Background: Falls in older adults are a major public health problem. White matter hyperintensities are highly prevalent in older adults and are a risk factor for falls. In the absence of a cure for WMHs, identifying potential strategies to counteract the risk of WMHs on falls are of great importance. Physical activity is a promising countermeasure to reduce both WMHs and falls risk. However, no study has yet investigated whether PA attenuates the association of WMHs with falls risk. We hypothesized (...) that PA moderates the association between WMHs and falls risk.Methods: Seventy-six community-dwelling older adults aged 70–80 years old were included in this cross-sectional study. We indexed PA using the Physical Activity Score for the Elderly Questionnaire. Falls risk was assessed using the Physiological Profile Assessment, and WMH volume was determined by an experienced radiologist on T2-weighted and PD-weighted MRI scans. We first examined the independent associations of WMH volume and PASE score with PPA. Subsequently, we examined whether PASE moderated the relationship between WMH volume and PPA. We plotted simple slopes to interpret the interaction effects. Age, sex, and Montreal Cognitive Assessment score were included as covariates in all models.Results: Participants had a mean age of 74 years and 54 were female. Forty-nine participants had a Fazekas score of 1, 19 had a score of 2, and 6 a score of 3. Both PASE and WMH volume were each independently associated with PPA score. The interaction model indicated that PASE score moderated the association between WMH volume and PPA, whereby higher PASE score attenuated the association between WMHs and falls risk.Conclusion: PA is an important moderator of falls risk. Importantly, older adults with WMH can reduce their risk of falls by increasing their PA. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist and Catholic Monks Talk about CelibacyThomas Ryan, CSPThe electronic sign at the Minneapolis–St. Paul airport was flashing "Orange Alert" as a dozen Buddhist monks arrived in their burnt orange robes from around the country for three days of dialogue on celibacy with a similar number of Catholic monastics come together from various monasteries at St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota. As he opened the October 26–29, 2006, (...) meeting, Rev. William Skudlarek, executive director of Monastic Interreligious Dialogue (MID), said, "You (Buddhists) have been at this for some five-to-seven hundred years longer than we have. We have something to learn."This was the second Monks in the West interreligious dialogue. The first took place in 2004 at the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas in northern California. On the Catholic side, the participants came from the Benedictine, Cistercian, and Camaldolese monasteries. On the Buddhist side, they came from the Theravada, Mahayana, and Tibetan traditions. Through the event, participants began the day with an hour of quiet sitting in meditation and joined the monastic community at St. John's for their rhythm of daily prayer.The first session dealt with theory, the "why" of celibacy. Buddhist participants explained that their teachings focus on seeing how suffering is created and cured. Attachments give rise to suffering, so advancement in the spiritual life requires letting go of one's attachments. Attachment to desires, among which are sexual desires, is a hindrance to spiritual progress. "Raging desire takes away choice, freedom," said Rev. Kusala Bhikshu, a Buddhist chaplain at UCLA, in his opening presentation. "The senses must be controlled in order to be free."Brother Gregory Perron from St. Procopius monastery in Indiana spoke of how monastic life demands a profound understanding and acceptance of solitude. "Celibacy is a tool," offered Perron, "a skillful means like intentional simplicity of life, by which our heart is burrowed out and the core of our being laid bare. By embracing it, the monk accepts the aloneness that characterizes every human being."In response to Buddhist reflections on the illusory nature of the body, Catholic participants pointed out Christianity's remarkably positive evaluation of the [End Page 143] body in the doctrines of the Incarnation, the bodily Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus, and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Both sides acknowledged balancing points of reference as well, such as, in Christianity, Paul's "Who will rescue me from this body of death?" (Rom 7:24). Though humankind ranks eighth from the bottom in Buddhism's thirty-two-realm cosmology, that level is the only one where spiritual growth can happen. Thus human form is in the end praised by the Buddha.In the second session, the participants moved from theory to practice. Rev. Jisho Perry from the Shasta Buddhist Abbey in California said that "the whole thrust of training is not to give in to desire that arises." He described the Buddhist method of accepting sexual feelings without either acting on them or repressing them, but just letting them pass through. "The right use of will is willingness, not willpower—the willingness to sit there and let that feeling pass through," he said.Fr. Skudlarek expressed appreciation for this Buddhist approach to transforming the sexual energy. "I