This paper argues that although Epicureans will never marry for love, they may find it therapeutic to marry for sex: Epicureans may marry in order to limit anxiety about securing a sexual partner if they are prone to such anxiety and if they believe their prospective partner will satisfy them sexually. The paper shows that Epicureans believe that the process of obtaining sex can be a major source of anxiety, that it is acceptable for the sage to marry under certain (...) circumstances, and that the desire for sex alone is free of the groundless assumptions that fuel love. Epicureans would therefore approve of marrying to alleviate sexual anxiety. (shrink)

This paper considers how Plato can account for the fact that pain features prominently in the intellectual pleasures of philosophers, given that in his view pleasures mixed with pain are ontologically deficient and inferior to ‘pure,’ painless pleasures. After ruling out the view that Plato does not believe intellectual pleasures are actually painful, I argue that he provides a coherent and overlooked account of pleasure in the Phaedrus, where purity does not factor into the philosopher’s judgment of pleasures at all; (...) what matters instead is the extent to which a given pleasure fosters the philosophical life. I show that to argue, as James Warren has recently done, that Plato thinks intellectual pleasures are not per se painful is less successful than the Phaedrus account at explaining philosophers’ lived experiences of pleasure, which often involve pain. (shrink)

Diogenes Laertius reports that the Epicurean sage will pity slaves rather than punish them. This paper considers why a hedonistic egoist would feel pity for her subordinates, given that pity can cause psychological pain. I argue that Epicureans feel bad for those who lack the natural good of security, and that Epicureans’ concern for others is entirely consistent with their hedonistic egoism: they will endure the pain of pity in order to achieve the greater pleasure of social cohesion and to (...) avoid the greater pain of social conflict. According to Epicureans, our feelings for fellow humans prevent us from becoming savages, unable to enter into trustworthy compacts to promote our safety. (shrink)

In the Philebus, Plato claims that there exists a natural state of organic harmony in which a living organism is neither restored nor depleted. In contrast to many scholars, I argue that this natural state of organic stability differs from a neutral state between pleasure and pain that Plato also discusses in the dialogue: the natural is without any changes to the organism, the neutral is merely without the perception of these changes. I contend that Plato considers the natural state (...) to be unobtainable by human beings, who can only achieve its closest approximation, namely, the neutral state. (shrink)

Contemporary critics of Augustine, including many feminists, have often charged him with debasing the body by considering it to be the seat of sin, worthy of enmity and neglect. I argue that in several texts Augustine displays a marked effort to liberate his readers from precisely that position. I attempt to show that in De doctrina christiana and City of God, Augustine defends the body by shifting the blame for sin from the flesh to the soul. I contend that this (...) move does not amount to claiming that the body is inherently good, but only that it is not inherently worthy of contempt -or, at least, no more than is the soul. I go on to show that in the Enchiridion Augustine moves beyond a mere defense of the body: he argues for its inherent goodness. This claim results from his metaphysics of created being, in which all substances are good to some extent simply because they are creations of God. Thus Augustine both defends the body, by showing that it is not entirely responsible for sin, and redeems it, by showing that it is inherently good. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article considers Michel Foucault's theories of ethical speech and militant life in the context of Occupy Wall Street's encampments in Zuccotti Park. Focusing on the encampments and the production and circulation of resources to meet bodily needs, the article concludes that occupation was a self-inflicted form of precarity as well as an extension of an already existing vulnerability, a living that is at once a form of social death. I read the occupations as a mode of militant life, (...) which is to say, that which enacts precarity while at the same time transforming it into the object of radical speech. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay thinks through the relationship between dystopia and utopia, in particular, how the constellation of past and present in radical demands amid state and economic violence is that which creates “crisis”—an estrangement from the present, a reclaiming of past insurgency, and the possibilities for other worlds.

ABSTRACT This essay thinks through the relationship between dystopia and utopia, in particular, how the constellation of past and present in radical demands amid state and economic violence is that which creates “crisis”—an estrangement from the present, a reclaiming of past insurgency, and the possibilities for other worlds.

