Through an examination of French organicism–one of the models proposed for the nascent science of sociology in the late 19th century–this article argues two main points: that organicism was crucial in the establishment of ‘society’ as a scientific object; and that the specific characteristics of this new object were retained by later sociology long after the organic analogies and evolutionary views that justified them had been explicitly abandoned. Organicism played a significant role in establishing a strong notion of society as (...) a concrete, real entity–a notion that had a lasting impact on sociological theory and became one of the most important ‘categories of thought’ of the 20th century. (shrink)

The development of neuropsychological assessment methods using virtual reality (VR) is a valid and promising option for the detection of cognitive impairment in the older people, focusing on activities composed of tasks of multiple demands. This study verified the association of age, schooling, and general cognitive status on the performance of neurologically healthy older adults in ECO-VR, a virtual reality task of multiple demands for neuropsychological assessment. A total of 111 older adults answered a sociodemographic questionnaire, the Mini Mental State (...) Examination, the Vocabulary subtest of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Adults (third edition), and the ECO-VR. Correlation analyses, multiple linear regression, and comparisons between groups (effects by age and schooling groups) were used to evaluate the results. The ECO-VR total score was significantly associated with age, years of education, MMSE, and Vocabulary subtest. The linear regression models identified that age was the main predictor for total score and rule breaking of ECO-VR. According to the univariate analysis, it was identified the main effect of age group and schooling group in the total ECO-VR score, but there was no interaction effect. The results are discussed in order to understand the role of sociodemographic characteristics in the performance of older adults in a virtual reality task of multiple demands. It was also verified the possibility use of virtual reality for neuropsychological assessment of older adults. (shrink)

Past research has found a strong and positive association between the independent self-construal and life satisfaction, mediated through self-esteem, in both individualistic and collectivistic cultures. In Study 1, we collected data from four countries and replicated these findings in cultures which have received little attention in past research. In Study 2, we treated independence as a multifaceted construct and further examined its relationship with self-esteem and life satisfaction using samples from the United States and Romania. Different ways of being independent (...) are associated with self-esteem and life satisfaction in the two cultures, suggesting that it is not independence as a global concept that predicts self-esteem and life satisfaction, but rather, feeling independent in culturally appropriate ways is a signal that one’s way of being fits in and is valued in one’s context. (shrink)

Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the primary architect of the neuron doctrine and the law of dynamic polarization, is considered to be the founder of modern neuroscience. At the same time, many philosophers, historians, and neuroscientists agree that modern neuroscience embodies a mechanistic perspective on the explanation of the nervous system. In this paper, I review the extant mechanistic interpretation of Cajal’s contribution to modern neuroscience. Then, I argue that the extant mechanistic interpretation fails to capture the explanatory import of Cajal’s (...) law of dynamic polarization. My claim is that the definitive formulation of Cajal’s law of dynamic polarization, despite its mechanistic inaccuracies, embodies a non-mechanistic pattern of reasoning (i.e., design explanation) that is an integral component of modern neuroscience. (shrink)

Jewish law has a history stretching from the early period to the modern State of Israel, encompassing the Talmud, Geonic and later codifications, the Spanish Golden Age, medieval and modern responsa, the Holocaust and modern reforms. Fifteen distinct periods are separately studied in this volume, each one by a leading specialist, and the emphasis throughout is on the development of the institutions and sources of the law.

Emotional stimuli (e.g. words, images) are often remembered better than neutral stimuli. However, little is known about how memory is affected by an environmentally induced emotional state (without any overtly emotional occurrences) – the focus of this study. Participants were randomly assigned to discovery (n = 305) and replication (n = 306) subsamples and viewed a desktop virtual environment before rating their emotions and completing objective (i.e. item, temporal-order, duration) and subjective (e.g. vividness, sensory detail, coherence) memory measures. In both (...) samples, a Partial Least Squares Correlation analysis showed that an emotional state characterised by high negative emotion (i.e. threat, fear, anxiety) and arousal was reliably associated with better memory in both objective (i.e. item) and subjective (i.e. vividness and sensory detail) domains. No reliable associations were observed for any temporal memory measures (objective or subjective). Thus, an environmentally induced state of negative emotion corresponds with enhanced memory for indices of episodic memory pertaining to “what” happened, but not necessarily “when” it happened. (shrink)

