The thought of the ancient atomists about the activity of the soul in the body is an important chapter in the history of reflection on the soul in ancient philosophy. A review of testimonies and fragments attributed to Democritus of Abdera shows its singular conception of the soul as a complex network of transactions through which it exercises, inside compound bodies, its role in driving principle of beings animated. These texts show the tension and dynamism that characterize the activity of (...) the soul and especially the close relationship between the activities of perceiving and thinking, essential activities to the economy of living beings, now for what is the management of biological life, now in terms of knowledge and human action. What we propose here is to examine how Democritus conceived the activity of the soul in its complexity and the various operations through which it accomplishes its function in the animation and the maintenance of life of animate beings, and particularly of human life. To do this, we will take as a basis the testimonies referred to the nature of the soul – especially the testimony of Aristotle and his disciples and commentators – and then examine the activities through which proceeds its role of motor principle, namely the sensations and the intellection. And, finally, we intend to demonstrate that these operations should not be considered, in the context of atomist thought, as two independent and opposed faculties or activities, but as two different levels or degree, contiguous and complementary, of one and the same activity. (shrink)

« La mesure est le plus grand des biens » et « rien de trop » apparaissent dans les sentences attribuées aux Sept Sages de l’Antiquité Grecque. Elles font état d’une sagesse qui blâme l’excès et invite à la modération. Les échos de ces propos résonnent dans différentes périodes de l’Antiquité et chez des auteurs appartenant aux traditions les plus variées, parmi lesquels se trouve notamment Démocrite. Nombreux sont en effet les fragments qui attestent de sa condamnation des excès, de (...) sa réflexion critique sur les richesses et de son éloge de la modération et de l’équilibre entendus comme conditions du bien-être et de l’action bonne. « La juste proportion est belle en toutes choses » (DK 68 B 102), proclame le philosophe. Cette juste proportion est érigée en condition pour atteindre la « bonne humeur » ( euthymiê ) et le « bien-être » ( euestô ). La réflexion de Démocrite se fonde sur une sorte de principe économique qui s’exprime par la notion de « mesure » ( metriotês ). La capacité à être modéré est aussi le signe distinctif de l’être humain bien accompli (DK 68 B 70), et s’oppose aux différentes formes de l’avidité. Lorsque l’on examine les fragments qui traitent de ce sujet, l’on constate que le philosophe a dressé un inventaire qui prend en compte les domaines les plus divers de la vie. Il est en effet question de la mesure aussi bien dans le cadre des affections comme le plaisir et le désir, que dans celui de la satisfaction de nos besoins élémentaires. Il en est également question pour ce qui est de notre attitude à l’égard des biens matériels et des richesses. Dans cet article nous avons choisi de faire porter l’attention sur la réflexion du philosophe sur les richesses et les biens matériels, en prenant tout particulièrement en compte sa mise en cause du désir dans l’économie de la vie humaine. Classification JEL : B1. (shrink)

This book collects texts from three specialists in ancient philosophy which deal with the question of perceptive and intellective knowledge in antiquity. They try to present, in their different analyzes, the complex interrelationship among perception and thought in ancient authors, like Heraclitus, Parmenides, Democritus, Plato and Aristotle. The purpose of the texts is to expose the visible field - the perceptual knowledge domain - interacts with the invisible - the domain of reason and thought. In other words, that among them (...) there is no a radical separation of these two areas, although they are clearly distinct. (shrink)

. The uniform prior distribution is often seen as a mathematical description of noninformativeness. This paper uses the well-known Three Prisoners Paradox to examine the impossibility of maintaining noninformativeness throughout hierarchization. The Paradox has been solved by Bayesian conditioning over the choice made by the Warder when asked to name a prisoner who will be shot. We generalize the paradox to situations of N prisoners, k executions and m announcements made by the Warder. We then extend the consequences of hierarchically (...) placing uniform and symmetrical priors for the probability p of the Warder naming Prisoner B, say. We prove that breaks of indifference and neutrality caused by assignment of uniform and symmetrical priors in lieu of degenerate indifference probabilities hold in general. Speaking of unknown probabilities or of probability of a probability must be forbidden as meaningless. Bruno de Finetti, 1977 I regard the use of hierarchical chains as a technique helping you to sharpen your subjective probabilities. I. J. Good, 1981. (shrink)

