Awareness growth—coming to entertain propositions of which one was previously unaware—is a crucial aspect of epistemic thriving. And yet, it is widely believed that orthodox Bayesianism cannot accommodate this phenomenon, since that would require employing supposedly defective catch-all propositions. Orthodox Bayesianism, it is concluded, must be amended. In this paper, I show that this argument fails, and that, on the contrary, the orthodox version of Bayesianism is particularly well-suited to accommodate awareness growth. For it entails what I call the refinement (...) view, which allows us to capture that awareness growth consists in the increase of one’s capacity of discernment. (shrink)

Implicit biases involve associations outside conscious awareness that lead to a negative evaluation of a person on the basis of irrelevant characteristics such as race or gender. This review examines the evidence that healthcare professionals display implicit biases towards patients. PubMed, PsychINFO, PsychARTICLE and CINAHL were searched for peer-reviewed articles published between 1st March 2003 and 31st March 2013. Two reviewers assessed the eligibility of the identified papers based on precise content and quality criteria. The references of eligible papers were (...) examined to identify further eligible studies. Forty two articles were identified as eligible. Seventeen used an implicit measure, to test the biases of healthcare professionals. Twenty five articles employed a between-subjects design, using vignettes to examine the influence of patient characteristics on healthcare professionals’ attitudes, diagnoses, and treatment decisions. The second method was included although it does not isolate implicit attitudes because it is recognised by psychologists who specialise in implicit cognition as a way of detecting the possible presence of implicit bias. Twenty seven studies examined racial/ethnic biases; ten other biases were investigated, including gender, age and weight. Thirty five articles found evidence of implicit bias in healthcare professionals; all the studies that investigated correlations found a significant positive relationship between level of implicit bias and lower quality of care. The evidence indicates that healthcare professionals exhibit the same levels of implicit bias as the wider population. The interactions between multiple patient characteristics and between healthcare professional and patient characteristics reveal the complexity of the phenomenon of implicit bias and its influence on clinician-patient interaction. The most convincing studies from our review are those that combine the IAT and a method measuring the quality of treatment in the actual world. Correlational evidence indicates that biases are likely to influence diagnosis and treatment decisions and levels of care in some circumstances and need to be further investigated. Our review also indicates that there may sometimes be a gap between the norm of impartiality and the extent to which it is embraced by healthcare professionals for some of the tested characteristics. Our findings highlight the need for the healthcare profession to address the role of implicit biases in disparities in healthcare. More research in actual care settings and a greater homogeneity in methods employed to test implicit biases in healthcare is needed. (shrink)

Background Implicit biases are present in the general population and among professionals in various domains, where they can lead to discrimination. Many interventions are used to reduce implicit bias. However, uncertainties remain as to their effectiveness. -/- Methods We conducted a systematic review by searching ERIC, PUBMED and PSYCHINFO for peer-reviewed studies conducted on adults between May 2005 and April 2015, testing interventions designed to reduce implicit bias, with results measured using the Implicit Association Test (IAT) or sufficiently similar methods. (...) -/- Results 30 articles were identified as eligible. Some techniques, such as engaging with others’ perspective, appear unfruitful, at least in short term implicit bias reduction, while other techniques, such as exposure to counterstereotypical exemplars, are more promising. Robust data is lacking for many of these interventions. -/- Conclusions Caution is thus advised when it comes to programs aiming at reducing biases. This does not weaken the case for implementing widespread structural and institutional changes that are multiply justified. (shrink)

Bioethics scholarship considering the possibility of gestating an embryo to full term in an artificial womb (ectogenesis) often overstates the capacities of current technologies and underestimates the barriers to the development of full ectogenesis. Moreover, this debate causes harm by (1) neglecting more immediate problems in the development of artificial wombs, (2) treating abortion as a “problem with a technological solution,” bolstering anti-abortion rhetoric, and (3) presuming the stability of women’s reproductive rights. The ectogenesis conversation must consider anticipated uses of (...) the technology (neonatal intensive care) and acknowledge the immediate context (recognizing abortion as essential healthcare and existing reproductive inequities). (shrink)

In response to two trenchant objections, radical subjective Bayesianism has been widely rejected. In this paper, I seek, if not to rehabilitate subjectivism, at least to show its critic what is attractive about the position. I argue that what is at stake in the subjectivism/anti-subjectivism debate is not, as is commonly thought, which norms of rationality are true, but rather, the conception of rationality that we adopt: there is an alternative approach to the widespread telic approach to rationality, which I (...) call the poric approach, on which subjectivism is an attractive position. I then argue that the poric approach—and therefore subjectivism—cannot be easily dismissed. (shrink)

Katie Steele and H. Orri Stefánsson argue that, to reflect an agent’s limited awareness, the algebra of propositions on which that agent’s credences are defined should be relativised to their awareness state. I argue that this produces insurmountable difficulties. But the project of relativising the agent’s algebra to reflect their partial perspective need not be abandoned: the algebra can be relativised, not to the agent’s awareness state, but to what we might call their subjective modality.

