Neurosurgery for psychiatric disorders, also sometimes referred to as psychosurgery, is rapidly evolving, with new techniques and indications being investigated actively. Many within the field have suggested that some form of guidelines or regulations are needed to help ensure that a promising field develops safely. Multiple countries have enacted specific laws regulating NPD. This article reviews NPD-specific laws drawn from North and South America, Asia and Europe, in order to identify the typical form and contents of these laws and to (...) set the groundwork for the design of an optimal regulation for the field. Key challenges for this design that are revealed by the review are how to define the scope of the law, what types of regulations are required, and how to approach international harmonization given the potential migration of researchers and patients. (shrink)

BackgroundCentral to ethically justified clinical trial design is the need for an informed consent process responsive to how potential subjects actually comprehend study participation, especially study goals, risks, and potential benefits. This will be particularly challenging when studying deep brain stimulation and whether it impedes symptom progression in Parkinson’s disease, since potential subjects will be Parkinson’s patients for whom deep brain stimulation will likely have therapeutic value in the future as their disease progresses.MethodAs part of an expanded informed consent process (...) for a pilot Phase I study of deep brain stimulation in early stage Parkinson’s disease, an ethics questionnaire composed of 13 open-ended questions was distributed to potential subjects. The questionnaire was designed to guide potential subjects in thinking about their potential participation.ResultsWhile the purpose of the study (safety and tolerability) was extensively presented during the informed consent process, in returned responses 70 percent focused on effectiveness and 91 percent included personal benefit as potential benefit from enrolling. However, 91 percent also indicated helping other Parkinson’s patients as motivation when considering whether or not to enroll.ConclusionsThis combination of responses highlights two issues to which investigators need to pay close attention in future trial designs: (1) how, and in what ways, informed consent processes reinforce potential subjects’ preconceived understandings of benefit, and (2) that potential subjects see themselves as part of a community of Parkinson’s sufferers with responsibilities extending beyond self-interest. More importantly, it invites speculation that a different paradigm for informed consent may be needed. (shrink)

Canada is six years into a new era of legalized medical assistance in dying (MAiD). The law continues to evolve, following a pattern in which Canadian courts rule that legal restrictions on eligibility for MAiD are unconstitutional and Parliament responds by gradually expanding eligibility for MAiD. The central tension underlying this dialogue between courts and government has focused on two conceptions of how to best promote and protect the interests of people who are vulnerable by virtue of intolerable and irremediable (...) suffering due to an illness, disease, or disability. Do we, as a society, have a duty to protect vulnerable people from seeking certain medical procedures that are contrary to their interests, as those are perceived by others? Or do we have a duty to uphold their rights to autonomy, including the right to make choices within a range that may be constrained by many factors, some of which may be socially unjust? This is a recurrent problem in bioethics and medical law, which we explore through the lens of how Canadian courts and Parliament have grappled with defining eligibility for MAiD. (shrink)

The telos of Christian spiritual formation is to love God and to love one’s neighbor as oneself. However, racism undermines loving one’s neighbor, which weakens the Christian witness and contributes to division within American culture and the church. Unfortunately, racism is seldom viewed as a spiritual formation issue, nor is it specifically addressed as such in the spiritual formation literature. Therefore, this essay focuses on four primary areas: spiritual formation and race from a biblical perspective, including a definition of terms; (...) biblical examples of racial reconciliation; four critical periods of US history that have contributed to racial trauma and inequality; and suggested steps toward racial reconciliation. Healing collective racial wounds begins with recognizing the truth related to America’s past and requires a disposition to listen, learn, lament, repent, repair, and relate to one another. (shrink)

