Who is my neighbour? Understanding indifference as a vice

Indifference is often described as a vice. Yet who is indifferent; to what; and in what way is poorly understood, and frequently subject to controversy and confusion. This paper proposes a framework for the interpretation and analysis of ethically problematic forms of indifference in terms of how different states of indifference can be either more or less dynamic, or more or less sensitive to the nature and state of their object

The assignment of moral status: Age-related differences in the use of three mental capacity criteria

This study examined children's and young adults' use of three mental capacity criteria for treating an entity as one to which moral subjects have moral obligations, that is, as having moral status. In line with philosophical theorizing, these criteria were the capacity to (1) perceive; (2) suffer; and (3) think. In this study, 116 respondents aged 9 to 18 years old gave moral judgments and guilt and shame attributions in response to stories about perpetrators whose behaviour negatively affected entities with different mental capacities. The moral judgments revealed that 9-year-old children assigned moral status primarily on the basis of the victimized entity's ability to suffer. Eleven-year-old children also used the ability to suffer, but they assigned additional moral status when the victimized entity was able to perceive. Young adults also used perception as a criterion, but they assigned additional moral status when the victimized entity was simultaneously able to suffer and able to think. When compared to their moral judgments, the moral emotion attributions of respondents of all age groups were more strongly affected by the victimized entity's ability to think. © 2008 The British Psychological Society

Education as site of memory: developing a research agenda

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the publisher via the DOI in this recordThe field of memory studies tends to focus attention on the ‘3Ms’ – museums, monuments, memorials – as sites where memories are constructed, communicated, and contested. Where education is identified as a site for memory, the focus is often narrowly on what is or is not communicated within curricula or textbooks, assuming that schools simply pass on messages agreed or struggled over elsewhere. This article explores the possibilities opened when educative processes are not taken as stable and authoritative sites for transmitting historical narratives, but instead as spaces of contestation, negotiation and cultural production. With a focus on ‘difficult histories’ of recent conflict and historical injustice, we develop a research agenda for education as a site of memory and show how this can illuminate struggles over dominant historical narratives at various scales, highlighting agencies that educational actors bring to making sense of the past

Y-Like Retinal Ganglion Cells Innervate the Dorsal Raphe Nucleus in the Mongolian Gerbil (Meriones unguiculatus)

Background: The dorsal raphe nucleus (DRN) of the mesencephalon is a complex multi-functional and multi-transmitter nucleus involved in a wide range of behavioral and physiological processes. The DRN receives a direct input from the retina. However little is known regarding the type of retinal ganglion cell (RGC) that innervates the DRN. We examined morphological characteristics and physiological properties of these DRN projecting ganglion cells. Methodology/Principal Findings: The Mongolian gerbils are highly visual rodents with a diurnal/crepuscular activity rhythm. It has been widely used as experimental animals of various studies including seasonal affective disorders and depression. Young adult gerbils were used in the present study. DRN-projecting RGCs were identified following retrograde tracer injection into the DRN, characterized physiologically by extracellular recording and morphologically after intracellular filling. The result shows that DRN-projecting RGCs exhibit morphological characteristics typical of alpha RGCs and physiological response properties of Y-cells. Melanopsin was not detected in these RGCs and they show no evidence of intrinsic photosensitivity. Conclusions/Significance: These findings suggest that RGCs with alpha-like morphology and Y-like physiology appear to perform a non-imaging forming function and thus may participate in the modulation of DRN activity which includes regulation of sleep and mood

The old question of Barth’s universalism: an examination with reference to Tom Greggs and T. F. Torrance

In the course of reflecting on Tom Greggs' recent claim that Barth ‘did not reject universalism [...] only problematic elements associated with it’, Mark Koonz raises the fascinating question of Barth’s doctrinal position on universalism. That is, the question as to whether limited atonement or universalism are two separate, mutually exclusive alternatives. This paper argues that Barth’s understanding is a good deal more complex than Greggs allows for. Limited atonement and universalism are related, not by way of paradox or as contraries, but through the absolute freedom of the grace of the living God in Jesus Christ. The paper also draws on T. F. Torrance to illuminate further the way in which these doctrines might be harmonised coherently.Publisher PD

Soul-Centered Coaching: Encouraging Psychological Creativity within a Life Coaching Partnership

James Hillman (1972) declared, “What the psyche has experienced during the past seventy years in analytical therapy should also be possible for it wherever it goes” (p. 5). As a life coach—someone who starts from a place of curiosity—I became curious. Did this mean that the imaginal practices of depth psychology could be used within a life coaching container? Could imaginal practices such as Jung’s active imagination and Hillman’s personifying work in a life coaching partnership? What benefits might life coaching clients gain through creating a connection with psychic figures? What would a life coach—or a depth psychologist—need to merge these two ways of engaging with individuals, both in terms of training and resources? And, finally, what does each profession—life coaching and depth psychology—obtain from such a merger? Using the methodology of hermeneutic phenomenology, I entered into a six-session soul-centered coaching partnership with three participants. Each took part in six sessions designed to develop their psychological creativity while experiencing a coaching relationship. Factoring in my own observations, as well as the personal accounts of the participants, I found that imaginal practices positively impacted participants’ abilities to connect with and move through their life transitions. This merging of the two professions would require life coaches to undergo extensive learning in depth psychology, and depth psychologists to acquire professional coaching skills, but this study holds forth promise for a blending of the two fields

Properties of Singular Schubert Varieties

This thesis deals with the study of Schubert varieties, which are subsets of flag varieties indexed by elements of Weyl groups. We start by defining Lascoux elements in the Hecke algebra, and showing that they coincide with the Kazhdan-Lusztig basis elements in certain cases. We then construct a resolution (Zw, π) of the Schubert variety Xw for which Rπ*(C[l(w)]) is a sheaf on Xw whose expression in the Hecke algebra is closely related to the Lascoux element. We also define two new polynomials which coincide with the intersection cohomology Poincar\\u27e polynomial in certain cases. In the final chapter, we discuss some interesting combinatorial results concerning Bell and Catalan numbers which arose throughout the course of this work