Background: Newer “closed-loop” neurostimulation devices in development could, in theory, induce changes to patients’ personalities and self-perceptions. Empirically, however, only limited data of patient and family experiences exist. Responsive neurostimulation (RNS) as a treatment for refractory epilepsy is the first approved and commercially available closed-loop brain stimulation system in clinical practice, presenting an opportunity to observe how conceptual neuroethical concerns manifest in clinical treatment. Methods: We conducted ethnographic research at a single academic medical center with an active RNS treatment program (...) and collected data via direct observation of clinic visits and in-depth interviews with 12 patients and their caregivers. We used deductive and inductive analyses to identify the relationship between these devices and patient changes in personality and self-perception. Results: Participants generally did not attribute changes in patients’ personalities or self-perception to implantation of or stimulation using RNS. They did report that RNS affected patients’ experiences and conceptions of illness. In particular, the capacity to store and display electrophysiological data produced a common frame of reference and a shared vocabulary among patients and clinicians .Discussion: Empirical experiences of a clinical population being treated with closed-loop neuromodulation do not corroborate theoretical concerns about RNS devices described by neuroethicists and technology developers. However, closed-loop devices demonstrated an ability to change illness experiences. Even without altering identify and self-perception, they provided new cultural tools and metaphors for conceiving of epilepsy as an illness and of the process of diagnosis and treatment. These findings call attention to the need to situate neuroethical concerns in the broader contexts of patients’ illness experiences and social circumstances. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Studies in Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric Jahrgang: 45 Heft: 1 Seiten: 69-86.

The elimination of child marriage is a goal that ranks high on the agendas of civil society organizations, national governments, and multilateral institutions. To date, however, there has been very little scholarship on the historical debates over the definition of child marriage. This article examines the history of age-restricted marriage as it was debated during the development of human rights instruments in the post-World War II era. Using archives of the United Nations and affiliated organizations, we detail how and why (...) efforts to establish a universal minimum age for marriage were repeatedly unsuccessful. We illustrate how the current, commonly used definition of child marriage—as marriage before the age of 18—has never been agreed upon in a legally binding international convention but was seemingly established through a discursive innovation that borrowed principles from the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child. (shrink)

Proponents of grounding often describe the notion as "metaphysical causation" involving determination and production relations similar to causation. This paper argues that the similarities between grounding and causation are merely superficial. I show that there are several sorts of causation that have no analogue in grounding; that the type of "bringing into existence" that both involve is extremely different; and that the synchronicity of ground and the diachronicity of causation make them too different to be explanatorily intertwined.

In this major new work, Bernstein explores the ethical and political dimensions of the modernity/post-modernity debate. Bernstein argues that modernity / post-modernity should be understood as a kind of mood - one which is amorphous, shifting and protean but which exerts a powerful influence on our current thinking. Focusing on thinkers such as Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Habermas and Rorty, Bernstein probes the strengths and weaknesses of their work, and shows how they have contributed to the formation of (...) a new mood, a new and distinctive constellation of ideas. This new constellation has put ethical and political issues back on the philosophical agenda, forcing us to confront anew, the Socratic question 'How should I live?'. (shrink)

This book offers a significant reinterpretation of the history of republican political thought and of Niccolo Machiavelli's place within it. It locates Machiavelli's political thought within enduring debates about the proper size of republics. From the sixteenth century onward, as states grew larger, it was believed only monarchies could govern large territories effectively. Republicanism was a form of government relegated to urban city-states, anachronisms in the new age of the territorial state. For centuries, history and theory were in agreement: constructing (...) an extended republic was as futile as trying to square the circle; but then James Madison devised a compound representative republic that enabled popular government to take on renewed life in the modern era. This work argues that Machiavelli had his own Madisonian impulse and deserves to be recognized as the first modern political theorist to envision the possibility of a republic with a large population extending over a broad territory. (shrink)

In contested areas of environmental research and policy, all stakeholders are likely to claim that their position is scientifically grounded but disagree about the relevant scientific conclusions or the weight of the evidence. In this article, I draw on a year of participant observation and over 110 in-depth interviews, with the case study of controversial chemicals used as flame retardants in consumer products. I develop the concept of strategic science translation, the process of interpreting and communicating scientific evidence to an (...) intended audience in order to advance certain goals and interests. Engaging in selective, interpretive, or inaccurate SST allows competing stakeholders to bolster their arguments, strengthen their authority, and inspire change regarding a policy-relevant issue. Because stakeholders deploy imbalanced resources when they participate in contested environmental fields, their actions in those fields and the resulting policy outcomes often reduce not to the settling of scientific truths but to power differentials. (shrink)

