Cultural differences in the emphasis on positive and negative emotions suggest that the impact of these emotions on well-being may differ across cultural contexts. The present study utilised a momentary sampling method to capture average momentary emotional experiences. We found that for participants from cultural contexts that foster positive emotions, average momentary positive emotions predicted well-being better than average momentary negative emotions. In contrast, average momentary negative emotions were more strongly associated with well-being measures for Asian Americans, the group from (...) a cultural context that emphasises monitoring of negative emotions. Furthermore, we found that acculturation to American culture moderated the association between average momentary positive emotions and well-being for Asian Americans. These findings suggest the importance of culture in studying the impact of daily emotional experiences on well-being. (shrink)

The present study examined the effects of gender on the emotional responses (physiology, self-reports of emotion, and emotional facial behaviour) of European Americans (EA) and Hmong Americans (HA) while they relived past emotional events. Women were more emotionally reactive than men: They demonstrated greater changes in electrodermal reactivity overall, reported experiencing more intense emotion while reliving anger and love, and smiled more while reliving happiness and love. The pattern and magnitude of these differences were similar for EA and HA, suggesting (...) that to some degree, the effects of gender on emotional response may hold across ethnic groups. (shrink)

As clinical-psychological scientists and practitioners increasingly work with diverse populations of traumatized people, it becomes increasingly important to attend to cultural models that influence the ways in which people understand and describe their responses to trauma. This paper focuses on potential uses of the concept of cultural script in this domain. Originally described by cognitive psychologists in the 1980s, scripts refer to specific behavioral and experiential sequences of elements such as thoughts, memories, attention patterns, bodily sensations, sleep abnormalities, emotions and (...) affective expressions, motivation, coping attempts and ritualized behaviors that are relevant to posttraumatic adjustment. We differentiate between experiences of traumatic stress that are scripted (e.g., cultural explanations are available) versus unscripted. Further characteristics such as script tracks, the effect of script interruptions, and contextual fit of scripts with other cultural models are also described. We consider examples of traumatic stress associated with war and organized, sexualized violence from ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ world regions. The concluding part of this review describes a number of possibilities for methodological approaches to assessment of cultural scripts. Capturing central elements of the script(s) of trauma would aid psychological researchers and clinicians in understanding the experiences of trauma in cultural context, which could ultimately lead to better clinical service opportunities worldwide. (shrink)

