Previous research has demonstrated that speakers adapt individual characteristics of speech production to the social context, for example via phonetic convergence. Studies have measured the impact of social dynamics on convergence in typical speakers, but the impact of individual differences is less well-explored. The present study measures phonetic convergence before and after a cooperative interaction with an undergraduate student by comparing teens with a history of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and with typical development. Results revealed a small temporal convergence effect (...) for typically developing dyads; in contrast, dyads including autistic teens showed no convergence. Furthermore, the degree of convergence was negatively related to severity of ASD symptomatology and atypical sensory profiles. While social and sensory processing abilities may play a role in phonetic convergence, high covariance between these measures makes it difficult to differentiate their contributions in isolation. (shrink)

Addressing God -- Approaching God -- Experiencing God -- Receiving God -- Worshipping God -- Manifesting God.

Companion animals -- Animals on factory farms -- Birds and marine wildlife -- Animals in research facilities -- Conclusion: Noah's task.

The theory of visual perception that Irvin Rock develops and supports in this book with numerous original experiments, views perception as the outcome of a process of unconscious inference, problem solving, and the building of structural descriptions of the external world.

This essay examines the difficulties faced by the claim that artworks are simple physical objects (or, in the case of non-visual art forms, simple structures of another sort) and examines alternative proposals regarding their ontological nature.

The culturally pervasive tendency to identify aspects of the body as aesthetically imperfect harms individuals and scaffolds injustice related to disability, race, gender, LGBTQ+ identities, and fatness. But abandoning the notion of imperfection may not respect people’s reasonable understandings of their own bodies. I examine the prospects for a practice of aesthetic assessment grounded in a notion of the body’s function. I argue that functional aesthetic assessment, to be respectful, requires understanding the body’s functions as complex, malleable, and determined by (...) the projects and interests of the person whose body it is. Aesthetically relevant functions, on this account, are determined neither by the body’s status as organism nor by cultural assumptions about how bodies should function or be used. (shrink)

Dieser Band versammelt Beitrage aus der Kulturwissenschaft, Medientheorie, Linguistik und Philosophie, Kunst- und Literaturwissenschaft, mit einem Schwerpunkt in der Germanistischen Mediavistik.

The ability of videos to serve as evidence of racial injustice is complex and contested. This essay argues that scrutiny of the Black body has come to play a key role in how videos of police violence are mined for evidence, following a long history of racialized surveillance and attributions of threat and superhuman powers to Black bodies. Using videos to combat injustice requires incorporating humanizing narratives and cultivating resistant modes of looking.

This paper has three objectives. First, I argue that apprehending an installation artwork is similar to apprehending an artwork for performance: in each case, audiences must recognize a relationship between the performance or display one encounters and the parameters expressed in the underlying work. Second, I consider whether realizations are also artworks in their own right. I argue that, in both installation art and performance, a particular realization is sometimes an artwork in its own right (even as it realizes another (...) work). I offer criteria for determining when this is the case. Application of the criteria yields the verdict that performances are sometimes artworks in their own right, while displays of installation artworks rarely are. This difference, though, is merely contingent on the conventions of the respective art forms. Third, I address ontological concerns about entities that are both abstract and temporal, as many artworks are on my analysis. (shrink)

On several current views, including those of Matthew Kieran, Gary Iseminger, Jerrold Levinson, and Noël Carroll, aesthetic appreciation or experience involves second-order awareness of one’s own mental processes. But what if it turns out that we don’t have introspective access to the processes by which our aesthetic responses are produced? I summarize several problems for introspective accounts that emerge from the psychological literature: aesthetic responses are affected by irrelevant conditions; they fail to be affected by relevant conditions; we are ignorant (...) of their causes and thus confabulate in explaining them; our attempts to offer explanations change our preferences; and the preferences we form after explanation are lower in quality. I suggest that by distinguishing introspective awareness of mental processes from introspective awareness of mental states, we can safeguard a worthwhile concept of aesthetic experience. In addition, we should recognize that theoretical, rather than introspective, understanding of our mental processes may play a valuable role in aesthetic appreciation. (shrink)

An extensive literature about pictorial representation discusses what is involved when a two-dimensional image represents some specific object or type of object. A smaller literature addresses parallel issues in sculptural representation. But little has been said about the role played by the sculptural material itself in determining the meanings of the sculptural work. Appealing to Nelson Goodman and Catherine Elgin’s discussions of literal and metaphorical exemplification, I argue that the material of which a sculpture is constituted plays key roles in (...) what is represented and how it is represented, in part because we have bodily and emotional responses to the real possibilities the sculptural material creates for us. I discuss examples of contemporary artworks by Melvin Edwards, Kara Walker, Willie Cole, Marc Quinn, Ai Weiwei, Janine Antoni, El Anatsui, Zoe Leonard, and others. (shrink)

This reference essay surveys recent work in the emerging sub-discipline of everyday aesthetics, which builds on the work of John Dewey to resist sharp distinctions between art and non-art domains and argue that aesthetic concepts are properly applied to ordinary domains of experience.

