We estimate that 208,000 deep brain stimulation (DBS) devices have been implanted to address neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders worldwide. DBS Think Tank presenters pooled data and determined that DBS expanded in its scope and has been applied to multiple brain disorders in an effort to modulate neural circuitry. The DBS Think Tank was founded in 2012 providing a space where clinicians, engineers, researchers from industry and academia discuss current and emerging DBS technologies and logistical and ethical issues facing the field. (...) The emphasis is on cutting edge research and collaboration aimed to advance the DBS field. The Eighth Annual DBS Think Tank was held virtually on September 1 and 2, 2020 (Zoom Video Communications) due to restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The meeting focused on advances in: (1) optogenetics as a tool for comprehending neurobiology of diseases and on optogenetically-inspired DBS, (2) cutting edge of emerging DBS technologies, (3) ethical issues affecting DBS research and access to care, (4) neuromodulatory approaches for depression, (5) advancing novel hardware, software and imaging methodologies, (6) use of neurophysiological signals in adaptive neurostimulation, and (7) use of more advanced technologies to improve DBS clinical outcomes. There were 178 attendees who participated in a DBS Think Tank survey, which revealed the expansion of DBS into several indications such as obesity, post-traumatic stress disorder, addiction and Alzheimer’s disease. This proceedings summarizes the advances discussed at the Eighth Annual DBS Think Tank. (shrink)

The examination of the notion of science from a sociological perspective has begun to transform the attitudes to science traditionally upheld by historians and philosophers.

‘Generalists’ hold that conspiracy theories, as a class, have epistemic defects. Well confirmed theories that invoke conspiracies, such as the theory that the Nixon administration conspired to orchestrate the break in at the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate complex, on 17 June 1972, – the ‘Watergate theory’ – raise a problem for generalists as it’s hard to understand how such theories can have epistemic defects. The Watergate theory is often not considered a mere conspiracy theory, because it enjoys (...) ‘official theory’ status and in folk usage that means it is not a conspiracy theory. However, most people concede that the Watergate theory was a conspiracy theory before obtaining official status. So, appealing to folk usage does not make the problem go away. Recently however, several generalist scholars including, Cassam, Mandik, Thalman and Butter, have argued that theories invoking conspiracies that enjoy official status were never conspiracy theories. I’ll consider their reasoning and show where they go wrong. I’ll work with the examples of the Watergate theory and the ‘false flag’ theory of the Mountain Meadows massacre of 1857, which has it that this massacre of over 100 people was led by white Utahn Mormons disguised as Native Americans. (shrink)

The Sociology of Intellectual Life outlines a social theory of knowledge for the 21st century. Steve Fuller deals directly with a world in which it is no longer taken for granted that universities and academics are the best places and people to embody the life of the mind. While Fuller defends academic privilege, he takes very seriously the historic divergences between academics and intellectuals, attending especially to the different features of knowledge production that they value."--BOOK JACKET.

This paper presents completeness and conservative extension results for the boolean extensions of the relevant logic T of Ticket Entailment, and for the contractionless relevant logics TW and RW. Some surprising results are shown for adding the sentential constant t to these boolean relevant logics; specifically, the boolean extensions with t are conservative of the boolean extensions without t, but not of the original logics with t. The special treatment required for the semantic normality of T is also shown along (...) the way. (shrink)

Philosophy &Public Affairs, Volume 52, Issue 2, Page 221-250, Spring 2024.

Au Centre Pompidou-Metz, faisant écho à l'exposition inaugurale, un colloque international a étudié de manière pluridisciplinaire et transversale la question du chef-d'œuvre. Loin de se focaliser sur le débat esthétique, les diverses approches ont assigné le droit, l'histoire, la sociologie, l'économie et les sciences exactes, pour mieux soumettre cet "objet" à un véritable examen clinique. Cette question ne serait-elle plus d'actualité? Loin s'en faut! Entre cœur et raison, la sacralisation des œuvres d'art produit toujours autant de savoirs, de savoir-faire et (...) de savoirs sur le faire. Mettant en avant le patrimoine, restaurant les objets de l'art, les reconstituant, favorisant le tourisme culturel, exhumant le vrai, condamnant le faux : à sa mesure, le "chef-œuvre" dynamise encore et toujours les divers moments de l'art. (shrink)

This paper is a study of four subscripted Gentzen systems G u R +, G u T +, G u RW + and G u TW +. [16] shows that the first three are equivalent to the semilattice relevant logics u R +, u T + and u RW + and conjectures that G u TW + is, equivalent to u TW +. Here we prove Cut Theorems for these systems, and then show that modus ponens is admissible — which (...) is not so trivial as one normally expects. Finally, we give decision procedures for the contractionless systems, G u TW + and G u RW +. (shrink)

For low-risk mothers who do not wish to give birth in a hospital, a nearby birth center led by midwives is an excellent option.