Self-referential sentences have troubled our understanding of language for centuries. The most famous self-referential sentence is probably the Liar, a sentence that says of itself that it is false. The Liar Paradox has encouraged many philosophers to establish theories of truth that manage to give a proper account of the truth predicate in a formal language. Kripke’s Fixed Point Theory from 1975 is one famous example of such a formal theory of truth that aims at giving a plausible notion of (...) truth by allowing truth value gaps. However, not only the concept of truth gives rise to paradoxes. A syntactical treatment of epistemic notions like belief and knowledge leads to contradictions that very much resemble the Liar Paradox. Therefore, it seems to be fruitful to apply the established theories of truth to epistemic concepts. In this paper, I will present one such attempt of solving the epistemic paradoxes: I adapt Kripke’s Fixed Point Theory and interpret truth, knowledge and belief within the framework of a partial logic. Thereby I find not only the fixed point of truth but also the fixed points of knowledge and belief. In this fixed point, the predicates of truth, belief and knowledge find their definite interpretation and the paradoxes are avoided. (shrink)

How worried should we be about how impressionable we are—how susceptible we are to being influenced and even transformed by our encounters with one another? Some moral philosophers think we should be quite worried indeed: they hold that interpersonal influence is an especially morally dangerous way to change. It calls for additional moral scrutiny as compared with vectors of change that come from within the influencee’s own psyche—their antecedent values, desires, commitments, and so forth—just because it has an external source. (...) I argue that this heightened scrutiny of exogenous sources of change is unwarranted. Dramatic psychic changes do call for reflection and critical scrutiny, especially when they are sudden. But this scrutiny need not be concerned with the procedural issue of whether the impetus for the change came from inside or outside the changing person’s antecedent psychology. We can just evaluate the substantive changes themselves. (shrink)

Over two hundred years after Immanuel Kant’s death, the first full, critical, and digital edition of his last manuscript is currently being completed by the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften. This edition stands in institutional continuity with Wilhelm Dilthey’s monumental Akademieausgabe of Kant’s writings that was grounded in Dilthey’s lastingly influential concept of the national, literary-philosophical archive. The new edition showcases Kant’s dynamic writing process as a matter of investigation in its own right. As I argue here, it brings into view (...) the constitutive role of the archive for both texts and interpretative practices. A historical perspective that links the legacy of the Akademieausgabe with the digital edition of the Opus postumum highlights the changing role of the archive in emphasising or de-emphasising the manuscript’s resistance to certain appropriations and stylisations of Kant as a thinker. (shrink)

Placing the analyses in an interdisciplinary manner, the present paper fallows to catch and value, form a moral-formative perspective, the interpretations of the ethical theories regarding the evolutions in a moral plan, in order to build a structural model of the morality development levels, with all the complex and dynamiccomponents that this one transmits. We have proposed that this should have as final purpose the transfer and focalization of this data over the significant space of forming the human being as (...) a moral, autonomous and responsible personality, by offering, we hope, in the terms in of efficiency, a rich space, a more complete and operational form about the levels of morality and moral education. The education in mostly very responsible for the step that defines the educated morality, of the community, of the society and a re-thinking, a restructuring and direction of the moral education on different levels is, we think, a way of responding to the challenges of today and tomorrow’s world. (shrink)

