For a world mired in catastrophe, nothing could be more urgent than the question of survival. In this theoretically and methodologically groundbreaking book, Adam Y. Stern calls for a critical reevaluation of survival as a contemporary regime of representation. In Survival, Stern asks what texts, what institutions, and what traditions have made survival a recognizable element of our current political vocabulary. The book begins by suggesting that the interpretive key lies in the discursive prominence of "Jewish survival." (...) Yet the Jewish example, he argues, is less a marker of Jewish history than an index of Christianity's impact on the modern, secular, political imagination. With this inversion, the book repositions Jewish survival as the supplemental effect and mask of a more capacious political theology of Christian survival. The argument proceeds by taking major moments in twentieth-century philosophy, theology, and political theory as occasions for collecting the scattered elements of survival's theological-political archive. Through readings of canonical texts by secular and Jewish thinkers—Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig, and Sigmund Freud—Stern shows that survival belongs to a history of debates about the sovereignty and subjection of Christ's body. Interrogating survival as a rhetorical formation, the book intervenes in discussions about biopolitics, secularism, political theology, and the philosophy of religion. (shrink)

Monica Colvin-Adams,1 Nonyelum Harcourt,1 Robert LeDuc,2 Ganesh Raveendran,1 Yassir Sonbol,3 Robert Wilson,1 Daniel Duprez11Cardiovascular Division, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA; 2Division of Biostatistics University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA; 3Cardiovascular Division, St Luke's Hospital System, Sugar Land, TX, USAObjective: Arterial elasticity is a functional biomarker that has predictive value for cardiovascular morbidity and mortality in nontransplant populations. There is little information regarding arterial elasticity in heart transplant recipients. This study aimed to characterize small and large artery elasticity in heart (...) transplant recipients in comparison with an asymptomatic population free of overt cardiovascular disease. A second goal was to identify demographic and clinical factors associated with arterial elasticity in this unique population.Methods: Arterial pulse waveform was registered noninvasively at the radial artery in 71 heart transplant recipients between 2008 and 2010. SAEs and LAEs were derived from diastolic pulse contour analysis. Comparisons were made to a healthy cohort of 1,808 participants selected from our prevention clinic database. Multiple regression analyses were performed to evaluate associations between risk factors and SAE and LAE within the heart transplant recipients.Results: LAE and SAE were significantly lower in heart transplant recipients than in the normal cohort. Female sex and history of ischemic cardiomyopathy were significantly associated with reduced LAE and SAE. Older age and the presence of moderate cardiac allograft vasculopathy were also significantly associated with reduced SAE. Transplant duration was associated with increased SAE.Conclusion: Heart transplants are associated with peripheral endothelial dysfunction and arterial stiffness, as demonstrated by a significant reduction in SAE and LAE when compared with a healthy population. Furthermore, cardiac allograft vasculopathy is associated with a significant reduction in SAE, suggesting a potential use in screening heart transplant recipients at risk for developing this complication.Keywords: heart transplant, endothelial function, arterial elasticity, cardiac allograft vasculopathy. (shrink)

Humans can learn complex functional relationships between variables from small amounts of data. In doing so, they draw on prior expectations about the form of these relationships. In three experiments, we show that people learn to adjust these expectations through experience, learning about the likely forms of the functions they will encounter. Previous work has used Gaussian processes—a statistical framework that extends Bayesian nonparametric approaches to regression—to model human function learning. We build on this work, modeling the process of learning (...) to learn functions as a form of hierarchical Bayesian inference about the Gaussian process hyperparameters. (shrink)

A work powerful and pervading in its implications not only for metaphysics but also for art, political science, and the philosophy of history.

