What form can metaphysics still take in a philosophical modernity that has been decisively shaped by the impact of Kant’s critical project? This question has exercised Dieter Henrich, one of Kant’s greatest living interpreters. This paper focuses on Henrich’s intricate argument that metaphysical thinking, albeit of a new kind, remains indispensable especially in an age for which self-consciousness is a first principle. Henrich seeks a form of thought that can justify and preserve what he views as modernity’s greatest achievement, its (...) conception of the free, self-determining subject. Yet his description of this metaphysics for a new era reveals its surprisingly Platonic affinities. The paper focuses on those affinities, both in order critically to assess Henrich’s own work on subjectivity, but also because they reveal a fundamental and philosophically significant continuity that underlies all forms of comprehensive thinking, even in forms as divergent as those of Plato and Kant. (shrink)

What is the significance of the recurring link between tyranny and philosophy in Plato? Often, Plato’s treatment of tyranny is discussed either in the context of moral psychology—as a problem of agency, moral choice and akrasia — or political science, where it is the limit case of political decline. It is suggested, however, that a close inspection of the myth of Er and an elucidation of its neglected links, not just with the rest of the Republic but also with dialogues (...) such as the Philebus and the Symposium, shows that Socrates’ fascination with tyrannical characters points to a deeper theme — nature, and specifically the problem of its benevolence to our purposes and its very ambiguous relation to human excellence and degradation. Philosopher and tyrant, for all the radical differences between them, both illuminate the internal instability of the human being in Plato’s thought. (shrink)

Most scholars agree that Plato’s concept of freedom, to the extent he has one, is ‘intellectualist’: true freedom is submission to the rule of reason through philosophical knowledge of rational order. Surprisingly, though, there are few explicit linkages of philosophy and freedom in Plato. Socrates is called many things in the dialogues, but not ‘free’. I aim to understand why by studying the Theaetetus, heretofore ignored in discussions of Platonic freedom. By examining the Digression and Socrates’ ‘dream’ about wholes and (...) parts, I show that describing freedom as ‘rule of reason’ simplifies what, for Plato, is a more tangled skein. In the Digression, philosophers are free in occupying a comprehensive standpoint transcending all limited and partial perspectives. Socrates’ dream, however, shows that logos cannot completely account for the knowledge of complex wholes or for itself as such a whole. Philosophical freedom cannot mean comprehensive discursive knowledge, then, since reason lacks a comprehensive grasp of itself. Socrates dreams of the rational whole, but is aware of why it remains only a dream, rather than wakeful knowledge. This awareness constitutes a freedom attained, not in total liberation from the confines of the partial human perspective, but within those confines. (shrink)

In her 2014 monograph, Sarah Broadie argues that Timaeus’s cosmology points to a radical Platonic insight: the full rationality of the cosmos requires the existence of individualized, autonomous, and finite beings like us. Only human life makes the cosmos truly complete. But can Timaeus do full justice to the uniquely human way of being and hence to his own insight? My paper argues that he cannot and that Plato means for us to see that he cannot, by showing how Timaeus (...) treats a famous Platonic theme: eros. Timaeus describes human perfection as assimilation to the mathematical proportions of the cosmos, but by comparing Timaeus with the Symposium I show that, given his deeply mathematized conception of reason, Timaeus cannot provide what Diotima can: a phenomenologically satisfactory account of how we come to identify ourselves with this perfection. Such identification is a transformation in our self-understanding explicable only because of the desirous and reflexive character of the soul. Expressing this character, however, requires combining the mathematical with a poetic, or even mantic, register. Only these sensibilities together grant access to Plato’s cosmology in its fullness. (shrink)

Can the Euthydemus illuminate the philosophical significance of sophistry? In answering this question, I ask why the most direct and sustained confrontations between Socrates and the two brothers should all center on time and the soul. The Euthydemus, I argue, is a not primarily a polemic against eristic manipulation of language, but a diagnosis of the soul’s ambiguous unity. It shows that sophistic speech emerges from the soul’s way of relating to its own temporal character and to logos. Stated differently, (...) a central theme of this dialogue is one which, we are repeatedly told, the Greeks had not yet thematized--the nature of interiority. (shrink)

