Training can influence behavioral performance and lead to brain reorganization. In particular, training in one modality, for example, auditory, can improve performance in another modality, for example, visual. Previous research suggests that one of the mechanisms behind this phenomenon could be the cross-modal recruitment of the sensory areas, for example, the auditory cortex. Studying expert musicians offers a chance to explore this process. Rhythm is an aspect of music that can be presented in various modalities. We designed an fMRI experiment (...) in which professional pianists and non-musicians discriminated between two sequences of rhythms presented auditorily or visually. Behavioral results showed that musicians performed in both visual and auditory rhythmic tasks better than non-musicians. We found no significant between-group differences in fMRI activations within the auditory cortex. However, we observed that musicians had increased activation in the right Inferior Parietal Lobe when compared to non-musicians. We conclude that the musicians’ superior visual rhythm discrimination is not related to cross-modal recruitment of the auditory cortex; instead, it could be related to activation in higher-level, multimodal areas in the cortex. (shrink)

This paper considers the similarities between Adam Smith's device of the impartial spectator and the use of perspectival devices in common law reasoning. The paper adopts a reading of Smith's device as one involving the exercise of imaginative sympathy by an ordinarily virtuous, and culturally and historically situated, spectator who does not have a stake in the outcome of the scene being evaluated. The point here is to show that the impartial spectator is 1) a device of common, ordinary virtue (...) – both in the sense of being located in a culture at a specific point in time, and in the sense of possessing only moderate, achievable virtues ; and 2) a device that enables a focus on a situation, which requires imaginative work, emotional engagement and careful, particularised description. Having so modelled Smith's device, the paper shows the similarities between it and the use of perspectival devices in common law reasoning, specifically here via the ‘right-thinking member of society' test in defamation law. (shrink)

The paper presented here illustrates the issue of philosophy within the contemporary practice of American medicine. Four forms of relationship between both disciplines will be discussed: philosophy and medicine, philosophy within medicine, medical philosophy, and philosophy of medicine. The aim of the paper is to illustrate the specificity of the proposed forms of relationship, i.e. the contrast between the autonomous approach of the both disciplines and the realistic philosophy of medicine promoted by Edmund D. Pellegrin, which closely links the issue (...) of the nature and theory of medicine with the undertaking of philosophical reflection. The issue of the topicality of Edmund D. Pellegrin's philosophy of medicine in the context of the current challenges of American health care will also be discussed. (shrink)

The presented article illustrates David DeGrazia’s bioethical standpoint regarding the theoretical and the practical problem of memory in the context of the personal identity of a patient suffering from Alzheimer's disease. The first part of the article is a presentation of the theoretical problem of memory in the context of numerical and narrative identity being the center of the metaphysical theory of the human person. The second part of the article presents a practical memory problem in the bioethical case of (...) a patient diagnosed with early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. The American bioethicist and philosopher David DeGrazia proposes that the theoretical solutions regarding the identity of the human person find their practical application in bioethics in resolving moral dilemmas in the health care. The final part of the article focuses on criticizing the possibilities of practical applications of theoretical solutions on the subject of the human person in the bioethical position of David DeGrazia. (shrink)

As behavioural economics reveals, human decision-making deviates from neoclassical assumptions about human behaviour and people (often) fail to make the ‘right’ welfare-enhancing choice. The purpose of Sunstein and Thaler’s concept of ‘nudge’ is to improve individual welfare. To provide normative justification, they argue that the only relevant normative criterion is whether the individual is ‘better off as judged by themselves’, so that the direction in which people are to be nudged is defined by their own preferences. In light of behavioural (...) findings, however, people’s choices do not provide a sound basis for eliciting preferences and thus for assessing welfare. In this paper, I aim to challenge Sunstein and Thaler’s normative view, arguing that it is unreasonable to rely on conventional welfare economics, particularly considering the given context. Sunstein and Thaler depend on an approach of ‘preference purification’ which assumes informed, latent, and true preferences: As a result they face crucial methodological, epistemological, and practical objections, and cannot show how their approach enhances individual welfare. By building on the concepts of R. Sugden and C. Schubert, I develop an alternative normative framework for behavioural public policy, based on a contractualist perspective in which people may consent to collective choice rules in order to align future behaviour with values, to achieve particular goals or to preserve personal integrity. Individual consent and citizens’ participation and deliberation are crucial to this approach. This contractualist approach may provide a normative justification for behavioural public policy, and help to reconcile behavioural and normative economics. (shrink)

