Within a broadly Thomistic frame, this paper shows how simple apophaticism in the theology of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite is the more fitting mode of knowing the triune God, beyond the use of all divine names. Specifically, we will proceed using the work of Father Bernard Lonergan, SJ on theological fittingness. After setting forth Father Lonergan's understanding of fittingness, the paper will proceed through Dionysius's cataphatic names, apophatic names, and apophatic silence. The cataphatic and apophatic names, while true, useful, and fittingly (...) said of God, will be shown to be imperfectly applied to God. As such, their fittingness pales in comparison to the simple silence of the intellect orientated towards God, despite such pure apophaticism's dissimilarity to normal human intellectual operations. (shrink)

L'Europe prétend être une personnalité culturelle née voilà des siècles dans l'Athènes des philosophes. Cette certitude est-elle lieu commun ou réalité vérifiée? Raymond Klibansky et David Pears ont dirigé, à la demande de l'Unesco, cette vaste enquête visant à dresser un état des lieux de la philosophie en Europe aujourd'hui. On y trouvera donc des inventaires, pays par pays, des grandes tendances et interrogations en philosophie, mais également, à partir de quelques coups de sonde très diversifiés - sur l'éthique (...) universaliste, les droits de l'homme, les nouvelles formes de rationalité scientifique, les rapports entre le langage et l'esprit ou bien encore l'enseignement comparé de la philosophie en Europe -, une des interrogations philosophiques entre pays, donc du dialogue pourtant nécessaire entre penseurs et intellectuels, par-delà les frontières nationales et culturelles. Au terme de cet étonnant voyage au pays des concepts, la conclusion inéluctable est bien : " Philosophes, encore un effort pour être européens... ". (shrink)

For the epic journey of autumn migration, long-distance migratory birds use innate and learned information and follow strict schedules imposed by genetic and epigenetic mechanisms, the details of which remain largely unknown. In addition, bird migration requires integrated action of different multisensory systems for learning and memory, and the hippocampus appears to be the integration center for this task. In previous studies we found that contrasting long-distance migratory flights differentially affected the morphological complexity of two types of hippocampus astrocytes. Recently, (...) a significant association was found between the latitude of the reproductive site and the size of the ADCYAP1 allele in long distance migratory birds. We tested for correlations between astrocyte morphological complexity, migratory distances, and size of the ADCYAP1 allele in three long-distance migrant species of shorebird and one non-migrant. Significant differences among species were found in the number and morphological complexity of the astrocytes, as well as in the size of the microsatellites of the ADCYAP1 gene. We found significant associations between the size of the ADCYAP1 microsatellites, the migratory distances, and the degree of morphological complexity of the astrocytes. We suggest that associations between astrocyte number and morphological complexity, ADCYAP1 microsatellite size, and migratory behavior may be part of the adaptive response to the migratory process of shorebirds. (shrink)

Psychiatry is rapidly adopting digital phenotyping and artificial intelligence/machine learning tools to study mental illness based on tracking participants’ locations, online activity, phone and text message usage, heart rate, sleep, physical activity, and more. Existing ethical frameworks for return of individual research results (IRRs) are inadequate to guide researchers for when, if, and how to return this unprecedented number of potentially sensitive results about each participant’s real-world behavior. To address this gap, we convened an interdisciplinary expert working group, supported by (...) a National Institute of Mental Health grant. Building on established guidelines and the emerging norm of returning results in participant-centered research, we present a novel framework specific to the ethical, legal, and social implications of returning IRRs in digital phenotyping research. Our framework offers researchers, clinicians, and Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) urgently needed guidance, and the principles developed here in the context of psychiatry will be readily adaptable to other therapeutic areas. (shrink)

Distils the principles of ethics for busy people and students, and shows how they can be applied without oversimplifying nor becoming overly theoretical. The book focuses on the need for a strong adherence to codes of corporate governance in a rapidly deregulating and globalizing world.