This paper begins with a recognition that questions of climate change, environmental degradation, and our relations to the natural world are increasingly significant and requiring of a response not only as philosophers of education but also as citizens of the planet. As such the paper explores five of the key journals in philosophy of education in order to identify the extent, range, and content of current discussions related to the environment. It then organizes and summaries the articles that were located (...) while seeking to identify the extent, possibilities, and limitations of current discussions relating to the environment in the philosophy of education community. The hope is that ultimately this work is an invitation to anyone, regardless of tradition, orientation, and expertise, to contribute to the expansion and deepening of both theory and practice in the face of this most serious of challenges. (shrink)

Most mainstream feminist anti-rape scholarship and activism may be described as carceral feminism, insofar as it fails to engage with critiques of the criminal punishment system and endorses law-and-order responses to sexual and gendered violence. Mainstream feminist anti-rape scholars and activists often view increased conviction rates and longer sentences as a political goal—or, at the very least, are willing to collaborate with police and lament cases where perpetrators of sexual violence are given “light” or non-custodial sentences. Prison abolitionists, on the (...) other hand, have tended to insist that most lawbreakers are non-violent and that the “dangerous” are “few”, thus avoiding serious engagement with the widespread phenomenon of sexual violence. Despite the prevalence of carceral feminism, to my knowledge no feminist scholar has explicitly embraced this label, and the closest I have found to a defense of carceral feminism is feminist legal scholar Lise Gotell’s “critique of the critique of carceral feminism”. For this reason, it is with Gotell’s article that I primarily engage in defending anti-carceral feminism and prison abolitionism even in the difficult case of sexual assault. (shrink)

Drawing on the work of Foucault and Western confessional writings, this book challenges the transhistorical and commonsense views of confession as an innate impulse resulting in the psychological liberation of the confessing subject. Instead, confessional desire is argued to be contingent and constraining, and alternatives to confessional subjectivity are explored.

There has long been interest in why languages are shaped the way they are, and in the relationship between sign language and gesture. In sign languages, entity classifiers are handshapes that encode how objects move, how they are located relative to one another, and how multiple objects of the same type are distributed in space. Previous studies have shown that hearing adults who are asked to use only manual gestures to describe how objects move in space will use gestures that (...) bear some similarities to classifiers. We investigated how accurately hearing adults, who had been learning British Sign Language for 1–3 years, produce and comprehend classifiers in locative and distributive constructions. In a production task, learners of BSL knew that they could use their hands to represent objects, but they had difficulty choosing the same, conventionalized, handshapes as native signers. They were, however, highly accurate at encoding location and orientation information. Learners therefore show the same pattern found in sign-naïve gesturers. In contrast, handshape, orientation, and location were comprehended with equal accuracy, and testing a group of sign-naïve adults showed that they too were able to understand classifiers with higher than chance accuracy. We conclude that adult learners of BSL bring their visuo-spatial knowledge and gestural abilities to the tasks of understanding and producing constructions that contain entity classifiers. We speculate that investigating the time course of adult sign language acquisition might shed light on how gesture became conventionalized during the genesis of sign languages. (shrink)

Ratnayake's interesting paper challenges two claims, that cognitive distortions in depression involve epistemic issues; and that cognitive behavioral therapy can rectify those epistemic issues. We are going to discuss both claims here and offer some reasons not to underestimate the epistemic relevance of CBT. First, there may be epistemic issues underlying cognitive distortions in depression that CBT can effectively address, including blind acceptance of negative automatic thoughts and insensitivity to evidence. But, even if CBT were primarily in the business of (...) enhancing utility as opposed to validity, this would have significant, though indirect, epistemic benefits.All human agents, whether they have a... (shrink)

