James cornman and r routley and v macrae have argued that the principle of identity (alias leibniz's law) is inconsistent with certain plausible and widely accepted identity statements; e.G., "the temperature of a gas is identical with the mean kinetic energy of the molecules of the gas." they argue on this ground that the principle of identity should be modified to remove this appearance of inconsistency. The requisite modification however, Removes whatever "metaphysical teeth" the unmodified version might have had. I (...) argue in this paper that such attacks on the principle of identity are utterly unwarranted. (shrink)

Production and comprehension have long been viewed as inseparable components of language. The study of vision, by contrast, has centered almost exclusively on comprehension. Here we investigate drawing—the most basic form of visual production. How do we convey concepts in visual form, and how does refining this skill, in turn, affect recognition? We developed an online platform for collecting large amounts of drawing and recognition data, and applied a deep convolutional neural network model of visual cortex trained only on natural (...) images to explore the hypothesis that drawing recruits the same abstract feature representations that support natural visual object recognition. Consistent with this hypothesis, higher layers of this model captured the abstract features of both drawings and natural images most important for recognition, and people learning to produce more recognizable drawings of objects exhibited enhanced recognition of those objects. These findings could explain why drawing is so effective for communicating visual concepts, they suggest novel approaches for evaluating and refining conceptual knowledge, and they highlight the potential of deep networks for understanding human learning. (shrink)

In his early work, the philosopher Stanley Cavell offers a sustained engagement with the threat of epistemological scepticism, shaped by the intuition that although (as the late Wittgenstein shows) ordinary language use is the practice within which alone meaning is possible (and which can thus not be further analysed or rationalised), it is also a basic human inclination to wish to escape the limitations of the ‘ordinary’. This, for Cavell, is the root of scepticism. Scepticism, on this view, thus appears (...) not primarily as an epistemological but as an (injurious) moral stance, which cannot be refuted but must be continually confronted and overcome. Vis-à-vis scepticism, ‘acknowledgement’ is the practice-based recognition of the world and other people in their continuing elusiveness, which ineluctably involves risk, but just so is the only way of knowing that is appropriate to and honours the (finite) human condition. One problematic aspect of this (very fertile) approach is that Cavell’s secular viewpoint makes it difficult for him to say both why the desire for a ‘beyond’ arises in the first place, and why its expression as denial is morally wrong (rather than merely misguided). His approach thus invites a theological ‘supplementation’ which grounds the human condition in an original and real relation to God that is meant to draw the believer, through Christ, into the divine life itself. Such a reinterpretation both elucidates the concepts of scepticism and acknowledgement, and makes these concepts available for a theological outlook that is able to accommodate Cavell’s profound insights into ‘the human’. (shrink)

Choisir un livre, c'est en exclure beaucoup d'autres, contribuer à circonscrire le cercle lumineux de l'attention, participer à une aventure dont l'enjeu est la survie; vivre dans les lettres, ce n'est pas s'installer dans un patrimoine mais l'inventer, faire du soleil et de la place, inséparablement. Rééditer ce livre dans une édition de poche, ce n'est pas seulement faire en sorte qu'il soit de nouveau disponible; c'est en prolonger le rayonnement mais aussi le déplacer, l'inscrire autrement dans l'aventure de la (...) survie. Dans sa première vie, La Mémoire des œuvres s'est imposé à quelques-uns comme un bréviaire. Écrit pour tous et pour chacun, il demande et appelle l'amitié d'un plus large public, c'est un livre ami de la mémoire, qui aide à penser et qui aide à vivre, à habiter plus librement le séjour des livres. (shrink)

Toute oeuvre veut tenir l'attention, la diriger et produire de l'effet. Mais l'attention et l'effet ne sont pas les memes selon que l'oeuvre en dit plus ou en dit moins c'est-a-dire selon sa densite. Le developpe ou le concis, l'emphatique ou l'elude, le riche ou l'austere ne produisent pas les memes intensites. En explorant les variations de la densite litteraire, on retrouve directement des enjeux essentiels. Que vise l'ideal du complet face a l'ideal du pur? Comment la litterature se rapporte-t-elle (...) au langage ordinaire? Quel peut etre le minimum artistique qui subsiste au bord du silence? Comment comprendre l'echec de la lecture, l'interet perdu et l'ennui? (shrink)

The impetus to revisit the issues involved in readings of Genesis 2-3 came from Deborah Rooke’s article in Feminist Theology published in 2007, and in particular follows a presentation at an ‘Afternoon of Theology’ at a girls’ secondary school, where the author provided a response to the challenge set by the history of interpretation and the subsequent cultural assumptions of the meaning of the Garden of Eden narrative. The discussion proceeds partly through narrative retelling, partly through a critical commentary and (...) partly through an Eve/snake dialogue. (shrink)

