In a surface-dwelling animal like the rat, experimental strategies for investigating the hippocampal correlates of three-dimensional space appear inevitably complicated by the interplay of global versus local reference frames. We discuss the impact of the resulting confounds on present and future empirical analysis of the hypothesis by Jeffery and colleagues.

This is a book about how we see: the environment around us (its surfaces, their layout, and their colors and textures); where we are in the environment; whether or not we are moving and, if we are, where we are going; what things are good for; how to do things (to thread a needle or drive an automobile); or why things look as they do.The basic assumption is that vision depends on the eye which is connected to the brain. The (...) author suggests that natural vision depends on the eyes in the head on a body supported by the ground, the brain being only the central organ of a complete visual system. When no constraints are put on the visual system, people look around, walk up to something interesting and move around it so as to see it from all sides, and go from one vista to another. That is natural vision—and what this book is about. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the ethical-political dilemma in Kant’s work, sometimes expressed through the metaphor of the “crooked wood of humanity.” Kant separates external and internal freedom and the types of legislation each form of freedom requires (coercive and noncoercive). Yet, he also argues that corrupt political institutions adversely affect individual ethical development, and, reciprocally, corrupt inner dispositions of a populace adversely affect the establishment of just political institutions. I argue that a major way in which Kant addresses this vicious circle (...) is through ethical institutions, that is, noncoercive public resources for articulating and disseminating the principles of the moral law. I discuss the idea of an ethico-civil society or ethical community formulated in the Religion as an ideal model for ethical institutions mediating the ethical and the legal-political in a noncoercive, progressive manner. (shrink)

Postnatal parent-infant physiological regulatory effects described in the previous paper (Part I) are viewed here as being biologically contiguous with events that occur prenatally, preparing and sensitizing the fetus to the average microenvironment into which the infant is expected, based on its evolutionary past, to be born. Following McKenna (1986), evidence (some of which is circumstantial) is presented concerning fetal hearing and fetal amniotic liquid breathing as they are affected both by maternal cardiovascular blood flow sounds in the uterus and (...) by fluctuating maternal blood sugar levels. These data are linked in turn to the infant’s postulated postnatal responsivity to parental sensory cues, including auditory and vestibular respiratory cues that may assist infants as they “learn” to breathe and, for some, to resist a SIDS event. Data on the respiratory and vocalizing behavior of normal and hearing-impaired persons are used to show that not all forms of human breathing are innate; some forms develop with experience. These data reveal how human infants learn, for example, to coordinate higher and lower brain respiratory nuclei in the context of learning initially to cry with intent and purpose and later to speak. Voluntary, cortex-based breathing emerges at the same time that infants are most likely to die from SIDS, between 2 and 4 months of age. This switch between voluntary and involuntary breathing during both sleep (while dreaming) and wake cycles, which depends on the integration of higher cortical and lower brain stem nuclei, is complex and is possibly the basis of the human species’ unique susceptibility to SIDS—a syndrome as yet unrecognized in other species. These human infant vulnerabilities, including delayed maturity, can explain in part why natural selection ought to favor increased infant sensitivity to parental sensory cues provided by a caregiver—stimuli available in the evolving parental care environment that included parent-infant co-sleeping for more than 4–5 million years of human evolution. (shrink)

Review of: Wood, Allen W., Kant and Religion, Cambridge, Cambridge U.P., 2020, 250 pp. ISBN: 978-0521799980.

Abstract:As a flagship program of the New Deal, the CCC was one of several federal agencies which turned to the natural and built environment to promote socio-cultural homogenization between the First and Second World War. This article investigates the CCC's role as an agent of national transformation and considers the links between the New Deal's treatment of the American landscape and its promotion of a new, more pluralistic national identity. While historians of the interwar United States are quick to note (...) the social and environmental significance of the CCC, the cultural role of this program remains largely overlooked. Specifically, relevant scholarship has neglected to address the architectural output of this program and the way it related to the New Deal's broader socio-cultural initiatives. With camps in each of the forty-eight states and overseas territories, the CCC reconfigured much of the American landscape and deployed a regionally diverse blend of vernacular architecture, all while fostering a mythologized sense of cultural heritage from coast to coast. In order to better understand both the role and rationale behind this process, this article considers several examples of CCC-produced architecture and landscape design across the greater United States. It argues that these designs were key vehicles of the unifying message that drove the New Deal and its many so-called ‘alphabet agencies’ from the depths of economic depression to a state of preparedness as the country approached the precipice of global war. This article also considers the Corps' role in the New Deal's construction of popular historical consciousness and draws attention to the frequent transregional interactions between enrollees and local populations. (shrink)