Associations between cardiorespiratory fitness and brain health in healthy older adults have been reported using a variety of cardiorespiratory fitness estimates. Using commonly used methods to determine CRF, we assessed the relationship between CRFe and executive function performance. Healthy older adults, underwent three CRF tests: a Maximal Graded Exercise Test performed on a cycle ergometer, the Rockport Fitness Walking Test, and a Non-Exercise Prediction Equation. Executive function was assessed by a computerized cognitive assessment using an N-Back task and a Stroop (...) task. Multiple hierarchical regression analyses were conducted to assess the relationship between different CRFe and executive function performance. Regardless of age and education, cardiorespiratory fitness estimated from the Maximal Graded Exercise Test and the Rockport Fitness Walking Test was significantly associated with the global switch cost. All CRFe were associated with the interference cost. No association was observed between CRFe and local switching costs or the updating costs. In the present study, not all subcomponents of executive function were related to CRFe. Interestingly, the executive functions that were associated with CRFe are those that are known to be the most affected by aging. (shrink)

As a discipline of its own, the philosophy of science can be traced back to the founding of its academic journals, some of which go back to the first half of the twentieth century. While the discipline has been the object of many historical studies, notably focusing on specific schools or major figures of the field, little work has focused on the journals themselves. Here, we investigate contemporary philosophy of science by means of computational text-mining approaches: we apply topic-modeling algorithms (...) to eight major philosophy of science journals, from the 1930s up until 2017. Based on the full-text content of some 15,897 articles, we identified 25 research themes and 8 thematic clusters that show how the research agenda of the philosophy of science has changed in its content over the course of the last eight decades, up to the philosophy of science we now know. We also show how each one of the journals contributed in its own way to this thematic evolution. (shrink)

This study provides evidence regarding the level of ethical cognition of business students at the entry to college as compared to a national norm. It also provides comparative evidence on the effects of group versus individual ethical cognition upon completion of a business ethics course. The Principled Score (P-score) from the Defining Issues Test (DIT) was used to measure the ethical cognition of a total sample of 301 business students (273 entering students plus 28 students in a business ethics course). (...) The results indicate that (1) business students are not significantly different from the national norms at entry to college and (2) group reasoning helps male students improve their P-scores significantly in the business ethics course at a loss of P-score (albeit not statistically significant) for female students. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Commentary on “Spiritual Experience and Psychopathology”Francis G. Lu (bio), David Lukoff (bio), and Robert P. Turner (bio)Jackson and Fulford have written an impor-tant paper which addresses an area of increasing interest in the United States—the relationship between religious/spiritual experiences and psychopathology. Using primarily the Present State Examination as the diagnostic framework, the authors describe in rich clinical detail three patients where certain phenomena lead to a possible (...) diagnosis of schizophrenia. However, the patients’ outcomes were uniformly positive—how can this be? The authors argue persuasively for the importance of a contextual assessment “in which psychotic phenomena themselves are embedded in the values and beliefs of the person concerned.” In this commentary, we will first present innovations in the DSM-IV relevant to cultural and religious/spiritual issues, which complement the authors’ conclusions, and then comment upon the paper from this perspective.In the DSM-IV Introduction (1994), a section entitled “Ethnic and Cultural Considerations” provides a rationale for innovations in DSM-IV that better enables its use with culturally diverse individuals: “A clinician who is unfamiliar with the nuances of an individual’s cultural frame of references may incorrectly judge as psychopathology those normal variations in behavior, belief, or experience that are particular to the individual’s culture. For example, certain religious practices or beliefs (e.g., hearing or seeing a deceased relative during bereavement) may be misdiagnosed as manifestations of a Psychotic Disorder” (xxiv). In the introduction, three types of information are cited: 1) sections entitled “Age, Gender and Cultural Considerations” in the text of ninety diagnostic categories discuss clinical variations due to these factors; 2) an Outline for Cultural Formulation designed to assist the clinician in systematically evaluating and reporting the impact of the individual’s cultural context; and 3) a Glossary of Culture-Bound Syndromes. These innovations, based on recommendations of the NIMH Workgroup on Culture, Diagnosis and Care to the Task Force on DSM-IV, are described in extensive detail in an important recent book (Mezzich, Kleinman, Fabrega, and Parron 1996).As an example of the importance of the Age, Gender, and Cultural Consideration section relevant to religious and spiritual experiences, consider the section in the text describing schizophrenia, where the following appears: “Clinicians assessing the symptoms of Schizophrenia in socioeconomic or cultural situations that are different from their own must take cultural differences into account. Ideas that may appear to be delusional in one culture (e.g., sorcery and witchcraft) may be commonly held in another. In some cultures, visual or auditory hallucinations with a [End Page 75] religious content may be a normal part of religious experience (e.g., seeing the Virgin Mary or hearing God’s voice)” (281). Secondly, in the analogous section of the text describing Brief Psychotic Disorder, the following appears: “It is important to distinguish symptoms of Brief Psychotic Disorder from culturally sanctioned response patterns. For example, in some religious ceremonies, an individual may report hearing voices, but these do not generally persist and are not perceived as abnormal by most members of the person’s community” (303).The Outline for Cultural Formulation provides the clinician a concise tool to specify the following information concerning the cultural context that is relevant to clinical care: cultural identity of the individual, cultural explanations of the individual’s illness, cultural factors related to psychosocial environment and levels of functioning, cultural elements of the relationship between the individual and the clinician, and overall cultural assessment for diagnosis and care. Religion is explicitly mentioned in the third section so as to encourage the assessment of “the role of religion... in providing emotional, instrumental, and information support” (1994, 844). This outline for cultural formulation is more fully explicated in a recent chapter by Lu, Lim, and Mezzich (1995).A major innovation in DSM-IV relevant to this topic is the new diagnostic category entitled Religious or Spiritual Problem defined as follows: “This category can be used when the focus of clinical attention is a religious or spiritual problem. Examples include distressing experiences that involve loss or questioning of faith, problems associated with conversion to a new faith, or questioning of spiritual values that may not necessarily be related to an organized... (shrink)