Data access and data sharing are vital to advance medicine. A growing number of public private partnerships are set up to facilitate data access and sharing, as private and public actors possess highly complementary health data sets and treatment development resources. However, the priorities and incentives of public and private organizations are frequently in conflict. This has complicated partnerships and sparked public concerns around ethical issues such as trust, justice or privacy—in turn raising an important problem in business and data (...) ethics: how can ethical theory inform the practice of public and private partners to mitigate misaligned incentives, and ensure that they can deliver societally beneficial innovation? In this paper, we report on the development of the Swiss Personalized Health Network’s ethical guidelines for health data sharing in public private partnerships. We describe the process of identifying ethical issues and engaging core stakeholders to incorporate their practical reality on these issues. Our report highlights core ethical issues in health data public private partnerships and provides strategies for how to overcome these in the Swiss health data context. By agreeing on and formalizing ethical principles and practices at the beginning of a partnership, partners and society can benefit from a relationship built around a mutual commitment to ethical principles. We present this summary in the hope that it will contribute to the global data sharing dialogue. (shrink)

Frameworks of emotional development have tended to focus on how environmental factors shape children's emotion understanding. However, individual experiences of emotion represent a complex interplay between both external environmental inputs and internal somatovisceral signaling. Here, we discuss the importance of afferent signals and coordination between central and peripheral mechanisms in affective response processing. We propose that incorporating somatovisceral theories of emotions into frameworks of emotional development can inform how children understand emotions in themselves and others. We highlight promising directions for (...) future research on emotional development incorporating this perspective, namely afferent cardiac processing and interoception, immune activation, physiological synchrony, and social touch. (shrink)

Hellenistic philosophy concerns the thought of the Epicureans, Stoics, and Skeptics, the most influential philosophical groups in the era between the death of Alexander the Great and the defeat of the last Greek stronghold in the ancient world. The Routledge Handbook of Hellenistic Philosophy provides accessible yet rigorous introductions to the theories of knowledge, ethics, and physics belonging to each of the three schools. It explores the fascinating ways in which interschool rivalries shaped the philosophies of the era, and offers (...) unique insight into the relevance of Hellenistic views to issues today, such as environmental ethics, consumerism, and bioethics. Eleven countries are represented among the Handbook's thirty-five authors, whose chapters were written specifically for this volume and are organized thematically into six sections: I. The people, history, and methods of Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Skepticism. II. Earlier philosophical influences on Hellenistic thought, such as Aristotle, Socrates, and Presocratics. III. The soul, perception, and knowledge. IV. God, fate, and the primary principles of nature and the universe. V. Ethics, political theory, society, and community. VI. Hellenistic philosophy's relevance to contemporary life. Spanning from the ancient past to the present, this Handbook aims to show that Hellenistic philosophy has much to offer all thinking people of the twenty-first century. (shrink)

_Co-Published by Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group and the Association of Teacher Educators._ The_ Handbook of Research on Teacher Education_ was initiated to ferment change in education based on solid evidence. The publication of the First Edition was a signal event in 1990. While the preparation of educators was then – and continues to be – the topic of substantial discussion, there did not exist a codification of the best that was known at the time about teacher education. Reflecting the needs (...) of educators today, the Third Edition takes a new approach to achieving the same purpose. Beyond simply conceptualizing the broad landscape of teacher education and providing comprehensive reviews of the latest research for major domains of practice, this edition: stimulates a broad conversation about foundational issues brings multiple perspectives to bear provides new specificity to topics that have been undifferentiated in the past includes diverse voices in the conversation. The Editors, with an Advisory Board, identified nine foundational issues and translated them into a set of focal questions: What’s the Point?: The Purposes of Teacher Education What Should Teachers Know? Teacher Capacities: Knowledge, Beliefs, Skills, and Commitments Where Should Teachers Be Taught? Settings and Roles in Teacher Education Who Teaches? Who Should Teach? Teacher Recruitment, Selection, and Retention Does Difference Make a Difference? Diversity and Teacher Education How Do People Learn to Teach? Who’s in Charge? Authority in Teacher Education How Do We Know What We Know? Research and Teacher Education What Good is Teacher Education? The Place of Teacher Education in Teachers’ Education. _The Association of Teacher Educators is an individual membership organization devoted solely to the improvement of teacher education both for school-based and post secondary teacher educators. For more information on our organization and publications, please visit: www.ate1.org _. (shrink)

For over three decades, clinical ethicists in the United States have recorded their consulting activities to supplement documentation in the medical record, often using locally developed instrument...

