BackgroundPreprint usage is growing rapidly in the life sciences; however, questions remain on the relative quality of preprints when compared to published articles. An objective dimension of quality that is readily measurable is completeness of reporting, as transparency can improve the reader’s ability to independently interpret data and reproduce findings.MethodsIn this observational study, we initially compared independent samples of articles published in bioRxiv and in PubMed-indexed journals in 2016 using a quality of reporting questionnaire. After that, we performed paired comparisons (...) between preprints from bioRxiv to their own peer-reviewed versions in journals.ResultsPeer-reviewed articles had, on average, higher quality of reporting than preprints, although the difference was small, with absolute differences of 5.0% [95% CI 1.4, 8.6] and 4.7% [95% CI 2.4, 7.0] of reported items in the independent samples and paired sample comparison, respectively. There were larger differences favoring peer-reviewed articles in subjective ratings of how clearly titles and abstracts presented the main findings and how easy it was to locate relevant reporting information. Changes in reporting from preprints to peer-reviewed versions did not correlate with the impact factor of the publication venue or with the time lag from bioRxiv to journal publication.ConclusionsOur results suggest that, on average, publication in a peer-reviewed journal is associated with improvement in quality of reporting. They also show that quality of reporting in preprints in the life sciences is within a similar range as that of peer-reviewed articles, albeit slightly lower on average, supporting the idea that preprints should be considered valid scientific contributions. (shrink)

Although death by neurologic criteria is legally recognized throughout the United States, state laws and clinical practice vary concerning three key issues: the medical standards used to determine death by neurologic criteria, management of family objections before determination of death by neurologic criteria, and management of religious objections to declaration of death by neurologic criteria. The American Academy of Neurology and other medical stakeholder organizations involved in the determination of death by neurologic criteria have undertaken concerted action to address variation (...) in clinical practice in order to ensure the integrity of brain death determination. To complement this effort, state policymakers must revise legislation on the use of neurologic criteria to declare death. We review the legal history and current laws regarding neurologic criteria to declare death and offer proposed revisions to the Uniform Determination of Death Act and the rationale for these recommendations. (shrink)

Mealey's sociopathy model is an exemplar of popular diathesis-stress models. Although such models, when presented in descriptive language, offer the illusion of integrative explanation, their actual scientific value is very limited because they fail to make specific, quantitative, falsifiable predictions. Conceptual and quantitative weaknesses of such diathesis-stress models are discussed and the requirements for useful models are outlined.

The Serbian Orthodox Church has been described in scholarship as having had a significant impact onto the social and political life of Serbia, especially since the wars of the nineties. With the coming of the age of the Internet and social science automation, however, more options have gradually become available to researchers in the recent years. For this reason, this article will tackle the official rhetoric of the Serbian Orthodox Church in relation to the sociopolitical with the assistance of social (...) science automation. Forming an examination via the methodological lens of Operational Code Analysis, this article delves into the Church’s discourse on Kosovo, via heavy vetting of all official statements given on the website of the Serbian Orthodox Church. It also expands upon the initial methodology – Operational Code Analysis – to an analysis of an institution with a uniform discourse, which has so far not seen light in scholarly production. (shrink)

ai Diminished gaze fixation is one of the core features of autism and has been proposed to be associated with abnormalities in the neural circuitry of affect. We tested this hypothesis in two separate studies using eye tracking while measuring functional brain activity during facial discrimination tasks in individuals with autism and in typically developing individuals. Activation in the fusiform gyrus and amygdala was strongly and positively correlated with the time spent fixating the eyes in the autistic group in both (...) studies, suggesting that diminished gaze fixation may account for the fusiform hypoactivation to faces commonly reported in autism. In addition, variation in eye fixation within autistic individuals was strongly and positively associated with amygdala activation across both studies, suggesting a heightened emotional response associated with gaze fixation in autism. (shrink)

This compact collection of philosophical texts from the _Summa Theologica_--on God, creation, the soul, human acts, moral good and evil, love, habits, virtue, and law--is presented newly translated in abridged form and cast in a modified version of the medieval _quaestio_. Included are only the most important objections and Aquinas’ replies; appeals to scriptural, theological, and philosophical authorities have been omitted. Unlike the ordering of the originals, questions and answers are here presented prior to objections and replies; the result is (...) a sharp, rich, topically organized question-answer presentation of Aquinas' major philosophical arguments within a brief compass. A general Introduction, headnotes, a glossary, an index, and a select bibliography offer expert guidance to the work of this major philosopher. (shrink)

