Abstract:This paper reads parallel scenes in Herodotus and Thucydides to find a shared emphasis on flawed deliberation as the cause of catastrophic defeats for imperial powers. Both texts question the foresight and rhetorical strategies of self-styled wise advisers who ironically advance the very decisions they seek to forestall. Yet both authors also suggest that better strategies of advice could have altered the outcome. In contrast with those who read Herodotus and Thucydides as fatalists showing the futility of wise counsel in (...) the face of imperial aggression, we find that they evince a belief in the constructive possibilities of advice. (shrink)

The pace of change and, indeed, the sheer number of clinical ethics committees has accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Committees were formed to support healthcare professionals and to operationalise, interpret and compensate for gaps in national and professional guidance. But as the role of clinical ethics support becomes more prominent and visible, it becomes ever more important to address gaps in the support structure and misconceptions as to role and remit. The recent case of Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children (...) NHS Foundation Trust v MX, FX and X, [21]–[23] and [58]) has highlighted the importance of patient/family representation at clinical ethics committee meetings. The court viewed these meetings as making decisions about such treatment. We argue that this misunderstands the role of ethics support, with treatment decisions remaining with the clinical team and those providing their consent. The considered review by clinical ethics committees of the moral issues surrounding complex treatment decisions is not a matter of determining a single ethical course of action. In this article, we consider current legal understandings of clinical ethics committees, explore current concepts of ethics support and suggest how they may evolve, considering the various mechanisms of the inclusion of patients and their representatives in ethics meetings which is not standard in the UK. (shrink)

Over the last half century, a multijurisdictional, multiscale system of governance has emerged to address concerns associated with toxic chemicals that have the capacity to bioaccumulate in organisms and biomagnify in food chains, leading to fish consumption advisories. Components of this system of governance include international conventions (such as the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants and the Minamata Convention on Mercury), laws enacted by nation states and their subjurisdictions, and efforts to adaptively manage regional ecosystems (such as the U.S.–Canadian (...) Great Lakes). Given that many of these compounds – including mercury, industrial chemicals such as polychlorinated biphenyls, and pesticides such as toxaphene – circulate throughout the globe through cycles of deposition and reemission, regional efforts to eliminate the need for fish consumption advisories cannot be successful without efforts to reduce emissions everywhere in the world. This paper argues that the scientific community, by monitoring the concentrations of these compounds in the atmosphere and by modeling their fate and transport, play an important role in connecting the various jurisdictional scales of governance. In addition, the monitoring networks that this community of scientists has established can be visualized as a technology of governance essential in an era in which societies have the capacity to produce and release such chemicals on an industrial scale. (shrink)

Objectives: The objectives of this research are to identify social skills and bullying among high school students. The particular objective consists in locating the correlation between the social skills that the student presents in relation to the bullying that exists in educational institutions. Methodology: We work with high school students, Goldstein's Social Skills Checklist is applied, it contains six areas, which are obtained by answering fifty items with a Likert scale, with options of never, rarely, sometimes, frequently. and always. With (...) a score of 1,2,3,4. And 5 respectively. Likewise, the Cisneros Bullying Self-Test is used. It contains three harassment indicators and eight areas. It presents fifty items on a Likert scale, with three response options, never, rarely and many times, with a score of 1, 2 and three respectively. Reliability and correlation will be obtained from the results. Contribution: Identifying bullying and its form of existence will allow prevention and treatment of the phenomenon by improving the social skills of secondary school students. (shrink)

Passant du cinéma d’animation pour enfants (en suivant les exemples de films comme Chicken Run et Le monde de Nemo ) aux artistes queer contemporaines qui ont embrassé l’échec comme un style à part entière, Jack Halberstam part à la recherche de modèles de parentés, d’alliances et de communautés pour faire alternative au monde néo-libéral et à l’idéologie du succès qui en façonne les subjectivités. Cette idéologie se déploie notamment au travers des multiples injonctions à « réussir » dans les (...) différents aspects de la vie sociale : il faut produire, accumuler et se reproduire – autant de maillons dans la chaîne de (re)production du capital. Dans The Queer Art of Failure, Halberstam propose une méthode de déviance joyeuse par rapport à cette idéologie du succès : « d’abord, résister à la maîtrise » ; « ensuite, privilégier la naïveté et l’absurdité (la stupidité) ». (shrink)

