Medthics is an online graphic novel series comprising of six issues . What is often viewed as pop culture escapism, this "comic book" series tackles the complex world of medicine and its moral/ethical intricacies. From topics about physician identity formation to humane patient care, Medthics brings to the forefront subject matter essential to clinical practice. The art of medicine is depicted through stylized characters as they live their lives through a fictional world inspired by true events.

Many philosophers of science follow Hempel in embracing both substantive and methodological anti-psychologism regarding the study of explanation. The former thesis denies that explanations are constituted by psychological events, and the latter denies that psychological research can contribute much to the philosophical investigation of the nature of explanation. Substantive anti-psychologism is commonly defended by citing cases, such as hyper-complex descriptions or vast computer simulations, which are reputedly generally agreed to constitute explanations but which defy human comprehension and, as a result, (...) fail to engender any relevant psychological events. It is commonly held that the truth of the substantive thesis would lend support to the methodological thesis. However, the standard argument for the substantive thesis presumes that philosophers’ own judgments about the aforementioned cases issues from mastery of the lay or scientific norms regarding the use of ‘explanation.’ Here we challenge this presumption with a series of experiments indicating that both lay and scientific populations require of explanations that they actually render their targets intelligible. This research not only undermines a standard line of argument for substantive anti-psychologism, it demonstrates the utility of psychological research methods for answering meta-questions about the norms regarding the use of ‘explanation.’. (shrink)

The general thesis of this paper is that the motives of the currently dominant global educational governance are rooted in a specific cultural milieu in the time of the Cold War, more precisely in the late 1950s, heading to a harmonious world. The more specific thesis is that a series of failures in the achievement of this harmonized globe led to reforms in educational governance, leading eventually to the development of instruments like large-scale assessments, such as PISA. The concluding (...) thesis of the paper is that precisely because the idea of global governance is rooted in a specific culture, its instruments run the risk of only affecting formal structures of education in other cultures rather the inner activities of the ‘educational fabric’. (shrink)

This book explores how shamanic Daoist practices help cultivate the skills of an elicitive peaceworker. Author Kathleen McGoey uses embodied writing to describe her direct experiences with qigong and other meditation forms, and to explain the creation of inner peace that ultimately extends far beyond the individual. A trans-rational understanding of peace weaves together transpersonal interpretations of intuition with ancient Daoist wisdom. By relating the outcomes of such approaches to real world conflict transformation, McGoey proposes a practical personal consciousness that (...) strives for harmony with our's and others' environments. (Series: Masters of Peace - Vol. 9). (shrink)

According to Bronislaw Baczko, utopias may be considered as different forms—they are not linked to any precise literary genre—of critique of social reality and the quest for alternatives. Some consist of a detailed description of a new social order, whereas others confine themselves to an overall design, which solely defines a series of values and principles. They all contain an ideal of perfection: a utopian view of the world always stems from the awareness of a breach between what must (...) be and social reality, which is deemed to be in crisis and dominated by evil. There is, thus, no utopia without an ideal opposed to reality. That said, idealized as they may be, utopias do allow such reality to cease to be deemed.. (shrink)

In this second paper in a series on stochastic electrodynamics the system of a charged harmonic oscillator (HO) immersed in the stochastic zero-point field is analyzed. First, a method discussed by Claverie and Diner and Sanchez-Ron and Sanz permits a finite closed form renormalization of the oscillator frequency and charge, and allows the third-order Abraham-Lorentz (AL) nonrelativistic equation of motion, in dipole approximation, to be rewritten as an ordinary second-order equation, which thereby admits a conventional phase-space description and (...) precludes the runaway solutions of the AL equation. Second, following several authors, a momentum is defined that reduces to the usual canonical momentum in the limit of no radiation reaction, and the statistical moments of the oscillator position and this momentum are calculated in closed form to all orders of the radiative corrections. As has been shown by many authors, the velocity second moment is unbounded; semiquantitative arguments are given to support the conjecture that the use of the point-particle dipole approximation is responsible for this divergence. Third, it is shown that, to zeroth order in the radiative corrections, the renormalized HO has the same expectation energy found by other authors, that of the quantum ground state. (shrink)

