Clinical responses to dopamine replacement therapy for individuals with Parkinson’s disease are often difficult to predict. We characterized changes in MDS-UPDRS motor factor scores resulting from a short-duration L-Dopa response, and investigated how the inter-subject clinical differences could be predicted from motor cortical magnetoencephalography. MDS-UPDRS motor factor scores and resting-state MEG recordings were collected during SDR from twenty individuals with a PD diagnosis. We used a novel subject-specific strategy based on linear support vector machines to quantify motor cortical oscillatory frequency (...) profiles that best predicted medication state. Motor cortical profiles differed substantially across individuals and showed consistency across multiple data folds. There was a linear relationship between classification accuracy and SDR of lower limb bradykinesia, although this relationship did not persist after multiple comparison correction, suggesting that combinations of spectral power features alone are insufficient to predict clinical state. Factor score analysis of therapeutic response and novel subject-specific machine learning approaches based on subject-specific neuroimaging provide tools to predict outcomes of therapies for PD. (shrink)

In 1956 Jacques Lacan proposed as interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe's "Purloined Letter" that at once challenged literary theorists and revealed a radically new conception of psychoanalysis. Lacan's far-reaching claims about language and truth provoked a vigorous critique by Jacques Derrida, whose essay in turn has spawned further responses from Barbara Johnson, Jane Gallop, Irene Harvey, Norman Holland, and others. The Purloined Poe brings Poe's story together with these readings to provide, in the words of the editors, "a (...) structured exercuse in the elaboration of textual interpretation. The Purloined Poe reprints the full text of Poe's story, followed by Lacan's "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter,'" along with extensive commentary by the editors. Marie Bonaparte's and Shoshana Felman's discussions of traditional and contemporary approaches to "psychoanalysing" texts precede Alan Bass's new translation of Derrida's "Purveyor of Truth." The subsequent essays join the Lacan-Derrida debate and offer alternative readings by literary theorists, philosophers, psychologists, and psychoanalysts. The Purloined Poe convenes much of the most important current scholarship on "The Purloined Letter" and presents a rich sampling of poststructuralist discourse. (shrink)

My thesis is that moral ignorance does not imply a failure to care adequately about what is in fact morally significant. I offer three cases: one in which someone is ignorant of the precise nature of what she cares about; one in which someone does not reflect on the significance of what she cares about in a particular set of circumstances, and one in which someone cares deeply about two morally significant considerations while being mistaken about their relative significance. I (...) argue that these agents all clearly care at least “adequately” about everything morally significant, including the very considerations that in fact make their acts wrong. This creates theoretical room for a way of thinking about culpable moral ignorance that respects the key concerns of those in the voluntarist tradition who have held that moral ignorance is typically blameless, within an approach to thinking about moral responsibility according to which we are blameworthy for that which manifests poor quality of will; caring adequately does not require moral omniscience, but motivated moral ignorance and moral ignorance that reflects indifference to things that matter morally are still blameworthy. My thesis also suggests a fruitful change of direction for quality-of-will theorists: we should articulate the nature and structure of the standards for adequate caring, i.e. those that specify what it is to care “adequately”. I close by offering an initial proposal as to what these standards might look like and identifying four promising avenues for further research on this topic. (shrink)

As we combat the COVID-19 pandemic, both the prescription of antimicrobials and the use of biocidal agents have increased in many countries. Although these measures can be expected to benefit existing people by, to some extent, mitigating the pandemic's effects, they may threaten long-term well-being of existing and future people, where they contribute to the problem of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). A trade-off dilemma thus presents itself: combat COVID-19 using these measures, or stop using them in order to protect against AMR. (...) Currently, I argue, we are choosing to continue with these measures, and thus to prioritize combatting COVID-19, without adequate ethical reflection on the AMR-associated costs of these measures. I discuss the magnitude of the possible costs and benefits involved in making the trade-off in favour of COVID-19, and their distribution. I highlight two salient aspects of distribution that can help determine whether combatting COVID-19 whilst exacerbating AMR produces justly distributed costs and benefits: distribution between current and future populations, and distribution between existing geographical populations. Adopting this account, I argue that based on the magnitude and distribution of costs and benefits of combatting COVID-19, we have good reason to rethink this trade-off, and instead consider prioritizing protecting current and future people against AMR, but jettisoning measures against COVID-19 that also exacerbate AMR. (shrink)

Offers a robust, full-orbed theology of beauty, showing how it has functioned as a theological concept from biblical times to the present day.