Unlock the secrets of the art world and unleash your creative potential with this innovative and inspiring book. Drawing on the principles of vital art education, this book offers a fresh approach to art instruction that emphasizes the importance of creativity, experimentation, and personal expression. Full of practical tips, engaging exercises, and stunning examples of art, this book is a must-read for artists of all levels and backgrounds. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is (...) part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Descartes and the Last ScholasticsBlake D. DuttonRoger Ariew. Descartes and the Last Scholastics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. Pp. xi + 230. Cloth, $42.50.The attempt to understand Descartes vis-à-vis the scholastic tradition dates back to the studies of Etienne Gilson early in this century. Though Descartes saw himself as a revolutionary who would overthrow the Aristotelianism entrenched in the universities, Gilson was able to demonstrate his reliance upon (...) a variety of scholastic sources for important terminology, distinctions, and arguments which permeate his writings. Unfortunately, this line of investigation was largely ignored among Anglo-American scholars who were generally hostile to Scholasticism and uninterested in contextualizing Descartes's thought. However, since the mid-eighties there has been a distinct shift in attitude as scholars have increasingly turned their attention to the place of Scholasticism within Descartes's intellectual environment. Among these, Roger Ariew has to be counted as one of the most sophisticated, and his new book, Descartes and the Late Scholastics, marks an important contribution to the growing literature on the topic.Ariew's book is actually a collection of essays published over the last decade, including two which he co-authored with Marjorie Grene. Many of these have been substantially expanded to include fresh material and reworked so as to give the whole a greater sense of continuity. After a marvelous opening chapter in which he lays out his overall account of Descartes's attitude towards Scholasticism, Ariew presents the remaining essays in two large groups: those dealing with the immediate context of Descartes's thought and those dealing with its reception through the early part of the eighteenth century.Among the more interesting results of the first group of studies is Ariew's claim that the scholastic climate in and around Paris during Descartes's lifetime was predominately Scotistic rather than Thomistic. He shows this by looking at positions taken by a number of Parisian schoolmen on important issues which typically divided Scotists and Thomists. Ariew goes on to argue that not only was the Parisian environment Scotistic, but that Descartes aligned himself with the Scotists on many key issues in both physics (e.g., that time is independent of motion) and metaphysics (e.g., that the principle of individuation is a form). This is certainly an intriguing claim since most studies of this type have viewed Descartes in relation to Aquinas and those Jesuit thinkers who were broadly Thomistic in outlook. In bringing to light this Scotistic background, Ariew has opened up an important new line of inquiry.Other topics included in this first section are the literary and philosophical background [End Page 275] to the "new way of ideas" of which Descartes is a founder, the place of Descartes's doctrine of matter and form in seventeenth century debates over hylomorphism, and the reaction of Scholastics to the observational results of the new astronomy. What emerges in these essays is not only a highly nuanced view of Descartes's relation to Scholasticism, but an important corrective to still prevalent views of the Scholastics as reactionary and blindly opposed to developments within the new science. This last point is made with particular force in the fifth essay entitled "Scholastics and the New Astronomy." There Ariew argues that the astronomical observations of Galileo et alia were not in themselves decisive for overthrowing the Aristotelian cosmology as it had been articulated in the seventeenth century. This is because scholastic astronomers were generally accepting of such findings (e.g., sunspots) and were able to accommodate them within their own systems by making relatively minor adjustments. Although these systems ultimately proved themselves inadequate, Ariew makes a strong case that the Aristotelianism of the seventeenth century was sufficiently fluid to accommodate most of what the astronomers offered up. Thus the necessity for a radical