Many have argued that Plato’s intermediates are not independent entities. Rather, they exemplify the incapacity of discursive thought to cognizing Forms. But just what does this incapacity consist in? Any successful answer will require going beyond the intermediates themselves to another aspect of Plato’s mathematical thought - his attribution of a quasi-numerical structure to Forms. For our purposes, the most penetrating account of eidetic numbers is Jacob Klein’s, who saw clearly that eidetic numbers are part of Plato’s inquiry into the (...) ontological basis for all counting: the existence of a plurality of formal elements, distinct yet combinable into internally articulate unities. However, Klein’s study of the Sophist reveals such articulate unities as imperfectly countable and therefore opaque to διάνοια. And only this opacity, I argue, successfully explains the relationship of intermediates to Forms. (shrink)

Knowledge and Ignorance of Self in Platonic Philosophy is the first volume of essays dedicated to the whole question of self-knowledge and its role in Platonic philosophy. It brings together established and rising scholars from every interpretative school of Plato studies, and a variety of texts from across Plato's corpus - including the classic discussions of self-knowledge in the Charmides and Alcibiades I, and dialogues such as the Republic, Theaetetus, and Theages, which are not often enough mined for insights about (...) this crucial philosophical topic. The rich variety of readings and hermeneutical methods allows for an encompassing view of the relevant scholarly debates. The volume is intended to serve as a standard resource for further research on Plato's treatment of self-knowledge, and will highlight the relevance of Plato's thought to contemporary debates on selfhood, self-reflection and subjectivity. (shrink)

I argue that Plato’s deployment of the resumptive phrase πάλιν ἐξ ἀρχῆς illuminates the philosophical significance of his art of transition in Socratic dialogues. These explicit calls for a new beginning often appear when a conversation fails to account for two particular elements of ordinary experience: assumptions about whole-part relations and about the interlocutor’s self-conception as a being responsive to basic rational and normative distinctions. Returning to the archē is a form of ἀνάμνησις, reminding us that these assumptions constitute true, (...) but inarticulate, opinions of a fundamental kind. They are the preconditions for discourse that philosophical διαλέγεσθαι must preserve and ground. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that in the “Great Speech” of the Protagoras, Plato investigates the consequences of a view of history as progress away from nature, as expressed in Protagoras’ account of humanity’s origin and development. Socrates’ hedonistic calculus, in the dialogue’s second half, confronts Protagoras with the full implications of his view - showing how, absent a doctrine of natural human perfections, progress necessarily devours its own tail.

Summary In a noteworthy new study, Richard Velkley brings together Martin Heidegger and Leo Strauss as part of a reexamination of the foundations and nature of philosophical questioning. In what follows, I critically reflect on this shared search for foundations, and particularly on the role of Plato in Strauss's effort to forge a new path for philosophy which moves away from Heidegger without losing sight of him.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Hegel on Self-Consciousness: Desire and Death in the Phenomenology of SpiritAndy R. GermanRobert B. Pippin. Hegel on Self-Consciousness: Desire and Death in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Princeton-Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011. Pp. viii + 103. Cloth, $29.95.If Hegel's system cannot be understood without the Phenomenology of Spirit, it is certainly impossible to understand the Phenomenology without understanding its famous transition, in chapter 4, to self-consciousness and the (perhaps (...) all-too-famous) master-slave dialectic. In these published lectures, then, Robert Pippin has compelling reasons for seeking the heart of the Phenomenology in two of its crucial assertions: that "Self-Consciousness is desire itself" and that "Self-Consciousness attains its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness" (¶¶167 and 175 in Miller's translation).Pippin's Hegel is essentially Kantian, concerned with the apperceptive nature of self-consciousness, i.e. not as mere receptivity to sensory or intellectual form, but as an activity, a judging or "taking" the world to be such and so. For Kant, this activity is transcendental or purely formal, the unification of the spatio-temporal manifold by a continuous, apperceptive "I" (31). Pippin argues that Hegel jettisons Kantian formality in favor of a broader question: how, rather than being subject to my desires, am I the subject of my desires? (32). An answer is possible only if self-consciousness is neither observational nor an immediate self-presence but instead (i) a practical achievement (15) that (ii) requires other self-conscious subjects (19). Unlike Platonic erōs, then, which points away from human life, self-conscious desire is constant self-examination of the reasons for our actions or beliefs. This is Hegel's version of Kant's insight that reason is the desire for justification, ultimately before "all others" (56–57).Thus we pivot to the claim that the successful or "satisfying" achievement of self-consciousness involves recognition by others. "Our answerability to the world," as Pippin writes, "is inextricably bound up with... our answerability to each other" (61). Unlike John McDowell's interpretation of the master-slave dialectic as an analogy for the struggle between the passive and active elements within one mind (42), Pippin argues that self-consciousness is social all the way down. It is "something like having a position," i.e. avowing a practical commitment or making a normative claim (65), which implies the presence of another self-conscious subject who recognizes my right to such claims, or challenges that right, even to the outermost—a struggle to the death over recognition and authority. Self-consciousness, then, is "not... a reflection of some substantive or metaphysical nature but... a social achievement... bound up with... social conflict" (75). On the decisive point, Pippin agrees with Brandom's neo-pragmatism: "[S]elf-conscious beings do not have natures, they have histories" (68), specifically, the history of struggle and reconciliation among rational, mutually recognizing subjects.But what, then, does recognition mean and how does it "satisfy"? And in what does our "answerability to others" consist if there is no "non-question begging... standard" (83) by which to judge our answers? Hegel, Pippin writes, "has a ‘pragmatic' or a ‘historicized' or ‘dialogical' view of what counts as the appeal to reasons.... He understands practical reason as a kind of interchange of attempts at justification among persons... " (84). Justification, however, cannot mean an appeal to nature. Indeed, in the struggle for recognition, self-conscious freedom means indifference to mere natural life or desire. Nature no longer points to philosophical wholeness, as our love of seeing does in Aristotle's Metaphysics. To paraphrase Pippin's titles, he shows with superior clarity that Hegel's idealism really is modernism: i.e. the most thoroughgoing rejection of the Greek link between eleutheria and eudaimonia.But when Hegel writes of "the point where knowledge no longer needs to go beyond itself... where Concept corresponds to object and object to Concept" as the necessary "goal" of knowledge (¶80), this suggests that the "interchange of justifications" reaches an end. Even if this end is the socio-political order of mutual recognition among rational persons, it is surely not the mere fact of recognition that satisfies us... (shrink)

