Pre-Socratic philosophy. - Plato. - Aristotle. - Post-Aristotelian philosophy. - The Theory of art: Quintilian, Longinus, and Philostratus. - Plotinus. - The lesser Neoplatonists. - Neoplatonic views of three early Christians. - Mediaeval descriptive psychology. - The psychology of the mystics. - Dante's theory of vision. - Conclusion.

Background: The factors influencing parents’ willingness to enroll their children in biobanks are poorly understood. This study sought to assess parents’ willingness to enroll their children, and their perceived benefits, concerns, and information needs under different consent and data-sharing scenarios, and to identify factors associated with willingness. Methods: This large, experimental survey of patients at the 11 eMERGE Network sites used a disproportionate stratified sampling scheme to enrich the sample with historically underrepresented groups. Participants were randomized to receive one of (...) three consent and data-sharing scenarios. Results: In total, 90,000 surveys were mailed and 13,000 individuals responded (15.8% response rate). 5737 respondents were parents of minor children. Overall, 55% (95% confidence interval 50–59%) of parents were willing to enroll their youngest minor child in a hypothetical biobank; willingness did not differ between consent and data-sharing scenarios. Lower educational attainment, higher religiosity, lower trust, worries about privacy, and attitudes about benefits, concerns, and information needs were independently associated with less willingness to allow their child to participate. Of parents who were willing to participate themselves, 25% were not willing to allow their child to participate. Being willing to participate but not willing to allow one’s child to participate was independently associated with multiple factors, including race, lower educational attainment, lower annual household income, public health care insurance, and higher religiosity. Conclusions: Fifty-five percent of parents were willing to allow their youngest minor child to participate in a hypothetical biobank. Building trust, protecting privacy, and addressing attitudes may increase enrollment and diversity in pediatric biobanks. (shrink)

The theme of The Planetary Clock is the representation of time in postmodern culture and the way temporality as a global phenomenon manifests itself differently across an antipodean axis. To trace postmodernism in an expansive spatial and temporal arc, from its formal experimentation in the 1960s to environmental concerns in the twenty-first century, is to describe a richer and more complex version of this cultural phenomenon. Exploring different scales of time from a Southern Hemisphere perspective, with a special emphasis on (...) issues of Indigeneity and the Anthropocene, The Planetary Clock offers a wide-ranging, revisionist account of postmodernism, reinterpreting literature, film, music, and visual art of the post-1960 period within a planetary framework. By bringing the culture of Australia and New Zealand into dialogue with other Western narratives, it suggests how an antipodean impulse, involving the transposition of the world into different spatial and temporal dimensions, has long been an integral (if generally occluded) aspect of postmodernism. Taking its title from a Florentine clock designed in 1510 to measure worldly time alongside the rotation of the planets, The Planetary Clock ranges across well-known American postmodernists (John Barth, Toni Morrison) to more recent science fiction writers (Octavia Butler, Richard Powers), while bringing the US tradition into juxtaposition with both its English (Philip Larkin, Ian McEwan) and Australian (Les Murray, Alexis Wright) counterparts. By aligning cultural postmodernism with music (Messiaen, Ligeti, Birtwistle), the visual arts (Hockney, Blackman, Fiona Hall), and cinema (Rohmer, Haneke, Tarantino), this volume enlarges our understanding of global postmodernism for the twenty-first century. (shrink)

This paper presents a computer model of cortical broadcast and competition based on spiking neurons and inspired by the hypothesis of a global neuronal workspace underlying conscious information processing in the human brain. In the model, the hypothesised workspace is realised by a collection of recurrently inter-connected regions capable of sustaining and disseminating a reverberating spatial pattern of activation. At the same time, the workspace remains susceptible to new patterns arriving from outlying cortical populations. Competition among these cortical populations for (...) influence on the workspace is effected by a combination of mutual inhibition and top-down amplification. (shrink)

_Humanizing Education_ offers historic examples of humanizing educational spaces, practices, and movements that embody a spirit of hope and change. From Dayton, Ohio, to Barcelona, Spain, this collection of essays from the _Harvard Educational Review_ carries readers to places where people have first imagined—and then organized—their own educational responses to dehumanizing practices and conditions. Contributors include Montse Sánchez Aroca, William Ayers, Kathy Boudin, Fernando Cardenal, Jeffrey M. R. Duncan-Andrade, Marco Garrido, Jay Gillen, Maxine Greene, Kathe Jervis, Nancy Uhlar Murray, (...) Valerie Miller, Wendy Ormiston, Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas, Vanessa Siddle Walker, Arthur E. Thomas, and Travis Wright. (shrink)

