Everyday beliefs often organize and guide motivations, goals, and behaviors, and, as such, may also differentially motivate individuals to value and attend to emotion-related cues of others. In this way, the beliefs that individuals hold may affect the socioemotional skills that they develop. To test the role of emotion-related beliefs specific to anger, we examined an educational context in which beliefs could vary and have implications for individuals’ skill. Specifically, we studied 43 teachers’ beliefs about students’ anger in the school (...) setting as well as their ability to recognize expressions of anger in children’s faces in a dynamic emotion recognition task. Results revealed that, even when controlling for teachers’ age and gender, teachers’ belief that children’s anger was useful and valuable in the school setting was associated with teachers’ accuracy at recognizing anger expressions in children’s faces. The belief that children’s anger was harmful and not conducive to learning, however, was not associated with teachers’ accuracy at recognizing children’s anger expressions. These findings suggest that certain everyday beliefs matter for predicting skill in recognizing specific emotion-related cues. (shrink)

1. The field of genetics has seen a huge increase in advancements over the past decade. Diseases that were once considered to have no treatment options yielding dismal outcomes now have quick and e...

Consumers are bombarded with labels and claims that are intended to address their concerns about how food products are produced, processed, and regulated. Among those are the natural or all-natural claims and the certified organic label. In this study, two focus groups were conducted to explore consumers’ attitudes toward all-natural and organic pork and to gather their reactions to the USDA organic standards for meat, and the policy for natural claims. Results indicated that participants had positive associations with the terms (...) “organic” and “all-natural” with exceptions regarding the trustworthiness of all-natural claims. Participants perceived the “no” labeling theme (no antibiotics, no hormones, no chemicals, etc.) often coupled with the all-natural label on pork products as identifying potential health and animal welfare risks. In response to the USDA standards and policies for labeling pork products as organic or all-natural, participants expressed confusion and had many unanswered questions. (shrink)

The Weight of the Nation™ conference was held in Washington, D.C. This article presents the issues and topics presented and discussed within the Food and Water System: Agriculture, Access and Sustainability track. Areas for opportunity are outlined in this article.

Improving generalization in psychology will require more expansive data collection to fuel more expansive statistical models, beyond the scale of traditional lab research. We argue that citizen science is uniquely positioned to scale up data collection and, that in spite of certain limitations, can help to alleviate the generalizability crisis.

In what constitutes the only English-language collection of essays ever dedicated to the analysis of Montesquieu's contributions to political science, the contributors review some of the most vexing controversies that have arisen in the interpretation of Montesquieu's thought. By paying careful attention to the historical, political, and philosophical contexts of Montesquieu's ideas, the contributors provide fresh readings of The Spirit of Laws, clarify the goals and ambitions of its author, and point out the pertinence of his thinking to the problems (...) of our world today. (shrink)

Much of the developing world, including Kenya, is rapidly urbanizing. Rising food and fuel prices in recent years have put the food security of the urban poor in a precarious position. In cities worldwide, urban agriculture helps some poor people gain access to food, but urban agriculture is less common in densely populated slums that lack space. In the Kibera slums of Nairobi, Kenya, households have recently begun a new form of urban agriculture called sack gardening in which vegetables such (...) as kale and Swiss chard are planted into large sacks filled with topsoil. This paper examines relationships among sack gardening, social capital, and food security in Kibera. We used a mixed methods approach, combining qualitative interviews with a household survey, as well as focus group discussions with both farmers and non-farmers. We present evidence that sack gardening increases social capital, especially for those households that undertake sack gardening in groups. We also find that sack gardening in the Kibera slums has a positive impact on household food security by improving household dietary diversity and by reducing the need to resort to painful coping mechanisms that are used during food shortages. (shrink)

