The chapters published in this volume developed from presentations, and their associated discussions at a conference organised by the Scottish Branch of the British Psychological Society, held at Rothesay, Isle of Bute, Scotland in September 1987. The goal of the conference was to bring together workers across a wide area of neuropsychological research to discuss recent technological advances, developments in assessment and rehabilitation, and to address theoretical issues of current interest. Thus, the chapters in this book include contributions on the (...) use of Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography in neuropsychological research, studies of hemi spheric specialisation and cooperation, alcoholic and Alzheimer type dementia, prosopagnosia and facial processing, the assessment, management and rehabilitation of memory problems, the assessment of premorbid intellectual status and issues in developmental neuropsychology. Many of those engaged in research and clinical practice in neuropsychology encounter a range of topic at least as wide as this in their professional lives. The opportunity for researchers and clinicians to discuss some of the key issues in the field was invaluable and we hope that readers gain as much from the material presented here as the participants did from the meeting itself. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper investigates influences upon the development of library classification systems in nineteenth-century Britain. Two case studies – Edward Edwards's ‘scheme of classification for a town library’ of 1859 and the Bibliotheca Lindesiana of the earls of Crawford who made a number of significant contributions to the development of library classification over a fifty-year period – are deployed to explore how classification schemes reflected the habituses of their creators and how they were shaped by their socio-economic, epistemological and (...) geographical contexts. The paper also investigates the discourse of classification, examining authors’ claims for the legitimacy, widespread applicability and superiority of their schemes, while revealing how these claims were compromised or modified by practical considerations. The case studies suggest that a modernizing narrative of a transition in the second half of the nineteenth century from an aristocratic, largely rural and amateur paradigm of knowledge formation to a bourgeois, urban and professional model requires significant modification: a more nuanced approach is required, which recognizes the permeability of geographic and social boundaries and the continued relevance of aristocratic libraries as key sites of knowledge formation until the end of the century. (shrink)

Thousands of youth suffering from acquired brain injury or other early-life neurological disease live, mature, and learn with only limited communication and interaction with their world. Such cognitively capable children are ideal candidates for brain-computer interfaces. While BCI systems are rapidly evolving, a fundamental gap exists between technological innovators and the patients and families who stand to benefit. Forays into translating BCI systems to children in recent years have revealed that kids can learn to operate simple BCI with proficiency akin (...) to adults. BCI could bring significant boons to the lives of many children with severe physical impairment, supporting their complex physical and social needs. However, children have been neglected in BCI research and a collaborative BCI research community is required to unite and push pediatric BCI development forward. To this end, the pediatric BCI Canada collaborative network was formed, under a unified goal to cooperatively drive forward pediatric BCI innovation and impact. This article reflects on the topics and discussions raised in the foundational BCI-CAN meeting held in Toronto, ON, Canada in November 2019 and suggests the next steps required to see BCI impact the lives of children with severe neurological disease and their families. (shrink)

The purpose of this essay is to provide the historian with a generic understanding of the term economy by examining some aspects of the work of the Hungarian ?economic historian? Karl Polanyi (1886?1964). It does not seek to explain Polanyi's economic ideas to economists nor does it seek to locate his ideas within the discourses of the academic discipline of economics; there is abundant academic literature which carries out those tasks. This essay is intended to help fill a void in (...) the historical understanding, especially the modern historical understanding, of the term economy, and of how the characteristics associated with it are generally understood. Yet, in reality, it is the neoclassical paradigm of economics which is typically and uncritically taken to be the touchstone for understanding the economy. This circumstance is problematic, however, when referring to the economy of societies earlier than the late nineteenth century or of societies whose culture differs radically from that of the advanced capitalist ?west.? Polanyi's insights may help historians avoid the risk of either distorting or anachronistically misunderstanding the economy of such societies. (shrink)

For several examples of Hermitian operators, the issues involved in their possible self-adjoint extension are shown to conform with recognizable properties in the solutions to the associated classical equations of motion. This result confirms the assertion made in an earlier paper (Ref. 1) that there are sufficient classical “symptoms” to diagnose any quantum “illness.”.

