bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
A K+-sensitive AND-gate dual-mode probe for simultaneous tumor imaging and malignancy identification
Authors: Wang Qiyue , Li Fangyuan , Liang Zeyu , Liao Hongwei , Zhang Bo , Lin Peihua , Liu Xun , Hu Shen , Lee Jiyoung , Ling Daishun
Published: April 2022

Although molecular imaging probes have the potential to non-invasively diagnose a tumor, imaging probes that can detect a tumor and simultaneously identify tumor malignancy remain elusive. Here, we demonstrate a potassium ion (K+) sensitive dual-mode nanoprobe (KDMN) for non-invasive tumor imaging and malignancy identification, which operates via a cascaded ‘AND’ logic gate controlled by inputs of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and fluorescence imaging (FI) signals. We encapsulate commercial K+ indicators into the hollow cavities of magnetic mesoporous silica nanoparticles, which are subsequently coated with a K+-selective membrane that exclusively permits the passage of K+ while excluding other cations. The KDMN can readily accumulate in tumors and enhance the MRI contrast after systemic administration. Spatial information of the tumor lesion is thus accessible via MRI and forms the first layer of the ‘AND’ gate. Meanwhile, the KDMN selectively captures K+ and prevents interference from other cations, triggering a K+-activated FI signal as the second layer of the ‘AND’ gate in the case of a malignant tumor with a high extracellular K+ level. This dual-mode imaging approach effectively eliminates false positive or negative diagnostic results and allows for non-invasive imaging of tumor malignancy with high sensitivity and accuracy.
A systematic review of iodine intake in children, adults, and pregnant women in Europe—comparison against dietary recommendations and evaluation of dietary iodine sources
Authors: Bath Sarah C , Verkaik-Kloosterman Janneke , Sabatier Magalie , ter Borg Sovianne , Eilander Ans , Hora Katja , Aksoy Burcu , Hristozova Nevena , van Lieshout Lilou , Tanju Besler Halit , Lazarus John H
Published: April 2022

Context

Adequate iodine intake is essential throughout life. Key dietary sources are iodized salt and animal products, but dietary patterns in Europe are changing, for example toward lower salt intake and a more plant-based diet.

Objective

To review iodine intake (not status) in European populations (adults, children, and pregnant women) to identify at-risk groups and dietary sources.

Data sources

PubMed, Embase, and Cochrane databases, as well as European national nutrition surveys were searched for data on had iodine intake (from dietary assessment) and sources of iodine, collected after 2006.

Data selection

In total, 57 studies were included, comprising 22 national surveys and 35 sub-national studies. Iodine intake data were available from national surveys of children aged <10 years (n = 11), 11–17 years (n = 12), and adults (n = 15), but data from pregnancy were only available from sub-national studies.

Results

Iodine intake data are lacking—only 17 of 45 (38%) European countries had iodine-intake data from national surveys. Iodine intake reported from national surveys was below recommendations for: (1) children aged <10 years in 2 surveys (18%), (2) boys and girls aged 11–17 years in 6 (50%) and 8 (68%) surveys, respectively, and (3) adult men and women in 7 (47%) and 12 (80%) surveys, respectively. In pregnant women, intake was below recommendations except where women were taking iodine-containing supplements. Just 32% of national surveys (n = 7) included iodized salt when estimating iodine intake. Milk, dairy products, fish, and eggs were important contributors to intake in many countries, suggesting limited sources in plant-based diets.

Conclusion

Results are limited by the challenges of dietary assessment for measuring iodine intake. Future national surveys should include iodine intake. Policy makers should consider dietary sources alongside any iodized salt policies when considering methods for improving population iodine intake.

Systematic Review Registration

PROSPERO 2017 CRD42017075422.
The Concept of Life’s Meaning
Authors: Metz Thaddeus
Published: April 2022

The author of this chapter critically discusses views about what at least analytic philosophers have in mind when reflecting on what makes life meaningful. He first demonstrates that there has been a standard view of that, according to which meaningfulness involves the actions of persons, ones that exhibit a high desirability characteristically present in ‘the good, the true, and the beautiful’ and absent from the cases of Sisyphus or the Experience Machine. Then, he addresses five recent challenges to the standard view. He concludes that the standard view should be revised to accommodate judgements that animal lives can exhibit a limited meaning, groups of human persons can exhibit substantial meaning, and there is a difference between mundane and great meaning possible in the life of a person. However, he resists radical suggestions that meaningfulness never inheres in people’s actions, but only in information, or that it need not be positive, but can be negative.
Can Neuroscience Shed Light on What Constitutes a Meaningful Life?
Authors: Hacker P. M. S.
Published: April 2022

