BackgroundIn Parkinson's disease, the side of motor symptoms onset may influence disease progression, with a faster motor symptom progression in patients with left side lateralization. Moreover, worse neuropsychological outcomes after subthalamic nucleus deep brain stimulation have been described in patients with predominantly left-sided motor symptoms. The objective of this study was to evaluate if the body side of motor symptoms onset may predict motor outcome of bilateral STN-DBS.MethodsThis retrospective study included all consecutive PD patients treated with bilateral STN-DBS at Grenoble (...) University Hospital from 1993 to 2015. Demographic, clinical and neuroimaging data were collected before and 1 year after surgery. The predictive factors of motor outcome at one-year follow-up, measured by the percentage change in the MDS-UPDRS-III score, were evaluated through univariate and multivariate linear regression analysis.ResultsA total of 233 patients were included with one-year follow-up after surgery [143 males ; 121 right body onset; 112 left body onset; mean age at surgery, 55.31 ± 8.44 years; mean disease duration, 11.61 ± 3.87]. Multivariate linear regression analysis showed that the left side of motor symptoms onset did not predict motor outcome.ConclusionsIn this retrospective study, the body side of motor symptoms onset did not significantly influence the one-year motor outcome in a large cohort of PD patients treated with bilateral STN-DBS. (shrink)

Do you dream in color? If you answer Yes, how can you be sure? Before you recount your vivid memory of a dream featuring all the colors of the rainbow, consider that in the 1950s researchers found that most people reported dreaming in black and white. In the 1960s, when most movies were in color and more people had color television sets, the vast majority of reported dreams contained color. The most likely explanation for this, according to the philosopher (...) class='Hi'>Eric Schwitzgebel, is not that exposure to black-and-white media made people misremember their dreams. It is that we simply don't know whether or not we dream in color. In Perplexities of Consciousness, Schwitzgebel examines various aspects of inner life and argues that we know very little about our stream of conscious experience. Drawing broadly from historical and recent philosophy and psychology to examine such topics as visual perspective, and the unreliability of introspection, Schwitzgebel finds us singularly inept in our judgments about conscious experience. (shrink)

Situates Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite as a Neoplatonic philosopher in the tradition of Plotinus and Proclus.

In Thinking Being , Perl articulates central arguments and ideas regarding the nature of reality in Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and Thomas Aquinas, thematizing the indissoluble togetherness of thought and being, and focusing on continuity rather than opposition within this tradition.

This article deals with the concept of infinity in classical American philosophy. It focuses on the philosophical and technical developments of infinity in the 19th Century American thinkers Royce and Peirce.

The view that belief is a dyadic relation between a believer and some other object, e.g., a proposition, appears to receive support from the fact that we can infer ‘There is something that Jones believes' from ordinary belief ascriptions such as ‘Jones believes that the tallest man is wise’. On consideration, however, it turns out that even a crude nonrelational view of belief can accommodate this inference. In order to permit the inference the nonrelationalist must read‘ There is something that (...) Jones believes' as equivalent to‘ Jones has a belief. (shrink)

Removing the Commons defends a Lockean Left-Libertarian account of the moral conditions in which people may remove, either via use or appropriation, natural resources from the commons. I conclude that self-owning agents may remove natural resources from the commons just so long as they leave others the competitive value of their removal in a way that best affords others an equal opportunity for welfare.

Neuroethics is an interdisciplinary field that arose in response to novel ethical challenges posed by advances in neuroscience. Historically, neuroethics has provided an opportunity to synergize different disciplines, notably proposing a two-way dialogue between an ‘ethics of neuroscience’ and a ‘neuroscience of ethics’. However, questions surface as to whether a ‘neuroscience of ethics’ is a useful and unified branch of research and whether it can actually inform or lead to theoretical insights and transferable practical knowledge to help resolve ethical questions. (...) In this article, we examine why the neuroscience of ethics is a promising area of research and summarize what we have learned so far regarding its most promising goals and contributions. We then review some of the key methodological challenges which may have hindered the use of results generated thus far by the neuroscience of ethics. Strategies are suggested to address these challenges and improve the quality of research and increase neuroscience's usefulness for applied ethics and society at large. Finally, we reflect on potential outcomes of a neuroscience of ethics and discuss the different strategies that could be used to support knowledge transfer to help different stakeholders integrate knowledge from the neuroscience of ethics. (shrink)

