Based on recent insight into the thalamocortical system and its role in perception and conscious experience, a unified pathophysiological framework for hallucinations in neurological and psychiatric conditions is proposed, which integrates previously unrelated neurobiological and psychological findings. Gamma-frequency rhythms of discharge activity from thalamic and cortical neurons are facilitated by cholinergic arousal and resonate in networks of thalamocortical circuits, thereby transiently forming assemblies of coherent gamma oscillations under constraints of afferent sensory input and prefrontal attentional mechanisms. If perception is based (...) on synchronisation of intrinsic gamma activity in the thalamocortical system, then sensory input to specific thalamic nuclei may merely play a constraining role. Hallucinations can be regarded as underconstrained perceptions that arise when the impact of sensory input on activation of thalamocortical circuits and synchronisation of thalamocortical gamma activity is reduced. In conditions that are accompanied by hallucinations, factors such as cortical hyperexcitability, cortical attentional mechanisms, hyperarousal, increased noise in specific thalamic nuclei, and random sensory input to specific thalamic nuclei may, to a varying degree, contribute to underconstrained activation of thalamocortical circuits. The reticular thalamic nucleus plays an important role in suppressing random activity of relay cells in specific thalamic nuclei, and its dysfunction may be implicated in the biological vulnerability to hallucinations in schizophrenia. Combined with general activation during cholinergic arousal, this leads to excessive disinhibition in specific thalamic nuclei, which may allow cortical attentional mechanisms to recruit thalamic relay cells into resonant assemblies of gamma oscillations, regardless of their actual sensory input, thereby producing an underconstrained perceptual experience. Key Words: Charles Bonnet syndrome; gamma oscillations; hallucinations; late paraphrenia; Lewy body dementia; perception; schizophrenia; thalamocortical system. (shrink)

Before a general cognitive model for recurrent complex visual hallucinations (RCVH) is accepted, there must be more research into the neuropsychological and cognitive characteristics of the various disorders in which they occur. Currently available data are insufficient to distinguish whether the similar phenomenology of RCVH across different disorders is in fact produced by a single or by multiple cognitive mechanisms.

At the turn of the 17th century, in Romanian philosophy the nobility of spirit is seen as a certain but intermediate value, to be cherished while man waits for his divine reward, which is everlasting life, as presented in Divanul [The Divan] by Dimitrie Cantemir. Two hundred and fifty years later, man is regarded as having evolved from the animal forms of life in Mihai Ralea’s systematic presentation Explicarea omului [An Explanation of Man], and the sole meaning of nobility is (...) the revolutionary one, the heroic one, that is the ethical one. From a totally different point of view, during the interwar period, Constantin Micu Stavilă developed a general theory of man and society thus compellingly arguing against the claims of all ideologists of the natural genesis of human spirituality. In this theory the nobility of spirit was said to come from work and creation. By presenting these examples, my intention is to rediscover this spiritual, moral and socio-cultural ideal in order to find its place, role and profile in designing a new view of human nature, for a more decent human world. (shrink)

The Institute of Social Research, from which the Frankfurt School developed, was founded in the early years of the Weimar Republic. It survived the Nazi era in exile, to become an important centre of social theory in the postwar era. Early members of the school, such as Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse, developed a form of Marxist theory known as Critical Theory, which became influential in the study of class, politics, culture and ideology. The work of more recent members, and in (...) particular Habermas, has received wide attention throughout Europe and North America. Tom Bottomore's study takes a new and controversial look at the contributions of the Frankfurt School to modern sociology, examining several issues not previously discussed elsewhere. He discusses the neglect of history and political economy by the critical theorists, and considers the relationship of the later Frankfurt School to the radical movements of the 1960s and the present time. His critical analysis makes the school's writers accessible, through an assessment of their work and an exploration of the relationship of Critical Theory to other forms of sociological thought, especially positivism and structuralism. (shrink)

In 2015, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals set an ethical imperative: end extreme poverty and hunger by 2030. Microfranchising can contribute to this critical effort by offering nonprofit organizations and businesses an opportunity to rapidly scale entrepreneurship within Base of the Pyramid markets. However, while abundant literature exists on traditional franchising, we know little about how to leverage microfranchising in resource-scarce contexts to alleviate poverty. To address this gap, we report a longitudinal case study of a microfranchise network aimed (...) at providing timely access to quality, affordable agricultural input, and services for millions of small-scale farmers in Bangladesh. Anchored in the BOP and microfranchise literature and drawing on innovation theory as an analytical lens, we provide a detailed account of how CARE—a global humanitarian and development non-governmental organization—developed and managed the network. We found that context played a strong role and that adaptability therefore was key to successfully recruiting and engaging BOP entrepreneurs and other business partners in the network. Moreover, as members joined the network with past ties and established practices, managing these path dependencies had important implications for network performance. Network sustainability in terms of financial and social impact was also a key theme that required careful consideration throughout network development. We combine these empirical findings with extant literature to discuss contributions to the theory and practice of microfranchising and innovation networking in the BOP context. (shrink)

