Delusions are one of the most classical symptoms described in schizophrenia. However, despite delusions are often emotionally charged, they have been investigated using tasks involving non-affective material, such as the Beads task. In this study we compared 30 patients with schizophrenia experiencing delusions with 32 matched controls in their pattern of responses to two versions of the Beads task within a Bayesian framework. The two versions of the Beads task consisted of one emotional and one neutral, both with ratios of (...) beads of 60:40 and 80:20, considered, respectively, as the “difficult” and “easy” variants of the task. Results indicate that patients showed a greater deviation from the normative model, especially in the 60:40 ratio, suggesting that more inaccurate probability estimations are more likely to occur under uncertainty conditions. Additionally, both patients and controls showed a greater deviation in the emotional version of the task, providing evidence of a reasoning bias modulated by the content of the stimuli. Finally, a positive correlation between patients’ deviation and delusional symptomatology was found. Impairments in the 60:40 ratio with emotional content was related to the amount of disruption in life caused by delusions. These results contribute to the understanding of how cognitive mechanisms interact with characteristics of the task in the context of delusional thinking. These findings might be used to inform improved intervention programs in the domain of inferential reasoning. (shrink)

This article outlines and compares current and proposed global institutional mechanisms to increase equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines, focusing on their institutional and operational complementarities and overlaps. It specifically considers the World Health Organization's (WHO’s) COVAX (COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access) model as part of the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator (ACT-A) initiative, the WHO’s COVID-19 Technology Access Pool (C-TAP) initiative, the proposed TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Agreement) intellectual property waiver and other proposed WHO and World Trade Organization technology (...) transfer proposals. We argue that while various individual mechanisms each have their specific individual merits—and in some cases weaknesses—overall, many of these current and proposed mechanisms could be highly complementary if used together to deliver equitable global access to vaccines. Nonetheless, we also argue that there are risks posed by the proliferation of proposals in this context, including the potential to disperse stakeholder attention or to delay decisive action. Therefore, we argue that there is now a clear need for concerted global multilateral action to recognise the complementarities of specific models and to provide a pathway for collaboration in attaining global equitable access to vaccines. The institutional infrastructure or proposals to achieve this amply exist at this point in time—but much greater cooperation from industry and clear, decisive and coordinated action from states and international organisations are urgently needed. (shrink)

