老虎保护公众意识态度变化研究

本研究以问卷调查的方式对上海市中学生,中医药大学生、和普通公众的老虎保护意识进行了对比调查和纵向调查,以评估国际野生生物保护协会亚洲保护交流项目的“拯救虎虎”公众意识宣传教育活动的效果。     

The Curriculum as a Standard of Public Education

This contribution first searches for historical and empirical evidence for whether and how curricula act or acted as a measure of public education. The problem is explicated on account of a short history of curriculum work and distinguished in a analytical, a political, programmatical and practical discourse of curriculum work. Curriculum work always underlies premises of planning, learning and effects. Three models are finally developed and brought in touch with the different discourses. Curriculum work proves to be an attempt to make publicly acceptable the empirically impossible accountability of schools.     

王夫之“阴阳向背”说的本体意义

王夫之阴阳十二位向背是根据乾坤并建之体的性质及体用一源的原理引申、推论出来的,他用这一原理来批评象数学的机械排比和框定,并用事物的自然自足、自立自全的性质,证明《序卦传》的三种卦序说不能成立,为自己独特的卦序说奠立基础。他要证明的哲学原理是,显现有向背,阳阳无或缺;本体所具有的性质与功能,同时就具于个体之中,个体因此而有了主体性、能动性,和自由地独立活动的品格。     

“易象”新说——兼论《周易》原有《象经》问题

论文对古代典籍所载"易象"一名作了新的解读。认为所谓"易象",仅是当时《周易》的另一种称谓而已,它并不神秘;"易象"与今本《象传》没有直接联系,尚无渊源,《象传》"演德","易象""尊礼尚施",至汉代仍保存有以古礼诠释《周易》的传统;古代《周易》原有《象经》,或以《卦下易经》当之,惜已不传;但在清人的《易》著中,至今仍可见其传承的轨迹。     

Perspective-taking and depth of theory-of-mind reasoning in sequential-move games

Theory-of-mind (ToM) involves modeling an individual's mental states to plan one's action and to anticipate others' actions through recursive reasoning that may be myopic (with limited recursion) or predictive (with full recursion). ToM recursion was examined using a series of two-player, sequential-move matrix games with a maximum of three steps. Participants were assigned the role of Player I, controlling the initial and the last step, or of Player II, controlling the second step. Appropriate for the assigned role, participants either anticipated or planned Player II's strategy at the second step, and then determined Player I's optimal strategy at the first step. Participants more readily used predictive reasoning as Player II (i.e., planning one's own move) than as Player I (i.e., anticipating an opponent's move), although they did not differ when translating reasoning outcome about the second step to optimal action in the first step. Perspective-taking influenced likelihood of predictive reasoning, but it did not affect the rate at which participants acquired it during the experimental block. We conclude that the depth of ToM recursion (related to perspective-taking mechanisms) and rational application of belief-desire to action (instrumental rationality) constitute separate cognitive processes in ToM reasoning.     

QUANTUM PHYSICS AND THEOLOGY: JOHN POLKINGHORNE ON THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS

Abstract Thought experimentation is part of accepted scientific practice, and this makes it surprising that philosophers of science did not seriously engage with it for a very long time. The situation changed in the 1990s, resulting in a highly intriguing debate over thought experiments. Initially, the discussion focused mostly on thought experiments in physics, philosophy, and mathematics. Other disciplines have since become the subject of interest. Yet, nothing substantial has been said about the role of thought experiments in nonphilosophical theology. This paper discusses the role of thought experiments in Christian theology in comparison to their role in quantum physics, as mentioned by John Polkinghorne in Quantum Physics and Theology. We first look briefly at the history of the inquiry into thought experiments and then at Polkinghorne's remarks about the role of thought experimentation in quantum physics and Christian eschatology. To determine the actual importance of thought experiments in Christian theology a number of new examples are introduced in a third step. In the light of these examples, in a fourth step, we address the question of what it is that explains the cognitive efficacy of thought experiments in quantum physics and Christian theology.     

Immobility reaction at birth in newborn infant

Objective

To describe an immobility reaction (IR) that was not previously reported at or immediately after birth in human newborns.

