Biblical discourses of divine law -- Greco-Roman discourses of law -- Bridging the gap: divine law in Hellenistic and Second temple Jewish sources -- Minding the gap: Paul -- The "truth" about Torah -- The (ir)rationality of Torah -- The flexibility of Torah -- Natural law in Rabbinic sources?

Although evidence of teaching behaviour has been identified in some nonhuman species, human teaching appears to be unique in terms of both the breadth of contexts within which it is observed, and in its responsiveness to needs of the learner. Similarly, cultural evolution is observable in other species, but human cultural evolution appears strikingly distinct. This has led to speculation that the evolutionary origins of these capacities may be causally linked. Here we provide an overview of contrasting perspectives on the (...) relationship between teaching and cultural evolution in humans, and briefly review previous research which suggests that cumulative culture can occur without teaching. We then report the results of a novel experimental study in which we investigated how the benefits of teaching may depend on the complexity of the skill to be acquired. Participants were asked to tie knots of varying complexity. In our Teaching condition, opportunities to interact with an experienced partner aided transmission of the most complex knots, but not simpler equivalents, relative to exposure to completed products alone, and also relative to information about the process of completion. We conclude by considering the plausibility of various accounts of the evolutionary relationship between teaching and cultural evolution in humans. (shrink)

Controversy persists over the ethics of compensating research participants and providing posttrial benefits to communities in developing countries. Little is known about residents' views on these subjects. In this study, interviews about compensation and posttrial benefits from a hypothetical HIV vaccine trial were conducted in Uganda’s Rakai District. Most respondents said researchers owed the community posttrial benefits and research compensation, but opinions differed as to what these should be. Debates about posttrial benefits and compensation rarely include residents' views like these, (...) but future ones should. (shrink)

In his book, Being?in?the?World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I, Hubert Dreyfus argues that Heidegger's concept of authenticity is incomprehensible. He maintains that there are two conflicting accounts of inauthenticity in Being and Time. He elucidates what he calls the ?structural account? of inauthenticity and being?in?the?world in the main body of his work, and then criticizes what he calls the ?motivational account? in an Appendix. Because he overlooks certain textual evidence and underemphasizes fleeing and the role of (...) choice, his interpretation is neither complete nor compelling. I offer an alternative interpretation of authenticity. While Heidegger's notion of authenticity may still be weakened by other flaws, it is not incomprehensible in the sense that Dreyfus contends. (shrink)

Consideration of affective dimensions beyond arousal may be useful for a more precise understanding of the effects of emotional events on episodic memory. As highlighted by Kensinger (2009), the valence of an event may differentially impact the accuracy of its recall. Paralleling work on attention, we propose that the relevance of an event or stimulus for survival may also importantly modulate memory accuracy. However, few memory studies to date have accounted for motivational relevance, and the stimuli employed in most studies (...) are not matched on this dimension. (shrink)

Concerns about the influence of financial interests on research have increased, along with research dollars from pharmaceutical and other for-profit companies. Researchers’ financial ties to industry sponsors of research have also increased. Financial interests in biomedical research could influence research design, conduct, or reporting, and could compromise data integrity, participant safety, or both. Investigators’ financial ties with for-profit companies may influence reported scientific results, and may have compromised research participant safety.Disclosure is one commonly accepted method of managing financial relationships in (...) order to minimize possible threats to scientific objectivity, the safety of research participants, or public trust in the integrity of clinical research. Disclosure is presumed useful to the extent that “it gives those who would be affected, or who are otherwise in a good position to assess the risks, information they need to make their own decision.”. (shrink)

This article suggests a way to circumvent some of the problems that follow from the lack of consensus on a definition of emotion (Izard, 2010; Kleinginna & Kleinginna, 1981) and emotion regulation (Cole, Martin, & Dennis, 2004) by adopting a conceptual framework based on discrete emotions theory and focusing on specific emotions. Discrete emotions theories assume that neural, affective, and cognitive processes differ across specific emotions and that each emotion has particular motivational and regulatory functions. Thus, efforts at regulation should (...) target the specific dysregulated emotions. The positive effects of emotion regulation are more likely to be optimized when they result from or lead to emotion utilization—the constructive use of the energy of emotion arousal. Effective processes for regulation differ for basic emotions and emotion schemas. This article identifies neural systems that facilitate emotion experiences and emotion regulation processes. It considers the implications of the developmental change from basic emotions to emotion schemas, and also briefly discusses the effects of interventions on changes in emotion knowledge, emotion regulation, and social and emotional competence. (shrink)

