The deceptive clues in the impossible puzzle film confirm the viewer’s internal expectations and allow retrospective attributing. In the film, a transcendental object negates an internal expectation, causing a retrospective blockage. Retrospectivity does not stop there; the transcendental object reinterpreting deceptive clues in the associative area leads to repeated attribution. This article consists of three parts. First, it discusses impossible puzzle films in the context of complex narrative classification. The following section introduces the Jungian concept of synchronicity and (...) illustrates how it works. The article concludes with a case study of Long Day’s Journey into Night (2018), which contains more complicated puzzles and explains how mind-game narrative techniques create deceptive clues and induce deceptive retrospective attribution. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to elaborate philosophical and ethical underpinnings of posthumous diagnosis of famous historical figures based on literary and artistic products, or commonly called retrospective diagnosis. It discusses ontological and epistemic challenges raised in the humanities and social sciences, and attempts to systematically reply to their criticisms from the viewpoint of clinical medicine, philosophy of medicine, particularly the ontology of disease and the epistemology of diagnosis, and medical ethics. The ontological challenge focuses on the doubt (...) about the persistence of a disease over historical time, whereas the epistemic challenge disputes the inaccessibility of scientific verification of a diagnosis in the past. I argue that the critics are in error in conflating the taxonomy of disease and the act of diagnosing a patient. Medical diagnosis is fundamentally a hypothesis-construction and an explanatory device that can be generated under various degrees of uncertainty and limited amount of information. It is not an apodictic judgment as the critics presuppose, but a probabilistic judgment with varying degrees of plausibility under uncertainty. In order to avoid this confusion, I propose that retrospective diagnosis of a historical figure be syndromic without identifying underlying disease, unless there is justifiable reason for such specification. Moreover it should be evaluated not only from the viewpoint of medical science but also in a larger context of the scholarship of the humanities and social sciences by its overall plausibility and consistency. On the other hand, I will endorse their concerns regarding the ethics and professionalism of retrospective diagnosis, and call for the need for situating such a diagnosis in an interdisciplinary scope and the context of the scholarship of the historical figure. I will then enumerate several important caveats for interdisciplinary retrospective diagnosis using an example of the retrospective diagnosis of Socrates for his life-long intermittent neurologic symptoms. Finally, I will situate the present argument in a larger context of the major debate among the historians of medicine and paleopathologists, and discuss the similarities and differences. (shrink)

The transitory and ever-evolving process of law making plays a role of primal importance in the regulation of human conduct of society. It goes without saying that in this entire process, judges have a participation. The power entrusted by law and the nature of judicial process, make judges the prime mover of the development of law. It matters how judges decide cases. It matters most to people unlucky or litigious or wicked or saintly enough to find themselves in court... The (...) effect emanating from the decision of a case affects the life of a person in many ways that at times has far reaching impact...When the law in question happens to be criminal law, it requires a cautious consideration to see how the interpretive tools used by judges affect the life of a litigant in ways both seen and unseen... Several areas concerning adjudication and judicial interpretation have been the subject matter of study. This paper includes a discussion on the principle of non- retrospectivity in light of judicial adjudication in criminal matters. (shrink)

Retrospective rule-making has few supporters and many opponents. Defenders of retrospective laws generally do so on the basis that they are a necessary evil in specific or limited circumstances, for example to close tax loopholes, to deal with terrorists or to prosecute fallen tyrants. Yet the reality of retrospective rule making is far more widespread than this, and ranges from ’corrective’ legislation to ’interpretive regulations’ to judicial decision making. The search for a rational justification for retrospective (...) rule-making necessitates a reconsideration of the very nature of the rule of law and the kind of law that can rule, and will provide new insights into the nature of law and the parameters of societal order. This book examines the various ways in which laws may be seen as retrospective and analyses the problems in defining retrospectivity. In his analysis Dr Charles Sampford asserts that the definitive argument against retrospective rule-making is the expectation of individuals that, if their actions today are considered by a future court, the applicable law was discoverable at the time the action was performed. The book goes on to suggest that although the strength of this ’rule of law’ argument should prevail in general, exceptions are sometimes necessary, and that there may even be occasions when analysis of the rule of law may provide the foundation for the application of retrospective laws. (shrink)

