Research teams have used extra-uterine systems to support premature fetal lambs and to bring them to maturation in a way not previously possible. The researchers have called attention to possible implications of these systems for sustaining premature human fetuses in a similar way. Some commentators have pointed out that perfecting these systems for human fetuses might alter a standard expectation in abortion practices: that the termination of a pregnancy also entails the death of the fetus. With Biobags, it might be (...) possible, some argue, that no woman has the right to expect that outcome if the technology is able to sustain fetal lifeafteran abortion. In order to protect the expectation that the termination of a pregnancy always entails the death of the fetus, Elizabeth Romanis has argued that fetuses sustained in Biobags have a status different than otherwise ‘born’ children. In support of that view, she argues that these ‘gestatelings’ are incapable of independent life. This argument involves a misunderstanding of the gestational support involved, as well as a misapprehension of neonatology practice. Here, we argue that any human fetus sustained in a Biobag would be as ‘independent’ as any other premature infant, and just as ‘born’. Neonatologists would seem to have certain presumptive moral responsibilities toward any human fetus gestating in a Biobag. It remains a separate question whether the perfection and widespread application of Biobags for premature human beings would or should alter the expectation that ending a pregnancy also entails fetal death. (shrink)

Research teams have used extra-uterine systems to support premature fetal lambs and to bring them to maturation in a way not previously possible. The researchers have called attention to possible implications of these systems for sustaining premature human fetuses in a similar way. Some commentators have pointed out that perfecting these systems for human fetuses might alter a standard expectation in abortion practices: that the termination of a pregnancy also entails the death of the fetus. With Biobags, it might be (...) possible, some argue, that no woman has the right to expect that outcome if the technology is able to sustain fetal life _after_ an abortion. In order to protect the expectation that the termination of a pregnancy always entails the death of the fetus, Elizabeth Romanis has argued that fetuses sustained in Biobags have a status different than otherwise ‘born’ children. In support of that view, she argues that these ‘gestatelings’ are incapable of independent life. This argument involves a misunderstanding of the gestational support involved, as well as a misapprehension of neonatology practice. Here, we argue that any human fetus sustained in a Biobag would be as ‘independent’ as any other premature infant, and just as ‘born’. Neonatologists would seem to have certain presumptive moral responsibilities toward any human fetus gestating in a Biobag. It remains a separate question whether the perfection and widespread application of Biobags for premature human beings would or should alter the expectation that ending a pregnancy also entails fetal death. (shrink)

As a study involving diabetes care demonstrates, children sometimes have a much more sophisticated capacity for taking charge of their own health care decisions than is usually recognized in bioethics. Protecting these children from their disease means involving them in their treatment as much as possible, helping them to understand it and take responsibility for it so that they can navigate the multitude of daily decisions that become part of the diabetes medical regimen.

The devastating impact of the national opioid epidemic has given rise to hundreds of lawsuits. This article details the extremely broad range of legal claims, compares the opioid cases to other public health litigation efforts, including tobacco, and describes the special mechanism — a multidistrict litigation — through which more than 700 opioid-related cases have been consolidated thus far, with settlement almost certain to follow.

A familiar adage in the philosophy of science is that general hypotheses are better supported by varied evidence than by uniform evidence. Several studies suggest that young children do not respect this principle, and thus suffer from a defect in their inductive methodology. We argue that the diversity principle does not have the normative status that psychologists attribute to it, and should be replaced by a simple rule of probability. We then report experiments designed to detect conformity to the latter (...) rule in children's inductive judgment. The results suggest that young children in both the United States and Taiwan are sensitive to the constraints imposed by the rule on judgments of probability and evidential strength. We conclude with a suggested reinterpretation of the thesis that children's inductive methodology qualifies them as “little scientists.”. (shrink)

The Unspeakable Girl is, to judge a book by its cover, not merely peripheral to Agamben’s oeuvre, but something rather trifling: a philosophical bauble, a curiosity piece. Published in collaboratio...

