In this essay, I use the theological anthropology of the apostle Paul as a diagnostic lens in order to bring into focus some implicit assumptions about human personhood in the goals and methods of treatment with psychotropic medications. I argue that Paul views the body as a mode of participation in larger relational matrices in both vulnerable and vital ways. He thus sees the self as constituted relationally rather than as fundamentally isolated and self-determining. Such an understanding of personhood yields (...) an account of human agency as co-constituted and freedom as interpersonally mediated and sustained. From this perspective, the proper goal for psychiatric medication is the removal of barriers to life-giving human connections; methods of care for persons in psychological distress may include medication, but they also require embodied personal encounter. (shrink)

In this important book, Susan Hurley sheds new light on consciousness by examining its relationships to action from various angles. She assesses the role of agency in the unity of a conscious perspective, and argues that perception and action are more deeply interdependent than we usually assume. A standard view conceives perception as input from world to mind and action as output from mind to world, with the serious business of thought in between. Hurley criticizes this picture, and considers (...) how the interdependence of perceptual experience and agency at the personal level (of mental contents and norms) may emerge from the subpersonal level (of underlying causal processes and complex dynamic feedback systems). Her two-level view has wide implications, for topics that include self-consciousness, the modularity of mind, and the relations of mind to world. The self no longer lurks hidden somewhere between perceptual input and behavioral output, but reappears out in the open, embodied and embedded in its environment. Hurley traces these themes from Kantian and Wittgensteinian arguments through to intriguing recent work in neuropsychology and in dynamic systems approaches to the mind, providing a bridge from mainstream philosophy to work in other disciplines. Consciousness in Action is unique in the range of philosophical and scientific work it draws on, and in the deep criticism it offers of centuries-old habits of thought. (shrink)

Background: Hospitals are experiencing an estimated 16.5% turnover rate of registered nurses costing from $44,380 - $63,400 per nurse—an estimated $4.21 to $6.02 million financial loss annually for hospitals in the United States of America. Attrition of all nurses is costly. Most past research has focused on the new graduate nurse with little focus on the mid-career nurse. Attrition of mid-career nurses is a loss for the profession now and into the future. Research objective: The purpose of the study was (...) to explore relationships of professional values orientation, career development, job satisfaction, and intent to stay in recently hired mid-career and early-career nurses in a large hospital system. Research design: A descriptive correlational study of personal and professional factors on job satisfaction and retention was conducted. Participants and research context: A convenience sample of nurses from a mid-sized hospital in a metropolitan area in the Southwestern United States was recruited via in-house email. Sixty-seven nurses met the eligibility criteria and completed survey documents. Ethical considerations: Institutional Review Board approval was obtained from both the university and hospital system. Findings: Findings indicated a strong correlation between professional values and career development and that both job satisfaction and career development correlated positively with retention. Discussion: Newly hired mid-career nurses scored higher on job satisfaction and planned to remain in their jobs. This is important because their expertise and leadership are necessary to sustain the profession into the future. Conclusion: Nurse managers should be aware that when nurses perceive value conflicts, retention might be adversely affected. The practice environment stimulates nurses to consider whether to remain on the job or look for other opportunities. (shrink)

The term conceptual simulation refers to a type of everyday reasoning strategy commonly called “what if” reasoning. It has been suggested in a number of contexts that this type of reasoning plays an important role in scientific discovery; however, little direct evidence exists to support this claim. This article proposes that conceptual simulation is likely to be used in situations of informational uncertainty, and may be used to help scientists resolve that uncertainty. We conducted two studies to investigate the relationship (...) between conceptual simulation and informational uncertainty. Study 1 was an in vivo study of expert scientists; the results suggest that scientists do use conceptual simulation in situations of informational uncertainty, and that they use conceptual simulation to make inferences from their data using the analogical reasoning process of alignment by similarity detection. Study 2 experimentally manipulated experts' level of uncertainty and provides further support for the hypothesis that conceptual simulation is more likely to be used in situations of informational uncertainty. Finally, we discuss the relationship between conceptual simulation and other types of reasoning using qualitative mental models. (shrink)

