The latest attempt by a determined, well-resourced lobby to introduce a law to permit assisted suicide/euthanasia in the UK was announced 15 May 2013 in the House of Lords. There are many dangerous facets to their arguments, not least of which is the rôle they cast for doctors in this debate.Rush Rhees' remarks on the topic display a depth that is lacking in the current debate in the public square, which needs to be lifted from its current low level.I try (...) to show inter alia why the question of who is ‘qualified to speak’ in this deep moral dilemma is important ; why resistance is vital against a law, which must be general, permitting assisted suicide/euthanasia ; how one group of people judging another group of people as candidates for elimination, is based on the false notion that a disabled life is ‘not worth living’; that so many of the deep moral questions raised by assisted suicide/euthanasia are not even considered in the contemporary impoverished public debate. (shrink)

This paper discusses Kevin Kelly’s recent attempt to justify Ockham’s Razor in terms of truth-finding efficiency. It is argued that Kelly’s justification fails to warrant confidence in the empirical content of theories recommended by Ockham’s Razor. This is a significant problem if, as Kelly and many others believe, considerations of simplicity play a pervasive role in scientific reasoning, underlying even our best tested theories, for the proposal will fail to warrant the use of these theories in practical prediction.

Abstract:Qi has been both understood separately as substance and as field. This essay argues that qi in the Zhuangzi is both substance and field together. This qi field-substance is bidimensional where its vertical axis is that of substance and its horizontal axis that of field. This essay argues that the vertical dimension does not imply a substance dualism but a holism where qi differs in degrees of refinement; it argues that the horizontal dimension is composed of interrelated yinyang forces that (...) constitute an "empty" field. It also argues that at the center of this qi field-substance is the heart-mind and the body and, by drawing on rich resonances between the Zhuangzi and phenomenology, that human beings bring the fields of qi that they are situated in into certain coherences. (shrink)

The rise of modern science and the proclaimed 'death' of God in the nineteenth century led to a radical questioning of divine action and authorship - Bultmann's celebrated 'demythologizing'. Remythologizing Theology moves in another direction that begins by taking seriously the biblical accounts of God's speaking. It establishes divine communicative action as the formal and material principle of theology, and suggests that interpersonal dialogue, rather than impersonal causality, is the keystone of God's relationship with the world. This original contribution to (...) the theology of divine action and authorship develops a new vision of Christian theism. It also revisits several long-standing controversies such as the relations of God's sovereignty to human freedom, time to eternity, and suffering to love. Groundbreaking and thought-provoking, it brings theology into fruitful dialogue with philosophy, literary theory, and biblical studies"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Review comment on the first edition "Wheldall asks himself and his readers what has transpired within the field of educational psychology ... and what its relevance actually is for teaching, learning and education. As such it is a 'must read' for all educational psychologists, students of educational psychology, teachers and teacher trainers." Professor Paul Kirschner, Open Universiteit, British Journal of Educational Technology What is the relevance of educational psychology in the twenty first century? In this collection of essays, leading educational (...) psychologists reflect on the seminal developments which have been made in the field over the past twenty five years or so and assess how far we have progressed. Given a broad and personal remit to address a range of issues, the contributors review and critique a variety of topics, including: intelligence; communication; family environments; individual differences; reading; peer learning; classroom behaviour; and higher education. Providing provocative and challenging insights into the state of contemporary educational psychology, the contributors acknowledge throughout the successes and progression in the field, but with a critical edge and a challenge being thrown down to psychologists of education to make study more seriously informed and as a consequence, reformed. Now in its second edition this compelling text for students and researchers is thoroughly updated and includes four new chapters. (shrink)