Research has shown that specific individual values, such as green and environmental values, are important in motivating the decision to start a sustainable business. Beyond this finding, there is limited knowledge about why, how, and when such values become important and what this means for sustainable entrepreneurship engagement. We address this question abductively and conduct a multi-case study of 18 sustainable entrepreneurs and their fashion companies. Drawing on the self-activation and the impressionable years hypotheses, we identified three ways in which (...) sustainability-oriented values become activated and more important to individuals: (1) through informational stimuli, (2) through formative and life-changing experiences, and (3) through socialization. Further, we show that the entrepreneurs engaged in reflexive learning due to the value-activating experience, whereby they critically questioned their assumptions and actions. Together, one or more value activations and the involved reflexive learning contributed significantly to the decision to become a sustainable entrepreneur. With this novel explanation for why and how values become engaged in the first place, we contribute to the theory of (sustainable) entrepreneurship. Further, our research helps devise value-activating strategies for practitioners who want to help (prospective) entrepreneurs act more in line with their sustainability-oriented values and start a sustainable business. (shrink)

I discuss two interrelated ways in which disgust functions in motherhood. First, relaxation of the mother’s sense of disgust allows her to nurture her child more effectively. Second, others’ responses of disgust are used to enforce social norms regarding the “good” mother. If the mother acquiesces, she must continually monitor and tidy her child, which may interfere with the child’s exploration of the world. If she does not, she is subject to ongoing signs that she is flawed or failing as (...) a mother. (shrink)

The 13th-15th centuries were witness to lively and broad-ranging debates about the nature of persons. In this paper, I look at how the uses of ‘person’ in logical/grammatical, legal/political, and theological contexts overlap in the works of 13th-15th century contemplatives in the Latin West, such as Hadewijch, Meister Eckhart, and Catherine of Siena. After explicating the key concepts of individuality, dignity, and rationality, I show how these ideas combine with the contemplative use of first- and second-person perspectives, personification, and introspection (...) to yield a concept of 'person' that both prefigures Locke's classic 17th century definition and deeply influences the development of personalism. (shrink)

This reference essay addresses how sculpture may be defined, the nature of sculptural representation and content, the distinctive forms of tactile and bodily experience to which sculpture can give rise, and the ontology of sculpture. It addresses both sculptures whose form is largely fixed and contemporary sculptural practices incorporating found objects and variable presentation.

Medieval philosophy is primarily associated today with university-based disputations and the authorities cited in those disputations. In their own time, however, scholastic debates were recognized as just one part of wide-ranging philosophical and theological discussions. A Hidden Wisdom breaks new ground by drawing attention to another crucial component of these conversations: the Christian contemplative tradition. The thirteenth–fifteenth centuries in particular saw a dramatic increase in the production and consumption of mystical and contemplative literature in the ‘Christian West’, by laypeople as (...) well as religious scholars, women as well as men. A Hidden Wisdom focuses on five topics of particular interest to both scholastics and contemplatives in this period—namely, self-knowledge, reason and its limits, love and the will, persons, and immortality and the afterlife. This focus centers on the (often overlooked) contributions of medieval women and demonstrates that when we reunite scholasticism with its contemplative counterpart, we gain not only a more accurate understanding of the scope of medieval Christian philosophy and theology but also an increased awareness of a deeply practical tradition that builds up as well as tears down, generates as well as deconstructs. The book’s treatment of topics and figures is meant to be representative rather than exhaustive—a tasting menu rather than a comprehensive study. The choice of topics offers a series of ‘hooks’ for philosophers to connect their own interests to issues central to medieval contemplative philosophy, while also providing medievalists in other disciplines a fresh lens through which to view these texts. (shrink)

The study combines theories of myth, popular culture, structuralism and poststructuralism to explain the enormous appeal of Star Wars and Harry Potter. Although much research already exists on both stories individually, this book is the first to explicitly bring them together in order to explore their set-up and the ways in which their structures help produce ideologies on gender and ethnicity. Hereby, the comparison yields central insights into the workings of modern myth and uncovers structure as integral to the success (...) of the popular genre. It addresses academic audiences and all those wishing to approach the tales from a fresh angle. (shrink)

