Although implicit tests of positive and negative affect exist, implicit measures of distinct emotional states are scarce. Three experiments examined whether a novel implicit emotion-assessment task, the rating of emotion expressed in abstract images, would reveal distinct emotional states. In Experiment 1, participants exposed to a sadness-inducing story inferred more sadness, and less happiness, in abstract images. In Experiment 2, an anger-provoking interaction increased anger ratings. In Experiment 3, compared to neutral images, spider images increased fear ratings in spider-fearful participants (...) but not in controls. In each experiment, the implicit task indicated elevated levels of the target emotion and did not indicate elevated levels of non-target negative emotions; the task thus differentiated among emotional states of the same valence. Correlations also supported the convergent and discriminant validity of the implicit task. Supporting the possibility that heuristic processes underlie the ratings, group differences were stronger among those who responded relatively quickly. (shrink)

Some individuals devalue positivity previously associated with negativity (Winer & Salem, 2016). Positive emotions (e.g. happiness) may be seen as threatening and result in active avoidance of futu...

The male gametes of most organisms lack cytoplasm. Consequently, most cytoplasmic genetic elements are maternally inherited: they cannot be transmitted patrilinnearly. The evolutionary interests of cytoplasmic elements therefore lie in transmission through the female. These elements may thus be in evolutionary conflict with nuclear genes which are transmitted by both sexes. This conflict is manifested in observations of cytoplasmically induced biased sex‐ratios. Some cytoplasmic genes avoid this fate by biasing the primary sex ratio towards females, or by inducing parthenogenesis. Others (...) kill male hosts, and either achieve transmission via dispersal, or benefit their clonal relatives in the dead male's female siblings. Still others cause the failure of zygotes resulting from pairings between males carrying specific microbes and females lacking them, causing an increase in the microbes through the sterilisation of non‐bearing females. Many, but not all, of these ‘ultra‐selfish’ microbes are closely related. Investigations of the significance of their phylogenetic affinities, or lack of them, their adaptability in terms of the methods by which they avoid, or ameliorate, the adverse effects of being in male hosts, and their importance as selective agents in the evolution of invertebrate sex determination systems, provide fertile spheres for future research. (shrink)

In this paper we study abstract elementary classes with Löwenheim-Skolem number $\kappa$ , where $\kappa$ is cofinal with $\omega$ , which have finite character. We generalize results obtained by Kueker for $\kappa=\omega$ . In particular, we show that $\mathbb{K}$ is closed under $L_{\infty,\kappa}$ -elementary equivalence and obtain sufficient conditions for $\mathbb{K}$ to be $L_{\infty,\kappa}$ -axiomatizable. In addition, we provide an example to illustrate that if $\kappa$ is uncountable regular then $\mathbb{K}$ is not closed under $L_{\infty,\kappa}$ -elementary equivalence.

I recently wrote to a friend and occasional Report contributor that part of the job of editor, as I understand it, is to recognize the merit in and, in effect, foster the advancement of work that one actually believes is in some sense wrongheaded. It's a point I want on the table as I introduce the two articles in this issue of the Report—not because I necessarily think these articles are wrongheaded, but because I want it clear that publishing the (...) articles does not necessarily mean I or others at the Center think they are right, either. We publish articles that we think advance thinking, but that can mean publishing articles that challenge morally compelling positions. Thus, deciding whether one agrees with a .. (shrink)

The classic argument against anarchy, and in favor of government, is presented by Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan, published in 1651. Hobbes contends that a sovereign with sufficient power to make and enforce laws is necessary if individuals are to be both secure from one another’s potential aggressions and prosperous as a result of beneficial cooperation with others. Recently, a number of writers have suggested that, in a nuclearly armed world, an international analogue of Hobbes’s argument demonstrates the necessity of (...) establishing a world government. For convenience, I shall henceforth refer to the general argument underlying this claim as the Nuclear World Government Argument. (shrink)

