For years, both psychologists and the general public have been fascinated with the notion that there are gender differences in cognitive abilities; even now, flashy cover stories exploiting this idea dominate major news magazines, while research focuses on differences in verbal, mathematical, spatial, and scientific abilities across gender. This new volume in the Counterpoints series not only summarizes and addresses the validity of such research, but also questions its ideology and consequences. Why do we search so intently for these differences? (...) And what are the social and cultural implications of this relentless emphasis? Do biological mechanisms, in fact, contribute to the male-female differences in cognition? These are just a few of the questions generated by this controversial topic as it is debated throughout the book. (shrink)

As interest in working memory is increasing at a rapid pace, an open discussion of the central issues involved is both useful and timely. This new volume compares and contrasts conceptions of working memory, with contributions from proponents of different views.

This article introduces the key issues and themes that the articles in the Special Issue aim to apply and develop in greater detail. First, we argue that the field of collective remembering can be conceived as a site of active contestation, rather than simply a means of communicating a historic past or our deontic position in relation to these pasts. Approaching collective remembering as a Lieu de Dispute allows us, in turn, to foreground three consequential dimensions of remembrance, which the (...) articles in the issue examine in different ways: that collective remembering is an interpersonal, political and affective practice. This introduction discusses these three dimensions to collective remembering in greater detail, before outlining the remaining contents of the Special Issue. (shrink)

In this article, we analyse Il Memoriale della Shoah, the memorial of the victims of the Shoah in Milan, which was inaugurated in 2013 and, in 2015, was turned into a night shelter for destitute migrants. To understand the rhetoric and politics of the Memorial, we bring together the notions of affective practices, découpages du temps (lit. slices of time) and multidirectional memory. This analytic approach allows us to examine the nonlinear shape of remembering, the dialectic relationships between the spatialisation (...) of time and the temporalisation of space, the ways in which emotions are brought into being semiotically in context, and the ethical questions that these feelings raise. Through detailed multimodal and affective analysis of the affordances of the built environment and its soundscape, the curation of the Memorial, the contextualisation of three guided tours (two online and one in situ) and politicised commentary on the Memorial’s decision to shelter refugees, our paper illustrates the multi-layered character of the relationship between space and time – one in which the past, the present and the future partly overlap and mobilise political action. (shrink)

This article, taking a social semiotic approach, analyses two pieces of music written, shared and exalted by two pre-1945 European fascist movements – the German NSDAP and the British Union of Fascists. These movements, both political and cultural, employed mythologies of unity, common identity and purpose in order to elide the realities of social distinction and political–economic inequalities between bourgeois and proletarian groups in capitalist societies. Visually and inter-personally, the fascist cultural project communicated a machine-like certainty about a vision for (...) a new society based on discipline, conformity and the might of the nation. In this article, we are interested in the ways that these very same discourses are also communicated through sound and music in two songs: The Horst Wessel Lied and the BUF marching song, two songs that used the same melody. We analyse the discourses communicated by the semiotic choices made in melody, arrangements, sound qualities, rhythms as well as in lyrics. The article first identifies some of the underlying semiotic resources for meaning making in sound and then shows how these are used in order to communicate specific ideas, values and attitudes. (shrink)

This article explores the rhetoric, and mass mediation, of the national Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration ceremony, as broadcast on British television. I argue that the televised national ceremonies should be approached as an example of multi-genre epideictic rhetoric, working up meanings through a hybrid combination of genres, author/animators and modes. Epideictic rhetoric has often been depreciated as simply ceremonial ‘praise or blame’ speeches. However, given that the topics of praise/blame assume the existence of social norms, epideictic also acts to presuppose (...) and evoke common values, in general, and a collective recognition of shared social responsibilities, in particular. My methodology draws on the Discourse-Historical Approach to Critical Discourse Analysis, given, first, its central prominence in analysing argumentative strategies in discourse and, second, the ways it facilitates a reflexive ‘shuttling’ between text-discursive features, intertextual relations and wider contexts of society and history. Here, I examine how a catastrophic past is invoked in speech and evoked through image and music, in response to the demands that uncertainty of the future ‘places upon one’s conscience’. (shrink)