How do our personalities and mental processes, our " states of consciousness" , derive from a gray mass of tissue with the consistency of a soft-boiled egg? How can mere molecules constitute an idea or emotion? Some of the most important questions we can ask are about our own consciousness. Our personalities, our individuality, indeed our whole reason for living, lie in the brain and in the elusive phenomenon of consciousness it generates. Thinkers in many disciplines have long struggled with (...) such questions, often in ways that have seemed incompatible, if not downright contradictory. Philosophers have meditated on the subjective experience of consciousness, with little attention to the physical realm, while scientists have sought to establish a causal relation between brain function and mind, often ignoring the qualitative aspects of experience. In Journey to the Centers of the Mind, neuroscientist Susan Greenfield offers an intriguing, unifying theory of consciousness that encompasses both phenomenological mental events and physical aspects of brain function. Using information gathered from clues in animal behavior, human brain damage, computer science, neurobiology, and philosophy, Greenfield offers a " concentric theory" of consciousness, and shows how certain events in the brain correspond to our qualitative experience of the world. Demonstrating the ways in which we can interpret the experience of consciousness in terms of interactions among neurons, she explores how much we can learn by continuing to find the links between our physical and mental inner worlds. (shrink)

A critical review of four recent works that reflect current conflicts and tensions among feminists regarding new reproductive technologies: In Search of Parenthood by Judith Lasker and Susan Borg; Ethics and Human Reproduction by Christine Overall; Made to Order, Patricia Spallone and Deborah Steinberg, eds. and Reproductive Technologies: Gender, Motherhood and Medicine, Michelle Stanworth, ed. Their positions are evaluated against the background of growing feminist dialogue about the future of reproduction and the bearing of reproductive innovations on such related (...) issues as racism, sexuality, motherhood and abortion. (shrink)

This article examines the historical construction of depression over about a hundred years, employing the social life of methods as an explanatory framework. Specifically, it considers how emerging methodologies in the measurement of psychological constructs contributed to changes in epistemological approaches to mental illness and created the conditions of possibility for major shifts in the construction of depression. While depression was once seen as a feature of psychotic personality, measurement technologies made it possible for it to be reconstructed as changeable (...) and treatable. Different types of scaling techniques (Likert versus dichotomous scales) enabled the separation of depressive personality from reactive depression, paving the way for measuring the severity and intensity of emotions. Techniques to test sensitivity to change provided a means of demonstrating the efficacy of new psychoactive drug treatments. Later, more advanced techniques of precision scaling enabled the management of a new measurement problem, clinician unreliability, associated with the growing number of professionals involved in mental health care. Through statistical management of unreliability, the construct of depression has dramatically reduced over this period from hundreds of questionnaire items to potentially just two. Exploring the history of depression through this lens produces an alternative narrative to those that have emerged as a result of medicalisation and the actions of individuals and pressure groups. (shrink)

Respect for patient autonomy is a central principle of medical ethics. However, there are important unresolved questions about the characteristics of an autonomous decision, and whether some autonomous preferences should be subject to more scrutiny than others. In this paper, we consider whether _inappropriately adaptive preferences_—preferences that are based on and that may perpetuate social injustice—should be categorised as autonomous in a way that gives them normative authority. Some philosophers have argued that inappropriately adaptive preferences do not have normative authority, (...) because they are only a reflection of a person’s social context and not of their true self. Under this view, medical professionals who refuse to carry out actions which are based on inappropriately adaptive preferences are not in fact violating their patient’s autonomy. However, we argue that it is very difficult to articulate a systematic and principled distinction between normal autonomous preferences and inappropriately adaptive preferences, especially if this distinction needs to be useful for clinicians in real-life situations. This makes it difficult to argue that inappropriately adaptive preferences are straightforwardly non-autonomous. Given this problem, we argue that there are significant theoretical issues with contemporary understandings of autonomy in bioethics. We discuss what this might mean for the practice of medicine and for medical ethics education. (shrink)

Studies of native syntactic processing often target phrase structure violations that do not occur in natural production. In contrast, this study examines how variation in basic word order is processed, looking specifically at structures traditionally labelled as violations but that do occur naturally. We examined Swedish verb-second and verb-third word order processing in adult native Swedish speakers, manipulating sentence-initial adverbials in acceptability judgements, in simultaneously recorded event-related potentials to visually presented sentences and in a written sentence completion task. An initial (...) corpus study showed that the adverbials differ in frequency in fronted position, and although all occur mainly with V2 word order, kanske occurs more frequently with V3 in natural production than both idag and hemma. The experimental results reflected these patterns such that V2 sentences were overall more frequently produced and were deemed more acceptable than V3 sentences. The ERP results consisted of a biphasic N400/P600 response to V3 word order that indicated effects of word retrieval and sentence reanalysis. We also found consistent effects of adverbials. As predicted, V3 was produced more frequently and judged as more acceptable in Kanske sentences than in sentences with the other two adverbials. The ERP analyses showed stronger effects for idag and hemma with V3, especially regarding the P600. The results suggest that the naturally occurring word order ‘violation’, V3 with kanske, is processed differently than V3 with other adverbials where the V2 norm is stronger. Moreover, these patterns are related to individuals’ own production patterns. Overall, the results suggest a more varied native word order processing than previously reported. (shrink)

Wollstonecraft's early works express a coherent view of moral psychology, moral education and moral philosophy which guides the construction of her early fiction and educational works. It includes a valuable account of the relation between reason and feeling in moral development. Failure to recognize the complexity and coherence of the view and unhistorical readings have led to mistaken criticisms of Wollstonecraft's position. Part I answers these criticisms; Part II describes and textually supports her view.

