With the growth of neuroscience research, new neuroscience and society (NeuroX) fields like neuroethics, neurolaw, neuroarchitecture, neuroeconomics, and many more have emerged. In this article we report on lessons learned about mentoring students in the interdisciplinary space of neuroscience and society. We draw on our experiences with the recently launched Dana Foundation Career Network in Neuroscience & Society. This resource supports educators and practitioners mentoring students aiming to apply neuroscience in diverse fields beyond medicine and biomedical science. Through our (...) programming, we identified three key lessons: (1) students are interested in exploring a wide range of neuroscience and society intersections; (2) outreach to underserved institutions generates avenues for students to join NeuroX conversations; and (3) by offering free access to online NeuroX resources and a network of subject-matter experts, the Career Network joins many partners helping to bridge the gap between neuroscience and society. (shrink)

The volume offers an assorted collection of studies showcasing digitalization methods. The focus on Romance languages (e.g. Latin, Italian, Romanian, Spanish) provides an entry point in digital humanities, at large, exemplified by a tripartite division of the collection: resources and digitalization, tools and interfaces, and computational methods.

In Edwards, we see the portrait of a man who knows how to merge in one vocation the ministry of a pastor and that of an evangelist. As a pastor, Edwards knew how to act soberly in supervising the flock of God. As an evangelist, he knew how to avoid any excess of emotionalism and how to focus his efforts on maintaining steadiness and stability in his care for the human souls. He saw himself under the obligation to take the (...) message of God to all those who struggled in this life. In his mind it was clear that God chooses his servants and then commissions them to preach the gospel with passion. (shrink)

Whatever opinion we might have on the covenants of God with man, we cannot escape the fundamental truth that covenant theology is the best way of presenting the Biblical development of God’s revelation in the history of mankind. Therefore, our duty is to learn to think in covenantal terms, because thinking in covenantal terms means to think biblically. When God, in His sovereignty, has chosen to deal with man, He has chosen to do so through two covenants: the covenant of (...) works, made between God and Adam as the representative head of all mankind, and through the covenant of grace, made between God and Christ on behalf of those who were predestined and elected in Christ. (shrink)

_On the Lyricism of the Mind: Psychoanalysis and Literature_ explores the lyrical dimension of the psychic space. It is not presented as an artistic disposition, but rather as a universal psychic quality which enables the recovery and recuperation of the self. The specific nature of human lyricism is defined as the interaction as well as the integration of two psychic modes of experience originally defined by the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion: The emergent and the continuous principles of the self. Dana (...) Amir elaborates Bion's general notion of an interaction between the emergent and the continuous principles of the self, offering a discussion of the specific function of each principle and of the significance of the various types of interaction between them as the basis for mental health or pathology. The author applies these theoretical notions in her analytic work by means of literary illustrations showing how the lyrical dimension may be used to teach psychoanalytic readings of literature and explore the connection between psychoanalytic and literary languages._ _ On the Lyricism of the Mind presents a new psychoanalytic understanding of the capacity to heal, to grieve, to love and to know, using literary illustrations but also literary language in order to extract a new formulation out of the classic psychoanalytic language of Winnicott and Bion. This book will appear to a wide audience to include psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and art therapists. It is also extremely relevant to literary scholars, including students of literary criticism, philosophers of language and philosophers of mind, novelists, poets, and to the wide educated readership in general._ _. (shrink)

Nelkin presents a simple and natural account of freedom and moral responsibility which responds to the great variety of challenges to the idea that we are free and responsible, before ultimately reaffirming our conception of ourselves as agents. Making Sense of Freedom and Responsibility begins with a defense of the rational abilities view, according to which one is responsible for an action if and only if one acts with the ability to recognize and act for good reasons. The view is (...) compatibilist -- that is, on the view defended, responsibility is compatible with determinism -- and one of its striking features is a certain asymmetry: it requires the ability to do otherwise for responsibility when actions are praiseworthy, but not when they are blameworthy. In defending and elaborating the view, Nelkin questions long-held assumptions such as those concerning the relation between fairness and blame and the nature of so-called reactive attitudes such as resentment and forgiveness. Her argument not only fits with a metaphysical picture of causation -- agent-causation -- often assumed to be available only to incompatibilist accounts, but receives positive support from the intuitively appealing Ought Implies Can Principle, and establishes a new interpretation of freedom and moral responsibility that dovetails with a compelling account of our inescapable commitments as rational agents. (shrink)

Jim buys a ticket in a million-ticket lottery. He knows it is a fair lottery, but, given the odds, he believes he will lose. When the winning ticket is chosen, it is not his. Did he know his ticket would lose? It seems that he did not. After all, if he knew his ticket would lose, why would he have bought it? Further, if he knew his ticket would lose, then, given that his ticket is no different in its chances (...) of winning from any other ticket, it seems that by parity of reasoning he should also know that every other ticket would lose. But of course he doesn’t know that; in fact, he knows that not every ticket will lose. (shrink)

