Identifying biomarkers of developing mental disorder is crucial to improving early identification and treatment—a key strategy for reducing the burden of mental disorders. Cross-frequency coupling between two different frequencies of neural oscillations is one such promising measure, believed to reflect synchronization between local and global networks in the brain. Specifically, in adults phase–amplitude coupling (PAC) has been shown to be involved in a range of cognitive processes, including working and long-term memory, attention, language, and fluid intelligence. Evidence suggests that increased (...) PAC mediates both temporary and lasting improvements in working memory elicited by transcranial direct-current stimulation and reductions in depressive symptoms after transcranial magnetic stimulation. Moreover, research has shown that abnormal patterns of PAC are associated with depression and schizophrenia in adults. PAC is believed to be closely related to cortico-cortico white matter (WM) microstructure, which is well established in the literature as a structural mechanism underlying mental health. Some cognitive findings have been replicated in adolescents and abnormal patterns of PAC have also been linked to ADHD in young people. However, currently most research has focused on cross-sectional adult samples. Whereas initial hypotheses suggested that PAC was a state-based measure due to an early focus on cognitive, task-based research, current evidence suggests that PAC has both state-based and stable components. Future longitudinal research focusing on PAC throughout adolescent development could further our understanding of the relationship between mental health and cognition and facilitate the development of new methods for the identification and treatment of youth mental health. (shrink)

Women have achieved lasting social change since the Sixties, but not because of Feminist politics. The vast majority of women have been empowered instead by popular culture, which gave them vital economic power and political significance as consumers. Factors like the marginalization of men under Margaret Thatcher, and Tony Blair's making government part of popular culture, combined to make women the dominant political force in our society. Yet by the very nature of the popular culture that empowered them - trivial, (...) emotional and irrational - women have brought about change in crucial aspects of our society which now threaten the democratic system itself. (shrink)

This paper aims to show that the pivotal notion in John Searle's account of the unconscious, despite his representation of Freud's position, is found in Freud's work as part of a very similar view of the issues surrounding the concept of the unconscious. The pivotal notion in question consists in treating the concept of the unconscious as a vocabulary without ontological commitment which Searle claims we must do for the following reason: to reconcile what he considers to be the dualistic (...) concept of the unconscious with an ontology of the mental which recognises no states but conscious states and states of the neurophysiology with the capacity to cause them. The role of the concept in Searle's account is explained. Then his representation of Freud is challenged: firstly, by explicating how Freud accepted that the concept of the unconscious entailed no ontological commitment and, secondly, by showing how this fitted into his wider thinking on how the concept of the unconscious could be understood in terms of a vocabulary, leading ultimately to a justification of the concept of the unconscious in terms of explanatory power. On the basis of this exposition, Searle's charge of dualism against Freud is disputed. (shrink)

This paper aims to show that the pivotal notion in John Searle's account of the unconscious, despite his representation of Freud's position, is found in Freud's work as part of a very similar view of the issues surrounding the concept of the unconscious. The pivotal notion in question consists in treating the concept of the unconscious as a vocabulary without ontological commitment which Searle claims we must do for the following reason: to reconcile what he considers to be the dualistic (...) concept of the unconscious with an ontology of the mental which recognises no states but conscious states and states of the neurophysiology with the capacity to cause them. The role of the concept in Searle's account is explained. Then his representation of Freud is challenged: firstly, by explicating how Freud accepted that the concept of the unconscious entailed no ontological commitment and, secondly, by showing how this fitted into his wider thinking on how the concept of the unconscious could be understood in terms of a vocabulary, leading ultimately to a justification of the concept of the unconscious in terms of explanatory power. On the basis of this exposition, Searle's charge of dualism against Freud is disputed. (shrink)

