Correspondence with a disciple revealing an altogether unknown facet of Sri Aurobindo's personality: his great sense of humour.

Across two studies, a wide age range of participants was interviewed about the nature of death. All participants were living in rural Madagascar in a community where ancestral beliefs and practices are widespread. In Study 1, children (8–17 years) and adults (19–71 years) were asked whether bodily and mental processes continue after death. The death in question was presented in the context of a narrative that focused either on the corpse or on the ancestral practices associated with the afterlife. Participants (...) aged 8 years and older claimed that death brings an end to most bodily and mental processes. Nevertheless, particularly in the context of the religious narrative, they claimed that certain mental processes continue even after death. This assertion of an afterlife was more evident among adults than children, especially with respect to cognitive processes, such as knowing and remembering. In Study 2, 5‐ and 7‐year‐olds were asked similar questions in connection with the death of a bird and a person. Seven‐year‐olds consistently claimed that bodily and mental processes cease at death, whereas 5‐year‐olds were unsystematic in their replies. Together, the two studies replicate and extend findings obtained with Western children showing that, in the course of development, different conceptions of death are elaborated—a biological conception in which death terminates living processes and a religious conception in which death marks the beginning of a new form of spiritual existence. (shrink)

Anthropology combines two quite different enterprises: the ethnographic study of particular people in particular places and the theorizing about the human species. As such, anthropology is part of cognitive science in that it contributes to the unitary theoretical aim of understanding and explaining the behavior of the animal species Homo sapiens. This article draws on our own research experience to illustrate that cooperation between anthropology and the other sub-disciplines of cognitive science is possible and fruitful, but it must proceed from (...) the recognition of anthropology’s unique epistemology and methodology. (shrink)

Rebbetzin Esther Greenberg was famous throughout Israel as a mentor to countless women, including some of the best-known teachers and counselors.

We welcome the critical appraisal of the database used by the behavioral sciences, but we suggest that the authors' differentiation between variable and universal features is ill conceived and that their categorization of non-WEIRD populations is misleading. We propose a different approach to comparative research, which takes population variability seriously and recognizes the methodological difficulties it engenders.

Interviews with female impersonators reveal the social, cultural, and economic aspects of their occupation and the subculture of the homosexual transvestite.

The overall goal of this target article is to demonstrate a mechanism for an embodied cognition. The particular vehicle is a much-studied, but still widely debated phenomenon seen in 7–12 month-old-infants. In Piaget's classic “A-not-B error,” infants who have successfully uncovered a toy at location “A” continue to reach to that location even after they watch the toy hidden in a nearby location “B.” Here, we question the traditional explanations of the error as an indicator of infants' concepts of objects (...) or other static mental structures. Instead, we demonstrate that the A-not-B error and its previously puzzling contextual variations can be understood by the coupled dynamics of the ordinary processes of goal-directed actions: looking, planning, reaching, and remembering. We offer a formal dynamic theory and model based on cognitive embodiment that both simulates the known A-not-B effects and offers novel predictions that match new experimental results. The demonstration supports an embodied view by casting the mental events involved in perception, planning, deciding, and remembering in the same analogic dynamic language as that used to describe bodily movement, so that they may be continuously meshed. We maintain that this mesh is a pre-eminently cognitive act of “knowing” not only in infancy but also in everyday activities throughout the life span. Key Words: cognitive development; dynamical systems theory; embodied cognition; infant development; motor control; motor planning; perception and action. (shrink)

Abstract[I] want to single out one phenomenon that could be called the ‘politics of sources’. It points to the extent to which the histories that both scientists and historians can write are artifacts of the available sources. The Rockefeller Foundation not only opened its archives very early on for historical work but also invested a lot in making the archives readily available for historical exploration. During the 1980s, many young historians took advantage of this opportunity. Thus, in a relatively early (...) phase of the professional historiography of molecular biology, one could have gained the impression that the development of the new biology as a whole was a bio‐politically directed enterprise of the Rockefeller Foundation sustained by the vision that social processes could ultimately be controlled by biological processes. (shrink)

