Our goal is to prove that the golden section, however important, is not the only key to understand a mathematical-formalizing approach to the idea of beauty. Having developed, from this point of view, reading keys linked to the post-modern, it is necessary to link together the multiple rivulets of knowledge that gather in this direction. Moreover the canons of the approaches presented up to now are very indicative for the understanding of many aspects of beauty, which however depends on (...) the historical moment and the cultures created in the various civilizations. Therefore we can affirm that there is no effective definition of "beauty" that can be codified through fixed canons, but that the concept is expressed by a series of stratifications and interpretations that tend to link several major variations, expressing the various answers given by man to the question: what is the beauty? (shrink)

Our goal is to prove that the golden section, however important, is not the only key to understand a mathematical-formalizing approach to the idea of beauty. Having developed, from this point of view, reading keys linked to the post-modern, it is necessary to link together the multiple rivulets of knowledge that gather in this direction. Moreover the canons of the approaches presented up to now are very indicative for the understanding of many aspects of beauty, which however depends on (...) the historical moment and the cultures created in the various civilizations. Therefore we can affirm that there is no effective definition of "beauty" that can be codified through fixed canons, but that the concept is expressed by a series of stratifications and interpretations that tend to link several major variations, expressing the various answers given by man to the question: what is the beauty? (shrink)

Our goal is to prove that the golden section, however important, is not the only key to understand a mathematical-formalizing approach to the idea of beauty. Having developed, from this point of view, reading keys linked to the post-modern, it is necessary to link together the multiple rivulets of knowledge that gather in this direction. Moreover the canons of the approaches presented up to now are very indicative for the understanding of many aspects of beauty, which however depends on (...) the historical moment and the cultures created in the various civilizations. Therefore we can affirm that there is no effective definition of "beauty" that can be codified through fixed canons, but that the concept is expressed by a series of stratifications and interpretations that tend to link several major variations, expressing the various answers given by man to the question: what is the beauty? (shrink)

"Annual dinner and act golden gavel competition." Ethos: Official Publication of the Law Society of the Australian Capital Territory, (194), pp. 18.

While society debates whether and how to use public funds to support work on human embryonic stem cells (hESCs), many scientific groups and businesses debate a different question — the extent to which patents that cover such stem cells should be permitted to limit or to tax their research. The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), a non-profit foundation that manages intellectual property generated by researchers at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, owns three patents that have been at the heart (...) of the latter controversy The story of WARF's patents and the controversy they have fostered highlights not only continuing tensions between proprietary and nonproprietary approaches to developing science and technology, but also an at least partly reassuring capacity of public and private sectors to deal with those tensions in a way that can render them substantially manageable, and frequently more manageable as a technology matures. More particularly, the cumulative story of WARF's patents features three leitmotifs that suggest how an attentive and engaged public sector might commonly succeed in working with public and private sector actors to achieve workable balances between proprietary rights and more general social interests: (1) right holders' decisions to pursue less than full rights assertion or enforcement; (2) the ability of government and other public sector actors to help bring about such decisions through co-option or pressure; and (3) the frequent availability or development of technological alternatives that limit research bottlenecks. (shrink)

Several widely publicized incidents of academic research misconduct, combined with the politicization of the role of science in public health and policy discourse (e.g., COVID, immunizations) threaten to undermine faith in the integrity of empirical research. Researchers often maintain that peer-review and study replication allow the field to self-police and self-correct; however, stark disparities between official reports of academic research misconduct and self-reports of academic researchers, specifically with regard to data fabrication, belie this argument. Further, systemic imperatives in academic settings (...) often incentivize institutional responses that focus on minimizing reputational harm rather than the impact of fabricated data on the integrity of extant and future research. (shrink)

While society debates whether and how to use public funds to support work on human embryonic stem cells, many scientific groups and businesses debate a different question — the extent to which patents that cover such stem cells should be permitted to limit or to tax their research. The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, a non-profit foundation that manages intellectual property generated by researchers at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, owns three patents that have been at the heart of the (...) latter controversy. The story of WARF’s patents and the controversy they have fostered highlights not only continuing tensions between proprietary and nonproprietary approaches to developing science and technology, but also an at least partly reassuring capacity of public and private sectors to deal with those tensions in a way that can render them substantially manageable, and frequently more manageable as a technology matures. (shrink)

In this article, I distinguish two models of personal integrity. The first, wholeheartedness, regards harmonious unity of the self as psychologically healthy and volitional consistency as ethically ideal. I argue that it does so at the substantial cost of framing ambivalence and conflict as defects of character and action. To avoid these consequences, I propose an alternate ideal of humility that construes the self as multiple and precarious and celebrates experiences of loss and transformation through which learning, growth, innovation, and (...) dynamic relationship become possible. This ideal not only sustains prospects for integrity but is more suitable than wholeheartedness for recognizing practices of contestation, such as those involving potentially destabilizing encounters with difference that is common within pluralistic societies, as vital for rich, well-lived lives. (shrink)

The 21st-century construction of a new Chinese political discourse faces the same dilemma that Chinese intellectuals first identified in the 19th century – how to make currently pre-eminent Eurocen...