Child analysis has occupied a special place in the history of psychoanalysis because of the challenges it poses to practitioners and the clashes it has provoked among its advocates. Since the early days in Vienna under Sigmund Freud child psychoanalysts have tried to comprehend and make comprehensible to others the psychosomatic troubles of childhood and to adapt clinical and therapeutic approaches to all the stages of development of the baby, the child, the adolescent and the young adult. Claudine and Pierre (...) Geissmann trace the history and development of child analysis over the last century and assess the contributions made by pioneers of the discipline, whose efforts to expand its theoretical foundations led to conflict between schools of thought, most notably to the rift between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein. Now taught and practised widely in Europe, the USA and South America, child and adolescent psychoanalysis is unique in the insight it gives into the psychological aspects of child development, and in the therapeutic benefits it can bring both to the child and its family. (shrink)

This twelfth volume of Correspondence contains authoritative and fully annotated texts of all known letters sent both to and from Bentham between July 1824 and June 1828. The 301 letters, most of which have never before been published, have been collected from archives, public and private, in Britain, the United States of America, Switzerland, France, Japan, and elsewhere, as well as from the major collections of Bentham Papers at University College London Library and the British Library.In mid-1824 Bentham was still (...) preoccupied with the Greek struggle for independence against Turkey, though his active involvement waned as he became disenchanted with the behaviour of the deputies sent to London by the Greek National Assembly. His international reputation was reflected in his continuing contact with Simón Bolívar and Bernardino Rivadavia in South America, and with John Quincy Adams, John Neal, Henry Wheaton, and others in the United States, and his forging of new contacts in Guatemala, India, and Egypt. In the autumn of 1825 he visited France, where he stayed with Jean Baptiste Say and La Fayette, and was fêted by the French liberals.Bentham made considerable progress drafting material for his pannomion, or complete code of laws, and in particular for his Constitutional and Procedure Codes, while John Stuart Mill edited the massive Rationale of Judicial Evidence. Bentham became increasingly active in the cause of law reform, and exchanged a series of letters on the subject with Robert Peel, the Home Secretary, and Henry Brougham. He maintained his friendships with John and Sarah Austin, George and Harriet Grote, James and John Stuart Mill, John Bowring, Joseph Hume, Francis Burdett, Francis Place, and Joseph Parkes, re-established contact with the third Marquis of Lansdowne, son of his old friend the first Marquis, and made new acquaintances in James Humphreys, Sutton Sharpe, and Albany Fonblanque. (shrink)

Jeremy Bentham, the philosopher and reformer, was at the height of his fame and influence in the 1820s. The 301 letters in this volume, many of which are previously unpublished, contain correspondence with international leaders such as Simn Bolvar, the 'Liberator', and Bernardino Rivadavia of Buenos Aires, British statesmen such as Robert Peel and Henry Brougham, and leading intellectuals such as John Stuart Mill and Sarah Austin.

This article discusses the conditions under which the use of expert knowledge may provide an adequate response to public concerns about high-tech, late modern risks. Scientific risk estimation has more than once led to expert controversies. When these controversies occur, the public at large – as a media audience – faces a paradoxical situation: on the one hand it must rely on the expertise of scientists as represented in the mass media, but on the other it is confused by (...) competing expert claims in the absence of any clear-cut standard to judge these claims. The question then arises, what expertise can the public trust? I argue that expert controversies cannot be settled by appealing to neutral, impartial expertise, because each use of expert knowledge in applied contexts is inextricably bound up with normative and evaluative assumptions. This value-laden nature of expert contributions, however, does not necessarily force us to adopt a relativist conception of expert knowledge. Nor does it imply active involvement of ordinary citizens in scientific risk estimation – as some authors seem to suggest. The value-laden, or partisan, nature of expert statements rather requires an unbiased process of expert dispute in which experts and counter-experts can participate. Moreover, instead of being a reason for discrediting expert contributions, experts'' commitment may enhance public trustworthiness because it enlarges the scope of perspectives taken into account, to include public concerns. Experts who share the same worries as (some of) the public could be expected to voice these worries at the level of expert dispute. Thus, a broadly shaped expert dispute, that is accessible to both proponents and opponents, is a prerequisite for public trust. (shrink)

Some recent version of mysticism -- Empty epiphanies in modernist and postmodernist theory -- The gender of human togetherness -- Histories of modern selfhood -- Meister Eckhart's anthropology -- Becoming God in fourteenth-century Europe -- The makings of the modern self -- Taking leave of Sigmund Freud -- Everyday acknowledgments.

