ABSTRACT Throughout the early modern period, the most widely read astronomical textbooks were Johannes de Sacrobosco's De sphaera and the Theorica planetarum, ultimately in the new form introduced by Georg Peurbach. This essay argues that the images in these texts were intended to develop an “intelligent eye.” Students were trained to transform representations of specific heavenly phenomena into moving mental images of the structure of the cosmos. Only by learning the techniques of mental visualization and manipulation could the student “see” (...) in the mind's eye the structure and motions of the cosmos. While anyone could look up at the heavens, only those who had acquired the intelligent eye could comprehend the divinely created order of the universe. Further, the essay demonstrates that the visual program of the Sphaera and Theorica texts played a significant and hitherto unrecognized role in later scientific work. Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler all utilized the same types of images in their own texts to explicate their ideas about the cosmos. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Throughout the early modern period, the most widely read astronomical textbooks were Johannes de Sacrobosco's De sphaera and the Theorica planetarum, ultimately in the new form introduced by Georg Peurbach. This essay argues that the images in these texts were intended to develop an “intelligent eye.” Students were trained to transform representations of specific heavenly phenomena into moving mental images of the structure of the cosmos. Only by learning the techniques of mental visualization and manipulation could the student “see” (...) in the mind's eye the structure and motions of the cosmos. While anyone could look up at the heavens, only those who had acquired the intelligent eye could comprehend the divinely created order of the universe. Further, the essay demonstrates that the visual program of the Sphaera and Theorica texts played a significant and hitherto unrecognized role in later scientific work. Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler all utilized the same types of images in their own texts to explicate their ideas about the cosmos. (shrink)

Interactive narratives are inextricable from the way that we understand our encounters with digital technology. This is based upon the way that these encounters are processually formed into a narrative of episodic events, arranged and re-arranged by various levels of agency. After describing past research conducted at the iCinema Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, this paper sets out a framework within which to build a relational theory of interactive narrative formation, outlining future research in the area.

Peace is a hallmark of human societies. However, certain ant species engage in long-term intergroup resource sharing, which is remarkably similar to peace among human groups. We discuss how individual and group payoff distributions are affected by kinship, dispersal, and age structure; the challenges of diagnosing peace; and the benefits of comparing convergent complex behaviours in disparate taxa.

Tragedy and Citizenship provides a wide-ranging exploration of attitudes toward tragedy and their implications for politics. Derek W. M. Barker reads the history of political thought as a contest between the tragic view of politics that accepts conflict and uncertainty, and an optimistic perspective that sees conflict as self-dissolving. Drawing on Aristotle's political thought, alongside a novel reading of the Antigone that centers on Haemon, its most neglected character, Barker provides contemporary democratic theory with a theory of tragedy. (...) He sees Hegel's philosophy of reconciliation as a critical turning point that results in the elimination of citizenship. By linking Hegel's failure to address the tragic dimensions of politics to Richard Rorty, John Rawls, and Judith Butler, Barkeroffers a major reassessment of contemporary political theory and a fresh perspective on the most urgent challenges facing democratic politics. Derek W. M. Barker is a program officer at the Kettering Foundation. (shrink)

One method for investigating the neurobiology of consciousness is to experimentally manipulate consciousness as a variable and then visualize the resultant functional brain changes with advanced imaging techniques. To begin investigation into this area, healthy volunteers underwent positron emission tomography scanning while listening to randomized word lists in both conscious and unconscious conditions. Following anaesthesia, subjects had no explicit memories. Nonetheless, subjects demonstrated implicit memory on a forced-choice test . These subsequent memory scores were correlated with regional brain metabolism measured (...) during encoding. Conscious recall and unconscious recognition memory demonstrated considerable anatomic overlap in correlating significantly with relative glucose metabolism in auditory verbal memory areas. However, only conscious recall correlated with mediodorsal thalamic nucleus activity; unconscious recognition memory did not. These findings suggest that conscious versus unconscious memory distinctions may depend on the presence or absence of correlated thalamic activity, and directly implicate the thalamus in the neurobiology of consciousness. (shrink)

Extensive research has demonstrated that rs1360780, a common single nucleotide polymorphism within the FKBP5 gene, interacts with early-life stress in predicting psychopathology. Previous results suggest that carriers of the TT genotype of rs1360780 who were exposed to child abuse show differences in structure and functional activation of emotion-processing brain areas belonging to the salience network. Extending these findings on intermediate phenotypes of psychopathology, we examined if the interaction between rs1360780 and child abuse predicts resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) between the amygdala (...) and other areas of the salience network. We analyzed data of young European adults from the general population (N = 774; mean age = 18.76 years) who took part in the IMAGEN study. In the absence of main effects of genotype and abuse, a significant interaction effect was observed for rsFC between the right centromedial amygdala and right posterior insula (p <.025, FWE-corrected), which was driven by stronger rsFC in TT allele carriers with a history of abuse. Our results suggest that the TT genotype of rs1360780 may render individuals with a history of abuse more vulnerable to functional changes in communication between brain areas processing emotions and bodily sensations, which could underlie or increase the risk for psychopathology. (shrink)

