This essay contends that while Nancy and Esposito have strikingly similar concepts of the place of the political in post-metaphysical community, their respective articulations of these concepts noticeably diverge. Because of his commitment to excavating the political project of immunity as central to the Western political tradition in and through the category of the legal person, Esposito announces community as impolitical, as the interruptive spacing, and thus alternating displacement, of the political conceived as the site of emancipatory agency. In contrast, (...) in the work of Agamben and in the recent work of Nancy, an articulation of the person and the political in more agential terms can be found. This divergence presents interpretive difficulties insofar as Esposito's discussion of community as impolitical could be read as advancing ontological neutrality or passivity that threatens to separate political activity from its liberating potential. I argue that such ontological neutrality is a product of Esposito's confrontation with the political as dominated by both the logic of immunity and an engagement with the complex legacy of Heidegger's problematic political trajectory. To this extent it is an open question whether Esposito's project leaves room for a new vision of the political and for political agency. (shrink)

This article aims to examine journalists' adversarial challenges within the Australian political news interview. Within the Australian context, journalists tend to challenge interviewees: by challenging the content of the prior turn, by `interrupting' the prior turn, and by initially presenting their challenge as a freestanding assertion, not attributed to a third party. As a result, journalists could be interpreted as expressing their own perspective on the topic at hand, rather than maintaining a neutralistic stance. Although the challenging nature of journalistic (...) questions has been previously noted within the Australian context, there have been few analyses of such challenges. Using the framework of conversation analysis, the aim of the following article is to examine adversarial challenges in more detail. In particular, the article will focus on how interviewers and interviewees collaboratively produce the political news interview in such a way as to avoid accusations of bias or non-neutrality. First, the article will focus on the challenging nature of the IR's turn, by examining the various techniques used by journalists to ensure that they maintain a neutralistic stance. Second, it will examine the way in which IEs respond to such adversarial challenges. It will show how although politicians do not overtly accuse IRs of bias or impartiality, they clearly orient to the challenging nature of the journalists' turn. (shrink)

This article revises a paper I read at the SAAP session in honor of my late friend, Richard Robin. The discussion that followed the paper was much better than the paper, and my present effort, I hope, has benefited from that discussion. What I say here is exploratory. I am more confident of my criticisms of other authors than of the alternative I propose. It is the mere sketch of an idea, its many obvious difficulties blithely ignored. I hope in (...) later articles to make up for present deficiencies.I begin by developing a suggestion of Robin's, that Peirce's idea of a normative science grew out of his work on the norms of science, and proceed toward an explanation of the possibility of a normative science, hence of.. (shrink)

The health benefits of male circumcision are wide rangingIn this issue, John Hutson has reiterated the conventional Western medical view that “the surgical argument for circumcision of all neonatal males at present is very weak” and he criticises many of the circumcisions performed in later childhood, without anaesthesia, as “physically cruel and potentially dangerous” [see page 238].1 He is also of the opinion that “the diseases which circumcision is able to prevent are uncommon or even rare”. But therein he errs, (...) and greatly errs.He cites only two publications dealing with the protective effect of male circumcision against HIV infection, and makes no mention of the important recent meta-analysis of Weiss, Quigley, and Hayes2 which shows conclusively from a large number of studies that …. (shrink)

Summary In her highly publicised polemic, All Must Have Prizes (1996), Melanie Phillips launches a scathing attack upon the British educational establishment and various facets of policy and practice during the past three decades. She is especially critical of progressivism and approaches to teaching and learning supposedly predicated upon relativist principles (e.g. multicultural education). Our own research on primary?school children's constructions of British identity (Carrington, B. & Short, G. (1995): What makes a person British? Children's conceptions of their national (...) culture and identity, Educational Studies, 21, pp. 217?238) is singled?out for criticism. We begin this paper with a rejoinder to Phillips. Among other things, we take issue with her defence of an assimilationist approach to the curriculum. In the second part of the paper, we present the findings of a recently completed case?study of 12? and 13?year?olds? constructions of their national identity, which replicates the earlier work (criticised by Phillips) with 8? to 11?year?olds. We show that the young adolescents, in common with their counterparts in primary schools, tended to adopt a pluralist viewpoint. Once again, there was an almost complete dearth of comments that were racist or nationalistic. We conclude by briefly exploring the policy implications of the findings. [1] Paper presented to the 1997 Conference of the Association for Moral Education: The Voices of Care and Justice?enhancing dialogue among theorists, researchers and practitioners, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA. (shrink)

