Small talk plays a big role in conversational perception. In the study here, pairs of conversational participants engaged in three iterations of an ecologically valid task-break dialogue where the break was either small talk via videoconferencing or waiting the same amount of time with cameras and mics turned off. Small talk increased conversational participants’ enjoyment of conversations, their willingness to engage in future conversations with their addressees, and their actual engagement in unprompted conversations with their addressees. Dyads who were instructed (...) to engage in small talk conversation during breaks were approximately three and a half times more likely to have conversations in the sixty second unprompted conversation period at the end of the study compared to dyads whose cameras and mics were off during the earlier break periods. Reciprocity effects previously observed in audio-only and text-only communication were not observed in this study. The findings presented here demonstrate that not only can the positive influence of small talk be replicated and extended to videoconferencing interactions, but such talk can also lead to an increased desire for continued interactions with conversational partners. (shrink)

While many aspects of cognition have been shown to be shared between humans and non-human animals, there remains controversy regarding whether the capacity to mentally time travel is a uniquely human one. In this paper, we argue that there are four ways of representing when some event happened: four kinds of temporal representation. Distinguishing these four kinds of temporal representation has five benefits. First, it puts us in a position to determine the particular benefits these distinct temporal representations afford an (...) organism. Second, it provides the conceptual resources to foster a discussion about which of these representations is necessary for an organism to count as having the capacity to mentally time travel. Third, it enables us to distinguish stricter from more liberal views of mental time travel that differ regarding which kind(s) of temporal representation is taken to be necessary for mental time travel. Fourth, it allows us to determine the benefits of taking a stricter or more liberal view of mental time travel. Finally, it ensures that disagreement about whether some species can mentally time travel is not merely the product of unrecognised disagreement about which temporal representation is necessary for mental time travel. We argue for a more liberal view, on the grounds that it allows us to view mental time travel as an evolutionarily continuous phenomenon, and to recognise that differences in the ways that organisms mentally time travel might reflect different temporal representations, or combinations thereof, that they employ. Our ultimate aim, however, is to create the conceptual framework for further discussion regarding what sorts of temporal representations are required for mental time travel. (shrink)

In this paper I look at three versions of the charge that liberalism’s emphasis on individuals is detrimental to community—that it encourages a pernicious disregard of others by fostering a particular understanding of the individual and the relation she has with her society. According to that understanding, individuals are fundamentally independent entities who only enter into relations by choice and society is seen as nothing more than a venture voluntarily entered into in order to better oneself. Communitarian critics argue that (...) since liberals neglect the degree to which individuals are dependent upon their society for their self-understanding and understanding of the good, they encourage individuals to maintain a personal distance from others in their society. The detrimental effect this distancing is said to have on communities is often called “asocial individualism” or “asocialism.” I argue that all three versions of the charge fail against liberalism and that liberalism—with its insistence on the normative import of individuals—is not detrimental to communities, but can actually foster strong communities. (shrink)

BackgroundEngagement is important within cohort studies for a number of reasons. It is argued that engaging participants within the studies they are involved in may promote their recruitment and retention within the studies. Participant input can also improve study designs, make them more acceptable for uptake by participants and aid in contextualising research communication to participants. Ultimately it is also argued that engagement needs to provide an avenue for participants to feedback to the cohort study and that this is an (...) ethical imperative. This study sought to explore the participants’ experiences and thoughts of their engagement with their birth cohort study.MethodsParticipants were recruited from the Children of the 90s (CO90s) study. Qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with 42 participants. The interviews were transcribed verbatim, and uploaded onto Nvivo software. They were then analysed via thematic analysis with a constant comparison technique.ResultsParticipants’ experiences of their engagement with CO90s were broadly based on three aspects: communication they received from CO90s, experiences of ethical conduct from CO90s and receiving rewards from CO90s. The communication received from CO90s, ranged from newsletters explaining study findings and future studies, to more personal forms like annual greeting cards posted to each participant. Ethical conduct from CO90s mainly involved participants understanding that CO90s would keep their information confidential, that it was only involved in ‘good’ ethical research and their expectation that CO90s would always prioritise participant welfare. Some of the gifts participants said they received at CO90s included toys, shopping vouchers, results from clinical tests, and time off from school to attend data collection (Focus) days. Participants also described a temporality in their engagement with CO90s and the subsequent trust they had developed for the cohort study.ConclusionThe experiences of engagement described by participants were theorized as being based on reciprocity which was sometimes overt and other times more nuanced. We further provide empirical evidence of participants’ expectation for a reciprocal interaction with their cohort study while highlighting the trust that such an interaction fosters. Our study therefore provides key insights for other cohort studies on what participants value in their interactions with their cohort studies. (shrink)

