In this collection, white women philosophers engage boldly in critical acts of exploring ways of naming and disrupting whiteness in terms of how it has defined the conceptual field of philosophy. Focuses on the whiteness of the epistemic and value-laden norms within philosophy itself, the text dares to identify the proverbial elephant in the room known as white supremacy and how that supremacy functions as the measure of reason, knowledge, and philosophical intelligibility.

This essay draws on a wide range of feminist, psychoanalytic and other anti-racist theorists to work out the specific mode of space as ‘contained’ and the ways it grounds dominant contemporary forms of racism i.e. the space of phallicized whiteness. Offering a close reading of Lacan’s primary models for ego-formation, the mirror stage and the inverted bouquet, I argue that psychoanalysis can help us to map contemporary power relations of racism because it enacts some of those very dynamics. Casting the (...) production of subjectivity on the field of the visual, Lacan performs some of the fundamental conceptions of space and embodiment that ground the dominant forms of racism in these cultural symbolics. Namely, he articulates a body that is bound by skin, structured by a logic of containment, cathected through aggression and distance, and read primarily through the way it looks – both how it appears and how it beholds the appearances of other bodies. Unraveling this nexus of power relations, I argue that a fundamental anti-racist strategy is to interrupt, interrogate and re-deploy this interpellation of images. Key Words: ego-formation • embodiment • historicity • Lacan • ontological • phallus • race/racial difference/racism • space • visual • whiteness. (shrink)

I admit that when I think of pragmatism’s contributions to political philosophy, I primarily think of Jane Addams and John Dewey. Their contributions to democratic theory and practice have been extremely important in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere, so much so that “pragmatist politics” and “Deweyan democracy” are virtually synonymous. I also think of W.E.B. Du Bois’s criticisms of anti-Black racism and white supremacy in the United States and across the globe. In any case, my first instincts have (...) never been to turn to William James for political inspiration or insight. I’m not alone in thinking and... (shrink)

Warrior cultures throughout history have developed unique codes that restrict their behavior and set them apart from the rest of society. But what possible reason could a warrior have for accepting such restraints? Why should those whose profession can force them into hellish kill-or-be-killed conditions care about such lofty concepts as honor, courage, nobility, duty, and sacrifice? And why should it matter so much to the warriors themselves that they be something more than mere murderers? The Code of the Warrior (...) tackles these timely issues and takes the reader on a tour of warrior cultures and their values, from the ancient Greeks and Romans to the 'barbaric' Vikings and Celts, from legendary chivalric knights to Native American tribesmen, from Chinese warrior monks pursuing enlightenment to Japanese samurai practicing death. Drawing these rich traditions up to the present, the author quests for a code for the warriors of today, as they do battle in asymmetric conflicts against unconventional forces and the scourge of global terrorism. (shrink)

Symbolic arithmetic is fundamental to science, technology and economics, but its acquisition by children typically requires years of effort, instruction and drill1,2. When adults perform mental arithmetic, they activate nonsymbolic, approximate number representations3,4, and their performance suffers if this nonsymbolic system is impaired5. Nonsymbolic number representations also allow adults, children, and even infants to add or subtract pairs of dot arrays and to compare the resulting sum or difference to a third array, provided that only approximate accuracy is required6–10. Here (...) we report that young children, who have mastered verbal counting and are on the threshold of arithmetic instruction, can build on their nonsymbolic number system to perform symbolic addition and subtraction11–15. Children across a broad socio-economic spectrum solved symbolic problems involving approximate addition or subtraction of large numbers, both in a laboratory test and in a school setting. Aspects of symbolic arithmetic therefore lie within the reach of children who have learned no algorithms for manipulating numerical symbols. Our findings help to delimit the sources of children’s difficulties learning symbolic arithmetic, and they suggest ways to enhance children’s engagement with formal mathematics. We presented children with approximate symbolic arithmetic problems in a format that parallels previous tests of non-symbolic arithmetic in preschool children8,9. In the first experiment, five- to six-year-old children were given problems such as ‘‘If you had twenty-four stickers and I gave you twenty-seven more, would you have more or less than thirty-five stickers?’’. Children performed well above chance (65.0%, t1952.77, P 5 0.012) without resorting to guessing or comparison strategies that could serve as alternatives to arithmetic. Children who have been taught no symbolic arithmetic therefore have some ability to perform symbolic addition problems. The children’s performance nevertheless fell short of performance on non-symbolic arithmetic tasks using equivalent addition problems with numbers presented as arrays of dots and with the addition operation conveyed by successive motions of the dots into a box (71.3% correct, F1,345 4.26, P 5 0.047)8.. (shrink)

