The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal Is Bringing Science and Spirit Together by Charles T. Tart. Philosophy of Personal Identity and Multiple Personality by Logi Gunnarsson. Eusapia Palladino and Her Phenomena by Hereward Carrington. Can the Mind Survive beyond Death? In Pursuit of Scientific Evidence by Satwant K. Pasricha. Morphic Resonance: The Nature of Formative Causation by Rupert Sheldrake. A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Formative Causation by Rupert Sheldrake. “Why AI Is a Dangerous Dream,” (...) Opinion, Interview with Noel Sharkey by Nic Fleming. (shrink)

All humans experience itch in the course of their life. Even a discussion on the topic of itch or seeing people scratch can evoke the desire to scratch. These events are coined ‘contagious itch’ and are very common. We and others have shown that videos showing people scratching and pictures of affected skin or insects can induce itch in healthy persons and chronic itch patients. In our studies, patients with atopic dermatitis were more susceptible to visual itch cues than healthy. (...) Also, personality traits like agreeableness and public self-consciousness were associated with induced scratching in skin patients, while neuroticism correlated with induced itch in healthy subjects. The underlying course of contagious itch is not yet fully understood. It is hypothesized that there are human mirror neurons that are active when we imitate actions and/or negative affect. Until now, there has been only limited data on the mechanisms of brain activation in contagious itch though. We have barely begun to understand the underlying physiological reactions and the triggering factors of this phenomenon. We summarize what we currently know about contagious itch and provide some suggestions what future research should focus on. (shrink)

In the game theory literature, Garrett Hardin’s famous allegory of the “tragedy of the commons” has been modeled as a variant of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, labeled the Herder Problem (or, sometimes, the Commons Dilemma). This brief paper argues that important differences in the institutional structures of the standard Prisoner’s Dilemma and Herder Problem render the two games different in kind. Specifically, institutional impediments to communication and cooperation that ensure a dominant strategy of defection in the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma are absent (...) in the Herder Problem. Their absence does not ensure that players will achieve a welfare-enhancing, cooperative solution to the Herders Problem, but does create far more opportunity for players to alter the expected payoffs through cooperative arrangements. In a properly modeled Herder Problem—along the lines of an assurance game—defection would not always be the dominant strategy. Consequently, the Herder Problem is not in the nature of a Prisoner’s Dilemma. (shrink)

The Guest Editorial On Wolverines and Epistemological Totalitarianism by Etzel Cardeña (JSE 24(3), Fall 2011) is little more than a rant, in which invective, ridicule, and mockery take the place of reasoned argumentation. Mind you, there’s nothing wrong with a good rant, especially when one agrees with the overall perspective, and I actually found myself in agreement with much of what the author had to say. Most of Cardeña’s anger is directed at those Materialist philosophers and psychologists who happily pontificate (...) against the possibility of psi while remaining studiously ignorant of the data that parapsychological research has uncovered. I think everyone who comes to parapsychology with an open mind at some point experiences the same frustration that Cardeña expresses toward Materialist idealogues, whose conclusions and opinions have been formed a priori and appear to be impervious to empirical data. But he seems equally upset with those who are “pro-psi,” lamenting "the epistemological absolutism that pervades both the strident anti-psi and pro-psi proponents from what I consider a healthy abeyance from fully committing to a closed position in science or in other aspects of life." (Cardeña, p. 539). (shrink)

ObjectiveProcessing Speed, the ability to perceive and react fast to stimuli in the environment, has been shown to be impaired in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. However, it is unclear whether PS can be improved following targeted treatments for ADHD. Here we examined potential changes in PS following application of transcranial electric stimulation combined with cognitive training in children with ADHD. Specifically, we examined changes in PS in the presence of different conditions of mental fatigue.MethodsWe used a randomized double-blind (...) active-controlled crossover study of 19 unmedicated children with ADHD. Participants received either anodal transcranial direct current stimulation over the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex or transcranial random noise stimulation, while completing CT, and the administration order was counterbalanced. PS was assessed before and after treatment using the MOXO-CPT, which measures PS in the presence of various conditions of mental fatigue and cognitive load.ResultstRNS combined with CT yielded larger improvements in PS compared to tDCS combined with CT, mainly under condition of increased mental fatigue. Further improvements in PS were also seen in a 1-week follow up testing.ConclusionThis study provides initial support for the efficacy of tRNS combined with CT in improving PS in the presence of mental fatigue in pediatric ADHD. (shrink)

