Applying Behrendt & Young's (B&Y's) model of thalamocortical synchrony to complex visual hallucinations in neurodegenerative disorders, such as dementia with Lewy bodies and progressive supranuclear palsy, leads us to propose that the primary pathology may be cortical rather than thalamic. Additionally, the extinction of active hallucinations by eye closure challenges their conception of the role of reduced sensory input.

When should listening through observation stand alone? --.

As the above quote clearly highlights, it is the responsibility of researchers and research supervisors to be certain that their research staff and students assistants are very familiar with all of the ethical principles and current standards relevant to the research they are conducting. Indeed, they must take an active role in being certain that their research staff and students complete appropriate training in these ethical principles and standards, and how they apply them to the research context in which they (...) are working. This is especially important in areas in which there may be physical harm such as chronic pain research. During the past decade, there has been a great increase in research of chronic pain, with breakthroughs in better understanding its etiology, assessment, and treatment (1,2). Obviously, much of this research was conducted using humans and animals as subjects. As a consequence, there were a number of ethical issues that investigators have to be cognizant of when conducting their studies. In this chapter, we will discuss such ethical issues in three major areas: (i) laboratory research with human subjects; (ii) laboratory research with animals; and (iii) translating these laboratory research ndings to ‘‘real world’’ applications in the clinical treatment arena. (shrink)

Commentators agree that the Perception and Attention Deficit (PAD) model is a promising model for accounting for recurrent complex visual hallucinations (RCVH) across several disorders, though with varying detailed criticisms. Its central tenets are not modified, but further consideration of generative models of visual processing and the relationship of proto-objects and memory systems allows the PAD model to deal with variations in phenomenology. The commentaries suggest new ways to generate evidence that will test the model.

This study draws on stakeholder management theory and the resource-based view of the firm to determine the factors affecting a facility’s decision to implementenvironmental management systems and practices. Four levels of environmental commitment to the natural environment are proposed including whether a facility has an EMS, whether a facility has a person responsible for environmental issues, whether a facility is ISO 14001 certified and the comprehensiveness of a facility’s EMS as measured by the number of practices undertaken. We empirically test (...) these hypotheses using manufacturing facility-level data from Canada, France, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Norway and the USA. (shrink)

The texts in this volume offer critical assessments of a number of leading figures in contemporary intellectual life, who are in different ways thinkers at the intersection of history and politics. They include Roberto Unger, advocate of plasticity; the historians of antiquity and of revolution, Geoffrey de Ste. Croix and Isaac Deutscher; the philosophers of liberalism, Norberto Bobbio and Isaiah Berlin; the sociologists of power, Michael Mann and W.G. Runciman; the exponents of national identity, Andreas Hillgruber and Fernand Braudel; the (...) ironists of science, Max Weber and Ernest Gellner; Carlo Ginzburg, explorer of cultural continuity, and Marshall Berman, herald of modernity. A concluding chapter looks at the idea of the end of history, recently advanced by Francis Fukuyama, in its successive versions from the nineteenth century to the present, and considers the situation of socialism today in the light of it. (shrink)

An introduction to ethical reasoning -- Comparative religious perspectives on war -- Just and unjust war in Shakespeare's Henry V -- Anticipating and preventing atrocities in war -- The CIA's original "social contract" -- The KGB: CIA's traditional adversary -- Espionage -- Covert action -- Interrogation -- Concluding reflections.

Situation Theory grew out of attempts by Jon Barwise in the late 1970s to provide a semantics for 'naked-infinitive' perceptual reports such as 'Claire saw Jon run'. Barwise's intuition was that Claire didn't just see Jon, an individual, but Jon doing something, a situation. Situations are individuals having properties and standing in relations. A theory of situations would allow us to study and compare various types of situations or situation-like entitles, such as facts, events, and scenes. One of the central (...) themes of situation theory of meaning and reference should be set within a general theory of information, one moreover that is rich enough to do justice to perception, communication, and thought. By now many people have contributed by the need to give a rigorous mathematical account of the principles of information that underwrite the theory. (shrink)

I argue for the consistency of frege's treatments of identity and number. Specifically, I argue that geach is wrong in suggesting that frege's insights about number should have led him to the doctrine of relative identity.

