The return of genetic research results after death in the pediatric setting comes with unique complexities. Researchers must determine which results and through which processes results are returned. This paper discusses the experience over 15 years in pediatric cancer genetics research of returning research results after the death of a child and proposes a preventive ethics approach to protocol development in order to improve the quality of return of results in pediatric genomic settings.

Broadening access to both computational and educational resources is crit- ical to diffusing machine learning (ML) innovation. However, today, most ML resources and experts are siloed in a few countries and organizations. In this article, we describe our pedagogical approach to increasing access to applied ML through a massive open online course (MOOC) on Tiny Machine Learning (TinyML). We suggest that TinyML, applied ML on resource-constrained embedded devices, is an attractive means to widen access because TinyML leverages low-cost and globally (...) accessible hardware and encourages the development of complete, self-contained applications, from data collection to deployment. To this end, a collaboration between academia and industry produced a four part MOOC that provides application-oriented instruction on how to develop solutions using TinyML. The series is openly available on the edX MOOC platform, has no prerequisites beyond basic programming, and is designed for global learners from a variety of backgrounds. It introduces real-world applications, ML algorithms, data-set engineering, and the ethi- cal considerations of these technologies through hands-on programming and deployment of TinyML applications in both the cloud and on their own microcontrollers. To facili- tate continued learning, community building, and collaboration beyond the courses, we launched a standalone website, a forum, a chat, and an optional course-project com- petition. We also open-sourced the course materials, hoping they will inspire the next generation of ML practitioners and educators and further broaden access to cutting-edge ML technologies. (shrink)

Rather than focusing on political and legal debates surrounding attempts to determine if and when genocidal rape has taken place in a particular setting, this essay turns instead to a crucial, yet neglected area of inquiry: the moral significance of genocidal rape, and more specifically, the nature of the harms that constitute the culpable wrongdoing that genocidal rape represents. In contrast to standard philosophical accounts, which tend to employ an individualistic framework, this essay offers a situated understanding of harm that (...) features the importance of interdependence and relationality and that conceptualizes harms as embodied and contextual. The paper ultimately reveals what is distinctive about this particular crime of sexual violence by exploring the logic of genocidal rape: genocidal rape involves the harm of forced self-betrayal unleashed relationally, causing victims as representatives of their group to participate inadvertently in the destruction of that group. (shrink)

In a provocative essay, Sarah Kamens recommends the literature of postcolonial theory as a remedy for some of the limitations of current psychiatric theory and practice. Her provocation lies not advocating engagement with this literature, which certainly has much to offer psychiatry, but in the way she chooses to energize her argument by contrasting two very different phenomena: the experience of hearing voices and the use of ghost-writing in the psychiatric literature. Although Ka-mens acknowledges these phenomena come from “distant (...) teleological and experiential realms,” in both cases, she suggests, there are hidden authors who may be experienced or understood as hauntings. In this brief commentary, I will... (shrink)

It is a pleasure to respond to these thought-provoking commentaries by Laurence J. Kirmayer and Nancy Nyquist Potter. Rather than addressing their comments one-by-one—and rather than entering into the same meditative attitude that produced my original essay, an unusual and exploratory text—I will take the liberty of responding to a theme that appears in both commentaries: the potential epistemic violence done by interpretation. It is perhaps no mistake that interpretative violence is thematized in commentaries on the topic of haunting—the (...) haunting of texts and of experience. In responding to this theme, I will offer some reflections on the role of psychotherapy in producing interpretations.Kirmayer’s commentary... (shrink)