In this response I take issue with Professor Ausland’s use of the account of the soul in Republic 4 as a basis for reading Republic 8-9. I believe that the method and assumptions of Republic 4 are pre-dialectical and that Books 8-9 should be read in light of the digressive Books 5-7. By placing greater emphasis on the asymmetry between Book 4 and Books 8-9, the basic assumptions governing the decline of regimes will show themselves to tell a different story (...) of moral experience and moral decomposition than we find in Professor Ausland’s instructive and insightful reading of the dialogue. (shrink)

I apply some of the lessons from quantum theory, in particular from Bell’s theorem, to a debate on the foundations of decision theory and causation. By tracing a formal analogy between the basic assumptions of causal decision theory (CDT)—which was developed partly in response to Newcomb’s problem— and those of a local hidden variable theory in the context of quantum mechanics, I show that an agent who acts according to CDT and gives any nonzero credence to some possible causal interpretations (...) underlying quantum phenomena should bet against quantum mechanics in some feasible game scenarios involving entangled systems, no matter what evidence they acquire. As a consequence, either the most accepted version of decision theory is wrong, or it provides a practical distinction, in terms of the prescribed behaviour of rational agents, between some metaphysical hypotheses regarding the causal structure underlying quantum mechanics. (shrink)

I address two seemingly unrelated topics: the first is the subject and formulation of the hypotheses and the second is the number of hypotheses. On the topic of the subject of the hypotheses, my position is that we are initially given an indefinite monad, a “one”, which is in no case “the one”, “the one itself”, or the form of unity. We are meant to read the hypotheses with the question in mind, “what one is this?” If we do so, (...) we are confronted with strikingly different answers, which, when taken together, point us toward key insights into the nature of intelligibility. On the topic of the number of hypotheses: we are led to expect four, but we are given eight. My position is that we are meant to disarm apparent contradictions between paired hypotheses, especially H1-H2 but also H3-4, 5-6, and 7-8, because doing so will help us further determine the different types of monad Parmenides has in view. In the end, two primary types of monad emerge from the process of disambiguation, namely, form and sensible particular, and we, having differentiated these types of “one”, will have gathered resources for understanding how sensible particulars are grounded in forms. (shrink)

In _Civilization and Its Discontents_, Freud made abundantly clear what he thought about the biblical injunction, first articulated in Leviticus 19:18 and then elaborated in Christian teachings, to love one's neighbor as oneself. "Let us adopt a naive attitude towards it," he proposed, "as though we were hearing it for the first time; we shall be unable then to suppress a feeling of surprise and bewilderment." After the horrors of World War II, the Holocaust, Stalinism, and Yugoslavia, Leviticus 19:18 seems (...) even less conceivable—but all the more urgent now—than Freud imagined. In _The Neighbor_, three of the most significant intellectuals working in psychoanalysis and critical theory collaborate to show how this problem of neighbor-love opens questions that are fundamental to ethical inquiry and that suggest a new theological configuration of political theory. Their three extended essays explore today's central historical problem: the persistence of the theological in the political. In "Towards a Political Theology of the Neighbor," Kenneth Reinhard supplements Carl Schmitt's political theology of the enemy and friend with a political theology of the neighbor based in psychoanalysis. In "Miracles Happen," Eric L. Santner extends the book's exploration of neighbor-love through a bracing reassessment of Benjamin and Rosenzweig. And in an impassioned plea for ethical violence, Slavoj Žižek's "Neighbors and Other Monsters" reconsiders the idea of excess to rehabilitate a positive sense of the inhuman and challenge the influence of Levinas on contemporary ethical thought. A rich and suggestive account of the interplay between love and hate, self and other, personal and political, _The Neighbor_ will prove to be a touchstone across the humanities and a crucial text for understanding the persistence of political theology in secular modernity. (shrink)

(2005). Wonder in the face of scientific revolutions: Adam Smith on Newton's ‘Proof’ of Copernicanism. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 13, No. 4, pp. 697-732. doi: 10.1080/09608780500293042.