This volume addresses the relationship between law and neoliberalism. Assembling work from established and emerging legal scholars, political theorists, philosophers, historians and sociologists from around the world, including the Americas, Australia, Europe and the United Kingdom, it addresses the conceptual, legal, and political relationships between liberal legality and neoliberal economics. More specifically, the book analyses the role that legality plays in the dominant economic force of our time: offering both a legal corrective to scholarship in economics and political economy that (...) has paid insufficient attention to legal ideas and, at the same time, a political economic corrective to legal scholarship which has only recently turned to theorizing neoliberalism. It will be of enormous interest to those working at the intersection of law and politics in our neoliberal age. (shrink)

Parents in Iran, China and the United States were asked 1) about their potential influence on their children’s religious and scientific views and 2) to consider a situation in which their children expressed dissent. Iranian and US parents endorsed their influence on the children’s beliefs in the two domains. By contrast, Chinese parents claimed more influence in the domain of science than religion. Most parents spoke of influencing their children via Parent-only mechanisms in each domain, although US parents did spontaneously (...) note Multiple sources for the transmission of religious views. Parents proposed a similar stance towards children’s dissenting religious and scientific views. Chinese and US parents were more likely to express Supportive approaches and Iranian parents were more likely to express a Directive approach by comparison. The present research informs our understanding of the cultural transmission of views about science and religion. (shrink)

The emergence of complex deep-learning models capable of producing novel images on a practically innumerable number of subjects and in an equally wide variety of artistic styles is beginning to highlight serious inadequacies in the ethical, aesthetic, epistemological and legal frameworks we have so far used to categorise art. To begin tackling these issues and identifying a role for AI in the production and protection of human artwork, it is necessary to take a multidisciplinary approach which considers current legal precedents, (...) the practice of software engineering, historical attitudes towards technological innovation and a sustained technical analysis of the models themselves. This paper queries the location and nature of substantive artistic work in the developmental stages of an AI-generated image, offering critiques of existing assumptions and posing questions for future research. The emergence of convincing AI creative output, artistic or literary, has significant long-term implications for the humanities, including the need for re-appraisal of foundational ideas about authorship and creativity in general. The effects of artificial intelligence, whether generalised or task-specific, cannot be ignored or displaced now that easy-access, scalable image and text production is a reality. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Drawing upon cross-sectional research with pre- and in-service police officers in the U.K. (N = 571), this paper reports on the moral reasoning strategies favored by the respondents in dealing with bespoke work-related moral quandaries specific to the professional practice of policing. The dominant form of moral reasoning in dealing with those dilemmas was deontological (rule-based). The second most frequently selected reasoning strategy was virtue ethical. Further analysis of the police research data indicated that those with an undergraduate degree (...) were significantly more likely to adopt virtue ethical and consequentialist-utilitarian reasoning strategies than those who did not have an undergraduate degree. (shrink)

Giorgio Agamben's The Kingdom and the Glory opens by intervening in a debate between the jurist Carl Schmitt and the theologian Erik Peterson. Peterson's “Monotheism as a Political Problem” undermined Schmitt's thesis that the modern concept of sovereignty derives from Christian theology by arguing that divine monarchy is a Judaic and Greek idea that was liquidated by the doctrine of the Trinity. Agamben, by contrast, argues that the Trinity preserves and transforms the model of divine monarchy by casting God as (...) singular in his being and multiple in his management of the world. I argue that this critique of Peterson in fact builds upon the “Monotheism” essay, which shows how political theologians inherited and rearticulated conceptual problems derived from Aristotle's Metaphysics, and is driven by Agamben's concern with the impact of Aristotle's thought on ontology and politics. (shrink)

Ofsted requires UK schools to help students understand the working world and gain employability skills. However, the aims of education are much broader: Education should enable flourishing long after leaving school. Therefore, students’ career decisions should be conducive to long-term flourishing beyond career readiness and educational attainment. In this mixed-methods study, we asked a representative sample of UK adults to reflect on their career decision-making processes at school and at university. We also measured current levels of self-reported objective (e.g., financial (...) security) and subjective (e.g., subjective well-being) flourishing. The open-ended career decision reflections were coded for three moral reasoning strategies: virtue ethical, consequentialist, and deontological. Using correlations and structural equation modelling, we examined the association between the propensity for using each moral reasoning strategy in past career decisions and current flourishing. Virtue ethical moral reasoning in relation to career decision-making predicted aspects of flourishing most strongly and frequently. Consequentialist reasoning weakly and infrequently positively predicted aspects of flourishing. Deontological reasoning either did not predict flourishing at all, or negatively predicted flourishing. Our results suggest that the reasoning strategy behind career decisions people take in school or university is important to consider in UK careers provision, and current best practice. (shrink)