Richard J. Bernstein argues that many of the important themes in philosophy during the past 150 years are variations and developments of ideas that were prominent in the classical American pragmatists: Charles S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and George H. Mead. The pragmatic thinkers reject a sharp dichotomy between subject and object, mind-body dualism, the quest for certainty, and the spectator theory of knowledge. They seek to bring about a sea change in philosophy that highlights the social character (...) of human experience and normative social practices, the self-correcting nature of all inquiry, and the continuity of theory and practice. And they - especially James, Dewey, and Mead - emphasize the democratic ethical-political consequences of a pragmatic orientation. Many of the themes developed by the pragmatic thinkers were central to the work of major twentieth-century philosophers such as Wittgenstein and Heidegger, but the so-called analytic/Continental split obscures this underlying continuity. Bernstein develops an alternative reading of contemporary philosophy that brings out the persistence and continuity of pragmatic themes. He explains why the discussion of pragmatism is alive, varied, and widespread"--Jacket. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Richard J. Arneson BENTHAMITE UTILITARIANISM AND HARD TIMES IT is commonly understood that Dickens's vaguely specified criticisms of the "Hard Facts" philosophy in Hard Times are intended as criticisms of Benthamite Utilitarianism. It is also commonly held that, on the level of theory at any rate, Dickens's criticisms are in the form of caricature so crudely painted as almost entirely to misrepresent its object. ' It would be (...) foolish to deny the presence of bathos, flat caricature, and stereotyped sentiment in this novel, or for that matter in any of Dickens's novels. But alongside the flamboyantly bad there is much stronger and subtler material. In this paper I examine the criticisms of Utilitarianism in Hard Times, and argue that Dickens's arguments possess more cogency than he is usually given credit for. It will turn out that much of the intellectual interest of the novel derives from the tension between what Dickens says to us in authorial sermons and what he shows us in the structure of his plot. One complaint Dickens offers is that Utilitarians like Thomas Gradgrind oppose fact to fancy and, in their gross worship of fact and downcrying of fancy, stifle much in human beings that is essential to their flourishing. The fact-versus-fancy theme is traceable in the novel's handling of education in the Gradgrind school, of the upbringing of the Gradgrind children, and of working-class life in industrial towns such as Coketown. Here as elsewhere Dickens means to present in tandem a criticism of the "Hard Facts" philosophy and of the society which he believed increasingly to be operating on the principles of that philosophy; hence a response to Hard Times must deal with social criticism as well as philosophical critique. What exactly is it that Gradgrind thinking aims to excise from Victorian culture by its campaign against "fancy"? Critics have objected that 60 Richard J. Arneson61 Dickens's notion of fancy comprehends only playful imagination and light-minded amusement and as such cannot bear the heavy burden of argument he rests upon it.2 In many passages of the novel fancy is indeed tantamount to play. But Dickens insists on the significance of fancy for moral education and on the continuity between light fancy and the poetical imagination that heightens moral sensibility. Fancy, nurtured in a child even in the humble pursuits of nursery rhymes and fairy tales, turns into moral imagination in an adult, who is thereby enabled to place himself in thought in the position of another, intuit his way of thinking, sense his feelings, and so acquire the knowledge and the inclination to treat the other with intelligent sympathy. That Gradgrind education frustrates this natural process is Dickens's complaint against it. It is worth calling attention to the similarity between Dickens's complaint against a vaguely discerned spirit of the times and the much more focused criticism urged by J. S. Mill against Bentham in his 1838 essay in London and Westminster Review. Bentham, says Mill, lacked himself, and failed to appreciate, a certain sort of imagination— that which enables us, by a voluntary effort, to conceive the absent as if it were present, the imaginary as if it were real, and to clothe it in the feelings which, if it were indeed real, it would bring along with it. This is the power by which one human being enters into the mind and circumstances of another. This power constitutes the poet, insofar as he does anything but melodiously utter his own actual feelings.... Mill concludes that Bentham, lacking imagination and an historical sense, "saw accordingly in man little but what the vulgarest eye can see."3 And in his Autobiography, Mill acknowledges that in the Benthamite Radical circles he frequented in the 1820's, "From this neglect both in theory and in practise of the cultivation of feeling, naturally resulted, among other things, an undervaluing of poetry, and of Imagination generally, as an element of human nature."4 A sympathetic internal critic of Utilitarianism, Mill tries to retain the essentials of Bentham's secular and empiricist moral doctrine while softening its cruder aspects. Like Bentham, Mill identifies morality with furthering the greatest happiness... (shrink)

Drawing freely and expertly from Continental and analytic traditions, Richard Bernstein examines a number of debates and controversies exemplified in the works of Gadamer, Habermas, Rorty, and Arendt. He argues that a "new conversation" is emerging about human rationality—a new understanding that emphasizes its practical character and has important ramifications both for thought and action.

