Background: There is a growing interest in using cognitive behavioural therapy with people who have Asperger Syndrome and comorbid mental health problems. Aims: To examine whether modified group CBT for clinically significant anxiety in an AS population is feasible and likely to be efficacious. Method: Using a randomised assessor-blind trial, 52 individuals with AS were randomised into a treatment arm or a waiting-list control arm. After 24 weeks, those in the waiting-list control arm received treatment, while those initially randomised to (...) treatment were followed-up for 24 weeks. Results: The conversion rate for this trial was high, while attrition was 13%. After 24 weeks, there was no significant difference between those randomised to the treatment arm compared to those randomised to the waiting-list control arm on the primary outcome measure, the Hamilton Rating Scale for Anxiety. Conclusions: Trials of psychological therapies with this population are feasible. Larger definitive trials are now needed. Declaration of Interest: None Trial Registration: ISRCTN 30265294, UKCRN 8370. (shrink)

L’idéal éthique et son revers selon Aristote est un titre volontairement oxymorique dont Louise Rodrigue (L. R.) se justifie d’emblée (p. 1). Il s’agit par là de considérer l’originalité de l’éthique d’Aristote, tant d’un point de vue interne à sa propre pensée que d’un point de vue externe, celui du courant philosophique auquel elle est maintenant associée. Originalité revendiquée, donc, mais également appuyée sur des usages antérieurs du terme d’idéal à propos de l’éthique aristotélicienne...

This book brings together the stories of biographers, novelists, scholars, and artists as they have written about the journeys (some literal, some figurative) they have made to their subjects. Contributors include Elizabeth Wood, J.J. Wilson, Leah Glasser, Jane Lazarre, and Alice Walker.

The artist's house is a prism through which to view not only the artistic practice of its inhabitant, but also to apprehend broader developments in sculpture and contemporary art in relation to domestic architecture and interior space. Based on a series of interviews and site visits with living artists about the role of their home in relation to their work, Kirsty Bell looks at the house as receptacle, vehicle, model, theater, or dream space. In-depth analyses of these contemporary examples—including Jorge (...) Pardo, Mirosław Bałka, Danh Vo, Gregor Schneider, Frances Stark, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Paweł Althamer, Mark Leckey, Monika Sosnowska, Gabriel Orozco, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Andrea Zittel—are contextualized by key artists of the twentieth century such as Kurt Schwitters, Alice Neel, Edward Krasiński, Carlo Mollino, and Louise Bourgeois. A two-way flow from the domestic arena to the exhibition space becomes apparent, in which the everyday has a significant role to play in the merging of such developments as installation art, relational aesthetics, expanded collage, and performance art. (shrink)

Those who wish to defend the role of aesthetic values in science face a dilemma: Either aesthetic language is used metaphorically for what are ultimately epistemic features, or aesthetic language is used literally but it is difficult to see the importance of such values in science. I introduce a new account that gets around this problem by looking to an overlooked source of aesthetic value in science: the relation between form and content. I argue that a fit between the content (...) of a thought experiment, and the way in which that content is formulated, can have important epistemic pay offs through contributing to scientific understanding. (shrink)

G e moore and ludwig wittgenstein were very different teachers, both because of their differing views on the nature and aims of philosophical investigation, and because of the differences in the way they thought, their educational backgrounds, and the kind of persons they were. this paper records experiences of the two philosophers as teachers and as personalities, and indicates the features of their teaching which stemmed from their views and from their personalities.

Plato famously promised to complement the Sophist and the Statesman with another work on a third sort of expert, the philosopher--but we do not have this final dialogue. Mary Louise Gill argues that Plato promised the Philosopher, but did not write it, in order to stimulate his audience and encourage his readers to work out, for themselves, the portrait it would have contained. The Sophist and Statesman are themselves members of a larger series starting with the Theaetetus, Plato's investigation (...) of knowledge, and the whole series relies on the Parmenides, the second part of which presents a philosophical exercise, introduced as the first step in a larger philosophical program. Gill contends that the dialogues leading up to the missing Philosopher, though they reach some substantive conclusions, are philosophical exercises of various sorts designed to train students in dialectic, the philosopher's method; and that a second version of the Parmenides exercise, closely patterned on it, spans parts of the Theaetetus and Sophist and brings the philosopher into view. This is the exercise about being, the subject-matter studied by Plato's philosopher. Plato hides the pieces of the puzzle and its solution in plain sight, forcing his students (and modern readers) to dig out the pieces and reconstruct the project. Gill reveals how, in finding the philosopher through the exercise, the student becomes a philosopher by mastering his methods. She shows that the target of Plato's exercise is internally related to its pedagogical purpose. (shrink)

