This paper considers a new problem for desire theories of well-being. The problem claims that these theories are implausible because they misvalue the effects of fleeting desires, long-standing desires, and fluctuations in desire strength on well-being. I begin by investigating a version of the desire theory of well-being, simple concurrentism, that fails to capture intuitions in these cases. I then argue that desire theories of well-being that are suitably stability-adjusted can avoid this problem. These theories claim that the (...) average strength of a desire, and the length of time that it is held, both influence the extent to which its fulfilment or frustration affects well-being. I end by considering whether value-fulfilment theories of well-being have a more attractive response to this problem. I find that these theories have significant downsides that make them unappealing alternatives. (shrink)

Desire theories of well-being claim that how well someone’s life goes for them is entirely determined by the fulfilment and frustration of their desires. This thesis considers the viability of theories of this sort. It examines a series of objections that threaten to undermine these views. These objections claim that desire theories of well-being are incorrect because they have implausible implications. I consider four main objections over the course of this thesis. The first claims that these theories are incorrect (...) because they implausibly entail that self-sacrifice does not exist. The second claims that these theories are incorrect because they implausibly entail that severe depression does not diminish the well-being of those afflicted by this condition. The third claims that these theories are incorrect because they have implausible implications about the relative importance of fleeting desires, long-standing desires, and fluctuations in desire strength to well-being. The fourth claims that these theories are incorrect because they fail to capture the intuition that desire fulfilments which leave us disappointed and bereft of feelings of satisfaction do not improve well-being. In each of these cases, I find that desire theories of well-being have sufficient resources to refute these objections. The primary finding of this thesis is that many of the arguments against desire theories of well-being are unsuccessful. A secondary set of findings concern observations about the structure of human psychology. (shrink)

How do we determine the well-being of a person when her preferences are not stable across worlds? Suppose, for instance, that you are considering getting married, and that you know that if you get married, you will prefer being unmarried, and that if you stay unmarried, you will prefer being married. The general problem is to find a stable standard of well-being when the standard is set by preferences that are not stable. In this paper, I shall show that the (...) problem is even worse: inconsistency threatens if we accept both that your desires determine what is good for you and that you must prefer what is better for you. After I have introduced a useful toy model and stated the inconsistency argument, I will go on to discuss a couple of unsuccessful theories and see what we can learn from their mistakes. One important lesson is that how you would have felt about a life had you never led it is irrelevant to the question of how good that life is for you. What counts is how you feel about your life when you are actually leading it. Another lesson is that a life can be better for you even if you would not rank it higher, if you were to lead it. (shrink)

The paper constitutes an exploration of the construction of academic identities through a retrospective autoethnographic narrative analysis. In what is an essentially experimental mode I set out to examine processes of identification, and in particular, the understanding of desire that lies at the heart of them, for, it can be argued without desire there is no identity. Therefore, I begin my analysis by following two lines of thought concerning desire. The first, drawing on the work of Lacan, conceives of desire (...) negatively as lack (Fink 1995; Lacan 2001). The second deriving from the work of Deleuze and Guattari (2004/1987, 2004/1972) constructs desire as abundance, a positive force. These two conceptualisations may, at first sight, appear to be opposed but is this necessarily the case? The question to be examined then is, to what extent can these two conceptualisations of desire – as lack and as abundance - be held to be incommensurable? And following this, can an unstable accommodation between desire as lack and desire as abundance be drawn on in theorising processes of identification and the subjectivities that these processes give rise to? If identification is always (already?) an inherently unstable process, located within a space, which I shall designate a narrative space, how does a mobilisation of desire which moves between lack and abundance enable a creative and experimental conceptualisation of processes of identification to emerge? (shrink)

Is postlapsarian sexual desire primarily altruistic or disordered? This paper utilizes the resources in the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas and in the contemporary magisterium to argue that recent phenomena such as the #MeToo movement underscore the inherently unstable and aggressive nature of sexual desire when it is uprooted from its natural end. Aquinas highlights three aspects of desire that more sex-positive accounts of sexuality would do well to heed: its natural infinity, its self-referential nature, and its power of (...) rationalization. By directing the motor of desire toward its natural ends, virtue—led by reason—can redirect desire away from self and toward the good. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ABORTION AS A SACRAMENT: MIMETIC DESIRE AND SACRIFICE IN SEXUAL POLITICS Bernadette Waterman Ward SUNY-Oswego "If men got pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament." That familiar taunt is mostly aimed at Roman Catholics to humiliate them for their purportedly religious and anti-rational opposition to abortion. It is conventional to sniffthat the "religious assumptions" on which disapproval of abortion is "typically based" are "highly questionable" (Chambers 1). But the cultural (...) theories of René Girard suggest that it is because men don't get pregnant that abortion already is a sacrament. The key elements of sacrificial religion, as Girard defines it, are the presence of intolerable tension that must lead to social disruption; the choice of a victim who cannot strike back to absorb the community's violence; and the concealment ofthe function ofthe sacrifice, which employs actual violence for the purpose of stabilizing institutional violence. Abortion in America is upheld not as medical or even political policy, but as, in fact, a religious sacrifice. Girard's definition ofreligion requires neither a moral code nor a divinity nor a metaphysical grounding. The cult of Dionysus, to name only one example, evidently endorsed nothing we would recognize as a general code of morality; Buddhism, a far more august example, does not focus on a divinity; animism proposes no universal metaphysics. As to sacraments, Bernadette Waterman Ward19 Thomas Aquinas, following St. Augustine, did not scruple to call nonChristian sacrifices sacraments oftheir religions, "Whether true or false."' Scapegoating defines religious sacrifice. It protects the sacrificing community and promotes its unity—so long as all believe that the scapegoat must suffer. Often the victim is called an enemy to some established order; sacrifice is always conservative, even if it upholds an inherently unstable system. Because powerlessness, not real disruptive power, is the criterion for becoming a scapegoat, sacrifice requires a strong shared illusion. Classical religions provide unopposable gods to choose the tragically necessary victims, allowing strong ambivalence to surround the sacrifice itself. Ifthis is not present, the death or banishment takes on a different character—more political than religious, though Girard notes a fundamental unity between those two methods ofcontrolling mimetic violence. Mimetic violence originates in illusion surrounding a rivalry. Often there is an object involved, such as territory or wealth or political rank, but the object, which seems important, is actually irrelevant. The rivalry can continue, seeking new objects, whatever concrete acquisitions either party makes or loses. General, aimless rivalry dominates a social world of fragile, undefined selves in which anyone can be a model for imitation, and therefore anyone can be a threat to one's sense ofself. What an imitator actually seeks is to have whatever is desirable; most desirable ofall, perhaps, is the ability to know what is desirable, a mysterious quality that is constantly attributed to others; Girard calls this quality "being." From the nursery we are each other's disciples, wanting each other's toys not because of their inherent virtue so much as because someone else has seen some virtue in them. As human desire has no real single object, it has no closure; envy and revenge threaten others in a widening net of destruction. In the classic scenario, the model whose "being" has become matter for imitation finds himself in competition for the object, and attacks the rival, who returns in kind. A disciple who can rally aspire to the model's status can become a dangerous, even a deadly rival; in imagination, and sometimes in reality, they turn each other intp monsters. Yet as the desire has no single object, neither has the rage: the violence can be easily transferred to another object than one's rival. Sometimes those who are uneasy about their status in relation to one another can cement a powerful unity by focusing blame on some common target: a scapegoat. The Orwellian scenario is in fact the normal scenario: individuals caught in the maelstrom of social instability 'Summa Theologiae, 3a.61.1 31. 20Abortion as a Sacrament seek to avoid victimization by diverting the violence into blame and destruction directed, first of all, against someone else—and, if possible, against someone who cannot strike back: a sacrifice. Not all sacrificial religious... (shrink)