This volume -- a companion to Thomas Reid: Selected Philosophical Writings (2012) -- makes available material from Thomas Reid's autograph manuscripts and student notes of his lectures. It includes an introductory essay by Nicholas Wolterstorff.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Peculiarly Favored Condition of GeneticsJames J. Lee, PhD (bio) and Damien Morris, MSc (bio)Turkheimer and Greer (2024) (henceforth “T&G”) make some fair points about problems in the scientific profession, including the regrettable tendency to promise practical applications of research that then never materialize. However, T&G’s sustained critique of a body of work associated with one particular researcher to make these general points struck us as uncharitable. More pressingly, (...) we feel that the far-reaching conclusions that T&G attempt to draw from the results they review from the Spit for Science (S4S) cohort are unjustified and risk misleading readers that psychiatric and behavioral genetics is in a parlous state.T&G state that S4S “produced a clear answer to the question it was designed to address,” namely, that its results “unambiguously contradict the hypothesis that alcohol-related behaviors have a meaningful genetic basis.” But S4S cannot possibly have provided affirmative evidence for the null hypothesis, because as a single cohort it lacked the statistical power to do so. Elsewhere T&G acknowledge that the sample size of S4S does not suffice for many purposes; they cannot have it both ways. When GCTA has been applied to samples of greater size, it has unambiguously supported the hypothesis that alcohol-related behaviors have a meaningful genetic basis. The UK Biobank yielded estimates exceeding 0.10 for the contribution of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) with minor allele frequency of greater than 0.05 to the heritability of drinks per week, estimates more than ten times their standard errors (Liu et al., 2019).This heritability contributed by common variants is sometimes called “SNP heritability,” and T&G disparage it for the alleged “disadvantage of being substantially smaller” than “twin and family heritabilities.” Nowhere do T&G consider what the precise numbers actually mean—an approach that can be hazardous to your scientific health, as the late John Loehlin might have said. Let us, then, consider these numbers. Under a model of pure neutrality, SNP and pedigree narrow-sense heritabilities should be fairly close, essentially as a result of factors p(1 − p) canceling in the multiplication of the numbers of SNPs to be found at a given allele frequency by the average heritability contributed per SNP (Hill, 2010). If SNP and pedigree heritabilities are not close, then natural selection must have been acting on [End Page 441] the trait, preventing new mutations of large effect from becoming common and thereby concentrating heritability at allele frequencies lower than those typically studied in genome-wide association studies (GWAS). This deduction has been abundantly confirmed: the tendency of GWAS SNPs to reside in evolutionarily conserved regions (Finucane et al., 2015; Kim et al., 2019), the younger age of GWAS SNPs when compared to control SNPs of comparable frequencies (Gazal et al., 2017), the discovery of several rare variants with larger effects than those observed in typical GWAS (Barton et al., 2021; Chen et al., 2023; Marouli et al., 2017), the directly measured deleterious fitness effects of mutations in evolutionarily constrained genes (Gardner et al., 2022), and the substantial additional genetic variance accumulated when rare variants are included in GCTA-type studies, sometimes enough to close the gap between SNP and pedigree heritabilities (Evans et al., 2018; Jang et al., 2022; Pathan et al., 2024; Wainschtein et al., 2022).The genetic architecture of a typical quantitative trait consists of many sites across the genome that can mutate to affect it, numbering potentially in the millions (Agarwala et al., 2013; Zeng et al., 2021), of which those that are common SNPs have very small effects as a result of selection. This is the message, but T&G seem to find fault with the messenger, painting “tiny” effect sizes as an embarrassment to the field of behavioral genetics as a whole. We prefer to view the finding of high polygenicity as a revelation about nature, rather than as a debating point. What is this finding telling us? If one takes the action of stabilizing selection as the initial assumption (Uyeda et al., 2011), then the extreme polygenicity revealed by GWAS becomes part of the answer to the question regarding how traits can... (shrink)

It examines three core questions. First, what is the scope and direction of neuroscientific inquiry?