Historically left to the margins, the topics of imagination and creativity have gained prominence in philosophy of science, challenging the once dominant distinction between ‘context of discovery’ and ‘context of justification’. The aim of this chapter is to explore imagination and creativity starting from issues within contemporary philosophy of science, making connections to these topics in other domains along the way. It discusses the recent literature on the role of imagination in models and thought experiments, and their comparison with fictions. (...) It then turns to the importance of constraints on imaginings in the scientific domain, as well as whether constraints can hinder creativity. The second part of the paper focuses on the social dimensions of science. It considers imagination and creativity of scientific communities, asks whether the institution of science promotes creativity (and whether we want it to) or if it encourages conservativeness, and ends with a reflection on the politics of imagination and creativity in science. (shrink)

Following extensive examination of published and unpublished materials, we provide a history of the use of dexamethasone in pregnant women at risk of carrying a female fetus affected by congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH). This intervention has been aimed at preventing development of ambiguous genitalia, the urogenital sinus, tomboyism, and lesbianism. We map out ethical problems in this history, including: misleading promotion to physicians and CAH-affected families; de facto experimentation without the necessary protections of approved research; troubling parallels to the history (...) of prenatal use of diethylstilbestrol (DES); and the use of medicine and public monies to attempt prevention of benign behavioral sex variations. Critical attention is directed at recent investigations by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Office of Human Research Protections (OHRP); we argue that the weak and unsupported conclusions of these investigations indicate major gaps in the systems meant to protect subjects of high-risk medical research. (shrink)

Presents a set-theoretic version of the analysis of "there be" as predicating instantiation of a property, a property-theoretic version of which was developed in McNally 1992. This paper provides a solution to the criticism that McNally 1992's analysis could not account for sentences in which postverbal nominal contains a monotone decreasing or nonmonotonic determiner.

RESUMO Este texto discute alguns problemas metodológicos e históricos concernentes à fenomenologia da consciência de imagem elaborada por Edmund Husserl e algumas de suas repercussões teóricas. Primeiramente será tematizado o escopo mais amplo em que a abordagem filosófica das imagens auferiu relevância no século XX, a saber, a assim chamada “virada icônica” ou “pictórica”, conforme as respectivas formulações de Gottfried Boehm e William Mitchell. Será situada nesse contexto a fenomenologia da imagem e, mais especificamente, a fenomenologia da consciência de imagem (...) elaborada por Husserl, considerando-se, em especial, os eixos norteadores dos três direcionamentos que sobressaem nas teorias contemporâneas da imagem, a saber: as abordagens antropológica, semiótica e perceptiva. A partir da retomada de nuances semióticas remanescentes na fenomenologia da consciência de imagem, serão apresentados alguns pontos críticos acerca da classificação das análises de Husserl no escopo do direcionamento perceptivo e, finalmente, apontadas implicações do copertencimento à apresentação intuitiva da imagem daquilo que se denominará “circunstancialidade indicativa”. ABSTRACT This text addresses some methodological and historical problems concerning the phenomenology of image consciousness elaborated by Edmund Husserl as well as some of its theoretical repercussions. At first, I examine the broader scope in which the philosophical approach to images became relevant in the 20th century, the so-called “iconic turn” or “pictorial turn”, according to the respective terms proposed by Gottfried Boehm and William Mitchell. In this context I situate the phenomenology of image and, more specifically, the phenomenology of image consciousness elaborated by Husserl, considering, in particular, the guiding axes of three directions that stand out in contemporary theories of image, namely: the anthropological, the semiotic and the perceptual approach. By the resumption of semiotic nuances remaining in the phenomenology of image consciousness I present some critical points about the classification of Husserl’s analyses in the scope of perceptual approach. Finally, I point out some implications of the co-belonging to the intuitive image presentation of what can be called “indicative circumstantiality”. (shrink)

