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The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 11, Page 42-43, November 2011.

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Text of and reflection on the 1981 encounter between Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jacques Derrida, which featured a dialogue between hermeneutics in Germany and post-structuralism in France. <br.

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55 chapters cover the cutting edge in this dynamic field. Includes foundational perspectives, reasoning, ontology, design processes, methods, values, responsibilities, and reimagining of engineering. Essential for students and researchers studying the philosophy/ethics of engineering, technology, or design.

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Building on the breakthrough text Philosophy and Engineering: An Emerging Agenda, this book offers 30 chapters covering conceptual and substantive developments in the philosophy of engineering, along with a series of critical reflections by engineering practitioners. The volume demonstrates how reflective engineering can contribute to a better understanding of engineering identity and explores how integrating engineering and philosophy could lead to innovation in engineering methods, design and education. The volume is divided into reflections on practice, principles and process, each of (...) which challenges prevalent assumptions and commitments within engineering and philosophy. The volume explores the ontological and epistemological dimensions of engineering and exposes the falsity of the commonly held belief that the field is simply the application of science knowledge to problem solving. Above all, the perspectives collected here demonstrate the value of a constructive dialogue between engineering and philosophy and show how collaboration between the disciplines casts light on longstanding problems from both sides. The chapters in this volume are from a diverse and international body of authors, including philosophers and engineers, and represent a highly select group of papers originally presented in three different conferences. These are the 2008 Workshop on Philosophy and Engineering held at the Royal Academy of Engineering; the 2009 meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Technology at the University of Twente in the Netherlands; and the Forum on Philosophy, Engineering, and Technology, held in Golden, Colorado at the Colorado School of Mines. (shrink)

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Americans have reason to be concerned about the condition of American democracy at the start of the twenty-first century. Surveys show that civic participation has declined, cynicism about government has increased, and young people have a weak grasp of the principles that underlie our constitutional system. Crucial questions must be answered: How serious is the situation? What role do schools play in shaping civic behavior? Are current education reform initiatives—such as multiculturalism and school choice—counterproductive? How can schools contribute toward reversing (...) the trend? This volume brings together leading thinkers from a variety of disciplines to probe the relation between a healthy democracy and education. Their original and provocative discussions cut across a range of important topics: the cultivation of democratic values, the formation of social capital in schools and communities, political conflict in a pluralist society, the place of religion in public life, the enduring problems of racial inequality. Gathering together the most current research and thinking on education and civil society, this is a book that deserves the attention of everyone who cares about the quality and future of American democracy. (shrink)

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Philosophical reflections on our ethical responsibilities toward urban wildlife populations have tended to be based on a “parallel planes” framework. This framework is insufficient when it comes to looking after the well-being of city-dwelling wild animals. A different starting-point in thinking about urban wildlife ethics, informed by phenomenology, can bring a number of possible obligations to the fore—for example, an ethics of attentiveness, flexibility, adjustment, and change; virtues associated with an ethic of care from attentiveness through generosity to empathy; and (...) a practice of hospitality. These obligations are moral rather than political; their “ought” is generated from the perspective of an ethic of care. (shrink)

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This chapter appreciates the way focal things may counterbalance devices. It finds that Borgmann's evaluation of the device paradigm does not always bear out for individual devices. Simply because a technological object can be classified as a device does not necessarily mean that it will have the negative effects on engagement and human relationships that Borgmann's theory predicts; some devices actually foster these values, illustrating the chapter's points with a study done on women's use of telephones. “The machinery that clouds (...) the story of a device does not appear to prevent that device from playing a role in relationship building.” If so, devices under some conditions may be more promising than Borgmann thinks; Michelfelder finds that devices can themselves support focal practices if they are used in a context of narrative and tradition. (shrink)

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In 2003, Peter Singer and others sounded a warning in the pages of the journal Nanotechnology that research into the ethical, social, and legal implications of nanotechnology was increasingly lagging behind research into nanotechnology itself. More recently, Alfred Nordmann and Arie Rip have argued that while the pace of ELSI inquiry has now picked up, the inquiry itself is focused far too much on hypothetical and futuristic scenarios. But might there be advantages for ethicists and philosophers of technology interested in (...) the ELSI of emerging technologies to continue to think in a speculative vein? Drawing upon some lessons learned from the development of environmental ethics, and looking primarily at information and computing technologies, I suggest three reasons as to how speculative thinking can add value to ELSI reflection. I argue that it can allow for critical values to emerge that might otherwise go unheeded, open up avenues to reframe issues that might otherwise go unnoticed, and, perhaps most importantly, permit questions to be raised that might otherwise go unvoiced. (shrink)