One type of argument to sceptical paradox proceeds by making a case that a certain kind of metaphysically “heavyweight or “cornerstone” proposition is beyond all possible evidence and hence may not be known or justifiably believed. Crispin Wright has argued that we can concede that our acceptance of these propositions is evidentially risky and still remain rationally entitled to those of our ordinary knowledge claims that are seemingly threatened by that concession. A problem for Wright’s proposal is the (...) so-called Leaching worry: if we are merely rationally entitled to accept the cornerstones without evidence, how can we achieve evidence-based knowledge of the multitude of quotidian propositions that we think we know, which require the cornerstones to be true? This paper presents a rigorous, novel explication of this worry within a Bayesian framework, and offers the Entitlement theorist two distinct responses. (shrink)

Although D. Petrovich’s recent book The World’s Oldest Alphabet: Hebrew as the Language of the Proto-Consonantal Script advances several claims about the origin of the alphabet and biblical history, its main arguments are linguistic. In particular, Petrovich identifies the language of the early alphabetic inscriptions as Hebrew as part of a larger argument for the historicity of the biblical Exodus tradition. In this review essay, I will summarize and critique Petrovich’s linguistic arguments. Along the way, I will consider two important (...) questions in the classification of the Canaanite languages. (shrink)

Psychoneural reductionists sometimes claim that sufficient amounts of lower-level explanatory achievement preclude further contributions from higher-level psychological research. Ostensibly, with nothing left to do, the effect of such preclusion on psychological explanation is extinction. Reductionist arguments for preclusion have recently involved a reorientation within the philosophical foundations of neuroscience---namely, away from the philosophical foundations and toward the neuroscience. In this chapter, I review a successful reductive explanation of an aspect of reward function in terms of dopaminergic operations of the mesocorticolimbic (...) system in order to demonstrate why preclusion/extinction claims are dubious. (shrink)

It will come as no surprise that I have a different interpretation of the four passages in which, McRae claims, Descartes “definitely includes extension and its modes in what is given through the senses”. In the first, Descartes includes extension, etc., among his ideas of corporeal bodies. This is not to say that he includes them among his adventitious ideas, though. All adventitious ideas are ideas of external bodies. But the converse is not true. Not all ideas of corporeal bodies (...) are ipso facto adventitious ideas, for, as I see it, the idea of the true and immutable nature of body is non-sensible and innate. McRae slides from “all adventitious ideas seem to be ideas of external bodies” to “all ideas of external bodies are adventitious”. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Four philosophical concerns about higher-order logic in general and the specific demands placed on it by the neo-logicist project are distinguished. The paper critically reviews recent responses to these concerns by, respectively, the late Bob Hale, Richard Kimberly Heck, and myself. It is argued that these score some successes. The main aim of the paper, however, is to argue that the most serious objection to the applications of higher-order logic required by the neo-logicist project has not been properly understood. (...) The paper concludes by outlining a strategy, prefigured in recent work of Øystein Linnebo, for meeting this objection. (shrink)

This article explores early Greeks' cosmological speculation, showing how they explored the possibility of a “theory of everything” and human understanding of the cosmos. In the exposition of competitive cosmologies, there are three questions still unresolved: the form of most of the matter in the universe is not known; the process of beginning of the universe is not known; and whether the universe is finite or infinite is also not known. Presocratic solutions to these problems, still perplexing to the contemporaries, (...) are tackled in this article, with the addition of a note on what is called the anthropic principle, which addresses the place of human life and human observation in the whole. (shrink)

This chapter develops an account of epistemic nihilism—roughly, the rejection of truth’s intrinsic or instrumental value in favor of statements that reject or obscure truth to secure an advantage for the speaker—by examining three instances of such nihilism: lying, bullshit, and trolling. It further argues that epistemic nihilism, exacerbated by changes in the media landscape, can pose a significant threat to liberal democratic institutions and ideals by undermining the democratic ideal of good faith engagement on a level playing field, while (...) also encouraging undemocratic actions (e.g., terrorism) among interlocutors who take the nihilist’s claims seriously. Finally, this chapter argues that in extreme cases, we are justified in denying epistemic nihilists a platform from which to speak by drawing a parallel with vexatious litigant laws that deny individuals the right to petition courts for redress on the grounds that abuse of that right results in significant harm to both individuals and the legal system itself. (shrink)

I argue that campus closures and shifts to online instruction in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic created an obligation to offer courses asynchronously. This is because some students could not have reasonably foreseen circumstances making continued synchronous participation impossible. Offering synchronous participation options to students who could continue to participate thusly would have been unfair to students who could not participate synchronously. I also discuss why ex post facto consideration of this decision is warranted, noting that similar actions (...) may be necessary in the future and that other tough pedagogical cases share important similarities with this case. (shrink)

