Abstract:Therapeutic misconception (TM)—when clinical research participants fail to adequately grasp the difference between participating in a clinical trial and receiving ordinary clinical care—has long been recognized as a significant problem in consent to clinical trials. We suggest that TM does not primarily reflect inadequate disclosure or participants’ incompetence. Instead, TM arises from divergent primary cognitive frames. The researchers’ frame places the clinical trial in the context of scientific designs for assessing intervention efficacy. In contrast, most participants have a cognitive frame (...) that is personal and focused primarily on their medical problems. To illustrate this, we draw on interview material from both clinical researchers and participants in clinical trials. We suggest that reducing TM requires encouraging subjects to adjust their frame, not just add information to their existing frame. What is necessary is ascientific reframingof participation in a clinical trial. (shrink)

Ecological feminism is the position that there are important connections-historical, symbolic, theoretical-between the domination of women and the domination of nonhuman nature. I argue that because the conceptual connections between the dual dominations of women and nature are located in an oppressive patriarchal conceptual framework characterized by a logic of domination, (1) the logic of traditional feminism requires the expansion of feminism to include ecological feminism and (2) ecological feminism provides a framework for developing a distinctively feminist environmental ethic. I (...) conclude that any feminist theory and any environmental ethic which fails to take seriously the interconnected dominations of women and nature is simply inadequate. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Cognitive Linguistics Jahrgang: 26 Heft: 2 Seiten: 331-359.

Social scientists have offered a number of explanations for why Americans commonly deny that human-caused climate change is real. In this paper, I argue that these explanations neglect an important group of climate change deniers: those who say they are on the side of science while also rejecting what they know most climate scientists accept. I then develop a “nature of science” hypothesis that does account for this group of deniers. According to this hypothesis, people have serious misconceptions about what (...) scientific inquiry ought to look like. Their misconceptions interact with partisan biases to produce denial of human-caused climate change. After I develop this hypothesis, I propose ways of confirming that it is true. Then I consider its implications for efforts to combat climate change denial and for other cases of public rejection of science. (shrink)

The disappearance of Catharine Macaulay’s eighteenth-century defense of the doctrines that justified the seventeeth-century republican parliament, has served to obscure an important strand of enlightenment faith, that was active in the lead up to the American and French Revolutions, and that also played a significant role in the history of feminism. This faith was made up of two intertwined strands, ‘Christian eudaimonism’ and ‘rational altruism’. Dominant contemporary accounts of the origins of republicanism and democratic theory during the eighteenth-century have excluded (...) serious consideration of Macaulay’s writing. Bringing her works into the mix, both poses difficulties for certain genealogies of the political thought of the period, and tends to favour a once popular view, which emphasized the centrality of Locke. Nevertheless, the Locke whose influence is found in Macaulay’s writing is not the possessive individualist, or rational egoist, that he and other liberals have been represented as being, but rather a rational altruist, whose political philosophy is grounded in natural law and harks back to Milton. This same philosophy provides the philosophical foundations for Wollstonecraft’s two most significant political texts, the Vindication of the Rights of Men and Vindcation of the Rights of Woman. (shrink)

This is a timely re-appraisal of feminist political thinkers and their male contemporaries, providing a re-evaluation of feminist humanism.

I consider the relationship between scientific practice and the philosophical debate surrounding biological individuality. I argue for the sensitivity account, on which biologists do not require a resolution to the individuality debate. This view puts me in disagreement with much of the literature on biological individuality, where it has become common to claim that there is a relationship of dependence between biologists’ conceptions of individuality and the quality of their empirical work.

I identify a controversial hypothesis in evolutionary biology called the plasticity-first hypothesis. I argue that the plasticity-first hypothesis is underdetermined and that the most popular means of studying the plasticity-first hypothesis are insufficient to confirm or disconfirm it. I offer a strategy for overcoming this problem. Researchers need to develop a richer middle range theory of plasticity-first evolution that allows them to identify distinctive empirical traces of the hypothesis. They can then use those traces to discriminate between rival explanations of (...) evolutionary episodes. The best tools for developing such a middle range theory are experimental evolution and formal modelling. (shrink)

We may create a catch-22 so that only people who are unlikely to need health insurance can afford it.... Genetic risk testing is important because it exposes the logic of a system that provides access to health insurance to those least likely to need it.

