Education is so strongly emphasized in the Chinese culture that academic success is widely regarded as the only indicator of success, while too much physical activity is often discouraged because it drains energy and affects academic concentration. This study investigated the relations among academic achievement, self?esteem, school conduct and physical activity level. The participants were 333 Chinese pre?adolescents (aged 8?12) in Hong Kong. Examination results and conduct grades were obtained from the school records. Global self?esteem was measured with the Physical (...) self?description questionnaire (PSDQ), while physical activity patterns of the children were assessed with the Physical activity questionnaire for children (PAQ?C). Results showed that high academic achievers consistently attained better school conduct marks. However, physical activity level was quite an independent entity that was related neither to academic achievement nor school conduct. Furthermore, regression analyses showed that only academically high?achieving boys and physically active boys had higher self?esteem. (shrink)

Although statistically common, and legal since 1973, abortion still bears significant stigma--a proverbial scarlet A. Fear of this stigma leads most of the women and men who are part of the 21% of American pregnancies that end in abortion to remain silent. This book brings the story of ordinary abortion out of the shadows and invites a new conversation about its actual practice, ethics, politics, and law. Katie Watson lends her incisive legal and medical ethics expertise to navigate wisely (...) and respectfully one of the most divisive topics of contemporary life. (shrink)

(2002). Scarlet Letter or Chastity Belt? What Legal Dramas of the Twenty-first Century are “Telling” Law Students about a Career in Law. Legal Ethics: Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 90-102.

“This book isn’t a blueprint for a new conversation. It’s an explanation of why we need one, and an invitation to participate in moving that forward”, says Katie Watson in the introduction to her book Scarlet A: The Ethics, Law and Politics of Ordinary Abortion. She does herself a disservice with this; in many respects her text provides us with just that—a model for what a more productive discussion of how society responds to and organizes around the issue of (...) unwanted pregnancy might look like; a question that has remained contentious across the centuries and for which we may never have an ‘answer.’ It is precisely because perceptions of abortion are so hard to prise apart from our attitudes towards women... (shrink)

This paper presents an interpretation of the 1945 forbidden film Scarlet Street in a way so as to touch the problem of gender in film noir. Firstly, I give an ac-count of film noir, agreeing with Robert Pippin’s argument concerning film genres. Then, I claim that time and repetition, irony and hierarchy, art and per-spective constitute the core subjects explored in Scarlet Street. Furthermore, I try to connect all the subjects into a single one. My point is to (...) show how art, perspective, time, repetition, irony and hierarchy are articulated in the main character’s gender identity. Finally, I suggest there is a deep connection be-tween the movie’s character constitution and Cavell’s understanding of gender and agency.Keywords: Film. Gender. Psychoanalysis. Cavell. Freud. (shrink)

A new type of neuronal cell was discovered a few years ago: the mirror neurons. Their existence is a disturbing fact for our conceptions of intelligence and memory, giving to the whole universe of mind understanding a new logical framework. The impact of such a discovery on our concept of aesthetics and philosophy of thought makes us to recall Peirce, Lupasco, Buckminster Fuller launching ourselves to field folds, the super-string model or black holes among other non-linear time and space complexes.

How does a country achieve a public capital market in which firms can raise capital from investors? In seeking clues and hypotheses, this article looks back to the dawn of the public corporation in the United States. The battles for control of the Erie Railroad, known as the "Scarlet Woman of Wall Street," a reference to its ill repute, stand at the symbolic center of these developments. The battles for control, which waxed and waned between 1868 and 1872, involved: (...) the titan of the transportation age, Cornelius Vanderbilt; the brilliant and notorious stock market manipulator and takeover entrepreneur, Jay Gould; the largest and most powerful railroad of the era, the Pennsylvania; control over rail transportation to New York City; and the politics and courts of New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. It was played out in the securities markets, the courts, the legislatures, and the newspapers and attracted the attention, and condemnation, of some of the leading commentators of the day. Rereading this history from the vantage point of the end of the twentieth century, several features are striking. First, the battles are remarkably familiar: they are recognizably modern battles for control over a widely-held corporation. Second, many of the tactics utilized are now illegal. Finally, surprising connections emerge between antitrust, federalism, and the emergence of public capital markets. (shrink)