Teleosemantics holds that the contents of psychological states depend crucially on the functions of such states. Etiological accounts of function hold that the functions of things depend on their histories, especially their evolutionary or learning histories. Etiological teleosemantics combines these two features. Consider the case of beliefs. Since selection rests on the stable effects of things, since beliefs have no obvious effects independent of unstable desires, and since desires themselves have mental content, beliefs may seem a hard (...) case for etiological teleosemantics. But David Papineau deploys the effects of beliefs mediated by conation in an artful way to evade these difficulties. I argue that accounts with such an architecture are false. (shrink)

This essay comprises an overview of the plot to Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, followed by a more detailed examination of the three parts of the book. It begins by showing the importance of metaphilosophy to Rorty's project, while explaining the significance of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature for both Rorty's philosophy as a whole, and the history of philosophy. Then follows the overview, after which I explain the detail of Rorty's arguments, while developing a line of (...) argument to show that Rorty's final conclusion that there is no objective truth – because the world can be endlessly redescribed – undermines his argumentative strategy. Taking into account Rorty's standard response, according to which he was making a pragmatic social proposal, I conclude that Rorty's desire to avoid the nihilistic conclusion that life is meaningless, led him to transform existentialism into postmodernism; and that the result, however brilliant, is nevertheless unstable and badly motivated. (shrink)

Models in decision theory and game theory assume that preferences are determinate: for any pair of possible outcomes, a and b, an agent either prefers a to b, prefers b to a, or is indifferent as between a and b. Preferences are also assumed to be stable: provided the agent is fully informed, trivial situational influences will not shift the order of her preferences. Research by behavioral economists suggests, however, that economic and hedonic preferences are to some degree indeterminate and (...) unstable, which in turn suggests that other sorts of preferences may suffer the same problem. Even fully informed agents do not always determinately prefer a to b, prefer b to a, or feel indifferent as between a and b. Seemingly trivial situational influences rearrange the order of their preferences. One could respond that decision theory and game theory are not meant to describe actual behavior, and that they instead adumbrate an ideal of rationality from which human action diverges in various ways. When the divergences are small and systematic, they help us identify the heuristics that conspire to help people approximate rationality. One such heuristic, dubbed the Wilde heuristic, is explored. However, the divergences documented by behavioral economists threaten to be too large to handle through idealization. The Rum Tum Tugger Model, in which indifference is intransitive, is spelled out as one promising way for decision and game theory to retrench. Preferences may be locally unstable and indeterminate, but when the differences between options are sufficiently large, they approximate stability and determinacy. (shrink)

Demoralising ethical theory involves eschewing the deontic categories of moral obligation, moral permissibility, and moral impermissibility from our ethical thought. In this paper, I evaluate the case made in Alastair Norcross’s recent book, _Morality By Degrees_ (2020), for a consequentialist version of such demoralisation. Norcross defends scalar consequentialism, a radical variant of consequentialism which restricts fundamental normative verdicts to a scalar ranking of available actions, ordered according to the goodness of the consequences they produce. Following an introductory Sect. 1, I (...) assess the positive case for scalar consequentialism in Sect. 2, concluding that no strong case has been made for the view. In Sect. 3, I assess the case against the view, concluding that while scalar consequentialism may be able to avoid _the action-guidingness objection_, it falls foul of _the force objection_. In Sect. 4, I expand on this critique, showing that Norcross gives an unstable account of how to assess attitudes, such as desires, beliefs and emotions. In Sect. 5, I argue that appeal to a contextualist reductionism does little to make the scalar view appealing. (shrink)

The subject of “The Other”, the different one always generated conflicts more or less serious in the history of humanity, without proposals of any resolution. In the measure in that The Other questions, by similitude or by difference, the identity in which the subject is sustained, that questioning make unstable that precarious construction, and because of this, it converts itself in the opposer. In this study, we will find, in the text of Il Visconte Dimezzato by Italo Calvino, the (...) subject of the Otherness/Alterity, analyzing from the semiotic point of view the reactions and behaviors of each one of the two characters and of the members of the society in which they live. The starting point of the story by Italo Calvino is that in a war between Austria and the Turks, the Viscount Medardo di Terralba as a consequence of a canon shot remains divided vertically into two halves and both halves survive. One of the two halves is very bad and the other is very good. Each one of the two halves sees in the other one “The Other”, feeling itself “The One” but incomplete and desiring to turn to be “The Same” as it was before being divided by the canon shot. (shrink)