Revenge is a powerful word. It can conjure up the scheming, embittered individual, plotting the downfall of his enemies well beyond reason and morality – or, more seriously, tragic cycles of violence and blood vendettas, spiraling into entrenched civil conflict over generations. Philosophers have argued that the consequences and the moral psychology of revenge mean it is incompatible – even antithetical – to any plausible conception of moral repair. In this paper I challenge that incompatibility by suggesting that, in contexts (...) of unresponsive and imperfect institutional justice, appropriate acts of vengeance may both create accountability and express solidarity, thus contributing to moral repair. Drawing on past work by French (2001) and MacLachlan (2016), as well as two films with feminist avengers as protagonists, Hard Candy (2005) and Promising Young Woman (2021), I sketch an approach to virtuous third-party vengeance as a starting point for broader, more reparative, understandings of legitimate personal interventions after wrongdoing. -/- . (shrink)

In this volume leading researchers present new work on the semantics and pragmatics of adjectives and adverbs, and their interfaces with syntax. Its concerns include the semantics of gradability; the relationship between adjectival scales and verbal aspect; the relationship between meaning and the positions of adjectives and adverbs in nominal and verbal projections; and the fine-grained semantics of different subclasses of adverbs and adverbs. Its goals are to provide a comprehensive vision of the linguistically significant structural and interpretive properties of (...) adjectives and adverbs, to highlight the similarities between these two categories, and to signal the importance of a careful and detailed integration of lexical and compositional semantics. The editors open the book with an overview of current research before introducing and contextualizing the remaining chapters. The work is aimed at scholars and advanced students of syntax, semantics, formal pragmatics, and discourse. It will also appeal to researchers in philosophy, psycholinguistics, and language acquisition interested in the syntax and semantics of adjectives and adverbs. (shrink)

Two types of formal models - landscape search tasks and two-armed bandit models - are often used to study the effects that various social factors have on epistemic performance. I argue that they can be understood within a single framework. In this unified framework, I develop a model that may be used to understand the effects of functional and demographic diversity and their interaction. Using the unified model, I find that the benefit of demographic diversity is most pronounced in a (...) functionally homogeneous group, and decreases with the increase of functional diversity. (shrink)

This paper explores Husserl’s late manuscripts in order to sketch a phenomenological description of drives and the dimension of passive constitution that belongs to them. Although this topic touches upon psychological issues, it will be shown that a specifically phenomenological approach allows us to recognize the transcendental significance of instincts. By means of the phenomenological reduction, drives reveal a peculiar subject, the ‘original child’, which is described not as a figure of developmental psychology but as a transcendental subject pre-forming the (...) way the world appears to us. Drives work constantly and passively as obscure sources of sense, and the original child is always involved in the constitution of the world. Sharpening our understanding of the inner structure of subjectivity by digging into deeper constitutive levels has important consequences for our view of intersubjectivity: it is not only the individual subject’s consciousness but equally the relation between human subjects which is necessarily rooted in the dimension of drives. Accordingly, collective teleology cannot be considered a late product of human cooperation. Instead, it is an original and pre-predicative impulse. (shrink)

For too long the questions of how we treat animals and how we treat our fellow human beings have been considered separately. But the contours of the current animal crisis make it clear – the harms we are inflicting on the nonhuman world have devastating impacts on humans: zoonotic diseases caused by habitat destruction and animal exploitation have brought human life to a standstill; mass production of animals for food is poisoning the ground and contributing to catastrophic climate change. Animal (...) Crisis responds to this fractured relationship between human beings and animals by exploring the complex social and political contexts in which animals are harmed, revealing the connections between our callous and cruel attitudes to the animal world and those same attitudes towards vulnerable human groups. Marking a stark contrast to traditional theories in animal ethics, Alice Crary and Lori Gruen argue that there can be no animal liberation without human emancipation. Borrowing from critical social theory and ecofeminism, they build a framework for understanding and combatting the structural forces that shape and enable the diminishment of some for the advantage of a few, isolating critical resources that are crucial for animal and human emancipatory struggles alike. (shrink)

