In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Life in LimboM. ChiuWhen my son was 7 years old, he began complaining of headaches. They were frequent, but never seemed severe. “I have a headache!” was always followed by “Can I watch TV?” I didn’t believe the pain was real until it woke him up in the middle of the night. I knew then that something must be wrong. I approached our pediatrician, who said it sounded like (...) migraines, but we should order an MRI to rule anything out. The appointment was scheduled several months in advance, and I always had the urge to cancel it. I was pretty sure my son just wanted to watch TV. The pediatrician told me I might as well do the MRI. He told me that if we skipped it and something was wrong, I would never be able to live with the regret. We kept the Monday morning appointment, and went to the MRI expecting reassurance that nothing was wrong. Instead, we got a phone call later that day. They needed to see us on immediately, but wouldn’t tell me why. Of course, I knew something was wrong. “Is it a tumor?” I asked. “This isn’t something we can discuss on the phone” was the answer I got. An appointment was scheduled for Wednesday. Two days might be “immediately” to medical professionals, but to a parent who just heard that her child had an abnormal MRI, it was an eternity. I planned my son’s funeral in those two days.Our meeting with the Neurologist began with reviewing the MRI. “See this spot here? It shouldn’t be there”. A tumor. 1 ½ × 1 ½ × 2 ½ cm tumor, in the right thalamus. Small, they said. Looks like a Low Grade Glioma they said. The kind of tumor you want to have, if you have to have a brain tumor. A biopsy was scheduled for two weeks later. The [End Page E2] biopsy confirmed it was a Juvenile Pilocytic Astrocytoma (JPA). The neurosurgeon was confident she could remove all of the tumor. We were at one of the best Children’s Hospitals in the world. We were in good hands.A few days before the surgery, a friend who is a medical doctor suggested we get a second opinion. “It couldn’t hurt, it could help”, my husband said. Fortunately, he just sold a start–up company, and was planning to take a few months off from work before starting his next venture. He had time to research, talk to friends in the medical field and make phone calls.Our second opinion from another leading hospital reviewed the MRI’s with us. The neurosurgeon asked, “Did they say tumor? One?” Yes, they did. “See this here?” he said, pointing to a second spot on the MRI. He said it was possibly a second tumor, or more likely, an extension of the first. It was in inoperable location. Surgery wasn’t an option. Chemo would be our best choice. Why would we cut into our son’s brain to remove part of the tumor when he would need to do chemo anyway? Why not try chemo first?I would like to say that we do not fault our original neuro–oncology team for missing this second abnormality. It is hard to notice an ant in the room when there is an elephant staring at you. People make mistakes, and tumors don’t always look the same. That’s what second opinions are for. That is why doctors should encourage patients to get second opinions.We scheduled the surgery for port implantation, and got busy educating ourselves about chemo regimes. It was going to be a long journey. 18 months of transfusions with a pretty low success rate and a high rate of secondary complications. Unsure if we were doing the right thing, we got a third opinion. I am so grateful that my husband was between jobs and had time to devote to finding the best possible treatment for our son. We were financially stable and had great insurance. What do people do when they don’t have this luxury?By now, several months had passed since our first MRI. Our... (shrink)

Se analiza el debate actual sobre el concepto de Escuela de Salamanca. Se muestran las nuevas propuestas de los estudiosos: su carácter global (no solo Salamanca); su alcance interdisciplinar (no solo teológico, también jurídico, económico, sociopolítico, etc); la cuestión de los miembros también experimenta una ampliación, aunque siempre se señala un cierto cordón umbilical con los Maestros salmantinos; todo ello dentro de un marco temporal que se extiende durante el siglo XVI y primera mitad del XVII. Estas nuevas perspectivas no (...) excluyen los elementos tradicionales, sino que amplían y desarrollan el concepto primitivo, pero con carácter inclusivo. Por último, se aborda el tema de las condiciones de posibilidad de la Escuela, que se contextualiza en un ámbito histórico que la hace posible. Al término del estudio se ofrece un posible nuevo concepto de la Escuela, todavía _in fieri_. (shrink)

La psiquiatría nace con el siglo XIX, la fenomenología con el XX. Desde el advenimiento de la segunda ha querido la primera ver en ella una vía para la superación del positivismo que la atenazaba desde su mismo origen. Uno de sus intentos más logrados fue el del psiquiatra Ludwig Binswanger a lo largo de los años veinte del pasado siglo. Recorrió en ese tiempo las Investigaciones lógicas de Husserl y ensayó su acercamiento a la psicología estructural. Proponemos que una (...) deficiente lectura de las posibilidades de la fenomenología ―comprensible en su prematuridad, desgraciada en su ímpetu anti-(neo)kantiano― impidió que reconociera su horizonte trascendental y así pudiera entrever caminos de acceso al mundo, a la persona y a su concreto sufrimiento. Para concluir presentamos el intento que supone el proyecto La mirada filosófica como mirada médica por recuperar aquella problematicidad y ahondar en una aproximación respetuosa al padecer, tal como aparece, sin violentarlo por el concepto. (shrink)