ObjectivesThe aims of this research were to compare the levels of physical activity of eHealth users and non-users, to determine the effects of these technologies on motivations, and to establish the relationship that could exist between psychological constructs and physical activity behaviors.MethodsThis cross-sectional study involved 569 adults who responded to an online questionnaire during confinement in France. The questions assessed demographics, usage of eHealth for exercise and physical activity, and behavioral levels. The questionnaire also measured the constructs of Social Cognitive (...) Theory, the Theory of Planned Behavior, and automaticity facets toward eHealth for exercise and physical activity.ResultsParticipants who were users of eHealth for exercise and physical activity presented significantly higher levels of vigorous physical activity and total physical activity per week than non-users. The chi-square test showed significant interactions between psychological constructs toward eHealth and physical activity levels. Self-efficacy was significantly and negatively correlated with walking time per week. Concerning the automaticity facets, efficiency was positive and significantly correlated with vigorous physical activity levels per week. Then, regressions analyses showed that self-efficacy and automaticity efficiency explained 5% of the variance of walking minutes per week and vigorous physical activity per week, respectively.ConclusionThis study has shown that people during confinement looked for ways to stay active through eHealth. However, we must put any technological solution into perspective. The eHealth offers possibilities to stay active, however its benefits and the psychological mechanisms affected by it remains to be demonstrated: eHealth could be adapted to each person and context. (shrink)

The objective was to analyze the influence of the social context on bullying. A mixed investigation was proposed: the social context was analyzed, were applied questionnaires and interviews; were analyzed descriptively, normality tests and non-parametric tests; different manifestations of bullying are presented; their frequency varies between both high schools.

Awareness of the risks posed by excess nitrogen is low beyond the scientific community. As public understanding of scientific issues is partly influenced by news reporting, this article is the first to study how the British press has discussed nitrogen pollution. A corpus-assisted frame analysis of newspaper articles highlighted five frames: Activism, where environmental charities and organizations are portrayed as having an active role in fighting pollution; Government Responsibility, where privatization is presented as central and positioned as one of the (...) main causes of pollution; Industry Responsibility, in which industries’ actions are depicted as causing pollution to increase; Pollutions as Politics, in which pollution is not discussed as a problem to be solved but rather as a means to increase votes; and Risk, where readers are warned about the possible effects of pollution on human health, flora and fauna. The analysis also points to the absence of named scientists and sources with the coverage being dominated by politicians. (shrink)

For the period 2015–2019 and based on a Spanish sample of 145 listed companies, this paper provides insights into how narcissistic chief executive officers (CEOs) influence the proportion of women in top management teams (TMTs). As a further analysis and in line with social psychology and upper echelons theories, we study whether the power and gender of a CEO and the female proportion in the firm's board moderate the relationship. Our results reveal that narcissistic CEOs are less likely to support (...) women in TMTs, confirming that CEO personality traits influence team structure. Further results suggest that this aversion increases as the CEO's power grows and is a woman, and when female proportion in board decreases. The results have an impact on the gender equality goal, demonstrating that the behavior of women toward promoting gender equality in TMTs depends both on the specific position of women in the firm's hierarchy and on their personal psychological attributes. We find that women directors support social identity values and that narcissistic female CEOs act like queen bees. (shrink)

Emma Borg examines the relation between semantics and pragmatics, and assesses recent answers to fundamental questions of how and where to draw the divide between the two. She argues for a minimal account of the interrelation between them--a 'minimal semantics'--which holds that only rule-governed appeals to context can influence semantic content.

