Deep brain stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease can lead to the development of neuropsychiatric symptoms. These can include harmful changes in mood and behaviour that alienate family members and raise ethical questions about personal responsibility for actions committed under stimulation-dependent mental states. Qualitative interviews were conducted with twenty participants following subthalamic DBS at a movement disorders centre, in order to explore the meaning and significance of stimulation-related neuropsychiatric symptoms amongst a purposive sample of persons (...) with PD and their spousal caregivers. Interview transcripts underwent inductive thematic analysis. Clinical and experiential aspects of post-DBS neuropsychiatric symptoms were identified. Caregivers were highly burdened by these symptoms and both patients and caregivers felt unprepared for their consequences, despite having received information prior to DBS, desiring greater family and peer engagement prior to neurosurgery. Participants held conflicting opinions as to whether emergent symptoms were attributable to neurostimulation. Many felt that they reflected aspects of the person’s “real” or “younger” personality. Those participants who perceived a close relationship between stimulation changes and changes in mental state were more likely to view these symptoms as inauthentic and uncontrollable. Unexpected and troublesome neuropsychiatric symptoms occurred despite a pre-operative education programme that was delivered to all participants. This suggests that such symptoms are difficult to predict and manage even if best practice guidelines are followed by experienced centres. Further research aimed at predicting these complications may improve the capacity of clinicians to tailor the consent process. (shrink)

We estimate that 208,000 deep brain stimulation (DBS) devices have been implanted to address neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders worldwide. DBS Think Tank presenters pooled data and determined that DBS expanded in its scope and has been applied to multiple brain disorders in an effort to modulate neural circuitry. The DBS Think Tank was founded in 2012 providing a space where clinicians, engineers, researchers from industry and academia discuss current and emerging DBS technologies and logistical and ethical issues facing the field. (...) The emphasis is on cutting edge research and collaboration aimed to advance the DBS field. The Eighth Annual DBS Think Tank was held virtually on September 1 and 2, 2020 (Zoom Video Communications) due to restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The meeting focused on advances in: (1) optogenetics as a tool for comprehending neurobiology of diseases and on optogenetically-inspired DBS, (2) cutting edge of emerging DBS technologies, (3) ethical issues affecting DBS research and access to care, (4) neuromodulatory approaches for depression, (5) advancing novel hardware, software and imaging methodologies, (6) use of neurophysiological signals in adaptive neurostimulation, and (7) use of more advanced technologies to improve DBS clinical outcomes. There were 178 attendees who participated in a DBS Think Tank survey, which revealed the expansion of DBS into several indications such as obesity, post-traumatic stress disorder, addiction and Alzheimer’s disease. This proceedings summarizes the advances discussed at the Eighth Annual DBS Think Tank. (shrink)

DBS Think Tank IX was held on August 25–27, 2021 in Orlando FL with US based participants largely in person and overseas participants joining by video conferencing technology. The DBS Think Tank was founded in 2012 and provides an open platform where clinicians, engineers and researchers can freely discuss current and emerging deep brain stimulation technologies as well as the logistical and ethical issues facing the field. The consensus among the DBS Think Tank IX speakers was that DBS expanded in (...) its scope and has been applied to multiple brain disorders in an effort to modulate neural circuitry. After collectively sharing our experiences, it was estimated that globally more than 230,000 DBS devices have been implanted for neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders. As such, this year’s meeting was focused on advances in the following areas: neuromodulation in Europe, Asia and Australia; cutting-edge technologies, neuroethics, interventional psychiatry, adaptive DBS, neuromodulation for pain, network neuromodulation for epilepsy and neuromodulation for traumatic brain injury. (shrink)

Introduction: philosophies of race and ethnicity / Peter Osborne, Stella Sandford -- pt. 1. Ch. 1. Philosophy and racial identity / Linda Martin Alcoff -- ch. 2. Fanon, phenomenology, race / David Macey -- Ch. 3. Primordial being: enlightenment and the Indian subject of postcolonial theory / Chetan Bhatt -- Ch. 4. Race and language in the two Saussures / Robert J.C. Young -- pt. 2. Ch. 5. Unspeakable histories: diasporic lives in old England / Bill Schwarz -- Ch. (...) 6. Race, colonialism and history: China at the turn of the twentieth century / Rebecca E. Karl -- Ch. 7. Ethnicity and species: on the philosophy of the multi-ethnic state in Japanese imperialism / Naoki Sakai -- Ch. 8. On Chineseness as a theoretical problem / Rey Chow -- Ch. 9. Race and slavery: the politics of recovery and reparation / Fran¸ coise Vergés -- Ch. 10. Rewriting the black subject: the black Brazilian emancipatory text / Denise Ferreira da Silva. (shrink)

