Opinions are rarely binary; they can be held with different degrees of conviction, and this expanded attitude spectrum can affect the influence one opinion has on others. Our goal is to understand how different aspects of influence lead to recognizable spatio-temporal patterns of opinions and their strengths. To do this, we introduce a stochastic spatial agent-based model of opinion dynamics that includes a spectrum of opinion strengths and various possible rules for how the opinion strength of one individual affects the (...) influence that this individual has on others. Through simulations, we find that even a small amount of amplification of opinion strength through interaction with like-minded neighbors can tip the scales in favor of polarization and deadlock. (shrink)

Spatially situated opinions that can be held with different degrees of conviction lead to spatiotemporal patterns such as clustering (homophily), polarization, and deadlock. Our goal is to understand how sensitive these patterns are to changes in the local nature of interactions. We introduce two different mixing mechanisms, spatial relocation and nonlocal interaction (“telephoning”), to an earlier fully spatial model (no mixing). Interestingly, the mechanisms that create deadlock in the fully spatial model have the opposite effect when there is a sufficient (...) amount of mixing. With telephoning, not only is polarization and deadlock broken up, but consensus is hastened. The effects of mixing by relocation are even more pronounced. Further insight into these dynamics is obtained for selected parameter regimes via comparison to the mean-field differential equations. (shrink)

We routinely need to process the identity of many faces around us, and how the brain achieves this is still the subject of much research in cognitive neuroscience. To date, insights on face identity processing have come from both healthy and clinical populations. However, in order to directly compare results across and within participant groups, and across different studies, it is crucial that a standard task is utilised which includes different exemplars (for example, non-face stimuli along with faces), is memory-neutral, (...) and taps into identity recognition across orientation and across viewpoint change. The goal of this study was to test a previously behaviourally tested, optimised face and object identity matching design in a healthy control sample whilst being scanned using fMRI. Specifically, we investigated categorical, orientation, and category-specific orientation effects while participants were focused on identity processing of simultaneously presented exemplar stimuli. Alongside observing category and orientation specific effects in a distributed set of brain regions, we also saw an interaction between stimulus category and orientation in the bilateral fusiform gyrus and bilateral middle occipital gyrus. Generally these clusters showed the pattern of a heightened response to inverted, as opposed to upright faces; and to upright, as opposed to inverted shoes. These results are discussed in relation to previous studies and to potential future research within prosopagnosic individuals. (shrink)

Research uses of human bodies maintained by mechanical ventilation after being declared dead by neurological criteria, were first published in the early 1980s with a renewed interest in research on the newly or nearly dead occurring in about last decade. While this type of research may take many different forms, recent technologic advances in genomic sequencing along with high hopes for genomic medicine, have inspired interest in genomic research with the newly dead. For example, the Genotype-Tissue Expression program through the (...) National Institutes of Health aims to collect large numbers of diverse human tissues with the eventual goal of elucidating the genetic bases of common diseases through a better understanding of the relationship between genetic variation and gene expression. (shrink)

Recent advances in next generation sequencing along with high hopes for genomic medicine have inspired interest in genomic research with the newly dead. However, applicable law does not adequately determine ethical or policy responses to such research. In this paper we propose that such research stands at a crossroads between other more established biomedical clinical and research practices. In addressing the ethical and policy issues raised by a particular research project within our institution comparatively with these other practices, we illustrate (...) the moral significance of paying careful heed to where one looks for guidance in responding to ethical questions raised by a novel endeavor. (shrink)

Definitions of death are based on subjective standards, priorities, and social conventions rather than on objective facts about the state of human physiology. It is the meaning assigned to the facts that determines whensomeone may be deemed to have died, not the facts themselves. Even though subjective standards for the diagnosis of death show remarkable consistency across communities, they are extrinsic. They are driven, implicitly or explicitly, by ideas about what benefits the community rather than what benefits the indidvidual. The (...) differences that do exist across communities generally reduce to questions about legitimacy and not fact. The questions at the core of the debate about brain death are better framed by asking: Whom ought we deem to be dead? rather than: Who is dead. The rationale for equating brain death with death, therefore, extends well beyond somatic and biological concepts of death. (shrink)

ArgumentThe Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) was developed at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, in the 1930s and 1940s. It became a highly successful and highly controversial psychometric tool. In professional terms, psychometric tools such as the MMPI transformed psychology and psychiatry. Psychometric instruments thus readily fit into the developmental history of psychology, psychiatry, and neurology; they were a significant part of the narrative of those fields’ advances in understanding, intervening, and treating people with mental illnesses. At the same time, (...) the advent of such tools also fits into a history of those disciplines that records the rise of obsessional observational and evaluative techniques and technologies in order to facilitate patterns of social control that became typical during the Progressive Era in the United States and after. It was those patterns that also nurtured the resistance to psychometrics that emerged during the Vietnam War and after. (shrink)

The name of the first author was incorrect in the initial online publication. The original article has been corrected.

