Current neuroimaging techniques with high spatial resolution constrain participant motion so that many natural tasks cannot be carried out. The aim of this paper is to show how a time-locked correlation-analysis of cerebral blood flow velocity (CBFV) lateralization data, obtained with functional TransCranial Doppler (fTCD) ultrasound, can be used to infer cerebral activation patterns across tasks. In a first experiment we demonstrate that the proposed analysis method results in data that are comparable with the standard Lateralization Index (LI) for within-task (...) comparisons of CBFV patterns, recorded during cued word generation (CWG) at two difficulty levels. In the main experiment we demonstrate that the proposed analysis method shows correlated blood-flow patterns for two different cognitive tasks that are known to draw on common brain areas, CWG, and Music Synthesis. We show that CBFV patterns for Music and CWG are correlated only for participants with prior musical training. CBFV patterns for tasks that draw on distinct brain areas, the Tower of London and CWG, are not correlated. The proposed methodology extends conventional fTCD analysis by including temporal information in the analysis of cerebral blood-flow patterns to provide a robust, non-invasive method to infer whether common brain areas are used in different cognitive tasks. It complements conventional high resolution imaging techniques. (shrink)

This book draws on fields as diverse as biochemistry, physiology, pharmacology, psychology, psychiatry, and ethology, to form a fascinating synthesis of information on the nature of fear and of panic and anxiety disorders. Dr. Marks offers both a detailed discussion of the clinical aspects of fear-related syndromes and a broad exploration of the sources and mechanisms of fear and defensive behavior. Dealing first with normal fear, he establishes a firm, scientific basis for understanding it. He then presents a thorough analysis (...) of the development, symptoms and treatment of fear-related syndromes. Phobic and obsessive-compulsive disorders are examined in detail. The book is illustrated with examples of fear and defensive behavior in other living organisms. By drawing provocative analogies between animal and human behavior, it sheds new light on the origins of fears, phobias, and obsessive-compulsive problems, as well as on their treatment by drugs and psychological means. Clinical psychologists, ethologists, and anyone interested in the mechanisms of behavior will be fascinated by this authoritative study. The text is intriguing and informative, and the bibliography of over 2,100 entries makes it an invaluable reference. (shrink)

Despite ongoing feminist debates about the past, present and future of feminism, the multidimensionality of time in activist work has largely remained under-examined. This article develops the partial timeframes of trajectories, encounters and timings to explore the practices of women organizing in Czech NGOs after 1989. Empirically the study draws on individual and group interviews conducted with NGO activists in 2003/2004 and 2009/2010 as well as organizational websites. The article argues that a timescape perspective provides a useful heuristic lens for (...) tracing trajectories of organizing shaped by different funding mechanisms; activist encounters that open up social and political alternatives of acting and being; and the effects of timing activist engagements with the lifetimes of activists. The conclusion reflects on the implications of an investigation through time for reconfiguring pervasive deficit accounts of NGO-based activism and its futures. (shrink)

This article focuses on the recent production of sleep as a matter of concern in American society. In it, I draw primarily on fieldwork with sleep researchers and clinicians to understand the means by which ideas about sleep are produced and disseminated, and discuss the rise of sleep medicine since the late 1970s and the ways sleep disabilities have been constructed and mobilized in contemporary allopathic research and practice. The article provides a description of modern sleep medicine practices, and analyses (...) clinical encounters between researchers, clinicians and patients, particularly the ways patient cases are produced and interpreted. I follow these ethnographic observations with textual analysis of the National Sleep Foundation's campaigns to promote sleep awareness, and offer the theoretical concepts of medical abstraction and insistence as a means to understand the production of sleep as a matter of concern, and how it might be made to adhere in particular patients' lives and the practices of clinicians. (shrink)

Most recent developments in the study of social dilemmas give an increasing amount of attention to cognition, belief systems, valuations, and language. However, developments in this field operate almost entirely under epistemological assumptions which only recognize the instrumental form of rationality and deny that “value judgments” or “moral questions” have cognitive content. This standpoint erodes the moral aspect of the choice situation and obstructs acknowledgment of the links connecting cognition, inner growth, and moral reasoning, and the significance of such links (...) in reaching cooperative solutions to many social dilemmas. Concurrently, this standpoint places the role of communication and mutual understanding in promoting cooperation in morally relevant conflicts of action in a rather mysterious situation. This paper draws on Habermas’s critique of instrumental action, and on the most recent developments in institutional and behavioral economics with a view to enhancing our knowledge of the interventions used to cope with social dilemmas. We conclude the paper with a brief presentation of a research strategy for examining the capacity of alternative developmental models to predict dissimilar choices under similar incentive conditions in social dilemmas. (shrink)

