Prevailing theories of the neural basis of at least a subset of individuals with autism spectrum disorder include an imbalance of excitatory and inhibitory neurotransmission. These circuitry imbalances are commonly probed in adults using auditory steady-state responses to elicit coherent electrophysiological responses from intact circuitry. Challenges to the ASSR methodology occur during development, where the optimal ASSR driving frequency may be unknown. An alternative approach is the amplitude-modulated sweep in which the amplitude of a tone is modulated as a sweep (...) from 10 to 100 Hz over the course of ∼15 s. Phase synchrony of evoked responses, measured via intra-trial coherence, is recorded as a function of frequency. We applied such AM sweep stimuli bilaterally to 40 typically developing and 80 children with ASD, aged 6–18 years. Diagnoses were confirmed by DSM-5 criteria as well as autism diagnostic observation schedule observational assessment. Stimuli were presented binaurally during MEG recording and consisted of 20 AM swept stimuli with a duration of ∼30 s each. Peak intra-trial coherence values and peak response frequencies of source modeled responses were examined. First, the phase synchrony or inter-trial coherence of the ASSR is diminished in ASD; second, hemispheric bias in the ASSR, observed in typical development, is maintained in ASD, and third, that the frequency at which the peak response is obtained varies on an individual basis, in part dependent on age, and with altered developmental trajectories in ASD vs. TD. Finally, there appears an association between auditory steady-state phase synchrony and clinical assessment of language ability/impairment. We concluded that the AM sweep stimulus provides a mechanism for probing ASSR in an unbiased fashion, during developmental maturation of peak response frequency, peak frequencies vary, in part due to developmental age, and importantly, ITC at this peak frequency is diminished in ASD, with the degree of ITC disturbance related to clinically assessed language impairment. (shrink)

This book argues that the meaning of negation, perhaps the most important logical constant, cannot be defined within the framework of the most comprehensive theory of proof-theoretic semantics, as formulated in the influential work of Michael Dummett and Dag Prawitz. Nils Kürbis examines three approaches that have attempted to solve the problem - defining negation in terms of metaphysical incompatibility; treating negation as an undefinable primitive; and defining negation in terms of a speech act of denial - and concludes that (...) they cannot adequately do so. He argues that whereas proof-theoretic semantics usually only appeals to a notion of truth, it also needs to appeal to a notion of falsity, and proposes a system of natural deduction in which both are incorporated. Offering new perspectives on negation, denial and falsity, his book will be important for readers working on logic, metaphysics and the philosophy of language. (shrink)

1. Yuhak sasang kwa in'gan simni ŭi kibon kusŏngch'e.

Die Reden des Studentenpfarrers Bolzano -- Von den Grausamkeiten der Christen an den Juden -- Über den Mut -- Über den Selbstmord -- Über das Verhältnis der beiden Volksstä̕mme in Böhmen -- Über Lug und Trug -- Die Edition der Reden in der Bolzano-Gesamtasugabe : Korrekturen, Konjekturen und Annotationen -- Anhang: Sprachliche Eigentümlichkeiten der Schriften Bolzanos und ihrer Editionen im 19. Jahrhundert.

In this article, I first show in what way Augustine's 'De doctrina Christiana' actually concerns liberal education, or at least includes it within its scope. Second, I articulate the new 'modus' of education, its new “mode” or “measure,” presented in 'De doctrina'. Third, I exemplify the modification of education by briefly considering Augustine’s treatment of rhetoric in Book IV of 'De doctrina'. Fourth and finally, I conclude with general remarks that attempt to situate the sort of education of which Augustine (...) speaks in 'De doctrina' among some current alternatives with which we are familiar. (shrink)

The sensorimotor account of vision proposed by O'Regan & Noë (O&N) challenges the classical view of visual cognition as a process of mentally representing the world. Many infant cognition researchers would probably disagree. I describe the surprising ability of young infants to represent and reason about the physical world, and ask how this capacity can be explained in non-representational terms. As a first step toward answering this question, I suggest that recent models of embodied cognition may help illustrate a way (...) of escaping the representational trap. (shrink)

