Legal institutions worldwide construct theories about gender’s ontology—i.e., theories about what gender is—and use those constructions to govern. In this article, I analyse how the Family Court of Australia constructed ontologies of gender to govern young people’s gender-affirming hormone use. By analysing the ‘reasons for judgment’ published about cases where minors applied for the Court’s authorisation to use hormones, I show that the Court constructed two theories about the ontology of gender concurrently—one essentialist and the other performative—which it leveraged (...) to arbitrate the legitimacy of hormone use. By critically examining the Court’s ontological assertions, I argue that both theories advanced anti-queer directives that tethered the legitimacy of hormone use to its promise to produce normatively gendered subjects. This analysis highlights that legal regimes concerned with controlling gender-affirming practices have much more at stake than access to those practices alone. By governing mechanisms of gender’s production, these regimes do not merely shape how gender can be expressed but also the possible forms of gender itself. (shrink)

Are incorrect judgments on false belief tasks better explained within the framework of a conceptual change theory or a bias theory? Conceptual change theory posits a change in the form of reasoning from 3 to 4 years old while bias theory posits that processing factors are responsible for errors among younger children. The results from three experiments showed that children who failed a test of false belief took as long to respond as those who passed, and both groups of children (...) took longer to respond to belief questions than to questions about prior states of reality. These results seem to support the bias theory. (shrink)

_Disrupting Shameful Legacies: Girls and Young Women Speaking Back through the Arts to Address Sexual Violence_ is based on methodologies that seek to disrupt colonial legacies, by privileging speaking up and speaking back through the arts and visual practice to challenge the situation of sexual violence.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Trauma, Recognition, and the Place of LanguageJuliet Mitchell (bio)Definitions of trauma abound within the psychoanalytic discipline. My own definition is going to be simple. A trauma, whether physical or psychical, must create a breach in a protective covering of such severity that it cannot be coped with by the usual mechanisms by which we deal with pain or loss. The severity of the breach is such that even (...) if the incident is expected, the experience cannot be foretold. We cannot thus make use of anxiety as a preparatory signal. The death of a sick relative, the amputation of a diseased limb may be consciously known about in advance, but if they are to be described as traumatic then the foreknowledge was useless. In trauma we are untimely ripped.Whether it is as childhood seduction, infantile abuse, shell shock, or war violence, or as a preoccupation with the place of neoteny and the trials of human birth, trauma is continually posited as the hypothetical “origin” of psychic states. However, although “trauma” is crucial to psychoanalytic theory, trauma in itself is not really the focus of its analysis. Freud proposed a “biological bedrock” on which psychic states were formed, but this bedrock was not the object of psychoanalytic inquiry. I suggest that what emerges as a motif in the many retheorizings of psychoanalysis time and again, as another “bedrock,” is trauma. One might call it an “experiential bedrock.” As with biology, it is crucial—but as the area of another mode of inquiry. Psychoanalysis is equipped to contribute to the understanding of the reaction to trauma, not to the trauma itself.In a colloquial context we tend to look from the perspective of the observer and label a range of difficult or tragic occurrences “traumatic.” Instead, I want to define trauma from the perspective of the person who experiences it. This means both that the same event will not always be traumatic for different people, and that the experience of different events, if they are experienced as trauma, will be the same whatever the event and whoever the sufferer. It was essentially for this reason that Freud eventually disagreed with the rich findings of Otto Rank, who proposed the trauma of birth as the origin of mankind’s neurosis. Trauma is the great equalizer. What differentiates us, since we were all born? Furthermore, what appears to be the trauma from the observer’s perspective may, from the viewpoint of the psychic response of the recipient, only be the catalyst that brings to the surface an experience which, were it not for this later event, might not in itself have been traumatic (or vice versa). Even so extreme an experience as the Holocaust may not breach the defenses of a particular individual. The catalytic event in the present triggers an earlier occurrence which becomes traumatic only by virtue of its retrospectively endowed meaning.Probably all animate matter can be traumatized; it would seem likely that the response to the breach in the human defensive system takes place at a generalizable psychosocial level. Recognition and language are interactional social processes; without another person neither a psyche nor language is possible. Object relations analysts, notably D. W. Winnicott, whom Max Hernandez addresses in his paper in this issue, have devoted their work to aspects of the psyche, Lacanians to language. To me the fields are interdependent and gain from being looked at together, both in their practice and in the theories that can [End Page 121] be applied to them. When we have a physical trauma it is common for an immediate aftereffect to be some uncertainty about words; even the ability to spell correctly can temporarily disappear. There are undoubtedly physiological explanations for this. But I shall argue that there are psychological parallels. Every patient whom I would regard as having had some relevant form of trauma had a specific relationship to language, and it is this that concerns me. In addition, Max Hernandez describes the breach in the defenses caused by the anal rape of a patient when he was a young boy. But neither the patient’s symptom nor his complaint on coming to a therapist for treatment pertains to... (shrink)