It is widely supposed that it is important to ensure that patients undergoing medical procedures hope that their treatments will be successful. But why is hope so important, if indeed it is? After examining the answers currently on offer in the literature, we identify a hitherto unrecognized reason for supposing that it is important that patients possess hope for a successful treatment, which draws on prospect theory, Kahneman and Tversky’s hugely influential descriptive theory about decision-making in situations of risk and (...) uncertainty. We also consider some concerns about patient consent and the potential manipulation of patients that are raised by our account. (shrink)

Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby (2024) has called for bioethics to end talk about personhood, asserting that such talk has the tendency to confuse and offend. It will be argued that this has only limited application for (largely) private settings. However, in other settings, theorizing about personhood leaves a gap in which there is the risk that the offending concept will get uptake elsewhere, and so the problem Blumenthal-Barby nominates may not be completely avoided. In response to this risk, an argument is presented (...) in support of the idea that the role of philosophers and bioethicists, far from ending talk of personhood, ought to be to clarify the concept, and to do so in nuanced ways, given its application for specific kinds of impairments. The case of dementia is used to illustrate this in the context of person-centered care. Ironically, given the stigma attached to dementia, far from the need to end talk of personhood, bioethicists are needed to rescue the concept and clarify its role. (shrink)

This article gathers together various internet resources that are available for translator’s of Kant’s texts, including resources for digital texts of Kant’s and historically-relevant other writings, digital catalogs of published books and periodicals, online dictionaries, and digitally available 18th/19th century monolingual and bi-lingual dictionaries, encyclopedia, and Kant-specific lexicons.

The excellent contributions to this special issue are organized around a duality between sociality and materiality. They argue for greater emphasis on materiality. This article reflects upon what sustains the dichotomy between sociality and materiality, noting in particular the importance of the use and management of boundaries. The article asks whether and how dichotomies themselves might fruitfully become the target of social science analysis.

On nomme ici « un sexe » une manière singulière d’envisager une pratique sexuelle et de s’y engager. Michel Leiris est exemplaire dans sa manière d’exposer une pratique que l’on pourrait qualifier, en usant d’un de ses propres termes de « timoré ». Loin d’être naturelle ou immédiatement exaltante, l’acte sexuel se présente plutôt pour lui comme une épreuve, certes sans violence ni dimension sacrale, mais qui peut néanmoins être comparée, comme l’écriture elle-même, à une sorte de corrida intime.

Immanuel Kant’s forty-one years of academic lectures have come down to us primarily in the form of a great quantity of student notes. They span eleven different academic subjects and over thirty years of Kant’s teaching career, from the Herder notes of 1762-64 to the Vigilantius notes of the mid-1790s. These notes have value to the extent they reflect what Kant actually said in his lectures. If this is granted then their value lies in several directions: they clarify and develop (...) points made in his published writings, they consider topics not discussed in any of the published writings, they provide much of the philosophical context against which these writings were to be understood, they offer new perspectives into Kant’s intellectual development, and they round out our understanding of Kant’s life and personality. This essay briefly reviews the reliability of the Academy edition transcriptions of Kant’s notes, the relationship to what Kant might have actually said in the classroom, the question of whether Kant's lectures reflected his actual beliefs, the dating of the notes to actual semesters, the nature of university lectures of that day, and offers a brief typology of the roughly 100 sets of notes available to us and an overview of those notes available in each of the subjects over which Kant lectured. (shrink)

It is often held that authoritative directives are intended to serve as exclusionary reasons, meaning that their intended force is that those who are subject to them should not act on or be motivated by some of their other reasons for action. I argue that the exclusion found in two common domains (practical rationality and non-instrumental moral duties) differs too much in character from authoritative exclusion to plausibly serve as its single source. I argue that a better account of authoritative (...) exclusion can be constructed by combining those two sources, providing support for what I describe as a moralized version of Joseph Raz’s normal justification thesis, which understands obedience to authority as a requirement of instrumental morality rather than instrumental rationality. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Ghost in the Machine Objection The Private Language Argument Ockham's Razor and Identity Argument from Neural Dependence Arguments from Personal Identity Argument from Evolution.

Explores C. S. Lewis's views of the purpose of higher education and his distinctive answer: to experience pleasure.

Abstract“Applications” of knowledge symbolically and structurally “codify” thinking, often displacing the human who is relegated to passive, routine reproduction of operations and left with no space or time to understand or question the relations underlying the processes. This is both mirrored and augmented by the schematic narrowing of computational, calculative reason and nebulous or hidden code that is often read-only if human-readable at all. According to French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, this has toxic effects on learning, systemically and progressively embedding failures (...) to think, hindering the potential for the collective and individual human adoption and adaptation of the knowledge of life. This article presents a process-based model to care for this problem through Stieglerian critical pedagogy, phenomenography, and process philosophy. The model evolved out of a course with the aim to achieve collective cultural literacy in that which “goes without saying” in the increasingly ubiquitous digital design of everyday life. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Plato Aristotle.