Sounding the Abyss achieves an analysis that extends Cavell's already rich range of work into surprising new directions in postcolonialism, multiculturalism, and general cultural criticism. The work never strays from its concern with reassessing the divide between philosophy's analytic and Continental factions.

Previous research has demonstrated electroencephalogram (EEG) changes in response to low-odor concentrations, resulting in near-chance detection. Such findings have been taken as evidence for olfaction without awareness. We replicated and extended previous work by examining EEG responses to water-water control, 0.0001, 0.001, 0.01, and 1 ppm isoamyl acetate (IAA) in water paired with water only. Detection was above chance (>50%) for .001 and above, and alpha decreased only to those concentrations, suggesting that EEG changes corresponded to IAA awareness. However, when (...) correct trial EEGs were compared to incorrect trial EEGs during .001 ppm, right posterior/central alpha decreased during incorrect trials and alpha decreased more globally (including frontal sites) during correct trials. These data may not reflect awareness or unawareness per se. Instead, results are discussed regarding activation of perceptual systems in the posterior region during incorrect trials and the activation of frontal action systems during a subset of correct trials. (shrink)

Human cooperation is highly unusual. We live in large groups composed mostly of non-relatives. Evolutionists have proposed a number of explanations for this pattern, including cultural group selection and extensions of more general processes such as reciprocity, kin selection, and multi-level selection acting on genes. Evolutionary processes are consilient; they affect several different empirical domains, such as patterns of behavior and the proximal drivers of that behavior. In this target article, we sketch the evidence from five domains that bear on (...) the explanatory adequacy of cultural group selection and competing hypotheses to explain human cooperation. Does cultural transmission constitute an inheritance system that can evolve in a Darwinian fashion? Are the norms that underpin institutions among the cultural traits so transmitted? Do we observe sufficient variation at the level of groups of considerable size for group selection to be a plausible process? Do human groups compete, and do success and failure in competition depend upon cultural variation? Do we observe adaptations for cooperation in humans that most plausibly arose by cultural group selection? If the answer to one of these questions is “no,” then we must look to other hypotheses. We present evidence, including quantitative evidence, that the answer to all of the questions is “yes” and argue that we must take the cultural group selection hypothesis seriously. If culturally transmitted systems of rules (institutions) that limit individual deviance organize cooperation in human societies, then it is not clear that any extant alternative to cultural group selection can be a complete explanation. (shrink)

Gil R, Arroyo-Anllo EM, Ingrand P, Gil M, Neau JP, Ornon C, Bonnaud V. Self-consciousness and Alzheimer’s disease. Acta Neurol Scand 2001: 104: 296–300. # Munksgaard 2001. Objectives – To propose a neuropsychological study of the various aspects of self-consciousness (SC) in Alzheimer’s disease. Methods – Forty-five patients with probable mild or moderate AD were included in the study. Severity of their dementia was assessed by the Mini Mental State (MMS). Fourteen questions were prepared to evaluate SC. Results – No (...) significant correlations were found between SC score and educational level, age, and duration of disease. A significant correlation was found between SC score and the severity of dementia, whereas frontal disturbances were just short of the significance threshold. The various aspects of SC were not impaired to the same degree. The most disturbed ones were awareness of cognitive deficiencies, moral judgements and prospective memory. The least disturbed aspects were awareness of identity and of mental representation of the body. Items relating to anosognosia and moral judgements were significantly correlated with the MMS score, whereas affective state, body representation disorders, prospective memory, and capacities for introspection were not related to the severity of the dementia. Consciousness of identity was sound, regardless of MMS score. Conclusions – AD clearly induces an heterogeneous impairment of SC. SC requires a convergence of many neural networks. In AD, neuronal alterations involve many cortical areas and information sent to the associative frontal cortex from memory, language and visuospatial areas is lacking or disturbed. Thus, the sequential order of successive stimuli cannot be maintained by the heteromodal associative cortex (dorsal convexity of the prefrontal cortex), and the supramodal associative cortex (located rostrally in the frontal lobes) is unable to provide reliable monitoring and assessment of simultaneous neural cognitive networks carrying insufficient and inadequate input. The core deficiency in AD patients might be impaired SC equated with the disability to maintain sequential and simultaneous ‘‘attention to life’’. The Self-Consciousness Questionnaire, a clinical scale providing multidimensional measurement, indicates that different aspects of consciousness are not correlated with overall cognitive deficiency as determined by the MMSE. (shrink)

With an upsurge of interest and investment in new legal technologies comes consideration of who is making them and whether these individuals or entities should be subject to regulation. This article looks at how such regulation might function in light of the existing regulatory regimes governing lawyers and the capacities of legal regulators. It considers the ramifications both of maintaining the existing system, or in extending some form of regulation to these new entrants to the legal services market.