: Are incorrect judgments on false belief tasks better explained within the framework of a conceptual change theory or a bias theory? Conceptual change theory posits a change in the form of reasoning from 3 to 4 years old while bias theory posits that processing factors are responsible for errors among younger children. The results from three experiments showed that children who failed a test of false belief took as long to respond as those who passed, and both groups of (...) children took longer to respond to belief questions than to questions about prior states of reality. These results seem to support the bias theory. (shrink)

The Parmenides is arguably the pivotal text for understanding the Platonic corpus as a whole. I offer a critical analysis that takes as its key the closely constructed dramatic context and mimetic irony of the dialogue. Read with these in view, the contradictory characterizations of the "one" in the hypotheses dissolve and reform as stages in a systematic response to the objections that Parmenides earlier posed to the young Socrates' notions of forms and participation, potentially liberating Socrates from his (...) dependence on sensible simile and yielding a distinctively conceptual articulation of the difference and relation of forms and their sensible participants. The dialogue as a whole thereby functions as the means for the "conversion" of the soul to eidetic being for which Plato has the elder Socrates call in Republic VII. (shrink)

It is no longer necessary to defend current historiography of psychology against the strictures aimed at its early text book incarnations in the 1960s and 1970s. At that time, Robert Young and others denigrated then standard textbook histories of psychology for their amateurism and their justifications propaganda for specific standpoints in current psychology, disguised as history. Since then, at least some textbooks writers and working historians of psychology have made such criticisms their own. The demand for textbook histories continues (...) nonetheless. Psychology, at least in the United States, remains the only discipline that makes historical representations of itself in the form of “history and systems” courses an official part of its pedagogical canon, required, interestingly enough, for the license in clinical practice.1In the meantime, the professionalization of scholarship in history of psychology has proceeded apace. All of the trends visible in historical and social studies of other sciences, as well as in general cultural and intellectual history, are noe present in the historical study of psychology. Yet despite the visibility and social importance of psychology's various applications, and the prominence of certain schools of psychological thought such as behaviorism and psychoanalysis in contemporary cultural and political debate, the historiography of psychology has continued to hold a marginal position in history and social studies of science. (shrink)

Hymen reconstruction surgery is a simple procedure to repair a woman’s hymen, requested by women who, for religious and cultural reasons, believe they must appear to have an intact hymen on their wedding night. Debates surrounding possible ethical justification for the procedure are complex and heated. These articles from the Harvard Ethics Consortium present and explore the case of a young woman who asked a young female physician on call for a referral for the procedure.

Aberrant consumer behaviour costs firms millions of pounds a year, and the Internet has provided young techno-literate consumers with a new medium to exploit businesses. This paper addresses Internet related ethics and describes the ways in which young consumers misdemean on the Internet and their attitudes towards these. Using a sample of 219 generation Y consumers, the study identified 24 aberrant behaviours which grouped into five factors; illegal, questionable activities, hacking related, human Internet trade and downloading. Those perceived (...) as least wrong were; "Downloading movie and music files from the Internet for free". The consequences of these behaviours have implications for educators, consumer policy and marketers. (shrink)