Drawing on philosophy, history, moral psychology, and ethics, this revised and expanded edition of French’s The Code of the Warrior examines historical and contemporary warrior cultures and their values, arguing that today’s warriors need a code, as their ancestors did, to prevent them from crossing the thin but critical line that separates warriors from murderers in the battle against global terrorism.

How is a disease contracted, and how does it progress through the body? Answers to these questions are fundamental to understanding both basic biology and medicine. Advances in the biomedical sciences continue to provide more tools to address these fundamental questions and to uncover questions that have not been thought of before. Despite these major advances, we are still facing conceptual and technical challenges when learning about the etiology of disease, especially for genetic diseases. In this review, we illustrate this (...) point by discussing the causal links between molecular mechanisms and systems-level phenotypes in molecular diseases. We begin with an examination of sickle cell anemia, and how mechanisms of the disease have been comprehended over the last century. While sickle cell anemia involves a mutation in a single protein in a single cell type, other diseases involve mutations in networks with many protein interactions and in diverse cell types. We introduce the challenges that result from these differences and illustrate the current obstacles by discussing the RASopathies, a recently discovered class of developmental syndromes that result from mutations in signaling networks. Methods to study mutant genotypes that lead to mutant phenotypes are discussed, particularly the use of model organisms and mutant proteins to study protein interactions that may be important for development of disease. These studies will point toward the future of diagnosing and treating genetic disease. (shrink)

This paper addresses the concern that despite centuries of analysis of jus ad helium and jus in hello, the pernicious view persists that war is a separate and amoral sphere: "C'est la guerre!" In fact, there are and must be rules for armed conflicts, and foul offenses such as rape and murder are not excused by war. What individuals do beyond the bounds of jus in hello reveals and affects their character as much as actions taken in more peaceful contexts. (...) Traditional martial virtues such as loyalty and discipline, if they are not undermined by mixed signals from leadership or corrupted by an unethical command climate, can be used to bolster the warrior's commitment to exercising restraint in wartime. These virtues remain accessible to the warrior even when dehumanization of the enemy dampens the mind's capacity for empathy and produces moral callousness. (shrink)

The rationality of concern for oneself has been taken for granted by the authors of western moral and political thought in a way in which the rationality of concern for others has not. While various authors have differed about the morality of self-concern, and about the extent to which such concern is rationally required, few have doubted that we have at least some special reasons to care for our selves, reasons that differ either in degree or in kind from those (...) we have to care for others. The rationality of prudence as traditionally conceived was thus taken to be threatened by Lockean accounts of personal identity. For taking a person’s identity through time to consist in psychological continuity is often thought to result in the numerical distinctness of his present and future selves, thus leaving his present self in the unsavoury position of having to ask, “Why care specially about my future self, if he won’t really be me?”. (shrink)

In his recent article ‘Notes Towards a Critique of Buddhist Karmic Theory’ Paul J. Griffiths makes four criticisms of Buddhist karmic theory: it is empirically false, it is incoherent, it is morally repugnant, and it is vacuous. After listing these four criticisms, Griffiths concludes that ‘all these mean that Buddhist karmic theory as expounded in the major theoretical works devoted to it must be false’.

In medieval Europe, knights were permitted to settle disputes through trial by combat. This was a practice whereby members of the noble class who were accused of a crime could defend themselves not...

