ArgumentThis text is a reflection on the fate of a special kind of scientific object - anatomy collections - and their place in contemporary times. Though the phenomenon of keeping and displaying such collections is generally dying out, those specimens which survive continue to puzzle and fascinate us. To understand the current status of such collections, and the nostalgia evoked by the specimens within them, I argue, we should approach them as modern ruins. This allows us to think of them (...) as places of absence, pointing to unfinished lives and unfinished scientific projects. The paper begins with the story of a preserved human face from the Francis I. Rainer anatomical-anthropological collection (Bucharest), and continues by discussing the fate of that collection, and of anatomy collections more widely. Ultimately, the paper asks, what is it that we want to preserve: specimens, practices, or research philosophies? (shrink)

How does consciousness vary across the animal kingdom? Are some animals ‘more conscious’ than others? This article presents a multidimensional framework for understanding interspecies variation in states of consciousness. The framework distinguishes five key dimensions of variation: perceptual richness, evaluative richness, integration at a time, integration across time, and self-consciousness. For each dimension, existing experiments that bear on it are reviewed and future experiments are suggested. By assessing a given species against each dimension, we can construct a consciousness profile for (...) that species. On this framework, there is no single scale along which species can be ranked as more or less conscious. Rather, each species has its own distinctive consciousness profile. (shrink)

This article identifies limitations in traditional approaches to engineering ethics pedagogy, reflected in an overreliance on disaster case studies. Researchers in the field have pointed out that these approaches tend to occlude ethically significant aspects of day-to-day engineering practice and thus reductively individualize and decontextualize ethical decision-making. Some have proposed, as a remedy for these defects, the use of research and theory from Science and Technology Studies to enrich our understanding of the ways in which technology and engineering practice are (...) intricated in social and institutional contexts. While endorsing this approach, this article also argues that STS scholarship may not sufficiently address the kinds of questions about normativity and agency that are essential to engineering ethics. It proposes making use of the growing body of research in a field called “postphenomenology,” an approach that combines STS research with the traditional phenomenological concern with the standpoint of lived-experience. Postphenomenology offers a method of inquiry that combines STS’s investigation into social and institutional dimensions of technology with phenomenological reflection on our lived experience of embodied engagement with technical objects and sociotechnical systems, particularly the ways in which these involvements affect our moral perception and agency. The aim in using this approach in engineering ethics is thus to illuminate moral dimensions of everyday professional life of which practitioners may not typically be aware. The article concludes with some concrete curricular interventions for engineering ethics classrooms. (shrink)

This paper applies the account developed by Susanna Siegel in The Rationality of Perception to aesthetic cases and explores the implications of such an account for aesthetic engagement as well as curatorial and exhibitionary practices. It argues that one’s prior outlook – expertise, beliefs, desires, fears, preferences, attitudes – can have both aesthetically good and bad influences on perceptual experiences, just as it can have both epistemically good and bad influences. Analysing these bad influences in cases of ‘hijacked’ aesthetic perception (...) will reveal that, unless we recognize that our perception of high-level and low-level aesthetically relevant properties is norm-governed, we will be at a loss to explain what goes wrong in these cases. Just as perception can be rational or irrational, so too can it be apt or inapt. (shrink)

Miranda Fricker’s influential concept of epistemic injustice has recently seen application to many areas of interest, with an increasing body of healthcare research using the concept of epistemic injustice in order to develop both general frameworks and accounts of specific medical conditions and patient groups. This paper illuminates tensions that arise between taking steps to protect against committing epistemic injustice in healthcare, and taking steps to understand the complexity of one’s predicament and treat it accordingly. Work on epistemic injustice is (...) therefore at risk of obfuscating legitimate and potentially fruitful inquiry. This paper uses Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Myalgic Encephalomyelitis as a case study, but I suggest that the key problems identified could apply to other cases within healthcare, such as those classed as Medically Unexplained Illnesses, Functional Neurological Disorders and Psychiatric Disorders. Future work on epistemic injustice in healthcare must recognise and attend to this tension to protect against unsatisfactory attempts to correct epistemic injustice. (shrink)

The development and use of large and dynamic health data repositories designed to support research pose challenges to traditional informed consent models. We used semi-structured interviewing to elicit diverse research stakeholders' views of a model of consent appropriate to participation in initiatives that entail collection, long-term storage, and undetermined future research use of multiple types of health data. We demonstrate that, when considering health data repositories, research stakeholders replace a concept of consent as informed with one in which consent is (...) engaged. In engaged consent, a participant's ongoing relationship with a repository serves as a substitute or adjunct to information exchange at enrollment. We detail research stakeholders' views of the risks of engaged consent and suggest questions for further study about engagement and consent procedures in initiatives that aim to store data for future unspecified research purposes. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 10, Page 20-22, October 2012.

