Grief is often thought of as an emotional response to the death of someone we love. However, the term “grief” is also used when referring to losses of various other kinds, as with grief over illness, injury, unemployment, diminished abilities, relationship breakups, or loss of significant personal possessions. Complementing such uses, we propose that grief over a bereavement and other experiences of loss share a common phenomenological structure: one experiences the loss of certain possibilities that were integral to—and perhaps central (...) to—the unfolding structure of one’s life. Grief can thus be conceived of in a broad but still univocal way. To develop this position, we focus on the example of grief over involuntary childlessness, where lack of a concrete, historical object of emotion serves to make explicit the way in which grief concerns future possibilities. We go on to suggest that the phenomenological complexity, diversity, and prevalence of grief are obscured when approached via an abstract, simplified conception of bereavement. -/- . (shrink)

Those who find their work meaningful often need to be more committed. Over-commitment, in turn, frequently results in stress, personal conflicts, and burnout. Such over-commitment, in other words, leads to employees needing to take more care of themselves. This paper considers the prospects for meaningful self-care in the context of working time reduction. For this, we consider the case of the four-day workweek, asking employees of such organizations to explain how they make meaning out of their newly found time off. (...) Conceptually, we rely upon the work of Michel Foucault, particularly his analysis of the care of the self. On its basis, we coded five self-care practices: (1) rest and recuperation, (2) professional and personal development, (3) domestic work, (4) balancing work, and (5) additional work. We conclude by highlighting the theoretical and practical implications of work reduction for the analytical, ethical, and practical pursuit of meaningful work. (shrink)

The nature of moral judgments, and, more specifically, the question of how they relate, on the one hand, to objective reality and, on the other, to subjective experience, are issues that have been central to metaethics from its very beginnings. While these complex and challenging issues have been debated by analytic philosophers for over a century, it is only relatively recently that more interdisciplinary and empirically-oriented approaches to such issues have begun to see light. The present chapter aims to make (...) a contribution of that kind. We will present the results of an empirical – specifically, corpus linguistic – study that offers evidence that moral predicates exhibit hallmarks of subjectivity at the linguistic level, but also, that they differ significantly from paradigmatically subjective predicates. (shrink)

The global COVID‐19 pandemic challenged the world—how it functions, how people move in the social worlds and how government/government services and people interact. Health services, operating under the principles of new public management, have undertaken rapid changes to service delivery and models of care. What has become apparent is the mechanisms within which contemporary health services operate and how services are not prioritising the person at the centre of care. Person‐centred care (PCC) is the philosophical premise upon which models of (...) health care are developed and implemented. Given the strain that COVID‐19 has placed on the health services and the people who deliver the care, it is essential to explore the tensions that exist in this space. This article suggests that before the pandemic, PCC was largely rhetoric, and rendered invisible during the pandemic. The paper presents an investigation into the role of PCC in these challenging times, adopting a Foucauldian lens, specifically governmentality and biopolitics, to examine the policies, priorities and practical implications as health services pivoted and adapted to changing and acute demands. Specifically, this paper draws on the Australian experience, including shifting nursing workforce priorities and additional challenges resulting from public health directives such as lockdowns and limitations. The findings from this exploration open a space for discussion around the rhetoric of PCC, the status of nurses and that which has been lost to the pandemic. (shrink)

Philosophical research into olfaction often focuses on its limitations. We explore instead an underappreciated capacity of the sense of smell, namely, its role in interpersonal experience. To illustrate this, we examine how smell can enable continuing connections to deceased loved ones. Understanding this phenomenon requires an appreciation of, first, how olfaction's limitations can facilitate experiences of the deceased person and, second, how olfaction enables experiences of what we refer to as the ‘olfactory air’ of a person. This way of experiencing (...) someone privileges their status as an environmentally situated human animal. (shrink)

