The COVID-19 pandemic has had a devastating impact on care homes in the United Kingdom, particularly for those residents living with dementia. The impetus for this article comes from a recent review conducted by the authors. That review, a qualitative media analysis of news and academic articles published during the first few months of the outbreak, identified ethical care as a key theme warranting further investigation within the context of the crisis. To explore ethical care further, a set of salient (...) ethical values for delivering care to care home residents living with dementia during the pandemic was derived from a synthesis of relevant ethical standards, codes and philosophical approaches. The ethical values identified were caring, non-maleficence, beneficence, procedural justice, dignity in death and dying, well-being, safety, and personhood. Using these ethical values as a framework, alongside examples from contemporaneous media and academic sources, this article discusses the delivery of ethical care to care home residents with dementia within the context of COVID-19. The analysis identifies positive examples of ethical values displayed by care home staff, care sector organisations, healthcare professionals and third sector advocacy organisations. However, concerns relating to the death rates, dignity, safety, well-being and personhood – of residents and staff – are also evident. These shortcomings are attributable to negligent government strategy, which resulted in delayed guidance, lack of resources and Personal Protective Equipment, unclear data, and inconsistent testing. Consequently, this review demonstrates the ways in which care homes are underfunded, under resourced and undervalued. (shrink)

Preoperative mapping of language and declarative memory functions in temporal lobe epilepsy patients is essential since they frequently encounter deterioration of these functions and show variable degrees of cerebral reorganization. Due to growing evidence on language and declarative memory interdependence at a neural and neuropsychological level, we propose the GE2REC protocol for interactive language-and-memory network mapping. GE2REC consists of three inter-related tasks, sentence generation with implicit encoding and two recollection memory tasks: recognition and recall. This protocol has previously been validated (...) in healthy participants, and in this study, we showed that it also maps the LMN in the left TLE. Compared to healthy controls, left TLE showed widespread inter- and intra-hemispheric reorganization of the LMN through reduced activity of regions engaged in the integration and the coordination of this meta-network. We also illustrated how this protocol could be implemented in clinical practice individually by presenting two case studies of LTLE patients who underwent efficient surgery and became seizure-free but showed different cognitive outcomes. This protocol can be advantageous for clinical practice because it is short and easy to perform; allows brain mapping of essential cognitive functions, even at an individual level; engages language-and-memory interaction allowing to evaluate the integrative processes within the LMN; provides a more comprehensive assessment by including both verbal and visual modalities, as well as various language and memory processes. Based on the available postsurgical data, we presented preliminary results obtained with this protocol in LTLE patients that could potentially inform the clinical practice. This implies the necessity to further validate the potential of GE2REC for neurosurgical planning, along with two directions, guiding resection and describing LMN neuroplasticity at an individual level. (shrink)

Inner speech has been shown to vary in form along several dimensions. Along condensation, condensed inner speech forms have been described, that are supposed to be deprived of acoustic, phonological and even syntactic qualities. Expanded forms, on the other extreme, display articulatory and auditory properties. Along dialogality, inner speech can be monologal, when we engage in internal soliloquy, or dialogal, when we recall past conversations or imagine future dialogs involving our own voice as well as that of others addressing us. (...) Along intentionality, it can be intentional (when we deliberately rehearse material in short-term memory) or it can arise unintentionally (during mind wandering). We introduce the ConDialInt model, a neurocognitive predictive control model of inner speech that accounts for its varieties along these three dimensions. ConDialInt spells out the condensation dimension by including inhibitory control at the conceptualization, formulation or articulatory planning stage. It accounts for dialogality, by assuming internal model adaptations and by speculating on neural processes underlying perspective switching. It explains the differences between intentional and spontaneous varieties in terms of monitoring. We present an fMRI study in which we probed varieties of inner speech along dialogality and intentionality, to examine the validity of the neuroanatomical correlates posited in ConDialInt. Condensation was also informally tackled. Our data support the hypothesis that expanded inner speech recruits speech production processes down to articulatory planning, resulting in a predicted signal, the inner voice, with auditory qualities. Along dialogality, covertly using an avatar’s voice resulted in the activation of right hemisphere homologs of the regions involved in internal own-voice soliloquy and in reduced cerebellar activation, consistent with internal model adaptation. Switching from first-person to third-person perspective resulted in activations in precuneus and parietal lobules. Along intentionality, compared with intentional inner speech, mind wandering with inner speech episodes was associated with greater bilateral inferior frontal activation and decreased activation in left temporal regions. This is consistent with the reported subjective evanescence and presumably reflects condensation processes. Our results provide neuroanatomical evidence compatible with predictive control and in favor of the assumptions made in the ConDialInt model. (shrink)

Emily Brady provides a systematic account of aesthetics in relation to the natural environment, offering a critical understanding of what aesthetic appreciation ...