The essays in this special issue of Centaurus examine overlooked agents and sites of knowledge production beyond the academy and venues of industry- and government-sponsored research. By using gender as a category of analysis, they uncover scientific practices taking place in locations such as the kitchen, the nursery, and the storefront. Because of historical gendered patterns of exclusion and culturally derived sensibilities, the authors in this volume find that significant contributions to science were made in unexpected places and that these (...) were often made by women. The shift in focus to these different sites and different actors broadens the spectrum of what counts as science and where science happens. That is, in moving beyond the parameters of formal academic structures, this special issue seeks to recast the ways in which the production of science itself is defined and to engage readers in the redesign of the boundaries of our discipline. (shrink)

Niedenthal et al. recognize that cultural differences are important when interpreting facial expressions. Nonetheless, many of their core observations derive more from individualistic cultures than from collectivist cultures. We discuss two examples from the latter: (1) lower rates of mutual eye contact, and (2) the ubiquity of specific These examples suggest constraints on the assumptions and applicability of the SIMS model.

L’Angleterre du xviie siècle connut un intense bouillonnement politique et religieux dont le paroxysme se situe au milieu du siècle, lors de la première révolution anglaise. De profondes aspirations égalitaires s’exprimèrent au sein de certains groupes. Les sectes dissidentes qui émergèrent alors offrirent à des individus, jusque-là condamnés au silence par leur position sociale, la possibilité de prendre la parole et la plume pour s’exprimer publiquement. Les femmes furent nombreuses à se sa...

It is widely known that one of the projects that was most preoccupying the late, and much regretted, Alexander Kazhdan in his latter years was a study of Byzantine literature that would bring this field into the modern era. For far too long Byzantine literature, he asserted, had been encased in the strait-jacket imposed by Krumbacher's magisterial Geschichte. Byzantinists were constrained by a Handbuch mentality whose bonds had been confirmed by the three volumes that replaced Krumbacher's single tome: Beck on (...) ‘Theologische Literatur’ and ‘Volksliteratur’ and Hunger on high-style secular literature. However humane the tone might appear at times in these reference works (Hunger's contributions being particularly noteworthy), nothing could disguise the fact that these books were taxonomic catalogues. Byzantium's literary output was categorised by genre, genres largely imposed by modern historians and not necessarily recognisable to any Byzantine: authors were disposed under a series of at times arbitrary divisions and it was virtually impossible to have a sense of any individual's total output; Psellos was perhaps the most notoriously splintered example. Furthermore, the content of these catalogues was resolutely pragmatic: names, dates, works, editions, contents. Qualitative assessments were eschewed, there was little interpretation of literary movements. (shrink)

The theory that practical reasoning is wholly instrumental says that the only practical function of reason is to tell agents the means to their ends, while their ends are fixed by something other than reason itself. In this essay I argue that Hume has an instrumentalist theory of practical reasoning. This thesis may sound as unexciting as the contention that Kant is a rationalist about morality. For who would have thought otherwise? After all, isn't the ‘instrumentalist’ line in contemporary discussions (...) of this topic descended directly from Hume himself? Contrast the following recent comment from Robert Audi's book on practical reasoning, holding the standard line, with the comment from Christine Korsgaard following it:Hume's conception of practical reasoning, so far as we can formulate it, can be located within … the foundationalist account of motivation in which reason plays the instrumentalist role … by virtue of arousing and directing our desires. (shrink)

