"A new framework has been established across the United Kingdom with four key priorities. These priorities include helping patients receive a final diagnosis quickly, increasing rare disease awareness among healthcare professionals, better coordination of care, and improving access to specialist care, treatments, and drugs (DHSC, 2021).".

Contemporary and challenging, this thought-provoking book outlines a number of the key dilemmas in animal welfare for today's, and tomorrow's, world. The issues discussed range from the welfare of hunted animals, to debates around intensive farming versus sustainability, and the effects of climate and environmental change. The book explores the effects of fences on wild animals and human impacts on carrion animals; the impacts of tourism on animal welfare; philosophical questions about speciesism; and the quality and quantity of animal lives. (...) The welfare impacts of human-animal interactions are explored, including human impacts on marine mammals, fish, wildlife, and companion and farm animals. Animal Welfare in a Changing World provides: Concise, opinion-based views on important issues in animal welfare by world experts and key opinion leaders. Pieces based on experience, which balance evidence-based approaches and the welfare impacts of direct engagement through training, campaigning and education. A wide-ranging collection of examples and descriptions of animal welfare topics which outline dilemmas in the real world, that are sometimes challenging, and not always comfortable reading. This is a 'must-read' book for animal and veterinary scientists, ethologists, policy and opinion leaders, NGOs, conservation biologists and anyone who feels passionately about the welfare of animals. (shrink)

Despite the importance of effective observational analysis in the technical aspects of climbing performance, limited research informs this aspect of climbing coach education. Thus, the purpose of the present research was to explore cognitive-perceptual mechanisms underpinning visual search strategies of expert and novice climbing coaches through the novel combination of eye-tracking technology and retrospective think-aloud methodology. Analysis of gaze data revealed expert climbing coaches to demonstrate fewer fixations of greater duration, and fixate on distinctly different areas of the visual display, (...) than their novice counterparts. Retrospective think-aloud interviews further demonstrated differences in the cognitive-perceptual mechanisms underpinning these visual search strategies, with expert coaches more cognisant of their visual search strategy. To expand, the gaze behaviour of expert climbing coaches was underpinned by hierarchical and complex knowledge structures relating to principles of climbing movement. This enabled expert coaches to actively focus on the most relevant aspects of a climber’s performance for analysis. Findings demonstrate the utility of combining eye tracking and retrospective think-aloud interviewing as a new, efficient methodology of capturing the cognitive-perceptual processes of climbing coaches to inform coaching education/strategies. (shrink)

Source [1] Andrew E. P. Mitchell, Federica Galli, Sondra Butterworth. (2023). Editorial: Equality, diversity and inclusive research for diverse rare disease communities. Front. Psychol., vol. 14. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1285774. "It is also important to recognize that certain mental health disorders are classified as rare conditions and have their own cultural concepts of distress, as defined in the DSM-5 (American Psychiatric Association, 2013)" and require “equal attention and support for individuals and their families, both physically and emotionally”. [1].

Field theories have been central to physics over the last 150 years, and there are several theories in contemporary physics in which physical fields play key causal and explanatory roles. This paper proposes a novel field trope-bundle (FTB) ontology on which fields are composed of bundles of particularized property instances, called tropes and goes on to describe some virtues of this ontology. It begins with a critical examination of the dominant view about the ontology of fields, that fields are properties (...) of a substantial substratum. (shrink)

This book offers an exciting re-interpretation of Auguste Comte, the founder of French sociology. Following the development of his philosophy of positivism, Comte later focused on the importance of the emotions in his philosophy resulting in the creation of a new religious system, the Religion of Humanity. Andrew Wernick provides the first in-depth critique of Comte's concept of religion and its place in his thinking on politics, sociology and philosophy of science. He places Comte's ideas in the context of (...) post-1789 French political and intellectual history, and of modern philosophy, especially postmodernism. Wernick relates Comte to Marx and Nietzsche as seminal figures of modernity and examines key features of modern and postmodern French social theory, tracing the inherent flaws and disintegration of Comte's system. Wernick offers original and fascinating insights in this rich study which will attract a wide audience from sociologists and philosophers to cultural theorists and historians. (shrink)