This article elaborates on the dilemma faced by modernist poets in seeking to define values in an intellectual context that was post-Romantic and post-epistemic. Pound and Stevens, for example, reacted strongly against the ways that Romantic writers had tried to tie the rhetorical elaboration of values to precise descriptions, as if description could still support values. Victorian writing tended to experience the effort to ground value in fact as a source of constant irony, given that the desired values refused to (...) become manifest. Positivist philosophy and its literary allies asserted that values simply occupy a different and much more unstable realm than do facts. Having established these historical premises, the essay then concentrates on how Stevens and Pound, in challenging positivist assumptions, sought two different sources of value, each of which, however, placed value within the domain of experience. Pound's approach was Nietzschean, in that it was Nietzsche who had demonstrated how valuing precedes determinations about fact. Pound's capacity to make his early lyric poems seem to come out of nowhere and depend on linguistic invention alone for their power is shown to be a realization of Nietzschean strategies. Meanwhile, Stevens in his early work tried out a range of attitudes that seemed to him capable of defying fact, especially by approximating aphoristic self-assertion. Finally, Pound in his Cantos and Stevens from the late thirties onward developed self-reflexive versions of an analogical model of valuing that, as Dora Zhang has shown, shaped the response of novelists (James, Proust, and Woolf) to the same dilemma that modernist poets were facing. The essay closes with a reading of section XII of “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” as a demonstration of Stevens's analogical mode. (shrink)

At Republic 370c–372d, Plato presents us with an early polis that is self-sufficient, peaceful, cooperative, and which provides a comfortable life for its inhabitants. While Glaucon derides this polis as a ‘city for pigs’, Socrates is quick to defend its virtues characterizing it as a city which is not only ‘complete’, but a ‘true’ and ‘healthy’ city. Is Plato sincere when he lauds the city of pigs? if so, why does the city of pigs degenerate so precipitously into the luxurious (...) city? Some commentators have been unable to find any place for the ‘city of pigs’ in the substantive argument of the Republic. Other commentators have supposed that the source of instability in the city of pigs is the nature of human desire. I argue that these interpretations miss what is most deeply interesting about the city of pigs. On my reading, the city of pigs is healthy and true in that it is a unified community. However, this unity depends on good fortune, is highly contingent, and thus unstable. (shrink)

Meditations, aphorisms, maxims, notes, and comments construct a philosophy of thought congruent with the inconsistency of our reality. Those who continue to think never return to their point of departure. —Inconsistencies These 130 short texts—aphoristic, interlacing, and sometimes perplexing—target a perennial philosophical problem: Our consciousness and our experience of reality are inconsistent, fragmentary, and unstable; God is dead, and our identity as subjects discordant. How can we establish a new mode of thought that does not cling to new gods (...) or the false security of rationality? Marcus Steinweg, as he did in his earlier book The Terror of Evidence, constructs a philosophical position from fragments, maxims, meditations, and notes, formulating a philosophy of thought that expresses and enacts the inconsistency of our reality. Steinweg considers, among other topics, life as a game (“To think is to play because no thought is firmly grounded”); sexuality (“wasteful, contradictory, and contingent”); desire (”Desire has a thousand names; It's earned none of them”); reality (“overdetermined and excessively complex”); and world (“a nonconcept”). He disposes of philosophy in one sentence (“Philosophy is a continual process of its own redefinition.”) but spends multiple pages on “A Tear in Immanence,” invoking Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, and others. He describes “Wandering with Foucault” (“Thought entails wandering as well as straying into madness”) and brings together Derrida and Debord. He poses a question: “Why should a cat be more mysterious than a dog?” and later answers one: “Beauty is truth because truth is beauty.” By the end, we have accompanied Steinweg on converging trains of thought. “Thinking means continuing to think,” he writes, adding “But thinking can only pose questions by answering others.” The question of inconsistency? Asked and answered, and asked. (shrink)

This article is concerned with the ways in which literary spaces can become sexualized by the transfer of objects between women, as well as by the ways in which bodies themselves touch. It discusses how lesbian desire changes both spatial and temporal structures, via a consideration of the use of pearl imagery. In particular, it analyses the link between sexual, class and bodily construction in two texts: Daphne du Maurier's novel Rebecca (1938) and Carol Ann Duffy's poem ‘Warming Her Pearls’ (...) (1987). These texts encode contrasting ideas about the lesbian body, ideas that are discursively textured by the periods in which they were written and by the relative ideological resistance of their writers. While du Maurier's novel establishes a concept of spatial and temporal enclosure, Duffy's poem creates an unconfined and unstable lesbian body-text. Within this, the pearl can be seen as a subversive device, destructuring and stretching the parameters of lesbian desire. (shrink)

One persistent challenge in scientific practice is that the structure of the world can be unstable: changes in the broader context can alter which model of a phenomenon is preferred, all without any overt signal. Scientific discovery becomes much harder when we have a moving target, and the resulting incorrect understandings of relationships in the world can have significant real-world and practical consequences. In this paper, we argue that it is common (in certain sciences) to have changes of context (...) that lead to changes in the relationships under study, but that standard normative accounts of scientific inquiry have assumed away this problem. At the same time, we show that inference and discovery methods can “protect” themselves in various ways against this possibility by using methods with the novel methodological virtue of “diligence.” Unfortunately, this desirable virtue provably is incompatible with other desirable methodological virtues that are central to reliable inquiry. No scientific method can provide every virtue that we might want. (shrink)

Spinoza, according to common opinion, could only have written lamentable platitudes on sexual love, narrowly inspired by the prejudices of his time and without serious philosophical foundation: that for which, in the past, he has been congratulated,1 he is now reproached; or, at best, excused. He would even have, some believe to be able to add, increased the pervading puritanism: sexuality, as such, would give rise in him to a deep repulsion and women would horrify him. The second of these (...) two assertions, if one sticks to the manifest content of the texts, actually rests on nothing; if one calls upon their latent content, it would require, to be established with a minimum of rigor, a study of which we will not dispute the theoretical possibility, but which, in fact, has not yet been undertaken. The first, on the other hand, has all the appearance of the obvious: that men love women for their beauty and do not support their attachment to someone else,2 that they desire them more the more admirers they have,3 that the jealousy of the male is exacerbated by the representation of the pudenda and of the excrementa of his rival,4 that sensual attachment is unstable and conflictual,5 that it often turns to obsession,6 that Adam loved Eve because of their similarity of nature,7 that he who remains insensitive to the generosity of a courtesan does not offend by ingratitude,8 that only free men and free women can marry one another and only if they want children,9 well, it seems, that isn’t anything sensational; now these eight passages, if the two definitions of the libido are added to them,10 are the only, if I’m not mistaken, that Spinoza expressly devoted to the question! He would therefore, apparently, only have drawn up a report of deficiency. (shrink)

