This article argues that personal meaning should be considered important when addressing issues of learning. It is claimed that meaningful learning is not primarily intra-psychological, as suggested by humanistic psychologists and parts of cognitive psychology, but is an integrated part of the person’s participation in various social practices. Inspired by critical psychology and situated learning, it is suggested that in order to comprehend what people in everyday life experience as meaningful, we have to understand the concerns subjects pursue across different (...) contextual settings and the kind of conduct of everyday life they try to realise. A case example from an ongoing research project about how baker apprentices learn their trade is outlined in order to exemplify some of the theoretical considerations. Two baker apprentices, Peter and Charlotte, are presented to illustrate how they orientate their learning activities in the bakeries according to their future participation in the baking trade and in relation to the conduct of everyday life they wish to pursue. (shrink)

The current study examined the effects of cuing autobiographical memory retrieval in 12 older participants with dementia through immersion into a historically authentic environment that recreated the material and cultural context of the participants’ youth. Participants conversed in either an everyday setting or a museum setting furnished in early twentieth century style while being presented with condition matched cues. Conversations were coded for memory content based on an adapted version of Levine, Svoboda, Hay, Winocur, and Moscovitch coding scheme. More autobiographical (...) memories were recalled in the museum setting, and these memories were more elaborated, more spontaneous and included especially more internal details compared to memories in the control condition. The findings have theoretical and practical implications by showing that the memories retrieved in the museum setting were both quantitatively and qualitatively different from memories retrieved during a control condition. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are by Alva NoëFrederik M. Bjerregaard-NielsenNOË, Alva. The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2023. 288 pp. Cloth, $27.95In The Entanglement, Alva Noë sets forth a minimal yet meaningful definition of art and philosophy and asks how they make us what we are. Art and philosophy are the modes (...) of practice that disrupt and disorganize our habitual ways of doing things, everything from dancing to language, to philosophy and art themselves. They are the reflection at a distance of what we do. “In this sense, then, art is disruptive. Always: everywhere.” From this basis, he tackles a wide range of phenomena from dancing, seeing, writing, and so forth, to introduce a distinction between these as everyday phenomena and their function as art. This delimitation is not material, nor intrinsic to any of the analyzed phenomena; rather, it depends on each practice’s ability to disrupt, disorganize, and force upon us the question of what dancing, seeing, writing is at all. Noë provides an example: At an art exhibition one is confronted with a painting that is ungraspable, foreign, meaningless. But, through a mediation (pointers from a friend, new knowledge of the era, analyses of the style, and so forth) the painting starts becoming significant; it starts to make sense. The viewer is stopped in her tracks, and a painting that was before closed is now opened up to a new perception, a new way of seeing.But Noë extends this aesthetic domain to experience and perception. In perception, we are actively engaged in achieving the things around us, achieving the world. And, in art, this habitual way of attainment is obstructed, for art presents us with new ways of seeing, listening, feeling, and so forth. Noë thus challenges common (especially neuro-aesthetic) views on perception and experience in favor of a more phenomenological approach by which he accentuates the active engagement in the world by which perception and experience come about. And this aesthetic domain, broadly understood, is the locus of showing how we, through these disruptive practices, create new ways of doing, perceiving, understanding, and, even further, create ourselves. We “all operate in a space of significance held open by art.” In other words, it is through a reassessment of the aesthetic that Noë shows how art and philosophy make us what we are. For what we are, for Noë, is this ability of disruption, development, and creation of ourselves. This is what makes us human. Human nature is therefore essentially cultural, a disruption of habit and new avenues of development, but one that is rooted in our body as a horizon of possibilities. Even though he does not conclude on this phylogenetic question, Noë does seem to suggest that the species’s ability to generate art (exemplified by early cave paintings) and philosophy are foundational [End Page 724] to its development or, more strongly, necessary to it being what it is. He thus proposes an alternative to the traditional schism of the nature/nurture and natural/cultural debate, which takes this wide view of aesthetics as its central term.One might raise the question whether the text would have benefited from more thorough analyses of the thinkers who are at play, sometimes at the margin, sometimes at the foundation of the disruption Noë’s text attempts, notably: Merleau-Ponty, with his extensive analyses of habit and style and their place in our life engaging behavior; Derrida’s deconstruction of phonocentrism, which attacks written language’s subordination to the spoken and asks the fundamental question of the ontology of language as such; or perhaps most present by its absence, Nietzsche’s grandiose thought of the human being and life itself as an aesthetic phenomenon. For Nietzsche thereby incorporated both ontology and critique in the sphere of aesthetics in his revaluation of all values. This, quite like Noë, allowed Nietzsche to set forth the human being as a creature of its own creation. These authors are given brief treatments, relegated to footnotes, or left out entirely.But such a critique might be too... (shrink)

