Amblyopia, or lazy eye, is a neurological vision disorder that studies have shown to affect two to five percent of the population. Current methods of treatment produce the best visual outcome, if the condition is identified early in the patient's life. Several early screening procedures are aimed at finding the condition while the patient is a child, including an automated vision screening system. This paper aims to use artificial intelligence techniques to automatically identify children who are at risk for developing (...) the amblyopic condition and should therefore be referred to a specialist, i.e., pediatric ophthalmologist. Three techniques, namely, decision tree learning, random forest, and artificial neural network, are studied in this paper in terms of their effectiveness, using metrics of sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy. The features used by the techniques are extracted from images of patient eyes and are based on the color information. The efficacy of pixel color data is investigated with respect to the measurement of the rate of change of the color in the iris and pupil, i.e., color slope features. A 10-fold stratified cross validation procedure is used to compare the effectiveness of the three AI techniques in this medical application domain. (shrink)

Visual Agnosia is a comprehensive and up-to-date review of disorders of higher vision that relates these disorders to current conceptions of higher vision from cognitive science, illuminating both the neuropsychological disorders and the nature of normal visual object recognition.Brain damage can lead to selective problems with visual perception, including visual agnosia the inability to recognize objects even though elementary visual functions remain unimpaired. Such disorders are relatively rare, yet they provide a window onto how the normal (...) brain might accomplish the complex task of vision. Visual Agnosia reviews a century of case studies of higher-level visual deficits following brain damage, places them in the general context of current neuroscience, and draws relevant conclusions about the organization of normal visual processing. It is unique in drawing on research in cognitive psychology, computational vision, visual neurophysiology, and neuropsychology to interpret the agnosias and draw inferences from them about visual object recognition.Following a historical account of agnosia research, Visual Agnosia offers a taxonomy of a wide range of agnosia syndromes, describing and interpreting the syndromes in terms of the latest theoretical models of visual processing and ultimately bringing them to bear as evidence on a variety of questions in the study of higher vision.Martha J. Farah is Associate Professor of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. Visual Agnosia is included in the Issues in Biology of Language and Cognition series, edited by John Marshall. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Mental Disorder and Moral Responsibility:Disorders of Personhood as Harmful Dysfunctions, With Special Reference to AlcoholismJerome C. Wakefield (bio)Keywordsalcohol dependence, philosophy of psychiatry, mental disorder, harmful dysfunction, psychiatric diagnosis, person, moral responsibilityIn his paper, Ethical Decisions in the Classification of Mental Conditions as Mental Illness, Craig Edwards grapples with a profound problem: why is it that when we classify a mental condition as a mental disorder, that tends to (...) take the condition out of the sphere of moral responsibility or virtuousness of character? For example, it is not uncommon when someone commits suicide and the question is raised as to why he or she did it, that instead of a reason or character trait that would place the act within a moral calculus, one is offered the explanation "she was clinically depressed" or "he was bipolar," and this tends to terminate discussion and make reasons and moral evaluation superfluous. Why does such a comment have that effect?As Edwards notes, this can get complicated as the moral and the disordered interact. Certainly people are sometimes morally responsible for acting on their disordered impulses (as in pedophilia), and they are responsible for putting themselves in the way of disorder, as when someone imbibes in a way likely to lead to alcoholism. But at the normal/disorder divide, there seems to be a consistent lifting of some responsibility, reflecting the application of the sick role. For example, the rough equivalent of our current category of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was recognized as a disorder in earlier wars ("shell shock," "war neurosis"), but often considered an expression of cowardice; the cowardice was morally evaluable as a failure of virtue (even if, like many personality traits, being a coward is not within the person's direct voluntary control) and led to contempt for those with PTSD, but nonetheless—except in cases thought to be malingering—the PTSD that resulted constituted a disorder for which the individual was [End Page 91] not in the same direct sense blameworthy. This moral shift requires explanation.This topic also has important social ramifications. Relief from responsibility may sound like a good thing, and it is trumpeted by mental health advocates as a reason for supporting the classification of many conditions as disorders. But as Edwards is aware, it is a two-edged sword. Disordered status may allow escape from censure and offer the protections of the sick role, but it also changes the relationship of the agent to his or her own actions and imposes the responsibility of the sick role on the individual to attempt to change ("get better"). The sick role allows for no defense of an idiosyncrasy based on normal variation ("It takes all kinds…") or the individual's eccentric vision or steadfast integrity, for that vision or sense of integrity are now seen as pathological and not morally legitimate. The individual is subjected to endless entreaties to seek help and it is implied that not to do so is irresponsible, so that a decision to embrace one's nature and remain as one is becomes illegitimate. Moreover, the sick role allows for no explanation in terms of the individual's normal defensive response to unjust, deprived, or challenging social or environmental circumstances, thus weakening the motives for social change rather than individual intervention.In sum, there is an inevitable sense in which being placed in the sick role inherently stigmatizes the "sick" condition in virtue of the special moral attitudes extended to the disordered. Cultures can thus easily exploit the sick role and its much-touted relief from responsibility to extend the reach of social control processes. This is one reason why the distinction between disorder and non-disorder is so important, and why it is crucial to identify when non-disordered conditions are mislabeled as disorders—as when, for example, psychiatry gets it wrong about the distinction between normal and disordered sadness (Horwitz and Wakefield, 2007). Such overpathologization can redefine the boundaries of our moral universe on mistaken grounds.Edwards offers two provocative answers—not entirely at ease with each other—to the question of why mental disorders relieve the patient from moral responsibility: (1) mental disorders are... (shrink)

The publication of DSM-5 has been accompanied by a fair amount of controversy. Amongst DSM’s most vocal ‘insider’ critics has been Thomas Insel, Director of the US National Institute of Mental Health. Insel has publicly criticised DSM’s adherence to a symptom-based classification of mental disorder, and used the weight of the NIMH to back a rival research strategy aimed at a more biology-based diagnostic classification. This strategy is part of Insel’s vision of a future, more preventative psychiatry in which mental (...) disorders are not only understood as biological disorders of the brain, but also as neurodevelopmental disorders. This paper examines the interest and merit of Insel’s views of mental and neurodevelopmental disorder for the philosophy of psychopathology, with a special focus of his neurodevelopmental model of schizophrenia. Pitman’s ‘moderate materialism’ will be used both as a philosophical lens through which to examine Insel’s position, as well as an example of a philosophical framework that may require updating and revision in the light of moves towards a neurodevelopmental conception of mental disorder. (shrink)

In this updated and extended edition of their book, Goodale and Milner explore one of the most extraordinary neurological cases of recent years--one that profoundly changed scientific views on the visual brain. Taking us on a journey into the unconscious brain, this book is a fascinating illustration of the power of the 'unconscious' mind.

