New Approaches to Religion and the Enlightenment examines religious belief and practice during the age of Enlightenment from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including theology, the natural sciences, politics, the law, art, philosophy, and literature.

Background Stroke is a worldwide problem with a limited number of approved treatments. Obtaining informed consent for acute stroke therapy is complicated by the breadth of information that must be communicated in a short period of time, the hectic nature of the emergency environment, the possible lack of understanding by the patient and/or family, and the critically time-sensitive nature of treatment for stroke. Complicating matters even further, patients are often unable to consent for themselves, placing the burden on surrogates to (...) infer patients’ wishes regarding treatment, and potentially limiting acute treatment by practitioners. Innovation An advance directive for acute stroke therapy was created, entitled COAST (Coordinating Options for Acute Stroke Therapy). This clinical initiative is being piloted at a large comprehensive stroke center, including the development of the advance directive form, integration of the form with electronic medical records, training healthcare providers, and outreach to patients. Conclusions COAST is an advance directive for stroke designed to make stroke care more efficient, optimize patients’ autonomy, improve the quality of healthcare, and streamline the ethical management of complex care decisions in acute stroke. The inherent benefit of COAST is in providing patients and their families with more information regarding stroke and its treatment options, allowing them to take a more active role in their care. (shrink)

Humans’ indigenous microbes strongly influence organ functions in an age‐ and diet‐dependent manner, adding an important dimension to aging biology that remains poorly understood. Although age‐related differences in the gut microbiota composition correlate with age‐related loss of organ function and diseases, including inflammation and frailty, variation exists among the elderly, especially centenarians and people living in areas of extreme longevity. Studies using short‐lived as well as nonsenescent model organisms provide surprising functional insights into factors affecting aging and implicate attenuating effects (...) of microbes as well as a crucial role for certain transcription factors like forkhead box O. The unexpected beneficial effects of microbes on aged animals imply an even more complex interplay between the gut microbiome and the host. The microbiome constitutes the major interface between humans and the environment, is influenced by biosocial stressors and behaviors, and mediates effects on health and aging processes, while being moderated by sex and developmental stages. (shrink)

Acquiring perceptual expertise is slow and effortful. However, untrained novices can accurately make difficult classification decisions by reformulating the task as similarity judgment. Given a query image and a set of reference images, individuals are asked to select the best matching reference. When references are suitably chosen, the procedure yields an implicit classification of the query image. To optimize reference selection, we develop and evaluate a predictive model of similarity-based choice. The model builds on existing psychological literature and accommodates stochastic, (...) dynamic shifts of attention among visual feature dimensions. We perform a series of human experiments with two stimulus types and nine classification tasks to validate the model and to demonstrate the model's potential to boost performance. Our system achieves high accuracy for participants who are naive as to the classification task, even when the classification task switches from trial to trial. (shrink)

De Neys offers a welcome departure from the dual-process accounts that have dominated theorizing about reasoning. However, we see little justification for retaining the distinction between intuition and deliberation. Instead, reasoning can be treated as a case of multiple-cue decision making. Reasoning phenomena can then be explained by decision-making models that supply the processing details missing from De Neys's framework.

Does exploration of the gut microbiota–brain axis expand our understanding of what it means to be human? Recognition and conceptualization of a gut microbiota–brain axis challenges our study of the nervous system. Here, integrating gut microbiota–brain research into the metaorganism model is proposed. The metaorganism—an expanded, dynamic unit comprising the host and commensal organisms—asserts a radical blurring between man and microbe. The metaorganism nervous system interacts with the exterior world through microbial‐colored lenses. Ongoing studies have reported that gut microbes contribute (...) to brain function and pathologies, even shaping higher neurological functions. How will continued collaborative efforts (e.g., between neurobiology and microbiology), including partnerships with the arts (e.g., philosophy), contribute to the knowledge of microbe‐to‐mind interactions? While this is not a systemic review, this nascent field is briefly described, highlighting ongoing challenges and recommendations for emerging gut microbiota–brain research. Also see the video abstract here https://youtu.be/lP9gOW8StXg. (shrink)

