“Medicalization” has been a contentious notion since its introduction centuries ago. While some scholars lamented a medical overreach into social domains, others hailed its promise for social justice advocacy. Against the backdrop of a growing commitment to health equity across the nation, this article reviews historical interpretations of medicalization, offers an application of the term to non-biologic risk factors for disease, and presents the case of housing the demonstrate the great potential of medicalizing poverty.

Patients belonging to ethnic, racial, and religious minorities have been all but excluded from the legal academy’s ongoing conversation about informed consent. Perhaps this is just as well, since the conversation appears to have concluded that the doctrine has failed to serve as a meaningful regulation of clinical relationships. Informed consent does not operate in practice the way it was intended in theory. More than a decade ago, Peter Schuck noted the “informed consent gap” that distinguishes the “proper” law of (...) informed consent “on the books” from the actual consent law in action, and called for a more contextualized approach to informed consent. Susan Wolf later called for a systemic approach to informed consent in order to accommodate multiple decision points in the managed care setting. Some reformers have sought enhancements to expand the doctrine. (shrink)

Dialogues generated over a year of weekly meetings with 8 children at a school in Edinburgh. The author and the children attempted to craft stories reflecting philosophical problems.

Across the country, legal and health care professionals who understand that health outcomes are most influenced by social and environmental conditions have improved patient health by adopting the interdisciplinary MLP health care delivery model. However, the MLP field cannot advance population health, let alone long-term health equity, until it addresses the structural determinants of health inequity that are rooted in discrimination, segregation, and other forms of racial and ethnic subordination.

The confluence of racial unrest and Medicaid expansion in Virginia should inspire a national reimagining of how health care can contribute to health equity. Hospitals in particular can leverage their role as economic drivers in communities to equalize health and social outcomes for all. The urgent need for innovative opioid intervention presents a fertile proving ground for new ways that hospitals can act to reduce the impact of racial inequity. Inspired by the role hospitals played to achieve desegregation during the (...) Civil Rights era, this essay proposes an integrated approach to use Medicaid expansion to advance health and racial healing in America. (shrink)

Gareth Matthews suggests that we can better understand the nature of philosophical inquiry if we recognize the central role played by perplexity. The seminal representation of philosophical perplexity is in Plato's dialogues; Matthews examines the intriguing shifts in Plato's attitude to perplexity and suggests that these may represent a course of philosophical development that philosophers follow even today.

Why do we spend so much of our time passing on amusing anecdotes, making wisecracks,watching The Simpsons? In Inside Jokes, Matthew Hurley, DanielDennett, and Reginald Adams offer an evolutionary and cognitive perspective.

Gareth Matthews suggests that we can better understand the nature of philosophical inquiry if we recognize the central role played by perplexity. The seminal representation of philosophical perplexity is in Plato's dialogues; Matthews invites us to view this as a response to something inherently problematic in the basic notions that philosophy deals with. He examines the intriguing shifts in Plato's attitude to perplexity and suggests that this development may be seen as an archetypal pattern that philosophers follow even today. So (...) it is that one may be won over to philosophy in the first place by the example of a Socratic teacher who displays an uncanny gift at getting one perplexed about something one thought one understood perfectly well. Later, however, wanting like Plato to move beyond perplexity to produce philosophical 'results', one may be chagrined to discover that one's very best attempt to develop a philosophical theory induces its own perplexity. Then, like late Plato and like Aristotle, the philosopher may seek to 'normalize' perplexity in a way that both allows for progress and yet respects the peculiarly baffling character of philosophical questions. (shrink)

Some things are funny -- jokes, puns, sitcoms, Charlie Chaplin, The Far Side, Malvolio with his yellow garters crossed -- but why? Why does humor exist in the first place? Why do we spend so much of our time passing on amusing anecdotes, making wisecracks, watching _The Simpsons_? In _Inside Jokes_, Matthew Hurley, Daniel Dennett, and Reginald Adams offer an evolutionary and cognitive perspective. Humor, they propose, evolved out of a computational problem that arose when our long-ago ancestors were (...) furnished with open-ended thinking. Mother Nature -- aka natural selection -- cannot just order the brain to find and fix all our time-pressured misleaps and near-misses. She has to bribe the brain with pleasure. So we find them funny. This wired-in source of pleasure has been tickled relentlessly by humorists over the centuries, and we have become addicted to the endogenous mind candy that is humor. (shrink)

