The practice of nursing involves ongoing interactions between nurses' and clients' lived bodies. Despite this, several scholars have suggested that the “lived body” (Merleau‐Ponty, 1962) has not been given its due place in nursing practice, education or research (Draper, J Adv Nurs, 70, 2014, 2235). With the advent of electronic health records and increased use of technology, face‐to‐face assessment and embodied understanding of clients' lived bodies may be on the decline. Furthermore, staffing levels may not afford the time nurses (...) need to be as “present” with their clients in embodied ways. The failure to attend to the lived body may contribute to missed opportunities for care and decreased quality of life for both clients and healthcare practitioners. In this paper, we undertake an analysis of selected aspects of the work of Maurice Merleau‐Ponty. The aim is to advance understanding of the affordances this work may offer to enhancing client–nurse interactions within the practice of nursing. Merleau‐Ponty's notions of embodiment, intersubjectivity and intercorporeality as articulated in his seminal texts The Phenomenology of Perception (New York, NY: Routledge, 2012) and The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968) are examined. These three constructs are discussed as they relate to the lived body in client–nurse interactions in nursing practice and education. Finally, implications of how attention to “the lived body” could shape interactions and have the potential to foster increased quality of life of clients and nurses are considered. (shrink)

Research on human infants has begun to shed light on early-developing processes for segmenting perceptual arrays into objects. Infants appear to perceive objects by analyzing three-dimensional surface arrangements and motions. Their perception does not accord with a general tendency to maximize figural goodness or to attend to nonaccidental geometric relations in visual arrays. Object perception does accord with principles governing the motions of material bodies: Infants divide perceptual arrays into units that move as connected wholes, that move separately from one (...) another, that tend to maintain their size and shape over motion, and that tend to act upon each other only on contact. These findings suggest that o general representation of object unity and boundaries is interposed between representations of surfaces and representations of objects of familiar kinds. The processes that construct this representation may be related to processes of physical reasoning. (shrink)

Experiments with young infants provide evidence for early-developing capacities to represent physical objects and to reason about object motion. Early physical reasoning accords with 2 constraints at the center of mature physical conceptions: continuity and solidity. It fails to accord with 2 constraints that may be peripheral to mature conceptions: gravity and inertia. These experiments suggest that cognition develops concurrently with perception and action and that development leads to the enrichment of conceptions around an unchanging core. The experiments challenge claims (...) that cognition develops on a foundation of perceptual or motor experience, that initial conceptions are inappropriate to the world, and that initial conceptions are abandoned or radically.. (shrink)

Despite increasing interest in the figure of Socrates and in love in ancient Greece, no recent monograph studies these topics in all four of Plato's dialogues on love and friendship. This book provides important new insights into these subjects by examining Plato's characterization of Socrates in Symposium, Phaedrus, Lysis and the often neglected Alcibiades I. It focuses on the specific ways in which the philosopher searches for wisdom together with his young interlocutors, using an art that is 'erotic', not in (...) a narrowly sexual sense, but because it shares characteristics attributed to the daimon Eros in Symposium. In all four dialogues, Socrates' art enables him, like Eros, to search for the beauty and wisdom he recognizes that he lacks and to help others seek these same objects of erôs. Belfiore examines the dialogues as both philosophical and dramatic works, and considers many connections with Greek culture, including poetry and theater. (shrink)

A new method was devised to test object permanence in young infants. Fivemonth-old infants were habituated to a screen that moved back and forth through a 180-degree arc, in the manner of a drawbridge. After infants reached habituation, a box was centered behind the screen. Infants were shown two test events: a possible event and an impossible event. In the possible event, the screen stopped when it reached the occluded box; in the impossible event, the screen moved through the space (...) occupied by the box. The results indicated that infants looked reliably longer at the impossible than at the possible event. This hnding suggested that infants (1) understood that the box continued to exist, in its same location, after it was occluded by the screen, and (2) expected the screen to stop against the occluded box and were surprised, or puzzled, when it failed to do so. A control experiment in which the box was placed next to the screen provided support for this interpretation of the results. Together, the results of these experiments indicate that, contrary to Piaget’s (1954) claims, infants as young as 5 months of age understand that objects continue to exist when occluded. The results, also indicate that 5-month-old infants realize that solid objects do not move through the space occupied by other solid objects. (shrink)

