SummaryHuman height is a heritable trait that is known to be influenced by environmental factors and general standard of living. Individual and population stature is correlated with health, education and economic achievement. Strong sexual selection pressures for stature have been observed in multiple diverse populations, however; there is significant global variance in gender equality and prohibitions on female mate selection. This paper explores the contribution of general standard of living and gender inequality to the variance in global female population heights. (...) Female population heights of 96 nations were culled from previously published sources and public access databases. Factor analysis with United Nations international data on education rates, life expectancy, incomes, maternal and childhood mortality rates, ratios of gender participation in education and politics, the Human Development Index and the Gender Inequality Index was run. Results indicate that population heights vary more closely with gender inequality than with population health, income or education. (shrink)

J. G. A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner have led a recent onslaught on the alleged "myth of coherence" in the history of ideas. But their criticisms depend on mistaken views of the nature of mind: respectively, a form of social constructionism, and a focus on illocutionary intentions at the expense of beliefs. An investigation of the coherence constraints that do operate on our ascriptions of belief shows historians should adopt a presumption of coherence, concern themselves with coherence, and proceed (...) to reconstruct sets of beliefs as coherent wholes. The history of ideas merges history with aspects of philosophy, where philosophy is understood as the study of the grammar of our concepts. (shrink)

J. G. A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner have led a recent onslaught on the alleged ”myth of coherence“ in the history of ideas. But their criticisms depend on mistaken views of the nature of mind: respectively, a form of social constructionism, and a focus on illocutionary intentions at the expense of beliefs. An investigation of the coherence constraints that do operate on our ascriptions of belief shows historians should adopt a presumption of coherence, concern themselves with coherence, and proceed (...) to reconstruct sets of beliefs as coherent wholes. The history of ideas merges history with aspects of philosophy, where philosophy is understood as the study of the grammar of our concepts. (shrink)

Quentin Meillassoux’s 2006 After Finitude offered a sharp critique of the phenomenological project, charging that phenomenology was one of the “two principal media” of correlationism—ultimately reducible to an “extreme idealism.” Meillassoux grounds this accusation in an account of givenness that presupposes that “every variety of givenness” finds its genesis within the positing of the subject. However, this critique fails to hit its mark precisely because it presupposes an account of intuitive givenness that is entirely foreign to the phenomenological (...) project. Quite against Meillassoux’s conflation of givenness, the world-for-us, and the positing subject—the very centre of the phenomenological project is the recognition that intuitive givenness cannot be reduced to the constructive activity of the subject. Givenness is marked by a heterogeneity; givenness refers to what is given to us, not to what emerges from us. (shrink)

(2011). Mindfulness: diverse perspectives on its meaning, origins, and multiple applications at the intersection of science and dharma. Contemporary Buddhism: Vol. 12, Mindfulness: diverse perspectives on its meaning, origins, and multiple applications at the intersection of science and dharma, pp. 1-18. doi: 10.1080/14639947.2011.564811.

Artificial Neural Networks have reached “grandmaster” and even “super-human” performance across a variety of games, from those involving perfect information, such as Go, to those involving imperfect information, such as “Starcraft”. Such technological developments from artificial intelligence (AI) labs have ushered concomitant applications across the world of business, where an “AI” brand-tag is quickly becoming ubiquitous. A corollary of such widespread commercial deployment is that when AI gets things wrong—an autonomous vehicle crashes, a chatbot exhibits “racist” behavior, automated credit-scoring processes (...) “discriminate” on gender, etc.—there are often significant financial, legal, and brand consequences, and the incident becomes major news. As Judea Pearl sees it, the underlying reason for such mistakes is that “... all the impressive achievements of deep learning amount to just curve fitting.” The key, as Pearl suggests, is to replace “reasoning by association” with “causal reasoning” —the ability to infer causes from observed phenomena. It is a point that was echoed by Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis in a recent piece for theNew York Times: “we need to stop building computer systems that merely get better and better at detecting statistical patterns in data sets—often using an approach known as ‘Deep Learning’—and start building computer systems that from the moment of their assembly innately grasp three basic concepts: time, space, and causality.” In this paper, foregrounding what in 1949 Gilbert Ryle termed “a category mistake”, I will offer an alternative explanation for AI errors; it is not so much that AI machinery cannot “grasp” causality, but that AI machinery (qua computation) cannot understand anything at all. (shrink)

