Public health care interventions—regarding vaccination, obesity, and HIV, for example—standardly take the form of information dissemination across a community. But information networks can vary importantly between different ethnic communities, as can levels of trust in information from different sources. We use data from the Greater Pittsburgh Random Household Health Survey to construct models of information networks for White and Black communities--models which reflect the degree of information contact between individuals, with degrees of trust in information from various sources correlated with (...) positions in that social network. With simple assumptions regarding belief change and social reinforcement, we use those modeled networks to build dynamic agent-based models of how information can be expected to flow and how beliefs can be expected to change across each community. With contrasting information from governmental and religious sources, the results show importantly different dynamic patterns of belief polarization within the two communities. (shrink)

Immunology researchers are beginning to explore the possibilities of reproducibility, reuse and secondary analyses of immunology data. Open-access datasets are being applied in the validation of the methods used in the original studies, leveraging studies for meta-analysis, or generating new hypotheses. To promote these goals, the ImmPort data repository was created for the broader research community to explore the wide spectrum of clinical and basic research data and associated findings. The ImmPort ecosystem consists of four components–Private Data, Shared Data, Data (...) Analysis, and Resources—for data archiving, dissemination, analyses, and reuse. To date, more than 300 studies have been made freely available through the ImmPort Shared Data portal , which allows research data to be repurposed to accelerate the translation of new insights into discoveries. (shrink)

Sartre and Foucault were two of the most prominent and at times mutually antagonistic philosophical figures of the twentieth century. And nowhere are the antithetical natures of their existentialist and poststructuralist philosophies more apparent than in their disparate approaches to historical understanding. A history, thought Foucault, should be a kind of map, a comparative charting of structural transformations and displacements. But for Sartre, authentic historical understanding demanded a much more personal and committed narrative, a kind of interpretive diary of moral (...) choices and risks compelled by critical necessity and an exacting reality. Sartre's history, a rational history of individual lives and their intrinsic social worlds, was in essence immersed in biography. In Volume One of this authoritative two-volume work, Thomas R. Flynn conducts a pivotal and comprehensive reconstruction of Sartrean historical theory, and provocatively anticipates the Foucauldian counterpoint to come in Volume Two. (shrink)

After reviewing how Jean Wahl interprets the early Marcel, specifically his Metaphysical Journal, in a seminal work whose title captured the philosophical spiritof the 1930s, Vers le concret (“Toward the Concrete”), I discuss the existentialist style of philosophizing, offer five criteria for judging a philosopher to be an existentialist and submit Marcel’s work to each. I turn to the appropriateness of calling him a neo-Socratic philosopher, an appellation he seemed to prefer, and conclude with some observations of how this mixture (...) of the Socratic and the existentialist places Marcel in the lineage of those like Michel Foucault and Pierre Hadot who speak of philosophy less as a doctrine and more as a way of life. (shrink)

We have identified an emerging tool being used by the UK government across a range of public bodies in the service of public policy - the online targeted advertising infrastructure and the practices, consultancy firms, and forms of expertise which have grown up around it. This reflects an intensification and adaptation of a broader ‘behavioural turn’ in the governmentality of the UK state and the increasing sophistication of everyday government communications. Contemporary UK public policy is fusing with the powerful tools (...) for behaviour change created by the platform economy. Operational data and associated systems of classification and profiling from public bodies are being hybridised with traditional consumer marketing profiles and then ‘projected’ onto the classification systems of the targeted advertising infrastructures. This is not simply a case of algorithms being used for sorting, surveilling, and scoring; rather this suggests that targeted interventions in the cultural and behavioural life of communities are now a core part of governmental power which is being algorithmically-driven, in combination with influencer networks, traditional forms of messaging, and frontline operational practices. We map these uses and practices of what we describe as the ‘Surveillance Influence Infrastructure’, identifying key ethical issues and implications which we believe have yet to be fully investigated or considered. What we find particularly striking is the coming-together of two separate structures of power - the governmental turn to behaviourism and prevention on one hand, and the infrastructures of targeting and influence on the other. We theorise this as a move beyond ‘nudge’ or ‘behavioural science’ approaches, towards a programme which we term ‘influence government’. (shrink)

We are celebrating the centennial year of the birth of Jean-Paul Sartre. His death and the huge funeral cortege that spontaneously gathered on that occasion marked the passing of the last of the philosophical "personalities" of our era. Contrast, for example, his departure, which I did not witness, with that of Michel Foucault, which I did. The latter was acknowledged in a modest ceremony at the door of the Salpêtrière Hospital; his private funeral in the province was even more stark. (...) The two passings exhibit the distinction graphically. Foucault, the most likely candidate to become Sartre's successor as reigning intellectual on the Left Bank, exited the institution that had figured in several of his books attended by a small crowd of a couple hundred, admittedly assembled without public notification, on a damp morning to hear Gilles Deleuze read a brief passage from the preface to The Uses of Pleasure. Describing philosophy as "the critical work that thought brings to bear on itself," the message had an ironically haunting Sartrean ring. (shrink)

