Many teacher candidates get their first taste of life as a full-time teacher in their practicums, during which they confront a host of challenges, pedagogical and ethical. Because ethics is fundamental to the connection between teachers and students, teacher candidates are often required to negotiate dilemmas in ways that keep with the ethical ideals espoused both by the professional body and the community at large. Presenting the case of a teacher candidate who finds herself emotionally depleted in her devotion to (...) students, we look to the ethics of care and virtue for clarifying insights. Care ethics extols intersubjectivity and reciprocity, while virtue ethics enjoins commitment to a noble ideal for its own sake; both perspectives offer useful insights for our case. We argue that the perspectives and practices of contemplative traditions can facilitate the integration of care and virtue ethics, mitigating the risk of disruption in caring relations while minimizing the possibility of a personal p... (shrink)

What kind of symbiosis between archaeon and bacterium gave rise to their eventual merger at the origin of the eukaryotes? I hypothesize that conditions favouring bacterial uptake were based on exchange of intermediate carbohydrate metabolites required by recurring changes in availability and use of the two different terminal electron chain acceptors, the bacterial one being oxygen. Oxygen won, and definitive loss of the archaeal membrane potential allowed permanent establishment of the bacterial partner as the proto‐mitochondrion, further metabolic integration and highly (...) efficient ATP production. This represents initial symbiogenesis, when crucial eukaryotic traits arose in response to the archaeon‐bacterium merger. The attendant generation of internal reactive oxygen species (ROS) gave rise to a myriad of further eukaryotic adaptations, such as extreme mitochondrial genome reduction, nuclei, peroxisomes and meiotic sex. Eukaryotic origins could have started with shuffling intermediate metabolites as is still essential today. (shrink)

This is a review of Patrick Meier’s 2015 book, Digital Humanitarians: How Big Data Is Changing the Face of Humanitarian Response. The book explores the role of technologies such as high-resolution satellite imagery, online social media, drones, and artificial intelligence in humanitarian responses during disasters such as the 2010 Haiti earthquake. In this analysis, the book is examined using a humanitarian health ethics perspective.

Placebos are commonly defined as ineffective treatments. They are treatments that lack a known mechanism linking their properties to the properties of the condition on which treatment aims to intervene. Given this, the fact that placebos can have substantial therapeutic effects looks puzzling. The puzzle, we argue, arises from the relationship placebos present between culturally meaningful entities, our intentional relationship to the environment and bodily effects. How can a mere attitude toward a treatment result in appropriate bodily changes? We argue (...) that an ‘enactive’ conception of cognition accommodates and renders intelligible the phenomenon of placebo effects. Enactivism depicts an organism’s adaptive bodily processes, its intentional directedness, and the meaningful properties of its environment as co-emergent aspects of a single dynamic system. In doing so it provides an account of the interrelations between mind, body and world that demystifies placebo effects. (shrink)

Using data from the National Hospital Discharge Survey, this paper analyzes the effect of Medicaid eligibility expansions from 1985 to 1996 on the health insurance coverage of women giving birth. We find that the eligibility expansions reduced the proportion of pregnant women who were uninsured by approximately 10%, although the magnitude of this decrease is sensitive to specification. The decrease in the proportion of uninsured pregnant women came at the expense of a substantial reduction in private insurance coverage (crowd-out) of (...) at least 55%. Substantial crowd-out and the relatively small change in the proportion uninsured suggest that Medicaid eligibility expansions may have had small effects on infant and maternal health. (shrink)

This work proposes a logical analysis for the kind of knowledge or insight provided by Buddhist enlightenment, which is often presented only in the form of contradictions and riddles. The comprehension of contradictions is perplexing to most western logic, and yet developed here is a theory demonstrating how a non truth-functional interpretation can be attached to certain naturalistic contradictions. In this way, the logical and psychological status of Enlightenment can be analysed in a manner consistent with the claims of much (...) Eastern thought. For example, it is argued that by breaking the logical principle of identity, it is possible to understand the contradiction "Everybody's friend is nobody's friend" in such a way as to learn something new about friendship, thereby causing us to modify our concept of friendship. In this way our grasp of contradictions can lead to conceptual change. -/- It is further noted that conflicts in all areas of life can be expressed by contradictions, so that our capacity in general to grasp naturalistic contradictions is also a basis for conflict-resolution -thus justifying the term 'Enlightenment'. This pragmatic comprehension of contradictions is thus shown to formalise, not only the Middle Way of Buddhism, but also Socratic dialectic. Finally, the analysis explains why gnomic utterances in every religion and Zen in particular, are sometimes expected to trigger spiritual enlightenment. (shrink)

This article outlines the struggle between the power of the health care professional and the rights of the individual to choose freely a modality of treatment. Nurses are instrumental in assisting patients in making the best decision for a therapy they will have to assume for the rest of their lives. In guiding patients' decision, nurses must take into account these unavoidable contingencies: changes in lifestyle, nutritional restrictions, level of acceptance, compliance issues, ease of training and availability of support/facilities. Ensuring (...) that the patient makes an informed decision is therefore an ongoing challenge for nurses as they are taking part in a delicate balancing act between not directly influencing the patient's decision while making sure the patient is accurately informed. (shrink)

