Human neural and behavioral activities have been reported to exhibit fractal dynamics known as 1/f noise, which is more aptly named 1/f scaling. Some argue that 1/f scaling is a general and pervasive property of the dynamical substrate from which cognitive functions are formed. Others argue that it is an idiosyncratic property of domain‐specific processes. An experiment was conducted to investigate whether 1/f scaling pervades the intrinsic fluctuations of a spoken word. Ten participants each repeated the word bucket over 1,000 (...) times, and fluctuations in acoustic measurements across repetitions generally followed the 1/f scaling relation, including numerous parallel yet distinct series of 1/f fluctuations. On the basis of work showing that 1/f scaling is a universal earmark of metastability, it is proposed that the observed pervasiveness of 1/f fluctuations in speech reflects the fact that cognitive functions are formed as metastable patterns of activity in brain, body, and environment. (shrink)

Understanding how impactful scientific articles were funded informs future funding decisions. The structural significance of articles is broken down into two submeasures: citation count and “generativity”. Generativity is an attempt to provide a quantitative operationalization of transformativeness, a concept often used as a funding criterion despite not being a well-defined construct. This report identifies highly impactful and generative publications indexed in the subject area of psychology in the Web of Science in the year 2002. Publications that reported funding sources were (...) found to be more generative than those that did not, and research that was privately funded was found to be more generative than publicly funded research. This analysis is exploratory, and hopefully contributes to a foundation for future empirical investigations into the structure and nature of transformative science that granting agencies would want to fund. (shrink)

This collection of essays is dedicated to the prolific career of Paul Ricoeur. Honoring his work, this anthology addresses questions and concerns that defined Ricoeur’s.

A Comparative Dictionary of Raute and Rawat: Tibeto-Burman Languages of the Central Himalayas. By Jana Fortier. Harvard Oriental Series, vol. 88. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019. Pp. xx + 276. $50.

Click on the DOI link to access the article.

Pancreatitis is a complex, progressively destructive inflammatory disorder. Alcohol was long thought to be the primary causative agent, but genetic contributions have been of interest since the discovery that rare PRSS1, CFTR and SPINK1 variants were associated with pancreatitis risk. We now report two associations at genome-wide significance identified and replicated at PRSS1-PRSS2 and X-linked CLDN2 through a two-stage genome-wide study. The PRSS1 variant likely affects disease susceptibility by altering expression of the primary trypsinogen gene. The CLDN2 risk allele is (...) associated with atypical localization of claudin-2 in pancreatic acinar cells. The homozygous CLDN2 genotype confers the greatest risk, and its alleles interact with alcohol consumption to amplify risk. These results could partially explain the high frequency of alcohol-related pancreatitis in men. © 2012 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

"This first full reconstruction of Perry Anderson's distinguished career provides an overview of the evolution of the British New Left since 1956 and reveals a great deal about the vicissitudes of Marxist theory and political practice in ...

This article introduces the Normative Representativeness Requirement (NRR) on any moral objection to a decentralized, profit-oriented system of political economy. I develop and defend the NRR and then show why the most important recent critique of the profit system—which I call The Moderate Critique (developed by, for instance, Elizabeth Anderson)—fails to meet the NRR. This article also defends the radical claim that no objection to the profit system itself, rather than just key aspects or salient instances of it, succeeds (...) in meeting the NRR. Critics of the profit system should not seek an alternative to the profit system, but, at most, an alternative within it. (shrink)

In Considerations on Western Marxism, released in 1976, Perry Anderson stated and vindicated an affiliation to the Trotskyist tradition long apparent from the pages of New Left Review under his editorship. Central to this tradition, in its orthodox forms, was a historico-political perspective which regarded the Soviet Union as ‘degenerate’ or ‘deformed’ ‘workers’ states’ – post-capitalist social formations whose complex character dictated rejection of Stalinism and anti-Sovietism alike. In Anderson's case, this orientation received a Deutscherite inflection: abroad, no (...) less than at home, Soviet power was a contradictory phenomenon, by turns reactionary and progressive. The potential regeneration of the Russian Revolution and its sequels, whether via ‘proletarian revolution’ from below, or bureaucratic reformation from above, remained an article of faith among Marxists of this observance to the end. Accordingly, the debacle of Gorbachevite perestroika proved a profoundly disorientating experience for many who lent little or no credence to the mendacious claims of ‘actually existing socialism'. Amid capitalist euphoria at Communist collapse, what was to be said – and done? Anderson's displaced answer was forthcoming in 1992 in ‘The Ends of History’. (shrink)

