bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Scandinavian Historical Writing
Authors: Torstendahl Rolf
Published: January 2018

This chapter looks at Scandinavian historical writing, focusing on how historiography has developed in closely related ways in the three Scandinavian countries: Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. The main periods are 1945–60, 1960–85, and 1985 until today. In the first period, old struggles were brought to an end. In the second, historical research as an individual undertaking was succeeded by large, collective projects on social history relying on sociological theory. In the third, still another enlargement of the field of history became evident, which created a new strain on the unity of the profession. The chapter then demonstrates that Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, despite some national variations, followed remarkably similar post-war trajectories.
Vietnamese Historical Writing
Authors: Pelley Patricia
Published: January 2018

This chapter demonstrates how the process of decolonization and the ensuing separation of Vietnam into a northern and southern state as part of the Cold War in Asia led to different types of history-writing. In both Vietnamese regimes, the writing of history had to serve the state, and in both countries historians emphasized its political function. Whereas North Vietnam located itself in an East Asian and Marxist context, historians of South Vietnam positioned it within a Southeast Asian setting and took a determinedly anti-communist position. After 1986—over a decade after reunification—with past tensions now relaxed, the past could be revaluated more openly under a reformist Vietnamese government that now also permitted much greater interaction with foreign historians.
Settler Histories and Indigenous Pasts: New Zealand and Australia
Authors: Attwood Bain
Published: January 2018

This chapter focuses on historical writing in New Zealand and Australia, which has been transformed since 1945. In the 1950s and 1960s, as the number of academic historians increased exponentially and growing professionalization occurred, a project of constructing a progressive story of masculinist nation-making and nationalism became dominant, while in the 1970s and 1980s, a younger generation of historians—many of them women and first-generation Australians—challenged this triumphant nationalist story of self-realization as they embraced social and cultural history and their emphases on the differences of class, gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. There is one area in which historical writing in New Zealand and Australia has undoubtedly been distinctive, at least in terms of its public impact; namely, that concerning the pasts of the indigenous peoples. The chapter then looks at the historiography of aboriginal–settler relations in Australia and New Zealand.
Epilogue: On the Current and Future State of Historical Writing
Authors: Megill Allan
Published: January 2018

This epilogue argues that historians ought to be able to produce a universal history, one that would ‘cover’ the past of humankind ‘as a whole’. However, aside from the always increasing difficulty of mastering the factual material that such an undertaking requires, there exists another difficulty: the coherence of universal history always presupposes an initial decision not to write about the human past in all its multiplicity, but to focus on one aspect of that past. Nevertheless, the lure of universal history will persist, even in the face of its practical and conceptual difficulty. Certainly, it is possible to imagine a future ideological convergence among humans that would enable them to accept, as authoritative, one history of humankind.
The Growth of Historical Method in Tang China
Authors: Hartman Charles , DeBlasi Anthony
Published: January 2018

This chapter discusses how the full emergence of the centralized, aristocratic state in the seventh century brought about an official historiography that was part of the bureaucracy of that state. Beginning in the Tang, each dynastic court maintained an office of historiography. Over time, a regularized process evolved that, in theory and often in reality, turned the daily production of court bureaucratic documents into an official history of the dynasty. Although this process was ongoing throughout the dynasty, the final, standard ‘dynastic history’ was usually completed after the dynasty's demise by its successor state. Indeed, the very concept of a series of dynastic histories that, taken together, would present an official history of successive, legitimate Chinese states, dates from the eleventh century.
The Birth and Flowering of Japanese Historiography: From Chronicles to Tales to Historical Interpretation
Authors: Bentley John R.
Published: January 2018

This chapter explains how early Japanese historiography seemed to burst suddenly on the historical stage in the beginning decades of the eighth century. Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters) was presented to Empress Genmei in the first month of 712, while Nihon shoki (Chronicle of Japan), Japan's first official historical chronicle, was presented to Empress Gensho in the fifth month of 720. The capital had been moved to a new site, in Nara, in the third month of 710, so the compilation of new histories is perhaps a natural outcome of this move to imitate China by building a permanent capital. However, neither this chronology nor its analysis should be taken at face value. Most scholars agree that the decree of Great King Tenmu issued in the third month of 681 was the impetus for the compilation of both Kojiki and Nihon shoki.
Coptic and Ethiopic Historical Writing
Authors: Witakowski Witold
Published: January 2018

