It has been suggested that early cry parameters are connected to later cognitive abilities. The present study is the first to investigate whether the acoustic features of infant cry are associated with cognitive development already during the first year, as measured by oculomotor orienting and attention disengagement. Cry sounds for acoustic analyses (fundamental frequency; F0) were recorded in two neonatal cohorts at the age of 0-8 days (Tampere, Finland) or at 6 weeks (Cape Town, South Africa). Eye tracking was used (...) to measure oculomotor orienting to peripheral visual stimuli and attention disengagement from central stimuli at 8 months (Tampere) or at 6 months (Cape Town) of age. Only a marginal positive correlation between fundamental frequency of cry (F0) and visual attention disengagement was observed in the Tampere cohort, but not in the Cape Town cohort. This correlation indicated that infants from the Tampere cohort with a higher neonatal F0 were marginally slower to shift their gaze away from the central stimulus to the peripheral stimulus. No associations between F0 and oculomotor orienting were observed in either cohort. We discuss possible factors influencing the current pattern of results suggesting a lack of replicable associations between neonatal cry and visual attention and suggest directions for future research investigating the potential of early cry analysis in predicting later cognitive development. (shrink)

Part one: the search for cosmic consciousness -- R.M. Bucke and the future of humanity -- William James and the anesthetic revelation -- Henri Bergson and the Elan Vital -- The superman -- A.R. Orage and the new age -- Ouspensky's fourth dimension -- Part two: esoteric evolution -- The bishop and the bulldog -- Enter the madame -- Dr. Steiner, I presume? -- From Goethean science to the wisdom of the human being -- Cosmic evolution -- Hypnagogia -- Part (...) three: the archaeology of consciousness -- The invisible mind -- Cracking the egg -- Lost worlds -- Noncerebral consciousness -- The split -- Part four: participatory epistemology -- The shock of metaphor -- The participating mind -- The tapestry of nature -- Thinking about thinking -- The black hole of consciousness -- Other times and places -- Faculty X -- Part five: the presence of origin -- The ascent of Mount Ventoux -- Structures of consciousness -- The mental-rational structure -- The integral structure -- Last words: playing for time. (shrink)

Artykuł podejmuje namysł nad kategorią lektury z perspektywy estetycznej. Śledzi rozmaite spo­soby użycia tego pojęcia i różne sensy kryjące się za figurą czytania, nie zawsze pokrywające się z tradycyjnymi definicjami odnotowywanymi współcześnie w słownikach. W punkcie wyjścia leży rozpoznanie, że kategoria lektury ma dziś szerokie zastosowanie, tzn. jej przedmiotem są nie tylko utwory piśmiennicze czy literackie. Artykuł stara się odpowiedzieć na pytanie, co sprawia, że pojęcie lektury bywa tak chętnie aplikowane do przestrzeni estetycznej i dlaczego czytaniu poddawane są także zjawiska (...) – co szczególnie frapujące – o wyraźnym wizualnym nacechowaniu, do których zasadniczo przystaje przede wszystkim postawa widza, a nie czytelnika. O atrakcyjno­ści lektury jako narzędzia służącego do kontaktu ze zjawiskami o charakterze pozaczytelniczym decyduje splot jej właściwości. Lekturę można bowiem traktować z jednej strony jako dyspozycję mentalną i poznawczą, służącą wyjaśnianiu znaczeń, a z drugiej strony jako praktykę, która ma swoje psychosomatyczne, sensualne, percepcyjne uwarunkowania. To dzięki temu tak dobrze sprawdza się w przestrzeni estetycznej, pozostając m.in. w symbiotycznej relacji z oglądaniem. (shrink)

Emily Carroll and Parker Crutchfield propose a new inconsistency argument against abortion restrictivism. In response, I raised several objections to their argument. Recently Carroll and Crutchfield have replied and seem to be under the impression that I’m a restrictivist. This is puzzling, since my criticism of their view included a very thinly veiled, but purposely more charitable, anti-restrictivist inconsistency argument. In this response, I explain how Carroll and Crutchfield mischaracterize my position and that of the restrictivist.