"The problem of art in the modern era," according to the opening of Audrey Wasser's The Work of Difference: Modernism, Romanticism, and the Production of Literary Form, "is the problem of the new". Citing the familiar maxim of Ezra Pound, "make it new," Wasser locates in the problem of novelty the problem of modern art as such. Modernity inherits its fixation on the new from a longer tradition, which for Wasser begins with the German romantics in the wake of Kantian (...) aesthetics. Crucial for Wasser is the way in which the romantic philosophers, particularly Friedrich Schlegel and other contributors to the Athenaeum, attempted to resolve the problems with the Kantian system by "invest[ing] the literary with the... (shrink)

The language of morality and legality infuses every aspect of the Middle East conflict. From repeated assertions by officials that Israel has “the most moral army in the world” to justifications for specific military tactics and operations by reference to self-defense and proportionality, the public rhetoric is one of legal right and moral obligation. Less often heard are the voices of those on the ground whose daily experience is lived within the legal quagmire portrayed by their leaders in such uncompromising (...) terms. This Article explores the opaque normative boundaries surrounding the actions of a specific group within the Israeli military, soldiers returning from duty in Hebron in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. By examining interviews with these soldiers by an Israeli NGO, it identifies different narratives of legality and illegality which inform their conduct, contrasting their failure to adhere to conventional legal discourses with the broader “legalization” of military activities. Seeking an explanation for this disjunction, it explores the ways in which the soldiers’ stories nonetheless reflect attempts to negotiate various normative and legal realities. It places these within the legal landscape of the Occupied Palestinian Territories which has been normatively re-imagined by various forces in Israeli society, from the judicially-endorsed discourse of deterrence manifested in the day-today practices of brutality, intimidation and “demonstrating power,” to the growing influence of nationalist-religious interpretations of self-defense and the misuse of post-modernist theory by the military establishment to “smooth out” the moral and legal urban architectures of occupation. The Article concludes by considering the hope for change evident in the very act of soldiers telling ethically-oriented stories about their selves, and in the existence of a movement willing to provide the space for such reflections in an attempt to confront Israeli society with the day-to-day experiences of the soldier in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. (shrink)

Introduction -- The syntax of English clefts -- Clefts and the licensing of relative clauses -- Clefts in Slavonic languages -- The syntax of specificational sentences -- Conclusion.

The concept of modernity is fraught with contestation, a wedge that divides people, practices, institutions, and beliefs. This chasm is particularly pronounced for traditional institutions like the...

One of the most important objections to information-based semantic theories is that they are incapable of explaining Frege cases. The worry is that if a concept’s intentional content is a function of its informational content, as such theories propose, then it would appear that coreferring expressions have to be synonymous, and if this is true, it’s difficult to see how an agent could believe that a is F without believing that b is F whenever a and b are identical. I (...) argue that this appearance is deceptive. If we heed the distinction between the analog and digital contents of a signal, it is actually possible to reconstruct something akin to Frege’s sense/reference distinction in purely information-theoretic terms. This allows informational semanticists to treat coreferring expressions as semantically distinct and to solve Frege cases in the same way that Frege did—namely, by appealing to the different contents of coreferring expressions. (shrink)

This classroom edition includes _On the Social Contract_, the _Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts_, the _Discourse on the Origins of Inequality_, and the Preface to _Narcissus_. Each text has been newly translated and includes a full complement of explanatory notes. The editors’ introduction offers students diverse points of entry into some of the distinctive possibilities and challenges of each of these fundamental texts, as well as an introduction to Rousseau’s life and historical situation. The volume also includes annotated (...) appendices that help students to explore the origins and influences of Rousseau’s work, including excerpts from Hobbes, Pascal, Descartes, Mandeville, Diderot, Voltaire, Madame de Staël, Benjamin Constant, Joseph de Maistre, Kant, Hegel, and Engels. (shrink)

Bounded Meaning develops a new theory of how and why semantic interpretation depends not just on global information, but also on local information. Mandelkern provides criticisms of the dominant theory, dynamic semantics, and proposes a new theory of bounds as limits on admissible interpretations of an expression.