Thick terms and concepts, such as honesty and cruelty, are at the heart of a variety of debates in philosophy of language and metaethics. Central to these debates is the question of how the descriptive and evaluative components of thick concepts are related and whether they can be separated from each other. So far, no empirical data on how thick terms are used in ordinary language has been collected to inform these debates. In this paper, we present the first empirical (...) study, designed to investigate whether the evaluative component of thick concepts is communicated as part of the semantic meaning or by means of conversational implicatures. While neither the semantic nor the pragmatic view can fully account for the use of thick terms in ordinary language, our results do favour the semanticist interpretation: the evaluation of a thick concept is only slightly easier to cancel than semantically entailed content. We further discovered a polarity effect, demonstrating that how easily an evaluation can be cancelled depends on whether the thick term is of positive or negative polarity. (shrink)

There is growing interest in understanding and eliciting division of labor within groups of scientists. This paper illustrates the need for this division of labor through a historical example, and a formal model is presented to better analyze situations of this type. Analysis of this model reveals that a division of labor can be maintained in two different ways: by limiting information or by endowing the scientists with extreme beliefs. If both features are present however, cognitive diversity is maintained indefinitely, (...) and as a result agents fail to converge to the truth. Beyond the mechanisms for creating diversity suggested here, this shows that the real epistemic goal is not diversity but transient diversity. (shrink)

This paper explores the ethical and conceptual implications of the findings from an empirical study (reported elsewhere) of decision-making capacity in anorexia nervosa. In the study, ten female patients aged thirteen to twenty-one years with a diagnosis of anorexia nervosa, and eight sets of parents, took part in semistructured interviews. The purpose of the interviews was to identify aspects of thinking that might be relevant to the issue of competence to refuse treatment. All the patient-participants were also tested using the (...) MacArthur Competence Assessment Tool—Treatment test of competence. This is a formalized, structured, interviewer-administered test of competence, which is a widely accepted clinical tool for determining capacity. The young women also completed five brief, self-administered questionnaires to assess their levels of psychopathology. The issues identified from the interviews are described under two headings: difficulties with thought processing and changes in values. The results suggest that competence to refuse treatment may be compromised in people with anorexia nervosa in ways that are not captured by traditional legal approaches. (shrink)

The role of values in scientific research has become an important topic of discussion in both scholarly and popular debates. Pundits across the political spectrum worry that research on topics like climate change, evolutionary theory, vaccine safety, and genetically modified foods has become overly politicized. At the same time, it is clear that values play an important role in science by limiting unethical forms of research and by deciding what areas of research have the greatest relevance for society. Deciding how (...) to distinguish legitimate and illegitimate influences of values in scientific research is a matter of vital importance.Recently, philosophers of science have written a great deal on this topic, but most of their work has been directed toward a scholarly audience. This book makes the contemporary philosophical literature on science and values accessible to a wide readership. It examines case studies from a variety of research areas, including climate science, anthropology, chemical risk assessment, ecology, neurobiology, biomedical research, and agriculture. These cases show that values have necessary roles to play in identifying research topics, choosing research questions, determining the aims of inquiry, responding to uncertainty, and deciding how to communicate information. Kevin Elliott focuses not just on describing roles for values but also on determining when their influences are actually appropriate. He emphasizes several conditions for incorporating values in a legitimate fashion, and highlights multiple strategies for fostering engagement between stakeholders so that value influences can be subjected to careful and critical scrutiny. (shrink)

Increasingly, epistemologists are becoming interested in social structures and their effect on epistemic enterprises, but little attention has been paid to the proper distribution of experimental results among scientists. This paper will analyze a model first suggested by two economists, which nicely captures one type of learning situation faced by scientists. The results of a computer simulation study of this model provide two interesting conclusions. First, in some contexts, a community of scientists is, as a whole, more reliable when its (...) members are less aware of their colleagues' experimental results. Second, there is a robust tradeoff between the reliability of a community and the speed with which it reaches a correct conclusion. ‡The author would like to thank Brian Skyrms, Kyle Stanford, Jeffrey Barrett, Bruce Glymour, and the participants in the Social Dynamics Seminar at University of California–Irvine for their helpful comments. Generous financial support was provided by the School of Social Science and Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences at UCI. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, Baker Hall 135, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890; e-mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

