The documented efficacy and long-term benefit of antidepressants in patients with recurrent forms of severe anxiety or depressive disorders support their use in those individuals with these disorders, who experience suicidal thoughts or behavior. In general, it is assumed that antidepressants are beneficial for all symptoms of depression, including suicidality. However, some evidence suggests that Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors [SSRIs] may cause worsening of suicidal ideas in vulnerable patients. Systematic reviews and pooled analysis of experimental, observational, and epidemiological studies have (...) investigated the use of SSRIs and their association with suicidality. Taking account of the methodological limitations of these studies, the current evidence fails to provide a clear relationship between their use and risk of suicidality in adults. However, in children and adolescents, there appears to be a bit of increased risk of suicidal ideations and attempts, but not of completed suicides. This risk can be anticipated and managed clinically. Clinicians are, therefore, advised to maintain a close follow-up during the initial treatment periods and remain vigilant of this risk. This advisory, however, should not deter clinicians from the use of effective dosages of antidepressants for a sufficient period of time, in every age group of patients, when clinically needed, and if found suitable otherwise. (shrink)

This book offers a novel account of the relationship of experience to knowledge. The account builds on the intuitive idea that our ordinary perceptual judgments are not autonomous, that an interdependence obtains between our view of the world and our perceptual judgments. Anil Gupta shows in this important study that this interdependence is the key to a satisfactory account of experience. He uses tools from logic and the philosophy of language to argue that his account of experience makes available (...) an attractive and feasible empiricism. (shrink)

Phenomenal particularism is the view that particular external objects are sometimes part of the phenomenal character of perceptual experience. It is a central part of naïve realist or relational views of perception. We consider a series of recent objections to phenomenal particularism and argue that naïve realism has the resources to block them. In particular, we show that these objections rest on assumptions about the nature of phenomenal character that the naïve realist will reject, and that they ignore the full (...) resources that naïve realism has to offer in explaining phenomenal character. (shrink)

This volume reprints eight of Anil Gupta's essays, some with additional material. The essays bring a refreshing new perspective to central issues in philosophical logic, philosophy of language, and epistemology.

After nearly 20 years of work by activists, fair trade, a movement establishing alternative trading organizations to ensure minimal returns, safe working conditions, and environmentally sustainable production, is now gaining steam, with increasing awareness and availability across a variety of products. However, this article addresses several major remaining challenges: (a) a lack of agreement about what fair trade really means and how it should be certified; (b) uneven awareness and availability across different areas, with marked differences between some parts of (...) Europe and North America that reflect more fundamental debates about distribution; (c) larger questions about the extent of the potential contribution of fair trade to development under the current system, including limitations on the number and types of workers affected and the fair trade focus on commodity goods. (shrink)

We are self-conscious creatures thrown into a world which is not of our making. What is the connection between being self-conscious and being related to an objective world? Descartes and Kant, in different ways and with different emphases, argued that self-conscious subjects must be related to an objective world. But many have worried about their starting points. ‘One should say it is thinking, just as one says, it is lightning’, the eighteenth-century philosopher, physicist, and aphorist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg writes. ‘To (...) say cogito is already too much as soon as one translates it as I am thinking. To assume the I, to postulate it, is a practical requirement.’ Lichtenberg raises a question here about our entitlement to think of ourselves as the agent of our thinking. Sometimes thoughts strike us like lightning. When this happens, we are their patient. It is central to our self-conscious lives that this is the exception: we are first and foremost the agents of our thinking. What right do we have to think of ourselves as such? The Practical Self argues that self-consciousness requires faith in ourselves as the agents of our thinking. But faith can be undermined and it can be sustained. And this provides us with a connection to the world since our faith in ourselves as the agents of our thinking is sustained by practices which relate us to other thinkers. Self-conscious subjects must have faith in themselves as thinking agents and it is our relations to the others which sustain this faith. Self-consciousness connects us to a world of others. (shrink)

The standard behavioral index for human consciousness is the ability to report events with accuracy. While this method is routinely used for scientific and medical applications in humans, it is not easy to generalize to other species. Brain evidence may lend itself more easily to comparative testing. Human consciousness involves widespread, relatively fast low-amplitude interactions in the thalamocortical core of the brain, driven by current tasks and conditions. These features have also been found in other mammals, which suggests that consciousness (...) is a major biological adaptation in mammals. We suggest more than a dozen additional properties of human consciousness that may be used to test comparative predictions. Such homologies are necessarily more remote in non-mammals, which do not share the thalamocortical complex. However, as we learn more we may be able to make “deeper” predictions that apply to some birds, reptiles, large-brained invertebrates, and perhaps other species. (shrink)

In this paper I distinguish two ways of raising a sceptical problem of others' minds: via a problem concerning the possibility of error or via a problem concerning sources of knowledge. I give some reason to think that the second problem raises a more interesting problem in accounting for our knowledge of others’ minds and consider proposed solutions to the problem.

In the essays which make up The Sovereignty of Good, Iris Murdoch gives us a picture of moral life in which ‘the metaphor of vision [is] almost irresistibly suggested’. This chapter aims to clarify the role played by the metaphor of vision in Murdoch’s philosophical thinking. I’ll examine two different things which might be meant by the term ‘moral vision’: vision of moral things or vision which is itself moral. The suggestion will be that whilst both capture something important about (...) Murdoch’s work, each may mislead about what is distinctive in her views. For Murdoch, I shall suggest, there is no distinctively moral vision. There is only vision: a loving gaze directed upon the reality of others. (shrink)

The Bayesian brain hypothesis provides an attractive unifying framework for perception, cognition, and action. We argue that the framework can also usefully integrate interoception, the sense of the internal physiological condition of the body. Our model of entails a new view of emotion as interoceptive inference and may account for a range of psychiatric disorders of selfhood.

