民主的概念

The core elements of modern democracy are citizens who share equally in mutually-compatible basic rights, serve as the final decision-makers on the community’s constitution, and choose whom to be entrusted with legislative and executive powers, while at the same time wielding final veto power over the present government. The rule of the majority in modern democracy is no longer a fundamental principle, but rather a derivative principle the validity of which is based on the above-mentioned core elements. Translated by Hu Jinglei from Tianjin Shehui Kexue 天津社会科学 (Tianjin Social Sciences), 2007, (5): 7–12     

Enhancing Justice?

This article focuses on the follow question: Are human enhancement technologies likely to be justice impairing or justice promoting? We argue that human enhancement technologies may not be inherently just or unjust, but when situated within obtaining social contexts they are likely to exacerbate rather than alleviate social injustices.     

On Affectionate Respect in Gender Justice: An Inquiry into the Cultural Abuse of Sex

Phallogocentrism as cultural abuse of sex is a difficult issue that has been addressed by many modem Western feminist philosophers.By comparing their insights with those deriving from Chinese Confucianism and Daoism,I propose the concept of "affectionate respect" as an intellectual counterbalance to phallogocentrism.In this essay,I have discussed certain arbitrary fallacies based on masculine predominance and spotlighted the merits of being female in balancing emotion and reason,justice and fairness,and institutionally-biased powers and the human rights of innate dignity.To achieve gender justice and equality before God and under Heaven must be logically and morally extended to law and politics.     

Mental rotation with egocentric and object-based transformations

Two experiments were conducted to address methodological issues with past studies investigating the influence of egocentric and object-based transformations on performance and sex differences in mental rotation. In previous work, the egocentric and object-based mental rotation tasks confounded the stimulus type (embodied vs. non-embodied) and transformation task (egocentric vs. object-based). In both experiments presented here, the same stimuli were used regardless of the type of transformation but task instructions were modified to induce either egocentric (left–right judgment) or object-based (same–different judgment) processing. Experiment 1 used pairs of letters whereas Experiment 2 presented pairs of line-drawings of human hands. For both experiments, it was hypothesized that the mental rotation slope for response time would be steeper for object-based than for egocentric transformations. This hypothesis was verified in both experiments. Furthermore, Experiment 2 showed a reduced male advantage for egocentric compared to object-based rotations, whereas this pattern was reversed for Experiment 1. In conclusion, the present study showed that the influence of the type of transformation involved in mental rotation can be examined with the same set of stimuli simply by modifying task instructions.     

The Episodic Nature of Experience: A Dynamical Systems Analysis

Context is an important construct in many domains of cognition, including learning, memory, and emotion. We used dynamical systems methods to demonstrate the episodic nature of experience by showing a natural separation between the scales over which within‐context and between‐context relationships operate. To do this, we represented an individual's emails extending over about 5 years in a high‐dimensional semantic space and computed the dimensionalities of the subspaces occupied by these emails. Personal discourse has a two‐scaled geometry with smaller within‐context dimensionalities than between‐context dimensionalities. Prior studies have shown that reading experience (Doxas, Dennis, & Oliver, 2010) and visual experience (Sreekumar, Dennis, Doxas, Zhuang, & Belkin, 2014) have a similar two‐scaled structure. Furthermore, the recurrence plot of the emails revealed that experience is predictable and hierarchical, supporting the constructs of some influential theories of memory. The results demonstrate that experience is not scale‐free and provide an important target for accounts of how experience shapes cognition.     

A Defence of Jury Nullification

In both Great Britain and the United States there has been a growing debate about the modern acceptability of jury nullification. Properly understood, juries do not have any constitutional right to ignore the law, but they do have the power to do so nevertheless. Juries that nullify may be motivated by a variety of concerns: too harsh sentences, improper government action, racism, etc. In this article, I shall attempt to defend jury nullification on a number of grounds. First, I discuss the use of general verdicts and reject their replacement in criminal trials by special verdicts. Second, I examine verdicts based upon mistakes and racial prejudice, turning my attention to perverse verdicts and the question of whether or not juries are guilty of legislating when nullifying the law. Finally, I look at the problem of the awarding of excessive damages by juries. My goal will be to provide a sound theoretical defence of the practice of jury nullification.R. Pound, Law in Books and Law in Action, American Law Review 44 (1910),18.The term jury nullification is synonymous with jury equity. The use of jury nullification has been suspected of playing a role in the infamous trials of O. J. Simpson and Rodney King in the last decade. See People v Simpson, No. BA097211 (Cal. Super. Ct. 1995); People v Powell, No. BA035498 (Cal. Super. Ct. 1991).     

Judicial Responses to Civil Disobedience: A Comparative Approach

In this paper, I compare the extent of Anglo-American judicial engagement in response to civil disobedience with that of the French judiciary. I begin by examining what the civil disobedient can realistically expect to achieve in a court of law. I shall argue that his priority should be to require the judge, acting as a mouthpiece for the law, to respond to his complaints. To do this, the civil disobedient must be able to deny liability for the offence he has allegedly committed by urging a different interpretation of the law on the basis of an alternative -- but plausible -- reading of constitutional or human rights. If the civil disobedient can do this, he can claim a victory of sorts, even if his claims are ultimately unsuccessful. But legal culture can present a further barrier. Judges have different roles in different jurisdictions and therein lie further difficulties for the French civil disobedient.     

Science and Human Behavior translated into Portuguese: Ciência e Comportamento Humano

Science and Human Behavior was translated to Portuguese as part of the effort to begin a psychology course at the University of Brasília 40 years ago; one of the many results of the first visit of Fred S. Keller to Brazil. The book has been used continuously in undergraduate courses in Brazil since 1967.     

Cholinergic modulation of learning and memory in the human brain as detected with functional neuroimaging

The advent of neuroimaging methods such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) has provided investigators with a tool to study neuronal processes involved in cognitive functions in humans. Recent years have seen an increasing amount of studies which mapped higher cognitive functions to specific brain regions. These studies have had a great impact on our understanding of neuroanatomical correlates of learning and memory in the living human brain. Recently, advances were made to go beyond the use of fMRI as a pure cognitive brain mapping device. One of these advances includes the use of psychopharmacological approaches in conjunction with neuroimaging. The paper will introduce the combination of neuroimaging and psychopharmacology as a tool to study neurochemical modulation of human brain function. A review of imaging studies using cholinergic challenges in the context of explicit and implicit learning and memory paradigms is provided which show that cholinergic neurotransmission modulates task-related activity in sensory and frontal cortical brain areas.     

On medicine, culture, and children's basic interests: a reply to three critics

Margaret Mohrmann, Paul Lauritzen, and Sumner Twiss raise questions about my account of basic interests, liberal theory, and the challenges of multiculturalism as developed in Children, Ethics, and Modern Medicine. Their questions point to foundational issues regarding the justification and limitation of parental authority to make decisions on behalf of children in medical and other contexts. One of the central questions in that regard is whether adults' decisions deserve to be respected, especially when they seem contrary to a child's or adolescent's basic interests. Questions about respect, in turn, focus attention on other's decisions about what seems good for families and children, decisions that may be paternalistic or utilitarian. Such decisions are further complicated by a child's or adolescent's budding autonomy and need for respect and recognition. Pediatric bioethics grounded in an account of a child's basic interests produces a theory of negative and positive rights for assessing adults' actions in relation to children, especially (but not only) when adults demand respect in their expressions of care.