Musicians sometimes shake their heads in wonderment at the remarkable incidence of musical creativity that occurred in Germany and Austria between the years 1750 and 1900. One after another, a series of musical giants arose in rapid succession, each unique, and each exemplifying human artistic genius of the highest possible order. That the German-speaking world dominated music composition during this period is scarcely open to question. But it was not always this way. In the seventeenth century, the first phase (...) of the period which has come to be known as the Baroque, the Italians were dominant, and in the centuries before that the Flemish composers of the Renaissance and the high Middle Ages like Ockeghem and Josquin des Pres were second to none in importance. (shrink)

In this fourth paper in a series on stochastic electrodynamics (SED), the harmonic oscillator-zero-point field system in the presence of an arbitrary applied classical radiation field is studied further. The exact closed-form expressions are found for the time-dependent probability that the oscillator is in the nth eigenstate of the unperturbed SED Hamiltonian H 0 , the same H 0 as that of ordinary quantum mechanics. It is shown that an eigenvalue of H 0 is the average energy that (...) the oscillator would have if its wave function could be just the corresponding eigenstate. The level shift for each unperturbed eigenvalue is found and shown to be unobservable for a different reason than in the corresponding QED treatment. Perturbation theory is applied to the SED Schrödinger equation to derive first-order transition rates for spontaneous emission and resonance absorption. The results agree with those of quantum electrodynamics, but the mathematics is strikingly different. It is shown that SED demands discarding the ideas of quantized energies, photons, and completeness of the Schrödinger equation, Finally, an intuitive physical SED model is suggested for the photoeffect and for Clauser's (2) coincidence experiment. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:SubStance 32.3 (2003) 109-132 [Access article in PDF] Passages Beyond the Resistance:René Char's Seuls demeurent and its Harmonics in Semprun and Foucault Van Kelly —Les actions du poète ne sont que la conséquence des énigmes de la poésie. —Le poète ne jouit que de la liberté des autres. René Char Spanish-born writer Jorge Semprun, in his memoir of deportation to Buchenwald, L'écriture ou la vie (1994), tells how in (...) spring 1945 he first came to read what is arguably René Char's first influential book of poetry, Seuls demeurent, and to recite on the liberated camp's assembly ground one of the keynote poems of the collection, "La liberté," as an emblem of his survival. Although Char had published several collections prior to World War II, Seuls demeurent was a major sign that something had changed in his poetry and politics, that he was about to entrer dans la carrière, to borrow the phrase that historian Olivier Wieviorka uses to describe the political and cultural ascension of French resisters in the postwar era. 1 A Gaullist officer, Marc, present at the liberation of Buchenwald in mid-April 1945, gave a copy of Seuls demeurent to Semprun, who had been deported for resistance activities in France. Semprun immediately felt that this book transcended what better-known writers had published from the late 1930s through early 1944, when he lost contact with a French literary scene he knew well (L'écriture, 79-87).Indeed, Seuls demeurent resonated so strongly in the post-Liberation years that it furnished a major reference point in Foucault's preface to his Folie et déraison (1961), where the philosopher links his own critique of social repression with Char's "Partage formel," the poetic sequence of aphorisms that concludes Seuls demeurent. Without mentioning his source (either poet or title of the poem), Foucault quotes from aphorism XXII, where Char praises the uncanny murmur he calls "étrangeté légitime," 2 and where we might hear the whispers of the Resister's legitimate revolt against repression as well as a legitimate strangeness or new self-assertive idiom within poetry. [End Page 109]It is interesting that Semprun and Foucault route their early encounters with Char's writing through the more explicitly poetical Seuls demeurent, and not through Feuillets d'Hypnos, a series of maxims, action portraits, and homages published in 1946 inGallimard's « Espoir » series, directed by Albert Camus, Char's friend. In Feuillets d'Hypnos, Char described, aphoristically more than anecdotally, his experience in the southern French Resistance. Seuls demeurent (and eventually other poems in a similar vein from his 1948 compendium Fureur et mystère, into which Seuls demeurent was merged alongside Feuillets d'Hypnos) purveyed Char's most lasting political and ideological impact on the generations represented by Semprun and Foucault.To understand how Seuls demeurent and the liberational poetics it initiated might spur two such nonconformist yet widely divergent left intellectual projects—Semprun's politique fiction, which resulted in novels like La deuxième mort de Ramón Mercader (1969), and Foucault's archeologies of social control—we must try to read Char's work back into the immediacy of its era, with the help of historians like H.R. Kedward, Henri Michel and others, despite the fact that Seuls demeurent is striated with discernible secondary work—the displacements and condensations that the Occupation and Liberation induced in its survivors and itinerants. Semprun and Foucault, in their quotations from Char's poetry, attest to the sense of personal empowerment that his voice effected. Perhaps something in his poetics, especially its mode of interaction with history, anticipated such readers.I will explore these ideas by showing, first, how in Seuls demeurent Char's poetic re-enactment of his passage through WWII foregrounds historical events and violence, but privileges poetry as a means of giving overriding sense to the war, and more specifically to the French internal Resistance, to the extent that it was morally distinct (if not always organizationally severed) from De Gaulle's external... (shrink)

