A romance with the concept of community has long characterized activist healthcare movements and has more recently been taken up by academic medical centers as a sign of virtuous civic engagement. During the late 1960s, the word community, as deployed by administrators at prestigious AMCs, became increasingly politicized, commodified and racialized. Here, we analyze how the concept of community was initially framed in the 1963 Community Mental Health Centers Act, the first legislation to establish community mental health centers in America. (...) We then examine the Health Policy Advisory Center’s analysis of the proposed Washington Heights Community Mental Health Center to be run by Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, an institution that had historically neglected residents’ health needs. Community pushback against Columbia’s plan to build a multi-block center, amplified by medical students and residents critical of the professionalized community mental health movement, escalated in the late 1960s, leading the city’s planning board to reject Columbia and approve a community council’s plan for preventive and rehabilitative local services. These conflicting overtones of “community” still inform understandings of the word in medicine today; thus, a critical historical analysis of “community” is warranted. (shrink)

Environmental ethicists have frequently criticized ancient Greek philosophy as anti-environmental for a view of philosophy that is counterproductive to environmental ethics and a view of the world that puts nature at the disposal of people. This provocative collection of original essays reexamines the views of nature and ecology found in the thought of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and Plotinus. Recognizing that these thinkers were not confronted with the environmental degradation that threatens contemporary philosophers, the contributors to this book find that (...) the Greeks nevertheless provide an excellent foundation for a sound theory of environmentalism. (shrink)

This is a fully revised edition of one of the most successful volumes in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought series. Incorporating extensive updates to the editorial apparatus, including the introduction, suggestions for further reading, and footnotes, this third edition of More's Utopia has been comprehensively re-worked to take into account scholarship published since the second edition in 2002. The vivid and engaging translation of the work itself by Robert M. Adams includes all the ancillary materials (...) by More's fellow humanists that, added to the book at his own request, collectively constitute the first and best interpretive guide to Utopia. Unlike other teaching editions of Utopia, this edition keeps interpretive commentary - whether editorial annotations or the many pungent marginal glosses that are an especially attractive part of the humanist ancillary materials - on the page they illuminate instead of relegating them to endnotes, and provides students with a uniquely full and accessible experience of More's perennially fascinating masterpiece. (shrink)

A child’s death is a profound loss for mothers and affects hundreds of thousands of women. Mothers report inconsolable and progressive grief that is distinct from depression and impacts daily emotions and functions. The brain mechanisms responsible for this relatively common and profound mental health problem are unclear, hampering its clinical recognition and care. In an initial exploration of this condition, we used resting state functional MRI (fMRI) scans to examine functional connectivity in key circuits, and task-based fMRI to examine (...) brain network activity in grieving mothers in response to pictures of their deceased child and as well as recognizable deceased celebrities and unfamiliar individuals. We compared nine mothers who had lost an adult child and aged-matched control mothers with a living child of a similar age. Additionally, we collected diffusion imaging scans to probe structural connectivity and complemented the imaging studies with neuropsychological assessments. Increased functional activation in Ventral Attention/Salience Networks accompanied by a reduced activation in the medial prefrontal cortex in response to the deceased child’s picture robustly distinguished the grieving mothers from controls. Heightened resting-state functional connectivity between the paraventricular thalamic nucleus (PVT) and the amygdala distinguished the grieving mothers from the controls and correlated with subjective grief severity. Structurally, maternal grief and its severity were associated with alterations in corticolimbic white matter tracts. Finally, grieving mothers performed worse than controls on neuropsychological tests of learning, memory, and executive function, linked with grief severity. Reduced activation in cortical regions inhibiting emotions and changes in the PVT circuitry—a region involved in long-term emotional memories and decision making under conflict—distinguish grieving mothers from controls. Notably, the magnitude of neurobiological changes correlates with the subjective severity of grief. Together, these new discoveries delineate a prevalent and under-recognized mental health syndrome and chart a path for its appreciation and care. (shrink)

