The generalized second law of thermodynamics states that entropy always increases when all event horizons are attributed with an entropy proportional to their area. We test the generalized second law by investigating the change in entropy when dust, radiation and black holes cross a cosmological event horizon. We generalize for flat, open and closed Friedmann–Robertson–Walker universes by using numerical calculations to determine the cosmological horizon evolution. In most cases, the loss of entropy from within the cosmological horizon is more than (...) balanced by an increase in cosmological event horizon entropy, maintaining the validity of the generalized second law of thermodynamics. However, an intriguing set of open universe models shows an apparent entropy decrease when black holes disappear over the cosmological event horizon. We anticipate that this apparent violation of the generalized second law will disappear when solutions are available for black holes embedded in arbitrary backgrounds. (shrink)

The Greek & Latin Roots of English approaches the study of Latin and Greek thematically: vocabulary is organized into various topics, from politics to philosophy, with chapters featuring cumulative exercises and notes to help students learn the pleasures of language study. The fifth edition features revised exercises, alphabetical vocabulary lists, and more.

Background Inadequate knowledge among health care providers (HCPs) and parents of affected children limits the understanding and utility of secondary genetic findings (SFs) in under-represented populations in genomics research. SFs arise from deep DNA sequencing done for research or diagnostic purposes and may burden patients and their families despite their potential health importance. This study aims to evaluate the perspective of both groups regarding SFs and their choices in the return of results from genetic testing in the context of orofacial (...) clefts.Methods Using an online survey, we evaluated the experiences of 252 HCPs and 197 parents across participating cleft clinics in Ghana and Nigeria toward the return of SFs across several domains.Results Only 1.6% of the HCPs felt they had an expert understanding of when and how to incorporate genomic medicine into practice, while 50.0% agreed that all SFs should be returned to patients. About 95.4% of parents were willing to receive all the information from genetic testing (including SFs), while the majority cited physicians as their primary information source (64%).Conclusions Overall, parents and providers were aware that genetic testing could help in the clinical management of diseases. However, they cited a lack of knowledge about genomic medicine, uncertain clinical utility, and lack of available learning resources as barriers. The knowledge gained from this study will assist with developing guidelines and policies to guide providers on the return of SFs in sub-Saharan Africa and across the continent. (shrink)

The evidence linking tobacco product advertising to adolescent smoking initiation and resulting long-term addiction, premature death, and disability is well established. Each link in the causal chain has been substantiated: children and adolescents are especially vulnerable to advertising; point-of-sale advertising comprises 92.1% of cigarette advertising and marketing expenditures by manufacturers and 71.3% of smokeless tobacco advertising; tobacco companies have targeted youth through advertising; advertising exposure causes adolescents to start and to continue smoking; among adults who become daily smokers, nearly all (...) first use of cigarettes occurs by 18 years of age; adolescents who smoke are at high risk for long-term addiction because their brains are still developing; and long-term addiction results in the tremendous personal, social and financial costs of tobacco-related illnesses. (shrink)

Introduction: The Binge Eating Scale (BES) is a widely-used self-report questionnaire to identify compulsive eaters. However, research on the dimensions and psychometric properties of the BES is limited. Objective: The aim of this study was to examine the properties of the Spanish version of the BES. Method: Confirmatory Factor Analyses (CFAs) were carried out to verify the BES factor structure in a sample of Spanish college students (N = 428, 75.7% women; age range = 18–30). An invariance measurement routine was (...) carried out across sexes, the latent means were compared, and estimates of reliability and convergent and discriminant validity were presented. Results: A one-factor model fit the data best and was also equivalent between sexes. The scalar invariance model showed statistically significant differences across sexes, with a higher prevalence in women. Regarding reliability, the results were excellent. Finally, high statistically significant correlations were obtained with other measures of binge eating (BE), food addiction, impulsivity, binge drinking, and body mass index (BMI). Conclusions: The Spanish 16-item BES is a valid and reliable scale to evaluate BE in the youth population. (shrink)

In online lectures, unlike in face-to-face lectures, teachers lack access to (nonverbal) cues to check if their students are still “with them” and comprehend the lecture. The increasing availability of low-cost eye-trackers provides a promising solution. These devices measure unobtrusively where students look and can visualize these data to teachers. These visualizations might inform teachers about students’ level of “with-me-ness” (i.e., do students look at the information that the teacher is currently talking about) and comprehension of the lecture, provided that (...) (1) gaze measures of “with-me-ness” are related to comprehension, (2) people not trained in eye-tracking can predict students’ comprehension from gaze visualizations, (3) we understand how different visualization techniques impact this prediction. We addressed these issues in two studies. In Study 1, 36 students watched a video lecture while being eye-tracked. The extent to which students looked at relevant information and the extent to which they looked at the same location as the teacher both correlated with students’ comprehension (score on an open question) of the lecture. In Study 2, 50 participants watched visualizations of students’ gaze (from Study 1), using six visualization techniques (dynamic and static versions of scanpaths, heatmaps, and focus maps) and were asked to predict students’ posttest performance and to rate their ease of prediction. We found that people can use gaze visualizations to predict learners’ comprehension above chance level, with minor differences between visualization techniques. Further research should investigate if teachers can act on the information provided by gaze visualizations and thereby improve students’ learning. (shrink)

The progression of research and scholarly inquiry does not occur in isolation and is wholly dependent on accurate reporting of methods and results, and successful replication of prior work. Without mechanisms to correct the literature, much time and money is wasted on research based on a crumbling foundation. These guidelines serve to outline the respective responsibilities of researchers, institutions, agencies, and publishers or editors in maintaining the integrity of the research record. Delineating these complementary roles and proposing solutions for common (...) barriers provide a foundation for best practices. (shrink)

Domain experts regularly teach novice students how to perform a task. This often requires them to adjust their behavior to the less knowledgeable audience and, hence, to behave in a more didactic manner. Eye movement modeling examples (EMMEs) are a contemporary educational tool for displaying experts’ (natural or didactic) problem‐solving behavior as well as their eye movements to learners. While research on expert‐novice communication mainly focused on experts’ changes in explicit, verbal communication behavior, it is as yet unclear whether and (...) how exactly experts adjust their nonverbal behavior. This study first investigated whether and how experts change their eye movements and mouse clicks (that are displayed in EMMEs) when they perform a task naturally versus teach a task didactically. Programming experts and novices initially debugged short computer codes in a natural manner. We first characterized experts’ natural problem‐solving behavior by contrasting it with that of novices. Then, we explored the changes in experts’ behavior when being subsequently instructed to model their task solution didactically. Experts became more similar to novices on measures associated with experts’ automatized processes (i.e., shorter fixation durations, fewer transitions between code and output per click on the run button when behaving didactically). This adaptation might make it easier for novices to follow or imitate the expert behavior. In contrast, experts became less similar to novices for measures associated with more strategic behavior (i.e., code reading linearity, clicks on run button) when behaving didactically. (shrink)

Domain experts regularly teach novice students how to perform a task. This often requires them to adjust their behavior to the less knowledgeable audience and, hence, to behave in a more didactic manner. Eye movement modeling examples (EMMEs) are a contemporary educational tool for displaying experts’ (natural or didactic) problem‐solving behavior as well as their eye movements to learners. While research on expert‐novice communication mainly focused on experts’ changes in explicit, verbal communication behavior, it is as yet unclear whether and (...) how exactly experts adjust their nonverbal behavior. This study first investigated whether and how experts change their eye movements and mouse clicks (that are displayed in EMMEs) when they perform a task naturally versus teach a task didactically. Programming experts and novices initially debugged short computer codes in a natural manner. We first characterized experts’ natural problem‐solving behavior by contrasting it with that of novices. Then, we explored the changes in experts’ behavior when being subsequently instructed to model their task solution didactically. Experts became more similar to novices on measures associated with experts’ automatized processes (i.e., shorter fixation durations, fewer transitions between code and output per click on the run button when behaving didactically). This adaptation might make it easier for novices to follow or imitate the expert behavior. In contrast, experts became less similar to novices for measures associated with more strategic behavior (i.e., code reading linearity, clicks on run button) when behaving didactically. (shrink)

Patient report of functioning is one component of the neurocognitive exam following traumatic brain injury, and standardized patient-reported outcomes measures are useful to track outcomes during rehabilitation. The Traumatic Brain Injury Quality of Life measurement system is a TBI-specific extension of the PROMIS and Neuro-QoL measurement systems that includes 20 item banks across physical, emotional, social, and cognitive domains. Previous research has evaluated the responsiveness of the TBI-QOL measures in community-dwelling individuals and found clinically important change over a 6-month assessment (...) interval in a sample of individuals who were on average 5 years post-injury. In the present study, we report on the responsiveness of the TBI-QOL Cognition–General Concerns and Executive Function item bank scores and the Cognitive Health Composite scores in a recently injured sample over a 1-year study period. Data from 128 participants with complicated mild, moderate, or severe TBI within the previous 6 months were evaluated. The majority of the sample was male, white, and non-Hispanic. The participants were 18–92 years of age and were first evaluated from 0 to 5 months post-injury. Eighty participants completed the 1-year follow-up assessment. Results show acceptable standard response mean values for all measures and minimal detectable change values ranging from 8.2 to 8.8 T-score points for Cognition–General Concerns and Executive Functioning measures. Anchor rating analysis revealed that changes in scores on the Executive Function item bank and the Cognitive Health Composite were meaningfully associated with participant-reported changes in the areas of attention, multitasking, and memory. Evaluation of change score differences by a variety of clinical indicators demonstrated a small but significant difference in the three TBI-QOL change scores by TBI injury severity grouping. These results support the responsiveness of the TBI-QOL cognition measures in newly injured individuals and provides information on the minimal important differences for the TBI-QOL cognition measures, which can be used for score interpretation by clinicians and researchers seeking patient-reported outcome measures of self-reported cognitive QOL after TBI. (shrink)

I am most grateful to Philosophy East and West for publishing a special issue on philosopher Ibn Khaldūn. The time is particularly propitious since his ideas are currently permeating the political and cultural climate of his native North Africa. The team contributing to the present issue comprises six authors from four different continents. Ridha Chennoufi and Mehdi Saiden are philosophers from the University of Tunis, the city in which Ibn Khaldūn was born. M. Akif Kayapınar is a political scientist teaching (...) at Istanbul Sehir University, while Jeremy Kleidosty does research at the Centre of Excellence on Reason and Religious Recognition, University of Helsinki... (shrink)

We prove that the zero-set of a C ∞ function belonging to a noetherian differential ring M can be written as a finite union of C ∞ manifolds which are definable by functions from the same ring. These manifolds can be taken to be connected under the additional assumption that every zero-dimensional regular zero-set of functions in M consists of finitely many points. These results hold not only for C ∞ functions over the reals, but more generally for definable C (...) ∞ functions in a definably complete expansion of an ordered field. The class of definably complete expansions of ordered fields, whose basic properties are discussed in this paper, expands the class of real closed fields and includes o-minimal expansions of ordered fields. Finally, we provide examples of noetherian differential rings of C ∞ functions over the reals, containing non-analytic functions. (shrink)