Misinformation can have significant societal consequences. For example, misinformation about climate change has confused the public and stalled support for mitigation policies. When people lack the expertise and skill to evaluate the science behind a claim, they typically rely on heuristics such as substituting judgment about something complex (i.e. climate science) with judgment about something simple (i.e. the character of people who speak about climate science) and are therefore vulnerable to misleading information. Inoculation theory offers one approach to effectively neutralize (...) the influence of misinformation. Typically, inoculations convey resistance by providing people with information that counters misinformation. In contrast, we propose inoculating against misinformation by explaining the fallacious reasoning within misleading denialist claims. We offer a strategy based on critical thinking methods to analyse and detect poor reasoning within denialist claims. This strategy includes detailing argument structure, determining the truth of the premises, and checking for validity, hidden premises, or ambiguous language. Focusing on argument structure also facilitates the identification of reasoning fallacies by locating them in the reasoning process. Because this reason-based form of inoculation is based on general critical thinking methods, it offers the distinct advantage of being accessible to those who lack expertise in climate science. We applied this approach to 42 common denialist claims and find that they all demonstrate fallacious reasoning and fail to refute the scientific consensus regarding anthropogenic global warming. This comprehensive deconstruction and refutation of the most common denialist claims about climate change is designed to act as a resource for communicators and educators who teach climate science and/or critical thinking. (shrink)

Competency has become a key concept in education in general over the last four decades. This article examines the development of the competency‐based movement with a particular focus on the significance it has had for nursing education. Our hypothesis is that the competency movement can only adequately be understood if it is analyzed in relation to the broad societal transformation of the last decades—often summarized under the catchword neoliberalism—and with it the emergence of managerial models for Human Resource Management (HRM) (...) for the reorganization of social services. Classical professions, which were characterized under welfarism by an esoteric knowledge based on ethical norms, have now become marketable commodities that can be evaluated in the same way as other commodities. We want to underline that while this development is still under way, it is the concept of competency that was the decisive political instrument enabling this profound change. With the widespread implementation of competency‐based education that now governs nursing knowledge, the development of a critical, oppositional perspective becomes more challenging, if not entirely impossible. We will be focusing primarily on nursing education in Canada, although we maintain that it has relevance for nursing internationally. (shrink)

Nurses working in correctional and forensic mental health settings face unique challenges in the provision of care to patients within custodial settings. The subjectivities of both patients and nurses are subject to the power relations, discourses and abjection encountered within these practice milieus. Using a poststructuralist approach using the work of Foucault, Kristeva, and Deleuze and Guattari, this paper explores how both patient and nurse subjectivities are produced within the carceral logic of this apparatus of capture. Recognizing that subjectivities are (...) fluid and dynamic, and capable of change, Deleuze and Guattari's concept of deterritorialization will illustrate opportunities for resistance, where nurses can begin to practice outside the dominant carceral logic (and restrictions) of the system. (shrink)

Recovery is a model of care in (forensic) mental health settings across Western nations that aims to move past the paternalistic and punitive models of institutional care of the 20th century and toward more patient‐centered approaches. But as we argue in this paper, the recovery‐oriented services that evolved out of the early stages of this liberating movement signaled a shift in nursing practices that cannot be viewed only as improvements. In effect, as “recovery” nursing practices became more established, more codified, (...) and more institutional(ized), a stasis developed. Recovery had been reterritorialized. The purpose of this paper is to examine some of the threads of recovery, from its early days of antipsychiatry activism to its codification into mental health—including forensic mental health—institutions through the lens of poststructuralist philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. We believe that Deleuze and Guattari's scholarship provides the necessary, albeit uncomfortable, framework for this critical examination. From a conceptualization of recovery as an assemblage, we critically examine how we can go about creating something new, caught in a tension between stasis and change. (shrink)

Our economy is neither overwhelmingly capitalist, as Marxist political economists argue, nor overwhelmingly a market economy, as mainstream economists assume. Both approaches ignore vast swathes of the economy, including the gift, collaborative and hybrid forms that coexist with more conventional capitalism in the new digital economy. Drawing on economic sociology, anthropology of the gift and heterodox economics, this book proposes a groundbreaking framework for analysing diverse economic systems: a political economy of practices. The framework is used to analyse Apple, Wikipedia, (...) Google, YouTube and Facebook, showing how different complexes of appropriative practices bring about radically different economic outcomes. Innovative and topical, Profit and Gift in the Digital Economy focusses on an area of rapid social change while developing a theoretically and politically radical framework that will be of continuing long-term relevance. It will appeal to students, activists and academics in the social sciences. (shrink)