In the Introduction to her recent translation of the Poetics, Miss Hubbard astutely recognizes the intellectual orientation of Aristotle's aesthetic theory. She observes that for Aristotle the concept of mimesis is intimately connected with that of mathesis and thus that the basic pleasure of art is the intellectual pleasure involved in learning. She then correctly identifies two levels of the learning process involved in mimesis: on a lower level it signifies the way in which children learn their first lessons but (...) on a much more sophisticated plane it denotes a process by which our understanding of ‘moral facts and moral possibilities’ is deepened. She perceptively concludes that if art is to achieve the goal set for it by Aristotle, it must have a significant relationship to ultimate truth. (shrink)

What are some of the key historical trends in hours of work per worker in US? What economic, social-psychological, organizational and institutional forces determine the length of individuals' working hours? How much of the trend toward longer working hours among so many workers may be attributable to workers' preferences, workplace incentives or employers' constraints? When can work become overwork or workaholism – an unforced addiction to incessant work activity which risk harm to workers, families or even economies? The first part (...) of this article traces the history of the length of working hours and its recent polarization. The second part develops a multi-disciplinary model to identify motivations behind working longer hours. Individuals' desired work hours will stem from the weighted contribution of five sources: (1) current real wage rates; (2) forward-looking, wage trajectories; (3) relative status associated with hours of labor; (4) intrinsic rewards, process benefits or amenities acquired through work; (5) hours demanded by the employer and other structural constraints, to which workers may adapt. Employers and their established conditions of work have influenced the course of long run trends labor supply and in work time structures. The final section suggests policies that might address the persistence of long hours. (shrink)

Mental and substance use disorders have been identified as the leading cause of global disability, and the global burden of mental illness is concentrated among those experiencing disability due to serious mental illness. Music has been studied as a support for SMIs for decades, with promising results; however, a lack of synthesized evidence has precluded increased uptake of and access to music-based approaches. The purpose of this scoping review was to identify the types and quantity of research at intersections of (...) music and SMIs, document evidentiary gaps and opportunities, and generate recommendations for improving research and practice. Studies were included if they reported on music's utilization in treating or mitigating symptoms related to five SMIs: schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, major depressive disorder, or post-traumatic stress disorder. Eight databases were searched; screening resulted in 349 included studies for data extraction. Schizophrenia was the most studied SMI, with bipolar disorder studied the least. Demographics, settings, and activity details were found to be inconsistently and insufficiently reported; however, listening to recorded music emerged as the most common musical activity, and activity details appeared to have been affected by the conditions under study. RCTs were the predominant study design, and 271 unique measures were utilized across 289 primary studies. Over two-thirds of primary studies reported positive results, with 2.8% reporting worse results than the comparator, and 12% producing indeterminate results. A key finding is that evidence synthesis is precluded by insufficient reporting, widely varied outcomes and measures, and intervention complexity; as a result, widespread changes are necessary to reduce heterogeneity, increase replicability and transferability, and improve understandings of mechanisms and causal pathways. To that end, five detailed recommendations are offered to support the sharing and development of information across disciplines. (shrink)

In the Introduction to her recent translation of the Poetics, Miss Hubbard astutely recognizes the intellectual orientation of Aristotle's aesthetic theory. She observes that for Aristotle the concept of mimesis is intimately connected with that of mathesis and thus that the basic pleasure of art is the intellectual pleasure involved in learning. She then correctly identifies two levels of the learning process involved in mimesis: on a lower level it signifies the way in which children learn their first lessons but (...) on a much more sophisticated plane it denotes a process by which our understanding of ‘moral facts and moral possibilities’ is deepened. She perceptively concludes that if art is to achieve the goal set for it by Aristotle, it must have a significant relationship to ultimate truth. (shrink)

Timothy J. Golden presents an existential, phenomenological, and political interpretation of Douglass's use of narrative. Reading Douglass with Kierkegaard, Kafka, Kant, and Levinas, Golden argues that analytic theism is an inauthentic preoccupation with knowledge at the expense of a concrete moral sensibility that Douglass's narrative provides.

