Transcranial direct current stimulation over the contralateral primary motor cortex of the target muscle has been described to enhance corticospinal excitability, as measured with transcranial magnetic stimulation. Recently, tDCS targeting the brain regions functionally connected to the contralateral primary motor cortex was reported to enhance corticospinal excitability more than conventional tDCS. We compared the effects of motor network tDCS, 2 mA conventional tDCS, and sham tDCS on corticospinal excitability in 21 healthy participants in a randomized, single-blind within-subject study design. We (...) applied tDCS for 12 min and measured corticospinal excitability with TMS before tDCS and at 0, 15, 30, 45, and 60 min after tDCS. Statistical analysis showed that neither motor network tDCS nor conventional tDCS significantly increased corticospinal excitability relative to sham stimulation. Furthermore, the results did not provide evidence for superiority of motor network tDCS over conventional tDCS. Motor network tDCS seems equally susceptible to the sources of intersubject and intrasubject variability previously observed in response to conventional tDCS. (shrink)

This paper questions the shifting meaning of the ethical categories of proximity and alterity in the light of the technological and social changes that virtual social worlds went through. It takes Roger Silverstone’s key theme of “proper distance” as a point of departure, and discusses the significance of this concept by linking it up with the more media-theoretical approaches on virtual communication as developed in McLuhan’s and Baudrillard’s body of thought. It is argued that today’s virtual realities ask for both (...) a philosophical and media-sociological reconsideration of the traditional ethical category of alterity. As such, it links up with Feenberg’s idea that “online groups are indeed a qualitatively new medium” (A. Feenberg and M. Bakardjieva, “Virtual Community: No ‘Killer Implication,’” New Media & Society 6(1) (2004): 37–43, 41), but at the same time challenges Feenberg’s reservations about a theory of media centrism. (shrink)

Peter of Spain's Tractatus, which appeared in a first critical edition by L.M. de Rijk, is a handbook on logic; it is now estimated that it dates from the second quarter of the thirteenth ce...

Gerald Odonis' logic is generous in its acceptance of ontological counterparts of linguistic expressions. He claims that universals have an objective status and are independent of our mental operations. This article takes a closer look at his views on the meaning of what he calls esse tertio adiacens, i.e., the type of being expressed in propositions of the form 'S is P'. To a certain extent Odonis' analysis resembles Peter of Spain's account of compositio. Unlike his predecessor, however, Odonis thinks (...) that the 'being' used in any true statement, regardless of whether the subject exists or not, is univocal. It turns out that Odonis' account is more in line with John Duns Scotus' intensionalist theory of propositional composition. (shrink)

As this book richly and entertainingly demonstrates, philosophy is as much the search for the right questions as it is the search for the right answers. Robert M. Martin’s popular collection of philosophical puzzles, paradoxes, jokes, and anecdotes is updated and expanded in this third edition, with dozens of new entries.

The strong connection between the two and its development into the Middle Ages form a major subject of this volume.Other themes featuring in this book are Plato ...

Some things are funny -- jokes, puns, sitcoms, Charlie Chaplin, The Far Side, Malvolio with his yellow garters crossed -- but why? Why does humor exist in the first place? Why do we spend so much of our time passing on amusing anecdotes, making wisecracks, watching _The Simpsons_? In _Inside Jokes_, Matthew Hurley, Daniel Dennett, and Reginald Adams offer an evolutionary and cognitive perspective. Humor, they propose, evolved out of a computational problem that arose when our long-ago ancestors were furnished (...) with open-ended thinking. Mother Nature -- aka natural selection -- cannot just order the brain to find and fix all our time-pressured misleaps and near-misses. She has to bribe the brain with pleasure. So we find them funny. This wired-in source of pleasure has been tickled relentlessly by humorists over the centuries, and we have become addicted to the endogenous mind candy that is humor. (shrink)

Perelman teaches us that, unlike demonstrations, arguments cannot be reduced to or understood as closed systems. In some particular--but telling-- ways, arguments are like jokes. Telling a joke requires close attention to, e.g., appropriateness as re gards subjects, length, the extent of shared knowledge of both particulars and stereotypes, and whether it is possible to be ironic without being misunderstood. Thinking along these lines points up the futil ity of reducing either the invention or the evaluation of arguments to (...) formal schemata. (shrink)

Previous studies have shown that children retreat from argument‐structure overgeneralization errors (e.g., *Don’t giggle me) by inferring that frequently encountered verbs are unlikely to be grammatical in unattested constructions, and by making use of syntax‐semantics correspondences (e.g., verbs denoting internally caused actions such as giggling cannot normally be used causatively). The present study tested a new account based on a unitary learning mechanism that combines both of these processes. Seventy‐two participants (ages 5–6, 9–10, and adults) rated overgeneralization errors with higher (...) (*The funny man’s joke giggled Bart) and lower (*The funny man giggled Bart) degrees of direct external causation. The errors with more‐direct causation were rated as less unacceptable than those with less‐direct causation. This finding is consistent with the new account, under which children acquire—in an incremental and probabilistic fashion—the meaning of particular constructions (e.g., transitive causative = direct external causation) and particular verbs, rejecting generalizations where the incompatibility between the two is too great. (shrink)

