Singularity in Beauvoir's The Ethics of Ambiguity

Though it has gone unnoticed so far in Beauvoir Studies, the term “singularity” is a technical one for Simone de Beauvoir. In the first half of the essay I discuss two reasons why this term has been obscured. First, as is well known Beauvoir has not been read in the context of the history of philosophy until recently. Second, in The Ethics of Ambiguity at least, singularité is translated both inconsistently and quite misleadingly. In the second half of the essay I attempt to demonstrate the importance of this term in The Ethics. The will to disclose being is the will to disclose the singularity of the other, whether human, land, sky or painting. Ambiguity, which Beauvoir distinguishes from absurdity in Camus, is an image suggesting this necessarily mutual disclosure of singularity.     

Coping with work and family: How do dual‐earners interact?

Juggling the demands of both work and family has become increasingly difficult, especially for dual‐earner households; nevertheless, families have developed strategies to deal with work‐family challenges. This paper uses couple level analyses (APIM models) with 100 dual‐earner couples to provide insight about partners' mutual influence on the use of work‐family coping strategies. The results show that women's use of coping strategies is more associated with work‐family conflict and work‐family enrichment than men's coping. In addition, using partner coping, having a positive attitude towards multiple roles, using planning and management skills and avoiding having to cut back on professional responsibilities is associated with better outcomes (more enrichment and less conflict). Surprisingly, the use of childcare facilities is associated with women's conflict and partner effects were only found concerning the use of management and planning skills. These skills, however, have distinct effects for men and women's outcomes: their use by men reduces their own conflict but increases their wives', while their use by women decreases their own conflict and increases their own and their partner's enrichment. These results point to the fact that gender roles continue to be a hallmark of work‐family issues. Our design and results point out the need for new interventions that take couple interdependences into account.     

Women Creating Public Art and Community, 2000–2014

This narrative describes a series of 15 short‐term public art projects that were part of a program for women and girls in Lowell, Massachusetts, a mid‐size city in the United States. The projects were designed to give public space to women’s stories and perspectives by exhibiting their creative art in response to suggested themes. A few thousand women and girls representing diverse age and cultural groups created art based on their lived experiences. The organizers of the program met people in comfortable settings, tailored their art‐making approaches to particular groups, and used inclusive processes in developing and executing the program. Program successes and challenges were related to the organizational structure of the art projects, the annual themes and art media, the extent of outreach and support, the process of creation, and the impact of art exhibits. Using community psychology and feminist frameworks, authors reflect on the projects and their relevance across contexts, highlight key organizing strategies, and identify ways the project represents community psychology in action.     

Plastic stability of bimetals composed of Ti-based metallic glass composite and pure titanium

The plastic stability of bimetals composed of a Ti-based metallic glass composite (MGC) and a pure titanium (PT) under tension has been investigated. The results reveal that the plastic stability of the MGC/PT bimetal is strongly dependent on the thickness fraction of the MGC: when the thickness fraction of the MGC decreases to a critical value, a homogeneous plastic deformation occurs in the MGC/PT bimetals, i.e. the strain localization and necking of the MGC is effectively suppressed. This unique phenomenon is explained using the normalized strain-hardening rate, and the quantitative relationship between the normalized strain-hardening rate of the MGC/PT bimetals and the thickness fraction of the MGC is thereby established.     

奥古斯丁与西方激情理论的分化

尚处自然思维阶段的希腊早期思想,对于人的激情的本体论意义有一种模糊领会。柏拉图理念哲学对自然的超越导致他的激情理论的唯理主义方面;同时他又在《会饮篇》重新发挥爱的本体论意义。这构成其激情理论的神秘主义方面,这两方面并未得到很好统一。亚里士多德和斯多葛派只继承了其中的唯理主义方面,并将其发展成激情理论的一个独立向度,且使之主宰了当时的伦理学和认识论思考。奥古斯丁则在《圣经》神学和柏拉图关于爱的思想基础上否定这种唯理主义,开创了西方激情理论的神秘主义向度,从而造成西方激情理论的分化。后来的西方神秘主义激情理论都是直接或间接地继承、发展了奥古斯丁的相关思想,并对当代西方思想产生了重大影响。     

试析伊斯兰极端主义形成的社会思想根源

伊斯兰教是崇尚和平与发展的宗教。但在当今世界上,假借伊斯兰教之名从事违反人类本性的暴力恐怖活动已成为一种屡禁不止、愈演愈烈的现象。大量事实一再证明宗教极端主义思想是导致暴力恐怖主义重要思想基础之一,而国内政治、地缘政治、世界政治,特别是霸权主义主导的国际干预则是宗教极端主义形成的重要推手。本文在以往研究的基础上,从社会与思想根源的视角和层面就伊斯兰极端主义的表现形态、基本特征和产生根源等问题作了较为深入、系统的学理分析。     

BALDEY: A database of auditory lexical decisions

In an auditory lexical decision experiment, 5541 spoken content words and pseudowords were presented to 20 native speakers of Dutch. The words vary in phonological make-up and in number of syllables and stress pattern, and are further representative of the native Dutch vocabulary in that most are morphologically complex, comprising two stems or one stem plus derivational and inflectional suffixes, with inflections representing both regular and irregular paradigms; the pseudowords were matched in these respects to the real words. The BALDEY (“biggest auditory lexical decision experiment yet”) data file includes response times and accuracy rates, with for each item morphological information plus phonological and acoustic information derived from automatic phonemic segmentation of the stimuli. Two initial analyses illustrate how this data set can be used. First, we discuss several measures of the point at which a word has no further neighbours and compare the degree to which each measure predicts our lexical decision response outcomes. Second, we investigate how well four different measures of frequency of occurrence (from written corpora, spoken corpora, subtitles, and frequency ratings by 75 participants) predict the same outcomes. These analyses motivate general conclusions about the auditory lexical decision task. The (publicly available) BALDEY database lends itself to many further analyses.     

Individual differences in the shape bias in preschool children with specific language impairment and typical language development: theoretical and clinical implications

We investigated whether preschool children with specific language impairment (SLI) exhibit the shape bias in word learning: the bias to generalize based on shape rather than size, color, or texture in an object naming context (‘This is a wek; find another wek’) but not in a non‐naming similarity classification context (‘See this? Which one goes with this one?’). Fifty‐four preschool children (16 with SLI, 16 children with typical language [TL] in an equated control group, and 22 additional children with TL included in individual differences analyses but not group comparisons) completed a battery of linguistic and cognitive assessments and two experiments. In Experiment 1, children made generalization choices in object naming and similarity classification contexts on separate days, from options similar to a target object in shape, color, or texture. On average, TL children exhibited the shape bias in an object naming context, but children with SLI did not. In Experiment 2, we tested whether the failure to exhibit the shape bias might be linked to ability to detect systematicities in the visual domain. Experiment 2 supported this hypothesis, in that children with SLI failed to learn simple paired visual associations that were readily learned by children with TL. Analyses of individual differences in the two studies revealed that visual paired‐associate learning predicted degree of shape bias in children with SLI and TL better than any other measure of nonverbal intelligence or standard assessments of language ability. We discuss theoretical and clinical implications.