This essay interrogates the motives of eighteenth-century European naturalists to alternately show and hide their laboring-class fossil suppliers. Focusing on rare moments of heightened visibility, I ask why gentlemen naturalists occasionally, deliberately, and even performatively made visible the marginalized science workers on whom they crucially depended but more typically ignored or effaced. Comparing archival fragments from elite works of natural history across a considerable stretch of time and space, including Italy, France, Switzerland, Britain, Ireland, Germany, Spain, and French, Spanish, and (...) British America, this essay sketches the contours of a disparate group of people I term ‘earth workers’: laborers of very low social rank, such as quarrymen, shepherds, ditch-diggers, and fieldworkers, whose daily labor in and on the earth enabled the discovery of subterranean specimens. At the same time, archival traces of laboring lives ultimately reveal more about the naturalists who created them than they do about the marginalized laborers whose lives they faintly record. Cultural norms of elite masculinity and scholarly self-presentation in the Republic of Letters help us to understand why some eighteenth-century naturalists felt they had to publicly disavow a form of labor that would come to be recognized as a crucial and skilled part of scientific fieldwork in the modern era. Compared to other kinds of invisible labor that historians of science have brought into view, the social meaning of earth work rendered it uniquely visible in some ways and uniquely invisible in others. (shrink)

This article brings to light how AI research has benefited from post-Wittgensteinian philosophy. My research shows that Wittgenstein’s work began to engage the attention of AI researchers not only in the 1970s down to the present but right from the early beginnings of computational research in the 1950s. More specifically, his later philosophy inspired a group of researchers called the Cambridge Language Research Unit (CLRU) to start one of the first programs in machine translation, information retrieval, mechanical abstracting, and knowledge (...) representation technologies in the early 1950s, all of which have later been claimed for AI and cognitive science. I focus on the philosophical work of CLRU founder Margaret Masterman and her extraordinary but forgotten contributions to ordinary language philosophy. (shrink)

This article analyses the consequences that disinformation phenomena have for a model of communication, focusing on the dangers that disinformation poses to democratic societies, especially when it is disseminated by the media. Disinformation is examined here from the perspective of social cognitive psychology, with special attention to the role played by motivated reasoning and confirmation bias in human cognition. From this perspective, disinformation phenomena should be studied not only through an analysis of how the media operate, but also through an (...) understanding of how we process information and what we use it for from a social cognitive point of view. This article emphasizes the role that intuition and affective persuasion play in communication processes, as key elements of motivated reasoning, and argues that once this cognitive dimension is integrated into communication theory, preventive strategies can be designed to protect democracies from the dangers caused by disinformation. Ideological polarization and a lack of consensus are highlighted here as being among the biggest dangers, preventing agreement on issues that affect the proper functioning of democracy. While a certain conception of communication posits reasoning, the media and education as the tools for resolving conflicts and preventing disagreements, this article concludes that the success of disinformation phenomena points to the need for a model that includes the cognitive elements mentioned above. (shrink)

In spite of the tremendous progress in recent decades of biological science, many aspects of the behaviour of organisms in general and of humans in particular remain still somewhat obscure. A new approach towards the study of the behaviour of man was presented by Heisenberg when he emphasized that a Cartesian view of nature as an object out there is an illusion in so far as the observer is always part of the formula, the man viewing nature must be figured (...) in, the experimenter into his experiment and the artist in the scene he paints. (Heisenberg, 1969).The present study is an attempt to make a step forward in this direction by focusing on the ways and means of involvement of the observer which make him an indelible part of the observation. (shrink)

