“What is the structure of thought?” is as central a question as any in cognitive science. A classic answer to this question has appealed to a Language of Thought (LoT). We point to emerging research from disparate branches of the field that supports the LoT hypothesis, but also uncovers diversity in LoTs across cognitive systems, stages of development, and species. Our letter formulates open research questions for cognitive science concerning the varieties of rules and representations that underwrite various LoT-based systems (...) and how these variations can help researchers taxonomize cognitive systems. (shrink)

The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI) is an ontology that provides terms with precisely defined meanings to describe all aspects of how investigations in the biological and medical domains are conducted. OBI re-uses ontologies that provide a representation of biomedical knowledge from the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) project and adds the ability to describe how this knowledge was derived. We here describe the state of OBI and several applications that are using it, such as adding semantic expressivity to (...) existing databases, building data entry forms, and enabling interoperability between knowledge resources. OBI covers all phases of the investigation process, such as planning, execution and reporting. It represents information and material entities that participate in these processes, as well as roles and functions. Prior to OBI, it was not possible to use a single internally consistent resource that could be applied to multiple types of experiments for these applications. OBI has made this possible by creating terms for entities involved in biological and medical investigations and by importing parts of other biomedical ontologies such as GO, Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) and Phenotype Attribute and Trait Ontology (PATO) without altering their meaning. OBI is being used in a wide range of projects covering genomics, multi-omics, immunology, and catalogs of services. OBI has also spawned other ontologies (Information Artifact Ontology) and methods for importing parts of ontologies (Minimum information to reference an external ontology term (MIREOT)). The OBI project is an open cross-disciplinary collaborative effort, encompassing multiple research communities from around the globe. To date, OBI has created 2366 classes and 40 relations along with textual and formal definitions. The OBI Consortium maintains a web resource providing details on the people, policies, and issues being addressed in association with OBI. (shrink)

Most healthcare providers work from ethical principles based on a Western model of practice that may not adhere to the cultural values intrinsic to Indigenous peoples. Breaking bad news is an important topic of ethical concern in health research. While much has been documented on BBN globally, the ethical implications of receiving bad news, from an Indigenous patient perspective in particular, is an area that requires further inquiry. This article discusses the experiences of Māori lung cancer patients and their families, (...) in order to investigate the ethical implications of receiving bad news. Data collection occurred through 23 semistructured interviews and nine focus groups with Māori lung cancer patients and their families in four districts in the Midland Region of New Zealand: Waikato, Bay of Plenty, Lakes and Tairāwhiti. The findings of this study were categorised into two key themes: communication and context. Avenues for best practice include understanding the centrality of the HCP–patient relationship and family ties in the healthcare journey, and providing patients with the full range of viable treatment options including hope, clear advice and guidance when the situation calls for it. Overall, the findings of this study hold implications for providing culturally safe and humanistic cancer care when BBN to Māori and Indigenous patients. (shrink)

This essay seeks a philosophical understanding of the nature of kairos that, in turn, discloses the nature of philosophizing. This essay claims that the kairos of philosophy is dialogue, and that dialogue is kairological in two ways: (1) Dialogue is not just a phenomenon that occurs in chronological time but, rather, imposes its own time in order to see how life (or being) itself is disclosed to us; (2) dialogue is kairological because it denotes a moment in which we are (...) pushed into the open, which demands our receptivity and response. Section I explains kairos as “circumstance” in Aristotle, as a required point of view in Heidegger, and as related to the beginning of creation in Schelling. Section II understands dialogue, as the kairos of philosophy, as a crisis—a breaking away from an ordinary understanding of and experience in the world. This destabilizing experience resonates with the untimeliness of philosophizing. (shrink)

