ZusammenfassungIn diesem Artikel werden die Modernisierungskampagnen in Ägypten während der 1960er und 1970er Jahre analysiert. Die Regulierung des Nils durch den Assuan-Hochdamm und die ihm folgenden Bewässerungsprojekte führten dazu, dass die Infestitionsrate mit Bilharziose in der Bevölkerung stieg. Infolgedessen entstand ein Diskurs zwischen Experten des Globalen Nordens und Angehörigen der ägyptischen Eliten über Modernisierung, Entwicklungshilfe, Dammbau und Gesundheitsversorgung. Der Kampf gegen Bilharziose war darin eine Chiffre, die verschiedene machtgeladene Konzepte und Argumente in sich vereinte. In dieser Arbeit wird diese Chiffre (...) entschlüsselt, was einen tieferen Einblick in die mit dem Thema verbundenen zeitgenössischen Dimensionen von Macht erlaubt. Der Text ist um drei thematische Achsen herum konzipiert. Es wird erstens das diskursive Wechselspiel zwischen Modernisierung, Gesundheit und Entwicklungshilfe in und für Ägypten behandelt; zweitens stehen weit zurückreichende und lange vorgebrachte Argumente in Bezug auf die zuvor erörterten Konzepte innerhalb eines internationalen Expertendiskurses im Mittelpunkt. Drittens wird eine beispielhafte Fallstudie der westdeutschen Gesundheits- und Entwicklungshilfe mit dem Kampf gegen Bilharziose in der ägyptischen Oase Fayoum vorgestellt. (shrink)

Voluntary acts are preceded by electrophysiological (RPs). With spontaneous acts involving no preplanning, the main negative RP shift begins at about200 ms. Control experiments, in which a skin stimulus was timed (S), helped evaluate each subject's error in reporting the clock times for awareness of any perceived event.

I have taken an experimental approach to this question. Freely voluntary acts are preceded by a specific electrical change in the brain that begins 550 ms before the act. Human subjects became aware of intention to act 350-400 ms after RP starts, but 200 ms. before the motor act. The volitional process is therefore initiated unconsciously. But the conscious function could still control the outcome; it can veto the act. Free will is therefore not excluded. These findings put constraints on (...) views of how free will may operate; it would not initiate a voluntary act but it could control performance of the act. The findings also affect views of guilt and responsibility. But the deeper question still remains: Are freely voluntary acts subject to macro-deterministic laws or can they appear without such constraints, non-determined by natural laws and ‘truly free'? I shall present an experimentalist view about these fundamental philosophical opposites. (shrink)

Over a long career, Libet has conducted experiments that have shown, in clear and concrete ways, how the brain produces conscious awareness.

Evidence that led to the hypothesis of a backwards referral of conscious sensory experiences in time, and the experimental tests of its predictions, is summarized. Criticisms of the data and the conclusion by Churchland that this hypothesis is untenable are analysed and found to be based upon misconceptions and faulty evaluations of facts and theory. Subjective referral in time violates no neurophysiological principles or data and is compatible with the theory of "mental" and "physical" correspondence.

Wilson et al. focus on one class of AGL tasks: the cognitively demanding task of detecting non‐adjacent dependencies (NADs) among items. They provide a typology of the different types of NADs in natural languages and in AGL tasks. A range of cues affect NAD learning, ranging from the variability and number of intervening elements to the presence of shared prosodic cues between the dependent items. These cues, important for humans to discover non‐adjacent dependencies, are also found to facilitate NAD learning (...) in several nonhuman animal species. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 10, October 2020, Page 90-91.

