The West has lost its traditional spiritual anchors following the rise of science and the social revolution of the sixties. Healing and wholeness begins with reclaiming the spiritual forms that gave rise to Western culture to provide grounding to meet the challenges of meaning in the era global cultural interchange.

An exploratory survey was conducted to determine if there are differences in ethical decisions by business students based upon cultural backgrounds. Students' responses to a vignette concerning advertising of cigar products in a variety of different media provided evidence of significant cultural differences between three groups of students from different geographical locations within the United States. This article suggests that the presumption that an individuals ethical beliefs and behaviors do not change after childhood may be in error.

This study provides a comparison of thinking style and ethical decision-making patterns between 386 U.S. students and 506 students from the People’s Republic of China enrolled in undergraduate business education in their respective countries. Contrary to our expectations, the Chinese students demonstrated a significantly greater linear thinking style compared to American students. As hypothesized, both Chinese and U.S. students possessing a balanced linear and nonlinear thinking style profile demonstrated greater ethical intent across a series of ethics vignettes. Chinese students also (...) were more likely to adopt an act utilitarian rationale, an ethical philosophy that in practice may violate government regulations or social rules to benefit one’s family instead of society for explaining their decisions across the vignettes. We conclude with a discussion of important theoretical as well as practical and potential future implications based on this comparative study. (shrink)

The Proceedings of the National Summit on Legal Preparedness for Obesity Prevention and Control is based on a two-part conceptual framework composed of public health and legal perspectives. The public health perspective comprises the six target areas and intervention settings that are the focus of the obesity prevention and control efforts of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.This paper presents the legal perspective. Legal preparedness in public health is the underpinning of the framework for the four “assessment” papers and (...) the four “action” papers that are integral to the application of public health law to any particular health issue. In addition, this paper gives real-world grounding to the legal framework through examples that illustrate the four core elements of legal preparedness in public health that are at work in obesity prevention and control. (shrink)

Children spend more time in school than in any social institution outside the home. And schools probably exert more influence on children’s development and life chances than any environment beyond the home and neighbourhood. The purpose of this book is to document some important ways schools influence children’s development and to describe various models and methods for studying schooling effects. Key features include: Comprehensive Coverage – this is the first book to provide a comprehensive review of what is known about (...) schools as a context for human development. Topical coverage ranges from theoretical foundations to investigative methodologies and from classroom-level influences such as teacher-student relations to broader influences such as school organization and educational policies. Cross-Disciplinary – this volume brings together the divergent perspectives, methods and findings of scholars from a variety of disciplines, among them educational psychology, developmental psychology, school psychology, social psychology, psychiatry, sociology, and educational policy. Chapter Structure – to ensure continuity, chapter authors describe 1) how schooling influences are conceptualized 2) identify their theoretical and methodological approaches 3) discuss the strengths and weaknesses of existing research and 4) highlight implications for future research, practice, and policy. Methodologies – chapters included in the text feature various methodologies including longitudinal studies, hierarchical linear models, experimental and quasi-experimental designs, and mixed methods. (shrink)