Whilst certain verbs may appear in both the intransitive inchoative and the transitive causative constructions (The ball rolled/The man rolled the ball), others may appear in only the former (The man laughed/*The joke laughed the man). Some accounts argue that children acquire these restrictions using only (or mainly) statistical learning mechanisms such as entrenchment and pre-emption. Others have argued that verb semantics are also important. To test these competing accounts, adults (Experiment 1) and children aged 5–6 and 9–10 (Experiment (...) 2) were taught novel verbs designed to be construed — on the basis of their semantics — as either intransitive-only or alternating. In support of the latter claim, participants' grammaticality judgments revealed that even the youngest group respected these semantic constraints. Frequency (entrenchment) effects were observed for familiar, but not novel, verbs (Experiment 1). We interpret these findings in the light of a new theoretical account designed to yield effects of both verb semantics and entrenchment/pre-emption. (shrink)

Comparatively speaking, philosophy has not been especially long-winded in attempting to answer questions about what is funny and why we should think so. There is the standard debate of many centuries’ standing between superiority and incongruity accounts of humor, which for the most part attempt to identify the intentional objects of our amusement.1 There is the more recent debate about humor and morality, about whether jokes themselves may be regarded as immoral or about whether it can in certain circumstances be (...) wrong to laugh.2 There is even apparently some disagreement about whether amusement is an emotion proper or a different kind of psychological attitude altogether. While I have almost despite myself taken .. (shrink)

Resumen El objetivo de este trabajo es analizar enunciados conversacionales con humor fallido producido en conversaciones entre mujeres, entre hombres, y entre hombres y mujeres para comprobar si utilizan las mismas estrategias conversacionales cuando se trata de evitar la descortesía. El humor fallido se produce cuando los interlocutores, si bien reconocen la presencia de un enunciado humorístico, no lo continúan para así evitar ataques hacia la imagen de algunos de los participantes. Para llevar a cabo nuestro objetivo, nos basaremos en (...) la Teoría General del Humor Verbal propuesta por Attardo y Raskin ed: Joke similarity and joke representation model. En HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research : pp. 293-347) y, en especial, Attardo, en la Teoría de la Cortesía que proponen Brown y Levinson, en tanto que analizaremos ejemplos extraídos del Corpus de conversaciones coloquiales de Briz y grupo Val.Es.Co. y del corpus de los mismos autores en proceso de digitalización. (shrink)

Background: The magnitude of bullying and harassment among psychiatrists is reportedly high, yet no peer-review published studies addressing this issue could be found. Therefore, it was decided to conduct a pilot study to assess the degree of the problem, the types of bullying/harassment and to provide some insights into the situation.Methods and Principal Findings: Following multiple focus group meetings, a yes/no response type questionnaire was developed to assess the degree and type of bullying and harassment experienced by psychiatrists. Over a (...) 3-month period the questionnaire was administered to a random sample of 60 psychiatrists. 57 out of the 60 psychiatrists reported harassment and bullying. Frequencies of the following response variables are presented in descending order: rumours 40% ; defamation 20% ; passing remarks 20% ; false accusations 15% ; threats 13.3% ; verbal abuse 13.3% ; unjustified complaints 13.3% ; promotion blocked 13.3% ; humiliation 13% ; bad reference given 10% ; credentials questioned 8.3% ; physical attacks 5% ; termination 5% ; derogatory remarks 1.7% and 1.7% were subjected to personal work. As a result of being subjected to harassment, 66.7% of the psychiatrists did not take any action, whereas 33.3% confronted the person they believed responsible. Asked whether the bullying and harassment caused distress, 18.3% of the psychiatrists did not report any effect, 30% reported mild distress, 40% moderate distress and severe distress was reported by 11.7%.Conclusions: It was concluded that the magnitude of bullying and harassment among psychiatrists may be quite high, as evidenced by this pilot study. There is a need for extensive systematic studies on this subject and to establish strategies to prevent and address this issue at a national and regulatory level. (shrink)