Bearing witness is a familiar if diversely employed concept. On the one hand, it concerns the accuracy and validity of practical affairs, for example in a court of law, at a wedding, or in a law office. On the other hand, the term can embody powerful religious, social, and/ or moral meaning, whether in bearing witness to historical trauma and human suffering, or in paying heed to everyday, seemingly ordinary aspects of nature and of human life. In this article, we (...) address the question of what renders a witness trustworthy. We characterize ethical and epistemic constituents of witnessing. We examine the work of several exemplary witnesses: W. G. Sebald, Saidiya Hartman, Jonathan Lear, Etty Hillesum, and John Berger alongside Jean Mohr. These sources help us think about the education of a person who aspires to bear witness, whether it be to traumatic events or to quotidian life in educational or other settings. We present criteria of trustworthiness that can support reflection on what we take to be the important place of bearing witness in educational inquiry and practice. (shrink)

Is magic real? Could anything be real that can't be quantified or scientifically investigated? Are qualities like love, beauty, and goodness really just about hormones and survival? Are strangely immaterial things, like thought and personhood, fully explainable in scientific terms? Does nature itself have any intrinsic value, mysterious presence, or transcendent horizon? Once we ask these questions, the answer is pretty obvious: of course science can't give us a complete picture of reality. Science is very good at what it is (...) good at, but highly important aspects of human meaning are simply outside of science's knowledge range. So how might we better relate scientific facts to qualitative mysteries? How might we integrate our powerful factual knowledge with wisdom about the higher meaning of things? This book defines magic as the real qualities and mysteries of the world that science just can't grasp. It looks at how we came to put magic in the box of subjective make-believe. It explores how we might get it out of that box and back into our understanding of reality. (shrink)

This book provides practical and research-based chapters that offer greater clarity about the particular kinds of teacher reflection that matter and avoids talking about teacher reflection generically, which implies that all kinds of reflection are of equal value.

In this paper we argue that predictive processing (PP) theory cannot account for the phenomenon of affect-biased attention prioritized attention to stimuli that are affectively salient because of their associations with reward or punishment. Specifically, the PP hypothesis that selective attention can be analyzed in terms of the optimization of precision expectations cannot accommodate affect-biased attention; affectively salient stimuli can capture our attention even when precision expectations are low. We review the prospects of three recent attempts to accommodate affect with (...) tools internal to PP theory: Miller and Clark’s (2018) embodied inference; Seth’s (2013) interoceptive inference; and Joffily and Coricelli’s (2013) rate of change of free energy. In each case we argue that the account does not resolve the challenge from affect-biased attention. For this reason, we conclude that prediction error minimization is not sufficient to explain all mental phenomena, contrary to the claim that the PP framework provides a unified theory of all mental phenomena or the brain ‘s cognitive functioning. Nevertheless, we suggest that empirical investigation of the interaction between affective salience and precision expectations should prove helpful in understanding the limits of PP theory, and may provide new directions for the application of a Bayesian perspective to perception. (shrink)

Advances in genomics have led to calls for developing population-based preventive genomic sequencing programs with the goal of identifying genetic health risks in adults without known risk factors. One critical issue for minimizing the harms and maximizing the benefits of PGS is determining the kind and degree of control individuals should have over the generation, use, and handling of their genomic information. In this article we examine whether PGS programs should offer individuals the opportunity to selectively opt out of the (...) sequencing or analysis of specific genomic conditions or whether PGS should be implemented using an all-or-nothing panel approach. We conclude that any responsible scale-up of PGS will require a menu approach that may seem impractical to some, but that draws its justification from a rich mix of normative, legal, and practical considerations. (shrink)

Clinical trials for acute conditions such as myocardial infarction and stroke pose challenges related to informed consent due to time limitations, stress, and severe illness. Consent processes shou...