Book-carrying styles of 1,133 school-age children (kindergarten through high school) were observed, and anatomical measurements (hips, waist, and underarm) of the space between the trunk and fall line of the arm in 735 of the students was recorded. With the exception of handedness, the results replicated those of earlier studies of sexual differences in bookcarrying styles and implicated the protrusion of female hips as instrumental in this phenomenon.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Future of Sexual Difference: An Interview with Judith Butler and Drucilla Cornell*Pheng Cheah (bio) and Elizabeth Grrosz (bio)EG:Luce Irigaray’s writings have always figured strongly in your works, probably more than in the work of other American feminist theorists. Out of all the feminist theorists you both interrogate, she seems to emerge as a kind of touchstone of the feminist ethical, political, and intellectual concerns to which you (...) seem to aspire. Could each of you briefly outline how she figures in your work, whether your relations to her have changed, and if so, how?JB:I think that probably early on, when I started working on French feminism as a graduate student in the early ‘80s, I was not interested in her at all because she seemed to me to be an essentialist and that was a term we used quite easily then, when we thought we knew what it meant. In the late ‘80s, I started to rethink my objections to her on that basis and found that she was, among the feminist theorists I had read, perhaps the most versed in philosophy and that her engagement with philosophy was a curious mixture of both loyalty and aggression. And it became very interesting to me when I started thinking about her whole practice of critical mimesis—what she was doing when she was reading Freud, what was she doing when she was reading Plato—and I read Speculum again and again, frightened by its anger, compelled by the closeness of the reading, confused by the mimetism of the text. Was she enslaved to these texts, was she displacing them radically, was she perhaps in the bind of being in both positions at the same time? And I realized that whatever the feminine was for her, it was not a substance, not a spiritual reality that might be isolated, but it had something to do with this strange practice of reading, one in which she was reading texts that she was not authorized to read, texts from which she was as a woman explicitly excluded or explicitly demeaned, and that she would read them anyway. And then the question is: what would it mean to read from a position of radical deauthorization in order to expose the contingent authority of the text? That struck me as a feminist critical practice, a critical reading practice that I could learn from, and from that point on, highly influenced by both Drucilla’s work and Naomi Schor’s work [see Schor], I started to read her quite thoroughly.PC:Is this kind of relationship that she has with the philosophers she reads a sexual relationship? I am thinking of some of the sexualized terms you just used: loyalty and aggression.JB:Yes, there is no doubt that there is an eros of a certain kind, usually the kind that frightens me, quite frankly. I think Carolyn Burke has made this argument that Irigaray [End Page 19] has a romance with the philosophers [see Burke]. I think she has a certain masochistic-sadistic erotic engagement with the philosophers.EG:Do you think it is sado-masochistic?JB:Well, I think it was much more aggressive in Speculum of the Other Woman than it became in An Ethics of Sexual Difference. There, I think there is an engagement that is still very difficult, but at least there is evidence of a more loving engagement.PC:I hope that we can return to the question of love at the end. Is this the kind of relationship that you have to her texts?JB:No, I’m probably too frightened. [Everybody laughs.] And I don’t engage them that closely, probably because I find it frightening to be in that particular knot. She doesn’t actually have a chapter in any of my books. I think I can’t quite devote a chapter to her....EG:No, but you devote large sections of chapters....JB:That’s true, but I can’t stay there for a prolonged period of time [laughs], whatever that’s worth.EG:I’d like to come back to this later, because I think it is a really interesting... (shrink)

Despite much research on the relationship between awareness and dementia little can be concluded concerning their relationship and the role of other factors. It is likely that studies capture different phenomena of awareness. This study aimed at identifying and delineating such variation by analysing data from three questionnaires obtained during the longitudinal study of awareness in 101 people with early-stage dementia. The data concerned awareness in relation to memory, activities of daily living and socio-emotional function. Significant differences in patterns of (...) discrepancies were obtained. This suggests that the awareness phenomena involved were structurally different; and that, in turn, this may reflect variation in the intrinsic linking between awareness and its ‘object’ . The identification of such differences is necessary so that appropriate methodologies can be applied to the study of awareness in different contexts. (shrink)

Mother-to-child transmission of the Human Immunodeficiency –Virus is a serious public health problem, contributing up to 90% of childhood HIV infections. In Tanzania, the prevention-of-mother-to-child-transmission feature of the HIV programme was rolled out in 2000. The components of PMTCT include counselling and HIV testing directed at antenatal clinic attendees. It is through the process of Provider Initiated Counseling and Testing that counselling is offered participant confidentiality and voluntariness are upheld and valid consent obtained. The objective of the study was to (...) explore antenatal clinic attendees’ experiences of the concept of voluntariness vis- a- vis the implementation of prior counseling and subsequent testing for HIV under the PITC as part of their antenatal care. In-depth interviews were conducted with17 antenatal clinic attendees and 6 nursing officers working at the Muhimbili National Hospital antenatal clinic. The study data were analyzed using qualitative content analysis. Antenatal clinic attendees’ accounts suggested that counselling and testing for HIV during pregnancy was voluntary, and that knowledge of their HIV status led them to access appropriate treatment for both mother and her newborn baby. They reported feeling no pressure from nursing officers, and gave verbal consent to undergo the HIV test. However, some antenatal clinic attendees reported pressure from their partners to test for HIV. Healthcare providers were thus faced with a dilemma of disclosure/ nondisclosure when dealing with discordant couples. Antenatal clinic attendees at MNH undertook the PITC for HIV voluntarily. This was enhanced by their prior knowledge of HIV, the need to prevent mother- to- child transmission of HIV, and the effectiveness of the voluntary policy implemented by nursing officers. (shrink)