African American spirituality provides a rich lens into the heart and soul of the black church experience, often overlooked in the Christian spiritual formation literature. By addressing this lacuna, this essay focuses on three primary shaping qualities of history: the effects of slavery, the Civil Rights Movement under Dr. Martin Luther King's leadership, and the emergence of the Black Church. Four spiritual practices that influence African American spirituality highlight the historical and cultural context of being “forged in the fiery furnace,” (...) including worship, preaching and Scripture, the community of faith and prayer, and community outreach. The essay concludes by recognizing four areas of the lived experiences of African Americans from which the global church can glean: persevering in pain and suffering, turning to God for strength, experiencing a living and passionate faith, and affirming God's intention for freedom and justice to be afforded to every individual. (shrink)

Experiential evidence shows that pain is associated with common meanings. These include a meaning of threat or danger, which is experienced as immediately distressing or unpleasant; cognitive meanings, which are focused on the long-term consequences of having chronic pain; and existential meanings such as hopelessness, which are more about the person with chronic pain than the pain itself. This interdisciplinary book - the second in the three-volume Meanings of Pain series edited by Dr Simon van Rysewyk - aims to better (...) understand pain by describing experiences of pain and the meanings these experiences hold for the people living through them. The lived experiences of pain described here involve various types of chronic pain, including spinal pain, labour pain, rheumatic pain, diabetic peripheral neuropathic pain, fibromyalgia, complex regional pain syndrome, endometriosis-associated pain, and cancer-related pain. Two chapters provide narrative descriptions of pain, recounted and interpreted by people with pain. Language is important to understanding the meaning of pain since it is the primary tool human beings use to manipulate meaning. As discussed in the book, linguistic meaning may hold clues to understanding some pain-related experiences, including the stigmatisation of people with pain, the dynamics of patient-clinician communication, and other issues, such as relationships between pain, public policy and the law, and attempts to develop a taxonomy of pain that is meaningful for patients. Clinical implications are described in each chapter. This book is intended for people with pain, their family members or caregivers, clinicians, researchers, advocates, and policy makers. (shrink)

Edited by Marthe Chandler and Ronnie Littlejohn, this work is a collection of expository and critical essays on the work of Henry Rosemont, Jr., a prominent and influential contemporary philosopher, activist, translator, and educator in the field of Asian and Comparative Philosophy. The essays in this collection take up three major themes in Rosemont's work: his work in Chinese linguistics, his contribution to the theory of human rights, and his interest in East Asian religion. Contributions include works by the (...) leading scholars in Chinese philosophy in the Western world and Rosemont's close associates: Roger T. Ames, Bao Zhiming, Mary Bockover, Marthe Chandler, Ewing Y. Chinn, Erin M. Cline, Fred Dallmayr, Jeffrey Dippmann, Herbert Fingarette, Harrison Huang, Eric Hutton, Philip J. Ivanhoe, David Jones, William La Fleur, Ronnie Littlejohn, Ni Peimin, Michael Nylan, Harold Roth, Sumner Twiss, Tu Weiming, David Wong, with responses from Henry Rosemont, Jr. and a brief Reminiscence by Noam Chomsky. (shrink)

In seeking to explain the evolution of social cooperation, many scholars are using increasingly complex game-theoretic models. These complexities often model readily observable features of human and animal populations. In the case of previous games analyzed in the literature, these modifications have had radical effects on the stability and efficiency properties of the models. We will analyze the effect of adding spatial structure to two communication games: the Lewis Sender-Receiver game and a modified Stag Hunt game. For the Stag Hunt, (...) we find that the results depart strikingly from previous models. In all cases, the departures increase the explanatory value of the models for social phenomena. (shrink)

