Parkinson's Disease (PD) is a long-term degenerative disorder of the central nervous system that mainly affects the motor system. The symptoms generally come on slowly over time. Early in the disease, the most obvious are shaking, rigidity, slowness of movement, and difficulty with walking. Doctors do not know what causes it and finds difficulty in early diagnosing the presence of Parkinson’s disease. An artificial neural network system with back propagation algorithm is presented in this paper for helping doctors in identifying (...) PD. Previous research with regards to predict the presence of the PD has shown accuracy rates up to 93% [1]; however, accuracy of prediction for small classes is reduced. The proposed design of the neural network system causes a significant increase of robustness. It is also has shown that networks recognition rates reached 100%. (shrink)

Parkinson's Disease (PD) is a long-term degenerative disorder of the central nervous system that mainly affects the motor system. The symptoms generally come on slowly over time. Early in the disease, the most obvious are shaking, rigidity, slowness of movement, and difficulty with walking. Doctors do not know what causes it and finds difficulty in early diagnosing the presence of Parkinson’s disease. An artificial neural network system with back propagation algorithm is presented in this paper for helping doctors in identifying (...) PD. Previous research with regards to predict the presence of the PD has shown accuracy rates up to 93% [1]; however, accuracy of prediction for small classes is reduced. The proposed design of the neural network system causes a significant increase of robustness. It is also has shown that networks recognition rates reached 100%. (shrink)

The global catastrophe known as COVID-19 has shattered the world’s socioeconomic structure. Effective and affordable diagnosis techniques are crucial for better COVID-19 therapy and the eradication of bogus cases. Due to the daily upsurge in cases, hospitals only have a small supply of COVID-19 test kits. The study describes a deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) design for categorizing chest x-ray images in the diagnosis of COVID-19. The lack of a substantial, high-quality chest x-ray picture collection made efficient and exact CNN (...) categorization problematic. The dataset has been pre-processed using an image enhancement strategy to provide an effective training dataset for the proposed CNN model to achieve performance. The proposed model achieves 99.73% of accuracy, 98.95% of specificity, 99.47% of precision, 99.62% of sensitivity, and 98.71% of F1 score. A comparative study between the proposed model and numerous CNN-based COVID-19 detection algorithms is carried out to demonstrate that it outperforms other models. When evaluated on a separate dataset, the suggested model excelled over all other models, generally and explicitly. (shrink)

This article investigates the claim that some truths are fundamentally or really true — and that other truths are not. Such a distinction can help us reconcile radically minimal metaphysical views with the verities of common sense. I develop an understanding of the distinction whereby Fundamentality is not itself a metaphysical distinction, but rather a device that must be presupposed to express metaphysical distinctions. Drawing on recent work by Rayo on anti-Quinean theories of ontological commitments, I formulate a rigourous theory (...) of the notion. In the final sections, I show how this package dovetails with ' interpretationist' theories of meaning to give sober content to thought that some things — perhaps sets, or gerrymandered mereological sums — can be 'postulated into existence'. (shrink)

Philosophers of experiment have acknowledged that experiments are often more than mere hypothesis-tests, once thought to be an experiment's exclusive calling. Drawing on examples from contemporary biology, I make an additional amendment to our understanding of experiment by examining the way that `wide' instrumentation can, for reasons of efficiency, lead scientists away from traditional hypothesis-directed methods of experimentation and towards exploratory methods.

It is tempting to think (though many deny) that epistemic agents exercise a distinctive kind of control over their belief‐like attitudes. My aim here is to sketch a “bottom‐up” model of epistemic agency, one that draws on an analogous model of practical agency, according to which an agent's conditional beliefs are reasons‐responsive planning states that initiate and sustain mental behavior so as to render controlled.