To investigate whether cognitive neuroscience can actually illuminate the meaning of life, the notions of finding meaning in life and living a meaningful life are first explained. The limits of the explanatory potentialities of cognitive neuroscience are then explored. It is then argued that, contrary to the view of Paul Thagard, explaining what constitutes a meaningful life and why it does so lie beyond the purview of cognitive neuroscience. To suppose that there could be a natural science of meaning in life is a form of scientism, that is, an extension of scientific methods beyond their proper domain of application.
Theism and Meaning in Life
Authors: Mawson T. J.
Published: April 2022

This chapter examines meaningfulness in life as significance. It argues that there are two sorts of significance, subjective significance and objective significance. Subjective significance is a matter of how much something is cared about, and objective significance is a matter of how objectively valuable something is relative to suitable comparators. Given these understandings and in critical conversation with the work of Williams and Kahane, the chapter draws out the assumptions on which human lives may be argued to be more significant in both these senses if there’s a God than if there’s not, and endorses these assumptions (in one case, somewhat tentatively), arguing indeed that, on them, one may say that individuals’ lives have infinite significance in both senses if there is a God and only finite significance in both senses if there is not.
The Rationality of Suicide and the Meaningfulness of Life
Authors: Cholbi Michael
Published: April 2022

A wide body of psychological research corroborates the claim that whether one’s life is (or will be) meaningful appears relevant to whether it is rational to continue living. This chapter advances conceptions of life’s meaningfulness and of suicidal choice with an eye to ascertaining how the former might provide justificatory reasons relevant to the latter. Drawing upon the recent theory of meaningfulness defended by Cheshire Calhoun, the decision to engage in suicide can be understood as a choice related to life’s meaningfulness insofar as an individual can see no point in investing her agency in her anticipated future. These meaning-based reasons relevant to suicidal choice either cannot be reduced to the reasons of well-being that philosophers have typically used to analyse suicide decisions or at least forms a distinct class of reasons within those that contribute to well-being.
Psychological Approaches to Life’s Meaning
Authors: Baumeister Roy F.
Published: April 2022

Intended to provide an overview of psychological research on life’s meaning for a philosophical readership, this chapter reviews multiple lines of enquiry. People find meaning in diverse places, so the questions (needs for meaning) may be more constant than the answers. Self-rated meaningfulness often emphasizes family, love, work, and religion, some of which seem little more than basic animal drives embellished with meaningfulness. Self-rated meaningfulness rises and falls in response to mundane events, increasing after seeing simple orderly patterns and while performing routines, and decreasing after interpersonal rejection. Searching for meaning is largely uncorrelated with finding or having it. Applying meaning to life may increase its incompleteness. Self-rated happiness correlates with meaningfulness, but important differences exist, including differential relevance of goal satisfaction, time span, interpersonal relations, stressful involvements, and self-expression.
The Experience of Meaning
Authors: Kauppinen Antti
Published: April 2022

Recently, psychologists have started to distinguish between three kinds of experience of meaning. Drawing on philosophical as well as empirical literature, the author of this chapter argues that the experience of one’s own life making sense involves a sense of narrative justification, so that not just any kind of intelligibility suffices; the experience of purpose includes enthusiastic future-directed motivation against the background of a global sort of hopefulness, or the resonance of what one does right now with one’s values; and finally, the experience of significance consists primarily of feelings of pride and fulfilment, which construe one’s own actions as making a positive difference to the world or as mattering to someone who matters to one. Mutually exclusive philosophical views of what makes lives meaningful could all be simultaneously correct about the fittingness of these different kinds of experience.
Meaning in Life and Phoniness
Authors: Landau Iddo
Published: April 2022

Many people complain that phoniness causes, or contributes to causing, life to be insufficiently meaningful. In this chapter, the author explores the relation between phoniness and meaning in life, arguing that the former sometimes enhances rather than undermines the latter. After typifying phoniness and distinguishing it from neighbouring notions (e.g. lying, deceiving, being hypocritical), the author discusses the ways in which phoniness undermines life’s meaning. He then discusses common reactions to phoniness and claims that two of them are preferable to others. He argues that the prevalence and degree of phoniness can be easily exaggerated, and that phoniness sometimes protects or even increases, rather than undermines, meaning in life. Hence, some of the efforts to combat phoniness are unhelpful. Occasionally, there is also reason to doubt their motivation. However, since in many cases phoniness does diminish life’s meaning, there is need for a nuanced understanding of the relation between the two.
Pessimism, Optimism, and Meaning in Life
Authors: Benatar David
Published: April 2022

