This chapter contains sections titled: Flirting and Courtship Conservative Ideology Power Dynamics and Relationships Exploring the Views of Conservative Men Timing and Reciprocity Themes of Contradiction Conclusion.

Quantum mechanics is an extraordinarily successful scientific theory. But more than 100 years after it was first introduced, the interpretation of the theory remains controversial. This Element introduces some of the most puzzling questions at the foundations of quantum mechanics and provides an up-to-date and forward-looking survey of the most prominent ways in which physicists and philosophers of physics have attempted to resolve them. Topics covered include nonlocality, contextuality, the reality of the wavefunction and the measurement problem. The discussion is (...) supplemented with descriptions of some of the most important mathematical results from recent work in quantum foundations, including Bell's theorem, the Kochen-Specker theorem and the PBR theorem. (shrink)

In the Buddhist ethical traditions, equanimity along with love, compassion, and sympathetic joy form what are called the four boundless qualities, which are affective states one cultivates for moral and spiritual development. But there is a sense in which equanimity seems very unlike the three others: love, compassion, and sympathetic joy all imply an emotional investment in others, whereas equanimity seems to imply an absence of such investment. This observation has provoked debate as to how to properly understand the relationship (...) between equanimity and the other three qualities. In this paper, I propose that equanimity - like love, compassion, and sympathetic joy - is itself a virtue of good intimate relationships and not in conflict with such virtues. (shrink)

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)

Buddhist philosophical traditions share the Hellenistic orientation toward therapy, particularly with regard to therapeutic interventions in our emotional life. As Pierre Hadot and Martha Nussbaum have ably argued, for the Hellenistic philosophers, philosophy itself is a therapy of the emotions. In this paper, I shift the focus of the contemporary philosophical literature on therapies of the emotions, which investigates almost exclusively the Hellenistic philosophers, and instead draw on the therapies developed by Tibetan Buddhist philosophers and yogis, in particular Gampopa (1079–1153), (...) Tsongkhapa (1357–1419), and Patrul Rinpoche (1808–87). The texts I use are in the genre of Tibetan literature called lo jong (blo sbyong), or mind (blo)- training (sbyong). I argue that the philosophical analysis of the Tibetan Buddhist therapies gives us a model of moral improve- ment that is both novel and promising. This model focuses on the morally improving agent’s capacity for self-awareness and relaxation, her playful approach to emotional-ethical obstacles, and the cultivation of sophisticated, context-sensitive and appropriately flexible judgments about her emotional-ethical life. I also offer a rough taxonomy of Tibetan therapies of the emotions, which will serve as a vehicle to understanding the view of moral improvement described above. (shrink)

The disability rights movement grounds material critiques of the treatment of people with disabilities in a social constructionist perspective, locating disability in the social rather than physical realm, and demedicalizing the concept of disability. However, this conceptualization is threatened by the medicalization of nonnormative erections as the biomedical pathology erectile dysfunction (ED). Although use of medical treatments for ED can have positive outcomes for individuals, the medical community's tendency to include sexual difference in the rubric of disability threatens to remedicalize (...) that category. Furthermore, medicalized conceptions of ED often serve to refocus sexuality around phallocentric, normative sex acts and gender roles, undoing the deconstructive work of disability sex studies. Finally, although aging Western populations targeted for ED treatment represent potentially expanded bases for disability movement activism, the pathologizing of nonnormative sexuality may have the power to instead focus this group on individualistic use of medical interventions geared toward “normalcy.”. (shrink)

Philosophical discussions of climate change have mainly conceived of it as a moral or ethical problem, but climate change also raises new challenges for aesthetics. In this paper I show that, in particular, climate change (1) raises difficult questions about the status of aesthetic judgments about the future, or ‘future aesthetics’; and (2) puts into relief some challenging issues at the intersection of aesthetics and ethics. I maintain that we can rely on aesthetic predictions to enable us to grasp, in (...) some sense, aesthetic value in environments affected by climate change and, through a discussion of three hypothetical cases, I argue that, although moral considerations will press on aesthetic judgments, aesthetic value will not necessarily be trumped by them. (shrink)

