Planning allows us to coordinate our actions over time, and the ability to plan is crucial in many areas of our lives. I argue that while planning is deeply embedded in contemporary societies, not all individuals have equal access to the structures that support such planning. This article explores how external planning-support structures are essential to our capacity to plan and how inequality in access to these structures can impact an individual's ability to deliberate and pursue long-term plans. I conclude (...) by suggesting that we need to think more deeply about unequal access to the structures that support planning directly, not just inequality in resources. (shrink)

I argue that folk psychology does not serve the purpose of facilitating prediction of others' behaviour but if facilitating cooperative action. (See my subsequent book *The Importance of Being Understood*.

Upward mobility through the path of higher education has been an article of faith for generations of working-class, low-income, and immigrant college students. While we know this path usually entails financial sacrifices and hard work, very little attention has been paid to the deep personal compromises such students have to make as they enter worlds vastly different from their own. Measuring the true cost of higher education for those from disadvantaged backgrounds, Moving Up without Losing Your Way looks at the (...) ethical dilemmas of upward mobility—the broken ties with family and friends, the severed connections with former communities, and the loss of identity—faced by students as they strive to earn a successful place in society. -/- Drawing upon philosophy, social science, personal stories, and interviews, Jennifer Morton reframes the college experience, factoring in not just educational and career opportunities but also essential relationships with family, friends, and community. Finding that student strivers tend to give up the latter for the former, negating their sense of self, Morton seeks to reverse this course. She urges educators to empower students with a new narrative of upward mobility—one that honestly situates ethical costs in historical, social, and economic contexts and that allows students to make informed decisions for themselves. -/- A powerful work with practical implications, Moving Up without Losing Your Way paves a hopeful road so that students might achieve social mobility while retaining their best selves. (shrink)

Three architectural members made of tufa, found by chance in the region of ancient Abdera, are published in this study. They revive the type of the Ionic capital in antis, known at Didyma and on Samos. They consist of three semicylindrical horizontal elements placed one above the other, with a leaf-and-dart profile, the ends of which correspond with three volutes superimposed on the sides of the capitals. Capitals of this type generally adorn the antae of altars in Π, but also (...) other structures. Two of the capitals from Abdera adorned with three-leaf palmettes between the volutes are incomplete and probably constituted a pair: the form of the volutes implies a date about 480 BC. The third capital combines Archaic, conservative features with later ones and may be dated about 460 BC. The workmanship of the back of these capitals, the construction details, and the lack of excavation data can not suggest a safe relation to altars or other buildings. (shrink)

The last years have seen a surge of scandals in financial intermediation. This article argues that the agency structure inherent to most forms of financial intermediation gives rise to conflicts of interest. Though this does not excuse scandalous behavior it points out market imperfections. There are four types of conflicts of interest: personal-individual, personal-organizational, impersonal-individual, and finally, impersonal-organizational conflicts. Analyzing recent scandals we find that all four types of conflicts of interest prevail in financial intermediation.

The Sustained Attention to Response Task is a Go–No-Go signal detection task developed to measure lapses of sustained conscious attention. In this study, we examined the impact global interference and spatial uncertainty has on SART performance. Ten participants performed either a SART or a traditionally formatted version of a global–local stimuli detection task with spatially certain and uncertain signals. Reaction time in the SART was insensitive to global interference and spatial uncertainty, whereas reaction time in the low-Go task was sensitive. (...) Spatial uncertainty increased errors of omission in the SART, which was not expected if the SART measures mindlessness. There was a high correlation between participants’ errors of commission rate and their reaction time in the SART. The results, overall, support the view that the SART is a better measure of response strategy than lapses in sustained attention or mindlessness. (shrink)

This paper explores the application of ethic of care principles to research practice. It reflects on a research partnership between a voluntary-sector organisation (VSO) for older people and a university research centre (URC). The focus is a participatory research project on older people and well-being in which older volunteers were involved as co-researchers. The shared values of the VSO's culture of practice and the participatory approach of the university researchers have enabled joint research projects to be developed within an ethic (...) of care framework. The model sought to break down the barriers between expert and lay knowledge and encouraged the mutual recognition, sharing and validating of different areas of expertise. An ethic of care framework offers context-specific ways of understanding and responding to the ethical challenges of undertaking participatory research, and to the relational aspects of well-being identified by older people during the course of the work. (shrink)

To investigate whether making performance predictions affects prospective memory processing, we asked one group of participants to predict their performance in a PM task embedded in an ongoing task and compared their performance with a control group that made no predictions. A third group gave not only PM predictions but also ongoing-task predictions. Exclusive PM predictions resulted in slower ongoing-task responding both in a nonfocal and in a focal PM task. Only in the nonfocal task was the additional slowing accompanied (...) by improved PM performance. Even in the nonfocal task, however, was the correlation between ongoing-task speed and PM performance reduced after predictions, suggesting that the slowing was not completely functional for PM. Prediction-induced changes could be avoided by asking participants to additionally predict their performance in the ongoing task. In sum, the present findings substantiate a role of metamemory for attention-allocation strategies of PM. (shrink)