This chapter examines pessimistic and optimistic views about life’s meaning. To this end, it engages three broad questions. First, what is one asking when one asks whether life has meaning? Different possible questions are differentiated, and the relevant ones highlighted. Second, what constitutes optimism or pessimism about life’s meaning? Optimists and pessimists can disagree about whether life has a specified kind of meaning, or they can disagree about whether the presence or absence of such meaning is good or bad. Competing understandings of optimism and pessimism are discussed. Third, how optimistic or pessimistic should one be about life’s meaning? It is argued that while one should be optimistic that life has some meaning, one should be pessimistic about how much meaning life has. It would be better if individuals’ lives were much more meaningful than they actually are.
The Palestine Question: From the Balfour Declaration to the Deal of the Century
Authors: Ghanim Honaida
Published: April 2022

The colonial framework introduced a central perspective into Palestinian studies in the context of addressing Zionism, Zionist relations with the Palestinian entity, and the creation of the question of Palestine. This chapter explores the rise and shifts of the Palestinian question from the Balfour Declaration to the “deal of the century.” Informed by a sociohistorical approach, the chapter discusses historical shifts and analyzes the Palestine question within relations of interplay and entanglement with the Zionist project and, later, with the state of Israel. It focuses on the sociological dimensions of the Palestine question at the intersection of settler colonialism, theology, and state-making, on the one hand, and indigenous resistance, national struggle, and pragmatism, on the other.
Political Ideologies in the Middle East and North Africa
Authors: Browers Michaelle
Published: April 2022

This review of research on political ideologies in the Middle East and North Africa analyzes both historical connections among ideological traditions and the conceptual particularities of and variations among the development of some of the main ideologies in the region over time. The author critically engages some of the predominant narratives about the course of ideological thinking in the region, including varying accounts about its onset and sources and debates over whether it has ended and, if so, the character of what has followed. Methods proposed for studying regional ideologies and scholarship that employs conceptions of non-ideological movements and ideologies as dispositions or everyday practices are also examined.
The Social Life of Nonprofit and Third Sector in the Middle East
Authors: Challand Benoît
Published: April 2022

The chapter reconstructs the moments and turning points in which the themes of “not-for-profit” and “third sector” emerge as a basis for the creation of new institutions and new types of social research, both in the Western and Middle Eastern contexts. Such institutions are connected to the (re-)emergence of the theme of civil society in the 1990s in Middle Eastern studies and request a critical reappraisal since the blooming of these concepts was deeply connected to the spread of neoliberal ideology and practices. The chapter maps the various origins of civil society, some in Arab philosophy, and the recent trends in the use of these concepts in the Middle East as well as in academic and professional literature dedicated to the third sector. It shows how a rich internal debate around civil society has existed within the Middle East itself, disproving theories that civil society is only a “Western” concept or practice. The chapter finally argues that, like civil society, the third sector entails a zone of shadow and exclusions.
The Politics of Education
Authors: Mirshak Nadim N.
Published: April 2022

This chapter starts by providing an overview of education in the Middle East and North Africa. Taking Egypt as its main case study, it argues that despite the increasing investments and growth in educational access and attainment, the region still faces endemic problems. These include poor-quality education, the mismatch of skills and labor market requirements, poor teaching conditions, persistent social and economic inequalities, authoritarian and violent education, and challenges specific to the ongoing conflicts and refugee crisis. The chapter then critically analyzes two of the most cited reform recommendations, namely developing education systems conducive to the requirements of the global market and the private sector, and the expansion of educational technology. The chapter concludes by arguing for adopting a political sociological outlook that considers power, politics, and education to be inherently intertwined. Only then could one properly envision alternatives to transform education in the region.
Youth Unemployment and Alienation in the Middle East
Authors: De Bel-Air Françoise
Published: April 2022

The chapter highlights the structural reasons behind the persistence of youth unemployment in the Mashreq and the Gulf Cooperation Council countries. Youth unemployment is a major focus of public policymaking in the region, especially since 2011. In a political demography approach, which uses labor and population statistics, the chapter questions, deconstructs, and re-politicizes the issue of youth unemployment. The demonstration questions the prominence of graduates’ unemployment. It also highlights the scale of inactivity, which compounds unemployment among youth, especially women. Youth unemployment incurs “waithood” and delayed adulthood and underscores youth’s political alienation from the social contract. The chapter concludes that the main obstacle to channeling young Arabs to sustainable employment is political by essence. It is structurally incompatible with the current clientelist, authoritarian systems ruling in the region. Policies currently enacted to alleviate youth unemployment address its political consequences (youth discontent), not its root causes.
Human Rights and Domestic Work in the Contemporary Gulf
Authors: Sabban Rima
Published: April 2022

