Avoiding the Pheidippides effect : how theories contribute to endurance trail practice

Ultra endurance sport has shown a significant increase during the last couple of decades. This paper focuses on theories which explain the phenomenal efforts ultra endurance athletes face when running extreme distances. These ultra athletes have to endure physical pain and mental distress for long hours or even days before crossing the finishing line. This extreme running on technical terrain requires considerable physiological effort (Millet, Hoffman, & Morin, 2012). Freund et al. (2012), states that as a consequence of running such distances, runners will experience muscle soreness, cramps, ruptured muscle fibres that lead to myalgia and myofascial pain, compartment syndrome, inflammation of tendons and joint capsules, and fatigue fractures. And yet, none of them succumb to their injuries or exhaustion under normal conditions, as in the case of Pheidippides. Various theories argue that the body is a high functioning machine which depends on physical measures to determine its efficiency while others put the brain as central to endurance practice and argue that the brain is the ultimate regulator which is there to protect the body. The athlete can never be harmed as the brain is taking measures so that body systems are never in distress. The beating heart is protected and catastrophe cannot occur. This paper illustrates various diverse theories which posit different arguments regarding extreme running and how it is actually achievable, without the athlete perishing due to the effort.peer-reviewe

Deflating Deflationary Truthmaking

In this paper we confront a challenge to truthmaker theory that is analogous to the objections raised by deflationists against substantive theories of truth. Several critics of truthmaker theory espouse a ‘deflationary’ attitude about truthmaking, though it has not been clearly presented as such. Our goal is to articulate and then object to the underlying rationale behind deflationary truthmaking. We begin by developing the analogy between deflationary truth and deflationary truthmaking, and then show how the latter can be found in the work of Dodd, Hornsby, Schnieder, Williamson, and others. These philosophers believe that the ambitions of truthmaker theory are easily satisfied, without recourse to ambitious ontological investigation—hence the analogy with deflationary truth. We argue that the deflationists’ agenda fails: there is no coherent deflationary theory of truthmaking. Truthmaking, once deflated, fails to address the questions at the heart of truthmaking investigation. Truthmaking cannot be had on the cheap

Burge on Perception and the Disjunction Problem

According to the Disjunction Problem, teleological theories of perceptual content are unable to explain why it is that a subject represents an F when an F causes the perception and not the disjunction F v G, given that the subject has mistaken G’s for F’s in the past. Without an adequate explanation these theories are stuck without an account of how non-veridical representation is possible, which would be an unsettling result. In this paper I defend Burge’s teleological theory of perception against the Disjunction Problem, arguing that a perceptual state’s representing what I call an error-prohibiting disjunctive property is incompatible with the truth of perceptual anti-individualism. And because perceptual anti-individualism is at the heart of Burge’s theory, I conclude that Burgeans need not be concerned with the Disjunction Problem

Institutions and Indirectness in Intellectual Property

Institutions are important to intellectual property. Information is a major subject of exchange, and the special challenges of contracting over information have long been at the heart of economic theories of contracting. Exchanges involving information are difficult because a buyer will be reluctant to make a purchase without knowing what he is buying, but once the seller reveals the information, the buyer will no longer need to pay for it. Contractors can also face challenges from asymmetric information, and some of the limits on people’s ability to contract stem from the problems of incomplete information

Microscopic spinon-chargon theory of magnetic polarons in the t-J model

The interplay of spin and charge degrees of freedom, introduced by doping mobile holes into a Mott insulator with strong anti-ferromagnetic (AFM) correlations, is at the heart of strongly correlated matter such as high-Tc cuprate superconductors. Here we capture this interplay in the strong coupling regime and propose a trial wavefunction of mobile holes in an AFM. Our method provides a microscopic justification for a class of theories which describe doped holes moving in an AFM environment as meson-like bound states of spinons and chargons. We discuss a model of such bound states from the perspective of geometric strings, which describe a fluctuating lattice geometry introduced by the fast motion of the chargon. This is demonstrated to give rise to short-range hidden string order, signatures of which have recently been revealed by ultracold atom experiments. We present evidence for the existence of such short-range hidden string correlations also at zero temperature by performing numerical DMRG simulations. To test our microscopic approach, we calculate the ground state energy and dispersion relation of a hole in an AFM, as well as the magnetic polaron radius, and obtain good quantitative agreement with advanced numerical simulations at strong couplings. We discuss extensions of our analysis to systems without long range AFM order to systems with short-range magnetic correlations.Comment: 13 pages, 11 figure

