Visual Agnosia is a comprehensive and up-to-date review of disorders of higher vision that relates these disorders to current conceptions of higher vision from cognitive science, illuminating both the neuropsychological disorders and the nature of normal visual object recognition.Brain damage can lead to selective problems with visual perception, including visual agnosia the inability to recognize objects even though elementary visual functions remain unimpaired. Such disorders are relatively rare, yet they provide a window onto how the normal brain might accomplish the (...) complex task of vision. Visual Agnosia reviews a century of case studies of higher-level visual deficits following brain damage, places them in the general context of current neuroscience, and draws relevant conclusions about the organization of normal visual processing. It is unique in drawing on research in cognitive psychology, computational vision, visual neurophysiology, and neuropsychology to interpret the agnosias and draw inferences from them about visual object recognition.Following a historical account of agnosia research, Visual Agnosia offers a taxonomy of a wide range of agnosia syndromes, describing and interpreting the syndromes in terms of the latest theoretical models of visual processing and ultimately bringing them to bear as evidence on a variety of questions in the study of higher vision.Martha J. Farah is Associate Professor of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. Visual Agnosia is included in the Issues in Biology of Language and Cognition series, edited by John Marshall. (shrink)

One of the reasons why moral enhancement may be controversial, is because the advantages of moral enhancement may fall upon society rather than on those who are enhanced. If directed at individuals with certain counter-moral traits it may have direct societal benefits by lowering immoral behavior and increasing public safety, but it is not directly clear if this also benefits the individual in question. In this paper, we will discuss what we consider to be moral enhancement, how different means may (...) be used to achieve it and whether the means we employ to reach moral enhancement matter morally. Are certain means to achieve moral enhancement wrong in themselves? Are certain means to achieve moral enhancement better than others, and if so, why? More specifically, we will investigate whether the difference between direct and indirect moral enhancement matters morally. Is it the case that indirect means are morally preferable to direct means of moral enhancement and can we indeed pinpoint relevant intrinsic, moral differences between both? We argue that the distinction between direct and indirect means is indeed morally relevant, but only insofar as it tracks an underlying distinction between active and passive interventions. Although passive interventions can be ethical provided specific safeguards are put in place, these interventions exhibit a greater potential to compromise autonomy and disrupt identity. (shrink)

Chest pain is the pain felt in the chest by infants, children and adolescents. In most cases the pain is not associated with the heart. It is mainly recognized by the observance or report of pain by the infant, child or adolescent by reports of distress by parents or care givers. Chest pain is not unusual in children. Lots of children are seen in ambulatory clinics, emergency rooms and hospitals and cardiology clinics. Usually there is a benign cause for the (...) pain for utmost children. Certain patients have conditions that are serious and perhaps life-threatening. Chest pain in pediatric patients needs careful physical examination and a detailed history that would point to the possibility of a serious cause. Researches of pediatric chest pain are scarce. It has been difficult to create evidence-based guidelines for evaluation. In this paper we propose an expert system to help doctors and parents, and care giver in diagnosing chest pain in infants and children. This expert System is design and implemented in SL5 Object language. (shrink)

The paper depicts the blueprint of an electronic wise indicating system for demonstrating learning French to understudies to overcome the inconveniences they go up against. The fundamental idea of this structure is a proficient introduction into learning French. The system shows the purpose of learning French and coordinates thusly made issues for the understudies to clarify. The system is logically balanced at run time to the understudy’s individual progress. The system gives unequivocal help to adaptable presentation to learners.

This paper explores the ‘indigenous’ philosophy of education of Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas, a Malay-Muslim scholar who’s theoretical work culminated in the establishment of a counter-colonial higher education institution. Through presenting al-Attas’ life and philosophy and by exploring the arguments of his critics, I aim to shed light on the challenges and paradoxes faced by indigenous academics working at the interface of philosophy and education.