This article explores forms of haptic sociality in interspecies interaction. Data examined are taken from a corpus of equine assisted therapy sessions, in Finland and France. During these sessions, therapists invite clients to pay close attention to the horse’s behavioral displays of comfort or discomfort and to react accordingly. In this way, the horse is regarded as a living, sentient creature, whose body has haptic and kinesthetic properties, resulting in socialization practices that cultivate forms of care. The study discusses Merleau-Ponty’s (...) concept of “esthesiologic body”, in light of analytical instances, draws on contemporary re-examinations of phenomenological notions (such as intersubjectivity and intercorporeality) by ethnomethodologists and analysts of social interaction, and proposes to respecify them in the particular context of human–animal interactions. The argument is inspired by a conversation analytic approach, sensitive to the orderly character of social actions. Two formats, displaying diverse ways in which participants interact with the horse as an _esthesiologic_ body, are examined in detail. The analysis shows the fundamental role played by touch and haptic practices in the practical accomplishment of intercorporeality. (shrink)

In a 1983 interview, Michel Foucault contrasts our contemporary interest in sexual identity with the ancient Greek preoccupation with diet, arguing that sex has replaced food as the privileged medium of self-constitution in the modern West. In the same interview, Foucault argues that modern liberation movements should return to the ancient model of ethics, of which diet was a prime example, as aesthetics or self-transformative practice. In this paper I take up Foucault's argument with respect to the Animal Liberation Movement (...) and the dietetics of ethical vegetarianism. Contra Foucault, I suggest that diet has not been replaced by sexuality in the modern West, and that food choices, along with and intertwined with sexuality, continue to function as practices of self-constitution in both disciplinary and aesthetic fashions. I then consider the implications of this argument for the Animal Liberation Movement, exploring ways in which it might (and to some degree already does) take on aesthetic rather than moral strategies in order to pursue what Foucault once described as “an ethics of acts and their pleasures which would be able to take into account the pleasure of the other.”. (shrink)

This commentary argues the case for developmental psychopathology in understanding social learning. Informed by work on “epistemic disruption,” we have described difficulties with social learning associated with many forms of psychopathology. Epistemic disruption manifests in an inability to move between innovation and conformity, and arises from poor mentalizing, which generates difficulties in identifying social cues that trigger the correct stance.

AbstractMichel Foucault is well known as a theorist of power who provided forceful critiques of institutions of confinement such as the psychiatric asylum and the prison. Although the invention of factory farms and industrial slaughterhouses, like prisons and psychiatric hospitals, can be considered emblematic moments in a history of modernity, and although the modern farm is an institution of confinement comparable to the prison, Foucault never addressed these institutions, the politics of animal agriculture, or power relationships between humans and other (...) animals more generally. The few times that Foucault discussed animality or human–animal relations, animals and animality remained metaphors for humans and human experiences. Despite Foucault's failure to analyze human–nonhuman animal relations, a significant body of Critical Animal Studies literature has mobilized Foucault's work over the last decade. In particular, a number of scholars have taken up Foucault's writings to consider how relations between humans and nonhuman animals in agriculture might be conceptualized as instances of sovereign power, biopower, disciplinary power, and pastoral power, as well as why we may not think that these are power relations at all. This essay provides an overview of Foucault's accounts of power and of the Foucauldian scholarship that applies these accounts to human–nonhuman animal relations in animal agriculture. (shrink)

Building Abolition: Decarceration and Social Justice explores the intersections of the carceral in projects of oppression, while at the same time providing intellectual, pragmatic, and undetermined paths toward abolition. Prison abolition is at once about the institution of the prison, and a broad, intersectional political project calling for the end of the social structured by settler colonialism, anti-black racism, and related oppressions. Beyond this, prison abolition is a constructive project that imagines and strives for a transformed world in which justice (...) is not equated with punishment, and accountability is not equated with caging. Composed of sixteen chapters by an international team of scholars and activists, with a Foreword by Perry Zurn and an Afterword by Justin Piché, the book is divided into four themes: - Prisons and Racism - Prisons and Settler Colonialism - Anti-Carceral Feminisms - Multispecies Carceralities. This book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students, activists, and scholars working in the areas of Critical Prison Studies, Critical Criminology, Native Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Black Studies, Critical Race Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Critical Animal Studies, with particular chapters being of interest to scholars and students in other fields, such as, Feminist Legal Studies, Animal Law, Critical Disability Studies, Queer Theory, and Transnational Feminisms. (shrink)