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Background: People with traumatic brain injury face a range of mental health challenges during the adjustment process post-injury, but access to treatment can be difficult, particularly for those who live in regional and remote regions. eHealth provides the potential to improve access to evidence-based psychological therapy for people with a severe TBI. The aim of the current study is to assess the efficacy of a psychological intervention delivered via video consulting to reduce psychological distress in people with TBI.Methods: This paper (...) outlines the protocol for a multi-center, three-arm, parallel, non-inferiority randomized controlled trial of an evidence-based manualized psychological intervention, ACT-Adjust. ACT-Adjust provides nine sessions for adults with a moderate to severe TBI experiencing clinical levels of psychological distress. Fifty-six participants referred from Brain Injury Rehabilitation Units across New South Wales and the NSW icare scheme will be randomly allocated to three conditions; video consulting, face-to-face and, a waitlist control.Discussion: This is the first RCT to evaluate the efficacy of a psychological therapy delivered via video consulting for individuals with a moderate to severe TBI.Trial Registration:www.anzctr.org.au, Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry ANZCTRN2619001602112. (shrink)

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Philosophers and others concerned with the moral good of personal privacy most often see threats to privacy raised by the development of pervasive computing as primarily being threats to the loss of control over personal information. Two reasons in particular lend this approach plausibility. One reason is that the parallels between pervasive computing and ordinary networked computing, where everyday transactions over the Internet raise concerns about personal information privacy, appear stronger than their differences. Another reason is that the individual devices (...) which can become linked in a pervasive computing environment: PDAs, GPS sensors, RFID chips/readers, publicly-located video surveillance cameras, Internet-enabled mobile phones, and the like, each raise threats to individual privacy. Without discounting the value of this approach, this paper aims to propose an alternative; and, as a result of recasting the threat to individual privacy from pervasive computing, to identify other, and deeper, moral goods that pervasive computing puts at risk that otherwise might remain concealed. In particular, I argue that pervasive computing threatens to compromise what I call existential autonomy: the right to decide for ourselves at least some of the existential conditions under which we form and develop our ways of life, including our relations to information technology. From this perspective, some moral goods at stake in protecting privacy in an environment of pervasive computing emerge that have less to do with furthering human well-being through the promotion of self-identity and subjectivity, than with stimulating curiosity, receptivity to difference, and, most broadly, openness to the world. (shrink)

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This chapter appreciates the way focal things may counterbalance devices. It finds that Borgmann's evaluation of the device paradigm does not always bear out for individual devices. Simply because a technological object can be classified as a device does not necessarily mean that it will have the negative effects on engagement and human relationships that Borgmann's theory predicts; some devices actually foster these values, illustrating the chapter's points with a study done on women's use of telephones. “The machinery that clouds (...) the story of a device does not appear to prevent that device from playing a role in relationship building.” If so, devices under some conditions may be more promising than Borgmann thinks; Michelfelder finds that devices can themselves support focal practices if they are used in a context of narrative and tradition. (shrink)

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Solutions to the problem ofprotecting informational privacy in cyberspacetend to fall into one of three categories:technological solutions, self-regulatorysolutions, and legislative solutions. In thispaper, I suggest that the legal protection ofthe right to online privacy within the USshould be strengthened. Traditionally, inidentifying where support can be found in theUS Constitution for a right to informationalprivacy, the point of focus has been on theFourth Amendment; protection in this contextfinds its moral basis in personal liberty,personal dignity, self-esteem, and othervalues. On the other hand, (...) the constitutionalright to privacy first established by Griswoldv. Connecticut finds its moral basis largelyin a single value, the value of autonomy ofdecision-making. I propose that an expandedconstitutional right to informational privacy,responsive to the escalating threats posed toonline privacy by developments in informationaltechnology, would be more likely to find asolid moral basis in the value of autonomyassociated with the constitutional right toprivacy found in Griswold than in the varietyof values forming the moral basis for the rightto privacy backed by the Fourth Amendment. (shrink)