Vaccine refusal has increasingly been the focus of public health concern. Rates of children who are up to date on vaccines have declined in recent years, and vaccine refusal has been implicated in disease outbreaks. Most research on children who are not fully immunized identifies white affluent mothers as most likely to opt out by choice and Black mothers as more likely to face structural barriers that limit access to vaccines for their children. In this paper, we analyze social media (...) posts and online discussions among Black mothers to better understand their concerns about vaccines. Unlike white women who reject vaccines as a personal choice, Black mothers express unique concerns about the role of the state in their lives. Specifically, some Black mothers using social media view vaccines as a white technology and claim that white women have greater freedom in opting out of vaccines without the same risks to their families. They describe efforts to strategize interactions with pediatricians and other healthcare providers who can report them to social service agencies or block access to welfare and nutritional benefits for their families if they refuse vaccines. Black women’s experiences with structural gendered racism in interactions with healthcare and education systems shape vaccine decisions and should be taken seriously. (shrink)

Available for the first time in English, this critical translation draws from the original seven Latin editions and Georg Friedrich Meier's 18th-century German translation. Together with a historical and philosophical introduction, extensive glossaries and notes, the text is supported by translations of Kant's elucidations and notes, Eberhard's insertions in the 1783 German edition and texts from the writings of Meier and Wolff. For scholars of Kant, the German Enlightenment and the history of metaphysics, Alexander Baumgarten's Metaphysics is an essential, authoritative (...) resource to a significant philosophical text. (shrink)

Increasing emphasis on patient self-management, including having patients advocate for their needs and priorities, is generally a good thing, but it is not always wanted or attainable by patients. The aim of this critical ethical review is to deepen the current discourse in patient self-advocacy by exposing various situations in which patients struggle to self-advocate. Using examples from oncology patient populations, we disambiguate different notions of self-advocacy and then present limits to the more demanding varieties (i.e., health-related, trust-based, and psychological); (...) we argue that these limits create ethical dilemmas with respect to whether it is always desirable to encourage patients to self-advocate. We conclude that self-advocacy can be both under and overrated with respect to how much it benefits the patient with cancer, with many instances being indeterminate. Ultimately, providers must understand the patient's perspective relative to the challenges they are experiencing and work with them to meet their needs. (shrink)

A substantial portion of the developed world's population is increasingly dependent on machines to make their way in the everyday world. For certain privileged groups, computers, cell phones, PDAs, Blackberries, and IPODs, all permitting the faster processing of information, are commonplace. In these populations, even exercise can be automated as persons try to achieve good physical fitness by riding stationary bikes, running on treadmills, and working out on cross-trainers that send information about performance and heart rate.

This paper considers the ways that concepts such as social justice and law were used as semiotic objects-in-tension by a group of five US undergraduates considering law school to make sense of their ideas about entering the discourse communities and communities of practice associated with being a lawyer. This group was made up of undergraduate women who had completed a summer residency program sponsored by the Law School Admissions Council to increase enrollment of students from under-represented groups. Of the five (...) participants, two were US-born; the others immigrated to the US as teenagers; each was aware of her position as multiply marginalized, by gender as well as other factors, including refugee or immigrant status, religious affiliation, sexual identity, and/or association with “at risk” labeling. Data analyzed reflect a 3-year study of their changing perceptions of their relationships to law school discourse communities, using text, interviews, individual video narratives, and informal, face-to-face group meetings. A sociolinguistic approach to multimodal discourse analysis is used to examine the ways that the women, each in a unique way, articulated an increased investment in direct and embodied engagement, lived experience, and personal testimony—not as supplements to doing/being a lawyer, but as necessary and expected practices therein. Over time and through various modalities, they used their vantage point from outside the dominant discourse communities of law to stage social critique and to contest the binary logic and normative criteria that forge the boundaries of exclusion from and inclusion in these communities. Specifically, they resemiotized notions of being a lawyer from the margins in ways that demanded a more fluid and polysemous interpretation of what it means to do ethically rigorous social justice work—hence reworking the relationships between justice and the law and widening the semiotic potential of their own future work. Particularly significant are the ways that semiotic trajectories progressed from an emphasis on what Halliday identifies as textual functions of language to interpersonal and ideational functions. Such a trajectory away from entextualization suggests that voices and perspectives from the margins may be using those imaginary margins tactically as sites from which to contest the boundaries that define whose voices count within the legal system and to contest normative limits on semiotic potentialities for lawyers working toward more just social futures. (shrink)

