This report describes research focusing on virtues and character in teaching, by which we mean the kind of personal qualities professional teachers need to facilitate learning and overall flourishing in young people that goes beyond preparing them for a life of tests. The ‘good’ teacher is someone who, alongside excellent subject knowledge and technical expertise, cares about students, upholds principles of honesty and integrity both towards knowledge and student–teacher relationships, and who does good work . In the Framework for Character (...) Education , we considered the character of teachers to be a crucial ingredient in the development of flourishing children. This new report describes research that examined how teachers thought about, and drew upon, character strengths and virtues in their daily professional lives. (shrink)

BackgroundSuicide research aims to contribute to a better understanding of suicidal behaviour and its prevention. However, there are many ethical challenges in this research field, for example, regarding consent and potential risks to participants. While studies to-date have focused on the perspective of the researchers, this study aimed to investigate the views and experiences of members of Human Research Ethics Committees (HRECs) in dealing with suicide-related study applications.MethodsThis qualitative study entailed a thematic analysis using an inductive approach. We conducted semi-structured (...) interviews with a purposive sample (N = 15) of HREC Chairs or their delegates from Australian research-intensive universities. The interview guide included questions regarding the ethical concerns and challenges in suicide-related research raised by HREC members, how they dealt with those challenges and what advice they could give to researchers.ResultsThe analysis identified four main themes: (1) HREC members’ experiences of reviewing suicide-related study applications, (2) HREC members’ perceptions of suicide, suicide research, and study participants, (3) Complexity in HREC members’ decision-making processes, and (4) HREC members’ relationships with researchers.ConclusionsReliance on ethical guidelines and dialogue with researchers are crucial in the assessment of suicide-related study applications. Both researchers and HREC members may benefit from guidance and resources on how to conduct ethically sound suicide-related studies. Developing working relationships will be likely to help HRECs to facilitate high quality, ethical suicide-related research and researchers to conduct such research. (shrink)

Individual differences in effortful control, a component of temperament, reflecting the ability to use attention and other cognitive processes to self-regulate emotion and behavior, contribute to child academic adjustment, social competence, and wellbeing. Research has linked excessive screen time in early childhood to reduced self-regulation ability. Furthermore, research suggests that parents are more likely to use screens with children who have more challenging temperaments, such as low levels of effortful control. Since screen time by children between the ages of 0 (...) and 18 has increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, it remains timely to investigate the developmental pattern of association between child screen media use and effortful control. We hypothesize that higher levels of screen media intake at age 3.5 will be associated with lower effortful control at age 4.5 and that lower effortful control at 3.5 will contribute to more screen media intake at age 4.5. This study draws on participants followed longitudinally over the span of 2-years for an investigation of Canadian preschoolers’ screen media use during the pandemic. A follow-up with this sample was completed in 2021. Analyses using a cross-lagged panel model revealed stability in child screen time and effortful control between the ages of 3.5 and 4.5. Child screen time at age 3.5 significantly contributed to decreased effortful control scores at the age of 4.5, whereas effortful control at age 3.5 did not contribute to screen time at age 4.5. Our results partially confirmed our hypothesis and indicated that higher levels of screen time intake were detrimental to the development of effortful control. These results suggest that screen media use, an exceedingly frequent activity, may play an enduring role in development by shaping young children’s temperaments. (shrink)

This document is designed to give guidance on assessing researchers in bioethics/medical ethics. It is intended to assist members of selection, confirmation and promotion committees, who are required to assess those conducting bioethics research when they are not from a similar disciplinary background. It does not attempt to give guidance on the quality of bioethics research, as this is a matter for peer assessment. Rather it aims to give an indication of the type, scope and amount of research that is (...) the expected in this field. It does not cover the assessment of other activities such as teaching, policy work, clinical ethics consultation and so on, but these will be mentioned for additional context. Although it mentions the UK’s Research Excellence Framework, it is not intended to be a detailed analysis of the place of bioethics in the REF. (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)

Developments in the sociology of the body and the sociology of health impel us to investigate embodiment resistances against hegemonic biomedical definitions of normativity. Bearing in mind that the body is a social object defined by institutions, the analysis of body itineraries leads us to glimpse modes of subversion, resistance and destabilization of biomedical definitions. This article deals with the role of modern science and technology in the observation and diagnosis of the body and its consequences in the definition of (...) health and disease, the normal and the pathological. Second, biomedicine is analysed as an institution that orders gender and underpins sexual dimorphism through debates on depathologization and dysnormality. The implications of technology and medicine in the processes of neoliberal subjectivation promoted by body optimization practices are also discussed. (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)

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.