This paper uses argumentation tools such as argument diagrams and argumentation schemes to analyze four examples of argument from analogy, and argues that to proceed from there to evaluating these arguments, features of the context of dialogue need to be taken into account. The evidence drawn from these examples is taken to support a pragmatic approach to studying argument from analogy, meaning that identifying the logical form of the argument by building an argument diagram of the premises and conclusion is (...) not by itself sufficient for argument evaluation. To get further, it is argued, the argument evaluator needs to take into account how this particular argument was used in context to support a conversational goal.Cet article utilise des outils d'argumentation tels que des diagrammes d'argument et des schèmes d'argumentation pour analyser trois exemples d'argument par analogie, et soutient que pour évaluer ces arguments de manière adéquate, il est nécessaire de tenir compte du contexte d'utilisation de l'argument. Ces exemples suggèrent que l’étude des arguments par analogie à partir de seulement l’identification de leur forme logique n'est pas adéquate. Pour aller plus loin, on avance que l'analyste d'argument doit prendre en compte comment un argument particulier a été utilisé dans un contexte pour soutenir un but conversationnel. (shrink)

ABSTRACTConcerned with how individuals assess scientific experts on the Internet, our research investigates the virtual r/science subreddit and their popular Ask-Me-Anything series, where sci...

Emotional Intelligence (EI) has been conceptualized in the literature either as a dispositional tendency, in line with a personality trait (trait EI; Petrides and Furnham, 2001), or as an ability, moderately correlated with general intelligence (ability EI; Mayer and Salovey, 1997). Surprisingly, there have been few empirical attempts conceptualizing how the different EI approaches should be related to each other. However, understanding how the different approaches of EI may be interwoven and/or complementary is of primary importance for clarifying the conceptualization (...) of EI and organizing the literature around it. We introduce a theoretical framework explaining how trait EI, ability EI, and emotion information processing – a novel component related to EI recently introduced in the literature (e.g., Fiori and Vesely Maillefer, 2018) – may contribute to effective emotion-related performance and provide initial evidence supporting its usefulness in predicting EI-related outcomes. More specifically, we show that performance in a task in which participants had to infer the mental and emotional states of others, namely a Theory of Mind task, was predicted jointly (e.g., interaction effects) by trait EI, ability EI, and emotion information processing, after controlling for personality and IQ (N = 323). Our results argue for the importance of investigating the joint contribution of different aspects of EI in explaining variability in emotionally laden outcomes. (shrink)

