我们应该“创造生命”吗？

人造细胞是现代生物科学技术中的热点问题之一,由人造细胞及其衍生出来人造生命的伦理问题也备受关注,关于是否应该继续研究人造生命,支持者和反对者之间各执其词。以克莱格·文特“创造人造细胞”事件为切入点,回顾了人造生命的历史,简要介绍人造细胞的产生过程,分析人造细胞的正面和负面影响;同时提出马克思主义哲学可以为医学伦理问题的研究提供不同的维度与角度,让人们对人造细胞产生的道德问题做出更全面的判断。     

Capturing Children's Response to Parental Conflict and Making Use of It

To read this article's abstract in both Spanish and Mandarin Chinese, please visit the article's full-text page on Wiley InterScience ( http://interscience.wiley.com/journal/famp ).
The aim of our study is to examine the interface between children's physiological changes and the specificities of parental conflict, and to develop a procedure in which such information can be shared with the family for therapeutic change. Children from 20 families were exposed to parental conflict discussion (CD) while their arousals were measured through skin conductance and heart rate sensors. It was found that regardless of the subject of the argument, 80% of the time they were complaining about each other. Likewise, 80% of the time the children were responding to the parents' own interpersonal tension, including moments of silence. The protocol established for the study, consisting of CD and debriefing, was found to be a powerful tool in moving parents toward conflict resolution.     

Gricean Communication and Transmission of Thoughts

Gricean communication is communication between utterers and their audiences, where the utterer means something and the audience understands what is meant. The weak transmission idea is that, whenever such communication takes place, there is something which is transmitted from utterer to audience; the strong transmission idea adds that what is transmitted is nothing else than what is communicated. We try to salvage these ideas from a seemingly forceful attack by Wayne Davis. Davis attaches too much significance to the surface structure of sentences of the type ‘S communicates the belief (desire …) that p to A’ by assuming that the communicated entity is denoted by the grammatical object following ‘communicates’. On our proposal, what is communicated in all Gricean cases is a thought. And since S communicates the thought that p to A only if S means that p and A understands what S means, the thought that p will be transmitted from S to A.     

The ontology of meanings

In part 4 of Meaning, Expression, and Thought, Davis rejects what he calls Fregean ideational theories, according to which the meaning of an expression is an idea; and then presents his own account, which states that, e.g., the meaning of ‘Primzahl’ in German is the property of meaning prime number. Before casting doubt on the latter ontology of meanings, I come to Frege’s defence by pointing out that he was not an advocate of the position Davis named after him because Fregean senses are not lexical meanings and Fregean thoughts are not types of mental events.

Kant on Infinite and Negative Judgements: Three Interpretations,Six Tests,No Clear Result

Topoi - In his table of judgements, Kant added infinity as a third quality. An infinite judgement ‘All S are non-P’ is said to differ from the affirmative ‘All S are P’...     

Towards a neural basis of music perception

Music perception involves complex brain functions underlying acoustic analysis, auditory memory, auditory scene analysis, and processing of musical syntax and semantics. Moreover, music perception potentially affects emotion, influences the autonomic nervous system, the hormonal and immune systems, and activates (pre)motor representations. During the past few years, research activities on different aspects of music processing and their neural correlates have rapidly progressed. This article provides an overview of recent developments and a framework for the perceptual side of music processing. This framework lays out a model of the cognitive modules involved in music perception, and incorporates information about the time course of activity of some of these modules, as well as research findings about where in the brain these modules might be located.     

Equivalent testimonies as a touchstone of coherence measures

Over the past years, a number of probabilistic measures of coherence have been proposed. As shown in the paper, however, many of them do not conform to the intuitition that equivalent testimonies are highly coherent, regardless of their prior probability.     

浅析阿尔贝特·施韦泽的医学伦理人格

阿尔贝特·施韦泽作为20世纪西方社会中极具影响力的人物，他所主张的敬畏生命的伦理思想固然值得我们今天学习研究、发扬光大，而他作为一名著名医学家，他传奇智慧的人生中所进行的一系列医学实践活动，更是展示了他热爱生命、热爱人类、热爱医学、富有理想、淡泊名利、甘于奉献医学的高尚医学伦理人格、炽热的医学伦理情怀，更值得我们当今每一位医务工作者和在校医学生敬仰、学习。     

The impact of violations on uncertainty and the consequences for attractiveness

This investigation aimed at extending past research on expectation violations by arguing that violations vary both in valance and in their influence on uncertainty and that the combination of valence and uncertainty states conjointly influences judgments of a violator's social attractiveness. In explaining the predicted variance in uncertainty following violations, a distinction is proposed between congruent violations (i.e., behaviors that are more intense instantiations of a previously displayed message) and incongruent violations (i.e., behaviors that are opposite in meaning from previously displayed messages). Five models for explaining violation effects are contrasted. Results (a) confirm that violations differ in their impact on uncertainty, (b) generally support the validity of the proposed distinction between congruent and incongruent violations, and show that the inclusion of uncertainty and valence in models of violation outcomes accounts for greater variance in social attraction than either one separately.