On November 2019, the world commemorated the 30th anniversary of the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child. The UNCRC noted that “the press and other media have essential fu...

Bridging the gap between the world of science and the realm of the spiritual, B. Alan Wallace introduces a natural theory of human consciousness that has its roots in contemporary physics and Buddhism. Wallace's "special theory of ontological relativity" suggests that mental phenomena are _conditioned_ by the brain, but do not _emerge_ from it. Rather, the entire natural world of mind and matter, subjects and objects, arises from a unitary dimension of reality that is more fundamental than these dualities, as (...) proposed by Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung. To test his hypothesis, Wallace employs the Buddhist meditative practice of _samatha_, refining one's attention and metacognition, to create a kind of telescope to examine the space of the mind. Drawing on the work of the physicist John Wheeler, he then proposes a more general theory in which the participatory nature of reality is envisioned as a self-excited circuit. In comparing these ideas to the Buddhist theory known as the Middle Way philosophy, Wallace explores further aspects of his "general theory of ontological relativity," which can be investigated by means of _vipasyana_, or insight, meditation. Wallace then focuses on the theme of symmetry in reference to quantum cosmology and the "problem of frozen time," relating these issues to the theory and practices of the Great Perfection school of Tibetan Buddhism. He concludes with a discussion of the general theme of complementarity as it relates to science and religion. The theories of relativity and quantum mechanics were major achievements in the physical sciences, and the theory of evolution has had an equally deep impact on the life sciences. However, rigorous scientific methods do not yet exist to observe mental phenomena, and naturalism has its limits for shedding light on the workings of the mind. A pioneer of modern consciousness research, Wallace offers a practical and revolutionary method for exploring the mind that combines the keenest insights of contemporary physicists and philosophers with the time-honored meditative traditions of Buddhism. (shrink)

Do psychological traits predict philosophical views? We administered the PhilPapers Survey, created by David Bourget and David Chalmers, which consists of 30 views on central philosophical topics (e.g., epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language) to a sample of professional philosophers (N = 314). We extended the PhilPapers survey to measure a number of psychological traits, such as personality, numeracy, well-being, lifestyle, and life experiences. We also included non-technical ‘translations’ of these views for eventual use in other (...) populations. We found limited to no support for the notion that personality or demographics predict philosophical views. We did, however, find that some psychological traits were predictive of philosophical views, even after strict correction for multiple comparisons. Findings include: higher interest in numeracy predicted physicalism, naturalism, and consequentialism; lower levels of well-being and higher levels of mental illness predicted hard determinism; using substances such as psychedelics and marijuana predicted non-realist and subjectivist views of morality and aesthetics; having had a transformative or self-transcendent experience predicted theism and idealism. We discuss whether or not these empirical results have philosophical implications, while noting that 68% of our sample of professional philosophers indicated that such findings would indeed have philosophical value. (shrink)

BackgroundThe last few decades have seen the rising global acknowledgment of the importance of ethics in the conduct of health research. But research ethics committees or institutional review boards (IRBs) have also been criticized for being barriers to research. This article examines the case of the Philippines, where little has been done to interrogate the health research and IRB culture, and whose circumstances can serve as reflection points for other low- and middle-income countries.MethodsSemi-structured interviews were conducted from July to October (...) 2020 to elicit health researchers’ perspectives and experiences regarding IRBs and the ethics approval process in the country, as well as counterpoint narratives from researchers who have also worked for IRBs.ResultsAcross the fields of clinical, public health, and social science research, the issue of ethics review revealed itself to be foremost an issue of inequity. IRB processes serve as a barrier for those outside the academe; those belonging to institutions, cities, or entire regions without their own accredited IRBs; and researchers working independently, without ample budget, or on highly specialized topics—more so for non-clinical researchers who must grapple with the primarily biomedical framework of most IRBs. Consequently, the research landscape invariably favors those with the resources to do research, and researches that tend to attract funding.ConclusionThe broader challenge of equity in health research will entail more fundamental reforms, but proximal interventions can be done to make the ethics approval process more equitable, such as enhancing institutional oversight, regulating IRB fees, and enabling a more supportive and welcoming environment for early-career, student, independent, and non-clinical health researchers. This article ends by reflecting on the implications of our findings toward the larger research culture. (shrink)

