Introduction: Motor evoked potentials (MEPs) to transcranial magnetic stimulation are known to be susceptible to several sources of variability. However, conflicting evidences on individual characteristics in relatively small sample sizes have been reported. We investigated the effect of age, height, and sex on MEPs of the motor cortex and spinal roots in a large cohort. Methods: A total of 587 subjects clinically and neuroradiologically intact were included. MEPs were recorded during mild tonic contraction through a circular coil applied over the (...) “hot spot” of the first dorsal interosseous and tibialis anterior muscles, bilaterally. Central motor conduction time (CMCT) was estimated as the difference between MEP cortical latency and the peripheral motor conduction time by cervical or lumbar magnetic stimulation. Peak-to-peak MEP amplitude to cortical stimulation and right-to-left difference of each parameter were also measured. Results: After Bonferroni correction, general linear (multiple) regression analysis showed that both MEP cortical latency and peripheral motor conduction time at four limbs positively correlated with age and height. At lower limbs, an independent effect of sex on the same measures was also observed (with females showing smaller values than males). CMCT correlated with both age (negatively) and height (positively) when analyzed by a single regression; however, with a multiple regression analysis this significance disappeared, due to the correction for the multicollinearity within the dataset. Conclusions: Physical individual features need to be considered for a more accurate and meaningful MEPs interpretation. Both in clinical practice and in research setting, patients and controls should be matched for age, height, and sex. (shrink)

Starting from the 13th century, the question of defining theology as a science gained prominence within a new epistemological reflection on the discipline. It has been hypothesized that the availability of new translations of Aristotelian works significantly contributed to the growing interest among theologians in the theory of science. One of the most prominent intellectuals who recognized the necessity of defining theology as a science and outlining its boundaries and investigative methods in relation to other disciplines, was Albert the Great (...) (d. 1280). Numerous studies have been dedicated to exploring Albert’s treatment of this subject since the 1930s. However, little to no attention has been given to the role played by Arabic sources, particularly the works of Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā, d. 1037), the philosopher and polymath of Persian origin, in shaping Albert’s own definition of theology as a science. This contribution concentrates on the analysis of a section of the Summa Theologiae (Treatise I, quaestio V, chapter 3), with particular emphasis on the ‘translation’ of the logical-argumentative method from its domain of application in scientific and philosophical research to the branch of theology dedicated to safeguarding Christian doctrine against the criticisms and the attacks of heretics. The aim is to analyze how Albert accomplished this translation of the method of inquiry by drawing parallels between the defence of the principles of philosophical inquiry, which is a primary concern of metaphysics, and the defence of the articles of faith in theology. It is by reconciling sources from both the Christian and the Arabo-Islamic traditions that Albert claims the use of a form of dialectic argumentation within theology. (shrink)

This paper discusses Freud’s notion of subject is his writings concerning culture (mainly Civilisation and its discontents ) as a means of understanding contemporary problems concerning subjectivity. But given that our own society differs widely from Freud’s in many relevant respects, there arises the question of which elements of his theory retain their pertinence and which should be adapted or rejected. The answer to this question lies in a careful genetic reconstruction of Freud’s conception of the conflict between subjectivity and (...) culture so as to be contrasted with our own present situation. (shrink)

