In the United States, disease screening is offered to the public as a consumer service. It has been proposed that the act of “consumption” is a manifestation of agency and that the decision to consume is an exercise of autonomy. The enthusiasm of the American public for disease screening and the expansion in the demand for all sorts of disease screening in recent years can be viewed as an expression of such autonomy. Here, we argue that the enthusiasm for disease (...) screening witnessed in the American public today may be more a reflection of the constraint on autonomy than its facilitation. It is our opinion that the articulation of socio-historical processes has contributed to a moral imperative which is reflected in the decision making of individuals around disease screening. We suggest medical and health professionals have a responsibility to facilitate the exercise of individual autonomy in health care decision making as an integral component of professional obligation. These professionals need to problematise healthcare activities that constrain individual autonomy. (shrink)

A record of the words and teachings of Confucius, _The Analects_ is considered the most reliable expression of Confucian thought. However, the original meaning of Confucius's teachings have been filtered and interpreted by the commentaries of Confucianists of later ages, particularly the Neo-Confucianists of the Song dynasty, not altogether without distortion.In this monumental translation by Professor D. C. Lau, an attempt has been made to interpret the sayings as they stand. The corpus of the sayings is taken as an organic (...) whole and the final test of the interpretation rests on the internal consistency it exhibits. In other words, _The Analects_ is read in the light of _The Analects._This results in a truer understanding of Confucius' thought than the traditional interpretation and paves the way for a re-assessment of its importance in the history of Chinese thought and its relevance to the present day world.This volume also contains an introduction to the life and teachings of Confucius, and three appendices on the events in the life of Confucius, on his disciples, and on the composition of _The Analects._. (shrink)

There are two popular views regarding the origin of critical thinking: (1) The concept of critical thinking began with Socrates and his Socratic method of questioning. (2) The term ‘critical thinking’ was first introduced by John Dewey in 1910 in his book How We Think. This paper argues that both claims are incorrect. Firstly, critical reflection was a distinguishing characteristic of the Presocratic philosophers, setting them apart from earlier traditions. Therefore, they should be recognized as even earlier pioneers of critical (...) thinking. Secondly, John Dewey not only used the term ‘critical thinking’ before 1910, but there were also other authors who used it before him. The meaning of ‘critical thinking’ at the turn of the twentieth century was shaped by various traditions of linguistic usage, including literary criticism, science and medicine, and Kantian philosophy. (shrink)

Wenn Bildung die Aneignung von Welt bedeutet, dann schienen lange Zeit insbesondere die hohen Freiheitsgrade dieser Aneignung entscheidend: "Erziehung ist eine Zumutung, Bildung ein Angebot".

We discuss cases where subjects seem to enjoy conscious experience when the relevant first-order perceptual representations are either missing or too weak to account for the experience. Though these cases are originally considered to be theoretical possibilities that may be problematical for the higher-order view of consciousness, careful considerations of actual empirical examples suggest that this strategy may backfire; these cases may cause more trouble for first-order theories instead. Specifically, these cases suggest that (I) recurrent feedback loops to V1 are (...) most likely not the neural correlate of first-order representations for conscious experience, (II) first-order views seem to have a problem accounting for the phenomenology in these cases, and either (III) a version of the ambitious higher-order approach is superior in that it is the simplest theory that can account for all results at face value, or (IV) a view where phenomenology is jointly determined by both first-order and higher-order states. In our view (III) and (IV) are both live options and the decision between them may ultimately be an empirical question that cannot yet be decided. (shrink)

In this chapter, we discuss a selection of current views of the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC). We focus on the different predictions they make, in particular with respect to the role of prefrontal cortex (PFC) during visual experiences, which is an area of critical interest and some source of contention. Our discussion of these views focuses on the level of functional anatomy, rather than at the neuronal circuitry level. We take this approach because we currently understand more about experimental (...) evidence at this coarse level and because these results are appropriate for arbitrating between current theoretical frameworks. We discuss the Two-Visual-Systems Hypothesis (Milner & Goodale 1995; 2006), Local Recurrency (Lamme 2010; Lamme 2006), Higher Order (Lau 2008; Lau & Rosenthal 2011) and Global Workspace theories (Baars 1997; Baars 2005; Dehaene & Naccache 2001; Dehaene 2014). Despite the apparent stark differences between conscious and unconscious perceptual processing, available evidence suggests that their neural substrates must be largely shared. This indicates that the difference in neural activity between conscious and unconscious perceptual processing is likely to be subtle and highly specialized. We argue that current experimental evidence about the involvement of specific activity in prefrontal cortex supports the higher order neural theory of consciousness. In consequence, imaging techniques that focus only on marked differences between conscious and unconscious level of activity are likely to be insensitive to the relevant neural activity patterns that underlie conscious experiences. Finally, it follows from the evidence we discuss that the functional advantages of conscious over unconscious perceptual processing may be more limited than commonly thought. (shrink)

