_For centuries medicine was predominantly a tradition-based "trade" until the introduction of science transformed it into an intellectually rigorous discipline. That transformation contributed heavily to the dominance in medical education of the learning of biomedical concepts ("knowing that") over learning how to translate that knowledge into clinical performance ("knowing how"). The recent emergence of performance-oriented educational initiatives suggests, however, that the balance between these two complementary approaches is changing, a change that has been referred to as "the Flexnerian revolution of (...) the 21 ^st century." Problem-based learning, learning the practice of evidence-based medicine, and learning to use clinical guidelines are among the important initiatives designed to develop high-level performance in the care of individual patients. Initiatives in which learners acquire skill in changing the performance of care systems are also being widely implemented. These trends have received important formal support through recent changes in residency training accreditation standards. Although it is too early to assess the impact of these initiatives or to know whether they will develop further, medical education is unlikely to reach its full potential unless it successfully comes to grips with the challenges of understanding, teaching, and measuring performance._. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Lenore Davidoff 1923–2014 Lenore Davidoff, a pioneering historian of British women, died October 19, 2014, from Hodgkins’ lymphoma. We have lost a generous and influential leader in gender studies and an early supporter of Feminist Studies. Born in the United States, Davidoff left in 1953 to study sociology at the London School of Economics. Her first book, The Best Circles: Society, Etiquette and the Season (1973), (...) led her to a subject she made her own: the paid and unpaid work of women, not only of wives and mothers, but also of servants. In 1979 she published an article in Feminist Studies on the secret cross-class love between a master and servant, “Class and Gender in Victorian England: The Diaries of Arthur J. Munby and Hannah Cullwick.” It remains one of Feminist Studies’s most frequently cited publications. Davidoff went on to publish numerous books and articles, including the influential Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (1987), co-authored with Catherine Hall, which argued that the formation of separate spheres—men for business, women for home—was an integral part of the early capitalist enterprise. Davidoff played a key role in building a community of fellow scholars in the 1970s and 1980s. She was instrumental in starting the Feminist History Group in London and the Women ’s Research and Resources Centre, now the Feminist Library. She served as the founding editor of the international journal Gender and History from 1987 until 1994 and remained active on its board till her death. Davidoff inspired countless feminists with her writings, mentorship, and friendship. She was invariably encouraging with younger scholars, offering incisive suggestions that could turn an early, inchoate idea into an exciting project. She will be sorely missed. —Martha Vicinus I n M e m o r y o f... (shrink)

Goldstein reported multiple cases of failure to categorise colours in patients that he termed amnesic or anomic aphasics. These patients have a particular difficulty in producing perceptual categories in the absence of other aphasic impairments. We hold that neuropsychological evidence supports the view that the task of colour categorisation is logically impossible without labels.

The purpose of the commentary is not to contradict HIT but rather to question whether its increase in predictive power outweighs the decrease in parsimony. For the refutable aspects of HIT, a simpler model for naming appears to achieve as much. Both models better fit the facts concerning naming performance than describe category-specificity.

The question of whether colour categorisation is determined by nontrivial constraints (i.e., universal neurophysiological properties of visual neurons) is an empirical issue concerning the organisation of the internal colour space. Rosch has provided psychological evidence that categories are organised around focal colours and that the organisation is universal; this commentary reconsiders that evidence.

ABSTRACTThis paper engages in an overdue dialogue amongst some aspects of the thinking of Maria Zambrano and psychoanalytic theory. The discussion focuses on some epistemological and phenomenological ideas that were prevalent in twentieth-century European philosophy. The notion of the real, for instance, is one of the jambs of this comparison, particularly between Zambrano and Jacques Lacan’s ideas. Reflecting upon how Zambrano, Lacan and Freud characterised the origins and limits of the subject and language is testimony of these problems and limits (...) themselves. Division, traversement, schism and exile are distinct yet similar heterogeneities that are central in the thinking of these authors. The Zambranian schism between philosophy and poetry, where pathos and logos are divided, resembles the psychoanalytic understood schism between the psychic and bodily and recalls the problems of the Freudian pleasure principle. These schisms can in turn be understood as an exile of a mythical prelinguistic unity which is best characterised by Lacan as the fundamental castration of the subject of desire. The psychoanalytic reflection upon Zambrano’s writing itself opens possibilities for future dialogues, perhaps in terms of a sinthomatic savoir-faire, which offers yet another layer to the discussion of her remarkable life and work. (shrink)

Evidence from aphasia is considered that leads to a distinction between abstract and concrete thought processes and hence for a distinction between rules and similarity. It is argued that perceptual classification is inherently a rule-following procedure and these rules are unable to be followed when a patient has difficulty with name comprehension and retrieval.