Gulf countries continue to develop national institutions, policies, and programs to address labor and human rights issues faced by migrant domestic workers, specifically on work conditions in the domestic labor market. While a plethora of academic and policy studies highlight rights groups’ political, legal, and social criticisms toward the Gulf countries, limited studies have examined the institutionalized responses of the states in addressing migrant domestic work exploitations and abuses. Using document analysis on the current academic, policy, and government publications, this chapter records formal efforts made by Gulf nations to improve the conditions of migrant and domestic work. While it is an important practice to document these institutionalized efforts toward improving the social welfare of these workers, a central argument in this chapter highlights a contingency on the future commitments of these governments to uphold standards of human rights through sustainable policies. Critical relevance lies within both empirical and theoretical perspectives on the Gulf states’ responses toward migration management.
Religion and the City
Authors: Hammond Timur
Published: April 2022

This chapter provides an introduction to some of the conceptual issues raised by the study of religion and the city. It identifies four broad meta-questions that frame this interdisciplinary field of study: the nature of the relationship between religion and the city, the challenges of reconciling the plurality of religious experience and the need for a general definition, the question of a single urban process, and the ongoing importance of the “region” as an analytical lens. The chapter argues that greater attention to these meta-questions would provide one strategy for expanding conversations and collaborations across multiple disciplinary and methodological approaches.
What Satellite Television Has Done to the Public Sphere and to the Public in the Maghreb
Authors: Hadj-Moussa Ratiba
Published: April 2022

This chapter shows how the advent of satellite television in the Maghreb constitutes a historical turn that recomposes the Maghrebin public spheres. The existing duality between national and satellite televisions has produced a unique configuration where parallel, conflicting ideas and perspectives came into existence. These perspectives, which opposed most of the official discourses’ orientations, are conveyed in daily life practices and interactions, such as the streets and semipublic spaces, and are relayed by social media. Hence, the understanding of the novel and complex realities of Maghrebi political public spheres requires that the ordinary practices be considered as spaces and moments of the political fabrics in the Maghreb.
A Sociology of Knowledge on Humanitarianism and Displacement
Authors: Carpi Estella , Fiddian-Qasmiyeh Elena
Published: April 2022

In this chapter, the authors endeavor to build a sociology of knowledge of studies conducted on humanitarianism and war-induced displacement in the Middle East region, considering the cases of Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, and Turkey in particular. A comparative analysis suggests that similarities and differences across the literature are not always motivated by specific forms of state governmentality. In this framework, postcolonial history seems to provide partial explanations. As a result, the displacement and humanitarianism literature need to transcend the state paradigm and focus on a larger variety of social and political factors. While most scholars have examined the work of the United Nations and of international institutions in the region, the authors highlight the need to learn from multilingual literature, especially that produced in the Global South, and from a deeper investigation of the principles and modalities of crisis management developed by actors from the Global South.
No Bread, No Freedom, No Social Justice
Authors: Teti Andrea , Gervasio Gennaro
Published: April 2022

Conventional approaches to democratization in the Middle East take for granted the priority of some civil–political rights (e.g., voting) over others (e.g., rights of association or protest, socioeconomic rights). The discursive structure of these approaches has framed both the promotion of democracy by the European Union and regional governments’ counter-conductive reframing against that effort. But this pas de deux is part of a broader dynamic in which the common ground shared by these two efforts frames democracy so as to deny and delegitimize both the conception of democracy held by Middle Eastern and North African populations themselves and the political and socioeconomic demands of those same populations. Governments, in short, are engaged in “counter-conducting” their own populations. Drawing on critical discourse analysis of key documents, public opinion survey data, and activist interviews, an analysis of the Egyptian case shows that the discursive competition between governments is (also) a dance around democracy which seeks to avoid the more radical, egalitarian demands by populations.
Varieties of Secularity
Authors: Zemmin Florian
Published: April 2022

Modern societies in the Middle East have been shaped by processes of secularization, leading to a state of secularity on two levels: structural differentiations and conceptual distinctions between religion and the secular. Overt promotion of secularism failed to gain wider societal acceptance, especially among those who perceive a tension or contradiction between secularity and Islam. While some scholars share this view, recent works point out conceptual distinctions between the religious and the secular in Islam. After a snapshot of scholarly approaches, this chapter attends first to structural differentiations and then to conceptual distinctions of secularity. It largely focuses on the formative period of modernity but also adds a historical and contemporary dimension. Acknowledging the hegemony of colonial powers in configuring secularity both historically and conceptually, but highlighting Islamic variations and precolonial resources of secularity in the Middle East, this chapter furthers a research perspective on the varieties of secularity in global modernity and their plural genealogies.
Social Media and Contentious Politics
Authors: De Angelis Enrico , Badran Yazan
Published: April 2022