What is the significance of the recurring link between tyranny and philosophy in Plato? Often, Plato’s treatment of tyranny is discussed either in the context of moral psychology—as a problem of agency, moral choice and akrasia — or political science, where it is the limit case of political decline. It is suggested, however, that a close inspection of the myth of Er and an elucidation of its neglected links, not just with the rest of the Republic but also with dialogues (...) such as the Philebus and the Symposium, shows that Socrates’ fascination with tyrannical characters points to a deeper theme — nature, and specifically the problem of its benevolence to our purposes and its very ambiguous relation to human excellence and degradation. Philosopher and tyrant, for all the radical differences between them, both illuminate the internal instability of the human being in Plato’s thought. (shrink)

Knowledge and Ignorance of Self in Platonic Philosophy is the first volume of essays dedicated to the whole question of self-knowledge and its role in Platonic philosophy. It brings together established and rising scholars from every interpretative school of Plato studies, and a variety of texts from across Plato's corpus - including the classic discussions of self-knowledge in the Charmides and Alcibiades I, and dialogues such as the Republic, Theaetetus, and Theages, which are not often enough mined for insights about (...) this crucial philosophical topic. The rich variety of readings and hermeneutical methods allows for an encompassing view of the relevant scholarly debates. The volume is intended to serve as a standard resource for further research on Plato's treatment of self-knowledge, and will highlight the relevance of Plato's thought to contemporary debates on selfhood, self-reflection and subjectivity. (shrink)

BackgroundThis study aimed to translate the negative and positive items of the Psychological Consequences Questionnaire into German, to adapt this version to the context of screening for cirrhosis and fibrosis of the liver, and to test its psychometric properties.Materials and methodsThe three subscales were translated into German using a forward-backward translation method. Furthermore, we adapted the wording to the context of liver diseases. In sum, the PCQ comprises twelve negative items and ten positive items. We tested the acceptability, (...) distribution properties, internal consistency, scale structure, and the convergent validity using an analysis sample of 443 patients who were screened for cirrhosis or fibrosis of the liver.ResultsWe found low non-response and non-unique answer rates on the PCQ items in general. However, positive items had higher non-response rates. All items showed strong floor effects. McDonald’s Omega was high for both the negative and the positive PCQ scale, as well as for the total PCQ scale. Confirmatory factor analysis could reproduce the three dimensions that the PCQ intends to measure. However, it suggests not summing up a total PCQ score and instead treat the subscales separately considering a higher order overall construct. Convergent validity with the short form of the Spielberger State-Trait Anxiety Inventory was acceptable.ConclusionOverall, our study results report a successful adaptation of the German PCQ with good performance in terms of acceptability, internal consistency, scale structure, and convergent validity. Floor-effects limit the content validity of the PCQ, which needs to be addressed in future research. However, the German version of the PCQ is a useful measurement for both negative and positive screening consequences - even in a non-cancer setting. (shrink)

This is an amended version of material that first appeared in A. Clark, Microcognition: Philosophy, Cognitive Science, and Parallel Distributed Processing (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1989), Ch. 1, 2, and 6. It appears in German translation in Metzinger,T (Ed) DAS LEIB-SEELE-PROBLEM IN DER ZWEITEN HELFTE DES 20 JAHRHUNDERTS (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. 1999).