Because no single person or group holds knowledge about all aspects of research, mechanisms are needed to support knowledge exchange and engagement. Expertise in the research setting necessarily includes scientific and methodological expertise, but also expertise gained through the experience of participating in research and/or being a recipient of research outcomes. Engagement is, by its nature, reciprocal and relational: the process of engaging research participants, patients, citizens and others brings them closer to the research but also brings the research closer (...) to them. When translating research into practice, engaging the public and other stakeholders is explicitly intended to make the outcomes of translation relevant to its constituency of users. In practice, engagement faces numerous challenges and is often time-consuming, expensive and ‘thorny’ work. We explore the epistemic and ontological considerations and implications of four common critiques of engagement methodologies that contest: representativeness, communication and articulation, impacts and outcome, and democracy. The ECOUTER methodology addresses problems of representation and epistemic foundationalism using a methodology that asks, “How could it be otherwise?” ECOUTER affords the possibility of engagement where spatial and temporal constraints are present, relying on saturation as a method of ‘keeping open’ the possible considerations that might emerge and including reflexive use of qualitative analytic methods. This paper describes the ECOUTER process, focusing on one worked example and detailing lessons learned from four other pilots. ECOUTER uses mind-mapping techniques to ‘open up’ engagement, iteratively and organically. ECOUTER aims to balance the breadth, accessibility and user-determination of the scope of engagement. An ECOUTER exercise comprises four stages: engagement and knowledge exchange; analysis of mindmap contributions; development of a conceptual schema ; and feedback, refinement and development of recommendations. ECOUTER refuses fixed truths but also refuses a fixed nature. Its promise lies in its flexibility, adaptability and openness. ECOUTER will be formed and re-formed by the needs and creativity of those who use it. (shrink)

Online education has become an essential component of education. Thus, several factors, such as the student’s learning strategy and motivation, generally contribute to their academic success. This study investigates the relationship between learning strategies, motivation, and online learning environment among 150 first-year college students. Employing correlational design, the statistical findings of the study reveal that the r coefficient of 0.59 indicates a moderate positive correlation between the variables. The p-value of 0.00, which is less than 0.05, leads to the decision (...) to reject the null hypothesis. Hence, a significant relationship exists between learning strategies, motivation, and the online learning environment. (shrink)

Here we identify approximately 40,000 healthy human volunteers who were intentionally exposed to infectious pathogens in clinical research studies dating from late World War II to the early 2000s. Microbial challenge experiments continue today under contemporary human subject research requirements. In fact, we estimated 4,000 additional volunteers who were experimentally infected between 2010 and the present day. We examine the risks and benefits of these experiments and present areas for improvement in protections of participants with respect to safety. These are (...) the absence of maximum limits to risk and the potential for institutional review boards to include questionable benefits to subjects and society when weighing the risks and benefits of research protocols. The lack of a duty of medical care by physician–investigators to research subjects is likewise of concern. The transparency of microbial challenge experiments and the safety concerns raised in this work may stimulate further dialogue on the risks to participants of human experimentation. (shrink)

From the acclaimed writer and thinker--whose award-winning books include both fiction and non-fiction--a dazzlingly original plunge into the drama of philosophy, revealing its hidden but essential role in today's debates on love, religion, politics, and science. Imagine that Plato came to life in the 21st century and set out on a multi-city speaking tour: How would he handle a host on Fox News who challenges him on religion and morality? How would he mediate a debate on the best way to (...) raise a child between a Freudian psychoanalyst and a Tiger Mom? How would he answer a neuroscientist who, about to scan Plato's brain, argues that all his philosophical problems can be solved by our new technologies? What would he make of Google, and the idea that knowledge can be crowdsourced rather than reasoned out by experts? With a philosopher's depth and a novelist's imagination, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein probes the deepest issues confronting us--from sexuality and child-rearing to morality and the meaning of life--by allowing us to eavesdrop on Plato as he encounters the modern world. By reviving the Platonic art of the dialogue for the 21st century, she demonstrates that the questions he first posed continue to confound and enlarge us. (shrink)

Much research has linked surprise to violation of expectations, but it has been less clear how one can be surprised when one has no particular expectation. This paper discusses a computational theory based on Algorithmic Information Theory, which can account for surprises in which one initially expects randomness but then notices a pattern in stimuli. The authors present evidence that a “randomness deficiency” heuristic leads to surprise in such cases.

