This paper argues that the future of the liberal arts will be decided by how they engage or fail to engage broad cultural dynamics that threaten to diminish them. It focuses on three areas of concern: the cultural predominance of science and technology in the modem world, the widespread failure to address the moral cultivation of the young, and the leveling effects of mass society on individual lives. In each case, it recommends actions that, if undertaken, would combat the (...) growing cultural isolation of these arts. (shrink)

Combined non-invasive brain stimulation (NIBS) and rehabilitation interventions have the potential to improve function in children with unilateral cerebral palsy (UCP), however their effects on developing brain function are not well understood. In a proof-of-principle study, we used single-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to measure changes in corticospinal excitability and relationships to motor performance following a randomized controlled trial consisting of 10 days of combined constraint-induced movement therapy (CIMT) and cathodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) applied to the contralesional motor (...) cortex. Twenty children and young adults (mean age = 12 years, 9 months, range = 7 years, 7 months, 21 years, 7 months) with UCP participated. TMS testing was performed before, after, and 6 months after the intervention to measure motor evoked potential (MEP) amplitude and cortical silent period (CSP) duration. The association between neurophysiologic and motor outcomes and differences in excitability between hemispheres were examined. Contralesional MEP amplitude decreased as hypothesized in five of five participants receiving active tDCS immediately after and 6 months after the intervention, however no statistically significant differences between intervention groups were noted for MEP amplitude [mean difference = −323.9 μV, 95% CI = (−989, 341), p = 0.34] or CSP duration [mean difference = 3.9 ms, 95% CI = (−7.7, 15.5), p = 0.51]. Changes in corticospinal excitability were not statistically associated with improvements in hand function after the intervention. Across all participants, MEP amplitudes measured in the more-affected hand from both contralesional (mean difference = −474.5 μV) and ipsilesional hemispheres (−624.5 μV) were smaller compared to the less-affected hand. Assessing neurophysiologic changes after tDCS in children with UCP provides an understanding of long-term effects on brain excitability to help determine its potential as a therapeutic intervention. Additional investigation into the neurophysiologic effects of tDCS in larger samples of children with UCP are needed to confirm these findings. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.1 (2003) 1-20 [Access article in PDF] Crime, Compassion, and The Reader John E. MacKinnon IN "WRITING AFTER AUSCHWITZ," Günter Grass describes how at the age of seventeen he stubbornly refused to believe the evidence arrayed before him and his classmates of Nazi atrocities, the photographs showing piles of eyeglasses, shoes, hair, and bones. "Germans never could have done, never did do a thing like that," (...) he recalls thinking. And "when the Never collapsed," he and other young Germans were assured that they were free of responsibility. "It took several more years," Grass reports, "before I began to realize: This will not go away; our shame cannot be repressed or come to terms with." Later, he confesses that those of his age "belonged to the Auschwitz generation—not as criminals, to be sure, but in the camp of the criminals." 1Although one would be hard-pressed to find a novel more dramatically different in style and narrative development than Grass's own dark, audacious fables, Bernhard Schlink's The Reader 2 nonetheless shares this fascination with the notion of collective guilt, in particular the burden of inheritance endured by Germany's "second generation." Set in a university town in the late 1950s, the novel tells the story of a high school student, Michael Berg, who falls in love with Hanna Schmitz, a woman twenty years his senior. Though capable of genuine concern and deep affection, Hanna is oddly secretive, often brusque and officious, occasionally given to cruelty and sarcasm, and prone to unpredictable fits of pique. She also has an endearing quirk: she likes Michael to read to her. Eventually, and without explanation, she vanishes from Michael's life. It is seven years before he sees her again, when, as a law student, he attends a trial of concentration-camp guards, one of whom is Hanna. She stands accused, along with four other [End Page 1] women, of serving at both Auschwitz and a satellite camp near Cracow, of being actively involved in the selection of prisoners for almost certain death, and of locking several hundred women in a church, where they burned to death during a bombing raid.In light of testimony given at trial, Hanna's puzzling conduct, and his own recollections of their time together, it finally dawns on Michael that Hanna cannot read, that she was and remains illiterate. But while in retrospect this may explain certain episodes of frustration, incomprehension, and overreaction on her part, does it have any bearing on her guilt? What would Michael himself have done if similarly situated, and similarly