Under the light of ancient Western philosophies, our darker moods like grief, anguish, and depression can seem irrational. When viewed through the lens of modern psychology, they can even look like mental disorders. The self-help industry, determined to sell us the promise of a brighter future, can sometimes leave us feeling ashamed that we are not more grateful, happy, or optimistic. Night Vision invites us to consider a different approach to life, one in which we stop feeling bad about (...) feeling bad. -/- In this powerful and disarmingly intimate book, Existentialist philosopher Mariana Alessandri draws on the stories of a diverse group of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophers and writers to help us see that our suffering is a sign not that we are broken but that we are tender, perceptive, and intelligent. Thinkers such as Audre Lorde, María Lugones, Miguel de Unamuno, C. S. Lewis, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Søren Kierkegaard sat in their anger, sadness, and anxiety until their eyes adjusted to the dark. Alessandri explains how readers can cultivate “night vision” and discover new sides to their painful moods, such as wit and humor, closeness and warmth, and connection and clarity. -/- Night Vision shows how, when we learn to embrace the dark, we begin to see these moods—and ourselves—as honorable, dignified, and unmistakably human. (shrink)

This paper aims to arrive at a coherent concept of one sort of mental disorder and of appropriate methods of treating it. Incoherence arises because of the conflict between modern conceptions both of morality and of health and illness and the necessary use of moral terms in defining what makes some mental disorders. Modern moral philosophy and modern conceptions of health and illness imply that health is a non-moral good, and so that illness is a “disorder” in a non-moral (...) sense. Ancient ethics, on the other hand, allows states as well as actions to be morally evaluated, and so for the notion of a moral order or disorder which is not consciously chosen. It is argued that some kinds of mental disorder can be modeled on this conception of an unchosen moral disorder, and that the appropriate treatment for them is that species of moral education that we call “psychotherapy.”. (shrink)

This paper explores moments of democratising disorderliness that interrupt a vision of the sublime as a particular ordering of subjectivity. Situated within the context of the Narmada movement against the construction of the Sardar Sarovar Dam in India in the mid-1990s, it argues that sublime regimes and ‘counter-sublime’ insurgences draw their energies from the figures of the dam and the bund, respectively. Where the dam’s walls establish the horizons of visibility, of who counts as subject, the bund’s curved surfaces reveal (...) a pluralising depth that folds the visible with/in the invisible, constituting the possibility of novel modes of seeing/subjectification. Working through oral histories, films, images, archival materials and ethnographic studies alongside the work of Foucault and the later Merleau-Ponty, the paper argues that the Narmada movement enacts a counter-sublime that contests the invisibility imposed by the dam in favour of an imbrication of the human and non-human disclosing radically different constellations of visibility and subjectification. (shrink)

Imagine a world where machines can see and understand the world the way humans do. Rapid progress in artificial intelligence has led to smartphones that recognize faces, cars that detect pedestrians, and algorithms that suggest diagnoses from clinical images, among many other applications. The success of computer vision is founded on a deep understanding of the neural circuits in the brain responsible for visual processing. This book introduces the neuroscientific study of neuronal computations in visual cortex alongside of the psychological (...) understanding of visual cognition and the burgeoning field of biologically-inspired artificial intelligence. Topics include the neurophysiological investigation of visual cortex, visual illusions, visual disorders, deep convolutional neural networks, machine learning, and generative adversarial networks among others. It is an ideal resource for students and researchers looking to build bridges across different approaches to studying and developing visual systems. (shrink)

In the creation myth of the Timaeus Plato describes God as wishing that all things should be good so far as is possible. Wherefore, finding the whole visible sphere of the world not at rest, but moving in an irregular fashion, out of disorder He brought order, thinking that this was in every way an improvement. To achieve His end He placed intelligence in soul and soul in body, reflecting that nothing unintelligent could ever be better than something intelligent . (...) From this account of creation it would seem that God confronted a chaotic world whose disorderly motions existed in full independence of the principle of soul. Yet, in his doctrinal pronouncements in the Laws and the Pbaedrus on the origin of motion, Plato declares soul to be elder born than bodies and the prime source of all their changes and transformations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 10.1 (2003) 29-31 [Access article in PDF] On the Border:Reflections on the Meaning of Self-Injury in Borderline Personality Disorder Robert L. Woolfolk Keywords borderline personality disorder, values, psychotherapy, diagnosis IT IS A PLEASURE to comment on Nancy Potter's elegantly written, provocative paper. Professor Potter raises important and intriguing issues that have not only clinical implications for practitioners, but also are of theoretical significance for those (...) who ponder the conceptual status of mental illnesses and their manifestations.Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is the mental health professional's bête noire. In the diagnostic context, borderline is an adjective that is evocative, albeit imprecise. Persons with BPD tend to the worst of multiple pathological worlds, to fall through the diagnostic cracks, to occupy the boundaries of decorum and safety. Even such intrepid and astute folk as Marsha Linnehan and Otto Kernberg, who have devoted careers to understanding and treating those with BPD, have acknowledged the limited state of current knowledge. Justice Stewart's theory of natural concepts seems to apply to patients to whom we give the label borderline personality disorder: we cannot define the disorder readily, but we know one when we see one. And when we see such a patient it is costly in time and stress and corrosive of one's sense of professional efficacy. So with these patients, any assistance in conceptualizing the problem or in modification of therapeutics is welcome.Professor Potter's phenomenological formulation of self-injury is cogent and helpful in a number of ways. Self-injurious behavior is, when conventionally interpreted, a prototype for irrationality and affliction. It is also dramatic, graphic, and often repugnant. Professor Potter's analysis brings us face to face with what most of us know but sometimes forget or fail to apply: Psychotherapy is a value-laden endeavor. Early on, both Max Weber and Carl Jung were eloquent on this point and we have been reminded often enough of it in the last four decades (Rieff 1966; Woolfolk 1998; Woolfolk and Murphy, in press). Usually it is the moral values residing in the underlying ideologies of treatment and diagnosis that are brought to our attention. The axiological underpinnings of psychotherapy, however, are aesthetic as well as ethical. Professor Potter successfully argues that, as therapists, we may be in the thrall of a parochial aesthetic that produces [End Page 29] a kind of tunnel vision inimical to therapeutic effectiveness and to the ethical treatment of the human beings who are our patients. She has impeccable advice for therapists on this topic: Although none of us can step outside of culture altogether, we can evaluate our attitudes, beliefs, and values from a second-order level (Taylor 1989; Frankfurt 1971). Complete objectivity is an unlikely ideal. But clinicians can, and should, think critically about ways in which prevailing norms and values may be influencing their understanding of the world and their ways of being in it. (Potter 2003, 11) Professor Potter also quite effectively persuades that a comprehensive understanding of disorders that occur mostly in women (e.g., somatization disorder) must effectively comprehend feminist scholarship and the sociocultural realities of gender. The concept of the commodification of the female body has been informative in both the epidemiology and treatment of yet another woman's disorder, anorexia nervosa. And although the linkages of somatic commodification to self-injurious behavior may not appear to be so straightforward, the paper points the way to deeper and possibly richer explanations of phenomena that seem at first glance to be inexplicable.The introduction of the concept of uptake into clinical contexts is also a valuable contribution. Those of us familiar with the traditions of psychotherapy recognize a concept both familiar and central. Uptake has family resemblance to the empathic attitude so extensively discussed by both Rogers and Kohut. Those with hermeneutic leanings will recognize affinities with Verstehen and the Gadamerian anticipation of completeness (Vorgriff der Vollkommenheit). Any truly humanistic approach to treatment or diagnosis must encompass the lived experience of the patient. This is not to... (shrink)

The history of brain-computer interfaces developed from a mere idea in the days of early digital technology to today’s highly sophisticated approaches for signal detection, recording, and analysis. In the 1960s, electroencephalography was tied to the laboratory due to equipment and recording requirements. Today, amplifiers exist that are built in the electrode cap and are so resistant to movement artefacts that data collection in the field is no longer a critical issue. Within 60 years, the field has moved from simple (...) and artefact-sensitive EEG recording to making real the vision of brain-computer communication. In the last 40 years, direct brain-computer interaction went from simple communication programs to sophisticated BCI-controlled applications. In the past two decades, much research was conducted with locked-in individuals, and since the 2010s, independent home use by exemplary patients has been demonstrated. In these patients with locked-in syndrome, BCI were installed at their home and long-term usage was established, resulting in increased quality of life. Maintaining communication in disorders leading to LIS contributes significantly to the patients’ sense of being full persons. BCI as an assistive technology will likely be perceived as integral part of the self: insofar as it can prevent total loss of communication and the ensuing social isolation, it enables essential conditions for the subjective and intersubjective experience of personhood. (shrink)

