Proximity and interpersonal contact are prominent components of social connection. Giving affective touch to others is fundamental for human bonding. This brief report presents preliminary results from a pilot study. It explores if exposure to bonding scenes impacts the activity of specific muscles related to physical interaction. Fingers flexion is a very important component when performing most actions of affectionate contact. We explored the visuo-motor affective interplay by priming participants with bonding scenes and assessing the electromyographic activity of the fingers (...) flexor muscle, in the absence of any overt movements. Photographs of dyads in social interaction and of the same dyads not interacting were employed. We examined the effects upon the electromyographical activity: during the passive exposure to pictures, and during picture offset and when expecting the signal to perform a fingers flexion task. Interacting dyads compared to matched non-interacting dyads increased electromyographic activity of the fingers flexor muscle in both contexts. Specific capture of visual bonding cues at the level of visual cortex had been described in the literature. Here we showed that the neural processing of visual bonding cues reaches the fingers flexor muscle. Besides, previous visualization of bonding cues enhanced background electromyographic activity during motor preparation to perform the fingers flexion task, which might reflect a sustained leakage of central motor activity downstream leading to increase in firing of the respective motor neurons. These data suggest, at the effector level, an implicit visuo-motor connection in which social interaction cues evoke intrinsic dispositions toward affectionate social behavior. (shrink)

L'histoire de la réception littéraire de l'Utopie de Thomas More au Portugal a été une histoire d'omissions, de censures et de traductions différées qui met en évidence un défaut dans le système culturel portugais. En effet, il est quelque peu ironique qu'une œuvre aussi représentative de la littérature et de la pensée occidentale, historiquement associée à l'ouverture des horizons géographiques du monde, et qui attribue au personnage d'un marin lusitanien, Raphaël Hythlodée, la découverte d'un lieu idéal, n'a été traduite en (...) portugais que dans la seconde moitié du vingtième siècle. Cependant, la première décennie du vingt-et-unième siècle semble annoncer une fortune littéraire plus favorable à l'Utopie de More dans la langue portugaise: non seulement une édition du chef d'œuvre de More a finalement été traduite du latin, mais aussi deux romans ont été publiés en 2004, A lenda de Martim Regos, de Pedro Canais, et Rafael, de Manuel Alegre. Dans le cadre de leurs propres déroulements narratifs, les deux œuvres réaccentuent les traits complexes du personnage du marin portugais et découvreur de l'île idéale. La même réinvention du personnage de Raphaël avait déjà été tentée, en 1998, par José V. de Pina Martins dans son long récit dialogique Utopia III. Dans cet essai, je me concentrerai à la fois sur les sources documentaires liées à la culture portugaise qui sont à la base de l'Utopie de More et sur certains aspects pertinents de la réception du personnage de Raphaël Hythlodée dans les romans susmentionnés. (shrink)

Nei suoi diversi stadi evolutivi la vita biologica sul nostro pianeta ha mostrato due principali “adattamenti” al tempo: in primo luogo, imprimendo nel codice genetico elementi che facilitassero la variabilità periodica ai cambiamenti ambientali (luce, temperatura, precipitazioni), fenomeni tipici del nostro pianeta e del suo satellite rispetto al sole; in secondo luogo, dotando il sistema nervoso animale di strutture che garantissero, oltre l’equilibrio, le attività sensoriali e motorie rego...

Nei suoi diversi stadi evolutivi la vita biologica sul nostro pianeta ha mostrato due principali “adattamenti” al tempo: in primo luogo, imprimendo nel codice genetico elementi che facilitassero la variabilità periodica ai cambiamenti ambientali (luce, temperatura, precipitazioni), fenomeni tipici del nostro pianeta e del suo satellite rispetto al sole; in secondo luogo, dotando il sistema nervoso animale di strutture che garantissero, oltre l’equilibrio, le attività sensoriali e motorie rego...

