bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Merging genotyping-by-sequencing data from two ex situ collections provides insights on the pea evolutionary history
Authors: Pavan Stefano , Delvento Chiara , Nazzicari Nelson , Ferrari Barbara , D’Agostino Nunzio , Taranto Francesca , Lotti Concetta , Ricciardi Luigi , Annicchiarico Paolo
Published: January 2022

Pea (Pisum sativum L. subsp. sativum) is one of the oldest domesticated species and a widely cultivated legume. In this study, we combined next generation sequencing (NGS) data referring to two genotyping-by-sequencing (GBS) libraries, each one prepared from a different Pisum germplasm collection. The selection of single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) loci called in both germplasm collections caused some loss of information; however, this did not prevent the obtainment of one of the largest datasets ever used to explore pea biodiversity, consisting of 652 accessions and 22 127 markers. The analysis of population structure reflected genetic variation based on geographic patterns and allowed the definition of a model for the expansion of pea cultivation from the domestication centre to other regions of the world. In genetically distinct populations, the average decay of linkage disequilibrium (LD) ranged from a few bases to hundreds of kilobases, thus indicating different evolutionary histories leading to their diversification. Genome-wide scans resulted in the identification of putative selective sweeps associated with domestication and breeding, including genes known to regulate shoot branching, cotyledon colour and resistance to lodging, and the correct mapping of two Mendelian genes. In addition to providing information of major interest for fundamental and applied research on pea, our work describes the first successful example of integration of different GBS datasets generated from ex situ collections – a process of potential interest for a variety of purposes, including conservation genetics, genome-wide association studies, and breeding.
Starch content changes and metabolism-related gene regulation of Chinese cabbage synergistically induced by Plasmodiophora brassicae infection
Authors: Ma Yinbo , Choi Su Ryun , Wang Yu , Chhapekar Sushil Satish , Zhang Xue , Wang Yingjun , Zhang Xueying , Zhu Meiyu , Liu Di , Zuo Zhennan , Yan Xinyu , Gan Caixia , Zhao Di , Liang Yue , Pang Wenxing , Lim Yong Pyo
Published: January 2022

Clubroot is one of the major diseases adversely affecting Chinese cabbage (Brassica rapa) yield and quality. To precisely characterize the Plasmodiophora brassicae infection of Chinese cabbage, we developed a dual fluorescent staining method for simultaneously examining the pathogen, cell structures, and starch grains. The number of starch (amylopectin) grains increased in B. rapa roots infected by P. brassicae, especially from 14 to 21 days after inoculation. Therefore, the expression levels of 38 core starch metabolism genes were investigated by quantitative real-time PCR. Most genes related to starch synthesis were up-regulated at 7 days after P. brassicae inoculation, whereas the expression levels of starch degradation-related genes were increased at 14 days after inoculation. Then, genes encoding the core enzymes involved in starch metabolism were investigated by assessing their chromosomal distributions, structures, duplication events, and synteny among Brassica species. Genome comparisons indicated that 38 non-redundant genes belonging to six core gene families related to starch metabolism are highly conserved among Arabidopsis thaliana, B. rapa, Brassica nigra, and Brassica oleracea. Previous genome sequencing projects have revealed that P. brassicae obtained host nutrients by manipulating plant metabolism. Starch may serve as a carbon source for P. brassicae colonization, as indicated by histological observations and transcriptomic analysis. Results of this study may elucidate the evolution and expression of core starch metabolism genes and provide researchers with novel insights into the pathogenesis of clubroot in B. rapa.
Comparative transcriptomic analysis on compatible/incompatible grafts in Citrus
Authors: He Wen , Xie Rui , Wang Yan , Chen Qing , Wang Hao , Yang Shaofeng , Luo Ya , Zhang Yong , Tang Haoru , Gmitter Frederick G , Wang Xiaorong
Published: January 2022

Grafting is a useful cultivation technology to resist abiotic and biotic stresses and is an integral part of citrus production. However, some widely utilized rootstocks may still exhibit graft incompatibility in the orchard. ‘Hongmian miyou’ (Citrus maxima (Burm.) Merrill) is mutated from ‘Guanxi miyou’, but these two scions showed different compatibility with available Poncirus trifoliata rootstock. Foliage etiolation is an observed symptom of graft incompatibility, but its mechanism remains poorly understood. This study is the first to investigate the morphological, physiological, and anatomical differences between compatible and incompatible grafts, and perform transcriptome profiling at crucial stages of the foliage etiolation process. Based on comprehensive analyses, hormonal balance was disordered, and two rate-limiting genes, NCED3 (9-cis-epoxycarotenoid dioxygenase 3) and NCED5, being responsible for ABA (abscisic acid) accumulation, were highlighted. Further correlation analysis indicated that IAA (indole-3-acetic acid) and ABA were the most likely inducers of the expression of stress-related genes. In addition, excessive starch accumulation was observed in the lamina and midribs of leaves of incompatible grafts. These results provide a new insight into the role of hormonal balance and ABA biosynthesis genes in regulating and contributing to graft incompatibility, and will further define and deploy candidate genes to explore the mechanisms underlying citrus rootstock–scion interactions.
The activation of gene expression and alternative splicing in the formation and evolution of allopolyploid Brassica napus
Authors: Li Mengdi , Hu Meimei , Xiao Yafang , Wu Xiaoming , Wang Jianbo
Published: January 2022

