A long-standing theoretical tradition in clinical psychology and psychiatry sees deliberate self-harm , such as wrist-cutting, as “functional”—a means to avoid painful emotions, for example, or to elicit attention from others. There is substantial evidence that DSH serves these functions. Yet the specific links between self-harm and such functions remain obscure. Why don’t self-harmers use less destructive behaviors to blunt painful emotions or elicit attention? Economists and biologists have used game theory to show that, under certain circumstances, self-harmful behaviors by (...) economic agents and animals serve important strategic goals. In particular, “costly signals” can credibly reveal a “private state” in situations where verbal claims and other “cheap” signals might be disbelieved. Here, DSH is scrutinized using signaling theory, and a variant, the theory of bargaining with private information. The social contexts and associated features of DSH suggest that it might be a costly, and therefore credible, signal of need that compels social partners to respond. (shrink)

Why did nineteenth‐century German historians and physicists habitually warn against vices that they believed philosophers in particular embodied: speculation, absence of common sense, and excessive systematizing? Drawing on a rich array of sources, this article interprets this vice‐charging as a rhetorical practice aimed at delineating empirical research from Naturphilosophie and Geschichtsphilosophie as practiced in the heyday of German Idealism. The strawman of “the philosopher” as invoked by historians and physicists served as a negative model for strongly empiricist scholars committed to (...) virtues like precision, thoroughness, and conscientiousness. In their historical narratives, historians and physicists consistently depicted philosophy either as a relic from the past or as a phase that they had virtuously left behind. This boundary work was central to the self‐positioning of both history and physics, which makes clear that the persona of the philosopher mattered not only to philosophers but also to scholars in adjacent disciplines. (shrink)

Commonsense reasoning about the physical world, as exemplified by "Iron sinks in water" or "If a ball is dropped it gains speed," will be indispensable in future programs. We argue that to make such predictions (namely, envisioning), programs should use abstract entities (such as the gravitational field), principles (such as the principle of superposition), and laws (such as the conservation of energy) of physics for representation and reasoning. These arguments are in accord with a recent study in physics instruction where (...) expert problem solving is related to the construction of physical representations that contain fictitious, imagined entities such as forces and momenta (Larkin 1983). We give several examples showing the power of physical representations. (shrink)

What kind of people make good scientists? What personal qualities do scholars say their peers should exhibit? And how do they express these expectations? This article explores these issues by mapping the kinds of virtues discussed by American scientists between 1945 and 2000. Our wide-ranging comparative analysis maps scientific virtue talk across three distinct disciplines – physics, psychology, and history – and across sources that typify those disciplines’ scientific ethos – introductory textbooks, book reviews, and codes of ethics. We find (...) that, when inducting students into a discipline, evaluating peers, or codifying their professional standards, postwar American scientists routinely named virtues like carefulness, objectivity, and honesty. They applied such virtues not only directly to scholars’ characters, minds, and attitudes (thereby equating virtues with personal qualities), but also to their methods, modes of reasoning, and working habits (in the form of what we call virtue-qualifiers). Strikingly, we find that physicists, psychologists, and historians drew upon largely similar repertoires of virtue. For all of them, scientific work required carefulness, thoroughness, and accuracy. Not all virtues, however, were equally important in all disciplines (notably objectivity), nor did each ethos-forming genre place equal emphasis on the directly personal nature of such virtues. All in all, our research establishes an extended framework for understanding the ways virtues remained present in postwar American scientific discourse writ large. (shrink)

Future robots should have common sense about the world in order to handle the problems they will encounter. A large part of this commonsense knowledge must be naive physics knowledge, since carrying out even the simplest everyday chores requires familiarity with physics laws. But how should one start codifying this knowledge? What kind of skills should be elicited from the experts (each and every one of us)? This paper will attempt to provide some hints by studying the mental models of (...) force and motion. (shrink)

In Focus: Laszlo Moholy-Nagy reproduces almost fifty of the artist's photographs, with commentaries on each by katherine Ware, an Assistant Curator in the Musuem's Department of Photographs. Included as well is an edited transcript of a colloquim on Moholy-Nagy's work, with comments by Thomas Barrow, Jeannine Fiedler, Charles Hagen, Hattula Moholy-Nagy, Weston Naef, Leland Rice, and Katherine Ware. A chronology of significant events in the artist's life is also provided.