This paper explores the benefits of video feedback for teaching philosophy. Our analysis, based on results from a self-report student survey along with our own experience, indicates that video feedback possesses a number of advantages over traditional written comments. In particular we argue that video feedback is conducive to providing high-quality formative feedback, increases detail and clarity, and promotes student engagement. In addition, we argue that the advantages of video feedback make the method an especially apt tool for addressing challenges (...) germane to teaching philosophy. Video feedback allows markers to more easily explain and illustrate philosophical goals and methods. It allows markers to model the doing of philosophy and thereby helps students to see philosophy’s value. Video feedback is a promising tool for addressing both cognitive and affective barriers to learning philosophy. Such advantages are especially valuable in the context of a student-centered, intentional learning framework. In light of these advantages, we find that video feedback is underappreciated and underutilized. (shrink)

"Blending literary and photo-journalism, history, and storytelling, essays examine eighteen Texas dance halls in terms of their music, culture, and community. Also considers the predominantly Czech and German heritage from which these halls evolved, as we.

German Idealism is arguably the most influential force in philosophy over the past two hundred years. This major four-volume work is the first comprehensive survey of its impact on science, religion, sociology and the humanities, and brings together fifty-two leading scholars from across Europe and North America. Each essay discusses an idea or theme from Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Fichte, or another key figure, shows how this influenced a thinker or field of study in the subsequent two centuries, and how (...) that influence is felt in contemporary thought. Crossing established scholarly divides, the volumes deal with fields as varied as feminism, architectural history, psychoanalysis, Christology and museum curation, and subjects as diverse as love, evolution, the public sphere, the art of Andy Warhol, the music of Palestrina, the philosophy of Husserl, the literature of Jane Austen, the political thought of fascism and the foundations of international law. (shrink)

The first study of its kind, The Impact of Idealism assesses the impact of classical German philosophy on science, religion and culture. This third volume explores German Idealism's impact on the literature, art and aesthetics of the last two centuries. Each essay focuses on the legacy of an idea or concept from the high point of German philosophy around 1800, tracing out its influence on the intervening period and its importance for contemporary discussions. As well as a (...) broad geographical and historical range, including Greek tragedy, George Eliot, Thomas Mann and Samuel Beckett, and key musicians and artists such as Wagner, Andy Warhol and Frank Lloyd Wright, the volume's thematic focus is broad. Engaging closely with the key aesthetic texts of German Idealism, this collection uses examples from literature, music, art, architecture and museum studies to demonstrate Idealism's continuing influence. (shrink)

This lecture-form essay examines various orders of relation between visual art and writing focusing on Adorno’s propositions about art as écriture. Following introductory remarks concerning Adorno’s relation to recent and contemporary Conceptual, activist and multi-media practices and his brief descriptions of the “virtuoso” work of Pablo Picasso, it addresses the relational nexus between art and history mediated by names and titles (looking to the work of the German artist who christened himself Andy Hope 1930), the operations of methexis (...) and Sprachcharakter, realism and abstraction, and ideas, both analagous and discontinuous, in the thinking Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard, each convened under the auspices of Adorno’s somewhat ahistorical understanding of écriture. The creatively elastic notion of écriture suggests that the defining quality of art as enigma is best comprehended “from the perspective of language.”. (shrink)

Traces the decline of beauty as an ideal from early German romanticism to the twentieth century. The American abstract expressionist painter Barnett Newman famously declared in 1948 that the impulse of modern art is to destroy beauty. Not long after that, Andy Warhol was reconciling the world of art with the world of everyday life, painting soup cans and soda bottles. In this book, Federico Vercellone provides an account of the decline of beauty as a Platonic ideal from (...) early German Romanticism to the twentieth century. He traces this intellectual trajectory from Goethe, Dilthey, and Nietzsche, through modernism and the avant-garde move ment, to the work of Adorno and Heidegger. Rather than the death or destruction of beauty, Vercellone argues instead that beauty in the twentieth century came back to live in reality and everyday life. He suggests this is a new edition of the classical ideal rather than an abandonment of it, and further makes the case for the ecological significance of this orientation and outlook. Federico Vercellone is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Torino and the author of many books, including (with Olaf Breidbach) Thinking and Imagination: Between Science and Art. Sarah De Sanctis is a philosophy scholar and the translator of over fifteen philosophy books, including Quasi-Things: The Paradigm of Atmospheres, by Tonino Griffero and Manifesto of New Realism, by Maurizio Ferraris, both also published by SUNY Press. She has edited, with Anna Longo, Breaking the Spell: Contemporary Realism under Discussion. (shrink)