_Foucault’s Law_ is the first book in almost fifteen years to address the question of Foucault’s position on law. Many readings of Foucault’s conception of law start from the proposition that he failed to consider the role of law in modernity, or indeed that he deliberately marginalized it. In canvassing a wealth of primary and secondary sources, Ben Golder and Peter Fitzpatrick rebut this argument. They argue that rather than marginalize law, Foucault develops a much more radical, nuanced and (...) coherent theory of law than his critics have acknowledged. For Golder and Fitzpatrick, Foucault’s law is not the contained creature of conventional accounts, but is uncontainable and illimitable. In their radical re-reading of Foucault, they show how Foucault outlines a concept of law which is not tied to any given form or subordinated to a particular source of power, but is critically oriented towards alterity, new possibilities and different ways of being. _Foucault’s Law_ is an important and original contribution to the ongoing debate on Foucault and law, engaging not only with Foucault’s diverse writings on law and legal theory, but also with the extensive interpretive literature on the topic. It will thus be of interest to students and scholars working in the fields of law and social theory, legal theory and law and philosophy, as well as to students of Foucault’s work generally. (shrink)

Contemporary public reason liberalism holds that coercion must be publicly justified to an idealized constituency. Coercion must be justified to all qualified points of view, not the points of view held by actual persons. Critics, in particular Nicholas Wolterstorff and David Enoch, have complained that idealization, by idealizing away what actual people accept, risks authoritarianism and disrespect by forcing people to comply with laws they in fact reject. I argue that idealization can withstand this criticism if it satisfies two conditions. (...) First, the standards of idealization, such as the norms of rationality and information, must be grounded in the present commitments of the large majority of members of the public. Second, the standards of idealization must be moderate; that is, they cannot be used to attribute reasons to citizens that stray too far from their actual commitments. (shrink)

_Challenges conventional understandings of Heidegger’s account of the body._.

Theories of scientific rationality typically pertain to belief. In this paper, the author argues that we should expand our focus to include motivations as well as belief. An economic model is used to evaluate whether science is best served by scientists motivated only by truth, only by credit, or by both truth and credit. In many, but not all, situations, scientists motivated by both truth and credit should be judged as the most rational scientists.

Social norms – rules governing which behaviours are deemed appropriate or inappropriate within a given community – are typically taken to be uniquely human. Recently, this position has been challenged by a number of philosophers, cognitive scientists, and ethologists, who have suggested that social norms may also be found in certain non-human animal communities. Such claims have elicited considerable scepticism from norm cognition researchers, who doubt that any non-human animals possess the psychological capacities necessary for normative cognition. However, there is (...) little agreement among these researchers about what these psychological prerequisites are. This makes empirical study of animal social norms difficult, since it is not clear what we are looking for and thus what should count as behavioural evidence for the presence (or absence) of social norms in animals. To break this impasse, we offer an approach that moves beyond contested psychological criteria for social norms. This approach is inspired by the animal culture research program, which has made a similar shift away from heavily psychological definitions of ‘culture’ and to become organized around a cluster of more empirically tractable concepts of culture. Here, we propose an analogous set of constructs built around the core notion of a normative regularity, which we define as a socially maintained pattern of behavioural conformity within a community. We suggest methods for studying potential normative regularities in wild and captive primates. We also discuss the broader scientific and philosophical implications of this research program with respect to questions of human uniqueness, animal welfare and conservation. (shrink)

Much of contemporary knowledge is generated by groups not single individuals. A natural question to ask is, what features make groups better or worse at generating knowledge? This paper surveys research that spans several disciplines which focuses on one aspect of epistemic communities: the way they communicate internally. This research has revealed that a wide number of different communication structures are best, but what is best in a given situation depends on particular details of the problem being confronted by the (...) group. (shrink)

This book offers cutting edge research on the modifications and disruptions of bodily experience in the context of anxiety, depression, trauma, chronic illness, pain, and aging. It presents original contributions in applied phenomenology, biomedical ethics, and the use of medical technologies.

