Young Man Shinran. A Reappraisal of Shinran's Life. Takamichi Takahatake. The Canadian Corporation for the Studies in Religion, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Waterloo, Ontario 1987. xv, 228 pp. Can. $14.95.

The article argues for a Straussian interpretation of Tacitus’ Agricola by showing that Tacitus’ explicit praise of the life of Agricola and criticism of the Stoic martyrs are undermined by his implicit comparisons to other lives within the text and by his allusions to other works of Socratic political philosophy, especially Xenophon’s. The popular teaching of the Agricola is that Agricola’s policy of political quietism is the best way of life for an ambitious young Roman living under a tyrannical (...) emperor, while the Stoic’s political extremism is not beneficial for the common good. The philosophic teaching, by contrast, is that a ‘serious and wise man’ will pursue a kind of Xenophontic approach to politics because he recognizes that the philosophic life is the highest life, but that it is necessary for the philosopher to advise the tyrant if the conditions for a philosophic life are going to be possible. (shrink)

This article examines the events in Thanh Phong, Vietnam, on the night of 25.26 February 1969, when Lieutenant (junior grade) Bob Kerrey led a squad of U.S. Navy SEa-Air-Land (SEAL)s on a mission to capture a Viet Cong district chief. It studies the events at an outlying hooch the SEALs encountered as they approached the village, and what happened in Thanh Phong, examining several sources, most notably Gregory Vistica’s New York Times Magazine article and Kerrey.s recent memoir, When I Was (...) a Young Man. The article explains the differing accounts at the hooch and in the village, and considers whether military necessity, fear for their own lives, or obedience to superior orders can justify what these accounts offer. It concludes that neither Gerhard Klann.s nor the combined conflicting versions offered as his “best memory” by Kerrey gives sufficient reason to justify the deaths of about two dozen Vietnamese civilians. (shrink)

Award-winning poet and critic Kevin Young traces the history of the hoax as a peculiarly American phenomenon--the legacy of P.T. Barnum's 'humbug' culminating with the currency of Donald J. Trump's 'fake news'. Disturbingly, Young finds that fakery is woven from stereotype and suspicion, with race being the most insidious American hoax of all. He chronicles how Barnum came to fame by displaying figures like Joice Heth, a black woman whom he pretended was the 161-year-old nursemaid to George Washington, (...) and 'What Is It?', an African American man Barnum professed was a newly discovered missing link in evolution. Bunk then turns to the hoaxing of history and the ways that forgers, plagiarists, and journalistic fakers invent backstories and falsehoods to sell us lies about themselves and about the world in our own time, from pretend Native Americans like Nasdijj to the deadly imposture of Clark Rockefeller, from the made-up memoirs of James Frey to the identity theft of Rachel Dolezal. This brilliant and timely work asks what it means to live in a post-factual world of 'truthiness' where everything is up for interpretation and everyone is subject to a pervasive cynicism that damages our ideas of reality, fact, and art."--Dust jacket flap. (shrink)

