Primary progressive multiple sclerosis (PPMS) shows a highly variable disease progression with poor prognosis and a characteristic accumulation of disabilities in patients. These hallmarks of PPMS make it difficult to diagnose and currently impossible to efficiently treat. This study aimed to identify plasma metabolite profiles that allow diagnosis of PPMS and its differentiation from the relapsing-remitting subtype (RRMS), primary neurodegenerative disease (Parkinson’s disease, PD), and healthy controls (HCs) and that significantly change during the disease course and could serve as surrogate (...) markers of multiple sclerosis (MS)-associated neurodegeneration over time. We applied untargeted high-resolution metabolomics to plasma samples to identify PPMS-specific signatures, validated our findings in independent sex- and age-matched PPMS and HC cohorts and built discriminatory models by partial least square discriminant analysis (PLS-DA). This signature was compared to sex- and age-matched RRMS patients, to patients with PD and HC. Finally, we investigated these metabolites in a longitudinal cohort of PPMS patients over a 24-month period. PLS-DA yielded predictive models for classification along with a set of 20 PPMS-specific informative metabolite markers. These metabolites suggest disease-specific alterations in glycerophospholipid and linoleic acid pathways. Notably, the glycerophospholipid LysoPC(20:0) significantly decreased during the observation period. These findings show potential for diagnosis and disease course monitoring, and might serve as biomarkers to assess treatment efficacy in future clinical trials for neuroprotective MS therapies. (shrink)

Margaret Cavendish is known for her personal allegiance to monarchy in England. This is reflected in her writings; as Hobbes did, she tended to criticize severely any attempt at rebellion and did not think England could become a republic. Yet it seems that Cavendish did have sympathy with some republican values, in particular, as Lisa Walters has argued, with the republican concept of freedom as nondomination. How can we explain this apparent inconsistency? I believe that the answer lies in a (...) lack of fit between the republican theories that were available to her and the values she accepted and according to which she was expected to live her life. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 46, no. 2. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 259 Heather Berg Left of #MeToo In her 1949 call to “End the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!” Claudia Jones tells the story of Dora Jones, a Black domestic worker enslaved for forty years by her employer.1 Elizabeth Ingalls, a wealthy white woman, had traveled to Dora Jones’s Alabama home as a missionary teacher (...) and persuaded the seventeen-year-old Jones to travel to Boston as her housekeeper in 1907. Ingalls would keep Jones captive until 1947. In the intervening years, Ingalls subjected Jones to routine physical abuse and an endless expanse of intensive, unpaid domestic labor. With no days off and permitted to leave only for errands, Jones was allowed no personal relationships or contact with the outside world. Ingalls’s first husband, the bureaucrat Walter Harman, raped Jones over the course of three years, and Jones became pregnant.2 Ingalls would term this an “affair” and, as court documents showed, pushed Jones to “submit” to an abortion.3 Later, when Jones protested her abusive conditions and attempted to escape, Ingalls blackmailed her, threatening 1. Claudia Jones, “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!” Political Affairs (June 1949): 11. 2. I am inferring non-consent based on Jones’s captivity. On unfreedom and the politics of consent, see Saidiya Hartman, “Seduction and the Ruses of Power,” Callaloo 19, no. 2 (1996): 537–60. 3. United States v. Ingalls et al., Cr. No. 10568-SD (District Court, S.D. California, July 29, 1947). 260 Heather Berg to “commit Jones to prison” for interracial “adultery” and the abortion she had as a result. Jones finally won her freedom in 1947, a year after Ingalls’s adult daughter reported her mother to the police.4 Claudia Jones offers Dora Jones’s story as evidence of the exceptional precarity of Black women domestic workers. Like others in her cohort of “black left feminists” (to borrow Erik McDuffie’s term), Jones focused on domestic work as a field that epitomized the “triple oppression” at which she took aim.5 Sexual violence at work is not exceptional in Claudia Jones’s telling. Instead, it operates alongside a catalog of abuses at the intersection of capitalism, state terror, the degradation of women, imperialism, and white supremacy. An active member of the Communist Party, Jones insisted on thinking these systems together, maintaining that only through collective struggle against them could justice be won. Women would not be comrades in that struggle in any simple way. Jones was sharply critical of the idea that Black women’s oppression could be explained by “the rotten bourgeois notion about a ‘battle of the sexes.’”6 Instead, she urged working-class Black people to fight “against their common oppressors, the white ruling class.”7 Solidarity among women was illusory, in part, because of white women’s roles as employers of Black women’s domestic work. Against a narrative of sexual violence that describes simple dominance by men over women, Dora Jones’s story highlights the ways that systems of domination work together to enable abuse. Her suffering was not the same as that visited on bourgeois white women. Instead, it was perpetrated and enabled by one. There is no sisterhood to be found here. A critique of this framework is now common sense in most feminist circles, and yet the loudest feminist intervention in recent years trades in exactly the “bourgeois notion about a ‘battle of the sexes.’” Some seventy years after “An End to the Neglect’s” publication, the #MeToo movement has brought broad international attention to 4. For an overview of the case and its legal legacy, see Risa L. Goluboff, The Lost Promise of Civil Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 162–5. 5. Erik S. McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 9. 6. Jones, “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!” 13. 7. Ibid. Heather Berg 261 the problem of workplace sexual violence. In 2006, civil rights activist Tarana Burke founded an anti-violence movement based... (shrink)

