Prefrontal cerebral areas project to Purkinje cells, located in the most lateral part of the cerebellum, via mossy and climbing fibers. The latter olivary error signals reflect the attentional load of the prefrontal cortex. At the cerebral level, LTP-LTD plasticity allows these Purkinje cells to adaptively reinforce the active pyramidal cells involved in the motor sequence.

Pierson et al. (2024) surveyed 824 U.S. bioethicists on a wide range of ethical issues, including topics related to abortion, medical aid in dying, and resource allocation, among others. They conte...

The reality of the thinking subject -- The paralogisms and transcendental idealism -- The first paralogism -- The second paralogism -- Transcendental self-consciousness -- Other interpretations of the paralogisms -- Empirical apperception -- Pure apperception -- The person as subject -- Apperception and inner sense -- The third paralogism and Kant's conception of a person -- The embodied subject -- The fourth paralogism.

The research project described in this report represents one of the most extensive studies of character education ever undertaken, including over 10,000 students and 255 teachers in schools across England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. Research techniques consisted of a mixture of surveys, moral dilemmas and semi-structured interviews. This report explores: - The current situation in character education, both in the UK and internationally - How developed British students are with respect to moral character and the extent to which they (...) are able to understand and apply moral virtues, especially those aged 14 and 15 - How teachers in the UK understand their role in terms of students’ moral and character development - What helps or hinders the development of children’s characters according to teachers in UK schools. (shrink)

Cannabis use in some individuals can meaningfully introduce de novo risk for the initiation of opioid use and development of opioid use disorder. These risks may be particularly high during adolescence when cannabis use may disrupt critical periods of neurodevelopment. Current research studying the combination of genetic and environmental factors involved in substance use disorders is poorly understood. More research is needed, particularly to identify which adolescents are most at risk and to develop effective interventions addressing contributing factors such as (...) trauma and psychiatric comorbidity. (shrink)

Is addiction a behavioral pattern, or the underlying cause of a behavioral pattern? Both views are found in prominent accounts of addiction, but theorists generally do not notice that they are taking a controversial position, let alone justify it. A third possibility is that addiction consists in both addictive behavior and its causes, though this view is less obviously present in the literature. I argue that two important considerations favor the "cause view" over the "behavior" and "hybrid" views. The first (...) is that we want to be able to explain addictive behavior with reference to addiction. The second is that addiction seems to persist long after addictive behavior has ceased. Only the cause view can easily accommodate both data points. (shrink)