This paper analyzes Alphonso Lingis’ contributions to the ongoing philosophical debate on the “question of the animal.” It situates Lingis’ philosophy of the animal within what Matthew Calarco calls the “indistinction” approach, a framework that transcends traditional binary distinctions between humans and animals. It also explores how Lingis’ philosophy challenges anthropocentrism by proposing a novel ontology of life that emphasizes the shared ontological ground between humans and animals, promoting an understanding of life as characterized by excess, kinship, and interconnectedness. It (...) then goes on to link this to his ethical stance which is grounded in the phenomenology of the animal encounter. This paper ultimately advocates for the relevance and force of a Lingisian philosophy of the animal, underscoring its potential to reshape contemporary discussions on animal ontology, ethics, and environmental issues. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:RECENT INTERPRETATIONS OF EARLY CHRISTIAN ASCETICISM ROBIN DARLING YOUNG The Oatholio University of A.merioa Washington, D.O. Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Sebastian Brock and Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Holy Women of the Syria.n Orient. Be1·keley: University of California Press, 1987. Elizabeth A. Clark, Ascetic Piety and Women's Faith. Essays on Late Ancient Christianity. Lewiston/Queenston: (...) The Edwin Mellen Press, 1986. Elain~ Pagels, Adam, Eve and the Serpent. New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1988. Introduction FROM THE FIRST century, the development of patristic Christology, both orthodox and heterodox, was the result of a collective reflection upon the identity and redemptive action of Jesus, the Logos, who was en arche and became incarnate at a specific point in the history of the cosmos. Likewise, the development of the patristic theory of askesis, tihe devout discipline of the Christian, beginning within the New Testament canon, was a discussion of how the Christian might, through his moral life, move toward the goal offered him by the Logos: conversion to, identification with, and eventual unification with Jesus Christ. This occurred by the means of progressive discipline and love in the company of other believers and employed methods older than Christianity itself. What made and makes Christian askesis unique as a U4 ROBIN DARLING YOUNG religious self-discipline is the personal identification of the believer with Christ. It is undeniable that Christolo~J, soteriology, and ascetical theory have been linked historically. The answer to the question, "Who do men say that I am?" (Mt. 16.13) will imply the form of the response to the divine imperative of " follow me" (:~11. 16.24,Q5). Those theologians of the early church who were blessed with consistency almost automatically adjusted their Christology and their moral theology. A concise statement of this connection may be found in Irenaeus's Against Heresis (5.18-20). "[Christ] caused man to cleave to and to become one with God... unless man had been joined to God, he could never have become a partaker of immortality." The result of the incarnation is the imperative.for human beings, now freed by the " most holy and merciful Lord, [who] loves the human race" (18.6), to model their actions after his (20.2). Origen's Exhortation to 1Vlartyrdom recalls the earlier formulation of Paul when he refers to " the mind of Christ within us" (ch. 4) and states that "Now it is revealed whether or not we have taken up our cross and followed Jesus. This will have happened if Christ is living in us " (12). The willingness to face martyrdom was the great test of Christ's inner presence : " I think that they love God with all their soul who with a great desire to be in union with God withdraw and separate their soul not only from the earthly hody but from eveTything material " (3). Such an exhortation, which sees askesis as a preparation for martyrdom as well as a mode of life, had already been clear-·ly enunciated hy Ignatius (To the Ephesians, 4). Ignatius, "called Theophoros (God-bearer)," wrote that he had "welcomed that beloved name of yours, earned through your natural righteousness in accordance with faith and love in Christ Jesus, our savior. Imitating God [incarnate] and inflamed by the blood of God [in the Eucharist] you accomplished your common task perfectly." EARLY CHRISTIAN ASCETICISM H5 Together with Paul, Ignatius left a legacy of early Christi.an opinion remarkable for the unity it proposes between Christ.and the Christian. Reflecting upon the incarnation, it understands Christ,as redeemer and model for Christians. Although critical Biblical scholarship has for decades prescinded from a portrait of Christ himself, as opposed to the communities founded hy him, most early Christians considered him to have been a single, celibate person. They did not, of course, think of Christ as a monk in the later sense of the term, hut their insistence that the Christian moral life of ascesis and sacrifice,be modeled upon Jesus' own life can he seen a:s preparing the way for such a view of Christ. The best reason for... (shrink)

This article explores the underexamined political dimensions of Alphonso Lingis’ philosophy, with a focus on his understanding of community, alterity, and passion as a possibility for political action. I show how Lingis’ work departs from liberal individualism in order to emphasize “community” as a condition for political engagement rooted in the ethical imperative evoked by the singularity and suffering of others. I then present a speculative account of Lingisian politics which builds on the possible reasons for his admiration of revolutionary (...) figures such as Gandhi and Ché Guevara as exemplars of a passionate, compassionate, and dynamic political praxis. (shrink)

In this collection of closely interrelated essays, Robert Young emphasizes the scope of the nineteenth-century debate on 'man's place in nature' at the same time as he engages with the approaches of scholars who write about it. He is critical of the separation of the writing of history from writing about history, historiography, and of the separation of history from politics and ideology, then or now. Dr Young challenges fellow historians for reimposing the very disciplinary boundaries that the (...) nineteenth-century debate showed were in the service of ideological forces in that culture. Rather, he proposes that the full weight of the contending forces should be made apparent and debated openly so that neither nineteenth-century nor contemporary issues about the role of science in culture should be treated in a narrow perspective. (shrink)

Historical fiction set in Judea of the first century CE. Amos, a young Judean searching for his religious identity, travels and debates famous figures representing the main religious and ideological movements of the time. The conclusion Amos reaches is that the quest for the understanding of God's intentions and motives is eternal.