Standpoint theorists have long been clear that marginalization does not make better understanding a given. They have been less clear, though, that social dominance does not make ignorance a given. Indeed, many standpoint theorists have implicitly committed themselves to what I call the strong epistemic disadvantage thesis. According to this thesis, there are strong, substantive limits on what the socially dominant can know about oppression that they do not personally experience. I argue that this thesis is not just implausible but (...) politically pernicious; it is an excuse for ignorance and silence that stifles our ability to address many injustices. Moreover, I argue that if we are to avoid lending support to the SEDT while working within a standpoint theory framework, we must hold that the socially dominant can achieve marginalized standpoints. So, we must hold that men can achieve feminist standpoints, that white women (and men) can achieve black feminist standpoints, and so on. (shrink)

We show that the Lascar group $\operatorname {Gal}_L$ of a first-order theory T is naturally isomorphic to the fundamental group $\pi _1|)$ of the classifying space of the category of models of T and elementary embeddings. We use this identification to compute the Lascar groups of several example theories via homotopy-theoretic methods, and in fact completely characterize the homotopy type of $|\mathrm {Mod}|$ for these theories T. It turns out that in each of these cases, $|\operatorname {Mod}|$ is aspherical, i.e., (...) its higher homotopy groups vanish. This raises the question of which homotopy types are of the form $|\mathrm {Mod}|$ in general. As a preliminary step towards answering this question, we show that every homotopy type is of the form $|\mathcal {C}|$ where $\mathcal {C}$ is an Abstract Elementary Class with amalgamation for $\kappa $ -small objects, where $\kappa $ may be taken arbitrarily large. This result is improved in another paper. (shrink)

La musique a exercé depuis les temps les plus reculés une telle fascination sur l’esprit humain que l’homme n’a eu de cesse de créer des instruments nouveaux, de les perfectionner, de travailler sa voix pour lui donner la plus parfaite expression, de rechercher de nouvelles harmonies, de se laisser guider par son inspiration afin de concevoir les plus belles oeuvres. Mais d’où vient cette inspiration qui permit à certains êtres de léguer à l’humanité des chefs-d'oeuvre qui, plusieurs siècles après leur (...) naissance, continuent à élever notre âme? Et quel est, ou quel devrait être, le rôle véritable de la musique? C’est ce que nous découvrirons en lisant ces lignes. Les articles de cette oeuvre collégiale, conçue dans le cadre de l’Université Rose-Croix Internationale, apportent un éclairage original et vécu sur le rôle de la musique dans le domaine spécifique de la spiritualité. Ils explorent l’apport de musiciens de génie et se penchent également sur le comportement de l’auditeur, qui ne peut être purement passif s’il veut bénéficier pleinement des influences les plus subtiles de la musique. Par ailleurs, ces articles analysent l’importance de l’interprétation, qui est essentielle, tant pour la transmission que pour la réception de l’oeuvre musicale. (shrink)

