Donald Russell, Emeritus Professor of Classical Literature at the University of Oxford, has been a leading figure in several fields of classical scholarship over the last few decades. The present volume collects essays written in his honour by scholars who have all worked closely with him. They fall into three sections, corresponding to Donald Russell's main work: Latin literature, Greek imperial literature, and ancient literary criticism. They are unified by two of Russell's own pervasive concerns: ethics, the concern of classical (...) literature with moral conduct, and rhetoric, the techniques of effective persuasion. (shrink)

BackgroundInvolvement of adolescent girls in biomedical HIV research is essential to better understand efficacy and safety of new prevention interventions in this key population at high risk of HIV infection. However, there are many ethical issues to consider prior to engaging them in pivotal biomedical research. In Uganda, 16–17-year-old adolescents can access sexual and reproductive health services including for HIV or other sexually transmitted infections, contraception, and antenatal care without parental consent. In contrast, participation in HIV prevention research involving investigational (...) new drugs requires adolescents to have parental or guardian consent. Thus, privacy and confidentiality concerns may deter adolescent participation. We describe community perspectives on ethical considerations for involving adolescent girls in the MTN 034 study in Uganda.MethodsFrom August 2017 to March 2018, we held five stakeholder engagement meetings in preparation for the MTN 034 study in Kampala, Uganda (NCT03593655): two with 140 community representatives, two with 125 adolescents, and one with 50 adolescents and parents. Discussions were moderated by the study team. Proceedings were documented by notetakers. Summary notes described community perspectives of adolescent participation in HIV research including convergent, divergent or minority views, challenges, and proposed solutions.ResultsMost community members perceived parental or guardian consent as a principal barrier to study participation due to concerns about adolescent disclosure of pre-marital sex, which is a cultural taboo. Of 125 adolescent participants, 119 (95%) feared inadvertent disclosure of sexual activity to their parents. Community stakeholders identified the following critical considerations for ethical involvement of adolescents in HIV biomedical research: (1) involving key stakeholders in recruitment, (2) ensuring confidentiality of sensitive information about adolescent sexual activity, (3) informing adolescents about information to be disclosed to parents or guardians, (4) offering youth friendly services by appropriately trained staff, and (5) partnering with community youth organizations to maximize recruitment and retention.ConclusionsStakeholder engagement with diverse community representatives prior to conducting adolescent HIV prevention research is critical to collectively shaping the research agenda, successfully recruiting and retaining adolescents in HIV clinical trials and identifying practical strategies to ensure high ethical standards during trial implementation. (shrink)

Creativity and morality are key attributes that stakeholders demand of organizations. Accordingly, higher education institutions and professional training programs also seek to cultivate these attributes in future leaders. However, research has hitherto shown that, under certain conditions, creativity may conflict with morality. This complicates the development of creative individuals who are also moral. We examined the complex relationship between creativity and moral reasoning with data collected from a group of undergraduate students. By considering the cognitive processes behind creativity and moral (...) reasoning, we propose perspective taking as a moderating factor. Specifically, we found that while creative individuals might not necessarily adopt a lower level of moral reasoning, there was a more nuanced moderating relationship among creativity, perspective taking, and moral reasoning. That is, individuals who were weak in perspective taking tended to adopt a lower level of moral reasoning if they were also creative. Perspective taking was also directly and positively associated with moral reasoning. We explore the implications of our findings for future research and curriculum/program design. (shrink)

