The twelve specially written essays in this volume investigate the neglected topic of mental action, and show its importance for the metaphysics, epistemology, and phenomenology of mind. The essays investigate what mental actions are, how we are aware of them, and what is the relationship between mental and physical action.

This chapter critically analyses the ethical and political dimensions of supposedly subtle and non-coercive interventions that aim to ‘prevent crime’ through environmental designs making certain public spaces less attractive for specific groups. Examples include benches designed to discourage sleeping (targeted at homeless people), high-pitched noises or classical music played to deter lingering (targeted at youngsters), and specific lighting to prevent aggression (targeted at nightlife). While these interventions may appear less problematic than more traditional exclusionary measures, they raise ethical and political (...) worries that come into view clearly when we analyse them as instances of nudging, on the one hand, and niche construction and affective scaffolding, on the other. Employing this approach reveals how these exclusionary environmental designs not only risk reinforcing problematic stereotypes and social inequalities and discipline rather than prevent crime, they also can alienate specific groups, constitute affective injustices, and inflexibly reduce the diverse purposes public spaces potentially have. The chapter argues that environments are never neutral as they inevitably support and encourage some bodies, behaviours, moods, and emotions while suppressing and discouraging others. (shrink)

The literature on patient public involvement and engagement (PPIE) in health research has grown significantly in the last decade, with a diverse range of definitions and topologies promulgated. This has led to disputes over what the central functions and purpose of PPIE in health research is, and this in turn makes it difficult to assess and evaluate PPIE in practice. This paper argues that the most important function of PPIE is the attempt to make health research more democratic. Bringing this (...) function to the fore and locating PPIE in the wider context of changes in contemporary forms of democratic engagement provides greater conceptual clarity over what PPIE in research should be trying to achieve. Conceptualizing PPIE as a form of democratization has a number of benefits. First, theories of what are appropriate, normatively justifiable and workable criteria for PPIE practices can be developed, and this can provide tools to address the legitimacy and accountability questions that have troubled the PPIE community. Second, this work can be used to form the basis of a research agenda to investigate how PPIE in health research operates, and how it can facilitate and/or improve democratic processes in health research. (shrink)

Research in the philosophy of addiction commonly explores how agency is impacted in addiction by focusing on moments of apparent loss of control over addictive behavior and seeking to explain how such moments result from the effects of psychoactive substance use on cognition and volition. Recently, Glackin et al. (2021) have suggested that agency in addiction can be helpfully analyzed using the concept of affordances. They argue that addicted agents experience addiction-related affordances, such as action possibilities relating to drugs, drug (...) paraphernalia, and drug-related activities, as aberrantly salient motivations for action. Building on this approach, we present a novel two-tiered affordance model of addiction. In doing so, we suggest that what is significant about the addicted person’s world is not simply what affordances are experienced as salient, but also the way in which the addicted person’s world is shaped by a dominant concern. It is not only that addiction-related affordances become more prominent as addiction progresses but that one’s plurality of concerns become monopolized by and funneled through addiction. Our model endorses Glackin et al.’s idea that addiction-related affordances become aberrantly salient, while proposing why they become and remain so. This way of viewing agency in addiction also brings to light important implications for recovery and treatment. For, if an addicted person adopts a new, even “socially approved,” dominant concern, there is a risk that the shape of addiction is preserved, even though the content changes, leaving an individual at the risk of addiction substitution or relapse. (shrink)

This paper uses narrative from the social centre movement in the UK to argue that social centres are examples of the MacIntyrean small communities that can virtuously resist the overbearing market influence. Looking at the contrast between rented and squatted centres, the paper argues that those that are squatted are practice-based communities, and those that are rented, are institutions. This therefore highlights the interrupting role of the market and argues that the rented centres are incompatible with MacIntyre’s ideal.

