Eugen Bleuler, in 1911, renamed the group of mental disorders with poor prognosis which Emil Kraepel in had called ``dementia praecox'' ``group of schizophrenias'',because for him the splitting of personality was the main symptom.Biographical, scientific and methodological influences on Bleuler's concept of schizophrenia are shown with special reference to Kraepelin and Freud.Bleuler was a passionate and very experienced clinician. He lived with his patients, taking care of them and writing down his observations. Methodologically he was an empiricist and an eclecticist (...) with a wide reading knowledge.In an impaired association of ideas, in disordered affectivity, in marked ambivalence and autism Bleuler saw the main symptoms of schizophrenia. For him these so-called pathological phenomena actually seemed to be only exaggerations of normal psychic functions. So there were only a quantitative, not a qualitative difference between schizophrenia and normal psychic processes and studies on schizophrenic ``pathology'' –seen as a disturbance, not as a disease – might analogously illustrate normal psychic reactions and vice versa.In etiology as well as in therapy Bleuler took into account psychological and (neuro)physiological(somatic) mechanisms – thus combining organicism and dynamic psychiatry and coming very close to modern concepts, e.g. the one of stress and vulnerability. Bleuler's main merit is the stressing of an idiographic ``understanding'' of the patient and a plausible and subtle explanation of schizophrenia which helped to reduce the alienation of the affected persons. (shrink)

In the introduction to hisAllgemeine Psychopathologie, published in 1913, Karl Jaspers stated that psychology has little value for the psychopathologist because it focuses on all kinds of interesting matters, but not on normal psychic life. In this article we argue that today, in the year 2013, little has changed in this respect. During the past century, normal psychic life (non-pathological psychic life) has rarely been a topic of research. Clinical psychology has focused primarily on studying (...) three other topics: the mind-body problem (does the mind actually exist, or are we exclusively the result of brain function?), the methodological debate (should psychology use quantitative or qualitative research results as a basis for its expertise?) and the psychotherapy debate (Is psychotherapy effective? If so, which form is the most effective?). Due to this focus, our knowledge in the above-mentioned areas has increased significantly, but the issue raised by Karl Jaspers about normal psychic life has still not been addressed. In this article, we propose that normal psychic life should indeed become the new focus of clinical psychology. We illustrate the importance of this new focus with three examples from clinical psychology: the Global Assessment of Functioning scale, empathy and the emergence of positive psychology during the past decade. We then explore the efficacy of phenomenology for studying this normal psychic life, thereby discovering a useful epistemological basis in Husserl’s systematic phenomenology. Various phenomenological research methods are evaluated in the light of this systematic phenomenology. (shrink)

Plato’s Republic is governed by an analogy drawn between the structures of cities and souls. Because the inner workings of souls are difficult to discern, we might better find the soul’s nature and virtues by looking at the city’s nature and virtues. Despite successfully using the analogy to discern the nature of the soul, its virtues, and its proper ordering, the Republic frequently obscures the very analogy that functions as its guiding thread, and it is not (...) at all obvious whether the political material in Books V–VII has a psychological correlate. This essay develops a psychological reading of key moments in the dialogue where the city-soul analogy fades in favor of more apparently political content. Focusing on the Allegory of the Cave, it argues that when the Cave is read as a “psychic drama,” it discloses reason’s drama within the soul. Like the freed prisoner, reason must be liberated from imprisonment alongside the sub-rational elements of the soul so that it may see the truth by which it can be nourished. However, reason must also descend, like the prisoner, to the sub-rational elements of the soul in order to care for them, for its own sake and for theirs. Read this way, the Republic presents an account of reason which rules the passions in the “precise sense” of Book I, that is, for their sake, and not simply for its own liberation and well-being. (shrink)

Functional explanations apply not only in cases of normal functioning, but also in the case of malfunctioning. According to a straightforward analysis, a bearer of the function to F is malfunctioning if and only if it does not F although it should do so. This makes malfunctions and malfunctionings analogous to negative causation and thus peculiarly problematic, because they seem to involve absent dispositions and absent processes. This analysis seems also to require that the function to F cannot be (...) identical with the disposition to F. Then we seem to be trapped in a dilemma: Either the realm of functions is separated from the realm of dispositions; then it seems that functions cannot be causally efficacious. Alternatively, functions are considered to be identical with dispositions; but then malfunctioning seems to be conceptually impossible. The paper defends and further develops the thesis of Röhl and Jansen that functions are not a special type of dispositions. For this purpose, it first reviews different varieties of malfunction and malfunctioning and suggests definitions of both malfunction and malfunctioning. It reviews how causal, etiological and intentional theories of functions can deal with these problems. In particular, the paper discusses the special-disposition account of the Basic Formal Ontology. Spear, Ceusters and Smith :103--128, 2016) have defended the special-disposition account of the Basic Formal Ontology by suggesting various strategies how a special-disposition account can deal with malfunctions. On the one side, the paper evaluates these strategies and indicates several problems arising from them. On the other hand, it describes how to account for the non-optionality and the causal efficacy of functions, if functions are not dispositions. While function types are not identical to disposition types, there are important interrelations between functions and dispositions, namely heuristically, from a design perspective for artefact functions, and from an evolutionary perspective for types of biological functions. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Axel Honneth deploys the categories of normal and pathological to explain contemporary society in organic terms. This article concerns itself with how these medical references function in Honneth's work to explain the social world, and what their political implications are. For Honneth, social normality is a normative resource, even if it is only accessible through the study of pathology. Socially accepted norms are taken to reflect legitimate principles, with the early Honneth taking pathology as an individual psychic (...) suffering that results from injustice, and the later Honneth taking pathology as an overextension of the logic of one social sphere into the terrain of another. The implications of Honneth's organic account of society are explored through the lens of a competing “French” account of the norm offered by Canguilhem and Foucault. These French thinkers view socially accepted norms not as reflecting legitimate principles, but as standardizing processes of normalization that stifle normativities that do not conform. It is suggested that Honneth's account of normativity must be articulated with Canguilhem's and Foucault's account of normalization. That said, through the course of the analysis, several unexpected continuities are discovered between these two different traditions. (shrink)

This paper looks at the nature of normal-proper functions and the role they play in theories of representational content. More specifically: I lay down two desiderata for a theory which tries to capture what's distinctive of normal-proper functions and discuss two prominent theories which claim to satisfy them. I discuss the advantages of having normal-proper functions ground a theory of representational content. And, I look at both orthodox and heterodox versions of such theories.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Plato's Political Analogy: Fallacy or Analogy? ROBERT W. HALL THE INTERPRETATIONOf the familiar political analogy between the state and the soul is crucial to a proper understanding of Plato's conception of the individual and his relation to the polls. Interpretations which, consciously or not, tend to identify the justice of the individual with that of the state result either in a subordination of justice of the (...) individual to that of the state, or in endowing the ordinary citizen with an inferior justice. These interpretations of the political analogy have beert adequately dealt with? Recently, Vlastos has stressed what he considers to be the logical or deductive character of the analogy." He finds defects or fallacies in Plato's logic, which, while not necessarily fatal to the significance of the analogy, seriously impair its cogency. What is of particular interest is Vlastos' claim that the primary goal of the analogy is a demonstration, unknown to most scholars, albeit an unsuccessful one, that the justice of the individual necessarily instantiates or entails ordinary acts of justice,a Vlastos has thus raised the question of what kind of approach is most fruitful in unlocking the meaning of the political analogy. My own conviction is that the political analogy can best be understood through a careful examination or observation of the two wholes, the state and the individual, and the character of their relationship. A consideration of the essentials of Vlastos' outlook on the analogy will be a useful introduction to what may be termed a "phenomenological" approach. Such a perspective may provide a better understanding of what Plato is attempting to establish in the analogy, and of how he goes about it. Vlastos' interpretation of the political analogy is strongly colored by his assessment of the central concern of the Republic, the proof that justice "pays." By this Vlastos means that what he terms "psychological justice," the correct, hierarchical arrangement of the three parts or aspects of the soul, must be proven to result in acts of external justice. It is this relationship between psychological justice and ordinary or social justice which sets the problem of logical consistency in Vlastos' account of the political analogy. As the definition of justice of the individual or psychological justice, Vlastos offers Socrates' statement, "In the case of each one of us, whoever is such that each of the three [psychic elements] in him does its own, he is a just man." The social description of justice is: What we laid down at the start as a general requirement when we were founding the polls this, or some form of it, is justice. We did lay down, and often stated, if you recall, that every single person ought to engage in the social function.., for which his own nature is I For exponents of these positions and their critics, cf. my "Plato's Theory of Justice in the Republic," Bucknell Review, XV, 2 (May, 1967), 60, n. I. G. Vlastos, "Justice and Psychic Harmony in the Republic," The 1ournal of Philosophy, LXVI, 16 (August 21, 1969), 505-521. All further references to this article will be by page number. s 506, 515. [419] 420 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY best fitted.uWe did say this.--And indeed that to do one's own and not to be meddlesome is justice, this we have often heard from many others, and have often said ourselves.-Wc have said it.--This, then, my friend, if taken in a certain way, appears to be justice: to do one's own. (433A-B) 4 Vlastos admits that this social description is not really a definition of the justice of the individual, "that 'doing one's own' was not meant to constitute a definition of the justice of an individual person.''~ Nonetheless, this social description functions for him as a definition of the individual's justice, and plays a prominent role in the supposed fallacy of equivocation in the meaning of justice. Vlastos argues for this social description on the grounds that "/or Plato every just man must have the disposition named by the 'doing one's own' formula.''e The basis for this claim is Socrates' declaration that "the same (moral) characters... (shrink)

