Creating a space for recovery‐focused psychiatric nursing care Within contemporary mental health‐care, power relationships are regularly played out between psychiatric nurses and service users. These power relationships are often imperceptible to the practicing nurse. For instance, in times of distress, service users often turn to or/and ‘construct’ discourses, beliefs and knowledge that are at odds with those which psychiatric nurses rely on to inform them of the mental status of the service user. The psychiatric nurse is in the position to (...) impose knowledge onto service users, usually in concurrence with ‘traditional or bio‐psychiatry’, without realizing or failing to acknowledge that the service user may have an alternative explanation of his/her mental health problems/experiences. In this paper, practice examples, based on the experiences of the four authors (from within and outside of services), are used to illustrate this ‘hidden’ power relationship. The authors use Foucault's ideas about: (i) government; (ii) the knowledge/power nexus and resistance; (iii) and his analytic tool of genealogy to help unravel this paradox within psychiatric nursing practice. The authors also use the emerging discourse of recovery as an alternative (and challenge) to ‘traditional bio‐psychiatry’ and consider the implications for psychiatric nursing practice. (shrink)

Resumen:El pensamiento social crítico mantiene una relación ambivalente con la ciencia. Sustanciales críticas a ella han venido, en décadas recientes, desde el feminismo y el decolonialismo. Este artículo aborda la forma en que la investigación social crítica chilena emplea las herramientas de la ciencia para la construcción de la facticidad, sus procedimientos de validación y la noción de verdad que aplica en su proceso constructivo, buscando ver cómo se manifiesta tal relación en la práctica y en la apreciación de los (...) investigadores. Se basa en el análisis cuantitativo de un corpus de 291 textos de carácter crítico publicados entre 2000 y 2022, y en el análisis cualitativo y cuantitativo de un subconjunto de 167 textos, junto a entrevistas a 55 de sus autores. Entre sus resultados destacan, como características de la práctica investigativa crítica: un evasivo tratamiento de la verdad; una gran valoración de la evidencia empírica; un significativo cambio de herramientas teóricas y supuestos epistemológicos; la exploración de nuevas herramientas metodológicas participativas, pero por grupos reducidos, con limitaciones operativas y escasa irradiación; la falta de arraigo efectivo de la noción de “validez catalítica” y una adhesión tácita, no reconocida, a una noción habermasiana de la verdad.Palabras clave: ciencia social crítica; verdad; difracción; conocimiento situado; validez catalítica. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to propose a systematic classification of emotions which can also characterize their nature. The first challenge we address is the submission of clear criteria for a theory of emotions that determine which mental phenomena are emotions and which are not. We suggest that emotions as a subclass of mental states are determined by their functional roles. The second and main challenge is the presentation of a classification and theory of emotions that can account for (...) all existing varieties. We argue that we must classify emotions according to four developmental stages: 1. pre-emotions as unfocussed expressive emotion states, 2. basic emotions, 3. primary cognitive emotions, and 4. secondary cognitive emotions. We suggest four types of basic emotions (fear, anger, joy and sadness) which are systematically differentiated into a diversity of more complex emotions during emotional development. The classification distinguishes between basic and non-basic emotions and our multi-factorial account considers cognitive, experiential, physiological and behavioral parameters as relevant for constituting an emotion. However, each emotion type is constituted by a typical pattern according to which some features may be more significant than others. Emotions differ strongly where these patterns of features are concerned, while their essential functional roles are the same. We argue that emotions form a unified ontological category that is coherent and can be well defined by their characteristic functional roles. Our account of emotions is supported by data from developmental psychology, neurobiology, evolutionary biology and sociology. (shrink)

