The resting-state human electroencephalogram power spectrum is dominated by alpha and theta oscillations, and also includes non-oscillatory broadband activity inversely related to frequency. Gratton proposed that alpha and theta oscillations are both related to cognitive control function, though in a complementary manner. Alpha activity is hypothesized to facilitate the maintenance of representations, such as task sets in preparation for expected task conditions. In contrast, theta activity would facilitate changes in representations, such as the updating of task sets in response to (...) unpredicted task demands. Therefore, theta should be related to reactive control, while alpha may be more relevant to proactive control. Less is known about the possible relationship between 1/f activity and cognitive control, which was analyzed here in an exploratory fashion. To investigate these hypothesized relationships, we recorded eyes-open and eyes-closed resting-state EEG from younger and older adults and subsequently tested their performance on a cued flanker task, expected to elicit both proactive and reactive control processes. Results showed that alpha power and 1/f offset were smaller in older than younger adults, whereas theta power did not show age-related reductions. Resting alpha power and 1/f offset were associated with proactive control processes, whereas theta power was related to reactive control as measured by the cued flanker task. All associations were present over and above the effect of age, suggesting that these resting-state EEG correlates could be indicative of trait-like individual differences in cognitive control performance, which may be already evident in younger adults, and are still similarly present in healthy older adults. (shrink)

Many businesses, including professional sport teams, are designing and engaging in socially responsible initiatives which benefit stakeholders as well as the businesses themselves. Gaining insight into stakeholders' expectations regarding corporations' corporate social responsibility initiatives through dialogue is important as the way a business is viewed and evaluated by stakeholders underlies subsequent interactions. Based on semi-structured interviews with 42 diverse stakeholders involved in a professional sport team's CSR initiative we found that stakeholders' expectations of the team's involvement in the community related (...) to social and institutional norms, values, and benefits. The team also appeared to be meeting stakeholder expectations about being socially responsible in the community. This study provides new insights into a firm's CSR expectations through engaging in stakeholder management and interaction. Future research directions and practical suggestions are offered for organizations attempting to understand and meet stakeholders' expectations in the area of CSR. (shrink)

This article investigates how Latin American women who migrate to the US frame their language experiences through narratives told in sociolinguistic interviews. As narratives reflect and shape social realities and relationships, narrative analysis can illuminate how individuals position themselves relative to language obstacles and ideologies, thus providing insights into processes that are central to the migration experiences of millions of individuals. We found that women related two types of stories: language conflict narratives, in which language was presented as part of (...) a broader ethnic or social conflict, and language difficulty narratives, which focused on individual, personal problems with language experienced by protagonists. Our analysis illustrates how interviewers’ questions, and the interviewees’ language conflict narratives in particular, confirm, reproduce, but also contest central language ideologies and dominant discourses about migration in the US. (shrink)

In Summa Theologiae I.76.1 Aquinas presents an argument for the hylomorphic union of body and soul that he attributes to Aristotle. Aquinas builds on Aristotle’s original argument, however, offering his own short but powerful line of reasoning in support of one of the main premises. This additional argument involves an appeal to the principle that nothing acts except insofar as it is in act. This principle has roots in the thought of Aristotle, but is not explicitly used by him. It (...) is, however, fundamental for Aquinas and pervasive throughout his work. In this paper I examine the principle and its implications for Aquinas’ version of the argument. Furthermore, I argue that the principle is foundational to Aquinas’ criticisms of Averroes’ account of the intellective soul and that its inclusion renders Aquinas’ version of the argument incompatible with Averroes’ view. (shrink)

What is the future of Philosophy of education? Or as many of scholars and thinkers in this final ‘future-focused’ collective piece from the philosophy of education in a new key Series put it, what are the futures—plural and multiple—of the intersections of ‘philosophy’ and ‘education?’ What is ‘Philosophy’; and what is ‘Education’, and what role may ‘enquiry’ play? Is the future of education and philosophy embracing—or at least taking seriously—and thinking with Indigenous ethicoontoepistemologies? And, perhaps most importantly, what is that (...) ‘Future’? These debates have been located in the work of diverse scholars: from the West, from Global South, from indigenous thinkers. In this collective piece, we purposefully juxtapose diverse takes on the future of these intersections. We have given up the urge to organise, place together, separate with subheadings or connect the paragraphs that follow. Instead, we let these philosophers of education and thinkers who use philosophical texts and ideas to sit together in one long read as potentially ‘strange and unusual bedfellows’. This text urges us to understand how these scholars and thinkers perceive our educational philosophical futures, and how the work and thinking they have done on thinking about what the future of that new key in philosophy of education may look like is embedded in a much deeper and richer literature, and personal experience. (shrink)

