What does the abundance of data and proliferation of data-making methods mean for the ordinary person, the person on the street? And, what could they come to mean? In this paper, we present an overview of a year-long project to examine just such questions and complicate, in some ways, what it is to ask them. The project is a collective exercise in which we – a mixture of social scientists, designers and makers – and those living and working on one (...) street in Cambridge, Tenison Road, are working to think through how data might be materialised and come to matter. The project aims to better understand the specificities and contingencies that arise when data is produced and used in place. Mid-way through the project, we use this commentary to give some background to the work and detail one or two of the troubles we have encountered in putting locally relevant data to work. We also touch on a methodological standpoint we are working our way into and through, one that we hope complicates the separations between subject and object in data-making and opens up possibilities for a generative refiguring of the manifold relations. (shrink)

We agree with Vaesen that there is evidence for cognitive differences between humans and other primates. However, it is too early to draw firm conclusions about the uniqueness of the cognitive mechanisms underlying human tool use. Tests of causal understanding are in their infancy, as is the study of animals more distantly related to humans.

Charles Taylor's influential exposition of Hegel made the doctrine of expressivism of central importance and identified Herder as its exemplary historical advocate. The breadth and generality of Taylor's use of ?expressivism? have led the concept into some disrepute, but a more precise formulation of the doctrine as a theory of meaning can both demonstrate what is worthwhile and accurate in Taylor's account, and allow us a useful point of entry into Herder's multifaceted philosophy. A reconstruction of Herder's (...) overall philosophical position, centred around a refined theory of what this paper labels ?Herderean expressivism?, reveals a naturalistic, teleological metaphysics. This metaphysics fulfils the Hegelian aim of providing what Dieter Henrich has called a ?feedback loop? between ontology and epistemology. Exploring Herder's expressivism, therefore, helps further the case for his decisive impact on Hegel's philosophy. Herder's methodological naturalism, however, represents an obstacle to Hegel's absolute idealism. (shrink)

The summer of 2020 witnessed perhaps the largest protests in American history in response to police and vigilante brutality against the black community. New protests are still erupting every time another suppressed video, such as of Daniel Prude, surfaces, or another killing, such as Breonna Taylor’s, goes unpunished. As communities demand meaningful reform, the point – or pointlessness – of “implicit bias training” takes on renewed urgency. Implicit bias trainings aim to raise awareness about the unwitting or unwilling prejudices (...) and stereotypes that shape our habits of thinking, feeling, and navigating through the social world. These trainings have been widely adopted by businesses, schools, and law enforcement agencies. Do they make any difference? -/- Although I conduct implicit bias trainings myself (including for courts, judges, police, and attorneys), I share many critics’ concerns. Many trainings are too brief and oversimple, and too often their real function is to permit organisations to “check a box” to protect against litigation, rather than to spark real change. But “implicit bias training” is just another way of saying “education about implicit bias,” and, like all kinds of education, it can be done well or poorly. If implicit bias is one important piece of a large and complex puzzle, then education about it – when done right – should have a meaningful role to play in helping us understand ongoing inequities and enact reforms. (shrink)

This essay presents an integrated account of Michael Wyschogrod's Zionism as a function of his broader theological anthropology, eschatology, and carnal interpretation of Israel's election. Against Leora Batnitzky, I show that Wyschogrod's Zionism, while definitively messianic, is decidedly not fanatical or fundamentalist. Against Meir Soloveichik, I show that Wyschogrod has maintained this non-fanatical messianism consistently throughout his career, and so his pacific political prescriptions are organically at one with his vigorous calls for Jewish sovereignty over the land.

The volume investigates the question of meaning of mystical phenomena and, conversely, queries the concept of "meaning" itself, via insights afforded by mystical experiences. The collection brings together researchers from such disparate fields as philosophy, psychology, history of religion, cognitive poetics, and semiotics, in an effort to ascertain the question of mysticism's meaning through pertinent, up-to-date multidisciplinarity. The discussion commences with Editor's Introduction that probes persistent questions of complexity as well as perplexity of mysticism and the reasons why problematizing mysticism (...) leads to even greater enigmas. One thread within the volume provides the contextual framework for continuing fascination of mysticism that includes a consideration of several historical traditions as well as personal accounts of mystical experiences: Two contributions showcase ancient Egyptian and ancient Israelite involvements with mystical alterations of consciousness and Christianity's origins being steeped in mystical praxis; and four essays highlight mysticism's formative presence in Chinese traditions and Tibetan Buddhism as well as medieval Judaism and Kabbalah mysticism. A second, more overarching strand within the volume is concerned with multidisciplinary investigations of the phenomenon of mysticism, including philosophical, psychological, cognitive, and semiotic analyses. To this effect, the volume explores the question of philosophy's relation to mysticism and vice versa, together with a Wittgensteinian nexus between mysticism, facticity, and truth; language mysticism and "supernormal meaning" engendered by certain mystical states; cognitive-poetic analysis of mystical poetry; and a semiotic scrutiny of some mystical experiences and their ineffability. Finally, the volume includes an assessment of the so-called New Age authors' contention of the convergence of scientific and mystical claims about reality. The above two tracks are appended with personal, contemporary accounts of mystical experiences, in the Prologue; and a futuristic envisioning, as a fictitious chronicle from the time-to-come, of life without things mystical, in the Postscript. The volume contains fourteen chapters; its international contributors are based in Canada, Israel, United Kingdom, and the United States. (shrink)

This paper expands the definition of gray-marketing to include some ethically problematic marketing activities and techniques used in personal selling in China. Based on this, a conceptual model of gray-marketing for a particular type of selling in which both the sellers and the buyers exhibit problematic ethics in an exchange and the associated hypotheses are developed and tested. The findings show that, first, the respondents have different ethical evaluations of different marketing practices used in personal selling such as giving and (...) accepting gifts, buying and accepting meals, and offering and accepting kickbacks. Some of these practices may not be considered unethical. Second, in terms of ethical assessment, gray-marketing practiced by buying agents is more unacceptable than when practiced by sales agents. Third, a person's ethical evaluation of gray-marketing behavior, empathy for gray-marketing, and belief that gray-marketing has serious consequences, significantly affects his inclination to use gray-marketing. This paper concludes with a discussion of some possible applications of our research findings. (shrink)

Genetics holds the key to understanding normal human biology and possibly many of the major causes of human disease and impairment. Research into human developmental genetics seems, therefore, to be both necessary and justified. However, such research requires the use of embryonic and fetal tissue obtained from spontaneous abortions and elective termination of pregnancy. This paper examines the arguments in favour of using tissue from elective terminations and the evolution of regulatory frameworks for this research. The paper argues that the (...) recent statutory and regulatory reforms in the UK have not properly addressed the issue of ethically obtaining postimplantation human embryos for research. It is argued that the recent reforms have left the Polkinghorne guidelines untouched but that these are now unequal to the task. A practical suggestion for reform of the approach to the informing and consent of potential donors is offered. (shrink)

Whilst previous observational studies have linked negative thought processes such as an external locus of control and holding negative cognitive styles with depression, the directionality of these associations and the potential role that these factors play in the transition to adulthood and parenthood has not yet been investigated. This study examined the association between locus of control and negative cognitive styles in adolescence and probable depression in young adulthood and whether parenthood moderated these associations. Using a UK prospective population-based birth (...) cohort study: the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, we examined the association between external locus of control and negative cognitive styles in adolescence with odds of depression in 4,301 young adults using logistic regression models unadjusted and adjusted for potential confounding factors. Interaction terms were employed to examine whether parenthood moderated these associations. Over 20% of young adults in our sample were at or above the clinical threshold indicating probable depression. For each standard deviation increase in external locus of control in adolescence, there was a 19% higher odds of having probable depression in young adulthood, after adjusting for various confounding factors including baseline mood and different demographic and life events variables. Similarly, for each SD increase in negative cognitive styles in adolescence, there was a 29% higher odds of having probable depression in the adjusted model. We found little evidence that parenthood status moderated the relationship between external locus of control or negative cognitive styles in adolescence and probable depression following adjustment for confounding factors. Effect estimates were comparable when performed in the complete case dataset. These findings suggest that having an external locus of control and holding negative cognitive styles in mid- to late adolescence is associated with an increased likelihood of probable depression in young adulthood. (shrink)