In the present article, the author analyses the interpretation of the phenomenon of Christ by Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. The author uses comparative and hermeneutic methods of historical and philosophical research. Dostoevsky's Christ and Nietzsche's Jesus are interpreted as “conceptual characters” (G. Deleuze), occupying an important place in the philosophical constructions of both thinkers. Stating the epoch-making event of the “death of God” in European culture, they discover the origins of nihilism in Christianity itself and attempt (each in his own way) (...) to recreate the original, pristine Christianity. Reconstruction of the original image of Christ makes it possible to comprehend not only the historical destiny of Christianity and the European portion of humanity, but also the prospects for overcoming the crisis of European and Russian (in the case of Dostoevsky) self-consciousness. It is argued that both interpretations, although far from orthodox Christianity, play the role of a central link in the development of the philosophic thinking of the Russian writer and German philosopher from the critical deposition of European humanism and metaphysics to new projects of human existence in the world. The conceptual images of Dostoevsky's Christ and Nietzsche's Jesus personally embody the spiritual attitudes and models of life that are timeless in nature, and at the same time serve as an expression of the “fundamental metaphysical positions” (M. Heidegger) of existential thinkers. The assertion of the absolute genuineness and beauty of the moral ideal of Christ allows Dostoevsky to return transcendence to the godless world – to substantiate the neo-Christian version of metaphysics, the religious-existential ontology. The “Glad Tidings” of Jesus, his life and death, appear in Nietzsche’s works as a practical elimination of transcendence, the Platonic dualism of the “true” and “visible” worlds. The spiritual attitude of Jesus reveals a direct affinity to Nietzsche's anti-metaphysical “philosophy of becoming”. (shrink)

INDUS-EM is India’s only level one conference imparting and exchanging quality knowledge in acute care. Specifically, in general and specialized emergency care and training in trauma, burns, cardiac, stroke, environmental and disaster medicine. It provides a series of exchanges regarding academic development and implementation of training tools related to developing future academic faculty and residents in Emergency Medicine in India. The INDUS-EM leadership and board of directors invited scholars from multiple institutions to participate in this advanced educational symposium that was (...) held in Thrissur, Kerala in October 2013. (shrink)

The research is aimed at outlining aspects of the influence of the achievements of the culture of the third information revolution on the formation of the young generation in the philosophical discourse of the French philosopher M. Serres, revealing the features of the achievements of the third information revolution of modern culture, in particular in the spatial, temporal and, in fact, human dimensions, their influence on the formation of personality of the “hopthumb”. The theoretical basis of the study is based (...) on culturological and anthropological aspects of the influence of information and computer technology on the formation of personality, human self-awareness in the modern world. The methodology of M. Serres is used in the work. The scientific novelty of the proposed article is the analysis of the philosophical and pedagogical achievements of the French philosopher M. Serres, in particular, argued the presence in the scientific heritage of a famous contemporary doctrine of special characteristics and features of the modern young man, which the author calls " hopthumb" against the background of the formation of a new space of culture. In addition, the study of the theoretical constants of M. Serres made it possible to outline the signs of the third information revolution, to generalize and actualize the philosophical reflection on the self-identification of the individual in the new conditions. Based on the analysis of the work of the modern philosopher, the connection between the rapid achievements of the information revolution and the culture of younger generations was revealed and understood. (shrink)

Communicative Understandings of Women's Leadership Development: From Ceilings of Glass to Labyrinth Paths, edited by Elesha L. Ruminski and Annette M. Holba, weaves the disciplines of communication studies, leadership studies, and women's studies to offer theoretical and practical reflection about women's leadership development in academic, organizational, and political contexts. This work claims a space for women's leadership studies and acknowledges the paradigmatic shift from discussing women's leadership using the glass ceiling to what Eagly and Carli identify as the labyrinth of (...) leadership. (shrink)