Do we see more than we can report? Psychologists and philosophers have been hotly debating this question, in part because both possibilities are supported by suggestive evidence. On one hand, phenomena such as inattentional blindness and change blindness suggest that visual awareness is especially sparse. On the other hand, experiments relating to iconic memory suggest that our in-the-moment awareness of the world is much richer than can be reported. Recent research has attempted to resolve this debate by showing that observers (...) can accurately report the color diversity of a quickly flashed group of letters, even for letters that are unattended. If this ability requires awareness of the individual letters’ colors, then this may count as a clear case of conscious awareness overflowing cognitive access. Here we explored this requirement directly: can we perceive ensemble properties of scenes even without being aware of the relevant individual features? Across several experiments that combined aspects of iconic memory with measures of change blindness, we show that observers can accurately report the color diversity of unattended stimuli, even while their self-reported awareness of the individual elements is coarse or nonexistent — and even while they are completely blind to situations in which each individual element changes color mid-trial throughout the entire experiment. We conclude that awareness of statistical properties may occur in the absence of awareness of individual features, and that such results are fully consistent with sparse visual awareness. (shrink)

Abstract:Vulnerability is an important criterion to assess the ethical justification of the inclusion of participants in research trials. Currently, vulnerability is often understood as an attribute inherent to a participant by nature of a diagnosed condition. Accordingly, a common ethical concern relates to the participant’s decisionmaking capacity and ability to provide free and informed consent. We propose an expanded view of vulnerability that moves beyond a focus on consent and the intrinsic attributes of participants. We offer specific suggestions for how (...) relational aspects and the dynamic features of vulnerability could be more fully captured in current discussions and research practices. (shrink)

Everything is constantly changing. Our emotions are one of the primary ways we track, evaluate, organize, and motivate responsive action to those changes. Furthermore, emotions are inherently interpersonal. We learn what to feel from others, especially when we are children. We “catch” other people’s emotions just by being around them. We get caught in escalating response–counterresponse emotional sequences. This all takes place in time, generating complex patterns of interpersonal emotional dynamics. This review summarizes theory, empirical findings, and key challenges for (...) future research regarding three processes that contribute to interpersonal affective dynamics: (a) Convergence of social partners’ emotional responses to the external world, (b) emotional reactivity of social partners to each other, and (c) interpersonal emotion regulation. (shrink)

This paper explores factors shaping perceptions of Greenhouse Gas Removal (GGR) amongst a range of informed stakeholders, with a particular focus on their role in future social and political systems. We find considerable ambivalence regarding the role of climate targets and incumbent interests in relation to GGR. Our results suggest that GGR is symbolic of a fundamental debate – occurring not only between separate people, but sometimes within the minds of individuals themselves – over whether technological solutions represent a pragmatic (...) or an unethical strategy. We present the idea of a ‘Monsanto effect’, whereby an entirely separate debate taps into deeper narratives and becomes so pervasive that it spills over into a new topic area. Our findings have signifi-cant implications for extant and emergent climate policy as they suggest that, in addition to the considerable practical challenges facing large-scale GGR deployment, there is a deeper psychological challenge in that actors are themselves conflicted about the fundamental desirability of GGR. (shrink)

Long histories and entrenched habits of inattention among advantaged groups mean that even minor challenge and concession can provoke subjective perceptions of victimization. How, in such conditions, might claims of structural injustice break through? Drawing on field work with practitioners across conflict mediation, therapy, education, and performance – four sectors that facilitate listening in fraught contexts yet are undertheorized in politics – this article makes the case that among the most overlooked and powerful resources for cultivating receptivity and responsiveness among (...) advantaged groups are the arts of listening. Practices of engagement across these sectors establish listening as potent rather than passive, given the extent to which it constitutes the field of encounter and shapes what emerges within it, both in terms of expression and, more significantly in this context, receptivity of those to whom one listens. Yet this also means that how one listens is a pivotal consideration – particularly when listening might serve to reinforce and normalize unjustly dominant positions. In contrast to progressive politics’ emphasis on finding more forceful forms of voice and conventional reliance on direct communicative practices, this article explores how specific comedic, theatrical, and embodied tactics can generate ‘oblique forms of listening’ potentially useful to social justice struggles. (shrink)