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In a series of publications in the early 1990s, Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome Ravetz coined the phrase “post-normal science” and set out its dimensions. Drawing on the framework of their efforts, the reflections assembled in this paper invite the reader to consider the contours of post-normal engineering. These reflections start with overviews of post-normal science and what could be called “normal” engineering. From there, this paper first spells out a picture of features of post-normal engineering directly aligned with post-normal science (...) before going on to look at other conceptual elements which, to some degree, break with this alignment. Together, these can be said to constitute the “new face of post-normal engineering.” This discussion will serve as a lens through which to explore possible on-ramps philosophers may use to engage with engineers and others in an “extended peer community.”. (shrink)

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Some kinds of technological change not only trigger new ethical problems, but also give rise to questions about those very approaches to addressing ethical problems that have been relied upon in the past. Writing in the aftermath of World War II, Hans Jonas called for a new ``ethics of responsibility,'' based on the reasoning that modern technology dramatically divorces our moral condition from the assumptions under which standard ethical theories were first conceived. Can a similar claim be made about the (...) technologies of cyberspace? Do online information technologies so alter our moral condition that standard ethical theories become ineffective in helping us address the moral problems they create? I approach this question from two angles. First, I look at the impact of online information technologies on our powers of causal efficacy. I then go on to consider their impact on self-identity. We have good reasons, I suggest, to be skeptical of any claim that there is a need for a new, cyberspace ethics to address the moral dilemmas arising from these technologies. I conclude by giving a brief sketch of why this suggestion does not imply there is nothing philosophically interesting about the ethical challenges associated with cyberspace. (shrink)

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We generally agree with Burt's thesis. However, we note that the author did not discuss epigenetics, the study of how the environment can alter gene structure and function. Given epigenetic mechanisms, the utility of polygenic risk scores (PRS) is limited in studies of development and mental illness. Finally, in this commentary we expand upon the risks of reliance upon PRSs.

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This volume, the result of an ongoing bridge building effort among engineers and humanists, addresses a variety of philosophical, ethical, and policy issues emanating from engineering and technology. Interwoven through its chapters are two themes, often held in tension with one another: “Exploring Boundaries” and “Expanding Connections.” “Expanding Connections” highlights contributions that look to philosophy for insight into some of the challenges engineers face in working with policy makers, lay designers, and other members of the public. It also speaks to (...) reflections included in this volume on the connections between fact and value, reason and emotion, engineering practice and the social good, and, of course, between engineering and philosophy. “Exploring Boundaries” highlights contributions that focus on some type of demarcation. Public policy sets a boundary between what is regulated from what is not, academic disciplines delimit themselves by their subjects and methods of inquiry, and professions approach problems with unique goals and by using concepts and language in particular ways that create potential obstacles to collaboration with other fields. These and other forms of boundary setting are also addressed in this volume. Contributors explore these two themes in a variety of specific contexts, including engineering epistemology, engineers’ social responsibilities, engineering and public policy-making, engineering innovation, and the affective dimensions of engineering work. The book also includes analyses of social and ethical issues with emerging technologies such as 3-D printing and its use in medical applications, as well as social robots. Initial versions of the invited papers included in this book were first presented at the 2014 meeting of the Forum on Philosophy, Engineering, and Technology, held at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, USA. The volume furthers fPET’s intent of extending and developing the philosophy of engineering as an academic field, and encouraging conversation, promoting a sense of shared enterprise, and building community among philosophers and engineers across a diversity of cultural backgrounds and approaches to inquiry. (shrink)

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Signed languages display a variety of pointing signs that serve the functions of deictic and anaphoric pronouns, possessive and reflexive pronouns, demonstratives, locatives, determiners, body part labels, and verb agreement. We consider criteria for determining the linguistic status of pointing signs. Among those criteria are conventionality, indexicality, phonological compositionality, being subject to grammatical constraints, and marking the kinds of grammatical distinctions expected of pronouns. We conclude that first-person points meet all these proposed criteria, but that nonfirst person points are in (...) part gestural. Lastly, we review evidence for the grammaticization over time of systems of pointing signs within signed languages. (shrink)

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Festivals, as Hans-Georg Gadamer once pointed out, differ from other events due to their special temporal structure. They allow whoever participates in them to experience time with reference to its lingering rather than its passing away, by marking off a space between the moments of everyday life--a "while" whose duration refuses to be measured by the clock.