We argue that explainable artificial intelligence (XAI), specifically reason-giving XAI, often constitutes the most suitable way of ensuring that someone can properly be held responsible for decisions that are based on the outputs of artificial intelligent (AI) systems. We first show that, to close moral responsibility gaps (Matthias 2004), often a human in the loop is needed who is directly responsible for particular AI-supported decisions. Second, we appeal to the epistemic condition on moral responsibility to argue that, in order to (...) be responsible for her decision, the human in the loop has to have an explanation available of the system’s recommendation. Reason explanations are especially well-suited to this end and we examine whether – and how – it might be possible to make such explanations fit with AI systems. We support our claims by focusing on a case of disagreement between human in the loop and AI system. (shrink)

This essay explores the unique temporal experience in anxiety. Drawing on first-person accounts as well as examples from literature, I attempt to show how anxiety not only disrupts our physiological and cognitive timing but also disturbs the embodied rhythms of everyday social life. The primary goal, however, is to articulate the extent to which human existence itself is a temporally structured event and to identity the ways that anxiety disrupts this structure. Using Martin Heidegger’s account of human existence as a (...) point of departure, I show how the mood of anxiety has the power to alter our self-interpretations by closing down or constricting our experience of the future. I argue that a constricted future impedes our ability ‘to be’ because it closes off the range of projective meanings that we would ordinarily draw on to create or fashion our identities. (shrink)

Background Community advisory boards have expanded beyond high-income countries and play an increasing role in low- and middle-income country research. Much research has examined CABs in HICs, but less is known about CABs in LMICs. The purposes of this scoping review are to examine the creation and implementation of CABs in LMICs, including identifying frequently reported challenges, and to discuss implications for research ethics. Methods We searched five databases for publications describing or evaluating CABs in LMICs. Two researchers independently reviewed (...) articles for inclusion. Data related to the following aspects of CABs were extracted from included publications: time, country, financial support, research focus, responsibilities, and challenges. Thematic analyses were used to summarize textual data describing challenges. Results Our search yielded 2005 citations, 83 of which were deemed eligible for inclusion. Most studies were published between 2010 and 2017. Upper-middle-income countries were more likely to have studies describing CABs, with South Africa, China, and Thailand having the greatest numbers. The United States National Institutes of Health was the main source of financial support for CABs. Many CABs focused on HIV research. Thirty-four studies reported how CABs influenced the informed consent process for clinical trials or other aspects of research ethics. CAB responsibilities were related to clinical trials, including reviewing study protocols, educating local communities about research activities, and promoting the ethical conduct of research. Challenges faced by CABs included the following: incomplete ethical regulations and guidance; limited knowledge of science among members of communities and CABs; unstable and unbalanced power relationships between researchers and local communities; poor CAB management, including lack of formal participation structures and absence of CAB leadership; competing demands for time that limited participation in CAB activities; and language barriers between research staff and community members. Several challenges reflected shortcomings within the research team. Conclusions Our findings examine the formation and implementation of CABs in LMICs and identify several ethical challenges. These findings suggest the need for further ethics training among CAB members and researchers in LMICs. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that the insistence by Fodor et. al. that the Language of Thought hypothesis must be true rests on mistakes about the kinds of explanations that must be provided of cognitive phenomena. After examining the canonical arguments for the LOT, we identify a weak version of the LOT hypothesis which we think accounts for some of the intuitions that there must be a LOT. We then consider what kinds of explanation cognitive phenomena require, and conclude that (...) three main confusions lead to the invalid inference of the truth of a stronger LOT hypothesis from the weak and trivial version. These confusions concern the relationship between syntax and semantics, the nature of higher-level causation in cognitive science, and differing roles of explanations invoking intrinsic structures of minds on the one hand, and aetiological or evolutionary accounts of their properties on the other. (shrink)

