ABSTRACT “Utopia Is in the Blood: The Bodily Utopias of Martin R. Delany and Pauline Hopkins” considers how Delany and Hopkins employ the discourse of racial science in order to construct their own racial utopias. Focusing on Hopkins' Of One Blood and Delany's Principia of Ethnology, Reid argues that the genre of utopian writing enables both authors to refute contemporary scientif ic claims at the same time that they use the discourse of science to establish the utopian past of (...) Ethiopia. Both Delany and Hopkins reconf igure nineteenth-century and turn-of-the-century American racial science in their ethnological texts and reveal an epistemological vision of the scientif ic meaning of blackness through a utopian understanding of “black” blood. (shrink)

State governments provide preprinted advance directive forms to the general public. However, many adults in the United States (US) lack the skills necessary to read and comprehend health care-related materials. In this study, we sought to determine the readability of state government-sponsored advance directive forms.

"Biodiversity prospecting" has been touted as a mechanism for both discovering new pharmaceutical products and saving endangered ecosystems. It is unclear what values may arise from such activities, however. Evidence from transactions is incomplete and existing theoretical models are flawed. We calculate an upper bound on the value of the "marginal species." Even under favorable assumptions this bound is modest. Slightly modified assumptions lead to drastically lower estimates. We extend our findings to the value of the marginal hectare of habitat (...) and find that the incentives for habitat conservation generated by private pharmaceutical research are also, at best, very modest. (shrink)

BackgroundIn the Canadian Alliance for Healthy Hearts and Minds (CAHHM) cohort, participants underwent magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the brain, heart, and abdomen, that generated incidental findings (IFs). The approach to managing these unexpected results remain a complex issue. Our objectives were to describe the CAHHM policy for the management of IFs, to understand the impact of disclosing IFs to healthy research participants, and to reflect on the ethical obligations of researchers in future MRI studies.MethodsBetween 2013 and 2019, 8252 participants (...) (mean age 58 ± 9 years, 54% women) were recruited with a follow-up questionnaire administered to 909 participants (40% response rate) at 1-year. The CAHHM policy followed a restricted approach, whereby routine feedback on IFs was not provided. Only IFs of severe structural abnormalities were reported.ResultsSevere structural abnormalities occurred in 8.3% (95% confidence interval 7.7–8.9%) of participants, with the highest proportions found in the brain (4.2%) and abdomen (3.1%). The majority of participants (97%) informed of an IF reported no change in quality of life, with 3% of participants reporting that the knowledge of an IF negatively impacted their quality of life. Furthermore, 50% reported increased stress in learning about an IF, and in 95%, the discovery of an IF did not adversely impact his/her life insurance policy. Most participants (90%) would enrol in the study again and perceived the MRI scan to be beneficial, regardless of whether they were informed of IFs. While the implications of a restricted approach to IF management was perceived to be mostly positive, a degree of diagnostic misconception was present amongst participants, indicating the importance of a more thorough consent process to support participant autonomy.ConclusionThe management of IFs from research MRI scans remain a challenging issue, as participants may experience stress and a reduced quality of life when IFs are disclosed. The restricted approach to IF management in CAHHM demonstrated a fair fulfillment of the overarching ethical principles of respect for autonomy, concern for wellbeing, and justice. The approach outlined in the CAHHM policy may serve as a framework for future research studies.Clinical trial registrationhttps://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/nct02220582. (shrink)

A diagnosis of dementia often comes with difficulties in understanding a conversational context and expressing how one feels. So far, research on how to facilitate advance care planning for people with dementia focused on defining relevant themes and topics for conversations, or on how to formalize decisions made by surrogate decision makers, e.g., family members. The aim of this review is to provide a better scope of the existing research on practical communication aspects related to dementia in ACP conversations. In (...) November 2020, seven databases were searched to select papers for inclusion. This search was updated in December 2021. The search strategy consisted of three tiers, intersected by using the Boolean term “AND,” and resulted in 787 studies. Two researchers followed explicit criteria for two sequential levels of screening, based on titles and abstracts and full papers. A total of 22 studies were included for data analysis. Seven topics emerged clustered around two themes. This scoping review provides practical suggestions for healthcare professionals to improve ACP communication and uncovered gaps in research on communication aspects related to dementia in ACP conversations, such as non-verbal behavior, timing and implementation, and personal preferences. (shrink)

Christian Metaphysics - Made in the Image of God is a book for those that seek a deeper understanding in knowing who God is, and how we as human beings relate to him physically, emotionally, and spiritually in a metaphysical way, both now and in the future.

