BackgroundPhysician burnout is a growing phenomenon in current health systems worldwide. With the emergence of COVID-19, burnout in healthcare is progressively becoming a serious concern. Increasing emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment threaten the effective delivery of healthcare. Compassion fatigue and moral injury are a considerable risk to the doctor-patient relationship. These issues can potentially be mitigated by mindfulness practice, which has shown promising results in reducing burnout, restoring compassion, and preventing moral injury in physicians.MethodologyA scoping review was conducted (...) to investigate the effects of mindfulness practice on physician burnout. High-ranking journals were targeted to analyze high-quality studies and synthesize common themes in the literature. Studies conducted on current practicing physicians were included. Mindfulness practice of varying forms was the main intervention studied. Gray literature and studies conducted only on allied health personnel were excluded from this review.Results31 studies were included in this scoping review. Mindfulness practice decreased emotional exhaustion and depersonalization while improving mood, responses to stress, and vigor. Self-awareness, compassion, and empathy were also increased in study participants. From this review, four themes emerged: innovations in mindfulness practice, mindfulness and positive psychology, the impact of mindfulness on work and patient care, and barriers and facilitators to physician mindfulness practice.ConclusionMindfulness was widely reported to benefit mental health and well-being, but the studies reviewed seemed to adopt a mono focus and omitted key considerations to healthcare leadership, systems-level culture, and practices. Mindfulness practice is a quintessential component of positive psychology and is inherently linked to effective leadership. A mindful and compassionate physician leader will play a crucial role in addressing current practice gaps, prioritizing staff mental health, and providing a supportive platform for innovation. (shrink)

Uterus transplantation is an emerging technology adding to the arsenal of treatments for infertility; specifically the only available treatment for uterine factor infertility. Ethical investigations concerning risks to uteri donors and transplant recipients have been discussed in the literature. However, missing from the discourse is the potential of uterus transplantation in other groups of genetically XY women who experience uterine factor infertility. There have been philosophical inquiries concerning uterus transplantation in genetically XY women, which includes transgender women and women with (...) complete androgen insufficiency syndrome. We discuss the potential medical steps necessary and associated risks for uterus transplantation in genetically XY women. Presently, the medical technology does not exist to make uterus transplantation a safe and effective option for genetically XY women, however this group should not be summarily excluded from participation in trials. Laboratory research is needed to better understand and reduce medical risk and widen the field to all women who face uterine factor infertility. (shrink)

This paper discusses diverse practices across religions from a universalistic view. Various religions define their beliefs and rituals within an ecological context. Whether it is an Abrahamic, African or humanistic religion, they all have one ritual ground to facilitate their beliefs on. This ground takes the form of environmental or earth-based practices. Religious initiations and the history of spiritual leaders have illustrated that human spirituality is connected to nature and Mother Earth. In addition, Islam views contemplation about natural wonders as (...) an essential pathway to approach God. Despite the variety of religious traditions held, ecology is what universalizes all religions. (shrink)

In this article, I discuss Gadamer's hermeneutic account of understanding as an alternative to Kuhn's incommensurability thesis. After a brief account of Kuhn's aesthetic account and arguments against it, I argue that the linguistic account faces a paradox that results from Kuhn's objectivist account of understanding, and his lack of historical reflexivity. The statement 'Languages are incommensurable' is not a unique view of language, and is thus subject to contest by incommensurable readings. Resolving the paradox requires an account of incommensurability (...) that is self-referentially consistent, open-ended, and historically reflexive whereby we recognize that our very interest in incommensurability is historically conditioned. By meeting these conditions, Gadamer's account of historical understanding offers a middle ground between two extremes: on the one side is the claim that understanding involves becoming a native of an incommensurable language, and on the other side is the rejection of the prospect of understanding a contextually removed language altogether. Gadamer is discussed as a mediator between Kuhn's epistemic and historical projects, and thus paves the way for a new hermeneutics of science. The notions of traditional horizon, historically effected consciousness, the universality of interpretation, alienation, dialogical openness, and the fusion of horizons are also discussed. (shrink)

