This volume questions the present-day assumption holding the Italian academies to be the model for the European literary and learned society, by juxtaposing them to other types of contemporary literary and learned associations in several Western European countries.

In The Cruel Radiance, Susie Linfield challenges the idea that photographs of political violence exploit their subjects and pander to the voyeuristic tendencies of their viewers. Instead she argues passionately that looking at such images—and learning to see the people in them—is an ethically and politically necessary act that connects us to our modern history of violence and probes the human capacity for cruelty. Grappling with critics from Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht to Susan Sontag and the postmoderns—and analyzing (...) photographs from such events as the Holocaust, China’s Cultural Revolution, and recent terrorist acts—Linfield explores the complex connection between photojournalism and the rise of human rights ideals. In the book’s concluding section, she examines the indispensable work of Robert Capa, James Nachtwey, and Gilles Peress and asks how photography should respond to the increasingly nihilistic trajectory of modern warfare. A bracing and unsettling book, The Cruel Radiance convincingly demonstrates that if we hope to alleviate political violence, we must first truly understand it—and to do that, we must begin to look. (shrink)

This article outlines and compares current and proposed global institutional mechanisms to increase equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines, focusing on their institutional and operational complementarities and overlaps. It specifically considers the World Health Organization's (WHO’s) COVAX (COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access) model as part of the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator (ACT-A) initiative, the WHO’s COVID-19 Technology Access Pool (C-TAP) initiative, the proposed TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Agreement) intellectual property waiver and other proposed WHO and World Trade Organization technology (...) transfer proposals. We argue that while various individual mechanisms each have their specific individual merits—and in some cases weaknesses—overall, many of these current and proposed mechanisms could be highly complementary if used together to deliver equitable global access to vaccines. Nonetheless, we also argue that there are risks posed by the proliferation of proposals in this context, including the potential to disperse stakeholder attention or to delay decisive action. Therefore, we argue that there is now a clear need for concerted global multilateral action to recognise the complementarities of specific models and to provide a pathway for collaboration in attaining global equitable access to vaccines. The institutional infrastructure or proposals to achieve this amply exist at this point in time—but much greater cooperation from industry and clear, decisive and coordinated action from states and international organisations are urgently needed. (shrink)

The work of psychiatrist R. D. Laing deserves recognition as a key contribution to sociological theory, in dialogue with the interactionist and interpretivist sociological traditions. Laing encourages us to identify meaningful social action in what would otherwise appear to be nonsocial phenomena. His interpretation of schizophrenia as a rational strategy of withdrawal reminds us of the threat that others can pose to the self and how social relations are implicated in even the most "private" and "internal" of experiences. He developed (...) a far-reaching critical theory of the self in modern society, which challenges the medicalization and biochemical reduction of human problems. Using the case of shyness as an example, the article seeks to demonstrate the importance of Laing's theories for examining the fragility of the self in relation to contemporary social order. (shrink)

This article rewrites the history of the tomb of Philip the Bold made for the Chartreuse de Champmol in Dijon, through a close reading and re-transcription of the entire archival record, including some previously unknown documents, paying careful attention to what their terminology and chronology reveal about time, cost, materials and process; it analyses the scale of the project, and in particular the acquisition and working of materials: limestone from Tonnerre, ‘alabaster’ as spolia from Autun, black marble from Dinant, white (...) marble, presumably from Italy, via Paris, alabaster from Grenoble and a pinkish limestone from Resne, near Dijon. By reconsidering this record, along with the physical and visual evidence of the existing monument, it argues that there was not one but two tombs made for Philip the Bold: the first was completed by Jean de Marville and then rejected by Philip, and perhaps also by the Carthusians; the second, that we have today, was started again from scratch in the early 1390s by Claus Sluter, in collaboration, possibly, with Jacques de Baerze. The story of how these two tombs were planned, worked on, adapted or restarted, along with what Marville’s abandoned project may have looked like, and what may have become of its constituent parts, is woven into the narrative of Philip’s political and religious ambitions, the role of his wife Margaret of Flanders, and of the construction and decoration of the Chartreuse de Champmol itself. (shrink)