In this article, we trace the histories of discourses supporting ‘jobs for natives’ in the UK and Austria using the discourse-historical approach to critical discourse studies. DHA uses four ‘levels of context’ as heuristic devices in critical analysis. In this article, we focus our attention predominantly on the broadest of these, largely eschewing the text internal analysis typical of CDA, in favour of a wider contextual sweep. In this way, we deconstruct and trace the conceptual history of British and Austrian (...) slogans of the extreme right related to issues of un/employment. We argue that slogans such as ‘British Jobs for British workers’ and ‘Austria First’ have been recontextualised into current political rhetoric while carrying historical context-dependent connotations, stemming from pre-World War II colonialism and antisemitism. Hence, we further claim that – although such rhetoric is currently widespread across EU member states – the ideologies and traditions drawn upon are distinct and create specific subtexts to be exploited for political ends; this is part of the discursive strategy of ‘calculated ambivalence’ employed in such rhetoric. (shrink)

A key and continuing concern within the pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation is how to account for effective persuasion disciplined by dialectical rationality. Currently, van Eemeren and Houtlosser offer one response to this concern in the form of strategic manoeuvring. This paper offers a prior/passing theory of communicative interaction as a supplement to the strategic manoeuvring approach. Our use of a prior/passing model investigates how a difference of opinion can be resolved while both dialectic obligations of reasonableness and rhetorical ambitions of (...) argumentative success are simultaneously accommodated. The paper explores the model with particular reference to the pragma-dialectical rules of critical discussion, strategic manoeuvring and fallacious reasoning. (shrink)

The experiences of students taking the same courses in the humanities by distance learning were compared when tutorial support was provided conventionally or online . The Course Experience Questionnaire and the Revised Approaches to Studying Inventory were administered in a postal survey to 1264 students taking two different courses with the UK Open University. There were no significant differences between the students who received face-to-face tuition and those who received online tuition either in their perceptions of the academic quality of (...) their courses or in the approaches to studying that they adopted on those courses. Provided that tutors and students receive appropriate training and support, course designers in the humanities can be confident about introducing online forms of tutorial support in campus-based or distance education. (shrink)

My plan is to examine Nietzsche's view of (what is I think) the most characteristically Kantian kind of argument, what's now often called 'transcendental argument'. I understand this as an argument in which a concept or principle or value is justified as a 'condition of the possibility' of something indisputable (or indispensable). I will look at Nietzsche's critique of this pattern of argument in Kant, but also at the ways he still uses such arguments himself, in all three of the (...) sectors of Kant's critique: theoretical, practical, aesthetic. Planejo examinar a visão de Nietzsche sobre o que creio seja o tipo de argumento mais kantiano, o que é atualmente chamado de 'argumento transcendental'. Eu o entendo como um argumento no qual um conceito, ou princípio, ou valor seja justificado como uma 'condição da possibilidade' de algo indisputável (ou indispensável). Aprofundar-me-ei na crítica que Nietzsche estabelece sobre esse padrão de argumento em Kant, mas também nas formas em que ele mesmo se utiliza de tais argumentos, em todos os três setores da crítica de Kant: a teórica, a prática e a estética. (shrink)

Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories and (...) On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action. (shrink)

This paper describes the application of eight statistical and machine-learning methods to derive computer models for predicting mortality of hospital patients with pneumonia from their findings at initial presentation. The eight models were each constructed based on 9847 patient cases and they were each evaluated on 4352 additional cases. The primary evaluation metric was the error in predicted survival as a function of the fraction of patients predicted to survive. This metric is useful in assessing a model’s potential to assist (...) a clinician in deciding whether to treat a given patient in the hospital or at home. We examined the error rates of the models when predicting that a given fraction of patients will survive. We examined survival fractions between 0.1 and 0.6. Over this range, each model’s predictive error rate was within 1% of the error rate of every other model. When predicting that approximately 30°K of the patients will survive, all the models have an error rate of less than 1.5%. The models are distinguished more by the number of variables and parameters that they contain than by their error rates; these differences suggest which models may be the most amenable to future implementation as paper-based guidelines. (shrink)

