This qualitative research study, a replication of a study published in 2002, investigated the qualities of a good nurse and the role ethics plays in decision making. After reviewing the limitations of the published work, the current study implemented modifications related to the research questions, sample selection, data collection, and use of software for data analysis. The original study identified seven categories that related to being a good nurse and doing the right thing. In the present study, the use of (...) relational analysis led to the recognition of four categories: (1) personal traits and attributes; (2) technical skills and management of care; (3) work environment and co-workers; and (4) caring and caring behaviors. To understand what it means to be a good nurse and do the right thing is a complex task; however, this research adds to the small amount of empirical data that exists to describe those characteristics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Mary J. Reichling (March 29, 1941–July 4, 2023)Barbara KennisonIn the early morning hour on July 4, 2023, Mary died from cancer at the age of 82. On July 8, 2023, her family, professional colleagues, former students, and friends gathered in Holy Family Chapel, Nazareth, Michigan to celebrate her life and legacy. In this sacred space, several in attendance offered expressions regarding Mary’s impact on their life professionally and personally. (...) Reflecting on the words in the music served to provide comfort and solace as did the choir and instrumental interludes. Monsignor Michael Hazard celebrated the mass of Christian Burial.Mary was born on March 28, 1941, in Detroit, Michigan, the oldest child of Clarence and Evangeline Reichling. As a young child, she aspired to becoming a physician and was quickly discouraged by others as this was viewed as a profession for men, not women. Her father, recognizing her talent and interest in music, continued to support her as she pursued her music studies, giving her a high level of confidence and skill in piano performance while still in high school.Her teaching career was launched after completing her undergraduate degree from Nazareth College, Kalamazoo, Michigan, August 5, 1966, her Masters in Music Education from Indiana University in 1969, and a Doctor of Music Education from Indiana University in 1991. [End Page 89]Her initial teaching began at Nazareth College, addressing the academic needs of students holding an interest in music and music education. Mary also provided private lessons to young children, teens, and adults. On several occasions I had the opportunity to observe her work with children and young people and was fascinated by her depth of understanding in addressing not only the musical learning needs of her private students as well as the social and psychological issues that had an impact on their musical abilities.An event stands out in my mind. Two adults, well known to the Kalamazoo community, Father John Grathwohl, Pastor, St Thomas Moore Student Parish, Western Michigan University and Evan LeDuc, Kalamazoo’s City Manager, decided to take violin lessons with Mary as their instructor. They appeared at her studio door, dressed like Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi in the film, The Blues Brothers, as they were wearing long oversized trench coats, black overshoes, black felt crumpled hats, and dark sunglasses, carrying their violin cases, and looking unshaven and disheveled. Mary, seeing them, lost her composure and began to laugh uncontrollably as the two stood there in stoic silence. Regaining her composure, she directed them to their respective chairs in front of music stands, had them take out their violins, and the lesson began. Not only was she respected by these two men but also by all the children and young people in her academic care.Having completed her undergraduate and graduate studies, Mary maintained an intense interest in learning, especially in philosophy and neuroscience with a focus on concepts such as thought, imagination, emotion, movement, space, and time. She was fascinated by the relationship between the performer and the audience, with respect to emotion, images, and imagination. Research for her doctoral dissertation, which she titled, “Images of Imagination: A Philosophical Study of Imagination in Music with Application to Music Education,” is reflective of her interest and research in the neuroscience field. Mary was awarded the Dean’s Dissertation Prize, Indiana University and awarded first place in 1991 Outstanding Dissertation in Music Education, national competition sponsored by the Council for Research in Music Education.In 1991, Mary accepted a position in the Department of Music, University of Louisiana, Lafayette where she taught undergraduate and graduate students. She served as advisor to graduate students in the music education concentration as well as serving on students’ dissertation committees. Her commitment to students was exemplified by her availability, in spite of other commitments to the University and music community beyond the university. The fruits of her professorial activity were evident in graduating students obtaining teaching positions in Lafayette, Vermillion, and Iberia parishes.In an effort to promote the music program and recruit students, she maintained a strong connection with area music teachers. This relationship served to [End Page 90] foster and facilitate high school students... (shrink)

