When we reach to pick up an object, our actions are effortlessly informed by the object’s spatial information, the position of our limbs, stored knowledge of the object’s material properties, and what we want to do with the object. A substantial body of evidence suggests that grasps are under the control of “automatic, unconscious” sensorimotor modules housed in the “dorsal stream” of the posterior parietal cortex. Visual online feedback has a strong effect on the hand’s in-flight grasp aperture. Previous work (...) of ours exploited this effect to show that grasps are refractory to cued expectations for visual feedback. Nonetheless, when we reach out to pretend to grasp an object (pantomime grasp), our actions are performed with greater cognitive effort and they engage structures outside of the dorsal stream, including the ventral stream. Here we ask whether our previous finding would extend to cued expectations for haptic feedback. Our method involved a mirror apparatus that allowed participants to see a “virtual” target cylinder as a reflection in the mirror at the start of all trials. On “haptic feedback” trials, participants reached behind the mirror to grasp a size-matched cylinder, spatially coincident with the virtual one. On “no-haptic feedback” trials, participants reached behind the mirror and grasped into “thin air” because no cylinder was present. To manipulate haptic expectation, we organized the haptic conditions into blocked, alternating, and randomized schedules with and without verbal cues about the availability of haptic feedback. Replicating earlier work, we found the strongest haptic effects with the blocked schedules and the weakest effects in the randomized uncued schedule. Crucially, the haptic effects in the cued randomized schedule was intermediate. An analysis of the influence of the upcoming and immediately preceding haptic feedback condition in the cued and uncued random schedules showed that cuing the upcoming haptic condition shifted the haptic influence on grip aperture from the immediately preceding trial to the upcoming trial. These findings indicate that, unlike cues to the availability of visual feedback, participants take advantage of cues to the availability of haptic feedback, flexibly engaging pantomime, and natural modes of grasping to optimize the movement. (shrink)

This is a surprisingly good book. Published by Longmans in Great Britain as part of a series on "Education Today," it provides a very lucid and cogent first glimpse at the discipline of the philosophy of religion. The author's perspective is derivative of the analytic school, but what makes the book so valuable is that Goodall relates linguistic distinctions to Biblical categories. The author makes it obvious that he is a believer and authenticates the conviction that one can be (...) a believer and still sound like Flew or Ryle. The influence of Ian T. Ramsey comes through loud and clear. Goodall presents his proofs for the validity of religious statements with clarity and vigor. Worth the price of the book alone is Goodall's discussion of Lear's "The pobble who had no toes."--W. A. J. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Bridge From Analysis to Action:Psychodynamic Analyses of Religion and Michael S. Hogue's American ImmanenceAJ Turner (bio)I. IntroductionThe purpose of this essay is to work constructively with Michael S. Hogue's groundbreaking American Immanence: Democracy for an Uncertain World to demonstrate how psychodynamic analyses of religion are essential theoretical allies in the fight for resilient democracy. The "revolution in mind"1 that psychodynamic approaches contribute, especially in their analyses of religion, (...) both complements and complicates socio-political theory as a whole. In the improvisational spirit of "yes-and," the goal here is not to identify and decry the failures and shortcomings of Hogue's theopolitical vision but rather to inspire the recovery of a sibling discourse—a kind of "rebirth of a forgotten alternative"2—that also draws deeply from the American immanental tradition in order to add psychodynamic depth to Hogue's timely and important analysis. Psychodynamic theories of religion shed light on how symbolic identifications, including and especially ultimate concerns, structure personal and collective experience. By engaging religion and theology sympathetically, constructively, and creatively, theorists such as Rollo May, Gordon Allport, Karen Horney, Erich Fromm, and Ernest Becker departed from the skepticism, reductionism, and dismissal that characterized psychoanalytic analyses of religion in the wake of Freud.3 Each of these figures, and especially Becker whose work will be a focus in this essay, are noteworthy interlocutors for extending Hogue's theopolitical theorizing of resilient democracy, particularly in how they drew unique inspiration from the American immanental tradition [End Page 44] in their social analyses. In this respect, they provide a more robust theorization of the psychosocial conditions of the associational ethos needed to connect Hogue's conception of resilient democracy with forms of agonistic organization and democratic activism. Briefly stated, psychodynamic approaches are a helpful bridge for connecting these proposals to strategies of organization, their impediments, and collective action.In this way, both psychodynamic analyses of religion and Hogue's theopolitical innovation insist that no revolutionary political change is possible, and certainly not of the kind or scale needed to counter our wickedly entangled global crises, without a deep engagement with theological imaginaries. They differ, however, in their theoretical aims. Whereas Hogue compellingly argues for the political upshot of a theology deriving from the American immanental tradition, psychodynamic analysts of religion focus on the function of ultimate concerns in individual and collective life. In other words, American Immanence rests on a methodology of analyzing the philosophical and theological assumptions that have contributed to our climate crises and then presenting clear and compelling articulation of an alternative paradigm meant to open up new ways of being. In contrast psychodynamic analyses leverage conceptual clarity of psychic reality for the fundamentally therapeutic aim of transformation. At their best, both approaches share what could be called an etiological orientation to ontological questions in order to provide liberative alternatives through rational understanding and clarification, but the terrain, and thus the problems they hope to mitigate in their analyses are focused differently. Extending the visual metaphor, they are different lenses highlighting different areas of the same landscape. Furthermore, it must be said that neither are sufficient in themselves, but the psychodynamic theorists of religion to be highlighted in this essay share deeply with Hogue's heading in American Immanence.II. A Problematic AssumptionIn emphasizing and attempting to explain4 the role of non-rational processes in the both individual and social processes of perception and organization of experience, psychodynamic theories confound a widely held and problematic assumption that the triumph of rational analysis is the hallmark for building the society to which we should aspire. Political theory in general, [End Page 45] especially as it has taken its cues from a rationalist legacy about the inherently liberating force of Reason, has been weighted toward an assumption that its task of exposing the mystifications of power would suffice in inspiring more "rational" and therefore necessarily equitable social organization. This speaks to the longstanding socio-political interest in "consciousness raising" tactics, which are often meant to dispel "false consciousness." It even comes across in the emphases of Deweyan pragmatists on education. Psychologists of all stripes point out that this approach... (shrink)

