Gastrulation is the process of early development that reorganizes cells into the three fundamental tissue types of ectoderm, mesoderm, and endoderm. It is a coordinated series of morphogenetic and molecular changes that exemplify many developmental phenomena. In this review, we explore one of the classic developmental systems, the sea urchin embryo, where investigators from different backgrounds have converged on a common interest to study the origin, morphogenesis, and developmental regulation of the endoderm. The sea urchin embryo is remarkably plastic in (...) its developmental potential, and the endoderm is especially instructive for its morphological and molecular responsiveness to inductive cell interactions. We start by examining and integrating the several models for the morphogenetic mechanisms of invagination and tissue elongation, the basic processes of endoderm morphogenesis in this embryo. We next critique the proposed mechanisms of inductive gene regulation in the endoderm that exemplifies a concept of modular transcriptional regulation. Finally, we end with an examination of the current molecular models to explain cell fate determination of the endoderm. Recent progress at the molecular level should soon allow us to explain the seminal experimental observations made in this embryo over a hundred years ago. BioEssays 21:459–471, 1999. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

Sexually reproducing metazoans establish a cell lineage during development that is ultimately dedicated to gamete production. Work in a variety of animals suggests that a group of conserved molecular determinants act in this germ line maintenance and function. The most universal of these genes are Vasa and Vasa‐like DEAD‐box RNA helicase genes. However, recent evidence indicates that Vasa genes also function in other cell types, distinct from the germ line. Here we evaluate our current understanding of Vasa function and its (...) regulation during development, addressing Vasa's emerging role in multipotent cells. We also explore the evolutionary diversification of the N‐terminal domain of this gene and how this impacts the association of Vasa with nuage‐like perinuclear structures. (shrink)

The Comment gives corroborative support to Stróżyński’s thesis by using resources from I.6[1].7–9 and VI.5[23].1. The nature of the soul and its ascent to intellect and the One is clarified in I.6[1].7, as the soul’s ascent recaptures its own nature. It identifies not only with intellect, but directly with the One, needing only its own powers, making union with the One within one’s reach and common to all. A barrier to seeing this has been the 19th century description of mysticism (...) as rare and incommunicable. I.6[1].8–9 add both a method of reading texts and the cosmos in ancient mystical fashion and a redefinition of light for seeing the One. In VI.5[23].1, Plotinus provides a fundamental sense of self that captures an ancient wisdom that identifies the self internally with the One not as totally other but as intimately immanent to the soul. (shrink)

In the present paper I describe a general formal semantic scheme for the interpretation of quantum mechanics (QM), and on the basis of this scheme I examine the modal interpretation of QM — both the Copenhagen and the anti-Copenhagen variants — proposed by van Fraassen [19, 20, 21], This is intended to be a fragment of a larger work [12] which additionally investigates a number of closely related interpretations, including ones proposed by Bub and Demopoulos [1, 2, 3, 4], Fine (...) [5, 6], and Krips [16, 17].Formal semantically speaking (see, e.g., Thomason [18]), a logic L may be characterized as an ordered pair, where SYN is the underlying syntax (language) of L, and SEM is the semantics of L, which consists of a class of semantic assignments on SYN. (shrink)

This book, focusing on the history of religious and political thinking in early modern Russia, demonstrates that Russia’s path toward enlightenment began long _before_ Peter the Great’s opening to the West. Examining a broad range of writings, G. M. Hamburg shows why Russia’s enlightenment constituted a precondition for the explosive emergence of nineteenth-century writers such as Fedor Dostoyevsky and Vladimir Soloviev.