Susi offers a novel non-coherence theory of digital human rights to explain the change in meaning and scope of human rights rules, principles, ideas and concepts, and the interrelationships and related actors, when moving from the physical domain into the online domain. The transposition into the digital reality can alter the meaning of well-established offline human rights to a wider or narrower extent, impacting core concepts such as transparency, legal certainty and foreseeability. Susi analyses the 'loss in transposition' (...) of some core features of the rights to privacy and freedom of expression. The non-coherence theory is used to explore key human rights theoretical concepts, such as the network society approach, the capabilities approach, transversality, and self-normativity, and it is also applied to e-state and artificial intelligence, challenging the idea of the sameness of rights. This title is part of the Flip it Open programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sunyata and Otherness:Applying Mutually Transformative Categories from Buddhist-Christian Dialogue in ChristologySusie Paulik Babka“The universe is expanding,” the physicists tell us. “But doesn’t an expansion of something mean the presupposition of boundaries?” my naïve mind inquires, thinking too much in terms of discrete substances. Can “something” expand “into” nothing, “into” emptiness? Shot through with “dark energy” (the name an intellectual signifier allowing physicists to speak of the ineffable), the immensity (...) of the universe teaches a lesson in humility before mystery and the radically new. Dark energy makes up 74 percent of the universe and is responsible for increasing the rate of the universe’s expansion; it may be explained as the energy of empty space, or space devoid of matter and gravity. Although an unobservable phenomenon, dark energy penetrates the known universe as that which counteracts gravity’s relationship to matter, causing a negative pressure in regions of the universe devoid of matter to expand. Hence, the energy of emptiness is the reason for the universe’s expansion; emptiness is the reason reality is better described by rapid change and impermanence than stasis and immutability.While it would seem that these developments do not impact religious thinking, the Dalai Lama and others have argued that because science helps us understand the nature of reality, it affects the paradigm in which we consider the veracity of religious ideas. In his words, “if scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims.”1 This is a bold statement, challenging both East and West to consider that when derived from only one source, even our most treasured religious ideas are narrowly conceived.The Western worldview has kept pace neither with the challenges of cosmic and subatomic physics nor with a more sophisticated global community. Since Parmenides in the pre-Socratic era, Western thought has been dominated by Greek philosophical categories, in which the perfection of beings is regarded in immutability and stasis, and things ideally tend toward independence or self-sufficiency. These categories [End Page 73] not only are inadequate to describe reality discovered through scientific means but also fail to articulate the meaning of the religious and cultural encounters taking place between East and West. Writes Joseph O’Leary, “The encounter with Buddhist thought enhances the hermeneutical task of theology, by opening up the possibility that Christian truth today can be more luminously presented in a discourse influenced by Buddhist analytical methods and ontological insights than in the old frameworks formed in dialogue with Greek ontology.”2Deconstructing substance ontology in the West suggests not only that science is a valuable conversation partner to religion but also that religions be conversation partners with each other. Christians should consider how divine or ultimate reality is manifest in other religions and abandon claims to exclusive truth. As Joseph O’Leary argues,The religions need each other, whatever their utter self-sufficiency on the plane of abstruse theological claims. The religions, as human historical trajectories, are inevitably marked by incompleteness and tragic failures. The tensions between them are not to be suppressed by dogmatic self-affirmation, but to be interpreted as the tension of “truth” itself, making itself felt within the finitude and brokenness of the human language striving to express it.3Truth for the Dalai Lama is “pursued by means of critical investigation,” requiring conversation with modern thought forms as well as both religious and secular Western traditions. If Christian theology is to be relevant today, it must continue to deconstruct the classical metaphysical categories that impede the appreciation of what is possible or true, especially in the encounter with non-Christian and non-Western thought, culture, and religious practice. Interreligious encounter necessitates the questioning of ontotheology, the classical metaphysical logic that refers to the rational basis for naming God, the supreme being, with supreme attributes, such as eternity, immutability, omniscience, and omnipotence. Ontotheology is related to the substance ontologies that describe the relation between God and the world and East and West in terms of dualism that according to Paul Knitter “so stresses the difference between two realities, so separates them... (shrink)

Theology, vulnerability, and art as the consciousness of grief -- Christology positive and im-positive -- Dedication to vulnerability in the form of art -- Visual art as a resource for theology of the incarnation -- Beyond language, beyond reason: vulnerability, art, and the problem of catastrophic suffering -- The presence of the absent God: incarnation and abstract expressionism.

In this paper we will be discussing the ethical risks of the transcendental quality of virtual spaces as they apply to digital health, especially in relation to new attempts to construct a “social mediome.” As we will discuss in the following section, phenomenology has raised criticisms against the context-lessness and ethical opacity of technology. The creation of a social mediome seems to come as an answer to this criticism as it creates a context that gives voice and flesh to human (...) beings within their virtual lives. Yet, as we will discuss in this paper, the transcendental quality of this social mediome might involve the risk of normalizing health in a way that would prevent individuals from achieving well-being according to the meaning that they personally attribute to it. (shrink)

In The Cruel Radiance, Susie Linfield challenges the idea that photographs of political violence exploit their subjects and pander to the voyeuristic tendencies of their viewers. Instead she argues passionately that looking at such images—and learning to see the people in them—is an ethically and politically necessary act that connects us to our modern history of violence and probes the human capacity for cruelty. Grappling with critics from Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht to Susan Sontag and the postmoderns—and analyzing photographs (...) from such events as the Holocaust, China’s Cultural Revolution, and recent terrorist acts—Linfield explores the complex connection between photojournalism and the rise of human rights ideals. In the book’s concluding section, she examines the indispensable work of Robert Capa, James Nachtwey, and Gilles Peress and asks how photography should respond to the increasingly nihilistic trajectory of modern warfare. A bracing and unsettling book, The Cruel Radiance convincingly demonstrates that if we hope to alleviate political violence, we must first truly understand it—and to do that, we must begin to look. (shrink)