Recent efforts to argue that nonepistemic values have a legitimate role to play in assessing scientific models, theories, and hypotheses typically either reject the distinction between epistemic and nonepistemic values or incorporate nonepistemic values only as a secondary consideration for resolving epistemic uncertainty. Given that scientific representations can legitimately be evaluated not only based on their fit with the world but also with respect to their fit with the needs of their users, we show in two case studies that nonepistemic (...) values can play a legitimate role as factors that override epistemic considerations in assessing scientific representations for practical purposes. (shrink)

This paper offers a phenomenological analysis of Heidegger’s account of “the uncanny” as it relates to the coronavirus pandemic. It explores how the pandemic has disrupted Dasein’s sense of “homelike” familiarity and how this disruption has undermined our ability to be, that is, to understand or make sense of things. By examining our experience of temporality, lived-space, and intersubjectivity, the paper illuminates different ways in which the pandemic has left us confused and anxious about our self-interpretations and future projects. The (...) paper concludes by showing how the uncanny is not simply something we feel in times of crisis; it is, for Heidegger, who we are. This means the secure feeling of familiarity that we embodied prior to the pandemic was an illusion all along, that we are not and never have been at-home in the world. (shrink)

In _Marx at the Margins_, Kevin Anderson uncovers a variety of extensive but neglected texts by the well-known political economist which cast what we thought we knew about his work in a startlingly different light. Analyzing a variety of Marx’s writings, including journalistic work written for the _New York Tribune_, Anderson presents us with a Marx quite at odds with our conventional interpretations. Rather than providing us with an account of Marx as an exclusively class-based thinker, Anderson here offers (...) a portrait of Marx for the twenty-first century: a global theorist whose social critique was sensitive to the varieties of human social and historical development, including not just class, but nationalism, race, and ethnicity, as well. _Marx at the Margins _ultimately argues that alongside his overarching critique of capital, Marx created a theory of history that was multi-layered and not easily reduced to a single model of development or revolution. Through highly-informed readings on work ranging from Marx’s unpublished 1879–82 notebooks to his passionate writings about the antislavery cause in the United States, this volume delivers a groundbreaking and canon-changing vision of Karl Marx that is sure to provoke lively debate in Marxist scholarship and beyond. (shrink)

This paper integrates personal narratives with the methods of phenomenology in order to draw some general conclusions about ‘what it means’ and ‘what it feels like’ to be depressed. The analysis has three parts. First, it explores the ways in which depression disrupts everyday experiences of spatial orientation and motility. This disruption makes it difficult for the person to move and perform basic functional tasks, resulting in a collapse or contraction of the life-world. Second, it illustrates how depression creates a (...) situational atmosphere of emotional indifference that reduces the person’s ability to qualitatively distinguish what matters in his or her life because nothing stands out as significant or important anymore. In this regard, depression is distinct from other feelings because it is not directed towards particular objects or situations but to the world as a whole. Finally, the paper examines how depression diminishes the possibility for ‘self-creation’ or ‘self-making’. Restricted by the illness, depression becomes something of a destiny, preventing the person from being open and free to access a range of alternative self-interpretations, identities, and possible ways of being-in-the-world. (shrink)

Provides an accessible and scholarly introduction to the core ideas of the existentialist tradition. Kevin Aho draws on a wide range of existentialist thinkers in chapters centering on the key themes of freedom, being-in-the-world, alienation, nihilism, anxiety and authenticity. He also addresses important but often overlooked issues in the canon of existentialism, with discussions devoted to the role of embodiment, the movement's contribution to ethics, politics, and environmental and comparative philosophies, as well as its influence on contemporary psychiatry and (...) psychotherapy. The enduring relevance of existentialism is shown by applying existentialist ideas to contemporary philosophical discussions of interest to a wide audience. The book covers secular thinkers such as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, and Beauvoir as well as religious authors, such as Buber, Dostoevsky, Marcel, and Kierkegaard"--Back cover. (shrink)

