Specific passages within the prose sermons of the book of Jeremiah portray the prophet as a teacher of torah who refers to laws of Deuteronomy and discusses their significance for his particular audience. This portrait of Jeremiah leads beyond the deuteronomistic image of the prophets and has been inserted into the book in postexilic times.

Contour adaptation is a recently described paradigm that renders otherwise salient visual stimuli temporarily perceptually invisible. Here we investigate whether this illusion can be exploited to study visual awareness. We found that CA can induce seconds of sustained invisibility following similarly long periods of uninterrupted adaptation. Furthermore, even fragmented adaptors are capable of producing CA, with the strength of CA increasing monotonically as the adaptors encompass a greater fraction of the stimulus outline. However, different types of adaptor patterns, such as (...) distinctive shapes or illusory contours, produce equivalent levels of CA suggesting that the main determinants of CA are low-level stimulus characteristics, with minimal modulation by higher-order visual processes. Taken together, our results indicate that CA has desirable properties for studying visual awareness, including the production of prolonged periods of perceptual dissociation from stimulation as well as parametric dependencies of that dissociation on a host of stimulus parameters. (shrink)

Although activated spinal cord glia contribute importantly to neuropathic pain, how nerve injury activates glia remains controversial. It has recently been proposed, on the basis of genetic approaches, that toll-like receptor 4 may be a key receptor for initiating microglial activation following L5 spinal nerve injury. The present studies extend this idea pharmacologically by showing that TLR4 is key for maintaining neuropathic pain following sciatic nerve chronic constriction injury. Established neuropathic pain was reversed by intrathecally delivered TLR4 receptor antagonists derived (...) from lipopolysaccharide. Additionally, -naltrexone, -naloxone, and -naloxone, which we show here to be TLR4 antagonists in vitro on both stably transfected HEK293-TLR4 and microglial cell lines, suppressed neuropathic pain with complete reversal upon chronic infusion. Immunohistochemical analyses of spinal cords following chronic infusion revealed suppression of CCI-induced microglial activation by -naloxone and -naloxone, paralleling reversal of neuropathic pain. Together, these CCI data support the conclusion that neuron-to-glia signaling through TLR4 is important not only for initiating neuropathic pain, as suggested previously, but also for maintaining established neuropathic pain. Furthermore, these studies suggest that the novel TLR4 antagonists -naloxone and -naloxone can each fully reverse established neuropathic pain upon multi-day administration. This finding with -naloxone is of potential clinical relevance. This is because -naloxone is an antagonist that is inactive at the -opioid selective receptors on neurons that produce analgesia. Thus, these data suggest that -opioid antagonists such as -naloxone may be useful clinically to suppress glial activation, yet -opioid agonists suppress pain. (shrink)

In this paper, I ask how we, as linguistically constituted subjects, form communities that respect difference. Whatever “commonality” we find in our multicultural society cannot be grounded in a narrow concept of reason, a singular method of inquiry, or an a priori logic, but in language. By examining Hans-Georg Gadamer’s concept of linguisticality, we see that there can be a universal ground of meaning that will foster the formation of communities without recourse to the traditional foundations of thinking. Gadamer contends (...) that language presents philosophy an infinite task that urges us to consider our fundamental linguisticality, the linguistic experience from which languages develop. By examining Augustine’s notion of the “innerword”, Gadamer explains our capacity to understand others, even when understanding seems least likely. Gadamer’s hermeneutics encourages us to understand the Other’s language. I conclude that a Gadamerian community allows us to understand each other without requiring that the Other become like us. (shrink)

