“Let me tell you where I'm coming from...”—so begins many a discussion in contemporary U.S. culture. Pressed by an almost compulsive desire to situate ourselves within a definite matrix of reference points in both scholarly inquiry and everyday parlance, we seem to reject adamantly the idea of a universal human subject. Yet what does this rhetoric of self-affiliation tell us? What is its history? David Simpson’s _Situatedness_ casts a critical eye on this currently popular form of identification, suggesting that, (...) far from being a simple turn of phrase, it demarcates a whole structure of thinking. Simpson traces the rhetorical syndrome through its truly interdisciplinary genealogy. Discussing its roles within the fields of legal theory, social science, fiction, philosophy, and ethics, he argues that the discourse of situatedness consists of a volatile fusion of modesty and aggressiveness. It oscillates, in other words, between accepting complete causal predetermination and advocating personal agency and responsibility. Simpson’s study neither fully rejects nor endorses the present-day language of self-specification. Rather it calls attention to the limitations and opportunities of situatedness—a notion whose ideological slippage it ultimately sees as allowing late-capitalist liberal democracies to function. Given its wide scope and lively rendering, _Situatedness_ will attract a range of scholars in the humanities and legal studies. It will also interest all those for whom the politics of subjectivity pose real problems of authority, identity, and belief. (shrink)

This paper holds the view that although bullshit and obscurantism are obviously related phenomena, they should be kept distinct for conceptual reasons. It shows that whereas phenomena of bullshit tend to concentrate on speech acts and a violation of the expectations of relevance therein, obscurantism betrays an indirect move to confound while promising deep content. After an overview of studies on bullshit and a look at the different characteristics and types of obscurantism, this paper investigates why readers retain interest in (...) reading obscure texts. Interpretive charity, which is one of the reasons for this sustained interest, is found to be unsuccessful in making sense of obscurantism. Obscurantism is thus seen to be a vice more cryptic and systematic than bullshit. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Yet Life Keeps ComingPatricia Romanowski BasheWhile the guidance offered to authors of commentary articles suggests they not write about their personal experiences, the fact is, I would not be here were it not for my personal experience as the mother of a young man with autism spectrum disorder and other diagnoses. Though I left a successful writing career to become a special education teacher and then a Board Certified (...) Behavior Analyst (BCBA), it was not, strictly speaking, a career decision. It was a mom decision. When asked how I came to where I am today, I say, “Well, one day, I looked across the table at an individualized education program (IEP) meeting and asked myself, ‘Could I do as good a job as the people sitting across from me?’ And the answer was, yes.” Some people believe I am joking. I am not.To parent a child with autism is to be confronted daily with a dream of his future and the realization that you probably cannot achieve that alone. Instead, you will rely on a world of professionals, institutions, and systems to make it happen. How well that works out for you depends on a number of factors that should not matter but ultimately do: where you live, how well funded and law abiding your local school district is, how much access you have to qualified professionals, and how well your state agencies charged to care for individuals with disabilities after they leave school does its job. Though essential, love, dedication, and hope may not be enough to hoist your child over the hurdles, whether they are set by immovable bureaucracy or mercurial brain chemistry. We each strive to clear the track, to level the road, and I chose to do that by “going pro” and becoming a small part of the system that will serve my son and countless others with ASDs throughout their lives. Even so, I find myself as daunted by the transition to adulthood and the prospect of preparing him for a life without me as anyone writing here. Anonymous Three, who recounts her son’s struggle for independence, captures the questions that most of us might never get to answer but can’t stop asking: “What happens when we can no longer care for him?”When a pediatric psychiatrist diagnosed my own son with Asperger disorder in 1997, I wished to be one day free of the obligation to explain his diagnosis to people who had never heard of it. Today, thanks to major campaigns to promote autism awareness and the public recognition of a handful of celebrities with autism, there is less explaining required. It seems that everyone knows someone who has a child with autism, and everyone knows Temple Grandin’s story. Contrast this to the world of 1993, shortly after my friend and coauthor Barbara L. Kirby (Romanowski Bashe and Kirby 2001, 2005) turned to the internet to make sense of her son’s Asperger diagnosis. There was no Google, no Bing. It would be months before the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV), which included Asperger’s for the first time, was published. Local doctors and teachers had never heard of it; parents and professionals were still gathering facts, trying to put the pieces together to form a coherent picture of what it meant to have autism. [End Page 183]Some things are different now, nearly twenty years later. Professionals, parents, and individuals with autism have developed a culture of autism, complete with opposing views on everything from applied behavior analysis and classroom inclusion to medication and guardianship. As a number of narratives illustrate, parents often find themselves making tough choices around these issues, and the best option in the abstract is not always the best option or even a possibility in the real world, on the ground. These narratives depict how the parents of individuals with ASDs struggle, sometimes mightily, to bridge the gap between what should be in terms of reliability of diagnosis and prognosis, access to effective, affordable, evidence–based education, treatment, and intervention, and—perhaps most important—meaningful, practical, realistic planning and programming for successful transition to adulthood. And... (shrink)

