Deep brain stimulation (DBS) to different sites allows interfering with dysfunctional network function implicated in major depression. Because a prominent clinical feature of depression is anhedonia--the inability to experience pleasure from previously pleasurable activities--and because there is clear evidence of dysfunctions of the reward system in depression, DBS to the nucleus accumbens might offer a new possibility to target depressive symptomatology in otherwise treatment-resistant depression. Three patients suffering from extremely resistant forms of depression, who did not respond to pharmacotherapy, psychotherapy, (...) and electroconvulsive therapy, were implanted with bilateral DBS electrodes in the nucleus accumbens. Stimulation parameters were modified in a double-blind manner, and clinical ratings were assessed at each modification. Additionally, brain metabolism was assessed 1 week before and 1 week after stimulation onset. Clinical ratings improved in all three patients when the stimulator was on, and worsened in all three patients when the stimulator was turned off. Effects were observable immediately, and no side effects occurred in any of the patients. Using FDG-PET, significant changes in brain metabolism as a function of the stimulation in fronto-striatal networks were observed. No unwanted effects of DBS other than those directly related to the surgical procedure (eg pain at sites of implantation) were observed. Dysfunctions of the reward system--in which the nucleus accumbens is a key structure--are implicated in the neurobiology of major depression and might be responsible for impaired reward processing, as evidenced by the symptom of anhedonia. These preliminary findings suggest that DBS to the nucleus accumbens might be a hypothesis-guided approach for refractory major depression. (shrink)

Transcranial magnetic stimulation is a relatively non-invasive technique to interfere with the function of small cortical areas through currents induced by alternating magnetic fields emanating from a handheld coil placed directly above the targeted area. This technique has clear effects on a whole range of measures of brain function and has become an important research tool in neuropsychiatry. More recently, TMS has been studied in psychiatry mainly to assess its putative therapeutic effects in the treatment of refractory major depression. Most (...) studies indicate that both low-frequency TMS and higher frequency repetitive TMS may have some antidepressant properties. This is most interesting and opens a whole new avenue of low invasive techniques to stimulate the brain in major depression. However, definite therapeutic effects of clinical significance still remain to be demonstrated. (shrink)

_Taking Picture Books Seriously: What can we learn about philosophy through children's books?_ This warm and charming volume casts a spell on adult readers as it unveils the surprisingly profound philosophical wisdom contained in children's picture books, from Dr Seuss's _Sneetches_ to William Steig's _Shrek!_. With a light touch and good humor, Wartenberg discusses the philosophical ideas in these classic stories, and provides parents with a practical starting point for discussing philosophical issues with their children. Accessible and multi-layered, it answers (...) questions like, Is it okay for adults to deceive kids? What's the difference between saying the Mona Lisa is a great painting and vanilla is your favorite flavor? Each chapter includes illustrations commissioned especially for this book. (shrink)

In her essay “The Idea of Perfection,” Iris Murdoch argues that sustained attention directed towards another can result in a person’s moral improvement by getting them to have a more accurate view of the other. In this essay, I argue that the award-winning film My Octopus Teacher illustrates Murdoch’s view and corrects some of its shortcomings. It illustrates Murdoch’s claim by showing how one of the filmmaker’s sustained attention directed at an octopus results not only in an alternation in the (...) filmmaker’s view of the cephalopod but also transforms his life by making him more open to others. Because the central relationship in the film is one between a human being and a cephalopod, the film also corrects the anthropocentric bias in Murdoch’s account by showing that a human being can have a transformative relationship with a creature as alien appearing as an octopus. (shrink)

I examine the thesis that Otto Neurath anticipated the programme of naturalised epistemology already at the time of the Vienna Circle and consider the relation between Neurath's proposals and those of two contemporary theorists whose research programmes he would thus have broadly anticipated. The thesis is confirmed by reference to Neurath's own writings. The connection between Neurath's programme and the programmes of his two successors considered here, however, is found to be highly indirect in one case and nonexistent in the (...) other — despite their undeniable overlap. (shrink)

The Image of the Unseen God develops a novel understanding of God and God's action compatible with the teachings of Jesus, the Christian tradition, and contemporary science.