The interpretation of quantum mechanics is discussed from the viewpoint of quantum logic (QL). QL is understood to concern the possible properties that can be ascribed to a physical system SYS. The micro-state of SYS at any given moment t is identified with the set of all properties actualized by SYS at time t. Minimal adequacy requirements are proposed for all interpretations of micro-states. A strict interpretation is defined to be one according to which the properties ascribable to SYS are (...) individuated by the projection operators on the associated Hilbert space. Two strict interpretations are examined. Kochen's interpretation is also discussed, and it is argued that it is not a strict interpretation. (shrink)

Management plays an important role in reinforcing ethics in organizations. To support this aim, managers must use incentive and goal programs in ethical ways. This study examines experimentally the potential ethical costs associated with incentive-driven and goal-induced employee behavior from a managerial perspective. In a quasi-experimental setting, 243 MBA students with significant professional work experience evaluated a hypothetical employee’s ethical behavior under incentive pay systems modeled on a business case. In the role of the employee’s manager, participants evaluated the ethicality (...) of the employee’s incentive-driven and goal-induced ethical/unethical behavior and the outcomes of behavior, with consequences that were either favorable or unfavorable to the organization. The results indicated that participants discounted the ethical considerations of incentive-driven and goal-induced behavior when consequences were favorable to the organization. Participants’ morals and outcome orientations were also significantly related to their ethical judgments and intentions to intervene. The implications of these findings for research and practice are discussed. (shrink)

This paper uses the notion of Galois-connection to examine the relation between valuation-spaces and logics. Every valuation-space gives rise to a logic, and every logic gives rise to a valuation space, where the resulting pair of functions form a Galois-connection, and the composite functions are closure-operators. A valuation-space (resp., logic) is said to be complete precisely if it is Galois-closed. Two theorems are proven. A logic is complete if and only if it is reflexive and transitive. A valuation-space is complete (...) if and only if it is closed under formation of super-valuations. (shrink)

This volume, the twenty-seventh year of published proceedings, contains papers and commentaries presented to the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy during academic year 2010-11. The papers treat thinkers ranging from Philolaus, Plato and Aristotle, to Plotinus.

Volume XXX contains papers and commentaries presented to the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy during academic year 2013-14. They feature: _Philebus_, _Republic_, _Theaetetus_ and _Alcibiades I_, _Sophist_, and _Symposium_, _Apology_ and _Phaedo_, on pleasure, knowledge, the city, and the philosopher.

Pickering & Garrod (P&G) consider the possibility that inner speech might be a product of forward production models. Here I consider the idea of inner speech as a forward model in light of empirical work from the past few decades, concluding that, while forward models could contribute to it, inner speech nonetheless requires activity from the implementers.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Plotinus by Lloyd P. GersonGary M. Gurtler S.J.Lloyd P. Gerson. Plotinus. The Arguments of the Philosophers. London: Routledge, 1994. Pp. xviii + 338. Cloth, $59.95.This challenging account of Plotinus’ philosophy is appropriately published in a series called The Arguments of the Philosophers. Professor Gerson confronts Plotinus’ position on some major issues in the history of philosophy with an array of counterarguments, ancient, medieval, and modern. More often than (...) not, Plotinus’ position is presented cogently and sympathetically, refuting the notion that Plotinus is merely a philosophical lightweight. The book is rigorous, demanding more than passing knowledge of the history of philosophy and its current trends, especially the Anglo-American. It will thus serve to establish Plotinus as a reputable philosopher among analytic philosophers. Students of Plotinus will find it controversial. Both results will enhance the scholarly work on Plotinus that has flourished recently, indicated in Gerson’s extensive bibliography, although less apparently utilized in establishing his account of Plotinus’ philosophy.The author himself admits that the book is difficult and he indicates where he thinks Plotinus is to blame (225). It thus falls to the reviewer to indicate difficulties traceable to the author. The symptoms are easily seen in the portrait of Plotinus that emerges from these pages. It is a strange one indeed: a Plotinus who is scholastic in organization, Thomist in holding the real distinction and post-Cartesian in epistemology. The Platonic character of Plotinus’ Neoplatonism is not merely absent, but positively excluded by Gerson’s insistence on fitting Plotinus to the Procrustean bed of modern logic, eliminating experience as of dubious philosophical worth. This is most noticeable in his treatment of mysticism, but occurs also when he considers the social or intersubjective dimension of human life and, more crucially, the methodological starting point of Plotinus’ philosophy. Gerson’s method proceeds, in scholastic fashion, from the First Principle to those ontological and logical principles that are deduced from it, coming finally to consider the soul and its capacities. This inversion of Plotinus’ [End Page 128] position entails constant difficulties as Gerson drives his logical engine to make deductions where none are necessary.Attention to Plotinus’ Platonism entails two interlocking assumptions excluded in the above portrait. One concerns the nature and limits of language itself. Language and discursive thought in general are essentially images of what in some way is and they are thus subordinate to the more direct contact of experience, whether sensible or intelligible. The other concerns the nature of experience itself as the starting point of Plotinus’ reflection, moving from the immediate awareness of the empirical self (Gerson’s “endowed self”) to those conditions that make such awareness possible in the dependence both of the soul and the sensible world on the intelligible world, and ultimately on the One. That Plotinus begins with the human situation can be seen in V 3[49] 6,1–11, where he contrasts precisely the necessity of Intellect with the persuasion possible for the soul. He recognizes that whatever the allure of logical thought it is not sufficient to convince the soul. It does not take into account the status of language as an image and the experience of the soul as essentially embodied. It is characteristic of post-Cartesian philosophy, on the contrary, to read necessity into the soul and to assume that propositional thought is identical with the real and brings certitude with it. This denies the analogous character that human knowledge has for someone like Plotinus. Similar problems arise about the nature of intellect.Within the logical parameters that Gerson has set for his interpretation, the influence of Plotinus on and the claims made about him with regard to religion (203–12) and mysticism (218–24) fall by the way. This may please those who would otherwise ignore Plotinus’ philosophy, but it will not persuade people on either side of the religious divide. The issue, however, is less about a specific kind of experience than about any kind of experience that cannot be reduced to logical categories. Ultimately, the claim being made is that what cannot be captured in logical categories is no more than an empty surd. Gerson, in fact, reverses... (shrink)