Observational learning can enhance the acquisition and performance quality of complex motor skills. While an extensive body of research has focused on the benefits of synchronous (i.e., concurrent physical practice) and non-synchronous (i.e., delayed physical practice) observational learning strategies, the question remains as to whether these approaches differentially influence performance outcomes. Accordingly, we investigate the differential outcomes of synchronous and non-synchronous observational training contexts using a novel dance sequence. Using multidimensional cross-recurrence quantification analysis, movement time-series were recorded for novice dancers (...) who either synchronised with (n = 22) or observed and then imitated (n = 20) an expert dancer. Participants performed a 16-count choreographed dance sequence for 20 trials assisted by the expert, followed by one final, unassisted performance trial. Although end-state performance did not significantly differ between synchronous and non-synchronous learners, a significant decline in performance quality from imitation to independent replication was shown for synchronous learners. A non-significant positive trend in performance accuracy was shown for non-synchronous learners. For all participants, better imitative performance across training trials led to better end-state performance, but only for the accuracy (and not timing) of movement reproduction. Collectively, the results suggest that synchronous learners came to rely on a realtime mapping process between visual input from the expert and their own visual and proprioceptive intrinsic feedback, to the detriment of learning. Thus, the act of synchronising alone does not ensure an appropriate training context for advanced sequence learning. (shrink)

How far does a researcher’s responsibility extend when an incidental finding is identified? Balancing pertinent ethical principles such as beneficence, respect for persons, and duty to rescue is not always straightforward, particularly in neuroimaging research where empirical data that might help guide decision making are lacking. We conducted a systematic survey of perceptions and preferences of 396 investigators, research participants, and Institutional Review Board members at our institution. Using the partial entrustment model as described by Richardson, we argue that (...) our data supports universal reading by a neuroradiologist of all research MRI scans for incidental findings and providing full disclosure to all participants. (shrink)

The latest volume in the Oxford Readings in Philosophy series, this work brings together some of the best and most influential recent philosophical scholarship on Nietzsche. Opening with a substantial introduction by John Richardson, it covers: Nietzsche's views on truth and knowledge, his 'doctrines' of the eternal recurrence and will to power, his distinction between Apollinian and Dionysian art, his critique of morality, his conceptions of agency and self-creation, and his genealogical method. For each of these issues, the (...) papers show Nietzsche's continuing philosophical importance. Giving a clear and accessible overview, while retaining an analytical philosophical approach throughout, this volume is essential reading for all students of Nietzsche. (shrink)

Deeply moved by his experiences in the trenches of the First World War, the Scottish philospher John Macmurray came to challenge the conventions inherited from European traditions of thought and mounted an assault on impersonal philosophies that failed to address needs and emotional reality.

This book argues, against recent interpretations, that Nietzsche does in fact have a metaphysical system--but that this is to his credit. Rather than renouncing philosophy's traditional project, he still aspires to find and state essential truths, both descriptive and valuative, about us and the world. These basic thoughts organize and inform everything he writes; by examining them closely we can find the larger structure and unifying sense of his strikingly diverse views. With rigor and conceptual specificity, Richardson examines the (...) will-to-power ontology and maps the values that emerge from it. He also considers the significance of Nietzsche's famous break with Plato--replacing the concept of "being" with that of "becoming." By its conservative method, this book tries to do better justice to the truly radical force of Nietzsche's ideas--to demonstrate more exactly their novelty and interest. (shrink)