In this essay I argue that the distinction between neoliberalism and the Westphalian order that is said to precede it are all facets of one and the same phenomenon: archism. Archism is a style of politics based on rule and division. Looking at the work of Derrida, Foucault and Benjamin, I examine the inner workings of archism and how it can be resisted. Above all, I consider the notion of the ‘archeon’; that privileged perch from which the state or law (...) can judge without itself being subject to that judgment. The archeon, I argue is the central node of archism that allows itself to insinuate into any number of myriad forms without appearing to be the same phenomenon. By looking at the way Benjamin subverts the theological origins of the archeon with the idea of a God who abandons the position of judgment, I show a model for how to think differently about archism such that we do not seem eternally fated to choose between the same false dichotomies over and over again. (shrink)

Female behavior that is driven by ambivalent attachment is far from passive or withdrawn. As dramatised in the movie such women's emotional hyper-reactivity is often expressed in violence, which is antithetical to securing investment from mates or peers. Single motherhood, rather than reflecting an avoidant strategy in which close relationships are devalued, is often the result of ecological conditions in which paternal investment is desired but unavailable.

A distinguished critic explores the term "situatedness" - the self's position in time and place in the world and its treatment seen in legal theory, social ...

The study examines the argumentative competencies of people with Asperger syndrome (AS) and compares this with those of normal – or what are called neurotypical (NT) – subjects. To investigate how people with AS recognise, evaluate and engage in argumentation, we have adapted and applied the empirical instrument developed by van Eemeren, Garssen and Meuffels to study the conventional validity of the pragma-dialectical freedom rule (van Eemeren, Gars- sen & Meuffels 2003a; 2003b; 2005a; 2005b; van Eemeren & Meuffels, 2002). (...) Our paper begins with some background information on Asperger syndrome and how it impacts upon communication and argumentation; then it addresses the research questions and methods used; thirdly, it presents some initial findings; finally, it will conclude with some im- plications for those people with AS, for those they come into contact with and for the pragma-dialectic model in general. (shrink)

Ordinary cases of object seeing involve the visual perception of space and spatial location. But does seeing an object require such spatial perception? An empirical challenge to the idea that it does comes from reflection upon Bálint's syndrome, for some suppose that in Bálint's syndrome subjects can see objects without seeing space or spatial location. In this article, I question whether the empirical evidence available to us adequately supports this understanding of Bálint's syndrome, and explain how the (...) aforementioned empirical challenge can be resisted. (shrink)

My uncle is obsessed with thermometers. I have seen him, in the street, stop in front of a chemist to check whether there would not be a thermometer in the window. Then he would carefully read the temperature. In his house, every room has its own thermometer. There are thermometers hidden in various places in the garden, too. When he is visiting, he often leaves a thermometer somewhere in the house. He may pity his hosts, living without a thermometer at (...) hand. But, more likely, he just wants to make sure that he will be able to read the room temperature next time he comes. He is afraid to be too hot. He thinks that you are more likely to catch viruses when you are hot... (shrink)

While travelers have generally sought to avoid peril, some modern ones—namely, explorers, scientists, and adventurers—have come to embrace risk as an essential ingredient of their expeditions. The evolution of risk as an object of, rather than an obstacle to, travel has been long in the making. Yet this evolution is tricky to chart, since the desire for risk-oriented travel has grown up alongside demands for safer travel. In fact, the processes are linked. The tangled threads of travel, as a process (...) that sometimes avoids and sometimes leans into danger, make the story of expeditionary disasters more complicated. Yet they also make these stories worth telling. Travel disasters are not merely the stuff of National Geographic and the Discovery Channel; they are tools that give us new ways to think about modern mobility—scientific exploration, tourism, extreme adventurism, and the travel of exile—practices usually treated independently but that here are connected and compared. (shrink)