SARS and monkeypox have given the public health community a unique opportunity to examine the use of quarantine measures. Until recently, the word “quarantine”was not used in polite conversation, and evoked unsavory images. The recent SARS epidemic illustrated the important role of quarantine and isolation as a public health response to communicable disease.As public health officials in Toronto began to take control of the SARS epidemic, a second wave of the disease emerged. In the first SARS epidemic, approximately 8,200 individuals (...) were isolated. There were approximately 82 probable cases, 66 suspect cases, and 24 deaths. On May 22, 2003, SARS II emerged. In total, approximately 13,000 people were quarantined. SARS II saw the onset of difficult questions being asked about the control and spread of SARS.The province of Ontario establishes the public health policies and legislative framework for the entire province. (shrink)

Susi offers a novel non-coherence theory of digital human rights to explain the change in meaning and scope of human rights rules, principles, ideas and concepts, and the interrelationships and related actors, when moving from the physical domain into the online domain. The transposition into the digital reality can alter the meaning of well-established offline human rights to a wider or narrower extent, impacting core concepts such as transparency, legal certainty and foreseeability. Susi analyses the 'loss in transposition' of some (...) core features of the rights to privacy and freedom of expression. The non-coherence theory is used to explore key human rights theoretical concepts, such as the network society approach, the capabilities approach, transversality, and self-normativity, and it is also applied to e-state and artificial intelligence, challenging the idea of the sameness of rights. This title is part of the Flip it Open programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details. (shrink)

Recent work on a small European cave salamander (Proteus anguinus) has revealed that it has exceptional longevity, yet it appears to have unexceptional defences against oxidative damage. This paper comes at the end of a string of other studies that are calling into question the free‐radical damage theory of ageing. This theory rose to prominence in the 1990s as the dominant theory for why we age and die. Despite substantial correlative evidence to support it, studies in the last five years (...) have raised doubts over its importance. In particular, these include studies of mice with the major antioxidant genes knocked out (both singly and in combination), which show the expected elevation in oxidative damage but no impact on lifespan. Combined, these findings raise fundamental questions over whether the free‐radical damage theory remains useful for understanding the ageing process, and variation in lifespan and life histories.Editor's suggested further reading in BioEssays Blind cave salamanders age very slowly: A new member of Methuselah's Bestiary Abstract. (shrink)

Graphical AbstractA hunter gatherer in our evolutionary history would have faced many threats when physically active, including the risks of predation, snakebite and fractured limbs. In article number 1900156, John R. Speakman argues that these threats in our evolutionary past selected us to be as sedentary as possible. Image credit: Stephanie Summers.

Theology, vulnerability, and art as the consciousness of grief -- Christology positive and im-positive -- Dedication to vulnerability in the form of art -- Visual art as a resource for theology of the incarnation -- Beyond language, beyond reason: vulnerability, art, and the problem of catastrophic suffering -- The presence of the absent God: incarnation and abstract expressionism.

This article identifies and explores the realm of ‘social nothingness’: objects, people, events and places that do not empirically exist, yet are experienced as subjectively meaningful. Taking a phenomenological approach, I investigate how people perceive, imagine and reflect upon the meanings of unlived experience: whatever is significantly not present, never appeared or cannot happen to them. These ‘negative symbolic social objects’ include no-things, no-bodies, non-events and no-where places: for example, rejected roles, unpursued careers or absent people. Reversing some key concepts (...) from phenomenology, I examine the process of ‘negative noesis’ in three aspects. ‘Negative intentionality’ describes people’s motivational stance towards absent things, such as feelings of missing, wishing, haunting, avoidance or surrender. ‘Negative embodiment’ is the corporeal grounding of negational acts, through experiences of impairment, incapacity, severance, disturbance and decline. ‘Negative temporality’ describes the recognition of past or future impossible selves and their place within biographical identity stories. (shrink)

Nothing really matters. All the things that we do not do, have or become in our lives can be important in shaping self-identity. From jobs turned down to great loves lost, secrets kept and truths untold, people missed and souls unborn, we understand ourselves through other, unlived lives that are imaginatively possible. This book explores the realm of negative social phenomena - no-things, no-bodies, non-events and no-where places - that lies behind the mirror of experience. Taking a symbolic interactionist perspective, (...) the author argues that these objects are socially produced, emerging from and negotiated through our relationships with others. Nothing is interactively accomplished in two ways, through social acts of commission and omission. Existentialism and phenomenology encourage us to understand more deeply the subjective experience of nothing; this can be pursued through conscious meaning-making and reflexive self-awareness. The Social Life of Nothing is a thought-provoking book that will appeal to scholars across the social sciences, arts and humanities, but its message also resonates with the interested general reader. (shrink)

