In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Playing the Dummy:Maugham, Smartphones, and the End of EleganceEric BronsonIOn the Russian Trans-Siberian train from Vladivostok to Petrograd (now St. Petersburg), an American businessman won't stop talking for the entire ten-day journey. In his story, "A Chance Acquaintance," W. Somerset Maugham describes this 1917 meeting between Ashenden, a British character loosely based on himself, and the chatty American, named Harrington. The two passengers are blissfully unmoved by the revolution (...) unfolding all around them. Ashenden casually suggests the two of them try and find another pair to pass the time playing bridge. Harrington refuses. "It beats me how an intelligent man can waste his time card-playing," Harrington asserts, "and of all the unintellectual pursuits I have ever seen it seems to me that solitaire is the worst. It kills conversation. Man is a social animal and he exercises the highest part of his nature when he takes part in social intercourse."1 Ashenden doesn't understand the American's distaste for playing cards, especially bridge. "'There is a certain elegance in wasting time,' said Ashenden. … 'Besides,' he added with bitterness, 'you can still talk.'" [End Page 477]Like many of his fictional characters, Maugham enjoyed eloquent, "time-wasting" games like bridge. Unlike solitaire, bridge encourages social interaction. Once, when his confounded bridge partner confronted Maugham with evidence that his high-class opponents were cheating, Maugham was nonplussed. "They gave us double Martinis to start with," he noted, "a slap-up lunch with a particularly good bottle of white Burgundy and old brandy with our coffee."2 The dishonesty was irrelevant. For Maugham, a good bridge game, like the attendant conversation, should help temper one's moral outrage and skim over the unruly passions that so often plague our public and private lives. Elegance, for Maugham, meant presenting the appearance of calm and respectability, especially when such presentations conflicted with one's more turbulent emotions.In Maugham's short story "The Three Fat Women of Antibes," the women around the bridge table desperately try to keep up appearances, both physically and emotionally. When passionate arguments inevitably threaten to undo the air of genteel conversation, Lena, the newest addition to the table, states, "I think it's such a pity to quarrel over bridge. … After all, it's only a game."3 But while it might be true that bridge is "only a game," Maugham took games seriously. Parlor games like bridge were spaces to practice and perfect the social mores on which colonial hierarchies were solidified. In Maugham's England, the game of life required an elegant performance of the many roles the genteel class was expected to play. That performance was predicated on a relentless effort to keep up ordinary appearances by regulating emotional displays. As Maugham wrote in a 1944 article for Good Housekeeping, a good bridge game rewards people who are "truthful, clearheaded, and considerate," characteristics essential "for playing the more important game of life."4More than any other card game, bridge is built on conventions. Etiquette dictates how cards are shuffled, passed, and played. While there is always some room for surprise and risk, everyone around the table needs to know the bidding and playing conventions to ensure the best possible game. In every hand a silent partner, known as the dummy, lays their cards face up, thereby taking themself out of the action.The persistence of such conventions is a holdover from the game of whist, the predecessor of bridge. In an early-nineteenth-century story, "Mrs. Battle's Opinions on Whist," essayist Charles Lamb describes an elderly whist player who enjoys the elegant waste of time that such long card games encourage. While dances and parties help build social skills around untrustworthy passions, card games like whist, and later bridge, [End Page 478] were more like "a long meal; not like quadrille, a feast of snatches. One or two rubbers might co-extend in duration with an evening. They gave time to form rooted friendships." This kind of congeniality mattered to serious people like Mrs. Battle, people who "despised superficiality, and looked deeper than the colours of things."5The game of bridge... (shrink)

"The greatest crisis of our times in a failure of the human imagination." -Editors The world is currently undergoing a period of unprecedented crises on virtually every front: economic, ecological, and humanitarian. It is starkly apparent that a shift is needed in our dominant structural systems - and that by addressing the collective thinking that has created and maintained these systems, scholars can do their part to catalyze such a shift. The interdisciplinary field known as the Anthropology of Consciousness offers (...) important insights for enacting this necessary shift. This book draws on the work of a group of diverse scholars to explore what the intersection of anthropology and consciousness studies can contribute to the "public turn" within anthropology and the academy in general. Its twelve chapters span disparate geographies and disciplinary frameworks, yet cohere in their focus on common themes such as imagination, empathy, agency, dialogue, and ethics. The answers to the question "So What? Now What?" differ for a linguistic anthropologist in the South Pacific, an environmental educator in Hawai'i, a grant-writing anthropologist serving a refugee agency in Portland, Oregon and the founder of a girls' school in Brazil. Nevertheless, they are united in the desire to reframe the anthropology of consciousness as an "anthropology of conscience," and this pioneering volume is the result. (shrink)