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In this book, which received an honorable mention for the Johnsonian Prize in 1981, the author wants to "make Being and Time more readily accessible to non-Heideggerians". Non-Heideggerians, by whom Guignon means philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition, ought to find here that he has done exactly that. Guignon's strategy is to re-work the metaphysically-rooted vocabulary of Being and Time into the language of beliefs, grounds and justifications familiar to the epistemologist. What emerges from this move is a carefully articulated critique (...) which should be unsettling both to non-Heideggerians and Heideggerians alike. (shrink)

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Dans la production industrielle qui entoure actuellement l'œuvre de Hannah Arendt en France, certains ouvrages se distinguent tant par leur qualité que par leur originalité. C'est le cas de celui de Françoise Collin qui aborde la pensée de Hannah Arendt à travers le prisme de la natalité. Ce qui intéresse F. Collin dans l'œuvre arendtienne, qui irrigue ses propres travaux depuis une quinzaine d'années, c'est la capacité de préserver l'agir en commun dans un monde durablement marqué par...

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This co-edited volume compares Chinese and Western experiences of engineering, technology, and development. In doing so, it builds a bridge between the East and West and advances a dialogue in the philosophy of engineering. Divided into three parts, the book starts with studies on epistemological and ontological issues, with a special focus on engineering design, creativity, management, feasibility, and sustainability. Part II considers relationships between the history and philosophy of engineering, and includes a general argument for the necessity of dialogue (...) between history and philosophy. It continues with a general introduction to traditional Chinese attitudes toward engineering and technology, and philosophical case studies of the Chinese steel industry, railroads, and cybernetics in the Soviet Union. Part III focuses on engineering, ethics, and society, with chapters on engineering education and practice in China and the West. The book’s analyses of the interactions of science, engineering, ethics, politics, and policy in different societal contexts are of special interest. The volume as a whole marks a new stage in the emergence of the philosophy of engineering as a new regionalization of philosophy. This carefully edited interdisciplinary volume grew out of an international conference on the philosophy of engineering hosted by the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. It includes 30 contributions by leading philosophers, social scientists, and engineers from Australia, China, Europe, and the United States. (shrink)

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In a paper recently published in this Review, I tried to show that part of the formal beauty of the Hercules Furens is due to a subtle treatment of the familiar doctrine that the tyrant's wealth and power are of trifling value compared with Sophrosune, the gain that is really gain. Perhaps some further notes on the dramatic use made by Euripides of these familiar ideas may be of interest. One object with which I started was to observe the use (...) of the word τúραννος in Greek drama. Though the poets frequently enough use it merely as a convenient equivalent for βασιλεúσetc., popular feeling made it easy to suggest the meaning ‘tyrant,’ ‘bad King,’ or ‘Usurper’; and the poets use the ambiguity with great subtlety and in a manner which enables them to obtain fine effects of irony and scorn. What is more important is the fact that the notion of a tyrant with which we are acquainted in later Greek literature was already common-place in the fifth century, and that many dramatic effects depend on the recognition by the audience of the commonplace as such. Indeed, it is often the adaptation by the poet of the familiar ideas that lends formal beauty to compositions which, if we think simply of the plot, appear at first sight jerky or ‘epeisodic.’. (shrink)

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We report the identification of a recurrent, 520-kb 16p12.1 microdeletion associated with childhood developmental delay. The microdeletion was detected in 20 of 11,873 cases compared with 2 of 8,540 controls and replicated in a second series of 22 of 9,254 cases compared with 6 of 6,299 controls. Most deletions were inherited, with carrier parents likely to manifest neuropsychiatric phenotypes compared to non-carrier parents. Probands were more likely to carry an additional large copy-number variant when compared to matched controls. The clinical (...) features of individuals with two mutations were distinct from and/or more severe than those of individuals carrying only the co-occurring mutation. Our data support a two-hit model in which the 16p12.1 microdeletion both predisposes to neuropsychiatric phenotypes as a single event and exacerbates neurodevelopmental phenotypes in association with other large deletions or duplications. Analysis of other microdeletions with variable expressivity indicates that this two-hit model might be more generally applicable to neuropsychiatric disease. © 2010 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

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H.B.D. Kettlewell is best known for his pioneering work on the phenomenon of industrial melanism, which began shortly after his appointment in 1951 as a Nuffield Foundation research worker in E.B. Ford's newly formed sub-department of genetics at the University of Oxford. In the years since, a legend has formed around these investigations, one that portrays them as a success story of the 'Oxford School of Ecological Genetics', emphasizes Ford's intellectual contribution, and minimizes reference to assistance provided by others. The (...) following essay reviews the important influence Ford, E.A. Cockayne, and P.M.Sheppard played in Kettlewell's research, leading up to his most famous experiments in 1953. It documents several reasons for doubting that Ford was as intellectually involved in the design of these investigations as he has previously been portrayed. It clarifies Kettlewell's intellectual contribution to the investigations for which he is famous, as well as the pivotal roles Cockayne andSheppard played in the design, execution and interpretation of these investigations. (shrink)

