Working memory has been one of the most intensively studied systems in cognitive psychology. The Cognitive Neuroscience of Working Memory brings together world class researchers from around the world to summarise our current knowledge of this field, and directions for future research.

If libertarianism is true, then there is a sense in which agents have it within their power to bring it about that some world is actual. Against recent arguments for the incompatibility of divine foreknowledge and human freedom, I offer an account of power over the past which takes this implication of libertarianism into consideration. I argue that the resulting account is available to Ockhamists and that it is immune to recent criticisms of the notion of counterfactual power over the (...) past. But I contend that it is not an option for Molinists and that this fact leaves that position vulnerable to incompatibilist arguments. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:In, Out Me, You Mental, Moral Where Do I Begin?Mark D. Rego (bio)I once attended a Buddhist meditation retreat, led by an American meditation teacher. The instructor had studied and practiced is Asia for many years and was well versed in the practices and teachings of Buddhism. Among his opening remarks was something along the line of the following: "One question that is asked on every retreat is, (...) 'if there is no true self, then who is it who has come here to become free of the illusion of a self?' The answer is, I don't know, but we can start anyway."This sense of practicality in the face of unanswerable questions is built into Buddhism, as is the relationship among the particularities of each individual, a process akin to externality, mental well-being, and morality.I raise Buddhism both because of its central interest into the nature of the self (an obviously germane consideration in the papers under discussion) and because of this second feature noted, namely the comfortable integration of individuality, character building, ethical action, and mental well-being (the issue of the true self will, thankfully, have to wait). It is this theme that I raise via the discussion of externality.The commentaries of Talmadge and Graham, unintentionally I think, pull me toward a beguiling observation in my daily practice of psychiatry. Namely, patients commonly report their clinical improvements in terms of how they deal better with others, how they are more thoughtful and even handed (with themselves included), and how they better cope with the demands of their individual lives. In senses both highly individual and highly principled, and in ways both explicit and implicit, when patients feel better they often feel that they are better people (all the kinds of treatment mentioned in my paper equally apply; there is no exclusivity in this result).There is also an interesting consistency in a dual manner in which this is expressed. In one way people report the improved coping, handling, and so on mentioned. In the next breath the same person commonly says, "I feel like myself."The meditation instructor would be pleased; it appears that through a process of becoming aware of and letting go of some form of negativity an individual feels better, acts better, and feels more unified. (As the instructor was psychologically sophisticated, he would not mistake the "like myself" sentiment as a Buddhist heresy. Rather, he would understand it as a reflection of being more at ease with and aware of disparate parts of himself.) And all this without figuring out who the real self is. [End Page 331]I mention these observations about Buddhism and clinical care because when I consider the processes of evaluating, deciding, and forging identity and volition it seems to me that somewhere between the lines the individual is aligning himself with some sense of what is good. The resultant experience of volition and cohesive identity is, often but not always, experienced as good both psychologically and morally.Change, Others, and ValuesIn the two commentaries that follow my paper on Frankfurtian externality and therapeutic change (Rego 2004), Talmadge (2004) and Graham (2004) highlight different aspects of externality and therapeutics. Talmadge, an addiction psychiatrist, expands the theme of volitional change in recovery from addiction. For Talmadge, as for most in the field, the question of when and how an addict has truly committed to change (hitting "rock bottom"? accepting the first of the twelve steps?) is perennially in the air. Such knowledge would be invaluable in guiding addicts along their rocky paths.Although still far short of the mark, Talmadge finds some illustrative guidance in Frankfurt. The shift that takes place within the addict to place him on the road to recovery is not necessarily "rock bottom," or conformity to a program's dictates or a state of new knowledge. Rather, it is a shift in will. By whatever process (and Talmadge is quite aware that there seem to be many paths) the addict has come to care about sobriety in a way he or she did not before. He or she now cares in a way that is part of him or her... (shrink)

Is it rational to strive for the unattainable? In this short and provocative study, Nicholas Rescher vigorously defends both the rationality and practicality of seriously pursuing impossible dreams.