The understanding of locomotion in neurological disorders requires technologies for quantitative gait analysis. Numerous modalities are available today to objectively capture spatiotemporal gait and postural control features. Nevertheless, many obstacles prevent the application of these technologies to their full potential in neurological research and especially clinical practice. These include the required expert knowledge, time for data collection, and missing standards for data analysis and reporting. Here, we provide a technological review of wearable and vision-based portable motion analysis tools that (...) emerged in the last decade with recent applications in neurological disorders such as Parkinson's disease and Multiple Sclerosis. The goal is to enable the reader to understand the available technologies with their individual strengths and limitations in order to make an informed decision for own investigations and clinical applications. We foresee that ongoing developments toward user-friendly automated devices will allow for closed-loop applications, long-term monitoring, and telemedical consulting in real-life environments. (shrink)

In this paper the authors provide an epistemological view on the old controversial random-necessity. It has been considered that either one or the other form part of the structure of reality. Chance and indeterminism are nothing but a disorderly efficiency of contingency in the production of events, phenomena, processes, i.e., in its causality, in the broadest sense of the word. Such production may be observed in natural and artificial processes or in human social processes (in history, economics, society, politics, etc.). (...) Here we touch the object par excellence of all scientific research whether natural or human. In this work, is presented a hypothesis whose practical result satisfies the Hegelian dialectic, with the consequent implication of their mutual reciprocal integration_._ Producing abstractions, without which, there is no thought or knowledge of any kind, from the concrete, that is, the real problem, which in this case is a given Ontological System or Reality. (shrink)

Devenir borgne! Difficile de ne pas vivre ce handicap comme un drame. Sans la vision binoculaire et stéréoscopique, le réel semble n'avoir plus d'épaisseur. L'auteur rapporte ce qu'il a éprouvé au cours de sa prise en charge ophtalmologique et interroge en même temps les peintres malvoyants et les philosophes : qu'est-ce que voir? Le handicap visuel permettrait-il de dépasser l'ordinaire de la vision? Pour répondre à ces questions, Monet, Degas, Victor Brauner sont interpellés dans leurs oeuvres ou encore Bruegel et (...) Rembrandt, en même temps que sont convoqués Platon, Descartes, Alain, Merleau-Ponty ou encore James Joyce et William Blake, sans oublier les Évangiles. Les bien-voyants ne se rendent pas compte qu'ils sont condamnés à vivre la tyrannie du réel. Et si les yeux empêchaient de voir en vrai? Le genre humain n'a peut-être pas vocation à voir mais à entrevoir. Dans ces conditions, ne devrait-on pas considérer la malvoyance comme un atout? Ne serait-il pas temps de voir autrement qu'avec les yeux? Peut-être, alors, sentira-t-on la présence de l'Être émerger de la pénombre"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

The public, mental health consumers, as well as mental health practitioners wonder about what kinds of values mental health professionals hold, and what kinds of values influence psychiatric diagnosis. Are mental disorders socio-political, practical, or scientific concepts? Is psychiatric diagnosis value-neutral? What role does the fundamental philosophical question "How should I live?" play in mental health care? In his carefully nuanced and exhaustively referenced monograph, psychiatrist and philosopher of psychiatry John Z. Sadler describes the manifold kinds of values and (...) value judgements involved in psychiatric diagnosis and classification systems like the DSM. Professor Sadler takes the reader on a fascinating conceptual tour of the inner workings of psychiatric diagnosis, considering the role of science, culture, sexuality, politics, gender, technology, human nature, patienthood, and professions in building his vision of a more humane psychiatric diagnostic process. (shrink)

Recently, a number of experiments have emphasized the degree to which subjects fail to detect large changes in visual scenes. This finding, referred to as “change blindness,” is often considered surprising because many people have the intuition that such changes should be easy to detect. Levin, Momen, Drivdahl, and Simons documented this intuition by showing that the majority of subjects believe they would notice changes that are actually very rarely detected. Thus subjects exhibit a metacognitive error we refer to as (...) “change blindness blindness.” Here, we test whether CBB is caused by a misestimation of the perceptual experience associated with visual changes and show that it persists even when the pre- and postchange views are separated by long delays. In addition, subjects overestimate their change detection ability both when the relevant changes are illustrated by still pictures, and when they are illustrated using videos showing the changes occurring in real time. We conclude that CBB is a robust phenomenon that cannot be accounted for by failure to understand the specific perceptual experience associated with a change. (shrink)

Color-vision defects constitute a spectrum of disorders with varying degrees and types of departure from normal human color vision. One form of color-vision defect is dichromacy; by mixing together only two lights, the dichromat can match any light, unlike normal trichromatic humans, who need to mix three. In a philosophical context, our titular question may be taken in two ways. First, it can be taken at face value as a question about visible properties of external objects, and second, it (...) may be interpreted as the more intangible question of “what it’s like” to be color-blind. (shrink)

The vision of an art masterpiece is associated with brain arousal by neural processes occurring quite spontaneously in the viewer. This aesthetic experience may even elicit a response in the motor areas of the observers. In the neurorehabilitation of patients with stroke, art observation has been used for reducing psychological disorders, and creative art therapy for enhancing physical functions and cognitive abilities. Here, we developed a virtual reality task which allows patients, by moving their hand on a virtual canvas, (...) to have the illusion of painting some art masterpieces, such as The Creation of Adam of Michelangelo or The birth of Venus of Botticelli. Twenty healthy subjects and four patients with stroke performed this task and a control one in which they simply colored the virtual canvas. Results from User Satisfaction Evaluation Questionnaire and the NASA Task Load Index highlighted an appropriate level of usability. Moreover, despite the motor task was the same for art and control stimuli, the art condition was performed by healthy subjects with shorter trajectories and with a lower perception of physical demand. In experiment 2, only the patients treated with artistic stimuli showed a reduction in the erroneous movements performed orthogonally to the canvas. This finding reminds the so-called Mozart effect that improves the performance of subjects when they listen to classic music. Thus, we called this improvement in the performance when interacting with an artistic stimulus as Michelangelo effect. (shrink)

Prevention of age-related disorders is increasingly in focus of health policies, and it is hoped that early intervention on processes of deterioration can promote healthier and longer lives. New opportunities to slow down the aging process are emerging with new fields such as personalized nutrition. Data-intensive research has the potential to improve the precision of existing risk factors, e.g., to replace coarse-grained markers such as blood cholesterol with more detailed multivariate biomarkers. In this paper, we follow an attempt to (...) develop a new aging biomarker. The vision among the project consortium, comprising both research and industrial partners, is that the new biomarker will be predictive of a range of age-related conditions, which may be preventable through personalized nutrition. We combine philosophical analysis and ethnographic fieldwork to explore the possibilities and challenges of managing aging through bodily signs that are not straightforwardly linked to symptomatic disease. We document how the improvement of measurement brings about new conceptual challenges of demarcating healthy and unhealthy states. Moreover, we highlight that the reframing of aging as risk has social and ethical implications, as it is generative of normative notions of what constitutes successful aging and good citizenship. (shrink)