PurposeThe unique constraints to everyday life brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic have been suggested to negatively impact those with pre-existing mental health issues such as eating disorders. While individuals with eating disorders or disordered eating behaviors likely represent a vulnerable group to the COVID-19 pandemic, the impact of the pandemic is yet to be fully established.MethodsWe systematically examined the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on eating disorders and disordered eating behaviors. We searched electronic databases MEDLINE, PsycINFO, CINAHL, and EMBASE (...) for literature published until October 2021. Eligible studies were required to report on individuals with or without a diagnosed eating disorder or disordered eating behaviors who were exposed to the COVID-19 pandemic.FindingsSeventy-two studies met eligibility criteria with the majority reporting an increase in eating disorder or disordered eating behaviors associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, it appears children and adolescents and individuals with a diagnosed eating disorder may present vulnerable groups to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.DiscussionThis mixed systematic review provides a timely insight into COVID-19 eating disorder literature and will assist in understanding possible future long-term impacts of the pandemic on eating disorder behaviors. It appears that the role of stress in the development and maintenance of eating disorders may have been intensified to cope with the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic. Future research is needed among understudied and minority groups and to examine the long-term implications of the COVID-19 pandemic on eating disorders and disordered eating behaviors.Systematic review registrationhttps://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/display_record.php?RecordID=284749, PROSPERO [CRD42021284749]. (shrink)

Between 1989 and 1998, The Fund for Animals organized protests and acts of civil disobedience against the largest pigeon shoot in this country. During this long campaign, The Fund used a variety of approaches to argue for its position. This article focuses on two distinct enactments of civil disobedience at the Hegins shoot. Through an historical comparative analysis, the article describes the acts of civil disobedience and the context within which they took place for both 1992 and 1996. The article (...) focuses on audience reaction, including media representatives, in order to discern why onlookers may have found one instance of civil disobedience more compelling than another. The findings suggest that the effectiveness of civil disobedience may be determined in part by the way it is enacted. Specifically, civil disobedience is more persuasive when enacted in clearly nonviolent/non-threatening ways and when participants demonstrate not only a willingness to suffer for their beliefs but also an interest in communicating that suffering to onlookers. (shrink)

One of the greatest dramatists of all time, Shakespeare, recognized that dramatic action was not limited to the stage. Now, in Drama and Intelligence, a work firmly rooted in developmental drama, Richard Courtney is the first to examine dramatic action as an intellectual and cognitive activity. Courtney explores the nature of those experiences we live "through" and which involve us in what is termed "as if" thinking and action.

This work argues that teleological motives lie at the heart of Kant's critical philosophy and that a precise analysis of teleological structures can both illuminate the basic strategy of its fundamental arguments and provide a key to understanding its unity. It thus aims, through an examination of each of Kant's major writings, to provide a detailed interpretation of his claim that philosophy in the true sense must consist of a teleologia rationis humanae. The author argues that Kant's critical philosophy forged (...) a new link between traditional teleological concepts and the basic structure of rationality, one that would later inform the dynamic conception of reason at the heart of German Idealism. The process by which this was accomplished began with Kant's development of a uniquely teleological conception of systematic unity already in the precritical period. The individual chapters of this work attempt to show how Kant adapted and refined this conception of systematic unity so that it came to form the structural basis for the critical philosophy. (shrink)

Althusser called a recent essay: ‘Is it simple to be a Marxist in philosophy?’ My title, intentionally provocative, echoes that question. Following Althusser, I shall answer it in the negative and, in so doing, shall raise a series of further questions concerning the nature of and connections between politics, science and philosophy. My lecture will keep turning on these three points, just as Althusser's own work has turned on them, ever since his first book, a monograph on Montesquieu, up to (...) his most recent critical interventions on the role and organization of the French Communist Party in the 1970s. In an interview given in 1968, characteristically entitled ‘Philosophy as a revolutionary weapon’, Althusser linked the three points in an autobiographical comment: In 1948, when I was thirty, I became a teacher of philosophy and joined the French Communist Party. Philosophy was an interest; I was trying to make it my profession. Politics was a passion; I was trying to become a communist militant. (shrink)