Atheology, accurately defined by Alvin Plantinga, offers reasons why god’s existence is implausible. Skeptically reasoning that theological arguments for god fail to make their case is one way of leaving supernaturalism in an implausible condition. This ‘rationalist’ atheology appeals to logical standards to point out fallacies and other sorts of inferential gaps. Beyond that methodological marker, few shared tactics characterize atheists and agnostics stalking theological targets. If unbelief be grounded on reason, let atheology start from a theological stronghold: the principle (...) of sufficient reason, a cornerstone of rationality. Seven rules, corollaries to that principle, are enough to show how theological arguments for god repeatedly contravene rationality by perpetuating mysteries, contradictions, begging of questions, pseudo-explanations, and the like. None of these complaints are new, nor has theology been unaware of them. Disorganized atheology has, so far, allowed theology to appear to answer them. Five major arguments for god are systematically analyzed and refuted using these seven rules of rationality, as a preliminary exercise illustrating this re-organized and re-focused rationalist atheology. (shrink)

This paper addresses what some view as a progressive and decades-long devaluing of the liberal arts in our educational institutions and society at large. It draws attention to symptoms of this trend and possible contributing factors, identifies benefits commonly attributed to the liberal arts, and then shows how insights from recent research on neuroplasticity provide good reason to believe that a traditional liberal education has positive effects on a person's brain. The paper supports the thesis that well-designed liberal arts courses (...) can literally transform students' minds and lives as a result of unique and synergistic brain processes activated and strengthened by the leaming experiences such courses provide. It finishes with recommendations to help reinvigorate and promote the value of liberal education. (shrink)

This essay is concerned with modern and postmodern theories of the sublime and with a possible theological response to them. The essay first discusses the “modern sublime” and the “postmodern sublime”, and shows how these versions of the sublime terminate in one or the other form of “pure immanence” and, hence, are not sublime in any standard sense of the term. The essay then argues, in a second part, for an aesthetic of the beautiful and the sublime based upon the (...) theological doctrine of the analogy of being as articulated in the past century by Erich Przywara, S. J. (shrink)

This book, the first of its kind, surveys the career of the renowned Australian-German theatre and opera director Barrie Kosky. Its nine chapters provide multidisciplinary analyses of Barrie Kosky’s working practices and stage productions, from the beginning of his career in Melbourne to his current roles as Head of the Komische Oper Berlin and as a guest director in international demand. Specialists in theatre studies, opera studies, musical theatre studies, aesthetics, and arts administration offer in-depth accounts of Kosky’s unusually wide-ranging (...) engagements with the performing arts – as a director of spoken theatre, operas, musicals, operettas, as an adaptor, a performer, a writer, and an arts manager. Further, this book includes contributions from theatre practitioners with first-hand experience of collaborating with Kosky in the 1990s, who draw on interviews with members of Gilgul, Australia’s first Jewish theatre company, to document this formative period in Kosky’s career. The book investigates the ways in which Kosky has created transnational theatres, through introducing European themes and theatre techniques to his Australian work or through bringing fresh voices to the national dialogue in Germany’s theatre landscape. An appendix contains a timeline and guide to Kosky’s productions to date. (shrink)

Though long overshadowed by the more familiar lights of the German Enlightenment, arguably no figure of the lateeighteenth century exercised a more profound influence upon the intellectual giants of the early nineteenth centurythan the Koenigsberg author and critic, Johann Georg Hamann (1730–88), otherwise known as the ‘Magus of theNorth.’ In an effort to establish Hamann's place in the history of ideas--beyond popular misconceptions that Hamannwas an ‘irrationalist’--this article traces the history of Hamann's reception, showing how his notoriously difficultwritings (his ‘sibylline (...) leaves’) were interpreted by such celebrated figures as Goethe, Schelling, Hegel, andKierkegaard. (shrink)

Responsibility for the protection of human research subjects is shared by investigators, research ethics committees, sponsors/funders, research institutions, governments and, the focus of this article, physicians who enrol patients in clinical trials. The article describes the general principles of the patient-physician relationship that should regulate the participation of physicians in clinical trials and proposes guidelines for determining when and how such participation should proceed. The guidelines deal with the following stages of the trial: when first considering participation, when deciding whether (...) to enrol patients, when asking patients to participate, when the trial is underway and when it is completed. (shrink)

