The question whether epistemological concepts are closed under deduction is an important one since many skeptical arguments depend on closure. Such skepticism can be avoided if closure is not true of knowledge (or justification). This response to skepticism is rejected by Peter Klein and others. Klein argues that closure is true, and that far from providing the skeptic with a powerful weapon for undermining our knowledge, it provides a tool for attacking the skeptic directly. This paper examines various arguments in (...) favor of closure and Klein's attempted use of closure to refute skepticism. Such a refutation of skepticism is mistaken. But the closure principle is in any case false, so the skepticism that depends on it is undermined. The appeal of the closure principle derives from a failure to recognize an important feature of our epistemological concepts, namely, their context relativity. (shrink)

Continuing rapid developments in the life sciences offer the promise of providing tools to meet global challenges in health, agriculture, the environment, and economic development; some of the benefits are already being realized. However, such advances also bring with them new social, ethical, legal, and security challenges. Governance questions form an increasingly important part of the discussions about these advances--whether the particular issue under debate is the development of ethical principles for human genome editing, how to establish regulatory systems for (...) the safe conduct of field trials of gene drive-modified organisms, or many others. However there are continuing concerns that the knowledge, tools, and techniques resulting from life sciences research could also enable the development of bioweapons or facilitate bioterrorism. Between June 10 and 13, 2018, more than 70 participants from 30 different countries and 5 international organizations took part in an international workshop, The Governance of Dual Use Research in the Life Sciences: Advancing Global Consensus on Research Oversight, in Zagreb, Croatia. Hosted by the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, the workshop was a collaboration among the InterAcademy Partnership, the Croatian Academy, the Croatian Society for Biosafety and Biosecurity, and the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop."--Publisher's description. (shrink)

Youths with disruptive behavior disorders and psychopathic traits showed reduced amygdala responses to fearful expressions under low attentional load but no indications of increased recruitment of regions implicated in top- down attentional control. These findings suggest that the emotional deficit observed in youths with disruptive behavior disorders and psychopathic traits is primary and not secondary to increased top- down attention to nonemotional stimulus features.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Veterans Affairs National Center for Clinical EthicsJames L. Bernat (bio)The veterans health administration is the largest health care system in the United States and, indeed, is larger that the health care system of many foreign countries. In February 1991 the Department of Veterans Affairs (V.A.) in Washington, D.C. awarded a contract to the clinical ethics group at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in White River Junction, Vermont to (...) establish the V.A. National Center for Clinical Ethics. In this article I describe the organizational context, mission, operation, and future direction of the Center, which William A. Nelson, Ph.D., and I co-direct.The Veterans Health AdministrationThe Department of Veterans Affairs operates 171 hospitals providing services ranging from primary, secondary, and tertiary medical care to psychiatric hospitals, rehabilitation centers, and nursing homes. The V.A. also provides outpatient services at all hospitals and at dozens of free-standing outpatent clinics. V.A. medical centers employ over 14,000 physicians and serve approximately 4.5 million veteran patients (Hollingsworth and Bondy 1990; Mirvis 1990).The V.A. serves an important educational function, providing training sites for medical students, postgraduate physicians, and trainees in other health-related fields. Approximately 78 percent of V.A. medical centers are affiliated with medical schools. Over one-third of all American medical students and over 40 percent of interns and residents spend a portion of their training in V.A. medical centers. More than 100,000 students in all health-related fields train in V.A. facilities annually (Hollingsworth and Bondy 1990).Research is another mission of the V.A. Many academic physicians and scientists derive their research and salary funding from V.A contracts and awards. The V.A. Research Career Development Program provides the means for many medical school faculty members to achieve successful careers as scientists and clinical investigators. Although research accounts for only slightly more than 1 percent of the V.A. medical budget, two V.A. researchers have been awarded the Nobel Prize (Hollingsworth and Bondy 1990). [End Page 385]In comparison to other medical care settings, the average V.A. patient is likely to be older, poorer, male, less well-educated, more chronically ill, and more expensive to care for. Many patients first patronize the V.A. system after they have been bankrupted by the costs of a major illness. Unlike young, healthy patients ideally favored by health maintenance organizations, these patients immediately require large expenditures for hospitalizations, medications, and other treatments. Additional burdens have been placed on V.A. facilities by a record of chronic federal underfunding over the past decade, despite expanded patient censuses at every facility.Bioethical issues arise in V.A. facilities with great frequency for several reasons. Older and poorer patients are often sicker, have fewer home-support resources, and have completed fewer advance directives for health care. Chronic operational underfunding requires explicit health care rationing systemwide. Academic physicians within the V.A. system have multiple professional duties that have the potential for conflict. Although their primary duty is to their patients, they also must serve the federal government and their medical school academic supervisors. The practice of medical care rationing pits the physician's professional duty to his patient against his duty to the system (Mirvis 1990).The V.A. has responded to these bioethical demands with several initiatives. Hospital ethics advisory committees have been developed in nearly every V.A. medical center. The V.A. National Bioethics Committee has been empaneled to encourage uniform policies across the V.A. system concerning bioethical issues. Most recently, funds were provided for the V.A. National Center for Clinical Ethics.Functions of the National Center for Clinical Ethics (NCCE)The NCCE has a fourfold mission: 1) to enhance the quality of clinical ethics programs at all 171 V.A. medical centers nationwide; 2) to staff the V.A. National Bioethics Committee; 3) to assist administrators and planners in the V.A. Central Office on policy development concerning bioethical issues; and 4) to study, organize, and coordinate clinical, educational, and research bioethics programs throughout the system.Enhancing the quality of clinical ethics programs at V.A. medical centers is largely an... (shrink)