With an upsurge of interest and investment in new legal technologies comes consideration of who is making them and whether these individuals or entities should be subject to regulation. This article looks at how such regulation might function in light of the existing regulatory regimes governing lawyers and the capacities of legal regulators. It considers the ramifications both of maintaining the existing system, or in extending some form of regulation to these new entrants to the legal services market.

Despite establishing the gendered construction of infertility, most research on the subject has not examined how individuals with such reproductive difficulty negotiate their own sense of gender. I explore this gap through 58 interviews with women who are medically infertile and involuntarily childless. In studying how women achieve their gender, I reveal the importance of the body to such construction. For the participants, there is not just a motherhood mandate in the United States, but a fertility mandate—women are not just (...) supposed to mother, they are supposed to procreate. Given this understanding, participants maintain their gender by denying their infertile status. They do so through reliance on essentialist notions, using their bodies as a means of constructing a gendered sense of self. Using the tenets of transgender theory, this study not only informs our understanding of infertility, but also our broader understanding of the relationship between gender, identity, and the body, exposing how individuals negotiate their gender through physical as well as institutional and social constraints. (shrink)

The cultural construction of motherhood represents women of low socioeconomic status as excessively fertile, placing them outside of the infertility discourse. Previous research on infertility reinforces poor women’s exclusion by focusing on the experiences of women receiving medical treatment, typically women of high SES. In this article, the author explores how 20 poor and working-class women negotiate their experiences of infertility. In-depth interviews expose the contextual experiences of infertility among women of low SES, specifically revealing the structural inequality apparent within (...) those experiences. The women are not passive objects of dominant discourses; they are active subjects in resisting, redefining, and accepting the discourses according to their contexts. Women of low SES are outsiders—within to dominant understandings and resolutions to infertility. Their unique insights not only provide a more nuanced understanding of infertility but they also begin to deconstruct the stratified system of reproduction. (shrink)

It is imperative that creative techniques be designed for the conduct of active conflict. The failure to explore alternatives to violent force is fostered by an inbred literature which is preoccupied with descriptive analyses of small group conflict or with policy and the implications of nuclear warfare. An entirely new concept is required based upon the union of technique with theory. Psychoanalytic experience with intrapsychic conflict should be brought to bear upon problems of large-scale conflict in a manner not yet (...) attempted. The central questions and their answers may require the fielding of an experimental corps to refine constructive techniques for engaging in conflict. (shrink)

_BMC Medical Ethics_ is an open access journal publishing original peer-reviewed research articles in relation to the ethical aspects of biomedical research and clinical practice, including professional choices and conduct, medical technologies, healthcare systems and health policies. _BMC __Medical Ethics _is part of the _BMC_ series which publishes subject-specific journals focused on the needs of individual research communities across all areas of biology and medicine. We do not make editorial decisions on the basis of the interest of a study or (...) its likely impact. Studies must be scientifically valid; for research articles this includes a scientifically sound research question, the use of suitable methods and analysis, and following community-agreed standards relevant to the research field. Specific criteria for other article types can be found in the submission guidelines. _BMC series - open, inclusive and trusted_. (shrink)

Each contributor to this book has used personal experience as the basis from which to frame his individual sociological perspectives. Because they have personalized their work, their accounts are real, and recognizable as having come from 'real' persons, about 'real' experiences. There are no objectively-distanced disembodied third person entities in these accounts. These writers are actual people whose stories will make you laugh, cry, think, and want to know more.

Roger North's The Musicall Grammarian 1728 is a treatise on musical eloquence in all its branches. Of its five parts, I and II, on the orthoepy, orthography and syntax of music, constitute a grammar; III and IV, on the arts of invention and communication, form a rhetoric; and V, on etymology, consists of a history. Two substantial chapters of commentary introduce the text, which is edited here for the first time in its entirety: Jamie Kassler places his treatise within (...) the broader context not only of North's musical and non-musical writings but also their relation to the intellectual ferment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and Mary Chan describes physical and textual aspects of the treatise as evidence for North's processes of thinking about musical thinking. (shrink)

Perspectives on Quine, now available in paperback, is a collection of twenty-one new essays dealing with the thought of America's most distinguished living philosopher, Willard Van Orman Quine. After the editors' brief introduction to Quine's thought, the volume opens with an important new essay by Quine entitled Three Indeterminacies. The essays that follow, written by leading philosophers, are rich with insights into a wide variety of Quine's concerns ranging from logic and set theory to natural language, truth, evidence, natural kinds, (...) naturalized epistemology, and much more. Each essay concludes with a summary and response from Quine himself. (shrink)