Nietzsche wrote in a scientific culture transformed by Darwin. He read extensively in German and British Darwinists, and his own works dealt often with such obvious Darwinian themes as struggle and evolution. Yet most of what Nietzsche said about Darwin was hostile: he sharply attacked many of his ideas, and often slurred Darwin himself as mediocre. So most readers of Nietzsche have inferred that he must have cast Darwin quite aside. But in fact, John Richardson argues, Nietzsche was (...) deeply and pervasively influenced by Darwin. He stressed his disagreements, but was silent about several core points he took over from Darwin. Moreover, Richardson claims, these Darwinian borrowings were to Nietzsche's credit: when we bring them to the surface we discover his positions to be much stronger than we had thought. Even Nietzsche's radical innovations are more plausible when we expose their Darwinian ground; we see that they amount to a new Darwinism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 4.1 (1997) 91-93 Concurrent Contents: Recent and Classic References at the Interface of Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology Articles Allen, J. F., J. Hallperin, and R. Friend. 1985. Removal and diversion tactics and the control of auditory hallucinations. Behavior Research and Therapy 23:601-605.Baker, H. D. 1995. Psychoanalysis and ideology: Bakhtin, Lacan, and Zizek. History of European Ideas 20:499-504.Bernet, R. 1994. Derrida-Husserl-Freud: The trace of transference. Southern (...) Journal of Philosophy 32 suppl.:141-158.Boden, M. A. 1996. Commentary on "Towards a design-based analysis of emotional episodes." Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 3, no. 2:135-136.Castelfranchi, C., and M. Miceli. 1996. Commentary on "Towards a design-based analysis of emotional episodes." Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, no. 2:129-133.Fowes, B. J., and F. C. Richardson. 1996. Why is multiculturalism good? American Psychologist 51, no. 6:609-621.Frith, C. 1996. Commentary on "Free will in the light of neuropsychiatry." Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 3, no. 2:91-93.Forde, R. 1996. Inclusion of psychosocial conditions in clinical practice and the problem of medicalization. Theoretical Medicine 17, no. 2:151-161.Gaylin, W., and D. Doukas. 1995. The second-hand suicide threat. Hastings Center Report 25:20-22.Gillet, G. 1995. Consciousness, thought, and neurological integrity. Journal of Mind and Behavior 16, no. 3:215-233.Haskell, R. E. 1993. Realpolitik in the addictions field: Treatment-professional, popular-culture ideology, and scientific research. Journal of Mind and Behavior 14, no. 3:257-276.Kuys, T. 1995. The tally argument again. Methodological Science 28, nos. 2-3:43-55.Lear, J. 1995. The heterogeneity of the mental: Sebastian Gardner's irrationality and the philosophy of psychoanalysis. Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy 104:863-879.Libet, B. 1996. Commentary on "Free will in the light of neuropsychiatry." Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 2, no. 3:95-96.Lloyd, D. 1996. Commentary on "Toward a design-based analysis of emotional episodes." Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 3, no. 2:127-128.Pepper-Smith, R., W. R. C. Harvey, and M. Silberfeld. 1996. Competency and practical judgment. Theoretical Medicine 17, no. 2:135-150. [End Page 91]Spence, S. A. 1996a. Free will in the light of neuropsychiatry. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 3, no. 2:75-90.------. 1996b. Response to the commentaries. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 3, no. 2:99-100.Stein, D. J. 1996. The philosophy of psychopathy. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 39:569-580.Stephens, G. L. 1996. Commentary on "Free will in the light of neuropsychiatry." Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 3, no. 2:97-98.Varela, C. R. 1995. Ethnogenic theory and psychoanalysis: The unconscious as a social construction and a failed explanatory concept. Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 25:4.Weisberger, A. M. 1995. The ethics of the broader usage of Prozac: Social choice or social bias? International Journal of Applied Philosophy 10, no. 1:69-74.Wright, I., A. Sloman, and L. Beaudoin. 1996a. Response to the commentaries. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 3, no. 2:137.------. 1996b. Towards a design-based analysis of emotional episodes. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 3, no. 2:101-126. Books American Psychiatric Association. Task Force on Consent to Voluntary Hospitalization. 1993. Consent to voluntary hospitalization. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association.Christiansen, H. D. 1972. Ethics in counseling: Problem situations. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.Clark, P., and C. Wright, eds. 1988. Mind, psychoanalysis and science. New York: Blackwell.Comerchero, V., ed. 1970. Values in conflict: Christianity, marxism, psychoanalysis, existentialism. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.Epstein, R. S. 1994. Keeping boundaries: Maintaining safety and integrity in the psychotherapeutic process. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press.Fairbairn, G. J. 1995. Contemplating suicide: The language and ethics of self harm. New York: Routledge.Grubb, A., ed. 1991. Decision-making and problems of incompetence. New York: John Wiley & Sons.Haas, L. J., and J. L. Malouf. 1995. Keeping up the good work: A practitioner's guide to mental health ethics. 2nd ed. Sarasota: Professional Resource Exchange.Hacking, I. 1995. Rewriting the soul: Multiple personality and the sciences of memory. Princeton: Princeton University... (shrink)

Understanding everyday behavior relies heavily upon understanding our ability to improvise, how we are able to continuously anticipate and adapt in order to coordinate with our environment and others. Here we consider the ability of musicians to improvise, where they must spontaneously coordinate their actions with co-performers in order to produce novel musical expressions. Investigations of this behavior have traditionally focused on describing the organization of cognitive structures. The focus, here, however, is on the ability of the time-evolving patterns of (...) inter-musician movement coordination as revealed by the mathematical tools of complex dynamical systems to provide a new understanding of what potentiates the novelty of spontaneous musical action. We demonstrate this approach through the application of cross wavelet spectral analysis, which isolates the strength and patterning of the behavioral coordination that occurs between improvising musicians across a range of nested time-scales. Revealing the sophistication of the previously unexplored dynamics of movement coordination between improvising musicians is an important step towards understanding how creative musical expressions emerge from the spontaneous coordination of multiple musical bodies. (shrink)

An international team of scholars offer a broad engagement with the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche. They discuss the main topics of his philosophy, under the headings of values, epistemology and metaphysics, and will to power. Other sections are devoted to his life, his relations to other philosophers, and his individual works.

