Introduction Joseph Dunne, Attracta Ingram, Frank Litton This volume of essays has two main objectives: first, to pay tribute to Fergal O'Connor, ...

Catholic University Of America, Philosophical Studies, No. 145, Abstract No. 2.

We are currently facing global healthcare crisis that has placed unprecedented stress on healthcare workers as a result of the coronavirus disease 2019. It is imperative that we develop novel tools to assist healthcare workers in dealing with the significant additional stress and trauma that has arisen as a result of the pandemic. Based in research on the effects of immersive environments on mood, a neuroscience research laboratory was rapidly repurposed using commercially available technologies and materials to create a nature-inspired (...) relaxation space. Frontline healthcare workers were invited to book 15-min experiences in the Recharge Room before, during or after their shifts, where they were exposed to the immersive, multisensory experience 496 Recharge Room users completed a short survey about their experience during an unselected, consecutive 14-day period. Average self-reported stress levels prior to entering the Recharge Room were 4.58/6. After a single 15-min experience in the Recharge Room, the average user-reported stress level was significantly reduced 1.85/6. Net Promoter Score for the experience was 99.3%. Recharge Rooms such as those described here produce significant short-term reductions in perceived stress, and users find them highly enjoyable. These rooms may be of general utility in high-stress healthcare environments. (shrink)

In an increasingly data-driven age of medicine, do companies that offer genetic testing directly to patients represent an important part of personalising care, or a dangerous threat to privacy? Should we celebrate this new mechanism of patient involvement, or fear its implications?The Universities of Oxford and Cambridge addressed these issues in the 10th annual Medical Ethics Varsity Debate, through the motion: “This House Regrets the Rise of Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Testing”. This article summarises and extends key arguments made in the debate, (...) exploring the impacts of such genetic testing on both the individual patient and broader society, with special consideration as to whether companies can ever truly guarantee anonymity of genetic data. (shrink)

In an increasingly data-driven age of medicine, do companies that offer genetic testing directly to patients represent an important part of personalising care, or a dangerous threat to privacy? Should we celebrate this new mechanism of patient involvement, or fear its implications?The Universities of Oxford and Cambridge addressed these issues in the 10th annual Medical Ethics Varsity Debate, through the motion: “This House Regrets the Rise of Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Testing”. This article summarises and extends key arguments made in the debate, (...) exploring the impacts of such genetic testing on both the individual patient and broader society, with special consideration as to whether companies can ever truly guarantee anonymity of genetic data. (shrink)

"Why should we care about having true beliefs? And why do demonstrably false beliefs persist and spread despite consequences for the people who hold them? Philosophers of science Cailin O’Connor and James Weatherall argue that social factors, rather than individual psychology, are what’s essential to understanding the spread and persistence of false belief. It might seem that there’s an obvious reason that true beliefs matter: false beliefs will hurt you. But if that’s right, then why is it irrelevant to many (...) people whether they believe true things or not? In an age riven by "fake news," "alternative facts," and disputes over the validity of everything from climate change to the size of inauguration crowds, the authors argue that social factors, not individual psychology, are what’s essential to understanding the persistence of false belief and that we must know how those social forces work in order to fight misinformation effectively."–Publisher’s description. (shrink)

What makes ethical accounts natural law ethical is, I argue, commonly misrepresented in teaching within much of the philosophical academy. Yet those immersed in the field of natural law and ethics rarely give definitions/brief characterisations of what makes ethical accounts natural law ethical. I suggest theoretical reasons for the lack. I argue that bringing natural law into ethics is best understood as leading to theoretically unitary accounts, not simply collections of positions detachable from each other: an overlooked and significant point (...) when defending natural law ethical accounts. My arguments throughout rely on the metaethical/normative ethical distinction, which is relatively little used in the natural law literature. I argue that the distinction helps clarify what is distinctive of natural law ethical accounts in general, especially to the secular contemporary philosophical academy, where appreciation of natural law ethical accounts is commonly appreciably lower than in philosophical contexts with a religious ethos. (shrink)

This chapter examines the notion of philosophical truth that Adorno, in Negative Dialectics, believes to be possible by means of his changed conception of philosophy. What that examination finds is that philosophical truth, as Adorno recommends it, is realized through “singular” philosophical experiences. The critical question is that of how the truths that are conveyed through “singularity” can be understood to have persuasive force over us, Adorno's readers. Also examined is the relationship between the philosophically authentic “singularity” approach and the (...) critical endeavors evident, in the same book, through Adorno's engagements with a range of figures from the modern philosophical tradition. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Hegel and Negative Dialectic Adorno's Disagreement with Hegel The Hegelianism of Adorno's Critical Theory: An Assessment.