In 1996, the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro chose a sentence by Gilles Deleuze as the epigraph for an article, published in the Brazilian journal Mana, on Amerindian perspectivism. (A modified version of the article appeared in English two years later, in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.) Since then, Deleuze's name has appeared often in works about perspectivism, but Chamois's new book is the first monograph to focus on perspectivism and Deleuze. Among the most important contributions of Chamois's (...) analysis is to draw our attention to a little-known passage in a course, “Truth and Time,” that Deleuze taught in 1983 (and that is available for listening online). In it, he criticizes the example of the cube used as a paradigm, at least since Edmund Husserl's day, to conceptualize what a perspective is. It is impossible to see all six faces of a cube at the same time; thus, to “intuit” the cube as a cube, we must add to our own perception of a profile of the cube more possible points of view on it. The problem with this example and description is that it takes for granted that the subject already knows what she needs to see (a cube).Inspired, however, by the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, Deleuze holds that each perception is an invitation to other perceptions: “To perceive is to become capable of perceiving more and more things that were initially not perceived” (percevoir, c'est devenir apte à percevoir de plus en plus de choses qui d'abord n’étaient pas perçues). Deleuze contrasts the “spatial” or “frozen” notion of perspective to the “temporal perspective” that he seeks to emphasize: “It's time that acts as perspective” (C'est le temps qui agit comme perspective). The question, therefore, at the heart of Deleuze's perspectivism is how a perspective changes over time. Chamois goes through the early texts of Deleuze to show how the idea of the temporal perspective emerged from the concept of the structure Autrui. The “structure-Other” is best exemplified by someone else's emotive face—the frightened face of my friend, for instance. If I perceive that face while, say, I am laughing, another possible world would slip into my own: a frightening world penetrates my humorous one, and perhaps I should turn my head to see what danger may be en route. As in the case of the cube, my own limited perception is supplemented by others’ limited perceptions. The object of perception in this case, however, is not presupposed to be stable (the world is changing), and what I am about to see is not known in advance.But what, precisely, in the face of the other must I notice to become aware of the world she perceives? Deleuze does not explore that question in any detail, but Chamois reviews recent anthropological and psychological research that supplies some elements of a response. To confront the writings of Deleuze with relevant scientific data is fruitful. I must admit, though, that I was a bit embarrassed by the framing of the discussion: Chamois presents Deleuze's concepts as hypotheses demanding verification that they are “corroborated by the facts.” For Deleuze, concepts are inseparable from percepts and affects; as opposed to a hypothesis, a concept is true not because it correlates to a set of relevant facts but because it helps us to perceive other aspects of the world (percept) and induces us to act better (affect). Thus, the minute and rewarding analysis of Chamois should be complemented with an assessment of what we learn to focus on and of how we change our actions thanks to the perspectivism of Deleuze—in contrast to other forms of perspectivism (or indeed to other cosmologies). (shrink)

In his latest book, Descola analyzes more than 150 graphic works from all over the world, among which are animal statuettes of the Koryaks, a people of the Kamchatka region of Russia. Those figurines always represent animals lying in wait, ready to jump or already running. Such representations, the anthropologist argues, incline us to pay attention to what motivates and what troubles the animals: “All those animals that we see undertaking an action manifestly intentional or properly responding to unexpected events (...) cannot but impose on the observers of their image the idea that they are moved by aims, that they have an interiority just like humans.” This type of animal figuration is especially common in peoples that in Descola's previous book, Beyond Nature and Culture, he referred to as “animist.”In that book, published in 2005, he described the animist ontology and three other modes of paying attention to continuities and differences between humans and animals: naturalism, analogism, and totemism. At the time, he focused exclusively on the description of those ontologies, as opposed to any study of their evolution. He begins his study of the genesis of ontologies in Les formes du visible by suggesting that each type of graphic work induces a different way of paying attention to psychological and physical continuities and differences. For instance, in contrast to a Koryak statuette, an anatomical plate (to use a simple example not covered in the book) depicts only the body of a dead and dissected specimen. By referring simultaneously to an anatomical description of the human body and to that of another mammal, we tend to see how similar our bodies are. Whereas the animist ontology emphasizes the psychological continuity of humans and animals, the naturalist ontology insists instead on their physical continuity. By producing and using repeatedly some kinds of graphic works, each society comes to favor one or another ontology, one or another way of paying attention to the world. (Descola never says so in these words, but what he seems to mean by ontologies are modes of attention).Descola's questions in this new book are engaging: What do images make us pay attention to? What modes of attention do images stimulate? Each case study selected by the author is, moreover, fascinating in itself: an Amerindian mask, an Aboriginal painting on a piece of bark, a sixteenth-century Mongolian drawing of an elephant. The answers offered for the questions asked are unfortunately always already canvassed by the theory of the four ontologies. In previous work, Descola built that theory based on discursive and ethnographic material; sometimes we are left with the impression that images (as opposed to spoken words) do not make any significant difference, since they did not motivate him to modify in any way his theory in his new book.In addition, Descola's framework brings him to focus only on a particular aspect of what images induce in our modes of attention: in his thinking, ontologies are defined solely by the way we notice (or do not notice) differences and continuities between beings on two levels, physical and psychological, which respectively he terms the exteriority and the interiority of beings. By combining these two pairs of opposing features (continuity/difference, interiority/exteriority), he constitutes his four ontologies. But depictions can produce more fine-grained ontologies by making us pay attention to, say, the separation or the blending of bodies, the stability or fluidity of souls, the equality or inequality of power between beings. Moment by moment, while reading Descola, we find ourselves tied to his four ontologies and indeed find it almost impossible to imagine ontologies other than the four he has set out. In a structuralist vein, he even presents that number as a necessary, logical, and cognitive limit to the construction of ontologies. Nevertheless, by opening the analysis of the modes of attention to more than just the double pair of features picked out by the anthropologist, we could well unearth more diversified ontologies, induced by images (and by other cultural and technical particulars). We could detect, in other words, more than four modes of paying attention to our environment and to our companion beings. (shrink)