I found the JCS issue on Machine Consciousness, Volume 10, No. 4-5 , frustrating and alienating. There seems to be a consensus building that consciousness is accessible to scientific scrutiny, so much so that it is already understood well enough to be modeled and even synthesized. I'm not so sure. It could be instead that the vocabulary of consciousness is being subtly redefined to be amenable to scientific investigation and explicit modeling. Such semantic revisionism is confusing and often misleading. Whatever (...) else consciousness is, it is at least a certain quality of life apparent from personal reflection. Introspection is, after all, the only way we know that consciousness even exists. Scientific and technical redefinitions that fail to account for its phenomenal quality are at best incomplete. In my view, all but one of the ten articles in the JCS volume on Machine Consciousness commit various degrees of Protean distortion. (shrink)

Motivated by problems that arise in computing degrees of belief, we consider the problem of computing asymptotic conditional probabilities for first-order sentences. Given first-order sentences φ and θ, we consider the structures with domain {1,..., N} that satisfy θ, and compute the fraction of them in which φ is true. We then consider what happens to this fraction as N gets large. This extends the work on 0-1 laws that considers the limiting probability of first-order sentences, by considering asymptotic conditional (...) probabilities. As shown by Liogon'kii [24], if there is a non-unary predicate symbol in the vocabulary, asymptotic conditional probabilities do not always exist. We extend this result to show that asymptotic conditional probabilities do not always exist for any reasonable notion of limit. Liogon'kii also showed that the problem of deciding whether the limit exists is undecidable. We analyze the complexity of three problems with respect to this limit: deciding whether it is well-defined, whether it exists, and whether it lies in some nontrivial interval. Matching upper and lower bounds are given for all three problems, showing them to be highly undecidable. (shrink)

Are mechanisms for social attention influenced by culture? Evidence that social attention is triggered automatically by bottom-up gaze cues and is uninfluenced by top-down verbal instructions may suggest it operates in the same way everywhere. Yet considerations from evolutionary and cultural psychology suggest that specific aspects of one's cultural background may have consequence for the way mechanisms for social attention develop and operate. In more interdependent cultures, the scope of social attention may be broader, focusing on more individuals and relations (...) between those individuals. We administered a multi-gaze cueing task requiring participants to fixate a foreground face flanked by background faces and measured shifts in attention using eye tracking. For European Americans, gaze cueing did not depend on the direction of background gaze cues, suggesting foreground gaze alone drives automatic attention shifting; for East Asians, cueing patterns differed depending on whether the foreground cue matched or mismatched background cues, suggesting foreground and background gaze information were integrated. These results demonstrate that cultural background influences the social attention system by shifting it into a narrow or broad mode of operation and, importantly, provides evidence challenging the assumption that mechanisms underlying automatic social attention are necessarily rigid and impenetrable to culture. (shrink)

The interconnections, common interests, and other linkages between the Jewish and Islamic traditions have long been a matter of interest to academics. Today the need to understand these relationships, and to emphasize commonalities rather than conflicts, is of the greatest public interest. The present volume of studies, likely the first such collection in the scholarly literature, explores the full range of interconnections between Jews and Muslims in all fields (intellectual history, religion, philosophy, social history, etc.) and in all periods, from (...) the Middle Ages till today. The essays have been written by some twenty distinguished scholars from North America, Europe, and Israel. The volume is dedicated to our esteemed colleague Joel L. Kraemer, John Barrows Professor Emeritus in the Divinity School and on the Committee on Social Thought of the University of Chicago. In the course of his distinguished career Professor Kraemer has made major contributions to our understanding of the intellectual and cultural history of the Jews in the Arabic world, Islamic and Jewish philosophy and their sources in ancient philosophy, the humanistic renaissance in Islam (on which he published two seminal monographs), and Maimonides (on which he has published many important papers and is completing a biography and a translation of Maimonides' letters, to appear in the Yale Judaica Series). (shrink)

What is the future of Philosophy of education? Or as many of scholars and thinkers in this final ‘future-focused’ collective piece from the philosophy of education in a new key Series put it, what are the futures—plural and multiple—of the intersections of ‘philosophy’ and ‘education?’ What is ‘Philosophy’; and what is ‘Education’, and what role may ‘enquiry’ play? Is the future of education and philosophy embracing—or at least taking seriously—and thinking with Indigenous ethicoontoepistemologies? And, perhaps most importantly, what is that (...) ‘Future’? These debates have been located in the work of diverse scholars: from the West, from Global South, from indigenous thinkers. In this collective piece, we purposefully juxtapose diverse takes on the future of these intersections. We have given up the urge to organise, place together, separate with subheadings or connect the paragraphs that follow. Instead, we let these philosophers of education and thinkers who use philosophical texts and ideas to sit together in one long read as potentially ‘strange and unusual bedfellows’. This text urges us to understand how these scholars and thinkers perceive our educational philosophical futures, and how the work and thinking they have done on thinking about what the future of that new key in philosophy of education may look like is embedded in a much deeper and richer literature, and personal experience. (shrink)

