Measuring neuronal activity with electrophysiological methods may be useful in detecting neurological dysfunctions, such as mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI). This approach may be particularly valuable for rapid detection in at-risk populations including military service members and athletes. Electrophysiological methods, such as quantitative electroencephalography (qEEG) and recording event-related potentials (ERPs) may be promising; however, the field is nascent and significant controversy exists on the efficacy and accuracy of the approaches as diagnostic tools. For example, the specific measures derived from an (...) electroencephalogram (EEG) that are most suitable as markers of dysfunction have not been clearly established. A study was conducted to summarize and evaluate the statistical rigor of evidence on the overall utility of qEEG as an mTBI detection tool. The analysis evaluated qEEG measures/parameters that may be most suitable as fieldable diagnostic tools, identified other types of EEG measures and analysis methods of promise, recommended specific measures and analysis methods for further development as mTBI detection tools, identified research gaps in the field, and recommended future research and development thrust areas. The qEEG study group formed the following conclusions: 1. Individual qEEG measures provide limited diagnostic utility for mTBI. However, many measures can be important features of qEEG discriminant functions, which do show significant promise as mTBI detection tools. 2. ERPs offer utility in mTBI detection. In fact, evidence indicates that ERPs can identify abnormalities in cases where EEGs alone are nondisclosing. 3. The standard mathematical procedures used in the characterization of mTBI EEGs should be expanded to incorporate newer methods of analysis including nonlinear dynamical analysis, complexity measures, analysis of causal interactions, graph theory and information dynamics. 4. and 5. are too long to include here. (shrink)

In this response to the critiques of Fontaine and Hughes and Evans, we touch on main points of consensus and contention, and offer some suggestions for future programs of research.

Michael A. PetersBeijing Normal UniversityMy deepest condolences to Pepe, Dom and Marcus and to Jim’s grandchildren. Tina and I spent a lot of time at the Marshall family home, often attending dinn...

The author develops the claim that humans characteristically maintain a sense of protectedness by creating various forms of metaphysical illusion, replacing the tragic finitude and transience of human existence with a permanent and eternally changeless reality. One such illusion forms around planet earth itself, transformed into an indestructible metaphysical entity. It has become increasingly difficult, in the face of the ravages of climate change, to maintain the illusion of earth’s indestructibility, and with it, a sense of safety. The author refers (...) to the feelings evoked by the crumbling of metaphysical illusion as Apocalyptic anxiety¬—the dread of the end of human civilization. This Apocalyptic dread needs to be confronted (not evaded) in a comportment of dwelling—with our vulnerable planet and with our vulnerable fellow human beings. (shrink)

The claim is frequently made that structured collections of individuals who are themselves subjects of mental and cognitive states – such collections as courts, countries, and corporations – can be, and often are, subjects of mental or cognitive states. And, to be clear, advocates for this so-called group-minds hypothesis intend their view to be interpreted literally, not metaphorically. The existing critical literature casts substantial doubt on this view, at least on the assumption that groups are claimed to instantiate the same (...) species of mental and cognitive properties as individual humans. In this essay, I evaluate a defensive move made by some proponents of the group-oriented view: to concede that group states and individual states aren’t of the same specific natural kinds, while holding that groups instantiate different species of mental or cognitive states – perhaps a different species of cognition itself – from those instantiated by humans. In order to evaluate this defense of group cognition, I develop a view of natural kinds – or at least of the sort of evidence that supports inferences to the sameness of natural kind – a view I have previous dubbed the ‘tweak-and-extend’ theory. Guided by the tweak-and-extend approach, I arrive at a tentative conclusion: that what is common to models of individual cognitive processing and models of group processing does not suffice to establish sameness of cognitive (or mental) kinds, properties, or state-types, not even at a generic or overarching level. (shrink)

This volume assembles ten studies of the life and work of Thomas Harriot (1560-1621). These are based on lectures that have been given annually at Oriel College, Oxford since 1990, by such authorities as Hugh Trevor Roper, David Quinn and John D. North. The contributions to Thomas Harriot. An Elizabethan man of science shed new light on all the main aspects of Harriot's life and stand as an important contribution to the re-evaluation of one of the most gifted and intriguing (...) figures in early modern British science. (shrink)

Designed for those wanting to be teachers, administrators, or other educational practitioners, this work shows how the study of educational philosophy should ...