This book comprises forty-one essays, some of them about solar eclipses, space stations, mushrooms, and refugees, but the majority focus on animals, mostly birds. Macdonald starts each piece with a personal recollection from childhood or adulthood. “Vesper Flights,” for instance—the essay that gives the book its title—begins: “I found a dead swift once, a husk of a bird under a bridge over the River Thames.... I picked it up, held it in my palm... and realised that I didn't know what (...) to do.” The author continues by setting out the little that she did know, before that encounter, about swifts—she knew only that they are very difficult to observe individually because of the velocity and the height of their flights. To her, the swifts had always been like “aliens on earth.”Those birds are known for their peculiar flights at dusk, when they go up almost vertically into the sky. Scientists used to believe that they went up to sleep; but, at the end of the 1970s, in order to study the interaction between birds and airplanes, Luit Buurma of the Netherlands made radar observations that showed the swifts do not sleep at high altitude. The hypothesis of Buurma and other scientists is that they go up to forecast the weather. In the convective boundary layer, the winds are unaffected by geographic components, and, at that altitude, the swifts may also orient themselves better, thanks in part to the polarized light that is clearest at twilight. “What they are doing,” Macdonald summarizes these findings, “is flying so high they can work out exactly where they are, to know what they should do next.”Macdonald was trained in the history of science, which explains her taste for telling stories in which she explains how we come to know other animal species. She stresses the importance of technical devices in the construction of knowledge (without military radar, scientists would never have known where the swifts were flying). In each chapter, she also underscores the problem of what she aptly calls “multispecies social etiquette”: it is such a problem (how to avoid collisions with birds, a particular kind of social interaction) that moved scientists to study swifts in the first place. I much enjoyed reading these parts of each chapter. I was less convinced, however, by the morals that she draws from animal behaviors—for example: “Swifts are my fable of community, teaching us about how to make right decisions in the face of oncoming bad weather, in the face of clouds that sit like dark rubble on our horizon.” What makes me uncomfortable with such general conclusions is that they could as well be reached without the birds. (shrink)

Tracing different kinds of semiotic practices in boxing, in our text we provide a detailed reconstruction of the way athletes and other participants interpret each other’s actions and integrate these interpretations in their own course of motor action. Drawing on an ethnomethodological approach we argue that these interpretations should not be seen as being isolated from their contextual background. This context and the semiotic actions taking place within them mutually elaborate one another. Analyzing several video recordings and their transcripts, we (...) show how the social interaction of boxing fights consists of a “multi-layeredness of semiotic practice.” These layers of semiotic practice are complemented by what we introduce as asemiotic practices. Asemiotic practices exploit semiotic routines that are a part of boxing and attempt at weakening and overcoming the opponent during the fight thus eventually destroying his or her semiotic capacities. (shrink)

This volume includes chapters from an exciting group of scholars at the cutting edge of their fields to present a multi-disciplinary look at how international law shapes behavior. Contributors present overviews of the progress established fields have made in analyzing questions of interest, as well as speculations on the questions or insights that emerging methods might raise. In some chapters, there is a focus on how a particular method might raise or help answer questions, while others focus on a particular (...) international law topic by drawing from a variety of fields through a multi-method approach to highlight how these fields may come together in a single project. Still others use behavioral insights as a form of critique to highlight the blind spots and related mistakes in more traditional analyses of the law. Throughout this volume, authors present creative, insightful, challenges to traditional international law scholarship. (shrink)

Synthetic biology has emerged as one of the newest and promising areas of bio-technology. Issues typically associated to SB, notably in the media, like the idea of artificial life creation and “real” engineering of life also appear in many popular films. Drawing upon the analysis of 48 films, the article discusses how scientists applying technologies that can be related to SB are represented in these movies. It hereby discusses that traditional clichés of scientists in general tend to be sublated by (...) new stereotypical characterizations. These reflect real trends in bio-technological research such as SB, especially the increased relationship between science and industry. Frankenstein 2.0. looks less like the old, genius yet mad scientist, and follows a more entrepreneurial than academic spirit. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to formulate first-order Peano arithmetic within the resources of relevant logic, and to demonstrate certain properties of the system thus formulated. Striking among these properties are the facts that it is trivial that relevant arithmetic is absolutely consistent, but classical first-order Peano arithmetic is straightforwardly contained in relevant arithmetic. Under, I shall show in particular that 0 = 1 is a non-theorem of relevant arithmetic; this, of course, is exactly the formula whose unprovability was (...) sought in the Hilbert program for proving arithmetic consistent. Under, I shall exhibit the requisite translation, drawing some Goedelian conclusions therefrom. Left open, however, is the critical problem whether Ackermann’s rule γ is admissible for theories of relevant arithmetic. The particular system of relevant Peano arithmetic featured in this paper shall be called R♯. Its logical base shall be the system R of relevant implication, taken in its first-order form RQ. Among other Peano arithmetics we shall consider here in particular the systems C♯, J♯, and RM3♯; these are based respectively on the classical logic C, the intuitionistic logic J, and the Sobocinski-Dunn semi-relevant logic RM3. And another feature of the paper will be the presentation of a system of natural deduction for R♯, along lines valid for first-order relevant theories in general. This formulation of R♯ makes it possible to construct relevantly valid arithmetical deductions in an easy and natural way; it is based on, but is in some respects more convenient than, the natural deduction formulations for relevant logics developed by Anderson and Belnap in Entailment. (shrink)