Although risky decision-making has been posited to contribute to the maladaptive behavior of individuals with psychopathic tendencies, the performance of psychopathic groups on a common task of risky decision-making, the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT; Bechara, Damasio, Damasio, & Anderson, 1994), has been equivocal. Different aspects of psychopathy (personality traits, antisocial deviance) and/or moderating variables may help to explain these inconsistent findings. In a sample of college students (N = 129, age 18–27), we examined the relationship between primary and secondary psychopathic (...) features and IGT performance. A measure of impulsivity was included to investigate its potential as a moderator. In a joint model including main effects and interactions between primary psychopathy, secondary psychopathy and impulsivity, only secondary psychopathy was significantly related to risky IGT performance, and this effect was not moderated by the other variables. This finding supports the growing literature suggesting that secondary psychopathy is a better predictor of decision-making problems than the primary psychopathic personality traits of lack of empathy and remorselessness. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 23 (2003) 21-32 [Access article in PDF] Re-Creating Christian Community:A Response to Rita M. Gross Donald W. Mitchell Purdue University In Rita M. Gross's well-written, insightful, and provocative paper entitled "Some Reflections about Community and Survival," Rita says: "I am challenging my Christian colleagues to consider what role Western religious concepts about the individual may have played in getting us into the current hyper-individualism. I also (...) am asking whether the Buddhist concept of interdependence might be very useful in providing tools with which to think about why this hyper-individualism cannot survive."In terms of Rita's challenge, one could make the generalization that the notion of the individual soul being saved or on a journey to union with God has certainly played an important role in Christianity. At the extreme in this regard, Thomas à Kempis even advised solitude and the actual avoidance of other people, seen by him to be distractions to the spiritual life. However, most Christians would see this advice as an unhealthy extreme, agreeing with Rita that solitude has a "valued role...in the context of social life, not a substitute for it" (11). It is much more common for Christians to see themselves as parts of the mystical body of Christ, and to believe that their authentic selfhood and discipleship are found in the context of fellowship and community life in the church.In what follows here, I will try to show how the notions of selfhood and discipleship are being defined in a particular re-creation of Christian community, which includes persons of other faiths. I have been asked to make my response from the perspective of my own Christian community, the Focolare, which focuses on the kinds of social, economic, and environmental issues that we have been discussing for the past three years. In so doing, I will also try to show how the Focolare's trinitarian vision of God, community, and the cosmos is a possible answer to the above-quoted question Rita asks about how interdependence might be an antidote to hyper-individualism. Along the way, I will raise issues that relate to other points Rita makes in her paper, and then address her conclusions at the end of my paper. Seeds of a New Christian Community The Focolare began duringWorld War II with a small group of young women, whose ages ranged from fifteen to twenty-five, living in the city of Trent, Italy. 1 At the center [End Page 21] of the group was Chiara Lubich, who was only twenty-three at the time. In May of 1944 Lubich's home was destroyed by bombs, and her family decided to leave the city. Lubich made the difficult decision to remain with her companions in Trent, where they would meet in the bomb shelters as often as eleven times each day. They would take with them to the shelters only the Bible, which they searched for guidance in that difficult situation. What they came to understand in those hours together and then put into practice became the basis for re-creating a Christian community, one that is sensitive to the social, political, and economic conditions that had produced the war in which they were caught.A foundational discovery for these young women was a collective and yet very personal experience, in the midst of the death and destruction of the war, that "God is Love" (I John 4:8). Their contemplation of the First Letter of John, as well as other parts of the Scripture, strengthened not only their belief in the existence of God, when many were doubting God's existence, but also their faith in the love of God for each one of them.Wanting to respond to this experience of God's love, they again found in Scripture that God does not seek just a response of individual prayerful sentiment or personal piety, but a response that includes doing God's will: "It is not those who say to me, 'Lord, Lord,' who will enter the kingdom of heaven... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 22 (2002) 101-104 [Access article in PDF] A Christian Response to Buddhist Reflections on Prayer Donald W. Mitchell Purdue University In his essay, Kenneth K. Tanaka considers two important elements of Christian prayer when he presents young Megan praying. First is the petitionary element of her prayer, and second is the relational element. Saint John Damascene expresses these same two dimensions in his classical definition (...) of Christian prayer: "Prayer is the raising of one's mind and heart to God, or the requesting of good things from God." 1 This movement of the mind and heart to God makes Christian prayer a living relationship that is itself a gift of God through Christ. The "heart" of a person is that hidden center in which Christ resides and from where his spirit moves both heart and mind toward God in a relation of love and devotion. As Saint Thérèse of Lisieux puts it, "For me, prayer is a surge of the heart... it is a cry of recognition and of love, embracing both trial and joy." 2 One responds to trials, one's own or those of others, with prayers of petition or intercession; and to joys or blessings with prayers of adoration, praise and thanksgiving. In all cases, the prayers are the dynamics of a person's relationship with God, where God is both ultimate