In recent cancer research, strong and apparently conflicting epistemological stances have been advocated by different research teams in a mist of an ever-growing body of knowledge ignited by ever-more perplexing and non-conclusive experimental facts: in the past few years, an 'organicist' approach investigating cancer development at the tissue level has challenged the established and so-called 'reductionist' approach focusing on disentangling the genetic and molecular circuitry of carcinogenesis. This article reviews the ways in which 'organicism' and 'reductionism' are used and opposed (...) in this context, with an aim at clarifying the debate. Methodological, epistemological and ontological implications of both approaches are discussed. We argue that the 'organicist/reductionist' opposition in the present case of carcinogenesis is more a matter of diverging heuristics than a claim about theoretical or ontological (ir)reducibility. As a matter of fact, except for the downward causation claim, which we question, we argue that the organicist arguments are compatible with the reductionist approach. Moreover, we speculate that both approaches, which currently focus on specific entities i.e., genes versus tissues, will need to shift their conceptual frameworks to studying complex arrays of relationships potentially ranging over several levels of entities, as is the case with 'systems biology'. (shrink)

Human expression is open-ended, versatile, and diverse, ranging from ordinary language use to painting, from exaggerated displays of affection to micro-movements that aid coordination. Here we present and defend the claim that this expressive diversity is united by an interrelated suite of cognitive capacities, the evolved functions of which are the expression and recognition of informative intentions. We describe how evolutionary dynamics normally leash communication to narrow domains of statistical mutual benefit, and how expression is unleashed in humans. The relevant (...) cognitive capacities are cognitive adaptations to living in a partner choice social ecology; and they are, correspondingly, part of the ordinarily developing human cognitive phenotype, emerging early and reliably in ontogeny. In other words, we identify distinctive features of our species' social ecology to explain how and why humans, and only humans, evolved the cognitive capacities that, in turn, lead to massive diversity and open-endedness in means and modes of expression. Language use is but one of these modes of expression, albeit one of manifestly high importance. We make cross-species comparisons, describe how the relevant cognitive capacities can evolve in a gradual manner, and survey how unleashed expression facilitates not only language use, but also novel behaviour in many other domains too, focusing on the examples of joint action, teaching, punishment, and art, all of which are ubiquitous in human societies but relatively rare in other species. Much of this diversity derives from graded aspects of human expression, which can be used to satisfy informative intentions in creative and new ways. We aim to help reorient cognitive pragmatics, as a phenomenon that is not a supplement to linguistic communication and on the periphery of language science, but rather the foundation of the many of the most distinctive features of human behaviour, society, and culture. (shrink)

We hypothesize that when honesty is not motivated by selfish goals, it reveals social preferences that have evolved for convincing strategically vigilant partners that one is a person worth cooperating with. In particular, we explain how the patterns of dishonest behavior observed in recent experiments can be motivated by preferences for social and self-esteem. These preferences have evolved because they are adaptive in an environment where it is advantageous to be selected as a partner by others and where these others (...) are strategically vigilant: they efficiently evaluate the expected benefit of cooperating with specific partners and attend to their intentions. We specify the adaptive value of strategic vigilance and preferences for social and self-esteem. We argue that evolved preferences for social and self-esteem are satisfied by applying mechanisms of strategic vigilance to one's own behavior. We further argue that such cognitive processes obviate the need for the evolution of preferences for fairness and social norm compliance. (shrink)

If the desert was long perceived as a hostile and inhospitable territory, it was gradually conquered during the 20th century by the practice of sports and leisure activities. The aim of this articl...

