Emergent Properties in Chemistry - Relating Molecular Properties to Bulk Behavior.

Certain properties of an object only emerge when a sufficient number of those objects are present in a definite arrangement. For example, one or two water molecules cannot said to be in a liquid state, but a drop of water can be. This concept of emergence has been studied extensively, but only occasionally discussed explicitly in the context of chemistry. In this paper, we aim to show the fruitfulness of the concept of emergence for chemical inquiry by considering four case studies of emergent chemical properties, i. e., the liquidity and freezing of water, structural properties of crystals, thermodynamical phase transitions and quantum mechanical phenomena. We show that some of these properties emerge gradually, some at discrete points, and some should be taken to emerge only when the number of constituents tends to infinity. We argue that studying the way in which chemical properties emerge presents a useful avenue for research that promises greater insight into the nature of those properties.

Conceptual competence in psychiatric training: building a culture of conceptual inquiry.

Building a culture of conceptual inquiry in psychiatric training requires the development of conceptual competence: the ability to identify and examine assumptions that constitute the philosophical foundations of clinical care and scientific investigation in psychiatry. In this article, we argue for the importance of such competence and illustrate approaches to instilling it through examples drawn from our collective experiences as psychiatric educators.

Institutional design and moral conflict in health care priority-setting.

Priority-setting policy-makers often face moral and political pressure to balance the conflicting motivations of efficiency and rescue/non-abandonment. Using the conflict between these motivations as a case study can enrich the understanding of institutional design in developed democracies. This essay presents a cognitive-psychological account of the conflict between efficiency and rescue/non-abandonment in health care priority-setting. It then describes three sets of institutional arrangements-in Australia, England/Wales, and Germany, respectively-that contend with this conflict in interestingly different ways. The analysis yields at least three implications for institutional design in developed democracies: (1) indeterminacy at the level of moral psychology can increase the probability of indeterminacy at the level of institutional design; (2) situational constraints in effect require priority-setting policy-makers to adopt normative-moral pluralism; and (3) the U.S. health care system may be in an anti-priority-setting equilibrium.

Cross-cultural experiences and self-development: a psychobiographical study of Bruce Lee.

A common challenge people face in today's cross-cultural world is how to solve a series of adaptation problems caused by cultural conflict. Exploring Bruce Lee's successful cross-cultural experiences through psychobiography offers some inspiration and thoughts. How did Bruce Lee successfully integrate martial arts, symbolising the Eastern culture, with films representing the Western culture, finally propelling kung fu films onto the international stage? Numerous publicly available materials about Bruce Lee were collected for this study, and the research data were evaluated using thematic analysis. Bruce Lee's success benefitted from reconstructing cultural environment information and exercising his initiative to shape a new cultural environment. His life experiences reflect individual cognition behaviour and social and cultural environments as two aspects of a dynamic circulation system and show that the two have reached internal and spiralling harmony through mutual integration. In the context of the Oriental collectivism culture's family narrative, Chinese adults' personality development features the unique theme of 'inheritance and innovation'. Dealing with the relationship between self-actualisation and familism is another important and challenging task in developing the Chinese personality.

Hippocrates, the first aphorism, and decorum: A personal view of caution and guidance regarding Generation Z students.

Generation Z students can be challenging. The Internet, the Covid-19 epidemic, its political aftermath, and the substantial online educational content they have been required to endure, has left them with a perspective towards a work-life balance to which we older, more experienced faculty are not accustomed. Here, I give caution and guidance to my colleagues regarding their interactions with this cohort through my reading of the Hippocratic corpus.

The two lights of Paracelsus: natural philosophy meets theology.

The Swiss natural philosopher, physician, and radical reformer Theophrastus of Hohenheim (1493-1541), known as Paracelsus, endeavoured to reconcile his various perspectives in his extensive biblical exegeses. Symbolizing this effort were the two lights of nature and the Holy Spirit, which, on one hand, explored worldly and mortal aspects of nature and, on the other hand, led to eternal life. In response to the prevailing dispute between Luther and Zwingli over the interpretation of the Eucharist, Paracelsus developed his own viewpoint, introducing the concept of the new human with a renewed corporeal body. His comprehensive interpretations of the Gospel of Matthew not only addressed theology but also engaged with the perspectives of a natural philosopher, physician, and advocate of natural magic.

Superstitions of composure: the Ayn Rand cult and the pop-psychology of self-esteem.