overhaul of basic philosophical and scientific assumptions was by no means as evident as standard histories of this period would have us believe.The second section of the book is dedicated to debates over Cartesianism and its fate in the generations immediately following Descartes's death. Here Ariew provides a wealth of detail about various condemnations of Cartesianism, a comparative study of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Heavy TrafficDenis DuttonIt was the Reverend Sidney Smith who said, “I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices a man so.” Thirty years ago that remark was still a joke. These days, it’s a downright plausible idea, one with a distinctly postmodern ring. If the objects of experience are nothing but constructions, inventions of our cultures and mind-sets, that must go as well for all the books (...) we read—including those books which urge this fact on us. To read them is to construct them, to write them for yourself. But wait—that can’t be a fact, because facts are just prejudices too. Takes your breath away to realize how far scholarship has come.These thoughts drifted through my mind reading The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology, edited by George E. Marcus and Fred R. Myers (University of California Press, $48.00 cloth, $17.95 paper). It comprises a long introduction plus eleven chapters which “explore the boundaries and affinities between art, anthropology, representation, and culture, casting a critical, ethnographic light on the art worlds of the contemporary West and the ways they give value to cultural form—in short, a “‘traffic’ in culture.” It is not easy to make out a consistent thread in the essays themselves. Carol Vance offers a fine discussion in the form of four small essays on censorship, the NEA, Jesse Helms, and so forth. There is no discernible connection with anthropology, and I cannot see why these pieces are included. Nancy Sullivan, described as a Ph.D. candidate in Fred R. Myers’s NYU anthropology department, struggles with her cumbersome account of the artworld in the last generation. Again, I can detect no hint of how anthropology has helped her understand the artworld. Hal Foster makes a cameo appearance of only a few pages, a kind of postmodern arabesque with lots of big words. Christopher B. Steiner revisits material [End Page 283] presented in his book, African Art in Transit, which is squarely in the field, and Steven Feld agonizes about appropriation of world music into commercial music business while telling some interesting tales about a radio program he produced of music from Papua New Guinea. The feminist Judith L. Goldstein does a late-capitalist, “late-postmodernist” job on women’s makeup, with much reliance on Fredric Jameson but no anthropology I can discern, despite the fact that she gave a version of it at an American Anthropological Association conference. If we really have reached “late-postmodernism” we can only be thankful. Molly H. Mullin’s account of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century enthusiasm for American Indian artifacts, on the other hand, may begin with clichés about “élite responses to the rise of consumer capitalism,” but it soon settles down to a solid account of the people and problems of trying to achieve recognition of Indian handicrafts as art. This was made possible, we learn, by much devoted work from people who were multiculturalists before the word existed, white Americans whose actions were based on a love of Indian cultures and arts, rather than postcolonial theory and the school of resentment. All the issues of art vs. craft, the relation of tourism to artistic development, authenticity, and so on, were raised in the 1920s and 30s, with sophistication not often seen today.But to figure out how it all is supposed to tie together, we have to turn to the book’s explanatory introduction. This is so turgidly vague that when I was done I felt like invoicing the authors for my time. These pages are peppered with half-assertions I’d half want to dispute if their meaning were plainer, and a few that are plain enough to be flat-out wrong. Among many examples: “Ironically, the very category of ‘art’—as opposed to ‘the arts’—goes unexamined in its own hierarchies of sense, so that various forms of popular performance, in which disinterested contemplation does not necessarily reign supreme, are excluded.” Excluded? Notice that irritating passive voice: who, I’d like to know, has left popular performance unexamined and excluded? What are “hierarchies of sense”? The sentence carries no reference. In... (shrink)

