Primary headaches are highly prevalent and represent a major cause of disability in young adults. Neurofeedback is increasingly used in the treatment of chronic pain; however, there are few studies investigating its efficacy in patients with headaches. We report the results of a cross-over sham-controlled study on the efficacy of neurofeedback in the prophylactic treatment of tension-type headache. Participants received ten sessions of infra-low frequency electroencephalographic neurofeedback and ten sessions of sham-neurofeedback, with the order of treatments being randomized. The study (...) also included a basic psychotherapeutic intervention — a psychoeducational session performed before the main study phases and emotional support provided throughout the study period. The headache probability was modeled as a function of the neurofeedback and sham-neurofeedback sessions performed to date. As a result, we revealed a strong beneficial effect of neurofeedback and no influence of the sham sessions. The study supports the prophylactic use of infra-low frequency neurofeedback in patients with TTH. From a methodological point of view, we advocate for the explicit inclusion of psychotherapeutic components in neurofeedback study protocols. (shrink)

Aging is associated with decreased functional connectivity in the main brain networks, which can underlie changes in cognitive and emotional processing. Neurofeedback is a promising non-pharmacological approach for the enhancement of brain connectivity. Previously, we showed that a single session of infra-low frequency neurofeedback results in increased connectivity between sensory processing networks in healthy young adults. In the current pilot study, we aimed to evaluate the possibility of enhancing brain connectivity during aging with the use of infra-low frequency neurofeedback. Nine (...) females aged 52 ± 7 years with subclinical signs of emotional dysregulation, including anxiety, mild depression, and somatoform symptoms, underwent 15 sessions of training. A resting-state functional MRI scan was acquired before and after the training. A hypothesis-free intrinsic connectivity analysis showed increased connectivity in regions in the bilateral temporal fusiform cortex, right supplementary motor area, left amygdala, left temporal pole, and cerebellum. Next, a seed-to-voxel analysis for the revealed regions was performed using the post- vs. pre-neurofeedback contrast. Finally, to explore the whole network of neurofeedback-related connectivity changes, the regions revealed by the intrinsic connectivity and seed-to-voxel analyses were entered into a network-based statistical analysis. An extended network was revealed, including the temporal and occipital fusiform cortex, multiple areas from the visual cortex, the right posterior superior temporal sulcus, the amygdala, the temporal poles, the superior parietal lobule, and the supplementary motor cortex. Clinically, decreases in alexithymia, depression, and anxiety levels were observed. Thus, infra-low frequency neurofeedback appears to be a promising method for enhancing brain connectivity during aging, and subsequent sham-controlled studies utilizing larger samples are feasible. (shrink)

In this article we develop a taxonomy of emotional injustice: what occurs when the treatment of emotions is unjust, or emotions are used to treat people unjustly. After providing an overview of previous work on this topic and drawing inspiration from the more developed area of epistemic injustice, we propose working definitions of ‘emotion’, ‘injustice’, and ‘emotional injustice’. We describe seven classes of emotional injustice: Emotion Misinterpretation, Discounting, Extraction, Policing, Exploitation, Inequality, and Weaponizing. We say why it is useful to (...) distinguish these and also to subsume them under a single concept. Our aims are both theoretical and practical: to provide a unified account of emotional injustice, while recognizing the diversity of this phenomenon; to facilitate further research on this topic; to recognize the political importance of emotions; and to outline some of the ways in which emotional injustice can be combated. (shrink)

The review surveys the main ideas discussed at the international scientific conference “Immanuel Kant and the ‘New Enlightenment’” hosted by the Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University (IKBFU) in Kaliningrad on 20-22 April 2022. It was organised by IKBFU’s research unit Academia Kantiana with the support of the Petersburg Dialogue Forum. Speakers analysed the theses of the Report to the Club of Rome, Come on! Capitalism, Short-termism, Population and the Destruction of the Planet (2018), whose authors, Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker and (...) Anders Wijkman, initiated a call for a “new Enlightenment”. The participants compared these theses with Kant’s philosophical ideas and looked for an answer to the question whether Kant’s critical philosophy should be consigned to the “old” Enlightenment or whether it has real potential for the desired “new Enlightenment”. The summaries of papers and discussions are arranged in order of their presentation. The Conference has shown that Kant’s Enlightenment has not lost its relevance while the ideas of the “new Enlightenment” need to be further examined philosophically. (shrink)

Through an examination of the bacteria that produce the cellulose, an investigation of the growing process and properties, and a discussion of an artistic exploration, one can fully grasp bio cellulose’s potential in becoming a synergist for sustainable fashion. This new creative and radical approach re-imagines the future materials for fashion and other fields requiring textile applications that are grown and renewable. Questions how textile can be created to be sustainable, biodegradable and infinitely reusable and mainly what the paradigms for (...) the new aesthetics are. The aim of this article is to convey the need for new biomaterials inspired by nature. (shrink)