Within the United States, the most prominent justification for criminal punishment is retributivism. This retributivist justification for punishment maintains that punishment of a wrongdoer is justified for the reason that she deserves something bad to happen to her just because she has knowingly done wrong—this could include pain, deprivation, or death. For the retributivist, it is the basic desert attached to the criminal’s immoral action alone that provides the justification for punishment. This means that the retributivist position is not reducible (...) to consequentialist considerations nor in justifying punishment does it appeal to wider goods such as the safety of society or the moral improvement of those being punished. A number of sentencing guidelines in the U.S. have adopted desert as their distributive principle, and it is increasingly given deference in the “purposes” section of state criminal codes, where it can be the guiding principle in the interpretation and application of the code’s provisions. Indeed, the American Law Institute recently revised the Model Penal Code so as to set desert as the official dominate principle for sentencing. And courts have identified desert as the guiding principle in a variety of contexts, as with the Supreme Court’s enthroning retributivism as the “primary justification for the death penalty.” While retributivism provides one of the main sources of justification for punishment within the criminal justice system, there are good philosophical and practical reasons for rejecting it. One such reason is that it is unclear that agents truly deserve to suffer for the wrongs they have done in the sense required by retributivism. In the first section, I explore the retributivist justification of punishment and explain why it is inconsistent with free will skepticism. In the second section, I then argue that even if one is not convinced by the arguments for free will skepticism, there remains a strong epistemic argument against causing harm on retributivist grounds that undermines both libertarian and compatibilist attempts to justify it. I maintain that this argument provides sufficient reason for rejecting the retributive justification of criminal punishment. I conclude in the third section by briefly sketching my public health-quarantine model, a non-retributive alternative for addressing criminal behavior that draws on the public health framework and prioritizes prevention and social justice. I argue that the model is not only consistent with free will skepticism and the epistemic argument against retributivism, it also provides the most justified, humane, and effective way of dealing with criminal behavior. (shrink)

BackgroundConsidering ethical issues in midwifery care is essential for improving the quality of health services and the client's satisfaction. This study aimed to develop and validate the code of ethics for Midwives in Iran (ICEM).Materials and methodsThis was a mixed sequential study that was performed in three phases including a qualitative study, a review, and the content validity assessment. The first phase was a qualitative study with a content analysis approach. The data were collected by conducting in-depth semi-structured individual interviews (...) with 14 midwifery and ethics experts. The purposive sampling method was used to recruit the participants and sampling continued until data saturation. The data were analyzed using the conventional content analysis described by Graneheim and Lundman. Lincoln and Guba’s criteria were used to confirm the trustworthiness of the data. Then, a narrative review of the selected national and international codes of ethics for Midwives was performed to complete the items of the ICEM. For validity assessment, the face and content validity of the items of ICEM was assessed by 15 experts to calculate the content validity ratio (CVR) and index (CVI).ResultsFourteen experts were interviewed in the qualitative phase, and 207 codes were extracted from a content analysis which were categorized into 23 sub-categories and 6 main categories. The extracted codes were considered as the items for ICEM that were completed by a review of the selected national and international code of ethics for Midwives. The content validity and ratio assessment of the items demonstrated an average CVI = 0.92 and CVR = 0.85. Then, the final version of ICEM was developed with 92 items in 6 domains about; 1) "professional Commitments" with 30 items; 2) "providing midwifery services to the client and her companions” with 26 items; 3) “relationship with colleagues" with 11 items; 4) “herself” with 6 items; 5) “education and research” with 8 items; and, 6) “management” with 11 items.ConclusionICEM was prepared with 92 items in six sections that facilitate its use for midwives who are working in the different fields of care, counseling, education, research, and management. In this new version of the ICEM, the items related to recent social-, scientific, and technical improvements were considered for providing ethical midwifery care. (shrink)

I argue here that a clearer conception of Gandhi's nonviolence is required in order to understand his resonance for contemporary environmentalism. Gandhi's nonviolence incorporates elements of both the brahmin or ascetic, as well as the ksatriya or warrior. Contemporary environmental movements by and large over-emphasize the self-abnegating, self-denying and self-scrutinizing ascetic components of Gandhi's thought, to the neglect of the confrontational and warrior-like ones. In so doing, they often also over-emphasize the ethical dimension of Gandhi's thought, missing the discursive political (...) dimension with which this Gandhian ethics is interwoven. I will argue here that the warrior-like and confrontational political aspect of Gandhi's nonviolence must be brought to the fore in discussions of environmentalism. In so doing, Gandhi can be read as an advocate of a certain form of "ecological" citizenship, requiring both the scrutiny of one's bodily consumptive behaviours, as well as the placement of one's body on the frontlines of aggressive political contestation. (shrink)

