The specialised vocabularies of lawyers, ethicists, and political scientists obscure the roots of many real disagreements. In this book, the distinguished American international lawyer Alfred Rubin provides a penetrating account of where these roots lie, and argues powerfully that disagreements which have existed for 3,000 years are unlikely to be resolved soon. Current attempts to make 'war crimes' or 'terrorism' criminal under international law seem doomed to fail for the same reasons that attempts failed in the early nineteenth century (...) to make piracy, war crimes, and the international traffic in slaves criminal under the law of nations. And for the same reasons, Professor Rubin argues, it is unlikely that an international criminal court can be instituted today to enforce ethicists' versions of 'international law'. (shrink)

1. In the first place, Miller asserts that "Sinnott refuses classification." It is not clear from the context whether this is a direct refusal on the part of Sinnott himself or merely a way of expressing Miller's impression that he has found Sinnott's philosophy so complex that it defies classification. Yet, Miller also states: "I agree with Sinnott and with all who advocate some sort of vitalism" and this would seem to be an association of Sinnott with vitalists. Towards the (...) end of his article, however, Miller bluntly links Sinnott with the well-known materialist Ernst Haeckel. (shrink)

Scarcely fifty years ago the “Indian sphinx” posed enigmas that seemed simple. Known pre-Columbian civilizations were relatively few, and their past, however obscure, could be considered recent in contrast to the millenniums that separate us from the cultures of the ancient Orient. Today this is no longer true. The emergence of new archeological horizons has singularly transformed our summary view of the history of man in the Western Hemisphere. The date of the first human migrations through the Bering Straits has (...) been put back some twenty or thirty thousand years—to the Aztec, Mayan, and Incan civilizations which the Spaniards knew in their full flower. Others have been added which, in turn, give rise to fresh enigmas. (shrink)

Most lymphocytes of the T cell lineage develop along the CD4/CD8 pathway and express antigen receptors on their surfaces consisting of clonotypic αβ chains associated with invariant CD3‐γδε components and ζ chains, collectively referred to as the T cell antigen receptor complex (TCR). Expression of the TCR complex is dynamically regulated during T cell development, with immature CD4+CD8+ thymocytes expressing only 10% of the number of αβ TCR complexes on their surfaces expressed by mature CD4+ and CD8+ T cells. Recent (...) evidence demonstrates that low surface TCR density on CD4+CD8+ thymocytes results from the limited survival of a single TCR component within the ER, the TCRα chain, which has a half life of only 15 minutes in immature thymocytes, compared to >75 minutes in mature T cells. Instability of TCRα proteins in immature CD4+CD8+ thymocytes represents a novel mechanism by which expression of the multisubunit TCR complex is quantitatively regulated during T cell development. In the current review we discuss our recent findings concerning the assembly, intracellular transport, and expression of αβ TCR complexes in CD4+CD8+ thymocytes and comment on the functional significance of TCRα instability during T cell development. (shrink)

The process-dissociation procedure was used to estimate the influence of spatial and form-based processing in the Simon task. Subjects made manual responses to the direction of arrows . The results provide evidence that the form and spatial location of a single stimulus can have functionally independent effects on performance. They also indicate the existence of two kinds of automaticity—an associative component that reflects prior S-R mappings and a nonassociative component that reflects the correspondence between stimulus and response codes.

Beginning in September of 1924, Alfred North Whitehead presented a regular course of 85 lectures which concluded in May of 1925. These represent the first ever philosophy lectures he gave and capture him working out the philosophical implications of the remarkable turns physics had taken in his lifetime. This volume finally recreates these lectures by transcribing notes by W.P. Bell, W.E. Hocking and Louise Heath taken at the time - many of which have only recently been discovered and including (...) hundreds of sketches of Whitehead's blackboard diagrams. This is a unique insight into the evolution of Whitehead's thought during the months when he was drafting his seminal work, Science and the Modern World. (shrink)

Autorzy argumentują, że Bóg może być zarówno wszechmocny, jak i wszechmocny, oraz że Bóg może być zarówno wszechmocny, jak i nieskazitelny. Proponują pięć warunków filozoficznej adekwatności dla koncepcji maksymalnej mocy i przedstawiają analizę, która spełnia wszystkie pięć warunków. Jak argumentują, analiza ta jest zarówno filozoficznie adekwatna, jak i teologicznie akceptowalna.

The mathematical background and content of Greek philosophy, by F. S. C. Northrop.--The one and the many in Plato, by R. Demos.--An introduction to the De modis significandi of Thomas of Erfurt, by S. Buchanan.--Truth by convention, by W. V. Quine.--Logical positivism and speculative philosophy, by H. S. Leonard.--The nature and status of time and passage, by P. Weiss.--Causality, by S. Kerby--iller.--The compound individual, by C. Hartshorne.--The good, by O. H. Lee.

