Mindfulness can benefit athletes’ mindset and performance. These benefits may be enhanced by sport-specific mindfulness interventions. Accordingly, our objectives were 2-fold: first, to develop a rowing-specific mindfulness intervention, and second, to investigate its effects on mindfulness, flow, reinvestment, and rowing performance. Rowers were randomly assigned to either a 6-week rowing-specific mindfulness intervention, which included generic and rowing-specific practices, or a control group. Rowers completed pre-test and post-test measures of performance, mindfulness, flow, and rowing-specific reinvestment. Lastly, rowers completed an evaluation form (...) following the intervention. The results demonstrated that the intervention group increased flow, mindfulness, and improved performance, additionally conscious motor processing decreased from pre-test to post-test. However, the intervention did not preferentially change mindfulness or reinvestment compared to control. Participants provided favorable feedback and evaluated the intervention positively. Our 6-week rowing-specific mindfulness intervention promoted flow, encouraged mindfulness, and aided performance. Thus, we provide preliminary explorative evidence that a sport-specific mindfulness intervention can benefit athletes. We recommend that future research, with large sample sizes and improved home practice, should examine mediators and moderators of the mindfulness-performance relationship. (shrink)

Biomedical research is increasingly globalized with ever more research conducted in low and middle-income countries. This trend raises a host of ethical concerns and critiques. While community engagement has been proposed as an ethically important practice for global biomedical research, there is no agreement about what these practices contribute to the ethics of research, or when they are needed.

Potential conflicts between the roles of physicians and researchers have been described at the theoretical level in the bioethics literature (Czoli, et al., 2011). Physicians and researchers are generally in mutually distinct roles, responsible for patients and participants respectively. With increasing emphasis on integration of research into clinical settings, however, the role divide is sometimes unclear. Consequently, physician–researchers must consider and negotiate salient ethical differences between clinical– and research–based obligations (Miller et al, 1998). This paper explores the subjective experiences and (...) perspectives of 30 physician–researchers working in three Canadian paediatric settings. Drawing on qualitative interviews, it identifies ethical challenges and strategies used by physician–researchers in managing dual roles. It considers whether competing obligations could have both positive and adverse consequences for both physician–researchers and patients. Finally, we discuss how empirical work, which explores the perspectives of those engaged in research and clinical practice, can lead the way to understanding and promoting best practice. (shrink)

Efforts to address child trafficking require intensive collaboration among professionals of varied disciplines. Healthcare professionals have a major role in this multidisciplinary approach. Training is essential for all professionals, and policies and protocols may assist in fostering an effective, comprehensive response to victimization.

Psychedelics such as psilocybin reliably produce significantly altered states of consciousness with a variety of subjectively experienced effects. These include certain changes to perception, cognition, and affect,1 which we refer to here as the acute subjective effects of psychedelics. In recent years, psychedelics such as psilocybin have also shown considerable promise as therapeutic agents when combined with talk therapy, for example, in the treatment of major depression or substance use disorder.2 However, it is currently unclear whether the aforementioned acute subjective (...) effects are necessary to bring about the observed therapeutic effects of psilocybin and other psychedelics. This uncertainty has sparked a lively—though still largely hypothetical—debate on whether psychedelics without subjective effects (“nonsubjective psychedelics” or “non-hallucinogenic psychedelics”) could still have the same therapeutic impact, or whether the acute subjective effects are in fact necessary for this impact to be fully realized.3,4,5. (shrink)

State Medical Boards (SMBs) can take severe disciplinary actions (e.g., license revocation or suspension) against physicians who commit egregious wrongdoing in order to protect the public. However, there is noteworthy variability in the extent to which SMBs impose severe disciplinary action. In this manuscript, we present and synthesize a subset of 11 recommendations based on findings from our team’s larger consensus-building project that identified a list of 56 policies and legal provisions SMBs can use to better protect patients from egregious (...) wrongdoing by physicians. (shrink)