Explainable AI (xAI) methods are important for establishing trust in using black-box models. However, recent criticism has mounted against current xAI methods that they disagree, are necessarily false, and can be manipulated, which has started to undermine the deployment of black-box models. Rudin (2019) goes so far as to say that we should stop using black-box models altogether in high-stakes cases because xAI explanations ‘must be wrong’. However, strict fidelity to the truth is historically not a desideratum in science. Idealizations (...) – the intentional distortions introduced to scientific theories and models – are commonplace in the natural sciences and are seen as a successful scientific tool. Thus, it is not falsehood qua falsehood that is the issue. In this paper, I outline the need for xAI research to engage in idealization evaluation. Drawing on the use of idealizations in the natural sciences and philosophy of science, I introduce a novel framework for evaluating whether xAI methods engage in successful idealizations or deceptive explanations (SIDEs). SIDEs evaluates whether the limitations of xAI methods, and the distortions that they introduce, can be part of a successful idealization or are indeed deceptive distortions as critics suggest. I discuss the role that existing research can play in idealization evaluation and where innovation is necessary. Through a qualitative analysis we find that leading feature importance methods and counterfactual explanations are subject to idealization failure and suggest remedies for ameliorating idealization failure. (shrink)

With so much attention on the issue of voice in democratic theory, the inverse question of how people come to listen remains a marginal one. Recent scholarship in affect and neuroscience reveals that cognitive and verbal strategies, while privileged in democratic politics, are often insufficient to cultivate the receptivity that constitutes the most basic premise of democratic encounters. This article draws on this scholarship and a recent case of forum theatre to examine the conditions of receptivity and responsiveness, and identify (...) specific strategies that foster such conditions. It argues that the forms of encounter most effective in cultivating receptivity are those that move us via affective intensity within pointedly mediated contexts. It is this constellation of strategies—this strange marriage of immersion and mediation—that enabled this performance to surface latent memory, affect and bias, unsettle entrenched patterns of thought and behaviour, and provide the conditions for revisability. This case makes clear that to lie beyond the domain of cognitive and verbal processes is not to lie beyond potential intervention, and offers insight to how such receptivity might be achieved in political processes more broadly. (shrink)

Halley and colleagues highlight important aspects of advocacy and justice in rare disease and provide recommendations for stakeholders to encourage progress toward equity and justice. In the rare d...

In the early twentieth century, Hilda Diana Oakeley set out a new kind of British idealism. Oakeley is an idealist in the sense that she holds mind to actively contribute to the features of experience, but she also accepts that there is a world independent of mind. One of her central contributions to the idealist tradition is her thesis that minds construct our experiences using memory. This paper explores the theses underlying her idealism, and shows how they are intricately connected (...) to the wider debates of her period. I go on to explain how the parts of Oakeley's idealism are connected to further areas of her thought – specifically, her views on history and her growing block theory of time – to provide a sense of Oakeley's philosophy as a system. As there is no existing literature on Oakeley, this paper aims to open a path for further scholarship. (shrink)

The early modern Catharine Cockburn wrote on a wide range of philosophical issues and recent years have seen an increasing interest in her work. This paper explores her thesis that immaterial substance need not think. Drawing on existing scholarship, I explore the origin of this thesis in Cockburn and show how she applies it in a novel way to space. This thesis provides a particularly useful entry point into Cockburn's philosophy, as it emphasises the importance of her metaphysics and connects (...) with many of her further philosophical views. This paper shows that it is rewarding to consider Cockburn's philosophical views as a holistic system. (shrink)

Coordinated group behaviour can result in conflict or social cohesion. Thus having a better understanding of coordination in social groups could help us tackle some of our most challenging social problems. Historically, the most common way to study group behaviour is to break it down into sub-processes, such as cognition and emotion, then ideally manipulate them in a social context in order to predict some behaviour such as liking versus distrusting a target person. This approach has gotten us partway to (...) understanding many important collective behaviours, but I argue that making major changes in the world will require a more integrated approach. In this review, I introduce dynamic systems theory, with a focus on interpersonal systems, where all the processes we typically study in individuals, such as cognition and emotion, become intertwined between social partners over time. I focus on the concept of coordination, defined as a temporal correlation between interacting components of a system (or systems) arising due to coupling between them. Finally, I show how this perspective could be used to guide investigations of social problems such as polarisation. (shrink)