This chapter discusses four ways in which the question of the price of a choice can arise: one trivial, one about risk, one awful, and one moral. It is very hard to compare the awfulness of a choice to the desirability or undesirability of the things one is choosing between. The undesirability of having to choose between loyalty to the child and opposition to terrorism seems to be incomparable both to the loyalty and to the opposition. The final decision is (...) made with the valuation one would use if forced to make a choice between all the options, and along the way to this final decision one discards less trusted valuations. The chapter also considers agenda‐manipulating strategies. They deal with a decision‐making situation by structuring the comparisons that are to be made in order to think it through. Agenda‐manipulation will arise naturally in many dilemma‐managing strategies. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungIm Spielfilm Never Let Me Go werden Klone als vulnerable und heteronome Individuen dargestellt, die zur anonymen Organspende gezwungen werden. In diesem Beitrag wird die Darstellung dieser Figuren in ihrer individuellen Entwicklung und gesellschaftlichen Sozialisation unter der Frage untersucht, welche Bezüge sich zu bioethischen Aspekten ergeben. Die Klone befinden sich in einer Situation der „privilegierten Deprivation“: Aus Sicht der Zuschauer sind sie sozial benachteiligt und können sich nicht zu komplett autonomen Wesen entwickeln, aber aus ihrer eigenen Perspektive sind sie im (...) dystopischen System immer noch „privilegiert“. Wir argumentieren, dass dieser Film auf symbolische Weise diejenigen Individuen fokussiert, die vom medizinischen Fortschritt nicht profitieren oder die nicht genügend Handlungsspielraum haben, um sich gegen geltende Praxen zu positionieren. Filme wie Never Let Me Go können deshalb ein Beitrag sein, um die Perspektive marginalisierter Personen im medizinischen System einzunehmen. (shrink)

For all of recorded history prior to the second half of the twentieth century, there has been but one realm in which the cognitive processes of reasoning and problem solving, learning and discovery, language and mathematics took place. The realm of human intellect no longer has an exclusive claim on these cognitive processes--artificial intelligence represents a parallel claim. Wagman compares the two realms, focusing on each of the major components of cognition: logic, reasoning, problem-solving, language, memory, learning, and discovery. He (...) identifies consonant and disparate modes of cognition, and develops a general theory of human and artificial intelligence. (shrink)

Pain: the most senseless of things or the most vital of phenomena? This essay aims at a defense of the meaning of pain through an inquiry into the ek-static temporality that structures a being-in-pain. The argument considers the common understanding of pain as a symptom. As the present result of a source of injury that demands a cure, a being-in-pain pictures a movement from something to something else, that is, it pictures the ek-static structure discovered by Aristotle. Furthermore, the argument (...) recalls the Aristotelian apprehension of pain as responsible for the innermost secret of dynamics as such. Pain causes unease and demands change, and hence it opens up a future dimension that marks a beginning of motion and change in general, and of time in particular. When confronted with a pain bound to be chronic, when no change can be expected, time remains. The concluding reading of witness-literature, supports the guiding intuition of pain as a passion in service of things forgotten, in futural light of an eventually new beginning. (shrink)

The thoughts of apocalypse can either be intense and demanding, or lead to the risk of abandoning the present to a state of inertia and impotence. The apocalypse can be, in fact, the moment of the Last Judgment. In this case, justice is related to the revelation of truth. But the apocalypse can also be the revelation of the end of any truth, i.e. the revelation that the history doesn’t have any meaning, that the end is as endless as it (...) is hopeless. This article takes up “the apocalypse of Blanchot.” It shows that by thinking that the apocalypse has always already occurred, history is not what leads to an end, but is rather the responsibility to an endless end. In that sense, for Blanchot, history is not the redemption of contingency as eternity; rather, what must be historicized is the eternity of the end. (shrink)

I am primarily concerned here with C. I. Lewis's suggestion in a letter to me that some admitted defects in his ethical views might be removed by appealing to Peirce's views on the summum bonum, which Peirce identified as the evolutionary process whereby the universe becomes more and more orderly. Since Lewis held in his published writings that what is morally obligatory can never be determined by empirical facts alone, I argue that since the alleged growing orderliness of the universe (...) must be established empirically, Lewis cannot analyze an obligatory action as one that contributes to that process without abandoning his view that obligatoriness cannot be established empirically. I also argue that if Lewis were to abandon his opposition to a naturalistic theory of obligation, appealing to Peirce's summum bonum would not help Lewis out of what he called his predicament in ethics. (shrink)