Since the advent of the internet, researchers have been interested in the intersubjective possibilities and constraints that digital environments offer users. In the literature, we find some who argue that seemingly disembodied digitally mediated interactions are severely limited when compared to their embodied face-to-face counterparts and others who are more optimistic about the possibilities that such technologies afford. Yet, both camps tend towards offering what we see as static accounts of online intersubjectivity – accounts that attempt to determine the very (...) possibilities and constraints of digital platforms based upon their design. What we think these approaches fail to take into account is how users’ intersubjective capabilities on digital platforms can evolve and change over time. Developmental psychology emphasises the way in which intersubjective capabilities build upon and are interrelated to one another, allowing for more sophisticated styles of intersubjectivity to emerge only once earlier stages are already in place. We find this suggestive for analysing intersubjectivity online as it provides a framework for thinking about how various an individual’s intersubjective capabilities might develop. We argue that in some cases this can happen through gradual adjustments of our basic intersubjective capabilities to digital spaces, especially those that strive to mimic established forms of offline interaction (e.g., Zoom). In other cases, this can involve more substantial processes of learning to walk and talk again online. Consequently, determining the possibilities and limits of online intersubjectivity is, at least in part, relative to a user’s skill, history, and familiarity with the technology in question. (shrink)

BackgroundDespite its ubiquity in academic research, the phrase ‘ethical challenge(s)’ appears to lack an agreed definition. A lack of a definition risks introducing confusion or avoidable bias. Conceptual clarity is a key component of research, both theoretical and empirical. Using a rapid review methodology, we sought to review definitions of ‘ethical challenge(s)’ and closely related terms as used in current healthcare research literature.MethodsRapid review to identify peer-reviewed reports examining ‘ethical challenge(s)’ in any context, extracting data on definitions of ‘ethical challenge(s)’ (...) in use, and synonymous use of closely related terms in the general manuscript text. Data were analysed using content analysis. Four databases (MEDLINE, Philosopher’s Index, EMBASE, CINAHL) were searched from April 2016 to April 2021.Results393 records were screened, with 72 studies eligible and included: 53 empirical studies, 17 structured reviews and 2 review protocols. 12/72 (17%) contained an explicit definition of ‘ethical challenge(s), two of which were shared, resulting in 11 unique definitions. Within these 11 definitions, four approaches were identified: definition through concepts; reference to moral conflict, moral uncertainty or difficult choices; definition by participants; and challenges linked to emotional or moral distress. Each definition contained one or more of these approaches, but none contained all four. 68/72 (94%) included studies used terms closely related to synonymously refer to ‘ethical challenge(s)’ within their manuscript text, with 32 different terms identified and between one and eight different terms mentioned per study.ConclusionsOnly 12/72 studies contained an explicit definition of ‘ethical challenge(s)’, with significant variety in scope and complexity. This variation risks confusion and biasing data analysis and results, reducing confidence in research findings. Further work on establishing acceptable definitional content is needed to inform future bioethics research. (shrink)

Written as the introduction to a special issue of Body & Society on the topic of animation and automation, this article considers the interrelation of those two terms through readings of relevant work in film studies and science and technology studies (STS), inflected through recent scholarship on the body. Drawing upon historical and contemporary examples, we trace how movement is taken as a sign of life, while living bodies are translated through the mechanisms of artifice. Whereas film studies has drawn (...) upon work ranging from production history to semiotics and psychoanalysis to conceptualize the ways in which the appearance of life on the cinema screen materializes subjectivities beyond it, STS has developed a corpus of theoretical and empirical scholarship that works to refigure material-semiotic entanglements of subjects and objects. In approaching animation and automation through insights developed within these two fields we hope to bring them into closer dialogue with each other and with studies of the body, given the convergence of their shared concerns with affective materializations of life. More specifically, an interest in the moving capacities of animation, and in what gets rendered invisible in discourses of automation, is central to debates regarding the interdependencies of bodies and machines. Animation is always in the end a relational effect, it seems, while automation implies the continuing presence of hidden labour and care. (shrink)

