Psychiatric Euthanasia, Mental Capacity, and a Sense of the Possible

Euthanasia for psychiatric conditions is currently legal in Belgium and the Netherlands. It is also highly controversial, as illustrated by some recent, high-profile cases. In this paper, I show how a better understanding of the associated phenomenology can inform debate in this area. I focus on how phenomenological changes that occur in psychiatric illness can erode the ability to experience and entertain certain types of possibility, making some scenarios seem inevitable and others impossible. Although strong convictions that originate in competent decisions differ from verbal and non-verbal behaviours stemming from losses of possibility, detecting the difference is by no means straightforward. I add that a sense of the possible can be sustained, enhanced, or diminished by ways of experiencing and relating to other people. Consequently, the extent to which decision-making capacity is impaired in a given case may vary with interpersonal context. I consider the implications of these points for evaluating euthanasia as a response to mental suffering

Sensed Presence without Sensory Qualities : A Phenomenological Study of Bereavement Hallucinations

This paper addresses the nature of sensed-presence experiences that are commonplace among the bereaved and occur cross-culturally. Although these experiences are often labelled bereavement hallucinations, it is unclear what they consist of. Some seem to involve sensory experiences in one or more modalities, while others involve a non-specific feeling or sense of presence. I focus on a puzzle concerning the latter: it is unclear how an experience of someone’s presence could arise without a more specific sensory content. I suggest that at least some of these experiences consist in a dynamic and non-localized experience of significant and salient possibilities. This can amount to the sense of currently relating to a particular individual and, by implication, a sense of that person’s presence. Where an experience of this kind also includes sensory qualities, they are inessential to the sense of relatedness and perhaps symptomatic of it

Collisions at infinity in hyperbolic manifolds

For a complete, finite volume real hyperbolic n-manifold M, we investigate the map between homology of the cusps of M and the homology of $M$. Our main result provides a proof of a result required in a recent paper of Frigerio, Lafont, and Sisto

Das Problem mit dem Problem des Bewusstseins

This paper proposes that the ‘problem of consciousness’, in its most popular formulation, is based upon a misinterpretation of the structure of experience. A contrast between my subjective perspective (A) and the shared world in which I take up that perspective (B) is part of my experience. However, descriptions of experience upon which the problem of consciousness is founded tend to emphasise only the former, remaining strangely oblivious to the fact that experience involves a sense of belonging to a world in which one occupies a contingent subjective perspective. The next step in formulating the problem is to muse over how this abstraction (A) can be integrated into the scientifically described world (C). I argue that the scientifically described world itself takes for granted the experientially constituted sense of a shared reality. Hence the problem of consciousness involves abstracting A from B, denying B and then trying to insert A into C, when C presupposes aspects of B. The problem in this form is symptomatic of serious phenomenological confusion. No wonder then that consciousness remains a mystery.L’article affirme que le « problème de la conscience », dans sa formulation la plus répandue, est fondé sur une interprétation erronée de la structure de l’expérience. Le contraste entre « ma perspective subjective » (A) et « le monde partagé dans lequel j’adopte cette perspective » (B) fait partie de mon expérience. Néanmoins, les descriptions de l’expérience sur lesquelles est fondé le problème de la conscience n’ont tendance qu’à l’accentuer, négligeant étrangement le fait que l’expérience implique le sens d’appartenance au monde dans lequel on occupe une perspective subjective contingente. L’étape suivante de la formulation de ce problème consiste à réfléchir sur ce comment cette abstraction (A) peut être intégrée dans un monde décrit scientifiquement. (C). Je soutiens que le monde décrit prend scientifiquement lui-même pour acquis le sens de la réalité partagée basée sur l’expérience. Par conséquent, le problème de la conscience implique de soustraire A de B, de nier B puis d’essayer d’insérer A dans C, tandis que C présuppose des aspects de B. Le problème de cette forme est symptomatique d’une importante confusion phénoménologique. Il n’est donc pas étonnant que la conscience demeure un mystère.In dem Artikel wird die These vertreten, dass sich das – um es in populärster Weise zu formulieren – „Problem des Bewusstseins” auf einer falschen Interpretation der Erfahrungsstruktur gründet. Der Kontrast zwischen meiner subjektiven Perspektive (A) und der gemeinsamen Welt, in der ich meine Perspektive einnehme (B), ist Bestandteil meiner Erfahrung. Beschreibungen von Erfahrungen, die den Grundstein für die Bewusstseinsausbildung legen, neigen jedoch dazu, lediglich Ersteres zu betonen, wobei sie merkwürdigerweise die Tatsache vergessen, dass Erfahrung mit einschließt, sich zugehörig zu der Welt zu fühlen, in der man eine kontingente subjektive Perspektive einnimmt. Der nächste Schritt bei der Formulierung des Problems ist, darüber nachzudenken, wie diese Abstraktion (A) in die wissenschaftlich beschriebene Welt (C) integriert werden kann. Der Verfasser stellt die Behauptung auf, dass die wissenschaftlich beschriebene Welt selbst das durch die Erfahrung konstituierte Gefühl der Zugehörigkeit zu einer gemeinsamen Wirklichkeit als selbstverständlich voraussetzt. Daher schließt das Problem des Bewusstseins mit ein, dass A von B abstrahiert und B abgestritten wird; sodann wird versucht, A in C zu insertieren, wenn C Aspekte von B voraussetzt. Das so geartete Problem ist symptomatisch für massiven phänomenologischen Wirrwarr. Demnach verwundert nicht, dass das Bewusstsein weiterhin ein rätselhaftes Phänomen ist