limited? Thus, the story of Michael and Hanna serves as an allegory of the relation between the two generations of Germans, those who were Nazis, or who at least assisted or accommodated them, and the "lucky late-born." It is against this background that Schlink is able most searchingly to investigate questions of complicity, recrimination, and atonement.As much courtroom drama as rite-of-passage tale, The Reader is also something of a philosophical investigation. According to Eva Hoffman, in fact, Schlink has managed to compose "a fictionalized essay... a kind of philosophical parable." For all the briskly evocative prose, she adds, The Reader "gradually acquires some of the severity of a legal or logical argument, in which propositions are set forth and then tested from various points of view." 3 In a recent article, Jeremiah P. Conway offers a sympathetic interpretation of the novel, attending in particular to the philosophical issues that it raises. Conway challenges Martha Nussbaum's claim that it is logically incoherent for us to feel compassion for one whom we hold responsible for a morally reprehensible act. 4 For in Hanna, he suggests, we have a compelling counterexample, a fit object of our compassion no less than our condemnation. And yet, Conway's challenge is grounded in an even more fundamental denial that The Reader is at all concerned to establish the circumstances of Hanna's life as mitigating her crime.In what follows, I will argue that this interpretation is untenable... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 71-84 [Access article in PDF] Christian Views on Ritual Practice Society and Sacrament: The Anglican Left and Sacramental Socialism, Ritual as Ethics Nicholas GrovesLoyola University Introduction August in New York City is frequently a time of intense heat, where the congestion of city living kindles tempers to the breaking point. This is true in a special way in the tenements of the city, where people (...) without air-conditioning take raw anger and frustration into the streets. It was in this environment, in the tenements of the Lower East Side, that gang violence erupted in August of 1959. At least two young people were shot in gang-related "rumbles" and retaliation. Blacks and Puerto Ricans, already scrambling for the few available jobs society provided for them, squared off against each other. Police and the city of New York vowed more punishment, more arrests. (At this same time, Leonard Bernstein portrayed these struggles in terms of the love of Tony and Maria, but in "real life" it was "East Side Story" as much as "West Side Story.")In response to renewed war among his youth, the Episcopal priest, Fr. Kilmer Myers of St. Augustine's Chapel (now St. Augustine's Parish) also took to the streets. Canceling the church's usual patronal festival and carnival, he led his people in a procession through the streets of his neighborhood, with clergy clad in the solemn vestments of the Eucharist, with banners, incense, and hymns. His purpose: to pray and to plead that the killing stop, and that the authorities see the agony of the young who had abandoned an almost three-year "truce" he had helped work out with youth leaders between rival gangs.Myers wrote later in his book, Light the Dark Streets (Greenwich, Conn.: Seabury Press, 1957) about his ministry at St. Augustine's. In contrast to a city government and police department intent on further punishment as a solution to gang problems, Fr. Myers posed the presence of people who lived and worked with the young people and a community in desperate need: A parish such as this... so filled with darkness, defeat... and a longing for victory.... We think of next year and the year after that. We are not sure that we have the strength or that we can ask for it. The shouts in the street become an unending shout. The angry cry mingles with music from the tenement.... [End Page 71] There is the scream of the police siren. Will it stop in the block? There is the uncertainty at each youth affair. Will someone be shot or stabbed? (p. 96) In 1981, Bishop Desmond Tutu challenged the government of South Africa to abandon its policy of apartheid, a challenge he and others later won. But at that point, with any kind of victory far from certain, he confronted his opponents with words about his own spiritual commitment: I want to say that there is nothing the government can do to me that will stop me from being involved in what I believe is what God wants me to do. I do not do it because I like doing it. I do it because I am under what I believe to be the influence of God's hand. I cannot help it when I see injustice. I cannot keep quiet. I will not keep quiet, for as Jeremiah says, when I try to keep quiet, God's word burns like a fire in my breast. But what is it that they can ultimately do? The most awful thing that they can do is to kill me, and death is not the worst thing that can happen to a Christian. (Quoted in S. DuBoulay, Tutu: Voice of the Voiceless [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988], pp. 174-175.) How does ritual involve ethics? I would like to present for your consideration one example of such an intersection: the witness of what some have called the "Anglican Left" in both Britain and the United States, or what the historian Peter Jones has named "sacramental socialism... (shrink)