Oncogenic transformation is often associated with aberrant glycosylation in experimental and human tumors. The carbohydrate epitopes, resulting either from incomplete synthesis or neosynthesis, accumulate in high density, possibly in a novel conformation, at the tumor cell surface. A variety of monoclonal antibodies have been developed that recognize tumor‐associated carbohydrate antigens and their aberrant organization at the cell surface. These carbohydrate epitopes and the antibodies specific to these structures are being exploited to develop novel diagnostic tools and therapeutic strategies for cancer.

v. 1. Vedas to the auxiliary scriptures -- v. 2. Three non-Vedic systems : Cārvāka, Jaina, and Buddha -- v. 4. Western impact on Indian thought.

Anil Gomes considers Murdoch's view that morality is real and that, with the right conceptual resources, we can perceive it.

This commentary considers Merker's mesodiencephalic proposal in relation to quantitative measures of neural dynamics suggested to be relevant to consciousness. I suggest that even if critical neural mechanisms turn out to be subcortical, the functional utility of consciousness will depend on the rich conscious contents generated by continuous interaction of such mechanisms with a thalamocortical envelope. (Published Online May 1 2007).

Neural Darwinism (ND) is a large scale selectionist theory of brain development and function that has been hypothesized to relate to consciousness. According to ND, consciousness is entailed by reentrant interactions among neuronal populations in the thalamocortical system (the ‘dynamic core’). These interactions, which permit high-order discriminations among possible core states, confer selective advantages on organisms possessing them by linking current perceptual events to a past history of value-dependent learning. Here, we assess the consistency of ND with 16 widely recognized (...) properties of consciousness, both physiological (for example, consciousness is associated with widespread, relatively fast, low amplitude interactions in the thalamocortical system), and phenomenal (for example, consciousness involves the existence of a private flow of events available only to the experiencing subject). While no theory accounts fully for all of these properties at present, we find that ND and its recent extensions fare well. (shrink)

In this rigorous investigation into the logic of truth Anil Gupta and Nuel Belnap explain how the concept of truth works in both ordinary and pathological..

iterations of REA operators, as well as extensions, generalizations and other applications are given in [6] while those for the ...

Papers presented in three conferences, supported by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the Excellence Cluster 16: 'Cultural Foundation of Integration' at the University of Konstanz, and the Institute of German Studies and the Forum Scientairum at the Univesity of Tubingen.

What is the status of the claims which make up Kant’s arguments in the Critique of Pure Reason? This question seemed to Kant’s contemporaries to require a metacritique. Strawson’s criticisms of Kant should be understood in this context: as raising a metacritical challenge about Kant’s grounds for the claims which make up his arguments. What about the claims which make up Strawson’s own arguments in The Bounds of Sense? I argue in this chapter, against what I take to be the (...) general consensus, that Strawson did not and should not have understood these claims to be analytic. Rather he is somewhat puzzlingly committed to our possessing non-analytic but still a priori knowledge of his claims. What could such knowledge consist in? I’ll extract from G.E. Moore’s early writings on Kant a model for understanding such knowledge, one which enables us to better appreciate the way in which Strawson’s methodology dovetails with Kant’s own. (shrink)

In the first part of this chapter, I summarise some of the issues in the philosophy of mind which are addressed in Kant’s Critical writings. In the second part, I chart some of the ways in which that discussion influenced twentieth-century analytic philosophy of mind and identify some of the themes which characterise Kantian approaches in the philosophy of mind.

A recent report by Persaud et al. [Persaud, N., McLeod, P. & Cowey, A. . Post-decision wagering objectively measures awareness. Nature Neuroscience 10, 257–261] addresses a fundamental issue in consciousness science: the experimental measurement of conscious content. The authors propose a novel technique, ‘post-decision wagering’, in which subjects place bets on the correctness of decisions or discriminations. In this note, I critique the authors’ claim that their method “measures awareness directly”.

The metacognitive stance of Smith et al. risks ignoring sensory consciousness. Although Smith et al. rightly caution against the tendency to preserve the uniqueness of the human mind at all costs, their reasoned stance is undermined by a selective association of consciousness with high-level cognitive operations. Neurobiological evidence may offer a more general, and hence more inclusive, basis for the systematic study of animal consciousness.

A development project introduces various changes into a community. Some of these changes are positive while others are negative or warrant better planning. Evaluation reports designed strictly for quantitative, targetoriented physical and fiscal achievements often overlook many of these changes. Our personal field observations and experiences with an agricultural development project showed us several examples of impacts brought about in the local farming system in some hill districts of Nepal. These impacts cannot be neglected and project evaluation and progress reports (...) should accommodate such changes. (shrink)

Some criticisms are offered of Barwise and Etchemendy's theory of truth, the principal one being that it violates a feature of truth called “supervenience”.

‘How, then, she had asked herself, did one know one thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were?’ So asks Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse. It is this question, rather than any concern about pretence or deception, which forms the basis for the philosophical problem of other minds. Responses to this problem have tended to cluster around two solutions: either we know others’ minds through perception; or we know others’ minds through a form of inference. In the (...) first part of this paper I argue that this debate is best understood as concerning the question of whether our knowledge of others’ minds is based on perception or based on evidence. In the second part of the paper I suggest that our ordinary ways of thinking take our knowledge of others’ minds to be both non- evidential and non-perceptual. A satisfactory resolution to the philosophical problem of other minds thus requires us to take seriously the idea that we have a way of knowing about others’ minds which is both non-evidential and non-perceptual. I suggest that our knowledge of others’ minds which is based on their expressions – our expressive knowledge - may fit this bill. (shrink)