The study of cases of illusory or unstable perception of some visual stimuli allows exploration of the psychology of perception of the surrounding world. The wired construction known as “Necker cube” is one such stimulus: it can be perceived as a cube whose front face is seen higher than the back face or vice versa. The switch can occur intentionally or spontaneously. The investigations were focused on switching parameters, relation of the switching to eye position, pre-history, and environment. Here we (...) define that the kernel of the problem is recognizing the 2D drawing as a 3D Necker cube. To this end, we have expanded Gestalt's psychology methods that allow us to recognize 2D figures in drawings for recognizing 3D figure in a flat drawing (including the Necker cube). The presented algorithm for recognizing the cube based on the imitation principle allowed the development of the model of switching between two possible perceptions of the Necker cube. The paper shows that the predictions are in conformity with previously available experimental data. The results confirm the imitation principle of perception, and suggest expanding our research on perception to a wider class of 3D figures, opening a window into the internal processes of perception. (shrink)

This collection addresses a post-WWII shift in the hierarchy of scientific explanations, where the highest goal moves from reductionism towards some ...

In much of the current academic and public discussion, conspiracy theories are portrayed as a negative phenomenon, linked to misinformation, mistrust in experts and institutions, and political propaganda. Rather surprisingly, however, philosophers working on this topic have been reluctant to incorporate a negatively evaluative aspect when either analyzing or engineering the concept conspiracy theory. In this paper, we present empirical data on the nature of the concept conspiracy theory from five studies designed to test the existence, prevalence and exact form (...) of an evaluative dimension to the ordinary concept conspiracy theory. These results reveal that, while there is a descriptive concept of conspiracy theory, the predominant use of conspiracy theory is deeply evaluative, encoding information about epistemic deficiency and often also derogatory and disparaging information. On the basis of these results, we present a new strategy for engineering conspiracy theory to promote theoretical investigations and institutional discussions of this phenomenon. We argue for engineering conspiracy theory to encode an epistemic evaluation, and to introduce a descriptive expression—such as ‘conspiratorial explanation’—to refer to the purely descriptive concept conspiracy theory. (shrink)

Light and Kennison found that bias effects in the forced-choice perceptual identification of words occurred only in a subset of participants, those who claimed on a strategy questionnaire to be deliberately guessing words they had studied previously. McKoon and Ratcliff raised a number of objections to the proposal that bias effects are due to guessing strategies, citing difficulties in our statistical treatment of data, our use of subjective reports to classify participants, and our approach to the general problem of (...) separating implicit from explicit influences on performance. This article responds to these objections. (shrink)

Contingency is the presence of non-actualized possibility in the world. Fatalism is a view of reality on which there is no contingency. Since it is contingency that permits agency, there has traditionally been much interest in contingency. This interest has long been embarrassed by the contention that simple and plausible assumptions about the world lead to fatalism. I begin with an Aristotelian argument as presented by Richard Taylor. Appreciation of this argument has been stultified by a question pertaining to the (...) source of necessity and possibility and a closely related one regarding the nature of metaphysics itself. Answering these questions reveals the crucial issue here, to wit, necessity and possibility in a temporal world. This issue is investigated through an important later criticism of Taylor by David Foster Wallace. Wallace’s critique is significant because it brings to the fore the pivotal notion for understanding contingency in a temporal world, that of synchronic possibility, the idea that incompatible states of affairs are possible at a single moment. This notion provides the basis of distinguishing two systematic accounts of truth, modality and time: two metaphysics of contingency. On one account, Taylor’s Aristotelian argument is straightforwardly valid and compelling; on the other, it is fallacious. In closing, I present reasons why the former account, supporting the Aristotelian views of time and truth, is correct and make some comments to ameliorate this conclusion. (shrink)