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The Phillips & Silverstein model of NMDA-mediated coordination deficits provides a useful heuristic for the study of schizophrenic cognition. However, the model does not specifically account for the development of schizophrenia-spectrum disorders. The P&S model is compared to Meehl's seminal model of schizotaxia, schizotypy, and schizophrenia, as well as the model of schizophrenic cognitive dysfunction posited by McCarley and colleagues.

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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.

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DBS Think Tank IX was held on August 25–27, 2021 in Orlando FL with US based participants largely in person and overseas participants joining by video conferencing technology. The DBS Think Tank was founded in 2012 and provides an open platform where clinicians, engineers and researchers can freely discuss current and emerging deep brain stimulation technologies as well as the logistical and ethical issues facing the field. The consensus among the DBS Think Tank IX speakers was that DBS expanded in (...) its scope and has been applied to multiple brain disorders in an effort to modulate neural circuitry. After collectively sharing our experiences, it was estimated that globally more than 230,000 DBS devices have been implanted for neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders. As such, this year’s meeting was focused on advances in the following areas: neuromodulation in Europe, Asia and Australia; cutting-edge technologies, neuroethics, interventional psychiatry, adaptive DBS, neuromodulation for pain, network neuromodulation for epilepsy and neuromodulation for traumatic brain injury. (shrink)

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Objectives: This study explored a multidimensional model of the relationships between social media use, gender, peer bullying victimization experiences, and the onset of anxiety symptoms among children. We hypothesized that greater experience of bullying would be associated with greater onset of anxiety. We also expected that gender and social media use would be linked with anxiety among elementary school children. To test this hypothesis, a structural equation modeling approach was used.Methods: A total of 456 elementary children aged 11–13 years from (...) nine schools were recruited for this research. We used two psychological measures: The Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders and the Personal Experience Checklist as well as a sociodemographic questionnaire.Results: The social media usage survey found that all participants used social media. Instagram and YouTube were the platforms most used by the participants. The Structural Equation Model results suggest that bullying victimization and gender predicted the onset of anxiety in elementary school children. The model explained 32.1% of the variance of the outcome with very adequate fit indicators based on most indices, χ2 = 173.56, df = 52, p< 0.001; CFI = 0.92; TLI = 0.94; RMSEA = 0.07. Instagram use was correlated positively with generalized anxiety disorder. Gender was negatively correlated with Instagram use and positively correlated with YouTube use. Girls were found to use Instagram more and boys were found to use YouTube more. It was also found that girls had higher scores onSCARED dimensions, except for school avoidance. Girls were more prone to onset of anxiety than boys, except for school avoidance, which was not related to gender. Boys were found to experience significantly more physical bullying than girls. On the other hand, girls were found to experience more panic disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, separation anxiety disorder, and social anxiety than boys.Conclusion: This study found that bullying victimization significantly influences the onset of anxiety in children. Particular attention should be paid to cyberbullying in this context. This study also found a link between gender and anxiety—girls had a greater tendency to experience the onset of various types of anxiety, including panic disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, separation anxiety disorder, and social anxiety. Gender was also correlated with the form of bullying victimization. The findings of this study suggest that boys were more likely to experience physical bullying than girls. Interestingly, we found that Instagram use was significantly correlated with developing separation anxiety. In particular, children demonstrated school avoidance when experiencing cyberbullying. Limitations and future directions are discussed. (shrink)

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According to the early futurist Julian Huxley, human life as we know it is ‘a wretched makeshift, rooted in ignorance’. With modern science, however, ‘the present limitations and miserable frustrations of our existence could be in large measure surmounted’ and human life could be ‘transcended by a state of existence based on the illumination of knowledge’ (1957b, p. 16).