Conversations in Metaphysics: Ever Ancient, Ever New introduces students to metaphysics through a set of contemporary readings based on classical metaphysical texts, thinkers, and concepts. It challenges readers to consider and seek possible answers to questions of metaphysics relative to human knowledge and the nature of reality. Organized historically, the readings endeavor to define and probe the concepts of metaphysics, existence, being, God, evil, and morality from antiquity to the present. The historical lens provides students with deeper context for the (...) contemporary readings and helps them establish a basic knowledge of metaphysics and its place within philosophical tradition. In later readings, students are invited to explore how metaphysics relates to religion, science, and technology in the modern world, as well as how metaphysics has shaped and continues to shape the reality of our universe. Rich with engaging material and endless opportunities for critical thought, Conversations in Metaphysics is an ideal ancillary text for courses in philosophy that call attention to metaphysics and philosophy of religion. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Story Song Prayer.

Plato's Bedroom is a book for people who want to be better at falling in love and being in love, with all the ecstasies and dangers erotic life can bring. It is also an inviting book for readers who are intellectually playful and up for a challenge, written with verve, and full of stories thoughtful persons will find to be mirrors of their own erotic selves. Drawing on Greek myth, Plato, Shakespeare, and a wide range of modern literature and movies, (...) the book gets Aphrodite talking with the young lovers in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and lets us listen in on Woody Allen arguing with Othello. The author's account of how we seek, fear, avoid, and sometimes destroy love, is astonishingly fresh and engaging. Throughout its pages, one hears the voice of an engaging teacher and the conversation of a wise friend. In short, this is a work of practical philosophy, not scholarship, though only a scholar could have written it. It invites readers into a deep appreciation of timeless ancient wisdom through reflecting on their own powers for love and their susceptibility to desire. A distinctive feature of the book is the interweaving of two guiding threads in Plato's conception of erotic experience: androgyny, that is, the integration of masculine and feminine; and creativity, in both a sexual and a spiritual sense. These two aspects of Plato's erotic vision, androgyny and creativity, lead readers to a sense of grateful wonder and sacred awe at our own erotic powers. Our natural experience of romantic love, articulated so well by Plato, points toward a more explicitly religious interpretation of love's commitments and pleasures. (shrink)

Rethinking Cooperation with Evil advances the theological conversation on this topic from both speculative and practical vantage points. To facilitate his argument, Connors utilizes historical analyses that contrast Aquinas's method of moral reasoning with that of the casuist treatment of cooperation. Consequently, the book includes numerous case studies that will be of interest both to moral theologians and readers new to the topic.

Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often implicitly – assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is (...) substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior – hence, there are no obviousa priorigrounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions ofhumannature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges. (shrink)

The life of the man whose pamphlet "Common Sense" became one of the basic tracts of the American Revolution.

The home birth movement in the United States is an alternative health belief system that promotes a model of pregnancy and childbirth contradictory to the conventional biomedical model. The alternative model stresses normalcy and non-intervention and is informed by an ideology that promotes individual authority and responsibility for health and health care. It is founded in an epistemological system that assigns primacy and goodness to the Natural, fuses moral and practical injunctions in the arena of health behavior, and valorizes subjective (...) as well as objective sources of knowledge. ( Natural = as found in nature without technical intervention). Differences of opinion with the conventional medical model of childbirth do not spring from misunderstanding of this model, but from disagreement with it. Members of this movement are typically educated, middle class, and white. Keywords: alternative childbirth, home birth, midwifery, out-of-hospital birth. (shrink)

Most non-human animals live in the wild and it is probable that suffering predominates in their lives due to natural events. Humans may at some point be able to engage in paradise engineering, or the modification of nature and animal organisms themselves, to improve the well-being of wild animals. We may, in other words, make nature 'red in tooth and claw' no more. We argue that this creates a tension between environmental ethics and animal ethics which is likely insurmountable. First, (...) we argue that concern for the environment can be compatible with helping individual wild animals but should see redesigning nature as morally impermissible. Second, we argue that if we are concerned with animal well-being, we may reject that we have a duty to help wild animals even to the point of redesigning nature, but we must nevertheless concede that it is permissible to do so under certain circumstances. We show how this permissibility can be derived from three animal rights views: Tom Regan's, a novel account inspired by Thomas Pogge and a libertarian approach to animal rights. (shrink)