Book description: * Seventeen brand-new essays by leading philosophers and psychologists * Genuinely interdisciplinary work, at the forefront of both fields * Includes a valuable introduction, uniting common threads Leading philosophers and psychologists join forces to investigate a set of problems to do with agency and self-awareness, in seventeen specially written essays. In recent years there has been much psychological and neurological work purporting to show that consciousness and self-awareness play no role in causing actions, and indeed to demonstrate that (...) free will is an illusion. The essays in this volume subject the assumptions that motivate such claims to sustained interdisciplinary scrutiny. Patients with Anarchic Hand syndrome sometimes find their hands perform apparently goal-directed actions which the patients disown, yet seem to be unable to suppress (for example, reaching out for someone else's food in a restaurant). On the face of it, these patients lack the kind of control and self-awareness we ordinarily take ourselves to have when acting intentionally. Questions raised by this phenomenon include: What is involved in being aware of an action as one's own? What is the nature of the control these patients are lacking and which characterizes normal intentional actions? What is the relation between a priori explanations of consciousness and self-consciousness, on the one hand, and empirical work on the information-processing mechanisms involved in action control, on the other? Questions of action control and self-awareness tend to be treated separately in both philosophy and psychology. The central idea behind this volume is that outstanding unresolved issues on both topics, and in both disciplines, can only be resolved by an interdisciplinary examination of the relations between them. The editors' useful introductory essay offers a guide to cross-disciplinary reading of the contributions, and makes connections between them explicit. The book will be compulsory reading for psychologists and philosophers working on action explanation, and for anyone interested in the relation between the brain sciences and consciousness. (shrink)

Diogenes’s exchange with Cicermos the Olympic pankratist is unusual in that it is both a dialectical exchange and is successful in changing Cicermos’s mind. Most Cynic rhetoric is physical or gestural and more often alienates than convinces. The puzzling difference is explained by the rhetorical choices Diogenes makes with his uniquely receptive audience.

Lucy O'Brien argues that a satisfactory account of first-person reference and self-knowledge needs to concentrate on our nature as agents. Clearly written, with rigorous discussion of rival views, this book will be of interest to anyone working in the philosophy of mind and action.

The last few years have seen dramatic progress in the development of HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). These developments have been met by ethical concerns. HIV interventions are often thought to be ethically difficult. In a context which includes disagreements over human rights, controversies over testing policies, and questions about sexual morality and individual responsibility, PrEP has been seen as an ethically complex intervention. We argue that this is mistaken, and that in fact, PrEP does not raise new ethical concerns. Some (...) of the questions posed by PrEP are not specific to HIV prophylaxis, but simply standard public health considerations about resource allocation and striking a balance between individual benefit and public good. We consider sexual disinhibition in the context of private prescriptions, and conclude that only unjustified AIDS-exceptionalism or inappropriate moralism about sex supports thinking that PrEP raises new ethical problems. This negative conclusion is significant in a context where supposed ethical concerns about PrEP have been raised, and in the context of HIV exceptionalism. (shrink)

When I started reading Sara Protasi’s book, The Philosophy of Envy, I was excited to learn more about an emotion I thought I rarely experienced. In the opening pages, I found myself nodding along as Protasi quotes her mother saying: “I never feel envy, but I often feel jealousy!” (6). But envy, it turns out, is sneaky, often masking itself in the guise of other emotions, hiding just below the surface. What this meticulously argued book unveils is both a nuanced (...) taxonomy of different kinds of envy and the intimate relationship that envy has to all manner of other emotions, including jealousy, shame, resentment, despair, and love. I now recognize that not only am I more familiar with envy than I supposed, but I experience envy rather often. This got me thinking about other instances of envy that I experience which I have previously overlooked or perhaps mislabeled. Prompted by Protasi’s insightful handling of envy in its varied forms, one question kept coming back to me: can you envy yourself? (shrink)