On August 29, 2006, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit held that an injured ERISA plan beneficiary need not be “made whole” by any injury-related recovery from a third party in order for her ERISA plan to assert subrogation or reimbursement rights if the plan's terms either 1) “unambiguously establish a plan priority” to any funds a beneficiary recovers from a third party, or 2) are reasonably interpreted to establish such a priority by an (...) ERISA plan fiduciary clearly authorized to do so.In 1991, appellants William and Judith Moore purchased an ERISA health insurance policy from Blue Cross Blue Shield of the National Capital Area and its wholly-owned subsidiary CapitalCare. On September 10, 1992, the Moores’ daughter Alistaire, a plan beneficiary, was seriously injured in an automobile accident. (shrink)

In his paper in the same volume, Sider argues that, of maximalism and quantifier variance, the latter promises to let us make better sense of neo-Fregeanism. I argue that neo-Fregeans should, and seemingly do, reject quantifier variance. If they must choose between these two options, they should choose maximalism.

1Department of Moral Philosophy, University of St Andrews, Fife KY16 9AL, Scotland, UKTolstoy on Aesthetics: What is Art? H.O. Mounce Aldershot, UK Ashgate 2001 v + 115 Hardback£35.00, $59.95.

Division III of Being and Time (BT) was supposed to address the question of the sense of being. Being and its sense are in question because while we do understand being, it is also strangely withheld from us. That we understand being is evidenced by the fact that we have access to what and that things are (rather than not); that being is withheld from us is evidenced by the fact that we do not seem to be able to articulate (...) what it is that we grasp in this. Being is both given to us and withheld from us. To be given yet withheld is to be question-worthy—and it is also to be the proper object of phenomenology (BT 35). Being is the phenomenon: that which shows itself (phainomenon) (BT 31) but also needs to be “let be seen” (legein) (BT 32). To make sense of being is to make sense of both how it shows itself and how it hides itself. -/- Division I explains how being shows itself by, first, explaining how we discover entities in their being and, second, explicating the structure of our openness to being (i.e., disclosedness). The next step should be to explain how being hides itself—the phenomenon that Heidegger sometimes calls “falling.” But Heidegger does not do this. He is distracted by a different (albeit related) phenomenon: inauthenticity. By pursuing authenticity and inauthenticity throughout §40 and the so-called existentialist chapters in Division II, Heidegger does give us important insight into the riskiness and fragility of our relationship to being. But he does not capture the finitude that he should be aiming at: the withholding of being. Lacking this, Heidegger does not have our finite openness to being fully in view. As a result, the structure of the temporality that he draws out accounts for our openness to being but not for the finitude of this openness. This finitude is not a mere limitation on our part—it is not just that we don’t fully “get” being. It belongs to how being works that it withholds itself from us and so makes itself question-worthy. So, if Heidegger’s goal in Division III is to show how being makes sense, then he will need to make sense of this fundamental feature of being. It is, if nothing else, the feature that sparked his investigation. But because he lost sight of the withholding of being at the end of Division I, Heidegger is not in a position to make sense of being in Division III. -/- By the time he starts working seriously with the notion of phusis in the 1930s, Heidegger has reoriented himself to the phenomenon of being’s withholding. By approaching BT from the perspective of Heidegger’s work in this period, then, we can see more clearly what BT accomplished and where it veered off course. I will do this by interpreting Heidegger’s reading (in Introduction to Metaphysics [IM]) of the opening strophes of the choral ode from Sophocles’ Antigone. On Heidegger’s ontological reading, these strophes show us the various features of being by speaking of the natural world: being is understood as the sea, the earth, and the living thing. I will argue that BT illuminates being as the living thing and being as the earth, and in this explains how being is given to us. But BT falters when it tries to reach being as the sea. The sea is an image of being’s simultaneous granting and withholding. Because Heidegger has not thought being’s withholding in Divisions I and II, he cannot go on to make sense of this withholding as simultaneous with being’s granting in Division III. In short, Heidegger should have thought being as the sea in Division III, but he cannot. (shrink)