BackgroundAn editorial expression of concern (EEoC) is issued by editors or publishers to draw attention to potential problems in a publication, without itself constituting a retraction or correction.MethodsWe searched PubMed, PubMed Central (PMC), and Google Scholar to identify EEoCs issued for publications in PubMed and PMC up to 22 August 2016. We also searched the archives of the Retraction Watch blog, some journal and publisher websites, and studies of EEoCs. In addition, we searched for retractions of EEoCs and affected articles (...) in PubMed up to 8 December 2016. We analyzed overall historical trends, as well as reported reasons and subsequent editorial actions related to EEoCs issued between August 2014 and August 2016.ResultsAfter screening 5076 records, we identified 230 EEoCs that affect 300 publications indexed in PubMed, the earliest issued in 1985. Half of the primary EEoCs were issued between 2014 and 2016 (52%). We found evidence of some EEoCs that had been removed by the publisher without leaving a record, and some were not submitted for PubMed or PMC indexing. A minority of publications affected by EEoCs had been retracted by early December 2016 (25%). For the subset of 92 EEoCs issued between August 2014 and August 2016, affecting 99 publications, the rate of retraction was similar (29%). The majority of EEoCs were issued because of concerns with validity of data, methods, or interpretation of the publication (68%), and 31% of cases remained open. Issues with images were raised in 40% of affected publications. Ongoing monitoring after the study identified another 17 EEoCs to year’s end in 2016, increasing the number of EEoCs to 247 and publications in PubMed known to be affected by EEoCs to 320 at the end of 2016.ConclusionsEEoCs have been rare publishing events in the biomedical literature, but their use has been increasing. Most have not led to retractions, and many remain unresolved. Lack of prominence and inconsistencies in management of EEoCs reduce the ability of these notices to alert the scientific community to potentially serious problems in publications. EEoCs will be made identifiable in PubMed in 2017. (shrink)

Purpose‐driven businesses have a stated objective to contribute to the welfare of society and the planet alongside generating shareholder value. As interest in purpose‐driven businesses grows, an emerging “purpose ecosystem” of advisers, investors, and enablers offers different types of support for businesses wanting to transition to sustainability. This paper examines how the transition towards purpose‐driven business in Australia and the United Kingdom requires addressing challenges facing this support ecosystem at three levels. First, at the individual level where support providers need (...) to build the capabilities of managers who are experiencing tensions around integrating societal and environmental purpose while facing pressure for maximizing shareholder value. Second, the support providers working within the purpose ecosystem offering professional advice and finance face their own tensions between environmental or social objectives and commercial pressures. Third, there are challenges facing actors in the ecosystems aiming to change the wider policy and institutional environment but facing lobbying from those wanting to keep “business as usual.” We identify practical implications for those parts of the purpose‐driven business ecosystem providing support. This includes building capabilities to combine social, environmental, and commercial purpose; coordination among support providers; and creating an institutional environment to avoid “purpose wash.”. (shrink)

The dual-code proposal of number representation put forward by Cohen Kadosh & Walsh (CK&W) accounts for only a fraction of the many modes of numerical abstraction. Contrary to their proposal, robust data from human infants and nonhuman animals indicate that abstract numerical representations are psychologically primitive. Additionally, much of the behavioral and neural data cited to support CK&W's proposal is, in fact, neutral on the issue of numerical abstraction.

On a version of consent theory that tempts many, predatory sexual relations involving significant power imbalances (e.g. between professors and students, adults and teenagers, or employers and employees) are wrong because they violate consent-centric norms. In particular, the wronged party is said to have been incapable of consenting to the predation, and the sexual wrong is located in the encounter’s nonconsensuality. Although we agree that these are sexual wrongs, we resist the idea that they are always nonconsensual. We argue instead (...) that it is possible for students, teenagers, employees, etc. to fully consent to sexually predatory encounters; denying as much renders survivors of predation vulnerable to compounding harms. Survivors face a dilemma: give up either their understanding of their experience as wrong, or their self-conception as an agent capable of consenting. We call the latter phenomenon agential demotion. (shrink)

The application of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies in healthcare have immense potential to improve the care of patients. While there are some emerging practices surro...

