The judgement of human ability is ubiquitous, from school admissions to job performance reviews. The exact make-up of ability traits, however, is often narrowly defined and lacks a comprehensive basis. We attempt to simplify the spectrum of human ability, similar to how five personality traits are widely believed to describe most personalities. Finding such a basis for human ability would be invaluable since neuropsychiatric disease diagnoses and symptom severity are commonly related to such differences in performance. Here, we identified four (...) underlying ability traits within the National Institutes of Health Toolbox normative data (n= 1, 369): (1) Motor-endurance, (2) Emotional processing, (3) Executive and cognitive function, and (4) Social interaction. We used the Human Connectome Project young adult dataset (n= 778) to show that Motor-endurance and Executive and cognitive function were reliably associated with specific brain functional networks (r2= 0.305 ± 0.021), and the biological nature of these ability traits was also shown by calculating their heritability (31 and 49%, respectively) from twin data. (shrink)

BackgroundThis study aimed to determine what, how, and under what circumstances individual-focused interventions improve well-being and decrease burnout for critical care healthcare professionals.MethodThis realist approach, expert opinion interview, was guided by the Realist And Meta-narrative Evidence Synthesis: Evolving Standards II guidelines. Semi-structured interviews with critical care experts were conducted to ascertain current and nuanced information on a set of pre-defined individual interventions summarized from a previous umbrella review. The data were appraised, and relationships between context, mechanisms, and outcomes were extracted, (...) which created theory prepositions that refined the initial program theory.ResultsA total of 21 critical care experts were individually interviewed. By understanding the complex interplay between organizational and personal factors that influenced intervention uptake, it was possible to decipher the most likely implementable intervention for critical care healthcare professionals. The expert recommendation suggested that interventions should be evidence-based, accessible, inclusive, and collaborative, and promote knowledge and skill development. Unique mechanisms were also required to achieve the positive effects of the intervention due to the presence of contextual factors within critical care settings. Mechanisms identified in this study included the facilitation of self-awareness, self-regulation, autonomy, collaboration, acceptance, and inclusion.ConclusionThis validation of a theoretical understanding of intervention that addressed well-being and burnout in critical care healthcare professionals by expert opinion demonstrated essential mechanisms and contextual factors to consider when designing and implementing interventions. Future research would benefit by piloting individual interventions and integrating these new theoretical findings to understand better their effectiveness for future translation into the “real-world” setting. (shrink)

Introduction Future HIV vaccine efficacy trials with adolescents will need to ensure that participants comprehend study concepts in order to confer true informed assent. A Hepatitis B vaccine trial with adolescents offers valuable opportunity to test youth understanding of vaccine trial requirements in general. Methods Youth reviewed a simplified assent form with study investigators and then completed a comprehension questionnaire. Once enrolled, all youth were tested for HIV and confirmed to be HIV-negative. Results 123 youth completed the questionnaire (mean age=15 (...) years; 63% male; 70% Hispanic). Overall, only 69 (56%) youth answered all six questions correctly. Conclusions Youth enrolled in a Hepatitis B vaccine trial demonstrated variable comprehension of the study design and various methodological concepts, such as treatment group masking. (shrink)

This book from the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity provides a faith-based evaluation of recent technologies and trends in bioethics--including the current debate surrounding stem cell research. Fifteen noted scholars and medical practitioners discuss some of today's new and controversial work in biomedicine--xenotransplantation, artificial intelligence, cybernetics, and more--and evaluate from a Christian perspective both the science and the ethical questions it raises. Designed to orient general readers to the current state of biomedical research, Cutting-Edge Bioethics is must reading for (...) anyone wishing to confront and wrestle with the challenging moral issues posed by this ever-advancing field. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 11, Page 42-43, November 2011.

A. NATURAL. HISTORY. OF. THE. SENSES. “This is one of the best books of the year—by any measure you want to apply. It is interesting, informative, very well written. This book can be opened on any page and read with relish.... thoroughly  ...