Examines the philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience behind visual experience. Chapters on attention, illusions, aftereffects, binocular rivalry, hemispheric differences, attentional blink, agnosias and other disorders. Particular attention paid to consciouseness. The systematic review of key topics and the multitude of perspectives make this book an ideal primary or ancillary text for graduate courses in perception, vision, consciousness, or philosophy of mind.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On the Importance of Conceptual ContrastsMadness, Reason, and Mad PrideAwais Aftab, MD (bio)Garson (2023) offers an engaging historical and philosophical discussion around the importance Late Modern thinkers assigned to the task of differentiating madness from idiocy (or more specifically, to the tripartite distinction of sanity, madness, and idiocy). Based on this analysis, Garson’s identifies the need to offer a positive account of mental illness—one that does not define the (...) essence of mental illness exclusively as the absence, lack, or failure of the power of reasoning. Following the Late Modern thinkers (Locke, Kant, Wigan, and Heinroth), Garson concludes that madness is infused with reason, and what characterizes madness is the presence of reason in an altered and mutated form. This is all worth taking seriously. My own assessment of this historical and philosophical material nonetheless differs from that of Garson. To recognize madness as possessing reason within it in an altered form may be of less profound significance than he thinks it is. Garson’s discussion commendably highlights the importance of making conceptual contrasts explicit in definitional debates, and this should indeed lead us to search for contrasts that are more philosophically illuminating (what is better will depend on the context of inquiry). However, in my view, the recognition of madness as altered reason neither reframes the project of defining “mental disorder” nor does it provide an intellectual scaffolding for mad activism.The significance of “madness contains reason within in but in an altered or perverse form” is difficult to translate into contemporary scientific terms, and the fuzziness and historical baggage around the terms “madness,” “reason,” and “perversion” does not make it easy. “Mental disorder” or “psychopathology” means to us something quite different than what madness meant to Late Modern thinkers, and while “madness” remains a popular term in philosophical literature, there is no clarity on the nature of overlap between the domain of madness and the domain of conditions currently classified by the diagnostic manuals. Mental disorders, as currently conceptualized, include a motley of conditions that were previously characterized using terms such as idiocy, madness, neuroses, and psychopathic personalities. [End Page 297]From our contemporary vantage point, to compare idiocy and madness is to make a distinction within the domain of psychopathology. We are comparing two groups of psychiatric conditions. The lessons we derive from this comparison do not necessarily extrapolate well to a comparison of mental disorders with something outside the domain of psychopathology. To the extent that psychopathology is inclusive of both idiocy and madness, psychiatric disorders both contain and do not contain “reason” within them. The domain is heterogenous in this regard, and broad generalizations about the nature of reason in the mental disorders would be simplistic at best and inaccurate at worst. Other distinctions that we have made within the domain of psychopathology have included organic versus functional, neurosis versus psychosis, categories versus continua, and distinctions used within nosology have included operationalized criteria versus phenomenology, idiographic versus nomothetic, medical versus non-medical, description versus explanation, and so on (Aftab & Ryznar, 2021; Zachar, Banicki, & Aftab, 2023), all of which have the potential to offer a positive account of some aspect of psychopathology.It is worth nothing that the distinction between “absence of reason” versus “perversion of reason” is analogous to the common distinction between absence of function and altered function in patho-physiology. Such a distinction exists for almost every function that exists. Consider vision: absence of vision (blindness) and altered vision (illusions, distortions, hallucinations). Consider hypoesthesia (reduced sense of touch) and paraesthesia (altered sense of touch—tingling, pricking, burning, etc.). Garson alludes to diminished sexual capacity versus paraphilia as an analogy, but he does not seem to appreciate that the analogy applies much more broadly. Is the distinction between absence of reason versus perversion of reason of any greater significance than the distinction between blindness and hallucination? If we were to say, “What distinguishes hallucination from blindness is not the failure, absence, or lack of sight, but its presence—albeit in a perverse and mutated form,” how profound would it really be for our notions of disorder? Or imagine some Late Modern physician saying that a disturbance of speech and... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Minding Psychiatric PracticePaul B. Lieberman, MD (bio)In recent discussions of what makes or should make something 'a psychiatric disorder' (if anything does; Lange, 2007), attention and contention have mostly involved problems distinguishing disorder from normal life, expectable suffering, neurological disease, criminality, prejudice, error, religious experience and effects of injustice, but the question of what makes or should make something psychiatric is also important and difficult to answer. It's important (...) because general conceptions of what kinds of things we treat (e.g., disorders of the heart, brain, or mind) guide practice by specifying what constitutes, nurtures or poisons them, ways they may break apart or be repaired and processes that produce change, as well as by helping to draw appropriate boundaries between psychiatry and other fields. It's difficult because psychiatry comprises many kinds of objects, theories and forms of practice (primarily biomedical, psychodynamic and cognitive behavioral), and we don't know which, if any, are 'natural' or valid. It's also not established whether or why all or any should be called, 'psychiatric,' what explains their being so-called (if it is correct to do so), or which may be fundamental or constitutive and which derivative and potentially eliminable.One appealing answer (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders [DSM] an swer; American Psychiatric Association, 2013) to the question of what makes something psychiatric is that it is mental in some essential way. But few psychiatrists could explain what that might mean, nor would many be able to say what a mental disorder is or defend the idea that the conditions they work with are (always?) such things (though many probably wouldn't deny it either; they wouldn't know what to say and most wouldn't think it mattered). But if the idea that 'psychiatric disorders are essentially mental' seems obvious yet unclear to psychiatrists, what's the alternative? And if no alternative leaps to mind, then are psychiatrists practicing without knowing what they're treating?In "What makes a disorder 'mental'? A practical treatment of psychiatric disorder," Joseph Gough (2023) addresses these problems with two bold proposals: first, that we abandon altogether using 'mental' (assuming we understand its meaning) in the definition of 'psychiatric disorder,' and, second, that we, instead, define psychiatric disorders as those conditions best treated by psychiatrists (including psychologists, social workers, nurses and other practitioners).To a psychiatrist, these proposals seem, both, a welcome validation of our work ("At last, someone appreciates us!"), but also a troubling destabilization of how we understand that work ("That can't be right: it's backwards!") In Gough's [End Page 37] wide-ranging and carefully reasoned defense of his two proposals, he offers many novel and provocative insights relevant to problems defining psychiatric disorders. I will consider only a few of the issues he raises, which I think are especially worth emphasis and further thought.Gough initially rejects mentality in the definition of psychiatric disorder by reminding us that it is neither sufficient nor necessary for inclusion in the DSM. Vision is mental but blindness is not in the manual; caffeinism and erectile dysfunction are not mental but are included. Later, he offers two additional reasons for abandoning mentality: it promotes stigma and encourages dualism. I think all these arguments are correct. (Although blindness is not the best example because DSM defines mental disorders as disturbances of "thought, feeling and behavior" and blindness is none of these. But many other examples (e.g., encephalopathies) could make the point.)But Gough passes over this issue too quickly: we should pause and consider more carefully possible reasons to keep or even privilege the mental in psychiatry as well as the losses we might suffer if we gave it up. The examples and arguments he offers for abandoning the mental could be contested if one were motivated to do so. For example, one could argue, as Gough does elsewhere, that the DSM is just wrong sometimes and should be revised. Perhaps, as Gough briefly considers, there is a subset of 'mental' disorders that are properly psychiatric (where, e.g., certain favored features such as meaning, agency, narrative, or connection of 'self and world' are preserved, and... (shrink)

