Despite the importance of human blood to clinical practice and research, hematology and blood transfusion data remain scattered throughout a range of disparate sources. This lack of systematization concerning the use and definition of terms poses problems for physicians and biomedical professionals. We are introducing here the Blood Ontology, an ongoing initiative designed to serve as a controlled vocabulary for use in organizing information about blood. The paper describes the scope of the Blood Ontology, its stage of development and some (...) of its anticipated uses. (shrink)

With prevalent life issues—stress, addictions, loneliness, health, and violence, to name a few—as its point of departure, Challenges and Pleasures sets out to explain the various roles values and ethics can play for us. It proceeds by demonstrating how the quality of our lives and living morally are inextricably bound. As part of this explanatory process, the text investigates the nature of values and an ethical life.

The desire for a meaningful life is ubiquitous, yet the ordinary concept of a meaningful life is poorly understood. Across six experiments (total N = 2,539), we investigated whether third-person attributions of meaning depend on the psychological states an agent experiences (feelings of interest, engagement, and fulfillment), or on the objective conditions of their life (e.g., their effects on others). Studies 1a–b found that laypeople think subjective and objective factors contribute independently to the meaningfulness of a person’s life. Studies 2a–b (...) found that positive mental states are thought to make a life more meaningful, even if derived from senseless activities (e.g., hand-copying the dictionary). Studies 3a–b found that agents engaged in morally bad activities are not thought to have meaningful lives, even if they feel fulfilled. In short, both an agents’ subjective mental states and objective impact on the world affect how meaningful their lives appear. (shrink)

The concept of Smart Healthy Age-Friendly Environments (SHAFE) emphasises the comprehensive person-centred experience as essential to promoting living environments. SHAFE takes an interdisciplinary approach, conceptualising complete and multidisciplinary solutions for an inclusive society. From this approach, we promote participation, health, and well-being experiences by finding the best possible combinations of social, physical, and digital solutions in the community. This initiative emerged bottom-up in Europe from the dream and conviction that innovation can improve health equity, foster caring communities, and sustainable development. (...) Smart, adaptable, and inclusive solutions can promote and support independence and autonomy throughout the lifespan, regardless of age, gender, disabilities, cultural differences, and personal choices, as well as promote happier and fairer living places. The New European Bauhaus initiative gathers “beautiful, sustainable, and inclusive projects and ideas” to inspire a positive transformation around us. The New European Bauhaus 2024 Festival took place between 9-13 April. “Designing the perfect New European Bauhaus neighbourhood: New European Bauhaus meets SHAFE” was a Satellite Event of the Festival, held as an online workshop, organised by the SHAFE Foundation on April 9th, 2024. At the event, a group of 50 participants with a multidisciplinary background discussed how to meet the challenges of the European Garcia family to enable them to live in a perfect neighbourhood. The White Paper presents the findings of the participants with the New European Bauhaus inspiring projects and ideas to house the European Garcia family in their neighbourhood. The White Paper recommends developers, designers, planners, and policymakers to include person-centred design of social and physical environments and technologies. Although awareness of person-centred design is growing, many initiatives still hamper the inclusion of citizens or end-users throughout the development of products and services. (shrink)

How does thinking affect doing? There is a widely held view that thinking about what you are doing, as you are doing it, hinders performance. Once you have acquired the ability to putt a golf ball, play an arpeggio on the piano, or parallel-park, reflecting on your actions leads to inaccuracies, blunders, and sometimes even utter paralysis--that's what is widely believed. But is it true? After exploring some of the contemporary and historical manifestations of the idea, Barbara Gail Montero (...) develops a theory of expertise which emphasizes the role of the conscious mind in expert action. She aims to dispel various myths about experts who proceed without any understanding of what guides their action, and she analyzes research in both philosophy and psychology that is taken to show that conscious control and explicit monitoring of one's movements impedes well practiced skills. Montero explores a wide range of real-life examples of optimal performance, in sports, the performing arts, healthcare, the military, and other fields, and draws from psychology, neuroscience, and literature to offer a refreshing and persuasive view of expertise, according to which expert action generally is and ought to be thoughtful, effortful, and reflective. (shrink)

Many mathematicians are platonists: they believe that the axioms of mathematics are true because they express the structure of a nonspatiotemporal, mind independent, realm. But platonism is plagued by a philosophical worry: it is unclear how we could have knowledge of an abstract, realm, unclear how nonspatiotemporal objects could causally affect our spatiotemporal cognitive faculties. Here I aim to make room in our metaphysical picture of the world for the causal relevance of abstracta.