The US neutrino community gathered at the Workshop on the Intermediate Neutrino Program at Brookhaven National Laboratory February 4-6, 2015 to explore opportunities in neutrino physics over the next five to ten years. Scientists from particle, astroparticle and nuclear physics participated in the workshop. The workshop examined promising opportunities for neutrino physics in the intermediate term, including possible new small to mid-scale experiments, US contributions to large experiments, upgrades to existing experiments, R&D plans and theory. The workshop was organized into (...) two sets of parallel working group sessions, divided by physics topics and technology. Physics working groups covered topics on Sterile Neutrinos, Neutrino Mixing, Neutrino Interactions, Neutrino Properties and Astrophysical Neutrinos. Technology sessions were organized into Theory, Short-Baseline Accelerator Neutrinos, Reactor Neutrinos, Detector R&D and Source, Cyclotron and Meson Decay at Rest sessions.This report summarizes discussion and conclusions from the workshop. (shrink)

Mindfulness and compassion meditation are thought to cultivate prosocial behavior. However, the lack of diverse representation within both scientific and participant populations in contemplative neuroscience may limit generalizability and translation of prior findings. To address these issues, we propose a research framework calledIntersectional Neurosciencewhich adapts research procedures to be more inclusive of under-represented groups. Intersectional Neuroscience builds inclusive processes into research design using two main approaches: 1) community engagement with diverse participants, and 2) individualized multivariate neuroscience methods to accommodate neural (...) diversity. We tested the feasibility of this framework in partnership with a diverse U.S. meditation center (East Bay Meditation Center, Oakland, CA). Using focus group and community feedback, we adapted functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) screening and recruitment procedures to be inclusive of participants from various under-represented groups, including racial and ethnic minorities, gender and sexual minorities, people with disabilities, neuropsychiatric disorders, and/or lower income. Using person-centered screening and study materials, we recruited and scanned 15 diverse meditators (80% racial/ethnic minorities, 53% gender and sexual minorities). The participants completed the EMBODY task – which applies individualized machine learning algorithms to fMRI data – to identify mental states during breath-focused meditation, a basic skill that stabilizes attention to support interoception and compassion. All 15 meditators’ unique brain patterns were recognized by machine learning algorithms significantly above chance levels. These individualized brain patterns were used to decode the internal focus of attention throughout a 10-min breath-focused meditation period, specific to each meditator. These data were used to compile individual-level attention profiles during meditation, such as the percentage time attending to the breath, mind wandering, or engaging in self-referential processing. This study provides feasibility of employing an intersectional neuroscience approach to include diverse participants and develop individualized neural metrics of meditation practice. Through inclusion of more under-represented groups while developing reciprocal partnerships, intersectional neuroscience turns the research process into an embodied form of social action. (shrink)

McGee argues that it is sometimes reasonable to accept both x and x-> without accepting y->z, and that modus ponens is therefore invalid for natural language indicative conditionals. Here, we examine McGee's counterexamples from a Bayesian perspective. We argue that the counterexamples are genuine insofar as the joint acceptance of x and x-> at time t does not generally imply constraints on the acceptability of y->z at t, but we use the distance-based approach to Bayesian learning to show that applications (...) of modus ponens are nevertheless guaranteed to be successful in an important sense. Roughly, if an agent becomes convinced of the premises of a modus ponens argument, then she should likewise become convinced of the argument's conclusion. Thus we take McGee's counterexamples to disentangle and reveal two distinct ways in which arguments can convince. Any general theory of argumentation must take stock of both. (shrink)

Advancements in novel neurotechnologies, such as brain computer interfaces and neuromodulatory devices such as deep brain stimulators, will have profound implications for society and human rights. While these technologies are improving the diagnosis and treatment of mental and neurological diseases, they can also alter individual agency and estrange those using neurotechnologies from their sense of self, challenging basic notions of what it means to be human. As an international coalition of interdisciplinary scholars and practitioners, we examine these challenges and make (...) recommendations to mitigate negative consequences that could arise from the unregulated development or application of novel neurotechnologies. We explore potential ethical challenges in four key areas: identity and agency, privacy, bias, and enhancement. To address them, we propose democratic and inclusive summits to establish globally-coordinated ethical and societal guidelines for neurotechnology development and application, new measures, including “Neurorights,” for data privacy, security, and consent to empower neurotechnology users’ control over their data, new methods of identifying and preventing bias, and the adoption of public guidelines for safe and equitable distribution of neurotechnological devices. (shrink)