Nurses and midwives are the majority of healthcare professionals globally, including Africa, and they provide care at all levels of the health system including community levels. Nurses and midwives contribute to the care of patients with rigid or dogmatic religious beliefs or those with suicidal ideations. This review paper discusses acute and chronic diseases that have suicidal tendencies such as terminal cancer, diseases with excruciating pain, physical disability, stroke, end-stage renal failure, and diabetics who are amputated. It was reiterated that (...) nurses and midwives taking care of these patients should be alert and observant to identify their suicidal tendencies. The paper also discusses religious or spiritual inclinations that negatively affect healthcare access and adherence, especially to biomedical or western medicine. It was emphasized that some religious beliefs do not allow their followers to employ biomedical treatment and nurses and midwives should not impose their faith on patients and their families. The paper ends with a discussion on the specific roles of nurses and midwives in the care of patients with suicidal ideations such as assessment, counseling, administering medication, observation, social interaction, ensuring safety measures, and providing an enabling environment for the family to part of the care and for the observation of religious coping strategies. Nurses and midwives should enhance their knowledge and skills on suicide and increase public education on suicide prevention and identification of those at risk. (shrink)

This paper investigates the claim that artificial Intelligence Systems cannot be held morally responsible because they do not have an ability for agential self-awareness e.g. they cannot be aware that they are the agents of an action. The main suggestion is that if agential self-awareness and related first person representations presuppose an awareness of a self, the possibility of responsible artificial intelligence systems cannot be evaluated independently of research conducted on the nature of the self. Focusing on a specific account (...) of the self from the phenomenological tradition, this paper suggests that a minimal necessary condition that artificial intelligence systems must satisfy so that they have a capability for self-awareness, is having a minimal self defined as ‘a sense of ownership’. As this sense of ownership is usually associated with having a living body, one suggestion is that artificial intelligence systems must have similar living bodies so they can have a sense of self. Discussing cases of robotic animals as examples of the possibility of artificial intelligence systems having a sense of self, the paper concludes that the possibility of artificial intelligence systems having a ‘sense of ownership’ or a sense of self may be a necessary condition for having responsibility. (shrink)

The most extensive descriptions of Gog and Magog in the Hebrew Bible appear in Ezekiel 38–39. At various stages of their political career, both Reagan and Bush have linked Gog and Magog to the bêtes noires of the USA, identifying them either as the ‘communistic and atheistic’ Russia or the ‘evil’ Iraq. Biblical scholars, however, seek to contextualise Gog of Magog in the historical literary setting of the ancient Israelites. Galambush identifies Gog in Ezekiel as a cipher for Nebuchadnezzar, the (...) Babylonian king, who acted as Judah’s oppressor in the 6th century BCE. More recently, Klein concludes that Gog, along with his companions, is ‘eine Personifikation aller Feinde, die Israel im Buch Ezechiel gegenüberstehen’. Despite their differences in detail, these scholars, such as Reagan and Bush, work with a dualism that considers only the features of Judah’s enemies incorporated into Gog’s characteristics. Via an analysis of the semantic allusions, literary position and early receptions of Ezekiel 38–39, this article argues that Gog and his entourage primarily display literary attributes previously assigned to Judah’s political allies. (shrink)

This is a community based research project using a case study of 20 people living in middle America who are food insecure, but do not use food pantries. The participants’ rate of actual hunger is twice that of food insecure community members who use food pantries. Since most of the participants are not poor, the Asset Vulnerability Framework is used to classify causes of food insecurity. The purpose of the study is to identify why participants are food insecure and why (...) they do not use food pantries. Findings reveal that the participants restrict the quality and quantity of food eaten as a strategy to manage their budget. Following AVF, this strategy allows them to offset lower returns to labor assets, cover rising costs of human capital investment, protect their two most important productive assets of housing and transportation, and compensate for household relationships that increase their vulnerability. In addition, food insecurity itself inhibited social capital formation, further increasing vulnerability. The main reasons the participants do not use food pantries is to protect their social capital assets: almost all of the participants hid their hunger from colleagues, friends, relatives, and even the people they lived with. The participants described fear of societal shaming and blaming as motivations for hiding their hunger. However, using food pantries could reduce their food insecurity. Therefore, there was a feedback loop between food insecurity and social capital: food insecurity reduced social capital and efforts to protect social capital prevented participants from improving food security by using food pantries. (shrink)