Resumen: Asociadamente a la complejización del sistema educacional, toman forma procedimientos que buscan su regulación y que, al mismo tiempo, van dando forma a las metas a lograr. En el caso de Chile, en los últimos 50 años se ha constituido un dispositivo de evaluación del sistema educacional de gran alcance, que incluye pruebas nacionales como el SIMCE y la PSU, el Sistema de Evaluación Docente, el Sistema de Acreditación Universitario, la evaluación de la productividad académica, pruebas internacionales como PISA (...) y TIMSS, y la elaboración de rankings de instituciones educacionales. Este dispositivo es una tecnología clave de gubernamentalidad que posibilita regular la conducta de la población. En su constitución se entretejen conocimientos, teóricos y técnicos, provenientes de las ciencias sociales, con preocupaciones y estrategias que buscan el gobierno de la población. Se combinan ciencia social y poder. El dispositivo constituye una tecnología político moral con poderosos efectos performativos que dan forma a lo que asumimos, para todos los efectos prácticos, como la calidad educacional de las diferentes entidades del sistema -estudiantes, escuelas, programas, profesores, universidades, etc.- y que las valoriza en términos de tal calidad. El texto busca articular conceptualmente las operaciones de este dispositivo y sus derivaciones.: Associated with the increasing complexity of the educational system, procedures that seek its regulation take form and, at the same time, shape the goals to be achieved. In the case of Chile, in the last 50 years, a powerful evaluation device for the educational system has been established, which includes national tests such as SIMCE and PSU, the Teacher Evaluation System, the System of University Accreditation, the evaluation of the academic productivity, international tests such as PISA and TIMSS, and the elaboration of rankings of educational institutions. This device is a key technology of governmentality that makes possible to regulate the behavior of the population. In its constitution are interwoven theoretical and technical knowledge from the social sciences and concerns and strategies for the government of the population. Social science and power are combined. The device constitutes a moral and political technology with powerful performative effects that shape what we assume, for all practical purposes, as the educational quality of the different entities of the system -students, schools, programs, professors, universities, etc.-, which are valued in terms of such quality. The paper seeks to articulate theoretically the operations of this device and its derivations. (shrink)

El artículo presenta los resultados de una investigación empírica que busca caracterizar el campo de las ciencias sociales en Chile, en el período 2000-2006, en cuanto a su proceso cognitivo, comparando entre las disciplinas. Para ello se constituyó un corpus de 479 publicaciones en las cuales se re..

This work provides a text and an extended study of those fragments of Heraclitus' philosophical utterances whose subject is the world as a whole rather than man and his part in it. Professor Kirk discusses fully the fragments which he finds genuine and treats in passing others that were generally accepted as genuine but here considered paraphrased or spurious. In securing his text, Professor Kirk has taken into account all the ancient testimonies, and in his critical work he (...) attached particular importance to the context in which each fragment is set. To each he gives a selective apparatus, a literal translation and and an extended commentary in which problems of textual and philosophical criticism are discussed. Ancient accounts of Heraclitus were inadequate and misleading, and as Kirk wrote, understanding was often hindered by excessive dogmatism and a selective use of the fragments. Professor Kirk's method is critical and objective, and his 1954 work marks a significant advance in the study of Presocratic thought. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to examine a special subgroup of emotion: self-referential emo- tions such as shame, pride and guilt. Self-referential emotions are usually conceptualized as (i) essentially involving the subject herself and as (ii) having complex conditions such as the capacity to represent others’ thoughts. I will show that rather than depending on a fully fledged ‘theory of mind’ and an explicit language-based self-representation, (i) pre-forms of self-referential emotions appear at early developmental stages already exhib- iting their (...) characteristic structure of the intentional object of the emotion being identical with or intricately related to the subject experiencing the emotional state and that (ii) they precede and substantially contribute to the development of more complex representations and to the development of a self-concept, to social interaction and to ways of understand- ing of other minds. (shrink)

BackgroundIn December 2014, China announced that only voluntarily donated organs from citizens would be used for transplantation after January 1, 2015. Many medical professionals worldwide believe that China has stopped using organs from death-row prisoners.DiscussionIn the present article, we briefly review the historical development of organ procurement from death-row prisoners in China and comprehensively analyze the social-political background and the legal basis of the announcement. The announcement was not accompanied by any change in organ sourcing legislations or regulations. As a (...) fact, the use of prisoner organs remains legal in China. Even after January 2015, key Chinese transplant officials have repeatedly stated that death-row prisoners have the same right as regular citizens to “voluntarily donate” organs. This perpetuates an unethical organ procurement system in ongoing violation of international standards.ConclusionsOrgan sourcing from death-row prisoners has not stopped in China. The 2014 announcement refers to the intention to stop the use of organs illegally harvested without the consent of the prisoners. Prisoner organs procured with “consent” are now simply labelled as “voluntarily donations from citizens”. The semantic switch may whitewash sourcing from both death-row prisoners and prisoners of conscience. China can gain credibility only by enacting new legislation prohibiting use of prisoner organs and by making its organ sourcing system open to international inspections. Until international ethical standards are transparently met, sanctions should remain. (shrink)