In this interview, Vicki Kirby discusses her research into the relationship between nature and culture, focusing in particular on her recent edited collection, What If Culture Was Nature All Along? The volume appears in the ‘New Materialisms’ series, and so the interview begins by situating the collection with respect to the recent materialist turn in social theory. Kirby discusses the influence of deconstruction on her thought, and the way that she draws upon Derrida to think through recent research in the (...) life sciences and its implications for understanding the relationship between matter, life, and communication. She also goes into the political implications of her work and the relationship between biopolitics and biodeconstruction. (shrink)

These 12 essays give you new perspectives on how Agamben's work is increasingly relevant to economy and political action: the two ideas that frame the most pressing problems of global politics. New analyses of Agamben's recent work on government and his relationship to the revolutionary tradition opening up new ways of thinking about politics and critical theory in the post-financial crisis world. Contributors: Daniel McLoughlin Giorgio Agamben Jason E. Smith Jessica Whyte Justin Clemens Mathew Abbott Miguel Vatter Nicholas Heron (...) Sergei Prozorov Simone Bignall Steven DeCaroli. (shrink)

This article examines whether the gender balance on the High Court of Australia has disrupted the gender regime. In so doing it considers the first lead judgments of the three women judges who sat concurrently on the High Court of Australia between 2009 and early 2015. The High Court has adopted an interesting informal practice of welcoming new judges whereby the newest member authors the lead judgment and their judicial colleagues offer a one-line concurrence. The way in which judicial authority (...) is conferred in these judgments is reminiscent of the space in political spheres where an incumbent has their first opportunity to set out their identity and agenda in a speech free of the noise of dissent or debate; the ‘maiden’ speech. In that space the price an incumbent pays for comity is conformity. This article contends that the first judgment is a useful way of situating a discussion about women judges’ contributions vis-à-vis difference by querying the extent to which the woman judge can ever shake-off her status as the maiden bound to conform for the sake of comity. (shrink)

The scientific transformation of the hermeneutic art has been the common goal for the various formalist-structuralist programs of interpretation that have dominated human studies in our century - such as New Criticism in literary analysis, the formalist programs in art history and musicology, the Gestalt and Freudian psychology, structuralism in linguistics and anthropology, etc. In this volume, these formalist-structuralist programs shall be called structural programs of interpretation in Europe and America.

In this broad-scale theoretical work, McLoughlin proposes a new set of disciplines for human science, based on a relativist view of knowledge and a naturalist view of human nature. McLoughlin addresses the major current issues of the philosophy of social science and designs his theory for cross-cultural application. He also offers an explanation of the relationships among the biological, psychological, and sociological sciences. Philosophers of science, especially social science, will appreciate this work, as will all scholars interested in (...) the understanding and explanation of past and present human behavior. (shrink)

Technical Graphics is one of the technology subjects taught at Junior Certificate level in post- primary schools in Ireland. The Junior Certificate examination is held at the end of the Junior Cycle in post-primary schools, which caters for students aged from 12 to 15 years. As a teacher of Technical Graphics for the past seven years, I have gained a great understanding and insight into the different topics in the subject and how they are perceived by students. I concur with (...) the State Examinations Commission report (2008) that students lack an understanding of the rotation element of transformation geometry, one of the six topics covered on the Junior Cycle Technical Graphics course. The purpose of this study is to implement a new teaching methodology through the use of SolidWorks in an effort to improve the students’ visualization, spatial awareness and understanding of transformation geometry. I engaged in an action research study of my own practice as I investigated if SolidWorks could actually be used at Junior Certificate level to improve student understanding of transformation geometry. The action research took place over a five-week period and included three cycles of research. The research was carried out with a third-year Junior Cycle group aged between fifteen and sixteen years of age and all students in the class took part in the study. The first stage of the research examined student progress as they worked through the topic following teacher instruction on SolidWorks. The second stage of the research examined the students’ progress as they used the software for themselves. I carried out an assessment task with students towards the end of the study, which showed that student learning had improved in comparison to previous years. (shrink)

