In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:MATERNAL COMPASSION IN THE THOUGHT OF RENÉ GIRARD, EMIL FACKENHEIM, AND EMMANUEL LÉVINAS Ann W. Astell Purdue University l;ike empathy, compassion is a word that seldom occurs in the /writings of René Girard,' who prefers to answer to Martin Heidegger's "anxiety" [Die Sorge] before death by speaking instead of a "concern for victims" [le souci des victims].2 Maternal corn-passion does enter Girardian analysis directly, however, in his discussion ofthe (...) biblical good harlot, a compassionate mother whom Girard calls "the most perfect figura Christi that can be imagined" (1978, 241). In this paper I focus on the neglected theme of maternal compassion in the writings of Girard, letting them enter into conversation, first, with Emil Fackenheim's reflections on the plight and actions of Jewish mothers during the Holocaust and, second, with themes sounded in the philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas. I argue that maternal compassion is actually central to Girard's understanding of the unveiling of the victimage mechanism, because it sees goodness in the very life of every potential victim, regardless ofwhat that person has done or is capable ofdoing, simply because he or she exists, has a face. The "innocence" of every victim is reducible to the innocence of the infant, because an infant within a sacrificial system can substitute for every other possible victim. The infant and, even more, the unborn bring us back to the very origins of life, to the Creator. There 1 On empathy and Girard, see my "Saintly Mimesis, Contagion, and Empathy." " See James William's comment on this topic in René Girard, ISee Satan Fall Like Lightning (177, note 4). The locus classicus for Martin Heidegger's "anxiety" is his Being and Time, sections 39-42. 16Ann W. Astell is, as Plato asserts and Lévinas reminds us, a "Good beyond being" that, on a transcendent plane, constitutes the "innocence" ofevery human being that lives, protesting against any one's murder. To illustrate the triangulation of desire, the rivalry of doubles, the mimetic crisis, and its possible outcome in victimage, René Girard turns to the famous biblical story ofthe judgment of Solomon in 3 Kings 3:16-28. In that story two women, two harlots, approach the king, each claiming to be the mother ofa single, living infant, over whom they are fighting. "The symmetry is obvious," Girard writes, "and it represents the very essence of human conflict" (1978, 238). Unable to determine the truth ofthe case on the basis of their conflicting testimonies, the wise king tests them by proposinga sacrificial solution that parodies distributivejustice. He decides to cut the baby in half, giving each woman an equal share, the symmetrical division ofthe victim mirroring the symmetry between the litigants. "The Latin word decidere," Girard notes, "mean etymologicalIy to divide by the sacrificial knife, to cut the throat of a victim" (1978, 238). The proposed sacrifice is averted because its horrific promise of an equal apportionment of parts of the baby's body—a sameness that would confirm the two as doubles—reveals a significant difference between the two women. According to the usual reading of the passage, one of the mothers, having (either deliberately or accidentally) killed her own baby by smothering him, lacks any genuine love for the other woman's infant. As Girard explains, "The only thing that counts for her ispossessing what the other onepossesses. In the last resort, she is ready to accept being deprived ofthe child as long as her opponent is deprived of it in the same way.... All that counts is her fascination with her hated model and rival" (1978, 239). The other woman, however, filled with yearning for the life ofthe child to whom she has given birth, reveals herself to be its true mother by renouncing her maternal rights in a passionate plea: "I beseech thee, my lord, give her the child alive, and do not kill it" (3 Kings 3:26). Commenting on the passage, Girard characterizes the values of the false mother as sacrificial, those ofthe good mother as anti-sacrificial. With reference to the child whose fate hangs in the balance, the distinction is clear enough. The true mother begs for the baby... (shrink)