Allopolyploids contain two or more sets of subgenomes. To establish a compatible relationship between subgenomes, a series of gene expression changes has occurred in allopolyploids. What evolutionary changes have taken place in transcripts of Brassica napus during its early establishment and subsequent evolution is a fascinating scientific question. Here, we study this issue using a set of materials (natural and resynthesized B. napus and their progenitors/parents) and long-read RNA sequencing technology. The results showed that more genes were upregulated in resynthesized B. napus compared with its two parents, and more upregulated expressed genes were observed in natural B. napus than in resynthesized B. napus. The presence of upregulated genes in an organism may help it to adapt to the influence of “genomic shock” and cope with the natural environment. Isoforms are produced from precursor mRNAs by alternative splicing (AS) events, and more than 60% of the isoforms identified in all materials were novel, potentially improving the reference genome information for B. napus. We found that the isoform numbers and the numbers of genes potentially involved in AS and alternative polyadenylation increased in B. napus after evolution, and they may have been involved in the adaptation of plants to the natural environment. In addition, all identified isoforms were functionally annotated by searching seven databases. In general, this study can improve our overall understanding of the full-length transcriptome of B. napus and help us to recognize the significant changes in gene expression and isoform abundance that have occurred in allopolyploid B. napus during evolution.
Deaths Among U.S. Air Force Basic Military Trainees, 2008-2020
Authors: Butler Cody R , Kasper Korey B , Huggins Robert A , Cropper Thomas Leo , Frankel Dianne N , Pawlak Mary T , Casey Theresa , Casa Douglas J
Published: January 2022

Introduction

The U.S. Air Force (USAF) Basic Military Training (BMT), a rigorous training program for all enlisted members of the USAF, trains roughly 36,000 recruits annually. Transforming civilians into ready warrior airmen has inherent risks to trainee health, which has infrequently included death. While the average death rate at USAF BMT has decreased between 1956 and 2007 due to process improvement and preventive medicine efforts, further review is warranted to examine the deaths that have occurred since the last published period (1997-2007) and to determine the impact policy changes and updates have had on death rates since that time. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to identify death rates and types from 2008 to 2020, explore policy implementation, and identify areas needing further improvement or modifications to the overall safety, fitness, and health of USAF BMT trainees.

Materials and Methods

All deaths were examined and reviewed from 2008 through 2020 for trainees attending the USAF BMT using medical records and autopsy reports. Death rates were calculated using the total population of trainees in a given year as well as over the entire 13-year study period.

Results

From 2008 to 2020, five deaths occurred among USAF BMT trainees (one cardiac, two exertional sickling due to sickle cell trait, one infection, and one suicide). This resulted in an overall average death rate of 1.08 per 100,000 trainees, as compared to 1.46 per 100,000 from 1997 to 2007. The last death in the study period occurred in 2016.

Conclusion

A modest downward trend of average death rate has continued since 2007, and no deaths from 2016 through 2020 represents the longest time frame without any deaths at USAF BMT over all times reported (dating back to 1956) which suggest that emergency best practice policies are/have improved. However, cardiac death rate and suicide rate have not changed since the last report. Policies and practices should be continuously reviewed and refined to reduce the risk of death at USAF BMT.
Using Contact-Based Education to Reduce Diabetes-Related Stigma Among Medical Residents in a Military Health System
Authors: Wan WingYee , Kravchenko Maria , Wardian Jana
Published: January 2022

Introduction

Healthcare provider-related stigma against patients with diabetes is associated with worse doctor–patient relationships and patient self-care. A previous feasibility study showed benefit in using a contact-based education approach to improve attitudes of medical students toward patients with diabetes. We hosted a panel of people who had personal experience with diabetes. The panel was attended by internal medicine residents in a military health system. We compared diabetes-related stigma among the residents before and after the panel.

Materials and Methods

Panel participants included a Black male active duty service member diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, a Black veteran with type 2 diabetes, and a White woman with two sons who have type 1 diabetes. During a 1 hour panel for medicine residents, these panelists were asked to discuss their personal experiences with diabetes, common misconceptions regarding diabetes, and what they wish healthcare providers understood about diabetes. The validated Diabetes Attitude Scale-3 (DAS-3) questionnaire, which assesses diabetes-related attitudes based on a five-point Likert scale (strongly agree = 5, strongly disagree = 1), was given to the trainees before and after the panel. The survey also collected demographic information and contained short-answer questions about personal experiences with diabetes and diabetes-related stigma. Survey responses were linked with identifier questions to preserve anonymity.