This paper examines the role that linguistic and cognitive prominence play in the resolution of anaphor–antecedent relationships. In two experiments, we found that pronouns are immediately sensitive to the cognitive prominence of potential antecedents when other antecedent selection cues are uninformative. In experiment 1, results suggest that despite their theoretical dissimilarities, topic and contrastive focus both serve to enhance cognitive prominence. Results from experiment 2 suggest that the contrastive prosody appropriate for focus constructions may also play an important role in (...) enhancing cognitive prominence. Thus different types of linguistic prominence (topic, contrastive focus) appear to have the common effect of increasing the cognitive prominence of the discourse referent. For pronouns with two possible antecedents, the cognitive prominence of an antecedent aids in anaphor resolution, immediately biasing selection towards the more prominent (and ultimately preferred) antecedent. (shrink)

This article examines how public health addresses alcohol use through marketing — place, product, promotion, and price. The article reviews current product trends and how restrictions on certain products designs may reduce youth consumption; how product availability may be restricted through zoning; and the current advertising landscape.

Grossman’s first major, published study of Marxist economic theory was a devastating critique of Fritz Sternberg’s ambitious and long book, Imperialism. The article exposed the way Sternberg failed to grasp Marx’s method and basic economic arguments, and drew impatient revolutionary conclusions from assumptions of anti-revolutionary revisionism. It also outlined Grossman’s own recovery, restatement and elaboration of features of Marx’s economic analysis, and Lenin’s conception of workers’ revolution. This abridgement consists of the first three sections of the article. An (...) introduction to Grossman’s article is published simultaneously. (shrink)

The "Ignorance Interpretation" of quantum mechanical mixtures holds, roughly, that whenever a system S belongs to an ensemble, which is represented by a mixed statistical operator U=Σ pi P[ψ i] (0≤ pi≤ 1, Σ ipi=1,P[ψ i] is the projection operator for the state ψ i), then S is in some pure state, although we are ignorant as to which one. It has been concluded, e.g. by van Fraassen, that "the ignorance interpretation is untenable," and he presumably favors adopting "the position (...) that mixtures of pure states are themselves new states...to say that a system is in a proper mixture is to say that it is not in a pure state." I wish to argue in this paper that there are no good grounds for rejecting the ignorance interpretation. (shrink)

Children diagnosed with type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM) are at risk for neurocognitive sequelae, including impaired attention functioning. The specific nature of the cognitive deficit varies; current literature underscores early age of diabetes diagnosis and increased disease duration as primary risk factors for this neurocognitive decline. Forty-three children with T1DM were evaluated for Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) symptomatology using the MOXO continuous performance test (MOXO-CPT) performed during a routine outpatient evaluation. The study cohort demonstrated a significant decline in all four (...) domains of attention functioning. The effect was most pronounced with early age at T1DM diagnosis, a longer disease duration and with poorer glycemic control (represented by higher HbA1c values). With increased disease duration (of 5 plus years), acute hyperglycemia was associated with inattention in the real-time setting. These findings highlight the need for routine screening of neurocognitive function in children with T1DM so that early intervention can be employed during this crucial period of cognitive development. (shrink)

Mindfulness, derived from Buddhist psychology and philosophy, has gained broad popularity in the last decades, due importantly to scientific interest and findings. Yet Buddhist mindfulness developed in Asian pre-scientific culture and religion, and is predicated upon long-term cultivation of introspective awareness of lived experience, not highly accessible to empirical study. Further complicating the ‘science' of mindfulness, mindfulness's very definition is multifaceted, resistant to dismantling and requires substantial amounts of personal practice to gain expertise. Most scientists investigating mindfulness have not achieved (...) a high level of this expertise. Here I address how mindfulness is currently being invented as a scientific fact or object of inquiry. The intrinsic porosity of subjective and objective factors influencing the investigation of mindfulness is highlighted: the evolving body of ‘scientific' experts, instruments used to measure mindfulness, the alliances of funders and other supporters of mindfulness research, and the public representation of the related findings. (shrink)