This article explores the discursive construction, regulation and performance of the body in the context of the swimming pool. The near-naked state of the swimmer’s body presents a potential threat to the interaction order, insofar as social encounters may be misconstrued as sexual, and so rituals are enacted to create a ‘civilized’ definition of the situation. The term ‘performative regulation’ is introduced to theorize this process, as a synergy of the symbolic interactionist models of dramaturgy (Goffman) and negotiated order (Strauss) (...) and the post-structuralist concept of disciplinary power (Foucault). The regulation and representation of the swimmer’s body can be understood as mutually constitutive mechanisms, enforced by the pool-as-institution but enacted through the embodied practices of individual actors in the pool-as-interaction. Crossley’s notion of reflexive body techniques is applied to interpret this dualistic process in relation to communicative gestures and facework rituals, which implicates both individual and social bodies in the somatization of the interaction order. (shrink)

_A lively intellectual history that explores how prominent midcentury public intellectuals approached Zionism and then the State of Israel itself and its conflicts with the Arab world_ In this lively intellectual history of the political Left, cultural critic Susie Linfield investigates how eight prominent twentieth-century intellectuals struggled with the philosophy of Zionism, and then with Israel and its conflicts with the Arab world. Constructed as a series of interrelated portraits that combine the personal and the political, the book includes (...) philosophers, historians, journalists, and activists such as Hannah Arendt, Arthur Koestler, I. F. Stone, and Noam Chomsky. In their engagement with Zionism, these influential thinkers also wrestled with the twentieth century’s most crucial political dilemmas: socialism, nationalism, democracy, colonialism, terrorism, and anti‑Semitism. In other words, in probing Zionism, they confronted the very nature of modernity and the often catastrophic histories of our time. By examining these leftist intellectuals, Linfield also seeks to understand how the contemporary Left has become focused on anti‑Zionism and how Israel itself has moved rightward. (shrink)

This paper draws on the ethics of care to investigate how citizens grappled with ethical tensions in the mundane practice of grocery shopping at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. We use this case to address the broader question of what it means ‘to care’ in the context of a crisis. Based on a qualitative longitudinal cross-country interview study, we find that the pandemic transformed ordinary shopping spaces into places fraught with a sense of fear and vulnerability. Being forced to (...) face one’s own vulnerability created an opportunity for individuals to relate to one another as significant others through a sense of “response-ability”, or the capacity of people to respond to ethical demands through situated ethical reasoning. We argue for a practical ethos of care in which seemingly small decisions such as how often to go shopping and how much to buy of a particular product serve as a means to relate to both specified and generalized others—and through this, ‘care with’ society. Our study contributes to displacing the continuing prevalence of an abstract and prescriptive morality in consumption ethics with a situated and affective politics of care. This vocabulary seems better suited to reflect on the myriad of small and unheroic care acts in times of crisis and beyond. (shrink)

The Phenomenology of Sex, Love, and Intimacy presents a phenomenological exploration of love as it manifests itself through sexual desires and intimate relationships. Setting up a unique dialogue between psychology and philosophy, Susi Ferrarello offers a perspective through which clinicians can inform their practice on diverse issues of human sexuality. Drawing on Husserl's phenomenology, Ferrarello's analysis of love spans a range of disciplines including psychology, theology, biology, epistemology, and axiology, as well as areas related to gender, consent, and political control. (...) Combining Husserlian perspectives on ethics with a focus on lived-experience, this text will deepen therapists' understanding of love as the subject of interdisciplinary inquiry and enable them to locate questions of sexuality and intimacy within an academic framework. With key theoretical principles included to allow clinicians to think through and clarify their practice, this book will be a valuable tool for sex therapists, marriage and family therapists, and counselors, as well as psychology and philosophy students alike. (shrink)

The idea that oxidative stress may underpin life history trade‐offs has become extremely popular. However, experimental support for the concept has proved equivocal. It has recently been suggested that this might be because of flaws in the design of existing studies. Here, we explore the background to the oxidative stress hypothesis and highlight some of the complexities in testing it. We conclude that the approach recently suggested to be least useful in this context (comparing reproducing to non‐reproducing animals) may in (...) fact be the most powerful. Moreover, suggested alternative approaches of limiting food supply or manipulating litter sizes have many complexities and problems. We suggest some useful alternative approaches that have not been previously advocated, particularly the study of individuals reproducing at greater parity later in life. Finally, the measures of oxidative stress and tissues that are analysed influence the experimental outcome. This suggests our conceptual model of the trade‐off is currently too simplistic, and that studies based on single or limited numbers of assays, or restricted to single tissues, whether they support or refute the theory, should be interpreted with great caution. (shrink)