M y aim in this paper will be to show that the concept of desert remains an important and useful concept even if one supposes that the justification of praise, blame, punishment, and reward lies solely in their influence on behaviour. The argument will be incomplete, however. I will discuss only deserved legal punishment, the broader notion of deserved harm, and, briefly, deserved blame.

Slurs such as spic, slut, wetback, and whore are linguistic expressions that are primarily understood to derogate certain group members on the basis of their descriptive attributes and expressions of this kind have been considered to pack some of the nastiest punches natural language affords. Although prior scholarship on slurs has uncovered several important facts concerning their meaning and use –including that slurs are potentially offensive, are felicitously applied towards some targets yet not others, and are often flexibly used not (...) only derogatorily to convey offense towards out-group members but also non-derogatorily to convey affiliation with in-group members– the literature remains largely focused on slurs that typically target African Americans, male homosexuals, and sexually active females. Since no account of slurs that typically target Hispanics or Mexican-Americans has so far been proposed, here I offer the first systematic and empirically informed analysis of these that accounts for both their derogatory and appropriative use. Importantly, this article reviews over a dozen Spanish stereotypes and slurs and explains how the descriptive attributes involved in a stereotype associated with a slur can contribute to the predication of certain content in the application of that slur toward its target in context. This article further explains how the psychological effects of stereotype threat and stereotype lift can be initiated through the application of a relevant slur towards its target in context as well. -/- ----- -/- Las expresiones peyorativas tales como spic (‘spic’), slut (‘zorra’), wetback (‘espalda mojada’) y whore (‘puta’) son expresiones lingüísticas que se entienden principalmente para minusvalorar ciertos miembros de un grupo sobre la base de sus atributos descriptivos (como la raza o el sexo). Se ha considerado que las expresiones de este tipo conllevan algunos de los puñetazos más desagradables que el lenguaje natural puede proporcionar. Aunque la literatura especializada sobre expresiones peyorativas ha descubierto varios hechos importantes en cuanto a significado y uso –entre los que se incluyen que tales expresiones son potencialmente ofensivas, apuntan efectivamente hacia unos objetivos pero no hacia otros, y con frecuencia se utilizan con flexibilidad no sólo despectivamente para ofender a miembros por fuera de un grupo, sino que también de forma no despectiva para afiliar con miembros dentro de un mismo grupo–, tal literatura sigue centrada en gran medida en las expresiones peyorativas que típicamente apuntan contra los afroamericanos (nigger ‘negro’), los homosexuales varones (fagot ‘maricón’), y las mujeres sexualmente activas (slut ‘zorra’). En tanto que no se ha propuesto al momento dar cuenta de expresiones peyorativas dirigidas contra hispanos o mexicano-americanos, en este trabajo se ofrece el primer análisis sistemático y empíricamente informado de tales expresiones, tanto en sus usos despectivos y de apropiación. Es importante destacar que en este artículo se revisan más de una docena de estereotipos y expresiones peyorativas en español, además de explicar cómo los atributos descriptivos que participan de un estereotipo asociado con una difamación pueden contribuir a la predicación de determinados contenidos en la aplicación de esa expresión hacia su objetivo en contexto. Asimismo, en este artículo se explica cómo comienzan los efectos psicológicos de la amenaza estereotipada y el realce estereotipado cuando se emplea una expresión peyorativa relevante contra un objetivo en contexto. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence (AI) shares many generalizability challenges with psychology. But the fields publish differently. AI publishes fast, through rapid preprint sharing and conference publications. Psychology publishes more slowly, but creates integrative reviews and meta-analyses. We discuss the complementary advantages of each strategy, and suggest that incorporating both types of strategies could lead to more generalizable research in both fields.