Physicists regularly invoke universal laws, such as those of motion and electromagnetism, to explain events. Biological and medical scientists have no such laws. How then do they acquire a reliable body of knowledge about biological organisms and human disease? One way is by repeatedly returning to, manipulating, observing, interpreting, and reinterpreting certain subjects—such as flies, mice, worms, or microbes—or, as they are known in biology, “model systems.” Across the natural and social sciences, other disciplinary fields have developed canonical examples that (...) have played a role comparable to that of biology’s model systems, serving not only as points of reference and illustrations of general principles or values but also as sites of continued investigation and reinterpretation. The essays in this collection assess the scope and function of model objects in domains as diverse as biology, geology, and history, attending to differences between fields as well as to epistemological commonalities. Contributors examine the role of the fruit fly Drosophila and nematode worms in biology, troops of baboons in primatology, box and digital simulations of the movement of the earth’s crust in geology, and meteorological models in climatology. They analyze the intensive study of the prisoner’s dilemma in game theory, ritual in anthropology, the individual case in psychoanalytic research, and Athenian democracy in political theory. The contributors illuminate the processes through which particular organisms, cases, materials, or narratives become foundational to their fields, and they examine how these foundational exemplars—from the fruit fly to Freud’s Dora—shape the knowledge produced within their disciplines. Contributors Rachel A. Ankeny Angela N. H. Creager Amy Dahan Dalmedico John Forrester Clifford Geertz Carlo Ginzburg E. Jane Albert Hubbard Elizabeth Lunbeck Mary S. Morgan Josiah Ober Naomi Oreskes Susan Sperling Marcel Weber M. Norton Wise. (shrink)

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the race to find an effective vaccine or treatment saw an ‘extraordinary number’ of clinical trials being conducted. While there were some key success stories, not all trials produced results that informed patient care. There was a significant amount of waste in clinical research during the pandemic which is said to have hampered an evidence-based response. Conducting trials which could have been predicted to fail to answer the research question (e.g. because they are not large enough (...) to provide a definitive result) is not only a waste of resources but also a breach of research participants’ trust and a violation of research ethics. The issues seen in COVID-19 clinical trials are symptomatic of a wider trial design crisis where many trials do not provide informative results. This paper examines the roles of key stakeholders in delivering ethical and informative trials and whether guidance published by ‘The Good Clinical Trials Collaborative’ could be used to align key stakeholder groups and enable a joined-up approach to improve clinical trial design. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to examine two philosophical accounts of thinking—yet examine them anew by considering what I take to be their under-examined relationship. These are the accounts of Gilbert Ryle and Martin Heidegger. It is often supposed that these two philosophers belong to differing, even conflicting, philosophical traditions. However, this article will seek to demonstrate that an unrecognised affinity exists between them on account of their shared endeavour to venture ahead of the ‘beaten tracks’ of Modern Philosophy. (...) In this way, I will seek to challenge a number of preconceptions that inform the way these thinkers are interpreted and utilised by philosophers of education—particularly preconceptions about Ryle that appear to be active in much ‘thinking skills’ literature. Through exploring certain under-attended-to aspects of Ryle's work (including his early essays on phenomenology and his later reflections on the nature of thinking) this article will seek to offer a renewed investigation into these two philosophical accounts of thinking, in terms of both their limitations and the ways of thinking they open. (shrink)

This book makes a compelling case for the significance of the long, surprising, and epistemologically significant history of scientific observation, a history ...

