Experiential evidence shows that pain is associated with common meanings. These include a meaning of threat or danger, which is experienced as immediately distressing or unpleasant; cognitive meanings, which are focused on the long-term consequences of having chronic pain; and existential meanings such as hopelessness, which are more about the person with chronic pain than the pain itself. This interdisciplinary book - the second in the three-volume Meanings of Pain series edited by Dr Simon van Rysewyk - aims to better (...) understand pain by describing experiences of pain and the meanings these experiences hold for the people living through them. The lived experiences of pain described here involve various types of chronic pain, including spinal pain, labour pain, rheumatic pain, diabetic peripheral neuropathic pain, fibromyalgia, complex regional pain syndrome, endometriosis-associated pain, and cancer-related pain. Two chapters provide narrative descriptions of pain, recounted and interpreted by people with pain. Language is important to understanding the meaning of pain since it is the primary tool human beings use to manipulate meaning. As discussed in the book, linguistic meaning may hold clues to understanding some pain-related experiences, including the stigmatisation of people with pain, the dynamics of patient-clinician communication, and other issues, such as relationships between pain, public policy and the law, and attempts to develop a taxonomy of pain that is meaningful for patients. Clinical implications are described in each chapter. This book is intended for people with pain, their family members or caregivers, clinicians, researchers, advocates, and policy makers. (shrink)

Present science policy discourse is focused on a broad concept of “techno-science” and emphasizes practical economic goals and gains. At the same time scientists are worried about the freedom of research and the autonomy of science. Half a century ago the difference between basic and applied science was widely taken for granted and autonomy was a value in high esteem. Most recent accounts of the history of science policy start abruptly from World War II, emphasize the Cold War context, and (...) neglect the pioneering role of the Soviet Union in forming todays “big science.” This paper claims that a closer look into the intellectual heritage from the early twentieth century will be helpful in navigating present issues of science policy. The “Lysenko affair” was a paradigmatic case in forming Cold War views on science and politics. (shrink)

Humanity has sat at the center of philosophical thinking for too long. The recent advent of environmental philosophy and posthuman studies has widened our scope of inquiry to include ecosystems, animals, and artificial intelligence. Yet the vast majority of the stuff in our universe, and even in our lives, remains beyond serious philosophical concern. In _Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing_, Ian Bogost develops an object-oriented ontology that puts things at the center of being—a philosophy in (...) which nothing exists any more or less than anything else, in which humans are elements but not the sole or even primary elements of philosophical interest. And unlike experimental phenomenology or the philosophy of technology, Bogost’s alien phenomenology takes for granted that _all_ beings interact with and perceive one another. This experience, however, withdraws from human comprehension and becomes accessible only through a speculative philosophy based on metaphor. Providing a new approach for understanding the experience of things _as_ things, Bogost also calls on philosophers to rethink their craft. Drawing on his own background as a videogame designer, Bogost encourages professional thinkers to become makers as well, engineers who construct things as much as they think and write about them. (shrink)

In this paper, I address the question of whether it is ever permissible to grant a request for physician-aid-in-dying (PAD) from an individual suffering from treatment-resistant depression. I assume for the sake of argument that PAD is sometimes permissible. There are three requirements for PAD: suffering, prognosis, and competence. First, an individual must be suffering from an illness or injury which is sufficient to cause serious, ongoing hardship. Second, one must have exhausted effective treatment options, and one’s prospects for (...) recovery must be poor. Third, the individual must be judged competent to request PAD. I argue that many cases of treatment-resistant depression meet the first two requirements. Thus, the key question concerns the third. I consider four features of depression that might compromise a person’s decision-making capacity. Ultimately, I conclude that PAD requests from depressed patients can be permissibly granted in some circumstances. (shrink)

Given the increasing interest in ancient military history it seems timely to set Perikles' Peloponnesian War policy of avoiding major land battles in the context of the military options available and how these worked in practice. I should, however, sound one note of caution from the start. My discussion represents a modern assessment of the defence strategies and options available to Athens in 431. While Perikles and his successors undoubtedly considered how best to fight the war, it would be misleading (...) to even imply that their thought processes involved conducting an analysis anywhere near as sophisticated as the one which follows. Quite simply they lacked the theoretical concepts and even the technical vocabulary to do so. There was no history or tradition of staff college appreciations in fifth century Athens and no body of technical or theoretical military literature, and it seems clear that even experienced and successful commanders did not look at war with the same sort of theoretical constructs which we take for granted today. (shrink)

