The medical biography of Ludwig van Beethoven remains enigmatic. Some of his health problems, such as his early and eventually profound deafness, are well documented and extensively discussed, although not necessarily well explained . Other medical problems, and his ultimate cause of death, remain unclear. Perhaps unsurprisingly for such an important musical figure, there has been no dearth of speculation about the illnesses that may have befallen Beethoven. Medical historians and physicians have suggested a myriad of illnesses, including but hardly (...) limited to .. (shrink)

Arguably the biggest challenge in analyzing English tense is to account for the double access interpretation, which arises when a present tensed verb is embedded under a past attitude—e.g., "John said that Mary is pregnant". Present-under-past does not always result in a felicitous utterance, however—cf. "John believed that Mary is pregnant". While such oddity has been noted, the contrast has never been explained. In fact, English grammars and manuals generally prohibit present-under-past. Work on double access, on the other hand, has (...) either disregarded the oddity (e.g., Abusch 1997: 39) or treated it as a reflex of a particular dialect (e.g., Kratzer 1998: 14). The goal of the paper is to argue—based on a corpus study—that a present-under-past sentence is grammatical, but modulated by two, interacting pragmatic phenomena: cessation and parentheticality. (shrink)

This article questions whether it is legitimate to propagate national sentiment and foster ties of nationality through school curricula. Against certain arguments for the ethical significance of nationality I question whether those who share a national identity have special moral obligations to members of their national group that they do not have to other persons. I argue that such ties of sentiment are unnecessary for achieving principled liberal goals, and that education within a liberal democracy should focus directly upon certain (...) general moral principles, such as fairness, justice, and toleration. The recent Advisory Group on Citizenship's Education for Citizenship and the Teaching of Democracy in Schools (1998) similarly endorses, I argue, education focused upon general moral principles. (shrink)

At first glance, it is surprising that contemporary racist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan advertise a pro‐environmental stance. This fact, however, might be expected by Luc Ferry, who argues for a connection between the racism and nature protection laws of the Third Reich. Ferry argues that a non‐anthropocentric approach to nature makes it easier to dehumanize humans so that a non‐anthropocentric environmental ethic can transform into racist environmentalism. Does this contemporary case vindicate Ferry? We argue that it does not. (...) When the underlying theoretical foundations and historical conditions that gave rise to the racist environmentalist movements and the contemporary non‐anthropocentric environmental left are analyzed, quite different pictures emerge: one type of non‐anthropocentric environmentalism is racist, one type of anthropocentric environmentalism is racist, and one type of non‐anthropocentric environmentalism is not racist, meaning that any relation between a non‐anthropocentric approach to nature and dehumanizing the Other is more complex and historically contextual than Ferry allows. (shrink)

Should we educate for patriotism? The issue has exercised many political philosophers and philosophers of education over the last few years and produced radical divisions among them. This paper comments on two recent contributions to the debate, by David Stevens and David Archard. While both these essays oppose education for patriotism, the present paper supports it. It argues that David Stevens's essay wrongly assumes that patriotic sentiment must be based on obligations to one's fellow-nationals, while David Archard's misgivings about education (...) for patriotism seem to turn largely on his over-restrictive conception of education. (shrink)

The white‐rot fungus Phanrochaete chrysosporium has the ability to degrade a wide variety of structurally diverse organic compounds, including a number of environmentally persistent organopollutants. The unique biodegradative abilities of this fungus appears to be dependent upon its lignin‐degrading system. The non‐specific and partially extracellular nature of this system suggests that it may be useful as a supplementary means to treat organochemical wastes.

