Patients with advanced dementia are less likely than those with other terminal illnesses to receive palliative care. Due to the nature and course of dementia, there may be a failure to recognize the terminal stage of the disease. A possible and under-investigated explanation for this healthcare disparity is the healthcare practitioner who plays a primary role in end-of-life decision-making. Two potential areas that might impact provider decision-making are cognitive biases and moral considerations. In this analysis, we demonstrate how the cognitive (...) biases and moral considerations of practitioners related to clinical decision-making are inherent in clinical practice and may impact on providers’ accuracy related to diagnostic and treatment related decision-making associated with patients with advanced dementia. Anchoring, default, availability, representativeness and framing biases are cognitive biases based on the "Two System Model" that relate to decision-making in end-of-life care. In patients with advanced dementia, those biases may result in a tendency to adhere to traditional mandatory care, involving an aggressive approach to care, which values saving lives at all costs, without taking into account the possible suffering and long-term consequences. Aspects such as moral sensitivity and moral courage play an important role in ethical decision-making related to advanced dementia. Investigations of clinical decision-making that include the cognitive biases and ethical considerations of practitioners might advance the comprehensive understanding of the clinical decision-making process related to care of patients with advanced dementia and promote the quality of care given to this population. (shrink)

Apocalyptic thinking permeates Paul’s ideas about the gospel, God, the present age, and what is to come. Paul in his letters not only writes about the revelations that he himself has received, but also how the gospel reveals God’s ultimate justice. Apocalypticism as an ideology is fundamentally concerned with justice and the expectation of a future intervention that will conclusively reconcile the injustices of the world with the justice of God. Though of course Paul never sat down and wrote an (...) “Apocalypse” or even an apocalyptic letter, his letters reveal glimpses of the apocalyptic ways Paul thought about the world and humanity’s place in it. This article reviews the history and main tenets of apocalypticism and then examines three fundamental areas of apocalyptic thinking as expressed in Paul’s letters: the idea of apocalypse as full disclosure, the apocalyptic promise of full justice, and Paul’s use of apocalyptic ideas to reorient his readers to thinking about true-but-hidden identity, both of the “present evil age” and of one’s current place in it. Paul draws upon and employs apocalyptic imagery to solve practical problems in his communities, equipping them to face the world with a full cosmic perspective. (shrink)

Animal welfare science and ecology are both generally concerned with the lives of animals, however they differ in their objectives and scope; the former studies the welfare of animals considered ‘domestic’ and under the domain of humans, while the latter studies wild animals with respect to ecological processes. Each of these approaches addresses certain aspects of the lives of animals living in the world though neither, we argue, tells us important information about the welfare of wild animals. This paper argues (...) for the development of a new scientific discipline ‘welfare biology’ to address these issues and more, given the deficiencies of pre-existing life science disciplines to research the subject. Welfare biology is the study of the welfare of all living beings who have a welfare, with a value orientation toward promoting that welfare, regardless of the beings’ situation or relationship to humans and our activities. (shrink)

This study investigated relationships between state anxiety and leisure-domain physical activity levels during Covid-19 pandemic. We used frequency, duration, and intensity as key variables of physical activity. Trait anxiety, state anxiety before pandemic, age, gender, and education level were also included in the analysis. Our general hypothesis was that participants who declared doing more physical activity levels would exhibit lower levels of anxiety during the Covid-19 pandemic. A convenient sample of 571 volunteer adults was drawn mainly from São Paulo State, (...) the epicenter of Covid-19 pandemic in Brazil. To obtain the participants’ levels of anxiety we used a validated short-version of the State and Trait Anxiety Inventory. Levels of physical activity were measured via questions from VIGITEL, a validated questionnaire about the individual’s habits on risk factors. Answers were given regarding the first week of March 2020 and at the very moment the participant was filling in the electronic form. Data analyses were conducted through descriptive and inferential techniques, with the use of non-parametric tests and linear regression models. Overall, participants’ responses indicate that anxiety levels were higher during the pandemic compared to the period that preceded the pandemic, and that frequent and long physical activity in the leisure-domain reduced anxiety, regardless its intensity. The regression models revealed an inverse relationship between physical activity and anxiety and independent of gender, age, education level, trait anxiety, and physical activity before pandemic. (shrink)

The Demands of Liberal Education analyses and applies contemporary liberal political theory to certain key problems within the field of educational theory. Levinson examines problems centred around determining appropriate educational aims, content and institutional structure and argues that liberal governments should exercise a much greater control over education than they now do. Combining theoretical with empirical research, this book will interest and provoke scholars, policy makers, educators, parents, and all citizens interested in education politics.

This paper draws upon Hannah Arendt's idea of the 'right to have rights' to critique the current protection gap faced by refugees today. While refugees are protected from refoulement once they make it to the jurisdiction or territory of a state, they face an ever-increasing array of non-entrée policies designed to stymie access to state territory. Without being able to enter a state capable of securing their claims to safety and dignity, refugees cannot achieve the rights which ought to be (...) afforded to them under international law. Drawing upon both legal theory and political philosophy, this paper argues that refugees today, just as the stateless in Arendt’s time, must be afforded the ‘right to have rights’, understood as a right to enter state territory. (shrink)

In the present essay I intend to approach the racial problems of today's world, or more particularly the problem of the Negro and of his integration in multiracial societies, from the point of view of the Jungian concept of Persona.I will, of necessity, limit iny study to one national case only, that of Brazil. The use of Brazil as a particular instance for study can be easily justified. Brazil is probably the most complex multiracial society in the world and one (...) that boasts the least tensions among communities of different stock, religion or cultural background. In 8.5 million sq. km., over one hundred and twenty million people are living who speak the same language, both in the literal and the figurative sense. We believe we have been somehow more successful than the Americans in emphasizing the element of fraternity that is so fundamental to the democratic way of life. My thesis is that we have achieved such a result thanks to a very peculiar working of the archetype of the Persona. This article will try to adumbrate the construction of what one may call a collective Persona, a fa¸ade, a pattern of national behaviour which tries to overcome the problem by simply overlooking the fact that genetic differences of colour, shape and mind exist. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Butler on Subjectivity and Authorship: Reflections on Doing Philosophy in the First PersonAsher WaldenWhat drew me to theology a number of years ago was that it was the most personal kind of philosophy, to the extent that it deals with the most important issues of one’s own “personal” life. It used the tools of the philosophical tradition to address questions that the philosophers—especially those in the University of Chicago’s (...) analytically oriented environment—seemed not to want to ask; at least, not when I was an undergraduate there some years ago. My engagement with philosophy has always been about personal questions, and in the past I tended to eschew the political realm as being at best external to the more essential business of philosophy. But the questions I have been asking lately are rather different from the ones that concerned me back when I was still in Chicago. Largely due to the birth of my son two years ago, questions that before were only secondhand—questions about education, democracy, and debt—are now very personal and very, very important to me. I am perhaps a latecomer to the position that, as the saying goes, “The personal is the political.” But being a convert, like the earliest Christian Apologists, may afford me an opportunity and motivation to argue the position all the more earnestly.The way I have sought to incorporate these different questions and perspectives in my theologizing has primarily been through engagement with the Confucian philosophical tradition. The Confucian tradition is, in large measure, a series of reflections on the individual’s utter embeddedness in familial, sociopolitical, environmental, and sacred structures and forces. The tradition has its own resources for expressing and navigating this embeddedness, but what has become interesting to me is that the requisite resources are being developed independently, and perhaps more forcefully, within the realm of postmodern and postcolonial theory. Indeed, these newer articulations may [End Page 55] well be vital for present-day Confucian thinkers to consider in reformulating and re-presenting their own commitments and traditions in the current era.The questions posed to and for the current paper are, first, how does the religiously committed philosopher (or theologian, in a loose sense of the term) consciously incorporate political and economic considerations into her theological research and discursive product; and second, to what extent and in what ways is it necessary for her also to include and address her own personal life/history into the same. Naturally, these are questions which religious thinkers will ask and answer anew for themselves, and repeatedly. My own engagement with Judith Butler in the current paper will merely provide, I hope, one possible model for such an account of how the personal and the political may function in theological discourse. Generally, the model given here suggests that such considerations are not external add-ons to the more essential “hard-core” theologizing of the doctrines of God and Christology. It is not a matter of (first) theory and (then) application. Rather, theological discourse is one place where ethical subjectivity is attained, if provisionally, through conscientious and critical engagement with both one’s religious tradition and the sociopolitical-economic structures in which those traditions are practiced, and where one’s own place within those structures is both questioned and created.In her recent work Giving an Account of Oneself, Judith Butler continues her project of deconstructing the metaphysics of the substantive self, begun in her deservedly noted early work, Gender Trouble. In particular, she argues that the subject comes into being through processes and in contexts that, while not completely determinative of one’s subjectivity, do limit one’s ability to give a complete account of oneself, one’s actions and motivations. She asks the important question of whether this opacity of the conditions of one’s coming into being limits the possibility of taking responsibility, or being held responsible, for one’s actions. She ultimately finds, with Foucault, that selfhood is itself an ethical process, one occasioned and in large part constituted by the call, and subsequent attempt, to give an account.The question which drives Butler’s essay is, generally, if the subject comes... (shrink)

Philosophy Lab: An Experiential Approach to Conceptual Analysis gives students the skills and strategies needed to do philosophical work in the Analytic tradition. They are presented with a step-by-step method for performing a preliminary conceptual analysis and practice examples to apply the method to standard philosophical problems. Students are introduced to the work of great thinkers including Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Wittgenstein, and Ryle. These works are complemented by contemporary empirical findings concerning perception, desire, emotion, moral intuition, and other basic elements (...) of explicit intentional cognition. Each chapter features primary source material, commentary, and activity instructions. The activities are designed to allow students to experience each mode of cognition in relative isolation, and then to see how they combine and interrelate in more complex contexts. Finally, students use the template model of conceptual analysis to explore the material. They identify and isolate the concept to be analyzed, determine whether it is simple or complex, and if complex, identify the constituent parts of the concept. Specific topics covered include causal power, sex and marriage, compassion, ambition, justice, and death. Through presentation and modeling the book not only enables student to do conceptual analysis with precision, it helps them understand and interpret philosophical issues. Philosophy Lab is a comprehensive, carefully designed text for first courses in philosophy. It may be used with first-year undergraduate students, advanced high-school students, or adult learners. Asher Walden holds a Ph.D. in philosophy and religion from Drew University. Dr. Walden is currently an adjunct lecturer at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. (shrink)

The 1850s through early 60s was a transformative period for nascent studies of the remote human past in Britain, across many disciplines. Naturalists and scholars with Egyptological knowledge fashioned themselves as authorities to contend with this divisive topic. In a characteristic case of long-distance fieldwork, British geologist Leonard Horner employed Turkish-born, English-educated, Cairo-based engineer Joseph Hekekyan to measure Nile silt deposits around pharaonic monuments in Egypt to address the chronological gap between the earliest historical and latest geological time. Their conclusion (...) in 1858 that humans had existed in Egypt for exactly 13,371 years was the earliest attempt to apply geological stratigraphy to absolute human dates. The geochronology was particularly threatening to biblical orthodoxy, and the work raised private and public concerns about chronological expertise and methodology, scriptural and scientific authority, and the credibility of Egyptian informants. This essay traces these geo-archaeological investigations; including the movement of paper records, Hekekyan’s role as a go-between, and the publication’s reception in Britain. The diverse reactions to the Egyptian research reveal competing ways of knowing the prehistoric past and highlights mid-Victorian attempts to reshape the porous boundaries between scholarly studies of human antiquity. (shrink)