Despite Sartre's almost proverbial rejection of Freudian psychoanalysis, Jean-Pierre Boulé places the philosopher himself on the couch in a wonderfully detailed and suggestive work. He notes that the fruit of his study may well be "to help us gain a better understanding of Sartre as an embodied sexual being and possibly demonstrate a new way of connecting biography with oeuvre." After analyzing Boulé's argument and considering the psychoanalytic method itself, I address this last claim about relating Sartre's biography and oeuvre, (...) especially in view of the integral role assigned biography in any existentialist theory of history. (shrink)

After reviewing how Jean Wahl interprets the early Marcel, specifically his Metaphysical Journal, in a seminal work whose title captured the philosophical spiritof the 1930s, Vers le concret (“Toward the Concrete”), I discuss the existentialist style of philosophizing, offer five criteria for judging a philosopher to be an existentialist and submit Marcel’s work to each. I turn to the appropriateness of calling him a neo-Socratic philosopher, an appellation he seemed to prefer, and conclude with some observations of how this mixture (...) of the Socratic and the existentialist places Marcel in the lineage of those like Michel Foucault and Pierre Hadot who speak of philosophy less as a doctrine and more as a way of life. (shrink)

How are we to make sense of madness and psychosis? For most of us the words conjure up images from television and newspapers of seemingly random, meaningless violence. It is something to be feared, something to be left to the experts. But is madness best thought of as a medical condition? Psychiatrists and the drug industry maintain that psychoses are brain disorders amenable to treatment with drugs, but is this actually so? There is no convincing evidence that the brain is (...) disordered in psychosis, yet governments across the world are investing huge sums of money on mental health services that take for granted the idea that psychosis is an illness to be treated with medication. Although some people who use mental health services find medication helpful, many do not, and resist the idea that their experiences are symptoms of illnesses like schizophrenia. Consequently they are forced into having treatment against their wishes. So, how do we make sense of this situation? Postpsychiatry addresses these questions. It involves an attempt to rethink some of the fundamental assumptions of mental health work, showing how recent developments in philosophy and ethics can help us to clarify some of the dilemmas and conflicts around different understandings of madness. Throughout, the authors examine the conflicting ways in which politicians, academics, and mental health professionals appear to understand madness, and contrast this with voices and experiences that are usually excluded - those of the people who use mental health services. They then examine the power of psychiatry to shape how we understand ourselves and our emotions, before considering some of the basic limitations of psychiatry as science to make madness meaningful. In the final section of the book they draw on evidence from service users and survivors, the humanities and anthropology, to point out a new direction for mental health practice. This new direction emphasises the importance of cultural contexts in understanding madness, placing ethics before technology in responding to madness, and minimising 'therapeutic' coercion. (shrink)

This article aims to test the hypothesis that metaphysical grounding is an instance of essentially ordered (or per se ) causation, a species of causation identified by medieval philosophers and theologians like Aquinas and Scotus, but largely forgotten from then on. The article reviews some of the consensus of grounding theorists on the nature of metaphysical grounding (or ontological dependence) compared to some of the crucial characteristics of essentially ordered causal series as articulated by scholastic and neo-Aristotelian philosophers then and (...) now. The authors emphasize their similarities, which they hold is enough to render strongly plausible the thesis that grounding is essentially ordered causation (G = EOC). Moreover, they highlight the potential benefits of this identification both for theories of grounding and EOC, especially as it concerns matters of fundamentality. Finally, they consider the limits of their hypothesis. (shrink)

In this important book, Thomas R. Flynn reinterprets and evaluates Sartre's social and political philosophy, arguing that the existential ethics of Sartre's ...