Questions about the status of literary truth are as old as literary criticism, but they have become both more intricate and more compelling as literature has grown progressively more self-conscious and labyrinthian in its dealings with "reality." One might perhaps read The Iliad or even David Copperfield without raising such issues. But authors like Gide , Nabokov, Borges, and Robbe-Grillet seem continually to remind their readers of the complex nature of literary truth. How, for instance, are we to deal with (...) a passage like the following from William Demby's novel The Catacombs:"When I began this novel, I secretly decided that, though I would exercise a strict selection of the facts to write down, be they 'fictional' facts or 'true' facts taken from newspapers or directly observed events in my own life, once I had written something down I would neither edit not censor it ."1What does this sentence mean? When an apparently fictional narrator distinguishes between "fictional" and "true" facts, what is the status of the word "true"? It clearly does not mean the same as "fictional," for he opposes it to that term. Yet it cannot mean "true" in the sense that historians would use, for he calls what he is writing a novel, and even if he quotes accurately from newspapers, the events of a narrator's life are not "historically" true. · 1. William Demby, The Catacombs , p.93. Peter J. Rabinowitz, assistant professor at Kirkland College, is currently working on articles on Raymond Chandler, Faulkner, and Dostoyevsky and is, as well, a music critic for the Syracuse Guide. He wrote his doctoral dissertation in comparative literature on the philosophical implications of Nabokov's use of humor and terror. "Truth in Fiction" is the first article he has had published in a scholarly journal. (shrink)

In recent years, many scholars have suggested that the Baldwin effect may play an important role in the evolution of language. However, the Baldwin effect is a multifaceted and controversial process and the assessment of its connection with language is difficult without a formal model. This paper provides a first step in this direction. We examine a game-theoretic model of the interaction between plasticity and evolution in the context of a simple language game. Additionally, we describe three distinct aspects of (...) the Baldwin effect: the Simpson– Baldwin effect, the Baldwin expediting effect and the Baldwin optimizing effect. We find that a simple model of the evolution of language lends theoretical plausibility to the existence of the Simpson– Baldwin and the Baldwin optimizing effects in this arena, but not the Baldwin expediting effect. (shrink)

The dominance in normal awareness of visual percepts, which are linked to space, obscures the fact that most thoughts are non-spatial. It is argued that the mind is intrinsically non-spatial, though in perception can become compresent with spatial things derived from outside the mind. The assumption that the brain is entirely spatial is also challenged, on the grounds that there is a perfectly good place for the non-spatial in physics. A quantum logic approach to physics, which takes non-locality as its (...) starting point, offers a non-reductive way of reconciling the experience of mind with the world description of physics. For further progress it is necessary to place mind first as the key aspect of the universe. (shrink)

Universals: Loux, M. J. The existence of universals. Russell, B. The world of universals. Quine, W. V. O. On what there is. Pears, D. F. Universals. Strawson, P. F. Particular and general. Wolterstorff, N. Qualities. Bambrough, R. Universals and family resemblances. Donagan, A. Universals and metaphysical realism. Sellars, W. Abstract entities. Wolterstorff, N. On the nature of universals.--Particulars: Loux, M. J. Particulars and their individuation. Black. M. The identity of indiscernibles. Ayer, A. J. The identity of indiscernibles. O'Connor, D. J. (...) The identity of indiscernibles. Allaire, E. B. Bare particulars. Chappell, V. C. Particulars re-clothed. Allaire, E. B. Another look at bare particulars. Meiland, J. W. Do relations individuate? Long, D. C. Particulars and their qualities. Copi, I. Essence and accident. Chandler, H. S. Essence and accident. Plantinga, A. World and essence. (shrink)

To be sure, I agree that Nabokov creates a "sense of dizzying complexity," but I don't see how Dowling accounts for it at all. First of all, the passage he cites from Pnin is not an instance of the Liar's Paradox. The Liar's Paradox occurs when a single person claims that he or she always lies—for in that case, there is no logically consistent way to call the claim either true or false. In Pnin, however, we have something quite different: (...) a person, whom we suspect of often filtering the truth to serve his own ends, claims that someone else has called him a liar. That's confusing, perhaps, but not logically inconsistent; for instance, it would be logically inconsistent to say that Pnin is wrong, or is at least exaggerating, when he says that you shouldn't believe anything that the narrator says. Indeed, Pnin is wrong, and the careful reader can sort out the narrator's claims with a fair degree of accuracy, at least on the second reading. The odd sensation that Pnin inspires comes not because there's no logically consistent way to determine the truth or falsity if the narrative but rather because we can figure out when and how the narrator has slanted his statements only once we have finished the book, for only the last chapter gives us the evidence we need to interpret the earlier chapters properly. Peter J. Rabinowitz, assistant professor of comparative literature at Hamilton College, is the author of articles on Raymond Chandler, Faulkner and Dostoyevsky, and literary borrowing and is, as well, a music critic for Fanfare. (shrink)

