In the face of the external challenge of the Protestant Reformation, as well as the internal threat of spiritual, moral, and disciplinary corruption, two Catholic saints worked tirelessly to reform the Church in different but complementary ways. Philip Neri (1515–95) and Charles Borromeo (1538–84) led the Catholic Counter–Reformation during the middle–to–late sixteenth century, placing their distinctive gifts at the service of the Church. Philip Neri used his personal humility, intelligence, and charisma to attract the people of Rome to Christ, (...) while Charles Borromeo employed his gifts for administration and his experience as a top aide to the pope to promote needed institutional reform. Both men achieved great personal holiness and moved others to holiness of life. It is their response to and sharing of the ‘universal call to holiness’, then, that constitutes the core of both of their approaches to ecclesial reform. Their focus on holiness, expressed in an emphasis on either the ‘charismatic’ or ‘hierarchical’ dimensions of the Church’s life, also provides a model for today’s Church, scarred as she is by scandal and in need of a new movement of reform. (shrink)

Cognitive systems face a tension between stability and plasticity. The maintenance of long‐term representations that reflect the global regularities of the environment is often at odds with pressure to flexibly adjust to short‐term input regularities that may deviate from the norm. This tension is abundantly clear in speech communication when talkers with accents or dialects produce input that deviates from a listener's language community norms. Prior research demonstrates that when bottom‐up acoustic information or top‐down word knowledge is available to disambiguate (...) speech input, there is short‐term adaptive plasticity such that subsequent speech perception is shifted even in the absence of the disambiguating information. Although such effects are well‐documented, it is not yet known whether bottom‐up and top‐down resolution of ambiguity may operate through common processes, or how these information sources may interact in guiding the adaptive plasticity of speech perception. The present study investigates the joint contributions of bottom‐up information from the acoustic signal and top‐down information from lexical knowledge in the adaptive plasticity of speech categorization according to short‐term input regularities. The results implicate speech category activation, whether from top‐down or bottom‐up sources, in driving rapid adjustment of listeners' reliance on acoustic dimensions in speech categorization. Broadly, this pattern of perception is consistent with dynamic mapping of input to category representations that is flexibly tuned according to interactive processing accommodating both lexical knowledge and idiosyncrasies of the acoustic input. (shrink)

The last couple of years have seen a rapid growth of interest in the study of crossmodal correspondences – the tendency for our brains to preferentially associate certain features or dimensions of stimuli across the senses. By now, robust empirical evidence supports the existence of numerous crossmodal correspondences, affecting people’s performance across a wide range of psychological tasks – in everything from the redundant target effect paradigm through to studies of the Implicit Association Test, and from speeded discrimination/classification tasks through (...) to unspeeded spatial localisation and temporal order judgment tasks. However, one question that has yet to receive a satisfactory answer is whether crossmodal correspondences automatically affect people’s performance , as opposed to reflecting more of a strategic, or top-down, phenomenon. Here, we review the latest research on the topic of crossmodal correspondences to have addressed this issue. We argue that answering the question will require researchers to be more precise in terms of defining what exactly automaticity entails. Furthermore, one’s answer to the automaticity question may also hinge on the answer to a second question: Namely, whether crossmodal correspondences are all ‘of a kind’, or whether instead there may be several different kinds of crossmodal mapping . Different answers to the automaticity question may then be revealed depending on the type of correspondence under consideration. We make a number of suggestions for future research that might help to determine just how automatic crossmodal correspondences really are. (shrink)

Top-down models typically used to explain social behavior involve specific adaptations and higher level cognition. The Pavlovian conditioning model proposed can be extended to explain formation of dominance hierarchies and group structure, can replace a pheromonal model of reproductive suppression, and can be applied to language learning. This bottom-up approach based on general learning principles is a refreshing alternative to top-down models.