Thoughtful Images: Philosophy Illustrated is the first systematic investigation of how artists throughout the ages have illustrated philosophical texts, ideas, concepts, and theories. The book begins by developing a theory of visual illustrations of philosophical texts and undermining what the author calls "the denigration of illustration." The book then takes a more historical approach, beginning in Ancient Greece and Rome and proceeding through Medieval illuminations and printed broadsides to the frontispieces of philosophical texts. Throughout, attention is paid to how technological (...) developments enable different means for illustrating philosophy. (shrink)

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Thomas E. Hill, Jr.; Servility and Self-Respect, The Monist, Volume 57, Issue 1, 1 January 1973, Pages 87–104, https://doi.org/10.5840/monist197357135.

James Fitzjames Stephen is remembered as a judge, legal historian, and the author of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, a reply to J. S. Mill's late works. He is less well remembered for his journalism, though it earned him a reputation among his contemporaries as one of the most trenchant writers on topics ranging across the social, religious, political, moral, and philosophical questions debated in his time. It was largely in his journalistic writing that Stephen set forth his views on these questions. (...) Despite such a reputation, however, only a small proportion of this writing was collected during his lifetime, and very little has been republished since his death.Selected Writings of James Fitzjames Stephen: On Society, Religion, and Government includes thirty-five essays expressing Stephen's views on the questions of his day, which have not lost their interest in ours. He wrote at a time when much of the finest writing in English was published in periodicals, often anonymously. The essays in this volume are drawn mostly from Stephen's unsigned contributions to the Saturday Review, with additions, both signed and unsigned, from other periodicals, extending from the 1850s to the 1880s. (shrink)

In Justice, Care, and Value Thomas Randall advances the radical potential of care ethics as a distinct (and preferable) theory of distributive justice. Advancing the care ethical literature this book defends a vision of society that can best enable such relations to flourish. Specifically, Randall uses breakthrough arguments to propose a values-driven theory of care ethics that identifies good caring relations through classifying the values of care. He argues that such a theory gives us unique and meaningful solutions to (...) contemporary questions and encourages us to think about distributive justice across personal, political, global, and intergenerational domains. Through this the book makes significant strides to engage care ethics with the broader moral and political philosophy literature. Topical and interdisciplinary, Randall demonstrates that care ethics has the conceptual resources to ground distributive theories of socialism, territorial and natural resource rights, obligations to future generations, and historic redress. The book will be of great interest for academics, researchers, and students in feminist philosophy, but also in liberalism, global and intergenerational theories of justice, and political economy. (shrink)

It is a violation of legitimate academic freedom to attempt to link Catholicism to a particular school of economic thought and shut down all further debate. Whether the realm of human choice, which economics describes, is subject to an array of cause-and-effect relationships is obviously a matter for human reason to determine. From there, reason can then investigate these relationships. Although economic policy has a moral dimension, economics as a positive scienceconsists merely of an edifice of cause-and-effect relationships, and to (...) that extent is as autonomous as the purely descriptive sides of all other sciences. (shrink)

There are many ways of writing about the moral life, but at first sight few seem more formal and apparently remote from its urgent, anguishing problems than ...

Since ancient times the practices and ethics of bankers and banking in general have undergone a great deal of criticism. While lending is motivated by profit, and while households are not explicitly coerced into borrowing money, the justice of a system which exploits workers and at the same time encourages them to borrow money in order to maintain a certain standard of living can be viewed as sometimes unfair and perhaps immoral. The value of goods, according to St. Thomas (...) Aquinas and Karl Marx, should mostly reflect the value of labor embodied in them, and for that reason, labor should be compensated fully for its work. For these reasons, Aquinas and Marxian economists offer somewhat similar and at the same time different views on both the labor theory of value as well as on the morality of certain banking practices. If credit and the banking system also bring about crisis and the greater concentration and centralization of capital, then the morality of these outcomes also needs to be examined. (shrink)

Schmitt has equivocated about the underlying psychology of sociosexuality, but from the data presented in the target article, it would appear that he has drawn out the underlying cognitive architecture. In this commentary, I describe this architecture and discuss two emerging hypotheses about heterosexual and homosexual male sociosexuality.

