The Body as Gift, Resource, and Commodity, edited by Martin Gunnarson and Fredrik Svenaeus, is a volume containing 11 research pieces about organ transplants and organ trade in current times, and is the outcome of a research project at the Centre for Studies in Practical Knowledge, Södertörns University in Stockholm. The main contributors include a philosopher, a historian, and three ethnologists, assisted by medical researchers and physicians and other scholars from the Baltic region. As such, the range of focus is (...) generally limited to the prevailing practices in that region, although their connections with practices in other parts of the world are discussed where directly relevant.The authors’ aim, as mentioned in the introduction of the book, is to add to the growth of knowledge and reflection in the field of reference and thus help to build sound political judgment and policies on organ, tissue, and cell donation, both in view of the need to save lives and their impac .. (shrink)

A person’s epistemic goals sometimes clash with pragmatic ones. At times, rational agents will degrade the quality of their epistemic process in order to satisfy a goal that is knowledge-independent (for example, to gain status or at least keep the peace with friends.) This is particularly so when the epistemic quest concerns an abstract political or economic theory, where evidence is likely to be softer and open to interpretation. Before wide-scale adoption of the Internet, people sought out or stumbled upon (...) evidence related to a proposition in a more random way. And it was difficult to aggregate the evidence of friends and other similar people to the exclusion of others, even if one had wanted to. Today, by contrast, the searchable Internet allows people to simultaneously pursue social and epistemic goals.This essay shows that the selection effect caused by a merging of social and epistemic activities will cause both polarization in beliefs and devaluation of expert testimony. This will occur even if agents are rational Bayesians and have moderate credences before talking to their peers. What appears to be rampant dogmatism could be just as well explained by the nonrandom walk in evidence-gathering. This explanation better matches the empirical evidence on how people behave on social media platforms. It also helps clarify why media outlets (not just the Internet platforms) might have their own pragmatic reasons to compromise their epistemic goals in today’s competitive and polarized information market. Yet, it also makes policy intervention much more difficult, since we are unlikely to neatly separate individuals’ epistemic goals from their social ones. (shrink)

The lateralized ERP N2pc component has been shown to be an effective marker of attentional object selection when elicited in a visual search task, specifically reflecting the selection of a target item among distractors. Moreover, when targets are known in advance, the visual search process is guided by representations of target features held in working memory at the time of search, thus guiding attention to objects with target-matching features. Previous studies have shown that manipulating working memory availability via concurrent tasks (...) or within task manipulations influences visual search performance and the N2pc. Other studies have indicated that visual vs. spatial working memory manipulations have differential contributions to visual search. To investigate this the current study assesses participants' visual and spatial working memory ability independent of the visual search task to determine whether such individual differences in working memory affect task performance and the N2pc. Participants completed a visual search task to elicit the N2pc and separate visual working memory and spatial working memory assessments. Greater SPWM, but not VWM, ability is correlated with and predicts higher visual search accuracy and greater N2pc amplitudes. Neither VWM nor SPWM was related to N2pc latency. These results provide additional support to prior behavioral and neural visual search findings that spatial WM availability, whether as an ability of the participant's processing system or based on task demands, plays an important role in efficient visual search. (shrink)

Since its founding in 1943, Medievalia et Humanistica has won worldwide recognition as the first scholarly publication in America to devote itself entirely to medieval and Renaissance studies. Since 1970, a new series, sponsored by the Modern Language Association of America and edited by an international board of distinguished scholars and critics, has published interdisciplinary articles. In yearly hardbound volumes, the new series publishes significant scholarship, criticism, and reviews treating all facets of medieval and Renaissance culture: history, art, literature, music, (...) science, law, economics, and philosophy. (shrink)

