In Posterior Analytics II 16-17, Aristotle seems to claim that there cannot be more than one explanans of the same scientific explanandum. However, this seems to be true only for “primary-universal” demonstrations, in which the major term belongs to the minor “in itself” and the middle term is coextensive with the extremes. If so, several explananda we would like to admit as truly scientific would be out of the scope of an Aristotelian science. The secondary literature has identified a (...) second problem in II 16-17: the middle term of a demonstration is sometimes taken as the definition of the minor term (the subject), other times as the definition (or the causal part of the definition) of the major (the demonstrable attribute). I shall argue that Aristotle’s solution to the first problem involves showing that certain problematic attributes, which appear to admit more than one explanation, actually fall into the privileged scenario of primary-universal demonstrations. In addition, his solution suggests a conciliatory way-out to our second problem (or so I shall argue): the existence of an attribute as a definable unity depends on its subject having the essence it has, which suggests that both the essence of subjects and the essence of demonstrable attributes can play explanatory roles in demonstrations. (shrink)

There is agreement neither concerning the point that is being made in Posterior analytics 96b15–25 nor the issue Aristotle intends to address. There are two major lines of interpretation of this passage. According to one, sketched by Themistius and developed by Philoponus and Eustratius, Aristotle is primarily concerned with determining the definitions of the infimae species that fall under a certain genus. They understand Aristotle as arguing that this requires collating definitional predictions, seeing which are common to which species. (...) Pacius, on the other hand, takes Aristotle to be saying that a genus is studied scientifically through first determining the infimae species that fall under that genus. This interpretation attributes to Aristotle a distinction between primary and derivative subjects. I argue for Pacius’s interpretation, defending it against Barnes’s objections.Author Keywords: Demonstration; Definition; Aristotle; Species; Principles. (shrink)

In Posterior Analytics II 19 Aristotle compares the way in which sense perception gives rise to knowledge with the way in which one soldier’s ceasing his flight from the enemy leads other soldiers to do the same. Although the simile seems intended to characterize knowledge as the end result of an accumulative process, its concluding phrase ‘until it comes to the archê’ has no clear meaning. I argue that the phrase can be taken to refer not to the action (...) of soldiers but to the process in which repeated perception of the same thing gives rise to the formation of the universal. At 100a7-8 Aristotle speaks of ‘the one beside the many, in all of them the same, the starting point (archê) of art and scientific knowledge’. The mysterious phrase is not part of the simile but part of Aristotle’s description of the process the simile is intended to illuminate. (shrink)

Basic emotions such as happiness, sadness, and anger are universal, regardless of the human species, and are governed by specific brain regions. A recent report revealed that mentalizing, which is the ability to estimate other individuals’ emotional states via facial expressions, can be preserved with the help of awake surgery. However, it is still questionable whether we can maintain the ability to understand others’ emotions by preserving the positive mapping sites of intraoperative assessment. Here, we demonstrated the cortical regions related (...) to basic emotions via awake surgery for patients with frontal glioma and investigated the usefulness of functional mapping in preserving basic emotion. Of the 56 consecutive patients with right cerebral hemispheric glioma who underwent awake surgery at our hospital, intraoperative assessment of basic emotion could be successfully performed in 22 patients with frontal glioma and were included in our study. During surgery, positive responses were found in 18 points in 12 patients. Of these, 15 points from 11 patients were found at the cortical level, mainly the premotor and posterior part of the prefrontal cortices. Then, we focused on cortical 15 positive mappings with 40 stimulations and investigated the types of emotions that showed errors by every stimulation. There was no specific rule for the region-emotional type, which was beyond our expectations. In the postoperative acute phase, the test score of basic emotion declined in nine patients, and of these, it decreased under the cut-off value in three patients. Although the total score declined significantly just after surgery, it recovered within 3 months postoperatively. Our study revealed that through direct electrical stimulation, the premotor and posterior parts of the prefrontal cortices are related to various kinds of basic emotion, but not a single one. When the region with a positive mapping site is preserved during operation, basic emotion function might be maintained although it declines transiently after surgery. (shrink)

This article examines the nature of Robert Grosseteste's commentary on Aristotle's Posterior Analytics with particular reference to his “conclusions” . It is argued that the simple demonstrative appearance of the commentary, which is very much the result of the 64 conclusions, is in part an illusion. Thus, the exposition in the commentary is not simply based on the strict principles of the Posterior Analytics and on the proof-procedures of Euclidean geometry; rather the commentary is a complicated mixture of (...) different elements of twelfth-century texts and the scholarship of Grosseteste's day. (shrink)

The subset realization view proposes to solve the causal exclusion problem of non‐reductive mental instances by taking the mental instance as a part of its physical realizer. Many philosophers have argued that such a part‐whole relation will undermine physicalist realization because parts are ontologically prior to their wholes and the subset view is thus flawed. I argue that the relation that the subset view should propose is different from the ordinary part‐whole relation. What they should propose is another kind (...) of part‐whole relation under which parts are posterior to wholes. So, the subset view is not flawed in the aforementioned aspect. But discussion of the new part‐whole relation reveals that the subset view is in lack of a crucial argument against the exclusion reasoning, thus cannot solve the exclusion problem. Adopting the principle of causal proportionality (a route subset realizationists sometimes take) will not help the subset view either. So, my conclusion is, the subset view is yet to find a way to solve the exclusion problem. (shrink)