This collection of essays focuses on sacrifice in the context of Jewish and Christian scripture and is inspired by the thought and writings of Rene Girard. The contributors engage in a dialogue with Girard in their search for answers to key questions about the relation between religion and violence. The book is divided into two parts. The first opens with a conversation in which Rene Girard and Sandor Goodhart explore the relation between imitation and violence throughout human history, especially in (...) religious culture. It is followed by essays on the subject of sacrifice contributed by some of the most distinguished scholars in the field, including Bruce Chilton, Robert Daly, Louis Feldman, Michael Fishbane, Erich Gruen, and Alan Segal. The second part contains essays on specific scriptural texts. The authors explore new ways of applying Girardian analysis to episodes of sacrifice and scapegoating, demonstrating that fertile ground remains to further our understanding of violence in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. "In increasing numbers, scholars are turning to the mimetic theory espoused by Rene Girard in their research for answers to key questions about religion and violence. For the first time, the editors of this volume place in conversation with each other scholars who, from the perspective of Christian and Jewish traditions and scholarship, engage from the perspective of mimetic theory the sacrificial and antisacrificial features of ancient Judaism and early Christianity and explore their subsequent trajectories." --_Martha Reineke, University of Northern Iowa _. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The fifth chapter of Saint Bonaventure's Long Life of Saint Francis, the Legenda maior , is a veritable blazon of the body of Francis and its senses, physical and spiritual. The first chapter in the so-called "Inner Life" – the sequence of eight chapters on the virtues of St. Francis – Chapter Five is notable for its insistent focus on sensory experience, due both to Francis's physical mortifications and (...) to his consciousness of the world's beauty, the "comfort" provided to him by the "creatures" he touched, tasted, heard, and saw. The chapter opens with a declaration of Francis's choice to "carry in his own body the armor of the cross" by holding "in check his sensual appetites," practicing self-denial lest he give in "to the earthbound inclinations of the senses," and they impede his spiritual progress. It ends, after an account of four miracles involving tactile, gustatory, auditory, and visual experience, respectively, with a laud of God, the "entire fabric of [whose] universe / came to the service / of the sanctified senses of the holy man." The pivot upon which the narrative turns from deprivation to gratification is, as editors of the Legenda have noted, "a carefully crafted paragraph" on Francis's freely flowing tears, a paragraph "which needs to be understood in light of Bonaventure's theology of the spiritual senses."That theology has been interpreted, however, in vastly different ways by two major twentieth-century theologians, Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar, as the comparative work of Stephen Fields has shown, and as Balthasar himself, writing partly in response to Rahner, emphatically points out. Curiously, neither Rahner nor Balthasar pay particular attention to Chapter Five of the Legenda maior. In this essay I read that chapter closely, partly in light of the questions raised by the disagreement between Rahner and Balthasar . I argue that the operation of the spiritual senses in Francis's soul already at the purgative stage is understood by Bonaventure to have affected Francis's corporeal sensory experience, not as a general habitus but in isolated, expressive acts or perceptions involving particular senses at particular times and places. These corporeal perceptions of God's presence and glory in his creatures are, furthermore, an impressive means and safeguard for Francis's eternal beatitude: "Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted" .For this reason Chapter Five singles out four episodes in Francis's life that correspond to the four dotes or endowments of the glorified body. These four episodes explicitly highlight four of the five physical senses, but omit, significantly, any direct reference to the fifth sense, that of olfaction. Represented indirectly in Chapter Five, I propose, through a decisive act of charitable discretion, the spiritual sense of smell becomes explicit in Bonaventure's Legenda maior in Chapter Fifteen, when Francis's body is laid to rest in the odor of sanctity. Linked to his earlier exodus from a worldly to a virtuous life, the descriptions of Francis's "passing" from this mortal life in Chapter Fourteen and of the "transferal" of his body in the immediately following final chapter return to, complete, and perfect the imagistic pattern of sensory experience established in Chapter Five. As a figure for the virtue of discretion and thus for the free exercise of the rational will at the core of the human personality , the obscure and seemingly unimportant olfactory sense proves to be a vital key for unfolding Bonaventure's Christocentric anthropology.Purgation, the Spiritual Senses, and the DotesChapter Five is incontestably associated with the purgative stage of St. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Hidden Wisdom: Medieval Contemplatives on Self-Knowledge, Reason, Love, Persons, and Immortality by Christina Van DykeAnn W. AstellA Hidden Wisdom: Medieval Contemplatives on Self-Knowledge, Reason, Love, Persons, and Immortality. By Christina Van Dyke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. xxv + 228. $41.00 (hardcover). ISBN: 978-0-19-886168-3.Building upon Étienne Gilson’s The Mystical Theology of St. Bernard (1940), which identified a systematic structure in the thought of a great contemplative (...) theologian, Jean Leclercq’s paradigm-shifting book, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God (1960), won a place for medieval monastic theology alongside Scholastic theology, broadening the canon for scholars of medieval theology. That theological canon has long since been further broadened to include the books of women mystics.Van Dyke’s book similarly aims to widen the canon of texts studied under the rubric of medieval philosophy to include contemplative writings by women and men, some of whom are also regarded as mystics. This short, wise, and winning book is “perhaps the first book-length reintegration of the medieval contemplative tradition into discussions of medieval philosophy” (208).Van Dyke urges her fellow philosophers to engage seriously with meditative and mystical writings as a corrective of historically false claims: first, that “women didn’t do philosophy in the Middle Ages” (1); second, that mystical and contemplative writings, by definition, lack philosophical/rational content; third, that Scholastic disputations arose purely within the “isolated bubbles” of the universities and did not reflect ongoing societal and ecclesial “conversations that frequently included women” (2). Beyond this corrective [End Page 707] function, Van Dyke argues that the pairing of