It is usually taken as given that consciousness involves superior or more elaborate forms of information processing. Contemporary models equate consciousness with global processing, system complexity, or depth or stability of computation. This is in stark contrast with the powerful philosophical intuition that being conscious is more than just having the ability to compute. I argue that it is also incompatible with current empirical findings. I present a model that is free from the strong assumption that consciousness predicts superior performance. (...) The model is based on Bayesian decision theory, of which signal detection theory is a special case. It reflects the fact that the capacity for perceptual decisions is fundamentally limited by the presence and amount of noise in the system. To optimize performance, one therefore needs to set decision criteria that are based on the behaviour, i.e. the probability distributions, of the internal signals. One important realization is that the knowledge of how our internal signals behave statistically has to be learned over time. Essentially, we are doing statistics on our own brain. This ‘higherorder’ learning, however, may err, and this impairs our ability to set and maintain optimal criteria for perceptual decisions, which I argue is central to perception consciousness. I outline three possibilities of how conscious perception might be affected by failures of ‘higher-order’ representation. These all imply that one can have a dissociation between consciousness and performance. This model readily explains blindsight and hallucinations in formal terms, and is beginning to receive direct empirical support. I end by discussing some philosophical implications of the model. (shrink)

It has been over a decade and half since Christof Koch and the late Francis Crick first advocated the now popular NCC project (Crick and Koch, 1990), in which one tries to find the neural correlate of consciousness (NCC) for perceptual processes. In his chapter in this book Chris Frith provides a splendid review of how neuroimaging has contributed greatly to this project. For the sake of contrast, this chapter takes a more critical stance on what we have actually learned. (...) Many authors have written on whether looking for the neural correlates would eventually lead to an explanatory theory of consciousness, while the proponents defend that focusing on correlates is a strategically sensible first step, given the complexity of the problem (Crick and Koch, 1998;Crick and Koch, 2003). My point here is not to argue whether studying the NCC is useful, but rather, to question whether we are really studying the NCC at all. I argue that in hoping to sidestep the difficult conceptual issues, we have sometimes also missed the phenomenon of perceptual consciousness itself. (shrink)

The book is a collection of essays written by Gustavo Esteva over the last 20 years. In this book, Gustavo Esteva, renowned in Mexico as a philosopher on education and on developmentalism, collects four major areas of his writings: on learning, development, autonomy, and interculturality. A memorial to a great thinker, this book stimulates thoughts on developmentalism across the global south.

Terrorism, ethnocentrism, religious tension, competition over limited resources, war - these are just a few of the problems and challenges that have emerged in today's global economy. Globalization both implies and requires economic interdependence; and this should bring with it a heightened sense of the interconnectedness of the participating societies. But unfortunately, as recent events indicate, rather than our having formed a global community, today's society is more fragmented than ever. In light of this, education faces some formidable new challenges. (...) How do we prepare future citizens for the world they will live in? How do we teach future generations to embrace the paradox of accepting the value of multiculturalism despite the conflicts it has produced? How do we instill religious tolerance in a time when fundamentalism has become inextricably tied with terrorism? How do we promote economic growth in the face of overpopulation and its depletion of resources? The authors of this collection of essays explore these and related challenges, and they suggest some novel ways of dealing with them. (shrink)