Ayn Rand is known as an advocate of rugged individualism and unregulated capitalism, which has led to a scholarly focus on her influence on neoliberal and right-wing politics. This article focuses on the psychologically unrealistic conceptualisation of self-esteem in Rand's ethics, which arguably prevails in today's self-help culture. Rand endorsed Nathaniel Branden, her acolyte and lover, as official therapist for her circle. In this role, he promoted the positive effects of living according to Randian principles on mental health. Rand's so-called objectivism therefore provides not only a questionable philosophical framework for neoliberal politics but also, and perhaps predominantly for its followers, a set of guidelines for the project of self-optimisation. The fact that Rand's ideal of radical self-sufficiency is ultimately psychologically unliveable makes its use in applied psychotherapy ineffective and harmful. The article offers a cultural-historical case study about the ideological entanglements of philosophy and pop-psychological concepts and of clinical malpractice.

Cultural evolution: A review of theoretical challenges.

The rapid growth of cultural evolutionary science, its expansion into numerous fields, its use of diverse methods, and several conceptual problems have outpaced corollary developments in theory and philosophy of science. This has led to concern, exemplified in results from a recent survey conducted with members of the Cultural Evolution Society, that the field lacks 'knowledge synthesis', is poorly supported by 'theory', has an ambiguous relation to biological evolution and uses key terms (e.g. 'culture', 'social learning', 'cumulative culture') in ways that hamper operationalization in models, experiments and field studies. Although numerous review papers in the field represent and categorize its empirical findings, the field's theoretical challenges receive less critical attention even though challenges of a theoretical or conceptual nature underlie most of the problems identified by Cultural Evolution Society members. Guided by the heterogeneous 'grand challenges' emergent in this survey, this paper restates those challenges and adopts an organizational style requisite to discussion of them. The paper's goal is to contribute to increasing conceptual clarity and theoretical discernment around the most pressing challenges facing the field of cultural evolutionary science. It will be of most interest to cultural evolutionary scientists, theoreticians, philosophers of science and interdisciplinary researchers.

Exploring health and disease concepts in healthcare practice: an empirical philosophy of medicine study.

In line with recent proposals for experimental philosophy and philosophy of science in practice, we propose that the philosophy of medicine could benefit from incorporating empirical research, just as bioethics has. In this paper, we therefore take first steps towards the development of an empirical philosophy of medicine, that includes investigating practical and moral dimensions. This qualitative study gives insight into the views and experiences of a group of various medical professionals and patient representatives regarding the conceptualization of health and disease concepts in practice and the possible problems that surround them. This includes clinical, epistemological, and ethical issues. We have conducted qualitative interviews with a broad range of participants (n = 17), working in various health-related disciplines, fields and organizations. From the interviews, we highlight several different practical functions of definitions of health and disease. Furthermore, we discuss 5 types of problematic situations that emerged from the interviews and analyze the underlying conceptual issues. By providing theoretical frameworks and conceptual tools, and by suggesting conceptual changes or adaptations, philosophers might be able to help solve some of these problems. This empirical-philosophical study contributes to a more pragmatic way of understanding the relevance of conceptualizing health and disease by connecting the participants' views and experiences to the theoretical debate. Going back and forth between theory and practice will likely result in a more complex but hopefully also better and more fruitful understanding of health and disease concepts.

Limits of Optimization.

Optimization is about finding the best available object with respect to an objective function. Mathematics and quantitative sciences have been highly successful in formulating problems as optimization problems, and constructing clever processes that find optimal objects from sets of objects. As computers have become readily available to most people, optimization and optimized processes play a very broad role in societies. It is not obvious, however, that the optimization processes that work for mathematics and abstract objects should be readily applied to complex and open social systems. In this paper we set forth a framework to understand when optimization is limited, particularly for complex and open social systems.

Not a passive learner but an active one: a focus on the efficacy of philosophy-based language instruction and its consequences on EFL learners' critical thinking, engagement, and academic achievement.

This study investigates the impact of Philosophy-Based Language Teaching (PBLT) on the critical thinking skills and learner engagement of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students. A concurrent mixed-methods approach, including semi-structured interviews, document analysis, and academic achievement tests, was employed with an experimental group (EG) exposed to PBLT and a control group (CG) receiving traditional instruction. The results reveal a substantial positive effect of PBLT on the critical thinking abilities of EFL learners, as evidenced by thematic analyses of interviews and document content. Themes include heightened critical thinking awareness, collaborative knowledge construction, and increased learner engagement. Academic achievement tests further demonstrate significant improvement in the experimental group's performance. A comparison with existing literature underscores the novelty of our mixed-methods approach. Implications for language teachers, materials developers, syllabus designers, and policy-makers are discussed, highlighting the potential of PBLT in cultivating critical thinking and learner engagement.

