Healthcare workers carry a substantial risk of harm from infectious disease, particularly, but not exclusively, during outbreaks. More can be done by healthcare institutions to identify risks, quantify the current burden of preventable infectious disease amongst HCWs and identify opportunities for prevention. We suggest that institutional obligations should be clarified with respect to the mitigation of infectious disease risks to staff, and question the duty of HCWs to care while healthcare institutions persist with a reactive rather than proactive attitude to (...) infectious disease threats. (shrink)

Most cognitive psychology experiments evaluate models of human cognition using a relatively small, well-controlled set of stimuli. This approach stands in contrast to current work in neuroscience, perception, and computer vision, which have begun to focus on using large databases of natural images. We argue that natural images provide a powerful tool for characterizing the statistical environment in which people operate, for better evaluating psychological theories, and for bringing the insights of cognitive science closer to real applications. We discuss how (...) some of the challenges of using natural images as stimuli in experiments can be addressed through increased sample sizes, using representations from computer vision, and developing new experimental methods. Finally, we illustrate these points by summarizing recent work using large image databases to explore questions about human cognition in four different domains: modeling subjective randomness, defining a quantitative measure of representativeness, identifying prior knowledge used in word learning, and determining the structure of natural categories. (shrink)

Social anxiety may disrupt the empathic process, and well-regulated empathy is critical for navigating the social world. Two studies aimed to further understand empathy in the context of social anxiety. Study 1 compared individuals with elevated or normative social anxiety on a measure assessing cognitive and affective empathy for positive and negative emotions conveyed by other people (“targets”), completed under social threat. Relative to individuals with normative social anxiety, individuals with elevated social anxiety had greater cognitive empathy and no differences (...) in affective empathy, regardless of emotion type. As greater cognitive empathy can be maladaptive, Study 2 tested whether this could be down-regulated. Individuals with elevated social anxiety underwent emotional working memory training (eWMT) for negative emotional information, or control training (CT). Effects on an empathy measure completed under social threat were assessed. Cognitive empathy for negative emotions decreased following eWMT but not CT, and this was only evident for those with higher pre-training working memory capacity. Cognitive empathy for positive emotions and affective empathy were not affected. Overall, social anxiety is associated with aberrant elevated cognitive empathy for negative and positive emotions, and the deviation in cognitive empathy for negative emotions can be regulated with eWMT for certain individuals.Trial registration: Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry identifier: ACTRN12618001196235.. (shrink)

Beyond Power offers fresh ways to approach the burning political, religious, and scientific issues of our time. It also provides a compelling overview of the work of the great French philosopher Simone Weil, whom Albert Camus saw as "the only great mind of our time" and T. S. Eliot saw as "a woman of genius, a kind of genius akin to that of the saints.".

