Qualitative data typically contain multiple identifiable characteristics about people, places and events, in the unique voice of each participant. This short report considers sensitivity and security of audio-recordings, drawing attention to a lack of guidelines for researchers on the preservation or destruction of such data. The authors urge debate on this issue, with due consideration to both ethics and scientific rigour.

Religiosity is a prominent feature of the Geschwind syndrome, a behavioural pattern found in some cases of temporal lobe epilepsy. Since the 1950s, when Wilder Penfield induced spiritual feelings by experimental manipulation of the temporal lobes, development of brain imaging technology has revealed neural correlates of intense emotional states, spurring the growth of neurotheology. In their secular empiricism, psychiatry, neurology and psychology are inclined to pathologise deviant religious expression, thereby reinforcing the dualism of objective and phenomenal worlds. Considering theological perspectives (...) and the idea of cosmic consciousness, the authors urge a holistic approach to the spiritual events of epileptic aura, potentially leading to a deeper understanding of the mind and its transcendent potential. (shrink)

What is the Bare Particular Theory? Is it committed, like the Bundle Theory, to a constituent ontology: according to which a substance’s qualities—and according to the Bare Particular Theory, its substratum also—are proper parts of the substance? I argue that Bare Particularists need not, should not, and—if a recent objection to ‘the Bare Particular Theory’ succeeds—cannot endorse a constituent ontology. There is nothing, I show, in the motivations for Bare Particularism or the principles that distinguish Bare Particularism from rival views (...) that entails a constituent ontology. I outline a version of Bare Particularism that in rejecting a constituent ontology avoids the New Objection. I argue against Theodore Sider that this really is a distinct theory to the version of Bare Particularism that endorses a constituent ontology, and not a mere terminological variant. I show that this, the best version of the Bare Particular Theory, is also defensible against the old objections. (shrink)

The Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Act 2018 was commenced on 01/01/2019 in Ireland. The Act provides for legal termination of pregnancy under defined circumstances including for any reason at < 12 weeks gestation; and where two doctors agree there is ‘a condition affecting the foetus that is likely to lead to the death of the foetus either before, or within 28 days of, birth’. As such, abortion for congenital anomaly (CA) can occur at a number of time points, (...) depending on the adjudged severity. Infants born with CAs frequently require significant medical intervention and account for a high proportion of admissions to paediatric intensive care units (PICUs). The purpose of this paper was to evaluate the number of infants with CAs admitted to an Irish PICU in the period before and after the implementation of the Act. All PICU admissions < 1 month of age to a single Irish paediatric hospital between 2012 and 2021 were analysed. CAs were recorded, and the periods before and after the commencement of the Act compared. We found a difference in admissions involving CAs, particularly those related to congenital heart disease involving single ventricle anatomy. It is plausible that this difference was as a result of improved access to abortion services following the implementation of the Act. This article explores the legal conditions related to the abortion of a foetus with a CA in Ireland, and the possible impact of the Independent Review of the Operation of the Health ( Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Act 2018. (shrink)

Ferdinand Tönnies, the founder of sociology, has been characterised as contributing to the “destruction of reason,” although he viewed himself as a champion of Enlightenment with a social vocation. Here, we shall consider Tönnies’s discussion of the epistemological bases of what he called “rationalism”: his theory of the state, based on the rationalism of Hobbes, and of society, based on the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith and Hume; his implicit development of rationalist ethics and the positions he took on (...) Spinoza and Kant; and the relationship between his philosophy of history and that of his philosophical forebear, Adam Ferguson, who wrote in the age of bourgeois emancipation that marked the high Enlightenment. We shall conclude with reflections on the grounds on which Tönnies has been read as an opponent to rationalism and even as a foe of Enlightenment. (shrink)

Answering machine messages allegedly refute Kaplan's ‘classical account’ of the semantics of ‘I’, ‘here’ and ‘now’. The classical account doesn’t allow that a token of ‘I am not here now’ can be true; but these words in an answering machine message can communicate something true. In this paper I argue that the true content communicated by an answering machine message is extra-semantic content conveyed via the mechanism of ‘externally-oriented make-believe’. An answering machine message is associated with a game of make-believe (...) whose rules prescribe making believe that the agent who recorded the message is speaking there and then; and it thereby conveys that the circumstance that would make the message fictionally true obtains. (shrink)

This is the first study of the Cambridge Affair. Drawing upon archival and unpublished material, little-known texts pertaining to the Affair, and Derrida’s own oeuvre, this original account offers an historical and philosophical reconstruction of this crucial debate.