Results

Twelve participants completed both the pre- and post-panel survey. Seven were female (58%), 10 were White (83%), and eight were from suburban communities (67%). Mean scores improved for all five DAS-3 subscales scores, with the largest improvement in the Patient Autonomy subscale (4.12 to 4.4), followed by Psychosocial Impact of Diabetes Mellitus (4.34 to 4.56), Seriousness of Non-Insulin Dependent Diabetes Mellitus (4.27 to 4.44), Need for Special Training (4.52 to 4.68), and Value of Tight Control (4.07 to 4.10).

Conclusions

Contact-based education can be considered as a tool for reducing diabetes-related stigma among medical trainees.
Historicizing Resilience
Authors: Haldon John
Published: January 2022

In this chapter, the concept of “resilience” is introduced. Applying C. S. Holling's theory of adaptive change to the idea that the Byzantine Empire was “always collapsing,” the chapter offers various ways in which this can be used to understand sociopolitical frameworks within which empires and communities move through history. By showing the persistence of Byzantine institutions faced with the rise of the Abbasids and the adaptability of the identities of the people living in frontier zones, the chapter argues for a more holistic approach to questions of collapse, conquest, and continuity by taking into account the fact that these developments occurred in the context of a large and unyielding ecosystem. Whether or not a political institution collapsed—or was brought to its knees by outside forces—is invariably the result not just of human agency or military contingency but of a dynamic interplay of a great number of often uncontrollable phenomena.
Hope and Honor
Authors: Einwohner Rachel L.
Published: January 2022

Holocaust accounts typically cast Jewish victims as meek, going “like sheep to the slaughter.” Given such portrayals, people ask, “Why didn’t Jews resist?” But Jews did resist, staging armed uprisings in ghettos and camps throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. This book’s goal is not to dispel the myth of Jewish passivity; however, it instead argues that Jewish resistance deserves explanation. Research on social movements shows that protest occurs when protesters have an opportunity for action and both the material resources and belief in themselves to get their protest off the ground, but members of Jewish resistance movements lacked these factors. So why did they fight back? Using methods of comparative-historical sociology, the book answers this question by comparing three Jewish ghettos during World War II: Warsaw (site of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943), Vilna (where activists planned for armed resistance in the ghetto but could not achieve that goal), and Łódź (where no plans for armed resistance emerged). It finds that resistance rested on Jews’ assessments of the threats facing them, and especially on their hope for survival. Somewhat ironically, armed resistance took place only once activists reached the critical conclusion that they had no hope for survival and saw such resistance as the best response to their situation. These findings have implications for other examples of resistance under extreme conditions, such as prison riots and rebellions of enslaved people.
Fighting for Honor in the Warsaw Ghetto
Authors: Einwohner Rachel L.
Published: January 2022

Chapter 3 explains how framing and assessments of threat led to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. It shows that while the ghetto residents were initially unaware of the Nazi regime’s genocidal plans, they eventually came to believe that they would not survive the ghetto. This conclusion of hopelessness was critical to the emergence of two youth-led resistance organizations, the Jewish Fighting Organization (Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa, or ŻOB) and the Jewish Military Union (Żydowski Związek Wojskowy, or ŻZW), who advocated armed resistance. Equally importantly, these youth activists framed resistance as something that would not save Jewish lives, but instead would allow Jews to choose a dignified and honorable death rather than a passive acceptance of their murder. Thus, assessments of the situation as both hopeless yet amenable to an honorable death facilitated the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
Saving the Folk
Authors: Drake Jamil W.
Published: January 2022

Chapter 4 examines the Myrdal-Carnegie Negro Problem Study of the late 1930s, on cusp of World War II. It concentrates on the study’s work on religion by discussing the works of Guy Johnson and Allison Davis, a Black social anthropologist. Davis studied a variety of religious cultures in Natchez, Mississippi, such as Pentecostal, Holiness, and Spiritualism. Although he did not use the folk category, Davis nevertheless used “cultural lag” to frame what he took to be lower-class religion. He argued that these emotional, cathartic lower-class religions contributed to the maintenance of the “caste and class” system that subjugated Black and the poor populations in Mississippi Delta. Davis adds to Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal’s perspective that the lower-class religion of the rural folk populations was considered a “pathology” and consequently hindered the struggle for racial democracy, otherwise known as the “American Creed.” Thus, Davis, along with Johnson, supported Myrdal’s view that Black religion was not a source of salvation within the contours of the American republic. Rather, he felt that the welfare state could do for Black people and the broader southern economy what Black religion could not. Yet, the folk category simplified the complexity of Black religious expression and politics. It is difficult to assign religious practices to homogeneous racial and class demographics in the Delta. But in the end, this chapter argues that the Negro Problem Study generated the idea of the rural folk roots of the religion of poverty that was migrating to the urban North with the emerging “cults and sects.”
Preserving the Folk
Authors: Drake Jamil W.
Published: January 2022

