Do the rich descriptions and narrative shapings of literature provide a valuable resource for readers, writers, philosophers, and everyday people to imagine and confront the ultimate questions of life? Do the human activities of storytelling and complex moral decision-making have a deep connection? What are the moral responsibilities of the artist, critic, and reader? What can religious perspectives—from Catholic to Protestant to Mormon—contribute to literary criticism? Thirty well known contributors reflect on these questions, including iterary theorists Marshall Gregory, James Phelan, (...) and Wayne Booth; philosophers Martha Nussbaum, Richard Hart, and Nina Rosenstand; and authors John Updike, Charles Johnson, Flannery O'Connor, and Bernard Malamud. Divided into four sections, with introductory matter and questions for discussion, this accessible anthology represents the most crucial work today exploring the interdisciplinary connections between literature, religion and philosophy. (shrink)

The aim of this review is to show the fruitfulness of using images of facial expressions as experimental stimuli in order to study how neural systems support biologically relevant learning as it relates to social interactions. Here we consider facial expressions as naturally conditioned stimuli which, when presented in experimental paradigms, evoke activation in amygdala–prefrontal neural circuits that serve to decipher the predictive meaning of the expressions. Facial expressions offer a relatively innocuous strategy with which to investigate these normal variations (...) in affective information processing, as well as the promise of elucidating what role the aberrance of such processing might play in emotional disorders. (shrink)

Many upper limb amputees experience an incessant, post-amputation “phantom limb pain” and report that their missing limbs feel paralyzed in an uncomfortable posture. One hypothesis is that efferent commands no longer generate expected afferent signals, such as proprioceptive feedback from changes in limb configuration, and that the mismatch of motor commands and visual feedback is interpreted as pain. Non-invasive therapeutic techniques for treating phantom limb pain, such as mirror visual feedback (MVF), rely on visualizations of postural changes. Advances in neural (...) interfaces for artificial sensory feedback now make it possible to combine MVF with a high-tech “rubber hand” illusion, in which subjects develop a sense of embodiment with a fake hand when subjected to congruent visual and somatosensory feedback. We discuss clinical benefits that could arise from the confluence of known concepts such as MVF and the rubber hand illusion, and new technologies such as neural interfaces for sensory feedback and highly sensorized robot hand testbeds, such as the “BairClaw” presented here. Our multi-articulating, anthropomorphic robot testbed can be used to study proprioceptive and tactile sensory stimuli during physical finger-object interactions. Conceived for artificial grasp, manipulation, and haptic exploration, the BairClaw could also be used for future studies on the neurorehabilitation of somatosensory disorders due to upper limb impairment or loss. A remote actuation system enables the modular control of tendon-driven hands. The artificial proprioception system enables direct measurement of joint angles and tendon tensions while temperature, vibration, and skin deformation are provided by a multimodal tactile sensor. The provision of multimodal sensory feedback that is spatiotemporally consistent with commanded actions could lead to benefits such as reduced phantom limb pain, and increased prosthesis use due to improved functionality and reduced cognitive burden. (shrink)

Over 40 years of research have shown that traumatic brain injury affects brain volume. However, technical and practical limitations made it difficult to detect brain volume abnormalities in patients suffering from chronic effects of mild or moderate traumatic brain injury. This situation improved in 2006 with the FDA clearance of NeuroQuant®, a commercially available, computer-automated software program for measuring MRI brain volume in human subjects. More recent strides were made with the introduction of NeuroGage®, commercially available software that is based (...) on NeuroQuant® and extends its utility in several ways. Studies using these and similar methods have found that most patients with chronic mild or moderate traumatic brain injury have brain volume abnormalities, and several of these studies found—surprisingly—more abnormal enlargement than atrophy. More generally, 102 peer-reviewed studies have supported the reliability and validity of NeuroQuant® and NeuroGage®. Furthermore, this updated version of a previous review addresses whether NeuroQuant® and NeuroGage® meet the Daubert standard for admissibility in court. It concludes that NeuroQuant® and NeuroGage® meet the Daubert standard based on their reliability, validity, and objectivity. Due to the improvements in technology over the years, these brain volumetric techniques are practical and readily available for clinical or forensic use, and thus they are important tools for detecting signs of brain injury. (shrink)

Classicists have long been wary of comparisons, partly for ideological reasons related to the incomparability of ‘the Classical’, partly because of the often problematic basis and limited illumination afforded by such efforts as have been made: the -reception of the work of the Cambridge ritualists — such as J.G. Frazer and Jane Harrison — is a case in point in both respects. Interestingly, even the specifically comparative interests of the much more rigorous projects of the Paris School, at the Centre (...) Louis Gernet, have not had much resonance outside France, notwithstanding the enormous influence of their work concerning purely Greek subject matter. In part, perhaps, this was a result of the shift from Vernant's originally Marxist framework, in which societies were comparable in terms of an evolutionary sociological scheme, to a structuralist one, entailing an emphasis on the uniqueness of different cultural traditions. The emphasis on the uniqueness of the Classical world was only reinforced by post-structuralism and post-modernism, which in their strongest forms suggested that cultures, like languages, were fundamentally incommensurable, and thus not accessible to outsider knowledge, let alone comparable. Indeed, so virulent was the post-structuralist virus that disciplines to which we might have expected to be able to turn for guidance, like comparative religion, are only now recovering the courage ‘to compare religious phenomena, theologies or artefacts outside of footnotes or less heavily policed epilogues’. (shrink)