.As editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard in the early 1840s, Lydia Maria Child was responsible for keeping the abolitionist movement in the United States informed of relevant news. She also used her editorial position to philosophize. Her column entitled “Letters from New York” is particularly philosophical, including considerations of infinity, free will, time, nature, art, and history. She especially turned to German philosophers and intellectuals such as Kant, Schiller, Bettina von Arnim, Karoline von Günderrode, Jean Paul, Herder, and (...) Hegel in an attempt to guide her readers to a rejection of slavery for the right philosophical reasons. I consider the influence of German philosophy on three particular themes in her writings: a Romantic-Spinozistic view of humans and nature; a Kantian conception of conscience; and a Hegelian description of the philosophy of history. (shrink)

Puzzles concerning attitude reports are at the origin of traditional theories of content. According to most of these theories, content has to involve some sort of conceptual entities, like senses, which determine reference. Conceptual views, however, have been challenged by direct reference theories and informational perspectives on content. In this paper we lay down the central elements of the more relevant strategies for solving cognitive puzzles. We then argue that the best solution available to those who maintain a view of (...) content as truth conditions is to abandon the idea that content is the only element of mental attitudes that can make a difference as to the truth value of attitude reports. We finally resort to means of recognition of objects as one obvious element that helps explain differences in attitudes. (shrink)

Arguments for the effectiveness, and even the indispensability, of mathematics in scientific explanation rely on the claim that mathematics is an effective or even a necessary component in successful scientific predictions and explanations. Well-known accounts of successful mathematical explanation in physical science appeals to scientists’ ability to solve equations directly in key domains. But there are spectacular physical theories, including general relativity and fluid dynamics, in which the equations of the theory cannot be solved directly in target domains, and yet (...) scientists and mathematicians do effective work there (McLarty 2023, Elder 2023). Building on extant accounts of structural scientific explanation (Bokulich 2011, Leng 2021), I argue that philosophical accounts of the role of equations in scientific explanation need not rely on scientists’ ability to solve equations independently of their understanding of the empirical or experimental context. For instance, the process of formulating solutions to equations can involve significant appeal to information about experimental contexts (Curiel 2010) or of physically similar systems (Sterrett 2023). Working from a close analysis of work in fluid mechanics by Martin Bazant and Keith Moffatt (2005), I propose an account of heuristic structural explanation in mathematics (Einstein 1921, Pincock 2021), which explains how physical explanations can be constructed even in domains where basic equations cannot be solved directly. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic swept through New York City swiftly and with devastating effect. The crisis put enormous pressure on all hospital services, including the clinical ethics consultation team. This report describes the recent experience of the ethics consultants and Columbia University Irving Medical Center during the COVID-19 surge and compares the case load and characteristics to the corresponding period in 2019. By reporting this experience, we hope to supplement the growing body of COVID-19 scientific literature and provide details of the (...) human toll the virus took on our hospitals and communities. We also aim to highlight the role of the clinical ethics consultant as well as areas of policy and law that may need to be addressed in order to be better prepared for a future public health crisis. (shrink)

Because the demand for health services outstrips the available resources, priority setting is one of the most difficult issues faced by health policy makers, particularly those in developing countries. Priority setting in developing countries is fraught with uncertainty due to lack of credible information, weak priority setting institutions, and unclear priority setting processes. Efforts to improve priority setting in these contexts have focused on providing information and tools. In this paper we argue that priority setting is a value laden and (...) political process, and although important, the available information and tools are not sufficient to address the priority setting challenges in developing countries. Additional complementary efforts are required. Hence, a strategy to improve priority setting in developing countries should also include: (i) capturing current priority setting practices, (ii) improving the legitimacy and capacity of institutions that set priorities, and (iii) developing fair priority setting processes. (shrink)