Faculty resistance to Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) is an issue that has been recognized by WAC program directors and practitioners for decades, yet it remains unresolved. Perhaps the problem is not resistance per se, but how we interpret and react to it. Faculty resistance is typically viewed as an impediment to the pedagogical change WAC programs hope to achieve. Moreover, the label of "resistance" is often used without further examination of the underlying causes. Based on research and experience as (...) doctoral Writing Fellows in the Borough of Manhattan Community College WAC Program, we argue that so-called resistances are often justified concerns in regard to implementing WAC under given institutional, disciplinary, departmental, and personal constraints. We also suggest that if we listen and respond to these concerns, they become means to facilitate faculty engagement with WAC. By working through their concerns and adapting WAC to their context, faculty can take ownership of WAC and further develop the practice. Thus, what at first appears to be an impediment to deep-rooted pedagogical change ”resistance” can be used to encourage faculty to make WAC their own. (shrink)

Aristotle offers a conception of the private and its relationship to the public that suggests a remedy to the limitations of liberalism today, according to Judith A. Swanson. In this fresh and lucid interpretation of Aristotle's political philosophy, Swanson challenges the dominant view that he regards the private as a mere precondition to the public. She argues, rather, that for Aristotle private activity develops virtue and is thus essential both to individual freedom and happiness and to the well-being of (...) the political order. Swanson presents an innovative reading of the Politics which revises our understanding of Aristotle's political economy and his views on women and the family, slavery, and the relation between friendship and civic solidarity. She examines the private activities Aristotle considers necessary to a complete human life--maintaining a household, transacting business, sustaining friendships, and philosophizing. Focusing on ways Aristotle's public invests in the private through law, rule, and education, she shows how the public can foster a morally and intellectually virtuous citizenry. In contrast to classical liberal theory, which presents privacy as a shield of rights protecting individuals from one another and from the state, Aristotle, Swanson argues, presents privacy as opportunity or duty to pursue excellence. She concludes that for Aristotle a regime can attain self-sufficiency only by bringing about a dynamic equilibrium between the public and the private. The Public and the Private in Aristotle's Political Philosophy engages both long-standing and contemporary debates surrounding the interpretation of Aristotle. It will be essential reading for scholars and students of political philosophy, political theory, classics, intellectual history, and the history of women. (shrink)

According to the Spatial Quantity Association of Response Codes (SQUARC), people hold a mental association between horizontal position and quantity (lower quantities left, higher quantities right). While a large body of research has explored this effect for response speed and judgment accuracy, the affective downstream consequences of the SQUARC remain unexplored. Aiming to address this gap, the present two experiments (pre-registered, total N = 521) investigated whether stimulus arrangements that are compatible with the SQUARC for luminance are affectively preferred to (...) stimulus arrangements that are incompatible. SQUARC-compatible square arrangements (dark-left, bright-right) were preferred over SQUARC-incompatible square arrangements (dark-right, bright-left). The preference for SQUARC compatibility was not moderated by the horizontal orientation of the response scale. Our results confirm the direction of the spatial-luminance association and provide initial support that the cognitive processing of SQUARC compatibility is hedonically marked and appears sufficient to impact affective evaluations. (shrink)

The view that children's understanding of mind is constructed through social interaction is consistent with other social-constructivist models. We provide examples of similar claims in research on emotion perception, pretense understanding, autobiographical memory, and event knowledge. Identification of common elements from such socio-cultural perspectives may lead to greater theoretical integration and provide a new framework for exploring human development.

