The Body as Situation: A Darwinian Reading of The Second Sex

Challenging the influential view that the chapter on biology in the first volume of The Second Sex is exposing scientific myths in severe prose, in the view of this paper, the chapter is as much about scientific facts as it is an intriguingly open-ended dialogue between phenomenology and science. Beauvoir’s consuming epistemological and scientific preoccupation with the category of biology is analysed in a bid to advance a new, naturalist–feminist conception of Beauvoir’s theory of natural history. The analysis unravels the theoretical edifice, with its tensions between Beauvoir’s selective but brilliant appropriation of recent discoveries in evolutionary biology and genetics and certain deliberate rejections and omissions of Darwinian evolutionary thinking. Contrary to Beauvoir’s intentions, she ends up conflating the term biology with, in particular, reproductive physiology, and perpetuating the ill-fated division between body and psyche. In contributing to a reformulation of an empirically grounded approach to the embodied mind and situated body, this paper debates some promising insights from contemporary neuroscience and primatology. These insights are critical to theory development, based on a non-anthropocentric stance and non-dualistic understanding of the mind–brain continuum and the body as a situation.     

Considering advances in neuroscience through the lenses of law and human?rights

Advances in neuroscience should be subject to a robust public dialogue that includes attention to the legal and human rights issues raised by both research and its applications.     

法与神经科学研究述评——兼论认知科学与法

自上世纪90年代诞生以来,法与神经科学研究以神经科学的理论、方法和手段来研究与法律有关的广泛问题,具体涉及证据、刑法、民法、神经伦理学、法律决策和神经经济学等重叠交叉的应用领域。认知理论和脑成像技术的发展促成该领域的兴盛。从未来的发展看,法学作为与人的行为密切相关的学科,有必要吸收来自于认知科学领域的知识。概念层级理论有助于说明学科及其概念之间的关系：认知科学与法不等于法学与认知科学母学科的直接结合;认知法学的实质是认知路径的跨学科法学研究;法与神经科学的研究是认知科学与法研究这一领域中的子领域。     

Burnt into the Brain: Towards a Redefinition of Political Culture

The current US administration has made the promotion of ‘political and economic freedom’ overseas a cornerstone of its foreign policy doctrine. The underlying notion that human beings all over the world can be chiefly motivated by a desire for personal liberty seems a noble but hardly realistic ideal. Such motivation is fostered by processes of social modernization and individualization. These changes are linked not only to structural transformations and the spread of new values and ideas, but also to the gradual rewiring of the brains of individuals involved in them. New findings in neuroscience point to clear parallels between changes in social and personality structures (individualization, self-discipline, sense of agency, time orientation, trust, and the like), and modified patterns of brain wiring in individuals. The cultural changes sometimes seen as a precondition for democratization and democratic consolidation are therefore likely to be slow and to escape deliberate political orchestration. Moreover, diffuse processes of brain rewiring conducive to democratic political development, which can be seen as creating favourable neurocultural preconditions for democracy, may be hampered by the rapid spread of the market economy over new regions and areas of life in both developing and Western countries. These processes can be studied by the new sub-field of political science called neuropolitics, to be consolidated over the next few years.     

FAMILY LAW AND THE NEUROSCIENCE OF ATTACHMENT,PART II

Daniel Siegel is renowned for his ability to translate neuroscience for professions working outside the arena of science. Here, Siegel discusses advances in interpersonal neurobiology, specifically considering applications for family law. Siegel is a clinical professor of psychiatry and co‐director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA and director of the Mindsight Institute. He is the author of numerous articles, chapters, and books, including the internationally acclaimed professional texts, The Developing Mind: Toward a Neurobiology of Interpersonal Experience and The Mindful Brain: Reflection and Attunement in the Cultivation of Well‐Being.     

Empathy from a police work perspective

The purpose of this paper is to identify an appropriate conceptual model of empathy from the perspective of police work. This paper draws on the existing literature from two areas of research: (a) the literature describing the characteristics of the ideal police officer from a general perspective, as well as in a specifically Swedish context and (b) the literature analysing empathy as a theoretical construct. It is found that theoretical interdisciplinary approaches in the fields of social psychology and social cognitive neuroscience are relevant. The suggested conceptual model of empathy appropriate for the policing profession incorporates the typically antagonistic nature of police–citizen contacts, personal traits as expressed in interpersonal relations, and the social and cultural context. Because of the diversity and multicultural nature of modern societies, the values guiding police–citizen encounters are given special attention and related to the empathy research tradition. The proposed conceptual model of empathy aims at guiding future research in police–citizen interaction and, ultimately, supporting police practices regarding recruitment, career advancement and fieldwork.     

Increasing resolution,intensifying ambiguity: an ethnographic account of seeing life in brain scans

This paper argues that current images of the brain are providing a potent way in which human life itself is being constructed. In addition to material conceptions, exemplified by the human genome, scans that claim to illustrate features of the living brain serve to augment these with the idea of life as activity. Drawing from ethnographic research, the paper illustrates how, even among neuroscientists themselves, life is used as an implicit notion to hold together a range of contradictory methodological features of their work. The final section suggests that because this version of life is necessarily restricted, it may have a number of wider social and cultural consequences.     

The critique of language and its economy

Abstract

This paper draws upon and develops Paul Rabinow's concept of biosociality to analyse how the field of gambling research, the facts about gambling addiction and the politics of gambling regulation are in the process of transforming one another as the US gambling industry has begun to provide large amounts of funding for scientists and clinicians working on gambling problems. In particular, the paper focuses on the political economy of research that suggests that the negative consequences associated with gambling are not just social problems, but neurobiological ones. The paper introduces the notion of ‘biopolitical capital’ in order to describe how the gambling industry invests in particular kinds of research which are more likely to yield results that can be mobilized to support particular kinds of approaches to dealing with the social and personal problems associated with gambling.