There is a growing consensus in Britain on the importance of character, and on the belief that the virtues that contribute to good character are part of the solution to many of the challenges facing modern society. Parents, teachers and schools understand the need to teach basic moral virtues to pupils, such as honesty, self-control, fairness, and respect, while fostering behaviour associated with such virtues today. However, until recently, the materials required to help deliver this ambition have been missing in (...) Britain. The Knightly Virtues Programme, devised by the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, aims to help solve this challenge. The programme, designed for 9 to 11 year olds, draws on selected classic stories to help teach moral character in schools. This approach has proved to be popular with children and teachers, with more than 5,000 pupils from one hundred schools having participated in the programme so far. Fifty-five of these schools and 3,272 pupils were directly involved in different stages of the research. Based at the University of Birmingham, the Jubilee Centre houses leading academics dedicated to researching the various ways in which good character, which underpins the building blocks of society, can be developed. Recent research from the Centre has shown that the qualities that make up character can be learnt and taught, and suggests that we need a new emphasis on their importance in schools and in professional education. This report from the Centre into the use of classic literature within schools sets out the ways in which the Knightly Virtues Programme is able to develop the virtue literacy of school pupils, and the extent to which an understanding and awareness of good moral character can make positive changes to behaviour. The impact of the programme has been tested using several rigorous research methods, detailed in this report alongside their findings, which provide substantial empirical evidence for the effectiveness of using stories to develop virtue literacy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Volume XXIV, Number 1, April 1998, pp. 53-70 Hume on Justice to Animals, Indians and Women ARTHUR KUFLIK I. The Circumstances of Humean Justice For Hume, the virtue of justice is its "usefulness" to the support of society.1 To help prove this point, he guides us through a series of imaginative thought-experiments. Suppose that resources were infinitely available or that human beings were generous and kind (...) without limit: in such unusual circumstances, nobody would have even "dreamed of" the various property restrictions associated with justice. If the supposition seems too fanciful, the same point can be illustrated, at least to some extent, by special real-life circumstances as well: e.g., by the way that air or water or land go unregulated in those places where they are super-abundant or the way in which the line between what is "mine" and "thine" blurs in loving families or between intimate friends. Moving to the opposite extreme: suppose that resources were so scarce as to render it impossible for most people (regardless of their cooperative exertions) even to subsist. Or suppose that people were not merely limited in their benevolent concern but "perfectly malicious"! Once again, there would be little or no point to the observance of rules of justice. On Hume's account, such rules define a scheme of social cooperation. But by hypothesis, extreme scarcity makes even well-meaning cooperative effort unproductive. Extreme villainy makes it pointlessly dangerous. Indeed, in a world wholly villainous, just cooperative schemes would be altogether impossible. Arthur Kuflik is at the Department of Philosophy, The University of Vermont, 70 South Williams Street, Burlington, Vermont 05401-3404 USA. email: [email protected] 54 Arthur Kuflik What can we conclude? There is a range of circumstances within which schemes of justice make sense: (1) moderate scarcity (resources are adequate to sustain people, but not so extensive that everyone could have as much as might be desired); and (2) limited benevolence (people are neither saintly nor satanic; though clearly concerned about themselves, they are not incapable of caring about what happens to others). John Rawls has dubbed these conditions "the Humean circumstances of justice."2 Hume wants us to notice that they are the very conditions under which justice is both practically possible and socially necessary. Fortunately, they are also the conditions that most commonly prevail. ("The common situation of society is a medium amidst all these extremes" [EPM 188].) II. A More Puzzling Thought-experiment Suppose we grant that the foundation of justice is its usefulness to society. This raises a certain worry: aren't there groups whose members ought to be treated justly even though "society" could flourish just as well if they weren't? (Another way to put the point is to ask: just who are the members of "society"?) This very issue underlies one more puzzling, and even disturbing, Humean thought-experiment: Were there a species of creatures intermingled with men, which, though rational, were possessed of such inferior strength, both of body and mind, that they were incapable of all resistance, and could never, upon the highest provocation, make us feel the effects of their resentment; the necessary consequence, I think, is that we should be bound by the laws of humanity to give gentle usage to these creatures, but should not, properly speaking, lie under any restraint of justice with regard to them, nor could they possess any right or property, exclusive of such arbitrary lords. Our intercourse with them could not be called society, which supposes a degree of equality; but absolute command on one side, and servile obedience on the other.... And as no inconvenience ever results from the exercise of a power, so firmly established in nature, the restraints of justice and property, being totally useless, would never have place in so unequal a confederacy. (EPM 190-191) What can we learn from this thought-experiment? What insight into justice do we gain by imagining a "species of creatures intermingled" among us who, though endowed with some ability to think and to reason, are: (i) greatly inferior to us both physically and mentally; (ii) "incapable of all resistance" to our provocations; and... (shrink)