© 2017. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.We present new observations of the low-mass companion to HD 984 taken with the Gemini Planet Imager as a part of the GPI Exoplanet Survey campaign. Images of HD 984 B were obtained in the J and H bands. Combined with archival epochs from 2012 and 2014, we fit the first orbit to the companion to find an 18 au orbit with a 68% confidence interval between 14 and 28 au, an eccentricity (...) of 0.18 with a 68% confidence interval between 0.05 and 0.47, and an inclination of 119°with a 68% confidence interval between 114°and 125°. To address the considerable spectral covariance in both spectra, we present a method of splitting the spectra into low and high frequencies to analyze the spectral structure at different spatial frequencies with the proper spectral noise correlation. Using the split spectra, we compare them to known spectral types using field brown dwarf and low-mass star spectra and find a best-fit match of a field gravity M6.5 ±1.5 spectral type with a corresponding temperature of K. Photometry of the companion yields a luminosity of log=2.88 ± 0.07 dex with DUSTY models. Mass estimates, again from DUSTY models, find an age-dependent mass of 34 ±1 to 95 ±4 M Jup. These results are consistent with previous measurements of the object. (shrink)

Most of us have moral heroes--people such as Mother Teresa or Gandhi--who have dedicated their lives to making the world a better place. We admire such people, and may even seek to become more like them. But at the same time, we don't believe that anyone who falls short of their example is thereby bad or evil. We believe, in other words, both in the importance of moral ideals and exemplars and in the possibility of goodness short of perfection. This (...) book aims to give a rigorous philosophical account and defense of these claims from within a broadly Neo-Aristotelian perspective. (shrink)

This book looks at the thought of a key figure in Islamic history from the vantage point of different forms of authority. In addition to providing detailed textual analysis of al-Suyuti's legal writing in its historical context, the study also connects the pre-modern figure to contemporary debates in post-2011 Egypt.

David Chalmers supports his contention that there is a possible world populated by our zombie twins by arguing for the assumption that conceivability entails possibility. But, I argue, the modal epistemology he sets forth, ‘modal rationalism,’ ignores the problem of incompleteness and relies on an idealized notion of conceivability. As a consequence, this epistemology can’t justify our quotidian judgments of possibility, let alone those judgments that concern the mind/body connection. Working from the analogy that the imagination is to the possible (...) as perception is to the actual, I set forth a competing epistemology, ‘modal empiricism.’ This epistemology survives the incompleteness objection and allows some of our everyday modal judgments to be justified. But this epistemology can’t justify the claim that Zombie World is possible, which leaves Chalmers’s property dualism without the support it needs. (shrink)

This article demonstrates how meditation apps, such as Headspace and Calm, are imbricated within public discourse about technology addiction, exploring the consequences of this discourse on contemporary mental life. Based on ethnographic research with designers and users of meditation apps, I identify a promise put forth by meditation app companies that I call attention by design: a discursive strategy that frames attention as an antidote to technology addiction, which is ostensibly made possible when design is done right. I argue that (...) attention by design is a promise unfulfilled. Meditation app companies construct attention as socially valuable by endlessly pointing out its purported opposite, technology addiction. Attention by design is promissory in that it keeps promising even when it doesn’t deliver what it promises, compelling the user to return to a practice that represents socially desirable traits that can never be fully acquired—and that often recede further from reach as the person becomes distracted by other obligations and communication mediated through the smartphone. Despite this broken promise, users believe they are becoming more attentive. The promissory attention designed into meditation apps reflects a new form of governmentality, in which users receive a mental nudge to reinterpret similarly designed experiences as different. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 8, August 2020, Page W12-W13.