The conception of conscience that dominates discussions in bioethics focuses narrowly on private regulation of behaviour resulting from explicit attitudes. It neglects to mention implicit attitudes and the role of social feedback in becoming aware of one's implicit attitudes. But if conscience is a way of ensuring that a person's behaviour is in line with her moral values, it must be responsive to all aspects of the mind that influence behaviour. There is a wealth of recent psychological work demonstrating the (...) influence of implicit attitudes on behaviour. A necessary part of having a well-functioning conscience must thus be awareness and regulation of one's implicit attitudes in addition to one's explicit attitudes; this cannot be done by an individual in isolation. On my revised conception of conscience, heeding social feedback, being emotionally self-aware and engaging in self-monitoring are important for the possession of a well-functioning conscience. Health professionals may need specific training to help them develop and maintain a well-functioning conscience, which should involve cultivation of awareness of implicit attitudes, emphasis on social feedback and techniques to enable better control over them. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 41, no. 2. © 2015 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 259 Chloë Taylor Female Sexual Dysfunction, Feminist Sexology, and the Psychiatry of the Normal It is really weird that doctors should be the reigning experts on sex. —Leonore Tiefer1 The first volume of Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality provides a compelling and influential critique of the “sciences of sex.” In this work, Foucault suggests that there is (...) little that is scientific about the disciplines of psychoanalysis, psychiatry, and sexology that emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.2 In each case, Foucault argues that the authority of science is exploited to facilitate the regulation of sexuality in a biopolitical era in which the sex life of the population has become a crucial political stake.3 Sex, according to Foucault, is managed by doctors not so much to cure health problems as to enforce social norms, and sexual science does not provide the truth of sex or make people healthy, but naturalizes the monogamous, heterosexual, nuclear family.4 1. Leonore Tiefer, Sex Is Not a Natural Act and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Westview Press, 2004), 180. 2. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1978). 3. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: 133–160. See also Michel Foucault, Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France 1973–1974 (New York: Palgrave -MacMillan, 2006) and Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974–1975 (New York: Picador, 2003). 4. This is not to say that for Foucault doctors do not ever cure health problems or that their intentions are not to cure health problems. However, Foucault 260 Chloë Taylor Feminism has also posed powerful critiques of the sexual sciences. As Janice Irvine notes, feminist epistemology has rejected the purported neutrality of science, especially of the sciences that claim knowledge about sex and gender.5 Feminist and queer political theorists and activists have, moreover, “underscored the hollowness of solutions based on techniques” that are favored by sexologists; teaching men skills to resist premature ejaculation or to better stimulate their wives’ clitorises are not adequate resolutions to widespread and profound dissatisfactions with sex, gender, and marriage in a heterosexist and patriarchal society.6 As Irvine writes, Feminism and lesbian/gay liberation…challenged power inequalities between men and women and questioned the very concepts of maleness and femaleness, masculinity and femininity.…They presented alternatives to tradition and to expert power and authority. Therein lay their threat to American sexology.7 Given this antagonistic relationship, combining feminism and sexology has proved controversial. The work of feminist sexologist Shere Hite in the 1970s and 1980s was critiqued by sexologists and feminists alike: sexologists complained that the 1976 Hite Report was political and thus undermined the scientific prestige of sexology, while feminists criticized Hite for aspiring to a masculine scientific authority.8 Describing the relationship between feminism and sexology, Irvine notes that “the incompatibility of their concerns—science and market, on the one hand, versus shows that what we consider “healthy” is thoroughly political and that the effect of doctors’ practices is normalizing whatever their intentions may be. For two recent Foucauldian studies of the ways that medical and sexual science function to sexually normalize individuals and populations, see Ladelle McWhorter, Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); and Ladelle McWhorter, Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America: A Genealogy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009). 5. Janice Irvine, Disorders of Desire: Sexuality and Gender in Modern American Sexology, rev. ed. (1990; repr., Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2005), 101. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., 117. Chloë Taylor 261 progressive political change, on the other—led…to a contentious and emotionally charged history.”9 Drawing on both Foucauldian and feminist perspectives, this article explores a new chapter in this history, examining self-described feminist sexologists’ responses to the psychiatric diagnoses of Female Sexual Dysfunction (FSD). While psychologists had pathologized female sexuality under the label of frigidity since the nineteenth century, sexual dysfunctions were relatively marginal in the first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), published in 1952. In the DSM-1, frigidity (like impotence) was... (shrink)