_The Scarlet Empire_ (1906) by David Maclean Parry, a former president of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), offers an anti-utopian romance set in an authoritarian socialist Atlantis. Supplementing the efforts of NAM to limit the power of unions and diminish the appeal of socialism through political and editorial suasion, the novel promised a new and powerful way of proselytizing middle-class readers by competing with prominent literary utopians and socialists, especially Edward Bellamy and Upton Sinclair. The novel's protagonist is (...) converted to individualism and capitalism and comes to see socialism as emasculating. _Empire_ bundles capitalism and masculinity together through a redemptive adventure romance narrative that serves capitalist ideological purposes and has the protagonist combining tremendous wealth, a powerful faith in individualism, and a recovered masculine subjectivity to become a captain of industry and paragon of a hegemonic masculinity at the turn of the twentieth century. (shrink)

Near the end of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale stands on the scaffold of shame and tears away his shirt to reveal something to the community. The narrator exclaims: “It was revealed! But it were irreverent to describe that revelation.”1 The actual manner in which this revelation is manifest is hidden, allowing readers to fill in the details. What is presumed, however, is that there indeed was some mark on the minister’s chest, and the narrator (...) provides three explanations, derived from eyewitnesses, as to how it came into existence. It was the result of Dimmesdale’s self-flagellation, or the effects of Chillingworth’s evil potions, or the seemingly supernatural transference .. (shrink)

Nagel’s challenge is to devise an objective phenomenological vocabulary that can describe the objective structural similarities between aural and visual perception. My contention is that Charles Sanders Peirce’s little studied and less understood phenomenological vocabulary makes a significant contribution to meeting this challenge. I employ Peirce’s phenomenology to identify the structural isomorphism between seeing a scarlet red and hearing a trumpet’s blare. I begin by distinguishing between the vividness of an experience and the intensity of a quality. I proceed (...) to identify further points of structural isomorphism (a) between the experience of seeing a scarlet red and of hearing a trumpet blare and (b) between the qualities of those experiences. Lastly, I gesture towards how these distinctions can be an aid in describing what it is like to be a bat. (shrink)

Cyclist Lance Armstrong cheated his way to seven Tour de France . Such cheating is wrong because it harms society. To explain how that harm affects all of us, I use Aristotle's ideas of virtue ethics to argue that Armstrong, despite his charitable work, is not a virtuous person. Virtue is to some extent determined by society, so we need to be clear that Armstrong is not a person to emulate. A society which does not clearly disapprove of vice is (...) less than it might otherwise be because a good society is one that encourages virtue in its citizens. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 10, October 2019, Page W3-W4.

The scarlet “A” that the protagonist of Nathaniel Hawthorne's seventeenth‐century novel is forced to pin to her dress symbolizes the shame and social disgrace that she endures for conceiving a child out of adultery. In Scarlet A: The Ethics, Law, & Politics of Ordinary Abortion, Katie Watson argues that abortion is our era's scarlet letter: a mark of stigma that is invisible yet no less shameful, causing unnecessary cultural silences around what is a remarkably common practice. In (...) this brilliant new book, Watson draws on legal proceedings, bioethics literature, and personal experience; offers cultural and literary analysis; and uses her unique vantage point as a lawyer, bioethicist, and medical educator to develop a thought‐provoking and thoroughly fresh perspective on one of the most divisive moral issues of our time. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to analyse a particularly influential case of memory continuity in Portugal, that of _Padrão dos Descobrimentos_. Spaces of collective memory (such as public monuments) raise questions about what we celebrate, remember or rescue from oblivion, providing an opportunity to rethink the trauma. As such, care for public spaces is associated with ethical and cultural values. One of the difficulties with certain monuments has to do with the fact that they recall actions that today we (...) see as traumatic acts. Thus, it is important to reflect on a critical use of memory. On August 8, 2021, _Padrão dos Descobrimentos_ was the subject of a graffiti. One of the sides of the monument could read: “Blindly sailing for money, humanity is drowning in a scarlet sea”. A great controversy immediately arose around the meaning of this gesture, as well as the role played by a monument that, after being temporarily built in 1940 for the Portuguese World Exhibition, was, in its current version, inaugurated in 1960, on the occasion of the fifth centenary of the death of Infante D. Henrique. This episode reignited a deeper cleavage around the uses of history and memory, the Portuguese colonial past, and the role of the _Padrão dos Descobrimentos_ as an instrument for the reproduction of nationalism. In this sense, and with the authors proposing a new theoretical frame of reference based on the thought of Arendt and Ricoeur, its critical reading becomes relevant. (shrink)