This chapter focuses on how the Christians of Egypt and Ethiopia were closely connected by ecclesiastical bonds for nearly 1,700 years. The connection lasted from the time when Ethiopia's first bishop was consecrated by the Patriarch of Alexandria in the 340s, until the dependence of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church on the Coptic Orthodox Church ended formally in 1951. As a consequence of this long allegiance of the former Church to the latter, contacts in the cultural sphere developed strongly. The chapter shows how Coptic literature was written in two languages: in Coptic itself, written in an original alphabet that was based on the Greek, but expanded with seven letters borrowed from the Demotic writing system to represent sounds that did not exist in Greek; and in Arabic, as after about AD 700 Coptic began to lose its position as the language of the Egyptians.
Islamic Historical Writing, Eighth through the Tenth Centuries
Authors: Robinson Chase F.
Published: January 2018

This chapter discusses how the remarkable achievement of Al Tabari — a young Arab scholar — says something about both his exceptional abilities and energies and the context in which he wrote. His primary education took place against the backdrop of the so-called mihna, a period of over twenty years when a succession of caliphs attempted to impose a measure of theological uniformity through persuasion and coercion. Meanwhile, political and social turbulence at the centre of the polity resulted in the splintering off of provinces that had earlier paid regular tribute to the capitals in Syria and Iraq. What this means is that when Al Tabari was completing a draft of his history, he was surveying two interrelated processes. The first was the emergence of a Sunni scholarly elite that anchored its religious authority in its command of Prophetic Traditions, and second was the dissolution of an imperial order.
The Shaping of Past and Present, and Historical Writing in Rus’, c.900–c.1400
Authors: Shepard Jonathan
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores how Rus' chronicles from the late eleventh century onwards included deeds of princes, town assemblies, invaders, and reverend men and women. These chronicles make up the bulk of the historical writing available for the entire period. Compiled in a few urban centers, they focus on their respective regions and only fitfully offer panoramas of goings on throughout the land of Rus'. They neither formulate nor imply a philosophy of historical development, issuing forth streams of factual data. The one exception is the Povest' Vremennykh Let, a compilation and historical composition looking beyond recorded time to answer fundamental questions. It is both incomparable and significant: incomparable, in that no subsequent work articulated quite such a vision of Rus' as a polity to be held together; significant, in that its text was incorporated into subsequent Rus' chronicles until the sixteenth century.
History, Story, and Community: Representing the Past in Latin Christendom, 1050–1400
Authors: Briggs Charles F.
Published: January 2018

This chapter looks at Latin Christendom's evolution of historical writing, which had issued forth from a few, mostly monastic, centers, and eventually swelled into a substantial river fed by many and diverse tributaries. This expansionary trend in historiography was itself but one small manifestation of a protracted phase of accelerated growth in Europe, beginning in roughly the year 1000 and continuing until the early decades of the fourteenth century. The politically atomized, sparsely populated, and economically nonintegrated society that survived the inner turmoil attending the breakup of the Frankish Empire and the incursions of peoples from North Africa, the Eurasian Steppes, and Scandinavia during the ninth through early eleventh centuries, demonstrated a renewed vitality — spurred in part by the new political and economic conditions, as well as a period of improved climate.
Local Histories
Authors: Hudson John
Published: January 2018

This chapter looks at how local historical writing is prominent in medieval historiography, just as local affairs dominated most lives in the Middle Ages. However, the term and category local history is a modern concept, not a medieval one. Furthermore, even as a modern analytic category, local history can be problematic. One might ask whether the category should include powerful counties but not small kingdoms, or national histories with local sections or brief local elements. In England, the Anglo Saxon Chronicle was primarily concerned with national affairs, but also mentioned events in the particular monasteries where the various versions were written. This could provide curious juxtapositions, emphasizing the separate perception of the local and the national.
Institutional Histories
Authors: Lorge Peter
Published: January 2018

This chapter details how the writing of institutional history proceeded along markedly different tracks in Europe and China, primarily because the men writing those histories and the institutions they were concerned with were very different. In medieval Europe most educated men were religious professionals, who involved themselves in royal or aristocratic court governments because of their class and education. Meanwhile, in China, most educated men pursued learning in order to work for the central, imperial government. Moreover, Chinese levels of education were considerably higher than in Europe or anywhere else in the world, both in literacy and numeracy, yielding an imperial bureaucracy that communicated with itself and its ruler in a highly systematic and nuanced manner. Governments outside of China were far smaller, less coherent, less continuous, and less literate.
The Abbasid and Byzantine Courts
Authors: El Cheikh Nadia Maria
Published: January 2018

This chapter discusses how research into court culture is an essential part of the growth in historical anthropology. The main historiographical developments have focused first, on the ritual and symbolic aspects of rulership; and second, on the personal and domestic world. Any historical investigation of the court faces the problem of definition because courts were so diverse and also because any ruler's court could be different depending on the occasion. This may explain why it is that court studies are almost nonexistent for various periods of Islamic history. This is the same for the Byzantine court as well as the Abbasid society: the Byzantines, like the Abbasids, did not isolate the court as a social and cultural phenomenon worthy of literary attention; rather, court culture was a fact of life which those who lived in it did not feel the need to articulate.
Historical Writing, Ethnicity, and National Identity: Medieval Europe and Byzantium in Comparison
Authors: Innes Matthew
Published: January 2018