Organisationen spielen in modernen Gesellschaften eine zentrale Rolle. Der Beitrag geht davon aus, dass in den mittlerweile etablierten Formen von Ethik und Ethikberatung in Einrichtungen des Gesundheitssystems eine angemessene Reflexion des Organisationsbezugs oft ausbleibt bzw. eine besondere Herausforderung darstellt. Wir konzipieren deshalb eine „prozedurale Organisationsethik“, die sich kritisch mit der organisationalen Passung der Prozesse ethischer Reflexion auseinandersetzt. Daraus lassen sich als Anregung für Theorie und Praxis von ethischen Prozessen praktische Schlussfolgerungen ableiten. Sie betreffen die Orte der Differenzsetzung für die Frage (...) nach dem Guten; die ethischen Hintergrundtheorien und die Frage nach der organisatorischen Verknüpfung der Reflexionssettings. (shrink)

Definition of the problem Organisations play a vital role in modern societies. This article presumes a lack of sufficient organisational reflection of well-established forms of ethics and ethics counselling in institutions belonging to the health sector or sees particular challenges where it is implemented. Arguments We have therefore conceived a procedural type of organisational ethics which critically examines the organisational fit of processes in terms of ethical reflection, leading to practicable suggestions. Conclusions On the one hand they relate to where (...) differences are established when asking for the good; on the other hand they are concerned with background theories and the organisational fit of the reflection settings. (shrink)

Jean-Paul Sartre was one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. Regarded as the father of existentialist philosophy, he was also a political critic, moralist, playwright, novelist, and author of biographies and short stories. Thomas R. Flynn provides the first book-length account of Sartre as a philosopher of the imaginary, mapping the intellectual development of his ideas throughout his life, and building a narrative that is not only philosophical but also attentive to the political and literary (...) dimensions of his work. Exploring Sartre's existentialism, politics, ethics, and ontology, this book illuminates the defining ideas of Sartre's oeuvre: the literary and the philosophical, the imaginary and the conceptual, his descriptive phenomenology and his phenomenological concept of intentionality, and his conjunction of ethics and politics with an 'egoless' consciousness. It will appeal to all who are interested in Sartre's philosophy and its relation to his life. (shrink)

Sartre and Foucault were two of the most prominent and at times mutually antagonistic philosophical figures of the twentieth century. And nowhere are the antithetical natures of their existentialist and poststructuralist philosophies more apparent than in their disparate approaches to historical understanding. A history, thought Foucault, should be a kind of map, a comparative charting of structural transformations and displacements. But for Sartre, authentic historical understanding demanded a much more personal and committed narrative, a kind of interpretive diary of moral (...) choices and risks compelled by critical necessity and an exacting reality. Sartre's history, a rational history of individual lives and their intrinsic social worlds, was in essence immersed in biography. In Volume One of this authoritative two-volume work, Thomas R. Flynn conducts a pivotal and comprehensive reconstruction of Sartrean historical theory, and provocatively anticipates the Foucauldian counterpoint to come in Volume Two. (shrink)

Philosophy as a way of life -- Becoming an individual -- Humanism : for and against -- Authenticity -- A chastened individualism? Existentialism and social thought -- Existentialism in the twenty-first century.

Michel Foucault surveyed the history of Western philosophy in terms of the Delphic ‘Know thyself’ and the Socratic ‘care of the self’. The former generates academic philosophy as we know it today whereas the latter conceives of philosophy as a ‘way of life’. At issue are competing notions of ‘truth’ and the philosophical relevance of the discursive/nondiscursive domains. Comparing this account with a similar but distinct reading of the same Greek texts by Greco-Roman historian Pierre Hadot, I underscore the ‘existentialist’ (...) tenor of this distinction and assess the challenges and liabilities of pursuing philosophy as a ‘way of life’. (shrink)

Sartre and Foucault were two of the most prominent and at times mutually antagonistic philosophical figures of the twentieth century. And nowhere are the antithetical natures of their existentialist and poststructuralist philosophies more apparent than in their disparate approaches to historical understanding. In Volume One of this authoritative two-volume study, Thomas R. Flynn conducted a pivotal and comprehensive reconstruction of Sartrean historical theory. This long-awaited second volume offers a comprehensive and critical reading of the Foucauldian counterpoint. A history, (...) theorized Foucault, should be a kind of map, a comprehensive charting of structural transformations and displacements over time. Contrary to other Foucault scholars, Flynn proposes an "axial" rather than a developmental reading of Foucault's work. This allows aspects of Foucault's famous triad of knowledge, power, and the subject to emerge in each of his major works. Flynn maps existentialist categories across Foucault's "quadrilateral," the model that Foucault proposes as defining modernist conceptions of knowledge. At stake is the degree to which Sartre's thought is fully captured by this mapping, whether he was, as Foucault claimed, "a man of the nineteenth century trying to think in the twentieth.". (shrink)

Existentialism was one of the leading philosophical movements of the twentieth century. Focusing on its seven leading figures, Sartre, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty and Camus, this Very Short Introduction provides a clear account of the key themes of the movement which emphasized individuality, free will, and personal responsibility in the modern world. Drawing in the movement's varied relationships with the arts, humanism, and politics, this book clarifies the philosophy and original meaning of 'existentialism' - which has tended to (...) be obscured by misappropriation. Placing it in its historical context, Thomas Flynn also highlights how existentialism is still relevant to us today. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable. (shrink)