As the United States emerges from the worst public health threat it has ever experienced, the Supreme Court is poised to reconsider constitutional principles from bygone eras. Judicial proposals to roll back rights under a federalism infrastructure grounded in states’ interests threaten the nation’s legal fabric at a precarious time. This column explores judicial shifts in 3 key public health contexts — reproductive rights, vaccinations, and national security — and their repercussions.

Among the morass of critical issues impacting the results of the midterm elections in 2022 were core public health issues related to health care access, justice, and reforms. Collectively, voters’ communal health and safety concerns dominated outcomes in key races which may shape national, state, and local legal approaches to protecting the public’s health in the modern era.

The dominant paradigm of experiments in the social and behavioral sciences views an experiment as a test of a theory, where the theory is assumed to generalize beyond the experiment's specific conditions. According to this view, which Alan Newell once characterized as “playing twenty questions with nature,” theory is advanced one experiment at a time, and the integration of disparate findings is assumed to happen via the scientific publishing process. In this article, we argue that the process of integration is (...) at best inefficient, and at worst it does not, in fact, occur. We further show that the challenge of integration cannot be adequately addressed by recently proposed reforms that focus on the reliability and replicability of individual findings, nor simply by conducting more or larger experiments. Rather, the problem arises from the imprecise nature of social and behavioral theories and, consequently, a lack of commensurability across experiments conducted under different conditions. Therefore, researchers must fundamentally rethink how they design experiments and how the experiments relate to theory. We specifically describe an alternative framework, integrative experiment design, which intrinsically promotes commensurability and continuous integration of knowledge. In this paradigm, researchers explicitly map the design space of possible experiments associated with a given research question, embracing many potentially relevant theories rather than focusing on just one. Researchers then iteratively generate theories and test them with experiments explicitly sampled from the design space, allowing results to be integrated across experiments. Given recent methodological and technological developments, we conclude that this approach is feasible and would generate more-reliable, more-cumulative empirical and theoretical knowledge than the current paradigm – and with far greater efficiency. (shrink)

In a pioneering book, Philosophy of Microbiology, Maureen O’Malley argues for the philosophical importance of microbes through an examination of their impact on ecosystems, evolution, biological classification, collaborative behavior, and multicellular organisms. She identifies many understudied conceptual issues in the study of microbes. If philosophers follow her lead, the philosophy of biology will be expanded and enriched.

Fackenheim's combination of erudition and generosity served to inspire a lifetime of philosophical inquiry, and a number of his students are represented in this ...

This volume is a scholarly tribute to Fackenheim’s memory. It covers a wide spectrum of Fackenheim’s work including biographical, philosophical, and theological aspects of his thought that have not been addressed adequately in the past. Elie Wiesel, a close personal friend to Fackenheim for over 30 years, has provided the Foreword for the volume.

