Background Payment of research participants helps to increase recruitment for research studies, but can pose ethical dilemmas. Research ethics committees (RECs) have a centrally important role in guiding this practice, but standardisation of the ethical approval process in Ireland is lacking. Aim Our aim was to examine REC policies, experiences and concerns with respect to the payment of participants in research projects in Ireland. Method Postal survey of all RECs in Ireland. Results Response rate was 62.5% (n=50). 80% of RECs (...) reported not to have any established policy on the payment of research subjects while 20% had refused ethics approval to studies because the investigators proposed to pay research participants. The most commonly cited concerns were the potential for inducement and undermining of voluntary consent. Conclusions There is considerable variability among RECs on the payment of research participants and a lack of clear consensus guidelines on the subject. The development of standardised guidelines on the payment of research subjects may enhance recruitment of research participants. (shrink)

This essay examines a recent line of thought in aesthetics that challenges realist-leaning aesthetic theories. According to this line of thought, aesthetic diversity and disagreement are good, and our aesthetic judgments, responses, and attachments are deeply personal and even identity-constituting. These facts are further used to support anti-realist theories of aesthetic normativity. I aim to achieve two goals: (1) to disentangle arguments concerning diversity, disagreement, and personality; and (2) to offer realist-friendly replies to all three.

This study allows us to re-establish in the Sanctuary of Apollo a new limestone pillar that is very similar in conception to the one commonly known as "Paul-Emile's pillar". This monument was thus also probably dedicated on the initiative of the king Perseus when he returned to favour at Delphi. Since a letter from Adeimantos to Poliorcetes (302) was inscribed on it, it is suggested that this pillar may have functioned as a vehicle for the a posteriori transcription of (...) various bits of archives serving Macedonian propagande, which thus sought to courtter the defamatory campaign orchestrated by the Senate (cf. the famous "manifesto against Perseus"). The very recent discovery of another inscribed block confirme this hypothesis: we may well have here a reflection in monumental and epigraphical form of the power struggles that preceded the third Macedonian War, the last great political event to have had a close impact on the Sanctuary of Apollo and its Amphictiony. (shrink)

Inner speech has been shown to vary in form along several dimensions. Along condensation, condensed inner speech forms have been described, that are supposed to be deprived of acoustic, phonological and even syntactic qualities. Expanded forms, on the other extreme, display articulatory and auditory properties. Along dialogality, inner speech can be monologal, when we engage in internal soliloquy, or dialogal, when we recall past conversations or imagine future dialogues involving our own voice as well as that of others addressing us. (...) Along intentionality, it can be intentional (when we deliberately rehearse material in short-term memory) or it can arise unintentionally (during mind wandering). We introduce the ConDialInt model, a neurocognitive predictive control model of inner speech that accounts for its varieties along these three dimensions. ConDialInt spells out the condensation dimension by including inhibitory control at the conceptualization, formulation or articulatory planning stage. It accounts for dialogality, by assuming internal model adaptations and by speculating on neural processes underlying perspective switching. It explains the differences between intentional and spontaneous varieties in terms of monitoring. We present an fMRI study in which we probed varieties of inner speech along dialogality and intentionality, to examine the validity of the neuroanatomical correlates posited in ConDialInt. Condensation was also informally tackled. Our data support the hypothesis that expanded inner speech recruits speech production processes down to articulatory planning, resulting in a predicted signal, the inner voice, with auditory qualities. Along dialogality, covertly using an avatar’s voice resulted in the activation of right hemisphere homologues of the regions involved in internal own-voice soliloquy and in cerebellar deactivation, consistent with internal model adaptation. Switching from first-person to third-person perspective resulted in activations in precuneus and parietal lobules. Along intentionality, compared with intentional inner speech, mind wandering with inner speech episodes was associated with greater bilateral inferior frontal activation and decreased activation in left temporal regions. This is consistent with the reported subjective evanescence and presumably reflects condensation processes. Our results provide neuroanatomical evidence compatible with predictive control and in favor of the assumptions made in the ConDialInt model. (shrink)

Orientalism and Religion offers us a timely discussion of the implications of contemporary post-colonial theory for the study of religion. Drawing on a variety of post-structuralist and post-colonial thinkers, including Foucault, Gadamer, Said, and Spivak, Richard King examines the way in which notions such as mysticism, religion, Hinduism and Buddhism are taken for granted, and shows us how religion needs to be redescribed along the lines of cultural studies.

