ObjectiveBulimia nervosa and binge eating disorder are eating disorders characterized by recurrent binge eating episodes. Overlap exists between ED diagnostic groups, with BE episodes presenting one clinical feature that occurs transdiagnostically. Neuroimaging of the responses of those with BN and BED to disorder-specific stimuli, such as food, is not extensively investigated. Furthermore, to our knowledge, there have been no previous published studies examining the neural response of individuals currently experiencing binge eating, to low energy foods. Our objective was to examine (...) the neural responses to both low energy and high energy food images in three emotive categories in BN and BED participants.MethodsNineteen females with BN or BED, comprising the binge eating group, and 19 age-matched healthy control ’s completed thorough clinical assessment prior to functional MRI. Neural response to low energy and high energy foods and non-food images was compared between groups using whole-brain exploratory analyses, from which six regions of interest were then selected: frontal, occipital, temporal, and parietal lobes; insula and cingulate.ResultsIn response to low energy food images, the BEG demonstrated differential neural responses to all three low energy foods categories compared to HCs. Correlational analyses found a significant association between frequency of binge episodes and diminished temporal lobe and greater occipital lobe response. In response to high energy food images, compared to HC’s, the BEG demonstrated significantly decreased neural activity in response to all high energy food images. The HC’s had significantly greater neural activity in the limbic system, occipital lobe, temporal lobe, frontal lobe, and limbic system in response to high energy food images.ConclusionResults in the low energy food condition indicate that binge frequency may be related to increased aberrant neural responding. Furthermore, differences were found between groups in all ROI’s except the insula. The neural response seen in the BEG to disgust food images may indicate disengagement with this particular stimuli. In the high energy food condition, results demonstrate that neural activity in BN and BED patients may decrease in response to high energy foods, suggesting disengagement with foods that may be more consistent with those consumed during a binge eating episode. (shrink)

Du grand ingénieur et mathématicien Simon Stevin (Bruges 1548 - La Haye ? 1620), l'histoire a retenu avant tout l'œuvre scientifique, marquante par sa diversité et sa vocation à constituer des manuels pratiques.

En el estudio de los partidos y movimientos contemporáneos de extrema derecha hay una laguna reiteradamente enunciada por los estudiosos de la materia: el análisis de su sustrato ideológico. La razón principal de esta situación radica en la heterogeneidad, la fragmentación, el oportunismo y la ocultación planificada característicos de estos movimientos extremistas. En este artículo se pretende realizar un análisis de elementos fundamentales de la ideología del Front National recurriendo al modelo de Totalismo Ideológico formulado por ROBERT JAY LIFTON como (...) herramienta heurística de reducción de la complejidad. Ello nos permitirá comprobar que el discurso del Front National agrupa, en diferente grado pero de un modo claro, todos los componentes que posibilitan calificarlo de discurso y movimiento totalista. (shrink)

A necessary companion to the acclaimed Stone Reader, Modern Ethics in 77 Arguments is a landmark collection for contemporary ethical thought. Since 2010, The Stone—the immensely popular, award-winning philosophy series in The New York Times—has revived and reinterpreted age-old inquires to speak to our modern condition. This new collection of essays from the series does for modern ethics what The Stone Reader did for modern philosophy. New York Times editor Peter Catapano and best-selling author and philosopher Simon Critchley have (...) curated an unparalleled collection that illuminates just how imperative ethical thinking is in our day-to-day life. Like its predecessor, Modern Ethics in 77 Arguments explores long-standing ethical and moral issues in light of our most urgent dilemmas. Divided into twelve sections, the book opens with a series of broad arguments on existence, human nature and morality. Indeed, “big” questions of the human condition are explored by some of our best-known and most accomplished living philosophers: What is the meaning of our existence? Should we really “do what we love”? How should we respond to evil? Is pure altruism possible? Along with these examinations of timeless moral conundrums, readers will find arguments in the more contentious areas of religion and government: Can we have a moral life without God? Does it really matter if God exists? Is patriotism moral? Accessible and provocative, these pieces expose the persistence of the most basic themes and questions of moral and ethical life. Many of the essays stress the crucial importance of directly engaging the most pressing moral dilemmas in modern life. Should we be the last generation, knowing all the harm we’ve done to our planet? Should we embrace our inner carnivores, or swear off all animal products? From gun control and drone warfare to the morals of marriage and reproduction, readers will view familiar debates in new, surprising lights. The editors have meticulously arranged this book to reflect a wide range of perspectives, voices and rhetorical strategies. By directly addressing some of the most complex and troubling issues we face today—racial discrimination, economic inequality, immigration, citizenship and more—the volume reveals the profound power of ethics in shaping our perceptions of nearly every aspect of our lives. A jargon-free, insightful compendium, Modern Ethics in 77 Arguments offers a panoramic view of morality and is a critical addition to The Stone Reader that will energize and enliven the world of ethical thought in both the classroom and everyday American life. Including… The Meaningfulness of Lives by Todd May * A Life Beyond “Do What You Love” by Gordon Marino * Evolution and our Inner Conflict by Edward O. Wilson * Morals Without God? by Frans de Waal * Does It Matter Whether God Exists? by Gary Gutting * The Moral Hazard of Drones by John Kaag and Sarah Kreps * Can Refugees Have Human Rights? by Omri Boehm * Dear White America by George Yancy * Girlfriend, Mother, Professor? by Carol Hay * The End of “Marriage” by Laurie Shrage * When Vegans Won’t Compromise by Bob Fischer and James McWilliams * Should This Be the Last Generation? by Peter Singer. (shrink)