Standard theories in mereotopology focus on relations of parthood and connection among spatial or spatio-temporal regions. Objects or processes which might be located in such regions are not normally directly treated in such theories. At best, they are simulated via appeal to distributions of attributes across the regions occupied or by functions from times to regions. The present paper offers a richer framework, in which it is possible to represent directly the relations between entities of various types at different (...) levels, including both objects and the regions they occupy. What results is a layered mereotopology, a theory which can handle multiple layers (analogous to the layers of a lasagna) of spatially or spatiotemporally coincident but mereologically non-overlapping entities. (shrink)

Failings of a categorical systemFor decades, standardized classification systems have attempted to define psychiatric disorders in our mental health care system, with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed.; DSM-5; American Psychiatric Association (APA), 2013) and International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems 10th revision (ICD-10; World Health Organization, 2010) being internationally best-known. One of the major advantages of the DSM must be that it has seriously diminished the international linguistic confusion regarding psychiatric disorders. Since (...) its introduction, it contributed extensively towards one common international language for defining and conceptualizing psychiatric disorders. Strikingly, within the field of psychological testing a similar step forward seems to have not yet been taken. At present, there exists no international standard for the use of psychological tests that takes the definition of a specific symptom as listed in DSM-5 as its starting point, and reliably and validly measures this symptom. Rather, the majority of tests are measuring constructs consisting of a multitude of symptoms. For example, the Beck’s Depression Inventory (Beck et al., 1996) measures core symptoms of depression summing up to a depression score. Accordingly, we believe it is time for a change. The diagnostics of psychiatric disorders, where disorders are defined as nosological units with a single cause, a single organic substrate, and a single time course, has been problematic for centuries. The field of psychiatry has always been ambivalent about its desire to follow a medical model (Blaney, 2015), but afflicted due to its definitions of pathology. The definition of a psychiatric disorder in DSM-5 offers little room for a clear cut pathogenesis and harsh demarcation of syndromes. This is reflected in the DSM-5, where it states: “A mental disorder is a syndrome characterized by clinically significant disturbance in an individual’s cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior that reflects a dysfunction in the psychological, biological, or developmental processes underlying mental functioning” (APA, 2013, p.20). An unfortunate and recognized consequence of this definition within the current system is that many symptoms overlap within categories of psychiatric disorders and patients end up diagnosed with many co-morbid disorders.Two fundamental problemsRegardless of new attempts to improve the diagnostics of psychiatric disorders, the DSM-5 represents the status quo. Consequently, the distinction between diagnosis and classification remains substantial and more than a discussion on semantics. We identify two fundamental problems within the current framework. Generally, a psychiatric diagnosis is considered to be descriptive (Hengeveld and Schudel, 2003). The clinician will describe a syndrome (its nature, timespan, and severity) within the framework of a disorder, and often include a differential diagnosis, predisposing protective or vulnerability factors, and provoking or maintaining factors. Within the DSM-5 framework, a similar ‘approach to clinical case formulation’ is taken (APA, 2013, p. 19). Evidently, a descriptive diagnosis has a hypothetical character. It consists of the clinician’s hypothesis and is based on his or hers professional considerations according to the abovementioned factors. Once the clinician has formulated a descriptive diagnosis, it is then complementary ‘translated’ into a DSM-5 classification. Herein lies the problem. For the layman, the existence of this distinction between diagnosis and classification is usually unknown. Preceding treatment, the clinician will give the client a classification of the existing psychiatric problems and the client may attribute more meaning to it than appropriate, thereby fostering the risk of reification. Second, the DSM-5 is a categorical system. Thus, individual disorders are regarded as discrete units – ‘you either have it, or you don’t’. DSM-5 states about this: “(…) scientific evidence places many, if not most, disorders on a spectrum with closely related disorders that have shared symptoms, shared genetic and environmental risk factors (…)”. And “(…) we have come to recognize that the boundaries between disorders are more porous than originally perceived.” (APA, 2013, p. 6). This leads to a fundamental problem. Because the overwhelming majority of psychiatric disorders examined thus far using taxometric methods appear to be dimensional in nature (Haslam, 2003; Widiger and Samuel, 2005), consequently all of their categorizations become artificial and debatable. Even though DSM-5 took a modest step towards a more dimensional approach, its core remains categorical. To illustrate, consider the Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). This classification consists of nine diagnostic criteria of which a minimum of five need to be present for the diagnosis of BPD. A simple numerical combination algorithm leads to a staggering number of 256 distinct presentations of BPD (Albion et al., 2013). Due to this chameleon-like nature, the disorder’s diagnostic validity becomes questionable. Strikingly, this number is relatively small when compared to other conditions, e.g., there are 636,120 ways to have posttraumatic stress disorder (Galatzer-Levy and Bryant, 2013).DSM-5 does propose an alternative model for personality disorders based on personality functioning and traits (APA, 2013, p. 761), as a possible answer to the problem that most patients fit with multiple co-morbid personality disorders or to the category of personality disorder not otherwise specified. In November 2012, the chair committee of APA decided to move this alternative model to section III of DSM-5 and to sustain the categorical system in section II. A potential solutionDSM-5 and its predecessors have brought about an invaluable improvement regarding the formulation of a common international language for psychiatric disorders. However, the individual disorders fit poorly with its starting point of discrete units and strict boundaries. Van Os (2014) has argued for a better balance between the categorical and personalized aspects of psychiatric disorders. We argue for a two-step approach.Particularly due to the ‘weak boundaries’ between disorders, it might be beneficial to limit ourselves by merely categorizing clients into the main categories of the DSM-5 according to their most prominent symptoms (Van Os, 2014), i.e. their main complaint. In other words, clinicians could first ask themselves whether the symptomatology is concerning a neurodevelopmental disorder, or a bipolar and related disorder, or a depressive disorder, and so on. It will drastically reduce the over 400 classifications in DSM-5 down to 20 categories. Van Os (2014) even argues to combine some of the main categories, reducing this number even further to 15 categories. The advantages of reducing the over 400 classifications are fivefold: 1) a syndrome, being an aggregation of symptoms, creates a false relation between symptoms that are that are already heterogeneous themselves; 2) 15 broad categories are functional: it results into a very heterogeneous group of clients within a category and thus prevents stereotypes and invites further personalizing of complaints; and 3) a dimensional measure of a symptom rather than a syndrome will correspond better with the client regardless of it not providing the complete picture. Focusing on the main complaint will indicate where there is an immediate need for care (Van Os, 2014); 4) it will allow clinicians to recognise subthreshold conditions more easily (Magruder and Calderone, 2000); and 5) it might facilitate the development of clear demarcations between normal and abnormal functioning (Kessler, 2002; Widiger and Samuel, 2005). Please, see also Table 1.This also fits well within scientific advances, as thus far strongest evidence has been found for a distinction between internalizing and externalizing disorders, even superseding these 15 main categories (DSM-5; APA, 2013, p.13, but see Weiss et al., 1998). The second step would concern the personalized aspect, which we argue to define on a level of core symptoms of the specific main category, to be agreed upon later. To assess these core symptoms, the field of psychological testing could develop an internationally applicable instrument to reliably and validly measure each (core) symptom on a dimensional scale. Many of these instruments are readily available and have proven its psychometric properties within scientific research. Elements from these instruments could be easily transformed to work within the new system. Within the field of psychology, this approach could aid development of a common international language to define symptoms, analogous to the field of psychiatry. Importantly, current psychological testing mainly implies the use of self-report measures. This leads to an abundance of auto-amnestic information. To increase the reliability and validity of psychological tests to assess DSM-5 symptoms, it may be important to add two additional information resources. This would entail psychological tests where a next of kin answers questions about the symptom of the client, and psychological tests that include the clinicians’ judgment, such as structured clinician-based interviews. Conversely, we also need to acknowledge the well-known limitations of clinical judgment (e.g., Faust, 1986; Garb, 1998). Advantages of a new frameworkThe changes we suggest have big implications and are not easily implemented in the current framework. Clients may prefer the comfort of a single clear label, similar to what they are used to in other areas of medicine. Health insurance providers and policy makers may argue for single labels as well. Therefore, it would require a lot of explanation from our clinicians to promote a change. Our suggestions for broader categories may not disambiguate the current situation better than the existing approach, but it will promote personalisation of health care. Difficulties in diagnostic reliability will remain in disorders that fall on the boundaries of the taxons, e.g., schizoaffective disorder versus bipolar disorder with psychotic characteristics, which may benefit from further study. There are also some politically tinged questions to keep in mind: How will we finance our health care, and how will we ensure a gradual transition from the current financing system, including clients who already have their labels? What about visitations from insurers and health inspection? How can they control for a good standard of quality in health care when considering the increasing heterogeneity? Nevertheless, we argue that the benefits outweigh the disadvantages. We will see a shift from a categorical to a personalized approach, which will lead to less (self) stigmatizing, less estrangement, and it will challenge reification thinking. DSM-V states that “a reformulation of research goals should also keep DSM-5 central to the development of dimensional approaches to diagnosis that will likely supplement or supersede current categorical approaches to diagnosis in coming years” (APA, 2013, p. 13). Our proposition for psychological testing on symptom level could contribute to this development. Furthermore, this new approach will do more justice to the heterogeneity of symptoms within and outside of classification categories, see also Table 1. Moreover, in this new approach we join forces of expert knowledge from the fields of psychiatry and psychological science. Finally, it offers new and potentially better opportunities to map health care needs. This in turn will lead to a better interface for allocation of appropriate treatment. It will present a clearer picture of when preventative care is preferred over treatment and vice versa. Importantly, health care needs will be more closely attuned to the ‘own story’ of the client.We argue for the national and international psychological associations in Europe and the United States of America to support the idea of a collective approach to develop an internationally standardized psychological testing battery to reliably assess all the core symptoms of the main categories in DSM-5. (shrink)

