BackgroundThe wellbeing of people living with dementia and their family caregivers may be impacted by stigma, changing roles, and limited access to meaningful opportunities as a dyad. Group therapeutic songwriting and qualitative interviews have been utilized in music therapy research to promote the voices of people with dementia and family caregivers participating in separate songwriting groups but not together as dyads.ProceduresThis study aimed to explore how ten people with dementia/family caregiver dyads experienced a 6-week group TSW program. Dyads participated in (...) homogenous TSW groups involving 2–4 dyads who were either living together in the community or living separately because the person with dementia resided in a care home. The TSW program, informed by personhood, couplehood, family centered and group process frameworks, involved creating original lyrics through song parody and song collage. Qualified Music Therapists facilitated sessions and interviewed each dyad separately. Interviews were analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis.FindingsFive recurrent group themes were developed, indicating group TSW: was a positive shared experience, benefiting both members of the dyad and motivating further engagement with music; stimulated mental processes and reignited participants’ interests and skills; provided meaningful opportunities for reflection and connection with memories and life experiences; and prompted interaction and collaboration, leading to social connections, empathic relationships and experiences of inclusion. Participants also highlighted how: the facilitated process supported engagement, highlighting abilities and challenging doubts.ConclusionDyads identified group TSW as an opportunity to recognize strengths, voice ideas and opinions, share meaningful experiences, and do “more with music.” Participants valued TSW as a new, creative and stimulating experience that enabled connection with self and others and led to feelings of pride and achievement. Our findings further recognize how therapeutic intention and approach were reflected in participants’ engagement and responses regardless of dementia stage and type, dyad relationship, or musical background. This research may broaden perspectives and expand understanding about how people with dementia and their family caregivers access and engage in music therapy. (shrink)

(2013). A History of the Electron: J. J. and G. P. Thomson. International Studies in the Philosophy of Science: Vol. 27, No. 1, pp. 104-107. doi: 10.1080/02698595.2013.783973.

Coordination in thought is the treatment of beliefs by the believer as being about the same thing. Such treatment can be indirect, via an identity belief, or direct. Direct coordination presents a problem concerning how this treatment is justified. Dickie accounts for the justification of coordination in terms of aptness to a motivational state: coordination serves to fulfil a need to represent things outside the mind. I argue that this account gets the problem coordination presents wrong, and so does not (...) present an adequate solution. While the material of that account may be reconfigured to provide a more promising proposal, I argue that this depends on a specious psychology of belief, and will anyway end up being circular. I propose an account that, while similar in some ways, improves on both the official and reconfigured Dickie-style accounts, and points to some broader conclusions about the nature of rational cognition. (shrink)

From the Disney 'Teacher of the Year' and New York Times bestselling author comes a road map to enrich students' learning experiences, revised and updated for today's teachers and parents. After publishing the New York Times bestseller The Essential 55 (over 1 million copies sold), award-winning teacher Ron Clark took his rules on the road and traveled to schools and districts in 50 states. He met amazing teachers, administrators, students, parents, and all kinds of people involved in bringing up great (...) kids. These are the eleven qualities he describes in The Excellent 11: Enthusiasm, Adventure, Creativity, Reflection, Balance, Compassion, Confidence, Humor, Common Sense, Appreciation, and Resilience. Ron has filled this book with hundreds of suggestions, stories, and wonderfully funny anecdotes. You'll be smiling as you read--and finding the inspiration to change lives, one student at a time"--Back cover. (shrink)

Imogen Dickie develops an account of aboutness-fixing for thoughts about ordinary objects, and of reference-fixing for the singular terms we use to express them. Extant discussions of this topic tread a weary path through descriptivist proposals, causalist alternatives, and attempts to combine the most attractive elements of each. The account developed here is a new beginning. It starts with two basic principles, the first of which connects aboutness and truth, and the second of which connects truth and justification. These (...) principles combine to yield a third principle connecting aboutness and justification. Dickie uses the principle to explain how the relations to objects that enable us to think about them--perceptual attention; understanding of proper names; grasp of descriptions--do their aboutness-fixing and thought-enabling work. The book includes discussions of the nature of singular thought and the relation between thought and consciousness. (shrink)

This article is about the theoretical life of `the abject'. It focuses on the ways in which Anglo-American and Australian feminist theoretical accounts of maternal bodies and identities have utilized Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection. Whilst the abject has proved a compelling and productive concept for feminist theory, this article cautions against the repetition of the maternal (as) abject within theoretical writing. It argues that employing a Kristevan abject paradigm risks reproducing, rather than challenging, histories of violent disgust towards maternal (...) bodies. In place of the Kristevan model of the abject, it argues for a more thoroughly social and political account of abjection. This entails a critical shift from the current feminist theoretical preoccupation with the `transgressive potentiality' of `encounters with the abject' to a consideration of consequences of being abject within specific social and political locations. (shrink)