New technologies not only contribute greatly to society and the economy; they also involve fundamental societal shifts, challenging our values and ideas about ourselves and the world. With a view to aligning technological change and innovation with ethical values, the concept of responsible innovation advocates the inclusion of a variety of stakeholders, in particular from society. In shifting moral responsibility towards the producers of innovations, responsible innovation rejects the standard normative economic view that the ethical evaluation of innovations is a (...) matter of individual consumers’ market-based choices. However, in this article we argue that responsible innovation should not abandon all normative consideration of the individual outright, to which end we present an alternative normative economic approach based on preference learning. We show how this approach can provide an enhanced understanding of responsible innovation by clarifying the redistribution of moral responsibility and casting individuals in the normative role of co-innovators, rather than mere consumers. We argue that responsible innovation should enable individuals to form preferences and evaluate innovations, so as to align innovation with ethical demands. Finally, we show how our proposed approach can be put into practice in so-called laboratories in real-world contexts, using methods from the field of design. In short, drawing on normative economics, this article aims to establish a new understanding of responsible innovation that is conceptually sound and can form the basis for novel innovation practices. (shrink)

Ethical Politics and Modern Society introduces and critically examines British idealist philosopher, Thomas Hill Green, his practical philosophy and its reception in China between the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. As a response to the modernity issue in Great Britain, Green's philosophy, in particular his ethical politics, anticipated a practical solution to the individual alienation issue in modern society. Witnessing the resemblance between Green's ethical politics and classical Chinese ethical and political thought, some Chinese scholars became inclined (...) to take Green's thought as an intellectual approach to assimilate Western modernity. While Green and the Chinese scholars both intended to articulate an ethical conception of modern politics in response to the issue of modernity, their results were very different. In this book, James Jia-Hau Liu analyses why modern Chinese scholars introduced Green's philosophy to China and why the studies of Green's philosophy in China have since faded away. Modern Chinese scholars, such as Gao Yi-Han, Chin Yueh-Lin, Tang Jun-Yi, Chang Fo-Chuan and Yin Hai-Guang, are explored in greater detail. The contradictory standings towards modernity between Green and Chinese scholars illustrate how to understand the difference forms of modernity that can be embodied therein. Ethical Politics and Modern Society is a valuable resource to scholars of political philosophy, political theory, history of social and political thought, British Idealism and the work of Thomas Hill Green. (shrink)

In October 2019, the Belgian government announced the opening of an asylum center in a former retirement home, leading to civic and political protest that escalated into arson. We examine the construction of the events before, on, and after the arson by analyzing 135 articles from Flemish newspapers, the public broadcaster’s news website, and alternative media between October 25 and November 30, 2019 using qualitative content analysis. Our analysis emphasizes journalists’ role as gatekeepers, deciding which actors get access and legitimation (...) in media coverage. Focus is on the dynamic process of how events become discursively constructed through the interventions of journalists and their sources attempting to gain primary definer status. Our analysis confirms that institutional sources remain more likely to achieve primary definer status in legacy news media. Alternative media perform similar discursive interventions as legacy news media but utilize them to provide access and legitimacy to different actors and standpoints. In the first days of news coverage, in particular, the narratives developed in right-leaning alternative media seemed to spread in legacy news media. In the following days, governmental actors and experts, through their interventions in legacy news media, were able to steer the discourse in a different direction. (shrink)