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 29, Issue 1, Page 74-89, March 2021.

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)

When consent to medical treatment is described as ‘valid’, it might simply mean that it has a sound basis, or it could mean that it is legally valid. Where the two meanings are regularly interchanged, however, it can lead to aspects of the sound basis or the legal requirements being neglected. This article looks at how the term is used in a range of guidance on consent to treatment and argues for consistency.

The purpose of this article is to share with the reader the specific findings on the role of nurse as consumer advocate from a study on ethical decision-making in an emergency department (ED). Qualitative interviews were conducted with 11 health professionals (doctors and nurses) working in the ED of a hospital. The interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim and thematically analysed.In ED, where the decision-making is described as medico-centric, advocacy ipso facto necessitates a challenge to doctor decision-making. The findings indicate that (...) ED nurses experience with advocacy varied depending on the democratic qualities and communication skills of the particular doctor who had care of the consumer. It is noted that seeing the need for advocacy does not necessarily translate into effective action, as management support is essential for productive advocacy. A phenomenon of the desire not to rock the boat was reported. The findings indicate that the support of other nurses is essential for advocacy and affirm the importance of focusing on the ethical nature of the organisation as opposed to an exclusive focus on the individual. (shrink)

This article seeks to open up a re-examination of the relationship between thought and language by reference to two philosophers: John Austin and Jacques Derrida. While in traditional philosophical terms these thinkers stand far apart, recent work in the philosophy of education has highlighted the importance of Austin’s work in a way that has begun to bridge the philosophical divide. This article seeks to continue the renewed interest in Austin in educational research, yet also take it in new direction by (...) exploring Austin’s wider philosophical concern within the William James Lectures with the nature of language. The significance of the philosophical turn to language has entered the agenda of a number of philosophers of education in recent years. The main aim of this article will be to present, as a starting point for further work, an account of language that does justice to the way language actually operates. The article will argue that Austin’s account of the performative opens up new possibilities in this regard and yet—for reasons that will be made clear—also fails in the final instance to carry these through. By illustrating the way Derrida’s philosophy works, contrastingly, to take these possibilities to their full conclusion, I will argue that Derrida succeeds in bringing a radically new conception of language to the fore. The article will end by pointing towards some of the implications of the initial exploration conducted here to be developed elsewhere—particularly for the ways we think about thinking. (shrink)

This paper advances a novel account of how active forgetting underpins Nietzsche’s conception of health. Recent work has focused on what active forgetting is but does not explain how this process facilitates what Nietzsche calls ‘spiritual health’. I show that active forgetting – unlike Freudian repression or sublimation – preserves spiritual health when it is challenged by experiential content such as trauma, and that it allows for the incorporation of such experiences. I offer a reconstruction of active forgetting which makes (...) reference to the use of therapeutic narratives, which although neither necessary nor sufficient for active forgetting can aid and optimize this process in the face of traumatic experiences. My account provides a complex and clear distinction between forgetting and narrativization, in keeping with Nietzsche’s comments on the utility of adversity and the importance of resilience in relation to spiritual health. (shrink)

Starting with service robotics and industrial robotics, this paper aims to suggest philosophical reflections about the relationship between body and machine, between man and technology in our contemporary world. From the massive use of the cell phone to the robots which apparently “feel” and show emotions like humans do. From the wearable exoskeleton to the prototype reproducing the artificial sense of touch, technological progress explodes to the extent of embodying itself in our nakedness. Robotics, indeed, is inspired by biology in (...) order to develop a new kind of technology affecting human life. This is a bio-robotic approach, which is fulfilled in the figure of the cyborg and consequently in the loss of human nature. Today, humans have reached the possibility to modify and create their own body following their personal desires. But what is the limit of this achievement? For this reason, we all must question ourselves whether we have or whether we are a body. (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)

