Forty years after Dax Cowart fought to have his voice heard regarding his medical treatment, patient autonomy and rights are at the heart of patient care today. Yet, despite its centrality in patient care, the tension between a severely burned patient’s right to stop treatment and the physician’s role in saving a life has not abated. As this case study explores, barriers remain to hearing and respecting a patient’s treatment decisions. Dismantling these barriers involves dispelling the myths that burn patients (...) must grin and bear intense pain to recover and that a patient’s choice to discontinue treatment equals physician failure. Moreover, in these situations, sustained, direct engagement between physician and patient can reduce the moral distress of all involved and enable physicians to hear and better accept when a patient is calling for the end of the day. (shrink)

In their article “A Broader Understanding of Moral Distress,” Campbell, Ulrich, and Grady (2016) correctly assert that moral distress is well established in the nursing literature and is gaining at...

The expression “continental rationalism” refers to a set of views more or less shared by a number of philosophers active on the European continent during the latter two thirds of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth. Rationalism is most often characterized as an epistemological position. On this view, to be a rationalist requires at least one of the following: (1) a privileging of reason and intuition over sensation and experience, (2) regarding all or most ideas as innate (...) rather than adventitious, (3) an emphasis on certain rather than merely probable knowledge as the goal of enquiry. While all of the continental rationalists meet one or more of these criteria, this is arguably the consequence of a deeper tie that binds them together—that is, a metaphysical commitment to the reality of substance, and, in particular, to substance as an underlying principle of unity. (shrink)

Based on a multiyear study, this article analyzes the reproduction of adult gender segregation in two youth-sports organizations in which most men volunteers become coaches and most women volunteers become “team moms.” We use interviews and participant observation to explore how these gender divisions are created. While most participants say the divisions result from individual choices, our interviews show how gendered language, essentialist beliefs, and analogies with gendered divisions of labor in families and work-places naturalize this division of labor. Observation (...) reveals how patterned, informal interactions reproduce it as well. We show how nonreflexive informal interactions at the nexus of three gender regimes—youth sports, families, and workplaces—produce a gender formation with two interrelated characteristics: an ascendant professional class gender ideology that we call “soft essentialism” and a “gender category sorting system” that channels most men into coaching and most women into being “team moms.”. (shrink)

In recent years, due to the growing demand for computational resources, particularly in cloud computing systems, the data centers’ energy consumption is continually increasing, which directly causes price rise and reductions of resources’ productivity. Although many energy-aware approaches attempt to minimize the consumption of energy, they cannot minimize the violation of service-level agreements at the same time. In this paper, we propose a method using a granular neural network, which is used to model data processing. This method identifies the physical (...) hosts’ workloads before the overflow and can improve energy consumption while also reducing violation of service-level agreements. Unlike the other techniques that use a single criterion, namely, worked on the basis of the history of using the processor, we simultaneously use all the productivity rates criteria, that is, processor productivity rates, main memory, and bandwidth. Extensive real-world simulations using the CloudSim simulator show the high efficiency of the proposed algorithm. (shrink)

This chapter argues that for human, technological, and human-technological reasons, disagreement, critique, and counterspeech on social media fall squarely into the province of non-ideal theory. It concludes by suggesting a modest but challenging disposition that can help us when we are torn between opposing oppression and contributing to a flame war.

ABSTRACT This paper suggests a much more serious purpose for an education in music-making than play or pleasure or even the training of professional musicians. It presents and explicates a possible connection between musical performance training and the development of practical wisdom. Music in performance constitutes in effect a form of virtuous conduct, where one learns through doing and thereafter comes to love and to be capable of wise practical judgement. Excellence in this field requires the exercise of a species (...) of reasoning and judgement analogous to Aristotelian practical wisdom, and develops the distinctive qualities of character and vision of the practically wise person. (shrink)

