James Warren analyzes Epicurus’ and Epicureans’ attitudes toward death in a dialogue with contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. His study is hard to put aside once one has started reading. The book’s structure flows very well, the reader finds anticipated questions addressed, and the arguments fit together seamlessly. This is top level work.

Leader behavioral integrity (BI) is central to perceived credibility and thus to leaders’ effectiveness at fostering ethical and other climates. Our research broadens the theoretical foundation for BI research by integrating the cognitive–attributional role of trust in the formation and maintenance of leader BI perceptions. Guided by recent research on trust primacy and prior theories of fairness used to examine ethical behavior, we examine how perceptions of leader BI can be either diminished or maintained through trust velocity following a psychological (...) contract breach. Using a field and an experimental study, we explore the manner in which followers perceive leader’s actions when conflicting interests lead to unfulfilled promises. We found that trust velocity mediates the relationship between a psychological contract breach and leader BI (study 1), and that informational justice moderates this relationship (study 2), suggesting that leaders can attenuate the impact of broken promises on ascribed BI. Our findings offer a pathway for leaders operating in dynamic contexts to preserve BI and also help address concerns that have been raised about the behavioral integrity construct regarding its conceptual overlap with related constructs such as trust, psychological contracts, and informational justice. (shrink)

We, in the rare disease community are grateful to Halley et al. (2023) for highlighting some of the long-overlooked barriers to care. As the parent of a non-ambulatory, teenage boy living with Duch...

Decision making is a crucial element in the field of medicine. The physician has to determine what is wrong with the patient and recommend treatment, while the patient has to decide whether or not to seek medical care, and go along with the treatment recommended by the physician. Health policy makers and health insurers have to decide what to promote, what to discourage, and what to pay for. Together, these decisions determine the quality of health care that is provided. Decision (...) Making in Health Care is an up-to-date, comprehensive overview of the field of medical decision making. It includes quantitative theoretical tools for modeling decisions, psychological research on how decisions are actually made, and applied research on how physician and patient decision making can be improved. (shrink)

“Hooking up,” a popular type of sexual behavior among college students, has become a pathway to dating relationships. Based on open-ended narratives written by 273 undergraduates, we analyze how students interpreted a vignette describing a heterosexual hookup followed by a sexless first date. In contrast to the sexual script which holds that women want relationships more than sex and men care about sex more than relationships, students generally accorded women sexual agency and desire in the hookup and validated men’s post-hookup (...) relationship interest. However, in explaining the sexless date, students typically reasoned the woman was being chaste and withholding sex to redeem her reputation whereas they often characterized the man’s abstinence in terms of a pity date. The findings underscore the tenacity of gendered sexual scripts around heterosexual dates and hookups but also reveal fissures and contradictions that suggest some changes to the sexual double standard. (shrink)

Because of the “all-or-none” character of nervous activity, neural events and the relations among them can be treated by means of propositional logic. It is found that the behavior of every net can be described in these terms, with the addition of more complicated logical means for nets containing circles; and that for any logical expression satisfying certain conditions, one can find a net behaving in the fashion it describes. It is shown that many particular choices among possible neurophysiological assumptions (...) are equivalent, in the sense that for every net behaving under one assumption, there exists another net which behaves under the other and gives the same results, although perhaps not in the same time. Various applications of the calculus are discussed. (shrink)

Writings by a thinker—a psychiatrist, a philosopher, a cybernetician, and a poet—whose ideas about mind and brain were far ahead of his time. Warren S. McCulloch was an original thinker, in many respects far ahead of his time. McCulloch, who was a psychiatrist, a philosopher, a teacher, a mathematician, and a poet, termed his work “experimental epistemology.” He said, “There is one answer, only one, toward which I've groped for thirty years: to find out how brains work.” Embodiments of (...) Mind, first published more than fifty years ago, teems with intriguing concepts about the mind/brain that are highly relevant to recent developments in neuroscience and neural networks. It includes two classic papers coauthored with Walter Pitts, one of which applies Boolean algebra to neurons considered as gates, and the other of which shows the kind of nervous circuitry that could be used in perceiving universals. These first models are part of the basis of artificial intelligence. Chapters range from “What Is a Number, that a Man May Know It, and a Man, that He May Know a Number,” and “Why the Mind Is in the Head,” to “What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain” (with Jerome Lettvin, Humberto Maturana, and Walter Pitts), “Machines that Think and Want,” and “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity” (with Walter Pitts). Embodiments of Mind concludes with a selection of McCulloch's poems and sonnets. This reissued edition offers a new foreword and a biographical essay by McCulloch's one-time research assistant, the neuroscientist and computer scientist Michael Arbib. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the inverted gender roles portrayed in the Middle English Partonope of Blois, and the part played by Urake in realigning them. The relationship between hero and heroine begins with Partonope in a female passive role as a "kept man," and Melior in a male dominating role as a sexually self-assured woman who chooses the man she wants and controls him. Urake, one of the most unusually interventionistic of romance go-betweens, saves Partonope's life and prepares him, (...) both physically and psychologically, to assume his position as the triumphal hero; she also torments Melior into accepting a less controlling form of love more suitable for a medieval woman. In this way the conventional ending to the romance is enhanced by the satisfaction of seeing the inverted gender roles of hero and heroine put to rights. (shrink)

