Mere physical experiences of warmth, distance, hardness, and roughness are found to activate the more abstract psychological concepts that are analogically related to them, such as interpersonal warmth and emotional distance, thereby influencing social judgments and interpersonal behavior without the individual's awareness. These findings further support the principle of neural reuse in the development and operation of higher mental processes.

Pancreatitis is a complex, progressively destructive inflammatory disorder. Alcohol was long thought to be the primary causative agent, but genetic contributions have been of interest since the discovery that rare PRSS1, CFTR and SPINK1 variants were associated with pancreatitis risk. We now report two associations at genome-wide significance identified and replicated at PRSS1-PRSS2 and X-linked CLDN2 through a two-stage genome-wide study. The PRSS1 variant likely affects disease susceptibility by altering expression of the primary trypsinogen gene. The CLDN2 risk allele is (...) associated with atypical localization of claudin-2 in pancreatic acinar cells. The homozygous CLDN2 genotype confers the greatest risk, and its alleles interact with alcohol consumption to amplify risk. These results could partially explain the high frequency of alcohol-related pancreatitis in men. © 2012 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 33.1 (2000) 94-96 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Rhetoric Reclaimed: Aristotle and the Liberal Arts Tradition Rhetoric Reclaimed: Aristotle and the Liberal Arts Tradition. Janet M. Atwill. London: Cornell University Press, 1998. Pp. xvi + 235. $35.00 hard cover. Much like Weimar, Germany, American civil society has been buffeted for a half-century by both the lunatic right, hiding behind the mask of religious freedom, and (...) the lunatic left, sporting "pomo" (postmodern) tribal colors in the garb of academic freedom. In an earlier age, both might be burned at the stake; today, they are granted tax-exempt status. Readers seeking contributions to the life of the mind find their harangues both unpleasant and unrewarding. This book is unfortunately no exception.Atwill's title is deceptive. Her work is only marginally about either Aristotle or his rhetoric. She is more concerned to "reclaim" the liberal arts held hostage by the received tradition of Athenian democratic ideals. Vide: At issue are the character of the social identities of gender, race, and class and the nature of the social ties by which we are bound.... (3) Challenges to the... humanist paradigm... became the subject of... debates over cultural diversity, political correctness, and revisionist literary canons and historical accounts. Just what is at stake... is the type of subjectivity produced by the paideia of a multicultural curriculum (that subjects values, views of reality, and relationships to cultural and political authority. (12-13) So we are in for another salvo of pomo evangelism, with the usual suspects trotted out (Stanley Fish, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, and Edward Said) all with a view to rectifying the hegemonic white male biases of E. M. Cope, and rhetoric's four B's (Baldwin, Burnet, Burkhardt, and Hans Baron).Were Atwill offering a New Age update of Cope's commentary, her project might hold promise. Embers of such potential glow throughout the [End Page 94] book. Thus, her passing remarks on the relation of techne and theoria to Greek medicine (74-79) and to the cultural demands of what amounts to a plantation society (107-8) bear consideration. And her deconstruction of Cope's work as a managerial art grounded in associationist psychology (192-200) is especially insightful.Where the book disappoints is its clumsiness: it is simultaneously pedantic and superficial. On the first count, the author shows wide acquaintance with the standard commentaries on classical culture, but she seems often to be adrift in an ocean of secondary sources. For example, she is more likely to discuss Kennedy's treatment of Aristotle than Aristotle himself (58). And so it goes: Wright on Empedocles (90), Crane on Cicero (31), Woods on Cope (200). Indeed, it is difficult to tell from the book if the author's command of classical Greek extends much beyond Liddell and Scott.In addition to her overdependency on secondary sources, Atwill disregards historical contexts in pushing her quirky pomo readings to the fore. To cite only a few of these: For Plato, expertise is equivalent to function, and function determines one's place in the hierarchical order of the state. (30)... Physis (nature) or faculty equals function equals place in the