Online food retail has the potential to broaden access to systems of food provision which promote social and environmental quality attributes. This possibility is explored using data from a survey of 365 consumers who purchased food either via internet retailers of local and organic food, or via farmers’ markets, in Vancouver, Canada and Melbourne, Australia. Survey results are analyzed using principal component and regression techniques and interpreted via the theoretical framework of conventions theory. Key findings show that while online retailers (...) of local organic food are not currently attracting more resource constrained consumers, they do appeal to a similar, although broader, array of quality conventions. This research provides new insights into the challenges and opportunities associated with increasing consumer access to alternative food networks, as well as adding to the small number of quantitative studies in the conventions theory literature. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 8, August 2020, Page 27-29.

The guiding questions of this volume are: Can we have knowledge of the external world of things outside our minds?

This book examines the notion of honor with an eye to dissecting its intellectual demise and with the aim of making a case for honor’s rehabilitation. Western intellectuals acknowledge honor’s influence, but they lament its authority. For Western democratic societies to embrace honor, it must be compatible with social ideals like liberty, equality, and fraternity. Cunningham details a conception of honor that can do justice to these ideals. This vision revolves around three elements—character , relationships , and activities and accomplishment (...) . Taken together, these elements articulate a shared aspiration for excellence. We can turn the tables on traditional ills of honor—serious problems of gender, race, and class—by forging a vision of honor that rejects lives predicated on power and oppression. (shrink)

We discuss the concept of spontaneous breaking of gauge symmetry in super-conductors and superfluids and, in particular, the circumstances under which the absolute phase of a superfluid can be physically meaningful and experimentally relevant. We argue that the study of this question pushes us toward the frontiers of what we understand about the quantum measurement process, and underline the need for a new theoretical framework that keeps pace with modern technological capabilities.

This is a collection of writings by the late Lord Quinton, one of the wittiest and most versatile philosophers of his generation.

For nearly two centuries, Kronman argues, the aspirations of American lawyers were shaped by their allegiance to a distinctive ideal of professional excellence. In the last generation, however, this ideal has failed, undermining the identity of lawyers as a group and making it unclear to those in the profession what it means for them personally to have chosen a life in the law.

The development of a framework for coding argumentations schemes in the transcripts of classroom dialogical deliberations on controversial, socioscientific topics is described. Arriving at a coding framework involved resolving a number of complex issues and challenges that are discussed in order to create practical remedies. The description of the development process is based on audio recordings and written exchanges between the authors as they attempted to resolve differences in the interpretation and application of argumentation schemes . These deliberations address theoretical (...) and practical concerns for adapting notions of argumentation schemes to the practical context of analyzing authentic classroom interactions. The framework was developed to accommodate research and curriculum development in school science education. A practical framework for analyzing argumentation in authentic classroom contexts is proposed and implications for science education and argumentation theory are raised. (shrink)

Presents the intellectual milieu of mid-Tang China, particularly the conservative defense of literary pursuits and cultural tradition in the face of political and social uncertainty.

INTRODUCTION The Translation Over eighty years ago Solomon Schechter published a second version of Abot de Rabbi Nathan1 ...

Sidgwick famously claimed that an argument in favour of utilitarianism might be provided by demonstrating that a set of defensible philosophical intuitions undergird it. This paper focuses on those philosophical intuitions. It aims to show which specific intuitions Sidgwick endorsed, and to shed light on their mutual connections. It argues against many rival interpretations that Sidgwick maintained that six philosophical intuitions constitute the self-evident grounds for utilitarianism, and that those intuitions appear to be specifications of a negative principle of universalization (...) (according to which differential treatments must be based on reasonable grounds alone). In addition, this paper attempts to show how the intuitions function in the overall argument for utilitarianism. The suggestion is that the intuitions are the main positive part of the argument for the view, which includes Sidgwick's rejection of common-sense morality and its philosophical counterpart, dogmatic intuitionism. The paper concludes by arguing that some of Sidgwick's intuitions fail to meet the conditions for self-evidence which Sidgwick himself established and applied to the rules of common-sense morality. (shrink)

Graphical AbstractYeast mitochondria frequently mutate, and some dysfunctional mitochondria out-compete wild-type versions. The retrograde response enables yeast to tolerate dysfunction, but also produces ribosomal DNA circles (ERCs). We propose that ERC accumulation increases expression of the rDNA antisense gene, TAR1, which counteracts spread of respiration-deficient mitochondria in matings with wild-type yeast.