Can the theory and practice of the yogic tradition serve as a challenge to dominant cultural and political norms in the Western world? In this essay I demonstrate that modern yoga is a creature of fabrication, while arguing that yogic norms can simultaneously reinforce and challenge the norms of contemporary Western neoliberal societies. In its current and most common iteration in the West, yoga practice does stand in danger of reinforcing neoliberal constructions of selfhood. However, yoga does contain ample resources (...) for challenging neoliberal subjectivity, but this requires reading the yogic tradition in a particular way, to emphasize certain philosophical elements over others, while directing its practice toward an inward-oriented detachment from material outcomes and desires. Contemporary claims about yoga’s counterhegemonic status often rely on exaggerated notions of its former “purity” and “authenticity,” which belie its invented and retrospectively reconstructed nature. Rather than engaging in these debates about authenticity, scholars and practitioners may productively turn their energies toward enacting a resistant, anti-neoliberal practice of yoga, while remaining self-conscious about the particularity and partiality of the interpretive position on which such a practice is founded. (shrink)

Research on new media has always highlighted the assumption that in authoritarian contexts, communication technologies provide political activists with ampler space than available in the heavily policed physical world. However, social and political changes taking place throughout Egypt and the Arab region reflect a shift. In a country like Egypt, where only around 30 % of the population have internet access, the vibrant digital media scene is relocating itself once more in public spaces. Digital initiatives, such as Askar Kadhibun and (...) Musirrin, are transforming online media material into older modes of traditional media, such as graffiti and traveling street performances. This constitutes a shift towards the ascendancy of popular cultural production, and a challenge to the reification and sacrilization of digital media in a context where poverty and illiteracy play a major role in both the dissemination of information and in political mobilization. (shrink)

The Magic of Truth defends truth’s relativity by examining its role in the arts and sciences, as well as in our own lives and traditions. This book argues that no field of study can progress without calling into question the traditional view of truth as a clear, objective image.

Contemporary global events, such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the unresolved conflict in the Middle East, and the pessimistic relationships with Muslim countries, pose challenges for Muslims living in the United States in all walks of life. In addition, Muslims encounter daily struggles to live within a society that follows considerably dissimilar beliefs, norms, and way of life. Therefore, Islamic schools and other organizations emerged in response to those challenges. There are several debates in the literature about Islamic (...) schools; among those debates is whether Islamic schools segregate Muslim students, inspire religious intolerance, and rejection of social pluralism's ideals. In addition, there are debates of whether Islamic schools are capable of developing a strong Muslim identity skilled to tackle future challenges. Discussing these debates is considered the first step to critically tackling the challenges meeting Islamic schools, their relevance, and their continuity in a way that benefits Muslim generations and the American society. Furthermore, such debates draw attention to the impediments facing the success of these schools and the possible strategies to resolve problematic issues. This article explores each of these debates in detail. (shrink)

Le volume coordonné par Fabienne Baghdassarian et Gweltaz Guyomarc’h, intitulé Réceptions de la théologie aristotélicienne. D’Aristote à Michel d’Éphèse, paru chez Peeters en 2017, dans la collection dirigée par Pierre Destrée, est le fruit d’un colloque organisé par les éditeurs à l’Université Jean Moulin (Lyon 3) en octobre 2014. Il réunit onze contributions, certaines présentées lors de ce colloque et d’autres inédites, consacrées aux tensions problématiques internes à la théologie d’Arist...

Farah Nayeri addresses the difficult questions plaguing the art world, from the bad habits of Old Masters, to the current grappling with identity politics. For centuries, art censorship has been a top-down phenomenon--kings, popes, and one-party states decided what was considered obscene, blasphemous, or politically deviant in art. Today, censorship can also happen from the bottom-up, thanks to calls to action from organizers and social media campaigns. Artists and artworks are routinely taken to task for their insensitivity. In this (...) new world order, artists, critics, philanthropists, galleries and museums alike are recalibrating their efforts to increase the visibility of marginalized voices and respond to the people's demands for better ethics in art. But what should we, the people, do with this newfound power? With exclusive interviews with Nan Goldin, Sam Durant, Faith Ringgold, and others, Nayeri tackles wide-ranging issues including sex, religion, gender, ethics, animal rights, and race. By asking and answering questions such as: Who gets to make art and who owns it? How do we correct the inequities of the past? What does authenticity, exploitation, and appropriation mean in art?, Takedown provides the necessary tools to navigate the art world"--Publisher's description. (shrink)

The eye may be window to the soul, but neuroscientists aim to get inside and measure the interior directly. There's also talk about moving some walls.

