Critically significant parental effects in behavioral genetics may be partly understood as a consequence of maternal brain structure and function of caregiving systems recently studied in humans as well as rodents. Key parental brain areas regulate emotions, motivation/reward, and decision making, as well as more complex social-cognitive circuits. Additional key environmental factors must include socioeconomic status and paternal brain physiology. These have implications for developmental and evolutionary biology as well as public policy.

In accord with social neuroscience's progression to include interactive experimental paradigms, parents' brains have been activated by emotionally charged infant stimuli including baby cry and picture. More recent research includes the use of brief video clips and opportunities for maternal response. Among brain systems important to parenting are those involved in empathy. This research may inform recent studies of decreased societal empathy, offer mechanisms and solutions.

Humans have long been characterized as poor probabilistic reasoners when presented with explicit numerical information. Bayesian word problems provide a well-known example of this, where even highly educated and cognitively skilled individuals fail to adhere to mathematical norms. It is widely agreed that natural frequencies can facilitate Bayesian reasoning relative to normalized formats (e.g. probabilities, percentages), both by clarifying logical set-subset relations and by simplifying numerical calculations. Nevertheless, between-study performance on “transparent” Bayesian problems varies widely, and generally remains rather unimpressive. (...) We suggest there has been an over-focus on this representational facilitator (i.e. transparent problem structures) at the expense of the specific logical and numerical processing requirements and the corresponding individual abilities and skills necessary for providing Bayesian-like output given specific verbal and numerical input. We further suggest that understanding this task-individual pair could benefit from considerations from the literature on mathematical cognition, which emphasizes text comprehension and problem solving, along with contributions of online executive working memory, metacognitive regulation, and relevant stored knowledge and skills. We conclude by offering avenues for future research aimed at identifying the stages in problem solving at which correct versus incorrect reasoners depart, and how individual difference might influence this time point. (shrink)

This study situates Romantic literature in a historical narrative that runs from the Fall of the Bastille to Waterloo, and places Romantic texts against contemporary events like the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and the rise of European imperialism in Africa and Asia that mark the period from 1789 to 1832. At the same time, this study considers the relation of the Romantic epic to narratives of universal history from Hegel to Marx. A central concern is the appearance of the (...) Romantic hero as a Promethean subject of history in the bourgeois social revolutions of the age. Napoleon's career provides a paradigm for the bildungsroman of the Romantic subject; while the life of Goethe expresses this dynamic life-history as an aesthetic narrative. Taken together, then, these narratives define the milieu in which the Romantic subject is constituted, and delineate the parameters of the revolutionary transformations of modernity. ;The concept of modernity as a process of development came into currency as a description of the radical changes undergone by European society during the emergence of industrial capitalism, the democratization of the public sphere, and the rise of a world-imperial order. The Romantic period thus constitutes an event like the postmodern break in which the narratives through which history is mediated to individuals are shattered by a traumatic shift in modes of cultural production. Romantic epics like Faust, Part II, Jerusalem, Don Juan and The Excursion respond to this crisis of representation by reinserting historical experience into an overarching narrative of development that describes the evolution of the representative individual or collective subject, "Man," in his fall into alienation and self-division in social forms, and his rise toward utopian self-unification as a figure of desire for restored human community. The contradictions of modernity are thus reproduced in the Romantic epic, which both projects the totalized form of an emancipatory metanarrative and records the deconstruction of that narrative by social change. Romanticism, then, is a displaced ideological afterimage of the inception of modernity as it is experienced by Romantic writers in all its apocalyptic violence and utopian promise. (shrink)

In Questioning Martin Heidegger, Martin Heidegger’s “Overcoming Metaphysics” provides the jumping-off point for a wide-ranging critique and deconstruction of Western philosophy. This book also addresses Martin Heidegger’s controversial relationship with German National Socialism and the Holocaust, as well as with contemporary philosophers like J. F. Lyotard and Jacques Derrida.

