ABSTRACT:While the literature on psychedelic medicine emphasizes the importance of set and setting alongside the quality of subjective drug effects for therapeutic efficacy, few scholars have explored the therapeutic frameworks that are used alongside psychedelics in the lab or in the clinic. Based on a narrative analysis of the treatment manual and post-session experience reports from a pilot study of psilocybin-assisted treatment for tobacco smoking cessation, this article examines how therapeutic frameworks interact with the psychedelic substance in ways that can (...) rapidly reshape participants' identity and sense of self. We identified multiple domains relating to identity shift that appear to serve as smoking cessation mechanisms during psilocybin sessions, each of which had an identifiable presence in the manualized treatment. As psychedelic medicine becomes mainstream, consensual and evidence-based approaches to psychedelic-assisted identity shift that respect patient autonomy and encourage empowerment should become areas of focus in the emergent field of psychedelic bioethics. (shrink)

Drawing from the critical phenomenology of Alia Al-Saji, Christina Sharpe’s notion of “the wake,” and Jan Slaby’s work on affect, this paper offers a critique of George Ciccariello-Maher’s (2017) formulation of Frantz Fanon’s decolonized dialectic. I argue that Ciccariello-Maher’s formulation, while excellent in most respects, nevertheless contains a significant lacuna. While he is correct to point out that Fanon’s critique of universal reconciliation forces his dialectical activity to remain firmly rooted in the present, by failing to fully draw out how (...) the past always already weighs on the present, Ciccariello-Maher runs the risk of obscuring the affective weight of Fanon’s historical critique. This is problematic for the way it obscures the full range of ethical possibilities that stem from this particular affective experience—possibilities that Jan Slaby (2020: 189–95) makes clear via Christina Sharpe’s notion of “the wake.” In other words, while Ciccariello-Maher seems to frame Fanon’s recourse to infinitely deferred reconciliation as a reflection of the “ethical nihilism” (2017: 62) that characterizes the system of oppression he is responding to, a reformulation of Ciccariello-Maher’s observations with respect to affectivity re-frames this infinite deferral as an “embodied ethics of being and knowing” (Slaby 2020: 189). I will ultimately argue that this reformulation helps us understand Fanon’s parting words in Black Skin White Masks—“Oh my body, always make me a man who questions!” (Fanon 2008b: 206; 1952: 188)—as a call for the type of ethics suggested by Sharpe’s notion of “the wake” (2016). (shrink)

Examines an ethic of sexuality rooted in black queerness, including ethnographic interviews that help to trace the development of black queer ethics and sexual ethics.

When covering traumatic events, novice journalists frequently face situations they are rarely prepared to resolve. This paper highlights ethical dilemmas faced by journalists who participated in a focus group exploring the news media's trauma coverage. Major themes included professional obligations versus ethical responsibilities, journalists' perceived status and roles, permissible harms, and inexperience. Instructional classroom simulations based on experiential learning theory can bridge the gap between the theory of ethical trauma reporting and realities journalists face when covering events that are often (...) chaotic and unpredictable by their very nature. A simulation outline that can be used by journalism instructors is provided. (shrink)

This article examines discursive strategies used by police and politicians to describe and justify the application of penalty notices to minor criminal offences. Critical discourse analysis is used as an analytical tool to show how neoliberal economic thinking has informed the prism through which infringement notices have been rationalised as a legitimate alternative to traditional criminal prosecution, while also highlighting the contradictions inherent in neoliberalism as an ideology through which to view the embrace of legally hybrid powers in the criminal (...) justice system. Discursive strategies identified in the article include the use of ideological keywords ordinarily associated with free market economics and managerial efficiency; the adoption of militaristic vocabulary and metaphors in representations of policing and space; the strategies of assimilation and formulation to represent police views as uniform and coherent; and the use of nominalisations to legitimise the lack of procedural safeguards attached to infringement notices. The logic of—and the language ordinarily associated with—the domain of private business, the ‘free market’, and deregulation has infiltrated the criminal justice sphere. In addition, the naturalisation of neoliberal economic discourse in political and police representations of infringement notices produces and sustains important ideological effects, by disguising the ways in which the expanded use of administrative sanctions in public order policing intensifies state power at the expense of due process of law. (shrink)

