In people with chronic low back pain, maladaptive structural and functional changes on a cortical level have been identified. On a functional level, somatosensory cortical excitability has been shown to be reduced in chronic pain conditions, resulting in cortical disinhibition. The occurrence of structural and/or functional maladaptive cortical changes in people with CLBP could play a role in maintaining the pain. There is currently no measurement protocol for cortical excitability that employs stimulation directly to the lower back. We developed a (...) protocol for the measurement of single pulse somatosensory evoked potential waveforms and paired-pulse behavior generated from sensory nerves of the lower back and quantified its test–retest reliability in a sample of 30 healthy individuals to gain insights into the normal variability of cortical responses, which could then be compared to results from people with CLBP. We investigated cortical excitability by measuring SEPs and PPB. PPB was defined as the ratio of the amplitude of the second cortical response divided by the first cortical response. A2s was determined by subtracting the response to single-pulse stimuli from the paired pulse stimuli response to account for linear superposition effects. The test–retest reliability of the protocol was very poor with no evidence of systematic bias but a high amount of random variability between sessions. There was no significant difference in the right side PPB for session 1 and session 2 ; mean session difference [ = −0.44 ; t = −1.17, p = 0.26]. The ICC3.1 for the outlier-removed right side PPB were 0.19 and 0.43 for left side PPB. This finding potentially has wider implications for PPB protocols. If these findings were replicated in other groups and other nerves, it would question the validity of this measure more generally. However, these findings are restricted to healthy people and sensory nerves of the lower back and may not be generalizable. (shrink)

This is a rich, impressive, and important work in philosophical anthropology. It is rich and impressive in view of the wide range of literature upon which the author draws, and the interdisciplinary competencies which he exhibits. It is important because of the central issue which the work focuses on and analyzes from its interdisciplinary perspective.

In 1856, the State of Ohio began an enumeration of its population to count and identify people with disabilities. This paper examines the ethical role of the accounting profession in this project, which supported the transatlantic eugenics movement and its genocidal attempts to eliminate disabled persons from the population. We use a theoretical approach based on Levinas who argued that the self is generated through engagement with the Other, and that this engagement presupposes a responsibility to and for the Other. (...) We show that successive waves of legislation relied on State and County auditors along with Township clerks and assessors to conduct the mechanics of the enumeration of the population, which focused on the identification, categorization, and counting of the disabled people of the State. We argue that the accounting-based technologies of enumeration and reporting objectify the enumerated persons and deny the auditor’s pre-existing ethical obligation to this new Other. We show how the financial expertise and structures of the State were engaged in the execution of this mandate, which remained in place for over a century and supported a program of institutionalization. We consider the ramifications of this for our understanding of the ethical role of public sector accounting in the United States over this period, which has been under-explored. (shrink)

One of the most potent arguments against physician‐assisted death hinges on the worry that people with disabilities will be subtly coerced to accept death prematurely. The argument is flawed. There is nothing new in PAD: the risk of coercion is already present in current policies about end of life care. And to hold that any such risk is too much is tacitly to endorse vitalism and to deny that people with disabilities are capable of choosing authentically.

That freedom involves a power to choose is a natural idea. But it requires a model of man which English philosophers have usually rejected. It requires an agent equipped with a will, who is faced with genuine alternatives and is, in some sense, autonomous. So it is rejected both by those, like Hobbes, who hold a strong version of determinism and by those, like Hume, who deny the existence of an autonomous self. The will, says Hobbes, is simply ‘the last (...) appetite in deliberating’. A mind, says Hume, is ‘nothing but a heap or collection of different perceptions, united together by certain relations’. The way is then apparently open for a denial that men ever act freely at all and so for a thoroughly deterministic basis for the social sciences. But this is not the usual conclusion. Hobbes and Hume both agree that there is no conflict between freedom and determinism, once ‘freeedom’ is properly understood. A man is free when he can get what he wants. As Hobbes puts it, ‘liberty is the absence of all impediments to action which are not contained in the nature and intrinsical quality of the agent’. In other words freedom does not involve choice but consists instead in the power to satisfy desire. (shrink)

