Music is a natural human expression present in all cultures, but the functions it serves are still debated. Previous research indicates that rhythm, an essential feature of music, can enhance coordination of movement and increase social bonding. However, the prolonged effects of rhythm have not yet been investigated. In this study, pairs of participants were exposed to one of three kinds of auditory stimuli (rhythmic, arrhythmic, or white‐noise) and subsequently engaged in five trials of a joint‐action task demanding interpersonal coordination. (...) We show that when compared with the other two stimuli, exposure to the rhythmic beat reduced the practice effect in task performance. Analysis of the behavioral data suggests that this reduction results from more temporally coupled motor movements over successive trials and that shared exposure to rhythm facilitates interpersonal motor coupling, which in this context serves to impede the attainment of necessary dynamic coordination. We propose that rhythm has the potential to enhance interpersonal motor coupling, which might serve as a mechanism behind its facilitation of positive social attitudes. (shrink)

Medical assistance in dying was legalized in Canada in 2016. As of July 2017, approximately 2149 patients have accessed MAID. There remains no national-level data on the perspectives of future physicians about MAID or its changing legal status. We provide evidence from a national survey of Canadian medical students about their opinions, intentions, and concerns about MAID. From October 2016 to July 2017, we distributed an anonymous online survey to all students at 15 of Canada’s 17 medical schools. The survey (...) collected data on respondent socio-demographic characteristics, features of their medical education, intentions for medical practice, and perspectives on MAID. We analyzed responses using univariate descriptive and stepwise multivariate logistic regression. In 1210 completed surveys, 71% of respondents reported being willing to provide MAID under a legal framework that permits it. Non-religious respondents reported greater willingness to participate in MAID than respondents of any religious affiliation. Frequency of religious attendance was inversely associated with willingness to provide MAID. Medical students born in Québec were more willing to provide MAID than respondents from other provinces. Age, sex, socioeconomic status, year of medical study, previous academic major, and rural/urban city of birth were not associated with willingness to provide MAID. As the current class of medical students becomes the first cohort of new physicians to enter Canada’s changing medical and legal landscape around MAID, our findings inform the public debate by examining attributes associated with support or opposition to the practice. (shrink)

The present article is an elaborated and upgraded version of the Early Career Award talk that I delivered at the IAPR 2019 conference in Gdańsk, Poland. In line with the conference’s thematic focus on new trends and neglected themes in psychology of religion, I argue that psychology of religion should strive for firmer integration with evolutionary theory and its associated methodological toolkit. Employing evolutionary theory enables to systematize findings from individual psychological studies within a broader framework that could resolve lingering (...) empirical contradictions by providing an ultimate rationale for which results should be expected. The benefits of evolutionary analysis are illustrated through the study of collective rituals and, specifically, their purported function in stabilizing risky collective action. By comparing the socio-ecological pressures faced by chimpanzees, contemporary hunter-gatherers, and early Homo, I outline the selective pressures that may have led to the evolution of collective rituals in the hominin lineage, and, based on these selective pressures, I make predictions regarding the different functions and their underlying mechanisms that collective rituals should possess. While examining these functions, I echo the Early Career Award and focus mostly on my past work and the work of my collaborators, showing that collective rituals may stabilize risky collective action by increasing social bonding, affording to assort cooperative individuals, and providing a platform for reliable communication of commitment to group norms. The article closes with a discussion of the role that belief in superhuman agents plays in stabilizing and enhancing the effects of collective rituals on trust-based cooperation. (shrink)

Humans have evolved various social behaviors such as interpersonal motor synchrony, play and sport or religious ritual that bolster group cohesion and facilitate cooperation. While important for small communities, the face-to-face nature of such technologies makes them infeasible in large-scale societies where risky cooperation between anonymous individuals must be enforced through moral judgment and, ultimately, altruistic punishment. However, the unbiased applicability of group norms is often jeopardized by moral hypocrisy, i.e., the application of moral norms in favor of closer subgroup (...) members such as key socioeconomic partners and kin. We investigated whether social behaviors that facilitate close ties between people also promote moral hypocrisy that may hamper large-scale group functioning. We recruited 129 student subjects that either interacted with a confederate in the high synchrony or low synchrony conditions or performed movements alone. Subsequently, participants judged a moral transgression committed by the confederate toward another anonymous student. The results showed that highly synchronized participants judged the confederate’s transgression less harshly than the participants in the other two conditions and that this effect was mediated by the perception of group unity with the confederate. We argue that for synchrony to amplify group identity in large-scale societies, it needs to be properly integrated with morally compelling group symbols that accentuate the group’s overarching identity. Without such contextualization, synchrony may create bonded subgroups that amplify local preferences rather than impartial and wide application of moral norms. (shrink)

In this paper, we outline the policy implications of mobile health research conducted at the international level. We describe the manner in which such research may have an international dimension and argue that it is not likely to be excluded from conventionally applicable international regulatory tools. We suggest that closer policy attention is needed for this rapidly proliferating approach to health research.

