New Trends in Philosophy of Mind and Epistemology: An Overview

The seven papers included in this special issue of Argumenta might be ideally divided into two parts. On the one hand, this issue collects four contributions dealing with some important topics in Philosophy of Mind and Philosophy of language: the modularity of mind (the connections between the “pragmatic” module and epistemic vigilance mechanisms), the problem of perception and its link with action (the alleged anti-representational character of enactivism), the nature of phenomenal content (the plausibility of naïve realism in explaining the phenomenology of veridical visual experience), and the alleged irreducibility of consciousness (the claim that anti-physicalist intuitions are just a by-product of certain epistemological features of phenomenal concepts). On the other hand, there are three more contributions discussing some relevant themes in Logic and Epistemology: the actuality of the ancient Master Argument (its consistency and relationship with contemporary tense logic), the problem of evidence (the kind of evidence, psychological or non-psychological, intuitions actually provide), and that of counterevidence (the possibility that undermining defeaters, contrary to overriding defeaters, require the subject to engage in some higher-order epistemic reasoning)

Donald Davidson

Donald Davidson (1917-2003) è stato uno dei più importanti filosofi analitici del ventesimo secolo, non solo per la varietà dei temi affrontati (che vanno dalla filosofa della mente a quella dell'azione, dalla teoria della verità a quella del significato, da questioni epistemologiche a quelle estetiche), ma anche, e soprattutto, per la complessiva sistematicità del suo pensiero. Il presente saggio si concentra sugli argomenti più significativi della filosofia davidsoniana: il rapporto tra verità e significato, il ruolo centrale dell'interpretazione e della nozione di razionalità, il problema mente-corpo, la natura delle credenze e il legame tra pensiero e linguaggio

Harm shouldn\u2019t be a necessary criterion for mental disorder: Some reflections on the DSM-5 definition of mental disorder

The general definition of mental disorder stated in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders seems to identify a mental disorder with a harmful dysfunction. However, the presence of distress or disability, which may be bracketed as the presence of harm, is taken to be merely usual, and thus not a necessary requirement: a mental disorder can be diagnosed as such even if there is no harm at all. In this paper, we focus on the harm requirement. First, we clarify what it means to say that the harm requirement is not necessary for defining the general concept of mental disorder. In this respect, we briefly examine the two components of harm, distress and disability, and then trace a distinction between mental disorder tokens and mental disorder types. Second, we argue that the decision not to regard the harm requirement as a necessary criterion for mental disorder is tenable for a number of practical and theoretical reasons, some pertaining to conceptual issues surrounding the two components of harm and others pertaining to the problem of false negatives and the status of psychiatry vis-\ue0-vis somatic medicine. However, we believe that the harm requirement can be (provisionally) maintained among the specific diagnostic criteria of certain individual mental disorders. More precisely, we argue that insofar as the harm requirement is needed among the specific diagnostic criteria of certain individual mental disorders, it should be unpacked and clarified

New Trends in Philosophy of Mind and Epistemology: An Overview

open2openM.C. Amoretti; F. ErvasAmoretti, MARIA CRISTINA; F., Erva

The concept of disease in the time of COVID-19

Philosophers of medicine have formulated different accounts of the concept of disease. Which concept of disease one assumes has implications for what conditions count as diseases and, by extension, who may be regarded as having a disease (disease judgements) and for who may be accorded the social privileges and personal responsibilities associated with being sick (sickness judgements). In this article, we consider an ideal diagnostic test for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) infection with respect to four groups of people—positive and asymptomatic; positive and symptomatic; negative; and untested—and show how different concepts of disease impact on the disease and sickness judgements for these groups. The suggestion is that sickness judgements and social measures akin to those experienced during the current COVID-19 outbreak presuppose a concept of disease containing social (risk of) harm as a component. We indicate the problems that arise when adopting this kind of disease concept beyond a state of emergency

Year in review 2006: Critical Care – paediatrics

In 2006, paediatric intensive care-related subjects were discussed in a number of papers published in various journals, including Critical Care. Because they focused on the cardiovascular system and its support, we summarize them here. In particular, these papers highlighted the management of refractory septic shock, extracorporeal support, outcome markers in sepsis, and outcome after cardiac arrest

The First Cold Antihydrogen

Antihydrogen, the atomic bound state of an antiproton and a positron, was produced at low energy for the first time by the ATHENA experiment, marking an important first step for precision studies of atomic antimatter. This paper describes the first production and some subsequent developments.Comment: Invitated Talk at COOL03, International Workshop on Beam Cooling and Related Topics, to be published in NIM

The Ising-Kondo lattice with transverse field: an f-moment Hamiltonian for URu2Si2?

We study the phase diagram of the Ising-Kondo lattice with transverse magnetic field as a possible model for the weak-moment heavy-fermion compound URu2Si2, in terms of two low-lying f singlets in which the uranium moment is coupled by on-site exchange to the conduction electron spins. In the mean-field approximation for an extended range of parameters, we show that the conduction electron magnetization responds logarithmically to f-moment formation, that the ordered moment in the antiferromagnetic state is anomalously small, and that the Neel temperature is of the order observed. The model gives a qualitatively correct temperature-dependence, but not magnitude, of the specific heat. The majority of the specific heat jump at the Neel temperature arises from the formation of a spin gap in the conduction electron spectrum. We also discuss the single-impurity version of the model and speculate on ways to increase the specific heat coefficient. In the limits of small bandwidth and of small Ising-Kondo coupling, we find that the model corresponds to anisotropic Heisenberg and Hubbard models respectively.Comment: 20 pages RevTeX including 5 figures (1 in LaTeX, 4 in uuencoded EPS), Received by Phys. Rev. B 19 April 199

Magnetic Susceptibility of Multiorbital Systems

Effects of orbital degeneracy on magnetic susceptibility in paramagnetic phases are investigated within a mean-field theory. Under certain crystalline electric fields, the magnetic moment consists of two independent moments, e.g., spin and orbital moments. In such a case, the magnetic susceptibility is given by the sum of two different Curie-Weiss relations, leading to deviation from the Curie-Weiss law. Such behavior may be observed in d- and f-electron systems with t_{2g} and Gamma_8 ground states, respectively. As a potential application of our theory, we attempt to explain the difference in the temperature dependence of magnetic susceptibilities of UO_2 and NpO_2.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure