MPZL3 is a nuclear‐encoded, mitochondrially localized, immunoglobulin‐like V‐type protein that functions as a key regulator of epithelial cell differentiation, lipid metabolism, ROS production, glycemic control, and energy expenditure. Recently, MPZL3 has surfaced as an important modulator of sebaceous gland function and of hair follicle cycling, an organ transformation process that is also governed by peripheral clock gene activity and PPARγ. Given the phenotype similarities and differences between Mpzl3 and Pparγ knockout mice, we propose that MPZL3 serves as a signaling hub (...) that is regulated by core clock gene products and/or PPARγ to translate signals from these nuclear transcription factors to the mitochondria to modulate circadian and metabolic regulation. Conservation between murine and human MPZL3 suggests that human MPZL3 may have similarly complex functions in health and disease. We summarize current knowledge and discuss future directions to elucidate the full spectrum of MPZL3 functions in mammalian physiology. (shrink)

This chapter serves as an introduction to the collected volume. In the first section, we aim to provide background on important themes in social egalitarianism and to set the context for understanding which significant questions the chapters in this book pose and attempt to answer. In this section we focus especially on what could be said to characterize socially egalitarian relationships, on which relationships are of concern, and on what might make social egalitarianism distinct. In the second section, we provide (...) a brief explanation of the structure of the book and each of its chapters. (shrink)

This volume brings together a collection of ten original essays which present new analyses of social and relational equality in philosophy and political theory. The essays analyze the nature of social equality and its relationship with justice and with politics.

What kind of equality should we value and why? Current debate centres around whether distributive equality is valuable. However, it is not the only (potentially) morally significant form of equality. David Miller and T. M. Scanlon have emphasised the importance of social equality—a strongly egalitarian notion distinct from distributive equality, and which cannot be reduced to a concern for overall welfare or the welfare of the worst-off. However, as debate tends to focus on distribution, social equality has been neglected and (...) we do not have a clear understanding of what it is and why it might be valuable. This paper aims to address this gap. (shrink)

Much research is currently being conducted on health care practitioners' experiences of moral distress, especially the experience of nurses. What moral distress is, however, is not always clearly delineated and there is some debate as to how it should be defined. This article aims to help to clarify moral distress. My methodology consists primarily of a conceptual analysis, with especial focus on Andrew Jameton's influential description of moral distress. I will identify and aim to resolve two sources of confusion about (...) moral distress: the compound nature of a narrow definition of distress which stipulates a particular cause, i.e. moral constraint, and the distinction drawn between moral dilemma and moral distress, which implies that the two are mutually exclusive. In light of these concerns, I argue that the definition of moral distress should be revised so that moral constraint should not be a necessary condition of moral distress, and that moral conflict should be included as a potential cause of distress. Ultimately, I claim that moral distress should be understood as a specific psychological response to morally challenging situations such as those of moral constraint or moral conflict, or both. (shrink)

In this chapter, I propose that conceptions of justice in bioethics must be feminist, meaning they must be able to capture how the domains of health, healthcare and medicine exacerbate the subordination of those perceived to be women and girls and how injustice impacts their health. After providing context in the first section, I identify three problems with conceptions of justice in the bioethics literature that interfere with their potential to be feminist. They tend to adopt the ahistoricism and distributivism (...) characteristic of theories of justice that have been dominant in political philosophy, and they often rely on gendered conceptions of health that result in troubling comparisons of men and women’s health. My argument is primarily “negative”: it is a critique of generalist conceptions of justice in bioethics. However, in the final section I present characteristics of what a feminist conception of justice needs to look like and indicate how feminist bioethicists are using such a conception in assessing issues of injustice in bioethics. I emphasize the centrality of actual structural injustices, relational egalitarianism, and the assessment of values in conceptions of health and the health sciences. (shrink)

The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have rippled across the United States’ (US) agri-food system, illuminating considerable issues. US seed systems, which form the foundation of food production, were particularly marked by panic-buying and heightened safety precautions in seed fulfillment facilities which precipitated a commercial seed sector overwhelmed and unprepared to meet consumer demand for seed, especially for non-commercial growers. In response, prominent scholars have emphasized the need to support both formal (commercial) and informal (farmer- and gardener-managed) seed systems to (...) holistically aid growers across various contexts. However, limited attention to non-commercial seed systems in the US, coupled with a lack of consensus surrounding what exactly a resilient seed system looks like, first warrants an exploration into the strengths and vulnerabilities of existing seed systems. This paper seeks to examine how growers navigated challenges in seed sourcing and how this may reflect the resilience of the seed systems to which they belong. Using a mixed-methods approach which includes data from online surveys (n = 158) and semi-structured interviews (n = 31) with farmers and gardeners in Vermont, findings suggest that growers were able to adapt – albeit through different mechanisms depending on their positionality (commercial or non-commercial) within the agri-food system. However, systemic challenges emerged including a lack of access to diverse, locally adapted, and organic seeds. Insights from this study illuminate the importance of creating linkages between formal and informal seed systems in the US to help growers respond to manifold challenges, as well as promote a robust and sustainable stock of planting material. (shrink)

