example, are depicted as bleating like sheep. And, according to Heath, Helen is portrayed as speaking impetuously and inappropriately. The voices of even royal Greek women carry no authority in public matters. In Homer, a hero is a person who is accomplished both at speaking words and at doing deeds, and only a man has the potential to combine these skills.Heath maintains in chapter... (shrink)

In this paper I aim to clarify Hegel's objection to the use of ideals in ethical thinking by examining his opposition to Kant's ideal of perpetual peace. I explain why Hegel believes that the ideal of peace amounts to nothing more than a moral condemnation that ignores the significance for international relations of appreciating the modern nation-state as an ethical achievement. I argue, however, that Kant's proposed federation can be grounded in the concrete ethical realities Hegel accepts as compelling and (...) uses this basis to sketch a defensible understanding of the obligating force of ethical ideals against Hegel's objections. (shrink)

Along the way he interviewed professional resource managers and naturalists, biologists, interpreters, conservation agents, engineers, farmers, hunters, fishermen, writers, and many others in an effort to gain a perspective that only people who work with the land - for business or for pleasure - can have." "Shelton describes a range of land-management philosophies and techniques, from largely hands-off, as in state parks, to largely hands-on, as in farming. He also addresses the questions that surround some of the more controversial (...) practices, such as the use of fire for land management and the introduction of nonnative species."--Jacket. (shrink)

This paper discusses the views of Moritz Schlick connecting aesthetics with the meaning of life. The fundamental question that Schlick asks is how anything appears beautiful. The discussion of the beautiful comes down to a discussion of aesthetic pleasure. Aesthetic pleasure has the characteristic of having no use defined in survival terms of self-preservation and propagation. Art, for Schlick, is seen as essentially play. Schlick addressed how his view that connects aesthetic pleasure and play essentially to the non-useful, can be (...) explained in light of the theory of natural selection. Then this is related to the meaning of life as play or youth. (shrink)

Understanding good design requires addressing the question of what units undergo natural selection, thereby becoming adapted. There is, therefore, a natural connection between the formal Darwinism project (which aims to connect population genetics with the evolution of design and fitness maximization) and levels of selection issues. We argue that the formal Darwinism project offers contradictory and confusing lines of thinking concerning level(s) of selection. The project favors multicellular organisms over both the lower (cell) and higher (social group) levels as the (...) level of adaptation. Grafen offers four reasons for giving such special status to multicellular organisms: (1) they lack appreciable within-organism cell selection, (2) they have multiple features that appear contrived for the same purpose, (3) they possess a set of phenotypes, and (4) they leave offspring according to their phenotypes. We discuss why these rationales are not compelling and suggest that a more even-handed approach, in which multicellular organisms are not assumed to have special status, would be desirable for a project that aims to make progress on the foundations of evolutionary theory. (shrink)

Corruption has caused serious dysfunction in most of the public institutions in Zimbabwe. The effectiveness of public institutions on providing meaningful services today hinges upon the capacity of the Church and other social institutions to combat corruption. Regrettably, corruption has infected and affected both the Church and the secular institutions. This theoretical qualitative study explores the potential of the Church of Christ in Zimbabwe (COCZ) in curbing corruption in Zimbabwe. It employs a combination of the Christological kenosis and Ubuntu or (...) Hunhu as its theoretical lenses. The article argues that the Church has great potential to tackle corruption. The potential of the COCZ manifests in its organisation and public engagement. The restorative nature of the COCZ Restoration Movement (RM) magnifies scripture, the gospel of Christ (Christological kenosis) as a tool of conviction and behaviour change in public spaces to combat corruption. These unique attributes of the COCZ provide the rationale for choosing it as a case study in this article. The data were collected through the engagement with literature largely from the Zimbabwean scholars on the subject and the COCZ documents. The findings were that the COCZ can only unlock its potential if it is committed to taking a self-introspection and reconfigure itself in order to take a robust anti-corruption stance. Contribution: The study poses questions about the potential of the Church’s voice, through the case of the COCZ, in the context of corruption in Zimbabwe. It pushes for the Church to reclaim its authentic status in order to root out corruption and have relevance in the Zimbabwean communities’ lived experiences. Religion has always claimed higher ground in ethical and moral issues, but there is scanty literature on the COCZ’s role in combating corruption in Zimbabwe. The study maintains that the Church has a consequential opportunity to either drive the agenda to end corruption or lose relevance due to perceived complicit attitudes towards the same. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 1, January 2022.

Clinical ethics consultants (CECs) often face some of the most difficult communication and interpersonal challenges that occur in hospitals, involving stressed stakeholders who express, with strong emotions, their preferences and concerns in situations of personal crisis and loss. In this article we will give examples of how much of the important work that ethics consultants perform in addressing clinical ethics conflicts is incompletely conceived and explained in the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities Core Competencies for Healthcare Ethics Consultation and (...) the clinical ethics literature. The work to which we refer is best conceptualized as a specialized type of interviewing, in which the emotional barriers of patients and their families or surrogates can be identified and addressed in light of relevant ethical obligations and values within the context of ethics facilitation. (shrink)

The article by Professor Fiester (2015) expresses concern about the long-term moral distress or negative moral emotions, both aspects of moral residue, that linger in some stakeholders’ experiences...

The private sector has implemented many cost containment measures in efforts to control rising health care costs. However, these measures have not controlled costs in the long run, and can be expected not to succeed as long as business cannot control factors within the health care system which affect costs. Controlling private sector health care costs requires constraints on cost shifting which necessitates a unified financing system with expenditure limits. A unified financing system will involve a partnership between the public (...) and private sectors. (shrink)

This essay examines the contemporary approaches to systems theory, the strengths and limitations of these approaches, and how communication researchers can apply them creatively. It points out that using system approaches requires communication scholars to study the mutual interaction of both information inputs and matter/energy inputs. Overloads of these inputs coupled with storage problems could engender positive feedback loops and move the system away from the linear region of stability toward the edge of chaos. It could then self-organize as a (...) more complex system in a new phase space of its trajectory. This complexity approach could be used to trace the trajectory of the global mass communication system or to conduct empirical research on all or any of the information-processing subsystems within the eight hierarchical levels of nested systems ranging from cell to supranational systems. Although systems thinking is writ large in the onto-cosmology of Eastern philosophies, its epistemological and methodological refinements did not occur until quantum physics challenged the ‘atomism’ of the dominant Newtonian-Cartesian model. (shrink)