There is a disconnect between the central place that Hobbes now occupies in the presumed history of democratic republicanism, and the fortunes of his political philosophy during the period leading up to the American and French revolutions. Given the central place that Hobbes’s political ideas are now accorded in the history of liberal democracy, this is a surprising fact. One of the few eighteenth-century works to engage with Hobbes was Catharine Macaulay’s critical, Loose Remarks on certain positions to be found (...) in Mr Hobbes’s “Philosophical rudiments of government and society, first published in 1767. This chapter locates Macaulay’s polemic in the context of critiques and editions of Hobbes’s political philosophy, published earlier in the century, in particular the English edition of his works and the translation of Richard Cumberland’s De legibus naturae disquisition philosophica, which both appeared in 1750. It compares Macaulay’s critique with Cumberland’s and suggests that there are features of Macaulay’s treatment of Hobbes’s ideas which help explain how it has been possible for them to have come to occupy the central place they now enjoy in the history of democratic thought, as it is now taught, despite the fact that his philosophy was almost universally rejected by democratic republicans during the eighteenth century and thus had little to do with the actual genesis of Western democratic institutions. (shrink)

Although prior work on ethical decision-making has examined the direct impact of magnitude of consequences as well as the direct impact of emotions on ethical judgments, the current research examines the interaction of these two constructs. Building on previous research finding disgust to have a varying impact on ethical judgments depending on the specific behavior being evaluated, we investigate how disgust, as well as happiness and sadness, moderates the effect of magnitude of consequences on an individual’s judgments of another person’s (...) unethical behavior. Specifically, we propose and find that because disgust and happiness are both associated with more heuristic-based processing, they both lead to a stronger reliance on the magnitude of consequences when forming ethical judgments. In contrast, because sad and neutral emotional states are associated with more systematic processing, they both result in a weaker reliance on the magnitude of consequences. As such, the effect of magnitude of consequences on judgments of unethical behaviors is stronger when individuals making the judgments are experiencing disgust or happiness versus sadness or a neutral state. This research shows that ethical judgment severity is contingent on individual-level factors, particularly the current emotional state being experienced by the individual, interacting with magnitude of consequences to impact the ethical decision-making process. (shrink)

This article begins with clarification of the notion of progress. The author believes that it is possible to consider progress objectively, if by progress we understand a positive change in the effectiveness of something. He mentions two types of progress: progress of improvement and progress of augmentation. He then distinguishes evaluative from reflective philosophy. Evaluative philosophy gives answers to the second and third of Kant's famous three questions; reflective philosophy answers the first, dealing with the limits of human knowledge. Progress (...) in evaluative philosophy takes the form of augmentation. But in reflective philosophy it could take the form of improvement. The author believes, however, that it is not an easy task to improve contemporary social philosophy. Three main obstacles are: the “anthropological turn” in philosophy, the challenge of postmodernism, and the turning of social philosophy into a kind of useful knowledge. (shrink)

Margaret Jacob and Jonathan Israel have offered somewhat different accounts of what they call the ‘Radical Enlightenment’, that is those elements of enlightenment thought which resulted in the radical political upheavals of the late eighteenth century and the rise of democratic republicanism. Jonathan Israel, in particular, insists that the radical enlightenment was radical both in its secular rejection of all providentialist and teleological metaphysics, as well as radical in its democratic tendencies. This paper looks at the way in which Catharine (...) Macaulay’s very influential defence of the equal rights of men, during the lead up to the American and French revolutions, poses problems for Israel’s account of the radical enlightenment and argues that the religious foundation of her political radicalism was characteristic of many of her contemporaries and fits in better with Jacob’s more ecumenical account of the radical enlightenment than with Israel’s purely secular characterisation. (shrink)