La recherche d’une définition de la raison droite ( orthos logos ) au livre VI de l’ Éthique à Nicomaque d’Aristote n’est pas une recherche des “raisons droites” ou du “raisonnement droit” que produit l’expert – il ne tente pas de caractériser (et moins encore de “définir”) le type de justification ou de délibération qu’un médecin ou un phronimos produisent avant de choisir la bonne façon de procéder. A fortiori, il ne recherche pas des règles de conduite. Il recherche plutôt (...) les propriétés qui caractérisent l’âme d’une personne qui est capable de raisonner correctement: la “raison droite” comprise comme perfection de la partie rationnelle de l’âme. Dans cet article, j’examine la description aristotélicienne de la phronēsis, la vertu de la pensée ( dianoētikē aretē ) qui a rapport à l’action, et l’ euboulia, en tant qu’elle en est l’excellence caractéristique. (shrink)

Pericytes, like vascular smooth muscle cells, are perivascular cells closely associated with blood vessels throughout the body. Pericytes are necessary for vascular development and homeostasis, with particularly critical roles in the brain, where they are involved in regulating cerebral blood flow and establishing the blood-brain barrier. A role for pericytes during neurovascular disease pathogenesis is less clear—while some studies associate decreased pericyte coverage with select neurovascular diseases, others suggest increased pericyte infiltration in response to hypoxia or traumatic brain injury. Here, (...) we used an endothelial loss-of-function Recombination signal binding protein for immunoglobulin kappa J region (Rbpj)/Notch mediated mouse model of brain arteriovenous malformation (AVM) to investigate effects on pericytes during neurovascular disease pathogenesis. We tested the hypothesis that pericyte expansion, via morphological changes, and Platelet-derived growth factor B/Platelet-derived growth factor receptor β (Pdgf-B/Pdgfrβ)-dependent endothelial cell-pericyte communication are affected, during the pathogenesis of Rbpj mediated brain AVM in mice. Our data show that pericyte coverage of vascular endothelium expanded pathologically, to maintain coverage of vascular abnormalities in brain and retina, following endothelial deletion of Rbpj. In Rbpj-mutant brain, pericyte expansion was likely attributed to cytoplasmic process extension and not to increased pericyte proliferation. Despite expanding overall area of vessel coverage, pericytes from Rbpj-mutant brains showed decreased expression of Pdgfrβ, Neural (N)-cadherin, and cluster of differentiation (CD)146, as compared to controls, which likely affected Pdgf-B/Pdgfrβ-dependent communication and appositional associations between endothelial cells and pericytes in Rbpj-mutant brain microvessels. By contrast, and perhaps by compensatory mechanism, endothelial cells showed increased expression of N-cadherin. Our data identify cellular and molecular effects on brain pericytes, following endothelial deletion of Rbpj, and suggest pericytes as potential therapeutic targets for Rbpj/Notch related brain AVM. (shrink)

AimRapid eye movement (REM) sleep, non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, and sleep spindles are all implicated in the consolidation of procedural memories. Relative contributions of sleep stages and sleep spindles were previously shown to depend on individual differences in task processing. However, no studies to our knowledge have focused on individual differences in experience with Vipassana meditation as related to sleep. Vipassana meditation is a form of mental training that enhances proprioceptive and somatic awareness and alters attentional style. The goal (...) of this study was to examine a potential role for Vipassana meditation experience in sleep-dependent procedural memory consolidation.MethodsGroups of Vipassana meditation practitioners (N = 22) and matched meditation-naïve controls (N = 20) slept for a daytime nap in the laboratory. Before and after the nap they completed a procedural task on the Wii Fit balance platform.ResultsMeditators performed slightly better on the task before the nap, but the two groups improved similarly after sleep. The groups showed different patterns of sleep-dependent procedural memory consolidation: in meditators, task learning was positively correlated with density of slow occipital spindles, while in controls task improvement was positively associated with time in REM sleep. Sleep efficiency and sleep architecture did not differ between groups. Meditation practitioners, however, had a lower density of occipital slow sleep spindles tha... (shrink)

Nielsen Busch and Mjaaland (2023) raise important considerations, but confuse certain critical issues and overlook others, and questions emerge about how these decisions should be made in our socie...