This paper investigates the philosophical tensions between secular-liberalism and Islam, and reviews Islamic conceptualisations of knowledge, personhood and education, in order to conceptualise shakhsiyah Islamiyah as an authentic and credible form of personal agency within an Islamic worldview. It begins by examining the liberal critique of Islamic education and explores notions of authority and autonomy in Islamic educational theory. It proposes that these tensions exist to varying degrees in all educational practice. Some theoretical work to develop an Islamic understanding of (...) personal autonomy as selfhood is presented and translated into a concept of shakhsiyah Islamiyah. Finally, the possibility of understanding shakhsiyah Islamiyah as a dialogical Muslim-self is explored. (shrink)

In this essay, the authors analyze the COVID-19 pandemic from the perspective of inequalities and socio-economic vulnerabilities. We argue that the current pandemic has been looked at mainly through the lens of biology, leaving sociological blind spots in the response to this pandemic that have had adverse effects. We conclude with the suggestion that apart from recommendations from health sciences, policy makers must also take into account local societal structures in order to design effective policies to control the contagion.

When cognitive neuropsychologists make inferences about the functional architecture of the normal mind from selective cognitive impairments they generally assume that the effects of brain damage are local, that is, that the nondamaged components of the architecture continue to function as they did before the damage. This assumption follows from the view that the components of the functional architecture are modular, in the sense of being informationally encapsulated. In this target article it is argued that this “locality” assumption is probably (...) not correct in general. Inferences about the functional architecture can nevertheless be made from neuropsychological data with an alternative set of assumptions, according to which human information processing is graded, distributed, and interactive. These claims are supported by three examples of neuropsychological dissociations and a comparison of the inferences obtained from these impairments with and without the locality assumption. The three dissociations are: selective impairments in knowledge of living things, disengagment of visual attention, and overt face recognition. In all three cases, the neuropsychological phenomena lead to more plausible inferences about the normal functional architecture when the locality assumption is abandoned. Also discussed are the relations between the locality assumption in neuropsychology and broader issues, including Fodor's modularity hypothesis and the choice between top-down and bottom-up research approaches. (shrink)

The present study examines the extent to which sociohistorical and political contexts influence the language attitudes of Israeli-Druze students to Hebrew as L2 and to Modern Standard Arabic in Arabic-speaking schools. It is a pioneer explorative research study that compares students’ attitudes toward diglossia and L2. Using the Foreign Languages Attitudes and Goals Survey, the attitudes of second, fifth, and ninth graders in two different Druze schools were assessed. The results indicate a positive attitude towards L2 Hebrew, not only for (...) instrumental purposes but also for integration into Israel’s multicultural society. The positive attitude to L2 Hebrew is greater in older students, while the attitude to MSA becomes more negative among older students. Their low motivation to learn cultural heritage MSA may contribute to an understanding of how to teach it better or differently, as well as how to encourage future generations to learn it. (shrink)

Like people, academic fields grow, acquire an identity, establish goals, and ultimately impact the world in various ways. Here we check in with our young friend Neuroethics—a field I want to see develop and thrive. This won't happen if it keeps returning to issues like cognitive enhancement or neural causation of behavior and responsibility, with minor adjustments of its analyses. Neuroethics is at its best when scanning the horizon for new scientific and technical developments that intersect in new ways with (...) ethics and law. Consider the development of open‐ and closed‐loop deep brain stimulation for behavioral disorders. Under what conditions are patients responsible for their behavior when it is influenced by an implanted system? Neuroethics has also increased understanding of people's beliefs and attitudes toward neuroscience and its applications because effective policy must take empirical facts into account. (shrink)

