Sophie of Hanover on the Soul–Body Relationship

This chapter aims to examine Sophie of Hanover’s original, but often overlooked contribution to the debate over the soul–body relationship. It explains that her main interest is in problems pertaining to the influence of bodily motion on the soul, for instance how the mother’s physiological imagination has an impact on the development of the foetus or how ideas are caused by material determinations. It also argues that Sophie remains sceptical of any metaphysical explanation in the domain of rational psychology, for instance of the Leibnizian hypothesis of pre-established harmony. For a similar reason, I contend that it is very unlikely that Sophie would maintain a materialistic conception of ideas, as commentators have argued.

Newman’s Argument from Conscience

Recent authors, emphasizing Newman’s distaste for natural theology—especially William Paley’s design argument—have urged us to follow Newman’s lead and reject design arguments. But I argue that Newman’s own argument for God’s existence (his argument from conscience) fails without a supplementary design argument or similar reason to think our faculties are truth-oriented. In other words, Newman appears to need the kind of argument he explicitly rejects. Finding Newman’s rejection of natural theology to stem primarily from factors other than worries about cogency, however, I further argue that there is little reason not to pursue design arguments in order to save the argument from conscience.

Applicazioni cliniche degli studi RM perfusionali

In clinical practice, perfusional MR has been successfully proposed in the study of pathophysiology of stroke, seeming able to help in distinguishing ischaemic necrosis from penumbra. In tumor evolution, the main application concerns the attempt of grading and follow up the lesions: areas in initial malignant transformation with microvascular proliferation in absence of endotelial (and BBB alterations), can be recognized. For the above, the tecnique is recommended in guiding cerebral biopsies toward correct triggers. For similar reason the differential evaluation of post-treatment necrosis from recurrency can take advantage from perfusional MR. Moreover, it could be predictable the possibility of employement in following tumors treated with genic therapy, in a simple and atraumatic way. In the field of epilepsy good correlations with PET and SPET has stayed on evaluating temporal perfusion in case of parahippocampal sclerosis. Promising perspectives are also present in metabolic-degenerative field. The correlation with PET studies in case of Alzheimer disesease, in fact, reaches 80%, with clear documentation of temporal and parietal cortical hypoperfusion. Our experience, performed with a 0.5 T operating magnet on more than 80 patients, confirms the results already reported in literature.

Stratification and cut-elimination

In this paper, we show the normalization of proofs of NF (Quine's New Foundations; see [15]) minus extensionality. This system, called SF (Stratified Foundations) differs in many respects from the associated system of simple type theory. It is written in a first order language and not in a multi-sorted one, and the formulas need not be stratifiable, except in the instances of the comprehension scheme. There is a universal set, but, for a similar reason as in type theory, the paradoxical sets cannot be formed.It is not immediately apparent, however, that SF is essentially richer than type theory. But it follows from Specker's celebrated result (see [16] and [4]) that the stratifiable formula (extensionality → the universe is not well-orderable) is a theorem of SF.It is known (see [11]) that this set theory is consistent, though the consistency of NF is still an open problem.The connections between consistency and cut-elimination are rather loose. Cut-elimination generally implies consistency. But the converse is not true. In the case of set theory, for example, ZF-like systems, though consistent, cannot be freed of cuts because the separation axioms allow the formation of sets from unstratifiable formulas. There are nevertheless interesting partial results obtained when restrictions are imposed on the removable cuts (see [1] and [9]). The systems with stratifiable comprehension are the only known set-theoretic systems that enjoy full cut-elimination.