The concept of ‘neurodiversity’ to speak of conditions such as autism, dyslexia, and others as differences, not disorders or pathologies, relies on a robust account of human flourishing that can incorporate these conditions. Conceptions of illness and well-being are always partially theological, whilst also having to be grounded in the empirical realities of the present time. Therefore, positive developmental psychology is a particularly apt field for developing a theology-informed psychology. This article argues that recent work in theology-engaged psychology of (...) thriving, as opposed to subjective flourishing, is the best approach to securing a vision of well-being for neurodiverse persons. (shrink)

ObjectiveRetinal vein occlusion (RVO) is the second most common retinal vascular disorder after diabetic retinopathy, which is the main cause of vision loss. Retinal vein occlusion might lead to macular edema, causing severe vision loss. Previous neuroimaging studies of patients with RVO demonstrated that RVO was accompanied by cerebral changes, and was related to stroke. The purpose of the study is to investigate synchronous neural activity changes in patients with RVO.MethodsA total of 50 patients with RVO and 48 healthy subjects (...) with matched sex, age, and education were enrolled in the study. The ReHo method was applied to investigate synchronous neural activity changes in patients with RVO.ResultsCompared with HC, patients with RVO showed increased ReHo values in the bilateral cerebellum_4_5. On the contrary, patients with RVO had decreased ReHo values in the bilateral middle occipital gyrus, right cerebelum_crus1, and right inferior temporal gyrus.ConclusionOur study demonstrated that patients with RVO were associated with abnormal synchronous neural activities in the cerebellum, middle occipital gyrus, and inferior temporal gyrus. These findings shed new insight into neural mechanisms of vision loss in patients with RVO. (shrink)

Human beings have the unique ability to consciously reflect on the nature of the self. But reflection has its costs. We can ask what the self is, but as David Hume pointed out, the self, once reflected upon, may be nowhere to be found. The favored view is that we are material beings living in the material world. But if so, a host of destabilizing questions surface. If persons are just a sophisticated sort of animal, then what sense is there (...) to the idea that we are free agents who control our own destinies? What makes the life of any animal, even one as sophisticated as Homo sapiens, worth anything? What place is there in a material world for God? And if there is no place for a God, then what hold can morality possibly have on us--why isn't everything allowed? Flanagan's collection of essays takes on these questions and more. He continues the old philosophical project of reconciling a scientific view of ourselves with a view of ourselves as agents of free will and meaning-makers. But to this project he brings the latest insights of neuroscience, cognitive science, and psychiatry, exploring topics such as whether the conscious mind can be explained scientifically, whether dreams are self-expressive or just noise, the moral socialization of children, and the nature of psychological phenomena such as multiple personality disorder and false memory syndrome. What emerges from these explorations is a liberating vision which can make sense of the self, agency, character transformation, and the value and worth of human life. Flanagan concludes that nothing about a scientific view of persons must lead to nihilism. (shrink)

Testimony and witnessing require sentiency, not humanity. Sentiency is distinguished here as the capacity to experience energetic coalescing between elements/entities/presences and to derive a response from such encounters. Taking as its focal point the kincentric ecology and lifeworld of Yanyuwa Country in the south-west Gulf of Carpentaria, northern Australia, this paper strives to expand the conceptual roots for a discussion of testimony and witnessing through the principle of “unflattening.” Unflattening is a commitment of orientation, one that counteracts the type of (...) narrow, rigid thinking that is flatness, a condition in which humans are often unable to see past the boundaries of current frames of mind, the limits of our existence, our ontology, epistemic and moral habit (Sousanis, Unflattening (Harvard UP, 2015)). In a settler colonial context such as Australia, these are conditions which reflect a dominant epistemic tradition of the West, which relies upon certain ontological habits, reflective of a capitalist, modern, neo-liberal and individualistic tendency. But this is not the only Law and way of knowing that exists across the great landmass of Australia, mapped as it is by the languages and Laws of diverse Indigenous language groups. In Yanyuwa Country, communication between multifarious agents is common, ranging from those between humans, deceased kin who reside as “old people” in Country, Ancestral Beings which have become the embodiment of Country, non-human animals, elements, objects and places. Each and all are capable of communicating; be it as expressions of recognition of one another, revelation of emotional states, health or disorder, responsivity to the presence of others, Law and local empiricism. Drawing on my ethnographic encounters with Yanyuwa families, I aim, throughout this paper, to unflatten on three fronts: first, expand the relational scope of potential communicative pathways to take in sentient presence as a catalyst for relationality (carried forth by responsiveness to and between presences), second, examine the multidimensional nature of testimony and third, expand our vision of the enactment of witnessing – to consider who, what and when. I consider Indigenous, specifically Yanyuwa, relational ontologies as they bond and unify the human and non-human across a field of sentiency and communicative intention, shifting the focus or primal orientation to either side of and all around the human. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ADOLESCENCE, INDIFFERENTIATION, AND THE ONSET OF PSYCHOSIS Henri Grivois Hôtel-Dieu, Paris The onset of psychosis happens, by definition, only once. The first psychotic episode is unforeseeable and risks being overlooked. Left to itself its future is uncertain, and the prognosis is potentially unfavorable. The variety of its manifestations as well as its thymic and cognitive instability explains why so little is written on this subject. The psychiatric literature, by (...) its almost exclusive reference to evolved psychoses, has not distinguished the qualities peculiar to the onset of psychosis (nascent psychosis). Yet recent research reflects an interest in early diagnosis of psychosis to secure qualitative improvements and the chance ofa favorable outcome for patients. A special approach must be used for patients during the stage of nascent psychosis. Something must be done, but early treatment is not enough. Psychotropic medication has no more than a sedative effect and there are few specifics at this stage (Swain 175). Further, one risks obliterating the patient's lived experience. The entire battery of interventions, above all the first consultations, must follow from a rigorously organized and intensive strategy to directly engage with this subjective experience. For many years at l'Hôtel-Dieu, a general hospital situated in the center of Paris, we have harnessed ourselves to this task. First I shall describe the existence of centrality. It constitutes the most characteristic and permanent trait of the onset of psychosis. From the concept of concernment, I propose a phenomenological morphogenesis of the initial sequence of psychosis. Next I turn to the state of indifferentiation that overcomes the subject, and then to the vulnerability peculiar to adolescents. I shall end with some fundamental epidemiological data. Henri Grivois1 05 Centrality To be mad is not only the feeling of being uniquely in contact with all humanity, whether as alienated from it or as uniting all of it in oneself conceived as the only member of the species. It is this certainly but also more than this. It is to infer that one occupies a unique place in the human world. It is the feeling of being encircled by everyone. Without being responsible, the patient is placed in the forefront of some grandiose project. His centrality, whatever the mode ofexpression, orients him towards a form of mental disorder. As a general rule, at the beginning, centrality is never explicit and passes unnoticed. The physical and verbal behavior of the patient suffice to accuse him, without any further investigation, of unintelligibility and incoherence. Centrality is above all an emotion about which we should admit that we know almost nothing. People with nascent psychosis are the prey of intuitions impossible to comprehend. Like Rimbaud's drunken boat, they flee, drifting or hiding themselves, coming back and taking offagain. They are therefore incapable, wherever they go, of living an instant of unconcern. Incapable of expressing their singular rapport with the world, they keep silent. Very soon nevertheless centrality engenders a torrent of questions. Silently, voicelessly, patients apprehend in an almost automatic manner the responses to these questions in the verbal and gestural behavior of others. Since Esquirol (Gauchet and Swain 464) identified hallucinatory phenomena as the cause of psychosis, they have occupied a disproportionate place in mental science for 200 years. This construction of the concept of hallucination in psychiatry, key to the orthodox vision of psychosis, assures a watchful vigilance to rule out every non-symptomatic treatment ofpatients. Hours or perhaps days later, no longer capable of abstaining from interpretation, patients begin to sketch out an explanation ofthe prodigious situation which they have experienced. They interrogate their relation to others and the intentions and the degree of unanimity of people towards them. Invoking demons and monsters often gives their explanations a first coherence which is in harmony with the scale of their experience. On their side the psychiatrists, to facilitate verbalizing the experience, suggest paraphrases of a general order: influence, mental automatism, exterior action, xenopathia, etc. To mask centrality, to get away from it, or in response to the gravity of the event, the patients, in search of some responsibility, envisage more elaborate scenarios: mission, conspiracy, trial, condemnation. A political vocabulary, more plausible but less universal than a... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ezra Pound's ConfucianismChungeng ZhuTo T. S. Eliot's question "What does Mr. Pound believe?" Pound's answer is explicit and categorical: "I believe the Ta Hio" (Da Xue). Confucianism, Pound believes, offers a solution to the West that, from its political institutions to its economic system, has fallen into chaos and disorder. Ideology and aesthetics are inextricable. Pound also sees in Confucianism a way of making poetry in articulating his vision (...) of a new earthly paradise. In The Cantos, Pound covers numerous people and cultures across times and space, and Thomas Jefferson and John Adams stand out as two of Pound's preeminent Confucian heroes. Pound's view of Jefferson and Adams, of course, involves his views on politics, economics, law, and history—a host of complicated issues that cannot be all accounted for by his reading of Confucianism. Similarly, Pound's poetics is also influenced by various traditions.1 This study, however, focuses on the extent to which Pound's Confucianism has contributed to his reading of Jefferson and Adams and to his poetics. It specifically examines the relationship between Pound's Confucianism and his poetic form in presenting Jefferson and Adams—that is, how the poet brings his Confucianism to making heroes out of history, and how his poetic form serves to express his Confucian world-view.ISeveral aspects about Pound's Confucianism need to be addressed briefly, for they are essential to his evaluation of people and to his Confucian poetics. First of all, Pound considers Confucianism a totalizing philosophy rooted in the objective reality of organic nature.2 He believes that the Confucian Dao,which he refers to as the "process," not [End Page 57] only operates as an inherent unifying principle of harmonious order manifest in nature but also sets the norm to be followed in establishing culture.3 Unlike other failing metaphysical religions, Confucianism, in Pound's view, does not commit "splitting"—the separation of ideas from the phenomenal or culture from nature. Greek philosophy, he thinks, commits "splitting," for the Greek philosophers "have been served up as highbrows. We know them as ideas, each handed us as a maxim."4 He believes "Christian thought has never offered a balanced system"(GK, p. 29). The Eleusinian elements might be present in the very early church, but the ancient wisdom "seems to have disappeared when the mysteries entered the vain space of Christian theological discussion."5 In contrast, Confucianism, he believes, is totalizing in the sense that "Confucius offers a way of life, an Anschauung or disposition toward nature and man and a system for dealing with both" (GK, p. 24). Because of Confucianism, he maintains, "I fail to see that the history of China, or Chinese historic process, suffers a dichotomy or split into two opposite forces, as does that of Europe" (Prose, p. 67).Pound considers Confucianism not just a balanced system; he finds Confucianism particularly attractive because of Confucius's deep concern with man and culture, his focus on social and ethical issues, his emphasis on individual responsibility, and, above all, his strong commitment to realizing social order and harmony in this world. "The essence of religion," Pound believes, "is the present tense" (Prose, p. 70). Greek philosophy, Pound feels, ignores the question of individual responsibility and the feeling of common people, and the Greek philosophers "did not feel communal responsibilities vide infra. The sense of coordination, of the individual in a milieu is not in them" (GK, p. 38). He thinks that Greek philosophic thought "is at no point impregnated with a feeling for the whole people" (GK, p. 29). Pound is also critical of Christianity, particularly "the decline of Christian ethics" (Prose, p. 61). Christian religion, in his view, can no longer function for the West, for "Christianity has become the slogan of every oppression, of every iniquity" (Prose, p. 193).6 In comparison, Confucianism, Pound observes, advocates that knowledge is "to know men" and humanity is "to love men" (GK, p. 18). Confucius believes that "travel broadens the mind"; he has the "knowledge of local conditions" and is "interested in increasing agricultural production" (GK, p. 272). Confucius emphasizes "conduct" and "the value of personality" (Prose... (shrink)