This chapter aims to re-examine the complex relationship between social media and contentious politics following the 2011 uprisings in Egypt and Syria. The chapter explores the contingent, differentiated, and contradictory roles that social media played in each of these cases. The authors combine critical theoretical approaches to the internet and situated ethnographic accounts to make sense of this issue along the different phases of mobilization and its aftermath. They argue that the alternative hierarchies of power and visibility engendered by digital activism and facilitated by social media are an essential vehicle when it comes to establishing an effective connection between the street and the networked public sphere in the mobilization phase. In the post-mobilization phase, however, the logics of social media begin to hinder the ability of social movements to coalesce and transform the energy of the street into political decisions or leverage. Finally, they also argue that in the aftermath of mobilization, these alternative online hierarchies of power and visibility tend to quickly lose their legitimizing function, which rested upon their, now severed, connection with the street.
The Transformation of Islamic Law in Modernity
Authors: March Andrew F.
Published: April 2022

In the process of modernizing Muslim majority states in the 19th and 20th centuries, Islamic law was often replaced with foreign legal codes. But in many areas of the law, Islamic legal norms were not replaced but rather transformed from an uncodified “jurists’ law” applied by qadis into legal codes applied by sovereign states. This process involved the transformation of not only many aspects of the substance of Islamic law, but also the methods, agents, and epistemologies by which Islamic law is known and enforced. This chapter explores this revolution in Islamic law from the 19th-century Ottoman Tanzimat reforms to the 20th-century national appropriations of Islamic law in a few select areas, particularly family and personal status law.
The Archaeology of Agrarian Australia
Authors: Paterson Alistair
Published: April 2022

The arrival of Europeans in Australia heralded the establishment of new forms of farming reliant on a range of foreign domesticated plants and animals. More than any other colonial industry, farming transformed the continent’s environments, ecosystems, and Indigenous cultures. This chapter considers the history of the archaeology of agrarian Australia, and in particular the ways that Aboriginal people provided labour and knowledge. At the same time farming relied on Aboriginal peoples’ Country. Recent research highlights both the social and environmental dimensions of this history. Other work highlights how Aboriginal people managed landscapes in their own right, a fact also reported by some colonial observers. This management has the potential to highlight Aboriginal peoples’ agency and to offer ways to reconsider contemporary land management in an era increasingly concerned with the challenges of the Anthropocene.
Ecological Feminist Hermeneutics
Authors: Elvey Anne
Published: April 2022

Ecological feminist hermeneutics emerged in the wake of ecofeminist theory and women’s environmental activism in the second part of the twentieth century. While relatively few explicitly ecological feminist readings of biblical texts have appeared, feminist hermeneutics have informed ecological hermeneutics. The trend in ecological feminist hermeneutics is toward multidimensional approaches that recognize the complexity of situation and the persistence of worldviews that support antiwomen and anti-Earth perspectives. Rather than evolving from a normative biblical text or being applied normatively to biblical texts, ecological feminist hermeneutics open spaces for pneuma (breath/spirit) to “breeze through” in biblical interpretations where Earth has agency in the reading process. Bodies, matter, and habitat become important themes in ecological feminist readings oriented toward a decolonizing shift in dominant worldviews.
Genesis
Authors: Hiebert Theodore
Published: April 2022

The book of Genesis is one of our oldest ecological epics. It provides us, at the very beginning of our religious traditions, with perspectives on the world that are important to recognize in an age of environmental crisis. In its exploration of beginnings, it places the world at the center of its thought, it grounds human identity and vocation in the earth, and it connects divine activity closely to nature and its processes. As an early ecological epic, Genesis represents the values of an ancient subsistence agricultural society in the Mediterranean highlands, which saw itself closely integrated with the fertile soil on which it lived and on which it depended for its survival. Genesis thus escapes the later philosophical dualisms between spirit and matter and history and nature that have separated and privileged the human in dangerous ways and that have marginalized the world. Though citizens of a small ecological niche in an ancient world, its authors provide constructive conversation partners for those today seeking a more integrated view of the world and the human place in it.
Ecology and Eschatology in the Second Temple Period
Authors: Rowland Christopher
Published: April 2022

Disruptions in the natural world have deep biblical roots. They are signs of divine displeasure signifying that creation is out of joint because of human behavior. It is judgment on the destroyers of the earth (Rev 11:18). In the Jewish and Christian eschatological literature, natural disasters became a regular feature of the antecedents of the coming of a new age. Such cataclysmic events are often described as “apocalyptic” and are related to ancient texts such as the Book of Revelation. The evolution of this kind of description is considered in the light of the revelatory dimension which is such a dominant feature of the apocalyptic texts themselves. Ancient Jewish and Christian eschatology did not share the view that God had consigned the world to chaos. Rather the evidence suggests that there was a significant and lasting hope for a restored and glorious world once the new age had come. Far from being destroyed with fire it was going once again to blossom as a rose (cf. Isa 35:1–2). This became the dominant way in which Jewish and ancient Christian hopes were articulated. Whether that optimistic hope is sustainable rather than the bleaker view of the biblical prophetic literature that human behavior would lead to chaos and destruction is a pertinent question for our times.
Introduction
Authors: Marlow Hilary , Harris Mark
Published: April 2022

