Dance is an enjoyable, non-therapy-focused activity that may provide a range of benefits for people with Parkinson’s. The internal simulation of movement through observation, imitation, and imagery, is intrinsic to dance and may contribute to functional improvements for people with Parkinson’s. This study explored the feasibility and potential benefits of a dance program designed by a collaborative team of dance artists, researchers, physiotherapists, and people living with Parkinson’s. The program incorporated motor simulation through observation, imitation and imagery of movement, supported (...) by creative themes, expression, and music. A 6-week pilot trial of the program was conducted with 10 people with Parkinson’s. A focus group following the trial (N= 8) provided insights into the use of imagery, observation and imitation within dance, and the link between creativity and functional outcomes, as well as indicating multidimensional benefits of dance as reported in previous studies. Exploratory outcome measures also suggested potential effects on motor simulation, functional dexterity, and quality of life. The present study demonstrates the feasibility of a co-developed dance program for Parkinson’s and indicates how creative elements of dance may support functional outcomes. Future research should examine the role of motor simulation processes in dance for Parkinson’s, including the potential to develop transferable cognitive-motor skills. This study also highlights the value of collaborative partnerships in designing dance for health programs, which may optimise beneficial effects by using creative approaches to incorporate evidence-based elements, with guidance from individuals with lived experience to ensure the relevance to their goals. (shrink)

The question of whether a fetus can experience pain is an immense challenge. The issue demands consideration of the physical and psychological basis of being and the relation between the two. At the center of this debate is the question of how it is that we are conscious, a question that has inspired the writing of some of our most brilliant contemporary philosophers and scientists, with one commentary suggesting surrender. In my earlier review I attempted to draw together the various (...) strands of thinking that had attacked the question of fetal pain and relate them back to the bigger question of consciousness. In their vituperative response, Benatar and Benatar bite off my finger before looking to where I am pointing. I will examine each of their criticisms and attempt to redirect the readers' interest towards examining the subjectivity of pain and the mediating links between physiology and experience. (shrink)

This introduction is part of the special issue ‘ Self-knowledge in perspective’ guest edited by Fleur Jongepier and Derek Strijbos. // Papers included in the special issue: Transparency, expression, and self-knowledge Dorit Bar-On -/- Self-knowledge and communication Johannes Roessler -/- First-person privilege, judgment, and avowal Kateryna Samoilova -/- Self-knowledge about attitudes: rationalism meets interpretation Franz Knappik -/- How do you know that you settled a question? Tillmann Vierkant -/- On knowing one’s own resistant beliefs Cristina Borgoni -/- Self-knowledge and (...) imagination Peter Langland-Hassan -/- Transparent emotions? A critical analysis of Moran’s transparency claim Naomi Kloosterboer -/- Mind-making practices: the social infrastructure of self-knowing agency and responsibility Victoria McGeer -/- Pluralistic folk psychology and varieties of self-knowledge : an exploration Kristin Andrews -/-. (shrink)

The standard reply to the critique that narrative theories of the self are either chauvinistic or trivial is to “go implicit”. Implicit narratives, it is argued, are necessary for diachronically structured self-experience, but do not require that such narratives should be wholly articulable life stories. In this paper I argue that the standard approach, which puts forward a phenomenological conception of implicit narratives, is ultimately unable to get out of the clutches of the dilemma. In its place, I offer an (...) alternative approach that does avoid the dilemma, by construing implicit narrativity as an enabling condition for experiences, rather than as something that is itself present in experience. According to this constitutive account, the coherence and intelligibility of our experiences is due to the fact that they are anchored in a larger, diachronic context. This context, I argue, takes a fundamentally embodied and narrative dimension. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The expansion of health research to low and middle income countries has increased the likelihood of exploitation and undue influence in economically vulnerable populations. In behavioral research, “reasonable availability”, which was originally developed for biomedical research and advocates for the equitable provision of any product developed during the research process, cannot always prevent exploitation. In such cases and settings, the informed consent process may lack cross-cultural validity and therapeutic misconceptions may arise. This article advocates for a mutual learning framework (...) where international researchers can gain cultural competence while training and empowering local partners, increasing community ownership of health research. (shrink)