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In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 8.2 (2003) 132-139 [Access article in PDF] Environmentalism: A Global History, by Ramachandra Guha. New York: Longman, 161 pp, includes Bibliographic Essay and Index. Softcover, ISBN 0-321-01169-4. This short but wide-ranging book is a global survey of the history of environmental thought by one of the people most responsible for broadening environmental discussions to include recognition of post-colonial societies. The overall goal of this introductory (...) textbook is to explain multiple environmental discourses from Brazil, the United States, China, India, the Soviet Union, and Africa, and then to situate them as complimentary components of a global socially oriented environmental discursive framework.With that said, it is always difficult to evaluate an introductory textbook. In this case, much of what is covered represents well-worn ground for the environmental scholar. The thesis that emerges is less about a new set of environmental proposals and more about how we ought to understand the history of ideas that informs the development of policy and what ideas ought to be taught in the classroom. Since this book is designed as a textbook, much of my commentary stems from a consideration of how it might work in the classroom. [End Page 132]As an educator regularly teaching courses in environmental thought, ethics, planning, and policy, I have often wondered why so few texts exist on the global history of environmental thought. Guha's work represents an attempt to bridge this gap in the literature. Despite Guha's admirable intentions, I am hesitant to endorse this work as an introductory textbook on the global history of environmental thought for one important reason: Guha's methodology leads to the omission of important components of the global history of environmental thought. From the outset, it is important to acknowledge the difficulty of this type of project. The very title of this work signals perhaps an impossible project, given the 145 pages of text set aside for the task. Guha does cover a number of subjects well, and some are welcome additions to the discussion of the history of environmental thought. Overall though, the topics not covered work to neutralize what is accomplished by the topics that are covered. Consider first what Guha does include.The book is divided into two parts, each focusing on a wave of environmental thought. In the first part, there are four chapters and an afterword. In the initial chapter, Guha argues that a more social and international environmentalism can be a spur to "human reflection and human action," and not just a "scientific study of the state of nature or a balance sheet of the impact of human beings on the earth" (p. 3). While it is common to divide the environmental movement into waves (usually three or four), Guha chooses to delineate only one major shift and thus only two waves of environmentalism. The first wave is comprised of what Guha calls a "period of pioneering and prophecy" and an initial reaction to industrialization; the second wave is comprised of the more socially oriented responses that have emerged in recent decades (p. 3). There are good reasons for delineating more waves, but Guha's project is generally well-served by the two-wave distinction.Guha divides the first wave into three varieties distinguished by their different guiding ideologies—back-to-the-land, scientific conservation, wilderness idea—which are treated respectively in chapters two, three, and four. What I found most compelling about Guha's varieties are some of the figures he chose to include. For example, in chapter two Guha offers a treatment of the back-to-the-land ideology that concurrently condemned excessive industrialization and espoused a commitment to agrarian and pastoral values. From William Wordsworth, William Blake, John Clare, Edward Carpenter, Henry David Thoreau, John Ruskin, Edward Carpenter, [End Page 133] Henry David Thoreau, William Morris, and Octavia Hill, to Gandhi and the Nazis, Guha's range here is impressive. While I do have reservations about how convincing it is to link Wordsworth, Ruskin, and Gandhi according to a largely generic and nondescript agrarian ideal that he claims... (shrink)

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Background Individuals who were maltreated during childhood are faced with increased risks for developing various psychological symptoms that are particularly resistant to traditional treatments. This pilot study investigated the effects of a mindfulness based behavioral intervention for young adults with a childhood maltreatment history. Methods This study looked at self-report psychological questionnaires from 20 subjects (5 males) before and after a mindfulness-based behavioral intervention, compared to 18 subjects (6 males) in the waiting list control group (age range 22–29); all subjects (...) experienced mild-to-moderate childhood maltreatment. We analyzed changes in stress, anxiety, depression, mindfulness and self-compassion related to the intervention with linear mixed effects models; we also analyzed the relationships among questionnaire score changes with partial correlation analyses and mediation analysis. Results Linear mixed effects model analyses revealed significant group by time interaction on stress ( p p p p p p r = 0.578, p = 0.001), which negatively correlated with changes in depression ( r = −0.374, p = 0.05) and anxiety ( r = −0.395, p p r = −0.674, p r = −0.580, p r = −0.544, p Conclusion Our results suggest that, to some extent, the mindfulness-based intervention can be helpful for improving self-compassion and psychological health among young adults with a childhood maltreatment history. Clinical Trial Registration www.ClinicalTrials.gov, identifier NCT02447744. (shrink)