Machine learning is an increasingly significant part of modern healthcare, transforming the way clinical decisions are made and health resources are managed. These developme...

This study presents a web-based sentence comprehension test aimed at identifying high school students who are at risk for a language delay. By assessing linguistic skills on a sample of high school students with Italian as an L2 and their monolingual peers, attending a vocational school, we were able to identify a subgroup of L2 students with consistent difficulties in sentence comprehension, though their reading skills were within the average range. The same subgroup revealed to experience a lack of support (...) within the school context, suggesting that poor L2 skills might be a critical variable to consider in order to identify students at risk for school exclusion. Regarding the test, accuracy to the on-line sentence comprehension task was significantly predicted by reading abilities and vocabulary skills, thus indicating that this test might represent a rapid but efficient way to assess linguistic abilities at school. We recommend that establishing a valid and practical procedure for the evaluation of linguistic skills in bilingual students who struggle with their L2 is the first step towards promoting social inclusion in the multilingual classroom, in order to increase their ability to actively participate in school and social activities. (shrink)

The planetary boundaries concept has profoundly changed the vocabulary and representation of global environmental issues. The article starts by highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of planetary boundaries from a social science perspective. It is argued that the growth imperative of capitalist economies, as well as other particular characteristics detailed below, are the main drivers of the ecological crisis and exacerbated trends already underway. Further, the planetary boundaries framework can support interpretations that do not solely emphasize technocratic operational approaches and costs, (...) but also assume that these alone can be the solution. (shrink)

The notion of societal boundaries aims to enhance the debate on planetary boundaries. The focus is on capitalist societies as a heuristic for discussing the expansionary dynamics, power relations, and lock-ins of modern societies that impel highly unsustainable societal relations with nature. While formulating societal boundaries implies a controversial process – based on normative judgments, ethical concerns, and socio-political struggles – it has the potential to offer guidelines for a just, social-ecological transformation.

Thucydides' account of the Athenian general Phrynichus' secret correspondence with the Spartan admiral Astyochus is both troubling and obscure. It may be summarized as follows: Phrynichus, having eloquently opposed Alcibiades' efforts to be recalled from exile and fearing that a repatriated Alcibiades would take vengeance on him, wrote to Astyochus revealing Alcibiades' pro-Athenian activities. Astyochus handed the letter to Alcibiades, who then wrote to the ranking Athenians on Samos concerning Phrynichus' ‘treason’ and demanded his execution. Phrynichus then wrote again to (...) Astyochus, now proposing to make it possible for the Spartans to destroy the whole Athenian force at Samos. (shrink)

Foreword The collection of research papers in this book is a selection made from those which were presented at the eighth conference of the International ...

The EARN Theory of Well-Being includes a practical model for ascertaining and analyzing the well-being of individuals or groups; in its most recent iteration, EARN Theory includes insights from Lang's Network Theory of Well-Being, Revamped, which states that well-being is a matter of instantiating a holistically authentic positive causal network. Both EARN Theory and the Network Theory of Well-Being, Revamped are informed by the science of well-being and guided by a sense of justice. Presented as an inference to the best (...) explanation, the argument for EARN Theory is naturalistic while also inclusive of existential and moral considerations. EARN Theory gives us something to strive for where our well-being is concerned, and it helps us to articulate personal and societal reasons that our well-being gets derailed or diminished at times. EARN Theory has numerous practical applications, including philosophy-based consulting, self-help endeavors, and public policy reform that promotes a renewed notion of justice. (shrink)

There are in the Iliad nine examples of individuals, either human or divine, who recount their ancestry in some detail. The overlap of situation, assertion and vocabulary among these nine examples seems to be sufficient to constitute a theme of lineage-boasting.