La filosofia morale moderna è incapace di affrontare la diversità dei beni perché cerca di risolvere i problemi a essa connessi con una moralità risolutiva, rigidamente gerarchizzata. Ma ogni ritratto adeguato delle nostre vite deve rendere giustizia tanto alla differenza quanto all'unità. A tal scopo, è necessario cominciare a distinguere, perché nel ragionamento morale tutto dipende dai dettagli. E le risorse del ragionamento morale sono maggiori di quanto in genere ritengano i filosofi morali moderni. Trovare una "misura" tra l'aspirazione all'unità (...) e la diversità dei beni è il vero secreto del "condurre una vita".Modern moral philosophy is unable to deal with the diversity of goods because it tries to solve the problems it rises by a top priority, all-trumping morality. But any adequate account of our lives has to do justice to both difference and unity. To attain this goal, we have to begin to make distinctions, because everything hangs on the details in moral reasoning. And the resources of moral reasoning are greater than they are normally supposed to be in today moral philosophy. To find a "measure" between the aspiration to oneness and the diversity of goods is the true secret of our "living a life". (shrink)

Most of us came into ecology with memories of special personal places. A cliff top that Claude Monet might have painted. Allen as a youth spent his holidays on the Dorset Coast near Swanage; he can still smell the sea breeze of his childhood. Curtin grow up on a farm in southwestern Wisconsin, the dew of the grass and the bright green on a June morning remains vivid. The catching of reptiles and insects for him awakened a curiosity about the (...) natural world that has remained to this day. But once into the field there came the scholarship. With ever tighter grant monies, the pressure to publish takes so much of the fun out of it. A climate of unbridled careerism prevails and shows itself in the incremental state of the literature: little things to list on this year's activities report. There are now even predatory journals that cynically do not seriously review submissions, and only collect page charges. As journal editors have a desperate time getting reviews done by mature scholars, instead of a hand off to their overworked graduate students. So what is to be done - how can we bring the joy and importance of discovery back into it all? After all ecology is done by human beings. Mostly it is a personal mission, for what great ecologists write is frequently personal and life changing. So an undercurrent of this book is to remind and reveal the original purpose of science. Not professional advancement, but the genuine search for novel ideas and the imperative to share hard won insights and personal passions. (shrink)

The presence of parasites in a population has an impact on mate choice and has substantial evolutionary significance. A relatively unexplored aspect of this dynamic is whether or not the presence of parasites increases the likelihood of hybridization events, which also have a significant role in ecological adaptation. One explanation of increased hybridization in some areas and not others is that stress from parasites results in selection for an increase of novel genotypes. Two swordtail species Xiphophorus birchmanni and Xiphophorus malinche (...) maintain an active hybrid zone. The patterns of hybridization are unique in that they do not match up directly with expectations. We set out to test whether or not individuals can sense, using chemical cues, whether conspecifics in their immediate vicinity have high parasite loads and also whether this has an effect on mating and association behavior toward both conspecific and hybrid mates. Our hypothesis being that females will have greater association times with hybrid/heterospecific mates if conscpecifics are heavily parasitized. We found that females exposed to parasitized males had a weaker preference for conspecific odor than those exposed to unparasitized males, both relative to a water control and relative to hybrids. The empirical investigation described above is coupled with a historical and philosophical discussion of some of the issues surrounding the acceptance and understanding of the concept of hybridization. This discussion takes as its major themes: an analysis of the role that social views have on the formation of scientific hypothesis; the lag between epochal change in the scientific community and the assimilation of the consequences into social beliefs; the survival of hierarchical and teleological thinking in our concept of species and purity; and the failures of contemporary evolutionary theory to provide satisfactory explanations about the meaning and upshot of hybridization. Two specific misconceptions about hybridization are addressed. First, that hybridization clashes with the belief in kinds/types/species having separate and pure identities. Secondly, the teleological view that reads purpose into nature and places all instances of variation on a hierarchical scale; the top and bottom of which are determined by estimated closeness to the predetermined perfection of a type. < <. (shrink)

Over twenty-two years have passed since the beginning of the lexicographical compilation that has resulted in what is presently named the Digital Dictionary of Buddhism (DDB), and over thirteen years have passed since its installation on the WWWeb. Originally uploaded with approximately 3,200 entries, this compilation of terms, text names, person names, school names, etc., contains, at the time of this writing, over 45,000 entries, based on the contributions of 57 individuals. The DDB is also subscribed to by twenty university (...) libraries from top-rated institutions in North America, Europe, and Asia. Originally viewed by its creator primarily as a lexicographical tool for the translation of Buddhist canonical texts, the DDB is now fulfilling that role to a degree that is enhanced greatly by the concurrent maturation of canonical text digitization projects undertaken by the Chinese Buddhist Electronic Text Association (CBETA), the SAT Taishō Daizōkyō, Research Institute for Tripiṭaka Koreana (RITK), and the digital Hanguk bulgyo jeonseo (HBJ). As the usage of these digital canons grows in scope and sophistication, translators around the world can benefit immensely by the integrated usage of digital canons and the DDB, both through its web implementation and the usage of localized tools. This paper discusses some of the main benefits of combined usage of digital text and digital lexicon. (shrink)

