This article explores insights of physicist David Bohm on the source of thought and the creative intelligence that emerges from this source. It highlights a link that Bohm sees between this creativ...

This article suggests that ?evolutionary vision,? the unifying paradigm of physical, biological, and sociocultural evolution, needs to be fully embodied and deeply experienced in the human being, and that this can be effected by the experience at the heart of the ?perennial wisdom tradition,? 1 that is, that of ?non-dual perception.? The article suggests an ?action-based? experiment paralleling the method of a ?thought experiment,? based on the assumption that one way that one can experience this embodiment is by ?trying on? (...) the lens of non-dual perception, as practiced by the many traditions of perennial wisdom. (shrink)

In this issue, Ellen Fox and colleagues report on their national study on ethics consultation in U.S. hospitals, following up on the previous 1999–2000 landmark study. Th...

This article reviews the history of medical and research abuses experienced by American Indians since European colonization. This article examines the unethical research of American Indians/Alaska Natives in light of the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male. Literature citations indicate that significant unethical research and medical care incidents occurred both before and after the Tuskegee Syphilis Study among American Indians/Alaska Natives. The majority of these unethical abuses were committed by the federal government and within the historical context (...) of a long-term contentious relationship between American Indians and the federal government. Although President Clinton issued a highly visible public apology to the African American survivors of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment in 1997, American Indians have yet to experience such visible federal acknowledgment. To ensure ethical research in which benefits outweigh risks and findings are not value-laden or misrepresented, tribes have instituted their own Institutional Review Boards coupled with community-participatory activities. (shrink)

Nurses have traditionally been regarded as clinicians that deliver compassionate, safe, and empathetic health care (Nurses again outpace other professions for honesty & ethics, 2018). Caring is a fundamental characteristic, expectation, and moral obligation of the nursing and caregiving professions (Nursing: Scope and standards of practice, American Nurses Association, Silver Spring, MD, 2015). Along with caring, nurses are expected to undertake ever‐expanding duties and complex tasks. In part because of the growing physical, intellectual and emotional demandingness, of nursing as well (...) as technological advances, artificial intelligence (AI) and AI care robots are rapidly changing the healthcare landscape. As technology becomes more advanced, efficient, and economical, opportunities and pressure to introduce AI into nursing care will only increase. In the first part of the article, we review recent and existing applications of AI in nursing and speculate on future use. Second, situate our project within the recent literature on the ethics of nursing and AI. Third, we explore three dominant theories of caring and the two paradigmatic expressions of caring (touch and presence) and conclude that AI—at least for the foreseeable future—is incapable of caring in the sense central to nursing and caregiving ethics. We conclude that for AI to be implemented ethically, it cannot transgress the core values of nursing, usurp aspects of caring that can only meaningfully be carried out by human beings, and it must support, open, or improve opportunities for nurses to provide the uniquely human aspects of care. (shrink)

There is a global shortage of nurses that affects healthcare delivery, which will be exacerbated with the increasing demand for healthcare professionals by the aging population. The growing shortage requires an ethical exploration on the issue of nurse migration. In this article, we discuss how migration respects the autonomy of nurses, increases cultural diversity, and leads to improved patient satisfaction and health outcomes. We also discuss the potential for negative impacts on public health infrastructures, lack of respect for cultural diversity, (...) and ethical concerns related to autonomy and justice, including coercion and discrimination. This analysis is written from a rights-based ethics approach by referring to rights held by nurses and patient populations. Nurse migration highlights conflicts between nurses and between nurses and healthcare systems. Increased awareness of ethical challenges surrounding nurse migration must be addressed to enhance the well-being of nurses and patient populations. (shrink)

Depuis sa fondation comme discipline indépendante, la psychologie semble contourner les questions épistémologiques constitutives d’une science de l’esprit. Cet article s’attache à présenter brièvement quelques-unes de ces questions, à travers la psychologie historique d’Ignace Meyerson.

En danse comme dans les autres arts – même en science – écrit Hélène Marquié, le premier pas pour les études de genre est de donner de la visibilité aux femmes dans l’archive historique afin de reconstruire une histoire « mixte » (p. 218). L’auteure explique que c’est seulement avec les rapports de 2006 et de 2009 sur « l’accès égal » des hommes et des femmes aux performances et aux structures chorégraphiques que le féminisme à tonalité politique a commencé (...) à s’implanter dans la danse françai... (shrink)

In the exuberance that followed Einstein’s discoveries, philosophers at one time or another have proposed that his theories support virtually every conceivable moral in ontology. I present an opinionated assessment, designed to avoid this overabundance. We learn from Einstein’s theories of novel entanglements of categories once held distinct: space with time; space and time with matter; and space and time with causality. We do not learn that all is relative, that time in the fourth dimension in any non-trivial sense, that (...) coordinate systems and even geometry are conventional or that spacetime should be reduced ontologically to causal, spatio-temporal or other relations. (shrink)