In this paper, we explore the concept of virtue in nursing care. We particularly examine the description of ‘virtue’ offered by Aristotle, who considers it the mental constitution that forms the basis for laudable social behaviour. We then turn to Katie Eriksson's work on caritative caring ethics and draw parallels between the Aristotelian concept of virtue and being a good nurse. Eriksson suggests that embracing an ethos, a set of basic values, affects nurses’ attitudes as well as the way they (...) speak and take on their responsibility for the patient. We discuss these ideas in relation to a tentative ideal model of the movement from ethos to action to understand and address nurses’ ethical thinking and acting. Here, we focus on the catalytic role of virtue as a means for realizing a deliberate, intentional acting with the best of the patient in mind. As an outcome of our analysis, we suggest that the movement of virtue from ethos to action is most usefully conceptualized as knowledge about facts, habits of the heart, deeds of the hand and the power of words. Implications for nursing leadership are suggested, including incorporating organizational values through the means of ethical conversations. (shrink)

Edmund Burke is considered the father of conservatism. With his ‘Reflections on the French Revolution’ (1790), Burke presented a work that was already controversial at the time of its publication. In Burke’s understanding, people and their social institutions are historical beings that are subject to change but unchanging in the face of all change. The central concept in Burke’s argument is heritage, which encompasses both collective, historical memory and social organisation, and specifically refers to constitutional traditions. Society is hierarchically structured (...) and forms an organic unit based on a necessary balance between the principles of continuity and regeneration. According to Burke, the state is the coagulated historical rationality of people who must be taken at least as seriously as contemporaries in their efforts to shape a good order. With contributions by Michael Becker, Norbert Campagna, Oliver Hidalgo, Jürgen Kamm, Skadi Siiri Krause, Thomas Lau, Ulrich Niggemann, Henning Ottmann, Volker Reinhardt and Rüdiger Voigt. (shrink)

Quel sens donner à l'intrusion quand celle-ci est inséparable d'une mise en danger potentiellement mortelle de ce qui se pense ' un ', mais qu'elle est en même temps nécessaire pour que quelque chose advienne? Quelles perspectives ontologiques, esthétiques et politiques la venue de l'autre ouvre-t-elle alors qu'il peut nous mettre ' hors de nous '? Comment, de fait, l'intrus ne vient-il pas toujours d'ailleurs? La lecture de L'Intrus de Jean-Luc Nancy et des liens qui se tissent entre le philosophe, (...) la réalisatrice Claire Denis et les réalisateurs Nicolas Klotz et Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, permet d'envisager comment la notion d'ex-criture donne lieu à des gestes cinématographiques: greffe, adoption, adaptation ou encore intégration. (shrink)

In 2009, with the enactment of the Lisbon Treaty, the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union entered into force. Under Article 8 of the Charter, for the first time, a stand-alone fundamental right to data protection was declared. The creation of this right, standing as a distinct right to the right to privacy, is undoubtedly significant, and it is unique to the European legal order, being absent from other international human rights instruments. This commentary examines the parameters of (...) this new right to data protection, asking what are the principles underpinning the right. It argues that the right reflects some key values inherent in the European legal order, namely: privacy, transparency, autonomy and nondiscrimination. It also analyses some of the challenges in implementing this right in an era of ubiquitous veillance practices and Big Data. (shrink)

How should we measure metacognitive sensitivity, i.e. the efficacy with which observers’ confidence ratings discriminate between their own correct and incorrect stimulus classifications? We argue that currently available methods are inadequate because they are influenced by factors such as response bias and type 1 sensitivity . Extending the signal detection theory approach of Galvin, Podd, Drga, and Whitmore , we propose a method of measuring type 2 sensitivity that is free from these confounds. We call our measure meta-d′, which reflects (...) how much information, in signal-to-noise units, is available for metacognition. Applying this novel method in a 2-interval forced choice visual task, we found that subjects’ metacognitive sensitivity was close to, but significantly below, optimality. We discuss the theoretical implications of these findings, as well as related computational issues of the method. We also provide free Matlab code for implementing the analysis. (shrink)

Preamble -- Holding on -- The public intellectual -- Stories of action in theories of context -- Life politics -- Curriculum -- Teachers' lives, professional knowledge, educational reform -- Narrative -- Preamble -- Biography -- Scholarship -- Learning and pedagogy.