Institutional review boards are almost universally considered to be overworked and understaffed. They also require substantial commitments of time and resources from their members. Although some surveys report average IRB memberships of 15 people or more, federal regulations require only five. We present data on IRB meetings at eight of the top 25 academic medical centers in the United States funded by the National Institutes of Health. These data indicate substantial contributions from primary reviewers and chairs during protocol discussions but (...) little from other members, which implies that it may be possible for smaller IRBs to accomplish the same tasks with no reduction in the quality of review. (shrink)

Abstract John Breuilly's Nationalism and the State provides an indispensable guide to the history of nationalist doctrines and practices since 1800. Yet it misses a crucial dynamic. Top?down nationalizing efforts by European rulers generated bottom?up demands for autonomy or independence by political entrepreneurs claiming to represent distinct nations. Those demands gained credibility and strength when third parties such as great powers and international organizations validated them. This process established an evolving international procedure and an incentive structure that promote top?down suppression (...) of minorities, bottom?up bids for recognition, and violent struggles among the parties. (shrink)

Lucas van Valckenborch’s Winter Landscape hangs in the Kinsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. It was painted four hundred years ago as one of a set of the four seasons. Measured by sales of reproductions, it is one of the most popular paintings in the museum, though it is by no means the most distinguished example of the genre to which it belongs. The picture is a snow scene. In the long series of represented planed that recede from foreground to horizon, fallen (...) snow covers fields and roves. Across the surface of the canvas and scarcely diminishing in scale from bottom to top, touches of white paint represent falling snow. It is not a small painting, and these are not mere feathery indications, but palpable dabs from a loaded brush. To a taste fed on Modernist painting—or, for the pedantic, to a prejudice fuelled by Modernist accounts of painting—it is by virtue of this surprising frankness that the painting achieves more than mere anecdotal charm. It is not the illusion of depth in the picture that holds our sophisticated attention, nor the atmospheric re-creation of a leaden sky, nor do we admit to being engaged by the over-rehearsed animation of the peasants. What gives us pleasurable pause is the strange and distinctive form of skepticism about appearances that is set in play when the allure of imaginative depth meets resistance from the vividness of decorated surface.5 5. Wollheim uses the term ‘twofoldness’ for ‘this strange duality—of seeing the marked surface, and of seeing something in the surface.’ In his account this experience leads to a thematizing of the image, which ‘ushers in representation.’ Translated into his terminology, my suggestion would be that the Winter Landscape can be seen as catering to a Modernistic taste for the thematizing of ‘twofoldness’ itself. Charles Harrison is staff tutor and reader in the history of art at the Open University. He is the author of English Art and Modernism 1900-1939 , and he is now completing a second volume, English Art and Modernism 1940-1985. He is co-author of A Provisional History of Art & Language , and his most recent book—Essays on Art and Language—is due out in 1989. He has been associated with the Art & Language group since 1971 and is editor of the journal Art-Language. (shrink)

The eighteenth century was the century of self-organization, but also that of materialism, inasmuch as it was then that certain thinkers proclaimed themselves to be materialists (rather than just being labelled as such by enemies of various sorts). If one seeks to read these two features – one hesitates to call them ‘facts’ or ‘events’ – together, one arrives rather quickly at an influential metaphor, the beeswarm. But a metaphor of or for what? Irreducible organic unity, most broadly – spelled (...) out in the vocabulary of the period in terms of synergy, sympathy and sensibility, but also of cohesion, consensus and conspiration: individual bees have their characteristics, their intentions, and their own purposes, but they also ‘conspire’, ‘cohere’ and ‘consent’ in the name of a larger living unity, the swarm, although this leaves open further questions such as the exact nature of the order or organization yielded or enacted by the swarm (bottom-up? top-down? emergent? etc.). The fascination with the beeswarm is a fascination with organic unity and in some cases (notably Diderot), with the organic or organismic features of living matter itself. This is the story we wish to tell. (shrink)

