Background: Personality pathology does not have to be a contraindication to a bariatric surgery if a proper pre-surgical assessment is done. Indicating subgroups of patients with their specific needs could help tailor interventions and improve surgical treatment outcomes.Objectives: Using the Alternative DSM-5 model for personality disorders and the ICD-11 model for PDs to detect subgroups of patients with obesity based on a specific constellation of maladaptive personality traits and the level of overall personality impairment.Methods: 272 consecutively consented patients who underwent (...) a standard pre-surgical psychological assessment. The majority were women, age range was 22–79 years. Patients’ average body mass index was 43.95 kg/m2. All participants were administered the Personality Inventory for DSM-5 from which Level of Personality Functioning Scale-Self Report and Standardized Assessment of Severity of Personality Disorder scores were gained using the “crosswalk” for common metric for self-reported severity of personality disorder. The k-means clustering method was used to define specific subgroups of patients with obesity and replicated for equality testing to the samples of non-clinical respondents and psychiatric patients.Results: The cluster analysis detected specific groups in the sample of patients with obesity, which differed quantitatively from the samples of non-clinical respondents and psychiatric patients. A vast majority of patients with obesity showed above-average values in most of the PID-5 facets compared to the United States representative general community sample. In two out of the three clusters defined, patients demonstrated moderate to severe personality psychopathology within the Detachment and Negative Affectivity domains according to PID-5, which in one of the clusters corresponded to the mild overall impairment in both, LPFS-SR and SASPD. Moreover, higher levels of psychopathology prove to be associated with higher age and use of psychiatric medication.Conclusions: The dimensional DSM-5 and ICD-11 trait models are suitable procedures for defining specific “characters” of patients in a pre-bariatric setting. As such, they help to identify subgroups of patients with obesity who are different from general population and psychiatric patients. Implications for clinical practice and further research are discussed. (shrink)

The mystical experiences of the ṛṣis , the spiritual giants of the early Vedic times, led to the creation of the Vedic hymns and eventually to the formation of the whole elaborate structure of the Vedic religion, as upheld by the Indian priesthood. But there were obviously others who pursued mystical experiences without themselves engaging, like the ancient ṛṣis , in attempts to transmit their experiences through mythological poetry and religious leadership. They adopted mystical ecstasy as their way of life. (...) Mysticism as a conscious way of life is, in India, called Yoga. Being outside the trend of Vedic mythological creativity and the Brāhmanic religious orthodoxy, the Yogis of Vedic times left little evidence of their existence, practices and achievements. And such evidence as has survived in the Vedas is scanty and indirect. (shrink)

Our daily lives unfold continuously, yet our memories are organised into distinct events, situated in a specific context of space and time, and chunked when this context changes (at event boundaries). Previous research showed that this process, termed event segmentation, enhances object-context binding but impairs temporal order memory. Physiologically, peaks in pupil dilation index event segmentation, similar to emotion-induced bursts of autonomic arousal. Emotional arousal also modulates object-context binding and temporal order memory. Yet, these two critical factors have not been (...) systematically studied together. To address this gap, we ran a behavioural experiment using a paradigm validated to study event segmentation and extended it with emotion manipulation. During encoding, we sequentially presented greyscale objects embedded in coloured frames (colour changes defining events), with a neutral or aversive sound. During retrieval, we tested participants’ memory of temporal order memory and object-colour binding. We found opposite effects of emotion and event segmentation on episodic memory. While event segmentation enhanced object-context binding, emotion impaired it. On the contrary, event segmentation impaired temporal order memory, but emotion enhanced it. These findings increase our understanding of episodic memory organisation in laboratory settings, and potentially in real life with perceptual changes and emotion fluctuations constantly interacting. (shrink)

