'World' in middle Schelling: Why nature transcendentalizes

The importance of 'world' in Schelling's middle philosophy demonstrates that the famous Philosophical Inquiries into the Essence of Human Freedom (1809) retains its ontological value. Because world is not, as in Kant, a mathematical but rather a dynamic category, the ontological consequences of the articulation of the essence of human freedom entails that it, too, be articulated dynamically

The law of insuperable environment: What is exhibited in the exhibition of the process of nature?

Once something is said of something else, this “what it is that exists” or X of which what is said is said, is augmented, however minimally, by its expression. Due to the resulting progressive series, asking after what it is of which what is said is said, cannot be answered by withdrawing what is said of it, by the ungeschenmachen of predication, but only by further augmentation, even if this consists in adding predicates that negate their predecessors. On the one hand, it may be said that here, yet again, philosophy finds the world well lost, for what is as it is remains unrecoverable once subject to augmentation. Yet what would this unaugmented X be

Prospects for a post-Copernican dogmatism: On the antinomies of transcendental naturalism

The essay argues that the transcendental objection to dogmatism is the latter's prioritisation of being over acting. The transcendental alternative is, as in Kant and Fichte, to prioritise acting over being. Yet the naturalistic alternative to this, that nature be transcendentally responsible for being and acting, is never explored, a deficit this essay seeks to make good

Movements of the world: The sources of transcendental philosophy

A great difference is made to contemporary accounts of transcendental philosophy if the question is raised as to how far down its inquiries into the sources of cognitions extend. It is true that the transcendental deduction is designed to reset the orbit of metaphysics around experiences rather than things; and although there are exceptions, neither Kant nor his successor transcendentalists ceased to extend the inquiry into the ultimate grounds of cognition insofar as these are made possible not by objectives, but by what exceeds their being, that is, their formation. Indeed, it is in thinking sources, in descendence, that transcendental philosophy most achieves its objects

"Physics of the Idea": An Interview With Iain Hamilton Grant (2013)

This is an interview with the philosopher Iain Hamilton Grant, author of Idealism: The history of a philosophy (Acumen, 2011) and Philosophies of Nature After Schelling (Continuum, 2008)

Il tre dogma di Trascendentalismo

In the early twenty-first century, philosophy stemming from the continental tradition has become overtly realist. This does not mean it abandons the sophisticated structures of reflection for a givenness on the refutation of which its earliest moments, in Kant, was premised. Nor does it entail a rediscovered faith in the adequacy of intellect to thing. Rather, we might say, new realisms have issued from a critique of transcendental dogmas. In this paper I will provisionally characterise the most salient of these transcendental dogmas before characterizing some of the experiments in removing them

The universe in the universe. German idealism and the natural history of mind

Recent considerations of mind and world react against philosophical naturalisation strategies by maintaining that the thought of the world is normatively driven to reject reductive or bald naturalism. This paper argues that we may reject bald or‘thoughtless’ naturalism without sacrificing nature to normativity and so retreating from metaphysics to transcendental idealism. The resources for this move can befound in the Naturphilosophie outlined by the German Idealist philosopher F.W.J. Schelling. He argues that because thought occurs in the same universe as thought thinks, it remains part of that universe whose elements in consequence nowadditionally include that thought. A philosophy of nature beginning from such a positionneither shaves thought from a thoughtless nature nor transcendentally reduces nature to the content of thought, since a thought occurring in nature only has ‘all nature’ as its content when that thought is additive rather than summative. A natural history of mind drawn from Schellingian premises therefore entails that, while a thought may have ‘all nature’ as its content, this thought is itself the partial content of the nature augmented by it

Phylogenetic ctDNA analysis depicts early-stage lung cancer evolution.

The early detection of relapse following primary surgery for non-small-cell lung cancer and the characterization of emerging subclones, which seed metastatic sites, might offer new therapeutic approaches for limiting tumour recurrence. The ability to track the evolutionary dynamics of early-stage lung cancer non-invasively in circulating tumour DNA (ctDNA) has not yet been demonstrated. Here we use a tumour-specific phylogenetic approach to profile the ctDNA of the first 100 TRACERx (Tracking Non-Small-Cell Lung Cancer Evolution Through Therapy (Rx)) study participants, including one patient who was also recruited to the PEACE (Posthumous Evaluation of Advanced Cancer Environment) post-mortem study. We identify independent predictors of ctDNA release and analyse the tumour-volume detection limit. Through blinded profiling of postoperative plasma, we observe evidence of adjuvant chemotherapy resistance and identify patients who are very likely to experience recurrence of their lung cancer. Finally, we show that phylogenetic ctDNA profiling tracks the subclonal nature of lung cancer relapse and metastasis, providing a new approach for ctDNA-driven therapeutic studies

The development and validation of a scoring tool to predict the operative duration of elective laparoscopic cholecystectomy

Background: The ability to accurately predict operative duration has the potential to optimise theatre efficiency and utilisation, thus reducing costs and increasing staff and patient satisfaction. With laparoscopic cholecystectomy being one of the most commonly performed procedures worldwide, a tool to predict operative duration could be extremely beneficial to healthcare organisations. Methods: Data collected from the CholeS study on patients undergoing cholecystectomy in UK and Irish hospitals between 04/2014 and 05/2014 were used to study operative duration. A multivariable binary logistic regression model was produced in order to identify significant independent predictors of long (> 90 min) operations. The resulting model was converted to a risk score, which was subsequently validated on second cohort of patients using ROC curves. Results: After exclusions, data were available for 7227 patients in the derivation (CholeS) cohort. The median operative duration was 60 min (interquartile range 45–85), with 17.7% of operations lasting longer than 90 min. Ten factors were found to be significant independent predictors of operative durations > 90 min, including ASA, age, previous surgical admissions, BMI, gallbladder wall thickness and CBD diameter. A risk score was then produced from these factors, and applied to a cohort of 2405 patients from a tertiary centre for external validation. This returned an area under the ROC curve of 0.708 (SE = 0.013, p  90 min increasing more than eightfold from 5.1 to 41.8% in the extremes of the score. Conclusion: The scoring tool produced in this study was found to be significantly predictive of long operative durations on validation in an external cohort. As such, the tool may have the potential to enable organisations to better organise theatre lists and deliver greater efficiencies in care