Astonishment that the things we are experiencing are "still" possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. It is not the beginning of any insight, unless it is that the idea of history from which it comes is untenable.And so tyranny naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme form of liberty?In 1940 the exiled German critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin warned that fidelity to a vision of history as (...) progress risked normalizing the remy-thologization of politics.1 Recent events have underlined the urgency, both for thought and for action, of rejecting the same unphilosophical astonishment in our own time. In the face of political... (shrink)

Complex cognitive skills such as reading and calculation and complex cognitive achievements such as formal science and mathematics may depend on a set of building block systems that emerge early in human ontogeny and phylogeny. These core knowledge systems show characteristic limits of domain and task specificity: Each serves to represent a particular class of entities for a particular set of purposes. By combining representations from these systems, however human cognition may achieve extraordinary flexibility. Studies of cognition in human infants (...) and in nonhuman primates therefore may contribute to understanding unique features of human knowledge. 2020 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Of other ancient writers, call into question the traditional view that katharsis in the Poetics is a homeopathic process - one in which pity and fear affect emotions like themselves. She maintains, instead, that Aristotle considered katharsis to be an allopathic process in which pity and fear purge the soul of shameless, antisocial, and aggressive emotions. While exploring katharsis, Tragic Pleasures analyzes the closely related question of how the Poetics treats the.

What leads humans to divide the social world into groups, preferring their own group and disfavoring others? Experiments with infants and young children suggest these tendencies are based on predispo- sitions that emerge early in life and depend, in part, on natural language. Young infants prefer to look at a person who previously spoke their native language. Older infants preferentially accept toys from native-language speakers, and preschool children preferentially select native-language speakers as friends. Variations in accent are sufficient to evoke (...) these social preferences, which are observed in infants before they produce or comprehend speech and are exhibited by children even when they comprehend the foreign-accented speech. Early-developing preferences for native-language speakers may serve as a foundation for later-developing preferences and conflicts among social groups. (shrink)

A series of experiments investigated the effect of speakers’ language, accent, and race on children’s social preferences. When presented with photographs and voice recordings of novel children, 5-year-old children chose to be friends with native speakers of their native language rather than foreign-language or foreign-accented speakers. These preferences were not exclusively due to the intelligibility of the speech, as children found the accented speech to be comprehensible, and did not make social distinctions between foreign-accented and foreign-language speakers. Finally, children chose (...) same-race children as friends when the target children were silent, but they chose other-race children with a native accent when accent was pitted against race. A control experiment provided evidence that children’s privileging of accent over race was not due to the relative familiarity of each dimension. The results, discussed in an evolutionary framework, suggest that children preferentially evaluate others along dimensions that distinguished social groups in prehistoric human societies. (shrink)

This article considers 3 claims that cognitive sex differ- ences account for the differential representation of men and women in high-level careers in mathematics and sci- ence: (a) males are more focused on objects from the beginning of life and therefore are predisposed to better learning about mechanical systems; (b) males have a pro- file of spatial and numerical abilities producing greater aptitude for mathematics; and (c) males are more variable in their cognitive abilities and therefore predominate at the upper (...) reaches of mathematical talent. Research on cogni- tive development in human infants, preschool children, and students at all levels fails to support these claims. Instead, it provides evidence that mathematical and scientific rea- soning develop from a set of biologically based cognitive capacities that males and females share. These capacities lead men and women to develop equal talent for mathe- matics and science. (shrink)

