DRGs may contain costs, but they threaten to restrict access to health care, to compromise its quality, and to impede the development of new medical technologies. Immediate corrections are necessary to ensure that hospitals continue to serve the poorest and sickest.

1 Evidence-based policy requires researchers to provide the answers to ecological questions that are of interest to policy makers. To find out what those questions are in the UK, representatives from 28 organizations involved in policy, together with scientists from 10 academic institutions, were asked to generate a list of questions from their organizations. 2 During a 2-day workshop the initial list of 1003 questions generated from consulting at least 654 policy makers and academics was used as a basis for (...) generating a short list of 100 questions of significant policy relevance. Short-listing was decided on the basis of the preferences of the representatives from the policy-led organizations. 3 The areas covered included most major issues of environmental concern in the UK, including agriculture, marine fisheries, climate change, ecosystem function and land management. 4 The most striking outcome was the preference for general questions rather than narrow ones. The reason is that policy is driven by broad issues rather than specific ones. In contrast, scientists are frequently best equipped to answer specific questions. This means that it may be necessary to extract the underpinning specific question before researchers can proceed. 5 Synthesis and applications. Greater communication between policy makers and scientists is required in order to ensure that applied ecologists are dealing with issues in a way that can feed into policy. It is particularly important that applied ecologists emphasize the generic value of their work wherever possible. (shrink)

Gilles Deleuze: Image and Text focuses on the intersection between Deleuzian philosophy and the arts.

Deleuze's concepts - such as assemblage, the fold, difference and repetition, cinema and desire - are key to understanding his philosophical approach: they work to unsettle particular bodies of knowledge, to open them up and link them to other concepts within and outside that body of knowledge. The short and accessible chapters in this book each focus on a single concept, offering a definition and showing what the concept does. The contributors also consider how the concepts are engaged, intersect, and (...) link, and how they may deviate from other areas of postmodern thought. Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts is aimed at a readership new to Deleuze both from within philosophy and outside the discipline. Contributors include Christa Albrecht-Crane, Ronald Bogue, Felicity J. Colman, Tom Conley, Gregory Flaxman, Eugene W. Holland, Karen Houle, Gregg Lambert, Melissa McMahon, Judith L. Poxon, Gregory Seigworth, Jennifer Daryl Slack, Daniel W. Smith, Patty Sotirin, Charles J. Stivale, Kenneth Surin, James Williams, and J. Macgregor Wise. (shrink)

Philosophers of science often make reference — whether tacitly or explicitly — to the notion of a scientific community. Sometimes, such references are useful to make our object of analysis tractable in the philosophy of science. For others, tracking or understanding particular features of the development of science proves to be tied to notions of a scientific community either as a target of theoretical or social intervention. We argue that the structure of contemporary scientific research poses two unappreciated, or at (...) least underappreciated, challenges to this concept of the “scientific community” in the philosophy of science. In particular, we will present two case studies from robotics research, broadly construed, which show that (1) the boundedness of the scientific community is threatened when private citizens can develop scientific and technological advances at minimal expense (democratization), and (2) the discreteness of scientific research programs is threatened by the complexly interrelated environment of contemporary scientific work (interconnectivity). Taken together, the extent of democratization and interconnectivity present a significant challenge for any practically oriented philosophy of science, one which we hope will be taken on directly by philosophers in the future. (shrink)

In ‘Reincarnation and Relativized Identity’ 1 J. J. MacIntosh argues that reincarnation is impossible. I wish to make a slightly backhanded defence of reincarnation by showing that MacIntosh's argument does not succeed. I do not follow his recipe for defence of reincarnation exactly.