The methods of assessing a writer's spirit vary in usefulness according to his genre. If he is a satirist much may often be learned through an examination of his names. This is certainly true of Horace, and one might have thought that in recent years a fair amount of attention would have been paid to this aspect of his work. Yet to the best of my knowledge no special study has been published in the present century. Certain points have been (...) well noted by scholars like Vogel, Becher, and Marouzeau, and a few editions contain summaries of the material. The last detailed discussion, however, was that of Cartault, and one must admit that it was not wholly unbiased. So it seems reasonable to review the evidence again, making use of the work done by Marx, Cichorius, Münzer, and others. We do not have to inquire about all the characters in the Sermones; only satirical references need be considered, and even here there is room for selection, because some of the figures are so obscure that nothing helpful can be said about them. (shrink)

Realists about fictional characters posit a certain theoretical role and a candidate to fill this role. I will delineate the role realists take fictional characters like Emma Woodhouse to fill, and I will argue that it is better filled by what I will call ‘characterisations’. In explaining what I mean by ‘characterisations’, I will show that the existence of these entities is comparatively uncontroversial. Realists should acknowledge their existence, but doing so, I will argue, obviates the need to acknowledge the (...) existence of Emma and other fictional individuals. (shrink)

Can epistemic luck be captured by modal conditions such as safety from error? This paper answers ‘no’. First, an old problem is cast in a new light: it is argued that the trivial satisfaction associated with necessary truths and accidentally robust propositions is a symptom of a more general disease. Namely, epistemic luck but not safety from error is hyperintensional. Second, it is argued that as a consequence the standard solution to deal with this worry, namely the invocation of content (...) variation, fails. Third, it is considered whether the condition can serve some restricted theoretical role; the hypothesis is rejected. Finally, it is tentatively suggested that epistemic luck’s hyperintensionality derives from its being an explanatory notion, and an analogy is drawn with failures of probabilstic conceptions of explanation in the philosophy of science. (shrink)

'There is nothing outside the text.' Possibly no single statement has caused such a storm in critical theory as this famous observation by the French philosopher, Jacques Derrida. While it is often misunderstood as meaning that nothing is real and that political actions are therefore pointless, Debating Derrida demonstrates that Derrida's philosophy does not lack political conviction. Niall Lucy examines three key terms - text, writing and differance - as they are used in three famous debates: Derrida's disputes over (...) speech-acts with John R. Searle, over discourse with Michel Foucault and over apartheid. Lucy also takes up the issue of Derrida's relationship to postmodernism and questions the 'political imperative' of the need to justify philosophy and the humanities in general according to a notion of their 'usefulness'. Debating Derrida decisively shows that instead of disagreeing with Derrida, we should rather be defending him. (shrink)

This theoretical paper argues for prioritarianism as an ethical underpinning for digital health in contexts of extreme disadvantage. In support of this claim, the paper develops three prioritarian principles for making ethical decisions for digital health programme design, grounded in the normative position that the greater the need, the stronger the moral claim. The principles are positioned as an alternative view to the prevailing utilitarian approach to digital health, which the paper argues is not sufficient to address the needs of (...) the worst off. As researchers of digital health, we must ensure that the most globally marginalised are not overlooked by overtly technocentric implementation practices. Consequently, the paper concludes by advocating for use of the three principles to support stronger critical reflection on the ethics involved in the design and implementation of digital health programmes. (shrink)

The influence of Husserlian phenomenology on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics has been the subject of some analysis in the secondary literature, with scholars emphasizing both Gadame...