Textbook Islam, nation building, and the question of violence / Gregory Starrett and Eleanor Abdella Doumato -- Egypt : promoting tolerance, defending against Islamism / James A. Toronto and Muhammad S. Eissa -- Iran : a Shi'ite curriculum to serve the Islamic state / Golnar Mehran -- Jordan : prescription for obedience and conformity / Betty Anderson -- Kuwait : striving to align Islam with Western values / Taghreed Alqudsi-Ghabra -- Oman : cultivating good citizens and religious virtue (...) / Mandana E. Limbert -- The Palestinian national authority : the politics of writing and interpreting curricula. Genesis of a new curriculum / Nathan Brown ; A conflict of historical narratives / Seif Da'Na -- Saudi Arabia : from "Wahhabi" roots to contemporary revisionism / Eleanor Abdella Doumato -- Syria : secularism, Arabism, and Sunni orthodoxy / Joshua Landis -- Turkey : sanctifying a secular state / Ozlem Altan -- Textbook meanings and the power of interpretation / Gregory Starrett -- Conclusion : tailor-made Islam / Eleanor Abdella Doumato and Gregory Starrett. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Bones, Stones, and Buddhist Monks: Collected Papers on the Archaeology, Epigraphy, and Texts of Monastic Buddhism in IndiaDan ArnoldBones, Stones, and Buddhist Monks: Collected Papers on the Archaeology, Epigraphy, and Texts of Monastic Buddhism in India. By Gregory Schopen. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1997. Pp. xvii + 298.For over twenty years now, Gregory Schopen has prolifically been producing articles on the archaeology, epigraphy, and texts (...) that pertain to Indian Buddhist monasticism. Schopen's treatment of this material has been extremely insightful and original, and his work has been instrumental in overturning many of the cherished convictions that had long constituted the "received wisdom" of Buddhist studies. In particular, his articles have prompted significant revision in thought regarding the development of Mahāyāna and regarding the role of the monastic religious in Buddhist cultic life.With the publication of this collection of Schopen's essays, Bones, Stones, and Buddhist Monks: Collected Papers on the Archaeology, Epigraphy, and Texts of Monastic Buddhism in India (the first of two such volumes, according to the Preface by Donald Lopez), Schopen's work stands to receive a wider hearing, and so to extend its already significant influence in the field of Buddhist studies. This is as it should be; for all scholars in the field are very much in Schopen's debt for the illuminating interpretations and conclusions that he has distilled from monumental amounts of epigraphical data. While Schopen has devoted care to the edition, translation, and interpretation of manuscript remains from Gilgit (chiefly, the Vinaya of the Mūlasarvāstivādins), his most characteristic and original interpretations have been of the kind of "donative inscriptions" attached to the material remains of Indian Buddhist cultic life—a task that requires, among other things, a rare expertise across the range of Middle Indic dialects. In deploying such expertise, Schopen has presented compelling evidence, for example, that it was in fact monks and nuns who sponsored the kinds of practices typically associated with the rise of Mahāyāna—a conclusion that counters the long-unchallenged view that it was Buddhist laypeople who initiated this movement. It would be good indeed if such conclusions, as well as the exemplary scholarship that warrants them, were to have influence in proportion to their originality and importance.Still, it must be said that the presentation of the essays collected in this volume also reveals one important problem, and it is to be hoped that this feature does not become entrenched as part of Schopen's influence. For particularly when reading these essays all at once, one is struck by the recurrent statement of a specious dichotomy between what religious people "actually did," and what canonical texts say they should have done. Overcorrecting the biases of his philological predecessors, Schopen insists on this dichotomy in a way, it seems to me, that reflects a problematic view of how canonical texts must have been used—a view according to [End Page 620] which, if attested behavior contradicts such texts, they must simply not have been used.The influential essay "Two Problems in the History of Indian Buddhism: The Layman/Monk Distinction and the Doctrines of the Transference of Merit" (reprinted as chapter 2 of this volume) clearly exemplifies the pattern of Schopen's work. He starts by arguing (contra the presupposition of many of his predecessors) that there is little basis for taking the Pāli canon as reflecting anything like the state of practice at an early point in history. He then goes on to show (on the basis of donative inscriptions that are much more reliably datable indicators of what was happening on the ground) that, contrary to what the "canon" would lead us to expect, it was in fact chiefly monks and nuns who sponsored the production of cultic images. This evidence calls for the recognition that "from its first appearance in inscriptions, the Mahāyāna was a monk-dominated movement" (p. 32); that "not only was the image cult overwhelmingly a monastic concern, it was also, on the basis of the available information, a monastically initiated cult" (p. 32); and that, "All of... [the] monks [involved] were doctrinal specialists... (shrink)