Resenha do livro: ENKVIST, Inger. Educação: Guia para perplexos. Campinas-SP: Kirion, 2019. 142 p. Inger Enkvist é professora de literatura espanhola na Universidade de Lund, na Suécia e estudiosa das ideias pedagógicas e práticas educativas, com vasta publicação de ensaios e livros sobre o tema, analisando-o em suas aplicações em diferentes contextos. É conhecida por sua crítica às abordagens pedagógicas que se tornaram hegemônicas a partir da metade do século XX, as quais ela sintetiza sob o título de “ nova (...) pedagogia”, contrastando-as com os pressupostos teóricos e práticas da chamada “pedagogia tradicional”. Na obra em análise, a autora procura esclarecer o conceito de “pedagogia tradicional” ou “educação tradicional” que, segundo ela, normalmente é apresentado de forma superficial, pejorativa e até caricatural. Remete-se à filosofia clássica para apresentar os fundamentos dessa tradição que já vem sendo negada desde que a educação passou a ser pensada dos pontos de vistas utilitarista e igualitarista, desde o século XIX, culminando na hegemonia de tais pressupostos em meados do século XX. Aponta a crise atual como, em grande parte, consequência dessa “nova” percepção. Nessa abordagem introdutória, propõe aos educadores o aprofundar-se no conhecimento dos conceitos e princípios educação tradicional, refletindo sobre as suas implicações práticas e os resultados obtidos por países que ainda os adotam. Realiza também uma avaliação dos pressupostos da “nova pedagogia” e as suas possíveis relações não apenas com os resultados da educação escolar, mas implicações sociais mais amplas. Aborda as diversas aplicações do conceito de educação e espaços onde ela é realizada, delimitando o seu enfoque a educação escolar e as suas relações. Discute os fundamentos epistemológicos da educação, o papel do professor, sua formação e postura profissional, as disciplinas escolares, seus objetivos e métodos de ensino e aprendizagem, bem como os papéis da instituição escolar, do aluno e a imprescindível colaboração da família. Aborda ainda a educação como política de Estado, refletindo sobre avaliações dos sistemas de ensino em diferentes contextos. Enkvist (2019) discute inicialmente o conceito de educação em suas diversas aplicações e nos vários espaços de sua realização, enfatizando aquela que é produzida no âmbito da família e da escola. Nesse aspecto, apesar das diferenças de objetivos e fundamentação teórica, a abordagem lembra Brandão (2001), apontando quão amplo é este conceito e a diversidade de possibilidades de suas aplicações, sendo a educação escolar apenas uma delas. Mesmo sendo o objetivo da autora tratar especificamente da educação escolar, reconhece a necessidade de articular a sua abordagem aos outros aspectos e instituições relacionadas. Para ela, “a educação de um jovem é um projeto de colaboração entre o próprio jovem, a família, a escola e a sociedade” (p.71). Data de registro: 01/10/2020 Data de aceite: 22/09/2021. (shrink)

This book explores the problem of moral metaphysics through investigations of four pivotal philosophers. It uses the contemporary idea of moral sentimentalism as a comparative category to explore the problems and challenges inherent in the project of moral metaphysics.

Educators and policy makers confront challenging questions of ethics, justice, and equity on a regular basis. Should teachers retain a struggling student if it means she will most certainly drop out? Should an assignment plan favor middle-class families if it means strengthening the school system for all? These everyday dilemmas are both utterly ordinary and immensely challenging, yet there are few opportunities and resources to help educators think through the ethical issues at stake. Drawing on research and methods developed in (...) the Justice in Schools project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education,_ Dilemmas of Educational Ethics_ introduces a new interdisciplinary approach to achieving practical wisdom in education, one that honors the complexities inherent in educational decision making and encourages open discussion of the values and principles we should collectively be trying to realize in educational policy and practice. At the heart of the book are six richly described, realistic accounts of ethical dilemmas that have arisen in education in recent years, paired with responses written by noted philosophers, empirical researchers, policy makers, and practitioners, including Pedro Noguera, Howard Gardner, Mary Pattillo, Andres A. Alonso, Jamie Ahlberg, Toby N. Romer, and Michael J. Petrilli. The editors illustrate how readers can use and adapt these cases and commentaries in schools and other settings in order to reach a difficult decision, deepen their own understanding, or to build teams around shared values. (shrink)