During the years 1814–1819, William Higgins, an Irish chemist who worked at the Dublin Society, claimed he had anticipated John Dalton in developing the atomic theory and insinuated that Dalton was a plagiarist. This essay focuses not on William Higgins, but on his uncle Bryan Higgins, a well-known chemist of his day, who had developed his own theories of caloric and chemical combination, similar in many respects to that of Dalton. New evidence is first introduced addressing Bryan's disappearance from the (...) scientific community after 1803. In his later years, Bryan apparently suffered from a condition resulting in a decline in his mental health, which explains why he never lodged any priority claims of his own against Dalton, or defended those of his nephew. Dalton's mention of Bryan's name in Part II ofA New System of Chemical Philosophy, his laboratory notebook entries, and a fresh look at his correspondence with chemist Thomas Charles Hope indicate that Dalton adopted a Higgins-like caloric model in 1803. Together these factors provide evidence to support the argument that Dalton learned of Bryan's theories via a meeting he had with William Allen on 10 July 1803. Existing evidence related to the origin of the atomic theory is worthy of re-examination in light of Dalton's possible prior knowledge of Bryan's work. (shrink)

This book is a collection from the articles of 'The Skeptic' and brings together the best from the magazine's archive in one myth-busting volume. It includes mystery articles on the weeping statue at a Dublin suburban home, Turin Shroud, Britain's Roswell, Nostradamus's predictions and UFOs.

The guiding theme of these essays by aesthetician, musician, and Santayana scholar Morris Grossman is the importance of preserving the tension between what can be unified and what is disorganized, random, and miscellaneous. Grossman described this as the tension between art and morality: Art arrests a sense of change and yields moments of unguarded enjoyment and peace; but soon, shifting circumstances compel evaluation, decision, and action. According to Grossman, the best art preserves the tension between the aesthetic (...) consummation of experience and the press of morality understood as the business of navigating conflicts, making choices, and meeting needs. This concern was intimately related to his reading of George Santayana. The best philosophy, like the best art, preserves the tension between what can be ordered and what resists assimilation, and Grossman read Santayana as exemplifying this virtue in his embrace of multiple perspectives. Other scholars have noted the multiplicity or irony in Santayana's work, but Grossman was unique in taking such a style to be a substantive part of Santayana's philosophizing. (shrink)

In this article, I examine violence as constitutive of mobility for the feminine diasporic subject through an examination of women migrant workers from Nepal. I frame this project with two distinct theoretical approaches to understanding violence. First, I draw upon Catharine MacKinnon's provocative question ‘Are women human?’ to elucidate points of disjuncture between individual women migrants and state policy that dehumanises them. Second, I address some of the gaps in MacKinnon's work by turning to Judith Butler's theory of violence as (...) primarily embodied in the corporeal subject. Drawing on 30 in-depth interviews with returned women migrant workers, I examine three moments in the migration process that demonstrate how violence operates ubiquitously in and through circuits of mobility. I conclude that by putting Butler's and Mackinnon's approaches to violence in dialogue and examining the Nepali case through a dialectic framework, intriguing possibilities for approaching migration and its problematics are revealed. (shrink)

Vigil's socio-relational framework of sex differences in emotion-expressive behavior has a number of interesting aspects, especially the principal concepts of reciprocity potential and perceived attractiveness and trustworthiness. These are attractive and potentially heuristic ideas. However, some of his arguments and claims are not well grounded in research on early development. Three- to five-year-old children did not show the sex differences in emotion-expressive behavior discussed in the target article. Our data suggest that Vigil may have underestimated the roles of epigenetic and (...) cultural factors in shaping emotion-expressive behavior. (shrink)

The European Legacy, Volume 17, Issue 5, Page 715-716, August 2012.