An individual's beliefs can be seen as rationally related to one another in a kind of web. These beliefs, however, may not form a single, seamless web. There may exist smaller, largely self-contained webs with few or no rational relations to the larger web. Such “webs of faith” make it possible for reasonable deliberators to persist in a disagreement even under ideal deliberative conditions. The possibility of reasonable disagreement challenges the assumption that rationality should lead to consensus and presents an (...) obstacle to the goals of liberal democracy. (shrink)

An explanation of Frege's change from objective idealism to platonism is offered. Frege had originally thought that numbers are transparent to reason, but the character of his Axiom of Courses of Values undermined this view, and led him to think that numbers exist independently of reason. I then use these results to suggest a view of Frege's mathematical epistemology.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Solon and Early Greek Poetry: The Politics of ExhortationGregory HaysElizabeth Irwin. Solon and Early Greek Poetry: The Politics of Exhortation. Cambridge Classical Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xiv + 350 pp. Cloth, $90.Thirty years ago we understood archaic Greek elegy pretty well—or so we imagined. The elegists sang of the new developments of the archaic period, above all the rise of the polis. They wrote first-person poetry (...) celebrating their own individuality; most modern anthologies open emblematically with Archilochus's... They invoked the phraseology of epic only to reject its values: Homer's aristocratic warriors retreated in disarray before the bandy-legged general of the mercenary Archilochus. The arrival of the citizen soldier was reflected in Tyrtaeus and Callinus, whose exhortations hoplites chanted as they marched into battle. Solon was a little harder to accommodate in this picture: an odd hybrid of Jeremiah and Polonius, rising to occasional grandeur, but weak on logic and organization. Still, his praise of Eunomia helped bridge the gap between Homeric naiveté and the abstract thinking of the fifth century. And of course there was that law code...This explanatory model reflects the Geistesgeschichte approach of Bruno Snell, Hermann Fränkel, and Werner Jaeger, and it has been notably tenacious. But as a tool for explaining elegy (and lyric generally) it has come to seem pretty dated. Archilochus's "I" was problematized as early as 1964 in K. J. Dover's contribution to the Fondation Hardt Archiloque volume. But it was in the 1980s that the ice really started to break up. In an influential article (JHS 106 [1986] 13-35), [End Page 427] Ewen Bowie stressed the symposium's centrality as the performative context for elegy, thus making conservative aristocrats the genre's primary consumers (so much for the citizen soldier and the rising middle class!). The rise of "cultural poetics" left archaic society—and its poets—looking much less familiar. Finally, the conventional relationship between elegy and epic was being reexamined. Many supposed Homeric allusions melted away under closer examination (notably in Robert Fowler's The Nature of Early Greek Lyric [Toronto, 1987]). Recent scholarship has proposed dramatically later dates for the stabilization of the Homeric poems, calling into question their priority to lyric even in a chronological sense. The old picture of elegy as an archaic response to a monolithic "epic" has given way to theories of an ongoing and dynamic dialogue between (and within) both genres.These trends are reflected in Elizabeth Irwin's study of Solon, a revised version of her 1999 Cambridge dissertation. It also reflects renewed interest in the poet, appearing soon after commentaries by Maria Noussia (2001) and Christoph Mülke (2002) and almost simultaneously with a collective volume edited by Josine Blok and André Lardinois (Solon of Athens: New Historical and Philological Approaches [Leiden, 2006]), to which Irwin has contributed. Along with Solon, Irwin focuses on Callinus and Tyrtaeus, and one of her stated goals is "to help us unlearn what we think we know about this poetry and its historical significance" (18).The book is divided into three parts. In part 1 ("The Politics of Exhortation") Irwin examines the tradition of martial exhortation represented by Tyrtaeus and Callinus. The conventional view had these poets discarding Homer's individualistic front-fighters in favor of the new citizen-armies of the polis— is now a civic virtue. But as Irwin observes, "fighting for one's fatherland" is not alien to Iliadic values. For her, the similarities between martial elegy and epic outweigh any differences. As she notes, the evocation of future warfare in sympotic elegy mirrors a corresponding appeal to past feasting in the exhortations of the Iliad. Martial elegy provides (or sees itself as providing) an off-duty complement to Homeric warriors' battlefield vaunts—the sort of thing Sarpedon might have directed to Glaucus back in Lycia while the slave-boys were refilling the goblets. Such Iliadic self-fashioning constructs its sympotic audience not simply as heroic, but specifically as a heroic elite. While martial elegy may pay lip service to the polis, its center of gravity is elsewhere. Thus Tyrtaeus fragment 11W can conclude with patronizing advice to the... (shrink)