In these seven letters, practising psychiatrist Vincenzo Di Nicola offers wisdom to a young therapist from 25 years of experience conducting relational therapy. Ranging from what to read and how to begin therapy, the letters cover therapeutic temperaments and technique, how to create a relational dialogue, the myths of individual psychology and the need for relational psychology, the evolution of therapy in the past century and when therapy is over-all the while looking forward to the relational practices of the (...) coming community. This book complements Di Nicola's model of working with families presented in A Stranger in the Family: Culture, Families, and Therapy (New York and London: W.W. Norton). -/- Awarded the prestigious Prix Camille-Laurin of the Association des médecins psychiatres du Québec - the Camille Laurin Prize of the Quebec Psychiatric Association. -/- From the Foreword: -/- "It's a beautiful idea, this project of turning to young people... The relational dialogue offers an important new direction of study to discover the deep basis of the therapeutic alliance, in order to understand the still too-little known phenomenon of 'change'... This is what you have brought together in your book: the search for the whole regarding the person and, at the same time, the network of primary affective relationships that we call the family and of social relationships ..." --from the Foreword by Maurizio Andolfi, M.D. Director of the Academy of Family Psychotherapy Professor of Psychology, University of Rome -/- Advance Review: -/- "Di Nicola is a true master of constructive inquiry, synthesis, and brilliant creativity. Memorable aphorisms leap from every page of this very wise, thoughtful, and beautifully written book in which the healing process of discovering and making meaning to help reorder the lives of troubled persons is clarified. I highly recommend this book for all who are or would be therapists!" --Armando Favazza, M.D., M.P.H. Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry University of Missouri-Columbia Author of Bodies Under Siege. (shrink)

This interdisciplinary volume brings together expert researchers coming from primatology, anthropology, ethology, philosophy of cognitive sciences, neurophysiology, mathematics and psychology to discuss both the foundations of non-human primate and human social cognition as well as the means there currently exist to study the various facets of social cognition. The first part focusses on various aspects of social cognition across primates, from the relationship between food and social behaviour to the connection with empathy and communication, offering a multitude of innovative approaches (...) that range from field-studies to philosophy. The second part details the various epistemic and methodological means there exist to study social cognition, in particular how to ascertain the proximal and ultimate mechanisms of social cognition through experimental, modelling and field studies. In the final part, the mechanisms of cultural transmission in primate and human societies are investigated, and special attention is given to how the evolution of cognitive capacities underlie primates’ abilities to use and manufacture tools, and how this in turn influences their social ecology. A must-read for both, young scholars as well as established researchers! (shrink)

The thesis deals with a section of the major philosophical summa by Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā, d. 1037), namely the Book of the Healing (Kitāb al-Šifāʾ). The summa is structured into four parts, devoted to Logic, Natural Philosophy, Mathematics and Metaphysics; the section at stake is Avicenna’s reworking of Porphyry’s Isagoge (Kitāb al-Madḫal, i.e. “Book of the Introduction”) opening the section of Logic of the Šifāʾ. The thesis is articulated into three main parts, namely (i) an edition of the Arabic text (...) of Avicenna’s Madḫal, (ii) an English translation and (iii) a systematic commentary; these three main parts are preceded by an Introduction (0) divided into two halves: (0a) a General Introduction focused on the doctrinal major innovations of the work and (0b) an Introduction to the Edition of the text, which offers a first comprehensive study of its direct and early indirect tradition and explains the criteria of the edition. (i) The only previous edition of Avicenna’s Madḫal was the one printed in Cairo in 1952 (then reprinted in Tehran in 1983 and in Beirut in 1993), based on ten manuscripts. The huge manuscript tradition of Avicenna’s Madḫal – and, more in general, of Avicenna’s Book of the Healing – is still a matter of investigation. According to the provisional results of the bibliographical research conducted in the present work, it can be estimated that the manuscript tradition of the Madḫal amounts to at least 119 certain witnesses and 14 possible additional witnesses (as explained in the Introduction to the edition, 0b). The text of the Cairo edition, far from being representative of the whole textual tradition, was reconstructed on the basis of ten manuscripts that were not selected on the basis of philological criteria and whose reciprocal stemmatic relations were not clear. Although a critical edition based on all the 119 certain witnesses of the work exceeds the scope of the present work, the edition provided in the thesis takes into account a larger number of manuscripts than the Cairo edition did and, most importantly, selects them by means of a preliminary collation made on portions of the text. The purpose of this preliminary collation is making the selection of the manuscripts employed less arbitrary and providing a reconstruction of their stemmatic relations (in the Introduction, 0b). Overall, 32 manuscripts among the 68 inspected were employed in the edition here proposed, 21 of which were systematically collated and 11 were eliminated as codices descripti. The present edition also assumes as a witness the twelfth-century Latin translation of the work, which is, at the present moment, among the earliest extant witnesses of the text. Hopefully, this editorial work allowed us to improve the text of the Cairo edition in a number of points that are crucial to the correct understanding of Avicenna’s argumentation. (ii) As this project started, complete translations of Avicenna’s Madḫal in modern languages were only available in Turkish and Russian. Chapters of the work had also been translated in other languages, but an English translation of the whole work was still a desideratum. A complete English translation is provided in the thesis, based on the newly-established Arabic text of the work and aiming at preserving the major possible consistency in rendering the relevant philosophical terms. As a complement to the translation, an apparatus of notes is offered to facilitate the immediate understanding of the text. (iii) The third section of the thesis consists in a systematic commentary on Avicenna’s Madḫal, which is meant to support a deeper understanding of the text in its entirety. The commentary deals with both historical and philosophical aspects; more in detail, it includes an analysis and an identification, when possible, of Avicenna’s sources, and underlines the points of major philosophical interest of the work, which are dealt in a more comprehensive manner in the General Introduction (0a). (shrink)