We are moral equals, but in virtue of what? The most plausible answers to this question have pointed to our higher agential capacities, but we vary in the degrees to which we possess those capacities. How could they ground our equal moral standing, then? This chapter argues that they do so only indirectly. Our moral equality is most directly grounded in a social practice of equality, a practice that serves the purpose of mitigating our tendencies toward control and domination that (...) interpreters of Rousseau call “inflamed amour-propre.” We qualify as participants in this practice of equality by possessing certain agential capacities, but it is our participation in the practice, and not the capacities themselves, that makes us moral equals. This chapter thus proposes moving from a capacity-based to practice-based view of moral equality. Doing so avoids problems for other accounts that, like the one defended here, ignore (above a threshold) the varying degrees to which we possess the pertinent agential capacities, such as Ian Carter’s account of “opacity respect.”​. (shrink)

This is an in-depth study of the Canadian philosopher George Grant's intellectual development and his contribution to understanding the philosophical and political implications of contemporary technology.

A good book may have the power to change the way we see the world, but a great book actually becomes part of our daily consciousness, pervading our thinking to the point that we take it for granted, and we forget how provocative and challenging its ideas once were—and still are. _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions _is that kind of book. When it was first published in 1962, it was a landmark event in the history and philosophy of science. Fifty (...) years later, it still has many lessons to teach. With _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, _Kuhn challenged long-standing linear notions of scientific progress, arguing that transformative ideas don’t arise from the day-to-day, gradual process of experimentation and data accumulation but that the revolutions in science, those breakthrough moments that disrupt accepted thinking and offer unanticipated ideas, occur outside of “normal science,” as he called it. Though Kuhn was writing when physics ruled the sciences, his ideas on how scientific revolutions bring order to the anomalies that amass over time in research experiments are still instructive in our biotech age. This new edition of Kuhn’s essential work in the history of science includes an insightful introduction by Ian Hacking, which clarifies terms popularized by Kuhn, including paradigm and incommensurability, and applies Kuhn’s ideas to the science of today. Usefully keyed to the separate sections of the book, Hacking’s introduction provides important background information as well as a contemporary context. Newly designed, with an expanded index, this edition will be eagerly welcomed by the next generation of readers seeking to understand the history of our perspectives on science. (shrink)

Being Reconfigured presents some of the most brilliant and audacious theses in recent phenomenological research. Challenging so much post-Heideggerian doxa, it argues against contemporary phenomenology’s denegation of Being, but suggests, as well, that phenomenology itself can provide a viable and fruitful alternative to this impasse. -/- Specifically, Being Reconfigured delineates the source of phenomenology’s ‘refusal’ of Being, in Husserl; the main strands it demonstrates, in Marion and Levinas; and the fundamental problems its entails—in Marion, the necessary retention of a ‘metaphysical’ (...) subject, and in Levinas, the necessary revival of Kantian dualisms and diremptions. Beyond this critical survey, however, Leask also provides an alternative perspective, through a reassessment of Edith Stein’s ‘generous ontology.’ This reassessment involves: delineating Stein’s Patristic and Scholastic sources; amplifying her suggestions, through the work of Michel Henry, Merleau-Ponty and Levinas himself; and demonstrating the contemporary significance of Stein’s phenomenology of Being-sustained and Being-safe(ty). By considering Being in these Steinian terms of support, safety and charity, Leask concludes, we might begin to overcome the difficulties described in the book’s earlier chapters—and to do so by radically reassessing the ‘nature’ of the Being that we take for granted. (shrink)