The community separation of the school system in Northern Ireland limits opportunities for daily cross-community interaction between young people. The deployment pattern of teachers is largely consistent with this divide. Pupils are therefore unlikely to be taught by a teacher from a community background other than their own. Nonetheless, recent research has shown that an increased proportion of teachers are diverting from the community consistent path and are teaching in a school not associated with their own community identity, although this (...) remained a very uncommon choice. Narrative interviews with a purposive sample of these ‘cross-over’ teachers provide illustrations of the factors that preserve the separation of the teaching profession by community identity. Thematic analysis of this data reveals that policy, perceptions and practice combine to restrict the possibility of cross-community career movement by teachers. If the out-workings of community division in Northern Ireland are to be addressed, then these issues will need to be considered, and actions taken to mitigate this segregation. (shrink)

This chapter argues that the moral/ethical system of early Buddhism is best understood as being both naturalistic and irrealist/antirealist. It is naturalistic because it excludes all supernatural forces and explains morality/ethics in terms of natural facts. It is irrealist/antirealist because it consists of hypothetical imperatives rather than categorical imperatives. The chapter examines both primary texts and contemporary scholarship. It then argues that the Buddhist theory of ethics is very similar to the immanence/immanentist theory of William Connolly, and that such theories (...) may be uniquely helpful in creating stable political cooperation in pluralistic societies. (shrink)

This article presents a first edition of three Mandaic lamellae from the Schøyen Collection, MS 2087/10, 2087/11, and 2087/18, which are the product of the same scribe and probably constituted a single amulet. The language of the amulet differs from that of other Mandaic texts, and demonstrates unknown or rare phonetic and morphological features. In addition, several lexemes that were hitherto unattested in Mandaic have been identified. Some of the amulet’s formulae are familiar from previously published texts, but in several (...) cases the new textual evidence allows us to improve upon their readings. (shrink)

Patients with schizophrenia have a higher risk of cardiovascular diseases and higher mortality from them than does the general population; however, the underlying mechanism remains unclear. Impaired cerebral autoregulation is associated with cerebrovascular diseases and their mortality. Increased or decreased cerebral blood flow in different brain regions has been reported in patients with schizophrenia, which implies impaired cerebral autoregulation. This study investigated the cerebral autoregulation in 21 patients with schizophrenia and 23 age- and sex-matched healthy controls. None of the participants (...) had a history of cardiovascular diseases, hypertension, or diabetes. All participants underwent 10-min blood pressure and cerebral blood flow recording through finger plethysmography and Doppler ultrasonography, respectively. Cerebral autoregulation was assessed by analyzing two autoregulation indices: the mean blood pressure and cerebral blood flow correlation coefficient (Mx), and the phase shift between the waveforms of blood pressure and cerebral blood flow determined using transfer function analysis. Compared with the controls, the patients had a significantly higher Mx (0.257 vs. 0.399, p = 0.036) and lower phase shift (44.3° vs. 38.7° in the 0.07–0.20 Hz frequency band, p = 0.019), which indicated impaired maintenance of constant cerebral blood flow and a delayed cerebrovascular autoregulatory response. Impaired cerebral autoregulation may be caused by schizophrenia and may not be an artifact of coexisting medical conditions. The mechanism underlying impaired cerebral autoregulation in schizophrenia and its probable role in the development of cerebrovascular diseases require further investigation. (shrink)

This article aims at developing a phronesis-oriented philosophical counselling, with a focus on the idea of semantic sentiment. In Section 1, we elucidate the characteristics of phronesis-oriented approach to philosophical counselling and state our reason for adopting this approach. In Section 2, we consider three visions of phronesis-oriented philosophical counselling, i.e., the Socratic vision, the Platonic vision, and the skill-based vision, and argue for the third vision. In Sections 3 and 4, we show how to practice such phronesis-oriented philosophical counselling (...) by introducing, exploring, and applying the idea of semantic sentiment. (shrink)