In response to a recent argument by David Bloor, I argue that denying absolutes does not necessarily lead to relativism, that one can be a fallibilist without being a relativist. At issue are the empirical natural sciences and what might be called “framework relativism”, that is, the idea that there is always a conceptual scheme or set of practices in use, and all observations are theory-laden relative to the framework. My strategy is to look at the elements that define a (...) relativist stance and show where the pragmatic fallibilist disagrees. Defending the pragmatic notion of experience will be central, given that relativists reject the idea that experience can play a role in objectively justifying belief. We can reject all absolutes and start from the premise that everything is historical, contingent, and situated. One of the lessons of pragmatism is that universal and fixed principles are not necessary for objective knowledge. (shrink)

One of the worst aspects of racism is the damage inflicted on the human person by evoking feelings of separateness and inferiority. In his Letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King meant to capture that impact by referring to a “degenerating sense of nobodiness.” This essay invokes King’s reference to “nobodiness” and connects it explicitly with the negative effects on three particular elements of the human person. Those are having a unique and expressive voice, living a narrative life, and (...) being a Thou. Each is part of a distinctive, unrepeatable personhood. Racism, however, with its categorizing and generalizing tendencies, denies the recognition of those attributes and thereby accords a status of “nobody” to the victim. His or her point of view, personal story, and capacity to stand with integrity as a Thou are set aside. Rendered a “nobody” by racism, his or her personhood has been denied. (shrink)

This chapter begins with an examination of Dretske's important article “Conclusive Reasons.” Dretske's key move is to offer a subjunctive analysis of his notion of a conclusive reason: “R is a conclusive reason for P if and only if R would not be the case unless P were the case.” It seems, however, that a counterexample produced by Martin shows that while this biconditional holds left to right, it does not hold right to left. Dretske uses his analysis conclusive (...) reasons to deny the principle of epistemic closure under known implication. He then uses this result in a response to skepticism. Reasons are given for rejecting his argument against epistemic closure. Nozick offers essentially the same subjunctive analysis that Dretske did, wrapped in possible‐world semantics. It is rejected on similar grounds. (shrink)

Annotation. Against the background of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Bradley provides a detailed differentiation between Aristotle's and Aquinas's view on moral principles and the end of man.

Professor Martin of the University of Rhode Island in this trenchant lecture to the Aristotelian Society of Marquette University summarily diagnoses the present ill–health of philosophy ‘as an academic subject’ in the United States and Europe and insists as a first principle of proper therapy upon the sharp distinction of metaphysics and ideology, that form of anti–philosophy pervasive to–day. Metaphysics traditionally claims to possess rational and objective knowledge of reality as such and thus to be able to define itself (...) and other philosophic sciences. Ideologies commonly deny this absolute claim and their ambiguous ‘quest for reality’, relevant only for human practice, is classically defined by Karl Mannheim as ‘ “an instrument for dealing with life–situations” ’. For preserving health Professor Martin demands that a choice between them be made, in his pungent criticism of Mr. H. D. Aiken’s recent evaluation of metaphysical answers. (shrink)

J Martin Stafford; A Rejoinder to Professor Edgley, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 15, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 171–174, https://doi.org/10.1111/.

“Man is a great miracle”. Nowadays, a student who happens to have studied nothing more than a smattering of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s philosophical writings might only remember this one line from the introduction of Pico’s most famous Oration, which Pico originally conceived as an introductory oration to a public disputation over his 900 Conclusions—that is, the 900 Conclusions primarily about philosophy, theology, and magic that he brazenly wished to debate in Rome in 1486, which earned him an excommunication. If (...) pressed by an instructor during an exam to explain what Pico means by this great miracle, a student might quote from a passage shortly... (shrink)

In the ten dense chapters of his new book, John Finnis examines and sometimes amends what he takes to be the key moral, legal, social and political doctrines of Thomas Aquinas. Finnis correctly stresses that neither ethics nor politics, in the Arstotelian tradition to which Aquinas belonged, are theoretical sciences. They are ‘practical’ or action‐guiding sciences. Since societal order originates in free choice, it is subject to moral norms. The latter are more firmly grounded by Aquinas than Aristotle because the (...) former unlike the latter has an explicit and coherent account of universal or exceptionless moral principles.Finnis natural law ethics derives from a set of self‐evident precepts that focus practical reason on the pursuit and protection of basic human goods. Finnis expanding list of the latter now include marriage. Finnis equates – implausibly, in my view – attaining the ensemble of basic human goods with Aquina's notion of beatitudo imperfecta or this‐worldly happiness.Throughout the book, Finnis' exegesis of Aquinas is slanted towards bolstering Finnis' own Thomist philosophical ethics. Accordingly, Thomistic historical scholarship, which carefully traced Aquinas' biblical and patristic sources and which locate Aquinas' theological ethics within the conditions of his own life and times, has little weight in Finnis' interpretation. Overall, Finnis shows little concern for the internal logic of the Summa theologiae and, consequently, he does not adequately clarify how Aquinas' own ethics, according to its proper principles, can be both integrally theological and rational without thereby becoming a philosophical ethics. (shrink)

