The theory of visual perception that Irvin Rock develops and supports in this book with numerous original experiments, views perception as the outcome of a process of unconscious inference, problem solving, and the building of structural descriptions of the external world.

Arien Mack and Irvin Rock make the radical claim that there is no conscious perception of the visual world without attention to it.

One Health is a novel paradigm that recognizes that human and non-human animal health is interlinked through our shared environment. Increasingly prominent in public health responses to zoonoses, OH differs from traditional approaches to animal-borne infectious risks, because it also aims to promote the health of animals and ecological systems. Despite the widespread adoption of OH, culling remains a key component of institutional responses to the risks of zoonoses. Using the threats posed by highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses to human (...) and animal health, economic activity and food security as a case exemplar, we explore whether culling and other standard control measures for animal-borne infectious disease might be justified as part of OH approaches. Our central premise is that OH requires us to reformulate ‘health’ as universal good that is best shared across species boundaries such that human health and well-being are contingent upon identifying and meeting the relevant sets of human and non-human interests and shared dependencies. Our purpose is to further nascent discussions about the ethical dimensions of OH and begin to describe the principles around which a public health agenda that truly seeks to co-promote human and non-human health could potentially begin to be implemented. (shrink)

In this paper, I will describe how Brentano was able to integrate descriptive philosophy and logical analysis fruitfully by pointing out Brentano’s concept of philosophy as a rigorous science. First I will clarify how Brentano attempted to turn philosophy into a rigorous descriptive science by applying scientific methods to philosophical questions. After spelling out the implications of such a descriptive understanding of philosophy, I will contrast this descriptive view of philosophy with a semantic-analytic understanding of philosophy as proposed by Frege. (...) After having thus set the stage I will argue that the current separation of philosophy into the seemingly antithetical strands of phenomenology and analytic philosophy may be seen as a consequence of how the term ‘rigorous science’ in ‘philosophy as a rigorous science’ is interpreted: Does a rigorous science grasp its object with as much exactitude as possible? Or is a science rigorous when its theories are expressed unambiguously, and their implications are drawn with precision? In the course of this investigation I will also point out how Brentano’s integrative use of descriptive philosophy and analysis can provide a suitable starting point for an equally successful integration of these methods in contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

In this contribution, I will argue for an ontological understanding of time as temporality. This, however, implies that in a certain sense being is temporality, by which I mean that on an ontological level temporality is nothing but the process of change, i.e. the dynamic aspect of being in its becoming, changing, and perishing, and that concrete beings are not merely in time, but they are temporal. This leads to the conclusion that actual time is the process of change that (...) becoming beings are, as well as the conclusion that reality is fundamentally temporal as argued by process metaphysicians like Alfred North Whitehead, Henri Bergson, Martin Heidegger, and Gilles Deleuze. The investigation begins with first establishing the methodological difficulties involved in thinking temporality as an ontological feature. In a second step, dynamic ontologies are introduced as the conceptual background best suited to think ontological temporality and their difference to event-ontologies is explained. Finally, the distinction between temporality and linear time is clarified. This introduction of temporality ends with some arguments for the existence of temporality that are inspired by Aristotle’s famous investigations into the nature of time. After having thus introduced temporality as an ontological feature and argued for the existence and relevance of it, its implications for our understanding of the dimensions of time and especially for anticipation are discussed. (shrink)

Within the field of medical ethics, discussions related to public health have mainly concentrated on issues that are closely tied to research and practice involving technologies and professional services, including vaccination, screening, and insurance coverage. Broader determinants of population health have received less attention, although this situation is rapidly changing. Against this backdrop, our specific contribution to the literature on ethics and law vis-à-vis promoting population health is to open up the ubiquitous presence of pets within cities and towns for (...) further discussion. An expanding body of research suggests that pet animals are deeply relevant to people’s health (negatively and positively). Pet bylaws adopted by town and city councils have largely escaped notice, yet they are meaningful to consider in relation to everyday practices, social norms, and cultural values, and thus in relation to population health. Nevertheless, not least because they pivot on defining pets as private property belonging to individual people, pet bylaws raise emotionally charged ethical issues that have yet to be tackled in any of the health research on pet ownership. The literature in moral philosophy on animals is vast, and we do not claim to advance this field here. Rather, we pragmatically seek to reconcile philosophical objections to pet ownership with both animal welfare and public health. In doing so, we foreground theorizations of personhood and property from sociocultural anthropology. (shrink)