Recent continental philosophy often seeks to retrieve Neoplatonic transcendence, or the Good, while ignoring the place of intellect in classical and medieval Neoplatonism. Instead, it attempts to articulate an encounter with radical transcendence in the immediacy of temporality, individuality, and affectivity.On the assumption that there is no intellectual intuition (Kant), intellectual consciousness is reduced to ratiocination and is taken to be “poor in intuition” (Marion). In this context, the present paper expounds Plotinus’ phenomenology of intellectual experience to show how intellect, (...) for Plotinus, is rather the richest mode of intuition, coinciding with the intelligible content of reality. This content, however, cannot be ultimate, but is the manifestation and apprehension of the transcendent Good as the condition of intelligibility. The Good, therefore, can be encountered only through the ascent to intellectual apprehension, and the visionof the Good is a transcendent moment within the intellectual apprehension of being, not a repudiation of or alternative to it. (shrink)

Though scholars of political science and moral philosophy have long analyzed the justifications for and against waging war as well as the ethics of warfare itself, the problem of _ending_ wars has received less attention. In the first book to apply just war theory to this phase of conflict, Eric Patterson presents a three-part view of justice in end-of-war settings involving order, justice, and reconciliation. Patterson’s case studies range from successful applications of _jus post bellum,_ such as the U.S. (...) Civil War or Kosovo, to challenges such as present-day Iraq. (shrink)

DISCUSSIONS OF THE ONTOLOGICAL STATUS of Plato’s forms too often take for granted that immanence and transcendence are opposed to each other: if the forms are in instances then they are not separate from them, while if the forms are separate then they are not in instances. This assumption is sometimes associated with the theory that there is a change in Plato’s thought between the early or Socratic dialogues, in which forms are regarded as immanent, and the middle dialogues and (...) Timaeus, in which they are seen as separate. I will argue, however, that immanence and transcendence are not opposed but that, on the contrary, the former implies the latter. That is to say, precisely in that the forms are present in their instances, they are ipso facto also separate from them in all the senses which Plato claims. The idea of sensibles as images of the forms, in turn, is an expression not of transcendence alone, but rather of the conjunction of immanence and transcendence: the paradigm is at once transcendent to and immanent in the image. The movement from the early to the middle dialogues, then, is not the rejection of one position and the adoption of another, but simply the express articulation of what was implicit in the original position. Thus we find, not a fundamental change in Plato’s thought from one period to another, but a single consistent and coherent theory of forms which is developed throughout these dialogues. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: God beyond being Creation as theophany Goodness, beauty, and love Evil Hierarchy Knowledge Symbolism Christological consummation.

Situates Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite as a Neoplatonic philosopher in the tradition of Plotinus and Proclus.

Living labs are interdisciplinary and participatory initiatives aimed at bringing research closer to practice by involving stakeholders in all stages of research. Living labs align with the principles of participatory research methods as well as recent insights about how participatory ways of generating knowledge help to change practices in concrete settings with respect to specific problems. The participatory, open, and discussion‐oriented nature of living labs could be ideally suited to accompany ethical reflection and changes ensuing from reflection. To our knowledge, (...) living labs have not been explicitly trialed and reported in ethics literature. In this discussion paper, we report and discuss four initial issues that marked the process of setting up a living lab in ethics: (1) determining the goals and expected outcomes of an ethics living lab; (2) establishing operational procedures; (3) selecting communities and defining pilot projects; and (4) adopting a lens to tackle emerging questions and challenges. We explain these four issues and present the paths taken based on the novel and specific orientation, that is, living ethics, at the basis of this project. In alignment with living ethics and É‐LABO, we approach challenges as learning opportunities to ask not only “how” questions but also “why” questions. We hope that this discussion paper informed by our experience helps to clarify the theoretical, methodological, and practical approaches necessary to successfully adopt and employ living labs in ethics. (shrink)

