BACKGROUND: Hallucinations and delusions that complicate Parkinson’s disease could lead to nursing home placement and are linked to increased mortality. Cognitive impairments are typically associated with the presence of hallucinations but there are no data regarding whether such a relationship exists with delusions. OBJECTIVE: We hypothesized that hallucinations would be associated with executive and visuospatial disturbance. An exploratory examination of cognitive correlates of delusions was also completed to address the question of whether they differ from hallucinations. METHODS: 144 PD subjects (...) completed a neuropsychological battery to assess cognition and the SAPS to examine psychosis. Correlational analyses assessed associations between hallucinations and delusions with cognitive domains. RESULTS: 48 subjects reported psychotic symptoms: 25 experienced hallucinations without delusions, 23 had symptoms dominated by delusions. Severity and/or number of hallucination subtypes were significantly correlated with lower scores in language, memory, attention, executive functioning, and visuospatial ability. Correlations with delusions were non-significant. Tests of differences in the size of the correlations between groups revealed a significant relationship between language and visuospatial performance with hallucinations. CONCLUSIONS: Cognitive correlates of hallucinations and delusions appear to be different in PD, suggesting distinct pathogenic mechanisms and possibly anatomical substrates. Hence, delusions may not share the same associations with dementia as hallucinations. Since this is a new finding, further studies will be needed to confirm our results. (shrink)

The objectives of this study were to develop a high-density chromosome bin map of homoeologous group 7 in hexaploid wheat, to identify gene distribution in these chromosomes, and to perform comparative studies of wheat with rice and barley. We mapped 2148 loci from 919 EST clones onto group 7 chromosomes of wheat. In the majority of cases the numbers of loci were significantly lower in the centromeric regions and tended to increase in the distal regions. The level of duplicated loci (...) in this group was 24% with most of these loci being localized toward the distal regions. One hundred nineteen EST probes that hybridized to three fragments and mapped to the three group 7 chromosomes were designated landmark probes and were used to construct a consensus homoeologous group 7 map. An additional 49 probes that mapped to 7AS, 7DS, and the ancestral translocated segment involving 7BS also were designated landmarks. Landmark probe orders and comparative maps of wheat, rice, and barley were produced on the basis of corresponding rice BAC/PAC and genetic markers that mapped on chromosomes 6 and 8 of rice. Identification of landmark ESTs and development of consensus maps may provide a framework of conserved coding regions predating the evolution of wheat genomes. (shrink)

Context The attitudes of medical professionals towards physician assisted dying have been widely discussed. Less explored is the level of agreement among physicians on the possibility of ‘rational suicide’—a considered suicide act made by a sound mind and a precondition of assisted dying legislation. Objective To assess attitudes towards rational suicide in a representative sample of senior doctors in England and Wales. Methods A postal survey was conducted of 1000 consultants and general practitioners randomly selected from a commercially available database. (...) The main outcome of interest was level of agreement with a statement about rational suicide. Results The corrected participation rate was 50%; 363 questionnaires were analysed. Overall 72% of doctors agreed with the possibility of rational suicide, 17% disagreed, and 11% were neutral. Doctors who identified themselves as being more religious were more likely to disagree. Some doctors who disagreed with legalisation of physician assisted suicide nevertheless agreed with the concept of rational suicide. Conclusions Most senior doctors in England and Wales feel that rational suicide is possible. There was no association with specialty. Strong religious belief was associated with disagreement, although levels of agreement were still high in people reporting the strongest religious belief. Most doctors who were opposed to physician assisted suicide believed that rational suicide was possible, suggesting that some medical opposition is best explained by other factors such as concerns of assessment and protection of vulnerable patients. (shrink)

Governments and other food system actors from the private sector, civil society, research and education institutions are being called upon to work together to enhance the sustainability, resilience and inclusiveness of food systems. The analysis presented in this study provides an insight into the process and direction of food system transformation, and the key capabilities required. It portrays the interplay of different internal and external dynamics combined with the capacity of food system actors to connect, forge alliances and commit to (...) specific actions that has enabled countries to move towards a more sustainable food system. (shrink)