We investigate the social choice implications of what we call "the proximity condition". Loosely speaking, this condition says that whenever a profile moves "closer" to some individual's point of view, then the social choice cannot move "further away" from this individual's point of view. We apply this idea in two settings: merging functions and preference aggregation. The precise formulation of the proximity condition depends on the setting. First, restricting attention to merging functions that are interval scale invariant, we prove that (...) the only functions that satisfy proximity are dictatorships. Second, we prove that the only social welfare functions that satisfy proximity and a version of the Pareto criterion are dictatorships. We conclude that either proximity is not an attractive normative requirement after all, or we must give up some other social choice condition. Another possibility is that our normative intuition about proximity needs to be codified using different axioms. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Phenomenological Interviews and Tourette'sThe authors report no conflicts of interest.We appreciate the responses from the two clinicians, Efron and Mathieson. We agree with their reminder about the holistic nature of clinician's engagement (mood, sociality, and work life) and with their emphasis on patient-reported outcome measures, although this is not quite what we did in our interviews. As has recently been recognized in section 24 of the Victorian Mental Health (...) and Well-being Act (to provide a local Australian example), patients and caregivers' "lived experience makes them valuable leaders and active partners in the mental health and wellbeing service system."1In this paper, however, our aim was both more modest and immodest: modest, in that we aimed to work with those "leaders and active partners" to generate a more adequate account of lived experience in concert with behavioral symptomatology; immodest, in that we wondered how the lived experience of Tourette syndrome (TS) aligned (or not) with some of the commonly ascribed features of the condition. Although phenomenology as a discipline does not own lived experience, of course, it is more systematically treated in this tradition, starting with elaborations of Erlebnis.Efron and Mathieson note that older patients are more likely to describe urges or premonitory urges (PUs). This raises the priming question: Has greater exposure to and involvement in medical concepts and treatments transformed the nature of their self-report, or has it provided them with more phenomenological skills, enabling them to pick out discrete parts of experience? Or perhaps they have just been exposed more frequently to the experience over time? We address some related issues below, in our reply to Fernandez, where we outline our interview techniques more fully.They end by noting that the aim of comprehensive behavioral intervention for tics is to become attentive to PUs to better block tics. This is complex and understudied. In principle, becoming aware of something cognitively and experientially can foreground or even perhaps induce that experience. Conversely, from the TS scholarship, we know that attending to urges in certain ways (e.g., via acceptance training) can also reduce perceived urge frequency and intensity (see Gev et al., 2016). We would welcome further work on this link between attention and experience in TS. [End Page 49]Response to FernandezBecause our paper was partly framed around Fernandez' own work on phenomenological psychopathology, we welcome his invitation to provide further "inspiration and guidance" for other phenomenological researchers conducting empirical studies, who may also be dealing with the challenge posed by "narrative habits." When an interviewee uses well-worn medicalized terms to describe their experience, it is not clear whether these descriptions genuinely reveal or rather occlude the experience in question. There are sometimes, perhaps often, second-person phenomenological 'tells' regarding interviewees genuinely re-evoking an experience, but for interviewers it still raises the question of how to prompt alternative and potentially more accurate descriptions of experience.Because of this challenge, we purposely did not use the term "urge" or "premonitory urge" (PU) in our interview questions. Instead, we asked about (and used the broader term of) "experiences" that may occur prior, during, or after ticcing, without assuming that there are such experiences in the first place. We guided interviewees to evoke the memory of a specific, singular tic event (a tic token; see Curtis-Wendlandt 2020, 2023). Once a memory of such an event had been identified, we asked interviewees the following three lead questions:1. What, if anything, did you experience during this tic?2. What, if anything, did you experience before this tic?3. What, if anything did you experience after this tic?The temporal framing of these questions counters common trends and assumptions in the scholarship, which has focused heavily on pre-tic experiences, with little attention given to post-tic experiences (reduced to notions of "relief" and barely investigated), and even less to experiential explorations of the tic itself. Our catalogue of supporting questions sought to elicit fine-grained descriptions of evoked/recalled experiences along sensory and cognitive-affective dimensions:•. Did you see anything before, during, or after this tic? If so, what did you see?•. Did you hear anything... (shrink)

This article engages with debates concerning the moral worth of human beings with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities (PIMDs). Some argue that those with such disabilities are morally less valuable than so-called normal human beings, whereas others argue that all human beings have equal moral value and so each group of humans ought to be treated with equal concern. We will argue in favor of a reconciliatory view that takes points from opposing camps in the debates about the moral worth (...) of humans with PIMDs. The view in question, roughly, is this: most humans with PIMDs are persons in the morally significant sense and so deserve equal moral consideration to so-called normal human beings. Some humans with PIMD may not, however, be persons, but nevertheless deserve equal moral consideration to persons because they stand in a special relation to persons. (shrink)

Using a dataset of corporate philanthropic gifts of $1 million or more, we examine the influence of corporate donors on the performance of recipient non-profit organizations. We find that corporate donors positively influence NPO performance, specifically in the form of higher revenues per employee, program ratios, and fundraising returns. We find little evidence that large foundation or individual donors similarly enhance organizational performance. In additional analysis, we find that large corporate donations matter when the corporation is more likely to have (...) influence over the recipient NPO. These findings suggest that corporate donors provide the monitoring and expertise needed to enhance organizational performance beyond simply providing funding to NPOs. Our results are robust to a two-stage model and propensity score matching to address endogeneity concerns. While prior research has examined the effect of corporate philanthropy on donor organization performance, we contribute to the literature by examining whether corporate philanthropy also improves recipient organization performance. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the psychological process of selectively attending to one source of information to the exclusion of others. In a meta-analysis, it reviews different tasks used to study selective attention, under the construct of conflict resolution, as assessed with functional imaging techniques. Both the anterior cingulate cortex and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex are involved in some aspect of conflict resolution, which is likely related to different mechanisms. The theme of heterogeneity of function is reflected in these results.