Over the last 40 years or so, there has been an explosion of cultural evolution research in anthropology and archaeology. In each discipline, cultural evolutionists investigate how interactions between individuals translate into group level patterns, with the aim of explaining the diachronic dynamics and diversity of cultural traits. However, while much attention has been given to deterministic processes, we contend that current evolutionary accounts of cultural change are limited because they do not adopt a systematic stochastic approach. First, we show (...) that, in contrast with the intense debates in ecology and population genetics, the importance of stochasticity in evolutionary processes has generated little discussion in the sciences of cultural evolution to date. Second, we speculate on the reasons, both ideological and methodological, why that should be so. Third, we highlight the inadequacy of genetically-inspired stochastic models in the context of cultural evolution modelling, and ask which fundamental stochastic processes might be more relevant to take up. We conclude that the field of cultural evolution would benefit from a stochastic revolution. For that to occur, stochastic models ought to be developed specifically for cultural data and not through a copy-pasting of neutral models from population genetics or ecology. (shrink)

Common symptoms of multiple sclerosis include motor impairments of the lower extremities, particularly gait disturbances. Loss of balance and muscle weakness, representing some peripheral effects, have been shown to influence these symptoms, however, the individual role of cortical and subcortical structures in the central nervous system is still to be understood. Assessing [18F]fluorodeoxyglucose uptake in the CNS can assess brain activity and is directly associated with regional neuronal activity. One potential modality to increase cortical excitability and improve motor function in (...) patients with MS is transcranial direct current stimulation. However, tDCS group outcomes may not mirror individual subject responses, which impedes our knowledge of the pathophysiology and management of diseases like MS. Three PwMS randomly received both 3 mA tDCS and SHAM targeting the motor cortex that controls the more-affected leg for 20 min on separate days before walking on a treadmill. The radiotracer, FDG, was injected at minute two of the 20 min walk and the subjects underwent a Positron emission tomography scan immediately after the task. Differences in relative regional metabolism of areas under the tDCS anode and the basal ganglia were calculated and investigated. The results indicated diverse and individualized responses in regions under the anode and consistent increases in some basal ganglia areas. Thus, anodal tDCS targeting the M1 that controls the more-affected leg of PwMS might be capable of affecting remote subcortical regions and modulating the activity of the circuitry connected to these regions. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Current attempts to understand unusually high rates of psychiatric illness in complex, chronic illnesses can be guilty of operating within an explanatory framework whereby there are two options. Either (a) that the psychiatric predicaments are secondary to the bodily condition, and (b) that they are primary. In this paper, I draw upon philosophical work on affect, contemporary empirical work, and qualitative first-person patient data to illustrate a much messier reality. I argue that affective experience is generally more complex in (...) such conditions, and that a variety of pre- and post-morbid causal factors dynamically interact such that the resultant psychiatric predicaments do not permit to classification as strictly primary or secondary to the bodily condition. Affective scaffolding, in my view, provides an apt theoretical framework for capturing this nuance. (shrink)

We discuss how transgenerational communitarianism deals with public decisions involving tradeoffs between different generations’ wellbeing and having global consequences. Policies for tackling climate change are an example. Although there is a natural, evolutionary, basis for intergenerational altruism, most people lack the competencies for constituting a transgenerational community. Moreover, greater attention to future generations’ wellbeing need not substitute for collective action: a lower discount rate reflecting a stronger concern for future generations may even worsen their wellbeing. Finally, in a world of (...) irreducible value pluralism, there is no community of persons sharing moral values that can legitimize common policies for addressing global problems: only the common interest of avoiding destructive consequences may motivate collective action to face problems like climate change. (shrink)