Although the philosophical systems of G. W. Leibniz and David Lewis both feature possible worlds, the ways in which their systems are similar and dissimilar are ultimately surprising. At first glance, Leibniz’s modal metaphysics might strike us as one of the most contemporarily relevant aspects of his system. But I clarify in this paper major interpretive problems that result from understanding Leibniz’s system in terms of contemporary views (like Lewis’s, for instance). Specifically, I argue that Leibniz rejects the inference that (...) if something is possible, it therefore occurs in some possible world. This discussion highlights how Leibniz’s account of individual substance (with his strict notion of identity) constrains his modal theorizing and produces fatalistic threats. I then make an unexpected connection between Leibniz’s and Lewis’s systems by showing that Leibniz’s treatment of fatalism bears similarities to the response Lewis gives to the fatalist when considering the paradoxes of time travel. (shrink)

Cognitively engaging physical activity has been suggested to have superior effects on cognition compared to PA with low cognitive demands; however, there have been few studies directly comparing these different types of activities. The aim of this study is to compare the cognitive effects of a combined physically and cognitively engaging bout of PA to a physical or cognitive activity alone in children. Children were randomized in pairs to one of three 20-min conditions: a cognitive sedentary activity; a non-cognitively engaging (...) PA; and a cognitively engaging PA. Executive function was assessed using a modified Eriksen flanker task immediately before and 10–15 min following the experimental condition. Children ages 6–8 years were included in the study. A repeated measures ANOVA found no significant difference between groups with respect to scores on the flanker task. The results do not support the hypotheses that a cognitively engaging bout of PA enhances cognitive performance over non-cognitively engaging PA or sedentary activities. Possible explanations for our findings include overexertion during the acute bout of PA and depletion of positive affect prior to performing the post-intervention EF tasks. (shrink)

I examine Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s adaptation of Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World in the comic series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I interpret philosophical aspects of Cavendish’s fictional landscape, including her vitalist materialism and naturalized talking animals, as they appear in series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, rendered through 3-D images and corresponding 3-D glasses worn by readers. Through this world adaptation, Moore and O’Neill onboard themes of naturalness, experimentation, technology-aided perceptual processes, and travel to intersecting worlds to enhance (...) The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’s commentary on the formative influence of fiction on authors and audiences. (shrink)

In 1977 Michel Foucault contemplated the idea of punishing rape only as a crime of violence, while in 1978 he argued that non-coercive sex between adults and minors should be decriminalized entirely. Feminists have consistently criticized these suggestions by Foucault. This paper argues that these feminist responses have failed to sufficiently understand the theoretical motivations behind Foucault's statements on sex-crime legislation reform, and will offer a new feminist appraisal of Foucault's suggestions.

Ethical issues arise in the world’s first population-level treatment of severe lead poisoning caused by small-scale mining for gold in rural Nigeria. Emergency medical intervention and environmental cleanup have reduced the mortality in children younger than 5 years from lead poisoning from over 40 to 2.5 per cent leaving little evidence of the harms caused by lead poisoning. In the absence of obvious sequelae, family adherence to long-term intensive therapy to remove accumulated lead reservoirs in children wanes and some community (...) miners challenge safer mining interventions to prevent recontamination of the environment with lead. This letter raises questions regarding community versus individual rights in public health interventions and patient autonomy. (shrink)