Ample research links mothers’ postpartum depression (PPD) to adverse interactions with their infants. However, most studies relied on general population samples, whereas a substantial number of women are at elevated depression risk. The purpose of this study was to describe mothers’ interactions with their 6- and 12-month-old infants among women at elevated risk, although with a range of symptom severity. We also identified higher-order factors that best characterized the interactions and tested longitudinal consistency of these factors from 6 to 12 (...) months of infant age. We leveraged data from eight projects across the United States (n = 647), using standardized depression measures and an adaptation of the NICHD Mother-Infant Interaction Scales. Overall, these depression-vulnerable mothers showed high levels of sensitivity and positive regard and low levels of intrusiveness, detachment, and negative regard with their infants. Factor analyses of maternal behaviors identified two overarching factors—“positive engagement” and “negative intrusiveness” that were comparable at 6 and 12 months of infant age. Mothers’ ability to regulate depressed mood was a key behavior that defined “positive engagement” in factor loadings. An exceptionally strong loading of intrusiveness on the second factor suggested its central importance for women at elevated depression risk. Mothers with severe depressive symptoms had significantly more “negative intrusiveness” and less “positive engagement” with their 6-month-old infants than women with moderate or fewer depressive symptoms, suggesting a potential tipping point at which symptoms may interfere with the quality of care. Results provide the foundation for further research into predictors and moderators of women’s interactions with their infant among women at elevated risk for PPD. They also indicate a need for evidence-based interventions that can support more severely depressed women in providing optimal care. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Mapping Gendered Ecologies: Engaging with and Beyond Ecowomanism and Ecofeminism by K. Melchor Quick Hall and Gwyn KirkCecilia Herles (bio)K. Melchor Quick Hall and Gwyn Kirk, Mapping Gendered Ecologies: Engaging with and Beyond Ecowomanism and Ecofeminism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021. ISBN- 978-1-7936-3946-2K. Melchor Quick Hall and Gwyn Kirk are leading feminist authors who have beautifully woven together an inspiring and diverse collection of essays (...) in the anthology, Mapping Gendered Ecologies: Engaging with and beyond Ecowomanism and Ecofeminism. What does it take to gather together some of the most eloquent voices of activists, teachers, farmers, artists, and organizers in an anthology focused on engaging with and beyond ecowomanism and ecofeminism, and what could this cultivate? I find Hall and Kirk's reflections on the process and their approach to collaboration illustrate some of the tools needed to address complex issues of disasters, the global pandemic, climate justice, white supremacy, gender oppression, and practices of domination. Their approach is to build relationships, acknowledge vulnerability, and appreciate differences in experiences. It seems fitting that this project initially began with Margo Okazawa-Rey who connected Hall and Kirk together. Okazawa-Rey's introduction generated the openness needed to bring this collection to fruition. Mapping as the thematic image of this collection is found in destructive boundary-making, the violence of enslavement, wars, and the dumping of contaminants in the environment. Mapping is also evident in the physical, temporal, and evolving locations in which Okazawa-Rey's work of sustaining community and recognizing interconnections across locations opens up the time and spaces to envision peace.This collection marks a shift away from the elitism of academic spaces by illuminating connections between community and university, and actively resisting against patriarchal notions of what counts as expertise and scholarship. The anthology draws attention to personal experiences as fundamentally relevant to perspectives about place, location, and [End Page 97] belonging and relations with land, water, sky and nonhumans. It begins with an autobiographical account by Hall who brilliantly weaves together her life story with her analytical insight in illustrating how Black geographies show spaces as often hard to map and in flux for the marginalized. In "Darkness All around Me: Black Waters, Land, Animals, and Sky" Hall notes how she is unable to discuss her understanding and relationship with Nature outside of being a Black Woman. When she poses the question, "how would our maps be different if they were rooted in the histories and realities of people of color?" (23) Hall pivots mapping to the contingent, unstable complexities that mark Black people's relations with land and food. In doing so, Hall reveals compelling insights into trauma, anxieties, and relationships with land and water in shifting landscapes. Connecting to the mission of Soul Fire Farm, to resist the US food apartheid and mobilize towards food justice, Hall reveals the possibilities for reparative healing properties in agricultural activities at Soul Fire Farm. Hall's narrative about racialized hierarchies recognizes how human hierarchies are connected to human-nonhuman animal divisions, raising the question of "How might we imagine freeing ourselves and other animals from the systems that seek to devalue us as (human and nonhuman) beings?" (27). Hall intervenes and challenges geographical mapping centered in white frameworks rooted in claims of stolen territories and measured in segregation and displacement. Pointing to Black shoals, Black food geographies, and Afrofuturism, to name a few, Hall is marking potential paths to shared liberation. Although Hall does not identify strongly as ecofeminist nor ecowomanist, this provides a promising direction for ecowomanist and ecofeminist inquiries, speaking to the need to explore what it takes for shared liberation. This direction also has the potential to offer insight into an alternative mapping for disability justice. Hall's acknowledgement of "being out of place" connects to the disability justice work of Sunaura Taylor (2014) and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018) in the mapping of access in describing surroundings and focusing on interconnectedness.In Kirk's autobiographical account, "Roots, Branches, Wings" she points to how Margo Okazawa-Rey (2020) introduced her to philosopher Alan Rosenberg's (1998) distinction between knowing and understanding. In contrast to knowing facts that... (shrink)