In this third paper in a series on stochastic electrodynamics (SED), the nonrelativistic dipole approximation harmonic oscillator-zero-point field system is subjected to an arbitrary classical electromagnetic radiation field. The ensemble-averaged phase-space distribution and the two independent ensemble-averaged Liouville or Fokker-Planck equations that it satisfies are derived in closed form without furtner approximation. One of these Liouville equations is shown to be exactly equivalent to the usual Schrödinger equation supplemented by small radiative corrections and an explicit radiation reaction (RR) (...) vector potential that is similar to the Crisp-Jaynes semiclassical theory (SCT) RR potential. The wave function in this SED Schrödinger equation is shown to have thea priori significance of position probability amplitude. The other Liouville equation has no counterpart in ordinary quantum mechanics, and is shown to restrict initial conditions such that (i) The Wigner-type phase-space distribution is always positive, (ii) in the absence of an applied field, the only allowed solution of both equations is the quantum ground state, and (iii) if a previously applied field is suddenly turned off, then spontaneous transitions occur, with no need for a triggering perturbation as in SCT, until the system is in the ground state. It is also shown that the oscillator energy is a fluctuating quantity that must take on a continuum of values, with average value equal to the quantum ground-state energy plus a contribution due to the applied classical field. (shrink)

We discuss some research that has examined approach motivational urges and how this research clarifies the definition of approach motivation. Our research and that of others have raised doubts about the commonly accepted definition of approach motivation, which views it as a positive affective state triggered by positive stimuli. We review evidence that suggests: (a) that approach motivation is occasionally evoked by negative stimuli; (b) that approach motivation may be experienced as a negative state; and (c) that stimuli are unnecessary (...) to evoke approach motivation. (shrink)

If agents motivated only by self-interested reasons practice different degrees of ethical environmental behavior at least partly because they hold different notions of what is in their self-interest, then the nature of our self-interest conceptions is a central issue in environmental ethics. Unless set by biology, as seems unlikely from the evidence, the breadth of the individual self-interest conception we each develop must depend on the specific experiences we are each contingently exposed to in our lives. If nurturing a stronger (...) environmental ethic within our society is a goal, if that ethic depends at least in part on how we individually conceive of our self-interest, and if the development of each of our self-interest conceptions responds contingently to input from others, then these reflections lead to normative considerations that reach beyond the standard ethical questions regarding how to act to others that concern, antecedently, whether to act at all. (shrink)

AUTHORITY AND INEQUALITY UNDER CAPITALISM AND SOCIALISM: USA, USSR, AND CHINA by Barrington Moore, Jr. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. 142 pp., $29.95.