Pre-eminent among European political philosophers, Norberto Bobbio has throughout his career turned to the political theory of Thomas Hobbes. Gathered here for the first time are the most important of his essays which together provide both a valuable introduction to Hobbes's thought and a fresh understanding of Hobbes's place in the theory of modern politics. Tracing Hobbes's work through _De Cive_ and _Leviathan_, Bobbio identifies the philosopher's relation to the tradition of natural law. That Hobbes must now be understood in (...) both this tradition as well as in the seemingly contradictory positivist tradition becomes clear for the first time in Bobbio's account. Bobbio also demonstrates that Hobbes cannot be easily labelled "liberal" or "totalitarian"; in Bobbio's provocative analysis of Hobbes's justification of the state, Hobbes emerges as a true conservative. Though his primary concern is to reconstruct the inner logic of Hobbes's thought, Bobbio is also attentive to the philosopher's biography and weaves into his analysis details of Hobbes's life and world—his exile in France, his relation with the Mersenne circle, his disputes with Anglican bishops, and accusations of heresy leveled against him. The result is a revealing, thoroughly new portrait of the first theorist of the modern state. (shrink)

An extensive literature has focused on the impact of new public management oriented structural changes on academics’ practice and identity. These critical studies have been resolute in concluding that NPM inevitably leads to a degeneration of academics’ ethos and values. Drawing from the moral philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre, we argue that these previous analyses have overlooked the moral agency of the academics and their role in ‘moralizing’ and consequently shaping the ethical nature of their practices. The paper provides a new (...) theoretical understanding of NPM-oriented reforms in light of the virtue ethics approach, thereby directing the attention to the moral character and moral agency of academics. Our analysis of interviews collected in the business department of a Danish university provides an example of how individuals have divergent ethical understandings of these structural changes and enact/resist pre-defined social roles in different ways. While in some cases the NPM agenda of the institutions has triggered internal moral conflict and a crisis of moral character, in other cases the new logic resonates with academics’ values and evaluative standards. Partially departing from the theoretical ground of MacIntyre, we conclude that academics can play a crucial role in shaping the morality of NPM-oriented institutions and in transforming these settings into suitable contexts for the cultivation of virtues. (shrink)

In her 1947 book _Toward an Ethics of Ambiguity_, Simone de Beauvoir sketches the outlines of a systematic existentialist ethical theory. This short and startlingly ambitious text purports to offer nothing less than a new way to meet the challenge of moral skepticism with a theory that at once grounds moral normativity and entails certain first-order moral norms. We argue that Beauvoir offers a distinctive and promising version of metaethical constructivism that deserves to be treated as a live option in (...) contemporary debates. Beauvoirian constructivism has much in common with Kantian constructivist approaches to metaethics. It departs from them in that the Beauvoirian existential imperative to will freedom is derived not from rational agency as such but from contingent features of our embodied subjectivity. (shrink)