Studies in adults with mental disorders suggest that the experience of early and chronic trauma is associated with changes in reward expectancy and processing. In addition, severe childhood trauma has been shown to contribute to the development of mental disorders in general. Data on effects of early childhood trauma on reward expectancy and processing in middle childhood currently appear insufficient. The present study aims to fill this research gap by examining the effects of developmental trauma disorder on reward expectancy and (...) processing in children aged 8–12 years, testing the hypothesis that children with multiple complex traumas exhibit altered reward processing as a result of prior disappointing reward experiences. One main feature of developmental trauma disorder is early experiences of multiple separation from important and close relationships alongside other experiences of emotional or physical harm. In the sequel children often show affect regulation disorders. To investigate this, we have developed an adapted version of the Monetary Incentive Delay Task, which examines children’s expectation of reward or frustration. In this first study, behavioral data will be collected from N = 40 children using this adapted version of the MID Task. Children in the experimental group will be recruited from youth welfare centers in Frankfurt a.M., Germany. Healthy control subjects will be recruited from after-school-care facilities. A brief trauma screening will be conducted for both groups, experimental and control. If children show signs of trauma, the presence of a developmental trauma disorder will be further delineated by a German translation of the Developmental Trauma Disorder Structured Interview for Children which was translated the first time in German by our research group. We hypothesize that children in the experimental group will be less accurate in performing the Monetary Incentive Delay Task because of their impaired emotion regulation skills due to emotional avoidance following developmental trauma. If the results of our initial behavioral study are promising, the MID task will be used in a future study to elucidate the relationship between trauma developmental disorder, reward expectancy and processing, and neurobiological processes in middle childhood. (shrink)

Recently, the US has joined many European jurisdictions in extending civil marriage to same sex as well as different sex dyads. Many liberals regard this as a development worth entrenching. But a prominent recent liberal challenge to civil marriage claims otherwise. According to this challenge, by defining and conferring civil marriage, the state privileges some relationships over others that serve equally well the important liberal goal of fostering effective liberal citizenship, in violation of a prominent interpretation of the doctrine of (...) state neutrality. Theorists who press this challenge, such as Elizabeth Brake and Tamara Metz, argue that it can be met effectively only by dismantling civil marriage and replacing it with more inclusive state-maintained arrangements. So far, prominent responses to this neutralist challenge to civil marriage have focused on the special value of either the relationships to which civil marriage currently extends, or the special value of civil marriage itself. In this article, I develop an alternative reply to this neutralist challenge to civil marriage, one focusing instead on the special vulnerabilities of some of the liberally valuable relationships to which civil marriage currently extends, amorous caregiving dyads. (shrink)

This is a critical response to Dr. Tamara Dobler's paper “What Is Wrong with Hacker's Wittgenstein? On Grammar, Context and Sense-Determination.” It demonstrates that Dr. Dobler has no idea of what Wittgenstein meant by “grammar” or “rule of grammar.” She does not know what Wittgenstein meant by “grammatical proposition,” nor does she know what a compositional account of meaning or a category mistake is. She labours under the illusion that to say, as Wittgenstein did, that a rule of grammar (...) excludes a form of words from use is incompatible with the claim that whether an utterance makes sense may be a context-dependent issue. Unlike Dr. Dobler, Wittgenstein did not. (shrink)

Islamic etiquette; Islamic ethics; meetings; Muḥammad, Prophet, d. 632's era; congresses; 20th century; comparison.

Despite their centrality and importance to both science and philosophy, relatively little has been written about thought experiments. This volume brings together a series of extremely interesting studies of the history, mechanics, and applications of this important intellectual resource. A distinguished list of philosophers and scientists consider the role of thought experiments in their various disciplines, and argue that an examination of thought experimentation goes to the heart of both science and philosophy.

La parroquia constituía un componente clave de la identidad en los siglos XVIII y XIX, ya que constituía la unidad de residencia principal y se fraguó como el principal marco de sociabilidad. El estudio de los conflictos por los cambios en las parroquias revela una cosmovisión identitaria densa y estable. De tal forma que pertenecer a un aparroquia no estaba condicionado exclusivamente por factores residenciales y devocionales, sino que la población se basó en múltiples elementos para argumentar y defender el (...) territorio parroquial propio, tales como factores económicos o patrimoniales. (shrink)