The authors conducted a baseline survey of baccalaureate and graduate degree health humanities programs in the United States and Canada. The object of the survey was to formally assess the current state of the field, to gauge what kind of resources individual programs are receiving, and to assess their self-identified needs to become or remain programmatically sustainable, including their views on the potential benefits of program accreditation. A 56-question baseline survey was sent to 111 institutions with baccalaureate programs and 20 (...) institutions with graduate programs. Respondents were asked about three areas: (1) program administration (managing unit, paid director, faculty lines, paid staff, funding sources); (2) educational program (curricular structure, CIP code usage, completion rates); and (3) views on accreditation for the field. A clear majority of respondents agreed that some form of accreditation or consultation service could address resource and sustainability issues. Overall, the survey responses to staffing, curricular structure, and support suggest the need for developing a sustainable infrastructure for health humanities. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Global biodiversity declines are increasingly recognized as profound ecological and social crises. In areas subject to colonialization, these declines have advanced in lockstep with settler colonialism and imposition of centralized resource management by settler states. Many have suggested that resurgent Indigenous-led governance systems could help arrest these trends while advancing effective and socially just approaches to environmental interactions that benefit people and places alike. However, how dominant management and conservation approaches might be decolonized (i.e., how their underlying colonial structure (...) might be addressed, transformed, and replaced) is not always clear. Here, we describe a ‘Decolonial Model of Environmental Management and Conservation’ as an alternative paradigm to dominant approaches of conservation and management. The tenets of the model describe characteristics that might be expected of decolonized management, contrasted with those of dominant state-led approaches such as those embedded in the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation. The model does not prescribe how Indigenous governments or communities ought to govern their own territories, but instead offers insights into how external management and conservation agencies and practitioners might support (or stop impeding) Indigenous-led governance. We illustrate the model with a conservation ‘bright spot’: grizzly bear stewardship in the area now referred to as the Great Bear Rainforest in British Columbia, Canada, with a focus on work led by or in collaboration with, and within the territories of, the Haíɫzaqv, Kitasoo/xai’xais, Nuxalk, and Wuikinuxv First Nations. While acknowledging the important context-specific variability among place-based management and conservation applications, we also discuss the model’s broader applicability. (shrink)

It is commonly supposed that metaphysical modal claims are to be evaluated with respect to a single domain of possible worlds: a claim is metaphysically necessary just in case it is true in every possible world, and metaphysically possible just in case it is true in some possible world. We argue that the standard understanding is incorrect; rather, whether a given claim is metaphysically necessary or possible is relative to which world is indicatively actual. We motivate our view by attention (...) to discussions in Salmon 1989 and Fine 2005, in which various data are taken to support rejecting the transitivity of accessibility and modal monism ; we argue that relativized metaphysical modality can accommodate these data compatible with both standard modal logic and modal monism. Noting an analogy with two-dimensional semantics, we argue that metaphysical modality has a complex structure, reflecting what is counterfactually possible, relative to each indicatively actual world. In arguing for the need for relativization, we are broadly on the same side as Crossley and Humberstone and Davies and Humberstone ; our contribution here is, first, to offer distinctively metaphysical reasons for relativization, and second, to show that relativization can be incorporated in ways minimally departing from standard modal logic. (shrink)

Recent research on the semantics and pragmatics of slurs has offered insight into several important facts concerning their meaning and use. However, prior work has unfortunately been restricted primarily to considerations of slurs that typically target females, homosexuals, and African Americans. This is problematic because such a narrowly focused attention to slurs in prior work has left theorizing of how slurs generally function relatively uninformed by facts of actual language use. As a result, theoretical accounts of slurs that have so (...) far been proposed have largely failed to accurately reflect actual usage, account for the empirical findings about slurs and general pejoratives from the social sciences, and offer any informative predictions to help guide future research. At this time more empirically oriented homework on the variety of ways that different slurs have been used in different cases would be helpful for theorists to consider so that they can proceed to develop more nuanced and empirically informed theories about slurs, their usage, and their effects. Accordingly, since no account of slurs for Italian Americans has so far been offered, this article provides a systematic and empirically informed analysis of slurs for Italian Americans that accounts for both their derogatory and appropriative use. Further, this article demonstrates that the family resemblance account of slurs maintained here has major advantages over previous accounts insofar as it is flexible yet robust enough to accommodate both the derogatory and appropriative use of slurs, can explain many of the psychological effects that slurs actually have on both their users and targets, and is more in accord with the real rather than ideal nature of our organic human psychology. (shrink)