Referring to a past that never was, dij vu shares a structure not only with fiction, but also with the ever more sophisticated effects of media technology. Tracing the term from the end of the nineteenth century, when it was first popularized in the pages of the Revue philosophique, Peter Krapp examines the genealogy and history of the singular and unrepeatable experience of dij vu. This provocative book offers a refreshing counterpoint to the clichid celebrations of cultural memory and forces (...) us do a double take on the sanctimonious warnings against forgetting so common in our time. Disturbances of cultural memory-screen memories, false recognitions, premonitions-disrupt the comfort zone of memorial culture: strictly speaking, dij vu is neither a failure of memory nor a form of forgetting. Krapp's analysis of such disturbances in literature, art, and mass media introduces, historicizes, and theorizes what it means to speak of an economy of attention or distraction. Reaching from the early psychoanalytic texts of Sigmund Freud to the plays of Heiner M]ller, this exploration of the effects of dij vu pivots around the work of Walter Benjamin and includes readings of kitsch and aura in Andy Warhol's work, of cinematic violence and certain exaggerated claims about shooting and cutting, of the memorial character of architecture, and of the high expectations raised by the Internet. Peter Krapp, lecturer in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, coedited "Medium Cool," a special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly on contemporary media theory. He has published in the fields of German studies, media studies, and literary theoryand, since 1995, has acted as editor of the Hydra Web site for theories of literature and media. (shrink)

This study began with a fascination for the enigma of American artist Andy Warhol (1928-1987). I began to collect his words. I had been intrigued by German philosopher, literary critic, and essayist Walter Benjamin’s (1892-1940) philosophical snapshots and with the notion of an aura that could be pealed from objects by photography. And I was taken by French philosopher, professor of law, and theologian Jacques Ellul’s (1912-1994) claim that religion, philosophy, and aesthetics were mere ornaments that had gone (...) the way of the ruffled sunshade on McCormick’s first reaper. Benjamin’s epistemological understanding of aura, the capacity of the object to look back and to direct the viewer in search for origins, fleshed out Ellul’s claim. The symbol had lost its symbolic dimension in the technical process where words became images and images became concepts; clichés were the nature of this productivity, which became more than tired expressions. The cliché is the machine in its new suit. This insight informed my reading of Warhol and Benjamin with Ellul. And, of course, my reading of Ellul has influenced my reading of Warhol and Benjamin. (shrink)

A connectionist system that is capable of learning about the spatial structure of a simple world is used for the purposes of synthetic epistemology: the creation and analysis of artificial systems in order to clarify philosophical issues that arise in the explanation of how agents, both natural and artificial, represent the world. In this case, the issues to be clarified focus on the content of representational states that exist prior to a fully objective understanding of a spatial domain. In particular, (...) the criticisms of (Chrisley, 1993) that were raised in (Holland, 1994) are addressed: how can we determine that a system’s spatial representations are more objective than before? And under what conditions (tasks, training regimes, environments) do such increases in objectivity occur? After analysing the results of experiments that attempt to shed light on these questions, the study concludes by comparing and contrasting this work with related research. (shrink)

The use of forward models is well established in cognitive and computational neuroscience. We compare and contrast two recent, but interestingly divergent, accounts of the place of forward models in the human cognitive architecture. On the Auxiliary Forward Model account, forward models are special-purpose prediction mechanisms implemented by additional circuitry distinct from core mechanisms of perception and action. On the Integral Forward Model account, forward models lie at the heart of all forms of perception and action. We compare these neighbouring (...) but importantly different visions and consider their implications for the cognitive sciences. We end by asking what kinds of empirical research might offer evidence favouring one or the other of these approaches. (shrink)