In everyday life, we assume that there are degrees of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness. Yet the debate about the nature of moral responsibility often focuses on the “yes or no” question of whether indeterminism is required for moral responsibility, while questions about what accounts for more or less blameworthiness or praiseworthiness are underexplored. In this paper, I defend the idea that degrees of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness can depend in part on degrees of difficulty and degrees of sacrifice required for performing the (...) action in question. Then I turn to the question of how existing accounts of the nature of moral responsibility might be seen to accommodate these facts. In each case of prominent compatibilist and incompatibilist accounts that I consider, I argue that supplementation with added dimensions is required in order to account for facts about degrees of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness. For example, I argue that the reasons-responsiveness view of Fischer and Ravizza requires supplementation that takes us beyond even fine-grained measures of degrees of reasons-responsiveness in order to capture facts about degrees of difficulty to extend the reasons-responsiveness view by appealing to such measures). I conclude by showing that once we recognize the need for these additional parameters, we will be in a position to explain away at least some of the appeal of incompatibilist accounts of moral responsibility. (shrink)

This Very Short Introduction explores the philosophical ideas and political theories of Hannah Arendt (1906-1975). As a survivor of the Holocaust, Arendt's life informed her work exploring the meaning and construction of power, evil, totalitarianism, and direct democracy. Through insightful readings of Arendt's best-known works, from The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) to The Life of the Mind (1978), Dana Villa traces the importance of Arendt's ideas for today's reader. In so doing, Villa explains how Arendt gained world-wide fame with (...) the publication of Origins, and went on to have a distinguished career as a political theorist and public intellectual. A sometimes controversial figure, Arendt is now recognised as one of the most important political thinkers of the twentieth century and her works have become an acknowledged part of the Western canon of political theory and philosophy"--From the publisher. (shrink)

This article offers an analysis of lived experiences of transnational mobility for gay-identified expatriates who reside in Manila, the Philippines. Drawing from in-depth interviewing and discourse analysis of eight cases, the author argues that homonormative mobility organizes gay men's travel, even as gay expatriates work to reimagine themselves through their travel and face destabilizing experiences in transnational spaces. The author offers a theorization of homonormative mobility to explain discourses of normative gender, race-nation, and desire in gay travel. Specifically, she argues (...) that expatriates describe their mobility as an escape from the heteronormative controls they face at home, masculine access to freeing places in “foreign” playgrounds, an act of homo-orientalist desire of Filipino men and spaces, a desirable experience that builds their own self-confidence, and troubling for their self-perceptions. (shrink)

Ernesto Mayz Vallenilla. In memoriam (1925-2015) Rememorando una clase magistral (A modo de homenaje personal).

Se plantea la paradoja resultante, por un parte, de la necesidad del fundacionalismo y, por la otra, de su imposibilidad. Frente a ello se sugiere una lectura de Sobre la certeza de Wittgenstein, que permite concebir una forma de fundacionalismo diferente a la clásica moderna: una en que fundamento y fundado pertenecen a ámbitos diferentes y donde se desvincula la verdad de la certeza. Ante la falta de claridad respecto a los requeridos cambios en el sistema de certezas, se consideran (...) ideas provenientes de la filosofía de Gadamer que permitirían una lectura adecuada de las secciones 94-99 de la mencionada obra. (shrink)

This essay examines Aristotle's discussion of the recognition scenes in Euripides' Iphigenia in Tauris and in Polyidus' alternative scenario. It suggests that Aristotle might show interest in Polyidus because he intuits the significance of the timing of the recognition scenes within the plot. Gluck's eighteen-century opera, Iphigénie en Tauride, maintains the general structure of Euripides' play but borrows Polyidus' recognition scene. The operatic recognition provides a clear dramatic frame to the brief references to Polyidus in the Poetics and facilitates an (...) analysis of the differences between Euripides and Polyidus. (shrink)

In conclusion, then, the situationist literature provides a rich area of exploration for those interested in freedom and responsibility. Interestingly, it does not do so primarily because it is situationist in the sense of supporting the substantive thesis about the role of character traits. Rather it is because it makes us wonder whether we really do act on a regular basis with the particular normative, epistemic,and reactive capacities that are central to our identity as free and responsible agents.