Functional imaging studies of neurologically intact adults have demonstrated that the right posterior cerebellum is activated during verb generation, semantic processing, sentence processing, and verbal fluency. Studies of patients with cerebellar damage converge to show that the cerebellum supports sentence processing and verbal fluency. However, to date there are no patient studies that investigated the specific importance of the right posterior cerebellum in language processing, because: case studies presented patients with lesions affecting the anterior cerebellum, and group studies (...) combined patients with lesions to different cerebellar regions, without specifically reporting the effects of right posterior cerebellar damage. Here we investigated whether damage to the right posterior cerebellum is critical for sentence processing and verbal fluency in four patients with focal stroke damage to different parts of the right posterior cerebellum. We examined detailed lesion location by going beyond common anatomical definitions of cerebellar anatomy, and employed a recently proposed functional parcellation of the cerebellum. All four patients experienced language difficulties that persisted for at least a month after stroke but three performed in the normal range within a year. In contrast, one patient with more damage to lobule IX than the other patients had profound long-lasting impairments in the comprehension and repetition of sentences, and the production of spoken sentences during picture description. Spoken and written word comprehension and visual recognition memory were also impaired, however, verbal fluency was within the normal range, together with object naming, visual perception and verbal short-term memory. This is the first study to show that focal damage to the right posterior cerebellum leads to language difficulties after stroke; and that processing impairments persisted in the case with most damage to lobule IX. We discuss these results in relation to current theories of cerebellar contribution to language processing. Overall, our study highlights the need for longitudinal studies of language function in patients with focal damage to different cerebellar regions, with functional imaging to understand the mechanisms that support recovery. (shrink)

The vertebrate Cdx genes (Cdx1 Cdx2 and Cdx4 in the mouse) encode homeodomain transcription factors related to the Drosophila caudal gene. The vertebrate Cdx gene products have been implicated in the development of the posterior embryo. In particular, loss‐ and gain‐of‐function experiments suggest that Cdx members are direct regulators of Hox genes and likely impart posterior information, in part, through this mechanism. Several signaling molecules, notably retinoic acid (RA*) and members of the Wnt (wingless) and fibroblast growth factor (...) (FGF) families, are also implicated in patterning of the posterior vertebrate embryo. Interestingly, recent work indicates that members of the Cdx family are targets of Wnt, RA and FGF signaling, suggesting that Cdx factors act to convey the activity of these signaling molecules to Hox genes. This article will briefly review Cdx expression and function, with particular emphasis on vertebrate model systems. BioEssays 25:971–980, 2003. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

We challenge Ruchkin et al.'s claim in reducing short-term memory (STM) to the active part of long-term memory (LTM), by showing that their data cannot rule out the possibility that activation of posterior brain regions could also reflect the contribution of a verbal STM buffer.

ABSTRACT Wilfrid Sellars argued that Kant’s account of the conceptual structures involved in experience can be given a linguistic turn so as to provide an analytic account of the resources a language must have in order to be the bearer of empirical knowledge. In this paper I examine the methodological aspects of Kant’s transcendental philosophy that Sellars took to be fundamental to influential themes in his own philosophy. My first aim here is to clarify and argue for the plausibility of (...) what I claim is Sellars’ interpretation of Kant’s ‘analytic’ transcendental method in the first Critique, based ultimately on non-trivial analytic truths concerning the concept of an object of our possible experience. Kant’s ‘transcendental proofs’ thereby avoid a certain methodological trilemma confronting the candidate premises of any such proof, taken from Sellars’ 1970s undergraduate exam question on Kant. In part II of the essay I conclude by highlighting in general terms how Kant’s method, as interpreted in the analytic manner explained in part I, was adapted by Sellars to produce some of the more influential aspects of his own philosophy, expressed in terms of what he contends is their sustainable reformulation in light of the so-called linguistic turn in twentieth-century philosophy. (shrink)

Aristotle in Physics I,1 says some strange-sounding things about how we come to know wholes and parts, universals and particulars. In explicating these, Simplicius distinguishes an initial rough cognition of a thing as a whole, an intermediate “cognition according to the definition and through the elements,” and a final cognition of how the thing's many elements are united: only this last is πιστήμη. Simplicius refers to the Theaetetus for the point about what is needed for πιστήμη and the ways (...) that cognition according to the definition and through the elements falls short. By unpacking this reference I try to reconstruct Simplicius' reading of “Socrates' Dream,” its place in the Theaetetus ' larger argument, and its harmony with other Platonic and Aristotelian texts. But this reconstruction depends on undoing some catastrophic emendations in Diels's text of Simplicius. Diels's emendations arise from his assumptions about definitions and elements, in Socrates' Dream and elsewhere, and rethinking the Simplicius passage may help us rethink those assumptions. (shrink)