In this paper, I ask how we, as linguistically constituted subjects, form communities that respect difference. Whatever “commonality” we find in our multicultural society cannot be grounded in a narrow concept of reason, a singular method of inquiry, or an a priori logic, but in language. By examining Hans-Georg Gadamer’s concept of linguisticality, we see that there can be a universal ground of meaning that will foster the formation of communities without recourse to the traditional foundations of thinking. Gadamer contends (...) that language presents philosophy an infinite task that urges us to consider our fundamental linguisticality, the linguistic experience from which languages develop. By examining Augustine’s notion of the “innerword”, Gadamer explains our capacity to understand others, even when understanding seems least likely. Gadamer’s hermeneutics encourages us to understand the Other’s language. I conclude that a Gadamerian community allows us to understand each other without requiring that the Other become like us. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungMit den Fortschritten im Bereich der psychiatrisch-genetischen Forschung gehen auch intensive Diskussionen bezüglich der daraus erwachsenden Implikationen einher. Hoffnungen wie Befürchtungen gegenüber der neuen Technologie und deren Folgen werden gleichermaßen zum Ausdruck gebracht. Über die Einstellung der Bevölkerung und insbesondere der Patienten mit affektiven oder schizophrenen Erkrankungen und ihrer Angehörigen in Deutschland war bisher allerdings wenig bekannt. Daher führten wir im Rahmen des Deutschen Humangenomprojektes erstmals eine Studie durch, um die Einstellungen und ihre beeinflussenden Faktoren zu erfassen. Wir entwickelten einen (...) Fragebogen zur Erfassung der Erwartungen, Hoffnungen und Befürchtungen sowie der die Einstellung beeinflussenden Faktoren. Hiermit wurde eine repräsentative Stichprobe von 3077 Personen aus der Allgemeinbevölkerung am Telefon befragt. Weiterhin wurden mit 316 Patienten und 163 Angehörigen persönliche standardisierte Interviews anhand des Fragebogens durchgeführt. Die Mehrzahl der Befragten hatte eine positive Einstellung zu psychiatrisch-genetischer Forschung, äußerte jedoch gleichzeitig ethische Bedenken. Übereinstimmend waren die Befragten der Ansicht, dass Informationen aus genetischen Untersuchungen vertraulich behandelt werden sollten. Kleine, aber signifikante Unterschiede zwischen den Gruppen zeigten sich bezüglich der Einstellung zu präsymptomatischer genetischer Diagnostik. Unsere Ergebnisse weisen auf eine Ambivalenz der Befragten gegenüber der psychiatrisch-genetischen Forschung und Untersuchung hin: Neben einer überwiegend positiven Einstellung wurden auch moralische Bedenken geäußert. (shrink)

Objectives:Social isolation is increasing in aging societies and several studies have shown a relation with worse cognition in old age. However, less is known about the association in the oldest-old (85+); the group that is at highest risk for both social isolation and dementia. Methods:Analyses were based on follow-up 5 to 9 of the longitudinal German study on aging, cognition, and dementia in primary care patients (AgeCoDe) and the study on needs, health service use, costs, and health-related quality of life (...) in a large sample of oldest-old primary care patients (AgeQualiDe), a multi-center population-based prospective cohort study. Measurements included the Lubben Social Network Scale (LSNS-6), with a score below 12 indicating social isolation, as well as the Mini-Mental Status Examination (MMSE) as an indicator of cognitive function. Results:Dementia-free study participants (n = 942) were M = 86.4 (SD = 3.0) years old at observation onset, 68.2% were women. One third (32.3%) of them were socially isolated. Adjusted linear hybrid mixed effects models revealed significantly lower cognitive function in individuals with smaller social networks (β = 0.5, 95% CI = 0.3-0.7, p <.001). Moreover, changes in an individual's social network size were significantly associated with cognitive changes over time (β = 0.2, 95% CI = 0.1-0.4, p =.003), indicating worse cognitive function with shrinking social networks. Conclusion:Social isolation is highly prevalent among oldest-old individuals, being a risk factor for decreases in cognitive function. Consequently, it is important to maintain a socially active lifestyle into very old age. Likewise, this calls for effective ways to prevent social isolation. (shrink)

Continental authors and editors often sought to ground alchemical writing within a long-established, coherent and pan-European tradition, appealing to the authority of adepts from different times and places. Greek, Latin and Islamic alchemists met both in person and between the covers of books, in actual, fictional or coincidental encounters: a trope utilised in Michael Maier’s Symbola aureae mensae duodecim nationum. This essay examines how works attributed to an English authority, George Ripley, were received in central Europe and incorporated into (...) continental compendia. Placed alongside works by the philosophers of other nations, Ripley’s writings helped affirm the unity and truth of alchemy in defiance of its critics. His continental editors were therefore concerned not only with the provenance of manuscripts and high-quality exemplars, but by a range of other factors, including the desire to suppress controversial material, intervene in contemporary polemics, and defend their art. In the resulting compilations, the vertical axis of alchemy’s long, diachronic tradition may be compared to the horizontal plane of pan-European alchemy. (shrink)

By way of conclusion we may add the following three items to A. Maier's and G. Federici-Vescovini's investigations: 1. The Questiones super libris Physicorum in the ms. Cesena, B. Malatestiana S.VIII.5 have been incorrectly attributed to John Buridan. Their real author is Albert of Saxony. 2. The ms. Cesena, B. Malatestiana S.VIII.5 ff. 4ra-4vb contains the Prologue and the tabula questionum of the Questions on De gen. et corr., whereas the ms. Vat. lat. 3097 ff. 103ra-146rb has the complete (...) text. This Prologue and the questions 1 and 3 can also be found in Vat. lat. 2185 ff. 50ra-50vb. This text certainly cannot be considered as another copy of Buridan's well known Questions on De gen. et corr. Neither is it certain that Nicole Oresme is their author, as A. Maier seems to believe. There are indications pointing in the direction of a redaction other than the one known, of Buridan's Questions. In any case this possibility cannot be ruled out by the material that has been presented here. 3. The ms. Cesena, B. Malatestiana S.VIII.5 has at one time had the same owner as the codices Vat. lat. 2159, 2160, 2185 and 3066, and the codices Cesena, B. Malatestiana S.VII.5 and S.VIII.2. This owner was in all probability Bernardus a Campanea of Verona, a physician. (shrink)