Según Ignacio Falgueras “ser” trascendentalmente significa “dar”. Sólo en la perspectiva del Dar divino se puede comprender el dar trascendental humano, ya que éste proviene y depende radicalmente de aquél. El Dar divino y el dar humano son radicalmente distintos. Las notas primordiales del Dar divino ad intra son: la comunicación interpersonal, la gratuidad y la sobreabundancia. Es un dar con ganancias, sin reservas y sin pérdidas. El Dar divino ad extra tiene triple modalidad: el dar equívoco, el dar análogo (...) y el dar unívoco. El dar trascendental humano refleja en cierta manera estas características del Dar divino.Sołomiewicz, A. (shrink)

We study Compositional Models based on Dirichlet Regression where, given a (vector) covariate x, one considers the response variable, y, to be a positive vector with a conditional Dirichlet distribution, y | X We introduce a new method for estimating the parameters of the Dirichlet Covariate Model given a linear model on X, and also propose a Bayesian model selection approach. We present some numerical results which suggest that our proposals are more stable and robust than traditional approaches.

Though common sense says that causes must temporally precede their effects, the hugely influential interventionist account of causation makes no reference to temporal precedence. Does common sense lead us astray? In this paper, I evaluate the power of the commonsense assumption from within the interventionist approach to causal modeling. I first argue that if causes temporally precede their effects, then one need not consider the outcomes of interventions in order to infer causal relevance, and that one can instead use temporal (...) and probabilistic information to infer exactly when X is causally relevant to Y in each of the senses captured by Woodward’s interventionist treatment. Then, I consider the upshot of these findings for causal decision theory, and argue that the commonsense assumption is especially powerful when an agent seeks to determine whether so-called “dominance reasoning” is applicable. (shrink)

Does y obtain under the counterfactual supposition that x? The answer to this question is famously thought to depend on whether y obtains in the most similar world in which x obtains. What this notion of ‘similarity’ consists in is controversial, but in recent years, graphical causal models have proved incredibly useful in getting a handle on considerations of similarity between worlds. One limitation of the resulting conception of similarity is that it says nothing about what would obtain were the (...) causal structure to be different from what it actually is, or from what we believe it to be. In this paper, we explore the possibility of using graphical causal models to resolve counterfactual queries about causal structure by introducing a notion of similarity between causal graphs. Since there are multiple principled senses in which a graph G* can be more similar to a graph G than a graph G**, we introduce multiple similarity metrics, as well as multiple ways to prioritize the various metrics when settling counterfactual queries about causal structure. (shrink)

The progress of electronic health technologies and biobanks holds enormous promise for efficient research. Evidence shows that studies based on sharing and secondary use of data/samples have the potential to significantly advance medical knowledge. However, sharing of such resources for international collaboration is hampered by the lack of clarity about ethical and legal requirements for transfer of data and samples across international borders. Here, the International Clinical Trial Center Network reports the legal and ethical requirements governing data and sample exchange (...) across four continents. The most recurring requirement is ethical approval, whereas only in specific conditions approval of national health authorities is required. Informed consent is not required in all sharing situations. However, waiver of informed consent is only allowed in certain countries/regions and under certain circumstances. The current legal and ethical landscape appears to be very complex and under constant evolution. Regulations differ between countries/regions and are often incomplete, leading to uncertainty. With this work, ICN illuminates the unmet need for a single international collaborative framework to facilitate DSE. Harmonising requirements for global DSE will reduce inefficiency and waste in research. There are many challenges to realising this ambitious vision, including inconsistent terminology and definitions, and heterogeneous and dynamic legal constraints. Here, we identify areas of agreement and significant difference as a necessary first step towards facilitating international collaboration. We propose the establishment of a working group to continue the comparison across jurisdictions, create a standardised glossary and define a set of basic principles and fundamental requirements for DSE. (shrink)

Adam Smith publico el presente ensayo en 1759, preocupado por las cuestiones eticas y morales que tarde o temprano repercuten en la vida economica de los individuos transformando su total existencia.