The authors were involved in developing an ethical framework to assist the Queens Region Board (Prince Edward Island, Canada) set priorities in health and health care. Two and one half years after the adoption of this framework, the authors undertook an evaluation of the framework. This paper will discuss: a) the historical background of regionalization in Canada, and in particular the circumstances leading up to the institution of regional boards in Prince Edward Island; b) the sorts of ethical issues facing (...) the Queens Regional Board; c) issues arising in connection with the use and development of ethics frameworks for managing ethical issues in priority setting; d) the framework adopted by the Queens Board and the process that led to its development; e) issues arising as concerns implementation of the framework; f) questions and issues pertinent to other boards and bodies considering similar initiatives. (shrink)

Methylation of cytosine DNA residues is a well‐studied epigenetic modification with important roles in formation of heterochromatic regions of the genome, and also in tissue‐specific repression of transcription. However, we recently found that the ciliate Oxytricha uses methylcytosine in a novel DNA elimination pathway important for programmed genome restructuring. Remarkably, mounting evidence suggests that methylcytosine can play a dual role in ciliates, repressing gene expression during some life‐stages and directing DNA elimination in others. In this essay, I describe these recent (...) advances in the DNA methylation field and discuss whether this unexpected novel role for methylcytosine in DNA elimination might be more widely conserved in eukaryotic biology, particularly in apoptotic pathways. (shrink)

Wisely, the authors begin this book by describing it as a polemic. They argue that most contemporary analytic metaphysics is a waste of time and resources since contemporary ‘neo-scholastic’ metaphysical theorizing cannot hope to attain objective truth given its penchant for making a priori claims about the nature of the world which are backed up by appeal to intuition. In engaging in this activity, metaphysicians have, the authors claim, abandoned hope of locating any interesting connection between their metaphysical pronouncements and (...) how our best empirical theories describe the world. Moreover, the success attained by empirical science just cannot be matched by metaphysical theorizing and so, faced with this asymmetry, empirical science wins: a priori metaphysical theorizing must give way to a naturalistic form of metaphysics, a positive account of which the authors attempt to elucidate in the second and third, rather lengthy chapters of the book.The first chapter consists of a statement of the authors’ negative view, a vigorous, sustained and sometimes withering attack upon contemporary a priori metaphysics. Most ire is reserved for those who indulge in what the authors call ‘pseudo-scientific metaphysics’; that is, those who pay lip service to keeping their metaphysical speculation in tune with physics, only to constrain their ontology in such a way that the entities and processes within it do not even play a role in current physical theory, or are in straightforward contradiction with it. Much philosophy of science and scientific metaphysics is too superficial and simplistic to deserve the name and bears more relation to ‘the philosophy of “A” Level chemistry’. The guilty in this respect include David Lewis, Jaegwon Kim, Jonathan Lowe, Donald Davidson, Jerry Fodor, Crawford Elder, Trenton Merricks among …. (shrink)

In the Aharonov- Bohm effect, electromagnetic potentials alter the two-slit interference pattern formed by an electron beam. We discuss here a curious feature of this effect, namely that, even though the interference pattern changes, none of its moments are shifted.

Comments on:Charles T. Mathewes, Agency, Nature, Transcendence, and Moralism: A Review of Recent Work in Moral Psychology.

John Searle's Speech Acts (1969) and Expression and Meaning (1979) developed a highly original and influential approach to the study of language. But behind both works lay the assumption that the philosophy of language is in the end a branch of the philosophy of the mind: speech acts are forms of human action and represent just one example of the mind's capacity to relate the human organism to the world. The present book is concerned with these biologically fundamental capacities, (...) and, though third in the sequence, in effect it provides the philosophical foundations for the other two. Intentionality is taken to be the crucial mental phenomenon, and its analysis involves wide-ranging discussions of perception, action, causation, meaning, and reference. In all these areas John Searle has original and stimulating views. He ends with a resolution of the 'mind-body' problem. (shrink)