In the first part of this text, the author includes a synthesis of Mircea Eliade and Ioan Petru Culianu’s thoughts regarding the actuality of ancient mythologies and their camouflaged presence within the cultural, political, social, and entertainment practices of the contemporary human being. The main idea of this text is that the Eliade-Culianu paradigm of the myths’ interpretations is of actuality because, in the first place, does not deceive the specific of mythology and explains myths through myths. The text then (...) presents the author’s ideas regarding the camouflaged presence of certain mythological phantasms within the games of the quotidian. Basically, these phantasms refer to the social mythologies reactivated in the world after September, 11, 2001, to mythological content of the neighborhood subcultures’ practices, as well as to the need of reinventing the “black sheep”. The author also mentions the mythological sequences disguised in a successful book - The Da Vinci Code - or in the extravagant car promotions in the contemporary Occident. (shrink)

Starting as a scientific presentation of the phenomenon of cloning, in which etymology, the definitions and some already classical examples are emphasized, this paper actually focuses on a less discussed perspective in nowadays debates on cloning. Thus, the paper aims at showing which are (if any) the mythical-religious structures of cloning, certainly without ignoring the social consequences, the advantages and disadvantages and the juridical effects of cloning. Discussing Mircea Eliadeís novella Les trois graces, the purpose of explaining the subtle reactivation (...) of ancient mythical-religious phantasms by the means of a contemporary scientific experiment such as cloning is reached. (shrink)

The origin and evolutionary dynamics of the spatial heterogeneity in genomic base composition have been debated since its discovery in the 1970s. With the recent availability of numerous genome sequences from a wide range of species it has been possible to address this question from a comparative perspective, and similarities and differences in base composition between groups of organisms are becoming evident. Ample evidence suggests that the contrasting dynamics of base composition are driven by GC‐biased gene conversion (gBGC), a process (...) that is associated with meiotic recombination. In line with this hypothesis, base composition is associated with the rate of recombination and the evolutionary dynamics of the recombination landscape, therefore, governs base composition. In addition, and at first sight perhaps surprisingly, the relationship between demography and genomic base composition is in agreement with the gBGC hypothesis: organisms with larger populations have higher GC content than those with smaller populations. (shrink)

Autonomy is a core value that is deeply entrenched in the moral, legal, and political practices of many societies. The development and deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) have raised new questions about AI’s impacts on human autonomy. However, systematic assessments of these impacts are still rare and often held on a case-by-case basis. In this article, I provide a conceptual framework that both ties together seemingly disjoint issues about human autonomy, as well as highlights differences between them. In the first (...) part, I distinguish between distinct concerns that are currently addressed under the umbrella term ‘human autonomy’. In particular, I show how differentiating between autonomy-as-authenticity and autonomy-as-agency helps us to pinpoint separate challenges from AI deployment. Some of these challenges are already well-known (e.g. online manipulation or limitation of freedom), whereas others have received much less attention (e.g. adaptive preference formation). In the second part, I address the different roles AI systems can assume in the context of autonomy. In particular, I differentiate between AI systems taking on agential roles and AI systems being used as tools. I conclude that while there is no ‘silver bullet’ to address concerns about human autonomy, considering its various dimensions can help us to systematically address the associated risks. (shrink)