never got a sense in our training of accepting the feeling with awareness and letting it pass without acting on it. You had to fight it! And the more you resisted, the stronger it got!"Rev. Heng Sure, who teaches at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, presented celibacy as the first step in a three-step process that goes from celibacy to stillness to insight. "It should not be seen just as a difficult adjunct to the spiritual path, but as essential to it," he said. The practice of meditation represents daily periods when the senses are stilled and not allowed to pursue sense objects. "Something happens to the energy in the stillness; the pressure goes away." In married life, he explained, spiritual practice is "partial and piecemeal," making celibacy a more effective means to move toward insight and the peace and happiness that flow from it. In the discussion, Benedictine Fr. Mark... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist and Catholic Monks Talk about CelibacyThomas Ryan, CSPThe electronic sign at the Minneapolis–St. Paul airport was flashing "Orange Alert" as a dozen Buddhist monks arrived in their burnt orange robes from around the country for three days of dialogue on celibacy with a similar number of Catholic monastics come together from various monasteries at St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota. As he opened the October 26–29, 2006, (...) meeting, Rev. William Skudlarek, executive director of Monastic Interreligious Dialogue (MID), said, "You (Buddhists) have been at this for some five-to-seven hundred years longer than we have. We have something to learn."This was the second Monks in the West interreligious dialogue. The first took place in 2004 at the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas in northern California. On the Catholic side, the participants came from the Benedictine, Cistercian, and Camaldolese monasteries. On the Buddhist side, they came from the Theravada, Mahayana, and Tibetan traditions. Through the event, participants began the day with an hour of quiet sitting in meditation and joined the monastic community at St. John's for their rhythm of daily prayer.The first session dealt with theory, the "why" of celibacy. Buddhist participants explained that their teachings focus on seeing how suffering is created and cured. Attachments give rise to suffering, so advancement in the spiritual life requires letting go of one's attachments. Attachment to desires, among which are sexual desires, is a hindrance to spiritual progress. "Raging desire takes away choice, freedom," said Rev. Kusala Bhikshu, a Buddhist chaplain at UCLA, in his opening presentation. "The senses must be controlled in order to be free."Brother Gregory Perron from St. Procopius monastery in Indiana spoke of how monastic life demands a profound understanding and acceptance of solitude. "Celibacy is a tool," offered Perron, "a skillful means like intentional simplicity of life, by which our heart is burrowed out and the core of our being laid bare. By embracing it, the monk accepts the aloneness that characterizes every human being."In response to Buddhist reflections on the illusory nature of the body, Catholic participants pointed out Christianity's remarkably positive evaluation of the [End Page 143] body in the doctrines of the Incarnation, the bodily Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus, and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Both sides acknowledged balancing points of reference as well, such as, in Christianity, Paul's "Who will rescue me from this body of death?" (Rom 7:24). Though humankind ranks eighth from the bottom in Buddhism's thirty-two-realm cosmology, that level is the only one where spiritual growth can happen. Thus human form is in the end praised by the Buddha.In the second session, the participants moved from theory to practice. Rev. Jisho Perry from the Shasta Buddhist Abbey in California said that "the whole thrust of training is not to give in to desire that arises." He described the Buddhist method of accepting sexual feelings without either acting on them or repressing them, but just letting them pass through. "The right use of will is willingness, not willpower—the willingness to sit there and let that feeling pass through," he said.Fr. Skudlarek expressed appreciation for this Buddhist approach to transforming the sexual energy. "I never got a sense in our training of accepting the feeling with awareness and letting it pass without acting on it. You had to fight it! And the more you resisted, the stronger it got!"Rev. Heng Sure, who teaches at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, presented celibacy as the first step in a three-step process that goes from celibacy to stillness to insight. "It should not be seen just as a difficult adjunct to the spiritual path, but as essential to it," he said. The practice of meditation represents daily periods when the senses are stilled and not allowed to pursue sense objects. "Something happens to the energy in the stillness; the pressure goes away." In married life, he explained, spiritual practice is "partial and piecemeal," making celibacy a more effective means to move toward insight and the peace and happiness that flow from it. In the discussion, Benedictine Fr. Mark... (shrink)