The article described at first conceptual of halal tourism which is based on Islamic Shariah. Second, analyses of halal tourism effectiveness practically. Third, research of Indonesia as biggest Muslim populations in the world provide and serve halal tourism. To research this thing authors used a descriptive analytical research method coupled with literacy techniques. As a summary that halal tourism is growing fast in Indonesia with some special advantages and efforts actually. Evidently, Indonesia has been selected as the best halal tourism (...) in the world by 2019 and the trend of increasing visitors especially from middle east whom mostly Muslim’s travelers to the country. The implications of the research are found relatively new development of halal tourism conceptually and the implications in promoting halal tourism, serving Muslims community to get satisfactions in tourism without deny their belief, halal tourism is a health tourism that provide only foods, beverages and healthy advertisement and also green tourism that secure environment practically. Practical implications there are first, promote halal tourism. Second, serve Muslims community to get satisfactions in tourism without deny their belief and Islamic tennets. Third, halal tourism is a health tourism that provide only foods, beverages and healthy advertisement and green tourism that secure environment. The article is original as a result of a research in international issue that concern of halal tourism which service tourists specially for Muslims, and also offers new platform in tourism business. (shrink)

This article is an update of Latour’s well-known case of the unreturned hotel key. In recent years, the hotel key has been replaced by a keycard and more recently by a digital key that can be downloaded on a smartphone. This article analyses how—with every step in the innovation process—the trust relation of hotel owner and hotel guest is mediated in a distinct way. The networked ontology of the digital key enables the collection of personal information from which the hotel (...) can tailor its services to the wishes of the hotel guests. While this may be in the interest of the guest, it, however, also makes the guest vulnerable as she has only limited control over the data and comes to depend on the conduct of the hotel. The digital key is not merely a key to open a hotel door; it also unlocks the personal information of the guest. (shrink)

Reasoning about bedrock abstract concepts such as time, number, and valence relies on spatial metaphor and often on multiple spatial metaphors for a single concept. Previous research has documented, for instance, both future-in-front and future-to-right metaphors for time in English speakers. It is often assumed that these metaphors, which appear to have distinct experiential bases, remain distinct in online temporal reasoning. In two studies we demonstrate that, contra this assumption, people systematically combine these metaphors. Evidence for this combination was found (...) in both directly elicited and spontaneous co-speech gestures about time. These results provide first support for the hypothesis that the metaphorical representation of time, and perhaps other abstract domains as well, involves the continuous co-activation of multiple metaphors rather than the selection of only one. (shrink)

In several jurisdictions, irremediable suffering from a medical condition is a legal requirement for access to assisted dying. According to the expressivist objection, allowing assisted dying for a specific group of persons, such as those with irremediable medical conditions, expresses the judgment that their lives are not worth living. While the expressivist objection has often been used to argue that assisted dying should not be legalised, I show that there is an alternative solution available to its proponents. An autonomy-based approach (...) to assisted suicide regards the provision of assisted suicide (but not euthanasia) as justified when it is autonomously requested by a person, irrespective of whether this is in her best interests. Such an approach has been put forward by a recent judgment of the German Federal Constitutional Court, which understands assisted suicide as an expression of the person’s right to a self-determined death. It does not allow for beneficence-based restrictions regarding the person’s suffering or medical diagnosis and therefore avoids the expressivist objection. I argue that on an autonomy-based approach, assisted suicide should not be understood as a medical procedure but rather as the person’s autonomous action. (shrink)

In this commentary, we point to guidelines for performing human neuroimaging studies and their reporting in microbiota-gut-brain articles. Moreover, we provide a view on interpretational issues in MGB studies, with a specific focus on gut microbiota–derived metabolites. Thus, extending the target article, we provide recommendations to the field to increase reproducibility and relevance of this type of MGB study.

Each essay in this book starts with a question posed by individual ethnographic experience and then goes on to frame this question in a broader, comparative context. Written in an engaging and accessible style, Questions of Anthropology presents an introduction to the purpose and value of Anthropology today."--BOOK JACKET.

Global discussions are ongoing on how to stimulate antibiotic research and development in order to provide patients with new antibiotics able to address the challenges of antimicrobial resistance. In this supplement, we present nine articles derived from the research performed as part of the Innovative Medicine Initiative-funded DRIVE-AB project and others. These publications provide new evidence and arguments in the debate around economic incentives to stimulate antibiotic innovation, including characteristics, implementation and governance.