This collection brings together a selection of writings on art by the internationally acclaimed novelist, historian and critic Marina Warner. For 30 years Warner has published widely on a range of art-world subjects and objects, from contemporary installation and film works to paintings by Flemish and Italian Renaissance masters, through Victorian photography and twentieth-century political drawings and prints. Warner's extraordinary curiosity in art and culture is conveyed in writing that is at once poetic and playful, elegant and rigorous, training our (...) eyes on the smallest of details while painting a broad-brushstroke landscape of art past and present. Themes familiar to Warner's readers--myth and fantasy, psychic and sexual experience, the vast and marvelous expanse of the human imagination--are treated in the lectures and articles, stories, interviews and essays contained here, some of which are published for the first time or republished from out-of-print sources. For the first of two volumes, editor Vivian Sky Rehberg has assembled themed sections titled "Playing in the Dark," "Telling Tales" and "Phantom Technologies." Texts include interviews with Tacita Dean and Paula Rego; catalogue essays on Leonora Carrington, Henry Fuseli, Zarina Bhimji, Tony Oursler and Fischli/Weiss; articles on Tracy Emin, Marlene Dumas, Louise Bourgeois; stories for artist's books by Kiki Smith and Helen Douglas; and lectures on Francis Bacon, Hieronymous Bosch and William Kentridge. "The Symbol Gives Rise to Thought" invites us to explore new ways of seeing and engaging with the traces of our artistic heritage. Marina Warner is a writer of fiction, criticism and history. Holder of 12 honorary degrees and two honorary fellowships, Warner is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature. She has judged the The Jerwood Drawing Prize and the Turner Prize; she is a regular broadcaster on the BBC, and has taught and given lectures worldwide, including the National Gallery and ICA, London and the Prado in Madrid; she has delivered the Presidential Lecture at Stanford University and the Carpenter Lecture at Harvard. She has been awarded a CBE, Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France and Commendatore dell'Ordine della Stella di Solidareità, Italy. Warner is a winner of the Aby Warburg Prize and a Getty Scholar. Vivian Sky Rehberg is an art historian and critic based in Paris and Rotterdam. A founding editor of "Journal of Visual Culture," she is a contributing editor of "Frieze," and has written for numerous contemporary art publications. Previously Chair of the department of Critical Studies at Parsons Paris School of Art + Design, where she taught modern and contemporary art, Rehberg is currently Course Director for the Masters in Fine Art at Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam.. (shrink)

Formal training in clinical ethics must become a central part of residency curricula to prepare practitioners to manage the ethical dimensions of patient care. Residency educators must ground their teaching in an understanding of the conceptual, biomedical, and psychosocial aspects of the important ethical issues that arise in that field of practice. Four aspects of professional competence in clinical ethics provide a useful framework for curricular planning. The physician should learn to: (1) recognize ethical issues as they arise in clinical (...) care and identify hidden values and unacknowledged conflicts; (2) think clearly and critically about these issues in ways that lead to ethically justifiable courses of action; (3) apply those practical skills needed to implement an ethically justifiably course of action; and (4) judge when the management of a clinical situation requires consultation with individuals or institutional bodies with additional expertise or authority. We argue that these practical goals can be accomplished with a relatively modest emphasis on the theoretical aspects of medical ethics. (shrink)

In this essay we discuss a class of apparently metaphorical idioms, exemplified by “fine as frog's hair,” that do not afford any obvious interpretation, and appear to have originated, at least in part, in language play. We review recent trends in both play theory and metaphor theory, and show that a playful approach to language is often an important element in the use and understanding of metaphors (and idioms generally), even when metaphors can be readily interpreted by means of a (...) vehicle-to-topic mapping. Based on this evidence we call for a more deliberate inclusion of language play in metaphor theory and analysis. (shrink)

Here are the answers to questions Man has sought through the ages; here are practical answers you hoped could be found somewhere; here are answers that work. ...