contemplative with Scholastic texts enriches the study of medieval philosophy through complementation by reinforcing philosophy’s status as a transformative pursuit of wisdom, highlighting its inherent variety as a field, engaging the historical voices of men and women alike in discussions of topics of common interest, and demonstrating the mutual complementarity of the Scholastic and contemplative philosophical traditions, which have distinctive emphases and provide different angles of approach to given questions and topics.What topics? The adjective “hidden” in the title has a double meaning. It gently points to the medieval contemplative tradition as “hidden” to presentday philosophers who, Van Dyke hopes, will discover its philosophical richness. The adjective also pairs with the adjectival noun “contemplatives” in the subtitle, suggesting the interplay in Van Dyke’s vocabulary, which treats “mystic” (a word often glossed as “hidden to the senses”) and “contemplative” as synonyms, but favors the latter as more directly indicative of willed and embodied cognition. In this choice, she draws encouragement both from Bernard McGinn’s broad definition of mysticism (namely, as a contemplative way of preparing one for the direct experience of God’s presence) and from Nicholas Watson’s description of mystical experience as “phenomenological” and “transcendent” (20); she distances herself from the purely psychological interests of William James and the homogenizing views of Evelyn Underhill.In chapter 1, “Mysticism, Methodology, and Epistemic Justice,” Van Dyke takes her fellow philosophers to task for defining “mysticism” narrowly in a way that excludes “embodied, non-unitive states... visions, auditions, and other somatic experiences” (4). This too-narrow definition, she argues, has worked “‘against the recognition of women’s experiences as properly mystical’” (10), excluded meditative practices belonging to the contemplative path practiced by medieval Christians, and effected “the exclusion of philosophers from most of the ongoing interand intradisciplinary conversations about mysticism” (20).The subtitle of Van Dyke’s book conveniently lists five topics—self-knowledge, reason, love, persons, and immortality—that reflect the major themes of chapters 2 through 6. These short chapters each have a similar arrangement, showcasing both the questions common to Scholastics and contemplatives and the differences in their approaches.Chapter 2, “Self-Knowledge” opens with the observation, “The importance of self-knowledge is a truth universally acknowledged in the contemplative philosophical tradition” (33). According to Van Dyke, university-based discussions about the self tend to inquire “about ‘what’ we are and how we come to know this, while contemplative and mystical discussions tend to focus on ‘who’ we are and to emphasize the significance of self... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Earthquake of 1906, the Christian Anarchy of Dorothy Day, and the Opened “Tomb” of René GirardAnn W. Astell (bio)The autobiographical writings of Dorothy Day (1897–1980) feature a childhood memory of catastrophe and conversion, her traumatic experience at age eight of the earthquake that rocked San Francisco and Oakland in 1906, leaving half of San Francisco in ruins and sending 50,000 refugees in flight from the burning city, many (...) of them in ferries across the bay. Day’s observations of the spontaneous behavior of people who helped one another at that time of crisis guided her later in dealing with the great crash of 1929 and the subsequent economic depression, during which, in 1933, she cofounded with Peter Maurin (1877–1949) the Catholic Worker Movement and its many Houses of Hospitality.Day’s experience of an anti-sacrificial civilization of love emerging spontaneously out of a chaotic situation of social crisis seems to challenge René Girard’s theory of the scapegoat-mechanism as the normative way of restoring order and peace to a community whose very existence is threatened by anarchy. A closer examination of Day’s experience and social thought in conversation with Girard’s reveals that Girard and Day agree about the violent origins of all culture, which Day envisages as revealed by an earthquake, Girard as concealed by a tomb—related foundational images that, as we shall see, Scripture scholars [End Page 19] find collocated especially in the final chapters of the Gospel according to St. Matthew. The difference between the two images—one natural and one man-made—should not, and indeed cannot, be overlooked, however. The earthquake and its social effect as observable phenomena force the consideration that Girard’s early formulations of his theory, which explicitly distanced it from naturalistic explanations of myth, need to be revised in a way that accords more closely with his own later, apocalyptic thought.In an article published recently in Contagion, Matthew Pattillo has shown that Girard’s writings parallel, and to some extent directly affected, those of Jacques Ellul,1 the noted Christian anarchist who cites Girard explicitly on occasion and whose many books, according to Mark and Louise Zwick, “influenced the later Catholic Worker Movement.”2 In this article, I follow Pattillo’s lead, going back in time in order to examine ways in which the mimetic theory of Girard illumines the early thought and practice of Day, highlighting the originality of Day’s Christian anarchism as a remedy for a culture founded on violence. Whereas Girard posits a prereligious phase of anarchic, contagious violence, to which the rituals and prohibitions of religious societies responded (thus distantly preparing the way for a secularized modernity in which “law and order” stand opposed to an ever-threatening “anarchy”), Day finds a freely chosen Christian anarchy the best cure for anarchic destruction and totalitarianism alike, thus forging what Pattillo calls a “‘third way’ beyond law, beyond morality, beyond chaos.”3 In the end, the prolonged crisis within which the Catholic Workers shape their anarchistic “new society” against an eschatological horizon confirms Girard’s apocalypticism, even as it serves to place it in conversation with the apocalyptic philosophy of history of the Russian philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev (1874–1949), whose thought influenced Maurin and Day.4The Earthquake and the TombFor Girard, the tomb is the real and metaphoric evolutionary origin of human civilization. “Culture,” he writes,always develops as a tomb. The tomb is nothing but the first human monument to be raised over the surrogate victim, the first, most elemental and fundamental matrix of meaning. There is no culture without a tomb, and no tomb without a culture; in the end, the tomb is the first and only [End Page 20] cultural symbol. The above-ground tomb does not have to be invented. It is the pile of stones in which the victim of unanimous stoning is buried.5Moving from its literal, historical meaning in connection with a primeval murder, Girard elaborates the metaphorical significance of the tomb for culture as a whole. As a site serving two functions simultaneously—namely, those of honoring the dead and of concealing a corpse—the tomb... (shrink)