En este artículo se intentará poner de manifiesto cómo, para Plotino, el retomo pasa, primeramente por una preparación intelectual que tiene por objeto evitar la caída del alma al contemplar la belleza sensible. Se tratará de mostrar también que el camino de vuelta, a su vez, es un camino contemplativo, ya que los varios grados de la contemplación corresponden a las diversas etapas en búsqueda de lo divino, y que el hombre, contemplando la belleza sensible a través del alma, se (...) eleva hasta la Inteligencia, y ésta, contemplando el Uno, se simplifica con El. En ese sentido, evidenciaremos que hay una estrecha relación entre la actividad contemplativa y la idea de lo bello, una vez que el hombre al contemplar, contempla lo bello y contemplándolo, vuelve al Uno: principio y fundamento de la filosofía plotiniana. (shrink)

En el artículo se expone la crítica de Herbert A. Simon a los dos supuestos básicos de la noción neoclásica de “agente”: la racionalidad perfecta y el interés propio. Se muestra cómo Simon criticó ambos supuestos al reconocer que las capacidades cognitivas de los agentes son limitadas, mostrando que existen problemas específicos que no tienen soluciones óptimas y que hay otras motivaciones irreducibles al interés propio, como la lealtad y la identificación grupal, que son fundamentales para entender el (...) comportamiento de las organizaciones. Se muestra cómo Simon apuntó hacia una noción de “racionalidad” históricamente acotada por la interacción del agente con su entorno, lo cual presenta una visión compleja y dinámica del comportamiento humano. Sin embargo, el artículo también muestra las dificultades que tuvo Simon para lograr la realización plena de este proyecto al asumir un supuesto de cognición individualista que le impidió dar un papel más sustantivo al entorno en la estructuración del comportamiento de los agentes. Se termina mostrando cómo la noción de “hábito” puede dar un papel más sustantivo al entorno para desarrollar así una concepción históricamente acotada de la racionalidad. (shrink)

This paper examines what agents should do when others fail to comply with their responsibilities to prevent dangerous climate change. It distinguishes between six different possible responses to noncompliance. These include what I term (1) 'target modification' (watering down the extent to which we seek to prevent climate change), (2) ‘responsibility reallocation’ (reassigning responsibilities to other duty bearers), (3) ‘burden shifting I’ (allowing duty bearers to implement policies which impose unjust burdens on others, (4) 'burden shifting II’ (allowing some to (...) protect peoples rights in ways which impose otherwise unjustified burdens on the duty bearers, (5) 'compromising moral ideals' (permitting agents to compromise non-justice ideals that they are otherwise bound by); and (6) ‘promoting compliance (implementing policies and creating institutions which reduce noncompliance). It concludes by outlining a methodological framework for evaluating these options, and by setting out my tentative and provisional evaluation of which responses are the least bad. (shrink)

Is it possible to approach quantum theory in a 'therapeutic' vein that sees its foundational problems as arising from mistaken conceptual presuppositions? The book explores the prospects for this project and, in doing so, discusses such fascinating issues as the nature of quantum states, explanation in quantum theory, and 'quantum non-locality'.

