Chronic stroke survivors with severe contralesional arm paresis face numerous challenges to performing activities of daily living, which largely rely on the use of the less-affected ipsilesional arm. While use of the ipsilesional arm is often encouraged as a compensatory strategy in rehabilitation, substantial evidence indicates that motor control deficits in this arm can be functionally limiting, suggesting a role for remediation of this arm. Previous research has indicated that the nature of ipsilesional motor control deficits vary with hemisphere of (...) damage and with the severity of contralesional paresis. Thus, in order to design rehabilitation that accounts for these deficits in promoting function, it is critical to understand the relative contributions of both ipsilesional and contralesional arm motor deficits to functional independence in stroke survivors with severe contralesional paresis. We now examine motor deficits in each arm of severely paretic chronic stroke survivors with unilateral damage to determine whether hemisphere-dependent deficits are correlated with functional independence. Clinical evaluation of contralesional, paretic arm impairment was conducted with the upper extremity portion of the Fugl-Meyer assessment. Ipsilesional arm motor performance was evaluated using the Jebsen-Taylor Hand Function Test, grip strength, and ipsilesional high-resolution kinematic analysis during a visually targeted reaching task. Functional independence was measured with the Barthel Index. Functional independence was better correlated with ipsilesional than contralesional arm motor performance in the left hemisphere damage group [JTHFT: [r = −0.73, p = 0.017]; grip strength: [r = 0.64, p = 0.047]], and by contralesional arm impairment in the right hemisphere damage group [UEFM: [r = 0.66, p = 0.040]]. Ipsilesional arm kinematics were correlated with functional independence in the left hemisphere damage group only. Examination of hemisphere-dependent motor correlates of functional independence showed that ipsilesional arm deficits were important in determining functional outcomes in individuals with left hemisphere damage only, suggesting that functional independence in right hemisphere damaged participants was affected by other factors. (shrink)

The ability to appropriately sequence a list of discrete items is an important facet in performing routine cognitive tasks and may play a significant role in the acquisition of early communication skills. Though the serial learning abilities of some species, such as chimpanzees and rhesus macaques are well documented, there is virtually no information on the extent of these skills with gorillas. In this study, a young female western lowland gorilla has demonstrated the ability to learn a list of seven (...) Arabic numerals by selecting them on a monitor behind an infrared touchframe. As list length increased, Rollie required fewer trials to reach the criterion, suggesting an acquisition of skills associated with serial learning. Rollie was most likely to correctly select the first item in the sequence and least likely to select the penultimate item in the sequence. Her performance suggests serial learning abilities in the range of other non-verbal species and provides preliminary evidence that supports the assertion that gorillas can succeed at this form of serial learning task. (shrink)

InhaltStichworte zur Dialektik der Freiheit oder Durchaus untaugliche Ausfuhrungen zur Philosophie Milan PruchasJ. Kosta, Das interdisziplinare Forschungsprojekt des Prager Fruhlings von 1968J. Kotik, Der LandvermesserKonzepte der DialektikM. Theunissen, Dialektik der Endlichkeit - Hegel von Heraklit bis DerridaC. Iber, Begriff und Kategorien negativer Dialektik bei AdornoA. Arndt, Figuren der Endlichkeit - Zur Dialektik nach KantB. Scholze, Die dialektische Aufwertung der Rhetorik: Zu Adornos Theorie der DarstellungMotive der Philosophie Hegels und ihre WirkungM. Sobotka, Hegels Spruch: Gott ist totM. Rolli, Zum Vergangenheitscharakter der (...) Hegelschen AsthetikA. Jubara, Vom Reich des Antichristen zum Homogenen Weltstaat. Das "Ende der Geschichte" bei Vladimir Solov'ev und Alexandre KojeveDie Differenz denkenC. Friedrich, Differenz und Wiederholung in der Sprache. Fur eine Konzeption der Sprache ohne TelosR. Krause, Verkehrte Welt - Dialektisch denken mit DeleuzeD. Benseler, Den Krieg finden. Bemerkungen zu Lyotards skeptischer Konzeption der PraxisMilan Prucha - Auswahlbibliographie. (shrink)