That's according to Niall Lucy in his latest book, PoMo Oz. Pitting his humour and intellect against the conservative power brokers, Lucy champions the notion that free thought, not free trade, is the basis of democracy.

This volume presents essays analysing the ambivalent history of the globally influential political and social concept of community and the paradigms it has engendered in academia and politics.

In 1833, Henry Alford, a Cambridge don, writes to an ‘earthly friend’ entreating help to cure his intolerance for some of his fellow Cantabrigians. He is, subsequently, visited in dreams by an unearthly friend. One hundred and sixty years later, John Holloway writes Civitatula, a poem celebrating Cambridge University's history. The year before, Holloway had been busy protesting the award of Derrida's Honorary Doctorate there. Reflecting on the turbulence of 1968, Holloway's narrator suggests a Cantabrigian encounter with extra-terrestrials as tonic (...) to this agitation. These oneiric visitations coalesce around a certain saying otherwise, which is also the saying of the other. They thus come into the orbit of Bartleby the Scrivener, he whom Derrida considers ‘the secret of literature’. This post-critical work of conspiracy theory considers, then, the force of this ‘secret’ in both space and time, whilst posing the question of how fantastic might the search for meaning become. (shrink)

This book presents the most complete translation to date of Erwin Schrödinger's work on colorimetry. In his work Schrödinger proposed a projective geometry of color space, rather than a Euclidean line-element. He also proposed new (at the time) colorimetric methods - in detail and at length - which represented a dramatic conceptual shift in colorimetry. Schrödinger shows how the trichromatic (or Young-Helmholtz) theory of color and the opponent-process (or Hering) theory of color are formally the same theory, or at least (...) only trivially different. These translations of Schrödinger's bold concepts for color space have a fresh resonance and importance for contemporary color theory. (shrink)

It is one of the central aims of the philosophy of science to elucidate the meanings of scientific terms and also to think critically about their application. The focus of this essay is the scientific term predict and whether there is credible evidence that animal models, especially in toxicology and pathophysiology, can be used to predict human outcomes. Whether animals can be used to predict human response to drugs and other chemicals is apparently a contentious issue. However, when one empirically (...) analyzes animal models using scientific tools they fall far short of being able to predict human responses. This is not surprising considering what we have learned from fields such evolutionary and developmental biology, gene regulation and expression, epigenetics, complexity theory, and comparative genomics. (shrink)

The dramatic increase in the number of overseas students studying in the United Kingdom and other Western countries has required academics to reevaluate many aspects of their own, and their institutions', practices. This article considers differing cultural values among overseas students toward plagiarism and the implications this may have for postgraduate education in a Western context. Based on focus-group interviews, questionnaires, and informal discussions, we report the views of plagiarism among students in 2 postgraduate management programs, both of which had (...) a high constituency of overseas students. We show that plagiarist practices are often the outcome of many complex and culturally situated influences. We suggest that educators need to appreciate these differing cultural assumptions if they are to act in an ethical manner when responding to issues of plagiarism among international students. (shrink)

This paper maintains (following Yougrau 1987; 2000 and Hinchliff 1996) that the dead and other former existents count as examples of non-existent objects. If the dead number among the things there are, a further question arises: what is it to be dead—how should the state of being dead be characterised? It is argued that this state should be characterised negatively: the dead are not persons, philosophers etc. They lack any of the (intrinsic) qualities they had while they lived. The only (...) facts involving the dead are facts about the relations they stand in—including the relations they bear to the qualities they formerly instantiated, and the intentional relations they stand in to us. Given an appropriate conception of qualities the dead can be said to be quality-less objects: bare particulars. The ‘Bare Particular Theory’ of individuals, it is argued, is coherent if and only if it concedes that the bare particulars it allows for don’t exist. The account of the dead and other former existents as bare particulars does justice to the misfortune of death, and points the way to a general theory of nonexistent objects. (shrink)