The main purpose of this paper is to examine the validity of the contention that, over the past decades, we have been witnessing the rise of the ‘posthuman condition’. To this end, the analysis draws on the work of the contemporary philosopher Rosi Braidotti. The paper is divided into four parts. The first part centres on the concept of posthumanism, suggesting that it reflects a systematic attempt to challenge humanist assumptions underlying the construction of ‘the human’. The second part focuses (...) on the concept of post-anthropocentrism, demonstrating that it articulates a desire to reject the twin ideas of ‘species supremacism’ and ‘human exceptionalism’, which it seeks to replace with ‘species egalitarianism’ and ‘monistic vitalism’. The third part is concerned with the concept of critical posthumanities, positing that its advocacy is based on the cross-fertilization of posthumanism and post-anthropocentrism. The fourth part offers an assessment of the ‘posthuman condition’ thesis, evaluating the extent to which it sheds new light on the ways in which our engagements with the world are shaped by the confluence of zoe-, geo-, and techno-based dimensions. The paper concludes with a brief summary of the key insights gained from the preceding inquiry. (shrink)

The Gibbs Paradox is essentially a set of open questions as to how sameness of gases or fluids are to be treated in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. They have a variety of answers, some restricted to quantum theory, some to classical theory. The solution offered here applies to both in equal measure, and is based on the concept of particle indistinguishability. Correctly understood, it is the elimination of sequence position as a labelling device, where sequences enter at the level of (...) the tensor product of one-particle state spaces. In both cases it amounts to passing to the quotient space under permutations. ‘Distinguishability’, in the sense in which it is usually used in classical statistical mechanics, is a mathematically convenient, but physically muddled, fiction. (shrink)

What constitutes a just war? How does race matter in America? Are the interests of corporations the same as those of the public when it comes to the environment or public health? Middle and high school history, literature, and science classes abound with important moral, social, and political questions. But under pressure to cover required materials and out of fear of raising controversy, teachers often avoid classroom discussions of questions of profound importance to students and to society. This book investigates (...) how schools can responsibly take an active role in moral education while honoring their academic mission. Using extensive observations in public, Catholic, and Jewish high schools, Katherine Simon analyzes the ways in which teachers avoid or address moral questions raised by students and implicit in course materials. She examines how morally charged issues may be taught responsibly in a diverse democracy. And in an afterword that teachers and teacher educators will find particularly useful, Simon provides practical tools and strategies for structuring discussion and designing units to help teachers explore moral issues more deeply with their middle and high school students. (shrink)

Economic inequality is a pressing issue that the global community must address in an urgent and detailed manner if global peace is to be sustained. This paper makes the claim that viable alternative solutions to global economic inequality can be found outside the boundaries of western capitalism. This claim is defended via three movements: first, a critique of Christian teachings on the common good is presented as a pathway to this economic alternative. Second, insights from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (...) that call for strategic solidarity to help undo structures of inequality in our world are appropriated. Third, a cultural and philosophical notion of what it means to be human in African thought is presented as a means for justifying the relevance of the African ethic of Ubuntu as a global economic alternative; one that grounds cosmic flourishing in a vision and praxis of relationality and shared identity for all. Keywords: African Philosophy, Inequality, Political Theology, Ubuntu, Ujamaa, Wealth. (shrink)

We should be suspicious of the idea that experiencing pain could enable animals to trade off different motivations in a common currency. It is not even clear that humans have a common motivational currency reflected in evaluative experience. Instead, pain may capture attention, inhibiting attention to competing motivations and needs, thereby making genuine trade-offs harder. Our criteria for pain in invertebrates should be part of a more subtle theory of the relationship between pain and decision-making.

Towards a Posthuman Theory of Educational Relationality critically reads the intersubjective theories on educational relations and uses a posthuman approach to ascribe agency relationally to humans and nonhumans alike. The book introduces the concept of ‘educational relationality’ and contains examples of nonhuman elements of technology and animals, putting educational relationality and other concepts into context as part of the philosophical investigation. Drawing on educational and posthuman theorists, it answers questions raised in ongoing debates regarding the roles of students and teachers (...) in education, such as the foundations of educational relations and how these can be challenged. The book explores educational relations within the field of philosophy of education. After critically examining intersubjective approaches to theories of educational relations, anthropocentrism and subject-centrism are localized as two problematic aspects. Post-anthropocentrism and intra-relationality are proposed as a theoretical framework, before the book introduces and develops a posthuman theory of educational relations. The analysis is executed through a diffractive reading of intersubjective theories, resulting in five co-concepts: impermanence, uniqueness-as-relationality, proximity, edu-activity, and intelligibility. The analysis provided through educational examples demonstrates the potential of using the proposed theory in everyday practices. Towards a Posthuman Theory of Educational Relationality will be of great interest to researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of philosophy of education, early childhood education, research methodology and curriculum studies. (shrink)

This paper develops and defends a new account of B-theoretic endurantism and a new account of the metaphysics of the quantum state, and highlights the parallels between the considerations that motivate them. These new accounts are both fragmentalist, in the sense that they follow Fine (2005) in invoking a symmetric coordination relation between facts, such that facts that are pairwise incompatible (like Hugh's being happy and Hugh's being sad) can both obtain provided that they are not related by this relation. (...) However, while Fine allows that fragments can be logically incoherent— P can obtain in one fragment while not-P obtains in another—the fragmentalist accounts defended here are motivated even if we insist on logical coherence between fragments. (shrink)