Whereas boson coherent states with complex parametrization provide an elegant, and intuitive representation, there is no counterpart for fermions using complex parametrization. However, a complex parametrization provides a valuable way to describe amplitude and phase of a coherent beam. Thus we pose the question of whether a fermionic beam can be described, even approximately, by a complex-parametrized coherent state and define, in a natural way, approximate complex-parametrized fermion coherent states. Then we identify four appealing properties of boson coherent states (eigenstate (...) of annihilation operator, displaced vacuum state, preservation of product states under linear coupling, and factorization of correlators) and show that these approximate complex fermion coherent states fail all four criteria. The inapplicability of complex parametrization supports the use of Grassman algebras as an appropriate alternative. (shrink)

Whereas boson coherent states with complex parametrization provide an elegant, and intuitive representation, there is no counterpart for fermions using complex parametrization. However, a complex parametrization provides a valuable way to describe amplitude and phase of a coherent beam. Thus we pose the question of whether a fermionic beam can be described, even approximately, by a complex-parametrized coherent state and define, in a natural way, approximate complex-parametrized fermion coherent states. Then we identify four appealing properties of boson coherent states and (...) show that these approximate complex fermion coherent states fail all four criteria. The inapplicability of complex parametrization supports the use of Grassman algebras as an appropriate alternative. (shrink)

One recent topic of debate in Bayesian epistemology has been the question of whether imprecise credences can be rational. I argue that one account of imprecise credences, the orthodox treatment as defended by James M. Joyce, is untenable. Despite Joyce’s claims to the contrary, a puzzle introduced by Roger White shows that the orthodox account, when paired with Bas C. van Fraassen’s Reflection Principle, can lead to inconsistent beliefs. Proponents of imprecise credences, then, must either provide a compelling reason to (...) reject Reflection or admit that the rational credences in White’s case are precise. (shrink)

This article examines allusions to Greek poetry in two Greek verse inscriptions carved on public monuments for Lycian dynasts of the late fifth and early fourth centuriesb.c.(CEG177, 888). Scholarship on these epigrams celebrating the rule, achievements and outstanding qualities of the dynasts Gergis (LycianKheriga) and Arbinas (Erbinna) has largely focussed on the evidence they provide for Lycian history, dynastic ideology and Lycia's relationship to Greece. Less attention has been paid to the possible significance of their long-noted echoes of Greek poetry. (...) Literary analysis of these epigrams has been sidelined, it seems, owing to a prevailing assumption that they were composed and inscribed primarily for Greeks visiting or resident in Xanthus, the Lycian ‘capital’ where they were inscribed, and so their literariness, unheard by Lycian ears, cannot add to our understanding of Lycia and Lycians. Yet, a recent observation of Peter Thonemann suggests that the appropriation and manipulation of Greek poetry is in fact central to the dynastic intent of the epigrams: to assert Lycia's non-Greek, ‘Asiatic’ identity. (shrink)

