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Responses to Trisokkas, Torsen and McManus
Get PDFTrisokkas raises two objections to my defence of Heidegger's claim against Hegel. Heidegger's claim is that Hegel had dogmatically assumed the priority of ‘logic’ in any inquiry into the meaning of being, thus inheriting the metaphysical tradition's dual assumptions that what must be said to matter most of all in our attempt understand our place in the world and a possible reconciliation with the world is the knowability of being. Everything else can only matter if the world is first of all available as knowable. The claim is not that Hegel cannot develop a ‘science of logic’ or, to use Hegelian shorthand, that Being cannot be understood as Concept. The issue is the status of the Logic, what significance it has in our attempt to understand ourselves and the meaning of being in general. Ultimately Hegel counts as the culmination of the metaphysical tradition because he believes, citing Aristotle, that ‘nous rules the world’, that everything is primordially available to us as rationally available, explicable. This means that even the meaning of the being of human history, sociality, religion and art is as expressions of reason, even as modes of rationality. Trisokkas objects that it is question-begging to saddle Hegel with a question that he is not, in the Science of Logic at least, attempting to answer. He puts this by saying that Hegel is simply not addressing the question of the status or significance of the Logic, that he has not ‘chosen’ to raise any question about what matters to human beings or to Hegel himself, but has chosen an inquiry into being. (‘Mattering is irrelevant at the beginning of Hegel's Logic.’ ‘All being is taken to be, is simply being.’) According to Trisokkas the Logic is simply an inquiry into being's possible determinacy. Trisokkas's second objection is a classic Hegelian objection, the one he himself raised against Schelling. He alleges that any philosophical understanding, even of the nondiscursive sources of meaningfulness, must itself be discursive in some way, as in Heidegger's own analysis or as in my book, and he cites this as evidence against the priority, at least for philosophy, of a nondiscursive attunement to significances. Mattering is a concept and our account of its significance must remain conceptual, not itself ‘poetic’
What Does 'Welcome' Look Like?: Understanding Private Refugee Sponsorship in the United States
Get PDFThe U.S. is the most recent of several refugee-receiving countries to develop a private refugee sponsorship program–the Welcome Corps program–to bolster refugee admissions. Private sponsorship constitutes an alternative model of refugee resettlement to the traditional government-assisted sponsorship, wherein groups of private citizens are responsible for raising funds for resettlement and delivering core resettlement services to refugees. This research aims to provide the first in-depth investigation of the Welcome Corps program through the eyes of sponsors. Through semi-structured interviews with 15 sponsors, I examine how sponsors encounter, navigate, and contest the stated bounds of their roles. I find that while sponsors are fairly successful at fulfilling their prescribed sponsorship tasks, sponsors struggle to navigate the disagreement and conflict inherent in the sponsor-sponsee relationship. I conclude with recommendations for improvements in the Welcome Corps program and U.S. refugee resettlement more generally, as well as future research directions
United States-based practice guidelines for children and adolescents with eating disorders
Get PDFIntroduction: Several practice guidelines exist from professional organizations in the United States to support the assessment and management of eating disorders in children and adolescents. This manuscript synthesizes the key areas of overlap from these guidelines and provides directions for future research and alignment to improve care. Recommendations: Consistent screening for eating disorders in primary care is recommended to ensure early identification and referral to treatment. Outpatient treatment supported by families, including family based treatment, is the first line of care recommended by guidelines. Multidisciplinary treatment teams benefit patients in covering the variety of aspects of health that eating disorders impact, including mental health, nutritional health, and physical health. Patients may require hospitalization under certain medical criteria such as bradycardia or specific lab abnormalities. Conclusions: Guidelines show consensus on the importance of early identification and treatment access, involvement of family in treatment, and the use of a multidisciplinary treatment team. However, future work is needed to guide care of Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder (ARFID), as well as the impact of weight inclusive care and the development of validated screening tools for children and adolescents for all eating disorders.</p
Fundamental Aspects of SPPS and Green Chemical Peptide Synthesis
Get PDFThis perspective essay will briefly recount fundamental physicochemical properties of the peptide-resin that have led to the almost universal use of stepwise solid phase peptide synthesis (SPPS) for the chemical synthesis of peptides. The essay discusses multiple aspects that must be addressed if we are to develop truly green chemical peptide synthesis. An optimal SPPS approach that retains the advantages inherent to polymer-supported chemical synthesis, combined with convergent synthesis based on modern chemical ligation methods for the condensation of unprotected peptide segments, will be described as a path to green synthesis of peptides and their efficient manufacture. Only the most pertinent primary literature is cited