As ever more countries enter the global economy, reshaping the body has become the means by which women are encouraged to enter modernity. Once bodies were local, marked by their own local traditions. Today, variety is replaced by uniformity. The formerly plump Miss Nigeria is superseded by a thin westernized version and sets the trend for how contemporary Nigerian women are to look. Encouraged to see the body as a consuming center, a personal logo that signifies our membership of the (...) global community, bodies across the world are being commercialized and restructured. This development means that we are losing bodies as we lose mother tongue languages. Standardization is supplanting diversity as facsimile bodies become the new calling card of belonging and identity. (shrink)

This book fills a critical niche that has long been overlooked. It specifically focuses on somatic practices to decrease stress and improve heart health. It will combine science, time-tested somatic mindfulness techniques, and patient stories to provide hope and help.

This paper draws on the ethics of care to investigate how citizens grappled with ethical tensions in the mundane practice of grocery shopping at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. We use this case to address the broader question of what it means ‘to care’ in the context of a crisis. Based on a qualitative longitudinal cross-country interview study, we find that the pandemic transformed ordinary shopping spaces into places fraught with a sense of fear and vulnerability. Being forced to (...) face one’s own vulnerability created an opportunity for individuals to relate to one another as significant others through a sense of “response-ability”, or the capacity of people to respond to ethical demands through situated ethical reasoning. We argue for a practical ethos of care in which seemingly small decisions such as how often to go shopping and how much to buy of a particular product serve as a means to relate to both specified and generalized others—and through this, ‘care with’ society. Our study contributes to displacing the continuing prevalence of an abstract and prescriptive morality in consumption ethics with a situated and affective politics of care. This vocabulary seems better suited to reflect on the myriad of small and unheroic care acts in times of crisis and beyond. (shrink)

_A lively intellectual history that explores how prominent midcentury public intellectuals approached Zionism and then the State of Israel itself and its conflicts with the Arab world_ In this lively intellectual history of the political Left, cultural critic Susie Linfield investigates how eight prominent twentieth-century intellectuals struggled with the philosophy of Zionism, and then with Israel and its conflicts with the Arab world. Constructed as a series of interrelated portraits that combine the personal and the political, the book includes philosophers, (...) historians, journalists, and activists such as Hannah Arendt, Arthur Koestler, I. F. Stone, and Noam Chomsky. In their engagement with Zionism, these influential thinkers also wrestled with the twentieth century’s most crucial political dilemmas: socialism, nationalism, democracy, colonialism, terrorism, and anti‑Semitism. In other words, in probing Zionism, they confronted the very nature of modernity and the often catastrophic histories of our time. By examining these leftist intellectuals, Linfield also seeks to understand how the contemporary Left has become focused on anti‑Zionism and how Israel itself has moved rightward. (shrink)

Husserl's 20th-century phenomenological project remains the cornerstone of modern European philosophy. The place of ethics is of importance to the ongoing legacy and study of phenomenology itself. Husserl's Ethics and Practical Intentionality constitutes one of the major new interventions in this burgeoning field of Husserl scholarship, and offers an unrivaled perspective on the question of ethics in Husserl's philosophy through a focus on volumes not yet translated into English. This book offers a refreshing perspective on stagnating ethical debates that pivot (...) around conceptions of relativism and universalism, shedding light on a phenomenological ethics beyond the common dichotomy. (shrink)

Human reproductive cloning has become the most palpable example of the globalization of science. Throughout the world, events and conjectures in the media, such as the birth and death in the United Kingdom of the cloned sheep Dolly and projects to clone human beings by Korean scientists, by members of the Canadian-based Raelian cult, and by the Italian physician Antinori in an undisclosed country, have galvanized the political will of individual countries to ban human reproductive cloning.Yet, international attempts to harmonize (...) policies in the area of biomedical ethics and human research, such as the 1997 Council of Europe’s Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine, and most recently, the United Nations’ efforts to adopt an international convention against human reproductive cloning, have been insufficient to trigger a substantial global policy design process on issues relating to these new technologies. (shrink)