This paper proposes that self-deception results from the emotional coherence of beliefs with subjective goals. We apply the HOTCO computational model of emotional coherence to simulate a rich case of self-deception from Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.We argue that this model is more psychologically realistic than other available accounts of self-deception, and discuss related issues such as wishful thinking, intention, and the division of the self.

Bringing Flowers HomeWe try to put a bandage on the wound,offering a vague apology:Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.Towers turn out to have been built on sand.Regimes collapse. No use in asking whywe ripped the bandage off that bleeding wound.An earthquake followed by a hurricane,fires, floods: they've passed some of us by.Us. And who is we? And what is home?Last week an enormous yellow moonhung low in a corner of the sky.Beauty is no bandage for the wound,hole in (...) the future much too big to mendor even to imagine, though we tryto camouflage it, bringing flowers home.You said, when we were talking of the end,that no one teaches us to say goodbye,or how to ease the bandage from the wound.Forgive me, death. I brought these flowers home.Moving the PianoCompact, gleaming, black and white,this sturdy Yamaha uprightstood staunchly in one room for yearsuntil, maneuvered through several doorstoday by two young slender menand up a ramp into their van,it ventured briefly out into the world again.The change of space, the space of change:the walls look naked, empty, strange.Heavy has given way to light.Habitual soliditytoo familiar to seeyields to possibilitytoo unfamiliar to see.Late and early, early, late,end, beginning—all are swirledinto a mist that veils the world.The black and white of status quoblends to a color I don't know,transition that I cannot name,but I salute it all the same.Goodbye, piano, and hello.So where is the piano going?Where will it find another life,music and memories unpackedin an unfolding second act?North Carolina, near a riverwhose stream, like time, is always flowing.My son lives there with his wife.Beloved, nothing is forever.You can't step twice into this life.Nap at Stony PointMy cousin and my friendon their respective recent deathbedsslid from my mind. I noticedthe scarlet splash of a cardinal perched on a cannonon a bluff above the Hudson.I lay down on a picnic table,sun on my face, five turkey vulturescircling overhead, and closed my eyes.And when I opened them I felt as pleasedas if I had completed some needful taskinstead of having forgottenhow my friend in January and my cousin in March,both of them alert and wry and tranquil,had faced what each of them clearly saw approaching—more, had recognized and greeted it,instead of ignoring it by looking through it,the way some people, even iftheir office is two doors down the hall,look right through you, pretending not to see you.Or maybe they don't see youany more than one envisions deathon a sunny April afternoon.The Last Lecture HallTheaters that were never ours,classrooms empty and refill.Nor do the trees belong to us.We cross the stage and disappearor venture in among the treesand lose ourselves there.Feverish categories blur.Genre distinctions: what for?The empty theater becomesa lecture hall. A classroom morphsinto a forest murmuringwith voices. Words pelt down like rainor rise like mist and dissipate.The rustling trees swell to a roar.But they were never still.Theater, classroom, maple, fir:feverish categories blur,presences pressing through the veilof the phenomenal;a leopard padding down the aisle.Tiger-masked students fill the seatsof the amphitheater.The old professor, looking outover the upturned faces, said“You are all allegoricalfigures to me. I will not learnyour names.” Did the students laugh?Tragedy, satire, comedy:genres are deciduous.Modes blur, leaves spin and fall.The leaves of memory seemed to makeA mournful rustling in the dark(Longfellow, “The Fire of Driftwood”).Lights go on in the theater.Class is over. We stumble out.The GatesWhen I woke up I had walked through a gate.I looked around the room—trickle or torrent, stepping into time—and bent my head to drink at a black stream.I look around a roomthick with the dust of after and before.Am I meant to drink from this black stream?My lips are dry,thick with the crust of after and before,gate of ivory and gate of horn.My lips are dry, I'm thirsty.Heat, cold, fire, snow, sun.Gate of ivory and gate of horn:to cross a threshold ends one story(firelight; snow squeaking; winter sun)and begins another.To cross a threshold ends one story(ever after? or a