In this study, we analyzed the academic integrity policies of colleges in Ontario, Canada, casting a specific lens on contract cheating. We extracted data from 28 individual documents from 22-publicly-funded colleges including policies and procedures (n = 27) and code of conduct (n = 1). We analyzed the characteristics of the documents from three perspectives: (a) document type and titles; (b) policy language; and (c) policy principles. Then we examined five core elements of the documentation including (a) access; (b) approach; (...) (c) responsibility; (d) detail; and (e) support. Key findings revealed that specific and direct language pertaining to contract cheating was largely absent from the policy documents, that underlying policy principles lacked clear definition, and that exemplary policy has yet to be developed in this context. We conclude with recommendations for increased policy research in the area of academic integrity and a call for policy revision in Canadian higher education institutions to more explicitly address the issue of contract cheating, as well as provide more support to students and other campus stakeholders to better understand how contract cheating impacts and impedes teaching and learning. (shrink)

Professional control in the selection of treatment options for patients is changing. In light of social and legal developments emphasising patient choice and autonomy, and restricting medical paternalism and judicial deference, this article examines how far patients and families can demand NHS treatment in England and Wales. It considers situations where the patient is an adult with capacity, an adult lacking capacity and a child. In all three cases, there is judicial support for professional autonomy, but there are also inconsistencies (...) that have potential to elevate the importance of patient and family preferences. In combination, they may be perceived by healthcare professionals as an obligation to follow patient preferences, even where doing so conflicts with other professional obligations. It is argued that a more nuanced approach to shared decision-making could help clarify the boundaries of decision-making responsibility. (shrink)

The biomedical industry relies on the skills of animal technologists to put laboratory animal welfare into practice. This is the first study to explore how this is achieved in relation to their participation in implementing refinement and reduction, two of the three key guiding ethical principles––the “3Rs”––of what is deemed to be humane animal experimentation. The interpretative approach contributes to emerging work within the social sciences and humanities exploring care and ethics in practice. Based on qualitative analysis of participant observation (...) within animal research facilities in UK universities, in-depth interviews with ATs, facility managers, and other stakeholders, and analysis of regulatory guidelines, we draw a contrast between the minimum required of ATs by law and how their care work not only meets but often exceeds these requirements. We outline how ATs constitute a key source of innovation and insight into the refinement of animal care and the reduction of animal use, hitherto not formally acknowledged. Exploring AT care work as an example of ethics in practice makes an original contribution to broader debates within health care and animal welfare about how technology, regulation, and behavior can foster and sustain a “culture of care”. (shrink)

This paper examines David Bakhurst's attempt to provide a picture of ‘the kinds of beings we are’ that is ‘more realistic’ than rationalism. I argue that there is much that is rich and compelling in Bakhurst's account. Yet I also question whether there are ways in which it could be taken further. I introduce the discussion by exploring Bakhurst's engagement with phenomenology and, more specifically, Hubert Dreyfus—who enters Bakhurst's horizon on account of his inheritance of the philosophy of John McDowell. (...) Whilst I recognise that Bakhurst's encounter with Dreyfus demonstrates his achievements—over rationalism and over Dreyfus—I also suggest that it opens up certain questions that remain to be asked of his position on account of its conceptualism. These questions originate, not from a Dreyfusian phenomenological perspective, but from the post-phenomenological perspective of Jacques Derrida. Through appealing to key Derridean tropes, I aim to show why the conceptual idiom Bakhurst retains may hold us back from understanding the open nature of human thought. I end by considering what therefore needs to come—and what needs to be let go—in order to best do justice to the ‘kinds of beings we are’. (shrink)