Advances in biotechnologies for human enhancement and designer babies appear to offer us new hope in medicine, but capitalism may incentivize the selection of traits for profit. Engineering Perfection: Solidarity, Disability, and Well-being offers an opposing Marxist view, one that embraces human vulnerability and embodied difference.

The Truth That Never Hurts brings together for the first time more than two decades of literary criticism & political thought about gender, race, sexuality, power & social change. As one of the first writers in the United States to claim Black feminism for Black women in the early seventies, this authors works has been ground breaking in defining a Black women's literary tradition; in examining the sexual politics of the lives of Black & other women of color; in representing (...) the lives of Black lesbians & gay men; & in making connections between race, class, sexuality, & gender. Her essay "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism," is often cited as a major catalyst in opening the field of Black women's literature. This essay also presented the first serious discussion of Black lesbian writing. Essays about racism in the women's movement, Black & Jewish relations, & homophobia in the Black community have ignited dialogue about topics that few other writers address. The collection also brings together topical political commentaries that examine the 1968 Chicago convention demonstrations; attacks on the NEA; the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas Senate hearings; & police brutality against Rodney King & Abner Louima. It also includes a never before published personal essay on racial violence, the day-to-day life of Kitchen Table Press, & the bonds between Black women that make it possible to survive. This authors writing offers a rare combination of intellectual challenge & an accessible personal voice. her commitment to telling the truth about difficult, even volatile issues, makes a unique contribution to American literature & social thought. (shrink)

This paper clarifies several sources of the epistemological confusion that currently characterize the field of clinical psychology. Using a constructivist framework, it is argued that much of this confusion can be traced to a traditional failure to distinguish among levels of analysis when evaluating and comparing clinical psychology theories. By recognizing certain distinctions among levels of analysis, it becomes clear that efforts to provide epistemological legitimacy for clinical psychology theories have often conflated not only theories with epistemology, but also epistemologies (...) that reside at different levels of analysis. Recognition of these distinctions also permits a more precise definition of the role for which the received view of a natural science epistemology and hermeneutics are competing. This role should be defined as a "superordinate" epistemology. It is demonstrated how this concept provides some of the terms necessary for settling the debate between advocates of the received view and advocates of hermeneutics. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

The predictable rhythmic structure is important to most ecologically relevant sounds for humans, such as is found in the rhythm of speech or music. This study addressed the question of how rhythmic predictions are maintained in the auditory system when there are multiple perceptual interpretations occurring simultaneously and emanating from the same sound source. We recorded the electroencephalogram (EEG) while presenting participants with a tone sequence that had two different tone feature patterns, one based on the sequential rhythmic variation in (...) tone duration and the other on sequential rhythmic variation in tone intensity. Participants were presented with the same sound sequences and were instructed to listen for the intensity pattern (ignore fluctuations in duration) and press a response key to detected pattern deviants (attend intensity pattern task); to listen to the duration pattern (ignore fluctuations in intensity) and make a button press to duration pattern deviants (attend duration pattern task), and to watch a movie and ignore the sounds presented to their ears (attend visual task). Both intensity and duration patterns occurred predictably 85% of the time, thus the key question involved evaluating how the brain treated the irrelevant feature patterns (standards and deviants) while performing an auditory or visual task. We expected that task-based feature patterns would have a more robust brain response to attended standards and deviants than the unattended feature patterns. Instead, we found that the neural entrainment to the rhythm of the standard attended patterns had similar power to the standard of the unattended feature patterns. In addition, the infrequent pattern deviants elicited the event-related brain potential called the mismatch negativity component (MMN). The MMN elicited by task-based feature pattern deviants had a similar amplitude to MMNs elicited by unattended pattern deviants that were unattended because they were not the target pattern or because the participant ignored the sounds and watched a movie. Thus, these results demonstrate that the brain tracks multiple predictions about the complexities in sound streams and can automatically track and detect deviations with respect to these predictions. This capability would be useful for switching attention rapidly among multiple objects in a busy auditory scene. (shrink)