The study of the feeling of knowing may have implications for some of the metatheoretical issues concerning consciousness and control. Assuming a distinction between information-based and experience-based metacognitive judgments, it is argued that the sheer phenomenological experience of knowing (''noetic feeling'') occupies a unique role in mediating between implicit-automatic processes, on the one hand, and explicit-controlled processes, on the other. Rather than reflecting direct access to memory traces, noetic feelings are based on inferential heuristics that operate implicitly and unintentionally. Once (...) such heuristics give rise to a conscious feeling that feeling can then affect controlled action. Examination of the cues that affect noetic feelings suggest that not only do these feelings inform controlled action, but they are also informed by feedback from the outcome of that action. (shrink)

_Teaching in a democracy is challenging and filled with dilemmas that have no easy answers._ For example, how do educators meet their responsibilities of teaching civic norms and dispositions while remaining nonpartisan? _Democratic Discord in Schools_ features eight normative cases of complex dilemmas drawn from real events designed to help educators practice the type of collaborative problem solving and civil discourse needed to meet these challenges of democratic education. Each of the cases also features a set of six commentaries written (...) by a diverse array of scholars, educators, policy makers, students, and activists with a range of political views to spark reflection and conversation. Drawing on research and methods developed in the Justice in Schools project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), _Democratic Discord in Schools_ provides the tools that allow educators and others to practice the deliberative skills they need in order to find reasonable solutions to common ethical dilemmas in politically fraught times. (shrink)

After its establishment in 1948 many Jews emmigrated to Israel from Arab countries, Yemen included. In 1995, a governmental committee was established to investigate the alleged disappearance of about 1000 Yemenite children from hospitals within transit camps where the new immigrants were kept in the 1950s. Interviews with Yemenites present how the bodies of new immigrants were medicalized and commodified in the transit camps during the mass-immigration period of the 1950s, and how people have come to resist it. I conclude (...) with the role of the Israeli medical profession and biomedical technologies in promoting national goals and as mediators of collective, group and individual identities. (shrink)

Western representation of countries from the Global South implies a dichotomist view of business ethics: on the one hand, universal ethics largely reproduces commonsensical views of the South as ‘less ethical’, and on the other hand, voices from the South are often conditioned to present themselves as substantially indigenous and unambiguous to be accepted as legitimate ethical subjects. We join the growing interest in bridging this gap by drawing on studies from human geography, and ask to what extent the materiality (...) of moral dilemmas bespeaks the disputed underpinning ethical values of a given space. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s perspective of the production of social space, we outline and apply the idea of ‘spatial ethics’ to organizations, in order to approach the entanglement between center and periphery. We analyze organizations in favelas, which are, for many authors, territories where experiences are extreme, and poverty and violence mix with vibrant culture and ingenuity. We critically approach the field of business ethics and suggest that one way of moving beyond the North–South debate is to consider that ethics cannot be transmitted or represented in empty milieus. (shrink)

Martin Buber’s political thought has enjoyed renewed attention lately, particularly his concept of “theopolitics,” a type of political practice that recognizes God as the ultimate political authority. In Buber’s biblical exegesis, theopolitics is a condition of everyday life in premonarchical Israel, but following the installation of the monarchy, it becomes a specialized activity of prophets, consisting chiefly in divinely commanded intercession against state actions. Buber suggests that a version of this prophetic activity is manifest in present-day socialist cooperatives, especially the (...) kibbutzim. Indeed, for Buber, these cooperatives can be seen as laying the groundwork for messianic redemption. This essay probes some potentially troubling implications of Buber’s theopolitical framework, taking objections raised in Walter Benjamin’s correspondence as an entry point. A central concern for Benjamin is Buber’s nationalist articulation of Jewish identity, which appears all the more problematic when considered in tandem with the teleological view of history evident in Buber’s framework. (shrink)