Scapula mobility complicates upper extremity kinematics assessment. Existing methods are diverse, providing inconsistent results. The current gold standard (bone pins) is prohibitively invasive. The purposes of the current study are to describe a virtual projection alternative to surface markers for video motion capture (VMC) of the scapula and to compare the results of the projection and surface marker methods to the results of similar existing methods. Ten participants were evaluated using VMC. Surface markers were applied to the trunk and arm (...) in accordance with existing guidelines. Three markers were affixed to plastic base on the skin over the acromion process. Other scapular landmarks were digitized in a neutral position. These landmarks’ locations were defined in reference to the acromion cluster and used to generate the projection. Humerothoracic, glenohumeral, and scapulothoracic kinematics were evaluated during shoulder abduction, flexion, and scaption. Joint angles produced by the surface markers and the projection were compared by Bonferroni-adjusted t tests. The results were compared to prior findings in the literature. The projection resulted in greater scapulothoracic upward rotation, internal rotation, and anterior–posterior tilt and less glenohumeral elevation (p <.0055) than did surface markers. The virtual scapula produced greater estimates of scapular mobility than did surface markers, corresponding to pre-existing results from similar methodologies. The result is a noninvasive measurement tool that produces different and superior results than do scapula surface markers. Measuring scapula kinematics via VMC without bone pins will facilitate future investigations into interactions between upper extremity injury, kinematics, and activity performance. (shrink)

In real-time, Twitter strongly imprints world events, popular culture, and the day-to-day; Twitter records an ever growing compendium of language use and change; and Twitter has been shown to enable certain kinds of prediction. Vitally, and absent from many standard corpora such as books and news archives, Twitter also encodes popularity and spreading through retweets. Here, we describe Storywrangler, an ongoing, day-scale curation of over 100 billion tweets containing around 1 trillion 1-grams from 2008 to 2020. For each day, we (...) break tweets into 1-, 2-, and 3-grams across 150+ languages, record usage frequencies, and generate Zipf distributions. We make the data set available through an interactive time series viewer, and as downloadable time series and daily distributions. We showcase a few examples of the many possible avenues of study we aim to enable including how social amplification can be visualized through ‘contagiograms’. (shrink)

It is predicted that the rapid acquisition of new genetic knowledge and related applications during the next decade will have significant implications for virtually all members of society. Currently, most people get exposed to information about genes and genetics only through stories publicized in the media. We sought to understand how individuals in the general population used and understood the concepts of ???genetics??? and ???genes.??? During in-depth one-on-one telephone interviews with adults in the United States, we asked questions exploring their (...) basic understanding of these terms, as well as their belief as to the location of genes in the human body. A wide range of responses was received. Despite conversational familiarity with genetic terminology, many noted frustration or were hesitant when trying to answer these questions. In addition, some responses reflected a lack of understanding about basic genetic science that may have significant implications for broader public education measures in genetic literacy, genetic counseling, public health practices, and even routine health care. (shrink)

The authors of this article are previous or current members of the Clinical Ethics Consultation Affairs (CECA) Committee, a standing committee of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH). The committee is composed of seasoned healthcare ethics consultants (HCECs), and it is charged with developing and disseminating education materials for HCECs and ethics committees. The purpose of this article is to describe the educational research and development processes behind our teaching materials, which culminated in a case studies book called (...) A Case-Based Study Guide for Addressing Patient-Centered Ethical Issues in Health Care (hereafter, the Study Guide). In this article, we also enumerate how the Study Guide could be used in teaching and learning, and we identify areas that are ripe for future work. (shrink)

The contributors to The Moral of the Story, all preeminent political theorists, are unified by their concern with the instructive power of great literature. This thought-provoking combination of essays explores the polyvalent moral and political impact of classic world literatures on public ethics through the study of some of its major figures-including Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, Jane Austen, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Robert Penn Warren, and Dostoevsky. Positing the uniqueness of literature's ability to promote dialogue on salient moral and intellectual (...) virtues, editor Henry T. Edmonson III has culled together a wide-ranging exploration of such fundamental concerns as the abuse of authority, the nature of good leadership, the significance of "middle class virtues" and the needs of adolescents. This collection reinvigorates the study of classic literature as an endeavor that is not only personally intellectually satisfying, but also an inimitable and unique way to enrich public discourse. (shrink)