Quel est l’étrange point commun qui réunit l’orientation spatiale, l’orientation sexuelle et l’orientalisme? Comment notre expérience intime de l’espace comme orienté et nos peurs de désorientation jouent-ils sur nos manières d’appréhender les dissidences de genre et de sexualité? Autant de questions que la phénoménologie de Sara Ahmed explore dans ce texte en s’interrogeant sur la manière dont les espaces que nous habitons redressent nos comportements et comment celleux qui désobéissent à cette rectitude sont lues comme étranges, obliques, bref : queer.

“Neural coding” is a popular metaphor in neuroscience, where objective properties of the world are communicated to the brain in the form of spikes. Here I argue that this metaphor is often inappropriate and misleading. First, when neurons are said to encode experimental parameters, the neural code depends on experimental details that are not carried by the coding variable. Thus, the representational power of neural codes is much more limited than generally implied. Second, neural codes carry information only by reference (...) to things with known meaning. In contrast, perceptual systems must build information from relations between sensory signals and actions, forming an internal model. Neural codes are inadequate for this purpose because they are unstructured and therefore unable to represent relations. Third, coding variables are observables tied to the temporality of experiments, whereas spikes are timed actions that mediate coupling in a distributed dynamical system. The coding metaphor tries to fit the dynamic, circular, and distributed causal structure of the brain into a linear chain of transformations between observables, but the two causal structures are incongruent. I conclude that the neural coding metaphor cannot provide a valid basis for theories of brain function, because it is incompatible with both the causal structure of the brain and the representational requirements of cognition. (shrink)

Avec l'extension du domaine du risque, consecutive aux avancees technologiques de tous ordres et a l'amplification des echanges a l'echelle planetaire, chacun porte desormais une responsabilite etendue, dans l'espace et le temps. Cette situation inedite, generatrice de nouveaux questionnements ethiques, met en lumiere un paradoxe: bien qu'essentielle dans un tel contexte, la notion de responsabilite semble avoir perdu de son sens et de sa clarte, comme dissimulee derriere la multiplicite de ses occurrences. Il devient ainsi decisif d'interroger a nouveau ce (...) concept: qu'est-ce que la responsabilite? Comment prendre une decision responsable face aux dilemmes moraux, juridiques, economiques, environnementaux, politiques, sociaux et societaux? Analysant a la fois les fondements philosophiques de la responsabilite et ses recentes metamorphoses, cet essai introduit autant a l'ethique appliquee, notamment dans le domaine des affaires et du management, qu'il suggere une nouvelle forme de sagesse pratique, singuliere et incarnee, centree sur l'exercice quotidien de vertus adaptees aux enjeux du monde contemporain. (shrink)

Integrated information theory postulates that a conscious experience depends on a repertoire of hypothetical experiences. This makes consciousness depend on the context that constrains the set of possibilities and on the scenarios imagined by the external observer, and not only on the system itself.

The neural coding metaphor is so ubiquitous that we tend to forget its metaphorical nature. What do we mean when we assert that neurons encode and decode? What kind of causal and representational model of the brain does the metaphor entail? What lies beneath the neural coding metaphor, I argue, is a bureaucratic model of the brain.

As environmental degradation becomes a growing concern, this article argues that the development of international law on climate change expresses the deep social contradictions between accumulation and reproduction under capitalism. These contradictions are translated into the creation of a form of public property over the right to emit greenhouse gases. This public property is unequally distributed amongst states in an imperialist manner. The distribution of these rights at the domestic level amounts to the distribution of rights to climate rent. Contrary (...) to popular accounts of the ‘commodification’ of nature, I argue that emission rights are not ‘commodities’, and emissions trading and carbon markets are not ‘accumulation strategies’. These are merely depoliticised forms in which climate rent is extracted and circulates to preclude political debates about the goals of production. (shrink)