In this paper we investigate whether, and how, corporate management strategically uses disclosure to manage the perceptions of different organizational audiences. In particular, we examine the interactions between the FIAT Group and three of its key organizational audiences—the local press, the international press, and the financial analysts, which are characterized by different levels of salience for the company. We focus on both how management reacts to the optimism level existing within each audience and how the narrative disclosure tone adopted by (...) FIAT influences the ex-post optimism in the local and international press or in the financial analyst community. We investigate the disclosure of the FIAT Group over a 6-year period , during which 70 price-sensitive press releases were published. On the basis of 1,887 news articles published in Italian newspapers and 411 analyst reports, we report evidence of different strategic patterns in the interaction processes between FIAT and its audiences. Our findings also indicate some differences in the way FIAT is affected by, and in turn, affects the sentiment of each audience, thus highlighting that the salience of the stakeholder is an important driver of the adoption of impression management techniques. Taken together, our findings point to issues related to setting the “tone at the top” and potential ethical matters. (shrink)

Recent scandals involving executive leadership have significantly contributed to the topic of corporate social responsibility (CSR) becoming one of the most important concerns of the management literature in the twenty-first century. The antithesis of CSR is embodied in executive corruption and malfeasance. Unfortunately such things are all too frequent. We view the degree of centrality of leadership, and the primary power motivation of leaders, as key factors that influence the engagement in corruptive leader behavior and consequent corporate social ir-responsibility (CSIR) (...) in organizations. Shared and self-leadership, on the other hand, we introduce as alternatives to traditional top-down centralized views of leadership that can establish needed checks and balances capable of reducing corruptive tendencies. We offer a conceptual model along with several propositions to help guide future research and practice. (shrink)

The objective of this paper is to explore how the various stages of consciousness development of top managers can influence, in practical terms, their abilities in and commitment to environmental leadership in different types of SMEs. A case study based on 63 interviews carried out in 15 industrial SMEs showed that the organizations that displayed the most environmental management practices were mostly run by managers at a post-conventional stage of consciousness development. Conversely, the SMEs that displayed less sustainable environmental management (...) practices were all run by managers at conventional stages of development. Drawing upon diverse examples of environmental leadership, this paper analyzes the reasons why the stages of post-conventional consciousness development of top managers seem to foster corporate greening in SMEs. The study also sheds light on the key values and abilities associated with both environmental leadership and the upper-stages of consciousness development, which include a broader and systemic perspective, long-range focus, integration of conflicting goals, collaboration with stakeholders, complexity management, collaborative learning, among others. (shrink)

Tactile perception is often impaired during movement. The present study investigated whether such sensory suppression also occurs during back movements, and whether this would be modulated by attention. In two tactile detection experiments, participants simultaneously engaged in a movement task, in which they executed a back-bending movement, and a perceptual task, consisting of the detection of subtle tactile stimuli administered to their upper or lower back. The focus of participants’ attention was manipulated by raising the probability that one of the (...) back locations would be stimulated. The results revealed that tactile detection was suppressed during the execution of the back movements. Furthermore, the results of Experiment 2 revealed that when the stimulus was always presented to the attended location, tactile suppression was substantially reduced, suggesting that sensory suppression can be modulated by top-down attentional processes. The potential of this paradigm for studying tactile information processing in clinical populations is discussed. (shrink)