Randomization is the “gold standard” design for clinical research trials and is accepted as the best way to reduce bias. Although some controversy remains over this matter, we believe equipoise is the fundamental ethical requirement for conducting a randomized clinical trial. Despite much attention to the ethics of randomization, the moral psychology of this study design has not been explored. This article analyzes the ethical tensions that arise from conducting these studies and examines the moral psychology of this design from (...) the perspectives of physician-investigators and patient-subjects. We conclude with a discussion of the practical implications of this analysis. (shrink)

The “culture wars” include debates about the “social construction” of X, where X includes, but is not limited to, quarks, the child viewer of television, and Zulu nationalism. Ian Hacking, with his usual erudition and style, analyzes the nature of “social construction” and uncovers the political and philosophical issues that drive these debates. Unlike most of the books associated with these “wars,” Hacking's book is not polemical, but rather attempts to understand the nature of the conflict without taking up sides.

This project is, in part, motivated by my contention that one cannot adequately answer the question regarding the proper justification for human rights until one has answered the metaphysical question regarding the fundamental nature of human rights and the ontological question regarding the proper status of human rights. I offer a sustained analysis of metaphysical, ontological, and justificatory questions regarding human rights with the purpose of illustrating the point that theories that fail to engage in such analyses are inadequate. In (...) particular, this essay argues that Michael Ignatieff’s theory of human rights, as articulated in Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, is philosophically inadequate because it fails to connect his justificatory arguments for human rights with metaphysical and ontological conceptions of and arguments for human rights. (shrink)

Surgeons who perform sex reassignment surgeries define their goals and evaluate their outcomes in terms of two kinds of results: aesthetic and functional. Since the neogenitals fashioned through sex reassignment surgeries do not enable reproductive function, surgeons must determine what the function of the genitals is or ought to be. A review of surgical literature demonstrates that questions of what constitute genital form and function, while putatively answered in the operating room, are not answerable in the discourses of clinical evaluation (...) used to define them. When the genitals—the word itself derived from the Latin genitas meaning to beget—are not reproductive, the question of their function shifts away from the biological and into other registers: pleasure, intimacy, sociality. As condensed sites of meaning and meaning-making around which selves, affects, resources, anxieties and futures are organized, the genitals signify in excess of the categories of “aesthetic” and “function” that surgeons use to assess them. Not reducible to either aesthetics or function, but constitutive of them both, this excess appears in surgical texts in the form of imagined futures of social and sexual engagement and demonstrates a powerful means by which properly sexed bodies are created. (shrink)

Bioethics, Volume 36, Issue 3, Page 318-327, March 2022.

Cartwright’s self-proclaimed philosophical heritage includes Aristotle and Otto Neurath. Her Aristotelianism includes the view that the aim of science is the identification of the capacities of things in nature. From Neurath she takes a “patchwork” view of theories according to which theories do not fit into an unified whole in which higher-order sciences reduce, in some way, to lower-order sciences. Instead, theories work for particular kinds of phenomena and there is no guarantee that any theory will work outside of those (...) situations for which it was constructed. Cartwright maintains that theories and laws may provide true descriptions of the world, but no one theory or set of laws is universal. She argues that, since laws and theories are not universal, all laws are ceteris paribus. The achievement of science does not rest on knowledge of laws, but knowledge of the capacities that the things in the world possess. (shrink)

In 1987, George Soros introduced his concepts of reflexivity and fallibility and has further developed and applied these concepts over subsequent decades. This paper attempts to build on Soros's framework, provide his concepts with a more precise definition, and put them in the context of recent thinking on complex adaptive systems. The paper proposes that systems can be classified along a ‘spectrum of complexity’ and that under specific conditions not only social systems but also natural and artificial systems can be (...) considered ‘complex reflexive.’ The epistemological challenges associated with scientifically understanding a phenomenon stem not from whether its domain is social, natural, or artificial, but where it falls along this spectrum. Reflexive systems present particular challenges; however, evolutionary model-dependent realism provides a bridge between Soros and Popper and a potential path forward for economics. (shrink)

This is an unusual book in that it is neither a synthetic presentation of Plotinus' thought nor an examination of a particular topic in Plotinus. It is rather, as the series title indicates, a study of Plotinus's arguments on a wide range of issues. For this reason, it would make exceptionally difficult reading for anyone who is not already familiar with Plotinus's philosophy.

