Workplace positivity expert Shola Richards (Making Work Work) explores a radical new concept for rethinking our personal, professional, and social lives: togetherness.

"All art should become science and all science art; poetry and philosophy should be made one." Friedrich Schlegel's words perfectly capture the project of the German Romantics, who believed that the aesthetic approaches of art and literature could reveal patterns and meaning in nature that couldn't be uncovered through rationalistic philosophy and science alone. In this wide-ranging work, Robert J. Richards shows how the Romantic conception of the world influenced (and was influenced by) both the lives of the people (...) who held it and the development of nineteenth-century science. Integrating Romantic literature, science, and philosophy with an intimate knowledge of the individuals involved—from Goethe and the brothers Schlegel to Humboldt and Friedrich and Caroline Schelling—Richards demonstrates how their tempestuous lives shaped their ideas as profoundly as their intellectual and cultural heritage. He focuses especially on how Romantic concepts of the self, as well as aesthetic and moral considerations—all tempered by personal relationships—altered scientific representations of nature. Although historians have long considered Romanticism at best a minor tributary to scientific thought, Richards moves it to the center of the main currents of nineteenth-century biology, culminating in the conception of nature that underlies Darwin's evolutionary theory. Uniting the personal and poetic aspects of philosophy and science in a way that the German Romantics themselves would have honored, The Romantic Conception of Life alters how we look at Romanticism and nineteenth-century biology. (shrink)

BACKGROUND Patients with chronic pain face significant barriers in finding clinicians to manage long-term opioid therapy (LTOT). For patients on LTOT, it is increasingly common to have them sign opioid treatment agreements (OTAs). OTAs enumerate the risks of opioids, as informed consent documents would, but also the requirements that patients must meet to receive LTOT. While there has been an ongoing scholarly discussion about the practical and ethical implications of OTA use in the abstract, little is known about how clinicians (...) use them and if OTAs themselves modify clinician prescribing practices. OBJECTIVE To determine how clinicians use OTAs and the potential impacts of OTAs on opioid prescribing. DESIGN We conducted qualitative analysis of four focus groups of clinicians from a large Midwestern academic medical center. Groups were organized according to self-identified prescribing patterns: two groups for clinicians who identified as prescribers of LTOT, and two who did not. PARTICIPANTS 17 clinicians from General Internal Medicine, Family Medicine, and Palliative Care were recruited using purposive, convenience sampling. APPROACH Discussions were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed for themes using reflexive thematic analysis by a multidisciplinary team. KEY RESULTS Our analysis identified three main themes: (1) OTAs did not influence clinicians’ decisions whether to use LTOT generally but did shape clinical decision-making for individual patients; (2) clinicians feel OTAs intensify the power they have over patients, though this was not uniformly judged as harmful; (3) there is a potential misalignment between the intended purposes of OTAs and their implementation. CONCLUSION This study reveals a complicated relationship between OTAs and access to pain management. While OTAs seem not to impact the clinicians’ decisions about whether to use LTOT generally, they do sometimes influence prescribing decisions for individual patients. Clinicians shared complex views about OTAs’ purposes, which shows the need for more clarity about how OTAs could be used to promote shared decision-making, joint accountability, informed consent, and patient education. (shrink)

Arguments are advanced that a theory of possible worlds cannot be a theory of meaning for modal statements, And lewis's version of the theory in his "counterfactuals" is used as a particular stalking-Horse. (a) 'possible world', Though used referentially, Is defined in a way that makes it non-Referential, And moreover, The theory does not supply or validate proposals for criteria that individuate worlds; hence the theory seems incomprehensible. (b) the theory yields no useable account of truth-Conditions for modal statements. (c) (...) a conceptualist version of the theory cannot overcome these problems. (d) lewis's similarity theory of possible worlds as a semantics for counterfactuals sustains in many cases (including one he cites) intuitively untrue counterfactuals and rejects many intuitively correct ones. (shrink)

The prelims comprise: Introduction The Implications Conclusion Note.

: According to Kuhn, theory choice is not governed by algorithms, but by values, which influence yet do not determine theory choice. Cladistic hypotheses, however, seem to be evaluated relative to a parsimony algorithm, which asserts that the best phylogenetic hypothesis is the one that requires the fewest character changes. While this seems to be an unequivocal evaluative rule, it is not. The application of the parsimony principle is ultimately indeterminate because the choice and individuation of characters that figure in (...) parsimony computations are indeterminate. The cladistic approach is Kuhnian because the application of parsimony depends on persuasion, background, training and tradition. (shrink)

Contrary to Block's assertion, “identity-crowding” does not provide an interesting instance of object-seeing without object-attention. The successful judgments and unusual phenomenology of identity-crowding are better explained by unconscious perception and non-perceptual phenomenology associated with cognitive states. In identity-crowding, as in other cases of crowding, subjects see jumbled textures and cannot individuate the items contributing to those textures in the absence of attention. Block presents an attenuated sense in which identity-crowded items are seen, but this is irrelevant to the debate about (...) phenomenal experience of an object in the absence of object-attention. Finally, even unconscious object perception in identity-crowding likely involves an attention-like selective process. (shrink)

The book stands somewhat apart from the rest of Freud's writings as a study of normal, rather than pathological psychology, and, although it contains the most closely reasoned accounts of complicated psychological processes that Freud ever gave, it remains one of his most readable works. It includes a rich collection of jokes, particularly those of Jewish folk tradition, in which Freud clearly revelled.