The Getty Museum owns 171 pictures by Ulmann, 55 of which are presented in the Museum's In Focus series. Judith Keller, associate curator of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum, wrote the extensive accompanying captions and participated, along with William Clift, David Featherstone, Charles Hagen, Weston Naef, Ron Pen, and Susan Millar Williams, in a 1994 colloquium on Ulmann and her work.

Paul M. Pietroski presents an ambitious new account of human languages as generative procedures that respect substantive constraints. He argues that meanings are neither concepts nor extensions, and sentences do not have truth conditions; meanings are composable instructions for how to access and assemble concepts of a special sort.

This book discusses some of the most challenging ideas emerging out of the research program on institutional diversity associated with the 2009 co-recipient of 2009 Nobel Prize in economics, Elinor Ostrom, while outlining a set of new research directions and an original interpretation of the significance and future of this program.

In their highly topical paper, Grahamet alargued that Trusted Research Environments (TREs) are not actually about trust because they reduce or remove ‘…the need for trust in the use and sharing of patient health data’. We believe this is fundamentally mistaken. TREs mitigate or remove some risks, but they do not address all public concerns. In this regard, TREs provide evidence for people to decide whether the bodies holding and using their data can be trusted. TREs may make it easier (...) for people to trust but there is still a need for that trust. (shrink)

The historical emphasis of medical ethics, based on substantive frameworks and principles derived from them, is no longer seen as sufficiently sensitive to the moral pluralism characteristic of our current era. We argue that moral decision-making in clinical situations is more properly derived from a process of dialogic consensus. This process entails an inclusive, noncoercive, and self-reflective dialogue within the community affected. In order to justify this approach, we make two claims—the first epistemic, and the second normative. The epistemic claim (...) follows from Habermas’ “ways” of knowing. We argue that the dialogue emanating from this episteme focuses on the relevant facts about the patient, as well as on the values attached to these facts, thus allowing facts and their meanings to serve as the basis for reflective action appropriate to the circumstances. The normative claim follows from Habermas’ discourse theory of morality and communicative action. It determines that clinical decision-making should be approached from the perspective of the actual reality of people in their situation of illness, set in their socio-cultural background, and hence be grounded in the second-person perspective. Relocating ethical decision-making from a monological space into one characterized by dialogue is especially appropriate to the clinical encounter. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 47, no. 2. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 419 Paul Amar Insurgent African Intimacies in Pandemic Times: Deimperial Queer Logics of China’s New Global Family inWolf Warrior 2 This essay offers a new paradigm of “deimperial queer analysis” that reveals the tension between the People’s Republic of China’s extractive expansionism in Africa and its claim to solidarity with Africans against white supremacy and Northern imperialism. (...) China has been labeled an “anti-imperial empire” that forcefully challenges previous Euro-American imperial legacies—all while it verges on reenacting them.1 A critical way it resolves this geopolitical tension is through the articulation of a mission for global China, and since 2017, the heroic filmic fictional figure of the “Wolf Warrior” anchors such an approach. The Wolf Warrior is a gorgeous, muscled, Chinese male rogue soldier in exile who adventures through the archipelago of the PRC’s shipping, mining, and medical projects across the Global South to battle white mercenaries, corrupt Asian businessmen, and local pirates—all while saving Africa from a ravaging pandemic. Extending a hugely popular film series, the release in 2017 of the blockbuster Wolf Warrior 2 (abbreviated below as Wolf 2) unleashed a worldwide social media frenzy as well as a revolution in diplomatic tone and protocol for China. In these ways, Wolf Warrior 2 came to mark the debut of the global PRC as a hegemonic structure 1. David Armitage, “The Anti-Imperial Empire?” Times Literary Supplement, no. 6018, August 3, 2018, https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-anti-imperialempire -american. 420 Paul Amar of feeling with an attendant popular cultural logic, launching a cast of military characters, humanitarian imaginaries, and gendered rebranding initiatives. These fused into a global cultural megaproject with the PRC presenting itself as a leader in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic in the Global South—a time the PRC has officially branded as its “Rejuvenation Era” of “Stepping Out into the World.” This essay shows how exactly this Wolf Warrior imagination has legitimized a new global regime, but I also reveal how, paradoxically, the Wolf Warrior regime has offered a distinct, more subversive worlding project. I argue here that the utopia immanent in this project can be revealed by interpretively turning this Wolf universe inside out through a deimperial queer analysis that honors and combines a Third World feminist lens and the “Asia as Method” approach with Danmei/BL and Slash queer-feminist fanfiction hacks. Danmei is a Chinese (originally mainly Tawainese) fanfiction genre that subverts mainstream heteronormative narratives by erotically aestheticizing and renarrating male-male intimacies within mainstream plotlines from feminist perspectives. BL (short for “boylove ”) is a similar Japanese fanfiction genre, and Slash is the term used in English for the queer/feminist hacking and excavation of sublimated and particularly utopian gender and sexuality plots from within seemingly conventional heteronormative or patriarchal popular-cultural texts. The everted or inside-out epistemology given expression here uses a set of non-phallogocentric lenses and decolonial feminist decoding practices. At stake is the urgency of not repeating the epistemic violence of conventional “anti-imperial” arguments, which tend to be heteronormative, statist, macho, and monolithic. Instead, the form of critique elaborated here brings questions of gender, race, and sexuality to the fore through a three-part approach. First, I identify the homoerotic register of the techno-infrastructural elements in the film. I generate close readings that detail the visual and genre codes of battle scenes, thug subjects, and piracy plots that forge a homoerotic model of rogue or “wolf” governmentality and that act as a metaphor for China’s techno -infrastructural rule. Second, this essay explores the gendered hauntings of supremacist humanism. I deploy a decolonial feminist lens to map the configuration of African women, female doctors, Maoist women insurgents, and feminized “flowerboys” as a rebel protectorate overseen by China’s phallic prerogative that is itself haunted by the specters of Euro-American humanist betrayal and white supremacy. Third, Paul Amar 421 I trace queer kinship utopias. I demonstrate that Wolf Warrior 2 rejuvenates a non-Western, queer, globalist kinship structure that triangulates Asian, white, and Black through adoption dramas and bromance bonds. Through these intimacies, an... (shrink)