ABSTRACTDeath as an inevitable reality is a subject of study in various philosophical schools. This concept can be reviewed within three realms: semantics, ontology, and epistemology. The objective of this article is to examine death within the ontological realm in the thoughts of Mullā Sadrā and Schopenhauer, and it attempts to answer the question whether philosophical discussions on the concept of death in Sadrā’s transcendental wisdom, despite differences in principles, methods, and objectives, are comparable to Schopenhauer’s intellectual framework. Using a (...) descriptive-analytical approach, the present study first investigates the issue of death in the thought of both philosophers and then focuses on their comparative analysis. The findings of this study show that both philosophers believe in the dichotomy in the world, immortality of human nature after death, existence of suffering in the world, asceticism, austerity, love, and affection to all human beings. However, each of them analyzes and explains the issue of death within his own intellectual framework. (shrink)

What if neurofeedback or other types of neurotechnological treatment, by itself or in combination with behavioral treatment, could achieve a successful “rewiring” of the psychopath’s brain? Imagine that such treatments exist and that they provide a better long-term risk-minimizing strategy compared to imprisonment. Would it be ethical to offer such treatments as a condition of probation, parole, or prison release? In this paper, I argue that it can be ethical to offer effective, non-invasive neurotechnological treatments to offenders as a condition (...) of probation, parole, or prison release provided that: the status quo is in no way cruel, inhuman, degrading, or in some other way wrong, the treatment option is in no way cruel, inhuman, degrading, or in some other way wrong, the treatment is in the best interests of the offender, and the offender gives his/her informed consent. (shrink)

At this ‘needy time’ in which humanity has been deteriorated into just dominance over nature through modern technicity, Martin Heidegger introduced art as the only way to overcome this modernity cr...

Downsizing due to COVID-19 and its consequences on laid-off employees has attracted the attention of many researchers, around the globe. However, the underlying mechanisms that explain the effects of COVID-19 downsizing on the employees who have survived cutoffs remain underexplored. Grounded in the conservation of resources theory, this manuscript aims to study the causal path through which COV-DS reduces the survivors’ affective commitment. The current study proposes the mediation of survivors’ job uncertainty, stress, and organizational identification between COV-DS and survivors’ (...) affective commitment. This study also posits the moderating role of transformational leadership between COV-DS and both the mediators. The extant study has employed WARPED partial least square WARP PLS 7 and Hayes Process Macro to test the hypothesized relationships. Using the sample of 274 employees from the private sector of Pakistan, it was found that job uncertainty’s stress strongly mediates the relationship between COV-DS and survivors’ affective commitment. While mediation of survivors’ organizational identification was not proven to be significant. However, with the moderation of transformational leadership, both the mediators were proven to be significant. (shrink)

This paper discusses the use of deep brain stimulation for the treatment of neurological and psychiatric disorders in children. At present, deep brain stimulation is used to treat movement disorders in children and a few cases of deep brain stimulation for psychiatric disorders in adolescents have been reported. Ethical guidelines on the use of deep brain stimulation in children are therefore urgently needed. This paper focuses on the decision-making process, and provides an ethical framework for (future) treatment decisions in pediatric (...) deep brain stimulation. I defend a shared decision-making model in case of deep brain stimulation for neurological and psychiatric disorders in children. To protect the vulnerable child patient, a dual consent process is needed where parents or parental guardians give their consent, and the child gives his/her assent. (shrink)

Recently there has been some discussion concerning a particular type of enhancement, namely ‘moral enhancement’. However, there is no consensus on what precisely constitutes moral enhancement, and as a result the concept is used and defined in a wide variety of ways. In this article, we develop a clarificatory taxonomy of these definitions and we identify the criteria that are used to delineate the concept. We think that the current definitions can be distinguished from each other by the criteria used (...) for determining whether an intervention is indeed moral enhancement. For example, some definitions are broad and include moral enhancement by any means, while other definitions focus only on moral enhancement by means of specific types of intervention. Moreover, for some definitions it suffices for an intervention to be aimed or intended to morally enhance a person, while other definitions only refer to ‘moral enhancement’ in relation to interventions that are actually effective. For all these differences in definitions we discuss some of their implications. This shows that definitions are significantly less descriptive and more normative than they are regularly portrayed to be. We therefore hope that the taxonomy developed in this paper and the comments on the implications for the normative debate of the variety of definitions will provide conceptual clarity in a complex and highly interesting debate. (shrink)