To construct their first lexicon, infants must determine the relationship between native phonological variation and the meanings of words. This process is arguably more complex for bilingual learners who are often confronted with phonological conflict: phonological variation that is lexically relevant in one language may be lexically irrelevant in the other. In a series of four experiments, the present study investigated English–Mandarin bilingual infants’ abilities to negotiate phonological conflict introduced by learning both a tone and a non-tone language. In a (...) novel word learning task, bilingual children were tested on their sensitivity to tone variation in English and Mandarin contexts. Their abilities to interpret tone variation in a language-dependent manner were compared to those of monolingual Mandarin learning infants. Results demonstrated that at 12–13 months, bilingual infants demonstrated the ability to bind tone to word meanings in Mandarin, but to disregard tone variation when learning new words in English. In contrast, monolingual learners of Mandarin did not show evidence of integrating tones into word meanings in Mandarin at the same age even though they were learning a tone language. However, a tone discrimination paradigm confirmed that monolingual Mandarin learning infants were able to tell these tones apart at 12–13 months under a different set of conditions. Later, at 17–18 months, monolingual Mandarin learners were able to bind tone variation to word meanings when learning new words. Our findings are discussed in terms of cognitive adaptations associated with bilingualism that may ease the negotiation of phonological conflict and facilitate precocious uptake of certain properties of each language. (shrink)

La philosophie commence avec l'étonnement. Et l'étonnement engendre l'interrogation et la connaissance. C'est Aristote qui structure les connaissances et l'intelligence. D'après M. Conche, la philosophie est « la recherche de la Vérité par la lumière naturelle », et cela au sujet du Tout de la réalité, et de la place de l'homme dans ce Tout. Et lorsque, dans cette recherche, une Vérité s'offre à nous, alors notre esprit, comme le pensait Cicéron, est empli du plus noble plaisir humain. Ce nouveau (...) volume présente les philosophes qui succèdent à Aristote jusqu'en 529 après Jésus-Christ, date à laquelle l'empereur byzantin Justinien a fermé toutes les écoles d'Athènes, contraignant ainsi ceux qui cherchent la Vérité à s'exiler à Rome. (shrink)

Depuis sa fondation comme discipline indépendante, la psychologie semble contourner les questions épistémologiques constitutives d’une science de l’esprit. Cet article s’attache à présenter brièvement quelques-unes de ces questions, à travers la psychologie historique d’Ignace Meyerson.

: In his landmark book, Peirce's Theory of Signs, T. L. Short argues that music signifies as a pure icon. A pure icon, according to Peirce, is not a likeness. It "does not draw any distinction between itself and its object" (EP2:163), and it "serves as a sign solely and simply by exhibiting the quality it serves to signify" (EP2:306). In music, this quality consists of the specifically musical feelings or ideas contained in the piece in question, and such musical (...) feelings are properly interpreted by means of an emotional interpretant rather than an energetic or logical one. Short, following Peirce, is correct in maintaining that music primarily signifies feeling-content whose proper means of expression is musical and whose proper interpretation by the listener involves the generation of a corresponding feeling. Nonetheless, musical signification is not purely iconic. Responding to the musical feelings presented in a work requires previous acquaintance with its style tradition, and this acquaintance involves logical interpretants. In addition, the integral temporality of music calls into question the possibility of its being purely iconic. (shrink)

En danse comme dans les autres arts – même en science – écrit Hélène Marquié, le premier pas pour les études de genre est de donner de la visibilité aux femmes dans l’archive historique afin de reconstruire une histoire « mixte » (p. 218). L’auteure explique que c’est seulement avec les rapports de 2006 et de 2009 sur « l’accès égal » des hommes et des femmes aux performances et aux structures chorégraphiques que le féminisme à tonalité politique a commencé (...) à s’implanter dans la danse françai... (shrink)

In this issue, Ellen Fox and colleagues report on their national study on ethics consultation in U.S. hospitals, following up on the previous 1999–2000 landmark study. Th...

