Aim: The present work proposes the study of the neuromotor activity of the masseter-jaw-tongue articulation during diadochokinetic exercising to establish functional statistical relationships between surface Electromyography, 3D Accelerometry, and acoustic features extracted from the speech signal, with the aim of characterizing Hypokinetic Dysarthria. A database of multi-trait signals of recordings from an age-matched control and PD participants are used in the experimental study. Hypothesis: The main assumption is that information between sEMG and 3D acceleration, and acoustic features may be quantified (...) using linear regression methods. Methods: Recordings from a cohort of eight age-matched control participants and eight PD participants were collected during the utterance of a diadochokinetic exercise. The dynamic and acoustic absolute kinematic velocities produced during the exercises were estimated by acoustic filter inversion and numerical integration and differentiation of the speech signal. The amplitude distributions of the absolute kinematic and acoustic velocities are estimated to allow comparisons in terms of Mutual Information. Results: The regression results show the relationships between sEMG and dynamic and acoustic estimates. The projection methodology may help in understanding the basic neuromotor muscle activity regarding neurodegenerative speech in remote monitoring neuromotor and neurocognitive diseases using speech as the vehicular tool, and in the study of other speech-related disorders. The study also showed strong and significant cross-correlations between articulation kinematics, both for the control and the PD cohorts. The absolute kinematic variables presents an observable difference for the PD participants compared to the control group. Conclusion: Kinematic distributions derived from acoustic analysis may be useful biomarkers toward characterizing HD in neuromotor disorders providing new insights into PD. (shrink)

Marr’s celebrated contribution to cognitive science (Marr 1982, chap. 1) was the introduction of (at least) three levels of description/explanation. However, most contemporary research has relegated the distinction between levels to a rather dispensable remark. Ignoring such an important contribution comes at a price, or so we shall argue. In the present paper, first we review Marr’s main points and motivations regarding levels of explanation. Second, we examine two cases in which the distinction between levels has been neglected when considering (...) the structure of mental representations: Cummins et al.’s distinction between structural representation and encodings (Cummins in Journal of Philosophy, 93(12):591–614, 1996; Cummins et al. in Journal of Philosophical Research, 30:405–408, 2001) and Fodor’s account of iconic representation (Fodor 2008). These two cases illustrate the kind of problems in which researchers can find themselves if they overlook distinctions between levels and how easily these problems can be solved when levels are carefully examined. The analysis of these cases allows us to conclude that researchers in the cognitive sciences are well advised to avoid risks of confusion by respecting Marr’s old lesson. (shrink)

A core tenet of metanormative non-naturalism is that genuine or robust normativity—i.e., the kind of normativity that is characteristic of moral requirements, and perhaps also of prudential, epistemic and even aesthetic requirements—is metaphysically special in a way that rules out naturalist analyses or reductions; on the non-naturalist view, the normative is sui generis and metaphysically discontinuous with the natural. Non-naturalists agree, however, that the normative is modally as well as explanatorily dependent on the natural. These two commitments—discontinuity and dependence—at least (...) initially pull in opposite directions, and one of the central challenges to non-naturalism is how to reconcile them. In this paper I spell out the most pressing version of this discontinuity problem, as I propose to call it, and I go on to offer a novel solution. Drawing on the ideology of reasons-firstism, I formulate an account of normative explanation which reconciles the two commitments, and I argue that competing accounts either do not solve the problem or are implausible on independent grounds. (shrink)

