The Research Excellence Framework of the Higher Education Funding Council for England is taking place in 2013, its three key elements being outputs, impact, and “quality of the research environment”. Impact will be assessed using case studies that “may include any social, economic or cultural impact or benefit beyond academia that has taken place during the assessment period.”1 Medical ethics in the UK still does not have its own cognate assessment panel—for example, bioethics or applied ethics—unlike in, for example, Australia. (...) Several researchers in medical ethics have reported to the Institute of Medical Ethics that during the internal preliminary stage of the Research Excellence Framework several medical schools have decided to include only research that entails empirical data gathering. Thus, conceptual papers and ethical analysis will be excluded. The arbitrary exclusion of reasoned discussion of medical ethics issues as a proper subject for medical research unless it is based on empirical data gathering is conceptually mistaken. “Empirical ethics” is, of course, a legitimate component of medical ethics research, but to act as though it is the only legitimate component suggests, at best, a partial understanding of the nature of ethics in general and medical ethics in particular. It also mistakenly places medicine firmly on only one side of the science/humanities “two cultures” divide instead of in its rightful place bridging the divide. Given the emphasis by the General Medical Council on medical ethics in properly preparing “tomorrow’s doctors,” we urge medical schools to find a way of using the upcoming Research Excellence Framework to highlight the expertise residing in their ethicist colleagues. We are confident that appropriate assessment will reveal work of high quality that can be shown to have social and cultural impact and benefit beyond academia, as required by the framework. (shrink)

In this study, we used data from the second wave of Midlife in the United States Study, MIDUS Biomarkers and MIDUS 3. We applied the serial mediation model to explore the serial mediating effects of perceived stress and depressive symptoms on the relationship between sleep quality and life satisfaction. A total of 945 participants were included in our study. The total indirect effect of sleep quality on life satisfaction through perceived stress, depressive symptoms and the combination of perceived stress and (...) depressive symptoms accounted for within the overall model was 45.5%. At the intervention level, programs designed to improve the level of life satisfaction among adults should focus on perceived stress and depressive symptoms. The prevention of perceived stress and depression contributes to improving life satisfaction and wellbeing. The serial mediation results should be confirmed by further longitudinal study. (shrink)

This collection, the first of its kind, brings together specially commissioned academic essays to mark fifty years since the death of John Kennedy Toole.

State A commits aggression against state B, and is called upon to remedy the serious damage that it has caused. (Perhaps B has successfully resisted the aggression, or perhaps some third party, C,...

The well-established finding that siblings growing up in the same family turn out to be very different from one another has puzzled psychologists and behavior geneticists alike. In this theoretical note we describe the possible ontogeny and phylogeny of a sibling differentiation mechanism. We suggest that sibling competition for parental investment results in sibling differentiation on a number of characteristics, producing different developmental trajectories within families. Variations in developmental trajectories within families may have had fitness advantages in ancestral environments because(a) (...) sibling competition for extrafamilial resources would be reduced and(b) these variations would be suited to environments containing a variety of niches or to changing environments. Predictions derived from this model and an example of an application to attachment theory are presented. (shrink)

My goal in this essay is to demonstrate the continuing relevance of Hegel’s theory of right for contemporary emancipatory politics. Specifically, my contention is that Hegel’s Philosophy of Right can and should be read as defending the possibility of principled, decisive side-taking in political struggles. By revisiting Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, I seek to demonstrate four interconnected theses: that the will’s freedom is both a) the fundamental principle upon which genuinely political change can be grounded, and b) essentially external to, (...) or subtractable from, any and all social alignments; but is nonetheless c) necessarily actualized in specifically political institutions, and finally d) only truly actualized through emancipatory reforms of such institutions. In combination, these four theses demonstrate that politics is the principled, decisive and emancipatory reform of existent political institutions through historically determined political movements. Having established these basic theses, I will examine how the philosophy and politics of ‘prescriptive reform’ operates in practice. (shrink)

My goal in this paper is to counter an increasingly common interpretation of the most famous moment in Hegel's thought - the struggle for recognition. Specifically, through a close reading of the movement from self-conscious desire to the moment of struggle, I seek to refute three key claims: a) that self-consciousness finds itself, qua determining center, challenged by another desire, b) that self-consciousness responds to this challenge by seeking to somehow subjugate the other as determining desire, and c) that self-consciousness (...) risks its own life primarily as a consequence of seeking the death of the other. I close with some (somewhat speculative) comments on the import of this reversal for understanding the role of recognition in Hegel's thought. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}. (shrink)

I have long concluded that psychologists seek 'facts' but don't care about 'truth'; while philosophers seek 'truth' but don't care about 'facts'. After attending Tucson-2002, I would create a third reckless stereotype: eastern philosophy seek 'enlightenment' but don't care about 'facts' or 'truth'. To avoid this seeming to be the equal-opportunity put-down that it really is, let me amend that to: scientists seek inductive 'facts' about consciousness, western philosophers seek deductive 'truth' about consciousness, and eastern philosophers seek transcendent 'enlightenment' - (...) to grow, transcend, or lose my/our own consciousness. To make it even more complicated, there are - obliquely bridging the facts, truth, and enlightenment camps - brain-probing anaesthesiologists and others advocating an intriguing package of quantum mechanics, microtubules, pan-psychism and causation-running-backwards-in- time. H-E-L-P! With the echoes of the conference still in my mental ears, I dedicate this report to Mountcastle, Maharishi, and Monty Python. (shrink)