This article explores the social benefits and moral arguments in favour of women and couples freezing eggs and embryos for social reasons. Social IVF promotes equal participation by women in employment; it offers women more time to choose a partner; it provides better opportunities for the child as it allows couples more time to become financially stable; it may reduce the risk of genetic and chromosomal abnormality; it allows women and couples to have another child if circumstances change; it offers (...) an option to women and children at risk of ovarian failure; it may increase the egg and embryo pool. There are strong arguments based on equal concern and respect for women which require that women have access to this new technology. Freezing eggs also avoids some of the moral objections associated with freezing embryos. (shrink)

A 21st-century growth in prevalence of extreme right-wing nationalism and social conservatism in Australia, Europe, and America, in certain respects belies the positive impacts of online, new, and alternative forms of global media. Cross-national forms of ‘far-right activism’ are unconfined to their host nations; individuals and organisations campaign on the basis of ethno-cultural separatism, while capitalising on internet-based affordances for communication and ideological cross-fertilisation. Right-wing revolutionary ideas disseminated in this media, to this end, embody politico-cultural aims that can only be (...) understood with attention to their philosophical underpinnings. Drawing on a dataset of articles from the pseudo-news websites, XYZ and The Unshackled, this paper investigates the representation of different rightist political philosophical traditions in contemporary Australia-based far-right media. A critical discourse and content analysis reveal XYZ and TU’s engagement with various traditions, from Nietzsche and the Conservative Revolution, to the European New Right and neo-Nazism. (shrink)

This paper offers an interpretation of Plato's Cratylus 427d1-431c3 that supports a reading of the dialogue as a whole as concluding in favour of a conventionalist account of naming. While many previous interpretations note the value of this passage as evidence for Platonic investigations of false propositions, this paper argues that its demonstration that there can be false (or incorrect) naming in turn refutes the naturalist account of naming; that is, it shows that a natural relation between name and nominatum (...) is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for reference. Socrates secures this outcome by using demonstratives and their concomitants to show how any putative natural imitative link between name and object may be overridden. Furthermore, Socrates' employment of demonstratives and context-dependent statements in his case-studies of false naming speaks in favour of a reading of this passage as primarily focussing on naming rather than on propositions in general. (shrink)

Inspired by my reading of the conclusions of Plato’s Cratylus, in which I suggest that Socrates endorses the claim that speaker’s intentions determine meaning of their utterances, this thesis investigates a modern parallel. Drawing on observations that people who produce an utterances that do not accord with the conventions of their linguistic community can often nevertheless communicate successfully, Donald Davidson concludes that it is the legitimate intentions of speakers to be interpreted in a particular way that determine the meanings of (...) their utterances. This thesis investigates how we might interpret the non-standard utterances of another from the perspective of Davidson’s anticonventionalist picture of language. It proceeds by investigating the possible roles for radical interpretation and triangulation in explaining successful day-to-day communication, where non-standard language use abounds, and argues that - even from a Davidsonian perspective - a full account of the linguistic skills and knowledge that a language user requires to interpret utterances must ultimately appeal at least to regularities word use and expressions, if not full-blown conventions. (shrink)

This paper develops a new account of reference-fixing for proper names. The account is built around an intuitive claim about reference fixing: the claim that I am a participant in a practice of using α to refer to o only if my uses of α are constrained by the representationally relevant ways it is possible for o to behave. §I raises examples that suggest that a right account of how proper names refer should incorporate this claim. §II provides such an (...) account. (shrink)

The UK Medical Research Council (MRC) takes the issue of conflict of interest very seriously. The overall aim is to preserve a climate in which personal and organisational innovation can flourish while ensuring that potential conflicts are disclosed and identified and conflicts are either avoided or managed with integrity. The approach needs to encompass the MRC’s various responsibilities and the levels at which conflicts might arise: MRC staff (scientists and administrators); the governing Council; research Boards and committees; external peer-reviewers; and (...) applicants for funding. To achieve its goals, the MRC has issued practical guidance on various aspects of conflict of interest. For the future, the MRC has identified the continuing commercialisation of science and the increasing involvement of lay people in scientific decision-making as special challenges in this area. (shrink)

