Contemporary health care often lacks generosity of spirit, even when treatment is most efficient. Too many patients are left unhappy with how they are treated, and too many medical professionals feel estranged from the calling that drew them to medicine. Arthur W. Frank tells the stories of ill people, doctors, and nurses who are restoring generosity to medicine--generosity toward others and to themselves. The Renewal of Generosity evokes medicine as the face-to-face encounter that comes before and after diagnostics, pharmaceuticals, (...) and surgeries. Frank calls upon the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin to reflect on stories of ill people, doctors, and nurses who transform demoralized medicine into caring relationships. He presents their stories as a source of consolation for both ill and professional alike and as an impetus to changing medical systems. Frank shows how generosity is being renewed through dialogue that is more than the exchange of information. Dialogue is an ethic and an ideal for people on both sides of the medical encounter who want to offer more to those they meet and who want their own lives enriched in the process. The Renewal of Generosity views illness and medical work with grace and compassion, making an invaluable contribution to expanding our vision of suffering and healing. (shrink)

The narrative ethicist imagines life as multiple points of view, each reflecting a distinct imagination and each more or less capable of comprehending other points of view and how they imagine. Each point of view is constantly being acted out and then modified in response to how others respond. People generally have good intentions, but they get stuck realizing those intentions. Stories stall when dialogue breaks down. People stop hearing others' stories, maybe because those others have quit telling their stories. (...) The narrative ethicist's job is to help people generate new imaginations that can restart dialogues. (shrink)

The ethics of telling stories about other people become questionable as soon as humans learn to talk. But the stakes get higher when health care professionals tell stories about those whom they serve. But for all the problems that come with such stories, I do not believe it is either practical or desirable for bioethicists to attempt to legislate an end to this storytelling. What we need instead is narrative nuance. We need to understand how to tell respectful stories in (...) which the patients are fully acknowledged fellow participants, not one‐dimensional objects of a knowing gaze. The problem is not narration itself but a particular version of narrational privilege, and getting rid of that would have benefits far beyond practices of writing case studies. In this essay, I first offer four considerations that I have found either omitted or underemphasized in discussions of the ethics of telling stories about patients. I then sketch a model of medical storytelling that might be the basis for shifting the ethical question from whether to how. (shrink)

1. Introduction. It is generally admitted that a large part of man's knowledge is based on inductive arguments. Hence any philosophical theory concerning the nature of inductive arguments constitutes an epistemological theory. Any such philosophical theory of induction must, if it is to be satisfactory, take adequate account of Hume's criticism of inductive arguments. One way of treating his criticism is to say that the validity of inductive arguments is in an important sense relative to some broad factual assumptions about (...) the general nature of the universe and that these general factual assumptions are presupposed in a certain way by the users of inductive arguments. Let us call any theory of this general type a postulate theory of induction. (shrink)

But even with respect to inductive arguments there are a number of different philosophical problems. One is to make explicit the fundamental or most general pattern or patterns of inductive argument. Once these patterns are known a second and third problem arise. The second is to justify man's use of and faith in inductive arguments. And the third is to formulate some general propositions about nature which could reasonably be accepted by users of inductive arguments and which when added to (...) the premises of these arguments make them explicitly deductive. (shrink)

Who's afflicted? Early in Nicole Piemonte's book Afflicted: How Vulnerability Can Heal Medical Education and Practice, she quotes an email from a physician whose voice sets the problem and tone. He describes himself as someone “who has intended well” but then “nearly burned out because of the insidious process of physician formation that left me a mess at the threshold of the suffering of other human beings.” His confessional manifesto regrets “the sad things I have seen and done.” His narrative (...) then turns to redemption: “I was—pardon the sentiment—loved back into a good medical practice as a form of growing wisdom and care” (pp. x–xi). Afflicted is written for those who hear this voice speaking for many others. (shrink)

Can a supercompact cardinal κ be Laver indestructible when there is a level-by-level agreement between strong compactness and supercompactness? In this article, we show that if there is a sufficiently large cardinal above κ, then no, it cannot. Conversely, if one weakens the requirement either by demanding less indestructibility, such as requiring only indestructibility by stratified posets, or less level-by-level agreement, such as requiring it only on measure one sets, then yes, it can.