: Within both popular and academic literature, concerns have been expressed about the implications of antidepressant use on character development. In this paper, I identify specific versions of these worries and argue that they are misguided. I begin by arguing that the obligation to suffer if it will bring about a noble character is imagined. Legitimate concerns about character enhancement remain, but they do not count against most antidepressant use. Thus there is no moral prohibition against antidepressant use. Furthermore, some (...) of the calls for caution about antidepressant use, such as those expressed by the President's Council on Bioethics, are overstated. (shrink)

This is the last of the four essays in Part II of the book on liberalism and traditionalist education; all four are by authors who would like to find ways for the liberal state to honour the self-definitions of traditional cultures and to find ways of avoiding a confrontation with differences. One of the tasks of the book is to separate out different kinds of affiliation and the extent to which the arguments made about cultural recognition can be extended to (...) other objects of affiliation. Mark Halstead’s chapter on schooling and cultural maintenance for religious minorities in the liberal state provides a catalogue of the different types of groups that are to be found in liberal societies, and the different kinds of cultural and educational claims that are typically attached to each of them. His definition of minority group is useful in conceptualizing many of the papers in the volume. The chapter falls into three sections: Section 10.1, which looks at four types of disadvantaged minorities, attempts to distinguish non-Western fundamentalist religious minorities living in the West from other minorities that may experience disadvantage of various kinds in liberal societies; Section 10.2, on religious minorities in the liberal state, explores some of the educational and other difficulties encountered by such religious minorities in more detail, and typical liberal responses; Section 10.3, on rethinking the liberal response, contains some proposals that are designed to meet the educational needs of both the liberal state and the religious minorities at the same time. (shrink)

The first half of this Editorial examines the implications of the close link between morality and religion in Islamic thinking. There is no separate discipline of ethics in Islam, and the comparative importance of reason and revelation in determining moral values is open to debate. For most Muslims, what is considered halāl (permitted) and harām (forbidden) in Islam is understood in terms of what God defines as right and good. There are three main kinds of values: (a) akhlāq, which refers (...) to the duties and responsibilities set out in the shari‘ah and in Islamic teaching generally; (b) adab, which refers to the manners associated with good breeding; and (c) the qualities of character possessed by a good Muslim, following the example of the Prophet Muhammad. Among the main differences between Islamic and western morality are the emphasis on timeless religious principles, the role of the law in enforcing morality, the different understanding of rights, the rejection of moral autonomy as a goal of moral education and the stress on reward in the Hereafter as a motivator of moral behaviour. The remainder of the Editorial is concerned with the two main aspects of moral education in Islam: disseminating knowledge of what people should and should not do, and motivating them to act in accordance with that knowledge. Ultimately, moral education is about inner change, which is a spiritual matter and comes about through the internalisation of universal Islamic values. (shrink)

After a brief discussion of the concept of love and contemporary attitudes towards it, the article examines previously unpublished findings about children's ways of thinking about love, using evidence drawn from a research project on the developing sexual values of 9 and 10 year-old children. Love features extensively in their discussions and appears central to their worldview. They are aware of some of the complexities of love, and would value opportunities to discuss it further. The article concludes with a discussion (...) of current inadequacies and future possibilities in schools' provision. (shrink)

The Therapeutic Process presents an informative, sequential, well-defined, and clinically rich guide to the process of psychodynamic psychotherapy. Specifically designed to have broad appeal and value for the beginning clinician as well as the more experienced clinician, this book includes many illustrative examples and well-defined terms.

This absorbing and accessible book provides an analysis of the principles, policy and practice of sex education. Utilizing unpublished research, the authors critically examine sex education within the growing discourse on the teaching of values and citizenship education.