Initial responses to questionnaires used to assess participants' understanding of informed consent for malaria vaccine trials conducted in the United States and Mali were tallied. Total scores were analyzed by age, sex, literacy (if known), and location. Ninety-two percent (92%) of answers by United States participants and 85% of answers by Malian participants were correct. Questions more likely to be answered incorrectly in Mali related to risk, and to the type of vaccine. For adult participants, independent predictors of higher scores (...) were younger age and female sex in the United States, and male sex in Mali. Scores in the United States were higher than in Mali (P = 0.005). Despite this difference participants at both sites were well informed overall. Although interpretation must be qualified because questionnaires were not intended as research tools and were not standardized among sites, these results do not support concerns about systematic low understanding among research participants in developing versus developed countries. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Exploring the Depth of Dream Experience: The Enactive Framework and Methods for Neurophenomenological Research” by Elizaveta Solomonova & Xin Wei Sha. Upshot: A neurophenomenological approach to the enactive account of consciousness in general is supported by an account of how the brain functions in creating imagery of non-present objects and situations. Three types of non-sensory imagery are needed to ground our consciousness of sensory imagery: proprioceptive imagery, motor imagery, and what Eugene Gendlin calls the (...) “felt sense” of a situation. Dreams show clearly how we image situations without sensory input, a process that is clearly enactive rather than reactive. This enactive account of imagery then supports Gendlin’s method of interpreting dreams by comparing their “felt sense” to the felt sense of waking situations. (shrink)

Editors’ note: These four interrelated discussions of the role of the cerebellum in coordinating emotional and higher cognitive functions developed out of a workshop presented by the four authors for the 2000 Conference of the Cognitive Science Society at the University of Pennsylvania. The four interrelated discussions explore the implications of the recent explosion of cerebellum research suggesting an expanded cerebellar role in higher cognitive functions as well as in the coordination of emotional functions with learning, logical thinking, perceptual consciousness, (...) and action planning. (shrink)

© 2016 Regents of the University of California.The Review summarizes much of particle physics and cosmology. Using data from previous editions, plus 3,062 new measurements from 721 papers, we list, evaluate, and average measured properties of gauge bosons and the recently discovered Higgs boson, leptons, quarks, mesons, and baryons. We summarize searches for hypothetical particles such as supersymmetric particles, heavy bosons, axions, dark photons, etc. All the particle properties and search limits are listed in Summary Tables. We also give numerous (...) tables, figures, formulae, and reviews of topics such as Higgs Boson Physics, Supersymmetry, Grand Unified Theories, Neutrino Mixing, Dark Energy, Dark Matter, Cosmology, Particle Detectors, Colliders, Probability and Statistics. Among the 117 reviews are many that are new or heavily revised, including those on Pentaquarks and Inflation. The complete Review is published online in a journal and on the website of the Particle Data Group. The printed PDG Book contains the Summary Tables and all review articles but no longer includes the detailed tables from the Particle Listings. A Booklet with the Summary Tables and abbreviated versions of some of the review articles is also available. (shrink)

Since Jackendoff has shown that language facilitates abstract and complex thought by making possible subtle manipulations of the focus of attention, and since the kind of attention relevant here is attention to aspects of intentional objects in conscious awareness, it follows that the abstract and complex thinking that language facilitates owes much to the working of a conscious process. This, however, conflicts with Jackendoff's view of consciousness as something which does not play a direct part in thinking, but is only (...) a byproduct of a non-conscious computational process in the brain which does the real thinking. I argue that, since Jackendoff s phenomenology of language shows that attention plays such an important part in thinking, yet language can help us attend only to what we are conscious of consciousness does play an important part in thinking. Moreover, consciousness cannot be merely an epiphenomenal byproduct separable in principle from underlying physical mechanisms, because this would imply that consciousness itself is not physical, which would lead to dualism. But if consciousness is inseparable from its physiological substratum, then it also causes whatever effects the physiological substratum causes. (shrink)

The book includes contributions by Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, George F. R. Ellis, Christopher D. Frith, Mark Hallett, David Hodgson, Owen D. Jones, Alicia Juarrero, J. A. Scott Kelso, Christof Koch, Hans Küng, Hakwan C. Lau, Dean Mobbs,...

D.G Attfield's article "Learning from Religion" in BJRE 18:2 raises a number of difficulties in the treatment of truth claims in Religious Education. He argues that these claims should limit the acceptable goals of non-confessional R.E. to teaching about religion and not cross a threshold of faith-commitment beyond which a child may learn from religion. His arguments rest on a questionable understanding of religions as entirely defined by their irreconcilable revelations, which actually condemns R.E to an ineffectual relativism. Attfield also (...) makes contradictory assumptions about the capacity of children to make valid autonomous decisions to enter into faith-commitment. I argue that the coherence of non-confessional R.E. requires a wisdom-based understanding of religious development, coupled with an understanding of educational development which emphasises the importance of individual role-models and the gradual building of coherent world-views. (shrink)

R D Smith; The Use of Memory, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 17, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 85–96, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.1983.tb00018.