This reader is the first of its kind to present the work of leading French women philosophers to an English-speaking audience. Howells draws on several major areas of philosophical and theoretical debate including Ethics, Psychoanalysis, Law, Politics, History, Science, and Rationality. The philosophers include some names already well-known in North American such as Kristeva, Irigaray, Cixous, and Kofman, but also many others celebrated in France but whose innovative work has not yet achieved such widespread recognition in the English-speaking world such (...) as Sylviane Agacinski, Nicole Loraux, Monique David-Menard, Francoise Collin, Genevieve Fraisse, and Blandine Kriegel. Most of the essays in the collection have been specially translated and in several cases this is the first time any of the philosopher's work has appeared in English. The project is necessarily feminist in inspiration but takes an important step forwards in not taking the feminist struggle itself as its focus but rather engaging with influential French women philosophers on the questions they themselves choose to foreground. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence (AI) will drastically change the healthcare system. Radiology is one speciality that is most affected as AI algorithms are increasingly used in diagnostic imaging. AI‐enhanced health technologies will, inter alia, increase workflow efficiency, improve diagnostic accuracy, reduce healthcare‐related costs, and help alleviate medical personnel shortages in under‐resourced settings. However, the development of AI‐enhanced technologies in healthcare is fraught with legal, ethical, and human rights concerns. Currently, the use of AI in South African healthcare is not governed by sui (...) generis legislation or ethical guidance focused exclusively and specifically on AI, although various provisions and principles from law and ethics find application. This article outlines these normative principles and explains their relationship with the extant legal obligations and regulatory framework as applied to the use of AI in radiology services in South Africa. The article concludes with three key recommendations for radiology practitioners using AI in South Africa. These are the need for: vigilant monitoring of AI use in practice, reforms to the liability framework, and appropriate guidance from local regulators and the Health Professions Council of South Africa on the ethical use of AI. (shrink)

Using focus groups, this small-scale, qualitative study investigated the way that students tend to think about religious truth-claims as compared to other types of truth-claim. All the student participants conceived of religious truth-claims as ‘opinions’, to be contrasted with the certain, indisputable ‘facts’ of science. For many students, it was the lack of empirical verification, as well as the existence of disagreement, which meant religious beliefs were relegated to this position. If these findings are generalisable, then there are implications for (...) the ongoing theoretical dispute over the extent to which truth should be a focus in religious education. The tendency for students to see religious claims as subjective lends support for a critical pedagogy that places evaluation of truth centre-stage. The findings also suggest a need for religious education and science teachers to include more reflection on the nature of the scientific method in their schemes of work in order to dispel the myths of unanimity and certainty in science. (shrink)

The Middles Ages are often portrayed as a time in which people with physical disabilities in the Latin West were ostracized, on the grounds that such conditions demonstrated personal sin and/or God’s judgment. This was undoubtedly the dominant response to disability in various times and places during the fifth through fifteenth centuries, but the total range of medieval responses is much broader and more interesting. In particular, the 13th-15th century treatment of three groups (martyrs, mothers, and mystics - whose physical (...) ‘defects’ were often understood as signs of special connection to God in this life, and who were often represented as retaining these signs in the life to come) challenge standard notions of beauty, disfigurement, and bodily perfection, particularly as the notion is applied to eternal life and our ultimate end. (shrink)

Microaggressions are a new moral category that refers to the subtle yet harmful forms of discriminatory behavior experienced by members of oppressed groups. Such behavior often results from implicit bias, leaving individual perpetrators unaware of the harm they have caused. Moreover, microaggressions are often dismissed on the grounds that they do not constitute a real or morally significant harm. My goal is therefore to explain why microaggressions are morally significant and argue that we are responsible for their harms. I offer (...) a conceptual framework for microaggressions, exploring the central mechanisms used for identification and the empirical research concerning their harm. The cumulative harm of microaggressions presents a unique case for understanding disaggregation models for contributed harms, blame allocation, and individual responsibility within structural oppression. Our standard moral model for addressing cumulative harm is to hold all individual contributors blameworthy for their particular contributions. However, if we aim to hold people responsible for their unconscious microaggressions and address cumulative harm holistically, this model is inadequate. Drawing on Iris Marion Young's social connection model, I argue that we, as individual perpetrators of microaggressions, have a responsibility to respond to the cumulative harm to which we have individually contributed. (shrink)