Bears comprise a subculture of gay men who valorize the larger, hirsute body. This research interrogates Bear culture as a gendered strategy for repudiating effeminacy that simultaneously challenges and reproduces norms of hegemonic masculinity. In this research, the author situates his ethnographic study of a major metropolitan Bear community in its social and historical context to illuminate this paradox, with special emphasis on the embodiment of Bear masculinity and its effect on sexual practice. The author concludes that through a process (...) of embodied agency, Bear culture yields a number of sexually innovative practices that disperse pleasure across the body and disrupt genitally centered, phallusandreceptacle interpretations of sex. However, the subversive potential of these practices is significantly undermined by an attendant set of practices that reflect heteronormative and hegemonically masculine interpretations of sex. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant is one of the greatest philosophers in history. But, as Peter Kreeft notes in this book, Kant is really two philosophers-a philosopher about how we know things and a philosopher of right and wrong. If he had written only on either topic, he would still be the most important and influential of the modern philosophers.

Cloning, gene therapy, stem-cell harvesting—are we on the path to a Huxley-like Brave New World? Not really, argues political philosopher and Kass Commission member Peter Augustine Lawler in Stuck with Virtue: The American Individual and Our Biotechnological Future, even as he admits that we will likely become more obsessive and anxious and will be subjected to new forms of tyranny. Rather, he contends, human nature is such that the biotechnological world to come, despite the best efforts of its proponents, (...) will still fail to make it possible to feel good without being good. It will be harder, Lawler warns, to be virtuous in the future, because we will be more detached than ever from the natural sources of happiness. But we may take some solace in the fact that virtue will still be the best way to live well with what we really know. With irony and wit, Lawler delivers the good news about the future of the American individual: We’re going to remain free, because the modern effort to make increasingly individualistic human beings at home with themselves and their environments through technological progress cannot succeed. That is the truth and promise, concludes Lawler, of a genuinely postmodern conservatism. (shrink)

This book explores the political, economic, social, and environmental health relations and politics of the global tech and electronics industry. Peter Little argues that, in the digital age, we need greater synthesis of political ecology, ethnography, and technocapital critique.

While histories of literature and philosophy have till now presented Calcidius as if he were no more than a secondhand mediator of Platonic thought, Peter Dronke, in The Spell of Calcidius, shows that this judgement must be radically revised. Calcidius' commentary (probably of the early fourth century) on Plato's Timaeus is a deeply individual work, which was able to inspire a fresh way of looking for truth, of searching for a world-picture that was not ready-made, among exceptional thinkers across (...) eight centuries. The spell Calcidius cast was intellectual freedom, a Christian's refusal to make Christian propaganda, a spirit of open enquiry. After the discussion of some key cosmological motifs in Calcidius himself and in Boethius, there follow chapters on the brilliant transformations of Calcidian thought in the ninth century by Eriugena and others; on the odi et amo towards Calcidius of Manegold of Lautenbach in the eleventh century; and on the ardent assimilation of his thought in the early twelfth by “us who love Plato”, as William of Conches proclaimed. The final chapter shows how in Bernardus Silvestris' epic, the Cosmographia (1147/8), the daring uses of language and speculation begun by Calcidius find their culminating creative renewal. (shrink)

We reexamine Plato’s use of visual metaphors by considering his own treatment of light and sight, which differed from the later view that the eye is purely passive. Instead, he considered the eye to be active, sending out beams that contact the “outer fire” and then return to the seer. This essential activity of the act of seeing changes the way we should read many passages in Plato based on metaphors of vision, in order to bring forward the fundamental activity (...) of the soul in knowing. Understood in this way, Plato’s words eidos and idea may refer not only to self-subsistent, transcendent “forms” but also to the active process of “seeing” that connects us with them. (shrink)

