It is not often that reading—let alone the reading of comics—is identified as a "need," a function of basic physical "survival": In Argentina, we were forced, as a question of survival, to use metaphor. … Readers often 'saw' hidden details in panels, which, let's be honest, the authors were not even conscious of—they had such a need for it. … A large number of graphic allusions … were evidently the work of [Alberto] Breccia. This is how scenario-writer Carlos Trillo looks (...) back on artist Alberto Breccia's tactic of opaquing the visual in their collaborative comic Buscavidas. The embedding of "graphic allusions" is figured as an incentive to the inventiveness of... (shrink)

Studies on transposable elements of the Ac family have led to different models for excision gap repair in either plants or Drosophila. Excision products generated by the plant transposable elements Ac and Tam3 imply a more or less straightforward ligation of broken ends; excision products of the Drosophila P element indicate the involvement of ‘double‐strand break’ (DSB) repair. Recent findings that excision products of Ac and Tam3 can also contain traces of the element ends indicate, however, that DSB repair might (...) be an alternative repair mechanism in plants. A functional DSB repair mechanism in plants can also be deduced from the observed rapid increases of Ac copy number during plant development and from the involvement of Ac in the generation of internal Ac deletions. On the other hand, alternative repair mechanisms may also be functional in Drosophila, because some of the ‘footprints’ generated upon P excision can be explained by a mechanism that has been postulated for excision gap repair in plants. It is concluded that plants and Drosophila can use similar repair mechanisms, but that the predominance of a certain repair mechanism is determined by the host. (shrink)

Indem er nämlich rein von aufzen her eine Ähnlichkeit in der Lehre von der Übertragung der Staatsgewalt und in der Vertragslehre ...

In this chapter I seek to examine the credibility of Finnis’s basic stance on Aquinas that while many neo-Thomists are meta-ethically naturalistic in their understanding of natural law theory (for example, Heinrich Rommen, Henry Veatch, Ralph McInerny, Russell Hittinger, Benedict Ashley and Anthony Lisska), Aquinas’s own meta-ethical framework avoids the “pitfall” of naturalism. On examination, the short of it is that I find Finnis’s account (while adroit) wanting in the interpretation stakes vis-à-vis other accounts of Aquinas’s meta-ethical foundationalism. I think (...) that the neo-Thomists are basically right to argue that for Aquinas we cannot really understand objective truths about moral standards unless we derive them from our intellective knowledge of natural facts as given to us by the essential human nature that we have. While I find Finnis’s interpretative position on Aquinas wanting, I go on to argue that his own attachment to non-naturalism is justified and should not be jettisoned. Because I think non-naturalism important to the future tenability of a viable natural law ethics (an ethics that is both cognitive and objectivist), I argue that Finnis should, so to speak, “beef up” his “fundamental option” for non-naturalism and more fully avail himself of certain argumentative strategies available in its defense, argumentative strategies that are inspired by the analytical philosophy of G.E. Moore. (shrink)

It is a commonplace to observe that the idea of natural law has polarised contemporary legal philosophy; jurists who are not for it are against it. More than once in its long history, going back to the very origins of philosophy in Western Europe, the natural law has been in eclipse, but it has invariably survived and, as one of its severest critics, Bergbohm, was forced to admit, the funeral orations pronounced over it have proved to be premature. In the (...) nineteenth century Benthamite utilitarianism, Comtist positivism and the historical jurisprudence of von Savigny made a lean period for the natural law. But the twentieth century saw the revival. In 1910 appeared J. Charmont’s Renaissance du droit nature!; the 1920’s saw the first of Jacques Leclercq’s Lefons de droit nature!; in 1930 Charles Grove Haines studied the natural law in contemporary jurisprudence in The Revival of Natural Law Concepts; and in 1936 appeared the first edition of Heinrich Rommen’s Die ewige Wiederkehr des Naturrechts. The movement towards the natural law, of which these books are only some of the indications, was greatly accelerated when men discovered the need for a defence against the excesses of totalitarian power; and, after the war, the Nuremberg trials proceeded upon what amounted to a basis of natural law. Not all, of course, are prepared to admit that the natural law is the only alternative to positivism and relativism in legal philosophy or even that the concept possesses vitality: the contemporary interest in the natural law, Norberto Bobbio has observed rather sourly, is rather like the interest of anatomists in a cadaver. (shrink)