This paper explores and reflects upon the literature and several mini case studies to recommend a change of focus for the linking management and development of community participants and community organisations. This change of focus looks at complexity and patterns that arise from the multitude of social interactions; the support and development of individuals and the effect this can have on an organisation’s wellbeing; and the effect a community organisation can have on that of the individual. To gain insight into (...) wellbeing, people need to be aware of their mind, body and energy and how they affect others. There is evidence that terminally ill people who have found new beliefs have experienced a spontaneous remission of disease. Humanity evolves in the same way as we control our destiny. We can learn to love, respect, trust, and commit to each other and work in harmony, or we can foster disharmony resulting in failure and negative feelings. As the economy changes, community organisations are under threat of extinction. Just as species and humanity evolve, we suggest that community organisations need to evolve to ensure wellbeing. (shrink)

Research on leadership has either ignored women or focused on sex differences. This paper illustrates how both of these strategies have been detrimental to women. An alternative conception based on sex-role orientation is presented and the research relating androgyny to leadership style and managerial effectiveness is reviewed. It is proposed that adopting an androgynous management style may help women to overcome the negative effects of sex-stereotyping in the workplace.

Despite the growing literature on childhood obesity and lifestyle intervention programmes focusing on weight loss, few studies have examined young persons’ experiences of being identified as candidates for such programmes and of participating in them. This paper does so. Juxtaposing insights from phenomenology with an approach inspired by Foucault, the paper shows how teenage girls’ bodily self-perception and bodily self-awareness are shaped in intercorporeal assemblages comprising other people and specific features or elements of the lifestyle programme. Inspired by van Manen’s (...) hermeneutic-phenomenological approach, with its point of departure in lived experience, this paper draws on interviews with Norwegian teenage girls participating in the same lifestyle programme and identifies three core thematic aspects of the girls’ experiences: being identified as a candidate for a lifestyle programme and not wanting this; negotiating the lack of weight loss and the scales; and bodily situated agency – feeling good and being able. Permeating all three themes are two central, interrelated phenomena: agency and resistance. Furthermore, the paper shows how a combination of Foucauldian insights and a phenomenological understanding of intercorporeality can help to shed light on the power, affective, material and temporal dimensions of dys-appearance, as well as those of eu-appearance, and thus contribute to the understanding of the girls’ narrated lived experiences. On the basis of these findings, we argue that weight-related treatment goals are not necessarily compatible with the strengthening of adolescents’ body images and self-esteem. However, whilst being obliged to attend to their bodies while in the programme, the girls also encountered unexpected, positive bodily feelings and experiences. Such events, we suggest, offer a means of resisting the more troubling dys-appearing bodily situations our participants described so powerfully. (shrink)

Traces women's defence of their moral and spiritual equality with men, from the works of Christine de Pizan, through Marguerite of Navarre, Madeleine de Scudéry, Arcangela Tarabotti, to Mary Astell and Mary Wollstonecraft, arguing that although she appears not to have been aware of these precursors, the arguments they developed paved the way for her feminism.

Although Catharine Macaulay was a contract theorist and early feminist her philosophy is not based on a concept of liberty like that of Hobbes, but on a notion of individual liberty as self government close to that accepted by Mary Astell. This raises the question of whether criticisms of liberal feminism which assume that it is rooted in Hobbes's suspect notion of freedom and consent may miss there mark.

New media can change the way that artifacts are constructed and used. Changes in these artifacts, in turn, will be reflected in work practices and processes. This article draws on an empirical investigation of the impact of computer-based technologies on classical scholarship to discuss some of the ramifications that a switch in medium may have for work. The article defines both traditional and computer-based tools as "packages" that consist of artifacts, skill sets, data, beliefs about the work process, and organizational (...) infrastructures, and applies the package metaphor to understand the multiple levels of changes taking place within classics as the use of textual databanks becomes more prevalent. (shrink)