Western culture has been moving away from its Christian roots for several centuries but the turn from Christianity accelerated in the 20th century. At the core of this decline is a loss of a sense of our own transcendence. Scientific materialism has so seriously impacted our belief in human transcendence that many people find it difficult to believe in God and the human soul. This anti-transcendent perspective has not only cast its spell on the natural sciences, psychology, philosophy, and literature, (...) it has also negatively impacted popular culture through the writings of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and many others. The warning signs of this loss of transcendence have been expressed by thinkers as diverse as Carl Jung (psychiatrist), Mircea Eliade (historian of religion), Gabriel Marcel (philosopher), C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. These warnings were validated by a 2004 study in the American Journal of Psychiatry which showed that the absence of religion alone was responsible for a marked increase in suicide rates, sense of meaningless, substance abuse, separation from family, and other psychiatric problems. Thus, the loss of transcendence is negatively affecting not only individuals’ sense of happiness, dignity, ideals, virtues, and destiny, but also the culture. Ironically, the evidence for transcendence is greater today than in any other period in history. The problem is – this evidence has not been compiled and propagated. Fr. Spitzer’s book provides a bright light in the midst of this cultural darkness by presenting both traditional and contemporary evidence for God and a transphysical soul from several major sources. He also shows how human consciousness and intelligence is completely special – and cannot be replicated by artificial intelligence or animal consciousness. We are transcendent beings with souls capable of surviving bodily death – self-reflective beings aware of perfect truth, love, goodness, and beauty. We are beings with an unrestricted capacity to know and create science, law, culture, art, music, literature, and so much more. The evidence reveals that we have the dignity of being created in the very image of God, and if we underestimate it, we will undervalue one another, underlive our lives, and underachieve our destiny. This work is the most comprehensive treatment of human transcendence available today. (shrink)

Hundreds of thousands of individuals experience traumatic injuries each year. Some are mild to moderate in nature and patients experience full functional recovery and little change to their physical appearance. Others result in enduring, if not permanent, changes in physical functioning and appearance. Reconstructive plastic surgical procedures are viable treatments options for many patients who have experienced the spectrum of traumatic injuries. The goal of these procedures is to restore physical functioning and reduce the psychosocial burden of living with an (...) appearance that may be viewed negatively by the patient or by others. Even after receipt of reconstructive procedures, many patients are left with residual disfigurement. In some, disability and disfigurement may be so profound that individuals are candidates for vascularized composite allotransplantation procedures, i.e., the transplantation of a vascularized human body part containing multiple tissue types as an anatomical and/or structural unit. This narrative review paper summarizes the literature on the psychosocial burden experienced by those who have visible disfigurement. While many of these individuals experience stigma and discrimination, relatively few studies have employed a stigma framework to understand the psychosocial sequelea. This paper briefly addresses this framework. Last, particular focus is given to the psychosocial issues of individuals with particularly severe injuries who are potential candidates for VCA procedures. (shrink)

(Statement of Responsibility) by Timothy S. Huebner.

Although health matters are commonly discussed in various social contexts, health-related interpersonal communication still remains a black box in health communication research. Bringing together research from the fields of health communication and interpersonal communication, we therefore examine how people communicate about health and illness in their everyday lives. Based on Channel Complementary Theory and the concept of communication repertoires, we focus on a) the communication partners, b) the communication channels, and c) the communication patterns relevant to health-related interpersonal communication. We (...) conducted a qualitative study with 22 semi-structured online interviews combined with ego-centered network maps. Findings show that a) what is discussed with whom depends on the intimacy of the relationship, topic sensitivity, and partners’ personal characteristics, b) face-to-face communication is the preferred way of communicating, and c) (a-)symmetry of roles, (in)formality, and intimacy of the relationship influence communication. (shrink)