A fictional text is commonly viewed as constituting an invitation to play a certain game of make-believe, with the individual sentences written by the author providing the propositions we are to imagine and/or accept as true within the fiction. However, we can’t always take the text at face value. What narratologists call ‘unreliable narrators’ may present a confused or misleading picture of the fictional world. Meanwhile there has been a debate in philosophy about so-called ‘imaginative resistance’ in which we are (...) inclined to resist imagining (or even accepting as true in the fiction) what’s explicitly stated in the text. But if we can’t take the text’s word for it, how do we determine what’s true in a fiction? We propose an account of fiction interpretation in a dynamic setting (a version of DRT with a mechanism for opening, updating, and closing temporary ‘workspaces’) and combine this framework with belief revision logic. With these tools in hand we turn to modelling imaginative resistance and unreliable narrators. (shrink)

Quotation exhibits characteristics of both use and mention. I argue against the recently popular pragmatic reductions of quotation to mere language use (Recanati 2001), and in favor of a truly hybrid account synthesizing and extending Potts (2007) and Geurts and Maier (2005), using a mention logic and a dynamic semantics with presupposition to establish a context-driven meaning shift. The main advantages are an account of error neutralization and shifted indexicality under quotation. The current paper addresses the problematic data involving (...) quoted non-constituents. (shrink)

I argue that emojis are essentially little pictures, rather than words, gestures, expressives, or diagrams. ???? means that the world looks like that, from some viewpoint. I flesh out a pictorial semantics in terms of geometric projection with abstraction and stylization. Since such a semantics delivers only very minimal contents I add an account of pragmatic enrichment, driven by coherence and nonliteral interpretation. The apparent semantic distinction between emojis depicting entities (like ????) and those depicting facial expressions (like ????) I (...) analyze as a difference between truth-conditional and use-conditional pictorial content: ???? depicts what the world of evaluation looks like, while ???? depicts what the utterance context looks like. (shrink)

Semantics traditionally focuses on linguistic meaning. In recent years, the Super Linguistics movement has tried to broaden the scope of inquiry in various directions, including an extension of semantics to talk about the meaning of pictures. There are close similarities between the interpretation of language and of pictures. Most fundamentally, pictures, like utterances, can be either true or false of a given state of affairs, and hence both express propositions (Zimmermann, 2016; Greenberg, 2013; Abusch, 2015). Moreover, sequences of pictures, like (...) sequences of utterances, can be used to tell stories. Wordless picture books, comics, and film are cases in point. In this paper I pick up the project of providing a dynamic semantic account of pictorial story-telling, started by Abusch (2012) and continued by Abusch & Rooth (2017); Maier & Bimpikou (2019); Fernando (2020). More specifically, I propose here a semantics of speech and thought bubbles by adding event reference to PicDRT. To get there I first review the projection-based semantics for pictures (section 1), noting the fundamental distinction between symbolic and iconic meaning that makes speech bubbles especially interesting (section 2). I then review the dynamic PicDRT framework for pictorial narratives (section 3), add events (section 4), and propose an account of speech bubbles as quotational event modification (section 5). I end with a brief look at other conventional, symbolic enrichments in comics (section 6). (shrink)

There is a familiar argument for the falsity of determinism, an argument that proceeds from the claim that agents are morally responsible. A number of authors have challenged the soundness of this argument. I pose a different challenge, one that grants its soundness. The challenge is that, given certain plausible assumptions, one cannot know the conclusion of this argument on the basis of knowing its premises. That is, one cannot know that determinism is false on the basis of this argument (...) even if agents are in fact morally responsible and moral responsibility is in fact incompatible with determinism. A slightly different version of the challenge tells also against the claim that one can be justified in believing that determinism is false on the basis of the argument, so that the challenge cannot be evaded by a retreat to an epistemic position weaker than knowledge. I compare my challenge to the challenge posed by the external world sceptic, and argue that there are asymmetries between these challenges that make it reasonable to accept the former and reject the latter. I close by considering the prospects for developing an epistemology of moral responsibility that is adequate to answer the challenge. (shrink)

It is rather uncontroversial that there are different ways to report de se attitudes, but there is still disagreement about the number and the nature of the different mechanisms at work. Following Anand (2006), I distinguish three types of de se reporting: one a special case of de re, another expressed by shifted indexicals, and a third expressed by dedicated de se pronouns. For the first two I propose reductions to de re and de dicto reporting, respectively, couched in a (...) dynamic framework where presupposition resolution takes center stage. For the third, I part ways with all current proposals in offering what is essentially a de re analysis of dedicated de se pronouns. I motivate this radical departure with examples of de se pronouns binding de re reflexives, as recently brought into the spotlights by Charlow (2010) and Sharvit (2010). (shrink)

