Clinical responses to dopamine replacement therapy for individuals with Parkinson’s disease are often difficult to predict. We characterized changes in MDS-UPDRS motor factor scores resulting from a short-duration L-Dopa response, and investigated how the inter-subject clinical differences could be predicted from motor cortical magnetoencephalography. MDS-UPDRS motor factor scores and resting-state MEG recordings were collected during SDR from twenty individuals with a PD diagnosis. We used a novel subject-specific strategy based on linear support vector machines to quantify motor cortical oscillatory frequency (...) profiles that best predicted medication state. Motor cortical profiles differed substantially across individuals and showed consistency across multiple data folds. There was a linear relationship between classification accuracy and SDR of lower limb bradykinesia, although this relationship did not persist after multiple comparison correction, suggesting that combinations of spectral power features alone are insufficient to predict clinical state. Factor score analysis of therapeutic response and novel subject-specific machine learning approaches based on subject-specific neuroimaging provide tools to predict outcomes of therapies for PD. (shrink)

The 23 papers that were prepared for a 1991 symposium that was cancelled beneath the weight of public and professional protests at some of the speakers invited, particularly Peter Singer. They analyze the application of theoretical considerations arising from philosophical reflection to particular concrete cases and situations of moral conflict in such fields as the environment, biology and medicine, business and professions, politics, law, and society. Among the topics are a philosophical critique of legal rights for natural objects, comparing the (...) value of human and nonhuman life, business ethics as a goal-rights system, liberal society and planned morality, and moral philosophy and its function. No subject index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

Symposium on Christopher Bennet's The Apology Ritual. A Philosophical Theory of Punishment [Cambridge University Press, 2008].

Bernard MacDougall Loomer (1912–1985) is well known for his influence on process theology, or as he preferred, “process-relational” theology. Less well known is his interpretation of the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) and its influence in the promotion of that philosophy not only among his students but also more recently beyond that circle. He presents his own views as one who has made Whitehead’s his own. Yet he is not uncritical of Whitehead. He has articulated an empirical naturalism in (...) Whiteheadian terms that is theistic and controversial by that fact. The analysis of his interpretation of Whitehead allows us to probe his theistic naturalism and to identify new possibilities in the .. (shrink)

The advances in treatment of HIV and the introduction of polymerase chain reaction assay for the virus now make it acceptable for HIV discordant couples where the male partner is seropositive to attempt to conceive through artificial insemination by husband (AIH) or via in vitro fertilisation. With undetectable viral load and washed sperm, there is minimal risk of transmission of HIV to the female partner, children, other patients, or staff. We describe the development of a programme of AIH for HIV (...) discordant couples and the reasoning behind offering such a programme. (shrink)

Autism spectrum disorder is characterized by atypical perception, including processing that is biased toward local details rather than global configurations. This bias may impact on memory. The present study examined the effect of this perception on both implicit and explicit memory in conditions that promote either local or global processing. The first experiment consisted of an object identification priming task using two distinct encoding conditions: one favoring local processing and the other favoring global processing of drawings. The second experiment focused (...) on episodic memory with two different cartoon recognition tasks that favored either local or a global processing. In addition, all the participants underwent a general clinical cognitive assessment aimed at documenting their cognitive profile and enabling correlational analyses with experimental memory tasks. Seventeen participants with ASD and 17 typically developing controls aged from 10 to 16 years participated to the first experiment and 13 ASD matched with 13 TD participants were included for the second experiment. Experiment 1 confirmed the preservation of priming effects in ASD but, unlike the Comparison group, the ASD group did not increase his performance as controls after a globally oriented processing. Experiment 2 revealed that local processing led to difficulties in discriminating lures from targets in a recognition task when both lures and targets shared common details. The correlation analysis revealed that these difficulties were associated with processing speed and inhibition. These preliminary results suggest that natural perceptual processes oriented toward local information in ASD may impact upon their implicit memory by preventing globally oriented processing in time-limited conditions and induce confusion between explicit memories that share common details. (shrink)

Bernard Bolzano's most fruitful invention was his method of variation. He used it in defining such fundamental logical concepts as logical consequence, analyticity and probability. The following three puzzles concerning this method of variation seem particularly worth considering, (i) How can we define the range of variation of an idea or the categorial conformity of two ideas without already using the concept of variation? This question was raised by Mark Siebel in his M. A. thesis, (ii) Why must we define (...) analyticity by means of (simultaneous or successive) variation of several ideas rather than by means of replacing a single idea? This problem is suggested by an example due to W.V.O. Quine, John R. Myhill and Benson Mates, (iii) Must every 'there is...' sentence be synthetic for Bolzano, as his pupil Franz Příhonský claims in his booklet Neuer Anti-Kant, or can a 'there is...' sentence be logically analytic? (shrink)

