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.

Although Elizabeth Anscombe’s work on causation is frequently cited and anthologized, her main arguments have been ignored or misunderstood as havingtheir basis in quantum mechanics or a particular theory of perception. I examine her main arguments and show that they not only work against the Humean causaltheories of her time, but also against contemporary attempts to analyze causation in terms of laws and causal properties. She shows that our ordinary usage does not connect causation with laws, and suggests that (...) philosophers emphasize laws for mostly historical reasons. Moreover, she argues that the core of causation is derivativeness, which is as neglected now as when she wrote. Her focus on derivativeness indicates to us how we can both avoid the position that the causal “because” is truth-functional and yet still hold that causal statements are really explanatory. (shrink)

This article is an interview with Elizabeth Povinelli, by Mathew Coleman and Kathryn Yusoff. It addresses Povinelli’s approaches to ‘geontologies’ and ‘geontopower’, and the discussion encompasses an exploration of her ideas on biopolitics, her retheorization of power in the current conditions of late liberalism, and the situation of the inhuman within philosophical and anthropological economies. Povinelli describes a mode of power that she calls geontopower, which operates through the governance of Life and Nonlife. The interview is accompanied by a (...) brief contextualizing introduction. (shrink)

This set of seven experiments examines reasoning about the inheritance and acquisition of physical properties in preschoolers, undergraduates, and biology experts. Participants (N = 390) received adoption vignettes in which a baby animal was born to one parent but raised by a biologically unrelated parent, and they judged whether the offspring would have the same property as the birth or rearing parent. For each vignette, the animal parents had contrasting values on a physical property dimension (e.g., the birth parent had (...) a short tail; the rearing parent had a long tail). Depending on the condition, the distinct properties had distinct functions (“function-predictive”) were associated with distinct habitats (“habitat-predictive”), or had no implications (“non-predictive”). Undergraduates' bias to view properties as inherited from the birth parent was reduced in the function- and habitat-predictive conditions. This result indicates a purpose-based view of inheritance, whereby animals can acquire properties that serve a purpose in their environment. This stance was not found in experts or preschoolers. We discuss the results in terms of how undergraduates' purpose-based inheritance reasoning develops and relates to larger-scale misconceptions about Darwinian evolutionary processes, and implications for biology education. (shrink)

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)

Process models are valuable conceptual tools to help in understanding the approaches to value creation in social enterprises. This teaching case illustrates the application of a process model about creating, building, and sustaining a social enterprise with a mission to provide clean water to communities in need. The social enterprise generates revenue in support of community water projects and works with community stakeholders in different locations throughout the world to provide sustainable clean water solutions. The case study uses primary data (...) from semi-structured interviews, direct observations of a community project, and archival sources to demonstrate application of the process model. The study shows how the social enterprise developed as a promising idea; was implemented through an operating model with resources to support social impact; and continues to build and evolve while guided by the social mission. The paper concludes with a discussion and teaching note on ways to use the case for educational purposes to enhance learning about the social value creation process. (shrink)

The vivid, dramatic images of distant stars and galaxies taken by the Hubble Space Telescope have come to define how we visualize the cosmos. In their immediacy and vibrancy, photographs from the Hubble show what future generations of space travelers might see should they venture beyond our solar system. But their brilliant hues and precise details are not simply products of the telescope's unprecedented orbital location and technologically advanced optical system. Rather, they result from a series of deliberate decisions made (...) by the astronomers who convert raw data from the Hubble into spectacular pictures by assigning colors, adjusting contrast, and actively composing the images, balancing the desire for an aesthetically pleasing representation with the need for a scientifically valid one. In Picturing the Cosmos, Elizabeth A. Kessler examines the Hubble's deep space images, highlighting the remarkable resemblance they bear to nineteenth-century paintings and photographs of the American West and their invocation of the visual language of the sublime. Drawing on art history and the history of science, as well as interviews with astronomers who work on the Hubble Heritage Project, Kessler traces the ways that the sublime, with its inherent tension between reason and imagination, not only forms the appearance of the images, but also operates on other levels. The sublime informs the dual expression—numeric and pictorial—of digital data and underpins the relevance of the frontier for a new era of exploration performed by our instruments rather than our bodies. Through their engagement with the sublime the Hubble images are a complex act of translation that encourages an experience of the universe as simultaneously beyond humanity's grasp and within the reach of our knowledge. Strikingly illustrated with full-color images, this book reveals the scientific, aesthetic, and cultural significance of the Hubble pictures, offering a nuanced understanding of how they shape our ideas—and dreams—about the cosmos and our places within it. (shrink)