Hans Peter Riegel zählt zu den wenigen Künstlern, die gleichzeitig als Autor tätig sind. Aus dieser Position schreibt er kenntnisreich und kritisch über den Kunstmarkt sowie Künstlerinnen und Künstler. Während der Recherchen zu seinen erfolgreichen Biographien über Joseph Beuys und Jörg Immendorff hat er viele Gespräche geführt, die bislang nur in Auszügen veröffentlicht wurden. Immer wieder hat er auch für namhafte Medien geschrieben, Künstler und Kreative interviewt. Jetzt hat Hans Peter Riegel eine Auswahl dieser Texte in diesem Buch (...) zusammengefasst. Unter anderem mit Beiträgen zu Marina Abramovic, Helge Achenbach, Joseph Beuys, Tina Brown, Jörg Immendorff und Eva Presenhuber sowie Interviews mit Jörg Immendorff, Diane Keaton, Marc Spiegler und Klaus Staeck. (shrink)

Foundations of Dialectical Psychology is a compilation of the writings of Klaus F. Riegel on dialectical psychology. The book presents chapters discussing such topics as the dialectics of human development; history of dialectical psychology; temporal organization of dialogues; and the analysis of the concept of crisis and its underlying philosophical model and ideology. Psychologists and students will find the book invaluable.

Abstrakt/Abstract Na příkladu dvou myslitelů ze zcela odlišných období dějin filosofie lze předvést otázku nejobecnějších podmínek pravdivé řeči, které se projevují na pomezí sémantiky v užším slova smyslu a utváření širšího pojmu světa jakožto pojmu, k němuž patří vytyčení jasných mezí smysluplného vypovídání o tom, co je. Od této velmi obecné otázky se příspěvek obrací k užšímu tématu negace čili k pravidlům užití řeči, která je sice správná a v některých případech pravdivá, avšak postrádá svůj vlastní a specifický korelát v (...) plné osnově skutečnosti samé. Výchozími texty jsou zlomky Parmenidovy básně O jsoucím a její moderní výklady od čtení Russellova až po tzv. modální interpretaci, kladoucí důraz na motivy nutného jsoucího a nemožného nejsoucího, a dále pasáže z Wittgensteinova Traktátu i Filosofických zkoumání (§ 50). Podrobnější srovnání postoje obou myslitelů k negaci umožňuje prohloubit i rozšířit starší srovnávání Parmenidova argumentu o nemožnosti mluvit o tom, co není, a Wittgensteinova důrazu na nutnou existenci jednoduchých objektů. Choosing two thinkers from two entirely different periods of the history of philosophy, one can fruitfully illustrate the issue of the most general conditions of truthful speech, which take effect on the crossroad of the narrowly conceived semantics and a broadly construed concept of the world as a concept that implies the posting of neat limits of the meaningful linguistic articulation of what there is. From this very general issue, the article turns to the narrower question of negation, and thus of the rules of the use of the correct and sometimes true speech that, nevertheless, lacks its specific referent in the full structure of reality. The texts under scrutiny are the fragments of Parmenides’ poem On Being and its modern exegeses ranging from Russell to the modal interpretation that emphasizes the necessary being and the impossible not-being, plus passages from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and also his Philosophical Investigation (§ 50). A more detailed comparison of the attitude of both thinkers towards negation helps to both deepen and expand the earlier suggested parallel between Parmenides’ argument about the impossibility to speak about what is not and Wittgenstein’s emphasis on the necessary existence of simple objects. (shrink)

This paper provides a finer analysis of the well-known form of the Local Deduction Theorem in contraction-free logics . An infinite hierarchy of its natural strengthenings is introduced and studied. The main results are the separation of its initial four members and the subsequent collapse of the hierarchy.

El artículo se refiere a una de las tesis de R. Barbaras, a saber, que « […] todo sentimiento es sentimiento de la naturaleza”. Este sentimiento es, en definitiva, el amor del mundo y corresponde a la apertura enigmática de la subjetividad por el mundo. Esta apertura hace posible el paso del proceso anónimo de la manifestación del mundo a su aparición para los sujetos, centralizada alrededor de sus movimientos desecantes. Si esta motricidad del deseo es desencadenada por el sentimiento, (...) el origen de este último es el acontecimiento de la separación del mundo que, sin embargo, se encuentra en la más estrecha adhesión a él. El sentimiento equivale, así, a un desgarramiento del aparecer de las realidades intramundanas, lo que recuerda la descripción de la trascendencia del Otro en E. Levinas. Si nada del mundo se manifiesta en el rostro del Otro según Levinas, porque toda su fenomenalidad se desvanece, éste no es el caso para Barbaras, para quien el sentimiento es una manera de participar en la manifestación primaria del Mundo, es decir, en la physis. De ahí nuestra propuesta de vincular el sentimiento al rostro de la naturaleza. (shrink)

