Objective: This study aimed to investigate whether galvanic vestibular stimulation with stochastic noise modulates the body sway and muscle activity of the lower limbs, depending on visual and somatosensory information from the foot using rubber-foam.Methods: Seventeen healthy young adults participated in the study. Each subject maintained an upright standing position on a force plate with/without rubber-foam, with their eyes open/closed, to measure the position of their foot center of pressure. Thirty minutes after baseline measurements under four possible conditions (...) performed without nGVS, the stimulation trials were conducted under the same conditions in random order, which were then repeated a week or more later. The total center of pressure path length movement and COP movement velocity in the mediolateral and anteroposterior directions were recorded for 30 s during nGVS. Furthermore, electromyography activity of the right tibial anterior muscle and soleus muscle was recorded for the same time and analyzed.Results: Three-way analysis of variance and post-hoc multiple comparison revealed a significant increment in COP-related parameters by nGVS, and a significant increment in soleus muscle activity on rubber. There was no significant effect of eye condition on any parameter.Conclusions: During nGVS, body sway and muscle activity in the lower limb may be increased depending not on the visual condition, but on the foot somatosensory condition. (shrink)

Instrumented assessments of quiet-stance postural control typically involve recording and analyzing of body sway signal, most often the center of pressure movement. It has been recently suggested that transient characteristics of body sway may offer additional information regarding postural control. In this study, we explored the relationship between whole-trial estimates of body sway and corresponding transient behavior indexes, as well as the effects of leg preference. A total of 705 healthy young athletes performed 30 (...) s single-leg body sway trials for both legs. It was found that the transient characteristics of the body sway are in negligible or weak correlation with the corresponding variables, averaged across the whole trial. All CoP variables showed transient characteristics, reflected in statistically significant decrease or increase throughout the trial. The preferred leg showed smaller body sway; however, the effect sizes were very small. Moreover, differences between the legs were also noted in terms of transient characteristics of body sway. In particular, the preferred leg showed earlier reduction in anterior–posterior body sway and larger reduction in medial–lateral body sway. Further studies should focus on examining the clinical utility of indexes of transient behavior of body sway, for instance, their sensitivity to aging-related changes and risk of falling. (shrink)

How is it that metaphors are meaningful, yet we have so much trouble saying exactly what they mean? I argue that metaphoric thought is an act of imagination, mediated by the contingent form of human embodiment. Metaphoric cognition is an example of the productive interplay between intentional imagery and the body scheme, a process of imaginal modeling. The case of metaphor marks the intersection of linguistic and psychological processes and demonstrates the need for a multi-disciplinary approach not only in (...) philosophy of language, but in cognitive science and consciousness studies as well. (shrink)

ObjectiveAre people with a characteristically large physiological sway rendered particularly unstable when standing on a moving surface? Is postural sway in standing individuals idiosyncratic? In this study, we examine postural sway in individuals standing normally, and when subtle continuous sinusoidal disturbances are applied to their support platform. We calculate consistency between conditions to verify if sway can be considered characteristic of each individual. We also correlate two different aspects of participants’ responses to disturbance; their sway (...) velocity and their regulation of body orientation.MethodsNineteen healthy adults (age 29.2 ± 3.2 years) stood freely on footplates coaxially aligned with their ankles and attached to a motorized platform. They had their eyes closed, and hips and knees locked with a light wooden board attached to their body. Participants either stood quietly on a fixed platform or on a slowly tilting platform (0.1 Hz sinusoid; 0.2 and 0.4 deg). Postural sway size was separated into two entities: (1) the spontaneous sway velocity component (natural random relatively rapid postural adjustments, RMS body angular velocity) and (2) the evoked tilt gain component (much slower 0.1 Hz synchronous tilt induced by the movement of the platform, measured as peak-to-peak (p-p) gain, ratio of body angle to applied footplate rotation).ResultsThere was no correlation between the velocity of an individual’s sway and their evoked tilt gain (r= 0.34,p= 0.15 andr= 0.30,p= 0.22). However, when considered separately, each of the two measurements showed fair to good absolute agreement within conditions. Spontaneous sway velocity consistently increased as participants were subjected to increasing disturbance. Participants who swayed more (or less) did so across all conditions [ICC(3,k)= 0.95]. Evoked tilt gain also showed consistency between conditions [ICC(3,k)= 0.79], but decreased from least to most disturbed conditions.ConclusionThe two measurements remain consistent between conditions. Consistency between conditions of two very distinct unrelated measurements reflects the idiosyncratic nature of postural sway. However, sway velocity and tilt gain are not related, which supports the idea that the short-term regulation of stability and the longer-term regulation of orientation are controlled by different processes. (shrink)