Programs, policies, and technologies — particularly those concerned with health equity — are often designed with justice envisioned as the end goal. These policies or interventions, however, frequently fail to recognize how the beneficiaries have historically embodied the cumulative effects of marginalization, which undermines the effectiveness of the intended justice. These well-meaning attempts at justice are bounded by greater socio-historical constraints. Bounded justice suggests that it is impossible to attend to fairness, entitlement, and equity when the basic social and physical (...) infrastructures underlying them have been eroded by racism and other historically entrenched isms. Using the case of Brazil’s National Health Policy for the Black Population, this paper proposes that bounded justice can contribute to justice discourses by serving as a concept, a proffering to a multi-disciplinary conceptual framework, and a potential analytic for those interested in the design of policy, technology, and programmatic interventions towards health equity. (shrink)

BackgroundYouth are increasingly aware of the negative effects of climate change on the planet and human health, but this knowledge can often come with significant affective responses, such as psychological distress, anger, or despair. Experiencing major “negative” emotions, like worry, guilt, and hopelessness in anticipation of climate change has been identified with the term eco-anxiety. Emerging literature focuses on adults' experience; however, little is known about the ways in which children and youth experience eco-anxiety.ObjectivesThe aim of this review was to: (...) identify the available evidence on the topic of eco-anxiety in children, clarify the mental health consequences brought by the awareness of climate change in this population, and identify knowledge gaps in the literature and considerations for future research.MethodsGiven that the research on the topic of eco-anxiety in children is limited, that there are very few randomized controlled trials, and that the goal is not to analyze individual studies in-depth, a scoping review was used. Keywords pertaining to the themes of eco-anxiety, climate change and children were used as search terms in five databases. Journal articles using qualitative and quantitative methods, as well as gray literature were examined by two independent reviewers. A descriptive-analytical method was used to chart the data that emerged from the literature. Eighteen articles were considered in the final analysis.ResultsEvidence confirms that children experience affective responses and eco-anxiety in reaction to then awareness of climate change. Mental health outcomes include depression, anxiety, and extreme emotions like sadness, anger, and fear. Youth from vulnerable communities, like indigenous communities, or those who have strong ties to the land are often identified as being emotionally impacted by climate change. The literature analyzed also describes how children and youth are coping with eco-anxiety, including maladaptive and adaptive responses. Preliminary considerations for parents, teachers and educators, mental health care providers, school systems, adults and people of power include adding age-appropriate climate education to the school curriculum, considering youth's emotions, and promoting healthy coping through empowerment. Important gaps exist in the definition of eco-anxiety in youth, as various characterizations of this emerging concept are found across articles. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to determine if reading achievement of students from high-poverty US schools differs as a function of participation in summer tutoring versus access to books. Data fro...

We extend Tomasello's discussion of children's developing sense of obligation to testimonial learning. First, we review a battery of behaviors in testimonial exchanges that parallel those described by Tomasello. Second, we explore the variable ways in which children hold others accountable, suggestive that children's evaluations of moral and epistemic responsibilities in joint collaborative activities are distinct.

Researchers are studying how artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to better detect, prognosticate and subgroup diseases. The idea that AI might advance medicine’s understanding of biological categories of psychiatric disorders, as well as provide better treatments, is appealing given the historical challenges with prediction, diagnosis and treatment in psychiatry. Given the power of AI to analyse vast amounts of information, some clinicians may feel obligated to align their clinical judgements with the outputs of the AI system. However, a potential (...) epistemic privileging of AI in clinical judgements may lead to unintended consequences that could negatively affect patient treatment, well-being and rights. The implications are also relevant to precision medicine, digital twin technologies and predictive analytics generally. We propose that a commitment to epistemic humility can help promote judicious clinical decision-making at the interface of big data and AI in psychiatry. (shrink)

“Everyone has a price at which he sells himself”: Immanuel Kant quotes this remark in the 1793 _Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone_, attributing it to “a member of English Parliament”. I argue, however, that the context of the quotation in the _Religion_ alludes to the arresting pedagogical practices of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, who famously said that “different people sell themselves at different prices” (Discourses 1.2). I argue that there are two sides of Epictetus’s pedagogical strategies: a jolting (...) side meant to expose self-deception and practical inconsistency; and an uplifting side meant to arouse the resources by which it is possible to progress towards virtue — specifically, our sense of kinship with the divine insofar as we are rational. I argue that Kant develops a conception of self-respect in later practical works that plausibly draws on Epictetus, and his distinctive version of the traditional Stoic account of rational agency. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