social order. (141) [For Aristotle,] private property is the means of both self-expression and self-knowledge; knowledge of the self would be impossible without the procurement of private property. The subject and object distinction, usually made in the context of epistemology, is relocated at the center of the notion of private property. (184-85) If Protagoras, Isocrates, and Cicero were appointed deans... today, I doubt that they would institute a curriculum based on principles of radical democracy. (209) Perhaps Atwill would prefer to pick her dean from among Che, Mao, Pol Pot, or Lenin. While such eccentric inferences may fit the bill for cultural studies, they flunk the test of impartiality. This is a commodification of pedantry--recycling fragments of academic publications to advocate a partisan position. But advocacy resting on innuendo, resentment, and polite sneering can never meet the standards of serious scholarship... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:176 BOOK REVIEWS tianity came into being. To take one example: God's involvement with and reaction to genuine novelties introduced into the world as a result of the initiatives of human freedom, rightly renders suspect the conception of God as immutable. But what immutability really claimed was not anything like inertia or unconcern, but only that God was not mutable in any of the ways characteristic of finite realities (...) striving to transcend their limitations. Immutability was predicated as a property of deity whose essence was Pure Actuality-the consummation of all mutation. What this meant to preclude from God was only change that amounted to some sort of further perfecting of his intrinsic being-leaving the way clear for the possibility at least of relational change vis-a-vis a world of creatures. There is no reason why contemporary experiences of God's saving activity in Christ must be articulated only in the conceptual and linguistic categories of the past. But seemingly there ought to be some means of showing that such newer articulations do not repudiate truths achieved in the past and handed on in authentic living tradition. The Catholic University of America Washington, D.C. WILLIAM J. HILL, 0.P. The Church: Communion, Sacrament, Communication. By ROBERT KRESS. New York: Paulist Press, 1985. Pp. iv + 217. $9.95. One of the results of the recent synod is certain to be more attention to deepening our understanding of the church as communion. Robert Kress's fine volume cannot help but be a useful contribution to that discussion. As he succinctly states, "the Church is the communion of believers who exist as the sacrament of Christ, who is the sacrament of God, who is the communion of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit" (p. 59). For Kress any ecclesiology that does not root the church in the triune, perichoretic (a favored word) life of God is a radically truncated one. As a theandric (another favored word) reality, the Church must mirror its ground or source. If that ground is a dynamic, joyous unity-in-diversity, this should be reflected in the life and structures of the ecclesial community. Such is the context in which the author reflects on a variety of themes that are reflective of the post-Vatican II agenda: the relationship among local, regional, and universal churches; the understanding of the church as sacrament; the tension between holiness and office; the meaning of leadership in a community best understood as a perichoretic communion of gifted members. To each of these topics Kress brings a grasp of the BOOK REVIEWS 177 tradition, a wide acquaintance with the relevant theological literature, and a willingness to make provocative judgments ("yes" to the ordination of women; " no " to the new egalitarianism-a church conceived without administrative, pastoral authority.) Kress particularly cherishes the church as "the memory and tradition of Christ." His commitment to this tradition has both rooted him and freed him. He draws knowledgeably on Aquinas and Augustine, Rahner and Heidegger, von Balthasar and the Shepherd of Hermas. Lawrence Cunningham is correct: this book is radically conservative. There is one area where I felt that there was a certain lack. Kress's treatment of the church as sacrament and of the seven sacraments contained much that was valuable: his stress on the sacramentality of ecclesial life as such, his historical analysis of "sacrament", his phenomenolog·y of the nature of Christian worship. Yet all of this seemed strangely abstracted from the liturgical praxis of the Christian community. This lack is especially visible in his admittedly tentative salvation-historical correlation of the sacraments with our sharing in the religious experience of Jesus (pp. 147-148). To make that correlation, especially in the case of Baptism, Confirmation, and Eucharist, without an exp1icit reference to the initiatory, communal dimension of these sacraments is certainly problematic. I would like to make a final comment, not on the substance of the book, but on its editing and proofing. There are a number of errors, the most obvious of which is the elimination of the umlaut from Heribert Miihlen's name. (There is a curious inconsistency, too, in the use of the umlaut. It is used in... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Critical Essays on Samuel Taylor ColeridgeWilliam E. CainCritical Essays on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, edited by Leonard Orr; vi & 194 pp. New York: Twayne, 1994, $42.00.“Coleridge, as you doubtless hear, is gone,” wrote Thomas Carlyle, August 12, 1834, to Ralph Waldo Emerson: “How great a Possibility, how small a realized Result.” There is now a huge Coleridge industry in the academy, engaged in producing editions of his writings (...) and examinations of his literary career. Yet Carlyle’s judgment continues to carry weight with many nonspecialist readers, who know Coleridge only as Wordsworth’s estimable friend and as the author of a handful of superb lyrics and radiant critical speculations in the Biographia Literaria (1817). These texts are indeed rich and suggestive: readers wish that there were more like them and that Coleridge’s achievement had somehow been greater, more monumental, like Wordsworth’s. Coleridge’s “misfortune,” concluded Carlyle’s friend, John Sterling, in January 1842, “was to appear at a time when there was a man’s work to do—and he did it not.”But the wish that Coleridge had been more than he was is misplaced, in large measure for the reason that it neglects the vast amount of significant work that he did accomplish—not only in poetry and criticism, but in philosophy, political journalism, social theory, and other disciplines and areas of thought. Experts in Romanticism know this work (or, at least, know of it), yet it has not [End Page 151] been excerpted in anthologies, contextualized and explained for students, or brought forward for analysis, beyond the circle of avid Coleridgeans, to extend and complicate the commonplaces about this writer that still enjoy wide circulation.In this respect, Leonard Orr, editor of Critical Essays on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, perhaps has missed an opportunity. His collection is valuable as far as it goes; it reprints eight excellent essays along with two new ones, and Orr’s own concise, informed Introduction, with footnotes packed with bibliography, provides a lucid overview of Coleridge studies. But the focus is strangely limited, the conception of the writer’s career is dated and conventional, and the selection of essays is too restricted.One is grateful for this collection’s strengths even as one regrets its gaps and omissions. John Beer gives a good account of the Coleridge/Wordsworth relationship; Stuart Peterfreund nicely shows how “Coleridge’s failed political vision of European history” is redeemed “as part of his critical vision of the imagination”; James C. McKusick, Paul Magnuson, Andrew M. Cooper, James Engell, and Anne K. Mellor explore Coleridge’s poetry—though oddly there is no essay devoted primarily to “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”; and Kathleen M. Wheeler, Lawrence Buell, and Jerome Christensen form a helpful unit of pieces on the Biographia Literaria. But readers will not find here anything more than brief mentions of, for example, Coleridge’s writings for The Watchman and The Friend, his striking interpretations of Shakespeare, Aids to Reflection, letters, notebooks, two Lay Sermons, and On the Constitution of the Church and State.This failure to supply broader, more innovative coverage is puzzling, given that the general aim of the series in which Orr’s book appears (Critical Essays on British Literature, gen. ed. Zack Bowen) is “to develop a new overall perspective on its particular subject.” Even more, Orr himself says in his Introduction that scholarship of the past two decades has prompted us to be “less likely to ignore the prose works beyond the Biographia” and has drawn attention to Coleridge’s marginalia and notebooks. Orr displays a sharp sense of the new Coleridge, yet has designed his book in a way that reflects the old one and that will tend for many readers simply to reinforce Carlyle’s adverse judgment.William E. CainWellesley CollegeCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