Since the advent of the women's movement, women have made unprecedented gains in almost every field, from politics to the professions. Paradoxically, doctors and mental health professionals have also seen a staggering increase in the numbers of young women suffering from an epidemic of depression, eating disorders, and other physical and psychological problems. In The Cost of Competence, authors Brett Silverstein and Deborah Perlick argue that rather than simply labeling individual women as, say, anorexic or depressed, it is time (...) to look harder at the widespread prejudices within our society and child-rearing practices that lead thousands of young women to equate thinness with competence and success, and femininity with failure. They argue that continuing to treat depression, anxiety, anorexia and bulimia as separate disorders in young women can, in many cases, be a misguided approach since they are really part of a single syndrome. Furthermore, their fascinating research into the lives of forty prominent women from Elizabeth I to Eleanor Roosevelt show that these symptoms have been disrupting the lives of bright, ambitious women not for decades, but for centuries. Drawing on all the latest findings, rare historical research, cross-cultural comparisons, and their own study of over 2,000 contemporary women attending high schools and colleges, the authors present powerful new evidence to support the existence of a syndrome they call anxious somatic depression. Their investigation shows that the first symptoms usually surface in adolescence, most often in young women who aspire to excel academically and professionally. Many of the affected women grew up feeling that their parents valued sons over daughters. They identified intellectually with their successful fathers, not with their traditional homemaker mothers. Disordered eating is one way of rejecting the feminine bodies they perceive as barriers to achievement and recognition. Silverstein and Perlick uncover medical descriptions matching their diagnosis in Hippocratic texts from the fourth century B.C., in anthropological studies of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and in case studies of many noted psychologists and psychiatrists, including the "hysteric" patients Freud used to develop his theories on psychoanalysis. They have also discovered that statistics on disordered eating, depression, and a host of other symptoms soared in eras in which women's opportunities grew--particularly the 1920s, when record numbers of women entered college and the workforce, the boyish silhouette of the flapper became the feminine ideal, and anorexia became epidemic, and again from the 1970s to the present day. The authors show that identifying this devastating syndrome is a first step toward its prevention and cure. The Cost of Competence presents an urgent message to parents, educators, policymakers, and the medical community on the crucial importance of providing young women with equal opportunity, and equal respect. (shrink)

The DRM paradigm produces robust false memories of non-presented critical words. After studying a thematic word list participants falsely remember the critical item “sleep.” We report two false memory experiments. Study One introduces a novel use of the lexical decision task to prime critical words. Participants see two letter-strings and make timed responses indicating whether they are both words. The word pairs Night-Bed and Dream-Thweeb both prime “sleep” but only one pair contains two words. Our primary purpose is to introduce (...) this new methodology via two pilot experiments. The results, considered preliminary, are promising as they indicate that participants were as likely to recognize critical words and presented words just as when studying thematic lists. Study Two actually employs the standard DRM lists so that semantic priming is in play there as well. The second study, however, uses functional near-infrared spectroscopy to measure activity in the prefrontal cortex during a DRM task which includes a deception phase where participants intentionally lie about critical lures. False and true memories occurred at high levels and activated many of the same brain regions but, compared to true memories, cortical activity was higher for false memories and lies. Accuracy findings are accompanied by confidence and reaction time results. Both investigations suggest that it is difficult to distinguish accurate from inaccurate memories. We explain results in terms of activation-monitoring theory and Fuzzy Trace Theory. We provide real world implications and suggest extending the present research to varying age groups and special populations. A nagging question has not been satisfactorily answered: Could neural pathways exist that signal the presence of false memories and lies? Answering this question will require imaging experiments that focus on regions of distinction such as the anterior prefrontal cortex. (shrink)