Introduction. The relevance of the research topic is determined by the necessity to study financial phenomena and processes in order to understand the economic essence of public finance in the life of society. The strategic imperative for the formation of public finance is the development of an appropriate provision for its implementation, adequate to the complex and changeable circumstances of the territory development. The main purpose of the study is to identify the features of performing the functions of public finance (...) for regions with a specific mode of operating. Methods. When solving the tasks, the author uses general logical methods: analysis, synthesis, induction, deduction, analogy; empirical level methods: observation, description, measurement, modeling, as well as private and special methods of scientific research: comparative analysis, system approach, the Robinsonade model (Crusoe model). Scientific novelty of the research. The scientific novelty of the results lies in solving an important scientific problem - identifying the features of implementing the allocative function of public finance in the regions with a specific mode of operating (as exemplified by the Donetsk People’s Republic, where there is a special military and political situation, a mobilization type of economy, a transitional period due to the integration of the Republic into the system of the Russian Federation federal relations) in order to improve the system of public finance management in such regions. Results. The main results of the study consist in characterizing the process of implementing the allocation function of public finance, which makes it possible to determine the maximum effect of economic actions of the subjects in the current conditions, as well as to lay the foundations for analyzing the following distribution function of public finance. Conclusions. The author makes a conclusion that in the context of strengthening the role of public finance, not only in ensuring the economic development of the Donetsk People’s Republic, but also in the post-crisis recovery and stabilization of business activity, the implementation of the allocation function of public finance becomes important. (shrink)

Questions of value are central to understanding alternative practices of food exchange. This study introduces a practice-based approach to value that challenges the dominant views, which capture value as either an input for or an outcome of practices of exchange. Building on a longitudinal ethnographic study on food collectives, I show how value, rather than residing in something that people share, or in something that objects have, is an ideal target that continuously unfolds and evolves in action. I found that (...) people organized their food collectives around pursuing three kinds of value-ideals, namely good food, good price and good community. These value-ideals became reproduced in food collectives through what I identified as valuing modes, by which people evaluated the goodness of food, prices and community. My analysis revealed that, while participating in food collectives in order to pursue their value-ideals, people were likely to have differing reasons for pursuing them and tended to attach different meanings to the same value-ideal. I argue that understanding how value as an ideal target is reproduced through assessing and assigning value is essential in further explorations of the formation of value and in better understanding the dynamics of organizing alternative practices of food exchange. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that the neo-Aristotelian conception of “friendships of character” appears to misrepresent the essential nature of "genuine", or "true", friendship. We question the neo-Aristotelian imperative that true friendship entails disinterested love of the other “for their own sake” and strives at enhancing moral virtue. We propose an alternative conception of true friendship as involving affective and motivational features which we call closeness, intimacy, identity, and trust. Even on this minimal construal, however, friendship can turn vicious when (...) one of its characteristics becomes overpowering and thereby destroys the very goods for which the friendship was originally sought. (shrink)

What kind of mental phenomenon is romantic love? Many philosophers, psychologists, and ordinary folk treat it as an emotion. This chapter argues the category of emotion is inadequate to account for romantic love. It examines major emotion theories in philosophy and psychology and shows that they fail to illustrate that romantic love is an emotion. It considers the categories of basic emotions and emotion complexes, and demonstrates they too come short in accounting for romantic love. It assesses the roles of (...) culture and evolution in shaping the romantic love phenomenon and evaluates the ways in which the norms of rationality that are applied to standard emotions fail to apply to love. It considers the category of sentiments and argue that despite coming close, it does not adequately capture the nature of romantic love. Finally, the chapter makes a case for love being best characterized as a syndrome. (shrink)

Tolstoy became acquainted with the works of Henry George as he was writing his treatise “What Then Should We Do?” George’s economic ideas fascinated him so much that he stepped away from the treati...

It has been argued that romantic love is an intrinsically moral phenomenon – a phenomenon that is directly connected to morality. The connection is elucidated in terms of reasons for love, and reasons of love. It is said that romantic love is a response to moral reasons – the moral qualities of the beloved. Additionally, the reasons that love produces are also moral in nature. Since romantic love is a response to moral qualities and a source of moral motivation, it (...) is itself moral. This chapter aims to cast doubt on both these claims. By employing the model of emotional rationality it shows that a moralistic fallacy is committed when reasons for love are construed as moral. Reasons of love are also not essentially moral but rather of both moral and nonmoral kinds. Reasons of love are in part determined by cultural narratives and norms pertaining to love. Romantic love is not moral in nature. Morality is extrinsic to love. (shrink)