This chapter broadly follows the chronological order of Foucault's texts, selecting only those which supply crucial views about nature or the environment. It is therefore task‐specified rather than offering a total survey of all of Foucault's mentions of nature or environment. This chapter begins with some comments on Foucault's histories in general, in order to sketch how his methodologies opened up questions about our suppositions and received histories, and how they are relevant to the skeptical interrogation of the usage of (...) “nature.”. Foucault's histories are wide‐ranging, and includes examinations of government and institutional powers, the human sciences, sexuality, medicine, prisons and punishment, morality, and the treatment of madness. Foucault was not an environmentalist, but at a time of environmental crisis environmentalism might become Foucauldian. (shrink)

In 1990, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued a consent order to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). The order decreed the AICPA to lessen its longstanding ethics code which had until then banned the receipts of commissions, referral fees and contingent fees. The FTC alleged that the AICPA banned receipt of the fees as an attempt to restrain trade (FTC, 1990).In the present study, we sought to determine if CPAs'' preference for bans on commissions, referral fees and (...) contingent fees is related to their moral reasoning whereby CPAs perceive the bans to serve as a means of resolving ethical issues. While determining this matter cannot prove whether the bans did or did not actually result in restrained trade, it can offer insight into the perceived ethical importance to CPAs of the overturned rules. Based on a random sample of AICPA members and using Rest''s Defining Issues Test (DIT) to measure moral reasoning, we did not find a CPA''s moral reasoning to be related to his/her preference for ethics rules which ban commissions, referral fees or contingent fees. However, our results did indicate that most CPAs prefer banning commissions, referral fees and contingent fees, with those CPAs holding a higher financial stake in public accounting, namely partners, favoring banning referral fees and contingent fees significantly less than CPAs with a lesser stake. Further, we noted a significant negative relationship between financial stake and moral reasoning. These results seem to suggest that self-interest among CPAs may influence their moral reasoning.Further study is needed to examine the relationship between self-interest of CPAs and their moral reasoning. If self-interest clouds moral judgments made by CPAs, capital markets are in danger. Rendering an independent audit opinion must exclude self-interest. (shrink)

Paul Helm examines some of Stephen Hawking's scientific arguments concerning God, and finds them unpersuasive.