A defence of the idea that there are sui generis duties of love: duties, that is, that we owe to people in virtue of standing in loving relationships with them. I contrast this non‐reductionist position with the widespread reductionist view that our duties to those we love all derive from more generic moral principles. The paper mounts a cumulative argument in favour of the non‐reductionist position, adducing a variety of considerations that together speak strongly in favour of adopting it. The (...) concluding section connects this debate with larger issues in moral theory concerning the general idea of obligation. (shrink)

Karl R. Popper is an important philosopher of science of 20th Century and is known in this field through his theory of falsification. But the critical theory of rationality is indeed his basic theory and it can be seen in his whole idea. Critique of historicism also contains his views on the social and political philosophy in a systematic context in relation to them. Popper embodied his views about the historicism through human-centered thoughts of philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Marx (...) and Hegel who are effective system builders and he raised a number of criticism against the holistic structures. We discuss in this article Popper's critique of historicism, especially his critics related with Plato, Aristotle, Hegel and Marx. (shrink)

The World Bank is committed to “work[ing] with countries to improve the health, nutrition and population outcomes of the world's poor, and to protect[ing] the population from the impoverishing effects of illness, malnutrition and high fertility”.1 Ethical issues arise in the interpretation of these objectives and in helping countries formulate strategies and policies. It is these ethical issues—which are often not acknowledged by commentators—that are the subject of this paper. It asks why there should be a focus on the poor, (...) and explores the link between improving the health of the poor, and reducing health inequalities between the poor and better-off. It discusses difficult ethical issues at both the global level and the country level. (shrink)

We argue that thoughts are structures of concepts, and that concepts should be individuated by their origins, rather than in terms of their semantic or epistemic properties. Many features of cognition turn on the vehicles of content, thoughts, rather than on the nature of the contents they express. Originalism makes concepts available to explain, with no threat of circularity, puzzling cases concerning thought. In this paper, we mention Hesperus/Phosphorus puzzles, the Evans-Perry example of the ship seen through different windows, and (...) Mates cases, and we believe that there are many additional applications. (shrink)

In the ancient Arabic dictionaries, the root “ḍ-r-r” has three main meanings: “to harm”, “to gather” and “strength”. In the course of history, many words have been derived from these root meanings and have acquired various meanings. In the present article, the words derived from the root “ḍ-r-r” are semantically analyzed. First, the etymological origins of the root as well as its compounds and their meanings in early Arabic dictionaries are analyzed. In this context, it was aimed to determine the (...) literal and figurative meanings they acquired over time. In doing so, Arabic poetry of the Jahiliyyah period and hadiths were also utilized. Afterwards, in order to determine the semantic meaning pattern of the root “ḍ-r-r” and its compounds, words containing antonymous and proximate meaning relations with this root were included and their semantic relations were compared. While words have “essential meanings” that they always carry and do not lose no matter which system they enter, there are also “relative meanings” that do not originate from the root of words but arise from the system of relations they are in. For this reason, in the next stage, it was aimed to determine the relative meanings of the related words in the Qur’anic context by including the uses of the root “ḍ-r-r” and its derivatives in the Qur’an. Finally, various uses of words that have a semantically antonymous or proximate relationship with the root “ḍ-r-r” and its de-rivatives in the Qur’an were presented and their semantic pattern was tried to be determined. (shrink)

Since the publication of Edmund Gettier's challenge to the traditional epistemological doctrine of knowledge as justified true belief, Roberts and Wood claim that epistemologists lapsed into despondency and are currently open to novel approaches. One such approach is virtue epistemology, which can be divided into virtues as proper functions or epistemic character traits. The authors propose a notion of regulative epistemology, as opposed to a strict analytic epistemology, based on intellectual virtues that function not as rules or even as skills (...) but as habits of the heart. To that end, they divide the task of clarifying and expounding their notion in the book's two parts.In the first part, Roberts and Wood examine various components that constitute their notion of regulative epistemology. The first are the epistemic goods or goals that drive the epistemic process. What is needed, claim Roberts and Wood, is an enriched notion of these goods rather than the restricted notion of justified true belief. Epistemic agents are more than calculating devices in that …. (shrink)