A curriculum guide and reference, detailing sequentially, according to age level, learning activities and selected resources and intended to facilitate classroom projects and discussions conducive to an understanding of death, dying, and bereavement.

Humans have been called “cooperative breeders” because mothers rely heavily on alloparental assistance, and the grandmother life stage has been interpreted as an adaptation for alloparenting. Many studies indicate that women invest preferentially in their daughters’ children, but little research has been conducted where patrilocal residence is normative. Bangladesh is such a place, but women nevertheless receive substantial alloparental investment from the matrilateral family, and child outcomes improve when maternal grandmothers are alloparents. To garner this support, women must maintain contact (...) with their natal families. Here, the visiting behavior of 151 interviewed mothers was analyzed. Despite the challenges of patrilocality and purdah, almost all respondents visited their own mothers, and mothers-in-law were visited far less. This contrast persists in analyses controlling for proximity, respondent age, postmarital residence, family income, and marital status. These results affirm the importance women place on matrilateral ties, even under a countervailing ideology. (shrink)

Warren Quinn was widely regarded as a moral philosopher of remarkable talent. This collection of his most important contributions to moral philosophy and the philosophy of action has been edited for publication by Philippa Foot. Quinn laid out the foundations for an anti-utilitarian moral philosophy that was critical of much contemporary work in ethics, such as the anti-realism of Gilbert Harman and the neo-subjectivism of Bernard Williams. Quinn's own distinctive moral theory is developed in the discussion of substantial, practical (...) moral issues. For example, there are important pieces here on the permissibility of abortion, the justification of punishing criminals when no particular good seems likely to result, and on the distinction between killing and allowing to die, a distinction crucial to the subject of euthanasia and other topics in medical ethics. The volume would be ideally suited to upper-level undergraduate courses and graduate seminars on the foundations of ethics. (shrink)

Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0048-3915%28198923%2918%3A4%3C334%3AAIACTD%3E2.0.CO%3B2-P..

It is commonly accepted that conversation is, in some sense, cooperative. This is due in part to Paul Grice’s articulation of the Cooperative Principle, which states that participants should “make [their] conversational contributions such as is required...” (1989, 26). Yet the significance of this principle, as well as the notion of cooperation that is entailed, is up for interpretation. For example, there are several ways of understanding what kind of force the Cooperative Principle is supposed to have: it could be (...) meant as a requirement on the behavior of speakers, a description of the way speakers behave, or an articulation of what speakers assume of one another’s contributions. I consider each of these options, and I argue that the first, which is often seen as a naïve interpretation, is worth considering. Although I ultimately reject the prescriptive interpretation of the Cooperative Principle, it offers a jumping off point for exploring other prescriptions on conversational behavior, such as the Requirement of Interlocutor Responsiveness, which I offer as an explicitly prescriptive conversational principle. (shrink)

This article draws upon affect theory to analyze transformations of garage sale sellers through the exchange of their affectively charged possessions. Garage sales are awash with human emotion; they feature used personal belongings suffused with identities, histories, stories, and memories that are moved along with affect. The objects for sale are “sticky” in that they act as vessels and glue for strands of sentiment to reflexively pass between sellers and buyers, transmitting affective orientations, whether positive or negative. The affective elements (...) of garage sale goods are contagious as they can intersubjectively leap from one body to another. (shrink)