Recent philosophical developments on personal indexicals reveal a disagreement between those who defend and those who deny the existence of a distinctive class of second person thoughts. In this piece, I tackle this controversy by highlighting two crucial constraints based on paradigmatic felicitous singular uses of the second person pronoun. On the one hand, the Addressing Constraint is brought out by the awareness and action capabilities displayed in successfully addressing another. On the other hand, the Merging Constraint arises, among other (...) things, from the fact that ‘I’/‘you’-exchanges ground intersubjective disagreement. Once these constraints are fully in view, I go on to show that they pose a challenging dilemma for any account of the second person and that the chasm between friends and foes of the distinctness of second person thought is better seen as endorsements of one of the horns of the dilemma. In reaction to this, I outline a way of accommodating both constraints in terms of ‘perspectives’, i.e. ways of thinking of a reference that do not individuate a thought. On the recommended approach, the second person perspective is cognitively distinctive but does not itself signal the existence of a distinctive second person type of thought. By contrast, a single type of thought about selves expressible with personal indexicals—the self-thought type—can be shown to comprise the third, the second and, perhaps surprisingly, the first person perspective. Unlike other perspectival approaches, the here proposed analysis relies on an elucidation of perspectives in terms of specific information on which a thinker draws made available by a concept-individuating reference rule. (shrink)

Abstract.The United States today is faced with a crisis of the liberal system stemming from a shortage of resources and ideas. Liberalism assumes that there will always be enough resources to meet all needs and that politics consists of the struggle of interest groups for resources to meet their particular needs. Liberalism is wrong on both counts: there are not enough resources and there is a common good which includes all particular needs properly understood. We must now revise our ideas (...) and institutions in order to make the common good attainable. Various changes in ideas and institutions toward that end are suggested. (shrink)

Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.

Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.

_On Tyranny_ is Leo Strauss’s classic reading of Xenophon’s dialogue _Hiero_, or _Tyrannicus_, in which the tyrant Hiero and the poet Simonides discuss the advantages and disadvantages of exercising tyranny. Included are a translation of the dialogue from its original Greek, a critique of Strauss’s commentary by the French philosopher Alexandre Kojève, and the complete correspondence between the two. This revised and expanded edition introduces important corrections throughout and expands Strauss’s restatement of his position in light of Kojève’s commentary to (...) bring it into conformity with the text as it was originally published in France. (shrink)

Due to its high degree of complexity and its historical nature, evolutionary biology has been traditionally portrayed as a messy science. According to the supporters of such a view, evolutionary biology would be unable to formulate laws and robust theories, instead just delivering coherent narratives and local models. In this article, our aim is to challenge this view by showing how the Price equation can work as the core of a general theoretical framework for evolutionary phenomena. To support this claim, (...) we outline some unnoticed structural similarities between physical theories and evolutionary biology. More specifically, we shall argue that the Price equation, in the same way as fundamental formalisms in physics, can serve as a heuristic principle to formulate and systematise different theories and models in evolutionary biology. (shrink)

Elizabeth Anscombe’s classic paper Causality and Determination claims that causation can be perceived. It also defends causal singularism, the idea that the causal relation is fundamentally between the particular cause and effect, and does not depend on regularities holding elsewhere in the universe. But does the former furnish an argument for the latter? The present paper analyses a special type of causal experience involving emotional reactions to present stimuli; for instance, being frightened by a spider. It argues that such experiences (...) are strongly local, in the sense that they justify belief in a local causal relation independently of our knowledge about events elsewhere in the universe. If this analysis is correct, Humean regularity theories of causation are false; and all other non-singularist theories of causation face a difficult explanatory challenge. This means that the case for causal singularism comes out considerably strengthened. (shrink)

There is an unresolved conflict concerning the normative nature of desire. Some authors take rational desire to differ from rational belief in being a normatively unconstrained attitude. Others insist that rational desire seems plausibly subject to several consistency norms. This article argues that the correct analysis of this conflict of conative normativity leads us to acknowledge intrinsic and extrinsic reasons to desire. If sound, this point helps us to unveil a fundamental aspect of desire, namely, that we cannot desire at (...) will. Unlike belief, however, desire can unproblematically accommodate a notion of instrumental attitude. (shrink)

