How the Brain Disease Paradigm Remoralizes Addictive Behaviour

In recent decades, addiction has been medicalized anew through the rise of an influential ‘brain disease paradigm’. This questions the equivalence of addiction to drug dependence by re-emphasizing loss of self-control over unhealthy impulses as the disease locus. While showing continuities with the nineteenth-century vision of addictions as ‘diseases of the will’, neurobiology objectifies disease as disrupted neurochemical transmission and lasting neuroadaptation. The brain disease paradigm emerged together with rapid advances in neuroimaging technology as well as intensified research efforts to confirm cigarette smoking as nicotine addiction. After smoking achieved such recognition in the late 1980s, numerous other unhealthy impulses and appetites have likewise come under neurobiological investigation as prospective cases of addiction. Despite its technoscientific sophistication, neurobiology's biomedicalization of addiction remains as partial and ambiguous as past medicalizations. By confirming moral self-transformation anew as an indispensable component of treatment and recovery, neurobiology revives addiction as a moral disease in the process of its objectification. Furthermore, through its rediscovery of a classic nineteenth-century ‘liberal disease’ at the molecular level, the neurobiology of addiction is acting as a vital moralizing resource in the biomedicalization of health and illness more generally today.     

Kant on Construction,Apriority, and the Moral Relevance of Universalization

This paper introduces a referential reading of Kant’s practical project, according to which maxims are made morally permissible by their correspondence to objects, though not the ontic objects of Kant’s theoretical project but deontic objects (what ought to be). It illustrates this model by showing how the content of the Formula of Universal Law might be determined by what our capacity of practical reason can stand in a referential relation to, rather than by facts about what kind of beings we are (viz., uncaused causes). This solves the neglected puzzle of why there are passages in Kant’s works suggesting robust analogies between mathematics and ethics, since to universalize a maxim is to test a priori whether a practical object with that particular content can be constructed. An apparent problem with this hypothesis is that the medium of practical sensibility (feeling) does not play a role analogous to the medium of theoretical sensibility (intuition). In response I distinguish two separate Kantian accounts of mathematical apriority. The thesis that maxim universalization is a species of construction, and thus a priori, turns out to be consistent with the account of apriority that informs Kant’s understanding of actual mathematical practice.     

Enhanced grain growth in yttria-doped zirconia thin film structures synthesized under photon irradiation

Enhanced grain growth in ultra-thin yttria-doped zirconia (YDZ) films synthesized under ultraviolet (UV) irradiation is reported. The mean grain size in UV-synthesized 7.5 mol% YDZ films nearly 56 nm thick increased to 85 nm upon annealing in an oxygen-rich ambient at 900°C for 1 h, while in thermally grown YDZ they grew only to ～15 nm under identical annealing conditions. In situ electron microscopy kinetic studies reveal an enhanced kinetic constant and self-limiting grain growth behaviour in the UV-synthesized oxide films. The difference between UV and thermally grown films was not significant in undoped films when compared to the case of 7.5 mol% YDZ.     

Stress-enhanced grain growth in a nanostructured aluminium alloy during spark plasma sintering

In this study, we report on the influence of high pressure on the microstructure evolution of cryomilled nanostructured Al alloy powders during spark plasma sintering (SPS). Our experimental results suggest that the particular mechanism that governs grain growth during SPS depends on the magnitude of the applied pressure. In the case of material consolidated at a high pressure (e.g. 500 MPa), grain coarsening occurs via a combination of thermally activated grain boundary (GB) migration, stress-coupled GB migration and grain rotation-induced grain coalescence. In contrast, in the case of the material consolidated at a low pressure (50 MPa), grain growth occurs primarily via thermally activated GB migration.     