Yet, he also says that it is philosophically indeterminate which criterion for what exists is correct. Nominalism is the view that certain objects ( i.e ., abstract objects) do not exist, and not the view that it is philosophically indeterminate whether or not they do. I resolve the dilemma that Azzouni's claims pose: Azzouni is a non-factualist about what exists, but he is a factualist about which criterion for what exists our community of speakers has adopted. It is in the (...) latter sense only that Azzouni can call himself a nominalist. My thanks to Jody Azzouni and to an anonymous referee for helpful suggestions. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

This study focuses on the cultural context of ethical decision making by considering the relationship between power distance and ethical judgment. Specifically, we propose that this relationship exists because of the influence of peers on ethical judgment and perceptions of justice. Considering the importance of peers in stage three of Kohlberg's model of moral development, we argue that peers are the basis for social comparisons, social cues and social identification and, hence, are critical to an individual's beliefs about justice. Using (...) scenarios developed by Reidenbach and Robin, data were collected from German and Italian graduate business students. Germany and Italy differ substantially in power distance, but not in the three other cultural dimensions of Hofstede. Results show that the ethical assessment of the respondents from the two countries differs when justice criteria are used. Theoretical and practical implications of the results are discussed. (shrink)

Objectives: Initially, we analyzed relations between the challenging working conditions of flight attendants with symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress. As the COVID-19 pandemic plunged airlines into an unprecedented crisis, its impact on the mental health of flying cabin crews became the focus of a second survey.Methods: Flight attendants were surveyed online with DASS-21 in May 2019 and April 2020, complemented with questions about working conditions and existential fears and fear of job loss.Results: Sample 1 revealed that symptoms of depression, (...) anxiety and stress highly correlated with the subjective assessment of working conditions, but not with objectifiable parameters. Sample 2 showed significant positive correlations between existential fears and fear of job loss with depression, anxiety and stress. Crew members, grounded in April 2020, showed significantly higher scores in depression and stress, while still flying individuals had more clinically relevant symptoms of anxiety. Mean value comparisons between sample 1 and 2 in DASS-21 revealed a significant increase in symptoms at the time of crisis with effect sizes of d = 0.63 for depression, d = 0.26 for anxiety, and d = 0.52 for stress. The incidence of clinically relevant symptoms among the respondents increased from 8 to 23%, from 6 to 14%, and from 8 to 24%.Conclusion: The COVID-19 pandemic and associated work restrictions coincide with severe impairment of mental health of flying cabin crews, consistent with a mental health protecting function of labor. (shrink)

The Finnish nursing theorist Katie Eriksson's (1943–2019) theory of caritative caring represents a non‐medical paradigm concerning the phenomena of nursing. The aim of this article was to present an oversight of the development of Eriksson's theory of caritative caring from a human science point of view. The historical development of the theory is outlined, combined with a brief overview of its philosophical connections, its impact on contemporary caring science research and its implications for nursing care. Caring science is considered a (...) human science in the Nordic tradition, as it is deeply rooted in basic issues of human life and existence. The key ideas of Eriksson's theory of caritative caring are linked to the metaparadigm concepts of human being, health and suffering, caring and environment. All of these are permeated with the ethos of caritative caring, that is, the caritas thought of human love and mercy, and the honouring of the absolute dignity of human beings. Epistemologically, Gadamer is the most influential philosopher when it comes to the theory of caritative caring. Eriksson's theory is used in, for example, intercultural caring, caring for patients suffering from addiction, the importance of aesthetic surroundings, providing ethically good care for older people and mothers as patients in psychiatric care. In these fields of research, Eriksson's ideas of ethics, caring and suffering are highlighted in various clinical contexts. Beyond the areas of nursing care in which Eriksson's work has been cited and developed, there are at least two areas that have been actively enhanced by her works: the field of leadership and education for nursing teachers. According to Eriksson, it is momentous to ponder scientific results as not limited to empirically strengthened, randomized outcomes. Part of making the results of scientific work evident is up to the individual nurses and their being in the world. (shrink)

This study focuses on the cultural context of ethical decision making by considering the relationship between power distance and ethical judgment. Specifically, we propose that this relationship exists because of the influence of peers on ethical judgment and perceptions of justice. Considering the importance of peers in stage three of Kohlberg's model of moral development, we argue that peers are the basis for social comparisons, social cues and social identification and, hence, are critical to an individual's beliefs about justice. Using (...) scenarios developed by Reidenbach and Robin, data were collected from German and Italian graduate business students. Germany and Italy differ substantially in power distance, but not in the three other cultural dimensions of Hofstede. Results show that the ethical assessment of the respondents from the two countries differs when justice criteria are used. Theoretical and practical implications of the results are discussed. (shrink)