A case has been made by various authors that the normative and processual notion of personhood found in African philosophy is discriminatory: it has been labelled as sexist, ableist and anti-queer. Within the anti-queer critique, one area that has not been specifically addressed in the literature is whether this notion of personhood is biased against people who identify as non-binary with respect to gender. This includes people who are gender fluid and gender neutral, among others. In this article, we argue (...) that the binary conception of gender is deeply connected to a colonial agenda, and does not accurately fit extra-colonial gender conceptions. Through an analysis of extra-colonial language and logic, read together with the flexibility inherent in the processual notion of personhood (on our reading), we argue that binaries do not sit comfortably with extra-colonial African thinking, and as such, processual and normative personhood can be understood in a way that embraces non-binary individuals. Further, the standards for achieving personhood are set by and achieved within the community, so a community which recognises and celebrates non-binary individuals can set up a framework for them to achieve personhood. Accordingly, normative personhood in African thought is found not to exclude those of non-binary gender. This reading saves the normative approach from some of the critiques levelled against it, as well as: i) enhancing consistency in an African world view; ii) strengthening the decolonial agenda; and iii) showing normative personhood to be fairer and more inclusive. (shrink)

There is a strong tendency in both theory and practice to view education’s democratic role as that of equipping students with specific attributes presumed necessary for democratic life. Discussions thus center around identifying the required values, skills, and capabilities, as well as the types of educational endeavors that best foster them. What underpins such discussions is the assumption that the child is inherently lacking, which, I argue, leads to a conceptual dead end. In this article, I explore how the concept (...) of childism can expand the epistemological framework for understanding and theorizing education’s democratic role. Using theoretical concepts from Biesta and Rancière’s sporadic democracy, along with Fricker’s theory of epistemic injustice, I discuss a case from a Danish state school where a teacher harasses a student. I argue that the perception of the child as a deficit being causes children to suffer systemic epistemic (and other) injustices, as incidents of adults harassing children can go unnamed and unrecognized. The potential long-term harm is a loss of trust in one’s ability to know, interpret, and understand the world. I argue that this is also a loss in potential claims for equality based on the perception of injustice, a loss that damages the democratic quality of society. The article advocates a childist turn in research on education’s democratic role. Childism enables a hermeneutical breakthrough that can spark new discussions of scholarly, social, and political norms regarding the question of democracy and education. (shrink)

This chapter addresses major tendencies in the history of academic French historiographies of philosophy, from the establishment of history of philosophy as a university discipline in the early nineteenth century to feminist critiques of the philosophical canon in the twentieth century. Focusing on the ways in which the philosophical character of the history of philosophy has been conceptualised, it argues that the history of the historiography of philosophy in France is marked in two ways by the intellectual legacy of Victor (...) Cousin. At the level of canon-formation, this history has involved continuity and reproduction of those authors and texts which Cousin regarded as central to the history of philosophy. At the level of theoretical accounts of the relation between the practice and the past of philosophy, this history has involved discontinuity and the contestation of the spiritualist eclectic framework within which Cousin himself accounted for this relation. With feminist historiographies of philosophy, the theory-constitutive function of the canon itself comes into question, thus opening a new field of inquiry as to what should be counted as properly ‘philosophical’. (shrink)

Background Ethical challenges constitute an inseparable part of daily decision-making processes in all areas of healthcare. Ethical challenges are associated with moral distress that can lead to burnout. Clinical ethics support has proven useful to address and manage such challenges. This paper explores how prehospital emergency personnel manage ethical challenges. The study is part of a larger action research project to develop and test an approach to clinical ethics support that is sensitive to the context of emergency medicine. Methods We (...) explored ethical challenges and management strategies in three focus groups, with 15 participants in total, each attended by emergency medical technicians, paramedics, and prehospital anaesthesiologists. Focus groups were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. The approach to data analysis was systematic text condensation approach. Results We stratified the management of ethical challenges into actions before, during, and after incidents. Before incidents, participants stressed the importance of mutual understandings, shared worldviews, and a supportive approach to managing emotions. During an incident, the participants employed moral perception, moral judgments, and moral actions. After an incident, the participants described sharing ethical challenges only to a limited extent as sharing was emotionally challenging, and not actively supported by workplace culture, or organisational procedures. The participants primarily managed ethical challenges informally, often using humour to cope. Conclusion Our analysis supports and clarifies that confidence, trust, and safety in relation to colleagues, management, and the wider organisation are essential for prehospital emergency personnel to share ethical challenges and preventing moral distress turning into burnout. (shrink)

