_A penetrating and provocative exploration of human mortality, from Epicurus to Joan Didion_ For those who don’t believe in an afterlife, the wisdom of the ages offers four great consolations for mortality: that death is benign and good; that mortal life provides its own kind of immortality; that true immortality would be awful; and that we experience the kinds of losses in life that we will eventually face in death. Can any of these consolations honestly reconcile us to our (...) inevitable demise? In this timely book, Andrew Stark tests the psychological truth of these consolations and searches our collective literary, philosophical, and cultural traditions for answers to the question of how we, in the twenty-first century, might accept our mortal condition. Ranging from Epicurus and Heidegger to bucket lists, the flaming out of rock stars, and the retiring of sports jerseys, Stark’s poignant and learned exploration shows how these consolations, taken together, reveal death as a blessing no matter how much we may love life. (shrink)

This article undertakes a history of labor as seen through acknowledgment sections of the journals of the History of Science Society—Isis and Osiris—and documents what has been intentionally removed from acknowledgments over the decades. It focuses on the Society’s editorial office, with special attention to the career of manuscript editor Joan Vandegrift. Alongside a reading of select printed acknowledgments, this article offers a vernacular history of labor and identifies a paradox: the web of people and things included in acknowledgments (...) expanded amid an intentional, systematic exclusion of paid editorial staff. Over the century, acknowledgments in the Society’s journals echoed changes in the historiography—as the field shifted from stories of atomized individuals discovering truths to accounts of sociopolitical relationships through which knowledge was crafted. Historical work has always depended on relationships of various forms, but the acknowledgment of these interdependences began to appear only in the 1970s as feminist and postcolonial approaches to scholarship emerged. At the same time, acknowledgment of direct paid labor of Society employees, who improved and manifested historians’ publications, was actively removed from articles. In the process, editorial staff such as Joan Vandegrift were excluded from one of the few historical records of their labor and from the economies of credit that structure publishing industries. Overall, the aim of this piece is to support better understanding, continued rewriting, and ongoing transformation of the labor inequalities in our field. (shrink)

There is little fear that the concept of motivational bias as proposed by Mele is likely to dampen the current academic ferment (see Mele's Introduction) with respect to self-deception for several reasons: (a) like philosophy, science has more recently abandoned the heuristic of a rational human mind; (b) the concept is parsimonious, applicable to many research topics other than self-deception, and, therefore, scientifically serviceable; (c) as a proximal mechanism it addresses process rather than function, that is, how rather than why (...) questions; (d) it is not as interesting a question as why there is a high prevalence of “real” self-deception (i.e., “garden-variety self-deception” as described by Mele, see sect. 6); and (e) a more penetrating issue is whether “real” self-deception is adaptive. (shrink)

Book-carrying styles of 1,133 school-age children (kindergarten through high school) were observed, and anatomical measurements (hips, waist, and underarm) of the space between the trunk and fall line of the arm in 735 of the students was recorded. With the exception of handedness, the results replicated those of earlier studies of sexual differences in bookcarrying styles and implicated the protrusion of female hips as instrumental in this phenomenon.

Inside Notes From the Outside wrestles with issues that have loomed over anyone who has had to come to terms with concrete, pragmatic questions regarding identity within the interacting spheres of race, gender, class, and power. Based on the premise that discourse regarding these issues tend to be cast into a relationship of powerful vs. powerless, the author contends that power is not a fixed thing, but a subtle, complex matrix that shifts over time. A thoughtful approach toward issues of (...) cultural difference, Inside Notes From the Outside provides a sincere and uniquely interior perspective on identity formation. (shrink)

With each novel infectious disease outbreak, there is scholarly attention to healthcare providers’ obligation to assume personal risk while they care for infected patients. While most agree that healthcare providers have a duty to assume some degree of risk, the extent of this obligation remains uncertain. Furthermore, these analyses rarely examine healthcare institutions’ obligations during these outbreaks. As a result, there is little practical guidance for healthcare institutions that are forced to weigh whether or when to exclude healthcare providers from (...) providing care or allow them to opt out from providing care to protect themselves. This article uses the COVID-19 pandemic to examine the concept of risk and the professional duties of both healthcare providers and healthcare institutions, and proposes a framework that can be used to make concrete institutional policy choices. This framework should be a useful tool for any hospital, clinic, or health agency that must make these choices during the current pandemic and beyond. (shrink)

Reviewing one of Derrida's books necessarily entails steering a path that avoids two sirens--the Scylla of oversimplifying or reducing, when confronted with a movement of thought which evolves deliberately in order to subvert categories, or the Charybdis of being merely mimetic and repetitive, fossilizing the strategies and gestures that have become identified with a signature that has achieved a peculiar singularity and currency. Such a path perhaps begins with the acknowledgement that Derrida is a philosopher who poses philosophical questions to (...) texts, wherever they come from, and to textuality as such. (shrink)