What role, if any, should the government perform in a society? Two very different answers to this question have been provided by John Rawls and Robert Nozick. For Rawls, the government plays an important role in ensuring that the principles of justice are realized in the workings of society. For Nozick, the role of government is limited to that of providing protection. The debate over these two views has led to the questioning of the entire liberal doctrine, a questioning that (...) has taken place not only within intellectual circles, but also within the society at large. (shrink)

Kant stated that there are three mental faculties: cognition, feeling, and desire. The faculty of feeling has received the least scholarly attention, despite its importance in Kant's broader thought, and this volume of new essays is the first to present multiple perspectives on a number of important questions about it. Why does Kant come to believe that feeling must be described as a separate faculty? What is the relationship between feeling and cognition, on the one hand, and desire, on the (...) other? What is the nature of feeling? What do the most discussed Kantian feelings, such as respect and sublimity, tell us about the nature of feeling for Kant? And what about other important feelings that have been overlooked or mischaracterized by commentators, such as enthusiasm and hope? This collaborative and authoritative volume will appeal to Kant scholars, historians of philosophy, and those working on topics in ethics, aesthetics, and emotions. (shrink)

In two experiments, we tested whether fearful facial expressions capture attention in an awareness-independent fashion. In Experiment 1, participants searched for a visible neutral face presented at one of two positions. Prior to the target, a backward-masked and, thus, invisible emotional or neutral face was presented as a cue, either at target position or away from the target position. If negative emotional faces capture attention in a stimulus-driven way, we would have expected a cueing effect: better performance where fearful or (...) disgusted facial cues were presented at target position than away from the target. However, no evidence of capture of attention was found, neither in behavior, nor in event-related lateralizations. In Experiment 2, we went one step further and used fearful faces as visible targets, too. Thereby, we sought to boost awareness-independent capture of attention by fearful faces. However, still, we found no significant attention-capture effect. Our results show that fearful facial expressions do not capture attention in an awareness-independent way. Results are discussed in light of existing theories. (shrink)

Text of and reflection on the 1981 encounter between Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jacques Derrida, which featured a dialogue between hermeneutics in Germany and post-structuralism in France. <br.

The widespread tendency, even within AI, to anthropomorphize machines makes it easier to convince us of their intelligence. How can any putative demonstration of intelligence in machines be trusted if the AI researcher readily succumbs to make-believe? This is (what I shall call) the forensic problem of anthropomorphism. I argue that the Turing test provides a solution. This paper illustrates the phenomenon of misplaced anthropomorphism and presents a new perspective on Turingʼs imitation game. It also examines the role of the (...) Turing test in relation to the current dispute between human-level AI and ‘mindless intelligence’. (shrink)

In this article the central philosophical issues concerning human-level artificial intelligence (AI) are presented. AI largely changed direction in the 1980s and 1990s, concentrating on building domain-specific systems and on sub-goals such as self-organization, self-repair, and reliability. Computer scientists aimed to construct intelligence amplifiers for human beings, rather than imitation humans. Turing based his test on a computer-imitates-human game, describing three versions of this game in 1948, 1950, and 1952. The famous version appears in a 1950 article in Mind, ‘Computing (...) Machinery and Intelligence’ (Turing 1950). The interpretation of Turing's test is that it provides an operational definition of intelligence (or thinking) in machines, in terms of behavior. ‘Intelligent Machinery’ sets out the thesis that whether an entity is intelligent is determined in part by our responses to the entity's behavior. Wittgenstein frequently employed the idea of a human being acting like a reliable machine. A ‘living reading-machine’ is a human being or other creature that is given written signs, for example Chinese characters, arithmetical symbols, logical symbols, or musical notation, and who produces text spoken aloud, solutions to arithmetical problems, and proofs of logical theorems. Wittgenstein mentions that an entity that manipulates symbols genuinely reads only if he or she has a particular history, involving learning and training, and participates in a social environment that includes normative constraints and further uses of the symbols. (shrink)

To explain how abstract concepts are grounded in sensory-motor experiences, several theories have been proposed. I will discuss two of these proposals, Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Situated Cognition, and argue why they do not fully explain grounding. A central idea in Conceptual Metaphor Theory is that image schemas ground abstract concepts in concrete experiences. Image schemas might themselves be abstractions, however, and therefore do not solve the grounding problem. Moreover, image schemas are too simple to explain the full richness of (...) abstract concepts. Situated cognition might provide such richness. Research in our laboratory, however, has shown that even for concrete concepts, sensory-motor grounding is task dependent. Therefore, it is questionable whether abstract concepts can be significantly grounded in sensory-motor processing. (shrink)