The Armidale State Forest is a pine plantation at the edge of the Armidale city in New South Wales, Australia. In 2000 and 2007 large parts of the forest were destroyed in clear-felling operations. This sparked community outrage which led to the formation of advocacy groups who have begun to restore the forest despite its controversial position as a “conifer invader” in Eucalypt country. In this paper I focus on the way personal memories are embodied in the pine forms to (...) challenge the native/invasive divide in Australian conservation discourse. I argue that the destruction of this devalued ecology caused a traumatic rupture to the Armidale communities’ connection to a forest which preserves their pasts. To heal this environmental and psychological damage, I propose a recuperative approach termed “ecological remembrance” that strives to repair severed connections between people and place. (shrink)

On August 29, 2006, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit held that an injured ERISA plan beneficiary need not be “made whole” by any injury-related recovery from a third party in order for her ERISA plan to assert subrogation or reimbursement rights if the plan's terms either 1) “unambiguously establish a plan priority” to any funds a beneficiary recovers from a third party, or 2) are reasonably interpreted to establish such a priority by an (...) ERISA plan fiduciary clearly authorized to do so.In 1991, appellants William and Judith Moore purchased an ERISA health insurance policy from Blue Cross Blue Shield of the National Capital Area and its wholly-owned subsidiary CapitalCare. On September 10, 1992, the Moores’ daughter Alistaire, a plan beneficiary, was seriously injured in an automobile accident. (shrink)

On August 29, 2006, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit held that an injured ERISA plan beneficiary need not be “made whole” by any injury-related recovery from a third party in order for her ERISA plan to assert subrogation or reimbursement rights if the plan's terms either 1) “unambiguously establish a plan priority” to any funds a beneficiary recovers from a third party, or 2) are reasonably interpreted to establish such a priority by an (...) ERISA plan fiduciary clearly authorized to do so.In 1991, appellants William and Judith Moore purchased an ERISA health insurance policy from Blue Cross Blue Shield of the National Capital Area and its wholly-owned subsidiary CapitalCare. On September 10, 1992, the Moores’ daughter Alistaire, a plan beneficiary, was seriously injured in an automobile accident. (shrink)

The Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, first leaked to the public on 2 May 2022 and officially released on 24 June 2022, overturned Roe v. Wade and thereby determined that abortion is no longer a federally protected right under the Constitution. Instead, the decision gives individual states the right to regulate abortion. Since the Dobbs decision first leaked, our institution has received numerous requests for permanent contraception from individuals stating that their motivation to pursue permanent contraception (...) was influenced by the Dobbs decision and concerns about their reproductive autonomy. Discussions with patients seeking permanent contraception since the Supreme Court’s leaked decision have led us to ask ourselves, is legislative anxiety an indication for surgery? This article presents a case series consisting of a convenience sample of 17 young, nulliparous individuals who sought out permanent contraception in the six months following the leak of the Dobbs decision. Healthcare professionals often feel discomfort in offering permanent contraception to young and nulliparous individuals. Accordingly, we discuss pertinent legal issues, review relevant ethical considerations, and offer a framework for these discussions intended to empower the consulting healthcare professional to center the bodily autonomy of every patient regardless of age, parity, or indication for permanent contraception. (shrink)

The 2015 judgment of the Namibia Supreme Court in Government of the Republic of Namibia v LM and Others set an important precedent on informed consent in a case involving the coercive sterilisation of HIV-positive women. This article analyses the reasoning and factual narratives of the judgment by applying Neil Manson and Onora O’Neill’s approach to informed consent as a communicative process. This is done in an effort to understand the practical import of the judgment in the particular context of (...) resource constrained public healthcare facilities through which many women in southern Africa access reproductive healthcare. While the judgment affirms certain established tenets in informed consent to surgical procedures, aspects of the reasoning in context demand more particularised applications of what it means for a patient to have capacity and to be informed, and to appropriately accommodate the disruptive role of power dynamics in the communicative process. (shrink)

Over the past four decades, the paradox of fiction has sparked considerable debate among philosophers. Unfortunately, the most promising solution to this puzzle, thought theory, currently earns its plausibility by way of intuition rather than evidence. I aim to address this by updating thought theory in light of recent empirical findings on affect. I will draw upon a wide range of scientific research—on the cognitive mechanisms driving emotion, the role of affect in counterfactual mind wandering and prospection, and the evolutionary (...) function of affect—to substantiate the claim that fictions can give rise to both real and rational emotional states. (shrink)