Books reviewed:Meredith Williams Wittgenstein, Mind and MeaningJohn Cottingham Philosophy and the Good LifeFrank Cioffi Freud and the Question of Pseudoscience.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Drieu, Céline: French Fascism, Scapegoating, and the Price of Revelation Richard J. Golsan Texas A &M University Although the Girardian concept of the scapegoat and its attendant phenomena have a number of obvious implications for the study of fascism, to date the connection has been addressed only in broadly theoretical terms. In Des Choses cachées and in subsequent works, René Girard has alluded to modern political scapegoating such (...) as the Nazi persecution of the Jews as examples of mass victimizations where the enormous number of victims represents an effort to compensate for the failure of the scapegoating process itself in the wake of Christian revelation.1 While the victims are initially vilified, they are not sacralized after their sacrifice, and order is maintained only so long as a steady stream of victims is forthcoming. As Andrew McKenna explains in Violence and Difference, "with the passing of the sacred order, of the sacred tout court, sacrifice becomes less and less capable of uniting the community and therefore demands more and more victims... the decline of symbolic violence brings an increase of real victims; their quantity mounts in inverse proportion to the ritual efficacy of sacrifice, and victimage appears more and more gratuitous" (159-60). Moreover, McKenna continues, victimage of this sort becomes increasingly untraceable, rootless, and it is this aspect of official Nazi anti-Semitism, for example, which allowed many Nazis in their postwar trials to proclaim their innocence for their roles in the Final Solution by insisting that they were "only following orders" (162-3). 1 See Things Hidden 128-9. For a more general discussion of the persecution of ethnic minorities as a source of social cohesiveness, see the essays "Violence and Representation" and "Generative Scapegoating." Drieu, Céline: French Fascism173 These observations certainly help to illuminate the role of scapegoating in Nazi racial politics and in the Holocaust in particular. They are less helpful, however, in understanding other paradigms of fascism in which antiSemitism did not play as central a role or in cases in which fascist ideology was not synonymous with government policy or political hegemony. The role of scapegoating in Italian Fascism, for example, is more difficult to ascertain than it is in Nazism because anti-Semitism was less crucial as a means of establishing social cohesiveness, at least until Nazi influence became predominant during World War II (Soucy xviii). In France, the presence of a number of fascist movements from the twenties through the end of the Occupation, and the absence of an autonomous fascist state during the same period, make the task of assessing the role of scapegoating even more difficult. This is especially true in light of the fact that a number of French fascist movements were not anti-Semitic, at least until it became expedient to be so to curry favor with the Nazis. In French Fascism: The First Wave, Robert Soucy notes that during the interwar years, fascist groups including "the Jeunesse Patriotes, the Croix de Feu and the Faisceau... welcomed Jews into their ranks" (xviii). The lack of a consistent attitude towards the Jews is, in fact, just one of several points of divergence among French fascists and fascist groups prior to World War Two. As a result, historians and political theorists who have studied French fascism have strongly disagreed as to its origins as well as its basic ideology. In Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, Zeev Sternhell argues that "the history of fascism can be described as a continuous attempt to revise marxism and create a national form of socialism" (20). Soucy, on the other hand, insists that on many of the most important social and political issues, including "taxation, government spending, nationalization, property rights, class conflict, religion, education, and foreign policy, French Fascism was overwhelmingly conservative" (xi). Other historians, especially among the French themselves, have gone so far as to insist that there is no such thing as French fascism, that such a creature, if it existed at all, was merely an import, a watered-down version of Nazism or Italian Fascism.2 If no consensus as to the nature or even the existence of French fascism can be reached by analyzing the programs... (shrink)

