Imagine that you are a teenager and have cancer. You undergo a year of chemotherapy and after a brief return to normal life, you have a relapse. Your physician says that chemotherapy and radiation therapy could be tried, but a bone marrow transplant is your only chance of a real cure. He tells you and your parents that you could die as a result of complications from the transplant, but without it you would only be expected to live one year. (...) You and your family discuss the alternatives and decide to have the transplant. You ask what will happen if the BMT fails, but both your physician and your family tell you that right now you must fight to get better and not think negative thoughts. You do not ask any more questions. (shrink)

Imagine that you are a teenager and have cancer. You undergo a year of chemotherapy and after a brief return to normal life, you have a relapse. Your physician says that chemotherapy and radiation therapy could be tried, but a bone marrow transplant is your only chance of a real cure. He tells you and your parents that you could die as a result of complications from the transplant, but without it you would only be expected to live one year. (...) You and your family discuss the alternatives and decide to have the transplant. You ask what will happen if the BMT fails, but both your physician and your family tell you that right now you must fight to get better and not think negative thoughts. You do not ask any more questions. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced developmental researchers to rethink their traditional research practices. The growing need to study infant development at a distance has shifted our research paradigm to online and digital monitoring of infants and families, using electronic devices, such as smartphones. In this practical guide, we introduce the Experience Sampling Method – a research method to collect data, in the moment, on multiple occasions over time – for examining infant development at a distance. ESM is highly suited for (...) assessing dynamic processes of infant development and family dynamics, such as parent-infant interactions and parenting practices. It can also be used to track highly fluctuating family dynamics and routines. The aim of the current paper was to provide an overview by explaining what ESM is and for what types of research ESM is best suited. Next, we provide a brief step-by-step guide on how to start and run an ESM study, including preregistration, development of a questionnaire, using wearables and other hardware, planning and design considerations, and examples of possible analysis techniques. Finally, we discuss common pitfalls of ESM research and how to avoid them. (shrink)

This book explores the scope and limits of the concept of personDS a vexed question in contemporary philosophy. The author begins by questioning the methodology of thought-experimentation, arguing that it engenders inconclusive and unconvincing results, and that truth is stranger than fiction. She then examines an assortment of real-life conditions, including infancy, insanity andx dementia, dissociated states, and split brains. The popular faith in continuity of consciousness, and the unity of the person is subjected to sustained criticism. The author concludes (...) with a look at different views of the person found in Homer, Aristotle, the post-Cartesians, and contemporary cognitive science. (shrink)

Commissurotomy surgery has lately attracted considerable philosophical attention. It has seemed to some that the surgical scalpel that bisects the brain bisects consciousness and the mind as well; and that the ordinary concept of a person is thereby most seriously threatened. I shall assess the extent of the threat, arguing that it is overestimated. The argument begins with section III; section II, which describes the operation and its effects, should be omitted by those already familiar with these facts.

This book offers an intervention into the process of decolonization through the re-subjectification of the settler subject. The authors draw on what Deleuze and Guattari call minor threads of philosophy, pedagogy, spirituality, and healing practices rooted in neglected lineages of European thought and ceremony. The book proposes a methodology for unontologizing the settler subject, which they term 'desettlering.' Rather than fetishizing indigenous theory and practice as a mode for resubjectifying settlers to facilitate land-based decolonization, it offers a fresh approach by (...) looking towards alternative sets of traditions and identity. These alternatives are used to interrogate minoritarian European philosophies, practices, and beliefs, which the authors propose could be deployed to unontologize the settler within current historical conditions. Asserting that such a process is not volitional but a historical necessity, the book offers a novel and timely investigation into who settlers become if they intend to engage seriously in decolonization. It will appeal to an interdisciplinary audience of scholars and researchers in psychological science, social psychology, counseling, philosophy, indigenous studies, and sociology. (shrink)

The nature of authority is shifting in online scholarly communication. This examination of the history and future of peer review argues that effective online communication requires the development of an open, community?oriented, post?publication system of peer?to?peer review, transforming peer review from a process focused on gatekeeping to one concerned with filtering the wealth of scholarly material made available via the Internet.