Catharine Macaulay’s The History of England challenges Hume’s interpretation of the history of the Stuarts, as developed in his The History of Great Britain, and is grounded in meta-ethical, religious, and political principles that are also fundamentally opposed to those developed by Hume, as she makes clear in her Treatise on the Immutabilty of Moral Truth. Here it is argued that the contrast between them poses a problem for a number of recent accounts of the enlightenment period, and that Macaulay’s (...) work demonstrates that one path to radical politics went via an optimistic strand of intellectualist theism. Macaulay’s ‘republican’ history, which was read on both sides of the Atlantic as justifying the overthrow of arbitrary governments, was grounded in conceptions of liberty, virtue, and sincere theistic belief, similar to those of the Cambridge Platonists. By contrast, Hume’s moral and religious scepticism led naturally to the political conservatism evident in his history. This paper offers an outline of their alternative accounts of the significance of the two English revolutions, and the opposing metaphysical and meta-ethical positions that underpin those accounts. It concludes with a discussion of the contrast between their concepts of liberty and their consequent very different evaluations of the value of liberty. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the connection between Catharine Macaulay’s views on freedom of the will and her promotion of the cause of political liberty and show that the position she develops has its origins in Locke’s philosophy. I argue for the existence of a distinctive ‘Lockean’ conception of political liberty, which is grounded in an account of moral agency, and which does not fit very well into contemporary characterizations of negative, republican, or positive liberty. I demonstrate that this concept (...) of political liberty was widely disseminated during the eighteenth century and can be found in the writing of many of Macaulay’s female contemporaries, both in Great Britain and on the Continent. Recognizing this ‘Lockean’ conception of political liberty is important for understanding the connection between the idea of enlightenment and radical movements promoting political reform. Furthermore, acknowledging its widespread influence throws doubt on Jonathan Israel’s recent attempt to overthrow standard histories—according to which Locke’s rational religion is foundational for radical politics during the period—as well as Israel’s attempt to replace such standard histories with an account that locates the impetus for political reform in metaphysical monism and religious skepticism. (shrink)

Levy’s essay (2011) claims that some intuitions leading to one’s moral judgments can be unreliable, and he proposes the use of a more reliable, third party, empirical measure. It is commendable that Levy attempts to work beyond traditional bounds; however, the author’s use of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data is questionable in supporting an argument about intentionality. As neuroscientists, we rely upon evidence-based thinking and conclusions to create generalizable knowledge, and while fMRI data can be informative in broad correlational (...) accounts of behavior, to rely upon these data as reliable measures of intuition is arguably just as speculative as the first-person account. It is of deep concern that society may attempt to apply these data in the manner Levy describes. Indeed, alarming misappropriation of fMRI and electroencephalography. (shrink)

Yih, Uusberg, Qian, and Gross proposed an appraisal approach to help conceptualize five different states that researchers have used as neutral control conditions. This approach has the poten...

I argue that for those who migrate to other countries for economic survival and political asylum, historical trauma wounds across geographical space. Using the work of David Eng and Nadine Naber on queer and feminist diasporas, I contend that homogeneous discourses of Filipino nationalism simplify and erase transphobia, homophobia, and heterosexism, giving rise to intergenerational conflict and the passing-on of trauma among activists in the United States. Focusing on Filipina/o/x American activist organizations, I center intergenerational conflict among leaders, highlighting transphobic (...) and homophobic struggles that commonly arise in cisgender women majority spaces. I contextualize these struggles, linking them to traumas inherited through legacies of colonialism, feudalism, imperialism, hetero-patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy. I inquire: how does historical and personal trauma merge and shape activist relationships and conflict, and what are activists doing to disrupt and work through historical trauma? I advocate for a decolonizing approach for “acting out” and “working through” trauma and healing collectively. By exploring conflict in organizations shaped by dominant Filipino nationalist ideologies, I resist romantic notions of the diaspora. Revealing the ways that dominant Filipino nationalism perpetuates a simultaneous erasure of nonnormative histories and bodies and epistemological and interpersonal violence among activists, I reject homogeneous conceptions of nationalism and open up possibilities for decolonial organizing praxis. (shrink)

Contributing to the debate between referentialist and predicativist accounts of the semantics of proper names, this paper partly endorses a recent trend to reject unitary accounts of their semantics. It does so by restoring a Fregean version of the variety of use account. It criticizes alternative variety of use accounts for not clearly distinguishing pragmatic, syntactic, and semantic issues and argues that, once these are distinguished, the necessity of accepting that names have a variety of uses, and are sometimes logical (...) singular terms and at others logical predicates shows that Frege’s claim, that we should recognize that names have both reference and sense, is vindicated. (shrink)