How, if at all, is knowing how to do something defeasible? Some, the “intellectualists”, treat the defeasibility of knowledge-how as in some way derivative on the defeasibility of knowledge-that. According to a recent proposal by Carter and Navarro (Philos Phenomenol Res 3:662–685, 2017), knowledge-how defeat cannot be explained in terms of knowledge-that defeat; instead, knowledge-how defeat merits and entirely separate treatment. The thought behind “separatism” is easy to articulate. Assuming that knowledge of any kind is defeasible, since knowledge-that and knowledge-how (...) are fundamentally different beasts, the best accounts of their defeasibility must reflect the underlying differences between them. I reject a separatist treatment of the defeasibility of knowledge-that and knowledge-how. One can acknowledge certain important differences between knowledge-that and knowledge-how without thereby needing two theories of defeasibility. Ultimately, though, I’ll argue that the defeasibility of basic knowledge-how, unlike non-basic knowledge-how, is a much more difficult issue than has been acknowledged. (shrink)

This paper critically examines color relationalism and color relativism, two theories of color that are allegedly supported by variation in normal human color vision. We mostly discuss color relationalism, defended at length in Jonathan Cohen's The Red and the Real, and argue that the theory has insuperable problems.

Grief research in philosophy agrees that one who grieves grieves over the irreversible loss of someone whom the griever loved deeply, and that someone thus factored centrally into the griever’s sense of purpose and meaning in the world. The analytic literature in general tends to focus its treatments on the paradigm case of grief as the death of a loved one. I want to restrict my account to the paradigm case because the paradigm case most persuades the mind that grief (...) is a past-directed emotion. The phenomenological move I propose will enable us to (1) respect the paradigm case of grief and a broader but still legitimate set of grief-generating states of affairs, (2) liberate grief from the view that grief is past directed or about the past, and thus (3) account for grief in a way that separates it from its closest emotion-neighbor, sorrow, without having to rely on the affective quality of those two emotions.If the passing of the beloved causes the grief but is not what the grief is about, then we can get at the nature of grief by saying its temporal orientation is in the past (the event of the passing), but its temporal meaning is the present and future—the new significance of a world with the pervasive absence that is the world without the beloved. The no-longer of grief is a no-longer oriented by a past (that which is no longer) that is referred a present and future (that which is a no-longer understood as not now as it once was). Looking at the griever’s relation to time can tell us much about the pain and the object of grief, then. As the griever puts the past before himself with a certainty about this world “henceforth,” a look at the griever’s lived sense of the fi nality of the irreversibly lost (1) liberates grief from the tendency in the literature to be reduced to a past-directed emotion, (2) accounts for grief ’s intensity, its affective force or poignancy, and thus (3) enables us to separate grief from sorrow according to its intentionalobject in light of the temporal meaning of these emotions. (shrink)

How should we go about developing emotion taxonomies suitable for a science of emotion? Scientific categories are supposed to be “projectable”: They must support generalizations required for the scientific practices of induction and explanation. Attempts to provide projectable emotion categories typically classify emotions in terms of a limited set of modules, but such taxonomies have had limited uptake because they arguably misrepresent the diversity of our emotional repertoire. However, more inclusive, non-modular, taxonomies also prove problematic, for they struggle to meet (...) the projectability constraint. In this paper, I explain how a developmental approach to emotion, one that utilizes the notion of progressive modularization, can help us approach emotion categorization in a more inclusive and projectable manner. (shrink)

What can features of cognitive architecture, e.g. the information encapsulation of certain emotion processing systems, tell us about emotional rationality? de Sousa proposes the following hypothesis: “the role of emotions is to supply the insufficiency of reason by imitating the encapsulation of perceptual modes” (de Sousa 1987: 195). Very roughly, emotion processing can sometimes occur in a way that is insensitive to what an agent already knows, and such processing can assist reasoning by restricting the response-options she considers. This paper (...) aims to provide an exposition and assessment of de Sousa’s hypothesis. I argue information encapsulation is not essential to emotion-driven reasoning, as emotions can determine the relevance of response-options even without being encapsulated. However, I argue encapsulation can still play a role in assisting reasoning by restricting response-options more efficiently, and in a way that ensures which options emotions deem relevant are not overridden by what the agent knows. I end by briefly explaining why this very feature also helps explain how emotions can, on occasion, hinder reasoning. (shrink)

There is a remarkable trend in contemporary environmentalism that emphasizes ‘accepting responsibility’ for the natural world in contrast to outdated preservationist thinking that shirks such responsibility. This approach is often explained and justified by reference to the anthropocene: this fundamentally new epoch—defined by human domination—requires active human intervention to avert planetary catastrophe. However, in this paper, I suggest this rhetoric encourages a flight from history. This often jubilant, sometimes anxious, yearning for unprecedented human innovation and—ultimately—control in our new millennia mirrors (...) the Futurist movement that took off near the beginning of the last century. Despite the significant differences in the details of how academics have defended this twenty-first-century environmental outlook, they all represent the true flight from history; they too quickly jettison the ideas of historical environmentalists and so misunderstand the environmental values at the heart of preservation that are more salient than ever. (shrink)