Bridging the gap between the world of science and the realm of the spiritual, B. Alan Wallace introduces a natural theory of human consciousness that has its roots in contemporary physics and Buddhism. Wallace's "special theory of ontological relativity" suggests that mental phenomena are _conditioned_ by the brain, but do not _emerge_ from it. Rather, the entire natural world of mind and matter, subjects and objects, arises from a unitary dimension of reality that is more fundamental than these dualities, as (...) proposed by Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung. To test his hypothesis, Wallace employs the Buddhist meditative practice of _samatha_, refining one's attention and metacognition, to create a kind of telescope to examine the space of the mind. Drawing on the work of the physicist John Wheeler, he then proposes a more general theory in which the participatory nature of reality is envisioned as a self-excited circuit. In comparing these ideas to the Buddhist theory known as the Middle Way philosophy, Wallace explores further aspects of his "general theory of ontological relativity," which can be investigated by means of _vipasyana_, or insight, meditation. Wallace then focuses on the theme of symmetry in reference to quantum cosmology and the "problem of frozen time," relating these issues to the theory and practices of the Great Perfection school of Tibetan Buddhism. He concludes with a discussion of the general theme of complementarity as it relates to science and religion. The theories of relativity and quantum mechanics were major achievements in the physical sciences, and the theory of evolution has had an equally deep impact on the life sciences. However, rigorous scientific methods do not yet exist to observe mental phenomena, and naturalism has its limits for shedding light on the workings of the mind. A pioneer of modern consciousness research, Wallace offers a practical and revolutionary method for exploring the mind that combines the keenest insights of contemporary physicists and philosophers with the time-honored meditative traditions of Buddhism. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Klio Jahrgang: 99 Heft: 1 Seiten: 26-50.

AimThe functional prognosis of patients after coma following either cardiac arrest or acute structural brain injury is often uncertain. These patients are associated with high mortality and disability. N20 and N70 somatosensory evoked potentials are used to predict prognosis. We evaluated the utility of SSEP as an early indicator of long-term prognosis in these patients.MethodsThis was a retrospective cohort study of patients admitted to the intensive care unit with a diagnosis of coma after CA or ABI. An SSEP study was (...) performed, including N20 and N70 at 24–72 h, after coma onset. Functional recovery was assessed 6–12 months later using the modified Glasgow scale. The study was approved by our local research ethics committee.ResultsIn the CA and ABI groups, the absence of N20 or N70 was a strong indicator of poor outcome. Conversely, the presence of N70 was an indicator of a good outcome.ConclusionSomatosensory evoked potentials are useful early prognostic markers with high specificity and sensitivity. Moreover, N70 has additional potential value for improving the prediction of good long-term functional outcomes.Clinical Trial Registration:[https://clinicaltrials.gov/], identifier [2018/01/001]. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to explore the connection between expressivism and disagreement. More in particular, the aim is to defend that one of the desiderata that can be derived from the study of disagreement, the explanation of ‘crossed disagreements’, can only be accommodated within a semantic theory that respects, at the meta-semantic level, certain expressivistic restrictions. We will compare contemporary dynamic expressivism with three different varieties of contextualist strategies to accommodate the specificities of evaluative language –indexical contextualism – (...) truth-conditional pragmatics –, pragmatic strategies using implicatures, and presuppositional accounts. Our conclusion will be that certain assumptions of expressivism are necessary in order to provide a semantic account of evaluative uses of language that can allow us to detect and prevent crossed disagreements. (shrink)

This volume of _Philosophical Issues_, on normativity, has unusually broad scope, and should have correspondingly broad appeal both because of its issues and because of its contributors. This volume includes pieces on moral psychology, theory of reasons and rationality, political philosophy, ethics, metaethics, and epistemology. Includes a book symposium on Brad Hooker's _Ideal Code, Real World_, with contributions by Richard Arneson and Alison McIntyre, along with Brad Hooker's response.