This article engages with A’s “Crop Rotation” in Either/Or—the “boredom” essay—as a source for serious thought on the modern crisis of faith. Exploring A’s portrayal of the modern subject as isolated and self-enclosed, a “bored” condition linked to its radical autonomy and self-directed existence, it suggests that A’s explanation for this condition still holds today: modern humans’ self-assertion (and hence self-isolation) emerges as a response to a profound loss of meaning. Through an existential reading of A’s essay, it highlights A’s (...) notion of “demonic pantheism” as illuminating what lies behind boredom, namely, a relatable experience of disillusionment following the loss of meaning—in other words, “existential doubt” or a crisis of faith. (shrink)

Today many homes are accessible from afar, with mobile phones functioning as remote controls for technologies within the home. In this article we propose the ‘leaky home’ as a conceptual figure to understand how automated homes that leak through connected devices and sensors that collect, transmit, receive and share data are experienced and sensed by bodies within these distributed spaces. The leak brings together postmodern metaphors of fluidity and the 21st century discourse of information leaks, while maintaining infrastructural connotations of (...) substances that shift domain in very tangible ways. By looking at a series of examples from media accounts and research conducted in Denmark, the UK, the USA and Australia, ranging from everyday family practices to digital coercive control, we explore how the care-control complex of the home is impacted by its leaky nature. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophy of perception is dominated by extremely polarized debates. The polarization is particularly acute in the debate between naïve realist disjunctivists and their opponents, but divisions seem almost as stark in other areas of dispute (for example, the debate over whether we experience so-called ‘high-level’ properties, and the debate concerning individuation of the senses). The guiding hypothesis underlying this volume is that such polarization stems from insufficient attention to how we should go about settling these debates. In general, there (...) is widespread, largely implicit disagreement concerning what philosophical theories of perception are supposed to explain, the claims that we should hold fixed in the course of theorizing, and the methods that such theorizing should employ. The goal of this volume is to move such methodological questions from the background to the fore, in the hope of facilitating progress. The contributions constitute an initial effort to spur more explicit, systematic discussion of methodology in philosophy of perception. They cover a wide range of relevant topics, from the relation between scientific and philosophical theorizing about perception, to lessons we can learn from the history of philosophy of perception. (shrink)

Public and academic discourse about big data and digital technologies in agriculture present polarizing visions of the future of food, but it is still unclear whether and to what degree farmers are taking up the narratives of proponents or critics. Building on the sociotechnical imaginaries literature, we characterize and analyze farmer imaginaries about digital agricultural technologies. We present the findings from a survey of farmers in Canada (n = 1000). To study imaginaries, the survey uses both affective image analysis and (...) an original scale with a spectrum of possible scenarios for ten key aspects of agri-food futures (e.g., labour shortages, robotics and automation, food security, and sustainability). Canadian farmers’ imaginaries simultaneously include both negative and positive views. Respondents have extremely positive top-of-mind affective associations to digital agricultural technologies. However, overall, respondents are only very mildly optimistic when anticipating the future impacts of digital agricultural technologies at the farm-level and have more pessimistic views on how these tools will impact the agriculture sector more broadly. Our analysis reveals three core narratives in the farmer sociotechnical imaginary about digital agricultural technologies: (1) a feeling of ‘winner takes all’ and exacerbating power imbalances and disparity, (2) a belief that these tools are essential to grow more food on less land with fewer environmental impacts, and (3) faith that farmers and robots can work in harmony. This research contributes to the growing global body of scholarship on farmer experiences with data and digital technologies with a new way of studying sociotechnical imaginaries. (shrink)