Todd Ryan - Berkeley et Les Philosophes du XVIIe Siecle: Perception et Scepticisme - Journal of the History of Philosophy 40:3 Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.3 402-404 Book Review Berkeley et Les Philosophes du XVIIe Siècle: Perception et Scepticisme Richard Glauser. Berkeley et Les Philosophes du XVIIe Siècle: Perception et Scepticisme. Sprimont: Mardaga, 1999. Pp. 352. Paper, NP. One of the central criticisms Berkeley makes of his materialist opponents is that they are inevitably committed to skepticism concerning (...) both the existence and nature of physical objects. This accusation is all the more striking for its uncompromising universality. Berkeley maintains that by virtue of their distinguishing between sensible ideas and the sensible qualities they represent, all materialist philosophers of the seventeenth century are either.. (shrink)

Dans la Partie X des Dialogues sur la religion naturelle, Philon, le sceptique, rejoint Demea, le défenseur de l’orthodoxie chrétienne, en dressant un catalogue effrayant des peines et des misères qui marquent la condition humaine. Cet article tend à démontrer que la source principale de leurs arguments est le débat à trois voix entre Bayle, Leibniz et William King sur la question de savoir si le bien ou le mal prédomine dans la vie humaine. De plus, nous suggérons que Philon, (...) intentionnellement et non sans malveillance, exagère la prévalence de la misère et de la souffrance afin de souligner la ressemblance entre l’orthodoxie chrétienne et les sceptiques religieux comme Bayle. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Berkeley au siècle des Lumières: Immatérialisme et scepticisme au XVIIIe siècleTodd RyanSébastien Charles. Berkeley au siècle des Lumières: Immatérialisme et scepticisme au XVIIIe siècle. Preface by Geneviève Brykman. Paris: Vrin, 2003. Pp. 368. Paper, € 28,00.The reception accorded to Berkeley's immaterialism by eighteenth-century philosophers constitutes one of the great puzzles of early modern philosophy. How is it possible that Berkeley, whose announced purpose in both the Principles and (...) Three Dialogues was to refute "Skeptics and Atheists," should quickly come to be seen as the foremost champion of Pyrrhonian skepticism, and indeed of atheistic solipsism? To be sure the caricature of philosophical opponents for polemical purposes is hardly limited to Berkeley. Yet from the [End Page 495] modern point of view Berkeley, the "good Bishop" who tirelessly insisted on the consonance of immaterialism with common sense, as well as the indispensable role of God as cause of our ideas of sense, seems a rather unlikely candidate for the near universal hostility—one might even say vilification—that was to be his lot.Forty years ago Harry M. Bracken attempted to unravel this paradox in his classic study The Early Reception of Berkeley's Immaterialism. Through a careful and philosophically informed examination of early accounts of Berkeley's immaterialism, Bracken argued that the distorted image of Berkeley that was to become the common currency of Enlightenment thinkers had its origin in the earliest accounts of Berkeley's work, most notably a pair of reviews in the Jesuit journal Mémoires de Trévoux, and a vituperative attack on "the atheism of the Immaterialists" by Father Tournemine. According to Bracken, the image of Berkeley as a radical disciple of Malebranche who pushed the Oratorian's philosophy to its logical conclusion by denying the existence of matter was promoted by the Jesuits as part of their theological and political struggle against Cartesianism. It was also in these early reviews that Berkeley's name was first associated with the legendary "egoist" philosopher who in addition to denying the existence of material substance, further claimed that his was the only created spirit in existence.Sébastien Charles's impressive new study extends Bracken's work by carefully documenting the dissemination of this distorted image of Berkeley throughout the intellectual world of eighteenth-century Europe. Charles's book is a comprehensive and impressively erudite survey of the use (and misuse) of Berkeley in the writings of the philosophes, as well as later thinkers, including the Idéologues and members of the Berlin Academy. Sadly, though perhaps not unexpectedly, the texts that Charles surveys afford little critical insight to interpreters of Berkeley. The misreadings of Berkeley are so egregious and so pervasive that the philosophy of the Principles and Three Dialogues is generally disfigured beyond recognition. Indeed, even to speak of a "misreading" of Berkeley is somewhat misleading, since many of those who took up the task of refuting immaterialism seem not to have read him at all.However, Charles's aim is much less to shed interpretive light on Berkeley's philosophy than to rectify the long-standing image of the eighteenth century as an era of unbridled epistemological optimism. Emphasizing the confrontations with radical skepticism to be found in the writings of thinkers as diverse as Rousseau and Diderot, La Mettrie and Destutt de Tracy, Charles argues that far from ignoring the threat of radical skepticism, materialists and dualists, deists and Christians made common cause in their struggle against what they took to be Berkeley's alleged "egoism." Indeed, for Charles, "the question of solipsism was the central problem for the metaphysics of the Enlightenment."The ubiquity of references to Berkeley among these thinkers certainly argues in favor of Charles's thesis. Yet the attempt to survey such a large number of authors frequently necessitates an abbreviated treatment that renders difficult the task of assessing the relative importance of the confrontation with radical skepticism in any individual thinker's system. Further, the very weakness and formulaic character of the attempted refutations might reasonably raise suspicions as to whether the threat of solipsism was taken as seriously as Charles maintains... (shrink)