This book brings together a group of Judith Butler's philosophical essays written over two decades that elaborate her reflections on the roles of the passions in subject formation through an engagement with Hegel, Kierkegaard, Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche, Merleau-Ponty, Freud, Irigaray, and Fanon. Drawing on her early work on Hegelian desire and her subsequent reflections on the psychic life of power and the possibility of self-narration, this book considers how passions such as desire, rage, love, and grief are bound up (...) with becoming a subject within specific historical fields of power. Butler shows in different philosophical contexts how the self that seeks to make itself finds itself already affected and formed against its will by social and discursive powers. And yet, agency and action are not necessarily nullified by this primary impingement. Primary sense impressions register this dual situation of being acted on and acting, countering the idea that acting requires one to overcome the situation of being affected by others and the linguistic and social world. This dual structure of sense sheds light on the desire to live, the practice and peril of grieving, embodied resistance, love, and modes of enthrallment and dispossession. Working with theories of embodiment, desire, and relationality in conversation with philosophers as diverse as Hegel, Spinoza, Descartes, Merleau-Ponty, Freud, and Fanon, Butler reanimates and revises her basic propositions concerning the constitution and deconstitution of the subject within fields of power, taking up key issues of gender, sexuality, and race in several analyses. Taken together, these essays track the development of Butler's embodied account of ethical relations. (shrink)

With the publication of this book psychotherapy finally arrives at the mainstream of mental health practice. This volume is an essential companion for every practising psychiatrist, clinical psychologist, psychotherapy counsellor, mental health nurse, psychotherapist, and mental health practitioner. It is integrative in spirit, with chapters written by an international panel of experts who combine theory and research with practical treatment guidelines and illustrative case examples to produce an invaluable book. Part One gives a comprehensive account of all the major psychotherapeutic (...) approaches. Parts Two and Three systematically describe psychotherapeutic approaches to the major psychiatric disorders and personality disorders. Many chapters are multi-authored and describe the psychodynamic, cognitive behavioural and other approaches for treating these illnesses. Part Four examines applications and modifications of psychotherapy across the lifecycle. Part Five describes psychotherapy with specific populations such as medical patients and those where gender is an issue, and finally Part Six tackles some of the special topics of concern to psychotherapists including ethics, legal issues, and psychotherapy and neuroscience. The first of its kind, this is a 'must have' volume for all trainee and practising psychological therapists, whatever their background - psychiatry, psychology, social work, or nursing. (shrink)

Recently, commentators such as Kenny and Hacker have disagreed about whether Wittgenstein's early picture theory of meaning is at all compatible with his later theory of “meaning‐as‐use”. Arguing in favor of their compatibility, Kenny finds that meaning‐as‐use supplements, rather than rivals the earlier conception of meaning.

In this paper we continue an ongoing dialogue that has as its goal the critical appraisal of theoretical perspectives on culture and health, in an effort to move forward scholarship on culture and health. We draw upon a programme of scholarship to explicate theoretical tensions and challenges that are manifest in the discourses on culture and health and to explore the possibilities Bourdieu's theoretical perspective offers for reconciling them. That is, we hope to demonstrate the need to move beyond descriptions (...) ‘of’ culture to an understanding of cultures as dynamic, and to show ways cultural practices create contexts that have the potential to foster or impede health.In our early research, largely undertaken in Canada's multicultural context, we sought to make visible the ways in which culture shaped conceptions of health and influenced health practices of immigrant groups. In recent years this focus has expanded to include populations that reflect the cultural and social diversity of our region. From the outset we attempted to move towards a conception of culture as negotiated, unifying, transformative and dynamic. While this position continues to hold appeal we are continually reminded that, despite our leanings towards constructivism, there is salience to the notion of culture as having enduring elements. It is this tension between the view of culture as embodied and enduring and culture as constructed and dynamic that we seek to examine.We explore whether Bourdieu's theoretical perspective offers promise for reconciling these apparently competing views. Using exemplars from our research we share insights that Bourdieu's work has offered to our analyses, thereby enabling us to move towards a view of culture that holds in tension these apparently contradictory positions of culture as both essence (albeit unstable, negotiated) and constructed. (shrink)

The Dutch law states that a physician may perform euthanasia according to a written advance euthanasia directive when a patient is incompetent as long as all legal criteria of due care are met. This may also hold for patients with advanced dementia. We investigated the differing opinions of physicians and members of the general public on the acceptability of euthanasia in patients with advanced dementia.