The ability to conduct logical reasoning is a fundamental aspect of intelligent behavior, and thus an important problem along the way to human-level artificial intelligence. Traditionally, symbolic methods from the field of knowledge representation and reasoning have been used to equip agents with capabilities that resemble human reasoning qualities. More recently, however, there has been an increasing interest in applying alternative approaches based on machine learning rather than logic-based formalisms to tackle this kind of tasks. Here, we make use of (...) state-of-the-art methods for training deep neural networks to devise a novel model that is closely coupled to symbolic reasoning methods, and thus able to learn how to effectively perform basic ontology reasoning. This term describes an important and at the same time very natural kind of problem settings where the rules for conducting reasoning are specified alongside with the actual information. Many problems in practice may be viewed as such reasoning tasks, which is why the presented approach is applicable to a plethora of important real-world problems. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the suggested method, we present the outcomes of several experiments that have been conducted on both toy datasets as well as real-world data, which show that our model learned to perform precise reasoning on a number of diverse inference tasks that require comprehensive deductive proficiencies. Furthermore, it turned out that the suggested model suffers much less from different obstacles that prohibit symbolic reasoning. (shrink)

What is implied by "ethics of history"? The authors of this volume, internationally renowned philosophers and intellectual historians, address this question in all its novelty and ambiguity and develop varied perspectives on the place and nature of ethics in the philosophy, enterprise, and practice of history. Is the whole historical process--largely consisting of the actions and sufferings of persons and groups--subject to ethical constraint? And what of the ways in which historians present their subject matter; are these methods subject to (...) moral scrutiny? Although they approach these issues from different directions, the contributors agree in their critique of the correspondence theory of history, tin their acceptance of an unbridgeable gap between the past and the historian's present account, and in their call for a revision of the popular appeal to historical objectivity. (shrink)

I defend three claims regarding Foucault’s historical a priori and the intelligibility of history that counter commonly received accounts of Husserl’s approach to the same. First, Foucault is not a transcendental thinker in the Kantian sense of the term. His use of the HP is contingent, postdictive, regional and hypothetical. Second, the three “axes” of the dyads knowledge/truth, power/government, and subjectivation/ethics along with Foucault’s “history of the present” enclose a space called “experience” Erfahrung as nonreflective and “freed from inner life.” (...) At this point, “experience” and “multiplicity” coalesce to confirm Foucault’s anti-phenomenological bias and nominalist commitment. Finally, the relations of transformation and displacement that define archaeological change support a “fittingness” between the epistemes in question. Neither necessitating nor aleatory, their relation could be called “aesthetic” in a broad sense. I conclude by listing ways Husserl’s approach to historical intelligibility is the inverse of Foucault’s. (shrink)

The central topic of current philosophy of religion has been the meaning and the truth of the assertion that God exists. The roots of this preoccupation lie in the natural theology, and the criticism of that theology, of the eighteenth century in the West. The arguments of Hume and Kant are still the basis of contemporary discussion. While this attachment to eighteenth-century concerns may manifest a laudable sense of reverence for our ancestors, it has led the philosophy of religion into (...) lamentable delinquencies and impoverishments. (shrink)

The effects of mental fatigue on both cognitive and physical performance are well described in the literature, but the recovery aspects of mental fatigue have been less investigated. The present study aimed to fill this gap by examining the persistence of mental fatigue on behavior and electrophysiological mechanisms. Fifteen participants performed an arm-pointing task consisting of reaching a target as fast as possible, before carrying out a 32-min cognitively demanding task [Time Load Dual Back task], and immediately, 10 and 20 (...) min after completion of the TLDB task. During the experiment, electroencephalography was continuously recorded. The significant increase in mental fatigue feeling after the TLDB task was followed by a decrease during the 20 min of recovery without returning to premeasurement values. Brain oscillations recorded at rest during the recovery period showed an increase in both theta and alpha power over time, suggesting a persistence of mental fatigue. Arm-pointing movement duration increased gradually over time during the recovery period, indicating that behavioral performance remained impaired 20 min after the end of the cognitively demanding task. To conclude, subjective measurements indicated a partial recovery of mental fatigue following a cognitively demanding task, whereas electrophysiological and behavioral markers suggested that the effects of mental fatigue persisted for at least 20 min. While the subjective evaluation of mental fatigue is a very practical way to attest the presence of mental fatigue, electrophysiological and behavioral measures seem more relevant to evaluate the time course of mental fatigue effects. (shrink)