The Axiology of Theism The existential question about God asks whether God exists, but the axiology of theism addresses the question of what value-impact, if any, God’s existence does have on our world and its inhabitants. There are two prominent answers to the axiological question about God. Pro-theism is the view that God’s … Continue reading The Axiology of Theism →.

In this paper, we put forward an interdisciplinary framework describing different levels of self-representations, namely non-conceptual, conceptual and propositional self-representations. We argue that these different levels of self-representation are differently affected by cultural upbringing: while propositional self-representations rely on “theoretical” concepts and are thus strongly influenced by cultural upbringing, non-conceptual self-representations are uniform across cultures and thus universal. This differentiation offers a theoretical specification of the distinction between an independent and interdependent self-construal put forward in cross-cultural psychology. Hence, this does (...) not only allow for a deeper understanding of different self-conceptions, but also for a formulation of new hypotheses regarding the cultural influence on self-representations. As one example, we will highlight the role of the proposed levels of self-representation for emotional experience and formulate some major implications of our interdisciplinary framework for future empirical research. (shrink)

‘Postmodern’ is a concept now deposited in the word banks of both highbrow cinephilesand lowbrow arbiters of popular filmic taste. How these two groups of critics deploy theterm, however, widely differs. Critiquing Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with SteveZissou , for instance, Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Glieberman writes: ‘Once again,[Anderson] creates a hermetic, glassed-in movie world of postmodern anachronisms thatcharms and distances in equal measure’ . Characteristic of most reviewers of LifeAquatic, Glieberman uses ‘postmodern’ in a purely aesthetic sense. Although this (...) apoliticaluse of the term is endemic to the business of popular film criticism, part of the reasoncritics deployed ‘postmodern’ bereft of all cultural and political connotations in the case ofLife Aquatic can be chalked up to the film itself. Any overtly political meaning in the film ismediated by what Todd Gilchrist calls the film’s ‘fantastic, just-left-of-realityuniverse.’ Anderson’s idiosyncratic filmmaking style – his penchant for what Josh Bell calls‘empty collections of quirks’ and ‘irrelevant eccentricities’ which prize ‘false clevernessover story and content’ – exacerbates the problem of politicizing Life Aquatic’spostmodernism . A growing cult of the author begets the faciledismissal or deification of Life Aquatic based on tenuously apolitical criteria. (shrink)

In my comments, I address two issues that are important but not central to the paper under review here. First, I present a reading of the postphenomenological concept of multistability by going back to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the primacy of perception. I conclude that assertions affirming the multistability of technologies should not be seen as merely empirical. Second, I address the adequacy of using the language of ‘empirical’ and ‘transcendental’ as a means to categorize exclusionary approaches in philosophy of technology.

The question of whether or not to partition data for the purposes of inferring phylogenetic hypotheses remains controversial. Opinions have been especially divided since Kluge's (1989, Systematic Zoology 38, 7–25) claim that data partitioning violates the requirement of total evidence (RTE). Unfortunately, advocacy for or against the RTE has not been based on accurate portrayals of the requirement. The RTE is a basic maxim for non-deductive inference, stipulating that evidence must be considered if it has relevance to an inference. Evidence (...) is relevant if it has a positive or negative effect on a given conclusion. In the case of ℈partitioned’ phylogenetic inferences, the RTE is violated, and the basis for rational belief in any conclusion is compromised, unless it is shown that the partitions are evidentially irrelevant to one another. The goal of phylogenetic systematics is to hypothesize past causal conditions to account for observed shared similarities among two or more species. Such inferences are non-deductive, necessitating consideration of the RTE. Some phylogeneticists claim the parsimony criterion as justification for the RTE. There is no relation between the two – parsimony is a relation between a hypothesis and causal question(s). Parsimony does not dictate the content of premises prior to an inference. ℈Taxonomic congruence,’ ℈supertrees,’ and ℈conditional combination’ methods violate the RTE. Taxonomic congruence and supertree methods also fail to achieve the intended goal of phylogenetic inference, such that ℈consensus trees’ and ℈supertrees’ lack an empirical basis. ℈Conditional combination’ is problematic because hypotheses derived from partitioned data cannot be compared – a causal hypothesis inferred to account for a set of effects only has relevance to those effects, not any comparative relevance to other causal hypotheses. A similar problem arises in the comparisons of hypotheses derived from different causal theories. (shrink)