Europe's largest Muslim population of 4-5 million Muslim resides in France. On February 10, 2004 the French government approved an internationally controversial ban on headscarves, known as the hijab, worn by Muslim women attending public schools. Although the law banned all religious symbols, in this paper I focus on the ramification it has on the Muslim girls adhering to the hijab. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the legislation ban of the hijab in France. Several questions are explored (...) at various stages of the discussion including the following: Is wearing the hijab an expression of culture, religious obligation, or both? Does wearing the hijab jeopardize secularism, as French educational policy suggests? What are the alleged reasons, explicit and underlying, for the French legislation under scrutiny? What do French educators think of the law banning the hijab? Did the legislation take into account the decision's effect on young Muslim women in France, their self-esteem, their educational pursuits, and their identity formation? (shrink)

Reflecting on stressors from a detached perspective – a strategy known as distancing – can facilitate emotional recovery. Researchers have theorised that distancing works by enabling reappraisals of negative events, yet few studies have investigated specifically how distancing impacts stressor appraisals. In this experiment, we investigated how participants’ (N = 355) emotional experience and appraisals of an interpersonal conflict differed depending on whether they wrote event-reflections from a linguistically immersed (first-person) or distanced (second/third-person) perspective. Partly replicating previous findings, distanced reflection (...) predicted increases in positive affect, but not reductions in negative affect, relative to immersed reflection. Linguistic distancing also predicted increases in motivational congruence appraisals (i.e. perceived advantageousness of the event), but did not influence other appraisal dimensions. We discuss how linguistic distancing may facilitate emotional recovery by illuminating the benefits of stressful experiences, enabling people to “see the good in the bad”. (shrink)

A 16-year-old adolescent who identifies as transgender wishes to consider fertility preservation prior to the use of gender-affirming hormones. The adolescent’s parents are divorced, and one parent supports fertility preservation while the other does not. This case explores the minor’s future reproductive autonomy and parental decision making in a field where there is limited evidence of known harms and benefits to the use of fertility preservation in the transgender population and about future potential regret from lack of consideration of fertility (...) preservation during the prime window of opportunity. This case is created from a composite of cases seen at multiple institutions. (shrink)

BackgroundClinical genomic professionals are increasingly facing decisions about returning incidental findings (IFs) from genetic research. Although previous studies have shown that research participants are interested in receiving IFs, yet there has been an argument about the extent of researcher obligation to return IFs. We aimed in this study to explore the perspectives of clinical genomics professionals toward returning incidental findings from genomic research.MethodsWe conducted a national survey of a sample (n = 113) of clinical genomic professionals using a convenient sampling. (...) A self-administered questionnaire was used to explore their attitudes toward disclosure of IFs, their perception of the duties to return IFs and identifying the barriers for disclosure of IFs. A descriptive analysis was employed to describe participants' responses.ResultsSixty-five (57.5%) respondents had faced IFs in their practice and 31 (27.4%) were not comfortable in discussing IFs with their research subjects. Less than one-third of the respondents reported the availability of guidelines governing IFs. The majority 84 (80%) and 69 (62.7%) of the study participants indicated they would return the IFs if the risk of disease threat ≥ 50% and 6–49%, respectively and 36 (31.9%) reported they have no obligation to return IFs.ConclusionClinical genomics professionals have positive attitudes and perceptions toward the returning IFs from genomic research, yet some revealed no duty to do so. Detailed guidelines must be established to provide insights into how genomics professionals should be handled IFs. (shrink)

The present paper examines the concept of the meaning of life in the Soren Kierkegaard’s view. Kierkegaard sees the concept of "meaning" as "end" and believes in "biology" as the supreme biologist. Based on evidence from his works, he believes that the end is not to be discovered in biology, but it is creatable. There are three witnesses to this: first, the end is, in Kierkegaard''''''''s view, paradoxical, and paradox is not real, but mental. Secondly, Christianity, in his opinion, is (...) anxious, not religious, and religion is unreasonable, and in relation to the mind not connected with the outside, and third, that he does not consider God as an active being, but rather the existence of anxiety, The mind and mind of man. Kierkegaard''''''''s predictions in this evidence include ontological non-reality, individualism, and faith. An analysis of these three presumptions suggests that Kierkegaard believed in the supposition of meaning in life. (shrink)