source and object of the prayers.Tanaka also makes two comments about Christian prayer in its public forms. First, he questions the appropriateness of public prayers for civic leaders or for teams at athletic events. Does God choose to aid only some political leaders or nations, or choose sides in athletic games? Though I may feel that God must prefer my son's Little League team, or at least Notre Dame football for heaven's sake, certainly God loves and cares for everyone. Perhaps Tanaka's final characterization of Christian prayer is helpful here: "conversational, personal and hopeful." In a public event, one expresses in prayer one's hope, while understanding that God's providence embraces everyone in ways that are larger than one can comprehend.In the essay by Taitetsu Unno on the Jesus Prayer and Nembutsu, the question of dualism and both the initiative and the consequence of prayer is addressed. Unno points out that according to the Jesus Prayer tradition in Eastern Orthodoxy, the initiative of the prayer is from God, much like the intoning of Nembutsu arising from the Vow of Great Compassion. Here, as in Saint Thérèse's "surge of the heart," the ultimate subject and object of prayer are the same. Unno points out that the consequence [End Page 101] of such a Christian prayer is a sense that the world is infused with the presence of God in a way that is similar to finding the Land of Bliss everywhere. Indeed, I would add that this similarity applies to more than just the Jesus Prayer. Saint Teresa of Avila refers to a prayer experience that is not uncommon in mature Christian spirituality "in which is revealed to the soul how all things are in God, and how within himself he contains them all." 3After presenting these similarities between the Jesus Prayer and Nembutsu, Unno raises what he sees as a fundamental difference: the treatment of sin, blind passions, and ignorance. Unno quotes a Christian Orthodox text that calls for the utter rejection of sin and evil, and depicts grace as entering the soul and driving evil outside. Unno then says, "To negate evil, sin, and death means to deny a part of one's reality; to affirm them through transformation means to make one's life complete and whole." The latter approach is, for Unno, key to the spirituality of Shinran and Shin Buddhism. I would like to make two comments here. First, it is unclear as to what Unno is saying about the Shin approach to evil. How can one transform evil into its opposite without evil being "nullified and eradicated"? When the "ice" of one's passions melt into the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 22 (2002) 101-104 [Access article in PDF] A Christian Response to Buddhist Reflections on Prayer Donald W. Mitchell Purdue University In his essay, Kenneth K. Tanaka considers two important elements of Christian prayer when he presents young Megan praying. First is the petitionary element of her prayer, and second is the relational element. Saint John Damascene expresses these same two dimensions in his classical definition (...) of Christian prayer: "Prayer is the raising of one's mind and heart to God, or the requesting of good things from God." 1 This movement of the mind and heart to God makes Christian prayer a living relationship that is itself a gift of God through Christ. The "heart" of a person is that hidden center in which Christ resides and from where his spirit moves both heart and mind toward God in a relation of love and devotion. As Saint Thérèse of Lisieux puts it, "For me, prayer is a surge of the heart... it is a cry of recognition and of love, embracing both trial and joy." 2 One responds to trials, one's own or those of others, with prayers of petition or intercession; and to joys or blessings with prayers of adoration, praise and thanksgiving. In all cases, the prayers are the dynamics of a person's relationship with God, where God is both ultimate source and object of the prayers.Tanaka also makes two comments about Christian prayer in its public forms. First, he questions the appropriateness of public prayers for civic leaders or for teams at athletic events. Does God choose to aid only some political leaders or nations, or choose sides in athletic games? Though I may feel that God must prefer my son's Little League team, or at least Notre Dame football for heaven's sake, certainly God loves and cares for everyone. Perhaps Tanaka's final characterization of Christian prayer is helpful here: "conversational, personal and hopeful." In a public event, one expresses in prayer one's hope, while understanding that God's providence embraces everyone in ways that are larger than one can comprehend.In the essay by Taitetsu Unno on the Jesus Prayer and Nembutsu, the question of dualism and both the initiative and the consequence of prayer is addressed. Unno points out that according to the Jesus Prayer tradition in Eastern Orthodoxy, the initiative of the prayer is from God, much like the intoning of Nembutsu arising from the Vow of Great Compassion. Here, as in Saint Thérèse's "surge of the heart," the ultimate subject and object of prayer are the same. Unno points out that the consequence [End Page 101] of such a Christian prayer is a sense that the world is infused with the presence of God in a way that is similar to finding the Land of Bliss everywhere. Indeed, I would add that this similarity applies to more than just the Jesus Prayer. Saint Teresa of Avila refers to a prayer experience that is not uncommon in mature Christian spirituality "in which is revealed to the soul how all things are in God, and how within himself he contains them all." 3After presenting these similarities between the Jesus Prayer and Nembutsu, Unno raises what he sees as a fundamental difference: the treatment of sin, blind passions, and ignorance. Unno quotes a Christian Orthodox text that calls for the utter rejection of sin and evil, and depicts grace as entering the soul and driving evil outside. Unno then says, "To negate evil, sin, and death means to deny a part of one's reality; to affirm them through transformation means to make one's life complete and whole." The latter approach is, for Unno, key to the spirituality of Shinran and Shin Buddhism. I would like to make two comments here. First, it is unclear as to what Unno is saying about the Shin approach to evil. How can one transform evil into its opposite without evil being "nullified and eradicated"? When the "ice" of one's passions melt into the... (shrink)