Tout comme dans la confession catholique, le vin connaît dans l’orthodoxie une symbolique très riche qui engendre – en l’étayant – une fonctionnalité liturgique assez complexe. Nous avons essayé de la surprendre à quatre niveaux contextuels: les liturgies eucharistiques et la litie; le sacrement du mariage; le rituel de la consécration des églises; les offices et rituels pour les morts. Nous avons étudié les fonctions liturgiques de sanctification, de guérison, de bénédiction et de purification du vin, qui peuvent être regroupées, (...) selon leur symbolique sous-jacente, en trois catégories principales: l’obtention d’une efficacité rituelle extraordinaire; l’actualisation de la communication symbolique caractéristique du mimodrame liturgique; l’alimentation du sentiment religieux chez les fidèles. L’actualisation de ces fonctions liturgiques dépend strictement de la mise en oeuvre de quelques conditions essentielles, propres à l’anthropologie religieuse: l’espace sacré, le temps sacré et le contexte rituel créé par la communication de type symbolique. (shrink)

Death can be good— I’ll tell you how. Just have it come Decades from now.1 Full disclosure: The above poem expresses my outlook, and I have trouble empathising with people who want to die. But that does not make me unable to evaluate objections to the expressivist argument against PAS. Reed sets forth the expressivist argument as follows: ‘[W]hen we allow PAS for individuals who are terminally ill or facing some severe disease or disability, we send a message of disrespect (...) to all individuals who face such adversities in that we imply that they are inferior or their lives are not worth living (or at least less worth living than they otherwise would be) precisely insofar as they are diseased or disabled’.2 The passage of mine that Reed quotes, however, was not intended to set forth an expressivist view. Rather than saying the double standard of selective legalisation ‘send[s] a message of disrespect’,3 it says this double standard in fact involves a systematic devaluation of some people’s lives. I will argue that there are conditions under which this double standard does send a message of disrespect, but first I want to disassociate myself from the expressivist formulations of Coleman and Keown that …. (shrink)

Terminally ill elderly and long-term disabled persons under our system of health care are eligible for Medicare and may qualify for the hospice care benefit. Despite such provisions, research shows that individuals still frequently do not receive the health care they need. But, as inadequate as end-of-life care can be for the general population, these inadequacies are exacerbated for individuals incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails. Although inmates are guaranteed a basic level of health care under the Eighth Amendment and (...) Due Process Clause, they lack the mobility or freedom to choose their health care coverage, and they are dependent on an institutional system for such care. Inside prison, security and access issues affect the care inmates receive. Further, the availability of adequate clinical resources, especially for high-cost procedures, may be problematic in some jurisdictions.In addition to the practical, institutional, and legal barriers to providing and improving general end-of-life care, efforts to improve end-of-life care for prisoners may also encounter a lack of public sympathy. (shrink)

My little girl has leukemia; she has had it for over a year, and now she needs at least five pints of blood a day. Not the whole blood, just the platelets. Most of our relatives and friends have given at least a few times. But we need more. Now I have to go to strangers.So begins Roberta Silman's short story, “Giving Blood,” a story about illness and charity. When the narrator's husband solicited blood donations at his workplace, “he thought (...) everyone would help…He must have asked a hundred people. Thirty gave. His officemate…turned green and said, ‘Oh, no, anything but that. I'm scared of needles.'”. (shrink)

The word ‘dignity’ is a staple of contemporary American medical ethics, where it often follows the words ‘death with’. People unfamiliar with this usage might expect it to apply to one’s manner of dying—for example, a stately exit involving ceremonial farewells. Instead, conventional usage generally holds that “death with dignity” ends or prevents life without dignity, by which is meant life marked not by buffoonery, but by illness and disability. Popular examples of dignity-depleters include dementia, incontinence, and being “dependent on (...) machines”—provided the machines are respirators rather than furnaces, refrigerators, and computers. (shrink)

This article employs the animated feature film WALL-E to examine a contemporary incarnation of paternal authority, the anal father of enjoyment. Slavoj Zizek coined the expression “anal father of enjoyment” to identify a metaphorical father who operates counter to Sigmund Freud’s oedipal. Unlike the oedipal father, the anal father does not command the subject to sacrifice enjoyment as a price for entry into the social order. Rather, the anal father directs the subject to enjoy excessively. This article reasons that the (...) anal father figuration is a result of global capitalism. While a post-apocalyptic event, such as climate change, may destroy the planet, it does not end capitalism. Yet, WALL-E suggests that with the demise of the anal father, capitalism can be replaced with an alternative economic system. (shrink)

At the beginning of "The Law of Mind," Charles S. Peirce makes this striking admission (W8:135):I may mention, for the benefit of those who are curious in studying mental biographies, that I was born and reared in the neighborhood of Concord—I mean in Cambridge—at the time when Emerson, Hedge, and their friends were disseminating the ideas that they had caught from Schelling, and Schelling from Plotinus, from Boehm, or from God knows what minds struck with the monstrous mysticism of the (...) East. But the atmosphere of Cambridge held many an antiseptic against Concord transcendentalism; and I am not conscious of having contracted any of that virus. Nevertheless, it is probable that some cultured bacilli, some benignant .. (shrink)