This book considers the place and value of knowledge in contemporary society. “Knowledge” is not a self-evident concept: both its denotations and connotations are historically situated. Since the Enlightenment, knowledge has been a matter of discovery through effort, and “knowledge for its own sake” a taken-for-granted ideal underwriting progressive education as a process which not only taught “for” and “about” something, but also ennobled the soul. While this ideal has not been explicitly rejected, in recent decades there has been a (...) tacit move away from a strong emphasis on its centrality, even in Higher Education. The authors address the values that inform knowledge production in its present forms, and seek to identify social and cultural factors that support these values.Against the background of increasingly restrictive conditions of academic work, the first section of this volume offers incisive critiques of Higher Education, with examples drawn from Australia and New Zealand. The second group of chapters considers how academics have viewed, and have tried to adapt to, present circumstances. The third section comprises papers that consider epistemological issues in the generation and promulgation of knowledge. The chapters in this volume are indicative of the work that needs to be done so that we can come to comprehend – and perhaps try and improve – our relationship to learning and knowledge in the 21st Century.This timely book will be of particular interest to workers in higher education; it should also inform and challenge all those who have concerns for the future of the intellectual life of our civilization. (shrink)

This article examines the possibility that phenomenology was “always already” a theological enterprise, by outlining some of the foundational criticisms levelled by Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser. For both thinkers, the phenomenological stress on “lived experience” grants an undue primacy to the realm of “interiority”; as a result, subjectivity is left, not just reified, but also deified. By contrast, both Foucault and Althusser will argue for understanding the subject as constituted rather than constitutive; philosophy’s task, accordingly, is to delineate the (...) broader structures that create “lived experience,” rather than to hypostatize the subject as the privileged bearer of logos. As well as outlining the contours of this critique, however, the article indicates some of the shortcomings entailed in a total disavowal of “lived experience.”. (shrink)

Next SectionIn response to public outrage stemming from exposés of animal abuse in research laboratories, the US Congress in 1985 mandated Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees (IACUCs) to oversee animal use at institutions receiving federal grants. IACUCs were enjoined to respect public concern about the treatment of animals in research, but they were not specifically instructed whether or not to perform ethical cost-benefit analyses of animal research protocols that IACUCs have chosen, with approval contingent upon a balancing of animal (...) pain and suffering against a reasonable expectation of resultant human benefit. IACUCs have chosen not to make such ethical judgments but, rather, restrict themselves to an advisory role, often tweaking the details of animal-use protocols, but eventually approving all of them. This disinclination by IACUCs to take a broader ethical view of their authority and responsibilities may reflect a membership composition highly skewed towards animal researchers themselves (67%) and institutional veterinarians (15%), both with vested interests in continuing animal research. The resultant ethical monoculture may impair IACUC's ability to meet public concern for laboratory animal welfare. Psychological research has established that unconscious bias affects us all, that deliberations among the like-minded lead to adapting extremist positions, and that groupthink blinds organisations to alternatives that might be obvious to outsiders. Taken together, skewed IACUC membership composition and psychological research insights into unconscious bias and groupthink suggest that an infusion of ethical diversity by increasing the percentage of institutionally unaffiliated members on IACUCs would broaden their ethical perspectives and enable them to better address public concerns about laboratory animal welfare. (shrink)

Learned men of the twelfth century, especially the first half, frequently wrote about themselves and each other. Well-known examples of autobiographical writing include Guibert of Nogent's De vita sua or Monodiae, Rupert of Deutz's defense of his theological career in his Apologia attached to his commentary on the Benedictine rule, Peter Abelard's Historia calamitatum, and Gerald of Wales's De rebus a se gestis. Examples of biographical narrative are easily found: the life of St. Goswin included an account of Goswin defeating (...) Abelard in disputation; Baudri of Bourgueil wrote a poem about famous schools and scholars; the anonymous Metamorphosis Goliae provided characterizations of many masters; John of Salisbury's Metalogicon described the teaching methods of Bernard of Chartres and, in an autobiographical account of his own education, offered sketches of many of the leading masters in northern France, while Otto of Freising's Gesta Friderici I Imperatoris recounted parts of the academic careers of Abelard and Gilbert of Poitiers. It is therefore possible to read about twelfth-century scholars in their own words: the way they taught, their personalities, their ambitions, their disappointments; in short, their lives, or representations of their lives. Moving toward the end of the twelfth century and into the thirteenth century, however, there is very little comparable material, perhaps even none. In the thirteenth century, scholars wrote a great deal about being a scholar, but they preferred always to stress their collective identity, so that narrative accounts of particular scholarly lives did not find a place within the emerging universities. Why was there a change in the way in which scholars chose to represent themselves and each other, a change that involved obscuring their lives, both from themselves and from us? Answering that question will reveal the long-term significance of conflict between Schoolmen and monks and the impact of monastic ideals upon universities. It will show how the need for support from parties outside the university and internal debates about the true nature and purpose of learning came together, how ideas developed within the world of learning mattered when conflict led to the grant of privileges, and how specific ways of thinking became politically significant when particular events generated a certain kind of document in which those ways of thinking were embedded. (shrink)