At Republic 370c-372d, Plato presents us with an early polis that is self-sufficient, peaceful, cooperative, and which provides a comfortable life for its inhabitants. While Glaucon derides this polis as a 'city for pigs', Socrates is quick to defend its virtues characterizing it as a city which is not only 'complete' , but a 'true' and 'healthy' city . Is Plato sincere when he lauds the city of pigs? If so, why does the city of pigs degenerate so precipitously into (...) the luxurious city ? Some commentators have been unable to find any place for the 'city of pigs' in the substantive argument of the Republic. Other commentators have supposed that the source of instability in the city of pigs is the nature of human desire. I argue that these interpretations miss what is most deeply interesting about the city of pigs. On my reading, the city of pigs is healthy and true in that it is a unified community. However, this unity depends on good fortune, is highly contingent, and thus unstable. (shrink)

The dependence of socio-political stability on the emotional expectations of voters is investigated. For this, a model of a socio-political system consisting of a society of voters and a democratically elected politician is considered. The neuropsychological model of the voter takes into account his emotional expectations. The social stability is guaranteed by the expectations of positive emotions of all voters. Socio-political stability means both the social stability and the re-election of politician. One type of voter is a Progressist who seeks (...) to fulfil his desires. It is shown that for the socio-political stability of the Progressist society, is enough a supportive environment. Another type of voter—a Phobic works in a fearful environment. It is shown that for the socio-political stability of the Phobic’s society, regular impacts that support their phobias are sufficient. As an example, emotional expectations, socio-political stability and information management in Eastern Europe are considered. The management of phobias in a weak economy is investigated. It is shown that in the absence of regular impacts supporting phobias a Phobic turns into a Progressist. Then the socio-political system becomes unstable with a weak economy and growth limits. The classification of the main social threats and phobias is given. The socio-political consequences of creating phobias, including corporate psychopaths and toxic leaders, are examined. Ways are proposed to resolve the contradiction between increased consumption and growth limits without the use of phobias, using high humanitarian technologies. (shrink)

Many commentators have argued that on Hume’s account, pride turns out to be something that is unstable, context-dependent, and highly contingent. On their readings, whether or not an agent develops pride depends heavily on factors beyond her control, such as whether or not her house, which is beautiful, is also the most beautiful in her neighborhood and whether or not her neighbors will admire the beauty of her house rather than become envious of it. These aspects of Hume’s theory (...) of pride, the peculiarity requirement and the social dependency of pride, stand in tension with Hume’s claims that virtue reliably produces pride-in-virtue and that pride-in-virtue serves as a powerful motive to virtue. If pride depends on the affirmation of others and arises only from qualities that are peculiar to their possessor, will the virtuous person reliably develop pride-in-virtue? And if not, can pride-in-virtue serve the motivational role Hume attributes to it? This paper tackles these problems by showing how the virtuous develop pride-in-virtue and how the desire for pride-in-virtue can serve as a powerful and admirable motive to virtue. (shrink)

The last century has catapulted us into a world full of instability, uncertainty, and a sense of bewilderment. The financial-economic crisis has been added to our difficulties, further polluting our environment, our relationships, our feelings, our wounds. Pre-cariousness, lack of work and of a vision for the future have been added to our sense of emptiness and disorientation. Hope has given way to darkness. We are immersed in the crisis. The feeling of tranquillity and security that we desire is fading, (...) far away, and even forgotten. We are poised upon unstable ground, which makes us tremble and amplifies our need for stability and support. The single person favours self control and mastery, retiring narcissistically into him or herself and refusing help from anyone, not accepting any kind of wound or fragility. Behind these widespread attitudes lies the myth of total independence and of self sufficiency. Psychological and psychotherapeutic disciplines bring a change, within this context, towards a “relational turning point”, discovering in the dynamics of reciprocity the source of individual wellbeing, balance in relationships, and a sense of belonging to a community. The connection with another person makes it possible to build up a sense of oneself where multiplicity and unity, difference and belonging, individual and community coexist. Individuality and belonging are no longer opposed to one another, causing irresolvable conflict in the development of the self, but thanks to reciprocity, to the capacity of self giving and to ethics, they can be fully integrated and contribute to the daily activities, both in the individual and collective dimension, of each person. (shrink)

The paper offers a critical examination of Ghazali’s main arguments against the views of the philosophers on causation. The authors argue that Ghazali’s definition of miracles as "departure from the usual course of events" carries at least two meanings, only one of which is in conflict with necessary causal relations. The authors also argue that Ghazali’s desire to uphold the possibility of miracles need not constrain him to repudiate the idea of necessary connection, since he is able to explain miracles (...) in ways that are compatible with belief in causality and necessary connection. The authors conclude by examining some arguments to the effect that Ghazali’s attempt to hold on to both miracles and necessary connection is inherently unstable, and explore directions which Ghazalians may take in order to counter these arguments. (shrink)

Understanding cooperative human behaviour depends on insights into the biological basis of human altruism, as well as into socio-cultural development. In terms of evolutionary theory, kinship and reciprocity are well established as underlying cooperativeness. Reasons will be given suggesting an additional source, the capability of a cognition-based empathy that may have evolved as a by-product of strategic thought. An assessment of the range, the intrinsic limitations, and the conditions for activation of human cooperativeness would profit from a systems approach combining (...) biological and socio-cultural aspects. However, this is not yet the prevailing attitude among contemporary social and biological scientists who often hold prejudiced views of each other's notions. It is therefore worth noticing that the desirable integration of aspects has already been attempted, in remarkable and encouraging ways, in the history of thought on human nature. I will exemplify this with the ideas of the fourteenth century Arab-Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun. He set out to explicate human cooperativeness - "asabiyah" - as having a biological basis in common descent, but being extendable far beyond within social systems, though in a relatively unstable and attenuated fashion. He combined psychological and material factors in a dynamical theory of the rise and decline of political rulership, and related general social phenomena to basic features of human behaviour influenced by kinship, expectation of reciprocity, and empathic emotions. -/- . (shrink)