This book focuses on the significance of the body in contemporary feminist scholarship. Whether the body is treated as biological bedrock or subversive metaphor, it is implicated in the cultural and historical construction of sexual difference as well as asymmetrical power relations. The contributors to this volume examine the role of the body as socially shaped and historically colonized territory and as the focus of individual womenÆs struggles for autonomy and self-determination. They also analyze its centrality to the feminist critique (...) of male-stream science as dualistic, distanced, and decontextualized. While the body has become a "hot item" in contemporary social theory and research, the renewed interest has received a mixed reaction from feminists. The body may be back, but the "new" body theory often proves to be just as disembodied as it ever was. The body revival seems to be less an attempt to re-embody masculinist science than just another expression of the same condition that evoked the feminist critique in the first place: a flight from femininity and everything that is associated with it in Western culture. Drawing on insights from contemporary feminist theories of gender and power, this book offers a timely critical appraisal of the recent "body revival." Embodied Practices not only sets an agenda for research about the body, but for an embodied perspective on the body as well. It will be a valuable and thought-provoking resource for students of womenÆs studies, social theory, cultural studies, and medical sociology. (shrink)

Classical Islamic thinker Ibn Rushd is widely recognized for his commentaries on Aristotle and his influence on Western Medieval and Renaissance thinkers. Understandably, his contributio...

Since its inception, the concept of `intersectionality' — the interaction of multiple identities and experiences of exclusion and subordination — has been heralded as one of the most important contributions to feminist scholarship. Despite its popularity, there has been considerable confusion concerning what the concept actually means and how it can or should be applied in feminist inquiry. In this article, I look at the phenomenon of intersectionality's spectacular success within contemporary feminist scholarship, as well as the uncertainties and confusion (...) which it has generated. Drawing upon insights from the sociology of science, I shall show how and why intersectionality could become a feminist success story. I shall argue that, paradoxically, it is precisely the concept's alleged weaknesses — its ambiguity and open-endedness — that were the secrets to its success and, more generally, make it a good feminist theory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 42.2 (2004) 223-224 [Access article in PDF] Jacqueline Broad. Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. x + 191. Cloth, $55.00. In this impressive study of early Modern Philosophy, Jacqueline Broad analyzes the influence that Cartesianism has had in the development of feminist thought. Her work covers the early modern philosophy of Elisabeth of Bohemia, Margaret Cavendish, (...) Ann Conway, Mary Astell, Damaris Cudworth Masham and Catherine Trotter Cockburn. She points out the paradoxical relationship between current feminist philosophy and the writings of early Modern women. Broad concentrates on the metaphysical issues of mind-body dualism, thinking matter, and the role of reason in knowledge.Recent feminists have argued that even though Cartesianism appears to emphasize an egalitarian concept of reason, it entails a male bias which excludes women from philosophy. Broad covers the work of Genevieve Lloyd, Hilda Smith, Margaret Atherton and other feminists. Her goal is to show that the common Cartesian interpretation of early women's writings obscures the anti-Cartesian and anti-dualist aspects of their thought. Like Lloyd, she argues that historically women were associated with a lesser form of reason following the rise of Cartesianism.The conflict between reason and femininity is noted in the complexity of early Modern thought. Broad argues that even though Elisabeth is remembered as a critic of Descartes, many of her suggestions are not as anti-dualist as some scholars believe. Broad highlights the critical content of Elisabeth's letters to Descartes and discusses her criticisms of dualism and her Cartesian method of discovering truth and certainty. On the basis of her letters she contends that Elisabeth can be regarded as a precursor to feminist philosophers who give an equal role to the body and emotions in their metaphysical and ethical writings.Like Elisabeth, Margaret Cavendish rejects Cartesian dualism. The common thread that runs through early Modern feminist philosophy is the argument that interaction between two unlike substances is inconceivable. Broad argues that like Cavendish, Anne Conway ascribes spiritual characteristics to the body and material properties to the soul. According to Broad, their ontological views amount to a rejection of the stereotypes of femininity.Broad argues that Mary Astell's metaphysical views diverge from the modern Cartesians of her time. Although she is indebted to Descartes, Broad contends that she supports a metaphysical system which avoids some of the gender biases identifiable in Cartesianism. Astell, for example, does not find a life based on reason as a rival to a life concerned with the body; her emphasis on rationality is simply a reaction to the stereotype of women as irrational material beings.Damaris Masham is generally considered a philosophical rival of Astell, but Broad argues that Masham's arguments are focused on the same presuppositions as Astell's. She argues that both philosophers champion women's education, criticize the occasionalism of Norris and believe in interaction between the corporeal and incorporeal worlds. Broad emphasizes the common theological outlook inspired by Cambridge Platonism. Contrary to the interpretation of Ruth Perry, she finds that there is sufficient evidence that Masham was positively inspired by the second part of Astell's Serious Proposal.Broad concludes with an analysis of Catherine Cockburns' metaphysics and moral philosophy. According to Cockburn, women's ignorance is simply the result of being discouraged from rational pursuits. Cockburn's defense of Locke's notion of thinking matter and her rejection of Cartesian notions of substance mark the end of the Cartesian influence on women philosophers in England. [End Page 223]Broad has shown that a reverence for reason and dualistic theories do not necessarily go hand in hand. She points out that early Modern feminist thinkers are not simply handmaidens to the great philosophical masters. As other scholars have argued, one can find unique approaches to substance as well as original moral positions.This text is a significant contribution to the literature on early Modern philosophy. Broad's in depth analysis will not fail to interest scholars in metaphysics, the history of philosophy and moral theory. Kathy... (shrink)