: The article discusses two issues implied by the structure of De caelo I.9: Aristotle’s further defence of the uniqueness of the universe and, in more detail, the general question of whether the cosmology of De caelo overlaps, or is even compatible, with Aristotle’s theology including the notion of the Prime Mover. It offers an analysis of several long-standing difficulties including the question of whether the lines 279a18–22 imply an external mover of the heavens. The negative answer that I will (...) defend does however not solve the problem of how Aristotle conceives the source of natural cosmic motion. In this respect, the article pays close attention to the peculiar conception of the animate supralunary matter and to De caelo II.3, 286a7–21 as a text that complements I.9 by relying on the holistic self-motion that implies no Prime Mover, but requires the separation of the supralunary and the sublunary spheres. The article also concludes that Arist otle, despite his rejection of the unceasingly revolving world soul, inherits some Platonic difficulties that arise once we make the notion of the divine life irreducible to divine thinking. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the difficult task of balancing access to misinformation with respect for patient decision-making. Due to its innate antagonism, the paradigm of “physician paternalism” versus “patient autonomy” may not adequately capture the clinical relationship. The authors hypothesized that most patients would, in fact, prefer significant physician input as opposed to unopinionated information when making medical decisions. There is a lack of empirical data corroborating this in the United States. To that end, a survey was distributed to (...) 650 individuals through Amazon Mechanical Turk, of which 499 responses met pre-determined quality criteria. Most respondents believed their doctor's insight would be better than their own if injured or gravely ill. When asked to affirm preferences separately, a significantly higher proportion of respondents preferred guidance from their doctor when making medical decisions compared to being presented with unopinionated information ( p < 0.001). Encouragingly, 93.1% believed that the doctor's primary goal was their health. When asked directly to compare physician guidance to unopinionated information, 69.1% respondents stated they would prefer physician guidance. We found a consistent association between educational/economic background and affirmative responses ( p < 0.001), suggesting particular attention should be paid to patients that are disadvantaged with respect to these demographic factors. The belief in a shared goal, and a consistent preference for physician input, suggests that patients endorse a more collaborative view of the clinical dynamic than is suggested by the paternalism-autonomy paradigm. This pilot study suggests physicians should not be afraid to communicate conviction with regard to treatment decisions. (shrink)

In the first part of this paper I argue that beauty and goodness are at least coextensive for Plato. That means that at least with respect to concrete particulars, everything that is good is beautiful and everything that is beautiful is good. Though the good and the beautiful are coextensive, there is evidence that they are not identical. In the second part of the paper I show significance of this relation. In ethics it implies that the good is the right. (...) It also allows one to see how platonists can believe that goodness exists in mathematics. And it explains the usefulness of mathematics in moral education. (shrink)

The influence of Eugen Fink on Jan Patocˇka is undeniable. Fink was his first advisor in questions concerning the phenomenology of the late Husserl in the mid-1930s. But as one can see in the correspondence between Patocˇka and Fink, there are also some hints to divergences, which this paper tries to make explicit, mainly on the basis of some later works and manuscripts by Patocˇka. They concern the status of the whole of the world (Weltganzes) as being different from the (...) human lifeworld (Menschenwelt) and the double concept of appearing in the cosmology of Fink, which Patocˇka – in the early 1970s – confronts with a project of an “asubjective” phenomenology. This project, introduced by an unambiguous criticism of the Cartesianism in Husserl, still maintains a certain proximity to Husserl, defining itself as a formal transcendentalism of appearing as such that is not divided into two modes of appearing as in Fink. It can be read as Patocˇka’s radicalization of the originary Husserlian project of phenomenology, rather than as its cosmological abandonment in an accordance with Fink. (shrink)