There are few doubts about the significance of science and technology for modern human culture and society. But as historians, we are still struggling to find appropriate descriptive terms to capture the broad processes of transformation brought about by “techno-science,” the merging of technical production and modern institutionalized science. This dissertation argues that the term “experience” may serve as such an analytic lens in the specific historical setting of German aviation research from the 1920s through 1945. I reconstruct, on the (...) one hand, the theorization of experience as a concept by the technical physicist Paul von Handel, influenced by the British astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington’s distinction between "scientific" and "everyday" experience. On the other hand, I use the term as a historian’s analytic concept to investigate practices in the context of flight experiments that I take to be constitutive of my historical actors’ experiences. These are recordings of experimental pilots’ cognitive judgements and bodily actions, some of them—such as in-flight note taking—continuous with older cultural technologies. On both of these levels of analysis, I explore the different resonances of “experience” as a term with a legacy as a central epistemological concept in the modern sciences, and as capturing the changing everyday reality in an increasingly technicized environment. My analysis of the textual theorization and simultaneous practical constitution of "techno-scientific experience" serves to read in a new light the story of the pilot and physicist Melitta Schiller-Stauffenberg. Of Jewish descent, Schiller chose to work for the Luftwaffe, the German air force, until her death in 1945 on a flight searching for her husband, Count Alexander Stauffenberg, who was imprisoned after his brother’s failed attempt to assassinate Hitler. The concept and practical reality of “experience” are key to understanding the two striking choices Schiller made as intrinsically connected: the professional choice of working simultaneously as a pilot and a physicist, and the political choice of supporting the Reich’s war effort. Schiller’s story may be understood as exemplifying the fragile identity of the experiencing and the knowing self in 20th-century techno-scientific modernity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:It’s a Human Rights Issue!Daniela TrufferI was born in 1965 in Switzerland with a severe heart defect and ambiguous genitalia. The doctors couldn‘t tell if I was a girl or a boy. First they diagnosed me with CAH and an enlarged clitoris, and cut me between my legs looking for a vagina.Because of my heart condition, the doctors assumed I would die soon. After an emergency baptism, I (...) stayed in the hospital for three months. My mother would travel to the city as often as possible, though she was only allowed to see me through a glass window.When I was two months old, and still in the hospital, doctors opened my abdomen and found healthy testes, which they threw in the garbage bin. According to my medical records, my parents had not provided consent. Further tests showed I am chromosomally male.Later the “castration” was declared a “mistake”: one doctor said I was a boy with hypospadias. As they had already removed the testes, however, they would have “to continue this way and the small patient must be made a girl.”After three months, my parents were finally allowed to take me home.During my childhood, I spent a lot of time in doctor’s offices and hospitals, suffering countless examinations of my genitals and urethral opening. When I was two, our family doctor stuck his finger into my urethral opening; I was screaming very loud, my father says. My mother had to put me into warm water because every time I had to pee I screamed in pain. Later I was hurried to the hospital with a bad infection. Still today my urethra often hurts after going to the toilet.I knew early in my life that I was different.I learned fragments of the truth only after decades of ignorance and denial. I was lucky to obtain my medical records. The hospital initially told me they no longer existed. When I insisted, they eventually sent me some recent files pertaining only to care I received after I was an adult. I kept calling. Once I was put through directly to the archive, where I was told that indeed there were “lots of files on microfilm.” However, it was only when I threatened to return with a lawyer that the hospital sent me a large pile of printouts.Finally I had it in black and white: The doctors had systematically lied to my parents, instructing them to “raise me as a girl” and never talk to me or to anyone else about “the gender issue.” Asked if I could have children, the doctors told them it was “doubtful.” At seven, the doctors still claimed it had been necessary to “remove the ovaries,” and at fourteen told me that I didn‘t menstruate because my “uterus was very small.”Because of the castration, my bone growth was reduced. To this day, I have to deal with health problems like a ruined metabolism, recurring fatigue and vertigo, and osteopenia.I would eventually grow older than doctors had originally predicted. At seven, they decided to operate on my heart septum and valve. I went to the hospital for preparatory cardiac catheterization. However, because of an infection, doctors put off the procedure. Since I had already been admitted, they decided to “use the opportunity to conduct the genital correction already planned in 1965,” and shortened my micropenis to the size of a “very small clitoris,” allegedly with my consent.Fortunately they didn‘t amputate the glans, and I still have sexual feelings left. But I remember the pain and unease, and how I often ran home from [End Page 111] school crying. Today I have a lot of scar tissue, which often hurts and itches.After a few days I was brought back to the cardiologist for the catheterization, and a few months later heart surgery. The doctors saved my life and destroyed it in the same year.I spent my childhood in fear, isolation, and shame. When I had to see a doctor, I was always scared stiff, but I never cried, and endured everything without any protest. I felt sick days in advance, and in... (shrink)

Schwartz developed his Theory of Basic Human Values and corresponding instruments, the portrait values questionnaire (PVQ) and the Schwartz values survey (SVS), in order to measure personal values. He uses these instruments (in a slightly modified form) in conjunction with his Theory of Cultural Value Orientations to measure cultural or societal values. His theoretical work is also used in studying organizational values; however, none of these instruments seem suitable to compare personal and perceived organizational values. If the PVQ is widely (...) used to measure personal values, and we need commensurate measures of the person and organization for comparative analysis, then can we not minimally adjust the PVQ to measure organizational values? In this article we discuss the testing of one such adjusted PVQ used for gauging universities’ organizational values. We developed the PVQ-uni to measure university values as perceived by students. We collected data from sociology departments at two universities, one in Austria ( n = 133) and one Nigeria ( n = 156). We then tested the reliability and the validity of the new instrument. Based on the data collected, we found that the PVQ-uni is a reliable and valid instrument; however, further refinements are needed for the instrument to be used successfully in Africa. (shrink)