The paper reports on the state of Polish and Belarusian scientists’ research on eighteenth century reconstruction and pictorial decorations of the Corpus Christ Church in Nieśwież. On the basis of the inquiry conducted based on Belarusian, Polish and American archives, the author forms a new hypothesis that the reconstruction and church decoration was done by a North Italian architect, Maurizio Pedetti. This hypothesis reveals the network of European artistic and ideological connections, part of which became Nieśwież through the artistic patronage (...) of the Radziwiłł family. (shrink)

Kunst als Projektionsfläche, Kunst als Ausdruck, Kunst als Gesellschaftskritik: Die Beitragenden dieses Bandes reflektieren unterschiedliche Dimensionen und Spannungslinien des Verhältnisses von Kunst und Kritik und untersuchen dabei das künstlerische Gestaltungs- und Inszenierungspotenzial aus interdisziplinärer Perspektive. Mit der Verflechtung von wissenschaftlichen Beiträgen und Kunstperformances erschliessen sie eine Bandbreite an unterschiedlichen Bedeutungszusammenhängen und Entwicklungsdynamiken von zentralen Diskursen der Kunstlandschaft unter Berücksichtigung u.a. architektonischer, philosophischer, kunsthistorischer, musikwissenschaftlicher und aktionistischer Aspekte"--Back cover.

William Connolly, one of the best-known and most important political theorists writing today, is a principal architect of the “new pluralism.” In this volume, leading thinkers in contemporary political theory and international relations provide a comprehensive investigation of the new pluralism, Connolly’s contributions to it, and its influence on the fields of political theory and international relations. Together they trace the evolution of Connolly’s ideas, illuminating his challenges to the “old,” conventional pluralist theory that dominated American and British political science (...) and sociology in the second half of the twentieth century. The contributors show how Connolly has continually revised his ideas about pluralism to take into account radical changes in global politics, incorporate new theories of cognition, and reflect on the centrality of religion in political conflict. They engage his arguments for an agonistic democracy in which all fundamentalisms become the objects of politicization, so that differences are not just tolerated but are productive of debate and the creative source of a politics of becoming. They also explore the implications of his work, often challenging his views to widen the reach of even his most recently developed theories. Connolly’s new pluralism will provoke all citizens who refuse to subordinate their thinking to the regimes in which they reside, to religious authorities tied to the state, or to corporate interests tied to either. _The New Pluralism_ concludes with an interview with Connolly in which he reflects on the evolution of his ideas and expands on his current work. _Contributors_: Roland Bleiker, Wendy Brown, David Campbell, William Connolly, James Der Derian, Thomas L. Dumm, Kathy E. Ferguson, Bonnie Honig, George Kateb, Morton Schoolman Michael J. Shapiro, Stephen K. White. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungDie Verbreitung kommerzieller Leihmutterschaft und ihr wachsender globaler Markt hat zu einer breiten Diskussion sowohl unter Wissenschaftlern als auch unter Aktivisten geführt. In diesem Aufsatz eröffnen wir durch die Auseinandersetzung mit einem Dokumentarfilm ethische Fragen, die mit der transnationalen indischen Leihmutterschaft in Verbindung stehen. Über den filmisch präsentierten Alltag von Leihmüttern wird deutlich, dass der Diskurs über kommerzielle Leihmutterschaft einer sensiblen Kontextualisierung für den spezifischen indischen Kontext bedarf. Die Perspektive von Surabhi Sharma bereichert die Diskussion, da sie den Zusammenhang von (...) Leihmutterschaft und Arbeit fokussiert. Dabei werden nicht nur die physischen Risiken betrachtet, denen Leihmütter ausgesetzt sind, sondern auch ihre soziale Vulnerabilität. (shrink)

Conformational changes of proteins and other biomolecules play a fundamental role in their functional mechanism. Single pair Förster resonance energy transfer offers the possibility to detect these conformational changes and dynamics, and to characterize their underlying kinetics. Using spFRET on microscopes with different modes of detection, dynamic timescales ranging from nanoseconds to seconds can be quantified. Confocal microscopy can be used as a means to analyze dynamics in the range of nanoseconds to milliseconds, while total internal reflection fluorescence microscopy offers (...) information about conformational changes on timescales of milliseconds to seconds. While the existence of dynamics can be directly inferred from the FRET efficiency time trace or the correlation of FRET efficiency and fluorescence lifetime, additional computational approaches are required to extract the kinetic rates of these dynamics, a short overview of which is given in this review. The functional mechanism of proteins is often driven by underlying conformational changes. These intramolecular changes and dynamics can be investigated using single pair Förster resonance energy transfer. The kinetic timescales of the dynamics in the range of nanoseconds to seconds is then quantified using different experimental and analytical implementations. (shrink)

We continue the program of looking for increased complexity within aesthetic field theory. We study a solution with five planar maxima and minima. Another solution in which we counted 19 planar maxima and minima is also studied. This latter solution was obtained by modifying our previous principles by allowing for an arbitrariness associated with the integration path in conjunction with the equation Γ jk:1 i =0.