William Norris Clarke, S.J., one of the leading Thomist scholars in the United States, came to the Philippines recently and delivered a series of lectures in the Ateneo de Manila University and the University of Santo Tomas on various philosophical topics inspired by the thought of St. Thomas. Fr. Clarke is now a Professor Emeritus of Philosophy in Fordham University. He was co-founder and editor (l961-85) of the International Philosophical Quarterly and is the author of some 60 articles, plus the (...) following books: The Philosophical Approach to God, The Universe as Journey, Person and Being, Explorations in Metaphysics: Being—God—Person, and The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics (Fall, 2000).He continues to fulfill his mission of propagating the thoughts of St. Thomas—-the “creative retrieval of St. Thomas,” as he puts it—-in and out of the U.S.An brief excerpt from this interview was originally published in Budhi: A Journal of Ideas and Culture1/3, 1997. (shrink)

This article examines the impact of gender on the relative economic success of microentrepreneurs, their contributions to family income, and the impact of gender ideology and income on household decision making. The concept of economic success is problematized by examining how these businesses, even those of limited assets and income generation, offer women increased autonomy in household budgetary matters and decision making. The analysis draws on data from a representative survey of 201 male and female microentrepreneurs in the Dominican Republic. (...) The findings show that household decision making is influenced by variations in economic power but that gender ideologies structure the direction and extent of this influence, reflected in distinct “gender thresholds,” or the point at which income contributions start to matter. (shrink)

We investigate the interaction between the product of invariant types and domination–equivalence. We present a theory where the latter is not a congruence with respect to the former, provide sufficient conditions for it to be, and study the resulting quotient when it is.

How contensted notions of modernity, civilisation and being governed were envisioned through the aid of photography.

How contensted notions of modernity, civilisation and being governed were envisioned through the aid of photography.

We compute the domination monoid in the theory of dense meet‐trees. In order to show that this monoid is well‐defined, we prove weak binarity of and, more generally, of certain expansions of it by binary relations on sets of open cones, a special case being the theory from [7]. We then describe the domination monoids of such expansions in terms of those of the expanding relations.

Examining previous discussions on how to construe the concepts of gender and race, we advocate what we call strategic conceptual engineering. This is the employment of a (possibly novel) concept for specific epistemic or social aims, concomitant with the openness to use a different concept (e.g., of race) for other purposes. We illustrate this approach by sketching three distinct concepts of gender and arguing that all of them are needed, as they answer to different social aims. The first concept serves (...) the aim of identifying and explaining gender-based discrimination. It is similar to Haslanger’s well-known account, except that rather than offering a definition of ‘woman’ we focus on ‘gender’ as one among several axes of discrimination. The second concept of gender is to assign legal rights and social recognitions, and thus is to be trans-inclusive. We argue that this cannot be achieved by previously suggested concepts that include substantial gender-related psychological features, such as awareness of social expectations. Instead, our concept counts someone as being of a certain gender solely based on the person’s self-identification with this gender. The third concept of gender serves the aim of personal empowerment by means of one’s gender identity. In this context, substantial psychological features and awareness of one’s social situation are involved. While previous accounts of concepts have focused on their role in determining extensions, we point to contexts where a concept’s role in explanation and moral reasoning can be more important. (shrink)

This article explores the discursive construction, regulation and performance of the body in the context of the swimming pool. The near-naked state of the swimmer’s body presents a potential threat to the interaction order, insofar as social encounters may be misconstrued as sexual, and so rituals are enacted to create a ‘civilized’ definition of the situation. The term ‘performative regulation’ is introduced to theorize this process, as a synergy of the symbolic interactionist models of dramaturgy (Goffman) and negotiated order (Strauss) (...) and the post-structuralist concept of disciplinary power (Foucault). The regulation and representation of the swimmer’s body can be understood as mutually constitutive mechanisms, enforced by the pool-as-institution but enacted through the embodied practices of individual actors in the pool-as-interaction. Crossley’s notion of reflexive body techniques is applied to interpret this dualistic process in relation to communicative gestures and facework rituals, which implicates both individual and social bodies in the somatization of the interaction order. (shrink)