Nostalgia, a sentimental longing for one’s past, can serve as a resource for individuals coping with discomforting experiences. The experience of bereavement poses psychological and physical risks....

Subtitled: Illinois as seen by the Farm Security Administration photographers, 1936-1943. 162 photos reflect the wide diversity of what has been called the nation's most representative state. Includes the work of Dorthea Lange, Esther Bubley, Edwin Rosskam and others. Cloth edition, $29.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Racism is a key driver of the social, political, and economic injustices that cause and maintain health inequities. Over centuries and across continents, racism has become deeply ingrained within societies. Therefore, we believe that it is our professional and ethical obligation as scientists, and public health scholars specifically, to address racism head on in order to ameliorate racialized health disparities. We argue that greater focus is needed on addressing racism rather than race and how race is described or defined. We (...) offer input from public health scholarship to help bioethicists and other scientists contribute to addressing racism. To do so effectively and comprehensively, public health scholars, bioethicists, and other scientists should work together to identify and implement equity-driven collaborations to eliminate the deleterious effects of racism on individuals, families, and communities. (shrink)

The Essays on the Active Powers of Man was Thomas Reid's last major work. It was conceived as part of one large work, intended as a final synoptic statement of his philosophy. The first and larger part was published three years earlier as Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man. These two works are united by Reid's basic philosophy of common sense, which sets out native principles by which the mind operates in both its intellectual and active aspects. (...) The Active Powers shows how these principles are involved in volition, action, and the ability to judge morally. Reid gives an original twist to a libertarian and realist tradition that was prominently represented in eighteenth-century British thought by such thinkers as Samuel Clarke and Richard Price. (shrink)

In three studies, we examined food as an elicitor of nostalgia. Study 1 participants visualised eating either a nostalgic or regularly consumed food. Study 2 participants visualised consuming 12 foods. Study 3 participants consumed 12 flavour samples. Following their food experiences, all participants responded to questions regarding the profile of food-evoked nostalgia (i.e. autobiographical relevance, arousal, familiarity, positive and negative emotions) and several psychological functions (i.e. positive affect, self-esteem, social connectedness, meaning in life). Study 2 and 3 participants also reported (...) their state nostalgia. Results revealed that food is a powerful elicitor of nostalgia. Food-evoked nostalgia has a similar contextual profile to previously examined elicitors, but is a predominantly positive emotional experience. Food-evoked nostalgia served multiple psychological functions and predicted greater state nostalgia. (shrink)

Thomas Reid is now recognized as one of the towering figures of the Enlightenment. Best known for his published writings on epistemology and moral theory, he was also an accomplished mathematician and natural philosopher, as an earlier volume of his manuscripts edited by Paul Wood for the Edinburgh Reid Edition, Thomas Reid on the Animate Creation, has shown. The Correspondence of Thomas Reid collects all of the known letters to and from Reid in a fully (...) annotated form. Letters already published by Sir William Hamilton and others have been reedited, and roughly half of the letters included appear in print for the first time. Writing in 1802, Reid's disciple and biographer Dugald Stewart doubted that Reid's correspondence &"would be generally interesting.&" This collection proves otherwise, for the letters illuminate virtually every aspect of Reid's life and career and, in some instances, provide us with invaluable evidence about activities otherwise undocumented in his manuscripts or published works. Through his correspondence we can trace Reid's relations with contemporaries such as David Hume and his colleagues at both King's College, Aberdeen, and the University of Glasgow, as well as his engagement with the most controversial philosophical, scientific, and political issues of his day. If anything, the letters assembled here serve as the starting point for understanding Reid and his place in the Enlightenment. (shrink)

Upshot: According to its introduction, the aim of Enaction is to “present the paradigm of enaction as a framework for a far-reaching renewal of cognitive science as a whole.” While many of the chapters make progress towards this aim, the book as a whole does not present enactivism as a coherent framework, and it could be argued that enactivism’s embrace of phenomenology means it is no longer a theory of cognition.