This paper describes and defends two arguments connecting ethics and religion that Kant makes in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. The first argument is that the moral demand is too high for us in our natural capacities, and God's assistance is required to bridge the resulting moral gap. The second argument is that because humans desire to be happy as well as to be morally good, morality will be rationally unstable without belief in a God who can (...) bring happiness and virtue together. The paper states and replies to three objections to each argument. (shrink)

A broad range of intellectual perspectives may be brought to bear on any important social institution. To this general rule, the institution of private property is no exception. The desirability of private property has been endlessly debated across the disciplines: philosophical, historical, economic, and legal. Yet there is very little consensus over its proper social role and limitations. Is it possible to find a unique solution to questions of property and private ownership, good for all resources and for all times? (...) The famous defense of private property that is found in chapter 5 of John Locke'sSecond Treatise of Governmentanswers this question in the affirmative, for Locke writes as though all property was given to mankind in common, and then seeks to find the quickest and most expeditious way to convert all common property into private property. His implicit, but undefended, assumption is that common forms of property are both undesirable and unstable, while private forms of ownership are always just the opposite. Yet his preferred method for moving from a commons to a regime of private property—the unilateral decision to appropriate by each actor—is one that has been frequently condemned as a sop to unbridled egotism, even though it is subject to two constraints: the first against waste, and the second requiring the appropria-tor to leave “enough, and as good” for others. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Critical Issues in Future Environmental EthicsHolmes Rolston III (bio)1. Sustainable development vs. sustainable biosphere. The question is whether to prioritize development within environmental constraints, or whether to prioritize a sustainable biosphere and work out a suitable economy within that priority. Sustainable development, likely to remain the favored model, is also likely to prove an umbrella concept that requires little but superficial agreement, bringing a constant illusion of [End Page (...) 139] consensus and glossing over deeper problems with a rhetorically engaging word. Everybody co-opts the idea and justifies their desired developments. Sustainability will prove to be a "metafix" that will unite everybody including industrialists, subsistence farmers, fair-wage social workers, riverkeepers, wildlife lovers, economists, and politicians—all of whom wish to have their cake and eat it too.2. In tension with this, a "sustainable biosphere" model demands a baseline quality of environment, with the economy worked out "within" such quality of life in a quality environment (clean air, water, stable soils, attractive residential landscapes, forests, mountains, rivers, rural lands, parks, wildlands, wildlife, renewable resources). Development is desired, but even more, society must learn to live within the carrying capacity of its landscapes. The fundamental flaw in "sustainable development" is that it sees the Earth as a resource only.3. Global warming. Global warming is a threat of the greatest magnitude, involving an unprecedented convergence of complexities, natural and technological uncertainties, global and local interactions, and difficult scientific, ethical, political, and social choices. There are cross-cultural issues, intergenerational issues, distributional issues, concerns about merit, justice, benevolence, and about voluntary and involuntary risk. There is a long lag time from decades to hundreds of years. Surely but gradually, local "goods" cumulate into global "bads". There are opportunities for denial, procrastination, self-deception, hypocrisy, free-riding, cheating, and corruption. Individual and national self-interests are at odds with collective global interests. This is the "tragedy of the commons" now taken at the pitch.4. Biodiversity. Charismatic megafauna is likely to disappear, except in pockets. Conservation plans will increasingly need to incorporate local communities and governments in developing nations which are too unstable (if not corrupt) to insure long-range conservation. Fauna and flora generally are likely to become increasingly depauperate, due to development, pollution, ignorance, and disinterest outside of native-range industrial, medical, and agricultural resource benefits. The planet is likely to become less diverse, warmer, increasingly trashy, and weedy.5. Escalating populations, escalating consumption, maldistribution. [End Page 140] These are three main global problems (drivingfor instance, global warming and depauperate fauna and flora). Global capitalism has no intrinsic capacities to solve these problems. A major problem is that products and capital move freely across national boundaries, but labor cannot, resulting in exploitation of cheaper labor. In addition to the human misfortunes produced by this system, such exploited peoples will progressively degrade their environments. As a result, both rich and poor will jeopardize both sustainability and conservation.6. The "enough" problem. Humans have long been driven by desires to increase security and wealth. Humans have Pleistocene appetites for salt, sugar, fat, sex, and to maximize our short-term security for self and kin, and perhaps tribe. Without such concerns, people did not make it through winter. So humans always want more in order to make us more secure—more pay, bigger houses, better health, more preferences satisfied, more comfort, economic and national security. For all of human history, we have been pushing back limits.7. Especially in the West, we have lived with a deep-seated belief that life will get better, that one should hope for abundance, and work toward obtaining it. In the West we have built this into our concept of human rights—a right to self-development, to self-realization. But such an egalitarian ethic scales everybody up and drives an unsustainable world.8. Humans are not well equipped to deal with the sorts of global level problems we now face. The classical institutions—family, village, tribe, nation, agriculture, industry, law, and medicine—have shorter horizons. Humans have no evolutionary ability to deal with long-range problems on world scales. Many biologists think we are incapable of doing this at the ranges now demanded. A... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.2 (2002) 153-174 [Access article in PDF] LSDNA: Rhetoric, Consciousness Expansion, and the Emergence of Biotechnology Richard Doyle I had to struggle to speak intelligibly. —Albert Hofmann on his self-experiment with LSD-25 Finding a place to start is of utmost importance. Natural DNA is a tractless coil, like an unwound and tangled audio tape on the floor of the car in the dark. —Kary Mullis on (...) the invention of Polymerase Chain Reaction 1. Undoing life What happened is this: Once upon a time there was a narrative of vitality. Ok, not a narrative, but an apprehension, a fear, a vision. It didn't have a beginning, middle, or end. It was. Its contours were no more determinable than those of consciousness. Indeed, our consciousness, as humans, was our sole alleged difference from it. From something called "life." We were more than life, but were also, tragically, confined to it. You know the story all too well. Some of its major authors were Cuvier, Lamarck, Darwin, Bichat. Even Shelley.Just because this sudden transformation happened on paper doesn't mean it was easy to endure. Enormous numbers of humans went on tranquilizers just to deal with the effects. Others, elsewhere, knew nothing but rumors. Nonetheless, they became increasingly implicated in its effects, the effects of understanding and experiencing both "life" and "consciousness" as informatic events. Suddenly—and it is sudden, a real surprise—both our vitality and our thought were distributed, scattered across a network and nowhere in particular. Timothy Leary and Francis Crick were speaking the same language, the language of information where the organic and the machinic enfold each other helically and, sometimes, the capacity for replication goes through the ceiling. This new language of information would [End Page 153] introduce a novel response and abyss: the pleasures and hells of eternal replication. The distribution of both life and consciousness enabled a dream of immortality from which we have not yet awakened, as the mere specter of infinite clonal replicants provokes entropies of identity even as it preserves the self from onslaughts of decay. 1In at least one of its characteristics this shift toward an informatic understanding of life is perhaps not really so novel. The seductions of control are hardly, historians of science tell us, foreign to the practices and effects of technoscience. Evelyn Fox Keller makes this point concisely and precisely in her not-quite eponymous essay, "From Secrets of Life to Secrets of Death," itself a self-professed sequel to her 1986 "Making Gender Visible." Here the scientific "impulse" is underwritten by a perennial motif that underlies much of scientific creativity, namely, the urge to fathom the secrets of nature and the collateral hope that, in fathoming the secrets of nature, we will fathom (and hence gain control of) our own mortality (Secrets, 29).Surely Keller is correct that the nascent practices of molecular biology were cryptographic in character, an espionage project unknowingly launched by Erwin Schrodinger during the Second World War. Surely it is crucial to this moment that while Schrodinger's 1943 Dublin lectures were introducing audiences to the concept of the code-script, Alan Turing again brilliantly decrypted a modified U-boat code, giving the Allies code superiority for the remainder of the war. 2 But in this segment on that strange growth called "biotechnology," I want to focus on what Keller has called the "collateral" of hope in this cryptographic impulse, namely the collateral equation between inquiry and control, specifically the control of mortality.For is "fathoming" a secret identical to the exercise of control? The very cadence and rhetorical encryption of Keller's formulation here, a general parenthetical syllogistic conclusion within and alongside a hyphenated invocation of particularity, suggest that concepts and practices of secrecy are more unstable than Keller implies with her invocation of Feynman's "disease" of lock picking: "One of my diseases, one of my things in life, is that anything that is secret, I try to undo" (40).For Keller, Feynman's confession is emblematic of a desire to control life and death... (shrink)