Animate vision systems have gaze control mechanisms that can actively position the camera coordinate system in response to physical stimuli. Compared to passive systems, animate systems show that visual computation can be vastly less expensive when considered in the larger context of behavior. The most important visual behavior is the ability to control the direction of gaze. This allows the use of very low resolution imaging that has a high virtual resolution. Using such a system in a controlled way provides (...) additional constraints that dramatically simplify the computations of early vision. Another important behavior is the way the environment “behaves‘. Animate systems under real-time constraints can further reduce their computational burden by using environmental cues that are perspicuous in the local context. A third source of economy is introduced when behaviors are learned. Because errors are rarely fatal, systems using learning algorithms can amortize computational cost over extended periods. Further economies can be achieved when the learning system uses indexical reference, which is a form of dynamic variable binding. Animate vision is a natural way of implementing this dynamic binding. (shrink)

Theodor Adorno once wrote an essay to "defend Bach against his devotees." In this book Dana Villa does the same for Hannah Arendt, whose sweeping reconceptualization of the nature and value of political action, he argues, has been covered over and domesticated by admirers who had hoped to enlist her in their less radical philosophical or political projects. Against the prevailing "Aristotelian" interpretation of her work, Villa explores Arendt's modernity, and indeed her postmodernity, through the Heideggerian and Nietzschean theme (...) of a break with tradition at the closure of metaphysics.Villa's book, however, is much more than a mere correction of misinterpretations of a major thinker's work. Rather, he makes a persuasive case for Arendt as the postmodern or postmetaphysical political theorist, the first political theorist to think through the nature of political action after Nietzsche's exposition of the death of God. After giving an account of Arendt's theory of action and Heidegger's influence on it, Villa shows how Arendt did justice to the Heideggerian and Nietzschean criticism of the metaphysical tradition while avoiding the political conclusions they drew from their critiques. The result is a wide-ranging discussion not only of Arendt and Heidegger, but of Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, Habermas, and the entire question of politics after metaphysics. (shrink)

The cerebral cortex is a rich and diverse structure that is the basis of intelligent behavior. One of the deepest mysteries of the function of cortex is that neural processing times are only about one hundred times as fast as the fastest response times for complex behavior. At the very least, this would seem to indicate that the cortex does massive amounts of parallel computation.This paper explores the hypothesis that an important part of the cortex can be modeled as a (...) connectionist computer that is especially suited for parallel problem solving. The connectionist computer uses a special representation, termed value unit encoding, that represents small subsets of parameters in a way that allows parallel access to many different parameter values. This computer can be thought of as computing hierarchies of sensorimotor invariants. The neural substrate can be interpreted as a commitment to data structures and algorithms that compute invariants fast enough to explain the behavioral response times. A detailed consideration of this model has several implications for the underlying anatomy and physiology. (shrink)

Introduction changing climates of colonialism -- Every Navajo has an anthro -- Extractive legacies: histories of Diné power -- The rise of energy activism -- Solar power in Klagetoh -- Sovereignty's interdependencies -- Contesting expertise: Public hearings on Desert Rock -- Artifacts of energy futures -- Off-grid in the Chuskas -- Conversions -- Vitalities.

Benardete paradoxes involve infinite collections of Grim Reapers, assassins, demons, deafening peals, or even sentences. These paradoxes have recently been used in arguments for finitist metaphysical theses such as temporal finitism, causal finitism, and discrete views of time. Here we develop a new finite Benardete-like paradox. We then use this paradox to defend a companions in guilt argument that challenges recent applications of patchwork principles on behalf of the aforementioned finitist arguments. Finally, we develop another problem for those applications by (...) examining the notion of exact duplication. (shrink)

In this paper, I take up the question of whether the phenomenon of self-deception requires a radical sort of partitioning of the mind, and argue that it does not. Most of those who argue in favor of partitioning accept a model of self-deception according to which the self-deceived person desires to and intentionally sets out to form a certain belief that she knows to be false. Such a model is similar to that of deception of other persons, and for this (...) reason is thought to require that the self-deceiver’s mind be partitioned; one “part” of her knows the truth, while the other “part” is convinced of a false belief. I argue that while both the partitionist model and its main competitor should be rejected, each contains a key insight. On the one hand, anti-partitionist models correctly invoke some sort of desire or motivation on the part of self-deceivers as playing a role in the acquisition of their beliefs. But it is partitionists who identify the right sort of desire, namely, the desire to believe. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt's rich and varied political thought is more influential today than ever before, due in part to the collapse of communism and the need for ideas that move beyond the old ideologies of the Cold War. As Dana Villa shows, however, Arendt's thought is often poorly understood, both because of its complexity and because her fame has made it easy for critics to write about what she is reputed to have said rather than what she actually wrote. Villa (...) sets out to change that here, explaining clearly, carefully, and forcefully Arendt's major contributions to our understanding of politics, modernity, and the nature of political evil in our century.Villa begins by focusing on some of the most controversial aspects of Arendt's political thought. He shows that Arendt's famous idea of the banality of evil--inspired by the trial of Adolf Eichmann--does not, as some have maintained, lessen the guilt of war criminals by suggesting that they are mere cogs in a bureaucratic machine. He examines what she meant when she wrote that terror was the essence of totalitarianism, explaining that she believed Nazi and Soviet terror served above all to reinforce the totalitarian idea that humans are expendable units, subordinate to the all-determining laws of Nature or History. Villa clarifies the personal and philosophical relationship between Arendt and Heidegger, showing how her work drew on his thought while providing a firm repudiation of Heidegger's political idiocy under the Nazis. Less controversially, but as importantly, Villa also engages with Arendt's ideas about the relationship between political thought and political action. He explores her views about the roles of theatricality, philosophical reflection, and public-spiritedness in political life. And he explores what relationship, if any, Arendt saw between totalitarianism and the "great tradition" of Western political thought. Throughout, Villa shows how Arendt's ideas illuminate contemporary debates about the nature of modernity and democracy and how they deepen our understanding of philosophers ranging from Socrates and Plato to Habermas and Leo Strauss.Direct, lucid, and powerfully argued, this is a much-needed analysis of the central ideas of one of the most influential political theorists of the twentieth century. (shrink)