According to the standard (recent) history of connectionism (see for example the accounts offered by Hecht-Nielsen (1990: pp. 14-19) and Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1988), or Papert's (1988: pp. 3-4) somewhat whimsical description), in the early days of Classical Computational Theory of Mind (CCTM) based AI research, there was also another allegedly distinct approach, one based upon network models. The work on network models seems to fall broadly within the scope of the term 'connectionist' (see Aizawa 1992), although the term (...) had yet to be coined at the time. These two approaches were "two daughter sciences" according to Papert (1988: p. 3). The fundamental difference between these two 'daughters', lay (according to Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1988: p. 16)) in what they took to be the paradigm of intelligence. Whereas the early connectionists took learning to be fundamental, the traditional school concentrated upon problem solving. (shrink)

In his stimulating and provocative collection of essays, Globalization and Justice, Kai Nielsen (2003b) defends a cosmopolitan account of global justice. On the cosmopolitan view, as Nielsen understands it, individuals are entitled to equal consideration regardless of citizenship or nationality and global institutions should be arranged in such a way that each person's interest is given equal consideration. Nielsen's defense of cosmopolitan justice in this collection will be of no surprise to readers familiar with his socialist egalitarian (...) commitments. Indeed, the internationalism underlying socialism, Nielsen would argue, naturally entails the cosmopolitan account of justice (e.g., chs. 5 and 6). (shrink)

In their target article, Nielsen Busch and Mjaaland (2023) address a longstanding debate within the bioethics and organ transplantation community regarding whether controlled donation after circula...

La philosophie de la religion de Wittgenstein et des philosophes analytiques qui l’ont suivi est-elle ou non un fidéisme ? Le livre est né d’une rencontre tardive entre deux penseurs qui ont engagé le débat, indépendamment l’un de l’autre, au milieu des années soixante. Au terme d’une douzaine de chapitres composés en alternance, à l’écriture toujours serrée et au ton parfois vif, les auteurs n’abandonnent pas leurs positions initiales, même si elles se sont nuancées avec les années. Il revie..

In this chapter, I argue that one can articulate a historically attuned and analytically rich model for understanding jazz in its various inflections. That is, on the one hand, such a model permits us to affirm jazz as a historically conditioned, dynamic hybridity. On the other hand, to acknowledge jazz’s open and multiple character in no way negates our ability to identify discernible features of various styles and aesthetic traditions. Additionally, my model affirms the sociopolitical, legal (Jim Crow and copyright (...) laws), and economic structures that shaped jazz. Consequently, my articulation of bebop as an inflection of Afromodernism highlights the sociopolitical, and highly racialized context in which this music was created. Without a recognition of the sociopolitical import of bebop, one’s understanding of the music is impoverished, as one fails to grasp the strategic uses to which the music and discourses about the music were put. (shrink)

Abstract:It is a common belief that obesity is wholly or partially a question of personal choice and personal responsibility. It is also widely assumed that when individuals are responsible for some unfortunate state of affairs, society bears no burden to compensate them. This article focuses on two conceptualizations of responsibility: backward-looking and forward-looking conceptualizations. When ascertaining responsibility in a backward-looking sense, one has to determine how that state of affairs came into being or where the agent stood in relation to (...) it. In contrast, a forward-looking conceptualization of responsibility puts aside questions of the past and holds a person responsible by reference to some desirable future state of affairs and will typically mean that he or she is subjected to criticism, censure, or other negative appraisals or that he or she is heldcost-responsible in some form, for example, in terms of demanded compensation, loss of privileges, or similar. One example of this view is the debate as to whether the obese should be denied, wholly or partially, free and equal access to healthcare,notbecause they are somehow personally responsible in the backward-looking sense but simply because holding the obese responsible will have positive consequences. Taking these two conceptions of responsibility into account, the authors turn their analysis toward examining the relevant moral considerations to be taken into account when public policies regarding obesity rely on such a conception of responsibility. (shrink)