In his extensive private manuscripts, Jeremy Bentham used same-sex male intimacy as a philosophical test-case for the full political and social enfranchisement of women, colonized and enslaved persons, and sexual nonconformists. Bentham argued that oppression in law, philosophy, religion, and literature were all based on aesthetic hierarchies that refused to acknowledge differences of taste in sensory pleasure, including sexual pleasure. In Uncommon Sense, Carrie Shanafelt reads Bentham's sexual nonconformity papers as an argument for the toleration of aesthetic difference as (...) the foundation for egalitarian liberty. Shanafelt challenges the common image of Bentham as a dehumanizing calculator or an eccentric projector, instead showing Bentham at his most intimate, outraged by injustice and desperate for the end of discriminatory violence. (shrink)

In this article, we argue that although Bohr's version of the Copenhagen interpretation is in line with several key elements of logical positivism, pragmatism is the closest approximation to a classification of the Copenhagen interpretation, whether or not pragmatists directly influenced the key figures of the interpretation. Pragmatism already encompasses important elements of operationalism and logical positivism, especially the liberalized Carnapian reading of logical positivism. We suggest that some elements of the Copenhagen interpretation, which are in line with logical positivism, (...) are also supported by pragmatism. Some of these elements are empirical realism, fallibilism, holism, and instrumentalism. However, pragmatism goes beyond logical positivism in espousing some other key elements of the Copenhagen interpretation, though imperfectly, such as the correspondence principle, complementarity, and indeterminism. (shrink)

This study investigates why successful companies have pursued creating shared value (CSV) during the COVID-19 pandemic and the immediately ensuing post-COVID-19 era. The paper aims to achieve a better understanding of the triggers that induce companies to pursue CSV initiatives. A qualitative thematic analysis of cases of CSV involving 54 companies honored by Fortune magazine within its 2022 Change the World list was investigated and systematically reviewed. Based on the analysis, we identified and classified the motivators of CSV projects according (...) to various internal and external triggers. The qualitative results revealed seven types of internal triggers for CSV initiatives. These are: (1) following founder/leader philosophy or experience, (2) foreseeing customer growth and profit potential, (3) enhancing employee loyalty and commitment, (4) developing a future talent pool, (5) improving operational efficiency and cutting costs, (6) building differentiation weapons, and (7) becoming an industry pioneer. Seven types of external triggers for CSV initiatives were also identified. These comprise (1) economic benefits, (2) environmental protection, (3) human rights, (4) public health, (5) social justice, (6) partnership availability, and (7) government stimuli. This study contributes to the CSV literature by providing analyses of the motivators that have induced CSV initiatives during the COVID-19 era. We conclude by discussing the implications for business academics and practitioners. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the nature of objective news and the debate regarding its possibility. It then assesses the main arguments for the unattainability of objective news. A close examination of these arguments shows that, contrary to widespread belief, journalists who try to provide objective news are not striving in vain. The chapter discusses the effect of competing journalistic aims and other limitations on our efforts to generate objective news. It suggests that the unwarranted skepticism regarding the possibility of objective news (...) is an artifact of the changing priorities of journalists and inadequate journalistic methods, and that the only real issue is how we can better train those journalists who want to generate objective news. (shrink)

Social media affordances enable us to construct multi-faceted online identities and personal brands that we use to engage and interact with audiences—defined and ambiguous, intended and unintended. There is a need to examine such online identities and associated micro-celebrity practices by users who appeal to multiple audiences through the strategic use of online spaces. In this special issue, we explore performances of our digital selves and the role played by active and interactive audiences in meaning-making within complex socio-political contexts while (...) simultaneously attempting to understand varied positions of media refusal and enactments of digital media resistance. (shrink)

Transplantation is a field of perpetual innovation. In the last 15 years, novel surgical interventions include uterine, tracheal, hand, face, and penile allotransplantation, as well as cardiac xeno...

