We offer a formal account of the English past tenses. We see the perfect as having reference time at speech time and the preterite as having reference time at event time. We formalize four constraints on reference time, which we bundle together under the term ‘perspective’. Once these constraints are satisfied at the different reference times of the perfect and preterite, the contrasting functions of these tenses are explained. Thus we can account formally for the ‘definiteness effect’ and the ‘lifetime (...) effect’ of the perfect, for the fact that the perfect seems to ‘explain’ something about the present, and that the perfect cannot presuppose a past time point. We explain why perfect and preterite can sometimes be interchangeable, and we offer a solution to the ’present perfect puzzle’. We explain the unacceptability of notorious examples of the perfect such as * Gutenberg has discovered the art of printing . We give greater definition to the familiar notions of ‘current relevance’ and ‘extended now’. (shrink)

Recently, a class of $\mathcal{P}\mathcal{T}$ -invariant scalar quantum field theories described by the non-Hermitian Lagrangian $\mathcal{L}$ = $ \frac{1}{2} $ (∂ϕ) 2 +gϕ 2 (iϕ)ε was studied. It was found that there are two regions of ε. For ε<0 the $\mathcal{P}\mathcal{T}$ -invariance of the Lagrangian is spontaneously broken, and as a consequence, all but the lowest-lying energy levels are complex. For ε≥0 the $\mathcal{P}\mathcal{T}$ -invariance of the Lagrangian is unbroken, and the entire energy spectrum is real and positive. The subtle (...) transition at ε=0 is not well understood. In this paper we initiate an investigation of this transition by carrying out a detailed numerical study of the effective potential V eff (ϕc) in zero-dimensional spacetime. Although this numerical work reveals some differences between the ε<0 and the ε>0 regimes, we cannot yet see convincing evidence of the transition at ε=0 in the structure of the effective potential for $\mathcal{P}\mathcal{T}$ -symmetric quantum field theories. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Womanist-Buddhist Consultation as a Reading CommunityCarolyn M. Jones MedineIn Breaking the Fall, the late Robert Detweiler (1932-2008) imagines what a reading community, "a contemporary version of the old storytelling cultures,"1 might look like. He suggests that in such a community, "The accent on community itself would offer a balance to our excessively privatizing tendencies; the communal interaction could counter our relentless drive to interpret... with attitudes of (...) play and Gelassenheit (abandonment, chance, and relaxation); the writing and reading community especially as a liminal entity, could nurture a respect for the incomprehensibility of form and a reverence for mystery."2 This description offers an entry to the work of the Womanist-Buddhist Consultations. To reach a provisional understanding of the meaning of that work, I shall reflect on first what we mean when we say that we want to read something. Second, I turn to a conversation with Robert Detweiler, who was one of my mentors, as a way to address the form of reading that we do and the form of community that we make in the Womanist-Buddhist Consultations. Third, I want to draw on the thought of the consultations themselves, using Emmanuel Levinas's work on reading and ethics, to examine the capacity the consultations have to hold tensions creatively and to allow multiple meanings to be part of them. Finally, I want to address the goals for the consultations. I am thinking specifically of Melanie Harris's desire to see the consultations as generating practices that promote peace, compassion, and justice, and Charlie Hallisey's desire to generate a more complex reading of Buddhist texts in and of themselves.The Womanist-Buddhist Consultations have met three times between 2009 and 2011. We met at Harvard Divinity School and at Texas Christian University for sessions of four days each, and for an evening at the University of Georgia between the two longer meetings. The Texas Christian meeting included some previous members from the Harvard meeting, and added new ones. The University of Georgia meeting consisted primarily of students who participated in the reading practice.In the meeting at the University of Georgia, Charles Hallisey looked askance at me when I said that Buddhism offers an entry into peace and compassion; yet Melanie Harris, when she constructed the later session at Texas Christian University, deployed the terms "peace" and "justice" as descriptors for the work of the group. Hallisey's ironic glance occurred right before we read, at the University of Georgia, a text that contained magic and murder. His glance and the content of that text have prompted [End Page 47] me to think through Harris's claims and to see how our group achieves both a reading of Buddhism and an ethical practice that generates peace and points to justice.The instructions that Hallisey gives for the reading process describe a practice of "being and reading together" as we encounter a variety of Buddhist texts.3 The group's guide is the bodhisattva Manjushri, who has overseen our work through an image gracing the wall at all our meetings. Manjushri has a sword to cut through obstacles, and holds a book, signifying wisdom. The practice of reading with friends, Hallisey told us, comes from Jewish tradition: we need a friend to help us overcome what we can and to begin to see what we cannot. The work involves three steps:1. To read passages individually.2. To read the same passages together in small groups.3. To gather again as a large group and discuss what we have discovered.The major goal of reading is to encounter levels of ourselves to which we ordinarily have no access, by examining a text that becomes "generous" to us. Reading together, Hallisey asserts, makes the generosity of the text visible to us.This process of reading, I would argue, is different from what we usually do when we read and different from what we mean when we tell students to read. Patricia O'Connell Killen, an AAR Teaching Award winner, has delineated some of what we mean when we say to our students: "Read chapter 2 of 'X' and come to class prepared."4... (shrink)