One of the key achievements of critical realism has been to expose the modernist myth of universal reason, which holds that authentic knowledge claims must be objectively ‘pure’, uncontaminated by the subjectivity of local place, specific time and particular culture. Wright aims to address the lack of any substantial and sustained engagement between critical realism and theological critical realism with particular regard to: (a) the distinctive ontological claims of Christianity; (b) their epistemic warrant and intellectual legitimacy; and (c) scrutiny of (...) the primary source of the ontological claims of Christianity, namely the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth. As such, it functions as a prolegomena to a much needed wider debate, guided by the under-labouring services of critical realism, between Christianity and various other religious and secular worldviews. This important new text will help stimulate a debate that has yet to get out of first gear. This book will appeal to academics, graduate and post-graduate students especially, but also Christian clergy, ministers and informed laity, and members of the general public concerned with the nature of religion and its place in contemporary society. (shrink)

Against a view currently popular in the literature, it is argued that Kant was not a niıve realist about perceptual experience. Naive realism entails that perceptual experience is object-dependent in a very strong sense. In the first half of the paper, I explain what this claim amounts to and I undermine the evidence that has been marshalled in support of attributing it to Kant. In the second half of the paper, I explore in some detail Kant’s account of hallucination and (...) argue that no such account is available to someone who thinks that veridical perceptual experience is object-dependent in the naive realist sense. Kant’s theory provides for a remarkably sophisticated, bottom-up explanation of the phenomenal character of hallucinatory episodes and is crucial for gaining a proper understanding of his model of the mind and its place in nature. (shrink)

Philosophers interested in the fitting attitude analysis of final value have devoted a great deal of attention to the wrong kind of reasons problem. This paper offers an example of the reverse difficulty, the wrong kind of value problem. This problem creates deeper challenges for the fitting attitude analysis and provides independent grounds for rejecting it, or at least for doubting seriously its correctness.

Kant holds that in order to have knowledge of an object, a subject must be able to “prove” that the object is really possible—i.e., prove that there is neither logical inconsistency nor “real repugnance” between its properties. This is (usually) easy to do with respect to empirical objects, but (usually) impossible to do with respect to particular things-in-themselves. In the first section of the paper I argue that an important predecessor of Kant’s account of our ignorance of real possibility can (...) be found in Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. In the middle sections I discuss the way in which our inability to prove the real possibility of things-in-themselves motivates Kant’s famous prohibition on certain kinds of knowledge-claims about them. In the final section I examine Hegel’s attempts to dissolve this problem of real repugnance and thereby remove an inherited obstacle to speculative knowledge of the supersensible. -/- . (shrink)

We discuss the view that a hole is identical to the region of spacetime at which it is located. This view is more parsimonious than the view that holes are sui generis entities located at those regions surrounded by their hosts and it is more plausible than the view that there are no holes. We defend the spacetime view from several objections.

ObjectiveTo present the ethical issues, moral arguments, and reasons found in the ethical literature on organoid models.DesignIn this systematic review of reasons in ethical literature, we selected sources based on predefined criteria: The publication mentions moral reasons or arguments directly relating to the creation and/or use of organoid models in biomedical research; These moral reasons and arguments are significantly addressed, not as mere passing mentions, or comprise a large portion of the body of work; The publication is peer-reviewed and published (...) in an academic article, book, national-level report, working paper, or Ph.D. thesis; The publications collected are in English.AnalysisEach article was read in-depth for identifiable moral reasons, arguments, and concerns. These were then inductively classified and synthesized to create broader categories of reasons, and eventually an overarching conceptual scheme was created.ResultsA total of twenty-three sources were included and analyzed out of an initial 266 collected sources. Five themes of ethical issues and arguments were found: Animal Experimentation; Clinical Applications and Experiments; Commercialization and Consent; Organoid Ontology and Moral Status; and Research Ethics and Research Integrity. These themes are then further broken down into sub-themes and topics. Given the extensive nature of the topics found, we will focus on describing the topics that comprised of more in-depth reasons and arguments rather than few, passing mentions or concerns.ConclusionsThe ethics of organoids requires further deliberation in multiple areas, as much of the discussions are not presented as in-depth arguments. Such sentiments are also echoed throughout the organoid ethics literature. (shrink)