In this essay I argue that the concept of “the body,” ironically generic and a-bodily, is a legacy of the modern political/ecological distinction. I proceed through five sections. First I suggest that the political and the ecological, in spite of a lot of excellent work undermining the nature-culture distinction, remain mutually resistant concepts. In section two I argue that this split can be partially understood through the work of Bruno Latour. For Latour modernity is defined by an attempt to (...) purge culture of nature. This is the “first Great Divide” that constitutes modernity as a concept and in fact a distinct nature-culture. For Latour, this distinction then gets externalized or projected to create a second Great Divide, one imagined by moderns between themselves and other societies. To illustrate the extent of the sway of this distinction, I read a recent and widely influential essay on doing history in the Anthropocene by Dipesh Chakrabarty. Chakrabarty underestimates the role of the nature-culture distinction in the making of climate crisis. Here I also explain that perhaps what is needed is recognition that the human as a morphology both separates itself from ecology and yet—incompatibly—is considered to be an ecological pinnacle. The human isn’t and yet is ecological. Differences among humans, when they are discussed, are attributed unilaterally to the political side of a new political-ecological split. After Latour the nature and culture distinction is questionable, but a political-ecological split survives that attributes the eruptions of discontinuous life entirely to human agency. In the third section I then turn to the work of Frantz Fanon to argue that Latour’s Great Divides are expressed as “Manichaean” in Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. The “ecological” import of Fanon’s concept of Manichaean-ism has largely been missed, thanks both to the salience of the political-ecological distinction and to the subtlety of Fanon’s account. But Fanon is not only talking about politics; he’s talking about ecology. The human, Fanon explains, is meant to be a natural master of the planet, a human among animals. The human is master of all “matter” with which all things related to bodies and all bodies related to things are identified. In the fourth section I suggest that it is this modern Manichaean-ism that produces a crucial double bind in the present: Those who fail to be “the body” of modernism are also those most harmed by its elemental (a word I borrow from a critical reading of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Luce Irigaray for an indistinguishably political and ecological) destruction. Politics, at least in the tradition that gives rise to modern politics, is in fact and has always been the privileging of certain bodies over others. There is no perfectly apolitical bodily feature, though some features of bodies are more politically formative than others. Modernity does nothing to intervene on this. In fact it exacerbates this theme. Neither the discourse of politics nor the discourse of ecology offers refuge to those whose bodies are considered a threat to a human morphology that is planetarily alienated. In the final section of the essay I argue that this partitioning of politics (relations among the humans) from ecology produces “the body” and its generic justice. I return to Latour to argue that he ultimately does not appreciate the double bind discussed in section four. Fanon does. Therefore Fanon offers a better framework for undermining “the political,” not by reducing it to the modern sense of “the ecological,” but by giving attention to what he suggests is the “cortico-visceral” injustice of a modernity that denies its own earthly status. (shrink)