For half a century, Ernest Fortin's scholarship has charmed and educated theologians and philosophers with its intellectual search for the best way to live. Written by friends, colleagues, and students of Fortin, this book pays tribute to a remarkable thinker in a series of essays that bear eloquent testimony to Fortin's influence and his legacy. A formidable commentator on Catholic philosophical and political thought, Ernest Fortin inspired others with his restless inquiries beyond the boundaries of conventional scholarship. With essays on (...) subjects ranging across philosophy, political science, literature, and theology Gladly to Learn and Gladly to Teach reflects the astonishing depth and breadth of Fortin's contribution to contemporary thought. (shrink)

For half a century, Ernest Fortin's scholarship has charmed and educated theologians and philosophers with its intellectual search for the best way to live. Written by friends, colleagues, and students of Fortin, this book pays tribute to a remarkable thinker in a series of essays that bear eloquent testimony to Fortin's influence and his legacy. A formidable commentator on Catholic philosophical and political thought, Ernest Fortin inspired others with his restless inquiries beyond the boundaries of conventional scholarship. With essays on (...) subjects ranging across philosophy, political science, literature, and theology Gladly to Learn and Gladly to Teach reflects the astonishing depth and breadth of Fortin's contribution to contemporary thought. (shrink)

Hegel’s basic position so far on the various meanings of evil as necessary and thereby intelligible directly in the development of spirit might be summed up as follows. Evil is always a necessary moment of instability which gives impetus in the movement from various meanings of particularity to various meanings of universality; from the more abstract expression of potential unity and truth to the more actualized notion and unity.

Hegel attempts both to give evil its metaphysical due and to give it intelligibility within a processive idealistic system. To accomplish these ends, he consistently employs the contrast between the natural and the free act of the subject and the contrast between the particular and the universal. He places these contrasts within the situation of an original and presupposed unity of spirit that itself is the ground of the mediation required for thinking freedom, for evil, and for ultimate reconciliation. He (...) argues for evil’s ultimate intelligibility in terms of its necessity as a consequent moment in the development of spirit from its ground; he resolves problems of evil’s penultimate irrationality in terms of its unstable contradictory elements in spirit’s history which is not yet fully concrete, a simultaneity of “ought to be” and “ought not to be” in the sense that the instability must be surpassed but not that it should never have been. The aims of this paper will be to summarize and evaluate Hegel’s efforts to give evil both significance and intelligibility within his system and to estimate if a system of progressive idealism contributes a philosophically new dimension to the problem of evil in a universe. (shrink)

The role of the prefrontal cortex is one of the most topical and important areas of research in contemporary neuropsychology. This cortical region appears to be linked with executive processes affecting many diverse areas of cognitive function. Working memory, information processing, behavioural organization, attention, judgement, and the ability to cope with novel experiences are just some of the diverse processes it affects. This book brings together contributions from some of the world's leading researchers on the prefrontal cortex. They discuss the (...) many recent theoretical and technical advances in the field - for example in our understanding of the neural architecture of the prefrontal cortex, in the development of comparable texts of cognition in humans and other primates, in our understanding of the relationships between neuronal activity and behaviour, and in the increasing use of functional neuroimaging to identify different levels of organization within the prefrontal cortex. These important developments make this an ideal time to address the many questions and debates that have arisen about the role and functional organization of this area of the brain. One of the first books to be written on the subject, The Prefrontal Cortex is a state-of-the-art account of our knowledge of this exciting subject. It will be welcomed by all researchers and students in neuro- and cognitive psychology, and neuroscience. (shrink)

A doctrine of analogy in various guises is the traditional medicine for the malady of theological meaninglessness; it supposedly cures both the anthropomorphism of univocation and the unintelligibility of equivocation. If Palmer is right, however, the cure is as bad as the disease. Analogy, he urges, is essential to traditional "descriptive" theology, i.e., to "a systematic presentation of our knowledge about God" which utilizes arguments and licenses inferences. Palmer indicates that analogy is required by anyone who "holds some beliefs about (...) the ultimate nature of the "universe", so that metaphysics as well as natural and revealed theology stands under the strictures of his argument. But his focus is on theology, and he says very little about the consequences for metaphysics. Palmer argues, the doctrine of analogy entails agnosticism with regard to the meaning of terms predicated of God; we cannot know what sense, if any, our theological terms possess. But if we cannot know the sense of our terms, or even whether they have any sense, we cannot know whether any term is being used in the same sense. Hence no inferences or arguments are possible in theology. More precisely, no arguments can be known to be valid in theology, which is to say that theology as traditionally conceived is impossible. (shrink)

