In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Levinas versus Levinas:Hebrew, Greek, and Linguistic JusticeOona EisenstadtI argue in this paper that Levinas's philosophical writings and his Jewish writings are not easily read as compatible. But I do not make the argument on what might seem to be the obvious grounds, namely, that the philosophical writings represent what Levinas calls the "Greek" while the Jewish writings represent what he calls the "Hebrew." On the contrary, my claim is (...) almost precisely the opposite. As Levinas uses the terms "Greek" and "Hebrew," each refers to a "sub-textual... way of thinking and speaking" (Richard Kearney, quoted in Cohen 1986, 18–19). The "Greek" is the ontological mode that seeks to describe the whole—this is essentially the mode I believe Levinas works the reader toward in the Jewish writings. The "Hebrew" is the dialogical mode that is never complete and preserves dissent—this is the mode he works the reader toward in the philosophical works. The first half of this paper contains a general discussion of the meaning of the two terms, the way in which Jacques Derrida brings out what is at stake in their use with the introduction of the more critically clarified terms "Jewgreek" and "Greekjew," and, finally, the beginning of my argument that Levinas is at odds with himself. The second half illustrates the argument with brief examinations of text: we look first at the "Hebrew" or "Jewgreekish" Levinas of the final chapter of Otherwise than Being, a Levinas in many ways comparable to Plato's dialogical Socrates; and second, at the "Greek" or "Greekjewish" Levinas of the Talmudic reading "The Pact," a Levinas who praises universality, universal translatability, mutuality, and reciprocality.As is well known, the juxtaposition Greek/Hebrew, as Levinas uses it, does the same work as several other juxtapositions he employs, including same/other, politics/ethics, said/saying, and totality/infinity. In each of these formulations, the first term refers to a way of thinking that pulls things [End Page 145] together into a larger order, and the second term to a rupture that operates as thought's origin and at the same time thought's challenge. On a first reading of Levinas, the reader has the impression that the juxtaposed elements stand in opposition to one another, but as one reads more one sees that this is only part of how he intends the juxtapositions to be understood; in particular, one sees that justice of any kind requires both elements. The reasons for this can be variously described. There are, for instance, the concrete organizational requirements of justice: a just society must, on the one hand, treat people as parts of ordered wholes (as citizens, as members of family groups or income groups, and so forth) and, on the other hand, allow those designations to be called into question by the rupturing ipseity of individuals. And there are, to introduce an example more pertinent to this paper, the concrete linguistic requirements of justice. A just discourse, or a good book, places its elements into a coherent order; this can be described by saying that it assumes or imposes a certain sameness by addressing its readers as a group, or that it stands as a said, but is most simply described by saying that the book speaks in Greek. However, it must also remain open to rupture by readers and writers who came before its having been written and readers and writers yet to come; this can be described as an other-in-the-same or a saying-in-the-said, but is most simply described, in Levinas's shorthand, as the incorporation or preservation of the Hebrew in the Greek.At the end of his first essay addressed to Levinas, "Violence and Metaphysics," Derrida plays, in a serious way, with the Greek/Hebrew distinction, and especially with the fact that the two sides depend on one another. This mutual dependence rests not only on the requirements of justice, but also, and first, on what seems to be a contradiction in Levinas's thinking. Levinas says (repeatedly, in almost all of his works) that it is the experience of rupture that calls us, in the first place, to totalize, which... (shrink)

We examine the embodiment of one foundational aspect of human cognition, language, through its bodily association with the gestures that accompany its expression in speech. Gesture is a universal feature of human communication. Gestures are produced by all speakers in every culture . They are tightly timed with speech . Gestures convey important communicative information to the listener, but even blind speakers gesture while talking to blind listeners , so the mutual co-occurrence of speech and gesture reflects a deep association (...) between the two modes that transcends the intentions of the speaker to communicate. Indeed, we believe that this linkage of the vocal expression of language and the arm movements produced with it are a manifestation of the embodiment of thought: that human mental activities arise through bodily interactions with the world and remain linked with them throughout the lifespan. In particular, we propose that speech and gesture have their developmental origins in early hand-mouth linkages, such that as oral activities become gradually used for meaningful speech, these linkages are maintained and strengthened. Both hand and mouth are tightly coupled in the mutual cognitive activity of language. In short, it is the initial sensorimotor linkages of these systems that form the bases for their later cognitive interdependence. (shrink)