This chapter analyzes the wider reverberations of debates about the premodern origins of modern nationalism. It looks at the different ways in which issues of origin and identity were articulated in Western historical writing up to the beginning of the thirteenth century, and Byzantine historiography of the same period. It argues that debate about premodern ethnic and national identity has a specific valency, with its roots in Western modernity. The concepts and questions used in the discussion of premodern ethnicity and national identity are therefore rooted in a Eurocentric framework, so as to avoid misrepresenting ‘ethnic’ and ‘national’ modes of identification when used in premodern Eurasia. These problems are not solely those of interpretation, but are also rooted in the way that the sources for premodern European history are organized and encountered by modern historians.
Historical Writing and Warfare
Authors: Riedel Meredith L. D.
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines how medieval cultures in the East were generally more reticent than Western ones in describing warfare in bloody detail. It looks at how three cultures approached the recording of war very differently. The Tang Chinese histories are formulaic, abstract to the point of statistics; they offer only names and casualty numbers. Byzantine writing about warfare is pragmatic, gives some operational details, and is concerned for the character of commanders, but avoids exalting them. Abbasid war poetry and chronicles glorify the moral superiority of Muslim commanders, especially in comparison to non-Muslim opponents, yet present the brute facts of battles in an epigrammatic way. All three cultures combined accounts of war with the exigencies of religion, which influenced their goals before battle and means of commemoration after battle.
The Epistemology of Yin-Yang Balancing as the Root of Chinese Cultural Traditions
Authors: Li Peter Ping
Published: January 2018

Most Eastern traditional philosophies, such as Taoism, from China, share a set of core themes that constitute a philosophy of wisdom (science–art integration), in contrast to Western philosophies with a focus on knowledge (science–art separation). This chapter argues that the epistemological system of yin-yang balancing is the root of Eastern culture traditions. Building on this theme, the chapter elaborates on the unique features of yin-yang balancing, in contrast to Aristotle’s formal logic and Hegel’s dialectics in the West. It is posited that yin-yang balancing is more sophisticated (rather than naïve) than all dialectical logic for paradox management, since it is the only system that can truly accommodate and appreciate paradox and has the potential to absorb all Western systems into a geocentric (East-meets-West) meta-system. The chapter concludes with an application of yin-yang balancing to the geocentric integration of the Eastern philosophy of wisdom with the Western philosophy of knowledge, toward a new geocentric meta-paradigm.
Culture and Lay Theories of Change
Authors: Zhang Ning , Ji Li-Jun , Guo Tieyuan
Published: January 2018

Lay theories of change refer to beliefs people hold about how events develop over time and are related to each other. This chapter reviews cultural differences in lay theories of change between East Asians and Euro-Americans/Canadians. The overarching theme from the existing research is that East Asians tend to believe more than Westerners that phenomena change in a cyclical way, whereas Westerners tend to believe that events are either relatively stable or develop in a linear fashion. This cultural variation is manifested in a wide range of predictions and decisions. Furthermore, Euro–North Americans are more likely than East Asians to hold linear beliefs about the correspondence between cause and effect in magnitude, and between appearance and reality (e.g., a strong appearance corresponds to a strong internal state). The chapter also discusses the cultural underpinnings of lay theories of change and directions for future research.
Analytic versus Holistic Cognition
Authors: Koo Minkyung , Choi Jong An , Choi Incheol
Published: January 2018

This chapter summarizes research on analytic versus holistic thinking, including locus of attention, causal perception, perception of change, tolerance of contradiction, and categorization—constructs that are widely studied in social psychology and other related fields, such as consumer psychology. The chapter also reviews the literature on the Analysis-Holism Scale (AHS): how it was developed and how it differs from scales that measure other cultural differences (e.g., individualism versus collectivism; independent versus interdependent self; dialectical versus linear self). Empirical evidence supporting the validity of the AHS in various cognitive domains is introduced. The chapter concludes with a review of recently published papers in which the AHS has been validated and utilized for various purposes.
Dialectical Thinking and Its Influence in the World
Authors: Park Joonha , Yamaguchi Susumu , Sawaumi Takafumi , Morio Hiroaki
Published: January 2018