This paper defends a deontological egalitarianism in the ethics of future generations. Concerns about the non-identity problem have been taken as a reason to develop sufficientarian approaches to intergenerational justice. This paper argues for a solution to the non-identity problem that refers to the claims of future persons. In principle, the content of these claims could be spelled out with a sufficientarian and an egalitarian approach. What speaks against sufficientarianism, however, is that the sufficiency threshold, unless it is set very (...) low, would have to be set arbitrarily. The hidden justification behind a higher threshold would be egalitarian. It draws its plausibility from the justified belief that future persons have a claim on us that we leave equally valuable shares of natural resources to them. (shrink)

In this article, we describe the social and economic changes that have contributed to contemporary problems of work—family conflict, gender inequality, and risks to children's healthy development. We draw on feminist welfare state scholarship to outline an institutional arrangement that would support an earner—carer society—a social arrangement in which women and men engage symmetrically in paid work and unpaid caregiving and where young children have ample time with their parents. We present a blueprint for work—family reconciliation policies in three areas—paid (...) family-leave provisions, working-time regulations, and early childhood education and care—and we identify key policy design principles. We describe and assess these work—family reconciliation policies as they operate in six European countries widely considered to be policy exemplars: Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Belgium, and France. We close with an analysis of potential objections to these policies. (shrink)

This article notes that research policy and early laboratory studies resonate in foregrounding the laboratory as an important place and agent in producing valued research output but tend to gloss over the complex processes by which laboratories are built and sustained over time as well as the significance of non-Western histories. Drawing on multisited ethnography in laboratories located in the geopolitical East of Europe, it examines the articulations and tensions between performing laboratories as locales and as locations of scientific excellence (...) across a range of heretofore underexamined online and offline sites, including group seminars and institutional Web pages. By drawing attention to enterprising modes of performing achievement and lab organization, the article shows how the laboratory is also a policy actor and reproduces Westward-oriented knowledge geographies. Pointing to care as a mode of ordering, it further explores different forms of material and affective labor that are obfuscated in such performances but build and sustain the lab as local–global assemblage. The article concludes by discussing the policy implications of making this labor visible. (shrink)

The proliferation of news and information sources has motivated a need to identify those providing legitimate journalism. One temptation is to go the route of such fields as medicine and law, namely to formally professionalize. This gives a clear method for determining who is a member, with an array of associated responsibilities and rewards. We argue that making such a formal move in journalism is a mistake: Journalism does not meet the traditional criteria, and its core ethos is in conflict (...) with the professional mindset. We thus shift the focus from whether the person is journalist to whether the work satisfies the conditions that characterize legitimate journalism. In explaining those conditions we also look at mechanisms for enhancing the power of persons doing journalism, drawing upon lessons from the labor movement. We also consider a self-declaration model while urging increased literacy from all participants in the news gathering and consuming enterprise. (shrink)

Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca founded the Brussels school of argumentation in 1958, when they published their famous Traité de l'argumentation. Even if, in Brussels, Eugène Dupréel had already set out to rehabilitate the Sophists, the intellectual atmosphere in the French-speaking world was not very propitious for rhetoric. Most French intellectuals were plunged into ideological debates linked to the intellectual monopoly of the French communist party on societal issues. Free discussion was certainly not very topical. It was only after the (...) fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, five years after Perelman's death, that rhetoric began to draw increasing attention. His ideas then gained momentum in France, as .. (shrink)

This essay examines ‘The Mapping Journey Project’, an installation artwork by Bouchra Khalili. It consists of eight large video screens and headsets. In each video, a migrant draws a map of her/his journey to and in Europe and narrates her/his route. In collaboration with Khalili, I argue, these storyteller/draftspersons create a dissident cartography that superimposes their lived geography on the background of legal geography. Thus, ‘The Mapping Journey Project’ is a work of art that is also a work of advocacy (...) and provocation. Rather than advocating particular policies, however, it advocates in the sense of affirming the dignity of the subjects of the videos and their right to speak the truth of their lives. Moreover, it provokes by elucidating the moral stakes of the current political and economic order and by issuing a pointed demand for humane solutions. So long as vast global disparities of wealth and political power persist, it is no wonder that people who are excluded from the elite privilege of belonging to a prosperous society are burning the borders that protect this unjust regime. (shrink)

This paper considers two accounts of the self that have gained prominence in contemporary feminist psychoanalytic theory and draws out the implications of these views with respect to the problem of moral reflection. I argue that our account of moral reflection will be impoverished unless it mobilizes the capacity to empathize with others and the rhetoric of figurative language. To make my case for this claim, I argue that John Rawls's account of reflective equilibrium suffers from his exclusive reliance on (...) impartial reason. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to draw attention to a conflict between two popular views about time: Arthur Prior’s proposal for treating tense on the model of modal logic, and the ‘Platonic’ thesis that some objects (God, forms, universals, or numbers) exist eternally.1 I will argue that anyone who accepts the former ought to reject the latter.

