A mutation alters the hemoglobin in some members of a species of antelope, and as a result the members fare better at high altitudes than their conspecifics do; so high-altitude foraging areas become open to them that are closed to their conspecifics; they thrive, reproduce at a greater rate, and the gene for altered hemoglobin spreads further through the gene pool of the species. That sounds like a classic example (owed to Karen Neander, 1995) of a causal chain traced by (...) evolutionary biology. But a view now nearly universal among philosophers maintains that such biological causation is always shadowed, perhaps even rivaled, by causation on a different level.1 That the subgroup of antelopes forages in areas closed to the conspecifics is a state of affairs embodied or realized, notes this view, in certain movements and state changes done by certain physical microparticles—untold billions of microparticles and movements, but a finite and determinate (more on this below) collection nevertheless. That the subgroup reproduces at a greater rate is likewise realized by a huge collection of microparticle movements, a different collection. And the microparticle happenings comprised in the first collection are causally responsible, strictly in accordance with the laws of microphysics, for the microparticle happenings in the second. Biological causation is always shadowed, perhaps even rivaled, by causation on the level of microphysics. The view I mean is general: any case of causing uncovered by any of the special sciences can be recaptured at the level of microphysics. This view is I think what most philosophers mean by “physicalism”; in any case, “physicalism” is the label I shall use. Physicalism comes in two forms. Modest physicalism holds that any causal transaction reported by the special sciences can be retraced by microphysics.2 Hegemonic physicalism holds that retracing such a transaction at the level of.. (shrink)

When a tree is chopped to bits, or a sweater unravelled, its matter still exists. Since antiquity, it has sometimes been inferred that nothing really has been destroyed: what has happened is just that this matter has assumed new form. Contemporary versions hold that apparent destruction of a familiar object is just rearrangement of microparticles or of 'physical simples' or 'world stuff'. But if destruction of a familiar object is genuinely to be reduced to mere alteration of something else, we (...) must identify an alteration proper to the career, the course of existence, of this something else; relatedly, the alteration must be characterizable without asserting the existence of the familiar object. All contemporary views fail one of these requirements. (shrink)

.What are the truth-makers for the claims we make about the ways familiar objects persist across change?“Stage theory” has come to be recognized as an alternative to endurantism and perdurantism. It locates the truth-makers in properties possessed by momentary object-stages and in relations between suitably propertied objectstages. This paper argues that stage theory needs tightening up: momentary stages are too short to possess by themselves the requisite properties, and relations to other stages cannot remedy the defect. Fixing this problem requires (...) reconstruing stage theory. It then is the position that all claims of persistence are true only when we are speaking loosely; in philosophical strictness, nothing persists. What stage theory then endangers is neither endurantism nor perdurantism—these now have no subject-matter—but recent efforts to argue that the essence/accident distinction is as objective as persistence itself. But even reconstrued stage theory fails. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titles: I II III IV.

The central dispute between evidentialists and pragmatists about reasons for belief concerns whether or not non-evidential considerations can be reasons for belief. In recent work, some pragmatists about reasons for belief have made their case for pragmatism by appealing, in part, to a broad range of cases in which facts about one’s relationships with significant others (friends, romantic partners, and the like) appear to give one non-evidential reasons to have beliefs skewed in their favor. This chapter explores whether and how (...) such relationships might provide non-evidential reasons for belief. After first making the case against the evidentialist’s claim that there cannot be non-evidential reasons for belief, this chapter turns to examine different accounts of how our personal relationships might ground reasons for doxastic partiality. These are accounts on which reasons for doxastic partiality are grounded in facts about what attitudes are partly constitutive of being a good significant other to someone, and accounts on which reasons for doxastic partiality are grounded in reasons, more broadly, to benefit one’s significant others. This chapter argues that our personal relationships do not provide non-evidential reasons for belief, even if the pragmatist is right that there can be non-evidential reasons for belief. (shrink)

