After yeast cells commit to the cell cycle in a process called START, genes required for DNA synthesis are expressed in late G1. Periodicity is mediated by a hexameric sequence, known as a MCB element, present in all DNA synthesis gene promoters. A complex that specifically binds MCBs has been identified. One polypeptide in the MCB complex is Swi6, a transcription factor that together with Swi4 also binds G1 cyclin promoters and participates in a positive feedback loop at START. The (...) finding that Swi6 is directly involved in both START and DNA synthesis gene control suggest a model in which Swi6, activated through its participation in START, serves as the central transcription factor in coordinating late G1 gene expression. The mechanism may be conserved in all eukaryotic cells. (shrink)

How do we theorize and analyze the structural power of finance when global capitalism itself undergoes constant and profound structural transformation? The literature continues to assume that the source of financial structural power is its unique ability to provide credit to the real economy, playing a crucial role in meeting the investment imperative. But recent research documents that most financial market activities no longer facilitate productive investment and can even be a drag on economic development. If the financial sector's primary (...) role is not to support productive investments, then on what basis does it continue to hold structural power? The contributions to this special issue engage with how decades of financialization have transformed the basis of structural power toward alternative functions that have gone unnoticed in the existing literature. These include household and real estate lending that fuels consumption-led growth, concentration and expansion of financial institutions as tools of geo-economic strategy, financing current account deficits that facilitate global imbalances, and wealth preservation that bolsters inequality. (shrink)

A la luz de algunas críticas recientes, en el marco de este texto se busca impulsar un debate que tiene lugar en dos frentes: por una parte, la lógica del origen de la lógica y, por otra parte, la relación entre psicoanálisis y marxismo. Para ello se recuperan algunos textos publicados por Alain Badiou hacia finales de la década de 1960, en los que polemiza con Jacques-Alain Miller alrededor de los concepto de "sutura" y "sujeto" (Zizek), para situar tanto las (...) diversas posiciones como las coherentes reconsideraciones a lo largo de su trayectoria intelectual. En efecto, desde "El concepto de modelo" hasta su más reciente trilogía (Teoría del sujeto, El ser y el acontecimiento y Lógica de los Mundos), se propone una perspectiva que lejos de establecer jerarquías y subordinaciones busca promover conexiones a partir de las especificidades y las diferencias a través de esa vía particular que es la filosofía. De este modo resulta posible apreciar que, pese a su crítica respecto de la primacía de la lógica del significante, los conceptos propuestos por Jacques Lacan funcionaron como una notoria fuente de inspiración para Badiou, especialmente en relación con el sujeto del inconsciente. (shrink)

The "Prisoner's Dilemma" game has been extensively discussed in both the public and academic press. Thousands of articles and many books have been written about this disturbing game and its apparent representation of many problems of society. The origin of the game is attributed to Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher. I quote from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Puzzles with this structure were devised and discussed by Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher in 1950, as part of the Rand (...) CorporationÂ’s investigations into game theory (which Rand pursued because of possible applications to global nuclear strategy). The title "prisonerÂ’s dilemma" and the version with prison sentences as payoffs are due to Albert Tucker, who wanted to make Flood and DresherÂ’s ideas more accessible to an audience of Stanford psychologists. The Prisoner's Dilemma is a short parable about two prisoners who are individually offered a chance to rat on each other for which the "ratter" would receive a lighter sentence and the "rattee" would receive a harsher sentence. The problem results from the fact that both can play this game -- that is, defect -- and if both do, then both do worse than they would had they both kept silent. This peculiar parable serves as a model of cooperation between two or more individuals (or corporations or countries) in ordinary life in that in many cases each individual would be personally better off not cooperating (defecting) on the other. (shrink)

A number of authors have commented on the topic of mandated reporting in cases of suspected child maltreatment and the application of this requirement to researchers. Most of these commentaries focus on the interpretation of current legal standards and offer opinions for or against the imposition of mandated reporting laws on research activities. Authors on both sides of the issue offer ethical arguments, although a direct comparison and analysis of these opposing arguments is rare. This article critically examines the ethical (...) arguments made by authors on both sides of the debate. The conclusion is reached that researchers should be mandated reporters of child maltreatment because the current arguments do not justify their exclusion from current ethical and legal standards. The author makes recommendations for the ethically responsible conduct of research in regard to this topic and legal implications are discussed. (shrink)