A key political-strategic question facing those aiming to foster environmental action is, When and how do environmental concerns resonate widely with citizens? This question invites reflection upon the rhetoric of “sacrifice,” especially as often deployed within wealthy consumer societies. This rhetoric has become a political sticking point that often entangles environmental discourse in a false dichotomy between sacrifice and self-interest and thereby constrains the political imaginary. By challenging this dichotomy we can draw attention to the ubiquity of notions of sacrifice (...) in everyday life, thereby defusing its ability to shut down ambitious proposals for action. We might use this insight to reorient talk about sacrifice in a manner that expands our imaginary and opens up broader possibilities for democratic change. (shrink)

The aim of this chapter is to draw attention to an overlooked dimension of sex trafficking—namely, its abuse of women’s reproductive rights; to diagnose a tension between international anti-trafficking and refugee law and US anti-trafficking and immigration law; and to show that US anti-trafficking and immigration law is enforcing a misguided conception of victims that denies recognition to agentic victims of human rights abuse. Although women who have been trafficked into sex work should be prime candidates for legal protection, they (...) aren’t. Criminal and legal practices amount to a three-way struggle over women’s bodily integrity and autonomy. Because misconceptions about victimhood perpetuate this cyclical struggle, I argue for legal reforms based on a credible conception of victimhood. (shrink)

Can one coherently integrate Darwin's view of evolution with an affirmation of the value of existence? In this fresh, lean, and substantive volume, William Meyer addresses this important question. By carefully analyzing Darwin's own writings and by drawing on the philosophical perspectives of William James, Alfred North Whitehead, and others, Meyer persuasively redirects the cultural conversation about Darwin away from the retrospective question of origins toward the prospective question concerning the ultimate significance of evolutionary life. As James recognized, (...) the question about the reality of God is more critical for the forward-looking question of value than it is for the backward-looking question of origins. Darwin was a theist in search of a better theism, and because theology had not yet caught up to him, he became increasingly agnostic and caught between his mechanistic understanding of nature, on the one hand, and his affirmation of the value and beauty of the world, on the other. Whitehead's philosophy of organism offers a way to integrate Darwin's evolutionary insights with his affirmation of the grandeur of nature. Meyer's clearly written and richly argued book enables us to integrate our evolutionary understanding of the world with our experience of value within it. (shrink)

The paper addresses issues of scientific conduct regarding relations between science and the media, relations between scientists and journalists, and attitudes towards the public at large. In the large and increasing body of literature on scientific conduct and misconduct, these issues seem underexposed as ethical challenges. Consequently, individual scientists here tend to be left alone with problems and dilemmas, with no guidance for good conduct. Ideas are presented about how to make up for this omission. Using a practical, ethical approach, (...) the paper attempts to identify ways scientists might deal with ethical public relations issues, guided by a norm or maxim of openness. Drawing on and rethinking the CUDOS codification of the scientific ethos, as it was worked out by Robert K. Merton in 1942, we propose that this, which is echoed in current codifications of norms for good scientific conduct, contains a tacit maxim of openness which may naturally be extended to cover the public relations of science. Discussing openness as access, accountability, transparency and receptiveness, the argumentation concentrates on the possible prevention of misconduct with respect to, on the one hand, sins of omission—withholding important information from the public—and, on the other hand, abuses of the authority of science in order to gain publicity. Statements from interviews with scientists are used to illustrate how scientists might view the relevance of the issues raised. (shrink)

Modus ponens provides the central theme. There are laws, of the form A→C. A logic L collects such laws. Any datum A provides input to the laws of L. The central ternary relation R relates theories L,T and U, where U consists of all of the outputs C got by applying modus ponens to major premises from L and minor premises from T. Underlying this relation is a modus ponens product operation on theories L and T, whence RLTU iff LTU. (...) These ideas have been expressed, especially with Routley, as worlds semantics for relevant and other substructural logics.Worlds are best demythologized as theories, subject to truth-functional and other constraints. The chief constraint is that theories are taken as closed under logical entailment, which clearly begs the question if we are using the semantics to determine which theory L is Logic itself. Instead we draw the modal logicians’ conclusion—there are many substructural logics, each with its appropriate ternary relational postulates.Each logic L gives rise to a Calculus of L-theories, on which particular candidate logical axioms have the combinatorial properties expected from the well-known Curry–Howard isomorphism . We apply their bubbling lemma, updating the Fools Model of Combinatory Logic at the pure → level for the system BT. We make fusion an explicit connective, proving a combinator correspondence theorem. Having taken relevant → as a left residual for , we explore its right residual mate →r. Finally we concentrate on and prove a finite model property for the classical minimal relevant logic CB, a conservative extension of the minimal positive relevant logic B+. (shrink)

This paper examines the broad social purpose of US climate science, which has benefitted from a public investment of more than $30 billion over the last 20 years. A public values analysis identifies five core public values that underpin the interagency program. Drawing from interviews, meeting observations, and document analysis, I examine the decision processes and institutional structures that lead to the implementation of climate science policy, and identify a variety of public values failures accommodated by this system. In contrast (...) to other cases which find market values frameworks (the profit as progress assumption) at the root of public values failures, this case shows how science values ( knowledge as progress ) may serve as an inadequate or inappropriate basis for achieving broader public values. For both institutions and individual decision makers, the logic linking science to societal benefit is generally incomplete, incoherent, and tends to conflate intrinsic and instrumental values. I argue that to be successful with respect to its motivating public values, the US climate science enterprise must avoid the assumption that any advance in knowledge is inherently good, and offer a clearer account of the kinds of research and knowledge advance likely to generate desirable social outcomes. (shrink)