Modularity has become a central and remarkably useful concept in evolutionary developmental biology, offering an explanation of how independent, interacting units make possible developmental events and evolutionary changes. These modules exist at several different levels of organization, from genes to signal transduction pathways to cell populations. Cell populations, which are multicellular modules, provide an opportunity both to clarify our notion of modularity and to reexamine such central concepts as cell-to-cell communication. Rosine Chandebois’s work on “cell sociology” is reframed in the (...) language of modularity in order to show how groups of cells maintain their collective identity during development and how signaling information from the group’s environment is received by the constituent cells. In a “test case” for our account of multicellular modules, we consider the vertebrate neural crest, a migratory cell population made up of several subpopulations. The neural crest proves yet again to be a complex case, showing the importance of taking into account both developmental and evolutionary transformations of multicellular modules. (shrink)

The contribution of data use in schools has been proven via visible changes in policy and practice in schools, changes in practitioners learning or cognition and changes in opinions or attitudes regarding teaching or policy-making. Nevertheless, limited research is available on the extent to which data use in schools results in the aforementioned effects and how they can be explained by data use expectations and collaboration. This paper addresses both issues by describing and explaining data use effects via a large-scale (...) study in Flanders. Data collected from 1472 teachers indicate that, although teachers are moderately positive about the extent to which data use results in different types of effects, data use effects cannot be taken for granted. Structural Equation Modelling shows that explicating data use expectations and data use collaboration are essential in order to facilitate data use effects in schools. (shrink)

Farming is undergoing a digital revolution. Our existing review of current Big Data applications in the agri-food sector has revealed several collection and analytics tools that may have implications for relationships of power between players in the food system. For example, Who retains ownership of the data generated by applications like Monsanto Corproation's Weed I.D. “app”? Are there privacy implications with the data gathered by John Deere's precision agricultural equipment? Systematically tracing the digital revolution in agriculture, and charting the affordances (...) as well as the limitations of Big Data applied to food and agriculture, should be a broad research goal for Big Data scholarship. Such a goal brings data scholarship into conversation with food studies and it allows for a focus on the material consequences of big data in society. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.1 (2000) 19-37 [Access article in PDF] Eudaimonism and Theology in Stoic Accounts of Virtue Michael Gass The Stoics were unique among the major schools in the ancient world for maintaining that both virtue and happiness consist solely of "living in agreement with nature" (homologoumenos tei phusei zen). We know from a variety of texts that both Cleanthes and Chrysippus, if not (...) also Zeno, characterized such conduct both in essentialist terms, as a matter of living purposively in a manner natural for the human species, and in cosmological terms, as a matter of living in agreement with the purposes of nature as a whole, this being regarded as identical to Zeus. This is not to suggest, however, that cosmo-theological speculation figured prominently in the ethical systems of the early Stoics. Judging from extant summaries and discussions of Stoic ethical doctrines, those doctrines were justified in a dialectical fashion, not by appeal to facts about the purposive order of nature but simply from an analysis of ethical concepts patterned after similar analyses by earlier philosophers (most notably, Aristotle). It is this kind of learning that Chrysippus apparently had in mind when he maintained that ethics should be studied prior to undertaking a systematic investigation of nature: [T]here are three kinds of philosopher's theorems, logical, ethical and physical.... [W]hat should be ranked first of these are the logical, next the ethical, third the physical; and what should come last in the physical theorems is theology. 1On the other hand, as we learn from the testimony of Plutarch (and also from other indirect textual evidence examined recently by Jacques Brunschwig), 2 [End Page 19] Chrysippus also believed that physics in general and theology in particular yield a quite distinct, demonstrative knowledge of the matters first studied in ethics. A. A. Long and others have suggested that such knowledge was regarded by the Stoics as encompassing not just information about the ways in which virtuous living is encouraged by, and fits into, the wider aims of nature at large but also a deeper understanding of the very essence of virtue. 3 Specifically, virtue is revealed to consist in a conscious and deliberate harmonization of one's actions with the purposes of the divine architect. Thus, under this interpretation of their ethical intentions, the Stoics thought of the initial, analytical approach to ethics as necessarily incomplete even in its treatment of strictly ethical topics; the systematic study of nature was thought to impart additional wisdom regarding ethical matters.In her recent study of ancient ethical theories, Julia Annas seeks to counter this view of the place of cosmo-theological speculation in early Stoicism by arguing that such a religious characterization of virtue is incompatible with the eudaimonism to which all schools of ancient philosophy, including Stoicism, were committed. 4 She concedes that first Cleanthes and then much later the Roman Stoics did regard virtue in religious terms, but in her assessment this represents a radical departure from mainstream Stoic thinking on this subject (which is identified mostly with the views of Chrysippus and his disciples, all of whom were clearly and consistently committed to the eudaimonistic model of ethical inquiry). Annas argues that whereas the Stoic sage was traditionally depicted as a person whose commitment to morally appropriate conduct stems from his own rational reflection on his own needs and interests, a person who identified completely with the aims of the divine architect in his purposive activity would be someone who surrendered his right to decide for himself what his needs and interests are, and who therefore could even be required to act in violation of what he might judge by himself to be crucial to his happiness.In what follows I demonstrate that this argument, often advanced in the literature as a reductio ad absurdum of divine command theories of morality, falls wide of the mark in the present case due to the fact that those Stoics who characterized virtue in religious terms did so apparently because they regarded a complete identification with... (shrink)