Cet article étudie l'évolution du discours concernant la présence des hommes dans l'enseignement secondaire féminin. Il montre en particulier l'émergence d'un courant réformateur dans les années 1840 cherchant à éliminer les hommes des pensionnats féminins pour laisser la place aux femmes. Cette position féministe disparaît pourtant lors des débats autour des cours Duruy dans les années 1860. À ce moment l'opposition cléricale à la présence des hommes dans l'enseignement féminin prend des connotations nettement conservatrices ; les femmes doivent éduquer les (...) femmes pour ne pas bouleverser l'ordre social. Dans les décennies suivantes les républicains eux-mêmes reprendront cette argumentation basée sur les qualités maternelles ­ et non intellectuelles ­ des femmes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Abortion to Abolition: Reproductive Health and Justice in Canada by Martha PaynterRebecca Simmons (bio)Abortion to Abolition: Reproductive Health and Justice in Canada by Martha Paynter Winnipeg, MB: Fernwood Publishing, 2022Martha Paynter's Abortion to Abolition: Reproductive Health and Justice in Canada is a bold, ambitious work that seeks to not only catalog Canada's meandering and often backtracking path toward reproductive justice, but to act as a manifesto for Paynter's (...) own ideas and goals for reproductive justice. The book takes the form of an anthology of stories, divided into chapters, that are grouped according to a certain right; for example, the right to bodily autonomy. This format effectively guides the reader from abortion to abolition. Paynter adroitly starts the book with white feminist favorites such as bodily autonomy and not having children. Then she logically progresses to more radical ideas such as parenting in prison and the total abolition of prisons. The stories in this book are accompanied by warm, colorful illustrations by Julia Hunt. These drawings help the reader visualize the person behind the story and the very real life that was affected by reproductive law and/or social norms. Paynter holds a PhD in nursing, and it is from this background that she writes, seeking to educate nurses and other healthcare professionals alongside a broader readership garnered through her clear, approachable writing style.Chapter 1 introduces the reader to many of the book's key themes by considering the right and need to have bodily autonomy, and the multiple ways this manifests itself in ordinary (and less-ordinary) life. Paynter considers the disparate stories of five women, all fighting in some way for bodily autonomy. The stories cover events of gender-based gun violence, sexual assault, transgender rights in prison, the legalization of sex work, police violence, and institutional racism. Each story recounted by Paynter catalogs tragedies and injustices with blunt and brutal honesty—perhaps to an unnecessary extent. Every horrific fact is laid bare for the readers as they uncover the intricacies of gender-based, imperialist, and racist violence. Paynter has chosen these stories to display the multitude of ways in which people—especially Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) and minoritized genders—can be willfully wronged by the state and [End Page 209] the criminal justice system, such that the reader must begin to confront the fact that these structures don't seem to exist to benefit or protect the most marginalized in society.Chapter 2 approaches the right not to have children through a number of stories related to contraception, abortion, and family planning. Paynter sketches some of the key points in Canada's journey toward the decriminalization of abortion, from paradoxical trailblazers, such as Dr. Emily Stowe in the 1800s, to the viral memefied content of art protestor iamkarats. While the unequivocal legality of abortion in Canada suggests incredible progressiveness and support for women's rights, Paynter paints a more complex picture through her chosen narratives. Crucially, the inequitable geographical access to abortion, in particular, throughout the huge landmass of Canada suggests that the right to not have children in Canada is not universal. Moreover, Paynter suggests that access is also bounded by financial constraints, finite public funding, and the limited availability of inclusive clinics that prioritize healthcare for LGBTQ2S+ people.Chapter 3 considers the topic of having children; in particular, the right to reproductive technologies and freedom from forced sterilization. Paynter quickly makes clear that while many white feminists might see having and not having children as diametrically opposed, they are two equally essential parts of reproductive justice. Paynter draws attention to the Sexual Sterilization Act of 1928 that was only overturned in 1972. She describes it as part of the "genocidal colonial project" (84), a collection of laws and policies aimed at fulfilling eugenicist, neoimperial ideals of increasing production of the white "race" and promoting the genocide of Indigenous peoples. Furthermore, Paynter argues that evidence of forced sterilization of Indigenous peoples, and other physical violence and neglect, persists to the present day and must be stopped and reparations made for previous harms. Paynter then considers the complex, often-debated case of commercialized surrogacy, which she defines... (shrink)

Cet article étudie l'évolution du discours concernant la présence des hommes dans l'enseignement secondaire féminin. Il montre en particulier l'émergence d'un courant réformateur dans les années 1840 cherchant à éliminer les hommes des pensionnats féminins pour laisser la place aux femmes. Cette position féministe disparaît pourtant lors des débats autour des cours Duruy dans les années 1860. À ce moment l'opposition cléricale à la présence des hommes dans l'enseignement féminin prend des connotations nettement conservatrices ; les femmes doivent éduquer les (...) femmes pour ne pas bouleverser l'ordre social. Dans les décennies suivantes les républicains eux-mêmes reprendront cette argumentation basée sur les qualités maternelles ­ et non intellectuelles ­ des femmes. (shrink)