Human beings, even very young infants, and members of several other species, exhibit remarkable capacities for attending to and engaging with others. These basic capacities have been the subject of intense research in developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, comparative psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind over the last several decades. Appropriately characterizing the exact level and nature of these abilities and what lies at their basis continues to prove a tricky business. The contributions to this special issue investigate whether and (...) to what extent the exercise of such capacities count as, or are best explained by, a genuine understanding of minds, where such understanding depends on the creatures in question possessing capacities for attributing a range of mental states and their contents in systematic ways. The question that takes center stage is: Do the capacities for attending to and engaging with others in question involve mindreading or is this achieved by other means? In this editorial we will review the state of the debate between mindreading and alternative accounts of social cognition. The issue is organized as follows: the first two papers review the experimental literature on mindreading in primates (Bermúdez) and children (Low & Wang), and the kinds of arguments made for mindreading and alternative accounts of social cognition. The next set of papers (Hedger & Fabricius, Lurz & Krachun, Zawidzki, and de Bruin et al.) further critique the existing experimental data and defend various mindreading and non-mindreading accounts. The final set of papers address further issues raised by phenomenological (Jacob, Zahavi), enactive (Michael), and embodied (Spaulding) accounts of social cognition. (shrink)

As I'm a writer, I'll begin with a story. It's not, I'm sorry to say, one of my own – I wish it were – but it is very philosophical. It's by the great blind Argentinian, Jorge Luis Borges, and it's called ‘Funes the Memorious’. Somewhere in a marshy province of Uruguay, Borges comes across a young man called Funes who has gone into an extraordinary mental state after a crippling fall from a horse. He is quite unable to (...) forget anything that has ever happened to him in his physical or mental life. He ‘not only remembered every leaf on every tree of every wood, but even every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it’ – and with exceptional vividness. In an attempt to manage this colossal burden, Funes thinks about classifying and reducing his memories to some practical order. But ‘two considerations dissuaded him: the thought that the task was interminable, and the thought that it was useless. He knew that at the hour of his death he would scarcely have finished classifying even all the memories of his childhood.’. (shrink)

The social organization of insect colonies has fascinated biologists and natural historians for centuries. Aristotle wrote in History of Animals about a division of labor among workers within the hive that is based on age. He observed that the field bees foraging for nectar and pollen have less “hair” on their bodies than the hive bees that care for young larvae and tend the nest. He concluded that the more pubescent hive bees must be older. We now know that, (...) in fact, the field bees are older and have less hair because the hairs break off as the bees age. The phenomenon of age related changes in behavior, age-polyethism, is now well documented for many social insects (Oster and Wilson 1978).Evidence of the ecological success of social insects is inescapable. Virtually everywhere you look you see them or the results of their activities. (shrink)

