Using food regime analysis, this paper critically analyzes how corporate actors amass, secure and apply power in the global agrifood system through International Investment Agreements (IIAs). IIAs are a key enabler of increasing corporate power in the agrifood system. We focus on three sets of investment provisions in IIAs: (a) the stringent enforceability mechanism of the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) system, (b) the expansion of the concept of expropriation, and (c) limitations or prohibitions on host countries to impose performance requirements (...) on foreign investors. We argue that these provisions compromise fairness in the international economic system. Attracted by promises of technology transfer, economic growth and employment, host states often prioritize policies that favor foreign investors even if such policies compromise domestic policy space. We provide analysis and examples of escalating corporate power at different stages of the industrial and transgenic model of agriculture. (shrink)

The study of perception and the role of the senses have recently risen to prominence in philosophy and are now a major area of study and research. However, the philosophical history of the senses remains a relatively neglected subject. Moving beyond the current philosophical canon, this outstanding collection offers a wide-ranging and diverse philosophical exploration of the senses, from the classical period to the present day. Written by a team of international contributors, it is divided into six parts: -/- Perception (...) from Non-Western Perspectives Perception in the Ancient Period Perception in the Medieval Latin/Arabic Period Perception in the Early Modern Period Perception in the Post-Kantian Period Perception in the Contemporary Period. The volume challenges conventional philosophical study of perception by covering a wide range of significant, as well as hitherto overlooked, topics, such as perceptual judgment, temporal and motion illusions, mirror and picture perception, animal senses and cross-modal integration. By investigating the history of the senses in thinkers such as Plotinus, Auriol, Berkeley and Cavendish; and considering the history of the senses in diverse philosophical traditions, including Chinese, Indian, Byzantine, Greek and Latin it brings a fresh approach to studying the history of philosophy itself. -/- Including a thorough introduction as well as introductions to each section by the editors, The Senses and the History of Philosophy is essential reading for students and researchers in the history of philosophy, perception, philosophy of mind, philosophical psychology, aesthetics and eastern and non-western philosophy. It will also be extremely useful for those in related disciplines such as psychology, religion, sociology, intellectual history and cognitive sciences. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

The Colettine reforms took place at a time of profound crisis in the Western Church, yet Colette successfully navigated the ecclesiastical politics of the early fifteenth-century in order to effect far-reaching reform of the Poor Clares and Friars Minor in France and Flanders.2 The politics of the ‘Great Western Schism’ strongly influenced the course of the events of Colette’s career. Not only was it not possible for any religious reforms to exist in a vacuum, but her close association with the (...) Dukes of Burgundy and their manipulation of ecclesiastical politics for their own ends, ensured that she was drawn into the complexity of events. She therefore had the task not only of negotiating the politics of the... (shrink)