Nancy Jecker (2013) makes a compelling argument for using a capabilities approach to resolve the issue of the fair allocation of health care resources across various age groups. This question has b...

Revenge is universal in human cultures, and is essentially personal and retributive. Its moral status is contested, as is its rationality. Revenge is traditionally associated with pleasure, but this association is not accounted for in contemporary philosophical treatments of revenge. Here I supply a theory of normal narcissistic functioning that can explain this association. Normal narcissism is an adaptive form of inter-psychic processing which has to do with the regulation of a coherent set of meta-representations of the (...) agent. It can be given a general account by integrating views drawn from clinical traditions, empirical psychology, and contemporary cognitive neuroscience. I explore the neural correlates of normal narcissism, its characteristic accompanying emotions and pleasures/displeasures, and its fundamental dynamics. It is proposed that this allostatic regulatory system plays a prominent role in retributive behavior, including revenge. Revenge is understood as a form of narcissistic repair, and a variety of puzzles concerning revenge are solved from this point of view. (shrink)

SummaryIn this synthetic exposition, devoted to the relations which exist between psľchic functions and anatomic structures, Dr Pontes first insists on the difficulties of the subject and of its scientific analysis. Soma, Psyche, and social Milieu form a kind of continuum which is artificiallľ dissociated by our one‐sided approaches. Experimentation cannot be fullľ practised on man, nor can its results on animal be extended to man without serious risks of error. Similar limitations appear if, resorting to the pathological method, (...) we try to apply to the normal conclusions arrived at through the Study of the abnormal. Special reference is made here to psychosurgery, a topic quite familiar to Dr Fontes, who is Dr Egas Moniz’ countryman.The author then summarises our present knowledge concerning the structure, connections and functions of encephalic centers, especially; the thalamus, the hypothalamus and the frontal lobes.Finally, he subscribes, though not without serious reservations, to the hierarchical conception of the Nervous Sľstem as well as of the human mind, first suggested by Jouffroy, after him developed by Baillarger, Janet, Wallon in France, by Hughlings Jackson in Great Britain, and recentlľ revived in Europe by von Mona‐kow and Mourgue, Eľ, and Delaľ. This view enables one to consider nervous or psľchic illnesses as various dissolutions, resulting on the one hand from the suppression of higher centers or powers, on the other hand from the liberation of lower ones. It agrees rather well with the informations gathered by the anatomy and the physiology of the nervous sľstem, and with the conclusions suggested by psychosurgical opérations. To the thalamus and hypothalamus correspond the lower and older manifestations of mind: emotion and instinct, to the cortex the higher and more recent adaptive and intellectual processes. The hypothalamus plays a most important role in the nervous machinery as a regulator of vegetative and instinctive life, of wake and sleep, of consciousness, and of the basic biological rhythms. At the cortical level the frontal lobe appears as the structural basis for such psychical functions as Ego‐control, Will, Personality, and succèssfull action on the milieu. (shrink)

The theory of transference and the centrality of transference interpretation have been hallmarks of psychoanalysis since its inception. But the time has come to subject traditional theory and practice to careful, critical scrutiny in the light of contemporary science. So holds Joseph Schachter, whose _Transference: Shibboleth or Albatross?_ undertakes this timely and thought-provoking task. After identifying the weaknesses and inconsistencies in Freud's original premises about transference, Schachter demonstrates how contemporary developmental research across a variety of domains effectively overturns any theory (...) that posits a linear deterministic relationship between early childhood and adult psychic functioning, including the adult patient's treatment behavior toward the analyst. No less trenchantly, he shows how contemporary chaos theory complements developmental research by making the very endeavor of historical reconstruction - of backward prediction - suspect on logical grounds. Nor, Schacter continues, does the clinical evidence normally adduced in support of transference theory provide the firm bedrock of data that most analysts suppose to exist. What one finds, he holds, are endlessly reiterated claims of identifying determining historical antecedents sustained only by descriptions of current behaviors through a gloss of theory. Less a polemic than a call to order, _Transference: Shibboleth or Albatross?_ is cogently argued and straightforwardly written. It is destined to be a thorn in the side of analysts who resist change and a spur to those who seek to bring analytic theory into closer alignment with contemporary science in the interest of improves treatment efficacy. (shrink)

Lately I’ve been reviewing the issues concerned with what’s usually called the “super-psi hypothesis.” Very roughly, that hypothesis is the claim that psychic functioning is considerably more extensive and controllable than its seemingly modest experimental manifestations suggest, so much so that it might even play a pervasive role in everyday affairs and operate on a large scale. I’ve already tackled this topic at some length, in order both to clarify the hypothesis and to evaluate the arguments pro and con (...) (see, e.g., Braude 1997, 2003). Here, I want simply to reconsider a suggestion I made in 1997, and which I now think may be more interesting than I appreciated at the time. Some like to protest that the super-psi hypothesis is unfalsifiable, because it seems that we can never prove or demonstrate that psychic functioning did not occur, no matter what the evidence turns out to be. If (as proponents of the super-psi hypothesis suggest) our psychic functioning can be sneaky or naughty—that is, if it can be inconspicuous and pervasive and be triggered by unconscious needs and desires, and if we can’t specify clear or useful limits to its degree of magnitude or refinement, then we can’t, strictly speaking, falsify hypotheses positing its operation. So for example, we can never know for certain whether a particular car crash was caused normally or by virtue of somebody’s PK. In the absence of something like a PK meter, the only difference between those two scenarios would be in their unobservable causal histories. (And even if we had a PK meter, we encounter the nagging problem of a regress of confirmation: Whatever we observe happening to the meter could also be the result of operator or onlooker PK—or seemingly random PK from some other source. So how do we determine for certain what caused the meter fluctuations?). (shrink)

Entitled merely “On the Object of Thought,” Chapter 8 of Gurwitsch’s Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1966) has the following note attached to its title: “Paper read at the meeting of the Phenomenological Society, April 27, 1946, at Hunter College, New York City. It was not possible to include here all the discussion. The original version was published in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research VII (1947).” What seems the integral script read at the International Phenomenological Society (...) meeting has, however, survived in the Nachlass. It is 596 lines long and 291 lines of it, i.e. practically half, correspond closely to the published version. The following, however, was added to the previously published version: and I must also forsake surveying the elaboration of concepts analogous to that of the “object of thought” in several contemporary psychological sciences. I have in view the abandonment of the constancy hypothesis in Gestalt theory, the studies of the late Gelb and Prof. Goldstein on the psychical effects of brain injuries, the late Levy-Bruhl’s account of mental functions in primitive societies, the views of the phonological school in linguistics, Max Weber’s verstehende Soziologie and especially his distinction between objektiver and subjektiver Sinn. (shrink)