This essay considers insects’ place-making powers in history of science topics. Insects have co-shaped the geographies of knowledge production throughout history in three primary dimensions: through their size, density, and multiplane existence. Insects’ miniature worlds have helped humans to create trans-scale analogies. Their spatial transgression and swarming capacity have overwhelmed people, including field researchers, contributing to the making of the places where science is produced. Finally, insects’ “ontologically alien” ways of engaging with environments (e.g., flying and living underground) have offered (...) valuable material for humans’ imaginings of their own realities. By prioritizing insects’ own spatial characteristics, this tripartite typology of human/insect entanglements intends to spur new ways of writing histories of science that engage with space and place. (shrink)

The Cognitive Reserve (CR) hypothesis suggests that the brain actively attempts to cope with neural damages by using pre-existing cognitive processing approaches or by enlisting compensatory approaches. This would allow an individual with high CR to better cope with aging than an individual with lower CR. Many of the proxies used to assess CR indirectly refer to the flexibility of thought. The present paper aims at directly exploring the relationships between CR and creativity, a skill that includes flexible thinking. We (...) tested a sample of 72 adults (aged between 45 and 78) assessing both their level of CR and their creativity. To evaluate CR we used the proxies commonly used in literature, namely, three subtests from the WAIS (vocabulary, similarities, and digit span) and the years of education. We also used an ad-hoc test asking people to report how frequently they tend to perform activities that are believed to increase CR. We used verbal creativity tasks (alternative uses and generation of acronyms) to assess individual levels of creativity. We asked participants to describe their main occupation (present or past) and coded each occupation as creative or not creative. Results (controlling for age-related differences) showed that scores from the WAIS correlated positively with creativity performance, even though correlations varied across the subtests. Focusing on the frequency and type of activities that people perform, and comparing individuals who have or had a creative job to those with a routine job, a clear relationship between creativity and CR emerged. This effect was more relevant than the level of job complexity. Implications for the study of CR and aging are discussed. (shrink)

The particular design of any technology may have profound social implications. Computing technologies are deeply intermeshed with the activities of daily life, playing an ever more central role in how we work, learn, communicate, socialize, and participate in government. Despite the many ways they have improved life, they cannot be regarded as unambiguously beneficial or even value-neutral. Recent experience shows they can lead to unintended but harmful consequences. Some technologies are thought to threaten democracy through the spread of propaganda on (...) online social networks, or to threaten privacy through the aggregation of datasets that include increasingly personal information, or to threaten justice when machine learning is used in such high-stakes, decision-making contexts as loan application reviews, employment procedures, or parole hearings. It is insufficient to ethically assess technology after it has produced negative social impacts, as has happened, for example, with facial recognition software that discriminates against people of color and with self-driving cars that are unable to cope with pedestrians who jay-walk. Developers of new technologies should aim to identify potential harmful consequences early in the design process and take steps to eliminate or mitigate them. This task is not easy. Designers will often have to negotiate among competing values—for instance, between efficiency and accessibility for a diverse user population, or between maximizing benefits and avoiding harm. There is no simple recipe for identifying and solving ethical problems. -/- Computer science education can help meet these challenges by making ethical reasoning about computing technologies a central element in the curriculum. Students can learn to think not only about what technology they could create, but also whether they should create that technology. Learning to reason this way requires courses unlike those currently standard in computer science curricula. A range of university courses on topics in areas of computing, ethics, society and public policy are emerging to meet this need. Some cover computer science broadly, while others focus on specific problems like privacy and security; typically, these classes exist as stand-alone courses in the computer science curriculum. Others have integrated ethics into the teaching of introductory courses on programming, artificial intelligence, and human-computer interaction. (shrink)

Forrest and Gross expose the scientific failure, the religious essence, and the political ambitions of "intelligent design" creationism. They examine the movement's "Wedge Strategy," which has advanced and is succeeding through public relations rather than through scientific research. Analyzing the content and character of "intelligent design theory," they highlight its threat to public education and to the separation of church and state.