The Introduction sets the scene for the whole volume of essays by briefly summarising the rise of ecological hermeneutics as an important field of study in contemporary Biblical Studies and highlights the importance of exploring the connections – and disconnections – between the ancient world of the biblical authors and our modern environmental predicament. The Introduction includes consideration of terminology such as 'nature' and 'creation' and cautions against anachronistic application of modern concepts regarding the material world onto biblical texts. The Introduction then outlines the scope of the volume and the rationale behind the four sections into which it is divided, before ending with some critical reflections and scope for further study.
Special Objects
Authors: Greenway Tyler S.
Published: April 2022

This chapter addresses three questions: (a) what are special objects, (b) where do special objects come from, and (c) what do special objects do? Special objects are defined as objects with counterintuitive properties or counterschematic causal effects that a group of people reflectively believe exist, that have a type of existence or action that is detectable by people, and whose existence motivates some differences in human behavior as a consequence. Distinctions between objects and agents, ordinary objects and special objects, special objects and special agents, and agential and nonagential special objects are also made. Three means of generating special objects are identified: direct supernatural action, ritual action, and contagion. The implications of and interpretative issues related to these means of generation are discussed, including an object’s continued connection to a supernatural agent, lay beliefs concerning an object’s origin, and the frequency with which different types of special objects may be generated. Finally, the effects of special objects within rituals, the power of these objects, and the means by which they bring about change are addressed. Several lines of future inquiry are also noted, including the need for a catalog that identifies the prevalence, use, and type of various special objects across religious traditions.
Neuroscience of Religion
Authors: Schjoedt Uffe , van Elk Michiel
Published: April 2022

This chapter introduces research within the neuroscience of religion, emphasizing the critical dimensions of experimental control and authenticity, while considering the problem of reverse inference. The chapter presents the strengths and weaknesses of five distinguishable neuroscientific approaches that can be characterized along these dimensions. The first approach examines the neural correlates of religion using adapted versions of standard experimental psychology paradigms. The second examines religion and spirituality in relation to structural differences in brain anatomy. The third examines the religion-brain link by analogy, using hypnosis and illusion paradigms. The fourth examines neurocognitive processes in authentic religious practice and experience directly in the laboratory. The fifth attempts to elicit religious experiences by exploiting participants’ belief in neuroscience (so-called neuroenchantment). The chapter ends with a discussion on the potential for theoretical integration across studies and approaches using the general framework of predictive processing.
Lived Faith and Cognitive Intuitions
Authors: Edman Laird R. O. , Penner Myron A.
Published: April 2022

This chapter presents an overview of cognitive science of religion (CSR) and shows how aspects of CSR can be applied to theology. It surveys some of the main methods and assumptions of CSR, including embedding CSR within ‘dual-system’ accounts of cognition, and employing multi-disciplinary experimental approaches across cultures and life-span. It surveys some of the main findings of CSR, and then explores how cognitive tendencies to attribute purpose to events and develop in-group bonds through ritual have consequences for theological reflection. These consequences are both cautionary (showing how human cognitive processes can be primed for purposes irrelevant to truth), and generative (showing how understanding human cognition can open new areas for theological reflection).
THE Nature of the World
Authors: Scott Julie B. , Barrett Justin L.
Published: April 2022

This chapter investigates the way human minds intuitively conceive of the world by dividing up objects according to their kinds: natural kinds, nominal kinds, and artifacts. People intuitively hold certain expectation sets (i.e., spatiality, physicality, or mentality expectation sets, etc.) for different ontological categories. When a concept fits most of the intuitive assumptions humans hold about the world, it is considered “minimally counterintuitive” and easier to think, remember, and be communicated; it thus has good inferential potential. Counterintuitive agents (CI agents) have especially high inferential potential, as they can be used as explanations for many personally relevant events, including the origin of the natural world. Research shows that children seem to have intuitive teleological reasoning; they conceive of the natural world as created, and created for a purpose. Research findings suggest that children intuitively hold beliefs of creationism (the natural world was created by a divine or CI agent) and essentialism (things hold a set of essential characteristics). Adults, even explicitly nonreligious adults, show signs of persisting, intuitive teleological reasoning about the natural world, even as created by agent(s), when tested under increased cognitive load.
Anonymous Welfarism, Critical-Level Principles, and the Repugnant and Sadistic Conclusions
Authors: Bossert Walter
Published: April 2022

