A comparative method of studying the biological bases of personality compares human trait dimensions with likely animal models in terms of genetic determination and common biological correlates. The approach is applied to the trait of sensation seeking, which is defined on the human level by a questionnaire, reports of experience, and observations of behavior, and on the animal level by general activity, behavior in novel situations, and certain types of naturalistic behavior in animal colonies. Moderately high genetic determination has been (...) found for human sensation seeking, and marked strain differences in rodents have been found in open-field behavior that may be related to basic differences in brain neurochemistry. Agonistic and sociable behaviors in both animals and humans and the trait measure of sensation seeking in humans have been related to certain common biological correlates such as gonadal hormones, monoamine oxidase (MAO), and augmenting of the cortical evoked potential.The monoamine systems in the rodent brain are involved in general activity, exploratory behavior, emotionality, socialization, dominance, sexual and consummately behaviors, and intracranial self-stimulation. Preliminary studies have related norepinephrine and enzymes involved in its production and degradation to human sensation seeking. A model is suggested that relates mood, behavioral activity, sociability, and clinical states to activity of the central catecholamine neurotransmitters and to neuroregulators and other transmitters that act in opposite ways on behavior or stabilize activity in the arousal systems. Stimulation and behavioral activity act on the catecholamine systems in a brain–behavior feedback loop. At optimal levels of catecholamine systems activity (CSA) mood is positive and activity and sociability are adaptive. At very low or very high levels of CSA mood is dysphoric, activity is restricted or stereotyped, and the organism is unsocial or aggressively antisocial. Novelty, in the absence of threat, may be rewarding through activation of noradrenergic neurons. (shrink)

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The emergence of the genetic counseling profession has allowed laypeople to understand and benefit from biological advances, and to make critical decisions about their application. The discipline of genetic counseling has been criticized from its very beginning, in particular because of its early association with the eugenics movement. This paper presents a critical and reflective overview of how genetic counseling is implicitly embedded in the history of eugenics but also counteracts past eugenic practices and ideas. After World War II, attempts (...) were made to distance genetic counseling from eugenics. The first definition of genetic counseling did not position this field as a medical encounter but "as a kind of genetic social work aimed primarily to provide people with an understanding of their family's genetics problems." This approach was a reaction to the genetic and social evolutionary ideas that informed eugenic theories during the first half of the 20th century. Professionals engaged in genetic counseling during the 1940s and1950s rejected eugenic practices, but there was still support for eugenics’ goals of improving heredity and eliminating disease. From the 1960s, genetic counseling underwent professionalization alongside feminization and a definition of core values. Among these values were nondirectiveness counseling and the autonomy of the counselee. The dark shadow of Nazi ideology and other eugenic practices, attempts to employ the historical responsibility of geneticists, and the dynamic medical, social, political, and educational changes of the 1960s and 1970s helped to frame approaches and delineate the goals and limits of the new profession of “genetic counseling.”. (shrink)

Since the onset of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, an array of off-label interventions has been used to treat patients, either provided as compassionate care or tested in clinical trials. There is a challenge in determining the justification for conducting randomised controlled trials over providing compassionate use in an emergency setting. A rapid and more accurate evaluation tool is needed to assess the effect of these treatments. Given the similarity to the Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) pandemic in Africa in 2014, we suggest (...) using a tool designed by the WHO committee in the aftermath of the EVD pandemic: Monitored Emergency Use of Unregistered and Investigational Interventions (MEURI). Considering the uncertainty around SARS-CoV-2, we propose using an improved MEURI including the Plan–Do–Study–Act tool. This combined tool may facilitate dynamic monitoring, analysing, re-evaluating and re-authorising emergency use of unproven treatments and repeat it in cycles. It will enable adjustment and application of outcomes to clinical practice according to changing circumstances and increase the production of valuable data to promote the best standard of care and high-quality research—even during a pandemic. (shrink)

Being and Time's fundamental ontoogy and existentialism both rest on the A Potiori Claim, which states that originary temporality is, although non-sequential, a genuine and basic concept of time from which we derive our more ordinary, sequential concept of time. In this paper, I develop a new reading and defense of this claim against the readings of William Blattner, which ties originary temporality too tightly to the particular roles and identities we live out and must therefore find Heidegger's project a (...) failure, and Tony Fisher, who implies that our various roles and identities hang together in time in a merely accidental and non-rational way. On my reading, originary temporality is the structure of Dasein's characteristic activity of existential commitment. Through this activity, we each work out, in our own case, what it takes to embody the capacity for sense-making, at all. Here, the non-sequentiality of originary temporality reflects the way in which commitments are revised and sustained through time, while the sequence of nows derives from our need to embody our commitment in a single life that negotiates among the practical demands that our various identities make of us. (shrink)

