This volume collects 12 essays by various contributors on the subject of the importance and influence of Schopenhauer’s doctoral dissertation for both Schopenhauer’s more well-known philosophy and the ongoing discussion of the subject of the principle of sufficient reason. The contributions deal with the historical context of Schopenhauer’s reflections, their relationship to idealism, the insights they hold for Schopenhauer’s views of consciousness and sensation, and how they illuminate Schopenhauer’s theory of action. This is the first full-length, English volume (...) on Schopenhauer’s Fourfold Root and its relevance for Schopenhauer’s philosophy. The thought-provoking essays collected in this volume will undoubtedly enrich the burgeoning field of Schopenhauer-studies. (shrink)

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration's rationale for supporting the development and approval of BiDil for heart failure specifically in black patients was based on under-powered, post hoc subgroup analyses of two relatively old trials , which were further complicated by substantial covariate imbalances between racial groups. Indeed, the only statistically significant difference observed between black and white patients was found without any adjustment for potential confounders in samples that were unlikely to have been adequately randomized. Meanwhile, because the accepted (...) baseline therapy for heart failure has substantially improved since these trials took place, their results cannot be combined with data from the more recent trial amongst black patients alone. There is therefore little scientific evidence to support the approval of BiDil only for use in black patients, and the FDA's rationale fails to consider the ethical consequences of recognizing racial categories as valid markers of innate biological difference, and permitting the development of group-specific therapies that are subject to commercial incentives rather than scientific evidence or therapeutic imperatives. This paper reviews the limitations in the scientific evidence used to support the approval of BiDil only for use in black patients; calls for further analysis of the V-HeFT I and II data which might clarify whether responses to H-I vary by race; and evaluates the consequences of commercial incentives to develop racialized medicines. We recommend that the FDA revise the procedures they use to examine applications for race-based therapies to ensure that these are based on robust scientific claims and do not undermine the aims of the 1992 Revitalization Act. (shrink)

The massive and unstoppable emergence of electronic books in libraries has altered their organization. This disruptive technology has led to structural changes. Currently, an e-book exists only if its metadata exists. The objective of this article is to analyse the impact that the massive incorporation of electronic books in university library systems is having in the processes of assignment of subject headings and classification codes. We carried out a survey of more than six hundred libraries, which means almost (...) all the university libraries in Portugal, Spain, England, United States, Brazil, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Australia. From the results obtained, it is deduced that: 1) librarians expect e-books to be provided with descriptive metadata related to the subject headings and classification codes; 2) the bibliographic records provided by publishers/providers seem to be improvable; 3) the quality of the metadata provided by the providers does not seem to be taken into account when selecting publishers for the purchase; 4) the discovery tools are also clearly improvable; 5) it seems that there is no “frustration” or “stress” among librarians about the changes produced in relation to technical processes; and, 6) it does not seem that we are facing a paradigm shift motivated by these issues. (shrink)

TALKING HEADS synthesizes the views and works of a breathtaking range of the most influential modern theorists of the humanities and social sciences.

In Process and Reality Professor A. N. Whitehead formulates a Cosmology which embodies a resolute attempt to combine in one philosophical synthesis a scientific account of Concrescence with a metaphysical explanation thereof in terms of Creativity.

The essay examines Robin Cook’s Coma and Priscille Sibley’s The Promise of Stardust that dramatize the reified and disposable status of the brain-dead patients who are classified as nonpersons. The essay argues that the man-machine entanglement as depicted in the novels constructs a deterritorialized and entangled form of subjectivity that intervenes in the dominant biomedical understanding of personhood and agency that we notionally associate with a conscious mind. The essay concludes its arguments by discussing Alexander Beliaev’s Professor Dowell’s Head which (...) depicts human subjectivity as an essentially embodied and distributive phenomenon and interrogates the Cartesian mind body dualism embedded in the dominant biomedical narratives. (shrink)

This article seeks to examine the political connotations of a recent ‘material turn’ in social and political theory and its implications for theorizations of political agency. ‘New materialist’ theories are premised upon transcending the limits which social constructivism places upon thought, viewed as a reification of the division of subject and object and so a hubristic anthropocentrism which places human beings at the centre of social existence. Yet new materialist theories have tended to locate the conditions of the separation (...) of mind and world they seek to overcome upon the terrain of epistemic or ethical error. By taking the work of Quentin Meillassoux, Jane Bennett and Karen Barad as exemplary, this article contends that new materialist theories not only fall short of their own materialist pretensions insofar as they do not interrogate the material conditions of the separation of the mental and material, but that the failure to do so has profound repercussions for the success of their accounts of political agency. This essay seeks to offer a counter-narrative to new materialist theories by situating the hierarchy between thought and world as a structural feature of capitalist social relations. (shrink)