'Ugly as sin', 'ugly duckling', 'rear its ugly head'. The word 'ugly' is used freely, yet it is a loaded term: from the simply plain and unsightly to the repulsive and even offensive, definitions slide all over the place. Hovering around 'feared and dreaded', ugliness both repels and fascinates. But the concept of ugliness has a lineage that has long haunted our cultural imagination. Gretchen E. Henderson explores perceptions of ugliness through history, from ancient Roman feasts to medieval grotesque (...) gargoyles, from Mary Shelley's monster cobbled from corpses to the Nazi Exhibition of Degenerate Art. Covering literature, art, music and even Uglydolls, Henderson reveals how ugliness has long posed a challenge to aesthetics and taste. Henderson digs into the muck of ugliness, moving beyond the traditional philosophic argument or mere opposition to beauty, and emerges with more than a selection of fascinating tidbits. Following ugly bodies and dismantling ugly senses across periods and continents, [this book] draws on a wealth of fields to cross cultures and times, delineating the changing map of ugliness as it charges the public imagination. Illustrated with a range of artefacts, this book offers a refreshing perspective that moves beyond the surface to ask what 'ugly' truly is, even as its meaning continues to shift. (shrink)

Hymenoplasty is a practice that must be judged from within its cultural confines and not only from outside. It offers women who have grown up within the sexual norms of a Western society the chance to return to their parental culture, with its female-specific virginity expectations. Hymenoplasty allows women to be sexually active prior to marriage, which equalizes the discrepancy between gender norms on premarital sexual experience. Caution is needed when comparing hymenoplasty to female genital mutilation. However, comparing hymenoplasty to (...) other cosmetic genital modification procedures raises unique ethical, social, and medical quandaries that highlight the importance of patient’s autonomy. (shrink)

Transactions in the U.S. garage sale range from the commercial to the giftlike, in a Maussian sense. As two-thirds of the participants, women create a sense of community through garage sale exchange. This article explores how women, partly differentiated along lines of race and class, solidify their personal relationships, transmit something of themselves with their possessions, transform their own lives in the process, and contribute to a broader spirit of community through the generalized reciprocity and even moral economy that manifests (...) in giftlike exchange. There is an important link, both material and symbolic, between women's relational skills, their association with the home and the moral, and the creation of community in the garage sale. (shrink)

The ancient philosophical school of Epicureanism tried to argue that death is "nothing to us." Were they right? James Warren provides a comprehensive study and articulation of the interlocking arguments against the fear of death found not only in the writings of Epicurus himself, but also in Lucretius' poem De rerum natura and in Philodemus' work De morte. These arguments are central to the Epicurean project of providing ataraxia (freedom from anxiety) and therefore central to an understanding of Epicureanism (...) as a whole. They also offer significant resources for modern discussions of the value of death--one which stands at the intersection of metaphysics and ethics. If death is the end of the subject, and the subject can not be benefited nor harmed after death, is it reasonable nevertheless to fear the ceasing-to-be? If the Epicureans are not right to claim that the dead can neither be benefited nor harmed, what alternative models might be offered for understanding the harm done by death and do these alternatives suffer from any further difficulties? The discussion involves consideration of both ethical and metaphysical topics since it requires analysis not only of the nature of a good life but also the nature of personal identity and time. A number of modern philosophers have offered criticisms or defences of the Epicureans' views. Warren explores and evaluates these in the light of a systematic and detailed study of the precise form and intention of the Epicureans' original arguments. Warren argues that the Epicureans also were interested in showing that mortality is not to be regretted and that premature death is not to be feared. Their arguments for these conclusions are to be found in their positive conception of the nature of a good and complete life, which divorce the completeness of a life as far as possible from considerations of its duration. Later chapters investigate the nature of a life lived without the fear of death and pose serious problems for the Epicureans being able to allow any concern for the post mortem future and being able to offer a positive reason for prolonging a life which is already complete in their terms. (shrink)

The postconflict Rwandan state has crafted a “we are all Rwandans” national identity narrative without ethnicity, in the interest of maintaining a delicate, postgenocide peace. The annual genocide commemoration period called Kwibuka—“to remember”—which takes place over the course of one hundred days every year, is an underresearched part of this narrative. During the commemoration period, génocidaires’ confessions increase dramatically; these confessions lead the government to previously undiscovered graves all over the country, just as confessions given during the grassroots justice system—gacaca—did (...) in the more immediate aftermath of the genocide. According to a prominent government official known for his prison outreach, the Rwandan government no longer provides incentives for prisoners to confess. Instead, he stated in a 2017 interview, those who speak up over twenty years later are simply “moved by the spirit of Kwibuka.” When confessions are made, memories of past action are used by the state, seemingly toward an ultimate end of reinforcing the national master narrative, to subsume the individual memories of innocent survivors into the national collective memory. This paper explores the questions around the state’s evolving use of prisoner confessions, both how those confessions are obtained, and how they factor into commemoration practices now. (shrink)