Reports of ethical violations by upper level managers continue to multiply despite increasing attention being given to ethics by firms and business schools. Much of the analysis of these violations focuses on either these managers'lack of operational principles or their willingness to abandon principles in the face ofcompetitive pressures. Much of the attention by firms and business schools focuses either on the articulation of operational principles (a deontological approach) or on the training of managers to sort their way through subtle (...) ethical dilemmas in the face of competitive pressure (a utilitarian approach). While valuable, these approaches alone are incomplete.This paper suggests that many ethical violations by upper managers are the by-product ofsuccess — not of competitive pressures. Our research suggests that many managers are poorly prepared to deal with success. First, success often allows managers to becomecomplacent and to lose focus, diverting attention to things other than the management of their business. Second, success, whether personal or organizational, often leads toprivileged access to information, people or objects. Third, with success usually comes increasinglyunrestrained control of organizational resources. And fourth, success can inflate a manager's belief in his or her personalability to manipulate outcomes. Even individuals with a highly developed moral sense can be challenged (tempted?) by the opportunities resulting from the convergence of these dynamics. We label the inability to cope with and respond to the by-products of success the Bathsheba Syndrome, based on the account of the good King David (a story familiar in a variety of traditions). Recognition of this phenomenon implies that we change or broaden our approach to the teaching of business ethics. It also implies that organizations must re-evaluate and change structures, procedures, and practices which enhance the likelihood of managers falling victim to the Bathsheba Syndrome. (shrink)

Misidentification syndromes occur commonly in neuropsychiatric practice and can be explained through aberrant integration of recollection and familiarity, in keeping with a dysfunction at the level of the attributional system in the new integrative memory model. We examine neuroimaging findings associated with Fregoli and Capgras syndromes and compare these with the proposed neural substrate of the integrative memory model supporting the core and attribution functions.

Patients with right parietal lesions often deny their paralysis , but do they have "tacit" knowledge of their paralysis? I devised three novel tests to explore this. First, the patients were given a choice between a bimanual task vs a unimanual one . They chose the former on 17 of 18 trials and, surprisingly, showed no frustration or learning despite repeated failed attempts. I conclude that they have no tacit knowledge of paralysis . Second, I used a "virtual reality box" (...) to convey the optical illusion to the patient that she was moving her paralyzed left hand up and down to the rhythm of a metronome, and yet she showed no sign of surprise. Third, I irrigated patient BM′s left ear canal with cold water, a procedure that is known to shift that patient′s spatial frame of reference by stimulating the vestibular system. Surprisingly, this allowed her "repressed" memory of paralysis to come to the surface; she said she had been paralyzed continuously for several days. I suggest that the vestibular stimulation produces these remarkable effects by mimicking REM sleep. These patients also emply a whole arsenal of grossly exaggerated Freudian "defense mechanisms" to account for their paralysis. To explain this, I propose that in normal individuals the left hemisphere ordinarily deals with small, local anomalies by trying to impose consistency but, when the anomaly exceeds threshold, an interaction with the right hemisphere forces a "paradigm shift". A failure of this process, in patients with right hemisphere damage, might partially account for anosognosia. Finally, I present a new conceptual framework that may help link several psychological and neurological phenomena such as Freudian defense mechanisms, vestibular stimulation, anosognosia, memory repression, visual illusions, anterograde amnesia, REM sleep, dreaming, and humor. (shrink)

Stein once urged us not to confuse the means of representation with that which is being represented. Yet that is precisely what philosophers of science appear to have done at the meta-level when it comes to representing the practice of science. Proponents of the so-called ‘syntactic’ view identify theories as logically closed sets of sentences or propositions and models as idealised interpretations, or ‘theoruncula, as Braithwaite called them. Adherents of the ‘semantic’ approach, on the other hand, are typically characterised as (...) taking them to be families of models that are set-theoretic, according to Suppes and others, or abstract, as Giere has argued. da Costa and French (Science and Partial Truth. OUP, Oxford, 2003) suggested that we should refrain from ontological speculation as to the nature of scientific theories and models and focus on their appropriate representation for various purposes within the philosophy of science. Such an approach allows both linguistic and non-linguistic resources to play their appropriate role (see also French and Saatsi, Philosophy of Science, Proceedings of the 2004 PSA Meeting, 78:548–559, 2006) and can be supported by recent case studies illustrating the heterogeneity of scientific practice. My aim in this paper is to further develop this ‘quietist’ view, and to indicate how it offers a fruitful way forward for the philosophy of science. (shrink)

