We note in Section I that an acceptable formulation of Presentism must preserve its consistency with Transient Time and inconsistency with Static Time. After arguing in Section II that certain formulations of Presentism are unacceptable, we offer in Section III a formulation of Presentism that we defend against the charge of triviality.

There has been much recent debate about Presentism among those who believe the doctrine to be nontrivial and true, those who believe it to be nontrivial and false, and those who believe it to be trivial — either trivially true or trivially false. Formulating Presentism precisely is problematic, which accounts for some of the controversy.

Abstract: Presentism is the view that whatever exists presently exists. Without defending Presentism, I argue first that Presentists should be Time-Free Presentists – Presentists whose views do not imply that there exist irreducible times. Second, I argue that Presentists should accept Limited Thick Presentism, the view that 'the present' has some extension and is thereby neither durationlessly thin nor unlimitedly 'thick'. Third, before addressing several objections to Limited Time-Free Thick Presentism [LTFTP], I argue that defenders of LTFTP should accept that (...) 'temporal becoming' involves an overlapping succession of present entities, not a 'skipping' from one set of present entities to the next discrete set. (shrink)

Arguing that the universe is absolutely directioned and that there exist spatial (directional) relations that Leibniz overlooked, H. Scott Hestevold formulates a new relationalist theory of space, exploring its implications for the Special Composition Question, reductivism regarding boundaries and holes, and the nature of spacetime.

When is it that two objects compose a whole? Or, put another way, if Z is an object composed of X and Y, then what must be done to bring it about that X and Y both exist and Z does not exist? The author defends an answer to what is now know as the Special Composition Question.

William H. Poteat’s thought, while indebted to Michael Polanyi, originates in Poteat’s own project of remembering all articulate significances to their pre-articulate grounding in the mindbody. He invented the term mindbody both to overstep the traditional distinction between mind and body and to name the living arche of all meaning and meaning-discernment. In focusing on the recovery of the mindbody as the bedrock ontological matrix for the aquisition of speech, the act of explicit reference par excellence, Poteat radicalizes and (...) advances Polanyi’s efforts to reclaim the tacit roots of all explicit knowledge. (shrink)

It no longer is true in a metaphorical sense only that a person can have a change of heart. We might grant this much — allow that a person may have one heart at one time and have another heart at still another time — and also resist the idea that a person can have a change of mind in anything other than a qualitative sense. In the discussion that follows, this standard view of the matter is called into question. (...) If the argument presented here is sound, it can happen both that one person has numerically different minds at different times and that different people have the same mind at different times. These possibilities, as I take them to be, call for reassessment of some well entrenched assumptions concerning personal identity and responsibility. In particular, they suggest that it may not be true that person A bears responsibility for making decisions person B previously made only on the condition that A is the same person as B. (shrink)

There have emerged two distinct approaches to preserving the coherence of theism. The most common approach involves explicating the concept of an absolutely perfect God in terms of the divine attributes and then analyzing the divine-attribute concepts in such a way that they are rendered mutually consistent. According to this ‘multiple-attribute’ approach, the coherence of theism ultimately turns both on whether each divine-attribute concept can be coherently analyzed independently of the other divine-attribute concepts and on whether the divine attributes are (...) then mutually consistent. (shrink)

William H. Poteat’s thought, while indebted to Michael Polanyi, originates in Poteat’s own project of remembering all articulate significances to their pre-articulate grounding in the mindbody. He invented the term mindbody both to overstep the traditional distinction between mind and body and to name the living arche of all meaning and meaning-discernment. In focusing on the recovery of the mindbody as the bedrock ontological matrix for the aquisition of speech, the act of explicit reference par excellence, Poteat radicalizes and (...) advances Polanyi’s efforts to reclaim the tacit roots of all explicit knowledge. (shrink)

Roderick M. Chisholm’s A Realistic Theory of Categories is a metaphysics treatise of extraordinary breadth and precision. Published in the year of its author’s eightieth birthday, Categories is a lean exposition of Chisholm’s systematic metaphysics, including his views on attributes, propositions, possible worlds, numbers, classes, relations, intentionality, events, time, space, material objects, persons, appearances, fictitious objects, and God. Chisholm develops his metaphysics with the resourcefulness, elegance, and intellectual integrity that have been a hallmark of his work.