Being and Time argues that we, as Dasein, are defined not by what we are, but by our way of existing, our “existentiell possibilities.” I diagnose and respond to an interpretive dilemma that arises from Heidegger's ambiguous use of this latter term. Most readings stress its specific sense, holding that Dasein has no general essence and is instead determined by some historically contingent way of understanding itself and the meaning of being at large. But this fails to explain the sense (...) in which Being and Time is a work of fundamental ontology, concluding in Heidegger's claim to have found the meaning of Dasein's being in the concept of originary temporality. On the other hand, readings that stress the general sense of “existentiell possibilities” find Heidegger on a fruitless quest for the transcendental conditions necessary for Dasein's existence, which seems to founder on the claims that Dasein is constitutively thrown, factical, and “in-each-case-mine” [jemeinig]. Both readings are problematic and, I contend, result from a failure to disambiguate and explain the ontologically unique relationship between the specific and general aspects of Dasein's essence. I argue that we can better explain this relationship, Heidegger's method for investigating it, and the sense in which Dasein has an essence that is open to philosophical investigation, if we read Being and Time's ontology of Dasein in terms of what Anton Ford calls “categorial” genus-species relationships. (shrink)

The ArgumentWritten as one book, Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-Century England has become two. One book, treating Puritanism and science, has since become “The Merton Thesis.” The other, treating shifts of interest among the sciences and problem choice within the sciences, has been less consequential. This paper proposes that neglect of one part of the monograph has skewed readers' understanding of the whole. Society and culture contributed to institutionalization of science and the directions it took, neither one exclusively. Four (...) aspects of the neglected chapters are examined: their theoretical underpinnings, the conceptions providing foundations for this part specifically and for the monograph as a whole; their comparative neglect, attributed partly to the absence of a cognitive constituency for their claims; the problem of problem choice in science in Merton's work; and the Merton monograph and later social constructionism:their differences and affinities. (shrink)

This article examines Xenophon’s suggestion for conducting cavalry displays in Eq. mag. 3 and develops the argument that the text is a significant document of Xenophon’s thought about political performativity as well as of 4th century Athenian political culture. I argue that one of Xenophon’s strategies to reform the relationship between the Athenian demos and the ideologically fraught elite institution of the cavalry was to conduct public displays that draw on the aesthetics and formal features of New Dithyramb. On the (...) basis of my analysis, I argue that understanding political performances requires closer attention to specific audience expectations, aesthetic norms, and cultural power, and suggest that Xenophon was a political thinker and actor who was highly attentive to such issues in the Athenian context. (shrink)

If we interpret ‘death’ in Heidegger not, like most readers, as the end of a particular person’s life or culture’s way of life, but more broadly as the absolute end of any capacity for sense-making whatsoever, I argue, we can best account for its role in Being and Time’s ontology of Dasein; find a systematic place for the various, more ‘local’ forms of breakdown that get called ‘death’ on the most prominent readings of the text; and highlight the continuity between (...) Heidegger’s early concerns about death and his later worries about nihilism and the technological worldview he calls ‘enframing’ (Gestell). (shrink)

Drawing from Marx’s 18 th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and the work of Carl Schmitt, this article proposes a framework that critically diagnoses the plebiscitary, executive-centered conception of democratic representation as a species of political theology. I reconstruct Marx’s comments on plebiscitarianism in The 18 th Brumaire through his earlier critique of political theology in ‘On the Jewish Question’, in order to contrast two modes of representation. The first, ‘ theological’ representation, is a symbolic incarnation of the unity of the (...) people in the person of the executive. The second, ‘ agonistic’ representation, develops only in the legislative assembly as a forum for translating social antagonisms and divisions into political ones. Turning from Marx to the writings of Carl Schmitt on plebiscitarianism, and to more recent analyses of populism, I show how these logics of political-theological versus antagonistic representation can function in different political contexts than the one Marx diagnosed. In conclusion, I argue that plebiscitarian democracy is neither an innocuous feature of institutions, nor a decisionist democratic alternative to liberal parliamentarism. Rather, it is a contemporary expression of political theology, premised upon depoliticization and the exclusion of social antagonisms from the sphere of democratic representation. (shrink)

Boganmeldelse af Sofie Lene Baks ”Racismeparagraffen” (Århus: Århus Universitetsforlag, 2021).

Depue & Morrone-Strupinsky (D&M-S) have elaborated a detailed description of the motivational system for affiliation and its neurological basis. This “bottom-up” approach, based almost entirely on studies of nonhuman species, fails to connect with personality differences at the human level. A “top-down” approach looks for common biological markers in human and nonhuman species and relates these to behavior in both.

Is a generalized positive incentive motivation a construct appropriate to the human level of behavior or would sensation or novelty seeking be a more appropriate one? Is positive incentive motivation, or susceptibility to signals of reward, a mechanism related only to extraversion traits including sociability, activation, social potency, and positive affect? Research shows that susceptibility to reward is related to impulsive sensation seeking and aggression as well as sociability and an aroused type of positive affect. Comparative and indirect human correlates (...) suggest an involvement of dopaminergic reactivity in sensation seeking and sociability. (shrink)

Psychopathy has as its central traits socialization, sensation seeking, and impulsivity. These are combined in a supertrait: Impulsive Unsocialized Sensation Seeking (ImpUSS). Secondary types are defined by combinations of ImpUSS and neuroticism or sociability. All broad personality traits have both genetic and environmental determination, and therefore different etiologies (primary as genetic, secondary as environmental) for primary and secondary sociopathy are unlikely.