This paper examines the current interest in ‘art activism’, and the relationship between artistic expression and civil disobedience. Boris Groys has argued that the lack of political dissidence within contemporary art is not down to the ineffectiveness of the aesthetic, but the far more effective intrusion of the aesthetic by the political. As such, the political question of civil disobedience is necessarily an aesthetic one. At the same time, this raises problems for how politically effective artistic dissidence can be. As (...) Grindon argues, if art activism often only mimics ‘real’ social activism, it remains within the boundaries of the gallery system with no real consequences. Most art activism fails to be effective civil disobedience, in this sense, as it already operates within the confines of pre-established curatorial spaces. As such, the use of art for the purposes of civil disobedience cannot be, then, mere aestheticism, but rather must act as ‘an insight into the transformed mechanisms of conquest’ : a conflict over the topology of disobedience which exposes the interrelation of aesthetics and politics through medium, space and archive. This paper critically assesses attempts in contemporary art to re-appropriate the symbolic dimension of dissidence as an aesthetic; in particular the use of militancy, asceticism and dissidence as an attempt to move beyond mere counter-political protest and towards a reclaiming of aesthetics from the intrusions of politics. It uses as a specific case example Militant Training Camp, a social experimental performance camp held at Arcadia Missa Gallery in London, March 2012. This weeklong performance piece was designed to explore the activity and mind-set of militant groups and the idea of non-pacifist activity within wider social movements. Engaging with not only the tradition of anarchist activism, but also more recent artistic engagements with civil disobedience, the camp involved a residential ascetic ‘training programme’ followed by a series of violent performances open to the public, often disturbing other sites of protest such as Anarchist theatres and Occupy sites in the process. The paper uses first-hand documentary evidence and critical reflection on the event in order to argue that, as both an act of civil disobedience, and an exploration of the limits of its aesthetic treatment, the event raises two specific issues surrounding the notion of disobedience and its conceptual possibilities. The first issue is the representation of rage within the context of art activism. Here, the performance is discussed with particular reference to Sloterdijk’s arguments that argues that militancy and revolt operate under a ‘thymotic economy’. However, Sloterdijk’s re-appropriation of the thymotic – a conceptualising of ‘rage’ which is not absorbed within the sublimination of psychology or Habermasian symbolism – is not as simple as offering an alternative, ‘non-symbolic’ rage. Given that modern militancy is always subject to containment, the second issue raised is the formative role of ‘curating’ acts of disobedience. Using the work of Groys on aesthetics and power, the paper assesses how ‘events’ of civil disobedience such as Militant Training Camp are located, represented, circulated and even stored, and the ways in which they might resist their reduction to or supplementing of a further economy which conceals the formative ‘rage’ of disobedience. (shrink)

As far as we know, the 5th-century B.C. Greek philosopher Socrates himself wrote nothing. We discover his thoughts and deeds entirely through the writings of his followers, disciples who accompanied him on his walks through the Athenian Agora and engaged in dialogue with him in the Stoa Basileios. Rather than examining his ideas in abstract, this stimulating little book aims to place Socrates in his physical setting, using textual references to follow his progress through the material remains that have been (...) uncovered by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens since 1931. The author not only sheds new light on the great philosopher's life, but also provides a vivid reconstruction, through following the career of one of its most famous citizens, of daily life at the center of classical Athens. (shrink)

Cameroon’s post-independence era has so far been marked by an upsurge in the number of Christian churches. This proliferation of Catholic, Protestant, and Pentecostal churches is probably the product of the heightened desire for spirituality. These churches, according to public opinion, are expected to be epicenters of good moral values and Christian behavior. Unfortunately, this has not always been the case. The present article seeks to point out that the establishment and growth of some indigenous denominations has been impacted by (...) corruption. The Presbyterian Church in Cameroon is a case in point. This article draws extensively from archival and oral sources and seeks to examine the causes and manifestations of corruption in the PCC. It also examines the effects of corruption on the Church and provides some recommendations to address this. The article concludes that Church elections, Church property, Church management, and integrity in leadership are crucial issues within the PCC around which corruption rotates. Hence, it suggests a multidimensional anti-corruption approach as the way out. (shrink)

ORTSBESTIMMUNG DER PHILOSOPHISCHEN GRAMMATIK I. Absicht dieser Arbeit ist es, ein wenig Licht in die teils komischen, teils lebensgefahrlichen Aspekte der Aufsplitterung unseres Lebens in h eines vor und in eines nach 17 zu bringen, und zwar anhand des Ent­ wicklungsgangs der Wittgensteinschen Philosophischen Grammatik. Das aufgezeigte Problem kursiert unter vielen Titeln und Etiketten: Theorie und Praxis, Wissen und Glauben, Beruf und Freizeit o. a. Diese Auf­ zahlungen mochten allerdings kein Unvermogen des Verfassers andeuten, sich auf einen Titel festzulegen. Vielmehr (...) ist es ein wichtiges Resultat Wittgensteinschen Philosophierens, dass verschiedene Sinne nicht selbiges vermeinen, insofern sie denselben Gegenstand meinen, sondern sofern sich der Sinn als Sinn durchhalt, d. i. als Gebrauch im umlaufist. Insofern der Verfasser mit Wittgenstein die Partikel »d. h. «, »d. i. «, »m. a. W. « und ahnliche flir das Philosophieren flir konstitutiv und eigentlimlich halt, also, mithin die Bestimmung »Sinn ist Sinn als Sinn«l zu erfiillen ver­ sucht (trotz der penetranten Haufung in einer derartigen Exposition), konnen die Untersuchungen zunachst als »subjektiv«, bzw. »transzen­ dental« bezeichnet werden. Die nahere Lokalisierung des Themas wird in drei Zligen vorgenommen: das populare Gegensatzpaar »Ideologie« und »Wissenschaft« fiihrt uns zu den in einer bestimmten philosophischen Tradition fixierten Begriffen »Lebenswelt« und »technische Welt«, deren Widerstreit wiederum von L. £ley auf das ungeklarte Verhaltnis von Phanomenologie und Logik zurlickgefUhrt worden ist. Nach dieser Orts­ bestimmung wird hoffentlich einigermassen verstandlich, dass die Kenn­ zeichnung Wittgensteins als eines Aufldarers nicht nur nicht logische Untersuchungen verbietet, sondern sie vielmehr notwendig macht. (shrink)