Volume 13 in the Major Conservative and Libertarian thinkers series focuses on F.A. Hayek, The influential member of the Austrian School of Economics.

Although the mechanics of how the eye works are well understood, debate still exists as to how the complex machinery of the brain interprets neural impulses...

An Enquiry into the Nature of Liberation: Bhaṭṭa Rāmakaṇṭha’s Paramokṣanirāsakārikāvṛtti, a Commentary on Sadyojyotiḥ’s Refutation of Twenty Conceptions of the Liberated State. Edited and translated by Alex Watson, Dominic Goodall, and S. L. P. Anjaneya Sarma. Collection Indologie, vol. 122. Pondicherry: Institut Français de Pondichéry, École française d’Extrême-Orient, 2013. Pp. 508. €38.

Résumé éditeur : This book tells two intertwined stories, centered on twentieth-century moral philosophers Elizabeth Anscombe, Mary Midgley, Philippa Foot, and Iris Murdoch. The first is the story of four friends who came up to Oxford together just before WWII. It is the story of their lives, loves, and intellectual preoccupations; it is a story about women trying to find a place in a man's world of academic philosophy. The second story is about these friends' shared philosophical project and their (...) unintentional creation of a school of thought that challenged the dominant way of doing ethics. That dominant school of thought envisioned the world as empty, value-free matter, on which humans impose meaning. This outlook treated statements such as “this is good” as mere expressions of feeling or preference, reflecting no objective standards. It emphasized human freedom and demanded an unflinching recognition of the value-free world. The four friends diagnosed this moral philosophy as an impoverishing intellectual fad. This style of thought, they believed, obscured the realities of human nature and left people without the resources to make difficult moral choices or to confront evil. As an alternative, the women proposed a naturalistic ethics, reviving a line of thought running through Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas, and enriched by modern biologists like Jane Goodall and Charles Darwin. The women proposed that there are, in fact, moral truths, based in facts about the distinctive nature of the human animal and what that animal needs to thrive.". (shrink)

This article discusses textually problematic passages in Catullus 63, a particularly corrupt poem from a particularly corrupt manuscript tradition. It proposes new conjectures and revives several old ones. Throughout there are notes on punctuation, conjecture attribution and an analysis of the structure of Attis’ lament.

Every action, touch, utterance, and look, every listening, taste, smell, and feel is a living question; but it is no ordinary propositional one-by-one question, rather it is a plenisentient sensing and probing non-propositional enquiry about how our world is, in its present continuous sense, and in relation to how we anticipate its becoming. I will take this assumption as my first premise and, by using the notion of enkinaesthesia, I will explore the ways in which an agent’s affectively-saturated co-engagement with (...) its world establishes patterns of co-articulation of meaning within the anticipatory affective dynamics and the experiential entanglement necessary for expedient action and adaptation. In advancing this thesis I will reject the minimalist notions of embodiment by amplifying and extending the claims made by the most radical of the embodied mind theories. Crucially, I will offer a new wave of embodiment theory which has at its core the radical extension of sensorimotor affect into the life and being of other agents where their experience is for us both direct and immediate. This I will present as an immanent intercorporeality. (shrink)

Filosofische ponering van de subjectiviteit van elke interpretatie.