Timothy O'Hagan - The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau - Journal of the History of Philosophy 40:4 Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.4 546-547 Book Review The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau Patrick Riley, editor. The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xii + 453. Cloth, $69.95. Paper, $24.95. The book contains fifteen essays, three written by the editor. Of the fourteen authors, twelve are men, thirteen are anglophone, ten are based in the United States. (...) There are two excellent reprinted papers by deceased authors: G. A. Kelly's "General overview" and Shklar's "Rousseau's images of authority." Both are well worth re-reading. The rest are all new. The dominant genre of the collection is that kind of intellectual history which addresses "influences," both the predecessors who are thought to have influenced Rousseau, and the influence he may have had on subsequent intellectual and political developments. Some.. (shrink)

Descartes’s mechanistic account of the passions is sometimes dismissed as one which lacks the resources toadequately explain the cognitive aspect of emotion. By some, he is taken to be “feeling theorist”, reducing thepassions to a mere awareness of the physiological state of the soul-body union. If this reading of Descartes’spassions is correct, his theory fails not only because it cannot account for the intentional nature of the passions,but also because the passions cannot play the role in Descartes’s moral theory they (...) are meant to play. I arguethat Descartes’s account is not best read as a feeling theory. I defend a reading of the Cartesian passions whichacknowledges their mechanistic nature, arguing that for Descartes, passions are modes of the soul withcognitive significance, they are perceptions of relational axiological properties. Thus, Descartes’s theory of thepassions has the resources to connect it with an account of good conduct. As a means of elaborating on thenormative nature of the passions I consider the role of generosity in Descartes’s moral theory. (shrink)

David Garland?s The Culture of Control tells us more about the political culture of a post?11 September world than even he must have anticipated. The core of Garland?s cultural argument is his elaboration of a Durkheimian concept of moral individualism, to which he attributes a trend?setting influence lasting into the new millennium. He argues that, among youth, this new cultural influence has an egoistic, hedonistic quality, linked to a non?stop consumption ethos of the new capitalism. He emphasises that it is (...) the disadvantaged rather than the more privileged participants in this hedonistic youth culture who have been singled out for legal exposure and criminal sanctioning in a highly politicised binge of late modern penality. Garland?s prescient account exposes the first and most visible layers of social control that still hide vast inequalities in crime and punishment. There are important untold stories of the unpunished, more privileged participants in the hedonistic ?party? subculture of late modernity. The youthful patrons of this subculture, like their officially deviant counterparts, are disaffiliated and distrustful of conventional institutions, including contemporary work, family and politics. Garland awakens an awareness of our need to learn more about both the sanctioned and unsanctioned youth who are prominent and consequential players in our changing culture and politics. (shrink)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was hailed by Claude Lévi-Strauss as the founder of the sciences of man. This collection of fourteen classic papers devoted to his work addresses the points of intersection between the moral and the political, the personal and the social. The volume is divided into five parts: The Critique of Progress and the Speculative Anthropology, The Naturalizing of Natural Law, The General Will and Totalitarianism, Anticipations of Game Theory and Strategies of Redemption. The articles are accompanied by an extensive, (...) detailed introduction by the editor along with a selective bibliography. (shrink)

This paper shows that Kant's investigation into mathematical purposiveness was central to the development of his understanding of synthetic a priori knowledge. Specifically, it provides a clear historical explanation as to why Kant points to mathematics as an exemplary case of the synthetic a priori, argues that his early analysis of mathematical purposiveness provides a clue to the metaphysical context and motives from which his understanding of synthetic a-priori knowledge emerged, and provides an analysis of the underlying structure of mathematical (...) purposiveness itself, which can be described as unintentional, but also as objective and unlimited. (shrink)

Timothy O'Hagan explores some of the apparent paradoxes in the writings of Rousseau.