Within the growing developmental literature on children's testimonial learning, the emphasis placed on children's evaluations of testimonial evidence has shielded from view some of the more collaborative dimensions of testimonial learning. Drawing on recent philosophical work on testimony and interpersonal trust, we argue for an alternative way of conceptualizing the social nature of testimonial learning. On this alternative, some testimonial learning is the result of a jointly collaborative epistemic activity, an activity that aims at the epistemic goal of true belief, (...) but that does so by means of an irreducibly social process. (shrink)

The chapter examines Kant’s thesis about the ‘radical evil in human nature’ developed in his Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. According to this thesis, the human moral condition is corrupt by default and yet by own deed; and this corruption is the origin (root, radix) of human badness in all its variety, banality, and ubiquity. While Kant clearly takes radical evil to be endemic in human nature, controversy reigns about how to understand this. Some assume this can only (...) be a synthetic a priori claim about the necessity of radical evil (and thus one requiring a transcendental deduction). However, Kant indicates that while radical evil is inevitable it is not, for that, strictly necessary. The best way to understand this is through a teleological approach that explains how we inevitably bring this corruption upon ourselves in the course of our development. The chapter thereby joins other teleological accounts, but distinctively argues that Kant draws on Stoic natural teleology (specifically the doctrine of oikeiōsis), which he knows through Seneca and Cicero. This background allows us to make sense of the structure of Kant’s argument in ways that shed fresh light on the philosophical content of the thesis about radical evil. It also allows us to see that another hotly debated issue — namely, whether radical evil should be understood in ‘psychological’ or ‘social’ terms — is spurious: we see that these are flip sides of one coin, and are better placed to register the broader ethical significance of this result. (shrink)

There can be no doubt that Kant thought we should be reflective: we ought to care to make up our own minds about how things are and what is worth doing. Philosophical objections to the Kantian reflective ideal have centred on concerns about the excessive control that the reflective person is supposed to exert over her own mental life, and Kantians who feel the force of these objections have recently drawn attention to Kant’s conception of moral virtue as it is (...) developed in his later work, chiefly the Metaphysics of Morals. Melissa Merritt’s book is a distinctive contribution to this recent turn to virtue in Kant scholarship. Merritt argues that we need a clearer, and textually more comprehensive, account of what reflection is, in order not only to understand Kant’s account of virtue, but also to appreciate how it effectively rebuts long-standing objections to the Kantian reflective ideal. (shrink)

Many extant theories of placebo focus on their causal structure wherein placebo effects are those that originate from select features of the therapy (e.g., client expectations or “incidental” features like size and shape). Although such accounts can distinguish placebos from standard medical treatments, they cannot distinguish placebos from everyday occurrences, for example, when positive feedback improves our performance on a task. Providing a social-epistemological account of a treatment context can rule out such occurrences, and furthermore reveal a new way to (...) distinguish clinical placebos from standard medical treatments. (shrink)

Why did Kant write the Critique of Judgment, and why did he say that his analysis of the judgment of taste — his technical term for our enjoyment of beauty — is the most important part of it? Kant claims that his analysis of taste “reveals a property of our faculty of cognition that without this analysis would have remained unknown” (KU §8, 5:213). The clue lies in Kant’s view that while taste is an aesthetic, and non-cognitive, mode of judgment, (...) it nevertheless involves the “free play” of cognitive capacities that is pleasurable in some way that ordinary cognitive business is not. My thesis is that the judgment of taste reveals a pleasure that is not usually apparent when we understand something in particular, but which is nevertheless proper to the activity of understanding as such. This matters, I argue, because in this way the judgment of taste points to a standard of cognitive virtue. (shrink)

The debate between ΛCDM and MOND is often cast in terms of competing gravitational theories. However, recent philosophical discussion suggests that the ΛCDM–MOND debate demonstrates the challenges of multiscale modeling in the context of cosmological scales. I extend this discussion and explore what happens when the debate is thought to be about modeling rather than about theory, offering a model-focused interpretation of the ΛCDM–MOND debate. This analysis shows how a model-focused interpretation of the debate provides a better understanding of challenges (...) asso- ciated with extension to a different scale or domain, which are tied to commitments about explanatory fit. (shrink)