Both as historian and as theoretician, Quentin Skinner has contributed brilliantly to our understanding of the tradition of political thinking and to the renewed interest in a genuinely historical reading of the texts of that tradition. Until now, however, Skinner's methodological articles have not been conveniently available under one cover. James Tully's excellent volume remedies that deficiency. Tully brings together five of Skinner's most important writings on interpretation, his own fine introduction to Skinner's work, seven essays by critics, and (...) a long reply by Skinner, in which he responds to virtually all the criticisms of his work that have appeared in print. No one seriously interested in intellectual history, the history of philosophy, or the history of political thought can afford to miss this book. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Introduction to Creative Writing ContributionsAlexis Pauline Gumbs, Akasha Gloria Hull, Cheryl Clarke, doris diosa davenport, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Asha French, Sharon Bridgforth, Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, Alexis De Veaux, and Sokari Ekinewhen i first began to dream of creative writing contributions for this special issue of Feminist Studies celebrating the fortieth anniversaries of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color and All the Women (...) Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies, I imagined a wealth of examples of the world and the work made possible by these two groundbreaking anthologies. I wondered what their editors and contributors were writing now. I wondered about the work of their students and people like me: those of us who understand everything we write as indebted to the path-making, silence-clearing, generative, and bodacious work of the participants in the miracles that are This Bridge Called My Back and But Some of Us Are Brave.But today as I reread the contributions that actually emerged from this process, I realize that my dream was too small. I imagined writing that would provide evidence of the ongoing impact made by these two anthologies. Instead, the creative writing in this special issue offers something more crucial and beautiful than I had imagined. These works are not mere evidence of a transformed world; these works are continuing to transform the world in urgent and visionary ways. As repeated again and again by participants in the 2022 celebration for the fortieth anniversary celebration of This Bridge Called My Back, the work that inspired these anthologies is not over. The writings featured in this issue not only show [End Page 198] how this work continues, but they feed, nurture, and provoke us as we honor our responsibility to transform this world.For example, when Akasha Gloria Hull, coeditor of But Some of Us Are Brave, shares her daily early morning meditative writing in "Writing and Rebirth: A Set of Journal Poems," we remember not only her fundamental work excavating the daily lives of Black women writers from the nineteenth century—most notably in Give Us Each Day, her edited book based on the diaries of poet Alice Dunbar Nelson—but also our own imperative. Hull's reflections on health challenges, interpersonal conflict, resurrection, collaboration, and writing itself remind us that our feminist praxis is impactful because of its dailyness. Those of us who wake up tomorrow will need to ask the same critical questions the editors of But Some of Us Are Brave asked of the fields of Black studies and women's studies. We will find surprises and repetitions in the days we meet, and then we will have to do it again.When we read two new prose poems by Cheryl Clarke, an original contributor to This Bridge Called My Back, we have an opportunity to time travel. In "Living as a Lesbian in the Archive of Style," we venture into a critical engagement with the term "hardcore lesbian," displacing the desires of the person who needs to classify others using that term with those of someone who has been hailed by it. Clarke's poem is a reminder that as we work in literary traditions and fields of study made possible by the revolutionary identity politics of an earlier era, we are still responsible for centering the experiences of those most impacted by our fluent and fluid naming practices. In "History," Clarke offers us a timely Black lesbian feminist lens on many iterations of responding to police violence, centering the perspective of a lesbian, her lover, and her lover's husband.The poem "On Being an hbcu Graduate, Teacher, Professor-Scholar at Stillman College, Tuscaloosa, AL, in May 2015" by doris diosa davenport—an original contributor to But Some of Us Are Brave—highlights the intimacy, hilarity, and poignancy of the daily work of intergenerational critical and creative praxis. In particular, she considers the context of institutions and regions that are sometimes excluded from the imaginary of how and where feminist work happens. davenport transmits the lessons and energy gained through her practice of thinking and gathering otherwise... (shrink)