Chapter 5 examines the field recordings of John Lomax in the Fisk University–Library of Congress Coahoma Study in Mississippi in 1941. It shows how Lomax’s use of the folk category contrasted with that of the liberal-minded social scientists in the previous chapters. Folk did not signal a culturally deficient population. Rather, it revealed the vibrant and rich religious and blues traditions among rural Blacks. Yet, this chapter argues that his agrarianism recycled the liberal-minded social scientific view of the folk that cast the religious cultures of the populations as isolated from modern society, particularly urbanization, mechanization/industrialization, and education. This is why he had a hard time in Clarksdale, particularly at the Baptist Convention, where the choir performed choral arrangements and outside vendors sold “gospel blues” sheet music. His view that folk was the natural and pure sounds of the rural Black communities betrayed how his recording sessions were manufactured due to his affiliation with government. Additionally, songsters like “Muddy Waters” demanded their money from him after their recording sessions. In the end, this chapter argues that Lomax’s romantic nationalism fell into the same traps of the liberal-minded social scientists.
Listening to British Nature
Authors: Guida Michael
Published: January 2022

This cultural history of early twentieth-century Britain shows how the sounds and rhythms of the natural world were listened to, interpreted, and used amid the pressures of modern life. The book argues that despite and sometimes because of the chaos of wartime and the struggle to recover, nature’s voices were drawn close to provide everyday security, sustenance, and a sense of the future. Nature’s sonic presences were not obliterated by the noise of war, the advent of radio broadcasting, and the rush of the everyday, rather they came to complement and provide alternatives to modern modes of living. This book examines how trench warfare demanded the creation of new listening cultures in order to understand danger and to imagine survival. It tells of the therapeutic communities who used quiet and rural rhythms to restore shell-shocked soldiers, and of ramblers who sought to immerse themselves in the sensualities of the outdoors. It shows how home front listening in the Blitz was punctuated by birdsong, broadcast by the BBC. In focusing on the sensing of sounds and rhythms, this study demonstrates how nature retained its emotional potency as the pace and unpredictabilities of life seemed to increase and new man-made sounds and sonic media appeared all around. To listen to nature, in relation to the changing soundscape of the modernizing world, was to cultivate an intimate connection with its vibrations and to sense an enduring order and beauty that could be part of the future.
Introduction
Authors: Guida Michael
Published: January 2022

Listening, as a way of paying attention to the natural environment and understanding its status and meanings, is the subject of this book. It exposes the significance of the sounds of nature in everyday lives in relation to the changing soundscape of the modernizing world. In part this is a history of the sounds of early twentieth century Britain, but more importantly it is a history of listening to and interpreting those sounds because with this emphasis I have been able to re-think our understanding of which sounds were significant in the social, cultural and private lives of the people of Britain. By focusing on listening attention, the book reveals the highly interconnected relationship between nature and modern life—that nature’s musicality, energy and tranquilities were highly valued and drawn close despite and sometimes because of the surrounding intensity of man-made or machine sounds.
The rambler’s search for the sensuous
Authors: Guida Michael
Published: January 2022

By examining the habits and experiences of walking in the countryside, moors, and mountains a deeply sensual public connection to nature is found in this chapter. Listening is part of this, but so too are touching and other sensory encounters. While rambling on one hand was an escape from the trials of urban and working life, it is argued that the weekend excursions that so many Britons participated in are better thought of as an exchange and balancing out of different sensations available in different places. Having said that, it was encounters with heather, streams, and rock formations that set the pulse racing. Rambling was by no means simply a search for peace and quiet, or for hilltop contemplation, rather walkers relished the accentuation of body rhythms and the stimulation that came from direct interaction with the natural environment.
Modern birdsong and civilization at war
Authors: Guida Michael
Published: January 2022

The modernization of listening is explored through the work of the German nature sound recordist and wartime broadcaster, Ludwig Koch, whose birdsong programmes were known to millions of adults and children during WWII. The sound of birdsong on the airwaves was not tainted by the cultural divisions that human music and speech could provoke in listeners; rather it struck a patriotic note and provided solace on the home front. The potency of birdsong during wartime is demonstrated when senior establishment figures ruminate about the possibility of appeasing Hitler by broadcasting the song of a nightingale to Germany. It is argued that these men were inspired by a vision of civilization strengthened by the presence of birds, whose voices they believed could express British moral values better than human ones.
The Power of Performance
Authors: Noë Alva
Published: January 2022