There is a growing consensus that emotions contribute positively to human practical rationality. While arguments that defend this position often appeal to the modularity of emotion-generation mechanisms, these arguments are also susceptible to the criticism, e.g. by Jones (2006), that emotional modularity supports pessimism about the prospects of emotions contributing positively to practical rationality here and now. This paper aims to respond to this criticism by demonstrating how models of emotion processing can accommodate the sorts of cognitive influence required to (...) make the pro-emotion position plausible whilst exhibiting key elements of modularity. (shrink)

Empirically-informed approaches to emotion often construe our emotions as modules: systems hardwired into our brains by evolution and purpose-built to generate certain coordinated patterns of expressive, physiological, behavioural and phenomenological responses. In ‘Against Modularity’ (2008), de Sousa argues that we shouldn’t think of our emotions in terms of a limited number of modules because this conflicts with our aspirations for a life of greater emotional richness. My aim in this paper is to defend de Sousa’s critique of modular emotion taxonomies (...) from some obvious rejoinders, and to develop his positive proposal as to how we might reconcile the evidence for emotional modularity with an attitude of disapproval towards rigid emotion taxonomies. (shrink)

To biologise racism is to treat racism as a neurological phenomenon susceptible to biochemical intervention. In 'Race on the Brain: What Implicit Bias Gets Wrong About the Struggle for Racial Injustice', Kahn (2018) critiques cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists for framing racism in a way that tends to biologise racism, which he argues draws attention and resources away from non-individualistic solutions to racial inequality. In this paper I argue the psychological sciences can accommodate several of Kahn’s criticisms by adopting a situated (...) approach to cognition, where we take environmental features as integral to the cognitive processes that manifest racial bias. (shrink)

The “puzzle” of emotional plasticity concerns making sense of two conflicting bodies of evidence: evidence that emotions often appear modular in key respects, and evidence that our emotions also often appear to transcend this modularity. In this paper, I argue a developmentalist approach to emotion, which builds on Karmiloff-Smith’s (1986, 1992, 1994, 2015) work on cognitive development, can help us dissolve this puzzle.

The problem of variability concerns the fact that empirical data does not support the existence of a coordinated set of biological markers, either in the body or the brain, which correspond to our folk emotion categories; categories like anger, happiness, sadness, disgust and fear. Barrett (2006a, b, 2013, 2016, 2017a, b) employs this fact to argue (i) against the faculty psychology approach to emotion, e.g. emotions are the products of emotion-specific mechanisms, or “modules”, and (ii) for the view that emotions (...) are constructed from domain-general “core systems” with the aid of our folk concepts. The conjunction of (i) and (ii), she argues, heralds a paradigm shift in our understanding of emotion: emotions aren’t triggered but made. In this paper, I argue such a shift is premature for a faculty psychology framework can accommodate the neurobiological variability of emotion. This can be done by treating emotions as developmental modules: non-innate systems which behave like modules, but form as a product of ontogenetic development. (shrink)

Recalcitrant emotions are emotions that conflict with your evaluative judgements, e.g. fearing flying despite judging it to be safe. Drawing on the work of Greenspan and Helm, Brady argues these emotions raise a challenge for a theory of emotion: for any such theory to be adequate, it must be capable of explaining the sense in which subjects that have them are being irrational. This paper aims to raise scepticism with this endeavour of using the irrationality shrouding recalcitrant episodes to inform (...) a theory of emotion. I explain how ‘recalcitrant emotions’ pick out at least two phenomena, which come apart, and that there are different epistemic norms relevant to assessing whether, and if so how, subjects undergoing recalcitrant bouts are being irrational. I argue these factors result in differing accounts of the precise way these emotions make their bearers irrational, which in turn frustrates present efforts to adjudicate whether a given theory of emotion successfully meets this challenge. I end by briefly exploring two possible ways a philosophy of emotion might proceed in the face of such scepticism. (shrink)

