Patricia Churchland's Touching a Nerve: The Self as Brain is her most recent wide-ranging argument for mind-to-brain reductionism. It's one of the leading anti-dualist works in neurophilosophy. It thus deserves careful attention by anti-reductionists. We survey the main arguments in this book for her thesis that the self is nothing but the brain. These arguments are based largely on the self's dependence upon neural activities as reflected in its various impairments, its unified experiences, and its powers of agency. We show (...) that dualism is quite compatible with this neural dependence. We argue that dualism can not only counter--but also turn the tables on--her arguments. Unlike most other critics, we focus not only on her hard problems but also on her easy problems in explaining consciousness. A new non-Cartesian substance dualism is presented that avoids existing dualist causal issues. It may thus avoid perennial physicalist and dualist problems. -/- . (shrink)

Arguments from consciousness to God’s existence (ACs) contend that physicalism is too problematic to explain the mind’s ultimate source. They add that theism probably better explains this source in terms of God making us in his own image (with conscious, unified, rational minds). But ACs are problematic too. First, physicalism has various competitors beside theism. Russellian monism and dual-aspect theory are examples. Second, all these theories, including theism, are seriously flawed. For example, it’s tied to traditional dualism, which has causal (...) issues (according to Murphy, Churchland, and other physicalists). But we argue that this theistic dualism can be refined to avoid its issues—and the issues in all other theories. So, it probably explains the mind’s origin better than other theories. We rely here on Lowe’s dualism, where the mind’s subject exists immaterially yet spatially, and is a unified, simple entity (unlike neural aggregates with their quite separate parts). This turns the tables on Churchland, Murphy, and other advocates for scientism. -/- . (shrink)

We pose a foundational problem for those who claim that subjects are ontologically irreducible, but causally reducible (weak emergence). This problem is neuroscience’s notorious binding problem, which concerns how distributed neural areas produce unified mental objects (such as perceptions) and the unified subject that experiences them. Synchrony, synapses and other mechanisms cannot explain this. We argue that this problem seriously threatens popular claims that mental causality is reducible to neural causality. Weak emergence additionally raises evolutionary worries about how we’ve survived (...) the perils of nature. Our emergent subject hypothesis (ESH) avoids these shortcomings. Here, a singular, unified subject acts back on the neurons it emerges from and binds sensory features into unified mental objects. Serving as the mind’s controlling center, this subject is ontologically and causally irreducible (strong emergence). ESH draws on recent experimental evidence, including the motivation of a possible correlate (or “seat”) of the subject, which enhances its testability. (shrink)

Western philosophy’s relationship with prisons stretches from Plato’s own incarceration to the modern era of mass incarceration. Philosophy Imprisoned: The Love of Wisdom in the Age of Mass Incarceration draws together a broad range of philosophical thinkers, from both inside and outside prison walls, in the United States and beyond, who draw on a variety of critical perspectives (including phenomenology, deconstruction, and feminist theory) and historical and contemporary figures in philosophy (including Kant, Hegel, Foucault, and Angela Davis) to think about (...) prisons in this new historical era. All of these contributors have experiences within prison walls: some are or have been incarcerated, some have taught or are teaching in prisons, and all have been students of both philosophy and the carceral system. The powerful testimonials and theoretical arguments are appropriate reading not only for philosophers and prison theorists generally, but also for prison reformers and abolitionists. (shrink)

By a "developed" economy, people roughly mean ones with a high, persistently-growing per-captia income which is not simply based on resource extraction (i.e., oil) or remittances or rentierism — an industrial (or, if there is such a thing, post-industrial) economy which makes most of its participants reasonably and increasingly prosperous. While there are of course differences among them --- the United States is not New Zealand, which is not Belgium, which is not Finland, which is not Japan --- they are (...) all more similar to each other than they are to the vast variety of "undeveloped", "under-developed", or (most optimistically) "developing" economies across the world. (Some people refer to the developed countries as "the North" and the others as "the South"; this drives me up the wall, if only from looking at where China and Australia are on the map.) Economies in the first category tend to stay there; so, sadly, do countries in the second. Development economics is the sub-discipline of economics which attempts to study how economies which have not attained this happy condition can be made to do so, and the factors which hold others back. (shrink)

Computationalism treats minds as computations. It hasn't explained how our quite similar sensory circuits encode our quite different qualia, nor how these circuits encode the binding of the different qualia into unifi ed perceptions. But there is growing evidence that qualia and binding come from neural electrochemical substances such as sensory detectors and the strong continuous electromagnetic field they create. Qualia may thus be neural substances, not neural computations (though computations may still help modulate qualia). This neuroelectrical view not only (...) avoids computationalism's empirical issues but also its problematic metaphysics. (shrink)

Page 1 Informal Voting. House of Representatives. Page 4 Senate Voting. Expression of Preferences. Page 6 Voting in Subdivisions within Electorates. Page 7 New Technology outlets. Teletnarketing and internet Adverhsing authorization. Page 9 Postal Voting. Fairness and Privacy.