United States Atomic Energy Commission (USAEC) and UN agencies utilized techniques of power and negotiation to implement radiation exposure regulations. USAEC affiliated scientists’ expertise was cultivated while establishing a radiation protection regime based on classified experiments. World Health Organization (WHO) leadership sought to manifest a human right to health, including a right to protection from radiation contamination. The careers of a few technical experts and interagency UN correspondence shows how American risk models of radiation regulation traveled and ultimately inhibited WHO (...) attempts to frame radiation as a public health threat. The USAEC and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) navigated WHO’s way of perceiving radiation with technical experts and bureaucratic and legislative means. This paper shows the underpinning at the UN of competing models of radiation regulation, one state centric and the other, an individual right to health. This narrative provides insights into the nature of the UN’s current conceptualization of radiation regulation and argues for further research into UN, radiation, and human rights history. (shrink)

This essay can be called, if you will, an exercise in choosing which words to use when in our contemporary context. I hope to add something useful to the work being done by Pierre Macherey (Machere...

This article revisits a famous staple of the Vergilian tradition, Servius's heavily contested scholion on the actress Volumnia Cytheris's theatrical rendition of Vergil's sixth Eclogue. By shifting the focus of inquiry from the strictly historical question ‘ did it happen?’ it cuts through, identifies and disentangles a nexus of prejudices which have led to the devaluing of Servius's information. The sidelining or dismissal of this piece of evidence, I argue, has more to teach us about our own culturally entrenched and (...) discipline-inherited assumptions than about what could have happened in late Republican Rome. Scrutiny of the evidence on the stage re-mediation of high poetry suggests it is entirely plausible that Cytheris would have performed a theatricalized version of Vergil's masterpiece. Indeed at the very heart of the story lies the convergence between élite poetry and the world of professional stage artists. Moreover, Cytheris's possible performance of a repertoire that coincides with the mythological core of pantomime dancing in its artistic maturity opens pivotal questions concerning what Plutarch aptly calls the “full association and mutual entanglement” between the arts of poetry and dance. Taking Servius seriously gives us the impetus to explore more decisively dimensions of Roman life that have been messily sidelined as a result of the systematic privileging of “texts” in our surveys of Roman intellectual landscapes over the centuries. Even if Servius's extract turned out to be no more than a “myth”, an “anecdote”, as such narratives go, this is an incredibly helpful one, provided we are willing to press it into the service of larger inquiries regarding the “circulation” of cultural energy between élite and popular culture. (shrink)

This book brings together eleven case studies of inductive risk-the chance that scientific inference is incorrect-that range over a wide variety of scientific contexts and fields. The chapters are designed to illustrate the pervasiveness of inductive risk, assist scientists and policymakers in responding to it, and productively move theoretical discussions of the topic forward.

Inference to the best explanation (IBE) is the principle of inference according to which, when faced with a set of competing hypotheses, where each hypothesis is empirically adequate for explaining the phenomena, we should infer the truth of the hypothesis that best explains the phenomena. When our theories correctly display this principle, we call them our ‘best’. In this paper, I examine the explanatory role of mathematics in our best scientific theories. In particular, I will elucidate the enormous utility of (...) mathematical structures. I argue from a reformed indispensability argument that mathematical structures are explanatorily indispensable to our best scientific theories. Therefore, IBE scientific realism entails mathematical realism. I develop a naturalistic, neo-Quinean ontology, which grounds physical and mathematical entities in structures. Mathematical structures are the truthmakers for the entities of our quantificational discourse. I also develop an ‘ontic conception’ of explanation, according to which explanations exist in the world, whether or not we discover and model them. I apply the ontic account to mathematical structures, arguing that these structures are the explanations for particles, forces, and even the conservation laws of physics. As such, mathematical structures provide the fundamental grounding for ontological commitment. I conclude by reviewing the evidence from modern physics for the existence of mathematical structures. (shrink)

Robert P. George, Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993, xvi + 241 pp.