Eye movements during mental imagery are not epiphenomenal but assist the process of image generation. Commands to the eyes for each fixation are stored along with the visual representation and are used as spatial index in a motor‐based coordinate system for the proper arrangement of parts of an image. In two experiments, subjects viewed an irregular checkerboard or color pictures of fish and were subsequently asked to form mental images of these stimuli while keeping their eyes open. During the perceptual (...) phase, a group of subjects was requested to maintain fixation onto the screen's center, whereas another group was free to inspect the stimuli. During the imagery phase, all of these subjects were free to move their eyes. A third group of subjects (in Experiment 2) was free to explore the pattern but was requested to maintain central fixation during imagery. For subjects free to explore the pattern, the percentage of time spent fixating a specific location during perception was highly correlated with the time spent on the same (empty) locations during imagery. The order of scanning of these locations during imagery was correlated to the original order during perception. The strength of relatedness of these scanpaths and the vividness of each image predicted performance accuracy. Subjects who fixed their gaze centrally during perception did the same spontaneously during imagery. Subjects free to explore during perception, but maintaining central fixation during imagery, showed decreased ability to recall the pattern. We conclude that the eye scanpaths during visual imagery reenact those of perception of the same visual scene and that they play a functional role. (shrink)

This article intends to analyse crossings between words and the Word. To this purpose, we will present linguistic and spiritual connotations of the terms belonging to the semantic field of the verb “to communicate” and of the idea of communication. We will also deepen the pneumatologic curative issue of the Word. The final section of the article will draw on the description of the extensive references in the relation between words and the Word.

This highly original interpretation of Paul by the Jewish philosopher of religion Jacob Taubes was presented in a number of lectures held in Heidelberg toward the end of his life, and was regarded by him as his “spiritual testament.” Taubes engages with classic Paul commentators, including Karl Barth, but also situates the Pauline text in the context of Freud, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Adorno, Scholem, and Rosenzweig. In his distinctive argument for the apocalyptic-revolutionary potential of Romans, Taubes also takes issue with the (...) “political theology” advanced by the conservative Catholic jurist Carl Schmitt. Taubes’s reading has been crucial for a number of interpretations of political theology and of Paul—including those of Jan Assmann and Giorgio Agamben—and it belongs to a wave of fresh considerations of Paul’s legacy. Finally, Taubes’s far-ranging lectures provide important insights into the singular experiences and views of this unconventional Jewish intellectual living in post-Holocaust Germany. (shrink)

This chapter explores whether it is possible to treat incompetent persons paternalistically. What is often seen to be wrong about acting paternalistically towards others is that one is treating these others as if they cannot make their own decisions about their own good. So how should one think about situations where one must make decisions on behalf of people who indeed cannot make their own decisions about their own good – especially if these people are still to some extent capable (...) of expressing their desires and concerns about what happens to them? This is often the case in the medical setting, when a patient has lost decisional capacity or has not developed such a capacity in the first place. Focusing on the medical setting, this chapter argues that insofar as someone has the component elements of agency, they can be the target of unjustified paternalism. The chapter first explores the ways in which patients may lack decisional capacity and whether such patients nevertheless retain a sense of agency that can be disrespected. It then examines whether, on some plausible accounts of paternalism, what constitutes disrespect towards the competent constitutes a similar disrespect to the agential capacities of the incompetent. (shrink)

As the age of genomic medicine has advanced rapidly, many questions pertaining to the reportability of both clinical and research findings have emerged. For example, the integration of genomic test...