We present an analytical study that puts forward a hypothesis about the role of analogy in thinking. The article presents a critique of the structural mapping hypothesis in analogy as an explanation of the analogical argument and will offer an alternative explanation — the functional hypothesis of the analogical argument. It will also be shown how such functions of thinking as recognition and memory, metaphor and syllogism, generalization and ontology, deduction and induction can be realized with the (...) help of the analogy method developed by the author. The article puts forward a hypothesis that these different functions are nothing more than different manifestations of one mechanism for the dissemination of thinking patterns through analogy.In the previous article [1] we described the results of experiments on obtaining analogs of words based on the statistics of predicates extracted from texts by a simple parser. In this article, continuing the topic of analogy, we will analyze two aspects:- how similar expressions (analogous argument) are found when solving problems and learning;- what is the role of analogy in thinking, namely, what thinking processes are realized with the help of analogy.The article critically examines the most well-known approaches to explaining and attempting to implement analogy. The authors propose another hypothesis, called functional analogy, which is distinguished by the simplicity of explaining the analogical argument, greater correspondence to examples of analogy, in the authors’ opinion, and the possibility of programmatic implementation. (shrink)

The purpose of this preliminary qualitative research study is to explore the role and function of multiple dynamic interactive aesthetic and intersubjective phenomena in the creative arts therapies process relative to transformation in perception, behavior, relationship, and well-being. A group of doctoral students and faculty studied these phenomena in an analogous creative arts therapies laboratory context using a method called Intrinsic Arts-Based Research. Intrinsic Arts-Based Research is a systematic study of psychological, emotional, relational, and arts-based phenomena, parallel to those emergent (...) in the creative arts therapies, using individual and collective intrinsic immersive and reflective experience in combination with qualitative and arts-based research methods. Our primary goal was to simulate the creative arts therapies experience in order to identify, document, and describe the complex transformative phenomena that occur at the nexus of arts-based expression, reflection, and relationships in the arts therapies. For the purposes of this paper transformation is defined as “.... a significant reconfiguration of perception and thought resulting in the lessening of psychic restraint and pain, allowing for the emergence of new psychological perspectives that contribute to living a more creative life” (Gerber et al. 2012, 45). Through a deductive thematic analysis of written accounts of these simulated creative arts therapies experiences by participant/researchers in the laboratory we identified three primary dynamic and interactive broad constructs that together, with more specific modifying themes, might account for and describe change within the creative arts therapies. These broad dynamic interactive themes are: ruptures, resolutions, and transformation; relationship and intersubjectivity; and, arts-based expressive processes. The more specific modifying themes include dialectical rupture and resolution, relational attunements and ruptures, imaginational flow, transcendence and ruptures, sensory/kinesthetic/embodied ways of knowing, and intersubjective transcendence. We propose that change in the creative arts therapies is driven more by a dynamic system of interactive phenomena the varying combinations of which create conditions for relational attunement, imagination, dialectical tensions and creative resolutions, and the ultimately creative transformation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 12.4 (2005) 343-348 [Access article in PDF] Doomed by Nature: The Inevitable Failure of our Naturally Selected Functions Andreas De Block Keywords psychoanalysis, Darwinism, evolutionary psychiatry, pathogenic metaphysics In their very thoughtful and stimulating replies, the three commentators foreground several topics crucial for both psychoanalysis and philosophical psychiatry. In my short response, I focus primarily on what the commentators believe to be the paper's (...) main shortcomings. The first critique reads as follows: Freud never claimed that the Homo sapiens is a fundamentally sick animal, but in fact thought that normalcy is possible and that normal behavior need not be interpreted as neurotic, perverse or psychotic. The second is that current Darwinian psychiatry does not substantiate the view that Homo sapiens is essentially an ill animal, whatever Freud's position might be. Third and last, the proposal that all human beings are ill to the core seems to be more of a religious slogan than a scientifically useful description. What Freud Really Said A transhistorical approach to Freud's work is far from simple, considering that it spans a period of over forty years and that it underwent considerable changes during that time. Not only did Freud introduce some radically new concepts during that time, such as narcissism and the death drive. Also, he regularly changed his position on the aim of psychoanalytic therapy, the ontogenesis of anxiety, and the nature of human sexuality. That Freud sometimes saw homosexuality as an inborn drive did not keep him on other occasions from thinking that homosexual desire was a result of the repression or projection of an oedipal (heterosexual) drive. Examples like these show that any exegesis of Freud's writings inevitably has to deal with some tensions. Freud's work contains numerous apparent, as well as real, contradictions, so that it is no surprise at all that Katherine Morris can produce textual evidence "proving" that Freud never held the view I attribute to him. According to her, Freud thought that we are not all neurotics and that normalcy is possible.I do not deny that several passages in Freud's work underscore the possibility of non-neurotic normalcy. Indeed, Freudian theory even describes processes—sublimation, the transformation from Id to Ego, the resolution of the oedipal complex, among others—that explain how human beings can escape neurosis and other mental disorders. But Freud's illustrations of these mechanisms or processes make clear that he could not conceive [End Page 343] of a nonpathogenic psychodynamics. Consider, for instance, how Freud emphasizes throughout his study of Leonardo da Vinci that Leonardo's sublimations make him extremely vulnerable to psychic exhaustion or "neurasthenia" (1910). Freud never tires of repeating that there is only a gradual difference between a neurotic patient and Leonardo da Vinci, the sublimating ("healthy") artist and scientist.Morris (2005) is right, of course, in arguing that a gradual difference between normality and mental illness does not imply that there is no difference at all. Quantity should not be thought the opposite of quality, because small quantitative differences can transform an "articulation" into a "breach." To use Hegel's famous example, there is a continuum between 110° C and -10° C, but everybody knows that that water evaporates above 100° C and freezes below 0° C. Applied to mental disorders, quantitative differences in levels of testosterone and serotonin may lead to qualitative differences in behavior; in other words, categorical and dimensional approaches to mental illnesses are not mutually exclusive. Having established that, we now need to take a closer look at how Freud articulated the differences between seemingly normal individuals and the mentally ill.Freud held that neurosis, psychosis, and perversion are caused by the interplay between instincts and defense mechanisms. Further, he thought that the pathogenic instincts were almost exclusively sexual. Now, although it is true that he sometimes recognized that the fear of death and the death drive are important factors for psychic life (Deeley 2005) and for the etiology of psychosis, more often than not he interpreted the fear of death as a symbolization of... (shrink)

The idea of rejection of some sentences on the basis of others comes from Aristotle, as Jan Łukasiewicz states in his studies on Aristotle's syllogistic [1939, 1951], concerning rejection of the false syllogistic form and those on certain calculus of propositions. Short historical remarks on the origin and development of the notion of a rejected sentence, introduced into logic by Jan Łukasiewicz, are contained in the Introduction of this paper. This paper is to a considerable extent a summary of papers (...) which are not easily available, even to the Polish reader: (1) J. Słupecki, Funkcja Łukasiewicza (Łukasiewicz’s function), Zeszyty Naukowe Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, Seria B, nr 3 (1959), 33-40; (2) U. Wybraniec-Skardowska, Teoria zdań odrzuconych (Theory of Rejected Sentences), (doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Jerzy Słupecki, published as a monograph), Zeszyty Naukowe Wyższej Szkoły Pedagogicznej w Opolu, Studia i Monografie, Nr 22 (1969), 5-131; (3) G. Bryll, Kilka uzupełnień teorii zdań odrzuconych (Some supplements to the theory of rejcted sentences), Zeszyty Naukowe Wyższej Szkoły Pedagogicznej w Opolu, Studia i Mnografie, Nr 22 (1969), 153-154. The paper also contains a good number of results which have not been published yet. Chapter I contains results presented in the papers (1)-(3). It provides an extension of Alfred Tarski’s theory of deductive systems presented by him in the papers [1930]: Fundamentale Begriffe der Methodologie der deduktiven Wssenschaften, I and Über einige fundamentale Begriffe der Metamathematik. The enriched theory is marked with T. The most essential new concept in T is the function Cn-1, whose definition was given by Słupecki in (1) on the basis of the so-called Tarski’s general theory of deductive systems. It has the form: y e Cn-1X iff Ex e X (x e Cn {y}), where Cn is Tarski’s consequence operation. In accordance with the definition: A sentence y is rejected on the basis of the sentences of the set X iff at least one of sentences of X is a consequence of y (is deducible from y). The intuitive meaning of the rejection function Cn-1: on the basis of false sentences we can reject false sentences only (while by means of the consequence operation Cn on the basis of true sentences we can deduce true sentences only). The function Cn-1 is a generalization of the notion of rejected sentences which was introduced into logic by Łukasiewicz. The essential property of the rejection function Cn-1 is that it satisfies the axioms of general Tarski’s consequence Cn, so it is a consequence operation, called the rejection consequence. In addition, it is an additive and normal operation. In Chapter I, there are given notions analogous to those of the theory of deductive systems, but they are written down by means of the symbol ‘Cn-1’ and not ‘Cn’. There are established the properties of introduced notions and differences and analogies taking place between them and properties of respective notions of the theory T. There are also given generalizations of the notions of ‘decidable system’ and ‘consistent system’ used by Łukasiewicz. The short Chapter II contains axioms of the system T’ which is equivalent to the system T. The only difference between sets of primitive notions of these systems consists in the appearance of the function Cn-1 in the system T’ instead of the function Cn. This chapter reproduces the results given in (2), but they are partially simplified. (shrink)