Die Philosophie Johann Baptist Schads – und für sie sei in dieser Untersuchung stellvertretend und ein wenig verkürzend sein Neuer Grundriss der transcendentalen Logik nach den Principien der Wissenschaftslehre aus dem Jahr 1801 herangezogen – beansprucht für sich keine vollständige, sondern nur partielle Eigenständigkeit, indem sie zwar v.a. auf das Gedankengut Fichtes zurückgreift, allerdings für sich reklamiert, die Hauptthesen der Wissenschaftslehre zu Ende zu denken, was in Schads Augen allein dadurch geschehen kann, daß das Übersinnliche, das Absolute, traditionell gesprochen: Gott (...) oder die Gottheit, mit den zu erarbeitenden, überformalen Mitteln der transzendentalen Logik als das gedacht wird, was nicht mehr eigentlich gedacht und nur noch in Negationsbezügen unzutreffend angesprochen zu werden vermag. Der eigenen Aufgabenstellung mit den in ihr zunächst nur enthaltenen, sich aber im Verlauf der folgenden systematischen Analysen bestätigenden Prämissen – etwa einer internen Logikdifferenz oder des grundsätzlichen Wahrheitsziels der Philosophie – folgend erarbeitet Schad eine transzendentale Logik, die diese wahre Philosophie sein soll, womit er sich einerseits dem Vernunftprogramm Kants anschließt, um andererseits die grundsätzlichen Bestimmungen der Wissenschaftslehre Fichtes aufzunehmen – in derjenigen Form, in der sie ihm allein bekannt sein konnten, was zwangsläufig bedeutet, daß Schad die späteren Versionen der Wissenschaftslehre und zumal die Logikausarbeitungen Fichtes in seinen Vorlesungen aus dem Jahr 1812 nicht berücksichtigen konnte, obwohl sie beim Rückvergleich mit Schads Werk sichtbar machen, daß die Wege Fichtes mit denen des Letztgenannten keinesfalls konvergieren, was jedoch nach der schon früh ablehnenden Haltung des Wissenschaftslehrers seinem selbsternannten Nachfolger gegenüber nicht zu erstaunen vermag. Daß hingegen trotz Fichtes negativer Bewertung den Ausführungen Schads durchaus ein Eigenwert sowie eine interessante Weiterführung der Wissenschaftslehre nicht abgesprochen werden können, mögen die folgenden Überlegungen beweisen. (shrink)

Fear of dementia leads some people to demand an opportunity to choose death over life with the illness. They want the power to make advance euthanasia directives and to refuse hand feeding at some point in the dementia process. But the choices we make in advance aren't always suited to the people we become. Experts and family members say people with dementia often adapt, becoming content with their lives. People should care about their future selves with dementia. Their advance instructions (...) about dementia care should give others freedom to respond to the up‐to‐date information required for good medical decision‐making. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“Please Help Me”Rebecca L. VolpeTwo–year–old Jay was born prematurely at 26 weeks gestation, addicted to opiates. After several months in the Neonatal ICU, he was sent home, ventilator–dependent but with a high likelihood of survival and a low chance of severe, lasting disability. When Jay was 1½, he had a cardiopulmonary arrest at home. The parents of children who are on ventilators at home receive extensive education and (...) training about how to respond to something like an arrest. They are taught that a quick response is often critical to their child’s long–term prognosis. And yet, Jay’s parents took such a long time to respond to his code that Jay now has severe hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy: his brain was deprived of oxygen for so long that he has no higher cortical function, and will never think, speak, walk, or play.Currently, Jay is ventilator–dependent and has a very poor prognosis. Jay goes back and forth between a nursing home and the hospital. During one of his many hospitalizations, the ICU team decided to call an ethics consultation, because they felt that continued aggressive intervention was no longer in Jay’s best interests. I was the person on the other end of the line when the medical team called. After having a brief conversation with the attending physician, I left my office and walked to the Pediatric ICU to visit Jay. I arrived at the bedside—really just a large crib—and saw a baby with dark hair lying flat on his back. His tongue was swollen and protruding from his mouth, his eyes were puffy and closed, and his limbs were limp. On his belly was a piece of paper with the words, “BECKY PLEASE HELP ME” typed in huge, bold font. I looked up, into the eyes of the attending physician and said, “Did you type that?” The physician nodded yes. Much could be said about this physician’s behavior. But the bottom line—from a clinical perspective, at least—is that this ICU team was desperate, and that they had significant expectations that I would be able to help them.I began the work of the consultation. I reviewed the medical record, spoke with members of the treating team, and set up a time to talk to the family. During the family meeting, I learned that Jay’s parents wanted to continue to treat aggressively, and that they believed it was not their place to decide when it was their son’s time to die. That was [End Page 122] God’s decision. They could not fathom removing interventions that were maintaining their son’s life. They acknowledged that his quality of life was not high, but, still, it was life.The preferences of the treating team were in stark contrast to the parents’ preferences. The neurologists believed Jay did not have the capacity to experience physical pain, but the ICU team believed that continuing to treat Jay was cruel. Although the ICU team acknowledged that Jay was probably not suffering, they noted that we could not know for sure, and that sometimes Jay grimaced and withdrew—signs that are often interpreted as suffering. The ICU team also argued that given all the sick children in the world, and the scarcity of healthcare resources, it didn’t make sense to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars into prolonging Jay’s life. Additionally, they discovered that Jay had osteopenia (weak, brittle bones)—which was causing multiple bone fractures. The ICU team anguished over the thought of Jay’s small, soft bones continuing to break despite their best efforts.The bioethicist in me knows that, as long as the patient isn’t suffering and the parents aren’t demanding futile interventions (they weren’t), our role as providers was not to judge the parents’ value system. I told the ICU team over and over that different people place different value on Jay’s type of life, and that it wasn’t for us to tell them that their value structure was wrong. I talked with other members of the clinical ethics consultation service. Then I brought the case to the entire institutional... (shrink)

