The Loss of Aging Identity: Social Theory, Old Age, and the Power of Special Hospitals

Medical and health languages have emerged as master narratives used to police the identities that older offenders adopt in contemporary special hospitals such as Broadmoor, Rampton, and Ashworth, in the United Kingdom. Both contain continually changing technologies that function to mediate relations between older offenders and special hospitals. Medical and institutional discourses have been presented as reducing limitations associated with psychiatric disorders. This represents an increase in professional control that can be exerted on inmates' lifestyles in special hospitals which extends to the surveillance and governance of older persons in such secure settings. It is evident that the use of the indeterminate sentence, compulsory treatment prevents older offenders from rehabilitation. The process of treatment is to transform, discipline and normalize their behavior. In order to achieve normalization, coercive forms of treatment are invoked from informal social rules to the use and overuse of psychothropic drugs. Mentally disordered older offenders are placed under the gaze of perpetual surveillance but find ways of negotiating, resisting, and subverting that gaze. Furthermore, this article illuminates how the aging body and the use of time become other sources of punishment, which are pivotal to the structural organization of secure settings in the United Kingdom.     

The Old Book Switcheroo: Or Anatomy of a Delusion

In this paper, an aging baby boomer “tells all” about his personal experience with some of the “pitfalls of organized religion,” as observed from his somewhat unusual perspective as a Jew by birth and a Roman Catholic by choice, and a lifelong Asperger’s sufferer, the butt of practical jokes in a variety of juvenile and adult settings. His conclusion, echoing H.L. Mencken’s famous statement that “the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy,” is that the best antidote to these “pitfalls” may be found simply in the responsible practice of religion, including both Judaism and Christianity. The author also believes his own survival in life despite some “ogres and tricksters” along the way validates the Jungian philosophy of synchronicity. He believes that the storms of life are best weathered by accepting them as parts of a Merciful Providence’s “vast eternal plans” for all His children on Earth.     

《西方社会公正思想》(英文版)感言

程立显同志的英文版专著 Western Ideas of So-cial Justice:A historical survey from the ethicalviewpoint(《西方社会公正思想》:以伦理学为视角的历史考察》) ,不久前由香港一家出版社出版。这是他二十多年来矢志不渝、心无旁骛地研究社会公正问题的又一可喜收获。这本专著 ,是作者在留英期间的博士论文的基础上修订、充实而成的。早在六七年前 ,我就两次细读过他的博士论文 ,感到它是我国中青年学者在社会伦理学领域的一大贡献 ,一直期盼着它的出版。如今 ,这一愿望终于得以实现 ,怎不令人欣喜 ?六七年时光的流逝 ,丝毫没有减损这本…     

Ideal Point Discriminant Analysis Revisited with a Special Emphasis on Visualization

Ideal point discriminant analysis is a classification tool which uses highly intuitive multidimensional scaling procedures. However, in the last paper, Takane wrote about it. He concludes that the interpretation is rather intricate and calls that a weakness of the model. We summarize the conditions that provide an easy interpretation and show that in maximum dimensionality they can be obtained without any loss. For reduced dimensionality, it is conjectured that loss is minor which is examined using several data sets. This research was conducted while the author was sponsored by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), Innovational Grant, no. 452-06-002.     

Assessing the Rising Emphasis on Muscularity for Women: Psychometric Properties of the Brazilian Version of the Female Muscularity Scale

The female appearance ideal has undergone considerable changes in recent years, resulting in increases in drive for muscularity among Brazilian women. The Female Muscularity Scale (FMS) was developed to assess muscularity concerns among U.S. women and was shown to be a promising measure of muscularity-related attitudes and behaviors. The present studies aimed to translate and culturally adapt the FMS to Brazilian Portuguese and to explore its factorial structure among Brazilian women (Study 1: n = 202, M_age = 24.40, SD = 5.03) and to confirm the factor structure as well as evaluate convergent and divergent validity and reliability of the FMS for young adult Brazilian women (Study 2: n = 382, M_age = 22.71, SD = 4.32). Exploratory factor analysis revealed a two-factor structure (Attitudes and Behaviors subscales), each comprising five items. Confirmatory factor analysis upheld the original two-factor structure with good fit indices. The full scale and its subscales presented convergent validity through associations with measures of body dissatisfaction, drive for muscularity, body-ideal internalization, body checking and avoidance behaviors, disordered eating, and exercise engagement. Evidence of divergent validity was obtained in relation to self-esteem and depressive symptoms. The Brazilian version of FMS also presented adequate values for internal consistency and 2-week test-retest reliability. These findings support the Brazilian version of the FMS as a useful tool for investigating muscularity-related aspects of body image and body change behaviors that are increasingly a source of concern for women.

     

The First Latin Book of Common Prayer: English Reformation in a Continental Perspective

Abstract

The Ordinatio ecclesiae (1551) of Alexander Alesius is a little-known Latin translation of the 1549 Book of Common Prayer. Alesius had been resident in England in the 1530s and had kept in touch with his English friends when he returned to the continent, becoming professor of theology at Leipzig. The Ordinatio ecclesiae is, in many ways, a baffling document since it is not a rigid translation of Cranmer's rite. Instead, it contains passages which are both more Roman and more evangelical than the English liturgy. Following a detailed comparison of the English and Latin versions, the author attempts to place the Ordinatio ecclesiae in the context of Reformation politics on the continent during the years between the ‘Augsburg Interim’ and the resumption of the Council of Trent. He finds that the Latin Prayer book was intended to publicize Cranmer's reform measures as an example of a territorial Reformation in order to add a substantial voice to the chorus of evangelical churches calling for a free General Council. The conservative nature of the first Book of Common Prayer seemed ideally suited to further dialogue between evangelicals and reform-minded Catholics, but also to appealing for reconciliation and unity among Lutheran theologians in Saxony who had become divided on the issue of the Interim.     

