Singles are an understudied yet growing segment of the adult population. The current study aims to expand the lens of relationship science by examining the well-being of unpartnered, single adults using latent profile analysis. We recruited singles closely matched to the United States census for an exploratory cross-sectional survey using five variables that strongly predict well-being. All five variables significantly predicted life satisfaction for the full sample. Latent profile analyses detected 10 groups of singles. Half of the profiles were happy (...) and half of the profiles were unhappy. Each profile had its own unique patterns relating to personal relationships, self-esteem, and personality traits. The happiest profile had the best relationships, self-esteem, and personality, while the unhappiest profile had the worst relationships, self-esteem, and personality. The profiles in between these two extremes had more nuanced patterns. For example, one relatively happy profile in the middle had high friendship satisfaction but low family satisfaction, while an adjacent profile showed the opposite pattern. Overall, singles who had positive relationships—both with themselves and others—were happiest. (shrink)

The McGurk illusion occurs when listeners hear an illusory percept, resulting from mismatched pairings of audiovisual speech stimuli. Hearing a third percept—distinct from both the auditory and visual input—has been used as evidence of AV fusion. We examined whether the McGurk illusion is instead driven by visual dominance, whereby the third percept, e.g., “da,” represents a default percept for visemes with an ambiguous place of articulation, like/ga/. Participants watched videos of a talker uttering various consonant vowels with and without audios (...) of/ba/. Individuals transcribed the CV they saw or heard. In the V-only condition, individuals predominantly saw “da”/“ta” when viewing CVs with indiscernible POAs. Likewise, in the AV condition, upon perceiving an illusion, they predominantly heard “da”/“ta” for CVs with indiscernible POAs. The illusion was stronger in individuals who exhibited weak/ba/auditory encoding. In Experiment2, we attempted to replicate these findings using stimuli recorded from a different talker. The V-only results were not replicated, but again individuals predominately heard “da”/“ta”/“tha” as an illusory percept for various AV combinations, and the illusion was stronger in individuals who exhibited weak/ba/auditory encoding. These results demonstrate that when visual CVs with indiscernible POAs are paired with a weakly encoded auditory/ba/, listeners default to hearing “da”/“ta”/“tha”—thus, tempering the AV fusion account, and favoring a default mechanism triggered when both AV stimuli are ambiguous. (shrink)

Long noncoding RNAs have been described in cell lines and various whole tissues, but lncRNA analysis of development in vivo is limited. Here, we comprehensively analyze lncRNA expression for the adult mouse subventricular zone neural stem cell lineage. We utilize complementary genome-wide techniques including RNA-seq, RNA CaptureSeq, and ChIP-seq to associate specific lncRNAs with neural cell types, developmental processes, and human disease states. By integrating data from chromatin state maps, custom microarrays, and FACS purification of the subventricular zone lineage, we (...) stringently identify lncRNAs with potential roles in adult neurogenesis. shRNA-mediated knockdown of two such lncRNAs, Six3os and Dlx1as, indicate roles for lncRNAs in the glial-neuronal lineage specification of multipotent adult stem cells. Our data and workflow thus provide a uniquely coherent in vivo lncRNA analysis and form the foundation of a user-friendly online resource for the study of lncRNAs in development and disease. © 2013 Elsevier Inc. (shrink)

