The locomotor pattern of a goldfish may be described by 17 locomotor variables whose time series are known to exhibit distinct patterns of autocorrelation. The present model reduces the set of 17 variables to a set of seven predictor variables which optimize the prediction of future locomotor behavior. These seven variables are then grouped into two clusters by a dendogram analysis, and it is shown that the clusters are also characterized by their strength of prediction. A locomotor control model is (...) then formulated where one cluster is interpreted to be a level of activity factor and the other is hypothesized to be a turning behavior factor. (shrink)

Since the early 1980’s, with the clinical advent of in vitro fertilization resulting in so-called “test tube babies,” a wide array of ethical considerations and concerns regarding artificial womb technology (AWT) have been described. Recent breakthroughs in the development of extracorporeal neonatal life support by means of AWT have reinitiated ethical interest about this topic with a sense of urgency. Most of the recent ethical literature on the topic, however, pertains not to the more imminent scenario of a physiologically improved (...) method of neonatal care through AWT, but instead to the remote scenario of “complete ectogenesis” that imagines human gestation occurring entirely outside of the womb. This scoping review of the ethical literature on AWT spans from more abstract concerns about complete ectogenesis to more immediate concerns about the soon-to-be-expected clinical life support of what we term the fetal neonate or fetonate. Within an organizing framework of different stages of human gestational development, from conception to the viable premature infant, we discuss both already identified and newly emerging ethical considerations and concerns regarding AWT and the care of the fetonate. (shrink)

Loneliness in medicine is a serious problem not just for patients, for whom illness is intrinsically isolating, but also for physicians in the contemporary condition of medicine. We explore this problem by investigating the ideal physician-patient relationship, whose analogy with friendship has held enduring normative appeal. Drawing from Talbot Brewer and Nir Ben-Moshe, we argue that this appeal lies in a dynamic form of companionship incompatible with static models of friendship-like physician-patient relationships: a mutual refinement of embodied virtue that draws (...) both persons together. The ideal physician-patient relationship has a dialectical character that fosters each member's improvement of phenomenologically recognizing and embodying moral virtues. A key component of this dynamic is a commitment to the common goal of the patient's health, realized through joint interactivities and conversations over time. The physician's presence to the patient's suffering—understood best as an alienating phenomenological condition for the patient—orients and discloses possibilities for virtuous caregiving by structuring the meanings of the goals, conversations, and joint narrative constitutive of their relationship. Presence to suffering, paradoxically, is perhaps an important prerequisite for this dynamic partnership. These activities dialectically build an interpretive horizon of understanding through which moral goods and character refinement—in and for the other—may become revealed for both persons in their shared being-in-the-world. This analysis of suffering, mood, and revealing of (possible) moral goods has implications for addressing the modern problem of loneliness for patients and physicians, who are increasingly inhibited from building flourishing relationships with each other. (shrink)

The consensus recommendations by Salter and colleagues (2023) regarding pediatric decision-making intentionally omitted adolescents due to the additional complexity their evolving autonomy presented. Using two case studies, one focused on truth-telling and disclosure and one focused on treatment refusal, this article examines medical decision-making with and for adolescents in the context of the six consensus recommendations. It concludes that the consensus recommendations could reasonably apply to older children.

Comprehensive work on philosophy of religion and religions in India.

This essay offers a critique of the culture of specio-vocationalism in American higher education by first drawing on Edmund Husserl’s conception of “world” and connecting this notion to education conceived as a “world-disclosing” activity. The essay will then give an account of how the trends of vocationalization and specialization manifest themselves in contemporary university culture, and how they work together to “de-world” the lives of our students and deprive them of possibilities that are part of what it means to be (...) human. After showing how this impoverishment undermines the world-disclosing function of higher education, the essay will then suggest one way to counter this “de-worlding of world”: the teaching of the situated finitude of the human condition by reminding our students that our knowledge or sense of the world is always only partial. It is this realization that has the potential of placing our students once again before the vastness of the world in wonder and curiosity. In this realization they will gain a better sense of the world as a distant horizon still to be explored in all of its inexhaustible complexity and meaning. At the same time, coming to grips with their own ignorance will imbue them with an intellectual humility that will shield them not only from their own finitude, but the finitude of others as well. (shrink)

In recent years a burgeoning bicycle culture has reanimated the city of Detroit. The following essay analyzes this reanimation through the themes of embodiment, mobility, spatiality, and the intersubjective creation of place, using the techniques of phenomenology. The description that emerges is an evolving social ontology with implications for cities like Detroit. In such cities any plan for re-urbanization must re-conceptualize both transportation schemas and public space on terrain once dominated by the automobile. The provisional phenomenological description on offer here (...) should be thought of as just one tool in this project, as Detroit and cities like it negotiate the reconstitution of their communities. (shrink)

In their article “Moral Hazards in Pediatrics” (2016), Brunnquell and Michaelson remind us that the child's perspective is of utmost importance when making health care decisions and express concern...

Historically, empirical research in bioethics has drawn on methods developed within the social sciences, including qualitative interviews, focus groups, ethnographic studies, and opinion surveys, t...