Making sense of the stories that people with Alzheimer's tell: a journey with my motherConfabulation or pseudo‐reminiscence of the sort produced by people with Alzheimer's is reconsidered by applying existing theories about the structure of narrative and work on reminiscence, and the construction of a life story to the stories told by the author's mother. This approach provides the basis for going beyond a negative estimate of confabulatory stories based on their apparent confusion of past and present, truth and fantasy., (...) to a more positive estimate of diem as complying with the norms of narrative, and as being functional for their teller as a means both of interaction and of reconstructing an identity. It also allows for identification of certain predominant themes, which may help one to grasp die general sense of such stories. (shrink)

"The book presents in accessible fashion recent important work on the self and self-consciousness and also moves the issues forward with interesting new ideas. It provides a notably crisp and clear treatment of some extremely intriguing topics." -- Jane Heal, Department of Philosophy, University of Cambridge In this book, José Luis Bermú dez addesses two fundamental problems in the philosophy and psychology of self-consciousness: (1) Can we provide a noncircular account of fully fledged self-conscious thought and language in (...) terms of more fundamental capacities? (2) Can we explain how fully fledged self-conscious thought and language can arise in the normal course of human development? Bermú dez argues that a paradox (the paradox of self-consciousness) arises from the apparent strict interdependence between self-conscious thought and linguistic self-reference. The paradox renders circular all theories that define self-consciousness in terms of linguistic mastery of the first-person pronoun. It seems to follow from the paradox of self-consciousness that no such account or explanation can be given. Drawing on recent work in empirical psychology and philosophy, the author argues that any explanation of fully fledged self-consciousness that answers these two questions requires attention to primitive forms of self-consciousness that are prelinguistic and preconceptual. Such primitive forms of self-consciousness are to be found in somatic proprioception, the structure of exteroceptive perception, and prelinguistic forms of social interaction. The author uses these primitive forms of self-consciousness to dissolve the paradox ofself-consciousness and to show how the two questions can be given an affirmative answer. (shrink)

Clicks, comments, transactions, and physical movements are being increasingly recorded and analyzed by Big Data processors who use this information to trace the sentiment and activities of markets and voters. While the benefits of Big Data have received considerable attention, it is the potential social costs of practices associated with Big Data that are of interest to us in this paper. Prior research has investigated the impact of Big Data on individual privacy rights, however, there is also growing recognition of (...) its capacity to be mobilized for surveillance purposes. Our paper delineates the underlying issues of privacy and surveillance and presents them as in tension with one another. We postulate that efforts at controlling Big Data may create a trade-off of risks rather than an overall improvement in data protection. We explore this idea in relation to the principles of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation as it arguably embodies the new ‘gold standard’ of cyber-laws. We posit that safeguards advocated by the law, anonymization and pseudonymization, while representing effective counter measures to privacy concerns, also incentivize the use, collection, and trade of behavioral and other forms of de-identified data. We consider the legal status of these ownerless forms of data, arguing that data protection techniques such as anonymization and pseudonymization raise significant concerns over the ownership of behavioral data and its potential use in the large-scale modification of activities and choices made both on and offline. (shrink)

This volume offers an array of newly commissioned essays, addressing the topic of love in the Christian tradition. Drawn from a range of expert theologians and philosophers in contemporary analytic and non-analytic theology, these essays join current debates within the theology of love, and aim to propose new avenues for future research. Including the last essay written by Marilyn McCord Adams, Love, Divine and Human deals with a rich variety of issues related to divine and human love. The broad scope (...) of the book includes divine transcendence and its methodological bearing on the doctrine of divine love, the nature and scope of divine love, the interrelation between God's love and wrath, the plausibility of an impassable God of love, and the application of various conceptions of divine love to the problem of divine hiddenness, human ethics, and human free will, among other topics. This unified collection of cutting-edge papers will advance discussion for all those focused on the theology of love. (shrink)

A central figure in Western history and American political thought, Thomas Paine continues to provoke debate among politicians, activists, and scholars. People of all ideological stripes are inspired by his trenchant defense of the rights and good sense of ordinary individuals, and his penetrating critiques of arbitrary power. This volume contains Paine’s explosive _Common Sense_ in its entirety, including the oft-ignored Appendix, as well as selections from his other major writings: _The American Crisis_, _Rights of Man,_ and _The Age of (...) Reason. _It also contains several of Paine’s shorter essays. All the documents have been transcribed directly from the originals, making this edition the most reliable one available. Essays by Ian Shapiro, Jonathan Clark, Jane Calvert, and Eileen Hunt Botting bring Paine into sharp focus, illuminating his place in the tumultuous decades surrounding the American and French Revolutions and his larger historical legacy. (shrink)

First published in 1918, this volume was partly based on lectures delivered by Dorothea Jane Stephen at and near Bangalore and was intended to illustrate the considerable influence exercised by the early literature of India on later Indian philosophy and culture. Examining themes of divinity and religion together with morality and human nature, the essays in this book combine to offer a fitting introduction to the importance and far-reaching effects of early Indian thought.