This article rewrites the history of the tomb of Philip the Bold made for the Chartreuse de Champmol in Dijon, through a close reading and re-transcription of the entire archival record, including some previously unknown documents, paying careful attention to what their terminology and chronology reveal about time, cost, materials and process; it analyses the scale of the project, and in particular the acquisition and working of materials: limestone from Tonnerre, ‘alabaster’ as spolia from Autun, black marble from Dinant, white (...) marble, presumably from Italy, via Paris, alabaster from Grenoble and a pinkish limestone from Resne, near Dijon. By reconsidering this record, along with the physical and visual evidence of the existing monument, it argues that there was not one but two tombs made for Philip the Bold: the first was completed by Jean de Marville and then rejected by Philip, and perhaps also by the Carthusians; the second, that we have today, was started again from scratch in the early 1390s by Claus Sluter, in collaboration, possibly, with Jacques de Baerze. The story of how these two tombs were planned, worked on, adapted or restarted, along with what Marville’s abandoned project may have looked like, and what may have become of its constituent parts, is woven into the narrative of Philip’s political and religious ambitions, the role of his wife Margaret of Flanders, and of the construction and decoration of the Chartreuse de Champmol itself. (shrink)

The work of psychiatrist R. D. Laing deserves recognition as a key contribution to sociological theory, in dialogue with the interactionist and interpretivist sociological traditions. Laing encourages us to identify meaningful social action in what would otherwise appear to be nonsocial phenomena. His interpretation of schizophrenia as a rational strategy of withdrawal reminds us of the threat that others can pose to the self and how social relations are implicated in even the most "private" and "internal" of experiences. He developed (...) a far-reaching critical theory of the self in modern society, which challenges the medicalization and biochemical reduction of human problems. Using the case of shyness as an example, the article seeks to demonstrate the importance of Laing's theories for examining the fragility of the self in relation to contemporary social order. (shrink)

We study the monoid of global invariant types modulo domination-equivalence in the context of o-minimal theories. We reduce its computation to the problem of proving that it is generated by classes...

We bring together recent discussions on data capitalism and biocapitalization by studying value flows in consumer genomics firms—an industry at the intersection between health care and technology realms. Consumer genomics companies market genomic testing services to consumers as a source of fun, altruism, belonging and knowledge. But by maintaining a multisided or platform business model, these firms also engage in digital capitalism, creating financial profit from data brokerage. This is a precarious balance to strike: If these companies’ business models consist (...) of assetizing the pool of genomic data that they assemble, then part of their work has to revolve around obscuring to consumers any uncertainties that would potentially impinge on these processes of assemblage. We reflect on the nature of these practices and the market relationships that enable them, and we relate this reflection to debates around alternative market arrangements that would potentially mitigate the extractive tendencies of these and other digital health firms. (shrink)

Para Gadamer, «el ser que puede ser comprendido es lenguaje», afirmación que implicaría que toda comprensión se da en la lingüisticidad. Por otra parte, afirma que si hay lingüisticidad, hay interpretación. Ahora bien, la cuestión que queda en entredicho en su obra es si esto implica que dicha lingüisticidad es concomitante con la comprensión, es decir, si en toda comprensión hay una mediación lingüística. El presente artículo busca indagar en el análisis de la palabra poética y la filosófica, para desde (...) tal análisis ver las posibilidades de resolución de la relación entre comprensión e interpretación. (shrink)

Centralised, compliance-focused approaches to research ethics have been normalised in practice. In this paper, we argue that the dominance of such systems has been driven by neoliberal approaches to governance, where the focus on controlling and individualising risk has led to an overemphasis of decontextualised ethical principles and the conflation of ethical requirements with the documentation of ‘informed consent’. Using a UK-based case study, involving a point-of-care-genetic test as an illustration, we argue that rather than ensuring ethical practice such compliance-focused (...) approaches may obstruct valuable research. We call for an approach that encourages researchers and research communities—including regulators, ethics committees, funders and publishers of academic research—to acquire skills to make morally appropriate decisions, and not base decision-making solely on compliance with prescriptive regulations. We call this ‘ethical preparedness’ and outline how a research ethics system might make space for this approach. (shrink)