This paper will take as its starting point the premise that developing translational bioethics is a worthwhile endeavour. I will develop an account of translational bioethics and discuss what implications this would have for the wider discipline of bioethics and argue that this would be a useful development for bioethics. The paper will conduct a form of ‘translational meta‐bioethics analysis’, in the words of Bærøe. I will argue that if we are serious about instituting translational bioethics, then it will need (...) to look and be organised in a very different way from current bioethics research, this will be a radically different form of bioethics from what we currently have. In this paper I will sketch what translational bioethics might look like. My proposal here is not that translational bioethics should supplant existing ways of doing bioethics, but rather that it should be an addition to it, another subdiscipline of bioethics. (shrink)

There is growing interest in political phenomenology in the role that affectivity and emotions play in the political realm. Broadly speaking, it has been suggested that political emotions fall into two sub-categories: political emotions of allegiance and political emotions of antagonism. However, what makes an emotion one of allegiance or one of antagonism has yet to be explored. In this chapter, we show how work done on the phenomenology of emotions, the phenomenology of sociality, and critical phenomenology, can inform our (...) understanding of political emotions. Inspired by frameworks from each of these fields respectively, we introduce three ‘levels’ of phenomenological analysis with regards antagonistic political emotions: (i) the antagonistic character of the emotion, (ii) the antagonistic role in group dynamics, and (iii) a critical reflection on the very notion of antagonistic. Through this three-pronged phenomenological analysis we show how we can better understand, and critique, the conceptualisation of political emotions of antagonism and allegiance as well as show that whether an emotion is considered one of allegiance or antagonism depends on what level of analysis is employed. (shrink)

Despite their flaws, large language models (LLMs) deserve a fair chance to prove their mettle against human experts, who are often plagued with biases, conflicts of interest, and other frailties. For epistemically unprivileged laypeople struggling to access expert knowledge, the accessibility advantages of LLMs could prove crucial. While complaints about LLMs' inconsistencies and arguments for human superiority are often justified (for now), they distract from the urgent need to prepare for the likely scenario of LLMs' continued ascent. Experimentation with both (...) the capabilities and institutional architecture of LLMs is necessary. Neither tech-bashing nor excessive gatekeeping will suffice. As LLMs are here to stay and they keep improving, it is high time we started thinking about how to navigate the impending wave of their proliferation. (shrink)

The JME editorial team selects its feature articles from the best papers accepted for publication based on their quality, novelty and capacity to move debate forward on a specific issue. Feature articles are made freely available and are published alongside reviewed and submitted commentaries. We do this partly to promote and acknowledge excellent work in medical ethics, but also to encourage authors to submit their best papers to the JME. JME feature articles have deepened the analysis of some central issues (...) for medical ethics. ‘Common morality’ is one way of underpinning general ethical principles and it is a concept that is central to the justification that Beauchamp and Childress give in their classic articulation of the four principles. 1 Rhodes’ critical discussion of common morality in her feature article 2 has been well cited since then, which is a good thing from the perspective of the author... (shrink)

In this chapter, I consider three ‘promises’ of bringing phenomenology into dialogue with networked learning. First, a ‘conceptual promise’, which draws attention to conceptual resources in phenomenology that can inspire and inform how we understand, conceive of, and uncover experiences of participants in networked learning activities and environments. Second, a ‘methodological promise’, which outlines a variety of ways that phenomenological methodologies and concepts can be put to use in empirical research in networked learning. And third, a ‘critical promise’, which suggests (...) how work done in the realm of critical phenomenology is complementary to and useful for exploring the social justice and emancipatory aims of networked learning researchers. Through this framework, I reflect upon multiple ways in which phenomenology has and might continue to fruitfully inform and shape networked learning research. In doing so, I emphasise that deploying phenomenology in the context of networked learning not only enriches our understanding of networked learning but that phenomenology itself is enriched through testing, finetuning, and expanding its methods, concepts, and understanding, as well as unveiling its own limitations and constraints. (shrink)