This article examines the distinction between active matter and active materials, and it offers foundational remarks toward a system of classification for active materials. Active matter is typically identified as matter that exhibits two characteristic features: self-propelling parts, and coherent dynamical activity among the parts. These features are exhibited across a wide range of organic and inorganic materials, and they are jointly sufficient for classifying matter as active. Recently, the term “active materials” has entered scientific use as a complement, supplement, (...) and extension of “active matter.” At the same time, new work in the philosophy of science has considered the problem of how to classify the products of synthetic and laboratory processes, and the extent to which the aims of classifying natural kinds compare and contrasts with the aims of classifying these synthetic kinds. In this article, I apply those considerations to the problems of classifying and characterizing active materials. In doing so, I also argue for a conception of active materials’ coherent dynamical activity as multiscale, rather than emergent, and I discuss how the special non-equilibrium status of active materials factors in to classificatory concerns. (shrink)

Possible worlds models of belief have difficulties accounting for unawareness, the inability to entertain (and hence believe) certain propositions. Accommodating unawareness is important for adequately modelling epistemic states, and representing the informational content to which agents have in principle access given their explicit beliefs. In this paper, I develop a model of explicit belief, awareness, and informational content, along with an sound and complete axiomatisation. I furthermore defend the model against the seminal impossibility result of Dekel, Lipman and Rustichini, according (...) to which three intuitive conditions preclude non-trivial unawareness on any possible worlds model of belief. (shrink)

The paper analyses the thoughts of Paul Feyerabend in the context of the events and influences he experienced in his life. Drawing/reflecting on the broader context sheds further light on his oeuvre and personality.

The inherently subjective nature of consciousness severely limits our ability to make progress on the problem of consciousness. The inability to acquire objective, publicly available data on the phenomenal aspect of consciousness makes evaluating alternative theories very difficult, if not impossible. However, the anomalous nature of subjective states with respect to our conventional theories of the physical world suggests the possibility of considering other anomalous data around consciousness that happen to be objective. For such purposes, I propose that we examine (...) the psi data gathered under laboratory conditions, which generally receive little attention. I wish to consider whether we have theories or frameworks of consciousness that attempt to account for subjective qualia but also fit the psi data. I argue that Russellian monism can be combined with an argument regarding quantum holism to arrive at a version of cosmopsychism that fits very well with the psi data. While I do not argue that such a framework exhausts the theoretical possibilities, I do suggest we can move forward with a framework that has attractive theoretical features and is also consistent with objective data currently on the table. (shrink)

ABSTRACT LeDoux's pioneering work on the neurobiology of fear has played a crucial role in informing debates in the philosophy of emotion. For example, it plays a key part in Griffiths’ argument for why emotions don’t form a natural kind. Likewise, it is employed by Faucher and Tappolet to defend pro-emotion views, which claim that emotions aid reasoning. LeDoux, however, now argues that his work has been misread. He argues that using emotion terms, like ‘fear’, to describe neurocognitive data adds (...) a ‘surplus meaning’: it attributes phenomenal properties to survival circuits which they don’t possess. This paper aims to explore LeDoux's new proposal, and examine the potentially devastating consequences that ensue for the aforementioned views. I end by addressing the worry that these lessons are conditional on LeDoux's own higher-order theory of emotional consciousness being true. (shrink)

The urgent importance of dealing with the climate crisis has led some influential theorists to argue that at least some demands for justice must give way to pragmatic and strategic considerations. These theorists (Cass Sunstein, Eric Posner, and David Weisbach, all academic lawyers, and John Broome, an academic philosopher) contend that the failures of international negotiations and other efforts to change economic policies and practices have shown that moral exhortations are worse than ineffective. Although Broome's position is similar in these (...) respects to that of Sunstein, Posner and Weisbach, it differs in other important respects, including his understanding of the idea of justice, his disagreement with the policy approach (which he calls "efficiency with sacrifice") favored by the economists Nicholas Stern and William Nordhaus, and his proposal for establishing a new international financial institution, a World Climate Bank, in addition to putting a price on carbon. Elsewhere I offer a critical analysis of the position taken by Posner and Weisbach in their book, Climate Change Justice. Their arguments against allowing principles of distributive justice (narrowly understood) to constrain treaty negotiations fail to rule out the principles of John Rawls' Law of Peoples (which is a conception of the moral basis of a just international order, including states' obligations to secure basic human rights for all). Therefore their arguments against shaping climate treaties to reflect any principles of justice do not succeed in supporting their position. Here I offer a critical analysis of Broome's position. I raise and discuss objections to Broome's proposal for a WCB, and I argue that the continued relevance of these objections is contingent on how the proposal for a WCB may get developed. (shrink)

