Musical Group Interaction (MGI) has been found to promote prosocial tendencies, including empathy, across various populations. However, experimental study is lacking in respect of effects of everyday forms of musical engagement on prosocial tendencies, as well as whether key aspects—such as physical co-presence of MGI participants—are necessary to enhance prosocial tendencies. We developed an experimental procedure in order to study online engagement with collaborative playlists and to investigate socio-cognitive components of prosocial tendencies expected to increase as a consequence of engagement. (...) We aimed to determine whether mereperceivedpresence of a partner during playlist-making could elicit observable correlates of social processing implicated in both MGI and prosocial behaviors more generally and identify the potential roles of demographic, musical, and inter-individual differences. Preliminary results suggest that for younger individuals, some of the social processes involved in joint music-making and implicated in empathic processes are likely to be elicited even by an assumption of virtual co-presence. In addition, individual differences in styles of listening behavior may mediate the effects of mere perceived partner presence on recognition memory. (shrink)

A collection of anecdotes that articulate the inspirations behind the development of the Frank/Suzuki Performance Aesthetics, an actor training system.

Introduction -- Aristotle and Locke in the American founding -- Equality, liberty, wisdom, morality, and consent in the idea of political freedom -- Humanizing certitudes and impoverishing doubts : a critique of The closing of the American mind by Allan Bloom -- "The Reichstag is still burning : the failure of higher education and the decline of the West" : a valedictory lecture -- The end of history means the end of freedom -- The American founding as the best regime (...) : the bonding of civil and religious liberty -- The decline and fall of the American idea : reflections on the failure of American conservatism -- Thomas Aquinas meets Thomas Jefferson -- Dred Scott revisited -- Legend of Sleepy Hollow. (shrink)

Josiah Royce's graduate seminar in comparative methodology exerted one of the great teaching and intellectual influences of its time. Edited from photostatic copies of the original notebooks by Grover Smith, the text offers a condensed account of a great course in an era when great ideas were being formulated.

This book documents the impact of Stephen Harris’s works in Aboriginal education, Aboriginal learning styles, domains of language use and bilingual-bicultural education. It provides a summary and critique of Stephen Harris's key ideas, particularly those on bilingual-bicultural education. This book also profiles the man, his background, his beliefs and talents. It showcases contributions and personal reflections from Stephen’s family, wife, close colleagues, and many of those influenced by his work. This festschrift explores the professional life and work of (...) Stephen Harris as an educator and anthropologist who worked in the Northern Territory of Australia. (shrink)

Publié dans la bien nommée maison d’édition Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond, Pour en finir avec la domination masculine est l’œuvre d’une historienne de la biologie et de la médecine (Ilana Löwy) et d’une sociologue du travail et du genre (Catherine Marry), toutes deux auteures de plusieurs ouvrages individuels et collectifs. Comme Les mots de l’histoire des femmes ou le Dictionnaire critique du féminisme, il s’agit d’un lexiquequi présente de façon synthétique mais savante de nombreux résu...

This paper focuses on the role of regulation in the shaping new scientific facts. Fleck chose to study the origins of a diagnostic test for a disease seen as a major public health problem, that is, a ‘scientific fact’ that had a direct and immediate influence outside the closed universe of fundamental scientific research. In 1935, when Fleck wrote his book, Genesis and development of a scientific fact, he believed that the tumultuous early history of the Wassermann reaction had come (...) to an end, and that this reaction was successfully stabilized through the standardization of laboratory practices and thanks to the rise of a specific professional segment—the serologists. He could not have predicted that in the 15 years that followed the publication of his book, regulatory measures—barely metioned in his historical narrative—would play a key role in the destabilization of the original meaning of this reaction. The introduction of mass screening for syphilis—mainly via legislation that introduced obligatory premarital tests and promoted the testing of pregnant women—weakened in fine the link between Wassermann serology and infection by the etiological agent of syphilis, the bacterium Treponema pallidum. Fleck elected to study the Wassermann reaction because of its novelty, its complexity, and because it became the focus of a controversy regarding its origins. However, the Wassermann reaction was also one the first examples of a medical technology regulated by the state and incorporated into legal dispositions. It may therefore be seen as an exemplary case of the close intertwining of scientific investigations, their practical applications and regulatory practices. (shrink)