The pragmatic framework developed by H.P. Grice in “Logic and Conversation” explains how a speaker can mean something more than, or different from, the conventional meaning of the sentence she utters. But it has been argued that the framework cannot give a similar explanation for cases where these pragmatic effects impact the understood content of an embedded clause, such as the antecedent of a conditional, a clausal disjunct, or the clausal complement of a verb. In this paper, I show that (...) such an explanation is available. One of the central arguments of the paper is that in a significant subset of cases, local pragmatic effects are a consequence of a global pragmatic requirement. In these cases, local pragmatic effects are a consequence of ‘acting locally’ to resolve a potential global pragmatic violation. These cases do not require us to posit application of pragmatic principles to the contents of embedded clauses. The account does, though, require the assumption that interpreters can identify and reason about the contents of unasserted sub-parts of sentences, an assumption that I motivate in section 3. Building on this, in section 4 of the paper, I argue that once we have recognized that interpreters can, and do, reason independently about the contents of non-asserted clauses, it becomes unproblematic to assume that in some cases, Gricean conversational principles do apply directly to these contents, providing an alternative route to account for local pragmatic effects. In revisiting the ideas of this paper in my response to the commentaries, I consider in more detail the revisions to Grice’s broader program that are necessitated by these moves, in particular acknowledging the problematicity of Grice’s notion of what is said. I argue that the starting point for Gricean reconstructions should instead be merely what is expressed, which carries no pragmatic commitments regarding what is speaker meant. (shrink)

We often praise and blame groups of people like companies or governments, just like we praise and blame individual persons. This makes sense. Because some of the most important problems in our society, like climate change or mass surveillance, are not caused by individual people, but by groups. Philosophers have argued that there exists such a thing as group responsibility, which does not boil down to individual responsibility. This type of responsibility can only exist in groups that are organized with (...) joint knowledge, actions and intentions. However, often disorganized groups without joint knowledge, actions and intentions are precisely the kinds of groups that cause problems. Therefore, in such cases, it becomes difficult, according to traditional accounts of collective responsibility to attribute responsibility to such groups. This has problematic implications. Therefore, I propose a new way of seeing collective responsibility, which is able to attribute the vice of irresponsibility to such disorganized groups. This involves seeing responsibility not as a relationship between the group and some action, but rather, as a virtue. In cases where it is difficult to establish whether a group is responsible for something, we should ask ‘is this group responsible, or irresponsible?’ This line of questioning is likely to be a more productive and philosophically legitimate way of holding groups morally responsible in such cases. (shrink)

Over the past four decades, software engineering has emerged as a discipline in its own right, though it has roots both in computer science and in classical engineering. Its philosophical foundations and premises are not yet well understood. In recent times, members of the software engineering community have started to search for such foundations. In particular, the philosophies of Kuhn and Popper have been used by philosophically-minded software engineers in search of a deeper understanding of their discipline. It seems, however, (...) that professional philosophers of science are not yet aware of this new discourse within the field of software engineering. Therefore, this article aims to reflect critically upon recent software engineers’ attempts towards a philosophy of software engineering and to introduce our own philosophical thoughts in this context. Finally, we invite the professional philosophers of science to participate in this interesting new discourse. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the target article “Arguments Opposing the Radicalism of Radical Constructivism” by Gernot Saalmann. First paragraph: As Maturana has often reminded us, everything said is said by an observer. What I say here I say as an observer and reflects who I am, what I can perceive and what sense I am prepared to make of that. Similarly, what Gernot Saalmann says in his article is said by an observer and reflects who he is, what he can (...) perceive and what sense he is prepared to make of that. I describe myself as an English speaking mathematics educator with a family background in neuroscience. Saalmann does not describe himself in his article but appears to be a German speaking sociologist. Given that we are different observers it is no surprise that we make different observations about radical constructivism. (shrink)