This is a review of an extraordinary tome by Charles Taylor, A secular Age. The book contains about 800 pages of intricate analysis and debate.1 This review attempts to summarise the author’s discussion of secularism under a few key headings and then offers a brief discussion of the material in each case. In the final section, it offers some personal reflections on the missiological implications of his main themes.

Over the past twenty-five years, history of science has expanded into history of knowledge. Plurality has been the main message. Commonality, by contrast, is the main finding of the present study. It examines the knowledge practices of the full range of participants in cases of public inquiry—trials, tests, inspections—involving human bodies in contexts of criminal law, police, public health, marriage and family, claims to community aid, and regulation of trades. The cases come from the archives of three agencies of inquiry (...) and evaluation—a government, a university faculty, and a guild—in a variety of polities in the Holy Roman Empire between about 1500 and 1650. Participants of widely differing education, occupation, and experience—learned, artisanal, and domestic, as well as specialized versions of these—are found to have shared practices of observation, description, explanation, and argument. This finding opens the prospect of a history of shared empirical rationality, in contrast to the hegemony of difference, dialogue or transfer, and “expertise,” in how we understand knowing in modern as well as premodern Europe. (shrink)

This essay draws a new picture of the science of bacteria in its 'golden age', circa 1880-1900: the organization of its knowledge and practice, its germ theory of disease, the difference between its two major research traditions, and, above all, its place in life science in this period that bristled with theories and debates over inheritance, variation, selection, evolution and that witnessed the transition from natural history to laboratory biology. Pasteur and Koch's science acquired this biological dimension not despite being (...) outside academic biology, nor despite the limitations of its applied, medical matrix, but rather because of that framework. The very practices of vaccine development constituted, at the same time, a new biological model of bacterial species and variation, which aligned them with other living things. Finally, the new picture reveals unsuspected continuity to later microbiology and molecular biology. In illuminating the self-perceptions of these sciences in relation to the past, it situates and opens a critical perspecive on writings by bacteriologists such as Ludwik Fleck, François Jacob and René Dubos, which have widely informed how we understand science. (shrink)

This book asks what it means to be Muslim, yet not pious, in Iraqi Kurdistan. Though Islam is often represented in terms of either daily devotion, such as prayer and fasting, or abandonment of faith, there are many who turn away from tradition without departing from Islam. J. Andrew Bush offers us a new way to understand religious difference in Islam, one that invites questions about divine texts and rejects easy answers about political or sectarian identities. Exploring the lives (...) of irreligious Muslims, Bush highlights the paradoxes of their ethical orientation. While profoundly averse to many aspects of Islamic traditions, irreligious Muslims nonetheless harbor attractions to other aspects--such as Sufi poetry. Exploring this complex weave of attraction and aversion, Relating to Islam in Kurdistan provides intimate portraits of irreligious Kurdish Muslims in everyday life and the historical conditions that have allowed such paradoxical religious orientations to appear very ordinary in contemporary Kurdistan. Whether readers approach the book as Muslims with a commitment to Islam, or as Muslims with ambivalence to Islam, or as non-Muslims who bear their own forms of certainty or ambivalence about Islam, the book will open to the door to thinking about the relationship between commitment and ambivalence in Islamic traditions. (shrink)

This book is about the respective roles of intuition and reasoning in ethics. It responds to a number of well-known philosophers and psychologists, and proposes a new perspective – radical in its moderation. It examines in depth the work of the philosopher Joshua Greene and the psychologist Jonathan Haidt. With the so-called empirical turn in ethics, much work has been done to try to isolate the role of reason and intuition in forming our moral judgements, with Haidt and Greene leading (...) the research programmes and attracting much of the professional and public attention, and many others following. The current view – shared by both camps – is that intuition is largely the driver of our moral judgements – a view summed up in Haidt’s slogan ‘intuition first, strategic reasoning second’. Haidt believes we have to live with this and accept it. Greene does not: he contends that our intuitions, while suitable for the environments in which we evolved, are worthless in the modern, global, technological age, and to avoid ethical disaster we must learn to adopt reason as the arbiter of moral truth. This book steers a middle course between these two positions and is therefore of great interest to philosophers and psychologists alike. (shrink)