We present a novel methodology for calculating the improvements obtained in successive versions of biomedical ontologies. The theory takes into account changes both in reality itself and in our understanding of this reality. The successful application of the theory rests on the willingness of ontology authors to document changes they make by following a number of simple rules. The theory provides a pathway by which ontology authoring can become a science rather than an art, following principles analogous to those that (...) have fostered the growth of modern evidence-based medicine. Although in this paper we focus on ontologies, the methodology can be generalized to other sorts of terminology-based artifacts, including Electronic Patient Records. (shrink)

We ordinarily suppose that there is a difference between having and failing to exercise a rational capacity on the one hand, and lacking a rational capacity altogether on the other. This is crucial for our allocations of responsibility. Someone who has but fails to exercise a capacity is responsible for their failure to exercise their capacity, whereas someone who lacks a capacity altogether is not. However, as Gary Watson pointed out in his seminal essay ’Skepticism about Weakness of Will’, the (...) idea of an unexercised capacity is much more difficult to make sense of than it initially appears. The aim of ’Rational Capacities’ is to provide the needed explication of this idea. (shrink)

Hastings Center Report, Volume 52, Issue S1, Page S21-S23, March‐April 2022.

WE must first state the subject of our inquiry and the faculty to which it belongs: its subject is demonstration and the faculty that carries it out demonstrative science.

This article examines how public health addresses alcohol use through marketing — place, product, promotion, and price. The article reviews current product trends and how restrictions on certain products designs may reduce youth consumption; how product availability may be restricted through zoning; and the current advertising landscape.

The analytical philosophy of the last hundred years has been heavily influenced by a doctrine to the effect that the key to the correct understanding of reality is captured syntactically in the ‘Fa’ (or, in more sophisticated versions, in the ‘Rab’) of standard first order predicate logic. Here ‘F’ stands for what is general in reality and ‘a’ for what is individual. Hence “f(a)ntology”. Because predicate logic has exactly two syntactically different kinds of referring expressions—‘F’, ‘G’, ‘R’, etc., and ‘a’, (...) ‘b’, ‘c’, etc.—so reality must consist of exactly two correspondingly different kinds of entity: the general (properties, concepts) and the particular (things, objects). We describe the historical influence of this view, and also show how standard first-order predicate logic can be used for the logical formalization of a more adequate “six category ontology”, which recognizes, at the level of both particulars and universals, not only things or objects but also events and qualities. (shrink)

A scholarly edition of a work by Adam Smith. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

Through practices aimed at strengthening key dimensions of well-being, from feeling at home in your body to tapping into the wisdom that already lives within you, Taylor Elyse Morrison, founder of the lifestyle brand Inner Workout, guides you to discover what "self-care" truly means and helps you cultivate a dynamic relationship with your whole being.

This review focuses on the Ogdoas scholastica by Jacob Lorhard, published in 1606. The importance of this document turns on the fact that it contains what is almost certainly the first published occurrence of the term “ontology.” The body of the work consists in a series of diagrams called “diagraphs.” Relevant features of this compendium of diagraphs are: 1. that it does not in fact contain the word “ontology,” and 2. that Lorhard himself was not responsible for its content.

The book presents a new way of understanding Darwinism and evolution by natural selection, combining work in biology, philosophy, and other fields.