Cheyne and Girard characterize felt presence during sleep paralysis attacks as a pre-hallucinatory expression of a threat-activated vigilance system. While their results may be consistent with this interpretation, they are nonetheless correlational and do not address a parsimonious alternative explanation. This alternative stipulates that FP is a purely spatial, hallucinatory form of a common cognitive phenomenon—social imagery—that is often, but not necessarily, linked with threat and fear and that may induce distress among susceptible individuals. The occurrence of both fearful and (...) non-fearful FPs in a multiplicity of situations other than sleep paralysis attacks supports the notion that FPs are hallucinatory variants of social imagery and that they are not necessarily bound to threat-activated vigilance. Evidence linking FPs with anxiety disorders supports the notion that the distress they evoke may be mediated by a more general affective distress personality factor. To illustrate the predominantly spatial character of FP hallucinations, similarities between FP and phantom limbs are summarized and the possibility that these two phenomena are parallel expressions of a mirror neuron system is considered. (shrink)

The past decade has seen an explosion of work on the history of the human sciences during the Cold War. This work, however, does not engage with one of the leading human sciences of the period: linguistics. This article begins to rectify this knowledge gap by investigating the influence of linguistics and its concept of study, language, on American public, political and intellectual life during the postwar and early Cold War years. I show that language emerged in three frameworks in (...) this period: language as tool, language as weapon, and language as knowledge. As America stepped onto the international stage, language and linguistics were at the forefront: the military poured millions of dollars into machine translation, American diplomats were required to master scores of foreign languages, and schoolchildren were exposed to language-learning on a scale never before seen in the United States. Together, I argue, language and linguistics formed a critical part of the rise of American leadership in the new world order — one that provided communities as dispersed as the military, the diplomatic corps, scientists and language teachers with a powerful way of tackling the problems they faced. To date, linguistics has not been integrated into the broader framework of Cold War human sciences. In this article, I aim to bring both language, as concept, and linguistics, as discipline, into this framework. In doing so, I pave the way for future work on the history of linguistics as a human science. (shrink)

The vital status of patients who are a part of controlled donation after circulatory death (cDCD) is widely debated in bioethical literature. Opponents to currently applied cDCD protocols argue that they violate the dead donor rule, while proponents of the protocols advocate compatibility. In this article, we argue that both parties often misinterpret the moral implications of the dead donor rule. The rule as such does not require an assessment of a donor’s vital status, we contend, but rather an assessment (...) of whether procurement of organs in cDCD cause the death of the donor or not. We then argue that commonly practiced cDCD protocols do not violate the dead donor rule, since the donation does not trigger or cause the death of the donors. (shrink)

Summary The recovery of the Camp Century deep ice core in 1966 – the first ice core to reach all the way through a polar ice sheet to bedrock – marked a shift from an era of United States military dominated glaciological research in Greenland to an era of climate oriented research on the island. This paper aims to provide an understanding of this shift. I show that the Camp Century ice core was at the heart of a complex blend (...) of environmental, military and scientific interests. By deconstructing these interests, I ultimately show that the island of Greenland underwent two reimaginings during the early Cold War. First, the island was reimagined as part of the US Cold War military sphere: driven by the need to secure the North American continent, the US established a hegemonic military colonization of Greenland. In the second reimagining of the island, environmental geography led the way: the scientific results of the Camp Century ice core and political concern about climatic change converged in the early 1970s to build Greenland into a unique location for pursuing research on climate questions. This paper adds to the literature by contextualizing the Camp Century ice core at the interface between the history of science, environmental history and Cold War history, and thereby illuminating Greenland as a dual geopolitical entity and environmental space. By highlighting the interaction of climatic change, geophysical sciences and national security narratives, it responds to recent historiographic calls to unite a set of narratives which, too often, talk past one another. (shrink)

ABSTRACT I argue that people have a right to self‐determination when they are plainly predominant in a certain territory and do not violate the civil liberties of minorities. But there is no self‐determination without the preservation of self‐identity and the cultural preservation that goes with its secure existence. So to preserve autonomy and self‐determination people must preserve their cultural identity and this cannot be securely sustained in modern conditions without a nation‐state concerned to nourish that identity. Such considerations support a (...) right to secession when certain conditions are met. The conditions are that the people in question have a cultural identity, live in a distinct territory which they have inhabited for a long time, form an extensive majority, and respect the civil liberties of the minorities living in that territory (as well as elsewhere). Where they are such a group they have a right to secede from a larger state to which they are historically attached. These conditions, I argue, are met in Quebec. (shrink)