We propose developing AIs whose only final goal is being shut down. We argue that this approach to AI safety has three benefits: (i) it could potentially be implemented in reinforcement learning, (ii) it avoids some dangerous instrumental convergence dynamics, and (iii) it creates trip wires for monitoring dangerous capabilities. We also argue that the proposal can overcome a key challenge raised by Soares et al. (2015), that shutdown-seeking AIs will manipulate humans into shutting them down. We conclude by comparing (...) our approach with Soares et al.'s corrigibility framework. (shrink)

The literature on global justice contains a number of distinct approaches. This article identifies and reviews recent work in four commonly found in the literature. First there is an examination of the cosmopolitan contention that distributive principles apply globally. This is followed by three responses to the cosmopolitanism, – the nationalist emphasis on special duties to co-nationals, the society of states claim that principles of global distributive justice violate the independence of states and the realist claim that global justice is (...) utopian and that states should advance national interest. (shrink)

According to the Everett interpretation, branching structure and ratios of norms of branch amplitudes are the objective correlates of chance events and chances; that is, 'chance' and 'chancing', like 'red' and 'colour', pick out objective features of reality, albeit not what they seemed. Once properly identified, questions about how and in what sense chances can be observed can be treated as straightforward dynamical questions. On that basis, given the unitary dynamics of quantum theory, it follows that relative and never absolute (...) chances can be observed; that only on repetition of a large numbers of similar trials can relative probabilities be measured; and so on. The epistemology of objective chances can in this way be worked out from the dynamics. its curious features are thus explained. But one aspect of chance set-ups seems to resist this subsuming of chancing to branching: how is it that chance involves uncertainty? And if that is not possible, on Everettian lines, then the whole project is doomed. I argue that in fact there is no difficulty in making sense of uncertainty in the face of branching. Contrary to initial impressions, the unitary formalism is consistent with a well-defined notion of self-locating uncertainty. It is also consistent without: the mathematics under-determines the metaphysics in these respects. (shrink)

The Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics divides naturally into two parts: first, the interpretation of the structure of the quantum state, in terms of branching, and second, the interpretation of this branching structure in terms of probability. This is the first of two reviews of the Everett interpretation, and focuses on structure, with particular attention to the role of decoherence theory. Written in terms of the quantum histories formalism, decoherence theory just is the theory of branching structure, in Everett's sense.

The Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics divides naturally into two parts: first, the interpretation of the structure of the quantum state, in terms of branching, and second, the interpretation of this branching structure in terms of probability. This is the second of two reviews of the Everett interpretation, and focuses on probability. Branching processes are identified as chance processes, and the squares of branch amplitudes are chances. Since branching is emergent, physical probability is emergent as well.

Although it is argued that social justice is a core concern for the discipline, nursing has not generally played a leadership role in the responses to many of the greatest social problems of our time. These include the accelerated rate of climate change, pandemic threats, systemic racism, growing health and social inequities, and the regulation of new technologies to ensure an equitable future ‘for all.’ In nursing codes of ethics, administration, education, policies, and practice, social justice is often claimed to (...) be a core value, yet it is rarely contextualized by philosophical or theoretical underpinnings. It appears that nurses’ commitment to social justice may stem more from a penchant for ‘doing good’ than an attempt to explore, understand, and enact what is meant by social justice from an ontological, epistemological, and methodological perspective. We contend that the dominance of a human science perspective in nursing contributes to a narrow definition of health and relegates many issues central to social justice to the margins of nurses’ care. In this article, we explore how the focus on ‘the human’ in the human science perspective may not only be limiting the capacity of nurses to develop strategies to adequately address social injustice, but in some instances, direct nurses to contribute to their very reproduction. We suggest that a critical interrogation of this human‐centric hegemony can identify avenues of rupture and introduce posthumanism as an additional philosophical perspective for consideration to help bridge the human‐social divide. (shrink)

Dialog is a joint action at different levels. At the highest level, the goal of interlocutors is to align their mental representations. This emerges from joint activity at lower levels, both concerned with linguistic decisions (e.g., choice of words) and nonlinguistic processes (e.g., alignment of posture or speech rate). Because of the high‐level goal, the interlocutors are particularly concerned with close coupling at these lower levels. As we illustrate with examples, this means that imitation and entrainment are particularly pronounced during (...) interactive communication. We then argue that the mechanisms underlying such processes involve covert imitation of interlocutors’ communicative behavior, leading to emulation of their expected behavior. In other words, communication provides a very good example of predictive emulation, in a way that leads to successful joint activity. (shrink)