The paper uses a comparison of Levinas and Adorno to raise certain questions about the former's thought. Both thinkers utilize Jewish experience as a trope for what eludes systematic conceptualization : the universalization and varying degrees of abstraction required to make this move form the content of the paper's central analysis. However, this analysis is framed in a wider argument about the way in which Levinas is an innovative thinker, the problems this innovation raises for the question of the eternal (...) relevance of his ideas, and the influence a unique aspect of his thought has had on contemporary philosophers who seek to update him. (shrink)

This article focuses on a Talmudic lecture Levinas delivered in 1965. Its long central section is an extended reading of most of that lecture’s images and ideas. Its frame, however, treats what does and does not change in Levinas’s conception of the State of Israel between the early ’60s and the early ’80s. At issue here are two other texts: a short but important paragraph from the 1961 lecture published as “Messianic Texts,” and the interview with Malka and Finkielkraut that (...) took place in 1982, shortly after the massacres at Sabra and Shatila. The gist of my closing argument is that while the structure of the understanding of Israel he outlined in 1961 does not change, it is developed very differently in the 1965 lecture and the 1982 interview. I try finally to account for this difference. In the meantime, the long analysis of 1965’s “Promised Land or Permitted Land” offers a novel account of Levinas’s hermeneutic, an account that might perhaps be applied to other Talmudic lectures. (shrink)

This systematic review identifies and critically evaluates instruments that have been developed to measure clinical trial informed consent comprehension in non-cognitively-impaired adults.Literature searches were carried out on Medline (Ovid), PsycInfo, CINHAL, ERIC, ScienceDirect, and Cochrane Library for English language articles published between January 1980 and September 2008. Instruments were excluded if they focused on consent onto paediatric trials, the construct under study was primarily capacity or competency, or the instrument was developed specifically for psychiatric or cognitively-impaired populations. Instruments selected for (...) review were evaluated against the following criteria: (1) method of item generation; (2) type and format of test items; (3) administration and interpretation of test results; and (4) psychometric properties.Three instruments met our defined inclusion criteria: the Deaconess Informed Consent Comprehension Test (DICCT), the Quality of Informed Consent (QuIC) questionnaire and the Brief Informed Consent Protocol (BICEP). Each instrument varied in terms of content measured. Significantly, these are the first standardized instruments developed to assess comprehension in non-cognitively-impaired adults. Yet, each instrument had its own set of limitations such as the lack of generalizability and the absence of details pertaining to how test results should be used to guide clinical decision-making.Standardized clinical trial informed consent comprehension assessments have been developed to identify gaps in research participants' understanding and ensure that respect for patient autonomy is satisfied. (shrink)

Este ensayo explica la idea de progreso en La Ciencia Nueva de Giambattista Vico. El progreso para Vico consiste en etapas que tienen patrones y la historia ideal eterna como punto de referencia. No es un progreso lineal e irreversible, sino un progreso general y cíclico con cabida para recaídas.

Scientific societies can play an important role in promoting ethical research practices among their members, and over the past two decades several studies have addressed how societies perform this role. This survey continues this research by examining current efforts by scientific societies to promote research integrity among their members. The data indicate that although many of the societies are working to promote research integrity through ethics codes and activities, they lack rigorous assessment methods to determine the effectiveness of their efforts.

The evolutionary scenario described in this target article parallels developmental patterns observed in human infants. Early vocalizations are largely expressive, manual control develops more rapidly than intentional vocal articulation, and vocal and manual activity are linked. In ontogenetic development, language is strongly rooted in bodily action and gesture.