Farmers’ willingness and ability to adapt to climate change are in part influenced by their social networks and sources of information. Drawing on assemblage theory and social network analysis in a novel way, this study explores the influence of Oregonian small farmers’ social and informational networks on their beliefs about and responses to climate change. The use of assemblage theory, which focuses on many disparate elements as they co-function in a space, allows for multiple entities within farmers’ networks and the (...) ways they interact to be examined, while the use of social network analysis highlights broader patterns in the structure and composition of farmers’ networks. Theoretically, this study brings these two distinct yet similar bodies of theory and methodologies together for the first time to expand the utility of both fields and explore farmers’ networks in a novel way. Results indicate that small farmers’ connections to other farmers and media in their networks are influencing their beliefs about climate change, while their responses are influenced by their ties to various agricultural and climatological information sources, as well as other nearby farmers. Finally, while farmers’ ties to other farmers are largely limited to those nearby, certain central individuals and entities, particularly beginning farmers, can act as bridges linking distinct groups of farmers. An understanding of these networks can be used to better disseminate critical information, such as forecasts and adaptation strategies, to help farmers adapt. (shrink)

Explores the challenges facing democracies in the twenty-first century In Democratic Failure, Melissa Schwartzberg and Daniel Viehoff bring together a distinguished group of interdisciplinary scholars in political science, law, and philosophy to explore the key questions and challenges facing democracies, both in the past and present, around the world. In ten timely essays, contributors examine the fascinating, centuries-old question of whether or not democracy can ever fulfill the promise of its ideals. Together, they explore lessons from the history of (...) democracy, various failures of democratic representation, and more. Ultimately, this latest installment of the NOMOS series provides thought-provoking insights into how we conceptualize, measure, and address democratic erosion in our present-day world. (shrink)

Building trust between academic medical centers and certain communities they depend on in the research process is hard, particularly when those communities consist of minoritized or historically marginalized populations. Some believe that engagement activities like the creation of advisory boards, town halls, or a research workforce that looks more like community members will establish or reestablish trust between academic medical centers and racialized communities. However, without systematic approaches to dismantle racism, those well‐intended actions become public performativity, and trust building will (...) fail. In this essay, we draw upon foundational ethical principles of trust, distrust, and trust building; apply the concept of bounded justice to performative trust acts; and center the works of Black and Indigenous feminist bioethicists to revisit some of the wisdom and valuable lessons they have contributed. Rebuilding trust is hard to do because people and institutions are often not honest about how hard it is and there is no simple box‐checking task that can disentangle our society's injustices, but there are steps to take in this direction. Individuals and institutions can recognize valuable relevant work that has already been written, partake in critical reflection, and then apply insights gained to take both small and sustainable steps toward transformational change and deeper trust. (shrink)

For more than fifteen years, Melissa Ann Pinney has been making photographs of girls and women, from infancy to old age, to portray how feminine identity is constructed, taught, and communicated. Her work depicts not only the rites of American womanhood—a prom, a wedding, a baby shower, a tea party—but the informal passages of girlhood: combing a doll's hair, doing laundry with a mother, smoking a cigarette at a state fair. With each view, we gain a greater understanding of (...) the connections between mother and daughter, and by extension the larger world of family, friends, and society. Pinney's approach to interpreting girlhood became more complicated and complex when her daughter, Emma, was born eight years ago. Emma's childhood evoked in Pinney her own girlhood and gave her work new meaning and purpose. Ultimately, Regarding Emma shares with all of us the incremental and the ritualistic changes that take place in a woman's life over time. Her photographs are artistic and social documents that reveal the subtle and bold aspects of feminine identity—documents whose reach will extend well beyond the walls of America's leading galleries and museums into the hearts and homes of everyday Americans. "Melissa Ann Pinney is making powerful art. In matters of light, color, and composition she is flawless. But these are not simply constructions of elements. These photographs bear witness to the speed at which the little girl becomes the old woman, to the fleeting, breathless beauty of childhood, to life itself, which leaves us stunned in its wake."—Ann Patchett, from the Foreword "Melissa Ann Pinney provides a compelling portrait of American girls as they make their way from infancy to adulthood. Using her daughter's childhood as a point of departure, she traces the complex terrain of adolescence and budding femininity. The results are photographs marked by empathy and grace."—Sylvia Wolf, Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City "These photographs by Melissa Ann Pinney impart a sense of the special and sacred everyday rituals we take for granted. She appreciates at once the transient nature of what she finds and its gravity. Her pictures describe so well the wonder, and beauty, and centrality of the things we know best and the people we see often."—Sandra S. Phillips, Curator of Photography, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art "Melissa Ann Pinney's record of life with her daughter, Emma, adds a new and touching chapter to our knowledge of the lives of women and girls."—Adam Gopnik, author of Paris to the Moon and a staff writer for The New Yorker "Melissa Pinney's passionate, painstaking investigation of the stages of women's lives is impressive for its rigor and courage. Her themes aren't imposed on the pictures or on the women, men, and children who people them; instead, they arise from her attentive study of particularities— of the ways human lives are etched on the surfaces of faces and the positions of bodies in real spaces and places, mundane but radiant. When she turns from the lives of others to her own life, the shift is seamless but the volume swells, the emotions grow more pointed and the paradoxes more painful, joyous, and direct. This is remarkable work by an artist at the height of her powers."—Peter Bacon Hales, author of William Henry Jackson and the Transformation of the American Landscape. (shrink)