The late Professor Friedländer’s work on Plato was originally published in two volumes at Berlin-Leipzig in 1928 and 1930. Of these the first volume discussed a large number of general Platonic themes, and the second commented on the dialogues in sequence. A substantial revision and expansion of the work was begun with the publication of Platon I: Seinswahrheit und Lebenswirklichkeit, corresponding to the original first volume. The original second volume was however now divided into two and the first part of (...) this revised second edition appeared as Band II Die Platonischen Schriften. The second and major part of this second volume appeared at Platon III: Die Platonischen Schriften, Zweite und Dritte Periode. Friedländer was now living in America and English translations of the three volumes by Hans Meyerhoff with further additions, revisions and notes appeared as Plato IH An Introduction ; Plato: The Dialogues, First Period ; and lastly the present volume Plato: The Dialogues, Second and Third Periods. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A RETURN TO THE SUBJECT: THE THEOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF CHARLES TAYLOR'S SOURCES OF THE SELF JAMES J. BUCKLEY Loyola College Baltimore, Maryland ECENT THEOLOGIANS have widely argued (or pve-. sumed) that modernity's 1turn to the subject creates deep p11ohlems for imagining, thinking about, or enacting who we m'e. These theologians do not aJwaJ"s agree on what constitutes "modernity." And they ra11e!ly agree on the 'alternative to " the (...) turn to the :subject.'' That is, some theologians airgue or presume that the turn from the subject ought to he baiekwa:rid, retrieving our sou11ces prior to what Vatican II and others c:a:lrl "the modeTn world;" others argue o'l.' presume tha:t the turn ought be forwavd to "post-modernity," either accommodating ourseh11es to the decentered selves of the post-modern secular avant garde or proclaiming the strange, new wo1'1d of the Bible. Hut neo-Augustinians and Thomists, liberation theologians and pragmatists, Wittgensrteinians and Barthians all roughly agree (in spite of deep disagx,eements) that we need to turn from the subject;1 Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity is a massivie challenge to these presumptions and argument1s.2 It is, we might s'ay, a call to re-turn to the :subjeict-;hut quwlified this time by a gl'e3.1ter sense of this subject 'is historiml context in the Enlightenment and Romantioism 1 For a summary of critiques of different turns to the subject, see David H. Kelsey, "Human Being," in Christian Theology: An Introduction to Its Traditions and Tasks, ed. Peter C. Hodgson and Robert H. King, Second Edition (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985 [Firnt Edition, 1982]), Chapter 6. 2 Charles Taylor Sources of the Sdf: The Making of the JJiodern Identity (Harvard University Press, 1989), referred to in the body of this essay by page numbers in parentheses. 497 498 JAMES J. BUCKLEY a1s weU.as this subject's constant ternptaition to undermine the very world it mak!es. A rea1der's response to the book wilil depend not only on how one rea1ds Taylor (e.g., does he under- or over-qualify his ca11 to return to Lhe subject?) but also on where the reader finds heriseilf on the tlieological spectrum. However, the fact that T.aylor',s book has been greeted with critical enthusiasm by both theologiical 'agnostics and contempomry Augustinians and Thomists suggests tha1t it is a book whose power and scope will resonabe with very different sort1s of men and women.3 My aim here is not to summarize or 1 assess the riches of this book. Soumes of the Self is a book of such clarity, power, and 1scope that lit will takce some 1 time for rea;ders (or, ak least, this reader) fo absorb it a;nd to respond :to Taylor adequateJy. My aim is much more modest, nameJy, to pursue some of the connections between Tayl:or's proposal and theology. These connections vv:i.11 suggest some chores Taylor has discoveil'ed or crea;ted for theoilogians. I rea:lize that I risk doing an injustice to a book by a philosopher, not a theologian. Tayfor is candid about hls own theologica1l convictions, while not pretending fully to ddend or evcen fully expl~ca:te those convictions. Nonetihe1ess, I wiill show tha:t his theses challenge n1any of us in ways tha:t justify a foous on theo1ogica,l isisues.Je objecition to. Tayloi; rightly speaks of the "anti-humanism of much evange[ieail rie~ ligion today," bu:t I be1ievie he is mistaken when he fails to 1.2 He carefully distinguishes neo-Nietzscheans like Lyotard, Derrida, and even Foucault, from Nietzsche himself, who had a kind of "saving inconsistency " (489) in his simultaneous affirmation and denial of a " sense of the magnificent, of the categorically affi.rmable, of the infinitely worthy of love " (453). ON CHARLES TAYLOR 509 qualify lthis "murch" and also when he caMs "figures like Cardina1l Ra:tzinger" anti-humanistic (318). He!thinks that abortion debrutes a're not so murch deep disagreements as they are exceptionail disagreements that only provie h0:w suhs1tantial our agreements are (515). But Taylor... (shrink)