One might say that Clare is almost by virtue of that label alone a political poet. “Peasant poet” is a contradiction in terms from the perspective of English literary history, or of the longer history of the literary pastoral. The phrase must refer to two different social locations, and as such makes social place an explicit, problematic concern for the middle-class readers of that poet’s work. To Clare’s publisher and patrons in the 1820s, as to his editors in (...) the 1980s, the language, the forms, the sentiments, and even the punctuation of his poetry are further markers of class difference for an audience invited to read him as a peasant poet. In recent collections concerned to recover the politics of English poetry these signs of difference are highly valued.2 They seem to mark Clare’s work as what Fredric Jameson terms “strong” political art, that is, “authentic cultural creation … dependent for its existence on authentic collective life, on the vitality of the ‘organic’ social group.”3At the time his poems were published class difference in English rural life was a political issue sufficiently charged to make publisher and patrons wish to minimize its marks in Clare’s poetry. On the one hand, a clearly understood hierarchy was the form of social stability that rural scenes staged for their urban middle-class audiences. Evidence of class difference confirmed the survival of this hierarchy and the reader’s position in it. Clare’s poetry of place affirmed a system of social as well as geographical differences felt as a traditional—and essential—aspect of English national identity. On the other hand, however, the countryside was precisely where the erosion of the hierarchical relations of deference and responsibility was particularly noticeable, and disturbing, in the years after 1815. Sporadic outbreaks of protest against low wages and unemployment in 1816, 1822, and 1830 realized dramatically for the middle and upper classes what one might call a rural version of the process Marx was later to term alienation: the known and familiar inhabitants of the rural scene—laborers, village artisans—were suddenly made strange to their middle- and upper-class neighbors, so much so that many observers were convinced that they must be strangers, intruders from another pace .4 The elements of difference, or strangeness, in Clare’s poetry—the marks of his identity as rural laborer—thus also risked awaking specific anxieties among his early readers. Clare’s editor and publisher, John Taylor, punctuated, regularized meter, and replaced some of Clare’s unfamiliar local vocabulary. Nonetheless, his two most important early patrons, the evangelical aristocrat Lord Radstock and the middle-class Mrs. Emmerson, objected to some lines as “radical slang” and others as “vulgar.” The language of class risked rejection as politically subversive. Especially in an already politicized rural scene, the peasant poet could not be a neutral figure. 2. Both A Book of English Pastoral Verse, ed. John Barrell and John Bull and The Faber Book of Political Verse, ed. Tom Paulin restore Clare’s original orthography and lack of punctuation to support the label “peasant poet.”3. Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text 1 : 140. Elizabeth Helsinger is associate professor of English and general studies at the University of Chicago and a coeditor of Critical Inquiry. Her Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder was published in 1982. The present essay is part of a book in progress on representations of the rural scene in Victorian England. (shrink)