The android Data from Star Trek admired human emotion whereas Spock viewed emotion as irrational and maladaptive. The theory that emotions fulfil adaptive functions is widely accepted in academic psychology but little is known about laypeople’s theories. The present study assessed the extent to which laypeople share Data’s view of emotion as helpful or Spock’s view of emotion as a hindrance. We also assessed how help and hinder theory endorsement were related to reasoning, emotion regulation, and well-being. Undergraduates completed a (...) stressful timed reasoning task and questionnaires that assessed their theories of emotion, emotion regulation strategies, happiness, and social support. Overall, participants viewed emotion more as a help than a hindrance. The more they endorsed the view that emotion helps, the better their reasoning scores. Endorsing a help theory also predicted the use of reappraisal which, in turn, predicted greater happiness and social support. In contrast, endorsing the view that emotion hinders was associated with emotion suppression and less social support. Thus, people’s theories about the functionality of emotion may have important implications for their reasoning and emotional well-being. (shrink)

Disclosure in clinical practice is aimed at promoting patient autonomy, usually culminating in patient choice (e.g., to consent to an operation or not, or between different medications). In medical ethics, there is an implicit background assumption that knowing more about (X) automatically translates to greater, or more genuine, autonomy with respect to one's choices involving (X). I challenge this assumption by arguing that in rare cases, withholding information can promote a patient's autonomy (understood as the capacity for rational choice in (...) alignment with one's values and goals). (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that brain death is death because, despite the appearance of genuine integration, the brain-dead body does not in fact possess the unity that is proper to a human organism. A brain-dead body is not a single entity, but a multitude of organs and tissues functioning in a coordinated manner with the help of artificial life support. In order to support this claim, I first lay out Hoffmann and Rosenkrantz’s ontological account of the requirements for organismal (...) unity and summarize an earlier paper in which I apply this account to the brain death debate. I then further support this ontological argument by developing an analogy between the requirements for the unity of an organism and the requirements for the unity of an orchestra. To do so, I begin by examining the role that a conductor plays in unifying a traditional orchestra, and then go on to show that the human organism functions like a traditional orchestra that relies upon a conductor for its unity. Next, I consider the conditions required to achieve orchestral unity in conductorless orchestras and show that, in contrast to simpler organisms like plants, the postnatal human organism lacks those conditions. I argue, in other words, that although conductorless orchestras do exist, the human organism is not one of them. Like a traditional orchestra without a conductor, the brain-dead body is not a unified whole. (shrink)