In this paper is studied the relationship between finite and infinite, creator and creature, in the metaphysics of Nicolaus of Cues; with this aim, the Cusano texts dealing with the transcendence of the Absolute´s infinity are highlighted, as well as the texts dealing with the inmanence of the finite in the Infinite. On the other hand, the relations of inmanence and transcendence, of finite and infinite, are made explicite through three kinds of affirmations or metaphores of Cusa: a) The Absolute (...) as Non aliud of the finite; b) The correlativity of the finite and infinite looks; c) Infinite intellect and human mind: relation as image. The paper finishes pointing out the impossibility of a reciprocal relation between finite and infinite, and emphasizing that the speculative horizon should be aimed at an analogy of the relation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Gonzales v. Oregon and the Politics of MedicineRonald A. Lindsay (bio)Throughout 2005, the morbid joke on Capitol Hill was that the twin inevitabilities of "death and taxes" had been replaced by "death politics and taxes." There seemed to be some truth in this observation given the highly publicized intervention by some members of Congress in the Schiavo case and the continuing controversy over government regulation of end-of-life care. (...) The Supreme Court's recent decision in Gonzales v. Oregon (74 U.S.L.W. 4068 (17 January 2006)) has resolved one of the critical issues relating to this controversy by holding that a physician may prescribe controlled substances to provide assistance in dying if such a practice is authorized by state law and not expressly prohibited by federal law. However, other issues remain. In fact, the Court's decision has underscored some of the reasons why there is not only continuing controversy over end-of-life care, but also over other aspects of the practice of medicine. First, it is apparent there is no consensus among health care professionals about the precise boundaries of the legitimate practice of medicine. Second, the regulation of the practice of medicine traverses ill-defined legal territory. In particular, there is significant uncertainty concerning the implications of some regulations as well as the allocation of regulatory authority between and within state and federal governments. This uncertainty leaves substantial room for political maneuvers.Before discussing the politics of medicine, it is worth looking at the regulation of controlled substances in some detail both because this review will provide the necessary background for understanding the ruling in Gonzales v. Oregon and because it will illustrate the uncertainty resulting from multiple sources of regulatory authority.Federal and State Regulation of Controlled SubstancesSince the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, the federal government has regulated certain aspects of the distribution and administration of drugs deemed susceptible to abuse. The current primary vehicle for federal regulation is the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act, enacted in 1970, of which Title II is known as the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) (21 U.S.C. § 801 et seq.). A [End Page 99] "controlled" substance is just that, a substance that is regulated under the CSA. The CSA classifies controlled substances in five categories or schedules based on their potential for abuse, their accepted medical use, and the risks associated with their use under medical supervision. Schedule I substances have a high potential for abuse and have no currently accepted use in medical treatment. Schedule II-V substances are approved for medical use but are subject to a descending hierarchy of restrictions on their use. To give a lawful prescription for a controlled substance, a physician must be registered with the appropriate federal agency, currently the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Moreover, to be valid, such a prescription must be issued for "a legitimate medical purpose" (21 U.S.C. § 830(b)(3)(A)(ii)).There is little dispute that the primary purposes of the CSA are to control drug abuse and to eliminate illicit trafficking in drugs. In accomplishing these objectives, there is a division of responsibility among various federal agencies, in particular the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Justice. Of particular relevance to the controversy in Gonzales v. Oregon is the Attorney General's authority to revoke a physician's registration for prescribing controlled substances if the physician's registration would be inconsistent with the public interest.All 50 states have their own statutes and regulations that address various aspects of the distribution and administration of controlled substances. Most states have adopted versions of the model Uniform Controlled Substances Act, which largely mimics federal law, but several states have placed additional restrictions on a physician's ability to prescribe controlled substances, including time limits on the validity of a prescription and limits on the quantity of a drug that can be prescribed. States are the primary, but by no means the exclusive, source of regulation of medical practice in general. States license physicians, establish boards and agencies to regulate the actions of physicians, and promulgate rules and guidelines to which physicians... (shrink)

Twitter makes conversation into something like a game. It scores our communication, giving us vivid and quantified feedback, via Likes, Retweets, and Follower counts. But this gamification doesn’t just increase our motivation to communicate; it changes the very nature of the activity. Games are more satisfying than ordinary life precisely because game-goals are simpler, cleaner, and easier to apply. Twitter is thrilling precisely because its goals have been artificially clarified and narrowed. When we buy into Twitter’s gamification, then our values (...) shift from the complex and pluralistic values of communication, to the narrower quest for popularity and virality. Twitter’s gamification bears some resemblance with the phenomena of echo chambers and moral outrage porn. In all these phenomena, we are instrumentalizing our ends for hedonistic reasons. We have shifted our aims in an activity, not because the new aims are more valuable, but in exchange for extra pleasure. (shrink)

Neuroscientists are searching for the engram within the conceptual framework established by John Locke's theory of mind. This framework was elaborated before the development of information theory, before the development of information processing machines and the science of computation, before the discovery that molecules carry hereditary information, before the discovery of the codon code and the molecular machinery for editing the messages written in this code and translating it into transcription factors that mark abstract features of organic structure such as (...) anterior and distal. The search for the engram needs to abandon Locke's conceptual framework and work within a framework informed by these developments. The engram is the medium by which information extracted from past experience is transmitted to the computations that inform future behavior. The information-conveying symbols in the engram are rapidly generated in the course of computations, which implies that they are molecules. (shrink)

This expanded edition of C L Hardin's ground-breaking work on colour features a new chapter, 'Further Thoughts: 1993', in which the author revisits the dispute ...