Minimal Semantics asks what a theory of literal linguistic meaning is for - if you were to be given a working theory of meaning for a language right now, what would you be able to do with it? Emma Borg sets out to defend a formal approach to semantic theorising from a relatively new type of opponent - advocates of what she call 'dual pragmatics'. According to dual pragmatists, rich pragmatic processes play two distinct roles in linguistic comprehension: as (...) well as operating in a post-semantic capacity to determine the implicatures of an utterance, they also operate prior to the determination of truth-conditional content for a sentence. That is to say, they have an integral role to play within what is usually thought of as the semantic realm. Borg believes dual pragmatic accounts constitute the strongest contemporary challenge to standard formal approaches to semantics since they challenge the formal theorist to show not merely that there is some role for formal processes on route to determination of semantic content, but that such processes are sufficient for determining content. Minimal Semantics provides a detailed examination of this school of thought, introducing readers who are unfamiliar with the topic to key ideas like relevance theory and contextualism, and looking in detail at where these accounts diverge from the formal approach. Borg's defence of formal semantics has two main parts: first, she argues that the formal approach is most naturally compatible with an important and well-grounded psychological theory, namely the Fodorian modular picture of the mind. Then she argues that the main arguments adduced by dual pragmatists against formal semantics - concerning apparent contextual intrusions into semantic content - can in fact be countered by a formal theory. The defence holds, however, only if we are sensitive to the proper conditions of success for a semantic theory. Specifically, we should reject a range of onerous constraints on semantic theorizing (e.g., that it answer epistemic or metaphysical questions, or that it explain our communicative skills) and instead adopt a quite minimal picture of semantics. (shrink)

ArgumentSociologists and historians have long favored externalist over internalist accounts of practices in the clinical disciplines. This has been particularly true in the case of the so-called new patient or borderline personality, which a range of commentators have located in culturally resonant narratives of decline. I argue here that these narratives, while pleasing, do not hold up as history; most problematic is their assumption that the appearance of the borderline portends the emergence of altogether novel forms of modal personhood. Internalist (...) accounts of the category's consolidation are equally problematic in asserting a coherence and a stable referent that repeatedly proves elusive. In the end, I suggest that a complex account of disciplinary practice that attends to knowledge production in the clinical encounter supports the conclusion that the new patient was new to psychoanalysis. Whether or not he was altogether new cannot be established, undermining the critics' certitude and prophecies of decline. (shrink)

It is often claimed that Margaret Cavendish was an anti-experimentalist who was deeply hostile to the activities of the early Royal Society—particularly in relation to Robert Hooke's experiments with microscopes. Some scholars have argued that her views were odd or even childish, while others have claimed that they were shaped by her gender-based status as a scientific ‘outsider’. In this paper I examine Cavendish's views in contemporary context, arguing that her relationship with the Royal Society was more nuanced than previous (...) accounts have suggested. This contextualized approach reveals two points: first, that Cavendish's views were not isolated or odd when compared with those of her contemporaries, and second, that the early Royal Society was less intellectually homogeneous than is sometimes thought. I also show that, although hostile to some aspects of experimentalism, Cavendish nevertheless shared many of the Royal Society's ambitions for natural philosophy, especially in relation to its usefulness and the importance of plain language as a means to disseminate new ideas. (shrink)

Psychedelics have been recognized as model interventions for studying altered states of consciousness. However, few empirical studies of the shamanic state of consciousness, which is anecdotally similar to the psychedelic state, exist. We investigated the neural correlates of shamanic trance using high-density electroencephalography (EEG) in 24 shamanic practitioners and 24 healthy controls during rest, shamanic drumming, and classical music listening, followed by an assessment of altered states of consciousness. EEG data were used to assess changes in absolute power, connectivity, signal (...) diversity, and criticality, which were correlated with assessment measures. We also compared assessment scores to those of individuals in a previous study under the influence of psychedelics. Shamanic practitioners were significantly different from controls in several domains of altered states of consciousness, with scores comparable to or exceeding that of healthy volunteers under the influence of psychedelics. Practitioners also displayed increased gamma power during drumming that positively correlated with elementary visual alterations. Furthermore, shamanic practitioners had decreased low alpha and increased low beta connectivity during drumming and classical music and decreased neural signal diversity in the gamma band during drumming that inversely correlated with insightfulness. Finally, criticality in practitioners was increased during drumming in the low and high beta and gamma bands, with increases in the low beta band correlating with complex imagery and elementary visual alterations. These findings suggest that psychedelic drug-induced and non-pharmacologic alterations in consciousness have overlapping phenomenal traits but are distinct states of consciousness, as reflected by the unique brain-related changes during shamanic trance compared to previous literature investigating the psychedelic state. (shrink)