Recent EEG studies on the early postmortem interval that suggest the persistence of electrophysiological coherence and connectivity in the brain of animals and humans reinforce the need for further investigation of the relationship between the brain’s activity and the dying process. Neuroscience is now in a position to empirically evaluate the extended process of dying and, more specifically, to investigate the possibility of brain activity following the cessation of cardiac and respiratory function. Under the direction of the Center for Healthy (...) Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, research was conducted in India on a postmortem meditative state cultivated by some Tibetan Buddhist practitioners in which decomposition is putatively delayed. For all healthy baseline and postmortem subjects presented here, we collected resting state electroencephalographic data, mismatch negativity, and auditory brainstem response. In this study, we present HB data to demonstrate the feasibility of a sparse electrode EEG configuration to capture well-defined ERP waveforms from living subjects under very challenging field conditions. While living subjects displayed well-defined MMN and ABR responses, no recognizable EEG waveforms were discernable in any of the tukdam cases. (shrink)

BackgroundOne of the next frontiers in HIV research is focused on finding a cure. A new priority includes people with HIV (PWH) with non-AIDS terminal illnesses who are willing to donate their bodies at the end-of-life (EOL) to advance the search towards an HIV cure. We endeavored to understand perceptions of this research and to identify ethical and practical considerations relevant to implementing it.MethodsWe conducted 20 in-depth interviews and 3 virtual focus groups among four types of key stakeholders in the (...) United States (PWH, biomedical HIV cure researchers, HIV clinicians, and bioethicists) to obtain triangulated viewpoints because little was known about the ethics of this topic. Each group was queried as to ethical considerations, safeguards, and protections for conducting HIV cure-related research at the EOL to ensure this research remains acceptable.ResultsAll four key stakeholder groups generally supported HIV cure-related research conducted at the EOL because of the history of altruism within the PWH community and the potential for substantial scientific knowledge to be gained. Our informants expressed that: (1) Strong stakeholder and community involvement are integral to the ethical and effective implementation, as well as the social acceptability of this research; (2) PWH approaching the EOL should not inherently be considered a vulnerable class and their autonomy must be respected when choosing to participate in HIV cure-related research at the EOL; (3) Greater diversity among study participants, as well as multi-disciplinary research teams, is necessitated by HIV cure-related research at the EOL; (4) The sensitive nature of this research warrants robust oversight to ensure a favorable risk/benefit balance and to minimize the possibility of therapeutic misconception or undue influence; and (5) Research protocols should remain flexible to accommodate participants’ comfort and needs at the EOL.ConclusionBecause of the ethical issues presented by HIV cure-related research at the EOL, robust ethical safeguards are of utmost importance. The proposed ethical and practical considerations presented herein is a first step in determining the best way to maximize this research’s impact and social value. More much inquiry will need to be directed towards understanding context-specific and cultural considerations for implementing EOL HIV cure research in diverse settings. (shrink)

The U.S. National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases and the National Institute of Mental Health have a new research priority: inclusion of terminally ill persons living with HIV in HIV cure-related research. For example, the Last Gift is a clinical research study at the University of California San Diego for PLWHIV who have a terminal illness, with a prognosis of less than 6 months. As end-of-life HIV cure research is relatively new, the scientific community has a timely opportunity to (...) examine the related ethical challenges. Following an extensive review of the EOL and HIV cure research ethics literature, combined with deliberation from various stakeholders and our experience with the Last Gift study to date, we outline considerations to ensure that such research with terminally ill PLWHIV remains ethical, focusing on five topics: 1) protecting autonomy through informed consent, 2) avoiding exploitation and fostering altruism, 3) maintaining a favorable benefits/risks balance, 4) safeguarding against vulnerability through patient-participant centeredness, and 5) ensuring the acceptance of next-of-kin/loved ones and community stakeholders. EOL HIV cure-related research can be performed ethically and effectively by anticipating key issues that may arise. While not unique to the fields of EOL or HIV cure-related research, the considerations highlighted can help us support a new research approach. We must honor the lives of PLWHIV whose involvement in research can provide the knowledge needed to achieve the dream of making HIV infection curable. (shrink)

Automated Vehicles (AVs) are designed and programmed to follow traffic rules. However, there is no separate and comprehensive regulatory framework dedicated to AVs. The current Queensland traffic rules were designed for humans. These rules often contain open texture expressions, exceptions, and potential conflicts (conflict arises when exceptions cannot be handled in rules), which makes it hard for AVs to follow. This paper presents an automatic compliance checking framework to assess AVs behaviour against current traffic rules by addressing these issues. Specifically, (...) it proposes a framework to determine which traffic rules and open texture expressions need some additional interpretation. Essentially this enables AVs to have a suitable and executable formalization of the traffic rules. Defeasible Deontic Logic (DDL) is used to formalize traffic rules and reasoning with AV information (behaviour and environment). The representation of rules in DDL helps effectively in handling and resolving exceptions, potential conflicts, and open textures in rules. 40 experiments were conducted on eight realistic traffic scenarios to evaluate the framework. The evaluation was undertaken both quantitatively and qualitatively. The evaluation result shows that the proposed framework is a promising system for checking Automated Vehicle interpretation and compliance with current traffic rules. (shrink)