Perceptions of human resource (HRM) management’s response to worker bullying were investigated through a netnographic analysis of written comments concerning an online ‘TEDx’ talk called “Bullying and Corporate Psychopaths at Work” to help determine whether HRM are seen as supportive of bullied workers. This research utilized a qualitative, ethnographic approach deemed to be highly valid in researching sensitive areas such as that of workplace bullying. Findings align with, deepen, and extend previous theory and knowledge in that a key finding that (...) emerges is that HRM is deemed by workers to be capable of, but unwilling to deal effectively with, bullying managers. HRM are seen as complacent in that they do little about psychopathic bullies, complicit in that they support managerial bullies and compounding in that they worsen outcomes from workers’ point of view. It appears that HRM has therefore lost the trust of this sample of bullied workers. The paper is a first to apply a netnographic analysis to the problem of workplace bullying and reveals HRM fails to deal with it to worker’s satisfaction. Implications include that the ubiquitous prevalence of workplace bullying around the world could continue unabated unless strict, clear codes of conduct are established and policed by HRM or non-HRM related forms of intervention are mobilized. (shrink)

Since the 1960s, the focus of African Philosophy has predominantly been Afrocentric, and with an emphasis on racial issues, as a reaction to Eurocentrism. To hold an open intercultural dialogue on African Philosophy with African and other philosophers is, therefore, not-self-evident. This article will argue that intercultural dialogues or (in case of more than two participants) ‘polylogues’ can and should become a more central point of focus in the academic study of African Philosophy. The author will center on how three (...) renowned African(a) philosophers with a focus on the Akan people of Ghana have initiated intercultural dialogues for the enhancement of human wellbeing. These are Kwasi Wiredu, Kwame Gyekye and Kwame Anthony Appiah. What these philosophers have in common is their belief that all human beings are interdependent and that an emphatic, ethic orientation to one another and mutual communication helps to live together in social harmony, which enhances the wellbeing of mankind. Discussing these African philosophers’ insights into depth will pave the way for other scholars to explore the intercultural dialogue as a weak or non-centric and non-racial focused philosophical method and to enhance understanding of its relation to African(a) Philosophy and a Global Ethics of care. Keywords: Global Ethics, African(a) Philosophy, Akan, intercultural philosophical dialogue, human wellbeing. (shrink)

Even-like particles have widely been analyzed as inducing scalar and additive presuppositions (cf. Horn 1969; Karttunen & Peters 1979; Rooth 1992; Gast & van der Auwera 2011). However, the additivity of even has been controversial since at least Horn 1992 and increasingly called into question (see Greenberg & Umbach 2021 for references); Greenberg specifically argues that scalar even-like particles can vary in additivity. This claim is surprising in light of the typological study in Gast & van der Auwera 2011, which (...) subsumes even and similar expressions under a larger class of additive particles. Against this background, we present an analysis of Italian addirittura, which with perfino has been described as scalar-additive (Visconti 2005) – but only optionally so – and is chosen preferentially over perfino precisely in those contexts that Greenberg takes to challenge the additivity of even. We argue, drawing on observations in Atayan 2017, that addirittura contrasts with perfino in deriving its scalar alternatives from rhetorical structure rather than focus structure. Once this is recognized we can view addirittura as additive, after all, in a rhetorical sense we describe below. (shrink)

A brief introduction to the problem of other minds and knowledge of the world outside our own minds.

Within the last decade, a growing number of artists, media activists and theorists have been engaged with the potential of the glitch – with processes and aesthetics that arise from visual errors in digital technologies. But glitches also offer clues to understanding normative knowledge and power systems, and to challenge these. This is relevant in critical approaches to photography and its historical role in forming, controlling and colonizing systems as well as conventional understandings of the medium as a transparent window (...) onto the world/reality. In this introduction we outline our approach to the glitch in the artistic and curatorial research project ‘Photography and the Glitch’, to which the contributors to this issue have contributed in various ways. (shrink)