In light of Perry Anderson's recent re-Iaunch of New Left Review, and the publication of Gregory Elliott's Perry Anderson: The Merciless Laboratory of History, it is perhaps an opportune moment for Marxists to assess Anderson's contribution to socialist strategic thought. At the heart of Anderson's manifesto is the claim that the principal aspect of the past decade ‘can be defined as the virtually uncontested consolidation, and universal diffusion, of neoliberalism'. There is, obviously, something in this (...) claim. However, Anderson also briefly notes, amongst other counter-currents, the labour upsurge in France in 1995, but dismisses the significance of these events with the claim that ‘capital has comprehensively beaten back all threats to its rule'. Anderson compares the context of the launch of the first New Left Review with that of the present day. He writes that, back then, a third of the planet had broken with capitalism, the discrediting of Stalinism in 1956 had unleashed a vital process of the rediscovery of authentic Marxism, while, culturally, there had been a qualitative break with the conformism of the 1950s. Today, by contrast, American capitalism has reasserted its international primacy, European social-democratic governments are implementing policies designed to follow the American model, Japan is suffering from a slump, while the Russian catastrophe has produced no popular backlash. Moreover, the Western powers have recently asserted themselves successfully in the Balkans, and, despite upsurges against capital in the 1990s, ‘no collective agency able to match the power of capital is yet on the horizon’. How are socialists to respond to this diagnosis? In this essay, I want to locate the logic of Anderson's interpretation of the present conjuncture within the context of his previous strategic claims. I will argue that, while socialists will always have much to learn from Anderson, strategically his thought has systematically suffered from a form of political impressionism. This suggests that his interpretation of the present conjuncture may fail the test of history. (shrink)

The theory of lower previsions is designed around the principles of coherence and sure-loss avoidance, thus steers clear of all the updating anomalies highlighted in Gong and Meng's "Judicious Judgment Meets Unsettling Updating: Dilation, Sure Loss, and Simpson's Paradox" except dilation. In fact, the traditional problem with the theory of imprecise probability is that coherent inference is too complicated rather than unsettling. Progress has been made simplifying coherent inference by demoting sets of probabilities from fundamental building blocks to secondary representations (...) that are derived or discarded as needed. (shrink)

Nicholas Rescher’s way of understanding process philosophy reflects the ambitions of his own philosophical project and commits him to a conceptually ideal interpretation of process. Process becomes a transcendental idea of reflection that can always be predicated of our knowledge of the world and of the world qua known, but not necessarily of reality an sich. Rescher’s own taxonomy of process thinking implies that it has other variants. While Rescher’s approach to process philosophy makes it intelligible and appealing to mainstream (...) analytic philosophy, it leaves behind the more daring ideas of Bergson, James, and Whitehead, all of whom envisioned the primordial reality of process in a radical ontology of becoming. This variant of process thought can be construed as coherent and self-consistent, but not without relinquishing the correspondence theory of truth and embracing challenging ideas that bring us in close proximity to existentialism, apophatic theology, and Buddhism. (shrink)

In this paper, we defend the view that Spinoza is committed to allowing for the existence of a plurality of possible worlds, that his necessitarianism is merely moderate, not strict enough to exclude the possibility of other worlds. To show that evidence for attributing strict necessitarianism to Spinoza is lacking, we shall concentrate on Don Garrett's article, “Spinoza's Necessitarianism,” in the conviction that his case for attributing strict necessitarianism to Spinoza is the strongest one available.

Do psychological traits predict philosophical views? We administered the PhilPapers Survey, created by David Bourget and David Chalmers, which consists of 30 views on central philosophical topics (e.g., epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language) to a sample of professional philosophers (N = 314). We extended the PhilPapers survey to measure a number of psychological traits, such as personality, numeracy, well-being, lifestyle, and life experiences. We also included non-technical ‘translations’ of these views for eventual use in other (...) populations. We found limited to no support for the notion that personality or demographics predict philosophical views. We did, however, find that some psychological traits were predictive of philosophical views, even after strict correction for multiple comparisons. Findings include: higher interest in numeracy predicted physicalism, naturalism, and consequentialism; lower levels of well-being and higher levels of mental illness predicted hard determinism; using substances such as psychedelics and marijuana predicted non-realist and subjectivist views of morality and aesthetics; having had a transformative or self-transcendent experience predicted theism and idealism. We discuss whether or not these empirical results have philosophical implications, while noting that 68% of our sample of professional philosophers indicated that such findings would indeed have philosophical value. (shrink)