Conceptual primitives and semantic universals are the cornerstones of a semantic theory which Anna Wierzbicka has been developing for many years. Semantics: Primes and Universals is a major synthesis of her work, presenting a full and systematic exposition of that theory in a non-technical and readable way. It delineates a full set of universal concepts, as they have emerged from large-scale investigations across a wide range of languages undertaken by the author and her colleagues. On the basis of empirical (...) cross-linguistic studies it vindicates the old notion of the "psychic unity of mankind", while at the same time offering a framework for the rigorous description of different languages and cultures. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IntroductionFrom the closing decades of the fourteenth century onwards, reform attempts within the various religious orders gained impetus under the banner of so-called Observant movements. In nearly all orders, these Observant movements advocated a return to the lifestyle of an imagined pristine beginning in the face of a real or perceived crisis.1Within the Clarissan world, there were a number of signs pointing towards such a crisis. Adherence to the (...) rule, as well as a viable form of communal religious life could be conspicuously absent by the later fourteenth century. This was not solely the result of failing religious stamina, due to the interference of lay benefactors or sheer lack of motivation among the choir nuns. From the later 1340s onwards, many religious houses suffered heavily from recurrent Plague epidemics and the effects of prolonged military campaigns.This was particularly visible in some areas in France that were touched by the Plague and the Hundred Years War. In Toulouse, the Clarissan monastic community was reduced from around 80 women in 1330 to just four by 1370. Other houses more or less disappeared altogether because of the Plague, as was the case in Carcassone, Lavaur, Narbonne and Samatan, and had to be refounded. The Clarissan monasteries of Auterive, Béziers, Boisset, Les Cassés, Gourdon, and Le Pouget were heavily damaged or completely destroyed by warfare, and needed rebuilding.2In many cases, surviving nuns from destroyed monasteries extra muros moved into town. They had to restart their community life under very difficult circumstances. To make ends meet, the women sometimes had to engage in forms of economic exploitation of their goods that were not in line with the requirements of their rule. To make up for extreme losses in population and revenue, they also had to resort to recruitment practices that brought in people not equipped to embrace the vows of poverty, abstinence and obedience.There was no uniformity in the ways in which reforms were initiated. Nor did they always have the same results. This becomes clear as soon as we take into account the choice for a specific rule, the implementation of additional reform constitutions and convent statutes, and the role played by nuns and abbesses, secular authorities, secular clergymen and, of course, leading Observant and non-Observant friars of the Franciscan order.The Tordesillas congregationAn early attempt at reform in Castile resulted in a congregation named after the Poor Clare monastery at Tordesillas. This royal foundation had been created around 1363 to perform intercessory prayers on behalf of Pedro I of Castile and his new wife Maria of Padiella. The house was well endowed, and papal privileges freed the house from episcopal oversight, in line with important Urbanist houses elsewhere.3 In 1377, this autonomy was augmented, when Pope Gregory XI, ‘for certain reasons’ , freed the house from control from the Franciscan provincial minister.4 This might have been motivated by thoughts towards religious reform.5In any case, the new Castilian ruler Juan I was not content with the nuns’ intercessory works for the royal family. He obtained several papal bulls from the Avignon Pope Clement VII to entice the monastery to return to its former “observance” of the rule and its prayer obligations. These bulls made the Franciscan confessor of the king, friar Fernando of Illescas, perpetual visitator of the Tordesillas house, with full powers for the duration of his life.6 He could remove the abbess from office and enter the monastic enclosure to correct abuses. He could also absolve nuns and monastic personnel from sins and excommunication, as well as appoint and dismiss confessors and deliver punishments.7From 1410 onwards, the Tordesillas reform model began to attract other monasteries, which coagulated into the reform congregation of Santa Maria la Real or Santa Clara de Tordesillas. By 1447.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:108 Feminist Studies 46, no. 1. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Ellyn Weiss Anna U. Davis: An Introduction Anna U. Davis is a Swedish American mixed-media artist who was born in Lund, Sweden, and currently resides in Washington, DC. Her work draws frequently on the challenges she has faced living in the United States, particularly those related to her gender and racial position. Her husband, who (...) spent most of his childhood in the same Swedish town as Davis, was born to an African American man and a white Swedish woman. When Anna, who is also white, was pregnant with her own son, now in his early twenties, she began drawing what she terms “Frocasians,” people who are neither black nor white and who cannot claim automatic acceptance from either group. As her work explores, the outsider status of Frocasions both presents opportunity and exacerbates insecurity. Davis’s Swedish roots are central to her brand of feminism. She remembers growing up in an environment where notions of gender justice were firmly embedded in the legal framework and norms of the community. Her struggles with inadequate childcare and family leave as a young mother in the United States, then, form a strong undercurrent shaping her critical perspective. Davis also narrates growing up in a household that was emotionally unstable and sometimes difficult to navigate. As an outgrowth of these varied struggles, her art both values and aims to project strength. Davis’s graphic skills anchor her work; she always starts with detailed pieces in black and white. These pieces are then sometimes All images shown in this art essay courtesy of Anna U. Davis. Anna U. Davis, The Modern Plague, 2012. Acrylic, ink pen, and paper collage on canvas, 30 × 26 inches. CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT Anna U. Davis, Bull’s-eye, 2009. Acrylic and paper collage on canvas, 38 × 4 inches. Anna U. Davis, The Edge of Transit, 2008. Acrylic and paper collage on canvas, 12 × 10 inches. Anna U. Davis, Houseman, 2018. Acrylic and ink pen on cut-out birch plywood, 46 × 3 inches. Anna U. Davis, Black Velvet, 201. Inkjet print, 60 × 80 inches. Anna U. Davis, Black Velvet, 201. Inkjet print, 60 × 80 inches. CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT Anna U. Davis, Drop Dead Gorgeous, 2008. Acrylic and paper collage on canvas, 48 × 96 inches. Anna U. Davis, Delivered Agenda, 2009. Acrylic and paper collage on canvas, 20 × 20 inches. Anna U. Davis, Anonymous Was the Woman, 2014. Acrylic and paper collage on canvas, 12 × 10 inches. NEXT PAGE Anna U. Davis, Dr. Jekyll & Mrs. Hyde, 201. Acrylic, ink pen, and paper collage on canvas, 2 × 96 inches. LEFT TO RIGHT Anna U. Davis, Equilibrium, 201. Acrylic, ink pen, and paper collage on canvas, 40 × 40 inches. Anna U. Davis, Second Class, 201. Acrylic, ink pen, and paper collage on canvas, 2 × 96 inches. CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT Anna U. Davis, Shark-cuteri, 2016. Acrylic, ink pen, and paper collage on canvas, 2 × 96 inches. Anna U. Davis, Face-it (part ), 2009. Acrylic and paper collage on canvas, 18 × 24 inches. Anna U. Davis, Love, 201. Acrylic, ink pen, and paper collage on canvas, 2 × 96 inches. CENTER Anna U. Davis, Last Call, 2019. Acrylic, ink pen, and paper collage on canvas, 10 × 10 inches. NEXT PAGE Anna U. Davis, Tripping, 201. Acrylic, ink pen, and paper collage on canvas, 2 × 96 inches. LEFT TO RIGHT Anna U. Davis, The Anonymous Celebrity, 2009. Acrylic and paper collage on canvas, 8 × 44 inches. Anna U. Davis, Tug of War, 2019. Acrylic, ink pen, and paper collage on raw linen, 41 × 31 inches. Anna U. Davis, Undertaker, 2009. Acrylic and paper collage on canvas, 4 × 2 inches. Anna U. Davis, Lena, 2009. Acrylic and paper collage on canvas, 32 × 32 inches. Ellyn Weiss 125 enlarged, either remaining in black and white, becoming the underpinning of a collage, or more recently, turning into a sculptural wall relief. The color in her pieces is typically derived from the brilliant tones of glossy illustrations in so-called “women’s magazines,” which she cuts up for collaging. The content is also influenced by the articles and advertisements in such magazines. Implicit in some of Davis’s... (shrink)

Pain is a global problem whose social, economic, and psychological costs are immeasurable. It is now seen as the most common reason why people seek medical (including psychiatric) care. But what is pain? This article shows that the discourse of pain tends to suffer from the same problems of ethnocentrism and obscurity as the discourse of emotions in general. Noting that in the case of pain, the costs of miscommunication are particularly high, this article offers a new paradigm for communicating (...) about pain. It shows how the use of natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) techniques developed in linguistic semantics can help in this area, as in other areas concerned with human subjectivity, and can lead to a greater understanding between psychologists, psychiatrists, medical practitioners, social workers, and ordinary suffering mortals. (shrink)

Introduction 1. Language and meaning Nothing is as easily overlooked, or as easily forgotten, as the most obvious truths. The tenet that language is a tool ...

Many individual sentient wild animals are vulnerable to anthropogenic climate change. In this article, I suggest that animal ethicists who take sentient animals’ moral status seriously are likely to agree that, other things being equal, we have moral responsibilities to assist wild animals made vulnerable to climate change. However, I also argue that these ethicists are likely to diverge in terms of the strategies they believe would actually fulfil such moral responsibilities, depending on whether their primary concern is rectificatory justice (...) or duties of beneficence. To support this argument, I consider three plausible strategies for helping wild animals vulnerable to climate change: rescue and rehabilitation, habitat restoration, and assisted migration. I argue that different theoretical approaches to animal ethics are likely to diverge on aspects of all these strategies. These differences mean that the process of creating wide agreement among animal ethicists on climate adaptation strategies to assist vulnerable wild animals faces significant hurdles. (shrink)

Making decisions can be tough, but how do you know it s the right one and how can you be sure that unconscious biases aren t distorting your thinking? In Risky Business, Anna Withers and Mark Withers draw on decades of research in the fields of psychology, behavioral economics and neuroscience to explain why are so-called rational brains are frequently fooled by over 100 powerful unconscious biases. At the same time they provide a straightforward framework everyone can use, where (...) these biases are embodied into eight memorable characters that help us to avoid these pitfalls and make better decisions.". (shrink)