When we judge an action as morally right or wrong, we rely on our capacity to infer the actor's mental states. Here, we test the hypothesis that the right temporoparietal junction, an area involved in mental state reasoning, is necessary for making moral judgments. In two experiments, we used transcranial magnetic stimulation to disrupt neural activity in the RTPJ transiently before moral judgment and during moral judgment. In both experiments, TMS to the RTPJ led participants to rely less on the (...) actor's mental states. A particularly striking effect occurred for attempted harms : Relative to TMS to a control site, TMS to the RTPJ caused participants to judge attempted harms as less morally forbidden and more morally permissible. Thus, interfering with activity in the RTPJ disrupts the capacity to use mental states in moral judgment, especially in the case of attempted harms. (shrink)

Thought: A Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

Studies of normal individuals reveal an asymmetry in the folk concept of intentional action: an action is more likely to be thought of as intentional when it is morally bad than when it is morally good. One interpretation of these results comes from the hypothesis that emotion plays a critical mediating role in the relationship between an action’s moral status and its intentional status. According to this hypothesis, the negative emotional response triggered by a morally bad action drives the attribution (...) of intent to the actor, or the judgment that the actor acted intentionally. We test this hypothesis by presenting cases of morally bad and morally good action to seven individuals with deficits in emotional processing resulting from damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC). If normal emotional processing is necessary for the observed asymmetry, then individuals with VMPC lesions should show no asymmetry. Our results provide no support for this hypothesis: like normal individuals, those with VMPC lesions showed the same asymmetry, tending to judge that an action was intentional when it was morally bad but not when it was morally good. Based on this finding, we suggest that normal emotional processing is not responsible for the observed asymmetry of intentional attributions and thus does not mediate the relationship between an action’s moral status and its intentional status. (shrink)

Philosophy of science has traditionally focused on the epistemological dimensions of scientific practice at the expense of the ethical and political questions scientists encounter when addressing questions of policy in advisory contexts. In this article, I will explore how an exclusive focus on epistemology and theoretical reason can function to reinforce common, yet flawed assumptions concerning the role of scientific knowledge in policy decision making when reproduced in philosophy courses for science students. In order to address this concern, I will (...) argue that such courses should supplement the traditional focus on theoretical reason with an analysis of the practical reasoning employed by scientists in advisory contexts. Later sections of this paper outline a teaching strategy by which this can be achieved that consists of two steps: the first examines idealized examples of scientific advising in order to highlight the irreducible role played by moral reasoning in justifying policy recommendations. The second employs argument analysis to reveal implicit moral assumptions in actual advisory reports that form the basis for class discussion. This paper concludes by examining some of the wider benefits that can be expected from adopting such an approach. (shrink)