Over one-third of older adults in many countries have a companion animal, and pets may harbor health-promoting potential. Few studies have considered pet-ownership in relation to economic vulnerability, and pet-ownership has not been often considered within policy efforts to promote ageing-in-place. We conducted a mixed methods case study to understand perspectives of both community agencies that support ageing-in-place and older adults themselves. A shortage of affordable, appropriate pet-friendly housing emerged as a challenge, even when framed as a legitimate choice and (...) preference for many older adults. In this manuscript, we share the trajectories of three economically vulnerable older adults whose affordable housing needs became entangled with commitments to pets. Guided by dialogical narrative methodology, we offer each narrative as a short vignette to illustrate the extent to which older adults will practice ‘more-than-human solidarity’ for a pet, even when their own well-being is compromised as a result; and highlight incongruence between the underlying moral values that shape solidaristic practices of individuals versus solidaristic arrangements that shape affordable housing opportunities. We suggest that housing rules and legislation that disrupt, rather than confirm, more-than-human solidarity may render older adults susceptible to, rather than protected from, deteriorating physical, mental and social well-being. We propose that collective solidaristic practices must reflect and subsume the moral complexity of solidarity practiced by individuals, to enable fair and equitable ageing-in-place. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Five More MinutesKristen Carey RockFive more minutes. How many times have you said the phrase, "I need just five more minutes"—perhaps to finish a note, clean up the kitchen, or read the kids a bedtime story? It is a seemingly insignificant amount of time. But what if you knew that these five minutes were the last five minutes you would spend conscious on this earth? The last five minutes (...) you would spend with your parents and your young children before you would receive a sedative and be transported down to the operating room, where you would be removed from life support and then donate your organs? In a hoarse rasp through his tracheostomy, he kept whispering, "Please. Just five more minutes."This is the reality that I walked into one Friday morning in 2021 as I took over the ICU service at my hospital. I am an ICU doctor at a busy academic center in the northeast and was on the frontlines of our COVID response, including the care of patients who required ECMO (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation)—the last resort for treating patients suffering from severe lung disease.I did not have the privilege of meeting this patient until the morning of his death, but I knew he had been in the hospital for close to three months due to acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) due to COVID-19. On the spectrum of COVID symptoms, this problem is the worst of the worst, and it left his lungs in tatters—so much so that he had relied on an ECMO machine to perform the functions of his lungs for many weeks in hopes that he would either recover or become eligible for a lung transplant. During this time, many hundreds of doctors, nurses, nurse practitioners and respiratory therapists had gotten to know him quite well. They met his father, former wife, and his four school-aged children. They learned of his service to our country as a member of the Air Force and his subsequent devotion to his community as a religious leader and beacon in his community. As he recovered to the point where he was able to be awake and interactive with a tracheostomy, allowing him to mouth words, they also got to know him as a kind and gentle man with a fierce will to live and devotion to his family.Yet, after many weeks of ups and downs, progress and setbacks, it became clear that he could not survive without the help of his ECMO machine. Though it is possible for someone to survive for many months on ECMO, like most forms of life support, it is a bridge rather than a destination therapy. More complicated and invasive than other forms of life support, it is resource-intense and fraught with medical complications. And one day, came the heartbreaking news that due to too many blood transfusions during his illness, he would not be able to receive a lung transplant. He and his care team realized this meant there was no path forward. It came as little surprise to those who knew him that when he realized that he could not live independent of machines or outside the walls of an intensive care unit, his final act would be to help others. He would give others the opportunity for the organ transplant that he so cruelly could not receive.And so, the date and time were set. The transplant teams from other hospitals began to arrive. His final morning on earth would be spent with his family, except for a last trip outside to see the sunshine. With masterful coordination, his ICU room was recreated on the roof atop our helipad. As an army of caregivers attended to his tubes, pumps, and machines, he was able to feel the warmth of the spring wind as the Air Force sent an honor guard of fighter jets to pay their final respects. I watched him smile as the planes flew overhead, unsure if he could see or just hear them. Even though someone had the foresight to place a pair of sunglasses on his face, he still grimaced at the sunlight after months of artificial... (shrink)

Based on a creative use of the phenomenological method, we argue that a close examination of the temporality of objects reveals the future as genuinely open. Without aiming to decide the matter of phenomenological realism, we suggest that this method can be used to investigate the mode of being of objects in their own temporality. By bracketing the anticipatory structure of experience, one can get a sense of objects’ temporality as independent of consciousness. This contributes to the current Realism versus (...) Idealism debates, but it does so without taking sides. The starting point is neither an analysis of pure consciousness, nor attempts to describe objects in-themselves, but the idea that things can be phenomenologically grasped through the difference between their temporality and our own. By being methodically “open to the future,” one can become aware of the sui generis temporality of objects as different from the temporality shaped by our anticipation. (shrink)

Palliative care and medical-legal partnership are complementary disciplines dedicated to integrating care to treat the whole patient and intervening before a legal or medical issue is at a crisis point. In this paper, we discuss the founding and operations of the Yale Palliative Medical Legal Partnership, give examples of typical cases, explain special considerations in this area of law, and propose areas for further research.