What does it mean to know who you are? Is it a matter of knowing your name? The things that you’ve done? The people you love? Such indispensible knowledge is somehow not enough; I can know all of these things, and still feel puzzled about who I am. “I am not the person I once was,” “I am not myself today,” and “I am learning who I am,” are all commonplace poems of a kind: expressive sentences completely at home both (...) in literature and ordinary life. Such a poem is the sentence “I know who I am.” This last is one of the many grand and emblematic boasts of Miguel de Cervantes’s hilariously self-fashioned knight, Don Quixote de la Mancha, a boast that can seem both impossible and yet utterly sensible, part quixotic and... (shrink)

A common contention of literary criticism is that literary forms can express, reflect, shape, represent or otherwise give form to human life. Literature can seem to offer the same idea as a promise of life’s meaningfulness; where expressive form is powerful, life need not be empty. Can literary forms give form to human life? I will argue for one sense in which this is true. As will become clear, at stake in this inquiry is not simply an idea about the (...) meaningfulness of literature’s poetry, but a way of answering the question of what it means to be human. (shrink)

Historically nurses have lacked significant input in end-of-life decision-making, despite being an integral part of care. Nurses experience negative feelings and moral conflict when forced to aggressively deliver care to patients at the EOL. As a result, nurses participate in slow codes, described as a limited resuscitation effort with no intended benefit of patient survival. The purpose of this study was to explore and understand the process nurses followed when making decisions about participation in limited resuscitation. Five core categories emerged (...) that describe this theory: (1) recognition of patient and family values at the EOL; (2) stretching time and reluctance in decision-making; (3) harm and suffering caused by the physical components of CPR; (4) nurse’s emotional and moral response to delivering aggressive care, and; (5) choosing limited resuscitation with or without a physician order. Several factors in end-of-life disputes contribute to negative feelings and moral distress driving some nurses to perform slow codes in order to preserve their own moral conflict, while other nurses refrain unless specifically ordered by physicians to provide limited care through tailored orders. (shrink)

I am indebted to many people, especially Dorsey Armstrong, Shannon French, and Kenneth Hodges, for helpful discussions of this material. An early version of this essay was read at the Thirty-Sixth International Congress on Medieval Studies.This essay is dedicated to the glorious memory of Nina Lindsey.

Of the stories describing the adventures full of deep significances of the various rabbis from the glorious Talmudic era, the most famous but also the most exploited is undoubtedly that of the “four sages who entered the Pardes”. If in the Talmudic-Midrashic literature it was used to point out the dangers and achievements that were related to speculations, rather than experiences, and in the mystical literature it was used to point out the dangers that could befall the mystic on his (...) way to God, to the kabbalists, Pardes was an unexplained parable for an unrevealed secret, a generalized metaphor for the danger zones of religious experience, seen as something which was good for the few, but pernicious for others. This article traces the manner in which Moshe Idel analyzes, in his books and lectures, the meanings of this legend, taking the reader on a fascinating journey in time and space, throughout various types of kabbalistic thinking and even maimonidean philosophy. (shrink)

Summary In about 1735, Emilie Du Châtelet began to translate Mandeville's Fable of the Bees. Her work, which is largely ignored by scholars, did, as this article demonstrates, turn out to be one of transformation rather than of translation and came at a crucial moment in the emerging French luxury debate. So far commercial society and luxury had been defended in purely economic terms, for instance in Melon's Essai politique, or as an aspect of divine providence for fallen man, by (...) Pierre Nicole amongst others. There was as yet no coherent defence on the level of secular ethics. As this article shows, Du Châtelet set out to remedy this. In co-operation with Voltaire, with whose recent praise of English society in the Lettres philosophiques she strongly identified, she rewrote the Fable to offer a defence of modern commercial society as both natural and moral. The article argues that she was able to do so by taking recourse to classic Epicureanism in the guise of Lucretius' De rerum natura, as an alternative to the Neo-Epicureanism, with its Augustinian overtones, as espoused by Mandeville. Voltaire in turn used her translation to lay the foundations for his defence of commercial society and progress in his Traité de métaphysique in which he uses the precise passages she had inserted into Mandeville's original. This article analyses the further aspects Voltaire adds to her arguments. Taken together, Du Châtelet's ?translation? and Voltaire's Traité offer a coherent defence of bourgeois society that would underlie Voltaire's later historiographical and philosophical works and which were crucial to his concept of ?Enlightenment? and ?progress? (shrink)