Scouting for Boys is the original blueprint and 'self-instructor' of the Boy Scout Movement. An all-time bestseller, it is both a handbook and a philosophy for a way of living that replaces self with service, puts country before individual, and duty above all. As well as practical instructions on how to light fires and stalk men and animals, it includes sections on chivalry, self-discipline, self-improvement and citizenship. This new edition reveals its maverick complexity and explores its contradictions about sexuality, the (...) environment, and the empire. (shrink)

Ethical lapses associated with the first facial transplant included breaches of confidentiality, bending of research rules, and film deals. However, discussions of the risk-benefit ratio for face transplantation are often deficient in that they ignore the needs, experience, and decision-making capability of potential recipients.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:14 Feminist Studies 46, no. 1. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Melissa Oliver-Powell Beyond the Spectacle of Suffering: Agnès Varda’s L’Unechante,l’autrepas and Rewriting the Subject of Abortion in France In the spring of 1971, three years after the revolutionary fervor of May 1968 in France, 343 women put their names to a courageous manifesto announcing that they were criminals of a particularly gendered nature. The authors of Manifeste (...) des 343 (Manifesto of the 343) comprised a large group of culturally eminent French women and activists declaring that they had all illegally undergone abortions, which at this point, despite growing decriminalization throughout much of Western Europe, were still outlawed within their republic. Though many of the revolutionary fires had now eased to embers, French feminists demonstrated that reproductive rights were still a vital and unresolved topic of social justice. Including names as weighty as Simone de Beauvoir, Jeanne Moreau, and Catherine Deneuve, the manifesto brought together exceptional women from the fields of academia, law, theater, film and literature, alongside grassroots activists. Their action was a bold challenge to the French authorities, daring them to arrest some of the country’s brightest thinkers and cultural innovators under a law the signatories felt was deeply unjust, sexist, and antithetical to the values of individual liberty and citizenship. It was a case of those with the broadest shoulders weaponizing their privilege to present a robust front line in the wider struggle for women’s rights. One of the signatories was filmmaker Agnès Varda. Her name, like those of several others on the list, demonstrates the symbiosis between Melissa Oliver-Powell 15 cultural production and gender politics that has often characterized French feminist thought. From the multidisciplinary writings of Beauvoir, to the novels of the écriture féminine movement, to the lyrical academic prose of Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and others, French and Francophone feminist writers have tended to connect art and politics with a great deal of fluidity. As a committed activist and a filmmaker, Agnès Varda falls very much within this tradition, often adopting and developing feminist practices within her cinema. This article examines how Varda’s 1977 film, L’Une chante, l’autre pas (One Sings, The Other Doesn’t) interacts with and participates in the feminist political project of reproductive rights as well as the ongoing intellectual and moral debates over abortion taking place in France throughout the late 1960s and 1970s. I look particularly at the adversarial construction of abortion narratives within these debates and the location of victimhood therein. Within mainstream cultural representations in and beyond France, abortion is typically constructed as either a traumatic or a transgressive moment. The same is often true on either side of political and social debates on abortion, which have tended either to characterize the women who get abortions as irresponsible and amoral or as sympathetic victims in need of protection. Though the transgressive element persists, it is the interaction with representations of trauma that interests me here. In approaching discussions of gendered injustice, it is common for feminist writers and activists to leverage pathos as a rhetorical strategy. While suffering can be a highly effective and galvanizing expression of oppression, such discourses also run the risk of producing excessive depictions of victimhood, which can displace the capacity for action from the subject of hardship onto the privileged oppressor. This risk is particularly at stake within the cultural form of film, as its visuality and identificatory mechanics have the potential to spectacularize the female victim and make her relatable only through suffering. This was often the case in earlier French films that featured abortion such as Les Mauvaises rencontres (1955), Des gens sans importance (1956), Journal d’une femme en blanc (1965), and Une femme en blanc se révolte (1966), all of which made their subjects sympathetic by entwining them in long narratives of victimization ending in death or disgrace. This article looks at how Varda’s L’Une chante, l’autre pas disengages from the spectacle of suffering that so often characterizes representations of women’s experiences 16 Melissa Oliver-Powell and rejects the idea that abortion narratives must... (shrink)

As editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard in the early 1840s, Lydia Maria Child was responsible for keeping the abolitionist movement in the United States informed of relevant news. She also...

