Currently much debate surrounds the significance of cross-cultural variation in mother-infant attachment. Is only one form of attachment “healthy,” or are different types of attachment adaptations to local socioecological conditions? Juvenile mortality rates have been promoted as important features of local environments that shape attachment, which in turn affects later reproductive strategies. To this we add fertility. Fertility changes the environment of a child by influencing the number of potential caregivers and competitors for care, and the cultural ethos regarding the (...) rights of children. Different combinations of fertility and mortality will likely give rise to different attachment forms, and only under one regime (low fertility and mortality) do we expect exclusivity in attachment. (shrink)

Preston's (2011) challenge to the moral presumption against geoengineering is applied to carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS) in Scotland, United Kingdom. Qualitative data is analysed to assess if and how Preston's arguments play out in practice. We argue that the concepts of 'lesser evil' and prioritising human well-being over non-interference in natural processes do bring different value positions together in support of CCS, but that not all people see short-term carbon abatement as the 'least worst' option or a suitable (...) way to prioritise human well-being. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The nature of two influential theories on the moral status of abortion logically commits them to welcoming the advent of ectogenesis as a solution to the abortion conflict. However, qualitative research into women's response to ectogenesis reveals that both women in favour and women opposed to abortion rights reject the technology on surprisingly similar grounds. The abortion framework which led women to reject ectogenesis as an ethical resolution to unwanted pregnancy is contrasted with the moral framework which shapes formal (...) ethical discussions of abortion. It is argued that the need for ethical relevance requires the views of ethicists to move closer to those of women [1]. (shrink)

Wars must be won if our country … is to be protected from unthinkable outcomes, as the events on September 11th most recently illustrated…. This best protection unequivocally requires armed forces having military physicians committed to doing what is required to secure victory…. As opposed to needing neutral physicians, we need military physicians who can and do identify as closely as possible with the military so that they, too, can carry out the vital part they play in meeting the needs (...) of the mission.Counterpoint:We believe the role of the “physician–soldier” to be an inherent moral impossibility because the military physician, in an environment of military control, is faced with the difficult problems of mixed agency that include obligations to the “fighting strength” and … “national security.”. (shrink)

After a brief introduction to Philosophical Practice, I explain why I use it in my courses and elaborate on some of the material and techniques I present to students in the hope that it helps them to become better-adjusted and happier people. As an example of the sorts of assignments I create for these courses I present a semester-long assignment called “Everyday Philosophical Practice” that is based on the practice of mindfulness and requires intentional metacognition from the students. This approach (...) has shown success not only at helping students to gain self-knowledge, but also at awakening and strengthening different positive cognitive dispositions such as desiring to think about difficult things, acceptance of the need for effort in clarifying thought, and the like. (shrink)

United States Air Force planes fly across mountains of green forest; behind them, fine white streams of chemical spray fill the sky. The planes fly alone or in formation covering wide swaths of the entire landscape. These images of the herbicide spraying during the United States-Vietnam War are ubiquitous in media material about Agent Orange, the most heavily used of the fifteen herbicides sprayed during the war. This representation of the war does not include guns, grenades, tanks, bombs, or dead (...) bodies. Instead, contemporary documentary filmmakers offer images of airplanes and chemical barrels to provide evidence of another weapon of war, pan dead and leafless forests in an otherwise lush landscape of green, and zero in on children’s deformed bodies to show the lasting environmental and health effects of Agent Orange. In this essay I share preliminary thoughts from my new project on Agent Orange and film in the United States and Vietnam. The bulk of social science writing on Agent Orange has focused on American veterans and their fight to secure benefits, while film scholars have analyzed the Vietnam War in Hollywood movies and television. I investigate documentary film, the transnational activism that generates these films, and the representations of gender, disabilities, bodies, history and culture within them. Here I offer a close reading of two turn-of-the-twenty-first-century documentaries about Agent Orange in Vietnam. (shrink)