In this chapter, first we will provide a brief discussion of part of the larger debates concerning metaphysics and attempt to place Masham alongside her friend John Locke in holding that the subject matter of metaphysics is usually either strictly the providence of revelation or is beyond human understanding. Next, we will explore Masham’s criticisms of Norris, Malebranche, and Leibniz to see how these views inform her objections. Here, it will become clear that Masham eschews metaphysics as an a (...) priori investigation into supernatural causes and spirits. She argues that not only do we lack positive evidence for the truth of these metaphysical hypotheses, but we have good reason – from experience and revelation – to believe them false. Finally, we will turn briefly to some of Masham’s positive views concerning the existence and nature of God, the nature of substances, and human freedom. Here, we will see that while Masham does not approve of metaphysical theses that seemingly conflict with our experience of the world, we can know some things about the nature of God and ourselves through experience and reason. This leaves room for Masham to engage in a fair amount of what we would currently consider metaphysical discourse. (shrink)

Are mental states "in the head"? Or do they intrinsically involve aspects of the subject's physical and social context? This volume presents a number of essays dealing with the compass of the mind. The contributors broach a range of issues with a commmon view that physical and social magnets do act upon mental states. The approaches that run through these papers make the volume challenging to cognitive psychologists, theorists of artificial intelligence, social theorists, and philosophers.

One of the classic papers of Australian feminist philosophy is G. Lloyd's "The Man of Reason" (Lloyd, 1979). The main concern of this paper is the alleged maleness of the Man of Reason, i.e., the thesis that our philosophical tradition in some deep way associates the concepts rational and male. Lloyd claims that her main goal is to bring this "undoubted" thesis "into clearer focus" (p.18), and indeed she makes no strenuous effort to demonstrate that the to-be-clarified thesis is actually (...) true. There are however a few places where she advances material she seems to be taking as some kind of evidence that the Man of Reason is male. One is on the second page, where she quotes from Augustine: And finally we see man, made in your image and likeness, ruling over all the irrational animals for the very reason that he was made in your image and resembles you, that is because he has the power of reason and understanding. And just as in man's soul there are two forces; on which is dominant because it deliberates and one which obeys because it is subject to such guidance, in the same way in the physical sense, woman has been made for man. In her mind and her rational intelligence she has a nature the equal of man's, but in sex she is physically subject to him in the same way as our natural impulses need to be subjected to the reasoning power of the mind, in order that the actions to which they lead may be inspired by the principles of good conduct. Now an interesting feature of this passage is that it appears to directly contradict the thesis of the maleness of the Man of Reason. Far from saying that rationality is a male prerogative, Augustine claims that "in her mind and her rational intelligence she has a nature the equal of man's" (my emphasis). Certainly Augustine claims that in sex woman is subject to man, and he also claims that there is an analogy or parallel between the dominance of man over woman in sex and the dominance of the rational part of the mind over the natural impulses.. (shrink)

Our conscious thought, at least at times, seems suffused with language. We may experience thinking as if we were “talking in our head”, thus using inner speech to verbalize, e.g., our premises, lemmas, and conclusions. I take inner speech to be part of a larger phenomenon I call inner semiotics, where inner semiotics involves the subjective experience of expressions in a semiotic (or symbol) system absent the overt articulation of the expressions. In this paper, I argue that inner semiotics allows (...) us to bootstrap our way into entertaining thoughts about exact numbers and quantities that we couldn't prior to our competence with a numeric code. I establish that our arithmetic thoughts literally occur as (internal ‘articulations’ of) expressions in a numeric code. However, a problem arises for my view: just as we can slip in overt speech, producing an utterance that deviates from what we mean to say, there is very good evidence that we can slip in inner speech as well. If our arithmetic thought occurs in a numeric code, it's far from clear how we determine when a covert utterance constitutes a slip. In closing, I provide an account of what makes an inner speech utterance a slip. (shrink)

Head stabilization is fundamental for balance during locomotion but can be impaired in elderly or diseased populations. Previous studies have identified several parameters of head stability with possible diagnostic value in a laboratory setting. Recently, the ecological validity of measures obtained in such controlled contexts has been called into question. The aim of this study was to investigate the ecological validity of previously described parameters of head stabilization in a real-world setting. Ten healthy subjects participated in the study. Head and (...) trunk movements of each subject were recorded with inertial measurement units (IMUs) for a period of at least ten hours. Periods of locomotion were extracted from the measurements and predominant frequencies, root mean squares (RMSs) and bout lengths were estimated. As parameters of head stabilization, attenuation coefficients (ACs), harmonic ratios (HRs), coherences and phase differences were computed. Predominant frequencies were distributed tightly around 2 Hz and ACs, HRs and coherences exhibited the highest values in this frequency range. All head stability parameters exhibited characteristics consistent with previous reports, although higher variances were observed. These results suggest that head stabilization is tuned to the 2 Hz fundamental frequency of locomotion and that previously described measures of head stability could generalize to a real-world setting. This is the first study to address the ecological validity of these measures, highlighting the potential use of head stability parameters as diagnostic tools or outcome measures for clinical trials. The low cost and ease of use of the IMU technology used in this study could additionally be of benefit for a clinical application. (shrink)