In the typical single-stimulus perceptual identification task, accuracy is improved by prior study of test words, a repetition priming benefit. There is also a cost, inasmuch as previously studied words are likely to be produced as responses if the test word is orthographically similar but not identical to a studied word. In two-alternative forced-choice perceptual identification, a test word is flashed and followed by two alternatives, one of which is the correct response. When the two alternatives are orthographically similar, test (...) words identical to previously studied items are identified more accurately than new words but tests words orthographically similar to studied words are identified less accurately than new words . Ratcliff and McKoon argue that these are bias effects that arise in the decision stage of word identification. We report five experiments that examined the alternative hypothesis that these bias effects arise from postperceptual guessing strategies. In single-stimulus perceptual identification, repetition priming benefits were equally great for young and older adults who claimed to use deliberate guessing strategies and those who did not . In contrast, only groups of young and older people who claimed to deliberately guess studied words in a two-alternative forced-choice task showed reliable benefits and costs. Costs and benefits were abolished in the two-alternative forced-choice task when a very long study list was used, presumably because the increased retrieval burden made the use of deliberate guessing strategies less attractive . Under conditions similar to those of Experiment 3, repetition priming was observed in single-stimulus perceptual identification . These results are consistent with the view that costs and benefits in the forced-choice perceptual identification task arise from deliberate guessing strategies but that those in the single-stimulus task do not. The possibility that the observed relationship between strategy reports and priming effects reflects erroneous postexperimental assessments of strategies by participants is also considered. (shrink)

For the theorists of crisis, the revolutionary state comes into existence through violence, and due to its inability to provide an authoritative katechon (restrainer) against internal and external violence, it perpetuates violence until it self-destructs. Writing during extreme economic depression and growing social and political violence, the crisis theorists––Joseph de Maistre, Juan Donoso Cortés, and Carl Schmitt––each sought to blame the chaos of their time upon the Janus-faced postrevolutionary ideals of liberalism and socialism by urging a return to pre-revolutionary moral (...) and religious values. They are united by three counterrevolutionary principles, all of which are purported to remedy revolutionary violence: traditional constitutional fidelity, the philosophy of the decision, and opposition to bourgeois liberalism. This essay is followed by the first complete English translation and publication of Donoso’s letter of October 24, 1851, which contains Donoso’s only reference to the “discussing class,” a political entity later popularized by Schmitt in his 1922 work Political Theology. (shrink)

The X-ray and bulk densities of PdIn alloys have been determined at ambient temperature on samples annealed at 1273 and 1373 K and quenched in water-ice mixtures. From these measurements the vacancy concentrations in this intermetallic phase have been obtained as a function of In concentration at these two temperatures. In addition, a generalized thermodynamic model is presented which considers the existence of antisite and vacancy defects on both sublattices without any dilute solution approximations. This model uses three energy parameters, (...) whose values have been obtained for PdIn using the measured vacancy concentrations and the chemical potentials of In. This model is able to describe all the available vacancy data and is suitable for calculating these values at compositions and temperatures when such data are not available. In addition, the model permits the calculation of the concentrations of the minority point defects. It is shown that dilute-solution approximations, which have invariably been used in this kind of modelling, are unsatisfactory. The present results and their analysis confirm that PdIn is a near-triple-defect type of intermetallic and not a near-Schottky type, as has been claimed recently. (shrink)

Reprint of paper first published in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research in 1984.

Early in his Essays on Intellectual Powers, Reid draws a distinction between mental power, mental operation, and mental capacity (EIP 21). To the untrained eye, these terms could probably be used interchangeably, and Reid believes this is correct, up to a point. He argues that, if we are interested in understanding exactly how the human mind works, we must use these terms with more precise meanings. This is part of his more general strategy of trying to always use the words (...) with their common meanings, as much as possible, but also pointing out that certain philosophical distinctions are needed to carry out the project of laying out the foundations of the science of the mind. This paper explains what the distinction between power, operation, and capacity is, according to Reid, with the goal of understanding why it is important to draw such a distinction, not only for the Reidian project, but for action theory, more generally. (shrink)

This volume provides a philosophical introduction to and analysis of the study of metaphor. By proceeding from the concrete analysis of complex metaphors, White is able to identify a range of features which are incompatible with standard accounts of the way words function in metaphor.