transformation?)and begins anotherthere is no law compelling us to enter.Ever after or a transformation.Torrent, trickle: we set foot in time,but there's no law compelling us to enterstory once we've latched the gate of dream.FilamentsYour past is thickening. You can seeits filaments, as carefullyyou begin to part the strands(they're all connected) with both hands,and clear a path. Now warilyenter the web—not all the way,but toward some kind of clarity.We have been rightly taught that wecan't finish, but must do, the work.Partway through the leafy murk,crisscrossing dapple of the trees,so tough and so precarious,you find yourself in the dawn air,the circle's center everywhere.Along the PromenadeReading a book about transitioningin the twenty-first-century meaning of the wordblends with plans for my son's upcoming weddingand scraps of conversation overheardat the Japanese-themed street fair today.Somnambulists along the promenadefloat in the warm currents of Broadway,eat talk look linger in the sun and shade.Then to the park: October leaves still green(climate change or merely Indian summer?).Snatched memories, I catch them on the wing:Samos Septembers, pomegranate tree,lemon tree, okra, a chameleon,the little summer of Saint Dimitri,they called it. All this happened; but to me?Streams of conversation flowing by.The sound artist described his work like this(if work is the right word): “Accidentallyuploading seemingly private messages,”which describes, also, dreams and poetry,the drifting crowd, incessant carousel,city and weather, time and holiday,all lived, palped, tasted, tested, overheard.Somnambulists along the promenadehave set up booths, their dreams... Bookending my dawn dream: symmetricalsoaking sponges dripping... DNA?Destiny, temperament, personality:the cards we're dealt and that we have to play,except we now can change them gradually.Transition: he or she or rather they,constructed, deconstructed, rearranged,the tarot spread of genealogy,inheritance as aleatoric play.We walked west to Eleventh Avenue,drawn by rumors of Ad Reinhardt's blue,which buzzed and throbbed. Stand still: my head was spinning.Allusions to water or to sky,dense, deep, alarming, ending or beginning... I sat awhile and watched the crowd glide by,enchanted promenaders all drawn inon the exhibition's last dayby the silence's cerulean humming.And then they climbed the stairs, and so did we,to lighter textures on an upper floorwhere Ruth Asawa's baskets in midairweightlessly demonstrated gravity,twigs, trees, crowns, bubbles dancing in white space.Next week my class will read “On Being Ill.”“Blogs,” I'll tell them, is the word we nowuse, not “essay,” for the moving mind,that saunterer who takes note and leaves behindand doubles back and ponders and regretsamidst the wash of vision, the flowand tidal pull of what we see and know,what we've dreamed, what we have said and heard,the thrumming colors and the floating crowd,as if the bubbly brew of sunny dayand anxious dreams could somehow all be caughtup in one enormous, one all-encompassing word. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Moral realism entails that there are metaphysically necessary moral principles of the form ‘all actions of nonmoral kind Z are morally good’; being discoverable a priori, these must be logically necessary. This article seeks to justify this apparently puzzling consequence. A sentence expresses a logically necessary proposition iff its negation entails a contradiction. The method of reflective equilibrium assumes that the simplest account of the apparently correct use of sentences of some type in paradigm examples is probably logically necessary. An (...) account is simple insofar as it uses few predicates designating properties easily recognizable in many different kinds of paradigm examples. I illustrate how reflective equilibrium uses these criteria to discover logically necessary nonmoral propositions such as ‘if S remembers doing X, S believes that he did X’ and ‘if it is scarlet, it is red’. I then illustrate how exactly the same procedures can lead us from paradigm examples of apparently true sentences asserting that actions of some kind are good to discovering moral principles. I advance the contingent hypothesis that most contemporary humans, although they initially disagree about moral issues, have derived from different paradigm examples the same concept of moral goodness, which will ensure that the use of reflective equilibrium will lead to eventual agreement about moral issues. That strongly suggests that the moral principles eventually reached by reflective equilibrium are logically necessary ones. (shrink)

