Affective forecasting often drives decision-making. Although affective forecasting research has often focused on identifying sources of error at the event level, the present investigation draws upon the “realistic paradigm” in seeking to identify factors that similarly influence predicted and actual emotions, explaining their concordance across individuals. We hypothesised that the personality traits neuroticism and extraversion would account for variation in both predicted and actual emotional reactions to a wide array of stimuli and events (football games, an election, Valentine's Day, birthdays, (...) happy/sad film clips, and an intrusive interview). As hypothesised, individuals who were more introverted and neurotic anticipated, correctly, that they would experience relatively more unpleasant emotional reactions, and those who were more extraverted and less neurotic anticipated, correctly, that they would experience relatively more pleasant emotional reactions. Personality explained 30% of the concordance between predicted and actual emotional reactions. Findings suggest three purported personality processes implicated in affective forecasting, highlight the importance of individual-differences research in this domain, and call for more research on realistic affective forecasts. (shrink)

The race against COVID-19 has been intense and painful and many of us are now looking for a way to move on. We may try to seize a degree of comfort and security by convincing ourselves that we are among the “fittest”—that is, among those who have managed to survive—who can now hope for a “new-normal” time, relatively unscathed. But this isn’t what we should be hoping for. Our world, and ourselves, will never be free of COVID-19 or its insidious (...) effects. COVID-19, like climate change, is a threat multiplier and the challenges it has raised are now indelibly engraved in our vulnerable, interconnected lives. Rather than vainly hoping for a return to an imaginary, erstwhile “normal” what we need is something more fundamental: a new version of hope that embraces a courage to learn what we need to do, to enable us to live a future to which we aspire. Perhaps counter-intuitively, we need to accept that the COVID-19 experience has already changed us deeply and hope that we can learn from this and from the future changes that the pandemic will give rise to. We need to radicalize our responses to the challenges, enabling ourselves to learn new lessons about old but increasingly pertinent topics, such as the realities of human fragility, and inter-connection. (shrink)

Emerging research has examined individual differences in affective forecasting; however, we are aware of no published study to date linking psychopathology symptoms to affective forecasting problem...

Recognizing the potential hidden artistic contributions of persons with dementia opens new opportunities for interpretation and potential communication. This visual essay explores the authors’ responses to the fragile objects of art produced by a person with severe dementia and examines what may be learned from them.

Dementia is more than a disease. What dementia is, how it is understood, and how it is experienced is influenced by multiple factors including our societal preoccupation with individual identity. This essay introduces empirical and theoretical evidence of alternative ways of understanding dementia that act as a challenge to common assumptions. It proposes that dementia be understood as an experience of systems, particularly networks of people affected by the diagnosis. Taking this step reveals much about the dementia experience, and about (...) what can be learned from persons with dementia and their networks of family, friends, and carers. It also suggests that dementia may be best thought of as an ecology that arises from the interaction between neuropathological change, people, language, and meaning. While challenging, this perspective may provide new ways of responding to dementia and caring for those affected by it. (shrink)

Among the far-reaching impacts of COVID-19 is its impact on care systems, the social and other systems that we rely in to maintain and provide care for those with “illness.” This paper will examine these impacts through a description of the influence on palliative care systems that have arisen within this pandemic. It will explore the impact on the meaning of care, how care is performed and identified, and the responses of palliative care systems to these challenges. It will also (...) highlight the current and potential future implications of these dynamics within the unfolding crisis of this pandemic. (shrink)

While there is a great deal to agree with in the essay Expanded Terminal Sedation in End-of-Life Care there is, we think, a need to more fully appreciate the humanistic side of both palliative and end-of-life care.1 Not only does the underlying philosophy of palliative care arguably differ from that which guides curative medicine,2 dying patients are in a uniquely vulnerable position given our cultural disinclination towards open discussions of death and dying. In this brief response, we critically engage Gilbertson (...) et al ’s essay and seek to contextualise the perspective they put forward. According to Cassell, we should distinguish between pain and suffering.3 The former often gives rise to the latter, but suffering has other causes. This includes existential distress, indicating that, unlike pain, suffering is not simply physiological phenomena. Suffering involves the disintegration of the person, meaning that it can impact patient autonomy. Certainly, that a patient is suffering does not equate to a lack autonomy. Nevertheless, we should take care when making decisions in circumstance where the integrity of our embodied personhood is under threat, something that is clearly the case for those who are dying, particularly those who have refractory symptoms while doing so. Generally speaking, refractory symptoms are those which are intractable. They persist despite attempts at palliation. While this implies that such symptoms—and the suffering they cause—cannot be reversed this is not necessarily the case. Not only can the symptoms experienced by dying patients change …. (shrink)

Learning from the profound challenge of dementia is an urgent priority. Success will require a critical deconstruction of current cultural and linguistic representations of this condition, and a kindling of novel and courageous approaches to re-conceptualise dementia's meaning and experience. This symposium collects provocative ideas arising from various discourses, theoretical perspectives, and methodolgical approaches to explore new ways to understand dementia.