It has been 40 years since the seminal papers on pharmacy's status as a profession sparked debate about the pharmacist's role in health care, yet the questions they raised are just as poignant today as they were then. Questions about whether pharmacists are the experts when it comes to drug therapy information can be answered practically by assessing the perception of pharmacists' obligations to patients as being dependent on or independent of physicians' responsibilities. Both options have important implications for pharmacy's (...) status as a profession, the value that pharmacists can add to health care, and a pharmacist's right to deny a patient emergency contraception. (shrink)

Overall, the deregulation of genetically engineered (GE) crops for commercial cultivation in North America has been a success story. In several cases, however, GE crops have sparked concerns and disagreements among the stakeholders and there are incidences of court lawsuits, including a recent one on glyphosate resistant (GR) alfalfa (Medicago sativa, L.). While GE crops can provide operational benefits to farmers, challenges are looming from commercialization of perennial GE crops. The unique ecology and biology of these crops and GE alfalfa (...) in particular can facilitate adventitious presence (AP) of GE traits and it makes more visible that economic risks for conventional growers and food/feed producers have not been adequately addressed by the GE regulatory system in the United States (US). Asynchronous market approvals and the existence of a number of GE sensitive export markets create uncertainties among the exporters. Policy development in these fields may be helpful for ensuring a broader acceptance and market success of GE agriculture in general. The analysis is focusing on the US, although many diagnosed problems are also relevant to other jurisdictions—in particular if no co-existence policy is in place. (shrink)

Nowadays, there has been an increase in security concerns regarding fingerprint biometrics. This problem arises due to technological advancements in bypassing and hacking methodologies. This has sparked the need for a more secure platform for identification. In this paper, we have used a deep Convolutional Neural Network as a pre-verification filter to filter out bad or malicious fingerprints. As deep learning allows the system to be more accurate at detecting and reducing false identification by training itself again and again with (...) test samples, the proposed method improves the security and accuracy by multiple folds. The implementation of a novel secure fingerprint verification platform that takes the optical image of a fingerprint as input is explained in this paper. The given input is pre-verified using Google’s pre-trained inception model for deep learning applications, and then passed through a minutia-based algorithm for user authentication. Then, the results are compared with existing models. (shrink)

In this chapter, I examine Lewis's ideas about ontological innocence, ontological commitment and double-counting, in his discussion of composition as identity in Parts of Classes. I attempt to understand these primarily as epistemic or methodological claims: how far can we get down this route without adopting radical metaphysical theses about composition as identity?

Katherine Hawley explores and compares three theories of persistence -- endurance, perdurance, and stage theories - investigating the ways in which they attempt to account for the world around us. Having provided valuable clarification of its two main rivals, she concludes by advocating stage theory.

How do things persist? Are material objects spread out through time just as they are spread out through space? Or is temporal persistence quite different from spatial extension? This key question lies at the heart of any metaphysical exploration of the material world, and it plays a crucial part in debates about personal identity and survival. This book explores and compares three theories of persistence — endurance, perdurance, and stage theories — investigating the ways in which they attempt to account (...) for the world around us. Having provided valuable clarification of its two main rivals, the book concludes by advocating stage theory. Such a basic issue about the nature of the physical world naturally has close ties with other central philosophical problems. This book includes discussions of change and parthood, of how we refer to material objects at different times, of the doctrine of Humean supervenience, and of the modal features of material things. In particular, it contains new accounts of the nature of worldly vagueness, and of what binds material things together over time, distinguishing the career of a natural object from an arbitrary sequence of events. Each chapter concludes with a reflection about the impact of these metaphysical debates upon questions about our personal identity and survival. (shrink)

I outline a number of parallels between trust and distrust, emphasising the significance of situations in which both trust and distrust would be an imposition upon the (dis)trustee. I develop an account of both trust and distrust in terms of commitment, and argue that this enables us to understand the nature of trustworthiness. Note that this article is available open access on the journal website.