Introduction -- Trapped by oneself in Jacques Tourneur's Out of the past -- "A deliberate, intentional fool" in Orson Welles's The lady from Shanghai -- Sexual agency in Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street -- "Why didn't you shoot again, baby?": concluding remarks.

This paper presents a puzzle or antinomy about the role of properties in causation. In theories of properties, a distinction is often made between determinable properties, like red, and their determinates, like scarlet (see Armstrong 1978, volume II). Sometimes determinable properties are cited in causal explanations, as when we say that someone stopped at the traffic light because it was red. If we accept that properties can be among the relata of causation, then it can be argued that there (...) are good reasons for allowing that some of these are determinable properties. On the other hand, there are strong arguments in the metaphysics of properties to treat properties as sparse in David Lewis’s (1983) sense. But then it seems that we only need to believe in the most determinate properties: particular shades of colour, specific masses, lengths and so on. And if we also agree with Lewis that sparse properties are ‘the ones relevant to causal powers’ (1983: 13) it seems we must conclude that if properties are relevant to causation at all, then all of these are determinate properties. I call this ‘the antinomy of determinable causation’. On the one hand, we have a good argument for the claim that determinable properties can be causes, if any properties are. I call this the Thesis. But on the other hand, we have a good argument for the claim that only the most determinate properties can be causes, if any properties are. I call this the Antithesis. Clearly, we need to reject either the Thesis or the.. (shrink)

We discuss explanation of an earlier event by a later event, and argue that prima facie cases of backwards event explanation are ubiquitous. Some examples: (1) I am tidying my flat because my brother is coming to visit tomorrow. (2) The scarlet pimpernels are closing because it is about to rain. (3) The volcano is smoking because it is going to erupt soon. We then look at various ways people might attempt to explain away these prima facie cases by (...) arguing that in each case the 'real' explanation is something else. We argue that none of the explaining-away strategies are successful, and so any plausible account of explanation should either make room for backwards explanation, or have a good story to tell about why it doesn't have to. (shrink)

In works of literary fiction, it is a part of the fiction that the words of the text are being recounted by some work-internal 'voice': the literary narrator. One can ask similarly whether the story in movies is told in sights and sounds by a work-internal subjectivity that orchestrates them: a cinematic narrator. George M. Wilson argues that movies do involve a fictional recounting (an audio-visual narration ) in terms of the movie's sound and image track. Viewers are usually prompted (...) to imagine seeing the items and events in the movie's fictional world and to imagine hearing the associated fictional sounds. However, it is much less clear that the cinematic narration must be imagined as the product of some kind of 'narrator' - of a work-internal agent of the narration. Wilson goes on to examine the further question whether viewers imagine seeing the fictional world face-to-face or whether they imagine seeing it through some kind of work-internal mediation . It is a key contention of this book that only the second of these alternatives allows one to give a coherent account of what we do and do not imagine about what we are seeing on the screen. Having provided a partial account of the foundations of film narration, the final chapters explore the ways in which certain complex strategies of cinematic narration are executed in three exemplary films: David Fincher's Fight Club , von Sternberg's The Scarlet Empress , and the Coen brothers' The Man Who Wasn't There. (shrink)