I argue in this article that there is a mistake in Searle's Chinese room argument that has not received sufficient attention. The mistake stems from Searle's use of the Church-Turing thesis. Searle assumes that the Church-Turing thesis licences the assumption that the Chinese room can run any program. I argue that it does not, and that this assumption is false. A number of possible objections are considered and rejected. My conclusion is that it is consistent with Searle's argument to hold (...) onto the claim that understanding consists in the running of a program. (shrink)

During periods of scarcity, or the fear of it, many health systems create or adopt triage protocols to determine how to best allocate limited resources. Interest in such protocols has become acute...

In this paper, I argue that John Locke's account of knowledge coupled with his commitments to moral ideas being voluntary constructions of our own minds and to divine voluntarism (moral rules are given by God according to his will) leads to a seriously flawed view of moral knowledge. After explicating Locke's view of moral knowledge, highlighting the specific problems that seem to arise from it, and suggesting some possible Lockean responses, I conclude that the best Locke can do is give (...) us a trivial account of moral knowledge which cannot avoid problems with subjectivity and relativism. (shrink)

For more than 20 years, both here and abroad, significant efforts have been undertaken to provide equal access to nutritional food for all citizens. Yet, the numbers of under-nourished continue to rise, as do those afflicted with non-communicable diseases (NCDs) such as obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease. Clearly, current efforts are not working. Relying on the psychological phenomena of learned helplessness and fundamental attribution error, it is argued that certain individuals may not be willing, or able, to take actions (...) that are currently prescribed regarding access to nutritious food. The water is muddied regarding potential solutions as the various actors involved (e.g., corporations, governments, individuals) cannot agree on a starting point and continue to point fingers regarding responsibility. It is posited that emphasis needs to shift from the current “one-size-fits-all” approach to one that is more tailored to the various actors, specifically the individuals. Within the group of individuals (consumers), based on Wenar’s Least Cost Theory, even further distinction must be made between those who see themselves as capable actors and those who do not. In this conceptual piece intended to refocus the discussion surrounding food access, we propose that future research should approach these issues from a unit of analysis perspective in an attempt to identify the solutions most likely to succeed at various participating levels. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Spheres of Philosophical Inquiry and the Historiography of Medieval Philosophy by John InglisMark D. JordanJohn Inglis. Spheres of Philosophical Inquiry and the Historiography of Medieval Philosophy. Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, volume 81. Leiden, Boston, Köln: Brill, 1998. Pp. x + 324. Cloth, $99.50.Modern philosophers have shown themselves quite unphilosophical about the academic history of their own discipline. Content with grand stories that move from Plato to themselves, (...) they have treated institutional histories, recent histories, and bibliographical histories as unworthy of attention. John Inglis sets out to change all that for the study of medieval philosophy. He demonstrates by the book’s end that we have failed to recognize our historiographical procedures as conventions—with very particular histories of their own.The first part of the book traces the genealogy of the dominant (one might say, hegemonic) model in recent studies of medieval philosophy. The genealogy is prefaced with two chapters that show how various were the motives for reconstructions of medieval thought before 1850 in authors such as Billuart, Goudin, and Brucker or Hegel, Ritter, and Hauréau. These chapters might be dismissed by contemporary scholars as so much antiquarianism. There can be no dismissing the relevance to contemporary work of Inglis’s main genealogy, which runs with surprising directness from Joseph Kleutgen (1811–1883) and Albert Stöckl (1823–1895) to Norman Kretzmann and Anthony Kenny.It adds to the piquancy of Inglis’s argument that most specialists in medieval philosophy will not even recognize the names of Kleutgen and Stöckl, much less feel kinship with them. But Inglis shows convincingly what Kleutgen and Stöckl did to make the study of medieval philosophy possible in modern universities. Kleutgen mapped the medieval texts onto a system of “spheres,” of fields or topics, recognizable to professors of philosophy. This means that he necessarily privileged epistemology, as he necessarily connected a medieval thinker’s views across the “spheres” into a system—or a failed attempt at one. Kleutgen then emphasized the reason/revelation dichotomy and an allegiance to what he understood as the system of Thomas Aquinas. Put these elements together and you have a surprisingly familiar story. It remained for Stöckl to write it up as an erudite and monumental narration.Inglis follows this „Kleutgen-Stöckl model” through a number of more familiar authors, including De Wulf, Gilson, Boehner, Weinberg, and the editors of the Cambridge [End Page 530] History of Later Medieval Philosophy. Of course, in reducing the genealogy to a list of famous names I ignore two of its great virtues. The first is the detail with which it retells the institutional circumstances and the forgotten intermediaries of the scholarly tradition. Behind the genealogy, around its borders, there stands Inglis’s enormous effort of original research, much of it archival. The genealogy’s second virtue is the dialectical subtlety with which it locates continuities under contradictions. Gilson is usually touted as the antithesis of De Wulf, and Kretzmann of Gilson. Inglis makes such antitheses seem superficial by comparing them with an abiding if tacit agreement about how medieval texts can be appropriated within modern philosophy. To seal the comparison, Inglis suggests in the book’s second part what a real antithesis to the Kleutgen-Stöckl model might be. He reconstructs, in his last two chapters, Thomas’s accounts of human knowledge and of theology’s relations to philosophy in opposition to that model’s prescriptions.No review can represent—or even adequately praise—the enormous learnedness of this book. Moreover, since the book already discusses so much, it must seem ungrateful to suggest that it ought to discuss anything else. Let me end then rather by posing two questions beyond the book’s end. First, does Inglis’s genealogy mean to suggest that the Kleutgen-Stöckl model is now chiefly received in English-speaking philosophy departments? I wonder, for example, how far Inglis might judge Alain de Libera’s Penser au Moyen Age (Paris: Éds. de Seuil, 1991) an alternative to that model. Certainly de Libera shows more self-consciousness about the culturally determined history behind our historiography. His emphasis on the thirteenth-century recovery... (shrink)