Vinciane Despret is a Belgian philosopher whose work proposes new questions and approaches to human–animal relations. Of central importance to her thought is an intellectual and cultural proposal to allow animals to show their agency and to be interesting. In scientific research animals are too often reduced to uninteresting, instinctive machines, whereas other modes of engagement allow us to see the wonderfully surprising, culturally rich, and intelligently inventive lives lived by animals. With genuine curiosity, Despret responds that humans and animals (...) transform one another through daily encounters, and she explores these metamorphoses through the history of philosophy, literature, science, field research, and art. In a playful though serious tone, Despret claims that animals are always more interesting than we give them credit for, and that the achievements of animals are never far from our own. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Wittgenstein’s PrefaceBrett BourbonIn his preface to Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein admits his failure to make his book anything more than an interrelated collection of remarks: "After several unsuccessful attempts to weld my results together into... a whole, I realized that I should never succeed. The best I could write would never be more than philosophical remarks." The fragmented character of Investigations is matched by its other formal oddities and difficulties: (...) its metaphors, its cryptic evocative obscurity about some things and its linguistic precision about others, its dramatization of philosophical positions in stories, in hypothetical worlds, and in the role of the interlocutor(s). Our initial and continual problem in reading Investigations is to understand the reason for its form, and to justify this form relative to its philosophical concerns and methods. I will argue that the justification of the form of Investigations comes down to a single question: how do we take up Wittgenstein's example—in thinking and in confusion—without mimicking him?IThe justification pursued in the preface bears affinities with theological justification, defined as our becoming righteous relative to God, as Calvin characterizes it, "an acceptation, whereby God receiving us into [End Page 428] favour, taketh us for righteous" (Institutes III. xi. §2).1 Righteousness as a mark of acceptation, the very tone of "righteousness" and God's power of acceptation, have no direct counterparts in Wittgenstein's philosophy. Philosophical justification does not have a doctrinal foundation that would establish any particular content nor any special relation between the pursuit of that justification (through philosophy) and its fulfillment, even hypothetically, in some possible acknowledgment of righteousness. The seriousness betrayed by Investigations need for justification, however, is expressed in the moral fervor of Wittgenstein's philosophizing. It is also his philosophical goal to encourage a kind of acceptation that the ground of our involvement in the world, in what constrains and confuses us, is no more than how we live and what we are: "Instead of the unanalyzsable, specific, indefinable; the fact that we act in such-and-such ways, e.g. punish certain actions, establish the state of affairs thus and so, give orders, render accounts, describe colours, take an interest in other's feelings. What has to be accepted, the given—it might be said—are facts of living" (Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, §630; c.f. PI, p. 226d).2 The translators comment in a footnote that a variant for "facts of living" in Wittgenstein's manuscript is "forms of life." What has to be accepted are forms of life.The form of Investigations is justified as part of a discovery, with or without a supporting theology, of how to move ourselves toward some greater form of perfection (although not to reach it). The Protestant cast of this justification, in Wittgenstein's case, is just (and I wouldn't want to extend it further) that while this justification is achieved by virtue of our effort, it is not effort towards the world, but towards our intransigent will, and that the grace that might enable our work is less a gift, than a condition within which we can struggle.3 Thus, "what has to be overcome," in philosophy, "is not the difficulty of the understanding but of the will" (CV, p.17).4 Philosophy for Wittgenstein is a form of self-education. One works on the will in order to see differently: but the will is neither a thing nor a faculty. Working on the will is not a psychological project of self-reform, but a reconstitution of our attitude toward what we take as necessary. We can describe such attitudes with the vocabulary of the passions by which express or curb our will: devotion, derision, hope, fear, confidence, indignation, pride, repentance, emulation, gratitude, consternation, daring, timidity, and so on. And thus "philosophy is a work on the will" is kind of maxim to help us remember a kind of attitude, purpose, and justification.I will derive an agnostic notion of justification from its Protestant [End Page 429] theological form, retaining its moral force and claim on our person, but without psychologizing it, with minimal doctrinal content, and without God. This is... (shrink)

About the Author James Elkins is E.C. Chadbourne Chair in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His many books include Pictures and Tears, How to Use Your Eyes, and What Painting Is, all published by Routledge. Michael Newman teaches in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is Professor of Art Writing at Goldsmiths College in the University of (...) London. His publications include the books Richard Prince: Untitled (couple) and Jeff Wall, and he is co-editor with Jon Bird of Rewriting Conceptual Art. (shrink)

The notion of a genetic program has been widely criticized by both biologists and philosophers. But the debate has revolved around a narrow conception of what programs are and how they work, and many criticisms are linked to this same conception. To remedy this, I outline a modern and more apt idea of a program that possesses many of the features critics thought missing from programs. Moving away from over-simplistic conceptions of programs opens the way to a more fruitful interplay (...) of ideas between the complexity of biology and our most complex engineering discipline. (shrink)

Drawing on recent advances in evolutionary biology, prominent scholars return to the question posed in a pathbreaking book: how evolution itself evolved.