I. Pragmatismus und Neukantianismus Marc Rölli: Die Durchquerung des Absoluten. Zur Hegel-Rezeption John Deweys Wolfgang Bonsiepen: Hegel und der Neukantianismus Matthias Wunsch: Phänomenologie des Symbolischen? Die Hegelrezeption Ernst Cassirers II. Phänomenologie - Ontologie - Lebensphilosophie Annette Sell: Das Geheimnis des Anfangs. Die Aufnahme des Hegelschen Anfangsbegriffs in der Philosophie Martin Heideggers Hans-Ulrich Lessing: Hegel und Helmuth Plessner: Die verpaßte Rezeption Walter Jaeschke: Der Geist und sein Sein. Nicolai Hartmann auf Hegelschen Wegen Holger Glinka: Aus Phänomenologie mach Dialektik. Jean-Paul Sartres (...) Anverwandlung Hegels III. Marxistische Tradition und kritische Theorie Andreas Arndt: Lenin liest Hegel Daniel Althof: Das "Geklapper der Triplizität" - Adornos Hegelrezeption Christoph J. Bauer: Mit Hegel gegen den 'Positivismus' - mit Hegel zum 'Wesen des Menschen'. Herbert Marcuses Interpretation der Hegelschen Urteilslehre IV. Postmoderne und Gegenwart Karin de Boer: Differenz: zwischen Hegel und Derrida Robert B. Pippin: Brandoms Hegel. (shrink)

Albert Einstein's bold assertion of the form-invariance of the equation of a spherical light wave with respect to inertial frames of reference became, in the space of six years, the preferred foundation of his theory of relativity. Early on, however, Einstein's universal light-sphere invariance was challenged on epistemological grounds by Henri Poincaré, who promoted an alternative demonstration of the foundations of relativity theory based on the notion of a light-ellipsoid. Drawing in part on archival sources, this paper shows how an (...) informal, international group of physicists, mathematicians, and engineers, including Einstein, Paul Langevin, Poincaré, Hermann Minkowski, Ebenezer Cunningham, Harry Bateman, Otto Berg, Max Planck, Max Laue, A. A. Robb, and Ludwig Silberstein, employed figures of light during the formative years of relativity theory in their discovery of the salient features of the relativistic worldview. (shrink)

his paper presents a unified treatment of the propositional and first-order many-valued logics through the method of tableaux. It is shown that several important results on the proof theory and model theory of those logics can be obtained in a general way. We obtain, in this direction, abstract versions of the completeness theorem, model existence theorem (using a generalization of the classical analytic consistency properties), compactness theorem and Lowenheim-Skolem theorem. The paper is completely self-contained and includes examples of application to (...) particular many-valued formal systems. (shrink)

Huemer [33] argues against the killing of animals. I offer a critical libertarian analysis of his claim.