The contributions in the current issue of Ethical Perspectives mainly derive from a conference on Catholic Intellectual Traditions organized jointly by the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and the Erasmus Institute, University of Notre Dame, and held at Leuven from November 10th to the 11th, 2000. As the reader can see from a quick perusal of the table of contents, the contributions cover a diverse range of topics. The reader might well ask what such contributions have to do with a journal concerned (...) with ethical perspectives. What do contributions bearing on religious themes from literature, or reflections on mystical love, or on Catholicism and modern scholarship, have to do with a journal devoted to ethics? Surely we have all learned to our benefit from Kant that ethics is entirely autonomous with respect to religion. If there is a relation, it is one that must respect that autonomy, and not muddy the waters by bringing back the outmoded promiscuity of religion and ethics, and especially it must guard against religion trying to sly its way back to dominion over ethics once again.A reply to this line of reflection would be that Ethical Perspectives is concerned not only with perspectives, not only with what happens within perspectives, but with ethical perspectives as themselves coming to articulation within contexts that contain all the richness of human life as lived. Such contexts cannot be considered apart from serious reflection on religion as expressing the sense of ultimate worth that humans understand and try to live diversely. Contexts have to do with the ethos within which ethical perspectives, and our determinate address to specific ethical dilemmas occur. The practice of a religion, or the absence of it, or indeed the rejection of such practice, communicates something of our sense of the most ultimate ethos of being, and its goodness.Clearly this communication will also be effected in a diversity of ways: for instance, in the understanding we have of the economy and the state as serving, or despoiling, the worth of human life; or in the art and literature that offer us images of significant human possibility set forth for imaginative contemplation with a forthrightness more integral than the confused flux of everyday life allows; or in the secret love of prayer that draws the human soul towards its most extreme abandonment and adoration. Ethical perspectives do not make full sense in the determinate terms they overtly set forth, but draw from sources of value that more often than not remain implicit and intimate to the perspectives themselves. Full ethical reflection requires mindfulness of these more intimate sources, and an honest address towards our religious being is demanded by such reflection. Such honesty is asked of a non-believer as of a believer. Both indeed may be differently called into question by that honesty.If the conference was organized with reference to Catholic Traditions, does this indicate a kind of sectarian narrowness for the intellectual, despite what the word `catholic' might betoken? It will be evident from the contributions that no such narrowness is here at work. Quite the opposite: it is the rich diversity that is striking. One does hear reference to the `ghetto' of Catholic ways, perhaps Church ways, perhaps Christian ways generally. This is a very interesting word: `ghetto'. The discerning reader will note in some of the contributions a strong sympathy for Judaism. But in some instances we will be urged to get out of our `ghetto'. It might seem that as `Catholics' or `Christians' we are already `Jews'. Who put us into the `ghetto'? Is this self-incurred? It seems there are some who have consigned themselves to their own `ghetto', but while this may be true, are there not `ghettos' of religion that are the afterlives of certain Enlightenment ways of thinking about religion, afterlives internalized by those religious who would get out of this now self-imposed ghetto, and make their accommodation with more enlightened ways. How delightfully tangled it all is! We preach repentance and wonder at the end who it is that needs to repent, perhaps we the preachers! One thinks of Lear telling the judge to bring the lash to himself. I don't believe Lear was a Catholic, but he certainly was not an Enlightenment intellectual.There is a question worth asking here, in that for not a few the notion of a `Catholic intellectual' or `Christian intellectual' is an oxymoron. To be a real intellectual is not to be affiliated to an organization that already knows in advance what the truth is. One is reminded of those debates earlier in the 20th century between Bertrand Russell and Frederick Copleston. Russell: You are a Catholic, ergo you already know the answer, ergo you cannot honestly ask the question, ergo what you do cannot be philosophy, that is, free thinking.Very clever, of course, and not without some truth. Do we have to agree with Heidegger that a Christian philosophy is a round square? The problem here, of course, is philosophical. I would say: to be a philosopher is to be able to ask about anything, including religion. But the how of the asking is very important. The asking about religion might well seek a confirmation for what is held beforehand. But this holds true of the critics of religion as much as the sympathizers. The shoe is sometimes on the other foot. It is not only the apologetic Catholics who bring presuppositions to bear on the asking of a question, but so also do those critics who, mirabile dictu, strangely often find their own presuppositions confirmed once again. How easy to accuse the other of not being a `real' intellectual; how galling when it turns out that one's own practice of the free intellect mirrors one's chained opponent.The lesson I take: we inevitably bring fundamental presuppositions to bear in the asking of determinate questions. And it is these presuppositions we need to understand as much as the determinate questions and determinate answers. We are all put to the test. This is more catholic than the offensive critic or the defensive apologist. But you must have trust in mind to be willing to let one's thought be thus open. Such trust cannot be accounted for fully in the determinate ideas one explores or defends. It is interesting also that this trust, in the how of asking questions, mirrors the trust in the how of a person's faith or hope in God. This trust bears on this and that situation or difficulty, but it is in excess of this or that determinate situation or difficulty. It concerns sources of expectation in truth and goodness that are more than we can determine in advance. They are more than we can ever determine completely, since they make our determining possible. We are given to be in this expectation which we cannot completely determine through ourselves alone. And one might say that religion is the way we are given to keep open our communication to these sources of ultimate trust. Russell's cleverness is admirable, but that cleverness will not do to deal with the issue. If the issue concerns ethos or context in the sense implied above, cleverness will never do justice to that. While religion has the power to make us more discerning here, there is a cleverness that tends to make us obtuse.Of course, we intellectuals and academics love cleverness, since we think we are very clever ourselves. Here is one of our sources of difficulty with religion. People who are not clever like us also seem to be religious. If so, one might be tempted to say: being religious then cannot be the same as being clever; it might not even be clever to be religious; ergo to be a truly clever intellectual and academic, I must leave religion in my youth, and put on adult ways of thinking. One might even add to the clinching argument: for ethical reasons we must leave that behind, for just as our thinking must be autonomous, so we must our being ethical become entirely autonomous. Adieu religion!There is an argument here, but one wonders if there are also hints of the operation of a sly process of shaming. We now live in a time where processes of embarrassment are often at work in the initiation of young academics and intellectuals. I hear it said, or rather I hear the significant silence saying this: “It is not that we argue against religion, it's just that well, we real intellectuals don't talk about such things anymore”. We may speak at the top of our heads as post-modernists who have robustly deconstructed the Enlightenment ideal, but at the level of the more elusive and intimate embarrassment we are unself-conscious children of the Enlightenment. But did not the Enlightenment tell us no longer to be children. But now, with our heads we postmoderns tell ourselves we no longer want to be children of the Enlightenment, but in our hearts with regard to religion we are still such children — I mean children of the Enlightenment. Is it not time for that child also to grow up. If I were allowed to prophesy — and of course I am not allowed, since prophecy is now said not only to be inadmissible but impossible — I would inadmissibly and impossibly have to say that at the end of that growing up being religious might again wait gently for this stout child. How galling this will be, I do not prophesy, since we will then have to make our peace with all those people there who are not as clever as we are.We all know Kant's remarks about Enlightenment freeing us from self-incurred tutelage. And of course, our servility to spiritual despots and priestly powers was part of that tutelage. And so we have become autonomous thinkers. What if this autonomy comes to mean that we substitute for self-incurred tutelage a kind of self-incurred spiritual mutilation? If God is the distinguished thing, this may be so; and no amount of self-exculpation, not even ethical self-exculpation, in terms of our being denizens of the epoch of the death of God, will quite exonerate our blasé lack of urgency about divine ultimacy. (shrink)