Heidegger's Eschatology is a ground-breaking account of Heidegger's early engagement with theology, from his beginnings as an anti-Modernist Catholic to his turn towards an undogmatic Protestantism and finally to a resolutely a-theistic philosophical method.

According to cognitive averaging theory, preferences for attractive faces result from their similarity to facial prototypes, the categorical central tendencies of a population of faces. Prototypical faces are processed more fluently, resulting in increased positive affect in the viewer.

The Judith Butler Reader is a collection of writings that span her impressive career and trace her intellectual history. Judith Butler, author of influential books such as Gender Trouble, has built her international reputation as a theorist of power, gender, sexuality and identity Organized in active collaboration between Judith Butler and Sara Salih Collects together writings that span Butler’s impressive career as a critical philosopher, including selections from both well-known and lesser-known works Includes an introduction and editorial (...) material to assist students in their readings of theories that stand at the forefront of contemporary theoretical and political debates. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Future of Sexual Difference: An Interview with Judith Butler and Drucilla Cornell*Pheng Cheah (bio) and Elizabeth Grrosz (bio)EG:Luce Irigaray’s writings have always figured strongly in your works, probably more than in the work of other American feminist theorists. Out of all the feminist theorists you both interrogate, she seems to emerge as a kind of touchstone of the feminist ethical, political, and intellectual concerns to which you (...) seem to aspire. Could each of you briefly outline how she figures in your work, whether your relations to her have changed, and if so, how?JB:I think that probably early on, when I started working on French feminism as a graduate student in the early ‘80s, I was not interested in her at all because she seemed to me to be an essentialist and that was a term we used quite easily then, when we thought we knew what it meant. In the late ‘80s, I started to rethink my objections to her on that basis and found that she was, among the feminist theorists I had read, perhaps the most versed in philosophy and that her engagement with philosophy was a curious mixture of both loyalty and aggression. And it became very interesting to me when I started thinking about her whole practice of critical mimesis—what she was doing when she was reading Freud, what was she doing when she was reading Plato—and I read Speculum again and again, frightened by its anger, compelled by the closeness of the reading, confused by the mimetism of the text. Was she enslaved to these texts, was she displacing them radically, was she perhaps in the bind of being in both positions at the same time? And I realized that whatever the feminine was for her, it was not a substance, not a spiritual reality that might be isolated, but it had something to do with this strange practice of reading, one in which she was reading texts that she was not authorized to read, texts from which she was as a woman explicitly excluded or explicitly demeaned, and that she would read them anyway. And then the question is: what would it mean to read from a position of radical deauthorization in order to expose the contingent authority of the text? That struck me as a feminist critical practice, a critical reading practice that I could learn from, and from that point on, highly influenced by both Drucilla’s work and Naomi Schor’s work [see Schor], I started to read her quite thoroughly.PC:Is this kind of relationship that she has with the philosophers she reads a sexual relationship? I am thinking of some of the sexualized terms you just used: loyalty and aggression.JB:Yes, there is no doubt that there is an eros of a certain kind, usually the kind that frightens me, quite frankly. I think Carolyn Burke has made this argument that Irigaray [End Page 19] has a romance with the philosophers [see Burke]. I think she has a certain masochistic-sadistic erotic engagement with the philosophers.EG:Do you think it is sado-masochistic?JB:Well, I think it was much more aggressive in Speculum of the Other Woman than it became in An Ethics of Sexual Difference. There, I think there is an engagement that is still very difficult, but at least there is evidence of a more loving engagement.PC:I hope that we can return to the question of love at the end. Is this the kind of relationship that you have to her texts?JB:No, I’m probably too frightened. [Everybody laughs.] And I don’t engage them that closely, probably because I find it frightening to be in that particular knot. She doesn’t actually have a chapter in any of my books. I think I can’t quite devote a chapter to her....EG:No, but you devote large sections of chapters....JB:That’s true, but I can’t stay there for a prolonged period of time [laughs], whatever that’s worth.EG:I’d like to come back to this later, because I think it is a really interesting... (shrink)