Bringing together Deleuze, Blanchot, and Foucault, this book provides a detailed and original exploration of the ideas that influenced Deleuze's thought leading up to and throughout his cinema volumes and, as a result, proposes a new definition of art. Examining Blanchot's suggestion that art and dream are "outside" of power, as imagination has neither reality nor truth, and Foucault's theory that power forms knowledge by valuing life, Eugene Brent Young relates these to both Deleuze's philosophy of time and his work (...) with Guattari on art. In doing so, he uses case studies from literature and popular film, including Kafka's Castle, Villeneuve's Arrival, and Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut. Providing important new insights for those working in literary and cinematic studies, this book advances a new definition of art as that which reverses the realities and truths of power to express obscure ideas and values beyond both our exterior and interior worlds. (shrink)

This research analyzes the theoretical answer received by one of the factors that cause the so-called Price Revolution in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries, specifically the aspect related to the alterations in the monetary values ​​of pieces of vellón and silver in Castile and England. In both countries, these episodes were rigorously analyzed from a theoretical point of view, as can be seen from the study of the monetary ideas of the period that were developed in these territories. (...) In this study, in light of the historical events that took place, we analyze the foundations of the monetary thought of Juan de Mariana and John Locke who oppose the the alteration of money by the sovereign for fiscal reasons, as well as their different reception. (shrink)

The analysis of TV violence cannot be limited to the quantification of its incidence, but should also take into account the type of violence broadcast and its context (what is depicted and how). Thus, normative models of violence (legitimized violence with positive consequences for the aggressor, or vice versa) could be understood as positive, while contra-normative models of violence (rewarding illegitimate violence and punishing legitimate violence) should be of far greater concern. This paper analyzes the normative contexts of TV violence (...) through a content analysis of randomly selected fragments of TV programming (147 recorded hours). The results show that news programs and TV series/soaps delegitimized violence to a higher extent, while films tend to show legitimized or ambivalent violence. Positive consequences of violence predominate in fictional programs, except for TV series/soaps. Normative presentation of violence is more frequent, especially in nonfiction genres, as fiction has more freedom to depict the socially undesirable. (shrink)

The late Jacob Klein’s important book is, remarkably, a lucid presentation of esoteric argument. Dealing with the famed Platonic triad, Theaetetus, Sophist, and Statesman, Klein settles the dispute about the missing dialogue, "The Philosopher," by first denying that it is missing and second showing that it is unnecessary. He argues, in short, that the triad is a dyad. That argument is reinforced by the distinction Klein strongly implies between the Socratic Theaetetus and the Eleatic Sophist and Statesman. "We can now (...) understand why the conversations of the ‘trilogy’ occur in two, not three, days and why the Sophist, the Statesman, and the Philosopher are dealt with in two, not three, dialogues". (shrink)

Comment on Alfandre et al, "Between Usual and Crisis Phases of a Public Health Emergency: The Mediating Role of Contingency Measures".

The _Platform Sutra_ records the teachings of Hui-neng, the Sixth Patriarch, who is revered as one of the two great figures in the founding of Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism. This translation is the definitive English version of the eighth-century Ch'an classic. Phillip B. Yampolsky has based his translation on the Tun-huang manuscript, the earliest extant version of the work. A critical edition of the Chinese text is given at the end of the volume. Dr. Yampolsky also furnishes a lengthy and detailed (...) historical introduction which contains much information hitherto unavailable even to scholars, and provides the context essential to an understanding of Hui-neng's work. He gives an account of the history and legends of Ch'an Buddhism, with particular attention to the traditions associated with Hui-neng, quoting or summarizing the most important narratives. He then discusses the various texts of the _Platform Sutra_, and analyzes its contents. (shrink)

Theoretical tools aimed at making explicit the injustices suffered by certain socially disadvantaged groups might end up serving purposes which were not foreseen when the tools were first introduced. Nothing is inherently wrong with a shift in the scope of a theoretical tool: the popularization of a concept opens up the possibility of its use for several strategic purposes. The thesis that we defend in this paper is that some public figures cultivate a public persona for whom the conditions of (...) the notion of testimonial injustice might be taken to apply, and this situation is exploited to their advantage, as a means to advance their political agendas. More specifically, they take advantage of this to generate situations of crossed disagreements, which in turn foster polarization. (shrink)

A guide for scientists who would like to contribute to the professional development of science teachers for elementary schools. Based on information from over 180 programs, describes what activities work and why, and suggests how to identify programs teachers have found to be effective and take the initial steps to become involved. Also provides vignettes illustrating the daily work of science teachers. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Some researchers have concluded that nonverbal recognition is generally superior to verbal recognition memory performance. The present study involved two experiments designed to assess claims of superior nonverbal memory. Experiment 1 compared performance for letter (common words) and nonletter (meaningful line drawings) items with matched high-imagery values. Experiment 2 compared performance for matched low-imagery items consisting of letters (pseudowords) and nonletter items (geometric matrices). Performance did not differ significantly between verbal and nonverbal items in either experiment, although the expected effects (...) of presentation rate and type of retrieval task were significant. It was concluded that recognition memory performance is not necessarily dependent upon the “verbalness ” or “non-verbalness ” of stimulus items. (shrink)