This chapter offers a plea for the media to reframe its coverage of campus controversies from free expression to academic freedom. These freedoms are entwined, but distinct. Freedom of expression is extended to all persons with no expectation of quality control, apart from legal prohibitions against defamation, threats, etc. By contrast, academic freedom is a cluster of freedoms afforded to scholarly personnel for a particular purpose – namely, the pursuit of universities’ academic mission to seek truth and advance understanding in (...) the service of society. An academic freedom framing better reflects the distinctive social purpose around which universities are organized, as well as universities’ duty of care to employees and students. While universities have a legal and moral duty of care to all employees and students, the unjust, exclusionary past and present of higher education arguably makes that duty particularly acute in the case of equity-deserving (e.g., racialized, Indigenous, disabled or 2SLGBTQ+) people. Finally, academic freedom framing for campus media stories is less monolithic than free expression framing, allowing for a more nuanced understanding of campus controversies while keeping universities accountable to the public they serve. In this chapter, I survey three very different campus controversies at a single Canadian university, and the media response each received. I show how an academic freedom frame for those stories would have produced better reportage while reducing opportunities for bad actors to manipulate both universities and the media. At the end of the day, the real crisis at universities isn’t the cancellation of ill-judged events that were never a part of the academic mission; it is the ongoing erosion of academic freedom. (shrink)

In substituting aesthetic criteria for the time-honoured yardsticks of reliability, validity and generalization, narrative researchers are sometimes criticized for devaluing the notion of truth. This paper suggests that what is an issue here is not so much empirical quantitative truth as rather artistic literary truth. The latter notion of truth is characterized in terms of ‘authenticity’ and the ramifications of authentic truth for narrative research are posited and explored. Only such an understanding of truth and the resolve seriously to apply (...) it will garner narrative researchers the epistemic respectability they seek. (shrink)

This chapter argues that a Peircean philosophy of sex offers a non-reductionist approach to sex as a biological category. The chapter surveys traditional biological accounts of sex categories and several social constructivist accounts of sex. It then provides an overview of Peirce’s scholastic realism and his ethics of inquiry. While Peirce regarded the distinction between the sexes as a rare “polar distinction”, the chapter works to recover the nuanced view of sex that Peirce ought to have adopted had he extended (...) his scholastic realism to reproductive biology. Ultimately, the Peircean account offered treats sex differences as norms expressed as bimodal distributions. The chapter concludes by illustrating some applications of this Peircean philosophy of sex, and gesturing to those that we can yet barely imagine. (shrink)

This paper considers Peirce's striking remarks about mathematics in a little-known review of Spinoza's Ethics within the larger context of his philosophy of mathematics. It argues that, for Peirce, true mathematical reasoning is always at the vanguard of thought, and resists logical demonstration. Through diagrammatic thought and her pre-theoretical innate faculty of logica utens, the great mathematician is able to see a theorem as true long before the logical apparatus necessary to demonstrate its truth exists. For Peirce, true mathematical thought (...) is in some sense pre-logical, and thus, the logical demonstration of this thought in the form of mathematical proofs is in fact "merely a veil over the living thought.". (shrink)

How many sexes are there? What is the relationship between sex and gender? Is gender a product of nature, or nurture, or both? _In Beyond the Binary_, Shannon Dea addresses these questions and others while introducing readers to evidence and theoretical perspectives from a range of cultures and disciplines, and from sources spanning three millennia. Dea’s pluralistic and historically informed approach offers readers a timely background to current debates about sex and gender in the media, health sciences, and public policy.

This paper considers Peirce's striking remarks about mathematics in a little-known review of Spinoza's Ethics within the larger context of his philosophy of mathematics. It argues that, for Peirce, true mathematical reasoning is always at the vanguard of thought, and resists logical demonstration. Through diagrammatic thought and her pre-theoretical innate faculty of logica utens, the great mathematician is able to see a theorem as true long before the logical apparatus necessary to demonstrate its truth exists. For Peirce, true (theoremic) mathematical (...) thought is in some sense pre-logical, and thus, the logical demonstration of this thought in the form of mathematical proofs is in fact "merely a veil over the living thought.". (shrink)

Our popular conception of integrity brings to mind uncompromising figures like Socrates or Sir Thomas More whose steadfast stands on matters of principle we accept and admire. The paper considers the implications of this for two committed feminists, both of whom are teachers. Their pedagogical philosophies are sufficiently different to lead one to charge the other with selling out her feminist principles. But is this a fair assessment? Is there room for compromise within the complex notion of integrity? How might (...) feminist teachers rework the concept to do justice to the complexities involved? (shrink)

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This paper advances the thesis that sensory concepts have as a semantic component the first-person indexical. It is argued that the private nature of our access to our own sensations forces, in our talking about them, an indexical reference to the inner states of the speaker in lieu of publicly accessible properties by which reference is usually fixed. Indexicals, such as ‘here’, can be understood despite ignorance of their referent. Such is the case with sensory terms. Furthermore, the thesis that (...) sensory terms are indexical has considerable explanatory power. I give two examples: firstly, I argue that clashes of intuition over Block's ‘inverted spectrum’ thought experiment can be explained by appeal to semantic properties of indexicals. Secondly, I argue that multiple realisability intuitions can be shown to be consistent with the view that sensations are type-identical with brain states. (shrink)

With this treatise, Mahan attempts to do justice to the subject of moral philosophy and, therefore, challenge the student who tries to fathom the depths and ascend the heights of thought.