Coordination is a widely employed term across recent quantitative and qualitative approaches to intersubjectivity, particularly approaches that give embodiment and enaction central explanatory roles. With a focus on linguistic and bodily coordination in conversational contexts, I review the operational meaning of coordination in recent empirical research and related theorizing of embodied intersubjectivity. This discussion articulates what must be involved in treating linguistic meaning as dynamic processes of coordination. The coordination approach presents languaging as a set of dynamic self-organizing processes and (...) actions on multiple timescales and across multiple modalities that come about and work in certain domains (those jointly constructed in social, interactive, high-order sense-making). These processes go beyond meaning at the level that is available to first-person experience. I take one crucial consequence of this to be the ubiquitously moral nature of languaging with others. Languaging coordinates experience, among other levels of behavior and event. Ethical effort is called for by the automatic autonomy-influencing forces of languaging as coordination. (shrink)

We argue that the authors’ call to integrate Bayesian models more strongly with algorithmic- and implementational-level models must go hand in hand with a call for a fully developed account of algorithmic rationality. Without such an account, the integration of levels would come at the expense of the explanatory benefit that rational models provide.

There is widespread agreement in neuroscience and psychology that the visual system identifies objects and faces based on a pattern of activation over many neurons, each neuron being involved in representing many different categories. The hypothesis that the visual system includes finely tuned neurons for specific objects or faces for the sake of identification, so‐called “grandmother cells”, is widely rejected. Here it is argued that the rejection of grandmother cells is premature. Grandmother cells constitute a hypothesis of how familiar visual (...) categories are identified, but the primary evidence against this hypothesis comes from studies that have failed to observe neurons that selectively respond to unfamiliar stimuli. These findings are reviewed and it is shown that they are irrelevant. Neuroscientists need to better understand existing models of face and object identification that include grandmother cells and then compare the selectivity of these units with single neurons responding to stimuli that can be identified. (shrink)

Its preoccupation with ontology presents radical democracy with a thorny dilemma: how to combine commitment and affirmation with a distinctive emphasis on contingency and contestability. The article addresses this dilemma by engaging with three different perspectives. Ernesto Laclau’s work shows the intrinsic constraints of ontology and the inadequacy of a simple distinction between ontology and ethico-political decision. Simon Critchley opposes tying radical politics to ontological prefiguration and argues for a particular ethico-political orientation. But ethics and politics come entwined with ontological (...) assumptions, and the ethical direction of politics can be as restrictive as its ontological framing. William Connolly weds ontology and ethics to a sharp awareness of their contestability. But his approach does not reach deep enough. It is not alive to the contestability of the very recognition of contestability. To enhance openness and reflexivity, projects of radical democracy should combine a dimension of substantive, detailed accounts with a reflexive commitment to contestability, which disrupts, questions and renews the thicker descriptions in the name of democracy and truth. (shrink)

Breheny et al. argue against the structural approach to alternatives. The empirical force of their argument comes mostly from challenges raised against Trinh and Haida. This paper aims to respond to these challenges, showing how they can be met by a natural refinement of Trinh and Haida’s proposal which turns out to capture additional facts previously not accounted for. Another aim of this paper is to recount the debate with enough precision and explicitness in order to enhance understanding and facilitate (...) future discussions. (shrink)

I doubt whether these three theses, which characterize basic features of Davidson's conception of meaning, are coherent. The narrow sense of (1) has (2) as an obvious corollary. The wider sense of (1), or some aspects of it, is partly explicated by (3). But this doesn’t seem to cohere with (2). When theory of meaning is taken in the wider sense to include an account of how one could come to know that such a theory of truth was true (for (...) a given language), and when the full force of the marriage between meaning and belief, as in (3), is appreciated, (2) seems to me doubtful. (shrink)

Askold Melnyczuk’s novel Ambassador of the Dead narrates the process through which a second-generation, assimilated American learns to comprehend the Ukrainian historical experience of his family and their generation. This article argues that the novel is centrally concerned with Nick’s learning process: as he begins to better understand his parents’ generation, he transforms his own identity. As a child, Nick is unable to see Ada — his friend’s mother, who is haunted by traumatic experiences — as anything other than an (...) unchanging, incomprehensible enigma: “Old World Syndrome.” Eventually, Nick comes to follow the example of Anton, a displaced Ukrainian who narrates a story-within-the-novel that returns Ada’s experiences to their historical and cultural contexts, while using magical realism to place her Ukrainian experience on a historical scale. Through Anton’s example, Nick learns how to see both Ada and his parents as complex historical actors in world history. Understanding the past then enables him to see himself as Ukrainian and claim an identity that is both Ukrainian and American. (shrink)