To the memory of Alan WhiteThe idea of mental representation occupies a rather prominent place in much contemporary discussion, both in philosophy and cognitive science, and not as a particularly controversial idea either. My reflections here, however, are intended to douse much of that discussion with some cold water. I should emphasize at the outset that I have no problems at all with the very idea of mental representation. What I find quite unsatisfactory is the philosophical or doctrinal underpinning of (...) much current theorising about it. Anyway, I shall suggest that talk of mental representation needs at least to be supplemented with, if not actually replaced by, a distinct notion of mental presentation, which cannot be reduced to it. But I start with the notion of an impression. (shrink)

It is known that for two given countable sets of unary relations A and B on ω there exists an infinite set H ⫅ ω on which A and B are the same. This result can be used to generate counterexamples in expressibility theory. We examine the sharpness of this result.

Moral duties are often described in terms of rigid requirements to perform, or refrain from performing, actions of certain specific types. In various theological traditions this point is often expressed in terms of the demands God places upon His creatures. However, there are several important ways, as Kant, Mill, and others have noted, in which the fulfillment of duty admits of options. In this paper an effort is made to offer a precise characterization of these ways. On this basis it (...) is concluded that many duties are not of the form in which duties are commonly characterized. (shrink)

Most of us think of memory in terms of the brain's ability to store and retrieve events, facts, and skills. Philosophers and cognitive scientists seek to understand memory in terms of causation and justification. This article steps back from these considerations to reflect broadly on what memory is. Drawing on the paradigm shift underway in mind sciences, I explore the implications of the emerging understanding of cognition as embodied, embedded, extended, and enacted. This new paradigm undermines epistemological dualism and individualism (...) and makes it possible to view memory as an ecological process. (shrink)

Husserl and Sartre’s analyses of mental imagery and some of the latest cognitive research on vision provide a framework for understanding a number of films by Hitchcock (Psycho and Rear Window) and Buñuel (Un Chien Andalou), films which similarly probe the subtleties and uses of mental imagery. One of the many ways to enjoy these films is to see them as explorations of visual phenomenology; they allow us to enact, as well as reflect upon, mental images as part of the (...) film experience.<br><br><br><br><br><br>. (shrink)

In 1962, Donald Caspar and Aaron Klug published their classic theory of virus structure. They developed their theory with an explicit analogy between spherical viruses and Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes. In this paper, I use the spherical virus-geodesic dome case to develop an account of analogy and deductive analogical inference based on the notion of an isomorphism. I also consider under what conditions there is a good reason to claim an experimentally untested analogy is plausible.

The problems that Millikan addresses in theories of concepts arise from an extensional view of concepts and word meaning. If instead one assumes that concepts are psychological entities intended to explain human behavior and thought, many of these problems dissolve.

In a recent article G. H. Merrill has defended realism against an argument devised by Hilary Putnam. My first aim is to show that Merrill's defence is inadequate. I shall also argue that the proper conclusion of Putnam's argument is somewhat different from the conclusion Putnam himself offers.

The concept of mimesis has been central to philosophical aesthetics from Aristotle to Kendall Walton: in plain terms, it highlights the links between a fictional world or a representational practice on the one hand and the real world on the other. The present collection of essays includes discussions of its general viability and pertinence and of its historical origins, as well as detailed analyses of various relevant issues regarding literature, film, theatre, images and computer games. The individual papers offer new (...) arguments for the specialist, yet in their sum also provide a solid and helpful survey of the current state of the debate. Contributions by P. Alward, G. Currie, D. Davies, L. Dole el, J. Hamilton, T. Kobli ek, P. Kot'atko, A. Kuzmicova, J. Levinson, A. Meskin, A. Pettersson, M. Pokorny, J. Robson, G. Rossholm, R. M. Sainsbury, F. Stjernberg, E. Terrone, K. Thein, A. Voltolini. (shrink)

Starting with the Apollonian Greek theory of techne, Means Without End presents a history of transformations of ideas about technology, viewed within their broader philosophical, theological, and scientific contexts. Critically focusing on the ideological genealogy of technology without limits and finding its cultural roots in Christian theology, it details ideological developments in the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and 19th century which prepared the way for a theory of autonomous technology and for postmodern technoculture in the 20th century.