Since the turn of the millennium, a new phenomenon has arisen on the global stage, as girls have increasingly begun to raise their voices. In an effort to achieve new philosophical understandings of contemporary childhoods in a post-truth era, the present article examines this Girl Rising movement from an existential perspective. In doing so, the article aims to problematise children’s right to be heard and listened to, as enshrined in Article 12 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. (...) More specifically, the article explores children as rights-holders and their rights-subject position and how these positions are supported (or not) by adults in different ways. Throughout the analysis, Greta Thunberg is used as a case study to illustrate the phenomenon under study. This new movement highlights children’s right to be heard as a valuable right. The defence of this view relies on the claim that at the heart of adult’s acknowledgement lies the uniqueness of each child and the implications of this uniqueness. Taking into consideration the realisation of children’s rights, powerful stakeholders who seek to silence children’s voices are also identified, as are worldwide adult acknowledgements intended to empower girls to exist ‘in’ and ‘with’ the world in a ‘grown-up’ way. (shrink)

Pet-directed speech (PDS) is often produced by humans when addressing dogs. Similar to infant-directed speech, PDS is marked by a relatively higher and more modulated fundamental frequency (f 0) than is adult-directed speech. We tested the prediction that increasing eye size in dogs, one facial feature of neoteny (juvenilisation), would elicit exaggerated prosodic qualities or pet-directed speech. We experimentally manipulated eye size in photographs of twelve dog breeds by −15%, +15% and +30%. We first showed that dogs with larger eyes (...) were indeed perceived as younger. We then recorded men and women speaking towards these photographs, who also rated these images for cuteness. Linear mixed-effects models demonstrated that increasing eye size by 15% significantly increased pitch range (f 0 range) and variability (f 0CV) among women only. Cuteness ratings did not vary with eye size, due to a possible ceiling effect across eye sizes. Our results offer preliminary evidence that large eyes can elicit pet-directed speech and suggest that PDS may be modulated by perceived juvenility rather than cuteness. We discuss these findings in the context of inter-species vocal communication. (shrink)

This book brings together the stories of biographers, novelists, scholars, and artists as they have written about the journeys (some literal, some figurative) they have made to their subjects. Contributors include Elizabeth Wood, J.J. Wilson, Leah Glasser, Jane Lazarre, and Alice Walker.

This chapter contains sections titled: What is First Philosophy? The Science of Being qua Being Categories and Change What Being is Primary? Overview of Metaphysics Z Subject Essence The Problem of Matter The Status of Form Potentiality and Actuality Form–Matter Predication Form and Functional Matter Primary Substances Theology Bibliography.

In this thesis I develop an account of how processes of social understanding are implicated in experiences of mental disorder, critiquing the lack of examination of this phenomena along the way. First, I demonstrate how disorder concepts, as developed and deployed by psychiatric institutions, have the effect of shaping the cognition of individuals with psychopathology through setting expectations. Such expectation-setting can be harmful in some cases, I argue, and can perpetuate epistemic injustices. Having developed this view, I criticise enactive accounts (...) of mental disorder for failing to consider how such terms like ‘dysfunction’ are open to interpretation and can come embedded with normative expectations. Enactive accounts consequently run the risk of perpetuating injustices in their account of the sociality of mental disorder. Similar concerns arise when we consider the attachment of enactivism to the medical model, I argue. But by adapting enactivism to consider other experiences of disorder, such as those described as ‘madness’, enactive psychiatry may genuinely provide ethical groundwork for a better conception of disordered experience. Then, I consider a further concern with a distinctly medicalised conception of mental disorder from the perspective of self-illness ambiguity, arguing that self-illness ambiguities appear to form a special class of ambiguities due to their proximity to disorder concepts which mark them as appropriate targets for therapeutic treatment. However, I argue further that we should be critical of the idea that self-illness ambiguities necessitate disambiguation, as, in cases where self and illness are demarcated, individuals may still experience distress because simply having a mental disorder can be socially alienating. The medicalised focus in self-illness ambiguity, and the explicit need from the medical perspective to disambiguate it, might then exacerbate the distress someone experiences in mental disorder. Moreover, drawing on Mad Studies, I suggest that one might not need a coherent self-narrative to live well. Because of this, one may not need to adopt a medicalised view of the self in the case of selfillness ambiguity. In order to support this analysis, I provide a phenomenological account of language and argue that the very thoughts implicated in mental disorder shape the individual’s perception of the world due to the way that language foregrounds particular aspects of our world. This demands a critical examination of the language adopted and used by both clinicians and disordered individuals. I thus conclude with some thoughts on how to approach research and developing understanding of mental disorder given that we, as people, are always implicated in this process and therefore socialisation of some kind will always be taking place. (shrink)