Yablo suggests that we can understand the possibility of mental causation by supposing that mental properties determine physical properties, in the classic sense of determination according to which red determines scarlet. Determinates and their determinables do not compete for causal relevance, so if mental and physical properties are related as determinable and determinates, they should not compete for causal relevance either. I argue that this solution won''t work. I first construct a more adequate account of determination than that provided (...) by Yablo. I then consider two common accounts of the mental, token identity theories and dispositional theories, and argue that on neither do mental and physical properties satisfy the requirements for determination. (shrink)

We can use language to say what people did, often describing the same action in different complex ways. Davidson offered an illuminating analysis of action reports like “Miss Scarlet stabbed Colonel Mustard with a dagger in the library,” which involve adverbial modifiers. Part of the challenge here is to say how such modifiers are semantically related to the rest of the sentence. Building on the ancient observation that verbs are often used to describe what happened, Davidson argued that an (...) action report implies the occurrence of an eventthat meets the conditions specified by the report; where an event can be described in endlessly many ways. In this chapter, I review Davidson's account, his arguments in favor of it, and his responses to some initial objections. I also discuss some subsequent work that supports central aspects of Davidson's proposal while also presenting challenges for combining his analysis of action reports with his broader conception of linguistic meaning. (shrink)

Sir Francis Galton writes: “Those who find a difficulty in understanding how a feebly felt mental action can vanquish a strong desire, will find the difficulty vanish if they consent to assume a physiological and not a psychical standpoint. The gain is as great as viewing the planetary system after the fashion of Copernicus, instead of that of Ptolemy. There is nothing contrary to experience in supposing that conflicting physiological actions may be perceived with a distinctness quite disproportionate to their (...) real efficacy. We may compare the conflict between faintly perceived activities of one kind and clearly perceived activities of another kind, to that between troops dressed in a uniform scarcely distinguishable from the background with others clad in staring scarlet. We must be content to admit that our consciousness has a very inexact cognisance of the physiological battles in our brain, and that the mystery why apparently weak motives of one class should invariably get the better of apparently strong motives of another class, lies wholly in the word ‘apparently’. In short, that the appearances of their relative strength are deceptive”. (shrink)

In her highly influential 1984 study Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, Kristin Luker speculates that opposition to legal abortion among women was likely to be strongest among those who were full-time homemakers without a college education. But despite a marked decline in that demographic group and a well-documented rise in public support for gender equality since then, the rate of support for legal abortion has remained stubbornly fixed at between fifty and fifty-five percent. This tepid support has coincided with (...) a steep decline in abortion services in rural states, and ever more sweeping restrictions on abortion being tested in the courts. Karissa Haugeberg's Women against Abortion and Katie Watson's Scarlet A both seek to address this state of affairs, albeit in markedly different ways. Haugeberg provides a historical chronicle of the motives and strategies of certain key women activists in the fight against legal abortion, with an eye toward how their concerns “came to serve as blueprints to legislators and judges who continue to craft policies and laws that erode women's right to abortion”. Katie Watson draws upon her experience as an attorney and bioethicist to write a guide “intended to encourage and equip you to engage in respectful, productive, private conversation about your experience with, and opinion of, abortion”. Though both authors reveal their support for legal abortion, both are concerned to understand the motives and goals of those who fight against it. (shrink)

This contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium on enmity argues that there is more to the problem of enmity than understanding, preventing, and resolving it: one must also recover from it and from its effects. Drawing on a psychoanalytic theory of shame that discriminates between narcissistic injuries that are enduring and those that can be overcome, this essay proposes a reading of Hester Prynne's transformation in The Scarlet Letter as a series of recognitions informed by her emotional relations to (...) her estranged husband, her lover, their daughter, and her fellow women. Nathaniel Hawthorne's heroine is condemned by her community for her adultery and suffers in silence for seven years before her shame erupts as anger at the men she had idealized and now recognizes as having betrayed her long before she deceived one of them. Only when she understands that the marriage arranged by her father to a man of his own age took advantage of her youth and legal powerlessness does she begin to redistribute blame for this sexual abuse. Refusing to serve the interests of her hated husband, she is able to forgive herself and eventually becomes a source of healing for other injured women. (shrink)