Fetal pain has long been a contentious issue, in large part because fetal pain is often cited as a reason to restrict access to termination of pregnancy or abortion. We have divergent views regarding the morality of abortion, but have come together to address the evidence for fetal pain. Most reports on the possibility of fetal pain have focused on developmental neuroscience. Reports often suggest that the cortex and intact thalamocortical tracts are necessary for pain experience. Given that the cortex (...) only becomes functional and the tracts only develop after 24 weeks, many reports rule out fetal pain until the final trimester. Here, more recent evidence calling into question the necessity of the cortex for pain and demonstrating functional thalamic connectivity into the subplate is used to argue that the neuroscience cannot definitively rule out fetal pain before 24 weeks. We consider the possibility that the mere experience of pain, without the capacity for self reflection, is morally significant. We believe that fetal pain does not have to be equivalent to a mature adult human experience to matter morally, and so fetal pain might be considered as part of a humane approach to abortion. (shrink)

Community energy initiatives are set up by volunteers in local communities to promote sustainable energy behaviors and help to facilitate a sustainable energy transition. A key question is what motivates people to be involved in such initiatives. We propose that next to a stronger personal motivation for sustainable energy, people’s perception that their community is motivated to engage in sustainable energy and their involvement in the community may affect their initiative involvement. We tested this proposition with a questionnaire study among (...) inhabitants of seven local communities. Results suggested that community factors are uniquely related to initiative involvement next to personal sustainable energy motivations. In particular, stronger community identification and more interpersonal contact with other community members increased the likelihood that people become involved in a community initiative, but the perception of the sustainable energy motivation of one’s community was not uniquely related to initiative involvement. We discuss theoretical and practical implications of these findings. (shrink)

Questions about the normative significance of ‘transparency’ do not receive much attention, even though they were central to Richard Moran’s (2001) original account. Instead, transparency is typically studied because of its epistemic and psychological peculiarities. In this paper, I consider three normative conceptions of transparency: teleological rationalism, procedural rationalism, and relational rationalism. The first is a theory about how transparency might relate to flourishing as a rational agent; the latter two are theories about how transparency relates to non-alienated self-knowledge. All (...) three conceptions, I argue, face serious problems. I end the paper by suggesting where the rationalist might go from here and by highlighting the importance of focusing not on the methods but on the broader circumstances in which self-knowledge is gained or lost. (shrink)

Augustine is the person from the ancient world about whom we know most. He is the author of an intimate masterpiece, the Confessions, which continues to delight its many admirers. In it he writes about his infancy and his schooling in the classics in late Roman North Africa, his remarkable mother, his sexual sins ('Give me chastity, but not yet,' he famously prayed), his time in an outlawed heretical sect, his worldly career and friendships and his gradual return to God. (...) His account of his own eventual conversion is a classic study of anguish, hesitation and what he believes to be God's intervention. It has inspired philosophers, Christian thinkers and monastic followers, but it still leaves readers wondering why exactly Augustine chose to compose a work like none before it. Robin Lane Fox follows Augustine on a brilliantly described journey, combining the latest scholarship with recently found letters and sermons by Augustine himself to give a portrait of his subject which is subtly different from older biographies. Augustine's heretical years as a Manichaean, his relation to non-Christian philosophy, his mystical aspirations and the nature of his conversion are among the aspects of his life which stand out in a sharper light. For the first time Lane Fox compares him with two contemporaries, an older pagan and a younger Christian, each of whom also wrote about themselves and who illumine Augustine's life and writings by their different choices. More than a decade passed between Augustine's conversion and his beginning the Confessions. Lane Fox argues that the Confessions and their thinking were the results of a long gestation over these years, not a sudden change of perspective, but that they were then written as a single swift composition and that its final books are a coherent consummation of its scriptural meditation and personal biography. This exceptional study reminds us why we are so excited and so moved by Augustine's story. Praise for Pagans and Christians 'This open-hearted and learned book is one that any scholar of the ancient world and of early Christianity would be proud to have written... Lane Fox has opened his pages to let in an entirely new world.' Peter Brown, New York Review of Books 'A work of generous humanity and recondite erudition... of consuming interest to all of us who want to know and understand the consequences of the ancient world.' Henry Chadwick, Financial Times Praise for The Unauthorised Version 'I don't know where one would turn for an account of the Bible so clear, so lively and, in many respects, so just.' Frank Kermode, Guardian 'Magnificent... delivered with authority and verve. Learned but never pedantic, he is an unfailingly incisive, thought-provoking, humane, courteous, and often entertaining guide.' Economist. (shrink)