We show that the first order theory of the lattice $\mathscr{L}^{ (S) of finite dimensional closed subsets of any nontrivial infinite dimensional Steinitz Exhange System S has logical complexity at least that of first order number theory and that the first order theory of the lattice L(S ∞ ) of computably enumerable closed subsets of any nontrivial infinite dimensional computable Steinitz Exchange System S ∞ has logical complexity exactly that of first order number theory. Thus, for example, the lattice of (...) finite dimensional subspaces of a standard copy of $\bigoplus_\omega$ Q interprets first order arithmetic and is therefore as complicated as possible. In particular, our results show that the first order theories of the lattice L(V ∞ ) of c.e. subspaces of a fully effective ℵ 0 -dimensional vector space V∞ and the lattice of c.e. algebraically closed subfields of a fully effective algebraically closed field F ∞ of countably infinite transcendence degree each have logical complexity that of first order number theory. (shrink)

We show that arbitrary tautologies of Johansson’s minimal propositional logic are provable by “small” polynomial-size dag-like natural deductions in Prawitz’s system for minimal propositional logic. These “small” deductions arise from standard “large” tree-like inputs by horizontal dag-like compression that is obtained by merging distinct nodes labeled with identical formulas occurring in horizontal sections of deductions involved. The underlying geometric idea: if the height, h(∂), and the total number of distinct formulas, ϕ(∂), of a given tree-like deduction ∂ of a minimal (...) tautology ρ are both polynomial in the length of ρ, |ρ|, then the size of the horizontal dag-like compression ∂ᶜ is at most h(∂)×ϕ(∂), and hence polynomial in |ρ|. That minimal tautologies ρ are provable by tree-like natural deductions ∂ with |ρ|-polynomial h(∂) and ϕ(∂) follows via embedding from Hudelmaier’s result that there are analogous sequent calculus deductions of sequent ⇒ρ. The notion of dag-like provability involved is more sophisticated than Prawitz’s tree-like one and its complexity is not clear yet. Our approach nevertheless provides a convergent sequence of NP lower approximations of PSPACE-complete validity of minimal logic. (shrink)

The main subject of this very original and engaging book is the history of the idea of formal proof. Von Plato shows how that idea emerged, from the Greeks to the crucial last few decades of the ni...

Professor Oswald Szemerényi's Einführung in die vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft, first published in 1970, remains the standard introduction to comparative Indo-European linguistics. It is available here in English for the first time, in a revised, enlarged, and updated fifth edition. The introductory section presents a general survey of the principles of diachronic-comparative linguistics, and the remainder of the book is a thorough and detailed analysis, according to those principles, of the phonological and morphological structure of the Indo-European group of languages. Each section (...) of the book has a detailed bibliography, so that the student can progress from the general overview to a more detailed examination of particular topics. (shrink)

‘Biochromatology’ can be defined as the study of the relationships between colours, and between colours and design in nature. Certain laws concerning biochromatics can be formulated in the terminology of the Colour Circle. One of them is that planes in warm colours and planes in cold colours never adjoin. Another law is that design is never polychromatic. It seems that the observed biochromatical facts can be explained with the help of the principle “optimal manifestation of colour”, which in turn is (...) based on the formative principles of matter itself. (shrink)

Solving complex spiritual problems of modern life leads us to rethinking its higher meanings, absolute values, essences. Philosophical and cultural worldview, as the supreme form of knowledge and comprehension of the existence of the world and man, now directs the study of the root causes, the essential foundations of the world order, the disclosure of the deep meaning of what is happening to the world, society, culture and man, focuses on the creation of universal explanatory models of things, its individual (...) components. Philosophical and cultural reflection as analytical means of cognition involves the ability to go beyond the real spheres of being and deduces the general cultural categories of the world of thought, such as being and non-being, God and soul, time and eternity, spirit and matter, death and immortality, etc. It is in the sense of reflexive activity of philosophical and cultural consciousness that it is possible to consider any phenomenon of being not in itself, but through the prism of the space of deep cultural meanings, which testifies to the metaphysical nature of culture, which is connected with the world of higher, absolute meanings and entities. In cultural studies, there is a tremendous experience with genesis and historical development of socio-cultural life, in particular, religious and philosophical culture. (shrink)