Incompatibilism about freedom and causal determinism is commonly supported by appeal to versions of the well known Consequence argument. Critics of theConsequence argument have presented counterexamples to the Consequence argument’s central inference principle. The thesis of this article is that proponents of the Consequence argument can easily bypass even the best of these counterexamples.

BackgroundHIV cure research involving cell and gene therapy has intensified in recent years. There is a growing need to identify ethical standards and safeguards to ensure cell and gene therapy (CGT) HIV cure research remains valued and acceptable to as many stakeholders as possible as it advances on a global scale.MethodsTo elicit preliminary ethical and practical considerations to guide CGT HIV cure research, we implemented a qualitative, in-depth interview study with three key stakeholder groups in the United States: (1) biomedical (...) HIV cure researchers, (2) bioethicists, and (3) community stakeholders. Interviews permitted evaluation of informants’ perspectives on how CGT HIV cure research should ethically occur, and were transcribed verbatim. We applied conventional content analysis focused on inductive reasoning to analyze the rich qualitative data and derive key ethical and practical considerations related to CGT towards an HIV cure.ResultsWe interviewed 13 biomedical researchers, 5 community members, and 1 bioethicist. Informants generated considerations related to: perceived benefits of CGT towards an HIV cure, perceived risks, considerations necessary to ensure an acceptable benefit/risk balance, CGT strategies considered unacceptable, additional ethical considerations, and considerations for first-in-human CGT HIV cure trials. Informants also proposed important safeguards to developing CGT approaches towards an HIV cure, such as the importance of mitigating off-target effects, mitigating risks associated with long-term duration of CGT interventions, and mitigating risks of immune overreactions.ConclusionOur study identified preliminary considerations for CGT-based HIV cure across three key stakeholder groups. Respondents identified an ideal cure strategy as one which would durably control HIV infection, protect the individual from re-acquisition, and eliminate transmission to others. Known and unknown risks should be anticipated and perceived as learning opportunities to preserve and honor the altruism of participants. Preclinical studies should support these considerations and be transparently reviewed by regulatory experts and peers prior to first-in-human studies. To protect the public trust in CGT HIV cure research, ethical and practical considerations should be periodically revisited and updated as the science continues to evolve. Additional ethics studies are required to expand stakeholder participation to include traditionally marginalized groups and clinical care providers. (shrink)

In this book, Lucy Jane Ward argues that although contemporary scholarship tends to divide Agnes Heller's work chronologically in terms of her “Marxist” and subsequent “post-Marxist” periods, a closer reading reveals her work as a continuing engagement both with and against Marx's idea of the human being rich in need.

In the late 1990s, Alice Sebold is writing what will become her phenomenally successful novel The Lovely Bones (2002), but she finds herself having to abandon it in order to write her critically acclaimed rape memoir Lucky (1999). She did not want, she says years later, Susie Salmon (the novel’s dead narrator) doing “work for her”, but wanted Susie free “to tell her own story”. Lucky would be the “real deal” about rape, while The Lovely Bones would be a fantasy. (...) And yet, the memoir and novel are similar in many respects; and nearly identical to begin with. The Lovely Bones opens with the rape, murder and mutilation of a young girl – Susie – while Lucky opens with reference to the girl who was raped, murdered and mutilated in the tunnel Sebold was also raped in. This girl, Sebold maintains, always haunts her. Thus, I will argue, it is not possible to read her novel, which some critics have dismissed as “timid and sentimental”, without reading her gritty autobiography; and vice versa it is not possible to read Sebold’s rape memoir without reading her novel, which in a complex way bears witness to that unnamed girl, if not for all dead, unnamed girls. The question is, then, how does the intertextuality of Sebold’s novel and memoir, and, more broadly, the interrelationship of truth and fantasy, impact on our reading of Sebold’s work, especially her memoir? Keywords Rape, fact, fiction, truth, lie, reading, writing, creative witnessing, wishful thinking, utopia. (shrink)