ABSTRACT:We combine prior research on ethical decision-making in organizations with a rational choice theory of corporate crime from criminology to develop a model of corporate offending that is tested with a sample of U.S. managers. Despite demands for increased sanctioning of corporate offenders, we find that the threat of legal action does not directly affect the likelihood of misconduct. Managers’ evaluations of the ethics of the act, measured using a multidimensional ethics scale, have a significant effect, as do outcome expectancies (...) that result from being associated with the misconduct but not facing formal sanctions. The threat of formal sanctions appears to operate indirectly, influencing ethical evaluations and outcome expectancies. Obedience to authority also affects illegal intentions, with managers reporting higher prospective offending when they are ordered to engage in misconduct by a supervisor. (shrink)

Over-time variability characterizes not only individual-level emotions, but also group-level emotions, those that occur when people identify with social groups and appraise events in terms of their implications for those groups. We discuss theory and research regarding the role of emotions in intergroup contexts, focusing on their dynamic nature. We then describe new insights into the causes and consequences of emotional dynamics that flow from conceptualizing emotions as based in group membership, and conclude with research recommendations.

Many philosophers accept that, as well as having a right that others not harm us, we also have a right that others not subject us to a risk of harm. And yet, when we attempt to spell out precisely what this ‘right against risk imposition’ involves, we encounter a series of notorious puzzles. Existing attempts to deal with these puzzles have tended to focus on the nature of rights – but I propose an approach that focusses instead on the nature (...) of risk. The key move is to distinguish two different ways in which to conceptualise the risk that a given action presents – one of which is linked to the notion of probability and the other to the notion of normalcy. (shrink)

Abstract:Catastrophe has increasingly become a consumer product. Perhaps because of this, we have become desensitised to the idea of catastrophe, so much so that narratives that should elicit fear and anxiety due to their reflecting a truth about our current world do not causally produce the necessary affective responses that would motivate us to act. This is the case with climate change. Through a superficial engagement with the climate change issue through social media, media, films, television, and other literature, we (...) experience catharsis daily. The release of the fear and anxiety that should lead us to action against climate change does not make us act against it. In this article, I put forth this argument by discussing how we superficially interact with climate change and catastrophe through the media, social media, films, television, and other literature. I refer to empirical evidence that supports my position. I consider how this superficial interaction leads to desensitization and causally produces a catharsis, leading to inaction. I put forth some initial remarks on how artmaking could be approached in a way that does not desensitize us to catastrophe by considering what Heidegger, Adorno, and Marcuse have to say about the function and origin of art. (shrink)

This essay is a response to Luis M. Augusto’s intriguing paper on the rift between mainstream and formal ontology. I will show that there are in fact two questions at issue here: 1. concerning the links between mainstream and formal approaches within philosophy, and 2. concerning the application of philosophy (and especially philosophical ontology) in support of information-driven research for example in the life sciences.

“Everything is a lie … Nothing is a lie” From reviews: -/- Jan Rabie’s short fiction collection 21 in the sixties was a sign of renewal, and it was the beginning of an era of unprecedented growth in local as well as Afrikaans literature and I hope this book can do the same – Koos Kombuis -/- An artful masterpiece – Anschen Conradie -/- To fly with a solo debut, that Smith does convincingly – Joan Hambidge -/- About: This (...) fictional work explores various philosophical ideas, from AI, climate change justice, technology and its ethical complications, to the ideas of clones and robots and their position in society as, plausibly, citizens with full "human rights". (shrink)

Though numerous disciplines are cultivating pedagogical relationships with the emerging field of digital humanities, philosophy appears to be among the least interested in what digital humanities has to offer. This is a missed opportunity. Through a proper pedagogical framing of both fields, I argue that philosophy educators would benefit from building a pedagogical relationship with digital humanities. First, I outline digital humanities methods and teaching practices, then I identify several core educational aims and teaching methods in philosophy, which I conceptualize (...) in terms of a creative art. Ultimately, I argue that digital humanities practices would enhance philosophy’s education aims by making philosophy more relevant and accessible to students’ needs, by fostering active learning, by establishing more equitable, collaborative participation, and by balancing skill-development with philosophical creation. The goal of this essay is not to replace traditional philosophy pedagogy, but rather to supplement it to better support modern students’ needs. (shrink)