Critical care society guidelines recommend that ethics committees mediate intractable conflict over potentially inappropriate treatment, including Do Not Resuscitate status. There are, however, limited data on cases and circumstances in which ethics consultants recommend not offering cardiopulmonary resuscitation despite patient or surrogate requests and whether physicians follow these recommendations. This was a retrospective cohort of all adult patients at a large academic medical center for whom an ethics consult was requested for disagreement over DNR status. Patient demographic predictors of ethics (...) consult outcomes were analyzed. In 42 of the 116 cases, the patient or surrogate agreed to the clinician recommended DNR order following ethics consultation. In 72 of 74 of the remaining cases, ethics consultants recommended not offering CPR. Physicians went on to write a DNR order without patient/surrogate consent in 57 of those cases. There were no significant differences in age, race/ethnicity, country of origin, or functional status between patients where a DNR order was and was not placed without consent. Physicians were more likely to place a DNR order for patients believed to be imminently dying. The median time from DNR order to death was 4 days with a 90-day mortality of 88.2%. In this single-center cohort study, there was no evidence that patient demographic factors affected ethics consultants’ recommendation to withhold CPR despite patient/surrogate requests. Physicians were most likely to place a DNR order without consent for imminently dying patients. (shrink)

Proposing and consenting to sex are things that ordinary people manage to do all the time, yet legal regulation of sex seems to be an intractable problem. No one is satisfied with rape law, but no one knows quite what to do about it.

There is a long tradition, in the history and philosophy of science, of studying Kant’s philosophy of mathematics, but recently philosophers have begun to examine the way in which Kant’s reflections on mathematics play a role in his philosophy more generally, and in its development. For example, in the Critique of Pure Reason , Kant outlines the method of philosophy in general by contrasting it with the method of mathematics; in the Critique of Practical Reason , Kant compares the Formula (...) of Universal Law, central to his theory of moral judgement, to a mathematical postulate; in the Critique of Judgement , where he considers aesthetic judgment, Kant distinguishes the mathematical sublime from the dynamical sublime. This last point rests on the distinction that shapes the Transcendental Analytic of Concepts at the heart of Kant’s Critical philosophy, that between the mathematical and the dynamical categories. These examples make it clear that Kant's transcendental philosophy is strongly influenced by the importance and special status of mathematics. The contributions to this book explore this theme of the centrality of mathematics to Kant’s philosophy as a whole. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy. (shrink)

Canada’s Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans mandates that all research involving human subjects be reviewed and approved by a research ethics board . We have little evidence on how researchers are dealing with this requirement in multisite studies, which involve more than one REB. We retrospectively examined 22 REB submissions for two minimal-risk, multisite studies in leading Canadian institutions. Most REBs granted expedited review to the studies, while one declared the application to be exempt from review. (...) Time between submission and approval ranged greatly, from four to 546 days. We received a total of 155 REB queries for changes and clarifications, most of which asked for further information, clarification, or additional documents. Less than a third of the REB queries were requests for specific changes, and a vast majority had a very limited impact on the research projects. Institutions also varied broadly in their description of what was required of local principal investigators. We conclude that the organizational and practical challenges these results imply could deter researchers from embarking on multisite research projects, and that recently proposed changes to the TCPS will not solve these problems. (shrink)

’Aυαγυώρισις γàρ διόλov, says Aristotle of the Odyssey,2 and throughout the poem's second half, with which we are here concerned, there is indeed a series of progressive recognitions as Odysseus reveals himself to Telemachos, Eurykleia, Eumaios, the suitors, Penelope and finally Laertes. So the importance of the opposite is not surprising; without concealment and deception there could be no eventual recognition. Concealment is of course necessary if Odysseus is to survive in the face of so many enemies, as Athena tells (...) him. But in addition, in any work of imaginative literature, so long as the reader or audience is aware of the truth, concealment and unperceived identity open the door to all sorts of half-truths and ironies – possibilities most obviously explored in tragedy and later comedy, but also made use of in the Odyssey. The irony which may be inherent in the arrival of the ‘nameless stranger’ has been most thoroughly explored by Fenik;3 here we examine a further implication. (shrink)

*The views expressed are the author's own and should not be construed as representing the policies and opinions of the American Medical Association.

At the close of Plato’s Apology, Socrates argues that death is a benefit regardless of whether it results in annihilation or an afterlife. According to the standard interpretation, Socrates of the Phaedo rejects the idea that annihilation is a benefit, instead arguing that the soul is immortal and that annihilation would harm a philosopher. Socrates certainly suggests in a few passages that he would resent annihilation. In this paper, however, I argue that the Phaedo does not mark a significant shift (...) in Socrates’ views about whether annihilation benefits. In both dialogues, he recognizes that if the gods choose to annihilate humans, they signal that human life is bad overall and that deprivation of a bad state is a benefit, albeit a benefit without an existing beneficiary. I contend that for Socrates, the possibility that humans benefit from annihilation entails neither the rationality of suicide nor the view that philosophers live miserable lives. (shrink)