In the article “On Avoiding Deep Dementia,” Norman Cantor defends a position that I suspect many readers share. In my years writing and speaking on advance directives and dementia, I've found that most people support one of two positions. They are convinced either that advance choices should control the treatment dementia patients receive or that the welfare of a person with dementia should sometimes take priority over earlier choices. As Cantor points out, I support the second position.I agree with several (...) of Cantor's arguments. Where Cantor and I part ways is over the degree of control that advance directives should exert over the care of persons with moderate dementia. Although I don't welcome the prospect of living with dementia, I believe that people with the condition should be represented in the debate over treatment standards. It's not surprising that many, perhaps most, people unaffected by dementia think that their preferences should control the care they would receive as dementia patients. But people taking this position are neglecting the concerns and interests they may have as dementia patients. (shrink)

Resilienz wird in der Psychologie und Sozialpädagogik häufig als positiv angesehen. In der Armutsbekämpfung ist diese Sichtweise durchaus nachvollziehbar, insbesondere in der Prävention von Kinderarmut: wenn Resilienz das ist, was ein Kind in die Lage versetzt, die Risiken und negativen Folgen von Armut besser zu bewältigen, scheint es sinnvoll, diese Fähigkeit bei Kindern zu fördern. Mein Beitrag befürwortet diesen Befund, plädiert aber dafür, dass die Resilienzdebatte der Untermauerung durch Argumente aus der praktischen Philosophie bedarf, da das, was häufig als Resilienz (...) bezeichnet wird, nicht immer positiv zu bewerten ist. Ziel meines Beitrags ist es, den Resilienzdiskurs im Rahmen der Kinderarmutsbekämpfung in einer normativen Theorie zu verankern: im Capability Ansatz von Amartya Sen. Resilienz wird damit, so meine These, zu einem fundamental normativen Begriff. Mein Beitrag gliedert sich in drei Teile: Zuerst wird auf die Grundideen des CA und die Stellung von Kindheit darin eingegangen. Im zweiten Teil wird der Resilienzbegriff im Kontext von Kinderarmutsprävention charakterisiert. Der dritte Teil widmet sich den Verbindungslinien zwischen der Resilienzdiskussion und dem CA. Leitgedanke ist dabei, dass der CA die menschliche Handlungsfähigkeit als normativ grundlegend auszeichnet. Auf dieser Basis lässt sich überzeugend beurteilen, warum Armut bei Kindern höchst problematisch ist und welches Ziel in der Resilienzförderung verfolgt werden soll. Wie ich argumentieren werde, ist die Bereitstellung von capabilities auch die gerechtigkeitstheoretische Basis von Resilienzförderung in der Praxis. Der Beitrag schließt mit Impulsen, welche, so meine Hoffnung, für eine weitere Diskussion der Normativität von Resilienz dienlich sein können. (shrink)