In the face of the increasing substitution of free speech for academic freedom, I argue for the distinctiveness and irreplaceability of the latter. Academic freedom has evolved alongside universities in order to support the important social purpose universities serve. Having limned this evolution, I compare academic freedom and free speech. This comparison reveals freedom of expression to be an individual freedom, and academic freedom to be a group-differentiated freedom with a social purpose. I argue that the social purpose of academic (...) freedom behooves an inclusive approach to group differentiation. (shrink)

In this chapter I provide resources for assessing the charge that post-secondary students are self-censoring. The argument is advanced in three broad steps. First, I argue that both a duality at the heart of the concept of self-censorship and the term’s negative lay connotation should incline us to limit the charge of self-censorship to a specific subset of its typical extension. I argue that in general we ought to use the neutral term “refrainment from speech,” reserving the more normatively charged (...) “self-censorship” for cases of bad refrainment. In the second step of the argument, I seek to narrow down what counts as bad refrainment by mapping broad categories of possible reasons for and consequences of refrainment from speech. I argue that in general refrainment from speech is only bad if it is for bad (or what I will later term vicious) reasons or has pernicious consequences. When considering pernicious consequences, I argue that we should be concerned in particular about systems that perpetuate the coercive silencing of marginalized voices. I draw on Kristie Dotson’s work to describe two means by which marginalized voices are systemically silenced: testimonial quieting and testimonial smothering. After considering these types of silencing, I circle back to the post-secondary context to assess whether there is cause for concern if, as some reports suggests, US college students are refraining from speech within the educational context. (shrink)

By tracing its own narrative from the feminist pragmatism of the 1980s-2000s back to the avant-la-lettre feminist pragmatism of the Progressive Era, this chapter explores the use of narrative within feminist pragmatism. It pays particular attention to uses of narrative in Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Anna Julia Cooper and Jane Addams to reveal the usefulness of narrative as a feminist pragmatist mode of inquiry and of elucidating meaning. The chapter concludes with a brief suggestion of where feminist pragmatist narrative may take (...) us next. (shrink)

The sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church captured headlines and mobilized public outrage in January 2002. But much of the commentary that immediately followed was reductionistic, focusing on single "causes" of clerical abuse such as mandatory celibacy, homosexuality, sexual repressiveness or sexual permissiveness, anti-Catholicism, and a decadent secular culture. _Predatory Priests, Silenced Victims: The Sexual Abuse Crisis and the Catholic Church_, a collection of groundbreaking articles edited by Mary Gail Frawley-O'Dea and Virginia Goldner, eschews such one-size-fits-all theorizing. In its (...) place, the abuse situation is explored in all its troubling complexity, as contributors take into account the experiences, respectively, of the victim/survivor, the abuser/perpetrator, and the bystander. Setting polemics to the side, _Predatory Priests, Silenced Victims_ provides a sober and sobering analysis of the interlacing historical, doctrinal, and psychological issues that came together in the sexual abuse scandal. It is mandatory reading for all who seek thoughtful, informed commentary on a crisis long in the making and yet to be resolved. (shrink)

The representational theory of phenomenal experience is often stated in terms of a supervenience thesis: Byrne recently characterises it as the thesis that “there can be no difference in phenomenal character without a difference in content”, while according to Tye, “[a]t a minimum, the thesis is one of supervenience: necessarily, experiences that are alike in their representational contents are alike in their phenomenal character.” Consequently, much of the debate over whether representationalism is true centres on purported counter-examples – that is (...) to say, purported failures of supervenience. The refutation of putative counter-examples has been, it seems to me, by and large successful. But there is a certain class of these for which the representationalist response has been something less than completely convincing. These are the cross-modality cases. I will explain what I mean, and then argue that the response in question is not only unconvincing but actually undermines the representationalist position. (shrink)