In Thomas More on statesmanship Gerard Wegemer challenges accounts of More’s thought by Richard Marius and Alistair Fox, who argue that uncertainty characterizes much of More’s work and thinking. While that approach underlines the complex nature of More’s intellectual inquiries, it does not always make sufficient room for his pre-intellectual certainties about God and self. Wegemer is concerned to demonstrate that those certainties formed More’s comprehensively developed philosophy of statesmanship. This thesis has two shortcomings: it leaves little room for the (...) very problematic nature of More’s intellectual life; and it threatens to replace More the man with an ideology that may not be his own. (shrink)

Joseon neo-Confucianism critically reviewed Chinese Chu Zi Studies and transformed it as Joseon seonglihak through intense debates occurred in the process of trying to settle down the problems raised in the contemporary Joseon society. The representative theories of Joseon seonglihak includes sadanchiljeongron(四端七情論, the theory of the Four Beginnings and the Seven Feelings), inmulseongdongiron (人物性同異論, the theory of whether human nature and animal nature are the same or different), seongbeomsimdongbudongron (聖凡心同不同論, the theory of whether the mind of the nobler man and (...) that of the inferior man arethe same or different), mibalon (未發論, the theory of not-yet-aroused). Among these, this article traces the originality of Joseon seonglihak by means of comparing the sadanchiljeongron of Lee Hwang(Toegye, 1501-1570) with the mibalon of Lee Gan (Oeam, 1677-1727). The clause that 'the nature is li [性卽理]' is the central proposition in Chu Zi Studies, whereas the clause that 'the Four Beginnings are the arousal of li [四端理之發]' is the central proposition in Lee Hwang's theory. The clauses that 'the nature is identified with the mind [心性一致]', that 'the nobler man takes li to be the mind', and that 'the mind is the nature and the nature is the mind' are the main claims made by Lee Gan. Chu Hsi takes the nature (the original nature) to be li, Lee Hwang takes the feeling (the Four Beginnings) to be li, and Lee Gan takes the mind (the original mind) to be li. These claims made by Lee Hwang and Lee Gan are fundamentally different from Chu Hsi's theory of mind and nature. (shrink)

The contemporary debate over man’s relation to his natural environment raises many complex issues which have thrown our familiar liberal and conservative political alignments into disarray. Although ecology is now generally regarded as a liberal cause with conservatives supporting commercial and industrial expansion, until very recently liberals almost unanimously championed industrialization andtechnological advance. Resistance to “progress” was the folly of only the most eccentric conservatives. Today, both liberal proponents of environmental protection and conservative defenders of business and industry argue on (...) merely prudential grounds: each side maintains that only the adoption of its own program can save human civilization from collapse, or even the race from extinction. Extremely radical environmentalists have based their arguments on nloral principle: humanity is just one species among many, and men are, therefore, morally obligated to respect the rights of other organisms and of the ecosystem as a whole. This position, however, is ultimately reducible to a self-contradictory utilitarianism. It is the reverent attitude of traditional conservatism - that man is superior to other creatures as the steward of creation, holding it not as absolute possessor but only in trust from his Creator - that promises both the most moral and the most sensible approach to environmental affairs. (shrink)

side or other from his conception of reality ; for though some kind of reality is generally allowed to exist on the other side, ... Thus to the ordinary man philosophy seems to offer no choice, but either to destroy absolutely one half of his sense of ...

Sir George Etherege, William Wycherley and William Congreve introduce into their play-worlds major female characters who demand independence and equality from their male counterparts. This book focuses on each major female character who demands independence and equality of her gallant-libertine before she will commit to marriage or courtship with him. This demand for equality is a contrast to the social and marital relationships found in the real world of 17th century English Restoration society where marriage was a bargaining process for (...) property and where the woman was treated as the man's property. Each of the three playwrights develops his virtuous women in a different way. Wycherley's approach to his characters, for instance, is quite different from that of Etherege and Congreve. But in each case, the playwrights present major female characters who prove themselves superior in wit and wisdom and thoroughly modern in their outlook. (shrink)