Whether we perceive high-level properties is presently a source of controversy. A promising test case for whether we do is aesthetic perception. Aesthetic properties are distinct from low-level properties, like shape and colour. Moreover, some of them, e.g. being serene and being handsome, are properties we appear to perceive. Aesthetic perception also shares a similarity with gestalt effects, e.g. seeing-as, in that aesthetic properties, like gestalt phenomena, appear to ‘emerge’ from low-level properties. Gestalts effects, of course, are widely observed, which (...) raises the question: do gestalt effects make it plausible that we perceive high-level aesthetic properties? Contra Stokes, this paper argues that they don’t. This is interesting in its own right, but it also points to a more general lesson, namely we should resist the temptation to appeal to gestalt effects to argue for high-level perception. (shrink)

The contemporary view of the relationship between conscious and unconscious intentionality consists in two claims: unconscious propositional attitudes represent the world the same way conscious ones do, and both sets of attitudes represent by having determinate propositional content. Crane has challenged both claims, proposing instead that unconscious propositional attitudes differ from conscious ones in being less determinate in nature. This paper aims to evaluate Crane's proposal. In particular, I make explicit and critique certain assumptions Crane makes in support of his (...) asymmetry, and argue for a conditional claim: if Crane is right that unconscious intentional states are indeterminate, this suggests that conscious intentional states are indeterminate in a similar fashion as well. (shrink)

*This work is no longer under development* Two major themes in the literature on indicative conditionals are that the content of indicative conditionals typically depends on what is known;1 that conditionals are intimately related to conditional probabilities.2 In possible world semantics for counterfactual conditionals, a standard assumption is that conditionals whose antecedents are metaphysically impossible are vacuously true.3 This aspect has recently been brought to the fore, and defended by Tim Williamson, who uses it in to characterize alethic necessity by (...) exploiting such equivalences as: A⇔¬A A. One might wish to postulate an analogous connection for indicative conditionals, with indicatives whose antecedents are epistemically impossible being vacuously true: and indeed, the modal account of indicative conditionals of Brian Weatherson has exactly this feature.4 This allows one to characterize an epistemic modal by the equivalence A⇔¬A→A. For simplicity, in what follows we write A as KA and think of it as expressing that subject S knows that A.5 The connection to probability has received much attention. Stalnaker suggested, as a way of articulating the ‘Ramsey Test’, the following very general schema for indicative conditionals relative to some probability function P: P = P 1For example, Nolan ; Weatherson ; Gillies. 2For example Stalnaker ; McGee ; Adams. 3Lewis. See Nolan for criticism. 4‘epistemically possible’ here means incompatible with what is known. 5This idea was suggested to me in conversation by John Hawthorne. I do not know of it being explored in print. The plausibility of this characterization will depend on the exact sense of ‘epistemically possible’ in play—if it is compatibility with what a single subject knows, then can be read ‘the relevant subject knows that p’. If it is more delicately formulated, we might be able to read as the epistemic modal ‘must’. (shrink)

A pair of compatibilists, John Fischer (2012: ch. 6; n.d.) and Manuel Vargas (2012) have responded to a problem about luck that Alfred Mele (2005, 2006) posed for incompatibilist believers in free will and moral responsibility. They offer assistance to libertarians - at least on this front. In this paper, we assess their responses and explain why what they offer is inadequate for libertarian purposes.

This article substantiates the common intuition that it is wrong to contribute to dangerous climate change for no significant reason. To advance this claim, I first propose a basic principle that one has the moral obligation to act in accordance with the weight of moral reasons. I further claim that there are significant moral reasons for individuals not to emit greenhouse gases, as many other climate ethicists have already argued. Then, I assert that there are often no significant moral (or (...) excusing) reasons to emit greenhouse gases. In any such trivial-cost – but not necessarily trivial-impact – cases, the individual then has an obligation to refrain. Finally, I apply the moral weighing principle to everyday situations of emitting and establish two surprisingly substantial implications: the relevance of virtues to the interpersonal assessment of environmentally harmful actions and the extensive individual ethical obligations that exist short of moral purity. (shrink)

(2014). A Priori Conditionals and the Conceivability of Zombies. Philosophical Papers: Vol. 43, No. 2, pp. 227-253.

