A misconception regarding the ultrastructural basis of myocardial failure has been observed in laboratory studies involving medical students and practicing physicians, in medical textbooks, and in clinical instruction of students. This misconception attributes heart failure to overextension of individual cardiac muscle fibres and their sarcomeres, resulting in a mechanically based decline in contractile force production. The basis of the misconception is a set of component misconceptions which interact in reciprocally supportive ways. The interlocking nature of the component misunderstandings strengthens the (...) overall misconception, making it difficult to undermine. A contributor to many aspects of the faulty account of heart failure is a tendency toward oversimplification of complex phenomena in learning, instruction, and scientific research. Implications for medical education are considered. (shrink)

BACKGROUND: Serotonin transporter promoter genotype appears to increase risk for depression in the context of stressful life events. However, the effects of this genotype on measures of stress sensitivity are poorly understood. Therefore, this study examined whether 5-HTTLPR genotype was associated with negative information processing biases in early childhood. METHOD: Thirty-nine unselected seven-year-old children completed a negative mood induction procedure and a Self-Referent Encoding Task designed to measure positive and negative schematic processing. Children were also genotyped for the 5-HTTLPR gene. (...) RESULTS: Children who were homozygous for the short allele of the 5-HTTLPR gene showed greater negative schematic processing following a negative mood prime than those with other genotypes. 5-HTTLPR genotype was not significantly associated with positive schematic processing. LIMITATIONS: The sample size for this study was small. We did not analyze more recently reported variants of the 5-HTTLPR long alleles. CONCLUSIONS: 5-HTTLPR genotype is associated with negative information processing styles following a negative mood prime in a non-clinical sample of young children. Such cognitive styles are thought to be activated in response to stressful life events, leading to depressive symptoms; thus, cognitive styles may index the "stress-sensitivity" conferred by this genotype. (shrink)

Professor Plant has presented a briefer treatment of Hegel’s philosophical development than did H. S. Harris in Towards the Sunlight, and a considerably more historical, epistemological and metaphysical treatment than is presented in Pelcynski’s Hegel; Political Philosophy and not so exhaustive an account of the political and social philosophy as appears in Avineri’s Hegel’s Philosophy of the Modern State. These four books taken together testify to the importance of Hegel on the contemporary philosophic scene. Plant’s volume is perhaps the best (...) in that it pulls together the various philosophical, political, and social strains in brief compass, for he demonstrates quite convincingly, as did Avineri and Harris, that the political and metaphysical writings of Hegel are closely interconnected and that the interpretation of art and religion flow from his considered interpretation of his contemporary cultural situation. Plant, with Marx, Engels, Kierkegaard, Baur, Feuerbach et al. and against Findlay and Bergman, argues that there is a Christian theological residue in Hegel’s system, but surprisingly, the fruit of the system is clarification not mystification. Only with that residue is the system and totality really explicable. An altogether welcome book.—R.L.P. (shrink)

This book is not a generalized essay on Hegel’s philosophy of history as the title seems to promise. It is rather an excellent exposition and interpretation of some of the main doctrines and assumptions of Hegel about the varieties of historical writing, mechanism and teleology, contingency and necessity. It also contains a discussion of the relation of Hegel to the covering law model of explanation. The first chapter is primarily an exposition and exegesis of Hegel’s discernment of the varieties of (...) historical writing in the long introduction to the Lectures. Although this section is generally successful, one of the burdens of Wilkins’ argument is that Hegel is not an a priori thinker, yet Hegel argues that the state is a necessary precondition to people having a history. Groups without a state lie "outside his plan." That such groups may be beyond his plan is appropriate, but that they can have no history needs to be critically evaluated in light of anthropological studies. A second difficulty with the exegesis centers around the almost complete neglect by Wilkins of the idea of providence in the Lectures and the notion of Christian religion. One can wonder whether a proper understanding of Hegel’s philosophy of history is complete without due consideration of both aspects. (shrink)

Professor Crites comes to his task with deep personal sympathy for and philosophic commitment to each of the protagonists in his volume. The subject of Crites’ work is not the tension of faith and history with which we are familiar in the works of Strauss, Baur, Feuerbach, Renan, and M. Arnold, but rather the tension of Christianity and culture. Crites chooses for his departure the notion and analogy of "domesticity," the accommodation, or lack thereof, of the gospel and the world. (...) With a fairness that is singularly unique among Hegelian critics of Kierkegaard, Crites argues that the issue between Kierkegaard and Hegel was the problem of the positivity of the Christian religion. For Hegel, the development of the notion of Christianity as the absolute religion solved the problem raised by the problem of positivity and Lessing’s essay "On the Proof of the Power and the Spirit." For Kierkegaard such a solution was a sellout, for it eliminated faith. Crites argues well the logic of both Kierkegaard’s and Hegel’s positions. Though the author has a few judicious things to say about Kierkegaard’s epistemology, his treatment would have profited by a more extended analysis of the epistemology of both Hegel and Kierkegaard, and by some indications regarding the importance and use of the modal categories in his author’s appraisal of both faith and history—R. L. P. (shrink)