Is Reason a Neutral Tool in Comparative Philosophy? In his answer to the symposium’s question, Jonardon Ganeri develops a »Manifesto for [a] Re:emergent Philosophy.« Tracking changes in the understanding of ›comparative philosophy,‹ he sketches how today’s world of academic philosophy seems to be set to enter an »age of re:emergence« in which world philosophies will be studied through modes of global participation. In their responses, the symposium’s discussants tease out implications of this Manifesto for different issues: While Mustafa Abu (...) class='Hi'>Sway suggests that comparative philosophy be understood as an intra-philosophical dialogue, whose aim depends on its participants, Paul Boghossian questions whether there can be conflicting, yet equally valid, ways of arriving at justified beliefs about the world. For her part, Georgina Stewart draws out the similarities between Ganeri’s understanding of comparative philosophy and the ethical stance involved in studying Maori science. In his Reply, Ganeri fleshes out his understanding of a pluralistic realism. Only an epistemic culture, which is open to a plurality of epistemic stances, he contends, can propel polycentric modes of knowledge production. (shrink)

After describing the three European strategies focused on social control, this essay will first demonstrate that the first two strategies try less to protect societies than to enforce efficient tools of governance. Additionally, they reinforce stereotypes harming Muslim immigrants. I show that diverse approaches in policing can make a difference in the communities where police forces operate. The third strategy, that of prevention requiring the cooperation of the citizens, may be more sustainable in the long term as it facilitates communication (...) among local politicians and involved actors. Finally, I point out that the interplay of interests, ideas and institutions matter a great deal to the comparison. (shrink)

As part of a research conducted in the field of professional didactics for the design of video-based training for saddlers, we mobilize an iterative and collaborative analysis protocol with professionals. We compare the effects produced during a debate between experts mediated by the researcher, based sometimes on a confrontation with video traces of the activity, sometimes on the temporary diagrams of a conceptual structure of the situation. Using the argumentative trilogue analysis framework, we show how these methodologies are able to (...) foster the expression of a process of conceptualization depending on whether professionals are confronted with lived images or concep-tualizations produced by the researcher. (shrink)

IntroductionThe world pandemic of the virus SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19 infection was announced by the World Health Organization on March 11, 2020. Due to the restrictions that were introduced in order to minimize the spread of the virus, people more often suffer from stress, depression, anxiety, and sleep disorders. The aim of this study was evaluation of the stress levels and sleep disorders among nursing students during the pandemic SARS-CoV-2.Materials and Study MethodsThis is a cross-sectional study conducted among 397 nursing (...) students on March 2020. The research tools used were original questionnaires, Perceived Stress Scale, and the Athenian Insomnia Scale, as well as Coping with Stress Inventory.ResultsRespondents felt a high level of stress, which occurred in 68.8% of interviewees regarding whether there was a danger of contracting COVID-19. Respondents experienced 84% stress levels when a family member suffered from COVID-19. Sleep disorders were determined mainly by the fear of infection and contact with someone who might be infected with the virus. Nursing students who felt a high level of stress often suffered from sleep disorders more frequently than students who felt a low or average stress level. The respondents decided to cope with stress by denial, taking psychoactive substances, ceasing action, or blaming themselves. The greater the intensity of stress experienced by students, the more often they undertook avoidance behaviors or showed helplessness.ConclusionDuring the pandemic, students experienced severe stress, which resulted in sleep disorders and avoidance behaviors. (shrink)

As study of knowledge, epistemology attempts at identifying its necessary and sufficient conditions and defining its sources, structure and limits. From this pointof view, until present, there are no applied approaches to the Romanian archaeology. Consequently, my present paper presents an attempt to explore the structural characteristics of the knowledge creation process through the analysis of the results of a series of interviews conducted on Romanian archaeologists. The interviews followed a qualitative approach built upon a semi-structured frame. Apparent data saturation (...) was reached after four interviews within initial target group (senior researchers with institutional authority). Under these conditions a decision was made to continue the interviews within a secondary control group (young doctoral or post-doc researchers guided by members of the initial target group) in order to both verify the observed data saturation and to assess the impact of the attitude of senior researchers towards scientific research on the younger generation. The preliminary results allow to assert that Romanian archaeology is still caught in a highly conservative and intradisciplinarian manner of knowledge production with a negative effect on both new knowledgeproduction and future specialists’ education. (shrink)