Epilepsy surgery is the most effective therapeutic approach for children with drug resistant epilepsy. Recent advances in neurosurgery, such as the Laser Interstitial Thermal Therapy, improved the safety and non-invasiveness of this method. Electric and magnetic source imaging plays critical role in the delineation of the epileptogenic focus during the presurgical evaluation of children with DRE. Yet, they are currently underutilized even in tertiary epilepsy centers. Here, we present a case of an adolescent who suffered from DRE for 16 years (...) and underwent surgery at Cook Children's Medical Center. The patient was previously evaluated in a level 4 epilepsy center and treated with multiple antiseizure medications for several years. Presurgical evaluation at CCMC included long-term video electroencephalography, magnetoencephalography with simultaneous conventional EEG and high-density EEG in two consecutive sessions, MRI, and fluorodeoxyglucose - positron emission tomography. Video long-term EEG captured nine focal-onset clinical seizures with a maximal evolution over the right frontal/frontal midline areas. MRI was initially interpreted as non-lesional. FDG-PET revealed a small region of hypometabolism at the anterior right superior temporal gyrus. ESI and MSI performed with dipole clustering showed a tight cluster of dipoles in the right anterior insula. The patient underwent intracranial EEG which indicated the right anterior insular as seizure onset zone. Eventually LITT rendered the patient seizure free. Retrospective analysis of ESI and MSI clustered dipoles found a mean distance of dipoles from the ablated volume ranging from 10 to 25 mm. Our findings highlight the importance of recent technological advances in the presurgical evaluation and surgical treatment of children with DRE, and the underutilization of epilepsy surgery in children with DRE. (shrink)

As a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of decentralized clinical trials, trials conducted in whole or in part at locations other than traditional clinical trial sites, significantly increased. While these trials have the potential advantage of access, participant centricity, convenience, lower costs, and efficiency, they also raise a number of important ethical and practical concerns. Here we focus on a number of those concerns, including participant safety, privacy and confidentiality, remote consent, digital access and proficiency, and trial oversight. (...) Awareness of these ethical complexities will help foster the development of processes and cooperative solutions to promote safe, ethical trials going forward, optimized to decrease burden and increase access for all participants. (shrink)

In this article, we explore the implications of opposing domains theory for developing ethical leaders. Opposing domains theory highlights a neurological tension between analytic reasoning and socioemotional reasoning. Specifically, when we engage in analytic reasoning, we suppress our ability to engage in socioemotional reasoning and vice versa. In this article, we bring together the domains of neuroscience, psychology, and ethics, to inform our theorizing around ethical leadership. We propose that a key issue for ethical leadership is achieving a healthy balance (...) between analytic reasoning and socioemotional reasoning. We argue that organizational culture often encourages too heavy a reliance on nonemotional forms of reasoning to arrive at moral judgments. As a result, leaders run the risk of suppressing their ability to pay attention to the human side of moral dilemmas and, in doing so, dehumanize colleagues, particularly subordinates, and clients. (shrink)

The assumptions that literary criticism and philosophy are closely linked—and that both disciplines can learn much from each other—lead David White to examine key passages in James Joyce’s novels both as a philosopher and as literary critic. In so doing, he develops a thesis that Joyce’s attempt to capture the mysterious process whereby perception and consciousness are translated into language entails a fundamental challenge to everyday notions of reality. Joyce’s stylistic brilliance and virtuosity, his destruction of normal syntax and (...) meaning, “shock one into a new reality.” In the book’s final section, White examines the subtle relation between literary language and human consciousness and traces parallels between Joyce’s stylistic experimentation and Wittgenstein’s and Husserl’s ideas about language. (shrink)

Commentaries on the target article offer diverse perspectives on integrative experiment design. Our responses engage three themes: (1) Disputes of our characterization of the problem, (2) skepticism toward our proposed solution, and (3) endorsement of the solution, with accompanying discussions of its implementation in existing work and its potential for other domains. Collectively, the commentaries enhance our confidence in the promise and viability of integrative experiment design, while highlighting important considerations about how it is used.