I had my accident on the rugby field on July 29, 2000 about 2.00 p.m. during a simple line - out, even before the ball was thrown in. I t just felt like another simple case of concussion , I staggered to the sideline, the coach asked me “what ’s wrong”? He said I told him I just felt sick and to put me back on the field in 10 minutes. Then I collapsed, eventually blacked out and then was rushed (...) to hospital unconscious in an ambulance with them struggling drastically to keep me alive. Af ter three days of being in there, they thought I was alright and were going to send me home. Then it star ted happening. First I nearly collapsed again tak ing a shower . For days the spe - cialists didn’t k now what was wrong with me. M y girlfriend at the time, who had rushed down from Wanak a when she had heard it had happened went mad at the specialists to do something. Af ter six days of going in and out of seizures, finally af ter what seemed like all the tests k nown to man, they said I had suffered several brain stem strokes then one massive major one, which altogether had lef t me diagnosed with the ex tremely rare and unk nown condition only k nown to a few as “ locked in syndrome”. (shrink)

What better way to celebrate, commemorate, critically reflect on, and think through Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth fifty years after its publication with a new North African syndrome: Revolution—or at least a series of revolts that continue to rock regimes across North Africa and the region. Fanon begins The Wretched writing of decolonization as a program of complete disorder, an overturning of order—often against the odds— willed from the bottom up. Without time or space for a transition, there (...) is instead an absolute replacement of one “species” of humanity by another. In periods of revolution, like the one we are experiencing today, such absolutes appear quite normal. Indeed, radical change becomes the “new normal” and the idea that revolutionary change is impossible is simply the rantings and ravings of the conservatives and reactionaries of the ancient regime. Too long buried under the weight of the tomes of academic discourse, Fanon has been resuscitated by the new dawn of North African revolutions. To celebrate Fanon, the revolutionary, all of a sudden seems contemporary and pertinent, while the musings of the critics who consigned him to postcolonial oblivion seem out of touch. But rather than continuing the painstaking work of exhuming Fanon from the postcolonial burial site, let us turn a commemoration of Fanon into an event. Indeed, why assume that a commemoration of Fanon after fifty years is not critical? Moreover why begin a contemporary engagement with Fanon assuming a priori the limits of his thought? Indeed, where to begin is a philosophic question. It is a question of “intention” as Edward Said puts it in one of his most radical and Vicoian works. Beginnings are revolutionary, implying return and repetition and, following Said, “a sort of historical dialectic that changes its character and meaning.” Vico, Said argues “said that the word human comes from root to bury ” suggesting that “his humanistic philosophy” contained “elements of its own negation.&rdquo. (shrink)

By bringing queer ecologies to bear on the blue humanities, this essay promotes a queer hydropoetic investigation that attends to the forms, aesthetics, and politics of pools. Pools are sites of aquatic enjoyment, sport, and revelation that have long been understudied within the blue humanities. We ask whether the promises and failures of swimming in these geographies can provide a queer heuristic in which submersion, immersion, and staying afloat subtend coming out, queer eroticism, and queer of color coalitional politics. (...) Our tripartite examination engages the independent film Saved! (2004), the ecosexual documentary Water Makes Us Wet (2019), and the young adult novel and graphic novel adaptation of Gabby Rivera’s Juliet Takes a Breath (2016/2019 and 2020, respectively). Our analysis of pools, as intimate bodies of water that capture media and literature alike, reorients the blue humanities to consider closer proximities and smaller scales of water’s queer potentiality. (shrink)

Readers of reports on ethical failures by four-star general officers must wonder, “Don’t they have staffs to ensure that the general follows ethics rules?” The Department of Defense publishes robust ethics guidance in several documents; however, a staff’s best efforts to implement this guidance may fail to make an impression on a senior leader who is susceptible to the “Bathsheba syndrome,” an allusion to the biblical account where the prophet Nathan rebuked King David for his moral failings. This paper (...) proposes a methodology to enable senior headquarters staffs to play the role of Nathan in supporting ethical behaviors by high-level officers. It examines the mechanisms that embed ethical behavior within members of those staffs in carrying out their three principal roles of advising, scheduling, and transporting the four-star officer. The authors offer a framework based on an ethical infrastructure of organizational climate that focuses the staff’s daily efforts to mitigate risk across seven ethical “danger areas” that threaten ethical failures by senior officers. (shrink)

The book treats the compelling question of war and personal responsibility in contemporary America. Cheyney Ryan examines how Americans often support modern warfare but have zero interest in fighting themselves . Ryan seeks to show how we must come to terms with our understanding and valuing of war when we ourselves are not committed to fighting in it.