Kant’s account of “the radical evil in human nature” in the 1793 Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone is typically interpreted as a reworking of the Augustinian doctrine of original sin. But Kant doesn’t talk about Augustine explicitly there, and if he is rehabilitating the doctrine of original sin, the result is not obviously Augustinian. Instead Kant talks about Stoic ethics in a pair of passages on either end of his account of radical evil, and leaves other clues that (...) his argument is a reworking of an old Stoic problem. “Radical evil” refers to the idea that our moral condition is — by default and yet by our own deed — bad or corrupt; and that this corruption is the root (radix) of human badness in all its variety, ubiquity, and sheer ordinariness. Kant takes as his premise a version of the Stoic idea that nature gives us “uncorrupted starting points” (Diogenes Laertius 7.89). What sense can be made of the origin of human badness, given such a premise? Kant’s account of radical evil is an answer to this old Stoic problem, which requires a conception of freedom that is not available in his Stoic sources. (shrink)

Kant's discussion of the feeling of respect presents a puzzle regarding both the precise nature of this feeling and its role in his moral theory as an incentive that motivates us to follow the moral law. If it is a feeling that motivates us to follow the law, this would contradict Kant's view that moral obligation is based on reason alone. I argue that Kant has an account of respect as feeling that is nevertheless not separate from the use of (...) reason, but is intrinsic to willing. I demonstrate this by taking literally Kant's references to force in the second Critique. By referring to Kant's pre-critical essay on Negative Magnitudes (1763), I show that Kant's account of how the moral law effects in us a feeling of respect is underpinned by his view that the will is a kind of negative magnitude, or force. I conclude by noting some of the implications of my discussion for Kant's account of virtue. (shrink)

It is widely assumed that Kant’s moral psychology draws from the dualist tradition of Plato and Aristotle, which takes there to be distinct rational and non-rational parts of the soul. My aim is to challenge the air of obviousness that psychological dualism enjoys in neo-Kantian moral psychology, specifically in regard to Tamar Schapiro’s account of the nature of inclination. I argue that Kant’s own account of inclination instead provides evidence of his commitment to psychological monism, the idea that the mentality (...) of an adult human being is rational through and through. I first consider Schapiro’s “intuitions” in favour of dualism: inclination must have a non-rational source, she contends, because they assail us unbidden and are not immediately responsive to volition, and because we are not responsible simply for having inclinations (only for acting on them). I explain how a monistic account of the nature of inclination can accommodate the first two points, and explain why the third neither is a point a Kantian can accept, nor is its denial the affront to common sense that Schapiro supposes. Then I turn to Schapiro’s aim to conceive of reflection as non-rational and thus independent of justificatory thought, and yet such as to induce rational reflection. I argue that it remains mysterious how inclination, on her account, could be resourced to play this role; and with that criticism in mind, I conclude by making a positive case for Kant’s conceiving of inclination in monistic terms, as an expression of rational mindedness. (shrink)

The volume brings together ancient-philosophy specialists and Kant scholars to advance our understanding of the significance of Stoicism for Immanuel Kant's ethical thought. Kant and Stoic Ethics -/- Contents: -/- Introduction -/- 1 Ethical Formulae in Ancient Stoicism — Brad Inwood -/- 2 Duties and Permissible Actions in the Early Stoics and Kant — Iakovos Vasiliou -/- 3 The Stoics and Kant on the Motive of Duty — Jacob Klein -/- 4 Kant on the Unity and Plurality of the Virtues (...) — Katja Maria Vogt -/- 5 Perfection and Morality — Stephen Engstrom -/- 6 The Stoical Sublime — I.S. Blecher 7 Kant’s Rejection of Stoic Eudaimonism — Michael Vazquez -/- 8 Life as a Game of Skill? Kant and the Stoics about the Results of Human Agency — Jens Timmermann -/- 9 Living in accordance with Nature: Kant and Stoicism — Paul Guyer -/- 10 On the Relationship between Orientation and Agency: From the Stoics’ Oikeiōsis to Kant’s Orientierung — Alix Cohen -/- 11 “Everyone has a price at which he sells himself”: Epictetus and Kant on Self-respect — Melissa Merritt -/- 12 Anger Reinstated: Stoics and Kant on Anger — Nancy Sherman 13 Kant’s Philosophy of History as Stoic Consolation — Rachel Zuckert -/- Bibliography Index . (shrink)