Under the sign of Libitina, the Roman goddess of burials and funerals invoked in Horace's Ode 3.30, this essay provides a celebratory introduction to the work of the Polish Jewish poet Zuzanna Ginczanka, situating her within the cultural history of commemoration and consecration of the dead in Poland and the painful confrontation with the unburied dead of the Holocaust, of whom Ginczanka is one. Her best-known poem, a bitter parody of Juliusz Słowacki's “My Testament,” turns the Horatian notion of poetry (...) as the most precious and enduring legacy on its head by construing the author's meager household possessions, looted after her denunciation to the Nazis in wartime, as the only offering her fellow citizens will cherish, while the text itself was actually brought as evidence in a postwar trial of the Polish woman she accuses in the poem and contributed to a conviction for collaboration. Using historian Thomas Laqueur's terms necro-sociability and necronominalism as competing impulses in a seemingly intractable struggle, this essay argues that it is possible to find in Ginczanka's joyful defiance of traditional accounts of body and spirit the point of departure for a poetics that claims a new freedom of imagination in the attempt to transcend the most stubborn of memory wars. (shrink)

Roberto Frega & Giovanni Maddelena – Can you recollect what the situation was concerning the study of pragmatism when you were in college? Richard J. Bernstein – I was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago from 1949 to 1951. At the time the “Hutchins College” was an unusual institution. The entire curriculum was fixed and it was organized around reading many of the great books of the Western tradition. From the time I arrived, I was reading Plato, Aristotle, (...) Galileo, Darwin, Herodotus... (shrink)

Widespread causal overdetermination is often levied as an objection to nonreductive theories of minds and objects. In response, nonreductive metaphysicians have argued that the type of overdetermination generated by their theories is different from the sorts of coincidental cases involving multiple rock-throwers, and thus not problematic. This paper pushes back. I argue that attention to differences between types of overdetermination discharges very few explanatory burdens, and that overdetermination is a bigger problem for the nonreductive metaphysician than previously thought.

Mindfulness-based training programs are highly established in competitive and recreational sports. One of the best-known approaches is the Mindfulness-Acceptance-Commitment Approach by Gardner and Moore), which integrates mindfulness aspects of awareness, non-judgmental attitude, and focus. Based on these aspects, Thienot and colleagues developed and validated an English language sport-specific questionnaire, the so-called Mindfulness Inventory for Sport, for the assessment of mindfulness skills in athletes. The aim of this study is to psychometrically test a German language version of the MIS. To assess (...) the psychometric properties, the MIS-D was examined in an online survey with an integrated test–retest design for reliability, validity, and measurement invariance. The present results support the psychometric quality of the German language version of the MIS. Necessary replications should among others focus on checking the measurement invariance for further relevant subgroups. (shrink)

In this essay I identify a type of linguistic phenomenon new to feminist philosophy of language: biased evaluative descriptions. Biased evaluative descriptions are descriptions whose well-intended positive surface meanings are inflected with implicitly biased content. Biased evaluative descriptions are characterized by three main features: (1) they have roots in implicit bias or benevolent sexism, (2) their application is counterfactually unstable across dominant and subordinate social groups, and (3) they encode stereotypes. After giving several different kinds of examples of biased evaluative (...) descriptions, I distinguish them from similar linguistic concepts, including backhanded compliments, slurs, insults, epithets, pejoratives, and dog whistles. I suggest that the traditional framework of Gricean implicature cannot account for biased evaluative descriptions. I discuss some challenges to the distinctiveness and evaluability of biased evaluative descriptions, including intersectional social identities. I conclude by discussing their social significance and moral status. Identifying biased evaluative descriptions is important for a variety of social contexts, from the very general and broad (political speeches) to the very particular and small (bias in academic hiring). (shrink)

Theories of causation grounded in counterfactual dependence face the problem of profligate omissions: numerous irrelevant omissions count as causes of an outcome. A recent purported solution to this problem is proportionality, which selects one omission among many candidates as the cause of an outcome. This paper argues that proportionality cannot solve the problem of profligate omissions for two reasons. First: the determinate/determinable relationship that holds between properties like aqua and blue does not hold between negative properties like not aqua and (...) not blue. Negative properties are those at stake in omissive causation. Second: proportionality misconstrues the nature of the problem to be solved. (shrink)

Free will, if such there be, involves free choosing: the ability to mentally choose an outcome, where the outcome is 'free' in being, in some substantive sense, up to the agent of the choice. As such, it is clear that the questions of how to understand free will and mental causation are connected, for events of seemingly free choosing are mental events that appear to be efficacious vis-a-vis other mental events as well as physical events. Nonetheless, the free will and (...) mental causation debates have proceeded largely independently of each other. Here we aim to make progress in determining how the free will and mental causation debates bear on one another. We first argue that the problems of free will and of mental causation can be seen as special cases of a more general problem, concerning whether and how mental events of a given type may be efficacious, qua the types of event they are---qualitative, intentional, freely deliberative---given their apparent causal irrelevancy for effects of the type in question; here we generalize what Horgan 1989 identifies as "the problem of mental quausation" (S1). We then build on this result to identify fruitful parallels between hard determinism and eliminative physicalism (S2) and soft determinism and non-reductive physicalism (S3). (shrink)

This paper argues that so-called “trumping preemption” is in fact overdetermination or early preemption, and is thus not a distinctive form of redundant causation. I draw a novel lesson from cases thought to be trumping: that the boundary between preemption and overdetermination should be reconsidered.

ABSTRACTThomas Hobbes transforms fear and curiosity from primarily theological to anthropological concerns. Fear and curiosity go from being, most centrally, part of religiousness, or part of worsh...