In his paper The Opposite of Human Enhancement: Nanotechnology and the Blind Chicken problem (Nanoethics 2:305–316, 2008) Paul Thompson argues that the possibility of disenhancing animals in order to improve animal welfare poses a philosophical conundrum. Although many people intuitively think such disenhancement would be morally impermissible, it’s difficult to find good arguments to support such intuitions. In this brief response to Thompson, I accept that there’s a conundrum here. But I argue that if we seriously consider whether creating beings (...) can harm or benefit them, and introduce the non-identity problem to discussions of animal disehancement, the conundrum is even deeper than Thompson suggests. (shrink)

Introduction -- Part 1. The nature of order in world politics: the concept of order in world politics; does order exist in world politics?; how is order maintained in world politics?; order versus justice in world politics -- Part 2. Order in the contemporary international system: the balance of power and international order; international law and international order; diplomacy and international order; war and international order; the great powers and international order -- Part 3. Alternative paths to world order: alternatives (...) to the contemporary states system; the decline of the states system; the obsolescence of the states system; the reform of the states system; conclusion. (shrink)

How do people understand questions about cause and prevent? Some theories propose that people affirm that A causes B if A's occurrence makes a difference to B's occurrence in one way or another. Other theories propose that A causes B if some quantity or symbol gets passed in some way from A to B. The aim of our studies is to compare these theories' ability to explain judgements of causation and prevention. We describe six experiments that compare judgements for causal (...) paths that involve a mechanism, i.e. a continuous process of transmission or exchange from cause to effect, against paths that involve no mechanism yet a change in the cause nevertheless brings about a change in the effect. Our results show that people prefer to attribute cause when a mechanism links cause to effect. In contrast, prevention is sensitive both to the presence of an interruption to a causal mechanism and to a change in the outcome in the absence of a mechanism. In this sense, ‘prevent’ means something different than ‘cause not'. We discuss the implications of our results for existing theories of causation. (shrink)

Habilitation thesis, book proposal in preparation.

Real Language Series General Editors:Jennifer Coates, Jenny Cheshire, Euan Reid This is a sociolinguistics series about the relationships between language, society and social change. Books in the series draw on natural language data from a wide range of social contexts. The series takes a critical approach to the subject, challenging current orthodoxies, and dealing with familiar topics in new ways. Gender and Discourse offers a critical new approach to the study of language and gender studies. Women moving into the public (...) domains of power traditionally monopolised by men are creating new identities for themselves, and the language that is used by them and about them offers an insight into gender roles. Clare Walsh reviews the current dominance/difference debates, and proposes a new analytical framework which combines the insights of critical discourse and feminist perspectives on discourse to provide a new perspective on the role of women in public life. A superbly accessible book designed for students and researchers in the field, the book features: - topical case studies from the arenas of politics, religion and activism- a new analytical framework, also summarised in chart form so the reader can apply their own critical analyses of texts. - written and visual text types for the reader's own linguistic and semiotic analysis. 'This important book takes up a neglected question in the study of language and gender - what difference women make to the discourse of historically male-dominated institutions - and brings to bear on it both the insights of feminist scholarship and evidence from women's own testimony. Clare Walsh's analysis of the dilemmas women face is both subtle and incisive, taking us beyond popular 'Mars and Venus' stereotypes and posing some hard questions for fashionable theories of language, identity and performance. (shrink)