Resumen: Este trabajo propone una aproximación a tres obras centrales de la poesía latinoamericana: Trilce, Altazor y En la masmédula, tomando como base la confrontación entre las limitaciones que el lenguaje necesariamente impone y la voluntad radicalmente transgresora que estos textos exhiben. En particular, el trabajo explora la tensión entre la tendencia del lenguaje a fragmentar la realidad mediante conceptos y la aspiración a la unidad -la superación de toda fragmentación- que denotan los procesos verbales desplegados en estas obras. Para (...) profundizar el análisis, se propone un diálogo entre el lenguaje poético y el pictórico, tomando como referencia los planteamientos teóricos de Piet Mondrian y su visión acerca de la relación entre lo “individual” y lo “universal”.: This article presents an approach to three masterpieces of Latin American poetry: Trilce, Altazor, and En la masmédula, based on the confrontation between the limitations that language necessarily entails and the rule-breaking attitude that these poetical works display. Specifically, this study explores the tension between the tendency to divide reality into segments inherent in language and the quest of unity -the cancellation of any kind of segmentation- that underlies verbal processes in Trilce, Altazor, and En la masmédula. In order to deepen the analysis, this work poses a significant connection between poetical and pictorial language, taking as reference Piet Mondrian’s theoretical contributions about the relationship between “individual” and “universal” forms. (shrink)

This paper seeks to analyse small‐ and medium‐sized enterprise (SME) managers' representations of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and CSR communication in a corporate communication perspective. The basic question is: how strategic is CSR communication in SMEs? Corporate communication and CSR theories are used to establish an ideal typology of CSR concepts informing an analysis of qualitative data in the form of interviews with three middle managers in two Danish SMEs. A CSR communication model published earlier by the authors is challenged (...) from a SME perspective. Results from an Internet‐based questionnaire survey of 1071 SMEs pave the way for the analysis. Our analysis shows that SME managers clearly have an inside‐out approach to CSR, with a strong emphasis on the internal (corporate culture) dimension. However, SMEs and/or SME managers tend not to communicate externally about the CSR activities of the company. Based on these findings, the paper argues that CSR communication in SMEs is challenged by the global economy and is under revision. The contribution of the paper is to provide an insight into SMEs' present stage in relation to a possible future approach to strategic CSR communication. The paper also reminds us that SMEs have no interest in turning their local and authentic practice into a forced marketing and branding exercise, leaving them with an artificial picture of who they are and strive to be in the future. They should keep on acting locally but force themselves to think globally. (shrink)

Metaphilosophy is itself philosophy about philosophy. It is not something before or independent of philosophy. Both Kai Nielsen and Richard Rorty are deeply concerned (someone might say obsessively preoccupied) with metaphilosophy. They both are thoroughly historicist and contextualist resolutely rejecting any form of a transcendental or metaphysical turn. They argue against claims to absolute validity (as well as against absolutism in any form) and a natural order of reasons: some 'Reason' to which any rational agent must be committed. They (...) both see philosophy as a transitional genre first (historically speaking) from religion then metaphysics and more latterly from scientistic conceptions of the world. But they differ about what philosophy is transitional to. For Rorty it is historical narrative and utopian proposals; for Nielsen it is critical theory. Rorty claims this, Nielsen's intentions to the contrary notwithstanding, commits him to enlightenment rationalism. Nielsen replies that his form of critical theory is deeply historicist and contextual without being resolutely atheoretical. This plays out in political orientation to Nielsen's being a socialist while Rorty is a social democrat. (shrink)

Gadamer's Truth and Method: A Polyphonic Commentary offers a fresh look at Gadamer's magnum opus, Truth and Method, which was first published in German in 1960, translated into English in 1975, and is widely recognized as a ground-breaking text of philosophical hermeneutics. The volume features essays from fourteen scholars--both established and rising stars--each of which cover a portion of Truth and Method following the order of the text itself. The result is a robust, historically and thematically rich polyphonic reading of (...) the text as a whole, valuable both for scholarship and teaching. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook Jahrgang: 2016 Heft: 1 Seiten: 39-50.

Five partly successive and partly overlapping framings have dominated the public debate about human embryonic stem cells since they first were “derived” a decade ago. Geron Corporation staged the initial framings as 1) basic research and 2) medical hope, but these two were immediately refuted and opposed by 3) bioethical concerns, voiced by influential politicians and leaders of opinion. Thereafter, the research community presented adult stem cells and therapeutic cloning as 4) techno-fix solutions supposed to bypass these ethical concerns. And (...) in recent years, 5) institutional limitations to and hurdles within the university–industrial complex (such as patentability, misconduct and fraud) have attracted more attention. The article purifies the arguments and points out the interests and institutions behind the five framings. It also discusses their interplay and finally addresses the question of what happened to the stem cells? (shrink)