The interaction between science and technology in the Industrial Revolution has been debated by various authors over the years. Most recently, Ursula Klein has described eighteenth-century chemistry as an interconnected system of science and technology because of the inherently productive nature of chemical experimentation. The technology used in the nineteenth gaslight industry follows the pattern that Klein describes: gaslight technology was derived from the academic studies of eighteenth-century pneumatic chemists. The foundation of the technology in science included first, a knowledge (...) about inflammable gases and their properties, and second, various instruments and processes developed for the study of gases. Although inflammable exhalations had been known long before the eighteenth-century, it was only with the work of Priestley, Volta, Berthollet, and other chemists that their properties and characteristics, including the multiplicity of species of inflammable gases, became known. The instruments and processes of pneumatic chemistry that were incorporated into gaslight apparatus were the retort, the pneumatic trough, lime purification of carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulphide, and finally the gasometer. The first important instance of lighting with inflammable gases, that of J. P. Minckelers in 1785, demonstrates that pneumatic chemistry formed part of an interconnected network of science and technology, as does the work of other early gaslight pioneers such as Philippe Lebon, Zachäus Winzler, and William Murdoch. Lebon came to gaslight through the investigation of distillation processes, and later thought of using the inflammable gas produced in this way. Zachäus Winzler, an Austrian chemist, recreated Lebon's thermolamp from the instruments in his laboratory after hearing descriptions of it. In the case of William Murdoch, he incorporated the pneumatic apparatus that James Watt had built for Thomas Beddoes. (shrink)

Suppose various observers are divided randomly into two groups, a large and a small. Not knowing into which group anyone has been sent, each can have strong grounds for believing in being in the large group, although recognizing that every observer in the other group has equally powerful reasons for thinking of this other group as the large one. Justified belief can therefore be observer-relative in a rather paradoxical way. Appreciating this allows one to reject an intriguing new objection against (...) Brandon Carter's 'doomsday argument'. Carter encourages us to doubt that we are among only the first hundredth, say, or first millionth, of all humans who will ever have existed. He thereby reinforces whatever reasons we may have for suspecting that, unless we take great care, the human race will not survive long. Admittedly his argument is weakened if our world is indeterministic, so that there is no suitably guaranteed 'fact of the matter' of how many humans will ever have existed. But even then, it can caution us against believing that a lengthy future for humankind 'is as good as determined'. Of all the objections the argument has yet faced, the new one is the most interesting. (shrink)

International codes of ethics play an important role in guiding professional practice in developing countries. In the occupational health setting, codes developing by international agencies have substantial import on protecting working populations from harm. This is particularly so under globalisation which has transformed processes of production in fundamental ways across the globe. As part of the process of revising the Ethical Code of the International Commission on Occupational Health, an African Working Group addressed key challenges for the relevance and cogency (...) of an ethical code in occupational health for an African context through an iterative consultative process. (shrink)

In the short time since Seana Shiffrin published Speech Matters, ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’ have become full-blown phenomena, and various forces have destabilized the line between truth and falsity. Now more than ever, Shiffrin’s project is one of urgent importance. This essay examines Chapter Four of Speech Matters, which asks the crucial question: when and how may the law regulate lies? Shiffrin concludes that the law could regulate lies much more often than it does, though sometimes it ought not (...) to for pragmatic reasons. For all of Shiffrin’s masterful explication, there is perhaps more to say in the space between Chapter Three’s moral account of free speech and Chapter Four’s legal one. Setting existing doctrine aside, how would a society translate the moral principles of Chapter Three into a system of law? Which worries are intrinsic to free speech, and which are purely pragmatic? In other words, what does a thinker-based account of law look like? (shrink)