The Inherent inseparability of psychopathology and phenomenology is generally a known fact, established and popularised by Karl Jaspers in Allgemeine Psychopathologie. In the following paper, I will show the development of interdisciplinary methodology initiated by Jaspers, and discuss it by combining M. Merleau Ponty`s theory of embodiment, R. D. Laing`s existential-phenomenological approach, and T. Fuchs` concept of brain resonance and integral causality with the hermeneutical thoughts of Paul Ricœur regarding the notion of selfhood. The main thesis proposes that fusion of (...) hermeneutics and phenomenology with psychiatry can play a significant methodological role in the approach to diagnosis and treatment of the psychotic disorders spectre, especially regarding the most complex yet inaccurately defined and evaluated mental disorder – schizophrenia. Due to the fundamental interpretative capacity of both disciplines regarding the understanding of the displacement (translocation) of subject, disembodiment, delusions and consciousness, I am considering them as a prerequisite for the effective expansion of psychiatric practice. (shrink)

The philosophical papers comprising this volume range from process metaphysics and theology, through the phenomenological study of intentionality, to the foundations of geometry and of the system of real numbers. New light, it is thought, is shed on all these topics, some of them being of the highest interest and under intensive investigation in contemporary philosophical discussion. Metaphysi cians, process theologians, semanticists, theorists of knowledge, phenomenologists, and philosophers of mathematics will thus find in this book, it is hoped, helpful materials (...) and methods. The categoreal scheme of Whitehead's Process and Reality is discussed rather fully from a logical point of view in the first paper [I] in the light of the author's previous work on the logico-metaphysical theory of events. The clarification that results is thought to provide a new depth and precision to the problem of interpreting one of the most difficult books in the recent history of metaphysics and cosmol ogy. A detailed examination of some aspects of Hartshorne's recent Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method is given in II. This book is perhaps the most significant work on process philosophy since Process and Reality itself, and its logical underpinnings thus merit a full critical discussion. (shrink)

We argue that thoughts are structures of concepts, and that concepts should be individuated by their origins, rather than in terms of their semantic or epistemic properties. Many features of cognition turn on the vehicles of content, thoughts, rather than on the nature of the contents they express. Originalism makes concepts available to explain, with no threat of circularity, puzzling cases concerning thought. In this paper, we mention Hesperus/Phosphorus puzzles, the Evans-Perry example of the ship seen through different windows, and (...) Mates cases, and we believe that there are many additional applications. (shrink)

This anthology is the first attempt to present a rounded picture of 'Kierkegaard as a philosopher' in English. After an introduction explaining how Kierkegaard viewed the task of 'becoming a philosopher', there are generous extracts from the Concept of Irony and the great pseudonymous works: Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, Repetition, Philosophical Fragments, The Concept of Anxiety, Prefaces, Johannes Climacus and Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Kierkegaard's own attempts to summarize the significance of his writings are also included, so that readers have the (...) opportunity to make up their own minds about the adequacy of his retrospective accounting. The Kierkegaard who emerges from these pages is not only a penetrating analyst of temporality, individuality, and irony, but also a lithe, witty and versatile stylist. He is probably one of the greatest writers in the philosophical tradition, and surely one of the most humorous. The anthology makes use of a range of classic translations, and includes new translations by Jane Chamberlain and Jonathan Rée, explanatory introductions, an index and a glossary. (shrink)

T‐lymphocyte recognition, activation and function involve anumber of T‐cell‐specific surface proteins in addition to the receptor for antigen. The structure, function and genetic analysis of four of these T‐cell differentiation antigens are discussed.