This article identifies the dominant public narrative of AIDS in Malawi through an analysis of qualitative interview data and policy and intervention materials. The public narrative creates distinctions between “risky” and “healthy” sex that organize HIV prevention efforts around moral categories, rather than relative risk. These distinctions oppose images of backward, ignorant villagers to the protective power of “love matches”. The analysis demonstrates that the public narrative and corresponding prevention efforts only make sense in connection with the patently false assumption (...) that love, heterosexuality, and modernity effectively protect individuals from HIV. This research brings to light the unspoken assumptions of modernity in the “charmed circle” of heteronormativity, as well as the need to consider the workings of heteronormativity in studies of modernization and globalization. Furthermore, it highlights individualistic and oversimplified analytic models currently directing HIV prevention efforts and points to potentially more effective strategies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Job, Boethius, and Epic TruthJames G. WilliamsJob, Boethius, and Epic Truth, by Ann W. Anstell; xiii & 240pp. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994, $32.95.Ann Anstell succeeds in showing that the book of Job and Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy served as vehicles for the transmission and transformation of heroic poetry through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance. The style is sometimes forbidding for the nonspecialist because (...) of dry descriptions of various texts and the extensive quotation of Latin without translation. There are certain sections, however, where the author is clearly passionately engaged in the subject and consequently comes across much more clearly and vividly to the reader; this is especially true of part of the discussion of Gregory’s Moralia in Job and the chapter on “Boethian Lovers,” particularly the treatment of Abelard’s Historia Calamitatum.The thesis and argument of the book are of great potential interest both to literary critics and literary historians and to philosophers and historians of philosophy. The “epic truth” of the title is a bridge between literary genre and transmission and the kind of philosophy concerned with concepts of self and [End Page 379] world. Anstell argues that the conventional distinctions between classical epic and medieval romance tend to overlook the historical continuity between the two genres. “The Middle Ages interpreted classical epic in a way that entailed its subsequent imitation in romance” (p. 212). Romance makes explicit what epic is implicitly about, namely a way or journey to self-knowledge.Boethius, writing about 525 as a prisoner, draws upon Virgil’s Georgics and Stoic and Neoplatonic writings. Lady Philosophy appears to him and educes him into recollection of his own true being through remembering the heroes of the past. He thus recognizes his own mortality and passions, the importance of reason, and the reality of his immortal soul. This journey to concrete awareness of the immortal soul is a key step towards the epic truth that emerged in Christian thinking, but in Boethius the centrality of Christ as Logos-Redeemer does not come into view. It does, however, in the tradition of reading and interpreting Job.Through his meditations and moral instructions on Job, Gregory (Pope, 590–604) used the precedent of Boethius’ Consolation to draw the classical form of the vir, the heroic mortal and the model of virtus, virtue, into the Christian configuration of sainthood. Using a Christian form of allegory, the “other-speaking” of a text that articulates its deeper structure and truth, Gregory portrays Job as a man of fortitude, courage, and patience whose suffering becomes the occasion truly to understand that his immutable soul is not the prisoner of the body that is sick and dying. “Job’s human nature, perfected in wisdom and power through suffering, reflects Christ’s own divine humanity, and far surpasses in heroic virtue the excellence of even an allegorized Aeneas” (p. 91).These two works, then, are the chief exemplars of the “heroic poetry” of the Middle Ages, which joined the literatures commonly designated as “epic” and “romance.” This medieval synthesis insisted on figural or allegorical continuity with classical antiquity but departed formally from classical literary conventions. Job and Boethius provided critical authorization for these tendencies. Job as Christ-figure was the model for legends of the saints, while the Consolation influenced the romance literature that featured stages of spiritual growth; this literature “extended into a history of personal salvation by assimilating the lover’s sufferings to those of Job and Christ” (p. 214). These two paradigmatic works, which provided models of the stable saint as Christ-figure and the emotional pilgrim on a spiritual journey, began to dissolve in the Renaissance. Boethius’s Consolation ceased to be understood in terms of the epic and Job came to be seen as a drama and a tragedy. Thus the author concludes that “the virtues... the Middle Ages attributed to Job, especially wisdom and fortitude, belong no longer to man but to God” (p. 215). Human beings must make their way in an inconstant, puzzling world separated from God.James G. WilliamsSyracuse UniversityCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