Le philosophe Frane Petriċ a consacré, surtout dans ses æuvres principales Discussiones peripateticae et Nova de universis philosophia une grande partie de ses recherches sur l`ontologie et la cosmologie à une étude originale de la lumière et du temps, deux concepts ayant un rôle important dans l`ouvrage d`Einstein « Electrodynamique des corps en mouvement ». La confrontation de ces concepts des deux penseurs fait apparaître leur affinité dans chacun des systèmes. Pour Patricius, de même que pour Einstein, la lumière est (...) une fonction unique, constante dans l`univers. Dans son analyse du temps et des concepts relevant du temps comme la durée, Patricius a développé une structure conceptuelle suffisamment dynamique pour que soit révélée sa consistance avec l`analyse du temps et de la simultanéité d`Einstein. (shrink)

Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein had an enormous influence on twentieth-century philosophy even though only one of his works, the famous Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, was published in his lifetime. Beyond this publication the impact of his thought was mainly conveyed to a small circle of students through his lectures at Cambridge University. Fortunately, many of his ideas have survived in both the dictations that were subsequently published, and the notes taken by his students, among them Alice Ambrose and the late Margaret Macdonald, (...) from 1932 to 1935. These notes, now edited by Professor Ambrose, are here published, and they shed much light on Wittgenstein's philosophical development. Among the topics considered are the meaning of a word and its relation to common usage, rules of grammar and their relation to fact, the grammar of first person statements, language games, and the nature of philosophy. This volume is indispensable to any serious discussion of Wittgenstein's work. (shrink)