The topic of the sublime is making a return to contemporary discourse on aesthetics and cognition. In Sublime Understanding, Kirk Pillow makes sublimity the center of an alternative conception of aesthetic response and interpretation. He draws an aesthetics of sublimity from Kant's Critique of Judgment, bolsters it with help from Hegel, and establishes its place in a broadened conception of human understanding. He argues that sublime reflection provides a model for an interpretive response to the uncanny Other outside our (...) conceptual grasp; it advances our sense-making pursuits but eschews unified, conceptual determination. Thus "sublime understanding" is the always partial, indeterminate grasping of contextual wholes through which we make sense of the uncanny particular in both art and the lived world. The book is divided into three parts. In the first two parts, Pillow presents insightful reinterpretations of Kant's and Hegel's aesthetics. In the third part he develops his own model of an aestheticized understanding, which illuminates contemporary discussions of metaphor and interpretation, while bridging Anglo-American and continental treatments of these issues. The presentation is a model of clear and well-crafted exposition, exemplifying the practice of aesthetically reflective sublime understanding that it articulates. (shrink)

Among the entities that can be mentally or linguistically represented are mental and linguistic representations themselves. That is, we can think and talk about speech and thought. This phenomenon is known as metarepresentation. An example is "Authors believe that people read books." -/- In this book François Recanati discusses the structure of metarepresentation from a variety of perspectives. According to him, metarepresentations have a dual structure: their content includes the content of the object-representation (people reading books) as well as the (...) "meta" part (the authors' belief). Rejecting the view that the object representation is mentioned rather than used, Recanati claims that since metarepresentations carry the content of the object representation, they must be about whatever the object representation is about. Metarepresentations are fundamentally transparent because they work by simulating the representation they are about. -/- Topics covered in this wide-ranging work include the analysis of belief reports and talk about fiction, world shifting, opacity and substitutivity, quotation, the relation between direct and indirect discourse, context shifting, semantic pretense, and deference in language and thought. (shrink)

Defending first-person introspective access to own mental states, we argue against Carruthers' claim of mindreading being prior to meta-cognition and for a fundamental difference between how we understand our own and others' mental states. We conclude that a model based on one mechanism but involving two different kinds of access for self and other is sufficient and more consistent with the evidence.

History is composed of a web of innumerable interacting causal chains, many of which are composed of millions of discrete events. The complexity of history puts us in a position of having knowledge of only a minuscule portion of the consequences of any event, actual or proposed. Our almost complete lack of knowledge of the data necessary to know if an event is gratuitous makes it very likely that we would be mistaken about a very large number of events. The (...) complexity of history, therefore, poses a significant challenge to certain types of evidential arguments from evil that begin with our observations of evils that appear to be gratuitous. (shrink)

This book presents an original discussion and analysis of epistemic peer disagreement. It reviews a wide range of cases from the literature, and extends the definition of epistemic peerhood with respect to the current one, to account for the actual variability found in real-world examples. The book offers a number of arguments supporting the variability in the nature and in the range of disagreements, and outlines the main benefits of disagreement among peers i.e. what the author calls the benefits to (...) inquiry argument. (shrink)