In the literature on expert trust, it is often assumed that track records are the gold standard for evaluating expertise, and the difficulty of expert identification arises from either the lack of access to track records, or the inability to assess them. I show, using a computational model, that even in an idealized environment where agents have a God’s eye view on track records, they may fail to identify experts. Under plausible conditions, selecting testimony based on track records ends up (...) reducing overall accuracy, and preventing the community from identifying the real experts. (shrink)

Recently, interest in the unique pathways linking discrete positive emotions to specific health outcomes has gained increasing attention, but the role of awe is yet to be elucidated. Awe is a complex and transformative emotion that can restructure individuals' mental frames so deeply that it could be considered a therapeutic asset for major mental health major issues, including depression. Despite sparse evidence showing a potential connection between depression and awe, this link has not been combined into a proposal resulting in (...) specific intervention guidelines. The aim of this perspective was three-fold: to provide a new unifying model of awe's functioning—the Matryoshka model; to show systematic and explicit connections between this emotion and depression; and to suggest specific guidelines of intervention utilizing the potential therapeutic role of awe for mental health, specifically for depression. This theoretical endeavor in its entirety has been framed within the health domain. (shrink)

This book explores Levinas's rethinking of the meaning of ethics, justice and the human from a position that affirms but goes beyond the anti-humanist philosophy of the twentieth century.

"In this volume, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak engages with 16 photographs by photographer Alice Attie as she attempts telepoiesis, a reaching toward the distant other through the empathetic power of the imagination."-- dust jacket.

This book aims to understand why women are the targets of online hate speech and how we can stop this from occurring.

Nicholas Makins makes a valuable contribution to the literature on medical decision-making, highlighting the role that risk attitudes play in deliberation and subsequently arguing that, in medical choices under uncertainty, if considerations of autonomy and beneficence support deference to patient values and outcome preferences then they also support deference to patients’ attitudes to risk.1 Crucially, however, Makins suggests that it is not simply first-order risk attitudes that are the appropriate target of deference but, rather, patients’ higher-order risk attitudes. In other (...) words, Makins argues that if considerations of autonomy and beneficence support deference in medical decision-making, this deference should include the risk attitudes that individuals desire to have or reflectively endorse. This commentary draws out a morally relevant and overlooked distinction between: (1) deferring to patients’ higher-order attitudes that endorse the first-order risk attitudes they currently hold. and (2) deferring to patients’ higher-order attitudes that endorse risk attitudes that are at odds with the first-order risk attitudes they currently hold (which equates to a higher-order desire to change one’s first-order risk-attitudes). I agree with Makins that if respect for autonomy and beneficence support deference to patient preferences, then these considerations may also support deference to at least some higher-order risk attitudes, namely, those of type (1). But I think that whether they support deference to those of type (2) is less clear. In particular, it does not …. (shrink)

This chapter provides a roadmap of ongoing conversations about cognitive disability and moral status. Its aim is to highlight the political stakes of these conversations for advocates for the cognitively disabled while at the same time bringing out how a fundamental point of divergence within the conversations has to do with what count as appropriate methods of ethics. The main divide is between thinkers who take ethical neutrality to be a regulative ideal for doing empirical justice to the lives of (...) people with cognitive disabilities and those who reject this methodological precept as unduly restrictive. What results is a debate between, on the one hand, fans of various familiar forms of moral individualism and Kantian approaches in ethics and, on the other, a range of disability scholars and activists who implicitly or explicitly make use of philosophically more radical methods. (shrink)