The “happiness agenda” is a worldwide movement that claims that happiness is the highest good, happiness can be measured, and public policy should promote happiness. Against Happiness is a thorough and powerful critique of this program, revealing the flaws of its concept of happiness and advocating a renewed focus on equality and justice. Written by an interdisciplinary team of authors, this book provides both theoretical and empirical analysis of the limitations of the happiness agenda. The authors emphasize that this movement (...) draws on a parochial, Western-centric philosophical basis and demographic sample. They show that happiness defined as subjective satisfaction or a surplus of positive emotions bears little resemblance to the richer and more nuanced concepts of the good life found in many world traditions. Cross-cultural philosophy, comparative theology, and social and cultural psychology all teach that cultures and subcultures vary in how much value they place on life satisfaction or feeling happy. Furthermore, the ideas promoted by the happiness agenda can compete with rights, justice, sustainability, and equality—and even conceal racial and gender injustice. Against Happiness argues that a better way forward requires integration of cross-cultural philosophical, ethical, and political thought with critical social science. Ultimately, the authors contend, happiness should be a secondary goal—worth pursuing only if it is contingent on the demands of justice. (shrink)

Il n'y a pas de beauté sans «contraires unis», c'est-à-dire sans coexistence à l'intérieur d'une même oeuvre de tendances antithétiques pour l'intellect, mais fondues d'une manière intime. La Beauté éclate quand ce qui est intellectuellement séparé ne forme plus qu'une unité profondément éprouvée. Ainsi les oeuvres les plus belles sont celles où s'interpénètrent un grand nombre de tendances, comme si les divergences s'effaçaient lorsqu'on s'achemine vers le plus profond.

1. Matter and form -- 2. Maimonides' theory of the parable -- 3. The parable of adamic perfection -- 4. Physical matter and its limitations on intellects -- 5. Maimonidean skepticism I -- 6. Maimonidean skepticism II -- 7. In the inner chamber of the ruler's palace: the critique of the theory of separate intellects -- 8. The embodied life of an intellect -- 9. Excrement and exegesis, or shame over matter.

Slurs such as spic, slut, wetback, and whore are linguistic expressions that are primarily understood to derogate certain group members on the basis of their descriptive attributes (such as their race or sex) and expressions of this kind have been considered to pack some of the nastiest punches natural language affords. Although prior scholarship on slurs has uncovered several important facts concerning their meaning and use –including that slurs are potentially offensive, are felicitously applied towards some targets yet not others, (...) and are often flexibly used not only derogatorily to convey offense towards out-group members but also non-derogatorily to convey affiliation with in-group members– the literature remains largely focused on slurs that typically target African Americans (nigger), male homosexuals (faggot), and sexually active females (slut). Since no account of slurs that typically target Hispanics or Mexican-Americans has so far been proposed, here I offer the first systematic and empirically informed analysis of these that accounts for both their derogatory and appropriative use. Importantly, this article reviews over a dozen Spanish stereotypes and slurs and explains how the descriptive attributes involved in a stereotype associated with a slur can contribute to the predication of certain content in the application of that slur toward its target in context. This article further explains how the psychological effects of stereotype threat and stereotype lift can be initiated through the application of a relevant slur towards its target in context as well. (shrink)

“Writers don’t have tasks,” said Saul Bellow in a Q-and-A. “They have inspiration.”Yes, at the typewriter, by the grace of discipline and the Muse, but here, on Central Park South, in the Essex House’s bright Casino on the Park, inspiration was not running high.Not that attendance at the forty-eight PEN conference was a task. It was rather what Robertson Davies called “collegiality.” “A week of it once every five years,” he said, “should be enough.” He, Davies, had checked in early, (...) Saturday afternoon, and attended every session. In black overcoat and black fur cap, he had a theatrical, Man-Who-Came-to-Dinner look. In the lobby he made a great impression.Why not? After all, weren’t writers here to be seen as well as to see each other, to make as well as take impressions? A month before, I’d spent a couple of hours at the Modern Language Association convention. There were thousands and thousands of scholars and critics there. Some of the most noted make a career of squeezing authors out of their texts. An author, wrote one tutelary divinity, “constitutes the privileged moment of individualization in the history of ideas, knowledge, [and] literature….”1 Not content with auctoricide, deconstructionist critics went after texts. “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte.”2 Since there’s nothing that doesn’t belong to the text, texts are interchangeable. And it’s not that superfluous, mythical being, the author, who decides they are, but his readers, at least those readers capable of erecting on his miserable pedestal—the poem, the story, the novel—a memorable explication.Ah well, was my thought, for some people a corpse will serve as well as a person. Indeed, for intellectual undertakers, hit-men, and cannibals, as well as for those who suffer the tyranny of authority, corpses are preferable to their living simulacra.Few authors at the PEN conference were troubled by these critical corpse-makers. They were here to see the authors behind the books they’d read, to swap stories and opinions, and to make clear to each other what splendid thinkers and noble humans they were outside of the poems and stories which had brought them here in the middle of winter and New York. In this city, more than any other in the history of the word, the word had been turned into gold. If one were going to abandon the typewriter for the podium, what better place to do it? In 1985, Richard Stern was given the Medal of Merit, awarded every six years to a novelist by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He is the author of, among other works, the novels A Father’s Words , Other Men’s Daughters , and Stitch . His third “orderly miscellany,” The Position of the Body, will be published in September 1986. This essay is part of a longer work. Stern is professor of English at the University of Chicago. (shrink)