Many human beings have considered the powers and the limits of human knowledge, but few have wondered about the power that the idea of knowledge has over us. Steven Connor's The Madness of Knowledge is the first book to investigate this emotional inner life of knowledge - the lusts, fantasies, dreams, and fears that the idea of knowing provokes. There are in-depth discussions of the imperious will to know, of Freud's epistemophilia (or love of knowledge), and the curiously insistent links (...) between madness, magical thinking, and the desire for knowledge. Connor also probes secrets and revelations, quarreling and the history of quizzes and "general knowledge," charlatanry and pretension, both the violent disdain and the sanctification of the stupid, as well as the emotional investment in the spaces and places of knowledge, from the study to the library. In an age of artificial intelligence, alternative facts, and mistrust of truth, The Madness of Knowledge offers an opulent, enlarging, and sometimes unnerving psychopathology of intellectual life. -- From Publisher, page 2 of cover. (shrink)

In Cajetan's Biblical Commentaries, Michael O'Connor argues that Cajetan's motive was more 'Catholic Reform' than 'Counter-Reformation', and that his method was a bold hybrid of scholasticism and Renaissance humanism, correcting the Vulgate's errors and expounding the text according to the literal sense.

In an era of digital revolution, artificial intelligence, big data and augmented reality, technology has shifted from being a tool of communication to a primary medium of experience and sociality. Some of the most basic human capacities are increasingly being outsourced to machines and we increasingly experience and interpret the world through digital interfaces, with machines becoming ever more ‘social’ beings. Social interaction and human perception are being reshaped in unprecedented ways. This book explores this technologisation of the social and (...) the attendant penetration of permanent liminality into those aspects of the lifeworld where individuals had previously sought some kind of stability and meaning. Through a historical and anthropological examination of this phenomenon, it problematises the underlying logic of limitless technological expansion and our increasing inability to imagine either ourselves or our world in other than technological terms. Drawing on a variety of concepts from political anthropology, including liminality, the trickster, imitation, schismogenesis, participation, and the void, it interrogates the contemporary technological revolution in a manner that will be of interest to sociologists, social and anthropological theorists and scholars of science and technology studies with interests in the digital transformation of social life. -/- Table of Contents -/- Introduction: The Technologisation of the Social: A 21st-Century Megamachine? Paul O’Connor -/- 1. Communication as Theatricalisation: Self-Presentation in the Digital Age Arpad Szakolczai -/- 2. Parasites of the Social: Digital Disruptions of the Labour Market Tom Boland -/- 3. Possessed by Technology: The Metastasis of Absence Agnes Horvath -/- 4. Technologisation of the Social: Symbiosis, Parasitism, or Predation? Daniel Gati -/- 5. J'accuse Zéro: The Technology of Zero and the Making of a Personal Void Ray Griffin -/- 6. Digital Affordances and the Liminal Stephen Turner -/- 7. The Smart Womb: Digital Technologies and the Maze of Trickster Politics Marius Ion Benta -/- 8. Brave New Industry? The Dark Side of Dematerialisation and Industry 4.0 Thomas S.J. Smith -/- 9. ‘What Have You Caught?’: Nannycams and Hidden Cameras as Normalised Surveillance of the Intimate Janos Mark Szakolczai -/- 10. Coercive Visibility: Discipline in the Digital Public Arena Paul O’Connor -/- Conclusion: Is There a Way Out of the Technologisation of the Social? Marius Ion Benta. (shrink)

In her Pharmaceutical Freedom, Jessica Flanigan argues that antibiotics can be regulated consistent with her otherwise largely deregulatory view with respect to pharmaceuticals and recreational drugs. I contend in this essay that the reasons for justifying antibiotic regulation are reasons that can be offered to justify the regulation of many other drugs, both pharmaceutical and recreational. After laying out the specifics of Flanigan’s view, I suggest that it is amenable to the regulation of drugs like varenicline. Though such drugs can (...) legitimately improve the quality of a patient’s life by helping them quit smoking, they could be permissibly regulated if they expose others to impermissible risks. I then argue that recreational drugs like alcohol could be regulated using the same reasoning. In the penultimate section of this essay, I anticipate objections that one might have to my extension of arguments favoring antibiotic regulation to drugs correlated with aggression. Flanigan might find my extrapolation of her view as entirely plausible and accept that her view is relatively friendly to these regulations, or she might reconsider her antibiotic caveat if these regulations are overly paternalistic on her understanding. I conclude by briefly considering the benefits and drawbacks of adopting each view. (shrink)