This article focuses on the most recent debates in the vibrant and emerging subfield of philosophy of emotion research. Given the dominance of 'cognitivist' theories of emotion in the philosophy, neurobiology, and cognitive science of emotion, we have witnessed a move away from attempts to pit reason and emotion against each other. This move, however, has opened the door to a host of thorny challenges for how we think about our affective relationship with the world, with concepts, and with other (...) minds. (shrink)

The struggle over legal abortion access in the United States is a religious controversy, not a scientific debate. Religious activists who believe that meaningful individual life (i.e., “personhood”) begins at a specific “moment-of-conception” are attempting to pass laws that force this view upon all pregnant persons, irrespective of their medical circumstances, individual preferences, or personal religious beliefs. This paper argues that such actions promote a constitutionally prohibited “establishment of religion.” Abortion policy in a secular state must be based upon scientifically (...) accurate biology, not unprovable theological presuppositions. The scientific facts regarding human pregnancy do not support the position that personhood begins with fertilization—at which point a pregnancy does not yet even exist. Abortion policy should regard the embryo/fetus as part of the pregnant individual’s body until delivery. We argue that individual “personhood” only begins when the _latent_ potentialities of the fetal nervous system are _actualized_ in the newborn after delivery. The paper argues that instantiating non-scientific beliefs concerning embryonic/fetal “personhood” into the law as the basis for abortion policy establishes a state-sponsored religion. The protection of religious liberty requires that abortion be decriminalized. Abortion should be treated like any other medical procedure and regulated similarly. To protect both religious freedom and sound medical practice, individual legal personhood should be recognized as beginning only at birth. (shrink)

Dans cet article, nous analysons les textes de G. W. Leibniz qui portent sur la censure et la liberté d’expression, notamment par rapport aux auteurs qu’il qualifie de « libertins » ou d’« athées ». Nous explorons le dispositif théorique qu’il propose pour déterminer les limites justes entre la censure et la liberté de pensée; dispositif qui permet, dans chaque cas, de choisir entre la réfutation savante et la suppression autoritaire des textes estimés pernicieux pour la morale ou la piété.

The question addressed here is whether evidence concerning defendants' past criminal records should be introduced at their trials because such evidence reveals their character and thus reveals whether they are the kinds of persons likely to have committed the crimes with which they are currently charged. I strongly caution against the introduction of such evidence for a number of reasons. First, the link between defendants' past criminal records and claims about their standing dispositions to think and act is tenuous, at (...) best. Second, noncharacter, or trace, evidence should have primacy in determining the guilt or innocence of defendants. Third, character evidence will vary in its freshness and specificity. Other things being equal, only relatively fresh and specific character evidence has probative value. Moreover, such evidence will have greater probative value in criminal cases where the issue before the court is whether a crime has been committed than in cases where the issue is whether it was the defendant who committed the crime. Finally, we might be more sanguine about the introduction of fresh and specific character evidence under conditions likely to work against its misuse or misinterpretation. However, the relevant conditions may not often be satisfied in the real world of criminal trials and defendants. (shrink)

Si la danse est peu présente dans l’œuvre esthétique d’Étienne Souriau, celui-ci a entretenu des liens étroits avec certains penseurs de la danse de son temps. En 1965, il écrit deux préfaces consacrées à la danse, et la danse occupe une place importante dans le Vocabulaire d’esthétique qu’il dirige. Ces textes demandent à être replacés dans leur contexte institutionnel et théorique, ce qui nécessite de remonter jusqu’aux années 1920-1930. Plus largement se pose la question des relations entre la philosophie esthétique (...) et la danse (notamment la danse classique). (shrink)

The basic structural units of society, as a highly organized social system, are social institutions, which allow to create a strong and stable system of relations between people, to form a social order. Leadership is one of the main elements that ensures the functioning of a social institute. The specific traits and particular attributes of political leadership are actively explored by scholars, while spiritual leadership with its particular characteristics remains unaddressed. In the modern world, the institute of leadership in Judaism (...) has a significant impact on its followers, and therefore it is important to study the historical roots of this phenomenon, the mechanisms of influence of the leader on the followers of the current and directly determine the role of the spiritual leader in the preserved national traditions of Judaism. (shrink)