Idiopathic Parkinson’s disease impairs working memory, but the exact nature of this deficit in terms of the underlying cognitive mechanisms is not well understood. In this study patients with mild clinical symptoms of PD were compared with matched healthy control subjects on a computerized battery of tests designed to assess spatial working memory and verbal working memory. In the spatial working memory task, subjects were required to recall a sequence of four locations. The verbal working memory task was methodologically identical (...) except for the modality of the stimuli used, requiring subjects to orally recall a sequence of six digits. In either case, half of the sequences were structured in a way that allowed ‘chunking’, while others were unstructured. This manipulation was designed to dissociate the strategic component of task performance from the memory-load component. Mild medicated patients with PD were impaired only on the structured versions of the verbal working memory tasks. The analogous deficit in the spatial working memory was less pronounced. These findings are in agreement with the hypothesis that working memory deficits in PD reflect mainly the executive component of the tasks and that the deficits may be at least partly modality-independent. (shrink)

Recent magnetic resonance imaging and pathological studies have indicated that axonal loss is a major contributor to disease progression in multiple sclerosis. 1 H magnetic resonance spectroscopy, through measurement of N -acetyl aspartate, a neuronal marker, provides a unique tool to investigate this. Patients with primary progressive multiple sclerosis have few lesions on conventional MRI, suggesting that changes in normal appearing white matter, such as axonal loss, may be particularly relevant to disease progression in this group. To test this hypothesis (...) NAWM was studied with MRS, measuring the concentration of N -acetyl derived groups. Single-voxel MRS using a water-suppressed PRESS sequence was carried out in 24 patients with primary progressive multiple sclerosis and in 16 age-matched controls. Ratios of metabolite to creatine concentration were calculated in all subjects, and absolute concentrations were measured in 18 patients and all controls. NA/Cr was significantly lower in NAWM in patients than in controls, as was the absolute concentration of NA. There was no significant difference in the absolute concentration of creatine between the groups. This study supports the hypothesis that axonal loss occurs in NAWM in primary progressive multiple sclerosis and may well be a mechanism for disease progression in this group. (shrink)

The issue of representing access control requirements continues to demand significant attention. The focus of researchers has traditionally been on developing particular access control models and policy specification languages for particular applications. However, this approach has resulted in an unnecessary surfeit of models and languages. In contrast, we describe a general access control model and a logic-based specification language from which both existing and novel access control models may be derived as particular cases and from which several approaches can be (...) developed for domain-specific applications. We will argue that our general framework has a number of specific attractions and an implication of our work is to encourage a methodological shift from a study of the particulars of access control to its generalities. (shrink)

What might a synaesthetic cinema look like? Or, better, what might it sound, smell, taste and feel like? This essay approaches David Lynch's Mulholland Drive as a means of thinking through conceptual but concrete descriptions of synaesthesia not as an artistic device, a metaphor, an historical trend, or a rare clinical condition, but as a way of being in space and time — and being in cinema — that is simultaneously abstract and very real. Lynch's film becomes, as well, an (...) opportunity to think about cinematic spectacle and ‘excess’ in sensorily specific ways. The hallucinatory sensual disjunctions that occur throughout the film reveal a double system of reference: vision and proprioception mutually informing and interrupting one another, in ways that recall Brian Massumi's discussion of topological architecture. Those moments of cinematic, sensory ‘excess’ are sensual reminders of the degree to which vision is entangled with other senses in the experience of cinema. (shrink)

This paper examines masculinity in relation to the modern tracking shot in Daren Aronofsky's The Wrestler and Derek Cianfrance's The Place Beyond the Pines. These films make prominent use of a particular tracking shot in which the camera floats behind a male character, his head neatly centred in the frame. The camera in these ‘follow-shots’ seems unmistakably but loosely tethered to the character's body. This paper attempts to ascertain the phenomenological nature and critical significance of that relationship, which in recent (...) films expresses the intimate distance and dissonance between mobile cameras, masculinity and the male body in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