Heuristic programming was the first area in which AI methods were tested. The favourite case-studies were fairly simple toyproblems, such as cryptarithmetic, games, such as checker or chess, and formal problems, such as logic or geometry theorem-proving. These problems are well-defined, roughly speaking, at least in comparison to real-life problems, and as such have played the role of Drosophila in early AI. In this chapter I will investigate the origins of heuristic programming and the shift to more knowledge-based and real-life (...) problem solving. (shrink)

The present study used masked repetition priming to examine whether face representations can be accessed without attention. Two experiments using a face recognition task presented masked repetition and control primes in spatially unattended locations prior to target onset. Experiment 1 used the same images as primes and as targets and Experiment 2 used different images of the same individual as primes and targets. Repetition priming was observed across both experiments regardless of whether spatial attention was cued to the location of (...) the prime. Priming occurred for both famous and non-famous targets in Experiment 1 but was only reliable for famous targets in Experiment 2, suggesting that priming in Experiment 1 indexed access to view-specific representations whereas priming in Experiment 2 indexed access to view-invariant, abstract representations. Overall, the results indicate that subliminal access to abstract face representations does not rely on attention. (shrink)

Before becoming an internationally renowned sadhu espousing words of wisdom in an Indian forest, Sampath Chawla pulls down his pants. The wedding guests are horrified. His supervisor at the small-town post office fires him on the spot—it is, after all, his daughter's wedding.In Kiran Desai's novel Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, the oafish Sampath probably shouldn't have been invited to the wedding in the first place. At the post office he has been sulking for some time. "The post office. The (...) post office. The post office. It made him want to throw up."1 More troubling, he routinely opens other people's mail and reads their private letters throughout the workday. The letters give Sampath insights into the lives of... (shrink)

A folk tune is brief enough to be readily grasped and remembered as a whole; it has an inner unity that makes it shapely to the ear and mind. As a temporal event, or succession of notes, it consists of a little tour through a sonic landscape; so that as we follow the course we recognize its topography; the setting forth, the approach to a turning point, a moment of heightened interest, a pause of retrospection or anticipation, a homecoming. It (...) falls naturally into related, self-defining stages of its whole extent, revealing balance, contrast, and decision. The balance normally relies on approximately the same number of stresses in corresponding phrases; the contrast usually on tonal sequence and management; the decision appears in cadential statement, and held, or repeating, notes, like signposts at an intersection or junction. Because the tune is seized as a whole, and because several parts have these mutual references, we gain already the suggestion of stanzas of a certain pattern and identical length. Since the phrasal cadences get their weight and meaning from their relative emphasis and relation to the tonic, they inherently prompt corresponding verbal emphases of rhyme or pause. By their perceptible division or separation they exert, moreover, a pressure on the verbal partner, so that the total syntactical and rhetorical structure is palpably affected, and restricted, by their influence. Bertrand H. Bronson is the author of such influential works as Joseph Ritson: Scholar-at-Arms, Johnson Agonistes and Other Essays, In Search of Chaucer, and Facets of the Enlightenment and is the editor of the four-volume The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads. Among other honors, he has received the American Council of Learned Sciences Award. "Traditional Ballads Musically Considered" will appear in a slightly different version as the introduction to Singing Tradition, to be published by Princeton University Press. (shrink)