Western Corn Rootworm in Soybeans: Is an Adjustment in the Economic Threshold Necessary?

Com rootworm larval injury in first-year com (rotated com) was first reported in six seed production fields near Piper City, Illinois, in 1987. Initially, prolonged diapause of northern com rootworm, Diabrotica barberi, was offered as the primary explanation for this injury to rotated com. However, some of the larvae collected from affected fields were reared in the laboratory and later found to be western com rootworms, Diabrotica virgifera virgifera (Levine and Gray 1996, O\u27Neal et al. 1997). Six years later (1993), again near Piper City, new observations of com rootworm injury to first-year com seed production fields were reported. Unlike the explanation offered in the mid-1980s, a shift in the ovipositional behavior of the western com rootworm was suggested as the underlying cause of the problem. Since that first report, researchers have sought explanations for this remarkable adaptation by western com rootworm to crop rotation, including repellency by pyrethroid insecticides, prolonged diapause, and changes in feeding preferences (Steffey et al. 1992; Levine and Oloumi-Sadeghi 1996; Spencer et al. 1998, 1999): To improve immediate management options, an economic threshold based upon adult captures in soybeans and subsequent larval injury in rotated com was developed (O\u27Neal et al. 1998, 1999)

Targeting the Most Harmful Offenders for an English Police Agency: Continuity and Change of Membership in the “Felonious Few”

Funder: University of CambridgeAbstract Research Question How concentrated is the total harm of offences with detected offenders (identified suspects) among the complete list of all detected offenders in a given year in an English police agency, and how consistent is the list of highest-harm “felonious few” offenders from one year to the next? Data Characteristics of 327,566 crimes and 39,545 unique offenders as recorded by Northamptonshire Police in 7 years from 2010 to 2016 provide the basis for this analysis. Methods Crime and offender records were matched to harm weightings derived from the Cambridge Crime Harm Index (Sherman et al. 2016a; Sherman et al., Policing, 10(3), 171–183, 2016b). Descriptive statistics summarize a concentration of harm identifying the felonious few, changes over time in membership of the “few”, offender typologies and tests for escalation of severity, frequency and intermittency across repeated offences. Findings Crime harm is much more concentrated among offenders than crime volume: 80% of crime harm that is identified to an offender is linked to a felonious few of just 7% of all detected offenders. While chronic repeat offenders are the majority contributors to harm totals of this group, those with the most general range of offence types contribute the most harm. Individual members of the felonious few rarely maintain that position year on year; over 95% of each year’s list is composed of individuals not present in previous years. Within individual crime histories, we observe a pattern of de-escalation in crime harm per offence over time. “One-time” offenders, those with just one crime record, typically made up a third of the felonious few in both number and harm contribution. Conclusions These findings demonstrate the potential to target a small number of repeat offenders for harm reduction strategies using a metric of total crime severity, not just volume, despite a substantial portion of crime harm caused by one-time offenders that may be largely unpredictable. </jats:sec

The covid-19 pandemic and the Bounds of grief

ABSTRACTThis article addresses the question of whether certain experiences that originate in causes other than bereavement are properly termed ‘grief’. To do so, we focus on widespread experiences of grief that have been reported during the Covid-19 pandemic. We consider two potential objections to a more permissive use of the term: grief is, by definition, a response to a death; grief is subject to certain norms that apply only to the case of bereavement. Having shown that these objections are unconvincing, we sketch a positive case for a conception of grief that is not specific to bereavement, by noting some features that grief following bereavement shares with other experiences of loss

On Feeling Unable to Continue as Oneself

This paper sets out a phenomenological account of what it is to feel unable to continue as oneself. I distinguish the feeling that a particular identity has become unsustainable from a sense that the world has ceased to offer the kinds of possibilities required to sustain any such identity. In feeling unable to continue as oneself, possibilities may remain for carrying on in practically meaningful ways but not as who one is or was. I reflect on the kinds of self and feeling involved in such experiences, emphasizing the essential openness of self-experience to transformative possibilities and the dynamic structure of feeling. To illustrate and further develop my approach, I turn to experiences of grief