Marking the centenary of Walter Benjamin's immensely influential essay, "Toward the Critique of Violence," this critical edition presents readers with an altogether new, fully annotated translation of a work that is widely recognized as a classic of modern political theory. The volume includes twenty-one notes and fragments by Benjamin along with passages from all of the contemporaneous texts to which his essay refers. Readers thus encounter for the first time in English provocative arguments about law and violence advanced (...) by Hermann Cohen, Kurt Hiller, Erich Unger, and Emil Lederer. A new translation of selections from Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence further illuminates Benjamin's critical program. The volume also includes, for the first time in any language, a bibliography Benjamin drafted for the expansion of the essay and the development of a corresponding philosophy of law. An extensive introduction and afterword provide additional context. With its challenging argument concerning violence, law, and justice-which addresses such topical matters as police violence, the death penalty, and the ambiguous force of religion-Benjamin's work is as important today as it was upon its publication in Weimar Germany a century ago. (shrink)

Origin of the German Trauerspiel was Walter Benjamin's first full, historically oriented analysis of modernity. Readers of English know it as "The Origin of German Tragic Drama," but in fact the subject is something else--the play of mourning. Howard Eiland's completely new English translation, the first since 1977, is closer to the German text and more consistent with Benjamin's philosophical idiom. Focusing on the extravagant seventeenth-century theatrical genre of the trauerspiel, precursor of the opera, Benjamin identifies allegory (...) as the constitutive trope of the Baroque and of modernity itself. Allegorical perception bespeaks a world of mutability and equivocation, a melancholy sense of eternal transience without access to the transcendentals of the medieval mystery plays--though no less haunted and bedeviled. History as trauerspiel is the condition as well as subject of modern allegory in its inscription of the abyssal. Benjamin's investigation of the trauerspiel includes German texts and late Renaissance European drama such as Hamlet and Calderón's Life Is a Dream. The prologue is one of his most important and difficult pieces of writing. It lays out his method of indirection and his idea of the "constellation" as a key means of grasping the world, making dynamic unities out of the myriad bits of daily life. Thoroughly annotated with a philological and historical introduction and other explanatory and supplementary material, this rigorous and elegant new translation brings fresh understanding to a cardinal work by one of the twentieth century's greatest literary critics.--. (shrink)

We perceive smells as perduring complex entities within a distal array that might be conceived of as smellscapes. However, the philosophical orthodoxy of Odor Theories has been to deny that smells are perceived as having a distal location. Recent challenges have been mounted to Odor Theories’ veracity in handling the timescale of olfactory perception, how it individuates odors as a distal entities, and their claim that olfactory perception is not spatial. The paper does not aim to dispute these criticisms. Rather, (...) what will be shown is that Molecular Structure Theory, a refinement of Odor Theory, can be further developed to handle these challenges. The theory is further refined by focusing on distal perception that requires considering the perceptual object as mereologically complex persisting odor against a background scene conceived of as a smellscape. What will be offered is an expansion of Molecular Structure Theory to account for distal smell perception within natural environments. (shrink)

Many philosophers accept an ‘Authority Thesis’ according to which self-ascriptions of one’s current mental states ordinarily are or ought to be met with a distinctive presumption of truth. Recently, however, Wolfgang Barz (2018) has argued that there is no adequately specified Authority Thesis. This, he argues, is because available specifications are either (1) philosophically puzzling but implausible, or (2) plausible but philosophically unpuzzling. I argue that there are several plausible and philosophically puzzling specifications of the Authority Thesis.

It is widely accepted in science that the universe is a closed deterministic system in which everything can, ultimately, be explained by purely physical...

Amodal completion is the representation of those parts of the perceived object that we get no sensory stimulation from. While amodal completion is rife and plays an essential role in all sense modalities, philosophical discussions of this phenomenon have almost entirely been limited to vision. The aim of this paper is to examine in what sense we can talk about amodal completion in olfaction. We distinguish three different senses of amodal completion – spatial, temporal and feature-based completion – and argue (...) that all three are present and play a significant role in olfaction. (shrink)