Are racial slurs always offensive and are racial stereotypes always negative? How, if at all, are racial slurs and stereotypes different and unequal for members of different races? Questions like these and others about slurs and stereotypes have been the focus of much research and hot debate lately, and in a recent article Embrick and Henricks (2013) aimed to address some of the aforementioned questions by investigating the use of racial slurs and stereotypes in the workplace. Embrick and Henricks (2013) (...) drew upon the empirical data they collected at a baked goods company in the southwestern United States to argue that racial slurs and stereotypes function as symbolic resources that exclude minorities but not whites from opportunities or resources and that racial slurs and stereotypes are necessarily considered as negative or derogatory irrespective of their particular context of use (pp. 197–202). They thus proposed an account of slurs and stereotypes that supports the context-insensitive position of Fitten (1993) and Hedger (2013) yet challenges the context-sensitive position of Kennedy (2002) and Croom (2011). In this article I explicate the account of racial slurs and stereotypes provided by Embrick and Henricks (2013), outline 8 of their main claims, and then critically evaluate these claims by drawing upon recent empirical evidence on racial slurs (both in-group and out-group uses) and stereotypes (for both whites and blacks) to point out both strengths and weaknesses of their analysis. Implications of the present analysis for future work on slurs and stereotypes will also be discussed. (shrink)

We present evidence indicating new individual differences with people's intuitions about the relation of determinism to freedom and moral responsibility. We analysed participants' written explanations of why a person acted. Participants offered one of either 'decision' or 'causal' based explanations of behaviours in some paradigmatic cases. Those who gave causal explanations tended to have more incompatibilist intuitions than those who gave decision explanations. Importantly, the affective content of a scenario influenced the type of explanation given. Scenarios containing highly affective actions (...) (e.g. murder) tended to generate more decision explanations than scenarios with low affective content (e.g. cheating on taxes). These results give important clues about the proximal processes generating some intuitions about free will and moral responsibility. (shrink)

Welcome to this special issue of Language Sciences on slurs. The collection in this issue consists of 21 original research articles from seasoned scholars and exceptional students across the humanities and social sciences. These scholars come from backgrounds in linguistics, anthropology, philosophy, psychology, and sociology, and here they investigate the use of slurs in a variety of natural languages, including English, Croatian, Hebrew, Korean, and Portuguese. -/- The topic of focus for this special issue has not only remained controversial and (...) relatively unexplored in academic publications, but has also largely been discussed in published work by privileged groups that lack practical experience of the variety of ways that slurs are actually used in contemporary life. This has resulted in mostly unseasoned speculations and one-sided discussions about slurs that do not offer genuine insight into the various ways that they are actually used and that does not help advance further research on the topic. Peer-review and citation practices in philosophy have been especially poor, leaving many minority groups without voice or proper credit for their original work. So with an opportunity to edit this special issue on slurs I felt it important to include contributions from a wide variety of demographics and disciplinary perspectives, and that each article be carefully peer-reviewed by an average of three anonymous reviewers. Scholars from different disciplines were encouraged to read widely, become familiar with each other’s work, and cite appropriately. This required an incredible effort and much patience from all involved, including authors, reviewers, and editors. But as a result this special issue provides a uniquely rigorous and interdisciplinary collection of articles from a wide variety of perspectives on a timely issue that has for far too long been neglected. -/- The aim for this special issue is not only to enrich our understanding of the meaning and use of slurs in natural language more specifically, but to further broaden our understanding of the meaning and use of natural language more generally by carefully considering, for instance, how language can carry such affective force, involve stereotypes of typical targets, and be used derogatorily or non-derogatorily depending upon the context and agents involved. The articles included in this collection explore these issues and much more, presenting new empirical findings and critical discussion that is sure to advance further fruitful work in the field. -/- I am honored to have the opportunity to provide a high quality and inclusive forum for discussion on slurs that will be of interest to lay readers, students, and seasoned scholars alike, and sincerely thank everyone involved for their thoughtful contributions to this special issue. (shrink)

Monica Colvin-Adams,1 Nonyelum Harcourt,1 Robert LeDuc,2 Ganesh Raveendran,1 Yassir Sonbol,3 Robert Wilson,1 Daniel Duprez11Cardiovascular Division, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA; 2Division of Biostatistics University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA; 3Cardiovascular Division, St Luke's Hospital System, Sugar Land, TX, USAObjective: Arterial elasticity is a functional biomarker that has predictive value for cardiovascular morbidity and mortality in nontransplant populations. There is little information regarding arterial elasticity in heart transplant recipients. This study aimed to characterize small and large artery elasticity in (...) heart transplant recipients in comparison with an asymptomatic population free of overt cardiovascular disease. A second goal was to identify demographic and clinical factors associated with arterial elasticity in this unique population.Methods: Arterial pulse waveform was registered noninvasively at the radial artery in 71 heart transplant recipients between 2008 and 2010. SAEs and LAEs were derived from diastolic pulse contour analysis. Comparisons were made to a healthy cohort of 1,808 participants selected from our prevention clinic database. Multiple regression analyses were performed to evaluate associations between risk factors and SAE and LAE within the heart transplant recipients.Results: LAE and SAE were significantly lower in heart transplant recipients than in the normal cohort. Female sex and history of ischemic cardiomyopathy were significantly associated with reduced LAE and SAE. Older age and the presence of moderate cardiac allograft vasculopathy were also significantly associated with reduced SAE. Transplant duration was associated with increased SAE.Conclusion: Heart transplants are associated with peripheral endothelial dysfunction and arterial stiffness, as demonstrated by a significant reduction in SAE and LAE when compared with a healthy population. Furthermore, cardiac allograft vasculopathy is associated with a significant reduction in SAE, suggesting a potential use in screening heart transplant recipients at risk for developing this complication.Keywords: heart transplant, endothelial function, arterial elasticity, cardiac allograft vasculopathy. (shrink)

This book explores how Modernist movements all across the Mediterranean basin differed from those of other regions. The chapters show how the political and economic turmoil of a period marked by world war, revolution, decolonization, nationalism, and the rapid advance of new technologies compelled artists, writers, and other intellectuals to create a new hybrid Mediterranean Modernist aesthetic which sought to balance the tensions between local and foreign, tradition and innovation, and colonial and postcolonial.

