I identify as a philosopher, as cisgender, as an American. But are these identities secured merely by my claiming them, and what is the broader significance of our self-identification? Here, I argue that self-identifying secures the standing to participate in an ongoing process of determining the membership of the group with that identity. Using resources from political philosophy, I show why groups are entitled to revise the criteria for group membership, how having a stake in the group entitles one to be a part of this process, and that self-identifying as being within the group demonstrates having the relevant stake. After showing how this follows in the case of self-identifying as being within a demos, I argue that these claims hold generally across other kinds of identities, despite important differences between identities and contexts of oppression.

We consider the boundary dynamics of iterated function systems of holomorphic self-maps of the unit disc. Our main result provides a sufficient condition which guarantees that the dynamical behaviour of a left iterated function system in the interior of the unit disc can be extended to the boundary. This generalises an extension of the classical Denjoy–Wolff theorem, due to Bourdon, Matache and Shapiro, to the setting of iterated function systems. To do so, we modify estimates for the Hardy norm of composition operators and combine them with a new technique of perturbing a left iterated function system by elliptic Möbius transformations.

In this article, we study a degenerate version of Ramsey’s theorem for pairs and two colors (${\mathsf {RT}}^2_2$), in which the homogeneous sets for color 1 are of bounded size. By ${\mathsf {RT}}^2_2$, it follows that every such coloring admits an infinite homogeneous set for color 0. This statement, called ${\mathsf {BRT}}^2_2$, is known to be computably true, that is, every computable instance admits a computable solution, but the known proofs use $\Sigma ^0_2$-induction ($\mathsf {I}\Sigma ^0_2$). We prove that ${\mathsf {BRT}}^2_2$ follows from the Erdős–Moser theorem but not from the ascending descending sequence principle, and that its computably true version is equivalent to $\mathsf {I}\Sigma ^0_2$ over ${\mathsf {RCA}}_0$.

As Elizabeth Spelman insists, “the history of woman’s inhumanity to woman is shameful” (Spelman 1991). If experiences of shame often function as a moral hinge between past and future, integrating the past in ways that motivate creative self and social revisioning, then this affective acknowledgment is crucial for social justice in feminist futures. As I argue, it is also made fraught by the specific ways that women experience the intersections of privilege and oppression in relation to shame. This paper provides a close reading of Elizabeth Spelman’s 1991 essay on shame “The feeling of virtue and the virtue of feeling” as a vehicle for outlining a moral and social problem: how displays of racial shame by white women, while ostensibly a mode of moral attentiveness and responsibility, sometimes function to deflect moral responsibility and assert moral privilege. Engaging with scholarship in feminist philosophy and affect theory, this article examines how white women learn to convert shame into displays of power in the form of racial innocence, masochism, and vulnerability. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, I argue that public displays of shame strip its political potential and risk further entrenching this form of unearned moral privilege.

Antiparasitic agents are routinely used in companion animal medicine. However, longitudinal evidence describing real-world usage patterns in dogs remains limited. This study aimed to characterise patterns, routes of administration, temporal trends, and seasonal variation in antiparasitic drug use among Golden Retrievers enrolled in a large prospective cohort study in the United States. A descriptive analysis was conducted to summarise antiparasitic usage data from the Morris Animal Foundation’s Golden Retriever Lifetime Study over nine study years (corresponding to years 0 to 8). Percentages with respective 95% CI were used to summarise drug types, therapy combinations, routes of administration, and temporal and seasonal patterns of use. A total of 17,715 antiparasitic use records were analysed. Drug usage pattern was highly concentrated within a limited number of products, with the ivermectin–pyrantel pamoate combination accounting for 23.0% of all recorded use. Other commonly used agents included afoxolaner (9.73%), metronidazole (9.16%), and lufenuron–milbemycin oxime (8.95%). Oral formulations were predominant, representing 65.28% of all administrations. Single-agent therapy accounted for 47.27% of use, while two-drug combination therapy represented 46.65%. The antiparasitic medications spanned multiple pharmacological classes targeting both endo- and ectoparasites, including anthelmintics, ectoparasiticides, and antiprotozoals. Antiparasitic use declined by 1.8% over the study period. We observed a seasonal variation in antiparasitic drug usage, with higher usage during cooler months (winter) and lower use in summer. These findings provide baseline evidence of the burden of endoparasites and ectoparasites in Golden Retriever dogs and highlight the need for stewardship-oriented parasite control strategies in companion animal practice.