Physicians, philosophers, and theologians consider how to address death and dying for a diverse population in a secularized century.Most of us are generally ill-equipped for dying. Today, we neither see death nor prepare for it. But this has not always been the case. In the early fifteenth century, the Roman Catholic Church published the Ars moriendi texts, which established prayers and practices for an art of dying. In the twenty-first century, physicians rely on procedures and protocols for the efficient management (...) of hospitalized patients. How can we recapture an art of dying that can facilitate our dying well? In this book, physicians, philosophers, and theologians attempt to articulate a bioethical framework for dying well in a secularized, diverse society.Contributors discuss such topics as the acceptance of human finitude; the role of hospice and palliative medicine; spiritual preparation for death; and the relationship between community, and individual autonomy. They also consider special cases, including children, elderly patients with dementia, and death in the early years of the AIDS epidemic, when doctors could do little more than accompany their patients in humble solidarity.These chapters make the case for a robust bioethics—one that could foster both the contemplation of finitude and the cultivation of community that would be necessary for a contemporary art of dying well.ContributorsJeffrey P. Bishop, Lisa Sowle Cahill, Daniel Callahan, Farr A. Curlin, Lydia S. Dugdale, Michelle Harrington, John Lantos, Stephen R. Latham, M. Therese Lysaught, Autumn Alcott Ridenour, Peter A. Selwyn, Daniel Sulmasy. (shrink)

What happens to philosophy when philosophical activities migrate to the AI lab? My article explores the philosophical work that has gone into the machine simulations of language and understanding after Alan Turing. The early experiments by AI practitioners such as Karen Spärck Jones, Richard Richens, Yorick Wilks, and others at the Cambridge Language Research Unit (CLRU) led to the creation of the machine interlingua, semantic networks, and other technological innovations central to the development of AI in the 1950s–1970s. I attempt (...) to show how, in the midst of their computational work, the CLRU pioneers engaged with Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ferdinand de Saussure, Rudolf Carnap, and other philosophers and developed startling new ways of formulating fundamental questions about language and human understanding. More significantly, their philosophical activities on the machine present an inclusive and culturally diverse picture of the world that profoundly negates the ethnocentric metaphysics of human-machine conundrums that John Searle and his critics represent in the Chinese Room debate. The familiar legacy of that debate has long distorted the narrative of AI origins through its simultaneous reiteration and repudiation of the Turing test. My study seeks to clarify those origins, but my primary goal is to demonstrate what it is like to practice philosophy on the machine and how the critique of metaphysics is made possible in the AI lab. (shrink)

The growth in organic and local foods consumption has been examined using two different approaches to identify characteristics and motivations of food shoppers: market segmentation and economic models using multivariate analysis. The former approach, based on Means-end Chain theory, examines how intrinsic characteristics of foods affect food choices. The latter microeconomic approach examines economic constraints and extrinsic factors. This study demonstrates value in combining the two approaches to generate better empirical predictions of who buys organic and local food. It also (...) supports a broader theoretical framework to explain behavior in terms of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Using US data, an adaptation of the Food Related Lifestyle model yields four consumer lifestyles segmented by intrinsic motivations related to food. Each consumer segment exhibits distinct organic and local foods consumption behaviors. A multinomial logit model is estimated to examine the probability of being in one of these four groups as a function of extrinsic variables and economic constraints. In support of Alphabet theory and Regulatory Focus theory, we find that inclusion of extrinsic factors improves prediction of behavior and the ability to explain why they buy organic and local foods. The extrinsic variables that significantly increase the probability of being in a particular consumer food lifestyle segment include: environmental concerns, health practices, race, the presence of a farmers’ market, and to a lesser degree, family composition and income. We also find regulatory focus is most pronounced among the most active organic and local food shoppers. (shrink)