Medieval interpretations of hylomorphism, in which substances are conceived as metaphysical composites of prime matter and substantial form, are receiving attention in contemporary philosophy. It has even been suggested that a recovery of Aquinas's conception of prime matter as a ‘pure potentiality’, lacking any actuality apart from substantial form, may be expedient in hylomorphic interpretations of quantum mechanics. In this paper, we consider a recent hylomorphic interpretation of non-relativistic quantum mechanics, the theory of Cosmic Hylomorphism, which does not explicitly invoke (...) any notion of prime matter in its original formulation. We argue that prime matter does in fact play a role in constituting and individuating particles in this theory. However, we demonstrate that the notion of prime matter which features in the extended version of Cosmic Hylomorphism that we propose here is distinct from Aquinas's conception of prime matter, inasmuch as it has discrete metaphysical parts. (shrink)

This is an essay on place in light of the ecological crisis as an exercise in what Pierre Charbonnier has recently called ecological reason, that is, “the environmental reflexivity of our species.” How do the roots of our prevailing political and economic relationships to the many lands that sustain us appear retroactively from the perspective of ecological reason? In a kind of tragic reversal, the mad rush to global prosperity and political dignity now appears as the emerging catastrophe of our (...) failure to heed the terrestrial affordances that sustain us. I explicate this problem and root about for responses to it by lacing together the recent work of Charbonnier as well as John Sallis, Bruno Latour, and Brian Burkhart in a single weave of place-specific thinking. How can we begin to rethink place from the ground up? (shrink)

While there has been a great deal of discussion of whether and when beliefs formed in an epistemically circular manner can be justified, there has been almost no discussion of exactly which beliefs are formed in a circular manner. These discussions have tended to focus on an extremely limited number of intuitively-identified paradigm examples concerning attempts to establish the reliability of a method of belief formation. Here, I seek to answer a prior analytical question about the nature of epistemic circularity (...) by developing a criterion which sorts epistemically circular beliefs from non-epistemically circular beliefs. (shrink)

This research explores the contextual approach within Christian-Jewish religious education, addressing a notable gap in existing literature and offering fresh insights into the application of the Contextual Teaching and Learning (CTL) model within Christian contexts. Through a qualitative literature study employing a three-step methodology, including an in-depth analysis of Deuteronomy 11:19–20, this study reveals that this biblical text provides both educational guidance and theological significance, serving as a foundational support for the CTL model in Christian-Jewish religious education. The integration of (...) digital media into biblical sources holds promise for future research, while the central challenge lies in harmonising life experiences and empirical phenomena with biblical reflections to seamlessly integrate inquiry processes and pedagogical phases, with potential avenues for further exploration in scripture models endorsing CTL. This research provides valuable insights for educators, parents and policymakers in Indonesia and beyond, advancing educational research in contextualised teaching models within religious education.Contribution: This article demonstrates that the CTL model in the digital era has the potential to revolutionise religious education and profoundly impact learners, making it a significant scientific contribution in the context of Christian-Jewish religious education. (shrink)