For both Rush Rhees and Stanley Cavell, Wittgenstein’s late investigations into language and language games are caught up with a profound underlying concern about the possibility of discourse itself. Rhees and Cavell isolate two such conditions, which are closely related.The first, emphasized by Cavell, is what he calls “acknowledgment.” In his seminal essay “Knowing and Acknowledging”, Cavell engages traditional skeptical arguments against the possibility of knowing other minds. Unlike most philosophers, however, Cavell does not attempt to repudiate the skeptic’s concerns (...) by devising a proof of the existence of other minds or a method for knowing them with certainty. Any such proof, he argues, would merely.. (shrink)

Focusing on forests and trees, this book investigates how relations between society and nature change over time. It traces historical perceptions and woodland management practices, explores the rise of scientific forestry methods, discusses in depth the organizational culture of the Forestry Commission, and considers the claim that present-day forestry has become a postmodern phenomenon.

We present a new road map for research on “How the Brain Got Language” that adopts an EvoDevoSocio perspective and highlights comparative neuroprimatology – the comparative study of brain, behavior and communication in extant monkeys and great apes – as providing a key grounding for hypotheses on the last common ancestor of humans and monkeys and chimpanzees and the processes which guided the evolution LCA-m → LCA-c → protohumans → H. sapiens. Such research constrains and is constrained by analysis of (...) the subsequent, primarily cultural, evolution of H. sapiens which yielded cultures involving the rich use of language. (shrink)

Systematic analysis of 25 contemporary North American feminist memoirs reveals the significance of this kind of cultural production in the life of the women's movement. In memoir, feminists contest dominant movement narratives, recast and reclaim conventional gender stereotypes, and use their experiences to refine movement ideas and goals. Combining sociological aggregation and pattern identification and interpretivist understandings of memoir's empirical significance, this research indicates that feminists have spent considerable energy focused on transforming not just relations between women and men but (...) among women themselves. To this end, they assert that feminists must acknowledge two difficult “truths”—women are emotionally damaged, and women are not as socially capable as convention would suggest. By analyzing such arguments, this article indicates feminist memoir is a vehicle through which actors do not simply uphold but also contest movement narratives, refining or abandoning movement frames that wear thin as lived experience contradicts them. (shrink)

The celebrated author of _Gender Trouble_ here redefines Antigone's legacy, recovering her revolutionary significance and liberating it for a progressive feminism and sexual politics. Butler's new interpretation does nothing less than reconceptualize the incest taboo in relation to kinship -- and open up the concept of kinship to cultural change. Antigone, the renowned insurgent from Sophocles's _Oedipus,_ has long been a feminist icon of defiance. But what has remained unclear is whether she escapes from the forms of power that she (...) opposes. Antigone proves to be a more ambivalent figure for feminism than has been acknowledged, since the form of defiance she exemplifies also leads to her death. Butler argues that Antigone represents a form of feminist and sexual agency that is fraught with risk. Moreover, Antigone shows how the constraints of normative kinship unfairly decide what will and will not be a livable life. Butler explores the meaning of Antigone, wondering what forms of kinship might have allowed her to live. Along the way, she considers the works of such philosophers as Hegel, Lacan, and Irigaray. How, she asks, would psychoanalysis have been different if it had taken Antigone -- the "postoedipal" subject -- rather than Oedipus as its point of departure? If the incest taboo is reconceived so that it does not mandate heterosexuality as its solution, what forms of sexual alliance and new kinship might be acknowledged as a result? The book relates the courageous deeds of Antigone to the claims made by those whose relations are still not honored as those of proper kinship, showing how a culture of normative heterosexuality obstructs our capacity to see what sexual freedom and political agency could be. (shrink)