Laurence Renault has written a noteworthy book. In 1975 Jean-Luc Marion made sense of Descartes’s first work, the Regulae ad Directionem ingenii, by exploring the text as an appropriation and reinterpretation of Aristotelian theses concerning science and being. In Descartes ou la félicité volontaire, Renault, a former student of Marion’s and now his colleague at the Sorbonne, brings the same hermeneutic to Descartes’s final work, Les Passions de l’âme, to show the implications of philosophy-become-epistemology for an understanding of man’s (...) end or happiness. Renault argues that, in his later correspondence as well as his work on the passions, Descartes was occupied with developing a conception of happiness that would be consistent with his reformulation of philosophy. While Descartes had previously appeared to subscribe to an Aristotelian notion of happiness as a contemplative theoretical activity, his later work evidences an appreciation of man’s happiness as founded on an act not of intellect, but of will. Descartes ou la félicité volontaire explores the subtle nuances of this change. (shrink)

After introducing some of the many issues raised by intergenerational justice, the paper will focus in particular on the motivational problem: Why should we be motivated to act in favor of others when sacrifices on our behalf are required? And more specifically, how can such sacrifices be justified when those we act for are neither born nor easily unidentifiable? While many accounts of moral motivation exist, most scholars will grant that emotional engagement is a strong motivational drive. Hence, the paper (...) will focus on such a drive. I will, first, argue that immediate emotions and empathy – understood uniquely as a form of emotional attunement – are insufficient to grant that the acts they motivate are morally acceptable. The case of future generations is a perfect example of such insufficiency. Second, I will discuss the possibility of regulated emotions and sympathy playing such a role. In fact, by regulating and educating emotions, a conscious or “rational” component is added, which could help avoid the biases and limitations immediate affective phenomena show. Such a “rational” component would also enable us to provide a criterion to distinguish cases in which emotions drive us in morally acceptable or unacceptable directions. In the second part of the paper, the sentimentalist tradition will be reconsidered, with particular attention to Adam Smith’s moral proposal – since the sympathetic engagement of an impartial spectator could be an excellent example of a regulated and educated emotional attunement of the kind required to deal with some of the many moral issues future generations raise and, in particular, with the motivational problem itself. (shrink)

The multiplicity of deubiquitinating enzymes (DUBs) encoded by vertebrate genomes is partly attributable to whole genome duplication events that occurred early in chordate evolution. By surveying the literature for the largest family of DUBs (the ubiquitin-specific proteases), extensive functional redundancy for duplicated genes has been confirmed as opposed to singletons. Dramatically conflicting results have been reported for loss of function studies conducted through RNA interference as opposed to inactivating mutations, but the contradictory findings can be reconciled by a recently proposed (...) compensatory mechanism involving nonsense-mediated RNA degradation. Duplicated genes are often inactivated to become pseudogenes, and it is proposed that such is the fate of the USP15 gene of zebrafish, a commonly used model system. As it is reviewed here, these observations have implications not only for the interpretation of model system phenotypes but also for therapeutic interventions designed to target DUBs. (shrink)

: Contextualism in epistemology has been proposed both as a way to avoid skepticism and as an explanation for the variability found in our use of "knows." When we turn to contextualism to perform these two functions, we should ensure that the version we endorse is well suited for these tasks. I compare two versions of epistemic contextualism: attributor contextualism and methodological contextualism. I argue that methodological contextualism is superior both in its response to skepticism and in its mechanism for (...) changing contexts. However, methodological contextualism still faces two challenges: explaining why we are solidly committed to some contexts, and explaining why knowledge within a context is valuable. I propose virtue contextualism as a useful extension of methodological contextualism, focusing on the way that our virtues depend on our social roles. My proposed virtue contextualism retains the benefits of methodological contextualism while explaining both our commitment to particular contexts and the value of knowledge held within those contexts. (shrink)

Justice, Gender and the Politics of Multiculturalism explores the tensions that arise when culturally diverse democratic states pursue both justice for religious and cultural minorities and justice for women. Sarah Song provides a distinctive argument about the circumstances under which egalitarian justice requires special accommodations for cultural minorities while emphasizing the value of gender equality as an important limit on cultural accommodation. Drawing on detailed case studies of gendered cultural conflicts, including conflicts over the 'cultural defense' in criminal law, (...) aboriginal membership rules and polygamy, Song offers a fresh perspective on multicultural politics by examining the role of intercultural interactions in shaping such conflicts. In particular, she demonstrates the different ways that majority institutions have reinforced gender inequality in minority communities and, in light of this, argues in favour of resolving gendered cultural dilemmas through intercultural democratic dialogue. (shrink)