This essay elaborates the nature and consequences of compression and noise, understood as interdependent phenomena determining current aesthetic regimes and modes of perception in the “cognitive co...

A phenomenological account of the forms of life characteristic of late capitalism--including television, celebrity culture, and personal electronics--culminating in an ontology of the gadget-commodity that brings together Marxist theories of commodity fetishism and ideology with Heidegger's attempt to think truth as unconcealment.

Rejecting the tendency to regard Fichte as merely a transitional figure in the development of German idealism, the following paper argues that, in the years following his dismissal from Jena, Fichte will come to map out a unique and compelling philosophical trajectory. This will be demonstrated, in particular, through a close reading of the Erlanger lectures Institutiones omnis philisophiae of 1805: in these texts, which undertake the pedagogical task of introducing his students to philosophy and indeed achieving a “transformation” of (...) perspective, Fichte makes a fundamental philosophical breakthrough. This becomes possible precisely because his focus on the pedagogical task draws his attention to the most fundamental subjective or even “existential” conditions of philosophical insight, leading him, in turn, to a theorization of the capacity of understanding, by producing contradictions, to open up a space of negativity; a negativity that is itself the essence of human freedom, and through which truth is yielded rather than either discovered or produced. Whereas Hegel and Schelling regard Kant’s residual dualism as a philosophical scandal, Fichte, through this notion of a radical freedom born from the unresolved negativity of the understanding, will seek not to overcome dualism through a higher perspective but to recognize its absolutely binding character. (shrink)

Agamben’s self-professed epigonism underwrites his entire project, serving as an even more fundamental methodological concept than the signature, paradigm, and archeology. In Infancy and History, Agamben maintains that transcendental experience is no longer a viable source of philosophical insight; philosophers go astray referring their thinking back to an authentic yet esoteric experience that, itself unspeakable, grounds positive philosophical assertions. Neither mysterious nor ineffable, the experience founding philosophy is the completely patent, non-latent, experience of language’s pure exteriority. Rather than “deconstructing” metaphysics (...) by exposing its hidden contradictions, philosophy must “deconfabulate,” telling fables about philosophy to undo its enchantments, since it is through the fable that the spell of silence, which itself originates in fable, can be broken. This “epigonal” method, which follows after the tradition rather than seeking a new grounding, is itself justified through Agamben’s account, in The End of the Poem, of the Italian, as opposed to Germanic, physiognomy and of a specifically Italian relation to language going back to Dante. To be Italian is to embrace the “deadness” of one’s own language, rejecting the myth of the resurrection of the original potencies of a dead classical language through a living, modern language. (shrink)

The inquiry into the nature of truth plays an important role in Fichte's thought, especially following his departure from Jena, and indeed in the WL-1804-ii the doctrine of truth emerges as the centerpiece of the WL. The following paper argues that the conception of truth evolves significantly after the WL-1804-ii, and that, in such texts as the Erlanger Metaphysik, the Spekulation zu Koppenhagen, and the 1812 WL, Fichte, building on the account of the hiatus in the WL-1804-ii while moving away (...) from its notion of absolute truth, seeks to understand truth in terms of freedom, or indeed, as what »yields to freedom«, wherein freedom, through the negativity of the concept, produces an emptiness, a clearing, that is »fulfilled« with truth. Anticipating the phenomenological account of truth yet without abandoning a strong sense of normativity, Fichte’s alethology remains a compelling alternative to contemporary positions. (shrink)

This paper attempts a philosophically rigorous interpretation of H.C. Andersen’s tales. Through a radically conceived sentimentality – the unmediated juxtaposition of the abjection of things, conceived as a paradoxical “desire for desire” having no place in the world, with a cruel, apathetic gaze – Andersen challenges the existence of the soul or subjectivity as what, by combining the theoretical gaze with contemplative pleasure, grants coherence to experience. Thus undermining not only Romantic self-reflection, and its suturing of philosophy to criticism, but (...) Plato’s erotic psychology, Andersen inaugurates a new philosophical literature: a writing for children cultivating an openness. (shrink)