Retrospective rule-making has few supporters and many opponents. Defenders of retrospective laws generally do so on the basis that they are a necessary evil in specific or limited circumstances, for example to close tax loopholes, to deal with terrorists or to prosecute fallen tyrants. Yet the reality of retrospective rule making is far more widespread than this, and ranges from 'corrective' legislation to 'interpretive regulations' to judicial decision making. The search for a rational justification for retrospective (...) rule-making necessitates a reconsideration of the very nature of the rule of law and the kind of law that can rule, and will provide new insights into the nature of law and the parameters of societal order.This book examines the various ways in which laws may be seen as retrospective and analyses the problems in defining retrospectivity. In his analysis Dr Charles Sampford asserts that the definitive argument against retrospective rule-making is the expectation of individuals that, if their actions today are considered by a future court, the applicable law was discoverable at the time the action was performed. The book goes on to suggest that although the strength of this 'rule of law' argument should prevail in general, exceptions are sometimes necessary, and that there may even be occasions when analysis of the rule of law may provide the foundation for the application of retrospective laws. (shrink)

In retrospecting "Two Dogmas" I find myself overshooting by twenty years. I think back to college days, 61 years agao. I majored in mathematics and was doing my honors reading in mathematical logic, a subject that had not yet penetrated the Oberlin curriculum. My new love, in the platonic sense, was Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica.

As consumer lifestyles have changed over recent decades, people have increasingly turned to meals prepared away from home. A major consequence of this shift in eating patterns has been a concomitant rise in obesity rates worldwide. Research has consistently documented that consumers tend to make less healthy choices when purchasing prepared meals away from home. In part, this can be attributed to inadequate information at the time of purchase; both nutrition experts and lay consumers tend, for example, to underestimate calories (...) in food purchased away from home and thus portion sizes tend to be larger. Thus, by requiring restaurants and other purveyors of prepared foods to provide the calorie content and other nutrition information at the point of purchase, consumers should be able to make more informed decisions and public health should be improved. The often maligned Affordable Care Act (i.e., “Obamacare”) addressed this issue in a mandate calling for compulsory nutrition labeling of prepared foods at the point of sale. In response to this effort, conservatives in Congress introduced the “Common Sense Nutrition Disclosure Act” (CSNDA) which, if enacted, would have effectively eviscerated the menu labeling provisions mandated by the Affordable Care Act. The stated rationale behind this legislation: to protect small business and prevent job loss resulting from overly‐burdensome federal regulations. This article provides a historical look at the evolution of federally mandated menu labeling in the United States with particular emphasis on opposition to its passage. The position is taken such that this legislation is beneficial, warranted, and long overdue, and its opposition, as reflected in the CSNDA, points to the need for new metrics when evaluating public policy. (shrink)

Many philosophers think the non-identity problem undermines the ability for future generations to have been wronged by past ones. This problem has prompted a number of responses, some of which purport to vindicate the relevant claims of wrongdoing. However, I argue that a closely related issue remains even for those convinced by these responses. It is commonly thought that wrongdoing makes certain retrospective attitudes, such as resentment, fitting toward the wrongdoer. In this paper, I shift a familiar problem of (...) future generations from wrongdoing to the fittingness of retrospective attitudes, and I show that a narrative sense of identity provides one means of addressing the puzzle of how these attitudes can be fi tting in non-identity cases. (shrink)

L’introspection peut être conçue comme une manière de s’observer pendant qu’on se livre à une activité mentale et comme une méthode de recherche dans les sciences du mental, dans l’intention de comprendre et de décrire aussi précisément que possible les événements mentaux d’ordre divers qui ont lieu en nous. Les critiques de l’introspection mettent en cause aussi bien la méthode et ses résultats que la possibilité même d’user d’une telle procédure. Les premières objections ont trait au caractère « objectif » (...) de l’introspection. L’autre catégorie d’objections porte sur la possibilité d’observer un événement mental pendant que celui-ci a lieu. Il n’en reste pas moins que nous nous regardons penser, sentir, agir. Puisque l’introspection au sens restreint n’est pas possible, à cause justement des problèmes que posent l’objectivité des résultats et la simultanéité de l’observation, je propose d’élargir la portée de l’introspection en la renforçant en arrière, par la rétrospection, considérée comme un regard jeté sur ce qui vient d’avoir lieu dans mon monde mental ; et en avant, par la prospection, considérée comme un regard jeté sur ce qui se passe en général dans mon monde mental. En partant de ce double point de vue, on constate que l’introspection est non seulement possible mais qu’elle est même intéressante et féconde. (shrink)

Moral theory has mostly focused on idealized situations in which the morally relevant properties of human actions can be known beforehand. Here, a framework is proposed that is intended to sharpen moral intuitions and improve moral argumentation in problems involving risk and uncertainty. Guidelines are proposed for a systematic search of suitable future viewpoints for hypothetical retrospection. In hypothetical retrospection, a decision is evaluated under the assumption that one of the branches of possible future developments has materialized. This evaluation is (...) based on the deliberator’s present values, and each decision is judged in relation to the information available when it was taken. The basic decision rule is to choose an alternative that comes out as morally acceptable (permissible) from all hypothetical retrospections. (shrink)