This paper develops a problem for conciliationism that is structurally similar to the self-undermining problem but which is immune to most of the solutions offered against it. A popular objection to conciliationism is that it undermines itself. Given the current disagreement among philosophers about conciliationism, conciliationism seems to require rejecting conciliationism. Adam Elga (2010) has influentially argued that this shows that conciliationism is an incoherent method. By recommending its own rejection, conciliationism recommends multiple, incompatible responses to the same body of (...) experience. Many have offered solutions to this problem, including Elga himself. However, there is another undermining problem. When a peer disagrees about their own peerhood, conciliationism can require the rejection of the peer’s peerhood. The result is that conciliationism recommends two incompatible responses to the same body of experience in a way that parallels the original self-undermining problem. But since many, if not all, of the proposed solutions to the original undermining problem depend on distinctive characteristics of conciliationism undermining itself, they cannot apply to a peer undermining themself. I illustrate this by dividing the solutions that have been offered against the self-undermining problem into two categories: self-exempting solutions and non-exempting solutions. I then show how the proposed solutions under each type do not extend to the peer-undermining problem. If that is right, then conciliationism is faced with a more difficult undermining problem than has been so far acknowledged. (shrink)

This book brings together eleven case studies of inductive risk-the chance that scientific inference is incorrect-that range over a wide variety of scientific contexts and fields. The chapters are designed to illustrate the pervasiveness of inductive risk, assist scientists and policymakers in responding to it, and productively move theoretical discussions of the topic forward.

Human communities teem with a variety of social norms. In order to change unjust and harmful social norms, it is crucial to identify the psychological processes that give rise to them. Most researchers take it for granted that social norms are uniquely human. By contrast, we approach this matter from a comparative perspective, leveraging recent research on animal social behaviour. While there is currently only suggestive evidence for norms in nonhuman communities, we argue that human social norms are likely produced (...) by a wide range of mechanisms, many of which we share with nonhuman animals. Approaching this variability from a comparative perspective can help norm researchers expand and reframe the range of hypotheses they test when attempting to understand the causes of socially normative behaviours in humans. First, we diagnose some of the theoretical obstacles to developing a comparative science of social norms, and offer a few basic constructs and distinctions to help norm researchers overcome these obstacles. Then we develop a six-dimensional model of the psychological and social factors that contribute to variability in both human and potential nonhuman norms. -/- This article is part of the theme issue ‘Social norm change: drivers and consequences’. (shrink)

This essay explores the unique temporal experience in anxiety. Drawing on first-person accounts as well as examples from literature, I attempt to show how anxiety not only disrupts our physiological and cognitive timing but also disturbs the embodied rhythms of everyday social life. The primary goal, however, is to articulate the extent to which human existence itself is a temporally structured event and to identity the ways that anxiety disrupts this structure. Using Martin Heidegger’s account of human existence as a (...) point of departure, I show how the mood of anxiety has the power to alter our self-interpretations by closing down or constricting our experience of the future. I argue that a constricted future impedes our ability ‘to be’ because it closes off the range of projective meanings that we would ordinarily draw on to create or fashion our identities. (shrink)

Both scientists and philosophers of science have recently emphasized the importance of promoting transparency in science. For scientists, transparency is a way to promote reproducibility, progress, and trust in research. For philosophers of science, transparency can help address the value-ladenness of scientific research in a responsible way. Nevertheless, the concept of transparency is a complex one. Scientists can be transparent about many different things, for many different reasons, on behalf of many different stakeholders. This paper proposes a taxonomy that clarifies (...) the major dimensions along which approaches to transparency can vary. By doing so, it provides several insights that philosophers and other science studies scholars can pursue. In particular, it helps address common objections to pursuing transparency in science, it clarifies major forms of transparency, and it suggests avenues for further research on this topic. (shrink)