In Monasteries and the Care of Souls in Late Antique Christianity, Paul C. Dilley explores the personal practices and group rituals through which the thoughts of monastic disciples were monitored and trained to purify the mind and help them achieve salvation. Dilley draws widely on the interdisciplinary field of cognitive studies, especially anthropology, in his analysis of key monastic 'cognitive disciplines', such as meditation on scripture, the fear of God, and prayer. In addition, various rituals distinctive to communal monasticism, (...) including entrance procedures, the commemoration of founders, and collective repentance, are given their first extended analysis. Participants engaged in 'heart-work' on their thoughts and emotions, which were understood to reflect the community's spiritual state. This book will be of interest to scholars of early Christianity and the ancient world more generally for its detailed description of communal monastic culture and its innovative methodology. (shrink)

This is the text of The Lindley Lecture for 1969, given by Paul Edwards, an Austrian-American philosopher.

Research Articles Paul A. Rahe, Social Philosophy and Policy, FirstView Article.

The ‘universal cell reaction’ (UCR), a coordinated biphasic response to external (noxious and other) stimuli observed in all living cells, was described by Nasonov and his colleagues in the mid‐20th century. This work has received no attention from cell biologists in the West, but the UCR merits serious consideration. Although it is non‐specific, it is likely to be underpinned by precise mechanisms and, if these mechanisms were characterized and their relationship to the UCR elucidated, then our understanding of the integration (...) of cellular function could be improved. As a step towards identifying such mechanisms, I review some recent advances in understanding cell mechanics and the stress response and I suggest potentially testable hypotheses. There is a particular need for time‐course studies of cellular responses to different stimulus doses or intensities. I also suggest a correspondence with hormesis; re‐investigation of the UCR using modern biophysical and molecular‐biological techniques might throw light on this much‐discussed phenomenon. BioEssays 29:324–333, 2007. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Each chapter in this volume seeks to explore, critique, and emphasize the continuing relevance of the vast contributions of Buchanan to our understanding of political economy and social philosophy.

Bernard Lonergan has attempted to clarify a major theoretical transition from a classicist conception of culture, which was operative for over two millennia,to a contemporary notion of culture which is empirical, historicist, and pluralist. I argue that this transition has significant implications for apprehending boththe difficulty and the possibility of intercultural understanding. While the need for intercultural understanding is timely and obvious, its actual achievement hasproven elusive. One major impediment, I argue, has been the effective persistence of classicist assumptions which (...) undermine our best theoretical understandings of what a culture is. (shrink)

Le problème traditionnel de l'antinomie entre la liberté humaine et le déterminisme que suggère la science est un faux problème. Cette antinomie repose sur une double mystification, qui affecte les deux termes traditionnellement mis en opposition : une mystification du côté du « déterminisme », d'une part, et une mystification du côté de la « liberté », d'autre part.The traditional problem of the antinomy between human freedom and the determinism suggested by science is a false problem that calls not for (...) solution but for dissolution. This antinomy rests on a double mystification, which concerns both of the traditionnally contrasted terms: a mystification with respect to “determinism”, and a mystification with respect to “freedom”. (shrink)

Addresses the nature of human religious belief in a series of vignettes and questions that explore humankind's relationship to the divine, from ancient times to the present, in the context of a taxi ride.