Rousseau’s discussion of education in Émile has for its essential background his rejection of a truly public education in modern society on the one hand and the rejection of the possibility of modern human beings developing in a state of natural innocence on the other hand. His suggestion in Émile is that a form of private education (“home-schooling”) is possible that preserves the inherent goodness of the natural state while at the same time providing the instruction necessary for the student (...) to become a successful social, and thus moral, person. The possibility of such an education on Rousseau’s own terms will be the central focus of this essay; though implications for education today will also be raised. (shrink)

Measuring gene expression on a global scale has been one of the vexing problems of cell biology. Velculescu et al.(1) recently proposed a system for identifying gene expression levels based on very short sequence tags – about nine base pairs – located at a specific site within a gene transcript. By coupling the strategy to current automated sequencing machines and the large expressed sequence tag databases, it should be possible to follow changes in gene expression for large numbers of genes (...) economically and accurately. (shrink)

Causation is one of philosophy's most venerable and thoroughly-analyzed concepts. However, the study of how ordinary people make causal judgments is a much more recent addition to the philosophical arsenal. One of the most prominent views of causal explanation, especially in the realm of harmful or potentially harmful behavior, is that unusual or counternormative events are accorded privileged status in ordinary causal explanations. This is a fundamental assumption in psychological theories of counterfactual reasoning, and has been transported to philosophy by (...) Hitchcock and Knobe (2009). A different view--the basis of the culpable control model of blame (CCM)--is that primary causal status is accorded to behaviors that arouse negative evaluative reactions, including behaviors that stem from nefarious motives, negligence or recklessness, a faulty character, or behaviors that lead to harmful or potentially harmful consequences. This paper describes four empirical studies that show consistent support for the CCM. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on the “America” part of Captain America's name and explores the more political aspects of his life and character. It looks at patriotism in general and how to characterize Captain America's brand of it; Cap's uneasy relationship with politics and the United States government; and how Cap puts principles above politics, even if it means defying his own government and giving up the shield and the title. The chapter explains that Cap's devotion to his country is based (...) on the principles and ideals upon which it was founded, and he regularly holds his government accountable to those same standards, which he interprets as inclusive and cosmopolitan, applying to the world outside America as well as everybody within it. It dispels any illusions that Captain America is a jingoist flag‐waver, and explains instead that he embodies an inclusive and cosmopolitan patriotism that balances idealism with clear‐eyed pragmatism. (shrink)