Hicks' edition of the De Anima contains valuable commentary from Hicks as well as useful summaries of the views of earlier commentators.

Originally published in 1907, this book contains the ancient Greek text of Aristotle's De Anima, his treatise on the differing souls of living things. An English translation is provided on each facing page, and Hicks supplies a very detailed commentary on each line at the end of the book, as well as a summary of each section. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Greek philosophy and the history of classical scholarship.

Requests by patients or their families for treatment which the patient's physician considers to be "inappropriate" are becoming more frequent than refusals of treatment which the physician considers appropriate. Such requests are often based on the patient's religious beliefs about the attributes of God (sovereignty, omnipotence), the attributes of persons (sanctity of life), or the individual's personal relationship with God (communication, commands, etc). We present four such cases and discuss some of the basic religious tenets of the three Abrahamic faith (...) traditions as they relate to such requests. We suggest that religious reasons for requesting "inappropriate" treatment are "special" and deserve serious consideration. We offer guidance to assist clinicians and clinical ethicists as they attempt to resolve these conflicts, emphasising the importance of understanding the religious beliefs of the patient/surrogate and suggesting the assistance of a religious interpreter. We suggest open discussion with patients and families of both the clinical situation and the theological basis for these requests. We also suggest that clinicians use additional religious doctrines or principles from patients' own traditions to balance the reasons behind the requests. We conclude that most persistent requests for "inappropriate" treatment should be honoured. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:R. D. Ackerman BELIEVING IN A FICTION: WALLACE STEVENS AT THE LIMITS OF PHENOMENOLOGY The "ring of men" of "Sunday Morning" will chant their "devotion to the sun, / Not as a god, but as a god might be, / Naked among them, like a savage source" (CP, pp. 69-70).' Solar nakedness is deferred even as it is named. The problem for belief is the question of appearance and (...) representation. Things appear as and like.... The phenomenological return to things is also a turn to fiction, as Husserl understood: "If anyone loves a paradox, he can really say... that the element which makes up the life of phenomenology... is fiction. ' " The sun is divine, and it is not; it is both naked and clothed, savage and civilized, source (or end) and means. But such paradox is ultimately unsatisfying, and as we will see with Stevens, the need for belief—for an image or idea of totality—forces the issue of fiction and reality. The Stevens we will have in view is not the Stevens—as if there were such a creature. Our Stevens is the one most persuaded by promises such as those of phenomenology, the one most concerned with decreation (reduction) and fresh beginnings, with discovery and recognition, with imagination, the body, and the earth. This is the Stevens for whom the barrier of language presages at last not absence and difference but fictive recovery of presence and identity, the one for whom poetry represents a way of belief beyond mysticism even as it bodes mythic proximity. Finally, this is the Stevens who predominates throughout the prose (as well as in much of the poetry), who tries mightily to secure a belief while disencumbering himself of metaphysics—but alas, I think, with small success. Although Stevens's association of the problem of belief with the idea of fiction occurs in early poems such as "A High-Toned Old Christian 79 80Philosophy and Literature Woman" and "To the One of Fictive Music," his most intensive involvement with fiction as belief dates from the early 1940s and spans the period of his major essays and his last four volumes of poems. He recounts, for instance, a 1942 conversation with a student: "I said that I thought that we had reached a point at which we could no longer really believe in anything unless we recognized that it was a fiction. The student said that that was an impossibility, that there was no such thing as believing in something that one knew was not true. It is obvious, however, that we are doing that all the time" (L, p. 430). What does it mean to believe in a fiction? That is my main subject here, as we seek out the limits of the phenomenological Stevens. His letters of this period are preoccupied with the problem of fictive belief: "If one no longer believes in God (as truth), it is not possible merely to disbelieve; it becomes necessary to believe in something else.... A good deal of my poetry recently has concerned an identity for that thing.... In one of the short poems that I have just sent to the harvard advocate, I say that one's final belief must be in a fiction. I think that the history of belief will show that it has always been in a fiction" (L, p. 370). The poem referred to, "Asides on the Oboe," begins: The prologues are over. It is a question now, Of final belief. So, say that final belief Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose. (CP, p. 250) Acknowledging that "in the long run, poetry would be the supreme fiction" (L, pp. 430-31), Stevens nonetheless singles out the nominative function of poetry as the essence of its claim to supremacy: "Poetry means not the language of poetry but the thing itself.... The subject matter is what comes to mind when one says of the month of August... 'Thou art not August, unless I make thee so'" (L, p. 377). The quoted line (also from "Asides") underscores the paradox that for Stevens the essence of fiction (the nontrue) is its capacity to nominate the true or the real. This... (shrink)