Bernard Bolzano's most fruitful invention was his method of variation. He used it in defining such fundamental logical concepts as logical consequence, analyticity and probability. The following three puzzles concerning this method of variation seem particularly worth considering, (i) How can we define the range of variation of an idea or the categorial conformity of two ideas without already using the concept of variation? This question was raised by Mark Siebel in his M. A. thesis, (ii) Why must we define (...) analyticity by means of (simultaneous or successive) variation of several ideas rather than by means of replacing a single idea? This problem is suggested by an example due to W.V.O. Quine, John R. Myhill and Benson Mates, (iii) Must every 'there is...' sentence be synthetic for Bolzano, as his pupil Franz Příhonský claims in his booklet Neuer Anti-Kant, or can a 'there is...' sentence be logically analytic? (shrink)

"Ces souvenirs ne sont pas venus selon un ordre chronologique comme le sont habituellement les Mémoires. Ils sont venus à ma rencontre selon l'inspiration, les circonstances. S'interpellant les uns les autres, certains en ont fait émerger d'autres de l'oubli. Ils témoignent que j'ai pu admirer inconditionnellement des hommes ou femmes qui furent à la fois mes héros et mes amis. Ils témoignent des dérives et des dégradations, mais aussi des grandeurs et des noblesses que les violents remous de l'Histoire ont (...) entraînées chez tant de proches. Ils témoignent des illuminations qui m'ont révélé mes vérités, de mes émotions, de mes ferveurs, de mes douleurs, de mes bonheurs. Ils témoignent que je suis devenu tout ce que j'ai rencontré. Ils témoignent que le fils unique, orphelin de mère que j'étais, a trouvé dans sa vie des frères et des soeurs. Ils témoignent de mes résistances : sous l'Occupation, puis au cours des guerres d'Algérie, de Yougoslavie, du Moyen-Orient, et contre la montée de deux barbaries, l'une venue du fond des âges, de la haine, du mépris, du fanatisme, l'autre froide, voire glacée, du calcul et du profit, toutes deux désormais sans freins. Ces souvenirs témoignent enfin d'une extrême diversité de curiosités et d'intérêts, mais aussi d'une obsession essentielle, celle qu'exprimait Kant et qui n'a cessé de m'animer : Que puis-je savoir? Que puis-je croire? Que puis-je espérer? Inséparable de la triple question : qu'est-ce que l'homme, la vie, l'univers? Cette interrogation, je me suis donné le droit de la poursuivre toute ma vie."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Note.

Aristotle formulates in _Metaphysics_ M.9 an aporia about Forms, according to which, those who introduce Forms make them universal substances and, at the same time, separate entities and, hence, particulars. But, he claims, it is not possible that both attributes, being a universal and being a particular, inhere in the same thing. The interpretation that scholars have offered of this objection is external, in that they hold that it derives from Aristotle’s own conception of separation: only what is particular is (...) separate. Here I defend an internal interpretation which claims that the objection derives from an assumption about the explanatory role of Forms that Aristotle attributes to the Platonists. (shrink)

Aristotle formulates in _Metaphysics_ M.9 an aporia about Forms, according to which, those who introduce Forms make them universal substances and, at the same time, separate entities and, hence, particulars. But, he claims, it is not possible that both attributes, being a universal and being a particular, inhere in the same thing. The interpretation that scholars have offered of this objection is external, in that they hold that it derives from Aristotle’s own conception of separation: only what is particular is (...) separate. Here I defend an internal interpretation which claims that the objection derives from an assumption about the explanatory role of Forms that Aristotle attributes to the Platonists. (shrink)

En Metafísica M.2 Aristóteles desarrolla diversas objeciones en contra de la introducción platónica de objetos matemáticos como substancias no-sensibles, separadas de las sensibles. Su primera objeción es de carácter doble. En primer lugar, Aristóteles argumenta que la postulación de objetos geométricos separados produce una acumulación absurda. En segundo lugar, sugiere que este argumento geométrico se puede extender al caso de las unidades y los números. En este trabajo me ocupo de explicar esta extensión aritmética. Los especialistas han interpretado esta extensión (...) de una manera que denomino “maximalista”. Aquí defiendo una interpretación distinta, “minimalista”. (shrink)