Five‐ to 11‐year‐old U.S. children, from either a religious or secular background, judged whether story events could really happen. There were four different types of stories: magical stories violating ordinary causal regularities; religious stories also violating ordinary causal regularities but via a divine agent; unusual stories not violating ordinary causal regularities but with an improbable event; and realistic stories not violating ordinary causal regularities and with no improbable event. Overall, children were less likely to judge that religious and magical stories (...) could really happen than unusual and realistic stories although religious children were more likely than secular children to judge that religious stories could really happen. Irrespective of background, children frequently invoked causal regularities in justifying their judgments. Thus, in justifying their conclusion that a story could really happen, children often invoked a causal regularity, whereas in justifying their conclusion that a story could not really happen, they often pointed to the violation of causal regularity. Overall, the findings show that children appraise the likelihood of story events actually happening in light of their beliefs about causal regularities. A religious upbringing does not impact the frequency with which children invoke causal regularities in judging what can happen, even if it does impact the type of causal factors that children endorse. (shrink)

We argue that adopting a sociocultural lens to the origins of intergroup bias is important for understanding the nature of attacking and defending behavior at a group level. We specifically propose that the potential divergence in the development of in-group affiliation and out-group derogation supports De Dreu and Gross's framework but does indicate that more emphasis on early sociocultural input is required.

Lehar proposes an interesting theory of visual perception based on an explicit three-dimensional representation of the world existing in the observer's head. However, if we apply Occam's razor to this proposal, it is possible to contemplate far simpler representations of the world. Such representations have the advantage that they agree with findings in modern neuroscience.

The main concern of Agamben's work, prior to the Homo Sacer project, is how to understand the existence of or potentiality for language. Contemporary philosophy casts language as the unsayable presupposition of discourse. Agamben criticises this as an incomplete nihilism that remains within the horizon of metaphysics, and attempts to think the experience of language without an unsayable ground. I examine Agamben's critique of the role of the ineffable in the theory of the subject, and in the thought of Heidegger (...) and Derrida. I contrast this with his account of infancy as an experience that fully assumes the groundlessness of language. (shrink)

Fair trade banana farming in the Windward Islands of the Caribbean has emerged since the late 1990s in response to a crisis. Rulings by the World Trade Organization ended a longstanding trade dispute between the US and the EU by eliminating a system of preferential access of Windward Island bananas to the UK market. What followed was a period of rapid decline in banana exports from these small islands and a widespread abandonment of banana cultivation. Those banana farmers who remain (...) are now primarily fair trade producers. Fair trade banana production in the Windward Islands can thus be conceived as a survival strategy that farmers have developed in response to a particular instance of neoliberal globalization. The paper considers this response especially in the context of recent fieldwork on the island of St. Vincent. In light of contributions by several scholars who have drawn upon the work of Polanyi to understand both fair trade and resistance to neoliberalism, fair trade banana production in the Windward Islands appears significant not only as a local survival strategy, but also as part of a larger countermovement that resists neoliberal globalization. (shrink)