Whistleblowers have usually been treated as outcasts by private-sector employers. But legal, ethical, and practical considerations increasingly compel companies to encourage employees to disclose suspected illegal and/or unethical activities throughinternal communication channels. Internal disclosure policies/procedures (IDPP''s) have been recommended as one way to encourage such communication.This study examined the relationship between IDPP''s and employee whistleblowing among private-sector employers. Almost 300 human resources executives provided data concerning their organizations'' experiences.

To help eliminate perinatal HIV transmission, the US Department of Health and Human Services recommends against breastfeeding for women living with HIV, regardless of viral load or combined antiretroviral therapy status. However, cART radically improves HIV prognosis and virtually eliminates perinatal transmission, and breastfeeding's health benefits are well-established. In this setting, pregnancy is increasing among American women with HIV, and a harm reduction approach to those who breastfeed despite extensive counseling is suggested. We assess the evidence and ethical justification for (...) current policy, with attention to pertinent racial and health disparities. We first review perinatal transmission and breastfeeding data relevant to US infants. We compare hypothetical risk of HIV transmission from breastmilk to increased mortality from sudden infant death syndrome, necrotizing enterocolitis and sepsis from avoiding breastfeeding, finding that benefits may outweigh risks if mothers maintain undetectable viral load on cART. We then review maternal health considerations. We conclude that avoidance of breastfeeding by women living with HIV may not maximize health outcomes and discuss our recommendation for revising national guidelines in light of autonomy, harm reduction and health inequities. (shrink)

The rise of neuroplasticity has led to new fields of study about the relation between social inequalities and neurobiology, including investigations into the “neuroscience of poverty.” The neural phenotype of poverty proposed in recent neuroscientific research emerges out of classed, gendered, and racialized inequalities that not only affect bodies in material ways but also shape scientific understandings of difference. An intersectional, sociomaterial approach is needed to grasp the implications of neuroscientific research that aims to both produce and repair neurobiological difference. (...) Following Benjamin’s critique of the “carceral imagination” of technoscience, this article considers how such research may fix in terms of helping, or in contrast, fix by classifying and reifying, vulnerable subjects. I address the potential for biosocial determinism in linking neural phenotypes and social problems. I use an intersectional approach to consider the presence and absence of race in this body of research and explore how some methodological and conceptual framings of the “brain on poverty” mark poor and minority children for intervention in concert with neoliberal approaches to poverty. (shrink)

The duty to protect patient welfare underpins undergraduate medical ethics and patient safety teaching. The current syllabus for patient safety emphasises the significance of organisational contribution to healthcare failures. However, the ongoing over-reliance on whistleblowing disproportionately emphasises individual contributions, alongside promoting a culture of blame and defensiveness among practitioners. Diane Vaughan’s ‘Normalisation of Deviance’ provides a counterpoise to such individualism, describing how signals of potential danger are collectively misinterpreted and incorporated into the accepted margins of safe operation. NoD is an (...) insidious process that often goes unnoticed, thus minimising the efficacy of whistleblowing as a defence against inevitable disaster. In this paper, we illustrate what can be learnt by greater attention to the collective, organisational contributions to healthcare failings by applying NoD to The Morecambe Bay Investigation. By focusing on a cluster of five ‘serious untoward incidents’ occurring in 2008, we describe a cycle of NoD affecting trust handling of events that allowed poor standards of care to persist for several years, before concluding with a poignant example of the limitations of whistleblowing, whereby the raising of concerns by a senior consultant failed to generate a response at trust board level. We suggest that greater space in medical education is needed to develop a thorough understanding of the cultural and organisational processes that underpin healthcare failures, and that medical education would benefit from integrating the teaching of medical ethics and patient safety to resolve the tension between systems approaches to safety and the individualism of whistleblowing. Data sharing not applicable as no datasets generated and/or analysed for this study. (shrink)