The aim of the thesis is to show that there are some synthetic necessary truths, or that synthetic apriori knowledge is possible. This is really a pretext for an investigation into the general connection between meaning and truth, or between understanding and knowing, which, as pointed out in the preface, is really the first stage in a more general enquiry concerning meaning. (Not all kinds of meaning are concerned with truth.) After the preliminaries (chapter one), in which the problem is (...) stated and some methodological remarks made, the investigation proceeds in two stages. First there is a detailed inquiry into the manner in which the meanings or functions of words occurring in a statement help to determine the conditions in which that statement would be true (or false). This prepares the way for the second stage, which is an inquiry concerning the connection between meaning and necessary truth (between understanding and knowing apriori). The first stage occupies Part Two of the thesis, the second stage Part Three. In all this, only a restricted class of statements is discussed, namely those which contain nothing but logical words and descriptive words, such as "Not all round tables are scarlet" and "Every three-sided figure is three-angled". (The reasons for not discussing proper names and other singular definite referring expressions are given in Appendix I.). (shrink)

Stuttering is one of the most well-known speech disorders, but the underlying neurological mechanisms are debated. In addition to genetic factors there are also major non-genetic contributions. It is here proposed that infection with group A beta-hemolytic streptococcus (GAS) was a major underlying cause of stuttering until the mid 1900s, when penicillin was introduced for the treatment of streptococcal infections about 1946. The main mechanism proposed is an autoimmune reaction from tonsillitis, targeting specific molecules, for example within the basal ganglia. (...) It is here also proposed that GAS infections may have continued to cause stuttering to some extent, to the present date, though more rarely. If so, early diagnosis of such cases would be of importance. Childhood cases with sudden onset of stuttering after throat infection may be particularly important to assess for possible GAS infection. The support for this hypothesis primarily comes from three lines of argument. First, medical record data from the 1930s strongly indicates that there was one type of medical event in particular that preceded the onset of childhood stuttering with unexpected frequency: diseases related to GAS throat infections. In particular, this included tonsillitis and scarlet fever, but also rheumatic fever. Rheumatic fever is a childhood autoimmune sequela of GAS infection, which was a relatively widespread medical problem until the early 1960s. Secondly, available reports of changes of the childhood prevalence of stuttering indicates striking parallels between stuttering and the incidence of rheumatic fever, with (1) decline from the early 1900s, (2) marked decline from the introduction of penicillin about 1946, and (3) reaching a more stable level in the 1960s. The correlations between the data for stuttering and for rheumatic fever after introduction of penicillin are very high, at about 0.95. Thirdly, there are established biological mechanisms linking GAS tonsillitis to immunological effects on the brain. In addition, a small number of more recent case reports have provided further support for the hypothesis linking stuttering to GAS infection. Overall, it is proposed that the available data provides strong evidence for the hypothesis that GAS infection was a major cause of stuttering until the mid 1900s. (shrink)

The aim of the thesis is to show that there are some synthetic necessary truths, or that synthetic apriori knowledge is possible. This is really a pretext for an investigation into the general connection between meaning and truth, or between understanding and knowing, which, as pointed out in the preface, is really the first stage in a more general enquiry concerning meaning. After the preliminaries, in which the problem is stated and some methodological remarks made, the investigation proceeds in two (...) stages. First there is a detailed inquiry into the manner in which the meanings or functions of words occurring in a statement help to determine the conditions in which that statement would be true. This prepares the way for the second stage, which is an inquiry concerning the connection between meaning and necessary truth. The first stage occupies Part Two of the thesis, the second stage Part Three. In all this, only a restricted class of statements is discussed, namely those which contain nothing but logical words and descriptive words, such as "Not all round tables are scarlet" and "Every three-sided figure is three-angled". (shrink)

abstract In this paper I consider the nature of the purported vice of moralism by examining two examples that, I suggest, exemplify this vice: the first from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter; the second from David Owen's account of his experience as European negotiator between the warring parties in the former Yugoslavia. I argue that in different ways both these examples show the kind of human weakness or failure that is involved in the most extreme version of moralism, a (...) weakness that involves an inability to see or acknowledge those one seeks to judge as real, morally accountable, human beings. (shrink)