Collingwood's well-known dicta about history and its practice are not expressions of a perverse idealism but are rooted in reflection on his own work as historian. The problem which informs his writings on history was to make sense of the discipline of history without opening the way to historical skepticism. The early view of his Speculum Mentis, rooted in an external philosophical stance and not in the actual practice of history, was actually skeptical. In his middle years he regarded history (...) as the science of historical evidence, but this view left obscure the interest of history in the historical past. In his most mature view, as expressed in The Idea of History, Collingwood comes to see how the discipline of history, judged in terms of its own procedures and not by external norms imposed upon it from other sources, is able to make responsible knowledge claims and avoid the threat of skepticism. His well-known views about the historian's re-thinking past thought, the autonomy of history and the historical imagination all play roles to that end, and are entirely reasonable when it is understood what Collingwood intends by them. They are part of his theory of historical knowing, not of historical explanation. (shrink)

Excerpt from Les Etapes de la Philosophie Mathematique Nous voudrions indiquer maintenant comment notre enquete historique nous a guide vers les conclusions que nous avons soutenues dans les dernieres pages de notre travail. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the (...) aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

This paper explores the view that, on Mumford’s account of the purist, to the degree that the purist adopts an aesthetic perspective, he or she doesn’t watch the sport in question, and to the degree that he or she does watch the sport, there is a loss of aesthetic appreciation. The idea that spectators oscillate between partisanship and purism means that the purist is unable to avoid either the Scylla of not actually watching the sport, or the Charybdis of loss (...) of aesthetic appreciation at any given point. Ultimately there seems to be both a sport-shaped hole and an aesthetic-shaped hole in Mumford’s account of the purist. It is argued that oscillation is incapable of dealing with the problem precisely because it is disjunctive in nature and entails the spectator either watching sport from an aesthetic perspective or from a partisan perspective at any given time. An alternative conception of the aesthetic is considered that offers one way of dissolving the purist’s dilemma. (shrink)

Storytellers and their audiences over many millennia have thought that we can learn from fiction. Philosopher Gregory Currie challenges that supposition. He doubts knowing can be founded on imagining, and claims that what we think we learn from fiction is not reli­able in the way science or philosophy is, because not tested through peerreview, experi­ment, and argument. He underrates the role of the imagination in understanding all hu­man language, in fictionality outside formal fictions, and in science. Science is not “reliabilist” (...) as Currie assumes: it aims at bold imaginative discoveries that often overturn what had previously been thought secure and may well be displaced by still newer discov­eries. Fiction may not have peer review, but it is tested on the highly developed intuitions of audiences, on the expertise of critics, and through the corrective competition and inno­vations of other storytellers, as Joyce challenges Homer, or David Sloan Wilson’s recent Atlas Hugged challenges Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. There are strong reasons for predicting that fiction has a prosocial bias from which humans over many millennia have learned to expand their sociality. That does not mean that all exposure to fiction is beneficial. (shrink)

It was proved recently that Telgársky’s conjecture, which concerns partial information strategies in the Banach–Mazur game, fails in models of \. The proof introduces a combinatorial principle that is shown to follow from \, namely: \::Every separative poset \ with the \-cc contains a dense sub-poset \ such that \ for every \. We prove this principle is independent of \ and \, in the sense that \ does not imply \, and \ does not imply \ assuming the consistency (...) of a huge cardinal. We also consider the more specific question of whether \ holds with \ equal to the weight-\ measure algebra. We prove, again assuming the consistency of a huge cardinal, that the answer to this question is independent of \. (shrink)