The role of prefrontal cortex (PFC) in influencing creative thinking has been investigated by many researchers who, while succeeding in proving an effective involvement of PFC, reported suggestive but sometimes conflicting results. In order to better understand the relationships between creative thinking and brain activation in a more specific area of the PFC, we explored the role of dorsolateral PFC (DLPFC). We devised an experimental protocol using transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS). The study was based on a 3 (kind of stimulation: (...) anodal vs. cathodal vs. sham) × 2 (priming: divergent vs. convergent) design. Forty-five healthy adults were randomly assigned to one stimulation condition. Participants’ creativity skills were assessed using the Product Improvement subtest from the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT). After 20 min of tDCS stimulation, participants were presented with visual images of common objects. Half of the participants were instructed to visualize themselves using the object in an unusual way (divergent priming), whereas the other half were asked to visualize themselves while using the object in a common way (convergent priming). Priming was aimed at inducing participants to adopt different attitudes toward the creative task. Afterwards, participants were asked to describe all of the possible uses of the objects that were presented. Participants’ physiological activation was recorded using a biofeedback equipment. Results showed a significant effect of anodal stimulation that enhanced creative performance, but only after divergent priming. Participants showed lower skin temperature values after cathodal stimulation, a finding which is coherent with studies reporting that, when a task is not creative or creative thinking is not prompted, people show lower levels of arousal. Differences in individual levels of creativity as assessed by the Product Improvement test were not influential. The involvement of DLPFC in creativity has been supported, presumably in association to shift of attention modulated by priming. (shrink)

We investigate the complexity of isomorphisms of computable structures on cones in the Turing degrees. We show that, on a cone, every structure has a strong degree of categoricity, and that degree of categoricity is${\rm{\Delta }}_\alpha ^0 $-complete for someα. To prove this, we extend Montalbán’sη-system framework to deal with limit ordinals in a more general way. We also show that, for any fixed computable structure, there is an ordinalαand a cone in the Turing degrees such that the exact complexity (...) of computing an isomorphism between the given structure and another copy${\cal B}$in the cone is a c.e. degree in${\rm{\Delta }}_\alpha ^0\left$. In each of our theorems the cone in question is clearly described in the beginning of the proof, so it is easy to see how the theorems can be viewed as general theorems with certain effectiveness conditions. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Jahrbuch für Wissenschaft und Ethik Jahrgang: 17 Heft: 1 Seiten: 331-344.

Pathological Altruism presents a number of new, thought-provoking theses that explore a range of hurtful effects of altruism and empathy.

Vilar, Gerard Jean-François Lyotard: Estética y políticaBarcelona: Gedisa, 160 p.ISBN 9788418525896.

The book introduces young researchers to phenomenology and the two primary philosophical approaches along with the vocabulary of phenomenology including how to set up the research design and execute the study to include data collection, data analysis, and presentation of findings.

. . . I should like to review and summarize the preceding general points: 1. For any particular narrative, there is no single basically basic story subsisting beneath it but, rather, an unlimited number of other narratives that can be constructed in response to it or perceived as related to it.2. Among the narratives that can be constructed in response to a given narrative are not only those that we commonly refer to as "versions" of it but also those retellings (...) that we call "plot summaries," "interpretations," and, sometimes, "basic stories." None of these retellings, however, is more absolutely basic than any of the others.3. For any given narrative, there are always multiple basic stories that can be constructed in response to it because basic-ness is always arrived at by the exercise of some set of operations, in accord with some set of principles, that reflect some set of interests, all of which are, by nature, variable and thus multiple. Whenever we start to cut back, peel off, strip away, lay bare, and so forth, we always do so in accord with certain assumptions and purposes which, in turn, create hierarchies of relevance and centrality; and it is in terms of these hierarchies that we will distinguish certain elements and relations as being central or peripheral, more important or less important, and more basic or less basic.4. The form and feature of any "version" of a narrative will be a function of, among other things, the particular motives that elicited it and the particular interests and functions it was designed to serve. Some versions, such as translation and transcriptions, may be constructed in order to preserve and transmit a culturally valued verbal structure. Others, such as adaptations and abridgements, may be constructed in order to amuse or instruct a specific audience. And some versions, such as "interpretations," "plot summaries," and "basic stories," may be constructed in order to advance the objectives of a particular discipline, such as literary history, folklore, psychiatry—or, of course, narratology. None of these latter versions, however, is any less motivated or, accordingly, formally contingent than any of the other versions constructed to serve other interests or functions. Barbara Herrnstein Smith is professor of English and communications and the director of the Center for the Study of Art and Symbolic Behavior at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of Poetic Closure and On the Margins of Discourse. "On the Margins of Discourse" was also contributed as an essay to Critical Inquiry in the June 1975 issue. Responses to the present essay are Nelson Goodman's "The Telling and the Told" and Seymour Chatman's "Reply to Barbara Herrnstein Smith". Both appear in the Summer 1981 issue of Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