Welfarist population principles rank alternatives using information regarding the lifetime well-being of those that ever live, disregarding non-welfare information. Standard examples are classical (total) utilitarianism, average utilitarianism, and critical-level utilitarianism. A population principle implies Parfit’s Repugnant Conclusion if every alternative in which each individual’s lifetime well-being exceeds the level that corresponds to a neutral life is ranked as worse than some other alternative with a larger population in which everyone alive has a lifetime well-being above neutrality but arbitrarily close to it. As is well known, total utilitarianism implies the Repugnant Conclusion but average utilitarianism and critical-level utilitarianism with a critical level above neutrality do not. Because critical-level utilitarianism also has several other desirable properties, this class of population principles can be viewed as an attractive candidate for avoiding the Repugnant Conclusion. This chapter discusses some important characteristics of the critical-level (generalized) utilitarian principles and compares them to alternative proposals. In addition to the Repugnant Conclusion, Arrhenius’s Sadistic Conclusion is examined. Critical-level utilitarianism with a critical level above neutrality implies the Sadistic Conclusion. It is illustrated that it is impossible to obtain a population principle that avoids both of these conclusions, provided that some additional plausible requirements are imposed. Thus, the chapter illustrates one of the difficult trade-offs that are common in population ethics.
Separability and Population Ethics
Authors: Thomas Teruji
Published: April 2022

Separability is roughly the principle that, in comparing the value of two outcomes, one can ignore any people whose existence and welfare are unaffected. Separability is both antecedently plausible, at least as a principle of beneficence, and surprisingly powerful; it is the key to some of the best positive arguments in population ethics. This chapter surveys the motivations for and consequences of separability. In particular, it presents an ‘additivity theorem’ which explains how separability leads to total utilitarianism and closely related axiological views. It then examines systematically how this family of views can avoid the Repugnant Conclusion by incorporating lexicality, a critical level, or a neutral range.
Does the Repugnant Conclusion Have Important Implications for Axiology or for Public Policy?
Authors: Budolfson Mark , Spears Dean
Published: April 2022

Formal arguments have proven that avoiding the Repugnant Conclusion is impossible without rejecting one or more highly plausible population principles. To many, such proofs establish not only a deep challenge for axiology, but also pose an important practical problem of how policy-making can confidently proceed without resolving any of the central questions of population ethics. Here we offer deflationary responses: first to the practical challenge, and then to the more fundamental challenge for axiology. Regarding the practical challenge, we provide an overview of recent literature that explores the implications for public policy of the Repugnant Conclusion and related puzzles within population ethics, and shows that there is more commonality in the implications of different population axiologies than is generally recognized. The upshot is that uncertainty about population ethics presents no important problem for policy-making and the importance of population ethics to policy-making has been overstated. We then turn to more fundamental issues about axiology and describe a new series of formal proofs that undermine the idea that any plausible axiology could avoid the Repugnant Conclusion, including those that are assumed to avoid it in the literature. The philosophical upshot is that the Repugnant Conclusion cannot plausibly be avoided, and so it is a mistake to assume as a constraint on a plausible axiology that it must be avoided, as is assumed by most of the literature in population ethics, including by all of the fundamental impossibility theorems.
Animal Population Ethics
Authors: Gosseries Axel , Meijers Tim
Published: April 2022

In this paper, we explore four features that could potentially render animal population axiology and ethics significantly different from human population axiology and ethics. We begin with the need for and challenges to multispecies population ethics. We then look at the claim that many animals—as opposed to humans—may not have a life worth living. We also consider whether animal species extinction raises distinct issues that differ from human extinction. Finally, we explore whether the means of shaping population size and composition meet ethical standards more easily in the case of animals than in the case of humans. Perhaps measures to reach a demographic goal have a lower bar to clear in the case of animals: restricting procreation or ending lives may be easier to justify when it comes to animals. We conclude that once we abandon (standard) speciesism, none of these four features renders animal population axiology and ethics significantly different from human population axiology and ethics.
Disability and Population Ethics
Authors: Mosquera Julia
Published: April 2022

Population ethics is concerned with the evaluation of populations that vary in terms of the identity, number, or well-being of the individuals that compose them. The ethics of disability focuses on, among other things, the evaluation of the lives of people with disabilities and decisions concerning current and future disabled individuals. The ethics of disability raises philosophically interesting questions, some of which fall directly within the scope of population ethics. Some people with disabilities have sometimes, as a group, lower average well-being than other salient social groups. Moreover, the size of disabled populations is susceptible to change due to, for example, the availability of reproductive technologies. Given their theoretical similarities, the ethics of disability inherits some of the problems that arise in population ethics. This chapter presents and analyzes some of those problems, focusing on three in particular: (1) problems of procreation where the person created is disabled, (2) problems involving the infliction or removal of a disability, and (3) problems involving changes in the size of the disabled population.
Iranian Cinema and a World through the Eyes of a Child
Authors: Stephens John
Published: April 2022