This book provides a unique, cogent, engaging account of environmental determinism that has long been much needed in the classroom and beyond." -- Andrew Sluyter, Associate Professor, Louisiana State University, USA This book pulls together major critiques of contemporary attempts to explain nature-society relations in an environmentally deterministic way. After defining key terms, it reviews the history of environmental determinism's rise and fall within geography in the early twentieth century. It discusses the key reasons for the doctrine's rejection and presents (...) alternative, non-deterministic frameworks developed within geography for analyzing the roles played by the environment in human affairs. The authors examine the rise in recent decades of neo-deterministic approaches to such issues as the demarcation of regions, the causes of civilizational collapse in prehistory, today's globally uneven patterns of human well-being, and the consequences of human-induced climate change. In each case, the authors draw on the insights and approaches of geography, the academic discipline most conversant with the interactions of society and environment, to challenge the widespread acceptance that such approaches have won. The book will appeal to those working on human-environmental research, international development and global policy initiatives. William B. Meyer is Associate Professor of Geography at Colgate University, USA. He is the author of several previous books, including Human Impact on the Earth, Americans and Their Weather: A History, and The Progressive Environmental Prometheans. His research interests include urban geography, environmental history, and the history of environmental thought. Dylan M.T. Guss works in the technology investment sector. (shrink)

Master Sun's _The Art of War_ is by no means the only ancient Chinese treatise on military affairs. One chapter in the _Huainanzi_, an important compendium of philosophy and political theory written in the second century B.C.E., synthesizes the entire corpus of military literature inherited from the Chinese classical era. Drawing on all major, existing military writings, as well as other lost sources, it assesses tactics and strategy, logistics, organization, and political economy, as well as cosmology and the fundamental morality (...) of warfare. This powerful work set out to become the last word on military matters, subsuming and replacing all preceding literature. Written under the sponsorship of Liu An, king of Huainan, the _Huainanzi_'s "military methods" emphasize the preservation of peace as the ultimate value to be served by the military, insisting that the army can be effectively and rightly used only when defending the sacred hereditary position of the emperor and his vassals. This position stands in stark contrast to that of _The Art of War_, which prioritizes the enrichment and empowerment of the state. Liu An's philosophy also argues that military success depends on the personal cultivation of the commander and that deception is not enough to secure victory. Only a commander with the exceptional qualities of insight and cognition, developed through a program of meditative practice and yogic refinement, can effectively control and interpret the strategic situation. Andrew Seth Meyer offers both a full translation of this text and an extensive analysis of its historical context. His thorough treatment relates Liu An's teachings to issues in Chinese philosophy, culture, religion, and history, helping to interpret their uncommon message. (shrink)

Late in 1990, the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions at Illinois Institute of Technology (lIT) received a grant of more than $200,000 from the National Science Foundation to try a campus-wide approach to integrating professional ethics into its technical curriculum.! Enough has now been accomplished to draw some tentative conclusions. I am the grant's principal investigator. In this paper, I shall describe what we at lIT did, what we learned, and what others, especially philosophers, can learn (...) from us. We set out to develop an approach that others could profitably adopt. I believe that we succeeded. (shrink)

In this text, I discuss the concept of culture that ethnomethodology suggests. First, I will review the sources that Garfinkel refers to: While he draws heavily on Parsons’ conception of culture, he also criticizes it with reference to Schütz. I start the second part with examining Garfinkel conception of ethnos—that suffixes ‘ethnomethodology’—to then present six salient dimensions of the ethnomethodological conception of culture: recognizability; normatively interspersed knowledge and cooperative continuation; familiarity and trust; indexicality and vagueness; practice; and fractality and fragmentation. (...) The text ends with some thoughts comparing the ethnomethodological notion of culture to other conceptions. (shrink)

Our target article concerns the direction and growth of enactivism, a framework portrayed as a revolutionary shift in understanding cognition. While enactivism continues to be a lively position, it is unclear how its contributions relate to the cognitive sciences. Despite some empirical successes, enactivism remains somewhat insulated as a theoretical position and as a research program. There exists a discrepancy between enactivist aims and delivery. The basis of this problem, we argue, is that the overall objective of enactive theorising is (...) not clear, which has led to diverging strategies for implementation and integration with the cognitive sciences. We review contributions from different strains of enactivism – autopoietic, sensorimotor and radical – and their research goals, both tacit and explicit. We show that enactivism is productively understood as two projects we term utopian enactivism and scientific enactivism. Utopian enactivism aims to develop a philosophically defensible lens through which cognitive science is to be viewed. Scientific enactivism intervenes in scientific practice by contributing to the implementation of enactive ideas. Once disentangled, the utopian and scientific projects have important but independent tasks. Utopian enactivism is useful for building a coherent and defensible enactive philosophy of nature, while scientific enactivism is free to draw upon and contribute to non-enactive approaches in the cognitive sciences. We aim to motivate discussions that will enhance enactivism’s progress, and our reappraisal also offers a clear and explicit roadmap for renewing advances in enactivist philosophy and cognitive science. (shrink)

There are two ways of thinking about instants of time: "spatial" accounts emphasize the similarities between instants and places; "modal" accounts focus on the parallels between times and possible worlds. My aim in this paper is to draw attention to one respect in which times are more similar to possible worlds than they are to places.