This essay details the resurgence of wellness program as employed by large corporations with the aim of reducing healthcare costs. The essay narrows in on a discussion of how Big Data collection practices are being utilized in wellness programs and the potential negative impact on the worker in regards to privacy and employment discrimination. The essay offers an ethical framework to be adopted by wellness program vendors in order to conduct wellness programs that would achieve cost-saving goals without undue burdens (...) on the worker. The essay also offers some innovative approaches to wellness that may well better serve the goals of healthcare cost reduction. (shrink)

Several approaches to implementing symbol-like representations in neurally plausible models have been proposed. These approaches include binding through synchrony, “mesh” binding, and conjunctive binding. Recent theoretical work has suggested that most of these methods will not scale well, that is, that they cannot encode structured representations using any of the tens of thousands of terms in the adult lexicon without making implausible resource assumptions. Here, we empirically demonstrate that the biologically plausible structured representations employed in the Semantic Pointer Architecture approach (...) to modeling cognition do scale appropriately. Specifically, we construct a spiking neural network of about 2.5 million neurons that employs semantic pointers to successfully encode and decode the main lexical relations in WordNet, which has over 100,000 terms. In addition, we show that the same representations can be employed to construct recursively structured sentences consisting of arbitrary WordNet concepts, while preserving the original lexical structure. We argue that these results suggest that semantic pointers are uniquely well-suited to providing a biologically plausible account of the structured representations that underwrite human cognition. (shrink)

In Sweden, palliative care has, over the past decades, been object to policies and guidelines with focus on how to achieve “good palliative care”. The aim of this study has been to analyse how experts make sense of the development and the current state of palliative care. Departing from this aim, focus has been on identifying how personal experiences of ‘the self’ are intertwined with culturally available meta-level concepts and how experts contribute to construct new scripts on palliative care. Twelve (...) qualitative interviews were conducted. Four scripts were identified after analysing the empirical material: 1. script of paths towards working within palliative care; 2. script of desirable and deterrent reference points; 3. script of tensions between improvement and bureaucracy; and 4. script of low status and uncertain definitions. The findings of this study illustrate how experts in complex ways intertwine experiences of ‘the self’ with meta-levels concepts in order to make sense of the field of palliative care. The participants did not endorse one “right way” of “good” deaths. Instead, palliative care was considered to be located in a complex state where the historical development, consisting of both desirable ideals, death denials and lack of guidelines, and more recent developments of strives towards universal concepts, “improvement” and increased bureaucracy altogether played a significant role for how palliative care has developed and is organised and conducted today. (shrink)

Feminist work in the history of philosophy has come of age as an innovative field in the history of philosophy. This volume marks that accomplishment with original essays by leading feminist scholars who ask basic questions: What is distinctive of feminist work in the history of philosophy? Is there a method that is distinctive of feminist historical work? How can women philosophers be meaningfully included in the history of the discipline? Who counts as a philosopher? This collection is a unique (...) collaboration among philosophers from North America and the Nordic Countries, including papers written from both analytic and continental philosophical perspectives and discussing both ancient and modern philosophers. Feminist Reflections on the History of Philosophy will be of interest to historians of philosophy, feminist theorists, women's studies faculty and students, and humanists interested in canon formation and transformation. (shrink)

The ability to quickly and accurately recognise emotional states is adaptive for numerous social functions. Although body movements are a potentially crucial cue for inferring emotions, few studies have studied the perception of body movements made in naturalistic emotional states. The current research focuses on the use of body movement information in the perception of fear expressed by targets in a virtual heights paradigm. Across three studies, participants made judgments about the emotional states of others based on motion-capture body movement (...) recordings of those individuals actively engaged in walking a virtual plank at ground-level or 80 stories above a city street. Results indicated that participants were reliably able to differentiate between height and non-height conditions (Studies 1 & 2), were more likely to spontaneously describe target behaviour in the height condition as fearful (Study 2) and their fear estimates were highly calibrated with the fear ratings from the targets (Studies 1-3). Findings show that VR height scenarios can induce fearful behaviour and that people can perceive fear in minimal representations of body movement. (shrink)