The UK’s Medical Research Council (MRC) introduced a specific policy and procedure for inquiring into allegations of scientific misconduct in December 1997; previously cases had been considered under normal disciplinary procedures. The policy formally covers staff employed in MRC units, but those in receipt of MRC grants in universities and elsewhere are expected to operate under similar policies. The MRC’s approach is stepwise: preliminary action; assessment to establish prima facie evidence of misconduct; formal investigation; sanctions; and appeal. Strict time limits (...) apply at all stages. The procedure will be evaluated after two years. The indications so far are that the procedure is robust, and its clarity and transparency have been an asset to all parties. The MRC is also convinced that it is equally important to achieve a working culture that fosters integrity. Thus education and training in good research practices are fundamental to the prevention of research misconduct. (shrink)

It is central to Davidson’s argument in ‘A nice derangement of epitaphs’ that a speaker’s utterance can have a non-standard meaning, rather than that the speaker can mean something non-standardly when so uttering. Linguistic conventionalism typically holds that Mrs Malaprop, in uttering ‘a nice derangement of epitaphs’, might mean a nice arrangement of epithets but that her words do not. I suggest that Davidson’s view of language provides him with good grounds to claim that the nonstandard meanings can be attributed (...) to a speaker’s utterances and not merely the speakers themselves. However, I also suggest that in many cases of interpretation of non-standard utterances, communication is successful because an interpreter first grasps the speaker’s relevant intentions, rather than the meaning of the utterance itself. Indeed, in a single communicative exchange containing an innovative utterance successfully interpreted, it is not the meaning of the utterance that one is entitled to say is identified, but what a speaker means to communicate when he produces an utterance. (shrink)

Long‐term potentiation (LTP) of excitatory synapses is a leading model to explain the concept of information storage in the brain. Multiple mechanisms contribute to LTP, but central amongst them is an increased sensitivity of the postsynaptic membrane to neurotransmitter release. This sensitivity is predominantly determined by the abundance and localization of AMPA‐type glutamate receptors (AMPARs). A combination of AMPAR structural data, super‐resolution imaging of excitatory synapses, and an abundance of electrophysiological studies are providing an ever‐clearer picture of how AMPARs are (...) recruited and organized at synaptic junctions. Here, we review the latest insights into this process, and discuss how both cytoplasmic and extracellular receptor elements cooperate to tune the AMPAR response at the hippocampal CA1 synapse. (shrink)

This paper examines three views of what an omission or an instance of refraining is. The view advanced is that in many cases, an omission is simply an absence of an action of some type. However, generally one’s not doing a certain thing counts as an omission only if there is some norm, standard, or ideal that calls for one’s doing that thing.

Here is one argument against realism. (1) Realists are committed to the classical rules for negation. But (2) legitimate rules of inference must conserve evidence. And (3) the classical rules for negation do not conserve evidence. So (4) realism is wrong. Most realists reject 2. But it has recently been argued that if we allow denied sentences as premisses and conclusions in inferences we will be able to reject 3. And this new argument against 3 generates a new response to (...) the antirealist argument: keep 1 and 2, avoiding 4 by rejecting 3. My aim in this paper is to see how much work in the fight against anti-realism this new response can really do. I argue that there is a powerful objection to the response: 2 is in tension with the claim that denied sentences can be premisses and conclusions in inferences. But I show that, even given this objection, the new response has an important role to play. (shrink)

This paper uses a puzzle arising from cases of felicitous underspecification in uses of demonstratives to motivate a new model of communication using singular terms.

This article examines what is at stake in the attribution of narcissism to femininity and feminism and the routes through which arguments about ‘feminist narcissism’ became central to the popular abjection of feminism. It emphasizes the central role of narcissistic theories of identity in enabling feminist theory to prise open the mechanisms of feminine identity and thereby expose and critique the sexual politics of identity practices. The article argues that theorizing the politics of narcissism opens up ways of thinking through (...) some of the pressing and complex questions which face women today, questions of self-identity, self-esteem, body image, cultural idealization, normativity, incorporation, consumption and agency. (shrink)

: ‘Sortalism about demonstrative reference’ is the view that the capacity to refer to things demonstratively rests on the capacity to classify them according to their kinds. This paper argues for one form of sortalism. Section 1 distinguishes two sortalist views. Section 2 argues that one of them is false. Section 3 argues that the other is true. Section 4 uses the argument from Section 3 to develop a new response to the objection to sortalism from examples where we seem (...) to succeed in referring even though we get sortal classification wrong, or do not attempt to classify at all. (shrink)

This is an amended version of material that first appeared in A. Clark, Microcognition: Philosophy, Cognitive Science, and Parallel Distributed Processing (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1989), Ch. 1, 2, and 6. It appears in German translation in Metzinger,T (Ed) DAS LEIB-SEELE-PROBLEM IN DER ZWEITEN HELFTE DES 20 JAHRHUNDERTS (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. 1999).

