The ability of two or more cells to unite to form a new syncytial cell has been utilized in metazoans throughout evolution to form many complex organs, such as muscles, bones and placentae. This requires migration, recognition and adhesion between cells together with fusion of their plasma membranes and rearrangement of their cytoplasmic contents. Until recently, understanding of the mechanisms of cell fusion was restricted to fusion between enveloped viruses and their target cells. The identification of new factors that take (...) part in developmental cell fusion in C. elegans opens the way to understanding how cells fuse and what the functions of this process are. In this review, we describe current knowledge on the mechanisms and putative roles of developmental cell fusion in C. elegans and how cell fusion is regulated, together with other intercellular processes to promote organogenesis. BioEssays 25:672–682, 2003. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Souvent délaissée, la pensée politique de l’international chez Hobbes et Bentham recèle plus de points communs qu’on ne pourrait le penser. Pour reconstruire philosophiquement cette pensée, en s’attachant plus spécifiquement au rapport entre économie et politique, on explique d’abord leur commune opposition aux colonies et aux politiques étrangères bellicistes. On montre ensuite comment ils comprennent le commerce international, l’économie et le marché en relation avec l’État, et enfin qu’on ne saurait constituer une théorie politique internationale assurant la sécurité, la paix (...) et la prospérité qui soit autonome et séparée de la théorie de l’État. (shrink)

Mental Imagery, whereby we experience aspect of a perceptual scene or perceptual object in the absence of direct sensory stimulation is ubiquitous. Often the existence of mental imagery is demonstrated by asking one’s reader to volitionally generate a visual object, such as closing ones eyes and imagining an apple. However, mental imagery also arises in auditory, tactile, interoceptive, and olfactory cases. A number of influential philosophical theories have attempted to explain mental imagery in terms of belief-based forms of representation using (...) the Dependence Thesis, dependence upon means of access, such as enactivism, or in terms of the similarity of content with perceptual processing. The focus of this paper concerns the later approach and in particular assessing if Nanay’s promissory note that his theory is applicable to modalities other than vision, such as smell, seems likely to be of theoretical tender. The thesis argued for in this paper is that olfactory imagery exists and is best accounted for by considering it as a type of perceptual processing with a unique representational format relative to the olfactory perceptual modality. The paper concludes by summarizing the applicability of Nanay’s theory of mental imagery for olfaction and suggests some further issues that arise when transitioning to multi-modal mental imagery. (shrink)

In response to the racial disparities that plague the American criminal justice system, the Movement for Black Lives calls for an end to policing and punishment “as we know it.” But refusing to punish violent offenses leaves unprotected those most vulnerable to crime, and outright abolition thus appears to undermine black rights and liberties. I call this the decarceration dilemma. After discussing Tommie Shelby and Christopher Lewis’s attempts to resolve the dilemma, I offer my own, which employs a procedural rather (...) than a substantive solution. I lean on the principle of expanded asymmetry (EA), which holds that it is better to underpunish than overpunish. After defending EA, I note that it obtains only under conditions of uncertainty. I then show that because virtually all trials of black offenders meet the uncertainty condition, sentencing authorities are obliged to treat black offenders leniently. I conclude by noting the advantages of my proceduralist approach. (shrink)

Wilson et al. focus on one class of AGL tasks: the cognitively demanding task of detecting non‐adjacent dependencies (NADs) among items. They provide a typology of the different types of NADs in natural languages and in AGL tasks. A range of cues affect NAD learning, ranging from the variability and number of intervening elements to the presence of shared prosodic cues between the dependent items. These cues, important for humans to discover non‐adjacent dependencies, are also found to facilitate NAD learning (...) in several nonhuman animal species. (shrink)

Most proponents of conscientious objection accommodation in medicine acknowledge that not all conscientious beliefs can justify refusing service to a patient. Accordingly, they admit that constraints must be placed on the practice of conscientious objection. I argue that one such constraint must be an assessment of the reasonability of the conscientious claim in question, and that this requires normative justification of the claim. Some advocates of conscientious object protest that, since conscientious claims are a manifestation of personal beliefs, they cannot (...) be subject to this kind of public justification. In order to preserve an element of constraint without requiring normative justification of conscientious beliefs, they shift the justificatory burden from the belief motivating the conscientious claim to the condition of the patient being refused service. This generally involves a claim along the lines that conscientious refusals should be permitted to the extent that they do not cause unwarranted harm to the patient. I argue that explaining what would constitute warranted harm requires an explanation of what it is about the conscientious claim that makes the harm warranted. ‘Warranted’ is a normative operator, and providing this explanation is the same as providing normative justification for the conscientious claim. This shows that resorting to facts about the patient’s condition does not avoid the problem of providing normative justification, and that the onus remains on advocates of conscientious objection to provide normative justification for the practice in the context of medical care. (shrink)