Eye-tracking is increasingly studied as a cognitive and biological marker for the early signs of neuropsychological and psychiatric disorders. However, in order to make further progress, a more comprehensive understanding of the age-related effects on eye-tracking is essential. The antisaccade task requires participants to make saccadic eye movements away from a prepotent stimulus. Speculation on the cause of the observed age-related differences in the antisaccade task largely centers around two sources of cognitive dysfunction: inhibitory control (IC) and working memory (WM). (...) The IC account views cognitive slowing and task errors as a direct result of the decline of inhibitory cognitive mechanisms. An alternative theory considers that a deterioration of WM is the cause of these age-related effects on behavior. The current study assessed IC and WM processes underpinning saccadic eye movements in young and older participants. This was achieved with three experimental conditions that systematically varied the extent to which WM and IC were taxed in the antisaccade task: a memory-guided task was used to explore the effect of increasing the WM load; a Go/No-Go task was used to explore the effect of increasing the inhibitory load; a ‘standard’ antisaccade task retained the standard WM and inhibitory loads. Saccadic eye movements were also examined in a control condition: the standard prosaccade task where the load of WM and IC were minimal or absent. Saccade latencies, error rates and the spatial accuracy of saccades of older participants were compared to the same measures in healthy young controls across the conditions. The results revealed that aging is associated with changes in both IC and WM. Increasing the inhibitory load was associated with increased reaction times in the older group, while the increased WM load and the inhibitory load contributed to an increase in the antisaccade errors. These results reveal that aging is associated with changes in both IC and WM. (shrink)

This paper explores the manner in which educational and political conservatives attempted to control the content and purposes of the history curriculum in English schools during the period 1987-1994. It focuses upon this particular coalition because, since the late 1970s, it has set the agenda for the debate and dominated the race to produce a history curriculum designed to help produce a particular kind of society. The paper argues that the New Right's claim to be engaging in an educational debate (...) is spurious. Rather, its concern is primarily ideological and only educational in terms of its use of history education as a vehicle through which to disseminate a specific set of values and beliefs. (shrink)

This article takes two events in the ongoing story of a predicted UK avian flu epidemic—“the dead parrot” (October 2005) and “the dying swan” (April 2006)—and examines the role and use of three interconnected metaphor scenarios (related to the notions of “journey,” “war,” and “house”) in the UK press coverage about avian influenza in 2005 and 2006. These represent fundamental descriptive and explanatory structures that derive from culturally or phenomenologically salient objects or experiences, and which allow journalists, scientists, and policymakers (...) to reduce the complexity of the threat posed by a disease and to promote risk-management strategies for the disease that appear to make instinctive or intuitive sense to experts and the public. Although similar metaphor scenarios may be used over time, the kinds of reporting they are associated with and the policy scenarios that result from these framings differ depending on the perceived proximity of the disease threat. (shrink)

Emperor Julian's three-book treatiseContra Galilaeossurvives solely in those Christian sources that quoted it in order to respond to its forceful attack on Christianity. The bulk of these survivals comes from Cyril of Alexandria's twenty-bookContra Iulianum. The recent publication of the first modern critical edition of Cyril's work creates the occasion for a fresh study of the remnants of Julian's text that can be recovered from it. This is especially true for Books 11–20 of Cyril's treatise that are themselves lost and (...) survive only in quotations in later Greek and Syriac sources. The present article undertakes a reassessment of the Julianic material preserved via the Syriac transmission ofContra Iulianum, including several passages hitherto unknown or ignored in earlier studies of Julian's treatise. It provides the Syriac text and English translation of eight passages and contextualizes them in the wider argumentative aim ofContra Galilaeos. (shrink)

