RELIGIONE, RISPETTO E GUERRA: CONTRO LA VISIONE CANONICA DELLA RELIGIONE IN POLITICA

The last several decades have witnessed a vibrant discussion about the proper political role of religion in pluralistic liberal democracies. An important part of that discussion has been a dispute about the role that religious and secular reasons properly play in the justification of state coercion. As I understand it, the standard view advocated by the members of that pantheon, and by many others as well, includes the following two claims, namely, that reli-gious reasons cannot play a decisive role in justifying state coercion and that citizens and public officials in a liberal polity should not endorse state coercion that requires decisive re-ligious support. I am skeptical about the standard view’s restrictions on religious reasons as a class – restrictions that apply to any and all religious considerations, to religious reasons as such. My main aim in this paper is to motivate skepticism regarding the standard view. I will try to achieve this aim by reflecting on what I take to be the paradigmatic case of state coercion, namely, the use of military violence in war

Ventral striatal fMRI in affective and psychotic disorders: a transdiagnostic approach using resting state and task functional resonance imaging, clinical and genetic data

The effective clinical management of psychotic and affective disorders still represents a major challenge in psychiatry. Due to the high prevalence of these disorders and the subjective suffering, they cause a massive burden for the health system and society, and improvement in diagnostic and treatment strategies is urgently sought. In consideration of the literature, there are two promising avenues for this endeavour: On the one hand, particularly regarding schizophrenia (SCZ), early detection of high risk states or disease manifestation is crucial for the eventual treatment success. On the other hand, the heterogeneity of psychotic and affective disorders as well as blurry boundaries between the associated clinical syndromes often leave the diagnosis, which is the foundation of an evidence based treatment selection, on shaky ground. At the neurobiological level, several lines of evidence underline the role of the ventral striatum, particularly the nucleus accumbens (NAcc), for the pathophysiology of psychosis and more generally reward processing. Disturbed reward processing in turn is related to anhedonia, a core symptom of major depressive disorder (MDD), bipolar disorder (BD) and also SCZ. Against this background, this thesis aimed to unravel the potential of ventral striatal brain circuits as a source of biomarkers of psychotic and affective disorders. For this purpose, two sub-studies were performed: Firstly, we studied the impact of a validated polygenic risk score (PGRS) for SCZ, childhood adversity (CA) as widespread environmental factor and their interaction on resting state (RS) fMRI measures and NAcc seed connectivity in 253 healthy controls (HC) and compared these patterns with fully expressed disease in 23 patients with SCZ. Consistent with previous reports, SCZ patients showed strong regional functional connectivity density (FCD) increases in subcortical nuclei, particularly in the NAcc, compared with HC. Furthermore, in the HC sample, a a positive association between the FCD of the NAcc and both the PGRS and the interaction between PGRS and CA was found. Fine-mapping exhibited increased connectivity between the NAcc and visual association cortices for high levels of both PGRS and the PGRS-by-CA interaction. Taken together, this study showed that in HC, high PGRS for SCZ affects both global and regionally specific connectivity of the NAcc in a similar pattern as observed in SCZ patients, and that this effect was already amplified even by a history of very mild CA. This latter observation strengthened the notion that environmental factors need consideration in imaging genetics studies. Secondly, we examined the neural underpinnings of reward anticipation (RA) in MDD, BD and SCZ as studied by fMRI. This study revealed that aberrantly low striatal activation during RA is typical of SCZ, whereas the response of this network appeared to be preserved in MDD and BD. Interestingly, two further large-scale brain networks involved in RA – the salience network and the default mode network showed both transdiagnostic and further disease-specific alterations: While the salience network was found to be impaired primarily in SCZ patients, all patient groups revealed deficits in the suppression of the default mode network. Among hub regions of all three networks that were further differentiated in an early and a late response period, levels of anhedonia were correlated with the extent of the (early) hippocampal deactivation failure across diagnostic boundaries. In sum, both investigations confirm the possibility to use fMRI to probe the functional status of the ventral striatum. The first study underlines the centrality of striatal regions in the pahophysiology of psychosis as these alterations already emerged in healthy individuals at high genetic risk for developing SCZ, particularly when including unspecific environmental risk to the model. Hyperconnectivity of this region in SCZ during the resting state matched with a blunted response during the RA task. The latter studyshowed that at least two further large-scale brain networks are impaired in both psychotic and affective disorders during RA, indicating a potential of reward processing as a source of imaging phenotypes or biomarkers to characterize patients of the respective disease spectrum