Clinical ethics is a relatively new discipline within medicine, generated not so much by the Can we . . . ? questions of fact and prognosis that physicians ...

This essay develops the thesis that the essence of psychoanalysis lies in emotional phenomenology.

In the present essay we explore a form of linguistic witchery (Wittgenstein) aimed at forging a sense of unity from incompatible visions of reality—namely, the formation of oxymoronic hybrids.

The Covid-19 pandemic has led to severe shortages of many essential goods and services, from hand sanitizers and N-95 masks to ICU beds and ventilators. Although rationing is not unprecedented, never before has the American public been faced with the prospect of having to ration medical goods and services on this scale.

Data science skills are rapidly becoming a necessity in modern science. In response to this need, institutions and organizations around the world are developing research data science curricula to teach the programming and computational skills that are needed to build and maintain data infrastructures and maximize the use of available data. To date, however, few of these courses have included an explicit ethics component, and developing such components can be challenging. This paper describes a novel approach to teaching data ethics (...) on short courses developed for the CODATA-RDA Schools for Research Data Science. The ethics content of these schools is centred on the concept of open and responsible science citizenship that draws on virtue ethics to promote ethics of practice. Despite having little formal teaching time, this concept of citizenship is made central to the course by distributing ethics content across technical modules. Ethics instruction consists of a wide range of techniques, including stand-alone lectures, group discussions and mini-exercises linked to technical modules. This multi-level approach enables students to develop an understanding both of “responsible and open science citizenship”, and of how such responsibilities are implemented in daily research practices within their home environment. This approach successfully locates ethics within daily data science practice, and allows students to see how small actions build into larger ethical concerns. This emphasises that ethics are not something “removed from daily research” or the remit of data generators/end users, but rather are a vital concern for all data scientists. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIs offering hazard pay ethically permissible when the pay premium is the only reason that a dangerous job is accepted? Robert C. Hughes argues that it is not. Central to his argument is the claim that in such cases, workers intend the foreseeable risks of harm as a means to the pay premium. Herein I question the plausibility of this claim and then develop a conception of the concept of means sufficient to make it plausible. By so doing, (...) I provide support for Hughes’s stringent position. (shrink)

The Jeffreys–Lindley paradox displays how the use of a \ value ) in a frequentist hypothesis test can lead to an inference that is radically different from that of a Bayesian hypothesis test in the form advocated by Harold Jeffreys in the 1930s and common today. The setting is the test of a well-specified null hypothesis versus a composite alternative. The \ value, as well as the ratio of the likelihood under the null hypothesis to the maximized likelihood under the (...) alternative, can strongly disfavor the null hypothesis, while the Bayesian posterior probability for the null hypothesis can be arbitrarily large. The academic statistics literature contains many impassioned comments on this paradox, yet there is no consensus either on its relevance to scientific communication or on its correct resolution. The paradox is quite relevant to frontier research in high energy physics. This paper is an attempt to explain the situation to both physicists and statisticians, in the hope that further progress can be made. (shrink)

_A moving meditation on recent geopolitical crises, viewed through the lens of ancient and modern tragedy__ “Spare, elegant and poignant.... If there is a single contemporary book that should be pressed into the hands of those who decide issues of war and peace, this is it.”—John Gray, _New Statesman_ “It is tragic that Robert D. Kaplan’s luminous _The Tragic Mind_ is so urgently needed.”—George F. Will_ Some books emerge from a lifetime of hard-won knowledge. Robert D. Kaplan has (...) learned, from a career spent reporting on wars, revolutions, and international politics in Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia, that the essence of geopolitics is tragedy. In _The Tragic Mind_, he employs the works of ancient Greek dramatists, Shakespeare, German philosophers, and the modern classics to explore the central subjects of international politics: order, disorder, rebellion, ambition, loyalty to family and state, violence, and the mistakes of power. The great dilemmas of international politics, he argues, are not posed by good versus evil—a clear and easy choice—but by contests of good versus good, where the choices are often searing, incompatible, and fraught with consequences. A deeply learned and deeply felt meditation on the importance of lived experience in conducting international relations, this is a book for everyone who wants a profound understanding of the tragic politics of our time. (shrink)

Despite its familiarity and widespread acceptance, the concept of “brain death” remains incoherent in theory and confused in practice. Moreover, the only purpose served by the concept is to facilitate the procurement of transplantable organs. By abandoning the concept of brain death and adopting different criteria for organ procurement, we may be able to increase both the supply of transplantable organs and clarity in our understanding of death.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880Robert GrudinThe Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880, by D. G. Myers; 224 pp. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1996, $30.40 paper.D. G. Myers opens his history of creating writing instruction in America with an anecdote: When Vladimir Nabokov was proposed for a chair in literature at Harvard, Roman Jakobson objected. “What’s next?” he said. “Shall we appoint [End Page 529] (...) elephants to teach zoology?” This question not only provides Myers’s book with its title but also suggests a major issue of literary pedagogy: is the teaching of literature the province of philologists and theorists who interpret books, or is it the province of authors who write them? Jakobson the philologist implies that writers, who just produce the stuff, lack knowledge of interpretive method and thus have little business in the classroom. Others—writers and teachers alike—have thought differently and have over the past century fostered the growth of creative writing at American colleges and high schools.The Elephants Teach is a comprehensive and coherent effort to deal with a ponderous mass of history and discourse: the development of writing curricula since 1880 and the ongoing professional dialogue about the proper relationship between writing and teaching. The first four of his seven chapters deal with roots and preliminaries: the rise of literature instruction as philology after the Civil War, the inception of English composition at Harvard (championed by Adams Sherman Hill, Barrett Wendell, Dean Le Baron Briggs, and Charles Townsend Copeland), and the professional, cultural, and financial forces drawing writers to campuses in the early twentieth century. These chapters establish three major forces leading to the rise of the creative writing curriculum: the consensus that writing experience is of value to the individual and society, the reiterated conviction that literary instruction should consider the perspective of the writer, and the broad recognition by “serious” writers, who had little or no access to the mass market, that they could agreeably support themselves in the classroom. These forces would lead to what Myers correctly sees as a massive compromise: a complex of writing programs simultaneously satisfying students’ needs and allowing thousands of writers to pursue, if only by fits and starts, their professional calling.Myers then serves up the main course: a three-chapter narrative, stretching from the 1920s down to the present, of the history of creative writing as a so-named and self-conscious institution in American education. The opening of this section is not only informative but characteristic of the overall lucidity of Myers’s style: “Creative writing was first taught under its own name in the 1920s. It began in junior high school where it was originally conducted as an experiment to replace traditional English—grammar, spelling, penmanship, even literature classes—with something more appealing to young people. As such it was part of a broader movement to reform American education in the first half of the twentieth century. The cry was that subjects should not be taught, students should; the reform movement called itself progressive education. Creative writing was invented to transport progressive methods and materials into a junior-high-school English classroom. The man who invented it was a progressive educator—once well known, now largely forgotten—named Hughes Mearns” (p. 101). William Hughes Mearns (1875–1965) was himself a disciple of John Dewey, whose ideas formed the basis for progressive education in general. Adapting the Deweyan concept of learning as a spur to personal [End Page 530] development, Mearns saw writing “as the efficient cause of an education in which the final cause was personal growth” (pp. 104–11).After Mearns, Myers considers a somewhat more familiar chapter in history: the appearance of creative writing as a self-contained discipline on the college campus. Credit for the original initiative goes to Norman Foerster (1887–1972), who in 1930 took over the newly-founded School of Letters at the University of Iowa. A follower of Irving Babbitt and the “new humanism,” Foerster set out (in his own words) “to give all types of literary students a rigorous and appropriate discipline” (p. 126). Foerster’s “discipline” was a varied curriculum including... (shrink)

Robert Rupert argues against the view that human cognitive processes comprise elements beyond the boundary of the organism, developing a systems-based conception in place of this extended view. He also argues for a conciliatory understanding of the relation between the computational approach to cognition and the embedded and embodied views.