In this book John Richardson argues for centering the concept of values in the study of Nietzsche's philosophical thinking. He identifies twelve of Nietzsche's key concepts, and organizes them into three sections: the first two outline how values influence human behavior and self-conception, while the third presents new values Nietzsche himself defines in response to his previous critiques. The study builds on recent scholarship in philosophy and provides one of the most up-to-date comprehensive assessments of Nietzsche.

Martin Heidegger is one of the twentieth century’s most influential, but also most cryptic and controversial philosophers. His early fusion of phenomenology with existentialism inspired Sartre and many others, and his later critique of modern rationality inspired Derrida and still others. This introduction covers the whole of Heidegger’s thought and is ideal for anyone coming to his work for the first time. John Richardson centres his account on Heidegger’s persistent effort to change the very kind of understanding or (...) truth we seek. Beginning with an overview of Heidegger’s life and work, he sketches the development of Heidegger’s thought up to the publication of _Being and Time_. He shows how that book takes up Husserl’s method of phenomenology and adapts it. He then introduces and assesses the key arguments of_ Being and Time_ under three headings—pragmatism, existentialism, and temporality—its three levels of analysis of human experience. Subsequent chapters introduce Heidegger’s later philosophy, including his turn towards a historical account of being, and new ideas about how we need to ‘think’ to get the truth about it; his influential writings on language, art, and poetry, and their role in the Western history of being; and his claim that this history has culminated in a technological relation to things that is deeply problematic, above all in the way it excludes the divine. The final chapter looks at Heidegger’s profound influence on several intellectual movements ranging from phenomenology to existentialism to postmodernism. A much-needed and refreshing introduction to this major figure, _Heidegger_ is ideal reading for anyone coming to his work for the first time and will interest and stimulate students and scholars alike. (shrink)

"I suspect that this will become the book on Schopenhauer's metaphysics for many years to come, and will be required reading for any serious student of Schopenhauer's thought."--David E. Cartwright, University of Wisconsin, Whitewater.

A lucid introduction to the "existential phenomenology" of Martin Heidegger, particularly as developed in his major work, Being and Time, this work focuses on how Heidegger's ideas bear on the central problem in epistemology--that of how we can have objective knowledge. The author constructs fresh arguments clarifying Heidegger's contribution to the theory of knowledge, and shows why Heidegger deemed misguided the search for knowledge of the way things are in themselves.

Nietzsche attributes 'will power' to all living things, but this seems in sharp conflict with other positions important to him-and implausible besides. The doctrine smacks of both metaphysics and anthropomorphizing, which he elsewhere derides. Will to power seems to be an intentional end-directedness, involving cognitive or representational powers he is rightly loath to attribute to all organisms, and tends to downplay even in persons. This paper argues that we find a stronger reading of will to power-both more plausible and more (...) consistent with Nietzsche's other views-by developing his affinities with Darwinism. By seeing will to power as an 'internal revision' to Darwinism, opposing the latter's stress (as Nietzsche thinks) on 'survival', but assenting to its uses of natural selection, we can ground or naturalize that notion, congenially to Nietzsche and to us. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction The World as Becoming How Time Arises for Organisms Human Time Eternal Return Conclusion on Realism and Idealism.

Nietzsche attributes ‘will power’ to all living things, but this seems in sharp conflict with other positions important to him‐and implausible besides. The doctrine smacks of both metaphysics and anthropomorphizing, which he elsewhere derides. Will to power seems to be an intentional end‐directedness, involving cognitive or representational powers he is rightly loath to attribute to all organisms, and tends to downplay even in persons. This paper argues that we find a stronger reading of will to power‐both more plausible and more (...) consistent with Nietzsche's other views‐by developing his affinities with Darwinism. By seeing will to power as an ‘internal revision’to Darwinism, opposing the latter's stress (as Nietzsche thinks) on ‘survival’, but assenting to its uses of natural selection, we can ground or naturalize that notion, congenially to Nietzsche and to us. (shrink)