This study advances the claim that Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, which drew its inspiration and guidelines from Cicero's De Natura Deorum, fulfills four basic elements of Michel Meyer's theory of problematology. In doing so, it is argued, the Dialogues contribute importantly to our understanding of the question-answer pair, and to the notion of rhetoric as a way of knowing.

A neurally plausible model of how the process of visually perceiving a letter in the context of a word is learned, and how such processing occurs in adults is proposed. The model consists of a collection of abstract letter feature detector neurons and their interconnections. The model also includes a learning rule that specifies how these interconnections evolve with experience. The interconnections between neurons can be interpreted as representing the spatially redundant, sequentially redundant, and transgraphemic information in letter string displays. (...) Anderson, Silverstein, Ritz, and Jones's (1977) “Brain‐State‐in‐a‐Box” (BSB) neural mechanism is then used to implement the proposed model. The resulting system makes explicit qualitative predictions using both letter recognition accuracy and reaction time as dependent measures. In particular, the model offers an integrated explanation of some experiments involving manipulations of orthographic regularity, masking, case alternations, and experience with words. The similarities and differences between the model and models proposed by Adams (1979) and McClelland and Rumelhart (1981) are also discussed. (shrink)

My purpose in this paper is to reassert the traditional view that Athenian women of the classical period regularly had an association with phratries. As part of my argument I adduce an overlooked piece of evidence, a much discussed passage from the Donatus commentary on Terence; for this I provide a new interpretation.There is some evidence that Athenian women were introduced to their fathersphrateresat birth, or to their husbands'phrateresat marriage, or both. The speaker of Isaeus 3 repeatedly asserts that a (...) certain Pyrrhus would have presented his daughter to hisphrateresif she had been legitimate. A scholium on Aristophanes,Acharnians146 may refer to such a practice. Euxitheus calls as witnesses of his mother's citizenshipphrateresfor whom his father celebrated the wedding feast, thegamelia, on her behalf ; celebration of thegameliais regarded as proof of the legitimacy of the speaker's mother at Isaeus 8.19. Neither Demosthenes nor Isaeus says that women were formally registered among thephrateresor even present at the feast; but notices in the lexicographers do connect thegameliawith registration among or introduction to thephrateres. Many scholars have accepted these passages as evidence for normal practice at Athens in the classical period. (shrink)

James Baldwin writes that "I underwent, during the summer that I became fourteen, a prolonged religious crisis."1 Baldwin dealt with this crisis in his literary works through the strategic use of Christian theological themes and imagery to make compelling critiques of bourgeois cultural and Christian values. So "prolonged" was his "religious crisis" that Christian theological themes permeate Baldwin's immense literary corpus.2 Baldwin thus both was influenced by Christianity and critiqued it in his works. Considering these two points, I think it (...) appropriate to begin this essay with a biblical reference to the Christian narrative of the "fall" of humanity. I choose this biblical starting point not only because of .. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Nietzsche once remarked of Emerson's Essays, “never have I felt so much at home in a book.” Indeed, throughout his intellectual life, Nietzsche returned to Emerson more than any other author. This text is a presentation, for the first time in English, of Nietzsche's Emerson marginalia of 1881, along with those passages that he copied, with variations and abridgments, from Emerson's Versuche into a separate notebook in January 1882. For context, I have included in my notes brief passages from (...) the German translation alongside Emerson's original that bear the most direct relevance to the texts here presented. Often these are passages Nietzsche himself underlined. With particular attention to the German translation Nietzsche was reading, I demonstrate in my introduction critical ways in which Emerson provoked Nietzsche's thought, and articulate what I take to be the basis of Nietzsche's deep and abiding affinity with the American thinker. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to provide a philosophical discussion of Frederick Douglass's thought in relation to Christianity. I expand upon the work of Bill E. Lawson and Frank M. Kirkland—who both argue that there are Kantian features present in Douglass as it relates to his conception of the individual—by arguing that there are similarities between Douglass and Kant not only concerning the relationship between morality and Christianity, but also concerning the nature of the soul. Specifically, I try to (...) show that the moral weakness of slaveholding Christianity that Douglass attacked is found in the ecclesial formation of the slaveholding Christian church; it is a formation that begins with epistemology, but ignores ethics. I conclude, in part, that both Douglass and Kant reject a Cartesian psychological dualism in favor of a conception of the soul that is more attentive to one's moral development. (shrink)

Three decades have elapsed since Stanley Cavell, regarding Nietzsche's debt to Emerson, remarked, "no matter how obvious to anyone who cares to verify it, it stays incredible". With this book, Benedetta Zavatta has dispelled completely and forever that aura of the incredible. The book is a great advance on the two previous monographs dedicated to the Emerson–Nietzsche connection...