Taking its orientation from Peter Winch, this article critiques from a Wittgensteinian point of view some “theoreticist” tendencies within constructivism. At the heart of constructivism is the deeply Wittgensteinian idea that the world as we know and understand it is the product of human intelligence and interests. The usefulness of this idea can be vitiated by a failure to distinguish conceptual from empirical questions. I argue that such a failure characterises two influential constructivist theories, those of Ernst von Glasersfeld and (...) David Bloor. These are considered in turn. Both theories seek to give a general, causal account of knowledge: von Glasersfeld's in term of cognitive subjectivity, Bloor's in terms of social agreement. Ironically, given that both writers cite Wittgenstein as a source of theoretical inspiration, assumptions of both theories run counter to key Wittgensteinian arguments. To show that Wittgenstein's views offer no solace to the realist, the article closes with a brief consideration of John Searle's theory of knowledge. (shrink)

During a series of protests in Hong Kong about a leadership transition widely perceived to give Mainland China greater political influence, the Hong Kong Museum of History held a Special Exhibition of the Terracotta Warriors of Xian, China. Sponsored by "The Leisure and Cultural Service Department, " the exhibit featured the first emperor of the Qin Dynasty who ushered in "an epoch-making era in Chinese history that witnessed the unification of China" (Museum Exhibition). This essay explores the multi-media aspects of (...) the exhibit, arguing that encounters with dramatic music and fully immersive digital experiences are examples of an embodied, affective form of constitutive rhetoric. Put differently, the museum's multi-media elements demonstrate how Maurice Charland's theory of a constitutive rhetoric can be informed by recent work on affect and can provide one point from which to engage affect theory and the "affective dimension of politics.". (shrink)

Building from recent attempts in the humanities and social sciences to conceive of creative, entangled ways of doing interdisciplinary work, I turn to Braidotti’s ‘nomadic ontology’ to (re)vision the human body without a brain. Her exploration of the body as a ‘threshold of transformations’ is put into conversation with Deleuze’s comments on neurobiology to consider what a brainless body might do, or undo, in neuroscientific practice. I ground discussion in a case study, detailing the practices of brain decoding or ‘mind (...) reading,’ re-interpreting Rose’s account. Therein, I argue that the technical-social configurations of brain decoding are unlikely to usher in a radically new ontology, as Rose suggests. To better match Rose’s vision and align with new ontologies in cultural theory, I argue that neuroscience must become nomadic and embrace a body without a brain. I then conclude with six recommendations towards a nomadic neuroscience. (shrink)