This article investigates the challenges posed by the reliability of knowledge in neurophenomenology and its connection to reality. Neurophenomenological research seeks to understand the intricate relationship between human consciousness, cognition, and the underlying neural processes. However, the subjective nature of conscious experiences presents unique epistemic challenges in determining the reliability of the knowledge generated in this research. Personal factors such as beliefs, emotions, and cultural backgrounds influence subjective experiences, which vary from individual to individual. On the other hand, scientific knowledge (...) aims to uncover universal truths based on empirical observations and objective principles. Reconciling the subjective and objective realms presents a significant challenge in determining the reliability of knowledge generated through neurophenomenological research. This article aims to examine the inherent limitations and challenges of neurophenomenological research to shed light on the complexities involved in understanding the nature of knowledge itself. This article highlights that the ontological implications of the reliability of knowledge in neurophenomenology arise from the question of how subjective experiences relate to objective reality. Understanding the neural correlates and mechanisms behind subjective experiences can provide insight into the underlying ontological nature of consciousness. (shrink)

When people think about how a situation might have turned out differently, they tend to imagine counterfactual alternatives to their actions. We report the results of three experiments which show that people imagine alternatives to actions differently when they know about a reason for the action. The first experiment ( n = 36) compared reason - action sequences to cause - effect sequences. It showed that people do not imagine alternatives to reasons in the way they imagine alternatives to causes: (...) they imagine an alternative to an action more than an effect, and to a cause more than a reason. The second experiment ( n = 214) and the third experiment ( n = 190) both show that different sorts of reasons have different sorts of effects on how people imagine alternatives to actions. People imagine an alternative to an action (the protagonist went to a ball) less often when they know the reason for the action was an obligation (he had to participate in fundraising) compared to when they know about a weaker reason (he wanted to meet a famous violinist) or no reason. The second experiment shows the effect for a social obligation and the third experiment replicates and extends it to a health obligation. We interpret the results in terms of the possibilities that people keep in mind about actions and their reasons. (shrink)

This study investigated whether temporal clustering of autobiographical memories around periods of self-development would also occur when imagining future events associated with the self. Participants completed an AM task and future thinking task. In both tasks, memories and future events were cued using participant-generated identity statements . Participants then dated their memories and future events, and finally gave an age at which each identity statement was judged to emerge. Dates of memories and future events were recoded as temporal distance from (...) the identity statement used to cue them. AMs and future events both clustered robustly around periods of self-development, indicating the powerful organisational effect of the self. We suggest that life narrative structures are used to organise future events as well as memories. (shrink)

Contract cheating is a major problem in Higher Education because it is very difficult to detect using traditional plagiarism detection tools. Digital forensics techniques are already used in law to determine ownership of documents, and also in criminal cases, where it is not uncommon to hide information and images within an ordinary looking document using steganography techniques. These digital forensic techniques were used to investigate a known case of contract cheating where the contract author has notified the university and the (...) student subsequently confirmed that they had contracted the work out. Microsoft Word documents use a format known as Office Open XML Format, and as such, it is possible to review the editing process of a document. A student submission known to have been contracted out was analysed using the revision identifiers within the document, and a tool was developed to review these identifiers. Using visualisation techniques it is possible to see a pattern of editing that is inconsistent with the pattern seen in an authentic document. (shrink)

Progress -- Loss -- Return -- Amenability -- Citation tactics -- Affective subjects.

Much of the philosophical work on perception has focused on vision, with very little discussion of the chemical senses—olfaction and gustation. In this paper, I consider the challenge that olfactory experience presents to upholding a representational view of the sense modalities. Given the phenomenology of olfactory experience, it is difficult to see what a representational view of it would be like. Olfaction, then, presents an important challenge for representational theories to overcome. In this paper, I take on this challenge and (...) argue for a representational account of olfactory experience that honors its phenomenology. (shrink)

'Philosophy in a world of women. I reflected, talking with Mary, Pip and Elizabeth, how much I love them.' Two brilliant young scholars uncover the major philosophical contributions of four women whose ideas could have changed the course of twentieth-century thought. Written with energy, expertise and panache, The Quartet is a page-turning blend of research and recovery, storytelling, and a call to arms. Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley and Elizabeth Anscombe were great friends and comrades in the intellectual trenches, (...) rethinking the possibilities of moral philosophy when the men 'left the room' and taking on the establishment, ultimately embodied by President Truman. Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman bring these women out of the shadows and into vivid colour. (shrink)