The history of religions is divided into phenomenological and historical branches: the former has no definite interpretative categories but the latter does, namely the "religions" - Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, and others. But the "religions" are misleading and preclude understanding, for these categories were imposed before historical research and are neither historical nor religious. A definition of religion is needed to. begin, and Tillich's suggestion - religion is ultimate concern -is functional, enables us to identify what we are looking for, and (...) is non-judgmental. The "religions," on the other hand ' imply an essence of each religion and preclude the examination of the religious experience of each individual in his own terms. The historical study of religion should be undertaken according to areas, not "religions," and the final step should be determination of the "types" of concern-the task of phenomenology. (shrink)

In the first argumentative section of Book 1, Lucretius establishes the existence of matter and void , and in the second identifies matter as the atoms and defines their properties . In the third section, following Epicurean tradition, he attempts to refute a representative selection of Presocratic philosophers – Heraclitus , Empedocles and Anaxagoras – whose explanations of basic matter are potential rivals to the atomist theory which he has just outlined. The climax to this section is reached in Lucretius' (...) triumphant personal claim to be an original poet and health-bringing purveyor of truth . His foregoing criticism of the Presocratics as writers and thinkers is deeply coloured by the values he openly professes here. The introductory passages to each philosopher, in particular, are highly revealing of Lucretius' personal inclinations as a poet and exhibit a virtuoso command of several styles and techniques. (shrink)

We seek to change the conversation about brain death by highlighting the distinction between brain death as a biological concept versus brain death as a legal status. The fact that brain death does not cohere with any biologically plausible definition of death has been known for decades. Nevertheless, this fact has not threatened the acceptance of brain death as a legal status that permits individuals to be treated as if they are dead. The similarities between “legally dead” and “legally blind” (...) demonstrate how we may legitimately choose bright-line legal definitions that do not cohere with biological reality. Not only does this distinction bring conceptual coherence to the conversation about brain death, but it has practical implications as well. Once brain death is recognized as a social construction not grounded in biological reality, we create the possibility of changing the social construction in ways that may better serve both organ donors and recipients alike. (shrink)

This book is a history of the crucial developmental years of quantum theory with an emphasis on the literature rather than an overview of this period focusing on personalities or personal stories of the scientists involved. This book instead focuses on how the theoretical discoveries came about, when and where they were published, and how they became accepted as part of the scientific canon.

The concept of brain death has become deeply ingrained in our health care system. It serves as the justification for the removal of vital organs like the heart and liver from patients who still have circulation and respiration while these organs maintain viability. On close examination, however, the concept is seen as incoherent and counterintuitive to our understandings of death. In order to abandon the concept of brain death and yet retain our practices in organ transplantation, we need to either (...) change the definition of death or no longer maintain a commitment to the dead donor rule, which is an implicit prohibition against removing vital organs from individuals before they are declared dead. After exploring these two options, the author argues that while new definitions of death are problematic, alternatives to the dead donor rule are both ethically justifiable and potentially palatable to the public. Even so, the author concludes that neither of these approaches is likely to be adopted and that resolution will most probably come when technological advances in immunology simply make the concept of brain death obsolete. (shrink)

How exactly is accepting the bad side effects of good choices morally defensible? The best defense to date is by Joseph Boyle, John Finnis, and Germain Grisez and relies on the claim that bad side effects are unavoidable. But are they? Three accounts of why bad side effects are unavoidable—one by John Zeis, a second by Boyle, Finnis, and Grisez jointly, and a third by Boyle independently—are examined and rejected. Next, an alternative proposal which suggests bad side effects are always (...) avoidable is also examined and rejected. Finally, an adequate account of why bad side effects are unavoidable is presented and defended. This defense relies on certain facts about the goods which human agents ultimately find fulfilling and about human agents’ attempts to instantiate those goods through various projects. (shrink)

Savulescu and colleagues have provided interesting insights into how the UK public view the ‘best interests’ of children like Charlie Gard. But is best interests the right standard for evaluating these types of cases? In the USA, both clinical decisions and legal judgments tend to follow the ‘harm principle’, which holds that parental choices for their children should prevail unless their decisions subject the child to avoidable harm. The case of Charlie Gard, and others like it, show how the USA (...) and the UK have strikingly different approaches for making decisions about the treatment of severely disabled children. (shrink)

The concept of brain death was recently described as being “at once well settled and persistently unresolved.” Every day, in the United States and around the world, physicians diagnose patients as brain dead, and then proceed to transplant organs from these patients into others in need. Yet as well settled as this practice has become, brain death continues to be the focus of controversy, with two journals in bioethics dedicating major sections to the topic within the last two years.By way (...) of background, the Uniform Determination of Death Act states that “[a]n individual who has sustained either: irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions, or irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem, is dead. A determination of death must be made in accordance with accepted medical standards.” In other words, death can be defined by either cardiorespiratory or neurological criteria, with “brain death” representing the loss of all brain function. This standard, or closely related variants, has become the accepted approach throughout the United States and in many parts of the world. (shrink)