Basil Bernstein rarely had a good press in the forty-odd years in which he presented his developing theories to the public. Early admiration for his sociolinguistic 'discoveries' - of codes which regulate, at a deep-structural level, family beliefs and behaviours and relationships, as well as surface utterances - turned quite quickly into a suspicion that his description of social class difference amounted to a declaration of working class deficit. Although Bernstein's writings, particularly in the 1990s, became opaque to (...) the point of seeming to be purposefully obscurantist, they have always been enlivened by clear, pithy and punchy statements which left no room for ambiguity about the case he was making. The struggle to achieve an education system which would offer genuinely equal opportunities to children from all class and cultural backgrounds continued to underpin the writing and teaching of his later years. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 30, Issue 2, pp 156 - 177 Using the example of ghosts and religion, this paper argues for the importance of social context and background operative in Hobbes’s account of social life and, in particular, the role of environment, education, and language in explaining much of what we think we know, and much of what we believe. The paper looks to aspects of Hobbes’s epistemology and his account of belief, to make the case that he recognizes how (...) a kind of social conditioning is required to sustain certain beliefs. The paper briefly concludes with a focus on the commonwealth itself and how the example of religion and religious belief extends to the commonwealth and the kinds of beliefs required for the commonwealth to sustain itself. (shrink)

In the fast-paced world of clinical medicine, recognizing and acknowledging differences in worldviews is often overlooked. When dealing with the delicate issues broached in advance care planning, such oversights can lead to deep rifts within the health care provider-patient relationship. By providing guidance to those engaged in such endeavors and setting advance care planning in a global context, health care practitioners will be better able to care for their patients and achieve the noble goal of advance care planning_giving volume to (...) the voice of the patient in the last chapter of her life. (shrink)

Two conundrums puzzle COVID‐19 investigators: 1) morbidity and mortality is rare among infants and young children and 2) rates of morbidity and mortality exhibit large variances across nations, locales, and even within cities. It is found that the higher the rate of pneumococcal vaccination in a nation (or city) the lower the COVID‐19 morbidity and mortality. Vaccination rates with Bacillus Calmette–Guerin, poliovirus, and other vaccines do not correlate with COVID‐19 risks, nor do COVID‐19 case or death rates correlate with number (...) of people in the population with diabetes, obesity, or adults over 65. Infant protection may be due to maternal antibodies and antiviral proteins in milk such as lactoferrin that are known to protect against coronavirus infections. Subsequent protection might then be conferred (and correlate with) rates of Haemophilus influenzae type B (Hib) (universal in infants) and pneumococcal vaccination, the latter varying widely by geography among infants, at‐risk adults, and the elderly. Also see the video abstract here https://youtu.be/GODBYRbPL00. (shrink)

I propose a T‐cell receptor (TcR)‐based mechanism by which immunity mediates both “genetic self” and “microbial self” thereby, connecting microbiome disease with autoimmunity. The hypothesis is based on simple principles. First, TcR are selected to avoid strong cross‐reactivity with “self,” resulting in selection for a TcR repertoire mimicking “genetic self.” Second, evolution has selected for a “microbial self” that mimics “genetic self” so as to share tolerance. In consequence, our TcR repertoire also mimics microbiome antigenicity, providing a novel mechanism for (...) modulating tolerance to it. Also, the microbiome mimics the TcR repertoire, acting as a secondary immune system. I call this TcR‐microbiome mimicry “holoimmunity” to denote immune tolerance to the “holobiont self.” Logically, microbiome‐host mimicry means that autoimmunity directed at host antigens will also attack components of the microbiome, and conversely, an immunological attack on the microbiome may cross‐react with host antigens producing “holoautoimmunity.”. (shrink)

This article argues that governments in countries that currently permit intensive animal agriculture - especially but not exclusively high-income countries - are, in principle, morally justified in taking steps to restrict or even eliminate intensive animal agriculture to protect public health from the risk of zoonotic pandemics. Unlike many extant arguments for restricting, curtailing, or even eliminating intensive animal agriculture which focus on environmental harms, animal welfare, or the link between animal source food (ASF) consumption and noncommunicable disease, the argument (...) in this article appeals to the value of protecting populations from future global health emergencies and their broad social, economic, and health impacts, taking the SARS-CoV-2 virus as a particularly salient example. The article begins by identifying how intensive animal agriculture contributes to the outbreak (and risk of future outbreaks) of zoonotic diseases. Next, we explore three specific policy options: 1. Incentivizing plant-based and cell-based ASF alternatives through government subsidies; 2. Disincentivizing intensive ASF production through the adoption of a “zoonotic tax”; and 3. Eliminating intensive ASF production through a total ban. We argue that all three of these measures are permissible, although we remain agnostic as to whether these measures are obligatory. We argue for this conclusion on the grounds that each measure is justified by the same sorts of considerations that justify other widely accepted public health interventions, and each is compatible with a variety of theories of justice. We then address potential objections. Finally, we discuss how our novel argument relates to extant ethical arguments in favor or curtailing ASF production and consumption. (shrink)