Background: Empirical ethics inquiry works from the notion that stakeholder perspectives are necessary for gauging the ethical acceptability of human studies and assuring that research aligns with societal expectations. Although common, studies involving different populations often entail comparisons of trends that problematize the interpretation of results. Using graphical model selection—a technique aimed at transcending limitations of conventional methods—this report presents data on the ethics of clinical research with two objectives: (1) to display the patterns of views held by ill and (...) healthy individuals in clinical research as a test of the study's original hypothesis and (2) to introduce graphical model selection as a key analytic tool for ethics research. Methods: In this institutional review board (IRB)-approved, National Institutes of Health-funded project, data were collected from 60 mentally ill and 43 physically ill clinical research protocol volunteers, 47 healthy protocol-consented participants, and 29 healthy individuals without research protocol experience. Respondents were queried on the ethical acceptability of research involving people with mental and physical illness (i.e., cancer, HIV, depression, schizophrenia, and posttraumatic stress disorder) and non-illness-related sources of vulnerability (e.g., age, class, gender, ethnicity). Using a statistical algorithm, we selected graphical models to display interrelationships among responses to questions. Results: Both mentally and physically ill protocol volunteers revealed a high degree of connectivity among ethically salient perspectives. Healthy participants, irrespective of research protocol experience, revealed patterns of views that were not highly connected. Conclusions: Between ill and healthy protocol participants, the pattern of views was vastly different. Experience with illness was tied to dense connectivity, whereas healthy individuals expressed views with sparse connections. In offering a nuanced perspective on the interrelation of ethically relevant responses, graphical model selection has the potential to bring new insights to the field of ethics. (shrink)

Kant's account of aesthetic value is easily ignored or subordinated by the recent stress on the primacy of the practical in his system. For Kant, vindicating reason not only requires a methodological distinction between principles of thought and knowledge on the one side, and of action and morality on the other, but the introduction of a third "faculty," feeling, along with its own principle of judgment. Christine Korsgaard has interpreted Kant's overall account of rationality in terms of a kind of (...) rationalist constructivism, the spirit of which she traces to his humanism. She argues that, for Kant, the source of all value is ultimately humanity itself, or, to be more precise, humanity insofar as it is capable of full rational autonomy. Kant's own statement of the primacy of practical reason turns out to be far from clear. (shrink)

In his most recent book Rudolf Makkreel expands upon his previous work on the hermeneutics of Wilhelm Dilthey and its development in Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, as well as the hermeneutical importance of Kant’s theory of reflective judgment. The book begins with a helpful overview of key concepts of hermeneutics and contrasts Heidegger’s “ontological” hermeneutics with Dilthey’s “ontic” experiential views. Chapter 2 explores Hegel’s rejection of Kant’s account of aesthetic feeling and Gadamer’s assimilation of that rejection in his hermeneutics. (...) In general this first section presents interesting and helpful contrasts of the hermeneutical theories of Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer.. (shrink)

ABSTRACTI argue that by limiting the objects of genuine or purely aesthetic pleasure to the products of human artifice, Matthen wrongly excludes aesthetic pleasure in natural items. Cases of aesthetic reflection that yield the ‘facilitating pleasure’ he takes to be definitive of our experience of art regularly occur also in our aesthetic experience of nature. That is, many kinds of aesthetic appreciation of nature meet his criteria of ‘learned’ engagements that are ‘difficult’ and ‘costly’. Aesthetic appreciation of nature thus represents (...) a kind of facilitating pleasure that enlarges our conception of ourselves and our connection to the world in ways that are at least as sophisticated as art appreciation. (shrink)

By 2030, according to one reliable source, the world's population will have increased by 3 · billion, demand for food will have nearly doubled, and industrial output tripled . Consider two possible histories of the world in this period: The Admirable History . Wastage of energy and natural resources is reduced, as is poverty in developing countries. Pollution decreases. Greenhouse warming slows. Biodiversity is preserved. The natural environment is protected. Food is not short.