What, if anything, do we epistemically owe to each other? Various “traditional” views of epistemology might hold either that we don’t epistemically owe anything to each other, because “what we owe to each other” is the realm of the moral, or that what we epistemically owe to each other is just to be epistemically responsible agents. Basu (2019) has recently argued, against such views, that morality makes extra-epistemic demands upon what we should believe about one another. So, what we owe (...) to each other is not just a matter of word and deed, but also of belief. And in fact, Basu argues, sometimes those moral demands require us to believe in ways that cut against orthodox epistemic norms. This paper has three aims. First, to offer two strategies for accommodating the kinds of cases Basu discusses while nonetheless holding that only epistemic normativity makes demands on belief. Second, to offer an alternative account of what we owe to each other that does not hold that morality demands that we sometimes believe against our evidence or in violation of epistemic norms. And third, to give a brief diagnosis of why it seems intuitive that morality makes extra-epistemic doxastic demands on us. Ultimately, I argue that what we epistemically owe to each other does not require us to violate orthodox, invariantist epistemic norms. Morality demands that we have a proper regard for others, not that we sometimes believe against our evidence. (shrink)

In virtue of what are we responsible for our beliefs? I argue that doxastic responsibility has a crucial social component: part of being responsible for our beliefs is being responsible to others. I suggest that this responsibility is a form of answerability with two distinct dimensions: an individual and an interpersonal dimension. While most views hold that the individual dimension is grounded in some form of control that we can exercise over our beliefs, I contend that we are answerable for (...) our beliefs as long as they reflect our evaluative commitments and dispositions, or are products of our reasoning, where this does not amount to a form of control. I next argue that answerability has a second, largely neglected dimension: the interpersonal dimension, which is grounded in what I call our relations of doxastic dependence. As social creatures, we depend on one another in our capacity as believers. We depend on one another as believers not only in epistemic ways, but also in practical ways, because our beliefs inform and motivate our actions, and allow us to participate in shared practical goals. Depending on one another in these ways is an unavoidable part of cooperating in the shared project of pursuing epistemic and practical success, and it makes us vulnerable to both epistemic and moral harm. It is because of this, I argue, that answerability has interpersonal normative force upon us: we are subject to legitimate expectations associated with participating in relations of doxastic dependence. (shrink)

Carrie Figdor presents a critical assessment of how psychological terms are used to describe the non-human biological world. She argues against the anthropocentric attitude which takes human cognition as the standard against which non-human capacities are measured, and offers an alternative basis for naturalistic explanation of the mind.

The article explores the irreflexivity of metaphysical dependence in the physical structure of reality. It stresses that the word dependence denotes quasi-ireflexivity which affects the metaphysical relations of a physical structure. It focuses on the view that irreflexivity assumption has been made without discussion of the dependence relations on the structure of reality.

This paper presents a constructivist grounded theory on the decision-making process that UK home and alternative educators undertake and the related influencing factors. Twenty-one participants from a diverse range of backgrounds were interviewed between one and three times over a two-year period. Some were current home and alternative educators and others were undecided, or had changed their minds about home educating. The core process is entitled ‘Stepping out of the system?’ It was constructed from three main categories: attitudinal direction, surveying (...) the landscape and negotiating obstacles. Parents have opinions of school that developed before they began to consider how to educate their child; attitudes which are affect laden and guide the process of information gathering. The surveying the landscape stage involves both formal research and informal methods such as hearing the views of others and acting upon their own feelings. The final stage, negotiating obstacles, involves finding practical solutions to barriers they may face. The grounded theory is enriched and deepened by Reddy’s (2010) concept of emotional refuges. (shrink)

This paper outlines three broad conceptual schemes currently in play in the sciences concerned with explaining cognitive abilities. One is the anthropocentric scheme – human cognition – that dominated our thinking about cognition until very recently. Another is the cybernetic-computational scheme – cybernetic cognition – rooted in cognitive science and flourishing in such fields as artificial intelligence, computational neuroscience, and biocybernetics. The third is an evolutionary biological scheme – phylogenetic cognition – that conceptualizes cognition in terms of the phylogeny-based approach (...) we take to all other traits of evolved organisms. It shows how these conceptions ground different research questions and methods, and how their relationship is still in flux. (shrink)