A philosophical critique of George Grant's use of Heidegger that refers in detail to Reiner Schurmann to distinguish the terms "particularity" and "singularity.".

In this essay, I will outline the positive content of George Grant's conception of "particularity" and clarify it by comparing it to Reiner Schürmann's similar concept of "singularity" as a starting point for an engagement with the positive good to which it refers. In conclusion, a five-step existential logic will he presented, which, I will suggest, can resolve the important aspects of the difference between them.

The article reviews recent developments in England in the law of necessity as a defence to crime and calls for its further extension. It argues that the defence of necessity presents the criminal law with difficult questions of competing values and the ordering of harms. English law has taken a nuanced position on the respective roles of the courts and the legislature in the ordering of harms, although the development of the law has been pragmatic rather than coherently theorised. The (...) law has granted necessity some scope as an exculpatory principle in the law of general defences, but it has also respected the primacy of the legislature as the legitimate arbiter of many of the competitions of value that necessity throws up. The recognition of necessity has not been in the form of a single unified defence of that name. Rather it has taken the form of a number of defences, based on a principle of necessity, but with different nomenclature and different rationales. This approach to necessity is defended as right in terms of principle and policy. Any further development of necessity as a general defence should be restricted to two contexts, namely those of emergencies, and of conflicts of duty, where a danger of death or serious injury is present. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss the recent attempt of Axel Honneth of establishing a robust notion of progress through reference to recognitive structures. I claim that two strategies can be found in his writings for founding such a claim. On the one hand he tries to found the notion of progress on how differentiated the recognitive structures are. On the other hand he tries to found it on certain empirically revealed anthropological and psychological constants. I argue that both strategies fail. (...) The differentiation-strategy is too open, the psychological strategy is too narrow.I discuss in what sense Honneth’s reflections on the importance of recognitive structures still may be of value in critical discussions. Even though it may be granted that a certain notion of progress is inevitable in critical discussions, it does not follow that it has to be a robust notion. I suggest that recognitive structures may serve as a universal reference point that can be used to locate disagreement (recognitive structures are always at play), rather than a robust universal starting point that can be used solve disagreement (it is not given that we agree upon which recognitive structures should be furthered). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of MoralsIan RossDavid Hume. An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. Tom L. Beauchamp, editor. The Clarendon Edition of the Works of David Hume. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.An edition of Hume's philosophic writings on rigorous, modern bibliographic principles has long been a scholarly desideratum. Readers in the many fields in which Hume's thought and style have made a profound impression have (...) basically relied on the originals or derivatives of efforts of the Victorian era. One is Hume's Philosophical Works (4 v., London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1874-75), edited by the Oxford dons, T. H. Green and T. H. Grose. Well-known for his idealist philosophy and theory of liberalism, Green contributed introductions to the first and second volumes criticizing Hume from an anti-empirical standpoint. Grose offered a "History of [Hume's] Editions" as an introduction to the third volume, and claimed to have revised Hume's text throughout. This edition has the virtue of comprehensiveness, but is deficient in its offering of variant readings. Later there came from Oxford University Press editions of the Treatise of Human Nature (1888), deemed generally sound, and the two Enquiries (1894), marred by departures from Hume's text, prepared by a prominent civil servant, Sir Lawrence Amherst Selby-Bigge, whose chief contribution was to provide useful analytical indices. An attempt at achieving higher editorial standards was made by P. H. Nidditch, Professor of Philosophy in the University of Sheffield, in a "second" edition of Selby-Bigge's Treatise (1976) and a "third" edition of his text of the Enquiries (1975). Limits were imposed by Oxford University Press, apparently unwilling to make more then small changes in the existing pages. Nidditch announced (Enquiries, 1975, at p.348, n.2) that he had a "fresh" edition in preparation, but he did not live to complete this project.In the event, the challenge to produce a critical edition of Hume's philosophical, political, and literary writings was canvassed at early meetings of the Hume Society formed in 1973. Thereafter, in 1982, a team of general editors was formed by T. L. Beauchamp, D. F. Norton, and M. A. Stewart, determined to organize and finish the task in hand, and Oxford University Press finally conceded it was time to replace Selby-Bigge. With the appearance of Tom Beauchamp's "critical edition" of the second Enquiry (hereafter identified as EPM), published on 4 August 1999, but bearing the date 1998, the long wait for a reliable text, bibliographic apparatus, and ancillary scholarship, worthy of Hume, must be declared over.If we grant that it is appropriate to introduce the new Clarendon Edition of the Works of David Hume with the piece he deemed "best," it must also be asked why he made this judgment. Philosophers have generally held that his Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40) is the most profound and searching statement of his epistemological and moral thought, but its seeming lack of immediate success with readers made Hume dissatisfied with it. Such were his negative feelings, coupled with irritation at attacks on him focused on this "juvenile" work, that he partially repudiated the Treatise at the end of his life. He wrote an "Advertisement" to this effect, and it was inserted as a preface to the authoritative and posthumous 1777 edition of his Essays and Treatises. Here he stated he was "sensible of the error of going to the press too early, and he cast the whole [of [End Page 280] the Treatise] anew in the following pieces [including EPM], where some negligences in his former reasoning and more in the expression, are, he hopes, corrected" (EPM Intro., xii-xiii, n.4).On the evidence of Beauchamp's editorial labors, it would appear that EPM is Hume's "best" work in this sense. It represents the most thorough recasting of source material provided by the Treatise. Its essential moral principles and psychological insights about the passions are retained, but "readability and elegance" are achieved by pruning, simplifying, and compacting the Treatise's complex teaching, while adding a wealth of illustrative material drawn from Hume's mature reflection on his subject and... (shrink)

