ExcerptTo the Columbia Community:Over the past six months, many have spoken in our name. Some are wellmeaning alumni or non-affiliates who show up to wave the Israeli flag outside Columbia’s gates. Some are politicians looking to use our experiences to foment America’s culture war. Most notably, some are our Jewish peers who tokenize themselves1 by claiming to represent “real Jewish values,” and attempt to delegitimize our lived experiences of antisemitism. We are here, writing to you as Jewish students at Columbia (...) University, who are connected to our community and deeply engaged with our culture and history. We would like to speak in our name. (shrink)

After Confucius is a collection of eight studies of Chinese philosophy from the time of Confucius to the formation of the empire in the second and third centuries B.C.E. As detailed in a masterful introduction, each essay serves as a concrete example of thick description - an approach invented by philosopher Gilbert Ryle - which aims to reveal the logic that informs an observable exchange among members of a community or society. To grasp the significance of such exchanges, it is (...) necessary to investigate the networks of meaning on which they rely. Paul R. Goldin argues that the character of ancient Chinese philosophy can be appreciated only if we recognize the cultural codes underlying the circulation of ideas in that world. Thick description is the best preliminary method to determine how Chinese thinkers conceived of their own enterprise. Who were the ancient Chinese philosophers? What was their intended audience? What were they arguing about? How did they respond to earlier thinkers, and to each other? Why did those in power wish to hear from them, and what did they claim to offer in return for patronage? Goldin addresses these questions as he looks at several topics, including. (shrink)

This chapter reviews the aspects of Mencius that did and did not interest Han-dynasty writers. With the help of digital concordances, it is easy to discover that many of the passages considered crucial today were rarely, if ever, cited in the Han. These include the parable of the infant about to fall into a well (2A.6), the debate with a Mohist named Yi Zhi 夷之 (3A.5), and the concept of liangzhi 良知 (7A.15), which, since Wang Yangming 王陽明 (1472–1528), has been (...) considered a cornerstone of Mencian ethics. The chapter discusses other key passages that are never mentioned in Han sources. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and thus one cannot simply infer that these passages were unknown in the Han dynasty, but it remains significant that they were not regarded as essential to understanding Mencius’s philosophy. The conclusion will explore the differences between Mencius’s reception in the Han dynasty and his Neo-Confucianized reception today. (shrink)

How does sign language compare with gesture, on the one hand, and spoken language on the other? Sign was once viewed as nothing more than a system of pictorial gestures without linguistic structure. More recently, researchers have argued that sign is no different from spoken language, with all of the same linguistic structures. The pendulum is currently swinging back toward the view that sign is gestural, or at least has gestural components. The goal of this review is to elucidate the (...) relationships among sign language, gesture, and spoken language. We do so by taking a close look not only at how sign has been studied over the past 50 years, but also at how the spontaneous gestures that accompany speech have been studied. We conclude that signers gesture just as speakers do. Both produce imagistic gestures along with more categorical signs or words. Because at present it is difficult to tell where sign stops and gesture begins, we suggest that sign should not be compared with speech alone but should be compared with speech-plus-gesture. Although it might be easier (and, in some cases, preferable) to blur the distinction between sign and gesture, we argue that distinguishing between sign (or speech) and gesture is essential to predict certain types of learning and allows us to understand the conditions under which gesture takes on properties of sign, and speech takes on properties of gesture. We end by calling for new technology that may help us better calibrate the borders between sign and gesture. (shrink)

Goldin thus begins the book by asking the basic question "What are we reading?" while also considering why it has been so rarely asked. Yet far from denigrating Chinese philosophy, he argues that liberating these texts from the mythic idea that they are the product of a single great mind only improves our understanding and appreciation. By no means does a text require single and undisputed authorship to be meaningful; nor is historicism the only legitimate interpretive stance. The first (...) chapter takes up a hallmark of Chinese philosophy that demands a Western reader's cognizance: its preference for non-deductive argumentation. Chinese philosophy is an art he demonstrates, more than it is a rigorous logical method. Then comes the core of the book, eight chapters devoted to the eight philosophical texts divided into three parts: Philosophy of Heaven, Philosophy of the Way, and Two Titans at the End of an Age.. (shrink)