Virtue accounts of innovation ethics have recognized the virtue of creativity as an admirable trait in innovators. However, such accounts have not paid sufficient attention to the way creativity functions as a collective phenomenon. We propose a collective virtue account to supplement existing virtue accounts. We base our account on Kieran’s definition of creativity as a virtue and distinguish three components in it: creative output, mastery and intrinsic motivation. We argue that all of these components can meaningfully be attributed to (...) innovation groups. This means that we can also attribute the virtue of creativity to group agents involved in innovation. Recognizing creativity as a collective virtue in innovation is important because it allows for a more accurate evaluation of how successful innovation generally happens. The innovator who takes a collective virtue account of creativity seriously will give attention to the facilitation of an environment where the group can flourish collectively, rather than only nurturing the individual genius. (shrink)

Preoccupation with LTP as a putative memory mechanism may have retarded the consideration of pathological modulation of synaptic plasticity in clinical disorders where memory dysfunction is not a primary feature. Encouraged by Shors & Matzel's review, we consider the relationship between stress, synaptic plasticity, and depressive disorder.

In her book, Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett thinks through what ontological, political, and ecological questions would look like if humans could admit that matter and nonhuman things are living, creative agents; the contributors to this issue of Evental Aesthetics begin to think through what aesthetic questions would look like.

Reid's ideas on education are a direct development of his theory of the mind, and the writings in this volume form an integral part of his philosophy that has, until now, been ignored.

Although relatively neglected, Milton's three Latin poems for his school friend Charles Diodati are arguably amongst the most self-revelatory poems in the 1645 collection. As well as evidence of the strength of their literary friendship, each of these poems adumbrates aspects of Milton's vocational dilemma and provides an intriguing example of how Latin afforded Milton an imaginative freedom that he did not exercise when composing in English at this time. The disillusionment that clouded Milton's first impressions of Cambridge is voiced (...) feelingly in the wittily nuanced Elegia Prima, while Elegia Sexta, for all its affable and accommodating manner, also offers serious reflections on the conditions necessary to nurture poetic creativity, and captures what seems to be a pivotal moment in Milton's understanding of his own poetic vocation. Although both these verse-epistles are directed at Diodati as their immediate recipient, they enabled Milton to engage a European audience when recitations of his Latin verses won him acclaim in the Florentine academies. The Epitaphium Damonis, written after Milton's return from Italy, laments the death of Diodati, his first ?fit audience,? and celebrates the literary fellowship he had enjoyed in Florence. Separated from his school-friend by death and the Florentine literary community by the unbridgeable distance between them, the full force of his isolation found expression in a letter to Carlo Dati in which he described his feelings of inner exile. (shrink)

In this paper, the meanings of sentences containing the word or and a modal verb are used to arrive at a novel account of the meaning of or coordinations. It is proposed that or coordinations denote sets whose members are the denotations of the disjuncts; and that the truth conditions of sentences containing or coordinations require the existence of some set made available by the semantic environment which can be ‘divided up’ in accordance with the disjuncts. The relevant notion of (...) ‘dividing things up’ is made explicit in the paper. Detailed attention is given to the question of how the proposed truth conditions are derived from the syntactic input. The account offered allows for the derivation of both the disjunctive and the nondisjunctive readings of modal/or sentences, including the much-discussed free choice readings of may/or sentences. (shrink)