A. Kenny, Frege, an introduction to the founder of modern analytic philosophy. London:Penguin, 1995. viii-h223pp. £7.99 T. Willamson, Vagueness. London:Routledge, 1994. xiii-f-325 pp. £35.00 TOM BU...

We point out that the acceptance of the relativity principle together with the homogeneity and isotropy of space and the homogeneity of time inevitably leads to the Lorentz spacetime transformation with a universal limiting speed σ. Speculations on possible new four-dimensional symmetries involving a variable “speed of light” such as that proposed by Hsu must therefore be dismissed on such a basis alone. In this paper we draw attention to some logical inconsistencies in Hsu's attempt at establishing a new space-light (...) transformation law, and follow with a discussion on why such an attempt must necessarily fail. (shrink)

Desmond Clarke's remarks on “my” absurdity argument are puzzling. i) Although I do indeed still believe it to be a valid argument, I certainly would not claim credit for it. I believe that “Reducibility: Another Side Issue?” put the general problem of the reducibility of mind into a somewhat unorthodox context, but the particular claim Clarke is attacking forms only one very unoriginal step in the general argument of that essay. ii) Some points that Clarke makes I would certainly (...) agree to, and believe I have agreed to in some of the texts he cites, while others are far from anything I meant to convey. Under Clarke's, 1) of course the “antinomies” of the paper above referred to trade on ambiguities. That's one of the points of the paper. 2) in both “Reducibility … ” and “To Have A Mind …”, I have tried to specify the sense in which “mechanism” was being used. That I do not take such terms as self-explanatory should be clear, for instance, from the remarks in the latter paper that immediately follow the passage Clarke criticizes. 3) I have no idea how physics is to develop in the future, nor did I wish to suggest that I did. With the rest of Clarke's I entirely agree. As to his, I fail to see its relevance to my argument, unless it simply leads up to and, with which, again, I wholeheartedly concur. Nancy Maull's paper, which Clarke refers to, for example, seems to me to shed great light on what used to be thought the problem of reduction; I don't see how her argument conflicts with “mine.” iii) Clarke's two “interpretations” of “my” argument are even more puzzling. The first paragraph is clear, as far as it goes. But the second is entirely murky. Perhaps I may try to reconstruct it. “The question for the scientist of a reductivist disposition in this context,” Clarke writes, “is: would it be possible to construct an alternative theory which adequately explains the same phenomena as the human sciences?” Fair enough. But apparently one is not allowed to reflect about an answer to this question. One has to wait and see if such a theory does develop. And meantime to notice that any theory by its very nature is intentional: this is to use some part of the human sciences to establish the explanatory power of all the human sciences. Is that what is meant? If so, I would reply: that the claim that theories are inherently intentional is not a thesis of any “human science” but a philosophical thesis about the nature of intelligible discourse. If a wholly non-intentional theory of human action were stated it would invalidate itself as theory. Thus, to respond to the major accusation of, we would have an answer to Clarke's question such that the question could not have been asked. What we have, then, is not a petitio but a valid reductio ad absurdum. (shrink)