The epigrams of the Carmina Priapea comically celebrate the exploits of the ithyphallic god Priapus, most often seen lording over his garden threatening would-be thieves with rape. In so doing, they promote a phallocentric sex-gender ideology whose valorized position was reserved for the active man who could control himself and dominate others. But the physical experience of reading these poems runs counter to the codes of masculinity their content upholds. Their rhythms and sounds immerse the reader in a range of (...) all-over pleasures that undermine the bodily comportment championed and embodied by Priapus himself. They thereby invite their readers to experience what I call the touch of the cinaedus, an expansive sensuality associated with this maligned sexual type. The Carmina Priapea's ongoing suggestion that entering this garden of verse will turn its readers into cinaedi might, then, be read as a promise as well as a threat. This promise is no less than the promise of poetry itself, a form of linguistic organization that invites all readers to revel in the cinaedus' liberating touch. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: -- Part I -- 1. Portrait of the psychiatrist as a young man 1927-1960 -- 2. Portrait of the psychiatrist as an intellectual. Laing's early, notebooks, personal library, essays, papers, and talks -- 3. Laing and psychiatric theory -- 4. Laing and existential-phenomenology -- 5. Laing and Religion -- 6. Laing and the Arts -- Part II -- 7. Laing in the Army -- 8. Gartnavel Hospital and the 'Rumpus Room' -- 9. Individual patients at (...) Gartnavel -- 10. Laing at the Southern General Hospital -- 11. Laing in London -- 12. The Divided Self. (shrink)

What Can I Live with, as a Person and a Professional? Our personal moral wisdom is the lens through which we define reality, morality, and practicality. But how do we bring these together and make final decisions about what is right?The answer may sound radical, but it is actually realistic. When we face hard, complex decisions, we ultimately decide what is right by deciding what is right. As a senior executive at one of the world’s largest banks phrased it, “You (...) can keep turning over rocks trying to discover what’s right, but you won’t find it. You have to decide what’s right.”What actually happens in the moments of our final decisions? The reality is that no one knows. We do make final decisions, and we give reasons for them. But why do we choose one option, which is justified by strong reasons, rather than another, which is also justified by strong reasons?Serious researchers, along with social scientists, philosophers, religious thinkers, and poets, have given us a variety of incomplete and sometimes incompatible accounts of what should happen and what does happen when we make final decisions. For contemporary neuroscience, our ultimate moments of decision remain a mystery.Because our final choices resemble black boxes, it becomes especially important to ask and answer the four fundamental questions – What really matters, what is moral, what is practical, and what is right? By doing this, we shape and constrain what goes into the black box. Our personal moral wisdom doesn’t come with guarantees, but by thoughtfully answering the four fundamental questions, we load the dice in favor of responsible, practical decisions in our leadership moments. (shrink)