Preface Introduction Christopher J. Berry: Adam Smith: Outline of Life, Times, and Legacy Part One: Adam Smith: Heritage and Contemporaries 1: Nicholas Phillipson: Adam Smith: A Biographer's Reflections 2: Leonidas Montes: Newtonianism and Adam Smith 3: Dennis C. Rasmussen: Adam Smith and Rousseau: Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment 4: Christopher J. Berry: Adam Smith and Early Modern Thought Part Two: Adam Smith on Language, Art and Culture 5: Catherine Labio: Adam Smith's Aesthetics 6: James Chandler: Adam Smith as Critic 7: Michael (...) C. Amrozowicz: Adam Smith: History and Poetics 8: C. Jan Swearingen: Adam Smith on Language and Rhetoric: The Ethics of Style, Character, and Propriety Part Three: Adam Smith and Moral Philosophy 9: Christel Fricke: Adam Smith: The Sympathetic Process and the Origin and Function of Conscience 10: Duncan Kelly: Adam Smith and the Limits of Sympathy 11: Ryan Patrick Hanley: Adam Smith and Virtue 12: Eugene Heath: Adam Smith and Self-Interest Part Four: Adam Smith and Economics 13: Tony Aspromourgos: Adam Smith on Labour and Capital 14: Nerio Naldi: Adam Smith on Value and Prices 15: Hugh Rockoff: Adam Smith on Money, Banking, and the Price Level 16: Maria Pia Paganelli: Commercial Relations: from Adam Smith to Field Experiments Part Five: Adam Smith on History and Politics 17: Spiros Tegos: Adam Smith: Theorist of Corruption 18: David M. Levy & Sandra J. Peart: Adam Smith and the State: Language and Reform 19: Fabrizio Simon: Adam Smith and the Law 20: Edwin van de Haar: Adam Smith on Empire and International Relations Part Six: Adam Smith on Social Relations 21: Richard Boyd: Adam Smith, Civility, and Civil Society 22: Gavin Kennedy: Adam Smith on Religion 23: Samuel Fleischacker: Adam Smith and Equality 24: Maureen Harkin: Adam Smith and Women Part Seven; Adam Smith: Legacy and Influence 25: Spencer J. Pack: Adam Smith and Marx 26: Craig Smith: Adam Smith and the New Right 27: Tom Campbell: Adam Smith: Methods, Morals and Markets 28: Amartya Sen: The Contemporary Relevance of Adam Smith. (shrink)