Because human languages vary in sound and meaning, children must learn which distinctions their language uses. For speech perception, this learning is selective: initially infants are sensitive to most acoustic distinctions used in any language1–3, and this sensitivity reflects basic properties of the auditory system rather than mechanisms specific to language4–7; however, infants’ sensitivity to non-native sound distinctions declines over the course of the first year8. Here we ask whether a similar process governs learning of word meanings. We investigated the (...) sensitivity of 5-month-old infants in an English-speaking environment to a conceptual distinction that is marked in Korean but not English; that is, the distinction between ‘tight’ and ‘loose’ fit of one object to another9,10. Like adult Korean speakers but unlike adult English speakers, these infants detected this distinction and divided a continuum of motion-into-contact actions into tightand loose-fit categories. Infants’ sensitivity to this distinction is linked to representations of object mechanics11that are shared by non-human animals12–14. Language learning therefore seems to develop by linking linguistic forms to universal, pre-existing representations of sound and meaning. Our research focuses on the crosscutting conceptual distinctions between actions producing loose- and tight-fitting contact relationships (compare left and right columns in Fig. 1a) and actions producing containment versus support relationships (compare first and second rows in Fig. 1a). As early as Korean and English children begin to talk about such actions, they categorize them differently from one another and similarly to Korean- and Englishspeaking adults9,15. Moreover, English and Korean adults differ in their performance on non-linguistic categorization tasks involving heterogeneous examples of these actions, in accord with the differing semantics of their languages16,17, whereas the performance of young children on such tasks has been mixed9,10,18,19.. (shrink)

What is the proper role of politics in higher education? Many policies and reforms in the academy, from affirmative action and a multicultural curriculum to racial and sexual harassment codes and movements to change pedagogical styles, seek justice for oppressed groups in society. They understand justice to require a comprehensive equality of membership: individuals belonging to different groups should have equal access to educational opportunities; their interests and cultures should be taken equally seriously as worthy subjects of study, their persons (...) treated with equal respect and concern in communicative interaction. Conservative critics of these egalitarian movements represent them as dangerous political meddling into the disinterested pursuit of knowledge. They cast the pursuit of equality as a threat to freedom of speech and academic standards. In response, some radical advocates of such programs agree that the quest for equality clashes with free speech, but view this as an argument for sacrificing freedom of speech. (shrink)

Animal rights campaigners and scientists working with animals completed anonymous questionnaires in which they were asked to report, not only on their own beliefs and ideas about the animal experimentation debate, but also on those they perceived the opposing group to hold. Both groups of participants tended to have a negative and somewhat extreme view of the other. But they did have an accurate grasp of the arguments and defenses commonly offered on both sides of the debate, and showed some (...) agreement concerning the relative capacity of different animals to suffer. Differences appeared in the level of the phylogenetic hierarchy at which participants thought animals might be capable of suffering, and in their decision-making processes regarding the admissibility of animal experiments. (shrink)

According to Carey (2009), humans construct new concepts by abstracting structural relations among sets of partly unspecified symbols, and then analogically mapping those symbol structures onto the target domain. Using the development of integer concepts as an example, I give reasons to doubt this account and to consider other ways in which language and symbol learning foster conceptual development.

Four-month-old infants can perceive bimodally speciiied events. They respond to relationships between the optic and acoustic stimulation that carries information about an object. Infants can do this by detecting the temporal synchrony of an object’s sounds and its optically specified impacts. They are sensitive both to the common tempo and to the simultaneity of such sounds and visible impacts. These findings support the view that intermodal perception depends at least in part on the detection of invariant relationships in patterns of (...) light and sound. (shrink)

Healthcare workers are often assumed to have a duty to work, even if faced with personal risk. This is particularly so for professionals. However, the health service also depends on non-professionals, such as porters, cooks and cleaners. The duty to work is currently under scrutiny because of the ongoing challenge of responding to pandemic influenza, where an effective response depends on most uninfected HCWs continuing to work, despite personal risk. This paper reports findings of a survey of HCWs conducted across (...) three National Health Service trusts in the West Midlands, UK, to establish whether HCWs’ likelihood of working during a pandemic is associated with views about the duty to work. The sense that HCWs felt that they had a duty to work despite personal risk emerged strongly regardless of professional status. Besides a strong sense that everyone should pull together, all kinds of HCWs recognised a duty to work even in difficult circumstances, which correlated strongly with their stated likelihood of working. This suggests that HCWs’ decisions about whether or not they are prepared to work during a pandemic are closely linked to their sense of duty. However, respondents’ sense of the duty to work may conflict with their sense of duty to family, as well as other factors such as a perceived lack of reciprocity from their employers. Interestingly, nearly 25% of doctors did not consider that they had a duty to work where doing so would pose risks to themselves or their families. (shrink)