It is often assumed that East Asians, compared with Westerners, try to reshape their personal attitudes and expectations to fit the environment rather than attempting to influence realities. A recent review of the literature revises this idea by suggesting that East Asians, just like Westerners, do attempt to influence existing realities, but via subtly different routes: East Asians employ indirect strategies, seek support from influential others, or take a long-term approach to changing the world via self-improvement. This chapter discusses East Asians’ tendency to employ various tactics in association with dialecticism, and their default cognitive mode of understanding the self, others, and the environment as changeable, connected, and contradictory. Along with collectivist and interdependent cultural characteristics, dialecticism may have additive or interactive effects on control experiences and psychological functioning in East Asia.
Dialecticism and Mental Health
Authors: Wong Y. Joel , Liu Tao
Published: January 2018

Dialecticism, a cultural worldview commonly found in East Asian cultures, embraces the Taoist notion of yin (negative and passive) and yang (positive and active), which represents opposing elements that coexist harmoniously in all things in the world, including the self. This chapter explores four broad areas at the interface of dialecticism and mental health. It begins with a review of research on dialectical lay beliefs about mental health. The influence of dialecticism on mental health outcomes is then analyzed, as well as how dialecticism can be incorporated into conceptualizations and assessments of mental health. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how dialecticism can inform culturally competent clinical interventions. Throughout the chapter, gaps in the literature are identified and future directions given for research on dialecticism and mental health.
The women’s international gamelan group at the Pondok Pekak
Authors: McIntosh Jonathan
Published: January 2018

Balinese gamelan music stresses notions of unity, community and totality that are realized through the interaction of players and instruments. Traditionally considered a male activity, Balinese women now perform gamelan music in sacred and secular contexts. Moreover, the rise of mass tourism and an increase in the number of expatriates living in Bali now means that gamelan music has become an important site for ‘intercultural’ collective music-making. Nonetheless, little research exists concerning this emerging and significant facet of Balinese musical performance, with no studies examining intercultural musical activities of women’s gamelan ensembles. This chapter explores the collective creativity and social agency of an international women’s gamelan ensemble in Bali. Examining how this musical ensemble emerged, the micro processes of orchestral rehearsals and performances, and the relationship between traditional music and dance, this chapter extends research that has focused hitherto on the gamelan ensemble in Bali as a (primarily male) orchestral practice.
Orchestra and song
Authors: Padmanabhan Mekala
Published: January 2018

Orchestras have played a seminal role in creating a vibrant soundscape in Indian films since inception. From the earliest skeletal complement comprising violin, tabla and harmonium in silent films to the dynamic and expansive orchestral colour, timbre and styles of the twenty-first century, Tamil film orchestral sonorities have drawn global attention to the ‘Kollywood sound’. Music directors have adopted a cross-cultural approach to musical composition, enriching film background scores and song interludes while establishing film music’s distinctiveness as a musical genre. This chapter explores the logistical, artistic and creative processes employed by Tamil film music directors to create memorable musical narratives within the cinematic context.
Orchestras and musical intersections with regimental bands, blackface minstrel troupes, and jazz in India, 1830s–1940s
Authors: Shope Bradley
Published: January 2018

This chapter discusses blackface minstrel troupes, British regimental bands and jazz orchestras performing in India from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. It details their challenges and strategies for success, and suggests that their capacity to facilitate cosmopolitan encounters in the wider world contributed to their popularity and value. It first introduces problems and practicalities in maintaining bands performing British military music in India in the mid- and late-nineteenth century. It then briefly introduces the character and scope of ballroom dance music and blackface minstrelsy in urban centres. To end, it examines the character of jazz orchestras between the 1920s and 1940s, detailing the role of the gramophone industry, entertainment venues such as hotel and cinema hall ballrooms, and the Allied military in Calcutta on their growth and profitability. In each example, it articulates thoughts on the role and usefulness of orchestras and notes issues confronting their musicians.
The British symphony orchestra and the Arts Council of Great Britain
Authors: Wolf Benjamin
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores the relationship between British symphony orchestras and the Arts Council of Great Britain. Combining archival research with institutional sociology and cultural economics, it describes how the Arts Council’s demands changed between 1946 and 2000, and how financial and ideological constraints prevented the successful execution of some of these demands. Between 1946 and 1980, symphony orchestras were encouraged to focus on professional performances of the ‘fine arts’ and the performance of music by living composers. Subsequently the 1980s and 1990s witnessed a collapse in traditional ideas of artistic value and a growth in bureaucratized management, with symphony orchestras undergoing time-consuming appraisal procedures, expanding their educational activities and demonstrating limited support for the arts of ethnic minorities. Overall, the chapter suggests that the ideologies of subsidised support were in tension with each other, leading to only partial achievement of the goals that were set out by the Arts Council.
The Fall of Gods
Authors: Gallo Ester
Published: January 2018