Numerical simulations of coupled map lattices (CMLs) and other complex model systems show an enormous phenomenological variety that is difficult to classify and understand. It is therefore desirable to establish analytical tools for exploring fundamental features of CMLs, such as their stability properties. Since CMLs can be considered as graphs, we apply methods of spectral graph theory to analyze their stability at locally unstable fixed points for different updating rules, different coupling scenarios, and different types of neighborhoods. Numerical studies (...) are found to be in excellent agreement with our theoretical results. (shrink)

Exploring the risks, ambiguities, and unstable conceptual worlds of contemporary thought, Crossover Queries brings together the wide-ranging writings, across twenty years, of one of our most important philosophers.Ranging from twentieth-century European philosophy—the thought of Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Levinas, Janicaud, and others—to novels and artworks, music and dance, from traditional Jewish thought to Jain andBuddhist metaphysics, Wyschogrod’s work opens radically new vistas while remaining mindful that the philosopher stands within and is responsible to a philosophical legacy conditioned by the negative.Rather (...) than point to a Hegelian dialectic of overcoming negation or to a postmetaphysical exhaustion, Wyschogrod treats negative moments as opening novel spaces for thought. She probes both the desire for God and an ethics grounded in the interests of the other person, seeing these as moments both of crossing over and of negation. Alert to the catastrophes that have marked our times, she exposes the underlying logical structures of nihilatory forces that have been exerted to exterminate whole peoples. Analyzing the negationsof biological research and cultural images of mechanized and robotic bodies, she shows how they contest the body as lived in ordinary experience.“Crossover Queries brings together important essays on a remarkable range of topics by one of our most insightful cultural critics. Commenting on philosophical and theological issues that have shaped the recent past as well as scientific and technological questions that will preoccupy us in the near future, Wyschogrod consistently alerts us to the urgency of problems whose importance few recognize. To avoid the challenge these essays pose is to avoid responsibility for a future that appears to be increasingly fragile.”—Mark C. Taylor, Columbia University. (shrink)

Life can only be understood as an aim at that perfection which the conditions of its environment allow. For the pragmatist, the world’s saviors are immanent, multiple, and ordinary. “Man finds himself living in an aleatory world,” writes John Dewey, “his existence involves, to put it baldly, a gamble. The world is a scene of risk; it is uncertain, unstable, uncannily unstable.”3 This fundamental ambiguity is compounded by the distinct conditions of our late modern, globalizing, postsecular world. Amidst (...) the conditions of this world, the religious meanings, purposes, and desires that have traditionally oriented human life are being relativized; the boundaries of our religious and moral traditions .. (shrink)