This essential guide to paradoxes takes the reader on a lively tour of puzzles that have taxed thinkers from Zeno to Galileo and Lewis Carroll to Bertrand Russell. Michael Clark uncovers an array of conundrums, such as Achilles and the Tortoise, Theseus' Ship, Hempel's Raven, and the Prisoners' Dilemma, taking in subjects as diverse as knowledge, ethics, science, art and politics. Clark discusses each paradox in non-technical terms, considering its significance and looking at likely solutions.

In vitro fertilisation and other assisted reproductive technologies (ART) now enable many women to have children, who would otherwise have remained childless. The most obvious application for these technologies is to help physically infertile, but otherwise healthy young women to have children. However, increasingly, other groups are seeking access to ART to conceive, raising ethical questions about who should be allowed to use these technologies to bear children. In particular, the question of access to ART by lesbian couples and single (...) women has roused considerable ethical, legal and public debate.This paper examines the perhaps less often considered issue of older and postmenopausal women, who are infertile due to age, using ART to conceive. A range of objections have been made to allowing these women access to ART, including concerns about their ability to care for the child, the risk of birth defects and the ‘unnaturalness’ of extending childbearing capacity beyond the menopause. This paper examines these objections and provides some responses. (shrink)

In Freedom: An Impossible Reality, Ray Tallis argues that we escape imprisonment by causal determinism, and thus gain free will, by the virtual distance from natural laws afforded us by intentionality, a human capacity that he claims cannot be naturalized. I respond that we can’t know in advance that intentionality will never be subsumed by science, and that our capacities to entertain possibilities and decide among them are natural cognitive endowments that supervene on generally reliable neural processes. Moreover, any disconnection (...) from the multi-level determinants that account for human behavior cannot augment, but would likely undermine, effective human agency. Our full inclusion in nature, understood in terms of a pragmatic, explanatory determinism, is therefore not a prison from which we need to escape. (shrink)

Many religious people are alarmed about features of the current age - violence in the media, a pervasive hedonism, a marginalization of religion, and widespread abortion. These concerns influence politics, but just as there should be a separation between church and state, so should there be a balance between religious commitments and secular arguments calling for social reforms. Robert Audi offers a principle of secular rationale, which does not exclude religious grounds for action but which rules out restricting freedom except (...) on grounds that any rational citizen would accept. The book describes the essential commitments of free democracy, explains how religious and secular moral considerations can be integrated to facilitate co-operation in a world of religious pluralism, and proposes ideals of civic virtue that express the mutual respect on which democracy depends. Audi offers a balanced and sophisticated treatment of the relations between religion and politics in a modern, secular society. (shrink)

The contributions in this volume represent a detailed exploration of the salient legal and theoretical puzzles arising out of the body-as-property question, and a collation of the broad spectrum of analyses on offer.

Dennett depicts human minds as both deeply different from, yet profoundly continuous with, the minds of other animals and simple agents. His treatments of mind, consciousness, free will and human agency all reflect this distinctive dual perspective. There is, on the one hand, the (in)famous Intentional Stance, relative to which humans, dogs, insects and even the lowly thermostat (e.g. Dennett (1998) p.327) are all pronounced capable of believing and desiring in essentially the same theoretical sense. And there is, on the (...) other hand, a noteworthy (and increasing) insistence that human minds are special in that they exhibit a distinctive kind of “informational organization”: one that confers consciousness (Dennett (1998) p.347), and creates the space for agency, purpose, self-control (Dennett (1984) p.100), and “significant suffering” (Dennett (1998) p.351). What follows is a critical examination of this dual perspective, and of Dennett’s account of the key factor that makes us special - human language and our immersion in the sea of culture (Dennett (1998) p.146, (1996) p.130, (in press) p.7). In particular, I shall ask whether Dennett’s dual perspective masks a deeper tension in his accounts of consciousness and personhood, and whether the appeal to the transformative power of human language and culture can bear the heavy explanatory burden Dennett places upon it. These turn out to be significant challenges but ones which also help clarify the scope and power of this complex, multi-layered account. I end by commenting briefly on the wider significance of Dennett’s project as a major contribution to current debates concerning the continuity (or otherwise) of evolved cognitive strategies and the essentially hybrid (biological and non-biological) nature of human minds and persons. (shrink)