Addresses many issues including the nature of mind, matter, ideas, and substance; the debate between those who believe human beings have free will and those who subscribe to determinism; fatalism, realism, and personal identity; and ...

© 2015, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.Genetic studies have identified single nucleotide polymorphisms associated with the risk of prostate cancer. It remains unclear whether such genetic variants are associated with disease aggressiveness. The NCI-SPORE Genetics Working Group retrospectively collected clinicopathologic information and genotype data for 36 SNPs which at the time had been validated to be associated with PC risk from 25,674 cases with PC. Cases were grouped according to race, Gleason score and aggressiveness. Statistical analyses were used to compare the frequency (...) of the SNPs between different disease cohorts. After adjusting for multiple testing, only PC-risk SNP rs2735839 was significantly and inversely associated with aggressive and high-grade disease in European men. Similar associations with aggressive and high-grade disease were documented in African-American subjects. The G allele of rs2735839 was associated with disease aggressiveness even at low PSA levels in both European and African-American men. Our results provide further support that a PC-risk SNP rs2735839 near the KLK3 gene on chromosome 19q13 may be associated with aggressive and high-grade PC. Future prospectively designed, case-case GWAS are needed to identify additional SNPs associated with PC aggressiveness. (shrink)

In his book Objects and Persons, Trenton Merricks has reoriented and fine-tuned an argument from the philosophy of mind to support a selective eliminativism about macroscopic objects.1 The argument turns on a rejection of systematic causal overdetermination and the conviction that microscopic things do the causal work that is attributed to a great many (though not all) macroscopic things. We will argue that Merricks’ argument fails to establish his selective eliminativism.

“States have no morality, they have interests,” remarked an overzealous diplomat. And in this same manner we sometimes see that reasons of state take priority over moral rules. A sweet young thing testifying before a committee of the United State Congress said “sometimes you have to put yourself above the law,” no doubt repeating something that had been said to her. At a time when unrestrained application of the reasons of state can only lead to violence that can no longer (...) be sustained, we can judge to what extent such remarks are without foundation. (shrink)

State Medical Boards (SMBs) can take severe disciplinary actions (e.g., license revocation or suspension) against physicians who commit egregious wrongdoing in order to protect the public. However, there is noteworthy variability in the extent to which SMBs impose severe disciplinary action. In this manuscript, we present and synthesize a subset of 11 recommendations based on findings from our team’s larger consensus-building project that identified a list of 56 policies and legal provisions SMBs can use to better protect patients from egregious (...) wrongdoing by physicians. (shrink)

Providing the most thorough coverage available in one volume, this comprehensive, broadly based collection offers a wide variety of selections in four major genres, and also includes a section on film. Each of the five sections contains a detailed critical introduction to each form, brief biographies of the authors, and a clear, concise editorial apparatus. Updated and revised throughout, the new Fourth Edition adds essays by Margaret Mead, Russell Baker, Joan Didion, Annie Dillard, and Alice Walker; fiction by Nathaniel Hawthorne, (...) Ursula K. LeGuin, Anton Chekov, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Alice Walker, Louise Erdrich, Donald Barthelme, and James McPherson; poems by John Donne, Robert Browning, Walt Whitman, Edwin Arlington Robinson, e.e. cummings, Langston Hughes, W.H. Auden, Philip Levine, and Louise Gluck; and plays by August Wilson, Marsha Norman, Wendy Wasserstein, and Vaclav Havel. The chapter devoted to film examines the relation of film to literature and gives the complete screenplay for Citizen Kane plus close analysis of a scene from the film. With its innovative structure, comprehensive coverage, and insightful and stimulating presentation of all kinds of literature, this is an anthology readers will turn to again and again. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:88 Reviews EPISTEMOLOGY OFMODERNISM WILLIAM R. EVERDELL History/ St. Ann'sSchool Brooklyn, NY 11201, USA [email protected] Ann Banfield. The Phantom Table:Woolf,Fry,Russelland the Epistemology of Modernism. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge U.P., 2000. £35.00; US$49.95. In Virginia Woolf's difficult masterpiece, The Waves(1931),each of several separate interior monologues-"streams of consciousness" in the American critical idiom-is separated from the next by an interpolated "Interlude". The interior monologues are assigned co different characters, (...) bur the Interludes are rendered from no perspectiveat all, verymuch like the "Time Passes"chapter of Woolf's earlier and better known novel, Tothe Lighthouse (1927).The passive voice and the demonstrative and indefinite pronotms are essential, removing from the scene not only the characters' points of view, but the author's as well. Numbered among the consequences of the new twentieth-century technique of interior monologue, the Interludes can be accepted today as one more trick of literary "Modernism", but for Woolf it was new, and the task of preventing any of her Interludes from becoming just another report from the rypical "omniscient narrator" of Victorian fiction was one of the most demanding she ever set herself as a writer. Like her friend the Post-Impressionist critic Roger Fry, she wanted to analyze the world outside the self into its smallest sensible elements, then show human selvesasthey formed by accumulating the experience of these myriad, random, discontinuous components, and finally to recombine these components in their two kinds, selvesand sense-able things, into a meaningful whole-a work of art. Rejecting both the idealism of Bradley and the British philosophical generation of the 1890sand the naive positivist materialism coming out of the 1850s, Bertrand Russell eventually settled on an ontology most philosophers call "realist " in that it rejected the view that the world accessible to the senses was no more than a mental construct and considered it naive to assign the origin of subjectivity to matter. The material world was, Russell thought, actually external -"out there". He did think, however,that all we knew of the external world was what wassensed by the sensesand pictured by the mind. He alsoconcluded (in essayslike "The Relation of Sense-data to Physics"written in 1910-17)d1at both that world and what we knew of it was presented in very small parts, and Reviews 89 analyzable down to them, or, in other words, that both ontology and epistemology were atomized. Each mind, with its senses, occupied, he thought, one of an infinite number of occupied and unoccupied "perspectives", each of which Lmiquely focused che "sensibilia"-whatever was perceived in che external world-like a Leibnizian monad. Machemacicallogic, on which Russell set che highest store, would be able, he thought, to bring together perspectives by providing a minimal secof cruchswhich, though abscracc,were objective in che sense chaccheywere noc private and could be agreed to by all. Something similar though rougher mighc be done for chesensibilia in cheworld "ouc chere" by che science of physics. Did Virginia Woolflearn from Bertrand Russell?To a latcer-dayacademic ic sounds too urrerly improbable, for che simple reason (obvious to academics) chat anyone who has made icto the upper levelsof English literature must have chosen cheseparticular heights to scale because the trail was so blessedlyfreeof chosenasry mathematical burrs and logical reazles,and the air so filledwith che pure chatter of French phenomenologisrs, that no hiker would ever have to struggle with analytical philosophy again. Lessmetaphorically, the separation of departments of literature from those of philosophy has come so close to divorce chat few in U.S. English Departments can make head or cail of che graduate thesis that one of Russell's philosophy students wrote on F.H. Bradley, and fewer still can trace the term "objective correlative" used by thac student (who was in fact T. S. Eliot) back to an early work of Husserl. Meanwhile, ic is taken for granted by those in Philosophy that there are no ideas worth discussing in Woolf, or, indeed, in any other novelise,greacthough she may be, Lmlessone is to descend from ontology and epistemology to the foothills of ethics and politics, or worse, aesthetics. (Among... (shrink)