The article discusses the twin and, to a certain extent, reciprocal ideas of ‘Manifest Success’ and ‘Manifest Destiny.’ It argues that, as developed respectively by certain streams of thought within Islamic communities and religiously motivated political movements within the USA, they both display strong ideological characteristics in the negative sense. Apart from the historical evidence that contradicts their utopian aspirations, the sense of identity and destiny which they wish to inspire is politically dangerous for being illusory. Muslims and Christians need (...) to be aware of the ideological instrumentalising of their faith traditions, in order to be able to repudiate the undesirable appropriation of their core beliefs. (shrink)

Understanding consciousness is one of the central scientific challenges of our time. This book presents Andy Ross's recent work and discusses a range of perspectives on the core issues. The chapters are based on texts written for a variety of occasions and audiences. Reading them in order, one senses a growing clarity in the articulation of the new ideas, some of which are deep and rather subtle, and glimpses the outlines of a dynamic field. Ross has taken pains to unify (...) the collection and make the main thread clearly visible. His new ideas are of fundamental importance, and readers who grapple with them should gain insight that amply rewards the effort. (shrink)

Ted Honderich, 74, formerly Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at the University of London, recently published a short book on consciousness (Honderich, 2004). Colin McGinn, 57, his former colleague at University College London and now a professor of philosophy at the University of Miami, Florida, reviewed it (McGinn, 2007a). The review is quite long and detailed, but the first sentences set the tone. McGinn on Honderich: 'This book runs the full gamut from the mediocre to the (...) ludicrous to the merely bad. It is painful to read, poorly thought out, and uninformed. It is also radically inconsistent.'. (shrink)

In an era of climate change, deforestation, melting ice caps, poisoned environments, and species loss, many people are turning to the power of the arts and humanities for sustainable solutions to global ecological problems. Introduction to the Environmental Humanities offers a practical and accessible guide to this dynamic and interdisciplinary field. This book provides an overview of the Environmental Humanities' evolution from the activist movements of the early and mid-twentieth century to more recent debates over climate change, sustainability, energy policy, (...) and habitat degradation in the Anthropocene era. The text introduces readers to seminal writings, artworks, campaigns, and movements while demystifying important terms such as the Anthropocene, environmental justice, nature, ecosystem, ecology, posthuman, and non-human. Emerging theoretical areas such as critical animal and plant studies, gender and queer studies, Indigenous studies, and energy studies are also presented. Organized by discipline, the book explores the role that the arts and humanities play in the future of the planet. Including case studies, discussion questions, annotated bibliographies, and links to online resources, this book offers a comprehensive and engaging overview of the Environmental Humanities for introductory readers. For more advanced readers, it serves as a foundation for future study, projects, or professional development. (shrink)

This book taps the best American thinkers to answer the essential American question: How do we sustain our experiment in government of, by, and for the people? Authored by an extraordinary and politically diverse roster of public officials, scholars, and educators, these chapters describe our nation's civic education problem, assess its causes, offer an agenda for reform, and explain the high stakes at risk if we fail.

What was classification as it first took modern form in the eighteenth century, how did it work, and how did it relate to earlier describing and ordering? We offer new answers to these questions by considering an example less well known than that of botany or zoology, namely medicine, and by reconstructing practice on paper. The first and best-known disease classification is the “nosology” of the Montpellier physician François Boissier de Sauvages de Lacroix. Its several editions, we show, were less (...) products than process: published tools for building a classification system. The disorder of a hitherto unstudied notebook that Boissier de Sauvages kept throughout this process provided a way of breaking with the topical order of earlier physicians’ humanistic commonplace books of disease observation while sustaining the paper practices those earlier physicians—and Sauvages himself as a student—had used to order disease. This suggests a different picture of historical change than that of a scholarly world of ordered words giving way to a scientific one of ordered things. Classification, in the case of Sauvages’ nosology, arose through an incomplete break with, and intensified practice of, a past way of ordering the described world. The humanist paper practice that had made observationes, differently applied, now made species. Classification into genera and species by similarity and difference, which Sauvages’ nosology shared with botany, was an algorithm of paper and ink practice—in its operation more machine-like than humanist textual practice yet in its effects more creative and re-creative of categories and questions of relationship. Thus a new empiricism of generalizations arose out of the older, Renaissance empiricism of particulars. (shrink)

In many areas of the social and behavioral sciences, the nature of the experiments and theories that best capture the underlying constructs are themselves areas of active inquiry. Integrative experiment design risks being prematurely exploitative, hindering exploration of experimental paradigms and of diverse theoretical accounts for target phenomena.