The aim of this special issue of Rivista di Estetica is to investigate the nature of the auditory object and its specific status as an object of perception. The investigation was carried out using different methodologies: 1) focusing on the auditory object in relation to its metaphysical dimension; 2) working on the comparison between auditory and visual perception; 3) finding similarities and differences between auditory and musical objects; and, finally, 4) focusing exclusively on the speci...

RésuméLes oeuvres existantes d’Avicenne préservent-elles une trace de sa première production philosophique, aujourd’hui perdue? Cet article examine un texte jusqu’ici négligé, à savoir le chapitre « Sur les propositions hypothétiques » du « Traité concis sur les principes de la logique d’Avicenne » (Risāla mūǧaza fī uṣūl al-manṭiq, ci-après RM). Les nouveaux éléments offerts par le chapitre du RM en question conduiront à une lecture différente d’un autre passage bien connu de la réélaboration avicennienne des Analytiques premiers (Qiyās) d’Aristote dans (...) le « Livre de la guérison » (Kitāb al-šifāʾ). Les indices recueillis à partir de l’analyse de ces deux ouvrages nous amèneront finalement à réfléchir à la possibilité qu’Avicenne ait en fait composé un ouvrage (désormais perdu) sur les propositions et les syllogismes hypothétiques. Le RM d’Avicenne n’étant à ce jour pas édité, une édition, ainsi qu’une traduction anglaise du chapitre concerné, sont également fournies en annexe de cet article. (shrink)

Avicenna’s ground-breaking view of logic as both a tool for other sciences and a science in its own right has already attracted scholars’ attention and has been studied in several different respects. The present paper aims to address a specific issue entailed by considering logic as a science in its own right: that is, assessing the relation in which logic as a science stands to the other sciences, and particularly to metaphysics and psychology. The inquiry will focus on a fundamental, (...) yet tricky, passage of chapter I.4 of Avicenna’s Kitāb al-Madḫal, the opening work of his most comprehensive philosophical summa, the Kitāb al-Šifāʾ (Book of Healing). Due to the obscurity of some of Avicenna’s references, chapter I.4 “on the subject-matter of logic” has stimulated numerous attempts at interpretation from the Middle Ages to today. In this paper, I will attempt to provide a new reading of the chapter in light of Avicenna’s definition of the epistemological status of science in Burhān II.7. (shrink)

The series is devoted to the study of scientific and philosophical texts from the Classical and the Islamic world handed down in Arabic. Through critical text editions and monographs, it provides access to ancient scientific inquiry as it developed in a continuous tradition from Antiquity to the modern period. All editions are accompanied by translations and philological and explanatory notes.