This paper aims to clarify and resolve issues surrounding the so-called formal linking problem in interpreting the Internally Headed Relative Clause construction in Korean and Japanese, a problem that has been identified in recent E-type pronominal treatments of the construction (e.g., Hoshi, K. (1995). Structural and interpretive aspects of head-internal and head-external relative clauses. PhD dissertation, University of Rochester; Shimoyama, J. (2001). Wh-constructions in Japanese. PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts at Amherst). In the literature, this problem refers to the difficulty (...) of capturing the delimited semantic variability of the E-type pronoun present in the embedding clause of the construction. I show that the E-type pronoun at issue is subject to a different licensing condition from a typical E-type pronoun and therefore presents a different linking problem. More specifically, it requires that the embedded clause describe a state of its antecedent and its descriptive content be supplied by a salient property represented in the logical form of the embedded clause. I propose an event-based semantic analysis that derives the effects of this novel generalization by establishing a binding relation between the event structure of the embedded clause and the denotation of the E-type pronoun. (shrink)

I argue that justification isn't just in the head. The argument is simple. We should be guided by our beliefs. We shouldn't be guided by anything to do what we shouldn't do. So, we shouldn't believe in ways that would guide us to do the things that we shouldn't. Among the various things we should do is discharge our duties (e.g., to fulfil our promissory obligations) and respect the rights of others (e.g., rights not to be harmed or killed by (...) agents acting on bad information). The grounds of our duties and obligations aren't just in the head. Thus, the conditions that bear on the justification of our beliefs cannot be contained wholly in our heads. The internalist might be right about aspects of normativity, but their theories tell us important normative truths without telling us the whole truth. In addition to norms that tell us how to process information, there are norms that tell us how we ought to live together. In information-asymmetry cases, these norms clearly come apart. Important normative questions about what we should do when agents (who, we might suppose, do what they subjectively ought to do) have interests that come into conflict can only be answered by externalist theories that recognise information-transcendent norms and normatively significant relations that don't supervene upon the information of any agent in particular. The internalist picture turns out to be disturbing precisely because it falls silent when we're faced with questions about how to resolve these conflicts. Resolving these conflicts should be a pressing concern for every normative theory. (shrink)

In catechesis for adolescents seeking confirmation in the Roman Catholic Church, a dualistic bias unconsciously dichotomizes objective doctrine and subjective psychology. This is problematic because if a catechist does not communicate mind-independent truth, no seed of Catholic faith will have been planted in a student. At the same time, if a catechist does not affirm a student's subjectivity, the seed cannot find receptive soil. I believe the key to integrating these intellectual and affective elements – the head and the heart (...) – lies in the link between what Bernard Lonergan calls authentic subjectivity and objectivity. Catechists can appeal to this link by embracing the moral responsibility to ‘know our knowing,’ becoming aware of our dualistic bias and judging our faith experiences according to objective standards of knowledge. (shrink)

In a realistic steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) based brain-computer interface (BCI) application like driving a car or controlling a quadrotor, observing the surrounding environment while simultaneously gazing at the stimulus is necessary. This kind of application inevitably could cause head movements and variation of the accompanying gaze fixation point, which might affect the SSVEP and BCI’s performance. However, few papers studied the effects of head movements and gaze fixation switch on SSVEP response, and the corresponding BCI performance. This study (...) aimed to explore these effects by designing a new ball tracking paradigm in a virtual reality (VR) environment with two different moving tasks, i.e., the following and free moving tasks, and three moving patterns, pitch, yaw, and static. Sixteen subjects were recruited to conduct a BCI VR experiment. The offline data analysis showed that head moving patterns [F(2, 30) = 9.369, p = 0.001, effect size = 0.384] resulted in significantly different BCI decoding performance but the moving tasks had no effect on the results [F(1, 15) = 3.484, p = 0.082, effect size = 0.188]. Besides, the canonical correlation analysis (CCA) and filter bank canonical correlation analysis (FBCCA) accuracy were better than the PSDA and MEC methods in all of the conditions. These results implied that head movement could significantly affect the SSVEP performance but it was possible to switch gaze fixation to interact with the surroundings in a realistic BCI application. (shrink)

Neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero proposed the HEAVEN procedure – i.e. head anastomosis venture – several years ago, and has recently received approval from the relevant regulatory bodies to perform this body-head transplant in China. The BHT procedure involves attaching the donor body to the head of the recipient, and discarding the body of R and head of D. Canavero’s proposed procedure will be incredibly difficult from a medical standpoint. Aside from medical doubt, the BHT has been met with great resistance from (...) many, if not most bio- and neuroethicists.Given both the known challenges and unknown outcomes of HEAVEN, several important neuroethical and legal questions have emerged should Canavero be successful, including: What are the implications for transplantology in the U.S., inclusive of issues of expense, distributive justice, organizational procedures, and the cost of novel insight? How do bioethical and neuroethical principles, and legal regulations of human subject research apply? What are the legal consequences for Canavero performing a BHT? What are the tentative implications for the metaphysical and legal identity of R should they survive post-BHT? These questions are analyzed, issues are identified, and several solutions are proposed in an attempt to re-configure HEAVEN into a safe, clinically effective, and thus realistically viable procedure.Notably, the permissibility of conducting the BHT in China fosters additional, important questions, focal to whether Western ethics and professional norms be used to guide the BHT – or any neuroscientific research and its use - in non-Western countries, such as China; if the models of responsible conduct of research are identical, similar, or applicable to the intent and conduct of research in China; and what economic and political implications are fostered if/when such avant garde techniques are successful.These questions are discussed as a further impetus to develop a globally applicable neuroethical framework that would enable both local articulation and cosmopolitan inquiry and oversight of those methods and approaches deemed problematic, if and when rendered in more international settings. (shrink)

Growing concern with the panpsychist's ostensive inability to solve the ‘combination problem’ has led some authors to adopt a view titled ‘Cosmopsychism’. This position turns panpsychism on its head: rather than many tiny atomic minds, there is instead one cosmos-sized mind. It is supposed that this view voids the combination problem, however I argue that it does not. I argue that there is a ‘de-combination problem’ facing the cosmopsychist, which is equivalent to the combination problem as they are both concerned (...) with subjects being proper parts of other subjects. I then propose two methods for both theorists to avoid the problem of subject-subject proper parthood relations: a distinction between absolute and relative phenomenal unity, and a modification of the essential nature of subjects. Of these two options, I find the latter option wanting and propose that the first should be adopted. (shrink)

The vestibulo-ocular reflex plays an important role in controlling the gaze at a visual target. Although patients with vestibular hypofunction aim to improve their VOR function, some retain dysfunction for a long time. Previous studies have explored the effects of direct current stimulation on vestibular function; however, the effects of random noise stimulation on eye–head coordination have not previously been tested. Therefore, we aimed to clarify the effects of high frequency noisy vestibular stimulation on eye–head coordination related to VOR function. (...) Thirteen healthy young adult participants with no serious disease took part in our study. The current amplitude and density used were 0.4 mA and 0.2 mA/cm2, respectively, with a random noise frequency of 100–640 Hz. The electrodes were located on both mastoid processes. The stimulus duration and fade in/out duration were 600 and 10 s, respectively. Subjects oscillated their head horizontally, gazing at the fixation point, at 1 Hz for 30 repetitions. The coordination of eye–head movements was measured by eye-tracking and a motion capture system. Peak-to-peak angles for eye and head movement and deviation of the visual line from the fixation target revealed no significant differences between HF-nVS and sham. The lag time between the eye and head movement with HF-nVS post-stimulation was significantly shorter than that of the sham. We found that HF-nVS can reduce the lag time between eye and head movement and improve coordination, contributing to a clear retinal image. This technique could be applied as a form of VOR training for patients with vestibular hypofunction. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that paintings are transformations of the perceptual world, transformations that the world itself elicits but does not determine, thus undercutting the subjective-objective divide in art. First, I describe Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of institution, according to which sense develops only by changing, that is, by being taken up and coherently deformed. Next, I use this notion to argue that paintings develop the perceptual sense of the world by coherently deforming it. In other words, paintings are transformations (...) of the perceptual world that are called for by the world itself. To make my case, I analyze Susan Rothenberg’s painting Three Heads, a work that develops and furthers the perceptual sense of horses only by taking it up and changing it. Finally, I suggest that this view of painting motivates an interactive ontology according to which things are not self-contained but interactive, fundamentally opening onto things beyond themselves. (shrink)