[From the publisher] "Augustine and Roman Virtue" seeks to correct what the author sees as a fundamental misapprehension in medieval thought, a misapprehension that fuels further problems and misunderstandings in the historiography of philosophy. This misapprehension is the assumption that the development of certain themes associated with medieval philosophy is due, primarily if not exclusively, to extra-philosophical religious commitments rather than philosophical argumentation, referred to here as the ‘sacralization thesis'. Brian Harding explores this problem through a detailed reading of (...) Augustine's City of God as understood in a Latin context, that is, in dialogue with Latin writers such as Cicero, Livy, Sallust and Seneca. The book seeks to revise a common reading of Augustine's critique of ancient virtue by focusing on that dialogue, while showing that his attitude towards those authors is more sympathetic, and more critical, than one might expect. Harding argues that the criticisms rest on sympathy and that Augustine's critique of ancient virtue thinks through and develops certain trends noticeable in the major figures of Latin philosophy. (shrink)

In Defence of Christianity is a short book of Christian apologetics. Acknowledging that reason is not the basis of faith, Brian Hebblethwaite sets out some of the main reasons that can be advanced in support of the Christian faith. He defends the view that belief in God makes most sense of a world that has come up with moral and creative persons and communities, including all that they have produced in the way of culture, mysticism, and sainthood. He also (...) argues that the history of religions, and in particular the history of Israel and the story of Christ and his Church, offers the best diagnosis and solution of the problems that afflict humanity and the most hopeful picture of the ultimate future of creation. (shrink)

Females and males often exhibit conspicuous morphological, physiological and behavioral differences. Similarly, gene expression profiles indicate that a large portion of the genome is sex‐differentially deployed, particularly in the germ line. Because males and females are so fundamentally different, each sex is likely to have a different optimal gene expression profile that is never fully achieved in either sex because of antagonistic selection in females versus males. Males are hemizygous for the X chromosome, which means that recessive male‐favorable de novo (...) mutations on the X chromosome are subject to immediate selection. In females, a recessive female‐favorable mutation on one of two X chromosomes is not available for selection until it becomes frequent enough in the local population to result in homozygous individuals. Given that most mutations are recessive, one would expect that genes or alleles favoring males should accumulate on the X chromosome. Recent microarray work in Drosophila and C. elegans clearly shows the opposite. Why is the X chromosome a highly disfavored location for genes with male‐biased expression in these animals? BioEssays 26:543–548, 2004. Published 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

In this paper I offer a limited defence of “fairness” or “fair play” arguments for political obligation by focussing on one important critique of such arguments, that offered by A. John Simmons. I isolate Simmons's concentration on the idea of “accepting” benefits and argue that, among other difficulties, his criteria for when we can be said to accept a benefit from our political communities are too restrictive. While the scope of the discussion is narrow, I try to sketch ways in (...) which the failings of Simmons's critique are symptomatic of deeper problems with his libertarian approach. S. Afr. J. Philos. Vol.23(3) 2004: 282-291. (shrink)

In the _Nichomachean Ethics_, Aristotle defines three kinds of friendship: utility, pleasure, and virtue. The characters in the films of Sean Baker fit into none of these categories. Friendship is central to all of Baker’s films, but it takes the non-Aristotelian form of “friends, no matter what,” which I interpret as a description of the aporia of friendship, of an impossible friend, or a friend in the realm of fantasy. In other words, friends are only friends when they resist everything (...) friends are supposed to do. Betrayal, lies, and complications sit at the heart of this new definition. One mechanism for this kind of friendship is _mourning_. Friends are only friends when friendship is mourned, or when it is part of a crypt, or a vault for losses that are too traumatic to confront fully, as set out in the work of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Derrida, Nicolas Abraham and Mária Török, and developed by Laurence Rickels. This reading of mourning puts a particular spin on fantasy, for if fantasy is generally assumed to be about wish-fulfillment, then when fantasy reaches into the crypt for inspiration, it is retooled into a vehicle for confronting what is too hard to face. This is the function of friendship in Baker’s films: his friends are Judas figures going against their friends in order to keep their friendship alive. In _Tangerine_ (2015), two transgender sex workers in West Hollywood develop their friendship around a fight over a man. In _Starlet_ (2012), a young woman hides a secret from her elderly female friend, and this friendship is only saved when another actress betrays this secret. In these films, friendship is paradoxically formed by attempting to ruin friendship. Thought on fantasy and mourning will help in defining this type of non-Aristotelian friendship, as well as Freud’s work on the “ambivalence of feeling” from his writing on the First World War. (shrink)