Covering the fundamentals as well as many special topics of current interest, this is the most concise, up-to-date, and accessible graduate-level textbook on quantum mechanics available. Written by Gerald Mahan, a distinguished research physicist and author of an acclaimed textbook on many-particle physics, Quantum Mechanics in a Nutshell is the distillation of many years' teaching experience. Emphasizing the use of quantum mechanics to describe actual quantum systems such as atoms and solids, and rich with interesting applications, the book proceeds from (...) solving for the properties of a single particle in potential; to solving for two particles ; to addressing many-particle systems. Applications include electron gas, magnetism, and Bose-Einstein Condensation; examples are carefully chosen and worked; and each chapter has numerous homework problems, many of them original. Quantum Mechanics in a Nutshell expertly addresses traditional and modern topics, including perturbation theory, WKBJ, variational methods, angular momentum, the Dirac equation, many-particle wave functions, Casimir Force, and Bell's Theorem. And it treats many topics--such as the interactions between photons and electrons, scattering theory, and density functional theory--in exceptional depth. A valuable addition to the teaching literature, Quantum Mechanics in a Nutshell is ideally suited for a two-semester course. The most concise, up-to-date, and accessible graduate textbook on the subject Contains the ideal amount of material for a two-semester course Focuses on the description of actual quantum systems, including a range of applications Covers traditional topics, as well as those at the frontiers of research Treats in unprecedented detail topics such as photon-electron interaction, scattering theory, and density functional theory Includes numerous homework problems at the end of each chapter. (shrink)

Inspired by Peirce’s repeated claim in the final decade of his life that Spinoza was a pragmati(ci)st, this article examines whether or not Peirce also believed that Spinoza’s metaphysics leaves room for Firstness. He engaged this issue explicitly in his third “Lecture on Pragmatism” (1903), listing Spinoza’s among the metaphysics that include Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness. Moreover, over a decade earlier, in the context of his exploration of hyperbolic geometry and the evolutionary cosmology that he regarded as corresponding to it, (...) Peirce repeatedly (if obliquely) identified Spinoza with the cosmological model that embraces all three of the categories. The article concludes by sketching the ambitious thesis that Spinoza was not only, as is usually held, a necessitarian, but also a Peircean possibilist. (shrink)

Perceptual constancy, often defined as the perception of stable features under changing conditions, goes hand in hand with variation in how things look. A white wall in the orange afternoon sun still looks white, though its whiteness looks different compared with the same wall in the noon sun. Historically, this variation has often been explained in terms of our experience of “merely sensory” or subjective properties – an approach at odds with the fact that the variation does track objective features (...) of the perceptual situation, such as illumination. One approach, becoming more common, is to account for the variation in terms of further “dimensions” to perceptual experience. Especially in colour perception, this is a natural thought to have but the idea is often left vague. In this paper I argue that the “dimensional” strategy has problems of its own, but is useful in drawing out some interesting complications in the way perceptual experience is structured. Specifically, the structure of “constancy spaces” brings out the different ways in which there is stability and instability in the experience of constancy, without the need for novel or merely subjective features. Instability arises in a contingent structural feature of perceptual experience. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: I argue that when Spinoza describes substance and its attributes as he means that they are utterly indeterminate. That is, his conception of infinitude is not a mathematical one. For Spinoza, anything truly infinite eludes counting s conception is closer to a grammatical one. I conclude by considering a number of arguments against this account of the Spinozan infinite as indeterminate.

How are sex and gender related? Are they the same thing? What exactly is gender? How many genders are there? What is the science on all of this? Is gender a product of nature, nurture, or both? This book introduces readers to fundamental questions about sex and gender categories as they’ve been considered across the centuries and through a wide array of disciplines and perspectives. From the Bible to Darwin, from Enlightenment thinkers to contemporary trans philosophers, _Beyond the Binary_ offers (...) an accessible survey of the wide range of views about sex and gender. This revised and expanded edition uses updated terminology and diagnostic criteria and offers new material with a greater focus on trans, Indigenous, racialized, and subaltern thinkers. It includes useful discussion questions and further reading recommendations at the end of each chapter, as well as an extensive glossary of terms. (shrink)

This study examines C.S. Peirce's repeated remarks between 1904 and 1909 characterizing Spinoza as a precursor pragmatist.