After the hell of the Nazis and the terror of Communism, it is possible that a new catastrophe has appeared on the horizon: this time it is neoliberalism that wants to create its own 'new man'. For two centuries, Kant's critical subject and Freud's neurotic subject provided us with philosophical templates for modernity, but today modern capitalism is systematically destroying these two subjects and replacing them with something new. The two subjects of modernity both presupposed some reference to (...) a higher value or power which provided a symbolic guarantor, but neoliberalism, by emphasizing the exchange of commodities in the marketplace, destroys all transcendental references of this kind. Now human beings no longer look beyond themselves and no longer have to agree about symbolic values: they only have to get on with the circulation and consumption of goods. Deprived of his faculty of judgement and urged to enjoy himself without restraint, the 'new man' of neoliberalism takes centre stage in the era of global capitalism. In this biting critique of our contemporary condition Dufour shows that the radical transformation of the subject brought about by neoliberalism - what he calls 'the art of shrinking heads' - contains a new kind of violence which has far-reaching consequences for our ways of living together. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Breathing Without a Head:Plant Respirations in John Gerrard's Smoke TreesOrchid Tierney (bio)About two hours from where I grew up in Invercargill, Aotearoa New Zealand, is a large finger lake called Lake Wakatipu. The lake is nested in the Southern Alps of the South Island and, at the extremes, its body measures three miles wide and fifty-two miles long. The surrounding mountains are haunting in the evenings when the coniferous (...) wildlife is silent, and for as long as I can remember, Wakatipu has been called the breathing lake. I must have read this moniker on a brochure or travel poster in a hotel or a restaurant—I used to visit the area around the lake regularly during the winter months as a child—but according to local legend, it is the beating heart of a taniwha—an ogre called Matau—that causes the lake's respirations. Matakauri, the hero of this particular myth, set alight the ogre whilst he slept in order to rescue his beloved Manata, the beautiful daughter of a local chief, whom the taniwha had kidnapped. As Matau burned, he left behind his heart, which continued to beat rhythmically in the years that followed Matakauri's daring rescue. The myth brilliantly invokes the scientific expertise of the local Indigenous people, for the lake really does rise and fall regularly throughout the day. Despite being landlocked, Wakatipu has an observable seiche, or standing wave, that occurs every 26.7 minutes and results in a tide that rises and falls almost eight inches. Of course, the seiche is the Western scientific explanation for the lake's regular aquatic behavior. The lake breathes because Matau's heart is still beating.Wakatipu's origin myth proposes a respiration that is both wonderfully metaphorical and scientific, but it also raises questions about the embodiments of breath itself. Namely, I'm curious here as to who is an agent of breath? Who and what breathes? Who can breathe easily in the Anthropocene? Who can breathe easily at all? And yet: what an unnecessarily [End Page 14] cruel question this is when so many people nowadays cannot breathe fluently or joyfully in a global pandemic. Over the course of the past two years, the ventilator has become a vexed symbol of the persistence of life, of political incompetence. Of medicalized racial injustice. The lungs that strain against the COVID-19 virus are sometimes the same lungs that have historically struggled against anthropogenic non-viral forms of air pollution. Industrial air pollutants are indicators of systemic racism, imperialism, colonialism, and the uneven urban distributions of risk. Indeed, in December 2020, a British coroner ruled, for the first time in legal history of the United Kingdom, that emissions of nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter on the South Circular Road of London were the cause of nine-year-old Ella Kissi-Debrah's acute respiratory failure in February 2013 (Laville). Toxic airborne pollution is vile matter that forcibly connects gentle lungs with racialized environments. As Timothy Choy notes, "Air muddies the distinction between subjects and environments, and between subjects. This thickness and porosity rendered by air is part of what makes the air and the airborne such deeply felt elements" (157). We, human animals, are too porous for the heavy industry and traffic routes that fill the air and the softness of our lungs. And so: we know the matter of the air by the smoothness of respiration; we feel the keen politics of the air when breathing is labored.I can point to numerous examples where respiration in the context of human life is fraught. Indeed, the act of breathing foregrounds the buoyancy of humanity and the formations of life. I want to acknowledge and hold those complexities because breathing in relation to human life, especially for populations of color, disabled people, and transgender communities, is not yet guaranteed. And I want to consider additionally, who and what has been excluded from the formulations of breathing more generally, and how breathing itself has been anthropomorphized at the expense of other forms of more-than-human life. As Jane Bennett suggests, "humans are always in composition with nonhumanity, never outside of a sticky... (shrink)

The explanatory challenge of sentience is known as the “hard problem of consciousness”: How does subjective experience arise from physical objects and their relations? Despite some optimistic claims, the perennial struggle with this question shows little evidence of imminent resolution. In this article I focus on the “why” rather than on the “how” of sentience. Specifically, why did sentience evolve in organic lifeforms? From an evolutionary perspective this question can be framed: “What adaptive problem(s) did organisms face in their evolutionary (...) past and how were those challenges met? I argue that sentience was a critical component of the adaptive solution (i.e., adopting an agentic stance) to increasingly complex and unpredictable demands placed on vertebrates approximately 500 million years ago (the so-called Cambrian explosion). One consequence of taking an agentic stance is that it freed the organism from its neural moorings, positioning it within phenomenal space outside its brain. (shrink)