Nach einer kurzen Übersicht überDescartes' mechanistiche Theorie der somatischen Funktionen und der Reproduktion, wird in der vorliegenden Arbeit die Entwicklung dieser Theorie bis zur neuesten Zeit beschrieben. Sodann wird eine Übersicht gegeben über die vitalistische Theorie, welche unter wissenschaftlichen Forschern bis zur Mitte des vorigen Jahrhunderts vorherrschte. Dann werden die Gründe dafür angegeben, dass diese Theorie des Vitalismus ungefähr um diese Zeit verlassen wurde, um durch die mechanistische Theorie ersetzt zu werden. Diese ihrerseits ist jedoch auf einer unbegründeten metaphysischen Auffassung (...) vom Wesen der Wirklichkeit aufgebaut. Nehmen wir sie an, so können wir die synthetischen Einheit, die Gesamterscheinungsreihe, die wir unter dem Namen Reproduktion und Körperfunktion zusammenfassen, nicht richtig beschreiben. Der Begriff „Leben” ist eine Synthese aller Beziehungen, die zwischen dem Organismus und seiner Umwelt bestehen. Diese Auffassung des Lebens ist die Grundlage der Biologie, daher ist denn auch Biologie eine selbständige, unabhängige Wissenschaft.Zuletzt wird der Reflexbegriff behandelt. Die mechanistische Auffassung des Reflexbegriffes ist unrichtig, da alle Reflexfunktion synthetischen, oder integrativen Charakter hat. Wäre dem nicht so, dann würde das Nervensystem lediglich Chaos hervorzubringen imstande sein. Biologie, ohne die Gegebenheit des Lebens vorauszusetzen, ist unmöglich und wissenschaftliches Voraussagen auf dem Gebiete der Biologie ist überall nur auf Grund dieser Voraussetzung möglich.Après avoir donné un bref aperçu de la théorie mécanique cartésienne de l'activité corporelle et de la reproduction, l'article contenu dans cette revue trace le développment de cette théorie jusqu'à notre temps. Un bref aperçu est donné ensuite de la théorie vitaliste qui prévalait parmi les observateurs scientifiques jusqu'au milieu du siècle dernier. Après cela sont exposées les raisons pour lesquelles la théorie du vitalisme fut abandonnée de nos jours et il est démontré, qu'il est généralement admis que l'abandon de cette théorie implique l'adoption de la conception mécanique. Cette conception, cependant, est basée sur une conception métaphysique mal fondée se rapportant à la nature de la réalité et, en l'acceptant, nous ne pouvons exprimer ou décrire l'intégration qui apparait dans les phénomènes de reproduction et d'activité corporelle de toutes sortes. La vie c'est l'intégration soutenue s'étendant sur toutes les relations entre l'organisme et son entourage; et la conception de la vie, c'est la base de la biologie, de sorte que la biologie est une science indépendant.l'Article termine par une discussion de l'action-réflexe et démontre qu'une interprétation mécanique de l'action-réflexe est inadéquate, puisque l'intégration est incluse dans toute action-réflexe; car si tel n'était pas le cas, le système nerveux ne serait autre chose qu'un mécanisme à produire du chaos. La biologie ne peut pas se passer de la vie, comme sa conception fondamentale, et les prédicitions en matière de biologie sont toujours basées sur cette conception. (shrink)

A user-friendly textbook for students and teachers, The Philosophy of Public Administration covers all aspects of the public administration and management process as an instrument of serving the public. It lays a sound foundation of the basic principles and values, and it facilitates excellence in all the varied circumstances a professional public manager/administrator may encounter in practice. An MS PowerPoint presentation is also available on CD-ROM for instruction.

I Have argued elsewhere, and still believe, that the Phaedo was written before Plato's first journey to Italy, when the strong Pythagorean influences displayed in that dialogue were reaching him through the Pythagorean centres on the Greek mainland, in particular Phleius and Thebes; and that in the Republic and Phaedrus it is possible to trace equally strong Pythagorean influence but different in detail, because Plato had now come into contact with the Pythagoreans who still remained in Italy, particularly Archytas. The (...) most remarkable of these influences from whatever source was the doctrine of the immortality and transmigration of the soul, which we know to have been held by the earliest Pythagorean society, and the account of the soul's experience in the world below. (shrink)

