After spinal cord injury (SCI), motoneuron death occurs at and around the level of injury which induces changes in function and organization throughout the nervous system, including cortical changes. Muscle affected by SCI may consist of both innervated (accessible to voluntary drive) and denervated (inaccessible to voluntary drive) muscle fibers. Voluntary activation measured with transcranial magnetic stimulation (VATMS) can quantify voluntary cortical/subcortical drive to muscle but is limited by technical challenges including suboptimal stimulation of target muscle relative to its antagonist. (...) The motor evoked potential (MEP) in the biceps compared to the triceps (i.e., MEP ratio) may be a key parameter in the measurement of biceps VATMS after SCI. We used paired pulse TMS, which can inhibit or facilitate MEPs, to determine whether the MEP ratio affects VATMS in individuals with tetraplegia. Ten individuals with tetraplegia following cervical SCI and ten non-impaired individuals completed single pulse and paired pulse VATMS protocols. Paired pulse stimulation was delivered at 1.5, 10, and 30 ms inter-stimulus intervals (ISI). In both the SCI and non-impaired groups, the main effect of the stimulation pulse (paired pulse compared to single pulse) on VATMS was not significant in the linear mixed-effects models. In both groups for the stimulation parameters we tested, the MEP ratio was not modulated across all effort levels and did not affect VATMS. Linearity of the voluntary moment and superimposed twitch moment relation was lower in SCI participants compared to non-impaired. Poor linearity in the SCI group limits interpretation of VATMS. Future work is needed to address methodological issues that limit clinical application of VATMS. (shrink)

Vijay is a forty-eight-year-old man with profound mental retardation and cerebral palsy. He uses a wheelchair, cannot speak or eat by mouth, and requires constant care. He lived in a group home for twenty-eight years. During the last year, Vijay has required two visits to the emergency room on average per month and has been hospitalized for two hundred days in total. These hospitalizations are the result of a number of painful and dangerous complications related to the gastrostomy tube that (...) provides his nutrition. The last time he was in the hospital, doctors had to give him a peripherally inserted central catheter, or PICC line, to provide nutrition because the gastrostomy tube was no longer effective .. (shrink)

This paper broadly aims at examining the idea of the “soul” or “atma” in ancient Greece and in India during the Axial Age. Against the backdrop of this general understanding, an attempt is made at comprehending the idea of the soul in Plato’s Phaedo in the light, on the one hand of Aristotle’s De Anima and on the other of Bhagavad Gita (or Gita in short). It is opined that Socrates’s views, in Phaedo, are closer in spirit to the Hindu (...) ideas of “atma” in the Upanishads and the Gita than to the Greek ideas of the “soul”. An attempt has been made to provide a background for this paradoxical event. (shrink)

The review essay concerns the book: Bhushan and Garfield, Minds Without Fear. The book, in my view, accomplishes well the task of providing a philosophically coherent interpretation of the main episodes of the modern Indian intellectual tradition. In this essay, I describe the importance of the work and comment on the cosmopolitan nature of the period of Indian thought under consideration.

Philosophers of chemistry, following the lead of physicists, have been slow to realize that molecular descriptions issuing from quantum mechanics in the absence of chemical theory are fatally flawed. In the wake of this realization, new topics have begun to unfold—including new metaphysical issues, new concerns about the philosophy of chemistry's place in the philosophy of science, and new accounts of how properties are observed, inferred, and presented. A recent collection of essays, Of Minds and Molecules: New Philosophical Perspectives on (...) Chemistry edited by Nalini Bhushan and Stuart Rosenfeld, reveals what some of these new issues are and suggests new directions for the philosophy of chemistry. (shrink)

The most pressing issues of the twenty-first century—climate change and persistent hunger in a world of food surpluses, to name only two—are not problems that can be solved from within individual disciplines, nation-states, or cultural perspectives. They are predicaments that can only be resolved by generating sustained and globally robust coordination across value systems. The scale of the problems and necessity for coordinated global solutions signal a world historical transit as momentous as the Industrial Revolution: a transition from the predominance (...) of technical knowledge to that of ethical deliberation. This volume brings together leading thinkers from around the world to deliberate on how best to correlate worth (value) with what is worthwhile (values), pairing human prosperity with personal, environmental, and spiritual flourishing in a world of differing visions of what constitutes a moral life. Especially in the aftermath of what is now being called the Great Recession, awareness has mounted of the imperative to question the modern divorce of economics from ethics. While the domains of economics and ethics were from antiquity through at least the eighteenth century understood in many cultures to be coterminous and mutually entailing, the modern assumption has been that the goal of maximizing human prosperity and the aim of justly enhancing our lives as persons and as communities were functionally and practically distinct. Working from a wide array of perspectives, the contributors to this volume offer a set of challenges to the assumed independence of the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of human and planetary well-being. Reflecting on the complex interrelationship among economics, justice, and equity, the book resists "one size fits all" approaches and struggles to revitalize the marriage of economics and ethics by activating cultural differences as the basis of mutual contribution to shared human flourishing. The publication of this important collection will stimulate or extend critical debates among scholars and students working in a number of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, including philosophy, history, environmental studies, economics, and law. Contributors: Roger T. Ames, James Behuniak Jr., Steve Bein, Nalini Bhushan, Purushottama Bilimoria, Steven Burik, Amita Chatterjee, Baoyan Cheng, Gordon Davis, Jay L. Garfield, Steven F. Geisz, Peter D. Hershock, Larry A. Hickman, Kathleen M. Higgins, Heidi M. Hurd, Thomas P. Kasulis, Workineh Kelbessa, Lori Keleher, Oliver Leaman, James McRae, Jin Y. Park, James Peterman, Naoko Saito, May Sim, Robert Smid, Paul Standish, Kenneth W. Stikkers, Karsten J. Struhl, Meera Sushila Viswanathan, Wu Shiu- Ching, Xu Di, T. Yamauchi, Yang Liuxin. (shrink)