When interlocutors repeatedly describe referents to each other, they rapidly converge on referring expressions which become increasingly systematized and abstract as the interaction progresses. Previous experimental research suggests that interactive repair mechanisms in dialogue underpin convergence. However, this research has so far only focused on the role of other-initiated repair and has not examined whether self-initiated repair might also play a role. To investigate this question, we report the results from a computer-mediated maze task experiment. In this task, participants communicate (...) with each other via an experimental chat tool, which selectively transforms participants’ private turn-revisions into public self-repairs that are made visible to the other participant. For example, if a participant, A, types “On the top square,” and then before sending, A revises the turn to “On the top row,” the server automatically detects the revision and transforms the private turn-revisions into a public self-repair, for example, “On the top square umm I meant row.” Participants who received these transformed turns used more abstract and systematized referring expressions, but performed worse at the task. We argue that this is due to the artificial self-repairs causing participants to put more effort into diagnosing and resolving the referential coordination problems they face in the task, yielding better grounded spatial semantics and consequently increased use of abstract referring expressions. (shrink)

Husserl and Sartre’s analyses of mental imagery and some of the latest cognitive research on vision provide a framework for understanding a number of films by Hitchcock (Psycho and Rear Window) and Buñuel (Un Chien Andalou), films which similarly probe the subtleties and uses of mental imagery. One of the many ways to enjoy these films is to see them as explorations of visual phenomenology; they allow us to enact, as well as reflect upon, mental images as part of the (...) film experience.<br><br><br><br><br><br>. (shrink)

:Visual culture – art, film, entertainment, advertising – are saturated with images of normative heterosexual masculinity. They form visual narratives that project a largely coherent kind of masculinity where heterosexual men are shown to be creative and powerful; they initiate heroic action, take the moral high ground and preserve traditional roles and the status quo. This widely extensive visual field, peopled with normative images of masculinity, also affects and infiltrates the domain of art exemplified by Jackson Pollock and abstract expressionism (...) which, to the present day, continues to project masculinity as the originator and pioneer of aesthetic value. This essay reviews feminist and queer artists’ image making that appropriates the myth of homogeneous masculinity and turns it into a medium for a variety of creative and hybrid explorations. I argue that Deleuzoguattarian concepts such as becoming-woman and becoming-imperceptible help us to understand this molecularisation of masculinity. And importantly in the other direction, these feminist and queer image makers allow us to understand and explore more fully these concepts. (shrink)

A re-issue of Gregory Bateson's classic work. It summarizes Bateson's thinking on the subject of the patterns that connect living beings to each other and to their environment.

The essays in this volume represent the first steps by philosophers and artificial intelligence researchers toward explaining why it is necessary to add an ...

(Updated 5/23/24) This unpublished paper, which readers should feel free to cite, is posted primarily for the historical record. In recent work that has, deservedly, received some attention, Paul R. Daniels presents and defends a non-standard theory of persistence that he dubs transdurantism, according to which persisting objects are temporally extended simples. This is exactly what I do in work dating back to Spring 2004. (This work includes this version of this paper, as well as later version that was presented (...) to the University of Rochester's Philosophy Department in 2005.) While this might be a total coincidence, I doubt that it is, especially given that 'transdurantism' appears as a name for a theory of persistence associated with me in at least two places in the literature, one of which includes a citation of this paper. The paper begins with a discussion of what I call 'locative relations' (the relations borne by material objects to the regions of space and time they occupy), which draws relevant distinctions that others have failed to draw. The results of this discussion are then used in constructing spatial analogues for the three established theories of persistence--endurantism, perdurantism, and exdurantism--as well as for transdurantism. Next, these four views concerning persistence are explicitly formulated and a defense of their formulation is offered. Finally, transdurantism's advantages and disadvantages relative to the other theories are discussed. The main goal of the paper is to challenge the trichotomy between the established theories by arguing that transdurantism is also a viable view concerning persistence through time. [Note: Befitting its status as a historical document, with the exception of some light editing to fix typos that might impede understanding, no changes have been made to the paper.]. (shrink)

This volume began as a remembrance of Alonzo Church while he was still with us and is now finally complete. It contains papers by many well-known scholars, most of whom have been directly influenced by Church's own work. Often the emphasis is on foundational issues in logic, mathematics, computation, and philosophy - as was the case with Church's contributions, now universally recognized as having been of profound fundamental significance in those areas. The volume will be of interest to logicians, computer (...) scientists, philosophers, and linguists. The contributions concern classical first-order logic, higher-order logic, non-classical theories of implication, set theories with universal sets, the logical and semantical paradoxes, the lambda-calculus, especially as it is used in computation, philosophical issues about meaning and ontology in the abstract sciences and in natural language, and much else. The material will be accessible to specialists in these areas and to advanced graduate students in the respective fields. (shrink)

Discusses mental processes, the role of humans in nature, experience, and the connection between myth, religion, and science.