Fifteen years into a successful career as a college professor, Ilana Blumberg encounters a crisis in the classroom that sends her back to the most basic questions about education and prompts a life-changing journey that ultimately takes her from East Lansing to Tel Aviv. As she explores how civic and religious commitments shape the culture of her humanities classrooms, Blumberg argues that there is no education without ethics. When we know what sort of society we seek to build, our (...) teaching practices follow. In vivid classroom scenes from kindergarten through middle school to the university level, Blumberg conveys the drama of intellectual discovery as she offers novice and experienced teachers a pedagogy of writing, speaking, reading, and thinking that she links clearly to the moral and personal development of her students. Writing as an observant Jew and as an American, Blumberg does not shy away from the difficult challenge of balancing identities in the twenty-first century: how to remain true to a community of origin while being a national and global citizen. As she negotiates questions of faith and citizenship in the wide range of classrooms she traverses, Blumberg reminds us that teaching - and learning - are nothing short of a moral art, and that the future of our society depends on it. (shrink)

Smajdor addresses the problem of inferior clinical outcomes among adults with impairments of capacity to give informed consent (AWIC). She notes that AWIC are generally excluded from clinical trials to protect them against harms and avoid exploitation and claims there is a causal link between involvement in clinical trials and favourable outcomes. She argues, given this link, that we should increase AWIC representation in clinical trials and can justifiably do so by recognising the capacity of AWIC to assent. AWIC form (...) a diverse group, with multiple aetiologies, including, for example, Down syndrome, traumatic brain injury and dementia. In some cases, the inability to consent may fluctuate so that the same person could be AWIC only at certain times. Yet despite these differences, the group has a shared unmet need. We agree with Smajdor that AWIC outcomes should be improved, but question whether simply increasing representation in clinical trials is sufficient to achieve this. We identify the following points: 1. AWIC are under-represented in clinical trials. There is evidence of widespread exclusion of AWIC in clinical trials within the UK and abroad and it is often a specific exclusion criterion.1 2. AWIC have worse clinical outcomes and a lower life expectancy. The life expectancy …. (shrink)

Linguistic forms with dedicated evidential meanings have been described for a number of Australian languages (eg. Donaldson 1980, Laughren 1982, Wilkins 1989) but there has been little written on how these are used in social interaction. This paper examines evidential strategies in ordinary Garrwa conversations, by taking into account what we know more generally about the status of knowledge and epistemic authority in Aboriginal societies, and applying this understanding to account for the ways knowledge is managed in `ordinary' interactions.

Doctors Pratt and de Vries propose a well-structured and courageous approach to analyse and repair an insufficiently recognised discussion about epistemologies and knowledge production in bioethics.1 The authors invite researchers, scholars, public health experts and bioethicists from the global North to reflect about their lack of imagination regarding different sources of narratives produced by the global South. There is a critical analysis of injustices and an urgent call for global bioethicists to reorient their field and focus on the analysis and (...) development of ethical interventions to achieve a comprehensive epistemic justice for global health ethics. Feminist bioethicists from the global South already argued about the importance of the voices and biographies of the people and groups in the communities to reframe the bioethical reasoning regarding the meaning of individual’s needs during public health and humanitarian emergencies.2 Over a decade ago, Diniz and Guilhem described the role and goal of feminist bioethics in Latin America, shaped in an oppressive context promoted and created by …. (shrink)

Linguistic studies of evidentiality, the coding of source of knowledge, have often appeared divided into two camps: those whose focus is the semantic, morphological and typological characteristics of grammaticalized morphological evidential systems, and those whose focus is on the social functions of non-grammaticalized evidential constructions as markers of epistemic authority and responsibility. While interest in the discourse functions of all evidential systems has been growing as seen in the recent special issue of the journal Pragmatics and Society on ‘Evidentiality in (...) Interaction’, there has been little direct attention on whether the deployment of evidential strategies in discourse varies according to the grammatical status of the grammatical resources available to the speaker. This article examines the nature of both grammaticalized and non-grammaticalized evidential systems in a number of languages to show that while the underlying pragmatics of evidentiality is the same regardless of grammatical system, nonetheless grammaticalized evidential systems provide important evidence of the particular features of knowledge sources that are used in routine ways in discourse sufficiently to motivate their development into grammatical systems. (shrink)

Next SectionBackground There is an established link between depression and interest in hastened death in patients who are seriously ill. Concern exists over the extent of depression in patients who actively request euthanasia/physician-assisted suicide (PAS) and those who have their requests granted. Objectives To estimate the prevalence of depression in refused and granted requests for euthanasia/PAS and discuss these findings. Methods A systematic review was performed in MEDLINE and PsycINFO in July 2010, identifying studies reporting rates of depression in requests (...) for and cases of euthanasia/PAS. One author critically appraised the strength of the data using published criteria. Results 21 studies were included covering four countries. There was considerable heterogeneity in methods of assessing depression and selecting patients. In the highest quality studies, in the Netherlands and Oregon, 8–47% of patients requesting euthanasia/PAS had depressive symptoms and 2–17% of completed euthanasia/PAS cases had depressive symptoms. In the Netherlands, depression was significantly higher in refused than granted requests, and there was no significant difference in the rate of depression between euthanasia cases and similar patients who had not made a request for euthanasia. Conclusion It is unclear whether depression increases the probability of making a request for euthanasia/PAS, but in the Netherlands most requests in depressed patients are rejected, leaving a depression rate in cases that is similar to the surrounding population. Less evidence is available elsewhere, but some level of depression has been identified in patients undergoing euthanasia/PAS in all the countries studied. Whether the presence of depression is ever compatible with an ethical decision on euthanasia/PAS is discussed. (shrink)