Wittgenstein once wrote that 'The philosopher strives to find the liberating word, that is, the word that finally permits us to grasp what up until now has intangibly weighed down our consciousness'. Would Wittgenstein have been willing to describe the Tractatus as an attempt to find 'the liberating word'? This is the basic contention of this strikingly innovative study of the Tractatus. Matthew Ostrow argues that, far from seeking to offer a new theory in logic in the tradition of (...) Frege and Russell, Wittgenstein from the very beginning viewed all such endeavors as the ensnarement of thought. Providing a lucid and systematic analysis of the Tractatus, he argues that Wittgenstein's ultimate aim is to put an end to philosophy itself. He also highlights the intrinsic obstacles to any kind of interpretation that claims to summarize Wittgenstein's thought. (shrink)

Some philosophers argue that we are justified in rejecting skepticism because it is explanatorily inferior to more commonsense hypotheses about the world. Focusing on the work of Jonathan Vogel, I show that this “abductivist” or “inference to the best explanation” response rests on an impoverished explanatory framework which ignores the explanatory gap between an object's having certain properties and its appearing to have those properties. Once this gap is appreciated, I argue, the abductivist strategy is defeated.

Al-Ghazālī on Condemnation of Pride and Self-Admiration : Book XXIX of the Revival of the Religious Sciences. Translated by Mohammed Rustom. Cambridge: The Islamic Texts Society, 2018. Pp. xxxvi + 190. £17.99.

In the empirical logic approach to quantum mechanics, the physical system under consideration is given in terms of a manual of sample spaces. The resulting propositional structure has been shown to form an orthoalgebra, generalizing the structure of an orthomodular poset. An orthoalgebra satisfies the unique Mackey decomposition (UMD) property if, given two commuting propositions a and b, there is a unique jointly orthogonal triple (e, f, c) such that a=e⊕c and b=f⊕c. In a manual, E is refined by F (...) if E is logically equivalent to some partition of F, making results from F at least as informative as those from E. The main result is a characterization of the UMD property in terms of the refinement structure of an underlying manual, provided the manual is event saturated and orthogonally additive. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Argument A Argument B Argument C Further Reading Notes.

In a series of exquisite examples that could only have been gathered by a professional philosopher with an extraordinary respect for young minds, Gareth...

This chapter contains section titled: Further Reading Notes.

This chapter contains section titled: Standard Analysis First Alternative Analysis Second Alternative Analysis Third Alternative Analysis of Lying Fourth Alternative Analysis Further Reading.

This chapter contains section titled: Further Reading Notes.

This chapter contains section titled: Further Reading Notes.

Drawing on social comparison theory, we investigate employees’ ethical and performance comparisons relative to a similar coworker and subsequent emotional and behavioral responses. We test our theoretically driven hypotheses across two studies. Study 1, a cross-sectional field study, reveals that employees who perceive they are more ethical than their coworkers experience negative emotions toward the comparison coworkers and those feelings are even stronger when the employees perceive they are lower performers than their coworkers. Results also reveal that negative emotions mediate (...) the indirect relationship between being more ethical than a coworker, but also being a lower performer than that coworker onto social undermining and ostracism. Study 2, a 2 × 2 between-subjects experimental design, provides further support for our moderated mediation model. Results reveal that participants experience negative emotions when they receive information that they are more ethical than a comparison participant. Negative emotions are amplified if the participant is told they were a lower performer than the comparison participant. Those participants indicate their desire to mistreat and ignore the comparison participant if given the opportunity. Thus, we find support for our hypotheses using a multi-method design. (shrink)

This essay constructs a picture of the meaning of life based on De Anima 2. 2-4. It shows that there are organisms that preserve their form through the exercise of identifiable functions. For an individual to be a short, living thing is for it to be one of these naturally species-preserving organisms. For an individual living thing to be actually living is for it to be able to perform one of the psychic or living functions appropriate to its species.