Christians and Pagans in the Sacred Nation

Christopher J. Eberle’s contribution to the 2019 Editors’ Symposium: Pagans and Christians in the City

Religion and Insularity: Brian Leiter on Accommodating Religion

Crucial to Leiter’s overall case is the claim that there is no credible reason to accommodate religious objectors but not secular objectors: “[N]o one has been able to articulate a credible principled argument . . . that would explain why . . . we ought to accord special legal and moral treatment to religious practices.” He reaches this skeptical conclusion, in significant part, because he takes religion to be afflicted with a troubling defect, that is, religion involves commitment to categorical demands that are insulated from scientific and commonsensical scrutiny. But, I will argue, there is no good reason to believe that religion characteristically involves a commitment on the part of religious believers to insulate their normative convictions from critical scrutiny—scientific, commonsensical, or otherwise. I will also argue that, absent that supposed defect, one of the arguments canvassed by Leiter provides a credible consequentialist rationale for religious accommodation. That secular argument, I believe, can be amplified by various and sundry religious considerations. I conclude that the combination of these secular and religious considerations provides a credible overall case in favor of accommodating religious objectors, though not uniquely accommodating them. I take it that this marriage between religious and secular considerations is a normal and desirable, even if not obligatory, basis for the kind of political practice under discussion

Semantik-orientierter rekursiver Transfer in HPSG am Beispiel des Referenzdialogs

Wir machen einen Transfervorschlag für HPSG-Strukturen, der bei der Übersetzung der semantischen Repräsentation die syntaktische Struktur zusammen mit dem HPSG-spezifischen Semantischen Prinzip (Pollard/Sag (1994)) als rekursionssteuerndes Moment benutzt. Der Transfer übernimmt bei dieser Architektur eine Mediatorrolle zwischen dem Analyseergebnis, das eine quellsprachenspezifische semantische Repräsentation enthält, und dem Generatorinput, der eine zielsprachenspezifische semantische Repräsentation enthält. Das heißt u.a., dass die Transferkomponente Übersetzungsschwierigkeiten feststellt, strukturelle Veränderungen vornehmen und, bei Bedarf, zur Auflösung von translation mismatches (Kameyama et al. (1991)) eine vertiefte semantische Analyse der quellsprachlichen Äußerung anstoßen und deren Ergebnisse verwenden kann. Als mittelfristiges Ziel soll die Generierung zur Herstellung von Übersetzungsvarianten den Transferoutput an die Transferkomponente zurückgeben können mit Maßgaben, die es dem Transfer erlauben, gezielt alternative zielsprachspezifische Repräsentationen zu erzeugen. Unter dem Aspekt dieser kommunikativen Kompetenz übernimmt der Transfer die Rolle eines negociators (Kay et al. (1994))

Improved Imputation of Common and Uncommon Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) with a New Reference Set

Statistical imputation of genotype data is an important technique for analysis of genome-wide association studies (GWAS). We have built a reference dataset to improve imputation accuracy for studies of individuals of primarily European descent using genotype data from the Hap1, Omni1, and Omni2.5 human SNP arrays (Illumina). Our dataset contains 2.5-3.1 million variants for 930 European, 157 Asian, and 162 African/African-American individuals. Imputation accuracy of European data from Hap660 or OmniExpress array content, measured by the proportion of variants imputed with R^2^>0.8, improved by 34%, 23% and 12% for variants with MAF of 3%, 5% and 10%, respectively, compared to imputation using publicly available data from 1,000 Genomes and International HapMap projects. The improved accuracy with the use of the new dataset could increase the power for GWAS by as much as 8% relative to genotyping all variants. This reference dataset is available to the scientific community through the NCBI dbGaP portal. Future versions will include additional genotype data as well as non-European populations

Sin City Winds

Program listing performers and works performe