Experiential evidence shows that pain is associated with common meanings. These include a meaning of threat or danger, which is experienced as immediately distressing or unpleasant; cognitive meanings, which are focused on the long-term consequences of having chronic pain; and existential meanings such as hopelessness, which are more about the person with chronic pain than the pain itself. This interdisciplinary book - the second in the three-volume Meanings of Pain series edited by Dr Simon van Rysewyk - aims to better (...) understand pain by describing experiences of pain and the meanings these experiences hold for the people living through them. The lived experiences of pain described here involve various types of chronic pain, including spinal pain, labour pain, rheumatic pain, diabetic peripheral neuropathic pain, fibromyalgia, complex regional pain syndrome, endometriosis-associated pain, and cancer-related pain. Two chapters provide narrative descriptions of pain, recounted and interpreted by people with pain. Language is important to understanding the meaning of pain since it is the primary tool human beings use to manipulate meaning. As discussed in the book, linguistic meaning may hold clues to understanding some pain-related experiences, including the stigmatisation of people with pain, the dynamics of patient-clinician communication, and other issues, such as relationships between pain, public policy and the law, and attempts to develop a taxonomy of pain that is meaningful for patients. Clinical implications are described in each chapter. This book is intended for people with pain, their family members or caregivers, clinicians, researchers, advocates, and policy makers. (shrink)

In the present commentary we expand on two concepts relevant to understanding affliliative bonding. Differences and similarities between the functions and actions of oxytocin and vasopressin are difficult to study but may be critical to an understanding of mechanisms for social bonding. What is termed here a “trait of affiliation” may reflect in part the capacity of these same peptides to program the developing nervous system.

Cooper’s book criticizes the traditional "absolutist" Christian doctrine of God, as exemplified in Aquinas, and concludes with a constructive chapter on "Redemption and Process Theism." His critique is chiefly Hartshornean, not Whiteheadian in character. Cooper, adding nothing of substance to Hartshorne’s extant critique, instead scrutinizes the Thomistic texts to show just how and where the difficulties noted by Hartshorne arise. The final chapter, which leans heavily on Whitehead is chiefly a summary of the usual charges against process theism, together with (...) most of the standard process replies. The deepest difficulty, as the author sees it, lies in showing that Whitehead’s God can guarantee ultimate security or redemption in the face of ineradicable pain and evil; to show this requires reconceiving nature and redemption as well as God. Here Cooper is perhaps open to charges of occasional misinterpretation: For example, is it true that for Whitehead the fact of divine existence is "an ultimate irrationality,... an everlasting given"? And can actuality be separated from concreteness? (shrink)

Stanley Cavell’s long-awaited book is largely a revision of his 1961 Harvard dissertation, entitled The Claim to Rationality, but "it is no more properly speaking a revision than its predecessor was properly speaking a dissertation". Cavell notes in his foreword four "periods" or "strata" of writing spanning nearly two decades. Parts 2 and 3 are drawn from the dissertation, though "heavily edited", as is much of part 1, while other portions of parts 1 and most of part 4 were composed (...) as recently as 1974-77. Given this long gestation, plus Cavell’s Daedalian style and exquisite self-consciousness, it is no surprise that this dense and subtle book defies easy description. (shrink)

This engaging little book strays far from the mainstream of recent philosophy of religion—but for good reason and to good effect. Burke repudiates the parochialism implicit in the recent preoccupation with linguistic meaning, arguments for God’s existence, and problems of immortality. Most recent texts in the field display a "relentlessly Western, even Anglo-Saxon tunnel vision", viewing only a limited form of human religiosity in terms of some narrowing perspective. Hoping to break new ground, Burke treats religion as a universal human (...) phenomenon and tries to illumine its various central "functions" or purposes without casting them in an alien light. His method is expository, descriptive, "analytic," in an unusual sense, and non-argumentative. He attempts to display religious structures in such a perspicuous way that philosophical insight or "recognition" may occur. The result is, as the author notes, "one man’s perspective", yet it is a perspective informed by a great variety of thinkers from various reaches of sociology, theology and philosophy. (shrink)