Aristotle's brief accounts of some swifts and hirundines in Hist. an. 1.1 and 9.30 list several species whose identification has always been taken for difficult, and continues to vary from translation to translation. This note clarifies this small issue on the basis of Aristotle's text alone. I therefore assume that both passages, each introduced by a slightly different use of the term ἄποδες, offer sufficient information for recognizing the species in question. I will first translate and briefly comment upon the (...) passage from Book 1, then do the same with the text from Book 9. (shrink)

The basic theory of scientific understanding presented in Sections 1–2 exploits three main ideas.First, that to understand a phenomenonP (for a given agent) is to be able to fitP into the cognitive background corpusC (of the agent).Second, that to fitP intoC is to connectP with parts ofC (via arguments in a very broad sense) such that the unification ofC increases.Third, that the cognitive changes involved in unification can be treated as sequences of shifts of phenomena inC. How the theory fits (...) typical examples of understanding and how it excludes spurious unifications is explained in detail. Section 3 gives a formal description of the structure of cognitive corpuses which contain descriptive as well as inferential components. The theory of unification is then refined in the light of so called puzzling phenomena, to enable important distinctions, such as that between consonant and dissonant understanding. In Section 4, the refined theory is applied to several examples, among them a case study of the development of the atomic model. The final part contains a classification of kinds of understanding and a discussion of the relation between understanding and explanation. (shrink)

Pojem řádu má své veliké dějiny od předsókratiků až k H. Kringsovi, který v roce 1941 vydává knihu Ordo. U nás se pojmu řádu a řádovosti věnoval po celý život ze­jména brněnský a olomoucký myslitel J. L. Fischer (1894–1973). Idea řádu byla také jedním z pilířů jeho skladebné filosofie, jež měla základní problémy moderní společnosti vyřešit účinněji než marxismus. Současně s „laickým“ Fischerem usilovala v kritických 30. letech dvacátého století o nastolení kýženého řádu vyhraněně katolická skupina sou­středěná kolem tehdy nově (...) založené revue Řád. Oběma pólům šlo sice o podobný cíl (skoncovat s vládou neblahého kapitalismu), ale neporozuměly si pro různost svých věr. Toto osudové neporozumění bychom měli především na univerzitách v Brně a Olomou­ci napravovat využitím odkazu W. C. Smithe, který zásadně rozlišil setrvačnou tradiční víru (belief) a otevřenou víru všech opravdu tvůrčích lidí (faith). Takovou víru měl totiž podle autora také a snad především nový řád usilovně hledající Josef Ludvík Fischer. (shrink)

In the Belgian constitutional order, there is no room for any direct political powers to be exercised by the King. Even on the occasion of a crisis- when the Cabinet tenders its resignation or when the Kingperforms His constitutional mission in the process towards the formation of a new government ; His freedom of action is restricted by the objective context, defined mainly by the political parties.The King, however, retains the possibility of exercising his political influence. This influence may be (...) all the more important in a country, such as Belgium, where the parliamentary system of proportional representation and the constitutional rule that both major linguistic groups be equally represented in the Cabinet -amongst other factors - cause a cabinet formation to be a complex and delicate process. (shrink)

Free logic, an alternative to traditional logic, has been seen as a useful avenue of approach to a number of philosophical issues of contemporary interest. In this collection, Karel Lambert, one of the pioneers in, and the most prominent exponent of, free logic, brings together a variety of published essays bearing on the application of free logic to philosophical topics ranging from set theory and logic to metaphysics and the philosophy of religion. The work of such distinguished philosophers as (...) Bas van Fraassen, Dana Scott, Tyler Burge, and Jaakko Hintikka is represented. Lambert provides an introductory essay placing free logic in the logical tradition beginning with Aristotle, developing it as the natural culmination of a trend begun in the Port Royal logic of the 1600s, and continuing through current predicate logic--the trend to rid logic of existence assumptions. His Introduction also provides a useful systematic overview of free logic, including both a standard syntax and some semantical options. (shrink)

This volume focuses on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s important contribution to the phenomenology of corporeity and affectivity, and it explores the various influences his work had and still has on other disciplines.