Sex determination in most organisms involves a simple binary fate choice between male or female development; the outcome of this decision has profound effects on organismal biology, biochemistry and behaviour. In the nematode C. elegans, there is also a binary choice, either male or hermaphrodite. In C. elegans, distinct genetic pathways control somatic and germline sexual cell fate. Both pathways share a common set of globally acting regulatory genes; however, germline-specific regulatory genes also participate in the decision to make male (...) or female gametes. The determination of sexual fate in the germline of the facultative hermaphrodite poses a special problem, because first sperm then oocytes are produced. It has emerged that additional layers of post-transcriptional regulation have been imposed to modulate the activities of the global sex-determining genes, tra-2 and fem-3; the balance between these activities is crucial in controlling sexual cell fate in the hermaphrodite germline. BioEssays 23:596–604, 2001. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

(Wide) pro-theism is the view that the world is better overall if theism is true. (Wide) anti-theism is the view that our world would be better overall if atheism is true. Arguments for pro-theism and anti-theism typically make use of traditional theism (the view that an omni-God exists) and generic atheism (the view that an omni-God doesn’t exist). In my view, when the debate between pro-theists and anti-theists makes use of traditional theism and generic atheism, pro-theism clearly comes out on (...) top. In this paper, I consider whether this result (i.e. pro-theism’s advantage over anti-theism) changes if we bring axiarchism into the mix: I compare axiarchistic theism and axiarchistic atheism. General axiarchism is the view that the world exists because it is good that it exists, and extreme axiarchism is the view that the world exists because it is the best possible world. When we take general axiarchistic theism and general axiarchistic atheism as our worldviews for comparison, I argue that there is no significant change with respect to anti-theism and pro-theism: neither position is able to capture goods that are traditionally associated with the other position, and so pro-theism still wins out. However, if we instead compare extreme axiarchistic atheism with extreme axiarchistic theism there is a significant change: while the case for pro-theism remains the same (because, I argue, it is not able to capture any of the goods of anti-theism), the case for anti-theism is greatly strengthened, because it is able to capture nearly all of the goods of pro-theism (e.g. the good of an afterlife, of cosmic justice, of there being no gratuitous evil). In other words, given extreme axiarchism, atheistic worlds can (and will) house goods that are traditionally associated with theistic worlds (e.g. those listed prior). This means that, given extreme axiarchism, pro-theists can’t appeal to those goods as favoring their position: they obtain whether our world is atheistic or theistic. Thus, they don’t favor pro-theism over anti-theism; the case for anti-theism has been strengthened. (Alternatively, we may say that the case for pro-theism has been weakened.) Ultimately, there is one good that extreme axiarchistic atheism does not enable anti-theism to capture—namely, God’s intrinsic unlimited goodness—and I argue that this shows that there is still a gap between pro-theism and anti-theism; while the gap has been substantially narrowed, it has not been eliminated. Thus, I suggest that the best route forward for anti-theists is to cast doubt on the view that God’s intrinsic goodness is unlimited. (shrink)

Cognitive science-informed approaches have gained considerable influence in education in the UK and internationally, but not much is known about how teachers perceive cognitive science-informed strategies or enact them within the contexts of their everyday classrooms. In this paper, we discuss the perceptions and experiences of cognitive science-informed strategies of 13 teachers in England. The paper critically explores how the teachers understood and used cognitive science-informed strategies in their teaching, their views of the benefits and challenges for different subjects and (...) groups of learners, and their reflections on supporting factors and barriers for adopting the strategies in their schools. The teachers’ accounts illustrate some of the many complexities of adopting cognitive science-informed approaches in real-life educational settings. Drawing on their narratives, the paper emphasises the importance of acknowledging different contextual dimensions and the dynamic interactions between them to understand when and how teachers enact cognitive science-informed approaches in their classrooms. (shrink)

As Federal Indian Law has evolved, many questions have been posed regarding tribal jurisdiction. This paper examines the jurisdiction tribes have over member Indians, non-member Indians, and non-member, non-Indians. It addresses the ethical challenge faced by tribal attorneys who represent non-member Indian clients in a manner that ultimately undermines tribal sovereignty.

The question whether in a liberal democracy religion may serve as a basis of law-making should be desaggregated into two distinct questions. First, is religion a morally legitimate basis of law-making in a liberal democracy? Second, is religion a constitutionally legitimate basis of law-making in the United States? My focus in this article is on the second question, which, as a question about constitutional legitimacy, should not be confused with the first question, which is about moral legitimacy. Like other liberal (...) democracies, the United States is committed to the right to freedom of religious practice. Unlike most other liberal democracies, however, the United States is also committed to the non-etablishment of religion. According to the constitutional law of the United States, law-makers and other government officials may neither prohibit the `free exercise' of religion nor `establish' religion. Does the non-establishment norm ban religion as a basis of law-making? More precisely, should the non-establishment norm be understood to ban laws for which the only discernible rationale — or, at least, the only discernible rationale other than an implausible secular rationale — is religious? (shrink)