Explora-se no presente artigo a função que o reconhecimento do outro desempenha para a moralidade no âmbito da obra Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception, de Raimond Gaita, a partir da centralidade da noção de remorso, entendido como a recordação do significado moral para o agente daquilo que ele fez. Serão resgatados os exemplos partir dos quais Gaita pretende enfatizar o peso da moralidade e o significado de se fazer o mal moralmente para alguém. Não se pode compreender, segundo o (...) filósofo, uma situação como moralmente problemática se não for inteligível que quem a realizou deveria sentir um remorso genuíno diante constatação do mal gerado a partir de suas ações. (shrink)

This article identifies and explores the realm of ‘social nothingness’: objects, people, events and places that do not empirically exist, yet are experienced as subjectively meaningful. Taking a phenomenological approach, I investigate how people perceive, imagine and reflect upon the meanings of unlived experience: whatever is significantly not present, never appeared or cannot happen to them. These ‘negative symbolic social objects’ include no-things, no-bodies, non-events and no-where places: for example, rejected roles, unpursued careers or absent people. Reversing some key concepts (...) from phenomenology, I examine the process of ‘negative noesis’ in three aspects. ‘Negative intentionality’ describes people’s motivational stance towards absent things, such as feelings of missing, wishing, haunting, avoidance or surrender. ‘Negative embodiment’ is the corporeal grounding of negational acts, through experiences of impairment, incapacity, severance, disturbance and decline. ‘Negative temporality’ describes the recognition of past or future impossible selves and their place within biographical identity stories. (shrink)

Nothing really matters. All the things that we do not do, have or become in our lives can be important in shaping self-identity. From jobs turned down to great loves lost, secrets kept and truths untold, people missed and souls unborn, we understand ourselves through other, unlived lives that are imaginatively possible. This book explores the realm of negative social phenomena - no-things, no-bodies, non-events and no-where places - that lies behind the mirror of experience. Taking a symbolic interactionist perspective, (...) the author argues that these objects are socially produced, emerging from and negotiated through our relationships with others. Nothing is interactively accomplished in two ways, through social acts of commission and omission. Existentialism and phenomenology encourage us to understand more deeply the subjective experience of nothing; this can be pursued through conscious meaning-making and reflexive self-awareness. The Social Life of Nothing is a thought-provoking book that will appeal to scholars across the social sciences, arts and humanities, but its message also resonates with the interested general reader. (shrink)

Schiller a été fasciné par la résistance que la beauté oppose à la conceptualisation dans l’esthétique de Kant et l’a associée à une forme de temporalité particulière : l’« arrêt » sur le beau. La thèse que je soutiens est la suivante : le fait que nous nous arrêtions à contempler le beau ouvre pour Schiller une dimension critique au sein de l’esthétique, où l’expérience de la beauté résiste à la violence qui caractérise la modernité et en même temps cet (...) arrêt favorise l’apparition d’une perspective esthétique au sein de la critique en inaugurant une temporalité d’un autre type, en dehors de l’ordre causal des événements, dans laquelle il devient possible de « jouer » librement, et donc de manière critique, avec les déterminations historiques du présent. (shrink)

This essay presents a possible interpretation of the concept of beauty in Kant’s Critique of Judgment, which was itself suggested by Kant in the two introductionsto the text and gained force among the Early German Romantics and Idealists, introducing an alternative point of view into the concept of beauty and the role it plays in the relationship between reason and sensibility, man and world. Through the analysis of the four moments of the Analytic of the Beautiful, beauty will manifest itself (...) as the realm in which a special encounter between human freedom and nature takes place. Therefore, and as an alternative to some traditional interpretations of Kant’s aesthetic investigation, which understand Kant’s judgment of taste exclusively on the basis of its subjective conditions, the judgment of beauty will present itself also in the relationship it establishes with the objects of nature. (shrink)