This chapter details one of the performances in the exhibition “Move: Choreographing You” at the Hayward Gallery in London's Southbank Centre in 2010. The exhibition looked at the way performance and visual art intersect and collaborate. In one of the performances, the audience entered Queen Elizabeth Hall while the performers were already on the stage. Xavier Le Roy, the choreographer, then addressed the audience and encouraged everyone to have a conversation, including the performers. There was no use of amplification during the show, so everyone had to try very hard to make themselves heard. Conversation is not just talking; it is a dynamic of shared attention and listening. Ultimately, what the audience experienced in the theater was a simple, uncontrived, spontaneous group phenomenon. And it had to with politics and power: speakers sought to project their personal power into the situation. Indeed, what the audience experienced was a kind of political theater.
Irrational Man
Authors: Noë Alva
Published: January 2022

This chapter reviews Woody Allen's Irrational Man (2015), which tells the story of an alcoholic philosophy professor who arrives one summer to take up a teaching gig at an idyllic, elite liberal arts college. One of the charms of Allen's movies is the way he puts people on display in what they say. His movies are driven by conversation. In his enacted conversations, one gets to see not only what people think about themselves as well as about each other but also how they choose to show themselves in their social worlds. Irrational Man is no different. But much of the conversation in this movie is philosophical; it is quasi-Socratic dialogue, and what is enacted are arguments and justifications for people's actions. Do ends justify means? Are people free to do what they want? Are people free to act according to their own, perhaps entirely individual, conception of what is right? Much of what gets illuminated in Allen's cinematic conversations—as in the conversations of a genuine philosophical dialog—is never said aloud and perhaps cannot be made explicit.
RoboCop’s Philosophers
Authors: Noë Alva
Published: January 2022

This chapter discusses RoboCop (2014). It is difficult to find an argument for one side or the other of the artificial intelligence debate in RoboCop. On the surface, the movie seems to buy into an opposition between the rational mind and the emotional soul; the latter makes humans special, whereas the former is shared by man and machine. But it is possible to read the movie as pulling the rug out from under that simple-minded opposition. Alex, the hero robot cop, comes out of the lab an unfeeling drone, acting automatically, according to program. But gradually he takes form as a person with values, memories, projects, and feelings. Perhaps the film's real focus, like that of the original of which it is a remake, is the criticism of corporate capitalism. The movie makes the argument that there are dangers attached to technology whatever stand one takes on the more philosophical problems, especially in the setting of capitalism.
Pointing the Way to Liberation in Star Trek: Voyager
Authors: Noë Alva
Published: January 2022

This chapter analyzes Star Trek: Voyager (1995–2001). Until recently, the Star Trek franchise has always been a fantasy about a better future, with clean technology, human rights, food replicators, and the health and wealth and moral vision to explore strange new worlds in a search for knowledge. But it has also always been a vision of a future in which people's lives are structured in almost military-like power hierarchies. Voyager breaks with all that, or tries to. The puzzle at the heart of Voyager is that the crew is cast away, lost in space, and so they are not so much set adrift as set free. The chapter then reflects on the terrifying and tragic loss of Malaysian Airlines 370. It also considers the idea of balancing the complicated demands of life in the information age.
An Awkward Synthesis
Authors: Noë Alva
Published: January 2022

This chapter examines Pete Docter’s Inside Out (2015), the playful and ambitious story of the emotional life of a young girl, Riley, who is uprooted when her parents move to a new city so that her father can take up a job. René Descartes offered, but did not endorse, the idea that the body is a ship and the self resides in the body the way a ship's pilot does. Meanwhile, David Hume advanced the idea that there is no self, that what we call the self is in fact just a bundle of perceptions, feelings, and ideas. Contemporary cognitive science combines these two ideas in a most awkward synthesis: we are our brain, which in turn is modeled not as a self but as a vast army of little selves, or agencies, whose collective operations give rise to what looks from the outside like a single person or animal; but some of the events happening inside of us really are ours. Inside Out unfolds more like a textbook presentation of the awkward synthesis than by providing any insight into what it is like to be Riley or any other person. The chapter then assesses the role of gender in the film.
The Philosophical Eye
Authors: Noë Alva
Published: January 2022

This chapter describes the painter Adolph Menzel, who devoted himself to the task of making pictures. Plato thought of the painter as merely recording an image that was delivered to the senses. It is easy to make a picture of anything, he wrote; one simply holds a mirror up to it. The human action of seeing is, for Plato, also akin to holding up a mirror to the world. What one sees are nothing but images. Enter Menzel, whose work embodies a commitment to the refutation of this Platonic idea. The sketches of this compulsive and unstoppable artist, no less than his oil paintings and his gouaches, are not so much documentations of what there is as investigations of the way we manufacture our own experience. Ultimately, what Menzel teaches is that art can be a way of doing philosophy.
Is It Okay if Art Is Boring?
Authors: Noë Alva
Published: January 2022

