Medical Students’ Gender Awareness

Gender awareness in medicine consists of two attitudinal components: gender sensitivity and gender-role ideology. In this article, the development of a scale to measure these attitudes in Dutch medical students is described. After a pilot study and a feasibility study, 393 medical students in The Netherlands responded to a preliminary instrument consisting of 82 items (response rate 61.3%). Reliability and validity were established. A gender awareness scale containing a gender sensitivity subscale (14 items), and gender stereotypes towards patients (11 items) as well as towards doctors (7 items) was developed. The instrument may be used for research purposes to evaluate gender awareness raising courses.     

The step to rationality: the efficacy of thought experiments in science, ethics, and free will

Examples from Archimedes, Galileo, Newton, Einstein, and others suggest that fundamental laws of physics were—or, at least, could have been—discovered by experiments performed not in the physical world but only in the mind. Although problematic for a strict empiricist, the evolutionary emergence in humans of deeply internalized implicit knowledge of abstract principles of transformation and symmetry may have been crucial for humankind's step to rationality—including the discovery of universal principles of mathematics, physics, ethics, and an account of free will that is compatible with determinism.     

Flexible spatial mapping of different notations of numbers in Chinese readers

The spatial component of numerical and ordinal information has been explored in previous research. However, how such mapping emerges and how it is affected by the learning experience are issues still under debate. In the current study, we examined the orientation of the mental number line for different numerical notations (e.g., “1”, “—-”, “”) in Chinese readers. Our data demonstrated that Arabic numbers are mentally aligned horizontally with a left-to-right directionality, while Chinese number words are aligned vertically with a top-to-bottom directionality. These findings indicate that different notations of the same concept have flexible mappings within space, which is plausibly shaped by the dominant context in which the numerical notations appear.     

Appropriate Spiritual Care by Physicians: A Theological Perspective

It is argued that when spiritual care by physicians is linked to the empirical research indicating the salutary effect on health of religious beliefs and practices an unintended degradation of religion is involved. It is contended that it is much more desirable to see support for the patient’s spirituality as part of holistic care. A proposal for appropriate spiritual care by physicians is offered.

Wayne Martin on judgment

Wayne Martin’s Theories of Judgment marks a significant advance in the philosophical analysis of judgment. He understands that the domain of judgment is so large that it allows only a selective treatment. We can expand Martin’s insight by acknowledging that this domain is, in fact, hypercomplex and therefore unsurveyable in Wittgenstein’s sense. Martin’s treatment of judgments can, however, be extended in a number of directions. Of particular importance is it to understand the linguistic aspect of theoretical judgments, the challenges to the synthetic conception of judgment constituted not only by existential, but also by impersonal and negative judgments, and the exploration of the links between the notions of judgment and truth.

Synchrnoic consciousness from a neurological point of view: the philosophical foundations for neuroethics

Daniel Kolak’s theory of synchronic consciousness according to which the entire range of dissociative phenomena, from pathologies such as MPD and schizophrenia to normal dream states, are best explained in terms of consciousness becoming simultaneously identified as many selves, has revolutionary therapeutic implications for neurology and psychiatry. All these selves, according to Kolak—even the purely imaginary ones that exist as such only in our dreams—are not just conscious but also self-conscious, with beliefs, intentions, living lives informed by memories (confabulatory, in the case of the fictional ones) and personal histories. Kolak’s derivation of psychiatrically relevant aspects of his theory—a neurological rendition of a Kantian transcendental argument—can be given a straightforward neurological, and therefore open to scientific scrutiny, interpretation that would then more easily lend itself to the clinical setting in which these perplexing phenomena, along with their purveyors, must live and cope. This will be the main focus of this paper.     

《论语》开篇发覆

"子日:学而时习之,不亦说乎?有朋自远方来,不亦乐乎?人不知而不愠,不亦君子乎?"<论语>开篇这三句平直易解的话,由于缺失具体语境,在孔子身后的数千年间,语义泛化,被加以最通俗、最一般的解释.学就是学习,习就是温习或复习.由此也产生了"学习"一词.并且,"不亦乐乎"也化为习用的成语,"有朋自远方来"也成为欢迎远道而来的友人的套话.本文运用本证式的语句互见法,以<论语>证<论语>,首先对这三句话的几个关键词进行了考证.考证结果认为,"学"字,大多是指为了干政"复礼"而进行的学习,"习"是演习与实践之意,"时"则是"适时"之意.又根据前人的训释,将"朋"解为"众".与上述考证结果相应,笔者还从<论语·子路>篇所云"叶公问政,子日:近者说,远者来"一句发现了理解<论语>开篇语境的密码.这就是"问政"的"政"字.关于这句话与<论语>开篇的联系,历来无人揭示,因而也就无法准确把握<论语>开篇的语境.由于这一发现,<论语>开篇豁然开朗,孔子说这句话不是无的放矢,而是对为政者言为政.     

先秦法家法治思想的衍变——以《管子》、《商君书》和《韩非子》为中心

中国的“法治”思想源远流长,始于先秦法家,从春秋时期的管仲提出“以法治国”的主张,到战国时期的商鞅治国重“法”,再到韩非“法术势”相结合的法治理论的构建,先秦法家的法治思想经历了一个从萌芽到发展再到成熟的衍变过程,但法家的法治思想始终没有脱出君主专制下“以法治国”的巢臼。     

How to test the threat-simulation theory

Malcolm-Smith, Solms, Turnbull and Tredoux [Malcolm-Smith, S., Solms, M.,Turnbull, O., & Tredoux, C. (2008). Threat in dreams: An adaptation? Consciousness and Cognition, 17, 1281-1291.] have made an attempt to test the Threat-Simulation Theory (TST), a theory offering an evolutionary psychological explanation for the function of dreaming [Revonsuo, A. (2000a). The reinterpretation of dreams: An evolutionary hypothesis of the function of dreaming. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23(6), 877-901]. Malcolm-Smith et al. argue that empirical evidence from their own study as well as from some other studies in the literature does not support the main predictions of the TST: that threatening events are frequent and overrepresented in dreams, that exposure to real threats activates the threat-simulation system, and that dream threats contain realistic rehearsals of threat avoidance responses. Other studies, including our own, have come up with results and conclusions that are in conflict with those of Malcolm-Smith et al. In this commentary, we provide an analysis of the sources of these disagreements, and their implications to the TST. Much of the disagreement seems to stem from differing interpretations of the theory and, consequently, of differing methods to test it.     

Medical explanations and lay conceptions of disease and illness in doctor–patient interaction

Hilary Putnam’s influential analysis of the ‘division of linguistic labour’ has a striking application in the area of doctor–patient interaction: patients typically think of themselves as consumers of technical medical terms in the sense that they normally defer to health professionals’ explanations of meaning. It is at the same time well documented that patients tend to think they are entitled to understand lay health terms like ‘sickness’ and ‘illness’ in ways that do not necessarily correspond to health professionals’ understanding. Drawing on recent philosophical theories of concept possession, the article argues that this disparity between medical and lay vocabulary implies that it is, in an important range of cases, easier for doctors to create a communicative platform of shared concepts by using and explaining special medical expressions than by using common lay expressions. This conclusion is contrasted with the view that doctors and patients typically understand each other when they use lay vocabulary. Obviously, use of expressions like ‘sickness’ or ‘illness’ does not necessarily lead to poor communication, but it is important that doctors have an awareness of how patients interpret such terms.