Moral judgments, whether delivered in ordinary experience or in the courtroom, depend on our ability to infer intentions. We forgive unintentional or accidental harms and condemn failed attempts to harm. Prior work demonstrates that patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex deliver abnormal judgments in response to moral dilemmas and that these patients are especially impaired in triggering emotional responses to inferred or abstract events, as opposed to real or actual outcomes. We therefore predicted that VMPC patients would deliver (...) abnormal moral judgments of harmful intentions in the absence of harmful outcomes, as in failed attempts to harm. This prediction was confirmed in the current study: VMPC patients judged attempted harms, including attempted murder, as more morally permissible relative to controls. These results highlight the critical role of the VMPC in processing harmful intent for moral judgment. (shrink)

Video games are currently available which permit the virtual murder of children. No such games are presently available which permit virtual paedophilia. Does this disparity reflect a morally justifiable position? Focusing solely on different player motivations, I contrast two version of a fictitious game—one permitting the virtual murder of children, the other virtual paedophilia—in order to establish whether the selective prohibition of one activity over the other can be morally justified based on player motivation alone. I conclude that it cannot, (...) for reasons discussed. (shrink)

The Deleuze and Guattari Dictionary is a comprehensive and accessible guide to the world of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, two of the most important and influential thinkers in twentieth-century European philosophy. Meticulously researched and extensively cross-referenced, this unique book covers all their major sole-authored and collaborative works, ideas and influences and provides a firm grounding in the central themes of Deleuze and Guattari's groundbreaking thought. Students and experts alike will discover a wealth of useful information, analysis and criticism. A-Z (...) entries include clear definitions of all the key terms used in Deleuze and Guattari's writings and detailed synopses of their key works. The Dictionary also includes entries on their major philosophical influences and key contemporaries, from Aristotle to Foucault. It covers everything that is essential to a sound understanding of Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy, offering clear and accessible explanations of often complex terminology. The Deleuze and Guattari Dictionary is the ideal resource for anyone reading or studying these seminal thinkers or Modern European Philosophy more generally. (shrink)

Mediation is a process in which two parties agree to resolve their dispute by negotiating over alternative solutions presented by a mediator. In order to construct such solutions, the mediator brings more information and knowledge, and, if possible, resources to the negotiation table. In order to do so, the mediator faces the challenge of determining which information is relevant to the current problem, given a vast database of knowledge. The contribution of this paper is the automated mediation machinery to resolve (...) this issue. We define the concept of a Mediation Problem and show how it can be described in Game Description Language. Furthermore, we present an algorithm that allows the mediator to efficiently determine which information is relevant to the problem and collect this information from the negotiating agents. We show with several experiments that this algorithm is much more efficient than the naive solution that simply takes all available knowledge into account. (shrink)

Ethics in the Virtual World examines the gamer's enactment of taboo activities in the context of both traditional and contemporary philosophical approaches to morality. The book argues that it is more productive to consider what individuals are able to cope with psychologically than to determine whether a virtual act or representation is necessarily good or bad. The book raises pertinent questions about one of the most rapidly expanding leisure pursuits in western culture: should virtual enactments warrant moral interest? Should there (...) be a limit to what can be enacted or represented within these games? Or, is it all just a game? (shrink)

The editors of the JRE collected short essays from scholars of religion in response to a recent incident at Hamline University that made national headlines. Last fall, Hamline University administrators refused to extend a contract to an adjunct professor of art history after a Muslim student accused her of Islamophobia for showing a 14th‐century image of Mohammad in an online class. The event provoked intense conversations about issues of academic freedom, religious diversity, the status of contingent faculty, and race. These (...) essays bring together scholarly and personal reflections about the incident at Hamline and what it means for the pedagogy of religious studies. (shrink)

Pattern parametrisation has the potential to address the inefficiencies and environmental concerns associated with traditional pattern construction practices dominating both industry and academia. However, its adoption is still limited due to a lack of realisation despite its presence in CAD technical applications for decades. This has impeded its ability to shift the pattern industry and academia to a more efficient and sustainable paradigm. Using mixed methods and a three-phased quasi-experimental design, this study aims to enhance the realisation of pattern parametrisation (...) across various industry and academic settings and assess participants’ behavioural intentions to adopt it. Findings from a convenience sample of 40 UK-based participants, analysed using Kirkpatrick’s (1994) model, indicate increased recognition and intention to adopt pattern parametrisation, as evidenced by participants identifying its diverse applications and aspiring to integrate it into their future goals. This study contributes to theory and has practical applications for both academia and industry. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 2, February 2020, Page 55-57.

