Negative theology in Heidegger's Beiträge zur Philosophie

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion -     

SYSTEMS OF MEASUREMENT

Wittgenstein and Kripke disagree about the status of the proposition: the Standard Metre is one metre long. Wittgenstein believes it is necessary. Kripke argues that it is contingent. Kripke's argument depends crucially on a certain sort of thought‐experiment with which we are invited to test our intuitions about what is and isn’t necessary. In this paper I argue that, while Kripke's conclusion is strictly correct, nevertheless similar Kripke‐style thought experiments indicate that the metric system of measurement is after all relative in something like the way Wittgenstein seems to think. Central to this paper is a thought‐experiment I call The Smedlium Case.     

关于全科医学兴起和发展的哲学审视

全科医学的兴起已经成为"必然",当今医学科学的发展应该对这种"必然"做出理性的思考.全科医学的兴起和发展隐含着对现代医疗中失人性化倾向的反动,揭示了人道主义精神在现代医疗中的回归.全科医疗与专科医疗是一种互补关系,共同丰富和完善医疗卫生服务体系.     

Event-based prospective remembering in a virtual world

Most laboratory-based prospective memory (PM) paradigms pose problems that are very different from those encountered in the real world. Several PM studies have reported conflicting results when comparing laboratory- with naturalistic-based studies (e.g., Bailey, Henry, Rendell, Phillips, & Kliegel, 2010 ). One key contrast is that for the former, how and when the PM cue is encountered typically is determined by the experimenter, whereas in the latter case, cue availability is determined by participant actions. However, participant-driven access to the cue has not been examined in laboratory studies focused on healthy young adults, and its relationship with planned intentions is poorly understood. Here we report a study of PM performance in a controlled, laboratory setting, but with participant-driven actions leading to the availability of the PM cue. This uses a novel PM methodology based upon analysis of participant movements as they attempted a series of errands in a large virtual building on the computer screen. A PM failure was identified as a situation in which a participant entered and exited the "cue" area outside an errand related room without performing the required errand whilst still successfully remembering that errand post test. Additional individual difference measures assessed retrospective and working memory capacity, planning ability and PM. Multiple regression analysis showed that the independent measures of verbal working memory span, planning ability, and PM were significant predictors of PM failure. Correlational analyses with measures of planning suggest that sticking with an original plan (good or bad) is related to better overall PM performance.     

Trans-parency in the workplace: How the experiences of transsexual employees can be improved

Very little research has focused exclusively on the workplace experiences of transsexual employees. Studies that have been done are either qualitative case studies (e.g., Budge, Tebbe, & Howard; 2010; Schilt & Connell, 2007), or aggregate transsexual individuals with lesbian, gay, and bisexual employees (e.g., Irwin, 2002). The current study focuses on this underexamined population and examines general workplace experiences, and both individual and organizational characteristics that influence transsexual employees' job attitudes. Results reveal that organizational supportiveness, transsexual identity centrality, and the degree to which they disclose to individuals outside of work all predict transsexual employees' disclosure behaviors in the workplace. These disclosure behaviors are positively related to job satisfaction and organizational commitment, and negatively related to job anxiety. These relations are mediated by coworker reactions. This research expands knowledge about diverse employee populations and offers both theory and some of the first large-scale empirical data collected on the workplace experiences of transsexual employees.     

Attention capture by faces

We report three experiments that investigate whether faces are capable of capturing attention when in competition with other non-face objects. In Experiment 1a participants took longer to decide that an array of objects contained a butterfly target when a face appeared as one of the distracting items than when the face did not appear in the array. This irrelevant face effect was eliminated when the items in the arrays were inverted in Experiment 1b ruling out an explanation based on some low-level image-based properties of the faces. Experiment 2 replicated and extended the results of Experiment 1a. Irrelevant faces once again interfered with search for butterflies but, when the roles of faces and butterflies were reversed, irrelevant butterflies no longer interfered with search for faces. This suggests that the irrelevant face effect is unlikely to have been caused by the relative novelty of the faces or arises because butterflies and faces were the only animate items in the arrays. We conclude that these experiments offer evidence of a stimulus-driven capture of attention by faces.