Guided by a life-course perspective, this article uses data from 11 waves of the Michigan Panel Study of Income Dynamics to examine the influence of human capital, family structure, and local labor-market demand variables on the reentry into the labor force of midlife homemakers in the United States in the 1970s. By looking at two contiguous time periods, the first and last halves of the 1970s, it investigates how the influence of these factors varied with social changes in the job-opportunity (...) structure for women in the United States during the 1970s, a time when the service sector expanded and public approval of married women's employment rose. We found that the likelihood of reentry varied with education, age, and marital status, as well as time period. These findings suggest the need for a model of the labor-force reentry of homemakers in midlife that takes account of historical period as well as the distinctive realities of women's lives in middle adulthood. (shrink)

Modern sociology emerged in part out of the milieu of ‘state socialists’ in imperial Germany. An exploration of the milieu and its discourses provides insights as to the sense of the founding work of German sociology, Ferdinand Tönnies’ Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, the political context in which historicist economics were transformed into sociology, explicit and implicit influences behind sociology in the writings of von Stein, Rodbertus, Wagner and Schmoller, the response of the ‘socialists of the lectern’ to Tönnies’ sociology, and differing (...) responses to the debate between the historicist human sciences and rational theory. (shrink)

This article pursues Heidegger’s protracted engagement with the question of silent origins. First, I explore the so-called transitional thinking grounded in the fundamental attunement of reticence as it is put forward in the Beiträge zur Philosophie. Second, I consider the complex matter of Heidegger’s reference to the intimate, yet distinct, roles of poetry and thinking when it comes to articulating a response to the attunement of reticence. I then move to explain what is at stake in Heidegger’s engagement with Hölderlin (...) on the nature of language, silence, and listening. This latter task involves analyzing Heidegger’s contention that Hölderlin’s poetic thought is both philosophically exemplary and futural. Finally, since I take Heidegger’s interpretation of Hölderlin to be a critical appropriation, we must assess the coherence of his redeployment of Hölderlin’s thought models, especially, I will claim, his appropriation of the halfgods. (shrink)

Lehar proposes an interesting theory of visual perception based on an explicit three-dimensional representation of the world existing in the observer's head. However, if we apply Occam's razor to this proposal, it is possible to contemplate far simpler representations of the world. Such representations have the advantage that they agree with findings in modern neuroscience.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Making the Aristophanic AudienceNiall W. SlaterAristophanic comedy is rich in address to its audience and comments on the audience's behavior. It must be said at once, however, that this is not dispassionate reporting: Aristophanes' purpose in commenting on his audience is nearly always to redirect its attention or to shape or reshape the behavior of that audience. A study of the full extent of Aristophanes' attempts to shape the (...) response of his audience is beyond the scope of discussion here, where the focus is primarily on his strategies for controlling and directing the attention and response of his audience in general. Let me also make one methodological assumption explicit at this point. When the characters or chorus in Aristophanes remark on audience behavior, these comments must have some basis in reality in order either to be humorous or to influence that behavior: if things are not quite as Aristophanes describes them, they nonetheless must be close enough to reality for the audience to understand and react to them.The most basic problem of audience response in the theater is to make sure there is a response. Let me therefore begin simply with the problem of attention and attention span in the theater. There is still dispute as to whether the program of the City Dionysia was shortened during the war years from five to three comedies. I believe (against Wolfgang Luppe) that it was, which helps explain the comedy of a passage in Birds.1 In the play's parabasis, the chorus issues an invitation to the spectators to join their new bird city. If they join the city of birds, the audience is told, they will acquire wings, which will allow them to escape human limitations. In a superb parody of the common tragic choral theme of "I wish I were a bird and could fly away from here," the chorus enumerates the advantages of wings. One is, they would allow the spectators to fly away from the boring performances of tragedy! [End Page 351].(Birds 785–89)There's nothing better or more pleasant than to grow wings. Now, if one of you spectators had wings, when he was hungry he could escape the tragic performances, fly off home, have lunch, and then when he was full, fly back here again to us.Another advantage would be to slip away for a quick sexual encounter:.(793–96)And if any of you happens to be carrying on an affair with a married woman, and he sees the lady's husband in the Boule's seats, he again could have flown away from you with his wings, then after screwing her flown from her place back here again.These jokes work best, I submit, if Birds comes on in the afternoon, for they suggest a certain waning of audience interest and distraction by hunger as the morning's tragic tetralogy marched on. The solution? Skip the boring tragedy bits, head home for lunch, but do come back for "us," that is, the comedy at the end of the day's program.2Aristophanes is of course far too sensible to suggest directly that the spectators might be bored by the comedies on offer. He does allude to the problem of attention span in another way. Ecclesiazusae was probably produced in 393 B.C., well after the end of the war, when the [End Page 352] Dionysia certainly offered a full five comedies. At the end of the play, the chorus says it has a small request:.(1154–62)I want to make a small request of the judges: that the clever ones, remembering the clever stuff in this play, vote for me; those having a good laugh, vote for me because of the laughs; in fact, I want just about everybody to vote for me; and don't let the lot be any fault for us, that we drew the first position, but you must remember all these things. Don't transgress your oath, but always judge the choruses fairly, and don't imitate those low–class trollops, who always only remember their most recent customers.We shall come back to this passage when we consider... (shrink)

