In the contemporary world, voices are caught up in fundamentally different realms of discourse, practice, and culture: between sounding and nonsounding, material and nonmaterial, literal and metaphorical. In The Voice as Something More, Martha Feldman and Judith T. Zeitlin tackle these paradoxes with a bold and rigorous collection of essays that look at voice as both object of desire and material object. Using Mladen Dolar’s influential A Voice and Nothing More as a reference point, The Voice as Something (...) More reorients Dolar’s psychoanalytic analysis around the material dimensions of voices—their physicality and timbre, the fleshiness of their mechanisms, the veils that hide them, and the devices that enhance and distort them. Throughout, the essays put the body back in voice. Ending with a new essay by Dolar that offers reflections on these vocal aesthetics and paradoxes, this authoritative, multidisciplinary collection, ranging from Europe and the Americas to East Asia, from classics and music to film and literature, will serve as an essential entry point for scholars and students who are thinking toward materiality. (shrink)

Background: Editorial peer review is universally used but little studied. We examined the relationship between external reviewers' recommendations and the editorial outcome of manuscripts undergoing external peer-review at the Journal of General Internal Medicine. Methodology/Principal Findings: We examined reviewer recommendations and editors' decisions at JGIM between 2004 and 2008. For manuscripts undergoing peer review, we calculated chance-corrected agreement among reviewers on recommendations to reject versus accept or revise. Using mixed effects logistic regression models, we estimated intra-class correlation coefficients at the (...) reviewer and manuscript level. Finally, we examined the probability of rejection in relation to reviewer agreement and disagreement. The 2264 manuscripts sent for external review during the study period received 5881 reviews provided by 2916 reviewers; 28% of reviews recommended rejection. Chance corrected agreement on rejection among reviewers was 0.11. In mixed effects models adjusting for study year and manuscript type, the reviewer-level ICC was 0.23 and the manuscript-level ICC was 0.17. The editors' overall rejection rate was 48%: 88% when all reviewers for a manuscript agreed on rejection and 20% when all reviewers agreed that the manuscript should not be rejected. Conclusions/Significance: Reviewers at JGIM agreed on recommendations to reject vs. accept/revise at levels barely beyond chance, yet editors placed considerable weight on reviewers' recommendations. Efforts are needed to improve the reliability of the peer-review process while helping editors understand the limitations of reviewers' recommendations. © 2010 Kravitz et al. (shrink)

This collection of essays focuses on sacrifice in the context of Jewish and Christian scripture and is inspired by the thought and writings of Rene Girard. The contributors engage in a dialogue with Girard in their search for answers to key questions about the relation between religion and violence. The book is divided into two parts. The first opens with a conversation in which Rene Girard and Sandor Goodhart explore the relation between imitation and violence throughout human history, especially in (...) religious culture. It is followed by essays on the subject of sacrifice contributed by some of the most distinguished scholars in the field, including Bruce Chilton, Robert Daly, Louis Feldman, Michael Fishbane, Erich Gruen, and Alan Segal. The second part contains essays on specific scriptural texts. The authors explore new ways of applying Girardian analysis to episodes of sacrifice and scapegoating, demonstrating that fertile ground remains to further our understanding of violence in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. "In increasing numbers, scholars are turning to the mimetic theory espoused by Rene Girard in their research for answers to key questions about religion and violence. For the first time, the editors of this volume place in conversation with each other scholars who, from the perspective of Christian and Jewish traditions and scholarship, engage from the perspective of mimetic theory the sacrificial and antisacrificial features of ancient Judaism and early Christianity and explore their subsequent trajectories." --_Martha Reineke, University of Northern Iowa _. (shrink)

The idea that perceptual and cognitive systems must incorporate knowledge about the structure of the environment has become a central dogma of cognitive theory. In a Bayesian context, this idea is often realized in terms of “tuning the prior”—widely assumed to mean adjusting prior probabilities so that they match the frequencies of events in the world. This kind of “ecological” tuning has often been held up as an ideal of inference, in fact defining an “ideal observer.” But widespread as this (...) viewpoint is, it directly contradicts Bayesian philosophy of probability, which views probabilities as degrees of belief rather than relative frequencies, and explicitly denies that they are objective characteristics of the world. Moreover, tuning the prior to observed environmental frequencies is subject to overfitting, meaning in this context overtuning to the environment, which leads (ironically) to poor performance in future encounters with the same environment. Whenever there is uncertainty about the environment—which there almost always is—an agent's prior should be biased away from ecological relative frequencies and toward simpler and more entropic priors. (shrink)