In Utopophobia: On the Limits (If Any) of Political Philosophy, David Estlund defends against utopophobia in political philosophy. Estlund claims that it is no defect in a theory of justice if it sets a high standard that has little chance of being achieved by any society. The book does not, however, give similar permission to argue for unrealistically optimistic political proposals. Going beyond Estlund, I consider the possibility that some utopian thinking is warranted not just in the context of formulating (...) a theory of justice, but in the practical context, too. Sometimes theorizers ought to argue for and pursue political proposals that seem unrealistically optimistic. (shrink)

We report the results of a cross-cultural investigation of person-body reasoning in the United Kingdom and northern Brazilian Amazon (Marajó Island). The study provides evidence that directly bears upon divergent theoretical claims in cognitive psychology and anthropology, respectively, on the cognitive origins and cross-cultural incidence of mind-body dualism. In a novel reasoning task, we found that participants across the two sample populations parsed a wide range of capacities similarly in terms of the capacities’ perceived anchoring to bodily function. Patterns of (...) reasoning concerning the respective roles of physical and biological properties in sustaining various capacities did vary between sample populations, however. Further, the data challenge prior ad-hoc categorizations in the empirical literature on the developmental origins of and cognitive constraints on psycho-physical reasoning (e.g., in afterlife concepts). We suggest cross-culturally validated categories of “Body Dependent” and “Body Independent” items for future developmental and cross-cultural research in this emerging area. (shrink)

This paper investigates contemporary applications of the Aristotelian conception of potentiality in limit cases of life and death arising from developments in modern science in order to argue that in its current usage, the term is often so far from its Aristotelian context that its philosophical rigor and, hence, usefulness is undermined. By analyzing the account of the soul in Aristotle’s De Anima, I argue for the necessity of a conception of nature that can contextualize the relevant sense of potentiality (...) by giving a telos arising from the subject’s nature, which orients that subject’s potentiality. I argue that these contextualizing components of nature and teleology are necessary for using a philosophically rigorous sense of potentiality. I begin by surveying the current use of potentiality to delineate beginning and end-of-life cases in order to show that these various uses are not robust enough to offer answers to the challenging cases of life and death in a non ad hoc way. I then address John Lizza and Joel Feinberg’s suggestions for making the concept of potentiality more robust, namely, a more specified framework of ‘normal’ internal conditions and ‘important’ external conditions to which the subject’s potentialities can be referenced. I argue that the insufficiency of the current uses of potentiality is more specifically due to a lack of an Aristotelian conception of a teleological nature that directs the subject’s potentiality and further that this Aristotelian framework of the subject’s nature can provide an answer to Feinberg and Lizza call for a context of normalcy of internal features and external environment in a more robust way. In the final section, I turn back to the problematic cases of life and death in order to highlight how, given a more specific and robust conception of a teleological nature, my account can offer three suggestions for applying the concept of potentiality. (shrink)

Objective: Ethical guidelines are designed to ensure benefits, protection and respect of participants in clinical research. Clinical trials must now be registered on open-access databases and provide details on ethical considerations. This systematic survey aimed to determine the extent to which recently registered clinical trials report the use of standard of care and post-trial obligations in trial registries, and whether trial characteristics vary according to setting. Methods: We selected global randomized trials registered on http://www.clinicaltrials.gov and http://www.controlled-trials.com. We searched for intervention (...) trials of HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis from 9 October 2004, the date of the most recent version of the Helsinki Declaration, to 10 April 2007. Results: We collected data from 312 trials. Fifty-eight percent (58%, 95% CI = 53 to 64) of trial protocols report informed consent. Fifty-eight percent (58%, 95% CI = 53 to 64) of trials report active controls. Almost no trials (1%, 95% CI = 0.5 to 3) mention post-trial provisions. Most trials measure surrogate outcomes. Twenty percent (20%, 95% CI = 16 to 25) of trials measure patient-important outcomes, such as death; and the odds that these outcomes are in a low income country are five times greater than for a developed country (odds ratio (OR) 5.03, 95% CI = 2.70 to 9.35, p = < 0.001). Pharmaceutical companies are involved in 28% (CI = 23 to 33) of trials and measure surrogate outcomes more often than nonpharmaceutical companies (OR 2.45, 95% CI = 1.18 to 5.09, p = 0.31). Conclusion: We found a large discrepancy in the quality of reporting and approaches used in trials in developing settings compared to wealthier settings. (shrink)