Developments in biomedical science continue to transform our understanding of concepts such as health and disease. The creation of this expertise has also had a substantive role in changing the veterinary approach to animal diseases. Traditionally, companion animal veterinarians modelled their practices on developments in the diagnosis and treatment of human patients. As science and technology have realigned the boundaries between normalcy, intra-species variation and pathology in particular domains of expertise such as orthopaedic surgery, these patterns of knowledge translation have (...) changed. Not so long ago, treatments for the rupture of the cruciate ligament in human and canine patients were based on pathoanatomical comparison and designed to reestablish the stability of the joint by the functional restoration of ligament anatomy. Recently, a radically different characterization of the canine injury—with a corresponding alternative intervention—has been proposed within the field of veterinary orthopaedics. It views the normal anatomy of the canine knee as being in some way inherently pathogenic and proposes the surgical creation of an idealized structure as a remedy to dysfunction and disease. The veterinary focus on an ideal of patient performance, rather than a specific pathology, is now influencing how orthopaedists choose to approach analogous human injuries. In this article, I chart the history of canine ‘cruciate disease’ therapies as a means to map some of the epistemic assumptions, interplays of idealized and analogical reasoning and patterns of knowledge translation central to the biomedicalization of the science and practice of orthopaedic surgery. (shrink)

Theoretical explication of a growing body of empirical data on consciousness-related anomalous phenomena is unlikely to be achieved in terms of known physical processes. Rather, it will first be necessary to formulate the basic role of consciousness in the definition of reality before such anomalous experience can adequately be represented. This paper takes the position that reality is constituted only in the interaction of consciousness with its environment, and therefore that any scheme of conceptual organization developed to represent that reality (...) must reflect the processes of consciousness as well as those of its environment. In this spirit, the concepts and formalisms of elementary quantum mechanics, as originally proposed to explain anomalous atomic-scale physical phenomena, are appropriated via metaphor to represent the general characteristics of consciousness interacting with any environment. More specifically, if consciousness is represented by a quantum mechanical wave function, and its environment by an appropriate potential profile, Schrödinger wave mechanics defines eigenfunctions and eigenvalues that can be associated with the cognitive and emotional experiences of that consciousness in that environment. To articulate this metaphor it is necessary to associate certain aspects of the formalism, such as the coordinate system, the quantum numbers, and even the metric itself, with various impressionistic descriptors of consciousness, such as its intensity, perspective, approach/avoidance attitude, balance between cognitive and emotional activity, and receptive/assertive disposition. With these established, a number of the generic features of quantum mechanics, such as the wave/particle duality, and the uncertainty, indistinguishability, and exclusion principles, display metaphoric relevance to familiar individual and collective experiences. Similarly, such traditional quantum theoretic exercises as the central force field and atomic structure, covalent molecular bonds, barrier penetration, and quantum statistical collective behavior become useful analogies for representation of a variety of consciousness experiences, both normal and anomalous, and for the design of experiments to study these systematically. (shrink)

There is some complementarity of models for the origin of the electroencephalogram (EEG) and neural network models for information storage in brainlike systems. From the EEG models of Freeman, of Nunez, and of the authors' group we argue that the wavelike processes revealed in the EEG exhibit linear and near-equilibrium dynamics at macroscopic scale, despite extremely nonlinear – probably chaotic – dynamics at microscopic scale. Simulations of cortical neuronal interactions at global and microscopic scales are then presented. The simulations depend (...) on anatomical and physiological estimates of synaptic densities, coupling symmetries, synaptic gain, dendritic time constants, and axonal delays. It is shown that the frequency content, wave velocities, frequency/wavenumber spectra and response to cortical activation of the electrocorticogram (ECoG) can be reproduced by a “lumped” simulation treating small cortical areas as single-function units. The corresponding cellular neural network simulation has properties that include those of attractor neural networks proposed by Amit and by Parisi. Within the simulations at both scales, sharp transitions occur between low and high cell firing rates. These transitions may form a basis for neural interactions across scale. To maintain overall cortical dynamics in the normal low firing-rate range, interactions between the cortex and the subcortical systems are required to prevent runaway global excitation. Thus, the interaction of cortex and subcortex via corticostriatal and related pathways may partly regulate global dynamics by a principle analogous to adiabatic control of artificial neural networks. (shrink)

• We define a notion of order of indiscernibility type of a structure by analogy with Mitchell order on measures; we use this to define a hierarchy of strong axioms of infinity defined through normal filters, the α-weakly Erdős hierarchy. The filters in this hierarchy can be seen to be generated by sets of ordinals where these indiscernibility orders on structures dominate the canonical functions.• The limit axiom of this is that of greatly Erdős and we use (...) it to calibrate some strengthenings of the Chang property, one of which, CC+, is equiconsistent with a Ramsey cardinal, and implies that where K is the core model built with non-overlapping extenders — if it is rigid, and others which are a little weaker. As one corollary we have:TheoremIf then there is an inner model with a strong cardinal. • We define an α-Jónsson hierarchy to parallel the α-Ramsey hierarchy, and show that κ being α-Jónsson implies that it is α-Ramsey in the core model. (shrink)

Questions about necessity (or what has to be, or what cannot be otherwise) and possibility (or what can be, or what could be otherwise) are questions about modality. Fictionalism is an approach to theoretical matters in a given area which treats the claims in that area as being in some sense analogous to fictional claims: claims we do not literally accept at face value, but which we nevertheless think serve some useful function. However, despite its name, “Modal Fictionalism” in its (...) usual manifestations is not primarily fictionalism about claims of necessity and possibility, but rather a fictionalist approach to claims about possible worlds. (For instance, modal fictionalism is not normally fictionalist about the claim that “it is possible that there be a species of tail-less kangaroo”, but rather about the claim that “there is a possible world in which there is a species of tail-less kangaroo”.) The practice of taking possible worlds to be merely convenient fictions, or of treating talk about possible worlds as being useful without being literally correct, is quite common in philosophical circles. It is only recently, however, that philosophers have seriously examined the implications of taking possible worlds to be merely fictional objects, like Sherlock Holmes or a frictionless surface. (shrink)

Cancer biologists ascribe normal functions to parts of cancer. Normal functions are activities that parts of systems are in some minimal sense supposed to perform. Cancer biologists’ finding normality within the abnormality of cancer pose difficulties for two main approaches to normal function. One approach claims that normal functions are activities that parts are selected for. However, some parts of cancers that have normal functions aren’t selected to perform them. The other (...) approach claims that normal functions are part-activities typical for the system and that contribute to survival/reproduction. However, cancers are too heterogeneous to establish what’s typical across a type. (shrink)

A three dimensional hypercube representing all of the 4,096 dyadic computations in a standard bivalent system has been created. It has been constructed from the 16 functions arrayed in a table of functional completeness that can compute a dyadic relationship. Each component of the dyad is an operator as well as a function, such as “implication” being a result, as well as an operation. Every function in the hypercube has been color keyed to enhance the display of emerging patterns. (...) At the minimum, the hypercube is a “multiplication table” of dyadic computations and produces values in a way that shortens the time to do operations that normally would take longer using conventional truth table methods. It also can serve as a theorem prover and creator. With the hypercube comes a deductive system without the need for axioms. The main significance of the 3-D hypercube at this point is that it is the most fundamental way of displaying all dyadic computations in binary space, thus serving as a way of normalizing the rendition of uninterpreted, or raw, binary space. The hypercube is a dimensionless entity, a standard by which in binary spaces can be measured and classified, analogous to a meter stick. (shrink)