The psychiatrist, Dr. Charles B. Nemeroff of Emory University, is the most prominent example to date in a series of disclosures that is shaking the world of academic medicine and seems likely to force broad changes in the relationships between doctors and drug makers.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 123.1 (2002) 111-118 [Access article in PDF] Brief MentionSupplices, The Satyr Play: Charles Mee's Big Love Rush Rehm Berkeley Repertory Theater, long the most adventurous theater company in the San Francisco Bay area, opened its new Roda theater in style this spring with Aeschylus' Oresteia (trans. Fagles), followed (on the more intimate thrust stage) by Charles L. Mee's adaptation of Aeschylus' Danaid trilogy, (...) entitled Big Love. Seeing these productions in tandem reminds one of the similarities between the two trilogies, as if Aeschylus in his Oresteia developed and expanded ideas introduced five years earlier in Danaides. These include the horrific consequences of male violence, not the least of which involves the tragic female response of killing husbands and turning households into bloodbaths. The primal compulsions that affect human beings--particularly eros and vengeance, immortally hypostasized as Aphrodite and the Furies--drive through both trilogies, countered somewhat by the religious and moral imperatives to grant beleaguered foreigners asylum. Reflecting Athens's radical democracy, Aeschylus emphasizes the perils and responsibilities of a polity that must face the consequences of its own decisions. In dramatic terms, both trilogies tap the power of choral lyric to wash over plot and action, almost like a force of nature, moving the human drama into a wider spatial and temporal context. Aeschylus also exploits the apparent finality of a trial in both works to bring matters to a dramatic close. However, ultimate resolution depends on the fundamentally comedic faith in the curative powers of marriage, family, and time to restore the human community. Addressing these themes in Big Love, Mee uses them to construct an entertaining romp. One could say he converts Aeschylus' Danaides into a contemporary satyr play, the paratragic genre for which Aeschylus was famous in antiquity (none of his survive, but one called Amymone ended the Danaid tetralogy).Although only Supplices is extant, most scholars agree on the [End Page 111] trilogy's dramatic arc. 1 Led by their father Danaos, the fifty Danaids flee from detested marriage with their Egyptian cousins. They receive asylum in Argos, until the Argive leader Pelasgos is defeated in battle and the victorious Egyptians have their connubial way. Commanded by their father, the Danaids murder their husbands on their wedding night--all save Hypermestra, who spares Lynkeus. A trial absolves Hypermestra of disobedience, and Aphrodite celebrates the power of eros, manifest in the marriage of earth and sky. Due to its incomplete story line and the absence of all but a few short fragments from the latter two plays, Supplices has not proved popular on the modern stage.Enter Charles Mee, whose updated version Big Love follows (mutatis mutandis) the reconstruction outlined above. Missing is Danaos, and (as one might expect) Aeschylus' lyrically and poetically charged language. According to Mee, "getting into a Greek plot is like stepping into a Rolls Royce," and he clearly enjoys the ride. 2 In earlier plays, Mee has stepped into the plots of Euripides' Bacchae, Orestes, and Trojan Women (in the first half of his Trojan Women a Love Story). 3 His updated treatments have attracted the interest of classicists, drawn to new translations, contemporary productions, and modern adaptations of ancient material. 4 Regarding Mee's creative use of Greek tragedy, key questions remain: where is he heading in his smooth-riding import? does some destination guide the journey? whom does Mee pick up along the way?Answering the last first, Big Love--as directed by Les Waters at Berkeley, with a strong cast--sweeps up the audience with its energy and sense of play. It offers an evening of kitsch, froth, stage blood (over-the-top and inoffensive), and body-slamming physical humor. Although set in Italy--the Pelasgian Piero is a suave villa-owner who "makes arrangements" and "has connections"--this is very much an American play, full of commercial pop culture. For example, the first "chorus" has three representative Danaids singing Leslie Gore's schlock rock "You Don't [End Page 112] Own Me," using champagne flutes and empty bottles as microphones, like... (shrink)

Philosophy for Children (P4C) provides educators with the process and structures to engage children in inquiring as a group into 'big' moral, ethical, and spiritual questions, while also considering curricular necessities and the demands of national and local standards. Based on the actual experiences of educators in diverse and global classroom contexts, this comprehensive guide gives you the tools you need to introduce philosophical thinking into your classroom, curriculum and beyond. Drawing on research-based educational and psychological models, this book highlights (...) the advantages gained by students who regularly participate in philosophical discussion: from building cognitive and social/emotional development, to becoming more informed citizens. Helpful tools and supplementary online resources offer additional frameworks for supporting and sustaining a higher level of thinking and problem-solving among your students. This practical guide is essential reading for teachers, coaches, and anyone wondering how you can effectively teach philosophy in your classroom. (shrink)

As many as two million people in the United Kingdom repeatedly see people, animals, and objects that have no objective reality. Hallucinations on the border of sleep, dementing illnesses, delirium, eye disease, and schizophrenia account for 90% of these. The remainder have rarer disorders. We review existing models of recurrent complex visual hallucinations (RCVH) in the awake person, including cortical irritation, cortical hyperexcitability and cortical release, top-down activation, misperception, dream intrusion, and interactive models. We provide evidence that these can neither (...) fully account for the phenomenology of RCVH, nor for variations in the frequency of RCVH in different disorders. We propose a novel Perception and Attention Deficit (PAD) model for RCVH. A combination of impaired attentional binding and poor sensory activation of a correct proto-object, in conjunction with a relatively intact scene representation, bias perception to allow the intrusion of a hallucinatory proto-object into a scene perception. Incorporation of this image into a context-specific hallucinatory scene representation accounts for repetitive hallucinations. We suggest that these impairments are underpinned by disturbances in a lateral frontal cortex–ventral visual stream system. We show how the frequency of RCVH in different diseases is related to the coexistence of attentional and visual perceptual impairments; how attentional and perceptual processes can account for their phenomenology; and that diseases and other states with high rates of RCVH have cholinergic dysfunction in both frontal cortex and the ventral visual stream. Several tests of the model are indicated, together with a number of treatment options that it generates. Key Words: Blindness; Charles Bonnet; cholinergic; cortical release; delirium; dementia; dream intrusion; hallucination; Perception and Attention Deficit (PAD) model; schizophrenia. (shrink)