I begin by proposing and explicating a plausible articulation of the view that morality is overriding. I then argue that it would be desirable for this thesis to be sustained. However, the prospects for its vindication will depend crucially on which moral theory we adopt. I examine some schematic moral theories in order to bring out which are friendly and which unfriendly to moral overridingness. In light of the reasons to hope that the overridingness thesis can be sustained, theories apparently (...) incompatible with it – I argue that consequentialism is one – have a count against them. (shrink)

The best things in my Ufe have come to me by accident and this book results from one such accident: my having the opportunity, out of the blue, to go to work as H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. 's, research assistant at the Institute for the Medical Humanities in the University of Texas Medi cal Branch at Galveston, Texas, in 1974, on the recommendation of our teacher at the University of Texas at Austin, Irwin C. Lieb. During that summer Tris "lent" (...) me to Chester Bums, who has done important schol arly work over the years on the history of medical ethics. I was just finding out what bioethics was and Chester sent me to the rare book room of the Medical Branch Library to do some work on something called "medical deontology. " I discovered that this new field of bioethics had a history. This string of accidents continued, in 1975, when Warren Reich (who in 1979 made the excellent decisions to hire me to the faculty in bioethics at the Georgetown University School of Medicine and to persuade Andre Hellegers to appoint me to the Kennedy Institute of Ethics) took Tris Engelhardt's word for it that I could write on the history of modem medical ethics for Warren's major new project, the Encyclopedia of Bioethics. Warren then asked me to write on eighteenth-century British medical ethics. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 103, Issue 3, Page 620-638, November 2021.

In this paper, we theorize that the anticipation of guilt plays an important role in ethically questionable consumer situations. We propose an ethical decision-making framework incorporating anticipated guilt as partial mediator between consumers’ ethical beliefs (anteceded by ethical ideology) and intentions. In the first study, we compared several models using structural equation modeling and found empirical support for our research model. A second experiment was set up to illustrate how these new insights may be applied to prevent consumers from taking (...) advantage of the seller. Results showed that enhancing the anticipation of guilt (by making the interpersonal consequences of the unethical act more salient) increased consumers’ ethical intentions, controlling for ethical beliefs. Together these two studies might have important theoretical and managerial contributions. (shrink)

This chapter explores the practice of Body Weather (BW), a postmodern dance methodology, addressing how BW performers experience and enact agency in this context of practice. Adopting a cognitive ecological, ethnographic, and phenomenological approach, this work focuses on the creation of AURA NOX ANIMA (2016) – a short dance film directed by Sydney-based visual artist Lux Eterna and filmed on the sandy dunes in Anna Bay, New South Wales, Australia – to underscore the role played by the physical and cultural (...) environment in shaping BW performers’ sense of agency. Through the analysis of salient features of BW methodology, that include the practice of bisoku, slow movement, and the cultivation of an attention to the changing ‘weather’ of the performance ecology, this chapter suggests an ecological notion of agency as a key concept in the study of embodied cognition in performance. The chapter emphasises the relevance of addressing the environment-culture-context situatedness in the study of performance practices. (shrink)

While metaphysics is traditionally seen as dealing with the essence of things, for Wittgenstein it is grammar. But what does he mean by "grammar"? And does he mean the same thing by this word throughout his philosophical career? In this investigation, I strive to contribute to answering to these questions. I argue that Wittgenstein's notion of grammar has evolved and changed over the years of his philosophising.