Theorists, historians, and artists address the precarious futurity of the notion of the future. Not long ago, a melancholic left and a manic neoliberalism seemed to arrive at an awkward consensus: the foreclosure of futurity. Whereas the former mourned the failure of its utopian project, the latter celebrated the triumph of a global marketplace. The radical hope of realizing a singularly different, more equitable future displaced by a belief that the future had already come to pass, limiting post-historical society to (...) an uneventful life of endless accumulation. Today, amidst an abundance of neofuturisms, posthumanisms, futurologies, speculative philosophies and accelerationist scenarios, there is as well an expanding awareness of a looming planetary catastrophe driven by the extractionist logic of capitalism. Despite this return to the future, the temporal horizon of our present moment is perhaps more aptly characterized by the “shrinking future” of just-in-time production, risk management, high-frequency trading, and the futures market. In Futurity Report, theorists, historians, and artists address the precarious futurity of the notion of the future itself. Contributors McKenzie Wark, China Miéville, Kerstin Stakemeier, Diedrich Diederichsen, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Marina Vishmidt, Johannes Paul Raether, Felicity D. Scott, Silvia Maglioni, Graeme Thomson, Doreen Mende, Pedro Neves Marques, Achille Mbembe, Kodwo Eshun, Haytham El-Wardany, T. J. Demos, Ana Teixeira Pinto. (shrink)