The purpose of this paper is to challenge the suggestion that Kant offers a solution to the Reinhold/Sidgwick Problem in his Metaphysics of Morals. The problem, briefly, is about how Kant can hold moral evil to be imputable when he also seems to hold that freedom is found only in moral actions. After providing a new formulation of this problem under the title ‘Objection R/S’ and describing the popular strategy for addressing it through reference to this text, the paper recounts (...) some of the history relevant to interpreting the passage in question. The paper then argues that this strategy is not supported by the text and indeed proves to be contrary to other arguments that are central to Kant's moral thought. The closing section briefly considers other possible ways of addressing the Objection R/S. (shrink)

I argue for an egalitarian conception of modesty. Modesty is a virtue because an apt expression of what is, and is not, morally salient in our attitudes toward persons and is important because we are prone to arrogance, self‐importance, and hero worship. To make my case, I consider 3 claims which have shaped recent discussions: first, that modesty is valuable because it obviates destructive social rankings; second, that modesty essentially involves an indifference to how others evaluate one's accomplishments; and third, (...) the wide spread but normatively fraught assumption that the modest person is deserving of credit. Although the first two features identify something significant about modesty, they fail to ground it. I argue that appeals to deserved credit bear a larger explanatory burden than has been supposed; they can smuggle in the illegitimate social hierarchies that modesty is supposed to counter. I make my case for modesty as an excellence in moral perspective by arguing that prominent, nonegalitarian, accounts of modesty allow for or promote illegitimate forms of social privilege. Modesty is valuable because it expresses a commitment to fair distribution of basic moral recognition and a skillful response to unjust social hierarchies at odds with this fair distribution. (shrink)

Tracing the political origins of the Mexican indigenous rights movement, from the colonial encounter to the Zapatista uprising, and from Chiapas to Geneva, Courtney Jung locates indigenous identity in the history of Mexican state formation. She argues that indigenous identity is not an accident of birth but a political achievement that offers a new voice to many of the world's poorest and most dispossessed. The moral force of indigenous claims rests not on the existence of cultural differences, or identity, (...) but on the history of exclusion and selective inclusion that constitutes indigenous identity. As a result, the book shows that privatizing or protecting such groups is a mistake and develops a theory of critical liberalism that commits democratic government to active engagement with the claims of culture. This book will appeal to scholars and students of political theory, philosophy, sociology, and anthropology studying multiculturalism and the politics of culture. (shrink)

This paper explains a way of understanding Kant's proof of God's existence in the Critique of Practical Reason that has hitherto gone unnoticed and argues that this interpretation possesses several advantages over its rivals. By first looking at examples where Kant indicates the role that faith plays in moral life and then reconstructing the proof of the second Critique with this in view, I argue that, for Kant, we must adopt a certain conception of the highest good, and so also (...) must choose to believe in the kind of God that can make it possible, because this is essentially a way of actively striving for virtue. One advantage of this interpretation, I argue, is that it is able to make sense of the strong link Kant draws between morality and religion. (shrink)

This paper traces the philosophical concept of life prior to Kant and uses this to contextualize his account of aesthetic judgment as a form of life. It argues on this basis that, according to Kant, the form that taste claims for itself, as explicated in its four moments, results in a demand being placed on the transcendental philosopher to admit the idea of an ultimate subjective basis of all cognitive activities in human beings, that is, a shared principle and form (...) of cognititive life htat is uniquely human. (shrink)

Sidney Hook's intellectual legacy is steeped in controversy. Matthew Bagger calls Hook "an unjustly neglected figure [whose] relative obscurity owes [in part] to his renown as a cold warrior, which repelled the generation of scholars that came of age in the late nineteen sixties and seventies."1 Indeed, for many scholars, a first point of reference for Sidney Hook is not pragmatism, nor even Hook's teacher and mentor John Dewey, but Hook's staunch commitment to anti-Communism. In 2004, Richard Rorty wrote of (...) him that "at the present time our major interest in Hook will be in his crusade against the influence of Stalinism on US intellectual and political life,"2 an assertion that has yet to... (shrink)