From all points of the political compass, from widely different groups, have come indignant outcries against the trade in human organs from live vendors. Opponents contend that such practices constitute a morally outrageous and gross exploitation of the poor, inherently coercive and obviously intolerable in any civilized society. This article examines the arguments typically offered in defense of these claims, and finds serious problems with all of them. The prohibition of organ sales is derived not from the principles and argument (...) usually invoked in support of prohibition, but rather, from strong feelings of repugnance which exert an invisible but powerful influence on the debate, distorting the arguments [and working] to the detriment of the [very] people most in need of protection. (shrink)

According to both traditional positivist approaches and also to the sociology of scientific knowledge, social analysts should not themselves become involved in the controversies they are investigating. But the experiences of the authors in studying contemporary scientific controversies—specifically, over the Australian Animal Health Laboratory, fluoridation, and vitamin C and cancer—show that analysts, whatever their intentions, cannot avoid being drawn into the fray. The field of controversy studies needs to address the implications of this process for both theory and practice.

SummaryThis paper explicates a Constructivist Epistemology which underlies cybernetic models of perceiving and knowing. We focus on the recent work of W. T. Powers . Powers' model consists of hierarchially arranged negative feedback systems, is based on the claim that living organisms behave to control perceptions, and thus suggests that organisms construct their experiential world. We argue that this provides a basis for a modified scientific scepticism, a scepticism with a positive dimension gained by adding the notion of cognitive construction. (...) From this perspective, knowing and perceiving pertain to the construction of invariances in the living organism's experience.RésuméDans cet essai, nous exposons une épistémologie constructivistc qui sert de base pour des modèles cybernétiques de la perception et de la connaissancc. Nous nous référonts à l'œuvre de W. T. Powers qui a propose un modèle constitué par un arrangement hiérarchique de boucles rétroactives en partant de l'idée que tout comportement a pour but de contrôler les perceptions. Ce modèle suggère que le monde expérientiel est le produit d'une activité constructive. Nous défendons la thèse que cette orientation peut fournir le fondement d'un scepticisme scientifique qui acquiert un aspect positif par la notion de construction cognitive. De ce point de vue, connaissance et perception sont des activités qui construisent des invariances dans l'expérience d'un organisme.ZusammenfassungIn der vorliegenden Arbeit wird eine konstruktivistische Erkenntnistheorie entwickelt, die ihrerseits gewissen kybernetischen Modeller) der Wahrnehmurtg und Er‐kenntnis zugrundeliegt. Wir beziehen uns auf die Untersuchungen von W. T. Powers , dessen Modell aus hierarchisch angeordneten Rückkopplungssystemen besteht und auf der Annahme be‐ruht, dass das Verhalten von Lebewesen der Regelung von Wahrnehmungcn dicnt. Powers legt deshalb die Hypothese nahe, dass Organismen ihre Erlebenswelt konstru‐iren. Wir vertreten die Ansicht, dass diese die Grundlage für einen neuen wisscnschaftli‐chen Skeptizismus liefert, der auf Grund des Begriffes der kognitiven Konstruktion eine positive Dimension gewinnt. Von diesem Gesichtspunkt aus betrachtet betreffen Wissen und Wahrnehmung den aktiven Aufbau von Konstanten in der Erlebenswelt des Orga‐nismus. (shrink)

Filosofische analyse van het zelfconcept van de Zwitsers-Franse architect (1887-1965), herwaardering van zijn motieven als stadsplanoloog en nieuwe inzichten met betrekking tot zijn intellectuele relaties met andere leden van de avantgarde van de twintigste eeuw.

Evolutionary ethics - the application of evolutionary ideas to moral thinking and justification - began in the nineteenth century with the work of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, but was subsequently criticized as an example of the naturalistic fallacy. In recent decades, however, evolutionary ethics has found new support among both the Darwinian and the Spencerian traditions. This accessible volume looks at the history of thought about evolutionary ethics as well as current debates in the subject, examining first the claims (...) of supporters and then the responses of their critics. Topics covered include social Darwinism, moral realism, and debunking arguments. Clearly written and structured, the book guides readers through the arguments on both sides, and emphasises the continuing relevance of evolutionary theory to our understanding of ethics today. (shrink)

At least since the seventeenth century, the strange combination of epistemological certainty and ontological power that characterizes mathematics has made it a major focus of philosophical, social, and cultural negotiation. In the eighteenth century, all of these factors were at play as mathematical thinkers struggled to assimilate and extend the analysis they had inherited from the seventeenth century. A combination of educational convictions and historical assumptions supported a humanistic mathematics essentially defined by its flexibility and breadth. This mathematics was an (...) expression of l’esprit humain, which was unfolding in a progressive historical narrative. The French Revolution dramatically altered the historical and educational landscapes that had supported this eighteenth‐century approach, and within thirty years Augustin Louis Cauchy had radically reconceptualized and restructured mathematics to be rigorous rather than narrative. (shrink)