Jenny Saville is a leading contemporary painter of female nudes. This paper explores her work in light of theories of gender and embodied agency. Recent work on the phenomenology of embodiment draws a distinction between the body image and the body schema. The body image is your representation of your own body, including your visual image of it and your emotional attitudes towards it. The body schema is comprised of your proprioceptive knowledge, your corporeally encoded memories, and your corporeal proficiency (...) with respect to various environments and activities. Saville is concerned with body image issues, and I discuss how she reconfigures representational practices with respect to feminine body images. However, the most exciting potential for feminist analysis of the state of the female nude derives from the concept of the body schema, for this concept endows the human body with subjectivity and agency. My key question, then, is by what pictorial means and to what extent Saville succeeds in representing agentic womanhood. I argue that interpreting Saville’s paintings from the standpoint of the body schema demonstrates the radicality of her remaking of the female nude and the rapport between her imagery and feminist values. (shrink)

In line with proponents of 4E cognition, Gallagher [2019] is concerned that many cognitive phenomena are not amenable to decomposition strategies since their very nature is to be constituted extensively. By contrast the received view on causal explanation—the mechanistic account [Craver 2007]—emphasises the necessity for decomposition in explaining natural phenomena and insists on a sharp distinction between causal versus constitutive relations. I propose that removing the requirement that constitutive relations cannot also be causes helps to ease this tension between explanation (...) and Gallagher’s non-decompositional stance, per Leuridan [2012]. Further, I draw on Froese et al.’s [2013] minimal model of social cognition to argue that constitutive relations can and do act as causal difference-makers in the Woodwardian sense [Woodward 2003]. (shrink)

With neuroscience and psychology making significant advances in contemporary brain research, fundamental questions concerning the nature of human life and activity will become evermore critical as we proceed further into the twenty-first century. Put simply, are we creatures who exercise some genuine degree of freedom and agency in the world or are we creatures whose actions are largely if not wholly determined by biological, neurological, and psychological factors far below the radar of our conscious awareness? This article explores this important (...) and timely question by examining the views of Paul Sheldon Davies, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Alfred North Whitehead. Drawing on contemporary science, Davies dismisses Niebuhr’s existential analysis of human existence and any meaningful conception of human agency. Succinctly stated, can one take both the results of contemporary neuroscience seriously, as Davies does, and the affirmation of human agency seriously, as Niebuhr does? The thesis of this essay is that Whitehead offers a constructive bridge between Davies’ affirmation of science and Niebuhr’s existential account of human existence. In sum, it is argued that Whitehead’s process philosophy enables us to affirm the genuine influence of nonconscious factors in experience as well as the authenticity of human agency and subjectivity in the world. (shrink)

I seek to understand the relationship between human vulnerability and human rights as something more than a problem that respect for human rights solves. After characterizing vulnerability and noting that human rights are generally regarded as entitlements that respect the dignity of persons by securing their autonomous agency, I draw out the implications of these premises. I argue that human vulnerabilities are constitutive of the capacity for autonomous agency and therefore that the circumstances of respect for persons must include persons’ (...) vulnerability to many sorts of harms. Given that the opportunity to lead one’s life in one’s own way—that is, the opportunity to exercise autonomous agency—is indispensable to human dignity, respect for persons entails respect for the vulnerability that underwrites autonomous agency. If so, rights-bearers are necessarily vulnerable subjects. I further defend this conception of rights-bearers by arguing that it comports with three types of human rights theory: agency-centered, needs-centered, and practice-based accounts of human rights. (shrink)

Diversity and psychological health issues at the workplace are pressing issues in today’s organizations. However, research linking the two fields is scant. To bridge this gap, drawing from team faultline research, social categorization theory, and the job-demands resources model, we propose that perceiving one’s team as fragmented into subgroups increases strain. We further argue that this relationship is mediated by task conflict and relationship conflict and that it is moderated by psychological empowerment and task interdependence. Multilevel structural equation models on (...) a two-wave sample consisting of 536 participants from 107 work teams across various industries and work contexts partially supported the hypotheses: Task conflict did indeed mediate the positive relationships between perceived subgroups and emotional exhaustion while relationship conflict did not; effects on stress symptoms were absent. Moreover, contrary to our expectations, neither empowerment, nor task interdependence moderated the mediation. Results indicate that team diversity can constitute a job demand that can affect psychological health. Focusing on the mediating role of task conflict, we offer a preliminary process model to guide future research at the crossroads of diversity and psychological health at work. (shrink)

While some studies suggest cultural differences in visual processing, others do not, possibly because the complexity of their tasks draws upon high-level factors that could obscure such effects. To control for this, we examined cultural differences in visual search for geometric figures, a relatively simple task for which the underlying mechanisms are reasonably well known. We replicated earlier results showing that North Americans had a reliable search asymmetry for line length: Search for long among short lines was faster than vice (...) versa. In contrast, Japanese participants showed no asymmetry. This difference did not appear to be affected by stimulus density. Other kinds of stimuli resulted in other patterns of asymmetry differences, suggesting that these are not due to factors such as analytic/holistic processing but are based instead on the target-detection process. In particular, our results indicate that at least some cultural differences reflect different ways of processing early-level features, possibly in response to environmental factors. (shrink)

This short comment on Professor Sauvé Meyer’s paper attempts to draw attention to two issues that influence our understanding of Divine responsibility in the Timaeus. The first concerns the question of the literalness of the argument. If there is no creation, per much of the ancient tradition of commentators on the Timaeus, then there can be no divine responsibility. The second is the Timaeus’ account of the origin of non-human animals. Since they come from ‘fallen humans,’ and since they (...) are necessary in order for the Demiurgic creation to be complete or perfect, in some sense they, and the fall of humans, must be part of the divine plan. (shrink)