Method

We analyzed 31 videos of normal term vaginal deliveries recorded from Time 0 of birth defined as the as the moment that lies between the birth of the thorax and the pelvis of the infant. We searched for perinatal factors associated with newborn's IR.

Results

IR at birth was observed in 8 of the 31 newborns. The main features of their behavior were immobilization, frozen face, shallow breathing and bradycardia. One of the 8 newborns had sudden collapse 2 h after birth. We found significant relationships between maternal prenatal stress (PS) and IR (p = .037), and a close to significant one between infants’ lividness at Time 0 and IR (p = .053). The first breath of the 31 newborns occurred before and was not associated with the first cry (p < .001).

Discussion

The main features of IR at birth are similar to those of the universal most severe response to severe stress or danger. The relationship with PS suggests that children who had IR at birth might be at risk for similar disorders as those associated with PS. Sudden neonatal collapse of one of the IR newborns needs further research to determine if they are at risk for sudden infant death syndrome.

Conclusion

This first report of an IR reaction at birth in human infants could open up new paths for improving early neonatal care. Further research is needed for maternal PS, stress hormones, umbilical cord blood pH measurements in IR newborns. The challenge of education and support for parents of IR newborns is outlined.     

Constructive criticism: An evaluation of Buller and Hardcastle's genetic and neuroscientific arguments against Evolutionary Psychology

David Buller and Valerie Hardcastle have argued that various discoveries about the genetics and nature of brain development show that most “central” psychological mechanisms cannot be adaptations because the nature of the contribution from the environment on which they are based shows they are not heritable. Some philosophers and scientists have argued that a strong role for the environment is compatible with high heritability as long as the environment is highly stable down lineages. In this paper I support this view by arguing that the discoveries Buller and Hardcastle refer to either do not show as strong a role for the environment as they suggest, or these discoveries show that the brain's developmental process depends in many cases on input from the environment that is highly stable across generations.     

The moral behavior of ethics professors: Relationships among self-reported behavior,expressed normative attitude,and directly observed behavior

Do philosophy professors specializing in ethics behave, on average, any morally better than do other professors? If not, do they at least behave more consistently with their expressed values? These questions have never been systematically studied. We examine the self-reported moral attitudes and moral behavior of 198 ethics professors, 208 non-ethicist philosophers, and 167 professors in departments other than philosophy on eight moral issues: academic society membership, voting, staying in touch with one's mother, vegetarianism, organ and blood donation, responsiveness to student emails, charitable giving, and honesty in responding to survey questionnaires. On some issues, we also had direct behavioral measures that we could compare with the self-reports. Ethicists expressed somewhat more stringent normative attitudes on some issues, such as vegetarianism and charitable donation. However, on no issue did ethicists show unequivocally better behavior than the two comparison groups. Our findings on attitude-behavior consistency were mixed: ethicists showed the strongest relationship between behavior and expressed moral attitude regarding voting but the weakest regarding charitable donation. We discuss implications for several models of the relationship between philosophical reflection and real-world moral behavior.     

Empiricism,probability, and knowledge of arithmetic: A preliminary defense

The topic of this paper is our knowledge of the natural numbers, and in particular, our knowledge of the basic axioms for the natural numbers, namely the Peano axioms. The thesis defended in this paper is that knowledge of these axioms may be gained by recourse to judgments of probability. While considerations of probability have come to the forefront in recent epistemology, it seems safe to say that the thesis defended here is heterodox from the vantage point of traditional philosophy of mathematics. So this paper focuses on providing a preliminary defense of this thesis, in that it focuses on responding to several objections. Some of these objections are from the classical literature, such as Frege's concern about indiscernibility and circularity (Section 2.1), while other are more recent, such as Baker's concern about the unreliability of small samplings in the setting of arithmetic (Section 2.2). Another family of objections suggests that we simply do not have access to probability assignments in the setting of arithmetic, either due to issues related to the ω-rule (Section 3.1) or to the non-computability and non-continuity of probability assignments (Section 3.2). Articulating these objections and the responses to them involves developing some non-trivial results on probability assignments (Appendix A–Appendix C), such as a forcing argument to establish the existence of continuous probability assignments that may be computably approximated (Theorem 4 Appendix B). In the concluding section, two problems for future work are discussed: developing the source of arithmetical confirmation and responding to the probabilistic liar.