I would say very simply that the function of the intellectual is this: to put at the disposal of others, to put in common, this greater set of critical analytical tools, to make those tools freely available, and this naturally demands being rooted in reality that is in movement, a reality in which the researcher herself puts certain choices into practice, in which she can deem some matters to be more crucial than others. And the hope is, depending on the (...) choices made by all of those who are today committed to transforming that which exists, that there effectively comes about the wide-ranging social transformation of which we are in need.Costa’s definition of the intellectual is both inspiring and radical. Her.. (shrink)

In this article we present a phenomenological single-case study of a client’s experience of her therapist’s bodily movement in the context of narrative therapy. A client was interviewed regarding her experience of selected bodily movements of the therapist based on a video recording of one of her therapeutic sessions. The movements were analyzed through Maxine Sheets-Johnstone’s cardinal structures of movement while the interview was analyzed through a modification of Giorgi’s method for phenomenological psychology. We focused on the relationship between the (...) therapist’s bodily movement and therapeutic movement in the client and arrived at general structures of the client’s experience of being moved by movement. The experience comprises three core constituents: ‘shifts in sense of self’, ‘sense of togetherness’ and ‘feelings of mobility’, and reveals that the therapist’s bodily movements can lead to therapeutic changes compatible with the aim of narrative therapy. (shrink)

Of the many literary forms philosophy has taken, the survey is undoubtedly among the least likely to elicit excitement. Understood as the enumeration and summary of a series of positions, one could...

This article marks a decisive step towards the recovery of the French woman writer, journalist, and aviation pioneer Louise Faure-Favier, who today is virtually forgotten. The article begins by sit...

Hoerl & McCormack's dual systems framework provides a new avenue toward the scientific investigation of temporal cognition. However, some shortcomings of the model should be considered. These issues include their reliance on a somewhat vague consideration of “systems” rather than specific computational processes. Moreover, the model does not consider the subjective nature of temporal experience or the role of consciousness in temporal cognition.

Past studies have shown that the perceived time of actions is retrospectively influenced by post-action events. The current study examined whether rewarding performance feedback altered the reported time of action. In Experiment 1, participants performed a speeded button press task and received monetary reward for a presumed “fast,” or a monetary punishment for a presumed “slow” response. Rewarded trials resulted in the false perception that the response action occurred earlier than punished trials. In Experiments 2 and 3, the need for (...) a speeded response and reward were independently manipulated in order to decouple the cognitive and reward components in the feedback signal. When tested independently, neither variable affected the judged time of action. We conclude that meaningful feedback is only used when made salient by reward, to modulate the judged time of an action. (shrink)

Any attempt to construct a realist interpretation of quantum theory founders on the Kochen-Specker theorem, which asserts the impossibility of assigning values to quantum quantities in a way that preserves functional relations between them. We construct a new type of valuation which is defined on all operators, and which respects an appropriate version of the functional composition principle. The truth-values assigned to propositions are (i) contextual; and (ii) multi-valued, where the space of contexts and the multi-valued logic for each context (...) come naturally from the topos theory of presheaves. The first step in our theory is to demonstrate that the Kochen-Specker theorem is equivalent to the statement that a certain presheaf defined on the category of self-adjoint operators has no global elements. We then show how the use of ideas drawn from the theory of presheaves leads to the definition of a generalised valuation in quantum theory whose values are sieves of operators. In particular, we show how each quantum state leads to such a generalised valuation. A key ingredient throughout is the idea that, in a situation where no normal truth-value can be given to a proposition asserting that the value of a physical quantity A lies in a set D of real numbers , it is nevertheless possible to ascribe a partial truth-value which is determined by the set of all coarse-grained propositions that assert that some function f(A) lies in f(D), and that are true in a normal sense. The set of all such coarse-grainings forms a sieve on the category of self-adjoint operators, and is hence fundamentally related to the theory of presheave. (shrink)

We discuss some ways in which topos theory (a branch of category theory) can be applied to interpretative problems in quantum theory and quantum gravity. In Sec.1, we introduce these problems. In Sec.2, we introduce topos theory, especially the idea of a topos of presheaves. In Sec.3, we discuss several possible applications of topos theory to the problems in Sec.1. In Sec.4, we draw some conclusions.