This new collection by Walter Laqueur, one of the most distinguished historians and political commentators of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, vividly brings to life his perspective on fifty years of political life. The essays in this volume deal with events ranging from more than seventy years ago to some that have not yet happened, but may in years to come. Laqueur divides his writings into five main areas: optimism in politics, the topic that unites this volume; Europe; the (...) Arab Spring; Israel and Jewish affairs; and recollections of the past. This volume addresses an increasingly important question: How much optimism do we need in politics? Some neuroscientists believe that many of our assessments rest on an excess of optimism amounting to a dangerous bias. Another school of cognitive scientists sees the main danger in being influenced too much by negative conclusions. Although these competing perspectives have been only rarely investigated, Laqueur argues that such psychological factors play a decisive role in the assessment of political trends, and they should. Laqueur also reminds readers that there is a connection between writing history and commenting on current affairs, but it is not remotely as close and simple as often thought. The idea that the historian is somehow better qualified than others to interpret the present, let alone predict the future, is certainly not borne out by the evidence. Some great historians have been good and reliable political commentators, others have been miserable failures. Laqueur definitely falls in the former camp, as these reflections attest. (shrink)

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have found many useful applications in recent years. Of particular interest have been those instances where their successes imitate human cognition and many consider artificial intelligences to offer a lens for understanding human intelligence. Here, we criticize the underlying conflation between the predictive and explanatory power of DNNs by examining the goals of modeling.

In this paper, I hope to show that by considering connections between Bertrand Russell’s early account of names and C.I. Lewis’s theory of propositions, one can see that propositions (as traditionally understood)—while perhaps not explicitly relying on Russellian names, derive a good deal of their plausibility from them. I argue, however, that the Russellian take on names implies Tractarian restrictions on what may be named that are inconsistent with the traditional theory of structured propositions. That is, (i) it is a (...) mistake to claim that any meaningful string of linguistic (or ‘lexical’) entities—whether concrete or abstract—can name facts; (ii) no putative structured abstracta may be named by anything whatever; and (iii) if propositions may not be named and are not necessary to accomplish such tasks as providing objects for attitudes or being bearers of truth-values, then they would likely have been expelled from philosophical ontologies except for the persistence of an alluring myth. (shrink)

Psychopathy involves impaired capacity for prudential and moral reasoning due to impaired capacity for empathy, remorse, and sensitivity to fear-inducing stimuli. Brain abnormalities and genetic polymorphisms associated with these traits appear to justify the claim that psychopaths cannot be morally responsible for their behavior. Yet psychopaths are capable of instrumental reasoning in achieving their goals, which suggests that they have some capacity to respond to moral reasons against performing harmful acts and refrain from performing them. The cognitive and affective impairment (...) of the psychopath justifies mitigated responsibility, but not excuse. (shrink)

What is the role of consciousness in nature? The science of consciousness has largely neglected the question through its emphasis on human experience. In this précis of A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness, I outline how we can move from a top-down approach that begins with investigations in humans to an evolutionary bottom-up approach that targets the adaptive origins of even the most minimal forms of subjective experience. I will also offer an introduction to the central thesis of (...) the book, i.e. the pathological complexity thesis, according to which consciousness evolved in order to enable animals to adaptively respond to their life history challenges. (shrink)

Many believe that it is morally wrong to give lower priority for a liver transplant to alcoholics with end-stage liver disease than to patients whose disease is not alcohol-related. Presumably, alcoholism is a disease that results from factors beyond one's control and therefore one cannot be causally or morally responsible for alcoholism or the liver failure that results from it. Moreover, giving lower priority to alcoholics unfairly singles them out for the moral vice of heavy drinking. I argue that the (...) etiology of alcoholism may involve enough control for the alcoholic to be responsible for his condition and accordingly have a weaker claim to receive a new liver than someone who acquires the disease through no fault of his own. In addition, I show why it is more plausible to reframe the question of priority in terms of control and responsibility rather than virtue and vice. Given that medical resources like livers are scarce, some people may justifiably be given lower priority than others in receiving these resources. (shrink)

The axiom of choice ensures precisely that, in ZFC, every set is projective: that is, a projective object in the category of sets. In constructive ZF (CZF) the existence of enough projective sets has been discussed as an additional axiom taken from the interpretation of CZF in Martin-Löf’s intuitionistic type theory. On the other hand, every non-empty set is injective in classical ZF, which argument fails to work in CZF. The aim of this paper is to shed some light on (...) the problem whether there are (enough) injective sets in CZF. We show that no two element set is injective unless the law of excluded middle is admitted for negated formulas, and that the axiom of power set is required for proving that “there are strongly enough injective sets”. The latter notion is abstracted from the singleton embedding into the power set, which ensures enough injectives both in every topos and in IZF. We further show that it is consistent with CZF to assume that the only injective sets are the singletons. In particular, assuming the consistency of CZF one cannot prove in CZF that there are enough injective sets. As a complement we revisit the duality between injective and projective sets from the point of view of intuitionistic type theory. (shrink)

In this radical reinterpretation of Aristotle's Metaphysics, Walter E. Wehrle demonstrates that developmental theories of Aristotle are based on a faulty assumption: that the fifth chapter of Categories is an early theory of metaphysics that Aristotle later abandoned.