Explora-se no presente artigo a função que o reconhecimento do outro desempenha para a moralidade no âmbito da obra Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception, de Raimond Gaita, a partir da centralidade da noção de remorso, entendido como a recordação do significado moral para o agente daquilo que ele fez. Serão resgatados os exemplos partir dos quais Gaita pretende enfatizar o peso da moralidade e o significado de se fazer o mal moralmente para alguém. Não se pode compreender, segundo o (...) filósofo, uma situação como moralmente problemática se não for inteligível que quem a realizou deveria sentir um remorso genuíno diante constatação do mal gerado a partir de suas ações. (shrink)

Most people are aware of the health benefits of being physically active. The question arises then why people so easily fall into sedentary habits. The idea developed here is that sedentary behavior is part of a suite of behaviors to reduce levels of physical activity that were strongly selected in the evolutionary past, likely because high levels of physical activity had direct negative consequences for survival. However, hunter‐gatherer populations could not reduce activity indefinitely because of the need to be active (...) to hunt for, and gather food. Hence they never experienced low levels of activity that are damaging to health, and no corresponding mechanism avoiding low activity evolved. Consequently, gene variants promoting efficiency of activity and increased sedentariness were never selected against. Modern society facilitates reduced activity by providing many options to become less active and divorcing food intake from the need to be active. Choosing the less active option is hard wired in the genes; this explains why being sedentary is so common, and why reversing it is so difficult. Incentivizing activity may be enabled using modern technology, but ultimately may only end up replacing one set of health issues with others. Also see the video abstract here https://youtu.be/ekHbUwPw-v4. (shrink)

SARS and monkeypox have given the public health community a unique opportunity to examine the use of quarantine measures. Until recently, the word “quarantine”was not used in polite conversation, and evoked unsavory images. The recent SARS epidemic illustrated the important role of quarantine and isolation as a public health response to communicable disease.As public health officials in Toronto began to take control of the SARS epidemic, a second wave of the disease emerged. In the first SARS epidemic, approximately 8,200 individuals (...) were isolated. There were approximately 82 probable cases, 66 suspect cases, and 24 deaths. On May 22, 2003, SARS II emerged. In total, approximately 13,000 people were quarantined. SARS II saw the onset of difficult questions being asked about the control and spread of SARS.The province of Ontario establishes the public health policies and legislative framework for the entire province. (shrink)

SummaryDuring famines females generally have a mortality advantage relative to males, and the highest levels of mortality occur in the very young and the elderly. One popular hypothesis is that the sex differential in mortality may reflect the greater body fatness combined with lower metabolism of females, which may also underpin the age-related patterns of mortality among adults. This study evaluated the ‘body fat’ hypothesis using a previously published and validated mathematical model of survival during total starvation. The model shows (...) that at a given body weight females would indeed be expected to survive considerably longer than males in the absence of food. At a mass of 70 kg for example a female aged 30 would survive for 144 days compared with life expectancy of only 95 days for a male of the same age and weight. This effect is contributed to by both the higher body fatness and lower metabolism of the females at a given body weight. However, females are generally smaller than males and in addition to a sex effect there was also a major effect of body size – heavier individuals survive longer. When this body size effect was removed by considering survival in relation to BMI the sex effect was much reduced, and could be offset by a relatively small difference in pre-famine BMI between the sexes. Nevertheless, combining these predictions with observed mean BMIs of males and females across 48 countries at the low end of the obesity spectrum suggests that in the complete absence of food females would survive on average about 40% longer than males. The energy balance model also predicted that older adult individuals should survive much longer than younger adult individuals, by virtue of their lower resting metabolic rates and lower activity levels. Observations of the female survival advantage in multiple famines span a much wider range than the model prediction. This suggests in some famines body fatness may be a significant factor influencing the mortality differential between the sexes, but in other famines other factors are likely to be more important. Moreover, the pattern of mortality in relation to age is completely opposite that predicted. These data emphasize the complex nature of famine mortality and suggest that a simple model of energy utilization alone is inadequate to explain the major aspects of this phenomenon. (shrink)