Income is a primary determinant of social mobility, career progression, and personal happiness. It has been shown to vary with demographic variables like age and education, with more oblique variables such as height, and with behaviors such as delay discounting, i.e., the propensity to devalue future rewards. However, the relative contribution of each these salary-linked variables to income is not known. Further, much of past research has often been underpowered, drawn from populations of convenience, and produced findings that have not (...) always been replicated. Here we tested a large (n = 2,564), heterogeneous sample, and employed a novel analytic approach: using three machine learning algorithms to model the relationship between income and age, gender, height, race, zip code, education, occupation, and discounting. We found that delay discounting is more predictive of income than age, ethnicity, or height. We then used a holdout data set to test the robustness of our findings. We discuss the benefits of our methodological approach, as well as possible explanations and implications for the prominent relationship between delay discounting and income. (shrink)

The development and utility of genetically modified crops for smallholders around the world is controversial. Critical questions include what traits and crops are to be developed; how they can be adapted to smallholders’ ecological, social and economic contexts; which dissemination channels should be used to reach smallholders; and which policy environments will enable the greatest benefits for smallholders and the rural poor. A key question is how the voices of smallholders who have experience with or desire to use GM technologies (...) enter the larger debate. Africa has the greatest number of smallholders and poor with the least exposure to GM crops. Because of the well-established use of GM crops in South Africa by commercial farmers, we formed a community of practice involving smallholders, extension, researchers, non-profits and agribusiness in KwaZulu-Natal to examine the conditions under which GM crops are used by smallholders, how smallholders interact with GM technologies and what insights smallholders and other stakeholders can provide regarding these questions. One of the advantages of the CoP approach is that it brings stakeholders together in a non-hierarchical way that encourages new ways of thinking and new partnerships. Such interaction around a specific project can enhance the voice of smallholders in a variety of ways. In our project, smallholder participants have increased their knowledge and can make better decisions about GM technologies, which had been barriers for them. Notably, they have also improved their knowledge of maize production practices, accessed new practice networks, and met new researchers and resource providers. They are now being integrated into these networks in a way that should improve their livelihoods and make the wants and needs of smallholders better known. Such knowledge and experience has improved their voice in agriculture and rural development discussions. (shrink)

Background: In prior reports, we described the design and initial performance of a fully implantable, bi-directional neural interface system for use in deep brain and other neurostimulation applications. Here we provide an update on the chronic, long-term neural sensing performance of the system using traditional 4-contact leads and extend those results to include directional 8-contact leads.Methods: Seven ovine subjects were implanted with deep brain stimulation leads at different nodes within the Circuit of Papez: four with unilateral leads in the anterior (...) nucleus of the thalamus and hippocampus; two with bilateral fornix leads, and one with bilateral hippocampal leads. The leads were connected to either an Activa PC+S® or Percept PC°ledR deep brain stimulation and recording device. Spontaneous local field potentials, evoked potentials, LFP response to stimulation, and electrode impedances were monitored chronically for periods of up to five years in these subjects.Results: The morphology, amplitude, and latencies of chronic hippocampal EPs evoked by thalamic stimulation remained stable over the duration of the study. Similarly, LFPs showed consistent spectral peaks with expected variation in absolute magnitude dependent upon behavioral state and other factors, but no systematic degradation of signal quality over time. Electrode impedances remained within expected ranges with little variation following an initial stabilization period. Coupled neural activity between the two nodes within the Papez circuit could be observed in synchronized recordings up to 5 years post-implant. The magnitude of passive LFP power recorded from directional electrode segments was indicative of the contacts that produced the greatest stimulation-induced changes in LFP power within the Papez network.Conclusion: The implanted device performed as designed, providing the ability to chronically stimulate and record neural activity within this network for up to 5 years of follow-up. (shrink)