Much has been written about the ethics and values of today's business student, but this research has generally been characterized by a variety of methodological shortcomings — the use of convenience samples, a failure to establish the relevance of comparison groups employed, attempts to understand behavior in terms of unidimensional values preselected by the researcher, and the lack of well-designed longitudinal studies. The research reported here addresses many of these concerns by comparing the values and ethical decision making behavior of (...) a large cohort of students entering an M. B. A. program to students entering law school. Using the Rokeach value survey and several ethical decision making vignettes, significant differences were found between the two groups which have important implications for both the business and legal professions and the education of their future leaders. (shrink)

Prior research on the impact of ethics education within the business curriculum has yielded mixed results. Although the impact is often found to be positive, it appears to be both small and short-lived. Interpretation of these results, however, is subject to important methodological limitations. The present research employed a longitudinal methodology to evaluate the impact of an M.B.A. program versus a law program on the values and ethical decision making behavior of a cohort of students at two major universities in (...) the northeast. The results suggest that the M.B.A. curriculum remains a value-neutral experience for most students. In contrast, the law school program had a significant impact on both values and ethical decision making. (shrink)

This paper reports on an experimental study investigating the acquisition of grammatical gender in Russian by heritage speakers living in Norway. The participants are 54 Norwegian-Russian bilingual children (4;0-10;2) as well as 107 Russian monolingual controls (3;0-7;0). Previous research has shown that grammatical gender is problematic for bilingual speakers, especially in cases where gender assignment is opaque (Schwartz et al., 2015; Polinsky, 2008; Rodina and Westergaard, 2017). Furthermore, factors such as proficiency and family type (one or two Russian-speaking parents) have (...) been argued to be important. Interestingly, previous findings differ with respect to the kind of errors children make: restructuring to a two-gender system (masculine-feminine, see Polinsky, 2008) or defaulting to masculine (see Rodina and Westergaard, 2017). It is also not clear to what extent children are sensitive to gender cues or whether certain agreement patterns are simply memorized. To investigate this, we used both existing nouns and nonce words and tested both transparent and opaque gender cues. The results were checked against a number of background factors measuring exposure, proficiency, and dominance. Our findings show that bilingual children are clearly sensitive to morphophonological cues for gender assignment. The most common and robust error pattern for all bilinguals involved overgeneralization to masculine (especially affecting neuter and opaque nouns). At the same time, children from families with two Russian-speaking parents and monolinguals also occasionally overused feminine with vowel-final nouns. The following variables were found to be the most reliable predictors of accuracy on grammatical gender tasks: cumulative length of exposure (CLoE) and consistency of input in Russian, as well as the presence of older siblings, with CLoE to Russian being by far the most robust and important predictor. Furthermore, we show that a lexical diversity measure (number of different words in a Russian narrative) is also correlated significantly with the children’s performance on the gender tasks. At the same time, our results indicate that relative measures of dominance (e.g., the difference in exposure between the two languages or the difference in narrative scores) may be redundant when more robust absolute measures are present (CLoE and lexical diversity in the heritage language). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Truth MattersOnce in a while stunning new ideas that energize a scholarly discipline—or even wreck it altogether—come from the outside. The most influential philosopher of science in the last generation was not a philosopher at all, but an historian and physicist, Thomas Kuhn. Ernst Gombrich, an art historian, has deeply informed the philosophy of art, as the linguist Noam Chomsky has affected the philosophy of language. And Jacques Derrida (...) continues to cast his stupefying spell over many a literature department, even if most philosophers remain unimpressed.In a minor but spectacular way (how else to describe an event first encountered on the front page of the New York Times?), Alan Sokal has barged in on this honorable tradition. As a physicist, he successfully placed a barely-coherent, factually ludicrous, jargon-ridden article in a major journal of cultural studies.When we caught up with Sokal’s hoax, our initial reaction was sympathy for the hapless editors of Social Text. They weren’t the first journal editors to be landed with a contribution that went sour (though the only other episodes we could recall were plagiarism, not parody). However, when one of these chaps, Stanley Aronowitz, reacted in the Times by calling Sokal “ill-read and half-educated” (May 18, 1996), editorial fellow-feeling began to evaporate. And when Stanley Fish, executive director of the Duke University Press, which publishes Social Text, launched a bitter counterattack on Sokal three days later, it was hard not to regard Fish’s indignation, as E. D. Hirsch described it in a subsequent letter to the Times, as “the indignation of Tartuffe on being exposed.” [End Page 299]After some tedious preliminaries, Fish accused Sokal of failing to understand that the sociology of science is an enterprise “distinct” from science, “with objects of study, criteria, and goals all its own.” Sokal knows this, naturally, as he had already made clear in his Lingua Franca article on the hoax, and as he explains again in his afterword in this issue of our journal. But Fish went on to a more sweeping generalization. Imagining Sokal believed that cultural studies threaten the stability or integrity of the sciences, Fish said not to worry: “A