This article questions whether it is legitimate to propagate national sentiment and foster ties of nationality through school curricula. Against certain arguments for the ethical significance of nationality I question whether those who share a national identity have special moral obligations to members of their national group that they do not have to other persons. I argue that such ties of sentiment are unnecessary for achieving principled liberal goals, and that education within a liberal democracy should focus directly upon certain (...) general moral principles, such as fairness, justice, and toleration. The recent Advisory Group on Citizenship's Education for Citizenship and the Teaching of Democracy in Schools (1998) similarly endorses, I argue, education focused upon general moral principles. (shrink)

In Good Jew, Bad Jew Steven Friedman argues that the meaning of anti-Semitism favoured by the Israeli government and its allies prioritises loyalty to the Israeli state over identification with the Jewish people. On this view, ‘good Jews’ are those who support the Israeli state, and ‘bad Jews’ are those who criticise Zionism. This framing reflects a discursive transition over decades linked to the desire to make Israel part of Europe politically and culturally. Not only has the Zionist version (...) of anti-Semitism inverted traditional notions of Jewishness but it has transformed ‘Jewishness’ from the ‘other’ to whiteness, to an ally of white supremacists. This racial embrace goes hand in glove with the brutal practice of colonial violence evident in Gaza. Friedman makes his case drawing on the work African scholars such as Biko, Fanon and Mamdani, Southern scholars such as Ashis Nandy, as well as established scholars of the North. (shrink)

Ice Cube "What's a brother gotta do to get a message through to the Red, White, and Blue?" Ice-T Rap music has emerged as one of the most distinctive and controversial music genres of the past decade. A significant part of hip hop culture, [1] rap articulates the experiences and conditions of African-Americans living in a spectrum of marginalized situations ranging from racial stereotyping and stigmatizing to struggle for survival in violent ghetto conditions. In this cultural context, rap provides (...) a voice to the voiceless, a form of protest to the oppressed, and a mode of alternative cultural style and identity to the marginalized. Rap is thus not only music to dance and party to, but a potent form of cultural identity. It has become a powerful vehicle for cultural political expression, serving as the "CNN of black people", or upping the high-tech ante, as their "satellite communication system". It is an informational medium to tune into, one that describes the rage of African-Americans facing growing oppression, declining opportunities for advancement, changing moods on the streets, and everyday life as a matter of sheer survival. In turn, it has become a cultural virus, circulating its images, sounds, and attitude throughout the culture and body politic. (shrink)

he field of linguistics has exported a number of big ideas to the world. They include the evolution of languages as an inspiration to Darwin for the evolution of species; the analysis of contrasting sounds as an inspiration for structuralism in literary theory and anthropology; the Whorfian hypothesis that language shapes thought; and Chomsky's theory of deep structure and universal grammar. Even by these standards, George Lakoff's theory of conceptual metaphor is a lollapalooza. If Lakoff is right, his theory can (...) do everything from overturning millennia of misguided thinking in the Western intellectual tradition to putting a Democrat in the White House. (shrink)

: This article attempts to do two things: reveal a continuity of structure in white supremacy in the U.S. between its initial invention in the seventeenth-century English colonies and the present, and advance a specific analysis of a moment in the process of that invention that involved the domination and redefinition of women. That moment was provided by the matrilineal servitude statute passed in Virginia in 1662. To highlight the meaning of this statute, the article begins with a portrait (...) of a contemporary case in which a black woman is convicted of murder for bearing a stillborn child in South Carolina. By mapping a homology of structure between the earlier statute and the contemporary instance, a continuity in the structure of racialization is revealed that places it at the very foundation of the culture of the U.S. (shrink)