In 1484, humanist philosopher and theologian Marsilio Ficino published the first complete Latin translation of Plato's extant works. Students of Plato now had access to the entire range of the dialogues, which revealed to Renaissance audiences the rich ancient landscape of myths, allegories, philosophical arguments, etymologies, fragments of poetry, other works of philosophy, aspects of ancient pagan religious practices, concepts of mathematics and natural philosophy, and the dialogic nature of the Platonic corpus's interlocutors. By and large, Renaissance readers in the (...) Latin West encountered Plato's text through Ficino's translations and interpretation. -/- In Plato's Persona, Denis J.-J. Robichaud provides the first synthetic study of Ficino's interpretation of the Platonic corpus. Robichaud analyzes Plato's works in their original Greek and in Ficino's Latin translations, as well as Ficino's non-Platonic writings and correspondence, in the process uncovering new aspects of Ficino's intellectual work habits. In his letters and works, Ficino self-consciously imitated a Platonic style of prose, in effect devising a persona for himself as a Platonic philosopher. Plato's dialogues are populated with a wealth of literary characters with whom Plato interacts and against whom Plato refines his own philosophies. Reading through Ficino's translations, Robichaud finds that the Renaissance philosopher seeks an understanding of Plato's persona(e) among all the dialogues' interlocutors. In effect, Ficino assumed the role of Plato's Latin spokesperson in the Renaissance. -/- Plato's Persona is grounded in an extensive study of scholarship in Renaissance humanism, classics, philosophy, and intellectual history, and contextualizes Ficino's intellectual achievements within the contemporary Christian orthodox view of Platonism. Ficino was an influential figure in the early Italian Renaissance: the key intermediary between Greek and Latin, and between manuscript and print, giving voice to Plato and access to the ancient frameworks needed to interpret his dialogues. (shrink)

Were there atheists and was there atheism in the Renaissance and the Reformation? There are no clear records for self-professed atheists at the twilight of the period, yet it is largely at that time that the semantic field of atheism began to be assembled and articulated. In one way or another various strategies have been adopted to study the history of atheism and atheists in order to negotiate the lack of evidence of self-professed atheists. Some scholars categorically deny the existence (...) of atheists beyond the level of accusations, while others point to esoteric atheists. Some look for more visible evidence by studying atheism as a product of modern secularism, others by studying the history of theism. The essay offers an overview of the major scholarly approaches of those who have sought to answer this historical question, and presents a concluding case study of the humanist and philosopher Marsilio Ficino’s engagement with atheism. (shrink)

We address the way verb-based and rule-content knowledge are combined in understanding institutional deontics. Study 1 showed that the institutional regulations used in our studies were readily categorised into one of two content groups: rights or duties. Participants perceived rights as benefiting the addressees identified by the rule, whereas they perceived duties as benefiting the collective that imposed the rule. Studies 2, 3, and 4 showed that rule content had clear effects on perceptions of violations and relevance of cases for (...) explaining the rule, even when controlling for deontic verb, phrasing of the action permitted by a right, or the formality of the deontic verb. These effects are incompatible with a simple pragmatic disambiguation approach to pragmatic modulation, as they often induce permissibility judgments that contradict the core semantic meanings of the deontic verbs. Other ways of reconciling verb meaning with rule content should be considered in a fuller the.. (shrink)

This work extend to residuated lattices the results of [7]. It also provides a possible generalization to this context of frontal operators in the sense of [9].Let L be a residuated lattice, and f : Lk → L a function. We give a necessary and sufficient condition for f to be compatible with respect to every congruence on L. We use this characterization of compatible functions in order to prove that the variety of residuated lattices is locally affine complete.We study (...) some compatible functions on residuated lattices which are a generalization of frontal operators. We also give conditions for two operations P(x, y) and Q(x, y) on a residuated lattice L which imply that the function \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${x \mapsto min\{y \in L : P(x, y) \leq Q(x, y)\}}$$\end{document} when defined, is equational and compatible. Finally we discuss the affine completeness of residuated lattices equipped with some additional operators. (shrink)