This paper is about one of Arthur Prior’s earliest publications in philosophy, “The Nation and the Individual”. Its aims are to show that Prior made a remarkable contribution to social ontology in the 1930s which should be read with some attention to its historical background, which closely follows John Wisdom as to its theoretical elements, in particular the notion of a “logical construction”, but which is more clearly eliminativist with regard to nations and which is original in terms of rather (...) bold ethical consequences; to interpret Prior’s/Wisdom’s proposal as a promise of reduction by translation and to connect Prior’s/Wisdom’s ideas with John Searle’s recent work on social ontology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 35.4 (2005) 23-41MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]"With Conscious Artifice" Auden's Defense of MarriageSusannah Young-ah Gottlieb1 "Auden Said That?"The greatest lesson of life comes from Auden—sort of.In Mitch Albom's Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, A Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson, a line attributed to Auden forms the lesson around which the "runaway bestseller" revolves. As the first paragraph of the book explains and the last (...) paragraph repeats, the book recounts a pedagogical encounter between Mitch and a retired Brandeis professor of Social Psychology, Morrie Schwartz, who is dying of ALS: "The last class of my old professor's life took place once a week in his house, by a window in the study where he could watch a small hibiscus plant shed its pink leaves. The class met on Tuesdays. It began after breakfast. The subject was The Meaning of Life" [Albom, 1, 192]. Several years earlier Mitch had written his senior thesis under Morrie's direction. Upon learning of Morrie's condition from an episode of Nightline entitled "Life's Lessons," Mitch visits his dying teacher and finds his own feelings of "confusion and depression" [44] healed under Morrie's tutelage. From the first "class" of their renewed relationship Morrie emphasizes that contemporary culture condemns those under its influence to a "meaningless life" [43] and that the confusion Mitch experiences belongs to the entire era—and so, too, an urgent need for clarity. Mitch, in turn, sees in Morrie someone who, by virtue of his life-affirming wisdom and his proximity to death, can identify those "important things" that can fill the cultural vacuum about which he, as a sports reporter, knows all too well. On the fifth of their unofficial Tuesday "office hours," Morrie begins to fulfill his former student's expectations. Clarity comes in an imperative the old professor attributes to Auden:"Love is so supremely important. As our great poet Auden said, 'Love each other or perish.'""Love each other or perish." I wrote it down. Auden said that?[91]The line in question could scarcely be clearer, for it represents life in terms of a stark decision: love or death. Despite the simplicity of this choice, however, the scene is curiously complex, as if Mitch, against his explicit intentions, wants to dampen the effect of Morrie's wisdom. That Mitch writes down the line "Love each other or perish" is itself odd—even more so that he writes that he writes it down. As the beginning of the chapter explains at length, the conversation is being recorded, so that all of Morrie's wisdom may be preserved. The act of writing under these circumstances is less a sign of confidence in the supreme importance of the quotation in question than an indication of a degree of unresolved confusion: "Auden said that?" The confusion in this case cannot be attributed [End Page 23] to contemporary culture; rather, it consists in certain philological problems of citation: is Auden the author of the line, and if so, is it correctly rendered? Perhaps under the direction of another Brandeis professor, Mitch had learned and retained the famous last line of the penultimate stanza of Auden's "September 1, 1939": "We must love one another or die."1 Perhaps Mitch, or his publisher, having done some research, wants to signal an awareness of Morrie's misquotation but nevertheless remain faithful to the exact words of his teacher. And in any case who would care about such matters when something of great importance, indeed "life's greatest lesson," has just been articulated?Mitch's curiously inappropriate question does not, however, altogether disappear from Tuesdays. In response, Morrie does not so much insist on the accuracy of the quotation as on its goodness and truth:"Love each other or perish," Morrie said. "It's good, no? And it's so true. Without love, we are birds with broken wings."Say I was divorced, or living alone, or had no children. This disease—what I'm going through... (shrink)

ABSTRACT Circa 1630, the Dutch painter Pieter Jakobsz Codde, created a painting that shows little more than a young man sitting in a chair. Yet an in-depth examination of the person, the design of the space and the objects located in the room reveal that different aspects of disturbances and tensions have been integrated into the presentation and open a discourse on the imagery of melancholy and acedia. The paper shows by way of example that this is not an (...) iconographic gimmick but rather a challenge to differentiate and then decide between political as well as social meanings. Should the painting’ viewer decide between temperament and vice in the meaning of the representations, he or she determines at the same stroke the defining characteristics of the subject. For while the melancholy enjoyed social acceptance, acedia remained a vice to be avoided. Decisive in this: by acknowledging one’s competence to distinguish between the two states, the observer was able to prove his or her own personal good character traits. The image and the handling of the image thereby constitute a situation in which decision-making authority could be practiced and positive character traits could be solidified. (shrink)

The article studies the manner in which Stephen, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, experiences reality through highly formalized and mediated modes of cognition. The incongruity between cognition and the subject’s awareness of it is played out in Stephen’s relations with other characters, in the discrepancy between the words spoken in dialogue and the much more elaborate mental process which takes place simultaneously but silently in his mind. His exchange with the dean of studies, moreover, (...) shows that Stephen is unable to encounter the world without projecting onto it a grid of hypotheses where the answer is already potentially contained in the question, thus turning cognition into the mere saturation of a field outlined in advance. (shrink)