Indirect speech acts—responding “I forgot to wear my watch today” to someone who asked for the time—are ubiquitous in daily conversation, but are understudied in current neurobiological models of language. To comprehend an indirect speech act like this one, listeners must not only decode the lexical-semantic content of the utterance, but also make a pragmatic, bridging inference. This inference allows listeners to derive the speaker’s true, intended meaning—in the above dialog, for example, that the speaker cannot provide the time. In (...) the present work, we address this major gap by asking non-aphasic patients with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia and brain-damaged controls with amnestic mild cognitive impairment to judge simple question-answer dialogs of the form: “Do you want some cake for dessert?” “I’m on a very strict diet right now,” and relate the results to structural and diffusion MRI. Accuracy and reaction time results demonstrate that subjects with bvFTD, but not MCI, are selectively impaired in indirect relative to direct speech act comprehension, due in part to their social and executive limitations, and performance is related to caregivers’ judgment of communication efficacy. MRI imaging associates the observed impairment in bvFTD to cortical thinning not only in traditional language-associated regions, but also in fronto-parietal regions implicated in social and executive cerebral networks. Finally, diffusion tensor imaging analyses implicate white matter tracts in both dorsal and ventral projection streams, including superior longitudinal fasciculus, frontal aslant, and uncinate fasciculus. These results have strong implications for updated neurobiological models of language, and emphasize a core, language-mediated social disorder in patients with bvFTD. (shrink)

In his early works, Giorgio Agamben argues that some Auschwitz inmates practised a ‘silent form of resistance’ by shutting themselves off from the world until nothing could harm them. I argue that this conception of ‘bare life’ is both too abstract and too individualistic. Agamben’s idea of bare life’s resistance first neglects the socio-historical context that has produced particular instances of it, effectively barring the investigation into how to avoid future occurrences of sovereign violence. Agamben, second, emphasizes the potential for (...) resistance present in individual bodies shut off from the world without providing guidelines for how these bodies should form a substantive community. I consequently employ Vasily Grossman’s writings on the Shoah to provide an alternative conception of bare life’s resistance in the camps. According to Grossman, resistance lies not in closing oneself off from the world, but in cultivating ineradicable nodes of ‘senseless kindness’ in concrete human interactions. (shrink)

Characterisations of Henryk Grossman as a theorist of capitalism’s automatic collapse and political passivity are false. Even before the publication of his principal work, Grossman had linked his recovery of Marx’s account of capitalism’s tendency to break down to his own, interventionist, Leninist politics. This is apparent in his substantial critique of Fritz Sternberg’s influential 1926 book, Imperialism. Grossman’s article also restates fundamental aspects of Marx’s value theory, class analysis and account of wages.

The article endeavours to compare the reflections on the Shoah of two of the most celebrated intellectuals of Jewish origin of the 20th century, namely the German philosopher Hans Jonas and the Soviet writer Vasily Grossman. Both Jonas’ essay on The Concept of God after Auschwitz and Grossman’s novels and reports, such as The Hell of Treblinka, Life and Fate, and The Sistine Madonna, are characterised by a thorough enquiry into the ambivalence of the human condition, that tries (...) to shed some light on the disturbing abyss of Auschwitz and the Shoah. Although neither Jonas nor Grossman considered themselves as religious believers, thanks to the Shoah they recollected their Jewish roots and developed peculiar and innovative thoughts on the meaning and vulnerability of life, human freedom, immortality, and God. The article endeavours to highlight the main similarities and differences between these two authors, who tackled the issue of thinking after Auschwitz. (shrink)

Henryk Grossman's discussion of economic crises was designed to complement his Leninist understanding of politics. For Grossman, as for Marx, the fundamental contradiction of capitalist production is between the unlimited scope for expanding the output of use-values and restrictions imposed by the framework of producing profits. The increasing weight of capitalists' outlays on dead compared to living labour, which is the only source of new value, gives rise to the system's tendency to break down and, hence, to economic (...) crises. Deep financial crises can only be understood in the context of developments in production and particularly movements in the rate of profit. The initial widespread hostility to Grossman's development of Marxist economics can mainly be explained in terms of the logics of Social-Democratic and Stalinist politics. In contrast to dominant views on the Left today, the Marxist tradition in which Grossman stood places the construction of organisations capable of assisting the working class' conquest of political power at the heart of the responsibility of socialists. Grossman's political practice expressed his understanding of the close relationship between capitalism's breakdown tendency and the importance of building a revolutionary party. (shrink)