This paper points to a more expansive conception of grief by arguing that the losses of illness can be genuine objects of grief. I argue for this by illuminating underappreciated structural features of typical grief — that is, grief over a bereavement — which are shared but under-recognized. I offer a common chronic illness, chronic fatigue syndrome/myalgic encephalomyelitis (CFS/ME), as a striking case study. I then use this analysis to highlight some clinical challenges that arise should this claim receive uptake (...) in clinical practice. Extant literature on CFS/ME tells us that rates of comorbid depression are atypically high. If one accepts that people with CFS/ ME can grieve over losses associated with the condition, and that grief can be easily mistaken for depression in this context, this might suggest that rates of comorbid depression are inflated. I show, however, that the challenge of distinguishing between healthy and pathological grief arises in its place, and is just as tricky to solve. (shrink)

Any system of taxation depends on a substantial degree of compliance from the taxpayer. But do ethical considerations stop at obeying the letter of the tax law, or do they drive one to take a more critical and socially responsible attitude towards tax avoidance as well as evasion? Dr Alan Stainer is Head of Engineering Management at Middlesex University, Bounds Green Road, London N11 2NQ, and Founder Director of the International Society for Productivity & Quality Research; Lorice Stainer is Senior (...) Lecturer in Business Ethics at the University of Hertfordshire Business School and a Business Ethics Consultant; and Alexandra Segal is a Chartered Accountant, Taxation Manager with Keelings Chartered Accountants, London, and a Taxation Consultant. (shrink)

Prendre soin d’un parent souffrant de la maladie d’Alzheimer place l’ensemble de la famille dans des circonstances complexes et difficiles. Cet article s’emploie à comprendre comment la maladie d’Alzheimer vient convoquer l’histoire familiale, ses conflits et ses traces du négatif, perturbant à la fois les liens familiaux et l’inscription des proches dans leur rôle d’aidant. Les auteures rendent compte d’entretiens cliniques à visée de recherche menés auprès d’une fratrie de quatre sœurs confrontées à la dépendance de leur mère atteinte de (...) la maladie d’Alzheimer. À partir d’une analyse phénoménologique, elles montrent l’importance de la désorganisation des liens familiaux et la réactivation des conflits dans l’organisation concrète des aidants autour du parent malade. Les enfants confrontés à la maladie grave d’un parent doivent non seulement réaliser un travail d’acceptation de la maladie, mais aussi réélaborer l’histoire familiale ainsi réactivée. (shrink)

As an introduction to the case studies collected in the current special issue, this review article provides a brief, and by no means exhaustive, overview of research that proves to be relevant to the development of a concept of an aesthetics of knowledge in the academic study of religion and in science and technology studies. Finally, it briefly discusses recent work explicitly addressing the aesthetic entangle-ment of science and religion.

Contributions of science of culture to the research in organizational communication field. The present paper aims to discuss the conditions of likelihood ofinserting a methodological option in the field of organisational communication, an option that rose from the project of Ernst Cassirer to formulate a general theory of symbolic forms. In fact, it is about stating a theoretical and methodological frame capable of answering a concrete need, phenomenological in nature, to study the communication structure of organisations not as a given (...) fact, not as a finite and given construction, but as an ensemble of spiritual manifestations which build and enforce the human being. Access to the methodological contributions of symbolic form philosophy in the research of organisational communication is suggested by Cassirer himself through the thesis according to which the goal of his studies on symbolic forms will be truly attained only if its problematic will be reengaged and debated by each disciplinary field in turn. In this context, the thoretical frame suggested here delimits an approach which takes as its starting concept the immediate alternative of the concept of society, in other words the concept of culture, whose content is inextricably linked with the fundamental forms and propensities of the spirit. The main task of such a research frame is to approach the original source of human action, the cultural products - the words of the language, the images of the myth, of art, the intellectual symbols of knowledge, etc. From this point of view, the ground of organisational communication can be delimited and clarified to the extent in which it is regarded from the perspective of its subject, meaning in what regards the thinking in act of this communication. It is about a key mutation brought about by the methodology of the symbolic form philosophy, the mutation from object towards subject. In order to understand the organisational communication one must start from its subject, following the hypothesis that there is organisational communication in what regards the human being to the extent in which there is organisational communication in humans, since individual himself became, at a certain point, organisational communication. Therefore, the trasfer of methodological contribution herein proposed is based not on the capacity to approach organisational communication in its entirety, but on that of the subject as animal symbolicum and as inhabitant of a community which permanently insitutes a world within which he communicates, to which he refers and which he changes. The research in organisational communication participates, from this point of view, to the field of science of culture. (shrink)