The title question should be construed as an epistemological and not ontological one. Omitting the difficult problems of the ontology of intentionality we will ask, if all, what is needed to explain the phenomenon of meaningful use of words, could be found “in our private head” interpreted as a sphere of specific privileged access, the sphere that is in the relevant epistemological sense subjective, private or non public. There are many “mentalistic” theories of meaning that force us to the answer: (...) “yes”. According to these theories our words are meaningful in virtue of some intentions of the speaker. And our intentions consist in having some mental states that should be in the relevant sense subjective or private. (Searle, Chisholm) But there are also the philosophers (Kripke, Putnam) who claim to have the evidence to the contrary. They argue that the meanings of our words could not be “in the head”, because of two important reasons. (i) Very often we don’t know exactly the meanings of the words that we use meaningfully. Furthermore, our “semantical self-knowledge” is principally corrigible by other people, and hence our access to the meanings we use could be by no means privileged. And secondly (ii) we can imagine a situation in which two subjects with the same mental intention use the same word with the very different meanings. We will investigate our question on the ground of the Ingarden’s philosophy. As we will see, his answer turns out to be in an interesting sense: “yes and no”. (shrink)

Qualia internalism is the thesis that qualia are intrinsic to their subjects: the experiences of intrinsic duplicates have the same qualia. Content externalism is the thesis that mental representation is an extrinsic matter, partly depending on what happens outside the head. 1 Intentionalism comes in strong and weak forms. In its weakest formulation, it is the thesis that representationally identical experiences of subjects have the same qualia. 2.

The vast visual coverage of the Boxer Uprising in northern China that ended with foreigners traipsing through the Forbidden City in Beijing reflects both the richly innovative image technology at the turn of the century and the international interest in events that involved many of the world’s most powerful nations. Historians and students who seek to understand the incident through the innovative technology of today can, for the first time, access primary source images in large numbers malleably displayed in the (...) digital environment. The sheer volume of images collected in one place offers powerful new insights into a history already broadly covered in analytical texts and first-person accounts. One qualitative difference from previous histories is the emergence of subjective points of view that can be conveyed in multidimensional models that juxtapose experiential recordings of the day. Harnessing the tension of contrasting viewpoints – who knew what when – enables today’s learners to see through the lenses of past participants whose understanding was limited by location, communications and, one must remember, by not knowing the outcome. Those who were besieged in the Foreign Legations did not know if they would survive; soldiers and rebels on the road to Beijing knew only the difficulties of the march; illustrations in newspaper reports overseas were coloured by politics and both national and international rivalries. Digital visual representations have the possibility of recreating the collision of experiences that allow users to move between personal records and public reporting from the time to gain a knowledge that is unmitigated by an author’s text-based presentation and conclusions. The result is as much a revolution in perception of historical events – perception-based learning – as it is in information about these events. (shrink)

This essay identifies and intervenes in the limitations of both the social and the medical models of disability in the postcolonial context, suggesting that those limitations may apply to theorizations of disability more broadly. It suggests that Bessie Head's novel A Question of Power, which represents mental illness and disability without positing a stable etiology for them, illustrates the inapplicability of these ways of thinking about disability under instances of extreme precarity. As such, Head offers a test case for how (...) mental illness and disability writ large might be theorized without the suppositions implicit to the liberal subject. (shrink)

This paper establishes the novel generalization that Subject -Auxiliary Inversion in comparative clauses requires the co-presence of VP-ellipsis, and argues that this peculiar fact follows from a disjunctive formulation of an ECP that applies at PF. The analysis relies crucially on the presence of an intermediate trace of the A'-moved comparative operator at the edge of VP, which is subject to the ECP at PF, and which interacts with the head movement involved in SAI. This trace is unlicensed (...) in structures with I-to-C movement, but VP-ellipsis repairs the violation, providing further evidence that ellipsis can repair otherwise deviant structures. (shrink)

In order to explore the relationship of social support, self-efficacy, and subjective well-being of special education teachers in China, 496 teachers from 67 special education schools were surveyed by questionnaire. We found that the subjective well-being of special education teachers in China was in the medial level. There were significant differences in subjective well-being level among teachers of different genders, teacher position, education background, and teaching age. Male teachers were of higher subjective well-being; subjective well-being of head teachers was lower (...) than those were not head teachers; teachers with the educational background of postgraduate were of higher relaxation and tension than those with junior college educational background; the control scores of emotion and behavior of teachers with teaching age of 3 years and below were significantly lower than those of teachers with teaching age of more than 10 years. Self-efficacy played a partially mediating role in the relationship between social support and subjective well-being of special education teachers. Suggestions to improve the subjective well-being of special education teachers were discussed in the article. (shrink)

Interdisciplinary work of the sort attempted in my paper is fraught with risks and obstacles. One especially pernicious obstacle is the short-sighted prejudice that insists we should always divide a problem into its various components, allocate different parts to their respective disciplines, publish each separately, and, above all, keep the ethics separate from the rest. Although this may sometimes constitute good tactical advice in the mature stages of inquiry on a complex topic, it begs the question in the early initial (...) stages of discussion on a subject like the present one, which is tangled and complex and not suited to the traditional disciplinary boundaries of professional journals... (shrink)