With Shakespeare's Physic, John Crawford Adams joins that group of physicians so fascinated by the medical aspects of Shakespeare that they cannot resist a foray into medical and literary history. Adams follows men like R. R. Simpson, whose Shakespeare and Medicine was until recently the best book available on the subject. Like Simpson, Adams is not a historian, nor is he a literary critic, and like Simpson's book, Shakespeare's Physic has consequent strengths and deficiencies.To be sure, Adams's book (...) has a charming energy. He quotes widely and admiringly from Shakespeare's work and demonstrates considerable reading in medical history. His training in medicine, moreover, allows him to provide an interesting modern perspective on the illnesses that would have afflicted Shakespeare's contemporaries. Additionally, Adams, as neither a historian nor a literary critic, does not get bogged down in theory or minutiae, and so the book is accessible to nonspecialists.Often, however, one wishes Adams had been a historian so that he might have been more scrupulous in his work, for the lack of historical rigor here seriously detracts from the book's usefulness. Aside from quotations from Shakespeare, and notwithstanding the brief bibliography that is included, Adams fails to cite any of his sources. We have no way of directly checking his facts, and there is no way to build on his work.Moreover, if Adams had been more attentive to citing evidence for his claims, he might have more easily noticed when those claims were questionable. The bacterium that causes the plague, for example, is now properly called Yersinia pestis, not Pasteurella pestis, as Adams has it . More significantly, Adams's suggestion that madness was understood almost exclusively as a result of demonic possession and that it was treated only by exorcism is clearly incorrect . Richard Napier's early modern practice frequently employed physical treatments for madness since some forms of madness, including melancholy, were thought to proceed from the same sorts of humoral imbalances that were held to produce other maladies . Moreover, Winfried Schleiner has discussed the therapeutic uses of illusion in the period and links that mode of treatment to several Shakespeare plays . David Hoeniger has shown how Shakespeare demonstrates knowledge of the early modern use of music as treatment for mental illness .Also troubling is Adams's unscholarly tendency to assume that the medical aspects of Shakespeare's theater “must generally have been an accurate reflection of the world as it existed outside” . Similarly, Adams repeatedly assumes that characters speaking on medical and spiritual matters must be voicing Shakespeare's own particular philosophy. Literary scholars now acknowledge that such claims are unreliable, if not naive. Malvolio in Twelfth Night, for example, firmly rejects the Pythagorean notion of metempsychosis or reincarnation; Feste, in the same play, insists that it is true; Graziano in The Merchant of Venice has thought it false but is tempted by Shylock's wolfish temperament to believe it. Which is the view of the general public? Which is Shakespeare's? (shrink)

This book is the first interlinear bilingual edition of the core Inner Chapters of the book Zhuangzi, which must be counted among the most famous texts in Chinese intellectual and literary history. A special feature of this edition is that it follows the specific rhythm and rhyme of the text in the translation, making it possible to experience the particular style of this most exciting of the ancient Chinese philosophers. -/- An extensive introduction explains the history and the literary nature (...) of the text, and in particular it tells the story of how this text was appreciated and commented upon in China and translated into foreign languages through the ages. Extensive footnotes are provided to enable Western readers to read the text through the eyes of the enthusiastic Chinese commentators who have annotated the text over the centuries: traditional Chinese literary as well as philosophical commentaries are presented in detail in the original classical Chinese and in translation. -/- For the general reader this book will offer a rare opportunity to approach one of the most outrageously unconventional texts of world literature with the philosophical and philological perspectives of the greatest of its literate Chinese connoisseurs. For the student of Chinese this book will serve as a bilingual cornucopia of spirited classical Chinese discourse on a fiercely contested and always controversially discussed crucial text in the Daoist tradition of ancient China. (shrink)

The dispute between the empiricist and interpretivist conceptions of the social sciences is properly conceived not as a matter of reduction or covering laws. Features specific to the social sciences include the following. Explanations of human behavior make reference to intentional causation; social phenomena are permeated with mental components and are self-referential; social science explanations have not been as successful as those in natural science because of their concern with intentional causation, because their explanations must be identical with the propositional (...) content of the mind of the actor, and because a social phenomenon exists only if people believe it exists. Elements of an apparatus necessary to analyze this problematic social ontology are given and include selfreferentiality, constitutive rules, collective intentionality, linguistic permeation of the facts, systematic interrelationships among social facts, and primacy of acts over objects. (shrink)