This article draws on data from a study of the transition to motherhood to contribute to feminist theorizing of embodiment. Three bodily aspects of women's gendered sense of self are identified as undergoing possible change during this period—sensuality, shape, and space. The work of Arthur Frank is drawn on to theorize shifts in women's experience of these dimensions, and the author shows how the white, middle-class women studied could use such discourses around the body as resources in renegotiating their social (...) positioning. This empirical analysis demonstrates how physical changes may facilitate challenging the dominant body norms, although the work of Robert Connell indicates that social control may also be a consequence of such bodily conceptualizations. This article therefore uses its empirical analysis to contribute to theorizing the connections between bodily practices and gendered identity. (shrink)

This article explores and defends the claim that addictive desires—for alcohol in particular—are partly explained by the motive of self-escape. We consider how this claim sits with the neurophysiological explanation of the strength of addictive desires in terms of the effect addictive substances have on the dopamine system. We argue that nothing in the neuroscientific framework rules out pluralism about the causes of addictive desire.

This article examines the relationship between discourses of motherhood and discourses of employment for contemporary middle-class women. Drawing on data from a study of the transition to motherhood conducted in Bristol, UK, it is suggested that there are important continuities as well as con icts between the discursive construction of these two spheres. In consequence, a variety of relationships may be established between mothering and employment identities. The concept of `inter-spatiality' is suggested to conceptualize how the women negotiated the relationship (...) between the two. The findings suggest both that women do not necessarily experience con ict between these two sources of identity, and that they may have a degree of agency in negotiating the relationship between these interlocking parts of their lives. (shrink)

Philosophy is witnessing an ‘Agential Turn’, characterised by the thought that explaining certain distinctive features of human mentality requires conceiving of many mental phenomena as acts, and of subjects as their agents. We raise a challenge for three central explanatory appeals to mental agency – agentialism about doxastic responsibility, agentialism about doxastic self-knowledge, and an agentialist explanation of the delusion of thought insertion: agentialists either commit themselves to implausibly strong claims about the kind of agency involved in the relevant phenomena, (...) or make appeals to agency which seem explanatorily redundant. The agentialist literature does not contain a clear answer to this Agentialist Dilemma, and we put it forward here as a core challenge for the Agential Turn. But we also accept the fundamental motivation behind the Agential Turn, its critique and rejection of a purely passivist and spectatorial conception of the human mind. We close by urging the recognition of a broader category of rational subjectivity, a category which includes states which are neither active nor passive, but nevertheless form part of a subject’s rational point of view on the world. (shrink)

Abrasive, harsh, uncompromising, blunt, uncomfortable. Lyrical, haunting, evocative, pleasure-full, drenching, soaring. All of this, all at once, now, not later. No postponing, no deferring to an endlessly deferred not yet, not yet, not yet.

Mary of Magdala is widely and unaccountably known as a symbol of fallen and redeemed womanhood. By a mysterious conflation of named and anonymous women in the gospel narratives, a completely fictitious character has emerged into the Western Christian tradition. Christian writing, art and social action reflect this misconception. Eastern traditions are truer to the gospel narratives, recognising Mary as the apostle to the apostles, the one who stands in the presence of the risen Jesus and goes to tell the (...) other disciples the news of the resurrection. The gospels tell only a little about this character: she was a woman of means, from whom seven demons were cast out by Jesus. Her home town had experienced considerable violence and oppression. She was part of the inner circle around Jesus, and one of the first witnesses to the resurrection. She receives a specific commission from Jesus to go and tell. The model of Mary Magdalene has been used to bolster a view of women as seductresses and in need of cleansing from their natural corruption. Her image in art has shown women in a recumbent, suppliant posture. The scriptural model should rather strengthen the image of women in their full humanity, standing in the presence of Jesus and speaking publicly about divine things. (shrink)

This is the first book that attempts to analyze and define the metholodology and values of contemporary accounts of adjudication, which can be divided into orthodox philosophies on the one hand and heretical accounts on the other. The author offers an incisive and original analysis of how these supposedly incompatible accounts actually differ.