There is a clear tendency in contemporary political/legal thought to limit agency to individual agents, thereby denying the existence and relevance of collective moral agency in general, and corporate agency in particular. This tendency is ultimately rooted in two particular forms of individualism – methodological and fictive (abstract) – which have their source in the Enlightenment. Furthermore, the dominant notion of moral agency owes a lot to Kant whose moral/legal philosophy is grounded exclusively on abstract reason and personal autonomy, to (...) the detriment of a due recognition of the socio-historical grounds of moral social conduct.I shall argue that an adequate theory of responsibility is needed, which does not only take into account individual responsibility, but also collective and corporate responsibility, capable of taking into consideration society and its problems. Furthermore, corporations are consciously and carefully structured organisations with different levels of management and have clearly defined aims and objectives, a central feature upon which I shall be focussing in this paper. (shrink)

In their simplest form, hybrid languages are propositional modal languages which can refer to states. They were introduced by Arthur Prior, the inventor of tense logic, and played an important role in his work: because they make reference to specific times possible, they remove the most serious obstacle to developing modal approaches to temporal representation and reasoning. However very little is known about the computational complexity of hybrid temporal logics.In this paper we analyze the complexity of the satisfiability problem of (...) a number of hybrid temporal logics: the basic hybrid language over transitive trees; nominal Until logic; and referential interval logic. We discuss the effects of including nominals, the @ operator, the somewhere modality E, and the difference operator D. Adding nominals to tense logic leads for several frame-classes to an increase in complexity of the satisfiability problem from PSPACE to EXPTIME. On transitive trees, however, the satisfiability problem for this language can be decided in PSPACE. Along the way we make a detour through hybrid propositional dynamic logic: we establish upper bounds for a number of temporal logics by generalizing results due to Passy and Tinchev [29] and De Giacomo [16]. We conclude with some remarks on the relevance of our results to description logic, and draw attention to the utility of the spypoint technique for proving upper and lower bounds. (shrink)

The abstract description of a physical system is developed, along lines originally suggested by Birkhoff and von Neumann, in terms of the complete lattice of propositions associated with that system, and the distinction between classical and quantum systems is made precise. With the help of the notion of state, a propositional system is defined: it is remarked that every irreducible propositional system (of more than three dimensions) is isomorphic to the lattice of all closed subspaces of a Hilbert space constructed (...) on some division ring with involution. The propositional system consisting of a family of separable complex Hilbert spaces is treated as a particular case which is sufficiently general to include both classical and quantum mechanics. The theory of the Galilean particle without spin is given as an illustration. Finally, the basis for the statistical interpretation of wave mechanics is developed with the help of Gleason's theorem. In an appendix, a proof of essentially the first part of Gleason's theorem is given which is a little different (perhaps more geometric) from that originally given by Gleason. (shrink)

In his own writings, Rawls purposively used only a loose characterization of the basic structure, but two prominent misinterpretations highlight the current need for a more detailed account. First, G.A. Cohen argues that the Rawlsian focus on the basic structure is arbitrary due to the Rawlsian appeal to profound effects. Second, some theorists conflate the justification of coercion with the assessment of a basic structure by defining the basic structure as the coercive structure. Both misinterpretations can be corrected by carefully (...) specifying what social institutions are and explaining which social institutions come together to form the basic structure of society. (shrink)

A defining characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease is difficulty in retrieving semantic memories, or memories encoding facts and knowledge. While it has been suggested that this impairment is caused by a degradation of the semantic store, the precise ways in which the semantic store is degraded are not well understood. Using a longitudinal corpus of semantic fluency data, we derive semantic network representations of patients with Alzheimer’s disease and of healthy controls. We contrast our network-based approach with analyzing fluency data with (...) the standard method of counting the total number of items and perseverations in fluency data. We find that the networks of Alzheimer’s patients are more connected and that those connections are more randomly distributed than the connections in networks of healthy individuals. These results suggest that the semantic memory impairment of Alzheimer’s patients can be modeled through the inclusion of spurious associations between unrelated concepts in the semantic store. We also find that information from our network analysis of fluency data improves prediction of patient diagnosis compared to traditional measures of the semantic fluency task. (shrink)