Charles Darwin, the leading evolutionist, introduces and discusses his key mechanism, natural selection, in Chapter IV of his On the Origin of Species (1859). He shows how the mechanism follows from the struggle for existence, together with random variation, and he argues that it not only explains change, but change in the direction of features of adaptive worth. He introduces the secondary mechanism of sexual selection and then, through examples, shows how selection might be expected to work in nature. (...) He argues, based on the economic notion of the division of labor, that this shows how selection can lead to there being different species. He ends the chapter by showing how the overall result is a tree of nature, with the primitive at the bottom and the complex at the top. (shrink)

Abstract.I join others who have expressed profound gratitude for the life and thought of Arthur Peacocke. I recall some high points in my interaction with him during a period of forty years as an intellectual companion and personal friend. Some similarities in our thinking about evolution, emergence, top‐down causality, and continuing creation are indicated. Four points of difference are then discussed: (1) Emergent monism or two‐aspect process events? (2) Panentheism or process theism? (3) Creation ex nihilo and/or continuing creation? (4) (...) Voluntary or necessary limitation of God's power? Even when we differed I have benefited immensely from our ongoing interaction. (shrink)

Needless to say, Charles Parsons’s long awaited book1 is a must-read for anyone with an interest in the philosophy of mathematics. But as Parsons himself says, this has been a very long time in the writing. Its chapters extensively “draw on”, “incorporate material from”, “overlap considerably with”, or “are expanded versions of” papers published over the last twenty-five or so years. What we are reading is thus a multi-layered text with different passages added at different times. And this makes (...) for a rather bumpy read. There is another route Parsons could have taken: he could have reprinted the relevant papers with postscripts, and then top-and-tailed the collection with a preface and added concluding reflections. It must sound very ungrateful, but I rather suspect that that might have worked better. Much of the book is about arithmetic. But Parsons has woven into the discussion claims about mathematics more generally and about set theory in particular. We might well have a basic worry about this structure: for do defensible claims about the ontology and epistemology of arithmetic have to be generalizable to apply to more infinitary mathematics? For example, suppose you are attracted to a Hellman-like modal structuralist account of arithmetic: then should you think it a problem if you suspect that such an account can’t readily be extended to cope e.g. with set theory (since you boggle at the idea of possible worlds free of abstracta but with enough structure to somehow model ZFC)? Parsons himself seems to waver over such questions. So for present purposes, I’ll focus just on arithmetic, and in what follows I’ll revisit two of the most familiar Parsonian themes, his views on structuralism as an account of the ontology of arithmetic, and his exploration of the role of intuition in grounding arithmetical knowledge. (shrink)

This book is an encounter between Deleuze the philosopher, Proust the novelist, and Beckett the writer creating interdisciplinary and inter-aesthetic bridges between them, covering textual, visual, sonic and performative phenomena, including provocative speculation about how Proust might have responded to Deleuze and Beckett.

The psycho-social day-to-day experience of COVID-19 pandemic has shone some light on the wider scope of health vulnerability and has correspondingly enlarged the ethical debate surrounding the social implications of health and healthcare. This emerging paradigm is neither a single-handed problem of biomedical scientists nor of social analysts. It instead needs a strategically oriented collaborative and interdisciplinary preventive effort. To that effect, this article presents some socio-ethical reflections underscoring the judicious use of the insight from care ethics as an asset (...) in minimizing the possible propagation of the COVID-19 virus and the escalation of its vulnerability in the day-to-day human interaction. It further emphasizes that if this insight is overlooked, the effects of the diverse facets of the “shadow pandemics” of COVID-19—fallouts on both the affected and the infected—may equally be deadly. (shrink)