Founded or unfounded, these objections have not as yet received an adequate answer, i.e., an explanation of the possibility of a philosophy of subjectivity as constituting a reasonable addition to the philosophia perennis, a certain broadening of its perspective, without amounting instead to a simple jettisoning of the thought and gains of centuries. The writings of a Marcel, for example, do not provide such an explanation. Composed wholly within the perspective that is in question, and a little too cavalier in (...) their dismissal of scholastic thought, they cannot really come to grips with that thought, or thereby allay its reasonable suspicions. Even the work of P. de Finance is not wholly satisfactory on this point. As a reviewer of his latest book points out, P. de Finance makes constant and brilliant use of insights gained from the perspective of subjectivity, but he skirts around, without ever really meeting head on, the problems it raises. (shrink)

This article consists of four parts. In the first part it briefly describes the history of body‐to‐head transplantation (BHT) and the surgical plan proposed by Drs. Sergio Canavero and Ren Xiaoping on a human subject. In the second part it argues that the BHT procedure that they propose is scientifically invalid and technically infeasible so therefore would end in failure. In the third part it argues that the present conceivable procedure of BHT cannot be ethically justified because it would (...) bring great harm to the human subject, it is uncertain who would be the possible beneficiary, and valid informed consent cannot be obtained. In the fourth part it argues that the action of performing the procedure of BHT might violate China’s current criminal and civil laws. The conclusion that follows from the arguments above is that BHT should be prohibited now and also in the near future. However, this conclusion does not preclude scientists, neurosurgeons and bioethicists doing research into scientific, technical, surgical and ethical issues raised by BHT. (shrink)

People who attended the ICPIC conference last summer were given a opportunity to consider some perspectives offered by the acknowledged scholar and educational thinker, Gert Biesta. His presentation in Madrid focused on exploring the educational significance of doing philosophy with children from a particular viewpoint. Biesta addressed the question of whether Philosophy for Children movement can offer something more than a clear head, that is, a critical, creative, caring and collaborative thinker. To get the message through, he analysed some wider (...) patterns in the educational field, namely the rise of the language of learning in various educational environments. According to Biesta, this shift has created tendencies towards egocentrism in education. He articulated a subject position from which we can also start addressing the heart and soul of others. In what follows, I will explore this different take on positioning students basing on my reading of the scholarship of P4C and the talk of Gert Biesta accompanied with reading of his other works. I will offer a few views that seem to entail connections between the scholarship in P4C and Biesta. Furthermore, I will pose some questions the talk provoked. (shrink)

As an empirical example of introspective conditions in which the normal sense of self is disrupted, the delusion of thought insertion is of special interest to philosophers investigating the epistemic and phenomenological structures of introspection. A common strategy is to use immunity to error through misidentification as a tool with which to pick apart the implications of thought insertion for our understanding of the faculty of introspection. In this paper I turn that strategy on its head: I draw on our (...) understanding of introspection and of thought insertion to make two correctives to the literature on immunity to error through misidentification. The first is the identification of a formal distinction between two phenomena sometimes conflated under the rubric of misidentification errors. The second is a weakening of the presumed significance of claims to immunity to error through misidentification. With these tightenings to the notion of immunity to error through misidentification in hand, we will be in a better position to turn again to questions about the epistemic and phenomenological nature of introspection. (shrink)

Although the dream narrative, of (bio)logical necessity, originates with the dreamer, s/he typically does not know this. For the dreamer, the dream world is the real world. In this article I argue that this nightly misattribution is best explained in terms of the concept of mental ownership (e.g., Albahari, 2006; Klein, 2015a; Lane, 2012). Specifically, the exogenous nature of the dream narrative is the result of an individual assuming perspectival, but not personal, ownership of content s/he authored (i.e., “The content (...) in my head is not mine. Therefore it must be peripherally perceived”). Situating explanation within a theoretical space designed to address questions pertaining to the experienced origins of conscious content has a number of salutatory consequences. For example, it promotes predictive fecundity by bringing to light empirical generalizations whose presence otherwise might have gone unnoticed (e.g., the severely limited role of mental time travel within the dream narrative). -/- . (shrink)

The gist of the many-subjects argument is that, given physicalism, it’s hard to avoid the absurd result that there are many conscious subjects in your vicinity with more-or-less the same experiences as you. The most promising ways of avoiding this result have a consequence almost as bad: that there are many things in your vicinity that are in a state only trivially different from being conscious, a state with similar normative significance. This paper clarifies and defends three versions of the (...) many-subjects argument. One version poses the threat of conscious parts. Its key premise is that if physicalism is true, then not only you, but also certain parts of your body, are conscious. These parts might include your brain, your head, all-of-you-except-your-left-pinky, all-of-your-brain-except-one-neuron, or your left cerebral hemisphere. A second version poses the threat of conscious coinciders, things that currently occupy the same spatial region as you and share all your matter. Its key premise is that if physicalism is true, then not only you, but also some things that currently coincide with you, are conscious. These might include your body or the aggregate of particles of which you are currently composed. A third version poses the threat of conscious person candidates, the many human-body-shaped material objects in your vicinity that mostly overlap one another, differing only in a few peripheral atoms. This version claims that if physicalism is true, then there are many conscious person-candidates in your vicinity. -/- . (shrink)