In this short text, a distinguished philosopher turns his attention to one of the oldest and most fundamental philosophical problems of all: How it is that we are able to sort and classify different things as being of the same natural class? Professor Armstrong carefully sets out six major theories—ancient, modern, and contemporary—and assesses the strengths and weaknesses of each. Recognizing that there are no final victories or defeats in metaphysics, Armstrong nonetheless defends a traditional account of universals as the (...) most satisfactory theory we have.This study is written for advanced students, but as Armstrong goes considerably beyond his earlier work on this topic, it will interest professional scholars as well. Carefully plotted and clearly written, Universals is both a paradigm of exposition and a case study on the value of careful analysis of fundamental issues in philosophy. (shrink)

In this important study D. M. Armstrong offers a comprehensive system of analytical metaphysics that synthesises but also develops his thinking over the last twenty years. Armstrong's analysis, which acknowledges the 'logical atomism' of Russell and Wittgenstein, makes facts the fundamental constituents of the world, examining properties, relations, numbers, classes, possibility and necessity, dispositions, causes and laws. All these, it is argued, find their place and can be understood inside a scheme of states of affairs. This is a comprehensive and (...) rigorously this-worldly account of the most general features of reality, argued from a distinctive philosophical perspective, and it will appeal to a wide readership in analytical philosophy. (shrink)

Bioethics has paid surprisingly little attention to the special problems faced by women and to feminist analyses of current health care issues other than ...

Arguably no concept is more fundamental to science than that of causality, for investigations into cases of existence, persistence, and change in the natural world are largely investigations into the causes of these phenomena. Yet the metaphysics and epistemology of causality remain unclear. For example, the ontological categories of the causal relata have been taken to be objects (Hume 1739), events (Davidson 1967), properties (Armstrong 1978), processes (Salmon 1984), variables (Hitchcock 1993), and facts (Mellor 1995). (For convenience, causes and effects (...) will usually be understood as events in what follows.) Complicating matters, causal relations may be singular (Socrates’s drinking hemlock caused Socrates’s death) or general (Drinking hemlock causes death); hence the relata might be tokens (e.g., instances of properties) or types (e.g., types of events) of the category in question. Other questions up for grabs are: Are singular causes metaphysically and/or epistemologically prior to general causes or vice versa (or neither)? What grounds the intuitive asymmetry of the causal relation? Are macro-causal relations reducible to micro-causal relations? And perhaps most importantly: Are causal facts (e.g., the holding of causal relations) reducible to non-causal facts (e.g., the holding of certain spatiotemporal relations)? (shrink)

In this paper I argue that both defence and criticism of the claim that humans act ‘under the guise of the good’ neglects the metaphysical roots of the theory. I begin with an overview of the theory and its modern commentators, with critics noting the apparent possibility of acting against the good, and supporters claiming that such actions are instances of error. These debates reduce the ‘guise of the good’ to a claim about intention and moral action, and in so (...) doing have become divorced from the theory's roots in classical and medieval philosophy. Aristotle and Aquinas’ ‘guise of the good’ is primarily a metaphysical claim resting on the equivalence between actuality and goodness, from which conclusions about moral action are derived. I show the reasoning behind their theory and how it forms the basis for the claims about intention and action at the centre of the modern debate. Finally, I argue that the absence of its original foundation is apparent in recent attacks on the ‘guise of the good’. It is unsurprising that modern action theory and ethics have not always been able to comfortably accommodate the ‘guise of the good’; they are only telling half of the story. (shrink)

