Alcohol and the family in Canada

In the context of the family in Western society, alcohol often has been viewed as a problem. This article traces how the use of beverage alcohol in Canada related to the family in the transition from the preindustrial to late-twentieth-century era. Powerful temperance movements in the nineteenth century, and divisive prohibition policies in the early twentieth, attempted to protect the material and moral health of the family. Although liquor laws and social attitudes became more open starting in the 1930s, the medicalized discourse on alcoholism in the 1940s and 1950s was linked to notions of the family. Liberalization of retail and on - premise sales of alcohol in the 1960s and 1970s attempted to portray moderate drinking by adults as "normal" family activity. In the last quarter of the century, a neotemperance movement, reacting to issue such as impaired and driving and teenage drinking, suggested that alcohol's relationship to the family remained highly ambiguous.     

The origin of the term plasticity in the neurosciences: Ernesto Lugaro and chemical synaptic transmission

The Italian psychiatrist Ernesto Lugaro can be regarded as responsible for introducing the term plasticity into the neurosciences as early as 1906. By this term he meant that throughout life the anatomo-functional relations between neurons can change in an adaptive fashion to enable psychic maturation, learning, and even functional recovery after brain damage. Lugaro's concept of plasticity was strongly inspired by a neural hypothesis of learning and memory put forward in 1893 by his teacher Eugenio Tanzi. Tanzi postulated that practice and experience promote neuronal growth and shorten the minute spatial gaps between functionally associated neurons, thus facilitating their interactions. In addition to discovering the cerebellar cells known by his name and advancing profound speculations about the functions of the glia, Lugaro lucidly foresaw the chemical nature of synaptic transmission in the central nervous system, and was the first to propose the usage of the terms "nervous conduction" and "nervous transmission" in their currently accepted meaning.     

Friedrich Heinrich Lewy (1885-1950) and his work

In 1912, Friedrich Heinrich Lewy first described the inclusion bodies named after him and seen in paralysis agitans (p.a.). Tretiakoff had found (1919) that the nucleus niger is most likely to be affected but in a subsequent large-scale series of post-mortem examinations (1923). Lewy was able to confirm this for a minority of cases only, with the exception of those that displayed postencephalitic Parkinsonism (and an unknown number of atypical Parkinson syndrome cases not identified until the 1960s). In a speculative paper (1932), he saw similarities between inclusion bodies in p.a. and viral diseases like lyssa and postulated a viral genesis of p.a. In a historical review of basal ganglia diseases (1942), he did not mention the putative significance of the inclusion bodies for the post-mortem diagnosis. It seems that their importance was seen only after Lewy's death, long after Tretiakoff's initial naming of the 'corps de Lewy'. Lewy, however, had already described their diffuse and cortical distribution (1923). An identification of diffuse Lewy body disease or dementia followed much later. Lewy's career in many diverse branches of neurology and internal medicine was strongly affected by World War I and the difficult situation faced by Jews in Germany. Shortly after the Neurological Institute was founded in Berlin in 1932 (as a clinic and research institute), he was forced, in 1933, to emigrate. His exile in England and the United States mirrors the fate of many German Jews and academics in the first half of the 20th century.     

Descartes' embodied psychology: Descartes' or Damasio's error?

Damasio (1994) claims that Descartes imagined thinking as an activity separate from the body, and that the effort to understand the mind in general biological terms was retarded as a consequence of Descartes' dualism. These claims do not hold; they are "Damasio's error". Descartes never considered what we today call thinking or cognition without taking the body into account. His new dualism required an embodied understanding of cognition. The article gives an historical overview of the development of Descartes' radically new psychology from his account of algebraic reasoning in the early Regulae (1628) to his "neurobiology of rationality" in the late Passions of the soul (1649). The author argues that Descartes' dualism opens the way for mechanistic and mathematical explanations of all kinds of physiological and psychological phenomena, including the kind of phenomena Damasio discusses in Descartes' error. The models of understanding Damasio puts forward can be seen as advanced version of models which Descartes introduced in the 1640s. A far better title for his book would have been Descartes' vision.     

寻求新时间:启蒙与反启蒙的时间性北大核心CSSCI

以赛亚·伯林和其他历史主义的代表人物把启蒙与反启蒙运动塑造成了两种对立的文化。反启蒙是从启蒙内部而起的批判,因此在许多方面两者是重叠的。不过,在关于时间的看法方面,两者是相互冲突的。启蒙的时间更多倾向于年代学意义上的,可以被打上"空洞的"标签。而反启蒙对时间的感知却是"具体的"且与历史时间如出一辙。这两种不同的时间必然造成了在同时性问题方面不同的结果。