Human connection is universally important, particularly in the context of serious illness and at the end of life. The presence of close family and friends has many benefits when death is close. Hospital visitation restrictions during the Coronavirus pandemic therefore warrant careful consideration to ensure equity, proportionality, and the minimization of harm. The Australian and New Zealand Society for Palliative Medicine COVID-19 Special Interest Group utilized the relevant ethical and public health principles, together with the existing disease outbreak literature and (...) evolving COVID-19 knowledge, to generate a practical framework of visiting restrictions for inpatients receiving palliative and end-of-life care. Expert advice from an Infectious Diseases physician ensured relevance to community transmission dynamics. Three graded levels of visitor restrictions for inpatient settings are proposed, defining an appropriate level of minimum access. These depend upon the level of community transmission of COVID-19, the demand on health services, the potential COVID-19 status of the patient and visitors, and the imminence of the patient’s death. This framework represents a cohesive, considered, proportionate, and ethically robust approach to improve equity and consistency for inpatients receiving palliative care during the COVID-19 pandemic and may serve as a template for future disease outbreaks. (shrink)

The ability to extrapolate essential gist through the analysis and synthesis of information, prediction of potential outcomes, abstraction of ideas, and integration of relationships with world knowledge is critical for higher-order learning. The present study investigated the efficacy of cognitive training to elicit improvements in gist-reasoning and fact recall ability in 556 public middle-school students (grades seven and eight), versus a sample of 357 middle school students who served as a comparison group, to determine if changes in gist-reasoning and fact (...) recall were demonstrated without cognitive training. The results showed that, in general, cognitive training increased gist-reasoning and fact recall abilities in students from families in poverty as well as students from families living above poverty. However, the magnitude of gains in gist-reasoning varied as a function of gender and grade-level. Our primary findings were that seventh and eighth grade girls and eighth grade boys showed significant increases in gist-reasoning after training regardless of socioeconomic status. There were no significant increases in gist-reasoning or fact recall ability for the 357 middle school students who served in the comparison group. We postulate that cognitive training in middle school is efficacious for improving gist-reasoning ability and fact recall in students from all socioeconomic levels. (shrink)

This, the twenty-seventh volume in the annual series of publications by the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy, features a number of distinguised contributors addressing the topic of criminal justice. Part I considers "The Moral and Metaphysical Sources of the Criminal Law," with contributions by Michael S. Moore, Lawrence Rosen, and Martin Shapiro. The four chapters in Part II all relate, more or less directly, to the issue of retribution, with papers by Hugo Adam Bedau, Michael Davis, (...) Jeffrie G. Murphy, and R. B. Brandt. In the following part, Dennis F. Thompson, Christopher D. Stone, and Susan Wolf deal with the special problem of criminal responsibility in government-one of great importance in modern society. The fourth and final part, echoing the topic of NOMOS XXIV, Ethics, Economics, and the Law , addresses the economic theory of crime. The section includes contributions by Alvin K. Klevorick, Richard A. Posner, Jules L. Coleman, and Stephen J. Schulhofer. A valuable bibiography on criminal justice by Andrew C. Blanar concludes this volume of NOMOS. (shrink)

Analyst in training -- Becoming a philosopher -- Science, logic, and language -- Cambridge analysis -- Logical positivism and philosophy of language -- Wider audience -- Politics and critical thinking -- Logic and ideals -- Stebbing, philosophy, and linguistics.

Royzman and Kurzban suggest that disgust-related facial activity in response to unfairness may reflect a metaphorical communication rather than genuine feelings of disgust. We argue that this is a partial reading of our findings and that our experimental data, and those of others, are inconsistent with a social metaphor interpretation.

Archaeological Theory: The Basics is an accessible introduction to an indispensable part of what archaeologists do. The book guides the reader to an understanding of what theory is, how it works, and the range of theories used in archaeology. The growth of theory and the adoption of theories drawn from both the natural and social sciences have broadened our ability to produce trustworthy knowledge about the past. This book helps readers to see the value of archaeological theory and beyond what (...) is sometimes thought to be just the use of indigestible jargon. Key theories and concepts are introduced to the reader. Among the main questions discussed are the following: What is theory and why do we need it? What major areas of theory are, and have been, used and debated in archaeology? What do they tell us about themes including human society, evolution, culture, identity and agency? How might archaeological theory change in the future? This book is written mainly for readers new to archaeology and will help them to understand archaeological theory. It assumes no prior knowledge of archaeological theory and presents it in a selective and clear way, with case studies showing how theory is used in practice. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas and Theodor Adorno are both post-Shoah philosophers who experienced refugeedom. In different contexts, both discuss the question of a linkage between language and soil, and ultimately show that the distinction between the native and the foreign is untenable. I suggest that Levinas’s evocation of linguistic soil illustrates his understanding of Jewishness as defined by a ceding of ground, thus showing that Levinas’s thought relies on a conception of ground in order to then reject it. Adorno, in evoking a (...) “language without soil,” argues for a conception of language that rejects organicism, seeing both loanwords and Jews as examples of difference without foreignness. (shrink)

Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude represents an attempt at intellectual cooperation. No effort has been made, however, to attain unanimity of belief nor to proffer a platform of "planks" on which there is agreement. The consensus represented lies primarily in outlook, in conviction of what is most likely to be fruitful in method of approach. As the title page suggests, the volume presents a unity in attitude rather than a uniformity in results. Consequently each writer is definitively responsible (...) only for his own essay. The reader will note that the Essays endeavor to embody the common attitude in application to specific fields of inquiry which have been historically associated with philosophy rather than as a thing by itself. Beginning with philosophy itself, subsequent contributions discuss its application to logic, to mathematics, to physical science, to psychology, to ethics, to economics, and then again to philosophy itself in conjunction with esthetics and religion. The reader will probably find that the significant points of agreement have to do with the ideas of the genuineness of the future, of intelligence as the organ for determining the quality of that future so far as it can come within human control, and of a courageously inventive individual as the bearer of a creatively employed mind. (shrink)

Pragmatics and Literature is an important collection of new work by leading practitioners working at the interface between pragmatic theory and literary analysis. The individual studies collected here draw on a variety of theoretical approaches and are concerned with a range of literary genres. All have a shared focus on applying ideas from specific pragmatic frameworks to understanding the production, interpretation and evaluation of literary texts. A full-length introductory chapter highlights distinctions and contrasts between pragmatic theories, but also brings out (...) complementarities, shared aims and assumptions, and ways in which different pragmatic theories can make different contributions to our understanding of literary texts. The book as a whole encourages a sense of coherence for the field and presents insights from various approaches for systematic comparison. Building on previous work by the editors, the contributors and others, it makes a significant contribution to the growing field of pragmatic literary stylistics. (shrink)

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1983.

Mary Somerville (1780-1872), after whom Somerville College Oxford was named, was the first woman scientist to win an international reputation entirely in her own right, rather than through association with a scientific brother or father. She was active in astronomy, one of the most demanding areas of science of the day, and flourished in the unique British tradition of Grand Amateurs, who paid their own way and were not affiliated with any academic institution. Mary Somerville was to science what Jane (...) Austen was to literature and Frances Trollope to travel writing. Allan Chapman's vivid account brings to light the story of an exceptional woman, whose achievements in a field dominated by men deserve to be very widely known. (shrink)

This book defends a form of ethical intuitionism, according to which (i) there are objective moral truths; (ii) we know some of these truths through a kind of immediate, intellectual awareness, or "intuition"; and (iii) our knowledge of moral truths gives us reasons for action independent of our desires. The author rebuts all the major objections to this theory and shows that the alternative theories about the nature of ethics all face grave difficulties.

The poetry and journalistic essays of Katherine Tillman often appeared in publications sponsored by the American Methodist church. Collected together for the first time, her works speak to the struggles and triumphs of African-American women.

Philosophy has a language problem. A recent study by Schwitzgebel, Huang, Higgins and Gonzalez-Cabrera (2018) found that, in a sample of papers published in elite journals, 97% of citations were to work originally written in English. 73% of this same sample didn’t cite any paper that had been originally written in a language other than English. Finally, a staggering 96% of elite journal editorial boards are primarily affiliated with an Anglophone university. This is consistent with earlier data suggesting that journal (...) submissions from countries that are outside the Anglophone world and Europe have disturbingly low chances of being accepted. The route forward is not entirely clear. What is clear, however, is that this structural disadvantage deserves closer philosophical and empirical attention. We owe this to current and future members of our philosophical community who speak English non-natively. We also need this if we want to make sure philosophy is enriched by a diverse group of thinkers who have a grasp of different languages, and of the cultures strongly associated with them. (shrink)

This article discusses Ronald Preston's understanding of William Temple and the relationships between the two thinkers. It shows how both develop a theology of Christian realism which places great emphasis on the autonomy of the social sciences and the importance of economic expertise. Questions are raised about the appropriateness of this method, as well as their understanding of the state as an order of creation: these can easily lead to the reduction of the sphere of political morality and its substitution (...) with a form of technical rationality. After a brief discussion of the cult of the expert and the manager in contemporary British politics, and the limitation of political action through the rhetoric of ‘there is no alternative', the article concludes by calling for a remoralisation of political life against an economic reductionism which threatens to remove ethics from politics altogether. (shrink)

The first edition of The Scientific Background to Modern Philosophy took the dialogue of science and philosophy from Aristotle through to Newton. This second edition adds eight chapters, taking the dialogue through the Enlightenment and up to Darwin. This anthology is an attempt to help bridge the gap between the history of science and the history of philosophy.