Programmes serving international patients are increasingly common throughout the USA. These programmes aim to expand access to resources and clinical expertise not readily available in the requesting patients’ home country. However, they exist within the US healthcare system where domestic healthcare needs are unmet for many children. Focusing our analysis on US children’s hospitals that have a societal mandate to provide medical care to a defined geographic population while simultaneously offering highly specialised healthcare services for the general population, we assume (...) that, given their mandate, priority will be given to patients within their catchment area over other patients. We argue that beyond prioritising patients within their region and addressing inequities within US healthcare, US institutions should also provide care to children from countries where access to vital medical services is unavailable or deficient. In the paper, we raise and attempt to answer the following: (1) Do paediatric healthcare institutions have a duty to care for all children in need irrespective of their place of residence, including international patients? (2) If there is such a duty, how should this general duty be balanced against the special duty to serve children within a defined geographical area to which an institution is committed, when resources are strained? (3) Finally, how are institutional obligations manifest in paradigm cases involving international patients? We start with cases, evaluating clinical and contextual features as they inform the strength of ethical claim and priority for access. We then proceed to develop a general prioritisation framework based on them. (shrink)

Osiurak and Reynaud argue that children are not a good methodological choice to examine cumulative technological culture. However, the paper ignores other current work that suggests that young children do display some aspects of creative problem-solving. We argue that using multiple methodologies and examining how technical-reasoning develops in children will provide crucial support for a cognitive approach to CTC.

The concept of self-gaslighting has recently become prevalent in popular discourse but has yet to be subjected to detailed philosophical analysis. In this paper, I examine one context in which self-gaslighting is often discussed: situations in which someone has experienced trauma. I argue that the phenomenon currently described as self-gaslighting fails to display core features of manipulative gaslighting and that therefore we should seek other conceptual resources for understanding such cases. I suggest that self-gaslighting, at least in some paradigmatic cases, (...) amounts to either extremely successful interpersonal gaslighting or to internalized oppression. Utilizing these concepts instead of self-gaslighting avoids conceptual difficulties and also has a significant practical payoff. By moving away from the language of self-gaslighting we can move away from feelings of self-blame that so often accompany trauma. (shrink)

This study explores the reflective processes of Scottish artist, Norman Gilbert, as he created twenty-five drawings depicting his wife, Pat Gilbert, as she lay dying following an Alzheimer’s-related stroke. Norman, ninety-one, had drawn Pat regularly over their sixty-five-year marriage. One week after Pat died, Norman was interviewed by a family friend to chronicle his reflections on the drawings. The drawings along with the interview transcript are analyzed qualitatively as a case study. Norman’s Hospital Drawings of Pat transform what was initially (...) a private experience into a shared comprehension of end of life and bereavement. (shrink)

In this article, I focus on the way in which grief can alter temporal experience, to the extent that it is possible for the mourner to find themselves held out into the timeless time of the dead. My interpretation is informed by a close reading of poet Denise Riley’s remarkable work Time Lived, without Its Flow, which I bring into dialogue with the shifting conceptions of time put forward by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In so doing, I situate Riley’s account of the (...) limits of temporal experience in grief at the juncture of Merleau-Ponty’s turn away from the horizontal time of Phenomenology of Perception, and towards the vertical time of The Visible and the Invisible. By conceptualising Riley’s own interpretation of time in terms of Merleau-Ponty’s turn to a thicker, ontological interpretation of time, I suggest we are able to think through the limits of temporal experience in grief and see what is lit up about time, meaning, subjectivity and inter-subjectivity, and life and death as a result. (shrink)

The childhood platitude, “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” has become nothing more than wishful thinking as we prepare each new generation for the slew of hurtful words they will inevitably encounter throughout their life. The truth of the matter is, words can hurt. To discuss how this is possible, a recent surge in philosophy of language literature has had the sole focus of analyzing pejorative language, particularly slurs. From semantic content theories to (...) deflationary accounts, there have been numerous attempts to answer the questions “How can words hurt?” and “Why do some words hurt?” Unfortunately, in the current discourse, the focus has been so heavily on accounting for the features of derogatory words that the accounts skip over providing for even the most basic insult, as an indirect speech act. Using an analysis of insults, I argue that there is a layer of analysis prior to any semantic content that theories regarding speech acts should include and and I present a framework for an ethicist to do such an analysis. (shrink)