Cappelen and Lepore view themselves as embattled defenders of the Free Republic of Semantics from the attacks of its enemies, mostly in the form of pragmatic incursions. They withdraw to a limited territory, and defend it with reason, humor, and other less noble weapons. The enemies are everywhere. This way of posing the debates is often humorous and helps make the book easy to read. It also often leads the authors to caricaturize and to trivialize many of the problems, arguments (...) and positions held by the different parties. (shrink)

Is evil evidence against the existence of God? Does divine hiddenness provide an evidential problem for theism? Is our evolutionary history evidence that God doesn’t exist? Skeptical theism is the view that humans are cognitively limited in important ways that prevent us from providing affirmative answers to these evidential questions. In this book—the first monograph published on skeptical theism—Perry Hendricks gives careful, novel, and compelling arguments in favor of skeptical theism and provides a comprehensive defense of it, addressing all (...) major objections to skeptical theism on offer. The implications of skeptical theism are teased out: it undermines the most prominent arguments for atheism on offer, which significantly lowers the epistemic status of atheism. (shrink)

A defense of antecedent physicalism, which argues against the idea that if everything that goes on in the universe is physical, our consciousness and feelings ..

A pardon is an act of mercy according to the law, but is a pardon mercy in an ordinary or genuine sense? What distinguishes a pardon from a lenient judicial sentence, which is not mercy by the law’s lights? These are questions about what mercy as it is understood in law has to do with mercy as it is understood outside of law, and about who in government acts mercifully and when, if indeed anyone in government ever does. Here I (...) propose a general analysis of mercy, then bring that analysis to bear on government action. Three features of my analysis are noteworthy. First, almost all existing analyses say that mercy is unconstrained in a normative sense, but I argue that mercy is unconstrained in the way that arbitrary power is unconstrained. Second, although it’s often assumed that mercy must be motivated by compassion, I show that mercy only requires acting with the intention to benefit the recipient. Third, my analysis says that mercy requires the giver of mercy to overcome a motivation to treat the recipient harshly. Given this analysis, few government acts are merciful, but pardon is an institutional approximation or analog of mercy. -/- . (shrink)

Perry argues that certain sorts of indexicals are 'essential', in the sense that they cannot be eliminated in favor of descriptions. This paper also introduces the influential idea that certain sorts of indexicals play a special role in thought, and have a special connection to action.

One cue that may facilitate children's word learning is iconicity, or the correspondence between a word's form and meaning. Some have even proposed that iconicity in the early lexicon may serve to help children learn how to learn words, supporting the acquisition of even noniconic, or arbitrary, word–referent associations. However, this proposal remains untested. Here, we investigate the iconicity of caregivers’ speech to young children during a naturalistic free‐play session with novel stimuli and ask whether the iconicity of caregivers’ speech (...) facilitates children's learning of the noniconic novel names of those stimuli. Thirty‐four 1.5‐2‐year‐olds (19 girls; half monolingual English learners and half bilingual English‐Spanish learners) participated in a naturalistic free‐play task with their caregivers followed by a test of word‐referent retention. We found that caregivers’ use of iconicity, particularly in utterances in which they named the novel stimuli, was associated with the likelihood that children learned that novel name. This result held even when controlling for other factors associated with word learning, such as the concreteness and frequency of words in caregiver speech. Together, the results demonstrate that iconicity not only can serve to help children identify the referent of novel words (as in previous research) but can also support their ability to retain even noniconic word‐referent mappings. (shrink)

Annotation. In this sequel to his Morality, Politics, and Law, Michael Perry addresses the proper relation of moral convictions to the politics of a morally pluralistic society. While his analysis focuses on religious morality, Perry's argument applies to morality generally. Contending that nojustification of a contested political choice can be neutral among competing conceptions of human good, the author develops an ideal of "ecumenical politics" in which moral convictions about human good can be brought to bear in a (...) productive way in political argument. (shrink)

According to substantivalism, spacetime points and regions are real entities whose existence is not dependent on matter. In this paper, I motivate and defend a version of substantivalism which takes the totality of spacetime as fundamental, and show how this position avoids certain problem cases, in particular the objection from static Leibniz shifts, and better conforms to how we think about space in physics. I argue that, even though the static Leibniz shifts do not show ordinary substantivalism is committed to (...) in-principle undetectable physical structure ), they do indicate something problematic about the modal profile of space-time and its constituents. While the problem is modal, the solution cannot be solely a matter of revising the substantivalist's modal claims. Rather, I argue, the substantivalist must revise her background ontology of space-time. I show how this can be done by developing substantivalist theory that rejects this picture in favor of an alternative ontology of space-time in the spirit of priority monism. (shrink)