In Chapter 17 of his magnificent Reasons and Persons, Derek Parfit asks what he describes as an ‘awesome question’: ‘How many people should there ever be?’ For a utilitarian like me, the answer seems simple: there should be however many people it takes to make the world best. Unfortunately, if I answer Parfit's awesome question in this way, I may sink myself in a quagmire of axiological confusion. In this paper, I first describe certain aspects of the quagmire. Then I (...) introduce and explain some of the elements of a novel axiological view – ‘justicism’. Justicism is derived from some ideas originally suggested by Franz Brentano. It was developed in an effort to solve certain other problems confronting utilitarianism – problems explicitly about justice. I think, however, that as a sort of happy by-product, justicism also generates a plausible answer to Parfit's awesome question. This may come as a bit of surprise, since justicism is a form of totalism, and it is widely thought that no totalistic theory can provide a satisfactory answer to Parfit's question. After presenting and explaining my proposed solution, I address some objections. (shrink)

This paper deals with how telematic technologies such as the cellular phones, Internet, telerobotics and other varieties of telematic communication and control are placing into discussion the nature of knowledge and its scope. These technologies offer us knowledge by description and representation instead of physical contact, a fact that is often seen with suspicion since they are perceived as technologies of delusion in a culture characterized by its conspicuous materialism. What are the possible roles for our mediated activities in relation (...) with the comprehension of our environment and the construction of subjectivity? Telematic mediation necessarily deals with the immaterial aspects of technologies such as the changing concepts of reality and nature, future possibilities of an ethereal afterlife achieved through spiritual or technological means and the concept of distance that can render mediated communication delusory and unsatisfying while acting as an agent of delocalization. This view is supported by our traditional Platonic view that perceives representation of things as a palpable degradation while neglecting the constructive aspects of those fictional endeavours. (shrink)

Beginning with this issue, the "Review Essays" section of the journal has been renamed "Critical Assessments." The new name more accurately describes not only the content of the section but also the journal's methods of assessment. Submissions to the section are peer reviewed; published essays are catalogued and indexed like the rest of the content of Perspectives in Biology and Medicine.Where many journals publish reviews on the assets and liabilities of newly published books, the Critical Assessments section of Perspectives in (...) Biology and Medicine aims for robust, engaging essays, written in an informal style about important new books, and also about important new articles. Books are a typical means of publishing... (shrink)

The Termination Thesis (or “TT”) is the view that people go out of existence when they die. Lots of philosophers seem to believe it. Epicurus, for example, apparently makes use of TT in his efforts to show that it is irrational to fear death. He says, “as long as we exist, death is not with us; but when death comes, then we do not exist.”1 Lucretius says pretty much the same thing, but in many more words and more poetically: “Death (...) therefore to us is nothing, concerns us not a jot, since the nature of the mind is proved to be mortal; . . . when we shall be no more, when there shall have been a separation of body and soul, out of both of which we are each formed into a single being, to us, you may be sure, who then shall be no more, nothing whatever can happen to excite sensation.”. (shrink)

Guided by the work of William Alston, Jonathan Adler and Michael Levin propose a solution to the generality problem for reliabilism. In some respects their proposal improves on those we have discussed. We argue that the problem remains unsolved.

The present study provides evidence that valence focus and arousal focus are important processes in determining whether a dimensional or a discrete emotion model best captures how people label their affective states. Individuals high in valence focus and low in arousal focus fit a dimensional model better in that they reported more co-occurrences among like-valenced affective states, whereas those lower in valence focus and higher in arousal focus fit a discrete model better in that they reported fewer co-occurrences between like-valenced (...) affective states. Taken together, these findings suggest that one static, nomothetic theory may not accurately describe the subjective affective experience of all individuals. (shrink)

The classic action-effect (Kahneman & Tversky, 1982a) describes a phenomenon in which people associate stronger emotional regret with negative outcomes when the outcomes are a result of an action c...