J.D. Collier sees Putnam as arguing that metaphysical realism is false.' He sees the argument as proceeding from the background assumption that metaphysical realism has the consequence that truth is 'radically non-epistemic', so that 'an [epistemically] ideal theory could be radically wrong about the world' [3, p. 413]. But, according to Collier, Putnam argues that 'an ideal theory satisfying all of our methodological and theoretical constraints cannot be false' [3, p. 413]. Collier attempts to defend metaphysical realism against this Putnamian (...) attack by distinguishing 'between our ability to state a theory and our ability to conceive its possibility' [3, p. 413]. I will show that this defence is unsuccessful. (shrink)

Few aspects of social behavior tell us more about a culture than those practices that involve the roles it assigns to models and copies. Under interpretation, such conduct reveals its attitudes toward authority and antiquity, its sense of identity and regard for security, and the relative importance that it attached to imitation and invention. To varying degrees, all societies display these concerns, but in none were they so firmly grounded in a considered theory of the relation between prototype and derivative (...) as they were in Byzantium. An example from the domain of law will illustrate, though not explain, this cultural difference. As against the Roman tradition in which the use of copies as evidence in court was prohibited, at least from the tenth century on Byzantine tribunals accepted the legitimacy of certified copies of documents. The very word used for an official copy—ison, meaning equal— suggests the conceptual distinction between it and the terms copie, Kopie, kopiya, and so on, in modern languages, all derived from the Latin word for abundance. (shrink)

Agamben’s self-professed epigonism underwrites his entire project, serving as an even more fundamental methodological concept than the signature, paradigm, and archeology. In Infancy and History, Agamben maintains that transcendental experience is no longer a viable source of philosophical insight; philosophers go astray referring their thinking back to an authentic yet esoteric experience that, itself unspeakable, grounds positive philosophical assertions. Neither mysterious nor ineffable, the experience founding philosophy is the completely patent, non-latent, experience of language’s pure exteriority. Rather than “deconstructing” metaphysics (...) by exposing its hidden contradictions, philosophy must “deconfabulate,” telling fables about philosophy to undo its enchantments, since it is through the fable that the spell of silence, which itself originates in fable, can be broken. This “epigonal” method, which follows after the tradition rather than seeking a new grounding, is itself justified through Agamben’s account, in The End of the Poem, of the Italian, as opposed to Germanic, physiognomy and of a specifically Italian relation to language going back to Dante. To be Italian is to embrace the “deadness” of one’s own language, rejecting the myth of the resurrection of the original potencies of a dead classical language through a living, modern language. (shrink)

The first of its kind in English, _The Anthology of the Works of Ugo Spirito_ offers an account of the complex intellectual life of one of the most original and controversial Italian thinkers of the past century.

Covering scientific, legal, ethical, historical, theological and public policy aspects of human embryo research, the cases for and against are put strongly and clearly. Scientific evidence is cogently presented by leading embryologists.

This paper has two main purposes. First, it will provide an introductory discussion of hyperset theory, and show that it is useful for modeling complex systems. Second, it will use hyperset theory to analyze Robert Rosen’s metabolismrepair systems and his claim that living things are closed to efficient cause. It will also briefly compare closure to efficient cause to two other understandings of autonomy, operational closure and catalytic closure.

Trivers’s theory of parental investment suggests that adults should decide whether or not to invest in a given infant using a cost-benefit analysis. To make the best investment decision, adults should seek as much relevant information as possible. Infant facial cues may serve to provide information and evoke feelings of parental care in adults. Four specific infant facial cues were investigated: resemblance (as a proxy for kinship), health, happiness, and cuteness. It was predicted that these cues would influence feelings of (...) parental care for both sexes, but that resemblance would be more important for men than women because of the importance of paternity uncertainty in the ancestral environment. Seventy-six men and 76 women participated in a hypothetical adoption task in which they made judgments of infant faces. Average zero-order, partial, and component score correlations all revealed that men placed primary emphasis on cues of resemblance, while women placed primary emphasis on cues of health and cuteness (cues of infant quality). The correlations also showed that men placed a significantly greater emphasis on cues of resemblance than did women. (shrink)