This paper examines Harold Garfinkel’s work with ELIZA and a related program LYRIC from 1967 to 1969. AI researchers have tended to treat successful human–machine interaction as if it relied primarily on non-human machine characteristics, and thus the often-reported attribution of human-like qualities to communication with computers has been criticized as a misperception—and humans who make such reports referred to as “deluded.” By contrast Garfinkel, building on two decades of prior research on information and communication, argued that the ELIZA and (...) the LYRIC “chatbots” were achieving interactions that felt human to many users by exploiting human sense-making practices. In keeping with his long-term practice of using “trouble” as a way of discovering the taken-for-granted practices of human sense-making, Garfinkel designed scripts for ELIZA and LYRIC that he could disrupt in order to reveal how their success depended on human social practices. Hence, the announcement “Machine Down” by the chatbot was a desired result of Garfinkel’s interactions with it. This early (but largely unknown) research has implications not only for understanding contemporary AI chatbots, but also opens possibilities for respecifying current information systems design and computational practices to provide for the design of more flexible information objects. (shrink)

Across 13 essays "e; 12 of which were previously unavailable in English "e; Deleuze specialist Anne Sauvagnargues reveals the continuing potential of Deleuze, Guattari and Simondon to invent new concepts and new modes of creativity and existence. She redeploys their work, together with other key philosophers including Bergson, Lacan, Deligny and Ruyer, to create new concepts including geophilosophy, the artmachine, the ritornello, schizoanalysis and the machinic assemblage.