In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger introduces a unique interpretation of death as a kind of world-collapse or breakdown of meaning that strips away our ability to understand and make sense of who we are. This is an ‘ontological death’ in the sense that we cannot be anything because the intelligible world that we draw on to fashion our identities and sustain our sense of self has lost all significance. On this account, death is not only an event that we (...) can physiologically live through; it can happen numerous times throughout the finite span of our lives. This paper draws on Arthur Frank’s (At the will of the body: reflections on illness. Houghton, Boston, 1991) narrative of critical illness to concretize the experience of ‘ontological death’ and illuminate the unique challenges it poses for health care professionals. I turn to Heidegger’s conception of ‘resoluteness’ (Entschlossenheit) to address these challenges, arguing for the need of health care professionals to help establish a discursive context whereby the critically ill can begin to meaningfully express and interpret their experience of self-loss in a way that acknowledges the structural vulnerability of their own identities and is flexible enough to let go of those that have lost their significance or viability. (shrink)

This is a book symposium on Kevin Krein’s Philosophy and Nature Sports. Gunnar Breivik, Jim Parry and Irena Martínková, and Rebekah Humphreys provide critical commentary on the text. The critical comments are followed by a response from Krein. The discussion covers a broad range of topics. These include the definition of “sport,” comparisons between nature sports and friluftsliv, the role of risk in nature sports, the experience of flow and the sublime in nature sports, and the understanding of nature. (...) Krein argues, as he does in the book and elsewhere, that nature sports provide a framework that facilitates intimate and meaningful interactions with nature. He argues further that the discussion included here shows how deeply our understanding of nature, and our understanding of nature sports, influence both our experiences within those sports and our broader experience of the world. (shrink)

In this paper, I draw on Heidegger’s phenomenology of “moods” (_Stimmungen_) to interpret loneliness as a diffused and atmospheric feeling-state that often undergirds the lives of older adults, shaping the ways in which they are attuned to and make sense of the world. I focus specifically on residents in long-term care facilities to show how the social isolation and lockdown measures of the COVID-19 pandemic dramatically intensified the mood. The aim is to shed light on how profound and totalizing the (...) experience has been for residents. Making use of Heidegger’s account of the affective “collapse” or “breakdown” (_Zusammenbruch_) of meaning, I argue that when older adults are functionally locked in their rooms for months at a time and cut off from the orienting routines and rhythms of the relational world, the result is a crumbling of the fundamental meaning-structures that constitute subjectivity. The global sense of abandonment and disconnection strips away the possibility for self-understanding, and residents are often left confused and abandoned to an existence that has been drained of meaning and significance. (shrink)

This paper approaches the problem of testimony from a new direction. Rather than focusing on the epistemic grounds for testimony, it considers the problem from the perspective of an individual who must choose whom to trust from a population of many would-be testifiers. A computer simulation is presented which illustrates that in many plausible situations, those who trust without attempting to judge the reliability of testifiers outperform those who attempt to seek out the more reliable members of the community. In (...) so doing, it presents a novel defense for the credulist position that argues one should trust testimony without considering the underlying reliability of the testifier. (shrink)

Costly signalling theory has become a common explanation for honest communication when interests conflict. In this paper, we provide an alternative explanation for partially honest communication that does not require significant signal costs. We show that this alternative is at least as plausible as traditional costly signalling, and we suggest a number of experiments that might be used to distinguish the two theories.