Max Weber is noted for his diagnosis of the rationalization of life under capitalism. But in his social thought he also developed a powerful theory of the process of 'sociation' and associational life. This paper investigates the latter aspect of his thought in the context of his and Marianne Weber's American journey. Their observations about the religious sects, the African-American community, educational insti tutions, and the position of women reveal an understanding of democ ratization as a process of voluntaristic sociation, (...) whose original model is the sect. In these institutional settings and through their interactions with figures like William James, W. E. B. Du Bois, and M. Carey Thomas, the Webers develop a view of American social life that empha sizes the contribution of associative activity to the moral and political education of individuals, and to the creation of a distinctively modern form of democratic culture. (shrink)

The British journalist Christopher Hitchens has recently noted that the extraordinary excitement created by l’affaire Pound, an excitement sustained for now some forty years, is partly the result of having no fewer than three debates going on whenever the poet’s legal situation and his consequent hospitalization are discussed. As Hitchens says, those questions are: “First, was Pound guilty of treason? If not, or even if so, was he mad? Third, was he given privileged treatment for either condition?”1 I propose to (...) discuss all three issues in a way that fairly reflects the fact that I am neither a physician nor a lawyer. What I know of the state of medical expertise, both today and in the period of time from 1943 to 1958 , leads me, as a layman, to believe that there is an enormous latitude of understanding among medical professionals as to the precise meaning of “insanity.” At one extreme, for some distinguished physicians, the term means almost nothing. They see it as a legal term and as therefore irrelevant to them; some of them follow the line of reasoning developed by Thomas Szasz over his long writing career, namely that “mental illness” if not illness in any ordinary sense of the term.2 For other medical practitioners, it does mean something, but only when it is redefined into much smaller subcategories and enriched with much more precise terminology, and when the given patient and his full range of circumstances are considered.What I know of the legal understanding of insanity is that there has been and is now little firm agreement about “insanity” or “madness.” Equally competent juries and courts have been able to set down findings that are more or less plausible on their face but do not seem to comport at all with each other. I tentatively conclude that whatever “insanity” now is in the United States, and whatever it was when Pound was found unfit to stand trial in 1945, the standard is not the lucid simplicity of the M’Naghten test, namely, the ability of the accused to understand the difference between “right” and “wrong.” Human mind, self-awareness, and motivations are vastly more complicated than such a test would imply. 1. Christopher Hitchins, “American Notes,” Times Literary Supplement, 21 Oct. 1983, p. 1160.2. See Thomas Szasz, Insanity for a synthesis of his ideas as formulated in some eighteen books. William M. Chace is professor of English and Vice Provost for Academic Planning and Development at Stanford University. He is author of The Political Identities of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot , Lionel Trilling: Criticism and Politics , and scholarly essays on writers including Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence, T. E. Lawrence, and James Joyce. He is now working on a study of the ways in which American culture in this century has been subjected to critical analysis. (shrink)

In this study, we examined moral issues and gender differences in ethical judgment using Reidenbach and Robin’s [Journal of Business Ethics9 (1990) 639) multidimensional ethics scale (MES). A total of 340 undergraduate students were asked to provide ethical judgment by rating three moral issues in the MES labeled: ‚sales’, ‚auto’, and ‚retail’ using three ethics theories: moral equity, relativism, and contractualism. We found that female students’ ratings of ethical judgment were consistently higher than that of male students across two out (...) of three moral issues examined (i.e., sales and retails) and ethics theories; providing support for Eagly’s [1987, Sex Differences in Social Behavior: A Social-role Interpretation. (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc, Hillsdale, NJ, England)] social role theory. After controlling for moral issues, women’s higher ratings of ethical judgment over men’s became statistically non-significant. Theoretical and practical implications based on the study’s findings are provided. (shrink)

Lawrence Johnson advocates a major change in our attitude toward the nonhuman world. He argues that nonhuman animals, and ecosystems themselves, are morally significant beings with interests and rights. The author considers recent work in environmental ethics in the introduction and then presents his case with the utmost precision and clarity. Written in an attractive, nontechnical style, the book will be of particular interest to philosophers, environmentalists and ecologists.

Lawrence O'Donnell, Jr., Deadly Force: The True Story of How a Badge Can Become a License to Kill. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1983, 384 pp. Robert E. Goodin, Political Theory and Public Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982, ix + 286 pp.

This book offers an introductory account of the central theories of truth. A wide range of theories, from those of correspondence and coherence to Tarski's semantic conception of truth are presented and assessed in order to profit from that which is of value in them. The authot proposes a new account which it is asserted is adequate to meet the legitimate demands made on the theory of truth.