This piece continues an exchange between David Beaver and Jason Stanley, on the one hand, and Alice Crary, on the other, to which Beaver’s and Stanley’s “Neutrality” (immediately above) is a contribution. All three authors agree that the critique of ideology, propaganda, and oppressive structures should not be conceived as eliminating socially-situated perspectives and subjectively-mediated sensibilities from an allegedly neutral discursive space. Their exchange began with Crary’s 2018 article, “The Methodological as Political: What’s the Matter with ‘Analytic Feminism’?” which (...) attacks appeals to neutrality, including one Crary finds in Stanley’s 2015 book, How Propaganda Works, for obscuring a pivotal methodological insight of radical feminist thought, namely, that feminism’s political radicalism is complemented by a “methodological radicalism that involves making use of the practical power of ethically non-neutral resources, conceived as in themselves cognitively authoritative” (Crary 2018: 47). This new reply argues that Beaver’s and Stanley’s practice-based image of language, while at first seemingly aligned with this rejection of neutrality as an ideal for political discourse, fails to fully respond to her original complaint. The ideal of neutrality is problematic, not only in masking social location, but in wrongly impugning as ‘non-cognitive’ or ‘irrational’ critical resources drawn from socially-situated perspectives—the sorts of perspectives to which notable strands of feminist theory give voice precisely for their cognitive value. The current piece claims that to address this further danger it is necessary to go beyond Beaver’s and Stanley’s study of meaning and critically examine engrained philosophical assumptions about how to construe logical notions such as objectivity and truth. It closes by suggesting that, within philosophy of language broadly conceived, the tradition of ordinary language philosophy provides a more promising source of resources and illumination for struggles to make gender-based and overlapping forms of structural bias socially visible. (shrink)

In her article Reification and assent in research involving those who lack capacity, Anna Smajdor shows how excluding adults with impairments of capacity (AWICs) to protect them from the risks of medical research has the paradoxical effect of harming them by reifying them.1 While the medical risks of excluding vulnerable populations in general from medical research are well known, the main risk being the creation of therapeutic orphans, the risk of reifying these populations is less discussed. Hence, we commend Smajdor (...) for introducing an essential nuance in the debate on inclusion of AWICs in medical research. We also agree with her on the importance of acquiring assent from those who cannot legally consent rather than automatically excluding them from research, as we already do in paediatric research. However, we believe that she fails to acknowledge some practical challenges already observed in paediatric research that hinder the retrieval of assent from AWICs and, consequently, their inclusion in medical research. In this commentary, we will first introduce the main challenge to using assent to include AWICs in research, that is, the fact that individuals might oscillate within the capacity spectrum. We will then provide other examples of practical obstacles to the inclusion of AWICs …. (shrink)

In September 2000, the self-styled “anthropological journalist” Patrick Tierney began to make public his work claiming that the Yanomamö people of South America had been actively—indeed brutally—harmed by the sociobiological anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon and the geneticist-physician James Neel. Following a florid summary of Tierney’s claims by the anthropologists Terence Turner and Leslie Sponsel, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) saw fit to take Tierney’s claims seriously by conducting a major investigation into the matter. This paper focuses on the AAA’s problematic actions (...) in this case but also provides previously unpublished information on Tierney’s falsehoods. The work presented is based on a year of research by a historian of medicine and science. The author intends the work to function as a cautionary tale to scholarly associations, which have the challenging duty of protecting scholarship and scholars from baseless and sensationalistic charges in the era of the Internet and twenty-four-hour news cycles. (shrink)

This study examined the association of nurses’ ethical conflict with hospitals with organizational commitment, stress, turnover intention, absence and turnover. Participants were 410 nurses working at four different Canadian hospitals. A longitudinal design was used where nurses completed a questionnaire to capture ethical conflict, stress and organizational commitment, and one year later, measures of turnover intention, absence and actual turnover were obtained for the same sample. We found three aspects of nurses’ ethical conflict with hospitals: patient care values, value of (...) nurses, and staffing policy values. Our findings showed that all three aspects of nurses’ ethical conflict are associated with stress and patient care values is associated with actual turnover. We also found that staffing policy values is predictive of turnover intention, and that patient care values is predictive of absenteeism. Thus, our findings show the multidimensionality of nurses’ ethical conflict with hospitals. Further implications of our findings for practice and theory are discussed. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophy of perception is dominated by extremely polarized debates. The polarization is particularly acute in the debate between naïve realist disjunctivists and their opponents, but divisions seem almost as stark in other areas of dispute (for example, the debate over whether we experience so-called ‘high-level’ properties, and the debate concerning individuation of the senses). The guiding hypothesis underlying this volume is that such polarization stems from insufficient attention to how we should go about settling these debates. In general, there (...) is widespread, largely implicit disagreement concerning what philosophical theories of perception are supposed to explain, the claims that we should hold fixed in the course of theorizing, and the methods that such theorizing should employ. The goal of this volume is to move such methodological questions from the background to the fore, in the hope of facilitating progress. The contributions constitute an initial effort to spur more explicit, systematic discussion of methodology in philosophy of perception. They cover a wide range of relevant topics, from the relation between scientific and philosophical theorizing about perception, to lessons we can learn from the history of philosophy of perception. (shrink)

