Meghant Sudan

A study reported an increased risk of asthma in children whose mothers were exposed to magnetic field levels above 0.2 μT during pregnancy. We re-examined this association using data from mothers and children in the Danish National Birth Cohort.This study included 92,676 singleton-born children and their mothers from the DNBC. MF exposure from power lines was estimated for all residences where the mothers lived during pregnancy and for all children from birth until the end of follow up. Exposure was categorized into 0 μT, 0.1 μT, and ≥ 0.2 μT for analysis. Definitive and possible asthma cases were identified using data from three independent data sources: 1) mothers' reports, 2) a national hospitalization register, 3) a national prescription drug register. We calculated hazard ratios and 95% confidence intervals for the association between the highest level of exposure during pregnancy and asthma in children, adjusting for several potential confounding factors. We also examined the sensitivity of the risk estimates to changes in exposure and outcome definitions.No differences or trends in the risk of asthma development were detected between children with different levels of MF exposure regardless of the asthma case definition or outcome data source. For definitive cases, the HR for those with any exposure was 0.72, and it was 0.41 for those exposed to ≥ 0.2 μT. Adjustments for confounding and variations in the exposure definition did not appreciably alter the results.We did not find evidence that residential exposure to MF during pregnancy or early childhood increased the risk of childhood asthma. This interpretation is in line with the lack of an established biological mechanism directly linking MF exposure to asthma, but high exposure was very rare in this cohort.

This chapter considers the encounter of skepticism with the Kantian and post-Kantian philosophical enterprise and focuses on the intriguing feature whereby it is assimilated into this enterprise. In this period, skepticism becomes interchangeable with its other, which helps understand the proliferation of many kinds of views under its name and which forms the background for transforming skepticism into an anonymous, routine practice of raising objections and counter-objections to one’s own view. German philosophers of this era counterpose skepticism to dogmatism and criticism, ancient to modern skepticism, and, importantly, conceptualize the transitions from one form to another, which forms the conceptual matrix in which new disciplinary forms, such as psychology, anthropology, and historicism contend for cultural-intellectual standing beside philosophy. I present this assimilationist trajectory by reviewing three well-known moments of this encounter of skepticism and idealism: (1) Kant’s idealization of skepticism as a floating position amidst various philosophical positions through the dialectic, polemics, systematics, and history of pure reason; (2) Fichte’s schematic conception of skepticism as a dispute of systems in the early Wissenschaftslehre following his review of the skeptic G. E. Schulze’s attacks on Critical philosophy; (3) Hegel’s historicizing conception of skepticism in the context of differences between subjective idealism and speculative thought and his early Jena review of another work by the same skeptic Schulze.

'Populism' is defined, debated, and contested at multiple levels. Without entering the complexities involved in trying to define the term, this chapter takes as its point of departure the ideational approach staked by Muddle and Kultwasser in Populism: A Very Short Introduction. According to them populism is a "discourse, ideology or worldview". It is a 'thin-centered ideology' which conveniently fuses with 'thick-centered' ideologies such as socialism and/or nationalism and "considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogenous and antagonistic camps, 'the pure people' versus 'the corrupt elite'". But while Mudde and Kultwasser do an excellent job of laying down some of the critical terms underwriting the concept, namely, the people versus the elite, 'general will' as separate from the 'will of all', and the cult of the charismatic strongman leader, their treatment lacks an interdisciplinary approach to the concept. But this is expected since, as John Abromeit correctly notes, academic scholarship on populism is commonly dominated by political scientists with few, if rare, contributions from sociologists, media scholars, and historians resulting in a general dearth of interdisciplinary and theoretical explorations of populism: "Insights into the socio-economic roots and social-psychological mechanisms that underlie populist movements" remain absent in current studies. The attempt here will be to establish a partial corrective for this blind spot by introducing Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalytic theory for understanding some of the core concepts of Populism, but most specifically, by underlining the importance of addressing the issue from the perspective of the desiring rather than the discursive subject.