The recent study by Aron et al about lithium deficiency and the onset of Alzheimer’s disease provides a valuable explanatory framework for understanding how very small doses of lithium, delivered via environmental exposure, can exert neuroprotective effects. It also contains results which will need to be reconciled with foundational chemistry and existing evidence and which could be potentially misleading. The suggestion that lithium orotate (LiO) exhibits benefits relative to the more traditionally used lithium carbonate (LiC) requires further scrutiny in light of the following arguments: (a) no study has demonstrated the presence of stable LiO in physiological fluids; (b) acid–base chemistry predicts that LiO will be largely protonated in the stomach, causing it to dissociate and be absorbed as Li+; (c) experimental studies indicate that LiO and LiC have comparable pharmacokinetics after oral administration; and (d) previous research has shown that LiC also has neuroprotective effects, including at very low doses. Disproportionate focus on a specific lithium salt could have safety implications and may distract from answering fundamental questions about the effects of very low doses of lithium. More experiments are needed to provide evidence of a stable LiO complex in physiological fluids before this becomes the main form of lithium in future clinical trials.

The paper is concerned with maximal subgroups of the ample (better known as topological full) groups of homeomorphisms of totally disconnected compact metrizable topological spaces. We describe all maximal subgroups that are stabilizers of finite sets. Under certain assumptions on the ample group (including minimality), we describe all maximal subgroups that are stabilizers of closed sets or stabilizers of partitions into clopen sets. In particular, our results apply to the ample groups associated with Cantor minimal systems and to some Higman–Thompson groups.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Poland faced immense public health challenges amidst widespread destruction and political transformation. This article explores the largely overlooked medical mission of the Unitarian Service Committee (USC) in Poland, situating it within both humanitarian and geopolitical contexts. Drawing on archival research and press accounts, the study reconstructs the USC’s multifaceted aid efforts, including its Medical Teaching Mission, the establishment of the Piekary Śląskie hospital, and tuberculosis control initiatives. The analysis highlights how the USC combined direct medical assistance with educational outreach, aiming to support long-term recovery. However, operating behind the Iron Curtain, the Committee’s activities were subject to both surveillance and propaganda, revealing the entanglement of health and politics in Cold War Europe. This case offers new insights into the role of non-governmental actors in shaping postwar public health and diplomacy in Eastern Europe.

The European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act introduces a novel regulatory category of “unacceptable risk,” prohibiting specific AI practices that are deemed fundamentally incompatible with human rights and ethical principles. While much attention has focused on the regulation of high-risk AI systems, particularly in medical contexts, the AI Act’s outright bans under Article 5 have received far less scrutiny. This paper addresses that gap by examining how these prohibitions apply to healthcare and public health, which are domains defined by rapid technological uptake, structural vulnerability, and ethically sensitive decision-making. Drawing on the European Commission’s 2025 interpretative Guidelines, the paper argues that several health-related AI applications, such as emotion recognition tools, biometric categorisation systems, and technologies that influence or target vulnerable populations, may fall within the scope of the bans. It also shows that the Act’s medical and safety exceptions risk weakening the vulnerability protections that the prohibitions aim to secure. By integrating legal analysis with real-world health examples, the paper offers a framework for interpreting these prohibitions and assesses how they should guide the ethical boundaries of AI in healthcare, within and beyond the European context.

Taking Singapore’s Nanyang University (Nantah) as a case study, this article examines Cold War American efforts to reshape higher education in Southeast Asia, and the efforts of local elites to leverage these resources for their own agendas. Best known as the only ‘Chinese’ university outside of mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, Nantah has been variously critiqued as an institutional home for leftist-student activism and Chinese communal interests in decolonizing Southeast Asia. This article argues that it was also a centrepiece in an American-led political agenda to contain communist China by supporting ‘Free Chinese’ educational facilities in the diaspora. It demonstrates how American policies aimed at supporting Chinese higher education outside of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) encountered the local politics of decolonization in Singapore, producing new educational infrastructures in the region oriented towards American universities. While Nanyang University was initially the locus of American attention in the early Cold War, its strategic significance as a ‘Chinese’ university in Southeast Asia was increasingly sidelined by an assertive Singapore government eager to leverage American resources for its own developmental needs. Arguably, the longer term legacies of this episode can be discerned through Singapore’s centrality in the globalization of American higher education in Asia, and the broader reorienting of intellectual networks and epistemologies in Singapore which endures to the present day.

Infradiaphragmatic total anomalous pulmonary venous return is a rare CHD often requiring emergent cardiac surgery. Options are limited for premature infants. We describe successful transcatheter palliation of a premature infant utilising stenting of the ductus venosus followed by transhepatic portal venous access for stent placement in an obstructed vertical vein with hepatic tract closure using the VASCADE Vascular Closure System (Cardiva Medical Inc., Santa Barbara, CA).