The article highlights the issue of the psychological impact of fakes on the individual, which is intensively increased through various mass media and especially social networks. The general research aim comprises the study of features of the psychological influence of fakes on an individual and classification of this influence. It was proven that fakes intensify the person's stress, weaken adaptive reserves, reduce efficiency, and lead to stress disorders. Numerous fake messages cause intense emotional transformation of the individual through the (...) emotional receptivity of the message. It was found that under the influence of fakes, a person's direct participation in the information cycle through the mass media contributes to the consolidation of his behavior into certain groups. Fake information encourages fake modeling of one's own future and determines its influence on one's status in society. It was shown that human perception of emotional audiovisual narratives causes the tunnel vision. Pragmatic assumptions stimulate the individual to perceive fake information as the absolute truth, and in situations of uncertainty - to show a pronounced activity with a growing preference for information. Fakes can worsen physical and mental health, cause changes in mental processes, motivation, priorities and affect interaction in the society. That is why, the knowledge of features of the psychological impact of fakes on an individual will help understand the need to analyze information content, search, critically select and test messages to maintain one’s mental health. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.2 (2002) 239-259 [Access article in PDF] Original Sin and the Problem of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe Peter Harrison It is not the philosophy received from Adam that teaches these things; it is that received from the serpent; for since Original Sin, the mind of man is quite pagan. It is this philosophy that, together with the errors of the senses, made (...) men adore the sun, and that today is still the universal cause of the disorder of men's minds and the corruption of men's hearts. Nicolas Malebranche 1In his Éloge du Pere Malebranche, delivered to the Parisian Academy of Sciences on 22 April 1716, Bernard Fontenelle recounted the story of Nicolas Malebranche's somewhat controversial conversion to Cartesianism. When friends and colleagues had taken him to task over his new-found commitment to the doctrines of Descartes, Malebranche responded with this question: "Did Adam have the perfect science?" It was agreed that this was the common view. Malebranche responded that he, too, aspired to the perfect science, and that his quest for this knowledge could not be satisfied by following the historical or critical pursuits of his colleagues, but by adopting the procedures set out by Descartes. 2 For Malebranche, the Cartesian method offered a means of overcoming the limitations of the fallen intellectual faculties of Adam's seventeenth-century descendents, and thus of restoring the fabled encyclopedic knowledge of the first man. [End Page 239]Aspirations to recover the science of Adam provided a common motivation for a number of early-modern philosophical projects. Earlier in the seventeenth century Francis Bacon had famously observed in his Novum Organum (1620) that the human dominion over nature which Adam had lost at the Fall could be restored in some measure by the sciences: "For man by the fall fell at the same time from this state of innocency and from his dominion over creation." The moral losses of the human race were to be restored in some measure by "religion and faith"; Adam's lost knowledge, and the dominion which it made possible, by "arts and sciences." 3 Bacon's vision of a reconstructed knowledge of nature during the period which he regarded (somewhat prematurely) as "the last times" clearly played an important role in legitimizing the goals and methods of the new natural philosophy. Indeed the program of the Royal Society of London from its inception in 1660 explicitly relied upon a Baconian rhetoric of the restoration of that human knowledge and dominion over nature which Adam had once enjoyed.While historians such as Charles Webster have alluded to the ways in which the myth of an original perfect philosophy motivated projects for the advancement of learning in a rather general way, little attention has been paid to the manner in which early-modern views of the nature of the original fall from knowledge directly informed the methods of the new sciences, determined the scope of their enquiry, and provided ammunition for use against traditional learning. 4 Moreover, most commentators, following Webster's lead, have restricted their attention to Francis Bacon, and to the Baconian aspirations of subsequent reformers of knowledge in seventeenth-century England. In this paper I shall suggest that the biblical narrative of the Fall played a far more direct role in the development of early modern knowledge—both in England and on the Continent—than has often been assumed, and that competing strategies for the advancement of knowledge in the seventeenth century were closely related to different assessments of the Fall and of its impact upon the human mind. While confirmation of this claim would require a more comprehensive study than space here permits, this paper will set out a number of preliminary considerations which establish the plausibility of such a thesis, showing how the biblical narrative of the Fall directly informed the epistemological projects of the seventeenth century, and prompted various rationalist and empiricist solutions. [End Page 240] The Mind of Adam There was an almost universal consensus in the sixteenth... (shrink)