The growth of autistic self-advocacy and the neurodiversity movement has brought about new ethical, theoretical and ideological debates within autism theory, research and practice. These debates have had genuine impact within some areas of autism research but their influence is less evident within early intervention research. In this paper, we argue that all autism intervention stakeholders need to understand and actively engage with the views of autistic people and with neurodiversity as a concept and movement. In so doing, intervention researchers (...) and practitioners are required to move away from a normative agenda and pay diligence to environmental goodness-of-fit, autistic developmental trajectories, internal drivers and experiences, and autistic prioritized intervention targets. Autism intervention researchers must respond to these debates by reframing effectiveness, developing tools to measure autistic prioritized outcomes, and forming partnerships with autistic people. There is a pressing need for increased reflection and articulation around how intervention practices align with a neurodiversity framework and greater emphasis within intervention programmes on natural developmental processes, coping strategies, autonomy, and well-being. (shrink)

To address the complex challenge of global antimicrobial resistance (AMR), a pandemic treaty should include mechanisms that 1) equitably address the access gap for antimicrobials, diagnostic technologies, and alternative therapies; 2) equitably conserve antimicrobials to sustain effectiveness and access across time and space; 3) equitably finance the investment, discovery, development, and distribution of new technologies; and 4) equitably finance and establish greater upstream and midstream infection prevention measures globally. Biodiversity, climate, and nuclear governance offer lessons for addressing these challenges.

We examine the perceived importance of three organizational preconditions theorized to be critical for ethics program effectiveness. In addition, we examine the importance of ethical leadership and congruence between formal ethics codes and informal ethical norms in influencing employee perceptions. Participants from a large southern California government agency completed a survey on the perceived effectiveness of the organization’s ethics program. Results suggest that employee perceptions of organizational preconditions, ethical leadership and informal ethical norms were related to perceptions of ethics program (...) effectiveness. Based on these findings, organizations should evaluate the presence of essential preconditions and take steps to ensure that leaders model espoused organizational values to foster perceptions of effective ethics programs. (shrink)