One of Martin Heidegger’s enduring philosophical legacies is his overall vision of what it is to be us. We—whoever that turns out to include—are cases of Dasein, and as such we are distinctively open to entities, including others and ourselves. In this essay, I paint a picture of that openness that aims to capture why Heidegger’s vision has so powerfully gripped so many. Drawing on Heidegger’s thought both early and late, I present a synoptic view of us as open to (...) the encounter with entities' bursting forth into presencing. We can be more or less closed off to this upsurge, but we can also allow it in its full power: in philosophical and poetic openness. I draw on Borgmann, Buber, Plato’s Socrates, Rilke, and others to capture our openness at its Heideggerian best—and we ourselves at our best, showing up radiantly for encounter. (shrink)

We have identified a sample of 53 societies outside of the classical Himalayan and Marquesean area that permit polyandrous unions. Our goal is to broadly describe the demographic, social, marital, and economic characteristics of these societies and to evaluate some hypotheses of the causes of polyandry. We demonstrate that although polyandry is rare it is not as rare as commonly believed, is found worldwide, and is most common in egalitarian societies. We also argue that polyandry likely existed during early human (...) history and should be examined from an evolutionary perspective. Our analysis reveals that it may be a predictable response to a high operational sex ratio favoring males and may also be a response to high rates of male mortality and, possibly, male absenteeism. Other factors may contribute, but our within-polyandry sample limits analysis. (shrink)

When William of Ockham lectured on Lombard's Sentences in 1317-1319, he articulated a new theory of knowledge. Its reception by fourteenth-century scholars was, however, largely negative, for it conflicted with technical accounts of vision and with their interprations of Duns Scotus. This study begins with Roger Bacon, a major source for later scholastics' efforts to tie a complex of semantic and optical explanations together into an account of concept formation, truth and the acquisition of certitude. After considering the challenges of (...) Peter Olivi and Henry of Ghent, Part I concludes with a discussion of Scotus's epistemology. Part II explores the alternative theories of Peter Aureol and William of Ockham. Part III traces the impact of Scotus, and then of Aureol, on Oxford thought in the years of Ockham's early audience, culminating with the views of Adam Wodeham. Part IV concerns Aureol's intellectual legacy at Paris, the introduction of Wodeham's thought there, and Autrecourt's controversies. (shrink)

In his new book, Knowledge: The Philosophical Quest in History, Steve Fuller returns to core themes of his program of social epistemology that he first outlined in his 1988 book, Social Epistemology. He develops a new, unorthodox theology and philosophy building upon his testimony in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District in defense of intelligent design, leading to a call for maximal human experimentation. Beginning from the theological premise rooted in the Abrahamic religious tradition that we are created in the (...) image of God, Fuller argues that the spark of the divine within us distinguishes us from animals. I argue that Fuller’s recent work takes us away from key insights of his original work. In contrast, I advocate for a program of social epistemology rooted in evolutionary science rather than intelligent design, emphasize a precautionary and ecological approach rather than a proactionary approach that favors risky human experimentation, and attend to our material and sociological embeddedness rather than a transhumanist repudiation of the body. (shrink)

Vague existence can seem like the worst kind of vagueness in the world, or seem to be an entirely unintelligible notion. This bad reputation is based upon the rumour that if there is vague existence then there are non-existent objects. But the rumour is false: the modest brand of vague existence entailed by certain metaphysical theories of composition does not deserve its bad reputation.

When William of Ockham lectured on Lombard's "Sentences" in 1317-1319, he articulated a new theory of knowledge.