This article examines the ways in which 1970s French feminists who participated in the Women’s Liberation Movement (Mouvement de libération des femmes – MLF) wielded the spectre of lesbianism as an American idiosyncrasy to counteract the politicisation of lesbianism in France. It argues that the erasure of lesbian difference from the domain of French feminism was a necessary condition for making ‘woman’ an amenable subject for incorporation into the abstract unity of the French nation, wherein heterosexuality is conceived as a (...) democratic crucible where men and women harmoniously come together and differences are deemed divisive. Looking at the history of feminism from the standpoint of a lesbian perspective reveals unforeseen continuities between French ‘feminist’ and ‘anti-feminist’ genealogies insofar as they rest on common heterosexual and racial foundations. Finally, the article demonstrates that the alleged un-Frenchness ascribed to the word ‘lesbian’ in the 1970s feminist movement spectrally returned in the 1990s when the word ‘gender’ was, in its turn, deemed radically foreign to the French culture by feminist researchers. Fiercely reactionary constituencies against the legalisation of same-sex marriage have more recently taken up this rhetorical weapon against sexual and racial minorities. (shrink)

"In a complex world where competing groups claim to be speaking on behalf of incommensurate versions of 'humanity, ' the authors represented in "In the Name of ...

This article argues that Ludwik Fleck’s understanding of scientific observation as a social and cultural process stemmed not only from his practical experience as a bacteriologist and serologist, but also from a confrontation with ideas developed by other Polish thinkers. It discusses ideas of three such thinkers: the ophthalmologist and philosopher of medicine Zygmunt Kramsztyk, the mathematician and painter Leon Chwistek, and the playwright, painter and photographer Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz. Kramsztyk was interested in the way the observer’s preconceived idea shaped (...) observations through selection of specific visual elements and the rejection of others. Chwistek developed a theory of ‘multiple realities’ which proposed several divergent and equally valid patterns of grasping reality. In his plays, photographs, drawings and paintings Witkiewicz experimented restlessly with destabilization and transformation of the notion of a stable external reality. It links, then, debates on ‘reality’ in Poland between 1900 and 1939 to intersections of ideas derived from modern physics, psychology of perception, and avant-garde art.Keywords: Ludwik Fleck; Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz ; Leon Chwistek; Poland; Perception; Avant-garde art. (shrink)

In the inter-war period physicians elaborated numerous ‘biotherapies’ grounded in the complex interactions between physiology, bacteriology and immunology. The elaboration of these non-specific biological treatments was stimulated by the theory of generalized anaphylaxis that linked the violent reaction to a foreign protein to a broad array of chronic diseases, from asthma and urticaria to rheumatism or chronic colitis. Such diseases were perceived as the result of an ‘abnormal reactivity’ to a sensitisation of tissues and organs by bacteria and by foreign (...) proteins, a view that provided an effective bridge between new concepts derived from bacteriology and immunology and the long-standing pathological tradition. Accordingly, physicians attempted to treat these conditions through specific desensitisation and non-specific biological therapies: peptone treatment, protein therapy, haemotherapy, ‘antivirus’ or ‘opotherapy’. Therapies that attempted to neutralise the harmful effects of chronic infections through ‘desensitisation’ were not seen as marginal medical practices, but were promoted by leading advocates of the ‘Pasteurian sciences’, such as Richet, Widal, Vallery-Radot, Wright and Fleming. They also led to development of new products by the pharmaceutical industry. (shrink)

Orphei ad Musaeum -- Orphei hymni -- Procli Lycii philosophi hymni -- Magica dicta magorum ex Zoroastre.

Pragmatic sociology is often read as a reaction to and an alternative to Bourdieu’s ‘critical sociology’. This article, in contrast, offers an assessment of pragmatic sociology in terms of its contribution to the theory of culture in general and its affinities with repertoire theory in particular. Whereas the tendency has been to conceive of repertoires as largely unstructured entities, pragmatic sociology has demonstrated a systematic interest in their internal contents and structure, which it has even expanded through its more recent (...) turn to historical and macro comparative analysis. In the process, however, pragmatic sociology has also been leaning towards a form of cultural sociology that actually challenges some major aspects of repertoire theory–thus also bringing into relief the dilemmas facing any attempt at further elaboration of what is now a growing strand of cultural theory. (shrink)