The current research investigates the interaction between thought suppression and individuals’ explicit awareness of their thoughts. Participants in three experiments attempted to suppress thoughts of a prior romantic relationship and their success at doing so was measured using a combination of self-catching and experience-sampling. In addition to thoughts that individuals spontaneously noticed, individuals were frequently caught engaging in thoughts of their previous partner at experience-sampling probes. Furthermore, probe-caught thoughts were: associated with stronger decoupling of attention from the environment, more likely (...) to occur under cognitive load, more frequent for individuals with a desire to reconcile, and associated with individual differences in the tendency to suppress thoughts. Together, these data suggest that individuals can lack meta-awareness that they have begun to think about a topic they are attempting to suppress, providing novel insight into the cognitive processes that are involved in attempting to control undesired mental states. (shrink)

Each had met his match, and happily, in the other. This book is the story of an elective affinity.

Scholars have long recognized the importance of liberty in Milton's early prose, but they tend to center their analysis on republicanism. Although he would go on to express republicanism, Milton's early tracts tie liberty to English political and legal traditions rather than classical ones. Milton, in his early tracts, utilizes the language of the ancient constitution and the common law as he centers liberty on the property and bodies of English citizens, thus framing liberty in distinctly English terms. Additionally, Milton's (...) early prose accepts the power of the monarch, revealing Milton's initial commitment to the existing political structure. (shrink)

Sedlakova and Trachsel (2023) discuss the ethical concerns associated with employing what they term conversational artificial intelligence as therapist substitutes. Given their apprehensions, they...

Nicolas Philibert's 1997 documentary, La moindre des choses, depicts the daily lives of residents and staff at the private psychiatric clinic La Borde, and their production of Witold Gombrowicz's play Operetka. This paper will analyse the aesthetic and ethical implications of La Borde's production of Gombrowicz's play by mapping the documentary, text and production's collective expressions. The film's capacities to reconfigure audience subjectivities through a filmic and intensive entanglement will be explored at length by framing the documentary's cinematography in Félix (...) Guattari's theories of the ethico-aesthetic paradigm and minor cinema. (shrink)

The description for this book, The Conquest of Politics: Liberal Philosophy in Democratic Times, will be forthcoming.

The discussion about the double inscription of the political is a familiar trope among progressive thinkers, whose discussions have focused primarily on the ontological presuppositions of the political at the expense of a theoretical reflection on politics. This article shifts the emphasis to the latter. It develops an image of thought of our political actuality that moves beyond the commonplace observation that politics exceeds electoral representation. Its underlying assumption is that modernity is characterized by a continual process of political territorialization (...) and re-territorialization whereby the political frontier has experienced a series of displacements along a migratory arc that goes from the sovereign state to liberal party democracies. However, it does not stop there, for as politics colonizes new domains and carves up novel places of enunciation, the cartography we inherited from democratic liberalism experiences a Copernican de-centring that throws us into a scenario best described as an archipelago of political domains. This announces the becoming-other of politics, the post-liberal setting of our political actuality. (shrink)

Moral deliberation involves a constant interplay among specific judgments, general moral values and principles, and background beliefs about the world. We may also construct broad moral theories to explain how our judgments and general commitments hang together, but there is little hope of settling on any one comprehensive moral theory.

Critically examining what most people take for granted is central to philosophical inquiry. Philosophers who accept positions on policy making commissions, tasks forces, or committees cannot, however, play the same uncompromisingly critical role in this capacity as they do in the classroom or in their personal research or writing. Still, philosophers have much to contribute to such bodies, and they can do so without compromising their integrity or betraying themselves as philosophers. Keywords: compromise, critical reflection, embryo research, integrity, organ transplantation, (...) policy development, Warnock Committee CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Enmity, War, Intensity Norberto Bobbio once gave a minimal definition of politics, characterizing it as the activity of aggregating and defending our friends, and dispersing and fighting our enemies.1 We know that the instigator of this definition is Carl Schmitt, although his critics have often misunderstood the reference to enmity. What resonates most is the claim that friend-enemy oppositions constitute the basic code of the political and that such oppositions can lead to the extreme case of war. This might explain (...) why part of the debate on The Concept of the Political has revolved around the status of the enemy…. (shrink)