Aim: Participation in classroom physical activity breaks may improve children’s cognition, but few studies have involved adolescents. The primary aim of this study was to examine the effects of classroom-based resistance training with and without cognitive training on adolescents’ cognitive function.Methods: Participants were 97 secondary school students. Four-year 10 classes from one school were included in this four-arm cluster randomized controlled trial. Classes were randomly assigned to the following groups: sedentary control with no cognitive training, sedentary with cognitive training, resistance (...) training without cognitive training, and resistance training with cognitive training. Sessions varied in levels of both cognitive demand and resistance training and were administered three times per week for 4 weeks. Inhibition, cognitive flexibility, episodic memory, on-task behavior, and muscular fitness were assessed at baseline and post-test. Linear mixed models were used to examine changes within and between groups.Results: In comparison with the control group, episodic memory improved significantly in the resistance training without cognitive training group. There were no group-by-time effects for inhibition or cognitive flexibility. Classroom activity breaks both with and without cognitive demand improved participants’ on-task behavior in comparison with the control and sedentary group. The resistance training programs did not lead to improvements in muscular fitness.Conclusion: Participation in body weight resistance training without cognitive training led to selective improvements in episodic memory. No training effects were found for inhibition or cognitive flexibility. A longer study period may be necessary to induce improvements in muscular fitness and associated changes in inhibition and cognitive flexibility.Clinical Trial Registration:https://www.anzctr.org.au/ACTRN12621001341819.aspx, Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry—ACTRN12621001341819. (shrink)

In the first book-length study of American philosophy at the turn of the century, Daniel J. Wilson traces the formation of philosophy as an academic discipline. Wilson shows how the rise of the natural and physical sciences at the end of the nineteenth century precipitated a "crisis of confidence" among philosophers as to the role of their discipline. Deftly tracing the ways in which philosophers sought to incorporate scientific values and methods into their outlook and to redefine philosophy itself, Wilson (...) moves between close analysis of philosophical texts and consideration of professional careers of illustrative philosophers, such as Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey, and Josiah Royce. The author situates the emergence of professional philosophy in the context of the professionalization of American higher education and articulates, in the case of philosophy, the structures and values of a professional discipline. One of the most important consequences of this transformation was a new emphasis on communal theories of truth. Peirce, Dewey, and Royce all developed sophisticated and important theories of community as they were engaged in reshaping and redefining the limits of philosophy. This book will be of great importance for those interested in the history of philosophy, the rise of professions, and American intellectual and educational history, and to all those seeking to understand the contemporary revival of pragmatic thought and theories of community. (shrink)

Jaakko Hintikka (1998) has argued that clarifying the notion of abduction is the fundamental problem of contemporary epistemology. One traditional interpretation of Peirce on abduction sees it as a recipe for generating new theoretical discoveries . A second standard view sees abduction as a mode of reasoning that justifies beliefs about the probable truth of theories. While each reading has some grounding in Peirce's writings, each leaves out features that are crucial to Peirce's distinctive understanding of abduction. I develop and (...) defend a third interpretation, according to which Peirce takes abductive reasoning to lead to judgments about the relative pursuitworthiness of theories; conclusions that can be thoroughly disconnected from assessments of truth-value. Even if Peirce's use of "abduction" slides around among each of these three importantly different though potentially compatible senses, this neglected third understanding makes sense of a large number of Peirce's remarks and directs our attention to the cognitive structure of judgments that scientists face after the initial proposal of explanatory hypotheses but prior to their experimental testing; a topic which should be of interest to contemporary philosophers of science. (shrink)

