论性平等

性平等:合还是分尽管并不恰当,然而一个更为传统的对女权主义的定义就是,她相信公正的原则要求男女之间的平等。这种平等并非人类解放或女性解放的充分条件,但至少它是一个必要的条件。正是由于这个原因,并由于这种平等概念已经成为众所周知难以琢磨的概念,看来我们值得花费一些时间,对性平等所表示的意义进行反思。     

美作为德性的象征——论康德伦理学和美学的共同根源

伦理学与美学、审美与德性之间的联系在康德哲学中是显而易见的。康德在《判断力批判》中充分提示了这种联系。这种联系使第三批判在体系里起着理论哲学和实践哲学之间联结的作用。     

伦理学的规范及其社会使命

苏联伦理学专业工作者在《高等学校马克思主义伦理学基础》教学大纲草案中,把马克思主义伦理学的规范问题作为一个专题进行了研究。可以说,它是当前苏联学术界对这一科学命题的各种看法的总结。马克思主义伦理学被理介为“关于道德发展的社会本质和规律性、关于共产主义道德形成的规律性、关于道德原别与道德规范和它在争取共产主义社会的斗争中的作用”的科学。对这一概念,肯定要做仔细的分析研究工作。这     

纯粹道德学说与人类学——对康德先天有效的普遍实践法则的批判思考

康德伦理学的主旨自然是要为人类行为提供一条先天有效的普遍实践法则,以回答"我该做什么"这一中心议题.为了保证实践法则的普遍有效性,康德提出伦理学必须排除一切来自心理学和人类学的东西,伦理学的原理绝对不能建立在经验人类学基础上,于是,在纯粹道德学说的先验形而上学和经验人类学之间作出严格分离.按康德自己的说法是:纯粹道德学说不可建立在人类学上,但它能够而且必须运用到人类学上.作者在这里主要指出了康德晚年出版的一部重要伦理学文献:《伦理的形而上学》,这部书的意义尤其在我国没有得到应有的重视,处在许多康德伦理学研究者的视野之外,是造成某些片面理解的原因之一.翻译弗尔施纳这篇文章的意义在于有利于我们完整地考虑康德伦理学思想的系统布局,消除不必要的对康德的一些误解.     

Liberalism, legal moralism and moral disagreement

According to "legal moralism" it is part of law's proper role to "enforce morality as such". I explore the idea that legal moralism runs afoul of morality itself: there are good moral reasons not to require by law all that there is nevertheless good moral reason to do. I suggest that many such reasons have broad common-sense appeal and could be appreciated even in a society in which everyone completely agreed about what morality requires. But I also critique legal moralism from the special perspective of liberal political justice. Liberalism requires that citizens who disagree with one another on a number of morally significant matters nevertheless coexist and cooperate within a political framework of basic rights protections. When it comes to working out the most basic terms of their political association, citizens are expected to address one another within the limits of what Rawls has called "public reason". Critics of liberalism claim that this is an essentially a-moral (or expedient) attempt to evade substantive moral issues--such as the moral status of the fetus. I argue, on the contrary, that liberalism's emphasis on public reason is itself grounded in very deep--though (suitably) "non-comprehensive"--moral considerations.     

The effects of stress and stress hormones on human cognition: Implications for the field of brain and cognition

In this review, we report on studies that have assessed the effects of exogenous and endogenous increases in stress hormones on human cognitive performance. We first describe the history of the studies on the effects of using exogenous stress hormones such as glucocorticoids as anti-inflammatory medications on human cognition and mental health. Here, we summarize the cases that led to the diagnosis of glucocorticoid-induced 'steroid psychosis' in human populations and which demonstrated that these stress hormones could thus cross the blood-brain barrier and access the brain where they could influence cognition and mental health. We then summarize studies that assessed the effects of the exogenous administration of glucocorticoids on cognitive performance supported by the hippocampus, the frontal lobes and amygdala. In the second section of the paper, we summarize the effects of the endogenous release of glucocorticoids induced by exposure to a stressful situation on human cognition and we further dissociate the effects of emotion from those of stress on human learning and memory. Finally, in the last section of the paper, we discuss the potential impact that the environmental context to which we expose participants when assessing their memory could have on their reactivity to stress and subsequent cognitive performance. In order to make our point, we discuss the field of memory and aging and we suggest that some of the 'age-related memory impairments' observed in the literature could be partly due to increased stress reactivity in older adults to the environmental context of testing. We also discuss the inverse negative correlations reported between hippocampal volume and memory for young and older adults and suggest that these inverse correlations could be partly due to the effects of contextual stress in young and older adults, as a function of age-related differences in hippocampal volume.     

Imitation from 12 to 24 months in autism and typical development: a longitudinal Rasch analysis

The development of imitation during the second year of life plays an important role in domains of sociocognitive development such as language and social learning. Deficits in imitation ability in persons with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) from toddlerhood into adulthood have also been repeatedly documented, raising the possibility that early disruptions in imitation contribute to the onset of ASD and the deficits in language and social interaction that define the disorder. This study prospectively examined the development of imitation between 12 and 24 months of age in 154 infants at familial risk for ASD and 78 typically developing infants who were all later assessed at 36 months for ASD or other developmental delays. The study established a developmental measure of imitation ability and examined group differences over time, using an analytic Rasch measurement model. Results revealed a unidimensional latent construct of imitation and verified a reliable sequence of imitation skills that was invariant over time for all outcome groups. Results also showed that all groups displayed similar significant linear increases in imitation ability between 12 and 24 months and that these increases were related to individual growth in both expressive language and ratings of social engagement but not in fine motor development. The group of children who developed ASD by age 3 years exhibited delayed imitation development compared with the low-risk typical outcome group across all time-points, but were indistinguishable from other high-risk infants who showed other cognitive delays not related to ASD.     

Stability of recent and remote contextual fear memory

Following initial encoding, memories undergo a prolonged period of reorganization. While such reorganization may occur in many different memory systems, its purpose is not clear. Previously, we have shown that recall of recent contextual fear memories engages the dorsal hippocampus (dHPC). In contrast, recall of remote contextual fear memories engages a number of different cortical regions, including the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). To examine whether this reorganization leads to greater memory stability, we examined reconsolidation of 1 d-old (recent) and 36 d-old (remote) contextual fear memory in mice. We infused the protein synthesis inhibitor, anisomycin (ANI), into either the dHPC or ACC immediately following retrieval of either a recent or remote contextual fear memory. In the dHPC, ANI infusions disrupted subsequent expression of recent, but not remote, contextual fear memory. Similar infusions into the ACC had no effect on either recent or remote contextual fear memories, whereas systemically applied ANI blocked subsequent remote memory expression when long re-exposure durations were used. Together, these data suggest that as memories mature they become increasingly stable. Furthermore, the dissociation between the effects of systemically and centrally administered ANI on remote memory suggests that stability is due, in part, to the distributed nature of remote contextual fear memories.