Neurlolinguistic programming is a powerful technology for modelling aspects of human excellence so that others can achieve similar levels of effectiveness. This article describes how to teach a simple communication pattern called "pace and lead,” derived from studies of the hypnotic induction techniques of such master hypnotists as Milton Erickson. The "Pace and Lead" frame consists of several sensorily verifiable statements (pace) followed by a positive suggestion (lead). This pattern is the basis for virtually all communication which seeks to influence, (...) manipulate or heal and as such, constitutes a very useful skill with a wide variety of applications.This frame—simple in its outward form but profound in its potential extension to a variety of real world situations—deserves more general inclusion in the teaching of consciousness curriculum. Anthropologists with an interest in language and consciousness issues will appreciate the accessibility of the exercise and its ability to concretely embody abstract issues such as the role of language in the creation of personal and cultural "realities.”. (shrink)

Das Buch "Der kleine Hobbit" gilt als Vorläufer der wichtigsten Fantasy-Bücher aller Zeiten - den drei Bänden von "Der Herr der Ringe". Mit diesem Buch über die Abenteuer des Hobbits Bilbo Beutlin, zusammen mit 13 Zwergen und dem Zauberer Gandalf, schuf J.R.R. Tolkien schon jene Fantasiewelt, die uns alle später beim "Herrn der Ringe" nachhaltig beeindruckte. Elben, Trolle, Orks und ein Drache halten kleine und große Leser schon seit Jahren in Atem. Man stelle sich folgende Geschichte vor: Ein Mensch wohnt (...) in einer Höhle und lebt dort ein ruhiges, geordnetes und unaufgeregtes Leben, das schon seit Geburt an in den gleichen Bahnen verläuft. Eines Tages verlässt der Mensch seine Höhle und geht hinaus in die Welt. Dort sieht und erfährt er Dinge, die ihn nachhaltig verändern und reifen lassen. Er wird nach dieser Reise nie wieder derselbe sein wie vorher. Es ist nicht ungewöhnlich, wenn das bekannt klingt: Es handelt sich dabei um Platons Höhlengleichnis - eines der wichtigsten Gleichnisse bzw. Beispiele der Philosophie, genauer der Erkenntnistheorie. Die Handlung passt aber auch genau auf die Geschichte eines anderen Autors: J.R.R. Tolkien und sein Buch "Der kleine Hobbit". Auch hier verlässt eine Person (der Hobbit Bilbo Beutlin) die sichere und geordnete Umgebung des Auenlandes und zieht in die Welt hinaus. Diese abenteuerliche Reise wird ihn verändern und - wie wir alle wissen - mit dem Fund des EINEN Ringes für Mittelerde weitere große Folgen nach sich ziehen. Es ergibt also Sinn, den "kleinen Hobbit" mit seinen Inhalten unter der philosophischen Linse zu betrachten. Es ist nicht nur eine Kindergeschichte, sondern eine Auseinandersetzung mit Werten wie Mut, Freundschaft, Demut, Gnade und Weisheit - um nur einige zu nennen. (shrink)

The essential companion to Stieg Larsson's bestselling trilogyand director David Fincher's 2011 film adaptation Stieg Larsson's bestselling Millennium Trilogy—The Girlwith the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, andThe Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest—is aninternational phenomenon. These books express Larsson's lifelongwar against injustice, his ethical beliefs, and his deep concernfor women's rights. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo andPhilosophy probes the compelling philosophical issues behindthe entire trilogy. What philosophies do Lisbeth Salander and Kanthave in common? To catch a (...) criminal, can Lisbeth and Mikael becriminals themselves? Can revenge be ethical? Drawing on some ofhistory's greatest philosophical minds, this book gives freshinsights into Larsson's ingeniously plotted tale of crime andcorruption. Looks at compelling philosophical issues such as a feministreading of Lisbeth Salander, Aristotelian arguments for why we loverevenge, how Kant can explain why so many women sleep with MikaelBlomkvist, and many more Includes a chapter from a colleague of Larsson's—whoworked with him in anti-Nazi activities—that exploresLarsson's philosophical views on skepticism and quotes fromnever-before-seen correspondence with Larsson Offers new insights into the novels' key characters, includingLisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist, and investigates the author,Stieg Larsson As engrossing as the quest to free Lisbeth Salander from herpast, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Philosophy isideal reading for anyone interested in unraveling the subtext andexploring the greater issues at work in the story. (shrink)