The chief goal of Velmans' article is to find a way to solve the problem of how conscious experience could have bodily effects. I shall discuss his treatment of this below. First, I would like to deal with Velmans' treatment of my own studies of volition and free will in relation to brain processes. Unconscious Initiation and Conscious Veto of Freely Voluntary Acts Velmans appropriately refers to our experimental study that found that onset of an electrically observable cerebral process preceded (...) the appearance of the subject's awareness of the conscious wish to act, by at least 350 msec. That indicated that the volitional process is initiated unconsciously. Velmans uses the term preconscious instead of unconscious. But, in fact, subjects have no reportable awareness or intuitive feeling that the brain has started a process before their conscious wish/urge to act appears. Unconscious initiation of the voluntary process appeared to mean that conscious free will could not actually 'tell' the brain to begin its preparation to carry out a voluntary act. (shrink)

The paper begins by contrasting the unitary nature of conscious experience with the demonstrable localization of neural events. Philosophers and neuroscientists have developed models to account for this paradox, but they have yet to be tested empirically. The author proposes a `Conscious Mental Field', which is produced by, but is phenomenologically distinct from, brain activity. The hypothesis is, in principle, open to experimental verification. The paper suggests appropriate surgical procedures and some of the difficulties that would need to be overcome (...) in such an experiment. (shrink)

Olfactory perception provides a promising test case for enactivism, since smelling involves actively sampling our surrounding environment by sniffing. Smelling deploys implicit skillful knowledge of how our movement and the airflow around us yield olfactory experiences. The hybrid nature of olfactory experience makes it an ideal test case for enactivism with its esteem for touch and theoretical roots in vision. Olfaction is like vision in facilitating the perception of distal objects, yet it requires us to breath in and physically contact (...) the sensory object in a manner similar to touch. The paper offers an analysis of the central theoretical components of enactivism, whose soundness and empirical viability are tested using the empirical literature on sniffing. It will be shown that even if sniffing is an essential component of olfaction, the motoric component is not necessary for perceiving smells, which is contrary to the most crucial tenet of enactivism. Thus, the paper concludes that the theory cannot account for olfactory perception. (shrink)

The description for this book, The Conquest of Politics: Liberal Philosophy in Democratic Times, will be forthcoming.

Behav. and Brain Sci., 8, 558-566. Libet, B. (1987). 'Consciousness: Conscious, Subjective Experience.' In Encyclopedia of Neuroscience , ed. G. Adelman. ...

Mental Imagery, whereby we experience aspect of a perceptual scene or perceptual object in the absence of direct sensory stimulation is ubiquitous. Often the existence of mental imagery is demonstrated by asking one’s reader to volitionally generate a visual object, such as closing ones eyes and imagining an apple. However, mental imagery also arises in auditory, tactile, interoceptive, and olfactory cases. A number of influential philosophical theories have attempted to explain mental imagery in terms of belief-based forms of representation using (...) the Dependence Thesis, dependence upon means of access, such as enactivism, or in terms of the similarity of content with perceptual processing. The focus of this paper concerns the later approach and in particular assessing if Nanay’s promissory note that his theory is applicable to modalities other than vision, such as smell, seems likely to be of theoretical tender. The thesis argued for in this paper is that olfactory imagery exists and is best accounted for by considering it as a type of perceptual processing with a unique representational format relative to the olfactory perceptual modality. The paper concludes by summarizing the applicability of Nanay’s theory of mental imagery for olfaction and suggests some further issues that arise when transitioning to multi-modal mental imagery. (shrink)

It is critical to remember details about meetings with healthcare providers. Forgetting could result in inadequate knowledge about ones' health, non-adherence with treatments, and poorer health outcomes. Hearing the health care provider plays a crucial role in consolidating information for recall. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has meant a rapid transition to videoconference-based medicine, here described as telehealth. When using telehealth speech must be filtered and compressed, and research has shown that degraded speech is more challenging to remember. Here we present (...) preliminary results from a study that compared memory for health information provided in-person to telehealth. The data collection for this study was stopped due to the pandemic, but the preliminary results are interesting because the pandemic forced a rapid transition to telehealth. To examine a potential memory deficit for health information provided through telehealth, we presented older and younger adults with instructions on how to use two medical devices. One set of instructions was presented in-person, and the other through telehealth. Participants were asked to recall the instructions immediately after the session, and again after a 1-week delay. Overall, the number of details recalled was significantly lower when instructions were provided by telehealth, both immediately after the session and after a 1-week delay. It is likely that a mix of technological and communication strategies by the healthcare provider could reduce this telehealth memory deficit. Given the rapid transition to telehealth due to COVID-19, highlighting this deficit and providing potential solutions are timely and of utmost importance. (shrink)

The major findings by Libet et al. are briefly summarized. The criticisms and alternative proposals by Trevena and Miller, Pockett, and Gomes are analyzed and found to be largely unwarranted.