research project that takes the practice of science as an object of study is not a threat to that practice because, committed to its own goals and protocols, it doesn’t reach into, and therefore doesn’t pose a danger to, the goals and protocols it studies.”With this account of a well-ordered academic world, Fish inadvertently reveals what some see as a serious failing of cultural studies and postmodern theory: it poses a threat to absolutely nothing. Leave science aside for a moment, and consider a sociology of, say, astrology, or medicine, or the fashion industry. Could we envision a proper sociology of astrology which posed no danger to “the goals and protocols” in using planetary/zodiacal patterns to predict the future or retrodict the characters of subjects? Hardly; it’s the business of the sociology of any human activity to identify and question the intellectual claims and practical ambitions of that enterprise. And that is exactly what Alan Sokal did: he invented a clever test of the intellectual rigor of cultural studies in general and its version of poststructuralist sociology of science in particular. He then subjected Social Text—and implicitly in many minds the intellectual standards of the field it represents—to the test. It failed.Sokal’s methodology was not unique; it can be applied in different ways to many other disciplines. If you want to evaluate, for example, the intellectual pretensions of astrologers there is a fine way to do it; it essentially adapts the double-blind placebo procedure used in drug research, another celebrated testing methodology. Allow a group of astrologers to agree on a set of character readings based on accurate birth charts. Give these back, shuffled, with identifying information stripped off, to the subjects of the astrological readings. If the subjects can pick out their own readings from character descriptions alone (descriptions created by astrologers on the basis of birth information only, without meeting the subjects in question), then astrology must possess... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Truth MattersOnce in a while stunning new ideas that energize a scholarly discipline—or even wreck it altogether—come from the outside. The most influential philosopher of science in the last generation was not a philosopher at all, but an historian and physicist, Thomas Kuhn. Ernst Gombrich, an art historian, has deeply informed the philosophy of art, as the linguist Noam Chomsky has affected the philosophy of language. And Jacques Derrida (...) continues to cast his stupefying spell over many a literature department, even if most philosophers remain unimpressed.In a minor but spectacular way (how else to describe an event first encountered on the front page of the New York Times?), Alan Sokal has barged in on this honorable tradition. As a physicist, he successfully placed a barely-coherent, factually ludicrous, jargon-ridden article in a major journal of cultural studies.When we caught up with Sokal’s hoax, our initial reaction was sympathy for the hapless editors of Social Text. They weren’t the first journal editors to be landed with a contribution that went sour (though the only other episodes we could recall were plagiarism, not parody). However, when one of these chaps, Stanley Aronowitz, reacted in the Times by calling Sokal “ill-read and half-educated” (May 18, 1996), editorial fellow-feeling began to evaporate. And when Stanley Fish, executive director of the Duke University Press, which publishes Social Text, launched a bitter counterattack on Sokal three days later, it was hard not to regard Fish’s indignation, as E. D. Hirsch described it in a subsequent letter to the Times, as “the indignation of Tartuffe on being exposed.” [End Page 299]After some tedious preliminaries, Fish accused Sokal of failing to understand that the sociology of science is an enterprise “distinct” from science, “with objects of study, criteria, and goals all its own.” Sokal knows this, naturally, as he had already made clear in his Lingua Franca article on the hoax, and as he explains again in his afterword in this issue of our journal. But Fish went on to a more sweeping generalization. Imagining Sokal believed that cultural studies threaten the stability or integrity of the sciences, Fish said not to worry: “A research project that takes the practice of science as an object of study is not a threat to that practice because, committed to its own goals and protocols, it doesn’t reach into, and therefore doesn’t pose a danger to, the goals and protocols it studies.”With this account of a well-ordered academic world, Fish inadvertently reveals what some see as a serious failing of cultural studies and postmodern theory: it poses a threat to absolutely nothing. Leave science aside for a moment, and consider a sociology of, say, astrology, or medicine, or the fashion industry. Could we envision a proper sociology of astrology which posed no danger to “the goals and protocols” in using planetary/zodiacal patterns to predict the future or retrodict the characters of subjects? Hardly; it’s the business of the sociology of any human activity to identify and question the intellectual claims and practical ambitions of that enterprise. And that is exactly what Alan Sokal did: he invented a clever test of the intellectual rigor of cultural studies in general and its version of poststructuralist sociology of science in particular. He then subjected Social Text—and implicitly in many minds the intellectual standards of the field it represents—to the test. It failed.Sokal’s methodology was not unique; it can be applied in different ways to many other disciplines. If you want to evaluate, for example, the intellectual pretensions of astrologers there is a fine way to do it; it essentially adapts the double-blind placebo procedure used in drug research, another celebrated testing methodology. Allow a group of astrologers to agree on a set of character readings based on accurate birth charts. Give these back, shuffled, with identifying information stripped off, to the subjects of the astrological readings. If the subjects can pick out their own readings from character descriptions alone (descriptions created by astrologers on the basis of birth information only, without meeting the subjects in question), then astrology must possess... (shrink)