Theory of Mind (ToM) is the term used for our ability to predict and explain the behaviour of ourselves and others. Accounts of this theory have so far fallen into two competing types: Simulation Theory and 'Theory Theory'. In contrast with Theory Theory, Simulation Theory argues that we predict behaviour not by employing a model of people, but by replicating others' thoughts and feelings. This book presents a novel defence of Simulation Theory, reviewing the major challenges against it and positing (...) the theory as the most effective method for exploring how we know each other and ourselves. Drawing on key research in the field, chapters reopen the debates surrounding Theory of Mind and cover a variety of topics including schizophrenia with implications for experimental social psychology. In the past, one of the greatest criticisms against Simulation Theory is that it cannot explain systematic error in Theory of Mind. This book explores the rapidly developing heuristics and biases programme, pioneered by Kahneman and Tversky, to suggest that a novel bias mismatch defence available to Simulation Theory explains these systematic errors. Simulation Theory: A psychological and philosophical consideration will appeal to a range of researchers and academics, including psychologists from the fields of cognitive, social and developmental psychology, as well as philosophers, psychotherapists and practitioners looking for further research on Theory of Mind. The book will also be of relevance to those interested in autism, since it offers a new approach to Theory of Mind which explains central symptoms in autistic subjects. (shrink)

Summary During the past decade, the cultural restorationist wing of the New Right has sought to impose its own anachronistic and sentimental conception of ?British culture? on schools and colleges. This conception, which is little more than a glib celebration of quintessential ?Englishness?, characterises the national culture in largely monolithic and ethnically undifferen?tiated terms. Concerned about the possible pernicious effects of educational policies inspired by such thinking, we present the findings of a recently completed ethnographic study of 8?11 year?olds? conceptions (...) of British national culture. Our paper considers the extent to which children's understanding of this complex form of collective identity may vary with age, and ethnicity. We conclude by exploring the implications of the findings for anti?racist and multicultural education. (shrink)

When considering controversial thermodynamic scenarios such as Maxwell's demon, it is often necessary to consider probabilistic mixtures of states. This raises the question of how, if at all, to assign entropy to them. The information-theoretic entropy is often used in such cases; however, no general proof of the soundness of doing so has been given, and indeed some arguments against doing so have been presented. We offer a general proof of the applicability of the information-theoretic entropy to probabilistic mixtures of (...) macrostates, making clear the assumptions on which it depends, in particular a probabilistic version of the Kelvin statement of the Second Law. We briefly discuss the interpretation of our result. (shrink)

Images portraying exercise are commonly used to promote exercise behavior and to measure automatic associations of exercise (e.g., via implicit association tests). The effectiveness of these promotion efforts and the validity of measurement techniques partially rely on the untested assumption that the images being used are perceived by the general public as portrayals of exercise that is pleasant and motivating. The aim of this study was to investigate how content of images impacted people's automatic and reflective evaluations of exercise images. (...) Participants ( N = 90) completed a response time categorization task (similar to the implicit association test) to capture how automatically people perceived each image as relevant to Exercise or Not exercise. Participants also self-reported their evaluations of the images using visual analog scales with the anchors: Exercise / Not exercise, Does not motivate me to exercise / Motivates me to exercise, Pleasant / Unpleasant, and Energizing/Deactivating. People tended to more strongly automatically associate images with exercise if the images were of an outdoor setting, presented sport (as opposed to active labor or gym-based) activities, and included young (as opposed to middle-aged) adults. People tended to reflectively find images of young adults more motivating and relevant to exercise than images of older adults. The content of exercise images is an often overlooked source of systematic variability that may impact measurement validity and intervention effectiveness. (shrink)

Summary Compared to the literature on children's racial and ethnic identities, relatively little is known about their understanding of national identity. Such knowledge is necessary if schools are to challenge racism, xenophobia and ethnocentrism effectively. In this paper, we present the findings of a case?study (undertaken in a mainly?white Edinburgh primary school) of 9?11 year?olds? understanding of this complex form of collective identity. Particular attention is given to age?related differences in response. Comparisons are drawn between the Scottish children's conceptions of (...) their national identity and those of a multiethnic cohort drawn from three English primary schools (in a recently?completed, parallel investigation by the same authors). We conclude by exploring the policy implications of our data. (shrink)