The reception of Dewey's work has suffered, in terms of his political philosophy, from a certain mistrust. First, in the field of education, Dewey's refusal to grant "ultimate" or "high" status to certain values, even those of the French Republic, has made him a mistrusted figure.1 Apart from the pedagogues of Education Nouvelle, which defied the then dominant "Cartesian tradition of the dualistic philosophy of reason" in France, Dewey was little studied before the 1960s. In 2013, Kambouchner perceived an opposition (...) between Dewey and Durkheim;2 however, the French reception of The Public and Its Problems in 1927 also suffered from suspicion and skepticism.3 To begin, there was suspicion with regard to this... (shrink)

Alain Testart was one of the major social anthropologists of his time. He left behind a considerable and original body of work dealing with social structures and their evolution which afforded keys to the reinterpretation of archaeological material. A one-time self-professed Marxist, he had abandoned this theoretical framework many years ago. Nevertheless, since they tackle questions that are crucial to those who want to understand the past in order to change the present, his writings are a precious source of information (...) and of thought-provoking reasoning. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper introduces and transcripts two hitherto unpublished letters by the political economist David Ricardo to his neighbour and intimate friend Thomas Smith of Easton Grey. In these letters dated 11 December 1819 and 12 February 1821, Ricardo mentioned the third edition of his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, as well as his notes on the first edition of Malthus’s Principles of Political Economy Considered with a View to their Applications. Ricardo referred also to several contemporary debates in the (...) House of Commons where he seated for the borough of Minchinhampton since the early part of the year 1819. Amongst these debates are the ‘Seditious Meetings Prevention Bill’; the affair of a pamphlet anonymously published in late 1819 and entitled A Trifling Mistake; the issue of parliamentary reform; and Ricardo’s opposition to Alexander Baring on the origin of the contemporary distress as well as on his project of a return to bimetallism as a measure of relief. (shrink)

A “ late” (6th or 13th c.) coin hoard discovered at Argos This study is devoted to a monetary hoard uncovered during emergency excavations in Argos in 1998 by the IVth Ephorate of Nafplion. The bulk of this hoard consists of Byzantine coins, along side which are found examples attributed to the Vandals as well as earlier coins, some dating to the Hellenistic period. The presence of a half-follis of Justin II indicates that the hoard was deposited ca 575-580, when (...) Peloponnesus faced several successive Avaro-Slav movements. The possible presence of a 12-13th c. coin of Fauquembergues, which would significantly alter the date and the significance of this deposit, is also discussed. (shrink)

Objectives: Recent fMRI studies have shown that it is possible to reliably identify the defaultmode network (DMN) in the absence of any task, by resting-state connectivity analyses in healthy volunteers. We here aimed to identify the DMN in the challenging patient population of disorders of consciousness encountered following coma. Experimental design: A spatial independent component analysis-based methodology permitted DMN assessment, decomposing connectivity in all its different sources either neuronal or artifactual. Three different selection criteria were introduced assessing anticorrelation-corrected connectivity with (...) or without an automatic masking procedure and calculating connectivity scores encompassing both spatial and temporal properties. These three methods were validated on 10 healthy controls and applied to an independent group of 8 healthy controls and 11 severely brain-damaged patients [locked-in syndrome (n ¼ 2), minimally conscious (n ¼ 1), and vegetative state (n ¼ 8)]. Principal observations: All vegetative patients showed fewer connections in the default-mode areas, when compared with controls, contrary to locked-in patients who showed nearnormal connectivity. In the minimally conscious-state patient, only the two selection criteria considering both spatial and temporal properties were able to identify an intact right lateralized BOLD connectivity pattern, and metabolic PET data suggested its neuronal origin. Conclusions: When assess-. (shrink)

Showing a very early interest in Descartes, after having first considered him as a Christian thinker in the perspective of a deconstruction of religious life, Heidegger soon regards him as the major obstacle to the phenomenological analyses he wants to develop, as part of the first ontological search he gave himself: that of a hermeneutics of facticity. Therefore, the latter immediately takes in his work the shape of a hermeneutics of the I think, therefore I am, its author being blamed (...) for having entirely ignored the sense of being in the I am, focused as he is on the thinking ego, the ins and outs of which he develops. But the criticism also applying to Husserl, it is by laying the blame on his master, that Heidegger intends to radicalize the project of his own master, hence the necessity to throw light on the origin and the foundations of what we can call the Cartesian question in Heidegger. (shrink)

Editorial: Folk Epistemology. The Cognitive Bases of Epistemic Evaluation Content Type Journal Article Pages 477-482 DOI 10.1007/s13164-010-0046-8 Authors Christophe Heintz, Department of Cognitive Science, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary Dario Taraborelli, Centre for Research in Social Simulation, Department of Sociology, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK Journal Review of Philosophy and Psychology Online ISSN 1878-5166 Print ISSN 1878-5158 Journal Volume Volume 1 Journal Issue Volume 1, Number 4.