Unmasking the Self: Testing the Role of Conscious Awareness in Intentional Binding
No full textIntentional binding (IB), defined as the perceived temporal compression between a voluntary action and its consequence, has been widely interpreted as a behavioral index of agency and minimal selfhood. However, debates remain as to whether IB reflects a higher-level integrative process involving self-related interpretation, or whether it arises from low-level sensorimotor prediction. To test whether IB depends on conscious awareness of outcomes, and to examine the possible role of interpretive mechanisms, we conducted an experiment using a sensory masking paradigm that combined action–outcome contingency with stimulus visibility (masked vs. unmasked). A total of 100 participants (n = 81 after screening) completed five experimental blocks: a calibration block, and two types of action-outcome conditions (operant and baseline), each tested under masked and unmasked outcome visibility. In all operant trials, participants were instructed to press the spacebar at a time of their choosing; this voluntary action triggered the appearance of a blue circle on the screen after a fixed delay. In masked conditions, the blue circle (i.e., the outcome) was suppressed from conscious awareness using continuous flash suppression (CFS). Crucially, participants were always asked to report the estimated time of their action (the button press), not the outcome. Therefore, if the perceived action time was shifted later—closer to the expected outcome time—this temporal compression was taken as evidence of intentional binding, indicating that the action was perceptually drawn toward its consequence. One-tailed t-tests revealed that in the unmasked operant condition (Hypothesis 1), no significant IB effect was observed, contrary to prior literature. In the masked operant condition (Hypothesis 2), however, a significant negative binding effect emerged: participants perceived the action as occurring earlier when the visual outcome (the blue circle) was masked from awareness using CFS, compared to the baseline condition where no circle was shown. Rather than being drawn toward the consequence in time, the perceived action was repelled away from it, suggesting a breakdown in the typical predictive integration process. This reversed binding may indicate that, in the absence of conscious access to the outcome, the brain fails to construct a coherent causal model and instead temporally distances the action from an unacknowledged effect. For Hypothesis 3, a direct comparison between the masked and unmasked conditions revealed a significant difference in binding magnitudes, with the unmasked condition showing significantly greater binding than the masked condition. However, this result does not straightforwardly support our original hypothesis that conscious awareness enhances binding. For one thing, the unmasked condition did not yield a significant binding effect on its own, and the masked condition exhibited reversed binding. Therefore, the difference may reflect a shift from negative to null binding, rather than from weak to strong binding as originally expected. These findings challenge the assumption that IB reflects a stable signature of agency. Instead, they support the view that IB emerges only when conscious awareness enables predictive coherence between motor intentions and their sensory consequences. Our results align with theories positing that the self is constituted by interpretive architectures that integrate outcomes in a goal-directed, temporally coherent manner (e.g., Deacon, 2011). We discuss how IB may serve as a minimal behavioral window into the presence or disruption of such self-organizing systems
Bridges and Barriers: Essays on Integration, Social Learning, and Access to Education
No full textThis dissertation examines how social interactions, institutions, and public policy shape young people’s preferences and decisions, using experimental and quasi-experimental methods across diverse settings. Distinct group identities can create barriers to trade, investment in public goods, and social learning—barriers that educational institutions may help overcome. The first two chapters use lab-in-the-field experiments to understand the costs and benefits of group integration. The first paper studies how integration impacts productivity and cohesion in settings with broad linguistic diversity, where language differences may deepen the divides created by group identities. We randomly assign high school students to same- or different-ethnicity partners to play a cooperative video game in Macedonia, where students are segregated by ethnicity. We measure productivity using video game scores and assess social cohesion with two measures: the willingness to pay for a same-ethnicity partner (via an adaptive choice experiment) and ingroup bias (via a dictator game). We find that inter-ethnic contact improves social cohesion without affecting productivity. To examine the role of language, we exploit random variation in the language skills overlap within pairs. We find that shared language skills are associated with greater inter-ethnic cohesion gains and lower non-pecuniary costs. These results reflect both a match effect (i.e., sharing a language is beneficial) and a correlation between language skills and positive potential outcomes. Additionally, cross-ethnic pairs either match on one partner’s home language or on a third, neutral language. Cohesion gains are largest when the shared