This book offers a unique description of how phenomenology can help professionals from medical, environmental and social fields to explore notions such as interaffectivity, empathy, epoche, reduction, and intersubjective encounter. Written by a group of top scholars, it uniquely covers the relationship between phenomenology and bioethics, and focuses not only on medical cases, but also on the environment and emerging technologies. This variety of themes, whilst including techno-ethics, environmental ethics, animal ethics, and medical ethics, is conducive to appreciating broadly how (...) phenomenology can improve our quality of our life. Despite its difficult themes, the book appeals to an audience of both academics and professionals who are willing to understand how to increase the quality of care in their professional field. (shrink)

Affects and all its variants (affection, allure, affective force, etc.) represent our via_ regia_ to be alive and connected with our life-world. It is not the ego that constitutes the world we live in but the affections that allow us to become respectively objects of our life and subjects of our own choices. Affects are in fact main triggers of lower and higher feelings through which we become subjects and experience empathy with other people, intersubjectively connecting with them and making (...) ethical choices that are hopefully considerate of ourselves and our community. Yet it might happen that our feelings are not capable of truly feeling what we are affected by. When this happens, what affects us remains with us but cannot be felt and accordingly processed. In this paper, I will first work on the term affect and its variants. I will then describe how this connects with feelings. To finally analyze what happens when we are not capable of feeling our affects as in the case of alexithymia; or when we feel our affects too much as in the case of BPD; or when we do not want to feel certain affects as in the case of NPD. The main conceptual reference of this analysis will be Husserl and his static and genetic phenomenology. (shrink)

This paper will discuss the notion of solastalgia or climatic anxiety (Albrecht et al., 2007; Galea et al., 2005,) as a form of anxiety connected to traumatic environmental changes that generate an emotional blockage between individuals, their environment (Cloke et al., 2004,) and their place (Nancy, 1993,). I will use a phenomenological approach to explain the way in which emotions shape our constitution of reality (Husserl, 1970; Sartre, 1983, 1993, 1996; Seamon and Sowers, 2009; Shaw and Ward, 2009). The article’s (...) overall goal is to describe the relationship between environment and “climatic” emotions to understand what we can do to improve our well-being. I believe that scientistic and reductionistic ways of looking at climatic anxiety do not consider this complex dynamic and fail to propose actual solutions for the well-being of both the environment and the individuals. (shrink)

As ever more countries enter the global economy, reshaping the body has become the means by which women are encouraged to enter modernity. Once bodies were local, marked by their own local traditions. Today, variety is replaced by uniformity. The formerly plump Miss Nigeria is superseded by a thin westernized version and sets the trend for how contemporary Nigerian women are to look. Encouraged to see the body as a consuming center, a personal logo that signifies our membership of the (...) global community, bodies across the world are being commercialized and restructured. This development means that we are losing bodies as we lose mother tongue languages. Standardization is supplanting diversity as facsimile bodies become the new calling card of belonging and identity. (shrink)