In The Twentieth-Century Humanists from Spitzer to Frye, William Calin examines the contributions of eight scholar-critics who produced their most important work between the mid-1930s and the early 1960s, before the advent of contemporary critical theory. Five are from Continental Europe. Leo Spitzer, Robert Curtius and Erich Auerbach were German-language students of Romance literatures, while Albert Béguin and Jean Rousset, both speakers of French, were leading figures of the Geneva school. Calin also includes English-language scholars: the Oxford don (...) C. S. Lewis, the American F. O. Mathiessen, and the Canadian Northrop Frye. Calin's goal is threefold. He wants to draw distinctions between the mid-twentieth .. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Nature of Space by Milton SantosDave McLaughlinThe Nature of Spaceby milton santos (trans. by brenda baletti) Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2021When asked to review Milton Santos’s The Nature of Space, I was interested mostly in the book’s core theme. As a literary geographer, my own research focuses heavily on space as an analytical concept and a lived experience; I was keen to read and understand a (...) fresh perspective on this topic. Little did I know that opening this book would connect me to a world of geography scholarship for the most part ignored, actively or otherwise, in the Anglophone academy. For my sins, I was not alone in this ignorance. In 2017, for example, one scholar felt confident in writing that:The English-speaking geographical community knows very little about the theoretical work in geography being produced in the so-called [End Page 147] “global South.” They are unaware, for example, of the work of Brazilian geographer Milton Santos.1It is not my place here to write about the reasons why this is such a mistake. Others, better qualified than me, have already done so.2 My aim here is to do three things. First, to put Santos’s arrival into English-language geography in context; second, to consider briefly his key contribution to defining the nature of space; and finally, to touch on what Santos’s book offers us more broadly.Published in 2021, Brenda Baletti’s translation of Santos’s great work arrived on the crest of a wave of discussions, debates, and scholarly interventions around decoloniality in Western geography. This movement emphasizes uncovering “still colonising frames of knowledge”3—frames “through which the world is apprehended and explained and modelled for the future”—and “craft[ing] ways of thinking harder about and against them.”4 Others have argued that the long wait for an English translation of Santos’s The Nature of Space is evidence of just such modes of thought continuing, unreflectively, among Anglophone academia. In 2019, an English-language translation of Santos’s For a New Geography was published by the University of Minnesota Press, followed by The Nature of Space in 2021. Hopefully, publications indicate that some publishers, at least, are following Stephen Legg’s call to think hard against certain predominant Western frames.The Nature of Space, despite its mere 280 pages, is an opus of sorts. Santos’s style eschews narrow conceptualization in favor of building a solid theory of space on a remarkably broad foundation of thinkers, including Braudel, Merleau-Ponty, Habermas, Latour, and many, many others. This broad foundation is a result not only of his long career and his own widely travelled life; it is necessary due to the slippery and almost-undefinable nature of space itself. In a wonderful section of For a New Geography, Santos lays out the problem facing geographers in defining this concept around which our discipline revolves:I understand why geographers have spent more time defining geography than space as the latter is extremely hard to do. The same could be said of space as Saint Augustine said of time: “if I ask myself if I know [End Page 148] what it is, I respond that I do; but, if I ask myself to define it, I respond that I do not know how.”5Part of this complication, recognized by Santos, is that “space” is a word with many meanings outside academia.6 Yet, geographers also face no simple task in defining this core concept for our own needs. Doreen Massey’s definition from For Space is one of my favorites, not only because it well illustrates the complexity of the term “space,” but also due to the range of reactions it produces in my first-year undergraduate students when I introduce it: Space is the sphere of the possibility of the existence of multiplicity in the sense of contemporaneous plurality.7 This is a very crunchy sentence! But it gets to the heart of a conceptually complex truth: that space is the dimension in which things happen, a dimension in which we must live at all times, as well as... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Brian Boyd responds:In responding to my critical discussion, Lisa Zunshine restates the argument of Why We Read Fiction at some length but replies to none of my specific criticisms. These criticisms are all based on the evidence of the texts that she offers as case studies, especially Mrs Dalloway and Lolita. Although I—and the textual evidence—contradict her claims, she provides no answers to the criticisms.Let me respond to two (...) restatements. First: "Fictional narratives endlessly experiment with rather than automatically execute our evolved cognitive adaptations" (p. 190). This is often, but almost tautologically, true in the case of experimental fiction, as the work of Richardson, Woolf, and Nabokov (to cite Zunshine's key examples) was in their time. It is not necessarily true in the sense Zunshine especially means it—that authors give us a demanding cognitive workout of our capacity for Theory of Mind by incorporating multiple embedding, A's thoughts of B's thoughts of C's thoughts of D's thoughts of E—even in the case of fictional experimenters like Defoe, Tolstoy, or Joyce, and it is not true of the vast bulk of fiction, from folk tale or jokes to soap operas or pulp [End Page 196] novels, and it cannot therefore be an explanation for "why we read fiction," though it may explain why some of us read some fiction. And to identify overloaded embedding when it is not present, as Zunshine does in discussing Mrs Dalloway, constitutes a simple misreading.Second: "Our Theory of Mind makes literature as we know it possible" (p. 191). Granted, without Theory of Mind we would not have fiction. But nor would we have fiction without many other features of human nature: without sociality, episodic memory, language, childhood pretend play, empathy, the brain's inhibitory mechanisms, folk physics, our mental databases for individuals, and much, much more. An evolutionary and cognitive understanding of fiction needs to take into account many aspects of our capacity for understanding events and stories, not just one.Apart from one three-word phrase, Zunshine's sole quotation from my review is this: "To what extent has Zunshine benefited from the methodology, rather than results, of science?" (I refer to "the results of science" here because I note that although, for instance, she relies most heavily on Simon Baron-Cohen among Theory of Mind researchers, while ignoring major figures in the field like Janet Astington or Josef Perner, she does not even cite the book or any of the more than twenty papers of which Baron-Cohen has been primary author since his 1995 Mindblindness.) Her quotation from my review continues: "Alas, she appears to have learned less than one would have hoped.... Her formulations are often weak and indecisive, hedgings, rather than strong testable hypotheses. Rather than apply scientific stringency to her literary analysis, she seems more interested in exploiting than testing what she can find." She confesses herself puzzled by this charge. Let me explain one simple point.Science's core methodological principle is that claims should be subjected to the test of evidence, and accepted or rejected on the basis of their compatibility with the relevant evidence. Leo Spitzer long ago pointed out that good reading follows scientific method: we read, we make hypotheses about the text, and we either confirm or disconfirm the hypotheses according to what we find in the text, and search for ampler hypotheses when previous ones have been discredited.1 Literary scholarship has long been vitiated by a far flabbier methodology, by the naïve assumption that evidence for a proposition suffices: "I see a and b in the text, therefore my claim C is a valid interpretation." But if reading or interpretation C is incompatible with counter-evidence d and e in the text, it is a falsified hypothesis and needs to yield to a better [End Page 197] reading, an interpretation that can incorporate this counter-evidence. I showed that Zunshine's claims about her prime examples were not compatible with evidence in the texts. She does not challenge the textual counter-evidence I provide, but just ignores it. That is where literary criticism most urgently needs to learn from scientific... (shrink)

