BackgroundCoronary heart disease is closely associated with cognitive impairment, especially in severe cases of heart failure. However, it is unclear whether cardiac systolic function plays a role in the relationship between pre-existing CHD and cognitive impairment in subjects without clinical heart failure.MethodsIn total, 208 subjects from the First Affiliated Hospital of Xi’an Jiaotong University were recruited from June 2014 to January 2015, and were divided into CHD and non-CHD groups according to the inclusion and exclusion criteria. The global cognitive function (...) of all subjects was assessed by the Mini-Mental State Examination and cognitive impairment was defined as the score lower than the cutoff value. Left ventricular ejection fraction was measured using transthoracic echocardiograms. The relationship among pre-existing CHD, LVEF, and cognitive impairment was analyzed by multivariate logistic regression.ResultsIn total, 34 subjects met the criteria of cognitive impairment. Univariate analysis showed that the cognitive impairment prevalence in the CHD group was significantly higher than that in the non-CHD group. Multivariate logistic analysis revealed that CHD was significantly associated with a higher risk of cognitive impairment after adjusting for confounds except for LVEF. However, the OR of CHD decreased when LVEF was further corrected as a continuous variable, and LVEF was negatively associated with the risk of cognitive impairment.ConclusionPre-existing CHD is associated with a higher risk of cognitive impairment, and such an association can be considerably explained by reduced LVEF. An impaired cardiac systolic function may play a key role in the relationship between CHD and cognitive impairment among patients with pre-heart failure conditions. (shrink)

Philosophy, Islamic; Shiites; early works to 1800.

Relativism, the position that things are for each as they seem to each, was first formulated in Western philosophy by Protagoras, the 5th century BC Greek orator and teacher. This book focuses on the challenge to the possibility of expert knowledge posed by Protagoras, together with responses by the three most important philosophers of the next generation, Plato, Aristotle, and Democritus. In his book Truth, Protagoras made vivid use of two provocative but imperfectly spelled out ideas. First, that everyone is (...) a ‘measure’ of the truth, and that everyone is already capable of determining how things are, since the senses are the best and most credible guides to the truth. Second, given that things appear differently to different people, there is no basis on which to decide that one appearance is true rather than the other. Plato developed these ideas into a more fully worked-out theory, which he then subjected to refutation in the Theaetetus. Aristotle argued that Protagoras’ ideas lead to skepticism in Metaphysics Book G, a chapter which reflects awareness of Plato’s reaction in the Theaetetus. Finally, Democritus incorporated modified Protagorean ideas and arguments into his theory of knowledge and perception. There have been many important recent studies of these thinkers in isolation. However, there has been no attempt to tell a single, coherent story about how Democritus, Plato, and Aristotle responded to Protagoras’ striking claim, and to its perceived implications about knowledge, perception, and truth. This book offers a new account of this important chapter in the development of Greek epistemology. (shrink)

Business Ethics: A European Review, EarlyView.

This is the first book to bring together Western and Chinese perspectives on both moral and intellectual virtues. Editors Chienkuo Mi, Michael Slote, and Ernest Sosa have assembled some of the world’s leading epistemologists and ethicists—located in the U.S., Europe, and Asia—to explore in a global context what they are calling, "the virtue turn." The 15 chapters have never been published previously and by covering topics that bridge epistemology and moral philosophy suggest a widespread philosophical turn away from Kantian and (...) Utilitarian issues and towards character- and agent-based concerns. A goal of this volume is to show students and researchers alike that the turn toward virtue underway in the Western tradition is being followed by a similar turn toward virtue in Chinese philosophy. (shrink)

Topics in Cognitive Science, Volume 14, Issue 2, Page 295-310, April 2022.

In this essay I examine the role that reflection plays in knowledge. I argue that a notion of reflection grounded in ancient Chinese philosophy can help us understand second-order or reflective knowledge in both the accounts of Confucius and Ernest Sosa. I also argue that reflection can help us understand the most ideal kind of knowledge. I begin my paper by laying out Confucius’ and Sosa’s accounts of knowledge, while at the same time drawing the reader’s attention to their common (...) concern with reflective knowledge. Next I draw on an account of reflection from Confucius and elaborate on it. With this account of reflection in hand, I return to Confucius’ and Sosa’s accounts of knowledge and show how this account of reflection can help those accounts of knowledge. (shrink)

On the concept of Mokṣa in Indic philosophy.

Study with reference to Indic theory of aesthetics and Sanskrit poetics.

Comparative study of fundamentals of Yoga according to Patañjali and Nātha sect.

Classical interpretation of the ontology of Bhāgavatapurāṇa, mythological text, and Krishna, Hindu deity; viewpoint of the Chaitanya school in Vaishnavism.

Treatise, with commentaries, on ontology; according to the Chaitanya school in Vaishnavism.