Concerns about children's ability to fully comprehend and evaluate advertising messages has stimulated substantial research and heated debate among scholars, business leaders, consumer advocates, and public policy makers for more than three decades. During that time, some very fundamental questions about the fairness of marketing to children have been raised, yet many remain unresolved today. With the emergence of increasingly sophisticated advertising media, promotional offers and creative appeals in recent years, new issues have also developed. This paper provides a basis (...) for further examination of some the key questions in this area, and suggests how children's advertising research can be employed to illuminate them. (shrink)

Georg Simmel has long been appreciated as a major theorist of the arts in society, as well as of aesthetic phenomena in general in social life. Yet Simmel’s essays in the area have remained dispersed for many years across the disparate parts of his corpus and have not been easy to survey in their full thematic cohesion and interconnection. This symposium article reflects on Austin Harrington’s comprehensive anthology of these writings in English, published in 2020, which assembles virtually all the (...) relevant titles – many of them appearing in English for the first time. Among the central topics of discussion are Simmel’s fluid style of theorizing, his thinking about representation, reality and modernity in art, his relationships to philosophers and artistic personalities, and his legacy for the present. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay meditates on the entanglement of history and memory with forgetfulness, with silencing, with what is before or outside speech. Recalling along the way a few of the manifold varieties of the unthinkable made manifest in recent events, it notes the same mute iteration that led Freud to the death drive, only to be troubled once again by the very same repetitions enfolded in the diagnosis of cultural malaise Freud built upon his insight. Turning to Georg Simmel’s Philosophy (...) of Money for an alternative, non-psychoanalytic account of unconscious purpose as a trans-individual, cultural phenomenon, it arrives once again at the hypertrophic life-technologies of the modern—and at Simmel’s account of money as the ultimate being without qualities, “the most extreme … configuration of Geist” itself, which so thoroughly underpins ways of living that, obscuring dimensions of value that cannot be quantified, silently hum on in the face of catastrophe. (shrink)

A century after the advent of quantum mechanics and general relativity, both theories enjoy incredible empirical success, constituting the cornerstones of modern physics. Yet, paradoxically, they suffer from deep-rooted, so-far intractable, conflicts. Motivations for violations of the notion of relativistic locality include the Bell’s inequalities for hidden variable theories, the cosmological horizon problem, and Lorentz-violating approaches to quantum geometrodynamics, such as Horava–Lifshitz gravity. Here, we explore a recent proposal for a “real ensemble” non-local description of quantum mechanics, in which “particles” (...) can copy each others’ observable values AND phases, independent of their spatial separation. We first specify the exact theory, ensuring that it is consistent and has quantum mechanics as a fixed point, where all particles with the same values for a given observable have the same phases. We then study the stability of this fixed point numerically, and analytically, for simple models. We provide evidence that most systems are locally stable to small deviations from quantum mechanics, and furthermore, the phase variance per value of the observable, as well as systematic deviations from quantum mechanics, decay as \ time)\, where \. Interestingly, this convergence is controlled by the absolute value of energy, suggesting a possible connection to gravitational physics. Finally, we discuss different issues related to this theory, as well as potential novel applications for the spectrum of primordial cosmological perturbations and the cosmological constant problem. (shrink)

The importance of ethical listening -- The power of difference and values that unite -- Take off your armor and bring down the walls: adopting a listening posture -- Dolls and cages: listening as investment and care -- Deep listening: remembering and responding with intentional focus -- Hyenas and chickens: listening as invitation -- Hope for sustainable hospitality -- References -- About the author.