Helmut Fleischer has distinguished three different approaches to history in the development of Marx's thinking: the "anthropological" , the "pragmatological" , and the "nomological" . However, these represent a less continuous and coherent development than Fleischer claims. The 1857 Introduction to the Grundrisse can be instanced as a fourth view, more focused than the others on historiography, and at variance with what Marx says elsewhere. The sequence and overlapping of these four views call into question both the interpretation of Marx's (...) development as smoothly continuous and the interpretation of his development as "ruptured" into "early" and "late.". (shrink)

The theme of Aesthetics in Present Future concerns the new chances the arts have and the deep changes they are undergoing, due to the new media, and the digital world in which we are growingly immersed. That this world is to be understood from an aesthetic point of view, become clear if we think of how much of what we produce, and observe and study is offered through images in particular and perceptual means in general.

We provide a survey of significant libertarian contributions to the discussion surrounding ethics and taxation. By significant contributions, we mean those which have exerted a strong influence both on libertarianism, popular and academic, and on political and ethical discourse more broadly. Our discussion centers on the work of three prominent libertarians: Robert Nozick, Ayn Rand, and Murray Rothbard. For each, we present his or her position concerning some ethical aspect of taxation and evaluate objections to it. Section 4.2 discusses Nozick’s (...) analogy between taxation of labor from earnings and forced labor and applies his argument against the fairness principle to fairness-based justifications of such taxation. Section 4.3 focuses on Rand’s view that compulsory taxation as such is unjust and considers her proposed scheme of voluntarily-funded minimal government. We argue that she failed to convincingly argue for either the feasibility or desirability of the latter. Section 4.4 addresses Rothbard’s similar position concerning the injustice of taxation per se and defends his view against possible justifications of that institution. (shrink)

The first results of my Phd-thesis regarding Michael Psellos’ practical philosophy, namely his approach on brotherly love and cosmopolitism. I will analyze passages from several texts and present first translations. Secondly I will put his arguments in context with the classical pagan, late antique and Christian ways of understanding virtue, cosmopolitism and brotherly love as well as work out his proper innovation. Michael Psellos is representative for the byzantine way of thought and its unique mixture that just begins to be (...) analyzed by modern scholars. (shrink)

A small, insignificant-looking intellectual with absurdly long legs, Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) was a veritable Hans Christian Andersen caricature of a man. A strange combination of witty cosmopolite and melancholy introvert, he spent years writing under a series of fantastical pseudonyms, lavishing all the splendor of his magnificent mind on a seldom-appreciative world. He had a tragic love affair with a young girl, was dominated by an unforgettable Old Testament father, fought a sensational literary duel with a popular satiric magazine, and (...) died in the midst of a violent quarrel with the state church for which he had once studied theology. Yet this iconoclast produced a number of brilliant books that have profoundly influenced modern thought. In this classic biography, the celebrated Kierkegaard translator Walter Lowrie presents a charming and warmly appreciative introduction to the life and work of the great Danish writer. Lowrie tells the story of Kierkegaard's emotionally turbulent life with a keen sense of drama and an acute understanding of how his life shaped his thought. The result is a wonderfully informative and entertaining portrait of one of the most important thinkers of the past two centuries. This edition also includes Lowrie's wry essay "How Kierkegaard Got into English," which tells the improbable story of how Lowrie became one of Kierkegaard's principal English translators despite not learning Danish until he was in his 60s, as well as a new introduction by Kierkegaard scholar Alastair Hannay. (shrink)

This original and accessible text is more than an introduction to comparative philosophy in the East and West. It is also a guide to 'philosophizing' as a thinking process. In addition to outlining the presuppositions of different traditions, it discusses their methods and techniques for reasoning in what the author calls four dimensions of 'philosophical space': object, subject, the situational and the aspective/perspective dimension.