Background:Within nursing, the concepts of home and homelike have been used indiscriminately to describe characteristics of healthcare settings that resemble a home more than an institution.Objectives:The aim of this study was to investigate the concept of home. The main questions were as follows: What does the concept of home entail etymologically and semantically? Of what significance is the meaning of the concept to caring science and nursing?Design and methods:This study had a qualitative design with a hermeneutical approach guided by Gadamer. (...) Eriksson’s model of concept determination was partly used to determine the etymology and semantics, the essence and epistemic category of the concept of home. In this study, etymological dictionaries and 17 Swedish language dictionaries published between 1850 and 2001 were investigated.Ethical consideration:In all parts of this study, ethical guidelines have been followed concerning both gathering data from dictionaries and other sources and during the interpretation of these sources.Findings:The home, framed as the ethos of caring, can be drawn as a three-dimensional picture where the three dimensions have a common core, enclosed and inviolable. Symbolically, the picture of home can be seen as the ethos of the human being’s innermost room, the human being’s manner of being and the tone expressed in the external or abstract room where the human being lives and interacts with others.Conclusion:Based on the findings in this study, we conclude that home as ethos is an inner ethical dimension within the human being. Human beings who are in contact with their ethos, the self, feel at home and dare to follow the voice of their heart. Nurses who experience at-homeness have an ability to invite the patient into a caring relationship. The home and the feeling of being at home have significant meaning in terms of human beings’ health and well-being. (shrink)

Hong Kong is a territory of only 400 square miles in size, but with a large population of six million people. We have excellent medical facilities in both the public and private sector and the general health indices of the population are good, with low infant mortality rates and long life expectancies.

The social media industry lacks developed principles of professional ethics that it would need in order to better navigate the ethics of conforming to local media laws in authoritarian countries that lack meaningful protections for privacy, personal and political expression, and intellectual property. This chapter analyzes this question through three frameworks of professional ethics—journalism ethics, technology ethics, and business ethics—and the ways that social media resembles and crucially differs from these three industries.

In four experiments involving 565 German speakers we tested several hypotheses about possible determinants of the side-effect effect, which consists of judging foreseen bad, but not good, side-effects of actions as intentionally produced. Experiment 1 failed to find intentionality ascriptions for bad side-effects for the majority of the participants in two different scenarios and obtained no consistent support for two hypothesized social-cognitive determinants of the see, the agent’s attitude and the mode of effect description. Experiment 2 replicated the see in (...) the original ceo scenario, but again found no evidence that the effect was influenced by the agent’s attitude towards the side-effect. The see was also not influenced by a manipulation of the moral quality of the agent’s primary goal. Experiment 3 investigated six additional scenarios used in previous studies and again obtained clear evidence for the see only in the ceo scenario. In addition, Experiment 3 demonstrated that judgments of both intent and intentionality strongly increased if the original side-effect was described as a means to the agent’s primary goal, or as an independently pursued goal. Taken together, the findings suggest that for German speakers, the see depends on the specifics of the scenario content and is difficult to obtain outside the original ceo scenario. Consistent with these conclusions, Experiment 4 documented parallel difficulties replicating the “means effect”, an analogue of the see on the level of means, but replicated the see in a scenario closely modeled after the original ceo scenario. (shrink)

Consciousness and confidence seem intimately related. Accordingly, some researchers use confidence ratings as a measure of, or proxy for, consciousness. Rosenthal discusses the potential connections between the two, and rejects confidence as a valid measure of consciousness. He argues that there are better alternatives to get at conscious experiences such as direct subjective reports of awareness (i.e. subjects’ reports of perceiving something or of the degree of visibility of a stimulus). In this chapter, we offer a different perspective. Confidence ratings (...) in general, and metacognitive measures in particular, may offer important advantages over subjective ratings. The arguments we offer here are supported by empirical, practical and socio-strategic considerations. However, we do not suggest consciousness and confidence are interchangeable. We recognize the limitations of confidence ratings in some experimental designs and for some research questions. Nevertheless, we also address a potential conceptual link between consciousness and confidence that stems from Rosenthal’s very own work on mental quality space theory. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 10, Page 12-14, October 2012.