Empathy is the combined ability to interpret the emotional states of others and experience resultant, related emotions. The relation between prefrontal electroencephalographic asymmetry and emotion in children is well known. The association between positive emotion (assessed via parent report), empathy (measured via observation), and second-by-second brain electrical activity (recorded during a pleasurable task) was investigated using a sample of one hundred twenty-eight 6- to 10-year-old children. Contentment related to increasing left frontopolar activation (p < .05). Empathic concern and positive empathy (...) related to increasing right frontopolar activation (ps < .05). A second form of positive empathy related to increasing left dorsolateral activation (p < .05). This suggests that positive affect and (negative and positive) empathy both relate to changes in prefrontal activity during a pleasurable task. (shrink)

Light and Kennison found that bias effects in the forced-choice perceptual identification of words occurred only in a subset of participants, those who claimed on a strategy questionnaire to be deliberately guessing words they had studied previously. McKoon and Ratcliff raised a number of objections to the proposal that bias effects are due to guessing strategies, citing difficulties in our statistical treatment of data, our use of subjective reports to classify participants, and our approach to the general problem of separating (...) implicit from explicit influences on performance. This article responds to these objections. (shrink)

Philosophers and geographers have converged on the topic of public space, fascinated and in many ways alarmed by fundamental changes in the way post-industrial societies produce space for public use, and in the way citizens of these same societies perceive and constitute themselves as a public. This volume advances this inquiry, making extensive use of political and social theory, while drawing intimate connections between political principles, social processes, and the commonplaces of our everyday environments.

The inaugural collection in an exciting new exchange between philosophers and geographers, this volume provides interdisciplinary approaches to the environment as space, place, and idea. Never before have philosophers and geographers approached each other's subjects in such a strong spirit of mutual understanding. The result is a concrete exploration of the human-nature relationship that embraces strong normative approaches to environmental problems.

Environmental Ethics: An Anthology brings together both classic and cutting-edge essays which have formed contemporary environmental ethics, ranging from the welfare of animals versus ecosystems to theories of the intrinsic value of nature.

For two and a half months in 1928, the Japanese philosopher Shûzô Kuki had weekly talks with a young French student of philosophy—Jean-Paul Sartre. In 1928, Kuki had just come to Paris after having studied with Heidegger and Husserl. Freshly ac­quainted with the new phenomenology, Kuki in­troduced Sartre to this emerging movement in philosophy. In a well-researched introductory essay, Stephen Light details the eight years Kuki spent in Europe in the 1920s, a period during which Kuki came to know Henri (...) Bergson, Heinrich Rickert, and Emile Brehier, as well as Husserl and Heidegger. Light includes translations of two of Kuki’s essays on time and often of his short essays on matters Japanese, culminating in the insightful “General Characteristics of French Philosophy.” None of the Kuki essays were previously available in English. The final section of the book is a facsimile of the never before published notebook Kuki used during his discussions with Sartre. (shrink)

An extended visual exploration of Brooklyn and its inhabitants viewed from a bus window frame. The project was conceived as a symbolic photographic portrait of America in this specific time of history, a time of transition and transformation deeply affected by the global economic crisis and its consequences on society, politics and culture.

Schizophrenia patients exhibit impairments across multiple clinical, cognitive, and functional domains. A fundamental abnormality of the timing and/or efficiency of neural processes across disparate brain regions (i.e., cortico-cortical communications) may underlie many of the deficits in schizophrenia. Because gamma synchrony is temporally correlated with many cognitive processes, probing patterns of gamma activation may shed light on the functional integrity of neural circuits in schizophrenia and related disorders.

Discussion of ecological restoration in environmental ethics has tended to center on issues about the nature and character of the values that may or may not be produced by restored landscapes. In this paper we shift the philosophical discussion to another set of issues: the social and political context in which restorations are performed. We offer first an evaluation of the political issues in the practice of restoration in general and second an assessment of the political context into which restoration (...) is moving. The former focuses on the inherent participatory capacity at the heart of restoration; the latter is concerned with the commodified (primarily in the United States) and nationalized (primarily in Canada) uses to which restoration is being put. By comparing these two areas of inquiry we provide a foundation for a critical assessment of the politics of restoration based on the politics in restoration. (shrink)