The frame problem refers to the fact that organisms must be able to zero in on relevant aspects of the world and intelligently ignore the vast majority of the world that is irrelevant to their goals. In this paper we aim to point out the connection between two leading frameworks for thinking about how organisms achieve this. Predictive processing is a rapidly growing framework within cognitive science which suggests that organisms assign a high ‘weight’ to relevant aspects of the world, (...) effectively treating relevant aspects of the world as if they are more precise. This assignment of weight is called precision-weighting and is the predictive processing account of how organisms allocate their attention. Relevance Realization is a framework that conceptualizes an organism’s ability to realize relevance as resulting from a dynamical system in which a cognitive agent makes use of opponent processing relationships to zero in on relevant aspects of the world. In this paper we use recent work on the diametric model of autism and psychosis to demonstrate that the tradeoffs inherent to precision-weighting are also inherent to relevance realization. This connection will demonstrate that although these frameworks have a different intellectual background and use a different set of concepts and vocabulary, they are both pointing to the same underlying process. The fact that these different frameworks have converged on such a similar solution to the problem of how organisms realize relevance serves to demonstrate the plausibility of that solution. (shrink)

The literature contains evidence from some studies of asymmetric patterns of choice cycles in the direction consistent with regret theory, and evidence from other studies of asymmetries in the opposite direction. This article reports an experiment showing that both patterns occur within the same sample of respondents operating in the same experimental environment. We discuss the implications for modelling behaviour in such environments.

Every day, new warnings emerge about artificial intelligence rebelling against us. All the while, a more immediate dilemma flies under the radar. Have forces been unleashed that are thrusting humanity down an ill-advised path, one that's increasingly making us behave like simple machines? In this wide-reaching, interdisciplinary book, Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger examine what's happening to our lives as society embraces big data, predictive analytics, and smart environments. They explain how the goal of designing programmable worlds goes hand (...) in hand with engineering predictable and programmable people. Detailing new frameworks, provocative case studies, and mind-blowing thought experiments, Frischmann and Selinger reveal hidden connections between fitness trackers, electronic contracts, social media platforms, robotic companions, fake news, autonomous cars, and more. This powerful analysis should be read by anyone interested in understanding exactly how technology threatens the future of our society, and what we can do now to build something better. (shrink)

The field of emotion regulation has developed rapidly, and a number of emotion regulatory strategies have been identified. To date, empirical attention has focused on contrasting specific regulatio...

Jakob von Uexküll's theories of life -- Biography and historical background -- Nature's conformity with plan -- Umweltforschung -- Biosemiotics -- Concluding remarks -- Marking a path into the environments of animals -- The essential approach to the organism -- Heidegger and the biologists -- Paths to the world -- Disruptive behavior : Heidegger and the captivated animal -- The worldless stone -- The poor animal -- For example, three bees and a lark -- Animal morphology -- A shocking wealth (...) -- A fine line in the rupture of time -- An affected body -- The theme of the animal melody : Merleau-Ponty and the umwelt -- The structure of behavior -- A pure wake, a quiet force -- A leaf of being -- Interanimality -- The-animal-stalks-at-five-oclock : Deleuze's affection for Uexküll -- Problematic organisms -- Uexküll's ethology of affects -- The body without organs, the embryonic egg, and prebiotic soup -- Nature's refrain sung across milieus and territories -- The animal stalks. (shrink)

Emotion Review, Volume 14, Issue 3, Page 167-181, July 2022. A growing cadre of influential scholars has converged on a circumscribed definition of empathy as restricted only to feeling the same emotion that one perceives another is feeling. We argue that this restrictive isomorphic matching definition is deeply problematic because it deviates dramatically from traditional conceptualizations of empathy and unmoors the construct from generations of scientific research and clinical practice; insistence on an isomorphic form undercuts much of the functional value (...) of empathy from multiple perspectives of analysis; and combining the opposing concepts of isomorphic matching and self-other awareness implicitly requires motivational content, causing the RIM definition to implicitly require the kind of non-matching emotional content that it explicitly seeks to exclude. (shrink)