This comprehensive and important volume includes contributions by activists, journalists, lawyers and scholars from twenty-one countries. The essays map the directions the movement for women's rights is taking--and will take in the coming decades--and the concomittant transformation of prevailing notions of rights and issues. They address topics such as the rapes in former Yugoslavia and efforts to see that a War Crimes Tribunal responds; domestic violence; trafficking of women into the sex trade; the persecution of lesbians; female genital mutilation; and (...) reproductive rights. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Aristotelianism of Locke's PoliticsJ. S. MaloyThose, then, who think that the positions of statesman, king, household manager, and master of slaves are the same are not correct. For they hold that each of these differs not innly in whether the subjects ruled are few or many... the assumption being that there is no difference between a large household and a small city-state.... But these claims are not true.Aristotle, (...) Politics, 1252a1The Power of a Magistrate over a Subject may be distinguished from that of a Father over his Children, a Master over his Servant, a Husband over his Wife, and a Lord over his Slave. All which distinct Powers happening sometimes together in the same Man, if he be considered under these different Relations, it may help us to distinguish these Powers one from another, and show the difference betwixt a Ruler of a Common-wealth, a Father of a Family, and a Captain of a Galley.Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 2.22 [End Page 235]When the political theory of John Locke first appeared in print in 1689, the imposing authority of Aristotle stood ready to defeat it. So believed many of Locke's critics, at any rate. After his death in 1704, when it was confirmed that the internationally renowned author of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding had also written the anonymously published Two Treatises of Government, Locke was widely taken to represent a distinctive type of political theory based on individual rights and the social contract. Learned opposition to this sort of voluntaristic account of politics has often rested on Aristotle, "the Philosopher," the ancient authority on the human instinct for sociability and the hierarchal communities arising therefrom. Within the modern academy "liberals," "communitarians," and "republicans" have again made a habit of pronouncing the names of Locke and Aristotle in tones of antagonism. In broad outline the reasons have not changed in two or three centuries ago: the first stands for natural-rights individualism and the second for an organic conception of community.3What are we to make of this conventional opposition in light of the awkward fact that the second of Locke's Two Treatises, "Of Civil Government," takes the reclamation of the Aristotelian conception of political power as its principal purpose? Locke announced in the opening chapter of that essay that his chief target, Robert Filmer, had misunderstood the nature of distinctively political relationships, mainly by ignoring the differences between authority in political society and authority within the family (L 2.1–2). Locke alleged that this basic conceptual mistake of the Filmerian theory of "absolute" and "arbitrary" government was the source of its disastrous practical ramifications, which he had summed up in the first Treatise as "Chains for all Mankind" (L 1.1). Filmer, in turn, had taken Plato's side in the debate about political and familial rule which Aristotle had joined in the opening lines of his Politics (A 1252a). Though a perceptive reader long ago noticed the Aristotelianism of Locke's response to Filmer—Locke and Algernon Sidney were the "two famous men" to whom Rousseau alluded as having defended Aristotle against Filmer's Platonic notions of power—no modern scholar has attempted a full explanation of the significance of Locke's intervention in this debate.4 [End Page 236]The analysis below will show that Aristotle was the classic source for both the principal theoretic argument of Locke's second Treatise and the method employed to pursue it, i.e. using analogies of power for conceptual comparison and distinction. But my argument for the Aristotelianism of Locke's politics will rest on contextual as well as textual grounds. Not only was Locke pursuing an evident variation on the central theme of bk. 1 of Aristotle's Politics; he was far from alone in doing so. This sort of project was by the 1680s typical of radical constitutionalist writing in Europe, including not only English Whigs like Sidney and James Tyrrell but also a long line of writers on both sides of the English Channel, stretching back at least a century, who deployed a particular interpretation of Aristotle in the service... (shrink)

This paper argues that for the purposes of any sort of serious discussion about immoral conduct in sport very little is illuminated by claiming that the conduct in question is cheating. In fact, describing some behavior as cheating is typically little more than expressing strong, but thoroughly vague and imprecise, moral disapproval or condemnation of another person or institution about a wide and ill-defined range of improper advantage-seeking behavior. Such expressions of disapproval fail to distinguish cheating from many other types (...) of immoral conduct. The discussion shows that we should set the concept aside and assess the moral disapproval implied by claims of cheating by reference to the moral and other principles that underlie the practice of sport. This allows us to consider carefully the complexity of the issues that are raised when allegations of cheating are made and not be distracted by the emotionally loaded, conversation-stopping tendency of the concept. This means that some types of disputes in sport will be messy and demand more effort to resolve, but the payoff will be better informed and more thoughtful discussions and greater awareness of the moral complexity of sport and of its principled underpinnings. (shrink)