AbstractThe Belmont Report continues to be held in high regard, and most bioethical analyses conducted in recent years have presumed that it affects United States federal regulations. However, the assessments of the report’s creators are sharply divided. Understanding the historic reputation of this monumental report is thus crucial. We first recount the historical context surrounding the creation of this report. Subsequently, we review the process involved in developing ethical guidelines and describe the report’s features. Additionally, we analyze the effect of (...) unfolding events on the subsequent creation of federal regulations, especially on gene therapy clinical trials. Moreover, throughout this paper we evaluate the ethical principles outlined in this report and describe how they overlap with the issue of protecting socially vulnerable groups. Based on the analysis, we conclude that the features of the Belmont Report cannot be considered as having affected the basic sections of the federal regulations for ethical reviews that were made uniform in 1981. Nevertheless, regarding the regulations on gene therapy clinical trials—which were at first expected to be applicable to research involving children—in addition to implementing policies regarding the public review of protocols that passed ethical review, this report’s principles are clearly reflected in the key notes that should have been referred to when the report was created. (shrink)

What do all languages have in common, and what gives each language its individuality? Language typology, which has developed in response to these fundamental questions, is concerned with the construction of theoretical frameworks capable of delimiting the range of possible human languages and of capturing constraints on cross-linguistic variation. Language typology is a major concern of all contemporary schools of linguistics, yet a coherent image of the field is difficult to form because of the diversity of theoretical orientations and practical (...) methodologies. This collection brings together for the first time original contributions from major schools of typological research, from the Prague School to the Generative Grammar tradition. Leading scholars offer first-hand accounts of the theoretical foundations and substantive findings of their particular school of thought, clarifying basic assumptions which are often not explicitly stated in the literature. The collection as a whole provices both a survey of the place of individual typological schools in the historiography of the subject and a comprehensive account of the present state of language typology in an international context. It gives an overview of both the underlying unity of and the differences in the methods employed in the field. (shrink)

The lexicalist vs. transformationalist controversy involving causative sentences has been argued to the extreme extent in either position, studies based on Fillmore's case grammar by Sasaki and Taylor representing the former, and those based on the theory of lexical decomposition by McCawley and G. Lakoff representing the latter. The following work presents arguments that neither of these extreme positions is correct in Japanese. Different types of evidence are presented for the position that derives the lexical causative, e.g., koros 'kill', lexically (...) and the affixal causative, e.g., sin-ase 'cause to die', transformationally. (shrink)

Spontaneous actions are preceded by brain signals that may sometimes be detected hundreds of milliseconds in advance of a subject's conscious intention to act. These signals have been claimed to reflect prior unconscious decisions, raising doubts about the causal role of conscious will. Murakami et al. (2014. Nat Neurosci 17: 1574–1582) have recently argued for a different interpretation. During a task in which rats spontaneously decided when to abort waiting, the authors recorded neurons in the secondary motor cortex. The neural (...) activity and relationship to action timing was parsimoniously explained using an integration-to-bound model, similar to those widely used to account for evidence-based decisions. In this model, the brain accumulates spontaneously occurring inputs voting for or against an action, but only commits to act once a certain threshold is crossed. The model explains how spontaneous decisions can be forecast (partially predicted) by neurons that reflect either the input or output of the integrator. It therefore presents an explicit hypothesis capable of rejecting the claim that such predictive signals imply unconscious decisions. We suggest that these results can inform the current debate on free will but must be considered with caution. (shrink)

The state of the body is central to guiding motivational behaviours. Here we discuss how afferent information from face and viscera influence the processing and communication of emotional states. We highlight (a) the fine-grained impact that facial muscular and patterned visceral responses exert on emotional appraisal and communicative signals; (b) short-term changes in visceral state that bias brain responses to emotive stimuli; (c) the commonality of brain pathways and substrates mediating short- and long-term bodily effects on emotional processes; (d) how (...) topographically distinct representations of different bodily states are coupled to reported feelings associated with subtypes of disgust; and (e) how pupil signals contribute to affective exchange. Integrating these observations enriches our understanding of emotional processes and psychopathology. (shrink)