It has been argued that humans can face an ethical/epistemic dilemma over the automatic stereotyping involved in implicit bias: ethical demands require that we consistently treat people equally, as equally likely to possess certain traits, but if our aim is knowledge or understanding our responses should reflect social inequalities meaning that members of certain social groups are statistically more likely than others to possess particular features. I use psychological research to argue that often the best choice from the epistemic perspective (...) is the same as the best choice from the ethical perspective: to avoid automatic stereotyping even when this involves failing to reflect social realities in our judgements. This argument has an important implication: it shows that it is not possible to successfully defend an act of automatic stereotyping simply on the basis that the stereotype reflects an aspect of social reality. An act of automatic stereotyping can be poor from an epistemic perspective even if the stereotype that is activated reflects reality. (shrink)

Ethical beliefs are not justified by familiar methods. We do not directly sense ethical properties, at least not in the straightforward way we sense colors or shapes. Nor is it plausible to think – despite a tradition claiming otherwise – that there are self-evident ethical truths that we can know in the way we know conceptual or mathematical truths. Yet, if we are justified in believing anything, we are justified in believing various ethical propositions e.g., that slavery is wrong. If (...) ethical beliefs are not justified in these familiar ways, how are they justified? -/- In her widely read, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” and in her short complimentary paper, “On Brute Facts,” G.E.M. Anscombe answers this question with a compelling and unorthodox account of justification in ethics. Because of her polemical tone and because “Modern Moral Philosophy” does so much else besides, this contribution is easy to overlook. But her account is worth taking seriously, since (a) it is an underappreciated yet plausible account that sidesteps traditional controversies, (b) it offers rich conceptual tools for interpreting and critiquing ethical theories, (c) it suggests an appealing account of the place of ethical theory in ethical knowledge and, (d) it provides useful guidance for doing applied ethics. (shrink)

Fear generalisation is a psychological phenomenon that occurs when fear that is elicited in response to a frightening stimulus spreads to similar or related stimuli. The practical harms of pathological fear generalisation related to trauma are well-documented, but little or no attention has been given so far to its epistemic harms. This paper fills this gap in the literature. It shows how the psychological phenomenon, when it becomes pathological, substantially curbs the epistemic agency of those who experience the fear that (...) generalizes, limiting their ability to respond to evidence, and substantially limiting their epistemic horizons. It is argued that when these epistemic harms are caused by wrongful actions and decisions of individuals or institutions, because the fear is elicited in response to a traumatic experience inflicted by them, the harms should be considered epistemic wrongs. The epistemic wrongs are closely akin to agential epistemic injustice, a variety of distributive epistemic injustice, and sometimes also involve epistemic exclusion. The paper thereby identifies a previously underexplored psychological mechanism that can be a vehicle through which both individuals and institutions can epistemically wrong others. The argument has implications for how both epistemic wrongs and epistemic injustice should be conceived, suggesting that both can occur without being caused by primarily epistemic flaws or errors, or a bad epistemic character. Finally, it highlights the advantage of taking a victim-centred approach to understanding epistemic harm. (shrink)

Social groups—like teams, committees, gender groups, and racial groups—play a central role in our lives and in philosophical inquiry. Here I develop and motivate a structuralist ontology of social groups centered on social structures (i.e., networks of relations that are constitutively dependent on social factors). The view delivers a picture that encompasses a diverse range of social groups, while maintaining important metaphysical and normative distinctions between groups of different kinds. It also meets the constraint that not every arbitrary collection of (...) people is a social group. In addition, the framework provides resources for developing a broader structuralist view in social ontology. (shrink)

Some language encourages essentialist thinking. While philosophers have largely focused on generics and essentialism, I argue that nouns as a category are poised to refer to kinds and to promote representational essentializing. Our psychological propensity to essentialize when nouns are used reveals a limitation for anti-essentialist ameliorative projects. Even ameliorated nouns can continue to underpin essentialist thinking. I conclude by arguing that representational essentialism does not doom anti-essentialist ameliorative projects. Rather it reveals that would-be ameliorators ought to attend to the (...) propensities for our representational devices to essentialize and to the complex relationship between essentialism and prejudice. (shrink)

DISCOURSE; EXPRESSION (i) 'Discourse' is a word with a variety of meanings. One of the more useful is as an omnibus word covering both thought and talk. ...

Brennan and Jaworski (2018) accuse me of misunderstanding their thesis and failing to produce a counterexample to it. In this Response, I clarify my central argument in “Can’t Buy Me Love,” explain why I used prostitution as an example, and work to advance the debate.