Emerging adult newlywed couples often experience many demands on their time, and three common problems may surface as couples try to balance these demands—problems related to finances, sleep, and sex. We used two waves of dyadic data from 1,001 emerging adult newlywed couples to identify four dyadic latent profiles from husbands’ and wives’ financial management behaviors, sexual satisfaction, and sleep quality: Flounderers, Financially Challenged Lovers, Drowsy Budgeters, and Flourishers. We then examined how husbands’ and wives’ marital satisfaction, in relation to (...) profile membership, varied at a later wave. We found that Financially Challenged Lovers and Flourishers had significantly higher marital satisfaction than Drowsy Budgeters and Flounderers. Whereas, Financially Challenged Lovers and Flourishers did not differ in terms of marital satisfaction, Drowsy Budgeters seemed to have slightly higher marital satisfaction than Flounderers for wives only. However, we did not find evidence that these connections meaningfully differed by sex. Implications for the efforts of clinicians and educators are discussed. (shrink)

We prove that every non-computable incomplete computably enumerable degree is locally non-cappable, and use this result to show that there is no maximal non-bounding computably enumerable degree.

This book will be of great interest to philosophers of mind and epistemologists, historians of philosophy and their students, philosophers of religion, and ...

We construct a high c.e. degree which is not the join of two minimal degrees and so refute Posner's conjecture that every high c.e. degree is the join of two minimal degrees. Additionally, the proof shows that there is a high c.e. degree a such that for any splitting of a into degrees b and c one of these degrees bounds a 1-generic degree.

This commentary provides a legal analysis of the extent to which changes proposed by scholars to promote care for substance use disorder or other under-treated illnesses through risk adjustment could be implemented administratively, without legislation, in federal risk adjustment systems: Medicare's privatized component, Medicare's pharmaceutical component, and the individual and small group market. As the article explains, federal laws governing risk adjustment provide broad discretion to regulators and can reasonably be interpreted to permit full and final implementation through the administrative (...) process of almost all of the changes that scholars have proposed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophical Adventures in the Lands of Oz and EvGareth B. Matthews (bio)Charles Dodgson, using the pen name “Lewis Carroll,” was the first author in English to write philosophical fantasy for children. In naming his first Alice book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,1 Lewis Carroll may have been inspired by the famous saying of Aristotle that philosophy begins in wonder. More exactly, what Aristotle said was this: “For it is owing (...) to their wonder (thaumazein) that people both now begin, and first began to philosophize (philosophein)” (Metaphysics I, 1982b12-13). Plato expresses a similar idea in his dialogue Theatetus: “This is an experience characteristic of philosophy,” Plato has Socrates say, “this wondering: this is where philosophy begins and nowhere else” (155d).A reader might suppose that the wonder Plato and Aristotle thought could stimulate us to do philosophy was a Kantian awe at “the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”2 But, in fact, the wonder Plato and Aristotle allude to is a surprised recognition that something we thought we understood perfectly well actually presents a challenging perplexity (aporia). So for both Plato and Aristotle, philosophy begins in the wonder at a philosophically interesting perplexity.3 And, indeed, Alice’s adventures in Wonderland are adventures in philosophical perplexity.The first American writer of philosophical fantasy for children was L. Frank Baum, author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz4 and a number of other Oz books. For Baum philosophical fantasy took a rather different form from the fantasy of Lewis Carroll. This should hardly be surprising. After all, Carroll was a philosopher and an Oxford don whose specialty was logic. The hallmark of his fantasy is clever and thought- provoking [End Page 37] repartee, such as one might hope to hear at high table in an Oxford college. Consider this passage from chapter 7 (“A Mad Tea-Party”) of Alice in Wonderland:“Take some more tea,” the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.“I’ve had nothing yet,” Alice replied in an offended tone, “so I can’t take more.”“You mean you can’t take less,” said the Hatter: “it’s very easy to take more than nothing.”5As this passage helps us realize, “A has had more tea than B” is normally taken to imply that, although both A and B have had some tea, the amount that A has had is more than the amount that B has had. However, it can also be taken to mean simply that the amount A has had is more than the amount B has had, even where, in the case of B, that amount is zero. Or consider this exchange from chapter 6 (“Humpty-Dumpty”) of Through the Looking-Glass:“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’” Alice said.Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously, “Of course you don’t—till I tell you.I meant ‘There’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’”“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument,’” Alice objected.“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone,“it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”6This characteristically clever and amusing exchange forces readers to make a distinction between lexical meaning and speaker meaning. Of course the word “glory” does not mean “there’s a nice knock-down argument for you,” but what a speaker might mean to communicate by using the word “glory” is another issue. Moreover, the relationship between lexical meaning and speaker meaning is a very interesting issue in linguistics and the philosophy of language.Nothing like this clever repartee is to be found in the Oz books. Nor should that fact be very surprising. Frank Baum never took a philosophy course; he never even went to college. He was a theater producer and journalist. Yet, despite this lack of academic background, perhaps the most striking feature7 of Baum’s writing—something almost universally ignored in the scholarly literature on Baum... (shrink)