Recent developments in quantum theory have focused attention on fundamental questions, in particular on whether it might be necessary to modify quantum mechanics to reconcile quantum gravity and general relativity. This book is based on a conference held in Oxford in the spring of 1984 to discuss quantum gravity. It brings together contributors who examine different aspects of the problem, including the experimental support for quantum mechanics, its strange and apparently paradoxical features, its underlying philosophy, and possible modifications to the (...) theory. (shrink)

We review the problem of finding a general framework within which one can construct quantum theories of non-standard models for space, or space-time. The starting point is the observation that entities of this type can typically be regarded as objects in a category whose arrows are structure-preserving maps. This motivates investigating the general problem of quantising a system whose ‘configuration space’ (or history-theory analogue) is the set of objects Ob(Q) in a category Q. We develop a scheme based on constructing (...) an analogue of the group that is used in the canonical quantisation of a system whose configuration space is a manifold Q ≃ G/H, where G and H are Lie groups. In particular, we choose as the analogue of G the monoid of “arrow fields” on Q. Physically, this means that an arrow between two objects in the category is viewed as an analogue of momentum. After finding the ‘category quantisation monoid’, we show how suitable representations can be constructed using a bundle (or, more precisely, presheaf) of Hilbert spaces over Ob(Q). For the example of a category of finite sets, we construct an explicit representation structure of this type. (shrink)

This book evaluates some of the most common ethical issues confronted by reproductive endocrinologists, embryologists, and their teams. The authors apply core ethical principles and approaches to problem solving to each of the cases raised. This work is a guide for both those on the front lines of patient care as well as for students in the field, whatever their background. By outlining sample cases, the book is an instigator for ethical discussions among ethicists, medical practitioners and students.

When a chimpanzee stockpiles rocks as weapons or when a frog sends out mating calls, we might easily assume these animals know their own motivations--that they use the same psychological mechanisms that we do. But as Beyond the Brain indicates, this is a dangerous assumption because animals have different evolutionary trajectories, ecological niches, and physical attributes. How do these differences influence animal thinking and behavior? Removing our human-centered spectacles, Louise Barrett investigates the mind and brain and offers an alternative (...) approach for understanding animal and human cognition. Drawing on examples from animal behavior, comparative psychology, robotics, artificial life, developmental psychology, and cognitive science, Barrett provides remarkable new insights into how animals and humans depend on their bodies and environment--not just their brains--to behave intelligently. Barrett begins with an overview of human cognitive adaptations and how these color our views of other species, brains, and minds. Considering when it is worth having a big brain--or indeed having a brain at all--she investigates exactly what brains are good at. Showing that the brain's evolutionary function guides action in the world, she looks at how physical structure contributes to cognitive processes, and she demonstrates how these processes employ materials and resources in specific environments. Arguing that thinking and behavior constitute a property of the whole organism, not just the brain, Beyond the Brain illustrates how the body, brain, and cognition are tied to the wider world. (shrink)

This book is a translation into English of La religion grecque by Louise Bruit Zaidman and Pauline Schmitt Pantel, described by Dr Simon Price as 'an excellent book, by far the best introduction to the subject in any language'. It is the purpose of the book to consider how religious beliefs and cultic rituals were given expression in the world of the Greek citizen - the functions performed by the religious personnel, and the place that religion occupied in individual, (...) social and political life. The chapters cover first ritual and then myth, rooting the account in the practices of the classical city while also taking seriously the world of the imagination. For this edition the bibliography has been substantially revised to meet the needs of a mainly student, English-speaking readership. The book is enriched throughout by illustrations, and by quotations from original sources. (shrink)