The presence of asymmetry in the human cerebral hemispheres is detectable at both the macroscopic and microscopic scales. The horizontal expansion of cortical surface during development (within individual brains), and across evolutionary time (between species), is largely due to the proliferation and spacing of the microscopic vertical columns of cells that form the cortex. In the asymmetric planum temporale (PT), minicolumn width asymmetry is associated with surface area asymmetry. Although the human minicolumn asymmetry is not large, it is estimated to (...) account for a surface area asymmetry of approximately 9% of the region’s size. Critically, this asymmetry of minicolumns is absent in the equivalent areas of the brains of other apes. The left-hemisphere dominance for processing speech is thought to depend, partly, on a bias for higher resolution processing across widely spaced minicolumns with less overlapping dendritic fields, whereas dense minicolumn spacing in the right hemisphere is associated with more overlapping, lower resolution, holistic processing. This concept refines the simple notion that a larger brain area is associated with dominance for a function and offers an alternative explanation associated with “processing type.” This account is mechanistic in the sense that it offers a mechanism whereby asymmetrical components of structure are related to specific functional biases yielding testable predictions, rather than the generalization that “bigger is better” for any given function. Face processing provides a test case – it is the opposite of language, being dominant in the right hemisphere. Consistent with the bias for holistic, configural processing of faces, the minicolumns in the right-hemisphere fusiform gyrus are thinner than in the left hemisphere, which is associated with featural processing. Again, this asymmetry is not found in chimpanzees. The difference between hemispheres may also be seen in terms of processing speed, facilitated by asymmetric myelination of white matter tracts ( Anderson et al., 1999 found that axons of the left posterior superior temporal lobe were more thickly myelinated). By cross-referencing the differences between the active fields of the two hemispheres, via tracts such as the corpus callosum, the relationship of local features to global features may be encoded. The emergent hierarchy of features within features is a recursive structure that may functionally contribute to generativity – the ability to perceive and express layers of structure and their relations to each other. The inference is that recursive generativity, an essential component of language, reflects an interaction between processing biases that may be traceable in the microstructure of the cerebral cortex. Minicolumn organization in the PT and the prefrontal cortex has been found to correlate with cognitive scores in humans. Altered minicolumn organization is also observed in neuropsychiatric disorders including autism and schizophrenia. Indeed, altered interhemispheric connections correlated with minicolumn asymmetry in schizophrenia may relate to language-processing anomalies that occur in the disorder. Schizophrenia is associated with over-interpretation of word meaning at the semantic level and over-interpretation of relevance at the level of pragmatic competence, whereas autism is associated with overly literal interpretation of word meaning and under-interpretation of social relevance at the pragmatic level. Both appear to emerge from a disruption of the ability to interpret layers of meaning and their relations to each other. This may be a consequence of disequilibrium in the processing of local and global features related to disorganization of minicolumnar units of processing. (shrink)

Leszek Kolakowski, an eminent philosopher known mainly outside his native Poland for Main Currents of Marxism, was an enormously influential public figure in Poland. He was awarded the Order of the White Eagle when Poland was liberated and went into exile in 1968, first to North America, where he continued to give active support and advice to Solidarity, and then to Oxford. Kolakowski, who became a Fellow of the British Academy in 1980, was buried in Poland with military honours (...) and a minute's silence in the national Parliament. Obituary by Steven Lukes FBA. (shrink)

The current investigation was designed to examine the association of parenting during late childhood and early adolescence, a time of rapid physical development, with biological propensity for inflammation. Based on life course theory, it was hypothesized that parenting during this period of rapid growth and development would be associated with biological outcomes and self-reported health assessed in young adulthood. It was expected that association of parenting with health would be mediated either by effects on methylation of a key inflammatory factor, (...) Tumor necrosis factor (TNF), or else by association with a pro-inflammatory shift in the distribution of mononuclear blood cells. Supporting expectations, in a sample of 398 African American youth residing in rural Georgia, followed from age 11 to age 19, parenting at ages 11–13 was associated with youth reports of better health at age 19. We found that parenting was associated with changes in TNF methylation as well as with changes in cell-type composition. However, whereas methylation of TNF was a significant mediator of the association of parenting with young adult health, variation in mononuclear white blood cell types was not a significant mediator of the association of parenting with young adult health. The current research suggests the potential value of examining the health-related effects of parenting in late childhood and early adolescence. Further examination of protection against pro-inflammatory tendencies conferred by parenting appears warranted. (shrink)