Proposer une oeuvre nouvelle, developper une idee neuve ou une vision personnelle differente, c'est dire autre chose. Mais c'est aussi dire quelque chose qui n'est pas radicalement inoui et sans connexion. Impacts, emprunts, initiatives, traditions ou ruptures: ces relations d'influence traversent la vie des idees et des oeuvres, leurs rapports entre elles, leurs caracteres de famille, et ce qui les rend chacune distincte. Invention et memoire vont ensemble. Leur liaison et leur ecart organisent ce qu'il y a d'autonome et d'unique (...) dans un point de vue novateur, et ce qu'il y a de commun et de partage. (shrink)

Avian Flu Pandemic – Flight of the Healthcare Worker? Content Type Journal Article Pages 365-385 DOI 10.1007/s10730-009-9114-9 Authors Robert B. Shabanowitz, Geisinger Medical Center, Dept. of OB/GYN 100 North Academy Avenue Danville PA 17822-2920 USA Judith E. Reardon, Geisinger Medical Center Center for Health Research 100 North Academy Avenue Danville PA 17822-3003 USA Journal HEC Forum Online ISSN 1572-8498 Print ISSN 0956-2737 Journal Volume Volume 21 Journal Issue Volume 21, Number 4.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Future of Sexual Difference: An Interview with Judith Butler and Drucilla Cornell*Pheng Cheah (bio) and Elizabeth Grrosz (bio)EG:Luce Irigaray’s writings have always figured strongly in your works, probably more than in the work of other American feminist theorists. Out of all the feminist theorists you both interrogate, she seems to emerge as a kind of touchstone of the feminist ethical, political, and intellectual concerns to which you (...) seem to aspire. Could each of you briefly outline how she figures in your work, whether your relations to her have changed, and if so, how?JB:I think that probably early on, when I started working on French feminism as a graduate student in the early ‘80s, I was not interested in her at all because she seemed to me to be an essentialist and that was a term we used quite easily then, when we thought we knew what it meant. In the late ‘80s, I started to rethink my objections to her on that basis and found that she was, among the feminist theorists I had read, perhaps the most versed in philosophy and that her engagement with philosophy was a curious mixture of both loyalty and aggression. And it became very interesting to me when I started thinking about her whole practice of critical mimesis—what she was doing when she was reading Freud, what was she doing when she was reading Plato—and I read Speculum again and again, frightened by its anger, compelled by the closeness of the reading, confused by the mimetism of the text. Was she enslaved to these texts, was she displacing them radically, was she perhaps in the bind of being in both positions at the same time? And I realized that whatever the feminine was for her, it was not a substance, not a spiritual reality that might be isolated, but it had something to do with this strange practice of reading, one in which she was reading texts that she was not authorized to read, texts from which she was as a woman explicitly excluded or explicitly demeaned, and that she would read them anyway. And then the question is: what would it mean to read from a position of radical deauthorization in order to expose the contingent authority of the text? That struck me as a feminist critical practice, a critical reading practice that I could learn from, and from that point on, highly influenced by both Drucilla’s work and Naomi Schor’s work [see Schor], I started to read her quite thoroughly.PC:Is this kind of relationship that she has with the philosophers she reads a sexual relationship? I am thinking of some of the sexualized terms you just used: loyalty and aggression.JB:Yes, there is no doubt that there is an eros of a certain kind, usually the kind that frightens me, quite frankly. I think Carolyn Burke has made this argument that Irigaray [End Page 19] has a romance with the philosophers [see Burke]. I think she has a certain masochistic-sadistic erotic engagement with the philosophers.EG:Do you think it is sado-masochistic?JB:Well, I think it was much more aggressive in Speculum of the Other Woman than it became in An Ethics of Sexual Difference. There, I think there is an engagement that is still very difficult, but at least there is evidence of a more loving engagement.PC:I hope that we can return to the question of love at the end. Is this the kind of relationship that you have to her texts?JB:No, I’m probably too frightened. [Everybody laughs.] And I don’t engage them that closely, probably because I find it frightening to be in that particular knot. She doesn’t actually have a chapter in any of my books. I think I can’t quite devote a chapter to her....EG:No, but you devote large sections of chapters....JB:That’s true, but I can’t stay there for a prolonged period of time [laughs], whatever that’s worth.EG:I’d like to come back to this later, because I think it is a really interesting... (shrink)

Backround Education in ethics and professionalism should reflect the realities medical students encounter in the hospital and clinic. Method We performed content analyses on Case Observation and Assessments (COAs) written by third-year medical students about ethical and professional issues encountered during their internal medicine and paediatrics clinical clerkships. Results A cohort of 141 third-year medical students wrote 272 COAs. Content analyses identified 35 subcategories of ethical and professional issues within 7 major domains: decisions regarding treatment (31.4%), communication (21.4%), professional duties (...) (18.4%), justice (9.8%), student-specific issues (5.4%), quality of care (3.8%), and miscellaneous (9.8%). Conclusions Students encountered a wide variety of ethical and professional issues that can be used to guide pre-clinical and clinical education. Comparison of our findings with results from similar studies suggests that the wording of an assignment (specifying “ethical” issues, “professional” issues, or both) may influence the kinds of issues students identify in their experience-based clinical narratives. (shrink)