Recent developments in Continental philosophy have included the emergence of a school of “speculative realism,” which rejects the human-centered orientation that has long dominated Continental thought. Proponents of speculative realism differ on several issues, but many agree on the need for an object-oriented ontology. Some speculative realists identify realism with materialism, while others accord equal reality to objects that are non-material, even fictional. Several thinkers retain a focus on difference, a well-established theme in Continental thought. This paper looks at speculative (...) realism from the perspective of systems theory. Many of the tenets of speculative realism have long been features of systems metaphysics and are expressed clearly in a systems framework. However, some views of some speculative realists differ substantially from systems theoretic ideas. (shrink)

Many microbes responsible for infectious diseases are known to run an asymptomatic course in a significant portion of the population. By highlighting the conceptual complexities of host-microbe interactions, this paper elucidates the fact that while many infections remain asymptomatic, this does not necessarily mean that such infections are of no concern for health. The paper builds on the so-called damage-response framework and considers several developments required to gain a more comprehensive perspective on infections and their relationship to diseases. Irrespective of (...) their (short-term) clinical manifestation, infections leave an imprint with consequences for health. Finally, these considerations regarding host-microbe interactions must be incorporated into policy decisions and public understanding of health if we hope to handle future pandemics such as Covid-19 better. (shrink)

Abstraction and idealization are the two notions that are most often discussed in the context of assumptions employed in the process of model building. These notions are also routinely used in philosophical debates such as that on the mechanistic account of explanation. Indeed, an objection to the mechanistic account has recently been formulated precisely on these grounds: mechanists cannot account for the common practice of idealizing difference-making factors in models in molecular biology. In this paper I revisit the debate and (...) I argue that the objection does not stand up to scrutiny. This is because it is riddled with a number of conceptual inconsistencies. By attempting to resolve the tensions, I also draw several general lessons regarding the difficulties of applying abstraction and idealization in scientific practice. Finally, I argue that more care is needed only when speaking of abstraction and idealization in a context in which these concepts play an important role in an argument, such as that on mechanistic explanation. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to consider what it means to teach and learn philosophy in accordance with logotectonic thinking. The contemporary obsession with critical thinking, incessant questioning, and addressing “current problems” gains its genuine philosophical meaning only in the light of logotectonic building, which is able to differentiate philo-sophical thinking- as thanks-giving and learning·from the sofia and what has been thought – from the modern-”meditation” (Besinnung) and the submodern “anarchic” reflection.

Many scientific disciplines rely on the construction and use of models: biomedical sciences are no exception. This PhD thesis addresses several aspects of the practice of scientific modeling. First, I discuss the nature of modeling as such, proposing a novel, complementary account of scientific modeling which I term the experimentation-driven modeling account and which drives the construction of mechanistic models in many fields of biological and biomedical research, such as cancer immunology. Second, I scrutinize an objection to the mechanistic account (...) of explanation according to which the account fails to accommodate the common practice of idealizing difference-making factors. I argue that this objection ultimately fails because it is riddled with a number of conceptual inconsistencies. Third, I analyze the roles of similarity judgments in some fields of cancer research which employ a variety of mouse models to learn about the disease mechanisms, arguing that by appreciating the epistemic complexities it is possible to shed new light on more general philosophical debates regarding scientific representation. Fourth, mechanisms can also be studied using more theoretical apparatus in the form of simulations. I investigate an example of an agent-based model used to model the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2... (shrink)

This article re-evaluates the role of the manuscript tradition of the Historia Augusta in debates over the original contents and authorship of the text. Evidence for physical disruptions to the text before our oldest surviving manuscripts points to an earlier manuscript distributed across multiple codices. A multi-volume archetype eliminates critical arguments against the author's claims about lives missing before the Life of Hadrian as well as in the lacuna for the years a.d. 244–260. Other multi-volume codices of the eighth and (...) ninth centuries show that loss of an initial volume would have disrupted the textual tradition for the index, titles and authorial attributions. Comparison of our most complete early witness, Pal. lat. 899, to the independent branches of the textual tradition shows discrepancies between these paratextual elements as expected in a disrupted tradition. Ultimately, this article concludes that the current debates on authorship and the original scope of the Historia Augusta rest on paratextual elements from a single branch of the manuscript tradition, raising doubts about the centrality of these controversies to understanding the work. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

Checklists have been used to improve quality in many industries, including healthcare. The use of checklists, however, has not been extensively evaluated in clinical ethics consultation. This article seeks to fill this gap by exploring the efficacy of using a checklist in ethics consultation, as tested by an empirical investigation of the use of the checklist at a large academic medical system (Cleveland Clinic). The specific aims of this project are as follows: (1) to improve the quality of ethics consultations (...) by providing reminders to ethics consultants about process steps that are important for most patient-centered ethics consultations, (2) to create consistency in the ethics consultation process across the medical system, and (3) to establish an effective educational tool for trainers and trainees in clinical ethics consultation. The checklist was developed after a thorough literature review and an iterative process of revising and testing by a group of experienced ethics consultants. To pilot test the checklist, it was distributed to 46 ethics consultants. After a six-month pilot period in which ethics professionals used the checklist during their clinical activities, a survey was distributed to all of those who used the checklist. The 10-item survey examined consultants’ perceptions regarding the three aims listed above. Of the 25 survey respondents, 11 self-reported as experts in ethics consultation, nine perceived themselves to have mid-level expertise, and five self-reported as novices. The majority (68 percent) of all respondents, regardless of expertise, believed that the checklist could be a “helpful” or “very helpful” tool in the consultation process generally. Novices were more likely than experts to believe that the checklist would be useful in conducting consultations. The limitations of this study include: reduced generalizability given that this project was conducted at one medical system, utilized a small sample size, and used self-reported quality outcome measures. Despite these limitations, to the authors’ knowledge this is the first investigatation of the use of a checklist systematically to improve quality in ethics consultation. Importantly, our findings shed light on ways this checklist can be used to improve ethics consultation, including its use as an educational tool. The authors hope to test the checklist with consultants in other healthcare systems to explore its usefulness in different healthcare environments. (shrink)

A physician and spokesman for the French Ideologues, Pierre-JeanGeorges Cabanis (1757-1808) stands at the crossroads of several influential developments in modern culture--Enlightenment optimism about human perfectibility, the clinical method in medicine, and the formation and adaptation of liberal social ideals in the French Revolution. This first major study of Cabanis in English traces the influences of these developments on his thought and career. Originally published in 1980. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously (...) out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

For regular sets in Euclidean space, previous work has identified twelve ‘basic’ computability notions to which many previous notions considered in literature were shown to be equivalent. With respect to those basic notions we now investigate on the computability of natural operations on regular sets: union, intersection, complement, convex hull, image, and pre-image under suitable classes of functions. It turns out that only few of these notions are suitable in the sense of rendering all those operations uniformly computable.

We congratulate Fox and her colleagues (2007) for contributing to the published empirical literature on ethics consultation in United States hospitals. Their study demonstrates the continued wide v...

According to standard assumptions in semantics, ordinary users of a language have implicit beliefs about the truth-conditions of sentences in that language, and they often agree on those beliefs. For example, it is assumed that if Anna and John are both competent users of English and the former utters ‘grass is green’ in conversation with the latter, they will both believe that that sentence is true if and only if grass is green. These assumptions play an important role in an (...) intuitively compelling picture of communication, according to which successful communication through literal assertoric utterances is normally effected thanks to our shared beliefs about the truth-conditions of the sentences uttered in the course of the conversation. Against these standard assumptions, this paper argues that the participants in a conversation rarely have the same beliefs about the truth-conditions of the sentences involved in a linguistic interaction. More precisely, it argues for Variance, the thesis that nearly every utterance is such that there is no proposition which more than one language user believes to be that utterance’s truth-conditional content. If Variance is true, we must reject the standard picture of communication. Towards the end of the paper I identify three ways in which ordinary conversations can be communication-like despite the truth of Variance and argue that the most natural amendments to the standard picture fail to explain them. (shrink)

The history of the Euclidean Steiner tree problem, which is the problem of constructing a shortest possible network interconnecting a set of given points in the Euclidean plane, goes back to Gergonne in the early nineteenth century. We present a detailed account of the mathematical contributions of some of the earliest papers on the Euclidean Steiner tree problem. Furthermore, we link these initial contributions with results from the recent literature on the problem.

Recognize the “philo- sophia ” as such, this side of Postmodernism, means, starting from the surprising studies of Heribert Boeder, see it as a thought epochally built on a Wisdom, that is, on a initial Knowledge about the Destiny of Man. For the philo-sophical thought of the so-called “German Idealism”, that Wisdom is neither that of the Muses, as in the First epoch, neither the “Christian sapientia”, as in the Middle epoch, but the “Civil Consciousness” about Duty and Freedom.

The vast majority of research in nursing ethics over the last decade indicates that nurses may not be fully prepared to ‘deliver the good’ for their patients, or to contribute appropriately in the wider current health care climate. When suitable research projects were evaluated for this article, one key question emerged: if nurses are educationally better prepared than ever before to exercise their ethical decision-making skills, why does research still indicate that the expected practice-based improvements remain elusive? Hence, a number (...) of ideas gleaned from recent research about the current nature of nursing ethics, and especially teaching nursing ethics to student nurses, are analysed and critiqued in this article, which concludes with a cluster of ideas and conclusions based on that analysis. It is hoped that such a review may serve as a catalyst for nurse educators to re-examine their teaching practices with a view to enhancing good nursing practice through educational means. (shrink)