Globalization leads to cross-border business transactions between societies with very different norms and regulations regarding bribery. Bribery in international business transactions can be seen as a function of not only the demand for such bribes in different countries, but the supply, or willingness to provide bribes by multinational firms and their representatives. This study addresses the propensity of firms from 30 different countries to engage in international bribery. The study incorporates both domestic (economic development, culture, and domestic corruption in the (...) supplying country) and international factors (those countries’ patterns of trade and involvement in international accords) in explaining the willingness to bribe abroad. The propensity to provide bribes was the lowest when corruption was not tolerated in the multinational firms’ home countries, when the firms’ countries were signatories of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) anti-bribery convention, and when those countries traded heavily with wealthier nations. Further, these findings are maintained when controlling for levels of economic development and cultural values in the supplying country. In terms of culture, firms from high power distance countries showed a somewhat greater propensity for providing bribes in transactions with less-developed nations. (shrink)

People coordinate body postures and gaze patterns during conversation. We review literature showing that (1) action embodies cognition, (2) postural coordination emerges spontaneously when two people converse, (3) gaze patterns influence postural coordination, (4) gaze coordination is a function of common ground knowledge and visual information that conversants believe they share, and (5) gaze coordination is causally related to mutual understanding. We then consider how coordination, generally, can be understood as temporarily coupled neuromuscular components that function as a collective (...) unit known as a coordinative structure in the motor control literature. We speculate that the coordination of gaze and body sway found in conversation may be understood as a cross‐person coordinative structure that embodies the goals of the joint action system. (shrink)

concepts like numbers or time are thought to be represented in the more concrete domain of space and the sensorimotor system. For example, thinking of past or future events has a physical manifestation in backward or forward body sway, respectively. In the present study, we investigated the reverse effect: can passive whole-body motion influence the processing of temporal information? Participants were asked to categorize verbal stimuli to the concepts future or past while they were displaced forward and (...) backward , or upward and downward . The results showed that future related verbal stimuli were categorized faster during forward as compared to backward motion. This finding supports the view that temporal events are represented along a mental time line and that the sensorimotor system is linked to that representation. We showed that body motion is not just an epiphenomenon of temporal thoughts. Passive whole-body motion can influence higher-order temporal cognition. (shrink)

Individuals with cerebral palsy (CP) have deficits in processing of somatosensory and proprioceptive information. To compensate for these deficits, they tend to rely on vision over proprioception in single plane upper and lower limb movements and in standing. It is not known whether this also applies to walking, an activity where the threat to balance is higher. Through this study, we used visual perturbations to understand how individuals with and without CP integrate visual input for walking balance control. Additionally, we (...) probed the balance mechanisms driving the responses to the visual perturbations. More specifically, we investigated differences in the use of ankle roll response i.e., the use of ankle inversion, and the foot placement response, i.e., stepping in the direction of perceived fall. Thirty-four participants (17 CP, 17 age-and sex-matched typically developing controls or TD) were recruited. Participants walked on a self-paced treadmill in a virtual reality environment. Intermittently, the virtual scene was rotated in the frontal plane to induce the sensation of a sideways fall. Our results showed that compared to their TD peers, the overall body sway in response to the visual perturbations was magnified and delayed in CP group, implying that they were more affected by changes in visual cues and relied more so on visual information for walking balance control. Also, the CP group showed a lack of ankle response, through a significantly reduced ankle inversion on the affected side compared to the TD group. The CP group showed a higher foot placement response compared to the TD group immediately following the visual perturbations. Thus, individuals with CP showed a dominant proximal foot placement strategy and diminished ankle roll response, suggestive of a reliance on proximal over distal control of walking balance in individuals with CP. (shrink)

