ABSTRACTThis paper identifies some of the ethical problems encountered when Western-led military forces conduct operations designed to improve the condition of women in modern conflict zones. We rely on examples from recent conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, where commanders were required to direct some of their capabilities toward female-based initiatives. Critics have charged that such initiatives were not adequately linked to doctrine-based training, and also that the methods used to build relationships with women were unsuccessful because they were not properly (...) integrated into the broader mission. We go further, and reveal how female-based initiatives essentially contributed to instability because they created multiple ethical pitfalls faced by the primary agents of change; military commanders, male leaders in conflict zones, and the women intended to be beneficiaries of those initiatives. Arguably, if Western-led military forces can address the ethical concerns we identify, then they will be in an im... (shrink)

This is a 1,039-item updating and extension of Henri Bergson: A Bibliography, published by the Philosophy Documentation Center in 1974. While it concentrates on bibliographic items that have appeared in the 1970s, this bibliography contains items both by and about Bergson which were published prior to the 1970s. The present work is admittedly incomplete; but it attempts a more complete annotation than was available in the 1974 bibliography.

The following introduction offers a broad survey of the history of quantum physics. It then outlines the position of each contributor in this Special Focus Section concerning the collapse of the quantum wave function and defines three important terms (Hilbert space, Schrödinger’s cat, and decoherence) used in discussing this topic.

Henri Bergson was born in Paris on October 18, 1859, the son of a Polish father (Varsovie Michael Bergson) and an English mother (Katherine Levinson Bergson). Both Michael and Katherine Bergson were Jewish, and they shared a Hasidic background. Though Henri Bergson did not consider himself Jewish in any orthodox sense, he conceded that the awareness of belonging to an unfairly treated minority was to have a lasting influence on his life. While his father was a pianist – a popularizer (...) of Chopin – and composer, his mother was deeply interested in the arts, especially the contemporary literary world. (shrink)

The main contributor to this volume is David Louis Miller of the University of Texas at Austin. Both a student of Mead's and an editor and defender of his thought, Miller attempts in his essay and subsequent responses to demonstrate both the overall coherence of Mead's philosophy and the extent to which that philosophy makes room for the concept of individual creativity. Miller thus corrects many false or otherwise superficial interpretations of Mead's social psychology, and of, by implication, contemporary symbolic (...) interactionism. (shrink)

John Mullarkey. Bergson and Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 206 pp. ISBN 0 7486 0957 1 (paperback), US$20; Keith Ansell Pearson, Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual : Bergson and the Time of Life (London: Routledge, 2002), 246 pp. ISBN 0 415 23727 0 (cloth), US$90, 0 415 23728 9 (paperback), US$27.95; Leonard Lawlor, The Challenge of Bergson: Phenomenology, Ontology, Ethics (New York: Continuum, 2003), 153 pp. ISBN 0 8264 6802 0 (cloth), US$73.50, 0 8264 6803 9 (paperback), (...) US$24.95; John Mullarkey, ed., The New Bergson [Angelaki Humanities] (New York: Manchester University Press, 1999), 235 pp. ISBN 0 7190 5380 3 (cloth), US$69.95; 0 7190 5553 9 (paperback), US$29.95; John Mullarkey and Keith Ansell Pearson, eds., Bergson: Key Writings [Athlone Contemporary European Thinkers], trans. Melissa McMahon (New York: Continuum, 2002), 402 pp. ISBN 0 8264 5728 2 (cloth), US$99.95, 0 8264 5729 0 (paperback), US$33.95. (shrink)

Theories of perception and of memory are closely allied. The binding problem (which considers how bits of perception are reassembled by the brain) leads to neurophysiological subjectivism. This could be outflanked by arguing with Bergson that perceiving consciousness is out in the world. Thus the brain would bind only behavioral “maps.” In turn, consciousness would retain our personal pasts. Such personal (episodic) memories both help us to recognize present objects and to perform creative acts. Memory, although retentive, is also creative. (...) This is important in rethinking biological and evolutionary memory. (shrink)

Although widely studied in other domains, relatively little is known about the metacognitive processes that monitor and control behaviour during reasoning and decision-making. In this paper, we examined the conditions under which two fluency cues are used to monitor initial reasoning: answer fluency, or the speed with which the initial, intuitive answer is produced, and perceptual fluency, or the ease with which problems can be read. The first two experiments demonstrated that answer fluency reliably predicted Feeling of Rightness judgments to (...) conditional inferences and base rate problems, which subsequently predicted the amount of deliberate processing as measured by thinking time and answer changes; answer fluency also predicted retrospective confidence judgments. Moreover, the effect of answer fluency on reasoning was independent from the effect of perceptual fluency, establishing that these are empirically independent constructs. In five experiments with a variety of reasoning problems similar to those of Alter et al., we found no effect of perceptual fluency on FOR, retrospective confidence or accuracy; however, we did observe that participants spent more time thinking about hard to read stimuli, although this additional time did not result in answer changes. In our final two experiments, we found that perceptual disfluency increased accuracy on the CRT, but only amongst participants of high cognitive ability. As Alter et al.’s samples were gathered from prestigious universities, collectively, the data to this point suggest that perceptual fluency prompts additional processing in general, but this processing may results in higher accuracy only for the most cognitively able. (shrink)

Beginning in the 1970s and culminating in the first two decades of the 21st century, there has been a marked shift in the sciences from a predominantly reductionist and mechanistic approach to a broader and more holistic viewpoint. It goes without saying that such a shift in point of view will have significant implications, not only for the sciences but for our concepts of nature and of human beings. The present essay is an attempt to assess the significance of this (...) change in the focus of the sciences and to describe the nature of its components. Originally, it had a far more limited scope, that of comparing two of the parts of the new nonreductionist stance: brain plasticity and biological systems theory. Unfortunately, my understanding of one of these factors (systems theory) turned out to be incorrect, while the section on brain plasticity was incomplete. The result of this dual realization is an essay of far greater scope, taking in both new developments in the sciences far beyond that of plasticity, and reassessing the content and impact of systems theory, which is greater than I had thought. I will begin with a study of systems theory, dealing first with the unexpected mathematics which made its present status possible. Then I will deal with its history, which reaches back over a century. One of the confusions into which we are liable to fall is to fail to distinguish the old systems theory from the new. This is even more likely because the two versions of the theory have many features in common. (shrink)

The following introduction offers a broad survey of the history of quantum physics. It then outlines the position of each contributor in this Special Focus Section concerning the collapse of the quantum wave function and defines three important terms (Hilbert space, Schrödinger’s cat, and decoherence) used in discussing this topic.