The academic literature in research ethics has been marked in the past decade by a much broader focus on the need for the protection of developing communities subjected to international clinical trials. Because of the proximity of the revision of the Declaration of Helsinki, completed in October 2008, most papers have addressed the issue of a double standard of care following the use of placebo. However, other no less important issues, such as interactions between the lifestyles structures of low-income communities (...) and the efficiency of risk-minimising procedures also deserve attention. The purpose of this paper is to discuss forms of uncertainty involved in clinical trials in poor and low-income countries that are not addressed by conventional methods of risk assessment. Furthermore, the increase in size of risks that are identified by conventional assessment methods will be addressed. Besides, the difficulty in properly applying risk-minimising procedures will be discussed. Finally, this paper proposes the involvement of research ethics committees in the risk evaluation process and the establishment of national ethics evaluation systems. (shrink)

We re-express a previous general result in a way which seems easier to remember, using the terminology of infinite games. We show how this can be applied to construct recursive linear orderings, showing, for example, that if there is a ▵ 0 2β + 1 linear ordering of type τ, then there is a recursive ordering of type ω β · τ.

We extend results of Harizanov and Barker. For a relation R on a recursive structure /oA, we give conditions guaranteeing that the image of R in a recursive copy of /oA can be made to have arbitrary ∑α0 degree over Δα0. We give stronger conditions under which the image of R can be made ∑α0 degree as well. The degrees over Δα0 can be replaced by certain more general classes. We also generalize the Friedberg-Muchnik Theorem, giving conditions on a pair (...) of relations R and S under which the images of R and S can be made ∑α0 and independent over Δα0 in a recursive copy of /oA. (shrink)

Yvonne C. Zimmerman offers a groundbreaking exploration of the relationship between freedom and sexual regulation in American approaches to human trafficking.

Chalmers' (2018) meta-problem of consciousness emphasizes unexpected common ground between otherwise incompatible positions. We argue that the materialist should welcome discussion of the meta-problem. We suggest that the core of the metaproblem is the seeming arbitrariness of subjective experience. This has an unexpected resolution when one moves to an interventionist account of scientific explanation: the same interventions that resolve the hard problem should also resolve the meta-problem.

In the majority of academic institutions nursing and medical students receive a traditional education, the content of which tends to be specific to their future roles as health care professionals. In essence, each curriculum design is independent of each course. Over the last decade, however, interest has been accumulating in relation to interprofessional and multiprofessional learning at student level. With the view that learning together during their student training would not only encourage and strengthen future collaboration in practice settings but (...) also enhance patient care, the University of Dundee decided to run a pilot study to explore shared teaching in ethics between medical and nursing students. This article presents a report on the reasons for selecting health care ethics as a precursor for shared teaching, the educational tool used for the sessions, and the results of student and facilitator evaluation of the short course. Overall, despite problems such as poor attendance by some students, and facilitation and timetable difficulties, most of the feedback from students and facilitators has been positive. In essence the ‘idea’ has gone from strength to strength and there are now three levels of shared teaching in ethics between nursing and medical students, with plans to include further sessions with students from other disciplines. Within the text, ‘health care ethics’ will be referred to as ‘ethics’; nursing students/nurses encompasses midwifery students/midwives. (shrink)

Any theory of information needs to comply with what we call the implementation, formalization, and representation constraints. These constraints are justified by basic considerations concerning scientific modelling and methodology. In the first part of this paper, we argue that the implementation and formalization constraints cannot be satisfied because the relation between Shannon information and IIT must be clarified. In the second part of the paper, we focus on the representation constraint. We argue that IIT cannot succeed in satisfying this constraint (...) for semantic contents without offering models for concepts, conceptual roles, and context sensitivity. In the final part of the paper, further complications are raised with respect to the distinction between consciousness and attention, which apply more specifically to the representation constraint. We conclude with some recommendations as to how IIT may succeed in solving these problems, highlighting the advantages and enormous potential of IIT as a scientific theory. (shrink)

Book Information Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy. Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy Bernard Williams , Princeton : Princeton University Press , 2002 , 328 , US$27.95 ( cloth ) By Bernard Williams. Princeton University Press. Princeton. Pp. 328. US$27.95 (cloth:).