Award-winning storyteller Barbara Diamond Goldin has collected and retold twenty-four stories about tzedakah in this inspiring volume. Some of these stories are based on oral tales, like "The Two Beggars," which is from Afghanistan, and "The Rabbi's Blessing," which is from Tunisia. Some stories, like "A Town of Baruchs" and "The Rabbi and the Rag Dealer" are Hasidic in origin, while others, like "Ox and Herbs" and "The Two Keys," are from much older sources. Some of the stories are (...) based on midrashic tales. The Hebrew word tzedakah is often translated as "charity," but it actually means "justice" or "righteousness." According to the Jewish Sages, tzedakah means we have an obligation to give to those in need, not only when we are feeling generous, but on a regular basis. Barbara Diamond Goldin has brought these stories of tzedakah together in the hope that they will inspire the young and the old, the rich and the poor, to give to those in need and to adopt a righteous sensibility and sensitivity akin to the commandment of performing acts of loving-kindness. By performing these mitzvoth, we all engage in tikkun olam, repair of the world, and, according to the Sages, each good deed we perform in the physical world creates an angel in the metaphysical world. This book should encourage readers to create their own angels and to recapture the significance of the mitzvah of tzedakah to the Jewish community, even to the world, today. (shrink)

Chapter 49 of the Han Feizi, entitled 'Wudu', includes one of the earliest discussions in Chinese history of the concepts of gong and si: Han Fei takes si to mean 'acting in one's own interest'. Gong is simply what opposes si. 'Acting in one's own interest' is not inherently reprehensible in Han Fei's view; but a ruler must remember why ministers propose their policies: they are concerned only with enriching themselves, and look upon the ruler as nothing more than a (...) resource to be exploited in their quest for material aggrandizement. The interests of the ministers and the ruler are diametrically opposed. Ministers hope for a comfortable career; a ruler must weed out the posers in his search for those rare and invaluable adjuvants who are genuinely capable of administering the state. In short, if si is the self-interest of the minister, gong is the self-interest of the ruler. (shrink)

Assessment in ethics education faces a challenge. From the perspectives of teachers, students, and third-party evaluators like the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology and the National Institutes of Health, assessment of student performance is essential. Because of the complexity of ethical case analysis, however, it is difficult to formulate assessment criteria, and to recognize when students fulfill them. Improvement in students’ moral reasoning skills can serve as the focus of assessment. In previous work, Rosa Lynn Pinkus and Claire Gloeckner (...) developed a novel instrument for assessing moral reasoning skills in bioengineering ethics. In this paper, we compare that approach to existing assessment techniques, and evaluate its validity and reliability. We find that it is sensitive to knowledge gain and that independent coders agree on how to apply it. (shrink)

The first study of this ancient text in over 70 years, Rituals of the Way explores how the Xunzi influenced Confucianism and other Chinese philosophies through its emphasis on "the Way.".

Aristotle’s account of epistēmē is foundationalist. In contrast, the web of dialectical argumentation that constitutes justification for scientific principles is coherentist. Aristotle’s account of explanation is structurally parallel to the argument for a foundationalist account of justification. He accepts the first argument but his coherentist accounts of justification indicate that he would not accept the second. Where is the disanalogy? For Aristotle, the intelligibility of a demonstrative premise is the cause of the intelligibility of a demonstrated conclusion and causation is (...) asymmetric. Within the Posterior Analytics itself, Aristotle does not account for this, but elsewhere he develops the resources for doing so: the cause is what acts on a substrate to actualize a potential in that substrate, resulting in the effect. On the other hand, it may well happen that two propositions entail each other, in which case one may as well justify the one on the basis of the other as vice versa. (shrink)

The article is an approach to the work of Colombian writer Manuel Mejía Vallejo having as starting point the recognition of the importance of memory for literary creation, especially the remembrance of childhood. It is evident in the work of Mejía Vallejo the intention of leaving proof of the time and space in which he lived, as well as a concern to work out the role of memory in the life of the human being. It is argued in the article (...) that the literary style of the author might be understood as a narrative of memory, where memory reaches the category of poetic. (shrink)

This case study is a sociocultural analysis of how Kareem, a young Black man, both constructed a historical narrative and rearticulated two of his racialized identities. Kareem carried out two mediated actions. In the first, he incorporated cultural tools from the classroom—the schematic narrative template of racial progress and the specific narrative of the Movement—to support his thesis that NBA legend Bill Russell advanced the Civil Rights Movement. In the second, he positioned Bill Russell as a model Black man, drawing (...) on cultural tools forged from his self-identification, his awareness of the racialization of Black men, and his desire to articulate a positive image of them. Data include field notes, audio-recorded conversation, written work, and an interview. The paper concludes with implications of this study for K-12 educators, teacher educators, and researchers: (1) that students’ racialized identities and experiences are cultural tools that can intersect with disciplinary learning; (2) that racialization includes non-racial identities and practices; and (3) that history/social studies curriculum and instruction can facilitate students’ analyses of how narratives function in the learning of the past. (shrink)