Effective clinical practice in a hospital needs current knowledge together with the skills and right attitude; these should be applied continuously. Failure of this system can be due to ignorance or arrogance. We attempted to correct these deficiencies by formulating a set of policies which were enforced from 1962 to 1983. The policies related to the following: intensive care (including asthma, nutrition and organ donation), drug prescribing and resuscitation. We believe that these rules improved patient care and the standards of (...) training; the prescribing policy also saved money. (shrink)

Although virtually all comparative research about risk perception focuses on which hazards are of concern to people in different culture groups, much can be gained by focusing on predictors of levels of risk perception in various countries and places. In this case, we examine standard and novel predictors of risk perception in seven sites among communities affected by a flood in Mexico (one site) and volcanic eruptions in Mexico (one site) and Ecuador (five sites). We conducted more than 450 interviews (...) with questions about how people feel at the time (after the disaster) regarding what happened in the past, their current concerns, and their expectations for the future. We explore how aspects of the context in which people live have an effect on how strongly people perceive natural hazards in relationship with demographic, well-being, and social network factors. Generally, our research indicates that levels of risk perception for past, present, and future aspects of a specific hazard are similar across these two countries and seven sites. However, these contexts produced different predictors of risk perception—in other words, there was little overlap between sites in the variables that predicted the past, present, or future aspects of risk perception in each site. Generally, current stress was related to perception of past danger of an event in the Mexican sites, but not in Ecuador; network variables were mainly important for perception of past danger (rather than future or present danger), although specific network correlates varied from site to site across the countries. (shrink)

This paper investigates Street Fight Radio’s consumer community’s resistance to neoliberal financial consumer responsibilization. Extant scholarship critiques consumer responsibilization on ethical grounds for placing too much responsibility on consumers at the expense of institutional actors. It also describes some forms of aversion to parts of the responsibilization process among individuals and short-lived consumer collectives. However, it falls short of analyzing community-driven resistance to financial consumer responsibilization writ large, or consumers’ efforts to responsibilize other stakeholders. Our netnographic and ethnographic study of (...) Street Fight Radio (SFR), a populist grassroots political comedy radio show and podcast with a strong anti-neoliberal consumer community, addresses these previous theoretical limitations. Drawing from Foucault’s counter-conduct concept, we show how SFR’s consumer community bolsters and sustains community-level resistance to financial consumer responsibilization. It encourages consumers to push for collective protections from markets and responsibilize other actors to address systemic, structural precarity. Our analysis makes novel contributions by theorizing the role of community in sustaining resistance to consumer responsibilization and by demonstrating the role of precarious consumers’ performative staging of supposedly excessive, irresponsible consumption in reorienting consumer ethics. (shrink)

(1994). The correspondence between James Hutton (1726–1797) and James Watt (1736–1819) with two letters from Hutton to George Clerk-Maxwell (1715–1784): Part I. Annals of Science: Vol. 51, No. 6, pp. 637-653.

Jeffery Aubin ,Marie Chantal ,Dianne Cole ,Julio Chaves ,Cathelyne Duchesne ,Christel Freu ,Steve Johnston ,Brice Jones ,Amaury Levillayer ,Stéphanie Machabée ,Paul-Hubert Poirier ,Philippe Therrien ,Jonathan von Kodar ,Martin Voyer ,Jennifer Wees ,Eric Crégheur.

There are eleven previously unpublished letters between James Hutton and James Watt in the Doldowlod collection, which Birmingham City Archives acquires from Lord Gibson-Watt in 1994. They were written between 1774 and 1795. Very little of Hutton's other correspondence survives, so these letters add significantly to our knowledge. The earliest letters together with two letters from Hutton to George Clerk-Maxwell , describe geological tours that Hutton made through Wales, the Midlands, and the south-west of England in 1774. The correspondence after (...) 1774 reveals Watt's expertise in geology, and also discusses meteorology, varnish making, Symington's steam engines, the first experiments with steam navigation, pneumatic medicine, and other topics. (shrink)

This essay sketches the musical art of Frances Pelton-Jones, an American harpsichordist active at the beginning of the twentieth century. Almost entirely unknown today, she was widely acclaimed in her day for performing elaborate costume recitals dressed as Marie Antoinette. More than just a recitalist in costume, Pelton-Jones staged elaborate tableaux vivants with environmental decor to elicit fantasies of the past. Bridging the worlds of fashion, environmental design, and music, her performances offer a compelling case study to investigate (...) the aesthetic applications of Jane Bennett’s ecological theory of assemblages. Exploring how different human and nonhuman actants collaborated in Pelton-Jones’ art to evoke whole historical atmospheres for her audiences, I elaborate Bennett’s argument about the synthetic potential of combining certain materials to conjure an affect, highlighting how the delicacy of the assemblage as a whole often is contingent upon the frailty of the individual materials involved. Ultimately, Bennett’s theory affirms the aesthetic sensibilities of Pelton-Jones whose musical productions delighted audiences by harnessing the synthetic potential of well-coordinated vital materials. (shrink)