In this article, we blend the Piagetian informed understanding of critical thinking with the scholarship of critical theory to analyze service-Iearning as a pedagogical strategy to promote critically conscious thinking among Students in higher education. We draw from our teaching experiences and student reflections in three different courses at two universities. In these courses, service-leaming was designed to: promote understandings of course content related to societal systems of advantage and disadvantage, develop self-awareness, promote understanding of sociocultural identity differences, and to (...) instill a sense of responsibility for social change. Recommendations are provided. (shrink)

Language-related potentials are increasingly used to objectify adaptive neuroplasticity in stroke-related aphasia recovery. Using preattentive [mismatch negativity ] and attentive phonologically related paradigms, neuroplasticity in sensory memory and cognitive functioning underlying phonological processing can be investigated. In aphasic patients, MMN amplitudes are generally reduced for speech sounds with a topographic source distribution in the right hemisphere. For P300 amplitudes and latencies, both normal and abnormal results have been reported. The current study investigates the preattentive and attentive phonological discrimination ability in (...) 17 aphasic patients at two timepoints during aphasia recovery. Between the two timepoints, a significant improvement of behavioral language performance in both languages is observed in all patients with the MMN latency at timepoint 1 as a predictive factor for aphasia recovery. In contrast to monolinguals, bilingual aphasic patients have a higher probability to improve their processing speed during rehabilitation, resulting in a shortening of the MMN latency over time, which sometimes progresses toward the normative values. (shrink)

Neuroenhancement offers the prospect of improving the cognitive, emotional and motivational functions of healthy individuals. Of all the conceivable interventions, psychopharmacology provides the most readily available ones, such as antidepressants which are thought to make people “better than well”. However, up until now, whether they possess such an enhancing ability remains controversial and therefore in this systematic review we will evaluate the effect and safety of modern antidepressants in healthy individuals. A search of MEDLINE and EMBASE databases and cross-references was (...) carried out and the pharmaceutical industry was contacted for suitable data. Trials published in any language through the third week of July 2007 were regarded. Included were single or double blind randomised or quasi-randomised controlled trials that compared a placebo to one or more of the following antidepressants: bupropion, citalopram, duloxetine, escitalopram, fluoxetine, fluvoxamine, moclobemide, paroxetine, reboxetine, sertraline or venlafaxine in any dose or dosing schedule. Eligible studies were those involving healthy people of any age and either sex who showed no evidence of a psychiatric disorder, cognitive decline or other disease. One hundred thirty-five articles met our inclusion criteria reporting single dose trials and trials with repeated drug administration. Sixty-five of these articles were eligible for a statistical analysis. Based on a linear mixed model, a meta-analysis and a fixed effects meta-regression were performed. Pooling of results by meta-analysis was stratified by the outcome measures mood, emotional processing, wakefulness, attention, memory, and executive functions. On a significance level of p < 0.05 the following significant results emerged: After a single dose of an antidepressant, a significant effect was shown in two of the analysed outcomes. Firstly, there was a small yet significant negative effect on wakefulness. On memory, a positive effect after several measurements was found, but this result could be traced to the results of the one study out of all included studies, which had that many assessment points. The analysis of trials with repeated drug administration yielded the following effects: on mood, a non-significant positive effect was detected that was continuously increasing and reached significance at the last assessment point. Regarding attention, a fluctuating effect was found, while for memory, the fact that the two groups started with a group difference confounded the results. For wakefulness there was no significant effect in any particular assessment point, while for emotional processing and executive functions, the small number of studies did not allow for any effect to emerge. In summary, no consistent evidence for enhancing effects of antidepressants could be found. There is little evidence so far to support the popular opinion that antidepressants have a positive effect on the mood of healthy individuals after repeated administration. No evidence of a significant adverse event profile could be found. The studies included in this systematic review not only provide insufficient evidence for or against any effect in healthy people, but they are inapt to be used for answering this question. This may be explained by the fact that most of them were not designed to examine neuroenhancement effects. The growing public interest in neuroenhancement stands in stark contrast to the paucity of data on enhancement effects of available psychopharmacological agents. (shrink)

The thesis of The Internationalists is that the Kellogg Briand Pact of 1928 fundamentally reshaped the international legal order. By outlawing war, the Pact replaced one basic norm of international legal ordering with another. Hathaway and Shapiro present their argument in the form of a narrative, including biographical details about the central protagonists and vignettes about key meetings. They present it all with an eye not only to the importance of particular characters, but also to sheer coincidence. Underneath the sweeping (...) historical narrative lies a serious, scholarly book with a central legal and philosophical argument. Hathaway and Shapiro use the history of international law from the seventeenth through the twentieth century to examine the nature of enforcement mechanisms, the relation between rights and remedies, issues of collective as opposed to individual responsibility, and—perhaps most strikingly—the changing status of neutrality. (shrink)