Dennett argues that we can be mistaken about our own conscious experience. Despite this, he repeatedly asserts that we can or do have unchallengeable authority of some sort in our reports about that experience. This assertion takes three forms. First, Dennett compares our authority to the authority of an author over his fictional world. Unfortunately, that appears to involve denying that there are actual facts about experience that subjects may be truly or falsely reporting. Second, Dennett sometimes seems to say (...) that even though we may be mistaken about what our conscious experience is, our reports about. (shrink)

We investigate the question of whether one can characterize complexity classes in terms of efficient reducibility to the set of Kolmogorov-random strings . This question arises because and , and no larger complexity classes are known to be reducible to in this way. We show that this question cannot be posed without explicitly dealing with issues raised by the choice of universal machine in the definition of Kolmogorov complexity. What follows is a list of some of our main results.• Although (...) Kummer showed that, for every universal machine U there is a time bound t such that the halting problem is disjunctive truth-table reducible to in time t, there is no such time bound t that suffices for every universal machine U. We also show that, for some machines U, the disjunctive reduction can be computed in as little as doubly-exponential time.• Although for every universal machine U, there are very complex sets that are -reducible to , it is nonetheless true that . • Any decidable set that is polynomial-time monotone-truth-table reducible to is in .• Any decidable set that is polynomial-time truth-table reducible to via a reduction that asks at most f queries on inputs of size n lies in. (shrink)

Two articles on the reduction of chemistry are examined. The first, by McLaughlin (1992), claims that chemistry is reduced to physics and that there is no evidence for emergence or for downward causation between the chemical and the physical level. In a more recent article, Le Poidevin (2005) maintains that his combinatorial approach provides grounding for the ontological reduction of chemistry, which also circumvents some limitations in the physicalist program. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Chemistry and (...) Biochemistry, UCLA, 607 Charles E. Young Drive East, Box 951569, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1569; e-mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

We investigate whether age profiles of ethnobiological knowledge development are consistent with predictions derived from life history theory about the timing of productivity and reproduction. Life history models predict complementary knowledge profiles developing across the lifespan for women and men as they experience changes in embodied capital and the needs of dependent offspring. We evaluate these predictions using an ethnobiological knowledge assessment tool developed for an off-grid pastoralist population known as Choyeros, from Baja California Sur, Mexico. Our results indicate that (...) while individuals acquire knowledge of most dangerous items and edible resources by early adulthood, knowledge of plants and animals relevant to the age and sex divided labor domains and ecologies (e.g., women’s house gardens, men’s herding activities in the wilderness) continues to develop into middle adulthood but to different degrees and at different rates for men and women. As the demands of offspring on parents accumulate with age, reproductive-aged adults continue to develop their knowledge to meet their children’s needs. After controlling for vision, our analysis indicates that many post-reproductive adults show the greatest ethnobiological knowledge. These findings extend our understanding of the evolved human life history by illustrating how changes in embodied capital and the needs of dependent offspring predict the development of men’s and women’s ethnobiological knowledge across the lifespan. (shrink)

Just War Thinking reconsiders the intersection between morality and pragmatics in foreign policy and modern warfare. The book argues that a political ethic of responsibility should motivate the contemporary application of military force by states in order to protect international security and human life, considering the challenges posed by today's new wars: targeted killing, humanitarian intervention, terrorism, jus post bellum, and the influences of public opinion and supranational institutions.

Rosenberg's The Thinking Self also takes Husserl to task. Without going into the details here, Rosenberg finds Husserl's reliance on retentions to be inadequate. Instead, Rosenberg proposes that previous representations enter into our unified, instantaneous awareness of a succession as ones of which we are aware that we are, or were, aware of; as items of so-called meta-awareness. But this account falls prey to the same worries as Husserl's. For again, it is by no means clear what a series of (...) awarenesses, meta-awarenesses, meta-meta-awarenesses, etc. have to do with the representation of a temporal series. (shrink)

In Planned Parenthood v. Casey the Court argued that the Fourteenth Amendment protected “choices central to personal dignity and autonomy”. In...

