A relatively healthy forty-six-year-old woman with mild hypertension receives a prescription for an antihypertensive medication. One of the medication's adverse effects is its potential to cause severe depression. Four months later, she is diagnosed with anxiety, an early manifestation of depression. An antianxiety drug is prescribed, but her anxiety worsens. Her physician then diagnoses her as having a depressive disorder, and prescribes a new antidepressant medication. She is still on the same antihypertensive.A seventy-two-year-old man is given furosemide and digoxin to (...) control a mild case of congestive heart failure and hypertension. Because furosemide deletes potassium from the body, his physician also places him on a potassium supplement. Six months later, the physician tells the patient to stop taking the furosemide and prescribes an angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitor. An effect of ACE inhibitors is to reduce the body's excretion of potassium thereby reducing the digoxin's effectiveness. (shrink)

Savage et al. include groove and dance among musical features which enhance social bonds and group coherence. I discuss groove as grounded in structure and performance, and relate musical performance to play in nonhuman animals and humans. The interplay of individuals' contributions with group action is proposed as the common link between music and play as contributors to social bonding.

The Body Incantatory: Spells and the Ritual Imagination in Medieval Chinese Buddhism. By Paul Copp. Sheng Yan Series in Chinese Buddhist Studies. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Pp. xxx + 363. $55.

A number of fairness issues and principles are developed and discussed from the context of personnel selection. It is noted that not too much attention has been paid to these issues and concerns in the past. A distinction is made between justice and fairness having to do with the procedural components and processes of selection, the nature of the information used to make selection decisions, and the resulting outcomes of the selection process. Ideas for future research and exploration are also (...) extended. (shrink)

. Moral systems are described as systems of indirect reciprocity, existing because of histories of conflicts of interest and arising as outcomes of the complexity of social interactions in groups of long‐lived individuals with varying conflicts and confluences of interest and indefinitely iterated social interactions. Although morality is commonly defined as involving justice for all people, or consistency in the social treatment of all humans, it may have arisen for immoral reasons, as a force leading to cohesiveness within human groups (...) but specifically excluding and directed against other human groups with different interests. (shrink)

International medical travel occurs when patients cross national borders to purchase medical goods and services. On occasion, physicians in home countries will be the last point of domestic contact for patients seeking healthcare information before they travel abroad for care. When this is the case, physicians have a unique opportunity to inform patients about their options and help guide them towards ethical practices. This opportunity brings to the fore an important question: What role should physicians in more-developed home countries play (...) in promoting or constraining international medical travel towards less-developed destination countries? In our view, critical attention to the decision spaces of patients—defined by the personal circumstances, socio-cultural cues, and legal constraints that inform decision-making—is a useful starting point for evaluating the proper response of physicians to various forms of international medical travel. (shrink)

An astounding project of analysis on more than one hundred translations of ancient philosophical texts, this index of words found in the Ancient Commentators on Aristotle series comprises some 114,000 entries. It forms in effect a unique dictionary of philosophical terms from the post-Hellenistic period through to late antiquity and will be an essential reference tool for any scholar working on the meaning of these ancient texts. As traditional dictionaries have usually neglected to include translation examples from philosophical texts of (...) this period, scholars interested in how meanings of words vary across time and author have been ill served. This index fills a huge gap, therefore, in the lexical analysis of ancient Greek and has application well beyond the reading of ancient philosophical commentaries. Bringing together the full indexes from 110 of the volumes published in Bloomsbury's Ancient Commentators on Aristotle series, McKirahan has combined each word entry and analysed how many times particular translations occur. He presents his findings numerically so that each meaning in turn has a note as to the number of times it is used. For meanings that are found between one and four times the volume details are also given so that readers may quickly and easily look up the texts themselves. (shrink)

A number of studies in the apparent motion literature were examined using the cognitive penetrability criterion to determine the extent to which beliefs affect the perception of apparent motion. It was found that the interaction between the perceptual processes mediating apparent motion and higher order processes appears to be limited. In addition, perceptual and inferential beliefs appear to have different effects on perceived motion optimality and direction. Our findings suggest that the system underlying apparent motion perception has more than one (...) stage and is informationally encapsulated from cognitive factors. (shrink)

Since Freud, clinicians have understood that disturbing memories contribute to psychopathology and that new emotional experiences contribute to therapeutic change. Yet, controversy remains about what is truly essential to bring about psychotherapeutic change. Mounting evidence from empirical studies suggests that emotional arousal is a key ingredient in therapeutic change in many modalities. In addition, memory seems to play an important role but there is a lack of consensus on the role of understanding what happened in the past in bringing about (...) therapeutic change. The core idea of this paper is that therapeutic change in a variety of modalities, including behavioral therapy, cognitive-behavioral therapy, emotion-focused therapy, and psychodynamic psychotherapy, results from the updating of prior emotional memories through a process of reconsolidation that incorporates new emotional experiences. We present an integrated memory model with three interactive components – autobiographical (event) memories, semantic structures, and emotional responses – supported by emerging evidence from cognitive neuroscience on implicit and explicit emotion, implicit and explicit memory, emotion-memory interactions, memory reconsolidation, and the relationship between autobiographical and semantic memory. We propose that the essential ingredients of therapeutic change include: (1) reactivating old memories; (2) engaging in new emotional experiences that are incorporated into these reactivated memories via the process of reconsolidation; and (3) reinforcing the integrated memory structure by practicing a new way of behaving and experiencing the world in a variety of contexts. The implications of this new, neurobiologically grounded synthesis for research, clinical practice, and teaching are discussed. (shrink)

By a thorough study of the Posterior Analytics and related Aristotelian texts, Richard McKirahan reconstructs Aristotle's theory of episteme--science. The Posterior Analytics contains the first extensive treatment of the nature and structure of science in the history of philosophy, and McKirahan's aim is to interpret it sympathetically, following the lead of the text, rather than imposing contemporary frameworks on it. In addition to treating the theory as a whole, the author uses textual and philological as well as philosophical material (...) to interpret many important but difficult individual passages. A number of issues left obscure by the Aristotelian material are settled by reference to Euclid's geometrical practice in the Elements. To justify this use of Euclid, McKirahan makes a comparative analysis of fundamental features of Euclidian geometry with the corresponding elements of Aristotle's theory. Emerging from that discussion is a more precise and more complex picture of the relation between Aristotle's theory and Greek mathematics--a picture of mutual, rather than one-way, dependence. Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

The so-called “mind-brain” problem affords the greatest opportunity for the cooperation of philosophy and science in the advancement of knowledge. In this paper we will outline pertinent facts already learned about the human mind from neurological disciplines, and, using some hypotheses from outstanding workers in neurobiology, we will relate this material to some important philosophical problems. Our proposal is to examine these problems in the light of knowledge gathered from the scientific disciplines, and we hope to demonstrate how this method (...) may eventually clarify some of the confusion and suggest certain solutions. (shrink)

In Republic ix, Socrates begins his argument that deceptive pleasure causes insatiable desire by citing the error that cessation of pain is the greatest pleasure. Some interpret this error as an illusion, experiencing pleasure when there is no pleasure; but illusion cannot explain insatiable desire. Our interpretation explains insatiable desire—and Socrates’ restatement of wisdom and justice to include pleasures, which links the knowledge of unchanging reality with these virtues.