: The main threads of Emmanuel Levinas's theory of ethics, developed in his philosophical works, Totality and Infinity (1969), and Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1998), instruct that ethics require transcendence of being and nature, which he describes in terms of a transcendence of animality to the human. This apparent devaluation of the nonhuman would seem to preclude the development of Levinasian environmental ethics. However, a deconstructive reading of Levinas recognizes a subtext that interrupts the main threads of his (...) argument running against the inclusion of nonhuman others in ethics. Through a critical reconstructive reading of Levinas, I develop an ethic extraneous to Levinas's transcendent ethics, an ethic outside his "otherwise than being.". (shrink)

Journal Name: Cognitive Linguistics Issue: Ahead of print.

Designing the future of work is crucial to the health and well‐being of people and societies. Experts predict that developments such as the advancement of digital technologies, automation, and the movement of manufacturing jobs to low‐wage countries will lead to major transformations in the labour market, and some foresee significant job losses. Due to the close relationship between employment and health, major job losses would have significant negative impacts on the health and well‐being of individuals and societies. Job losses would (...) also pose a major challenge to solidaristic support within societies because they would negatively affect the recognition of similarities among people, which is vital for solidaristic practice and institutions. To prevent these negative effects, a fundamental redesign of the relationship between work and income is necessary. And for this project to succeed, we need to reconsider of the value of work. Building on definitions of flourishing people and societies, we argue that the value of work should not be determined by the labour market, but according to its importance for society. Using a solidarity‐based framework we argue that such a re‐valuation of work will help to ensure social cohesion and increase reciprocity in our societies. It will serve as a foundation upon which we can reconfigure the relationship between work and income without risking the loss of social cohesion and solidarity. (shrink)

Prenatal screening and testing are preference‐based health care options. They are offered so that pregnant women and their partners can learn genetic information about the developing fetus. In this literature review, I summarize studies of women’s and their partners’ psychological responses to prenatal testing and screening. These studies investigate the experiences of pregnant women, largely in the United States, who have access to health care services. Although the results indicate that these women are receptive to prenatal testing and screening and (...) seem to have limited negative psychological consequences, pregnant women without access to these services are not represented and may have different experiences. With that caveat in mind, based on the evidence, women generally do well psychologically as they manage the options that arise for them in the prenatal context. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that trust is an important aspect of social reality, one that realist social theory has paid little attention to but which clearly resonates with a realist social ontology. Furthermore, the emergence of an interest in trust in specific subject fields such as organization theory indicates the growing significance of issues of trust as market liberalism has developed. As such, the emergence of an interest in trust provides support for Archer's characterisation of late modernity in The (...) Reflexive Imperative as a period of heterogeneity and greater incongruity. Commenting on this provides an opportunity to discuss the issue of habit in relation to trust and also the importance of the analysis of integration as a means to explain problems of trust. The commentary draws on examples from finance. (shrink)

This collection of essays by Robert Brandon spans two decades and most of the important problems in the philosophy of biology. Four of his five most important contributions to the philosophy of biology can be found here: the concept of relative adaptedness and its role in the propensity interpretation of fitness; the principle of natural selection; the use of the screening-off relation in defense of organismic selection; and the distinction between units of selection and levels of selection. The fifth major (...) contribution, an analysis of the concept of "environment," mentioned briefly in an essay on the co-evolution of organisms and environment, is given an extended treatment in his 1990 book, Adaptation and Environment. (shrink)

In early work within Conversation Analysis, utterances within a request sequence which inquire regarding some of the preconditions of granting the request are analyzed as pre-requests. Levinson, in an extended discussion of the organization of pre-requests and request sequences, treats utterances such as ‘do you have X?’, ‘can I have X?’ or ‘can you X for me?’ as inquiring about preconditions that could prevent the recipient from granting the request. By checking on preconditions, the requester works to avoid producing a (...) request which will be declined, which is a dispreferred action. In other words, pre-requests, like other pre-sequences, function to project that another action will be produced if a favorable response is given; if not, that projected action may not be produced. In this view, then, they work to maintain the preference organization. This study uses requesting in service encounters to re-examine the evidence for an analysis of such utterances as pre-requests and finds that alternative analyses are more suited in these requesting activities. (shrink)