This book explores an important central thread that unifies Russell's thoughts on logic in two works previously considered at odds with each other, the Principles of Mathematics and the later Principia Mathematica. This thread is Russell's doctrine that logic is an absolutely general science and that any calculus for it must embrace wholly unrestricted variables. The heart of Landini's book is a careful analysis of Russell's largely unpublished "substitutional" theory. On Landini's showing, the substitutional theory reveals the unity of Russell's (...) philosophy of logic and offers new avenues for a genuine solution of the paradoxes plaguing Logicism. (shrink)

Gregory T. Doolan provides here the first detailed consideration of the divine ideas as causal principles. He examines Thomas Aquinas's philosophical doctrine of the divine ideas and convincingly argues that it is an essential element of his metaphysics. According to Thomas, the ideas in the mind of God are not only principles of his knowledge, but they are productive principles as well. In this role, God's ideas act as exemplars for things that he creates. As Doolan shows, this theory (...) of exemplarism is an integral part of Thomas's account of the existence and order of the created universe. It also accounts in part for the freedom of God's creative act. The volume begins with an introduction to Thomas's doctrine of exemplarism and then addresses his arguments for the existence of exemplar ideas within the mind of God. Having established the existence of divine ideas, Doolan considers how Thomas reconciles their multiplicity with God's simplicity. The work identifies the various things for which Thomas posits divine ideas. As Doolan is careful to show, Thomas does not consider all of these ideas to be exemplars because not all of them act as causal principles. After identifying the ideas that do act in this way, Doolan considers how such exemplars can be causes of natural things without compromising the causality of natural agents. The volume culminates with a consideration of the role that the divine ideas play within the structure of Thomas's theory of participation. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Gregory T. Doolan, assistant professor of philosophy at The Catholic University of America, is a contributor to Wisdom's Apprentice: Thomistic Essays in Honor of Lawrence Dewan, O.P., and Reassessing the Liberal State: Reading Maritain's Man and the State. This is his first book. (shrink)

A distinctive feature of modern capitalist societies is the tendency of the market to take over the production, maintenance, and distribution of goods that were previously produced, maintained, and distributed by nonmarket means. Yet, there is a wide range of disagreement regarding the proper extent of the market in providing many goods. Labor has been treated as a commodity since the advent of capitalism, but not without significant and continuing challenges to this arrangement. Other goods whose production for and distribution (...) on the market are currently the subject of dispute include sexual intercourse, human blood, and human body parts such as kidneys. How can we determine which goods are properly subjects of market transactions and which are not? The purpose of this article is to propose a theory of what makes economic goods differ from other kinds of goods, which can help to answer this question. (shrink)

This book surveys the leading modern theories of property - Lockean, libertarian, utilitarian/law-and-economics, personhood, Kantian and human flourishing - and then applies those theories to concrete contexts in which property issues have been especially controversial. These include redistribution, the right to exclude, regulatory takings, eminent domain and intellectual property. The book highlights the Aristotelian human flourishing theory of property, providing the most comprehensive and accessible introduction to that theory to date. The book's goal is neither to cover every conceivable theory (...) nor to discuss every possible facet of the theories covered. Instead, it aims to make the major property theories comprehensible to beginners, without sacrificing accuracy or sophistication. The book will be of particular interest to students seeking an accessible introduction to contemporary theories of property, but even specialists will benefit from the book's lucid descriptions of contemporary debates. (shrink)

Older minority Americans experience worse health outcomes than their white counterparts, exhibiting the need for social justice in all areas of their health care. Justice, fairness, and equity are crucial to minimizing conditions that adversely affect the health of individuals and communities. In this paper, Alzheimer's disease (AD) is used as an example of a health care disparity among elderly Americans that requires social justice interventions. Cultural factors play a crucial role in AD screening, diagnosis, and access to care, and (...) are often a barrier to support and equality for minority communities. The “conundrum of health disparities” refers to the interplay between disparity, social justice, and cultural interpretation, and encourages researchers to understand both (1) disparity caused by economic and structural barriers to access, treatment, and diagnosis, and (2) disparity due to cultural interpretation of disease, in order to effectively address health care issues and concerns among elderly Americans. (shrink)