The literary works of ninth-century scholar Dawud Al-Muqammas, who converted from Judaism to Christianity and then back to Judaism, reflect his pioneering approaches during a formative time in Jewish and Muslim medieval philosophy. A master of diverse genres, he composed, among other works, the thoughtful Twenty Chapters, which is not only the first known Jewish Kalam text but also the earliest extant theological summa written in Arabic. This authoritative edition presents an Arabic-letter edition of the Judeo-Arabic text, along with a (...) parallel English translation, notes, and introduction, by Sarah Stroumsa. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The political works of Adam Blackwood offer a powerful defence of absolute monarchy, and one which explicitly sets political power within a religious framework. Critiquing the resistance theories of his contemporaries, Blackwood was sceptical about the political value of natural law and of any appeal to popular sovereignty, at least in contemporary Europe. Blackwood was deeply troubled by the way Christianity was being used to justify resistance, often in Protestant texts that aligned Christianity and natural law, and he insisted (...) that true Christianity taught obedience. Though he has often been likened to his contemporary Jean Bodin, a closer examination of Blackwood’s writing reveals significant differences, especially on the linked issues of natural law, the value of historical argument, and religion. For Blackwood, sovereign power in general had to be underpinned by religion, the one constant in a world of diverse and mutable social practices, and its particular, local manifestation had to be understood historically, as the product of conquest and force. Aware of the potential tensions between Catholic Christianity and monarchical authority, Blackwood also developed a distinctive piety in an attempt to bolster the alliance he advocated between religious and political authority. (shrink)

Despite multiple axes of variation in defining wellbeing, the paper argues for the dominance of a ‘components approach’ in current research and practice. This approach builds on a well-established tradition within the social sciences of attending to categories whether for their identification, their value or their meanings and political resonance. The paper critiques the components approach and explores how to move beyond it towards conceptually integrating the various categories and dimensions through a relational and situated account of wellbeing. Drawing on (...) more fluid social sciences, wellbeing is framed as an effect, dependent on the mobilisation of resources from everyday encounters with complex assemblages of people, things and places. Through such a framing, wellbeing can be conceived of as stable and amenable to change, as individual and collective and as subjective and objective. Policy interventions then need to attend to the relationalities of particular social and spatial contexts. (shrink)

Leibniz's earliest philosophy and its importance for his mature philosophy have not been examined in detail, particularly in the level of detail that one can achieve by placing Leibniz's philosophy in the context of the sources for two of the most basic concerns of his philosophical career: his metaphysics of individuals and the principle oftheir individuation. In this book I provide for the first time a detailed examination of these two Leibnizian themes and trace its implications for how we should (...) interpret other major Leibnizian themes and for how we should read Leibniz and other philosophers of the sixteenth and later centuries as 'modem' philosophers. Leibniz began his philosophical career more than 300 years ago, a fact that shapes fundamentally my attempt in the pages that follow to come to terms now with the texts that he left us. Leibniz's did not do philosophy in a way wholly congenial to twentieth century philosophical methodologies, especially those that have enjoyed some prominence in recent Anglo-American philosophy. Moreover, as we shall see, Leibniz is not a modem philosopher, when 'modem' is understood to mean making a sharp break with medieval philosophy. Indeed, I shall argue, scholars should discard such terms as 'modem' from historical philosophical scholarship, so that old texts can be allowed to remain old - to stand on their own in and from times now long past. (shrink)

This paper empirically supports school food as a site of contested values, where corporate interests can come into direct conflict with those of communities. This is a story about the experience of a small group of activist parents going up against a major food service corporation contracted by their school district. The analysis considers their experiences as dedicated and knowledgeable parent activists who, after years of trying to work with employees of the global food service corporation, grow weary, aim to (...) overthrow it, and finally, after a decade, succeed. In response to the parents’ struggles, I apply a food sovereignty lens to school food, introducing the concept of school food sovereignty. I propose that school food sovereignty requires community participation and consideration of the health and welfare of students, environmental sustainability, local economic benefits, cultural congruence, and attention to food-related justice. (shrink)