This paper begins with a puzzle regarding Lewis' theory of radical interpretation. On the one hand, Lewis convincingly argued that the facts about an agent's sensory evidence and choices will always underdetermine the facts about her beliefs and desires. On the other hand, we have several representation theorems—such as those of (Ramsey 1931) and (Savage 1954)—that are widely taken to show that if an agent's choices satisfy certain constraints, then those choices can suffice to determine her beliefs and desires. In (...) this paper, I will argue that Lewis' conclusion is correct: choices radically underdetermine beliefs and desires, and representation theorems provide us with no good reasons to think otherwise. Any tension with those theorems is merely apparent, and relates ultimately to the difference between how 'choices' are understood within Lewis' theory and the problematic way that they're represented in the context of the representation theorems. For the purposes of radical interpretation, representation theorems like Ramsey's and Savage's just aren't very relevant after all. (shrink)

Este artículo ofrece una perspectiva general de los sermones navideños de Agustín. Navidad es para él más importante de lo que podrían sugerir sus palabras a Jenaro (cf. ep. 55,2). De hecho, los paralelos entre sus predicaciones navideñas y pascuales son llamativos en este aspecto. En los sermones de Navidad, la catequesis se basa en el credo niceno o en el constantinopolitano, más bien que en los credos bautismales de Cuaresma y Pascua. Juantas, las fiestas de Navidad y Pascua celebran (...) tanto teológica como litúrgicamente el único misterio de la salvación. (shrink)

Comparing the passage of Aristotle’s treatise De anima, III, 8, 431b.21-24 and Ecclesiastes 3: 10-11, the author reveals a similar epistemological image: the universe is in the soul of the cognizing subject, for it embraces all existing things in the process of perception and cognition of the world.

The author reveals a fundamentally significant parallel in the definitions of the method of cognition through a comparison of things and essences, attested in Aristotle’s “Eudemian Ethics” and in Ecclesiastes. With this particular attention is paid to the consideration of the semantic field of key terms used in the corresponding formulations. The examples of Ecclesiastes's application of the methodology of cognition developed by him demonstrate that his “pessimistic” and “skeptical” statements are only judgments with which sometimes directly opposite premises are (...) compared in the process of his reasoning, which results in rather optimistic conclusions; so that the “inconsistency” of Ecclesiastes proves to be only seeming. (shrink)

This is a Turkish translation (by by Necmettin Tan) of Stephen Palmquist, ‘Immanuel Kant: A Christian Philosopher?’, Faith and Philosophy 6:1 (January 1989), pp.65-75. For abstract, see the English version, located in the "Kant 2. Phil. of Religion articles" portion of this website.

This is a protocol for a Cochrane Review (Intervention). The objectives are as follows: -/- The main aim of this review will be to assess the effects of changing practitioner empathy or patient expectations for all conditions. The main objective is to conduct a systematic review of randomised trials where the intervention involves manipulating either (a) practitioner empathy or (b) patient expectations, or (c) both.

The common saying, “it is better to give than to receive”, is so widespread that its truth is often merely assumed. But can this ethical maxim withstand a careful philosophical analysis? The relevant concepts (“giving”, “receiving”, and “better”)can be interpreted in too many ways to discuss thoroughly in a single essay. Instead, this essay classifies the various ways of interpreting the distinction between giving and receiving, then explores in depth one of the options, based on a pivotal distinction between active (...) and passive types of both giving and receiving. I defend the controversial claim that there is at least one important sense (arguably the most important, for ethical purposes) in which it is not better to give than receive, but that in this sense precisely the opposite holds true. Indeed, the survival of the human race may depend on our willingness to receive. (shrink)

This essay offers a historical account, as well as an explanation, of the recent rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the Maldives.

The paper is written in response to those who fail to recognize the relation between a patient's mental competency and her state of pain. Some clinicians claim that a proper diagnosis can only be made in the absent of analgesia. Rather, the patient's state of pain directly affects her mental competency and thus her ability to give valid consent. Clinicians should rethink their approach to diagnosis when the patient is in pain.

