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This article provides a critical reading of Alaa Al Aswany's novel The Yacoubian Building (2002), evoking important questions about the nature of terrorism in Egypt and how young men are transformed into religious fanatics. While certainly not excusing terrorists' violent acts, we try to use the novel as a guide to understand what makes a terrorist tick. The novel invites us to witness the fall into the abyss of terror of a young man who dreams of being a policeman. The novel shows that while Taha struggles to change his fate, he faces marginalisation, police corruption, oppression and torture, which finally set him on the path to violence. The paper thus uses the novel as a focal point to broaden our understanding of who a terrorist figure is. Furthermore, we are interested in the literary representations of terrorism and why this novelist chooses terrorism as a main structuring element. By offering a qualitative, different understanding of the fundamental aspects of terrorism, we try to reveal that while it is the terrorist's finger that pulls the trigger, there is a disorienting history of social, political and economic circumstances behind each bullet. The paper concludes that Al Aswany neither demonises nor offers an apology for extremists. He simply presents them as humans so that we can understand what they are angry about. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary is about two papers on the relations between the neuroscience and the physics of time. One is by Buonomano & Rovelli, entitled 'Bridging the neuroscience and physics of time' and the other one is by Gruber, Block & Montemayor, entitled 'Physical time within human time'. The present commentary takes the form of an interview of Remy Lestienne, who published a book on the work of Whitehead, related to the two papers cited above. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tests whether or not psychological type preferences predicted the extent of liberal versus conservative attitudes towards a range of controversial moral issues among 3,515 clergy and laity from the Church of England who took part in the 2013 Church Times survey. Summated rating scales were produced from Likert items related to four different issues: same-sex relationships, the ordination of women, divorce and remarriage, and cohabitation. After allowing for general theological stance, psychological type preferences for sensing over intuition and thinking over feeling were significantly associated with more conservative attitudes. For theological liberals, sensing types had slightly more conservative moral attitudes, on average, than did intuitive types, but there was no difference among theological conservatives. For theological conservatives, thinking types had slightly more conservative moral attitudes, on average, than did feeling types, but there was no difference among theological liberals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pierre Janet, the French philosopher, psychotherapist, and doctor (1859–1947), has often been presented as one of the central figures in contemporary clinical psychology, whose practices and ideas are said to have anticipated those of Sigmund Freud, before becoming a fierce critic of psychoanalysis. What is less well known, however, is that he was also an experienced botanist. The recent discovery of his personal herbarium, which was long thought to be lost, leads historians to address a curious paradox. Unlike his professional papers, of which only a fraction remains, his entire collection built up over 70 years of passionate collecting has been preserved. Thus although the world-famous clinician, bound to medical secrecy, still resists historical exposition, the hitherto unknown amateur naturalist appears in the full light of day. Even though Janet was careful not to hastily amalgamate the study of human behaviour to that of plants, detailed examination of his abundant written work shows that these two disciplines could overlap on occasions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of time in physics and its connection to consciousness are becoming increasingly problematic. A missing ingredient to both could be retrocausation — the temporal inverse of everyday causation — in which the future influences the past. Apparent evidence for it is in the phenomenon of precognition. Thus far, psychology and physics have assiduously avoided incorporating precognition into their paradigms, even though experimental evidence for it is substantial. Among many noteworthy studies, the Graff–Cyrus experiment is explicated here as an outstanding example of the phenomenon. It is hoped that consciousness, retrocausation, and precognition can be accommodated within the current paradigm of physics, helping bridge the gap to psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]