Postural instability marks a prevalent symptom of Parkinson’s disease. It often manifests in increased body sway, which is commonly assessed by tracking the Center of Pressure. Yet, in terms of postural control, the body’s Center of Mass, and not CoP is what is regulated in a gravitational field. The aim of this study was to explore the effect of early- to mid-stage PD on these measures of postural control in response to unpredictable visual perturbations. We investigated three (...) cohorts: 18 patients with early to mid-stage PD [Hoehn & Yahr stage ; 1.94 ± 0.70]; a group of 15 age-matched controls ; and a group of 12 young healthy adults. Participants stood on a force plate to track their CoP, while the movement of their entire body was recorded with a video-based motion tracking system to monitor their CoM. A moving room paradigm was applied through a head-mounted virtual reality headset. The stimulus consisted of a virtual tunnel that stretched in the anterior-posterior direction which either remained static or moved back and forth in an unpredictable fashion.We found differences in mean sway amplitude and mean velocities of CoP and CoM between the groups under both conditions, with higher MSA of CoP and CoM for PD and higher mean velocities of both variables for PD and ECT when compared with YCT. Visual perturbation increased mean CoP velocity in all groups but did not have effects on mean CoM velocity or MSA. While being significantly lower for the young adults, the net effect of visual perturbation on mean CoP velocity was similar between patients with PD and age-matched controls. There was no effect of the visual perturbation on mean CoM velocity for any of the groups.Our simultaneous assessment of CoP and CoM revealed that postural control is reflected differently in CoM and CoP. As the motion of CoM remained mostly unaffected, all groups successfully counteracted the perturbation and maintained their balance. Higher CoP velocity for PD and ECT revealed increased corrective motion needed to achieve this, which however was similar in both groups. Thus, our results suggest increased effort, expressed in CoP velocity, to be an effect of age rather than disease in earlier stages of PD. (shrink)

Virtual reality enables individuals to be exposed to naturalistic environments in laboratory settings, offering new possibilities for research in human neuroscience and treatment of mental disorders. We used VR to study psychological, autonomic and postural reactions to heights in individuals with varying intensity of fear of heights. Study participants were immersed in a VR of an unprotected open-air elevator platform in an urban area, while standing on an unstable ground. Virtual elevation of the platform elicited robust and reliable psychophysiological activation (...) including increased distress, heart rate, and electrodermal activity, which was higher in individuals suffering from fear of heights. In these individuals, compared with individuals with low fear of heights, the VR height exposure resulted in higher velocity of postural movements as well as decreased low-frequency body sway oscillations. This indicates that individuals with strong fear of heights react to heights with maladaptive rigidity of posture due to increased weight of visual input for balance control, while the visual information is less reliable at heights. Our findings show that exposure to height in a naturalistic VR environment elicits a complex reaction involving correlated changes of the emotional state, autonomic activity, and postural balance, which are exaggerated in individuals with fear of heights. (shrink)

In human lives, technology holds sway in mundane and extraordinary ways, such as in the ways we work, entertain, transport, and feed ourselves, and importantly in the ways we encounter and manage health, disease, illness, and death. A significant area of Heidegger's later work is questioning technology. Unlike many current inquiries that centre on contemporary technology's function, utility, and positive transformations, Heidegger offers a radical way of thinking about technology through developing an inquiry that uncovers technology's essence of revealing. (...) In this article, Heidegger's thinking about technological modes of revealing in regard to bodies, health, and illness is explored. In Heidegger's view, the ordered revealing of modern technology has overshadowed other modes of revealing. This article highlights how remembering concealment and unconcealment in its many modes can be relevant to nurses and others involved in health care. Through tracing Heidegger's thinking about technology, a more critical approach to the effects and outcomes of modern technologies within health care systems can be generated. (shrink)