This paper draws from contemporary psychoanalytic theory as well as nineteenth-century crowd theory to critique Louis Althusser’s account of the ideological interpellation of the subject. I argue that rather than ideology interpellating the individual as a subject, bourgeois ideology interpellates the subject as an individual. By “bourgeois ideology” I mean the loose set of ideas and apparatuses associated with European modernity, an instrumental concept of reason, and the emergence of the capitalist mode of production. The advantage of reversing the Althusserian (...) account is that the subject is not pre-constrained to the individual form, a form that is itself always already as failing and impossible as it is assumed and demanded. In Althusser’s version, the individuality that emerges in history is posited as universal, a given. In mine, the individual form is itself the problem; it’s a coercive and unstable product of the enclosure of the common in never-ceasing efforts to repress, deny, and foreclose collective political subjectivity. The individual is thus a form of capture. Rather than natural or given, the individual form encloses into a singular bounded body collective bodies, ideas, affects, desires, and drives. There is nothing necessary about the link between subjectivity and individuality; it is an effect contingent to the array of processes that converge into bourgeois modernity. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 70-75. cartography of ghosts . . . And as a way to talk . . . of temporality the topography of imagination, this body whose dirty entry into the articulation of history as rapturous becoming & unbecoming, greeted with violence, i take permission to extend this grace —Akilah Oliver from “An Arriving Guard of Angels Thusly Coming To Greet” Our disappearance is already here. —Jacques Derrida, 117 I wrestled with death as a threshold, an aporia, a bandit, (...) a part of life. —Akilah Oliver Moraine in geological lingo is that which is left behind. Moraine- a euphemism for the de-stabilizing referent of the writer-ly body as a “troubled and troubling landscape marked by cultural and historical signifiers, the body as flesh memory [...] the body as transitory” (Oliver, Author Statement). Moraine— a geological metaphor of the poet as a holder of memory, as an accumulation of rocks and debris carried along the edge, terminal, dropped at the foot of language (in language). “Flesh Memory” according to Akilah Oliver is "that which my body recalls [...] everything has to do with the task of remembrance and its narrative reinvention [...] I was always translating an idea of the world as it presented itself at any given time. To write was a choice about how to be seen, how to enter the world as translator, actor, participant, in the dialogues that apparently made the real 'real'" (Levitsky). Flesh. Memory. The stuff some poems are made from. The stuff that gets abandoned, gleaned, and picked up by more flesh and memory. "My body, my life has always felt like a kaleidoscopic rip in the dominant fabric [...] has always been a dialogue with the impossible and the apparent” (Levitsky). The impossible-body or poet's body anticipates and performs (through language) an irretrievable death. IN APORIA I realized everything I must have been doing must have been Death. It was Christmas or Labor Day—a holiday—and every time you turned on the radio they said something like ‘four million’ or ‘going to die’.” — Andy Warhol I’m trying on egos, [a justification for the planet’s continuance]. Oh hello transgressor, you’ve come to collect utilitarian debts, humbling narrative space. Give me condition and wheatgrass, I his body disintegrating. I his body is ossification. Death my habit radius, yeah yeah. I his body can’t refuse this summons. I can’t get out this fucking room. Tell me something different about torture dear Trickster. Tell me about the lightness my mother told me to pick the one i love the best how it signals everything I ever wish to believe true just holy on my ship. I jump all over this house. this is it [what I thought is thought only, nothing more deceptive than]: I his body keeps thinking someone will come along, touch me. As like human or lima bean. I’m cradling you to my breast, you are looking out. A little wooden lion you & Peter carve on Bluff Street is quieting across your cheekbone. Not at all like the kind of terror found in sleep, on trembling grounds. It is yesterday now. I have not had a chance to dance in this century. Tonight I shall kill someone, a condition to remember Sunday morning. To think of lives as repetitions [rather than singular serial incarnations]. To understand your death is as exacerbating as trying to figure out why as schoolchildren in mid-nineteen-sixties Southern California we performed reflexive motions: cutting out lace snowflakes, reading Dick and Jane search for their missing mittens, imagining snow. Disintegrat ing . The -ing gerund catapults from the non-finite verb into past, present, future. The -ing as a tail pinned to death, a dog spinning to bite and never fully reaching itself, always shy of the end, circumreferential; a double copulative: deathing. Possessively AO calls it “habit radius” (a virtual fetish attribute) or an inescapable death presence that “confronts us with the paradox of an unattainable object [...] through it’s being unattainable” (Agamben, 27). A flirtation or dialogue with an unknowable thing and aporia utilized as investigative instrument to engage (death) while (in Southern California) we “perform reflexive motions,” cut lace snowflakes, imagine snow, and pay rent like “yeah, yeah” what else is new. And this too, fiction. The book I wish to right. The restored fallen, heroic. Did you expect a different grace from the world? Or upon exit? I’m working on “tough.” They think I am already. All ready. Who is the dead person? Is "I'm sorry" real to a dead person? Browning grass. My hands on this table. A contentious century. A place to pay rent. Redemptive moments. Am I now the dead person? Dead person, dead person, will you partake in my persimmon feast? The body inside the body astounds, confesses sins of the funhouse. I too have admired the people of this planet. Their frilly, orderly intellects. The use they’ve made of cardamom, radiation as well. How they’ve pasteurized milk, loaned surnames to stars, captured tribes, diseases, streets, and ideas too. The living-body as archive: is it possible to experience the living-body as archive without a (kind of) death? Sifting the rubble, rummaging through hoarded debris, skin sheds, memory-napping, and re-awoken (in flesh and) on terrain. “An investigative poetics seeks to unravel staid communities of thought and grasp at what might always be just beyond reach; a poetics of inquiry that lies between language as meaning, and language as rapturous entry into the world of posited ideas and idealism”( Levitsky). Something snaps. Lights blow out prior to embarking upon an investigative poetics. It begins with a question (often a sexy aporia) that leads to openings. "Every politics of memory [...] implies an intervention of the state. It's a state that legislates and acts with regard to the nonfinite mass of materials to be stored, materials which must be collected, preserved” (Derrida & Stiegler, 62). It seems poetic investigation already contains the potentiality of an (invisible) archive if the writer is “always writing” especially when not. Here’s my stupid digital romantic inclination: the living-body (of a poet) is a self-sustaining archive of non-finite memories. But not even I really believe that. AO innovated and sculpted an investigative poetic praxis. In a conversation with poet Rachel Levitsky, poetic-voice is viewed not as a precious identifier, but as a means to think through/about form, concluding that form is linked to framing. While poetic-voice may have tendency to precede form, it also erupts as a result of framing techniques. “They are frames that hold the shape of thinking (which is also to say of imagining) [...].”7 This reminds me of my rabbit who symmetrically chewed the corners of his hutch, which makes me wonder if it’s an expression of the shape of some animal anxiety tick I won’t ever have access to. Beyond the form/frame, death is an unoriginal yet unique limit; death is a damn deathless thing. It functions as a source of poetic