"... stimulating and insightful... a thoroughly researched and timely contribution to the secondary literature of ethics... " —Library Journal "His important new work establishes Scott... as one of the foremost interpreters of the Continental philosophical tradition of the US.... Necessary for anyone working in ethics or the Continental tradition." —Choice "... a provocative discourse on the consequences of the ethical in the thought of Nietzsche, Foucault, and Heidegger." —The Journal of Religion Charles E. Scott's challenging book advances the broad (...) claim that ethics as a way of judging and thinking has come into question as philosophers have confronted suffering and conflicts that arise from our traditional systems of value. (shrink)

The question a judge has to ask in deciding whether or not life-sustaining treatment should be withdrawn is whether the continued treatment is lawful. It will be lawful if it is in the patient’s best interests. Identifying this question gives no guidance about how to approach the assessment of best interests. It merely identifies the judge’s job. The presumption in favour of the maintenance of life is part of the job that follows the identification of the question.The presumption is best (...) regarded as a presumption of law. It has long been recognised as part of the way in which the English law discharges its obligations under Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights (the right to life). But even if it is a ‘mere’ evidential presumption it cannot, on the facts of most cases involving applications for the withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment from patients in prolonged disorders of consciousness, be rebutted. (shrink)

Professor Michael S. Moore, Charles R. Walgreen, Jr. Chair and Co-Director, Program in Law and Philosophy at the University of Illinois College of Law, delivered Duke Law's Annual Brainerd Currie Memorial Lecture entitled "The Elusive Quest for a Constitutional Right to Liberty." One of the country's most prominent authorities on the intersection of law and philosophy, he has published eight books and some 60 major articles, which have appeared in the country's top law reviews and peer reviewed journals in (...) philosophy and psychiatry. He is the author of Placing Blame, a General Theory of the Criminal Law, widely regarded as the leading modern statement of the retributivist theory of punishment and of that theory's systematic application to criminal law doctrine. In Act and Crime: The Philosophy of Action and its Implications for Criminal Law, Moore provided a unified theory of action that underlies English and American criminal jurisprudence. Professor Moore has presented more than 150 lectures and papers in law, jurisprudence, political theory, legal philosophy, political science and economics, philosophy, psychology, and psychiatry. Sponsored by the Office of the Dean. (shrink)

The history of dynasties and the reigns of kings can be shown to conform to certain recurring astrological configurations or periods of years in the past and can be extrapolated into the future. The various recurring periods are provided, as they are described by Abu Ma‘shar in his Book on Religions and Dynasties (On the Great Conjunctions), and then the application of these doctrines to Bohemian history is illustrated.

Hervaeus Natalis distinguishes two types of items that can have esse obiective in the intellect: objects of acts of intellection (man, this cat, etc.) and properties unapprehended by these acts, or background properties (being a species, being a particular, etc.), that are beings of reason. Yet, his conception of the esse obiective of objects evolved. First, he had a neutral conception of esse obiective: items presenting themselves to the intellect are cognized, transparently, without being altered in the process. Later, he (...) developed an ontologically committing conception of the objective being of objects: items presenting themselves to the intellect take on rational being (esse rationis) as such. This evolution transpires because Hervaeus introduces intentional relations as what makes the cognized item be objectively in the intellect and includes them within the class of background properties (being of reason). Both these conceptions manage to account for our access to extra-mental things. -/- . (shrink)

Did modern American social thought take a wrong turn when it followed John Dewey and William James? In this searching history of early twentieth-century political theory, James Hoopes suggests that, contrary to conventional wisdom, these pragmatic philosophers did not provide the basis for a socially-minded political theory. Dewey and James did not provide intellectual safeguards against the amoral acceptance of realpolitik and managerial elitism that has given liberalism a bad name. Hoopes finds a more substantial basis for liberal political theory (...) in the communitarian-based pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce. Had modern social thought been influenced by Peirce, argues Hoopes, society could be seen as a set of interpretive relationships rather than a collection of discrete interests to be managed from the top down by elitist experts. Hoopes traces the influence of James and Dewey in the thought of Walter Lippman, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Mary Parker Follett. He concludes with a critical examination of contemporary thinkers, most notably Richard Rorty, who believe that James and Dewey offered the most socially useful philosophy within the pragmatic tradition. Combining philosophy, political theory, history, and close textual analysis in original ways, Community Denied offers a bold departure from previous studies of the subject and demonstrates the damage done to liberalism by reliance on a philosophy with no way of truly conceptualizing community. (shrink)