Heideggerian thought is routinely understood to involve an insistence on finitude, and a rejection of the metaphysical priority of the infinite. As a general rule, this characterization is adequate, but it risks a significant oversimplification of a complex theme in Heidegger’s thinking. After an initial discussion of his dominant position on (in)finitude, the paper focuses on a number of largely neglected and some recently published texts concerning Heidegger’s retrieval of the inheritance of the Greek and Latin grammar of Being, as (...) well as the origins of the idea of the infinite in Anaximander’s ἄπειρον. These texts reveal some important tensions in Heideggerian thought on the status of infinitude in its relation to die Sache selbst of that thought. (shrink)

This paper looks to make a small contribution to the critical engagement between philosophical Thomism and phenomenology, inspired by the recent work of the German phenomenologist and hermeneutic thinker Günter Figal. My suggestion is that Figal’s proposal for a broad-based hermeneutical philosophy rooted in a renewed realism concerning things in their externality and “objectivity” provides great potential for a renewed encounter with Thomist realism. The paper takes up this issue through a brief examination of some of the more problematic idealistic (...) features of Kantian and Husserlian thought, before turning to consider how these aspects of the tradition are reframed within Figal’s phenomenological realism. The Thomist position concerning the relation between things and their understanding (including the complex matter of the verbum mentis) is then raised, drawing both on Aquinas’s own texts and the interpretations of Jacques Maritain. Some striking emerging affinities between this tradition and Figal’s hermeneutic phenomenology are noted. (shrink)

The relation between humans and nature is at the core of the great existential threats of our time, from climate change, extreme weather, and environmental destruction to devastating pandemics. We are becoming increasingly aware of the fact that, unless we change our behavior radically and quickly, the most likely outcome will be the destruction of countless species and forms of life, including our own. But we also need to change the way we think about nature, and think about the relation (...) between humans and nature – this is a key intellectual task. In this important book, Richard J. Bernstein argues that an adequate conception of humans and nature, capable of facing up to the existential threats of our time, requires taking full account of the major projects dealing with nature in the past. Focusing on key figures of modernity – Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud – Bernstein reconstructs their conceptions of nature and uncovers the reasons that led them to their distinctive views. Working through the contradictions and incompatibilities among these diverse thinkers, Bernstein identifies common themes that have shaped their struggles in dealing with the relation of humans to nature. He offers a critical overview of the challenges illuminated by each perspective that must be confronted in our thinking of nature today. As a prolegomenon to rethinking humanity and nature, this book uncovers the rich conceptual resources available within the modern tradition that can help us to develop an adequate understanding of nature for our time. (shrink)

In her recent, provocative essay “What Is the Point of Equality?”, Elizabeth Anderson argues against a common ideal of egalitarian justice that she calls “ luck egalitarianism” and in favor of an approach she calls “democratic equality.”1 According to the luck egalitarian, the aim of justice as equality is to eliminate so far as is possible the impact on people’s lives of bad luck that falls on them through no fault or choice of their own. In the ideal luck egalitarian (...) society, there are no inequalities in people’s life prospects except those that arise through processes of voluntary choice or faulty conduct, for which the agents involved can reasonably be held responsible. Anderson asserts that the adherents of luck egalitarianism, which can be elaborated in many different ways, include John Roemer, Erik Rakowski, Thomas Nagel, Ronald Dworkin, Gerald Cohen, Richard Arneson, and Philippe Van Parijs.2 In contrast, according to the democratic equality conception, justice as equality requires an end to oppressive social relationships. In the ideal society of democratic equality, the social conditions of everyone’s freedom are secured, each stands to every other in a relationship of fundamental equality, including equal respect, and all have real freedom to participate in democratic self-government. (shrink)

Addressing 1) the problem of nihilism in Nietzsche and his response with the advocacy of self-creation; 2) Heidegger's response to Nietzsche's culmination of Western metaphysics by means of being as will to power in his later works; and 3) whether a remedial position occurs in the works of A.N. Whitehead.

Hannah Arendt warnte grundsätzlich davor, Begriffe des Absoluten in politische Auseinandersetzungen einzuführen. Der gegenwärtige Gebrauch der Rhetorik des Bösen zeigt, wie Recht sie damit hatte. Ihr Verständnis des radikal Bösen erweist sich weiterhin als aufschlussreich für gegenwärtige Probleme, wie Flüchtlingselend, Staatenlosigkeit und Einwanderungsfragen. Ihre Reflexionen über die Banalität des Bösen können uns helfen, das Böse und auch die Verantwortlichkeit in einer globalisierten verwalteten Welt heute besser zu verstehen.