This piece examines the diagnostic procedures for breast cancer from the patient’s point of view, trying to establish the importance of communication and reassurance, while showing how the absence of these can lead to greater distress than necessitated.

This paper attempts to get some critical distance on the increasingly fashionable issue of realism in political theory. Realism has an ambiguous status: it is sometimes presented as a radical challenge to the _status quo_; but it also often appears as a conservative force, aimed at clipping the wings of more ‘idealistic’ political theorists. I suggest that what we might call ‘actually existing realism’ is indeed a conservative presence in political philosophy, and that its ambiguous status plays a part in (...) making it so. But I also argue that there is no necessary connection between realism and conservatism. This paper describes the three contingent and suspiciously quick steps which lead from an initial commitment to being attentive to the real world, via a particular kind of pessimism about political possibilities, to an unnecessarily conservative destination. In the process, I try to show how the ubiquitous trinity of realism, pessimism and conservatism might be pulled apart, thus removing the artificial tension between ‘being realistic’ and the demand for far-reaching social change. (shrink)

Some Radical New Ideas About Consciousness Consciousness and the Cosmos: A New Copernican Revolution -/- Consciousness is our new frontier in modern science. Most scientists believe that it can be accomodated, explained, by existing scientific principles. I say that it cannot. That it calls all existing scientific principles into question. That consciousness is to modern science just exactly what light was to classical physics: All of our fundamental assumptions about the nature of Reality have to change. And I go on, (...) in this work,to spell out a whole new view of Reality, and of the Universe. -/- And so, we'll have some fun! -/- Modern science is already in deep trouble... -/- Lorna Green. (shrink)

This article considers the challenge posed by Gayatri Spivak to rethink world literature along postcolonial lines as an ethical encounter with alterity. Read in this way, Spivak participates in a reframing of world literature that retains the critical gains made by postcolonial theory and suggests that the work of world literary analysis ought not necessarily be de/prescriptive but might involve a contestation of the power relations that structure the world. In developing this argument, I draw on four further perspectives: Pascale (...) Casanova's problematic assertion of literary singularity in The World Republic of Letters; Fredric Jameson's theorization of “third world literature” as counterpoint to Casanova's limiting understanding of national literature; Gilles Deleuze, who offers a way to rethink world literature in a process of becoming; and Édouard Glissant, whose work proposes a “relational” vision of difference that, like that of Spivak, demands an ethical, imaginati.. (shrink)

Nous chercherons ici à montrer comment le projet Tela Botanica permet à la fois une transformation et une actualisation du savoir botanique. Trois éléments particuliers retiendront notre attention : la libre circulation et la mise à disposition des données les plus récentes du travail des botanistes ; l’articulation nouvelle entre le travail scientifique des amateurs et celui des professionnels ; la création d’une forme organisationnelle hybride combinant des éléments propres au milieu associatif et à l’entreprise privée. Nous utiliserons ces trois (...) axes d’analyse tour à tour, en fournissant des exemples et des réflexions théoriques pour chacun.This article illustrates how the Tela Botanica project is simultaneously transforming botanical knowledge and breathing new life into the field of botany. We discuss three characteristics in particular: the ready availability and free circulation of the most up-to-date botanical data, new links between the scientific work of amateur and professional botanists and the appearance of a hybrid organisational form that combines features from the non-profit model and from private enterprise. We examine these three characteristics in turn, with examples and theoretical discussions in each case. (shrink)