The burden of this article is that although the idea of `the self'which Galen Strawson decribes in his target article is initially very attractive, it eventually doesn't work. There is a lot of competition for a `pole position'notion -- `human', `person', psuche, `soul', even `sake'-- and the idea of `self'does not seem to deserve the prize. What Strawson wants to do with the notion of a `self'can be done equally well, and more economically, by the first-person pronoun. A question raised (...) repeatedly is: `What is a self worth wanting?'Perhaps the greatest area of disagreement with Strawson's article is with his idea that `the self'needs to have little or nothing to do with time-related plans and emotions: guilt and remorse; pride; hope and expectation; career choices... even such apparently mundane things as pension-plans -- in fact, any long-term forward- or backward-looking psychological phenomena. The question of realism is pressed. (shrink)

Commissurotomy surgery has lately attracted considerable philosophical attention. It has seemed to some that the surgical scalpel that bisects the brain bisects consciousness and the mind as well; and that the ordinary concept of a person is thereby most seriously threatened. I shall assess the extent of the threat, arguing that it is overestimated. The argument begins with section III; section II, which describes the operation and its effects, should be omitted by those already familiar with these facts.

This study explored the furry identity. Furries are humans interested in anthropomorphic art and cartoons. Some furries have zoomorphic tendencies. Furries often identify with, and/or assume, characteristics of a special/totem species of nonhuman animal. This research surveyed both furries and non-furry individuals attending a furry convention and a comparison group of college students . Furries commonly indicated dragons and various canine and feline species as their alternate-species identity; none reported a nonhuman-primate identity. Dichotomous responses to two key furry-identity questions produced (...) a two-by-two furry typology. These two independent dimensions are self-perception and species identity . One-quarter of the furry sample answered “yes” to both questions, placing them in the “Distorted Unattained” quadrant. This type of furry has certain characteristics paralleling gender-identity disorder. To explore this parallel, the furry typology, and the proposed construct of “Species Identity Disorder” needs further research. (shrink)

In Being and Nothingness Jean-Paul Sartre contends that the self's fundamental relation with the other is one of inescapable conflict. I argue that the research of the last few decades on the ability of infants - even newborns - to imitate the facial expressions and gestures of adults provides counter-evidence to Sartre's claim. Sartre is not wrong that the look of the other may be a source of self-alienation, but that is not how it functions in the first instance. An (...) earlier and more primary form of looking with and at the other is a source of self-discovery. In early imitation, the infant and adult each see the other not as objects of experience but as subjects of action. Such looking is necessary for the infant to realize its own potential as a self-conscious, goal-directed subject of perception and action. (shrink)

An increasing number of global policy regimes are intended to influence international business practices, but their effectiveness is uncertain. This article presents a conceptual framework for understanding the effectiveness of regimes, with seven propositions. The case of the evolving global anticorruption regime is described and used to test the propositions. Two key conclusions are (a) the difficulty of the problem being addressed is a key factor in limiting regime effectiveness and (b) this problem, as well as others, can be addressed (...) in part by careful development of formal regime policies. Implications for scholarship and practice are presented. (shrink)

The Oregon Health Division's report on assisted suicide under the state's new legislation does not provide enough data to support its reassuring conclusions. Especially glaring is the lack of data on the palliative care offered to patients who requested assisted suicide, on their financial situation, and on their emotional state.

A theory of implementation for multilateral regulation of business is introduced. Four types of implementation actors (international organizations, states, nongovernmental organizations, and business associations) and three implementation tasks (communicate, monitor, and sanction) are identified. The ease of implementation is affected by issues and events that occur early in the life cycle of a policy. Ten propositions are put forward regarding the effects of problem definition and policy formulation on implementation. The theory is illustrated with the Montreal Protocol on Substances that (...) Deplete the Ozone Layer. (shrink)

In this paper, I outline the cumulative network model of the self. This model articulates the self as relational, recognizing social relations as constitutive of the self. The theory arises out of concerns about the individualistic paradigms of two main frameworks in the analytic philosophical literature on personal identity, namely, the psychological and the animalist approaches to personhood and is explicitly inspired by feminist theories on relational autonomy and self. I argue that “relationality” is not only social, but that the (...) self is relational throughout, psychologically, physically, biologically, culturally, semantically, as well as socially. Hence, the self is a network of relations. The model also aims to recognize that temporality or historicity is constitutive of the self, that the self is a process, not a static three-dimensional thing. Hence, the self is a cumulative network. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Metaphysics Metaphysics of Natural Complexes Metaphysics of Human Process.