How should we shape the practice of pastoral care, especially in the context of bioethical counseling? Martin Luther grounded it in a mutual dialogue of brethren. Friedrich Schleiermacher transformed this Protestant understanding according to the modern ideals of freedom and responsibility for oneself. In response to the other basic question of pastoral care: What is the human soul?, Sigmund Freud overcame the Platonic model undergirding Schleiermacher's account. Whoever seeks to care for his own soul and the soul of the other (...) should learn from Freud. One of the most fruitful consequences of such study lies in the formation of a mature religiosity. Another such consequence concerns the pastor's aspiring to an attitude of self-control in counseling. Building one's own competence on the experience and the knowledge of Freud can help one counteract the temptation to transfer one's own (unconscious) wishes onto the conversation partner and conversely to ward off transference from the other onto oneself. On the level of ideals and ultimate principles, however, Christian pastors, unlike Freud, will not see fate and the anonymous forces of Eros and Thanatos, as the ultimate last horizons of human self-understanding. Instead, the good news of sinful man's justification by God transcends even the limits of human existence imposed by fate. (shrink)

The fifth base in human DNA, 5‐methylcytosine, is inherently mutagenic. This has led to marked changes in the distribution of the CpG methyl acceptor site and an 80% depletion in its frequency of occurrence in vertebrate DNA. The coding regions of many genes contain CpGs which are methylated in sperm and serve as hot spots for mutation in human genetic diseases. Fully 30–40% of all human germline point mutations are thought to be methylation induced even though the CpG dinucleotide is (...) under‐represented and efficient cellular repair systems exist. Importantly, tumor suppressor genes such as p53 also contain methylated CpGs and these serve as hot spots for mutations in some, but not all, human cancers. Comparison of the spectrum of mutations present in this gene in different human cancers allows for predictions to be made on the molecular mechanisms of tumorigenesis. (shrink)

Historian James H. Jones published the first edition of Bad Blood, the definitive history of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, in 1981. Its clear-eyed examination of that research and its implications remains a bioethics classic, and the 30-year anniversary of its publication served as the impetus for the reexamination of research ethics that this symposium presents. Recent revelations about the United States Public Health Service study that infected mental patients and prisoners in Guatemala with syphilis in the late 1940s in (...) order to determine the efficacy of treatment represent only one of the many attestations to the persistence of ongoing, critical, and underaddressed issues in research ethics that Bad Blood first explored. Those issues include, but are not limited to: the complex and contested matters of the value of a given research question, the validity of the clinical trial designed to address it, and the priorities of science. (shrink)

Two new manuscripts have come to my attention since I made a study of the MS. tradition of Seneca's Natural Questions. The first is Munich, Bayerische Staats-bibliothek, Clm 18961, part ii , which I shall call Y, a late-ninth-century manuscript from Brittany or the lower Loire. It contains a short collection of theological and philosophical excerpts from a variety of authors, a collection emanating from the circle of Alcuin, probably from the generation after Alcuin himself. Included in the collection are (...) three extracts from the preface of Book 1 of Seneca's Natural Questions. Since the earliest surviving manuscripts of the Seneca work hitherto known are from the twelfth century, it is of considerable interest to see how the text of the Natural Questions in these excerpts relates to the later MS. tradition. (shrink)