Much of the philosophical work on perception has focused on vision. Recently, however, philosophers have begun to correct this ‘tunnel vision’ by considering other modalities. Nevertheless, relatively little has been written about the chemical senses—olfaction and gustation. The focus of this paper is olfaction. In this paper, I consider the question: does human olfactory experience represents objects as thus and so? If we take visual experience as the paradigm of how experience can achieve object representation, we might think that the (...) answer to this question is no. I argue that olfactory experience does indeed represent objects—just not in a way that is easily read from the dominant visual case. (shrink)

We can learn much about perceptual experience by thinking about how it can mislead us. In this paper, I explore whether, and how, olfactory experience can mislead. I argue that, in the case of olfactory experience, the traditional distinction between illusion and hallucination does not apply. Integral to the traditional distinction is a notion of ‘object-failure’—the failure of an experience to present objects accurately. I argue that there are no such presented objects in olfactory experience. As a result, olfactory experience (...) can only mislead by means of a kind of property hallucination. The implications of my arguments are twofold. First, we see that accounts of representational content cannot always be based on the visual model. And, secondly, we see that we must recast the notion of nonveridicality, allowing for a notion of non-veridical experience that is disengaged from any particular object. (shrink)

Seattle rain smelled different from New Orleans rain…. New Orleans rain smelled of sulfur and hibiscus, trumpet metal, thunder, and sweat. Seattle rain, the widespread rain of the Great Northwest, smelled of green ice and sumi ink, of geology and silence and minnow breath.— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug PerfumeMuch of the philosophical literature on perception has focused on vision. This is not surprising, given that vision holds for us a certain prestige. Our visual experience is incredibly rich, offering up a mosaic (...) of apparent three-dimensional objects. For this reason, it is commonplace to suppose that visual experience is world-directed, with the view taking its most popular form in the representational, or content, view. World-directed views contrast with what we might call subjectivist views — views according to which experiences are raw feels or mere sensations. (shrink)

Clinical ethics committees aim to resolve conflict, facilitate communication and ease moral distress in health care. Dialogue in committee discussions is complex and involves a balance between implicitly and explicitly expressed values of patients, families and professionals. Evaluating effectiveness and concrete outcomes is challenging and most studies focus on broad benefits such as quality of care and reduction of unnecessary or unwanted treatments. In this paper we propose ‘physician satisfaction’ as a valuable outcome. We refer to the clinical ethics approach (...) followed at one large paediatric hospital in Australia, propose reasons for the often-expressed feeling of satisfaction and discuss why this feeling matters. We conclude that physician satisfaction is a valid measure of an effective ethics consultation because it implies the person has been listened to and respected by others, and has perhaps developed greater understanding of and insights into their own work and values, and those of others. (shrink)

Much of the philosophical work on perception has focused on vision. Recently, however, philosophers have begun to correct this ‘tunnel vision’ by considering other modalities. Nevertheless, relatively little has been written about the chemical senses—olfaction and gustation. The focus of this paper is olfaction. In light of new physiological and psychophysical research on olfaction, I consider whether olfactory experience is object-based. In particular, I explore the claim that “odor objects” constitute sensory individuals. It isn’t obvious—at least at the outset—whether they (...) meet the widely accepted principles of object individuation and recognition at work in the visual and auditory cases. Among the general issues I consider, then, is whether these traditional principles form necessary, or simply sufficient, conditions on object perception. As we see, at the very least, considering the object-recognition model of olfaction challenges us to look more closely at well-entrenched models of object perception. But the payoff of doing so is high. We not only learn something about a modality that philosophers have historically neglected; by asking new questions and challenging old assumptions, we also further our understanding of perception in general. (shrink)