When the Iranian cinema industry redeveloped after its destruction during the 1979 Islamic Revolution, children’s films became a means through which to question the impact of new social forms, especially in relation to children’s subjectivities. This questioning encouraged a dual visual perspective that swung between a point of view that observes the child character and a child’s point of view that is constituted diegetically as a cognitive stance from which the world is perceived. The technique is employed in the industry’s three main areas: films for young children, films about children, and young-adult films. Always subject to strict censorship, these films negotiate a narrow path between aesthetic pleasure and social critique. Initially, a cinema about boys, by the mid-1990s, films had begun admitting girls as major characters, and then, as funding for children’s films shrank, young-adult films with a focus on youth agency became a major form.
Real Animals and the Problem of Anthropomorphism in Children’s Film
Authors: Alonso-Recarte Claudia , Ramos-Gay Ignacio
Published: April 2022

06Abstract: Throughout their history, Western children’s films (along with the subgenre of family films) have recurrently featured real animals, usually as the partner or sidekick of a protagonist child. This chapter examines the significance that the real animal body, whether a wild or domestic one, has within the genre, and the narrative and ethical challenges it faces within visual culture. By focusing primarily on the tensions between the authentic and the artificial within the context of modernity, the study offers a critical perspective on how anthropomorphism is practiced through the conventions that are appropriate to the genre, and on how such idiosyncratic narrativization of the animal then contributes to the consolidation of ethical discourses pertaining to the use of animals in the film industry.
Negotiating East and West When Representing Childhood in Miyazaki’s Spirited Away
Authors: Whitehurst Katherine
Published: April 2022

This chapter explores how the figure of the child gives insight into the construction of the Japanese nation and culture in Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001). The chapter outlines how Eastern and Western ideologies intersect in Spirited Away and argues that as the child navigates varied cultural expectations to seek a resolution, the child becomes the embodiment of utopic social change within an imagined Japan. The chapter demonstrates how the child in Spirited Away serves as a site to question past ideals of the nation, to resist neoliberal greed, and to project a hopeful future that sees Japan re-craft the interplay between Japanese collectivist values and Western individualism in the wake of neoliberalism.
Screen Adaptations of The Wizard of Oz and Metafilmicity in Children’s Film
Authors: Bunch Ryan
Published: April 2022

A survey of films associated with L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz shows that they offer playful metafilmic and material affordances, which audiences have exploited to actively participate in discourses and definitions of childhood and children’s film. By attending to these active negotiations, through what I term the films’ metafilmic address, we can acknowledge the co-presence of children and adults in the theatre without diminishing the status of family films as also fully children’s films or positioning child spectators as passive. Children, in collaboration with adult filmmakers and co-viewers, contribute to the definitions and meanings of children’s films by participating in the practices and discourses available through living repertoires of children’s film and their fictional worlds, in this case, the world of Oz.
The Walt Disney Company, Family Entertainment, and Hollywood’s Global Hits
Authors: Krämer Peter
Published: April 2022

In 2016, Disney releases occupied the five top spots on the annual worldwide box-office chart, with Captain America: Civil War, the latest instalment of Marvel’s Avengers franchise; Rogue One: A Star Wars Story; the Pixar sequel Finding Dory; Zootopia, a rare original script filmed by the revived Walt Disney Animation Studios; and a live-action remake of The Jungle Book. Although Disney has since the 1980s had several adult-oriented global hits, the 2016 chart toppers were closely aligned with the company’s traditional emphasis on family entertainment. This chapter charts the rise of the Walt Disney Company to global box-office dominance, paying particular attention to the takeovers of Pixar Animation Studios (in 2006), Marvel Entertainment (in 2009), and Lucasfilm Ltd. (in 2012). It also surveys the prevalence of family oriented global hits released by the other major Hollywood studios, examines the special place of Star Wars (1977) in evolving hit patterns, and highlights several key thematic concerns of Hollywood’s biggest hits (both Disney and non-Disney): parent-child relationships, the threat and reality of large-scale destruction, and internationalism.
Don Bluth and the Disney Renaissance
Authors: Kunze Peter C.
Published: April 2022

lidAbstract: The Disney Renaissance, a period of creative revitalization and corporate expansion, has long dominated the history of a larger rejuvenation in US animation production across film and television in the 1980s and 1990s. Perhaps the most important of the feature animators was Don Bluth, a former Disney animator who launched a new animation studio to carry on the Disney legacy and pose the first serious threat to Disney’s domination of feature animation. In focusing on his career, this chapter challenges the hegemony of Disney in animation history and complicates received notions of Disney’s contributions to contemporary children’s film. In so doing, it aims to recover a major contributor to children’s film whose work remains obscured by the legacy and continuing relevance of his former employer and rival.