What is the difference between a performance of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and the symphony itself? What does it mean for musicians to be faithful to the works they perform? To answer this question, Goehr combines philosophical and historical methods of enquiry. She describes how the concept of a musical work emerged as late as 1800, and how it subsequently defined the norms, expectations, and behavior characteristic of classical musical practice. Out of the historical thesis, Goehr draws philosophical conclusions about the (...) normative functions of concepts and ideals. She also addresses current debates amongst conductors, early-music performers, and avant-gardists. (shrink)

This paper argues that Protagoras’ great myth depicts human nature as both Promethean and Epimethean: human foresight depends on the condition of oversight. If Protagoras’ praise of foresight betrays his desire to overcome this condition, Socrates embraces it. While Protagoras repeats Epimetheus’ mistake of forgetting his own nature by aiming to overcome the risks of oversight, Socrates’ foresight recognizes that oversight and perplexity are intrinsic to human nature.

Consideration of social cognition—how an individual’s decision-making is influenced by her/his social environment—is key to understanding the behaviour of socially living nonhuman primates. In this chapter we discuss primate social cognition by focusing on primates’ behavioural responses to the presence and actions of others, how they adjust their behaviour to maximize their own gains, and possibly also the rewards received by a partner. Individuals can observe and replicate the actions of others, or the outcomes of their actions, to accelerate behavioural (...) acquisition of techniques to obtain rewards. Beyond passively observing others, primates can also work with group mates to obtain rewards more easily or to get rewards that would otherwise be unattainable by a single individual. Although not universally seen among primates, one individual may also help another to acquire resources. Prosocial and collaborative interactions may result in an imbalance of benefits received, and certain primate species respond negatively when receiving less than a social partner, a response which may protect individuals against cheating. Such behaviours demonstrate how the interplay between an individual’s desires and those of others can modify behavioural outcomes and the importance of considering cognition from a social perspective in order to understand the decision-making of individuals. However, there is variation both within and between species in their sensitivity to the actions of others and their responses to them. Thus, a comparative framework is needed when studying what is meant by ‘primate social cognition’. (shrink)

I have vigorously absorbed the negative element of the age in which I live, an age that is, of course, very close to me, which I have no right ever to fight against, but as it were a right to represent. The slight amount of the positive, and also of the extreme negative, which capsizes into the positive, are something in which I have had no hereditary share. I have not been guided into life by the hand of Christianity – (...) admittedly now slack and failing – as Kierkegaard was, and have not caught the hem of the Jewish prayer shawl – now flying away from us – as the Zionists have. I am an end or a beginning.1. (shrink)

Adam of Wodeham and William of Ockham ascribe different properties to intuitive apprehensions. The properties that Wodeham ascribes to intuitive cognitions concur with his reading of one of the four scenarios that Ockham proposes in order to test the idea that an intuitive apprehension serves as an epistemic warrant. In this article, I explain that Wodeham avoids skepticism through his account of intuitive cognitions; even though, like Ockham, he accepts that God can cause us to undergo various sorts of mental (...) acts in virtue of which we could believe that something exists when really it does not exist. (shrink)

The last decade has seen a slow but steady increase in the number of postdoctoral scholars employed in faculties of education. In this article, seven postdoctoral scholars who worked in the same Ca...

This article explores the role that repetition plays in symbolic healing through a close examination of the speech patterns and actions performed by a healer in a Chol Maya ritual aimed at curing a woman of kisiñ—the “embarrassment-sickness.” The authors examine the repetition of speech patterns in the healing chant and the frequency with which other paralinguistic elements, such as taps, co-occur with the chant verses. The sound patterns generated during the ritual, specifically those created by the rhythmic tapping of (...) the patient's body with a bough bouquet, are yet another form of repetition often overlooked in analyses of healing rituals, which have concentrated on other symbolic elements used by healers. It is argued that the repetition of phrases in parallel verses serves as metapragmatic commentary on the healing process as a restructuring of the patient's body, which has been unstructured by the disease. (shrink)