In this paper we propose a formal theory of partitions (ways of dividing up or sorting or mapping reality) and we show how the theory can be applied in the geospatial domain. We characterize partitions at two levels: as systems of cells (theory A), and in terms of their projective relation to reality (theory B). We lay down conditions of well-formedness for partitions and we define what it means for partitions to project truly onto reality. We continue by classifying well-formed (...) partitions along three axes: (a) degree of correspondence between partition cells and objects in reality; (b) degree to which a partition represents the mereological structure of the domain it is projected onto; and (c) degree of completeness and exhaustiveness with which a partition represents reality. This classification is used to characterize three types of partitions that play an important role in spatial information science: cadastral partitions, categorical coverages, and the partitions involved in folk categorizations of the geospatial domain. (shrink)

The tendency to attribute foundationalist ambitions to the Vienna Circle has long obscured our view of its attempted revolution in philosophy. The present paper makes the case for a consistently epistemologically anti-foundationalist interpretation of all three of the Circle's main protagonists: Schlick, Carnap, and Neurath. Corresponding to the intellectual fault lines within the Circle, two ways of going about the radical reorientation of the pursuit of philosophy will then be distinguished and the contemporary potential of Carnap's and Neurath's project explored.

Logical Empiricism is commonly regarded as uninterested in, if not hostile to sociological investigations of science. This paper reconstructs the views of Otto Neurath and Philipp Frank on the legitimacy and relevance of sociological investigations of theory choice. It is argued that while there obtains a surprising degree of convergence between their programmatic pronouncements and the Strong Programme, the two types of project nevertheless remain distinct. The key to this differences lies in the different assessment of a supposed dilemma facing (...) post-Mertonian sociologists of science. (shrink)

Neurath's proposal for the form of protocol statements explicates the multiple embedding of a singular sentence as specifying different conditions for the acceptance of such a sentence as a bona fide scientific datum. Before theories are accepted or rejected in the light of such evidence, however, a further condition must be met which Neurath did not formalize. The different conditions are discussed and shown to constitute a naturalistic theory of scientific data and a pragmatic theory of theory acceptance.

Re-analysis of the data provided in the target article reveals a lack of evidence for a strong, universal relationship between parasite stress and the variables relating to sociality. Furthermore, even if associations between these variables do exist, the analyses presented here do not provide evidence for Fincher & Thornhill's (F&T's) proposed causal mechanism.

This essay, responding to recent work of David Cummiskey and Barcia Baron, defends the thesis that imperfect duty of beneficence in Kant's The Metaphysics of Morals is a rather minimal, indeterminate requirement but must be supplemented by judgement guided by the values expressed in Kant's formulas of the Categorical Imperative. So understood, Kant's ethics is neither as permissive nor as inflexibly demanding as various commentators have thought. Although Kant does not acknowledge supererogation as a moral category, arguably his position implies (...) that some acts are meritorious and more than required. (shrink)

In The Ethics of Care, Virginia Held explores what values of care might fulfil normative criteria for evaluating the moral worth of relations. Held identifies seven potential values: attentiveness, empathy, mutual concern, sensitivity, responsiveness, taking responsibility, and trustworthiness. Though Held’s work is helpful as a starting point for conceptualizing some normative criteria, two problems need addressing. First, Held does not provide sufficient justification for why these potential values ought to be considered genuine values in the care ethical framework. Second, Held (...) overlooks two other potential values cited in the care literature: competence and respect. This paper builds upon Held’s work to offer a more coherent understanding of the values of care. It does so by scrutinizing and conceptually organizing the above nine potential values. Of these nine, only four are considered genuine values: attentiveness, mutual concern, responsiveness, and trustworthiness. It is concluded that good caring relations are those that exemplify the four values of care in their deliverance of caring practices. (shrink)