This paper attempts to articular a notion of a Black ontological order or form experienced through a set of conditions that seek to produce a coherent incoherent blackness. I argue that Black being is one that is only known through an external essential imposition of a Euro-American narrative of what I call global niggerdom in which all Black people are made the same through post-Enlightenment modernist antiblack logics. The conditions, identifications, and practices that constitute global niggerdom, however, only hold insofar (...) as Black people are specified from without. The paper turns to the debates on reparations and their ethnicization to make the case that the Euro-American logics that produce global niggerdom also collapse when Black people turn to nation as the force through which to make sense of themselves. (shrink)

This article examines the retrospective accounts of drunken behaviour by groups of students who drink together regularly. The literature on `collective remembering' has demonstrated how shared memories are constructed discursively, and this is likely to be even more true of memories for events when participants were drunk. Close reading of the extracts from one particular interview reveals the way participants construct `drunken identities' for one another, and suggests how they may embroider narrative recollections through subsequent information becoming available to (...) supplement their sketchy individual recall. The implications of these processes are discussed with reference to legal contexts and theories of self and identity. (shrink)

The comparative historical method provided the possibility to perform a retrospective analysis of parole release, learn about the origin of the institution and the trends of its development within the historical dialectics, evaluate its social importance and benefits, distinguish its positive and negative characteristics, and forecast the model that would be more acceptable in Lithuania today. In order to create a versatile standpoint regarding the variety of conceptions (models) of this institution, the author analyzes the evolution of release on (...) parole, because without an analysis of the historic world outlook it would be impossible to perceive the essence of the modern model of release on parole, to disclose its content, to identify the factors influencing its formation and foresee the perspectives of its further evolution. (shrink)

The problem of free will lies at the heart of modern scientific studies of consciousness. Some authors propose that actions are unconsciously initiated and awareness of intention is referred retrospectively to the action after it has been performed [e.g. Aarts, H., Custers, R., & Wegner, D. M. . On the inference of personal authorship: Enhancing experienced agency by priming effect information. Consciousness & Cognition, 14, 439–458]. This contrasts with the common impression that our intentions cause those actions. By combining a (...) stop signal paradigm and an intentional action paradigm we show that participants sometimes indicate to have intentionally initiated an action while reaction time data strongly suggest that they in fact failed to stop the action. In a second experiment we demonstrate that the number of trials in which participants misattributed their awareness of intention varied with the intentional involvement during action planning. Our data support the retrospective account of intentional action. Furthermore, we introduce an experimental approach that objectifies introspective judgments of awareness of intention. (shrink)

Argues from the rationality of nostalgia, affirmation, and regret to a principle of ‘specificity’: it can be rational to respond more strongly to facts that provide us with reasons than to the fact that such reasons exist.

The Philosophical Forum, Volume 52, Issue 3, Page 245-261, Fall 2021.

Anna Chavlovski,1 Greg A Knoll,1–3 Timothy Ramsay,4 Swapnil Hiremath,1–3 Deborah L Zimmerman1–31University of Ottawa, 2Ottawa Hospital, 3Kidney Research Centre, Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, 4Ottawa Methods Centre, Ottawa, ON, CanadaBackground: In patients with end-stage renal disease, use of vitamin D and calcium-based phosphate binders have been associated with progression of vascular calcification that might have an impact on renal transplant candidacy. Our objective was to examine management of mineral metabolism in patients wait-listed for renal transplant and to determine the impact on (...) cardiac perfusion imaging.Methods: Data was collected retrospectively on patients wait-listed for a renal transplant, being either active and on hold. Demographic data, medications, serum concentrations of calcium, phosphate, parathyroid hormone, and cardiac perfusion imaging studies were collected from the electronic health record. Chi-square and Student’s t-tests were used to compare active and on-hold patients as appropriate. Logistic regression was used to examine variables associated with worsening cardiac imaging studies.Results: The wait-listed patients were of mean age 56 ± 14 years and had been on dialysis for 1329 ± 867 days. On-hold patients had received a significantly greater total dose of calcium and were more likely to have developed worsening cardiovascular imaging studies. Total doses of calcium and calcitriol were associated with worsening cardiovascular imaging studies.Conclusion: Patients on hold on the renal transplant waiting list received higher total doses of calcium. A higher total dose of calcium and calcitriol was also associated with worsening cardiovascular imaging. Time on dialysis before transplant has been associated with worse post-transplant outcomes, and it is possible that the total calcium and calcitriol dose received contributed to these inferior outcomes.Keywords: dialysis, calcium, cardiac, transplantation. (shrink)