Relational quantum mechanics (RQM) is an interpretation of quantum mechanics based on the idea that quantum states do not describe an absolute property of a system but rather a relationship between systems. There have recently been some criticisms of RQM pertaining to issues around intersubjectivity. In this article, we show how RQM can address these criticisms by adding a new postulate which requires that all of the information possessed by a certain observer is stored in physical variables of that observer (...) and thus is accessible by measurement to other observers. This makes it possible for observers to reach intersubjective agreement about quantum events that have occurred in the past. We suggest a possible ontology for a version of RQM employing this postulate; this ontology upholds the principle that quantum states are always relational, but it also postulates a set of quantum events that are not strictly relational. We show that the new postulate helps address the preferred basis problem in RQM. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:656 Feminist Studies 43, no. 3. © 2017 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Ghost Story The day our house burned, Mama dumped it in the river. Palms on the shore, finch in place of bruises. A hollowed tusk birthing pockets of gray glowing some kind of holy, salt-spittle and rattling. Carolina Horror Story Sandra, softest face south of the Mason Dixon line, got eggshells under her toes, eyes made of (...) salt and other things too holy to remember. Oil slicks and line breaks spilling out of her mouth, gets called sugar, sugar walkin’ down the street, sugar at high tide, high noon, peeled molasses at the bottom of the barrel, shotgun cool. Sugar’s got a face I can only look at crying, look at human, arranged and harmless. Sugar, sugar what’s wrong, Emily Zhang Emily Zhang 657 air’s so stale it could choke a hurricane? Turns to me like the tide, shoots me through and through with her face, refractin’ all the night’s light. Honey Open up the sky, shaken of its salt. Open up the lip of a run-on sentence, blurry and reeling, the way air turns into breath. Open when the smallest fires become streams of bright dust, swimming pools swelling from bee stings. Open the sweetness out of summer. Open when we dump frogs into bathtubs and the waves set like milk, when our mouths are full of spit and we shuck foam from our hair. Open for the movie theater trips when the sky is setting heavy, for the horror films where girls sound like rabbits and rabbits look like girls. Open with waxwings birthed from dirt, the Band-Aids and yawning trash cans, the cavities. Open for the way the air sticks to us like a hide, the way we feel like wine stains, but wanted. Open in the grocery store produce section when we see the damp crabs clawing each other and we think of womanhood. Open for the girls with lips like copper wiring, fluorescents, double-exposure, for our melting sense of un-worry, our hands always self-corrected. Open when we’re halfway over the fence and the neighbor’s Doberman is trying to bite the meat off our ankles. Open the way a sprinkler head looks like a rotting berry, the way we all fall lightly in love with witches. Open for the radios spilling music slow, elbows on the dashboard, weary elbows, loud elbows. Open for the unholy women throughout history who sat alone on islands where the sky was so blue it burned with borrowed static now lost.... (shrink)

This essay looks to re-evaluate sculptor Richard Serra’s famous claim that “to remove the work is to destroy it.” Using OOO, and particularly Graham Harman’s interpretation of Martin Heidegger’s tool analysis, in order to analyze the now famous moment when Tilted Arc was de-installed from Federal Plaza, Manhattan in 1989, this paper argues that the work was not in fact destroyed but rather that its ontological autonomy was even more absolutely revealed in that moment as such. Although it is the (...) case that art objects and sites are prone to discursive co-construction and evaluation, it is this analysis’ claim that they both are possessive of a deep, substantive form also, a form resistant to appropriation. Tilted Arc therefore revealed something even more insidious and dangerous to those who opposed it than the power of art to speak back to its surroundings. Rather, it uncovered the substantive objecthood of the site itself. (shrink)