ABSTRACT A division in scholarship on Rousseau’s Second Discourse turns on the issue of division itself. Some see Rousseau’s natural man collapsing the division between man and beast through suggesting that our origins might be in orangutans, while others see Rousseau depicting a rupture of the human being from the rest of the animal kingdom through the separation of the physical and the metaphysical. I argue that in looking to the natural scientific culture of Rousseau’s own time, one can see (...) that he is employing a uniquely informed vision of the human being that itself straddles this divide of interpretation through presenting man as both a naturally and mythically hybrid creature. To conclude, I claim that illuminating this hybrid identity of the human being also sheds new light on the kind of narrative Rousseau employs. His ‘hypothetical history’ is itself a hybrid of two distinct origin stories, mirroring the very argument Rousseau is making: that man is always a duplex of the animal and the spiritual. This moves beyond presenting Rousseau as a thinker of irresolvable paradoxes to seeing the Second Discourse as a resolved presentation of what it means to be a natural duplex. (shrink)

We propose the ‘patient-worker’ as a theoretical construct that responds to moral problems that arise with the globalization of healthcare and medical research. The patient-worker model recognizes that some participants in global medical industries are workers and are owed worker's rights. Further, these participants are patient-like insofar as they are beneficiaries of fiduciary relationships with healthcare professionals. We apply the patient-worker model to human subjects research and commercial gestational surrogacy. In human subjects research, subjects are usually characterized as either patients (...) or as workers. Through questioning this dichotomy, we argue that some subject populations fit into both categories. With respect to commercial surrogacy, we enrich feminist discussions of embodied labor by describing how surrogates are beneficiaries of fiduciary obligations. They are not just workers, but patient-workers. Through these applications, the patient-worker model offers a helpful normative framework for exploring what globalized medical industries owe to the individuals who bear the bodily burdens of medical innovation. (shrink)

Children ask many questions, but do not always receive answers to the questions they ask. We were interested in whether the act of generating questions, in the absence of an answer, is related to children’s later thinking. Two experiments examined whether children retain the questions they ask in working memory, and whether the type of questions asked relate to their categorization. Four to ten-year-old children (N= 42 in Experiment 1,N= 41 in Experiment 2) were shown 12 novel objects, asked three (...) questions about each, and did not receive answers to their questions. Children recalled their questions in the first experiment and categorized variants of the novel objects in the second experiment. We found that children have robust working memory for their questions, indicating that these questions may relate to their subsequent thinking. Additionally, children generalize category boundaries more narrowly or broadly depending on the type of question they ask, indicating that children’s questions may reflect an underlying bias in how they think about the world. These findings suggest that future research should examine questions in the absence of answers to understand how inquiry affects children’s cognitive development. (shrink)

Mirror neurons are neurons which fire in two distinct conditions: (i) when an agent performs a specific action, like a precision grasp of an object using fingers, and (ii) when an agent observes that action performed by another. Some theorists have suggested that the existence of such neurons may lend support to the simulation approach to mindreading (e.g. Gallese and Goldman, 1998, 'Mirror neurons and the simulation theory of mind reading'). In this note I critically examine this suggestion, in both (...) its original and a revised form (due to Iacoboni et al., 2005, 'Grasping the intentions of others with one's own mirror neuron system'), and argue that the existence of mirror neurons can in fact tell us very little about how intentional attribution actually proceeds. (shrink)

William James is known as a nineteenth-century philosopher, psychologist, and psychical researcher. Less well-known are the medical fixations that united his multiple identities and drove his ambition to change the way American society conceived of itself in body, mind, and soul. William James, M.D. offers an account of the development and cultural significance of James's ideas and works, and establishes, for the first time, the relevance of medical themes to his major lines of thought. James lived at a time when (...) old assumptions about faith and the moral and religious possibilities for human worth and redemption were increasingly displaced by a concern with the medically "normal" and the perfectibility of the body. Woven into treatises warning of the degeneration of humanity, these ideas comprised the origins of the eugenics movement and were manifest in a growing social stigma attached to illness and invalidism, a disturbing intellectual current in which James felt personally implicated. Most chronicles of James's life have portrayed a distressed young man, a psychological or spiritual crisis, followed by the emergence of a mature thinker who threw off his pallor of mental sickness for good. In contrast, Emma Sutton draws on his personal correspondence, unpublished notebooks, and diaries to show that James considered himself a genuine invalid to the end of his days. Sutton makes the compelling case that his philosophizing was not an abstract occupation but an impassioned response to his own life experiences and challenges. To ignore the medical James is to misread James altogether. Sales points: First book to map William James's preoccupation with medical ideas, concerns, and values across the disciplinary breadth of his work Reveals how themes of invalidism, health, and healing underpinned the genesis of many of James's major philosophical, psychological, and political ideas Draws on the approximately 9,400 items of Jamesian correspondence, together with his private notes and reading lists. (shrink)