This paper aims to trace the evolution of Bachelard's thought as he gropes toward a concrete formulation of a philosophy of the imagination. Reverie, the creative daydream, occupies the central position in Bachelard's emerging metaphysic, which becomes increasingly “phenomenological” in a manner reminiscent of Husserl. This means that although Bachelard does not use Husserlian terms, he appropriates the following features of (Husserlian) phenomenology: 1. a desire to “embracket” the initial (rationalistic) impulse; and 2. an aspiration to apprehend in its entirety, (...) the creative epiphany of an image. Ultimately, this paper aims to show that there is a sense in which Bachelard's metaphysical concerns in his poetics are an outgrowth of (rather than radical break from) his earlier scientific and epistemological concerns. What results in reverie is an aesthetic intentionality providing a metaphysic of the imagination: the aesthetic object, such as fire or water, is an object only insofar as it enables/calls forth a subject to enter into a receptive, self-aware and cosmic state of being; subject-ness and object-ness are intimately and archetypally intertwined. Bachelard's “new poetics” results from his transplantation/cross-fertilization of the general epistemology of the “new scientific spirit” on to/across his aesthetics. (shrink)

Levinas’s Humanism of the Other may be seen as a meditation of King Lear. His philosophy offers what a critique of traditional and modern anti-humanism urgently needs: an ethics that precedes being. It provides a necessary ethical foundation needed to investigate questions of the human and humanity that Shakespeare examines so thoroughly in this powerful tragedy. Prefiguring Levinas’s later philosophy, Shakespeare dramatizes this humanism of the other through the suffering and vulnerability of the body. Lear’s and Gloucester’s parallel journeys are (...) both grounded in this vulnerability of the body and fragility of the mind that lead them to a humanism of the other. Moreover, the ethical good that precedes ontology, the saying, is profoundly staged through the characters of Cordelia and Edgar. This vision of King Lear, therefore, underlies and informs Levinas’s radical critique of traditional humanism and contemporary anti-humanism in his insistence on a humanism of the other. (shrink)

El liberalisme polític és la ideologia o tradició política dominant de les nostres democràcies occidentals. Ho és tant des del punt de vista històric, pel que fa a les seves conquestes institucionals, com des del punt de vista del pensament, pel.

Advance care planning (ACP) is a process that seeks to elicit patients’ goals, values, and preferences for future medical care. While most commonly employed in adult patients, pediatric ACP is becoming a standard of practice for adolescent and young adult patients with potentially life-limiting illnesses. The majority of research has focused on patients and their families; little attention has been paid to the perspectives of healthcare providers (HCPs) regarding their perspectives on the process and its potential benefits and limitations. Focus (...) groups were conducted with 15 physicians as part of a larger study of adolescent and young adult ACP in hematopoietic stem cell transplant (HSCT) patients. This study identified two categories important to the utility of ACP in pediatric HSCT patients; (1) the temporal context of ACP and decision making and (2) the limitations of pediatric ACP, with subcategories identified as (a) embodied and witnessed knowing, (b) the impact of clinical cascades—when the treatment of one organ system creates complications in another system that needs to be treated—and a creation of a “new normal” following complications of illness and its treatment in the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU), (c) the balancing of adolescents’ autonomy with their capacity to make informed medical decisions, and (d) the epistemological frames that differ between HCP and patients and their families. These findings support ACP in adolescent and young adult HSCT patients, with a number of implications for practice as this process becomes more common. (shrink)

In this article I intend to show that the inference problem, one of the main objections raised against the anti-Humean theory of natural laws defended by Dretske, Tooley and Armstrong (?DTA theory? for short), can be successfully answered. First, I argue that a proper solution should meet two essential requirements that the proposals made by the DTA theorists do not satisfy. Then I state a solution to the inference problem that assumes a local immanentistic view of universals, a partial definition (...) of the nomic necessitation relation as a relation of existential dependence, and a principle constraining multiple occupancy. I also argue that my solution meets the two requirements. Finally, I deal with non-standard laws such as exclusion laws, causal laws and laws involving spatiotemporal parameters. (shrink)

Machine Learning (ML) is on the rise in medicine, promising improved diagnostic, therapeutic and prognostic clinical tools. While these technological innovations are bound to transform health care, they also bring new ethical concerns to the forefront. One particularly elusive challenge regards discriminatory algorithmic judgements based on biases inherent in the training data. A common line of reasoning distinguishes between justified differential treatments that mirror true disparities between socially salient groups, and unjustified biases which do not, leading to misdiagnosis and erroneous (...) treatment. In the curation of training data this strategy runs into severe problems though, since distinguishing between the two can be next to impossible. We thus plead for a pragmatist dealing with algorithmic bias in healthcare environments. By recurring to a recent reformulation of William James’s pragmatist understanding of truth, we recommend that, instead of aiming at a supposedly objective truth, outcome-based therapeutic usefulness should serve as the guiding principle for assessing ML applications in medicine. (shrink)

On June 28, 1993, the United States Supreme Court ruled on the admissibility of expert scientific opinion and evidence in federal court cases. The importance of the case can be measured by the interest it stimulated. The scientific community turned out in particular force to register its views. At the heart of the controversy was a debate over the nature of scientific knowledge and its relation to law. More than any other Supreme Court case in recent memory, the amici seemed (...) to view the Daubert case both as posing a potential challenge to basic scientific premises and as an opportunity to reclaim a lost prerogative to determine how science is applied in courts. (shrink)

Renaissance humanist Joan Lluís Vives explained his views on Law, its origin, its elements, and its corruption mainly in the De disciplinis (1531). However, he had already outlined some relevant key notions in early works such as the Praefatio in Leges Ciceronis (1514) and, especially, the Aedes legum (1519). The aim of this article is twofold: on the one hand, to provide the reader with a succinct introduction to the latter work and, on the other hand, to identify some (...) of its key concepts and describe their meaning. (shrink)