This paper develops a phenomenology of we as home, integrating Edmund Husserl’s concept of the homeworld (Heimwelt) with a new account of presubjective relationality. It argues that selfhood is not founded in an isolated ego but in an originary we-condition—a relational field that precedes and grounds individual subjectivity. Drawing on Husserl’s threefold distinction of static, genetic, and generative phenomenology, the study adopts a generative orientation to show how meaning, embodiment, and belonging arise within a historical and communal horizon. The presubjective (...) self designates the level of lived relatedness prior to reflective self-awareness, where the “I” and the “we” co-emerge in mutual dependence rather than opposition. Through close reading of Husserl’s later manuscripts—especially Umwelt, Heimwelt and the C-Manuscripts—the paper reconstructs the idea that the “lowest stratum” of subjectivity is not the ego, but the home to which the ego belongs. The homeworld is thus understood as the generative soil of selfhood: a network of intersubjective, cultural, and historical relations through which personal identity and normality take shape. Extending this insight, the article elaborates the notion of we as home to describe the ontological, embodied, and ethical dimensions of belonging. Embodiment is treated as the medium in which this relational structure becomes lived and tangible: the body of the individual is always part of a larger communal body. Memory, likewise, functions as the temporal mode in which the we endures, transmitting shared meaning across generations. Finally, the ethical horizon of we as home lies in its openness—the recognition that genuine dwelling is achieved only when the boundaries of home expand to include the stranger. By uniting phenomenological, ontological, and ethical analyses, the paper proposes that we as home offers a generative paradigm for understanding selfhood, community, and universality. It shows that to be human is to dwell together in a shared world—to be, from the beginning, each other’s home. (shrink)

Edmund Husserl presents eudaimonia as the goal of all ethical existence. He reflects on the meaning of eudaimonia primarily by designating its source. In doing so, his ethics appears to undergo a significant rupture in its development. Before wartime, the subject’s alignment (Konvenienz) with objectively established reasons was what brought about ethical success. The will behind practical rationality did not necessarily represent individual personhood. In contrast, works from the mid-1920s and onwards argue that love, precisely as experienced by individual persons, (...) leads to eudaimonia. I propose that accounts of eudaimonia in the early 1920s can alleviate the apparent radicality of this contrast by connecting rational accomplishment with personhood. Drawing on Husserliana volumes XXVII, XXXV, XXXVII, and XLII, I establish how personhood may, in an ethical context, determine both the form and contents of evidence (Evidenz) as the hallmark of Husserlian rationality. Then, I develop this nascent connection to originally reconstruct Husserl’s conception of personhood in the language of evidence. I redefine personhood as the network of evidence and its losses across different times and domains of the acting consciousness. After responding to objections, I explain how my reconstruction softens the contrast between rationality and love as integral sources of eudaimonia. Compared with other similar attempts, my account can illuminate the role irrationality of accidents (Irrationalität des Zufalls) such as illness and death plays in Husserl’s ethics. Despite appearing ethically irrelevant, irrationality of accidents disrupts genuine personhood understood as the normatively desirable configuration of evidences: the ultimate meaning of eudaimonia (249 words). (shrink)

Pre-reading language skills develop rapidly in early childhood and are related to brain structure and functional architecture in young children prior to formal education. However, the early neurobiological development that supports these skills is not well understood. Here we acquired anatomical, diffusion tensor imaging and resting state functional MRI from 35 children at 3.5 years of age. Children were assessed for pre-reading abilities using the NEPSY-II subtests 1 year later. We applied a data-driven linked independent component analysis to explore (...) the shared co-variation of gray and white matter measures. Two sources of structural variation at 3.5 years of age demonstrated relationships with Speeded Naming scores at 4.5 years of age. The first imaging component involved volumetric variability in reading-related cortical regions alongside microstructural features of the superior longitudinal fasciculus. The second component was dominated by cortical volumetric variations within the cerebellum and visual association area. In a subset of children with rs-fMRI data, we evaluated the inter-network functional connectivity of the left-lateralized fronto-parietal language network and its relationship with pre-reading measures. Higher functional connectivity between the FPL and the default mode and visual networks at 3.5 years significantly predicted better Phonological Processing scores at 4.5 years. Together, these results suggest that the integration of functional networks, as well as the co-development of white and gray matter brain structures in early childhood, support the emergence of pre-reading measures in preschool children. (shrink)