A considerable amount of academic attention has been paid to John Kennedy and to his group of advisors during the Cuban missile crisis. Next to no attention has been accorded other bodies of the Kennedy White House that had daily access to a President's most private moments and possibly to his important deliberations. Drawing on Richard Reeves' account of President Kennedy: Profile of Power, I revisit the early 1960s looking for bodies of power that are culturally sexed female by others (...) and compelled into being as workaday secretaries and confidants, and para-Everythings for Kennedy. In doing so, I draw on the feminist body theorizing of Judith Butler, Rosi Braidotti and Elizabeth Grosz, as well as the evocations of bodies in important but abjected places featured in Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale. After constructing the historically broad category of the handmaid to Washington power, I reread constructions of decision-making in the Cuban missile crisis offered by Graham Allison and conclude that the feint of mancentred Washington masks bodies given the locations, skills and resources to ooze into spaces of decision and power canonically forbidden to them. (shrink)

Ce recueil d’essais rassemblés par une équipe internationale de chercheurs examine la représentation des hommes dans les œuvres de neuf écrivaines de la Belle Époque. Le volume est composé de onze essais sur neuf écrivaines dont certaines, telle Colette, sont toujours célèbres. La plupart cependant sont beaucoup moins connues aujourd’hui, sauf par des spécialistes. Pourtant, pendant leur époque, elles furent les auteures de best-sellers ou couronnées de prix, bien qu’elles aient dû faire face...

Neo-sentimentalism is the view that to judge that something has an evaluative property is to judge that some affective or emotional response is appropriate with respect to it. The difficulty in assessing neo-sentimentalism is that it allows for radically different versions. My aim is to spell out what I take to be its most plausible version. I distinguish between a normative version, which takes the concept of appropriateness to be normative, and a descriptive version, which claims that appropriateness in emotions (...) is a matter of correspondence to evaluative facts. I argue that the latter version can satisfy the normativity requirement that follows from Moore’s Open Question Argument, that it is superior to the former with respect to the explanatory role of values, and with respect to the Wrong Kind of Reason Objection. Finally, I argue that the circularity that is involved is not vicious: understood epistemically, neo-sentimentalism remains instructive. (shrink)

Four-month-old infants can perceive bimodally speciiied events. They respond to relationships between the optic and acoustic stimulation that carries information about an object. Infants can do this by detecting the temporal synchrony of an object’s sounds and its optically specified impacts. They are sensitive both to the common tempo and to the simultaneity of such sounds and visible impacts. These findings support the view that intermodal perception depends at least in part on the detection of invariant relationships in patterns of (...) light and sound. (shrink)

In arguing about justice, different sides often accept common moral principles, but reach different conclusions about justice because they disagree about facts. I argue that motivated reasoning, epistemic injustice, and ideologies of injustice support unjust institutions by entrenching distorted representations of the world. Working from a naturalistic conception of justice as a kind of social contract, I suggest some strategies for discovering what justice demands by counteracting these biases. Moral sentiments offer vital resources to this end.

This book explores the tradition of the 'science of man' in French medicine of the era 1750-1850, focusing on controversies about the nature of the 'physical-moral' relation and their effects on the role of medicine in French society. Its chief purpose is to recover the history of a holistic tradition in French medicine that has been neglected because it lay outside the mainstream themes of modern medicine, which include experimental, reductionist, and localistic conceptions of health and disease. Professor Williams also (...) challenges existing historiography, which argues that the 'anthropological' approach to medicine was a short-term by-product of the leftist politics of the French Revolution. This work argues instead that the medical science of man long outlived the Revolution, that it spanned traditional ideological divisions, and that it reflected the shared aim of French physicians, whatever their politics, to claim broad cultural authority in French society. (shrink)

In this discipline-redefining book, Elizabeth T. Hurren maps the post-mortem journeys of bodies, body-parts, organs, and brains, inside the secretive culture of modern British medical research after WWII as the bodies of the deceased were harvested as bio-commons. Often the human stories behind these bodies were dissected, discarded, or destroyed in death. Hidden Histories of the Dead recovers human faces and supply-lines in the archives that medical science neglected to acknowledge. It investigates the medical ethics of organ donation, the (...) legal ambiguities of a lack of fully-informed consent and the shifting boundaries of life and re-defining of medical death in a biotechnological era. Hurren reveals the implicit, explicit and missed body disputes that took second-place to the economics of the national and international commodification of human material in global medical sciences of the Genome era. This title is also available as Open Access. (shrink)