Preview: “America does not think much of its philosophers,” Douglas Anderson writes in his introduction to Philosophy Americana. “We do not teach philosophy in our high schools. A majority in America have no idea what philosophy is about or why it might be interesting, if not important.” Perhaps that lack of appreciation for philosophy is coeval with its beginnings when the ancient Athenians put Socrates to death. Anderson’s lament is clearly present from the supposed birth of Western philosophy, and vividly (...) so in 1486 in Italian humanist Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s discourse known as The Dignity of Man, where he states, “The whole of philosophy is occasion for contempt and contumely, rather than honor and glory. The deadly and monstrous persuasion has invaded practically all minds, that philosophy ought not to be studied at all or by very few people; as though it were a thing of little worth to have before our eyes and at our fingertips....Thus,” Pico said six centuries ago, “we have reached a point, it is painful to recognize, where the only persons accounted wise are those who can reduce the pursuit of wisdom to a profitable traffic.” So it seems today in America and so it has apparently been and will ever be. Nevertheless, Anderson hopes to open a discussion about how philosophy does and does not manifest itself in American culture, how its practitioners remain “invisible,” and largely misunderstood “in rural, laboring, underclassed, and unschooled settings.” It is not his intention, at least in this book, to take up the issue of race in a discipline as overwhelmingly white as Western philosophy. Yet this has been for me, a black American philosopher, a lifelong meditation, which I will attempt to address in this essay. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 11, November 2019, Page 39-41.

La crisis es valorada fundamentalmente como una crisis económica, aunque en realidad afecta también a lo político y lo social. Por eso, la primera tarea debe consistir en replantear los axiomas de la economía que han desembocado en la creencia en el Homo economicus y la apología de la competitividad. Frente a ello, convendría desarrollar una política de la cooperación, que aquí recibe el nombre de contrademocracia. Esta cooperación no debería tener miedo del conflicto ni del rol, muchas veces problemático, (...) que debe desempeñar el otro, y ella encuentra su mejor ejemplificación en la concepción de la comunidad desarrollada por Jean-Luc Nancy y Roberto Esposito, lo que aquí llamamos una comunidad de la diferencia. (shrink)

On 5th June 2022 Wales played Ukraine for a place in the FIFA World Cup finals, which are due to be held in Qatar in November and December 2022.I suspect that all right-mined people wanted Ukraine...

If Europe wants to overcome its current crisis, it urgently needs to develop a new political vision and a new concept for political integration. By focusing on the idea of a cosmopolitan Europe, this article outlines such a political vision for Europe. To this end, it first suggests reformulating the concept of cosmopolitanism in such a way that it is not tied to the ‘cosmos’ or the ‘globe’. With the aid of such a generalized concept of cosmopolitanism it then presents (...) a novel, cosmopolitan approach to European integration that is no longer concerned with harmonizing rules and eliminating (national) differences, but with recognizing them. Finally, it outlines a new, post-national model of democracy for Europe that no longer disenfranchises citizens and instead gives them an active role in European decision-making processes. (shrink)

Integrating race and gender in a social constructionist framework, the authors examine the way that second-generation Asian American young women describe doing gender across ethnic and mainstream settings, as well as their assumptions about the nature of Asian and white femininities. This analysis of interviews with 100 daughters of Korean and Vietnamese immigrants finds that respondents narratively construct Asian and Asian American cultural worlds as quintessentially and uniformly patriarchal and fully resistant to change. In contradistinction, mainstream white America is constructed (...) as the prototype of gender equality. Hence, Asian American and white American women serve in these accounts as uniform categorical representations of the opposing forces of female oppression and egalitarianism. The authors consider how the relational construction of hegemonic and subordinated femininities, as revealed through controlling images that denigrate Asian forms of gender, contribute to internalized oppression and shape the doing of ethnicity. (shrink)

The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have seen the rise of a new phenomenon - online ordination. It can be accepted that much of this burgeoning industry is a financial scam, but is that the whole story? The very existence of online ordination raises questions. Why do people feel the need for a “minister” to officiate at weddings? If they are sufficiently estranged from the religious sphere that no bona fide minister of religion will marry them, and if secular (...) alternatives are readily available, why make use of this service? This article presents an overview and typology of online ordination services and places them in the context of the development of religion in contemporary society, and the development of society itself. (shrink)

"Sure to be controversial and of interest to a wide audience in feminist history" (Judith Grant, University of Southern California), this book draws on a wide range of political and intellectual traditions to demonstrate that, only by ...

Hastings Center Report, Volume 52, Issue S1, Page S32-S34, March‐April 2022.

This is paper from my graduate school days that has had chunks of it published, but which I never did develop fully—nor do I think I ever shall. It is useful for getting a sense on how the notion 'obediential potency' was used in Thomas's day, however, and visits key moments in Thomas's writing that illustrate how he applies the notion in his teaching.Oh, the paper was written for Fr Walter Principe, who had no love for the notion of obediential (...) potency; but he did say to me that I had started to change his mind... (shrink)