The most popular concepts of happiness among psychologists and philosophers nowadays are concepts of happiness according to which happiness is defined as " satisfaction with life as a whole ". Such concepts are " Whole Life Satisfaction " concepts of happiness. I show that there are hundreds of non-equivalent ways in which a WLS conception of happiness can be developed. However, every precise conception either requires actual satisfaction with life as a whole or requires hypothetical satisfaction with life as a (...) whole. I show that a person can be "happy" at a time even though he is not actually satisfied with his life as a whole at that time. I also show that a person can be "happy" at a time even though it is not correct to say that if he were to think about his life at that time, he would be satisfied with it as a whole. My thesis is that if you think that happiness is the Good, you should avoid defining happiness as whole life satisfaction. (shrink)

This paper examines a particularly egregious example of a NIMBY claim and considers three proposals for explaining what about that claim might be ethically problematic: The NIMBY claimant is being selfish or self-serving; The NIMBY claim cannot be morally justified, because respecting everyone's NIMBY claims leaves communities worse off; and if policymakers were to defer to people's NIMBY claims, they would end up perpetuating environmental injustices. We argue that these proposals fail to explain why there is anything wrong with the (...) NIMBY claim per se. (shrink)

A widespread assumption in the contemporary discussion of probabilistic models of cognition, often attributed to the Bayesian program, is that inference is optimal when the observer's priors match the true priors in the world—the actual “statistics of the environment.” But in fact the idea of a “true” prior plays no role in traditional Bayesian philosophy, which regards probability as a quantification of belief, not an objective characteristic of the world. In this paper I discuss the significance of the traditional Bayesian (...) epistemic view of probability and its mismatch with the more objectivist assumptions about probability that are widely held in contemporary cognitive science. I then introduce a novel mathematical framework, the observer lattice, that aims to clarify this issue while avoiding philosophically tendentious assumptions. The mathematical argument shows that even if we assume that “ground truth” probabilities actually do exist, there is no objective way to tell what they are. Different observers, conditioning on different information, will inevitably have different probability estimates, and there is no general procedure to determine which one is right. The argument sheds light on the use of probabilistic models in cognitive science, and in particular on what exactly it means for the mind to be “tuned” to its environment. (shrink)

This paper develops responses to several critics who commented on an earlier paper that we published in this journal. In that paper, we argued that there is nothing necessarily wrong with NIMBY claims or those who make them. The critics raised some important issues, such as whether “NIMBY” is essentially a pejorative term; the possibility that NIMBY claimants are saying something deep about the noncomparability of places; what exactly it means for policy makers to defer to a NIMBY claim; the (...) relationship between NIMBY and environmental justice claims; and whether there is any principled way to distinguish good from bad NIMBY claims. We explore these issues further, and in the course of responding to the critics, we develop some further reasons for skepticism about the prospects for distinguishing good from bad NIMBY claims in a principled way. (shrink)

In earlier work I defended Intrinsic Attitudinal Hedonism—a view about what makes for individual personal welfare. On this view, a person’s level of welfare is entirely determined by the amounts of intrinsic attitudinal pleasure and pain he or she takes in things. The view seems to run into trouble in cases involving individuals who take their pleasure in disgusting, immoral things; and in cases involving individuals who take their pleasure in things that really don’t actually happen; and in cases involving (...) individuals who enjoy pleasures but who lead meaningless lives; and in cases involving individuals whose lives fail to manifest an attractive narrative structure. After sharpening up the objections, I introduce a distinction between Pure Welfare Narrowly Conceived and Enriched Welfare Broadly Conceived. I go on to claim that if this distinction is recognized, we will be able to say that each of the objections rests on the fallacy of equivocation. If, years ago, I had been more sensitive to the distinction between Pure Welfare and Enriched Welfare I would have been able to respond to the objections in a more coherent and effective way. I present that response here. In an appendix, I compare my current view with a related view defended by Shelly Kagan in ‘Me and My Life’. (shrink)

: Vasubandhu, an advocate of the idealist Yogācāra school of Buddhism, argues that the nonexistence of external objects can be inferred from the appearance of nonexistent things in perceptual illusion. The idealist view and the argument from illusion are criticized by proponents of the realist Nyāya school on the grounds that illusory experience is parasitic upon veridical experience. The parasitism objection successfully defeats Vasubandhu's argument from illusion but fails to decisively disprove the idealist view because it remains possible that each (...) illusory experience gets its content from a previous illusory experience in an infinite chain. (shrink)

Brian Huss argues that the consensus theory of argumentation is as good as, or better than, the epistemological approach at giving useful real-world advice about arguments. I describe these two ways of theorizing about arguments, describe the advice that Huss thinks the two theories can offer, make a case largely by means of examples for the view that the epistemological approach does yield useful real world advice, and then formulate and respond to Huss's arguments. I conclude with a few brief (...) comments on consensus and arguments. (shrink)