I am interested in fear of non-existence, which is often discussed in terms of fear one’s own death, or as it is sometimes called, fear of death as such. This form of fear has been denied by some philosophers. Cognitive theories of the emotions have particular trouble in dealing with it, granting it a status that is simultaneously paradigmatic yet anomalous with respect to fear in general. My paper documents these matters, and considers a number of responses. I provide examples (...) from philosophy and literature of fear of non-existence, and distinguish it from other death-related fears. I then look at the success that cognitive theories of the emotions have had in dealing with other “problematic” fears, such as phobias, and examine how the solutions here fail to apply to fear of non-existence. The problem lies with the perceptual-centred model of fear that is typically called upon. Against this I recommend a retreat to a belief-centred model for fear of non-existence. I argue that there are other fears that are better explained by a belief-centred rather a perceptual-based approach. This reinforces the plausibility of the belief-centred model, and goes some way to alleviating the anomalous and problematic status of the fear of non-existence. (shrink)

Employee attributions and emotional reactions to unethical behavior of top leaders in an organization recently involved in a highly publicized ethics scandal were examined. Participants (n = 76) from a large southern California government agency completed an ethical climate assessment. Secondary data analysis was performed on the written commentary to an open-ended question seeking employees' perceptions of the ethical climate. Employees attributed the organization's poor ethical leadership to a number of causes, including: lack of moral reasoning, breaches of trust, hypocrisy, (...) and poor ethical behavior role modeling. Emotional reactions to corruption included cynicism, optimism, pessimism, paranoia and fear, and were targeted at top leaders, organizational practices (i.e., the old boy network, nepotism, and cronyism) and ethics interventions. Implications for leadership training and other organizational ethics interventions are discussed. (shrink)

There is a fear of death that persistently eludes adequate explanation by contemporary philosophers of death. The reason for this is their focus on mortal harm issues, such as why death is bad for the person who dies. Claims regarding the fear of death are assumed to be contingent on the resolution of questions about the badness of death. In practice, however, consensus on some mortal harm issues has not resulted in comparable clarity on mortal fear. I contend we cannot (...) do justice to fear of death unless we detach it from theories about the badness of death, including the overwhelmingly-popular deprivation theory. The case for this involves disambiguation of certain aspects of mortal harm, a broad conception of what is involved in accounting for an emotion, and close attention to the nature of the fear in question. The source of fear of death is our departure from a context in which self-directed emotions have coherent application; our attitudes become ‘unmoored,’ in Samuel Scheffler’s phrase. While this does not result in a fear that is sui generis, it does demand that we remove the object of fear from the realm of well-being in order to make sense of it. (shrink)

"This book does serve a very useful purpose in returning power to the centre of the feminist stage. . . . This book makes clear the ways in which the machinations of power are more subtle, widespread, and multiform than it sometimes appears. Further, the clarity of presentation means that it is also a text that can usefully be included on student bibliographies." --Women's Philosophy Review "The Gender of Power, which announces itself in the first line of its Preface as (...) a scholarly treatment of the 'battle of the sexes,' is a fine contribution to this promising dialogue of understanding." --The Journal of Men's Studies "This well-edited book addresses the problem of gender in theories of power directly, incisively, and succinctly. It is as joyfully free of jargon and prolixity, as it is of dogma and flag-waving.". (shrink)

This article shares reflections from members of the community of philosophers of education in the United States and Canada who were invited to express their insights in response to the theme ‘Snaps...

Engaging in self-narrative is often touted as a powerful antidote to the bad effects of illness. However, there are various examples of what may broadly be termed “aversion” to illness narrative. I group these into three kinds: aversion to certain types of illness narrative; aversion to illness narrative as a whole; and aversion to illness narrative as an essentially therapeutic endeavor. These aversions can throw into doubt the advantages claimed for the illness narrator, including the key benefits of repair to (...) the damage illness does to identity and life-trajectory. Underlying these alleged benefits are two key presuppositions: that it is the whole of one’s life that is narratively unified, and that one’s identity is inextricably bound up with narrative. By letting go of these assumptions, illness narrative advocates can respond to the challenges of narrative aversions. (shrink)