Alfred I. Tauber (ed.), Organism and the Origins of Self. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991. xix + 384 pp., US$ 110.00 (US$ 25.00 paperback). This is a fascinating book based on a 1990 symposium at Boston University. It promises to change the way one conceives of the organism. The authors start from different specializations but provide a most tantalizing feast of ideas. Richard Lewontin commences the book with a strange foreword. Lewontin submits that the concern with the "self (...) and private identity in modern biology is ... only one manifestation of the ideology of individualism that is a shibboleth of our particular [bourgeois] form of social organization" (p. xix). If this is the case, the reader should stop reading the book and ask for her money back. But I advise patience. Tauber's introduction is a mixture of the history of the medical notion of disease and the advocacy of a dialectical concept of the self as the interpenetration of part and whole. Tauber highlights Elie Metchnikoff's appealing idea of phagocytosis as just one form of the active organism striving to attain harmony among competing cells. (shrink)

This article explores the alleged “selectivity problem” for Alfred Mele’s deflationary position on self-deception, a problem that can allegedly be solved only by appealing to intentions to bring it about that one acquires certain beliefs, or to make it easier for oneself to acquire certain beliefs, or to deceive oneself into believing that p. This article argues for the following thesis: the selectivity problem does not undermine this deflationary position on self-deception, and anyone who takes it to be a (...) problem for this position should regard it as being just as serious a problem for those who advocate the intention-featuring solution at issue. (shrink)

This paper discusses the reproductive health knowledge of Nigerian in-school adolescents, with special reference to pregnancy occurrence at first coitus. The data were derived from an Association for Reproductive and Family Health (ARFH) survey carried out in four secondary schools in Ibadan, Nigeria, between August and October 1995. A total of 828 students were interviewed. The results revealed that the majority of sexually active adolescents were not aware of the consequences of their actions. Religious affiliation and number of wives in (...) a male adolescents parents, were found to influence adolescents’ knowledge of pregnancy probability at first coitus. This paper confirms earlier findings that the majority of Nigerian adolescents do not know the consequences of sex. Therefore, a clear-cut plan of action is needed to inform sexually active adolescents through an effective sex education programme. (shrink)

Variable responses to transcranial direct current stimulation protocols across individuals are widely reported, but the reasons behind this variation are unclear. This includes tDCS protocols meant to improve attention. Attentional control is impacted by top-down and bottom-up processes, and this relationship is affected by state characteristics such as anxiety. According to Attentional Control Theory, anxiety biases attention towards bottom-up and stimulus-driven processing. The goal of this study was to explore the extent to which differences in state anxiety and related measures (...) affect visual attention and category learning, both with and without the influence of tDCS. Using discovery learning, participants were trained to classify pictures of European streets into two categories while receiving 30 min of 2.0 mA anodal, cathodal, or sham tDCS over the rVLPFC. The pictures were classifiable according to two separate rules, one stimulus and one hypothesis-driven. The Remote Associates Test, Profile of Mood States, and Attention Networks Task were used to understand the effects of individual differences at baseline on subsequent tDCS-mediated learning. Multinomial logistic regression was fit to predict rule learning based on the baseline measures, with subjects classified according to whether they used the stimulus-driven or hypothesis-driven rule to classify the pictures. The overall model showed a classification accuracy of 74.1%. The type of tDCS stimulation applied, attentional orienting score, and self-reported mood were significant predictors of different categories of rule learning. These results indicate that anxiety can influence the quality of subjects’ attention at the onset of the task and that these attentional differences can influence tDCS-mediated category learning during the rapid assessment of visual scenes. These findings have implications for understanding the complex interactions that give rise to the variability in response to tDCS. (shrink)

It is often suggested that our desires vary in motivational strength or power. In a paper expressing skepticism about this idea, Irving Thalberg asked what he described, tongue in cheek, as "a disgracefully naive question" (1985, p. 88): "What do causal and any other theorists mean when they rate the strength of our PAs," that is, our "desires, aversions, preferences, schemes, and so forth"? His "guiding question" in the paper seems straightforward (p. 98): "What is it for our motivational states (...) to have some degree of power to generate behavior?" Yet, he argued, ''as soon as we endeavor to clarify what philosophers of action and drive theorists in psychology mean by motivational strength, we run across one obscurity after another" (p. 103). This essay is an attempt to answer a more specific version of Thalberg's question. (shrink)

Common sense and philosophical tradition agree that mind makes a difference. What we do depends not only on how our bodies are put together, but also on what we think. Explaining how mind can make a difference has proved challenging, however. Some have urged that the project faces an insurmountable dilemma: either we concede that mentalistic explanations of behavior have only a pragmatic standing or we abandon our conception of the physical domain as causally autonomous. Although each option has its (...) advocates, most theorists have sought a middle way that accommodates both the common-sense view of mind and the metaphysical conviction about the physical world. This volume presents a collection of new, specially written essays by a diverse group of philosophers, each of whom is widely known for defending a particular conception of minds and their place in nature. Contributors include Robert Audi, Lynne Rudder Baker, Tyler Burge, Donald Davidson, Fred Dretske, Ted Honderich, Jennifer Hornsby, Frank Jackson, Jaegwon Kim, Brian P. McLaughlin, Ruth Garrett Millikan, H. W. Noonan, Philip Pettit, Ernest Sosa, and Robert Van Gulick. (shrink)