T. C. Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth (2001), tells the story of Tyrone Tierwater, a one time monkeywrencher and environmental avenger for “E. F.!” (Earth Forever!) who we first meet in 2025 in his mid-seventies. Tierwater is now working for a character based on Michael Jackson, who in his semi-retirement has employed the elder eco-warrior to help save some of the last remnants of a few dying species – warthogs, peccaries, hyenas, jackals, lions and what is likely the last (...) Patagoninan fox. The not too distant environmental future painted by Boyle is a disaster. Global warming has finally caught up to us with a vengeance and even the secure shores of the U.S. are wracked by unmitigated cycles of flooding and drought seriously degrading most semblances of life as we know it. To be sure, though, people, and some versions of progress, go on. While most affordable food and drink is limited to some combination of catfish and sake (very little else having survived decades of disastrous weather and a series of crop blights), and there are constant threats of new strains of life-threatening and highly contagious diseases, suburban development continues and new humans come into existence with the promise, at least in the developed world, of longer life spans. But Boyle does not give us anything like the overly optimistic views expressed by some conservative columnists who dismiss the need for global climate treaties; this is not an environmental future that is only felt with difficulty in the underdeveloped south requiring simpler economic readjustments for Americans without a substantial shift in lifestyle. The world.. (shrink)

As health care coverage gets more and more unfair by international standards, “Improving Fairness in Coverage Decisions” (Wynia et al. 2004) shows that the best of America's employers, unions, heal...

The collection of papers that comprise this thesis explore three sets of questions important to environmental philosophy, broadly construed. All three topics are explored through the theoretical device of environmental pragmatism, the argument that philosophical disagreements on environmental questions can sometimes be set aside in order to achieve compatible strategies to work toward improving environmental conditions. As part of this strategy, pragmatists also call for the abandonment of the existing prejudices of environmental philosophy, in particular nonanthropocentrism and commitments to moral (...) monism. Part I of the thesis looks at two sets of debates in environmental philosophy: the social ecology-deep ecology divide in political ecology, and the debate between monists and pluralists in environmental ethics. Both debates are used as a vehicle to advance the pragmatist position, as well as demonstrate the connection between this thesis and other attempts to articulate a workable form of pluralism in environmental philosophy. Next, the first half of Part II uses the pragmatist premise to launch applied investigations of two environmental questions: the privatization of environmental regulations, and the political appropriation of restoration ecology. The second half of Part II explores questions concerning urban space and political identity, which come to the center of environmental philosophy following a pragmatist assault on its existing prejudices. Finally, Part III continues the themes of the last half of Part II to look at issues concerning technology and built space, topics which have traditionally been ignored by environmental philosophers. These final chapters present a set of issues concerning space and place which must be integral to an environmental philosophy which has been tempered by pragmatic concerns. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉ Oublier Baudrillard? Pourquoi devrions-nous oublier un art qui, malgré sa remarquable sérénité et même sa nonchalance ostensible, s'acharne à nous dire quelque chose sur notre condition, un art qui ne craint ni d'investiguer, ni de raconter les terribles paradoxes de l'existence contemporaine et de la civilisation contemporaine, un art qui, aussi rare que cela puisse être, peut engendrer le paradoxe? ABSTRACT A respected commentator on contemporary French intellectual life, tells us that we should, perhaps, "forget Baudrillard" But why should (...) we forget such a subtle art as Baudrillard's? Why should we forget an art wich, for all its remarkable serenity and, even, ostensible nonchalance, remains impassioned to tell us something about our condition, an art fearing neither to investigate nor to narrate the terrible paradoxes of contemporary existence and contemporary civilization, indeed, an art wich, rare as this is, can bear paradox? (shrink)

Justifying involuntary psychiatric treatment on the basis of a judgment that a person lacks capacity is usually expressed in terms of a person’s ability to make a decision about his or her health and treatment. Typically, this relates to the ability to refuse treatment. Exactly what “capacity” means, however, and how one determines when another individual lacks capacity, or lacks sufficient capacity, in this context is particularly controversial, with the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities insisting (...) that involuntary treatment be abandoned altogether and capacity tests avoided.Capacity is a concept that has multiple meanings and applications across different disciplines and... (shrink)

This chapter discusses the methods of studying the nature of time, particularly the story method. It presents a discussion of time as related to identity and tells the story of a person put on trial for committing a murder five years ago who puts forward an unorthodox defense. The accused person claims to remember committing the murder, but argues that “the murderer is not the same person as me, for I have changed. I am not the same person as that (...) murderer of five years ago. Therefore you cannot punish me, for no one is guilty of a crime committed by someone else.” This defense, though not accepted by the court, raises the question of whether a person who changes over time, either physically or psychologically, remains the same person. (shrink)

Institutional corruption is a normative concept of growing importance that embodies the systemic dependencies and informal practices that distort an institution’s societal mission. An extensive range of studies and lawsuits already documents strategies by which pharmaceutical companies hide, ignore, or misrepresent evidence about new drugs; distort the medical literature; and misrepresent products to prescribing physicians. We focus on the consequences for patients: millions of adverse reactions. After defining institutional corruption, we focus on evidence that it lies behind the epidemic of (...) harms and the paucity of benefits. (shrink)