This commentary discusses 12 stories about receiving ethics consultation in hospitals. Five stories are by physicians, three by nurses, and four by family members; three of the writers have training in bioethics. Some writers requested the consultation, others experienced the consultation as an imposition forced upon them, and in two cases, the story is about the absence of any consultation service. Three types of narrative are found to structure the stories: the genuine dilemma narrative, the institutional intransigence narrative, and the (...) relational care narrative. Throughout, the question is what makes for a valuable consultation, and the general answer is whether consultation enables the development of mutually supportive relationships. (shrink)

We establish an Easton theorem for the least supercompact cardinal that is consistent with the level by level equivalence between strong compactness and supercompactness. In both our ground model and the model witnessing the conclusions of our theorem, there are no restrictions on the structure of the class of supercompact cardinals. We also briefly indicate how our methods of proof yield an Easton theorem that is consistent with the level by level equivalence between strong compactness and supercompactness in a universe (...) with a restricted number of large cardinals. We conclude by posing some related open questions. (shrink)

We obtain 2 models in which AC is false and in which there are long sequences of consecutive large cardinals.

Excerpt from Relativity The four chapters which follow are four lectures delivered before the Edinburgh Mathematical Colloquium on the subject of Relativity. As many of the audience had their chief interests in other branches of mathematical science, it was necessary to start ab initio. The best method appeared to be to treat the subject in the historical order; I have brought it down to the stage in which it was left by Minkowski. If I have stimulated any of my audience (...) to pursue the matter further, I shall be amply repaid for any trouble that I have taken. I wish to express my thanks to the Edinburgh Mathematical Society for the honour that they have conferred on me in inviting me to give these lectures. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

The definition of “model of a system” in terms of a homomorphism of the states of the system is evaluated and an alternative definition in terms of sequence generators is proposed. Sequence generators are finite graphs whose points represent complete states of a system. Sequence generators include finite automata and other information processing systems as special cases. It is shown how to define models in terms of a projection operator which applies to any sequence generator which has an output projection (...) and yields a new sequence generator. A model produced by the projection operator is embedded in the system it models. The notion of embedding is discussed informally and some questions raised about the relations of deterministic, indeterministic, and probabilistic models and systems. (shrink)

This essay discusses how two physicians in Britain's National Health Service describe and analyze the conditions of their work: how algorithms and protocols structure the care they can provide and create the dilemmas they and their patients face. In these issues, the NHS is a canary in the mineshaft of contemporary Western health care. NHS practices are understood as how states and state-like entities, Leviathans, seek to render their subjects _legible_; in this instance, to make both physicians and patients transparently (...) visible to surveillance and administration by standardizing medical work and patient need. Physicians respond by engaging in workarounds, finding ways to provide care despite systemic restrictions. (shrink)

One task of logic, Peirce held, is to classify arguments so as to determine the validity of each kind. His own classification is interesting because it includes a novel type of argument in addition to the two traditionally recognized types. It is the purpose of this paper to discuss what Peirce thought to be sufficiently distinctive about abduction to warrant calling it a new kind of argument. But since one finds in his writings on abduction a number of different views (...) it is first necessary to make a few remarks concerning the unity of Peirce's thought. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:This symposium contribution argues that politicized responses to the COVID-19 pandemic mark the fracturing of the consensus that bioethics has been built upon. This consensus involved the mutual dependence of principles and stories: principles need stories to become applicable in clinical action, and stories need to reflect principles if they are to make generalized claims. Two mid-20th-century theorists, Erving Goffman and Walter Benjamin, each predicted the thinness of appeals to principles and to stories, respectively; their skepticism describes our moment. Anti–public (...) health responses to COVID restrictions show that principles now have radically different meanings within different factional groups, so appealing to them perpetuates divisions. Complementary to that, stories are told more as displays of group membership than as testimony of individual experience. The predictable future is that bioethics controversies will become more fraught. (shrink)