Charney argues that the presence of inherited epigenetic effects makes twin, family, and adoption studies obsolete. This argument relies on both a faulty characterization of these studies and indirect comparisons of DNA and factors. I argue that twin and family studies will in fact serve a necessary and vital role in the study of epigenetic and neogenetic processes.

This paper explores how women and non-binary Latinx Community Workers in Toronto, Canada, negotiate their identities, citizenship practices and politics in relation to settler colonialism and decolonization. We demonstrate how LCWs enact a Latinx decolonial politic of belonging, an alternative way of practicing citizenship that strives to simultaneously challenge both Canadian and Latin American settler colonialism. This can be seen when LCWs refuse to be recognized on white settler terms as “proud Canadians,” and create community-based learning initiatives that incite conversations (...) among everyday Latinx community members around Canada’s settler colonial history and present, Indigenous worldviews, as well as race and settler colonialism in Latin America. We consider how LCWs’ enactments of a Latinx decolonial politic of belonging serve as small, incomplete, but crucial steps towards decolonization. (shrink)

In metaethics, empirical approaches are not just complementary to, but continuous with, traditional approaches to the subject. This chapter addresses traditional and empirical approaches to metaethics. It discusses how empirical approaches have been brought to bear on some central metaethical questions. The chapter illustrates not just the diversity of topics within metaethics itself but also the diversity of empirical methods and approaches that philosophers and psychologists working on these topics are using. The debate between internalists and externalists is a debate (...) concerning the psychology of moral judgment, but also a debate about our concept of moral judgment. As such, it has implications for other metaethical debates. Antirealists such as relativists and noncognitivists often defend internalism, and argue that their views are best equipped to explain the link between moral judgment and motivation. (shrink)

MĂDĂLINA DIACONU, Tasten, Riechen, Schmecken. Eine Ästhetik der anästhesierten Sinne, 2005 ; SILVIA STOLLER, VERONICA VASTERLING,LINDA FISHER, Feministische Phänomenologie und Hermeneutik, 2005 ; KARL SCHUHMANN, Karl Schuhmann: Selected Papers on Phenomenology. Edited by CEES LEIJENHORST and PIET STEENBAKKERS, 2004 ; HIROSHI GOTO, Der Begriff der Person in der PhänomenologieHusserls. Ein Interpretationsversuch der Husserlschen Phänomenologie als Ethik im Hinblick auf den Begriff der Habitualität, 2004 ; GÜNTER FIGAL, Lebensverstricktheit und Abstandsnahme. „Verhalten zu sich“ im Anschluss an Heidegger, Kierkegaard und Hegel, 2001 (...) ; JACQUES DERRIDA, Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, 2000. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This study investigated the effect of conspiracy ideation, moral disengagement, and intolerance of uncertainty on compliance with the anti-SARS-COV-2 social distancing rules and two other facets of people’s reactions toward the coronavirus crisis. A convenience sample of 245 Romanians completed an online survey in March 2020. Results indicate that conspiracy ideation is associated with lower assessments of virus risk and lower compliance with the confinement measures. Moral disengagement had a parallel effect of undermining personal compliance to the social distancing (...) regulations, highlighting the need to define social distancing as morally relevant and prevent individual justifications for noncompliance. (shrink)

Legal interpretations of the Uniform Determination of Death Act (UDDA) can and have evolved over time. Interpretation of the statutory term “irreversible” (circulation cannot ever resume) to mean “...

In _The Cosmic Perils of Qadi Ḥusayn Maybudī in Fifteenth-Century Iran_ Alexandra Dunietz explores the life and works of a provincial judge whose life exemplifies the intellectual, spiritual and political tensions of the Timurid, Ak Koyunlu and Safavid spheres.