In developing resemblance nominalism, Rodriguez-Pereyra attempts to meet the challenge that truths involving abstract nouns pose to the doctrine. He holds that one can render sentences containing abstract nouns without invoking attributes and defends this view by giving nominalistic sentences that express the truthmakers of two such sentences: ‘Scarlet is a colour’ and ‘Carmine resembles vermillion more than it resembles French blue.’ This article argues that his renderings have serious problems and fall far short of meeting the challenge posed (...) by truths involving abstract nouns. (shrink)

This is a reply to Byeong-Uk Yi who argued that my _Resemblance Nominalism_ fails to account for sentences featuring abstract nouns like Carmine resembles vermillion more than it resembles French Blue and Scarlet is a colour. I accept his criticism of what I said in my book on Resemblance Nominalism about, but then I go on to show how can be accounted for. I reject his criticism of what I said in my book about. I also show how Resemblance (...) Nominalism can account for other sentences featuring abstract nouns. (shrink)

abstract In this paper I consider the nature of the purported vice of moralism by examining two examples that, I suggest, exemplify this vice: the first from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter; the second from David Owen's account of his experience as European negotiator between the warring parties in the former Yugoslavia. I argue that in different ways both these examples show the kind of human weakness or failure that is involved in the most extreme version of moralism, a (...) weakness that involves an inability to see or acknowledge those one seeks to judge as real, morally accountable, human beings. (shrink)

According to Fine (among others), a nonbasic factual proposition must be grounded in facts involving those of its constituents that are both real and fundamental. But the principle is vulnerable to several dialectically significant counterexamples. It entails, for example, that a logical Platonist cannot accept that true disjunctions are grounded in the truth of their disjuncts; that a Platonist about mathematical objects cannot accept that sets are grounded in their members; and that a color primitivist cannot accept that an object’s (...) being scarlet grounds its not being chartreuse. The Finean might try to defend these implications, but it generates further problems. Instead, the principle should be rejected. An important upshot is that the principle cannot be relied on, as it has been, to distinguish robust realists from anti-realists about a propositional domain—the principle obscures ways of taking features to be both real and fundamental. (shrink)

This article explores late works by contemporary artist Louise Bourgeois that illuminate current concerns about ageing maternal bodies and the ambivalent responses of fear and loathing that they provoke. In 2003, Louise Bourgeois made an installation for the Freud Museum in Vienna entitled The Reticent Child, on the subject of her own earlier pregnancy and birth of her son, one of several works featuring maternity and fertility which Bourgeois has created in old age. In Nature Study 2007, made at the (...) age of 96 years, she depicts carnal couples and pregnant and birthing figures embodied in brilliant pinks and scarlet reds. Bourgeois represents women as the powerful agents of the maternal function, marking a return to motherhood as a central topic of her earlier work. Edward Said posited sources of cultural meaning as ‘the whole notion of beginning, the moment of birth and origin … reproductive generation, maturity’, and ‘the last great problematic … the last and late period of life, the decay of the body’ (Said, 2006: 4–6). What does it mean for Bourgeois to return to the theme of birth in her nineties and how does it resonate with contemporary anxieties about the ageing maternal body? If the space of the gallery is a safe arena for a woman artist to present sexuality and maternity in old age, how are older women who break codes of fertility represented elsewhere? In a culture which is hostile to the conjunction of ageing women with motherhood, I shall argue that Bourgeois’ late maternal works can help to undo the taboo on older mothers. (shrink)