Edward Halper’s “The Metaphysics of the Syllogism” argues that the ontological ground of valid inference is found in the necessity of the predications that constitute the premises of the sort of syllogism central to Aristotle’s theory: demonstration. I further support his conclusion on the basis of a consideration of the title and structure of Aristotle’s Analytics, as well as some recent analysis of Aristotle’s modal logic. Halper however suggests that the logical form of inference is a result of how the (...) mind sorts out the elements involved in a complex unity. I suggest that it is not primarily the mind that does this work, but language. What the mind does is primarily to be understood as a reflection of what language does, not vice versa. (shrink)

As Heraclitus, Cioran conceives man as a being that possesses lógos and is ruled in his life by it in its multiple aspects. Man not only makes use of word; this word also shapes him and traverses him entirely. Word is the necessary and intrinsic expression of every human being, and, as a result, he cannot elude it. In many of his works, Cioran warns us about the dangers that lógos has for man: not to find his genuine expression in (...) the midst of so many words, and to fall into totalizing fictions that lead us to deception and indoctrination. For this reason, in the midst of this misfortune, Cioran even considers silence as the only possible way out. However, if man denies the mark of language by avoiding all forms of expression, the anguish that his own existence entails will end up destroying him. Paradoxically, Cioran finds that the expression of lógos is the only possible salvation for man from the clutches of death, and that is, why by expressing oneself through lógos, one's own unhappiness becomes a necessary condition of life. (shrink)

En las últimas décadas, se ha consolidado un campo de estudios alrededor de la expertise que articula enfoques y programas de investigación heterogéneos, según los modos de conceptualizar la relación entre ciencia y política, saber y poder, de fijar sus conexiones y de determinar el nivel del análisis para su abordaje. El corpus foucaulteano contiene herramientas analíticas fructíferas para el tratamiento sustantivo de la politicidad inherente a los saberes, al cuestionar las lecturas instrumentales de aquella relación e inscribir la actividad (...) especializada en estrategias de gobierno y en formas de resistencia hacia ellas. Sin embargo, las conceptualizaciones del saber experto desde una matriz foucaulteana registran cierta dispersión y, pese al avance de los estudios sobre gubernamentalidad en este aspecto, la ausencia de una reflexión sobre la categoría de expertise introduce el riesgo de que en estos análisis se establezca una cuestionable relación de coherencia y correspondencia entre saberes y racionalidades de gobierno. En este artículo, nos proponemos revisar el corpus foucaulteano y sistematizar otras claves de lectura sobre los saberes y su condición política, a fin de aportar con ello al campo de estudios sobre expertise. Examinamos la “hipótesis de la guerra”, mostramos su pulso en el ejercicio de saber y ponemos en juego estas coordenadas analíticas en un pequeño trabajo de archivo sobre una serie documental de textos de Hayek, a propósito de la articulación de la racionalidad neoliberal de gobierno. La conformación del corpus y el análisis de los textos se valieron, metodológicamente, de una traducción instrumental de tales coordenadas mediada por una perspectiva materialista del discurso. (shrink)

Background Victoria was the first Australian state to legalize voluntary assisted dying (elsewhere known as physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia). Some institutions indicated they would not participate in voluntary assisted dying. The Victorian government issued policy approaches for institutions to consider Objective To describe and analyse publicly available policy documents articulating an institutional objection to voluntary assisted dying in Victoria. Methods Policies were identified using a range of strategies, and those disclosing and discussing the nature of an institutional objection were thematically (...) analysed using the framework method. Results The study identified fifteen policies from nine policymakers and developed four themes: (1) extent of refusal to participate in VAD, (2) justification for refusal to provide VAD, (3) responding to requests for VAD, and (4) appeals to state-sanctioned regulatory mechanisms. While institutional objections were stated clearly, there was very little practical detail in most documents to enable patients to effectively navigate objections in practice. Conclusion This study demonstrates that despite having clear governance pathways developed by centralized bodies (namely, the Victorian government and Catholic Health Australia), many institutions’ public-facing policies do not reflect this guidance. Since VAD is contentious, laws governing institutional objection could provide greater clarity and regulatory force than policies alone to better balance the interests of patients and non-participating institutions. (shrink)