Johnson and Stricker published an opinion piece in the Journal of Medical Ethics presenting their perspective on the 2008 agreement between the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) and the Connecticut Attorney General with regard to the 2006 IDSA treatment guideline for Lyme disease. Their writings indicate that these authors hold unconventional views of a relatively common tick-transmitted bacterial infection caused by the spirochete Borrelia burgdorferi. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that their opinions would clash with the IDSA's (...) evidence-based guidelines for the diagnosis and treatment of Lyme disease. Their allegations of conflict of interest against the IDSA resemble those made against the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2000, which were found to be baseless. It is the responsibility of all physicians and medical scientists to stand up to antiscientific, baseless and unethical attacks on those who support an evidence-based approach to caring for patients. (shrink)

This article offers three reflections on the nature of the metaphysical ‘wall’ erected between the ‘Included’ and the ‘Excluded/Other’ by the concept of private property and its implementation in a state’s legal apparatus. The first reflection explores the reality of the concept of private property, using Louis Althusser’s conception of ideology, in order to demonstrate that the liberal conception of private property masks power operating on two levels: the formal, repressive state apparatus, and the deeper, the personal, the real, the (...) actual level, which allows the Included to act upon ego in ways that negatively affect the Excluded/Other found in the ideological state apparatus. The second argues that the masked power that is private property permits war to be waged by the Included as against the Excluded/Other at two levels: intra-state and inter-state. This reveals a paradox in the distinction between Included and Excluded/Other: while the distinction demonstrates the allocation of power over resources, the reality is that every individual on earth is both Included and Excluded/Other. The final reflection briefly considers what could replace private property as a means of allocating goods and resources within a society. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Phenomenalistic Interpretation of Kant's Theory of Knowledge PAUL MARHENKEt Introduction THw FOLLOWINGARTXCLEwas one of two previously unpublished papers found in the effects of the late Paul Marhenke (1899-1952), who was a professor at the University of California from 1927 until his death. Because of the intrinsic interest of the paper, the editors of the Journal o/the History of Philosophy have kindly consented to publish it. I (...) have made a few revisions in the manuscript in order to prepare it for publication. These revisions do not affect the sense of the argument in any way, being confined mainly to the expansion of abbreviations, the correction of typographical mistakes, and so on. It is not known when this paper was written, or for what occasion. Professor W. R. Dennes, who wrote the biographical sketch of Paul Marhenke which is included in the In Memoriam volume published by the University of California, informs me that he was unaware of the existence of this paper. Professor Dennes writes in this connection: I can only say that ever since our year of graduate study together (1919-19207) Paul and I often discussed the question how far Kant's apparatus of Categories and so on merely expressed a strong confidence in various sorts of regularities in phenomena; and if the apparatus really grounded the confidence, did it do so by a question-begging procedure of, for example, assuming causal regularity, and then grounding and guaranteeing such regularity by a "deduction" of the category of causation. In our discussions that went on, off and on, for thirty years, Paul at various times took various positions--all interesting-and I often urged him to write out his views on the matter. I wish I knew at which stage he did write them out, but I do not. This was one subject upon which I think Paul changed his mind a good deal in the course of his years of study and teaching. Paul Marhenke's main interests in philosophy lay in epistemology and particularly in the realist-phenomenalist issue which he here discusses in the context of Kant's philosophy. For those readers who will be making their [47] 48 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY first acquaintance with his work, this paper will provide an impressive illustration of the subtlety of his mind and of the care with which he drew distinctions. For those of us who were familiar with the cast of his mind, former students and colleagues alike, it will evoke the man himself, with his insistence upon rigor and precision as viae mediae toward an understanding of philosophical issues--AvRuM STROLL Two CURRENTSRUN through the Kantian theory of knowledge, one subjective, the other objective. These two currents follow very often in extreme proximity, so that we find Kant speaking in the same paragraph or even in successive sentences of the object of knowledge as being nothing but a synthesis of representations, i.e., sensations, and as being distinct from those sensations and merely represented by them in the individual mind of the perceiver. The former position is indistinguishable from Berkeleyan subjectivism as far as the existential status of the objects of immediate awareness is concerned; the world perceived is merely a subjective representation of the real world of things in themselves. The argument by which this position is reached presupposes, however, the truth of the realistic assumption which is denied in the conclusion based on the argument. For the argument presupposes the causal theory of perception with its realistic presupposition of real objects, sense-organs, nerves, a brain, etc. According to Kant sensations arise in the mind due to the impinging of physical stimuli on our senseorgans. Henceforth, however, it is denied that we perceive anything but these sensations and the truth of the realistic premises on which the conclusion is based must therefore be denied. The manifold of sensations constitutes the originally given material of the mind. The question to which Kant now attempts to give an answer is how this manifold becomes organized into a world of objects. This answer is given in the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories. The Kantian solution of the problem is a failure if for no... (shrink)