Vertebrate haemoglobin (Hb), the oxygen‐carrying protein of the blood, consists of two α‐ and two β‐subunits, each containing one haem, and shows cooperative oxygen binding known as the haem–haem interaction. The amino‐acid sequences of Hbs found in different species have diverged considerably and the homology in the most distantly related ones is only 40%. How can such varied amino‐acid sequences give rise to similar three‐dimensional structures and functional properties? To what extent do amino‐acid replacements affect the structure of haemoglobin? Which (...) mutations are responsible for the functional differences between haemoglobins from different species? Expression of α‐ and β‐globins in Escherichia coli has enabled us to introduce any mutations in the haemoglobin molecule at will. By X‐ray crystallographic and functional studies of the engineered mutants, we are trying to answer these questions. (shrink)

This article characterizes Florence Nightingale's nursing reform as the cleaning of the Victorian home which she found unheimlich. She laid strong emphasis on an improvement in the hygiene of the house as a significant part of nursing, and, by establishing the nurse as a new occupation, gave the surplus of unmarried women a decent means of escape from the stifling domesticity in which they had been helplessly trapped. Her nursing at once reformed and reinforced the traditional role of woman as (...) a domestic figure, for she created the nurse as a mother figure in charge of the home space. In the Crimean War, Nightingale successfully nursed the idea of England as Home by attending to the dying soldiers at the front. Her crusade to nurse the unhomely space into a home, however, dismissed one uncanny place inside the imperial Home that needed urgent nursing, that is, Ireland, which had been suffering from the Great Famine and its aftermath. Nightingale confronted Irish Sisters of Mercy, who came to the Crimea to save the lives and souls of the Irish soldiers. These Irish nuns not only embodied the memories of the Famine which they had recently relieved, but also threatened Nightingale's single female authority by representing Ireland as a nation through their equally motherly presence. The service of the Irish nuns in the Crimean War was erased from the myth of the Lady with the Lamp. Nightingale could establish herself as an authoritative female subject and assumed the voice of England only by suppressing another female voice which challenged England's competence in Home management. (shrink)

The situation-dependent lateralization of sympathetic electrodermal arousal during real-life stress may challenge a unitary notion of arousal, and call into question the practice of unilateral electrodermal recording, but there are broader implications. Here we consider a potential relationship between stress-induced lateralized shifts in electrodermal activity, and a theory concerning lateralized emotion-induced cardiac arrhythmia.

人工と設計の花鳥風月。知覚し行為する生きものが住まう環境としての“世界”において、郵便ポストは実在するか?近代テクノロジーの観点を超えた生態学的環境と、ごく日常的な「ものども」のあり方を徹底的に問い直 す存在論の創出。本書では、心理学、認知科学、知識工学、哲学を専門とする著者が集まり、それぞれが独自の視点から環境について考察している。.

L’acte de la philosophie japonaise est celui d’un évidement de soi: acte d’accueil des traditions philosophiques du monde, acte en résonance, créateur d’une terminologie, d’une logique, d’une conceptualité originales, s’alimentant aux sources d’une pensée mythique jamais tarie. Les textes présentés ici en feront sentir l’inclassable nouveauté: cette philosophie n’est ni purement shintoïste, bouddhique, chrétienne, néoconfucianiste ; elle n’est ni « orientale » ni « occidentale », mais proprement japonaise.

現代の哲学界にあって、全く独自のアプローチを積み上げてきた永井均。永井哲学の最重要キーワードでもある「“私”」について、永井自身と森岡正博が哲学する。“私”、すなわち、「いまここに現にひとりだけ特殊な 形で存在している、私の特別なあり方」は決して普遍化できないはずだが、ひとたびそれを語ってしまうと、他者にも適用できる単なる「私」の話となり、本当に言いたかった特別さは消えてしまう。どうすれば私たちは私 だけがもつその特別さに近づくことができるだろうか?―独在性の解釈をめぐって、永井と森岡は徐々にすれ違いを見せていく。2人の議論の「噛み合わなさ」から浮かび上がってくる“私”の真相とは?この世の最大の謎 、“私”をめぐって繰り広げられるオリジナルでスリリングな知的冒険。.