Graciela Vidiella ha dedicado parte de su producción académica a indagar sobre la idea de una democracia deliberativa. En el marco de dicha indagación, Vidiella sostuvo que existe una incompatibilidad entre la idea de razón publica defendida por John Rawls y la concepción deliberativa de la democracia. Dicha critica deliberacionista contra la propuesta rawlsiana puede desagregarse en tres tesis: tesis del autogobierno procedimental, tesis sobre el uso crítico de la razón y tesis sobre el trato desigualitario. El presente artículo argumenta (...) en contra de dichas tesis y en defensa de la compatibilidad de la idea de razón publica rawlsiana y la democracia deliberativa. (shrink)

En este trabajo reconstruyo la estructura argumentativa del asociacionismo coercionista defendido por Michael Blake, que consta de dos premisas, una normativa y otra empírica. Sostengo que ambas premisas pueden ser rechazadas, de manera indirecta (en el caso de la premisa empírica) o directa (en el caso de la premisa normativa). La conclusión es que el asociacionismo coercionista no prueba la existencia de una discontinuidad normativa entre el plano doméstico y el plano global.

PurposeThis study aims to develop and validate a stigma scale for Chinese patients with breast cancer.MethodsPatients admitted to the Affiliated Cancer Hospital of Xiangya School of Medicine, Central South University, for breast cancer treatment participated in this study. Development of the Breast Cancer Stigma Scale involved the following procedures: literature review, interview, and applying a theoretical model to generate items; the Breast Cancer Stigma Scale’s content validity was assessed by a Delphi study and feedback from patients with breast cancer ; (...) exploratory factor analysis was used to assess the construct validity; convergent validity was assessed with the Social Impact Scale ; internal consistency Cronbach’s α, split-half reliability, and test–retest reliability were used to identify the reliability of the scale.ResultsThe final version of the Breast Cancer Stigma Scale consisted of 15 items and showed positive correlations with the Social Impact Scale. Exploratory factor analysis revealed four components of the Breast Cancer Stigma Scale: self-image impairment, social isolation, discrimination, and internalized stigma, which were strongly related to our perceived breast cancer stigma model and accounted for 69.443% of the total variance. Cronbach’s α for the total scale was 0.86, and each subscale was 0.75–0.882. The test–retest reliability with intra-class correlation coefficients of the total scale was 0.947, and split-half reliability with intra-class correlation coefficients of the total scale was 0.911. The content validity index was 0.73–1.0.ConclusionThe newly developed Breast Cancer Stigma Scale offers a valid and reliable instrument for assessing the perceived stigma of patients with breast cancer in clinical and research settings. It may be helpful for stigma prevention in China. (shrink)

The present study sought to clarify the impact of executive and social functioning on challenging behavior and the downstream influence of challenging behavior on quality of life and functioning in a large transdiagnostic sample. Understanding these relationships is crucial for developing and designing tailored intervention strategies. In a cross-sectional study, parent informants of 2,004 children completed measures of executive and social functioning, challenging behavior, child and family quality of life, and reported on functional impacts of challenging behavior. Using structural (path) (...) modeling, analyses evaluated the associations between executive and social functioning, including emotion regulation and risk avoidance, with overall and specific types of challenging behavior. Structural models also examined the influence of challenging behavior on child and family quality of life, including measures of the immediate and extended environment, and functional impacts on the parent/child as well as interactions with the medical/legal systems. Finally, mediational models explored the direct and indirect effects of executive and social functioning on quality of life and impact measures via challenging behavior. Results indicated that executive functioning accounts for substantial variance (R2 = 0.47) in challenging behavior. In turn, challenging behavior accounts for substantial variance in child and family quality of life (R2 = 0.36) and parent/child impacts (R2 = 0.31). Exploratory mediational models identified direct effects from executive and social functioning measures on quality of life and functional impacts and indirect effects for executive functioning via challenging behavior. These findings support the development of new intervention strategies and suggest the need to measure executive functioning when assessing and tailoring the treatment of challenging behavior in clinical practice. (shrink)