The ‘celebrated’ Catharine Macaulay was both lauded and execrated during the eighteenth century for her republican politics and her unconventional life. This comprehensive biography in the “life and letters” tradition situates her works in their political and social context and offers an unprecedented, detailed account of the content and influence of her writing, the arguments she developed in her eight volume history of England, and her other political, ethical, and educational works. Her disagreements with conservative opponents, David Hume, Edmund Burke, (...) and Samuel Johnson are developed in detail, as is her influence on more progressive admirers such as Thomas Jefferson, Jacques-Pierre Brissot, Mercy Otis Warren, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Macaulay emerges as a coherent and influential political voice, whose attitudes and aspirations were typical of those enlightenment republicans who based their progressive politics in rational religion. She looked back to the seventeenth century levelers and parliamentarians as important precursors of the struggles for liberty and political rights that she advocated for Great Britain, America, and France. Her defence of republican liberty and the equal rights of men offers an important corrective to certain misleading contemporary accounts of the origins of democratic republicanism during this crucial period. (shrink)

Louise Keralio-Robert began publishing translations, novels, history, and a collection of women’s works in the decade prior to the French Revolution. She was a republican journalist during its initial stages and then, after a period of obscurity, returned to publishing translations and novels at the end of the first decade of the nineteenth century. This article offers an overview of the works produced during these three periods of her literary endeavour and defends her against the charge of having been ‘une (...) pionnière du républicanisme sexiste’. It argues that Keralio-Robert sees certain traditional feminine characteristics as valuable antidotes to pre- and post-revolutionary fanaticism and that she proposes that an ideally virtuous character will combine ‘masculine’ greatness of heart and firmness of spirit with ‘feminine’ sweetness, modesty, and charity. (shrink)

Tracing her intellectual development from her university years, when she was trained in a Cartesian and neo-Kantian philosophical tradition, to her final decade, during which she was recognised as having inspired the emerging strands of late twentieth-century feminism, Beauvoir is shown to have been among the most influential philosophical voices of the mid twentieth century. Countering the recent trend to read her in isolation from Sartre, she is shown to have both adopted, adapted, and influenced his philosophy, most importantly through (...) encouraging him to engage with Hegel and to consider our relations with others. The Second Sex is read in the light of her existentialist humanism and ultimately faulted for having succumbed too uncritically to the masculine myth that it is men who are solely responsible for society's intellectual and cultural history. (shrink)

This volume brings together all the available letters between historian Catharine Macaulay and a number of eighteenth-century luminaries, including George Washington, David Hume, and Mary Wollstonecraft. It includes an extended introduction by the editor which offers unique insights into Macaulay's life and the thinking of her friends and correspondents.

Examines the relationship between the Chapelet des vertues which has been claimed to be a source for Christine de Pizan's Epistre Othea and argues that the direction of influence was in the other direction.

The purpose of this paper is three-fold: first, to argue that Martin Heidegger’s account of Dasein’s state-of-mind has implications for a Heideggarian understanding of social atmosphere or “mood,” itself understood as the domain in which we realize our meaningful attachment to the world; second, to link Heidegger’s account of Dasein to sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s analysis of affective labour in order to underscore Hochschild’s critique of affective labour by showing it to occur at the very site of our free and meaningful (...) involvement in the world; third, to demonstrate the relevance of Heidegger’s analysis to concrete sociological analysis. I begin by arguing that Heidegger’s existential account of affective life reveals affective life as: an accomplished attachment to worldly specificities, grounded on socially constituted significance, and our responsibility. Second, showing Hochschild’s account of emotions to be compatible with Heidegger’s work, I consider Hochschild’s analysis of airline stewardesses, clarifying how the affective lives of individuals and the shared, public dimension of affective life are both undermined by affective labour, specifically in terms of the way that communicative interactions are manipulated in commercial settings. Resulting from the manipulation of affective life by companies are various challenges to our freedom: an inability to find meaningful projects; a lack of substantial measures in terms of which to choose our projects; and the inability to recognize such choices as constitutive of affective life and as our responsibility. Connecting these consequences to the three aspects of affective life noted above, it is concluded that affective labour threatens the inherently social character of freedom and also suppresses and inhibits the existential involvement in the world through which we realize meaningfully our freedom. (shrink)