As part of the debate on multifaceted conceptions of education, non-formal education, a field difficult to define and characterize, emerges within in-between spaces abandoned by the dominant institutional system to serve a marginalized public to whom the right to education does not extend. Beyond a mere rejection of its form, the author uses the specific context of Mali to shed light on the flexibility and capacity for adaptation of community initiatives undertaken in the field of non-formal education, such as the (...) REFLECT approach, which is directly inspired by the learners' immediate environment. This approach serves as an illustration of certain methods of encountering otherness, the other in their individuality, and acts as a starting point for (re) thinking the education for excluded and highly vulnerable populations. (shrink)

This article addresses theoretical problems around the notion of ‘choice’, using empirical data from a three-year, ESRC-funded study of identity, transition and footwear among both women and men. With a focus on female participants who wore, or had worn high-heeled shoes, it draws on Budgeon’s argument for viewing the body as event, as becoming, and Finch’s use of the concept of display, to explore the temporalities of high-heeled shoe wear, particularly as an aspect of ‘dressing up’. Data from both focus (...) groups and year-long case studies allowed everyday and life course patterns of high-heeled shoe wear to be explored – in many cases, as they unfolded. This material has led us to critique the linear, goal-oriented nature of a modernist ‘project of the self’, and to argue that identification, as a dynamic process, may often be erratic, partial and temporary. Emphasized femininity, it is suggested, can be ‘displayed’ episodically, as an aspect of ‘doing gender’, a perspective that problematizes notions of a ‘post-feminist masquerade’ that inevitably secures gender retrenchment. Through an examination of the occasions and non-occasions that pattern the temporalities of women’s lives, therefore, the article demonstrates a distinction between displaying femininity and doing gender, one that simultaneously sheds light on their relationship with one another. (shrink)

Steve Sherlock’s The Performativity of Value: On the Citability of Cultural Commodities explores how social identity is increasingly constructed through the citation of cultural commodities—a process that has become “performative” of the U.S. cultural economy. Sherlock extends the work of Butler, Derrida, and the Bakhtin Circle to describe how the regeneration of exchange value involves the continual re-commodification of language.

In a philosophical approach to color, Gass explores man's perception of the color blue as well as its common erotic, symbolic, and emotional associations.

Should the `irrational' refusal to consent to ECT of a depressed patient who knows he is thought to be ill, knows that his doctor believes ECT will help him and knows that he is being asked to decide, be respected or overridden? The author of the first paper, an American bioethicist argues that the refusal should be overridden in the interests of fostering the autonomy of the patient by overcoming the impediment to that autonomy which major depression represents. A philosopher (...) and a psychiatrist respond and an editorial discusses the issues. (shrink)

In the last decade there has been a pragmatic turn in the work of those doing Christian ethics, especially as represented by the work of Jeffrey Stout and Franklin Gamwell. The pragmatic turn represents a critique of the highly influential work of Stanley Hauerwas and Alasdair MacIntyre, which argues for a strongly intra-church ethics. The pragmatists are correct in arguing that Christian ethics must engage the public sphere. However, I argue that they are deeply mistaken in their claim that this (...) engagement must rest on a weak or non-existent theology. I show that the claim that robust theology adds nothing to ethics, and that we can get along without it, is unsustainable. (shrink)

This article considers the photographs of Francesca Woodman in terms of the complex and ambivalent set of relations they configure between photographer, photographed subject and viewer. Usually described as ‘self-portraits’, the subject of these fleeting, fractured images simultaneously presents itself whilst seeming to withdraw from them. The self, there where it most openly declares itself, disappears. Drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy's concept of exposition, or exposure, which posits the self as being in-exteriority, thinking the intimacy of subjectivity in terms of an (...) originary relation to the outside or the other, I seek to problematize the possibility both of the portrait and the self that is its subject. (shrink)

Several writers have recently developed proposals calling for a public policy that would allow a number of individuals to commit suicide if they so choose. Suicide, it is argued, is a fundamental matter of personal liberty and as such only very minimal restrictions should be placed on it. In this essay I offer a critique of these views and the public policies they entail. The result is a defense of the general outlines of current professional and legal policies which permit (...) intervention, even coercive intervention, with suicidal persons in almost every case. (shrink)

Several writers have recently developed proposals calling for a public policy that would allow a number of individuals to commit suicide if they so choose. Suicide, it is argued, is a fundamental matter of personal liberty and as such only very minimal restrictions should be placed on it. In this essay I offer a critique of these views and the public policies they entail. The result is a defense of the general outlines of current professional and legal policies which permit (...) intervention, even coercive intervention, with suicidal persons in almost every case. (shrink)