Could low-level exposure to polluting chemicals be analogous to exercise -- a beneficial source of stress that strengthens the body? Some scientists studying the phenomenon of hormesis claim that that this may be the case.s A Little Pollution Good For You? critically examines the current evidence for hormesis.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Studying Penguins to Understand BirdsJacinta O. A. Tan (bio), Anne Stewart (bio), Ray Fitzpatrick (bio), and Tony Hope (bio)Keywordsanorexia nervosa, treatment decision-making, competence, valuesWe are grateful to Grisso, Appelbaum, Charland, and Vollmann for their thoughtful commentaries on our paper. We would like to respond by picking up on some of the points they make, although we do not address all the issues raised.Our general aims in the paper (...) are less immediately pragmatic than are the central concerns of Grisso and Appelbaum. Our interest is primarily in a number of ethical, and related conceptual, issues that arise from empirical data. In the long run, of course, we believe that these ethical and conceptual issues are important to the care of people with mental disorders, but our focus is philosophical.Our central interest is what justifies overriding treatment refusal. We are unhappy with a "status" approach according to which, for example, the mere fact that a person suffers a mental disorder provides grounds for overriding her wishes. Such an approach, it seems to us, fails to identify reasons, and discriminates against those with mental disorder, a view shared by the Law Commission (The Law Commission 1995). We are, on the other hand, attracted by the approach that grounds any overriding of treatment refusal on lack of capacity (or competence) to make treatment decisions. The concept of capacity has been well developed through legal cases and conceptual analysis, not least by Grisso and Appelbaum themselves. We were struck, however, first through clinical experience, and subsequently from the pilot study reported in our paper, that many patients with anorexia nervosa who refuse treatment do not necessarily lack capacity, using the current criteria, and yet show features or give reasons that raise serious doubts as to whether it is right to respect their refusal of treatment.To avoid reliance on a "status" approach, the issue with which we are grappling is whether the concept of capacity (and therefore lack of capacity) can be developed to encompass some of our findings, and whether it is ethically right to do so. Charland makes the important point that the concept of competence, or capacity, has both a descriptive and a prescriptive component. It is for this reason that the question of whether, for example, we should extend the criteria for capacity is part of the question of when it is morally right to override treatment refusal.Grisso and Appelbaum suggest that our work advances "our thinking about appreciation, rather than requiring that we add new elements" (2006, 297). From our perspective, and at this stage, it is a secondary issue whether we are suggesting a development of appreciation, or a new element (e.g., "pathological values"). The primary issue for us is whether the reasons for refusal to which we draw attention provide grounds for overriding refusal, and if they do how they can be characterized in [End Page 299] such a way as to avoid the ever-present danger of simply overriding autonomy in a patient's best interests.We chose to study anorexia nervosa for various reasons, but we expect that the issues raised have a more general relevance (such as to substance abuse and impulse control disorders as Grisso and Appelbaum and Charland suggest). We do not expect the results to be relevant to all, or even most, mental disorders. Our main interest is not the specific management of people with anorexia, but how the data challenge, and help to develop, the concept of capacity, and the ethical analysis of overriding patient refusal of treatment. Our paper aims to address what we understand Charland to be referring to by the "pretheoretical desiderata" (2006, 283) of the concept of capacity. One reason why we chose anorexia as the focus of this work is because it is different from many mental disorders in the issues that it raises. In this it is, perhaps, rather like studying penguins to better understand the concept of bird just because penguins, although clearly birds, have unusual features.We agree, therefore, with Grisso and Appelbaum's caution that it would be unwise to jump in and change the MacCAT-T on the basis of the results... (shrink)

Steven Wall has two compelling arguments for what I shall call public reason liberalism's reflexivity requirement. The political concerns to reconcile persons who hold diverse moral views, and to avoid authoritarianism in politics not only require the public justification of coercion but the public justification of the standard used to determine when coercion is publicly justified. The reflexivity requirement is said to entail that public reason is self-defeating. Once RR is correctly formulated, however, cases of self-defeat will be rare, as (...) citizens seldom employ public justification requirements as reasons. When they do, such requirements are rarely their sole reason for supporting political coercion. A properly formulated reflexivity requirement, therefore, does not imply self-defeat. It also allows for a more ecumenical understanding that establish the processes of public justification. (shrink)