(Accepted for an edition of Synthese that never saw light of day, and remained on my website. Written 2005.) Noting the status of the Law of Continuity as one of Leibniz’s most cherished axioms, Bertrand Russell charged that his philosophy nevertheless amounted to “a complete denial of the continuous”. Georg Cantor made a similar accusation of inconsistency about Leibniz’s philosophy of the actual infinite. But I argue that neither doctrine is inconsistent when the subtleties of Leibniz’s syncategorematic interpretation are properly (...) taken into account. Leibniz rejects the existence of infinite wholes: an infinite aggregate of actual things forms only a fictitious whole. Analogously, infinitesimals are only fictitious parts, this time of ideal wholes. That is, just as an actual infinity of terms can be understood syncategorematically as more terms than can be assigned a number, without there being any infinite numbers, so too the infinitely small can be given a syncategorematic interpretation by means of the Law of Continuity, without there existing any actual infinitesimals. By examining Leibniz’s justification of infinitesimals in his calculus, I argue that the syncategorematic interpretation is also applicable to series of changes, and thus exonerates Leibniz from Russell’s criticism: on this interpretation all naturally occurring transitions are continuous in that the difference between neighbouring states is smaller than any assignable. This means not that there exists a least difference, but that for any assignable finite difference, there exists a smaller one. Thus there is a true continuous transition, even though the states themselves and all assignable differences between them are actually discrete. (shrink)

Gottfried Leibniz is well known for his claim to have “rehabilitated” the substantial forms of scholastic philosophy, forging a reconciliation of the New Philosophy of Descartes, Mersenne and Gassendi with Aristotelian metaphysics (in his so-called Discourse on Metaphysics, 1686). Much less celebrated is the fact that fifty years earlier (in his Hypomnemata Physica, 1636) the Bratislavan physician and natural philosopher Daniel Sennert had already argued for the indispensability to atomism of (suitably re-interpreted) Aristotelian forms, in explicit opposition to the rejection (...) of substantial forms by his fellow atomist Sébastien Basson.1.. (shrink)

One of the most puzzling features of Leibniz’s deep metaphysics is the apparent contradiction between his claims that the law of continuity holds everywhere, so that in particular, change is continuous in every monad, and that “changes are not really continuous,” since successive states contradict one another. In this paper I try to show in what sense these claims can be understood as compatible. My analysis depends crucially on Leibniz’s idea that enduring states are “vague,” and abstract away from further (...) changes occurring within them at a higher resolution—consistently with his famous doctrine of "petites perceptions." As Leibniz explains further in a recently transcribed unpublished manuscript, these changes are dense within any actual duration, which is conceived as actually divided by them into states that are syncategorematically infinite in number and unassignably small. The correspondence between these unassignably small intervals between changes and the differentials of his calculus allows processes to be conceived as continuous, despite the discontinuity of the changes that occur in actuality. (shrink)

One observes regulation at every biological level. Organisms, cells, and biochemical processes operate efficiently, normally wasting neither material nor energy, and adjusting their functions to external influences. Nature evidently has evolved mechanisms specifically dedicated to regulation at many levels. What is the molecular basis of this control?In the 1950s these molecular control mechanisms began to be explored seriously. The discoveries of feedback inhibition of enzyme activity were important because they gave an initial example of how regulation is achieved at the (...) molecular level. We showed that certain enzymes are composed of two parts, one for catalysis and another distinct part present only to regulate this catalysis. Catalytic activity can be either stimulated or inhibited when a small molecule in the environment combines with the enzyme's regulatory site. In particular, a final product of a metabolic pathway generates a feedback loop which automatically limits its own excessive production, by combining with the regulatory site of an early enzyme in that pathway. Later studies showed that catalytic and regulatory structures of some enzymes could be separated physically.The discovery of regulatory sites and their interaction with molecules unrelated to their substrates was the basis for the generalized allosteric concept. This concept extends the regulatory site idea to a wide variety of processes such as control of gene expression, hormone action, and cellular growth. (shrink)

The Pajama (Pardee, Jacob, Monod) experiment provided a breakthrough in our understanding of the molecular mechanisms by which gene expression is regulated. Today, twenty‐five years later it provides a paradigm for thinking about problems of gene expression, such as growth regulation and differentiation. From this experiment emerged entities such as repressors, regulatory genes, the operon as a group of jointly controlled genes, and messenger RNA.