This investigation examined how people’s beliefs about the functionality of emotion shape their emotional response and regulatory strategies when encountering distressing events. In Study 1, we present data supporting the reliability and validity of an 8-item instrument, the Help and Hinder Theories about Emotion Measure (HHTEM), designed to assess an individual’s beliefs about the functionality of emotion. Participants who more strongly endorsed a Help Theory reported greater wellbeing, emotional acceptance, and use of reappraisal to regulate emotion. Participants who more strongly (...) endorsed a Hinder Theory reported less wellbeing and more expressive suppression and substance use. In Study 2, we demonstrate that encouraging participants to view emotion as helpful affected their physiological and regulatory response to a distressing event. Participants in the Help Theory condition showed greater physiological reactivity (SCL) during a distressing film than control participants but were more accepting of their emotional response. Shortly after the film, SCL decreased for participants in the Help Theory condition. Compared to control participants, they engaged in less suppression and reported less lingering effect of the film on their mood. Together, these studies suggest that people’s theories about the functionality of emotion influence their reactivity, the strategies they adopt to regulate emotion, and their ability to rebound after distressing events. (shrink)

In this article, I explore difficult and sensitive questions regarding the nature of transgender identity claims and the appropriate medical treatment for those suffering from gender dysphoria. I first analyze conceptions of transgender identity, highlighting the prominence of the wrong-body narrative and its dualist presuppositions. I then briefly argue that dualism is false because our bodily identity is essential and intrinsic to our overall personal identity and explain why a sound, nondualist anthropology implies that gender identity cannot be entirely divorced (...) from sexual identity. Finally, I make the case that arguments in favor of hormonal and surgical treatments for gender dysphoria rest on this mistaken dualist anthropology, and that these treatments therefore give false hope to those suffering from gender dysphoria, while causing irreversible bodily harm and diverting attention from underlying psychological problems that often need to be addressed. I also briefly discuss how these philosophical claims relate to empirical studies on the outcomes of hormonal and surgical treatments for gender dysphoria and to testimonies of transgender individuals who regret having undergone these treatments. (shrink)

I respond to a dilemma for Causal Decision Theory (CDT) under determinism, posed in Adam Elga's paper “Confessions of a Causal Decision Theorist”. The treatment I present highlights (i) the status of laws as predictors, and (ii) the consequences of decision dependence, which arises natively out of Jeffrey Conditioning and CDT's characteristic equation.My argument leverages decision dependence to work around a key assumption of Elga's proof: to wit, that in the two problems he presents, the CDTer must employ subjunctive-suppositional (rather (...) than evidential) transformations of a shared prior. (shrink)

Noah Rosenberg et al.'s 2002 article “Genetic Structure of Human Populations” reported that multivariate genomic analysis of a large cell line panel yielded reproducible groupings (clusters) suggestive of individuals' geographical origins. The paper has been repeatedly cited as evidence that traditional notions of race have a biological basis, a claim its authors do not make. Critics of this misinterpretation have often suggested that it follows from interpreters' personal biases skewing the reception of an objective piece of scientific writing. I contend, (...) however, that the article itself to some degree facilitates this misrepresentation. I analyze in detail several verbal and visual features of the original article that may predispose aspects of its racial interpretation; and, tracing the arguments of one philosopher and one popular science writer, I show how these features are absorbed, transformed into arguments for a biological basis of race, and re-attributed to the original. The essay demonstrates how even slight ambiguities can enable the misappropriation of scientific writing, unintentionally undermining the authors' stated circumspection on the relationship between cluster and race. (shrink)

Why might it be beneficial for adults to process fractions componentially? Recent research has shown that college-educated adults can capitalize on the bipartite structure of the fraction notation, performing more successfully with fractions than with decimals in relational tasks, notably analogical reasoning. This study examined patterns of relational priming for problems with fractions in a task that required arithmetic computations. College students were asked to judge whether or not multiplication equations involving fractions were correct. Some equations served as structurally inverse (...) primes for the equation that immediately followed it. Students with relatively high math ability showed relational priming both with and without high perceptual similarity. Students with relatively low math ability also showed priming, but only when the structurally inverse equation pairs were supported by high perceptual similarity between numbers. Several additional experiments established boundary conditions on relational priming with fractions. These findings are interpreted in terms of componential processing of fractions in a relational multiplication context that takes advantage of their inherent connections to a multiplicative schema for whole numbers. (shrink)