L'environnement numérique oblige à revoir les modèles sur lesquels se fondent les sciences de l'information et de la communication. La pensée du signe, du message et du document doit en effet évoluer vers une pensée de la traçabilité. Indicielle et détachable, automatique et malléable, la trace est un objet paradoxal, qui atteste le caractère indissociablement technique et politique de la présence numérique. Dans le règne de l'information sur mesure, la personnalisation nous rend plus actifs, tout en nous exposant au profilage. (...) Elle va jusqu'à redéfinir l'identité comme une collection de traces que nous devons apprendre à protéger, mais aussi à administrer. Cette nouvelle économie des empreintes enchevêtre les hiérarchies entre stock et flux comme entre contenu et relation. Recyclant nous-mêmes les traces que d'autres ont déposées, c'est désormais dans l'ombre numérique de la cité que nous sommes appelés à naviguer. Au-delà de la défense de la vie privée, il en va donc aussi de la mémoire et de l'oubli qui nous relient.The digital environment is forcing us to re-think the models on which media studies and information science are based. Theories of signs, messages and documents need to evolve towards reflections on traceability. Traces are paradoxical objects: linked to the personal yet detachable, automatic yet malleable, they bear witness to the inextricable links between the technical and the political in the digital sphere. In an age of "customized information", personalization makes people more active, and also exposes them to profiling, to the point where identity is being redefined as a collection of traces which we must learn to protect, and also to manage. This new economy based on digital "footprints" is overturning the hierarchical relationships between stock and flow, and between content and interaction. As we ourselves recycle the traces that others have left, we are having to find our way through the shadowlands of digital citizenship. Over and above privacy protection, what is at issue are the memories, but also the forgetting, that bind us to each other. (shrink)

This research project investigated manifestations of critical thinking in pupils 10 to 12 years of age during their group discussions held in the context of Philosophy for Children Adapted to Mathematics. The objective of the research project was to examine, through the pupils' discussions, the development of dialogical critical thinking processes. The research was conducted during an entire school year. The research method was based on the Grounded Theory approach; the material used consisted of transcripts of verbal exchanges among the (...) pupils. Analysis of the transcripts revealed that: critical thinking appears to the extent that a 'dia-logue' is established among pupils; on the cognitive level, dialogical critical thinking is comprised of four thinking modes: logical, creative, responsible and meta-cognitive; and on the epistemological level, dialogical critical thinking is only manifested in a context where egocentricity of perspective and relativism of beliefs are transcended. (shrink)

The concept of transformative experience (TE) has been widely explored by several disciplines from philosophy to neurobiology, and in different domains, from the spiritual to the educational one. This attitude has engendered heterogeneous models to explain this phenomenon. However, a consistent and clear understanding of this construct remains elusive. The aim of this work is to provide an initial comprehensive interdisciplinary, cross-domain, up-to-date, and integrated overview on the concept of TEs. Firstly, all the models and theories on TEs were reviewed (...) to extract and analyze TEs’ main components emerging from different disciplines. Then, this preliminary analysis was integrated with an in-depth examination of redundancies and particularities across domains and disciplines, to provide an integrated theoretical framework of TEs and a preliminary interdisciplinary operational definition of TEs. This examination, in turn, can help organize current research and theories, thus providing suggestions for operationalizing TEs as well as encouraging new interdisciplinary research endeavors. (shrink)