Commentaries in late antiquity were the predominant form of scholarly engagement with ancient, authoritative texts. Not only in Greek, but in Latin no less, ancient commentaries were an integral part of reading and understanding literature and philosophy (and theology, as part and parcel of philosophy at that time). I shall deal with commentaries (as self-standing works, different from glosses) on poetic, rhetorical, philosophical, and religious texts in Latin late antiquity, both ‘pagan’ and Christian. Grammatical and rhetorical education played (...) a remarkable role in their preparation, and questions of adaptation and of the reuse of earlier material, especially Greek models, will also come into play. (shrink)

ArgumentSpace projects represent, after World War II, the archetype of large-scale organization of scientific practices that are flexible, temporary, and oriented towards specific goals. A new form of activity, the project, emerged through the management of technical means, allocation of skills, and coordination of various players. Project management emerged as the synthesis of a set of social practices designed to subordinate as well as synchronize the initiatives of researchers, engineers, and technicians who had temporarily joined forces. This article presents the (...) genesis and deployment of the Franco-Soviet space program ARCAD 3 whose purpose was to study the magnetosphere with a satellite. This study is situated at the junction of three historiographical dimensions: scientific writings, links between action and graphic forms, and Big Science. The diagrams, organization charts and schedules produced by the French space agency throughout the entire project form the documentary substrata of this analysis. These graphic management tools define the role of each player, designate fields of competence, and specify the temporality of actions. A self-monitoring system as well as surveillance instrument, diagrams, organization charts and schedules are linked to form a certain vision of authority along the lines of the “neoliberal governmentality” defined by Michel Foucault. By defining in advance and in writing all the possible (or impossible) relationships, the chronological order of activities as well as the actions to be performed, graphic project management tools contribute to the transfer of coercive panoptic mechanisms towards a minimal organization of relationships between individuals. (shrink)

The unceasing approximation of the remarkable 2000th anniversary of the coming to the world of Christ highlights the need for further analysis of those processes that took place in the spiritual life of the ancient peoples and laid the foundations of modern civilization with its universal human norms and values.

This article aims to reveal the semantic dynamics of narratives on Rousseau in Kyiv academic philosophy of the 19th and early 20th centuries. through the separation of the informational layer from the rhetorical one in their content and the identification of hidden (unarticulated) elements that determined both the general nature of the narrative and the evaluative judgments of the narrators. Based on archival primary sources and printed editions (mostly bibliographic rarities), a historical and philosophic study of the narratives on Jean-Jacques (...) Rousseau and his philosophy of education performed, which were created and broadcast by professors of Kyiv Theological Academy and St.Volodymyr University Pamfil Yurkevych, Sylvester Gogotskyi, Markellin Olesnitskyi, Mykola Makkaveiskyi, Oleksandr Selikhanovych, and Vasyl Zenkovskyi. Keeping almost the same informational core, the narratives of Kyiv academicians on Rousseau differ significantly in terms of rhetoric. While the “older generation” goes into philosophical criticism of the pedagogical ideas of the Swiss thinker as the Stranger, the “younger ones”, limiting themselves to remarks about their controversial nature, represent him as the Self. This difference is due to both personal factors and institutional conditions for the development of Kyiv academic philosophy, as well as changes in the general political situation in the period of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. (shrink)

Christiaan Huygens’s late writings, ranging from 1686 to 1695, bear witness to his philosophical and theological reflections. In his Cosmotheoros, which was intended for publication, and other late writings that can be regarded as its preparatory drafts, Huygens deals with issues central to seventeenth-century philosophical debates: God’s power, divine and human intelligence, probabilistic epistemology, natural theology, and the plurality of worlds. This paper explains how Huygens’s reflections on animals and their souls, rational or not, play a key role (...) in his epistemological reflections on natural theology. The issue of animal generation, as well as of animal souls, is crucial to identifying elements of continuity between the scientific topics of Huygens’s works, and may be considered as the point of intersection between his understanding of mechanism and of the teleology of nature. This neglected perspective on Huygens’s philosophical-natural animism reveals key elements of his model of rationality and of his attitude towards religion, demonstrating his involvement in the debate over animism, in which he seems to have been strongly influenced by English Protestant empiricism. (shrink)

The Buridanian view of the concrete cognition as the general characteristics of sense perception was adopted by Jodocus Trutfetter and Bartholomaeus Arnoldi of Usingen. This theory was not accepted merely on the basis of authority, but it was argued against the competing view, which appeared as legitimate inside the late medieval school of via moderna.