The use of virtual humans holds the potential for interactive, automated interaction in domains such as remote communication, customer service, or public announcements. For signed language users, signing avatars could potentially provide accessible content by sharing information in the signer's preferred or native language. As the development of signing avatars has gained traction in recent years, researchers have come up with many different methods of creating signing avatars. The resulting avatars vary widely in their appearance, the naturalness of their movements, (...) and facial expressions—all of which may potentially impact users' acceptance of the avatars. We designed a study to test the effects of these intrinsic properties of different signing avatars while also examining the extent to which people's own language experiences change their responses to signing avatars. We created video stimuli showing individual signs produced by a live human signer, an avatar made using computer-synthesized animation, and an avatar made using high-fidelity motion capture. We surveyed 191 American Sign Language users, including Deaf, Hard-of-Hearing, and Hearing groups. Participants rated the three signers on multiple dimensions, which were then combined to form ratings of Attitudes, Impressions, Comprehension, and Naturalness. Analyses demonstrated that the Mocap avatar was rated significantly more positively than the CS avatar on all primary variables. Correlations revealed that signers who acquire sign language later in life are more accepting of and likely to have positive impressions of signing avatars. Finally, those who learned ASL earlier were more likely to give lower, more negative ratings to the CS avatar, but we did not see this association for the Mocap avatar or the Human signer. Together, these findings suggest that movement quality and appearance significantly impact users' ratings of signing avatars and show that signed language users with earlier age of ASL acquisition are the most sensitive to movement quality issues seen in computer-generated avatars. We suggest that future efforts to develop signing avatars consider retaining the fluid movement qualities integral to signed languages. (shrink)

Foucault’s critique of early modern political theory aimed at displacing sovereignty as the principle of intelligibility of power. In the genealogical literature since Foucault, sovereignty has become a residual category lacking analytic specificity, largely displaced by governance, in turn equated with politics. We argue that Foucault and the Foucauldians have not understood that the flourishing of governance has presupposed a symbolic regime with a division of knowledge-power-law characteristic of the democratic sovereign. The conflation of governance with politics, together with the (...) sliding of sovereignty under governance, has left Foucauldians unable to diagnose the dangers present in varying possible sovereignty-governance configurations. (shrink)

This book explores how people's subjective, felt experiences of their bodies in action provide part of the fundamental grounding for human cognition and language. Cognition is what occurs when the body engages the physical and cultural world and must be studied in terms of the dynamical interactions between people and the environment. Human language and thought emerge from recurring patterns of embodied activity that constrain ongoing intelligent behavior. We must not assume cognition to be purely internal, symbolic, computational, and disembodied, (...) but seek out the gross and detailed ways that language and thought are inextricably shaped by embodied action. Embodiment and Cognitive Science describes the abundance of empirical evidence from many disciplines, including work on perception, concepts, imagery and reasoning, language and communication, cognitive development, and emotions and consciousness, that support the idea that the mind is embodied. (shrink)

This book is a critical exposé of the ways in which mainstream political philosophy silences dissent.

Lorna Finlayson on hidden agendas, being realistic, and Jeremy Corbyn.

Since its influential rendering by Rae Langton in her 1993 paper, “Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts,” the “silencing argument” against pornography has become the subject of a lively debate that continues to this day. My intention in this paper is not to join in the existing debate, but to give a critical overview of it. In its current form, I suggest, it is going nowhere . Yet the silencing argument, I believe, nevertheless contains an indispensable insight—and more radical potential than (...) is usually acknowledged either by its defenders or its opponents. I argue that in order to preserve this insight and unleash its potential, we should begin by adopting the following motto: MacKinnon, not Austin! (shrink)

The sex‐determining genes of fungi reside at one or two specialised regions of the chromosome known as the mating type (MAT) loci. The genes are sufficient to determine haploid cell identity, enable compatible mating partners to attract each other, and prepare cells for sexual reproduction after fertilisation. How conserved are these genes in different fungal groups? New work1 seeks an answer to this question by identifying the sex‐determining regions of an early diverged fungus. These regions bear remarkable similarity to those (...) described in other fungi, but the sex proteins they encode belong to only a single class of transcription factor, the high mobility group (HMG), indicating that these are likely to be ancestral to other proteins recruited for fungal sex. BioEssays 30:711–714, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Doing research with young children can be challenging for many reasons, but this book provides clear guidance on how to engage in appropriate methods. Focusing on researching through play, careful consideration is given to: · the founding principles of playful research · understanding young children's perspectives · prioritising the rights of the child and the voice of the child · examples of innovative research methods Real life examples and research projects are presented, to enable common challenges to be anticipated and (...) to showcase successful creative approaches, and to inspire new paths in research. (shrink)

We provide algebraic conditions ensuring the decidability of the theory of modules over effectively given Prüfer (in particular Bézout) domains whose localizations at maximal ideals have dense value groups. For Bézout domains, these conditions are also necessary.