Some hold that if we can imagine God creating a world in which a particular proposition (p) is true, then we can conclude that p is possible. I argue that such appeals to God can’t provide us with a guide to possibility. For either God’s powers aren’t co-extensive with the possible or they are. And if they are, these appeals either beg the question or court a version of Euthyphro’s Dilemma. Some may argue that such appeals were only intended to (...) prompt us to think broadly about the modal claim at issue. I argue instead that these appeals must be understood as more than mere prompts. For it is these appeals that would, if successful, render the conceivability principle viable. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Breathing TogetherRebecca L. Walkowitz (bio)For the first seven years of my career, I taught a very large lecture course once, and sometimes twice, a year in a graded auditorium filled seat-to-seat with as many as 350 undergraduates. The course focused on a cluster of themes that linked art and violence–how art resists violence, how art animates violence, how art expresses violence, how violence spurs art– and traced those themes (...) through the history of British fiction from Joyce, Woolf, and Forster through Barker, Burgess, Ishiguro, and Rushdie. I loved teaching that class. I loved and was sometimes terrified and almost always invigorated by being in that room with those students. Needless to say, no one wore masks. Far from it.I remember the feel of the crowded, anonymous, yet intimate room. Intimate, because a group of 20 or 30 very avid students occupied the first few rows, and I came to value and recognize their attentive faces. I could hear their little sounds as they scratched out notes, adjusted their laptops, whispered to each other, and rustled papers. Intimate, because I was standing at my full, not very substantial height on a stage, and they were looking up at my body and listening to my voice for 50 minutes twice a week. And intimate, in another sense, because they would sometimes forget that we were there together live and behave in ways that I have never experienced in a smaller classroom. One day, two students in the last row, which in the slanted auditorium was directly level with my elevated gaze, spent most of the lecture kissing ardently. I was impressed by their enthusiasm and by the duration of their embrace. At the end of the lecture, I quick-stepped up the aisle to remind them: this is not TV; we are here together. I smiled while I said it, and they apologized for distracting me. I smile as I think about it now.During the COVID lockdown, I missed the embodied experience of large gatherings, including large lectures. The Zoom classroom, for all its affordances, can't replicate the accidental encounters, the risk and energy of embodied presentation, the warmth of individual eye contact, and the shoulder experiences of the class period: what happens in the time just before and the time just after the actual class takes place. The shoulder experiences are truly precious, as any seasoned teacher knows, because [End Page 258] they allow us to shift the scale of encounter up and down, and they allow us to interact in spontaneous and less formal ways than we do when the entire class is gathered as one. Close up and informally, we are more likely to use our faces and our hands: smiling, nodding, tilting, waving, and pressing our palms together to say thank you.There is a kind of social intimacy and a kind of social violence that can only be illustrated in a very large group, and I appreciated my lecture for allowing me to experience that. The most terrifying day of my class each semester was the day I spoke about– and performed!–the shock of involuntary, inchoate expression in E. M. Forster's A Room with a View. Like other Bloomsbury artists, Forster was committed to ushering out traditional ideas of self-restraint and maturity and ushering in greater communication between men and women, between social classes, and between ages about sexuality, desire, and the experiences of the body. The word of the day was "play": life needed more play, more honesty, more curiosity, and less seriousness, less decorum, and less lying to ourselves and others.What does this look like in the classroom? On the day in question, we would talk about the scenes in the novel in which characters are criticized for disruptive actions they cannot or do not control, such as fainting, laughing, bleeding, getting carried away, or expressing sounds in addition to words. I would explain that there are two problems with these actions: they are accidental or unintentional, and they involve an unexpected, unregulated expression of the body in public. Even worse, the actions take place in what our grandparents used to call "mixed... (shrink)

En France, l’un des premiers volumes collectifs en histoire des femmes s’intitulait Madame ou Mademoiselle : itinéraires de la solitude féminine. Publié en 1984, il interrogeait la question des femmes célibataires, leur présence démographique, leur marge de manœuvre, les stéréotypes qui leur étaient accolés. Depuis, les travaux historiques sur la solitude féminine n’ont pas été nombreux. En dehors de l’article de Cécile Dauphin sur les femmes seules dans Histoire des femmes en Occident, t. IV...