"A fundamental feature of our individual, human agency is its organization over time. Think again about growing food in a garden, or taking a trip, or writing a book. A central idea is that our capacity for planning agency is at the heart of this cross-temporal organization of our individual, human agency. Appeal to this role of our capacity for planning agency both fits our commonsense self-understanding and, I conjecture, would be a part of an empirically informed psychological (...) theory that begins with-- but potentially adjusts--this commonsense self-understanding. The basic thought is that we are resource-limited agents who achieve cross-temporal organization in part by settling in advance on prior, partial plans. These somewhat stable partial plans help pose problems of means and preliminary steps, and in pursuit of needed coordination help filter potential options. They thereby provide a background framework for downstream thought and action"--. (shrink)

Should you care less about your distant future? What about events in your life that have already happened? How should the passage of time affect your planning and assessment of your life? Most of us think it is irrational to ignore the future but harmless to dismiss the past. But this book argues that rationality requires temporal neutrality.

Recent studies on mind‐wandering reveal its potential role in goal exploration and planning future actions. How to understand these explorative functions and their impact on planning remains unclear. Given certain conceptions of intentions and beliefs, the explorative functions of mind‐wandering could lead to regular reconsideration of one's intentions. However, this would be in tension with the stability of intentions central to rational planning agency. We analyze the potential issue of excessive reconsideration caused by mind‐wandering. Our response resolves (...) this tension, presenting a model that aligns the roles of mind‐wandering in planning with empirical evidence and the sustained stability of intentions. (shrink)

In an analysis of artificially intelligent systems for medical diagnostics and treatment planning we argue that patients should be able to exercise a right to withdraw from AI diagnostics and treatment planning for reasons related to (1) the physician’s role in the patients’ formation of and acting on personal preferences and values, (2) the bias and opacity problem of AI systems, and (3) rational concerns about the future societal effects of introducing AI systems in the health care sector.

The ageing population is increasing worldwide with an increase in chronic disorders. At the same time, person‐centred care has become a policy within both health and social care. To facilitate coordination and collaboration and integrate the older adult's perspective in the decision‐making process the collaborative care planning process with the development of a written care plan can be used. In this study, the result of an interpreted analysis of four empirical studies of the collaborative care planning as a (...) person‐centred practice will be discussed and reflected on. A framework based on the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur's little ethics was used in the synthesis of the studies. The findings revealed two common threads: personhood and power asymmetry. Both challenges in achieving a person‐centred collaborative care planning. Ricoeur's dialogical thinking and description of a person served as an underpinning in discussing and reflecting upon the findings of the interpreted synthesis. Collaborative care planning is a complex process. However, Ricoeur's philosophy contributed to a greater understanding of the collaborative care planning as a person‐centred practice and accentuated that ethics, human values, and the older adults and care partners perspectives need to be given the same importance and considerations as the medical and social sciences perspectives for the collaborative care planning process to truly become person‐centred. (shrink)

Although smallpox was declared eradicated in 1980, there are fears that stocks of the virus manufactured for military purposes by the Soviet Union may have fallen into the hands of “rogue nations” or terrorists. Worries about bioterrorism have thus sparked debate about whether or not the smallpox vaccine, which can be dangerous, should be offered to the general public. Meaningful public debate on this issue requires expert information about the likelihood that the virus will in fact be used as a (...) weapon. Informed voluntary individual decision making, about whether to get vaccinated if vaccine is made available to the public, would similarly require appreciation of the likelihood of attack. Public deliberation and private deliberation thus both require briefing by the intelligence community. (shrink)

ABSTRACTPrevious research suggests that labelling emotions, or describing affective states using emotion words, facilitates emotion regulation. But how much labelling promotes emotion regulation? And which emotion regulation strategies does emotion labelling promote? Drawing on cognitive theories of emotion, we predicted that labelling emotions using fewer words would be less confusing and would facilitate forms of emotion regulation requiring more cognitively demanding processing of context. Participants mentally immersed themselves in an emotional vignette, were randomly assigned to an exhaustive or minimal emotion (...) labelling manipulation, and then completed an emotion regulation strategy planning task. Minimal emotion labelling promoted higher subjective emotional clarity. Furthermore, in terms of specific emotion regulation strategies, minimal emotion labelling prompted more plans for problem solving and marginally more plans for reappraisal, but did not affect plans for behav... (shrink)

Given that as much as half of human thought arises in a stimulus independent fashion, it would seem unlikely that such thoughts would play no functional role in our lives. However, evidence linking the mind-wandering state to performance decrement has led to the notion that mind-wandering primarily represents a form of cognitive failure. Based on previous work showing a prospective bias to mind-wandering, the current study explores the hypothesis that one potential function of spontaneous thought is to plan and anticipate (...) personally relevant future goals, a process referred to as autobiographical planning. The results confirm that the content of mind-wandering is predominantly future-focused, demonstrate that individuals with high working memory capacity are more likely to engage in prospective mind-wandering, and show that prospective mind-wandering frequently involves autobiographical planning. Together this evidence suggests that mind-wandering can enable prospective cognitive operations that are likely to be useful to the individual as they navigate through their daily lives. (shrink)