In his postapocalyptic novel, Those Who Remain, G. Michael Hopf (2016) makes an important observation about the effect crises can have on human psychology by noting that "hard times create strong [humans]" (loc. 200). While the catastrophic effects of the recent COVID-19 outbreak are incontestable, there are arguments to be made that the situation itself could be materia prima of a more grounded, and authentic generation of humanity, at least in theory. In this article I draw on Heidegger's early, implicit (...) ethic of finitude as well as his later work surrounding the nature of technology, and place them into dialogue with a global milieu contextualized by worldwide pandemic. I approach this discussion from two different angles: in the first part, I explicate the ethic of finitude, and use it as a framework to describe the observable behavior of communities worldwide in order to better understand how global crises impact the psychical welfare of individual human beings. In the second part, I apply lessons given to us by the later Heidegger, specifically those oriented around the movement away from calculative thinking, in an effort to define a loose, albeit fundamentally ennobling prescriptive aimed at easing the existential strain of the situation we have found ourselves in. *This is a pre-print of an article published in Human Arenas. The final authenticated version is available at DOI: 10.1007/s42087-020-00142-6. (shrink)

The focus of this chapter is on some of the ethical and philosophical issues at the intersection of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) applications in the health care sector and medical assistance in dying (e.g. physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia), including: (1) Is there a role for robotic systems/AI to play in the orchestration or delivery of assisted dying?; (2) Can the use of robotic systems/AI make the orchestration of assisted dying more ethical?; and (3) What insights can be generated in (...) the ethical debate on physician assisted suicide and euthanasia from considering the prospect of robotic systems/AI assisting with the provision of or providing assistance in dying? The prospect of including robotic systems/AI in the context of assisted dying provides opportunity to revisit longstanding philosophical and ethical issues under new light. Indeed, reflecting on these questions may invigorate debate, for example in reconsidering the de-medicalization of assisted dying, reconsidering whether assisted dying is within the proper scope of medicine, and reconsidering which normative approach to the ethics of assisted dying is the most appropriate. (shrink)

This volume concerns the status and ambitions of metaphysics as a discipline.

Étude de l'influence sur les commentateurs du Haut Moyen Âge des ouvrages d'Ambroise sur la Genèse. Leur impact fut profond, mais d'un autre côté il semble qu'ils n'étaient pas amplement lus. Cette impression est confirmée par la tradition manuscrite. Claude de Turin découvrit certaines des sources des commentaires d'Isidore sur la Genèse, au nombre desquelles figure Ambroise.

AI and people do not compete on a level-playing field. Self-driving vehicles may be safer than human drivers, but laws often penalize such technology. People may provide superior customer service, but businesses are automating to reduce their taxes. AI may innovate more effectively, but an antiquated legal framework constrains inventive AI. In The Reasonable Robot, Ryan Abbott argues that the law should not discriminate between AI and human behavior and proposes a new legal principle that will ultimately improve human (...) well-being. This work should be read by anyone interested in the rapidly evolving relationship between AI and the law. (shrink)

This paper is about how best to understand the notion of ‘public wrongs’ in the longstanding idea that crimes are public wrongs. By contrasting criminal law with the civil laws of torts and contracts, it argues that ‘public wrongs’ should not be understood merely as wrongs that properly concern the public, but more specifically as those which the state, as the public, ought to punish. It then briefly considers the implications that this has on criminalization.

This paper critically appraises the arguments that have been offered for what can be called ‘the expressive function of punishment’. According to this view, what distinguishes punishment from other kinds of non-punitive hard treatment is that punishment conveys a censorial/reprobative message about what the punished has done, and that this expressive function should therefore be accepted as part of the nature and definition of punishment. Against this view, this papers argues that the standard account of punishment, according to which punishment (...) is a kind of hard treatment that is imposed on an alleged offender in response to her alleged wrongdoing, can already properly account for punishment and distinguish it from other kinds of hard treatment when it is properly clarified and understood. Thus there is no need to accept the expressive function of punishment in addition to the standard account when it comes to the nature and definition of punishment. (shrink)