Abstract:This article examines the transformation that occurred in anarchist political economy during the interwar period by tracing the intellectual trajectory of Diego Abad de Santillán, an important labor organizer and policymaker during the Spanish Revolution and Civil War (1936–39). Representative of a broader intellectual struggle within anarchism, Abad de Santillán moved away from nineteenth-century ideas about inaugurating anarchism through autonomous communes and gravitated toward participatory national economic planning. Uncovering this shift sheds light on the techniques of governance available to anarchists (...) during the conflict and it highlights their efforts to steer elitist discourses about planning toward democratic management. (shrink)

This study described the relationships between academic class and student moral sensitivity and reasoning and between curriculum design components for ethics education and student moral sensitivity and reasoning. The data were collected from freshman (n = 506) and senior students (n = 440) in eight baccalaureate nursing programs in South Korea by survey; the survey consisted of the Korean Moral Sensitivity Questionnaire and the Korean Defining Issues Test. The results showed that moral sensitivity scores in patient-oriented care and conflict were (...) higher in senior students than in freshman students. Furthermore, more hours of ethics content were associated with higher principled thinking scores of senior students. Nursing education in South Korea may have an impact on developing student moral sensitivity. Planned ethics content in nursing curricula is necessary to improve moral sensitivity and moral reasoning of students. (shrink)

The central characteristic of denials is that they perform a non-monotonic correction operation on discourse structure. A second characteristic is that they may be used to object to various kinds of information including presuppositions and implicatures. In this paper we first use standard DRT to capture these features, implement an earlier proposal of van der Sandt (1991) in DRT and point out a shortcoming of that approach. We then adopt Layered DRT. LDRT is an extension of standard DRT designed to (...) represent and interpret different types of information conveyed in a conversation by distributing them over separate layers of the same LDRS. We will then show how LDRT allows us to solve the problems of the classic monostratal system. The resulting system makes use of a directed reverse anaphora mechanism to locate, remove and negate the material objected to. (shrink)

This book defends a comprehensive new vision of what addiction is and how people with addictions should be treated. The author argues that, in addition to physical and intellectual disabilities, there are volitional disabilities – disabilities of the will – and that addiction is best understood as a species of volitional disability. -/- This theory serves to illuminate long-standing philosophical and psychological perplexities about addiction and addictive motivation. It articulates a normative framework within which to understand prohibition, harm reduction, and (...) other strategies that aim to address addiction. The argument of this book is that these should ultimately be evaluated in terms of reasonable accommodations for addicted people and that the priority of addiction policy should be the provision of such accommodations. What makes this book distinctive is that it understands addiction as a fundamentally political problem, an understanding that is suggested by standard legal approaches to addiction, but which has not received a sustained defense in the previous philosophical or psychological literature. -/- This text marks a significant advance in the theory of addiction, one which should reshape our understanding of addiction policy and its proper aims. (shrink)

We propose to analyze well-known cases of "imaginative resistance" from the philosophical literature (Gendler, Walton, Weatherson) as involving the inference that particular content should be attributed to either: (i) a character rather than the narrator or, (ii) an unreliable, irrational, opinionated, and/or morally deviant "first person" narrator who was originally perceived to be a typical impersonal, omniscient, "effaced" narrator. We model the latter type of attribution in terms of two independently motivated linguistic mechanisms: accommodation of a discourse referent (Lewis, Stalnaker, (...) Kamp) and 'cautious' updating as a model of non-cooperative information exchange (Eckardt). (shrink)

This paper is an update of the documents we have concerning the Acts of the Christian martyrs, focused on three main aspects: 1) the kind of acts we know of and their classification from the point of view of their historic value; 2) the versions or editions of the texts that are most accepted by scholars; 3) the relevance of the different parts that make up these documents in order to discern the original text from passages that were rewritten or (...) underwent later variations. In this way, the article offers an exhaustive list of the documents for use in researching Christian martyrs in the Roman period. (shrink)

We propose to characterize imaginative resistance as the failure or unwillingness of the reader to take a fictional description of a deviant reality at face value. The goal of the paper is to explore how readers deal with such a breakdown of the default Face Value interpretation strategy. We posit two distinct interpretative ‘coping’ strategies which help the reader engage with the resistance-inducing fiction by attributing the offending content to one of the fictional characters. We present novel empirical evidence that (...) shows that actual readers use these strategies and we flesh out the exact workings of these strategies by integrating them into a general formal semantic framework for interpreting fiction. (shrink)