The notion that our society, its education system and its intellectual life, is characterised by a split between two cultures – the arts or humanities on one hand, and the sciences on the other – has a long history. But it was C. P. Snow's Rede lecture of 1959 that brought it to prominence and began a public debate that is still raging in the media today. This 50th anniversary printing of The Two Cultures and its successor piece, A Second (...) Look features an introduction by Stefan Collini, charting the history and context of the debate, its implications and its afterlife. The importance of science and technology in policy run largely by non-scientists, the future for education and research, and the problem of fragmentation threatening hopes for a common culture are just some of the subjects discussed. (shrink)

One of the very few accounts in English of German idealism, this ambitious work advances and revises our understanding of both the history and the thought of the classical period of German philosophy. As he traces the structure and evolution of idealism as a doctrine, Frederick Beiser exposes a strong objective, or realist, strain running from Kant to Hegel and identifies the crucial role of the early romantics—Hölderlin, Schlegel, and Novalis—as the founders of absolute idealism.

Is there such a thing as natural knowledge of God? C. Stephen Evans presents the case for understanding theistic arguments as expressions of natural signs in order to gain a new perspective both on their strengths and weaknesses. Three classical, much-discussed theistic arguments - cosmological, teleological, and moral - are examined for the natural signs they embody. At the heart of this book lie several relatively simple ideas. One is that if there is a God of the kind accepted by (...) Christians, Jews, and Muslims, then it is likely that a 'natural' knowledge of God is possible. Another is that this knowledge will have two characteristics: it will be both widely available to humans and yet easy to resist. If these principles are right, a new perspective on many of the classical arguments for God's existence becomes possible. We understand why these arguments have for many people a continued appeal but also why they do not constitute conclusive 'proofs' that settle the debate once and for all. Touching on the interplay between these ideas and contemporary scientific theories about the origins of religious belief, particularly the role of natural selection in predisposing humans to form beliefs in God or gods, Evans concludes that these scientific accounts of religious belief are fully consistent, even supportive, of the truth of religious convictions. (shrink)

C. Stephen Evans explains and defends Kierkegaard's account of moral obligations as rooted in God's commands, the fundamental command being `You shall love your neighbour as yourself'. The work will be of interest not only to those interested in Kierkegaard, but also to those interested in the relation between ethics and religion, especially questions about whether morality can or must have a religious foundation. As well as providing a comprehensive reading of Kierkegaard as an ethical thinker, Evans puts him into (...) conversation with contemporary moral theorists. Kierkegaard's divine command theory is shown to be an account that safeguards human flourishing, as well as protecting the proper relations between religion and state in a pluralistic society. (shrink)

The fact that many modal operators are part of an adjunction is probably folklore since the discovery of adjunctions. On the other hand, the natural idea of a minimal propositional calculus extended with a pair of adjoint operators seems to have been formulated only very recently. This recent research, mainly motivated by applications in computer science, concentrates on technical issues related to the calculi and not on the significance of adjunctions in modal logic. It then seems a worthy enterprise (both (...) for these contemporary topical pursuits and also for historical interest) to trace the concept of adjunction back to the origins of the algebraic semantics of modal logic and to make explicit its ubiquity in this branch of mathematics. (shrink)

This book is an explanation and defence of a veiw of faith and reason that is found in the writings of Kierkegaard, a view often termed as fideism. The author distinguishes indefensible forms of fideism that involve a rejection of reason from a fideism that requires that reason becomeself-critical. An understanding of the limits of reason requires both an understanding of faith as above reason, as in Aquinas and Kant, and also as against what is taken as rational by most (...) human beings.The fiedeistic view of faith as involving a critique of reason is illustrated by concrete discussions of three traditional topics in the philosophy of religion: knowledge of God's existence, the problem of evil and the question as to how someone could know that a particular religion could be basedon a revelation from God.The book presents a careful distinction between different kinds of fideism, with a critical rejection of some kinds and a defence of others. The author shows that fideism does not have to be understood as a rejection of reason, rather as a critique of the limits of reason. (shrink)

Michel Foucault had a great influence upon a wide range of disciplines, and his work has been widely interpreted and is frequently referred to, but it is often difficult for beginners to find their way into the complexities of his thought. This is especially true for readers whose background is Anglo-American or "analytic" philosophy. C. G. Prado argues in this updated introduction that the time is overdue for Anglo-American philosophers to avail themselves of what Foucault offers. In this clear and (...) greatly-revised second edition, Prado focuses on Foucault's "middle" or genealogical work, particularly Discipline and Punish and Volume One of The History of Sexuality, in which Foucault most clearly comes to grips with the historicization of truth and knowledge and the formation of subjectivity. Understanding Foucault's thought on these difficult subjects requires working through much complexity and ambiguity, and Prado's direct and accessible introduction is the ideal place to start. (shrink)