L'ouvrage ici presente appartient peut-etre a la derniere periode de la production d'Avicenne. Le Livre des directives et remarques supplee les parties perdues de La philosophie orientale, dernier grand projet avicennien, en ce sens qu'il tend a rearticuler science divine et science universelle, par raport a l'entreprise philosophique du Shifa'. Neanmoins les Directives ne sont aucunement un traite, mais plutot un recueil de notes sur des points controverses. Les liens entre les chapitres sont souvent tenus, parfois meme arbitraires, mais il (...) ressort pourtant de la des modifications importantes par rapport aux philosophes grecs. Les theories d'Avicenne sont ainsi toutes en faveur d'une pensee rationaliste et scientifique. L'avance scientifique des orientaux a, pour lui, ouvert a l'intelligence des voies nouvelles; les methodes grecques de pensee demeurent fondamentales, mais des exigences inconnues de leur temps demandent qu'elles soient depassees. (shrink)

This contribution explores the assertion that climate change may be described as a “wicked problem.” It notes that the term was introduced in the context of the management sciences where a managerial ethos prevailed and where moral connotations were excluded. Subsequent references to climate change as a wicked problem maintained both these features. Yet, if climate change not only poses technological, economic, and political problems but also has moral and, indeed, spiritual challenges—as is widely maintained—then such moral connotations cannot be (...) avoided. The description of a problem as wicked then becomes part of the problem. It is argued that the term is best understood as one used in jest, so that if we seek to define a problem’s wickedness in a conceptually precise way, we are missing the joke. The major moral dimensions of the challenges posed by climate changes should be taken seriously, but perhaps there is no need to take the term wicked problems all that seriously. What should not be laughed off is the managerial ethos that presumes that the challenges posed by climate changes can be addressed “exactly” through climate engineering or even social engineering. (shrink)

Academic philosophy can be puzzling to newcomers. The conventions, terms, and expectations entrenched among philosophers aren’t always clear from the outside. Why are philosophers so preoccupied with finding “the truth”—doesn’t everyone have their own philosophy? Is philosophy so deep and difficult that its literature has to be incomprehensible? What kinds of arguments can there be for a philosophical position? Where does the evidence come from? Why is there so much jargon—wouldn’t it be better to do away with it altogether? Best-selling (...) author and retired philosophy professor Robert Martin answers these questions and many more, offering a practical guide to arguing and writing philosophically. Anecdotes, jokes, asides, digressions, oddments, and entertainments are included throughout, resulting in an informal introduction that doesn’t shy away from the nuts and bolts of philosophical argument. (shrink)

1. First person authority: the received explanation Over a wide range of psychological attributes, a mature speaker seems to enjoy a defeasible form of authority on how things are with him. The received explanation of this is epistemic, and rests upon a cognitive assumption. The speaker’s word is a authoritative because when things are thus-and-so with him, then normally he knows that they are. This is held to be because the speaker has direct and privileged access to the contents of (...) his consciousness by means of introspection, conceived as a faculty of inner sense. Like perceptual knowledge, introspective knowledge is held to be direct and non-evidential. Accordingly, the first-person utterances ‘I have a pain’, ‘I believe that p’, ‘I intend to V’ are taken to be descriptions of what is evident to inner sense. Many classical thinkers held such subjective knowledge to be not only immediate, but also infallible and indubitable. The challenge to the received conceptions came from Wittgenstein. He denied the cognitive assumption, arguing that it cannot be said of me at all (except perhaps as a joke) that I know that I am in pain. For what is that supposed to mean — except perhaps that I am in pain?1 If it makes no sense to say that one knows that one is in pain, then the epistemic explanation is a non-starter, since it explains the special authoritative status of a person’s avowal of pain by reference to the putative fact that the subject of pain knows, normally knows, or cannot but know, that he is in pain when he is. It is important to note that Wittgenstein did not mechanically generalize the case of pain across the whole domain of firstperson utterances. The case of pain constitutes only one pole of a range of such utterances. Avowals and averrals of belief and intention approximate the other pole, and require independent analysis and grammatical description. (shrink)

As this book richly and entertainingly demonstrates, philosophy is as much the search for the right questions as it is the search for the right answers. Robert M. Martin’s popular collection of philosophical puzzles, paradoxes, jokes, and anecdotes is updated and expanded in this third edition, with dozens of new entries.

The nature of quantum computation is discussed. It is argued that, in terms of the amount of information manipulated in a given time, quantum and classical computation are equally efficient. Quantum superposition does not permit quantum computers to ''perform many computations simultaneously'' except in a highly qualified and to some extent misleading sense. Quantum computation is therefore not well described by interpretations of quantum mechanics which invoke the concept of vast numbers of parallel universes. Rather, entanglement makes available types of (...) computation processes which, while not exponentially larger than classical ones, are unavailable to classical systems. The essence of quantum computation is that it uses entanglement to generate and manipulate a physical representation of the correlations between logical entities, without the need to completely represent the logical entities themselves. (shrink)