Some demonstrative expressions, those we might term ‘bare demonstratives’, appear without any appended descriptive content (e.g. occurrences of ‘this’ or ‘that’ simpliciter). However, it seems that the majority of demonstrative occurrences do not follow this model. ‘Complex demonstratives’ is the collective term I shall use for phrases formed by adjoining one or more common nouns to a demonstrative expression (e.g. ‘that cat’, ‘this happy man’) and I will call the combination of predicates immediately concatenated with the demonstrative in such phrases (...) the ‘matrix’ of the expression. The question, then, is how we should construe the logical form of such expressions within a semantic theory for our language; and I wish to suggest that some recent answers to this question are, in fact, mistaken. The structure of the paper is as follows: first, I wish to highlight two (often underlying) assumptions about the nature of noun phrases in general, and suggest that, if they are both adopted, they apparently constrain the possible accounts of the logical form of complex demonstratives to just three options. The second and third parts of the paper will be concerned with expanding these options and arguing that none of them are adequate; thus the major part of the paper is concerned with the negative claim that the most obvious moves to make in this area must actually fail on closer inspection. The fourth and final section will then (very briefly) sketch the positive thesis of the paper: that we can deliver a clear and cohesive account of complex demonstratives, armed simply with elements which we will draw from David Kaplan’s theory of demonstratives, but only at the cost of rejecting (or at least refining) one assumption we recognised initially. (shrink)

Contemporary epidemiological methods testing the associations between green space and psychological well-being treat all vegetation cover as equal. However, there is very good reason to expect that variations in ecological "quality" (number of species, integrity of ecological processes) may influence the link between access to green space and benefits to human health and well-being. We test the relationship between green space quality and restorative benefit in an inner city urban population in Bradford, UK. We selected 12 urban parks for study (...) where we carried out botanical and faunal surveys to quantify biodiversity and assessed the site facilities of the green space (cleanliness, provision of amenities). We also conducted 128 surveys with park users to quantify psychological restoration based on four self-reported measure of general restoration, attention-grabbing distractions, being away from everyday life, and site preference. We present three key results. First, there is a positive association between site facilities and biodiversity. Second, restorative benefit is predicted by biodiversity, which explained 43% of the variance in restorative benefit across the parks, with minimal input from other variables. Third, the benefits accrued through access to green space were unrelated to age, gender, and ethnic background. The results add to a small but growing body of evidence that emphasise the role of nature in contributing to the well-being of urban populations and, hence, the need to consider biodiversity in the design of landscapes that enhance multiple ecosystem services. (shrink)

While the agricultural knowledges and practices of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color and women have shaped agriculture in the US, these knowledges have been colonized, exploited, and appropriated, cleaving space for the presently dominant white male agricultural narrative. Simultaneously, these knowledges and practices have been transformed to fit within a society that values individualism, production, efficiency, and profit. The authors use a decolonial Feminist Political Ecology framework to highlight the ways in which the knowledges of Indigenous, Black, and women (...) farmers have been and are being colonized; a tradition that makes alternative agriculture a predominantly white space. The authors interviewed 10 BIPOC and women farmers in Colorado to understand what values and knowledges were shaping their often-appropriated agricultural practices. Three themes emerged: people, place, and patterns. By centering these values, farmers create relational agricultural practices that support the well-being of human and more-than-human beings. To support the widespread implementation of these practices, food systems practitioners must elevate the voices and knowledges of historically excluded farmers. Only then can truly just and equitable alternative agricultural practices be realized in the US. (shrink)

The Ways We Think critiques predominant approaches to the development of thinking in education and seeks to offer a new account of thought informed by phenomenology, post-structuralism and the ‘ordinary language’ philosophical traditions. Presents an original account of thinking for education and explores how this alternative conception of thought might be translated into the classroom Explores connections between phenomenology, post-structuralism and ordinary language philosophical traditions Examines the relevance of language in accounts of how we think Investigates the philosophical accounts of (...) Gilbert Ryle, Martin Heidegger, John Austin and Jacques Derrida Draws upon experience of own teaching practice as philosopher-in-residence. (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)