Evans believes that in order to understand how some people can sometimes speak intelligibly and responsibly about God, we need not merely an analysis of theological language, nor even a comparison of theological with other kinds of discourse, but a full-blown, comprehensive theory of language. In quest of such a theory, Evans traces out two "dimensions," the symbolic and the conceptual, that he claims pervade all discourse interacting dialectically. A symbol is defined as "an ‘illuminating', ‘transformational', and ‘pointing’ linguistic sign (...) which, due to its kinship with or participation in the thing symbolized, makes that thing, through an awareness of it, present and manifest to those in a given community who understand and employ the symbol". "Conceptual" means "non-symbolic." But a theory of language, Evans believes, must go beyond language, since "The symbolic is the location of the disclosure of Being and provides authentic awareness and cognitive insight, and the conceptual is the realm of non-symbolic interpretation and provides conceptual information and objective knowledge". (shrink)

Early versions of satellite and radiosonde datasets suggested that the tropical surface had warmed more than the troposphere, while climate models consistently showed tropospheric amplification of surface warming in response to human-caused increases in greenhouse gases. We revisit such comparisons here using new observational estimates of surface and tropospheric temperature changes. We find that there is no longer a serious discrepancy between modeled and observed trends in the tropics. Our results contradict a recent claim that all simulated temperature trends in (...) the tropical troposphere are inconsistent with observations. This claim was based on the use of older radiosonde and satellite datasets and on two methodological errors: the neglect of observational trend uncertainties introduced by interannual climate variability and application of an inappropriate statistical “consistency test”.This emerging reconciliation of models and observations has two primary explanations. First, because of changes in the treatment of buoy and satellite information, new surface temperature datasets yield slightly reduced tropical warming relative to earlier versions. Second, recently developed satellite and radiosonde datasets now show larger warming of the tropical lower troposphere. In the case of a new satellite dataset from remote sensing systems, enhancedRSS warming is due to an improved procedure of adjusting for inter-satellite biases. When the RSS-derived tropospheric temperature trend is compared with four different observed estimates of surface temperature change, the surface warming is invariably amplified in the tropical troposphere, consistent with model results. Even if we use data from a second satellite dataset with smaller tropospheric warming than in remote sensing systems RSS, observed tropical lapse rates are not significantly different from those in all model simulations.Our results contradict a recent claim that all simulated temperature trends in the tropical troposphere and in tropical lapse rates are inconsistent with observations. This claim was based on the use of older radiosonde and satellite datasets and on two methodological errors: the neglect of observational trend uncertainties introduced by interannual climate variability and application of an inappropriate statistical “consistency test”. (shrink)

The principles of equality and equity, respectively in the Bill of Rights and the white paper on health, provide the moral and legal foundations for future health care for children in South Africa. However, given extreme health care need and scarce resources, the government faces formidable obstacles if it hopes to achieve a just allocation of public health care resources, especially among children in need of highly specialised health care. In this regard, there is a dearth of moral analysis which (...) is practically useful in the South African situation. We offer a set of moral considerations to guide the macro-allocation of highly specialised public health care services among South Africa's children. We also mention moral considerations which should inform micro-allocation. (shrink)

Li Zehou , a former professor of philosophy at Beijing University and a member of the Chinese Academy for Social Sciences in Beijing, is widely recognized as one of the most important thinkers in post-Mao China and "the leader of the Chinese Enlightenment" of the 1980s.1 One of the signatories of a petition to the government during the 1989 democracy movement, he was castigated in the official press after the crackdown and accused of being a proponent of "bourgeois liberalism." Li (...) left China in 1992 and has lived abroad ever since, returning only for occasional visits. He has been a guest professor at various Western universities and continues to publish academic writings, adding to his already voluminous Collected Works published in Taiwan a few years ago.2 At present he teaches at Boulder University in Colorado. (shrink)