This survey of the history of Protestant thought in the nineteenth century is founded upon two major methodological principles. The first is the hard-nosed avoidance of the national history approach. In spite of the continuity in certain nations of specific theological traditions there is another sense in which the varying efforts of Protest theology struggled to answer the same questions. Welch chose to ignore, as far as possible, national boundaries and concentrate on what can usefully be called the "Victorian era" (...) historically or in theological parlance the period "between Schleiermacher and Ritschl." By ignoring national boundaries and linguistic divisions Welch is able to discuss Feuerbach, Emerson, Comte, Mill, Carlyle, and the Arnolds in one chapter. This brings us to the second methodological point: Welch has included a number of figures in his survey who are not academic theologians but rather literary men or philosophers, as Coleridge, Emerson, Hegel, the Arnolds, Comte, Mill, Carlyle, etc. What might be a surprise here is the inclusion of the literary types. This work, when complete will compare favorably on the period covered with E. Hirsch’s Geschichte der Neuern [[sic]] Evangelischen Theologie, in Zusammenhang mit der Algemeinen [[sic]] Bewegnungen [[sic]] des Europaischen [[sic]] Denkens. The present book can be supplemented by the author’s God and Incarnation in Midnineteenth [[sic]] Century German Theology in "A Library of Protestant Thought" which contains vital readings of Thomasius, Dorner, and Biedermann. Three points, briefly, in criticism. The treatment of Hegel’s notion of spirit in relation to religion is not quite right. Also, the treatment of Kierkegaard as a right-wing Hegelian is quite surprising after Löwith’s placing of him in the left-wing group in From Hegel to Nietzsche, pp. 110-115. Then too, one questions whether Kierkegaard should be dubbed a "theological conservative".—R. L. P. (shrink)

The volume contains new translations of the introduction and preface to the second edition of The Essence of Christianity and Principles of the Philosophy of the Future. This comprises about one-half of the book. The remainder is Hanfi’s fifty-page introduction and translations of "Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy," "The Beginning of Philosophy," "The Necessity of a Reform of Philosophy," "Preliminary Theses on the Reform of Philosophy," and "Fragments Concerning the Characteristics of My Philosophical Development." The translations are quite readable. (...) Hanfi’s introduction refers to the relation of Feuerbach to Marx in the first and third sections while the second is given over to a survey of Feuerbach’s development and thought. Another aspect, and one of the most suggestive, is at the end of the first section where Hanfi attempts to show how Feuerbach’s anthropology relates to Heidegger’s Daseinsanalytik. One of the most interesting sections of Feuerbach’s text is "On the beginning of Philosophy," for Kierkegaard, in the context of fathering another philosophy of a very different kind, came upon some of the same criticisms of Hegel’s philosophy. This translation, along with those of Essence of Christianity, and the more recent The Essence of Religion, The Essence of Faith According to Luther, and the book by Kamenka, The Philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach, bespeak a renewed interest in the essential Feuerbach.—R.L.P. (shrink)

These two volumes complete the topical selections from Kierkegaard’s papers. Volume 3 covers L-R. Volume 4 covers S-Z. The entries are arranged chronologically within the topic. The forthcoming Volumes 5 and 6 will carry the autobiographical material. Volume 7 will contain a complete set of indexes and cross references. This is quite an expansion of the five volumes projected in the Hongs’ preface to Volume 1. English students will gain a full volume of selections and a much expanded cross reference (...) and index. (shrink)

Pompa’s book is a welcome addition to the sparse English literature on Vico, and it will be of interest not only to philosophers but to historians, anthropologists, and other social scientists. Vico is written and developed as a guide to the final version of the New Science which is surely one of the most obscure books ever written. This is the first book in English which takes as its aim the exposition of the New Science. The other English books, ranging (...) from Flint’s Vico in 1891 to Tagliacozzo and White’s Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium contained either a general survey of ideas, as in Flint, or a wide collection of background materials and analytic, historical, or comparative studies, as in Tagliacozzo and White. A. R. Caponigri in Time and Idea expressed perhaps the historically and philosophically most controversial thesis: that Vico had attempted to temporalize and historicize the Platonic forms in his concept of the "ideal eternal history.". (shrink)