The lambdaPi-calculus, a theory of first-order dependent function types in Curry-Howard-de Bruijn correspondence with a fragment of minimal first-order logic, is defined as a system of (linearized) natural deduction. In this paper, we present a Gentzen-style sequent calculus for the lambdaPi-calculus and prove the cut-elimination theorem. The cut-elimination result builds upon the existence of normal forms for the natural deduction system and can be considered to be analogous to a proof provided by Prawitz for first-order logic. The type-theoretic setting (...) considered here elegantly illustrates the distinction between the processes of normalization in a natural deduction system and cut-elimination in a Gentzen-style sequent calculus. (shrink)

Functions of type n are characteristic functions on n-ary relations. Keenan [5] established their importance for natural language semantics, by showing that natural language has many examples of irreducible type n functions, i.e., functions of type n that cannot be represented as compositions of unary functions. Keenan proposed some tests for reducibility, and Dekker [3] improved on these by proposing an invariance condition that characterizes the functions with a reducible counterpart with the same behaviour (...) on product relations. The present paper generalizes the notion of reducibility (a quantifier is reducible if it can be represented as a composition of quantifiers of lesser, but not necessarily unary, types), proposes a direct criterion for reducibility, and establishes a diamond theorem and a normal form theorem for reduction. These results are then used to show that every positive n function has a unique representation as a composition of positive irreducible functions, and to give an algorithm for finding this representation. With these formal tools it can be established that natural language has examples of n-ary quantificational expressions that cannot be reduced to any composition of quantifiers of lesser degree. (shrink)

Several fields contributing to psychiatric advances, such as psychology, biology, and the humanities, have not yet met to produce a cohesive and integrated picture of human function and dysfunction, strength and vulnerability, etc., despite advances in their own areas. The failure may have its roots in a disagreement on what we mean by the human person and his or her relationship with the world, for which the incommensurate language of these disciplines may be partly to blame. Turns taken by western (...) philosophy over the past 400 years may help to explain this. Language is such an important tool for psychiatrists, that examination of it may afford an insight into the reasons for divisions in the field. This paper aims to examine and compare psychologies (and hence psychiatries) derived from modern western philosophy, with similar concepts in other cultures, through the study of developments in terminology, in terms of the simplest facts about what it means to be human. Terminology used in mental health in western cultures is examined, with particular consideration of the term “self” as it has come to be used in a technical sense. Analogous terms from non-English speaking European languages, and some non-western cultures are studied. Western philosophy and psychology have evolved a meaning for the term “self” which is quite different from equivalent terms in non-western cultures. It is a moot point whether or not the development in western psychiatry of what are now technical terms to describe normal human experience has become needlessly obscure and ambiguous. It is not evident that this “new” language represents a genuine advance in understanding; it distances mental health professionals from those who are not familiar with it; and it makes transcultural dialogue difficult. (shrink)

Background Speech understanding may rely not only on auditory, but also on visual information. Non-invasive functional neuroimaging techniques can expose the neural processes underlying the integration of multisensory processes required for speech understanding in humans. Nevertheless, noise (from fMRI) limits the usefulness in auditory experiments, and electromagnetic artefacts caused by electronic implants worn by subjects can severely distort the scans (EEG, fMRI). Therefore, we assessed audio-visual activation of temporal cortex with a silent, optical neuroimaging technique: functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Methods (...) We studied temporal cortical activation as represented by concentration changes of oxy- and deoxy-hemoglobin in four, easy-to-apply fNIRS optical channels of 33 normal-hearing adult subjects and 5 post-lingually deaf cochlear implant (CI) users in response to supra-threshold unisensory auditory and visual, as well as to congruent auditory-visual speech stimuli. Results Activation effects were not visible from single fNIRS channels. However, by discounting physiological noise through reference channel subtraction, auditory, visual and audiovisual speech stimuli evoked concentration changes for all sensory modalities in both cohorts (p<0.001). Auditory stimulation evoked larger concentration changes than visual stimuli (p<0.001). A saturation effect was observed for the audiovisual condition. Conclusions Physiological, systemic noise can be removed from fNIRS signals by reference channel subtraction. The observed multisensory enhancement of an auditory cortical channel can be plausibly described by a simple addition of the auditory and visual signals with saturation. (shrink)

Normal narcissistic functioning has to do with the regulation of a coherent set of metarepresentations of the acting agent. That set of meta-representations has its own interior architecture and dynamics. Normal narcissistic functioning is an adaptive form of interpsychic processing which can be given a general account by integrating views of it drawn from the clinical traditions of psychoanalysis, empirical psychology, and contemporary cognitive and neurosciences. This is not to be confused with any form of organized psychopathology, though (...) pathological forms of narcissism are relevant to understanding normal narcissism. Neural correlates of normal narcissism, as also the characteristic emotions and pleasures/displeasures that accompany its operations, are also explored. It is proposed that this allostatic regulatory system plays a prominent role in a wide range of human behaviors. It also closes the gap between social norms governing such behaviors and the minds of the agents performing them. This integrative interpretation of the scientific material is offered as an exercise in “philosophy in cognitive science” and belongs to the tradition of naturalistic philosophical accounts of the human mind. (shrink)

The treatment-enhancement distinction draws a line between services or interventions meant to prevent or cure conditions that we view as diseases or disabilities and interventions that improve a condition that we view as a normal function or feature of members of our species. The line drawn here is widely appealed to in medical practice and medical insurance contexts, as well as in our everyday thinking about the medical services we do and should assist people in obtaining.

On the analogy of the colloquial register in some modern languages, where narrative and argument may be punctuated by oaths and exclamations in order to maintain a high affective level and compel the hearer's attention, it is reasonable to postulate that Attic conversation also was punctuated by oaths, that this ingredient in comic language was drawn from life, and that the comparative frequency of ║ M M Δ in comedy is sufficiently explained thereby. There are obvious affinities between some (...) passages of comedy, relaxed conversation in Plato and Xenophon, and the forceful, man-to-man tone which Demosthenes sometimes adopts to such good effect . Compare, for instance, Ar. V. 133 f. στιν δ' νομα ⋮ τ μν γέροντι ⋮ Φιλοκλέων / να μ Δία, τ δ' υε κτλ., where the oath is a response to imagined incredulity, and X. Smp. 4.27 ατν δ σέ, η, γ εδον να μ τν πόλλω, τε κτλ. . It is also important that the commonest oaths fit, in most of their forms, the end of an iambic trimeter: μ τν Δία, ν Δία,ν τούς θεούς, μ τος θεούς. Add that in Aristophanic dialogue over half the iambic trimeters end with major pause, and half the remainder with minor pause, and we can see why Δ / established itself early as a distinctive comic pattern. Out of 105 examples of M M Δ cited from comedy in Section II above, 59 have the oath at verse-end. In the case of πάνυ, which was almost exclusively Attic and — to judge from its great rarity in tragedy — felt by Athenian poets to be prosaic, we lack evidence on its functions in the colloquial register; it may or may not have served as affective punctuation. In prose, we have to reckon with the fact that π Mπ and Mπ π constituted a genuine stylistic choice as far back as the evidence will take us, since the two earliest instances in prose are [X.] Ath. 2.3 πάνυ δι χρείαν and ibid. 3.5 πολλ τι πάνυ. The oath, as treated by the comic poets on the basis of colloquial usage, is bound to have served as a model for πάνυ, exerting an influence which pulled πάνυ to the end of the verse, but there was also a powerful metrical constraint. As a dibrach ending in a vowel which could not be elided or enter into crasis, πάνυ was especially appropriate for verse-end. That in itself was enough both to establish Mπ π as the dominant pattern in comedy and to promote Mπ … π. Out of the total of 104 examples of Mπ π in comedy, 93 have πάνυ at verse-end, which makes Mπ π / one of the hallmarks of comic style. Mπ … π does not occur in prose in association with any other feature identified as colloquial, but it should be noted that Aiskhines and Demosthenes are much fonder of Mπ π than other prose authors. In some cases one can see that the order Mπ π avoids a succession of short syllables or hiatus or both , but there are other cases in which it has the opposite effect . The possibility of comic influence on oratorical language cannot be dismissed out of hand. It is also possible that someone will find positive determinants which will explain all the cases of Mπ π in prose. σόδρα, which, like πάνυ, is peculiarly Attic, is metrically more tractable than πάνυ, since it can be elided; even so, out of the 80 comic examples of Mσ σ no less than 58 have σόδρα at verse-end, and of those 58 there are 22 at major pause, 8 at presumed major pause and 9 at minor pause. The comic treatment of σόδρα is thus comparable with the treatment of πάνυ, and Timokles 222.4 τηρεν…σόδρα is in fact the closest analogy we have to Ar. Pl. 234 f. χθομαι…πάνυ. δέ and γάρ are a different matter, and in some significant respects different from each other. Postponement of δέ is especially prominent in Aeschylus and then abundant in fourth-century comedy. It is much less common in Euripides , rare in Sophocles and Aristophanes , and virtually limited in prose to the categories which I labelled –. There is as yet no evidence to associate postponement of δέ with colloquial language; on the contrary, it seems to have begun as a feature of poetic language and to have been taken up and exploited by fourth-century comedy. If, in addition to being Aeschylean, it was colloquial in the fourth century, what happened to it afterwards? Except for such an isolated and inexplicable case as Diod. xx85.1 — in a military narrative — it is not a feature of the Koine at literary, documentary or subliterate level. Postponement of γάρ was no doubt encouraged by postponement of δέ, but it is not itself notably poetic ). One can see how it could possibly have developed in the spoken language of the fourth century, extending the function of γάρ as an explanatory particle in a way which makes it comparable with the English ‘you see’ in ‘He didn't dare pick it up. He hurt his back last year, you see’. For an extension of this kind we may compare the current extension of the English genitive affix in ‘Then the girl whose place she was taking's mother turned up’ and ‘The man that Christopher liked's Introduction is much better’. Moreover, postponed γάρ appears in a segment of conversation constructed in indirect speech by Theophrastus in Char. 8.9 τ πργμα βοσθαι γάρ . Again we must ask: what happened to it afterwards? A couple of cases in Theophrastus' botanical works could be a reflex of the influence of comedy on literary language at Athens. The influence was plainly short-lived, since it did not affect the Koine. It is not hard to see why serious poetry in the fifth century and earlier should have experimented occasionally with the postponement of δέ and γάρ: treatment of M M q as a valid alternative to M q M is metrically very convenient. No poet, however, could afford to use common words in a bizarre, un-Greek way merely to save himself time and trouble in constructing a verse. Linguistic innovation is normally analogical, proceeding by extension from a starting-point already there, and the most obvious starting-point for postponement of δέ and γάρ is constituted by my class . This consideration provides comic postponement with a pedigree, but does not deny it individuality. The remarkable scale and frequency with which comedy exploited a phenomenon which tragedy used with restraint and prose hardly at all gives comic postponement the right to be regarded as a quite distinctive artificial feature of comedy. (shrink)