Contemporary debates on decolonising knowledge production, inclusive of research on Africa, are crucial and challenge researchers to reflect on the legacies of colonial power relations that continue to permeate the production of knowledge about the continent, its peoples, and societies. Yet these are not new debates. Sixty years ago, Ghana’s first president and pan-Africanist leader, Dr Kwame Nkrumah, highlighted the importance of Africa-centred knowledge. Similarly, in the 1980s, Claude Ake advocated for endogenous knowledge production on Africa. But progress has been (...) slow at best, indicated by the enduring predominance of non-African writers on African issues within leading scholarly journals. Thus, we examine why decolonisation of knowledge production remains so necessary and what can be done within the context of scholarly research in the humanities and social sciences. These questions are addressed at two levels, one more practical and one more reflective . At both levels, issues of power inequalities and injustice are critical. At the practical level, the asymmetrical power relations between scholars in the Global North and South are highlighted. At a deeper level, the critiques of contemporary African authors are outlined, all contesting the ongoing coloniality and epistemic injustices that affect knowledge production on Africa, and calling for a more fundamental reorientation of ontological, epistemological, and methodological approaches in order to decolonise knowledge production. (shrink)

Defining and identifying causal intervention effects for transmissible infectious disease outcomes is challenging because a treatment – such as a vaccine – given to one individual may affect the infection outcomes of others. Epidemiologists have proposed causal estimands to quantify effects of interventions under contagion using a two-person partnership model. These simple conceptual models have helped researchers develop causal estimands relevant to clinical evaluation of vaccine effects. However, many of these partnership models are formulated under structural assumptions that preclude realistic (...) infectious disease transmission dynamics, limiting their conceptual usefulness in defining and identifying causal treatment effects in empirical intervention trials. In this paper, we propose causal intervention effects in two-person partnerships under arbitrary infectious disease transmission dynamics, and give nonparametric identification results showing how effects can be estimated in empirical trials using time-to-infection or binary outcome data. The key insight is that contagion is a causal phenomenon that induces conditional independencies on infection outcomes that can be exploited for the identification of clinically meaningful causal estimands. These new estimands are compared to existing quantities, and results are illustrated using a realistic simulation of an HIV vaccine trial. (shrink)

Anthropology and photography have been linked since the nineteenth century, but their relationship has never been entirely comfortable—and has grown less so in recent years. Nostalgia for the Present aims to repair that relationship by involving intentional participants in an inclusive conversation; it is the fruit of a collaboration among an ethnographer, a photographer, a group of Moroccan farmers, and Abdelkrim Bamouh—a native intellectual whose deep understanding of rural Morocco made him not merely a translator but a facilitator of the (...) dialogue. The result is an arresting portrait of everyday life in Tagharghist, a contemporary High Atlas village. The pictures are central, and the text built around them creates a dialogical form of visual ethnography. Nostalgia for the Present is both a memorialization of a people and a way of life, and a rich foray into the potential of interdisciplinary collaboration. The photos in this book evoke a sense of nostalgia, a longing, and the words explore the contexts and ambiguities that vitalize it. As the book concludes, nostalgia happens in our present, and is about our future. It is a call from our heart to attend carefully to something we are leaving, something our gut tells us we ought to cherish and preserve, and bring with us on our inexorable march into the unknown. This book has been published with the support of the Centre Jacques Berque in Morocco. (shrink)

To sum up the main results of this study: I have disentangled two distinct patterns of argument that Taylor runs together in his attempt to show that there is a reason or explanation for the world as a whole. The first is based on the causal dependency of things in the world, the second is based on their logical contingency. It seems to make the most sense of Taylor's discussion if we interpret him not as invoking the principle of sufficient (...) reason at the crucial juncture, but as using these arguments to give backing to that principle by showing that it applies to the world in its totality. However, these arguments do not succeed in doing that. The first fails because it depends on a remote analogy between the world as a whole and the physical objects in the world. Concerning the second, an analysis of the logic of why-questions about the existence of things has revealed that the logical contingency of something is not a ground for thinking it has an explanation. The only promising interpretation of the principle of sufficient reason that we have found is as a causal principle pertaining to things in nature. (shrink)