This article extends prior conversation analytic research on the preference organization of sequence-initiating actions. Across two languages, this article examines one such action: explicitly soliciting an account for human conduct. Prior work demonstrates that this action conveys a challenging stance towards the warrantability of the accountable event/conduct. When addressees are somehow responsible for the accountable event/conduct, explicit solicitations of accounts are frequently critical of, and thus embody disaffiliation with, addressees. This article demonstrates that, when explicit solicitations of accounts embody disaffiliation, (...) they are systematically ‘withheld’ and, thus, can be characterized as ‘dispreferred’ actions. This article also examines: a) deviant cases, where account solicitations are not withheld, which is a practice for embodying aggravated disaffiliation; and b) negative cases, where account solicitations actually embody affiliation, and as such are typically treated as preferred actions and not withheld. (shrink)

This article provides an empirical demonstration of the saliency of epistemics to two core conversational organizations, turn-taking and repair. To that end, I examine cases in which a participant of a multiparty conversation intervenes into a repair sequence to respond to a repair initiation addressed to the trouble-source speaker, that is, in violation of the turn-taking rules, without having an epistemically grounded entitlement to do so. I show that such interventions enact a range of corrective actions vis-a-vis the repair initiation, (...) such as contesting and correcting assumptions or understandings conveyed by the repair initiation. In providing these corrections ‘out of turn’, the intervening speakers demonstrate their own attentive recipiency or cultural expertise and, at the same time, expose the repair initiator’s interactional faux pas. The analysis demonstrates the procedural consequentiality of epistemic considerations for the interlocutors – and, thus, the necessity to incorporate them into an empirically grounded analysis of their actions. (shrink)

This paper discusses some philosophical aspects related to the recent publication of the experimental results of the 2017 black hole experiment, namely the first image of the supermassive black hole at the center of galaxy M87. In this paper I present a philosophical analysis of the 2017 Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) black hole experiment. I first present Hacking’s philosophy of experimentation. Hacking gives his taxonomy of elements of laboratory science and distinguishes a list of elements. I show that the EHT (...) experiment conforms to major elements from Hacking’s list. I then describe with the help of Galison’s Philosophy of the Shadow how the EHT Collaboration created the famous black hole image. Galison outlines three stages for the reconstruction of the black hole image: Socio-Epistemology, Mechanical Objectivity, after which there is an additional SocioEpistemology stage. I subsequently present my own interpretation of the reconstruction of the black hole image and I discuss model fitting to data. I suggest that the main method used by the EHT Collaboration to assure trust in the results of the EHT experiment is what philosophers call the Argument from Coincidence. I show that using this method for the above purpose is problematic. I present two versions of the Argument from Coincidence: Hacking’s Coincidence and Cartwright’s Reproducibility by which I analyse the EHT experiment. The same estimation of the mass of the black hole is reproduced in four different procedures. The EHT Collaboration concludes: the value we have converged upon is robust. I analyse the mass measurements of the black hole with the help of Cartwright’s notion of robustness. I show that the EHT Collaboration construe Coincidence/Reproducibility as Technological Agnosticism and I contrast this interpretation with van Fraassen’s scientific agnosticism. (shrink)

This article provides a conversation analytic description of a previously unstudied conversational action: ‘articulating the unsaid’ via and-prefaced formulations of other people’s talk. Contributing to the extant research on formulations and on interactional functions of discourse markers, the article shows that and-prefaced formulations accomplish a distinct conversational action that has the following features: these formulations are assertions about the addressee’s domain of knowledge that perform a repair operation in the form of a request for confirmation; they articulate a ‘missing’ element (...) of the addressee’s preceding talk ; what is being formulated is claimably inferable from the prior talk; moreover, such formulations extend the addressee’s course of action on his/her behalf. The article describes compositional and sequential features of and-prefaced formulations and how they shape interactional trajectories of in-progress courses of action. (shrink)

L’article étudie comment les idées de la France des Lumières et de la France révolutionnaire ont contribué au changement de la langue sociopolitique russe, comment elles ont interféré avec le processus littéraire du romantisme en Russie et ont finalement contribué au changement du paradigme intellectuel en Russie dans la deuxième moitié du XIXe siècle. L’histoire des concepts de citoyen, de société, d’opposition politique est retracée de la deuxième moitié du XVIIIe siècle – à travers des documents officiels (Instructions, par Catherine (...) II), des textes littéraires (A. Radichtchev) – jusqu’au premier tiers du XIXe siècle – à travers les écrits politiques des décembristes. En conclusion, il est soutenu que l’échec du républicanisme des décembristes inspiré par la France des Lumières a orienté, dans la deuxième moitié du XIXe siècle, la pensée russe vers la problématique de la diversité humaine et de la nationalisation de l’Empire. Les principes universels du siècle des Lumières sont remplacés par l’intérêt porté à la diversité humaine de l’Empire russe, ce qui nécessitera, à son tour, l’élaboration d’un langage spécifique et de ses concepts. Cependant, ce tournant serait une conséquence du processus de réception des idées et des concepts de la France des Lumières et aurait été accéléré par la Révolution française. (shrink)