Many survivors of the Holocaust have carried feelings of shame related to having survived this horrific event. This paper traces a genealogy of shame by exploring the sources of shame that have haunted survivors, and how these have manifested themselves in their lives and the lives of their children. Arguing that the intergenerational transmission of shame has reinforced a culture of silence among survivors and their children, this paper calls for a reconceptualizing of the afterlife of the Holocaust, which leverages (...) shame as a powerful piece of remembering and understanding the Holocaust. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Note on Being Ability–different, Atypically–bodied... Criptastic?Emily HutcheonIn being prompted to write about my experiences with disability [alternatively written: (dis)ability, dis/ability, “disability,” disAbility], I am confronted with more questions than I have answers. Am I to reflect on that small window of time, one so small that I don’t actually remember it, when I did not know that I was different? My mom [End Page 196] has recounted (...) vivid moments where I seem to come to this realization—for example, at the age of three, when I see my twin sister and friends scrambling on a playground and I process that I am unable to join them. Realization of my differentness (my different body, my different way of moving, my different abilities) continued into my youth and adulthood (Can’t skate—check. Can’t ride a two–wheeled bike—check. Usually walk behind others, destined to be the last in a group—check. Was the smart kid in class, aka smartass–in–training—check).Eventually, I realized that my differentness was not contained to my body or my abilities. Were my mind, my self, and my relationships different as well? I seemed to empathize when others didn’t or couldn’t. I saw that certain things were just wrong, and was confused when others didn’t share my concern. I seemed to see, feel, and experience things that others did not. For instance, I had two invasive operations before the age of eleven, a handful of minor procedures and countless physiotherapy sessions. Some memories of these times are horrific. Some I cherish, including the genuine care of the health care staff. Some are hilarious, like being doped–up before invasive surgery at the age of ten and calling my favorite surgeon “So cute!!” But always, there was physical pain, pain, pain. At times, I was completely dependent on others to help me to the bathroom, the shower, to move around, and to recover. I received such tender and exquisite care from my mom during these times. The dependency, which I had no choice but to experience, the dependency that is feared by almost everyone I know (“If I am ever a burden to my family, shoot me”) is something that my mom and I constantly joke about (“Em, I will take care of you now, only if you change my diapers when I’m old, kay?”). I have come to learn that this dependency, along with those other shades of vulnerability, are an inevitable consequence of being human, and to deny this is to relinquish our capacity to connect with others.I had, and continue to have, relationships with strangers, friends and family, which are, in my best estimation, atypical. I am the recipient of staring, laughing, pointing, sympathy, disgust, empathy, tender care, curiosity, hostility, resentment, and ambivalence. While in the gym, complete strangers approach me to say, with all the kindness, enthusiasm, and obliviousness in the world: “Glad to see you out and about. Good for you!” For some, I am to be protected; for others, I am to be tiptoed around; and for others, I am to be congratulated for “overcoming my circumstance” and for being oh–so–valuable to society because of my smarts and productivity.It is a rare few who accept what Cerebral Palsy and epilepsy offer to my life and to their own, with all of their accompanying complexities, possibilities, and contradictions.It is ironic that the excellent health care and services I have received, which have probably changed my life for the better, are only made possible because of the “disability” label, which I have come to heartily dislike. I have always felt ill–at–ease with this word and concept. In my mind, it just does not describe me or others around me. Perhaps more accurately, the definitions and associations that stubbornly accompany the term (e.g., the disabled person as asexual, passive and in need of protection, the disabled person as the conquering hero) would never accurately describe me. Undoubtedly, the term is negative in its connotations. And, of course, the concept of disability relies on certain notions of “normal.” By most accounts in... (shrink)

Objective To develop an ethically, legally, and clinically appropriate ventilator allocation policy for AdventHealth Tampa and AdventHealth Carrollwood in Tampa, Florida, which could be enacted swiftly during the Covid-19 pandemic. Methods During Spring 2020, a subcommittee of the Medical Ethics Committee established consensus on the fundamental principles of the policy, then built on existing ethical, legal, and clinical guidance. Results The plan was finalized in May 2020. The plan triages patients based on exclusion criteria (imminent mortality), prognosis and expected benefit (...) of ventilation (using the Sequential Organ Failure Assessment), and change in prognosis over time. Decisions are made by committee in order to minimize moral distress among individual patient care providers. Conclusions Due to international concerns about healthcare resource shortages during the Covid-19 pandemic, hospitals need allocation policies informed by the crisis standard of care, the hospital’s ethical duty to plan for an emergency, and federal civil rights laws Policy Implications: This type of policy can serve as a model for other institutions to develop crisis standards of care resource allocation policies, which are a necessary component of disaster planning. (shrink)

There is an undeniable tendency to dismiss women’s sexual assault allegations out of hand. However, this tendency is not monolithic—allegations that black men have raped white women are often met with deadly seriousness. I argue that contemporary rape culture is characterized by the interplay between rape myths that minimize rape, and myths that catastrophize rape. Together, these two sets of rape myths distort the epistemic resources that people use when assessing rape allegations. These distortions result in the unjust exoneration of (...) people we cannot conceive of as monstrous, while making it too easy to believe that some marginalized people could be rapists. I also argue that rape myths enable a novel kind of epistemic injustice. This injustice concerns how our assessments of trustworthiness and our assessments of plausibility interact. I argue that rape myths can result in runaway credibility deflations that can explain both why people fail to believe most women, and also why people may unjustly believe false allegations that white women have been raped by black men. (shrink)

This article offers a definition of microaggressions that picks out a distinct injustice, and defines the injustice in question as structural. The article also argues that to be a relational egalitarian requires considering our social norms and social practices: the kinds of things that produce microaggressions and so structure socially unequal relations.