This paper explores the phenomenon of being ill (in cases of serious, chronic and terminal illnesses) both in its subjective and intersubjective dimensions. My main contention is that the philosophical tools of phenomenology uncover the framework for understanding the lived experience of the ill person as they privilege the first-person account of illness. It is through this that the essence of things and phenomena surrounding the body-in-illness are unveiled, as opposed to the medical world’s perspective, a third-person account of diseases. (...) A phenomenology of illness underscores that illness is a substantial parcel of human existence that alters the ill person’s experience of the body, intersubjective relations with the other, and relation with the world entirely. This essay is constituted of four major sections dabbling with a phenomenological account of the experience of the lived body, the body-in-illness, the intersubjective dimension of the body-in-illness, and a note on health. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy's Role in Psychopathology Back to Jaspers and an Appeal to Grow PracticalThe author reports no conflicts of interest.In "Philosophy's role in theorizing psychopathology," Gibson presents a defense of the continued relevance of philosophy to psychopathology, and a non-exhaustive framework for the role of philosophy in this domain (Gibson, 2024). I find it hard to disagree that psychopathology is soaked in philosophy from its origins, and that to try (...) and dry it out would be both unwise and impossible.In this commentary, I go back to Karl Jaspers' account of the role of philosophy in his General Psychopathology. In doing so, I do not find that Gibson adds anything new, but instead gives us a well-illustrated reminder that philosophy "is operative within every living science" (Jaspers, 1997, p. 770).Situated Psychopathological TheorizingGibson addresses a broad 'we' who might be engaged with psychopathological theorizing. This seems to encompass three main settings, from which examples are drawn.1. Everyday and regulative social practices (ordinary and legal setting).2. Empirically driven disciplines which work with psychopathological constructs (academic setting).3. Psychiatry and psychotherapy (clinical setting).In my view, it is a mistake not to map the terrain where psychopathological theorizing is situated. In each setting psychopathological theorizing has its own set of aims and constraints. In the ordinary setting, the aim might be to know whether to blame a loved one for their action. In the legal setting it might be to decide whether treatment or punishment is appropriate. In the clinical setting, the aim is usually a therapeutic assessment, and moral stance taking is often best kept at bay. In the academic setting, we might want to ensure our concepts are reliable and valid, opening them up to investigation using objective scientific methods. [End Page 13]Beyond what can be said in the most general terms, the role of philosophy will look different in these different situations.Understanding Is Not (Just) a Philosophical ToolUnderstanding is a mode of knowing that is concerned with the particular, rather than the general, and accessed inter-relationally, relying on tacit knowledge and empathetic imagination. Gibson introduces the concept as an elementary form of social intuition, used in ordinary life to make sense of social relations and other people's behaviors and reactions. I agree with Gibson, drawing on Strawson, that Understanding is a mode of knowledge that involves the subject of enquiry as a participant (Strawson, 1982). There is a moral imperative to take this stance, which drives us to value the expansion of what we are able to understand of other people's mental states. This at least partly motivates the agenda when we theorize about psychopathology.At times throughout his argument, Gibson seems to be arguing for the role of Understanding in psychopathological theorizing, in place of his explicit aim of arguing for the role of philosophy. However it is not at all clear that this replacement can be made. Accepting the picture drawn, Understanding is not any more the expertise or domain of the philosopher than the author, police officer, or sociologist. We are surely not meant to take Understanding as a uniquely philosophical tool, but rather a mode of knowing available to all social agents, integral to social reasoning in ordinary life and in the human studies.What philosophy can distinctively do is point to and defend the existence of forms of intersubjective and tacit knowledge within human studies such as psychopathology. For Jaspers, Understanding can be a scientific tool, albeit one that reminds us that knowledge in psychopathology is not all of one kind. One role for philosophy therefore is to help us to "distinguish the different modes of knowing," so that we might "order knowledge into a comprehensive whole" (Jaspers, 1997, p. 769). This is akin to the 'synthetic' role that Gibson proposes.Philosophy and ScienceJaspers defines scientific knowledge broadly as knowledge with "general validity, convincing insights (which can be proved), clarity of method, and the possibility for a meaningful discussion" (Jaspers, 1997, p. 768).We do not get such a definition from Gibson, but in the sections of... (shrink)

This article shares lessons-learned by the Center for Values in International Development (C4V) over nearly five years. It notes entrenched resistance by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) of any definition of ‘ethics’ beyond legal and regulatory compliance with government financial, procurement, and programming standards. Among practitioner organizations and firms, incorporation of international development ethics is generally viewed as naïve, out of touch with the highly competitive development ‘market’, and hence unnecessary. The article ends with a call to action (...) to coordinate and create mechanisms, provide funding and forums, and significantly improve collaboration between international development ethicists in academic circles, with international development and humanitarian response practitioners. (shrink)

Scholars often regard the 4th century controversy on education as a rivalry between philosophy, which is represented by Plato and Aristotle, and rhetoric, which is represented most prominently by Isocrates. The problem with this view is that it presupposes a distinction between philosophy and rhetoric which seems to be the product rather than the cause of the controversy. In this paper I discuss certain aspects of Isocrates’ thought which allow us to place him in the beginning of a tradition which (...) only later would be recognized as empiricist. Both Plato and Aristotle oppose Isocrates, but their arguments develop in different directions. I argue that Aristotle, who is influenced by Isocrates, provides him with the normative context rhetoric needs in order to qualify as an art. This, however, does not imply that Aristotle subscribes to empiricism. Following Plato, he postulates a realm of real essences grasped by reason which, in Aristotle’s case, ultimately accounts for his view that rhetoric is an offshoot of dialectic. By contrast, Plato bans rhetoric completely from the state, handing over the task of persuasion to the philosopher or the ideal legislator. (shrink)

An overview of the philosophical and bioethics literature on conscientious refusals by health care professionals to provide abortion and contraceptive services.