Drawing upon insights from virtue ethics, this essay develops a concept of collective identity specifically suited to deliberative democracy: a virtues-centered theory of deliberative justice. Viewing democratic legitimacy as a political phenomenon, we must account for more than the formal rules that must be satisfied according to deontological theories of deliberative democracy. I argue that common approaches to deliberative democracy are unable to account for the motivations of deliberation, or ensure that citizens have the cognitive skills to deliberate well. Next, (...) I engage with critics of deliberative democracy who have moved toward broader and more humanistic concepts of deliberation but have stopped short of conceiving of justice as a virtue and, in their own way, neglected questions of collective identity. I reconstruct justice as a virtue from a deliberative perspective, combining virtue ethics’ emphasis on habituation with a weaker sense of collective identity that allows for value pluralism and disagreement, consistent with deliberative democracy. That is, deliberative democracy requires a shared and habituated civic culture of mutual understanding of differences. Finally, drawing from discourse on race in contemporary American politics, I conclude with brief illustrations of the need for a collective identity based on mutual understanding. Although deliberative democracy does not require a thick or intense sense of social solidarity, it does need citizens to share habits, inclinations, and capacities to engage in communication across their differences. (shrink)

By now it goes without saying that cinema is and has always been a synesthetic experience. But what exactly do we mean when we say that? The paper develops a phenomenology of “cinematic synesthesia” that draws upon three recent developments: first, the neuroscientific “neonatal synesthesia hypothesis”; second, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s lectures on child psychology and translator Talia Welsh’s contextualization of that work within recent developmental psychology; and third, Dylan Trigg’s concept of a “darkened phenomenology” that accounts for the radically “unhuman.” These (...) conceptual lenses are trained on Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, whose legendary impact stems from its perplexing tangle of the sensory with the cognitive, the unconscious with the conscious, the individual with the collective, and the past with the present. (shrink)

Genomic research projects that collect tissues from deceased organ and tissue donors must obtain the authorization of family decision makers under difficult circumstances that may affect the authorization process. Using a quasi-experimental design, the Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues (ELSI) substudy of the Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) project compared the recall and understanding of the donation authorization process of two groups: family members who had authorized donation of tissues to the GTEx project (the comparison group) and family members who had authorized (...) organ and tissue donations in years previous, who subsequently participated in two different mock-authorization processes that mimicked the GTEx authorization process (the intervention groups). Participants in the comparison and intervention groups were matched on key demographic characteristics.We found that participants in the intervention groups who experienced a mock-authorization process demonstrated better recall of the tissue donation request than members of the comparison group. Our data indicate that the stress associated with the loss of a loved one limited the ability of family members to recall details about the GTEx project. However, we found a similar lack of knowledge in both the comparison and the intervention group participants, suggesting lack of knowledge may be due to the complexity and unfamiliarity of the information presented to them during the authorization process. We discuss these findings in the context of everyday clinical decision making in cognitively challenging conditions. (shrink)

This paper brings needed clarity to the influential view that species are cohesive entities held together by gene flow, and then develops an empirical argument against that view: Neglected data suggest gene flow is neither necessary nor sufficient for species cohesion. Implications are discussed. ‡I'm grateful to Rob Wilson, Alex Rueger and Lindley Darden for important comments on earlier drafts, and to Joseph Nagel, Heather Proctor, Ken Bond, members of the DC History and Philosophy of Biology reading group, and audience (...) members at the November 2006 meeting of the PSA, for helpful comments or discussion. Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada fellowship 752-2005-1208 supported research. †To contact the author, please write to: Philosophy Department, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 5185 Helen C. White Hall, 600 North Park Street, Madison, WI 53706; e-mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

This paper proposes a new and testable view about the nature of species and other evolving lineages, according to which they are feedback systems. On this view, it is a mistake to think gene flow, niche sharing, and trait frequency similarities between populations are among variables that interact to cause some further downstream variable that distinguishes evolving lineages from each other, some sort of “species cohesion” for example. Instead, gene flow, niche sharing, similarities between populations, and other causal variables feed (...) into each other—instances of these at earlier times help cause instances of these same variables at later times. And any lineage-identifying cohesion just is the recurrence or cycling of these feedback relations within metapopulations over generations. Such cohesion can then be represented as variable M within multi-dimensional variable spaces, where values of M vary dynamically with the frequency and magnitude of feedback relations. Related conditions for being a species or other evolving lineage are then clarified. To argue for the development and testing of this view, the paper shows how it improves upon others. (shrink)

The tattered remains of a few paragraphs of a work on harmonic theory were published in 1986 as P. Oxy. LIII.3706, with a careful commentary by M. W. Haslam. There are six fragments. Four of them are too small for any substantial sense to be recovered; and while fr. 2 and the second column of fr. 1 allow us to pick out significant words and phrases here and there, the remnants of these columns are very narrow, and the line of (...) reasoning seems inaccessible. Musicological analysis must focus on the first column of fr. 1. There is little enough even of that, and in attempting a relatively detailed interpretation I shall have to be rather less cautious than Haslam quite properly was. But I think that something can be made of it without stretching speculation too far, and if I am right the piece is of some genuine interest. Here are the two versions of the text that Haslam prints. The first records what is decipherable on the papyrus itself, while the second represents a partial reconstruction, restoring word-divisions and some of the missing letters. (shrink)