The ideas Darwin published in On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man in the nineteenth century continue to have a major impact on our current understanding of the world in which we live and the place that humans occupy in it. Darwin’s theories constitute the core of the contemporary life sciences, and elicit enduring fascination as a potentially unifying basis for various branches of biology and the biomedical sciences. They can be used to understand the biological ground (...) of human cognition, common behavioral patterns and disorders, and psychopathology more generally in psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience. Perhaps the best known expression of this fact is Dobzhansky’s famous dictum that “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution” (Dobzhansky T. Am Zool 4:443–452, 1964: 449; Am Biol Teach 35:125–129, 1973: 125), and given that all human behavior supervenes on some biological basis, evolutionary thinking has a vast scope even just in this regard. (shrink)

Memoirs and papers presented at a conference held on the occasion of the 90th birthday of the Mongolian philosopher Ts. Balkhaajav.

The cyclic GMP-gated channel responds to changes in free intracellular cGMP, and as a result, it plays a central role in the phototransduction process in rod and cone photoreceptor cells. Recent biochemical, immunochemical, and molecular biology studies indicate that this channel consists of a complex of two distinct subunits and one or more associated proteins. Primary structural analysis indicates that the a and (3 subunits contain a cGMP-binding domain, an even number of membrane-spanning segments, a voltage sensor motif and a (...) pore region. The latter two features are found in voltage-gated channels and suggest that these two classes of channels have evolved from the same ancestral channel protein. A working model for the membrane topography of the channel subunits is proposed based on immunogold labeling studies and sequence analysis. Recent studies also indicate that calmodulin binds to the 240 kDa protein of the channel complex and modulates the sensitivity of the channel for cGMP in a Ca2+-dependent manner. The molecular properties of the channel complex and the possible role of Ca2+-calmodulin modulation of the channel during photoactivation and photorecovery are discussed in relation to the current mechanism of phototransduction in photoreceptor cells. (shrink)

"This book is a Festschrift volume in honour of Prof. Trichur S. Rukmani that reflects the plethora of issues which she studied in her scholastic life. It includes twenty-four essays by distinguished scholars on various classical and contemporary issues pertaining to Indian studies. While the volume discusses current research in the field of Yoga -- Prof. Rukmani's primary research field -- it also invites further reflection on other areas of Indian thought which have attracted her attention in the course of (...) her long and fruitful academic career. The volume is divided thematically into six sections. The first two sections deal with the interpretation of the Yoga, Vedanta and Gaudiya-Vaishnava traditions, exploring issues of hermeneutics, methodology and philosophical analysis. The third section addresses issues of continuity within the Indian tradition and includes essays on tantric Shaivism, Mimamsa and the Bhagavad-Gita. The next two sections feature essays on the Sanskrit philosophical discourse, grammar, epic literature and renunciation in the Indian tradition. The last section of the volume takes up issues of contemporary relevance such as the insights from the Hindu tradition towards environmental ethics, the Svadhyaya movement and its dharmic ecology, non-violence, gender, cultural identity as well as syncretism."--Publisher description. (shrink)

Mongolian philosophy in the post-communism period.

Introduction At some point in your life you will have told a lie and have been believed. You will have deceived the person to whom you lied. ...