The Relevance of Multiculturalism for Aging

Though multiculturalists focus on race and minority status, issues of central importance to the aged, multiculturalism has not infiltrated the gerontology literature. However, since the so-called natural stages of life are cultural formations, each one a valuable creation, the topic of aging would certainly benefit from a connection to multiculturalism and its critique of the demands of assimilation.     

Learning the Relevance of Relevance and the Trouble with Truth: Evaluating Explanatory Relevance across Childhood

ABSTRACT

In four experiments, we investigate how the ability to detect irrelevant explanations develops. In Experiments 1 and 2, 4- to 8-year-olds and adults rated different types of explanations about “what makes cars go” individually, in the absence of a direct contrast. Each explanation was true and relevant (e.g., “Cars have engines that turn gasoline into power”), true and irrelevant (e.g., “Cars have radios that play music”), or a false statement that would be relevant if it were true (e.g., “Cars have rockets that speed them up”). Participants of all ages spontaneously indicated that false explanations were less helpful than relevant explanations. However, there was a developmental shift for irrelevant explanations: 4-year-olds only detected irrelevant explanations that did not involve internal features of cars (e.g., “Cars have parking lots that they park in”). Crucially, this shift between age 4 and 5 cannot be explained by 4-year-olds’ lack of knowledge since 4-year-olds correctly indicated that relevant explanations were more helpful than irrelevant feature explanations when given a direct contrast in Experiment 3. These results are further clarified in Experiment 4, in which we provided a different explanatory goal (“where to find cars”) and found that even young children have a nuanced understanding of explanatory relevance that is sensitive to differing explanatory goals. Together, these four experiments suggest an early-emerging ability to understand relevance, but a shift between age 4 and 5 in the ability to spontaneously use this understanding when evaluating individual explanations in isolation.     

Ranking Alternatives on the Basis of Preference Relations: A Progress Report with Special Emphasis on Outranking Relations

This paper is devoted to the study of techniques allowing one to rank order the elements of a finite set on the basis of a non-necessarily complete or transitive binary relation. In the area of MCDM, such a problem occurs with outranking methods. We review a number of theoretical results concerning this problem and show how they may be useful in order to guide the choice of a particular technique. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Relevance of Tillich for the Theology and Science Dialogue

This paper explores the relevance of the theology of Paul Tillich for the contemporary dialogue with the natural sciences. The focus is on his Systematic Theology , volume I. First I discuss the general relevance of Tillich's methodology (namely, the method of correlation) for that dialogue, stressing that a genuine dialogue requires cognitive input from both sides and that both sides find "value added" according to their own criteria (or what I call the method of "mutual creative interaction"). Then I move specifically to a Tillichian theological analysis of twentieth-century theoretical science and its empirical discoveries, including Big Bang, inflationary, and quantum cosmologies, quantum physics, thermodynamics, chaos and complexity, and molecular and evolutionary biology, suggesting how they relate to such Tillichian themes as finitude and the categories of being and knowing (time, space, causality, and substance) and to Tillich's understanding of such symbols as God, freedom and destiny, creation, and estrangement. In doing so, my intention is to provide a point of departure for further extended analyses of Tillich's theology in relation to contemporary natural science.     

孔子与鲁乐本及《诗经》

孔子与《诗经》的关系非常密切。本文认为《诗经》是孔子以鲁国乐本为底本,在授徒过程中经过逐渐编选,最终成为《诗三百》的。     

The effect of cue Relevance,Ambiguity, and self-reported hostility on tat responses

The interaction of cue relevance and ambiguity was studied. Ss high or low in self-reported hostility were administered 8 T A T cards, half of which were high in hostility cue relevance, half low. Half of each subset, in turn, was high in ambiguity, half low. Highly relevant cards tended to elicit more aggressive content than low relevant cards, and stories to ambiguous cards tended to contain more aggressive themes than unambiguous ones, independent of hostility relevance. Hostile Ss tended to be best discriminated from non-hostile Ss on highly relevant cards, where they responded with more aggressive themes. Results were contrasted with previous findings and it was concluded that consistent with findings where hostility is defined by observation or arousal, highly relevant cues are most sensitive to hostility level. While greater expression of negative content, increments in ambiguity did not add to the sensitivity of the stimuli.     

Kant on Construction,Apriority, and the Moral Relevance of Universalization

This paper introduces a referential reading of Kant’s practical project, according to which maxims are made morally permissible by their correspondence to objects, though not the ontic objects of Kant’s theoretical project but deontic objects (what ought to be). It illustrates this model by showing how the content of the Formula of Universal Law might be determined by what our capacity of practical reason can stand in a referential relation to, rather than by facts about what kind of beings we are (viz., uncaused causes). This solves the neglected puzzle of why there are passages in Kant’s works suggesting robust analogies between mathematics and ethics, since to universalize a maxim is to test a priori whether a practical object with that particular content can be constructed. An apparent problem with this hypothesis is that the medium of practical sensibility (feeling) does not play a role analogous to the medium of theoretical sensibility (intuition). In response I distinguish two separate Kantian accounts of mathematical apriority. The thesis that maxim universalization is a species of construction, and thus a priori, turns out to be consistent with the account of apriority that informs Kant’s understanding of actual mathematical practice.