In this paper, I seek to contribute to post-phenomenological descriptions of human-technological relations and the intentionalities exhibited in them by focusingon the intentionality exhibited in the use of a cochlear implant. To do so, I will use concepts developed by Don Ihde and further extended by Peter-Paul Verbeek to show that while post-phenomenological categories illuminate the intentional relationship of a cochlear implant wearer to her world, this relationship defies easy categorization. An examination of successful functioning with a cochlear implant will (...) reveal a distinct form of technological embodiment and intentionality that confirms and extends previous post-phenomenological analyses. (shrink)

This article breaks fresh ground on the probabilistic problem of evil, contesting its first premise (probably, if God exists, gratuitous evil does not exist) instead of the commonly contested second premise (probably, gratuitous evil exists). In so doing, it presents a rehabilitated version of Leibniz’s argument for the irrelevance of gratuitous evil vis-à-vis the existence of God, according to which it is logically impossible for any world God might create to be devoid of pointless evil. Accordingly, my argument provides theists (...) a more fruitful strategy for dealing with evil than asking skeptics to deny their intuitive recognition of pointless suffering. (shrink)

Denton and Hockx present thirteen essays treating a variety of literary organizations from China's Republican era. Interdisciplinary in approach, the essays are primarily concerned with describing and analyzing the social and cultural complexity of literary groupings and the role of these social formations in literary production of the period.

Several philosophers and theologians have attempted to formulate monergistic, soft libertarian accounts of salvation. These accounts hold that the sinner has the ability to either resist or to do nothing at all with God’s universally given saving grace, in which latter case God will save her. However, I wonder with Cyr and Flummer whether these accounts go far enough because the nonresistant sinner voluntarily remains quiescent and is therefore arguably praiseworthy. I aim to remedy this alleged weakness by formulating a (...) possible account on which it never crosses the nonresistant sinner’s mind to resist, making her quiescence an involuntary omission. For all sinners whose minds it crosses to resist, they, on the proposed account, freely choose to resist. Combining Molinism with the scriptural notion of blaspheming against the Holy Spirit, I proceed to explain why it may cross the mind of some sinners and not others to resist. (shrink)

Morality after Calvin' examines the development of ethical thought in the Reformed tradition immediately following the death of Calvin. The book explores a previously unstudied work of Theodore Beza, the Cato Censorius Christianus (1591). When read in conjunction with the works and correspondence of Beza and his colleagues (Simon Goulart, Lambert Daneau, Peter Martyr Vermigli, among others), the poems of the Cato reveal the theoretical underpinnings of the disciplinary activity during the period. Kirk M. Summers shows how the moral (...) fervor of the latter half of the sixteenth century had its genesis in a well-formulated theology that viewed a Christian's sanctification as a process of restoration to an original order created by God. 00. (shrink)

The history of emotions is notably fraught with semantic anxiety, and a great deal of ink has been spilt in attempts to clarify emotion terminology, with respect to both historical and contemporary usage. Because the 16th century is both a momentous time of linguistic change for European languages, and often for some reason neglected by historians of emotion trying to tell a longer story about emotion terminology, this article provides an overview of how 16th-century lexicons and prominent humanist authors handle (...) the basic Latin emotion terms affectus and passio. It suggests further that 16th-century usage confounds Thomas Dixon’s assertion that “classical Christian” usage consists of a generally firm distinction between the two terms. (shrink)

The formal definition of species as explanatory hypotheses presented by Fitzhugh is emended. A species is an explanatory account of the occurrences of the same character among gonochoristic or cross-fertilizing hermaphroditic individuals by way of character origin and subsequent fixation during tokogeny. In addition to species, biological systematics also employs hypotheses that are ontogenetic, tokogenetic, intraspecific, and phylogenetic, each of which provides explanatory hypotheses for distinctly different classes of causal questions. It is suggested that species hypotheses can not be applied (...) to organisms with obligate asexual, parthenogenetic, and self-fertilizing modes of reproduction. Hypotheses explaining shared characters among such organisms are, instead, strictly phylogenetic. Several implications of this emended definition are examined, especially the relations between species, intraspecific, and phylogenetic hypotheses, as well as the limitations of species names to be applied to temporally different characters within populations. (shrink)

The concept of a salience map has become important for the development of theories of visual attention and saccade generation. Recent studies have shown that the frontal eye fields have all of the characteristics of a salience map.