Grosz gives a critical overview of Lacan's work from a feminist perspective. Discussing previous attempts to give a feminist reading of his work, she argues for women's autonomy based on an indifference to the Lacanian phallus.

Face perception, perhaps the most highly developed visual skill in humans, is mediated by a distributed neural system in humans that is comprised of multiple, bilateral regions. We propose a model for the organization of this system that emphasizes a distinction between the representation of invariant and changeable aspects of faces. The representation of invariant aspects of faces underlies the recognition of individuals, whereas the representation of changeable aspects of faces, such as eye gaze, expression, and lip movement, underlies the (...) perception of information that facilitates social communication. The model is also hierarchical insofar as it is divided into a core system and an extended system. The core system is comprised of occipitotemporal regions in extrastriate visual cortex that mediate the visual analysis of faces. In the core system, the representation of invariant aspects is mediated more by the face-responsive region in the fusiform gyrus, whereas the representation of changeable aspects is mediated more by the face-responsive region in the superior temporal sulcus. The extended system is comprised of regions from neural systems for other cognitive functions that can be recruited to act in concert with the regions in the core system to extract meaning from faces. (shrink)

Two recent works in phenomenology of space address unusual themes. Ballanfat’s L’espace vide is concerned with a primal spatialization yielding an Open that is irreducible to a three-dimensional container for objects, while DuFour’s Husserl and Spatiality describes a layered space of ritual whose sensuous immediacy is infused with intercorporeal, interaffective, inter­generational, and geo-historical moments. Both books demonstrate that the phenomenological tradition can deal with complex topics and unfamiliar styles of experience, and both indicate the ethical import of their findings.

Political debate in an election season is artificially constrained by the media's focus on electability as the primary determinant of news coverage. What gets lost under this criterion is the wealth of ideas that lesser known candidates can bring to the debate. This article argues that political coverage by the mainstream media should be more responsible in its efforts to cultivate public discourse by redefining the standards for who gets covered and challenging the prevailing notions of electability. It also argues (...) for a view of campaign news that is less driven by events and that gives voters more information about candidates' ideas on key issues of the day. (shrink)

In _Between Gaia and Ground_ Elizabeth A. Povinelli theorizes the climatic, environmental, viral, and social catastrophe present as an ancestral catastrophe through which that Indigenous and colonized peoples have been suffering for centuries. In this way, the violence and philosophies the West relies on now threaten the West itself. Engaging with the work of Glissant, Deleuze and Guattari, Césaire, and Arendt, Povinelli highlights four axioms of existence—the entanglement of existence, the unequal distribution of power, the collapse of the event (...) as essential to political thought, and the legacies of racial and colonial histories. She traces these axioms' inspiration in anticolonial struggles against the dispossession and extraction that have ruined the lived conditions for many on the planet. By examining the dynamic and unfolding forms of late liberal violence, Povinelli attends to a vital set of questions about changing environmental conditions, the legacies of violence, and the limits of inherited Western social theory. _Between Gaia and Ground_ also includes a glossary of the keywords and concepts that Povinelli has developed throughout her work. (shrink)