This paper shows that low-level generalisations in argument structure constructions are crucial to understanding the concept of alternation: low-level generalisations inform and constrain more schematic generalisations and thus constructional meaning. On the basis of an analysis of the causative alternation in English, and more specifically of the theme, I show that each construction has its own schematic meaning. This analysis is conducted on a dataset composed of 11,554 instances of the intransitive non-causative construction and the transitive causative construction. The identification (...) of lower-level generalisations feeds into the idea that language acquisition is organic and abstractions are formed only gradually from exposure to input. So far, most of the literature on argument structure constructions has focused on the verb itself, and thus fails to capture these generalisations. I make up for this deficit through an in-depth analysis of the causative alternation. (shrink)

The role of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) in mate choice in humans is controversial. Nowadays, the availability of genetic variation data at genomic scales allows for a careful assessment of this question. In 2008, Chaix et al. reported evidence for MHC‐dependent mate choice among European American spouses from the HapMap 2 dataset. Recently, Derti et al. suggested that this observation was not robust. Furthermore, when Derti et al. applied similar analyses to the HapMap 3 European American samples, they did (...) not see a significant effect. Although some of the points raised by Derti et al. are relevant, we disagree with the reported absence of evidence for MHC‐dependent mate choice within the HapMap samples. More precisely, we show here that the MHC dissimilarity among HapMap 3 European American spouses is still extreme in comparison to the rest of the genome, even after multiple testing correction. This finding supports the hypothesis of MHC‐dependent mate choice in some human populations. (shrink)

Essai général sur le philosophe et prosateur chinois Tchouang-Tseu dont l'oeuvre se situe à l'origine du taoïsme philosophique et religieux. Ses leçons métaphysiques, son ironie contre toute forme d'autorité s'épanouissent sous forme de dialogues, fables et historiettes que l'auteur interprète et commente pour en dégager les enjeux.

This article offers a reading of Sartre's phenomenological ontology in light of the pre-modern understanding of ‘transcendentals’ as universal properties and predicates of all determinate beings. Drawing on Sartre's transcendental account of nothingness in his early critique of Husserl as well as his discussion of ‘determination as negation’ in Being and Nothingness, this article argues that Sartre's universal predicate of ‘the not’ (le non) could be understood in a similar light to the medieval scholastic conception of transcendentals. But whereas the (...) scholastics saw the transcendental properties of oneness, truth, and goodness as reflections of God's divine perfections, Sartre's predicate of the ‘not’ operates as an atheistic transcendental which signifies the non-being of God – that God is not. By comparing Sartre's phenomenological ontology to medieval theological metaphysics, this article not only highlights the atheist underpinnings of Sartre's entire ontological schema in Being and Nothingness but also offers a new way of interpreting Sartre as a systematic transcendental metaphysician. (shrink)

The stratum-specific treatment effect function is a random variable giving the average treatment effect (ATE) for a randomly drawn stratum of potential confounders a clinician may use to assign treatment. In addition to the ATE, the variance of the stratum-specific treatment effect function is fundamental in determining the heterogeneity of treatment effect values. We offer a non-parametric plug-in estimator, the targeted maximum likelihood estimator (TMLE) and the cross-validated TMLE (CV-TMLE), to simultaneously estimate both the average and variance of the stratum-specific (...) treatment effect function. The CV-TMLE is preferable because it guarantees asymptotic efficiency under two conditions without needing entropy conditions on the initial fits of the outcome model and treatment mechanism, as required by TMLE. Particularly, in circumstances where data adaptive fitting methods are very important to eliminate bias but hold no guarantee of satisfying the entropy condition, we show that the CV-TMLE sampling distributions maintain normality with a lower mean squared error than TMLE. In addition to verifying the theoretical properties of TMLE and CV-TMLE through simulations, we highlight some of the challenges in estimating the variance of the treatment effect, which lack double robustness and might be biased if the true variance is small and sample size insufficient. (shrink)