The contribution focuses on the question of the proper relationship between law and morality or secular law and natural law as its pre-positive foundation. The reflection on this fundamental question of legal ethics will be accompanied by an attempt to determine the possible relationship between theological ethics and secular law. The starting point for the pursuit of these questions are the reflections of St. Augustine (354 – 430) on the relationship between faith in God and the obligation of law, which (...) he develops in the context of his great work De civitate Dei and a theology of history in its wake. More precisely, it is the juxtaposition of two kingdoms or citizenships through which the Latin church father lays the foundation for many further conceptualizations between law and ethics: He distinguishes between the ideal state of God (civitas Dei) on the one hand, whose citizens strive to restore the original state of love in the bond with God, and the factually existing earthly state (civitas terrena) on the other hand, whose goal is to guarantee minimal conditions of human life in a state of justice (status iustitiae). The preceding considerations on the relationship between law and morality in the horizon of theological ethics can then be summarized in a concise way by the example of Christian marriage theology. Christian marriage, as a legal institution and sacrament in equal measure, reflects precisely this tension between law and morality. (shrink)

Examines Nietzsche's anti‐essentialism in the context of the metaphysics of the will to power, which posits an ontology of interactive and causally efficacious quanta of force characterized exclusively by relational properties. It is argued that this ontological model is marred by a fundamental incoherence. The concluding remarks touch upon the problem of relativism of truth and self‐reference. An attempt is made to situate the metaphysics of the will in the context of Nietzsche's whole philosophy.

Preliminary draft of November 2010—please do not circulate without permission.

Through a radical reinterpretation of classical philosophy as an organizational psychology, The Moral Psychology of St. Thomas: An Introduction to Ragamuffin Ethics just as radically reinterprets St. Thomas Aquinas's moral teaching to be a behavioristic psychology chiefly designed to synthesize right reason and right pleasure to help a person excel at living life as a whole. In the process of so doing, this work demonstrates how the skill of prudential living is a necessary condition for becoming a grand master of (...) leadership in any and every profession. (shrink)

The isolation of the Netherlands as the only country in which voluntary euthanasia is legal is about to end. In October 2001 the Belgian Senate voted by almost a 2:1 margin to allow doctors to act on a patient's request for assistance in dying. The legislation is expected to pass the lower house shortly. That the Netherlands' closest neighbor is likely to be the next country to take this step should provide food for thought among those who have denounced voluntary (...) euthanasia in the Netherlands as rife with abuses. If that were really the case, why would the country that is better placed than all others to know what goes on in the Netherlands – not only because of its geographical proximity, but because most of its people are Dutch-speaking – be ready to copy the Dutch model? (shrink)

This dissertation is meant to interpret Whitehead's basic unit of ontology in energetic terms. The actual entity is to be understood as an oscillating unit of existence that is nothing other than its oscillatory activity. There is nothing substantial underlying it: it is essentially a vibrating entity that has nothing more primary appended to it. Through such vibratory activity, it realizes itself out of its own conative drive and its deeply interrelated adventures with other entities and objects. Energizing actuality makes (...) such entities objectively stubborn, subjectively agentive, massively interrelated to others, and entirely aesthetic in constitution. There are two main ways to analyze this metaphysical energy. This is mirrored by Whitehead's twofold analysis of actuality from the genetic and coordinate perspectives, which itself is an adaptation of James's Pragmatic analysis of experience. The quantum oscillation model of atomicity perfectly matches Whitehead's genetic analysis, and thus the phases of actuality, the poles of existence, and the formation of an atomic unit, are all developed in oscillatory terms. Conversely there is the coordinate analysis, where issues of ontological rhythmicity, identity via agentive repetition, unification via cyclical patternings, and coeval concrescence among entities will be dealt with according to the principles of wave transmission. Each analysis develops important characteristics of actuality, but neither analysis on its own can capture the totality of what actuality is. For such a generic interpretation to occur, unification between the genetic and the coordinate analyses must take place. The energy thesis accomplishes this by adopting the language of energy fields. The actual entity is a field of energy that is both the center of agentive activity that defines the field, and the center of attention of other entities. Whitehead calls this ontologically agentive attention 'concern,' a term that allows Whitehead to be closely compared to Heidegger, whose existential analysis of Dasein will be used to further develop the character of actuality. The aesthetic core of Whiteheadian ontology will be developed by comparing it to Dewey's aesthetic theory of consummatory experience. Together, a fully concerned and consummatory actual entity will stand as the most generic rendering of actuality. (shrink)