In Late Works of Mou Zongsan , this influential Chinese philosopher speaks on the future of Chinese culture, the achievements of Confucianism, the place of Buddhism and Daoism in Chinese philosophy, and the possibility of partnership between Chinese and Western thought.

David Lewis championed a counterfactual account of causation, but counterfactual accounts have a notoriously difficult time handling cases of late preemption. These are cases in which we still count one event as the cause of another although the effect does not depend on the cause in the way taken to be necessary by the account. Lewis recognized these cases, but they have been shown to be problematic even for his final analysis of causation, the Influence Account. In this paper, (...) I show how these cases led to and remain a problem for Lewis’s Influence Account, and I give a new counterfactual account available to a Lewisian that can handle late preemption cases. What is crucial to my account is that a cause not merely has counterfactual influence over its effects, but that the cause has influence of the right kind. I conclude by arguing that even if problems remain with this account, they will not be problems of late preemption, and the problems stemming from other kinds of cases will be no worse for my account than for other counterfactual accounts. (shrink)

Late German Idealism: Trendelenburg and Lotze, by BeiserFrederick. Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2013.

Theodor Adorno’s “Late Style in Beethoven” is the first philosophically sophisticated attempt to chronicle, if not fully characterize, movements of the mature artwork. With direct reference to Beethoven’s third and final phase, Adorno offers a complex formulation of aging and artistry. He attempts to capture, ambitiously, the content and internal structure of the late artwork, the forms to which that internal structure is responsible, the artistic conventions governing that structure, the sociohistorical conditions in which the work was produced (...) and, finally, the personality of the late artist. Foremost among these formulations is the idea of late style as putatively strange and difficult. Works of the... (shrink)

Late Medieval and Early Modern Fight Books offers insights into the cultural and historical transmission and practices of martial arts, based on the corpus of the Fight Books (Fechtbücher) in 14th- to 17th-century Europe. The first part of the book deals with methodological and specific issues for the studies of this emerging interdisciplinary field of research. The second section offers an overview of the corpus based on geographical areas. The final part offers some relevant case studies. This is the (...) first book proposing a comprehensive state of research and an overview of Historical European Martial Arts Studies. One of its major strengths lies in its association of interdisciplinary scholars with practitioners of martial arts. Contributors are Sydney Anglo, Matthias Johannes Bauer, Eric Burkart, Marco Cavina, Franck Cinato, John Clements, Timothy Dawson, Olivier Dupuis, Bert Gevaert, Dierk Hagedorn, Daniel Jaquet, Rachel E. Kellet, Jens Peter Kleinau, Ken Mondschein, Reinier van Noort, B. Ann Tlusty, Manuel Valle Ortiz, Karin Verelst, and Paul Wagner. (shrink)

This essay positions the figure and thought of T.W. Adorno in relation to Mulk Raj Anand, and the latter’s foundational contributions to the modern Indian novel in English. In Adorno’s musical writings, “late style” features as a methodological premise, or an expository mode that removes the work from conventional norms of evaluation. Late style is directed especially toward canonized works that seem to lack current artistic or social relevance, despite their culturally privileged standing. The essay approaches Adorno and (...) Anand, accordingly: Their affiliations with European modernism and postcolonial realism, respectively, are read in late style, or, as largely obsoleted formations of the previous century. Focussing on Anand’s historical fiction, Across the Black Waters, my essay recuperates the novel’s vision of a single if internally differentiated twentieth-century: By imagining the Great War as world-historical crisis, Anand’s novel stage... (shrink)

The late scholastic era was, among others, contemporary to the “emergence of probability”, the German academic philosophy from Leibniz to Kant, and the introduction of Newtonian physics. Within this era, two branches of the late-scholastic analysis of induction can be identified, one which can be thought of as a continual development of earlier scholastic approaches, while the other one absorbed influences of early modern philosophy, mathematics, and physics. Both branches of scholastic philosophy share the terminology of modalities, probability, (...) and forms of arguments. Furthermore, induction was commonly considered valid as a result of being a covert syllogism. Last but not least, there appears to be a difference in emphasis between the two traditions’ analyses of induction: while Tolomei discussed the theological presuppositions of induction, Amort’s “leges contingentium” exemplify the principles of induction by aleatory phenomena and Boscovich’s rules for inductive arguments are predominately concerned with the generalisation of macro-level observations to the micro-level. (shrink)