During the past two decades Metaphysics of Natural Complexes has exerted a strong a growing influence on the continuing development of contemporary philosophy. This new and expanded edition acknowledges this influence and brings together much material. Included are the previously published articles “On the Concept of ‘the World,’” and “Probing the Idea of Nature,” which Buchler wrote subsequent to Metaphysics of Natural Complexes as extensions and completions of the system. Previously unpublished work on the key concept of contour has also (...) been added. In addition there are excerpts from Buchler’s replies to his critics, a set of editors’ notes to facilitate cross-referencing, and an updated index. This work presents a bold and forceful metaphysics and general ontology. It provides a systematic framework for understanding the broadest features of the world and nature, and for locating our understanding of human nature, selfhood, and society as complexes in and of nature. Buchler’s detailed analysis of identity, ordinality, nature, world, and validation advance our understanding of the basic categories to be used in defining and exploring whatever is. Unlike other contemporary philosophers that confine themselves to narrowly defined problems in hermeneutics or theory of knowledge, Buchler is unrelenting in his drive toward a more encompassing perspective, simultaneously combining interpretive precision with sheer breadth of vision. (shrink)

This paper argues that the force and weaknesses of Thomas Nagel’s arguments against psychophysical reductionism can be felt more fully when held up to the defense of a similar view in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. What follows for both from their shared rejection of psychophysical reductionism is a defense of the claim that an objective conception of subjective reality is necessarily incomplete. I examine each one’s defense of this claim. However, although they both claim an objective conception of subjectivity (...) will be incomplete, they do think we have some ability to form such a conception and I examine next the quite different ways in which Nagel and Sartre relate this ability to our use of language. The last sections of the paper discuss each philosopher’s belief that although the tension between the objective and the subjective is irreconcilable, humans continue to desire such reconciliation, i.e., they desire to be God. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is increasingly important in the global environment. Businesses that want to be socially responsible, but do not have the resources of multinational corporations, can partner with non-governmental (NGO), not-for-profit (NFP), and religious organizations to access information about the culture, customs, and needs of the people in areas where they wish to do business. Without such information, CSR projects can have unintended consequences that are not beneficial for the community. Suggesting that local farmers sell corn to ethanol (...) producers may increase the farmers' income but also increase the cost of a food staple to the community. Providing food aid may result in local farmers being unable to sell their crops for enough money to buy seed for the next harvest. Donating cheaper cinder blocks instead of adobe bricks may result in more available housing, but the housing may be unlivable in the summer heat. This paper presents a three-part model for businesses to follow to develop socially responsible projects. The first strategy is to use electronic sources of information about a country and area for background information. The second strategy is to gather on-the-ground information about important issues from the people who are already operating in a community as part of NGO, NFP and missionary initiatives. The third strategy is to develop scenarios that will help identify possible negative consequences of socially responsible projects so that the project implementation can be monitored for such consequences and interventions designed to decrease or counter the impact of negative consequences. (shrink)

More than half of the S&P 500 and the Fortune 500 companies publish corporate social responsibility reports. CSR is at the heart of a new form of corporation, the benefit corporation, which requires the pursuit of a social purpose as well as pursuit of profit. Thirty-four states, plus the District of Columbia, have enacted benefit corporation legislation. Most laws require that benefit corporations publish reports on their social purpose performance using a third-party assessment format. The purpose of this paper is (...) to analyze 1,530 benefit corporations identified by B Lab and the state of Minnesota for proof of social purpose performance, as demonstrated in reports on their websites. The study found some companies with excellent reports, but those had had a CSR focus prior to becoming benefit corporations or had been Certified B Corporations. However, most benefit corporations in the study had no published reports; many have no websites. (shrink)

More than half of the S&P 500 and the Fortune 500 companies publish corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports. CSR is at the heart of a new form of corporation, the benefit corporation, which requires the pursuit of a social purpose as well as pursuit of profit. Thirty-four states, plus the District of Columbia, have enacted benefit corporation legislation. Most laws require that benefit corporations publish reports on their social purpose performance using a third-party assessment format. The purpose of this paper (...) is to analyze 1,530 benefit corporations identified by B Lab and the state of Minnesota for proof of social purpose performance, as demonstrated in reports on their websites. The study found some companies with excellent reports, but those had had a CSR focus prior to becoming benefit corporations or had been Certified B Corporations. However, most benefit corporations in the study had no published reports; many have no websites. (shrink)