As everyone knows, since the end of the Second World War there has been a sensational revival of interest in the non-Christian religions particularly in the United States and in this country. The revival has taken two forms, the one popular, the other academic. The first of these has turned almost exclusively to Hindu and Buddhist mysticism and can be seen as an energetic reaction against the dogmatic and until very recently rigid structure of institutionalised Christianity and a search for (...) a lived experience of the freedom of the spirit which is held to be the true content of mysticism, obscured in Christianity by the basic dogma of a transcendent God, the ‘wholly Other’ of Rudolf Otto and his numerous followers, but wholly untrammelled by any such concept in the higher reaches of Vedanta and Buddhism, particularly in its Zen manifestation. On the academic side the picture is less clear. There is, of course, the claim that the study of religion, like any other academic study, must be subjected to and controlled by the same principles of ‘scientific’ objectivity to which the other ‘arts’ subjects have been subjected, to their own undoing. But even here there would seem to be a bias in favour of the religions of India and the Far East as against Islam, largely, one supposes, in response to popular demand. (shrink)

‘Mysticism means to isolate the eternal from the originated.’ This is not my definition of the word ‘mysticism’ but that of the founder of the ‘orthodox’ school of Muslim mysticism, Al-Junayd of Baghdad who flourished in the ninth century a.d . In actual fact it is not a definition of mysticism at all but of the Arabic word tawḥīd which means primarily ‘the affirmation of unity’; and that surely is an essential ingredient of any form of mysticism: it is the (...) affirmation through personal experience of unity either absolutely or in some qualified sense. (shrink)

Husserls Analyse der Wahrnehmung und Heideggers Zeittheorie sind beide in ihrem Theorieaufbau auf die Gegenständlichkeit der Gegenstände – oder auf den Gegenstandsbezug der Erfahrung und seine wesensmäßige Konstitution – fixiert. Hierin spiegelt sich, bei Heidegger explizit, Kantisches Erbe. Diese phänomenologische, transzendentalphilosophische Relevanz des Gegenstands verweist im Kern auf Intentionalität – und damit auf eine objektbezogene Selbstüberschreitungsfigur der Subjektivität. Ganz anders bestimmt Latour den Stellenwert der Dinge im Kollektiv, wenn er ihnen eine Handlungsmacht zuschreibt, die den traditionellen Gegensatz zwischen Handlungssubjekten und (...) Objektbehandlung einklammert. Der folgende Beitrag kreist den kritischen Punkt ein, der in der Theoriebildung zur Verzweigung phänomenologischer und ANTistischer Ansätze führt. Während sich die Phänomenologie im Zuge einer begrifflichen Rekonstruktion der Erfahrung von Gegenständen konsolidiert, ist die ANT auf die Beschreibung von Handlungsstrukturen ausgerichtet, die sich aus Aktanten aller Art zusammensetzen. Abschließend stellt sich die Frage, ob nicht die kollektivistische Soziologie Latours von dem methodischen Solipsismus der Phänomenologie lernen kann, dass es eine konstruktive Dimension und Machtfülle der deskriptiven Arbeit gibt, die nicht einfach den Akteuren überhaupt, sondern vor allem der Analytikerin überlassen ist? Husserl's analysis of perception and Heidegger's theory of time are both fixated on the objectivity of objects - or the objectrelation of experience and its essential constitution. This reflects - and in the case of Heidegger quite explicitly - Kantian heritage. This phenomenological, transcendental relevance of the object essentially refers to intentionality - and thus an object-related figure of self-transcending subjectivity. Quite differently, Latour determines the status of things in the collective, ascribing to them an agency that brackets the traditional opposition between acting subjects and passive objects. The contribution encircles precisely that critical point which leads to the separation of phenomenological and ANTistical approaches. While phenomenology grounds itself by reconstructing the experience of objects, ANT focuses on the description of the structures of action, which are composed of actants of all kinds. Finally, the question arises whether Latour's collectivist sociology can learn from phenomenology's methodological solipsism that there is a constructive dimension and plenitude of power in the work of description that is not just left to actors in general, but above all to the analyst herself? (shrink)