The time?honored concept of change seems capable of accounting for the appearance of matter from the primal energy of the Universe, and in turn for the emergence of life from that matter. As sentient beings, we, perhaps along with other advanced life forms in the cosmos, have become the collective consciousness of the Universe. Our raison d'etre is our ability to appreciate the cosmos?to wonder, to introspect, to abstract, to explain?for technological intelligence is a preeminently evolved agent of the Universe.

Melanesian ethnography has been a substantial and enduring presence in Strathern’s comparative project of anthropology. The cornerstone of this project was The Gender of the Gift, where a model was established for demonstrating the analogies between Melanesian societies based on a system of common differences. The comparisons created in this work were centred on a real and radical divide between Melanesia and the West. Strathern’s subsequent comparative work has examined the debates surrounding new social and technological forms in the West (...) (e.g. new genetic and reproductive technologies) through drawing analogies with Melanesian social forms; she has simultaneously highlighted the limits of these comparisons. Her intention in this comparative project has been to expand the range of concepts and language used to understand western social and technological innovations that potentially affect the world at large, so that debate is not simply circumscribed by western preoccupations and concerns. As mediated through the analysis of Strathern and the other Melanesian anthropologists she draws on, the voices and interests of non-westerners can potentially inform and even reform the grounds of such deliberations. (shrink)

Is God dead? -- The western split : transcendent, deity, desacralised nature -- The western split : God's otherness, humanity's degradation -- The western split : gender discrimination, its origins, and its consequences -- Energy and divinity -- Divinity within -- The Christian doctrine of incarnation : restricted immanence -- Incarnation and atonement mythology -- Creativity, divine, and human -- Divinity and ethics -- Religion and science -- The problem of evil : providence -- Death and beyond.

Isabelle Stengers anchors the major stake in Whiteheadian philosophy in the notion of constructivism. In doing so, the relation of this philosophy of becoming — the first anti-substantialist principle of which is stated as `principle of process' — to the ideas of vitalist intuition as the self-expression of the world is announced as eminently problematic. This problematizing opening to Whitehead obliges us to think about the constructivist nature of his concepts because of their irreducibility to the expression of facts of (...) experience since they must necessarily function as a machinic articulation of how things become implied in the `ontological principle' of reason; by the same token, it poses at the heart of the analysis the question of the pragmatic-speculative alterity in Whiteheadian constructivism. (shrink)

Masoch emerging from the Text for a Life-Experiment: what Deleuze delivers to us is a political program, because « there is no other danger but the father’s return. ».

Ernesto Neto's installation at the Panthéon in Paris, Leviathan Toth (2006), brings us into a semiotics of intensities that does not belong to the ‘aesthetic regime’ as described by Jacques Rancière but rather to a Diagrammatic Agency of Contemporary Art. In this case study, the latter is constructed after Deleuze and Guattari – from a politics of the Body without Organs critically and clinically identified to a Body without Image.

In this article, we begin from the assertion that global war does not affirm itself as an imperial ordering power without `opacifying' every regulative idea of peace, which is thereby reduced to the status of a deceptive illusion. `Postmodern' peace, which is absolutely contemporaneous with war, is deduced from war in the guise of the `post-democratic' institution of a permanent state of exception, of a continuation of war by other means (externally as well as internally), and of a reduction of (...) sovereignty to the imbalance of terror, in accordance with the principle of distinction that opposes friend and enemy. Once war, peace and barbarism interact with no rule other than the common sense of the unworldly squalor ( l'immonde), only Combat against War can destroy the sensorial evidence of a false social peace and open on to the construction of a World ( Monde) that is once again possible for the singularities that we are in common. Whence derives the character of social threat that marks out contemporary art (and explains the trials to which it is subjected) when it focuses on the mediatic world-image by putting to work a new transversalist aesthetic paradigm, exposing itself to the tearing asunder of the sensible in the over-exposition of peace to war. This could be art's new address, tracing its difference in a creative machination of affects that can no longer find support in any remembrance of the being of peace. (shrink)