In Subjects That Matter, Namita Goswami attends to philosophy’s institutional and disciplinary failures to reconcile its identitarian claims to universality and reason with the feminist and postcolonial modes of thinking it traditionally keeps at bay. This essay places Goswami’s critique within a context of “the thought from outside,” which, beginning with Foucault’s reading of Blanchot, continuing through the geopolitics of Dussel’s philosophy of liberation, and prominent in Catherine Malabou’s conceptualization of plasticity, demonstrates how political critiques of philosophical hegemony contain an (...) implicit theorization of “literature.” If “literature” gives voice to the thought from outside, does it in turn “decolonize” philosophy? If so, what itinerary of thought ought to follow the relationship between this literary decolonization of philosophy and its imbrication within the fold of philosophical thought? How to conceptualize the plastic relation between inside and outside, between center and periphery, without subordinating the latter to the hegemony of the former? This essay argues for a coherence between Goswami’s and Malabou’s materialist understandings of difference and a conceptualization of literature as an “outside” to philosophy that operates “excentrically” “inside” philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:René Girard and the Rhetoric of ConsumptionKathleen M. Vandenberg (bio)The work of René Girard, so productively applied in so many different fields—in theology, in anthropology, in literature, to name a few—has yet to be recognized or applied in the field of rhetorical studies. Yet there exists, I argue, a need precisely for Girard's theories as the over 2000 year-old discipline enters the twenty-first century.Girard's theory of mimetic or triangular (...) desire can be used as a model for understanding persuasion, because it is, among other things, an "expression of a basic set of ideas on... the dynamics of the self and human relations" (1996, vii). Girard's concern is with human relationships and, in a sense, with how individuals in these relationships act rhetorically upon themselves and others. Girard's mimetic theory hinges on the dynamics of imitation and explains how individuals relate through both the conscious and the unconscious sharing of behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs in certain situations. These situations are clearly rhetorical, as can be seen by examining the definition of the "rhetorical situation" set forth by Lloyd Bitzer, in his seminal 1968 article, "The Rhetorical Situation." Bitzer proposes three conditions that must be met for a rhetorical situation to exist: an exigency or imperfection marked by urgency; a rhetorical audience or an audience that can act; and constraints, or elements that have the power to constrain the decision and action needed to modify the exigency (7). In mass-mediated modern rhetoric, I argue that the exigencies exist externally (in the culture) and internally, the audience is both others and self, and the constraints are the alienation, mystification, and desire generated by hierarchies. Twentieth-century rhetorical theorist Kenneth Burke advises that "we must often think of rhetoric not in terms of some one particular address, but as a general body of identifications that owe their convincingness much more to trivial repetition and dull daily reënforcement than to exceptional rhetorical skill" (1950, 26). Such is the case with this particular form of rhetoric, which is generated and propagated by mimetic contagion and thus is best more narrowly defined as sociological propaganda, a type of propaganda [End Page 259] theorized by Jacques Ellul in Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes (1975).Ellul, the first to distinguish between political propaganda and sociological propaganda, proposes that the latter encompasses social behaviors "much more vast and less certain" than those of political propaganda (1975, 62). These social behaviors permit the penetration of an ideology in a society, a penetration that is achieved through the active participation of the masses. Sociological propaganda, as Ellul describes it, works from within; it is dependent on the individual's willingness and ability to persuade him- or herself and others. Sociological propaganda, Ellul posits, is created when members of a group behave in such a way as to influence the attitudes, actions, and lifestyles of others; often this behavior is unconscious, unintentional, and spontaneous.In these ways, the rhetoric of sociological propaganda operates in a markedly different fashion than more "traditional" rhetoric, which is largely understood to operate as a unilateral transaction in which an individual orator actively, openly, and orally works to move a relatively passive but physically present audience to act in accordance with the orator's own beliefs through a formally delivered speech. In its reliance on the interaction and cooperation of the many rather than the centrality and dominance of one speaker, in its acceptance of unintentional, spontaneous, and unconscious persuasion, in its dependence on the modern mass media, and in the limitless and nebulous nature of its boundaries in time and space, sociological propaganda constitutes a type of rhetoric heretofore insufficiently addressed by rhetorical studies. Although existing perspectives in rhetorical criticism have certainly addressed some aspects of this rhetoric, sociological propaganda is not easily explained with the terminology of traditional rhetorical criticism or easily approached from traditional rhetorical perspectives.This article asserts that the best way to approach and understand such propaganda is through the perspective of René Girard. Approaching this propaganda from a Girardian perspective permits us to look beyond the symbols of sociological propaganda and analyze our own responsibility in rhetorical... (shrink)

The line separating the “good life” and the savagery that the “good life” requires, or, perhaps what might be articulated as the line between the space of biopolitics and the space of necropolitics, is maintained in the present through both practices of global policing and imperial war. These practices of policing and war produce the very global refuse that constantly threatens the “good life”—actively wasting the lives and livelihoods of people and non-human lifeworlds Western colonialism established as the raw materials, (...) instruments, and objects of its civilizational goal—against which violence acts to protect a fundamentally human life worth living. At the same time, through capital-intensive projects of “saving” the very targeted populations it destroys, permanent war also produces the subordinated life that will come to serve as the means of maintaining and upholding that “good life.” Beyond this mode of colonial inhabitation, however, subsist other ecologies of life-making practices on the part of those deemed disposable, a planetary remainder which might well be our only hope for a possible future. (shrink)