Shaftesbury's Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times was first published in 1711. It ranges widely over ethics, aesthetics, religion, the arts, and ancient and modern history, and aims at nothing less than a new ideal of the gentleman. Together with Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Addison and Steele's Spectator, it is a text of fundamental importance for understanding the thought and culture of Enlightenment Europe. This volume, first published in 2000, presents an edition of the text together with an (...) introduction, explanatory notes and a guide to further reading. (shrink)

Shaftesbury's Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times was first published in 1711. It ranges widely over ethics, aesthetics, religion, the arts, and ancient and modern history, and aims at nothing less than a new ideal of the gentleman. Together with Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Addison and Steele's Spectator, it is a text of fundamental importance for understanding the thought and culture of Enlightenment Europe. This volume, first published in 2000, presents an edition of the text together with an (...) introduction, explanatory notes and a guide to further reading. (shrink)

Approaches bioethics on the basis of a conception of life and what is needed for the affirmation of its quality in the most encompassing sense. Johnson applies this conception to discussions of controversial issues in bioethics including euthanasia, abortion, cloning and genetic engineering. His emphasis is not on providing definitive solutions to all bioethical issues but on developing an approach to coping with them that can also help us deal with new issues as they emerge. The foundation of this discussion (...) is an extensive examination of the nature of the self and its good and of various approaches to ethics. His bioethic is integrally related to his well-known work on environmental philosophy. The book also applies these principles on an individual level, offering a user-friendly discussion of how to deal with ethical slippery slopes and how and where to draw the line when dealing with difficult questions of bioethics. (shrink)

Background Journal editors are responsible for what they publish and therefore have a duty to correct the record if published work is found to be unreliable. One method for such correction is retraction of an article. Anecdotal evidence suggested a lack of consistency in journal policies and practices regarding retraction. In order to develop guidelines, we reviewed retractions in Medline to discover how and why articles were retracted. Methods We retrieved all available Medline retractions from 2005 to 2008 and a (...) one-in-three random selection of those from 1988 to 2004. This yielded 312 retractions (from a total of 870). Details of the retraction including the reason for retraction were recorded by two investigators. Results Medline retractions have increased sharply since 1980 and currently represent 0.02% of included articles. Retractions were issued by authors (63%), editors (21%), journals (6%), publishers (2%) and institutions (1%). Reasons for retraction included honest error or non-replicable findings (40%), research misconduct (28%), redundant publication (17%) and unstated/unclear (5%). Some of the stated reasons might have been addressed by corrections. Conclusions Journals' retraction practices are not uniform. Some retractions fail to state the reason, and therefore fail to distinguish error from misconduct. We have used our findings to inform guidelines on retractions. (shrink)

In _Civil Society_, Lawrence Cahoone stages a critical engagement between the social-political viewpoints of liberalism, communitarianism, and conservatism in order to effect a balanced relation that will bypass or overcome the inadequacies of each position.

In this probing examination of the meaning and function of culture in contemporary society, Lawrence Cahoone argues that reason itself is cultural, but no less reasonable for it. While recent political and philosophical movements have recognized that cognition, the self, and politics are embedded in culture, most fail to appreciate the deep changes in rationalism and liberal theory this implies, others leap directly into relativism, and nearly all fail to define culture. Cultural Revolutions systematically defines culture, gauges the consequences (...) of the ineradicably cultural nature of cognition and action, yet argues that none of this implies relativism. After showing where other "new culturalists" have gone wrong, Cahoone offers his own definition of culture as teleologically organized practices, artifacts, and narratives and analyzes the notion of cultural membership in relation to race, ethnicity, and "primordialism." He provides a theory of culture's role in how we form our sense of reality and argues that the proper conception of culture dissolves "the problem" of cultural relativism. Applying this perspective to Islamic fundamentalism, Cahoone identifies its conflict with the West as representing the break between two of three historically distinctive forms of reason. Rather than being "irrational," he shows, fundamentalism embodies a rationality only recently devalued--but not entirely abandoned--by the West. The persistence of plural forms of reason suggests that modernization in various world cultures is compatible with continued, even magnified, cultural differences. (shrink)

This revised and expanded second edition of Cahoone's classic anthology provides an unparalleled collection of the essential readings in modernism and postmodernism. Places contemporary debate in the context of the criticism of modernity since the seventeenth century. Chronologically and thematically arranged. Indispensable and multidisciplinary resource in philosophy, literature, cultural studies, social theory, and religious studies.