In a recent study on indirect reports published in Journal of Pragmatics, Capone (2010) points out how several leading pragmatic theorists have recently argued that utterance interpretation incorporates societal information such that the final result of semantic and pragmatic interpretation takes sociocultural defaults into account (e.g., Jaszczolt, 2005a). Croom (2013) for one has pointed out how different in-group and out-group speakers have in fact used slurs in different ways, and further suggests that several salient cultural markers can aid in the (...) interpretation of whether a slur is being used derogatorily or nonderogatorily in a given context (p. 200). Thus, for pragmatic theorists concerned with the semantics and pragmatics of slurs more specifically, several highly important yet currently unexplored questions include the following: Are racial slurs always used to express offense, and are racial stereotypes always concerned with negative characteristics? How might the stereotypical features of members that a slur typically targets influence the meaning that slur communicates in context, and how might racial slurs and stereotypes differentially affect members of different races? Concerned with such questions, Embrick and Henricks (2013) recently argued that racial slurs and stereotypes function as symbolic resources that exclude nonwhite or non-European American minorities, but not whites or European Americans, from opportunities or resources, and so are necessarily negative or derogatory irrespective of the particular context of their use (pp. 197–202). They accordingly advocate an account of racial slurs and stereotypes that is consonant with the context-insensitive accounts of Fitten (1993) and Hedger (2013), yet dissonant with the context-sensitive accounts of Kennedy (2002) and Croom (2011). The purpose of this chapter is to first briefly explicate the context-insensitive and context-sensitive accounts of racial slurs and stereotypes, consider reasons for why issues concerning the semantics and pragmatics of slurs have often appealed to stereotypes and stereotypical features, and then critically evaluate the main claims that Embrick and Henricks (2013) recently proposed in support of their context-insensitive account by drawing upon empirical evidence on (in-group and out-group uses of) racial slurs and stereotypes (for European Americans and ­African Americans) from recent research in linguistics, sociology, and psychology. The chapter concludes by discussing implications of the present findings for future work in pragmatics on racial slurs and stereotypes. (shrink)

Our amorous and erotic experiences do not simply bring us pleasure; they shape our very identities, our ways of relating to ourselves, each other and our shared world. This volume reflects on some of our most prevalent assumptions relating to identity, the body, monogamy, libido, sexual identity, seduction, fidelity, orgasm, and more.The book covers common conflicts and confusions and includes work by established scholars and innovative new thinkers. Philosophically challenging but highly readable, the volume is ideal for a wide range (...) of courses on love and sex, including those taught in philosophy and gender studies. (shrink)

Does martial arts practice contribute to psychological well-being in professional martial artists? If so, what are the specific ways that martial arts practice accomplishes this? It has been a long-standing and widely held belief that martial arts practice can contribute to psychological well-being, however, there has been a lack of empirical research in the psychological literature focused on investigating the details of this hypothesis. The purpose of this research is therefore to investigate the impact of a paradigmatic martial arts practice—shadowboxing—on (...) the psychological well-being of professional martial artists. In this article I present the results from an original empirical study on professional Muay Thai practitioners (n = 14) that reveals how a martial arts practice (shadowboxing) contributes to their overall psychological well-being by contributing to their positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment. I present general results for how shadowboxing contributes to the psychological well-being of these professional martial artists overall, as well as more specific results for how shadowboxing contributes to the psychological well-being of these professional martial artists based on factors such as their gender, fight experience, and training location. This article also provides qualitative first-person reports from professional Muay Thai practitioners (n = 14) about their use of visualization and mental imagery and their experience of flow while shadowboxing, offering unique insight into the minds of professional martial artists as they are actively engaged in their craft. Finally, this article discusses the value and limitations of the present study and outlines suggestions for future research. (shrink)

The purpose of the article is to challenge widely accepted views of the relationship among rationality, morality, and prudence. It contends that we cannot understand either the rational or the moral enterprise without a correct philosophical view of the human self, and that such a view of the self is impossible without taking account of the rational and the moral enterprises themselves. The paper concludes that the moral point of view is anchored in the nature of selfhood so that one (...) can be neither rational and immoral nor prudent and immoral. (shrink)

Why do we spend so much of our time passing on amusing anecdotes, making wisecracks,watching The Simpsons? In Inside Jokes, Matthew Hurley, DanielDennett, and Reginald Adams offer an evolutionary and cognitive perspective.

Fieldwork in Familiar Places challenges the misconceptions about morality, culture, and objectivity that support these skepticisms, to show that we can take ...