This book has a wonderful introduction and afterword by Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki. From beginning to end, this tri-authored work offers an integrated treatment of process theology, pneumology, and ecclesiology for the benefit of local Christian congregations.Among the three voices at work in this book, John Cobb provides an important primer on Whitehead's views of possibilities, experience, and relationships. Opening each of the book's three parts, Cobb both lays the groundwork and provides a strong framing for pneumology on the basis of (...) Whiteheadian thought. The frame for the Spirit is a broad one, calling for diversity and spontaneity. Lest the spiritual become too ethereal, Cobb reminds us of Whitehead's emphasis on experience and responsiveness to the world around us. Our freedom involves a self-determination that actualizes our own happiness and our contribution to others (111). Cobb's sections build a frame for the sections written by Epperly and Nancarrow, and they also encourage continued reading of Whitehead. (However, the book's lack of an index or a resource page for this kind of growth is a shortcoming.)Epperly offers in each of the book's three sections efforts at honing the concept of spirituality. As a concept, spirituality is in danger of a vacuousness that has no leverage in the life experience of the practitioner. Epperly does not succumb. He explicates important conduits of the spirit: embodiment, imagination, affirmative awareness, and compassion. Epperly provides a definition of spirituality as an adventurous journey of compassion. Spirituality is less a state of being and more of an exploration or a becoming as one relates to the surrounding world. He works the definition of spirituality with a prism-like beauty over the course of the three sections, integrating important persons from various cultures and inviting the reader to imagine their own spiritual past and potential future contributions.In each of the three sections, Nancarrow brings ecclesiology into the mix, thus making the book an essential for pastors who care about the pragmatics of process in the community of a local congregation. Nancarrow's chapters might be best characterized as how-to chapters helping church folk revisit the routines of liturgy, small groups, and the sacrament of communion. He encourages specific practices to engage liturgy, freshen perception, and potentially awaken hearts that can grow dull in rote practices of worship. Discernment and group work receives step-by-step attention. It is not lost on the reader that Nancarrow means to connect the care of facilitation in groups to the group's experience of the Spirit's call. Quite deftly, he closes the book with attention to the sacrament of communion in which “imagination, intellect, will, memory, emotion, sensation, and physicality are all engaged” (137).In short, The Call of the Spirit does more than talk about the Spirit. The book provides a philosophy and theology for practicing into the Spirit and helping others do the same. The authors believe in the readers’ intellect, deep-seated compassion, and commitment to the communities from which the adventure might play out in the most profound ways. (shrink)

The first section of this paper is concerned with the intrinsic properties of elementary monadic logic (EM), and characterizations in the spirit of Lindström [2] are given. His proofs do not apply to monadic logic since relations are used, and intrinsic properties of EM turn out to differ in certain ways from those of the elementary logic of relations (i.e., the predicate calculus), which we shall call EL. In the second section we investigate connections between higher-order monadic and polyadic logics.EM (...) is the subsystem of EL which results by the restriction to one-place predicate letters. We omit constants (for simplicity) but take EM to contain identity. Let atypebe any finite sequence (possibly empty) of one-place predicate letters. A modelMof typehas a nonempty universe ∣M∣ and assigns to each predicate letterPofa subsetPMof ∣M∣.Let us take a monadic logicLto be any collection of classes of models, calledL-classes, satisfying the following:1. All models in a givenL-class are of the same type (called the type of the class).2. Isomorphic models lie in the sameL-classes.3. IfandareL-classes of the same type, thenandareL-classes. (shrink)

The shapes of neurons and glial cells dictate many important aspects of their functions. In olfactory systems, certain architectural features are characteristics of these two cell types across a wide variety of species. The accumulated evidence suggests that these common features may play fundamental roles in olfactoryinformation processing. For instance, the primary olfactory neuropil in most vertebrate and invertebrate olfactory systems is organized into discrete modules called glomeruli. Inside each glomerulus, sensory axons and CNS neurons branch and synapse in patterns (...) that are repeated across species. In many species, moreover, the glomeruli are enveloped by a thin and ordered layer of glial processes. Theglomerular arrangement reflects the processing of odor information in modules that encode the discrete molecular attributes of odorant stimuli being processed. Recent studies of the mechanisms that guide the development of olfactory neurons and glial cells have revealed complex reciprocal interactions between these two cell types, which may be necessary for the establishment of modular compartments. Collectively, the findings reviewed here suggest that specialized cellular architecture plays key functional roles in the detection, analysis, and discrimination of odors at early steps in olfactory processing. (shrink)