Context: Although ethics consultation is commonplace in United States (U.S.) hospitals, descriptive data about this health service are lacking. Objective: To describe the prevalence, practitioners, and processes of ethics consultation in U.S. hospitals. Design: A 56-item phone or questionnaire survey of the "best informant" within each hospital. Participants: Random sample of 600 U.S. general hospitals, stratified by bed size. Results: The response rate was 87.4%. Ethics consultation services (ECSs) were found in 81% of all general hospitals in the U.S., and (...) in 100% of hospitals with more than 400 beds. The median number of consults performed by ECSs in the year prior to survey was 3. Most individuals performing ethics consultation were physicians (34%), nurses (31%), social workers (11%), or chaplains (10%). Only 41% had formal supervised training in ethics consultation. Consultation practices varied widely both within and between ECSs. For example, 65% of ECSs always made recommendations, whereas 6% never did. These findings highlight a need to clarify standards for ethics consultation practices. (shrink)

My 2019 article ‘From Planning to Prototypes: New Ways of Seeing Like a State’ (P2P) drew attention to some shortcomings of the kinds of critical, reformist impulses fostered in law and development work. I sought to show that persistent preoccupations with the destructive hubris of ‘top-down’ planning—especially state planning—bypassed the tendency for great power to be deployed in other stylistic modes: through the release and responsive tweaking of prototypes, for instance. This article engages with later developments—at one of P2P’s main (...) field sites and scholarly literature in dialogue with P2P—to build upon the analysis therein. It elaborates on the kinds of power animated through prototyping, showing how prototyping is often combined with other governance styles and what it makes of the inputs on which law has typically been said to draw and of law’s claims to autonomy. It complicates the provenance of this style by reference to mid-to-late-twentieth century UN sanctions regimes, highlighting that governance prototyping is as much state-made as business-led and not restricted to the development field. With particular attention to the strangeness of the human user presupposed by prototyping, this article also aims to identify some modes of critical engagement to which this governance style might be answerable. (shrink)

Clinical bioethics is big business. There are now hundreds of people who bioethics in community and university hospitals, nursing homes, rehabilitation and home care settings, and some who play the role of clinical ethics consultant to transplant teams, managed care companies, and genetic testing firms. Still, there is as much speculation about what clinically active bioethicists actually do as there was ten years ago. Various commentators have pondered the need for training standards, credentials, exams, and malpractice insurance for ethicists engaged (...) in clinical consultation. Much of the discussion seems to accept an implicit presumption that all clinical ethics consultation practices look pretty much alike. But is this accurate? What do clinical ethicists do, how and where do they do it, and what kind of clinical ethics is useful in the hospital and in other settings? (shrink)

Machine learning algorithms reshape how people communicate, exchange, and associate; how institutions sort them and slot them into social positions; and how they experience life, down to the most ordinary and intimate aspects. In this article, we draw on examples from the field of social media to review the commonalities, interactions, and contradictions between the dispositions of people and those of machines as they learn from and make sense of each other.

In 1986, philosopher-bioethicist Samuel Gorovitz published an essay entitled “Baiting Bioethics,” in which he reported on various criticisms of bioethics that were “in print, or voiced in and around … the field” at that time, and set forth his assessment of their legitimacy. He gave detailed attention to what he judged to be the particularly fierce and “irresponsible attacks” on “the moral integrity” and soundness of bioethics contained in two papers: “Getting Ethics” by philosopher William Bennett and “Medical Morality Is (...) Not Bioethics,” coauthored by us. Gorovitz attributed some of the criticisms that bioethics was eliciting to the fact that this new, rapidly rising, and increasingly visible field had brought “scholars and practitioners together who otherwise would have little exposure to one another's disciplines. Their interactions are mutually enriching at times,” he declared, “but mutually baffling and even infuriating at other times.” In this latter regard, he suggested that “perhaps” Fox and Swazey's characterization of bioethics in the article he dissected “reflects a general revulsion at endeavors they see as inadequately like the social sciences or insufficiently respectful of them.” He went on to say that despite his objections to our “complaints” about bioethics—especially to our claim that “autonomy [had] been an unduly emphasized value” in the field—he had “a lingering sense” that there might be “a grain of truth” in them. Gorovitz ended his essay with an affirmation about the “benefit” that bioethics can derive from “responsible” and even from “irresponsible” criticism. “The unexamined discipline invites the philosopher's critical scrutiny no less than the unexamined life,” he aphoristically concluded. a. (shrink)