Several gaze contingent studies that used a fixed delay between physical eye movements and a display change documented a dip in the fixation duration distributions (e.g., Blanchard et al. 1984; McConkie et al. 1985; van Diepen et al. 1995). In a study by van Diepen et al. (1995), a moving mask paradigm was employed in which subjects searched line drawings of everyday scenes for non-objects. The appearance of the mask was delayed relative to the end of a saccade (beginning of (...) fixation) by 17, 46, 76 or 121 msec. All fixation duration distributions in the masking conditions exhibited a dip with longer masking delays resulting in the dip occurring at longer fixation durations. In contrast, a no-mask condition did not produce a dip. Similar effects in reading were reported by Blanchard et al. (1984), and McConkie et al. (1985). In both these studies the text was.. (shrink)

In 5 experiments, participants read text that was briefly replaced by a transient image for 33 ms at random intervals. A decrease in saccadic frequency, referred to as saccadic inhibition, occurred as early as 60 –70 ms following the onset of abrupt changes in visual input. It was demonstrated that the saccadic inhibition was influenced by the saliency of the visual event (Experiment 3) and was not produced in response to abrupt but irrelevant auditory stimuli (Experiment 1). Display changes restricted (...) to an area either inside or outside the perceptual span required for normal reading produced strong saccadic inhibition (Experiment 2). Finally, Experiments 4 and 5 demonstrated higher level cognitive or attentional modulation of the saccadic inhibition effect. (shrink)

In 1974, the Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau released a “green paper” known as the Lalonde Report, after the health minister at that time. The report formulated perspectives on health and the main concepts and ideas developed in it, particularly the concept of “lifestyle,” which became the foundation of public health policies in many different European countries and the United States. The concept of “lifestyle” connected personal behaviour and habits to the individual health condition; people were not dying due to (...) a lack of access to medical care but because they lived a life prone to personal risk taking. Furthermore, what is seldom discussed is that this report not only propagated the (neo)liberal view of citizens as autonomous rational actors (homo oeconomicus), with personal responsibility for their health, but it was a first step in the transformation of Medicare and went far beyond the question of health promotion. Health was no longer something that happened to a person but was created through personal choice and, therefore, one had to assume responsibility for one's behaviour. Using Foucault's definition of government as the “conduct of conduct,” we will demonstrate that the Lalonde report must be understood as a specific “technology of government” and contributed to a neoliberal transformation of health care despite the fact that the Canadian system of Medicare was based on the idea of universality, meaning citizens had equal access to health care independent of their socio‐economic situation. As we will demonstrate, the Lalonde report undermined this foundation and initiated a profound reorientation, not only of the healthcare system, but even more importantly, it radically changed the way we think about our behaviour around health‐related issues. We will also discuss how the making of the report contributed to the redefinition of politics and demonstrated a lack of concern with liberal‐democratic decision‐making processes. (shrink)

With the rising poverty in the Philippines, Filipino farm workers in Agusan del Sur faced distinctive challenges in their homes and working environment. This study aimed to discuss Filipino farm workers’ lived experiences, challenges, and coping mechanisms. Filipino farm workers shared their experiences that tapped into their psychological aspects. Mainly, the problem was stress, worry, and frustration centered on poverty and educational attainment. Some farm workers were likely unaware of the main problem that prolonged their hardships. Still, most have managed (...) to fortify their mental health. This report indicates that most Filipino farm workers in Agusan del Sur have a healthy psychological well-being. However, this statement does not change the intensity of their struggle to survive. (shrink)

Giving plays an important role in the contemporary economy, but this has been obscured by the perspectives of both mainstream economics and Marxist political economy. This paper draws on the work of J. K. Gibson-Graham to argue that this stunts our imagination about alternative futures, and on the work of Erik Olin Wright to suggest that gift-oriented economic practices could play a significant part in such futures. The most promising alternative economic futures involve not the replacement of a monolithic capitalism (...) with some other monolithic alternative, but rather a changing mix of already-diverse economic practices. One part of the Marxist tradition that stands in the way of such thinking is its employment of the concept of modes of production, and the paper proposes complexes of appropriative practices as an alternative or supplementary concept. (shrink)

Within thirty years of first appearing, the networked digital economy has spread its tentacles into the lives of half the population of the world, and transformed the balance of power in the commercial economy. Social theory has been slow to recognize the significance and scale of these developments, and this special issue is a contribution to redressing the balance. It is organized around the concept of moral economies: the values and norms that underpin and shape our participation in larger economic (...) structures. The digital economy today is the site of a range of competing economic models, and this is reflected in clashes between a corresponding range of moral economies. The contributors to this special issue map these tensions in examples of both gift and commodity models of economy, analyse the implications for global risk, and re-evaluate classic analytic schemes to represent these tensions. Because the economy is built on moral economies, the process of economic change is already inherently a process of debate and contestation between different moral economies, with the consequence that academic work on the ethics of the economy can influence these processes of change. (shrink)

The pathway that controls sexual fate in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans has been well characterized at the molecular level. By identifying differences between the sex‐determination mechanisms in C. elegans and other nematode species, it should be possible to understand how complex sex‐determining pathways evolve. Towards this goal, orthologues of many of the C. elegans sex regulators have been isolated from other members of the genus Caenorhabditis. Rapid sequence evolution is observed in every case, but several of the orthologues appear to (...) have conserved sex‐determining roles. Thus extensive sequence divergence does not necessarily coincide with changes in pathway structure, although the same forces may contribute to both. This review summarizes recent findings and, with reference to results from other animals, offers explanations for why sex‐determining genes and pathways appear to be evolving rapidly. Experimental strategies that hold promise for illuminating pathway differences between nematodes are also discussed. BioEssays 25: 221–231, 2003. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Cycling is one of the typical recreational activities, transportation, and sport among elderly adults in the Philippines. Based on the study, cycling provides many benefits to physical health, promotes well-being, contributes to improved quality of life, and is a great way for elderly adults to prevent depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues. As cycling becomes more prevalent during pandemics, the road has changed to include adding more bicycle lanes. Thus, the researchers explore the lived experiences of senior cyclists, specifically: (...) (1) to describe the experiences, (2) challenges, and (3) coping mechanisms. Correspondingly, the study used fifteen (15) participants in an Interpretative Phenomenology Analysis (IPA) procedure. The following findings are drawn from the study: (1) Most of the senior cyclists experienced life-threatening events while cycling, they experienced a high level of satisfaction and happiness, (2) Most senior cyclists are not bothered by the difficulties that others might view as a barrier to them continuing to pedal with passion. (3) Despite all the obstacles they may encounter, senior cyclists choose to get through those challenges by being understanding, patient, and calm. (shrink)

Mitochondria have been fundamental to the eco‐physiological success of eukaryotes since the last eukaryotic common ancestor (LECA). They contribute essential functions to eukaryotic cells, above and beyond classical respiration. Mitochondria interact with, and complement, metabolic pathways occurring in other organelles, notably diversifying the chloroplast metabolism of photosynthetic organisms. Here, we integrate existing literature to investigate how mitochondrial metabolism varies across the landscape of eukaryotic evolution. We illustrate the mitochondrial remodelling and proteomic changes undergone in conjunction with major evolutionary transitions. We (...) explore how the mitochondrial complexity of the LECA has been remodelled in specific groups to support subsequent evolutionary transitions, such as the acquisition of chloroplasts in photosynthetic species and the emergence of multicellularity. We highlight the versatile and crucial roles played by mitochondria during eukaryotic evolution, extending from its huge contribution to the development of the LECA itself to the dynamic evolution of individual eukaryote groups, reflecting both their current ecologies and evolutionary histories. (shrink)

Background The COVID-19 pandemic causes moral challenges and moral distress for healthcare professionals and, due to an increased work load, reduces time and opportunities for clinical ethics support services. Nevertheless, healthcare professionals could also identify essential elements to maintain or change in the future, as moral distress and moral challenges can indicate opportunities to strengthen moral resilience of healthcare professionals and organisations. This study describes 1) the experienced moral distress, challenges and ethical climate concerning end-of-life care of Intensive Care Unit (...) staff during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic and 2) their positive experiences and lessons learned, which function as directions for future forms of ethics support. Methods A cross-sectional survey combining quantitative and qualitative elements was sent to all healthcare professionals who worked at the Intensive Care Unit of the Amsterdam UMC - Location AMC during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. The survey consisted of 36 items about moral distress (concerning quality of care and emotional stress), team cooperation, ethical climate and (ways of dealing with) end-of-life decisions, and two open questions about positive experiences and suggestions for work improvement. Results All 178 respondents (response rate: 25–32%) showed signs of moral distress, and experienced moral dilemmas in end-of-life decisions, whereas they experienced a relatively positive ethical climate. Nurses scored significantly higher than physicians on most items. Positive experiences were mostly related to ‘team cooperation’, ‘team solidarity’ and ‘work ethic’. Lessons learned were mostly related to ‘quality of care’ and ‘professional qualities’. Conclusions Despite the crisis, positive experiences related to ethical climate, team members and overall work ethic were reported by Intensive Care Unit staff and quality and organisation of care lessons were learned. Ethics support services can be tailored to reflect on morally challenging situations, restore moral resilience, create space for self-care and strengthen team spirit. This can improve healthcare professionals’ dealing of inherent moral challenges and moral distress in order to strengthen both individual and organisational moral resilience. Trial registration The trial was registered on The Netherlands Trial Register, number NL9177. (shrink)

New concepts may prove necessary to profit from the avalanche of sequence data on the genome, transcriptome, proteome and interactome and to relate this information to cell physiology. Here, we focus on the concept of large activity-based structures, or hyperstructures, in which a variety of types of molecules are brought together to perform a function. We review the evidence for the existence of hyperstructures responsible for the initiation of DNA replication, the sequestration of newly replicated origins of replication, cell division (...) and for metabolism. The processes responsible for hyperstructure formation include changes in enzyme affinities due to metabolite-induction, lipid-protein affinities, elevated local concentrations of proteins and their binding sites on DNA and RNA, and transertion. Experimental techniques exist that can be used to study hyperstructures and we review some of the ones less familiar to biologists. Finally, we speculate on how a variety of in silico approaches involving cellular automata and multi-agent systems could be combined to develop new concepts in the form of an Integrated cell (I-cell) which would undergo selection for growth and survival in a world of artificial microbiology. (shrink)

On 18 November 2014, the United Nations launched an urgent new campaign to end AIDS as a global health threat by 2030. With its proposed strategy, the UN follows leading scientists who had declared the failure of former prevention strategies and now were promoting a ‘Seek and Treat for Optimal Prevention’ (STOP) approach as the most cost‐effective response to the pandemic to meet the goal of ‘an AIDS‐free generation’. STOP combines antiretroviral therapy and routine HIV screening to find persons unaware (...) that they are HIV‐positive, because research has shown that people consistently change their behaviour (i.e. increase condom use, have fewer partners) after an HIV diagnosis. AIDS activists have broadly criticized this strategy on different levels. In this article, we go beyond these criticisms and try to analyse the political rationalities behind this ‘new’ strategy. We believe that it is necessary to put the rationale underpinning the STOP programme into the context of broader societal transformations that can best be captured as the development of advanced liberal societies and the new emphasis on self‐controlling or self‐responsibility rather than on disciplining behaviour. (shrink)

Particular visions of urban development are often codified in multi-year resource management policies. These policies, and the negotiations leading to them, are based in specific problem frames and narratives with long legacies. As conditions change and knowledge improves, there is often a need to revisit how problems, opportunities, and development pathways were defined historically, and to consider the viability of alternative pathways for development. In this article, we examine the case of agriculture near Metropolitan Phoenix, in the Central Arizona region, (...) to highlight how frames and narratives embedded in policy can reinforce particular development pathways, even as information, conditions, and values evolve. Using expert interviews and secondary data, we document alternative frames and narratives that may offer different pathways for development and sustainability in the region. By highlighting alternative narratives, we demonstrate the uncertainties and limitations associated with all narratives about development pathways, and explore the possibilities that narrative shifts can alter future outcomes. (shrink)

This introduction to a special issue of Topoi introduces and summarises the relationship between three main varieties of 'enactivist' theorising about the mind: 'autopoietic', 'sensorimotor', and 'radical' enactivism. It includes a brief discussion of the philosophical and cognitive scientific precursors to enactivist theories, and the relationship of enactivism to other trends in embodied cognitive science and philosophy of mind.

Ethical challenges in genomic epidemiology are the direct result of novel tools used to confront scientific challenges in the field. An orders-of-magnitude increase in scale of genetic data collection has created the need for establishing diffuse international partnerships, sometimes across developed- and developing-world countries, with ramifications for assigning research ownership, distributing intellectual property rights, and encouraging capacity-building. Meanwhile, the fact that genomic epidemiological research is so far upstream in the pipeline of therapy development has implications for the privacy rights of (...) research participants and for a rigorous definition of valid informed consent, particularly in resource-poor settings. From these scientific underpinnings, we distill out two main categories of ethical issues: (1) How should researchers ensure that the subjects of research are appropriately protected? and (2) What is the structure of an equitable and fair system for distributing the financial and scientific rewards of research? We attempt to delineate the contours of specific problems in each category and propose steps toward solutions with reference to a particular project, known as gMap.net, that focuses on genomic epidemiological studies of malaria. (shrink)

This article aims to demonstrate how the formation of ethical subjectivity must be considered in conjunction with the techno-politics of secrecy and disclosure, and it proposes an account of the ways in which the technical transition and ‘democratization’ of archival upload/download capacity associated with digital communications fundamentally challenges the existing structure of control over such things as censorship and cultural memory understood in terms of power of recall. It argues that it is against this background and in view of the (...) mediality of communications that the question of responsibility with respect to secrets and their disclosure must ultimately be posed. It seeks to establish the difference between a purely political and an ethico-political understanding of the secrecy/disclosure dyad as this functions, on the one hand, in relation to philosophical inquiry itself and, on the other, in relation to normative representations of informational events, and it contextualizes its theoretical account of this difference in relation to the ‘Wikileaks phenomenon’ viewed as a disclosive event. It examines how ethical subjectivity is formed in relation to ‘information’ and in the wider context of a digital culture of archivization, characterized by the ubiquitous recording of communications of all kinds. Drawing centrally on the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, for whom ‘infinite responsibility’ is ‘incarnated’ as the ‘ultimate secret of subjectivity’ in me, and Derrida’s account of both the necessary technicity of the human and the impossibility of ‘saying the event’, it proposes a way of thinking the ethico-techno-politics of secrecy and disclosure in terms of the singularity of the event and the unique responsibility of the ethical Subject in relation to that. (shrink)

The development of immersive media-communication environments, and their theorization in terms of the `haptic', calls for a reconsideration of the relationship between sensuality and the ethics of contact. For the most part, the cultural theorization of the virtual which remains preoccupied with the visual has tended to limit its scope to the paradoxes, politics and ethics of representation. Much of media and cultural studies work, for instance, has adopted, directly or indirectly, the traditional visual and ocularcentric paradigm in its analyses (...) of cultural forms and technologies as these have become integrated into contemporary life. Whilst it has been argued, for instance by Mark Hansen in his recent books, that this paradigm is inadequate to digital media and the developments of human-machine interactions the digital introduces, few comentators have addressed how new developments in immersive sensory media environments bear on the ethics of communication. By way of a reflection on the themes of the tactility of contact and the ethics of touch in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, this article critically evaluates the ethical significance of the `sensory extension' haptic media represent. It identifies and argues against the neo-positivist tendency of Hansen's reliance on the empiricism of the neurosciences whilst locating the resources for an ethics of touch in Levinas' concept of time as `diachrony'. (shrink)

In this richly argued and provocative book, David Davies elaborates and defends a broad conceptual framework for thinking about the arts that reveals important continuities and discontinuities between traditional and modern art, and between different artistic disciplines. Elaborates and defends a broad conceptual framework for thinking about the arts. Offers a provocative view about the kinds of things that artworks are and how they are to be understood. Reveals important continuities and discontinuities between traditional and modern art. Highlights core topics (...) in aesthetics and art theory, including traditional theories about the nature of art, aesthetic appreciation, artistic intentions, performance, and artistic meaning. (shrink)

Social and linguistic perceptions are linked. On one hand, talker identity affects speech perception. On the other hand, speech itself provides information about a talker's identity. Here, we propose that the same probabilistic knowledge might underlie both socially conditioned linguistic inferences and linguistically conditioned social inferences. Our computational–level approach—the ideal adapter—starts from the idea that listeners use probabilistic knowledge of covariation between social, linguistic, and acoustic cues in order to infer the most likely explanation of the speech signals they hear. (...) As a first step toward understanding social inferences in this framework, we use a simple ideal observer model to show that it would be possible to infer aspects of a talker's identity using cue distributions based on actual speech production data. This suggests the possibility of a single formal framework for social and linguistic inferences and the interactions between them. (shrink)

Shows how ethical subjectivity is not based on individual morals but contemporary cultureTaking his lead from the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, and engaging with a number of ethical thinkers, Dave Boothroyd addresses a number of key contemporary ethical subjects. In doing so, he reveals how responsibility is grounded in the everyday encounters and situations we are all familiar with.

We present a specific elaboration and partial defense of the claims that cognition is enactive, embodied, embedded, affective and (potentially) extended. According to the view we will defend, the enactivist claim that perception and cognition essentially depend upon the cognizer’s interactions with their environment is fundamental. If a particular instance of this kind of dependence obtains, we will argue, then it follows that cognition is essentially embodied and embedded, that the underpinnings of cognition are inextricable from those of affect, that (...) the phenomenon of cognition itself is essentially bound up with affect, and that the possibility of cognitive extension depends upon the instantiation of a specific mode of skillful interrelation between cognizer and environment. Thus, if cognition is enactive then it is also embodied, embedded, affective and potentially extended. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetoric and Power: An Inquiry into Foucault’s Critique of ConfessionDave TellOn October 10, 1979, Michel Foucault revised his thesis on confession. On that day, some three years after the publication of his magisterial treatment of confession in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault argued that the Pythagoreans, Stoics, and Epicureans had, before the advent of Christianity, their own practices of confession. Yet these practices, unlike their (...) Christian variants, were not complicit with practices of domination (OS 310, 312). In the context of Foucault’s thought theretofore, in which the confession consistently figured as an essential component in the exercise of modern power, this is a radical shift. In lectures given at both Berkeley and Dartmouth in the fall of 1980, Foucault made similar arguments. On these occasions he argued that Seneca’s De ira constituted a “stoic confession,” the object of which was to enable the subject to “live differently, better, more happily, than other people” (AB 210, 205). Judith Butler captures the gravity of the shift: “In the last years of his life, Foucault returned to the question of confession, reversing his earlier critique in the first volume of the History of Sexuality, where he indicts confession as a forcible extraction of sexual truth, a practice in the service of a regulatory power” (2005, 112).This reversal was short lived. Although Foucault would celebrate ancient Greek techniques of the self for the rest of his life, he would not [End Page 95] long refer to these techniques in terms of confession. Thus, in another reading of De ira, this one in March 1982, Foucault again noted that the Stoics have “confessional practices” that are “very close to what is found in Christianity” (Herm 482). This time, however, he insisted that the Stoic practices were fundamentally different: “However, all these elements seem to me to be profoundly different from what we should call ‘confession’ in the strict, or anyway, spiritual sense of the word” (Herm 365). In The Care of the Self, Foucault again conceded that De ira—what he now called “the most detailed description” of antique practices of the self—looked “at first glance” like a Christian confession, but he again maintained that it is something quite different: “The purpose of the examination is not therefore to discover one’s own guilt, down to its most trifling forms” (CS 61–62). Foucault concluded that the various “discourses of the self”—the confession and the Greek techniques of the self—could not be placed into a single category (see GE 250). Indeed, the “profound difference” (Herm 299) between these two discourses of the self was perhaps Foucault’s most repeated claim of the 1980s (see Herm 222, 237–44, 299, 308; GE 247–48; WS 237; AB 207–8; RFT 27; UP 89; CS 239; SS 5; FI 5, 12; FS 30, 35, 44, 87, 96, 97, 143–45, 147).It is worth asking why Foucault returned so consistently to the distinction between these two discursive forms. This question gains even more relevance for readers of this journal when we remember that, on at least two occasions, Foucault defined one of these forms, the ancient techniques of the self, in terms of its opposition to rhetoric: the techniques of the self, he claimed, are “nonrhetorical” (Herm 368; FS 20). Thus the question that drives this essay is not so much why Foucault attached such importance to the distinction but rather how rhetoric itself might differentiate the confession from the techniques of the self. Stated differently, Foucault’s work on the confession vis-à-vis the technologies of the self provides a valuable opportunity to study the role of rhetoric in Foucault’s thought—not because they are both rhetorical forms but, curiously, because Foucault insists that one is not.In order to foreground the work of rhetoric in Foucault’s thought, I situate his discourses of the self in the context of Nietzsche’s critique of metonymy. Although this may seem arbitrary, it gains initial plausibility from three facts. First, we know that Foucault understood rhetoric in terms of tropes (OT 84; Cooper 1988, 4). Second, we know too that Foucault had a deep... (shrink)