Animals are used in biomedical research to study disease, develop new medicines, and test them for safety. As the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics’ review Normalising the Unthinkable acknowledges, many great strides in medicine have involved animals. However, their contribution has not always been positive. Decades of attempts to develop treatments for diseases including asthma, cancer, stroke, and Alzheimer’s using animals have failed to translate to humans, leaving patients with inadequate treatments or without treatments at all. As Normalising the Unthinkable (...) points out, we have to confront the fact that animal research may have hindered progress, at least in some respects. For example, animal tests have been shown to have very little ability to predict the safety of medicines for human patients. A dramatic illustration of this failing is TGN1412, which almost killed 6 clinical trial volunteers in 2006, after crab-eating macaques showed the drug to be safe, even at massive doses. This failing contributes to adverse drug reactions, which are now one of the world’s leading causes of death, killing hundreds of thousands of people every year and hospitalizing millions. A revolution in science and technology has produced a new generation of more relevant and predictive tools, which could be used to create safer medicines more quickly and at less cost: a win-win situation that should be supported by everyone. The obstacle preventing this from happening is governments’ continued insistence on animal testing. Yet the evidence is clear that reliance on animals as surrogate humans puts patients at risk, can delay medical progress, and can cause effective treatments to be wrongly discarded. There is a compelling case to be made that animal research is an ethical issue for humans as well as for animals. (shrink)

BackgroundParanoia is associated with a multitude of social cognitive deficits, observed in both clinical and subclinical populations. Empathy is significantly and broadly impaired in schizophrenia, yet its relationship with subclinical paranoia is poorly understood. Furthermore, deficits in emotion recognition – a very early component of empathic processing – are present in both clinical and subclinical paranoia. Deficits in emotion recognition may therefore underlie relationships between paranoia and empathic processing. The current investigation aims to add to the literature on social cognition (...) and paranoia by: characterizing the relationship between paranoia and empathy, and testing whether there is an indirect effect of emotion recognition on the relationship between empathy and paranoia.MethodsParanoia, empathy, and emotion recognition were assessed in a non-clinical sample of adults from the Nathan Kline Institute-Rockland dataset. Paranoia was measured using the Peters Delusions Inventory-21. Empathy was measured using the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, a self-report instrument designed to assess empathy using four subscales: Personal Distress, Empathic Concern, Perspective Taking, and Fantasy. Emotion recognition was assessed using the Penn Emotion Recognition Test. Structural equation modeling was used to estimate relationships between paranoia, the four measures of empathy and emotion recognition.ResultsParanoia was associated with the Fantasy subscale of the IRI, such that higher Fantasy was associated with more severe paranoia. No other empathy subscales were associated with paranoia. Fantasy was also associated with the emotion recognition of fear, such that higher Fantasy was correlated with better recognition of fear. Paranoia and emotion recognition were not significantly associated. The Empathic Concern subscale was negatively associated with emotion recognition, with higher empathic concern related to worse overall emotion recognition. All indirect paths through emotion recognition were non-significant.DiscussionThese results suggest that imaginative perspective-taking contributes to paranoia in the general population. These data do not, however, point to robust global relationships between empathy and paranoia or to emotion recognition as an underlying mechanism. Deficits in empathy and emotion recognition observed in schizophrenia may be associated with the broader pathology of schizophrenia, and therefore not detectable with subclinical populations. (shrink)

This provocative work provides a radical reassessment of the emergence and nature of Christian sexual morality, the dominant moral paradigm in Western society since late antiquity. While many scholars, including Michel Foucault, have found the basis of early Christian sexual restrictions in Greek ethics and political philosophy, Kathy L. Gaca demonstrates on compelling new grounds that it is misguided to regard Greek ethics and political theory—with their proposed reforms of eroticism, the family, and civic order—as the foundation of Christian (...) sexual austerity. Rather, in this thoroughly informed and wide-ranging study, Gaca shows that early Christian goals to eradicate fornication were derived from the sexual rules and poetic norms of the Septuagint, or Greek Bible, and that early Christian writers adapted these rules and norms in ways that reveal fascinating insights into the distinctive and largely non-philosophical character of Christian sexual morality. Writing with an authoritative command of both Greek philosophy and early Christian writings, Gaca investigates Plato, the Stoics, the Pythagoreans, Philo of Alexandria, the apostle Paul, and the patristic Christians Clement of Alexandria, Tatian, and Epiphanes, freshly elucidating their ideas on sexual reform with precision, depth, and originality. Early Christian writers, she demonstrates, transformed all that they borrowed from Greek ethics and political philosophy to launch innovative programs against fornication that were inimical to Greek cultural mores, popular and philosophical alike. The Septuagint's mandate to worship the Lord alone among all gods led to a Christian program to revolutionize Gentile sexual practices, only for early Christians to find this virtually impossible to carry out without going to extremes of sexual renunciation. Knowledgeable and wide-ranging, this work of intellectual history and ethics cogently demonstrates why early Christian sexual restrictions took such repressive ascetic forms, and casts sobering light on what Christian sexual morality has meant for religious pluralism in Western culture, especially among women as its bearers. (shrink)