Word co‐occurrence patterns in language corpora contain a surprising amount of conceptual knowledge. Large language models (LLMs), trained to predict words in context, leverage these patterns to achieve impressive performance on diverse semantic tasks requiring world knowledge. An important but understudied question about LLMs’ semantic abilities is whether they acquire generalized knowledge of common events. Here, we test whether five pretrained LLMs (from 2018's BERT to 2023's MPT) assign a higher likelihood to plausible descriptions of agent−patient interactions than to minimally (...) different implausible versions of the same event. Using three curated sets of minimal sentence pairs (total n = 1215), we found that pretrained LLMs possess substantial event knowledge, outperforming other distributional language models. In particular, they almost always assign a higher likelihood to possible versus impossible events (The teacher bought the laptop vs. The laptop bought the teacher). However, LLMs show less consistent preferences for likely versus unlikely events (The nanny tutored the boy vs. The boy tutored the nanny). In follow‐up analyses, we show that (i) LLM scores are driven by both plausibility and surface‐level sentence features, (ii) LLM scores generalize well across syntactic variants (active vs. passive constructions) but less well across semantic variants (synonymous sentences), (iii) some LLM errors mirror human judgment ambiguity, and (iv) sentence plausibility serves as an organizing dimension in internal LLM representations. Overall, our results show that important aspects of event knowledge naturally emerge from distributional linguistic patterns, but also highlight a gap between representations of possible/impossible and likely/unlikely events. (shrink)

What is a just way of spending public resources for health and health care? Several significant answers to this question are under debate. Public spending could aim to promote greater equality in health, for example, or maximize the health of the population, or provide the worst off with the best possible health. Another approach is to aim for each person to have "enough" so that her health or access to health care does not fall under a critical level. This latter (...) approach is called sufficientarian. Sufficientarian approaches to distributive justice are intuitively appealing, but require further analysis and assessment. What exactly is sufficiency? Why do we need it? What does it imply for the just distribution of health or healthcare? This volume offers fresh perspectives on these critical questions. Philosophers, bioethicists, health policy-makers, and health economists investigate sufficiency and its application to health and health care in fifteen original contributions. (shrink)

Previous research has shown that stimulus–response (SR) binding and retrieval processes also occur when responses are only observed in another person ( Giesen et al., 2014 ). Importantly, this effect depends on the two individuals interacting interdependently during the task (e.g., competition or cooperation). Interdependence, however, must not necessarily result from task-related demands, but can also reflect an intrinsic feature of a given relationship. The present study examines whether observing responses of one’s romantic partner also produces stimulus-based retrieval of observed (...) responses even if the task itself does not involve interdependence. Participants performed a task pairwise, either with their romantic partner or with a stranger. In a sequential prime-probe design, both participants of a pair gave color responses themselves (actors) or merely observed these (observers) in alternating fashion. As expected, stimulus-based retrieval of observationally acquired SR-bindings occurred only in romantically involved pairs; participants interacting with a stranger showed no retrieval effects. We conclude that mental representations of self and other are more closely intertwined in romantic couples, which produces automatic retrieval of observationally acquired SR binding effects even independently of the task itself. (shrink)

In the fifteenth century, idolatry could be understood as one in a diversity of religious rites. Nicholas of Cusa and subsequent Platonists emphasized that no rite was necessary, only love, and drew on prisca theologia to understand religion throughout the world. By the turn of the sixteenth century, cosmographers such as Peter Martyr Anglerius incorporated these ideas into descriptions of religious and cultural practice. Early Reformation concerns about removing superstitious rites and images, and the Counter-Reformation response to that critique, led (...) to a vilification of heterodox religion as idolatrous and the increasing location of idolatry in cultures outside of Europe. (shrink)

Many social gradients in health appear steeper for men than for women. I refer to this as the “Steepness Puzzle.” This paper explores the ethical implications of this Puzzle. First, it identifies potential explanations for the Steepness Puzzle, including methodological problems. Second, it highlights two harms associated with the methodological explanation: the consequences of biased epistemic practices and the marginalization of women. It also demonstrates how attempts to flatten the gradients in health could disproportionately favor men or reinforce troubling gendered (...) norms. Finally, I suggest ways to address the methodological problems underlying the Puzzle. (shrink)

Benzodiazepines and antidepressants have been shown to change responses to unfairness; however, the effects of their combined use on unfairness evaluation are unknown. This study examines the effects of concomitant benzodiazepines and antidepressants long-term use on the evaluation of fair and unfair offers. To analyze behavioral changes on responses to unfairness, we compared the performance of medicated participants and healthy controls in the Ultimatum Game, both in the proposer and in the respondent role. The results showed that long-term psychotropic users (...) had the worse economic strategy by accepting less offers than control subjects. However, in the proposer role, the unfair offers made by participants were similar between groups. The present results suggest that long-term use of psychotropic medication, specifically the combination of benzodiazepines and antidepressants, may increase the sensitivity to unfairness, resulting in higher rejection rates in conditions where this strategy is the most disadvantageous. (shrink)