Meat is a multi-billion-dollar industry that relies on people performing risky physical work inside meat-processing facilities over long shifts in close proximity. These workers are socially disempowered, and many are members of groups beset by historic and ongoing structural discrimination. The combination of working conditions and worker characteristics facilitate the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Workers have been expected to put their health and lives at risk during the pandemic because of government and industry pressures to keep (...) this “essential industry” producing. Numerous interventions can significantly reduce the risks to workers and their communities; however, the industry’s implementation has been sporadic and inconsistent. With a focus on the U.S. context, this paper offers an ethical framework for infection prevention and control recommendations grounded in public health values of health and safety, interdependence and solidarity, and health equity and justice, with particular attention to considerations of reciprocity, equitable burden sharing, harm reduction, and health promotion. Meat-processing workers are owed an approach that protects their health relative to the risks of harms to them, their families, and their communities. Sacrifices from businesses benefitting financially from essential industry status are ethically warranted and should acknowledge the risks assumed by workers in the context of existing structural inequities. (shrink)

Diverse beliefs about the nature and essence of scientific truth are pervasive in the nursing literature. Most recently, rejection of a more traditional and objective truth has resulted in a shift toward an emphasis on the acceptance of multiple and subjective truths. Some nursing scholars have discarded the idea that objective truth exists at all, but instead have argued that subjective truth is the only knowable truth and therefore the one that ought to govern nursing's disciplinary inquiry. Yet, there has (...) been relatively little critical debate or dialogue about the implications of adopting subjective and multiple truths as a maxim to govern the discipline. In this paper we examine what it might mean to adopt subjective forms of truth as the only knowable truths for nursing, and to accept the possibility of multiple co-existing realities. We understand the implications of such a philosophical stance for the epistemological basis of a practice science to be considerable, therefore we consider what it might mean for a practice-based discipline such as nursing to remain ambiguous on the question of truth, and examine the implications of failing to achieve consensus on what constitutes a truth claim. On the basis of this examination, we urge a cautious approach to the extremes of either position and argue for a more thoughtful and rigorous dialogue about ‘truth’ and knowledge in nursing practice, education, and research. (shrink)

After introducing the new field of cultural evolution, we review a growing body of empirical evidence suggesting that culture shapes what people attend to, perceive and remember as well as how they think, feel and reason. Focusing on perception, spatial navigation, mentalizing, thinking styles, reasoning (epistemic norms) and language, we discuss not only important variation in these domains, but emphasize that most researchers (including philosophers) and research participants are psychologically peculiar within a global and historical context. This rising tide of (...) evidence recommends caution in relying on one’s intuitions or even in generalizing from reliable psychological findings to the species, Homo sapiens. Our evolutionary approach suggests that humans have evolved a suite of reliably developing cognitive abilities that adapt our minds, information-processing abilities and emotions ontogenetically to the diverse culturally-constructed worlds we confront. (shrink)

Spatial asymmetries are an intriguing feature of directed attention. Recent observations indicate an influence of temperament upon the direction of these asymmetries. It is unknown whether this influence generalises to visual orienting behaviour. The aim of the current study was therefore to explore the relationship between temperament and measures of spatial orienting as a function of target hemifield. An exogenous cueing task was administered to 92 healthy participants. Temperament was assessed using Carver and White's (1994) Behavioural Inhibition System and Behavioural (...) Activation System (BIS/BAS) scales. Individuals with high sensitivity to punishment and low sensitivity to reward showed a leftward asymmetry of directed attention when there was no informative spatial cue provided. This asymmetry was not present when targets were preceded by spatial cues that were either valid or invalid. The findings support the notion that individual variations in temperament influence spatial asymmetries in visual orienting, but only when lateral targets are preceded by a non-directional (neutral) cue. The results are discussed in terms of hemispheric asymmetries and dopamine activity. (shrink)