The Covid‐19 pandemic has exposed four myths in bioethics. First, the flood of bioethics publications on how to allocate scarce resources in crisis conditions has assumed authorities would declare the onset of crisis standards of care, yet few have done so. This leaves guidelines in limbo and patients unprotected. Second, the pandemic's realities have exploded traditional boundaries between clinical, research, and public health ethics, requiring bioethics to face the interdigitation of learning, doing, and allocating. Third, without empirical research, the success (...) or failure of ethics guidelines remains unknown, demonstrating that crafting ethics guidance is only the start. And fourth, the pandemic's glaring health inequities require new commitment to learn from communities facing extraordinary challenges. Without that new learning, bioethics methods cannot succeed. The pandemic is a wake‐up call, and bioethics must rise to the challenge. (shrink)

This paper proceeds from a sense of dissatisfaction with much of current moral argument about defence policy, in particular the role of nuclear weapons. Discussions of the moral issues tend to divide into two distinct kinds of writing: on the one hand, impassioned calls to action based on and allied with equally impassioned moral exhortations; and on the other hand, usually in academic contexts, meticulous analyses and comparisons of aspects of nuclear policy with paradigm cases of acknowledged moral categories or (...) requirements, with the object of showing by analogy with these that the particular aspect of policy under discussion is or is not morally wrong. My unease is caused by the fact that, while it is difficult not to respond to the impassioned style of argument, as one recognizes in it a practical and moral urgency which our situation seems to demand, nevertheless it plainly appeals only to those already convinced of its conclusions. The unconverted tend to regard it with suspicion or disdain, for in contrast to the analytical style, which manifestly seeks to compel the intellect, the impassioned style seems to make its effect by stirring the emotions as much as if not instead of by compelling the intellect. On the other hand the analytical style can seem curiously irrelevant, even trivial, in relation to the issue. For instance, it has been argued that since: nuclear war is a moral disaster; deterrence is threatening or intending to wage nuclear war; it is wrong to threaten or intend to do something wrong; therefore: deterrence is wrong, and should be abandoned. It is hard to believe that defenders of deterrence as the cornerstone of defence policy are going to be persuaded by such an argument to abandon their advocation of it, if only because the argument totally ignores the object of deterrence. (shrink)

This note discusses some of the images and ideas that led to the depiction of Eros with the attributes of Herakles, an iconographical type that was developed and elaborated in the Hellenistic and Roman periods.Eros was not, in fact, the first to appropriate for himself the attributes of Herakles. From an early period popular imagination realised that even the mighty Herakles would occasionally be placed in a situation that lesser creatures could take advantage of. Before the Hellenistic period Kerkopes, satyrs (...) and goat-legged Pans made use of whatever opportunities there were to steal Herakles' attributes; thereafter these subhuman thieves appear to have been replaced by a group of Erotes or a single Eros. (shrink)