Recent scholarship has demonstrated Molina’s rejection of transworld damnation, claiming instead that there is at least one feasible world where any individual is freely saved, lost, or does not exist. This article argues that one can subscribe to Molina’s doctrine of individual predestination while maintaining, with William Lane Craig, that no actual person who fails to hear the gospel and is lost would have been saved in some feasible world where s/he heard the gospel. As part of the divine deliberation, (...) God could narrow down the spectrum of feasible worlds to a lower-order spectrum by factoring out worlds which, among other conditions, contain anyone who does not fall into either of two types. The first type comprises persons saved in at least one world where they receive only general revelation at the moment of salvation, lost in at least one world where they receive only general revelation, and lost in every world where they receive special revelation without first appropriating salvation through general revelation. The second type comprises persons saved in at least one world where they receive special revelation without first appropriating salvation through general revelation and lost in at least one comparable world. (shrink)

Elijah Hess has argued that, given the accuracy of Stalnaker-Lewis semantics, Molinists possess good reason to shift their position to neo-Molinism. Conceding the validity but denying the soundness of this argument, I contend that the Stalnaker-Lewis semantics is multiply flawed, especially in its definitions of □→ and ◇→. Based on corrected definitions of □→ and ◇→ consistent with Molina’s own thought, I show how Hess’s neo-Molinist square of opposition collapses and his neological stages of God’s knowledge are undermined, thereby leading (...) back to an original Molinism. (shrink)

Under what conditions would an artificially intelligent system have wellbeing? Despite its clear bearing on the ethics of human interactions with artificial systems, this question has received little direct attention. Because all major theories of wellbeing hold that an individual’s welfare level is partially determined by their mental life, we begin by considering whether artificial systems have mental states. We show that a wide range of theories of mental states, when combined with leading theories of wellbeing, predict that certain existing (...) artificial systems have wellbeing. Along the way, we argue that there are good reasons to believe that artificial systems can have wellbeing even if they are not phenomenally conscious. While we do not claim to demonstrate conclusively that AI systems have wellbeing, we argue that there is a significant probability that some AI systems have or will soon have wellbeing, and that this should lead us to reassess our relationship with the intelligent systems we create. (shrink)

It is generally assumed that existing artificial systems are not phenomenally conscious, and that the construction of phenomenally conscious artificial systems would require significant technological progress if it is possible at all. We challenge this assumption by arguing that if Global Workspace Theory (GWT) — a leading scientific theory of phenomenal consciousness — is correct, then instances of one widely implemented AI architecture, the artificial language agent, might easily be made phenomenally conscious if they are not already. Along the way, (...) we articulate an explicit methodology for thinking about how to apply scientific theories of consciousness to artificial systems and employ this methodology to arrive at a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for phenomenal consciousness according to GWT. (shrink)

ExcerptI. Blumenberg's Theses According to the introduction to a recent German volume of essays: “The reception of the Metaphorology, perhaps Blumenberg's most systematic theoretical work, has only just begun.”1 The Metaphorology appeared in English in 2010, translated by Robert Savage, and what goes for the German metaphorology-reception applies to a lesser degree to the rest of Blumenberg's work.2 His three big texts—The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1985), The Genesis of the Copernican World (1987), and Work on Myth (1988)—were published (...) in rapid succession by MIT Press, but they seem to have been quickly eclipsed by the…. (shrink)

This article argues that the 2010 short film Pumzi is an exploration of post-crisis, ecological rehabilitation that asks for a rethinking of narratives modes for representing climate change. Employing seeds and sowing as ecological tropes, Pumzi explores how we create and carry narrative in relation to a rapidly changing earth. Both the multi-scalar geographical expanses as well as the deep geological timelines of Anthropocene discourse mean that placing the human in relation to its post-crisis environment requires more collective notions of (...) what narrative production and world building mean. This article argues that Pumzi cultivates a sympoietic—making together—mode of storytelling in an age of environmental crisis and planet-death as a well to both tell new stories and to think future worlds. In this way, Pumzi offers us a vision of an afrofuturist eco-ethics based in narrative practice. (shrink)