Foucault’s remarks concerning psychoanalysis are ambivalent and even prima facie contra-dictory, at times lauding Freud and Lacan as anti-humanists, at others being severely criti-cal of their imbrication within psychiatric power. This has allowed a profusion of interpretations of his position, between so-called ‘Freudo-Foucauldians’ at one extreme and Foucauldians who condemn psychoanalysis as such at the other. In this article, I begin by surveying Foucault’s biographical and theoretical relationship to psychoanalysis and the sec-ondary scholarship on this relationship to date. I pay (...) particular attention to the discussion of the relationship in feminist scholarship and queer theory, and that by psychoanalytic thinkers, as well as attending to the particular focus in the secondary literature on Fou-cault’s late work and his relationship to the figure of Jacques Lacan. I conclude that Fou-cault’s attitude to psychoanalysis varies with context, and that some of his criticisms of psychoanalysis in part reflect an ignorance of the variety of psychoanalytic thought, partic-ularly in its Lacanian form. I thus argue that Foucault sometimes tended to overestimate the extent of the incompatibility of his approach with psychoanalytic ones and that there is ultimately no serious incompatibility there. Rather, psychoanalysis represents a substantively different mode of inquiry to Foucault’s work, which is neither straightforwardly ex-clusive nor inclusive of psychoanalytic insights. (shrink)

IntroductionAs we near the semicentennial of the 1976 publication of the first volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, for all its influence in the interim, this work remains today extraordinarily challenging in relation to our sexual mores. In this article, I will attempt to reapply its insights to analyze contemporary trends in sexuality and gender. Questions that I will consider include the continuing applicability of Foucault’s analyses, to what extent and how they may need to be revised in light of (...) historical developments, and what reading Foucault can tell us about our contemporary conjuncture. I will argue that volume 1 of The History of Sexuality remains highly relevant in this regard, although I will also indicate some ways in which things have moved on since Foucault’s time, and thus in which his thesis might be modified. Despite Foucault having apparently been extremely influential on academic thinking about sex, we seem nonetheless to have become or remained “other Victorians,” perversely mimicking the nineteenth-century sexology that Foucault pilloried. I will argue that we have continued to believe exactly the great myths about sex that Foucault sought to dispense with: namely, that sexuality has primarily been shaped by historic “repression,” that sexuality needs to be “liberated” from this repression, and that there is a “truth of sex” that is on the side of freedom. These beliefs have all mutated, however, to the extent that questions of sex (like many other social questions) are increasingly oriented around individual identities and the supposed sovereignty of the individual to determine their own truth. (shrink)

Perceived size is a function of viewing distance, retinal images size, and various contextual cues such as linear perspective and the size and location of neighboring objects. Recently, we demonstrated that illusion magnitudes of classic visual size illusions may be greatly enhanced or reduced by adding dynamic elements. Specifically, a dynamic version of the Ebbinghaus illusion (classically considered a “size contrast” illusion) led to a greatly enhanced illusory effect, whereas a dynamic version of the Corridor illusion (a “size constancy” illusion) (...) led to a greatly diminished illusory effect. Although these differences may arise from the different processes underlying these illusions (size contrast vs. size constancy), the dynamic variants we tested in our previous work also differed in the nature of the dynamic elements; specifically, whereas the Dynamic Ebbinghaus included a moving target and inducers that changed size and position, the Dynamic Corridor only included a moving target on a static background. Here, we explore further dynamic versions of the Ebbinghaus illusion and the Corridor and Ponzo illusions by separately manipulating three types of dynamic elements: target motion, context translation, and dynamic changes in context. Across five experiments examining 21 dynamic illusory configurations, adding target motion or a dynamically changing context separately resulted in little-to-no illusory effect. In contrast, the combination of target motion and a dynamically changing context led to a robust size illusion, consistent with an interactive effect. However, illusory effects that exceeded the matched classic, static illusory configuration were only observed for the dynamic versions of the Ebbinghaus illusion and the Revealed Ponzo illusions, in which the contextual elements changed size. We conclude that the combination of target motion and a dynamically changing context are necessary to produce dynamic size illusions, but that enhancement above and beyond static illusions may be largely specific to size contrast effects. Our results have important implications for the integration of motion signals, a ubiquitous environmental stimulus, in the perception of object size. (shrink)

This article deals with the relationship between the thought of Michel Foucault and that of Axel Honneth, arguing in favour of the former against the latter. I begin by considering Honneth’s early engagement in The Critique of Power with Foucault’s thought. I rebut Honneth’s criticisms of Foucault here as a misreading, one which prevents Honneth from coming to grips with Foucault’s position and hence the challenge that it poses to Honneth’s project. I then move on to offer a Foucauldian critique (...) of Honneth’s own position, arguing for a Foucauldian alternative to Critical Theory. (shrink)

The Target Article “Non-invasive prenatal testing for ‘non-medical’ traits: ensuring consistency in ethical decision making” by Bowman-Smart et al. (2023) raises the important issue that “decision-...