Objective: To review the principles and practice of the use of conscious sedation for IVF.Design: The pertinent literature was reviewed and recommendations are provided.Result(s): Conscious sedation appears to be the most commonly used method of pain relief for transvaginal retrieval of oocytes. Conscious sedation does not require the presence of an anesthesiologist and can be done in freestanding clinics. Agents commonly used include opioids in combination with benzodiazepines. This combination minimizes pain, decreases anxiety, and provides sedation and some amnesia Adjuvants (...) such as promethazine and hydroxyzine can also be used but often are not needed. Conscious sedation is well tolerated by patients and does not require highly specialized equipment. However, there are specific safeguards that should be followed. Only a few toxicity studies have been performed, but they are reassuring because they have not found significant effects on fertilization or cleavage.Conclusion(s): Conscious sedation appears to be a safe and cost-effective method of providing analgesia and anesthesia for transvaginal retrieval of oocytes. (shrink)

The phenomenological calculus is a relational paradigm for complex systems, closely related in substance and spirit to Robert Rosen’s own approach. Its mathematical language is multilinear algebra. The epistemological exploration continues in this paper, with the expansion of the phenomenological calculus into the realm of anisotropy.

This book contains three essays: "The Mask and the Face: The Perception of Physiognomic Likeness in Life and Art" by Gombrich, the renowned art historian and critic; "The Representation of Things and People" by psychologist, Julian Hochberg; and "How Do Pictures Represent" by philosopher, Max Black. The book is based upon lectures delivered in the Johns Hopkins 1970 Thalheimer Lectures, where, taking off from the question "how there can be an underlying identity in the manifold and changing facial expression of (...) a single individual," there is an interdisciplinary attempt at clarifying the problem of representation. Gombrich’s central thesis is that the key to artistic representation is empathy and projection, which is guided by the interlocking display of the permanent and mobile features of the object represented. Perceptual activity and empathy rely more on the muscular imitation than on passive visual reception. He holds that what is singled out as the likeness-factor uniting the permanent and mobile features in, for example, the photograph of the four-year old Lord Russell and such factors in the ninety-year old Russell is the "general tonus, the melody of transition from given ranges of relaxations to forms of tenseness." Hochberg’s essay spells out the position that perception is purposive behavior, wherein the purpose is the information sought and behavior is the "succession of glances in different directions." Holding that perceptual activity is grounded in expectations, he lays aside Gombrich’s muscularity-thesis in favor of a learned expectation of feature characteristics. Black’s essay is a conceptual analysis of "depiction," or more precisely, of "P displays a subject S if and only if R, where R ‘will constitute the necessary and sufficient condition for P displaying S'." The essay, which proceeds in a Wittgensteinian Investigations-type fashion ends where the reader would hope it begin. He concludes that the problem can only be adequately answered by moving from logical investigation to the world of the artisan and art lover. To arrive at this conclusion he debunks six candidates that claim to meet the depiction conditions: causal history, selective information, intention, mimesis, resemblance, and "looking-like." At best, depiction may be considered a "cluster" concept of all six. Further determination, he holds, requires knowledge of the purpose of a particular depiction, and this takes us out of logic and into art; and so Black stops, unfortunately.—W. A. F. (shrink)

Algebraic/topological descriptions of living processes are indispensable to the understanding of both biological and cognitive functions. This paper presents a fundamental algebraic description of living/cognitive processes and exposes its inherent ambiguity. Since ambiguity is forbidden to computation, no computational description can lend insight to inherently ambiguous processes. The impredicativity of these models is not a flaw, but is, rather, their strength. It enables us to reason with ambiguous mathematical representations of ambiguous natural processes. The noncomputability of these structures means computerized (...) simulacra of them are uninformative of their key properties. This leads to the question of how we should reason about them. That question is answered in this paper by presenting an example of such reasoning, the demonstration of a topological strategy for understanding how the fundamental structure can form itself from within itself. (shrink)

In a recent re-assessment of the medical aspects of the Plague of Athens which is, to date, the most scholarly and comprehensive, Poole and Holladay have emphasized the tendency of many infectious diseases markedly to decline in virulence over decades and centuries and, sometimes, significantly to change their clinical manifestations. In the light of modern medicine they consider four possibilities: The Plague was a disease which still exists today. This they regard as improbable, It still exists in some remote place (...) or places unknown to medical science. This is discussed and dismissed, It became extinct, It was caused by an agent which nowadays causes a significantly different clinical syndrome. They conclude as follows: ‘The truth, we suggest, almost certainly lies in possibility or . But we can see no way of choosing between them. On either view the question: “What was the Athenian Plague?” is in principle unanswerable if the questioner is wanting to attach to the Plagsie the name of some modern disease or diseases’. (shrink)

Some years ago, in the course of a general critique of what has sometimes been referred to as the covering law theory of explanation, I made the claim that perfectly satisfactory explanations can often be provided by indicating only one or a few necessary conditions, where we remain ignorant of the sufficient conditions, of what we nevertheless claim to understand. What seemed to me one identifiable type of such explanations I called “explaining how-possibly,” because it was a type more naturally (...) given in response to the question how it could be that a certain thing happened than to the more familiar question why it did so. In the present paper I propose to review certain objections to this thesis which have come to my attention in the interval, and to make such concessions as these seem to require. In fact, the concessions will be minor, since the general thesis still seems to me quite defensible. (shrink)

The authors discuss some of the conceptual issues that must be considered in using and understanding psychiatric classification. DSM-IV is a practical and common sense nosology of psychiatric disorders that is intended to improve communication in clinical practice and in research studies. DSM-IV has no philosophic pretensions but does raise many philosphical questions. This paper describes the development of DSM-IV and the way in which it addresses a number of philosophic issues: nominalism vs. realism, epistemology in science, the mind/body dichotomy, (...) the definition of mental disorders, and dimensional vs. categorical classification. (shrink)

The volume presents essays on the philosophical explanation of the relationship between body and soul in antiquity from the Presocratics to Galen. The title of the volume alludes to a phrase found in Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus, referring to aspects of living behaviour involving both body and soul, and is a commonplace in ancient philosophy, dealt with in very different ways by different authors.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)