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a rapid growth in research focused on developing vaccines and therapies. In this context, the need for speed is taken for granted, and the scientific process has adapted to accommodate this. On the surface, attempts to speed up the research enterprise appear to be a good thing. It is, however, important to consider what, if anything, might be lost when biomedical innovation is sped up. In this article we use the case (...) of a study recently retracted from the Lancet to illustrate the potential risks and harms associated with speeding up science. We then argue that, with appropriate governance mechanisms in place, it should be quite possible to both speed up science and remain attentive to scientific quality and integrity. (shrink)

Unlike other countries in South Asia, in Nepal research in the health sector has a relatively recent history. Most health research activities in the country are sponsored by international collaborative assemblages of aid agencies and universities. Data from Nepal Health Research Council shows that, officially, 1,212 health research activities have been carried out between 1991 and 2014. These range from addressing immediate health problems at the country level through operational research, to evaluations and programmatic interventions that are aimed at generating (...) evidence, to more systematic research activities that inform global scientific and policy debates. Established in 1991, the Ethical Review Board of the Nepal Health Research Council is the central body that has the formal regulating authority of all the health research activities in country, granted through an act of parliament. Based on research conducted between 2010 and 2013, and a workshop on research ethics that the authors conducted in July 2012 in Nepal as a part of the on-going research, this article highlights the emerging regulatory and ethical fields in this low-income country that has witnessed these increased health research activities. Issues arising reflect this particular political economy of research and includes questions to emerging regulatory and ethical frameworks. (shrink)

While doctors generally enjoy considerable status, some believe that this is increasingly threatened by consumerism, managerialism, and competition from other health professions. Research into doctors’ perceptions of the changes occurring in medicine has provided some insights into how they perceive and respond to these changes but has generally failed to distinguish clearly between concerns about “status,” related to the entitlements associated with one’s position in a social hierarchy, and concerns about “respect,” related to being held in high regard for one’s (...) moral qualities. In this article we explore doctors’ perceptions of the degree to which they are respected and their explanations for, and responses to, instances of perceived lack of respect. We conclude that doctors’ concerns about loss of respect need to be clearly distinguished from concerns about loss of status and that medical students need to be prepared for a changing social field in which others’ respect cannot be taken for granted. (shrink)

An intro. to Didaktic (the heart of thinking about teaching/teacher educ in Germany) for English-speaking readers, drawing on a range of writings assoc. w/ this tradition. Throws light on assumptions, characteristics, & weaknesses of curriculum thought.