Both the psychology of perception and the philosophy of perception seem to show a new face when the process is considered at its own level, distinct from that of sensation. Unfamiliar conceptions in physics, anatomy, physiology, psychology, and phenomenology are required to clarify the separation and make it plausible. But there have been so many dead ends in the effort to solve the theoretical problems of perception that radical proposals may now be acceptable. Scientists are often more conservative than philosophers (...) of science. I end, therefore, as I began, with a plea for help. (shrink)

Ectogestation technology, when feasible, will permit fetal development within an artificial womb. Ectogestation is termed ectogenesis when it is full (gestation occurs exclusively within an artificial womb post in vitro fertilisation) or partial (artificial gestation occurs during the course of in vivo gestation, post a caesarean-like fetal transfer). In what follows, I explore the implications for the gestational versus moral parenthood debate recently spotlighted by Benjamin Lange1 for various alternative uses of ectogestation compared to the baseline case of in vivo (...) gestation. I contrast ectogestation in four different contexts with in vivo gestation followed by vaginal delivery. I document the relevant outcomes, burdens and harms in particular, to the gestating mother, the biological father, the fetus and the child into whom it will develop. The focus on harms in considering intraparental claims to parenthood follows Lange’s focal article1: importantly, however, I focus not on harms from separation from the gestational procreator (as in adoption cases) but instead on harms arising from the use of ectogestation in various forms. I note at the outset, how, for each case discussed below, I indicate opportunities for each biological parent to establish voluntarism-based claims to moral parenthood. In the analyses, except where specifically noted, the default implication is that it is …. (shrink)

This authoritative volume provides a comprehensive road map of the important and rapidly growing field of emotion regulation.