This book fills a critical niche that has long been overlooked. It specifically focuses on somatic practices to decrease stress and improve heart health. It will combine science, time-tested somatic mindfulness techniques, and patient stories to provide hope and help.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sunyata and Otherness:Applying Mutually Transformative Categories from Buddhist-Christian Dialogue in ChristologySusie Paulik Babka“The universe is expanding,” the physicists tell us. “But doesn’t an expansion of something mean the presupposition of boundaries?” my naïve mind inquires, thinking too much in terms of discrete substances. Can “something” expand “into” nothing, “into” emptiness? Shot through with “dark energy” (the name an intellectual signifier allowing physicists to speak of the ineffable), the immensity (...) of the universe teaches a lesson in humility before mystery and the radically new. Dark energy makes up 74 percent of the universe and is responsible for increasing the rate of the universe’s expansion; it may be explained as the energy of empty space, or space devoid of matter and gravity. Although an unobservable phenomenon, dark energy penetrates the known universe as that which counteracts gravity’s relationship to matter, causing a negative pressure in regions of the universe devoid of matter to expand. Hence, the energy of emptiness is the reason for the universe’s expansion; emptiness is the reason reality is better described by rapid change and impermanence than stasis and immutability.While it would seem that these developments do not impact religious thinking, the Dalai Lama and others have argued that because science helps us understand the nature of reality, it affects the paradigm in which we consider the veracity of religious ideas. In his words, “if scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims.”1 This is a bold statement, challenging both East and West to consider that when derived from only one source, even our most treasured religious ideas are narrowly conceived.The Western worldview has kept pace neither with the challenges of cosmic and subatomic physics nor with a more sophisticated global community. Since Parmenides in the pre-Socratic era, Western thought has been dominated by Greek philosophical categories, in which the perfection of beings is regarded in immutability and stasis, and things ideally tend toward independence or self-sufficiency. These categories [End Page 73] not only are inadequate to describe reality discovered through scientific means but also fail to articulate the meaning of the religious and cultural encounters taking place between East and West. Writes Joseph O’Leary, “The encounter with Buddhist thought enhances the hermeneutical task of theology, by opening up the possibility that Christian truth today can be more luminously presented in a discourse influenced by Buddhist analytical methods and ontological insights than in the old frameworks formed in dialogue with Greek ontology.”2Deconstructing substance ontology in the West suggests not only that science is a valuable conversation partner to religion but also that religions be conversation partners with each other. Christians should consider how divine or ultimate reality is manifest in other religions and abandon claims to exclusive truth. As Joseph O’Leary argues,The religions need each other, whatever their utter self-sufficiency on the plane of abstruse theological claims. The religions, as human historical trajectories, are inevitably marked by incompleteness and tragic failures. The tensions between them are not to be suppressed by dogmatic self-affirmation, but to be interpreted as the tension of “truth” itself, making itself felt within the finitude and brokenness of the human language striving to express it.3Truth for the Dalai Lama is “pursued by means of critical investigation,” requiring conversation with modern thought forms as well as both religious and secular Western traditions. If Christian theology is to be relevant today, it must continue to deconstruct the classical metaphysical categories that impede the appreciation of what is possible or true, especially in the encounter with non-Christian and non-Western thought, culture, and religious practice. Interreligious encounter necessitates the questioning of ontotheology, the classical metaphysical logic that refers to the rational basis for naming God, the supreme being, with supreme attributes, such as eternity, immutability, omniscience, and omnipotence. Ontotheology is related to the substance ontologies that describe the relation between God and the world and East and West in terms of dualism that according to Paul Knitter “so stresses the difference between two realities, so separates them... (shrink)

"This book provides a unique phenomenological dialogue between psychology and philosophy on the origin of bioethics that shows the importance of bringing emotions into bioethical discourse. By addressing personal, interpersonal, and societal problems as dynamically interconnected in bioethical problems she helps us to renew our sense of responsibility toward a good quality of life. This interdisciplinary book is invaluable reading for students of health science, psychology, and philosophy, as well as for those interested in the link between emotions and bioethical (...) discourse from both a psychological and philosophical perspective"--. (shrink)

Following up from the previous book, Human Emotions and the Origins of Bioethics, this volume focuses on four psychological problems, anxiety, narcissism, restlessness, and emotional numbness, and explores how these problems influence bioethical issues and what bioethics can do to fix them. The Role of Bioethics in Emotional Problems presents a phenomenological exploration of emotional intention and describes how one's choices can determine a better relationship to themselves and their community. Not only does this book provide the reader with an (...) exhaustive account of the philosophical and psychological meaning of practical intentionality within Husserl's phenomenology, but it also applies Husserl's ethics to contemporary studies of human emotions and bioethical problems. Offering a non-reductionist model for an interdisciplinary inquiry into an emotional experience, it integrates clinical practice and articulates foundational knowledge of human emotional life at a professional level. Aimed at students of philosophy, psychology, psychotherapy, and bioethics, this book is a unique phenomenological dialogue between these disciplines on emotional well-being. (shrink)

How contensted notions of modernity, civilisation and being governed were envisioned through the aid of photography.

How contensted notions of modernity, civilisation and being governed were envisioned through the aid of photography.