Background The opioid epidemic has enabled rapid and unsurpassed use of big data on people with opioid use disorder to design initiatives to battle the public health crisis, generally without adequate input from impacted communities. Efforts informed by big data are saving lives, yielding significant benefits. Uses of big data may also undermine public trust in government and cause other unintended harms. Objectives We aimed to identify concerns and recommendations regarding how to use big data on opioid use in ethical (...) ways. Methods We conducted focus groups and interviews in 2019 with 39 big data stakeholders who had interest in or knowledge of the Public Health Data Warehouse maintained by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. Results Concerns regarding big data on opioid use are rooted in potential privacy infringements due to linkage of previously distinct data systems, increased profiling and surveillance capabilities, limitless lifespan, and lack of explicit informed consent. Also problematic is the inability of affected groups to control how big data are used, the potential of big data to increase stigmatization and discrimination of those affected despite data anonymization, and uses that ignore or perpetuate biases. Participants support big data processes that protect and respect patients and society, ensure justice, and foster patient and public trust in public institutions. Recommendations for ethical big data governance offer ways to narrow the big data divide, enact shared data governance, cultivate public trust and earn social license for big data uses, and refocus ethical approaches. Conclusions Using big data to address the opioid epidemic poses ethical concerns which, if unaddressed, may undermine its benefits. Findings can inform guidelines on how to conduct ethical big data governance and in ways that protect and respect patients and society, ensure justice, and foster patient and public trust in public institutions. (shrink)

A central problem in the cognitive sciences is identifying the link between consciousness and neural computation. The key features of consciousness—including the emergence of representative information content and the initiation of volitional action—are correlated with neural activity in the cerebral cortex, but not computational processes in spinal reflex circuits or classical computing architecture. To take a new approach toward considering the problem of consciousness, it may be worth re‐examining some outstanding puzzles in neuroscience, focusing on differences between the cerebral cortex (...) and spinal reflex circuits. First, the mammalian cerebral cortex exhibits exascale computational power, a feature that is not strictly correlated with the number of binary computational units; second, individual computational units engage in noisy coding, allowing random electrical events to gate signaling outcomes; third, this noisy coding results in the synchronous firing of statistically random populations of cells across the neural network, at a range of nested frequencies; fourth, the system grows into a more ordered state over time, as it encodes the predictive value gained through observation; and finally, the cerebral cortex is extraordinarily energy efficient, with very little free energy lost to entropy during the work of information processing. Here, I argue that each of these five key features suggest the mammalian brain engages in probabilistic computation. Indeed, by modeling the physical mechanisms of probabilistic computation, we may find a better way to explain the unique emergent features arising from cortical neural networks. (shrink)

Introduction: Depression, biology, aggression -- Underbelly -- The biological unconscious -- Bitter melancholy -- Chemical transference -- The bastard placebo -- The pharmakology of depression.

Though emotion conveys memory benefits, it does not enhance memory equally for all aspects of an experience, nor for all types of emotional events. In this review, I outline the behavioral evidence for arousal's focal enhancements of memory and describe the neural processes that may support those focal enhancements. I also present behavioral evidence to suggest that these focal enhancements occur more often for negative experiences than for positive ones. This result appears to arise because of valence-dependent effects on the (...) neural processes recruited during episodic encoding and retrieval, with negative affect associated with increased engagement of sensory processes, and positive affect leading to enhanced recruitment of conceptual processes. (shrink)

The Ninth International Conference on Computer Ethics: Philosophical Enquiry was held in Milwaukee, WI. Four papers originally presented at that conference are included in this issue of Computers and Society. The selected papers examine a wide range of information/computer-ethics-related issues, and taken together, they show great diversity in the field of information/computer ethics. We are continually negotiating with ethics, law, and policy in our technology-driven activities in the interconnected global arena. As we consider the themes within and among the papers (...) here, we encourage readers to think deeply about fundamental principles such as trust, accountability, anonymity, and human rights. Each of these papers takes us back, philosophically, to seminal and long-standing principles of ethics, broadly speaking, and then, brings us forward, to significant and contemporary challenges in ethics. The authors each weave narratives about our place and space as individuals, as members of cultural collectives, and evolving socio-political-technical norms around us, governing us, defining us. (shrink)