In this article, I discuss manuscript material written by Petrus van Musschenbroek (1692–1761) related to his first experiments with the Leiden jar. Despite the importance of the discovery of the Leiden jar for the history of electricity and the questions that still surround its discovery, a detailed treatment of this manuscript material is lacking in the literature. The main aim of this paper is to provide an outline of the manuscript material and to contextualize van Musschenbroek’s first experiments with the (...) Leiden jar. I show how the experiment fits within his research program on electricity and I discuss van Musschenbroek’s initial reactions to and analysis of the phenomenon. Before doing so, I first provide a short overview of the treatment of the early history of the Leiden jar in the secondary literature. After that, I discuss van Musschenbroek’s treatment of the topic of electricity in the textbooks he published in the years before the discovery of the device. Van Musschenbroek repeatedly emphasized that not enough experimental results were available for an informed theoretical treatment of the phenomenon of electricity to be possible. I then turn to the manuscript material, where I give a general description of the contents of the manuscript and van Musschenbroek’s experimental practice. The manuscript material further confirms recent work on the Leiden jar by Silva and Heering, and provides new insights into the way van Musschenbroek himself reacted to the discovery. (shrink)

Prototyping is not a new approach to computer-based information system development. It is just one technique among many used in system design. What might be new is for what purpose prototyping is used. The purpose could be to achieve a more user controlled system development and to give the future users a tool that will enable them to fully participate in not only the work with requirements specifications, but also in the actual systems design and organisational change. This paper describes (...) a working model of an approach-the PROTEVS model-in which it is recommended that the future system users design their own prototype systems. The prototypes may act as both requirements specifications and solutions for actual change. This alternative approach aims to offer a basis for new ways of action for future users as participants in the design, evaluation, and change of a workplace. A suitable environment for the approach to act within is also described—a local design shop. (shrink)

Artificial language learning experiments have become an important tool in exploring principles of language and language learning. A persistent question in all of this work, however, is whether ALL engages the linguistic system and whether ALL studies are ecologically valid assessments of natural language ability. In the present study, we considered these questions by examining the relationship between performance in an ALL task and second language learning ability. Participants enrolled in a Spanish language class were evaluated using a number of (...) different measures of Spanish ability and classroom performance, which was compared to IQ and a number of different measures of ALL performance. The results show that success in ALL experiments, particularly more complex artificial languages, correlates positively with indices of L2 learning even after controlling for IQ. These findings provide a key link between studies involving ALL and our understanding of second language learning in the classroom. (shrink)

For forty years, American priest and friar Reginald Foster, O.C.D., worked in the Latin Letters office of the Roman Curia’s Secretary of State in Vatican City. As Latinist of four popes, he soon emerged as an internationally recognized authority on the Latin language—some have said, the internationally recognized authority, consulted by scholars, priests, and laymen worldwide. In 1986, he began teaching an annual summer Latin course that attracted advanced students and professors from around the globe. This volume gathers contributions from (...) some of his many students in honor of his enduring influence and achievements. Its chapters explore a wide range of linguistic and literary evidence from antiquity to the present day in a variety of theoretical perspectives. If the motivation for putting together this collection has been to reflect (and reflect upon) Foster’s influences on Latin scholarship and pedagogy, its title alludes—via the medieval folk etymology of the word labyrinthus (“quasi labor intus”)—to its theme: ambiguity in Latin literature. (shrink)

This paper describes existing and potential short animated presentations that may be helpful in introductory logic courses (particularly in conjunction with Virginia Klenk’s "Understanding Symbolic Logic"), e.g. the progression of a proof, the distinction between inference and replacement rules, propositional variables, the use of truth tables, etc. The author offers reasons why animated presentations of various concepts and derivation rules ought to be short and simple rather than long and complex, provides an overview of some of the technical (...) limitations associated with such presentations, and discusses the prospects for developing future presentations. (shrink)

A Short Introduction to Modal Logic presents both semantic and syntactic features of the subject and illustrates them by detailed analyses of the three best-known modal systems S5, S4 and T. The book concentrates on the logical aspects of ...

In _Short-Term Psychodynamic Therapy with Children in Crisis, _Elisabeth Cleve presents the therapeutic stories of four children who have experienced trauma or are displaying dramatic clinical symptoms such as low self-esteem and anxiety. Exploring the situation between the individual child and the therapist, the therapeutic space and their experiences, each chapter follows the sessions and the progress made, concluding with a follow-up after the end of therapy. Cleve explores each case as it progresses, emphasising the inner strength of the children (...) and including the interactions between the therapist and the children’s parents. The focus of the psychotherapeutic encounter is in each case to help the child face the trauma, mourn what had been suffered and then move on in life with renewed strength. The final chapters explore the ethics of sharing case material and present Cleve’s reflections on working with traumatised children, and the book also includes forewords by Lars H. Gustafsson, paediatrician and associate professor of social medicine, and Björn Salomonsson, child psychoanalyst and researcher at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. This warm and readable work will be insightful reading for child psychologists and psychotherapists and other clinicians working with children who have experienced trauma. It will also be of interest to readers wishing to learn more about the processes of psychotherapy with children. (shrink)