This book examines the contentious relationship between psychoanalysis and anthropology as it has played out in disputes surrounding the Oedipus complex. Here, Eric Smadja explores the complicated historical and epistemological conditions leading up to the emergence of the conflict between the two disciplines. He considers the origins of each science, the "creation" of the Oedipus complex, and the place, role and influence of Freud's key and controversial work Totem and Taboo, both in the history of psychoanalysis and as it (...) connects with anthropology internationally. Focusing on such key figures as Bronislaw Malinowski, Ernest Jones, Franz Boas, Georges Devereux, Emile Durkheim, Claude Levi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan, Smadja charts the course of the debate as it unfolded during the twentieth century and tracks its contemporary status of the debate, with a focus on figures in both France and the United States. Discussing the divergences and convergences between the two fields, he compares and contrasts their historical, epistemological and methodological features and reflects on the new "acculturative" disciplines emerging from their interaction. The book concludes with a look at what the conflictual history of these two human sciences can tell us about the history of ideas and their processes and modes of communication. Exploring a dispute which reaches back to the very beginnings of psychoanalysis and anthropology, The Oedipus Complex will appeal to psychoanalysts in practice and in training, psychotherapists and academics and students of psychoanalytic studies, anthropology and the history of ideas. (shrink)

The view that belief is a dyadic relation between a believer and some other object, e.g., a proposition, appears to receive support from the fact that we can infer ‘There is something that Jones believes' from ordinary belief ascriptions such as ‘Jones believes that the tallest man is wise’. On consideration, however, it turns out that even a crude nonrelational view of belief can accommodate this inference. In order to permit the inference the nonrelationalist must read‘ There is (...) something that Jones believes' as equivalent to‘ Jones has a belief. (shrink)

In advocating Bayesian Enlightenment as a solution to Bayesian Fundamentalism, Jones & Love (J&L) rule out a broader critique of rationalist approaches to cognition. However, Bayesian Fundamentalism is merely one example of the more general phenomenon of Rationalist Fundamentalism: the tendency to characterize human judgments as rational and optimal in a post hoc manner, after the empirical data are already known.

Aims: The aim of this narrative synthesis was to explore the necessary and sufficient conditions required to define moral distress. Background: Moral distress is said to occur when one has made a moral judgement but is unable to act upon it. However, problems with this narrow conception have led to multiple redefinitions in the empirical and conceptual literature. As a consequence, much of the research exploring moral distress has lacked conceptual clarity, complicating attempts to study the phenomenon. Design: Systematic literature (...) review and narrative synthesis (November 2015–March 2016). Data sources: Ovid MEDLINE® In-Process & Other Non-Indexed Citations 1946–Present, PsycINFO® 1967–Present, CINAHL® Plus 1937–Present, EMBASE 1974–24 February 2016, British Nursing Index 1994–Present, Social Care Online, Social Policy and Practice Database (1890–Present), ERIC (EBSCO) 1966–Present and Education Abstracts. Review methods: Literature relating to moral distress was systematically retrieved and subjected to relevance assessment. Narrative synthesis was the overarching framework that guided quality assessment, data analysis and synthesis. Results: In all, 152 papers underwent initial data extraction and 34 were chosen for inclusion in the narrative synthesis based on both quality and relevance. Analysis revealed different proposed conditions for the occurrence of moral distress: moral judgement, psychological and physical effects, moral dilemmas, moral uncertainty, external and internal constraints and threats to moral integrity. Conclusion: We suggest the combination of (1) the experience of a moral event, (2) the experience of ‘psychological distress’ and (3) a direct causal relation between (1) and (2) together are necessary and sufficient conditions for moral distress. (shrink)

In 2014, questionable police killings of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Tamir Rice sparked mass protests and put policing at the center of national debate. Mass protests erupted again in 2020 after the brutal police killing of George Floyd. These and other incidents have put a spotlight on a host of issues that threaten the legitimacy of policing—excessive force, racial bias, over-policing of marginalized communities, historic injustices that remain unaddressed, and new technology that increases police powers. This introduction gives (...) an overview of these ethical challenges facing police today and the democratic institutions that oversee them. It then outlines the various interdisciplinary perspectives—from Black studies, criminology, history, law, philosophy, political science, and sociology—collected in the volume. Together, these contributions aim to clarify the question of which ethical principles should guide police, where current practices fall short, and what strategies hold the most promise for addressing these failures. (shrink)

Jones & Love (J&L) suggest that Bayesian approaches to the explanation of human behavior should be constrained by mechanistic theories. We argue that their proposal misconstrues the relation between process models, such as the Bayesian model, and mechanisms. While mechanistic theories can answer specific issues that arise from the study of processes, one cannot expect them to provide constraints in general.