The more than fifty years of dialogue since Vatican II launched the Catholic Church into the ecumenical movement have resulted in significant convergence, but reception of these results remains slow and inconclusive despite the stunning success of the Joint Declaration on Justification signed in 1999. This presentation explores some of the challenges for reception within the ecclesial and social context of ecumenical relationships today and discusses why the ecumenical imperative is even more critical at this point in time. It also (...) suggests a model of ecclesiology for the reception of relationships of full communion. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Origins of the Meme Meme Do Memes Exist? Trouble with Analogies and Units What is a Meme? A New Replicator or Culture on a Leash? Do Memes have Memotypes? Old Genes, New Memes Religions, Cults, and Viral Information Human Evolution Consciousness, Creativity, and the Nature of Self Conclusion Postscript: Counterpoint References.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.1 (2002) 224-238 [Access article in PDF] Bookmarks A Hanging Judge Denis Dutton "CORNERING THE MARKET ON CHUTZPAH," blared the headline on one review, and in tone it wasn't alone. It's not often that a book by a public intellectual has received as much media attention—mostly vilification and scorn—as Richard A. Posner's Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline (Harvard University Press, $29.95). Three reasons for this (...) stand out. First, there's the sheer audacity of including a list of the top hundred public intellectuals, drawn from a larger list of 546 names. This invites endless dispute over how the list was generated, who is on it, who is left off, where each one stands, and why. Second, there is the fact that Posner has managed in the book to offend half of the public intellectuals you'd expect to be called on to review it—almost as though he made a list of potential reviewers and worked in a swipe at each. Finally, he has tapped into the deep antipathy humanist intellectuals have to seeing a beloved topic treated quantitatively, with statistics and applications of social and economic theory, replete with graphs and algebraic formulae. And after all, what topic is more beloved by the intellectuals than they themselves? That Posner would actually treat such important people as a demographic type, sorting them in terms of race, age, field, politics, sex—why, he even asks why so many are Jews. It's outrageous... and delicious.Definitions first. The idea of an intellectual, Posner says, should not be identified merely with having highbrow, cultivated tastes, being especially creative, or having high intelligence. All of these things are possible without being an intellectual, which Posner thinks ought to denote the application of the mind to "political matters in the broadest sense of that word, a sense that includes cultural matters when they are [End Page 224] viewed under the aspect of ideology, ethics, or politics (which may all be the same thing)." There is therefore a vague redundancy in the term "public intellectual," since the placing of ideas in a larger public context, acting as social critic, is what the intellectual most essentially does. In our age of vast communication media, it is also done con-spicuously in public, through op-eds, public radio interviews, and on TV clips with the regulation public-intellectual bookcase as a backdrop. This concern with larger moral issues means that for Posner paradigm individuals would therefore include the likes of John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, Hannah Arendt, Arthur Koestler, Edmund Wilson, Susan Sontag, and most powerfully in Posner's mind, George Orwell: people who write about literature, art, science, and so forth from a broadly political or ideological perspective. For example, when Allan Bloom writes about rock and roll, he is not doing so as a music critic but as a philosopher who sees it as a symptom and source of social degradation. That's echte public intellectual work (and rather bad work in this particular case, Posner believes). That it is done for a broader public is also a crux for Posner, who leaves omits John Rawls from his list, because as influential as Rawls is as a philosopher, he does not address a larger public in the way that Richard Rorty and Martha Nussbaum do.The decline referred to in Posner's title is a decline in the actual worth of public intellectuals' work, not in their media celebrity, which has grown roughly inversely to the value of what they do. This invidious situation has followed, in Posner's view, the proliferation of academics in the ranks of public intellectuals. From the nineteenth century, with such names as Thoreau, J. S. Mill, Herbert Spencer, Matthew Arnold, and Tocqueville, to well into the twentieth, with the likes of Max Eastman, Edmund Wilson, H. G. Wells, and Dwight Macdonald, the great tradition of public intellectuals had its life outside of universities. Although there remain nonacademic public intellectuals today—Susan Sontag, Roger Kimball, Tom Wolfe, Gore Vidal—they are a severely diminished species. Universities, which have expanded... (shrink)

How can an art practice based upon lens imaging help us to question landscape as a pictorial category fixed in space and time? This article proposes that we practise landscape as an ongoing process that always surpasses human spatial and temporal framing while enfolding the activity of the human within it. Starting with reference to a specific geographic, geological and environmental site, the article tracks a process of situated making using the smartphone camera as the fulcrum of a performative activity.

The biblical “historians,” perhaps more than their modern day counterparts, show history to be a messy, complicated affair. For all its ambivalence about power and human relationships, the book of Judges functions as a profoundly thoughtful foundation myth.

This paper uses two museum exhibitions to raise questions about how Hiroshima and Auschwitz are coped with in the present. The stake of the paper is to examine how it has been possible for different polities to come to terms with criminal pasts that should cause shame and guilt. The criminality of Auschwitz is established, but not that of Hiroshima. In the first instance, then, the paper establishes the extent to which the justifications for the bombing of Hiroshima were and (...) remain controversial. The second part of the paper compares debates around two exhibitions: the Hiroshima exhibition at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC and the exhibition ‘Extermination War: Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941–44’ which travelled through Germany and Austria in the late 1990s. (shrink)

Malebranche's metaphysics and the problem of human freedom -- God, order, and general volitions -- Arnauld and Malebranche on the power of the human intellect -- The cognitive faculties and the divine ideas -- Malebranche on free will and imminent causation.