Each title in the "Key Issues" series aims to set the work in its historical context. In this collection of contemporary responses to "Leviathan", attention is focused on its critics who attacked Hobbes's moral, political and religious ideas in a series of pamphlets and short books.

We contest two claims: (1) that language, understood as the processing of abstract symbolic forms, is an instrument of cognition and rational thought, and (2) that conventional notions of turn-taking, exchange structure, and move analysis, are satisfactory as a basis for theorizing communication between living, feeling agents. We offer an enkinaesthetic theory describing the reciprocal affective neuro-muscular dynamical flows and tensions of co- agential dialogical sense-making relations. This “enkinaesthetic dialogue” is characterised by a preconceptual experientially recursive temporal dynamics forming the (...) deep extended melodies of relationships in time. An understanding of how those relationships work, when we understand and are ourselves understood, when communication falters and conflict arises, will depend on a grasp of our enkinaesthetic intersubjectivity. (shrink)

I want to discuss a view of punishment which stresses its ‘expressive’ character and seeks in that its justification. While I shall label this view ‘expressionism’, I should warn that most theorists who express an ‘expressionist’ view do not present it as an exhaustive account, but rather claim to be highlighting an aspect that tends to be neglected within the rationalist framework common to retributivism and utilitarianism. Among contemporary writings I shall focus on Joel Feinberg's article, ‘The Expressive Function of (...) Punishment’ in The Monist 49, No. 4 . While I accept that ‘expression’ usefully sums up much of what underlies punitive practices, I shall urge that the term conceals a variety of more or less amalgamated ingredients which need to be disentangled for critical inspection. I shall argue that under those aspects, punishment's justification continues to be elusive. I do not imagine that these arguments will deter my more punitive colleagues from continuing to seek such justification, but I hope they will search elsewhere. Feinberg writes: Punishment is a conventional device for the expression of attitudes of resentment and indignation, and of judgments of disapproval and reprobation, either on the part of the punishing authority himself or of those ‘in whose name’ the punishment is inflicted. Punishment, in short, has a symbolic significance largely missing from other kinds of penalties. (shrink)

This essay seeks to characterise the essential features of an equitable health care system in terms of the classical Aristotelian concepts of horizontal and vertical equity, the common language of “need” and the economic notion of cost-effectiveness as a prelude to identifying some of the more important issues of value that policy-makers will have to decide for themselves; the characteristics of health that can cause policy to be ineffective ; the information base that is required to support a policy directed (...) at securing greater equity, and the kinds of research that are needed to underpin such a policy. (shrink)

Recent policy in relation to clinical research proposals in the UK has distinguished between two types of review: scientific and ethical. This distinction has been formally enshrined in the recent changes to research ethics committee structure and operating procedures, introduced as the UK response to the EU Directive on clinical trials. Recent reviews and recommendations have confirmed the place of the distinction and the separate review processes. However, serious reservations can be mounted about the science/ethics distinction and the policy of (...) separate review that has been built upon it. We argue here that, first, the science/ethics distinction is incoherent, and, second, that RECs should not only be permitted to consider a study’s science, but that they have anobligation do so. (shrink)

The issue of directed donation of organs from deceased donors for transplantation has recently risen to the fore, given greater significance by the relatively stagnant rate of deceased donor donation in the UK. Although its status and legitimacy is explicitly recognized across the USA, elsewhere a more cautious, if not entirely negative, stance has been taken. In England, Wales and Northern Ireland, the Human Tissue Act 2004, and in Scotland the Human Tissue (Scotland) Act 2006, are both silent in this (...) regard. Although so-called conditional donation, donation to (or perhaps withheld from) a specific class, has been outlawed as a product of guidance issued by the Secretary of State for Health issued in the wake of the controversial incident occurring in the North of England in 1998, its intended application to ‘directed’ donation is less certain. Directed and conditional donations challenge the traditional construct of altruistic donation and impartial (equitable) allocation in a very immediate and striking fashion. They implicitly raise important questions as to whether the body or parts of the body are capable of being owned, and by whom. This paper attempts to explore the notion of donor ownership of body parts and its implications for both directed and conditional donation. (shrink)