Motivated by the call for more research on students’ perceptions of their ethical development in business education programs, this study examines students’ reflections on how their understanding of ethics was challenged and/or changed, and what facilitated the development of ethical decision-making approaches in a first-year accounting course. The results indicate that students developed more sophisticated and contextualised views of ethical issues in business, government and social contexts including the need to consider their impact on various stakeholders. Students attributed this development (...) to the various elements in the integrated course design including the real cases sourced in current newspaper articles, an ethical decision-making framework with various ethical perspectives, the reflective journal component and the ability to work in groups. These findings have implications for the design of effective ethics education programs in business. (shrink)

Carrie Jenkins presents a new account of arithmetical knowledge, which manages to respect three key intuitions: a priorism, mind-independence realism, and empiricism. Jenkins argues that arithmetic can be known through the examination of empirically grounded concepts, non-accidentally accurate representations of the mind-independent world.

Many empirically minded philosophers have used neuroscientific data to argue against the multiple realization of cognitive functions in existing biological organisms. I argue that neuroscientists themselves have proposed a biologically based concept of multiple realization as an alternative to interpreting empirical findings in terms of one‐to‐one structure‐function mappings. I introduce this concept and its associated research framework and also how some of the main neuroscience‐based arguments against multiple realization go wrong. *Received October 2009; revised December 2009. †To contact the author, (...) please write to: Department of Philosophy, 260 English‐Philosophy Building, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242; e‐mail: carrie‐[email protected]. (shrink)

This book unpicks the conceptual, ideological, and metaphysical tangles that get in the way of understanding romantic love. -/- Written for a general audience, What Love Is And What It Could Be explores different disciplinary perspectives on love, in search of the bigger picture. It presents a "dual-nature" theory: romantic love is simultaneously both a biological phenomenon and a social construct. The key philosophical insight comes in explaining why this a coherent—and indeed a necessary—position to take. -/- The deep motivation (...) behind this work is that we have a collective responsibility to figure out romantic love. It is a formidable and potentially dangerous force, its power underwritten by its twin footholds in our biological natures and in our most treasured social practices. Often we pretend that it is incomprehensible and out of control, but this is a way of abdicating our responsibility to understand love and fix it when it's broken. -/- What Love Is And What It Could Be explains that romantic love is currently broken in multiple interlocking ways, but also that we can change this status quo. Once we understand what love is, we will be able to take control of what it could be. (shrink)

The United States prison system, the largest in the world, operates through both exploitative and rehabilitative modes of discipline. To gain political and public support for the extensive resources expended housing, feeding, and controlling its incarcerated population, the carceral state strategically emphasizes a mix of each mode. Agriculture in prisons is particularly illustrative. With roots in racial capitalism and the carceral state’s criminalization of poverty, plantation convict leasing system, work reform efforts, and punitive and welfarist carceral logics, prison agriculture embodies (...) explicit forms of exploitation and claims of rehabilitation. Accordingly, this article contextualizes and explains results from a nationwide study of state prisons within our framework of the disciplinary matrix. At least 662 adult state prisons have agricultural activities, including an array of animal, food, and plant production. We find that the drivers of these activities are financial, idleness reduction, reparative, and training. Our disciplinary matrix framework departs from conventional assignments of a particular activity to one disciplinary mode or the other and recognizes that any activity may be driven by different prison needs or philosophies. We investigate how different combinations of agricultural activities and drivers rely on discourses of deservingness to naturalize and reproduce structures of racialized, classed, and gendered control inside and outside prison, as well as the legitimacy of the prison system itself. (shrink)

The paper identifies common barriers and challenges to Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) uptake and offers considerations for state and local public health departments to address barriers and retool infrastructure to increase access to PrEP to new users. Authors identify synergistic opportunities with federal agencies and funders to advance PrEP-related HIV prevention efforts, that prioritize strategies and investments to provide PrEP to people who could benefit from the intervention but are unaware of PrEP or struggle to access it. Barriers discussed and examined (...) include financing strategies to reduce financial burden of PrEP medication, expanding PrEP access and outreach beyond clinical settings, and increasing the network and reach of the provider community to serve people we oppress through policy choices and discourses of racial and socioeconomic inferiority. (shrink)

What is the content of a mental state? This question poses the problem of intentionality: to explain how mental states can be about other things, where being about them is understood as representing them. A framework that integrates predictive coding and signaling systems theories of cognitive processing offers a new perspective on intentionality. On this view, at least some mental states are evaluations, which differ in function, operation, and normativity from representations. A complete naturalistic theory of intentionality must account for (...) both types of intentional state. (shrink)

Humanists argue for assigning the highest moral status to all humans over any non-humans directly or indirectly on the basis of uniquely superior human cognitive abilities. They may also claim that humanism is the strongest position from which to combat racism, sexism, and other forms of within-species discrimination. I argue that changing conceptual foundations in comparative research and discoveries of advanced cognition in many non-human species reveal humanism’s psychological speciesism and its similarity with common justifications of within-species discrimination.