This article suggests evidence for and reasons why prior acquisition may either facilitate or inhibit acquisition of a new construction. It investigates acquisition of the German passive and future constructions which contain a lexical verb with either the auxiliary sein “to be” or werden “to become”, and are related through these to potential supporting constructions. We predicted that a supported construction should be acquired earlier, faster, and unusually rapidly. An inhibited construction should show an extended depressed usage. We analyzed a (...) dense corpus of a German boy between 2;0 and 5;0. He acquired the sein- before the werden-passive. The former was supported by his prior acquisition of the sein copula, whereas the werden-passive itself supported one werden copula construction. He acquired the werden-future extremely slowly due to the hindrance of a semantically identical construction. These results fit with an emergentist approach in which apparently “sudden” acquisition is still due to gradual learning mechanisms. (shrink)

A Fellow of the Royal Society rebuffs orthodox scientific conclusions.

How does science work? Does it tell us what the world is "really" like? What makes it different from other ways of understanding the universe? In Theory and Reality , Peter Godfrey-Smith addresses these questions by taking the reader on a grand tour of one hundred years of debate about science. The result is a completely accessible introduction to the main themes of the philosophy of science. Intended for undergraduates and general readers with no prior background in philosophy, Theory (...) and Reality covers logical positivism the problems of induction and confirmation Karl Popper's theory of science Thomas Kuhn and "scientific revolutions" the views of Imre Lakatos, Larry Laudan, and Paul Feyerabend and challenges to the field from sociology of science, feminism, and science studies. The book then looks in more detail at some specific problems and theories, including scientific realism, the theory-ladeness of observation, scientific explanation, and Bayesianism. Finally, Godfrey-Smith defends a form of philosophical naturalism as the best way to solve the main problems in the field. Throughout the text he points out connections between philosophical debates and wider discussions about science in recent decades, such as the infamous "science wars." Examples and asides engage the beginning student a glossary of terms explains key concepts and suggestions for further reading are included at the end of each chapter. However, this is a textbook that doesn't feel like a textbook because it captures the historical drama of changes in how science has been conceived over the last one hundred years. Like no other text in this field, Theory and Reality combines a survey of recent history of the philosophy of science with current key debates in language that any beginning scholar or critical reader can follow. (shrink)

By transcendental aesthetic, Kant means “the science of all principles of a priori sensibility” (A 21/B 35). These, he argues, are the laws that properly direct our judgments of taste (B 35 – 36 fn.), i.e. our aesthetic judgments as we ordinarily understand that notion in the context of contemporary art. Thus the first part of the Critique of Pure Reason, entitled the Transcendental Aesthetic, enumerates the necessary presuppositions of, among other things, our ability to make empirical judgments about particular (...) works of art. These presuppositions are sensible rather than intellectual because on Kant’s view, all intellection that considers objects of any kind, whether abstract or concrete, must at base connect to actual, material objects with which we come into direct contact; and this we can do only through sensibility (A 19/B 33). Thus the following discussion explores what Kant claims must be true of us in order to make the sorts of aesthetic judgments we make, rather than any particular class or quality of aesthetic judgments itself. On Kant’s view, what must be true of us in order to make aesthetic judgments is not different from what must be true of us in order to make any other kind of judgment about empirical objects. (shrink)

We have now reached the point at which cloud computing and other types of advanced infrastructure are bringing about a situation in which knowledge objects can be delivered in an efficient manner to hose who need to consume them. And just as highways were the infrastructure necessary for a manufacturing economy, serving as the arteries along which raw materials and manufactured goods coming in from all directions could flow, so we believe that ontologies will in the future provide an important (...) pillar in the infrastructure that is necessary for the accurate and safe delivery of all varieties of knowledge. (shrink)