This volume contains C. D. Broad's Cambridge lectures on Ethics. Broad gave a course of lectures on the subject, intended primarily for Part I of the Moral Sciences Tripos, every academic year from 1933 - 34 up to and in cluding 1952 - 53 (except that he did not lecture on Ethics in 1935 - 36). The course however was frequently revised, and the present version is es sentially that which he gave in 1952 - 53. Broad always wrote out (...) his lectures fully beforehand, and the manuscript on Ethics, although full of revisions, is in a reasonably good state. But his handwriting is small and close and in places difficult to decipher. I therefore fear that some words may have been misread. There was an additional complication. In the summer of 1953 Broad revised and enlarged two sections of the course, namely the section on "Moore's theory" and that on "Naturalistic theories" (both sections occur in Chapter 4). The revised version of the section on Moore is undoubtedly superior to the earlier version, and I have therefore included it. But in my opinion this is not true of the new version of the section on naturalistic theories: although more comprehensive than the earlier version, it is not only repetitive in itself, but also repeats, sometimes almost verbatim, passages which occur elsewhere in the lectures. In brief, the new version is not fully integrated with the rest of the course. (shrink)

A compelling account of Kierkegaard's ethical views, seeing him against the backdrop of nineteenth-century European society but showing the relevance of his thought for the twenty-first century. Kierkegaard's view of morality as grounded in God's command to love our neighbours as ourselves has clear advantages over contemporary secular rivals.

Emerald Fennell’s debut feature Promising Young Woman (2020) incisively examines sexual assault, misogyny, and the culture of complicity that continues to perpetuate `violence against women. This article will establish Fennell’s aptitude as a filmmaker in condemning the pervasive forces of patriarchal social order in harmony with Kate Manne’s account of structural misogyny analyzed in Down Girl (2017) and Entitled (2020). Fennell’s subversion of genre standards demonstrates how the actions of individuals, separate from the perpetrator, lead to additional acts of harm, (...) and addresses the ever-present reality of male violence which the feminist-hero is, ultimately, unable to surmount. Despite arguments that Promising Young Woman has not met the expectations for change the me-too movement inspired, Fennell challenges conventions to expose misogyny and male violence asking that future feminist filmgoers consider a new way forward. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to set out some of the ontologies amongst which some forms of anti-realism must select. This provides the appropriate setting for presenting an alternative realist ontology. The argument is that the choice between the varieties of anti-realism and realism is inevitably a choice between ontologies.

Plato. Aristotle. Augustine. Hume. Kant. Hegel. Every student of philosophy needs to know the history of the philosophical discourse such giants have bequeathed us. Philosopher C. Stephen Evans brings his expertise to this daunting task as he surveys the history of Western philosophy, from the Pre-Socratics to Nietzsche and postmodernism—and every major figure and movement in between.

This volume, which is part of the Clarendon Aristotle Series, offers a clear and faithful new translation of Books II to IV of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, accompanied by an analytical commentary focusing on philosophical issues. In Books II to IV, Aristotle gives his account of virtue of character in general and of the principal virtues individually, topics of central interest both to his ethical theory and to modern ethical theorists. Consequently major themes of the commentary are connections on the one (...) hand with other relevant Aristotelian texts and on the other with modern writings, both text-related and thematic. -/- Since the main aim of the volume is to make Aristotle's thought as accessible as possible to readers who do not know Greek, considerable care is taken to elucidate both his technical vocabulary and significant features of his Greek idiom. C. C. W. Taylor also provides systematic comparisons with other translations into English and other languages, and frequent references to other commentaries, ancient, medieval, and modern. These features make the work useful to other scholars in the field as well as to students of philosophy, both undergraduate and graduate. -/- In view of the widespread contemporary interest in the topic of virtue, the volume should appeal to students of ethics (even those hitherto unacquainted with ancient thought) and to any reader who is concerned to see how fundamental questions of life and conduct were approached in a culture significantly different from our own. (shrink)

Conscious macrostates are usually assumed to be emergent from the underlying physical microstates comprising the brain and nervous system of biological organisms. However, a major problem with this assumption is that consciousness is essentially nonmeasurable unlike all other proven emergent properties of physical systems. In an earlier paper, using a no-go theorem, it was shown that conscious states cannot be comprised of processes that are physical in nature (Reason, 2019). Combining this result with another unrelated work on causal emergence in (...) physical systems (Hoel, Albantakis and Tononi, 2013), we show in this paper that conscious macrostates are not emergent from physical systems and they also do not supervene on physical microstates. An important implication of our work is that there must be some form of violation of energy conservation in biological systems that are conscious. (shrink)