This chapter discusses whether it is okay if art is boring. Works of art, in all their variety, afford us the opportunity for boredom—and they do so when everything in our lives mitigates against boredom. Art's boredom, like philosophy's, is a valuable boredom. This boredom itself is an aspect of art's work, its power to disrupt and, in disrupting, reveal us to ourselves. But works of art do not just present themselves as obscure and out of focus. They also must give the audience the resources that they require to make sense of them. Works of art, then, are contractually guaranteed opportunities to move from not seeing to seeing, or from not getting it to getting it. Boredom can be a symptom of the fact that we are out of our comfort zone.
How to Love a Fake
Authors: Noë Alva
Published: January 2022

This chapter begins by describing how the venerable New York art dealer Knoedler and Company had sold forty paintings purported to be by Rothko, Pollock, de Kooning, and others but that were actually counterfeits made by a man in a Queens garage. We value paintings for their own qualities. If we also admire the painter, this is only because he or she managed to make those objects whose value is otherwise manifest. Perhaps then we should think of painting on what can be called the architecture model. What matters is the distinct achievement of the artist's conception, a conception than can be realized in different ways. Why suppose that a work is a fake or a copy just because the artist him- or herself did not actually make it? What makes a fake a good one is that it realizes, or investigates, or approximates an artist's contribution. It makes a move in a space of possibilities opened up by him or her. It is the very fact of the forgery's success that ensures that what the forger is doing is relevant to the original artist's work and so, at least potentially, a contribution to it.
Monuments
Authors: Noë Alva
Published: January 2022

This chapter looks at monuments, which, as a general rule, obscure the conditions of their own production; they redirect our attention to the person or event they memorialize. Observers do not generally view the monument thinking about the artists. It is distinct power of memorials—it is their point, really—that they obscure their partisan and parochial origins. To destroy a Leonardo is to hurt Leonardo's legacy and to damage our grasp on his historical situation. But to destroy a monument to Robert E. Lee is to hurt his legacy and not that of the responsible artist—and it is to alter our felt relation to Lee’s time and place, rather than the time and place of the manufacture of his memorial. There are all sorts of exceptions to these generalizations: the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, in Washington, DC, for all that it is a memorial, is actually very much associated with Maya Lin, its creator. The chapter then considers the ongoing debate about memorials to the Confederacy.
Bowie, Cheesecake, Sex, and the Meaning of Music
Authors: Noë Alva
Published: January 2022

This chapter addresses the idea that music has a history, looking at David Bowie's 2013 song “Where Are We Now?” Gary Marcus says that music is a kind of cognitive cheesecake: it is a refined craft for tickling the brain by acting on reward systems sensitive to repetition and novelty. The cheesecake theory of music treats music as like a species of masturbation. And masturbation has no history. The good that it delivers is unchanging; it is perfect as it is, and for the simple reason that the mechanics of orgasm are fixed by our basic body plan. To this, it will be objected that the pleasures induced by fat, sugar, and orgasm may be stable, but the means available to us for achieving these ends—the techniques, practices, technologies, and perversions—are indeed always evolving, and with the same rapidity, and so history, as in any other area of technology. Music, from this standpoint, is an evolving technology for auto-titillation and reward. Change in music is technological change—not change in what we like but change in how we get it.
Dylan’s Literature
Authors: Noë Alva
Published: January 2022

This chapter describes how Bob Dylan was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature. Dylan is a rock star, or a folk singer, or a pop musician. He is not a writer, neither of fiction nor of poetry or drama. Pop music and literature are as different as painting is different from filmmaking. The chapter then considers how Dylan himself takes on the question of his relation to literature in his Nobel Prize lecture, which has been published in the form of a recording. As a young person in grammar school, he read many great books, and some of them impressed him deeply. He asserts that he engages themes from these books in his own songs. Dylan then adds that songs are made for singing the way Shakespeare's lines are made to be performed onstage.
You Say “Tomato”
Authors: Noë Alva
Published: January 2022

This chapter highlights the Variation Effect, which is a very important yet poorly understand human phenomenon. Variety occurs not only at the level of regions and populations. It is a mark either of stupidity or arrogance to be unable or unwilling to accommodate one's manner of speech to the circumstances in which one finds oneself. As variation plays a central role in biological evolution, it also plays a fascinating role in the evolution of languages. To perceive or cognize the world at all is to be sensitive to the way patterns of variation allow for invariance to show up for us. We achieve access to what is invariant not because we are blind to variation but because we are so fluent in our mastery of variation that we can let it recede for us and rest in the background. In these ways, we come to appreciate that perception is at bottom an aesthetic achievement.
Art at the Limits of Neuroscience
Authors: Noë Alva
Published: January 2022