The following interview explores neuroscientist Christof Koch's participation in the adversarial collaboration, testing the integrated information theory (IIT) of consciousness against the global neuronal workspace theory (GNW). The interview offers a current update on the adversarial project and then pivots to Koch's responses to three standing critiques of IIT, which include the inexactness of IIT's measures of the neural correlates of consciousness, the charge that IIT implies an unwieldy panpsychism, and the claim that IIT conflates its measures with consciousness.

ABSTRACT The problem of quantum nonlocality references instantaneous entanglements happening between particles at great distances, putting under question physical assumptions about time and local effects. Despite a wide range of proposed solutions in physics, the problem persists; however, due to the recent interest in panconsciousness and panpsychism in philosophy as well as numerous suggestions that consciousness and quantum physics are intimately related, I argue in favor of thinking strange quantum effects—and nonlocality as case in point—in lieu of conscious activity happening (...) at a universal scale. Drawing on the mind-brain problem or “the hard problem” as an intellectual resource and particularly pertinent metaphor in the case helps to illuminate the argument; briefly stated, I argue that a conscious universe eliminates the necessity of thinking distance as a problem needing to be resolved to comprehend disparate physical observations. In other words, I offer a speculative vision for quantum nonlocality and ultimately aim to encourage scholars to more carefully consider what it is like to be In, Of, and About a brain when thinking about the universe. (shrink)

The following essay starts with a poem produced by ChatGPT after being prompted to “write a poem using combinations of words not found anywhere on the Internet as far as your data knows.” The poem includes the word “amorphigrist,” which inspired a second prompt stating, “Now write a long academic styled essay about ontology as the amorphigrist.” The essay was then edited and revised by this author to add philosophical background and complexity. Further prompts such as “Add a paragraph where (...) the duality between thought and material encounters is put into conversation with the duality between permanence and change” were given. What results is a human-nonhuman philosophy, an Amorphigrist Ontology. (shrink)

This paper examines Johann Ulrich Bilguer’s 1761 dissertation on the inutility of amputation practices, examining reasons for its influence despite its nonconformance to genre expectations. I argue that Bilguer’s narratives of patient suffering, his rhetorical likening of surgeons to soldiers, and his attention to the horrific experiences of war surgeons all contribute to the dissertation’s wide impact. Ultimately, the dissertation offers an example of affective rhetorics employed during the Enlightenment, demonstrating how bodies and environments—those “ambient rhetorics” made visible in a (...) text—can contribute to an analysis of genre deviations and widen the scope of genre studies. (shrink)

This essay argues that thinking about the role of biological skin in the formation of human subjectivity and the current impetus to bio-technologically "re-skin" the human body through the development of a sensual and sensing ubiquitous domain can challenge the efficacy of an analytic founded on heterogeneous collections of "bodies" in a post-Deleuzian mode. To make the case, this essay first challenges Mark Hansen's description of "the skin ego" as a passing of the subjectivity through the body and re-situates the (...) emergence of a subjectivity in childhood as a "bursting forth" from the material affordances of skin/s. This subtle shift is intended to exhume for discussion the skin dependencies of bodies in understanding themselves as bodies and in conceptualizing the world-as-world. After establishing the importance of skin, the essay then asserts that multiple skins in a ubiquitous, bio-compatible, mutually developmental environment causes an unprecedented shift in the formation and awareness-capacities of human subjectivity. Characterized by collectivity and immediacy, this shift leads to a situation of "exceedingly complex emergability" where the traces of "bodies" coming together disappear as no individual can trace or detect how, where, or why its affects are produced or what its affecting scope might be. The essay ends by arguing that greater complexity and dependence on the immediate coming together of Whatever Anywhere all the time in a ubiquitous "pure presencing," indicates a problem in deontological theory with an analysis developed from X subject's identification of affecting and affectable "bodies.". (shrink)

