James Edward Meade was a renowned British economist who, alongside Bertil Ohlin, was joint winner of the 1977 Nobel Prize in Economics. Originally published in 1958, this book contains the transcription of Meade's inaugural lecture as Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge University, delivered during the same year. Concise and highly readable, it will be of value to anyone with an interest in economic history, theories regarding inflation, and macroeconomic theory in general.

One hundred inpatients on an acute hospital elderly care unit and 43 of their relatives were interviewed shortly before hospital discharge. Eighty per cent of elderly patients and their relatives were aware of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). Television drama was their main source of information. Patients and relatives overestimated the effectiveness of CPR. Eighty-six per cent of patients were willing to be routinely consulted by doctors about their own CPR status, but relatives were less enthusiastic about routine consultation. Patients' and relatives' (...) views about the appropriateness of CPR did not differ significantly. Seventeen percent of patients did not desire CPR. However, 64 per cent of patients were ultimately willing to follow their doctor's advice about the appropriateness of CPR. The conclusion reached is that mentally competent, elderly patients but not their relatives should be routinely consulted about their own desire for CPR in order to avoid resuscitating patients against their wishes. Further research is required to find out how patients would feel about resuscitation if they were terminally ill or chronically confused, and how carers would feel about resuscitating such patients. (shrink)

Why do some groups succeed where others fail? We hypothesise that collaborative success is achieved when the relationship between the dyad's prior expertise and the complexity of the task creates a situation that affords constructive and interactive processes between group members. We call this state the zone of proximal facilitation in which the dyad's prior knowledge and experience enables them to benefit from both knowledge-based problem-solving processes (e.g., elaboration, explanation, and error correction) andcollaborative skills (e.g., creating common ground, maintaining joint (...) attention to the task). To test this hypothesis we conducted an experiment in which participants with different levels of aviation expertise, experts (flight instructors), novices (student pilots), and non-pilots, read flight problem scenarios of varying complexity and had to identify the problem and generate a solution with either another participant of the same level of expertise or alone. The non-pilots showed collaborative inhibition on problem identification in which dyads performed worse than their predicted potential for both simple and complex scenarios, whereas the novices and experts did not. On solution generation the non-pilot and novice dyads performed at their predicted potential with no collaborative inhibition on either simple or complex scenarios. In contrast, expert dyads showed collaborative gains, withdyads performing above their predicted potential, but only for the complex scenarios. On simple scenarios the expert dyads showed collaborative inhibition and performed worse than their predicted potential. We discuss the implications of these results for theories of collaborative problem solving. (shrink)

In The Art Instinct, Denis Dutton promoted a theoretical framework that “has more validity, more power, and more possibilities than the hermetic discourse that deadens so much of the humanities.”1 This framework is Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural and sexual selection. Dutton proposed to seek “human universals that underlie the vast cacophony of cultural differences and across the globe” (AI, p. 39), based on a shared, evolved human nature.This contrasts with the relativistic presumptions of those falling under the (...) shadow of Margaret Mead and Clifford Geertz, or “the dogmas of Freud, the speculations of Jung, the sterile formulations of behaviorism, all variously empty or misleading” (p. 37). Also .. (shrink)

De la psychologie sociale aux Théories critiques de J Habermas et A Honneth, en passant par l'interactionnisme symbolique ou la sociologie pragmatiste héritière de l'école de Chicago, l'oeuvre de GH Mead (1863-1931) constitue une source majeure de la théorie sociale. Cet ouvrage invite à la (re)découvrir. Tout en examinant les sources de la pensée de Mead et en discutant ses concepts fondamentaux, il propose de mettre en lumière le potentiel critique et créateur des perspectives qu'elle ouvre pour la théorie sociale. (...) Il montre comment ses développements consacrés au self, à l'Autrui généralisé, à l'interaction, au contrôle social, etc., ainsi que son traitement des problèmes liés, notamment, à la conscience de soi, à la communication, à la reconnaissance ou aux institutions peuvent être mis en dialogue et en confrontation avec les analyses de A Smith, GWF Hegel, W James, G Simmel, J Dewey, RE Park, E Goffman, H Blumer, A Schütz, H Garfinkel, J Habermas, A Honneth, R Collins. Il propose des traductions inédites de textes de GH Mead qui permettent de saisir le processus d'élaboration et la richesse de sa psychologie sociale. A la fois introduction, examen critique et mise en perspective de la pensée de Mead, ce livre s'adresse aux philosophes, sociologues et psychologues, étudiants ou chercheurs, intéressés par l'auteur et, plus généralement, par la théorie sociale d'hier et d'aujourd'hui. (shrink)

Some of the best work on American philosophy is being done today in Italy, much of it surrounding Prof. Carlo Sini of the University of Milan. His Whitehead et la funzione della filosofia, Il pragmatismo americano, and most recently Semiotica e filosofia —the last in part on Pierce—has prepared a climate for even more specialized work on American thought. The book presently under review is the first full-length study in Italian on Mead’s thought in its entirety.

Boyer suggests that laws cannot account for ownership intuitions, but there may be situations when intuitions hew to laws almost perfectly. Laws granting governments taxation powers provide an interesting case study. We report data here suggesting that people's intuitions track law very closely, and are unaffected by manipulating a P() tag input. We propose two hypotheses to explain this finding.

Nous considérons la structure dans son rapport au temps : sous ce rapport, la structure est normative, et l’avenir aide à constituer le présent et le passé. Des exemples sont empruntés à l’embryologie et à la géologie. On explique pourquoi il est difficile de concevoir une structure cosmique spatio-temporelle, et comment le développement récent de la physique nous y aide ; dans cette physique, la notion de structure cosmique a un rôle éminent. Il en résulte que seules sont viables les (...) combinaisons qui sont dans La ligne historique de la nature. (shrink)