There exists in academic medicine a core ethical issue that is seldom pursued: trainees are frequently not the best person in the operating room at a given intervention being performed, and yet as a profession we understand a fundamental need to afford them opportunities to perform. Academic centres are traditionally associated with a higher quality of care than non-academic centres, suggesting that practical measures exist within teaching hospitals that effectively mask the clinical discrepancies between trainees and their preceptors. Nonetheless, we (...) are bound by our ethical commitments as physicians to balance the obligations of care with the duty to teach. In order to ethically validate the model of ‘surgeon as teacher’, we propose that there must be a reconciliation of the tensions between traditional professional values in medicine with the constraints inherent in a time-bound utilitarian medical system. Ultimately, we must consciously accept that ensuring the longitudinal availability of skilled surgeons in society aligns more closely with our core ethical obligations as outlined in the social contract that medical professionals maintain with the general public than does the ethical demand to provide unreservedly individual-focused patient care. It is the duty of individual practitioners, as a necessity of lineage to maintain and fulfil our greater duties to society, to foster deontological relationships where possible within this utilitarian system while accepting short-term imperfection in our practice. There are no data in this manuscript. (shrink)

"First published by Oxford University Press, 1916."--Title page verso.

Does all conscious experience essentially involve self-consciousness? In his Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person, Dan Zahavi answers “yes”. I criticize three core arguments offered in support of this answer—a well-known regress argument, what I call the “interview argument,” and a phenomenological argument. Drawing on Sartre, I introduce a phenomenological contrast between plain experience and self-conscious experience. The contrast challenges the thesis that conscious experience entails self-consciousness.

The defection thesis holds that members of marginalized social groups are obligated not to express views important to others in the group that are regarded by the others as substantively wrong. In this essay, I evaluate arguments that seek to vindicate the defection thesis and conclude they all fail. Then, I argue that we have reason to believe sanctioning defectors in certain ways is wrongful and that the expression of their contentious ideas is good for members of marginalized groups. We (...) are left to conclude both that members of marginalized groups have no obligation to suppress certain heterodox views and that it is likely wrong to sanction them for expressing these views even if it were wrong for them to do so. (shrink)

Since the very beginning, Confucianism has been troubled by a serious gap between its political ideals and the reality of societal circumstances. Contemporary Confucians must develop a viable method of governance that can retain the spirit of the Confucian ideal while tackling problems arising from nonideal modern situations. The best way to meet this challenge, Joseph Chan argues, is to adopt liberal democratic institutions that are shaped by the Confucian conception of the good rather than the liberal conception of (...) the right.Confucian Perfectionism examines and reconstructs both Confucian political thought and liberal democratic institutions, blending them to form a new Confucian political philosophy. Chan decouples liberal democratic institutions from their popular liberal philosophical foundations in fundamental moral rights, such as popular sovereignty, political equality, and individual sovereignty. Instead, he grounds them on Confucian principles and redefines their roles and functions, thus mixing Confucianism with liberal democratic institutions in a way that strengthens both. Then he explores the implications of this new yet traditional political philosophy for fundamental issues in modern politics, including authority, democracy, human rights, civil liberties, and social justice.Confucian Perfectionism critically reconfigures the Confucian political philosophy of the classical period for the contemporary era. (shrink)

Joseph J. Fins calls for a reconsideration of severe brain injury treatment, including discussion of public policy and physician advocacy.

José Benardete developed a famous paradox involving a beginningless set of items each member of which satisfies some predicate just in case no earlier member satisfies it. The Grim Reaper version of this paradox has recently been employed in favor of various finitist metaphysical theses, ranging from temporal finitism to causal finitism to the discrete nature of time. Here, I examine a new challenge to these finitist arguments—namely, the challenge of implying that the future cannot be endless. In particular, I (...) develop future-oriented Benardete paradoxes and examine their epistemic symmetry with past-oriented paradoxes. (shrink)

In their forthcoming article, ‘What makes a medical intervention invasive?’ De Marco, Simons, and colleagues explore the meaning and usage of the term ‘invasive’ in medical contexts. They describe a ‘Standard Account’, drawn from dictionary definitions, which defines invasiveness as ‘incision of the skin or insertion of an object into the body’. They then highlight cases wherein invasiveness is employed in a manner that is inconsistent with this account (eg, in describing psychotherapy) to argue that the term invasiveness is often (...) used to explicitly or implicitly reference interventions that do not fall under the standard account. The authors offer an alternative ‘schematic’ definition of invasiveness, whereby medical interventions entail an underlying context-independent property of ‘basic invasiveness’ and may be understood both relative to each other and to a context-specific threshold of what is ‘invasive’. 1 We propose that the meaning of terms such as ‘invasiveness’ is necessarily heterogeneous,... (shrink)