Protein secretion is conventionally viewed as taking place by either of two cellular routes, a regulated pathway, involving external stimuli and secretory granules, and a presumptive ‘constitutive’ pathway, which does not involve hormonal or neuronal stimuli or the production of secretory granules. The evidence reviewed here strongly suggests that there are post‐synthesis rate‐limiting steps for many proteins released by the ‘constitutive’ pathway and, hence, that regulation in some sense is involved here too. The nature of these rate‐limiting determinants and events (...) is discussed. (shrink)

A common practice in textbooks is to introduce concepts or strategies in association with specific people. This practice aligns with research suggesting that using “real-world” contexts in textbooks increases students’ motivation and engagement. However, other research suggests this practice may interfere with transfer by distracting students or leading them to tie new knowledge too closely to the original learning context. The current study investigates the effects on learning and transfer of connecting mathematics strategies to specific people. A total of 180 (...) college students were presented with an example of a problem-solving strategy that was either linked with a specific person or presented without a person. Students who saw the example without a person were more likely to correctly transfer the novel strategy to new problems than students who saw the example presented with a person. These findings are the first evidence that using people to present new strategies is harmful for learning and transfer. (shrink)

Very little has been done to find out what corporations have done to build ethical values into their organizations. In this report on a survey of 1984 Fortune 1000 industrial and service companies the Center for Business Ethics reveals some facts regarding codes of ethics, ethics committees, social audits, ethics training programs, boards of directors, and other areas where corporations might institutionalize ethics. Based on the survey, the Center for Business Ethics is convinced that corporations are beginning to take steps (...) to institutionalize ethics, while recognizing that in most cases more specific mechanisms and strategies need to be implemented to make their ethics efforts truly effective. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Response to Estelle R. Jorgensen, “Four Philosophical Models of the Relationship Between Theory and Practice”W. Ann StokesEstelle Jorgensen has written a most interesting paper contrasting four different concepts of the relationship between theory and practice, and pointing out the advantages and disadvantages of each. Each approach introduces insights that the others have missed, but is not sufficient in itself to explain all the relationships between theory and practice. In (...) response to the concept of "dichotomy," I am also sympathetic to the attempt to distinguish practice and theory because it identifies two important constituents of experience, and it provides a fruitful way of investigating the relationship between the two concepts. However, I believe that a concept of dichotomy may put the two categoriees in too distant a relationship with each other. This distance may prevent us from recognizing the "interconnections and cross-fertilizations" that are often possible between them.The idea of "polarity" opens up the possibility of focusing on the ground [End Page 102] between the two concepts. It also provides a framework for allowing "practice to bubble up into theory," and "theory to bubble up into practice." Given that a theory may bring about a range of different practices and that practices may be based upon a range of differing theories, one needs to be able to move easily between the two worlds. Imagination, intuition, and rational thinking all contribute to our understanding of the relationship between the two concepts. In this situation of polarity one should not expect to find "a theory perfectly translated into a particular practice, or a practice drawing entirely and fully on one particular theory."I am also sympathetic to the view that "theory without practice is mentalism," and that "practice without theory is activism or instrumentalism bare of guiding principles," but like Jorgensen I find the concept of fusion the least helpful of the four concepts. Given the fact that very rarely (if ever) is theory perfectly exemplified in practice, or practice based solely upon one specific theory, the concept of fusion in many instances is too absolute. I am open to the suggestion that moral principles as well as aesthetic ones should guide the practice of music education despite the difficulties that a multiplicity of perspectives opens up. I also agree that democratic ideals can offer us one way of guiding the decisions made in the classroom and can offer a rallying point for persons coming from different ethnic, religious, political, and cultural backgrounds.The dialectical approach opens up a way to negotiate among differences of opinion and beliefs that influence practice. It assumes that there is no one perfect perspective on the relationship between theory and practice. The dialectical approach provides (1)a framework to investigate the theories and practices of which practitioners are aware, (2)opportunities to examine how practitioners adjudicate them, and (3)explanations of how and why they decide to act "in their particular lived situations." In contrast to the ontological approach, I like Jorgensen's epistemological approach to the investigation of theory and practice. It offers another perspective in addition to the influence that ontological theories can have in guiding music education practice.My view of the ideal relationship between theory and practice is one that acknowledges the differences between the two concepts, but allows for a variety of relationships between the two. It is one that recognizes that theory should influence practice and that practice should influence theory in an ongoing and continuous reciprocal exchange. It entails being sensitive to a variety of theories and particular practices, and being skilled at being able to pick which particular theory or theories best explains the practice observed.In addition to the concepts of dichotomy, polarity, fusion, and dialectic, another possible concept of the relationship between theory and practice might be based upon Michael Lewis, Margaret Sullivan, and Linda Michalson's view [End Page 103] of the "cognitive-emotional fugue."1 This perspective has the advantage of being very flexible. The authors describe emotion and cognition as being neither separate nor independent processes. "Rather both are elements of a continuous, inseparable stream of behavior like the parts of a fugue in which the theme is often lost... (shrink)