The expression “AI” has become as commonplace as “computer.” While many people have a relatively clear idea of what an AI system or a computer does or can do, fewer have an idea of how precisely th...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Full Collection of Personal NarrativesJake Beery, Neethi Pinto, Marcia King, Laura Wachsmuth, Alisha, Katie L. Gholson, T.S. Moran, Calvin R. Gross, Joanne Alfred, Cindy Bitter, Jenna Bennett, Nadia Khan, Clarice Douille, Kristen Carey Rock, Adrienne Feller Novick, Andrea Eisenberg, Japmehr Sandhu, Katherine Bakke, Heer Hendry, Karan K. Mirpuri, and Katerina V. Liong• Being the Difference• Grieving One More Time• Echoes of Grief: Tales from an Emergency Medicine and Critical (...) Care Nurse• Searching for Peace in Death• “I’d Love to go Off the Grid and Never Come Back”• “A Mother’s Love”• Tiny Person, Big Impact• Night Shift• Cracked Armor• Who Tells the Story• Navigating Hard Situations that Medical School Cannot Prepare You For• The Wish• Break• Five More Minutes• I Saw My Reflection• The Aftermath• Where the Journey Begins• Lessons Learned in Room 208• Joint and Grief Aches• My First Loss: Carrying His Legacy• Grieving the Loss of What Medicine Was Supposed to BeCopyright © 2024 Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

(2013). What to Think of Canine Obesity? Emerging Challenges to Our Understanding of Human–Animal Health Relationships. Social Epistemology: Vol. 27, No. 1, pp. 90-104. doi: 10.1080/02691728.2012.760662.

Plausible Logic allows defeasible deduction with arbitrary propositions, and yet when sufficiently simplified it is very similar to the Defeasible Logics of Billington and Nute. This paper presents Plausible Logic, explains some of the ideas behind the definitions, applies Plausible Logic to an example, and proves a coherence result which indicates that Plausible Logic is well behaved. We also report the first complete implementation of propositional Plausible Logic. The implementation has a web interface which makes it available to researchers and (...) students everywhere. The implementation is evaluated experimentally, and is shown to be capable of handling tens of thousands of rules and sufficiently many disjunctions for realistic problems. (shrink)

Flying phobia is a highly prevalent anxiety disorder, which causes sufferers significant distress and life interference. The processes which maintain flying phobia remain poorly understood. A systematic search of the literature was performed to identify what research has been conducted into the processes which may be involved in the fear of flying and whether processes which are believed to maintain other anxiety disorder diagnoses have been investigated in flying phobia. The results of the literature review are presented and related to (...) existing cognitive behavioral theory and research. The results indicate that little research has been conducted into a number of areas considered important in the wider cognitive behavioral literature on anxiety disorders: namely attention, mental imagery, memory, worry, and safety-seeking behaviors. The review proposes a hypothetical model, derived from cognitive behavioral theory, for the processes which may be involved in maintaining flying phobia, and considers a number of areas for future research. (shrink)

Since the 1990s, glycated haemoglobin (HbA1C) has been the gold standard for monitoring glycaemic control in people diagnosed as having either type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM) or type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). Discussions are underway about diagnosing diabetes mellitus on the basis of HbA1C titres and using HbA1C tests to screen for T2DM. These discussions have focused on the relative benefits for individual patients, with some attention directed towards reduced costs to healthcare systems and benefits to society. We argue that (...) there are strong ethical reasons for adopting HbA1C-based diagnosis and T2DM screening that have not yet been articulated. The rationale includes the differential impact of HbA1C-based diabetic testing on disadvantaged groups, and what we are beginning to learn about HbA1C vis-à-vis population health. Although it is arguable that screening must primarily benefit the individual, using HbA1C to diagnose and screen for T2DM may promote a more just distribution of health resources and lead to advances in investigating, monitoring and tackling the social determinants of health. (shrink)

Collection of Buddhist canonical texts translated from Sanskrit into Tibetan.

Collection of Buddhist canonical texts translated from Sanskrit into Tibetan.