A variety of commentators have explored the similarities between pragmatism and Thomas Reid’s Philosophy of Common Sense. Peirce himself claims his version of pragmatism either (loosely) is, or entails, a Critical Common-sensism, a blend of what is best in Kant and Reid. In this paper I argue for a neglected aspect of the relation between Peirce and Reid, and of each to common sense: linguistics. First, I summarize Peirce’s account of what distinguishes his common-sensism from Reid’s. Second, I argue for (...) the importance of appeals to linguistic universals by Reid as both a source for identifying common sense beliefs, and a basis for justifying them. While Peirce is occasionally tempted by such appeals, overall he is critical of appeals to language, especially as most Western philosophers have been familiar with a small set of (Indo-)European languages; say, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, and Latin. This leads to the third section, which concerns Peirce’s familiarity with major nineteenth century linguists, and his contention that the ‘peculiarity’ of Western European languages has impeded the development of logic and philosophy. In particular, I look at unpublished manuscripts where Peirce summarizes his own study of non-European languages, ranging from Arabic, to Ngarrindjeri, to Xhosa. Peirce was only an amateur linguist, and also aware of the challenges of doing cross-cultural linguistics through comparative grammar; e.g., the temptation to force unfamiliar languages onto the “Procrustean Bed of Aryan grammar” (CP 2.211). Nonetheless, this study left him suspicious of any claims of linguistic universals, and supported his anti-psychologism. That is, not only should logic and philosophy not be based upon psychology (at least as a special science), they should also be independent of linguistics. However, Peirce also advances something like the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, that language determines, or at least conditions, thought. The question now becomes what is the nature of a philosophy of common sense, even a critical one, without a common language, or possibly no commonalities across languages? (shrink)

Through case studies that highlight the type of information that is seldom reported in the news, Faces of Environmental Racism exposes the type and magnitude of environmental racism, both domestic and international. The essays explore the justice of current environmental practices, asking such questions as whether cost-benefit analysis is an appropriate analytic technique and whether there are alternate routes to sustainable development in the South.

This paper proposes an alternative perspective on the question of the relationship between German Idealism and American Pragmatism through attention to the philosophy of Josiah Royce. Despite being seen as a Hegelian, Royce declared himself a pragmatist. However, he also called his position Absolute Voluntarism. This paper suggests that the real issue between Idealism and Pragmatism is Intellectualism vs. Voluntarism. This distinction both parallels and cuts across the traditions of German Idealism and American Pragmatism, and promises to open up a (...) view broader than the traditional accounts of the qualified appreciation of Hegel seen in Peirce and Dewey, or the outright antipathy of James. With Peirce, we see that his continual call for Royce to study logic includes, or complements, his criticisms that Royce neglects Secondness. Regarding James, we see his influence on Royce is mediated also in their mutual study of Wundt’s voluntaristic psychology, which has its own roots in the pre-Kantian German Idealism of Leibniz. As for Dewey, he acknowledges Royce’s voluntarism, but rejects Royce’s claim that his Absolute Pragmatism/Voluntarism is pragmatism at all. Nonetheless, even if Royce failed to fuse his idealism and pragmatism, the very effort suggests he saw them as distinct enough to need fusion. (shrink)

Through case studies that highlight the type of information that is seldom reported in the news, Faces of Environmental Racism exposes the type and magnitude of environmental racism, both domestic and international. The essays explore the justice of current environmental practices, asking such questions as whether cost-benefit analysis is an appropriate analytic technique and whether there are alternate routes to sustainable development in the South.