The Holocaust marks a decisive moment in modern suffering in which it becomes almost impossible to find meaning or redemption in the experience. In this study, C. Fred Alford offers a new and thoughtful examination of the experience of suffering. Moving from the Book of Job, an account of meaningful suffering in a God-drenched world, to the work of Primo Levi, who attempted to find meaning in the Holocaust through absolute clarity of insight, he concludes that neither strategy works well (...) in today's world. More effective are the day-to-day coping practices of some survivors. Drawing on testimonies of survivors from the Fortunoff Video Archives, Alford also applies the work of Julia Kristeva and the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicot to his examination of a topic that has been and continues to be central to human experience. (shrink)

In 163 Galen gave an anatomy lesson in Rome before an audience that included ‘Demetrius of Alexandria, a friend of Favorinus, who was every day speakingin public on themes proposed to him, in the style and manner of Favorinus’.

We discuss the concepts of Weyl and Riemann frames in the context of metric theories of gravity and state the fact that they are completely equivalent as far as geodesic motion is concerned. We apply this result to conformally flat spacetimes and show that a new picture arises when a Riemannian spacetime is taken by means of geometrical gauge transformations into a Minkowskian flat spacetime. We find out that in the Weyl frame gravity is described by a scalar field. We (...) give some examples of how conformally flat spacetime configurations look when viewed from the standpoint of a Weyl frame. We show that in the non-relativistic and weak field regime the Weyl scalar field may be identified with the Newtonian gravitational potential. We suggest an equation for the scalar field by varying the Einstein-Hilbert action restricted to the class of conformally-flat spacetimes. We revisit Einstein and Fokker’s interpretation of Nordström scalar gravity theory and draw an analogy between this approach and the Weyl gauge formalism. We briefly take a look at two-dimensional gravity as viewed in the Weyl frame and address the question of quantizing a conformally flat spacetime by going to the Weyl frame. (shrink)

We extend the work of Ivancovsky et al. by proposing that in addition to novelty seeking, mood regulation goals – including enhancing positive mood and repairing negative mood – motivate both creativity and curiosity. Additionally, we discuss how the effects of mood on state of mind are context-dependent (not fixed), and how such flexibility may impact creativity and curiosity.

Bizarre delusions are not specific to schizophrenia and can be found in other psychotic disorders. However, to date, there are no studies investigating socio-demographic and clinical characteristics associated with BizD across the psychosis spectrum. In this study 819 subjects with a diagnosis of SZ, schizoaffective disorder and bipolar I disorder were included. Patients with history of BizD and with no BizD were compared with respect to socidemographic and clinical variables, and predictors of BizD were explored. Patients with BizD were less (...) educated, less likely to be married, had higher Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale negative scores and lower Young Mania Rating Scale scores. Younger age, SZ and SZA diagnoses, higher PANSS positive scores, presence of reference delusions, tactile and olfactory hallucinations were predictors. Our results indicate that BizD are associated with higher illness severity, lower functionality and specific set of symptoms. (shrink)

Explores the people and ideas that contributed to the formation of the 19th-century philosophico-religious movement known as New Thought, a movement dedicated in large measure to the remedying of illness through nonphysical means. Originally presented as the author's doctora thesis (Boston U., 1962) under the title Horatio W. Dresser and the Philosophy of New Thought. Supplementary bibliographical notes and an addendum outlining the author's further thoughts accompany this presentation. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

I present three problems regarding the Problem of the Base. They concern the nature of information, the kind of Platonism that physicalists allegedly confront, and the constraints imposed by causal principles. These problems focus on the notion of information and its relation to the Problem of the Base. I also highlight the importance of Schneider's paper, particularly its relevance for future debates.