The premise of this symposium is that the principle and ideal developed in Brown v. Board of Education2 and its successor cases lie at the heart of the rationale for affirmative action in higher education. The principle of the school desegregation cases is that racial segregation is an injustice that demands remediation. The ideal of the school desegregation cases is that racial integration is a positive good, without which “the dream of one Nation, indivisible”3 cannot be realized. Both the principle (...) and the ideal make racial integration a compelling interest. The Supreme Court recognized these claims in Grutter v. Bollinger. However, it failed to take full advantage of them. It thereby failed to answer crucial questions that must be answered by policies subject to strict scrutiny. In this essay, I shall display the links tying Grutter to Brown, discuss the vulnerabilities of Grut- ter in the absence of an explicit grounding in Brown, and demonstrate how the affirmative action policy upheld in Grutter, when explicitly grounded in Brown, survives strict scrutiny. To understand this argument, it is helpful first to explain the integrationist perspective that underlies it. (shrink)

Political figures engage rhetoric and exalted speech to excite the imagination, stir up the emotions, and prompt their listeners to embrace and act on an ideological perspective. However, there is more to excellent public oratory than eloquence. Rational persuasion is also a key component, emphasizing facts, evidence, and reasoning. Hume acknowledges that rational persuasion alone is not terribly effective in the public arena. His corpus contains many references to eloquence. Dispassionate delivery of evidence does not have the psychological impact of (...) eloquent delivery. What explains the difference? My aim in this paper is to use Hume’s theory of belief and “the feeling of conviction” to explain his analysis of effective oratory. Furthermore, I point to the abuses of eloquence in the political arena. Given these abuses, I ask why Hume considers eloquence a virtue. Although eloquence is immediately agreeable to us (one category of virtue for Hume), it can have detrimental, even deadly, consequences. Does this make it vicious in certain cases, since it has disutility, and given that usefulness to the public is another category of virtue for Hume? I suggest that skilled and elegant oratory is pleasing, but such oratory, when used for inhumane ends, could undermine the pleasure of the oratory experience itself. (shrink)

Mature representations of number are built on a core system of numerical representation that connects to spatial representations in the form of a ‘mental number line’. The core number system is functional in early infancy, but little is known about the origins of the mapping of numbers onto space. Here we show that preverbal infants transfer the discrimination of an ordered series of numerosities to the discrimination of an ordered series of line lengths. Moreover, infants construct relationships between individual numbers (...) and line lengths that vary positively, but not between numbers and lengths that vary inversely. These findings provide evidence for an early developing predisposition to relate representations of numerical magnitude and spatial length. A central foundation of mathematics, science and technology therefore emerges prior to experience with language, symbol systems, or measurement devices. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism continues to serve as a rich source of moral and theoretical insight. This collection of articles by top scholars offers fresh interpretations of Mill's ideas about happiness, moral obligation, justice, and rights. Applying contemporary philosophical insights, the articles challenge the conventional readings of Mill, and, in the process, contribute to a deeper understanding of utilitarian theory as well as the complexity of moral life.

Our language system is ambiguous in that the same utterance can be interpreted in different ways depending on the intention of the speaker. For example, the phrase, “Nice job!” can be interpreted a...

Infants were presented with an object that moved into reaching space on a path that was either continuously visible or interrupted by an occluder. Infants’ reaching was reduced sharply when an occluder was present, even though the occluder itself was out of reach and did not serve as a barrier to direct reaching for the object. We account for these findings and for the apparently contrasting findings of experiments using preferential looking methods to assess infants’ object representations, by proposing that (...) (a) object representations increase in precision over the infancy period, and (b) the precision of object representations varies in common ways at all ages as a function of object visibility and task demands. (shrink)

Most naturalists think that the belief/desire model from Hume is the best framework for making sense of motivation. As Smith has argued, given that the cognitive state (belief) and the conative state (desire) are separate on this model, if a moral judgment is cognitive, it could not also be motivating by itself. So, it looks as though Hume and Humeans cannot hold that moral judgments are states of belief (moral cognitivism) and internally motivating (moral internalism). My chief claim is that (...) the details of Hume’s naturalistic philosophy of mind actually allow for a conjunction of these allegedly incompatible views. This thesis is significant, since readers typically have thought that Hume’s view that motivation is not produced by representations, coupled with his view that moral judgments motivate on their own, imply that moral judgments could never take the form of beliefs about, or representations of, the moral (virtue and vice). (shrink)