This article addresses the problematic perspectives of drone culture. In critiquing focus on the drone’s apparent ‘autonomy’, it argues that such devices function as part of a socio-technical network. They are relational parts of human–machine interaction that, in our changing geopolitical realities, have a powerful influence on politics, reputation and warfare. Drawing on Žižek’s conception of parallax, the article stresses the importance of culture and perception in forming the role of the drone in widening power asymmetries. It examines how perceptions (...) of autonomy are evoked by drones, to claim that this misperception is a smokescreen that obscures the relational socio-technical realities of the drone. The article therefore argues that a more critical culture of the drone emerges by shifting the focus and perception from autonomy to anonymity. This allows us to engage more fully with the distributed agency and decision-making that define how drones are developed and deployed. Rather than focusing on the drone as a singular, fetishised, technical object, a relational approach to the drone assemblage is proposed that highlights the competing human interests that define and resist drones in global politics and culture. (shrink)

Sensations of acting and control have been neglected in theory of action. I argue that they form the core of action and are integral and indispensible parts of our actions, participating as they do in feedback loops consisting of our intentions in acting, the bodily movements required for acting and the sensations of acting. These feedback loops underlie all activities in which we engage when we act and generate our control over our movements.The events required for action according to the (...) causal theory, or Searle. (shrink)

Commentary on John Searle's Article John Searle presents a philosopher's view of how conscious experience and free action relate to brain function. That view demands an examination by a neuroscientist who has experimentally investigated this issue.

Many philosophers and legal theorists worry about punishing the socially disadvantaged as severely as their advantaged counterparts. One philosophically popular explanation of this concern is couched in terms of moral standing: seriously unjust states are said to lack standing to condemn disadvantaged offenders. If this is the case, institutional condemnation of disadvantaged offenders (especially via hard treatment) will often be unjust. I describe two problems with canonical versions of this view. First, its proponents groundlessly claim that disadvantaged offenders may be (...) punished as severely as advantaged ones, even though such punishment is unjust in light of the state’s loss of standing. Second, and more importantly, moral standing arguments prohibit states from blaming advantaged as well as disadvantaged offenders. This unwelcome outcome suggests that standing approaches incorrectly analyze the source of moral misgivings about punishing the disadvantaged. I conclude that those who share such concerns should put standing accounts aside. (shrink)

Protein turnover (PT) has been formally defined only in equilibrium conditions, which is ill‐suited to quantify PT during dynamic processes that occur during embryogenesis or (extra) cellular signaling. In this Hypothesis, we propose a definition of PT in an out‐of‐equilibrium regime that allows the quantification of PT in virtually any biological context. We propose a simple mathematical and conceptual framework applicable to a broad range of available data, such as RNA sequencing coupled with pulsed‐SILAC datasets. We apply our framework to (...) a published dataset and show that stimulation of mouse dendritic cells with LPS leads to a proteome‐wide change in PT. This is the first quantification of PT out‐of‐equilibrium, paving the way for the analysis of biological systems in other contexts. (shrink)

In my paper I am concerned with Peter van Inwagen's Consequence Argument. I focus on its probably best known version. In this form it crucially employs the notion of rendering a proposition false, anotion that has never been made sufficiently clear. The main aim of my paper is to shed light on thisnotion. The explications offered so far in thedebate all are based on modal concepts. Iargue that for sufficient results a ``stronger'', hyper-intensional concept is needed, namely the concept expressed (...) by the word ``because''. I show that my analysis is superior to the prior ones. On the basis of this analysis I further explain why van Inwagen''s argument fails. (shrink)

Business Ethics, the Environment & Responsibility, EarlyView.