Our understanding of body–world relations is caught in a curious contradiction. On one side, it is well established that many concepts that describe interaction with the outer world – ‘plasticity’ or ‘metabolism’- or external influences on the body - ‘environment’ or ‘milieu’ – appeared with the rise of modern science. On the other side, although premodern science lacked a unifying term for it, an anxious attentiveness to the power of ‘environmental factors’ in shaping physical and moral traits held (...) sway in nearly all medical systems before and alongside modern Europe. In this article, I build on a new historiography on the policing of bodies and environments in medieval times and at the urban scale to problematize Foucault’s claim about biopolitics as a modern phenomenon born in the European eighteenth-century. I look in particular at the collective usage of ancient medicine and manipulation of the milieu based on humoralist notions of corporeal permeability (Hippocrates, Galen, Ibn Sīnā) in the Islamicate and Latin Christendom between the 12th and the 15th century. This longer history has implications also for a richer genealogy of contemporary tropes of plasticity, permeability and environmental determinism beyond usual genealogies that take as a starting point the making of the modern body and EuroAmerican biomedicine. (shrink)

Vision is known to improve human postural responses to external perturbations. This study investigates the role of vision for the responses to continuous pseudorandom support surface translations in the body sagittal plane in three visual conditions: with the eyes closed, in stroboscopic illumination and with eyes open in continuous illumination with the room as static visual scene. In the frequency spectrum of the translation stimulus we distinguished on the basis of the response patterns between a low-frequency, mid-frequency, and high-frequency (...) range. With EC, subjects’ mean sway response gain was very low in the LFR. On average it increased with EO/SI and more so with EO/CI. In contrast, the average gain in the MFR decreased from EC to EO/SI and further to EO/CI. In the HFR, all three visual conditions produced, similarly, high gain levels. A single inverted pendulum model controlling center of mass balancing about the ankle joints formally described the EC response as being strongly shaped by a resonance phenomenon arising primarily from the control’s proprioceptive feedback loop. The effect of adding visual information in these simulations lies in a reduction of the resonance, similar as in the experiments. Extending the model to a double inverted pendulum suggested in addition a biomechanical damping effective from trunk sway in the hip joints on the resonance. (shrink)

The dramatic rise in inequality in the United States over the past generation has occasioned considerable attention from economists, but strikingly little from students of American politics. This has started to change: in recent years, a small but growing body of political science research on rising inequality has challenged standard economic accounts that emphasize apolitical processes of economic change. For all the sophistication of this new scholarship, however, it too fails to provide a compelling account of the political sources (...) and effects of rising inequality. In particular, these studies share with dominant economic accounts three weaknesses: they downplay the distinctive feature of American inequality —namely, the extreme concentration of income gains at the top of the economic ladder; they miss the profound role of government policy in creating this “winner-take-all” pattern; and they give little attention or weight to the dramatic long-term transformation of the organizational landscape of American politics that lies behind these changes in policy. These weaknesses are interrelated, stemming ultimately from a conception of politics that emphasizes the sway of the “median voter” in electoral politics, rather than the influence of organized interests in the process of policy making. A perspective centered on organizational and policy change —one that identifies the major policy shifts that have bolstered the economic standing of those at the top and then links those shifts to concrete organizational efforts by resourceful private interests —fares much better at explaining why the American political economy has become distinctively winner-take-all. (shrink)

Displacing the physiological model that had held sway in 19th-century medical thinking, early 20th-century hormone research promoted an understanding of the body and sexual desires in which variations in sex characteristics and non-reproductive sexual behaviours such as homosexuality were attributed to anomalies in the internal secretions produced by the testes or the ovaries. Biotypology, a new brand of medical science conceived and led by the Italian endocrinologist Nicola Pende, employed hormone research to study human types and hormone treatments (...) to normalise individuals who did not conform to accepted medical norms. Latin American medical doctors, eugenicists, and sexologists took up biotypology with enthusiasm. This article considers the case studies of Italy, Argentina, and Brazil, and analyses the work of medical doctors who adopted a biotypological mode of reasoning and employed to various extents hormone therapies in their practice. By focusing on hormone therapies that aimed to normalise secondary sexual characteristics and the sexual instinct, the article suggests that while the existence of normality was contested to the point that a number of medical scientists argued that no such thing existed, the pursuit of normality was carried out in very practical terms through the new medical technologies hormone research had introduced. (shrink)