Inner membranes of mitochondria are extensively folded, forming cristae. The observed overall correlation between efficient eukaryotic ATP generation and the area of internal mitochondrial inner membranes both in unicellular organisms and metazoan tissues seems to explain why they evolved. However, the crucial use of molecular oxygen (O2) as final acceptor of the electron transport chain is still not sufficiently appreciated. O2 was an essential prerequisite for cristae development during early eukaryogenesis and could be the factor allowing cristae retention upon loss (...) of mitochondrial ATP generation. Here I analyze illuminating bacterial and unicellular eukaryotic examples. I also discuss formative influences of intracellular O2 consumption on the evolution of the last eukaryotic common ancestor (LECA). These considerations bring about an explanation for the many genes coming from other organisms than the archaeon and bacterium merging at the start of eukaryogenesis. (shrink)

What is it to be an agent? One influential line of thought, endorsed by G. E. M. Anscombe and David Velleman, among others, holds that agency depends on practical rationality—the ability to act for reasons, rather than being merely moved by causes. Over the past 25 years, Velleman has argued compellingly for a distinctive view of agency and the practical rationality with which he associates it. On Velleman’s conception, being an agent consists in having the capacity to be motivated by (...) a drive to act for reasons. Your bodily movements qualify as genuine actions insofar as they are motivated in part by your desire to behave in a way that makes sense to yourself. However, there are at least two distinct ways of spelling out what this drive towards self-intelligibility consists in, both present in Velleman’s work. It might consist in a drive towards intelligibility in causal-psychological terms: roughly, a drive to maximize the rational coherence of your psychological states. Alternatively, it might consist in a drive towards narrative intelligibility: a drive to make your ongoing activity conform to a recognizable narrative structure, where that structure is understood emotionally. Velleman originally saw these options as basically equivalent, but later came to prioritize the drive towards causal-psychological intelligibility over that towards narrative intelligibility. I argue that this gets things the wrong way round—we should instead understand our capacities to render ourselves intelligible in causal-psychological terms as built upon a bedrock of emotionally suffused narrative understanding. In doing so, we resolve several problems for Velleman’s view, and pave the way for an embodied, embedded and affective account of practical rationality and agency. According to the picture that emerges, practical rationality is essential to agency, narrative understanding is essential to practical rationality, and the rhythms and structures patterning the ebb and flow of our emotional lives are essential to narrative understanding. (shrink)