This paper is going to focus on the problem of emotions in technology, in particular in reference to the case of algorithms developed to track early rehospitalizations. In this paper I am going to discuss how phenomenology can support the integration of emotions in technology and how this integration can improve our chances for that “decent survival” that the founder of bioethics, Potter, has envisioned as the main goal of this discipline (Natl Cancer Inst Monogr 13:111–116, 1964; Bioethics, bridge to (...) the future. Prentice Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, p 24, 1971; Ann N Y Acad Sci 196(Art. 4):200–205, 1972; Cancer Res 35:2297–2306, 1975; Global bioethics. Michigan University, 1988). I believe that descriptive phenomenology can be a useful philosophical and psychological approach to improve the moral and emotional intelligence behind machine learning programming (Dreyfus, What computers can’t do: the limits of artificial intelligence. HarperCollins, 1978; The Socratic and platonic basis of cognitivism. AI & Society, Springer, Berlin, 1988) and overcome the risk of ethical opacity implied in programming (Casacuberta, Ethical and technical aspects of emotions to create empathy in medical machines. In Van Rysewik SP, Pontier M (eds) Machine in medical ethics. Springer, New York/Dordrecht, 2015). On the one hand, the ethical aspect of phenomenology would allow us to grasp the predicative and pre-predicative facie of the lived-experiences and their emotional contents. On the other hand, the phenomenological method of research applied in psychology would offer a way to transcribe and interpret data in a responsible and contextualized way. (shrink)

There is increasing attention given to academic integrity across university education and dental schools are not immune to this problem (Andrews et al. J Dent Educ 71; 1027–1039, 2007; Ford & Hughes Eur J Dent Educ 16(1):e180–e186, 2012). While there has been an increasing concern about academic dishonesty in written exams and assignments, there appears to be a false sense of security in the integrity of practical assessments, involving dental procedures on simulated patients.This paper will present a situational analysis of (...) two unusual cases of academic dishonesty in preclinical dental practical assessments. The first case involved a student bringing a previously prepared plastic tooth into the examination room and substituting it for the assessment tooth. The second case involved a student removing key teeth during the exam to enable them to have better access and advantage over others to complete the assessment task. These two cases resulted in a complete review of practical assessment procedures and the application of new processes to maintain academic integrity. (shrink)

We bring together recent discussions on data capitalism and biocapitalization by studying value flows in consumer genomics firms—an industry at the intersection between health care and technology realms. Consumer genomics companies market genomic testing services to consumers as a source of fun, altruism, belonging and knowledge. But by maintaining a multisided or platform business model, these firms also engage in digital capitalism, creating financial profit from data brokerage. This is a precarious balance to strike: If these companies’ business models consist (...) of assetizing the pool of genomic data that they assemble, then part of their work has to revolve around obscuring to consumers any uncertainties that would potentially impinge on these processes of assemblage. We reflect on the nature of these practices and the market relationships that enable them, and we relate this reflection to debates around alternative market arrangements that would potentially mitigate the extractive tendencies of these and other digital health firms. (shrink)

This paper proposes a phenomenological exploration of the first trimester of pregnancy. In this paper I have presented three core problems that might already appear in the first trimester of pregnancy: alienation, objectification, and loss of identity, which might cause emotional distress for the woman and further develop into depressive states. The goal of the paper is to indicate the kind of mindful approach we can use to reduce the impact of these problems.

This paper follows the circuitous path of theories concerning the origins of viruses from the early years of the twentieth century until the present, considering RNA viruses in particular. I focus on three periods during which new understandings of the nature of viruses guided the construction and reconstruction of origin hypotheses. During the first part of the twentieth century, viruses were mostly viewed from within the framework of bacteriology and the discussion of origin centered on the “degenerative” or the “retrograde (...) evolution theory.” However, concomitantly, in the context of origin-of-life theorizing, the notion that viruses are vestiges of a prebiotic world was also being contemplated. In the 1960s the idea that viruses were genetic elements that “escaped” from cells became prevalent. These traditional hypotheses are being revisited nowadays by evolutionary virologists, who have placed them within a new conceptual framework that is supported by cutting-edge genomic and proteomic data. Two current, opposing scenarios of virus origin are presented. The philosophical dimensions of “revisiting” the original hypotheses are briefly discussed. (shrink)

This book provides an analysis of values and identity within the context of ancient, modern and contemporary philosophy. This issue is addressed from the viewpoints of intersubjective and individual experience. The contributors to this volume answer the following questions: What are the lived-meanings of "values" and "ethics" from a philosophical, sociological and psychological perspective? How does society constitute its own life-word? What is the meaning of values? What is the role of values in defining self-identity? How does their meaning change (...) within a political context? Do politics and aesthetics affect our moral identity? What is the role of values in the state of nature? How does art accomplish its primary task: raising human consciousness over and against the reified world of commodities?This volume offers an opportunity to reflect on these issues from a philosophical point of view and to explore the dialogue of philosophy with sociology and psychology. (shrink)