The introduction of digital games and simulations into science museums has prompted excitement about a new "post-museum" pedagogy emphasizing egalitarianism, interactivity, and personalized approaches to learning. However, many post-museums of science, this article aims to show, enact rhetorical performances that lead visitors to narrowly targeted answers and hide the authority of the expert in a play of tactile and affective activities, thus operating in opposition to many of the basic ideals of the post-museum. The Brain and Cognition Exhibit at the (...) Hong Kong Science Museum serves as a case study for how a post-museum exhibit, through embracing interactivity and visitor-centered tasks, becomes a site where science is tested on and performed through visitors' bodies such that institutional prescriptions are applied. Visitors are not merely encouraged at this exhibit to learn about the brain through doing but are trained to see functional and dysfunctional brains and to then diagnose themselves and their children by playing games and taking brain-measurement tests. As a result, the interactive engagement of the exhibit creates a new space of public medicalization. Reflections and suggestions are offered at the end of the article. (shrink)

Though only established as a discipline since the 1970s, philosophy of biology has already triggered investigations about its own history The Oxford handbook of philosophy of biology, Oxford University Press, New York, pp 11–33, 2008). When it comes to assessing the road since travelled—the research questions that have been pursued—manuals and ontologies also offer specific viewpoints, highlighting dedicated domains of inquiry and select work. In this article, we propose to approach the history of the philosophy of biology with a complementary (...) data-driven perspective that makes use of statistical algorithms applied to the complete full-text corpus of one major journal of the field—Biology and Philosophy—from its launch in 1986 up until 2017. By running text-mining and topic-modeling algorithms, we identified 67 key research topics that span across these 32 years. We also investigated the evolution of these topics over time and their fluctuating significance in the journal articles. Our results concur with known episodes or traits of the discipline—for instance, the significance of evolution-related topics or the decrease of articles with a marked historical dimension—but also highlight a diversity of topics that is much richer than what is usually acknowledged. (shrink)

Ethical issues related to comparative effectiveness research, or research that compares existing standards of care, have recently received considerable attention. In this paper we focus on how Ethics Review Committees should evaluate the risks of comparative effectiveness research. We discuss what has been a prominent focus in the debate about comparative effectiveness research, namely that it is justified when “nothing is known” about the comparative effectiveness of the available alternatives. We argue that this focus may be misleading. Rather, we should (...) focus on the fact that some experts believe that the evidence points in favor of one intervention, whereas other experts believe that the evidence favors the alternative. We will then introduce a case that illustrates this point, and based on that, discuss how ERCs should deal with such cases of expert disagreement. We argue that ERCs have a duty to assess the range of expert opinions and based on that assessment arrive at a risk judgment about the study under consideration. We also argue that assessment of expert disagreement is important for the assignment of risk level to a clinical trial: what is the basis for expert opinions, how strong is the evidence appealed to by various experts, and how can clinical trial monitoring affect the possible increased risk of clinical trial participation. (shrink)

Research has consistently shown ‘ability’ grouping (tracking) to be prey to poor practice, and to perpetuate inequity. A feature of these problems is inequitable and inaccurate practice in allocation to groups or ‘tracks’. Yet little research has examined whether such practices might be improved. Here, we examine survey and interview findings from a large-scale intervention study of grouping practices in 126 English secondary schools. We find that when schools are encouraged to allocate students and move them between groups according to (...) equitable principles by participation in a ‘best practice’ intervention, there is some increased equity of practice (i.e. a reduction in non-attainment factors used in allocation). However, the majority of schools continue to use subjective and potentially biased information to group students. Furthermore, some schools that claim to be using attainment setting appear to be using the inequitable practice of streaming. Our findings show that improvements in equity are constrained by operational and strategic factors, including timetabling, finance, and teachers’ values and beliefs relating to student ability and progression. We suggest strategies for encouraging schools to change their grouping practices, drawing on approaches for working with complex organisations. (shrink)