Efforts to promote gender equality often encourage changes to interpersonal interactions as a way of undermining gender hierarchy. Such programs are premised on the idea that the gender system can be “undone” when individuals behave in ways that challenge prevailing gender norms. However, scholars know little about whether and under what conditions real changes to the gender system can result from changed behaviors. We use the context of a gender sensitization program in the Democratic Republic of Congo to examine prospects (...) for transformative change at the interactional level of the gender system. Over nine months, we observed significant changes in men’s quotidian practices. Further, we identified a new commitment among many men to a more equal division of household labor. However, participants consistently undermined the transformative potential of these behavioral changes through their dedication to maintaining control over the objective, process, and meaning of change, resisting conceptions of equality that challenged the gender system. Because quotidian changes left gender hierarchy intact, they appear unlikely to destabilize the logics that legitimate women’s subordination. (shrink)

In this response I compare Rebecca Tuvel’s article, “In Defense of Transracialism,” to several other recent examples of philosophical and social justice scholarship in which authors draw comparisons between diverse identities and oppressions, and draw ethical and political conclusions about experiences that are not necessarily their own. I ask what methodological or authorial differences can explain the dramatically different reception of these works compared to Tuvel’s, and whether these differences in reception were justified. In this response I also challenge the (...) often-heard claim that Tuvel failed to draw on the evidence of experience in her article, as well as the assumption that social justice scholars should always do so. Finally, I consider Tuvel’s motivations in writing her article and describe them as intellectually generous, and I call for more intellectual generosity in academia as it is transformed by social media. (shrink)

The authors of the Target article, Shen and colleagues (2024) argue that there is a need for an ethical framework to help analyze when it is appropriate to return individualized research results (I...

In this short note we prove that a definable set X over is superstable only if.

Many disabled individuals adamantly oppose medical assistance in dying, quite rightly referencing pervasive ableism and, euthanasia’s dark history in the Aktion T4 program of Nazi Germany in which...

En tant que pratique religieuse, la prière se révèle dans le monde contemporain comme profondément diverse : comme l’observait déjà Marcel Mauss, ses transformations ont accompagné la sécularisation des sociétés et l’individuation des croyances, et elle est restée au cœur des formes les plus traditionnelles de piété. Cette « plasticité » de la prière lui a souvent valu d’être considérée depuis bien des horizons disciplinaires comme pratique religieuse « par excellence », ou phénomène religieu...

Psychiatric diagnoses are increasingly seen as viable categories around which self and social identities might be drawn. This introduces a new pressure on the “boundary problem” for psychiatry: when members of the public request diagnoses to affirm their self-identities how should we draw the line between mental disorder and normality? If psychiatrists have the authority to recognize and diagnose mental disorder, how can roles as diagnosers and gate-keepers be balanced in a post-stigma era of mental health care? Focusing on the (...) disorder identified would-be patient who would not attract the diagnosis they seek were they not to seek it, this essay explores what it means to have an identity bound to a psychiatric diagnosis and considers a framework for psychiatrists to negotiate clinical encounters that involve the seeking of identity affirming diagnoses. (shrink)

A number of theorists have defended the legalization and destigmatization of sex work by arguing that sex work is analogous to other kinds of labour that are socially accepted and even valorized. In contrast, one reason that anti-sex work feminist theorists have rejected the analogy between prostitution and other jobs, including professions that are potentially exploitative and dangerous, is that sex is tied up with personal identity and integrity in a way that other activities are not. This makes the selling (...) of one’s body or the use of parts of one’s body for sexual services psycho-sexually harmful in a way that distinguishes it from other forms of labour involving the sale or use of one’s body parts. This essay argues that Foucault’s work on sexuality helps to bring together what seems right about both sides of this debate. Drawing on Foucault, we can explain the fact that sex is experienced as intrinsic to identity in the modern West, as well as lend support to the view that this is a contingent and undesirable state of affairs. Moreover, this essay argues that Foucault’s proposal for desexualization suggests a way out of one of the main occupational hazards associated with sex work. (shrink)