Can the idea of a minimal proposition be successfully held? I will first formulate what the minimal proposition is in the minimalist’s mind, taking Emma Borg as the representative. What a minimalist seeks for a minimal proposition is the abstract and skeletal core meaning of a sentence, and this faith is founded on the notion of minimal word meaning—an atomic, code-like, conceptual thing. I show that the problem of this notion of minimal proposition lies in the three features, intuitive read-off, (...) invariantness, and truth-evaluability, that Borg ascribes to it. I shall argue, first, that positing a conceptual-like thing as the invariant minimal content of word cannot support the invariantness of the minimal proposition of a sentence, and second, that the skeletal content, as the minimal proposition of a sentence, is a grammatically analyzed product and thus is hardly truth evaluable. According to the analyses, the idea of a minimal proposition with these three features identified by minimalists cannot be maintained. (shrink)

Drone warfare disrupts the generally understood experience of war, and drone operators’ distance from the battlefield has called into question the authenticity of their experiences as participants in conflict. This article examines the autobiographies of three US military drone operators, analysing how the narration is discursively oriented to particular spatial and ideological perspectives. It argues that the linguistic construction of point of view in each text reflects a dynamic and sometimes paradoxical relationship between drone operators and their distance from the (...) battlefield. Observing the position and shifting of deictic centres, the analysis draws parallels between spatial perspective, ideology, and the social identities of drone operators and victims of drone strikes. It concludes by reflecting on the variety of discursive strategies employed across these texts, and considers this variation itself to be an emerging trend in the discourse of drone warfare. (shrink)

Caplan & Waters's model differentiating levels of processing and the role of working memory is important and likely right. However, their claim rests on a lack of correlation between working memory and structural complexity. We examine sources of variability in these measures that remain unaccounted for (by anyone), variability that muddies a straightforward claim that the lack of correlation is cleanly established.

Currently, much of sociology lacks an accurate understanding of what it means to be human. Hence, as a discipline, it often finds itself erroneously searching for probabilistic social laws based on inadequate philosophical anthropologies derived from the natural sciences. This article proffers a solution by re-acknowledging an overlooked axis of ‘human nature’. By conceiving of human beings as fundamentally moral, believing creatures, I argue that more adequate explanations of social life require a hermeneutical, historical and moralistic reading. Employing this alternative (...) approach to sociological analysis, I unearth the moral groundwork under-girding the debate between Easterners and Westerners over the question of whether the Hindu caste system is exploitative. Having done so, I conclude that only a more in-depth acknowledgment and articulation of the moral sources from which we draw our beliefs can propel debaters of both Eastern and Western philosophical dispositions towards resolution. (shrink)

What is agroecology’s moral vision, and what are the larger metaphysical, even theological, implications of it? Even though agroecology as a field now gathers collaborators from across the natural and social sciences, as well as members of farming communities and international movements, there remains relatively little explicit and sustained reflection upon this question. My main contention is that expanding agroecology’s dialogue of wisdoms (_diálogo de saberes_) to include theological traditions can address this lacuna. To show how, I explore the contribution (...) of one particular theological tradition—Catholic social teaching—and how its account of integral ecology enables agroecologists to deepen their engagement with fundamental questions raised by their own normative commitments. (shrink)

While the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of ‘body without organs’ is developed alongside their critique of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, it is also developed alongside their critique of Christianity, most poignantly in the sixth plateau of A Thousand Plateaus. Here Deleuze and Guattari quote Antonin Artaud in order to show how ‘the judgment of God weighs upon and is exercised against the BwO’. In order to understand this relationship between judgement of God and the BwO, this essay explores Deleuze's critiques of Christianity (...) in his earlier works and concludes that the BwO, much like Artaud's own poetry, is developed in contrast to an internalised form of Christianity. (shrink)