In this paper, it will be argued that each time a procedure in a representational system is functioning adequately and automatically, the child steps up to a metaprocedural level and considers the procedure as a unit in its own right. Data will be drawn from microdevelopment in children's creation of external memory devices (i.e., changes in representation of a spatial task during a one hour's session) as well as from macrodevelopment in language acquisition (i.e., changes occurring over age in a (...) study of nominal determiners, pronouns and gender markers). These two aspects of development of representational systems are examined with respect to the spontaneous passage from concrete reference to abstract systems, from idiosyncratic to conventional notations, from redundant to economic marking, from unifunctional to plurifunctional meaningful units. These micro‐ and manodevelopmental changes take place in a spontaneous fashion despite the fact that the child's earlier system is adequate for successfully conveying the information required. A discussion will be made of the way in which children tend to indicate externally, by unifunctional markers, information which was implicit in their earlier use of an adult‐like system. They appear to be striving for the delicate balance between encoding and decoding efforts, ultimately leading to a felicitous representational system. Metaprocedural behavior is hypothesized to act as a control mechanism in the striving for this delicate balance of information content and information processing effort. It also appears to act as a control mechanism for the interprocedural organizotion of what was previously a plethora of juxtaposed, unconnected procedures yielding superficially analogous behavior. The stepping‐up to a metaprocedural level seems to occur each time the child has a handle on his currently functioning, goal‐oriented system. This enables the child to treat the system, or procedures which are part thereof, as units functioning in their own right. Thus there appears to be a deep‐rooted psychological tendency for a representational tool which functions well procedurally to become subsequently a problem‐space per se. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:We combine prior research on ethical decision-making in organizations with a rational choice theory of corporate crime from criminology to develop a model of corporate offending that is tested with a sample of U.S. managers. Despite demands for increased sanctioning of corporate offenders, we find that the threat of legal action does not directly affect the likelihood of misconduct. Managers’ evaluations of the ethics of the act, measured using a multidimensional ethics scale, have a significant effect, as do outcome expectancies (...) that result from being associated with the misconduct but not facing formal sanctions. The threat of formal sanctions appears to operate indirectly, influencing ethical evaluations and outcome expectancies. Obedience to authority also affects illegal intentions, with managers reporting higher prospective offending when they are ordered to engage in misconduct by a supervisor. (shrink)

This paper, while neutral on questions about the minimality of truth, argues for the non-minimality of truth-aptness.

Metabolic dysfunction is a ubiquitous underlying feature of many neurological conditions including acute traumatic brain injuries and chronic neurodegenerative conditions. A central problem in neurological patients, in particular those with traumatic brain injuries, is an impairment in the utilization of glucose, which is the predominant metabolic substrate in a normally functioning brain. In such patients, alternative substrates including ketone bodies and lactate become important metabolic candidates for maintaining brain function. While the potential neuroprotective benefits of ketosis have been recognized for (...) up to almost a century, the majority of work has focused on the use of ketogenic diets to induce such a state, which is inappropriate in cases of acute disease due to the prolonged periods of time (i.e., weeks to months) required for the effects of a ketogenic diet to be seen. The following review seeks to explore the neuroprotective effects of exogenous ketone and lactate preparations, which have more recently become commercially available and are able to induce a deep ketogenic response in a fraction of the time. The rapid response of exogenous preparations makes their use as a therapeutic adjunct more feasible from a clinical perspective in both acute and chronic neurological conditions. Potentially, their ability to globally moderate long-term, occult brain dysfunction may also be relevant in reducing lifetime risks of certain neurodegenerative conditions. In particular, this review explores the association between traumatic brain injury and contusion-related dementia, assessing metabolic parallels and highlighting the potential role of exogenous ketone and lactate therapies. (shrink)