En este artículo propongo una aproximación al problema de la libertad en Karl Marx por medio de una lectura de “Los debates sobre la libertad de prensa y la publicación de los debates de la Dieta”, publicado en la Rheinische Zeitung en la primavera de 1842. En un primer momento, presentaré el contexto intelectual en el que se desarrolla este escrito señalando la herencia ilustrada del joven Marx. En un segundo momento, reconstruiré la posición de Marx frente a la libertad (...) de prensa. Finalmente, señalaré dos pliegues en el discurso de Marx que posibilitan una continuidad de la indagación sobre la libertad a lo largo de su obra. (shrink)

Human errors are widely considered among the major causes of road accidents. Furthermore, it is estimated that more than 90% of vehicle crashes causing fatal and permanent injuries are directly related to mental tiredness, fatigue, and drowsiness of the drivers. In particular, driving drowsiness is recognized as a crucial aspect in the context of road safety, since drowsy drivers can suddenly lose control of the car. Moreover, the driving drowsiness episodes mostly appear suddenly without any prior behavioral evidence. The present (...) study aimed at characterizing the onset of drowsiness in car drivers by means of a multimodal neurophysiological approach to develop a synthetic electroencephalographic -based index, able to detect drowsy events. The study involved 19 participants in a simulated scenario structured in a sequence of driving tasks under different situations and traffic conditions. The experimental conditions were designed to induce prominent mental drowsiness in the final part. The EEG-based index, so-called “MDrow index”, was developed and validated to detect the driving drowsiness of the participants. The MDrow index was derived from the Global Field Power calculated in the Alpha EEG frequency band over the parietal brain sites. The results demonstrated the reliability of the proposed MDrow index in detecting the driving drowsiness experienced by the participants, resulting also more sensitive and timely sensible with respect to more conventional autonomic parameters, such as the EyeBlinks Rate and the Heart Rate Variability, and to subjective measurements. (shrink)

Nine manuscripts preserving Avicenna's Kitāb al-Šifāʾ share a set of identical marginal glosses to the section of Logic. One of these manuscripts reports, at the end of each of the glosses, a certificate of transmission ascribing them to the theologian and philosopher Faḫr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606H/1210), which provides some material evidence of the existence of a flourishing exegetical activity on the Kitāb al-Šifāʾ during the twelfth-thirteenth century, in spite of the apparent lack of commentaries on the text in that (...) period. The present paper provides an edition of the so far unknown ḥāšiyāt to Avicenna's Kitāb al-Šifāʾ by al-Rāzī, with an attempt at reconstructing their tradition and contextualizing them within al-Rāzī’s exegetical and teaching activity. (shrink)

This is a reproduction of the original artefact. Generally these books are created from careful scans of the original. This allows us to preserve the book accurately and present it in the way the author intended. Since the original versions are generally quite old, there may occasionally be certain imperfections within these reproductions. We're happy to make these classics available again for future generations to enjoy!

Technologies like passive brain-computer interfaces can enhance human-machine interaction. Anyhow, there are still shortcomings in terms of easiness of use, reliability, and generalizability that prevent passive-BCI from entering real-life situations. The current work aimed to technologically and methodologically design a new gel-free passive-BCI system for out-of-the-lab employment. The choice of the water-based electrodes and the design of a new lightweight headset met the need for easy-to-wear, comfortable, and highly acceptable technology. The proposed system showed high reliability in both laboratory and (...) realistic settings, performing not significantly different from the gold standard based on gel electrodes. In both cases, the proposed system allowed effective discrimination between low and high levels of workload, vigilance, and stress even for high temporal resolution. Finally, the generalizability of the proposed system has been tested through a cross-task calibration. The system calibrated with the data recorded during the laboratory tasks was able to discriminate the targeted human factors during the realistic task reaching AUC values higher than 0.8 at 40 s of temporal resolution in case of vigilance and workload, and 20 s of temporal resolution for the stress monitoring. These results pave the way for ecologic use of the system, where calibration data of the realistic task are difficult to obtain. (shrink)

“Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history”: this was the single line that Charles Darwin devoted to human evolution in the Origin of Species (1859). At present, there is a number of extinct species, which we understand to be related to human evolution, demonstrating that the Darwin’s prediction was correct: light has been thrown, indeed. Moreover, the science of human origin (or palaeoanthropology) appears to be able to shed much light not only on the natural (...) history of humankind, but also on mechanisms and patterns of "evolution" as a general phenomenon. This is of special interest when we focus on data and hypotheses concerning the origin of our own species, Homo sapiens. (shrink)