IntroductionCognition generally declines gradually over time due to progressive degeneration of the brain, leading to dementia and eventual loss of independent functions. The rate of regression varies among the six cognitive domains. Current modality of cognitive assessment using neuropsychological paper-and-pencil screening tools for cognitive impairment such as the Montreal Cognitive Assessment has limitations and is influenced by age. Virtual reality is considered as a potential alternative tool to assess cognition. A novel, fully immersive automated VR system has been developed (...) to assess the six cognitive domains. As cognition is associated with age, VR performance is postulated to vary with age using this system.AimsThis is a feasibility study to evaluate the VR performance of cognitively healthy adults aged between 35 and 74 years old, based on the performance score and completion time using the CAVIRE system.MethodsConducted in a public primary care clinic in Singapore, 25 multi-ethnic Asian adults were recruited in each of the four age groups in years: 35–44; 45–54; 55–64, and 65–74. The eligibility criteria included a MoCA score of 26 or higher to reflect normal cognition and understanding English instructions. They completed common daily activities ranging from brushing teething to shopping, across 13 VR segments. Their performances scores and completion time were automatically computed by the CAVIRE system. These VR performance indices were compared across the four age groups using one-way ANOVA, F-test of the hypothesis, followed by pair-wise comparisons in the event of a significant F-test.ResultsOne participant dropped out from Group 1. The demographic characteristics of 99 participants were similar across the 4 age groups. Overall, younger participants in Groups 1 and 2 attained higher VR performance scores and shorter completion time, compared to those in Groups 3 and 4, in all six cognitive domains.ConclusionThe CAVIRE VR performance scores and completion time significantly differ between the younger and older Asian participants with normal cognition. Enhancements to the system are needed to establish the age-group specific normal performance indices. (shrink)

This paper argues that a minimal notion of function and a notion of normal-proper function are used in explaining how bodies and brains operate. Neither is Cummins’ notion, as originally defined, and yet his is often taken to be the clearly relevant notion for such an explanatory context. This paper also explains how adverting to normal-proper functions, even if these are selected functions, can play a significant scientific role in the operational explanations of complex systems that (...) physiologists and neurophysiologists provide, despite a lack of relevant causal efficacy on the part of such functions. (shrink)

A biological function is supposed to be performed adequately, and hence may fail to do so: this is dysfunction. This raises two questions. One is how to make explicit the way in which function can be discriminated from dysfunction without confusing dysfunction with non-function. The second question is how what is “right” and “wrong” can be legitimated by natural regulatory norms. A function can be viewed as a quality to which at least one variable with a definite set of values (...) is associated. Accordingly, function and dysfunction are the same quality of the same trait, but differ in the values associated to this variable. Dysfunction occurs when the associated set of values does not match this normal state. Biological systems have the epistemic singularity that their existence is the consequence of two distinct causal regimes, the so-called “proximate” and “ultimate” causes, whose convergence defines a system’s prescriptive normality. Each cause imposes restrictive rules that limit the possible ways these systems can putatively exist. When a system is insensitive to ultimate cause, it is determined by proximate causation alone, and hence escapes its own prescriptive norms. In conclusion: The normality of a biological system is defined by the convergence of proximate and ultimate causes. A function is a variable-associated quality whose values are defined relative to the norms of the system. Dysfunction occurs when the set of values of the same variable does not match the normality of the system, which can occur when the system is insensitive to ultimate causation. (shrink)

This essay argues that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment can be an extremely helpful ally for contemporary feminist theorists, critical race theorists, and disability studies scholars because his work suggests that the gender, race, and ability of bodies are not innate or fixed features of those bodies, much less corporeal indicators of physical, social, psychic, and even moral inferiority, but are themselves dynamic phenomena that have the potential to overturn accepted notions of normalcy, naturalness, and normativity. Taking seriously Merleau-Ponty’s insistence (...) that our bodies are the means by which we directly engage with the world, I suggest, encourages us to be attentive to how an individual’s or group’s gender, race, and bodily abilities differentially affect how their bodies are responded to by other bodies. The responses of others, in turn, directly influences the significance of an individual’s actions within that situation. This essay provides a critical examination of specific feminist philosophers, critical race scholars, and disability theorists who creatively utilize Merleau-Pontian insights to illustrate, and ultimately combat, the insidious ways in which sexism, racism, and “compulsory able-bodiedness”, impoverish the lived experience of both oppressors and the oppressed, largely by predetermining the meaning of their bodily interactions in accordance with institutionalized cultural expectations and norms. (shrink)

This article argues that the analogical argument employed by Augustine in De Trinitate (the soul-God analogy) is formally identical to the analogical argument employed by Plato in the Republic (the city-soul analogy). The similarities between these two analogies, however, have received insufficient attention in the secondary literature. My goal is to fill this lacuna. I first provide a summary of the analogical methodology of these two works, and I then proceed to translate these two analogies into one analogical (...) argument form, showing that they are formally equivalent. I then differentiate these two analogies from other analogical arguments by focusing on their exploratory and programmatic character. This differentiation helps to capture the uniqueness of these two analogies, to understand their function, and, ultimately, to appreciate more fully the consonance between Augustine’s methodology and Plato’s. (shrink)

Protein aggregation has been studied for at least 3 decades, and many of the principles that regulate this event are relatively well understood. Here, however, we present a different perspective to explain why proteins aggregate: we argue that aggregation may occur as a side‐effect of the lack of one or more natural partners that, under physiologic conditions, would act as chaperones. This would explain why the same surfaces that have evolved for functional purposes are also those that favour aggregation. In (...) the course of reviewing this field, we substantiate our hypothesis with three paradigmatic examples that argue for the generality of our proposal. An obvious corollary of this hypothesis is, of course, that targeting the physiological partners of a protein could be the most direct and specific approach to designing anti‐aggregation molecules. Our analysis may thus inform a different strategy for combating diseases of protein aggregation and misfolding. (shrink)