Quite unexpectedly, cognitive psychologists find their field intimately connected to a whole new intellectual landscape that had previously seemed remote, unfamiliar, and all but irrelevant. Yet the proliferating connections tying together the cognitive and evolutionary communities promise to transform both fields, with each supplying necessary principles, methods, and a species of rigor that the other lacks. (Cosmides and Tooby, 1994, p. 85).

Environmental ethicists typically find value in living things or their local environments: (1) anthropocentists insofar as they have value for human beings; (2) biocentrists in all organisms; and (3) ecocentrists in all ecosystems. But does the rest of nature have value? If so, is it merely as instrument or stage setting for life? A fanciful thought experiment focuses the point: is stellar nucleosynthesis a good thing? There are reasons to believe that it is intrinsically good, that even before life evolved, (...) stellar nucleosynthesis was a good. If so, then the three views above are incomplete as accounts of natural value. It further implies that some non-biological criterion can serve as a rational standard of value: namely, complexity. The attempt to answer the question of the value of stellar nucleosynthesis leads to a clarification of the meaning of intrinsic value, which also has implications for more local questions of environmental values. (shrink)

Focusing on Truth explores the question of what truth is, balancing historical with issue-orientated discussion. The book offers a comprehensive survey of all the major theories of truth. Lawrence Johnson investigates a number of closely related matters of truth in his inquiry, such as: What sorts of things are true or false? What is attributed to them when they are said to be true or false? What do facts have to do with truth? What can we learn from previous (...) theories? The book opens with an analysis of the coherence theory of truth and then the correspondence theory of truth, as developed by Moore, Russell and Wittgenstein. Through a study of the semantic conceptions of truth, the author reveals that an adequate theory of truth must take account of the pragmatics of person, purpose, and circumstance. A full understanding of facts and truth bearers is considered central to Johnson's criticism of the opposing truth theories of J. L. Austin and P. F. Strawson. Drawing on the merits of these theories and others, while identifying their deficiencies, Johnson presents a new account of truth, based on the correlation of referential foci and the use of linguistic conventions. This account is defended as being adequate to meet the legitimate demands made on a theory of truth. Johnson argues that the account leaves scope for statements of many different sorts to be true in their own widely varying ways, without the existence of a need to posit fundamentally different kinds of truth. (shrink)

“Whatever else of metaphysical or philosophical significance may be involved in a biblical pericope, it remains true that the writer or speaker was directing his words to something which he considered to be a vital element in the human situation, to understanding man's humanness as it finds expression in his life with others in a social context.”.

I develop the thesis that species and ecosystems are living entities with morally significant interests in their own right and defend it against leading objections. Contrary to certain claims, it is possible to individuate such entities sufficiently well. Indeed, there is a sense in which such entities define their own nature. I also consider and reject the argument that species and ecosystems cannot have interests or even traits in their own right because evolution does not proceed on that level. Although (...) evolution proceeds on the level of the genotype, those selected are able to cooperate in entities of various higher orders—including species and ecosystems. Having their own nature and interests, species and ecosystems can meaningfully be said to have moral standing. (shrink)

Future generations do not exist, and are not determinate in their make-up. The moral significance of future generations cannot be accounted for on the basis of a purely individualistic ethic. Yet future generations are morally significant. The Person-Affecting Principle, that (roughly) only acts which are likely to affect particular individuals are morally significant, must be augmented in such a way as to take into account the moral significance of Homo sapiens, a holistic entity which certainly does exist. Recent contributions to (...) Environmental Values by Alan Carter and Ernest Partridge are criticised (but not entirely rejected). (shrink)

The Affordable Care Act did not start the consolidation rapidly occurring with hospitals/health systems and medical groups, but it most definitely accelerated the movement to combine. In the last five years, the number and size of consolidations have been at an all-time high. This comment reviews the degree to which consolidation has occurred and explores the key reasons behind these consolidations. It then posits that consolidations should be evaluated in light of the Triple Aim goals of enhancing access to care, (...) reducing cost, and strengthening quality, and looks at the evidence to date in light of these goals. (shrink)