The inaugural title in the new, Open Access series BSPS Open, The Material Theory of Induction will initiate a new tradition in the analysis of inductive inference. The fundamental burden of a theory of inductive inference is to determine which are the good inductive inferences or relations of inductive support and why it is that they are so. The traditional approach is modeled on that taken in accounts of deductive inference. It seeks universally applicable schemas or rules or a single (...) formal device, such as the probability calculus. After millennia of halting efforts, none of these approaches has been unequivocally successful and debates between approaches persist. The Material Theory of Induction identifies the source of these enduring problems in the assumption taken at the outset: that inductive inference can be accommodated by a single formal account with universal applicability. Instead, it argues that that there is no single, universally applicable formal account. Rather, each domain has an inductive logic native to it. Which that is, and its extent, is determined by the facts prevailing in that domain. Paying close attention to how inductive inference is conducted in science and copiously illustrated with real-world examples, The Material Theory of Induction will initiate a new tradition in the analysis of inductive inference. (shrink)

Our lives are filled with repetitive tasks meant to boost productivity--what we come to know as habits. Over time, these habits (for example, brushing your teeth or putting on your right sock first) are done on autopilot. But when a layer of mindfulness accompanies a habit--when we focus on the precise way an act is performed--a ritual has been created. Now, an everyday act goes from black-and-white to technicolor. And as author Michael Norton explains here, it's these rituals that (...) make life worth living. Think of the way you savor a certain beverage, the care you take with a certain outfit that only gets worn on special occasions, the unique way that your family gathers around the table at the holidays, or the secret language you enjoy with your significant other. To some, these behaviors may seem quirky, but because rituals matter so deeply to us on a personal level, they saturate our lives with purpose and meaning. Rituals can heal a community experiencing a great loss, guide a speaker through a difficult presentation, drive a stadium of sports fans to ecstasy, inspire courage in soldiers going into combat, and help us rise to challenges and realize opportunities. Among those who have made effective use of rituals are Maya Angelou, Keith Richards, Barack Obama, and Steve Jobs. Drawing on decades of original research, author Michal Norton reveals that shifting from a "habitual" mindset to a "ritual" mindset can both enhance performance and add meaning to your life. (shrink)

Norton’s and Myrvold’s recent analyses of fluctuations and Landauer’s principle are compatible.

Preface: This volume originated in a conference on "The Place of Thought Experiments in Science and Philosophy" which was organized by us and held at the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, April 18-20, 1986. The idea behind this conference was to encourage philosophers and scientists to talk to each other about the role of thought experiments in their various disciplines. These papers were either written for the conference, or were written after it by commentators and (...) other participants.... We hope that this volume will be of use to other philosophers and scientists who are interested in thought experiments, as well as inspire more work in this area.... (shrink)

Terminally ill elderly and long-term disabled persons under our system of health care are eligible for Medicare and may qualify for the hospice care benefit. Despite such provisions, research shows that individuals still frequently do not receive the health care they need. But, as inadequate as end-of-life care can be for the general population, these inadequacies are exacerbated for individuals incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails. Although inmates are guaranteed a basic level of health care under the Eighth Amendment and (...) Due Process Clause, they lack the mobility or freedom to choose their health care coverage, and they are dependent on an institutional system for such care. Inside prison, security and access issues affect the care inmates receive. Further, the availability of adequate clinical resources, especially for high-cost procedures, may be problematic in some jurisdictions.In addition to the practical, institutional, and legal barriers to providing and improving general end-of-life care, efforts to improve end-of-life care for prisoners may also encounter a lack of public sympathy. (shrink)

Imagine a single musical tone—for instance, the A above middle C that the oboe plays to tune an orchestra. Now imagine this tone, with no variation in dynamics, pitch, or timbre, extended over the course of “an hour or a day,” existing, as Peirce describes in “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (W3:262),1 “as perfectly in each second of that time as in the whole taken together; so that, as long as it is sounding, it might be present to a (...) sense from which everything in the past was as completely absent as the future itself” (W3:262). Imagine a world consisting of nothing but the sensation of this single oboe A, and having never consisted of anything but it. In such a world, Peirce indicates, there would be no .. (shrink)

An infinite lottery machine is used as a foil for testing the reach of inductive inference, since inferences concerning it require novel extensions of probability. Its use is defensible if there is some sense in which the lottery is physically possible, even if exotic physics is needed. I argue that exotic physics is needed and describe several proposals that fail and at least one that succeeds well enough.