An examination of Plotinus’s treatise on matter, II 4[12], reveals interesting paradoxes. He seems to use Aristotle’s matter to explain Plato’s receptacle. Attention to the text reveals that both matter and the receptacle are, in fact, recast in terms of the otherness of Plato’s Sophist. By this, Plotinus articulates how matter and the receptacle function as the condition of possibility for the sensible cosmos. His analysis of related terms further supports this rapprochement: privation and substrate exclude quality and quantity as (...) attributes of matter; and the indefinite, the unlimited, size and mass echo the paradoxical language of the Timaeus. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Photo-credit to Chicago Sun-Times and James Mescall. 4 "The town is beastly and the weather was vile": Bertrand Russell in Chicago, 1938-1939 Visiting Chicago in 1867, Lord Amberley offered his wife an appreciation of the city: "The country around Chicago is flat and ugly; the town itself has good buildings but has a rough unfinished appearance which does not contribute to its attractions."l While Bertrand Russell is known to (...) have accepted and developed particular aspects of his father's thought, it is more likely that his own visits to Chicago, rather than this nineteenth -century appraisal, brought him to the opinion that "the town is beastly and the weather was vile."z One might suppose Russell's longest stay reaffirmed his image of the city suggested in a 1922 article expressing fear of "a slow destruction of the civilization of China" through which "the big towns will become like Chicago."3 Here, Russell appears to have envisioned this city as an amorphous collection of streets and structures manifesting the least desirable values of American capitalism. In his Autobiography a single paragraph is devoted to his 1938-1939 experience of "the bleak hideousness of Chicago" (II, p. 332). Yet there was far more to Russell's six-month sojourn than the little he chose to recall in print. One-half year is a significant period in anyone's life, even for a man who lived ninety-seven (and a half) years. This article, then, presents an account of Russell's coming to and departure from Chicago and his diverse activities while a professor at the University of Chicago. The need to secure some permanent academic position was strongly felt by Russell in the mid-1930s. His ~aertrand and Patricia Russell, The Amberley Papers (London: Allen and Unwin, 1966), p. 57. zThe Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (Boston: Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1968), II, p. 332. 3"How Washington Can Help China", New Republic, 4 Jan. 1922, p. 154. / 5 second marriage had ended and a third was beginn~ng; ~ar­ ticipation in the Beacon Hill experimen~ w~s behlnd hlmj and journalistic writing, though ~ contlnulng so~rce of income, was ceasing to be attractlve: No~ a d~slre to return to philosophical work, recurrlng fl~anclal troubles, and the fear of another, far m~r~ destr~ctlve.European~ar all contributed toward his declslon to lnvestlgate Amerlcan possibilities. My feelings are threefold: (a) I' have a lot of ideas in,my head that I long to work at and believe important (b) I am faced with such poverty that I may be unable to give a proper education to the child that is coming (c) That Europe is no place for children with the imminent risk of war--particularly England, which is ' 4 likely to suffer most in the next war. At first, with the help of his American publisher, Warder Norton, Russell approached Princeton University hoping for a research post "on the foundations of mathematics and philosophy" (letter to Norton, 13 Jan. 1937). But no prospect materialized, and he requested Norton to inquire at universities such as Columbia and Harvard. Finally in the spring of 1937 Russell received a letter from Professor Scott Buchanan who then represented the University of Chicago's Committee on the Liberal Arts (COTLA). Buchanan offered a place on COTLA with only minor teaching duties. Writing to Norton that this "seems a very agreeable job", Russell nevertheless suggested the post "may be reactionary and the sort of thing my radical friends would think I ought not to be connected with. '" it is a committee concerned with a conservative reform of education." But the invitation promised adequate time for independent research, and Russell, quite characteristically, concluded "my wish is to accept, but not if doing so would be wicked" (letter of 30 Apr. 1937). However, Buchanan, having soon thereafter left the University of Chicago for a Maryland college, corresponded no further with Russell. The COTLA job offer was officially withdrawn. Only in January 1938 did Russell again hear from a University of Chicago spokesman. Aware that Russell had been somewhat brusquely treated, Professor Richard P. McKeon of the Department of Philosophy now wrote "in the... (shrink)