This essay begins with a metaphor describing who enters the field of humanities in medicine and healthcare and the types of work they do. The role of witness is discussed, underscoring tensions between witnessing and analyzing. The essay then turns to my own background as an example of how each professional in this field brings something distinct. I briefly describe the three basic principles of my work with narrative: the injunction to keep the stories in the foreground, the work of (...) amplifying and connecting stories, and the need for generous interpretation. The second half of the essay tells three illness stories, describing their importance to me over several decades. These stories are by Audre Lorde, Reynolds Price, and Stewart Alsop, dealing with problems of silences imposed on ill people, problems caused by physicians’ perceived lack of time, and dilemmas of the end of life, respectively. (shrink)

During Abraham Nussbaum's first year of medical school, he participated in a white coat ceremony and was invested, literally, with a white coat that is symbolic of entry into the medical profession. He was also given a book, an anthology of writings on medicine that Nussbaum describes as having a "wistful quality" and being "engaging but reverential" ; the dust jacket featured a Norman Rockwell painting. He later went to a second-hand bookstore and traded the anthology for Abraham Verghese's 1994 (...) memoir, My Own Country, an excerpt from which was in the anthology. For Nussbaum, struggling to figure out what it means to be a doctor, Verghese's writing "portrays the physician as the storyteller of his... (shrink)

A question of Foreman and Magidor asks if it is consistent for every sequence of stationary subsets of the ℵ n ’s for 1≤n<ω to be mutually stationary. We get a positive answer to this question in the context of the negation of the Axiom of Choice. We also indicate how a positive answer to a generalized version of this question in a choiceless context may be obtained.

In At the Will of the Body , Arthur Frank told the story of his own illnesses, heart attack and cancer. That book ended by describing the existence of a "remission society," whose members all live with some form of illness or disability. The Wounded Storyteller is their collective portrait. Ill people are more than victims of disease or patients of medicine they are wounded storytellers. People tell stories to make sense of their suffering when they turn their diseases (...) into stories, they find healing. Drawing on the work of authors such as Oliver Sacks, Anatole Broyard, Norman Cousins, and Audre Lorde, as well as from people he met during the years he spent among different illness groups, Frank recounts a stirring collection of illness stories, ranging from the well-known--Gilda Radner's battle with ovarian cancer--to the private testimonials of people with cancer, chronic fatigue syndrome, and disabilties. Their stories are more than accounts of personal suffering: they abound with moral choices and point to a social ethic. Frank identifies three basic narratives of illness in restitution, chaos, and quest. Restitution narratives anticipate getting well again and give prominence to the technology of cure. In chaos narratives, illness seems to stretch on forever, with no respite or redeeming insights. Quest narratives are about finding that insight as illness is transformed into a means for the ill person to become someone new. (shrink)

In this paper I synthesize a unified system out of Peirce's life work, and name it Peirce's Evolutionary Pragmatic Idealism. Peirce developed this philosophy in four stages: His 1868–69 theory that cognition is a continuous and infinite social semiotic process, in which Man is a sign. His Popular Science Monthly pragmatism and frequency theory of probabilistic induction. His 1891–93 cosmic evolutionism of Tychism, Synechism, and Agapism. Pragmaticism: The doctrine of real potentialities, and Peirce's pragmatic program for developing concrete reasonableness. Peirce's (...) evolutionary conception of the cosmos is pantheistic, and he constructed it to reconcile religion with Darwinian evolution. (shrink)

We construct four models containing one supercompact cardinal in which level by level equivalence between strong compactness and supercompactness and level by level inequivalence between strong compactness and supercompactness are precisely controlled at each non‐supercompact measurable cardinal. In these models, no cardinal κ is ‐supercompact, where is the least inaccessible cardinal greater than κ.