Background: Scholarly work is needed to develop the conceptual and theoretical understanding of trust to nursing practice. The transition from hospital care to complex pediatric homecare involves nurses in myriad roles, including management and care provision. Complex pediatric homecare transforms children, families, professionals, and communities, but its exact implications are unclear. Research objectives: To conduct an ethical inquiry into the role and responsibilities of nurses in the qualitative experience of adults involved in the hospital-to-home transition of young, ventilator-dependent children. (...) Research design: We followed methods described by Franco Carnevale. We used a sociologically grounded theoretical orientation—trust—to re-interpret qualitative data for an ethical inquiry into a specific facet of that data. Participants and study context: The participants included 26 adults, including 14 nurses, involved in the hospital-to-home transition in a Canadian province. Participants represented family, hospital, home, and government. Ethical considerations: The Conjoint Health Research Ethics Board at the University of Calgary approved this study. Findings: First, the concept and practice of trust was salient to the experience of transition. For example, responsibilities’ allocation between hospital-based professionals to mothers, home-based nurses, and non-professionals necessitated reliance and vulnerability. Second, the consequences of distrust connected to recognized challenges. For example, tensions along rural–urban, medical-family, and professional–personal divide each revealed suspicion and uncertainty that led to isolation and anxiety for all involved. Third, recommendations to improve the experience and mitigate the challenges of transition can be grounded in trust promotion. For example, transition-specific education programs and codes of ethics would promote openness, recognize mutual vulnerability, and advance trust in transition. Conclusions: The challenges to transition evidenced distrust, while trust represents a powerful tool to counter these challenges and their implications. A climate of trust could bridge divides between mothers and professionals; rural and urban professionals; and professionals with differing relationships with the family. (shrink)

BackgroundAlthough gait patterns disturbances are known to be related to cognitive decline, there is no consensus on the possibility of predicting one from the other. It is necessary to find the optimal gait features, experimental protocols, and computational algorithms to achieve this purpose.PurposesTo assess the efficacy of the Stable Sparse Classifiers procedure for discriminating young and healthy older adults, as well as healthy and cognitively impaired elderly groups from their gait patterns. To identify the walking tasks or combinations of (...) tasks and specific spatio-temporal gait features that allow the best prediction with SSC.MethodsA sample of 125 participants was studied. They underwent assessment with five neuropsychological tests that explore different cognitive domains. A summarized cognitive index, based on the Mahalanobis distance from normative data, was calculated. The sample was divided into three groups using k-means clustering of MDCog in addition to Age. The participants executed four walking tasks and their gait patterns, measured with a body-fixed Inertial Measurement Unit, were used to calculate 16 STGF and dual-task costs. SSC was then employed to predict which group the participants belonged to. The classification's performance was assessed using the area under the receiver operating curves and the stable biomarkers were identified.ResultsThe discrimination HE vs. MCI-E revealed that the combination of the easy dual-task and the fast walking task had the best prediction performance. The features related to gait variability and to the amplitude of vertical acceleration had the largest predictive power. SSC prediction accuracy was better than the accuracies obtained with linear discriminant analysis and support vector machine classifiers.ConclusionsThe study corroborated that the changes in gait patterns can be used to discriminate between young and healthy older adults and more importantly between healthy and cognitively impaired adults. A subset of gait tasks and STGF optimal for achieving this goal with SSC were identified, with the latter method superior to other classification techniques. (shrink)