Art school curriculums in institutional settings are often irrelevant to the lived experiences, pathways, and histories of Black students. In this context, in Summer 2021 and 2022, Artspace gallery manager Joshua Vettivelu stewarded a series of projects centring Black students, creating space for open exploration through residencies and research supported by peer mentorship. These projects mobilized a durational approach, pairing small groups of students with slightly more experienced peer mentors over an extended period, in an environment underscored with care and (...) self-direction. In 2021, the it’s real because it happened residency and exhibit allowed participants to explore questions of self-portraiture and perception in collaboration. In 2022, The Black Creative Research Residency (BCRR) project paired a working artist, Shaya Ishaq, with three students to explore questions of optical allyship and Black resistance, culminating in the Knowable Archives, Unknowable Vessels exhibit. This exploration of optical allyship raised questions about allyship communicated through (sometimes shallow) visual signifiers, and in particular explored the works of David Drake – an enslaved potter working in the Antebellum South known for engraving his pots with poetry and his signature – and Josiah Wedgwood – a British potter who made abolitionist pendants for The Society for Effecting the Abolition of Slave Trade. This paper highlights the best practices that emerged from these residencies, such as providing both material resources and immaterial – that is to say, intellectual and relational – support through caring mentorship and relationship building. Furthermore, we explore the tension between both possibilities and limitations of radical care and Black creative practices within institutional constraints. (shrink)

Research in the philosophy of addiction commonly explores how agency is impacted in addiction by focusing on moments of apparent loss of control over addictive behavior and seeking to explain how such moments result from the effects of psychoactive substance use on cognition and volition. Recently, Glackin et al. (2021) have suggested that agency in addiction can be helpfully analyzed using the concept of affordances. They argue that addicted agents experience addiction-related affordances, such as action possibilities relating to drugs, drug (...) paraphernalia, and drug-related activities, as aberrantly salient motivations for action. Building on this approach, we present a novel two-tiered affordance model of addiction. In doing so, we suggest that what is significant about the addicted person’s world is not simply _what_ affordances are experienced as salient, but also the _way_ in which the addicted person’s world is shaped by a dominant concern. It is not only that addiction-related affordances become more prominent as addiction progresses but that one’s plurality of concerns become monopolized by and funneled through addiction. Our model endorses Glackin et al.’s idea that addiction-related affordances become aberrantly salient, while proposing why they become and remain so. This way of viewing agency in addiction also brings to light important implications for recovery and treatment. For, if an addicted person adopts a new, even “socially approved,” dominant concern, there is a risk that the _shape_ of addiction is preserved, even though the content changes, leaving an individual at the risk of addiction substitution or relapse. (shrink)

Displaying nonverbal pride after a boxing match leads to judgements of success. However, it is not clear the extent to which this effect generalises nor whether it can override competing information. An experimental design had 214 participants watch two boxing clips that were manipulated so that one was evenly matched and the other had a fighter with an advantage (i.e. demonstrating more skill). Nonverbal behaviour at the completion of the fight varied between fighters (pride versus neutral). When the fight was (...) evenly matched, the fighters displaying nonverbal pride were judged as winning the fight, but the fighter did not garner increased social influence. In contrast, when fighters demonstrated superior skill, the more skilled fighters who displayed neutral postures rather than the less-skilled ones displaying pride were judged as winning the fight, and the skilled fighters garnered increased social influence. These results suggest that in a boxing context, a pride bias works in evenly matched scenarios, but when differences in skill are more clearly present, a skill bias is more pronounced and leads to more social influence. Furthermore, perceptions of skill were associated with judgments of victory across stimuli, suggesting the importance of skill perceptions in such judgments. (shrink)

My aim in this piece is to understand what kinds of acts sneering acts are. I aim to look at what sneering acts do and what social function they perform. In particular, I want to mark them out as acts of ‘making people feel’. I explore the grounds on which we might criticize sneering acts, and ask whether the thing that we do when we sneer is always vicious.