The object of this paper is to suggest how the Frege–Dummettian notions of criterion of identity and criterion of application can be put to work within Putnam’s account of reference for natural kind terms in “Meaning of ‘Meaning’ ”. By doing so, some light can be shed on Putnam’s earlier views on “necessity relative to a body of knowledge” as well as his later views on sortal identity. If the Frege–Dummettian criteria are indeed at work within Putnam’s account, then (...) we must either give up rigidity or else give up the division of linguistic labor hypothesis. I will give an example from biological nomenclature that may sway us towards giving up the former. (shrink)

The concept of “ethical research” holds considerable sway over the ways in which contemporary biomedical, natural, and social science investigations are funded, regulated, and practiced within a variety of countries. Some commentators have viewed this “new” means of governance positively; others, however, have been resoundingly critical, regarding it as restrictive and ethics bodies and regulations unfit for the task they have been set. Regardless, it is clear that science today is an “ethical” business. The ways in which formal and (...) informal ethical discourses and practices—what might be called “regimes of normativity”—structure scientific work and the meanings it is ascribed with have, however, been underexplored. This article attends to how science and ethics articulate; how they are, in many ways, co-produced. Exploring these processes of co-production casts into sharp relief the essential emotionality of science; the relationships investigators have with their colleagues, work, and research participants pulse with emotion, potentially shaping in important ways the very kinds of knowledge that laboratories produce. (shrink)

Previous works usually report greater postural stability in precise visual tasks than in stationary-gaze tasks. However, existing cognitive models do not fully support these results as they assume that performing an attention-demanding task while standing would alter postural stability because of the competition of attention between the tasks. Contrary to these cognitive models, attentional resources may increase to create a synergy between visual and postural brain processes to perform precise oculomotor behaviors. To test this hypothesis, we investigated a difficult searching (...) task and a control free-viewing task. The precise visual task required the 16 young participants to find a target in densely furnished images. The free-viewing task consisted of looking at similar images without searching anything. As expected, the participants exhibited significantly lower body displacements and a significantly higher cognitive workload in the precise visual task than in the free-viewing task. Most important, our exploration showed functional synergies between visual and postural processes in the searching task, that is, significant negative relationships showing lower head and neck displacements to reach more expended zones of fixation. These functional synergies seemed to involve a greater attentional demand because they were not significant anymore when the cognitive workload was controlled. In the free-viewing task, only significant positive relationships were found and they did not involve any change in cognitive workload. An alternative cognitive model and its potential subtended neuroscientific circuit are proposed to explain the supposedly cognitively grounded functional nature of vision–posture synergies in precise visual tasks. (shrink)

Displacing the physiological model that had held sway in 19th-century medical thinking, early 20th-century medical scientists working on hormones promoted a new understanding of the body, psychological reactions, and the sexual instinct, arguing that each were fundamentally malleable. Hormones came to be understood as the chemical messengers that regulated an individual's growth and sexual development, and sexologists interested in this area focused primarily on children and adolescents. Hormone research also promoted a view of the body in which (...) ‘hermaphroditism’, homosexuality, and ‘sexual perversions’ such as masochism and sadism were attributed to anomalies in the internal secretions produced by the testes or the ovaries. This article focuses on Spanish, Italian, Argentinian, and Brazilian sexology shaped by endocrinological research in the interwar period. First, it shows the key role hormone treatments played in the historical development of sexology in Southern Europe and Latin America. Second, it looks at how sexologists employed hormone research to study human sexual development in the early stages of life, and how they set about ‘correcting’ what they viewed as ‘sexual anomalies’. (shrink)