Volume 39 of the Tanner Lectures on Human Values includes lectures initially scheduled during the academic year 2019-2020. Owing to the global coronavirus pandemic, some were delivered at a later date. The Tanner Lectures are published in an annual volume. In addition to permanent lectures at nine universities, the Tanner Lectures on Human Values funds special one-time lectures at selected higher educational institutions in the United States and around the world.

Any theory of information needs to comply with what we call the implementation, formalization, and representation constraints. These constraints are justified by basic considerations concerning scientific modelling and methodology. In the first part of this paper, we argue that the implementation and formalization constraints cannot be satisfied because the relation between Shannon information and IIT must be clarified. In the second part of the paper, we focus on the representation constraint. We argue that IIT cannot succeed in satisfying this constraint (...) for semantic contents without offering models for concepts, conceptual roles, and context sensitivity. In the final part of the paper, further complications are raised with respect to the distinction between consciousness and attention, which apply more specifically to the representation constraint. We conclude with some recommendations as to how IIT may succeed in solving these problems, highlighting the advantages and enormous potential of IIT as a scientific theory. (shrink)

Basado enteramente en pruebas internas, este estudio se propone mostrar que el manuscrito único del Dīwān de Ibn Quzmān, publicado en edición facsímil por David de Gunzburg en 1896, es una copia dictada. Se indica también que el copista, a quien con frecuencia se ha culpado de introducir en el texto popular andaluz correcciones o clasicismos, no estaba bien equipado para desempeñar tal papel. Si bien era un calígrafo de primera categoría, se aducen pruebas de que su conocimiento del árabe (...) no estaba a la altura de la calidad de su caligrafía. El estudio muestra que él fue el responsable de una amplia gama de problemas textuales que ha dejado perplejos a sucesivos editores del Dīwān. En marcado contraste, se muestra que Ibn Quzmān poseía un dominio magistral de la lengua árabe y de las tradiciones-árabes clásicas. Al parecer también había adquirido un alto grado de 'aculturación' en la lengua romance. Además de ofrecer las pruebas en que se basan estos asertos, el estudio constituye un ejemplo ilustrativo de cómo estas pruebas pueden ayudar a una mejor lectura e interpretación del Dīwān de Ibn Quzmān. (shrink)

Volume 1: Divine Agency and Divine Action, Volume I lays the groundwork for a constructive contribution to the contemporary debate regarding divine action. Noted scholar William J. Abraham argues that the concept of divine action is not a closed concept--like knowledge--but an open concept with a variety of context-dependent meanings. This volume charts the history of debate about divine action among key Anglophone philosophers of religion, and observes that they were largely committed to this erroneous understanding of divine action as (...) a closed concept. After developing an argument that divine action should be understood as an open, fluid concept, Abraham engages the work of William Alston, Process metaphysics, quantum physics, analytic Thomist philosophy of religion, and the theology of Kathryn Tanner. Abraham argues that divine action as an open concept must be shaped by distinctly theological considerations, and thus all future work on divine action among philosophers of religion must change to accord with this vision. Only deep engagement with the Christian theological tradition will remedy the problems ailing contemporary discourse on divine action. (shrink)

This article discusses a number of metaphors about the nature of science, in connection with three types of metaphysical realism: minimal, moderate and essentialistic realism. From the beginning, Kuipers accepts the first and rejects the third type of realism, but it is only later on that he endorses the second type. It is argued that this makes his remarks on essentialistic realism somewhat misleading; and his moderate realism is compared with some realist positions taken by other philosophers. It is further (...) argued that the metaphors of the mirror, the net and the map correspond to essentialistic, minimal and moderate realism, respectively. This explains why the map metaphor is by far the most suitable one in the context of Kuipers' theory of science. This does not imply, however, that it is the (only) true one and that the others are false. (shrink)

This article proposes an eclectic and holistic model of ethics and ethical thinking. It uses this tripart model to show how partialities can be integrated into impartial moral reasoning. Ethical reasoning is divided into three problem areas or "levels" - cases, frameworks, and ultimate ethical goals. Each level employs its own form of reasoning. For evaluating cases, the author advocates an eclectic application of principles; for evaluating frameworks of principles, the author advocates contractualism; for evaluating ethical theory as a whole, (...) the author advocates a notion of the human good inspired by Aristotelian perfectionism. This article argues that utilitarianism, which is one part of eclectic deliberation, is hampered by the idea that ethical reasoning must be based on a single moral criterion or "master" principle. The article concludes by showing how this eclectic model, supplemented by "mitigated impartialism," provides a systematic method for assessing partialities, with reference to the problem of patriotism in journalism. (shrink)