An emerging trend in cognitive science is to explore central epistemological questions using psychological methods. Early work in this growing area of research has revealed that epistemologists’ theories of knowledge diverge in various ways from the ways in which ordinary people think of knowledge. Reflecting the practices of epistemology as a whole, the vast majority of these studies have focused on the concept of propositional knowledge, or knowledge-that. Many philosophers, however, have argued that knowing how to do something is importantly (...) different from knowing that something is the case. Hence, in this paper we turn our attention to people’s concept of knowledge-how. We present data from two experiments that employed a sentence recognition task as an implicit measure of conceptual activation. The data from this implicit measure suggest that, contrary to prominent intellectualist theories of know-how, according to which know-how is a species of propositional knowledge, people’s concept of know-how more closely aligns with anti-intellectualism, the view that knowing how to perform some task consists in having the appropriate skills or abilities. (shrink)

Out of all the possible categories of protected areas, the most widely used around the world has been the national park. The reasons behind this predominance have colored the entire international conservation movement. I look at the ethical implications of the national park ideal’s phenomenal global success. Working from two assumptions-that human cultural diversity is good and desirable, and that there is a definite relation between such diversity and protected area conservation-I suggest that what is needed most right now is (...) a clarification and refocusing of the debate on this issue. (shrink)

Evolutionary psychology is a science in the making, working toward the goal of showing how psychological adaptation underlies much human behavior. The knee-jerk reaction that sociobiology is unscientific because it tells just-so stories has become a common charge against evolutionary psychology as well. My main positive thesis is that inference to the best explanation is a proper method for evolutionary analyses, and it supplies a new perspective on the issues raised in Schlinger's (1996) just-so story critique. My main negative thesis (...) is that, like many nonevolutionist critics, Schlinger's objections arise from misunderstandings of the evolutionary approach.Evolutionary psychology has progressed beyond telling just-so stories. It has found a host of ingenious special techniques to test hypotheses about the adaptive significance and proximate mechanisms of behavior. Naturalistic data using the comparative method combined with controlled tests using statistical analyses of data provide good evidence for a variety of hypotheses about behavioral control mechanisms — whether in nonhumans or in humans. For instance, the work of Gangestad and Thornhill on evolved mate preferences and fluctuating asymmetry of body type (FA) is a model of success. As the quantity and quality of evidence increase, we are entitled not just to regard such evolutionary hypotheses as preferable, but also as true. Such studies combine to show that the best explanation of the psychic unity of humankind — common patterns across societies, history, and cultures exposed by evolutionists — is the gendered, adapted, evolved species-typical design of the mind. (shrink)

This volume moves beyond ethics as problem-solving or ethics as etiquette to offer a look at ethics in primary care—as opposed to life-or-death—medical care. Professional Ethics and Primary Care Medicine deals with the ethics of routine, day-to-day encounters between doctors and patients. It probes beneath the hard decisions to look at the moral frameworks, habits of thought, and customs of practice that underlie choices. Harmon Smith and Larry Churchill argue that primary care, far from being merely a setting for the (...) rendering of care, provides a new understanding of both physician and patient, and thereby offers a fresh basis for medical ethics. (shrink)

The term 'sociobiology' was introduced in E. O. Wilson's Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975) as the application of evolutionary theory to social behavior. Sociobiologists claim that many social behaviors have been shaped by natural selection for reproductive success, and they attempt to reconstruct the evolutionary histories of particular behaviors or behavioral strategies. This survey attempts to clarify and evaluate the aim of sociobiology. Given that a neutral account is impossible, this entry does the next best thing. It takes sociobiology as (...) well as its critics seriously. On the one hand, by demonstrating that current studies of evolution and human behavior are based on Darwin's arguments for evolution (properly updated), we gain a strong rationale for thinking that something closer to sociobiology than to disconnectionism is needed to properly understand human sociality. Nevertheless, this survey reconstructs sociobiology in its best light, according to its aims. Consequently, criticism of sociobiology as it is actually practiced is not ignored or dismissed. This approach reveals what is best about sociobiology, while remaining sensitive to many of the problems it has generated. (shrink)