This paper advances the claim that skilful reflection is a master virtue in that skilful reflection shapes and corrects the other epistemic and intellectual virtues. We make the case that skilful reflection does this with both competence-based epistemic virtues and character-based intellectual virtues. In making the case that skilful reflection is a master virtue, we identify the roots of ideas central to our thesis in Confucian philosophy. In particular, we discuss the Confucian conception of reflection, as well as different levels (...) of epistemic virtue. Next we set out the Dual Process Hypothesis of Reflection, which provides an explanation of the workings of reflection in relation to Type 1 and Type 2 cognitive processes. In particular, we flag how repetition of Type 2 processes may eventually shape Type 1 processes and produce what we call downstream reflection. We distinguish competence-based epistemic virtues from character-based intellectual virtues. We also explain how our metacognition account of reflection, drawing on a Confucian conception of reflection and the Dual Process Hypothesis of Reflection, explains skilful reflection as a master virtue. Finally we outline an application of our metacognition account of reflection to a current debate in epistemology. (shrink)

Contemporary theatre allows for a script, a scenario, that is exclusively visual. If action is no longer supported by dialogue, this does not mean that it will disappear. It will undoubtedly return in gestural exchange and in a temporality that is expansive or contracted and condensed. Action becomes an opaque enigma. The interpretation of performative action is a journey that the spectator undertakes in a foreign country, where we are forced to learn a new language. It remains to be seen (...) what the reaction and the work of interpretation of the spectator would be when confronted with an action knowingly deprived of any meaningful anchor or referent. Would it merely be confusion? Confusion and an interpretative effort that often comes to an end by a harsh defeat: the aesthetic of the performative represents a moment of rupture in the process of rethinking of the traditional relationship between artist and spectator. (shrink)

During the Eighteenth Century – from Bonnet to Robinet, from Maupertuis to Diderot, and up to Buffon – several new topics of discussion were developed concerning materialism, the critique to finalism, the idea of nature as continuous metamorphosis , the advocacy of providentialism, or, to the contrary, of the role of chaos. As a result, scales, prototypes and types have been employed as interpretative hypotheses influencing the main choices and lines of research. In this regard, however, Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire's work (...) deeply modified the morphological metaphors. The teratologist's eye combined to the mineralogist's perspective established the priority of the material visibility of the living, based on the analysis of its structure rather than of its physiology. The single framework of organistion , on which base every being is formed is thus taken as the condition as well as the limit within which every possible variation in shape is fully justified. (shrink)

The application of financial market criteria to the art world has profoundly changed the reception of works of art. It is channelled through a private circuit of auction houses, galleries and collections, which monopolise the modalities of exhibition to the public and arbitrarily select works and artists, often conforming the taste of the spectators essentially to market criteria. This phenomenon is particularly important in the case of photography, which still remains, especially in some countries, on the fringes of the cultural (...) system of museums and large exhibition spaces. (shrink)

L’esthétique et la bonne table ont beaucoup de choses en commun. Le xviii e siècle hésite entre besoins physiques et raffinements du goût, entre la faim et l’appétit. Les théories de Dubos, de Voltaire et de Diderot sont ici examinées à la lumière des traités français de la « nouvelle cuisine » du siècle des Lumières, qui doivent beaucoup aux principes du bon goût. La cuisine bourgeoise qui s’est progressivement imposée est moins raffinée que que la cuisine aristocratique, mais le (...) cuisinier y est considéré à la fois comme un artiste qui joue avec les saveurs et comme un savant qui sait mélanger les éléments chimiques pour obtenir des mélanges nouveaux et surprenants. Un voyage de la philosophie à la table et retour. (shrink)

Nature doesn’t seem reducible to rigid systems and classifications. Although resorting to metaphors may give rise to contradictions, it allows the elaboration of explanatory models which help us to organize thought and to find orientation in the natural world. Giving form through metaphors stands for seeking the way by which mankind looks for both solutions and new configurations to face nature’s enigmas. The creation of morphological and/or evolutionary metaphors framed in a schematic way what Hugo called “man’s groping in the (...) universe of nature”. Circles, arrows, spirals, scales, etc. stood for research directions: for example, scale became metaphor of an “animal universe” that – as it was thought to be in the Eighteenth Century – organized itself in a bottom-up scale. The circle referred to “metamorphosis” , which reminds us of Goethe’s thinking. Metaphors are never an aim in themselves: they always determine a way of thinking as well as choices and research directions. Such a use of the linguistic image deeply influences the very notion of metaphor as figures of speech . If, on the one hand, metaphor shows unknown structures of nature, on the other it rediscovers its own ‘naturalness’. Starting from the deep interconnection between functional and formal tasks in morphological discussion, metaphor turned from “figure” to “figuration”, Gestaltung , and in doing so it revealed a dynamic structure able to make us understand new links and directions in the sense of a metamorphic nature. Far from limiting itself to a historical retrospection, the methodological significance of having recourse to metaphor profoundly informs the most recent questions in the scientific field and notably in life sciences, in the very moment in which it leads and encourages a renewed dialogue between sciences and philosophy. (shrink)

The work defines three aspects of Souriau’s animal aesthetics by stressing their relevance in the context of early and contemporary ethology: in (1), the concept «biological nature» which is interpreted by Souriau as a realm of appearances and as intrinsically aesthetic; in (2), the concept of animal sensibility, which makes it possible to reframe animals’ artistic behaviours and the sense by which such phenomena establish a meaningful relationship with the environment; in (3), the concept of form, in the description of (...) natural appearances, is presented as it enters into the process of institution that, accordingly to Souriau’s interpretation of biological nature, encompasses non-human animals and humans. All three definitions will allow us a), to present Souriau’s critique of anthropomorphism and his proposal of an «healthy» zoomorphism; b) to reformulate animals’ sensibility in a non-reductionistic fashion; and finally, c) to address the issue with the supposedly sole communicative function of animal artistic behaviors. (shrink)

From picture to photography and back. Tableau vivants, in their gestural synthetic dimension, represent for Diderot the apex of expression that the image can make explicit. Nothing closer to Wall’s poetics. His works show outstanding attention to detail: from scenic design to protagonists’ costumes, from light to actors’ action. And the result is exactly what Diderot saw in the eyes of people observing Chardin’s art: imagination at work.