SummaryHistorians have explored the continuities between science and the arts in the Industrial Revolution, with much recent historiography emphasizing the hybrid nature of the activities of men of science around 1800. Chemistry in particular displayed this sort of hybridity between the philosophical and practical because the materials under investigation were important across the research spectrum. Inflammable gases were an example of such hybrid objects: pneumatic chemists through the eighteenth century investigated them, and in the process created knowledge, processes and instruments (...) essential for the creation of a new gaslight industry from 1800. Once this industry began to expand and mature, the interests and experiments of the gas industry stimulated new research work which in turn had relevance for theoretical debates.This paper explores how the emergence of the gas industry from 1800 provided an impetus for new work in theoretical chemistry. Boulton & Watt, important pioneers of the gas industry, explored the compositions of inflammable gases for practical purposes: the composition of these gases had an important effect on the luminosity of gaslights, and hence the economics of the new technology compared to older forms of lighting. As they explored these questions in their engineering work, they stimulated their friend William Henry to explore the nature of these gases further, and he carried out a series of experiments to determine their composition more exactly than Boulton & Watt had done. Henry published a series of paper between 1805 and 1820 where he made arguments about the compositions of inflammable airs, and further related these to contemporary debates about the laws of multiple and definite proportions, as well as John Dalton's atomism. Henry's research was also a hybrid of the theoretical and practical in that he tried to develop results useful for the fledgling gas industry. Specifically, he suggested the best kind of coal to use, and showed how gas quality varied with distillation time and temperature. (shrink)

Chaotic itinerancy is useful for illustrating transitions in attractor dynamics seen in the olfactory system. Cantor coding is a good model for information processing, but so far it lacks perceptual proof. The theories presented provide a large step toward bridging the use of chaos as an interpretive tool and hard examination of chaotic neural activity during perception.

Declan and Karesha’s case reflects one of the most challenging narratives resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic: the experience of isolation, frustration, and disconnection for patients and their fa...

The ego or speaking subject of Pindar's Sixth Paian is anomalous, as has been acknowledged by many scholars. In a genre whose ego is predominantly choral, the speaking subject at the beginning of Paian 6 differentiates himself from the chorus and confidently analogizes his poetic authority to the prophetic power of Delphi by his self-description as αοίδιμον Πιερίδων προfάταν. I would like to correlate Pindar's exceptional ego in this poem with what has recently emerged as the poem's exceptional performance context. (...) Following Ian Rutherford's 1997 discovery of a second marginal title for the third triad , we might postulate performance by two choruses: the first two triads sung by a Delphian chorus stationary at the altar, the last triad sung by an Aiginetan chorus as they process to the altar. The need to reconcile within the poem and the space of performance two choruses, two communities, and two local mythic traditions generates the strikingly prominent speaking subject of Paian 6 as a mediating figure. (shrink)

This paper considers Pindar's diverse appropriations of elements of the sacred topography of Aegina for different purposes in epinikia composed for Aeginetan victors. It focuses on poems likely performed in the vicinity of the Aiakeion for their different mobilizations of a monument that we know from Pausanias stood beside the Aiakeion—the tomb of Phokos, an earth mound topped with the “rough stone” that killed him. The more speculative final part of the paper suggests that it may also be possible to (...) track a coherent ideology attached to the island's sacred topography across several Aeginetan odes, thereby detecting a broader structural unity that accompanies and frames the different individual appropriations of different poems. This part starts from Pausanias’ mythic narrative of the exemplary justice of Aiakos banishing his own son Telamon as the aetiology for a distinctive Aeginetan justice system inscribed in a whole set of man-made monuments that ring the island with concentric circles of rough stones. (shrink)