This systematic review identifies and critically evaluates instruments that have been developed to measure clinical trial informed consent comprehension in non-cognitively-impaired adults. Literature searches were carried out on Medline (Ovid), PsycInfo, CINHAL, ERIC, ScienceDirect, and Cochrane Library for English language articles published between January 1980 and September 2008. Instruments were excluded if they focused on consent onto paediatric trials, the construct under study was primarily capacity or competency, or the instrument was developed specifically for psychiatric or cognitively-impaired populations. Instruments (...) selected for review were evaluated against the following criteria: (1) method of item generation; (2) type and format of test items; (3) administration and interpretation of test results; and (4) psychometric properties. Three instruments met our defined inclusion criteria: the Deaconess Informed Consent Comprehension Test (DICCT), the Quality of Informed Consent (QuIC) questionnaire and the Brief Informed Consent Protocol (BICEP). Each instrument varied in terms of content measured. Significantly, these are the first standardized instruments developed to assess comprehension in non-cognitively-impaired adults. Yet, each instrument had its own set of limitations such as the lack of generalizability and the absence of details pertaining to how test results should be used to guide clinical decision-making. Standardized clinical trial informed consent comprehension assessments have been developed to identify gaps in research participants' understanding and ensure that respect for patient autonomy is satisfied. (shrink)

Eric Osborn's book presents a major study of Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, who attacked Gnostic theosophy with positive ideas as well as negative critiques. Irenaeus's combination of argument and imagery, logic and aesthetic, was directed to the bible. Dominated by a Socratic love of truth and a classical love of beauty, he was a founder of Western humanism. Erasmus, who edited the first printed edition of Irenaeus, praised him for his freshness and vigour. He is today valued for his (...) splendid aphorisms, his optimism, love of the created world, evolutionary view of history, theology of beauty and humour. Why have two millennia of European culture been so creative? Irenaeus points to Greek ways of thinking and the Christian Bible. Irenaeus's thought is complex, yet rewarding to the critical reader, and this full study of it will be of interest to theologians, historians of ideas, classicists, scientists and students. (shrink)

Utilitarian and deontological moral theories are often accused of failing to develop a convincing account of an agent's moral psychology, and so failing to provide an adequate theory of moral motivation that sustains their conception of morality as involving generally overriding moral duties. As a result of this apparent conflict between an agent's psychology and the demands of morality, many suggest making dramatic revisions to our conception of morality. I argue here that a more promising response is to examine where (...) it is that morality fits into human psychology, and then build a theory of moral motivation that sustains ordinary conceptions of morality from this foundation. To do this, I start by looking at Hume's account of moral motivation, which is grounded in a rich and full moral psychology. In an attempt to show that his theory provides a promising foundation for a contemporary theory of moral motivation, I explore his account of acting from duty and develop a new interpretation of his theory of moral motivation that fits most consistently with both his criticism of other accounts and his more general claims about the virtue of justice. I argue that Hume offers an account of justice as being always valuable in virtue of being a necessary condition to the enjoyment of one's good character. I go on to suggest that pride in one's character, what we might now call personal integrity, commits each agent to acting with a sense of duty, and enables her to attain a level of social interaction that is necessary for her psychological development, yet not possible without a commitment to justice. After defending this interpretation of Hume, I extend this basic notion of personal integrity and demonstrate how this idea, combined with the workings of empathy and the psychological need for positive social interaction, generates a viable theory of moral motivation that maintains the common conception of morality as involving generally overriding moral duties while avoiding threats of alienation. (shrink)

From Clouds to Corsair: Kierkegaard, Aristophanes, and Socrates -- The pure fool and the knight of faith: Wolfram's Parzival and the stages of existence -- From romantic aesthete to Christian analogue: Don Quixote's sallies in Kierkegaard's authorship -- Saying not quite "everything just as it is": Shakespeare on life's way -- "Sorrow's changeling": irony, humor, and laughter in Kierkegaard and Carlyle.

IN the first part of this paper we discussed R and the y family, which divides into the two groups v and Φ. Before leaving the y family, however, we may consider some of the recentiores, nearly all of which belong within it. They seem to contain no genuine tradition unknown to their elders and betters; so it is not proposed to inflict on the reader a detailed account of them all, but rather to study a representative selection. These manuscripts (...) consist of an uninterpolated and an interpolated group: the latter group includes also the Aldine edition. (shrink)

Once again available in paperback, Plato is the first half of Eric Voegelin's Plato and Aristotle, the third volume of his five-volume Order and History, which ...