A recent analysis of the genomes of Darwin's finches revealed extensive interspecies allele sharing throughout the history of the radiation and identified a key locus responsible for morphological evolution in this group. The radiation of Darwin's finches on the Galápagos archipelago has long been regarded as an iconic study system for field ecology and evolutionary biology. Coupled with an extensive history of field work, these latest findings affirm the increasing acceptance of introgressive hybridization, or gene flow between species, as a (...) significant contributor to adaptive evolution. Here, we review and discuss these findings in relation to both classical work on Darwin's finches and contemporary work showing similar evolutionary signatures in other biological systems. The continued unification of genomic data with field biology promises to further elucidate the molecular basis of adaptation in Darwin's finches and well beyond. (shrink)

Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} This article aims to examine the phenomenon of social services in post-1989 Romania, underscoring the role of the religious factor in the establishment and operation of nongovernmental organisations active in the area of family and child protection/child welfare. The results are based on empirical data collected from interviews with representatives (...) of NGO-s in Iaşi that correspond to the profile of faith-based organisations and which have been included in the list of accredited providers of social services. We used an assessment grid that allowed us to highlight a number of specific characteristics to the Romanian space, found among faith-based organisations involved in the development of social and medical services. One direction that Romanian organisation took was to dilute in time the religious message and to secularise their practices under the influence of the Orthodox majority, as well as following the requirements imposed by secular donors and especially by public ones. The channelling of private resources donated to religious cults predominantly towards building and restoring establishments (churches, monasteries) rather than towards the development of social faith-based programmes aimed at vulnerable populations has caused in faith-based organisations a high level of dependency on secular donors. The process in which the practices and the discourse are secularised is accompanied by a trend towards the fragmentation of the Christian-based civil society. (shrink)

This paper explores the perceptual space of Thomas A. Clark’s poetry and its links with the long and influential Western literary and artistic traditions of walking in the landscape, from Romanticism to Land Art. Particular attention will be given to the relations that Clark establishes in his writing between walking as a bodily practice and the multi-sensory engagement with the landscape it provides. It will be shown that Clark’s most significant contribution to the literature of walking lies in the balance (...) he creates between movement and stillness. In this dynamics, walking is envisaged as means of contemplation and communion to be found within the body, but which is at the same time directed towards the world, and the landscape appears as an infinite variety of perspectival views and as a dynamic process of discovery. (shrink)

This paper explores the perceptual space of Thomas A. Clark’s poetry and its links with the long and influential Western literary and artistic traditions of walking in the landscape, from Romanticism to Land Art. Particular attention will be given to the relations that Clark establishes in his writing between walking as a bodily practice and the multi-sensory engagement with the landscape it provides. It will be shown that Clark’s most significant contribution to the literature of walking lies in the balance (...) he creates between movement and stillness. In this dynamics, walking is envisaged as means of contemplation and communion to be found within the body, but which is at the same time directed towards the world, and the landscape appears as an infinite variety of perspectival views and as a dynamic process of discovery. (shrink)

"Theory of mind� describes the ability to impute mental states, such as beliefs, desires and intentions, to oneself and to other people. Usually we want to know why people did what they did and we wonder what they are going to do next. That is, everyday we try to predict and explain human behaviour. In order to do this we refer to a person"s beliefs, desires, emotions, intentions etc. Behaviour is the product of belief and desire: People do things because (...) they desire something and believe some act will achieve it. For adults it is clear that our assumptions about reality do not necessarily match the real world; but we know, regardless of whether our beliefs are true or not, our beliefs direct our actions. In contrast, it is not until the age of 4 years that children understand that one can be mistaken about the world and that actions can be based on this false belief. (shrink)