Genealogia jest tą nauką pomocniczą historii, która od pewnego już czasu obecna jest w cyberprzestrzeni. Deklasuje pod tym względem inne nauki pomocnicze historii, które pozostają daleko w tyle chociażby pod względem liczby wyświetleń w przeglądarce, będących efektem wyszukiwania stron internetowych. Stanowi to konsekwencję popularności badań genealogicznych, które w ostatnim czasie prowadzone są w znaczącej mierze nie przez naukowców, ale pasjonatów i genealogów-amatorów, którzy samodzielnie chcą zgłębiać historię swoich rodzin, a co za tym idzie – tworzyć rodzinne kompendia genealogiczne. O takim, (...) a nie innym ukierunkowaniu badań świadczą także różnego rodzaju poradniki, które w ostatnim czasie ukazały się na polskim rynku wydawniczym. Oferują one czytelnikowi zarówno omówienie tradycyjnych narzędzi wykorzystywanych w badaniach genealogicznych, jak i tych nowoczesnych, związanych z postępem technologicznym i przedstawianiem informacji w formie cyfrowej. W rezultacie w niemal każdej tego typu publikacji zamieszczony został rozdział poświęcony charakterystyce funkcjonujących w Internecie serwisów i baz danych, które stanowią nieocenioną pomoc w badaniach genealogicznych. Są nią także różnego rodzaju profile i grupy w mediach społecznościowych, które do tej pory pozostawały jednak niezauważone, tak przez naukowców, jak i popularyzatorów. Z tego też względu niniejszy artykuł poświęcony zostanie syntetycznemu omówieniu obecności genealogii w cyberprzestrzeni, zarówno w skali makro (duże serwisy i bazy internetowe), jak i mikro (niewielkie grupy w mediach społecznościowych). Celem artykułu jest bowiem ukazanie genealogii jako tej z nauk pomocniczych historii, która nie tylko odnalazła się w świecie cyfrowym, ale w nim zadomowiła i wciąż się rozwija. (shrink)

Seth MacFarlane’s space adventure, The Orville, is not “Family Guy in Space.” It is a social commentary of the most direct and compelling sort. Through satire, humor, and symbolism, The Orville explores the potential dangers of religion. It does so in individual episodes, such as “If the Stars Should Appear” and “Mad Idolatry,” as well as through the series as a whole in its depiction of how the Union resolves its political differences with the Krill and the Moclans. In this (...) chapter, we will look at how The Orville criticizes religion, both generally and specifically. We will see that while it is not a condemnation of all religious believers, it is a critique of religion itself, suggesting that it can become dangerous when it merges religious dogma with political power. (shrink)

Exploring the darkest side of organizations may have a potential to change our previous assumptions about business life. Scholars both in management and organizational research fields have shown interest in the "bright" side of behavioral life and have looked for the ways to create a positive organizational climate and assumed a positive relation between happiness of employees and productivity. These main assumptions of the Human Relations School have dominated the scientific inquiry on organizational behavior. However, "the dark side of organizational (...) life" may have more explanatory power than "the bright side". Hostility, jealousy, envy, rivalry, gossip, problematic personalities, dislike, revenge, and social exclusion are the realities of business life. A manager may devote most of their time to cope with conflicts, deviant behaviors, ambitious individuals, gossips, and dysfunctional rivalry among employees. It is evident that negative events and interactions among employees cost more time and energy for a manager than the positive side of organizational life. This edited collection specifically focuses on these issues and will be of interest to researchers, academics, and advanced students in the fields of management, organizational studies and behavior, sociology, social psychology, and human resource management. (shrink)

In this paper, we approach the problem of the relationship between Greek mathematics and Eleatic philosophy from a new perspective, which leads us to a reappraisal of Szabó’s hypothesis about the origin of mathematics out of Eleatic philosophy. We claim that Parmenidean philosophy, particularly its semantic core, has possibly been shaped by reflexion on the Pythagoreans’ mathematical practice, particularly in arithmetic. Furthermore, Pythagorean arithmetic originates not from another domain outside mathematics but from counting, i.e., it has its roots in man’s (...) practical activity. This interpretation restores the historically inverse relationship between mathematics and philosophy, refuting the attribution of mathematics’ origin to a field outside mathematics, for which Szabó’s hypothesis has been criticised. Moreover, Parmenidean theory of truth is viewed not as a defective predecessor of Aristotle’s classical theory of truth that needs to be remedied but as a semantic conception coordinated with the mathematics of Parmenides’ times. (shrink)

Для широкого круга читателей (слушателей, аспирантов, преподавателей) интересующихся данной проблемой.

We consider the quantum electrodynamic problem of the velocity of transmission of an excitation from one atom to another, which was posed by Fermi in 1932 and, in an improved version, by Ferretti in 1968. The problem is solved using Heisenberg operators. The transmission velocity is shown to exceed the light velocity. We argue that this acausal result is to be explained by the inadmissibly idealized description of the signal source used by Fermi and Ferretti.