In 1943, Henryk Grossman sent a draft of the study, eventually published in two parts as ‘The Evolutionist Revolt against Classical Economics’, to Max Horkheimer for comment. His very hostile response, Grossman’s drafts and the published study cast light not only on the changing relationship between Grossman and Horkheimer but also on the distance between Grossman’s classical Marxism and nascent mature Critical Theory. Grossman’s study identified the emergence of the idea of successive economic systems in (...) the work of Condorcet, Henri Saint-Simon and Simonde de Sismondi in France, James Steuart and Richard Jones in England, culminating in Marx’s formulations which entailed the role of class struggle and capitalism’s tendency to break down. Hegel was not an influence on Marx’s conception of modes of production. In addition to a series of spurious and minor criticisms, Horkheimer objected that Grossman’s approach was positivist, that it misconceived Hegel’s philosophy, and that it amounted to a conventional history of ideas. In response, Grossman made some changes in his study, but these were designed to strengthen his main arguments and successfully reaffirmed his Marxist approach in the face of Horkheimer’s criticisms. (shrink)

: The work of Boris Hessen and Henryk Grossman on the emergence of early modern science is an attempt at a historical sociology of science and a historical epistemology of scientific knowledge. One of their theses is elaborated here, namely that early modern mechanics developed in the study of contemporary technology. In particular I discuss the thesis that the replacement of the Aristotelian concept of motion by the modern general and mathematical concept developed in the study of transmission machines. (...) In addition to a discussion of the thesis and its implications, I also present a case study to substantiate the thesis. I show that Benedetti's famous refutation of Aristotle and his introduction of a new concept of motion depended on empirical knowledge of the newly invented treadle mechanism. I argue that although the historiography of science since the 1930s has explored many of the individual issues first raised by the Marxist historians of science, this perspective remains unique in that it establishes direct and informative connections between the grand narrative of the transition from agrarian-feudal society to industrial production in early capitalism and the development of science and technology down to specific cognitive issues such as shared assumptions concerning the natural order. (shrink)

Whereas most previous and later discussions of Marx’s transformation of values into prices of production have focused on his mathematical procedure, Henryk Grossman addressed the logic of its place in the structure ofCapital. On this basis he criticised underconsumptionist and disproportionality theorists of economic crises for inappropriately basing their accounts on the level of analysis of the value schemas in the second volume ofCapital. Such a criticism cannot be made of Grossman’s and Marx’s explanation of systemic crises in (...) terms of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. Grossman’s article still provides insights into Marx’s analysis of capitalism and his theory of economic crises, unsurpassed in the subsequent literature. (shrink)

Morris Grossman, the author of this captivating collection of essays Art and Morality: Essays in the Spirit of Santayana, was fond of quoting Santayana as saying, “when Peter tells you something about Paul you learn more about Peter than you do Paul.” This aphorism appears several times in this volume, and its emphatic repetition should clue us into Grossman’s approach to expository writing. While the book is ostensibly about figures from the history of philosophy and art in individual (...) essays, its real charm comes from getting a sense for Grossman’s intellectual temperament across the whole volume. One aspect of Grossman’s intellectual character which is favorably displayed portrayed in this book is his... (shrink)

This is an excerpt from the contentGender equality as a badge of modernity is one of the primary features of the homogenizing process known as globalization. Just as all but a handful of states now claim to be “republics”, regardless of the degree of substantive public rule, an affirmation of equal rights for men and women uniformly appears in modern constitutions and international conventions. Even more striking than the gap between formal and substantive democracy is the chasm that separates these (...) claims of gender equality from the reality of the lives of the world’s women and girls, a breach that is visible in multiple contexts, from the stubbornly low percentages of women in positions of political and economic power, to the cultural transmission of sexual subordination in mass media, to the growing number of impoverished, enslaved, and stateless women worldwide. Using the lens of citizenship to assess, understand and address this gap between formal and substantive equality is the principle project of Gender Equality. (shrink)