This paper will be concerned with the conjunctive interpretation of a family of disjunctive constructions. The relevant conjunctive interpretation, sometimes referred to as a “free choice effect,” (FC) is attested when a disjunctive sentence is embedded under an existential modal operator. I will provide evidence that the relevant generalization extends (with some caveats) to all constructions in which a disjunctive sentence appears under the scope of an existential quantifier, as well as to seemingly unrelated constructions in which conjunction appears under (...) the scope of negation and a universal quantifier. (shrink)

(Series copy) The new Oxford Readings in Feminism series maps the dramatic influence of feminist theory on every branch of academic knowledge. Offering feminist perspectives on disciplines from history to science, each book assembles the most important articles written on its field in the last ten to fifteen years. Old stereotypes are challenged and traditional attitudes upset in these lively-- and sometimes controversial--volumes, all of which are edited by feminists prominent in their particular field. Comprehensive, accessible, and intellectually daring, the (...) Oxford Readings in Feminism series is vital reading for anyone interested in the effects of feminist ideas within the academy. Can science be gender-neutral? In recent years, feminist critics have raised troubling questions about the practice and goals of traditional science, demonstrating the existence of a pervasive bias in the ways in which scientists conduct and discuss their work. This exciting volume gathers seventeen essays--by sociologists, scientists, historians, and philosophers--of seminal significance in the emerging field of feminist science studies. Analyzing topics from the stereotype of the "Man of Reason" to the "romantic" language of reproductive biology, these fascinating essays challenge readers to take a fresh look at the limitations--and possibilities--of scientific knowledge. (shrink)

The environment where people organize themselves is fundamentally different than thirty years ago: not only has society as a whole changed under the influence of globalization and technological innovation, the theoretical concepts of the organization and perceptions on the traditional ratio between the private and public sphere are shifting simultaneously. The modern, global society consists of arbitrary, fluid networks. The porous separation between the private and the public is fading, which constantly evokes and strengthens discussions on boundaries. We regard the (...) organization as the prototype of these changes in society. In the organization, a proliferating diversity both pushes back and oversteps boundaries, while also demanding new ones. This fundamental movement, which is continuous, must be understood if ‘we’ are to manage it.In this introductory text, we investigate how organization theory anticipates these shifting ratios caused by contradictory information coming together in what we once called stable and clear organizational frameworks. (shrink)

When Martin Luther mounted an attack on the industry of Indulgences, he affirmed key Reformation principles: human beings are saved by God’s grace alone and the priesthood of all the baptised gives all followers of Christ equal status. This was in conformity with an earlier generation of reformers who saw the Bible as ultimate authority and witnessed to biblical truth against corruption. The logical consequence of this should have been the enabling of women who were so disposed to exercise a (...) theological vocation. In practice, the resulting rupture in religious and social life often affected women for the worse. Educational formation and leadership opportunities were restricted by the closure of convents. While the trade guilds, with their tightly regulated social systems, did not allow scope for women who transgressed normative expectations, their suppression was not necessarily liberating for women. The new social model of the home replaced that of convent and guild and marriage was exalted in place of celibacy. Changes in devotional practice involved loss and gain. Women who did not conform to the domestic norm were treated at best with misogyny and female prophets of the radical Reformation paid for their convictions with their lives. In education, leadership, piety and radical social challenge, women’s options were restricted. However, the key Reformation principles ultimately enabled the development of women’s ministry which was marked by the ordination of Constance Todd 400 years later. (shrink)

Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.

The notion of measurement plays a central role in human cognition. We measure people’s height, the weight of physical objects, the length of stretches of time, or the size of various collections of individuals. Measurements of height, weight, and the like are commonly thought of as mappings between objects and dense scales, while measurements of collections of individuals, as implemented for instance in counting, are assumed to involve discrete scales. It is also commonly assumed that natural language makes use of (...) both types of scales and subsequently distinguishes between two types of measurements. This paper argues against the latter assumption. It argues that natural language semantics treats all measurements uniformly as mappings from objects (individuals or collections of individuals) to dense scales, hence the Universal Density of Measurement (UDM). If the arguments are successful, there are a variety of consequences for semantics and pragmatics, and more generally for the place of the linguistic system within an overall architecture of cognition. (shrink)