Le Manifeste du rio Negro (in Journal du rio Negro, 1978-2014) est l’un des premiers textes majeurs publiés en France au sujet de l’art écologique. Quoique d’un impact limité lors de sa diffusion, il est désormais repris et commenté par les acteurs de l’art contemporain. Dans ce texte, Pierre Restany s’inquiète de la relation art-nature, une fois n’est pas coutume. À partir de notre lecture de son journal, nous interrogeons les gestes des successeurs de Restany. Depuis l’émergence de l’art écologique, (...) plusieurs éléments constitutifs participent à définir la critique de cet art. Quels sont les modes d’appréciation privilégiés par les critiques? Sur quels critères fondent-ils leurs évaluations des œuvres? (shrink)

The critical reinterpretations of Libet's research by G. Gomes make speculative, unwarranted, and untested assumptions. These assumptions and arguments are analyzed and their status relative to Libet's findings is criticized.

For many rare diseases, the availability of effective interventions is limited or non-existent. In this context, clinical research evaluating emerging interventions may be the only potentially “the...

Provides an insight into the ever changing boundaries between science and philosophy.

Sensation elicited by a skin stimulus was subjectively reported to feel stronger when followed by a stimulus to somatosensory cerebral cortex , even when C was delayed by up to 400 ms or more. This expands the potentiality for retroactive effects beyond that previously known as backward masking. It also demonstrates that the content of a sensory experience can be altered by another cerebral input introduced after the sensory signal arrives at the cortex. The long effective S-C intervals support the (...) thesis that a duration of cortical activity of up to 0.5 s is required before awareness of a sensory stimulus is developed. (shrink)

Clinical research ethics consultation has emerged in the last 15 years as a service to those involved in the conduct of clinical research who face challenging issues for which more than one course of action may be justified. To respond to a growing field and need for opportunities to share knowledge and experience, the Clinical Research Ethics Consultation Collaborative, established in 2014, holds monthly webinars for its 90 members to present their most challenging cases to each other and engage in (...) substantive discussion. Every year, the group selects the four most interesting cases with accompanying commentaries for publication in the American Journal of Bioethics. This timely book brings together these cases and commentaries under a range of common themes for the first time, creating a permanent collection in book format that encourages and supports readers to gain a better understanding of the ethical challenges that they may face, and providing them with a convenient and reflective resource to reference in their own deliberations. Key Features- Comprehensive collection of cases and commentaries, chosen to reflect the range of issues faced by clinical researchers and oversight committees and illustrate the diversity of analysis that can arise. Supplemented by short introductions to each section. Focus on ethical rather than regulatory issues. Essential Reading for graduate students in bioethics and post-doctoral bioethics fellows, and useful for all participants in training grants that are funded by either NIH or NSF Presenting challenging cases to stimulate reflection, the book provides invaluable guidance to clinicians in training and in practice and to investigators, bioethics consultants, regulators, and oversight bodies. (shrink)

At times of crisis, existing institutional arrangements of societies are thrown into question. Crises that occur in multiple societies simultaneously present rare opportunities for comparative empirical analysis. Social theory can reveal the framing conditions of the responses to crises and the sources of variations between them. This paper compares the immediate responses of the Australian, UK and US governments to the global COVID-19 pandemic, particularly with regard to financing lockdowns, and points out significant differences between the three approaches. Drawing on (...) Polanyi’s method of institutional analysis, we compare the responses of these same national groups to an earlier crisis, the Japanese prisoner of war camps during the Second World War, to show similar patterns of integration recurring eight decades apart. This analysis shows that aspects of moral economies that are not usually apparent can become pronounced during crises, and points to the importance of enduring social imaginaries. (shrink)

This article is an attempt to examine and clarify the truth theory of American pragmatism. Three central ideas of this truth theory will be considered in light of Whitehead's metaphysics: a rejection of the correspondence theory of truth, a defense of fallibilism, and a recognition of the temporality of truth.