Emotional processing and episodic memory are closely related throughout childhood development. With respect to emotional episodic memory, available evidence shows that the consolidation of information is accompanied by an arousal that generates longer duration and persistence of the memory representations. In the case of early stages of development (i.e., first 5 years), it is less clear how these associations emerge and are modulated by individual and environmental factors. In this study, 116 4- to 5-years old Argentinean children from different socio-environmental (...) contexts (i.e., favorable or unfavorable living conditions at home), performed a task of visual emotional memory in which they observed a set of 15 images with variable emotional valences (negative, neutral, and positive). The child’s task was to appraise each image using one of the following three possible valences: (a) drawings of faces with smiles (positive valence), (b) drawings of faces with tears and round mouth with edges down (negative valence), or (c) drawings of faces with horizontal mouth (neutral valence). Five years-old children exhibited greater accuracy appraisal. Individual differences in emotional accuracy appraisal allowed us to observe different performances in free recall of negative visual images. Accuracy appraisal did not vary between children with respect to gender, living conditions at home, or language ability. Seven to ten days after the emotional appraisal children were asked to tell the experimenter all the images they remembered (variables of interest: free recall of negative, positive, or neutral images). Results showed individual (age) differences. Specifically, 5-years-old children evoked more images than 4-years-old children. These findings contribute to the understanding of emotional memory in early developmental stages and raise the need to include emotional appraisal in the assessment of episodic memory. (shrink)

ObjectiveTo increase knowledge of how doctors perceive futile treatments and scarcity of resources at the end of life. In particular, their perceptions about whether and how resource limitations influence end-of-life decision making. This study builds on previous work that found some doctors include resource limitations in their understanding of the concept of futility.SettingThree tertiary hospitals in metropolitan Brisbane, Australia.DesignQualitative study using in-depth, semistructured, face-to-face interviews. Ninety-six doctors were interviewed in 11 medical specialties. Transcripts of the interviews were analysed using thematic (...) analysis.ResultsDoctors’ perceptions of whether resource limitations were relevant to their practice varied, and doctors were more comfortable with explicit rather than implicit rationing. Several doctors incorporated resource limitations into their definition of futility. For some, availability of resources was one factor of many in assessing futility, secondary to patient considerations, but a few doctors indicated that the concept of futility concealed rationing. Doctors experienced moral distress due to the resource implications of providing futile treatment and the lack of administrative supports for bedside rationing.ConclusionsDoctors’ ability to distinguish between futility and rationing would be enhanced through regulatory support for explicit rationing and strategies to support doctors’ role in rationing at the bedside. Medical policies should address the distinction between resource limitations and futility to promote legitimacy in end-of-life decision making. (shrink)

The commentaries have led us to entertain expansions of our paradigm to include new theoretical questions, new criteria for what counts as a gesture, and new data and populations to study. The expansions further reinforce the approach we took in the target article: namely, that linguistic and gestural components are two distinct yet integral sides of communication, which need to be studied together.

El texto presenta un adelanto de un profundo “trayecto” de trabajo colectivo en curso impulsado por un grupo de jóvenes investigadores y docentes que integran el Programa “Problemáticas comunicacionales barriales, organizacionales y políticas. Experiencias de lucha y resistencia a comienzos de siglo XXI en la provincia de Córdoba” (Argentina), desde el año 2011. La sistematización de las distintas experiencias, que presenta el libro, permite poner en común las peculiaridades de los contradictorios escenarios de conflicto y resistencia analizados, organizada en tres (...) capítulos que repasan con cuidadosa “vigilancia epistemológica” los procesos realizados con los actores sociales que integran los proyectos a saber: habitantes de las ciudades-barrio, trabajadores de la economía solidaria y vecinos e instituciones que forman parte de instancias participativas en los gobiernos locales. (shrink)

It is difficult to create spoken forms that can be understood on the spot. But the manual modality, in large part because of its iconic potential, allows us to construct forms that are immediately understood, thus requiring essentially no time to develop. This paper contrasts manual forms for actions produced over three time spans—by silent gesturers who are asked to invent gestures on the spot; by homesigners who have created gesture systems over their life spans; and by signers who have (...) learned a conventional sign language from other signers—and finds that properties of the predicate differ across these time spans. Silent gesturers use location to establish co-reference in the way established sign languages do, but they show little evidence of the segmentation sign languages display in motion forms for manner and path, and little evidence of the finger complexity sign languages display in handshapes in predicates representing events. Homesigners, in contrast, not only use location to establish co-reference but also display segmentation in their motion forms for manner and path and finger complexity in their object handshapes, although they have not yet decreased finger complexity to the levels found in sign languages in their handling handshapes. The manual modality thus allows us to watch language as it grows, offering insight into factors that may have shaped and may continue to shape human language. (shrink)

Medications of choice, necessary supplies, and evidence-based health care now seem like luxuries. The contrast between my experience at a well-funded health unit and the Lev El Lev (“heart to heart”) African Refugee Clinic in Tel Aviv, Israel, is staggering. The complex personal, social, health, psychological, educational, and economic difficulties create a unique ethical environment for the health care provider.

This commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics is in a style familiar from the writings of Leo Strauss and his students. The reader is presented with a paraphrase of the whole of Aristotle’s text, marked by seemingly odd omissions, emphases, and offhand remarks. One soon sees that the book is written in code. Only as the book progresses is the author more explicit concerning what he takes to be the main lines of Aristotle’s esoteric teaching, which is as follows.Aristotle writes the Metaphysics (...) for students being initiated into philosophy. These students have already left behind a mythical world-view, but not all are.. (shrink)

Gesture does not have a fixed position in the Dienes & Perner framework. Its status depends on the way knowledge is expressed. Knowledge reflected in gesture can be fully implicit (neither factuality nor predication is explicit) if the goal is simply to move a pointing hand to a target. Knowledge reflected in gesture can be explicit (both factuality and predication are explicit) if the goal is to indicate an object. However, gesture is not restricted to these two extreme positions. When (...) gestures are unconscious accompaniments to speech and represent information that is distinct from speech, the knowledge they convey is factuality-implicit but predication-explicit. (shrink)

It is now a commonplace that Aristotle and Theophrastus systematically misunderstood Heraclitus in interpreting fire as an ἀρχή of the kind posited by the Milesians. While air in the thought of Anaxamines and the ἄπειρον in the thought of Anaximander can be considered to play the role of the Aristotelian material substrate without too much distortion, this is not so for fire in the thought of Heraclitus. As Cherniss has indicated, while a substrate of the kind posited by the Milesians (...) is a permanent being underlying change, Heraclitean fire is change itself. (shrink)

Scholarship on Xunzi in English has been plagued by imprecise readings of the text and general philosophical naivete. It is hoped that this account will provide a sympathetic and accurate reading of this central thinker. ;The Introduction addresses the problems of interpretation raised by the text at hand, and all philosophical texts like it. A method of "interpretation as integrity," modeled on the theory of "law as integrity" put forward by Ronald Dworkin, is finally defended and adopted. ;Chapter I takes (...) up Xunzi's celebrated criticism of the earlier philosopher Mencius, pointing out Xunzi's fundamental analogy between ruler and polity on the one hand, and mind and person on the other. The discussion leads to a consideration of Xunzi's philosophy of mind. It is concluded that the refutation of Mencius is no refutation at all, but an excellent point of departure for a study of Xunzi's thought. ;Chapter II considers Xunzi's view of Heaven. Xunzi's mechanism is compared, and ultimately contrasted, with the deism of Tindal: there is a dimension to Xunzi's Heaven that finds no analogue in Tindal's cosmos. The chapter ends with a rejection of the commonplace that Xunzi is a conventionalist. ;Chapter III begins with an overview of Western approaches to the problem of ritual, gravitating towards an emphasis on contractarianism, since this model comes closest to what we find in Xunzi. But it is shown how the differences between Xunzi and Hobbes, a frequent comparandum, highlight the unmistakable absolutism in Xunzi's style of contractarianism. ;Chapter IV opens with an account of the Dialecticians, an unfederated group of sophists whom Xunzi criticized frequently and earnestly. The reasons behind Xunzi's animadversions are found in his theory of language. Despite the vast freedom of names that Xunzi allows, in anticipation of Saussure and others, Xunzi is shown not to countenance ontological relativity. Instead, Xunzi postulates a Way , a universal ontology. The ramifications of this commitment are wide-ranging and contribute to the basic character of Xunzi's philosophy. (shrink)

The Prior and Posterior Analytics were entitled Ta Analutika by Aristotle himself. But it is not at all clear what Aristotle had in mind in grouping these two works together and in giving them this common title. This question was discussed at length by the ancient Greek commentators on Aristotle. Two main possibilities emerged. The first is that taken by Alexander of Aphrodisias, Ammonius, and Philoponus in his commentary on APr. According to this line of thought, Aristotle has in mind (...) the analysis that shows how a complex arises out of simple entities; both Analytics show us how to subject all lines of syllogistic reasoning (including demonstration) to such analysis. According to the second approach, found in the commentary on APo., 2 attributed to Philoponus, in giving APo., 2 the title 'Analytics' Aristotle has in mind the analysis that reasons from effects to causes. Demonstrations reveal the causes of things, and APo., 2 shows how this is the case. In this paper, the two approaches are compared, and a third approach, which builds on the second, but allows 'Analytics' to have a continuity of sense in its use as a title, is proposed. (shrink)