The controversial status of goluboi as a basic color term is discussed. Fuzzy logic alone cannot reliably attribute basic status to goluboi. Recent linguistic studies support a single basic blue category. Psychophysical data on color-space distances and color naming are currently ambiguous in this regard. Correspondence:p1 Institut für Arbeitsphysiologie an der Universität Dortmund, 44139 Dortmund, Germany [email protected] www.ifado.de/projekt-06/.

‘What is ‘sexual orientation’ for?’ is a question we need to answer when addressing a more seemingly basic one, ‘what is sexual orientation?’. The concept of sexual orientation is grounded in the concepts of sex and/or gender since it refers to the sex or gender of the individuals one is sexually attracted to. Typical categories of sexual orientation such as ’heterosexual’, ‘homosexual’, and ‘bi-sexual’ all rely on a sex or gender binary. Yet, it is now common practice to recognize sex (...) and gender categories that transcend the binary. Should our sexual orientation categories be revised to reflect sex and gender diversity? Drawing on the example of pansexuality, I argue that they should. The reason is that one aim of reconstructing the concept of sexual orientation—in addition to the epistemic goal of understanding— should also be political: it should make it easier to argue for the protection of those who have been marginalized or discriminated against because their sexual attraction is other than heterosexual. (shrink)

Russia’s relations with the European Court of Human Rights since the time of Russia’s accession to the Council of Europe have received a lot of attention on the part of academic scholars, practitioners, and media. Research on the ECtHR became especially important in the context of the twentieth anniversary of Russia’s acceptance of ECtHR jurisdiction that coincided with the unprecedented worsening of relations between Russia and the European countries due to the 2014 Crimea annexation. With voices that consistently advocate Russia’s (...) exit from the CoE, we believe it necessary to examine Russia-ECtHR relations as they are presented in the academic narrative. Drawing mostly on Russian-language sources, we want to highlight the variety of overarching themes and arguments relating to the crisis caused by the 2015 Constitutional Court Decision. We would like to examine various dimensions of this “crisis,” in order to be able to conclude whether Russia’s reaction to the Markin case and cases of non-compliance that followed was indeed part of a broader strategy of “backlash against international courts” we are currently witnessing worldwide. In the conditions when Russia’s exit from the Council of Europe is as likely as ever, the possibility of the “snowball effect” on the part of other member states threatens undermine the very raison d’être of the European human rights protection system. (shrink)

The aim of this literature-based study is to explore the influence of socio-cultural factors on business ethics in post-soviet countries with dissimilar cultural contexts. Specifically, this article seeks to identify and compare contextual influences on informal norms of morality in business in transitional post-soviet societies. In order to pursue this investigation, the countries of Belarus and Estonia were identified as being among the most noteworthy examples of culturally different post-soviet countries in transition. The study reveals contradictory manifestations of mixtures of (...) business norms in both Estonia and Belarus, which are conditioned by the merger of an autocratic bureaucratic soviet system with more participative and empowering forms of western management. The most persistent changes relate to moves from patriarchal and paternalistic types of relationship and low work motivation. The significance of these differences, which include nationality and religious legacies, will almost inevitably be overlooked should the countries be placed under the general umbrella of'former soviet states' when considering business ethics in these contexts. (shrink)

This book focuses on Albert Einstein and his interactions with, and responses to, various scientists, both famous and lesser-known. It takes as its starting point that the discussions between Einstein and other scientists all represented a contribution to the edifice of general relativity and relativistic cosmology. These scientists with whom Einstein implicitly or explicitly interacted form a complicated web of collaboration, which this study explores, focusing on their implicit and explicit responses to Einstein s work. This analysis uncovers latent undercurrents, (...) indiscernible to other approaches to tracking the intellectual pathway of Einstein to his general theory of relativity. The interconnections and interactions presented here reveal the central figures who influenced Einstein during this intellectual period. Despite current approaches to history presupposing that the efforts of scientists such as Max Abraham and Gunnar Nordström, which differed from Einstein s own views, be relegated to the background, this book shows that they all had an impact on the development of Einstein s theories, stressing the limits of approaches focusing solely on Einstein. As such, General Relativity Conflict and Rivalries proves that the general theory of relativity was not developed as a single, coherent construction by an isolated, brooding individual, but, rather, that it came to fruition through Einstein's conflicts and interactions with other scientists, and was consolidated by his creative processes during these exchanges. (shrink)