Depuis le début du XXe siècle jusqu’à la fin des années 1960, l’unité de la philosophie oxonienne est garantie par l’adhésion à une certaine forme de réalisme, « Oxford Realism », dont les deux principes sont la primauté de la connaissance sur la croyance et l’absolue indépendance de l’objet connu. On examinera l’histoire de la critique de Hume par le réalisme de l’école d’Oxford de Cook Wilson à Austin, en passant par Price.

What is philosophy of science? Numerous manuals, anthologies or essays provide carefully reconstructed vantage points on the discipline that have been gained through expert and piecemeal historical analyses. In this paper, we address the question from a complementary perspective: we target the content of one major journal of the field—Philosophy of Science—and apply unsupervised text-mining methods to its complete corpus, from its start in 1934 until 2015. By running topic-modeling algorithms over the full-text corpus, we identified 126 key research topics (...) that span across 82 years. We also tracked their evolution and fluctuating significance over time in the journal articles. Our results concur with and document known and lesser-known episodes of the philosophy of science, including the rise and fall of logic and language-related topics, the relative stability of a metaphysical and ontological questioning (space and time, causation, natural kinds, realism), the significance of epistemological issues about the nature of scientific knowledge as well as the rise of a recent philosophy of biology and other trends. These analyses exemplify how computational text-mining methods can be used to provide an empirical large-scale and data-driven perspective on the history of philosophy of science that is complementary to other current historical approaches. (shrink)

How could speaking of oneself be a methodological challenge in the humanities? The paper focuses on cultural studies as a new way of arguing about identity issues. Our thesis is that speaking of oneself entails neither a lack of objectivity nor an overflow of selfishness, but the requirement of self-reflexiveness. As an observer is not neutral but interacts with his field, he thus has to be a aware of his own background and explain it with fairness. So speaking of oneself (...) could be a condition of truth in the humanities. (shrink)

I argue that altruistic behavior and its variation across cultures may be caused by mental cognitive mechanisms that induce cooperative behavior in contract-like situations and adapt that behavior to the kinds of contracts that exist in one's socio-cultural environment. I thus present a cognitive alternative to Henrich et al.'s motivation-based account. Rather than behaving in ways that reveal preferences, subjects interpret the experiment in ways that cue their social heuristics. In order to distinguish the respective roles of preferences and cognitive (...) processes that determine economic behavior, we need more ethnography of strategies “in the wild.”. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to examine the medieval posterity of the Aristotelian and Pyrrhonian treatments of the infinite regress argument. We show that there are some possible Pyrrhonian elements in Autrecourt's epistemology when he argues that the truth of our principles is merely hypothetical. By contrast, Buridan's criticisms of Autrecourt rely heavily on Aristotelian material. Both exemplify a use of scepticism.

With a meta-analysis of 85 studies and 190 experiments, the authors test the relationship between socially responsible investing and financial performance to determine whether including corporate social responsibility and ethical concerns in portfolio management is more profitable than conventional investment policies. The study also analyses the influence of researcher methodologies with respect to several dimensions of SRI on the effects identified. The results indicate that the consideration of corporate social responsibility in stock market portfolios is neither a weakness nor a (...) strength compared with conventional investments; the heterogeneous results in prior studies largely reflect the SRI dimensions under study. (shrink)