Henceforth "to transform" should mean "to change the sense of sense."The field of the entity … is structured according to the diverse—genetic and structural—possibilities of the trace.The first article in the first issue of Philosophy and Rhetoric is "The Rhetorical Situation," Lloyd Bitzer's critical exegesis on "the nature of those contexts in which speakers or writers create rhetorical discourse". Bitzer contends that the rhetor produces "the rhetorical text" when a "real" or "natural" —"objective and publicly observable" —situation "calls the discourse (...) into existence". That was 1968. Five volumes later, as you know, Richard E. Vatz flips the causal relation, maintaining instead that... (shrink)

Building on the breakthrough text Philosophy and Engineering: An Emerging Agenda, this book offers 30 chapters covering conceptual and substantive developments in the philosophy of engineering, along with a series of critical reflections by engineering practitioners. The volume demonstrates how reflective engineering can contribute to a better understanding of engineering identity and explores how integrating engineering and philosophy could lead to innovation in engineering methods, design and education. The volume is divided into reflections on practice, principles and process, each of (...) which challenges prevalent assumptions and commitments within engineering and philosophy. The volume explores the ontological and epistemological dimensions of engineering and exposes the falsity of the commonly held belief that the field is simply the application of science knowledge to problem solving. Above all, the perspectives collected here demonstrate the value of a constructive dialogue between engineering and philosophy and show how collaboration between the disciplines casts light on longstanding problems from both sides. The chapters in this volume are from a diverse and international body of authors, including philosophers and engineers, and represent a highly select group of papers originally presented in three different conferences. These are the 2008 Workshop on Philosophy and Engineering held at the Royal Academy of Engineering; the 2009 meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Technology at the University of Twente in the Netherlands; and the Forum on Philosophy, Engineering, and Technology, held in Golden, Colorado at the Colorado School of Mines. (shrink)

IntroductionThis case study describes the process faculty at a large research university undertook to build a stand-alone online academic integrity course for first-year and transfer students. Because academic integrity is decentralized at the institution, building a more systematic program had to come from the bottom-up (faculty developed) rather than from the top down (institutionally mandated).Case descriptionUsing the learning management system, faculty and e-learning designers collaborated to build the course. Incorporating nuanced scenarios for six different types of misconduct (consistent with the (...) University’s Code of Student Rights, Responsibilities & Conduct), a pre- and post-test, and assessments for each scenario, the course provides experience in recognizing and avoiding academic misconduct.Discussion and evaluationAs a stand-alone course, the faculty who created it maintain control over content and are able to analyze student performance across the institution. In the ten months since its launch, the course has been eagerly adopted by faculty (n = 1853 students have completed the course) and post-test scores indicate students are learning from the course.ConclusionsAfter the successful launch of the student course, the next step, already underway, is the launch of learning modules for faculty and teaching assistants. (shrink)

By the 1950s, eugenics had lost its scientific status; it now belonged to the context rather than to the content of science. Interest in the subject was also at low ebb. But that situation would soon change dramatically. Indeed, in an essay-review published in 1993, Philip Pauly commented that a “eugenics industry” had come to rival the “Darwin industry” in importance, although the former seemed less integrated than the latter. Since then, the pace of publication on eugenics, including American eugenics, (...) has only accelerated, while the field has become even more fractured, moving in multiple and even contradictory directions. This essay explores the trajectory of work on the history of American eugenics since interest in the subject revived in the 1960s, noting trends and also fractures. The latter are seen to result partly from the fact that professional historians no longer own the subject, which has attracted the interest of scholars in several other disciplines as well as scientists, political activists, and journalists, and also from the fact that the history of eugenics has almost always been policy-oriented. Historians’ desire to be policy-relevant and at the same time attentive to context, complexity, and contingency has generated tensions at several levels: within individuals, among historians, and between professional historians and others who also engage with the history of eugenics. That these tensions are resolved differently by different authors and even by the same authors at different times helps explain why the fragmentation that Pauly noted is not likely to be overcome anytime soon. (shrink)

Introduction : but is it ethics? -- Alterity : the problem of transcendence -- Singularity : the unrepresentable face -- Responsibility : the infinity of the demand -- Ethics : normativity and norms -- Scarce resources? : Levinas, animals, and the environment -- Failures of recognition and the recognition of failure : Levinas and identity politics.