In both the philosophical and visual sense, ‘seeing is believing’ does not apply to nanotechnology, for there is nothing even remotely visible to create proof of existence. On the atomic and molecular scale, data is recorded by sensing and probing in a very abstract manner, which requires complex and approximate interpretations. More than in any other science, visualization and creation of a narrative becomes necessary to describe what is sensed, not seen. Nevertheless, many of the images generated in science and (...) popular culture are not related to data at all, but come from visualizations and animations frequently inspired or created directly from science fiction. Likewise, much of this imagery is based on industrial models and is very mechanistic in nature, even though nanotechnology research is at a scale where cogs, gears, cables, levers and assembly lines as functional components appear to be highly unlikely. However, images of mechanistic nanobots proliferate in venture capital circles, popular culture, and even in the scientific arena, and tend to dominate discourse around the possibilities of nanotechnology. The authors put forward that this new science is ultimately about a shift in our perception of reality from a purely visual culture to one based on sensing and connectivity. (shrink)

This article explores Jacques Derrida’s notion of ‘democracy to come’, showing how democracy generates what might be described as a ‘deconstructive’ relation to foundational ideas. This article opens with an overview of the political theory literature on Derrida’s political thought, arguing that scholars mistakenly present it as naïvely anti-foundationalist. The body of this article then briefly demonstrates that a Derridean approach to foundations does not aim to destroy or transcend them, but to interrupt our expectation that foundations be stable and (...) certain. Turning to Politics of Friendship and Rogues, this article shows that Derrida’s notion of the democracy to come hinges around the idea that there is precisely such a ‘deconstructive’ relation between democracy’s dual foundations of freedom and equality. Democracy is thus itself ‘deconstructive’. Far from the inconsistent and insincere defender of democracy that his critics describe, Derrida emerges as a provocative contributor to democratic theory. (shrink)

Justice can be pursued by the state, or through voluntary charity. This paper seeks to contribute to the debate about the appropriate division of labor between government and charitable agencies by developing a positive account of the charity sector's moral foundations. The account given here is grounded in a legal conception of charity, as a set of subsidies and privileges designed to cultivate a wide variety of activities aimed at enhancing civic virtue and autonomy. Among other things, this implies that (...) a charity sector oriented largely around the pursuit of justice will come at a moral cost to a liberal society, at least when the state is in a position to take the greater share of the responsibility. So, a positive account of charity provides at least a pro tanto reason for preferring a division of labor in which the state takes a greater share of the responsibility for pursuing justice. As well as developing and defending this conception in its own right, we apply it in offering some criticisms and enhancements of existing views about the division of labor. (shrink)