Previous studies of auditory expectation have focused on the expectedness perceived by listeners retrospectively in response to events. In contrast, this research examines predictive uncertainty —a property of listeners' prospective state of expectation prior to the onset of an event. We examine the information-theoretic concept of Shannon entropy as a model of predictive uncertainty in music cognition. This is motivated by the Statistical Learning Hypothesis, which proposes that schematic expectations reflect probabilistic relationships between sensory events learned implicitly through exposure. Using (...) probability estimates from an unsupervised, variable-order Markov model, 12 melodic contexts high in entropy and 12 melodic contexts low in entropy were selected from two musical repertoires differing in structural complexity (simple and complex). Musicians and non-musicians listened to the stimuli and provided explicit judgments of perceived uncertainty (explicit uncertainty). We also examined an indirect measure of uncertainty computed as the entropy of expectedness distributions obtained using a classical probe-tone paradigm where listeners rated the perceived expectedness of the final note in a melodic sequence (inferred uncertainty). Finally, we simulate listeners' perception of expectedness and uncertainty using computational models of auditory expectation. A detailed model comparison indicates which model parameters maximize fit to the data and how they compare to existing models in the literature. The results show that listeners experience greater uncertainty in high-entropy musical contexts than low-entropy contexts. This effect is particularly apparent for inferred uncertainty and is stronger in musicians than non-musicians. Consistent with the Statistical Learning Hypothesis, the results suggest that increased domain-relevant training is associated with an increasingly accurate cognitive model of probabilistic structure in music. (shrink)

In this article we refine the design ofcontext shifting experiments, which play a central role in contextualist debates, and we subject a large number of scenarios involving different types of expressions of interest to contextualists, including ‘know’ and color adjectives like ‘green’, to experimental investigation. Our experiment (i) reveals an effect of changing contexts on the evaluation of uses of the sentences that we examine, thereby overturning the absence of results reported in previous experimental studies (so‐callednull results), (ii) uncovers evidence (...) for a ‘truth bias' in favor of positive over negative sentences, and (iii) reveals previously unnoticed distinctions between the strength of the contextual effects displayed by scenarios involving knowledge ascriptions and scenarios concerning color and other miscellaneous scenarios. (shrink)

This important book examines how the growing field of cybernetic psychology - the study of the creative complexity of the mind - can be applied to a range of different realms, tapping into the unconscious potential within us all. Cybernetic psychology integrates theories from various schools of thought, bringing them together in one unified theory. First developed and described by Danish author and psychotherapist Ole Vedfelt. It can be used in therapeutic practice, in relation to learning and pedagogics, and as (...) a tool for better leadership. The 15 chapters within this volume apply the theory to these as well as other areas, including ecology, creativity, mindfulness and scientific enquiry itself. Insightful and wide-ranging, the book will appeal to psychotherapists and those working within mental health, as well as students and researchers across Education, Psychology and beyond. (shrink)

During the past decades, research collaboration between researchers from different disciplines has become more frequent. However, there is a need to look into the generic modalities and challenges. The article explores a series of potential obstructions to cross-disciplinary collaboration of methodological and epistemological nature. Furthermore, a number of contextual, inhibiting factors are outlined. As means of overcoming the obstacles, the importance of mutual knowledge, allocation of adequate time and conducive research management is emphasised. New teams may benefit from tutoring by (...) facilitators, who can help to make problem areas explicit and negotiate solutions. Owing to the training background of the author, most of the examples are drawn from the interface between biomedicine/natural science and applied medical anthropology. However, the issues raised basically apply to all sorts of cross-disciplinary research collaboration in various combinations. (shrink)