Block [Block, N. . Two neural correlates of consciousness. Trends in Cognitive Science, 9, 46–52] and Snodgrass claim that a signal detection theory analysis of qualitative difference paradigms, in particular the exclusion failure paradigm, reveals cases of phenomenal consciousness without access consciousness. This claim is unwarranted on several grounds. First, partial cognitive access rather than a total lack of cognitive access can account for exclusion failure results. Second, Snodgrass’s Objective Threshold/Strategic model of perception relies on a problematic ‘enable’ approach to (...) perception that denies the possibility of intentional control of unconscious perception and any effect of following different task instructions on the presence/absence of phenomenal consciousness. Many of Block’s purported examples of phenomenal consciousness without cognitive access also rely on this problematic approach. Third, qualitative difference paradigms may index only a subset of access consciousness. Thus, qualitative difference paradigms like exclusion failure cannot be used to isolate phenomenal consciousness, any attempt to do so still faces serious methodological problems. (shrink)

Processes of rapid and truncated agrarian change—driven through expanding urbanisation, infrastructure development, extractive industries, and commodity crops—are shaping the livelihood opportunities and aspirations of Indonesia’s rural youth. This study describes the everyday experiences of youth as they navigate the changing character of agriculture, aquaculture, and fishing livelihoods across gender, class, and generation. Drawing on qualitative field research conducted in the Maros District of South Sulawesi, we examine young people’s experiences of agrarian change in a landscape of entangled rural, coastal and (...) increasingly urbanised spaces. We find that young people aspire to secure, modern, and salary-based work, while continuing to seek and sustain intergenerational farming or aquaculture-based livelihoods. Youth take advantage of increased connectivity to diversify their incomes, yet their dependence on mobility also introduces new forms of gendered and class based precarity such as insecure working arrangements, disruption to education and violence (especially for young unskilled women and youth from financially insecure households). Our study highlights the persistent conditions of precarity that many young people encounter in both rural and urban settings, while challenging assumptions that youth are uninterested in rural futures. (shrink)

Arien Mack and Irvin Rock make the radical claim that there is no conscious perception of the visual world without attention to it.

How do people decide which claims should be considered mere beliefs and which count as knowledge? Although little is known about how people attribute knowledge to others, philosophical debate about the nature of knowledge may provide a starting point. Traditionally, a belief that is both true and justified was thought to constitute knowledge. However, philosophers now agree that this account is inadequate, due largely to a class of counterexamples (termed ‘‘Gettier cases’’) in which a person’s justified belief is true, but (...) only due to luck. We report four experiments examining the effect of truth, justification, and ‘‘Gettiering’’ on people’s knowledge attributions. These experiments show that: (1) people attribute knowledge to others only when their beliefs are both true and justified; (2) in contrast to contemporary philosophers, people also attribute knowledge to others in Gettier situations; and (3) knowledge is not attributed in one class of Gettier cases, but only because the agent’s belief is based on ‘‘apparent’’ evidence. These findings suggest that the lay concept of knowledge is roughly consistent with the traditional account of knowledge as justified true belief, and also point to a major difference between the epistemic intuitions of laypeople and those of philosophers. (shrink)

In this paper, I present and explore some ideas about how factive emotional states and factive perceptual states each relate to knowledge and reasons. This discussion will shed light on the so-called ‘perceptual model’ of the emotions.

The phenomenon and implications of stigma have been recognized across many contexts and in relation to many discrete issues or conditions. The notion of spatial stigma has been developed within stigma literature, although the importance and relevance of spatial stigma for rural places and rural people have been largely neglected. This is the case even within fields of inquiry like public and rural health, which are expansively tasked with addressing the socio-structural drivers of health inequalities. In this paper, we argue (...) that developing a better understanding of rural place stigma is critical for addressing contemporary patterns of spatial injustice and health inequalities affecting rural communities globally. Drawing on international literature and examples from the reported experiences of rurally living Australians and news and other media, we present an analysis highlighting the power in rural place stigma. In doing so, we build a case for the relevance and importance of interrogating rural place stigma, especially in the fields of public and rural health, for changing the conditions within—and the broader positioning of—the rural in the public and political landscapes. (shrink)

According to one understanding of the problem of dirty hands, every case of dirty hands is an instance of moral conflict, but not every instance of moral conflict is a case of dirty hands. So, what sets the two apart? The dirty hands literature has offered widely different answers to this question but there has been relatively little discussion about their relative merits as well as challenges. In this paper I evaluate these different accounts by making clear which understanding of (...) concept distinctness underlies them and which of them is, ultimately, the most plausible one in the case of dirty hands and ordinary moral conflict. In order to do so, I will borrow from the terminology employed in recent debates in the philosophy of evil which have tackled a similar problem to the one at hand, i.e. defining what sets evil apart from ordinary wrongdoing. Here it has been argued that concepts could be distinct in three ways: they can have a quantitative difference, a strong qualitative or a moderate qualitative difference. I conclude that the most convincing definition of dirty hands draws a moderate qualitative distinction between ordinary moral conflict according to which dirty hands are those moral conflicts that involve a serious violation or betrayal of a core moral value. (shrink)