The experiences of 90 individuals who self-identify as “excessive” or “maladaptive” fantasizers are summarized in this report. Our sample consisted of 75 female and 15 male participants, ranging in age from 18 to 63 who responded to online announcements. Participants completed a 14-question emailed survey requesting descriptions of their fantasy habits and causes of potential distress regarding fantasy. Results demonstrated that participants shared a number of remarkably specific behaviors and concerns regarding their engagement in extensive periods of highly-structured, immersive imaginative (...) experiences, including the use of kinesthetic activity which accompanies the fantasies of 79% of participants. Participants reported distress stemming from three factors: difficulty in controlling the need or desire to engage in fantasizing; concern that the quantity of fantasizing interfered with actual relationships and endeavors; and intense shame and exhaustive efforts to keep this behavior hidden from others. It is hoped that this report will encourage interest in this elusive syndrome. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:How We Keep Caring While Walking Through Our PainOla Ziara and Rachel CoghlanAuthor Dedication. To my dear brother Omar Ziara, a bright doctor, entrepreneur, and community advocate who was killed in an Israeli bombing in November 2023.May your soul rest in peace and may your memory remain alive in our hearts. May your unborn child grow up to become the wonderful man that you were. Forever loved by (...) all.Palestinian-American poet, Suheir Hammad, writes:Occupation means that every day you die, and the world watches in silence. As if your death was nothing, as if you were a stone falling in the earth, water falling over water.And if you face all of this death and indifference and keep your humanity, and your love and your dignity and you refuse to surrender to their terror, then you know something of the courage that is Palestine.I am a doctor from the Gaza Strip in Palestine. I live through acute war and protracted occupation. I work under missiles and through scant resources. I experience risks and dangers and face abominable choices made from nightmares. I know heartbreaking death.As doctors here, we fear, suffer, cry, and grieve alongside our patients and their families. This is my story of how we continue to care.Summer 2014 A Fifty-Two-Day War: How To Stay And How To Keep Them SafeThe huge bombardment strikes close to the hospital, scattering glass and rubble. It brings an abrupt end to my rare, quiet pause for coffee. Are the babies hit? We sprint to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, our full attention only on those infants, hastily checking every crib. My thoughts are frenzied. What if the next missile strikes us? Will I be able to rescue them? Will I have time to carry their tiny bodies outside through wreckage and fire? How will I choose who to save, and who to leave behind? Could I choose? Will I even be able to think lucidly, act logically for those babies if the fire consumes us? We stay.Somewhere, a house razed to the ground, a mother and her children dead. This time, our babies are safe.Summer 2014 A Fifty-Two-Day War: How To Cast Off Danger And How To Find ConsolationA missile shatters our neighbour’s roof. I am about to leave home for my evening shift. I check on my shaking mum; she is okay, not hurt at least. I ring the senior doctor. I am sorry. I am coming. I will be a little late. Two further missiles hit, wiping out the next-door building completely. No, do not send an ambulance for me. It is too dangerous. I will come [End Page 153] alone. Trembling through the dust and darkness, I leave on foot to reach those babies. I must compose myself. We are needed there to bring calm, to keep caring.And we gamble our lives to seek distraction and comfort for ourselves. We find solace through unbearable pain in our caring.Winter, Spring, Autumn, Summer, Any Day: How To Question Purpose And How To Feel HelplessIt is an ordinary night shift in ‘quiet’ times. Tonight, all the beds are occupied. All the ventilators are taken, forcing life into small, sick faces. At dawn, the phone call comes. A new baby struggling to breathe is on his way. I call around. No more beds to take him here or anywhere. No more ventilators—here or anywhere. Bring him here. We will care for him.He is in a very bad way. He needs immediate life-saving care. We take turns manually ventilating him, working to the hissing rhythm of the Ambu Bag1—inflating, deflating, inflating. Our arms ache. We keep pumping the bag. Do not stop. The moment when the morning shift arrives is our moment of salvage. We can go home. We have made it through the night without medicines, machines, disposables, or enough manpower, our arms throbbing. We have kept him alive.But he is so fragile, the system is fragile, we are fragile. Dare I even ask—is it worth it? Is it worth a baby surviving the... (shrink)

High producers are motivated to hunt in spite of high levels of sharing because the transfers come from absolutely larger amounts of resource. In the context of a generalized cooperative subsistence strategy, stinginess could provoke the withdrawal of cooperative partners and result in a loss of income. Good producers could have more to lose by not sharing than poor producers would.