R. S. Peters on Education and Ethics reissues seven titles from Peters' life's work. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the books are concerned with the philosophy of education and ethics. Topics include moral education and learning, authority and responsibility, psychology and ethical development and ideas on motivation amongst others. The books discuss more traditional theories and philosophical thinkers as well as exploring later ideas in a way which makes the subjects they discuss still relevant today.

R.G. Collingwood defined historical knowledge as essentially ‘scientific’, and saw the historian's task as the ‘re-enactment of past thoughts’. The author argues the need to go beyond Collingwood, first by demonstrating the authenticity of available evidence, and secondly, using Namier as an example, by considering methodology as well as epistemology, and the need to relate past thoughts to their present context. The ‘law of the consumption of time’ encourages historians to focus on landmark events, theories and generalisations, thus breaking from (...) Collingwood's emphasis on fidelity to past ideas and interpreting the past from the concepts of the present. This conflict can only be reconciled by the study of historiography. (shrink)

R.G. Collingwood defined historical knowledge as essentially ‘scientific’, and saw the historian's task as the ‘re-enactment of past thoughts’. The author argues the need to go beyond Collingwood, first by demonstrating the authenticity of available evidence, and secondly, using Namier as an example, by considering methodology as well as epistemology, and the need to relate past thoughts to their present context. The ‘law of the consumption of time’ encourages historians to focus on landmark events, theories and generalisations, thus breaking from (...) Collingwood's emphasis on fidelity to past ideas and interpreting the past from the concepts of the present. This conflict can only be reconciled by the study of historiography. (shrink)

Architect-scientist R. Buckminster Fuller talks about the discovery of the eternal pattern that is operative in the universe.

La psicología hoy en día es una ciencia indiscutible, pero no siempre fue así. Filósofos y científicos del pasado, consideraron que el estudio de la subjetividad del hombre no era ciencia; en ese marco aparece la figura del filósofo Wilhelm Dilthey. Desde la generalización de las ideas de Auguste Comte, el argumento de los defensores de la verdad axiomática, determinista y positivista fue que, el estudio de la subjetividad humana es imposible y no confiable, ya que no es verificable y (...) mucho menos medible. Dilthey va más allá de Schleiermacher, y propone una Hermenéutica capaza de interpretar las conductas humanas. (shrink)

A longish (12 page) discussion of Richard Sorabji's excellent book, with a further discussion of what it means for a theory of emotions to be a cognitive theory.

In late January of 1987, the State Treasurer of Pennsylvania, R. Budd Dwyer, shot himself to death in front of a dozen reporters and camera crews during a news conference in his office. Much was subsequently made in the popular press, and within the profession, about the difficult ethical decision television journalists were faced with in determining how much of the very graphic suicide tape to air. A review of the literature in this area suggests, however, that journalists have established (...) a set of relatively detailed conventions for dealing with events involving graphic depictions of death. Analysis of the Dwyer tape and interviews conducted with Pennsylvania television news directors show that eighteen of the twenty stations in the state that carry news used basically the same type and amount of footage in their evening newscasts. One decided to use no tape. One showed the moment of death. When the story broke around noon, two additional stations showed the moment of suicide, but they revised their story for the evening program. In addition, the wide majority of news directors interviewed said they had little difficulty in deciding how to edit the tape. The processing of the Dwyer story suggests that any ethical dilemmas faced by journalists during decision making were put aside for later consideration. The material was edited quickly and according to similar patterns, or conventions, around the state. The study suggests greater attention be given to the definition and interaction of personal professional values, in the ethical sense, and norms of news processing, in the sociological sense. (shrink)