Function and Teleology

This is a short overview of the biological functions debate in philosophy. While it was fairly comprehensive when it was written, my short book ​A Critical Overview of Biological Functions has largely supplanted it as a definitive and up-to-date overview of the debate, both because the book takes into account new developments since then, and because the length of the book allowed me to go into substantially more detail about existing views

Theorica et Practica: Historical Epistemology and the Re-Visioning of Thirteenth and Fourteenth-Century Medicine

Positivist medical historians, guided by the savoir of modern western biomedicine, have long depicted medieval medicine as an aberration along the continuum of scientific and medical progress. Historical epistemology, founded in the ideas of Cavailles, Foucault, Davidson, and Hacking, however, allows the historian to disrupt this false continuum and to unchain medieval medicine from modern medicine. Postmodernist approaches, such as those sourced in Lyotard, Barthes, and Derrida, allow the historian to further deconstruct medieval and modern medical discourse, revealing a multitude of narrative lenses spinning around biomedical and biocultural strands. In liberating these two medical systems and setting them within the distinct historical and epistemological contexts that both shaped and were shaped by them, the historian can revision the theories, practices, and culture of medieval medicine without having to anachronistically justify them according to modern medical discourse

Metabolic and endocrine aspects of coronary disease

The early history, the nature and the incidence of coronary atherosclerosis and ischaemic heart disease have been reviewed. Evidence has been presented to suggest that there are aetiological factors which favour the development of ischaemic heart disease without influencing the incidence of coronary atherosclerosis. The close relationship of cholesterol metabolism to coronary atherosclerosis and to ischaemic heart disease has been emphasised. The circulating lipids and lipoproteins have been studied in health in relation to age and sex. They were abnormal in the majority of patients with ischaemic heart disease, particularly in those under the age of 50. Analysis of the circulating lipids and lipoprotein could aid the solution of an equivocal diagnosis in young subjects suspected of having ischaemic heart disease. The effects of endogenous hormones and the action of administered hormones on the circulating lipids and lipoproteins have been described in detail. Hormones can also influence the fluid state of the blood and the tonicity and metabolism of arteries. It has been postulated that the homeostasis of cholesterol metabolism, of the fluid state of the blood and of arterial metabolism could be disturbed by alteration of the physiological endocrine balance. The thesis has been proposed that an endocrine imbalance could contribute to the development of coronary atherosclerosis and of ischaemic heart disease. The relationship of this thesis to existing theories of the aetiology of ischaemic heart disease has been considered in detail. Finally, some therapeutic implications of these metabolic and endocrine aspects of coronary disease have been considered

A Unifying Theory of Biological Function

A new theory that naturalizes biological function is explained and compared with earlier etiological and causal role theories. Etiological theories explain functions from how they are caused over their evolutionary history. Causal role theories analyze how functional mechanisms serve the current capacities of their containing system. The new proposal unifies the key notions of both kinds of theories, but goes beyond them by explaining how functions in an organism can exist as factors with autonomous causal efficacy. The goal-directedness and normativity of functions exist in this strict sense as well. The theory depends on an internal physiological or neural process that mimics an organism’s fitness, and modulates the organism’s variability accordingly. The structure of the internal process can be subdivided into subprocesses that monitor specific functions in an organism. The theory matches well with each intuition on a previously published list of intuited ideas about biological functions, including intuitions that have posed difficulties for other theories

Perverse coherent t-structures through torsion theories

Bezrukavnikov (later together with Arinkin) recovered the work of Deligne defining perverse $t$-structures for the derived category of coherent sheaves on a projective variety. In this text we prove that these $t$-structures can be obtained through tilting torsion theories as in the work of Happel, Reiten and Smal\o. This approach proves to be slightly more general as it allows us to define, in the quasi-coherent setting, similar perverse $t$-structures for certain noncommutative projective planes.Comment: New revised version with important correction