Objectives: Evidence based patient choice seems based on a strong liberal individualist interpretation of patient autonomy; however, not all patients are in favour of such an interpretation. The authors wished to assess whether ideals of autonomy in clinical practice are more in accordance with alternative concepts of autonomy from the ethics literature. This paper describes the development of a questionnaire to assess such concepts of autonomy.Methods: A questionnaire, based on six moral concepts from the ethics literature, was sent to aneurysm (...) patients and their surgeons. The structure of the questionnaire was assessed by factor analysis, and item reduction was based on reliability.Results: Ninety six patients and 58 surgeons participated. The questionnaire consisted of four scales. Two of the scales reflected the paternalistic and consumerist poles of the liberal individualist model, one scale reflected concepts of Socratic autonomy and of procedural independence, and the fourth scale reflected ideals of risk disclosure.Discussion: The Ideal Patient Autonomy Scale is a 14 item normative instrument. It is clearly distinct from the generally used psychological preference questionnaires that assess preferences for physician-patient roles. (shrink)

Adrian Viens, Guest Editor of this Olivieri symposium, and Julian Savulescu, the Editor of JME, set the scene for the symposium."In failing...[her] when she needed them most, it is now clear that some members of the University’s Faculty of Medicine heard her muffled cries of academic freedom from the back room, yet their response was to serve another round of drinks and turn the music up louder. With the bombshell revelations in the...affair, the plug may have been pulled on this (...) business sponsored party, and hopefully a sober re-examination of the university’s neglected role and responsibility toward independent inquiry and academic freedom can begin.1" "These guys don’t get one thing—we’re not going away. This isn’t a personal vendetta. This is something I want patients to be protected from when I’m dead, fifty years from now.2" "[The Olivieri affair is] not a mystery novel, but instead the latest skulduggery at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children.1" "The legal assaults which you have endured in your battle against the drug company, and in your battle against the medical establishment appear to have been fought with the type of uncommon bravery that is rarely seen. It is for this reason that our trustees have unanimously chosen to recognise you for this most prestigious award.3" "[The Olivieri affair resulted from] a fundamental misreading of the issue as a mere contractual and scientific dispute...[it is] Canada’s worst academic and research scandal in decades...[Since 1998, Olivieri has been] demoted, then restored, then harassed. She has been smeared with allegations attacking her competence, integrity, sanity and personality....4"The Olivieri affair is one of the most important events to occur in research ethics. From its dominance in the Canadian and international news media, to changes in the governance of public health, academic medicine, …. (shrink)

This paper examines the use of case studies in ethics education. While not dismissing their value for specific purposes, the paper shows the limits of their use. While agreeing that case studies are narratives, although rather thin stories, the paper argues that the claim that case studies could represent reality is difficult to sustain. Instead, the paper suggests a way of using stories in ethics teaching that could be more real for students, while also giving them a way of thinking (...) about their own professional practices. The paper shows how the method can be used to develop a more critical and reflective practice for students in the health care professions. Some immediate problems with the method are discussed. (shrink)

Informed consent enjoys an unassailable position in both clinical and research situations as a safeguard of patients’ rights. Keeping the patient involved in the decision making process is easier when there is direct communication with the individual. The Pakistani milieu offers challenges to this process because crucial decision making is often done by family members or is left entirely up to the attending physician. There seems to be a general acceptance of this shifting of focus from the individual to other (...) players. This also raises certain ethical dilemmas for physicians who may feel uncomfortable with communication which excludes the patient or in accepting a paternalistic primary decision making role. The objective of this informal qualitative study was to ascertain physicians’ perceptions regarding the process of information delivery to the patient in the Pakistani context and the various influences acting upon it. (shrink)

Parents’ freedom to choose infant male circumcision is the correct policyIndividuals and groups lobbying to have infant male circumcision prohibited or restricted often argue that the practice of routinely circumcising infants is unjustified. For instance, in this issue of the journal, John Hutson argues that it is virtually impossible to justify a policy in which the medical establishment should be able to embark on a “mass circumcision” campaign of 100% of the infant male population [see page 238].1Indeed, I would be (...) hard pressed to find anyone who could rationally disagree with this contention. However, this is because no one is currently arguing for the enactment of a policy that stipulates that all healthy male infants should be routinely circumcised . Arguments seeking to support a prohibition of “routine infant circumcision”, such as the one by Hutson, are arguing against a straw man—and a pitiful one at that.2 Such arguments only serve to misconstrue the debate and avoid engaging in the real and pressing issues concerning the legitimacy of the provision of this procedure.The questions that should be considered, and the ones which I shall be interested in discussing here, are what reasons are justifiable for allowing parents to choose to have their son circumcised? After well informed and careful deliberation should parents have the freedom to choose to have their son circumcised? These are the most relevant questions to be considered because there is a growing collection of citizens, medical practitioners, and lawyers who are currently lobbying for the practice of infant male circumcision to be outlawed—for example, there is a bioethicist who argues that the criminal law should be used …. (shrink)