El objetivo del presente artículo se centra en la labor contestataria y filógina del escritor siciliano Vincenzo di Blasi en relación con las teorías misóginas de Aristóteles expuestas en sus obras _La reproducción de los animales _y _Política, _ambas escritas en el siglo IV a.C_._ El artículo se abre con una introducción sobre los estudios que se han emprendido sobre las definiciones aristotélicas de la mujer para definir un marco teórico de partida. Posteriormente, se exponen de manera contrastada las (...) teorías de Aristóteles y las réplicas de Vincenzo di Blasi en el capítulo XIV de su _Apologia filosofico-storica in cui si mostra il sesso delle donne superiore a quello degli uomini_ (1737), demostrando la inclusión del autor dentro de la _Querella de las Mujeres_ en Italia. (shrink)

Il saggio si propone di approfondire i rapporti tra la filosofia di Bloch e l'idealismo tedesco, a proposito della particolare tematica della concezione del tempo, riguardo al plesso di problemi relativi alla filosofia della natura e alla filosofia della storia, tentando di enucleare gli aspetti teorici significativi della originale lettura blochiana dei materiali filosofici offerti dalla filosofia classica tedesca. In particolare la visione romantica della natura implicava per Bloch una connessione tra lo spazio e il tempo profondamente diversa da quella (...) rigida del meccanicismo e il contatto con Schelling offriva la prospettiva di un tempo della natura aperto alla dimensione del futuro. Nell'ambito storico invece le filosofie idealistiche della storia proponevano alcune tematiche, su tutte quella della libertà dell'uomo, che diventeranno cardini della filosofia di Bloch, legandosi proprio ad una concezione aperta e indecisa del futuro, ad una ontologia del non-ancora-essere caratterizzata dalla necessità del proprio compimento. (shrink)

H.-I. Marrou's Traité de la musique selon l'esprit de Saint Augustin is a useful document about the relationship between 1930s French music and non-conformist culture. His stress on the moral aim of music recalls the claim for a spiritual revolution that informs the spirit of 1930 and Jeune France's manifesto: the reading of Marrou's Traité helps us defining the humanistic poetics of music of the '30s, and the historical context mutually explains and justify most of Marrou's thought .His thought is (...) in fact developed in the wake of Christian Platonism revised by Augustine, subject to a series of small changes in sight of a better and more relevant moral theology. The philosophical outcome isn't very convincing, both for many appeals to the authority principle, and for frequent contradictions clearly emerging in his arguments. The tension between the fidelity to the doctrine, the attempts to re-read the music from an apologetic viewpoint and the aim to suggest a practical philosophy produces a methodological setback so striking that it represents one of the greater limits of the Treaty.Marrou's remarks about the relationship between Christianity and ancient philosophy are certainly as interesting as questionable from the point of view of the history of philosophy. He goes so far to correct Augustine himself, especially as regards the Pythagorean influence on his thought, to stress instead a religious component of the music that doesn't seem so evident in the Augustinian analysis.Quest'ultimo viene infatti sviluppato sulla scia del platonismo cristiano mediato da Agostino, che viene sottoposto a una serie di piccoli mutamenti in funzione di una migliore e più attuale teologia morale. L'esito filosofico non è tuttavia dei più convincenti, vuoi per i numerosi appelli al principio d'autorità, vuoi per le frequenti contraddizioni argomentative che emergono dal testo in modo evidente. La tensione tra la fedeltà alla dottrina, il tentativo di rilettura della musica in chiave apologetica e la proposta di una filosofia pratica producono così un vistoso scacco metodologico che rappresenta uno dei limiti maggiori del Trattato.Le considerazioni di Marrou sul rapporto tra cristianesimo e filosofia antica sono certamente molto interessanti ma assai discutibili da un punto di vista storico-filosofico. L’autore si spinge fino a correggere Agostino stesso, soprattutto per quanto riguarda la componente pitagorica della sua riflessione, per sottolineare invece una componente religiosa della musica che non sembra così evidente nella riflessione agostiniana.. (shrink)