The past few years have seen a revival of interest in Thomas Reid's philosophy. His moral theory has been studied by D. D. Raphael (The Moral Sense) and his entire philosophical position by S. A. Grave (The Scottish Philosophy of Common Sense). Prior to both, A. D. Woozley gave us the first modern reprint of Reid's Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man - in fact the first edition of any work by Reid to appear in print (...) since the Philosophical Works was edited in the nineteenth century by Sir William Hamilton. But Reid's aesthetic philosophy has not received its due. Woozley, in abridging the Essays, omitted the whole final essay, "On Taste," which is the only extended work on aesthetic theory that Reid ever published. Raphael, being interested primarily in Reid's moral theory, understand ably, treated aesthetics only as it was related to morality. And Grave, although he did present a short and very cogent resume of Reid's aes thetic position, obviously found himself drawn to other elements of Reid's philosophy. There are, of course, some accounts of Reid's aes thetic theory to be found in the various studies of eighteenth-century British aesthetics and criticism. None, however, appears to me to do any kind of justice to the philosophical questions which Reid treats in his aesthetics and philosophy of art. (shrink)

Background Nurses play an integral role in the care of children hospitalised with a serious illness. Although information about diagnostics, treatments, and prognosis are generally conveyed to parents and caregivers of seriously ill children by physicians, nurses spend a significant amount of time at the child’s bedside and have an acknowledged role in helping patients and families understand the information that they have been given by a doctor. Hence, the ethical role of the nurse in truth disclosure to children is (...) worth exploring. Methods A systematic academic database and grey literature search strategy was conducted using CINAHL, Medline Psych Info, and Google Scholar. Keywords used included truth, children, nurse, disclosure, serious illness, and communication. A total of 17 publications of varying types were included in the final data set. Ethical Considerations As this was a review of the literature, there were no direct human participants. Empirical studies included in the review had received ethics approval. Results Of the 17 articles included in the review, only one directly reported on the experiences of nurses asked to withhold the truth from patients. Empirical studies were limited to HIV-positive children and children diagnosed with cancer and the dying child. Conclusion A paucity of literature exploring the experiences, attitudes, and beliefs of nurses with regard to truth-telling to seriously ill children is evident. Little consideration has been given to the role nurses play in communicating medical information to children in a hospital setting. The 17 articles included in the review focused on cancer, and HIV, diagnosis, and end-of-life care. Further research should be undertaken to explore the experiences and attitudes of nurses to clinical information sharing to children hospitalised with a wide range of serious illnesses and in diverse clinical scenarios. (shrink)

In this paper, we develop the notion of a natural convention, and illustrate its usefulness in a detailed examination of indirect requests in English. Our treatment of convention is grounded in Lewis’s seminal account; we do not here redefine convention, but rather explore the space of possibilities within Lewis’s definition, highlighting certain types of variation that Lewis de-emphasized. Applied to the case of indirect requests, which we view through a Searlean lens, the notion of natural convention allows us to give (...) a nuanced answer to the question: Are indirect requests conventional? In conclusion, we reflect on the consequences of our view for the understanding of the semantics/pragmatics divide. (shrink)

There are two central themes that occupy the commentaries, and hence this response. The first is the character and role of what is said, both in my account, and in pragmatic theory in general. In response, I lay out in more detail the proposal from my original paper that the starting point for Gricean reasoning should be not what is said, but the pragmatically uncommitted what is expressed. As part of this argument, I restate and provide further arguments for my (...) claim that global and local pragmatic effects are continuous. The second central theme of the commentaries concerns the value of a Gricean account, which is not intended to model the psychological processes of interpretation. I respond to this concern in Section 5, ‘Pragmatics, psychology and processing’. (shrink)

The basic linguistic phenomenon of presupposition is commonplace and intuitive, little different from the relation described by the word presuppose in its everyday usage. In ordinary language, when we say that someone presupposes something, we mean that they assume it, or take it for granted. The term is used in the same way when we talk of a speaker presupposing something, although typically we are interested in those assumptions which are revealed by what the speaker says. To begin with the (...) most venerable case of presupposing, first discussed by Frege 1892, when a speaker makes an assertion, “there is always an obvious presupposition that the simple or compound proper names used have reference.” So a speaker who says. (shrink)