The book explores the relationship between colonial history and memory from the perspective of middle- class intergenerational relations. Drawing from a prolonged research conducted with Malayali middle classes in Kerala and in the diaspora, the analysis focuses on how specific historical events are retrieved in the present to shape kinship relations and to legitimize trajectories of class mobility. The book bridges historical analysis of gendered family relations as they developed in colonial and postcolonial times with an anthropological inquiry of the symbolic and material premises of kinship among contemporary middle classes. It provides an ethnographically grounded analysis of how middle-class status in contemporary south India is expressed by recalling family histories, and how remembrance shapes kinship ideals, norms, and experiences in domains as different as houses, conjugality, parenthood, reproduction and family size, intergenerational love and genealogical transmission. The book offers original insights on the continuities and differences between colonial and contemporary middle classes, and the role played by migration and diaspora in both contexts. It originally contributes to two interrelated and undertheorized fields within social sciences. Firstly, it addresses the need to develop further our understanding of how gendered kinship and family relations result from and express class belonging. Secondly, it unravels the complex and ambivalent relation between political history, memory, and the ‘private’ domain of family relations.
The Illam and Its Dispersion
Authors: Gallo Ester
Published: January 2018

Chapter four examines Nambudiri houses and the place they hold in the material phenomenology of kinship memories. Houses are understood here not only as ‘private domestic’ places but as domains where families’ engagement with political history is expressed, visualiszd (or hidden) in internal spatial dispositions, in the presentation of objects, in the daily routine, and in consumption practices. Indeed, houses are conceived as sites where kinship is ‘made’ by either reproducing the past, or by searching a distance from it. The social and symbolic significance of past Illams architecture (Nambudiri ancestral houses) is contrasted with the meanings ascribed to present middle-class dwellings and to the way people choose to inhabit the latter. The relation between gender, class mobility, and kinship will be developed by comparing middle-class Nambudiri men and women narratives.
Skepticism
Authors: Holt Robin
Published: January 2018

This chapter discusses Shakespeare’s The Tempest, specifically Prospero’s experience as a leader. Born into a Dukedom, he is at first naïve, too wedded to his books, losing command and control of Milan. Exiled to an island, but increasingly savvy, he regains pre-eminence and restores his fortunes. But at the very last he voluntarily relinquishes power. Why such a gesture? Using Prospero’s fall, rise and fall anew as a motif, Holt argues that strategic activity has typically been understood as a varying blend of three modes of relating to the world: knowledge, vision, and will. The puzzle of Prospero’s gesture is discussed more generally as a frustration with all three modes, notably in their tendency to remove exponents from the vulnerabilities of ordinary life. Judgment is proposed as an alternative: a skeptical relationship of critique and care in which the concern with ordering well-defined boundaries and asserting organizational distinctiveness give way to more circumspect, unhomely, and particular distributions and associations of resources and people.
Space
Authors: Holt Robin
Published: January 2018

The French writer Georges Perec set out to ascertain everything that happened in a Parisian square. For three days Perec noted all the events he could, especially the incidental, and accidental. He exhausted himself. The chapter discusses the story as exemplifying the inevitable limits to knowledge, and hence to strategy if all strategy concerns itself with is the production and use of knowledge. Measuring, analysing, and depicting a space (environment, market, territory, industry, theatre) does not have to be of the typically measured form, and even when such forms are used, such as structured representational techniques like grids, meaning is carried way beyond the statement of ‘facts’. By understanding the factual reading of space critically, the chapter suggests strategy exponents might envisage using multiple forms of organizing.
Critique
Authors: Holt Robin
Published: January 2018

The grounding work of Immanuel Kant is broached in this chapter, notably the Third Critique in which imagination and reason vie within a social and aesthetic form. The chapter uses scenes from Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves and the painting of Eugene Delacroix, La Mort de Sardanapole, to embody a judging ‘subject’. Throughout this chapter Kant is pitched against the skepticism of David Hume, and it is in the gradual winnowing of Kant’s categories and imperatives that the space for judgment emerges.
Hamlet
Authors: Holt Robin
Published: January 2018

Provoked by Hazlitt, this chapter discusses Hamlet as a spectating figure. For many like Carl Schmitt Hamlet’s inability to decide constitutes a failure of leadership and character—of practical capacity of moral development—and is indicative of what ails modern society. Strategy becomes the capacity to decide, to declare, with the sovereign, what counts and when. Yet Hamlet is far from such a failure. Indeed it is through Hamlet that we witness a figure somehow able to spectate and therefore judge in conditions where others would capitulate to the ease of a decision. In this way, Shakespeare presents a character whose attempts to consider and reconsider himself outside of the comforts of his assigned role as a prince and leader constitute a form of strategic self presentation that is almost peerless in its energy and force.
Good Pastoral
Authors: Holt Robin
Published: January 2018