Priming effects have been used widely as a tool to study attentional processes. However, inferences regarding attention depend on how priming effects are interpreted. In the case of negative priming, an activation-based framework for interpreting priming suggests that attention inhibits the representation of prime distractors and that this inhibition is measured in performance to subsequent probes. Data summarized in this article point out that negative priming does not depend on selection of one of two primes and that attentional influences during (...) retrieval play an important role in determining negative priming. Also, two experiments are described that demonstrate a correlation between priming effects and knowledge of the relation between primes and probes. We suggest that negative priming is not determined directly by a process of ignoring, but instead occurs because a repeated probe is less temporally distinct when ignored as a prime than when attended. (shrink)

Although Kant is often considered the philosopher who ended the reign of metaphysical dogmatism, the situation is not quite so clear. On the one hand, this analysis must bear in mind that Kant himself had a great interest in metaphysics, insofar as it was not dogmatic – Kant himself considered his Critique to be just a reform of metaphysics. On the other hand, the Critique of Pure Reason itself is a result of certain metaphysical-dogmatic preliminary decisions. In order to show (...) how one-sided the idea is that Kant simply did away with metaphysics, I will draw attention to the metaphysical presuppositions that shape the Critique of Pure Reason. The first thinker who attempted to explicate the metaphysical basis of the Critique was Kant’s friend and colleague Johann Georg Hamann. With Hamann’s guidance I will argue that even his Critique of Pure Reason was based on metaphysical presuppositions and that such an influence by metaphysical preliminary decisions is inevitable – even for such a sharp critic of metaphysical dogmatism as Kant. At the same time this text provides an introduction to Hamann’s thought, a thinker ahead of his times. (shrink)

This paper investigates the correlation of Thinking, as understood by Martin Heidegger, and his concept of Thing.

From the outset of Western philosophy most occidental philosophers held that both existence and knowledge depended on stability - what is genuinely changing does not have a clear essence or identity and is thus not an object for knowledge, nor can it be expressed in language. This is the case even though change touches all areas of life, shaping both the self and world, in subjective experience as well as scientific discoveries. In this contribution I will consider why precisely change (...) is seen as such a vexing problem for knowledge and I will look at what that means for our ability to know a world that is fundamentally characterised by change. In part 1, I discuss how the assumption that change can neither be known nor put into words, led to the development of epistemologies and ontologies that bypass the problem of change by understanding it in terms of its opposite. I will show how this strategy limits our ability to come to terms with concrete reality. In part 2, I point towards possible ways out of this predicament. I will use the Aristotelian tode ti to propose a novel way to encounter change on its own terms. (shrink)

It is a puzzling fact that the Greek term for Nature ‘physis’ could be used to refer to i) reality as a whole, ii) the nature of something, iii) to individual material beings or materiality and iv) all things that are self-generating. In order to understand and tie together this wide array of possible meanings, I will consider the thesis that ‘physis’ was in fact used as a concept of being, a term naming the fundamental property of all of reality (...) in the early pre-Socratics, poets and scientists before 500 BCE. Investigating ‘physis’ in this way can give us a way of thinking about Nature as a dynamic and creative but material process that goes far beyond the classical understanding of Nature as the sum of things that self-generate or the modern mathematical understanding of Nature born with Galileo, dominant to this day. (shrink)

For centuries most ontological systems have been based on the presupposition that the paradigmatic type of being is the kind of being things like stones and houses have. But if one looks at the beginning of Philosophy, at the emergence of philosophic thought, this choice was not obvious. For the pre-Socratics and even for Plato and Aristotle it was not obvious that reality is composed out of static and distinct elements. In this paper I investigate this relationship between a static (...) and a dynamic account of reality both in its historic as well as systematic dimension. I argue that ontologies are ultimately based on an analysis of predication and that dynamic ontologies are mainly based on an empirical or phenomenological investigation of singular and concrete reality. (shrink)

Explores what we know about God from the words of the Bible and from the world around us.

ABSTRACTThe recent increase in research and commercialization of genetically modified crops in Africa has resulted in considerable and understandable interest from farmers, scholars, and practitioners. However, messy situations are often hard to critically engage in from afar, and the recent article published by Braimah et al. [. Debated agronomy: Public discourse and the future of biotechnology policy in Ghana. Global Bioethics. doi:10.1080/11287462.2016.1261604] presents certain claims that further obfuscate – rather than clarify – an already complex landscape. In this commentary I (...) first seek to clarify particular details of the Ghanaian “GMO” story with particular focus on certain actors and their stances. Next, I highlight some methodological shortcomings of Debated Agronomy and correct certain dubious quotations and claims. Finally, I suggest a more ethnographically and discourse-focused methodology to gain much needed insight into how Ghanaia... (shrink)