What reason does one have to resist oppression? The reasons that most easily come to mind are those having to do with justice—reasons that arise from commitments to human equality and the common good. In this paper, I argue that there are also reasons of love—reasons that arise from personal attachments to specific people, projects, or activities. I defend a distinctive form of resistance that is characteristically undertaken for reasons of love, which I call Quiet Resistance. Contrary to theories that (...) build reasons of justice into the definition of resistance, I argue that we have strong reason to consider Quiet Resistance a genuine form of resistance. Finally, I argue that the reasons in favor of engaging in Quiet Resistance help to explain its distinctive value. In short, when one engages in Quiet Resistance, one’s actions are valuable in large part because they allow one to maintain respect for one’s personal values and meaning in life under oppressive conditions. (shrink)

In an era before the invention of photography, fine art prints based on famous paintings dominated the eighteenth-century art market, inviting a common comparison between engravers and translators. At a time when writers and scholars placed much value on the closeness of translations to their original texts, such comparisons reflected a subordination of the skills of technical engravers to the assumed genius of painters. However, careful examination of the copy-prints reveals that loyalty to originals was not the primary interest of (...) these visual translators. Instead, these translators saw themselves as active mediators. This essay reconsiders acts of eighteenth-century visual translation to reframe the practice of engraving during the period and to establish a new understanding of the movement from one visual artistic language to another. The case study of Nicolas de Launay, one the most successful engravers in eighteenth-century France, is selected for scrutiny and contextualized within historical debates around translation. The final aim is to illuminate important tensions between the disciplines of painting and engraving, as well as the complex process by which engravers strove to remain simultaneously loyal to the painters, to their audience, and to their own artistic identity. (shrink)

This article focuses on the follow question: Are human enhancement technologies likely to be justice impairing or justice promoting? We argue that human enhancement technologies may not be inherently just or unjust, but when situated within obtaining social contexts they are likely to exacerbate rather than alleviate social injustices.

To what extent can philosophical thought experiments reveal norms? Some ethicists have argued that certain thought experiments reveal that people draw a morally significant distinction between "doing" and "allowing". I examine one such thought experiment in detail and argue that the intuitions it elicits can be explained by "prospect theory", a psychological theory about the way people reason. The extent to which such alternative explanations of the results of thought experiments in philosophy are generally available is an empirical question.

Currently there is little guidance given to teachers in selecting focal issues for socio-scientific issues -based teaching and learning. As a majority of teachers regularly collaborate with other teachers, understanding what factors influence collaborative SSI-based curriculum design is critical. We invited 18 secondary science teachers to participate in a professional development on SSI-based instruction and curriculum design. Through intentional design, we studied how these teachers formed curriculum design teams and how they selected focal issues for SSI-based curriculum units. We developed (...) substantiative grounded theory to explain these processes. Key findings include how teachers’ tensions and agential moves worked in tandem in the development of a safe and shared place to share discontentment and generate opportunities to form design teams and select issues. Teacher passion and existing resources are factors as influential as considerations for issue relevance. Implications for teacher professional development and research are included. (shrink)

In this paper I propose a partition semantics for sentences containing objective predicates that takes into account the phenomenon of occasion-sensitivity associated with so-called Travis cases. The key idea is that the set of worlds in which a sentence is true has a more complex structure as a result of different ways in which it is made true. Different ways may have different capacities to support the attainment of a contextually salient domain goal. I suggest that goal-conduciveness decides whether some (...) utterance of a sentence is accepted as true on a particular occasion at a given world. The utterance will not be accepted as true at a world which belongs to a truth-maker which is less conducive to a contextually salient goal than other truth-makers. Finally, the proposed occasion-sensitive semantics is applied to some cases of disagreement and cancellability. (shrink)

How is the concept of patient care adapting in response to rapid changes in healthcare delivery and advances in medical technology? How are questions of ethical responsibility and social diversity shaping the definitions of healthcare? In this topical study, scholars in anthropology, nursing theory, law and ethics explore questions involving the changing relationship between patient care and medical ethics. Contributors address issues that challenge the boundaries of patient care, such as: · HIV-related care and research · the impact of new (...) reproductive technologies · preventative healthcare · technological breakthroughs that are changing personal-caring relationships. Chapters range from a consideration of the practicalities of nursing and family healthcare to a debate about ‘universal human needs’ and patients’ rights. This book is a provocative exploration of the ways in which healthcare models are socially constructed. It will be of interest to policy-makers, medical practitioners and administrators, as well as students of sociology, anthropology and social policy. (shrink)

The book discusses citizenship in the contemporary world; as a concept, as an ideal, as a policy and as a goal to be achieved from the perspective of different academic disciplines.