Crop genetic resources constitute a ‘new’ global commons, characterized by multiple layers of activities of farmers, genebanks, public and private research and development organizations, and regulatory agencies operating from local to global levels. This paper presents sui generis biocultural community protocols that were developed by four communities in Benin and Madagascar to improve their ability to contribute to, and benefit from, the crop commons. The communities were motivated in part by the fact that their national governments’ had recently ratified the (...) Plant Treaty and the Nagoya Protocol, which make commitments to promoting the rights of indigenous peoples, local communities and farmers, without being prescriptive as to how Contracting Parties should implement those commitments. The communities identified the protocols as useful means to advance their interests and/or rights under both the Plant Treaty and the Nagoya Protocol to be recognized as managers of local socio-ecological systems, to access genetic resources from outside the communities, and to control others’ access to resources managed by the community. (shrink)

This book collects most of the invited papers presented at the 12th International Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science in Oviedo, August 2003. It contains state of the art accounts of ongoing work by a selection of the most renowned researchers in the field. The papers in the Logic section deal with topics in mathematical logic, as well as philosophical logic, and the area of logic and computation. The section on General Methodology contains articles on models, theories, probability, (...) induction, causation, and other topics. A number of papers discuss Philosophical Issues of Particular Sciences, such as mathematics, physics, linguistics, psychology, biology, and medicine. There is also a section on Ethics of Science, and papers from a special symposium on the Emergence of Scientific Medicine in the 19th-20th Century. (shrink)

The way digital information technologies work and, more specifically, the possibilities for action that technological devices offer to us affect our processes of political belief formation. In particular, there seems to be a close connection between our digital affordances and the increase of the sort of polarization that threatens the proper functioning of democracy. In this paper, we analyze whether the type of polarization linked to the use of digital technologies, and which endangers the health of public deliberation, has to (...) do with the adoption of beliefs whose contents are increasingly extreme—extremism—or, on the contrary, has more to do with increasing our credence in the core beliefs of our political identity—radicalism. (shrink)

A dominant strand of philosophical thought holds that natural kinds are clusters of objects with shared properties. Cluster theories of natural kinds are often taken to be a late twentieth-century development, prompted by dissatisfaction with essentialism in philosophy of biology. I will argue here, however, that a cluster theory of kinds had actually been formulated by William Whewell (1794-1866) more than a century earlier. Cluster theories of kinds can be characterized in terms of three central commitments, all of which are (...) present in Whewell’s work on classification. Like contemporary cluster theorists, Whewell claims that kinds are united by similarity, that many kinds do not have essences, and that there are “gaps” between kinds. Moreover, Whewell advises taxonomists to look for consilience (roughly, convergence) between different classificatory schemes, a recommendation that reinforces the identification of natural classes with property clusters. Thus Whewell was not only an early cluster theorist, but one with important insights into what a cluster theory of kinds means for the practice of classification. (shrink)

Our paper discusses Recanati’s application of the mental files apparatus to reports of beliefs and other attitudes. While mental files appear early on in Recanati’s work on belief-reports, his latest book introduces the concept of indexed files (a.k.a. vicarious files) and puts it to work to explain how we can report other people’s attitudes and to account for opacity phenomena. Our goal is twofold: we show that the approach in Recanati’s Mental Files (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) departs significantly from (...) his earlier proposals as well as from the very spirit of truth-conditional pragmatics; and we argue that the indexed files approach, qua an attempt to provide a semantics for belief-reports, is untenable. -/- . (shrink)

En Investigaciones filosóficas y otros escritos postractarianos Wittgenstein rechazó la concepción de lo mental que incorpora la Tesis de Brentano. Ese rechazo, dirigido específicamente contra la idea de que los pensamientos representan la realidad conteniendo representaciones que concuerdan con ella, denuncia una confusión gramatical: los objetos a los que se dirigirían los pensamientos son sombras proyectadas por la gramática del lenguaje. Autores como Hacker y Glock consideran que esa confusión se produce al asimilar las oraciones mediante las cuales se adscriben (...) estados mentales a oraciones transitivas sin verbos psicológicos. El presente trabajo argumenta a favor de una imagen mucho más compleja de los medios utilizados por Wittgenstein para rechazar la Tesis de Brentano. Se defiende también que en la visión corregida de la intencionalidad de lo mental desempeñan un papel decisivo los requisitos de inocencia semántica, expresivismo, sistematicidad del significado y del lenguaje como vehículo del pensamiento, ignorados hasta el momento. (shrink)