This chapter assesses the limitations of neuroscience in bringing art into focus. Neuroscientists working on art almost universally assume what can be called the trigger conception of art. According to the trigger conception, artworks are stimuli that trigger a special kind of event—the aesthetic experience—in us. But artworks do not trigger aesthetic experiences, because aesthetic experiences are not episodes in consciousness like sensory episodes that start and stop, anchored in exposure to a stimulus. In a sense, they are not experiences as the term is used in consciousness research and philosophy. Aesthetic experience, insofar as it is a phenomenon at all, is critical. It unfurls in a space of thought and talk—that is, a space of criticism—and so, in an important sense, in a shared space. Aesthetic experiences are not private or individual; they are social. Indeed, aesthetic experience is something persons, not brains, undertake, and they do so always in the setting of others and against the background of a culture and a history.
All Thumbs at Communication
Authors: Zaharna R.S.
Published: January 2022

Chapter 1 examines how U.S. public diplomacy’s repeated failures to reach global publics exposed in real time the fallacy of a singular notion of “communication.” The chapter reveals how the dominant view of communication, far from being universal, is a template based on a distinctly Western, individual-level notion of communication as separate senders and receivers. The dominance of the template has overshadowed critical dynamics of relational and holistic understandings of the communication experience found in many of the world’s intellectual heritages. In a radical break from national and culture-based models of communication that simply insert different behavior patterns into the individual-level template, the chapter sketches three relations-based logics of communication. Each logic—the Individual, the Relational, and the Holistic—contains distinctive elements that help create a comprehensive vision of the human communication experience. The chapter concludes with key take-away points for Boundary Spanners.
Enhancing Collaboration
Authors: Zaharna R.S.
Published: January 2022

In Chapter 6, the book returns to the question of how to navigate global connectivity and leverage diversity to enhance our capacity for collaboration. Because the logics are pan-human and linked to our evolutionary capacity to cooperate, the logics are not mutually exclusive but instead are complementary and necessary for the functioning of human societies. The chapter adopts a mindset of connectivity and diversity and introduces the technique of layering or blending the unique strengths of the logics. The Individual logic reflects the power of speech and expands collaboration through storytelling. The Relational logic reflects the power of emotion and expands collaboration through empathy. The Holistic logic reflects the power of synchrony and expands collaboration through creative synergy. The chapter draws upon illustrative examples of the power of each logic and its ability to enhance collaboration from everyday diplomacies from around the world during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Unreasonable Healthy Eating Efforts
Authors: Barnhill Anne , Bonotti Matteo
Published: January 2022

This chapter employs the accessibility conception of public reason to critically assess healthy eating efforts in liberal democracies and identify respects in which these efforts may be unreasonable, i.e. publicly unjustified and therefore illegitimate. In order to do so, the chapter disaggregates the concept of ‘evaluative standards’ that is central to the accessibility conception of public reason in order to develop a categorization of evaluative standards that allows us to explain in what sense different types of healthy eating efforts may be unreasonable. According to this categorization, unreasonable healthy eating efforts may violate one or more of the following categories of evaluative standards: prescriptive epistemic evaluative standards, descriptive factual evaluative standards, descriptive metaphysical evaluative standards, and prescriptive moral evaluative standards. For each category, the chapter provides concrete examples related to actual healthy eating efforts.
Conclusion
Authors: Barnhill Anne , Bonotti Matteo
Published: January 2022

This chapter concludes the book by providing a summary of the key themes examined throughout it and by outlining three areas of investigation that we believe will deserve further attention in future research on food policy. First, while in this book we have only briefly surveyed key debates in political philosophy in relation to healthy eating efforts, before zooming in on the public reason lens, we believe that future research should also focus on other areas at the intersection between political philosophy and public health ethics, such as the ideas of ‘food freedom’ and ‘food democracy’. Second, while our analysis has focused on healthy eating efforts, the resources of political philosophy can and should also be employed to evaluate other areas of food policy, including policies promoting food security, food equity, and food sovereignty. Third, more work is needed to identify ways of integrating the normative analysis of policies (such as our public reason framework) into policymaking processes. This will require closer interaction amongst political philosophers, public health ethicists, and public policy scholars, and could be married with innovative methodologies for policy design and evaluation, including systems approaches and design thinking.
Harold Arlen
Authors: Wilder Alec
Published: January 2022

Not as well known as some of the great songwriters, Harold Arlen was a highly original composer with a distinctive style that displayed the strong influence of African American music. Indeed, his best-known songs date from his years he wrote for the Cotton Club in Harlem. Arlen is perhaps most famous for writing “Over the Rainbow” for the film The Wizard of Oz, but this song is not representative of Arlen’s unique style. This chapter explores some of his best work, including some that challenge the listener beyond normal expectations.
Additional Songs and Composers
Authors: Wilder Alec
Published: January 2022

