Since the Supreme Court of New Jersey decided the Quinlan case a quarter of a century ago, three American Supreme Court decisions and a host of state appellate decisions have addressed end-of-life issues. These decisions, as well as legislation addressing the same issues, have prompted a torrent of law journal articles analyzing every aspect of end-of-life law. In recent years, moreover, a number of law review articles, many published in this journal, have also specifically addressed legal issues raised by (...) palliative care. Much less is known in the United States, however, as to how other countries address these issues. Reflection on the experience and analysis of other nations may give Americans a better understanding of their own experience, as well as suggest improvements to their present way of dealing with the difficult problems in this area.This article offers a conceptual and comparative analysis of major legal issues relating to end-of-life treatment and to the treatment of pain in a number of countries. In particular, it focuses on the law of Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, Poland, France, the Netherlands, Germany, and Japan. (shrink)

Ju¨rgen Habermas has a familiar style of compatibilism to offer, according to which a person has free will insofar as that person responds appropriately to her reasons. But because of the ways in which Habermas understands reasons and causes, he sees a special objection to his style of compatibilism: it is not clear that our reasons can suitably cause our responses. This objection, however, takes us out of the realm of free will and into the realm of mental causation. In (...) this response to Habermas, I focus on the details of his style of compatibilism. I suggest that, while the basic picture is appealing, three key details of it are problematic. (shrink)

ExcerptHoratio is rarely thought of as a sovereign character in Hamlet. In fact, some Shakespearean commentators regard Horatio as a “nobody” or a “non-entity,” a poorly developed figure whose role in the play could have been replaced by other, more significant characters.1 However, reading Hamlet with Carl Schmitt's Hamlet or Hecuba allows Horatio to emerge as a pivotal figure inextricably bound to issues of sovereignty, succession, and representation. Contrary to many interpretations of Hamlet, which hastily designate Prince Fortinbras as the (...) sovereign of Denmark at the end of the play, it is actually Horatio who ends up as the most…. (shrink)

Analyses of environmental DNAs have provided tantalizing evidence for “rozellida” or “cryptomycota”, a clade of mostly undescribed and deeply diverging aquatic fungi. Here, we put cryptomycota into perspective through consideration of Rozella, the only clade member growing in culture. This is timely on account of the publication in Nature of the first images of uncultured cryptomycota from environmental filtrates, where molecular probes revealed non‐motile cyst‐like structures and motile spores, all lacking typical fungal chitinous cell walls. Current studies of Rozella can (...) complement these fragmentary observations from environmental samples. Rozella has a fungal‐specific chitin synthase and its resting sporangia have walls that appear to contain chitin. Cryptomycota, including Rozella, lack a cell wall when absorbing food but like some other fungi, they may have lost their “dinner jacket” through convergence. Rather than evolutionary intermediates, the cryptomycota may be strange, divergent fungi that evolved from an ancestor with a nearly complete suite of classical fungal‐specific characters. (shrink)

At the outset I would like to note how much I enjoyed working with Jacques, Sean, and Solanus on this year-long project. This session today is the culmination of our combined efforts, and with Wayne – my longstanding mentor and friend – here everything has come full circle. Indeed, I am honored today to present a paper on The Rediscovered Life. As we have already heard, Jacques’ research indicates this vita was authored sometime between 1232-1239. This date alone may be (...) sufficient to assign hermeneutical priority to The Rediscovered Life when discussing the question of Franciscan theory and praxis in the 1230s. Such a claim is confirmed, however, not simply by chronology, but by the author’s intent, liturgical... (shrink)