This last chapter considers the organizational form poetic judgment might take, arguing that in strategic practice it might be productively aligned to forms of the pastoral. In pastoral images there is no completion, and any sense of settlement is always accompanied by the possibility of discord. The chapter revisits the distinction between poetic judgment and practical knowledge associated with phronesis, arguing that it is an acceptance of the disturbance thrown up by experience and skepticism, but a refusal still to let the world decide.
Fluid Dynamics
Authors: Ruban Anatoly I.
Published: January 2018

This is Part 3 of a book series on fluid dynamics. This is designed to give a comprehensive and coherent description of fluid dynamics, starting with chapters on classical theory suitable for an introductory undergraduate lecture courses, and then progressing through more advanced material up to the level of modern research in the field. This book is devoted to high-Reynolds number flows. It begins by analysing the flows that can be described in the framework of Prandtl’s 1904 classical boundary-layer theory. These analyses include the Blasius boundary layer on a flat plate, the Falkner-Skan solutions for the boundary layer on a wedge surface, and other applications of Prandtl’s theory. It then discusses separated flows, and considers first the so-called ‘self-induced separation’ in supersonic flow that was studied in 1969 by Stewartson and Williams, as well as by Neiland, and led to the ‘triple-deck model’. It also presents Sychev’s 1972 theory of the boundary-layer separation in an incompressible fluid flow past a circular cylinder. It discusses the triple-deck flow near the trailing edge of a flat plate first investigated in 1969 by Stewartson and in 1970 by Messiter. It then considers the incipience of the separation at corner points of the body surface in subsonic and supersonic flows. It concludes by covering the Marginal Separation theory, which represents a special version of the triple-deck theory, and describes the formation and bursting of short separation bubbles at the leading edge of a thin aerofoil.
Introspection and reflection
Authors: Zahavi Dan
Published: January 2018

Rejecting the proposal that the aim of phenomenology is to provide refined descriptions of inner experiences, the chapter first discusses Husserl’s distinction between phenomenology and psychology. It next considers his employment of reflection, contrasts his position with that of Bergson, and outlines how Husserl operates with different concepts of reflection, and how a central task of phenomenological analysis is to account for the constitution of the object of consciousness. Phenomenological reflection does not only target experiential structures. It also investigates the object of experience, and the correlational a priori that holds between the experienced object and the different modes of givenness.
Metaphysical neutrality
Authors: Zahavi Dan
Published: January 2018

What is the relation between phenomenology and metaphysics? Is phenomenology metaphysically neutral, is it a kind of propaedeutic to metaphysics, or does it on the contrary have clear metaphysical implications? Chapter 2 examines Husserl’s answers to these questions, as they are articulated in his early pre-transcendental descriptive phenomenology. It is argued, partially through a criticism of Philipse’s interpretation, that Husserl in Logische Untersuchungen did emphasize the metaphysical neutrality of phenomenology, and that he at that point distanced himself from both metaphysical realism and metaphysical idealism (phenomenalism). It is also argued, however, that he eventually came to realize the philosophical limitations of this neutrality.
The Naturalist challenge
Authors: Zahavi Dan
Published: January 2018

The question of how to understand and respond to naturalism has been of concern to phenomenology since its very commencement. How should one assess recent attempts to naturalize phenomenology? Chapter 5 argues that it very much depends on what one means by naturalism, and that Husserl’s own response is less straightforward than one might assume and directly linked to the conception of transcendental philosophy he ended up defending. I first discuss the proposal according to which a naturalization of phenomenology entails abandoning the latter’s transcendental aspirations, and contrast this with Husserl’s well known anti-naturalism. I then introduce the more modest proposal that a naturalization of phenomenology simply entails the attempt to further a productive cross-fertilization between phenomenology and the sciences. I conclude by considering to what extent Husserl might have been willing to fundamentally rethink the very relation between the transcendental and the natural, between the constituting and the constituted.
The Explanatory Autonomy of Cognitive Models
Authors: Weiskopf Daniel A.
Published: January 2018

Psychology and neuroscience offer distinctive ways of modeling the mind/brain. However, cognitive and neural models often have significantly different structures, raising challenging questions about how they should be integrated to provide a complete picture of how the mind/brain system is organized. According to a certain mechanistic perspective, cognitive models should be viewed as being sketchy, incomplete versions of the fuller and more adequate models produced by neuroscience. Psychology is essentially an approximation to the mechanistic explanations given in neuroscience. Cognitive models are inherently inadequate, pending their gaps being filled in by a completed neuroscientific model. I argue that cognitive models are autonomous: they are sufficient in themselves to give adequate explanations of psychological and behavioral phenomena. In particular, they are not mere sketches, or approximations to underlying neuroscientific explanations. I offer a criterion for how psychological entities and processes may be real despite not mapping onto entities in neural mechanisms.
The Whole Story
Authors: Strevens Michael
Published: January 2018