It is arguably the case that olfactory system contains two senses that share the same type of stimuli, sensory transduction mechanism, and processing centers. Yet, orthonasal and retronasal olfaction differ in their types of perceptible objects as individuated by their sensory qualities. What will be explored in this paper is how the account of orthonasal smell developed in the Molecular Structure Theory of smell can be expanded for retronasal olfaction (Young, 2016, 2019a-b, 2020). By considering the object of olfactory (...) perception to be the molecular structure of chemical compounds composing odor plumes, Molecular Structure Theory provides a means for determining an odor’s olfactory quality, how odors can be identified and individuated, and how we perceive smellscapes. Surveying the differences between orthonasal and retronasal olfaction provides the basis for the central argument of the paper that the perceptible objects we refer to as smells and individuated on the basis of their olfactory qualities are only relative to orthonasal olfaction. Retronasal olfaction it is speculatively concluded might play an essential role in our perception of flavorful objects. (shrink)

This aims to be a prophetic book. In his previous work from 1998, Tom Beaudoin had begun articulating, on behalf of his own generation, a quest that reflected GenXers' irreverence toward social institutions, which have typically failed to address the spiritual dimensions of their own experience. Beaudoin began to notice that many of his own cohort were getting lost in hyperspace, collapsing their real identity into a virtual artifice. Since then, in the age of internet and Instagram, this has only (...) been magnified for GenY and GenZ (etc), and nowadays this makes Beaudoin’s worries seem as poignant as the prophet Jeremiah’s. One of Beaudoin’s challenge, which he only began to address in this book, has been how to articulate a prophetic voice without lapsing into a moralizing posture which, for his demoralized young audience, would surely de-authenticate it. (shrink)

In Act 1 scene iv of Macbeth, Duncan reflects that: 'There's no art to find the mind's construction in the face'. In contrast, the claim that Andy Young sets out in this book is that we are now developing a science of face perception which can indeed shed light on certain aspects of mentallife. Face and Mind consists of a series of seminal research and review papers on face perception published by the author and his colleagues over the last (...) 12 years. A comprehensive introductory chapter, written especially for this volume, serves to draw together the various themes explored in thedifferent contributions. The book examines the question of how faces are special, in terms of their social, biological, and theoretical roles. In particular, Face and Mind seeks to determine what our understanding of the face can tell us about the human brain. It discusses the evidence for anevolved neural substrate for face perception, and the question of whether we are innately predisposed to recognise faces, to find them attractive, and to decode the many social signals they give us. The ability of the human brain to process and remember the many different faces that we see andsubsequently recall is analysed. Young includes detailed studies of the types of impairment to face perception which can follow brain injury or psychiatric illness, and uses them to address these questions, as well as other issues of high intrinsic and interdisciplinary interest. These include theextent to which our mental lives result from the operation of discrete components devoted to different purposes, the differences between conscious and non-conscious processes, and how we use evidence to support our beliefs about the world. Because of the huge variety of social signals read from theface, it can offer unique theoretical and philosophical insights into these questions. This fascinating book will be of interest not only to psychologists and neuropsychologists working in the field of visual perception, but to cognitive scientists generally. It provides an excellent summary ofthe most important theorietical and empirical work done on face perception in recent years, and as such will be of interest to advanced undergraduate and post-graduate students in psychology, philosophy, and cognitive science. (shrink)