Susan Wolf famously argued that a saintly life would be. It would mean neglecting many activities that make human life worthwhile. But her argument assumes that our moral duties are simply duties to others, that a perfectly moral person would always act selflessly. It may be, however, that we also have duties to ourselves, which include the cultivation of so-called virtues. On this view, morality is pervasive, relating to all features of a human life, and has architectonic status, being capable (...) of shaping all that we do. (shrink)

What are the boundaries of bioethics? Where does bioethics give way to other kinds of ethics—organizational ethics, environmental ethics, social ethics, or just ethics? According to one commonly cited account of the origin of bioethics, the field always had a relatively broad remit; it was supposed to be about the ethics of the life sciences in general. In the early days of bioethics, however, the topic that seemed most in need of critical attention was the encounter between experts in medicine (...) and the laity—doctors or medical researchers on the one hand and patients or medical research subjects on the other. Even given the narrow focal point, however, bioethics very naturally expanded.Much of the September‐October 2018 issue of the Hastings Center Report either argues or assumes that bioethics extends well beyond into social ethics. A special report published as a supplement to this issue pushes the point explicitly. (shrink)

In the lead article in the May‐June 2019 issue of the Hastings Center Report, Aaron Wightman and coauthors consider the guiding principles for making decisions about life‐sustaining treatment for children who have profound cognitive impairments. They argue that the usual standard, which asks decision‐makers to consider what will be in the child's best interests, cannot provide sufficient guidance. Discussing this problem in HCR thirty‐five years ago, the philosopher John Arras proposed addressing it by means of a “relational potential standard,” according (...) to which decisions about providing life‐sustaining treatment to a child should depend in part on whether the child has the capacity to form human relationships. Wightman et al. build on Arras's work, but where Arras had suggested that the capacity to form relationships could be gauged by examining the child's cognitive capabilities, the authors suggest that the medical team should lean heavily on the parents’ views. (shrink)

We are living in what is widely considered the sixth major extinction. Most ecologists believe that biodiversity is disappearing at an alarming rate, with up to 150 species going extinct per day according to scientists working with the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity. Part of the reason the loss signified by biological extinction feels painful is that it seems irremediable. These creatures are gone, and there's nothing to be done about it. In recent years, however, the possibility has been (...) broached that, just possibly, something can be done, in at least some cases. Human ingenuity, a contributing factor in the extinction crisis, might achieve their “de‐extinction”—in at least some cases, and with sometimes significant qualifications about whether the original species had been “recreated” and whether it could resume its original place in the environment. De‐extinction is an entry point into a larger set of questions about how biotechnological tools can support, coexist with, or undermine the goals of conservation and about the very meaning of conservation. Are we beings in control of the world or beings who prosper by accommodating ourselves to webs of symbiotic interdependencies? Are we creators or creatures, or both—and if both, then how can we achieve the balance between them that might be called humility? The interplay of perfecting and accommodating is not unique to human beings—perhaps it characterizes all forms of life on Earth—but with humans, these modes of being are distinctive, and our technology greatly expands their scale and effects. It is such questions that the ten essays in this special report explore. (shrink)

The two articles in this issue of the Report consider different ways that hospitals' organizational failings can be masked by ethics talk. In the lead article, Ann Hamric, John Arras, and Margaret Mohrmann take a critical look at the increasingly popular view that courage is a vital part of the moral armamentarium of health care professionals. It's easy to overemphasize and distort this point, they argue. Alexandra Junewicz and Stuart Youngner have a somewhat similar take on patient satisfaction surveys, which (...) are now in widespread use at most hospitals. Surveys are valuable, say Junewicz and Younger, but it is very easy to make too much of them and to misuse them. (shrink)