Applied Natural Science: Environmental Issues and Global Perspectives will provide the reader with a complete insight into the natural-scientific pattern of the world, covering the most important historical stages of the development of various areas of science, methods of natural-scientific research, general scientific and philosophical concepts, and the fundamental laws of nature. The book analyzes the main scientific trends and developments of modern natural science and also discusses important aspects of environmental protection. Topics include: the problem of "the two cultures": (...) the mathematization of natural sciences and the informatization of society; the non-linear nature of the processes occurring in nature and society; application of the second law of thermodynamics to describe the development of biological systems; global problems of the biosphere; theory and practice of stable organic paramagnetic materials; polymers and the natural environment. Key features include: an interdisciplinary approach in considering scientific and technical problems; a discussion of general scientific trends in modern natural science, including globalization challenges in nature and society, the organic chemistry of stable paramagnetic materials, the fundamentals of the environmental chemistry of polymeric materials, etc.; a justification of applying classical (non-equilibrium) thermodynamics to studying the behavior of open (including biological) systems. (shrink)

The newly proposed framework for non-addictive psychoactive substances postulated by Müller & Schumann (M&S) provides an interesting and plausible explanation for non-addictive drug use. However, with specific reference to the relevant behavioral addiction literature, this commentary argues that the model may unexpectedly hold utility not only for non-addictive use of drugs, but also for non-addictive use of other potentially addictive behaviors.

This book explores the steady decline in the status of the individual in recent years and addresses common misunderstandings about the concept of individuality. Drawing from psychology, neuroscience, technology, economics, philosophy, politics, and law, White explains how and why the individual has been devalued in the eyes of scholars, government leaders, and the public. He notes that developments in science have led to doubts about our cognitive competence, while assumptions made in the humanities have led to questions about our moral (...) competence. In this book, White goes on to argue that both of these views are mistaken and that they stem from overly simplistic ideas about how individuals make choices, however imperfectly, in their interests, which are multifaceted and complex. In response, he proposes a new way to look at individuals that preserves their essential autonomy while emphasizing their responsibility to others, inspired by the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant and the legal and political philosophy reflected in the Bill of Rights to the U.S. Constitution. This book explains how individuality combines both rights and responsibilities, reconciles the popular yet false dichotomy between individual and society, and provides the basis for a humane and respectful civil society and government. This book is part of White's trilogy on the individual and society, which includes The Manipulation of Choice and The Illusion of Well-Being. (shrink)

Oxidative damage to DNA appears to be a factor in cancer, yet explanations for why highly elevated levels of such lesions do not always result in cancer remain elusive. Much of the genome is non‐coding and lesions in these regions might be expected to have little biological effect, an inference supported by observations that there is preferential repair of coding sequences. RNA has an important coding function in protein synthesis, and yet the consequences of RNA oxidation are largely unknown. Some (...) non‐coding nucleic acid is functional, e.g. promoters, and damage to these sequences may well have biological consequences. Similarly, oxidative damage to DNA may promote microsatellite instability, inhibit methylation and accelerate telomere shortening. DNA repair appears pivotal to the maintenance of genome integrity, and genetic alterations in repair capacity, due to single nucleotide polymorphisms or mutation, may account for inter‐individual differences in cancer susceptibility. This review will survey these aspects of oxidative damage to nucleic acids and their implication for disease. BioEssays 26:533–542, 2004. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

This chapter provides a quick primer on the volumes of the comic titles Captain America and Avengers. It talks about the beginnings and endings of which usually coincide with major events in the Marvel Universe. The story starts with the first volume of Avengers, since it was in the classic issue #4 of that title that Captain America was found in a block of ice and revived. These long‐running volumes of Captain America and Avengers lasted until 1996. Both series ended (...) when the Avengers were apparently killed in a battle with the villainous Onslaught. After the Avengers vs. X‐Men event, Marvel Comics relaunched many of its books and introduced new ones. The Watcher only knows what volume Captain America and the various Avengers titles are on, but Cap will live in on comics, movies, and TV long after this book has changed the course of American history. (shrink)