The paper attempts at analyzing the bases of interreligious dialogue in the West, as well as the forms of its successful or failed implementation in Romania. The author reviews the causes of the Western recent preoccupation towards the Oriental (especially Indian) religions. Then, he approaches the question of interreligious dialogue from the Romanian perspective, looking for the specific elements that transforms the framework. Thus, he firstly analyzes the failed forms of the interreligious dialogue (that are the stereotypical discourse, the missionary (...) and the proselytism), paying a special attention to the case study of MISA. Finally, he interprets Mircea Eliade’s writings on India as a successful and fruitful dialogue between two cultures and two religions. (shrink)

In this text, the problem of tolerance is discussed in the light of recent works of Umberto Eco and Stefan Afloroaei. The author argues that in the case of tolerance, the success lies not in tolerating the other, (not even in the weaker sense of the word), but rather in accepting him. The acceptance of the Other is the complete and powerful meaning of tolerance. Accep- tance ends where the very presence of the concept of tolerance is undermined and compromised (...) by its history of colonialism and exploitation. Therefore, the primary solution to understand and apply tolerance is the recognition of alterity, in an inner and outer meaning alike. (shrink)

The adaptation-by-binding account and the arousal-biased competition model suggest that emotional arousal increases binding effects for transient links between stimuli and responses. Two highly-powered, pre-registered experiments tested whether transient stimulus-response bindings are stronger for high versus low arousing stimuli. Emotional words were presented in a sequential prime-probe design in which stimulus relation, response relation, and stimulus arousal were orthogonally manipulated. In Experiment 1 (N = 101), words with high and low arousal levels were presented individually in prime and probe displays. (...) In Experiment 2 (N = 170), a high arousing affective word was presented simultaneously with a neutral word during the prime display; in the subsequent probe display, either the arousing or the neutral word repeated or a different high versus low arousal word was shown. Data from both experiments did not demonstrate a modulation of SRBR effects by stimulus arousal and SRBR effects were of equal magnitude for word stimuli of high and low arousal levels. These null results are not in line with binding accounts that hypothesise a modulatory influence of emotional arousal on perception-action binding. (shrink)

Schillers Anthropologie und die Philosophische Anthropologie – dahinter stehen zwei Denksysteme mit zahlreichen Parallelen. Während den Theorien selbst in den letzten Jahrzehnten große Aufmerksamkeit geschenkt wurde, ist die Analogie zwischen ihnen bislang nur wenig erforscht. Die Studie nutzt Schlüsselbegriffe und konstante Denkfiguren, die aus den Werken Schelers, Plessners und Gehlens herausgearbeitet und vor ihrem wissenschaftlichen wie gesellschaftlichen Hintergrund erklärt werden, zu dem heuristischen Zweck einer Neuinterpretation der schillerschen Philosophie vom Menschen. So deckt der typologische Vergleich zwischen den Schriften des späten (...) 18. und des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts strukturelle Parallelen ihrer gedanklichen Konfliktsituationen auf und macht Schillers Theorie vom Menschen als spezifische Philosophie der Moderne begreiflich, die auf die Krisenerfahrungen ihrer Epoche mit einer ästhetischen Anthropologie der Freiheit unter der Bedingung menschlicher Lebendigkeit antwortet. Auf diesem Wege eröffnen sich neue Perspektiven, durch die der Anthropologe Schiller gegenüber dem 'Moraltrompeter von Säckingen' ins rechte Licht rückt und Spannungen seines Denkens, wenn auch nicht aufgelöst, so doch verständlich gemacht werden. (shrink)

Mikhail Bakhtin aimed to invent a phenomenology of the self-experience and of the experience of the other in his early work. In order to realize such a phenomenology he combined different approaches he called idealism and materialism / naturalism. The first one he linked to Edmund Husserl, but did hardly name him directly concerning his phenomenology. Does this intersubjective phenomenology give a hint that Bakhtin used Husserlian ideas more than considered yet? Or did they both invent similar ideas independently from (...) each other? Both thinkers dealt with the issue of intersubjectivity. Husserl judged statements on other psycho-physical realities as metaphysics in the Logical Investigations II, but in his Ideas I he described the others as enhancing one’s experience through their “experiential surpluses”. In the same way Bakhtin described the unique perspective of the other as a mandatory and valuable part of the world of the act in his Philosophy of the Act and his investigations on Author and Hero. In order to understand the influence of Husserl’s phenomenology for Bakhtin’s early philosophy we need to take a look closer at those contentual parallels as well as some paraphrases yet unnoticed. This gives hint for the question if for Bakhtin Husserl was more than just a name dropped. In this article I reconstructed the relations between both thinkers and answered the question if the dating of Bakhtin’s early work until 1928 has to be re-considered. (shrink)