At the very beginning of L’Homme-Machine, La Mettrie claims that Leibnizians with their monads have “rather spiritualized matter than materialized the soul”; a few years later Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, President of the Berlin Academy of Sciences and natural philosopher with a strong interest in the modes of transmission of ‘genetic’ information, conceived of living minima which he termed molecules, “endowed with desire, memory and intelligence,” in his Système de la nature ou Essai sur les corps organisés. This text first (...) appeared in Latin in 1751 under the title Dissertatio inauguralis metaphysica de universali naturae systemate, with the pseudonym Dr Baumann; it was translated by Maupertuis in 1754 as Essai sur la formation des corps organisés and was later included in his 1756 Œuvres under the title Système de la nature. Now, it is clear that Maupertuis was a kind of Leibnizian; and that his molecule possessed higher-level, ‘mental’ properties. In that sense he falls under the first category described by La Mettrie. But he was also involved in a debate on this issue with Diderot, who put forth a sustained critique of Maupertuis’ theory of the molecule in the additions to his 1753 Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature. Where Maupertuis attributes higher-level properties to his living minima, Diderot argues that these properties are ‘organizational’, i.e., they can only be properties of the whole. At issue here is the degree of commitment to a form of materialism. (shrink)

In his Philosophical Inquiry concerning Human Liberty (1717), the English deist Anthony Collins proposed a complete determinist account of the human mind and action, partly inspired by his mentor Locke, but also by elements from Bayle, Leibniz and other Continental sources. It is a determinism which does not neglect the question of the specific status of the mind but rather seeks to provide a causal account of mental activity and volition in particular; it is a ‘volitional determinism’. Some decades later, (...) Diderot articulates a very similar determinism, which seeks to recognize the existence of “causes proper to man” (as he says in the Réfutation d’Helvétius). The difference with Collins is that now biological factors are being taken into account. Obviously both the ‘volitional’ and the ‘biological’ forms of determinism are noteworthy inasmuch as they change our picture of the nature of determinism itself, but my interest here is to compare these two determinist arguments, both of which are broadly Spinozist in nature – and as such belong to what Jonathan Israel called in his recent book “the radical Enlightenment,” i.e. a kind of underground Enlightenment constituted by Spinozism – and to see how Collins’ specifically psychological vision and Diderot’s specifically biological vision correspond to their two separate national contexts: determinism in France in the mid-1750s was a much more medico-biological affair than English determinism, which appears to be on a ‘path’ leading to Mill and associationist psychology. (shrink)

J. Willard Gibbs derived the following equation to quantify the maximum work possible for a chemical reaction$${\text{Maximum work }} = \, - \Delta {\text{G}}_{{{\text{rxn}}}} = \, - \left( {\Delta {\text{H}}_{{{\text{rxn}}}} {-}{\text{ T}}\Delta {\text{S}}_{{{\text{rxn}}}} } \right) {\text{ constant T}},{\text{P}}$$ Maximum work = - Δ G rxn = - Δ H rxn - T Δ S rxn constant T, P ∆Hrxn is the enthalpy change of reaction as measured in a reaction calorimeter and ∆Grxn the change in Gibbs energy as measured, if (...) feasible, in an electrochemical cell by the voltage across the two half-cells. To Gibbs, reaction spontaneity corresponds to negative values of ∆Grxn. But what is T∆Srxn, absolute temperature times the change in entropy? Gibbs stated that this term quantifies the heating/cooling required to maintain constant temperature in an electrochemical cell. Seeking a deeper explanation than this, one involving the behaviors of atoms and molecules that cause these thermodynamic phenomena, I employed an “atoms first” approach to decipher the physical underpinning of T∆Srxn and, in so doing, developed the hypothesis that this term quantifies the change in “structural energy” of the system during a chemical reaction. This hypothesis now challenges me to similarly explain the physical underpinning of the Gibbs–Helmholtz equation$${\text{d}}\left( {\Delta {\text{G}}_{{{\text{rxn}}}} } \right)/{\text{dT}} = - \Delta {\text{S}}_{{{\text{rxn}}}} \left( {\text{constant P}} \right)$$ d Δ G rxn / dT = - Δ S rxn constant P While this equation illustrates a relationship between ∆Grxn and ∆Srxn, I don’t understand how this is so, especially since orbital electron energies that I hypothesize are responsible for ∆Grxn are not directly involved in the entropy determination of atoms and molecules that are responsible for ∆Srxn. I write this paper to both share my progress and also to seek help from any who can clarify this for me. (shrink)