This paper seeks to elucidate self-constancy as the creative and formative dimension of moral responsibility, through an exploratory review of Fischer’s semi-compatibilist view of freedom. It underscores the value of artistic self- expression by highlighting the narrative meaning of one’s actions, seen as a cohesive sequence for storytelling rather than a mere chronological order. Self-constancy reflects the agent’s capacity to own their actions, making them a reliable and accountable person. In this light, the value of acting freely—akin to the value (...) of artistic self-expression—can be understood as the agent’s conscious effort to live a life of personal meaning, marked by epistemic awareness and creativity, whether life is determined or not. (shrink)

Agriculture is critical to the growth of an agricultural country. Many industries, including agricultural, have been altered as a result of the fast rise of Internet of Things-based technology. In India, farming employs over 70% of the people and generates one-third of the nation's capital. Agriculture-related issues have traditionally hampered the country's progress. The only answer to this challenge is smart agriculture, which involves upgrading conventional agricultural processes. Solutions based on IoT are being developed to autonomously manage and monitor agricultural (...) crops with minimum human intervention. Many elements of technology engaged in the realm of IoT in agriculture are covered in this article. It describes the essential components of IoT-based smart farming. Farmers benefit from IoTbased Agriculture by collecting live knowledge (Temperature, Soil Moisture, and Humidity) of agricultural data. These real-time measurements enable farmers to experiment with new agricultural techniques in order to boost average crop yields as well as plant quality. All of these actions will be controlled by any remote smart device or computer linked to the Internet, and they will be carried out by connecting sensors, Wi-Fi or ZigBee modules, cameras, and actuators with a Raspberry Pi and a microcontroller. (shrink)

Disintegration is the most important step for drug bioavailability because after, the disintegration process, the ingredients of solid dosage forms dissolve and become bioavailable. Generally, the tablets and capsules should be taken with a glass of water otherwise the manufacturer gives instructions to use the proper beverage. Several drugs are taken with different forms of beverages to ensure easy swallowing of the tablet, masking the bad taste of the drug and overcoming the drug aftertaste, these beverages can influence the disintegration (...) of the solid dosage form. The most common cold beverages consumed by the Libyan population are juice, milk, and Coca-Cola. These beverages are consumed without awareness of the possible effect of these beverages on drugs, especially over-the-counter drugs such as analgesic, antipyretic, and anti-inflammatory drugs that are taken without a prescription. This study aimed to evaluate the influence of three beverages, namely: orange juice, milk, and Coca-Cola on the disintegration time of four over-the-counter-drugs: Panadol, Congestal, Brufen, and Reality Extra using disintegration test of drugs in 0.1 N HCL and in hybrid medium prepared by combination of 150 ml 0.1 N HCL and 550 ml of beverage to simulate in vivo condition. The findings show that the orange juice significantly increases the disintegration time of all the investigated drugs. Coca-Cola significantly increases the disintegration time of Reality Extra, and slightly increases the disintegration time of Brufen, Congestal, and Panadol and the full-fat milk significantly increases the disintegration time of Reality Extra and Panadol while slightly increasing the disintegration time for Brufen and Congestal. It is concluded that commonly used beverages affect the disintegration time of the examined over-the-counter drugs. Patients should be advised to take these medications without beverages which may delay the disintegration and the onset of action of the drug. (shrink)

Fallibilism, as a fundamental aspect of pragmatic epistemology, can be illuminated by a study of law. Before he became a famous American judge, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., along with his friends William James and Charles Sanders Peirce, associated as presumptive members of the Metaphysical Club of Cambridge in the 1870s, recalled as the birthplace of pragmatism. As a young scholar, Holmes advanced a concept of legal fallibilism as incremental community inquiry. In this early work, I suggest that Holmes treats common (...) law cases more like scientific experiments than as deductive applications of already clear rules. Common law rules may be seen as a product of 1) the conflicts that occur in society, 2) the channeling of conflicts into legal disputes, 3) the gradual accumulation of judicial decisions classified into groups, and 4) the development of consensual understanding, expressed in rules and principles, as to how future cases should be classified and decided. This does not involve only lawyers and judges. Especially in controversial cases, it may indirectly involve an entire community. The legal process is seen as an extended intergenerational process of inquiry. It illuminates the relation of thought, expression, and conduct among a community of inquirers, applied to the problems of social ordering. (shrink)