How do questions concerning consciousness and phenomenal experience relate to, or interface with, questions concerning plans, knowledge and intentions? At least in the case of visual experience the relation, we shall argue, is tight. Visual perceptual experience, we shall argue, is fixed by an agent’s direct unmediated knowledge concerning her poise (or apparent poise) over a currently enabled action space. An action space, in this specific sense, is to be understood not as a fine-grained matrix of possibilities for bodily movement, (...) but as a matrix of possibilities for pursuing and accomplishing one’s intentional actions, goals and projects. If this is correct, the links between planning, intention and perceptual experience are tight, while (contrary to some recent accounts invoking the notion of ‘sensorimotor expectations’) the links between embodied activity and perceptual experience, though real, are indirect. What matters is not bodily activity itself, but our practical knowledge (which need not be verbalized or in any way explicit) of our own possibilities for action. Such knowledge, selected, shaped and filtered by the grid of plans, goals, and intentions, plays, we argue, a constitutive role in explaining the content and character of visual perceptual experience. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetoric and Power: An Inquiry into Foucault’s Critique of ConfessionDave TellOn October 10, 1979, Michel Foucault revised his thesis on confession. On that day, some three years after the publication of his magisterial treatment of confession in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault argued that the Pythagoreans, Stoics, and Epicureans had, before the advent of Christianity, their own practices of confession. Yet these practices, unlike their (...) Christian variants, were not complicit with practices of domination (OS 310, 312). In the context of Foucault’s thought theretofore, in which the confession consistently figured as an essential component in the exercise of modern power, this is a radical shift. In lectures given at both Berkeley and Dartmouth in the fall of 1980, Foucault made similar arguments. On these occasions he argued that Seneca’s De ira constituted a “stoic confession,” the object of which was to enable the subject to “live differently, better, more happily, than other people” (AB 210, 205). Judith Butler captures the gravity of the shift: “In the last years of his life, Foucault returned to the question of confession, reversing his earlier critique in the first volume of the History of Sexuality, where he indicts confession as a forcible extraction of sexual truth, a practice in the service of a regulatory power” (2005, 112).This reversal was short lived. Although Foucault would celebrate ancient Greek techniques of the self for the rest of his life, he would not [End Page 95] long refer to these techniques in terms of confession. Thus, in another reading of De ira, this one in March 1982, Foucault again noted that the Stoics have “confessional practices” that are “very close to what is found in Christianity” (Herm 482). This time, however, he insisted that the Stoic practices were fundamentally different: “However, all these elements seem to me to be profoundly different from what we should call ‘confession’ in the strict, or anyway, spiritual sense of the word” (Herm 365). In The Care of the Self, Foucault again conceded that De ira—what he now called “the most detailed description” of antique practices of the self—looked “at first glance” like a Christian confession, but he again maintained that it is something quite different: “The purpose of the examination is not therefore to discover one’s own guilt, down to its most trifling forms” (CS 61–62). Foucault concluded that the various “discourses of the self”—the confession and the Greek techniques of the self—could not be placed into a single category (see GE 250). Indeed, the “profound difference” (Herm 299) between these two discourses of the self was perhaps Foucault’s most repeated claim of the 1980s (see Herm 222, 237–44, 299, 308; GE 247–48; WS 237; AB 207–8; RFT 27; UP 89; CS 239; SS 5; FI 5, 12; FS 30, 35, 44, 87, 96, 97, 143–45, 147).It is worth asking why Foucault returned so consistently to the distinction between these two discursive forms. This question gains even more relevance for readers of this journal when we remember that, on at least two occasions, Foucault defined one of these forms, the ancient techniques of the self, in terms of its opposition to rhetoric: the techniques of the self, he claimed, are “nonrhetorical” (Herm 368; FS 20). Thus the question that drives this essay is not so much why Foucault attached such importance to the distinction but rather how rhetoric itself might differentiate the confession from the techniques of the self. Stated differently, Foucault’s work on the confession vis-à-vis the technologies of the self provides a valuable opportunity to study the role of rhetoric in Foucault’s thought—not because they are both rhetorical forms but, curiously, because Foucault insists that one is not.In order to foreground the work of rhetoric in Foucault’s thought, I situate his discourses of the self in the context of Nietzsche’s critique of metonymy. Although this may seem arbitrary, it gains initial plausibility from three facts. First, we know that Foucault understood rhetoric in terms of tropes (OT 84; Cooper 1988, 4). Second, we know too that Foucault had a deep... (shrink)

How should accounts that stress the embodied, embedded and engaged character of human minds accommodate the role of rationality in human subjectivity? Drawing on Matthew Boyle’s contrast between ‘additive’ and ‘transformative’ conceptions of rationality, I argue that contemporary work on embodied cognition tends towards a problematic ‘additivism’ about the relationship between mature human capacities to think and act for reasons, and sensorimotor capacities to skillfully engage with salient features of the environment. Additivists view rational capacities to reason and reflect as (...) a distinct ‘layer’ or ‘storey’ of human cognition, with a normative structure that differs from that of the sensorimotor coping skills which support it. I argue that emphasizing the embodied and engaged character of human minds is better combined with a ‘transformative’ conception of rationality – one which holds that acquiring abilities to give and ask for reasons transforms the normative structure of our unreflective embodied dealings with the environment. And I argue that a transformative embodied cognitive science of human rationality is not only possible, but underway. Integrating existing work on embodied cognition with work on the cultural and developmental contexts that shape human minds suggests how human immersion in culture transforms the structure of sensorimotor engagements by bringing about the communicability and negotiability of the meanings to which those engagements attune us. (shrink)

Clinical research with adults who are unable to provide informed consent has the potential to improve understanding and care of a number of devastating conditions. This research also has the potential to exploit some of society's most vulnerable members. Recently, a number of task forces and individual writers have proposed guidelines to ensure that such research is both possible and ethical. Yet, there is widespread disagreement over which safeguards should be adopted. In the present paper, I consider to what extent (...) these disagreements can be resolved by appeal to a general account of the interests of subjects who are unable to consent and the conditions that must be satisfied for research enrollment to constitute exploitation of their inability to make their own decisions. (shrink)

Clinical research with adults who are unable to provide informed consent has the potential to improve understanding and care of a number of devasting conditions. This research also has the potential to exploit some of society's most vulnerable members. Recently, a number of task forces and individual writers have proposed guidelines to ensure that such research is both possible and ethical. Yet, there is widespread disagreement over which safeguards should be adopted. In the present paper, I consider to what extent (...) these disagreements can be resolved by appeal to a general account of the interests of subjects who are unable to consent and the conditions that must be satisfied for research enrollment to constitute exploitation of their inability to make their own decisions. (shrink)