Stable evolutionary strategy of Homo sapiens (SESH) is built in accordance with the modular and hierarchical principle and consists of the same type of self-replicating elements, i.e. is a system of systems. On the top level of the organization of SESH is the superposition of genetic, social, cultural and techno-rationalistic complexes. The components of this triad differ in the mechanism of cycles of generation - replication - transmission - fixing/elimination of adoptively relevant information. This mechanism is implemented either in accordance (...) with the Darwin-Weismann modus, or according to the Lamarck modus, the difference between them is clear from the title. The integral attribute of the system of systems including ESSH is the production of evolutionary risks. The sources of evolutionary risk for stable adaptive strategy of Homo sapiens are the imbalance of (1) the intra-genomic co-evolution (intragenomic conflicts); (2) the gene-cultural coevolution; (3) the inter-cultural co-evolution; (4) techno-humanitarian balance; (5) intertechnological conflicts (technological traps). At least phenomenologically the components of the evolutionary risk are reversible, but in the aggregate they are in potentio irreversible destructive ones for bio-social, and cultural self-identity of Homo sapiens. When the actual evolution is the subject of a rationalist control and/or manipulation, the magnitude of the 4th and 5th components of the evolutionary risk reaches the level of existential significance. (shrink)

This paper is a commentary comparing the evolutionary perspectives of Denis Dutton’s The Art Instinct (2009) and Stephen Davies’s The Artful Species (2012). Their topics thus necessarily overlap, but their books have different purposes and a different feel. Davies’s book is an academic exercise. He has no real arguments or claims of his own. Dutton wishes to demonstrate that evolutionary psychology can provide a satisfying naturalistic explanation of aesthetic experience. Neither Davies nor Dutton fully succeeds in his (...) ambition. Davies extends his scepticism well beyond a sensible account of the state of current knowledge about human evolution, and Dutton fails to recognize underlying theoretical differences in his main sources of theoretical inspiration. The limitations in these two works do not define the boundaries of current knowledge in evolutionary aesthetics. The most advanced and adequate concept in the evolutionary humanities is the idea that humans evolved the capacity to create imaginative virtual worlds and use those worlds to guide human behaviour. Both books being considered in this essay approach the idea of imaginative virtual worlds and almost grasp it. Before taking up that topic, the paper shall discuss two subsidiary issues: Dutton’s effort to incorporate sexual selection, and Davies’s sceptical negations about all evolutionary knowledge. (shrink)

In The Art Instinct, Denis Dutton promoted a theoretical framework that “has more validity, more power, and more possibilities than the hermetic discourse that deadens so much of the humanities.”1 This framework is Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural and sexual selection. Dutton proposed to seek “human universals that underlie the vast cacophony of cultural differences and across the globe” (AI, p. 39), based on a shared, evolved human nature.This contrasts with the relativistic presumptions of those falling (...) under the shadow of Margaret Mead and Clifford Geertz, or “the dogmas of Freud, the speculations of Jung, the sterile formulations of behaviorism, all variously empty or misleading” (p. 37). Also .. (shrink)

Aging at work is a dynamic process. As individuals age, their motives, abilities and values change as suggested by life-span development theories (Kanfer & Ackerman, 2004; Lang & Carstensen, 2002). Their growth and extrinsic motives weaken while intrinsic motives increase (Kooij, De Lange, Jansen, Kanfer, & Dikkers, 2011), which may result in workers investing their resources in different areas accordingly. However, there is significant individual variability in aging trajectories (Hedge, Borman, & Lammlein, 2005). In addition, the changing nature of work, (...) the evolving job demands, as well as the available opportunities at work may no longer be suitable for older workers, increasing the likelihood of person-job misfit. The potential misfit may, in turn, impact how older workers perceive themselves on the job, which leads to conflicting work identities. With the traditional job redesign approach being a top-down process, it is often difficult for organizations to take individual needs and skills into consideration and tailor jobs for every employee (Berg, Dutton, & Wrzesniewski, 2010). Therefore, job crafting, being an individualized process initiated by employees themselves, can be a particularly valuable mechanism for older workers to realign and enhance their demands-abilities and needs-supplies fit. Through job crafting, employees can exert personal agency and make changes to the task, social and cognitive aspects of their jobs with the goal of improving their work experience (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001). Building on the Life Span Theory of Control (Heckhausen & Schulz, 1995), we posit that job crafting, particularly cognitive crafting, will be of increasing value as employees age. Through reframing how they think of their job and choosing to emphasize job features that are personally meaningful, older workers can optimize their resources to proactively redesign their jobs and maintain congruent, positive work identities. (shrink)

GREEN POLITICS: THE GLOBAL PROMISE, 2nd ed. by Charlene Spretnak and Fritjof Capra New York: E. P. Dutton, 1986; 224 pp., $12.95 SEEING GREEN: THE POLITICS OF ECOLOGY EXPLAINED by Jonathan Porritt Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985; 249 pp., $24.95, $6.95 paper THE SPIRITUAL DIMENSION OF GREEN POLITICS by Charlene Spretnak Santa Fe, N.M.: Bear 95 pp., $4.95 paper.