A number of recent papers have described the successful derivation of egg and sperm precursor cells from mouse embryonic stem cells—so-called “artificial” gametes. Although many scientific questions remain, this research suggests numerous new possibilities for stem cell research and assisted reproductive technology, if a similar breakthrough is achieved with human embryonic stem cells. The novel opportunities raised by artificial gametes also prompt new ethical questions, such as whether same-sex couples should be able to access this technology to have children who (...) are genetically related to them both.THE CREATION OF “ARTIFICIAL” GAMETESOver the past two years, a number of papers have been published detailing the first successful attempts at differentiating mouse embryonic stem cells into egg1 and sperm2 precursor cells. Previously, researchers had used embryonic stem cells to generate tissues such as brain, liver, and pancreatic cells, but not germ cells of any kind. Production of gamete precursor cells was achieved initially through allowing stem cell lines to differentiate more or less randomly, but recent research has focused on identifying the precise ways in which differentiation into gametes can be precipitated and controlled. These breakthroughs make it seem likely that ongoing research on human stem cells will yield similar possibilities,3 raising questions over the practicalities of what might be achieved with such “artificial” gametes. In turn, the novel opportunities presented by artificial gametes raise a number of ethical concerns.The initial breakthrough, namely the obtaining of egg cells from mouse stem cells, was achieved by means of relatively simple science. Rather than coaxing stem cells to develop into eggs using complicated cocktails of growth factors, researchers adopted standard cell culture conditions, but grew the cells at higher density than usual.3–6 Growing the cells in this way led to the formation of ovary-like cell aggregates, which (when separated and stimulated with …. (shrink)

Living-donor kidney transplantation is the “gold standard” treatment for many individuals with end-stage renal failure. Superior outcomes for the graft and the transplant recipient have prompted the implementation of new strategies promoting living-donor kidney transplantation, and the number of such transplants has increased considerably over recent years. Living donors are undoubtedly exposed to risk. In his editorial “underestimating the risk in living kidney donation”, Walter Glannon suggests that more data on long-term outcomes for living donors are needed to determine whether (...) this risk is permissible and the extent to which physicians and transplant surgeons should promote living-donor kidney transplantation.1 In this paper I argue that it is not clear that medical professionals have underestimated this risk, nor is it clear that more data on long-term outcomes are needed in order to determine whether it is permissible for individual autonomous agents to expose themselves to this or, indeed, any risk. The global shortage of organs available for transplantation ultimately means that every year thousands of individuals who value their life die needlessly. This is an unacceptable loss of human life. Saving life is one of the most wonderful things an individual can do for another. Promoting any strategy that will assist in saving life and preventing human suffering within acceptable moral limits is legitimate. (shrink)

The Report of the Ad Hoc Adivisory Group on the Operation of NHS Research Ethics Committees has resulted in a strange mixture of the timid, the revolutionary, and the bizarre.The Report of the Ad Hoc Advisory Group on the Operation of NHS Research Ethics Committees is a curious document.1 The remit of the review was focused on the workings and effectiveness of NHS research ethics committees and the multicentre committees ). The Group was primarily set up in response to a (...) series of complaints from medical researchers about the new research governance regime in the UK as a result of the Clinical Trials Directive2 and the Governance Arrangements for NHS Research Ethics Committees.3 The opportunity was also taken to consider the role of research ethics committees in a wider context, and take account of recent developments in relation to the ethics review of social care research,4 student projects,5 as well as recent legislation such as the Human Tissue Act,6 and the Mental Capacity Act.7 However, the resulting report is a strange mixture of the timid, the revolutionary, and the bizarre.A good example of the report’s timidity is its reluctance to propose fundamental change to the process of review or seriously limit the type of research that requires REC review. To its credit AHAG does suggest that some research ‘especially surveys and many studies on NHS staff, could normally be conducted safely without a requirement for REC review’ .1 This is, of course, to be welcomed. However, the report ultimately seems dismissive of the general complaint from researchers that the current process is inappropriately uniform. For example, in section 3.2, it is argued that the ‘common perception that the NHS REC system is dominated …. (shrink)

Wilkinson’s discussion of the individual and family consent to organ and tissue donation is to be welcomed because it draws attention to the “incoherent hybrid” of the current position.1 I wish to highlight some areas of his discussion and propose that, in a situation of posthumous organ and tissue donation, the cadaver has no individual rights and family rights should under no circumstances automatically outweigh the potential transplant recipients’ right to a life-saving treatment.Transplant immunobiology and clinical transplantation is a revolutionary (...) area of medicine and has saved thousands of lives. In the UK, between 1 April 2004 and 31 March 2005, organs from 752 people who died were used to save or dramatically improve many people’s lives through 2242 transplants.2 In the US, 23 506 transplants were performed between January and October 2005 from 12 084 donors.3 Information from available databases shows that demand for organs, cells and tissues has outstripped the supply. As of 18 January 2006, 6553 people are still waiting for transplants in the UK and there are 90 636 waiting list transplant candidates in the US.2,3 As of 01 January 2006, there are 15 977 people active on the Eurotransplant waiting list.4 It is likely that non-compulsory posthumous donation of organs has resulted in the loss of many thousands, possibly many …. (shrink)