Human tissue and body parts have been used in one way or another for millennia. They have been preserved and displayed, both in museums and public shows. Real human hair is used for wigs, while some artists even use human tissue in their works. Blood, bone marrow, whole organs and a host of other structures and human substances are all transplanted into living persons to treat illness. New life can be created from gametes through in vitro fertilisation , while the (...) creation of cell lines keeps tissue alive indefinitely. These uses create significant challenges for the legal system in the UK. The major challenge for the law is to balance the competing demands of those groups who have vested interests in human tissue—researchers, medical practitioners, patients, families, the community and the police, among many others. It must provide sufficient control to users of tissue, but also take account of the fact that our bodies hold psychological importance for us while we live and, after we die, for those we leave behind. To some degree the law has been successful, but we still lack a comprehensive, coherent approach to the regulation of human tissue. Partially as a reaction to this lack of a comprehensive approach, some commentators have turned to applying the concept of property to human tissue means to achieve regulatory outcomes they support. (shrink)

This paper is about the claim that, necessarily, a subject who can think that a is F must also have the capacities to think that a is G, a is H, a is I, and so on (for some reasonable range of G, H, I), and that b is F, c is F, d is F, and so on (for some reasonable range of b, c, d). I set out, and raise objections to, two arguments for a strong version of (...) this claim (Gareth Evans' generality constraint). I present a new argument for a weaker version of the claim, and sketch some directions of enquiry which this new argument opens up. (shrink)

I propose an amendment to Sosa’s virtue reliabilism. Sosa’s framework assigns a central role to sophisticated, conceptual, motivational states: ‘intentions to affirm aptly’. I argue that the suggestion that ordinary knowers in fact are motivated by such intentions in everyday belief-forming situations is at best problematic, and explore the possibility of an alternative virtue reliabilist framework. In this alternative framework, the role Sosa assigns to ‘intentions to affirm aptly’ is played instead by non-conceptual motivational states, which I call ‘needs’. The (...) first part of the paper sketches Sosa’s framework. The second develops the need-based alternative. I close by comparing the two proposals, concluding that the onus is at least on Sosa to say why his intention-based framework should be preferred. (shrink)

In the wake of three high-profile judicial decisions concerning the use of human biological materials, the editors of this collection felt in 2011 that there was a need for detailed scholarly exploration of the ethical and legal implications of these decisions. For centuries, it seemed that in Australia and England and Wales, individuals did not have any proprietary interests in their excised tissue. Others might acquire such interests, but there had been no clear decision on the rights or otherwise of (...) the persons from whom the tissue was obtained. In 2009, however, the Court of Appeal of England and Wales recognised a limited exception to this position in Jonathan Yearworth and others v North Bristol NHS Trust . In that case, the Court held that the appellants, who had deposited semen samples for freezing before they undertook treatment for cancer, had “for the purposes of a claim in negligence … ownership of the sperm which they had ejaculated”. One year later, the Supreme Court of Queensland, Australia, took a similarly property-based approach to determining how a semen sample stored shortly before death should be dealt in Bazley v Wesley Monash IVF . According to that court, the co-executors of the estate had sufficient proprietary interests in the semen to legally demand its return from the laboratory where it was held. In 2011, the New South Wales Supreme Court similarly found that the widow of a recently deceased man had a right to possession of his semen in Joceyln Edwards; Re the estate of the late Mark Edwards .In the editors’ view, these decisions signalled a turning point in the Anglo-Australian jurisprudence in this area, taking the law a step beyond the decisions of the late 20th century such as R v Kelly , in which possessory rights were found …. (shrink)

This special issue, Withholding artificial nutrition and hydration, comprises several papers, commentaries and responses centred largely around the issues raised by the 2011 decision of the English Court of Protection in W v M.i In that case, the mother of an adult patient applied for the withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment . In 2003, the patient, M, had contracted viral encephalitis and suffered irreparable brain damage as a result. She fell into a coma, and when she emerged appeared to be in (...) a vegetative state and for 8 years was entirely dependent on life-sustaining care.Following her mother's application, M was held to lack capacity and hence in accordance with section 4 of the Mental Capacity Act 2005 , the matter turned on whether it was in her best interests for the treatment to be withdrawn. It was made clear in the 1993 decision of Airedale NHS Trust v Bland that life-sustaining treatment could be withdrawn from a patient in a permanent vegetative state if, on balance, it was not in his or her interest to continue treatment.ii The MCA also allows for withdrawal of treatment, although the approach to best interests is slightly different. However, the case of W v M is importantly different from the Bland case, because M was found not to be in a PVS, but instead was minimally conscious . Much evidence was presented of her capacity to respond to stimuli, seemingly express emotion and occasionally speak.In the first of his papers in this issue , Julian Sheather provides an overview of the case, particularly illuminating the discussions of M's interests and the views of her …. (shrink)