Gay and lesbian-sponsored antiviolence projects have used activist strategies and “collective action frames” similar to the contemporary women's movement's antiviolence against women campaigns and have defined violence against gays and lesbians as a social problem resulting from criminal sexual assault that stems from institutionalized sexual terrorism. Unlike the contemporary feminist movement, which has been anchored in an all-encompassing critique of patriarchy, activism around antigay and lesbian violence has ignored patriarchy and the gender relations that sustain and reflect it; instead, gay (...) and lesbian activism has been preoccupied with homophobia and only implicitly concerned with institutionalized heterosexism. As a result, the fact that gays and lesbians embody gender and are firmly situated in gender relations is rendered invisible. This analysis examines how the collective action frame of one social movement can be appropriated, employed, and transformed by a subsequent movement. (shrink)

Cosmetic surgery provides a problematic case for feminist theorizing about femininity and women's relationship with their bodies. Feminist accounts of femininity and beauty are unable to explain cosmetic surgery without undermining the women who opt for it. I argue that cosmetic surgery may have less to do with beauty and more to do with being ordinary, taking one's life into one's own hands, and determining how much suffering is fair.

Kendal Mobley replies to Christopher Catherwood's article ‘Nationalism, ethnicity and tolerance: some historical, political and biblical perspectives’, published in Transformation, Vol 14, no. 1, January 1997, p. 10.

This study focused on the state-level implementation of the Common Core English Language Arts (CC-ELA) standards and the implications for state education department personnel in social studies. Researchers employed a mixed methods approach to data collection and analysis asking the following research questions: (1) How do state-level social studies coordinators understand the obligations and implications of the CC-ELA standards for social studies? and (2) What benefits and challenges do they anticipate the CC-ELA standards offer to social studies educators? Findings from (...) the survey and interviews offer a glimpse into the thinking of social studies coordinators. The findings clustered around four assertions: (1) Coordinators were generally supportive of the CC-ELA standards, (2) CC-ELA is changing the way social studies is enacted at the state level, (3) Coordinators were cautiously optimistic about the impact of CC-ELA on elementary social studies, and (4) Coordinators were consistently positive about the impact of CC-ELA on secondary social studies. The positive views of the CC-ELA standards, however, appeared to do little to mitigate the challenge that the state coordinators face as they translate the standards and teach them to social studies teachers across their states. (shrink)

What remains as an ongoing project, Weeks contends, is creating a theory of the constitution of subjects to account for the processes of social construction. This book presents one such account.

Yoga is thousands of years old, but because of its current popularity, some people wrongly dismiss it as just another exercise fad made fashionable by celebrities. In fact, as author Kathy Phillips demonstrates in this large, beautifully illustrated book, yoga is a gentle but powerful means of achieving strength, flexibility, serenity, and a healthy balance between body and mind. Originating on the Indian subcontinent at the dawn of civilization, yoga is now accepted worldwide as an effective way to deal (...) with physical and emotional stress. The Spirit of Yoga is a sensible introduction for beginners, and a source of inspiration for current practitioners who would like to learn more. It explains differences among the various yoga disciplines, enabling readers to make a considered choice that best fits their needs. The author uses her experience as a yoga teacher to describe exercises and postures-also shown in color photos-that can promote physical health and body flexibility while inducing emotional tranquility. Yoga positions are suggested as effective remedies for physical ailments and for discomforts produced by everyday stress. The author's witty approach to her subject demystifies today's yoga hype while offering readers sound guidance and emphasizing the entirely real benefits they can derive from this honorable discipline. The book's foreword is by the international fashion model Christy Turlington. Hundreds of color photos and illustrations. (shrink)