There are now over 1.1 million people overseen by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), with about 33,000 detained in jails and federal detention centers around the country at any particular time. The average detention time is two months, but some are detained for much longer periods. Since its inception, one hundred and twenty one deaths and countless cases of medical neglect have occurred. Given its secrecy, and lack of accountability and oversight, it is not clear how many of these deaths (...) are the result of grossly inadequate medical care. ICE is a branch of a government agency in a democratic country, thus the citizens on whose behalf it allegedly operates have an obligation to ensure that it operates in conformity with the fundamental principles of justice on which this nation was founded. ICE is a young and rapidly growing bureaucracy with little oversight. It operates using a mix of federal, state, local and private centers, many of which are penal institutions. It has a history of serious abuse, and even when it operates in conformity with its penal standards, it inflicts additional harm onto vulnerable people, especially asylum seekers and parents of minor children. It thus requires our constant vigilance and concern. Our immigration policies and detention practices are deeply troubling, but until we elect to reform them, we have a special obligation to the vulnerable populations that we house in ICE detention. (shrink)

Attentional biases have received considerable focus in research on cognitive biases and body dissatisfaction (BD). However, most work has focused on spatial allocation of attention. The current two experiments employed a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task to investigate the temporal allocation of attention to body-related words among young females with high and low BD. Experiment 1 assessed the stimulus-driven attention of body-related stimuli. Participants identified a neutral second target (T2) as accurately as possible while ignoring the preceding neutral, (...) fat-, or thin-related first target (T1). As expected, we observed spontaneous attentional blink effects elicited by fat- and thin-related T1s among participants with high BD, suggesting enhanced awareness of body-related stimuli even when this information does not have to be identified. Such effects did not emerge among participants without BD. Experimental 2 investigated the goal-directed attention of body-related stimuli, during which participants needed to identify both the T1 and neutral T2. Participants with BD showed reduced attentional blink effects after both fat- and thin-related T1, suggesting facilitated consolidation of body-related information in goal-directed attention among participants with BD. The findings may have important clinical implications for understanding how to decrease and even prevent body image dissatisfaction. (shrink)

During an initial palliative care assessment, a dying man discloses that he had killed several people whilst a young man. The junior doctor, to whom he revealed his story, consulted with senior palliative care colleagues. It was agreed that legal advice would be sought on the issue of breaching the man’s confidentiality. Two legal opinions conflicted with each other. A decision was made by the clinical team not to inform the police.In this article the junior doctor, the palliative medicine (...) specialist, a medical ethicist, and a lawyer consider the case from their various perspectives. (shrink)

Raimon Panikkar: A Companion to his Life and Thought is a guide to the life, work and thought of Raimon Panikkar, a self-professed Buddhist-Christian-Hindu philosopher and theologian. A man of deep and wide learning and an extremely prolific author, Panikkar is equally at home in various religious and cultural traditions and embodies in himself the ideals of intercultural, intrareligious, and interreligious dialogues. This book explicates Panikkar’s basic vision of life as the harmonious rhythm of divinity, humanity, and the cosmos, which (...) he terms "cosmotheandrism," and shows how it permeates and illumines his articulations of the central Christian doctrines. Given the complexity and difficulty of Panikkar’s thought this book is a welcome companion for a course on Panikkar and for a general reader who wishes to understand one of the most profound and orginal thinkers of our time. (shrink)

First published in 1930, this book presents an imagined account of conversation between Plato and ‘A Modern Young Man’. In the first part, political and social institutions are considered and property, forms of government, socialism, the control of population, war and education, are discussed. The second part examines the idea of real Goods including the concepts of truth, art and love. In this work, the author sees Plato reaffirming his belief that real Goods come from some higher world, which (...) it is the destiny of the spirits to pursue. (shrink)

Widely regarded as the greatest stylist of twentieth-century English literature,James Joycedeserves the term “revolutionary.” His literary experiments in form and structure, language and content, signaled the modernist movement and continue to influence writers today. His two earliest, and perhaps most accessible, successes—A Portrait of the Artist as a Young ManandDubliners—are here brought together in one volume. Both works reflect Joyce’s lifelong love-hate relationship with Dublin and the Irish culture that formed him. In the semi-autobiographicalPortrait, young Stephen Dedalus yearns (...) to be an artist, but first must struggle against the forces of church, school, and society, which fetter his imagination and stifle his soul. The book’s inventive style is apparent from its opening pages, a record of an infant’s impressions of the world around him—and one of the first examples of the “stream of consciousness” technique. Comprising fifteen stories,Dublinerspresents a community of mesmerizing, humorous, and haunting characters—a group portrait. The interactions among them form one long meditation on the human condition, culminating with “The Dead,” one of Joyce’s most graceful compositions centering around a character’s epiphany. A carefully woven tapestry of Dublin life at the turn of the last century,Dublinersrealizes Joyce’s ambition to give his countrymen “one good look at themselves.”. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Dangerous Sport of Social Climbing Not a Doe but a Roe The Belly of the Beast Notes.