Anisotropic grain growth kinetics in nanocrystalline nickel

ABSTRACT

Intriguing properties exhibited by nanocrystalline metals, including a high level of mechanical strength, arise from their nanometer-scale grain sizes. It is critical to determine the evolution of grain size of nanocrystalline materials at elevated temperature, as this process can drastically change the mechanical properties. In this work, a nanocrystalline Ni foil with grain size ～ 25?nm was annealed in situ in an X-ray diffractometer. X-ray diffraction peaks were analysed to determine the grain growth kinetics. The grain growth exponents obtained were ～ 2–4 depending upon the crystallographic direction, indicating the anisotropic nature of the grain growth kinetics.     

The inherent tensile strength of iron

The cohesive energy of Fe as a function of structure, strain and magnetic state has been computed using the full potential linearized augmented-plane-wave method within the framework of density functional theory and the generalized gradient approximation. Calculations corresponding to uniaxial stress in the <100> direction reveal that the ideal tensile strength of bcc Fe is about 14.2GPa and is determined by instability with respect to transformation into an unstable ferromagnetic fcc structure. The low-energy fcc phase is a modulatedantiferromagnetic fcc structure that is connected to the bcc phase via a first-order magnetic transformation and does not compromise its ideal strength.     

Thermodynamic consistency and fast dynamics in phase-field crystal modeling

A general formulation is presented to derive the equation of motion and demonstrate thermodynamic consistency for several classes of phase-field (PF) and PF crystal (PFC) models. It can be applied to models with a conserved and non-conserved phase-field variable, describing either locally uniform or periodic stable states, and containing slow as well as fast thermodynamic variables. The approach is based on an entropy functional formalism previously developed in the context of PF models for locally uniform states [P. Galenko and D. Jou, Phys. Rev. E 71 (2005) p.046125] and thus allows to extend several properties of the latter to PF models for periodic states, i.e., PFC models.     

The Moral-Psychology of the Common Agent – A Reply to Ido Geiger

Ido Geiger's paper ‘What it is the Use of the Universal Law Formula of the Categorical Imperative?’ is part of a growing trend in Kant scholarship, which stresses the significance of the rational competence of ordinary human beings. I argue that this approach needs to take into account that the common agent is an active reasoner who has the means to find out what she ought to do. The purpose of my paper is to show how universality already figures in the active reasoning of pre-theoretical agents in the form of a common universalization test. I present textual evidence for this test, and argue that this conception does not present pre-theoretical moral cognition in an overly intellectualistic or mechanistic way. Finally, I discuss how, on the pre-theoretical level, universalization relates to humanity or a rational agent's special status. Universalization is present to common agents in the form of procedures or questions that we ask ourselves, humanity as an awareness of certain particularly blatant violations of duty. These two different modes of cognition of duty are reflected in two different formulae of the Categorical Imperative.     

Situating Rhetorical Politics in Heidegger's Protopractical Ontology 1923–25: The French Occupy the Ruhr

Abstract

¹ 1 I am grateful to audiences at the University of California, Riverside, the Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and Mind Association at the University of East Anglia, and at Dalhousie University for helpful questions. Sincere thanks go to two anonymous referees and the editors of this Journal. For written comments, detailed discussion and encouragement, I am particularly grateful to Duncan MacIntosh, Susan Sherwin, Richmond Campbell, Lorraine Code, Steven Burns, Guy Longworth, Gary Watson, Margaret Chapman and Guy Blanchard. This paper makes a preliminary case for a central and radical claim. I begin with Bernard Williams’ seldom-faced argument that integrity cannot be a moral virtue because it lacks two key ingredients of moral virtues, namely a characteristic thought and motivation. Whereas, for example, generosity involves the thought that another could use assistance, and the motivation to actually give assistance, integrity lacks these two things essential to morally excellent responses. I show that several maneuvers aimed at avoiding Williams’ challenge fail and that others are likely to remain unpersuasive. The paper concludes by offering an argument to the best explanation: Williams’ important insight is best explained by the supposition that integrity is an epistemic virtue, and an epistemic virtue of a practical sort.