For the last three decades, physicists have been moving beyond the boundaries of their discipline, using their methods to study various problems usually instigated by economists. This trend labeled ‘econophysics’ can be seen as a hybrid area of knowledge that exists between economics and physics. Econophysics did not spring from nowhere—the existing literature agrees that econophysics emerged in the 1990s and historical studies on the field mainly deal with what happened during that decade. This article aims at investigating what happened (...) before the 1990s by clarifying the epistemic background that might have paved the way to the emergence of econophysics. This historical exploration led me to highlight the active role played by the Santa Fe Institute by promoting interdisciplinary research on complexity in 1980s. Precisely, by defining three research themes on economic complexity, the SFI defined a research agenda and a way of extending physics\biology to economics. This article offers a possible archeology of econophysics to clarify what could have contributed to the development of a particular episteme in the 1980s easing the advent of econophysics in the 1990s. (shrink)

This essay is intended to explore relations between work and subjectivity (that is, what concerns the individual subject: his or her suffering, pleasure, personal development, and so on). To this end, we shall draw on a body of theory and clinical practice that has been developing in France for some twenty years under the name of the `psychodynamics of work' and ask the three following questions. What is work? This question might seem trivial, but the clinical analysis of the relationship (...) between work and subjectivity shows that work is inseparable from suffering. Working inevitably means experiencing failure—in terms of one's know-how, technique and control of the work process. Is suffering simply an unfortunate consequence of work? We shall attempt to show that in fact it is also at the origin of intelligence and ingeniousness. Which subjectivity? Assuming that we recognise what work owes to subjectivity, we must also reverse the question and ask ourselves what subjectivity (individual development) owes to work. We shall attempt to show that work constitutes a decisive challenge for subjectivity, one that can enhance that subjectivity (self-fulfilment) or, conversely, destroy it (mental pathology). Here, we shall evoke the questions raised by mental pathologies generated by the new forms of work organisation. Subjectivity between work and action? Work is not simply an individual experience. We always work for someone. Working always means encountering others in social relations, or in other words, relations of domination and servitude. Under what conditions do men and women who work agree to cooperate with each other? What conditions allow us to ward off the violence threatening to emerge from the social relations of work? Work offers what is perhaps the most ordinary opportunity to learn about living together (in Aristotle's sense) and democracy. But it can also give rise to the worst—the instrumentalisation of human beings and barbarity. (shrink)

Ectopeptidases are transmembrane proteins present in a wide variety of tissues and cell types. Dysregulated expression of certain ectopeptidases in human malignancies suggests their value as clinical markers. Ectopeptidase interaction with agonistic antibodies or their inhibitors has revealed that these ectoenzymes are able to modulate bioactive peptide responses and to influence growth, apoptosis and differentiation, as well as adhesion and motility, all functions involved in normal and tumoral processes. There is evidence that ectopeptidase-mediated signal transduction frequently involves tyrosine phosphorylation. Combined (...) analyses of gene organization and regulation of ectopeptidases by various physiological factors have provided insights into their structure–function relationships. Understanding the roles of ectopeptidases in pathophysiology may have implications in considering them as therapeutic targets. BioEssays 23:251–260, 2001. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

Si l'on peine à trouver chez les historiens une définition de la dignité car elle semble relever du domaine de la morale, voire du droit, l'honneur n'est devenu un concept que récemment. Pourtant ce sont deux notions qui font agir a priori les mêmes ressorts psychologiques, l'estime de soi et une forme d'orgueil. Les sciences sociales se sont emparées de la notion d'honneur et l'ont analysée au prisme des "sociétés méditerranéennes", lui donnant une définition anthropologique dont la compétition, l'obsession de (...) la pureté sexuelle féminine et la violence vengeresse sont les principaux aspects. En réponse à l'injure, à la violence, à la séduction et au viol de la femme, ce modèle exigeant un acte réparateur est-il applicable au monde antique gréco-romain? Y retrouve-t-on cette obsession du sang et du sexe qui est au cœur du "modèle anthropologique"? L'ouvrage vise à resituer dans leur contexte historique les deux notions d'honneur et de dignité depuis l'époque archaïque jusqu'à celle de l'Antiquité tardive. Il les envisage selon quatre points de vue : le rapport entre l'individu et sa communauté politique, la nature de l'honneur familial et féminin en particulier, la violence, enfin, les formes du déshonneur."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