Background: Rumination, a tendency to focus on negative self-related thoughts, is a central symptom of depression. Studying the self-related aspect of such symptoms is challenging because of the need to distinguish self effects from the emotional content of task stimuli. This study employed an emotionally neutral self-related paradigm to investigate possible altered self-processing in depression and its link to rumination. Methods: People with major depressive disorder (n = 25) and controls (n = 25) underwent task-based electro-encephalogram recording. We studied late (...) event-related potentials, along with low-frequency oscillatory power. We compared electroencephalogram metrics between groups and correlated them with depressive symptoms and reported rumination. Results: Participants with major depressive disorder displayed a difference in late positive potentials across frontocentral electrodes between self-related and non-self-related conditions. We found no such difference in controls. The magnitude of this difference was positively correlated with depressive symptoms and reported rumination. Participants with major depressive disorder also had elevated theta oscillation power at central electrodes in self-related conditions, a finding that we did not see in controls. Limitations: Patients with major depressive disorder were medicated at the time of the study. The group studied was primarily female, so the observed effects may have been sex-specific. Conclusion: Rumination appears to be linked to altered self-related processing in depression, independent of stimuli-related emotional confounds. This connection between self-related processing and depression may point to a self disorder as a core component of depression. (shrink)

A common view in face recognition research holds that there is a stored representation specific to each known face. It is also posited that semantic or memory-based information cannot influence low-level face processing. The two experiments reported in this article investigate the nature of this representation and the flow of face information processing. Participants had to search for a particular primed face among other faces. In Experiment 1, the search was done in a context where distractors had either a different (...) degree of fame or the same degree of fame. In Experiment 2, the target face was primed either with semantic information or without any information. Both experiments demonstrated that increasing the display set size lengthened face detection time. However, the lengthening was a function of face fame. The search context also had an effect on the slope of the famous face detection. The results are explained in terms of the idea that face representations are reconstructed and that high- and low-level information are integrated into the processing. The integration process is not a conscious one. (shrink)

The nationally-famous advocate of physician-assisted suicide did not die by his own hand. Dr. Jack Kevorkian died the old-fashioned way in America: in a hospital, with multiple disorders undercutting his life. Kevorkian took up interest in assisted suicide early in his medical career, and he wanted prisoners on death row to volunteer for experiments just before their execution. Kevorkian saw individual consent as the wheel, axle, and grease for all decisions in these matters. He helped many people die, but it (...) is unclear what moral principle guided his decisions to say yes and no to requests for help in dying. His spree in helping people die came to an end, when he himself injected a man with a lethal substance. Because of his single-minded focus on the value of assisted suicide and experimentation before execution, he had little impact on the broader ethical analysis of assisted-suicide and the rights of prisoners. He leaves little legacy in ethics for the analysis of assisted-suicide or in vivo experimentation. (shrink)

The spectacular success of Empire and Multitude has brought Antonio Negri's writing to a new and wider audience. Negri'as work is singular in its depth and expression. It can be difficult to grasp the complexity of his ideas as they are rooted in the history of philosophy. This book offers an introduction to his thinking and is ideal for readers who want to come to grips with his key themes. Contributors include Pierre Macherey, Daniel Bensai;d, Charles Wolfe, Alex Callinicos, Miguel (...) Vatter, Jason Read, Alberto Toscano, Mamut Mutman, Ted Stolze, and Judith Revel. Written with dynamism and originality, the book will appeal to anyone interested in the evolution of Negri's thought, and especially to students of political philosophy, international studies, and literary theory. This book is the sequel to The Philosophy of Antonio Negri, Volume One: Resistance in Practice , but can be read entirely independently. (shrink)

This paper reviews Duane Friesen’s version of pacifism, particularly his realist approach, his demand for political engagement, and his proactive peacemaking stance. Second, it demonstrates his connections with process thought, especially around notions of ordered novelty and contrasts, the nonviolence of God, and eschatological openness. It provides three areas of critique and suggests alternatives, specifically concerning Friesen’s Christology, his notion ofrevelation, and his commitment to religious pluralism. This paper offers a form of pacifism for radical mainline Christians who would otherwise (...) be hesitant concerning some of Friesen’s theological presuppositions. The paper endeavors to show Friesen’s general compatibility with process philosophical commitments, thus furthering the conversation with process theologians who remain skeptical of pacifist commitments. (shrink)