Es bien conocido el aprecio que desde hace tiempo tiene la Iglesia por el método ver-juzgar-actuar, sin embargo, las reflexiones de la filosofía y la sociología hacen considerar hoy la necesidad de enriquecer el momento del ver, con unos elementos fenomenológicos y hermenéuticos que lo hagan más histórico y menos objetivista y de lograr además una mayor interacción entre los tres momentos. En este sentido, la investigación propone la inserción de las historias de vida de las personas y las comunidades (...) como un camino nuevo de conocimiento de la realidad. En efecto, la realidad no sólo consiste en el hecho desnudo, sino también en el hecho tal y como lo percibe el sujeto; no sólo es suceso, sino también narración. Así, las historias de vida, y el consecuente método autobiográfico constituyen, según la investigación, un recurso vital en la planificación pastoral; no simplemente un apéndice secundario o un recurso simplemente aplicativo, sino, un momento intrínseco de la reflexión y de la experiencia teológica y pastoral. It is well-known the log lasting appreciation of the church for the method see-judge-act, however the current philosophical and sociological considerations are considering the need for an enrichment of the moment of seeing with some phenomenological and hermeneutical elements which could make it more historical and less objective and to achieve, moreover, a major interaction among the three moments. In this sense, the research proposes also the introduction of the stories of people’s lives and of the communities as a new way of awareness of reality. Indeed, reality is not only in the naked event, but also in the event as it is seen by the subject; not only the happened event, but also its narration. For this reason, the life stories and the autobiographical method are, according to the research a vital resource in the pastoral planning; not simply a secondary appendix or a applicative type, but as an intrinsic moment of the theological and pastoral reflection and experience. (shrink)

Recent empirical work has offered strong support for ‘biased pluralism’ and ‘economic elite’ accounts of political power in the United States, according a central role to ‘business interest groups’ as a mechanism through which corporate influence is exerted. Here, we propose an additional channel of influence for corporate interests: the ‘policy-planning network,’ consisting of corporate-dominated foundations, think tanks, and elite policy-discussion groups. To evaluate this assertion, we consider one key policy-discussion group, the Council on Foreign Relations. We first briefly (...) review the origins of this organization and then review earlier findings on its influence. We then code CFR policy preferences on 295 foreign policy issues during the 1981–2002 period. In logistic regression analyses, we find that the preferences of more affluent citizens and the CFR were positive, statistically significant predictors of foreign policy outcomes while business interest group preferences were not. These findings are discussed with a consideration of the patterns of CFR ‘successes’ and ‘failures’ for the issues in our dataset. Although a full demonstration of a causal connection between corporate interests, the policy-planning network and policy outcomes requires further research, we conclude that this has been shown to be a plausible mechanism through which corporate interests are represented and that ‘biased pluralism’ researchers should include it in their future investigations. (shrink)

This paper addresses whether, how, and to what extent social studies student teachers who have been introduced to inquiry-oriented teaching (as manifest in the National Council for the Social Studies C3 Framework) in their secondary social studies methods course incorporate this approach into the planning for their practicum experience. Based on analysis of lesson plans used in the practicum and follow-up interviews with a small subset of student teachers, this paper analyzes the factors that promote or inhibit use of (...) this approach to teaching in their practicum experience. Results indicate the C3-oriented teaching approach, as taught in the methods course, did appear in the student teachers’ lesson plans. A small subset of student teachers used the framework competently while two smaller subsets were less adept in their application. The degree of application was affected by student teachers’ perceptions of their school placements and students’ needs. (shrink)

Many legal scholars well recognize that, in some instances, support for a law or policy may be primarily because of its expressive function, i.e. the statements it makes about underlying values. In these cases, the expressive content of a law or policy may actually overshadow its central purpose. Examples of this phenomenon, according to Cass Sunstein, include, for example, regulations against hate speech in the USA. He suggests that achieving the consequence (prohibiting hateful speech against certain groups) may not be (...) the real focus (central purpose) of the law. Rather, the real focus is on the social meaning of these regulations—that bigotry is unacceptable in a liberal society. In this way, a particular law or policy can operate on many levels—while aiming to achieve a particular objective or behavior, it can also be a valuable tool for achieving other important social goals through its expressive function. This article applies this insight to the realm of public health policy, with particular attention to the case of pandemic planning, and suggests that public health policy and its overall goals may be well-served by deliberate regard for, and appropriate utilization of, the expressive function. (shrink)

Any system of taxation depends on a substantial degree of compliance from the taxpayer. But do ethical considerations stop at obeying the letter of the tax law, or do they drive one to take a more critical and socially responsible attitude towards tax avoidance as well as evasion? Dr Alan Stainer is Head of Engineering Management at Middlesex University, Bounds Green Road, London N11 2NQ, and Founder Director of the International Society for Productivity & Quality Research; Lorice Stainer is Senior (...) Lecturer in Business Ethics at the University of Hertfordshire Business School and a Business Ethics Consultant; and Alexandra Segal is a Chartered Accountant, Taxation Manager with Keelings Chartered Accountants, London, and a Taxation Consultant. (shrink)