It is stated in many text books that the any metric appearing in general relativity should be locally Lorentzian i.e. of the type η μ ν =diag (1,−1,−1,−1) this is usually presented as an independent axiom of the theory, which can not be deduced from other assumptions. The meaning of this assertion is that a specific coordinate (the temporal coordinate) is given a unique significance with respect to the other spatial coordinates. In this work it is shown that the above (...) assertion is a consequence of requirement that the metric of empty space should be linearly stable and need not be assumed. (shrink)

The paper offers a new reading of the argument against poetry in Plato’s Republic 10. I argue that Socrates’ corruption charges rely on the tripartite theory of the soul, and that metaphysical doctrines play a role only in the first charge, which demonstrates that the poets are not qualified to teach by reducing tragic poetry to mimetic skill. This accusation clears the way for two corruption charges: the strengthening of appetite, and the softening of spirit (i.e., ‘the greatest charge’). The (...) former focuses on the dangerous association between the poets and the largest appetitive class in the city (hoi polloi), while the latter focuses on the corruption of the educated elite (hoi epieikeis). (shrink)

The relationship between metacognition and mindreading was investigated by comparing the monitoring of one’s own learning and another person’s learning . Previous studies indicated that in self-paced study judgments of learning for oneself are inversely related to the amount of study time invested in each item. This suggested reliance on the memorizing-effort heuristic that shorter ST is diagnostic of better recall. In this study although an inverse ST–JOL relationship was observed for Self, it was found for Other only when the (...) Other condition followed the Self condition. The results were interpreted in terms of the proposal that the processes underlying experience-based metacognitive judgments are largely unconscious. However, participants can derive insight from observing themselves as they monitor their own learning, and transfer that insight to Other, thus exhibiting a shift from experience-based to theory-based judgments. Although different processes mediate metacognition and mindreading, metacognition can inform mindreading. (shrink)

This article is intended to emphasize several ethical issues relating to the activities of the internal auditor. The points of view expressed relate mainly to the public sector of Israel. Beyond the discussion of the specific issues against its unique Israeli background (Internal Audit Law), the discussion throws light on general problems that have not yet been solved.

The Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen paradox (1935) is reexamined in the light of Shannon’s information theory (1984). The EPR argument did not take into account that the observer’s information was localized, like any other physical object.

Bell inequalities are derived for any number of observers, any number of alternative setups for each one of them and any number of distinct outcomes for each experiment. It is shown that if a physical system consists of several distant subsystems, and if the results of tests performed on the latter are determined by local variables with objective values, then the joint probabilities for triggering any given set of distant detectors are convex combinations of a finite number of Boolean arrays, (...) whose components are either 0 or 1 according to a simple rule. This convexity property is both necessary and sufficient for the existence of local objective variables. It leads to a simple graphical method which produces a large number of generalized Clauser-Horne inequalities corresponding to the faces of a convex polytope. It is plausible that quantum systems whose density matrix has a positive partial transposition satisfy all these inequalities, and therefore are compatible with local objective variables, even if their quantum properties are essentially non-local. (shrink)

Fundamentismus und Skeptizismus-Anarchismus sind zwei entgegengesetzte Positionen in der traditionellen Erkenntnistheorie und in der modernen Wissenschaftstheorie. Zwischen ihnen gibt es einen dritten Standpunkt, den Evolutionismus. Beispiele sind zwei neuere Arbeiten von Putnam und Stegmüller . Im Gegensatz zum logisch-statischen Fundamentismus berücksichtigt der Evolutionismus auch dynamische und naturalistische Ansätze. Stegmüller folgend entlehnen wir in der vorliegenden Untersuchung aus der Sprachphilosophie pragmatische Gesichtspunkte, um die logische Syntax und Semantik, die Werkzeuge des Fundamentismus, zu ersetzen. Wir zeigen die Kraft der Pragmatik bei der (...) Behandlung von Problemen wie Erkenntniswachstum, Begriffswechsel, Theorien- und Bedeutungsdynamik, wissenschaftliche Entdeckung und besonders beim Problem der Inkommensurabilität. Unser nicht-fundamentistischer Vorschlag ist ein heuristisches Modell, das auf der modernen genetischen Theorie basiert. (shrink)