The Hutchinsonian movement exercised considerable influence on thought about various topics of importance in England's Enlightenment/Counter-Enlightenment debates. Its epistemological stance, derived from a group of Irish writers of the early eighteenth century, places the movement at the centre of these debates and does much to explain its attraction to contemporaries. The article emphasises the persistence of Hutchinsonian thought and the continuing importance of its epistemological underpinnings into the early nineteenth century, drawing attention particularly to the writings of Bishop William Van (...) Mildert. (shrink)

Introduction: conceptual analysis of teaching, by B. P. Komisar and T. W. Nelson.--A concept of teaching, by B. O. Smith.--The concept of teaching, by I. Sheffler.--A topology of the teaching concept, by T. F. Green.--Teaching: act and enterprise, by B. P. Komisar.--Must an education have an aim? By R. S. Peters.--Curriculum as a field of study, by D. Heubner.--Can and should means-ends reasoning be used in teaching? By C. J. B. Macmillan and J. E. McClellan.

Bizarre delusions are not specific to schizophrenia and can be found in other psychotic disorders. However, to date, there are no studies investigating socio-demographic and clinical characteristics associated with BizD across the psychosis spectrum. In this study 819 subjects with a diagnosis of SZ, schizoaffective disorder and bipolar I disorder were included. Patients with history of BizD and with no BizD were compared with respect to socidemographic and clinical variables, and predictors of BizD were explored. Patients with BizD were less (...) educated, less likely to be married, had higher Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale negative scores and lower Young Mania Rating Scale scores. Younger age, SZ and SZA diagnoses, higher PANSS positive scores, presence of reference delusions, tactile and olfactory hallucinations were predictors. Our results indicate that BizD are associated with higher illness severity, lower functionality and specific set of symptoms. (shrink)

The Swedish philosopher Hägerström, who was professor in Uppsala during the first quarter of the present century, devoted much attention to the philosophical and psychological analysis of moral and legal phenomena. Hägersträm is a difficult writer. He had steeped himself in the works of German philosophers and philosophical jurists, and his professional prose-style both in German and in Swedish had been infected by them so that it resembles glue thickened with sawdust. But he enjoys a very high reputation in his (...) own and adjacent countries, and it seems to me that this is well deserved. I think, therefore, that it may be interesting and useful to try to provide English philosophers with an outline in my own words of Hägerström's doctrines, as I understand them, about the topic named in the title of this paper. (shrink)

In this interview, C. P. Goodman invites British Polanyi scholar Richard T. Allen to reflect on his interest in Polanyi’s philosophical ideas and share what he believes is valuable in his thought.

The article offers a study of the theological method of Henry Dodwell, the most distinguished British savant of the late Stuart period and a leading figure in the Non-Juring movement. The study takes the form of arguments for the extension of the contemporary dispute between the Ancients and Moderns, in its historiographical dimension, into the field of divinity; for substantial modification of the claims made in discussions of the dispute about the inherent conflict between the Renaissance's desire for revivification of (...) the past and its historical scholarship; and for reconsideration of the relationship between 17th century critical scholarship and the Enlightenment. (shrink)

The paper interprets Peirce's philosophy as a critical revival of Kant's idea of transcendental philosophy. The paper adopts, clarifies and extends the Peirce interpretation of the German philosopher K O Apel. In so doing, it shows Peirce to have articulated insights into meaning, knowledge and truth still of relevance today and to have identified important problems to which he proposed novel and still instructive solutions. (edited).