In his essay “Critique of Violence,” Walter Benjamin argued that only certain types of strikes can be considered revolutionary, while others—i.e., most bread and butter, or “political” strikes—tacitly rely on the violent logics of the state. This paper suggests, however, that by reading Benjamin against himself and applying his discussion of “pure means” to those “political” strikes, the extent to which even these basic collective actions represent effective “strategies of resistance” becomes evident. This framework requires an interdisciplinary approach to radical (...) labor studies, combining political theory with history in order to identify and analyze past instances of joyful community-building during strikes. Relying also on a historical case study—the 1926 miners’ lockout in South Wales—and Benjamin’s own writings on the discipline of history, this paper contends that strikes, and the “alternative communities” they encourage workers and their families to build, present enormous revolutionary potential. When theory and history are studied together, and when we pay close attention to the actual tactics of solidarity that make up strike actions, this potential is uncovered. (shrink)

L'auteure, riche de son expérience de scripte cinéma, analyse l'organisation spatio-temporelle des éléments constituants un film de fiction pour définir le concept de continuité apparente. Celui-ci est ensuite réinvesti dans l'étude de la stéréoscopie au cinéma. Ces deux notions sont à l'origine de la création de deux courts-métrages en 3D visant à les réunir.

The Nicholas Wolterstorff-Robert Audi debate surrounding the role of religious reasons in public debate remains unresolved in the United States. Alternatively, but relatedly, when politicians and Archbishops in the UK mention God the media react with force. This article seeks a more balanced reaction to the faith of politicians and Archbishops and a solution to the Wolterstorff-Audi debate. First, this article teases out the extent to which John Macmurray's philosophy of community is or is not evident in New Labour politics; (...) secondly, it expounds Macmurray's alternative ‘communitarianism’ by examining his account of church-state relations; thirdly, it introduces the philosophical notion of supervenience to provide a proper account of the relation between religious reasons and secular reasons in public debate and, finally, it provides an example of a ‘community’ that satisfies the essential criteria of Macmurray's definition. Thus, in addition to revealing the contemporary relevance of Macmurray's work and the misunderstandings surrounding the notion of community, this article engages with an ongoing international conversation on the ethics of religious voices in public places and proposes a solution to the Wolterstorff-Audi debate. (shrink)

I was excited to know what they have to tell us, their pain and their agony, because they never speak of that in the classroom, they never tell us how they feel. They only come to learn … I was rea...

This edited volume brings together the latest research on fictive interaction, that is the use of the frame of ordinary conversation as a means to structure cognition (talking to oneself), discourse (monologues organized as dialogues), and grammar (“why me? attitude”). This follows prior work on the subject by Esther Pascual and other authors, most of whom are also contributors to this volume. The 17 chapters in the volume explore fictive interaction as a fundamental cognitive phenomenon, as a ubiquitous discourse-structuring (...) device, as a possibly universal linguistic construction, and as an effective communicative strategy in persuasion and language pathology. The data discussed involve a wide variety of unrelated languages (spoken and signed) and modes of communication (oral, written, visual), across cultural contexts and historical time. The research presented combines linguistics and cognitive science, while bridging the gap between core grammatical studies and modern conversation and discourse analysis. The volume further reaches across what may be the most basic divide in linguistics: that between descriptive, theoretical, and applied linguistics. (shrink)

Autism is characterized by repetitive behavior and difficulties in adopting the viewpoint of others. We examine a communicative phenomenon resulting from these symptoms: non-prototypical direct speech for non-reports involving an actual utterance from previously produced discourse (e.g. quoting somebody’s words to refer to them,Pascual 2014). We video-recorded the naturalistic speech of five Brazilian children with autism, five typically developing children of the same mental age, and five of the same chronological age. They all used so-calledfictive speech(Pascual 2014,Dornelas & Pascual 2016) (...) for narration, expressing needs, and referring to individuals and events (e.g. sayingGoal!for ‘playing soccer’). Such verbatim fictive speech originated in specific prior interactions or in socio-communicative or socio-cultural knowledge. We found considerable differences in the three groups in the frequency and degree of creativeness of fictive speech as opposed to it representing standard linguistic formulae or echoing previously produced speech word by word. (shrink)