"The fixed person for fixed duties, who in older societies was such a godsend, in the future ill be a public danger." Twenty years ago, a single legal metaphor accurately captured the role that American society accorded to physicians. The physician was "c- tain of the ship." Physicians were in charge of the clinic, the Operating room, and the health care team, responsible - and held accountabl- for all that happened within the scope of their supervision. This grant of responsibility (...) carried with it a corresponding grant of authority; like the ship's captain, the physician was answerable to no one regarding the practice of his art. However compelling the metaphor, few would disagree that the mandate accorded to the medical profession by society is changing. As a result of pressures from a number of diverse directions - including technological advances, the development of new health professionals, changes in health care financing and delivery, the recent emphasis on consumer choice and patients' rights - what our society expects phy- cians to do and to be is different now. The purpose of this volume is to examine and evaluate the conceptual foundations and the moral imp- cations of that difference. Each of the twelve essays of this volume assesses the current and future validity of the "captain of the ship" metaphor from a different perspective. The essays are grouped into four sections. In Section I, Russell Maulitz explores the physician's role historically. (shrink)

This article offers a reading of the “transcendental” character of Alain Badiou’s and Giorgio Agamben’s ontologies. While neither Badiou nor Agamben are “transcendental” philosophers in the Kantian sense, this article argues that their respective projects of ontology both recover aspects of the “classical” conception of the transcendentals. Not unlike how pre-modern philosophers conceived of oneness, truth and goodness as transcendental properties of all things, both Badiou’s and Agamben’s ontologies present various structures which can be universally predicated of all being. However, (...) as opposed to the essentialist or even theological tendencies of traditional metaphysics, Badiou’s and Agamben’s ontologies are committedly “inessential” and atheistic at their very core. By replacing the divine names of the one, the true and the good in traditional metaphysics with a new yet quasi-classical transcendental notion of “the void” as a universal predicate of all beings, Badiou’s and Agamben’s works may be regarded as projects that go beyond both the pre-Kantian “theological” and the post-Kantian “subjective” conceptions of transcendental philosophy, thereby marking a new development in the history of western metaphysics. (shrink)

The development of art marketing as a new field of management occurs in a context of great confusion as to what constitutes the very definition of art, one aspect of this confusion being nothing else but the confusion between art and marketing itself. This confusion leads to conflicts between those who consider that art should be defined by a clear aesthetic criterion and those who accept the absence of such a criterion as a legitimate consequence of the principle of freedom (...) which applies both to the creation of the artist and to the taste of the public. This state of confusion does not seem to be experienced in the same way in France where it has tended to be considered as a symptom of crisis in the world of art and in the United States where it has raised as a dominant force in contemporary art. Hence the confusion of art and marketing varies as a function of time (as shown by the emergence of a new field of management) and of space (as shown by the comparison of the French and American cases). It will be proposed that it is possible to account for these historical fluctuation thanks to an institutional approach based on the notion of system of legitimacy. We shall propose the essentially dynamic institutional foundations of modernity leading to the proliferation of innovations which consequences are ever more difficult to anticipate as a reason why, in America, philosophers coming from the analytic tradition found it meaningful to address questions such as “What is art” (Arthur Danto) or “When is there art” (Nelson Goodman”) expressing the need to go beyond pragmatism as expressed by John Dewey’s Art as Experience to promote a positive attitude towards contemporary art, while, in France confusion between art and marketing has been commonly considered negatively as the sign of the triumph of the most radical form of rhetoric, i.e. sophism. (shrink)

Followers of Wittgenstein allegedly once held that a meaningful claim to know that p could only be made if there was some doubt about the truth of p. The correct response to this thesis involved appealing to the distinction between the semantic content of a sentence and features attaching to its use. It is inappropriate to assert a knowledge-claim unless someone in the audience has doubt about what the speaker claims to know. But this fact has nothing to do with (...) the semantic content of knowledgeascriptions; it is entirely explicable by appeal to pragmatic facts about felicitous assertion. (shrink)

Transcranial alternating-current stimulation in the frequency range of 1–100 Hz has come to be used routinely in electroencephalogram studies of brain function through entrainment of neuronal oscillations. It turned out, however, to be highly non-trivial to remove the strong stimulation signal, including its harmonic and non-harmonic distortions, as well as various induced higher-order artifacts from the EEG data recorded during the stimulation. In this paper, we discuss some of the problems encountered and present methodological approaches aimed at overcoming them. To (...) illustrate the mechanisms of artifact induction and the proposed removal strategies, we use data obtained with the help of a schematic demonstrator setup as well as human-subject data. (shrink)