Rationale: Deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the hippocampus is proposed for enhancement of memory impaired by injury or disease. Many pre-clinical DBS paradigms can be addressed in epilepsy patients undergoing intracranial monitoring for seizure localization, since they already have electrodes implanted in brain areas of interest. Even though epilepsy is usually not a memory disorder targeted by DBS, the studies can nevertheless model other memory-impacting disorders, such as Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). Methods: Human patients undergoing Phase II invasive monitoring for (...) intractable epilepsy were implanted with depth electrodes capable of recording neurophysiological signals. Subjects performed a delayed-match-to-sample (DMS) memory task while hippocampal ensembles from CA1 and CA3 cell layers were recorded to estimate a multi-input, multi-output (MIMO) model of CA3-to-CA1 neural encoding and a memory decoding model (MDM) to decode memory information from CA3 and CA1 neuronal signals. After model estimation, subjects again performed the DMS task while either MIMO-based or MDM-based patterned stimulation was delivered to CA1 electrode sites during the encoding phase of the DMS trials. Each subject was sorted (post hoc) by prior experience of repeated and/or mild-to-moderate brain injury (RMBI), TBI, or no history (control) and scored for percentage successful delayed recognition (DR) recall on stimulated vs. non-stimulated DMS trials. The subject’s medical history was unknown to the experimenters until after individual subject memory retention results were scored. Results: When examined compared to control subjects, both TBI and RMBI subjects showed increased memory retention in response to both MIMO and MDM-based hippocampal stimulation. Furthermore, effects of stimulation were also greater in subjects who were evaluated as having pre-existing mild-to-moderate memory impairment. Conclusion: These results show that hippocampal stimulation for memory facilitation was more beneficial for subjects who had previously suffered a brain injury (other than epilepsy), compared to control (epilepsy) subjects who had not suffered a brain injury. This study demonstrates that the epilepsy/intracranial recording model can be extended to test the ability of DBS to restore memory function in subjects who previously suffered a brain injury other than epilepsy, and support further investigation into the beneficial effect of DBS in TBI patients. (shrink)

In this collection of provocative essays, historians and literary theorists assess the influence of Michel Foucault, particularly his History of Sexuality, on the study of classics. Foucault's famous work presents a bold theory of sexuality for both ancient and modern times, and yet until now it has remained under-explored and insufficiently analyzed. By bringing together the historical knowledge, philological skills, and theoretical perspectives of a wide range of scholars, this collection enables the reader to explore Foucault's model of Greek culture (...) and see how well his interpretation accounts for the full range of evidence from Greece and Rome. Not only do the essays bring to light the assumptions, ideas, and practices that constituted the intimate lives of men and women in the ancient Mediterranean world, but they also demonstrate the importance of the History of Sexuality for fields as diverse as Greco-Roman antiquity, women's history, cultural studies, philosophy, and modern sexuality. The essays include "Situating The History of Sexuality" (the editors), "Taking the Sex Out of Sexuality: Foucault's Failed History" (Joel Black), "Incipit Philosophia" (Alain Vizier), "The Subject in Antiquity after Foucault" (Page duBois), "This Myth Which Is Not One: Construction of Discourse in Plato's Symposium" (Jeffrey S. Carnes), "Foucault's History of Sexuality: A Useful Theory for Women?" (Amy Richlin), "Catullan Consciousness, the 'Care of the Self,' and the Force of the Negative in History" (Paul Allen Miller), "Reversals of Platonic Love in Petronius' Satyricon" (Daniel B. McGlathery), and an essay from Dislocating Masculinity (Lin Foxhall). (shrink)

In The Art Instinct, Denis Dutton promoted a theoretical framework that “has more validity, more power, and more possibilities than the hermetic discourse that deadens so much of the humanities.”1 This framework is Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural and sexual selection. Dutton proposed to seek “human universals that underlie the vast cacophony of cultural differences and across the globe” (AI, p. 39), based on a shared, evolved human nature.This contrasts with the relativistic presumptions of those falling under (...) the shadow of Margaret Mead and Clifford Geertz, or “the dogmas of Freud, the speculations of Jung, the sterile formulations of behaviorism, all variously empty or misleading” (p. 37). Also .. (shrink)

Perhaps most fundamentally, Josiah Royce was a philosopher of community. As he said in his remarks at the Walton Hotel: “My earliest recollections include a very frequent wonder as to what my elders meant when they said that this was a new community…I wondered, and gradually came to feel that part of my life’s business was to find out what all this wonder meant.”. A true pragmatist, Royce saw that finding out what this wonder meant also involved balancing and dissolving (...) dichotomies such as autonomy and docility or The World and the Individual. An educator, historian, logician, novelist, philosopher, psychologist, and theologian, Royce... (shrink)