How Reasons Make Law.

According to legal anti-positivism, legal duties are just a subset of our moral duties. Not every moral duty, though, is legal. So what else is needed? This article develops a theory of how moral duties come to be law, which I call the constitutive reasons account. Among our moral reasons are legal reasons-and those reasons make moral duties into legal duties. So the law consists of moral duties which have, as one of their underlying reasons, a legal reason. Such legal reasons arise from a relationship with the body for which it is the law of. The legal reasons in America, then, are the moral reasons flowing from a relationship with the United States. These reasons include consent, democracy, association and fair play. They are law's constitutive reasons. By looking for them, we can better explain why some moral duties form part of the law, while others do not.

What Does It Mean to Be Human Today?

With the progress of artificial intelligence, the digitalization of the lifeworld, and the reduction of the mind to neuronal processes, the human being appears more and more as a product of data and algorithms. Thus, we conceive ourselves "in the image of our machines," and conversely, we elevate our machines and our brains to new subjects. At the same time, demands for an enhancement of human nature culminate in transhumanist visions of taking human evolution to a new stage. Against this self-reification of the human being, the present book defends a humanism of embodiment: our corporeality, vitality, and embodied freedom are the foundations of a self-determined existence, which uses the new technologies only as means instead of submitting to them. The book offers an array of interventions directed against a reductionist naturalism in various areas of science and society. As an alternative, it offers an embodied and enactive account of the human person: we are neither pure minds nor brains, but primarily embodied, living beings in relation with others. This general concept is applied to issues such as artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism and enhancement, virtual reality, neuroscience, embodied freedom, psychiatry, and finally to the accelerating dynamics of current society which lead to an increasing disembodiment of our everyday life. The book thus applies cutting-edge concepts of embodiment and enactivism to current scientific, technological, and cultural tendencies that will crucially influence our society's development in the twenty-first century.

Ritual and Power in Medicine: Questioning Honor Walks in Organ Donation.

Honor walks are ceremonies that purportedly honor organ donors as they make their final journey from the ICU to the OR. In this paper, we draw on Ronald Grimes' work in ritual studies to examine honor walks as ceremonial rituals that display medico-technological power in a symbolic social drama (Grimes, 1982). We argue that while honor walks claim to honor organ donors, ceremonies cannot primarily honor donors, but can only honor donation itself. Honor walks promote the quasi-religious idea of donation as a "good death," and mask the ambiguity and discomfort inherent in organ donation to promote greater acceptance by the medical community. While some goods may be achieved through honor walks, particularly for donor families, it is still important to examine the negative work done by this practice.

Personalized alignment techniques better restore the native trochlear groove compared to systematic alignment techniques in total knee arthroplasty.

PURPOSE: The relationship between constitutional coronal alignment and implant positioning on trochlear groove restoration in total knee arthroplasty (TKA) is poorly understood. This study aimed to determine whether the choice of alignment philosophy significantly affects the restoration of the trochlea groove. METHODS: Sixty-one imageless robotic TKAs performed by a single orthopaedic surgeon were retrospectively reviewed. In each case, the entire native trochlea was digitized to generate the native femoral anatomy, and implants were planned according to a functional alignment (FA) technique. Final implant position was recorded using the validated bone resection planes from the navigation system. Simulated femoral component positions were generated according to previously described alignment techniques: mechanical alignment (MA), gap balancing (GB), kinematic alignment (KA), restricted kinematic alignment (rKA) and restricted inverse kinematic alignment (riKA). Trochlear angle (TA), trochlear under/overstuffing and mediolateral sulcus offset were compared between the six simulated alignment techniques, as well as the final implanted technique. Further analyses investigated the effect of preoperative coronal alignment on trochlear position. Comparisons were assessed with an analysis of variance and Welch's t-tests or Wilcoxon's rank-sum tests with Bonferroni corrections. RESULTS: The implanted and simulated techniques all resulted in greater TA valgus compared to the native groove (p < 0.001). The implanted technique, KA and rKA were closer to the native TA than GB, MA and riKA (p > 0.001). All alignment philosophies understuffed the native trochlea groove. KA and rKA understuffed less than all other techniques (p < 0.001), and GB understuffed more than all other techniques (p < 0.001). In extension, all techniques shifted the trochlear sulcus laterally, while in flexion, they medialized it. These effects were most prominent in GB and MA. CONCLUSION: Personalized alignment techniques such as KA and rKA, which consider variations in individual anatomy, best restore the native patellar groove compared to systematic alignment techniques when using a standardized femoral component. LEVEL OF EVIDENCE: Level III, retrospective review.