It is strange to write for the pages of this journal a statement which will not come under the eye of its founding editor, Sheldon Sacks. For nearly five years everything that appeared in Critical Inquiry—articles, critical responses, editorial comments—was a matter of painstaking and passionate concern to Shelly Sacks. With a flow of questions and suggestions and a talent for unabashed cajolery, he generated articles and rejoinders to those articles. He worked tirelessly in editorial consultation and correspondence with contributors, (...) especially young writers, helping them to discover the best way of giving form to their ideas. Among the essays submitted to this journal he searched eagerly, even anxiously, for those which seemed, in his words, "right for C.I." What was right for C. I. was never, for Shelly Sacks, a cut-and-dried choice. In his own intellectual life, in his teaching and writing, he delighted in arguing important general questions: theories of representation in the arts, points of possible intersection between linguistic science and literary criticism, the interplay of social forces and cultural expressions. Not surprisingly, in reconnoitering for Critical Inquiry, he found special satisfaction in identifying writers who shared his passion for reexamining fundamental topics in the intellectual disciplines. If such writers made their case forcefully, so much the better: in choosing an essay for publication he assessed its capacity to stimulate interesting counterargument. At no time, however, did Shelly Sacks confuse his own beliefs with the nature of intellectual discourse. As an editor he was hospitable to writers whose premises he questioned and whose conclusions he deplored. Nor did Shelly attempt to achieve a spurious catholicity by following a quiet quota system designed to give each major line of interpretation—deconstructionist, Marxist, psychoanalytic, what have you—an occasional airing in Critical Inquiry. For Shelly each article stood on its own ground: if its author dealt responsibly and freshly with an interesting problem, that was enough. And, along with his commitment to theoretical inquiry, he responded warmly to the personal, the offbeat, the idiosyncratic. He regarded the feature Artists on Art, for example, as a central element in our design. As an editor Sheldon Sacks was above all a shaper. He labored to find and suggest connections in the phenomena of intellectual life. Even the construction of a table of contents for a typical Critical Inquiry issue became for him an opportunity to influence the reader's experience of what we offered. The eminence of an author or the allure of a title were put to one side as Shelly sought to orchestrate, through placement, a kind of intellectual counterpoint from one essay to another. Unheard melodies, doubtless, for many of us, but for Shelly real and sustaining. In this valedictory note we have spoken of Sheldon Sacks' editorial accomplishment—in our friendly view, a very distinguished one—rather than of the personal qualities which made working alongside him an exhilarating experience. We should report, however, that for more than half the life of this journal Shelly was ill and knew that the time available to him was likely to be relatively brief. Faced with this diminishing perspective, he did not—indeed it is more accurate to say he could not—moderate his involvement with the life of this journal. At his death, as at the launching of this enterprise, he held to the high ambition that Critical Inquiry encourage comeliness, vigor, and continuity in the discourse of our time. The appropriate "critical response" to this great loss is that Sheldon Sacks’ editorial colleagues, and our publisher, the University of Chicago Press, pledge whatever talents and energies we possess to the continuing life of the journal he imagined and brought into being. (shrink)

Fourfold is thought to be a defining theme of Heidegger’s later thought, and yet it remains to be one of the most controversial notions in Heidegger scholarship. Interpreting the fourfold has been a challenging issue. Some of them dismissed it as having no real philosophical weight, despite its overarching presence in many of Heidegger’s later literature. Some of them tried to interpret it without giving due attention to the intricacies at hand. In this paper, we argue that, Julian Young’s (...) understanding of the fourfold in terms of the twofold of nature and culture has certain drawbacks owing to its emphasis on the literal meanings. We also suggest an interpretative strategy to avoid the pitfalls of literal and metaphorical readings, in which Andrew Mitchell’s interpretation is a good case in point. Mitchell’s marvelous attempt to think the fourfold in terms of relationality, can be seen as a best ever effort, in that, it not only remedies many of the problems of previous interpretations, including that of Young but it also gives due consideration to the intricate relations between what Heidegger would call the technological standing reserve and the thing of the fourfold. We will also discuss how Young’s interpretative problems can be remedied, in the new light provided by Mitchell. Finally, we suggest that Mitchell’s reading should be complemented with an adequate account of the holy, in which, the holy is understood as a principle of unification and wholesomeness of the members of the fourfold, apart from understanding it purely in terms of the God, one of the members of the fourfold. (shrink)

This paper begins with a discussion of Stanley Cavell’s philosophy of language learning. Young people learn more than the meaning of words when acquiring language: they learn about (the quality of) our form of life. If we—as early childhood educators—see language teaching as something like handing some inert thing to a child, then we unduly limit the possibilities of education for that child. Cavell argues that we must become poets if we are to be the type of representatives of (...) language that education calls for. In the final section of the paper I discuss the work of Lucy Sprague Mitchell, someone who developed an approach to language teaching that overlaps in interesting ways with Cavell’s approach in The Claim of Reason. (shrink)