A recent article in this journal described practical and conceptual difficulties faced by public health researchers studying scabies outbreaks in British residential care facilities. Their study population was elderly, decisionally incapacitated residents, many of whom lacked a legally appropriate decision-maker for healthcare decisions. The researchers reported difficulties securing Research Ethics Committee approval. As practicing healthcare ethicists working in a large Canadian research hospital, we are familiar with this challenge and welcomed the authors’ invitation to join the discussion of the ‘outstanding (...) ambiguities and further questions’ that their experience uncovered. We propose a Power of Attorney for Research as one substantive solution to help address the problems they identified. Although we acknowledge the familiar shortcomings associated with Advance Directives in the clinical context, we believe that Powers of Attorney for Research Participation, accompanied by Advance Research Directives, may increase the likelihood of gaining deeper understandings of potential participant’s values and priorities and how they might apply to foreseeable research opportunities. (shrink)

Prison work creates ethical challenges for which a training program was initiated for Dutch prison staff to foster their Moral Craftsmanship (MCS). The concept of MCS is not yet defined and operationalized in literature. This explorative study aims to 1) define MCS, 2) identify conceptual elements of MCS, and 3) develop a measurement tool for MCS. A document and literature study provided input for the definition and selection of conceptual elements related within DCIA policy documents, identifying three conceptual levels of (...) MCS: individual (cognition, attitude, and actions), team, and leadership. This first MCSQ consists of seventy-one items distributed across the domains: values and norms, judgment and reasoning, consultation, implementation, looking back, interactions, and leadership. We tested its usability via ‘think-aloud interviews.’ Validation of the current version of the MCS-Questionnaire and consensus among experts about what to include or exclude in the concept of MCS are needed for further development. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Female Porngasm is More Interesting to Study than Male Porngasm Most Porn is Designed to Activate and Appeal to Men's Short‐Term Sexual Strategies Most Female Porngasms are Fake Our Study Results But Female Porn Stars Do Love the Sex! Correspondence Bias Error Management Theory Conclusions Notes.

We have recently found that nondirective meditation facilitates stress reduction. This supplementary study investigated whether defensive functioning would moderate these beneficial effects. We explored the occurrence of defense mechanisms and the impact of defensive functioning on the outcome of companies’ stress management programs regarding worries nervousness, mental distress, sleep problems, and muscle pain. The sample was a population of active, working professionals recruited from Norwegian companies. The intervention group obtained significant benefits on all outcome measures, but there were no effects (...) in the control group. We analyzed defensive functioning with the self-report questionnaire, Life Style Index, at four time points. The healthy adults who participated had a low level of defense scores at the outset. There was a significant reduction in the level of defenses in both groups over the study period, 6 months. Defensive functioning significantly moderated the change of the outcome measures from baseline to follow-up in the intervention group, but not in the control group. (shrink)