Causal explanations in the high-level sciences typically black-box the low-level details of the causal mechanisms that they invoke to account for their explananda: economists’ black-box psychological processes, psychologists’ black-box neural processes, and so on. Are these black-boxing explanatory models complete explanations of the phenomena in question, or are they just sketches of or templates for the whole explanatory story? This chapter poses a focused version of the question in the context of convergent evolution, the existence of which appears to show that underlying mechanisms are completely irrelevant to the explanation of high-level biological features, including perhaps thought and language—in which case a black-boxing model would be a complete explanation of such features rather than a mere sketch. Arguments for and against such a model’s explanatory completeness are considered; the chapter comes down tentatively against.
Function-Theoretic Explanation and the Search for Neural Mechanisms
Authors: Egan Frances
Published: January 2018

A common kind of explanation in cognitive science might be called function-theoretic: with some target cognitive capacity in view, the theorist hypothesizes that the system computes a well-defined function (in the mathematical sense) and explains how computing this function contributes to the exercise of the cognitive capacity. Recently, proponents of the so-called “new mechanist” approach in philosophy of science have argued that a model of a cognitive capacity is explanatory only to the extent that it reveals the causal structure of the mechanism underlying the capacity. If they are right, then a cognitive model that resists a transparent mapping to known neural mechanisms—as many function-theoretic models do—fails to be explanatory. I argue that a function-theoretic characterization of a cognitive capacity can be genuinely explanatory even absent an account of how the capacity is realized in neural hardware.
Pathogenic idiotypes of autoantibodies in autoimmunity: lessons from new experimental models of SLE
Authors: Shoenfeld Yehuda , Mozes Edna
Published: January 2018

Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is considered a classical autoimmune disease that involves many biological systems. Similar to other autoimmune conditions, its etiology is multifactorial entailing genetic, environmental, hormonal, and immunologic factors. In this review we demonstrate that by using a pathogenic idiotype of anti‐DNA autoantibodies, it is possible to explain some of the pathogenesis and diversity of clinical and serological manifestations reported by SLE patients. The 16/6 idiotype (Id) is a representative pathogenic idiotype of anti‐DNA autoantibodies. The serum titers of 16/6 Id in SLE patients correlate with clinical activity of the disease, and are deposited in afflicted tissues in SLE patients. SLE was experimentally induced in naive mice after immunization with 1 μg of the Id. The disease is characterized clinically (proteinuria), serologically (e.g., anti‐dsDNA, anti‐Sm antibodies), and by pathological findings (e.g., deposition of 16/6 Id in the kidneys). The condition can be induced by other human and mouse antibodies carrying the 16/6 Id, as well as by mouse antimonoclonal‐16/6 Id and by T cell lines and clones specifically reactive with 16/6 Id. There are strain‐dependent differences in susceptibility to the induction of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). Induction of SLE is directly correlated with the ability to respond to the 16/6 idiotype (or 16/6 Id)2 by anti‐Id antibody production. It is easier to induce the disease in females, and it can be modulated by manipulation of sex hormones. Being able to identify the pathogenic idiotype allowed us to generate T suppressor (Ts) cells specific for the 16/6 Id. Treatment of mice with these T cells abrogated the disease. Our studies point to the importance of pathogenic idiotypes of autoantibodies in autoimmunity, which suggests that SLE may represent a dysregulation of a functional network of idiotypes‐anti‐idiotypes interactions among autoreactive B cells, T helper cells, and T suppressor cells.— Shoenfeld, Y.; Mozes, E. Pathogenic idiotypes of autoantibodies in autoimmunity: lessons from new experimental models of SLE. FASEB J. 4: 2646‐2651; 1990.
Diet and metabolic development
Authors: Little Marie‐Térèse E. , Hahn Peter
Published: January 2018

For many years, investigators have been concerned with mechanisms that control and alter genetically regulated development. An intriguing aspect of these mechanisms is the ability of environmental factors to induce certain metabolic processes. Animal studies have shown that dietary manipulation of cholesterol and fatty acid metabolism during development can have persistent and permanent effects. In addition, there appears to be a critical period when changes in the diet can have lasting consequences. The changes in the control exerted by nutritional factors on metabolic development coincide with three phases of development: prenatal, suckling, and weaning. The effects of diet on cholesterol and fatty acid metabolism throughout these three phases of development will be addressed in this review.— Little, M.‐T. E.; Hahn, P. Diet and metabolic development. FASEB J. 4: 2605‐2611, 1990.
Metabolic effects of dietary fructose
Authors: Hallfrisch Judith
Published: January 2018