William James’s theory of emotion has been controversial since its inception, and a basic analysis of Cannon’s critique is provided. Research on the impact of facial expressions, expressive behaviors, and visceral responses on emotional feelings are each reviewed. A good deal of evidence supports James’s theory that these types of bodily feedback, along with perceptions of situational cues, are each important parts of emotional feelings. Extensions to James’s theory are also reviewed, including evidence of individual differences in (...) the effect of bodily responses on emotional experience. (shrink)

Expressivists about normative thought and discourse traditionally deny that there are nondeflationary normative propositions. However, it has recently been suggested that expressivists might avoid a number of problems by providing a theory of normative propositions compatible with expressivism. This paper explores the prospects for developing an expressivist theory of propositions within the framework of cognitive act theories of propositions. First, I argue that the only extant expressivist theory of cognitive propositions—Michael Ridge's ‘ecumenical expressivist’ theory—fails to explain identity conditions for normative (...) propositions. Second, I argue that this failure motivates a general constraint—the ‘unity requirement’—that any expressivist theory of propositions must provide a unified nonrepresentational explanation of that in virtue of which propositional attitudes have the content that they have. Third, I argue that conceptual role accounts of content provide a promising framework in which to develop an expressivist theory of cognitive propositions. (shrink)

The distinction between the "permanent" (will not reverse) and "irreversible" (cannot reverse) cessation of functions is critical to understand the meaning of a determination of death using circulatory–respiratory tests. Physicians determining death test only for the permanent cessation of circulation and respiration because they know that irreversible cessation follows rapidly and inevitably once circulation no longer will restore itself spontaneously and will not be restored medically. Although most statutes of death stipulate irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions, the accepted (...) medical standard is their permanent cessation because permanence is a perfect surrogate indicator for irreversibility, and using it permits a more timely declaration. Therefore, patients properly declared dead in donation after circulatory death (DCD) protocols satisfy the requirements of death statutes and do not violate the dead donor rule. The acronym DCD should represent organ "donation after circulatory death" to clarify that the death standard is the permanent cessation of circulation, not heartbeat. Heart donation in DCD does not retroactively negate the donor's death determination because circulation has ceased permanently. (shrink)

A combination of emerging life support technologies and entrenched organ donation practices are complicating the physician's task of determining death. On the one hand, technologies that support or replace ventilation and circulation may render the diagnosis of death ambiguous. On the other, transplantation of vital organs requires timely and accurate declaration of death of the donor to keep the organs as healthy as possible. These two factors have led to disagreements among physicians and scholars on the precise moment of death. (...) In this article, I suggest that the debate about exactly when a person dies can benefit from distinguishing the strict biological concept of death from the medical standards for determining human death, and I show how an appreciation of the difference between the permanent and irreversible cessation of circulation is helpful in understanding the reasons for the two approaches to determining when death should be declared. (shrink)

The shape of a life hypothesis holds that the temporal sequence of good or bad times in a life can itself be a valuable feature of that life. This is generally thought to be incompatible with additivism about lifetime well-being, which holds that lifetime well-being is fully determined by momentary well-being. This discussion examines Dale Dorsey’s recent argument that these views are in fact compatible. I argue that accepting the conjunction of these views requires stronger commitments than Dorsey recognizes. After (...) arguing that these commitments are problematic, I conclude that we should reject the compatibility claim. (shrink)

The publicity surrounding the recent McMath and Muñoz cases has rekindled public interest in brain death: the familiar term for human death determination by showing the irreversible cessation of clinical brain functions. The concept of brain death was developed decades ago to permit withdrawal of therapy in hopeless cases and to permit organ donation. It has become widely established medical practice, and laws permit it in all U.S. jurisdictions. Brain death has a biophilosophical justification as a standard for determining human (...) death but remains poorly understood by the public and by health professionals. The current controversies over brain death are largely restricted to the academy, but some practitioners express ambivalence over whether brain death is equivalent to human death. Brain death remains an accepted and sound concept, but more work is necessary to establish its biophilosophical justification and to educate health professionals and the public. (shrink)