Corporate governance and finance are dynamic academic fields that offer myriad opportunities for business ethics analysis. Within the corporate governance triad in recent years, shareholders have increased their power over boards of directors and executives through both regulation and movements to change corporate by-laws. The impact of board characteristics on firm performance has proven elusive, leading to questions concerning board processes and individual director beliefs and behaviors. At the same time, CEOs have lost considerable power, leaving many struggling to regain (...) their control and maintain their compensation levels, while others adopt a stewardship approach to their posts. In the field of finance, the recent financial debacle has led to a reexamination of financial regulation and of the fundamental nature and purpose of the industry. All of these issues provide business ethicists fodder for investigation and analysis. (shrink)

To explain social learning without invoking the cognitively complex concept of imitation, many learning mechanisms have been proposed. Borrowing an idea used routinely in cognitive psychology, we argue that most of these alternatives can be subsumed under a single process, priming, in which input increases the activation of stored internal representations. Imitation itself has generally been seen as a This has diverted much research towards the all-or-none question of whether an animal can imitate, with disappointingly inconclusive results. In the great (...) apes, however, voluntary, learned behaviour is organized hierarchically. This means that imitation can occur at various levels, of which we single out two clearly distinct ones: the a rather detailed and linear specification of sequential acts, and the a broader description of subroutine structure and the hierarchical layout of a behavioural Program level imitation is a high-level, constructive mechanism, adapted for the efficient learning of complex skills and thus not evident in the simple manipulations used to test for imitation in the laboratory. As examples, we describe the food-preparation techniques of wild mountain gorillas and the imitative behaviour of orangutans undergoing to the wild. Representing and manipulating relations between objects seems to be one basic building block in their hierarchical programs. There is evidence that great apes suffer from a stricter capacity limit than humans in the hierarchical depth of planning. We re-interpret some chimpanzee behaviour previously described as and suggest that all great apes may be able to imitate at the program level. Action level imitation is seldom observed in great ape skill learning, and may have a largely social role, even in humans. (shrink)

Coalitional games raise a number of important questions from the point of view of computer science, key among them being how to represent such games compactly, and how to efficiently compute solution concepts assuming such representations. Marginal contribution nets , introduced by Ieong and Shoham, are one of the simplest and most influential representation schemes for coalitional games. MC-nets are a rulebased formalism, in which rules take the form pattern → value, where “pattern ” is a Boolean condition over agents, (...) and “value ” is a numeric value. Ieong and Shoham showed that, for a class of what we will call “basic” MC-nets, where patterns are constrained to be a conjunction of literals, marginal contribution nets permit the easy computation of solution concepts such as the Shapley value. However, there are very natural classes of coalitional games that require an exponential number of such basic MC-net rules. We present read-once MC-nets, a new class of MC-nets that is provably more compact than basic MC-nets, while retaining the attractive computational properties of basic MC-nets. We show how the techniques we develop for read-once MC-nets can be applied to other domains, in particular, computing solution concepts in network flow games on series-parallel networks. (shrink)

Ethical decisions related to computer technology and computer use are subject to three primary influences: (1) the individual's own personal code (2) any informal code of ethical behavior that exists in the work place, and (3) exposure to formal codes of ethics. The relative importance of these codes, as well as factors influencing these codes, was explored in a nationwide survey of information system (IS) professionals. The implications of the findings are important to educators and employers in the development of (...) acceptable ethical standards. (shrink)

This qualitative study examined hospital nurses’ methods in handling meal and nutrition care during inpatient time, with an underlying focus on undernourished older adult. Observations and interviews were used to document nurses’ methods through the span of a transition (defined by an entry, passage, and exit). The study finds inconsistencies in care methods due to institutional processes restricting both mealtime care and nutritional logging of information throughout hospitalization. It is concluded that the consequences of these inconsistencies must be recognized and (...) that new approaches to meals and nutritional care should be introduced in order to provide greater flexibility. Based on the assumption that mobilizing patient resources is pivotal for meal and nutritional care, it is argued that it may be important to mobilize patient resources during mealtime and in nutritional logging of information in order to increase the visibility of meal and nutritional care in patient transitions within the institution and across settings. Both nurses’ methods and institutions developmental initiatives regarding meal and nutritional care need to accommodate the differences between what in this paper is defined as social‐bodily care and text‐based care. This could be met through care methods that take place with, more than for the patient. (shrink)