THIS PAPER IS A COMMENTARY ON LUDWIK FLECK'S ESSAY ON THE CONNECTION BETWEEN WHAT HE CALLS "THOUGHT-STYLES" AND SCIENTIFIC AND MEDICAL CONCEPTS. THE IDEA OF A "THOUGHT-STYLE" APPLIED TO CONCEPTS OF DISEASE IS THAT THEY ARE NOT ONLY VALUE-LADEN IN THE SENSE OF INCLUDING NORMATIVE DIMENSIONS. THEY ALSO EMBRACE BROAD SOCIAL FACTORS, AS WELL. I ARGUE THAT THOUGHT-STYLES SHOULD BE UNDERSTOOD TO BE "OPEN-TEXTURED," ADMITTING A PLURALITY OF VALUE CONSIDERATIONS TO CONCEPTS OF DISEASE.

Research focused on the prodromal period prior to the onset of psychosis is essential for the further development of strategies for early detection, early intervention, and disease pre-emption. Such efforts necessarily require the enrollment of individuals who are at risk of psychosis but have not yet developed a psychotic illness into research and treatment protocols. This work is becoming increasingly internationalized, which warrants special consideration of cultural differences in conceptualization of mental illness and international differences in health care practices and (...) rights regarding research participation. The process of identifying and requesting informed consent from individuals at elevated risk for psychosis requires thoughtful communication about illness risk and often involves the participation of family members. Empirical studies of risk reasoning and decisional capacity in young people and individuals with psychosis suggest that most individuals who are at-risk for psychosis can adequately provide informed consent; however ongoing improvements to tools and procedures are important to ensure that this work proceeds with maximal consideration of relevant ethical issues. This review provides a discussion of these issues in the context of international research efforts. (shrink)

Sarah Trimmer was an experienced Sunday and charity school educator, remembered for her popularization of images and fables in children's textbooks. Trimmer's ideas were already well respected during her lifetime and many of her books saw multiple editions, eliciting the interest of such figures as Queen Charlotte and the Dowager Countess Spencer. Her Reflections upon the Education of Children in Charity Schools, first published in 1792, was one of several books she wrote to advise her readers on how to (...) approach the Christian education of the poor. In it, Trimmer passionately advocated for the utility of charity schools, provided that they followed a more age-appropriate and critical curriculum, which she conveniently published as separate editions. Those interested in the history of education, social history, the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, or the changing voice of female authorship will benefit from this book. (shrink)

A musical phrase, or, for that matter, a musical unit of any size or shape, becomes an image whenever we imagine it to be invested with a content whose origins lie outside music. Such a content, according to the theory developed here, constitutes the image's conventional significance; it accounts for whatever strikes us about the image as having a common and familiar ring. That being so, the origins in question must be coincident with the fundamental ideas--the archetypes--that have been traditionally (...) represented as underlying and unifying Western culture. As the theoretical constructs they are, arehctypes are never encountered directly. It is in the form of their local variants that we make contact with the archetypes, and it is at this local level that the present book sets its sights: style, the typical or shared element in the musical imagery of a time and place, is studies as a function of Zeitgeist, the complex of beliefs, values, and ideals of a community. The approach is both thematic and historical, in keeping with a key objective of archetypal criticism. Far from repudiating the popular notion that music expresses the human emotions, this study attempts to recast emotion theory by examining musical images for kinds of behavior from which we may infer not only emotion (pathos, effectus) but also personality (ethos). Ethical and affective distinctions are very sharply drawn, in an effort to clarify and widen the vocabulary of musical commentary, as well as to provide cultural and historical backing for contents long considered the cliches of musical expression. (shrink)

This paper discusses several case studies that illustrate the relationship between the philosophy of language and three branches of linguistics: syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Among other things, I identify binding arguments in the linguistics literature preceding (Stanley 2000), and I invent binding arguments to evaluate various semantic and pragmatic theories of belief ascriptions.