In a recent unit of study in an undergraduate Health Sciences pathway course, we identified a set of essays which exhibited similarity of content but demonstrated the use of bizarre and unidiomatic language. One of the distinct features of the essays was the inclusion of unusual synonyms in place of expected standard medical terminology.We suspected the use of online paraphrasing tools, but were also interested in investigating the possibility of the use of online language translation tools. In order to test (...) the outputs of these tools, we used as a seed document a corpus of text which had been provided to the students as prompt for the essay. This document was put through six free online paraphrasing tools and six separate iterative language translations through the online Google Translate™ tool.The results demonstrated that free online paraphrasing tools did not identify medical terminology as standardised or accepted nomenclature and substituted synonyms, whereas Google Translate™ largely preserved medical terminology.We believe that textual indicators such as the absence of standard discipline-based terminology may be of assistance in the identification of machine paraphrased text. (shrink)

Hospitals are places where patients are unwell, where patients and their families may be upset, confused, frustrated, in pain, and vulnerable. The likelihood of these experiences and emotions manifesting in anger and aggressive behaviour is high. In this paper, we describe the involvement of a clinical ethics service responding to a request to discuss family aggression within a rehabilitation department in a large paediatric hospital in Australia. We suggest two key advantages of involving a clinical ethics service in discussions about (...) how to respond to family aggression. First, the process of ethics deliberation provides an opportunity for clinicians to be involved in the solution by articulating their perspectives, tolerance levels, and general concerns about the effects of family aggression towards staff. Second, supporting clinicians to articulate and identify the impact of parental aggression directly counters the disadvantages of the more blunt zero-tolerance policy response, which is necessarily imposed from the top down. (shrink)

Nothing seems as certain as death. However, what if life continues digitally after death? Companies and initiatives such as Amazon, Storyfile, Here After AI, Forever Identity and LifeNaut are dedicated to precisely this objective: using avatars, records, and other digital content of the deceased, they strive to enable a digital continuation of life. The deceased live on digitally, and at times, these can even appear very much alive-perhaps too alive? This article explores the ethical implications of these technologies, commonly known (...) as Death Tech. With the advancement of artificial intelligence, Death Tech will inevitably transform mourning practices, our perception of death, and how we cope with its reality in the coming years. In this article, it is demonstrated that Death Tech can contribute to individual grief support, education, and a vibrant culture of remembrance. However, it is crucial to recognise that the Digital Afterlife is not a paradise but necessitates active designing and ethical deliberation. DOI 10.5771/0010-3497-2023-3-427. (shrink)

Computational explanations focus on information processing required in specific cognitive capacities, such as perception, reasoning or decision-making. These explanations specify the nature of the information processing task, what information needs to be represented, and why it should be operated on in a particular manner. In this article, the focus is on three questions concerning the nature of computational explanations: What type of explanations they are, in what sense computational explanations are explanatory and to what extent they involve a special, “independent” (...) or “autonomous” level of explanation. In this paper, we defend the view computational explanations are genuine explanations, which track non-causal/formal dependencies. Specifically, we argue that they do not provide mere sketches for explanation, in contrast to what for example Piccinini and Craver :283–311, 2011) suggest. This view of computational explanations implies some degree of “autonomy” for the computational level. However, as we will demonstrate that does not make this view “computationally chauvinistic” in a way that Piccinini or Kaplan :339–373, 2011) have charged it to be. (shrink)

This paper considers what olfactory experience can tell us about the controversy over qualia and, in particular, the debate that focuses on the alleged transparency of experience. The appeal to transparency is supposed to show that there are no qualia—intrinsic, non-intentional and directly accessible properties of experience that determine phenomenal character. It is most commonly used to motivate intentionalism—namely, the view that the phenomenal character of an experience is exhausted by its representational content. Although some philosophers claim that transparency holds (...) for all of the sense modalities, any detailed discussion of it focuses on vision. But transparency seems unintuitive for olfactory experience. This paper argues that olfactory experience is indeed transparent and that explanations of what transparency is have been obscured by a reliance on the visual model. In this way, the paper clarifies and advances the debate about transparency. (shrink)