Over the last generation, the womanist idea--and the tradition blooming around it--has emerged as an important response to separatism, domination, and oppression. Gary L. Lemons gathers a diverse group of writers to discuss their scholarly and personal experiences with the womanist spirit of women of color feminisms. Feminist and womanist-identified educators, students, performers, and poets model the powerful ways that crossing borders of race, gender, class, sexuality, and nation-state affiliation(s) expands one's existence. At the same time, they bear witness to (...) how the self-liberating theory and practice of women of color feminism changes one's life. Throughout, the essayists come together to promote an unwavering vein of activist comradeship capable of building political alliances dedicated to liberty and social justice. Contributors: M. Jacqui Alexander, Dora Arreola, Andrea Assaf, Kendra N. Bryant, Rudolph P. Byrd, Atika Chaudhary, Paul T. Corrigan, Fanni V. Green, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Susan Hoeller, Ylce Irizarry, M. Thandabantu Iverson, Gary L. Lemons, Layli Maparyan, and Erica C. Sutherlin. (shrink)

An account of the distribution of the dorsal fricative in German has generally been assumed to require cyclic derivation and/or multiple phonological levels (Hall 1989, Moltmann 1990, Noske 1990, MacFarland and Pierrehumbert 1991, Iverson and Salmons 1992, Borowsky 1993). In this squib, I argue that the facts of fricative assimilation can be accounted for without cyclicity or separate phonological levels within Optimality Theory (OT) (Prince and Smolensky 1993) by employing a version of the theory of alignment proposed by McCarthy (...) and Prince (1993b), which permits direct interaction between morphological and phonological structures. I propose that the fricative in these cases is ambisyllabic, permitting an account under which fricative assimilation occurs only tautosyllabically. My analysis assumes that alignment constraints proper are not violated in cases of multiple linking, supporting the premise that the satisfaction of alignment constraints is to be distinguished from satisfaction of constraints requiring prosodic units to have crisp edges (as argued for in Itô and Mester (in press)). (shrink)

"Critique is a form of thinking and acting. It is determined by its objects, yet never accesses them immediately but is always mediated through its own forms of (re)presentation. Since the end of the 18th century, there has been a dynamization and fluidization of the understanding of form, as topoi such as the break, the marginalization, the tearing and opening indicate. However, these multifarious attempts to "build on the structure through demolition" (Benjamin) testify to the dependence of all articulation on (...) the forms of (re)presentation ["Darstellung"]. As a philosophical problem, the question of form arises in critical theory from Marx to Adorno. Since the 1960s, literary practices have proliferated which generate their critical statements less argumentatively than through the programmatic use of formal means. At the same time, the writing self, along with its attitudes, reflections, affects and instruments, visibly enters the critical scene - whereas the theatrical scene as a stage of critique has been contested intensively during the 20th century. This volume examines how the interdependence of critique, object, and form translates into critical stances, understood as learnable, reproducible gestures, which bear witness to changing conditions and media of critical practice. With contributions by Maria Fusco, Eva Geulen, Thomas Glaser, Birgit M. Kaiser, Sami Khatib, Sebastian Kirsch, Chris Kraus, Holger Kuhn, Oona Lochner, Isabel Mehl, Bettine Menke, Beate Söntgen, Heiko Stubenrauch, Kathrin Thiele, Lynne Tillman, Masha Tupitsyn, Mimmi Woisnitza."-Publisher's website. (shrink)

In this Black Mirror Christmas special, we meet two men in a desolate cabin, who each share stories that center around two different but related technologies: The cookie technology that allows one to make digital copies of individuals and use them as personal assistants, and the Z‐Eye technology, which can be used to block people in real life. As the stories unfold, they make for a very dark Christmas tale and it becomes clear that each of these technologies raise a (...) string of ethical questions, especially related to the trade‐off between the value of privacy vs. the value of access to information. The chapter looks at these problems through different ethical frameworks, in order to explore what solutions each framework would offer to these problems. (shrink)