One of Elizabeth Anscombe’s most decisive legacies is the rejection of modern legalistic morality, in the name of a rescue of Aristotelian-inspired natural normativity. However, as I will argue in this contribution, this legacy does not seem to have been fully collected, neither by those who, like Philippa Foot, are explicitly inspired by Anscombe’s work, nor by those who, while apparently opposing its assumptions, have also somehow recovered it by different routes, as emblematically does Christine Korsgaard in her (...) constitutivist proposal. In more detail, I aim to explore the relationship between teleology and normativity at the crossroads between neo-Aristotelian naturalism and constitutivism: both theories, though opposed, rest normativity on a link between function (the Aristotelian ergon) and practical reason and fail precisely in declining this relationship convincingly. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

I argue that our traditional conception of the duties imposed by human rights is unable to acknowledge the nature of many contemporary human rights violations. The traditional conception is based on a broadly deontological view according to which human rights impose primarily negative and perfect duties, and these duties are held to be specific prohibitions on certain kinds of actions . I argue that given this conception of the nature of the duties imposed by human rights, not only claims to (...) aid, but in addition, claims against many of the most serious and prevalent contemporary active harms will not count as genuine human rights claims. These harms increasingly result from extremely complex causal chains involving the behaviour of a huge number of agents, few or none of whom can be singled out as responsible for a serious harm to any specific victim. Institutional structures can have just as central a role to play in specifying and allocating responsibility for fulfilling many of the negative duties imposed by human rights as the positive duties. These structures can therefore be equally important in the realisation of both kinds of rights. Before the necessary institutional reforms have taken place, both kinds of rights are equally genuine, and ground the imperative of justice to reform existing social institutions. (shrink)

Khandro Rinpoche: A Needle Compassionately Sticking Out of a Cushion -- Dagmola Sakya: From the Palace to the Blood Bank -- Tenzin Palmo (Diane Perry): Sandpaper for the Ego -- Sangye Khandro (Nanci Gay Gustafson): Enlightenment Is a Full-time Job -- Pema Chödrön (Deirdre Blomfield-Brown): Relaxing into Groundlessness -- Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel: A Wonder Woman Hermit -- Chagdud Khadro (Jane Dedman): Like Iron Filings Drawn to a Magnet -- Karma Lekshe Tsomo (Patricia Zenn): Surfing to Realization -- Thubten Chodron (Cherry (...) Greene): A Rebel in Robes -- Roshi Joan Halifax: Fearless, Fierce, and Fragile -- Tsultrim Allione (Joan Rousmanière Ewing): The Enlightened Feminist -- Khandro Tsering Chödron: The Queen of Dakinis. (shrink)

The special concern we have for our future selves is often seen as making for a problem for psychological continuity theories, such as Derek Parfit's. On the basis of an account of the various kinds of procrastination, and of the ways imprudent procrastination involves harm to future selves, the paper argues that procrastinators often impose an uncompensated burden on their future selves, something that is best explained by a lack of concern for their future selves. Given this, the objections to (...) psychological continuity theories based on the idea of a special concern for our future selves are in serious trouble. (shrink)

The themes that emerge from these rich narratives by surgeons are familiar ones in the experiences of diverse health care providers. Questions about and difficulties with communication and with informed consent are common and troubling. Uncertainty was also a prevalent theme in these stories, uncertainty about the right thing to do or say and about how to treat the patients and families the surgeons wrote about. Uncertainty is a reality in medicine, and it is often said that medicine is an (...) art, not just a science. Although in medicine it is uncommon to find a situation so black and white that the course of action is obvious, this may be less true in surgery. Surgeons are prototypically confident in their recommendations. Yet, these surgeons poignantly describe uncertainty. Sometimes the uncertainty leads to careful reflection, taking a stand, or changing practice, and sometimes it lead to moral distress. (shrink)