The first of my works about a New Copernican Revolution, the shift from matter, and matter/energy to consciousness, and I go on to spell out a new Heaven, a new Universe, a new Earth, and a new Humanity.

In recent years, scholars have identified a political formation that mobilizes the emancipatory energies of feminism in the service of the expansion of the carceral state. ‘Carceral feminism,’ as it has come to be known, is often portrayed by these scholars as a product of feminist-conservative convergence. Here, I argue that the rise of the SlutWalk movement suggests a more complex genealogy for carceral feminism. By situating SlutWalk in the historico-theoretical context of feminism’s sex wars, I reveal the carceral–feminist impulses (...) roiling beneath its progressive ‘sex-positive’ surface. With its tendency to reduce sexual freedom to expressive freedom, valorize conventional forms of femininity and sexuality, and promote a fundamentally carceral paradigm of sexual freedom, the SlutWalk movement, I argue, is descended from anti-censorship/pro-sex feminism, a liberal-feminist hybrid that emerged out of the convergence of sex-radical feminism and liberalism during the sex wars. When viewed in this light, SlutWalk no longer appears as a sign that feminism’s ‘pleasure’ and ‘danger’ factions have negotiated a long-awaited ‘sex-détente.’ Rather, it stands as a testament to the extent to which feminism’s once radical aspirations in the domain of sexual politics have been supplanted by a tepid, heteronormative, and disquietingly carceral liberal project. (shrink)

Alison Jaggar recommends a radical break with a dominant approach to the philosophy of immigration shared by both liberal cosmopolitans and liberal nationalists. This paper is intended as an exploration of Jaggar’s conclusions and as an attempt to carry them further. Building on her critique, I argue that the characteristic questions asked by both cosmopolitans and nationalists appear inappropriate when seen against the political reality of immigration. In the last part of the paper, I argue that liberal nationalist contributions in (...) particular have problematized immigration and immigrants in ways not fundamentally different from those seen on the racist right. (shrink)

As well as providing a clear and critical introduction to the theory, this refreshing overview focuses on the practice of feminism with coverage of actions and activism, bringing the subject to life for newcomers as well as offering fresh perspectives for advanced students. Explanations of the main strands to feminism, such as liberalism, sit alongside an exploration of a range of approaches, such as radical, anarchist and Marxist feminism, and provide much-needed context against which more familiar historical themes may be (...) understood. The author's broad and inclusive view conveys the diversity and disagreement within feminism with accessible clarity. The analysis of key terms equips readers with a critical understanding of the vocabulary of feminist debates that will be invaluable to undergraduate students. (shrink)

Recent political developments have made the notion of 'post-truth' ubiquitous. Along with associated terms such as 'fake news' and 'alternative facts', it appears with regularity in coverage of and commentary on Donald Trump, the Brexit vote, and the role – relative to these phenomena – of a half-despised, half-feared creature known as 'the public'. It has become commonplace to assert that we now inhabit, or are entering, a post-truth world. In this paper, I issue a sceptical challenge against the distinctiveness (...) and utility of the notion of post-truth. I argue, first, that the term fails to capture anything that is both real and novel. Moreover, post-truth discourse often has a not-fully-explicit political force and function: to ‘irrationalise’ political disaffection and to signal loyalty to a ‘pre-post-truth’ political status quo. The central insight of the speech act theory of J. L. Austin and others – that saying is always also doing – is as indispensable for understanding the significance of much of what is labelled ‘post-truth’, I’ll argue, as it is for understanding the significance of that very act of labelling. Keywords: post-truth, speech acts, Trump, brexit, Austin. (shrink)