Psychiatry is becoming a cognitive neuroscience. This new paradigm not only aims to give new ways for explaining mental diseases by naturalizing them, but also to have an influence on different levels of psychiatric norms. We tried here to verify whether a biological paradigm is able to fulfill this normative goal. We analyzed three main normative assumptions that is to say the will of giving psychiatry a valid nosology, a rigorous definition of what is a mental disease, and new tools (...) for destigmatizing mentally ill patients. Although these different kinds of normativity are very heterogeneous, we must conclude that, in all these cases, biological psychiatry is a failure, in part because of a lack of epistemological conceptualization. (shrink)

Les mots nous manquent pour dire le plus banal des paysages. Vite à court de phrases, nous sommes incapables de faire le portrait d'une orée. Un pré, déjà, nous met à la peine, que grêlent l'aigremoine, le cirse et l'ancolie. Il n'en a pourtant pas toujours été ainsi. Au temps de Goethe et de Humboldt, le rêve d'une " histoire naturelle " attentive à tous les êtres, sans restriction ni distinction aucune, s'autorisait des forces combinées de la science et de (...) la littérature pour élever la " peinture de paysage " au rang d'un savoir crucial. La galaxie et le lichen, l'enfant et le papillon voisinaient alors en paix dans un même récit. Ce n'est pas que l'homme comptait peu : c'est que tout comptait infiniment. Des croquis d'Alfred Wallace aux " proêmes " de Francis Ponge, des bestiaires de William Swainson aux sonnets de Rainer Maria Rilke, ce livre donne à entendre le chant, aussi tenace que ténu, d'un très ancien savoir sur le monde - un savoir qui répertorie les êtres par concordances de teintes et de textures, compose avec leurs lueurs des dictionnaires éphémères, s'abîme et s'apaise dans le spectacle de leurs métamorphoses. (shrink)

Les femmes ont toujours travaillé, mais à quel prix? L’ouvrage de la sociologue et féministe Elisabetta Pernigotti, paru à titre posthume en avril 2018, repose sur un constat poignant. L’indépendance des femmes conquise par l’accession généralisée au marché du travail est une construction fallacieuse dissimulant une position largement inégalitaire dans leurs activités professionnelles. Dans la lignée des récents travaux de la feminist labour history, cette étude, issue d’une thèse de doctora...

Whereas Western moral philosophy has mainly accounted for recurrent failed or irrational actions through the concept of weakness of will, many early Chinese texts on self-cultivation, notably the Zhuangzi, stand for a philosophical position that explains our frustrations and failures as an "excess of the will." Leaving aside external factors such as accidents or mistakes, this essay explores the sources of thwarted plans and frustrated expectations that are due to factors internal to the individual—more precisely, to the nature of intentional (...) conscience. Such a view was generally inadmissible in Western moral philosophy, which revolves around the paradigm of a causal agent endowed with a 'muscular ethics' for which all that is desired, and indeed all that is achieved, may only be a direct effect of the will. In striking contrast to this orientation, the Zhuangzi presents a variety of situations in which things do not happen as planned because we were too aware of the plan that guided us. Here, I will use Jon Elster's concept of by-product states in order to explore this contrast between two contending models of action that, far from being culturally rooted, express an inner criticism in both traditions, European and Chinese. (shrink)

This is a paper about the nature of snobbery and the undermining import of a charge of snobbery. On my account, snobs sincerely attempt to identify and correctly evaluate the aesthetically relevant features of an object, but they get things wrong, and their getting things wrong is explained by the fact that they under-value that which they associate with being lower-class. We can see the need for this account by reflecting on examples, and can distinguish it from existing accounts of (...) snobbery by thinking about when and why evidence of snobbery constitutes higher-order evidence against one’s aesthetic judgements. Existing accounts either are consistent with snobs’ aesthetic judgements being flawless, and thus not undermined by evidence of snobbery, or they imply that the canonical reasoning-process for arriving at aesthetic judgements has been bypassed altogether. On my account, by contrast, snobbery does not bypass the canonical aesthetic reasoning-process but distorts it in systematic and predictable ways. (shrink)