Dostoevsky wrote that love in action is a harsh and terrible thing compared to love in dreams. That reality is particularly evident in medicine, where there is an almost universal, involuntary participation of physicians and other healthcare workers in the suffering of their patients. This paper explores this phenomenon through the paradigm of ‘mystery’ as explained by the French existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel. A mystery is different from a problem in the sense that the former requires the active immersion of (...) the person involved in order to be truly experienced. It is a ‘meta-problem’ that cannot be analyzed objectively and separately from the person that it affects, without changing the nature of the thing experienced. The authors contend that the human suffering encountered in medicine is one such phenomenon, and the paper draws on illustrations of this concept in art and literature. Awareness of the subtle but important difference between mystery and problem may help physicians better understand their personal entanglement with the suffering of patients. (shrink)

Molecular Revolution in BrazilFélix Guattari and Suely Rolniktranslated by Karel Clapshow and Brian HolmesYes, I believe that there is a multiple people, a people of mutants, a people of potentialities that appears and disappears, that is embodied in social, literary, and musical events.... I think that we're in a period of productivity, proliferation, creation, utterly fabulous revolutions from the viewpoint of this emergence of a people. That's molecular revolution: it isn't a slogan or a program, it's something that I (...) feel, that I live....--from Molecular Revolution in BrazilFollowing Brazil's first democratic election after two decades of military dictatorship, French philosopher Félix Guattari traveled through Brazil in 1982 with Brazilian psychoanalyst Suely Rolnik and discovered an exciting, new political vitality. In the infancy of its new republic, Brazil was moving against traditional hierarchies of control and totalitarian regimes and founding a revolution of ideas and politics. Molecular Revolution in Brazil documents the conversations, discussions, and debates that arose during the trip, including a dialogue between Guattari and Brazil's future President Luis Ignacia Lula da Silva, then a young gubernatorial candidate. Through these exchanges, Guattari cuts through to the shadowy practices of globalization gone awry and boldly charts a revolution in practice.Assembled and edited by Rolnik, Molecular Revolution in Brazil is organized thematically; aphoristic at times, it presents a lesser-known, more overtly political aspect of Guattari's work. Originally published in Brazil in 1986 as Micropolitica: Cartografias do desejo, the book became a crucial reference for political movements in Brazil in the 1980s and 1990s. It now provides English-speaking readers with an invaluable picture of the radical thought and optimism that lies at the root of Lula's Brazil. Félix Guattari, post-'68 French psychoanalyst and philosopher, is the author of Anti-Oedipus, The Anti-Oedipus Papers, 2006), and other books. Semiotext has published the first two volumes of his complete essays, Chaosophy and Soft Subversions, and will publish the final volume, Chaos and Complexity, in 2008. Suely Rolnik is a psychoanalyst, cultural critic, and curator who lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil. She was a close collaborator of Guattari during her exile in Paris from the military dictatorship in Brazil. (shrink)

The idea of radical, historical freedom which Patočka, beginning in the 1930s, thought of as a movement of transcendence, cannot be comprehended without taking embodiment – the human being’s corporeal and intercorporeal anchorage in the world – into account. This said, we consider the pertinence and permanence, for both human freedom and corporality, of a moment – to all appearances marginal – that constitutes in reality more of a limit for each of these elements and, as a result, allows a (...) link to be posited between them. This moment is the confrontation of the living, embodied soul with the cold and hostile side of the world, with the otherness which is alien to life, with the periphery of nature that is bereft of sense for life and constitutes its ultimate limit. The undermining of sense that can happen in such confrontations gives rise to a vertigo deriving from the extreme form of freedom enacted in them. This makes it possible to explain the rupture between spirit and life, a certain dualism opposing life and spirit, that prompts the question: Is thisdualism not specific to European humanity as constructed and called for by Patočka? (shrink)

Indian Philosophy. A Very Short Introduction. Sue Hamilton. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2001. xvi, 153 pp. Pb £5.99. ISBN 0-19-285374-0.

In the Philebus, Plato elaborates an image of our soul as a book where a scribe and a painter are constantly at work. This book examines the implicit premises of this image and aims at overcoming the general polarity of ancient phantasia and modern imagination.