This article explores the process of female self-fashioning in two previously neglected petitions dated 1786-87 by using signatures to analyse their texts and construct their contexts. In them, Helen Timberlake revises the account of frontier and Cherokee life her husband, Henry Timberlake, had published in his Memoirs. Her intense maternal voice, focused on loss, entangles her history with that of the Cherokee chief Ostenaco, providing a grounded but often untrue narrative of shared family life and a persona tailored to evoke (...) a history intertwined with that of George III. This article explores the mystery of Helen Timberlakes origins, while connecting the rhetoric of her petitions to the gendered emergence of sentimentalism, narratives of Indian captivity, and the historiography of ‘the Atlantic’. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant’s theory of imagination is a surprisingly fruitful nexus of explanation for the prima facie disparate characteristics of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), especially the sub-spectrum best characterized by the Sensory Integration (SI) and Intense World (IW) theories of ASD. According to the psychological theories that underpin these approaches to autism, upstream effects of sensory processing atypicalities explain a cascade of downstream effects that have been characterized in the diagnostic triad, e.g., poor sensory integration contributes to weak central coherence, which (...) in turn contributes to difficulty participating in a back and forth conversation. To see why Kant’s theory of imagination might be useful, consider that ASD is neither a sensory disorder nor an intellectual disorder per se. Cognitive dysfunction is a common comorbidity of ASD, not a characteristic of it. If we exclude sense and intellect, what’s left? According to Kant, imagination is a synthesizing faculty that mediates between sense and understanding. It does so by transforming intuition from the canonic and vital senses. The uses of imagination include our spatially formative, temporally associative, and communicatively affinitive production, where affinitive production includes sympathy and fantasy. Imagination is thus the faculty of sensory integration, embodied subjectivity, empathy, mindreading, and social cooperation. The wide range of how autism presents and how it is experienced can thus be understood in terms of the atypical development of specific functions of imagination. Kant’s theory of imagination provides a new perspective on how to organize our understanding of autism at the psychological level, one that makes sense of how some of the disparate characteristic phenomena of autism are systematically related and which might lead to novel predictions, research targets, or intervention recommendations. (shrink)

Mae Smethurst’s work has largely aimed to articulate nō theater in Western terms from their early roots, primarily through Aristotle’s On Tragedy. Her detailed examination of the shared structure of the content of these independent and superficially dissimilar arts reveals their mutual intelligibility and effectiveness through shared underlying universals. In this spirit, I outline how Zeami answers Plato’s first challenge to artistic performance, as expressed in Ion where Plato argues that rhapsody is not an art [techné] because it requires no (...) mastery. (Rhapsodes are instead vehicles of the divine.) This challenge to poetic performing arts, that is, to their claim to be arts at all, determines criteria by which we may judge any putative art, including sarugaku and its elevation to nōgaku. Though Zeami was unaware of Plato’s challenge, he nevertheless answers it in a way that brings Plato’s own assumptions and conceptual framework into relief. In this article I outline the first step of Zeami’s reply to Plato, how nō satisfies the criteria for mastery of a subject, with some help from zen master Dōgen. The focus of this article is twofold: 1) an examination of the ways Plato’s conception of a masterable subject entails metaphysical and epistemic tenets that may be revised or rejected in Buddhist tradition, and 2) a study of the means through which the sense of mindlessness that allegedly precludes rhapsody (and kamigakari) from qualifying as art (techné/michi) contrasts with the mushin and isshin of nō (and zazen). (shrink)

There are two truths in this world: one of the laboratory, and the other of the media. What people perceive as the truth is truer in a democracy than some grubby little experiment in a laboratory notebook.(1).

In response to Frontiers’ 2020 Call for Papers on “Stereotypes and Intercultural Relations: Interdisciplinary Integration, New Approaches, and New Contexts,” my paper integrates the scientific study of stereotypes with a literary-theatrical exploration of stereotyping. The focus is on Tibor Egervari’s post-Auschwitz adaptation of Shakespeare’s anti-Semitic comedy The Merchant of Venice, with a very brief look at his related work on Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and his 1998 collaboration with conductor Georg Tintner on a touring production of composer Viktor (...) Ullmann’s and librettist Peter Kien’s one-act opera, The Emperor of Atlantis, or Death’s Refusal, composed in the “model” concentration camp Terezín, in 1943–1944. Egervari’s theater art critically deconstructs what he calls “the Old Jew” stereotype in specific ways highly readable using the Stereotype Content Model and Behavior from Intergroup Affect and Stereotypes map. Theater performance can sometimes embody the forceful dynamic traced by the BIAS map, from cognition to affect to behavior. Egervari’s original adapation, which sets The Merchant of Venice in Auschwitz, reveals this dynamic clearly. My interdisciplinary study of Egervari’s theatrical-cultural work validates the SCM and BIAS map for literary studies and interprets the Shylock stereotype in the terms of those models and through the lens of Egervari’s anti-Nazi adaptation of Shakespeare’s Merchant. (shrink)