While nature is often claimed to be a space of harmonized balance or an antidote to the chaos of the modern world, we need a more grounded assessment of nature as endlessly changing and much less predictable than we like to assume. In this essay, I explore Karen Traviss’ provocative exploration of unbalanced nature and unbounded bodies in her wess’har series with the guidance of two ecocritics who reject the concept of balanced nature, Dana Phillips and Ursula Heise. Additionally, (...) I turn to the environmental philosopher Val Plumwood for insights regarding Traviss’ spurious yet rather standard vision of an unlimited technological panacea. Traviss’ series portrays how the boundaries and limits that we perceive as solid are often much less so than we believe, yet she also reveals—inadvertently, it seems—how easily we blindly ignore other, more solid limits. (shrink)

This article proposes a framework for the analysis of experienced discrimination in home mortgages. It addresses the problem of home mortgage lending discrimination in one of the richest areas of northern Italy. Employees of a local hospital were interviewed to study their perception of discriminatory behavior related to home financing. The analysis follows two steps. The first evaluates self-selection and the second focuses on the likelihood that applications are accepted by the bank. Findings show that discrimination is likely to appear (...) when the applicant’s nationality is considered. In addition to its findings, the study provides an original econometric model on a two-step procedure to test perceived discrimination and suggests a method and approach that may constitute a point of reference for those willing to study perceived discrimination. (shrink)

Critics of evolutionary psychology object that it is not rigorous science compared to other evolutionary science. Advocates reply that it is rigorous science, and that the critics are uninformed. Still, informed people having opposing preconceptions of what counts as rigor may reach opposing evaluative conclusions. I shall clarify the very idea of rigorous evolutionary histories in relation to the basic objection that “evolution without history” is not rigorous.

Pessoa (2013) makes an impressive case that emotion, motivation, and cognition are neurally intertwined. Our commentary broadens the discussion to the functional, “mind” level. We argue that philosophical and computational considerations justify some modern “separatist” views. We highlight several psychological phenomena that illustrate independence, including affective and motivational reactions to rudimentary inputs, and the guiding role of such reactions in cognition.

ABSTRACTGiven its intimate relationship with the human body and its environment, biotechnology innovation, and more particularly stem cell research innovations as a part thereof, implicate diverse social and moral/ethical issues. This paper explores some of the most important and controversial moral concerns raised by human embryonic stem cell research , focusing on concerns relating to the wellbeing of the embryo and the wellbeing of society . It then considers how and whether these concerns are dealt with in regulatory instruments in (...) Argentina, a southern developing country, examining in particular whether the values underlying these concerns have been translated into practical and effective rules reflective of the primary moral positions advanced. It concludes that Argentina's current state of stem cell research governance fails to consistently reflect the moral positions that have formed and is inadequate given Argentina's activity in this field. (shrink)

Over twenty years of research have examined the cognitive consequences of positive affect states, and suggested that positive affect leads to a broadening of cognition (see review by Fredrickson, 2001). However, this research has primarily examined positive affect that is low in approach motivational intensity (e.g., contentment). More recently, we have systematically examined positive affect that varies in approach motivational intensity, and found that positive affect high in approach motivation (e.g., desire) narrows cognition, whereas positive affect low in approach motivation (...) broadens cognition (e.g., Gable & Harmon-Jones, Citation2008a; Harmon-Jones & Gable, 2009). In this article we will review past models and present a motivational dimension model of affect that expands understanding of how affective states influence attentional and cognitive breadth. We then review research that has varied the motivational intensity of positive and negative affect and found that affect of low motivational intensity broadens cognitive processes, whereas affect of high motivational intensity narrows cognitive processes. (shrink)

"More and more applied work in biology, anthropology, linguistics, and allied fields is now undergirded by the assumption that we are approaching a threshold of irreversible loss..." asserts Harmon in his preface. He undertakes investigation of the "converging extinction crises," presenting far-reaching philosophical and scientific discussion with particular attention to the connections between biological and cultural diversity. Harmon is identified as a cofounder of Terralingua, a non-profit organization supporting linguistic, cultural, and biological diversity, and as director of the George Wright (...) Society (advancing parks and other protected areas); his scientific or other credentials are not stated. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