Las herramientas teóricas destinadas a señalar las injusticias que sufren ciertos grupos socialmente oprimidos pueden acabar siendo utilizadas con propósitos completamente opuestos a los iniciales. Modificar el alcance de una herramienta teórica no es necesariamente problemático: la popularización de un concepto abre las puertas a que se utilice estratégicamente para diferentes fines. La tesis que defendemos en este artículo es que algunos personajes públicos cultivan una imagen particular de sí mismos que parece satisfacer los requisitos de la noción de injusticia (...) testimonial y utilizan esta situación como medio para obtener beneficio político de ella. Más concretamente, estos personajes públicos se benefician de esta condición para generar situaciones de desacuerdos cruzados, que están estrechamente relacionados con el aumento de la polarización. (shrink)

This paper aims to address the difficulties of high school students in bridging their computational understanding with their visualization skills in understanding the notion of the limits in their calculus class. This research used a pre-experimental one-group pretest-posttest design research on 62 grade 10 students enrolled in the Science, Technology, and Engineering Program (STEP) in one of the public high schools in Zamboanga del Sur, Philippines. A series of remedial sessions were given to help them understand the function values, one-sided (...) limits, limits of a function, and its discontinuities with the aid of the GeoGebra. Results revealed that there is a significant improvement in their mathematics performance before and after the remediation, t(61) = -19.99, p<.05. The real-time feedback provided by the drawing interface of GeoGebra has provided the students the insights into how objects behave in geometrical space, bridging their understanding in locating the values shown by the computational algebraic processes. Additionally, the significant difference in the achievement reveals a large effect size (Cohen’s =2.54) which could be accounted for by the remediation using interactive activities in the GeoGebra. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first we outline a version of non-descriptivism, ‘minimal expressivism’, leaving aside certain long-standing problems associated with conventional expressivist views. Second, we examine the way in which familiar expressivist results can be accommodated within this framework, through a particular interpretation that the expressive realm lends to a theory of meaning. Expressivist theories of meaning address only a portion of the classical problems attributed to this position when they seek to explain why the expressions they (...) deal with have a given meaning. A position can nevertheless be termed ‘expressivist’ – in the minimal sense that we favor – based simply on the following key features of the meaning of these expressions: they can be used as functions of propositions, and they are not used to describe the way the world is. (shrink)

On September 1, 2023, Texas made important revisions to it its decades‐old statute granting legal safe harbor immunity to physicians who withhold or withdraw life‐sustaining treatment over the objection of critically ill patients’ surrogate decision‐makers. However, lawmakers left untouched glaring flaws in a key safeguard for patients—the transfer option. The transfer option is ethically important because, when no hospital is willing to accept the patient in transfer, that fact is taken as strong evidence that the surrogates’ treatment requests fall outside (...) accepted medical practice. But there are serious shortcomings in how the transfer option is carried out in Texas and many other states, which undermines the ethical usefulness of the process. We identify these shortcomings and recommend revisions to state statutes and professional guidelines to overcome them. (shrink)

Making data broadly accessible is essential to creating a medical information commons. Transparency about data-sharing practices can cultivate trust among prospective and existing MIC participants. We present an analysis of 34 initiatives sharing DNA-derived data based on public information. We describe data-sharing practices captured, including practices related to consent, privacy and security, data access, oversight, and participant engagement. Our results reveal that data-sharing initiatives have some distance to go in achieving transparency.

José Luis Moreno argumenta contra lo que considera una variedad de formas de fetichismo político. Lo que tienen en común es depositar una confianza excesiva o monolítica en algún mecanismo democrático en particular. Compartimos su motivación y en esta nota crítica intentamos llevar sus argumentos más lejos preguntándonos si diferentes tipos de conocimiento políticamente relevante pueden distinguirse, si en algunos contextos es necesario dejar las decisiones en manos de expertos y si la propuesta de Moreno cae en un nuevo tipo (...) de fetichismo con respecto al sorteo como mecanismo capaz de eliminar injusticias sociales profundas. (shrink)