This article elaborates on a view of human subjectivity as open and intersubjectively constituted and discusses it as a presupposition for student's participation in educational situations. It questions the traditional persistent concept of subjectivity as inner and private, the homo clausus, which puts self realization before recognition of the other and individual cognition before mutual meaning. From the perspective of homo clausus participation is thus limited to mere situated activity. A concept of human subjectivity as open and plural, homines aperti, (...) makes it possible to conceptualize educational situations relationally and to take the in‐between as point of departure for understanding pedagogical relationships. Participation can then be understood in terms of involvement in meaning making, knowledge construction and mutual will formation. The relevance of analyzing discrepancies between concepts in educational theory is that they direct our interest and our attention differently. This is also how theoretical understandings work in the praxis of teaching; teachers’ actions are certainly not guided by their theories, but their conceptions about such basic issues as subjectivity and self (what is a pupil?) make some actions and decisions seem more intelligible than others. (shrink)

This paper introduces Richard Rorty’s notion of the liberal ironist and his vision of a liberal utopia and explores the implications of these for philosophical questions concerning morality, as well as morality in general. Rorty’s assertions of the contingency of language, society and self are explored. Under the contingency of language, the figure of the ironist is defined, and Rorty’s conception of vocabularies is discussed. Under the contingency of society, Rorty’s definition of liberalism, his opposition of literary culture to materialist (...) and metaphysical culture, and his notions concerning utopian politics are discussed. Under the contingency of self, Rorty’s critique of Kantian and his appropriations of Deweyan and Freudian conceptions of morality are presented. Other key factors discussed are Rorty’s theory of the separation of the private and public spheres of life and his ideas concerning cruelty and human solidarity. In this way, a critical analysis of Rorty’s proposed balance between private, ironic doubt and public, liberal social hope is presented and assessed in terms of its merit as a system of thought suited to the needs of post-metaphysical, liberal societies. (shrink)

The author seeks to respond to the philosophical appeal of W. Norris Clarke, S.J., “to uncover the personalist dimension lying implicit within the fuller understanding of the very meaning and structure of the metaphysics of being itself, not hitherto explicit in either the metaphysical or personalist traditions themselves.” She does this by discussing the distinctions drawn by Karol Wojtyla: (1) between a human being’s personhood and his humanity, and (2) between the ontological dignity and the ethical dignity of the human (...) person. (shrink)

This paper explores Stein’s treatment of truth and art as a way of approaching her philosophy of the self. Stein argues that one can distinguish between the truthof what something is and the truth of what something ought to be. She maintains that the work of art helps us to understand this distinction because it can serve as a revelation of the truth of what something is, but the work of art only succeeds when it also reflects what its subject (...) ought to be. Stein makes an analogous distinction regarding the self as it is and as it ought to be. In her anthropology she argues that human beings are individuated not only by matter but also by form and that understanding our individuating form is the key to becoming the person we ought to be. Stein develops the theory that persons are called to be their true selves through their relationship to the divine. The paper argues that for Stein art and life are related in such a way that striving to be one’s true self transformsone’s life into a work of art. (shrink)

This dissertation concerns Edmund Husserl's theory of meaning. It focuses on Husserl's position as it develops from the Logical Investigations, published in 1900-01, through the writing of the Ideas in 1913. ;I argue that there are two theories of meaning at operation in Husserl's thinking in the Logical Investigations. One which is based upon the theory of pure logical grammar, the other based upon the theory of intentional acts of consciousness. I also consider the way in which Husserl's employs the (...) first of these to account for the distinction between sense and nonsense. ;The second chapter concerns the development of Husserl's thought from 1900 to 1913. In particular, I trace the development of this theory of the pure transcendental ego and its relationship to the notions of the epoche and the reduction. In turn, I consider the phenomenological criticism of this position made by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. ;Chapter three is concerned with the way in which the development of Husserl's thinking on the ego impacts on the theory of meaning. In particular, I focus on the developments which appear in the Vorlesungen Uber Bedeutungslehre: Sommersemester 1908 and Ideas I. The most significant development being the introduction of the concept of the noema as the object of the intentional act of meaning. I also consider the recent debate concerning the proper understanding of the noema as well as the relationship between sense and linguistic expression. ;These concerns lead to a consideration of Derrida's influential reading of Husserl's theory of meaning in Speech and Phenomena. While arguing that there is much of value in Derrida's reading, I criticize his claim that Husserl's theory is committed to a theory of pure self presence and intuitive presence. ;Finally, following Derrida, I question Husserl's theory of pure logical grammar. Through a consideration of poetic expression, I consider why this theory is unable to account for the distinction between sense and nonsense. However, I do argue that the intentional act theory can offer a justification for this distinction. For this reason, I conclude that a revised understanding of Husserl's phenomenological approach to meaning is still viable. (shrink)