Fructose, a naturally occurring hexose, is a component of many fruits, vegetables, and sweeteners. Because of the introduction of high fructose corn sweeteners in 1967, the amount of free fructose in the diet of Americans has increased substantially in the last 20 years. Fructose is sweeter, more soluble, and less glucogenic than glucose or sucrose, so it has been recommended as a replacement for these sugars in the diets of diabetic and obese people. Although an acute dose of fructose causes smaller increases in glucose and insulin than a comparable dose of glucose, there are a number of changes after dietary adaptation that may reduce its desirability as a sugar replacement in certain segments of the population. Fructose is absorbed primarily in the jejunum and metabolized in the liver. When consumed in excess of dietary glucose, it may be malabsorbed. Fructose is more lipogenic than glucose or starches, and usually causes greater elevations in triglycerides and sometimes in cholesterol than other carbohydrates. Dietary fructose has resulted in increases in blood pressure, uric acid, and lactic acid. People who are hypertensive, hyperinsulinemic, hypertriglyceridemic, noninsulin‐dependent diabetic, or postmenopausal are more susceptible to these adverse effects of dietary fructose than healthy young subjects. Although consumption of fructose as a component of fruits and vegetables is an unavoidable consequence of eating a healthy diet, added fructose seems to provide little advantage over other caloric sweeteners and compares unfavorably to complex carbohydrates in susceptible segments of the population.— Hallfrisch, J. Metabolic effects of dietary fructose. FASEB J. 4: 2652‐2660; 1990.
Activation of the Notch pathway in Down syndrome: cross‐talk of Notch and APP
Authors: Fischer David F. , van Dijk Renske , Sluijs Jacqueline A. , Nair Suresh M. , Racchi Marco , Levelt Christiaan N. , van Leeuwen Fred W. , Hol Elly M.
Published: January 2018

Down syndrome (DS) patients suffer from mental retardation, but also display enhanced β‐APP production and develop cortical amyloid plaques at an early age. As β‐APP and Notch are both processed by γ‐secretase, we analyzed expression of the Notch signaling pathway in the adult DS brain and in a model system for DS, human trisomy 21 fibroblasts by quantitative PCR. In adult DS cortex we found that Notch1, Dll1 and Hes1 expression is up‐regulated. Moreover, DS fibroblasts and Alzheimer disease cortex also show overexpression of Notch1 and Dll1, indicating that enhanced β‐APP processing found in both DS and AD could be instrumental in these changes. Using pull‐down studies we could demonstrate interaction of APP with Notch1, suggesting that these transmembrane proteins form heterodimers, but independent of γ‐secretase. We could demonstrate binding of the intracellular domain of Notch1 to the APP adaptor protein Fe65. Furthermore, activated Notch1 can trans‐activate an APP target gene, Kai1, and vice versa, activated APP can trans‐activate the classical Notch target gene Hes1. These data suggest that Notch expression is activated in Down syndrome, possibly through cross‐talk with APP signaling. This interaction might affect brain development, since the Notch pathway plays a pivotal role in neuron‐glia differentiation.—Activation of the Notch pathway in Down syndrome: cross‐talk of Notch and APP. Fischer D. F., Van Dijk R., Sluijs J. A., Nair S. M., Racchi M., Levelt C. N., Van Leeuwen F. W., Hol E. M. Activation of the Notch pathway in Down syndrome: cross‐talk of Notch and APP. FASEB J. 19, 1451–1458 (2005)
Using Clinical Questions Asked by Primary Care Providers Through eConsults to Inform Continuing Professional Development
Authors: Archibald Douglas , Liddy Clare , Lochnan Heather A. , Hendry Paul J. , Keely Erin J.
Published: January 2018

Introduction:

Continuing professional development (CPD) offerings should address the educational needs of health care providers. Innovative programs, such as electronic consultations (eConsults), provide unique educational opportunities for practice-based needs assessment. The purpose of this study is to assess whether CPD offerings match the needs of physicians by coding and comparing session content to clinical questions asked through eConsults.

Methods:

This study analyzes questions asked by primary care providers between July 2011 and January 2015 using a service that allows specialists to provide consultation over a secure web-based server. The content of these questions was compared with the CPD courses offered in the area in which these primary care providers are practicing over a similar period (2012–2014). The clinical questions were categorized by the content area. The percentage of questions asked about each content area was calculated for each of the 12 specialties consulted. CPD course offerings were categorized using the same list of content areas. Percentage of minutes dedicated to each content area was calculated for each specialty. The percentage of questions asked and the percentage of CPD course minutes for each content area were compared.

Results:

There were numerous congruencies and discrepancies between the proportion of questions asked about a given content area and the CPD minutes dedicated to it.

Discussion:

Traditional needs assessment may underestimate the need to address topics that are frequently the subject of eConsults. Planners should recognize eConsult questions as a valuable source of practice-associated challenges that can identify professional development needs of physicians.