language is the participant's own home language; if anything, matching on a neutral language yields lower gains than matching on the partner’s home language. The second paper asks how segregation influences social learning. On one hand, if one group has information that is beneficial to another, segregation may harm learning by preventing information flow. On the other hand, if individuals learn better from in-group members, segregation may increase learning. We formalize this tradeoff with a theoretical model and design a network-based social learning game to test how integration and segregation affect learning under different conditions. We have students in multi-ethnic Macedonian high schools play the game in groups of 6 and find two results that support the theory. First, we find that when a larger proportion of players exhibit bias, the potential learning loss from segregation is smaller. In low-bias groups, students learn more in the integrated networks than in the segregated networks, avoiding echo chambers, but the same is not true in the high-bias groups. Second, integration leads to more learning than segregation in games in which one ethnicity gets mostly incorrect signals and the other ethnicity gets mostly correct signals. Finally, we fit our model to the experimental data and find that, on average, students downweigh information from different-ethnicity players 45 percent more than same-ethnicity players. In the final paper, we shift focus to U.S. federal financial aid policy to study one of the largest-scale and most consequential policies determining whether students maintain access to Title IV aid, the ``Return of Title IV'' funds policy, referred to as R2T4. Students receiving Title IV aid who withdraw from college before completing the academic term are subject to an R2T4 calculation that could require the student or college to pay back any unearned Title IV funds to the federal government. We estimate the causal impacts of the R2T4 policy using a regression discontinuity design. The identification leverages a cutoff in the federal formula that determines whether a student or their college must return aid. We find that students at our threshold, who earn 60 percent of the federal aid to which they were entitled, must return \$1,600 on average. This unexpected debt reduces the likelihood of re-enrollment by nearly four percentage points compared to students who narrowly avoid the repayment threshold in the following year and by 2.6 percentage points within 4 years. These results are driven by students in the bottom half of the sample’s income distribution, who experience persistent enrollment declines of roughly 5.5 percentage points. Our findings add to a growing body of literature revealing the detrimental impacts of complex administrative processes on student outcomes, particularly for students from marginalized communities interacting with federal policies.</p
Divinized Civic Virtues in Cicero
Get PDFThis dissertation explores a group of Roman personifications—concordia, fides, honos, mens, pietas, salus, victoria, virtus—that Cicero discusses in De natura deorum and De legibus. I refer to them as utilitates, following the recurring term utilitas in the dialogues. These are not rhetorical abstractions or “minor” gods, as often presumed. Rather, they are civic virtues personified, worshipped through public cult, and deeply embedded in Roman religion and ethical discourse. Chapter I re-examines the religious and philosophical seriousness of these figures, contesting Christianizing and modernizing assumptions that have shaped much of the secondary literature. My approach is emic: I situate these deified virtues within Roman epistemologies and social practice, where they operated simultaneously as abstract concepts, divine agents, and civic ideals. Their semantic density lies in a metonymic structure: their names refer not only to a human quality, but also to its divine embodiment and the benefit it produces. In this framework, the divine is not a transcendent power, but a civic and moral presence. Chapter II turns to the literary challenges of representing these personifications, particularly in Virgil’s Aeneid, where ambiguity between abstraction and divinity is a poetic feature, not a flaw. I argue that our editorial practices—especially typographic conventions like capitalization—have often flattened this ambiguity. As a remedy, I advocate for the use of small caps to mark a deliberate in-betweenness and reflect the interpretive indeterminacy built into the ancient texts themselves. Chapter III analyzes the ethical dimension of these figures. Drawing primarily on De officiis, I show how the utilitates provide moral orientation in situations of competing obligations. They codify what is appropriate, model ethical behavior, and affirm the primacy of communal well-being over private interest. Their agency lies in their commemorative function: they recall and prescribe action through exempla, legislation, and cultic presence. The gods, in this context, are moral actors and civic participants. The epilogue considers Pudicitia as a potential addition to this group. Though not included by Cicero among the utilitates, she shares their defining features: she is an abstract noun, a literary figure, and a goddess with a cult. Her case reinforces the broader argument that Roman religion conceptualized civic virtues as divine forces with distributed identity and collective agency. This study reframes the so-called “deified abstractions” as vital elements of Roman polytheism. It argues that divinity, for the Romans, was neither purely mythological nor simply symbolic, but ethically functional and publicly enacted