Photographic pictorial experience is thought to have a peculiar phenomenology to it, one that fails to accompany the pictorial experiences one has before so-called ‘hand-made’ pictures. I present a theory that explains this in terms of a common factor shared by beliefs formed on the basis of photographic pictorial experience and beliefs formed on the basis of ordinary, face-to-face, perceptual experience: the having of a psychologically immediate, non-inferential etiology. This theory claims that photographic phenomenology has less to do with photographs (...) themselves, or the pictorial experiences they elicit, and is a matter of our cognitive response to those experiences. I illustrate this theory’s benefits: it is neutral on the nature of photography and our folk-conception of photography; it is consistent with photographic phenomenology’s being contingent; and it accounts for our experiences of hyper-realistic hand-made pictures. Extant theories of photographic phenomenology falter on one or more of these issues. (shrink)

The moral doctrine of Hobbes, in many ways the most interesting of our major British philosophers, is, I think, commonly seen in a false perspective which has seriously obscured its real affinities. This is, no doubt, largely due to the fact that most modern readers begin and end their study of Hobbes's ethics with the Leviathan , a rhetorical and, in many ways, a popular Streitschrift published in the very culmination of what looked at the time to be a permanent (...) revolution, and do not pay such attention to the more calmly argued statements of the same doctrine contained in the Elements of Law , circulated before the outbreak of the Civil War, or the De Cive. (shrink)

In this critical, feminist account of the management of intersex conditions under 2006's controversial “Disorders of Sex Development” (DSD) treatment model, I argue that like the “Optimal Gender of Rearing” (OGR) treatment model it replaced, DSD aims at securing a cisgendered future for the intersex patient, referring to a normalized trajectory of development across the lifespan in which multiple sexed, gendered, and sexual characteristics remain in “coherent” alignment. I argue this by critically analyzing two ways that intersex management has changed (...) between OGR and DSD: 1) regarding sex‐assignment recommendations for three patient populations and, 2) with the prenatal treatment of pregnant individuals at risk of conceiving a fetus with congenital adrenal hyperplasia with the steroid hormone dexamethasone. I conclude that like OGR before it, DSD also unjustifiably presumes that typical genitalia are necessary for cisgendered development. However, unlike OGR, it appeals to the empirically inadequate, theoretically suspect, and biologically determinist model of gender development known as brain‐organization theory. Given this, I conclude that the treatment of intersex people under DSD continues to be driven by problematically heterosexist and transphobic assumptions regarding the value and normalcy of cisgendered life, while practically and discursively constituting it as such. (shrink)

Recent work on seeing-in has taken a pluralist turn. There is variety among pictures, so we should expect variety among seeing-in. Dominic Lopes’s taxonomy of seeing-in is arguably the most thorough that is currently available. Lopes identifies five varieties of seeing-in. In this paper I identify a sixth: pseudo-actualism. This paper improves our current best taxonomy of seeing-in.

Incompatibilism, the view that free will and determinism are incompatible, subsists on two widely accepted, but deeply confused, theses concerning possibility and causation: (1) in a deterministic universe, one can never truthfully utter the sentence "I could have done otherwise," and (2) in such universes, one can never really take credit for having caused an event, since in fact all events have been predetermined by conditions during the universe's birth. Throughout the free will.