Globalization is often seen as the final stage in the transition towards a market economy. It is argued that a side-effect of globalization is cultural homogeneity and loss of life world, or ‘McDonaldization’. McDonaldization represents the rationalization of society in the quest for extreme efficiency. More recently, Meštrović has argued that the rationalization of emotions has also occurred and that Western societies are entering a postemotional phase. In postemotional societies there has been a separation of emotion from action. The result (...) is synthetic, manufactured emotions manipulated and standardized for mass consumption. In this paper I explore what it means to nurse in a ‘postemotional society’ and what impact this dulling of the emotions has had on a profession that locates ‘care’ as its central defining concept. My aim is to generate critical discussion of the shape and direction of contemporary society and the role of nursing within it. (shrink)

Prior research has examined value antecedents to sustainable consumption, including religious or cultural values. We bridge together these usually separated bodies of literature to provide an ethically-based examination of both religious and cultural values in one model to understand what drives sustainable consumption as well as outcomes on consumer well-being. In doing so, we also fulfill calls for more research on socio-demographic antecedents to ethical consumption, particularly in the domain of sustainable consumption. We examine this relationship using data from the (...) religiously and culturally diverse country of Singapore, collected from a door-to-door, representative sample utilizing numerous quality control techniques. Our path analysis and logical follow-up tests reveal that both religious and cultural values influence sustainable consumption, and then sustainable consumption positively influences consumer well-being. Implications are provided for consumer ethics, business’ ethical practices, and belief congruence theory. (shrink)

A new resolution of the mind-body problem that reconciles materialism and idealism.

The Internet has been used as a place for and site of an array of research activities. From online ethnographies to public data sets and online surveys, researchers and research regulators have struggled with an array of ethical issues around the conduct of online research. This paper presents a discussion and findings from Buchanan and Ess's study on US-based institutional review boards and the state of internet research ethics.

This book provides a reconstructive and critical interpretation of Sartre’s mature dialectical ethics. Taken together, as Sartre intended, the posthumously published key texts demonstrate that the ultimate goal of praxis is “integral humanity” and that “making the human” is always possible because the means to humanity can always be invented.

Trafficking and persistence of fetal microchimeric cells (fMCs) and circulating extracellular vesicles (EVs) have been observed in animals and humans, but their consequences in the maternal body and their mechanistic contributions to maternal physiology and pathophysiology are not yet fully defined. Fetal cells and EVs may help remodel maternal organs after pregnancy‐associated changes, but the cell types and EV cargos reaching the mother in preterm pregnancies after exposure to various risk factors can be distinct from term pregnancies. As preterm delivery‐associated (...) maternal complications are rising, revisiting this topic and formulating scientific questions for future research to reduce the risk of maternal morbidities are timely. Epidemiological studies report maternal cardiovascular risk as one of the major complications after preterm delivery. This paper suggests a potential link between fMCs and circulating EVs and adverse maternal cardiovascular outcomes post‐pregnancies, the underlying mechanisms, consequences, and methods for and how this link might be assessed. (shrink)

The interesting target article by Morsella et al. addresses critical issues that impact our understanding of consciousness. It is surprising, however, to see no treatment of the relationship between attention and consciousness, particularly given available models. Whether olfaction is most suitable as a model system to study consciousness for action also seems questionable. These issues are elaborated in the present commentary.

Instead of treating art as a unique creation that requires reason and refined taste to appreciate, Elizabeth Grosz argues that art-especially architecture, music, and painting-is born from the disruptive forces of sexual selection. She approaches art as a form of erotic expression connecting sensory richness with primal desire, and in doing so, finds that the meaning of art comes from the intensities and sensations it inspires, not just its intention and aesthetic. By regarding our most cultured human accomplishments as (...) the result of the excessive, nonfunctional forces of sexual attraction and seduction, Grosz encourages us to see art as a kind of bodily enhancement or mode of sensation enabling living bodies to experience and transform the universe. Art can be understood as a way for bodies to augment themselves and their capacity for perception and affection-a way to grow and evolve through sensation. Through this framework, which knits together the theories of Charles Darwin, Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Jakob von Uexküll, we are able to grasp art's deep animal lineage. Grosz argues that art is not tied to the predictable and known but to new futures not contained in the present. Its animal affiliations ensure that art is intensely political and charged with the creation of new worlds and new forms of living. According to Grosz, art is the way in which life experiments with materiality, or nature, in order to bring about change. (shrink)