investigation; that thing always “just beyond reach.” And how is death not a fetish (in this case an obsessive reverence for something non-material)? “Insofar as it [death] is a presence, a fetish [...] it is in fact something concrete and tangible; but insofar as it is the presence of an absence, it is, at the same time, immaterial and intangible, because it alludes continuously beyond itself to something that can never really be possessed [...] The fetish is [...] a sign of an absence, it is not an unrepeatable unique object; on the contrary, it is something infinitely capable of substitution, without any successive incarnations ever succeeding in exhausting the nullity of which it is the symbol” (Agamben, 33). AO utilized absence (the absent body [catapulted by the death of a beloved]) as an apparatus to investigate. In the process of conversing with absence or that which is absent, the absent body is affectionately objectified, incessantly summonsed back to a place of recognition, of objects, a desire for the absent body to remain intact while exiting the structural limits of grammar and syntax by moving into chant forms “to say what cannot be said” (Levitsky). from AN ARRIVING GUARD OF ANGELS THUSLY COMING TO GREET dear oluchi- the light is blinking rapidly on the black boxy machine. your room seems bigger than before and i am still planning to read some of those robert jordan books of yours. yesterday at the used bookstore where i was browsing the mysteries to “stall reality” (they are really not mysteries at all, they just employ death as the plot mistress but are unable to grasp its mystery at all)—well the point is, things were calm down here for a while and the world was little. i want to be big like you. or i want you not vast, not dead, not gone, but human small and here. i am so selfish. that is what i really want. to see you again. to oil your scalp. to hear you walk in the door, say ma i’m home . give me a chance to say welcome home son. or when leaving, don’t forget your hat . what do you wear out there? i wish you could have taken your new shoes with you. i’m so proud of you. i’m sorry for the way you died. i miss you all the time. even before, i missed you. out there, one time, some different men said: “shake for me girl, i wanna be your backdoor man.” who dat you love. 5/18/03 A letter-poem in sixteen lines “dear oluchi-” is safe-housed in epistolary form. Poetic voice is rendered as internal thought meanderings, a not-so-much confession, private/(pillow?) talk in the desire to be heard/witnessed by the referent and reader with an intent to absolve. The diminutive “i” bears a relation to poet Fanny Howe’s “little g God” in that “One of the (many) things I like about little g God is that you can have a vodka tonic while you talk to little g God, sing along to Bowie’s “I’m Afraid Of Americans,” and hum Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme,” though maybe not all at the same time” (Oliver, 2009). Towards the middle of the poem AO is at a used bookstore and remarks on the funny employment of death as a ‘plot mistress’ that ‘they’ (the dubious employed mystery authors) are ‘unable to grasp’, thereby giving death a mouthpiece, a modeling job, something to do to pass the time. from THE VISIBLE UNSEEN When I first saw graffiti, I recognized in it an ugly aesthetic, a dialectics of violence, a distortion of limbs, a hieroglyph. It was only later when I read the names of the dead that I then saw the path of ghosts charted there; its narrative of loss for the visible unseen whose place in history has been fictionalized and rendered unseen under the totalizing glare of history. Inscriptions, traces, specters. Graffiti begs a public face just as ghosts require non-ghosts (humans) to sense them. The “visible unseen” is a game of hide-and-seek between public viewer and graffiti-inscriber, an ephemeral-violent aesthetic on an ephemeral-policed canvas. Graffiti-inscribers already submit to being forgotten, expect to be washed away; perhaps it’s a holy urban mandala created by gangster-type monks without Buddhism. [...] in its refusal to disappear it forces a discourse in the public imagination we are forced to see what we would rather not, to make sense of an encoded language that we cannot read on the level of meaning. it irritates, forces its agency on us, speaks outside and beyond semiotic reach. An epic font-size pervading the public’s imagination, illegible, I could just close my eyes, remain passive, drive past, abandon it beyond reach, push it further away beyond death walls. In Barcelona I watched a clean up crew wash walls with an awesome water hose but I was more intrigued by their bodies; not a distortion of limbs, not hieroglyph but also not entirely legible; the laboring body permanently erasing specters of the city, and of course they knew it was also an invitation for the ghosts to return. Graffiti is death’s little sister, is also an aporia. [...] Graffiti (fr GK -graph(os), something drawn or written, to diagram or chart) attempts to stage the impossible: to erase the essence of its own subjectivity. Graffiti is a cartography of ghosts, a mapping of elegiac rapture (the transporting of a person from one place to another, as in heaven) and rupture (the state of being broken open.) Dwelling is a fiction stasis. [...] The notion of the past as being something done with, a look-back event, inhibits the possibility of reading graffiti as rapture, as rupture. If graffiti posits history as always in the process of becoming undone. [...] Because what is the body, if not also a complex temple, an unstable site through which to negotiate subjects, materiality, economies, gods, and modes of representations? The site where we are all already belated. Graphein meaning “to write.” “Derrida says every archive makes a law, and the law of genre is its own rupture” (Bloch, 39). However, graffiti is an (non/anti)-archive of erasure due to (the politics of) washing out its subjectivity, which only adds onto (or is symptomatic of) its character. The inhibition of “reading graffiti as rapture, as rupture” is partly due to it being a “look-back” event in that it’s process involves scratching through layers to reveal previous specters underneath. Graffiti (as an ancient genre) has always been a thing of ‘becoming undone’, and therefore ‘belated and always in arrival’ (Levitsky). It’s a Dionysian activity done at night with it’s back turned toward us. "The specter [...] is of the visible, but of the invisible visible, it is the visibility of a body which is not present in flesh and blood [...] appearing for vision, to the brightness of day [...] something becomes almost visible which is visible only insofar as it is not visible in flesh and blood. It is a night visibility. As soon as there is a technology of the image, visibility brings night. It incarnates in a night body, it radiates in a night light" (Derrida & Stiegler, 115). (shrink)

Excerpt from La Notion d'Espace Le probleme de l'espace que nous nous proposons de traiter forme une partie integrante de la cosmologie. Il a sa place tout indiquee dans cette etude cosmologique, intitulee: les causes constitutives du monde mineral. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format (...) whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

Rapid Automatized Naming is considered a universal marker of developmental dyslexia and could also be helpful to identify a reading deficit in minority-language children, in which it may be hard to disentangle whether the reading difficulties are due to a learning disorder or a lower proficiency in the language of instruction. We tested reading and rapid naming skills in monolingual Good Readers, monolingual Poor Readers, and MLC, by using our new version of RAN, the RAN-Shapes, in 127 primary school students. (...) In line with previous research, MLC showed, on average, lower reading performances as compared to mGR. However, the two groups performed similarly to the RAN-Shapes task. On the contrary, the mPR group underperformed both in the reading and the RAN tasks. Our findings suggest that reading difficulties and RAN performance can be dissociated in MLC; consequently, the performance at the RAN-Shapes may contribute to the identification of children at risk of a reading disorder without introducing any linguistic bias, when testing MLC. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)