Genetic testing for cancer susceptibility is an application of biotechnology that has the potential both to improve the psychosocial and physical wellbeing of the population and to cause significant psychosocia1 and physical harms. In spite of the uncertain value of genetic testing, it has captured the interest of biotechnology companies, researchers, health care providers, and the public. As more tests become feasible, pressure may increase to make the tests available and reimbursable. Both the benefits and harms of these tests lie (...) not as much in the tests themselves, as in their power to predict or alter the future. The value of the tests does not derive from the information per se, but from the ability to communicate effectively the information to patients and providers, and the behavioral responses of patients, providers, and others to this information. (shrink)

Using a new dataset of environmental, social, and corporate governance company ratings for the European market, this article examines whether socially responsible stock selection adds or destroys value in terms of portfolio performance. From 2004 to 2012, we find the following: Negative screens excluding unrated stocks from a representative European stock universe allow investors to significantly outperform a passive investment in a diversified European stock benchmark portfolio. Additional negative screens based on environmental and social scores neither add nor destroy portfolio (...) value, when cut-off rates are not too high. In contrast, governance screens can significantly increase portfolio performance under similar conditions. Thus, investors in the European stock market can do well while doing good. Because of a loss of diversification, positive screens can cause portfolios to underperform the benchmark. This implies that investors should concentrate on eliminating the worst firms. Our results are robust along several dimensions, namely, choice of performance measure, time, test parametrisation, portfolio weighting scheme, approximation of the risk-free rate, and consideration of transaction costs. (shrink)

The aim of this paper, which more generally is a contribution to political theology, is to show in what way the conception of peace in Nicholas of Cusa’s De Pace Fidei is dependent upon a specific philosophical anthropology. Within it any link between human being and law is replaced by the subject of faith. Central to the argument is demonstrating the ways in which this anthropological position is necessarily interarticulated with the larger metaphysical positions that are advanced across a range (...) of Cusanus’ texts. (shrink)

Necro-advertising refers to the use of deceased celebrities in advertising. This practice offers unique advantages to brands that seek to benefit from positive associations with timeless celebrities at a more affordable cost than celebrity endorsement. Nevertheless, how consumers actually respond to the use of deceased celebrities in advertising remains under-theorized. This research is the first to empirically examine consumers’ ethical judgments about necro-advertising practices. In particular, drawing from the signaling theory, it demonstrates the impact of consumer inferences about the existence (...) of a legal agreement for using deceased celebrities’ images on brand ethicality. The results of two experimental studies show that a low-equity brand is more likely to be perceived as unethical when using necro-advertising since consumers have limited knowledge about these brands. Conversely, our findings confirm how a high level of equity prevents from the aforementioned adverse effects since these brands’ assets send a credible signal about their capability to get approval from a deceased celebrity’s estate for the use of its image. While deepening current knowledge on the perceived ethicality of necro-advertising practices, this research uncovers the moderating effect of equity on consumer inferences about brand ethicality. The results also suggest managerial caveats and guidelines for low-equity brands. In particular, while necro-advertising may have a negative impact on the perceived ethicality of low-equity brands, disclosing a statement about a contractual engagement with the deceased celebrity’s estate can mitigate this negative effect by providing an unequivocal signal that the brand is acting ethically. (shrink)

ABSTRACTSome liberal-cosmopolitan theorists have sought to justify preventive war by proposing new institutions meant to ensure the accurate evaluation of non-imminent threats, and also make any wa...

The paper deals with the status of referents for claims among conflicting claimants when multiplicity is a fact and there is no room for a substantive notion of community. It develops a notion of contingent and 'impure' universal as it arises in the negotiation of equivalence in scenarios of conflict between claimants. My argument is that measures of equivalence cannot conform to the caricature of absolute, all-encompassing referents intent on subjugating difference in the name of sameness; that a reflection about (...) decisions and the validity of claims - i.e. concerning singularity - cannot be reduced to a simple application of the rule; and that decisions are lodged in the undecidable terrain between norms and their redescription, which means that the status of universals is an effect of continual political battles. Key Words: conflict • deliberation • negotiation • particularism • undecidability • universals. (shrink)

This collection brings together new papers addressing the philosophical challenges that the concept of a Devil presents, bringing philosophical rigor to treatments of the Devil. Contributors approach the idea of the Devil from a variety of philosophical traditions, methodologies, and styles, providing a comprehensive philosophical overview that contemplates the existence, nature, and purpose of the Devil. While some papers take a classical approach to the Devil, drawing on biblical exegesis, other contributors approach the topic of the Devil from epistemological, metaphysical, (...) phenomenological, and ethical perspectives. This volume will be relevant to researchers and scholars interested in philosophical conceptions of the Devil and related areas, such as philosophers of religion, theologians, and scholars working in philosophical theology and demonology. (shrink)

Par leurs contributions à ce livre, vingt-trois chercheur.e.s rendent hommage à leur collègue qui souvent fut aussi leur professeure, l’historienne juive Paula Hyman. Comme le rappelle Richard I. Cohen dans son avant-propos, P. Hyman fut une historienne des Juifs de France et les publications qu’elle a consacrées à la vie des Juifs dans la France contemporaine ont constitué un apport considérable à ce champ de recherches. Toutefois le volume dont il est ici question célèbre P. Hyman pour ses...