“El Árbol de Gernika es símbolo del bienestar de nuestro pueblo: no de ningún otro. Ni dentro de nuestro solar puede coexistir con ningún otro árbol”, escribía Sabino Arana en Euzkadi en septiembre de 1901. Esta concepción aranista del “nosaltres sols!” es el suelo interpretativo de la cosmovisión vasca, también de su historia negra de violencia. “No hay lugar en el mismo espacio geográfico para dos violencias legítimas, para dos soberanías, y el espacio geográfico de Euskal Herria es vasco por (...) definición en el caso de ETA, y ETA es la cristalización definitiva del pueblo vasco”, enlaza Joseba Arregi en el primero de los libros reseñados. La dialéctica entre el uno y el dos es la clave de bóveda de la construcción discursiva del tribalismo identitario. (shrink)

I propose a novel way to understand the stringency of Kant’s conception of beneficence. This novel understanding can ground our intuition that we do not have to forego (almost) all pursuit of our personal ends. I argue that we should understand the application of imperfect duties to specific cases according to the framework set by the adoption and promotion of ends. Agents have other ends than obligatory ones and they must weigh obligatory ends against these other ends. Obligatory ends are (...) special among ends only insofar as their adoption is not optional. My reading of the normative status of imperfect duties affords a way of thinking about beneficence modelled on the everyday ways in which agents pursue their personal projects and weigh different ends against each other. This establishes a middle-ground between an extremely demanding conception of beneficence and an overly latitudinarian one. Furthermore, it helps us understand why we do not have to be maximally beneficent and why there is a bias towards the near in our thinking about rescue cases. (shrink)

This chapter examines the traditional understanding of Horkheimer and Adorno's dialectic of enlightenment (exemplified by Jürgen Habermas and others), arguing that the traditional reading – with its stress on instrumental rationalization and a regressive or self‐destructive history – misses Horkheimer and Adorno's deepest aspirations, which are to offer an argument against a particular conceptualization of human agency (as apperceptive). Stressing instead, that Kant is the central interlocutor, the chapter shows how understanding this Kantian inheritance allows us to bring into focus (...) the radical nature of Horkheimer and Adorno's argument: that it is meant to bring into focus the problematic nature of conceiving human agency as dependent on apperception. In presenting this problem, the chapter shows how the ontogenetic origin of self‐consciousness becomes a crucial issue, and the thought of Sigmund Freud is marshaled both to make this clear and to show how Horkheimer and Adorno's account can benefit from making explicit its potential debt to Freud. (shrink)

BackgroundSocial cognition and competence are a key part of daily interactions and essential for satisfying relationships and well-being. Pediatric neurological and psychological conditions can affect social cognition and require assessment and remediation of social skills. To adequately approximate the complex and dynamic nature of real-world social interactions, innovative tools are needed. The aim of this study was to document the performance of adolescents on two versions of a serious video game presenting realistic, everyday, socio-moral conflicts, and to explore whether their (...) performance is associated with empathy or sense of presence, factors known to influence social cognition.MethodsParticipants first completed a pre-test measure of socio-moral reasoning based on three dilemmas from a previously validated computer task. Then, they either played an evaluative version or an adaptive version of a video game presenting nine social situations in which they made socio-moral decisions and provided justifications. In the evaluative version, participants’ audio justifications were recorded verbatim and coded manually to obtain a socio-moral reasoning maturity score. In the adaptive version, tailored feedback and social reinforcements were provided based on participant responses. An automatic coding algorithm developed using artificial intelligence was used to determine socio-moral maturity level in real-time and to provide a basis for the feedback and reinforcements in the game. All participants then completed a three-dilemma post-test assessment.ResultsThose who played the adaptive version showed improved SMR across the pre-test, in-game and post-test moral maturity scores, F = 9.81, pHF < 0.001, ϵ2 = 0.21, but those who played the Evaluative version did not. Socio-moral reasoning scores from both versions combined did not correlate with empathy or sense of presence during the game, though results neared significance. The study findings support preliminary validation of the game as a promising method for assessing and remediating social skills during adolescence. (shrink)

Indirect speech reports can be true even if they attribute to the speaker the saying of something weaker than what she in fact expressed, yet not all weakenings of what the speaker expressed yield true reports. For example, if Anna utters ‘Bob and Carla passed the exam’, we can accurately report her as having said that Carla passed the exam, but we can not accurately report her as having said that either it rains or it does not, or that either (...) Carla passed the exam or pandas are cute. This paper offers an analysis of speech reports that distinguishes weakenings of what the speaker expressed that yield true reports from weakenings that do not. According to this analysis, speech reports are not only sensitive to the informational content of what the speaker expressed, but also to the possibilities a speaker raises in making an utterance. As I argue, this analysis has significant advantages over its most promising competitors, including views based on work by Barwise and Perry : 668–691, 1981), views appealing to recent work on the notion of content parthood by Fine :199–226, 2016) and Yablo, and Richard’s : 605–616, 1998) proposal appealing to structured propositions. (shrink)