Can it ever be appropriate to feel guilt just because one's group has acted badly? Some say no, citing supposed features of guilt feelings as such. If one understands group action according to my plural subject account of groups, however, one can argue for the appropriateness of feeling guilt just because one's group has acted badly - a feeling that often occurs. In so arguing I sketch a plural subject account of groups, group intentions and group actions: for a group (...) to intend (in the relevant sense) is for its members to be jointly committed to intend that such-and-such as a body. Individual group members need not be directly involved in the formation of the intention in order to participate in such a joint commitment. The core concept of joint commitment is in an important way holistic, not being reducible to a set of personal commitments over which each party holds sway. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 65.2 (2004) 251-276 [Access article in PDF] British Geography's Republic of Letters: Mapping an Imagined Community, 1600-1800 Robert Mayhew University of Bristol Introduction: Geographies of the Republic of Letters One of the main ways in which scholars molded their self image in early modern Europe was as citizens of the "republic of letters." At the level of professed ideals the concept of the (...) republic of letters was simple: scholars would create an egalitarian world amongst themselves, where views could be expressed without the rancor of national, religious, historical, or other barriers to their exchanges. Recent studies have highlighted the impressive degree to which eighteenth-century scientists ignored war and xenophobia to exchange ideas, thereby enacting the cosmopolitan ideal of a republic of letters.1 Yet the details of this ideal have been the subject of intense scrutiny and debate, in part because there were many versions of scholarly cosmopolitanism,2 but more importantly because the reality of the republic of letters was in most instances at some distance from the ideal.3 There have been debates about the chronology of the rise and fall of the republic of letters, Miller seeing it as having risen to prominence in the later sixteenth century but in terminal decline by 1720. By contrast Goldgar shifts the era of the republic of letters to 1660-1750, and most recently Brockliss has argued for the essentially healthy state of the republic of [End Page 251] letters into the era of the French Revolution.4 Such chronological debates have themselves been prompted by a major disagreement over the relationship between the republic of letters and the Enlightenment of the philosophes: was the former a mere token of the ancien régime which was destroyed by an incipiently radical Enlightenment,5 or was the ideal of egalitarian cosmopolitanism which the republic of letters championed the seedbed for such radicalism, thereby making Enlightenment philosophes a subset of the republic of letters rather than their successors?6Clearly, debates about the meaning of the republic of letters have been sparked by its status as a quasi-political republican body and the extent to which this was mere terminology or was a real spur to new forms of political association. Yet the notion of a republic also presupposes a geography: a polis, fictive or real, needs a territorial scope over which it holds sway. Concerning the geography of the republic of letters, recent scholarship has been both more consensual and less critically acute. A number of scholars have documented the extent to which the republic's cosmopolitan ideals were undermined by national antagonisms and religious schisms.7 Furthermore, feminist scholars have pointed to the complexities of female participation in this arena, their salons enabling while their gender undermined their ability to negotiate a relationship with the public sphere of the republic.8 Clearly, there was a tension between nationalism (together with other forms of parochialism such as gender discrimination) and cosmopolitanism in the political geography of the republic of letters.At a more concrete level, several studies have analyzed the geography of the republic of letters by trying to map its spatial extent in diagrams or prose. Ultee has looked at the spatial extent of Leibniz's correspondents, and Brockliss has likewise mapped Esprit de Calvet's web of communications.9 Parallel studies of scientific correspondence networks have been conducted for Albrecht [End Page 252] von Haller and the natural historians clustered around Buffon.10 In this respect perhaps the most theoretically sophisticated work has been produced by historians of science galvanized by the work of Latour.11 Thus Lux and Cook have looked to the chains of contact and epistolary exchange by which Oldenberg came to credit knowledge claims for inclusion in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, while parallel methods have been used to analyze the geography of Jesuit scholarly exchange.12Other elements of the circulation of knowledge in early modern Europe beyond correspondence have also been examined to give readings of the geography of... (shrink)