A genus contains its species, and the species implies its genus. Does it mean that the species is a part of the genus and also the genus is a part of the species? But how can they be part of each other without being identical? In the context of kinds, in what sense is ‘part’ applicable? We argue that for Aristotle, a species and its genus are mutual parts, standing in different parthood relations to each other, viz. the genus (...) is a prior part of its species, while the species is a posterior part of its genus. Furthermore, we show that prior and posterior parthood concerning the genus and its species is grounded on the relations between matter and form in a matter-form compound. (shrink)

Según Danièle Moyal-Sharrock y Avrum Stroll, hay razones de peso para hablar de un “tercer Wittgenstein” cuyo corpus estaría formado por todas las obras que el filósofo vienés escribió con posterioridad a 1946, incluida la segunda parte de sus Investigaciones filosóficas. Entre las principales razones se encuentran el desarrollo de una nueva forma de fundamentalismo en la que el fundamento pertenece a una categoría distinta de lo fundamentado; la gramaticalización de la experiencia; la disolución del problema mente-cuerpo y la desmitificación (...) del escepticismo. En este artículo no sólo analizo dichos argumentos, sino que también parto de las principales diferencias entre los que se han venido llamando “primer” y “segundo Wittgenstein” para concluir que no tiene sentido hablar de un “tercer Wittgenstein”. (shrink)

Este artículo revisa los problemas relacionados con la distinción actual entre Ética pública y Ética privada; una distinción basada en una tesis reduccionista, según la cual los políticos y empleados públicos son los únicos sujetos agentes en los asuntos de Ética pública. El autor destaca especialmente que la noción actual de Ética Pública cae en el error de aislar en el espacio privado, cuestiones relacionadas con la Ética pública. Un concepto tan limitado, es un gran error que ha servido para (...) ocultar del foco de la Ética Pública una gran cantidad de asuntos vitales que van más allá del campo de interrelación público-privado. Los partidos políticos, los sindicatos, los contribuyentes, los contratistas, los medios de comunicación, las personas subsidiadas, los ciudadanos en general; todos ellos tienen un papel muy importante en la esfera pública, y por lo tanto son agentes en temas de Ética Pública. Por estas razones, el autor refuta la visión estrecha del concepto actual de Ética Pública y cree imprescindible repensarlo, objetiva y subjetivamente. Por otra parte, este estudio examina el nuevo panorama de los "códigos de ética" en España, con una mirada crítica cuando son sólo normas legales acompañadas de sanciones y no verdaderos “códigos de ética”. Estos principios, llamados "principios éticos", deberían ser deberes que los funcionarios públicos poseen por sí mismos y no por imposición. Por el contrario, en el caso que examinamos, esos principios son claramente deberes establecidos en la Constitución Española de 1978 y representan las obligaciones más primarias, superlativas y básicas de un empleado público. En un estado de duda moral, los códigos podrían ser útiles para proporcionar consejo, dando una regla para resolver el dilema ético. El autor reconoce que, en determinadas circunstancias, en tales casos, los códigos de ética pueden ayudar a los servidores públicos como guía en sus decisiones. Sin embargo, la obligación de respetar y garantizar el respeto de los mandatos constitucionales y la prohibición de la discriminación contra las personas por motivos de raza, sexo, religión.., u otras circunstancias, no plantean cuestiones morales. Por esa razón, el autor considera que el Estatuto Básico del Empleado Público en España comete un error al establecer como un principio ético, el deber de cumplir con la Constitución; el más alto deber legal que uno puede imaginar en el caso de los servidores públicos. (shrink)

Dividido em duas partes o artigo tem o objetivo de determinar qual a função das sensações no processo de conhecimento prescrito por Heráclito. Essa primeira parte é dedicada ao uso direto dos sentidos, aquele sem nenhum tipo de mediação entre a coisa percebida e quem a percebe. Após o exame de fragmentos abordando principalmente os sentidos do olfato, paladar e tato são encontrados os requisitos para obtenção de uma sensação direta apropriada. Tudo começa na coisa percebida que para ser reconhecida (...) propriamente dever ser percebida por um órgão apropriado. Esta apropriação é medida pela capacidade do órgão de distinguir a coisa segundo sua própria natureza. A sensação direta seria responsável pela etapa distintiva no processo de conhecimento que permitiria a identificação de opostos necessária à sua posterior união. O animal em que o órgão se encontra também é relevante no processo pois há indicações de que as sensações são geradas de acordo com a necessidade de cada espécie, um certo tipo de teleologia. Neste ponto o caso dos humanos torna-se particular pois a capacidade de alguma teoria da mente lhes permite identificar as diferenças percebidas em diferentes animais. Assim é introduzido um modo de indiretividade na sensação, ver o que os outros estão sentindo. Isto leva à segunda parte do artigo onde as sensações indiretas são examinadas. (shrink)