This article raises the question of ‘normality’ today and the fracturing of health ideals along new lines of enablement and function. In particular the study asks if ‘functional’ and ‘dysfunctional’ are displacing ‘normal’ and ‘pathological’ as master biopolitical binarisms, and if so, what distinctions can be drawn between them. The discourse of ‘function’ and ‘dysfunction’ is certainly ubiquitous in two areas of research and practice: gerontology and sexology. In the former case ‘functional health’ is linked to successful aging represented (...) by technical tests around activities of daily living (ADLs) and risk-assessment profiles. In the latter case, sexual function and dysfunction have become all-encompassing markers of heterosexual competence, now largely detached from reproductive imperatives, but refashioned as integral to responsible and successful self-management. Presenting examples from both cases, the article concludes that functionality, circulating under the signs of ‘normal’, ‘natural’ and ‘healthy’, furnishes economic, technological, educational, professional, pharmacological and policy fields with a rich intellectual, practical and regulatory resource. (shrink)

Abstract BACKGROUND: Anonymity remains the more common practice in gamete donations, but legislation prohibiting anonymity with a goal of protecting donor-conceived children's right to know their genetic origins is becoming more common. However, given the dearth of research investigating the function of anonymity for donors and recipients, it is unclear whether these policies will accomplish their goals. The aim of this study was to explore experiences with anonymity among oocyte donors and recipients who participated in an anonymous donor oocyte program (...) and to understand the ways in which anonymity functions for them. -/- METHODS: Semistructured interviews were conducted with 50 women: 28 oocyte donors and 22 recipients who were recruited from an academic center for reproductive medicine in the United States. -/- RESULTS: Donors and recipients view anonymity both as a mechanism to protect the interests of all parties (recipients, donors, and donor-conceived children) and as a point of conflict. Specifically, three key areas were identified where both donors and recipients saw anonymity as having an important role: relieving anxieties about family structures and obligations; protecting their interests and those of donor-conceived children (while acknowledging where interests conflict); and managing the future. -/- CONCLUSION: As gamete donation increasingly moves away from the practice of anonymity, examining why anonymity matters to stakeholders will be helpful in devising strategies to successfully implement identity-release options. (shrink)

Both Stahl and Leibniz worked out conceptions of the organism that diverged significantly from the mechanistic models involved in the Cartesian dualism of soul and body. In the polemics which developed in 1709-1710 concerning Stahl's Theoria medica vera , Leibniz focused his attacks on what he considered a paralogistic theory of the soul; he wondered in particular how such an abstruse metaphysics could be reconciled with the scientific analysis of vital phenomena. Contrary to Stahl, Leibniz would defend the view that (...) the sufficient reason of organisms at the phenomenal level depends on an integrative combination of specific mechanisms; but the soul conceived as an entelechy needs to be called upon to account for the functional integration of the whole at the substantive level. Thus, the psychic and the somatic would involve a joint rationality unfolding in analogical and expressive relationships. However, both domains would require the use of separate analytic methodologies in any attempt at explaining those relationships. (shrink)

Does biomedical enhancement challenge justice in health care? This paper argues that health care justice based on the concept of normal functioning is inadequate if enhancements are widespread. Two different interpretations of normal functioning are distinguished: the “species typical” vs. the “normal cooperator” account, showing that each version of the theory fails to account for certain egalitarian intuitions about help and assistance owed to people with health needs, where enhancements are widespread.

In the second chapter of The descent of man , Charles Darwin interrupted his discussion of the evolutionary origins of language to describe ten ways in which the formation of languages and of biological species were ‘curiously’ similar. I argue that these comparisons served mainly as analogies in which linguistic processes stood for aspects of biological evolution. Darwin used these analogies to recapitulate themes from On the origin of species , including common descent, genealogical classification, the struggle for existence, and (...) natural selection, among others. Skeptical of this interpretation, Gregory Radick sees the naturalistic account of language formation in the Descent comparisons as reinforcing Darwin’s idea that languages and the races of mankind have both undergone progressive development. Yet the details of Darwin’s language–species comparisons, as well as the polemical context in which they appear, show that they were not aimed at so limited a function. Rather, they addressed issues related to species transmutation in general. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Prophecy without Contempt: Religious Discourse in the Public Square by Cathleen KavenyKyle LambeletProphecy without Contempt: Religious Discourse in the Public Square Cathleen Kaveny CAMBRIDGE, MA: HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2016. 464 PP. $49.95"The American public square is not a seminar room" (419). This being the case, Cathleen Kaveny's Prophecy without Contempt challenges ethicists, among others, to reconsider the rhetoric of moral address. Rather than a narrow focus on deliberation, (...) Kaveny commends attention to the genre of indictment, and particularly the American jeremiad, as a significant mode of moral address that deserves normative analysis. Kaveny is no partisan of prophecy. But she offers moral and rhetorical criteria of prophetic speech that allow the genre to do its indispensable work.Kaveny's book proceeds in four parts. In the first part she sets the stage for her argument by surveying three prominent accounts of the status of public moral discourse, critiquing each yet drafting them all into a more global [End Page 195] critique of the failure to take into account the central significance of the rhetoric of prophetic indictment. Correcting this neglect in the second part, Kaveny executes a historical retrieval of the American jeremiad, beginning with early Puritan preachers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The point of her at times plodding historical reconstruction is that the jeremiad was not originally socially divisive but rather served to build up the community by calling listeners back to a commonly agreed-on covenant. This uniting function of the jeremiad fails in later generations. Some readers will worry that Kaveny's retrieval risks nostalgia insofar as it conforms to a MacIntyrian declension narrative in which golden origins were irreplaceably fractured.This risk, however, is mitigated by the third and fourth parts of the book, in which Kaveny turns to constructive ethics. She argues that the forensic rhetoric of prophetic indictment should be understood as a chemotherapy. It should not be confused with deliberation, the normal form of moral address. Yet, like chemotherapy, used in the right amount it can restore an ailing patient to health. As we have come to expect, Kaveny is especially adept at taking the moral frameworks developed in one sphere and applying them to another. Trading medical analogies for military, Kaveny argues that best practices of ius bellum verborum can be developed from just war criteria. She adds to these rhetorical constraints that prophetic critique be offered against one's own people with whom one identifies through lamentation and hope. Kaveny concludes with advocacy of prophetic humility and irony as necessary elements of prophetic speech in our pluralistic contemporary context.Although written in accessible prose, Kaveny's book deserves rigorous scholarly engagement. She constructs her argument with the gracious interdisciplinarity of a leading scholar of law and theology at the height of her powers. She is methodologically promiscuous but never shallow, drawing on scholarly fields of moral philosophy, biblical studies, American religious history, in-depth case analysis of contemporary arguments about abortion and torture, and historical paradigms of prophetic virtue (and vice). While scholars in each of these fields will find claims worth engaging in Kaveny's text, ethicists will be particularly interested in her argument for a constrained, continuing need for prophetic indictment.My one critique is that her account of prophetic rhetoric is too conservative. Based on her historical retrieval, Kaveny argues that indictment should serve only to call listeners back to an already agreed-on covenant. It is undoubtedly the case, however, that Kaveny's exemplars of indictment such as Jonah, Lincoln, and King innovated and developed the covenant, even as they invoked it. This complaint aside, Kaveny's book is a major contribution to contemporary conceptualizations of the public square, and stands poised to open new directions for moral analysis of religious actors in pluralistic publics. [End Page 196]Kyle LambeletNotre Dame UniversityCopyright © 2017 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

In Kant's Critique of Judgment (CJ), the actual mechanism of the construction of aesthetic ideas is only briefly sketched. I suggest that there may be a connection between certain aspects of Sections 49 and 59, such that the creation of aesthetic ideas can be related to the process of "symbolic hypotyposis" (¤59.2). I will argue that the process of symbolic hypotyposis relates to the formation of aesthetic attributes, as symbols, through an analogical process; that a symbol acts, in effect, as (...) one part of the four parts of an analogy, and that the aesthetic idea may result from the application of the process of analogy. I will suggest that aesthetic attributes may, in some cases, function as symbols, and induce what I will term "conceptual overflow," in which the normal contents of the symbol are supplemented through the analogical process. (shrink)

Contemporary diagnostic categories and various modes of treatment of mood disorders contribute to the development of a managed form of selfhood in contemporary society, particularly as articulated with management in the workplace. This produces a new iteration of the normal in relation to psychopathology; instead of the normal as an absence of disorder or distress, normalcy becomes the private management, often stemming from an external or internalized social injunction, of symptoms through various available techniques of self-care. I support (...) this claim through an analysis of the development of the category of the mood disorder under DSM-III and the functioning of common contemporary treatments such as antidepressant medications, cognitive-behavioral therapy, and alternative techniques such as mindfulness meditation. A new social problematic emerges, in part out of this convergence, in which the notion of mood becomes generalized and an object of vigilance. Everyone has moods; we always have moods; and moods are in principle always subject to the need of being managed. (shrink)