Myotonic dystrophy type 1 (DM1) is considered a progeroid disease (i.e., causing premature aging). This hypervariable disease affects multiple systems, such as the musculoskeletal, central nervous, gastrointestinal, and others. Despite advances in understanding the underlying pathogenic mechanism of DM1, numerous gaps persist in our understanding, hindering elucidation of the heterogeneity and severity of its symptoms. Accumulating evidence indicates that the toxic intracellular RNA accumulation associated with DM1 triggers cellular senescence. These cells are in a state of irreversible cell cycle arrest (...) and secrete a cocktail of cytokines, referred to as a senescence‐associated secretory phenotype (SASP), that can have harmful effects on neighboring cells and more broadly. We hypothesize that cellular senescence contributes to the pathophysiology of DM1, and clearance of senescent cells is a promising therapeutic approach for DM1. We will discuss the therapeutic potential of different senotherapeutic drugs, especially senolytics that eliminate senescent cells, and senomorphics that reduce SASP expression. (shrink)

Methods to facilitate co-production in mental health are important for engaging end users. As part of the Technology for Healthy Aging and Wellbeing initiative we organized two interactive co-production workshops, to bring together older adults, health and social care professionals, non-governmental organizations, and researchers. In the first workshop, we used two activities: Technology Interaction and Scavenger Hunt, to explore the potential for different stakeholders to discuss late life mental health and existing technology. In the second workshop, we used Vignettes, Scavenger (...) Hunt, and Invention Test to examine how older adults and other stakeholders might co-produce solutions to support mental wellbeing in later life using new and emerging technologies. In this paper, we share the interactive materials and activities and consider their value for co-production. Overall, the interactive methods were successful in engaging stakeholders with a broad range of technologies to support mental health and wellbeing and in co-producing ideas for how they could be leveraged and incorporated into older people’s lives and support services. We offer this example of using interactive methods to facilitate co-production to encourage greater involvement of older adults and other under-represented groups in co-producing mental health technologies and services. (shrink)

Animal welfare science and ecology are both generally concerned with the lives of animals, however they differ in their objectives and scope; the former studies the welfare of animals considered ‘domestic’ and under the domain of humans, while the latter studies wild animals with respect to ecological processes. Each of these approaches addresses certain aspects of the lives of animals living in the world though neither, we argue, tells us important information about the welfare of wild animals. This paper argues (...) for the development of a new scientific discipline ‘welfare biology’ to address these issues and more, given the deficiencies of pre-existing life science disciplines to research the subject. Welfare biology is the study of the welfare of all living beings who have a welfare, with a value orientation toward promoting that welfare, regardless of the beings’ situation or relationship to humans and our activities. (shrink)

Koonin, in an article in this issue, claims that CRISPR–Cas systems are mechanisms for the inheritance of acquired adaptive characteristics, and that the operation of such systems comprises a “Lamarckian mode of evolution.” We argue that viewing the CRISPR–Cas mechanism as facilitating a form of “directed mutation” more accurately represents how the system behaves and the history of neoDarwinian thinking, and is to be preferred.