This article attempts to do two things: reveal a continuity of structure in white supremacy in the U.S. between its initial invention in the seventeenth-century English colonies and the present, and advance a specific analysis of a moment in the process of that invention that involved the domination and redefinition of women. That moment was provided by the matrilineal servitude statute passed in Virginia in 1662. To highlight the meaning of this statute, the article begins with a portrait of (...) a contemporary case in which a black woman is convicted of murder for bearing a stillborn child in South Carolina. By mapping a homology of structure between the earlier statute and the contemporary instance, a continuity in the structure of racialization is revealed that places it at the very foundation of the culture of the U.S. (shrink)

This article attempts to do two things: reveal a continuity of structure in white supremacy in the U.S. between its initial invention in the seventeenth-century English colonies and the present, and advance a specific analysis of a moment in the process of that invention that involved the domination and redefinition of women. That moment was provided by the matrilineal servitude statute passed in Virginia in 1662. To highlight the meaning of this statute, the article begins with a portrait of (...) a contemporary case in which a black woman is convicted of murder for bearing a stillborn child in South Carolina. By mapping a homology of structure between the earlier statute and the contemporary instance, a continuity in the structure of racialization is revealed that places it at the very foundation of the culture of the U.S. (shrink)

Using a parallel mixed-methods design, the current study examined university students’ perceptions of academic cheating through collecting and analyzing both the quantitative and qualitative data. Our quantitative findings corroborate previous research that male students have engaged more in academic cheating than females based on students’ self-reports, and that undergraduate students are less willing to discuss issues on academic cheating as compared with their graduate counterparts. Five themes emerged from the thematic analysis of the qualitative data: flexible definitions for cheating, environmental (...) promotion of cheating, the moral transgression of cheating, cheating as an ambiguous justification, and cheating as a conscious decision making process. The mixed-methods findings indicate that there is no relationship between students’ gender or classification and their endorsements of the qualitative themes. However, non-White students are more likely to endorse the theme “cheating as an ambiguous justification.” Implications for reducing and preventing academic cheating at the university level are discussed. (shrink)

Suppose Ted is in an ordinary house in good viewing conditions and believes red, his table is red, entirely because he sees his table and its color; he also believes not-white, it is false that his table is white and illuminated by a red light, because not-white is entailed by red. The following three claims about this table case clash, but each seems plausible: 1. Ted’s epistemic position is strong enough for him to know red. 2. Ted (...) cannot know not-white on the basis of red. 3. The epistemic closure principle, suitably restricted, is true. Stewart Cohen has called this three-way clash of intuitions the problem of easy knowledge. If we wish to resolve the clash without accepting skepticism, we seem to have two options. According to the hard argument, the best response is to reject 3. The easy argument rejects 2. But there may be a third alternative, the reverse argument, which rejects 1 without ceding a substantial amount of ground to the skeptic. In this essay I criticize recent versions of the reverse argument and the hard argument, thereby lending support to the easy argument. (shrink)

If, as many historians and theorists now believe, narrative is the form proper to historical explanation, this raises the problem of the terms in which such narratives are to be evaluated. Without a clear account of evaluation, the status of historical knowledge remains obscure. Beginning with the view, found in Hayden White and others, that historical narrative constitutes a meaning not reducible to the factual content it engages, this essay argues that such meaning can arise only through a synthesis (...) of cognitive and normative discourses. Narrative combines "heterogeneous" language games in such a way that neither appeal to "truth content" nor to "justice" suffices to decide the question of which of two competing historical explanations is, as a whole, superior. Examining in critical detail the opposed positions on this issue articulated by two recent theorists-Frank Ankersmit and David Carr -the paper concludes that the debate between those who hold that historical narratives should be judged in essentially cognitive terms and those who hold that they should be judged in essentially political terms cannot be resolved and that a philosophical view of historical narrative that is neither realist nor idealist needs to be developed. (shrink)