Sometimes Strauss argues as if he thought it possible to understand man without raising questions about his relations to other things, and hence about his place in the whole. But when they are viewed in their broader context, such arguments are seen not to be his final word. Man's humanity cannot be understood in its own terms alone. The human soul differs from everything else in that it is "... open to the whole and therefore more akin to the whole (...) than anything else is." In ordinary usage, "whole" implies completeness and autonomy. But the openness of the soul--i.e., of a part--to the whole can only mean that the whole is open to itself. The whole is, then, not, in the ordinary sense of the term, whole. Nor is the soul which is "open" to it. Stripped of myths, "... the human soul is... more akin to the whole than anything else is" because neither of them is whole. The same conclusion follows when one tries to understand the definition of the philosopher as the man animated by quest for knowledge of the whole. Qua philosopher he knows neither that there is a whole, nor what it might be if there were one. To define the philosopher as the man who knows that he does not know only paraphrases the difficulty. It does not solve it. For "know" is here used equivocally. The same equivocation is at play in the comment "... one cannot know that one does not know without knowing what one does not know". Admittedly "knowledge of ignorance is not ignorance." The philosopher believes and perhaps divines more than he actually knows. All men do. The essential difference between the philosopher and other men may well consist in the fact that the philosopher distinguishes more conscientiously than do others between what he knows and what he believes, and that he strives more single-mindedly than do they to transform as large a share of his beliefs as possible into knowledge. He may conceivably at some point be said to have reached the stage where his aspirations have become reasoned expectations. But that is as far as he can possibly go as long as he remains a philosopher and has not become a wise man or a god. Until and unless the philosopher knows, in the strong sense of the term, he can no more decide whether his aspirations could be fulfilled than he can swim before getting wet. (shrink)

Gender discrimination continues to be a problem in organizations. It is therefore important that organizations use performance evaluation methods that ensure equal opportunities for men and women. This article reports the results of an experiment to investigate whether and, if so, how the gender of the rater and that of the ratee moderate the relationship between the level of subjectivity in performance appraisals and organizational attractiveness. Participants in the experiment were 313 undergraduate students. We predicted, and indeed established, that as (...) the probability increases that employee performance is evaluated by a female manager, women expect more positive outcomes of subjective, but not objective evaluation processes. Our data did not support our expectation that as the probability of being evaluated by a female manager increases, men expect less positive outcomes of subjective evaluation processes. The findings of this study contribute to our understanding of why women are over-represented in jobs with objective formula-based reward systems, such as piece-rate systems. They are also of interest to organizations that are looking for more ethical human resource management practices. (shrink)

KANT HELD THAT NEWTON AND ROUSSEAU HAD REVEALED the ways of Providence: “After Newton and Rousseau, God is justified, and Pope’s thesis is henceforth true.”.

This article attempts to re-establish the importance of Foucault's work for an understanding of the way in which modern law operates. This argument has two stages. Firstly, there is a critique of the interpretation of Foucault's work by legal and sociological thinkers. It is argued that by reading the term ‘juridical’ as synonymous with the term ‘law’ in Foucault, people miss the substance of Foucault's argument. The term juridical describes an arrangement and a representation of power rather than the law. (...) This is made clear through a critique of J. S. Mill's On Liberty which is shown to make a juridical distinction between power and a free space of action which is unsustainable. Secondly, Foucault's genealogy of power relations is recast from the perspective of a legal theoretician. Foucault's history of power relations is constructed from historical differences in the mode of operation of power and discourse. By analysing these differences and their relationship to the mode of operation of law, an account of the place of modern law in Foucault's genealogy is established. Modern law operates between Foucault's concepts of government and discipline. It provides a key way in which government decisions can adjust the relationships between disciplinary institutions. This introduces the idea that law begins to operate in the perspective of the complete lives of individuals rather than just to prevent certain actions. Law, then, operates in accordance with what Foucault calls ‘bio-power’. (shrink)

Etnofiction essay, between anthropology and philosophy.