Taking its departure from The Differend’s analysis of Auschwitz as a sign for the evental character of history, I argue that the looming ecological disaster we now face reveals both the continuing relevance and limits of Lyotard’s thought. While the form of political agency of the catastrophe to come involves a differend, this differend cannot be attached to a proper name, however problematic its mode of signification. This, however, suggests the even greater relevance of Lyotard’s treatment, in the conclusion of (...) The Differend, of capitalism in terms of temporal contradiction, as well as his theorization of oikos and ecology in subsequent works, where he distinguishes between the economic and the ecological. This distinction, I conclude, is rendered problematic by the catastrophe to come, as indeed is any attempt to draw an absolute distinction between “philosophical politics” and mere technocratic management or even to exclude speculation from the heart of philosophy. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 39, Issue 3, pp 205 - 234 For many people across the world, experiences of depression include features that extend beyond the biopsychiatric model, which predominates in research on the relationship between religious and spiritual coping and depressive symptoms. How does attending to these diverse experiences of depression challenge our understanding of the dynamic between religiosity and depression? This paper presents thirteen qualitative interviews among economically marginalized mothers in the metro-Boston area. Analyzing these narratives presents a complex (...) picture of the way chronic situational stress lies beneath their experiences of depression. From this expanded view of depressive experiences, we analyze the religious coping strategies of social support and meaning making to reveal the holistic, yet often ambiguous, ways these mothers engaged religious and spiritual resources to forge hope amidst chronic stress. (shrink)

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- List of table -- Notes on contributors -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: environmental human rights and political theory -- 1 The rights of humans as ecologically embedded beings -- 2 Defining the natural in the Anthropocene: what does the right to a 'natural' environment mean now? -- 3 Reconciliation of nature and society: how far can rights take us? -- 4 The foundation of rights to nature -- 5 Rights to natural resources and (...) human rights -- 6 Making sense of the human right to landscape -- 7 What's so good about environmental human rights? Constitutional versus international environmental rights -- 8 Environmental human rights - concepts of responsibility -- 9 Future people's rights: dispelling an ontological worry -- 10 Human rights-based precautionary approaches and risk imposition in the context of climate change -- Index. (shrink)

We propose three extensions of the theory developed by Juslin & Vll (J&V). First, motion should be considered as an additional mechanism. Second, synchronization plays a role in eliciting emotion. And, third, the spectrum of musical affect or feelings is denser and broader than the spectrum of emotions, suggesting an expansion of the scope of the theory beyond emotions.

B L Curtis; Learning and Intentionality, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 5, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 105–121, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.