David and Mary Norton present the definitive scholarly edition of Hume's Treatise, one of the greatest philosophical works ever written. This set comprises the two volumes of texts and editorial material, which are also available for purchase separately. -/- David Hume (1711 - 1776) is one of the greatest of philosophers. Today he probably ranks highest of all British philosophers in terms of influence and philosophical standing. His philosophical work ranges across morals, the mind, metaphysics, epistemology, religion, and aesthetics; (...) he had broad interests not only in philosophy as it is now conceived but in history, politics, economics, religion, and the arts. He was a master of English prose. -/- The Clarendon Hume Edition will include all of his works except his History of England and minor historical writings. It is the only thorough critical edition, and will provide a far more extensive scholarly treatment than any previous editions. This edition (which has been in preparation since the 1970s) offers authoritative annotation, bibliographical information, and indexes, and draws upon the major advances in textual scholarship that have been made since the publication of earlier editions - advances both in the understanding of editorial principle and practice and in knowledge of the history of Hume's own texts. (shrink)

Number terms and quantifiers share a range of linguistic (syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic) properties. On the basis of these similarities, one might expect these 2 classes of linguistic expression to pose similar problems to children acquiring language. We report here the results of an experiment that explicitly compared the acquisition of numerical expressions (two, four) and quantificational (some, all) expressions in younger and older 3-year-olds. Each group showed adult-like preferences for “exact” interpretations when evaluating number terms; however they did not (...) use the corresponding upper bounded interpretation when evaluating the quantifier some. Apparently, children follow different procedures for learning and evaluating numerals and quantifiers. These findings have implications for theories of number representation in child and adult grammars. (shrink)

My little girl has leukemia; she has had it for over a year, and now she needs at least five pints of blood a day. Not the whole blood, just the platelets. Most of our relatives and friends have given at least a few times. But we need more. Now I have to go to strangers.So begins Roberta Silman's short story, “Giving Blood,” a story about illness and charity. When the narrator's husband solicited blood donations at his workplace, “he thought (...) everyone would help…He must have asked a hundred people. Thirty gave. His officemate…turned green and said, ‘Oh, no, anything but that. I'm scared of needles.'”. (shrink)

I deny that the world is fundamentally causal, deriving the skepticism on non-Humean grounds from our enduring failures to find a contingent, universal principle of causality that holds true of our science. I explain the prevalence and fertility of causal notions in science by arguing that a causal character for many sciences can be recovered, when they are restricted to appropriately hospitable domains. There they conform to loose and varying collections of causal notions that form folk sciences of causation. This (...) recovery of causation exploits the same generative power of reduction relations that allows us to recover gravity as a force from Einstein's general relativity and heat as a conserved fluid, the caloric, from modern thermal physics, when each theory is restricted to appropriate domains. Causes are real in science to the same degree as caloric and gravitational forces. (shrink)

I give an informal outline of the hole argument which shows that spacetime substantivalism leads to an undesirable indeterminism in a broad class of spacetime theories. This form of the argument depends on the selection of differentiable manifolds within a spacetime theory as representing spacetime. I consider the conditions under which the argument can be extended to address versions of spacetime substantivalism which select these differentiable manifolds plus some further structure to represent spacetime. Finally, I respond to the criticisms of (...) Tim Maudlin and Jeremy Butterfield. (shrink)

David and Mary Norton present the definitive scholarly edition of one of the greatest philosophical works ever written. This second volume begins with their 'Historical Account' of the Treatise, an account that runs from the beginnings of the work to the period immediately following Hume's death in 1776, followed by an account of the Nortons' editorial procedures and policies and a record of the differences between the first-edition text of the Treatise and the critical text that follows. The volume (...) continues with an extensive set of 'Editors' Annotations', intended to illuminate Hume's texts; a four-part bibliography of materials cited in both volumes; and a comprehensive index. (shrink)

David and Mary Norton present the definitive scholarly edition of one of the greatest philosophical works ever written. This first volume contains the critical text of David Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, followed by the shortin which Hume set out the key arguments of the larger work; the volume concludes with A Letter from a Gentleman to his Friend in Edinburgh, Hume's defence of the Treatise when it was under attack from ministers seeking to prevent Hume's appointment as Professor (...) of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. (shrink)

Religious Pluralism Religious pluralism, broadly construed, is a response to the diversity of religious beliefs, practices, and traditions that exist both in the contemporary world and throughout history. The terms “pluralism” and “pluralist” can, depending on context or intended use, signify anything from the mere fact of religious diversity to a particular kind of philosophical … Continue reading Pluralism, Religious →.

This article employs the animated feature film WALL-E to examine a contemporary incarnation of paternal authority, the anal father of enjoyment. Slavoj Zizek coined the expression “anal father of enjoyment” to identify a metaphorical father who operates counter to Sigmund Freud’s oedipal. Unlike the oedipal father, the anal father does not command the subject to sacrifice enjoyment as a price for entry into the social order. Rather, the anal father directs the subject to enjoy excessively. This article reasons that the (...) anal father figuration is a result of global capitalism. While a post-apocalyptic event, such as climate change, may destroy the planet, it does not end capitalism. Yet, WALL-E suggests that with the demise of the anal father, capitalism can be replaced with an alternative economic system. (shrink)