This volume examines an often taken for granted concept-that of the concept itself. How do we picture what concepts are, what they do, how they arise in the course of everyday life? Challenging conventional approaches that treat concepts as mere tools at our disposal for analysis, or as straightforwardly equivalent to signs to be deciphered, the anthropologists and philosophers in this volume turn instead to the ways concepts are already intrinsically embedded in our forms of life and how they constitute (...) the very substrate of our existence as humans who lead lives in language. Attending to our ordinary lives with concepts requires not an ascent from the rough ground of reality into the skies of theory, but rather acceptance of the fact that thinking is congenital to living with and through concepts. The volume offers a critical and timely intervention into both contemporary philosophy and anthropological theory by unsettling the distinction between thought and reality that continues to be too often assumed and showing how the supposed need to grasp reality may be replaced by an acknowledgement that we are in its grip. Contributors: Jocelyn Benoist, Andrew Brandel, Michael Cordey, Veena Das, Rasmus Dyring and Thomas Schwarz Wentzer, Michael D. Jackson, Michael Lambek, Sandra Laugier, Marco Motta, Michael J. Puett, and Lotte Buch Segal. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:CREATOR AND CAUSALITY: A CRITIQUE OF PRE-CRITICAL OBJECTIONS ANDREW BEARDS University of Oalgary Calgary, Alberta IN SOME QUARTERS arguments ias to the existence or non-existence of God are still regarded as intellectually respectaible. Indeed, interest in such arguments is not restricted to those with a strictly philosophical or theological training. Every so often one may observe some specialist from the physical sciences taking an interest in the philosophical (...) discussion of cosmological issues. Such has been the case with the recent contributions of the physicist Paul Davies.1 However, such contributions are likely to invite from the philosopher the response that the generalized notions which the scientist attempts to transpose from the particular field of his scientific interest are the very notions which feature in the current debates on the philosophy and methodology of the sciences. Such debates bring into question the status of these scientific notions and therefore render any putative generalized or even metaphysical application of them problematic. Discussions of natural theology, then, often appear to be conducted in a manner which tends to take too much for granted with regard to the terms employed. The notion of causality, central to such,argumentation, is a case in point. Often enough a simple ":billiard hall" image of causal interaction seems to he all that one is required to keep before the mind in order to follow the lines of argument involved, he they ~or or aiga.inst the postulation of a First Cause. Thus, in the often referred to r:adio.debate on the existence of God between 1 Paul Davies, God and the New Physics (New York: T'ouchstone Books, 1984). 573 574 ANDREW BEARDS Bertrand Russell and Fl1ederick Copleston, Russell simply averred that he did not feel compelled to accept that a causal chain extended heyond the ·World to some First Cause. For, indeed, if one imagines a line of billiard halls transmitting momentum one to the other, there is nothing unintelligible about picturing a first!billiard hall initiating the process apparently unaided. Hume has surely taught us that much. If one is to heed the present debates raging in that arena known as the philosophy of science (by which term one can understand epistemology, metaphysics and virtually ·any other topic tr:aditiona1ly designated philosophical), then one can.be forgi¥en for asking how the question as to the existence of God could he raised in an intelligiible manner. For if one is to agree with Richa1d J. Bernstein's assertion that contemporary philosophy manifests, in the ma.in, 1a rebellious attitude to the "father figure,, of the methodical Descartes,2 then one can be equally well impressed by the fact that this " rebellious spirit" is no Jess informed iby a respect for the Kantian attempt to descry the parameters of valid human knowing. And was it not the Kantian achievement to have dispelled the oibfuscation of metaphysics, thereby eliminating the grounds which were helieved to have substantiated a rational affirmation of the existence of God? The term 'Pre-Critical ' in the title of this essay is, therefore, intended as an e¥ocation of the Kantian demand for a critical v;alidation of the terms employed in philosophical argumentation. However, I shall attempt to advance the thesis that the Kantian enterprise does not, in fact, result in a happy resolution of the problems which it sets for itself. This is, of course, a thesis which could 'be proposed f.rom a number of divergent philosophical standpoints. It is my intention to argue here, however, that the work of the philosopher Bernard Lonergan provides,a more satisfactory method for the carrying through of the critical endeavour to validate epistemologi2 Richard J, Bernstein, Beyond Objectwism and.Relatwism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), p. 18. CREATOR AND CAUSALITY 575 cally the philosophical,statements we propose. I believe it is the merit of Lonergan's work to have developed positions on the hasis of an explication of the exigences operative in criticism itself, such that any criticism of this explication will he rbut an example of an incoherent criticism,attempting to invalidate its own procedures.3 In what follows I shall attempt to develop the above-mentioned argument to the effect... (shrink)

In Democracy and the Claims of Nature, the leading thinkers in the fields of environmental, political, and social theory come together to discuss the tensions and sympathies of democratic ideals and environmental values. The prominent contributors reflect upon where we stand in our understanding of the relationship between democracy and the claims of nature. Democracy and the Claims of Nature bridges the gap between the often competing ideals of the two fields, leading to a greater understanding of each for the (...) other. (shrink)