This essay enacts a particular instance of the challenge post-structuralism poses to the study of history. In simpler, language, it concerns the difference that point of view makes when people are giving account of events, whether at first or second hand. The problem is that if all accounts of events are determined through and through by the observer’s frame of reference, then one will never know, in any given case, what really happened.I encountered this problem in concrete terms while preparing (...) to teach a course in colonial American literature. I’d set out to learn what I could about the Puritans’ relations with American Indians. All I wanted was a general idea of what had happened between the English settlers and the natives in seventeenth-century New England; post-structuralism and its dilemmas were the furthest things from my mind. I began, more or less automatically, with Perry Miller, who hardly mentions the Indians at all, then proceeded to the work of historians who had dealt exclusively with the European-Indian encounter. At first, it was a question of deciding which of these authors to believe, for it quickly became apparent that there was no unanimity on the subject. As I read one, however, I discovered that the problem was more complicated than deciding whose version of events was correct. Some of the conflicting accounts were not simply contradictory, they were completely incommensurable, in that their assumptions about what counted as a valid approach to the subject, and what the subject itself was, diverged in fundamental ways. Faced with an array of mutually irreconcilable points of view, points of view which determined what was being discussed as well as the terms of the discussion, I decided to turn to primary sources for clarification, only to discover that the primary sources reproduced the problem all over again. I found myself, in other words, in an epistemological quandary, not only unable to decide among conflicting versions of events but also unable to believe that any such decision could, in principle, be made. It was a moral quandary as well. Knowledge of what really happened when the Europeans and the Indians first met seemed particularly important, since the result of that encounter was virtual genocide. This was the kind of past “mistake” which, presumably, we studied history in order to avoid repeating. If studying history couldn’t put us in touch with actual events and their causes, then what was to prevent such atrocities from happening again? Jane Tompkins is professor of English at Duke University. She is the author of Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 and editor of Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism . Her current work concerns the construction of male identity in American popular culture. (shrink)

In this analysis Jane Blanken-Webb extends Elliot Eisner's account of how learning in the arts contributes to the creation of mind. Drawing on the psychoanalytic theory of D. W. Winnicott, Blanken-Webb argues that the acts of meaning making to which Eisner attends rely on a prior developmental achievement — namely, the establishment of self-in-relation-to-world. This prior development is important to recognize in order to appreciate all that is at stake and at play within acts of meaning making. To demonstrate (...) this, Blanken-Webb points to reverberations of an earlier process of psychological differentiation embedded within such acts that are crucial for aesthetic experience and that carry on a continual process of refinement of self-in-relation-to-world. While Eisner has a great deal to offer regarding the importance of providing students access to multiple forms of representation, this perspective adds that in doing so we are expanding on a foundation of self-in-relation-to-world, thus facilitating an educational unfolding that is much deeper than we typically recognize. (shrink)

Now if we might be inclined to endorse Heidegger's deconstruction of politics [and ethics] in modernity as being complicitous with a certain metaphysics of the will, a metaphysics which is ultimately hegemonic and destructive, we might also be willing to wonder whether the task of thinking that emerges from this diagnosis is not ultimately heading toward a philosophical dead end, one which, to be more specific, seems to rule out the very possibility of praxis.

T‐lymphocyte recognition, activation and function involve anumber of T‐cell‐specific surface proteins in addition to the receptor for antigen. The structure, function and genetic analysis of four of these T‐cell differentiation antigens are discussed.

Evidence for one or more loci on the human X chromosome influencing social cognition was recently presented by Skuse et al.(1). The imprinted locus is only expressed from a paternally inherited X chromosome, which means that boys do not express it because their only X chromosome comes from their mother. This raises the possibility of genetic as well as cultural influences on sex differences in behaviour and cognition. It may also offer some explanation for why boys are more vulnerable to (...) developmental disorders that affect social behaviour, such as autism. (shrink)

The contemporary world faces a number of problems that are both deep-seated and interrelated, since they arise from the very nature of technological society. The environment upon which all life depends is seriously threatened by climate change, rising sea levels, pollution, overpopulation, resource depletion and increased risks of droughts, forest fires, floods and other extreme weather events. Environmental degradation is intimately connected to the consumer lifestyle of developed countries. This lifestyle promotes materialism, entertainment and hedonistic superficiality that ultimately lead to (...) moral corruption. Our insensitive and destructive attitude towards nature is not isolated, or unrelated to other problems of social justice. The environmental crisis reflects human structures of domination that include political and economic exploitation, racism, sexism and ageism. These challenges are immense, and solutions to them will require a renewed dedication to moral reflection and a commitment to social justice. This book discusses the challenges in connection with topics such as human rights, economic exploitation and inequality, environmental protection, globalization, global food justice, technology, gender equality and ageism. It provides a plurality of moral and spiritual perspectives including Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism and Christianity that offer guidance in finding responses that are both possible and reasonable. (shrink)