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In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.4 (2003) 568-569 [Access article in PDF] James P. Scanlan. Dostoevsky the Thinker. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002. Pp. xiii + 251. Cloth, $29.95. Important works on Dostoevsky's life and thought abound, but James Scanlan offers the first comprehensive treatment and evaluation of Dostoevsky as a philosophical thinker. Scanlan uses Dostoevsky's thousands of letters, essays, and "capacious notebooks" (3), as well as (...) his literary work, to analyze systematically Dostoevsky's philosophical worldview and to argue for its coherence. Scanlan's commitment to careful scholarship is apparent throughout, including his translations of the texts. A philosopher himself, Scanlan contextualizes Dostoevsky's work in relation to traditional philosophers, including Descartes, Kant, and Kierkegaard. The result is a balanced, rich, and provocative treatment that also suggests new interpretations of some of Dostoevsky's literary works.If Bakhtin is right to describe Dostoevsky's novels as "polyphonic," how does one ascertain their author's position? Scanlan grants the challenges of approaching Dostoevsky as a philosopher. Nineteenth-century Russian thinkers rarely identified with particular philosophical schools, and Dostoevsky never thought of himself as a philosopher. Yet Dostoevsky was intensely interested in philosophy, and Scanlan argues that Dostoevsky's characters serve as surrogates for competing philosophical positions. Scanlan also reminds readers of Dostoevsky's often-neglected nonfiction works and weaves masterfully the nonfiction and the literature to support his argument.Echoing Bakhtin, Scanlan labels Dostoevsky's methodology "dialogical in style, monological in substance" (4). Doing so effectively rejects critical perspectives that suggest the author held contradictory positions. For Scanlan, Dostoevsky's dialectical method resulted from his preoccupation with combating others' ideas, implied by his frequent use of reductio ad absurdum arguments. Dostoevsky "sought to establish his own positions by demonstrating the failure of their antitheses" (231). Not only does Scanlan persuasively demonstrate the consistency of Dostoevsky's philosophical commitments, he also challenges the appropriation of Dostoevsky by existentialists as an "irrationalist," despite Dostoevsky's "convincing portrayals of human irrationality" and skepticism concerning rationality's powers (5).Scanlan examines Dostoevsky's vision of Christianity that included a strict binary of matter and spirit, and a rejection of rational egoism and mechanism (termed "nihilism"). Dostoevsky's positive deontologism, his "law of love" (with Christ as exemplar) was, for Dostoevsky, necessary to overcome the "law of personality," and conscience grounded in Christian love was the basis for salvation. Scanlan persuasively argues that Dostoevsky, if irrationalist, belongs more with Kant than Kierkegaard in viewing rationality as limited but not to be rejected wholesale. Scanlan uses this analysis to ground a provocative new reading of Notes from Underground.Scanlan also explores the connectedness of Dostoevsky's ethics and aesthetics in Dostoevsky's insistence that artists should create moral beauty beyond the purely aesthetic or cognitive. Much has been written about Dostoevsky's aesthetics, but Scanlan exposes its logical grounding in Dostoevsky's rejection of the subjective utilitarian aesthetics of Chernyshevsky and the radical materialism of Dobrolyubov. For Dostoevsky, the need for [End Page 568] beauty and creativity is intrinsic to human nature, and art serves an epistemological function that gestures toward reality, not as a "mindless photographer" (140) but as a cognitive vision penetrating "the core of his subject" (141). Dostoevsky also justified his use of the anomalous, noting that the exceptional might be "an avenue of access to the universal" (143).Dostoevsky's "dream of a community of perfect Christian brotherhood and love" (160) grounds Scanlan's examination of Dostoevsky's sociopolitical philosophy and his rejection of the critical view that Dostoevsky's politics radically changed over time. Though Scanlan agrees with biographers that Dostoevsky despised the "moral blight" (169) of serfdom, he argues that Dostoevsky's vision of Christian society permitted social stratification so long as service to masters was voluntary, cooperative, and rational. This analysis makes clear the distance between Dostoevsky and Western liberal political theorists.For Dostoevsky, society based on universal Christian love is the only acceptable "socialism," and the last part of Scanlan's work analyzes Dostoevsky's nationalism and its relation to his attacks on socialism. In addition to... (shrink)

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Turing used the expression “emotional” in three distinct ways: to state his philosophical theory of the concept of intelligence, to classify arguments for and against the possibility of machine intelligence, and to describe the education of a “child machine”. The remarks on emotion include several of the most important philosophical claims. This paper analyses these remarks and their significance for current research in Artificial Intelligence.

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