For approximately two thousand years, human thinkers have been attempting to define a behaviour, referred to as art, that humans have been practicing for tens of thousands of years. Defining this term has proved to be so difficult that Munro (1949: 5) to claim that the arts “are too intangible and changing to be defined or classified.” In this paper a 12-property cluster theory proposed by Denis Dutton is critically evaluated not in light of how well it fits with (...) current thinking in aesthetics, but in light of its scientific strength and its usefulness for examining art across cultures. (shrink)

The paper investigates the video game discourse of the Russian state media from 2011 to 2015. Critical discourse analysis serves as a methodological framework for this work, and Foucault’s power/knowledge model is used to explain the logic behind the «grotesque discourses». In the Russian press, video games are described as an instance of inculcation, provoking overintense emotions and forcing individuals to commit symbolic acts impossible from the standpoint of “normal” pedagogy. The paper problematizes the mythologization of violence in video games (...) and identifies the main tropes used to establish the connection between video games and violence (murders) as “natural” and “obvious”. Particular attention is paid to the publications of Aleksandr Minkin, a reporter at “Moskovskij Komsomolets” (“Moscow Komsomol Member”) and one of the most prominent critics of video games, as well as to the media coverage of the first school shooting in Russia (shooting at school № 263 in 2014). It is shown that video games are used in the media discourse as an explanatory principle that allows a shift from the crime to the criminal, to those acts which reveal moral depravity or psychological disorder, and those circumstances which foster criminalism. Pointing to the games helps restore the “normal” connection between social and moral qualities, explaining the crime committed by an honours student from a “good family” as being the result of the depictions of violence in video games affecting the child’s psyche. Video games are also described as a factor in shaping the “digital generation” or “generation of gamers” — odd and politically dangerous. The dangers that games create for both gamers and society in general (the non-distinction between the “real” and the “virtual”, the illusion of a “possible restart”) allow the journalists and experts to insist on strengthening measures of supervision and protection, and expanding legal and medical control. (shrink)

Contributions de : Brumberg-Chaumont, J. ; Burnett, C. ; Caiazzo, I. ; Dutton, P. ; Fidora, A. ; Fredborg, M. ; Gautier Dalché, P. ; Jacquart, D. ; Jeauneau, E. ; Jolivet, J. ; Obrist, B. ; Poirel, D. ; Rodnite Lemay, H.

The target articles in this special section shed new light on the old question whether and how emotions influence action. However, what is missing is a straightforward motivational analysis—considering what we have learned from the science of explaining the “why” and “how” of behavior. I posit that emotions can influence the motivation process and thus action by fulfilling at least three functions: First, being grounded in needs, experienced emotions can function as strong need-like motivational states. Second, anticipated emotions can function (...) as incentives and justify action. Third, emotions can inform about progress in goal pursuit permitting behavior calibration. In summary, there is little doubt that emotions influence action. They can do so because they are hypo-phenomena of motivation. (shrink)

In some young children brought by their parents for diagnosis of acute life-threatening events investigations suggested imposed apnoea as the cause rather than spontaneous occurrence. Covert video surveillance of the cot in which the baby was monitored allowed confirmation or rebuttal of this diagnosis. That parents were not informed of the video recording was essential for diagnosis and we assert ethically justifiable as the child was the patient to whom a predominant duty of care was owed. The procedure also avoids (...) the risk of separation of child from parent on inadequate information. (shrink)

The line of thought from which contemporary Social Science has come forth was occupied with problems of public policy in a way which has since become very much less prominent in the work of social scientists. The classic figures of social thought —Aristotle, Plato, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, Jeremy Bentham, James and John Stuart Mill, Ricardo, Hobbes and Locke, Burke, Machiavelli and Hegel—were all involved in the consideration of the fundmental problems of policy from the point of view of the man (...) who had to exercise power and to make practical decisions. Even where they themselves lived in remoteness from practical affairs the clarification of the standards for the judgment and guidance of public policy was always close to the centre of their attention. The politician's problems, reduced to fundamentals, were their problems. The problem of maintaining order through the prince's exercise of power was the point of departure of classical political philosophy; it was extended by modern liberalism to the maintenance of liberty in a framework of order. Political philosophy was regarded by those who professed it, as a means of enlightening rulers—and citizens—as to the right ends and the approximate means. The great ancestor of modern empirical social research, Sir William Petty, who regarded his task as the quantitative matter-of-fact description of what existed, viewed his problem as set by the prince's need to safeguard and maximise his power. Early economic theory accepted the same task. Even after mercantalism gave way to liberalism, economic theory was still intended to be a guide to policy. (shrink)