The Philosophy for Children in Schools Project is an ongoing research project to explore the impact of philosophy for children on classroom practice. This paper reports on the responses of head teachers, teachers and local educational authority officers in South Wales, UK, to the initial training programme in Philosophy for Children carried out by the University School of Education. Achieving change in schools through the embedding of new practices is an important challenge for head teachers. Interviews and qualitative questionnaires were (...) used to explore perceptions of and attitudes towards the dialogic practice of P4C and the related challenges for school leaders. The results provide an insight into how head teachers planned to embed the new practice of P4C in their schools. Results from the interviews and questionnaires have been subject to iterative analysis and categories derived under which to discuss the findings. There are many similarities in the ways in which different head teachers go about planning change n their schools as well as differences. The results provide insight into the role of initial continuing professional development in school development and the processes by which individual heads plan to embed change in practice across the whole school. (shrink)

Many economic theorists hold that social institutions can lead otherwise irrational agents to approximate the predictions of traditional rational choice theory. But there is little consensus on how institutions do so. I defend an economic internalist account of the institution-actor relationship by explaining economic rationality as a feature of individuals whose decision-making is aided by institutional structures. This approach, known as the subjective transaction costs theory, represents apparently irrational behavior as a rational response to high subjective transaction costs of thinking (...) and deciding. The theory has two attractive features. First, it reconciles rational choice theory with the increasing body of evidence cataloguing putative errors in economic decision-making. Second, it vindicates the explanatory power of individual choice against externalist challenges; the subjective transaction costs theory keeps economic rationality in the head. (shrink)

Brain transplants have long been no more than the subject of science fiction and engaging thought experiments. That is no longer true. Neuroscientists have announced their intention to transplant the head of a volunteer onto a donated body. Response has been decidedly mixed. How should we think about the moral permissibility of head transplants? Is it a life-saving/life-enhancing opportunity that appropriately expands the boundaries of medical practice? Or, is it a bioethical morass that ought not to be attempted? For (...) the purposes of this paper, I set aside questions regarding the surgical operation’s technological plausibility so as to focus on very basic questions regarding personal identity and the morality of head transplantation. The analysis begins with an exploration of the embodiment of persons. It considers whether persons can be conceptually distinguished from all parts of their body, even if they cannot be physically separated from some parts without loss of personhood. It argues that in most cases replacing body parts with reasonably similar parts will not destroy the conditions for sustaining personhood. However, as I explore, the phenomenology of personhood is such that some physical changes may prove to be too significant to maintain personal identity successfully over time. Given such complexity and the significance of the costs involved, the moral permissibility of head transplantation likely depends on recognizing that persons may give permission to collaborate in common activities, including projects with which others deeply disagree, provided that they only utilize the services and resources of free and consenting others. (shrink)

When Mill's The Subjection of Women was published in 1869 it was ahead of its time in boldly championing feminism. It failed to inaugurate a respectable intellectual debate. Feminist writers have tended to refer to it with respect but without any serious attempt to come to grips with Mill's actual arguments. Kate Millett's chapter in Sexual Politics is the only sustained discussion of Mill in the feminist literature that I am aware of, but it is not from a philosophical viewpoint, (...) and deals with Mill only in the service of an extended comparison with Ruskin. Philosophical books on Mill give the essay short measure. Alan Ryan in J. S. Mill heads one chapter ‘Liberty and The Subjection of Women’, but the former work gets twenty-six pages and the latter only four. Ryan says that ‘it is almost entirely concerned with the legal disabilities of women in Victorian England’. H. J. McCloskey, injfohn Stuart Mill: A Critical Study, gives the essay one and a half pages, commenting that it reads ‘like a series of truisms’ and seems so unimportant today because equality of the sexes has been achieved! (shrink)

Isn't probability 1 certainty? If the probability is objective, so is the certainty: whatever has chance 1 of occurring is certain to occur. Equivalently, whatever has chance 0 of occurring is certain not to occur. If the probability is subjective, so is the certainty: if you give credence 1 to an event, you are certain that it will occur. Equivalently, if you give credence 0 to an event, you are certain that it will not occur. And so on for other (...) kinds of probability, such as evidential probability. The formal analogue of this picture is the regularity constraint: a probability distribution over sets of possibilities is regular just in case it assigns probability 0 only to the null set, and therefore probability 1 only to the set of all possibilities. (shrink)