Processes comparable in important respects to those underlying human conscious and non-conscious processing can be identified in a range of species and it is argued that these reflect evolutionary precursors of the human processes. A distinction is drawn between two types of processing: stimulus-based and higher-order. For ‘higher-order,’ in humans the operations of processing are themselves associated with conscious awareness. Conscious awareness sets the context for stimulus-based processing and its end-point is accessible to conscious awareness. However, the mechanics of the (...) translation between stimulus and response proceeds without conscious control. The paper argues that higher-order processing is an evolutionary addition to stimulus-based processing. The model’s value is shown for gaining insight into a range of phenomena and their link with consciousness. These include brain damage, learning, memory, development, vision, emotion, motor control, reasoning, the voluntary versus involuntary debate, and mental disorder. (shrink)

Social scientists have drawn attention to the role of hype and optimistic visions of the future in providing momentum to biomedical innovation projects by encouraging innovation alliances. In this article, we show how less optimistic, uncertain, and modest visions of the future can also provide innovation projects with momentum. Scholars have highlighted the need for clinicians to carefully manage the expectations of their prospective patients. Using the example of a pioneering clinical team providing deep brain stimulation to children and young (...) people with movement disorders, we show how clinicians confront this requirement by drawing on their professional knowledge and clinical expertise to construct visions of the future with their prospective patients; visions which are personalized, modest, and tainted with uncertainty. We refer to this vision-constructing work as recalibration, and we argue that recalibration enables clinicians to manage the tension between the highly optimistic and hyped visions of the future that surround novel biomedical interventions, and the exigencies of delivering those interventions in a clinical setting. Drawing on work from science and technology studies, we suggest that recalibration enrolls patients in an innovation alliance by creating a shared understanding of how the “effectiveness” of an innovation shall be judged. (shrink)

Love, fear, hope, calculus, and game shows-how do all these spring from a few delicate pounds of meat? Neurophysiologist Ian Glynn lays the foundation for answering this question in his expansive An Anatomy of Thought, but stops short of committing to one particular theory. The book is a pleasant challenge, presenting the reader with the latest research and thinking about neuroscience and how it relates to various models of consciousness. Combining the aim of a textbook with the style of a (...) popularization, it provides all the lay reader needs to know to participate in the philosophical debate that is redefining our attitudes about our minds. Drawing on the rich history of neurological case studies, Glynn picks through the building blocks of our nervous system, examines our visual and linguistic systems, and probes deeply into our higher thought processes. The stories of great scientists, like Ramon y Cajal, and famous patients, like Sperry's split-brained epileptics, illuminate the scientific issues Glynn selects as essential for understanding consciousness. Some might argue that his lengthy explorations of natural selection overemphasize evolutionary explanations of psychological phenomena, but they must also agree that evolutionary psychology has distanced itself mightily from social Darwinism in recent years and merits a reappraisal. The great consciousness debate may form the core of the 21st-century Zeitgeist; get ready for it with An Anatomy of Thought. -Rob Lightner From Publishers Weekly How do we know? What do we think? How could a philosophical problem-'the mind-body problem,' say-induce a headache? What can evolutionary theory, molecular biology, the history of medicine and experimental psychology tell us about the features of human consciousness, and (once again) how do we know? Glynn, a physician and Cambridge University professor, meticulously attempts to answer these questions and more, setting forth the results of all sorts of research relevant to our brains-from 19th-century dissections to Oliver Sacks-like case studies, work with monkeys and supercomputers, and the enduring puzzles of philosophy, which he rightly saves for near the end. After explaining evolution by natural selection and 'clearing away much dross,' Glynn lays out the experiments and theories that have shown 'how nerve cells can carry information about the body, how they can interact' and how sense organs work; demonstrates the 'mixture of parallel and hierarchical organization' in our brains and 'the striking localization of function within it'; considers where neuroscience is likely to go; and admits that, among the many fields of exciting research just ahead, 'we can be least confident of progress toward a complete, scientific explanation of our sensations and thoughts and feelings.' Other recent explaining-the-brain books have sometimes advanced simplistic, or implausibly grand, claims about the nature and features of consciousness in general. Instead, Glynn offers a patient, informative, well-laid-out researcher's-eye view of what we have learned, how we figured it out and what we still don't know about neurons, senses, feelings, brains and minds. (Apr.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal The nature of consciousness, which perennially troubles the minds of scientists and philosophers, is the subject of an ever-growing body of literature. Two of the latest entries approach the topic from different perspectives. Glynn, a professor of physiology and head of the Physiological Laboratory at Cambridge, offers a comprehensive summary of what we know about the brain-both its evolution and its mechanisms. Among the topics he covers are natural selection, molecular evolution, nerves and the nervous system, sensory perception, and the specific structures responsible for our intellect. Using the mechanisms involved in vision and speech as models, Glynn skillfully describes various neurological deficiencies that can lead to 'disordered seeing' and problems with the use of language. He carefully distinguishes what we know through experimental evidence from what we know through the observation of patients with neurological damage. He also describes some of the major theories that attempt to explain why these structures arose. While his book concentrates on the structures that make up the mind, Glynn is well aware that some physical events appear explicable only in terms of conscious mental events-a situation that conflicts with the laws of modern physics. Only briefly, however, does he consider the various approaches that have been taken to deal with the issues of mind/body and free will. In contrast, this is the primary focus of The Physics of Consciousness. After reviewing the fundamentals of classic physics, Walker (who has a Ph.D. in physics) summarizes elements of the new physics in which our knowledge of space, time, matter, and energy are all dependent on the moment of observation. Walker explores the meaning of consciousness as a characteristic of the observer. In this context both the observer and the act of measurement are critical. In essence, Walker leads his reader on a journey through his concept of a 'quantum mind,' which can both affect matter (including other minds) and can be affected by other distant matter/minds. To break up what would otherwise be an extremely dense text, Walker also relates the very touching story of the loss of his high-school sweetheart to leukemia. Indeed, it is his memory of their relationship that drives Walker to seek an understanding of ultimate reality. At times, he has a tendency to be dogmatic-as when he concludes, 'our consciousness, our mind, and the will of God are the same mind.' While An Anatomy of Thought is appropriate for most academic libraries, the Physics of Consciousness will be most accessible to readers with some knowledge of advanced physics. -Laurie Bartolini, Illinois State Lib., Springfield Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist The codiscoverers of natural selection-Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace-disagreed over the possibility of finding an evolutionary explanation for the human mind. Glynn here argues Darwin's side of the debate, tracing an eons-long path of development starting from simple amino acids floating in primal seas and extending through the erect hominids in which the powers of a massive brain first manifest themselves. Patiently adducing evidence of an evolutionary origin for the underlying molecular machinery, Glynn dissects the nerve centers that make possible speech and hearing, sight, and reading. Pressing deeper, he lays bare the cortical foundations of personality. But those who deal with the mind must attend also to the arguments advanced by philosophers. And it is when he turns from dendrites to syllogisms (especially the vexing mind-body paradox) that Glynn's empirical reasoning fails him. In the end, he concedes his perplexity in trying to conceive of an evolutionary origin for human consciousness. This concession may set the shade of Alfred Wallace to chortling, but it will draw readers into an honest confrontation with a profound enigma. Bryce Christensen. (shrink)