Essays on Elections and Legislators
No full textThis dissertation investigates the relationship between elections and legislators’ behavior in democracies, focusing on the U.S. House of Representatives. The first chapter examines how electoral incentives influence representatives’ legislative activity and policy positions. Compiling data from 1954 to 2022, I compare legislators who win primaries and remain motivated for reelection to those who lose and exit the race. Through regression discontinuity and difference-in-differences designs, I find that primary losers significantly reduce effort-related activities, as evidenced by decreased roll-call participation, bill sponsorship, and voter communication. In contrast, the results show that legislators do not adjust policy positions for reelection; both winners and losers maintain consistent ideological and party-line adherence. These findings illuminate the scope of electoral incentives' effects and contribute to debates on electoral accountability and democratic representation. The second chapter explores how legislators respond to challengers of varying quality. Existing theories offer differing predictions about how incumbents behave under competitive pressure, yet, it remains empirically difficult to isolate legislators’ responses to challenger quality. This chapter addresses that challenge by leveraging the quasi-random variation in challenger quality produced by close opposition party primaries. The findings suggest that incumbents’ behavioral adjustments are limited, offering important implications for theories of electoral competition and candidate responsiveness. The final chapter investigates whether the ideological orientation of individual House members varies with their expected level of electoral competitiveness. We find that some—but not all—legislators anticipating closer elections engage in more partisan roll-call voting compared to those in safer districts. Our analysis shows that this responsiveness is more pronounced in districts where voters have greater access to local political information. These findings underscore that electoral accountability depends not only on the presence of competition but also on the quality of the information environment that links representatives to their constituents
Family Infrapolitics “Out of quota births”, Bureaucracy and Biopower in China
No full textSince China abolished the One-Child Policy in 2016, research on the policy has largely focused on its social, cultural, and demographic consequences. The experiences of families who had “out of quota” children—those deemed illegal under the policy—remain underexplored. This study asks how families with “out of quota” babies engaged with local bureaucracy, theorizing the acts, gestures, and thoughts involved in attempting “out of quota” births as “infra-politics”. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with families who had “out of quota” babies and with low-level bureaucrats, this study analyzes how families teased, deceived, and bargained with officials to have additional children
Chinese Adolescent Mothers Online: Self Presentation Strategies on Short-Video Social Media Platform to Mitigate Stigmatization
No full textAbstract Adolescent motherhood in China remains a deeply stigmatized identity that is shaped by cultural, political, and moral discourses. While rates of adolescent pregnancy have risen, state narratives around human capital development, the suzhi (population quality) discourse, and idealized motherhood continue to construct early pregnancy and motherhood as a deviation as moral and developmental failure. Drawing on historical, sociopolitical, and theoretical frameworks, including Confucian familial ideologies, population planning policies, and Goffman’s dramaturgical and stigma theories, this thesis explores how adolescent mothers navigate stigma and reconstruct their identity through digital self-presentation on Kuaishou, one of China’s most popular short-video social media platforms. The study combines digital ethnography and discourse analysis to examine 104 Kuaishou user accounts belonging to adolescent mothers aged between 15 to 24. Data includes 883 screenshots of visual posts and 541 screenshots of comment section interactions. Three primary strategies of stigma management emerged: (1) crating a “Good Mother” identity centered on love, sacrifice, and resilience: traits that align with socially accepted narratives of motherhood; (2) framing motherhood as a transformative journey of emotional and personal growth; and (3) more direct rejection of stigma through claiming authenticity, confession, and public declarations of marital legitimacy. These strategies reflect personal agency and culturally grounded performances that respond to the stigmatizing factors of suzhi discourse, Confucian morality, and neoliberal parenting ideals. The audience receptions are varied, with many users offering encouragement and micro-affirmations; others express judgement that is affected by the suzhi discourse and normative life trajectories, illustrating how stigma is reproduced and challenged in digital space. The study contributes to research on digital motherhood, youth culture, and stigma in contemporary China by exploring how marginalized young women use social media to resist cultural exclusion. It also demonstrates the utility of digital ethnography in accessing underrepresented narratives. Despite limitations such as reliance on publicly available data from a single platform, the findings suggest that digital spaces like Kuaishou can serve as a site of agency, identity negotiation, and moral redefinition for stigmatized youth