The classic theory of Common Law is based on the idea of a law derived from immemorial customs that guide judges’ decisions and contribute to the continuity and stability of the legal order. Hobbes, in his criticism of Edward Coke, questions the legal principles that characterize the “spirit of Common Law”. In his view, it is authority and not use that makes the law. This Hobbesian criticism, which can be considered as one of the ­sources of positivist interpretation of customary (...) law, first raises the question of the legal validity of custom but also leads to an original analysis of the court decisions and precedents. Two forms of rationality of law are opposed: one based on custom and knowledge of which is an “artificial reason”, the other based on natural law and the prescriptions of the judges’ individual reason. (shrink)

Opposant du rationalisme et opposé à son pendant, Heidegger n’a de cesse de penser la rationalité métaphysique pour nous prévenir du danger qu’elle contient et que manifeste le monde contemporain. Parce que nuancée – elle est contre une chose sans être pour son contraire – et limitée – elle prévient mais ne guérit rien –, sa position s’est heurtée aux caricatures et aux dénonciations. Aussi est-il quelque bonne raison à en proposer une défense par la bonne compréhension de sa plus (...) fameuse illustration, celle qu’offre le mot « la science ne pense pas ». Après la considération de ce dit, de son dire et de ses redites, l’étude de l’essence de la technique permettra la saisie de cette science en son essence impensée. (shrink)

BACKGROUND: Through their action on the locus coeruleus, ␣ 2-adrenoceptor agonists induce rapidly reversible sedation while partially preserving cognitive brain functions. Our goal in this observational study was to map brain regions whose activity is modified by clonidine infusion so as to better understand its loci of action, especially in relation to sedation. METHODS: Six ASA I–II right-handed volunteers were recruited. Electroencephalogram (EEG) was monitored continuously. After a baseline H215O activation scan, clonidine infusion was started at a rate ranging from (...) 6 to 10 ␮g ⅐ kgϪ1 ⅐ h Ϫ1. A sequence of 11 similar scans was then performed at 8 min intervals. Plasma clonidine concentration was measured. Using statistical parametric mapping, we sought linear correlations between normalized regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF), an indicator of regional brain activity, and plasma clonidine concentration or spindle EEG activity. RESULTS: Clonidine induced clinical sedation and EEG patterns (spindles) comparable to early stage nonrapid eye movement sleep. A significant negative linear correlation between clonidine concentration and rCBF or spindle activity was observed in the thalamus, prefrontal, orbital and parietal association cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, and precuneus. CONCLUSIONS: The EEG patterns and decreases in rCBF of specific brain regions observed during clonidine-induced sedation are similar to those of early stage nonrapid eye movement sleep. Patterns of deactivated brain regions are also comparable to those observed during general anesthesia or vegetative state, reinforcing the hypothesis that alterations in the activity of a common network occur during these modified conscious states. (shrink)

Comme une locomotive lancée à toute allure qui aurait perdu son conducteur, l’histoire des sociétés occidentales se caractériserait, à partir du milieu du xviiie siècle, par une accélération exponentielle qui serait devenue hors de contrôle. On a là une vision de la modernité dont Hartmut Rosa est le représentant le plus connu et qui est aujourd’hui largement partagée.Durant ces dernières décennies, les effets destructeurs de l’activité humaine sur la planète ont augmenté à une vitesse spectaculaire. Mais une sorte d’inversion apparaît (...) : la Nature, vue jadis comme lieu de la répétition, se trouve historicisée et même précipitée vers une fin, tandis que l’Histoire, lieu même du changement, semble étrangement stagnante.Associant étroitement histoire des concepts et réflexion sur la modernité, Christophe Bouton invite à une évaluation critique de ce récit de « l’accélération de l’histoire ». Qui sont ses défenseurs? Quelles sont les significations qu’elle revêt dans ses divers usages théoriques, pratiques et politiques? Vivons-nous vraiment à l’ère de l’accélération généralisée? Ne faut-il pas plutôt varier les perspectives en étant attentifs à d’autres expériences du temps historique, comme le souci du passé ou l’esprit de l’utopie, qui résistent à cette tendance de fond? (shrink)