Stem cell research. Drug company influence. Abortion. Contraception. Long-term and end-of-life care. Human participants research. Informed consent. The list of ethical issues in science, medicine, and public health is long and continually growing. These complex issues pose a daunting task for professionals in the expanding field of bioethics. But what of the practice of bioethics itself? What issues do ethicists and bioethicists confront in their efforts to facilitate sound moral reasoning and judgment in a variety of venues? Are those immersed (...) in the field capable of making the right decisions? How and why do they face moral challenge -- and even compromise -- as ethicists? What values should guide them? In The Ethics of Bioethics, Lisa A. Eckenwiler and Felicia G. Cohn tackle these questions head on, bringing together notable medical ethicists and people outside the discipline to discuss common criticisms, the field's inherent tensions, and efforts to assign values and assess success. Through twenty-five lively essays examining the field's history and trends, shortcomings and strengths, and the political and policy interplay within the bioethical realm, this comprehensive book begins a much-needed critical and constructive discussion of the moral landscape of bioethics. (shrink)

Although clinical ethics consultation is a high-stakes endeavor with an increasing prominence in health care systems, progress in developing standards for quality is challenging. In this article, we describe the results of a pilot project utilizing portfolios as an evaluation tool. We found that this approach is feasible and resulted in a reasonably wide distribution of scores among the 23 submitted portfolios that we evaluated. We discuss limitations and implications of these results, and suggest that this is a significant step (...) on the pathway to an eventual certification process for clinical ethics consultants. (shrink)

The present study examines the association between people’s interoceptive representation of physical sensations and the recognition of vocal and facial expressions of emotion. We used body maps to study the granularity of the interoceptive conceptualisation of 11 positive emotions (amusement, awe, compassion, contentment, desire, love, joy, interest, pride, relief, and triumph) and a new emotion recognition test (Emotion Expression Understanding Test) to assess the ability to recognise emotions from vocal and facial behaviour. Overall, we found evidence for distinct interoceptive conceptualizations (...) of 11 positive emotions across Asian American, European American, and Latino/a American cultures, as well as the reliable identification of emotion in facial and vocal expressions. Central to new theorising about emotion-related representation, the granularity of physical sensations did not covary with emotion recognition accuracy, suggesting that two kinds of emotion conceptualisation processes might be distinct. (shrink)

Aim: This article explores the issues of knowledge deficits of healthcare professionals in meeting the needs of people with IDD throughout the life span, and to identify factors that contribute to these deficits. Although statistics vary due to census results and the presence of a “hidden population,” approximately 1%–3% of the global population identify as living with an intellectual or developmental disability. People with intellectual or developmental disability experience health inequities and confront multiple barriers in society, often related to the (...) stigma of intellectual or developmental disability. Disparities in care and service are attributed to a lack of knowledge and understanding among healthcare providers about people with intellectual or developmental disability, despite their increased risk for chronic health problems. The near absence of educational programs in nursing both nationally and internationally contributes to this significant knowledge deficit. In addition, ethical considerations between paternalistic beneficence and idealized autonomy have resulted in a lack of clear direction in working with a population that is often ignored or exploited. Nurses who view people with intellectual or developmental disability as vulnerable without assessing or acknowledging their capabilities may err toward paternalism in an effort to “first do no harm.” Likewise, nurses who fail to recognize the challenges and limitations faced by people with intellectual or developmental disability may not provide sufficient protections for a vulnerable person. People with intellectual or developmental disability are not binary, but rather complex individuals with a myriad of presentations. This article seeks to encourage a well-informed model of nursing care. Through an ethical lens, this article explores the nurse’s ethical commitments in cases of victimization, access to care, decision making, and the provision of optimal end-of-life care for people with intellectual or developmental disability. (shrink)

Why do black families own less than white families? Why does school segregation persist decades after Brown v. Board of Education? Why is it harder for black adults to vote than for white adults? Will addressing economic inequality solve racial and gender inequality as well? This book answers all of these questions and more by revealing the hidden rules of race that create barriers to inclusion today. While many Americans are familiar with the histories of slavery and Jim Crow, we (...) often don't understand how the rules of those eras undergird today's economy, reproducing the same racial inequities 150 years after the end of slavery and 50 years after the banning of Jim Crow segregation laws. This book shows how the fight for racial equity has been one of progress and retrenchment, a constant push and pull for inclusion over exclusion. By understanding how our economic and racial rules work together, we can write better rules to finally address inequality in America. (shrink)