The negative co‐variation of life‐history traits such as fecundity and lifespan across species suggests the existence of ubiquitous trade‐offs. Mechanistically, trade‐offs result from the need to differentially allocate limited resources to traits like reproduction versus self‐maintenance, with selection favoring the evolution of optimal allocation mechanism. Here I discuss the physiological (endocrine) mechanisms that underlie optimal allocation rules and how such rules evolve. The hormone testosterone may mediate life‐history trade‐offs due to its pleiotropic actions in male vertebrates. Conservation in the actions (...) of testosterone in vertebrates has prompted the ‘evolutionary constraint hypothesis,’ which assumes that testosterone signaling mechanisms and male traits evolve as a unit. This hypothesis implies that the actions of testosterone are similar across sexes and species, and only the levels of circulating testosterone concentrations change during evolution. In contrast, the ‘evolutionary potential hypothesis’ proposes that testosterone signaling mechanisms and male traits evolve independently. In the latter scenario, the linkage between hormone and traits itself can be shaped by selection, leading to variation in trade‐off functions. I will review recent case studies supporting the evolutionary potential hypothesis and suggest micro‐evolutionary experiments to unravel the mechanistic basis of life‐history evolution. BioEssays 29: 133–144, 2007. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

This essay examines the use of fictions in the reasoning of the House of Lords and United Kingdom Supreme Court in the context of two recent lines of authority on English tort law. First, the essay explores the relevance of counter-factual scenarios to liability in the tort of false imprisonment, in the light of the Supreme Court decisions in Lumba and Kambadzi. The second series of decisions is on causation in negligence claims arising from asbestos exposure. These cases have revealed (...) fundamental, ongoing judicial disagreement about the nature and extent of the exceptions made to general principles. The cases are also shown to lend force to Del Mar’s argument about the diachronicity of legal fictions. Overall, it is argued that such fictions play an important role in common law reasoning. (shrink)

The papers selected for this volume offer a panorama of problems and methods at the intersection of legal theory and the humanities. The issues addressed include the role of the emotions and the imagination in legal reasoning, and the protection of the diversity of voices and perspective in the name of community. The articles balance renewed calls to humanise legal theory with those that analyse and explore the relevance of specific domains of the humanities - such as literature, architecture, music, (...) painting, drawing and film - for law. (shrink)

This collection brings together the most important and influential papers theorising the changing relationship between law and science. The articles span historical overviews of the attempts by legal scholars to model legal science on scientific methodology, and the efforts by legal philosophers scrutinising the claims made on behalf of genetics and neuroscience as to their implications for law and legal concepts. The volume strikes a balance between those that seek to protect law's autonomy against the perceived unwelcome inroads of science, (...) and those that seek to shape and change law by incorporating the latest scientific developments. (shrink)

Judging Virtuously: Developing an Empathic Capacity for Perceptual Sensitivity: A Review of Amalia Amaya and Ho Hock Lai , Law, Virtue and Justice.

This article explains the attempts of nurses to practice humanistic, holistic care in line with their professionalizing strategy. Ideally, the intention of nurses is to broaden their concerns beyond the physiological needs of patients, thereby circumventing biomedical control over their work. However, the author argues that resource constraints, and the coalescing of biomedical and managerial definitions of patients, suggest that holistic notions of care are subjected to a new form of calculus and normalizing technology. Critically, nurses are more preoccupied with (...) the day-to-day struggle to free up resources for healthcare, in particular bed spaces, and to pre-empt the problem of bed blocking. Such work suggests that the ‘emptying of beds’ is not just a symbol of accomplishment for nursing work. From the governmentality theory of Foucault, the administration of ‘beds’ has become part of the managerial power/knowledge discourse and an instrument for making nurses toe the financial bottom-line. (shrink)

This essay argues that the practical reason approach to the study of social conventions (and social normativity more generally) fails to adequately account for the fluency of social action in environments that we experience as familiar. The practical reason approach, articulated most recently in Andrei Marmor’s Social Conventions: From Language to Law (2009) does help us, though not wholly adequately, to understand how we tend to react to, and experience, unfamiliar situations or unfamiliar behaviors, that is, those situations in which (...) a certain practice becomes problematic or is problematized, or where we are obliged to, or moved to, justify or deliberate. The reason why the practical reason approach is not wholly adequate when it comes to understanding unfamiliar situations or unfamiliar behaviors is that it tends to subsume the unfamiliar under the familiar, that is, it tends to negatively evaluate anything that is deemed to be not in accordance with the rules and reasons already familiar to the observer. This excludes the possibility of the observer having to transform himself or herself, and thus change what is familiar to him or her. (shrink)