St. Augustine’s tremendous influence on Western thought continues to provide scholars from all fields with fresh insights and new connections to the philosophical and theological questions posed by modernity. The twenty essays collected here attempt not only to discuss perennial problems as found in Augustine—human willing, the nature of time, sin and free will, the soul’s relationship to the body—but also bring Augustine’s mind to bear on many post-Patristic concerns such as the alliance between theology and philosophy, linguistic analysis, the (...) insights of various ethical systems, as well as the fundamental tenets of modern liberal thought. (shrink)

In addition to the complete Enneads and Porphyry's Life of Plotinus, this republication of the fourth edition of MacKenna's Plotinus includes a brief foreword from the publisher, extracts from MacKenna's "Explanatory Matter in the First Edition", and two appendices: an essay titled "A Suggestive Outline of Plotinian Metaphysics," and a concor dance of the chronological and systematic orders of Plotinus' works. It also provides, at the conclusion of each treatise, selected brief passages in other translations, including MacKenna's first edition, Armstrong, (...) Guthrie, and Taylor. (shrink)

In this paper we compare the propositional logic of Frege’s Grundgesetze der Arithmetik to modern propositional systems, and show that Frege does not have a separable propositional logic, definable in terms of primitives of Grundgesetze, that corresponds to modern formulations of the logic of “not”, “and”, “or”, and “if…then…”. Along the way we prove a number of novel results about the system of propositional logic found in Grundgesetze, and the broader system obtained by including identity. In particular, we show that (...) the propositional connectives that are definable in terms of Frege’s horizontal, negation, and conditional are exactly the connectives that fuse with the horizontal, and we show that the logical operators that are definable in terms of the horizontal, negation, the conditional, and identity are exactly the operators that are invariant with respect to permutations on the domain that leave the truth-values fixed. We conclude with some general observations regarding how Frege understood his logic, and how this understanding differs from modern views. (shrink)

Miscarriage often is a traumatic experience with serious mental health implications. Friends and family members are often uncomfortable with and avoid discussing the topic with bereaved individuals, potentially making them feel ostracized, contributing to their mental health concerns. We investigated the correlation between posttraumatic stress symptoms, perceived ostracism, and recalled grief intensity measures in a sample of cisgender women who have had a miscarriage. These participants were recruited using Qualtrics’s Panel Recruitment Services. Women’s perceived ostracism correlated positively with posttraumatic stress (...) symptoms and negatively with grief congruence. Perceived ostracism also explained additional variance in posttraumatic stress symptoms when considered alongside grief intensity measures. (shrink)

This paper defends Plotinus’ reading ofSophist248e-249d as an expression of the togetherness or unity-in-duality of intellect and intelligible being. Throughout the dialogues Plato consistently presents knowledge as a togetherness of knower and known, expressing this through the myth of recollection and through metaphors of grasping, eating, and sexual union. He indicates that an intelligible paradigm is in the thought that apprehends it, and regularly regards the forms not as extrinsic “objects” but as the contents of living intelligence. A meticulous reading (...) ofSophist248e-249d shows that the “motion” attributed to intelligible being is not temporal change but the activity of intellectual apprehension. Aristotle’s doctrines of knowledge as identity of intellect and the intelligible, and of divine intellect as thinking itself, are therefore in continuity with Plato, and Plotinus’ doctrine of intellect and being is continuous with both Plato and Aristotle. (shrink)