Why, then, do we huddle in the dark around the campfires of our flickering narratives? There are obviously many different reasons for doing so. Yet, having heard various récits—whether "stories" or "accounts"—during the narrative conference, I am more inclined than ever to see self-assertive entertainment and self-transcending commitment as two kinds of ultimate motivation for our countless narratives. Stories and histories and other narrative or descriptive accounts help us to escape boredom and indifference—ours as well as that of other people. (...) Those nearly vacant states of mind at the zero degree of entertainment and commitment bring us frightfully close to the experience of nonexistence. Hence our desire to replace boredom by thrilling or gratifying entertainment and to replace indifference by the social or cosmic commitment either to change the world or to change ourselves. In a world of unmixed colors and pure literary genres, tragedy, comedy, satire, and romance might answer distinct needs for thrill, gratification, indignation, and admiration. But, as Roy Schafer and Victor Turner have reminded us, the private and social dramas underlying psychoanalytical and anthropological accounts are even less pure than most works of literature. Couldn't we conclude that life's internal and external dramas stem from a compound desire for self-assertion and self-transcendence—a desire which, in the realm of literary entertainment and commitment, motivates the emergence and appreciation of tragicomedy? Paul Hernadi teaches English and comparative literature at the University of Iowa. He is the author of Beyond Genre: New Directions in Literary Classification and the editor of What is Literature? and What is Criticism? His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, "Literary Theory: A Compass for Critics," appeared in the Winter 1976 issue. (shrink)

It has been disputed whether an externalist conception of the individuation of intentional states, such as beliefs and desires, is compatible with self-knowledge, that is, the claim that one's judgments about one's intentional states are non-evidential, non-inferential, and authoritative. I want to argue that these theses are indeed incompatible, notwithstanding an important objection to this incompatibility claim. The worry has been raised that if externalism is true, then for a subject to know, say, that he or she believes that p, (...) the subject would need to know, on the basis of some evidence, the external conditions which determine the belief's content. Thus, externalism would be incompatible with self-knowledge. But many philosophers have accepted an objection suggesting that this worry is mistaken because in order to have a belief one need not know the metaphysical conditions determining its content, even if they are externalist. And thus, the subject's reflexive judgment about the belief would not need to rest on evidence about those external conditions. But this objection rests on a crucial assumption according to which mental content is reflexively transparent in the sense that a subject could not judge that she or he has an intentional state and be mistaken about the content of her or his state, even if the content is externally determined. My main purpose is not reflexively transparent on the assumption of externalism and, thus, self-knowledge and externalism are incompatible. (shrink)

This book deals with the aftermath of the enlightenment and its legacy in the political, social, and racial context. It discusses the incomplete project of modernity in terms of social contract theory, racial justice issues, and political theology in the postcolonial context. Hermeneutical realism and cultural linguistic inquiry become substantial features in elaborating postcolonial political theology and its ethical stance against the colonization of lifeworld and its pathologies. A study of critical theory and political theology is of a reconstructive character (...) in seeking to relocate critical theory and political ethics in the context of alternative modernities at the level of postcolonial theory. (shrink)

Two essential Kantian insights are the significance for rationality of the capacity for criticism and the limits of cognition, discovered when criticism is pursued methodically, that are due to the perspectival character of the human standpoint. After a period of disparagement, these Kantian insights have been sympathetically construed and are now discussed within contemporary analytic philosophy. However, if Kant’s assumption of a single, immutable, human framework is jettisoned, then the rationality of historical succession is called into question. Moreover, if the (...) revolutionary character of framework transitions is acknowledged, then reason is historicized and even its character as reason is threatened. I argue that Menachem Fisch’s approach to criticism and rationality offers an escape from this post-Kantian predicament that acknowledges revolutionary framework transitions and that draws upon the dialogical traditions of Jewish thought, and I also argue that Fisch’s approach should be seen as thematizing, to use the terms of Kant’s aesthetics and of Fichte’s account of natural right, the reflecting rather than determining status of critical judgement, which involves second-personal address. (shrink)