The present research was designed to test whether the subjective experience of more effort related to more reward valuation as measured by a neural response. This prediction was derived from the theory of cognitive dissonance and its effort justification paradigm. Young adult participants (n = 82) engaged in multiple trails of a low or high effort task that resulted in a loss or reward on each trial. Neural responses to the reward (loss) cue were measured using EEG, so that the (...) event-related potential known as the Reward Positivity (RewP) could be assessed. Results revealed no significant differences between low and high effort conditions on the RewP. However, within the high effort condition, a more subjective experience of effort was associated with a larger RewP. This research extends past research on the effort justification paradigm of cognitive dissonance theory by suggesting that effort justification is associated with an implicit measure of reward valuation. It therefore challenges recent perspectives on dissonance processes that posit that these evaluative changes should only occur on explicit but not implicit measures. (shrink)

In The Adapted Mind (1992), Cosmides and Tooby argue for the thesis that biological evolution endowed the human mind with a system of content‐specific computational mechanisms designed to solve long‐standing adaptive problems humans encountered as hunter‐gatherers, and not just a generalized "capacity for culture" or all‐purpose "learning capacity". I analyze three types of arguments they offer: historical arguments for the rise of content‐Specific psychology; programmatic arguments for the aims, theory, concepts, and methods of their evolutionary approach; and experimental arguments for (...) the content‐dependence of reasoning. Their arguments stand or fall on the claim that functionally specialized adaptations must be richly structured in a content‐specific way. (shrink)

This paper is a critique of pornography from within the framework of Heideggerian phenomenology. I contend that pornography is a pernicious form of technological discourse in which women are reduced to spectral and anonymous figures fulfilling a universal role, namely that of sexual subordination. Further, the danger of pornography is covered over in the public sphere as a result of the pervasive appeal to its status as mere fantasy. I argue that relegating the problem to the domain of fantasy is (...) superficial and specious at best, inasmuch as fantasy itself is ultimately grounded in everyday reality. When not concealed as innocuous “fantasy,” pornography has been defended under the rubric of “free speech.” One of my aims is to repudiate this approach by revealing it as grounded in a highly suspect and self-contradictory phallocentric view of language. Rae Langton’s (2009) recently published collection of essays on pornography attacks the problem largely in terms of “objectification” and the Austinian notion of “illocutionary disablement” from a position of authority. In this paper, I too confront the issues of language, objectification, and authority, but as articulated by means of Heidegger’s critique of technology. (shrink)

Genomic research is an expanding and subversive field, leaking into various others, from environmental protection to food production to healthcare delivery, and in doing so, it is reshaping our relationship with them. The international community has issued various declaratory instruments aimed at the human genome and genomic research. These soft law instruments stress the special nature of genomics and our genetic heritage, and attempt to set limits on our activities with respect to same, as informed by the human rights paradigm. (...) This paper examines the primary thrust and, more importantly, the joint value position of the Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights and the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights, concluding that, though important legal instruments from the human rights paradigm, these instruments, or rather the values contained therein, must find a more influential hard law voice and a broader policy environment. (shrink)

For an object to be multilocated is for it to wholly occupy disjoint spatial regions simultaneously. If multilocation is possible, it is possible that a multilocated particle is wholly located at 1080 distinct locations, such that it constitutes a particle-for-particle duplicate of the actual universe. Such a universe would presumably be perceptually identical to the actual universe. If we take multilocation as possible, we are thus presented with two accounts between which our perceptual evidence cannot adjudicate: one wherein the universe (...) is constituted by many particles and another wherein it is constituted by one radically multilocated particle. Parsimony concerns dictate that the latter is the more rational to accept. Since this is absurd, we should reject that multilocation is possible. Mooney responds to the problem by arguing that distinct location is evidence of non-identity, even if acceptance of the possibility of multilocation entails that this evidence is not decisive. If this is right, then the evidence favors a theory featuring many particles. In this paper, I contend that our commitment to taking distinct location as evidence of nonidentity is motivated by a more fundamental intuition that does not apply in the relevant context. (shrink)