Despite his impressive influence on nineteenth-century philosophy, F. A. Trendelenburg's own philosophy has been largely ignored. However, among Kant scholars, Trendelenburg has always been remembered for his feud with Kuno Fischer over the subjectivity of space and time in Kant's philosophy. The topic of the dispute, now frequently referred to as the ?Neglected Alternative? objection, has become a prominent issue in contemporary discussions and interpretations of Kant's view of space and time. The Neglected Alternative contends that Kant unjustifiably moves from (...) the claim that we have a priori intuitions of space and time to the sceptical conclusion that space and time are exclusively subjective. Most current discussions trace the objection back to Trendelenburg and often use him to motivate the objection. However, to date Trendelenburg's actual arguments and reasons for rejecting the Kantian view of space and time have not been sufficiently uncovered; my goal here is to fill this lacuna. By better understanding what Trendelenburg actually argued, we will be in a better position to assess whether the Neglected Alternative objection against Kant is successful. But in addition, Trendelenburg's own system is of independent philosophical interest, and my work here will shed light on one part of it. (shrink)

First published in 1999, this book brings together the extensive modern evidence for innate imitation in babies. Modern research has shown imitation to be a natural mechanism of learning and communication which deserves to be at centre stage in developmental psychology. Yet the very possibility of imitation in newborn humans has had a controversial history. Defining imitation has proved to be far from straightforward and scientific evidence for its existence in neonates is only now becoming accepted, despite more than a (...) century of enquiry. In this book, some of the world's foremost researchers on imitation and intellectual development review evidence for imitation in newborn babies. They discuss the development of imitation in infancy, in both normal and atypical populations and in comparison with other primate species, stressing the fundamental importance of imitation in human development, as a foundation of communication and a precursor to symbolic processes. (shrink)

Part of a group commentary on Kant's Religion book. This chapter focuses on Part 2, section 2 on "The Evil Principle's Rightful Claim to Dominion over the Human Being, and the Struggle of the Two Principles with One Another" -/- .

Critical Realism and Marxism addresses controversial debates, revealing a potentially fruitful relationship; deepening our understanding of the social world and contibuting towards eliminating barbarism in contemporary capitalism.

In this paper I explore the pedagogical and political shift marked by the meaning and practice of diversity offered through New Labour education policy texts, specifically, the policy and practice of personalized learning (or personalization). The aim of this paper is to map the ways in which diversity relays and mobilizes a set of neoliberal positions and relationships in the field of education and seeks to govern education institutions and education users through politically circulating norms and values. These norms and (...) values, I want to argue, echo and redeem the kinds of frameworks, applications and rationalities typically aligned with modes of neoliberal or advanced liberal governance, e.g. marketization, monetarization, atomization and deregulation. I conclude the paper by considering how diversity in education renders problematic conventional antinomies of the citizen and consumer, public and private, state and civil society, etc., and forces us to confront the rhizomatic character of contemporary governance and education in the era of neoliberalism. (shrink)

Baghdad, California -- Calm down -- Clearing the dust -- Proof -- The big bang -- Evolution -- Evil -- Religion -- A crisis of reason.

Sand drawings are introduced in relation to the fieldwork of British anthropologists John Layard and Bernard Deacon early in the twentieth century, and the status of sand drawings as mathematics is discussed in the light of Wittgenstein’s idea that “in mathematics process and result are equivalent”. Included are photographs of the illustrations in Layard’s own copy of Deacon’s “Geometrical Drawings from Malekula and other Islands of the New Hebrides” (1934). This is a brief companion to my article “Wittgenstein on string (...) figures as mathematics” (2022), published in the journal Philosophical Investigations. (shrink)

Unrestricted Composition (UC) is, roughly, the claim that given any objects at all, there is something which those objects compose. (UC) conflicts in an obvious way with common sense. It has as a consequence, for instance, that there is something which has as parts my nose and the moon. One of the more influential arguments for (UC) is Theodore Sider’s version of the Argument from Vagueness. (A version of the Argument from Vagueness was first presented by David Lewis (1986), pp. (...) 212–213). That argument purports to show that some plausible claims concerning the nature of vagueness entail (UC). In this paper I will suggest a response to this argument. I will show that the proponent of Supersubstantivalism (SS)—the view that material objects are identical to regions of spacetime—can reject a premise of Sider’s argument without denying the plausible claims concerning vagueness. Doing so requires only rejecting a certain view concerning the relationship between the proper sub-region relation and the proper parthood relation. So, proponents of (SS) are in a better position than many of us to side with common sense regarding composition. In the first section of the paper, I will present Sider’s argument. In the second section, I will introduce (SS) and briefly discuss some reasons one might have to believe that it is true. In the third section, I will show how the proponent of (SS) can avoid commitment to (UC) and reject a premise of Sider’s argument. Last, I’ll briefly consider and respond to some objections. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend what may seem a surprising view: that John Stuart Mill’s famous harm principle would, if taken to be what justifies government action, disallow the existence of corporations. My claim is not that harmful activities of currently existing corporations warrants their losing corporate status according to the harm principle. The claim, rather, is that taken strictly, the harm principle and the legal possibility of incorporation are mutually exclusive. This view may be surprising—and I do not at (...) all mean to attribute it to Mill—but if I am right, it should be obvious. It should also encourage us to think more about the nature of the markets within which business occurs. (shrink)