This book reassesses the seminal work of Wilhelm Wundt by discussing the history and philosophy of psychology. It traces the pioneering theorist's intellectual development and the evolution of psychology throughout his career. The author draws on little-known sources to situate psychological concepts in Wundt's philosophical thought and address common myths and misconceptions relating to Wundt's ideas. The ideas presented in this book show why Wundt's work remains relevant in this era of ongoing mind/brain debate and interest continues in the links (...) between psychology and philosophy. Featured topics include: Theoretical and philosophical foundations of Wundt's early work in scientific psychology. Wundt's conception of scientific philosophy in relation to his theory of knowledge. The epistemological dimensions of Wundt's final project in scientific psychology. Wundt and the Philosophical Foundations of Psychology is a valuable resource for researchers, professors, and graduate students in cognitive and related psychology and philosophy disciplines. ----- "Saulo Araujo raises Wundt scholarship to a new level. This book is the splendid result of intensive studies of the entire Wundt oeuvre." Horst Gundlach Heidelberg, Germany "Saulo Araujo, in his study of Wundt's philosophy and psychology, is as remarkable for the breadth and depth of his scholarship as he is for the clarity of his writing." Rand B. Evans Emeritus Professor of Psychology, East Carolina University "A milestone, this book serves to establish an advanced level in Wundt studies. Araujo presents a reconstruction of Wundt's epistemology and philosophy of psychology and corrects misunderstandings in the reception of Wundt's essential thoughts." Jochen Fahrenberg Emeritus Professor of Psychology, University of Freiburg, Germany. (shrink)

Nous n'avons pas choisi d'etre aristoteliciens. Nous ne le sommes pas moins que les autres. Le livre Gamma de la Metaphysique accomplit la relegation de la sophistique qui n'a jamais ete achevee par Platon, en instaurant un regime de discours qui fera loi pour toute l'histoire de la metaphysique. Regime que nous appelons semantique, en reference au geste decisif d'Aristote qui fait equivaloir dire et signifier quelque chose. Il faut et il suffit qu'un sophiste lui dise Bonjour! pour qu'Aristote demontre, (...) que bon gre mal gre, il se place sous la juridiction de ce qu'on appelle depuis lors le principe de non-contradiction. La mise en demeure de parler fait office d'arme absolue, et la decision du sens est le foyer de la science de l'etre en tant qu'etre. Pas d'instauration du principe sans adversaire, donc sans stategie: cela suffit pour jeter le soupcon sur l'impression que donne Gamma d'une evidence definitive. (shrink)

The Rainbow Ramsey Theorem is essentially an "anti-Ramsey" theorem which states that certain types of colorings must be injective on a large subset (rather than constant on a large subset). Surprisingly, this version follows easily from Ramsey's Theorem, even in the weak system RCA₀ of reverse mathematics. We answer the question of the converse implication for pairs, showing that the Rainbow Ramsey Theorem for pairs is in fact strictly weaker than Ramsey's Theorem for pairs over RCA₀. The separation involves techniques (...) from the theory of randomness by showing that every 2-random bounds an ω-model of the Rainbow Ramsey Theorem for pairs. These results also provide as a corollary a new proof of Martin's theorem that the hyperimmune degrees have measure one. (shrink)

The present article examines the potential effects on the translation process of working interactively with a translation memory system, a tool for storing and sharing previous translations. A TM system automatically divides the source text into sentences presented to the translator one-by-one. Based on observations made in an empirical study of six professional translators and six translation students, it is argued that full sentences do not constitute a central cognitive processing category in translation, and that the sentence-by-sentence presentation inherent in (...) TM systems therefore creates an unnaturally strong focus on the sentence, which affects the very task of translation . Particular attention is given to the impact of the use of TM systems on the informants' revision behaviour and their tendency to change the sentence structure. (shrink)

Every day we are confronted with numerous alienating phenomena and equally alienating ways of dealing with them. The question is: How we can deal with them in a positive way? In his latest book, Bernhard Waldenfels powerfully demonstrates that it is not enough to only examine the otherness of the other if we disregard the stranger in ourselves. He argues for a responsive stance that dares to confront the uncanniness of our experience. How valuable this is—for psychiatric contexts, sociopolitical challenges (...) and also for philosophy itself—clearly shows in the contributions to this discursive volume, which attempt a response from their own perspectives. (shrink)