Turn of the century, Chinese culture, philosophy has become the study of philosophy school of learning. In recent years, research in this field has been further promoted. In this paper,从overall philosophy of culture and deepens the understanding of Marxist philosophy and cultural relations, the cultural context of globalization, conflict and cultural transformation on three aspects reviewed this development, and on this basis the study of philosophy in Chinese culture proposed a forward-looking. Philosophy of culture has been a hot topic since (...) the end of last century in China. And recent years, great efforts have also been made to push forward the study of this topic. This paper tries to give a brief retrospection of these efforts from three aspects as follows: Firstly, breakthroughs of the understanding of philosophy of culture; Secondly, the relationship between Marxism and the philosophy of culture; Thirdly, culture conflicts and the transformation of culture in the background of globalization. Based on the retrospection above, this paper sums up with an analysis of the perspective of philosophy of culture in China. (shrink)

The 2008 ‘credit crisis’ brought to attention that business and finance operate in open-complex systems. In contrast, the period leading up to the crisis was dominated by narrower thinking developed from the idea that business was about economics and that management concerned agency. This paper revisits ideas first developed in the late 1990s that arose from the observation that business was confronting interacting ‘systems.’ The main systems were around (sustainable) development, the internationalization of business and a set of social and (...) cultural concerns resulting from globalization.The paper anticipated the collapse of parts of the economic system as a result of hyper-competition. It points to the growing significance of ‘identity’ and its potential to create a ‘clash of values.’ It concludes by suggesting that as we enter this ‘systems age’ our models and assumptions around the boundaries of companies and the idea of companies and stakeholders would be severely challenged. (shrink)

Four developments have been central to the shaping of the field of religious ethics : the shift from Christian ethics to religious ethics, the dis- placement of normative ethics by descriptive, comparative, and analytical ethics, growth in self-consciousness as philosophical assumptions have come to articulation in critical philosophical consciousness, and the ex- tension of the Social Gospel's traditional agenda into more and different practical social issues. However, this "map" of the field, drawn from 35,000 feet, shows that though the changes (...) have, indeed, been significant, the continuities are far more pronounced than is generally admitted. (shrink)

I am the first to admit that my career has not followed a conventional path. But in talking to my colleagues, I am not sure that there is a conventional path to an academic career. This retrospective is both a look at how the profession has changed over the forty years since I began graduate school in the late 1970s, and a reflection on my own trajectory within that profession. Historiographical references reflect my own views and are not meant (...) to be comprehensive. I first discovered the history of science as an undergraduate history major at Connecticut College in the early 1970s. The course of physics for non-majors I took with David Fenton was based on Harvard Project Physics, which had been developed in the 1960s by two professors of science education, F. James Rutherford and Fletcher G. Watson, and the historian of science Gerald Holton. We actually wrote term papers for the class; mine was on the theory that Stonehenge was an astronomical observatory. (shrink)

I am the first to admit that my career has not followed a conventional path. But in talking to my colleagues, I am not sure that there is a conventional path to an academic career. This retrospective is both a look at how the profession has changed over the forty years since I began graduate school in the late 1970s, and a reflection on my own trajectory within that profession. Historiographical references reflect my own views and are not meant (...) to be comprehensive. I first discovered the history of science as an undergraduate history major at Connecticut College in the early 1970s. The course of physics for non-majors I took with David Fenton was based on Harvard Project Physics, which had been developed in the 1960s by two professors of science education, F. James Rutherford and Fletcher G. Watson, and the historian of science Gerald Holton. We actually wrote term papers for the class; mine was on the theory that Stonehenge was an astronomical observatory. (shrink)

This paper offers a descriptive and critical retrospective of an initiative of the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies to create a co-operative international network of partnering institutions under the aegis of The International Fellowship of Mission Theologians. It focuses on the years 1997–2007.

Since it is only five years since the publication of our paper, "Geographical categories: An ontological investigation" (Smith and Mark 2001), it seems somewhat strange to be making retrospective comments on the piece. Nevertheless, the field is moving quickly, and much has happened since the article appeared. A large number of papers have already cited the work, which suggests that there is a seam here that people find worthy of being mined. In this short essay, we first review the (...) paper and attempt to assess its significance from the perspective of our current work. We then put the paper in the context of our individual and joint works, which led up to it, and summarize our research trajectories since the paper appeared, pointing out what some of this reveals about spatial ontology in general. We conclude with some remarks on the future of ontological research in geographical information science. (shrink)