In a famous passage from “Slavery In Massachusetts,” Thoreau writes, “The remembrance of my country spoils my walk. My thoughts are murder to the State, and involuntarily go plotting against her.”1 Here is Thoreau the anarchist, the misanthrope, the self-righteous angry young man, as he is so often portrayed in the secondary literature. It would be easy to consider the issue resolved: the conventional wisdom about Thoreau's misanthropy and anarchism are demonstrated, and there is little more to say. It would (...) also be a significant mistake—one that has been made over and over again by commentators on both his political views and his nature writings. Thoreau's comment is not the climax of “Slavery in Massachusetts,” but rather is the prelude to the climax. Consider the passage that follows and leads to the conclusion of the essay. (shrink)

The widely touted discovery of mirror neurons has generated intense scientific interest in the neurobiology of intersubjectivity. Social neuroscientists have claimed that mirror neurons, located in brain regions associated with motor action, facial recognition, and somatosensory processing, allow us to automatically grasp other people's intentions and emotions. Despite controversies, mirror neuron research is animating materialist, affective, and embodied accounts of intersubjectivity. My view is that mirror neurons raise issues that are directly relevant to feminism and cultural studies, but interventions are (...) needed for the work to be compatible with nonreductionist critical thought. In this article I critique the dominant neuroscientific account of mirror neurons, called embodied simulation theory. I draw from feminist epistemologies as well as alternative interpretations of mirror neurons in cognitive science and philosophy of mind to consider mirroring as situated, embodied perception. (shrink)

The recent interest in wisdom in professional health care practice is explored in this article. Key features of wisdom are identified via consideration of certain classical, ancient and modern sources. Common themes are discussed in terms of their contribution to ‘clinical wisdom’ itself and this is reviewed against the nature of contemporary nursing education. The distinctive features of wisdom (recognition of contextual factors, the place of the person and timeliness) may enable their significance for practice to be promoted in more (...) coherent ways in nursing education. Wisdom as practical knowledge (phronesis) is offered as a complementary perspective within the educational preparation and practice of students of nursing. Certain limitations within contemporary UK nursing education are identified that may inhibit development of clinical wisdom. These are: the modularization of programmes in higher education institutions, the division of pastoral and academic support and the relationship between theory and practice. (shrink)

Relations of transworld similarity play an essential role in Lewis's system. Analysis reveals that they involve the possibility of detailed transworld belief. Such belief is problematic within Lewis's framework. He has an answer to the problems raised, but it relies on a dubious distinction between natural and mere properties. Replacing that distinction with a respectable one undermines an essential part of his case against one of his chief opponents, the linguistic ersatzist.

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of the vices considered in this essay, namely, sloth, envy, avarice, pride, anger, lust, and gluttony. It argues that these so-called ‘deadly sins’ were correctly named and correctly classed together. Irrespective of their theological background, they are similar in structure in that the agent’s thoughts and desires, while differing in content depending on the vice in question, focus primarily on the self and its position in the world. They are similar also in that (...) in each case they are destructive of that self and prevent its flourishing. (shrink)

Michigan is a critical agricultural state, and small family farms are a crucial component of the state’s food sector. This paper examines how the race/ethnicity of the family farm owners/operators is related to farm characteristics, financing, and impacts of the pandemic. It compares 75 farms owned/operated solely by Whites and 15 with People of Color owners/operators. The essay examines how farmers finance their farm operations and the challenges they face doing so. The article also explores how the Coronavirus-19 pandemic affected (...) farming operations, the financial viability of farms, and how farmers responded to the challenges posed by the pandemic. The study found that People of Color farm owners/operators were younger than White farm owners/operators. The People of Color farm owners/operators tended to manage smaller farms for shorter periods than White farm owners/operators. Though two-thirds of the Farmers of Color owned their farms, they were more financially vulnerable than White farm owners/operators. The farmers studied had difficulty obtaining loans to finance their farms. Farmers reported increasing requests from people for food assistance during the pandemic. Farmers responded to the pandemic by participating in government programs such as the Farm to Families Food Box Program that purchased their produce. It allowed farmers to supply emergency food assistance programs with products from their farms. The products went to families receiving food assistance from soup kitchens, food banks, and other community-based nonprofits. (shrink)