The Swiss-born medical researcher Karl Friedrich Meyer is best known as a ‘microbe hunter’ who pioneered investigations into diseases at the intersection of animal and human health in California in the 1920s and 1930s. In particular, historians have singled out Meyer’s 1931 Ludwig Hektoen Lecture in which he described the animal kingdom as a ‘reservoir of disease’ as a forerunner of ‘one medicine’ approaches to emerging zoonoses. In so doing, however, historians risk overlooking Meyer’s other intellectual contributions. (...) Developed in a series of papers from the mid-1930s onwards, these were ordered around the concept of latent infections and sought to link microbial behavior to broader bio-ecological, environmental, and social factors that impact hostpathogen interactions. In this respect Meyer—like the comparative pathologist Theobald Smith and the immunologist Frank Macfarlane Burnet—can be seen as a pioneer of modern ideas of disease ecology. However, while Burnet’s and Smith’s contributions to this scientific field have been widely acknowledged, Meyer’s have been largely ignored. Drawing on Meyer’s published writings and private correspondence, this paper aims to correct that lacuna while contributing to a reorientation of the historiography of bacteriological epidemiology. In particular I trace Meyer’s intellectual exchanges with Smith, Burnet and the animal ecologist Charles Elton, over brucellosis, psittacosis and plague—exchanges that not only showed how environmental and ecological conditions could ‘tip the balance’ in favor of parasites but which transformed Meyer thinking about resistance to infection and disease. (shrink)

In the early twentieth century, the United States Department of Agriculture funded international expeditions with the aim of finding plant specimens for introduction into the agricultural landscape and the new experimental projects in hybridization. One such agricultural explorer, noted for his eponymous lemon, was Frank Nicholas Meyer, an immigrant from the Netherlands whose expeditions in Asia have brought to the United States celebrated fruit and toxic weeds. Neither professional botanists nor farmers, plant hunters like Meyer worked by taking (...) advantage of historical allegiances to academic programs, while leaning on the authority of their newer national institutions. In addition to plants, through photographs that transposed Chinese landscapes to U.S. environmental counterparts, Meyer contributed to the imagination of the agricultural promise of the American West. The era of these plant explorers has ended but their material trace remains in a variety of spaces and modes of existence that have hitherto been disregarded. Reading Meyer’s letters shows the authority and discipline behind his transformation from gardener’s apprentice to professional plant collector. I argue that photographs and plants are understudied material traces that enable historians to re-examine the means by which credit was received, given, and exchanged. By drawing together these traces, I chart the continued importance of exploration and collection in the twentieth century and show the epistemic continuity between nineteenth-century natural history and twentieth-century experimental science. (shrink)

Jacques Rancière hat die Frage der Gleichheit in den Mittelpunkt der Kunstbetrachtung gestellt und damit international gerade an Kunsthochschulen Furore gemacht. Volkmar Mühleis widmet sich eingehend Rancières ästhetischem Denken und befragt es erstmals kritisch im Rahmen der Kunstpraxis. Dabei zeigt sich zum einen die besondere Qualität von Rancières Ansatz für den Kunstdiskurs -- der stets die Freiheit, aber kaum ihre Bedingung, die Gleichheit, verhandelte --, zum andern aber auch seine Schwächen. So operiert Rancière mit einem medialen Begriff, der kaum den (...) Anforderungen technologischer Kritik heutzutage standhält. Wenn er ästhetische Erfahrung in Anspruch nimmt, ohne zu klären, was Erfahrung hier im Einzelnen heisst, so verbleibt er seinem emanzipatorischen Gedankengut nach in einer rationalistischen Tradition. Mit Blick auf die Schriften von Bernard Stiegler, Bernhard Waldenfels und Käte Meyer-Drawe zeigt Volkmar Mühleis, wie diese besondere Qualität von Rancières ästhetischem Denken auf ganz andere Art die gegenwärtige Debatte bereichern kann. (shrink)

Verstehen ist nicht nur ein Grundbegriff menschlicher Lebensfuhrung und Lebenswelt, sondern besitzt auch in der Philosophie und den verschiedenen Wissenschaften eine zentrale Bedeutung. Die Frage nach der Moglichkeit von Verstehen ist dabei immer auch die Frage nach dem Subjekt und Objekt des Verstandnisses. Wer versteht wen oder was? Ist "Verstehen" also nur rationales Erfassen, Erkennen tieferer Einsichten und komplexerer Zusammenhange oder impliziert es mehr? Versteht man den Anderen, den Fremden, aber auch den Text wirklich so einfach? Und wenn ja, wie (...) strukturiert sich dieses Verstehen? Es soll in dem interdisziplinaren Band versucht werden, mit den genannten Fragen Anschlussfahigkeit zu evozieren, so dass die Vieldimensionalitat des Verstehens thematisiert und nach Funktion, Leistung und Grenzen des Verstehens vor allem in Philosophie, Geistes- und Naturwissenschaft gefragt werden kann. Mit Beitragen von Christina Brandt, Selin Gerlek, Julia Gruevska, Felix Huttemann, Bernhard Irrgang, Gudrun Kuhne-Bertram, Hans-Ulrich Lessing, Kevin Liggieri, Kate Meyer-Drawe, Sabine Ohlenbusch, Tobias Schlicht, Gunter Scholtz und Volker Steenblock. (shrink)