This book is one of a growing number on the Anglo-American scene devoted to attacking the empiricist or foundational model of knowledge. Those sympathetic to the Hegelian tradition should welcome such a change in the prevailing Zeitgeist. In this spirit, several writers have compared or connected Hegel and Marx to the language philosophy of the “later” Wittgenstein. Inspired in part by an article of Charles Taylor, David Lamb undertakes to elaborate upon “the considerable convergence of the later Wittgenstein, as (...) commonly understood, and the Hegelian understanding of language.” “It is striking,” he continues, “that the two philosophers argued very similarly against what might be called the empirical account of the relation between language and reality.” The core of this five-chapter book is devoted to highlighting this convergence, primarily between the sections on Sense-Certainty and Perception in the Phenomenology of Spirit and Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. The final two chapters deal with similarities between Hegel and Wittgenstein on a much broader scale. (shrink)

The argument of this paper is threefold: (a) Charles Bonnet’s naturalization of the principle of perfectibility (in the wake of Rousseau) is one example of a more general philosophical operation to be found in his writings: to naturalize the metaphysical while insisting upon its minimal difference from the material and so to generate an immaterialism that looks like a materialism; (b) this operation structures Bonnet’s entire palingenetic project which can be defined as an ‘anomalous naturalism’; (c) variants of this (...) anomalous naturalism were available to German philosophers during the last decades of the eighteenth century – philosophers such as G. E. Lessing, F. H. Jacobi and J. G. Herder – and, to this extent, their writings also display traits of this ‘anomalous naturalism’. (shrink)

In Religious Studies xxvi Harold W. Noonan and Charles B. Daniels severally take issue with my ‘Reincarnation and Relativized Identity’. Both make valuable points but both, I think, have somewhat missed the point of my original article. In that paper I singled out five different views on the possibility of life after death: that we are reincarnated in the self-same body we had in our pre-mortem state; that we are reincarnated in another — in a different — body; (...) that we continue to exist in a disembodied form, which may or may not culminate in re-embodiment; that pre-mortem life is a dream from which postmortem life is the awakening; that none of the above holds: there is no life after death. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Return of Scepticism: From Hobbes and Descartes to BayleSébastien CharlesGianni Paganini, editor. The Return of Scepticism: From Hobbes and Descartes to Bayle. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003. Pp. xxviii + 486. Cloth, $180.00.Cette édition des actes du congrès international « The Return of Scepticism », organisé par Gianni Paganini à l'Université du Piémont-Oriental de Vercelli en mai 2000, a pour ambition de faire le point sur l'état de la (...) recherche actuelle en cherchant à cerner au mieux les implications épistémologiques et les répercussions européennes du scepticisme à la période moderne. Placés sous le patronage de Richard H. Popkin, dont un essai ouvre l'ouvrage et pave la voie à de futures recherches sur la question, les textes rassemblés par Gianni Paganini ont pour trait commun d'insister sur la prégnance du scepticisme à l'époque moderne, tout en prenant garde au fait de bien replacer chaque stratégie sceptique dans l'environnement culturel et philosophique qui fut le sien. Divisé en sept sections, l'ouvrage fournit une vue d'ensemble de la question sceptique qui s'étale sur deux siècles, le XVIIe et le XVIIIe.Dans la première section, l'accent est mis sur un aspect délaissé de l'histoire du scepticisme moderne, à savoir le traitement particulier qui lui fut réservé dans la pensée anglaise des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Sont abordés ici les cas de Hobbes, dont le traitement du scepticisme est pensé en relation inversée avec celui de Descartes (G. Paganini), Locke, qui tend à faire sien le principe sceptique de la limitation du savoir (G. A. J. Rogers), et les Platoniciens de Cambridge, qui s'inspirent de la méthode sceptique pour compartimenter le champ du savoir (F. Tomasoni).Dans la deuxième section, c'est la pensée continentale qui est à l'honneur, avec des textes consacrés à Descartes spécifiquement ou à La Mothe le Vayer et Descartes, avec pour objectif commun de questionner l'originalité du travail cartésien en insistant notamment sur le rôle de l'epoché chez Charron comme source possible du cogito (J. R. Maia Neto) et sur une tradition sceptique non fidéiste présente dans les œuvres de La Mothe le Vayer comme de Descartes (J.-P. Cavaillé).La troisième section évoque la prise de conscience des enjeux sceptiques chez les sectateurs et les adversaires de Descartes, qui s'accordent tous à reconnaître l'insuffisance de la réfutation du scepticisme proposée par ce dernier. Ce point fait l'unanimité tant chez les opposants à Descartes—Martin Schoock (A. Del Prete), Pierre Villemandy (C. Borghero), Pierre-Daniel Huet (T. M. Lennon), et les philosophes italiens Fardella et Doria (M. T. Marcialis)—que chez ceux qui se sont inspirés de sa philosophie—Arnauld (G. Belgioioso), Malebranche, Foucher et Desgabets (E. Scribano).La prise en compte des enjeux sceptiques aux plans politique et religieux est intégrée dans la quatrième partie au sein de laquelle sont évoquées des thématiques plurielles comme la présence du probabilisme néo-académique chez Pascal (A. McKenna), l'interprétation sceptique, voire libertine, du pouvoir et de la liberté rattachée à la théorie hobbesienne de l'état de nature chez Samuel Sorbière (L. Bianchi), ou le rapport existant entre scepticisme et tolérance (L. Simonutti).La section suivante délaisse politique et religion pour aborder le cas de la science, et de l'effet du scepticisme au niveau épistémologique. Le cas de Martín Martínez témoigne du fait que le scepticisme peut être conciliable avec une vision empiriste de la science et qu'une physique sceptique reste possible (J. C. Laursen). De même, le rapport des savants italiens comme Redi, Magalotti ou Dati à l'égard du scepticisme est évocateur de la prise de conscience des dangers que le scepticisme pose pour le domaine du démontrable (M. Torrini), ce qui vaut également pour toute théorie de la signification, dont les implications sceptiques sont patentes (G. Hassler), ou pour toute approche historique minée par des considérations pyrrhoniennes (C. Grell... (shrink)