We live in an increasingly globalizing world, in which countries are closely linked by international trade and investment ties. Cross-cultural comparative studies of national values and ethics have attracted growing research interest in recent years, because shared practices, values and ethical standards depend on shared beliefs. However, the findings of such studies have been unable to reach a consensus on the impact of culture on ethics-related attitudes and behavior. Empirically, many "cross–cultural" differences reported by previous studies might actually stem from (...) cross-national differences. In order to partially fill this gap, this study advocates an analytical framework that isolates the role of cultural and national differences in order to test their relationship to individual level variables. Within this framework, we test competing hypotheses based on both cultural and national contexts by comparing groups of Chinese and American respondents together with a "bridging group" of Chinese Chinese-Americans. Theoretically, this contextual approach helps resolve the debate on the role of culture, by showing that culture plays a far more important role in shaping value orientations than the national background. Specifically, the two ethnic Chinese groups had many cultural values in common, and differed significantly from the Caucasian group. Implications are discussed. (shrink)

In this paper, I try to show to what extent Wittgenstein’s thinking about the problem of the meaning of life was influenced by Tolstoy. I begin with the problem of what Tolstoy’s writings, especially philosophical, Wittgenstein knew. Then I proceed to three areas of impact: (1) treating the question of the meaning of life as the central problem for philosophy, (2) defining Ethics in terms of the meaning of life, and (3) the idea that the solution of the problem of (...) the meaning of life lies in a practical change, not in giving a theoretical answer, which in turn is broken down into three more specific ideas, namely that (3a) the question concerning the meaning of life is a pseudo-question, that (3b) this vanishing of the question is not yet the solution, and that (3c) the solution of the problem of life consists in taking a religious attitude towards the world. I try to show that in point 1 Wittgenstein accepted Tolstoy’s general idea, but gave it his own version, which in turn makes the definition of Ethics in terms of the meaning of life in point 2 understandable; whereas in point 3 Wittgenstein accepts Tolstoy’s ideas and tries to formulate them in his own way. (shrink)

This collection of original essays brings together leading legal historians and theorists to explore the oft-neglected but important relationship between these two disciplines. Legal historians have often been sceptical of theory. The methodology which informs their own work is often said to be an empirical one, of gathering information from the archives and presenting it in a narrative form. The narrative produced by history is often said to be provisional, insofar as further research in the archives might falsify present understandings (...) and demand revisions. On the other side, legal theorists are often dismissive of historical works. History itself seems to many theorists not to offer any jurisprudential insights of use for their projects: at best, history is a repository of data and examples, which may be drawn on by the theorist for her own purposes. The aim of this collection is to invite participants from both sides to ask what lessons legal history can bring to legal theory, and what legal theory can bring to history. What is the theorist to do with the empirical data generated by archival research? What theories should drive the historical enterprise, and what wider lessons can be learned from it? This collection brings together a number of major theorists and legal historians to debate these ideas. (shrink)

This book provides a collection of 11 cutting-edge essays by leading young scholars, challenging long-held assumptions and offering new research paradigms in Philosophy of Law, in five parts: 1) methodology/metatheory; 2) reasoning/evaluating; 3) values/the moral life; 4) institutions/the social life; and 5) the global/international dimension.

The paper aims at presenting a synthetic reconstruction of Kierkegaard’s late critique of what he called “official Christianity,” that is that which in the world counts as Christianity but which, according to Kierkegaard, has nothing to do with real Christianity. The paper begins with a short presentation of what according to Kierkegaard the essence of real Christianity is, with special emphasis on his idea of imitating Christ. Then his main reproaches follow: leading a pagan life and calling it Christian, rejection (...) of imitation of Christ and putting some verbal activities instead, and rejection of imitation of Christ and worshiping him instead. Those three points are supplemented by Kierkegaardian critique of clergy. In the final section it is argued that Kierkegaard’s critique is universal in scope, i.e. it concerns all major Christian denominations. (shrink)