Ethical controversy over transplantation of human fetal tissue has arisen because the source of tissue is induced abortions. Opposition to such transplants has been based on various arguments, including the following: rightful informed consent cannot be obtained for use of fetal tissue from induced abortions, and fetal tissue transplantation might result in an increase in the number of abortions. These arguments were not accepted by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Human Fetal Tissue Transplantation Research Panel. The majority opinion of (...) the panel stated that abortion and fetal tissue use are entirely separate issues, and that tissue use is ethically acceptable because it can be morally insulated from the issue of abortion. In support of this view, panel members and others have replied to the arguments put forward by opponents of fetal tissue use. However, replies to the two arguments mentioned above have been unsatisfactory, and the shortcomings of those replies are identified herein. Examination of the arguments pro and con suggests that fetal tissue use cannot be completely insulated from the issue of abortion. Thus, in seeking an ethical justification for fetal tissue transplantation we must consider reasons other than those put forward by the NIH panel. In this paper it is argued that whatever wrong is involved in using fetal tissue from induced abortions must be balanced against the benefits for patients, and it is on this basis that fetal tissue transplantation can be ethically justified. (shrink)

A scholium in codex Vaticanus graecus 156 provides evidence that Cassius Dio'sRoman Historyonce contained an explicit reference to theludi saecularesofa.d. 204, something that has been denied in recent scholarship.

Patients with 'persistent vegetative state' (PVS) are often cited in the discussions of ethicists as examples of human beings who are unconscious and do not experience life, and a number of theoretical and practical recommendations have been made on that basis. This article examines the evidence and the theoretical rationale for the belief that people with PVS are unconscious and finds them wanting. This conclusion is related to the practice of the discipline of ethics.

In his lectures on ethics and on the state Schleiermacher develops a theory of a limited communitarian state, one that purports to balance individual interests and rights with the more general aims...

The field equations of the quadratic action principle of relativity are solved, assuming a weak perturbation of the basic structure, which is a highly agitated Riemannian lattice field of a very small lattice constant. A field emerges which can be interpreted as the weak gravitational field of an apparently Minkowskian space. This field does not coincide with Einstein's theory of weak gravitational fields. Whereas the redshift remains unchanged, the light deflection becomes reduced by11.1% of the value predicted by Einstein.

Purpose: To show the connections and differences between Mitterer's concept, cultural theory, and sociology of knowledge in order to reproduce the development of non-dualizing philosophy. Problem: Mitterer's non-dualizing philosophy explicitly places emphasis on the continuation and coherence of discourses. Consequently, it grants an epistemological option that does not focus on the object as the end of cognition and description, but rather as the beginning. This perspective not only helps to overcome fundamental philosophical problems; it also concedes that the whole concept (...) of non-dualizing philosophy refers theoretical descriptions, on the one hand, to the status of "so far" and, on the other hand, can be described as "from now on." Solution: It seems necessary to exemplify obvious and hidden connections to cultural theories, especially those of the early 20th century (i.e., Karl Mannheim, Heinrich Rickert, Max Weber, William James), which predominantly concentrate on the relations between language and object, experience and world. The illustration of those relations should bring out Mitterer's arguments, as well as how his argumentation can be applied to itself. Benefits: To explain and avoid the epistemological problems of realism, as well as of constructivism, which emerge within a dualistic perspective. (shrink)

This article argues for two main theses concerning Aristotle's Politics. The first is that outside the explicit discussion of citizenship in 3.1-5 'citizen' is used without reference to the criterion of legal eligibility which plays a central role in 3.1's account, and is instead used with reference to the non-legal attributes of individuals. The second is that there are differences with respect to virtue among those who claim citizenship based on 'free birth' and that Aristotle holds that a citizen should (...) have a minimal level of virtue, which excludes some of the free born. These theses are then brought to bear on the controversial thesis that the common interest is the interest of the citizens. The conception of 'citizen' related to the common interest must not be tied to eligibility and must include a minimal level of virtue such that the individual can participate in a correct regime. These results taken together suggest that the explicit account in 3.1 should be displaced as the primary account of the citizen. (shrink)