A Short Modern History of Studying Sacrobosco’s De sphaera. The treatise generally known as De sphaera offered at the beginning of the 13th century a general image of the structure of the Cosmos. In this paper I’m first trying to present a triple stake with which this treaty of Johannes de Sacrobosco (c. 1195 - c. 1256). This effort is intended to draw a context upon the treaty on which I will present in the second part of this paper (...) namely, a short modern history of studying this treaty starting from the beginning of the 20th century up to this day. The first stake consists in the well-known episode of translation of the XI-XII centuries in the Latin milieu of the Greek and Arabic treaties. The treatise De sphaera taking over, assimilating and comparing some of the new translations of the texts dedicated to astronomy. The second consists in the fact that Sacrobosco`s work can be considered a response to a need of renewal of the curriculum dedicated to astronomy at the University of Paris. And the third consists in the novelty and the need to use the De sphaera treatise in the Parisian University’s curriculum of the 13th century. (shrink)

The present study was conducted with the aim of constructing and validating a short form of the Profile of Mood States. The POMS is a widely-applied measure for the assessment of an individual's mood. Thus, it is of great relevance for many research questions in clinical and social psychology. To develop the short scale, we first examined psychometric properties and found the optimal 16-item solution among all valid combinations of the full POMS in an exploratory subsample of our (...) complete representative sample of the German general population. We then validated this model in a confirmatory subsample. Additionally, we examined its invariance across age groups and sex, as well as its reliability. Our results indicate that the POMS-16 is a valid and reliable measure of mood states with minimal losses compared to the 35-item version. Particularly where brevity and an economical assessment is desired, the POMS-16 should be considered. (shrink)

This article reviews experimental evidence for a specific sensorimotor function which can be dissociated from higher level representations of space. It attempts to delineate this function on the basis of results obtained by psychophysical experiments performed with brain damaged and healthy subjects. Eye and hand movement control exhibit automatic features, such that they are incompatible with conscious control. In addition, they rely on a reference frame different from the one used by conscious perception. Neuropsychological cases provide a strong support for (...) this specific motor representation of space, which can be spared in patients with lesions of primary sensory systems who have lost conscious perception of visual, tactile or proprioceptive stimuli. Observation of these patients also showed that their motor behavior can be ''attracted'' by a goal only under specific conditions, that is, when the response is immediate and when no cognitive representation of this goal is elaborated at the same time. Beyond the issue of the dissociation between an implicit motor representation and more cognitive processing of spatial information, the issue of the interaction between these two systems is thus a matter of interest. It is suggested that the conscious, cognitive representation of a stimulus can contaminate or override the short-lived motor representation, but no reciprocal influence seem to occur. The interaction observed in patients can also be investigated in normals. The literature provides examples of interaction between sensorimotor and cognitive framing of space, which confirm that immediate action is not mediated by the same system as delayed action, and that elaborating a categorial representation of the action goal prevents the expression of the short-lived sensorimotor representation. It is concluded that action can be controlled by a sensory system which is specialized for on-line processing of relevant goal characteristics. The temporal constraints of this system are such that it can affect the action before a full sensory analysis of this goal has been completed. The performance obtained on the basis of this spatial sensory processing suggests that short-lived motor representations may rather be considered as real ''presentation'' of the action world, which share its metric properties. (shrink)

Continuing the tradition of Oxford Calculatorial physics, the late fourteenth-century British Carmelite Richard Lavenham authored an amplification of the popular short textbook commonly referred to as Termini naturales. A copy of this amplification, preserved in a late fourteenth-century manuscript (Venezia, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, ms Lat. Z. 300 [= 1872]), is followed by a short series of notes and comments on some of the principles introduced in Lavenham’s treatise (drawn from the first four books of Aristotle’s Physics). The present (...) article offers an edition of the text, and analyses its content and relationship with fourteenth-century physics, especially with the physical doctrines of Richard Lavenham. (shrink)

Near the end of 2015, Luis Fariñas del Cerro officially retired as directeur de recherche in the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and became an Emeritus researcher of the CNRS. The present special issue is a Festschrift in his honour to celebrate Luis’s achievements in science, both as an outstanding scholar as well as a remarkable and highly successful organiser, administrator and leader in science and technology policy and management, in particular as the founder of the Journal of Applied (...) Non-Classical Logics. The issue contains 13 scientific contributions by 32 authors, among them Luis’s colleagues, former students and friends. Preceding versions of these papers were presented at the international workshop ‘Logical Reasoning and Computation’ that was held at IRITInstitut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse, Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, on 3–4 March 2016. The present introduction contains a short scientific biography describing the many different areas of logic and computation where Luis contributed significant advances. (shrink)