Several debates in contemporary metaphysics provoke us to ask what an event is. One theory, Pioneered by chisholm, Develops the analogy between the occurrence of events and the truth of corresponding propositions. I call these propositional analyses. It is unclear whether their adherents wish to jettison our event-Concepts, And replace them with concepts from another category, Such as semantics. The other theory of what events are that I scrutinize, Namely kim's and goldman's property-Exemplification analysis, Seems reductive. My suspicion is that (...) if you attempt to boil down the occurrence of an event to the "obtaining" or "taking place" of a proposition-Like "state of affairs"--Or to the "exemplification" of a property by an "object"--At some "time", We have a residual event: a mysterious episode of "obtaining" or "exemplifying" in which either states of affairs or properties and objects participate. Reduction is unlikely. (shrink)

This essay argues that Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics, Jürgen Habermas's communication theory, and Jacques Derrida's deconstruction all fit together within one philosophical paradigm: metamodernism. Metamodernism, as defined, is opposed to both modernism and radical forms of postmodernism. Within metamodernism, a political conundrum provides the key clue for understanding the relations among Gadamer, Habermas, and Derrida as well as for elaborating the contours of the paradigm. Specifically, the political implications of the three philosophies are intransitive: they seem to shift around rather (...) than being in fixed relations to each other. So, for instance, Gadamer sometimes seems to the political right of both Habermas and Derrida, but then, at different times, he stands between them, and then again, at other times, he seems to be to the left of both. This political paradox suggests that the traditional political categories of liberalism and conservatism do not suitably reflect the critical positions within metamodernism. Gadamer, Habermas, and Derrida are far more concerned with explaining the possibility and techniques of interpretive and social critique, while remaining true to the metamodernist paradigm, rather than fitting themselves into the traditional liberal or conservative political camps. (shrink)

Two critical reviews of Discipline and Punish inspired an exchange between Foucault and some prominent historians in 1978. In the texts from this exchange, Foucault addresses their criticism that, by focusing on unrealized plans and programs, such as Bentham’s Panopticon, his book lacks a sense of historical reality. Foucault replies, first, that the true aim of his book is to explore the emergence of a new type of penal rationality, not to insist that the Panopticon itself has been realized. Second, (...) he holds that types of rationality can produce distinctive sorts of effects, regardless of whether the plans and programs to which they are attached are ever fully achieved. This paper seeks to clarify Foucault’s underlying account in these responses of rationality and its efficacy. It also takes up and develops Foucault’s suggestive distinction between two different types of effects: “effects in the real” and “reality effects.”. (shrink)

The information required for perception may be available in the energy arrays that stimulate sensory organs but in a form not directly suitable for the planning and execution of the organism's actions in the environment. The requisite form of information is obtained, with no loss of adequate perception, by representation of sensory stimuli in frames of reference determined by internal control signals producing actions. This process seems evolutionarily advantageous but makes perception essentially non-direct, regardless of the degree of intra- or (...) inter-modal sensory integration. (shrink)

Scholars in the U.S. have shown relatively little interest in the management of legal conflict over health care in other nations. This article examines the Japanese health care system, particularly litigation over medical malpractice, and asks what American scholars and policy makers can learn from the Japanese experience.

The cost of health care, its growing share of the gross domestic product, and dire predictions about the future are a major political and economic issue in the U.S. The American legal system is commonly viewed as a significant part of the problem, particularly by those who believe that medical providers engage in defensive medicine in an effort to avoid malpractice litigation. Yet scholars and commentators in the U.S. have shown relatively little interest in how other nations manage legal conflict (...) over health care and whether they might learn something from abroad about the relationship between malpractice litigation and the health care system more generally.To that end, this article analyzes the Japanese health care experience, specifically the management of what are variously called adverse outcomes, medical accidents, and medical malpractice. How frequently do Japanese patients sue their doctors? Are medical malpractice litigation rates in Japan rising? If so, what is being done to control the increase and its impact on medical care? How well is Japan doing when it comes to balancing the needs of patients who believe they are victims of medical negligence with those of providers who think they are being unfairly accused? These are the questions, about Japan, that need to be asked by those interested in the nexus of law and health care in the U.S. (shrink)