In the eighteenth century the category of the aesthetic sought to bridge the gap between the prevalent dualities of Cartesian thought: art and science, history and science, prejudice and truth. This special issue of _boundary 2_ addresses current debates about the status of art in the context of global modernity. The range of arguments represented here cover a broad historical scope—from Cartesianism to present-day global modernity—of cultural discourse on the aesthetic to bring a focus to contemporary discussions of the corollary (...) concepts of beauty, virtue, taste, and truth. These essays present a rich and provocative account of the place of the aesthetic in late-twentieth-century culture. Included in this volume are considerations of the relation between theories of art and the avant-garde; art’s relation to cognition; the aesthetic as history; the aesthetic as a unique access to modernity; and its impact on problems of identity formation, ideology, and resistances to the institutional powers inherent in dominant social formations. _Contributors. _Charles Altieri, Peter Burger, David Carroll, Anthony J. Cascardi, Howard Caygill, Allen Dunn, Eric Gans, Agnes Heller, Ronald A. T. Judy, Marie-Rose Logan, Daniel T. O’Hara, Donald E. Pease, Alan Singer. (shrink)

Première rencontre avec Daniel Charles dans une 104 jaune en route vers les Treilles, le vaste domaine de la fondation Schlumberger qui égrène ses pins, ses oliviers et ses chênes rouvres sur trois collines du Haut-Var et où Jacqueline Ollier, directrice du centre Interspace, organisait un colloque sur le silence en juin 1984. J’y venais avec une image rythmique d’Éloges de Saint-John Perse : « – ô spondée du silence étiré sur ses longues! » et une métaphore croisée d’Anabase (...) : « je sais la... (shrink)