The principal findings of experimental economics are that impersonal exchange in markets converges in repeated interaction to the equilibrium states implied by economic theory, under information conditions far weaker than specified in the theory. In personal, social, and economic exchange, as studied in two-person games, cooperation exceeds the prediction of traditional game theory. This book relates these two findings to field studies and applications and integrates them with the main themes of the Scottish Enlightenment and with the thoughts of F. (...) A. Hayek. (shrink)

Mark Vernon links the resources of the philosophical tradition with numerous illustrations from modern culture to ask what friendship is and how it relates to sex, work, politics and spirituality. Unusually, he argues that Plato and Nietzsche, as much as Aristotle and Aelred, should be put center stage. Their penetrating and occasionally tough insights are invaluable if friendship is to be a full, not merely sentimental, way of life for today.

Examines independent documentary film production in India within a political context.

Hydrogen is troublesome in any periodic table classification. This being so it may as well be placed in a position that confers desirable attributes to the arrangement of the elements, while notionally recognising its lineage to the group 1 alkali metals and the group 17 halogens. Since the noble gases bridge the halogens and the alkali metals, and hydrogen encompasses the transition from the alkali metals to the halogens, there is more to the idea of hydrogen over helium. (Meyer 1870, (...) p. 357) (Proust 1927, p. 559). (shrink)

The book also points to some of the ways in which polities currently termed 'liberal democracies' fall clearly short of the values that might legitimize them.

Michel Foucault’s notion of “biopower” has been a highly fertile concept in recent theory, influencing thinkers worldwide across a variety of disciplines and concerns. In The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Foucault famously employed the term to describe “a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them.” With this volume, Vernon W. Cisney and Nicolae Morar bring together leading contemporary scholars to explore the (...) many theoretical possibilities that the concept of biopower has enabled while at the same time pinpointing their most important shared resonances. Situating biopower as a radical alternative to traditional conceptions of power—what Foucault called “sovereign power”—the contributors examine a host of matters centered on life, the body, and the subject as a living citizen. Altogether, they pay testament to the lasting relevance of biopower in some of our most important contemporary debates on issues ranging from health care rights to immigration laws, HIV prevention discourse, genomics medicine, and many other topics. (shrink)

Examines allegory in H lderlin's later work, exploring subjects such as Freud and Derrida's views of mourning, and offering original readings of works including Impossible Ode, Mnemosyne, and The Churchyard. Originally published in German as Laub voll Trauer: H lderlins spSte Allegorie in 1991 by Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Annotation c. by Book News.

The questions that my paper shall pursue are: 1) What path leads from Deleuze’s early writings to his latter-day conception of a life, and 2) What can such a conception of life mean? Our path will trace a reversal and a return, respectively, through phenomenology to Bergson. For Deleuze, a genuine concept of a life is thinkable, only when the phenomenological subject, which Deleuze considers an illusion, has been jettisoned, reabsorbed into the flux of immanence. This implies a return to (...) a century-old philosophical renewal, namely, the reformulation of the experience of time. (shrink)

Published in 1967, Voice and Phenomenon marked a crucial turning point in Derrida's thinking: the culmination of a 15-year-long engagement with the phenomenological tradition. It also introduced the concepts and themes that would become deconstruction. Voice and Phenomenon is a short book, but it can be an overwhelming text, particularly for inexperienced readers of Derrida's work. This is the first guide to clearly explain the structure of his argument, step by step.

The particular fascination of butterfly wings for developmental biologists (and others) lies in their spectacular array of colour patterns. The evolutionary and developmental relationships between these patterns have been analysed and we know something of the cell interactions involved in their formation(1). Now butterfly homologues of Drosophila wing‐patterning genes have been identified, and their expression patterns offer the first clues to the molecular mechanisms which specify wing colour patterns(2).

The formation of segments in the Drosophila early embryo is understood in greater detail than any other complex developmental process. Now, by studying other types of insect embryo, we can hope to deduce something of the ancestral mechanism of segmentation and the ways in which it has been modified in evolution. The parasitic wasp, Copidosoma floridanum, is spectacularly atypical of insects in that the small egg cell divides extensively, with no initial syncytial phase, and forms eventually some 2000 embryos(1). This (...) process raises intriguing questions about the control of embryonic polarity and segmentation. (shrink)