ABSTRACT As owner of the New Lanark cotton-mills from 1800, Robert Owen carried out a social experiment designed to transform the lives of his community of millworkers, through improved living and working conditions, free medical care and education. He intended to demonstrate how his ideas, if universally adopted, could transform society in general. Central to this experiment was his innovative and enlightened system of education in the Institute for the Formation of Character. This article looks in particular at the musical (...) life of New Lanark and explores Owen’s belief in the power of music to bind together people from different backgrounds, and to assist in the creation of a harmonious community. Lavishly funded musical activities played a major part in the curriculum, and in the life of the community as a whole. All this is well documented and fascinating insights into the lives of the New Lanark people are included in the travel journals and letters, some previously unpublished, of the many visitors who came to see Owen’s model community. (shrink)

Mindfulness and the Birth Sphere draws together and critically appraises a raft of emerging research around mindfulness in healthcare, looking especially at its relevance to pregnancy and childbirth. This is an essential read for all those interested in mindfulness in connection to pregnancy and childbirth, including midwives, doulas, doctors and birth activists, whether involved in practice, research or education.

In a recent broadcast talk it was said that philosophers commonly base arguments and theories on garbled versions of science. Professor Passmore's article in the April number of Philosophy seems to go some way to justifying this complaint. The article discusses the objectivity of history by a series of comparisons with science under various heads representing criteria of objectivity.

Alexithymia is a dimensional trait characterized by difficulties identifying and describing feelings and an externally oriented thinking (EOT) style. Here, we explored interrelationships between alexithymia and measures assessing how individuals process and regulate their responses to environmental and body-based cues. Young adults (N= 201) completed self-report questionnaires assessing alexithymia, sensory processing sensitivity (SPS), interoceptive accuracy (IA), sensory processing styles, and current levels of depression, anxiety, and stress. Whereas EOT was related to low orienting sensitivity, problems with emotional appraisal (difficulties identifying (...) feelings/difficulties describing feelings) were related to heightened sensory sensitivity. In addition, features of SPS improved the prediction of alexithymia above and beyond that accounted for by IA. We suggest that EOT is linked to problems maintaining a representation of one’s emotions in working memory and that low IA and problems with emotional appraisal are linked to atypicalities in sensory processing that may impact embodiment. A latent profile analysis revealed five classes of individuals distinguished by the relative strength of different alexithymic traits and by differences in IA and sensory processing styles. The classes identified included two lexithymic, one modal, and two alexithymic groups, showing different susceptibilities to SPS. Overall, our findings lend support to the view that alexithymia is associated with atypicalities in both bottom–up and top–down processes that impact emotion processing and regulation. They also raise the possibility that individuals with different alexithymia subtypes may differ with regard to a range of factors, including not only SPS but also early life experiences, mental health outcomes, and susceptibility to various personality disorders. (shrink)

Cognitive theories of metaphor understanding are typically described in terms of the mappings between different kinds of abstract, schematic, disembodied knowledge. My claim in this paper is that part of our ability to make sense of metaphorical language, both individual utterances and extended narratives, resides in the automatic construction of a simulation whereby we imagine performing the bodily actions referred to in the language. Thus, understanding metaphorical expressions like ‘grasp a concept’ or ‘get over’ an emotion involve simulating what it (...) must be like to engage in these specific activities, even though these actions are, strictly speaking, impossible to physically perform. This process of building a simulation, one that is fundamentally embodied in being constrained by past and present bodily experiences, has specific consequences for how verbal metaphors are understood, and how cognitive scientists, more generally, characterize the nature of metaphorical language and thought. (shrink)