This article emerges from a wider study on bicultural film archiving practice. It focuses on Jonathan Dennis as a subject of archiving, and as a distinctive archivist himself in relation to a specific archive at a particular moment. Dennis practice differed significantly from North American and European conventions contemporaneous with his life work. The charismatic founding director of Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision Jonathan Dennis became a conduit for tensions and debates during the 1981–2002 period in relation to indigenous and (...) non indigenous presentation of archival materials. This resulted in a film archive and curatorship practice which differed significantly from that of the North American and European archives he originally sought to emulate. As a Pākehā with a strong sense of social justice he argued for an awareness of geographical location and cultural context in his work. He supported a philosophical shift in archival practice, by engaging indigenous peoples in developing creative and innovative exhibitions and programmes from the 1980s period until his death.Note: From 1988 the official name for the New Zealand Film Archive was Ngā Kaitiaki o ngā Taonga Whitiāhua. Since August 2014 the institution is called Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision, New Zealand Archive of Film, Television and Sound Ngā Taonga Whitiāhua Me Ngā Taonga Kōrero to acknowledge the acquisition of the state-owned Television NZ Archive and Sound Archives from Radio NZ. For brevity’s sake the Archive is referred to throughout as NTSV.Key: NTSV PP JD refers to the NTSV Personal Papers of Jonathan Dennis. (shrink)

In his important recent book, Ethics and the Global Financial Crisis: Why Incompetence is Worse than Greed, Boudewijn de Bruin argues that a key element of the global financial crisis of 2007–2008 was a failure of epistemic virtue. To improve matters, then, de Bruin argues we need to focus on the acquisition and exercise of epistemic virtues, rather than to focus on a more ethical culture for banking per se. Whilst this is an interesting suggestion and it is indeed very (...) plausible that an increased focus on proper knowledge-related behaviour will be part of a solution, we are sceptical both about de Bruin’s overarching theoretical claims and about his practical suggestions for change. Instead we argue that change in this sector is best promoted by reconceiving of the relationship between financial institutions and the societies they serve, and that this is fundamentally not an epistemic but a moral issue. (shrink)

Common-sense (or folk) psychology holds that (generally) we do what we do for the reasons we have. This common-sense approach is embodied in claims like ‘I went to the kitchen because I wanted a drink’ and ‘She took a coat because she thought it might rain and hoped to stay dry’. However, the veracity of these common-sense psychological explanations has been challenged by experimental evidence (primarily from behavioural economics and social psychology) which appears to show that individuals are systematically irrational—that (...) often we do not do what we do because of the reasons we have. Recently, some of the same experimental evidence has also been used to level a somewhat different challenge at the common-sense view, arguing that the overarching aim of reasoning is not to deliver better or more reason-governed decisions for individual reasoners, but to improve group decision making or to protect an individual’s sense of self. This paper explores the range of challenges that experimental work has been taken to raise for the common-sense approach and suggests some potential responses. Overall, I argue that the experimental evidence surveyed should not lead us to a rejection of individual rationality. (shrink)

Harvey Siegel's epistemologically-informed conception of critical thinking is one of the most influential accounts of critical thinking around today. In this article, I seek to open up an account of critical thinking that goes beyond the one defended by Siegel. I do this by re-reading an opposing view, which Siegel himself rejects as leaving epistemology ‘pretty much as it is’. This is the view proposed by Charles Taylor in his paper ‘Overcoming Epistemology’. Crucially, my aim here is not to defend (...) Taylor's challenge to epistemology per se, but rather to demonstrate how, through its appeal to certain key tropes within Heideggerian philosophy, Taylor's paper opens us towards a radically different conception of thinking and the human being who thinks. Indeed, as will be argued, it is through this that Taylor and Heidegger come to offer us the resources for re-thinking the nature of critical thinking—in a way that exceeds the epistemological, and does more justice to receptive and responsible conditions of human thought. (shrink)

Uncertainty around the role ‘super-spreaders’ play in the transmission and escalation of infectious disease is compounded by its broad and vague definition. It is a term that has been much used in relation to COVID-19, particularly in social media. On its widest definition, it refers to a propensity to infect a larger than average number of people. Given the biological, behavioural and environmental variables relevant to infectivity, this might be pertinent to almost any infected individual who is not physically isolated (...) from others. Nor is the term confined to individuals with a propensity to spread infectious disease: it can potentially be used to describe events, policies or settings. This article explores the use of the term and considers circumstances in which the wide definition can be problematic. One problem is that it can lead to undeserved apportionment of moral blame to alleged super-spreaders. Another is that it can detract from scientific investigation of the heterogeneity of COVID-19 transmission. The author calls for a clearer epidemiological definition. (shrink)

Artist, poet, educationalist and autobiographer, Marion Milner is considered one of the most original of psychoanalytic thinkers whose life spans a century of radical change. _Marion Milner: The Life_,_ _is the first biography of this extraordinary woman. It introduces Milner and her works to the reader through her family, colleagues and, above all through her books, charting their evolution and development as well as their critical reception and contribution to current twenty-first century debates and discourses. In this book _Emma Letley (...) _draws_ _on primary sources, including the newly-opened Marion Milner Collection at the Archives of the British Psychoanalytical Society in London, as well as interviews and the re-contextualised series of Milner texts. She traces the process of Milner's writing of her books, her discovery of psychoanalysis, her training and her place in that world from the 1940's onwards. _Marion Milner: The Life _includes discussion of Milner's connection with D.W. Winnicott and her emergence as a most individual member of the Independent Group. Letley also shows how Milner's Personal Notebooks offer fascinating insights into her relationships, both personal and professional, and into many of her important ideas on creativity, the body-mind relationship, her revolutionary ideas on education and her particular personality as clinician working with both children and adults. Further, _Letley _explores Milner's literary character from her very early diaries and narratives to her last book written in her 90's published in 2012. Marion Milner: The Life places Marion Milner firmly in her Edwardian family setting and contains new material from primary sources, including a new view of her collegial connections. It provides a wealth of material on her life and works that will be invaluable to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, art psychotherapists, students, those involved with life writing and autobiography, and the general reader. (shrink)

In Chapter 3 of True Enough, Elgin outlines her view of objectual understanding, focusing largely on its non-factive nature and the extent to which a certain kind of know-how is required for the “grasping” component of understanding. I will explore four central issues that feature in this chapter, concentrating on the role of know-how, the concept of endorsement, Elgin’s critique of the factivity constraint on understanding, and how we might use aspects of Elgin’s framework to inform related debates on the (...) norm of assertion. (shrink)

“To create fiction is, in fact, a way to abolish reality.”1The main title of this article departs from a statement made by Andrew Cross in the chapter he wrote for The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, “Neither Either nor Or: the Perils of Reflexive Irony,” which must surely suggest a tantalizing read for anyone familiar with the writings of Italo Svevo. In his chapter, Cross posits Søren Kierkegaard’s theorizing of irony as “not just a verbal strategy, but a way of life.”2 (...) It is, of course, commonly accepted that Kierkegaard’s writing is characterized by various forms of intentional and self-conscious verbal indirectness, some of which will be explored in this article. But beyond irony as a speech... (shrink)