At the end of 1907 within a couple of months Lunačarskij met both Gor’kij and Brzozowski in Italy and found many important points of contact with each. To compare Lunačarskij’s thought at that time with Brzozowski’s “philosophical program” of 1907 casts some new light on the great variety of interpretations that enlivened Easter European Marxism at the beginning of the twentieth century. On the one hand, it explains Lunačarskij’s “economism” as distinct both from Brzozowski’s extreme anthropologism and Gor’kij’s “cosmism”; on (...) the other, it shows that Lunačarskij’s “philosophy of labour” promoted a violent attitude of conquest and humankind’s domination of nature. Although he criticized Brzozowski’s sympathies with German Idealism, Lunačarskij shared with him a deep appreciation of human creative power, which is evident in his peculiar form of collectivism as well. (shrink)

This text deals with the interpretation of where the meaningfulness of existence and our being in the world in Emmanuel Levinas’s conception originates in its contrast to the similar conception developed by phenomenology of appearing - which is represented by M. Heidegger and H. Maldiney. I want to show on what premises Levinas argues that the epiphany of sense can only emerge in the case of a continuous overcoming of the nonsense of appearing and thus of Being as such. Therefore, (...) I intend to go through the steps of Levinas’ reasoning, which he never developed systematically, and explain why he can view Being as nonsensical and what this notion of nonsense could possibly mean in Levinas’s philosophy. As a result, I would like present an implicit argumentation behind Levinas’s well-known claim that the birth of sense must be of ethical origin and cannot arise through the process of appearing or Being alone. (shrink)

Deleuze's theory of time set out in Difference and Repetition is a complex structure of three different syntheses of time – the passive synthesis of the living present, the passive synthesis of the pure past and the static synthesis of the future. This article focuses on Deleuze's third synthesis of time, which seems to be the most obscure part of his tripartite theory, as Deleuze mixes different theoretical concepts drawn from philosophy, Greek drama theory and mathematics. Of central importance is (...) the notion of the cut, which is constitutive of the third synthesis of time defined as an a priori ordered temporal series separated unequally into a before and an after. This article argues that Deleuze develops his ordinal definition of time with recourse to Kant's definition of time as pure and empty form, Hölderlin's notion of ‘caesura’ drawn from his ‘Remarks on Oedipus’ (1803) and Dedekind's method of cuts as developed in his pioneering essay ‘Continuity and Irrational Numbers’ (1872). Deleuze then ties together the conceptions of the Kantian empty form of time and the Nietzschean eternal return, both of which are essentially related to a fractured I or dissolved self. This article aims to assemble the different heterogeneous elements that Deleuze picks up on and to show how the third synthesis of time emerges from this differential multiplicity. (shrink)

In a number of recent philosophical works, the concept of ontography has been raised to involve a revaluation of figurative and visual thinking against logico-conceptual thinking— i. e. a revaluation of a philosophical practice that supplements or departs from the traditional site of philosophy, language. This paper investigates the ontographic dimensions of Charles S. Peirce’s diagrammatology by focusing on his system of »existential graphs« as ontography avant la lettre.

This article analyzes the autofigurative strategies of La travesía by Luisa Valenzuela in terms of the narratives of the self, the Argentine dictatorship and feminism. A correspondence is found between the disavowal of the voice, the structure of the autobiographical account and the portrait of the experience of the violence of the military regime and of gender. Initially, the novel is situated at the height of the narratives of the self that, with literary resources that are separated from the most (...) conservative autobiographical writings, denounce the impossibility of understanding the subject as univocal, while founding different approaches to the retelling of the experience. This location allows exploring the formal experiments that Valenzuela carries out around the autobiographical exercise and that highlight the crisis of the construction of memory and the exposure of contemporary subjectivity. In addition, it is shown how such strategies serve as a vehicle for reflection on feminism and dictatorship that permeate all of her work. For this, Valenzuela's notion of feminine writing is used, which puts the multiplicity of perspectives before the univocity of the autobiographical voice, the ambiguous before the precise, and the collective before the authoritarian. La travesía is, then, read as part of the works that come to the narration of the experience itself in a framework of the retelling of collective memory, with narrative games that point out the deictic futility of the self and the difficulty of recounting past time, without, therefore, abandoning the call for its reconstruction as a guarantee of non-repetition. (shrink)