What if "liberal democracy" were a contradiction in terms? This book distinguishes liberalism (a logic of order) from democracy (a principle of disordering) to defend a Rancièrean vision of impure politics.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Autism and Intersubjectivity:Beyond Cognitivism and the Theory of MindRichard Gipps (bio)The papers that make up this special issue of Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology are obviously united by both topic and approach. They all look at autism through a philosophical lens—both at infantile autism (Gallagher 2004a, 2004b; McGeer 2004; Shanker 2004) and at schizophrenic autism (Stanghellini and Ballerini 2004). Moreover, they are all concerned with the foundations of our understanding (...) of people and their minds, both the minds of others (Gallagher 2004a, 2004b; Shanker 2004; Stanghellini and Ballerini 2004) and that of oneself (McGeer 2004). The developmental disorder of infantile autism provides a conspicuous example of a disruption in the ability to develop such an understanding and enter into the social world, whilst schizophrenic autism provides a conspicuous example of what happens when one falls out of it (Stanghellini and Ballerini 2004).Yet what further affords the opportunity of this introduction is the possibility of discerning a strong common theme that runs through the philosophical treatment the papers provide. For they are united in their rejection of the primarily cognitive approach toward our capacity to relate to one another (or to ourselves) as to minded people taken by many in the mainstream of developmental psycho(patho)logy today.1 Such mainstream approaches ascribe to the developing child a 'theory of mind,' tacit knowledge of which supposedly enables them to negotiate the social world. In place of such an intellectualist, disengaged, cognition-focused psychology, we are offered perspectives that stress the primitive foundational character of our pre-reflective (noncognitive) engagement with one another, our emotion, our expression, and our embodiment.The grounds for this stressing of the affective and praxical dimensions of personal life over the cognitive and representational are twofold. First there is the developmental trajectory itself, and the claim is that the autistic child's interpersonal lacunae manifest themselves considerably before they develop the cognitive capacities for social knowledge (Gallagher 2004a; Shanker 2004). The principle ground, however, is philosophical, and the claim here is that what needs to be rejected in the developmental psycho(patho)logy is an alienated ontology and estranged epistemology that has implicitly become inscribed within it, constraining its explanatory project and limiting its vision of possibilities.2 That at least is how I [End Page 195] would put it and, by way of providing an overarching philosophical presentation of the papers of this issue, what follows shall be its elaboration.The ontology in question has it that the mind is an inner domain, that bodily behavior is an outer domain, that belief and thought epitomize the former, that intentionality is a function of the former and only derivatively manifest in the latter, that the form of our embodiment is contingent, that understanding is manifest primarily in thought and not intrinsically in praxis, that the mind is populated by free-standing inner representations, and that perception and the emotions are extrinsic to the understanding (Gallagher 2004a, 2004b; McGeer 2004; Shanker 2004). And such an ontology carries a host of epistemological implications. The self retreats from the interpersonal interactive domain, taking up residence even behind the subject's own mind, which itself becomes an objectified domain. In our own case, we are left in the predicament of needing to inspect (or intro-spect) our own inner states to find out how things are for us; our self-reports (avowals of what we think and feel) thereby become avowals of judgments of what we take ourselves to think and feel (McGeer 2004). And when we confront others the task becomes one of cognitively figuring out, from merely 'outer' clues, how things stand with them on the inside. The encounter with others is then epistemologically fraught, relying on inference and theory to take us from an outer domain of mere movement to a hidden inner world of intentionality (Gallagher 2004a, 2004b; Shanker 2004).Thus, an alienated ontology of the person and their mind bequeaths its own epistemological problematic, and the estranged epistemology gives to developmental psychology the task of filling in the details of the actual cognitive states and mechanisms which instantiate the theories and inferences which it has discerned a priori to be required. And psychopathology... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 9.1 (2002) 15-18 [Access article in PDF] Through a Glass, Darkly:Commentary on Ward Gwen Adshead Keywords: psychopathy, moral reasoning. Now we see, as through a glass darkly.... (St Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 13) JIM DID AN EVIL THING. He deliberately caused another person's suffering in a way that was humiliating, cruel, and persistent. He very nearly killed another man. He knew what (...) he was doing; he knew it was wrong, but somehow, that did not matter to him. After he was caught, he came to a forensic psychiatric facility where he was offered therapy. (What the purpose of therapy is could be the subject of a paper in its own right, although I will say a little more about this at the end of the paper). Several years on, Jim has had many thoughts about his behavior. First, he has no doubt that he was responsible insofar as he chose to do what he did, and he feels guilty on that count. Second, he is also aware that he had consciously carried out such acts many times in his mind before, but had not previously acted out his fantasy; and that therefore the process of crossing the line between fantasy and reality is a crucial one for him to think about further. This metaphor of a line that has to be crossed from one place to another suggests two worlds: one of internal reality and the other of external reality. Jim used the metaphor thus: "I came up to the line, but I drew back." He also said of this moment (when he nearly killed his first victim): "I said to myself... 'This is mad... I can't justify this.'... " I have emphasized these words of Jim's because I want to use his experience to explore some of the arguments raised in David Ward's most interesting paper. I found much to agree with, and some claims that sat less easily. I should say that the context of my response is my work as a psychotherapist with mentally disordered offenders in Broadmoor Hospital, and also a current research project with Jonathan Glover and Christine Brown on moral reasoning in antisocial men. Kant and Won't I have no doubt that most if not all of the men (and women) that I work with do operate according to universalizable principles. As the author suggests, however, these principles are incoherent and contain what Cleckley (1976) called a type of agnosia, or distorted vision. It seems to me that Kant's two forms of principle are really two different levels of intention or choice-making process. Kant's hypothetical level of intention is very much about making choices in the external world: I experience the world as cold, I want to be warm because I need to be warm, I will do what I need to do to make that need happen for me. It is not universalizable because [End Page 15] others may not feel the cold as I do. Notice that this level of intention may be very closely linked to the next level, which Kant calls categorical: I would like the world to be such that everyone who is needy will get their needs met, and I would like to be the sort of person who makes that happen. The categorical level of intention is Kant's take on the Golden Rule: that you should want everyone to be treated as you yourself would wish to be treated. It is an intentional process that is interpersonal, which implies a second order of thinking—thinking about one's thoughts and wishes, and thinking about the sort of person one would wish to be in relation to others.At this point, I think it may be helpful to bring in the other aspect of Kant's vision of moral intentions, which is the injunction to treat others as ends in themselves and not merely as means to ends. Thus every individual is a unique person or self, who claims respect as a person and not... (shrink)