ORTSBESTIMMUNG DER PHILOSOPHISCHEN GRAMMATIK I. Absicht dieser Arbeit ist es, ein wenig Licht in die teils komischen, teils lebensgefährlichen Aspekte der Aufsplitterung unseres Lebens in h eines vor und in eines nach I7 zu bringen, und zwar anhand des Ent­ wicklungsgangs der Wittgensteinschen Philosophischen Grammatik. Das aufgezeigte Problem kursiert unter vielen Titeln und Etiketten: Theorie und Praxis, Wissen und Glauben, Beruf und Freizeit o. ä. Diese Auf­ zählungen möchten allerdings kein Unvermögen des Verfassers andeuten, sich auf einen Titel festzulegen. Vielmehr (...) ist es ein wichtiges Resultat Wittgensteinschen Philosophierens, dass verschiedene Sinne nicht selbiges vermeinen, insofern sie denselben Gegenstand meinen, sondern sofern sich der Sinn als Sinn durchhält, d. i. als Gebrauch im Umlauf ist. Insofern der Verfasser mit Wittgenstein die Partikel »d. h. «, »d. i. «, »m. a. W. « und ähnliche für das Philosophieren für konstitutiv und eigentümlich hält, also, mithin die Bestimmung »Sinn ist Sinn als Sinn«! zu erfüllen ver­ sucht (trotz der penetranten Häufung in einer derartigen Exposition), können die Untersuchungen zunächst als »subjektiv«, bzw. »transzen­ dental« bezeichnet werden. Die nähere Lokalisierung des Themas wird in drei Zügen vorgenommen: das populäre Gegensatzpaar »Ideologie« lmd »Wissenschaft« führt uns zu den in einer bestimmten philosophischen Tradition fixierten Begriffen »Lebenswelt« und »technische Welt«, deren Widerstreit wiederum von L. Eley auf das ungeklärte Verhältnis von Phänomenologie und Logik zurückgeführt worden ist. Nach dieser Orts­ bestimmung wird hoffentlich einigermassen verständlich, dass die Kenn­ zeichnung Wittgensteins als eines Aufklärers nicht nur nicht logische Untersuchungen verbietet, sondern sie vielmehr notwendig macht. (shrink)

Ethical concerns are motivating the search for alternative methods to obtain pluripotent stem cells without destroying human embryos. The supporters of these methods stress the importance of ensuring that the biological entities used in these alternative methods are not “disabled or sick human embryos.” In this article the authors argue that biological entities bearing anomalies or alterations that directly inhibit the appearance of neural activity (DIANA anomalies) share the moral status of human organisms fulfilling the clinical criteria for brain death. (...) By contrast, in the absence of DIANA anomalies, the moral status of a person cannot be denied. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 7.2 (Spring 2007): 315–335. (shrink)

As multilevel selection theory has gained greater acceptance over the past quarter-century, scientists and scholars have shown an increased interest in the theory's historical antecedents. Despite this interest, however, the early twentieth century remains largely unexplored. It is generally assumed that biologists thought "naively" about evolutionary dynamics during this era, and that their attempts to explain biological phenomena often lacked sophistication. Now that several recent works have called attention to the complex relationship between biological individuality and the levels of selection, (...) we believe it will prove instructive to revisit these early-twentieth-century biologists and reassess their criteria for biological individuality. Doing so reveals that they constructed a multilevel explanation of evolution that anticipated modern interpretations in several important ways. Though it is certainly true that most of these early biologists failed to recognize natural selection's pervasive agency, it is no less true that one of them, termite expert Alfred Emerson, artfully united the multilevel theory of "emergent evolution" with natural selection in a way that differs but little from the theory of multilevel selection that many scientists and scholars now promote. After reviewing the historical record, we place these early-twentieth-century biologists in their proper historical context, and we compare their interpretation of evolution with modern interpretations. (shrink)