In _Matter and Consciousness_, Paul Churchland presents a concise and contemporary overview of the philosophical issues surrounding the mind and explains the main theories and philosophical positions that have been proposed to solve them. Making the case for the relevance of theoretical and experimental results in neuroscience, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence for the philosophy of mind, Churchland reviews current developments in the cognitive sciences and offers a clear and accessible account of the connections to philosophy of mind. For this (...) third edition, the text has been updated and revised throughout. The changes range from references to the iPhone's "Siri" to expanded discussions of the work of such contemporary philosophers as David Chalmers, John Searle, and Thomas Nagel. Churchland describes new research in evolution, genetics, and visual neuroscience, among other areas, arguing that the philosophical significance of these new findings lies in the support they tend to give to the reductive and eliminative versions of materialism. Matter and Consciousness, written by the most distinguished theorist and commentator in the field, offers an authoritative summary and sourcebook for issues in philosophy of mind. It is suitable for use as an introductory undergraduate text. (shrink)

The spiritual geography of Russian cosmism. General characteristics ; Recent definitions of cosmism -- Forerunners of Russian cosmism. Vasily Nazarovich Karazin (1773-1842) ; Alexander Nikolaevich Radishchev (1749-1802) ; Poets: Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov, (1711-1765) and Gavriila Romanovich Derzhavin (1743-1816) ; Prince Vladimir Fedorovich Odoevsky (1803-1869) ; Aleksander Vasilyevich Sukhovo-Kobylin (1817-1903) -- The Russian philosophical context. Philosophy as a passion ; The destiny of Russia ; Thought as a call for action ; The totalitarian cast of mind -- The religious and spiritual (...) context. The kingdom of god on earth ; Hesychasm: two great Russian saints ; The Third Rome ; Pre-Christian antecedents -- The Russian esoteric context. Early searches for "deep wisdom" ; Popular magic ; Higher magic in the time of Peter the Great ; Esotericism after Peter the Great ; Theosophy and anthroposophy -- Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov (1829-1903), the philosopher of the common task ; The one idea ; The unacknowledged prince ; The village teacher ; First disciple: Dostoevsky and Tolstoy ; The Moscow librarian ; Last years: Askhabad: the only portrait -- The "common task" ; Esoteric dimensions of the "common task" ; Fedorov's legacy: projectivism, delo, regulation -- The religious cosmists. Vladimir Sergeevich Solovyov (1853-1900) ; Sergei Nikolaevich Bulgakov (1871-1944) ; Pavel Aleksandrovich Florensky (1882-1937) ; Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev (1874-1948) -- The scientific cosmists. Konstantin Edouardovich Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) ; Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (1863-1945) ; Alexander Leonidovich Chizhevsky (1897-1964) ; Vasily Feofilovich Kuprevich (1897-1969) -- Promethean theurgy. Life-creation ; Cultural immortalism ; God-building ; Re-aiming the arrows of Eros ; Technological utopianism ; Occultism -- Fedorov's twentieth century followers. Nikolai Pavlovich Peterson (1844-1919) and Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kozhevnikov (1852-1917) ; Svyatogor and the biocosmists ; New wine and the universal task ; Alexander Konstantinovich Gorsky (1886-1943) and Nikolai Alexandrovich Setnitsky (1888-1937) ; Valerian Nikolaevich Muravyov (1885-1932) ; Vasily Nikolaevich Chekrygin (1897-1922) -- Cosmism and its offshoots today. The N.F. Fedorov museum-library ; The Tsiolkovsky museum and Chizhevsky center ; ISRICA - Institute for Scientific Research in Cosmic Anthropoecology ; Lev Nikolaevich Gumilev (1912-1992) and neo-eurasianism ; The hyperboreans ; Scientific immortalism: Igor Vishev, Danila Medvedev ; Conclusions about the Russian cosmists. (shrink)

Much discussion about experimental philosophy and philosophical methodology has been framed in terms of the reliability of intuitions, and even when it has not been about reliability per se, it has been focused on whether intuitions meet whatever conditions they need to meet to be trustworthy as evidence. But really that question cannot be answered independently from the questions, evidence for what theories arrived at by what sorts of inferences? I will contend here that not just philosophy's sources of evidence, (...) but also its inferential resources, are in great need of closer examination. (shrink)