Trauma and traumatization have arguably always been part of the human experience yet have in the last few decades come to occupy a prominent place in various popular and academic contexts. This chapter offers an interdisciplinary and comparative investigation of trauma and traumatization in different historical contexts. More specifically, my aim is to discuss whether the rich bodies of research in trauma and traumatization in Holocaust survivors and their descendants yield relevant insights for post-slavery contexts. It has been shown that (...) children of Holocaust survivors suffer from stress and other symptoms related to their parents’ traumatization which influence the interactions with their environments. Such results made me wonder whether the traumatic impact of chattel slavery—which has been abolished some 160 years ago—might have a similar impact, yet now across several generations. Issues of the transmission and current persistence of trauma are inherently linked to questions of social justice, recognition and reparations. This chapter is meant, however, as an exploration of interdisciplinary connections that should be studied in concert to account for the traumatic impact of historical and present day experiences. It starts by discussing the concepts of trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder. Continuing by exploring the phenomenon of the inter- and transgenerational transmission of trauma, it relies in part on the important body of research conducted on families of Holocaust survivors. I then turn to the much less researched ‘post-traumatic slave syndrome’ (DeGruy) and discuss two factors that might contribute to the transgenerational transmission of trauma in the families of former enslaved: epigenetics and the continuation of traumatization even after the abolition of slavery as articulated in Historical Trauma theory. Drawing upon these insights, I conclude that it is plausible that a continuing transgenerational transmission of trauma might occur in some families of slavery survivors, the knowledge of which might help to break the chains of such traumatization across generations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:How I Learned to Keep Worrying and Love Teaching the CanonAndrew DiltsFollowing the late Iris Marion Young’s usage of the term, I take pedagogical questions to be essentially pragmatic questions. As she puts it, “By being pragmatic I mean categorizing, explaining, developing accounts and arguments that are tied to specific practical and political problems, where the purpose of this theoretical activity is clearly related to these problems” (Young (...) 1994, 717–18). When thinking about the importance of feminist and continental pedagogical questions, I want to therefore locate my thoughts in specific political and practical problems faced by teachers.The specific political problem that I am concerned with here is the notion of the canon as it shapes the courses many of us teach. The specific practical manifestation of the problem of the canon is the question of how to teach such courses when one is assigned a syllabus, or constrained by the requirements of set curricula. My immediate concern is to focus on the position of the graduate instructor, adjunct lecturer, teaching assistant, and junior faculty member who lacks the institutional power and employment security to challenge the notion of the canon whether wholesale or only in part. I want to insist that teaching the canon as a practical and political problem, turns out to be an exemplary way to practice feminist, continental, radical, queer, and transgressive pedagogies. Teaching a canon is potentially radical because its (re)production is always also dangerous.I turn to feminist and continental approaches to teaching in particular because they are especially well suited to this practical and political problem. First, feminist philosophy has demonstrated the omission of women from the [End Page 78] canon while also emphasizing that women are central and crucial figures within canonical texts. Second, if continental philosophy distinguishes itself from those strains of the analytic tradition that conceive of themselves as timeless, ahistorical, and geographically universal, it does so in part by pointing to a historical and geographical referent: the “continent.” By taking the canon as an object of analysis, both perspectives can ground a pedagogical approach to a canonical course that provisionally embraces the canon precisely as a question, reflecting rather than refusing its contingency. Feminist and continental commitments to close reading, critical analysis, and sympathetic interpretation can promote a self-conscious and repeated practice of grappling over foundations. Such a practice would not be for the sake of preserving disciplines and normalizing canons, but rather for the sake of understanding the disciplined and normalized subjects that we are as teachers and student. A contingent and self-conscious stance toward canonical teaching, one that attends especially to the danger of pedagogical power, might moreover help us to situate our classrooms as spaces in which we, teachers and students, exercise something like collective agency.Let me make this more concrete with a symposium of two practices and one organizing principle. First, canonical courses must confront the question of the canon itself. The persistent questions of any survey, “classics,” or “foundations” course should be to ask what exactly makes the subject surveyable? What makes a classic a classic? What is built on a foundation and what makes something foundational? I first pose these questions by taking the course title itself as our first shared “text” for analysis, and by asking students what they think the class will be about and how exactly they have came to think that. It is usually striking to see just how confident many students are in what they’ve signed up for, and how sure they are in their knowledge of what counts as “classical” thought. Yet they have seldom thought about where this knowledge comes from. Such first questions of the course are thus self-reflective and critical questions: How did they know that Plato or Aristotle would be on the syllabus? This is the very first step in helping the students to recognize themselves as being active participants in the canon themselves, right along with me at the front of the room, actively investing their time in the production and reproduction of the canon.Our course will necessarily maintain some notions of classics, foundations, and canons. We... (shrink)

The task of tracking a small number (about four or five) visual targets within a larger set of identical items, each of which moves randomly and independently, has been used extensively to study object-based attention. Analysis of this multiple object tracking (MOT) task shows that it logically entails solving the correspondence problem for each target over time, and thus that the individuality of each of the targets must be tracked. This suggests that when successfully tracking objects, observers must also (...) class='Hi'>keep track of them as unique individuals. Yet in the present studies we show that observers are poor at recalling the identity of successfully tracked objects (as specified by a unique identifier associated with each target, such as a number or starting location). Studies also show that the identity of targets tends to be lost when they come close together and that this tendency is greater between pairs of targets than between targets and nontargets. The significance of this finding in relation to the multiple object tracking paradigm is discussed. (shrink)

Psychological stress reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic are complex and multifaceted. Research provides evidence of a COVID Stress Syndrome, consisting of worry about the dangerousness of getting infected with SARSCoV2 and coming into contact with infected surfaces, worry concerning the personal socioeconomic consequences of COVID-19, xenophobic fears that SARSCOV2 is being spread by foreigners, COVID-19-related traumatic stress symptoms, and compulsive checking and reassurance-seeking about COVID-19. Little is known about how these symptoms are related to vulnerability and protective personality (...) factors. Based on data from 1,976 US and Canadian adults, we conducted a prospective network analysis in which personality factors were initially assessed at Time 1 and then symptoms of the CSS were assessed at Time 2, 2.5 months later. Results indicated that trait optimism and trait resilience were negatively associated with negative emotionality, suggesting a modulatory influence. Negative emotionality was positively linked to the narrower traits of intolerance of uncertainty and health anxiety proneness. These narrower traits, in turn, were prospectively linked to symptoms of the CSS. Results suggest that the effects of broad personality traits on symptoms of the CSS were mediated by narrower traits such as the intolerance of uncertainty. Treatment implications are discussed. (shrink)