B L Curtis; Learning and Intentionality, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 5, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 105–121, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 13.1 (2003) 51-52 [Access article in PDF] Congress Considers Incentives for Organ Procurement Alexander S. Curtis [Tables]During the 108th Congressional session, several bills pertaining to ethical incentives for organ donation likely will be introduced. In some cases, they will be similar to bills before the 107th Congress (see Table 1). Bills in both the House of Representatives and the Senate address the establishment (...) and maintenance of donor registries, financial reimbursements for medical and nonmedical expenses incurred by qualifying donors, the presentation of commemorative medals, and tax credits.A bill entitled "Gift of Life Congressional Medal Act" (introduced last year by Senate majority leader Bill Frist (R-TN) as Senate Bill 325), and its corresponding bill of the same title (passed in the House of Representatives last year as H.R. 708), would establish a congressional commemorative medal honoring "any organ donor, or the family or family member of any organ donor." The medal is to be designed and struck with "suitable emblems, devices, and inscriptions" by the Secretary of the Treasury. The eligible donor or donor's family member would be presented with the medal by the Secretary of Health and Human Services. This bill would establish qualifying donations as those of human kidneys, livers, hearts, lungs, pancreases, or any other organ, but excludes corneas and eyes.Another bill, introduced by Representative Michael Bilirakis (R-FL) entitled "Organ Donation Improvement Act" (H.R. 624), would award grants or contracts to states, transplant centers, and qualified organ procurement organizations for the purpose of providing travel, subsistence, and incidental nonmedical expenses to individuals who make living donations. In order to receive reimbursement, the donating individuals must reside in states other than the states in which the intended recipients reside and the annual income of those receiving the organs cannot exceed $35,000. The bill also would appropriate $15,000,000 to make grants to states and public and nonprofit entities for the purpose of carrying out studies, public education demonstrations, and outreach activities "designed to increase the number of organ donors within the state." The bill would be effective from time of enactment through 2005. [End Page 51]Two other bills proposed within the House of Representatives in 2002 called for amendment to the Internal Revenue Code. The "Gift of Life Tax Credit Act (introduced as H.R. 1872 by Representative James Hansen (R-UT)) and the "Help Organ Procurement Expand Act" (introduced as H.R. 2090 by Representative Chris Smith (R-NJ)) present a refundable credit to individuals or to the estates of those who agree either to be living donors or to donate their organs upon death. The "Gift of Life Tax Credit Act" refunds $10,000 to the estates of eligible individuals "for the taxable year which includes the date of the individual's death." The "Help Organ Procurement Expand Act" offers a refund of $2,500 to qualified persons. Donations of kidneys, livers, pancreases, islet cells, lungs, and intestines are accepted, however several conditions restrict permissible donors. The "Gift of Life Tax Credit Act" requires that the legally competent individual's death not be due to a suicide and that the intention to donate was clearly declared. The "Help Organ Procurement Expand Act" prohibits donations from individuals who were killed with physician assistance, died as a result of a suicide, have been indicted or convicted of a felony or a misdemeanor offense, or are actively under criminal investigation for a possible felony offense. The "Help Organ Procurement Expand Act" also restricts procuring organs from unborn children or human fetuses and under circumstances in which the living donor would be subject to "unacceptable levels of medical risk of death or permanent debilitation." Alexander S. Curtis is a research assistant at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University, Washington, DC. He received his bachelor's degree from Miami University.... (shrink)

This book presents the first comparative study of the works of Charlotte Delbo, Noor Inayat Khan, and Germaine Tillion in relation to their vigorous struggles against Nazi aggression during World War II and the Holocaust. It illuminates ways in which their early lives conditioned both their political engagements during wartime and their extraordinary literary creations empowered by what Lara R. Curtis refers to as modes of ‘writing resistance.’ With skillful recourse to a remarkable variety of genres, they offer compelling (...) autobiographical reflections, vivid chronicles of wartime atrocities, eyewitness accounts of victims, and acute perspectives on the political implications of major events. Their sensitive reflections of gendered subjectivity authenticate the myriad voices and visions they capture. In sum, this book highlights the lives and works of three courageous women who were ceaselessly committed to a noble cause during the Holocaust and World War II. (shrink)

The question of Nietzsche’s use of political theory has a long and vexed history. The contributors of this book re-situate debates around the notion of difference, in relation to historical and scholarly concerns, but with a view to the current political context. Given that today we are faced with a host of political challenges of domination and resistance, the question raised in this volume is how Nietzsche helps us to think through and to address some of the problems. The authors (...) also discuss how his writings complicate our desire for swift solutions to seemingly intractable problems: how to resist slavishness in thought and action, how to maintain hard-won civil liberties and rights in the face of encroaching hegemonic discourses, practices and forces, or how to counteract global environmental degradation, in short, how to oppose ‘totalitarian’ movements of homogenization, universalization, equalization, and instead to affirm, both politically and ontologically, a culture of difference. (shrink)

Copyright ©2010–2015 all rights reserved. Jonathan Bennett [Brackets] enclose editorial explanations. Small ·dots· enclose material that has been added, but can be read as though it were part of the original text. Occasional •bullets, and also indenting of passages that are not quotations, are meant as aids to grasping the structure of a sentence or a thought. Every four-point ellipsis . . . . indicates the omission of a brief passage that seems to present more difficulty than it is worth. (...) Longer omissions are reported between brackets in normal-sized type.—All the quotations from Latin writers were given in the original in Latin.—The Lord Somers to whom this work is addressed was the Lord Chancellor of England, the most highly placed official in the legal system.—This work is the first of the five Treatises in Shaftesbury’s Characteristics of men, manners, opinions, and times. (shrink)

(1993). Evolutionary competence in the postmodern family: An idealized design approach. World Futures: Vol. 36, Evolutionary Consciousness, pp. 81-105.