"In 2003 the Getty Museum, which holds a collection of about 240 Weston prints, hosted a colloquium on the photographer. This volume in the In Focus series records remarks by the author, Brett Abbott, along with those of six other participants: William Clift, Amy Conger, David Featherstone, Weston Naef, David Travis, and Jennifer Watts. Context for their conversation is provided by the author's introduction, plate texts, and chronology. Approximately fifty of Weston's images demonstrate why his work continues to resonate (...) with a contemporary public and serves as a model for a host of photographers active today."--BOOK JACKET. (shrink)

David Gauthier develops morality in the social contract tradition as an emergent property rationally necessitated by the presence of inefficiency. To demarcate situations in which morality arises from those in which it does not, two principles, Strategic Emergence and Market Emergence, are motivated and assumed by Gauthier to be equivalent. Following the work of Bob Bright, this paper formalizes and expands upon a demonstration of the inconsistency of the two principles. Eliminating each of the emergence conditions is considered to resolve (...) the inconsistency. Additionally, the Kantian equilibrium is examined in place of the Nash equilibrium; however, Gauthier’s approach resists such amendments. (shrink)

This article proposes that Horace's Epodes and Ovid's Metamorphoses open with significant acrostics that comprise the first two letters, in some cases forming syllables, of successive lines: IB-AM/IAMB (Epod. 1.1–2) and IN-CO-(H)AS (Met. 1.1–3). Each acrostic, it will be argued, tees up programmatic concerns vital to the work it opens: generic identity and the interrelation of form and content (Epodes), etymology and monumentality (Metamorphoses). Moreover, as befits their placement at the head of collections, both acrostics negotiate the challenge of literary (...) commencement. The introduction reviews recent developments in acrostic studies and discusses important predecessors and parallels for Horace's and Ovid's ‘two-letter’ and syllabic acrostics. Two subsequent sections examine the acrostics singly, and a conclusion compares the dialogues that these acrostics open between author and reader, underscoring the welcome challenge which Ovid's acrostic offers to the prevailing scholarly view that this form of wordplay is a strictly visual affair. (shrink)

"Accompanies the exhibition Engaged Observers: Documentary Photography since the Sixties, held at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, June 29-November 17, 2010.".

When government actors seek to restrict the sale of hazardous substances, industry actors tend to intervene, deploying coordinated strategies aimed at delaying, preventing or weakening attempts to regulate their products. In many cases, this has involved deliberate efforts to obfuscate science, mislead the public and manipulate political actors in order to ensure desired policy outcomes. Strategies of regulatory obstructionism have resulted in the prolonged dispersal of harmful chemical substances with tangible impacts on public health. This article proposes that this behavior (...) should be interpreted as a form of violence. Examining the regulatory histories of lead, benzene, asbestos and PCBs, the article demonstrates how regulatory obstructionism and violence have become intractable characteristics of the chemical industry. (shrink)

Dictionary-making is an increasingly important avenue for cultural preservation and maintenance for Aboriginal people. It is also one of the main jobs performed by linguists working in Aboriginal communities. However, current tools for making dicitionaries are either not specifically designed for the purpose (Word, Nisus), with the result that dictionaries written in them are difficult to maintain, to keep consistent, and to manipulate automatically, or are too complex for many people to use (Shoebox), and are thereby wasted as potential resources. (...) Moreover, neither of these sets of tools provides a suitable user interface for people who simply want to browse or find words in a dictionary. We set out to design a dictionary 'template', written in software that was easy (and fun!) for people to use, and that maintained a consistent relationship among the information in the dictionary. (shrink)

A funny, sharp and smart picture book to help mommy and daddy through difficult moments.