Theories, Technologies, Instrumentalities of Color is the outcome of a workshop, held in Leuven, Belgium, in May 2000.

Taking as its point of departure a sharp critique of Rawls's influential A Theory of Justice, this book looks at politics from an aesthetic perspective.

As earlier research on Korsakoff syndrome (KS), a frequent neurological complication of alcohol-dependence (AD), mainly focused on cognition, affective impairments have been little investigated despite their crucial impact in AD. This article proposes new research avenues on this topic by combining two theoretical frameworks: (a) dual-process models, positing that addictions are due to an imbalance between underactivated reflective system and overactivated affective-automatic one; (b) continuity theory, postulating a gradual worsening of cognitive impairments from AD to KS. We suggest that this (...) joint perspective may renew the current knowledge by clarifying the affective-automatic deficits in KS and their interactions with reflective impairments, but also by offering a direct exploration of the continuity between AD and KS regarding reflective and affective-automatic abilities. (shrink)

Problems about the accidental properties of properties motivate us--force us, I think--not to identify properties with the sets of their instances. If we identify them instead with functions from worlds to extensions, we get a theory of properties that is neutral with respect to disputes over counterpart theory, and we avoid a problem for Lewis's theory of events. Similar problems about the temporary properties of properties motivate us--though this time they probably don't force us--to give up this theory as well, (...) and to identify properties with functions from ⟨world, time⟩ pairs to extensions. Again, the replacement theory is neutral with respect to a metaphysical dispute that the old theory (arguably) forces us to take a stand on--the dispute over whether objects have temporal parts. It also allows us to give a smoother semantics for predication, to better accommodate our intuitions about which objects temporary properties are properties of, and to make temporally self-locating beliefs genuinely self -locating. (shrink)

What makes us human? Why do people think, feel and act as they do? What is the essence of human nature? What is the basic relationship between the individual and society? These questions have fascinated both great thinkers and ordinary humans for centuries. Now, at last, there is a solid basis for answering them, in the form of accumulated efforts and studies by thousands of psychology researchers. We no longer have to rely on navel-gazing and speculation to understand why people (...) are the way they are - we can instead turn to solid, objective findings. This book, by an eminent social psychologist at the peak of his career, not only summarizes what we know about people - it also offers a coherent, easy-to-understand, though radical, explanation. Turning conventional wisdom on its head, the author argues that culture shaped human evolution. Contrary to theories that depict the individual's relation to society as one of victimization, endless malleability, or just a square peg in a round hole, he proposes that the individual human being is designed by nature to be part of society. Moreover, he argues that we need to briefly set aside the endless study of cultural differences to look at what most cultures have in common - because that holds the key to human nature. Culture is in our genes, although cultural differences may not be. This core theme is further developed by a powerful tour through the main dimension of human psychology. What do people want? How do people think? How do emotions operate? How do people behave? And how do they interact with each other? The answers are often surprising, and along the way the author explains how human desire, thought, feeling, and action are connected. (shrink)

Essay Review of two books of A.N. Maxwell, last of the Neo-Popperians: The Comprehensibility of the Universe (1998) and The Human World in the Physical Universe (2001).

In this volume Russell Hittinger presents a comprehensive and critical treatment of the attempt to restate and defend a theory of natural law, particularly as proposed by Germain Grisez and John Finnis. A Critique of the New Natural Law Theory begins by examining the positions of various moral philosophers such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Alan Donogan, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Stanley Hauerwas, who wish to recover particular facets of premodern ethics. Hittinger then explores the work of Grisez and Finnis, who claim to (...) have recovered natural law in a manner that avoids the standard objections brought against it since the Enlightenment; they thus claim to have recovered natural law theory available once again for moral theology. Hittinger examines this new theory for internal coherence and consistency. In addition, he examines whether it is sufficiently comprehensive to explicate the religious, anthropological, and metaphysical questions that bear upon natural law ethics. He argues that the new natural law theory fails because it does not take into account philosophical anthropology and metaphysics. It cannot show how and why "nature" is normative for human activity. Hittinger concludes that if natural law theory is to be recovered, we must discover how to constructively bring theoretical rationality to bear upon ethics and practical rationality. Until this is done, he asserts, we will not have a defensible theory of natural law. (shrink)

The general context of this paper is the locality problem in quantum theory. In a recent issue of this journal, Redei (1991) offered a proof of the proposition that algebraic Lorentz-covariant quantum field theory is past stochastic Einstein local. We show that Redei's proof is either spurious or circular, and that it contains two deductive fallacies. Furthermore, we prove that the mentioned theory meets the stronger condition of stochastic Haag locality.