This paper considers the prospect of moral transhumanism from the perspective of theological virtue ethics. I argue that the pursuit of goodness inherent to moral transhumanism means that there is a compelling prima facie case for moral enhancement. However, I also show that the proposed enhancements would not by themselves allow us to achieve a life of virtue, as they appear unable to create or enhance prudence, the situational judgement essential for acting in accordance with virtue. I therefore argue that (...) moral enhancement technologies should take a limited or supporting role in moral development, which I call ‘moral supplementation’. (shrink)

Slurs possess interesting linguistic properties and so have recently attracted the attention of linguists and philosophers of language. For instance the racial slur "nigger" is explosively derogatory, enough so that just hearing it mentioned can leave one feeling as if they have been made complicit in a morally atrocious act.. Indeed, the very taboo nature of these words makes discussion of them typically prohibited or frowned upon. Although it is true that the utterance of slurs is illegitimate and derogatory in (...) most contexts, sufficient evidence suggests that slurs are not always or exclusively used to derogate. In fact, slurs are frequently picked up and appropriated by the very in-group members that the slur was originally intended to target. This might be done, for instance, as a means for like speakers to strengthen in-group solidarity. So an investigation into the meaning and use of slurs can give us crucial insight into how words can be used with such derogatory impact, and how they can be turned around and appropriated as vehicles of rapport in certain contexts among in-group speakers. In this essay I will argue that slurs are best characterized as being of a mixed descriptive/expressive type. Next, I will review the most influential accounts of slurs offered thus far, explain their shortcomings, then provide a new analysis of slurs and explain in what ways it is superior to others. Finally, I suggest that a family-resemblance conception of category membership can help us achieve a clearer understanding of the various ways in which slurs, for better or worse, are actually put to use in natural language discourse. (shrink)

From folk tales to movies, stories possess features which naturally suit them to contribute to the growth of virtue. In this article I show that the fictional exemplars help the learner to grasp the moral importance of internal states and resolves a tension between existing kinds of exemplars discussed by virtue ethicists. Stories also increase the information conveyed by virtue terms and aid the growth of prudence. Stories can provide virtuous exemplars, inform learners as to the nature of the virtues (...) and offer practice in developing situational judgement. As such they are a significant resource for virtue ethics and moral education. (shrink)

R. M. Adams’s essay, “Must God Create the Best?” can be interpreted as offering a theodicy for God’s creating morally less perfect beings than he could have created. By creating these morally less perfect beings, God is bestowing grace upon them, which is an unmerited or undeserved benefit. He does so, however, in advance of the free moral misdeeds that render them undeserving. This requires that God have middle knowledge, pace Adams’s version of the Free Will Theodicy, of (...) what would result from his actualization of possible free persons. It is argued that God’s possession of such middle knowledge negates the freedom of created beings, since God completely determines every action of every created person. And since they are not free, they cannot qualify as morally unmeritorious or undeserving. And, with that, Adams’s theodicy of grace-in-advance collapses. (shrink)

This paper offers an analysis of work on human development in evolutionary anthropology from a Thomist perspective. I show that both fields view care for others as fundamental to human nature and interpret cooperative breeding as expression of the virtue of charity. I begin with an analysis of different approaches to the relationship between evolutionary anthropology and moral theory. I argue that ethical naturalism is the approach best suited to interdisciplinary dialogue, since it holds that natural facts are useful for (...) moral theory but do not encompass it. This forms the basis for a Thomist analysis of some key features of human evolution including bipedalism, higher encephalisation and extended childhood. In each case I explain how these parts of our nature contributed to the evolution of modern humans, and how each is reliant upon communal care. Finally, I offer three observations on these facts from a Thomist perspective. Firstly, that a good human life necessarily involves caring for others and being cared for ourselves. Secondly, that this is exemplified in the virtue of charity, which is the ground of all virtue. Finally, that the need for such care shows that human flourishing cannot be attained without divine aid. (shrink)

Racial epithets are terms used to characterize people on the basis of their race, and are often used to harm the people that they target. But what do racial epithets mean, and how do they work to harm in the way that they do? In this essay I set out to answer these questions by offering a pragmatic view of racial epithets, while contrasting my position with Christopher Hom's semantic view.