The aesthetic experience of Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinion of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is not reducible to an interpretation of plot or a linear critical analysis on the level of structure. Instead, it is thematized around a particular paradox of “double chronology” of autobiography, which continues the unfolding of the text yet simultaneously disrupts it. As such, Tristram Shandy’s lack of plot is a secondary phenomenon to the textual game of detour and digression it plays. This essay is less (...) concerned with providing a closed argument and much more concerned with opening up inquiry into time and the aesthetics of reading with brief recourse to Paul Ricoeur and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Overall, I hope to indicate how Tristram Shandy provides a space wherein the pleasure of reading itself is disclosed. (shrink)

Jerry Fodor’s arguments for a language of thought (LOT) are largely theoretical. Is there any empirical evidence that supports the existence of LOT? There is. Research on Global Aphasia supports the existence of LOT. In this paper, I discuss this evidence and why it supports Fodor’s theory that there is a language of thought.

La Revolución Rusa tuvo un inmediato impacto mundial, tanto por el ejemplo que supuso para procesos revolucionarios o de intensa movilización social desatados en el período subsiguiente en varios países de Europa (Finlandia, Alemania, Austria, Hungría, Italia, etc.) como por los grandes debates que suscitó en el socialismo internacional, ya que fue una de las principales causas del “gran cisma” (en palabras del historiador Carl Schorske) dentro de la II Internacional Socialista entre las organizaciones e individuos que se volcarían hacia (...) la reconstrucción de la socialdemocracia y aquellos que apostarían a la construcción de la Internacional Comunista.El período inmediatamente posterior a la Revolución Rusa (1917-1920), hasta la consolidación de la Comintern en su II Congreso, fue un momento fluido de debate acerca de la caracterización de la Revolución Rusa y sus consecuencias políticas, teóricas y estratégicas. A través del análisis de las posiciones de Karl Kautsky y Antonio Gramsci —dos intelectuales de gran influencia teórica en el movimiento socialista internacional— pretendemos iluminar algunos aspectos principales del debate que provocó este proceso: el carácter de las fuerzas sociales involucradas, los objetivos de la revolución, el rol de la democracia y la dictadura en el proceso de transición al socialismo y la aplicabilidad internacional del balance de la Revolución Rusa. El análisis se centra en fuentes primarias de cada autor, situando las posiciones de cada uno en el contexto de su relación con el socialismo de su país y los debates que lo atravesaban. (shrink)

La insistencia de Ibn Hazm en la interpretación literal del Corán y la Sunna ha llevado frecuentemente a los investigadores modernos a concluir que él es un pensador conservador o dogmático. En realidad, no es ninguna de las dos cosas. El zahirismo de Ibn Hazm enfatiza el alcance limitado de la ley religiosa islámica, e intenta reducir las pretensiones de los juristas musulmanes de hablar en nombre de la ley de Dios. Esta metodología le lleva a apoyar el racionalismo, el (...) individualismo y el anticlericalismo. Ibn Hazm argumenta con consistencia a favor de estos principios en sus trabajos sobre teoría legal islámica, entre los que se incluye el texto al-Nubdha al-kafiya fi usul ahkam al-din que traducimos aquí. Esta propuesta implica socavar todo el sistema del madhhab, lo que explica la reacción negativa que recibió del sistema religioso establecido. En lugar del madhhab, Ibn Hazm intenta hacer valer la responsabilidad individual de cada musulmán en la obediencia a la ley de Dios, tal y como se revela claramente en el texto sagrado del Islam. (shrink)