Building on Wittgenstein’s ideas, I defend a brand of pluralism that associates words with conceptual families and appeals to this notion in the course of philosophical problem solving. I argue that certain problems that the received view of conceptual engineering (‘improvement by replacement’) faces can be more easily overcome if we adopt a pluralist perspective. I show that the proposed approach can circumvent the problem of topic discontinuity, whilst also avoiding the threat of trivialisation, since it can easily accommodate both (...) coarse-grained and fine-grained topics. Finally, I argue that my variant of pluralism is compatible with de novo conceptual engineering insofar as it allows that the paradigm associated with a word may shift overtime thus creating an opportunity for new candidate members to join a conceptual family. (shrink)

Interview of Vsevolod Khoma with Professor Tamara Yashchuk within the framework of the research program “Ukrainian Philosophy of the 60s-80s of the 20th Century” of the Student Society of Oral History of Philosophy.

What reasons stand in favor of (or against) violent resistance to oppression? I distinguish two kinds of normative reasons that bear relevantly in such a practical deliberation. I argue that in addition to reasons of impartial morality, victims’ personal projects and relationships may also provide reasons for (or against) violent resistance. Moreover, there is no guarantee that conflicts will not occur between such reasons. Thus, some acts of violent resistance may arise from situations of radical choice in which impartial moral (...) reasons and personal reasons pull the agent in opposite directions. Regardless of what we ultimately think agents facing such decisions ought to do all things considered, recognizing such conflicts is crucial for understanding the circumstances that give rise to violence and for better sympathizing with victims who are pushed to such extreme modes of resistance. (shrink)

In 1951, the eight o’clock nightly news reported on Jean-Paul Sartre for the first time. By the end of the twentieth century, more than 3,500 programs dealing with philosophy and its practitioners—including Bachelard, Badiou, Foucault, Lyotard, and Lévy—had aired on French television. According to Tamara Chaplin, this enduring commitment to bringing the most abstract and least visual of disciplines to the French public challenges our very assumptions about the incompatibility of elite culture and mass media. Indeed, it belies the (...) conviction that television is inevitably anti-intellectual and the quintessential archenemy of the book. Chaplin argues that the history of the televising of philosophy is crucial to understanding the struggle over French national identity in the postwar period. Linking this history to decolonization, modernization, and globalization, _Turning On the Mind _claims that we can understand neither the markedly public role that philosophy came to play in French society during the late twentieth century nor the renewed interest in ethics and political philosophy in the early twenty-first unless we acknowledge the work of television. Throughout, Chaplin insists that we jettison presumptions about the anti-intellectual nature of the visual field, engages critical questions about the survival of national cultures in a globalizing world, and encourages us to rethink philosophy itself, ultimately asserting that the content of the discipline is indivisible from the new media forms in which it has found expression. (shrink)

On the most common interpretation of occasion-sensitivity what varies cross-contextually is the truth-conditional content of representations. Jerry Fodor argues that when extended to mental representation this view has some problematic consequences. In this paper I outline an approach to occasion-sensitivity which circumvents Fodor’s objections but still maintains that the aspect of thought that guides deliberation and action is occasion-sensitive. On the proposed view, what varies cross-contextually are not truth conditions but rather the conditions for accepting a representation as true relative (...) to a practical goal that is pursued on an occasion. I show that although the proposal entails an error theory this theory is not problematic since it is meant to compensate for the over-generating nature of semantic competence, namely, the fact that not all of the representation’s truth-makers are conducive to a given contextually salient goal. (shrink)