In this essay, we read Derrida’s Theory and Practice seminar against the backdrop of the theme of the “death of philosophy,” prominent in 1960s French philosophy. This theme takes two forms—one Nietzschean-Heideggerian and the other Hegelian-Marxian. We summarize both before turning to Derrida’s treatment of Althusser’s views on the Hegelian-Marxian form of this death. Althusser posits a distinction between theory in the general sense and Theory as a designation for Marxist dialectical materialism. Derrida gives two specific criticisms of Althusser that (...) we discuss: (1) Althusser commits himself to a tautology, by arguing that Theory only makes explicit what is implicit already in Marxist practice; (2) Althusser ultimately establishes the priority of practice over theory. We refute both of these charges before concluding that, prior to the distinction between theory and practice, is the world itself; and presenting itself to us as unthinkable, the world places the demands upon us that it be engaged with, in theory and in practice. (shrink)

The extraordinary story of Krishnamurti, hailed early in life as the messiah for the 20th century, is told here in the light of a century of changing spiritual attitudes. It is a tale of mysticism, sexual scandals, religious fervor and chicanery, out of which emerged one of the most influential thinkers of modern times. Krishnamurti was "discovered" as a young boy on a beach in India by members of the Theosophical Society, convinced that they had found the new world leader, (...) a spiritual savior as historic and as influential as Jesus himself. By the 1920s he was attracting worldwide press attention and people flocked to his talks in the thousands. In 1922, Krishnamurti broke with the society and set out on a teaching mission of his own as a secular philosopher of spirituality. He ultimately had a career that spanned six decades, founded seven schools, published 50 books and encompassed thousands of talks. This extraordinary story is told for the first time by Roland Vernon in the full light of 20th-century attitudes in a narrative that is as compelling as any novel. (shrink)

While neo-classical analysis works well for studying impersonal exchange in markets, it fails to explain why people conduct themselves the way they do in their personal relationships with family, neighbors, and friends. In Humanomics, Nobel Prize-winning economist Vernon L. Smith and his long-time co-author Bart J. Wilson bring their study of economics full circle by returning to the founder of modern economics, Adam Smith. Sometime in the last 250 years, economists lost sight of the full range of human feeling, (...) thinking, and knowing in everyday life. Smith and Wilson show how Adam Smith's model of sociality can re-humanize twenty-first century economics by undergirding it with sentiments, fellow feeling, and a sense of propriety - the stuff of which human relationships are built. Integrating insights from The Theory of Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations into contemporary empirical analysis, this book shapes economic betterment as a science of human beings. (shrink)

In this paper I employ the notion of the ‘thought of the outside’ as developed by Michel Foucault, in order to defend the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze against the criticisms of ‘elitism,’ ‘aristocratism,’ and ‘political indifference’—famously leveled by Alain Badiou and Peter Hallward. First, I argue that their charges of a theophanic conception of Being, which ground the broader political claims, derive from a misunderstanding of Deleuze’s notion of univocity, as well as a failure to recognize the significance of the (...) concept of multiplicity in Deleuze’s thinking. From here, I go on to discuss Deleuze’s articulation of the ‘dogmatic image of thought,’ which, insofar as it takes ‘recognition’ as its model, can only ever think what is already solidified and sedimented as true, in light of existing structures and institutions of power. Then, I examine Deleuze’s reading of Foucault and the notion of the ‘thought of the outside,’ showing the ‘outside’ as the unthought that lies at the heart of thinking itself, as both its condition and its impossibility. Insofar as it is essential to thinking itself, finally, I argue that the passage of thought to the outside is not an absolute flight out of this world, as Hallward claims, but rather, a return of the different that constitutes the Self for Deleuze. Thinking is an ongoing movement of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, or as Foucault says, death and life. Thinking, as Deleuze understands it, is essentially creative; it reconfigures the virtual, thereby literally changing the world. Thinking is therefore, according to Deleuze, thoroughly political. (shrink)

Consciousness is central to what we study in psychology and how we study it. This paper provides a description of the fundamental features and processes of consciousness. Based on Husserl's phenomenology, it begins with a description of Husserl's two most foundational, phenomenological claims: that we 'see' conscious acts, and that we 'see' that we 'see' them. Upon this footing, I explore two forms of skepticism, and I demonstrate their inherent problems. With skepticism described, I explicate an ontology of consciousness. First, (...) I provide a "presentational" model of consciousness that depicts the relation between conscious acts and the objects of consciousness. Second, I explain the importance of "Evidenz." Third, I provide a description of the ubiquitous nature of essences and their importance for a model of consciousness. Fourth, I briefly explain Husserl's account of transcendence. And finally, I describe intentionality and provide a clarification of the nature and function of ideas. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Abstract:In this essay we provide a brief account and interpretation of The Theory of Moral Sentiments showing that it departs fundamentally from contemporary patterns of thought in economics that are believed to govern individual behavior in small groups, and contains strong testable propositions governing the expression of that behavior. We also state a formal representation of the model for individual choice of action, apply the propositions to the prediction of actions in trust games, report two experiments testing these predictions, and (...) interpret the results in terms directly related to the model. In short, we argue that the system of sociability developed by Adam Smith provides a coherent non-utilitarian model that is consistent with the pattern of results in trust games, and leads to testable new predictions, some of which we test. (shrink)