[W. J. T.] Mitchell focuses on the exemplary status of the Wall of Fame in Sal’s Pizzeria, “an array of signed publicity photos of Italian-American stars in sports, movies, and popular music” . He argues that the Wall “exemplifies the central contradictions of public art” . “The Wall,” he writes, “is important to Sal not just because it displays famous Italians but because they are famous Americans … who have made it possible for Italians to think of themselves as (...) Americans, full-fledged members of the general public sphere” . For Buggin’ Out, the young black customer who angrily objects to the absence of photos of black people, the Wall “signifies exclusion from the public sphere” . Although the streets are saturated with images of “African-American heroes,” those “tokens of self-respect” are not enough for Buggin’ Out, who wants “the respect of whites, the acknowledgment that African-Americans are hyphenated Americans, too, just like Italians” . Mitchell astutely interprets the desired integration of the Wall as merely a symptom of a larger struggle for “full economic participation. As long as blacks do not own private property in this society,” he states, “they remain in something like the status of public art, mere ornaments to the public place, entertaining statues and abstract caricatures rather than full human beings” . By foregrounding the economic implications of the film, Mitchell has surely engaged one of the dominant goals of the man who formed Forty Acres and a Mule Productions and who recently opened the store called Spike’s Joint in New York City. Yet Mitchell’s sympathetic account belies the countercurrents that trouble the ostensible progressiveness of Spike Lee’s ambitious art. Jerome Christensen teaches in the English department at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of books on Coleridge and Hume and one forthcoming on Byron. Currently, he is completing a study of the continued pertinence of the romantic turn of mind called Romantic Theory, Romantic Practice. (shrink)

This book examines what, if anything, makes a depiction of fictional immorality—such as the murder, torture, or sexual assault of a fictional character—an example of immoral fiction, and therefore something that should be morally criticized and possibly prohibited.

Drawing together researchers from diverse theoretical positions, the aim of this book is to work towards a coherent and unified account of how we develop an understanding of one's and others' mental states.

Is the basis of criminality an act that causes harm, or an act undertaken with the belief that one will cause harm? The present study takes a cognitive neuroscience approach to investigating how information about an agent’s beliefs and an action’s conse- quences contribute to moral judgment. We build on prior devel- opmental evidence showing that these factors contribute differ- entially to the young child’s moral judgments coupled with neurobiological evidence suggesting a role for the right tem- poroparietal junction (...) (RTPJ) in belief attribution. Participants read vignettes in a 2 2 design: protagonists produced either a negative or neutral outcome based on the belief that they were causing the negative outcome (‘‘negative’’ belief) or the neutral outcome (‘‘neutral’’ belief). The RTPJ showed significant activation above baseline for all four conditions but was modulated by an interaction between belief and outcome. Specifically, the RTPJ response was highest for cases of attempted harm, where protag- onists were condemned for actions that they believed would cause harm to others, even though the harm did not occur. The results not only suggest a general role for belief attribution during moral judgment, but also add detail to our understanding of the inter- action between these processes at both the neural and behavioral levels. (shrink)

James O. Young seeks to explain why we value music so highly. He draws on the latest psychological research to argue that music is expressive of emotion by resembling human expressive behaviour. The representation of emotion in music gives it the capacity to provide psychological insight--and it is this which explains a good deal of its value.

This study empirically examines the association between certain director characteristics and the extent of voluntary audit committee disclosure in annual reports. Results suggest that Singapore's publicly traded firms are more likely to voluntarily disclose audit committee related information as: the number of board members increases; different individuals occupy the roles of CEO and board chairperson; and the proportion of independent directors serving on the board increases. Findings, however, fail to show any association between the amount of voluntary audit committee disclosure (...) and the percentage of executive directors' ownership. Documented findings are of interest and benefit to various parties including regulators, corporate governance reformists, and corporate management. For instance, findings imply that a positive by-product of implementing major corporate governance reforms currently championed by corporate governance reformists will be an increase in audit committee disclosures. As a result, there will be less pressure on regulators to develop, introduce, and enforce mandatory audit committee disclosures that may be potentially intrusive to a firm's management. (shrink)

Euclid discusses the ex aequali relationship twice in the Elements. The first is in Book V, during his discussion of arithmetical relations between mathematical magnitudes in general. The second is in Books VIIIX, he was not much troubled by the differences between his treatment of ex aequali ratios in these two contexts. Later generations of mathematicians, however, found these differences less acceptable and tried to minimize them in various ways. This paper summarizes Euclid's use of the ex aequali relation in (...) developing his mathematics. The paper then outlines the fate of the post-Theonine Greek attempts to the Euclidean discussion when the Elements entered the Arabic/Islamic intellectual tradition. The study concludes with the attempts by Ibn al-Hayam and Ibn al-Sarī to improve the parallelism between the discussions of ex aequali ratios in Book V and Book VII. (shrink)