The growing significance of social media in research demands new ethical standards and practices. Although a substantial body of literature on social media ethics exists, studies on the ethics of conducting research using social media are scarce. The emergence of new evidence sources, like social media, requires innovative methods and renewed consideration of research ethics. Therefore, we pose the following question: What are the defining characteristics of ethics papers on social media research? Following a modified version of the Preferred Reporting (...) Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) protocol, we analyzed 34 publications based on ten variables: author gender, publication year, region, academic discipline, type, design, methodology, social media platform in focus, positionality statement, and ethical issues. Our findings suggest contemporary social media research ethics primarily reflects the ethical ideals of the Global North, with limited representation from the Global South. Women authors have published more papers than men authors. Previous studies have prioritized ethical concerns such as privacy, informed consent, and anonymity while overlooking researchers’ risks and the ethics of social media sites. We particularly emphasized the lack of researchers’ positionality statements in research. Our findings will pave the way to understanding social media ethics better, especially with the rapid growth of social media research in global scholarship. (shrink)

In professional soccer, players, coaches, and researchers alike recognize the importance of cognitive skills. Research addressing the relevance of cognitive skills has been based on the cognitive component skills approach or the expert performance approach. Our project aimed to combine the strengths of both approaches to develop and validate cognitive tasks measuring inhibition and cognitive flexibility in a soccer-specific setting with a soccer-specific motor response. In the main study 77 elite youth soccer players completed a computerized version of the standard (...) flanker and number–letter tasks as well as flanker and number–letter tasks requiring a soccer-specific motor response in a soccer-specific setting. Results show good reliability for both tasks. For the SoccerBot360 number–letter task, switch effects for response times and accuracy and acceptable convergent validity were shown. A flanker effect for response time but not accuracy was apparent. Due to no acceptable convergent validity, the flanker task was revised and 63 adult soccer players participated in a follow-up validation study in the SoccerBot100. The revised flanker task showed the flanker effect for response time, but not for accuracy. However, acceptable convergent validity for response time was present. Thus, the soccer-specific number–letter and to some extent the soccer-specific flanker task show potential to be used as a valid cognitive diagnostic tool by soccer clubs. (shrink)

The original essays in this volume present new research on unstructured theories of content, which have traditionally played a central role in linguistics and philosophy of language. The volume explores a wide range of themes related to unstructured content, including both the continued controversy over whether unstructured theories individuate contents too coarsely and various applications of unstructured theories to topics like rationality, epistemic commitment, semantic expressivism, relevance, and propositional attitude ascriptions. It contains contributions from different theoretical perspectives, including both those (...) sympathetic to unstructured theories of content and those who are skeptical, as well as from different methodological backgrounds, with philosophy, logic, and linguistics all represented. With contributions from leading scholars in philosophy and linguistics, this volume will be of interest to anyone working in logic, metaphysics, or the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

In January 2023, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock forward to 90 s before midnight.

Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children is a birth cohort study within which the Project to Enhance ALSPAC through Record Linkage was established to enrich the ALSPAC resource through linkage between ALSPAC participants and routine sources of health and social data. PEARL incorporated qualitative research to seek the views of young people about data linkage, including their opinions about appropriate safeguards and research governance. In this paper we focus on views expressed about the purpose and composition of research ethics (...) committees. Digitally recorded interviews were conducted with 48 participants aged 17–19 years. Participants were asked about whether medical research should be monitored and controlled, their knowledge of research ethics committees, who should sit on these committees and what their role should be. Interview recordings were fully transcribed and anonymised. Thematic analysis was undertaken, assisted by the Framework approach to data management. The majority of interviewees had little or no specific knowledge of ethics committees. Once given basic information about research ethics committees, only three respondents suggested there was no need for such bodies to scrutinise research. The key tasks of ethics committees were identified as monitoring the research process and protecting research participants. The difficulty of balancing the potential to inhibit research against the need to protect research participants was acknowledged. The importance of relevant research and professional expertise was identified but it was also considered important to represent wider public opinion, and to counter the bias potentially associated with self-selection possibly through a selection process similar to ‘jury duty’. There is a need for more education and public awareness about the role and composition of research ethics committees. Despite an initial lack of knowledge, interviewees were able to contribute their ideas and balance the rights of individuals with the wider benefits from research. The suggestion that public opinion should be represented through random selection similar to jury duty may be worth pursuing in the light of the need to ensure diversity of opinion and establish trust amongst the general public about the use of ‘big data’ for the wider public good. (shrink)