Philosophical tradition has long held that free will is necessary for moral responsibility. We report experimental results that show that the folk do not think free will is necessary for moral responsibility. Our results also suggest that experimental investigation of the relationship is ill served by a focus on incompatibilism versus compatibilism. We propose an alternative framework for empirical moral psychology in which judgments of free will and moral responsibility can vary independently in response to many factors. We also suggest (...) that, in response to some factors, the necessity relation may run from responsibility to free will. (shrink)

Is the Germanic god Wotan really an archaic archetype of the Spirit? Was the Third Reich at first a collective individuation process? After Friedrich Nietzsche heralded the "death of God," might the divine have been reborn as a collective form of self-redemption on German soil and in the Germanic soul? In _Jung’s Wandering Archetype_ Carrie Dohe presents a study of Jung’s writings on Germanic psychology from 1912 onwards, exploring the links between his views on religion and race and providing (...) his perspective on the answers to these questions. Dohe demonstrates how Jung’s view of Wotan as an archetype of the collective Germanic psyche was created from a combination of an ancient discourse on the Germanic barbarian and modern theories of primitive religion, and how he further employed _völkisch_ ideology and various colonialist discourses to contrast hypothesized Germanic, Jewish and ‘primitive’ psychologies. He saw Germanic psychology as dangerous yet vital, promising rebirth and rejuvenation, and compared Wotan to the Pentecostal Spirit, suggesting that the Germanic psyche contained the necessary tension to birth a new collective psycho-spiritual attitude. In racializing his religiously-inflected psychological theory, Jung combined religious and scientific discourses in a particularly seductive way, masterfully weaving together the objective language of science with the eternal language of myth. Dohe concludes the book by examining the use of these ideas in modern Germanic religion, in which members claim that religion is a matter of race. This in-depth study of Jung’s views on psychology, race and spirituality will be fascinating reading for all academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian studies, religious studies and the history of religion. (shrink)

One question of the bounds of cognition is that of which things have it. A scientifically relevant debate on this question must explain the persistent and selective use of psychological predicates to report findings throughout biology: for example, that neurons prefer, fruit flies and plants decide, and bacteria communicate linguistically. This paper argues that these claims should enjoy default literal interpretation. An epistemic consequence is that these findings can contribute directly to understanding the nature of psychological capacities.

I argue that an explicit distinction between cognitive characters and cognitive phenotypes is needed for empirical progress in the cognitive sciences and their integration with evolution-guided sciences. I elaborate what ontological commitment to characters involves and how such a commitment would clarify ongoing debates about the relations between human and nonhuman cognition and the extent of cognitive abilities across biological species. I use theoretical proposals in episodic memory, language, and sociocultural bases of cognition to illustrate how cognitive characters are being (...) introduced in scientific practice. (shrink)

When a society is characterized by a climate of distrust, how does this impact the professional practices of news journalism? I focus on the practice of balance, or fair presentation of both sides in a story. I articulate a two-step model of how trust modulates the acceptance of tes-timony and draw out its implications for justifying the practice of balance.

I separate two intrinsic/extrinsic distinctions that are often conflated: one between properties (the intrinsic/extrinsic, or I/E, distinction) and one between the ways in which properties are had by individuals (the intrinsically/extrinsically, or I-ly/E-ly, distinction). I propose an analysis of the I-ly/E-ly distinction and its relation to the I/E distinction that explains, inter alia, the puzzle of cross-classification: how it can be, for example, that the property of being square can be classified as an intrinsic property and yet individuals can be (...) square intrinsically or else extrinsically. (shrink)