Family traditions take a somatic turn in a therapeutic practice that focuses on how bodies are passed down in families, not as assemblages of biological traits enjoined on the bodies of children by parents but as intentional fabrications devised by children out of the bodies of parents. Somatic psychology holds that parents offer children models of how to be embodied in the form of bodily attitudes. The body shapes I imitate and resist at every stage of life arise out of (...) the memory of the past, incarnate memory in the present, and project the memorial body toward its future. Taking up the techniques by which a person makes her body, the somatic psychologist induces her to unmake and remake it. This is a study of how the flesh remembers. (shrink)

Since the turn of the millennium South Korea has continued to grapplewith transgressions that shook the nation to its core. Following the serial killings of Korea's raincoat killer, the events that led to the dissolution of the United Progressive Party, the criminal negligence of the owner and also the crew members of the sunken Sewol Ferry, as well as the political scandals of 2016, there has been much public debate about morality, transparency, and the law in South Korea. Yet, despite (...) its prevalence in public discourse, transgression in Korea has not received proper scholarly attention. Transgression in Korea challenges the popular conceptions of transgression as resistance to authority, the collapse of morality, and an attempt at self- empowerment. Examples of transgression from premodern, modern, and contemporary Korea are examined side by side to underscore the possibility of reading transgression in more ways than one. These examples are taken from a devotional screen from medieval Korea, trickster tales from the late Choson period, reports about flesheating humans, newspaper articles about same- sex relationships from colonial Korea, and films about extramarital affairs, wayward youths, and a vengeful vigilante. Bringing together specialists from various disciplines such as history, art history, anthropology, premodern literature, religion, and film studies, the context- sensitive readings of transgression provided in this book suggest that transgression and authority can be seen as forming something other than an antagonistic relationship. (shrink)

Technology and animals often serve as the boundaries by which we define the human. In this issue contributors explore these categories as necessary supplements or as porous membranes which disturb the scaffolding of how the human is constructed. A lingering question throughout is whether we have ever been human or if such a category is a non-localizable ideal or perhaps a misnomer. In this collection of essays, internationally known theorists muddle the categorical boundaries such that animals and technologies become necessary (...) components rather than limits for what it means to be human. They examine a range of subjects, including apophatic animality, critical media objects-to-think-with, biosemiotic insect resonances, the monstrous and horrific which dislodges our cultural animals, and the problem of thinking of animality as stupidity. Novels, films, digital objects, scientific laboratories, philosophical texts, animals on the road and in the fields serve as sites for inquiry. The result of these investigations is the spectral possibility that we are not the humans we make ourselves out to be. This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki. (shrink)

In this collection of closely interrelated essays, Robert Young emphasizes the scope of the nineteenth-century debate on 'man's place in nature' at the same time as he engages with the approaches of scholars who write about it. He is critical of the separation of the writing of history from writing about history, historiography, and of the separation of history from politics and ideology, then or now. Dr Young challenges fellow historians for reimposing the very disciplinary boundaries that the (...) nineteenth-century debate showed were in the service of ideological forces in that culture. Rather, he proposes that the full weight of the contending forces should be made apparent and debated openly so that neither nineteenth-century nor contemporary issues about the role of science in culture should be treated in a narrow perspective. (shrink)

It can often seem as though existence is split in two: body and mind, flesh and spirit, moving and thinking. In the office or at study we are 'mind workers,' with seemingly superfluous bodies. Conversely, in the gym we stretch, run and lift, but our minds are idle. In How to Think About Exercise, author and philosopher Damon Young challenges this idea of separation, revealing how fitness can develop our bodies and minds as one. Exploring exercises and sports with (...) the help of ancient and modern philosophy, he uncovers the pleasures, virtues and big ideas of fitness. By learning how to exercise intelligently, we are contributing to our overall enjoyment of life and enhancing our full humanity. Find out how bestselling author Haruki Murakami quit smoking and took up running, and why the simple act radically changed his whole outlook on life; why Schopenhauer thought that swimming was a sublime act; how Charles Darwin came up with some of his best ideas while exercising; and much more. (shrink)