Control of wild animals may give rise to controversy, as is seen in the case of badger control to manage TB in cattle in the UK. However, it is striking that concerns about the potential suffering of the affected animals themselves are often given little attention or completely ignored in policies aimed at dealing with wild animals. McCulloch and Reiss argue that this could be remedied by means of a “mandatory application of formal and systematic Animal Welfare Impact Assessment ”. (...) Optimistically, they consider that an AWIA could help to resolve controversies involving wild animals. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the potential of AWIA. We begin by showing how ideas akin to AWIA already play a significant role in other animal ethics controversies, particularly those concerning laboratory animal use and livestock production; and we bring in lessons learnt from these controversies. Then we comment on the suggested development and application of AWIA in the case of badger control. Finally, we discuss the prospects of applying AWIA to other sorts of wild animal controversy. We argue that the AIWA, as developed by McCulloch and Reiss, relies on several dubious premises, including that killing is a welfare issue. Furthermore, we argue that AWIA is unlikely to prevent serious moral disagreements over how to weigh concerns about wild animals against priorities in human health, the health of domestic and farm animals, and biodiversity, but that it may nonetheless serve to limit harms imposed on the wild animals. (shrink)

The archive produces a linear time that reaches towards ‘what could be’ by asserting ‘what has been’, providing us reassurance of our existence through the assertion of a reliably past past. But the Anthropocene is an era of uncontained material ramifications, where the past juts into the future and temporality warps as change accelerates unexpectedly. As an ecological and geologic epoch, documentation of the Anthropocene inherently has a relationship to natural history museums and archives. These institutions, however, troublingly rest on (...) what Elaine Graham calls ‘ontological hygiene’ – the separateness of the human subject from ‘nature’. The Anthropocene however, challenges the western post-Enlightenment binary of man vs. nature, as it (supposedly) naturalizes humans into an earth systems force. As such, documentation of this epoch might resist ontological sanitation. This article outlines an artistic research practice to create artefacts of the Anthropocene – one that invites material idiosyncrasies, objects-in-becoming, ephemerality, and decay. I suggest that artistic ‘anarchices’ prioritize process over objects, and resist linear and static representation in lieu of material, embodied and sensory artefacts. These include relational encounters with waste materials, reworked forms of ‘geology’, edible artefacts and multimedia works at landfills and feral sites. The anarchives are interpolated by a rejection of hegemonic logic, positivism and ‘objective’ truths about environmental phenomena; Situated, ambiguous and material knowledges are inwrought into the so-called Anthropocene (and any alternatives to this term). By focusing on waste as an analytical category, I explore some of the ontological breakdowns present in the Anthropocene and question how to unorder systems and disturb materiality. (shrink)

The selections contained in these volumes from the papers and letters of Leibniz are intended to serve the student in two ways: first, by providing a more adequate and balanced conception of the full range and penetration of Leibniz's creative intellectual powers; second, by inviting a fresher approach to his intellectual growth and a clearer perception of the internal strains in his thinking, through a chronological arrangement. Much confusion has arisen in the past through a neglect of the develop ment (...) of Leibniz's ideas, and Couturat's impressive plea, in his edition of the Opuscu/es et fragments (p. xii), for such an arrangement is valid even for incomplete editions. The beginning student will do well, however, to read the maturer writings of Parts II, III, and IV first, leaving Part I, from a period too largely neglected by Leibniz criticism, for a later study of the still obscure sources and motives of his thought. The Introduction aims primarily to provide cultural orientation and an exposition of the structure and the underlying assumptions of the philosophical system rather than a critical evaluation. I hope that together with the notes and the Index, it will provide those aids to the understanding which the originality of Leibniz's scientific, ethical, and metaphysical efforts deserve. (shrink)