John Harris argues that opponents of human embryonic stem cell research, Catholics specifically, suffer an inconsistency in their moral thinking, opposing it on the basis that the sacrifice of an embryo is impermissible even for the good of curing disease. They have no objection to natural procreation, however, which results in many early miscarriages. Harris contends that Catholics tacitly endorse these miscarriages as a permissible sacrifice for the good of producing other, healthy children. This paper offers a response to the (...) argument that relies on only basic moral principles that Harris himself is likely to accept. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 12.3 (Autumn 2012): 461–476. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BALTHASAR'S USE OF THE THEOLOGY OF AQUINAS }AMES J. BUCKLEY Loyola College in Maryland Baltimore, Maryland T HE AIM OF THIS essay is to raise some questions about the internal consistency of Hans Urs von Balthasar's use of the theology of Thomas Aquinas. These are genuine questions. That is, they are not questions ("Is Balthasar's use of Aquinas consistent?") disguising or masking answers ("Balthasar's use of Aquinas is inconsistent"). (...) While I hope the questions set an agenda for disputations between students of these two theologians, my aim is not to settle the many disputations between the theologies of Aquinas and Balthasar, but to propose some quaestiones disputatae. In Balthasar's terms, the aim is to set up the theater and put some characters on the stage, not to stage the drama itself. Why bother? First, Balthasar's theology arises out of a tradition critical of the theology of Aquinas, and students of Aquinas can only ignore such objections at the price of abandoning Aquinas's habit of responding to such criticisms. The locus classicus of this critique is Balthasar's claim that he omits Aquinas from his canon of theological aestheticians because Aquinas is one of those whose "deep and lucid philosophical aesthetics" has "failed to achieve a theological translation, that is, to be seen as the unfolding of a theology based on biblical revelation" (GL II, 21).1 Thomas Aquinas (Balthasar later says) "was more of a philosopher than a theologian" (GL III, 9). We shall see later that ' I shall use the following abbreviations: ST = Summa Theologiae. Latin text and English translation, ed. Thomas Gilby, various translators (New York: McGraw-Hill; London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1964-80). GL =The Glory ofthe Lord: A Theological Aesthetic, ed. Joseph Fessio, S.J., and John Riches, various translators, 7 vols. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press; New York: Crossroad Publications, 1982-91). 517 518 JAMES J. BUCKLEY Balthasar also mentions other objections to Aquinas. In fact, part of my argument will be that this central criticism of Thomas's aesthetics is intelligible only against the background of other even more important criticisms of Aquinas's theology. I ought also to note at this early stage, however, that Balthasar 's criticisms of Aquinas are almost always carefully qualified. For example, in the locus classicus just cited, Balthasar objects to Aquinas's aesthetics, not his ethics or metaphysics; indeed, it is a criticism of Aquinas's theological aesthetics, not his philosophical aesthetics. Still further, Balthasar even says it "would perhaps" be possible to develop the "implicit" theological aesthetics in Thomas's philosophical aesthetics; however, Balthasar (inexplicably, some would say at this point) thinks this could only be done "witn uncertain success" (GL II, 21). One reason for the frequent allusiveness of Balthasar's objections to Aquinas is a second reason for bothering with Balthasar's use of Aquinas: in and with the firmness of Balthasar 's criticisms of Aquinas, the vast majority of Balthasar's uses of Aquinas are constructive rather than critical. Indeed, if taking the measure of theological disputation were primarily a matter of weighing quotations, it could easily be shown that Balthasar's use of Aquinas is by far more positive than negative. More importantly, I shall propose that Balthasar notices features of Aquinas's theology not often noted (or still not noted often enough) by many students of Aquinas. This common ground between Balthasar and Aquinas recalls how, among Roman Catholics in the first part of this century, there was a sort of alliance among Catholic reformers-over against strains of Catholic traditionalisms-between some forms of Thomism and TD= Theodramatik, 4 vols. (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1973-83). T-D =Theo-drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, various translators, 5 vols. planned (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988-). TL= Theologik, 3 vols. (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1985-87). For a summary of Balthasar's trilogy on beauty and goodness and truth, see his Epilog (Einsiedeln/Trier: Johannes Verlag, 1987) as well as My Work: In Retrospect, trans. Cornelia CapoI (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993). BALTHASAR'S THEOLOGY OF AQUINAS 519 what was known as la nouvelle theologie (including Balthasar).2 It is this common ground that ought to make us wary of... (shrink)

The disruptions to everyday life wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic include distortions in the experience of time, as reported widely by ordinary citizens and observed by journalists and social scientists. But how does this temporal disruption play out in different time scales—in the individual day as opposed to the medium- and long-term futures? And how might place influence how individuals experience and understand the pandemic's temporal transformations? This essay examines a range of temporal disruptions reported in day diaries and surveys (...) submitted to the Everyday Life in Middletown project, an online archive that has been documenting ordinary life in Muncie, Indiana, USA since 2016. Viewing these materials as instances of life writing, the essay probes the interactions between temporal disruptions and the local setting as they inflect the autobiographical selves our writers construct in their pandemic writings. It shows how living in Muncie—a postindustrial city with its particular combination of historical, demographic, economic, social, and political dynamics—structures the autobiographical stories available to our writers, and how the disruption of time produces new variations and problems for life writing. In the midst of a global crisis, we glimpse the pandemic's reshaping of a local structure of feeling in which a pervasive, local narrative of civic decline frames individual self-fashioning. (shrink)

In this article I consider the future of the field of emotion. My conclusion—borrowing the title of a little-remembered song from the 1980s—is that “the future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades.” I begin this article by considering some of the many daunting conceptual and empirical challenges here; this is clearly not a field for the faint of heart. I then turn to some of the incredible conceptual and empirical opportunities here; there are so many it’s easy to feel dizzy. (...) In the final section, I predict that the field of emotion will broaden and become more problem focused, and hazard a “top 10” list of hot topics. (shrink)

We argue that any theory of color physicalism must include consideration of ecological interactions. Ecological and sensorimotor contingencies resulting from relative surface motion and observer motion give rise to measurable effects on the spectrum of light reflecting from surfaces. These contingencies define invariant manifolds in a sensory-spatial space, which is the physical underpinning of all subjective color experiences.