I propose a critique of Heidegger’s poetics, and show that poetic critique of Heidegger is also philosophical critique on Lévinasian lines. I identify an obsessional erasure of absence in Heidegger’s poetics, a neglect of the immemorial other. Lévinas frames this critique through Valéry’s Eupalinos, a dialogue of an immemorial Socrates, in Limbo after his own death, praising architecture over his own, lost, philosophy. Separating poetics from ontology, Lévinas’s immemorial acknowledges irrecuperable traces, murmurs, or echoes of alterity; poetry, as commemoration, marks (...) the distance between loss and absence. This contrasts with Heidegger’s eulogy of Max Scheler and its echo in the Gedachtes, metaphysical and poetic monuments that seek an incompletable divorce from sensation and persons. I present Mark Doty’s elegy Atlantis as an illustration of Lévinas’s central philosophical critique of Heidegger’s thinking of death and persons. Atlantis embodies the immemorial; architecture alive with sound, an impossible city populated by absence. (shrink)

BackgroundA recent upsurge in nature-based exercise research demonstrates the potential added benefits of exercising in this context compared to more urban ones. Yet there is a lack of qualitative research investigating the lived experiences of those who participate in nature-based exercise events.ObjectiveTo explore the lived experience of individuals who were first-time participants in a nature-based running event.MethodSix participants who completed the Run Forrest trail run for the first time were individually interviewed. Semi-structured interviews were devised, and participants were invited to (...) talk about their experiences of running in the event. Interviews were analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis.ResultsFollowing data analysis, two superordinate themes were constructed to resemble participant experiences. “Maintaining good health is vital” reflected participants’ personal theory of health and their perceived benefits of exercise. “Nature as a special place” reflected the atmospheric characteristics of the event, including the pre-event set-up and the actual running event itself.ConclusionAnalysis suggests that participants considered the event and natural environment to provide unique value adding opportunities that encouraged positive experiences. These results also reaffirm the positive benefits associated with nature-based exercise, including potential benefits to individual wellbeing. Further research in this context may strengthen our collective understanding regarding individual motivation towards such events. (shrink)

The book is primarily an essay on the epistemology of the sort of armchair knowledge that we can hope to achieve in philosophy. The possibility of such knowledge is not to be explained by reinterpreting philosophical questions as questions about words or concepts. Although there are philosophical questions about words and concepts, most philosophical questions are not about words or concepts: they are, just as they seem to be, about the things, many of them independent of us, to which the (...) words or concepts refer. Nor is our linguistic or conceptual competence the basis for our philosophical knowledge; such competence merely …. (shrink)

This book is a practical guide for K-12 educators as well as parents of students who are identified as being in the top academic percentiles of the population.

ABSTRACT Historically, many philosophers and social scientists have sharply distinguished between “normative” and “empirical” forms of inquiry. In response, some have called for a re-engagement of these forms of inquiry. Here I offer a novel way of justifying such re-engagement in democratic theory. Drawing on classical pragmatism, I argue that normative democratic theory is a form of practical reasoning, hence inevitably involves empirical inquiry. Thus, in reasoning about what democratic processes ought to look like, we should avoid sharply distinguishing normative (...) from empirical forms of reasoning, just as we should avoid sharply distinguishing theoretical from practical forms of reasoning. (shrink)

Psychology training programs emphasize competencies like professional behavior, interpersonal skills, and emotional intelligence. Some students, known as students with problems of professional competence (SPPC), struggle in these areas. This study explored SPPC characteristics and educator experiences in managing them through semi-structured interviews with twelve Australian psychology educators. Thematic analysis revealed that SPPC often struggle with professional attitudes, feedback integration, reflective skills, and mental health, placing demands on resources and contributing to educator stress. The role of educators as gatekeepers, assessors, and (...) evaluators also raises concerns about maintaining ethical standards. Findings highlight the need for better understanding, support, and strategies for managing SPPC to uphold ethical standards. (shrink)

Rogers & McClelland (R&M) have provided an impressive outline of the capabilities of a class of multi-layered perceptrons that mimic many aspects of human knowledge acquisition. Despite this success, in the literature several basic issues are raised and concerns are expressed. Indeed, the problems are so acute that a different way of thinking is called for. In this commentary it is suggested that rational models approach provides a promising alternative.