ABSTRACT While—as Yancy himself reminds us regularly in this book—philosophy may begin in wonder, it cannot end there. Philosophical thought must move from wonder to commitment, whether that commitment is to something as abstract as the nature of numbers or as morally pressing as the response to racism. Philosophy, however intellectual an exercise it may be, is only worth pursuing if it addresses what is important to us, and only if in philosophizing we commit ourselves to making a difference, to (...) transforming ourselves and to benefiting our fellows. I was particularly struck when reading Across Black Spaces by Prof. Yancy’s project of recovery, specifically his recovery of the work of Thomas Nelson Baker, Gilbert Haven Jones, and Joyce Mitchell Cook—three profoundly original African American philosophers whose achievements are largely ignored in America today. My interest in this section of the book was piqued in part because of my own experience, in close collaboration with my colleague Nalini Bhushan, in a recovery project. In that case we were working to recover the work of Indian philosophers of the late 19th and early 20th century whose work had fallen into obscurity. That project led us to reflect on our own reasons for engaging in this kind of history of philosophy. John Makeham’s work recovering the work of the early 20th‐Century New Confucians, who fused Buddhist Yogācāra, Confucian ethics, and Pragmatist philosophy of science provides another example of this kind of enterprise. Reflection on these projects constitutes the background for my own thoughts about Prof. Yancy’s similar project. (shrink)

The original essays in this volume, while written from diverse perspectives, share the common aim of building a constructive dialogue between two currents in philosophy that seem not readily allied: Wittgenstein, who urges us to bring our words back home to their ordinary uses, recognizing that it is our agreements in judgments and forms of life that ground intelligibility; and feminist theory, whose task is to articulate a radical critique of what we say, to disrupt precisely those taken-for-granted agreements in (...) judgments and forms of life. Wittgenstein and feminist theorists are alike, however, in being unwilling or unable to "make sense" in the terms of the traditions from which they come, needing to rely on other means—including telling stories about everyday life—to change our ideas of what sense is and of what it is to make it. For both, appeal to grounding is problematic, but the presumed groundedness of particular judgments remains an unavoidable feature of discourse and, as such, in need of understanding. For feminist theory, Wittgenstein suggests responses to the immobilizing tugs between modernist modes of theorizing and postmodern challenges to them. For Wittgenstein, feminist theory suggests responses to those who would turn him into the "normal" philosopher he dreaded becoming, one who offers perhaps unorthodox solutions to recognizable philosophical problems. In addition to an introductory essay by Naomi Scheman, the volume’s twenty chapters are grouped in sections titled "The Subject of Philosophy and the Philosophical Subject," "Wittgensteinian Feminist Philosophy: Contrasting Visions," "Drawing Boundaries: Categories and Kinds," "Being Human: Agents and Subjects," and "Feminism’s Allies: New Players, New Games." These essays give us ways of understanding Wittgenstein and feminist theory that make the alliance a mutually fruitful one, even as they bring to their readings of Wittgenstein an explicitly historical and political perspective that is, at best, implicit in his work. The recent salutary turn in philosophy toward taking history seriously has shown how the apparently timeless problems of supposedly generic subjects arose out of historically specific circumstances. These essays shed light on the task of feminist theorists—along with postcolonial, queer, and critical race theorists—to "rotate the axis of our examination" around whatever "real need[s]" might emerge through the struggles of modernity’s Others. Contributors are Nancy E. Baker, Nalini Bhushan, Jane Braaten, Judith Bradford, Sandra W. Churchill, Daniel Cohen, Tim Craker, Alice Crary, Susan Hekman, Cressida J. Heyes, Sarah Lucia Hoagland, Christine M. Koggel, Bruce Krajewski, Wendy Lynne Lee, Hilda Lindemann Nelson, Deborah Orr, Rupert Read, Phyllis Rooney, and Janet Farrell Smith. (shrink)

'Minds Without Fear' attempts to showcase the intellectual agency of Anglophone Indian philosophers living under coloniality. The book’s thirteen chapters are framed by the acute professional anxiety many of them experienced then, and its rippling effects which continue till today. Like their predecessors, contemporary Indian philosophers worry that colonialism has crippled their intellectual abilities. Authors Nalini Bhushan and Jay Garfield argue that this anxiety is simply a type of “false consciousness” (38).