Terrorisme valt buiten alle democratische kaders en daarom hebben democratische landen er geen adequate antwoorden op. Het enige antwoord op de krachten, die chaos en angst zaaien is een wereldwijde open samenleving, met politieke vrijheid en ruimte voor religies.

Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, and Joel and Ethan Coen’s film adaptation of the same name, deliver two separate critiques of sacrificial violence through their particular renderings of Carla Jean Moss’s death scene, as they correspond, respectively, to the theories of René Girard and Slavoj Žižek. In both film and novel, the chase narrative offers a concrete representation of runaway acquisitive mimesis engendering resentment and cathartic violence. This violence is symbolically manifest in the character of Anton Chigurh. An (...) assassin whose killings often employ a ritual of chance, Chigurh is a symbol for both the violence foundational to culture and the fascinating draw such violence continues to have .. (shrink)

How should those who value reasonable pluralism navigate ethical and epistemological challenges related to speech and inquiry in higher education? We propose the ethical pursuit of public knowledge as a guiding vision for public colleges and universities with the understanding that other institutions will serve different purposes. The ethical criterion of mutuality calls for engagement across difference and reciprocal recognition of others’ basic equality and liberty. To maintain epistemic legitimacy, knowledge-production processes in these institutions should elevate ideas warranted by public (...) reasons that have withstood rigorous critical scrutiny above those that have not. Some forms of speech—including the expression of extremist views on both the Right and the Left—will prove unreasonable and incompatible with the guiding vision and should therefore be marginalized within these institutions. (shrink)

Familial disclosure of genetic information is an important, long-standing ethical issue that still gives rise to much debate. In France, recent legislation has created an innovative and unprecedented procedure that allows healthcare professionals (HCPs), under certain conditions, to disclose relevant information to relatives of a person carrying a deleterious genetic mutation. This article will analyse how HCPs in two medical genetics clinics have reacted to these new legal provisions and show how their reticence to inform the patients’ relatives on their (...) behalf leads them to use this option sparingly. (shrink)

Mathematics is often positioned as either neutral or non-neutral by mathematicians. However, in practice, issues of neutrality arise in situated contexts, and the positioning of mathematics as either neutral or non-neutral is done for many purposes. We interpret positioning of mathematical work, with different degrees of neutrality, as a response to conflicts of interest and power dynamics. Using a framework from ecofeminist critical theory, we examine the ways that mathematical neutrality is positioned and communicated to different audiences in ways that (...) can appear contradictory. Our goal is to demonstrate that the neutral/non-neutral dualism is insufficient for the analysis of neutrality in mathematics, which requires instead a robust analytical lens. We situate our discussion of these issues in the context of communication regarding the mathematical analysis of partisan gerrymandering in the United States. Through a study of communication to different audiences by mathematicians regarding mathematical techniques used to study partisan gerrymandering, we illustrate various ways in which dualistic views of neutrality are insufficient to describe and understand the complicated role of neutrality in this context. (shrink)

Dans cet article, l’auteur présente de façon synthétique ce qui définit l’approche de la planétarité qu’il a mise en œuvre au sein de son programme triannuel The Terraforming mené au Strelka Institute de Moscou. Son approche accélérationniste contraste avec les sensibilités actuellement dominantes dans les pensées écologistes européennes.

The brain's reliance on glucose as a primary fuel source is well established, but psychological models of cognitive processing that take energy supply into account remain uncommon. One exception is research on self-control depletion, where debate continues over a limited-resource model of self-control depletion. This model argues that transient reduction in self-control after exertion of prior self-control is caused by the depletion of brain glucose, and that self-control processes are special, perhaps unique, in this regard. This model has been argued (...) to be physiologically implausible in several recent reviews. This paper attempts to correct some inaccuracies that have occurred during debate over the physiological plausibility of this model. We contend that not only is such limitation of cognition by constraints on glucose supply plausible, it is well established in the neuroscience literature across several cognitive domains. Conversely, we argue that there is no evidence that self-control is special in regard to its metabolic cost. Mental processes require physical energy, and the body is limited in its ability to supply the brain with sufficient energy to fuel mental processes. This article reviews current findings in brain metabolism and seeks to resolve the current conflict in the field regarding the physiological plausibility of the self-control glucose-depletion hypothesis. (shrink)