In debates in philosophy and cognitive science concerning short-term memory mechanisms and perceptual experience, most discussion has focused on the working memory and the various forms of sensory memory such as iconic memory. In this paper, I present a summary of some evidence for a proposed further form of memory termed conceptual short-term memory. I go on to outline some of the ways in which this additional distinctive sort of short-term memory might be of relevance to ongoing (...) philosophical debates, specifically in relation to questions about high-level perceptual phenomenology, the relationship between consciousness and reportability, and the boundary between cognition and perception. I conclude that conceptual short-term memory offers a promising new direction of research and philosophical investigation. (shrink)

Given the prevalence of debilitating anxiety associated with music performance, there is a need for rapid, pinpointed assessment of the extent to which an individual experiences music performance anxiety. A short, five item scale, the Mazzarolo Music Performance Anxiety Scale, was developed to capture retrospective self-reported estimates of the frequency, intensity and aversion tendency associated with performing music. 102 musicians completed the scale, as well as an established MPA inventory. The M-MPAS was found to be internally reliable with all (...) items being statistically relevant to the overall scale. Furthermore, the M-MPAS was correlated with the relevant factors of an established MPA measure, suggesting that the new scale exhibited good construct validity. M-MPAS is easy to score, with a scale range of 0–30. A score of 11 or above is suggested as the range in which a diagnosis of potential high MPA can be made, but more research into this and the psychometric robustness of the scale is called for. Nevertheless, the reliability and validity demonstrated in the present study, along with the brevity of the M-MPAS suggest that the newly proposed scale may offer considerable triaging benefits for pinpointed assessment of the extent to which an individual experiences MPA. (shrink)

In his new book, _Charles Peirce and Modern Science_ (2022), T. L. Short convincingly presents Charles S. Peirce as a scientific philosopher whose philosophical views were influenced by his empirical and experimental work in geodesy, astronomy, chemistry, and psychology. This includes his treatment of metaphysics, theory of categories, cosmogony, phenomenology or phaneroscopy, semiotics, and normative science. In all of his works, Peirce exemplified the spirit of modern science, not as a system builder looking for final truths, but rather as (...) a fallibilist inquirer who was always ready to refine and revise his conjectures. In these comments, it is first pointed out that there existed a European counterpart to Peirce’s scientific philosophy: the program of “inductive metaphysics,” which is today continued as “abductive metaphysis” by analytic philosophers. Peirce’s contributions to nomological probabilistic explanations are then mentioned as a complement to Short’s treatment of statistical explanation. Finally, it is argued that Short’s remarks about Peirce’s ironical relation to modernity are based on a narrow interpretation of the values and achievements of modernity. (shrink)

It is a heroic enterprise to develop a systematic reading of Hegel's Doctrine of Being, the first of three books in the Science of Logic. The basic idea of Houlgate's grand interpretation of Hegel's three parts of this Doctrine, which I call the Logic of Quality, Quantity and Measure, is that Hegel demands a ‘presuppositionless derivation of categories’ (II: ix). Hegel on Being (in short: HoB) presents a thoroughgoing and rigorous interpretation in a kind of dialogue (as I would (...) characterize what HoB marks as ‘Excursus’) with Kant (I: 19–46, 307–73; II: 171–79) and especially Frege's formal logic and his attempts of a predicative definition of numbers (II: 25–138). In any case, HoB makes us aware of the really problematic presuppositions in post-Fregean Analytic Philosophy. (shrink)

The controversy over short selling has continued unabated from the introduction of modern equity trading in Amsterdam in 1610 to the present day. Nevertheless, the business ethics literature has not really addressed short selling. Short sellers not only profit from the misery of others, they also create it through their selling activities. However, they also provide a socially useful service by making prices better reflect true values, protecting other investors from purchasing overpriced securities. Short sellers can (...) also help to provide liquidity in the markets. Recently, there has been a hue and cry against so called "naked" short selling, which involves not delivering the shares that have been sold. This gives manipulators a tool for depressing stock prices and deprives purchasers of voting rights and potential stock lending revenue. Naked short selling creates ethical issues for short sellers, buyers, brokers, market makers, and regulators. Is it ethical to exploit a legal loophole that permits sellers to sell stock and delay delivering shares indefinitely? (shrink)