This book ranges over a number of problems in contemporary political science. Ostensibly about Marx and Burke, Aristotle and the behaviorists also figure in the development. One of the major difficulties of the book is the forced presence of Aristotle and the absence of Hegel. "Burke and Marx being in the Aristotelian tradition, considered it absurd to speak of man as anything but a social or political animal—a zoon politikon...". This sentence is probably correct, but it is ad hoc, for, (...) on this point, Hegel is Marx’s teacher—not Aristotle. There are numerous such references, and thus, as a revisionist view in the history of ideas, the book seems at points strained and at others inaccurate. There is a level of generality at which one can say that Burke, Aristotle, and Marx occupy a common position, and that is the level at which this book is written, viz., a very general generality. One is simply stunned by the overcoming of differences, the omission of distinctions. To suggest that Hegel is a Rationalist is to stretch the language of philosophy to meaninglessness. Repeated again is the simplicities about thesis, antithesis, synthesis, cloppity, clop. Perhaps this is enough about the shortcomings of this book. (shrink)

A great deal can be learned about this book by considering the author’s dedication: "to the memory of Paul Tillich who showed me where to look and to Walter Kaufmann who showed me how to see." This book is an ambitious effort to show the continuity and themes of nineteenth and early twentieth century continental philosophy. Tillich taught Schacht that in that fruitful era lie the roots of many of our philosophical and theological problems, i.e., where to look. Yet, many (...) of the judgments about this period are informed by the interpretation already familiar from the writings of Walter Kaufmann. This is not to suggest that this book is a rehash of the sometimes confused and inaccurate interpretations of Kaufmann. No, Schacht is his own man and as fully capable of making his own mistakes as correcting some of Kaufmann’s. (shrink)

OBJECTIVES: Early-emerging, temperamental differences in fear-related traits may be a heritable vulnerability factor for anxiety disorders. Previous research indicates that the serotonin transporter promoter region polymorphism is a candidate gene for such traits. METHODS: Associations between 5-HTTLPR genotype and indices of fearful child temperament, derived from maternal report and standardized laboratory observations, were examined in a community sample of 95 preschool-aged children. RESULTS: Children with one or more long alleles of the 5-HTTLPR gene were rated as significantly more nervous during (...) standardized laboratory tasks than children who were homozygous for the short alleles. Children homozygous for the short alleles were also rated as significantly shyer, by maternal report, than those with at least one copy of the long allele of the 5-HTTLPR gene. CONCLUSIONS: This study extends the literature linking the short alleles of the serotonin transporter promoter region polymorphism to fear and anxiety-related traits in early childhood and adulthood, and is one of very few studies to examine the molecular genetics of preschoolers' temperament using multiple measures of traits in a normative sample. (shrink)

This paper argues that professionals who make boundary-related decisions should be guided by relationship-based practice. In our roles as service users and professionals, drawing from our lived experiences of professional relationships, we argue we need to move away from distance-based practice. This includes understanding the boundary stories and narratives that exist for all of us – including the people we support, other professionals, as well as the organisations and systems within which we work. When we are dealing with professional boundary (...) issues, we should centre relationship-building skills that are central to many other aspects of our work. Skills that foster relationships at all levels – between professionals, service users, and services – need to be revalued. Our final recommendation is to create, develop, and foster safer spaces within and outside of organisations, as well as inter-professionally, for the discussion and exploration of boundary-related issues and practice. We are interested in hearing from those with experiences of being marginalised by boundaries so that they can inform a reshaping of our collective ideas around boundary related practices. To foster relationship-based practices in organisations, we have outlined several recommendations here; however, we recognize that these do not go far enough, and that collective action is needed to inform systemic change. (shrink)

In recent years, we have seen a new concern with ethics training for research and development professionals. Although ethics training has become more common, the effectiveness of the training being provided is open to question. In the present effort, a new ethics training course was developed that stresses the importance of the strategies people apply to make sense of ethical problems. The effectiveness of this training was assessed in a sample of 59 doctoral students working in the biological and social (...) sciences using a pre–post design with follow-up and a series of ethical decision-making measures serving as the outcome variable. Results showed not only that this training led to sizable gains in ethical decision making but also that these gains were maintained over time. The implications of these findings for ethics training in the sciences are discussed. (shrink)