Are fictional characters such as Sherlock Holmes real? What can fiction tell us about the nature of truth and reality? In this excellent introduction to the problem of fictionalism R. M. Sainsbury covers the following key topics: what is fiction? realism about fictional objects, including the arguments that fictional objects are real but non-existent; real but non-factual; real but non-concrete the relationship between fictional characters and non-actual worlds fictional entities as abstract artefacts fiction and intentionality and the problem of irrealism (...) fictionalism about possible worlds moral fictionalism. R. M. Sainsbury makes extensive use of examples from fiction, such as Sherlock Holmes, Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary and examines the work of philosophers who have made significant contributions to the topic, including Meinong, David Lewis, and Bas Van Fraassen. Additional features include chapter summaries, annotated further reading and a glossary of technical terms, making _Fiction and Fictionalism_ ideal for those coming to the issue for the first time. (shrink)

How do very young children use talk to create relationship? Are there associations between the quality of children’s relationships and their language use? Do children’s pragmatic abilities relate to other language competencies? This qualitative study addresses these questions using naturalistic data from a daycare setting by looking at the spontaneous peer talk in two overlapping dyads of toddler girls. This analysis indicates that young children have considerable pragmatic skill in using talk to create and maintain relationship. Children’s relational style and (...) language use seem closely connected: the different talk styles of the two dyads instantiate and support their distinct relational styles. Further, different styles of relational talk appear to tap different language abilities. Considered with other studies looking at young children’s language and particularly pragmatic skills, this analysis suggests that young children’s language capabilities in the context of specific relationships merit further attention. (shrink)

In 1958, economist A. W. Phillips published an article describing what he observed to be the inverse relationship between inflation and unemployment; subsequently, the "Phillips curve" became a central concept in macroeconomic analysis and policymaking. But today's Phillips curve is not the same as the original one from fifty years ago; the economy, our understanding of price setting behavior, the determinants of inflation, and the role of monetary policy have evolved significantly since then. In this book, some of the top (...) economists working today reexamine the theoretical and empirical validity of the Phillips curve in its more recent specifications. The contributors consider such questions as what economists have learned about price and wage setting and inflation expectations that would improve the way we use and formulate the Phillips curve, what the Phillips curve approach can teach us about inflation dynamics, and how these lessons can be applied to improving the conduct of monetary policy. ContributorsLawrence Ball, Ben Bernanke, Oliver Blanchard, V. V. Chari, William T. Dickens, Stanley Fischer, Jeff Fuhrer, Jordi Gali, Michael T. Kiley, Robert G. King, Donald L. Kohn, Yolanda K. Kodrzycki, Jane Sneddon Little, Bartisz Mackowiak, N. Gregory Mankiw, Virgiliu Midrigan, Giovanni P. Olivei, Athanasios Orphanides, Adrian R. Pagan, Christopher A. Pissarides, Lucrezia Reichlin, Paul A. Samuelson, Christopher A. Sims, Frank R. Smets, Robert M. Solow, Jürgen Stark, James H. Stock, Lars E. O. Svensson, John B. Taylor, Mark W. Watson. (shrink)

This book is available either individually, or as part of the specially-priced Arguments of the Philosphers Collection.

Scholars of Plato are divided between those who emphasize the literature of the dialogues and those who emphasize the argument of the dialogues, and between those who see a development in the thought of the dialogues and those who do not. In this important book Russell Dancy focuses on the arguments and defends a developmental picture. He explains the Theory of Forms of the Phaedo and Symposium as an outgrowth of the quest for definitions canvassed in the Socratic dialogues, by (...) constructing a Theory of Definition for the Socratic dialogues based on the refutations of definitions in those dialogues, and showing how that theory is mirrored in the Theory of Forms. His discussion, notable for both its clarity and its meticulous scholarship, ranges in detail over a number of Plato's early and middle dialogues, and will be of interest to readers in Plato studies and in ancient philosophy more generally. (shrink)