In this wide-ranging interview Andrew Sayer discusses how he became a realist and then the development of his work over the subsequent decades. He comments on his postdisciplinary approach, his early work on economy and its influences, how he came to write Method in Social Science and the transition in Realism and Social Science to normative critical social science and moral economy. The interview concludes with discussion of his three most recent books and the themes that connect them, not (...) least the ongoing problem of a ‘diabolical double crisis’ of capitalism: extreme inequality and climate change. (shrink)

An effort to expand and defend aspects of my earlier reading of the Deduction of Taste. The Red Scorpion is just for fun. -/- .

Medical-legal partnerships connect legal advocates to healthcare providers and settings. Maintaining effectiveness of medical-legal partnerships and consistently identifying opportunities for innovation and adaptation takes intentionality and effort. In this paper, we discuss ways in which our use of data and quality improvement methods have facilitated advocacy at both patient (client) and population levels as we collectively pursue better, more equitable outcomes.

Wittgenstein's farcical clash with literary critic F. R. Leavis over the analysis of Empson's poem "Legal Fiction" is well known to devotees of Wittgenstein's life (Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections (1981), edited by Rush Rhees, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 80). Less well known is the value of studying Empson's artistic and intellectual achievement as part of the wider cultural background for the appreciation of Wittgenstein's views and influence, early and late. This talk sketches some diverting byways awaiting further exploration. A recurrent theme (...) is contradiction. (shrink)

The fallacy fallacy is either the misdiagnosis of fallacy or the supposition that the conclusion of a fallacy must be a falsehood. This paper explores the relevance of these and related errors of reasoning for the appraisal of arguments, especially within virtue theories of argumentation. In particular, the fallacy fallacy exemplifies the Owl of Minerva problem, whereby tools devised to understand a norm make possible new ways of violating the norm. Fallacies are such tools and so are vices. Hence a (...) similar problem arises with argumentative vices. Fortunately, both instances of the problem have a common remedy. (shrink)

Andrew Sayer undertakes a fundamental critique of social science's difficulties in acknowledging that people's relation to the world is one of concern. As sentient beings, capable of flourishing and suffering, and particularly vulnerable to how others treat us, our view of the world is substantially evaluative. Yet modernist ways of thinking encourage the common but extraordinary belief that values are beyond reason, and merely subjective or matters of convention, with little or nothing to do with the kind of beings (...) people are, the quality of their social relations, their material circumstances or well-being. The author shows how social theory and philosophy need to change to reflect the complexity of everyday ethical concerns and the importance people attach to dignity. He argues for a robustly critical social science that explains and evaluates social life from the standpoint of human flourishing. (shrink)

Virtue theories have become influential in ethics and epistemology. This paper argues for a similar approach to argumentation. Several potential obstacles to virtue theories in general, and to this new application in particular, are considered and rejected. A first attempt is made at a survey of argumentational virtues, and finally it is argued that the dialectical nature of argumentation makes it particularly suited for virtue theoretic analysis.

This chapter explores two kinds of testimonial trust, what we call ‘evidential trust’ and ‘non-evidential trust’ with the aim of asking how testimonial trust could provide epistemic reasons for belief. We argue that neither evidential nor non-evidential trust can play a distinctive role in providing evidential reasons for belief, but we tentatively propose that non-evidential trust can in some circumstances provide a novel kind of epistemic reason for belief, a reason of epistemic facilitation. The chapter begins with an extensive discussion (...) of standard accounts of both kinds of trust and criticises especially the standard accounts of non-evidential trust. A new account of non-evidential trust is offered that avoids a number of difficulties that plague the standard accounts by rejecting what we call ‘attitude-liability assumptions’. (shrink)