The concept of “life” certainly is of some use to distinguish birds and beavers from water and stones. This pragmatic usefulness has led to its construal as a categorical predicate that can sift out living entities from non-living ones depending on their possessing specific properties—reproduction, metabolism, evolvability etc. In this paper, we argue against this binary construal of life. Using text-mining methods across over 30,000 scientific articles, we defend instead a degrees-of-life view and show how these methods can contribute to (...) experimental philosophy of science and concept explication. We apply topic-modeling algorithms to identify which specific properties are attributed to a target set of entities (bacteria, archaea, viruses, prions, plasmids, phages and the molecule of adenine). Eight major clusters of properties were identified together with their relative relevance for each target entity (two that relate to metabolism and catalysis, one to genetics, one to evolvability, one to structure, and—rather unexpectedly—three that concern interactions with the environment broadly construed). While aligning with intuitions—for instance about viruses being less alive than bacteria—these quantitative results also reveal differential degrees of performance that have so far remained elusive or overlooked. Taken together, these analyses provide a conceptual “lifeness space” that makes it possible to move away from a categorical construal of life by empirically assessing the relative lifeness of more-or-less alive entities. (shrink)

The explosion of health-related costs in U.S. firms over more than a decade is a huge concern for managers. The initiation of Health and Safety programs at the firm level is an adequate Corporate Social Responsibility initiative to contain this evolution. However, in spite of their documented efficiency, firms underinvest in those programs. This appears as a puzzle for health economists. In this paper, we uncover a strong negative relation of financial leverage to the implementation of H&S programs. The negative (...) impact of debt on investment and CSR activities is generally interpreted as an efficient disciplinary effect of debt on managers. H&S are particularly well suited to revisit this evidence, given their strong profitability and homogeneity across firms. Very interestingly, the negative effect is stronger for firms with high free cash flows, for which debt is used to prevent overinvestment. This strongly suggests that debt, while disciplining managers, also discourages investments which are valuable both for firms and society. (shrink)

L'article présente un raccord entre deux inscriptions déliennes. Ce raccord permet de reconstituer un règlement, dont le but est de veiller au bon fonctionnement du sanctuaire d'Apollon délien et de punir efficacement toute infraction éventuelle.

Les sources proposent deux dates concurrentes pour l’archontat de Damasias : 582/1 et 580/79. Cette étude tente premièrement d’établir que ces propositions sont toutes deux correctes. En effet, le nom de Damasias devait figurer sur la liste des archontes pour les trois années durant lesquelles il exerça cette charge, et non uniquement pour la première. La seconde partie de l’étude propose une interprétation nouvelle des intervalles de temps qui, dans le chapitre XIII de la Constitution d’Athènes, scandent la période séparant (...) le départ de Solon de la désignation de Damasias, afin de les faire correspondre avec les deux termini établis plus haut. Pareille démarche oblige à remettre sur le métier la chronologie de l’archontat solonien qui constitue le point de départ du comput, question que nous aborderons à travers l’implication du législateur dans la première guerre sacrée. (shrink)

Réservant à la pensée de Descartes un traitement plus réservé que l’étude qu’il peut mener de ses autres grands devanciers, Heidegger, à en croire certains commentateurs, dissimulerait mal envers le penseur français son inimitié, celle-ci le prémunissant sans doute du danger de ne pouvoir se relever d’un « cartésianisme inné », dont il fait le reproche aux philosophes. C’est pourtant contre ce préjugé qu’il s’agit ici de lutter en désamorçant, à travers l’éclaircissement de la notion d’ Auseinandersetzung , cet apparent (...) paradoxe : entrant toujours en confrontation avec ses ‘’prédécesseurs’’, jamais pourtant Heidegger n’entre en conflit avec eux. (shrink)

We introduce a new type system called “System ST” , based on subtyping, and prove the basic property of the system. We show the extraordinary expressive power of the system which leads us to think that it could be a good candidate for doing both proof and extraction of programs.