Two nurses diagnosed with opioid addiction launched legal action after being found guilty of unprofessional conduct due to addiction‐related behaviors. When covered by the media, their cases sparked both public and legal controversies. We are curious about the broader discursive framings that led to these strong reactions, and analyze the underlying structures of knowledge and power that shape the issue of opioid addiction in the profession of nursing through a critical discourse analysis of popular media, legal blogs and hearing tribunals. (...) We argue that addiction in nursing is framed as personal choice, as a failure in the moral character of the nurses, as decontextualized from addiction as disease arguments, and as an individualized issue devoid of contextual factors leading to addiction. Our investigation offers a critical case study of a nursing regulatory body that upheld popular assumptions of addiction as an autonomous, rational choice replete with individual‐based consequences – a framing that is inconsistent with evidence‐based practice in health‐care. We put forth this critical interrogation to open up possibilities for counterdiscourses that may promote more nuanced and effective responses to the issue of addiction in nursing. (shrink)

In her 2012 novel The Panopticon, Jenni Fagan chose to examine the possibility of emancipation from within the care system, and between the walls of an institution modelled on Bentham’s 18th century eponymous invention. Setting the adventures of Anais, an orphan and chronic offender, in that building, testifies to the persistence of the master trope of surveillance, which turns the visual world of the novel into an anxiety-ridden field of observation and control. The reference to disciplinary and punitive visuality proves (...) particularly effective in conveying Fagan’s critique of a system that has relinquished its duty of care and devotes itself to the marginalisation and subjugation of the young delinquents it purports to rehabilitate. However the novel also inspires itself from Foucault by reminding us that the visual field of discipline is not one in which power can be exerted absolutely. In the Panopticon, surveillance elicits the resistance of the residents, who repeatedly escape the all-seeing watchtower, claim a “right to look” and eventually bring down the dispositive of disciplinary visuality, allowing Anais’s emancipation in the process. Ultimately the narrative uses the visual paranoia of panopticism as a foil, as its young protagonist looks for practices of seeing and modes of inscription in the visual landscape that will nurture rather than discipline and punish. Far from rejecting visuality altogether, the narrative seeks out spaces where visual care and consideration constitute a response to the failure of the State system of surveillance effectively to reform or care for its citizens. (shrink)

Este ensaio visual desdobra-se de uma pesquisa poética de mestrado na qual o corpo da pesquisadora-artista é tornado objeto de si em experimentação. Essa experimentação se dá a partir da produção de uma série de fotodobragens intitulada Mulher dobrada (2016-2019), realizada em um ambiente rural de origem. Com isso, busca pensar os processos de subjetivação do feminino. O conceito filosófico de dobra, presente nos estudos de filosofia de Michel Foucault e Gilles Deleuze é aberto ao ato físico de dobrar e (...) redobrar o corpo ao meio. Um corpo definido em múltiplas formas, que pertence, mas, por vezes, destoa de seu ambiente. Um corpo que nasce nos diferentes ambientes, aos quais sempre volta, como os ciclos das plantas e a persistência de suas paisagens. Um corpo que, em uma poética, pode criar novas relações e voltar diferente. Fechado em si, protege-se do que é externo. Ao mesmo tempo, seu exercício particular é exposto ao outro, espectador. De dentro e para fora do próprio corpo, através da imagem, o gesto repetido de dobrar-se ao meio testa sua resistência. Entre a ductilidade e a quebra, movimento e inoperância, entre continuidade e ruptura, pertencimento e estranheza, no entre, visa desafiar a anatomia e o olhar identificador do corpo de mulher conhecido, através de uma mulher que olha para si. (shrink)