The dominant paradigm of experiments in the social and behavioral sciences views an experiment as a test of a theory, where the theory is assumed to generalize beyond the experiment's specific conditions. According to this view, which Alan Newell once characterized as “playing twenty questions with nature,” theory is advanced one experiment at a time, and the integration of disparate findings is assumed to happen via the scientific publishing process. In this article, we argue that the process of integration is (...) at best inefficient, and at worst it does not, in fact, occur. We further show that the challenge of integration cannot be adequately addressed by recently proposed reforms that focus on the reliability and replicability of individual findings, nor simply by conducting more or larger experiments. Rather, the problem arises from the imprecise nature of social and behavioral theories and, consequently, a lack of commensurability across experiments conducted under different conditions. Therefore, researchers must fundamentally rethink how they design experiments and how the experiments relate to theory. We specifically describe an alternative framework, integrative experiment design, which intrinsically promotes commensurability and continuous integration of knowledge. In this paradigm, researchers explicitly map the design space of possible experiments associated with a given research question, embracing many potentially relevant theories rather than focusing on just one. Researchers then iteratively generate theories and test them with experiments explicitly sampled from the design space, allowing results to be integrated across experiments. Given recent methodological and technological developments, we conclude that this approach is feasible and would generate more-reliable, more-cumulative empirical and theoretical knowledge than the current paradigm – and with far greater efficiency. (shrink)

One barrier to optimal pain management in the neonatal intensive care unit is how the healthcare community perceives, and therefore manages, neonatal pain. In this paper, we emphasise that healthcare professionals not only have a professional obligation to care for neonates in the NICU, but that these patients are intrinsically worthy of care. We discuss the conditions that make neonates worthy recipients of pain management by highlighting how neonates are vulnerable to pain and harm, and completely dependent on others for (...) pain management. We argue for a relational account of ethical decision-making in the NICU by demonstrating how an increase in vulnerability and dependence may be experienced by the healthcare community and the neonate’s family. Finally, an ethical framework for decisions around neonatal pain management is proposed, focussing on surrogate decision-making and the importance of compassionate action through both a reflective and an affective empathy. As empathy can be highly motivating against pain, we propose that, in addition to educational programs that raise awareness and knowledge of neonatal pain and pain management, healthcare professionals must cultivate empathy in a collective manner, where all members of the NICU team, including parents, are compassionate decision-makers. (shrink)

Background: Relatively little is known about neonatologists' roles in helping families navigate the difficult decision to attempt or withhold resuscitation for a neonate delivering at the threshold...

ObjectiveOverweight and obesity [body mass index ≥ 25 kg/m2] are associated with poorer prognosis among women with breast cancer, and weight gain is common during treatment. Symptoms of depression and anxiety are also highly prevalent in women with breast cancer and may be exacerbated by post-diagnosis weight gain. Altered brain function may underlie psychological distress. Thus, this secondary analysis examined the relationship between BMI, psychological health, and resting state functional connectivity among women with breast cancer.MethodsThe sample included 34 post-menopausal women (...) newly diagnosed with Stage 0-IIa breast cancer who were enrolled in a 6-month randomized controlled trial of aerobic exercise vs. usual care. At baseline prior to randomization, whole-brain analyses were conducted to evaluate the relationship between BMI and seed-to-voxel rsFC of the hippocampus and amygdala. Connectivity values from significant clusters were then extracted and examined as predictors of self-reported depression and anxiety.ResultsMean BMI was in the obese range. For both seeds examined, higher BMI was associated with lower rsFC with regions of prefrontal cortex, including ventrolateral PFC, dorsolateral PFC, and superior frontal gyrus. Hippocampal connectivity with the vlPFC was negatively correlated with self-reported anxiety.ConclusionHigher BMI was associated with lower hippocampal and amygdala connectivity to regions of PFC implicated in cognitive control and emotion regulation. BMI-related differences in hippocampal and amygdala connectivity following a recent breast cancer diagnosis may relate to future worsening of psychological functioning during treatment and remission. Additional longitudinal research exploring this hypothesis is warranted. (shrink)