Both patients and clinicians frequently report problems around communicating and assessing pain. Patients express dissatisfaction with their doctors and doctors often find exchanges with chronic pain patients difficult and frustrating. This chapter thus asks how we could improve pain communication and thereby enhance outcomes for chronic pain patients. We argue that improving matters will require a better appreciation of the complex meaning of pain terms and of the variability and flexibility in how individuals think about pain. We start by examining (...) the various accounts of the meaning of pain terms that have been suggested within philosophy and suggest that, while each of the accounts captures something important about our use of pain terms, none is completely satisfactory. We propose that pain terms should be viewed as communicating complex meanings, which may change across different communicative contexts, and this in turn suggests that we should view our ordinary thought about pain as similarly complex. We then sketch what a view taking seriously this variability in meaning and thought might look like, which we call the “polyeidic” view. According to this view, individuals tacitly occupy divergent stances across a range of different dimensions of pain, with one agent, for instance, thinking of pain in a much more “bodycentric” kind of way, while another thinks of pain in a much more "mindcentric” way. The polyeidic view attempts to expand the multidimensionality recognised in, e.g., biopsychosocial models in two directions: first, it holds that the standard triumvirate— dividing sensory/cognitive/affective factors— needs to be enriched in order to capture important distinctions within the social and psychological dimensions. Second, the polyeidic view attempts to explain (at least in part) why modulation of experience by these social and psychological factors is possible in the first place. It does so by arguing that because the folk concept of pain is complex, different weightings of the different parts of the concept can modulate pain experience in a variety of ways. Finally, we argue that adopting a polyeidic approach to the meaning of pain would have a range of measurable clinical outcomes. (shrink)

Existing research on the formation of employee ethical climate perceptions focuses mainly on organization characteristics as antecedents, and although other constructs have been considered, these constructs have typically been studied in isolation. Thus, our understanding of the context in which ethical climate perceptions develop is incomplete. To address this limitation, we build upon the work of Rupp to develop and test a multi-experience model of ethical climate which links aspects of the corporate social responsibility, ethics, justice, and trust literatures and (...) helps to explain how employees’ ethical climate perceptions form. We argue that in forming ethical climate perceptions, employees consider the actions or characteristics of a complex web of actors. Specifically, we propose that employees look outward at how communities are impacted by their organization’s actions, upward to make inferences about the ethicality of leaders in their organizations, and inward at their own propensity to trust others as they form their perceptions. Using a multiple-wave field study conducted at a privately held US corporation, we find substantial evidence in support of our model. (shrink)

This essay aims to outline in what ways Kierkegaard’s thinking of existence not only brings into view a concept of existence, but, more fundamentally, enables one to locate an opening to questioning anew the relation of thinking and existence. This thinking of existence does not seek to dissolve existence into knowledge but aims at intensifying the question of a thinking grounded not in the conclusion made in “an external relation between a knower and a non-knower” of which non-knowledge is the (...) negative determination of knowledge, but rather of a thinking grounded in existence. (shrink)

As moral injury is a still-emerging concept within the area of military mental health, prevalence estimates for moral injury and its precursor, potentially morally injurious events (PMIEs), remain unknown for many of the world’s militaries. The present study sought to estimate the prevalence of PMIEs in the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF), using data collected from CAF personnel deployed to Afghanistan, via logistic regressions controlling for relevant sociodemographic, military, and deployment characteristics. Analyses revealed that over 65% of CAF members reported exposure (...) to at least one event that would be considered a PMIE. The most commonly PMIEs individuals reported included seeing ill or injured women and children they were unable to help (48.4%), being unable to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants (43.6%), and finding themselves in a threatening situation where they were unable to respond due to the rules of engagement under which they were required to operate (35.4%). These findings provide support for both the presence of exposure to PMIEs in CAF members and the need for formal longitudinal data collection regarding PMIE exposure and moral injury development. (shrink)

The traditional distinction between basic and applied science has been much criticized in recent decades. The criticism is based on a combination of historical and systematic epistemic argument. The present paper is mostly concerned with the historical aspect. I argue that the critics impose an understanding at odds with the way the distinction was understood by its supporters in debates on science education and science policy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And I show how a distinction that refers to (...) difference on several epistemic and social dimensions makes good sense of representative historical cases. If this argument is tenable it suggests more continuity in the epistemology and politics of science than has been claimed by a new paradigm of science studies and politics during recent decades. (shrink)