Knowledge excludes luck. According to the received view, this intuition reveals that knowing is essentially modal in character. This paper demurs. Either knowledge does not exclude luck, or the entailment reveals nothing about its conceptual character. It is argued that knowledge excludesaccidentality, and that this notion is not modal but causal‐explanatory. There are three central tasks. The first is to explicate the concept of accident. The second is to argue that the concepts of luck and accident are “intensionally distinct,” which (...) is to say that no member of the intension of either holds on both. The third is to argue that an anti‐accident requirement on knowledge is preferable to an anti‐luck analogue on abductive grounds. (shrink)

This paper argues that the inappropriate framing and implementation of plagiarism detection systems in UK universities can unwittingly construct international students as ‘plagiarists’. It argues that these systems are often implemented with inappropriate assumptions about plagiarism and the way in which new members of a community of practice develop the skills to become full members of that community. Drawing on the literature and some primary data it shows how expectations, norms and practices become translated and negotiated in such a way (...) that legitimate attempts to conform with the expectations of the community of practice often become identified as plagiarism and illegitimate attempts at cheating often become obscured from view. It argues that this inappropriate framing and implementation of plagiarism detection systems may make academic integrity more illusive rather than less. It argues that in its current framing – as systems for ‘detection and discipline’ – plagiarism detection systems may become a new micro-politics of power with devastating consequences for those excluded. (shrink)

Following the deaths of ten Irish republican hunger strikers in 1981, radical Basque nationalists and Irish republicans of the Basque izquierda abertzale and Irish republican movement respectively, began to develop ever closer ties of transnational “solidarity”. In addition to the relationship between Herri Batasuna and Sinn Féin, more ad hoc organisational links in areas such as youth, prisoner, and language advocacy, fostered a shared political culture at the intersection of both movements, which was periodically reflected through the prism of cultural (...) expression. Utilising a wide array of primary sources, this article explores and analyses, for the first time, the emergence and development of this transnational nexus, from the hunger strikes of 1981 to the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. (shrink)

Gouvernance et libéralités de Saladin: D’après les données inédites de six documents arabes. Edited by Jean-Michel Mouyon; Dominique Sourdel; and Janine Sourdel-Thomine. Documents relatifs à l’histoire des croisades, vol. 22. Paris: AcadémIe des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettred, 2015. Pp. 148. €30.

What I was looking for were folk music records and the first one I saw was Odetta on the Tradition label. I went into the listening booth to hear it. Odetta was great. I had never heard of her unti...

(2009). Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of Paul Auster's In the Country of Last Things. Angelaki: Vol. 14, Ecopoetics and Pedagogies, pp. 21-28.

Students of geometry do not prove Euclid's first theorem by examining an accompanying diagram, or by visualizing the construction of a figure. The original proof of Euclid's first theorem is incomplete, and this gap in logic is undetected by visual imagination. While cognition involves truth values, vision does not: the notions of inference and proof are foreign to vision.