This chapter provides accessible analysis to fifty-three songs that were not included in Alec Wilder’s original edition of 1972. Much has changed in fifty years. Some songs have risen in stature while others have fallen. Outstanding songs by Black and women composers, many of which were unfairly passed over in their day, have been rediscovered. Some songs have proven themselves to be excellent vehicles for improvisation and have accordingly become jazz standards. The relevance to the American Songbook of composers such as George M. Cohan and Sigmund Romberg might not have seemed apparent in 1972, but it is now. Finally, Wilder, a formidable songwriter in his own right, did not include any of his own material in the 1972 publication. Ten of Wilder’s songs have been included with analysis and musical examples.
An Introduction to Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion
Authors: Stewart Jon
Published: January 2022

This work attempts to give a basic introduction to Hegel’s religious thinking by seeing it against the backdrop of the main religious trends in his own day that he was responding to, specifically the Enlightenment and Romanticism. The study provides an account of the criticism of religion by key Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire, Lessing, Hume, and Kant. This is followed by an analysis of how the Romantic thinkers, such as Rousseau, Jacobi, and Schleiermacher, responded to these challenges. For Hegel, the views of these thinkers from both the Enlightenment and Romanticism tended to empty religion of its content. The goal that he sets for his own philosophy of religion is to restore this lost content. A detailed account is given of Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, with an eye to the issue of the content of religious faith. It is argued that the basic ideas of the Enlightenment and Romanticism are still present today and that this remains an important issue for both academics and non-academics, regardless of their religious orientation.
Forerunners of the Christian Conception of the Divine: Judaism and Greco-Roman Polytheism
Authors: Stewart Jon
Published: January 2022

This chapter is dedicated to Hegel’s analysis of Judaism and Greco-Roman polytheism in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. In his account of the world religions, Hegel first treats the religions of nature, which conceive of the divine as an object of nature. Then he turns to the religions of spirit, which have a conception of the divine as a self-conscious entity. Here he treats Judaism and the colourful polytheistic religions of Greece and Rome. Since the religions of spirit are the closest to Christianity, Hegel is keen to show how they are superior to the religions of nature, but how they still fall short of the absolute religion. The key lies in their content, specifically, in their conceptions of the divine. An account is given of the role of God as a Creator and a God of justice and righteousness in Judaism. This is contrasted to the conception of the divine in the religions of nature. An account is given of Hegel’s interpretation of the Greek oracles as a voice of nature. Hegel also explores the important element of the Greek religion in art and especially sculpture. Hegel believes that in the concrete historical situation in the Roman world, people perceived a great sense of alienation with their external world, which was oppressive. This is found in their relation to the Roman emperor. The sense of alienation prepares the ground for Christianity and its message of reconciliation.
The Omission of Islam
Authors: Stewart Jon
Published: January 2022

One of the great mysteries about Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion is why he does not dedicate a special analysis to Islam in the same way that he does to the other religions. This chapter examines this question along with Hegel’s general understanding of Islam. According to Hegel, the basic conception of the divine in Islam is the unitary God. Given this, it is understandable that he is at pains to distinguish Islam conceptually from the two other great monotheistic religions: Judaism and Christianity. In contrast to Jehovah of Judaism, Allah is an inclusive, universal God who has a relation to all human beings not just a specific group. In contrast to Christianity, Islam with its insistence on the unity of the divine, radically rejects the empirical realm of particularity. God is what is infinite, absolute, and true, whereas the mundane world is transitory, corrupt, and of no ultimate value. The key difference between Christianity and Islam, according to Hegel, lies in the fact that the former recognizes the validity of the particular, without this impinging on or compromising the universal; specifically, through the person of Christ, the truth of the particular is accorded its due. Nevertheless Islam has an important role to play in the development of history, according to Hegel’s understanding.
The Reception of Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion
Authors: Stewart Jon
Published: January 2022

In the years immediately following Hegel’s death, the main points of contention about his thought in general involved the interpretation of his philosophy of religion. Even during Hegel’s own lifetime, his philosophy was attacked for being inconsistent with Christianity. This chapter outlines the various debates that centred on three main issues: the immortality of the soul, the personhood of God, and the divinity of Christ. It is argued that the labels traditionally used to characterize the Hegelian schools, that is, right and left Hegelianism, have long contributed to an oversimplification and distortion of this period in the history of ideas. In the debates themselves there are many cases of overlapping and crisscrossing of positions that render this form of categorization impossible. Hegel’s explicit statements about religion leave little room for ambiguity about his conscious goal with the lectures: to demonstrate the philosophical truth of Christianity and to restore the truth of the Christian dogmas which had been under attack ever since the Enlightenment.