Very diverse societies pose real problems for Rawlsian models of public reason. This is for two reasons: first, public reason is unable accommodate diverse perspectives in determining a regulative ideal. Second, regulative ideals are unable to respond to social change. While models based on public reason focus on the justification of principles, this book suggests that we need to orient our normative theories more toward discovery and experimentation. The book develops a unique approach to social contract theory that focuses on (...) diverse perspectives. It offers a new moral stance that author Ryan Muldoon calls, "The View From Everywhere," which allows for substantive, fundamental moral disagreement. This stance is used to develop a bargaining model in which agents can cooperate despite seeing different perspectives. Rather than arguing for an ideal contract or particular principles of justice, Muldoon outlines a procedure for iterated revisions to the rules of a social contract. It expands Mill's conception of experiments in living to help form a foundational principle for social contract theory. By embracing this kind of experimentation, we move away from a conception of justice as an end state, and toward a conception of justice as a trajectory. (shrink)

Most accounts of cognitive scaffolding focus on ways that external structure can support or augment an agent’s cognitive capacities. We call cases where the interests of the user are served benign scaffolding and argue for the possibility and reality of hostile scaffolding. This is scaffolding which depends on the same capacities of an agent to make cognitive use of external structure as in benign cases, but that undermines or exploits the user while serving the interests of another agent. We develop (...) criteria for scaffolding being hostile and show by reference to examples including the design features of electronic gambling machines and casino management systems that hostile scaffolding exists and can be highly effective. In cases where the scaffolding is deep and permits the offloading of significant cognitive work, hostile scaffolding exploitatively manipulates cognitive processing itself. Given the extent of human reliance on scaffolding this is an important and neglected vulnerability. [This is an updated version of the paper, added in February 2023.]. (shrink)

When are morally good actions beautiful, when indeed they are? In this paper, it is argued that morally good actions are beautiful when they appear to express the deep or true self, and in turn tend to give rise to an emotion which is characterised by feelings of being moved, unity, inspiration, and meaningfulness, inter alia. In advancing the case for this claim, it is revealed that there are additional sources of well-formedness in play in the context of moral beauty (...) in addition to those that have tended to be focused on to date: one which is connected to imagining a deep location for the goodness concerned, and another which is connected to imagining that the goodness stems from capacities which are essential to the person. (shrink)

In this article, robust evidence is provided showing that an individual’s moral character can contribute to the aesthetic quality of their appearance, as well as being beautiful or ugly itself. It is argued that this evidence supports two main conclusions. First, moral beauty and ugliness reside on the inside, and beauty and ugliness are not perception-dependent as a result; and, second, aesthetic perception is affected by moral information, and thus moral beauty and ugliness are on the outside as well.

Ryan Wasserman explores a range of fascinating puzzles raised by the possibility of time travel, with entertaining examples from physics, science fiction, and popular culture, and he draws out their implications for our understanding of time, tense, freedom, fatalism, causation, counterfactuals, laws of nature, persistence, change, and mereology.

This mixed methods study examines how college students’ perceptions and experiences affect their understanding of academic integrity. Using qualitative and quantitative responses from the Personal and Social Responsibility Institutional Inventory, both quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate that while campuses may see a reduction in overall levels of cheating when punitive academic integrity policies are present, students may develop higher levels of personal and academic integrity through the use of more holistic and community-focused practices.

In sub-Saharan Africa, a nurse gives iron pills as placebos to terminally ill patients. She tells them, acting in what she believes is in their best interests, “these will make you feel better”. The patients believe it will help their AIDS and their well-being improves. Do the motive and the patient’s positive outcome in well-being make the deceit justifiable when other issues such as consent, autonomy and potential consequences regarding the patient and the wider community are considered? Is there a (...) difference between lying and non-lying deception when the end result is the same? The patients feel better, but at what cost if the deceit was found out? It will be argued that although the actions of the nurse are understandable and to some extent defensible, they are unethical. It is not ethically acceptable to take away the patient’s autonomy and risk the health of the community even though the risk of deceit being discovered is a small one. (shrink)