Over the past several decades, medical ethics has gained a solid foothold in medical education and is now a required course in most medical schools. Although the field of medical ethics is by nature eclectic, moral philosophy has played a dominant role in defining both the content of what is taught and the methodology for reasoning about ethical dilemmas. Most educators largely rely on the case‐based method for teaching ethics, grounding the ethical reasoning in an amalgam of theories drawn from (...) moral philosophy, including consequentialism, deontology, and principlism.In this article we hope to make a case for augmenting the focus of education in medical ethics. We propose complementing the traditional approach to medical ethics with a more embedded approach, one that has been described by others as “microethics,” the ethics of everyday clinical practice. (shrink)

This paper uses an environmental justice framework to examine government response to weather-related disasters dating back some eight decades. It places the 2005 Hurricane Katrina disaster in socio-historical context of past emergencies with an emphasis on race and class dynamics and social vulnerability. Key questions explored include: What went wrong? Can it happen again? Is government equipped to plan for, mitigate against, respond to, and recover from natural and manmade disasters? Can the public trust government response to be fair? Why (...) are so many African Americans Alocked out@ of New Orleans= post-Katrina rebuilding, reconstruction, and recovery? (shrink)

Stolorow and his collaborators' post-Cartesian psychoanalytic perspective – intersubjective-systems theory – is a phenomenological contextualism that illuminates worlds of emotional experience as they take form within relational contexts. After outlining the evolution and basic ideas of this framework, Stolorow shows both how post-Cartesian psychoanalysis finds enrichment and philosophical support in Heidegger's analysis of human existence, and how Heidegger's existential philosophy, in turn, can be enriched and expanded by an encounter with post-Cartesian psychoanalysis. In doing so, he creates an important psychological (...) bridge between post-Cartesian psychoanalysis and existential philosophy in the phenomenology of emotional trauma. (shrink)

In the first argumentative section of Book 1, Lucretius establishes the existence of matter and void, and in the second identifies matter as the atoms and defines their properties. In the third section, following Epicurean tradition, he attempts to refute a representative selection of Presocratic philosophers – Heraclitus, Empedocles and Anaxagoras – whose explanations of basic matter are potential rivals to the atomist theory which he has just outlined. The climax to this section is reached in Lucretius' triumphant personal claim (...) to be an original poet and health-bringing purveyor of truth. His foregoing criticism of the Presocratics as writers and thinkers is deeply coloured by the values he openly professes here. The introductory passages to each philosopher, in particular, are highly revealing of Lucretius' personal inclinations as a poet and exhibit a virtuoso command of several styles and techniques. (shrink)

Recent debates over adults' theory of mind use have been fueled by surprising failures of perspective-taking in communication, suggesting that perspective-taking may be relatively effortful. Yet adults routinely engage in effortful processes when needed. How, then, should speakers and listeners allocate their resources to achieve successful communication? We begin with the observation that the shared goal of communication induces a natural division of labor: The resources one agent chooses to allocate toward perspective-taking should depend on their expectations about the other's (...) allocation. We formalize this idea in a resource-rational model augmenting recent probabilistic weighting accounts with a mechanism for (costly) control over the degree of perspective-taking. In a series of simulations, we first derive an intermediate degree of perspective weighting as an optimal trade-off between expected costs and benefits of perspective-taking. We then present two behavioral experiments testing novel predictions of our model. In Experiment 1, we manipulated the presence or absence of occlusions in a director–matcher task. We found that speakers spontaneously modulated the informativeness of their descriptions to account for “known unknowns” in their partner's private view, reflecting a higher degree of speaker perspective-taking than previously acknowledged. In Experiment 2, we then compared the scripted utterances used by confederates in prior work with those produced in interactions with unscripted directors. We found that confederates were systematically less informative than listeners would initially expect given the presence of occlusions, but listeners used violations to adaptively make fewer errors over time. Taken together, our work suggests that people are not simply “mindblind”; they use contextually appropriate expectations to navigate the division of labor with their partner. We discuss how a resource-rational framework may provide a more deeply explanatory foundation for understanding flexible perspective-taking under processing constraints. (shrink)