In this article we examine the figure of the doctor in animated debates around public sector medicine in contemporary South Africa. The loss of health professionals from the South African public system is a key contributor to the present healthcare crisis. South African medical schools have revised curricula to engage trainee doctors with a broader set of social concerns, but the disjunctures between training, health systems failures, and a high disease burden call into question whether junior doctors are adequately prepared (...) or whether conditions of care extend beyond medical training. A concern with 'resilience' suggests a correct ethical relation to a putative obligation to provide care in a struggling system. By examining the ways in which trainee doctors are expected to 'cope' with the demands of medical practice, to adopt the correct moral posture in relation to the urgency of care, and to enact a desirable ethical relation to the broader social and political context of medical practice, we examine the picture of humanist concern that animates the subjectivities and techniques of the self called for by this training, and advocate for endurance as an alternative framework for understanding the political and ethical relations between doctors, patients and health systems. (shrink)

Under what conditions does machine learning (ML) model opacity inhibit the possibility of explaining and understanding phenomena? In this article, I argue that nonepistemic values give shape to the ML opacity problem even if we keep researcher interests fixed. Treating ML models as an instance of doing model-based science to explain and understand phenomena reveals that there is (i) an external opacity problem, where the presence of inductive risk imposes higher standards on externally validating models, and (ii) an internal opacity (...) problem, where greater inductive risk demands a higher level of transparency regarding the inferences the model makes. (shrink)

Inuit artists espouse aesthetic values which are indicative of the degree of their involvement with the western art world and of the non-artistic cultural values which they wish to convey and perpetuate in their own communities. It is in this latter expression that Inuit aesthetics may be studied as a conveyor of Inuit rather than non-Inuit culture. In this paper, the statements made by Inuit woman artists from the Keewatin district are analysed with reference to the values associated with contemporary (...) mainstream fine art and the artists' own assertions regarding the importance of non-artistic values in the art-making process. (shrink)

What kinds of issues does the global crisis of climate change present to aesthetics, and how will they challenge the field to respond? This paper argues that a new research agenda is needed for aesthetics with respect to global climate change (GCC) and outlines a set of foundational issues which are especially pressing: (1) attention to environments that have been neglected by philosophers, for example, the cryosphere and aerosphere; (2) negative aesthetics of environment, in order to grasp aesthetic experiences, meanings, (...) and dis/values in light of the catastrophic effects of GCC; (3) bringing intergenerational thinking into aesthetics through concepts of temporality and ‘future aesthetics’ (4) understanding the relationship between aesthetic and ethical values as they arise in regard to GCC. (shrink)

Because idealizations frequently advance scientific understanding, many claim that falsehoods play an epistemic role. In this paper, we argue that these positions greatly overstate idealiza...

Experiments are commonly thought to have epistemic privilege over simulations. Two ideas underpin this belief: first, experiments generate greater inferential power than simulations, and second, simulations cannot surprise us the way experiments can. In this article I argue that neither of these claims is true of experiments versus simulations in general. We should give up the common practice of resting in-principle judgments about the epistemic value of cases of scientific inquiry on whether we classify those cases as experiments or simulations, (...) per se. To the extent that either methodology puts researchers in a privileged epistemic position, this is context sensitive. (shrink)

The objective of this study was to assess the beliefs of parents of youth soccer players about Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, concussion, and retirement from sport decisions and compare them to those of concussion-specialized clinicians. An electronic survey was completed by parents of youth club soccer players and concussion-specialized clinicians located in a large U.S. urban center. Parents believed more strongly in the causal relationship between concussions and CTE, and between CTE and harm than did clinicians. Parents who themselves had participated (...) in sport at a high level had more conservative beliefs than other parents about the number of concussions after which an athlete should retire from contact or collision sport. Results are discussed in the context of ethical risk communication between clinicians and parents. This includes the importance of communicating information about CTE to parents and youth athletes in an understandable way so that they can make informed choices about contact and collision sport participation. Further research is encouraged to evaluate approaches of communicating evidence about CTE to a diverse population of families of youth athletes. (shrink)

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