In this short intellectual biography, we chronicle Saul Kripke’s involvement in the development of modal logic, focusing on the decade beginning in 1953 and ending in 1963, during which time he ranged in age from 12 to 23. We also describe the state of modal logic before Kripke, Kripke’s correspondence with other modal logicians, and Kripke’s early influential publications on the semantics of modal logic as well as several later and lesser known contributions.

This essay is a soul biography charting how the trauma of facing military conscription in my teens influenced my entire life, emotional and professional. As a student I was studying, among other texts like the war poets from the First World War, Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The play’s protagonist was ready-made for psychological projection and self-identification for a student living in the 1960s zeitgeist of youthful yearning for peaceful “flower power.” In the first court ensemble scene of the play, Hamlet finds himself (...) in the position of alienated, isolated and disaffected youth – “A little more than kith and less than kind.” This chimed precisely with the theories of R.D. Laing as the most celebrated, countercultural psychologist in the 1960s, sheeting the blame for so-called mental disorders to “the politics of the family” causing “the divided self,” and presenting “madness” as an essentially “sane,” coping response to conflict – “Though this be madness, yet there is method in ‘t.” He is then compelled by circumstances forced upon him by actions of his father’s generation into facing extreme existential decisions and experiences. For me, this “generation gap” manifested in the law enforcing conscription of randomly chosen twenty year olds for the Vietnam conflict. The experience revealed and reinforced my sense of self as a temperamental pacifist and conscientious objector. It transpired that the intense psychic experiences of that year would preoccupy and shape me, both personally and professionally, for the rest of my life down to the present day. I have in my career published polemical essays dealing with war and peace, two books on Hamlet in particular, and more generally two on literature and pacifism, the latter being Shakespeare Against War: Pacifist Readings. Yet like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner I am still compelled once again to recount my critical, formative “agony,” “And until my ghastly tale is told, / This heart within me burns.”. (shrink)

The current investigation was designed to examine the association of parenting during late childhood and early adolescence, a time of rapid physical development, with biological propensity for inflammation. Based on life course theory, it was hypothesized that parenting during this period of rapid growth and development would be associated with biological outcomes and self-reported health assessed in young adulthood. It was expected that association of parenting with health would be mediated either by effects on methylation of a key inflammatory (...) factor, Tumor necrosis factor (TNF), or else by association with a pro-inflammatory shift in the distribution of mononuclear blood cells. Supporting expectations, in a sample of 398 African American youth residing in rural Georgia, followed from age 11 to age 19, parenting at ages 11–13 was associated with youth reports of better health at age 19. We found that parenting was associated with changes in TNF methylation as well as with changes in cell-type composition. However, whereas methylation of TNF was a significant mediator of the association of parenting with young adult health, variation in mononuclear white blood cell types was not a significant mediator of the association of parenting with young adult health. The current research suggests the potential value of examining the health-related effects of parenting in late childhood and early adolescence. Further examination of protection against pro-inflammatory tendencies conferred by parenting appears warranted. (shrink)

Esports is a rapidly growing industry worldwide, and it is making significant inroads in Hong Kong as well. However, owing to debates regarding the distinction between Esports and video gaming and the potential negative effects of engaging in Esports, its development in Hong Kong is still in its infancy. Therefore, this qualitative study investigated the perceptions and attitudes of teenagers and young adults toward Esports development and engagement, using the theory of planned behavior. Twenty-five teenagers and young adults (...) participated in this study, with their ages ranging from 15 to 29 years. Our results revealed the views of Hong Kong teenagers and young adults on the beneficial and deleterious outcomes, subjective norms, and barriers and facilitators of participating in Esports. Additionally, the results of this qualitative study may contribute toward a deeper understanding of Hong Kong Esports players to develop a theory of planned behavior construct for capturing the beliefs and perceptions of Hong Kong teenagers toward Esports. (shrink)