In L. Frank Baum's story, Ozma of Oz, which is a sequel to Baum's much more famous story, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Dorothy and her companion come upon a wound-down mechanical man bearing a label on which are printed the following words: Smith and Tinker's Patent Double-Action, Extra-Responsive, Thought-Creating Perfect-Talking MECHANICAL MAN Fitted with our Special Clock-Work Attachment Thinks, Speaks, Acts, and Does Everything but Live As Dorothy and her companion are made to discover when they wind up this (...) man, he is indeed capable of doing all the things of which his label boasts—acting, speaking and even thinking. But as Tik-Tok himself insists, and no one in the story casts doubt on the matter, he is not alive. (shrink)

This chapter examines the views of death by ancient Greek philosophers including Aristotle, Socrates, and Plato. It suggests that Aristotle offered no cheerful optimism similar to Socrates in his “Apology” and did not provide any arguments about the immortality of the soul like Plato in “Phaedo.” What Aristotle attempted to do was to help us face immortality that can enhance our chances of living worthy lives.

This commentary describes limitations of mental health parity requirements in ensuring access to insurance coverage for mental health treatment and surveys regulatory options employed by states in Medicaid managed care programs as supplements to parity that can further reduce the risk of inappropriate denials of coverage.

The topic of this dissertation is what thought must be like in order for the laws and generalizations of psychology to be true. I address a number of contemporary problems in the philosophy of mind concerning the nature and structure of concepts and the ontological status of mental content. Drawing on empirical work in psychology, I develop a number of new conceptual tools for theorizing about concepts, including a counterpart model of concepts' role in linguistic communication, and a deflationary theory (...) of concepts' formal features. I also suggest some new answers to old problems, arguing, for example, that content realism is not hostage to a naturalized semantics. This dissertation can, as a whole, be read as a sympathetic re-evaluation of the language of thought hypothesis (LOT). LOT claims that thoughts are sentences in a mental language of computation, and are composed of meaningful, atomic symbols—concepts—which are individuated entirely by their formal features. Each chapter either defends various components of LOT from recent criticism, or fills in gaps in the theory. I begin the dissertation by introducing the language of thought project, and motivating and explaining each of its central components. In chapter 2, I discuss a recent competitor to atomism—neo-empiricism—and argue that it fails to meet several key desiderata on theories of concepts, and defend atomism from similar charges. In chapter 3, I argue against a view common to both philosophy and psychology: that concepts must be shareable. If true, atomism is in jeopardy. I find shareability to be unmotivated, and suggest an alternative counterpart model of concepts that does a better job of explaining the things shareability was supposed to explain. Chapter 4 takes up the question of what formal features are and how mental symbols are individuated. I develop a reductive account, arguing that formal features are certain sorts of physical properties and symbol types are sets of these properties. I turn to the topic of content in chapter 5, and defend a very strong version of content realism against recent criticism. (shrink)

We construct a ${\Sigma^0_2}$ e-degree which is both high and noncuppable. Thus demonstrating the existence of a high e-degree whose predecessors are all properly ${\Sigma^0_2}$.

This paper centers its analysis around the remarkable work of the transdisciplinary commentary al-Minaḥ al-quddūsiyya, written by the Algerian scholar Aḥmad al-ʿAlawī (d. 1934). Although they are incredibly rare in the Islamic textual tradi­tion, transdisciplinary commentaries are commentaries that are written in a discipline different from that of the base texts upon which they build. In the case of the Minaḥ, al-ʿAlawī wrote his text as an entirely Sufi commentary upon Ibn ʿĀshir’s (d. 1040/1631) al-Murshid al-muʿīn, a didactic poem that (...) is often categorized as a work of Mālikī fiqh. Through an examination of the text of the Minaḥ and the biography of its author, this paper aims to uncover why al-ʿAlawī wrote his commentary and what his ideological assumptions were that allowed him to approach Ibn ʿĀshir’s Murshid in such a novel manner. (shrink)