Institutional investors and corporations increasingly recognize that extra-financial determinants of business performance can both create value and uncover significant risks within a business or investment portfolio. For companies that invest in, develop, own, or operate commercial real estate assets, this awareness of extrafinancial impacts has led to a significant interest in what has been called "responsible property investment (RPI)". Within the field of RPI, green real estate — real estate investment and management that seeks to reduce the environmental impacts of (...) building construction and operations — has begun to receive attention. This attention has been extended over the past decade to community property development projects, where both social and environmental considerations related not only to the building, but also the project site and surrounding community are integrated into management and investment decisions. Some examples of these projects include affordable and workforce housing, urban revitalization and brownfield redevelopment. More social-focussed issues such as labour and workplace considerations are also key components of responsible property investing, yet to date labour issues have received little attention in the RPI literature and workplace considerations are reflected indirectly through environmental considerations in the green building literature. This paper explores responsible real estate investment in Canada by taking an integrated approach in examining both environmental and social factors and their potential impact on such investments. A series of semi-structured interviews are conducted with key stakeholders in Canada to gain insight into how using environmental and social factors may influence long-term risk and financial returns in real estate investment in Canada with particular emphasis on institutional investors engaged in these practices. Data is used to analyse the impact that ESG considerations have on financial performance of these assets. Jantzi-Sustainalytics ESG ratings are used along with the stock price changes of fourteen real estate companies and REITs to interrogate this question. (shrink)

In the noble tradition of Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget (Penguin, 2011), Curtis White's We, Robots takes the radical position that maybe we shouldn't cede every bit of control, humanity, and decision making to technology, and that the techno-futurists in our mix have things dangerously backwards. What a notion! In this sharply argued and rousing book, White not only attacks the technology-loving establishment, but offers a beautiful and essential alternative.

The present study aimed to quantify the magnitude of sex differences in humans' ability to accurately recognise non-verbal emotional displays. Studies of relevance were those that required explicit labelling of discrete emotions presented in the visual and/or auditory modality. A final set of 551 effect sizes from 215 samples was included in a multilevel meta-analysis. The results showed a small overall advantage in favour of females on emotion recognition tasks (d = 0.19). However, the magnitude of that sex difference was (...) moderated by several factors, namely specific emotion, emotion type (negative, positive), sex of the actor, sensory modality (visual, audio, audio-visual) and age of the participants. Method of presentation (computer, slides, print, etc.), type of measurement (response time, accuracy) and year of publication did not significantly contribute to variance in effect sizes. These findings are discussed in the context of social and biological explanations of sex differences in emotion recognition. (shrink)

This essay seeks to scrutinize Kierkegaard’s critical philosophical theology. The intent is to demonstrate how his religious thought, especially on God’s relation to the world and to the human being, can contribute to generating a cogent response to the challenges presented by our accelerating secular world. Apart from the narrative on the Dane’s passionate reflections, I employ two other narratives to facilitate this inquiry into Kierkegaard. The first of these facilitating narratives comes from highlighting the work on the concept of (...) resonance by the social theorist Hartmut Rosa. Rosa’s rich analysis of our contemporary situation provides a persuasive case for the accelerating pace of our secular world, the complex dynamics of alienation that are at play within it, and the need for social transformation that creates space for increasing resonance within personal and social relationships and structures. The second facilitating narrative centers on the notion of dancing in God, which I believe holds promise for effectively communicating moving, bodily, rhythmic, passionate, and responsive thoughts and actions concerning God’s engagement in our contemporary world. I hope to show that these three complementary discourses together provide a provocative religious discourse and vision that can prove helpful in addressing many of the challenges of our time. (shrink)