A scholarly study of the Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus (204/5-270) and his understanding of the soul; its chapters include: beauty and the good, forgetting the self, matter as indefinite and incorporeal, omnipresence and incorporeality, and omnipresence and transcendence. The work confirms much recent scholarly consensus on Plotinus, but many of the author's interpretations and general conclusions also give constructive challenges to some existing modes of understanding Plotinus's thought. The arguments and their textual evidence, with the accompanying Greek, provide the reader with (...) direct evidence for testing these conclusions as well as appreciating the nature of Plotinus' philosophizing. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:RANSOM'S GOD WITHOUT THUNDER: REMYTHOLOGIZING VIOLENCE AND POETICIZING THE SACRED Gary M. Ciuba Kent State University From tree-lined Vanderbilt University of 1930 Nashville, the modernist poet and critic John Crowe Ransom longed to hear in his imagination the God who thundered fiercely in ancient Greece, Rome, and Israel. The God of sacrifice who in Homer's Iliad, "his thunder striking terror," received libations from the warring armies (230). The (...) God of jealousy who in Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound "drove the sleepless thunderbolt, / plunged the fire spurting shaft/ down" on Typhon for defying heaven with his violence (46). The God of vengeance who in Ovid's Metamorphoses sent "blinding / Thunder [to shake] Olympus, and Pelim / Thrust down by heaven's bolt crashed over Ossa" when the giants piled mountain upon mountain to reach Jove's throne (35). The God ofviolence who in Psalm 78:48 delivered the cattle ofthe obstinate Egyptians "to the hail, and their flocks to hot thunderbolts" or who in 1 Samuel 7:10 "thundered with great thunder" to smite the Philistines. In God Without Thunder: An Unorthodox Defense of Orthodoxy Ransom attacked the modern heresy that deprived the deity ofsuch awful might and summoned Americans to live under a new myth of sacred violence. IfRansom listened with the ears ofthe Methodist faith in which he had been raised, he might have heard how the god of old was muted at the university where he studied and later taught. Ten years before Ransom was born, Methodist-sponsored Vanderbilt had eliminated the lectureship of naturalist Alexander Winched because hisPre-Adamites had challenged the Creation story in Genesis. But in 1914, when Ransom returned to his alma Gary M. Ciuba41 mater to begin more than two decades of teaching there, the Methodists ended their affiliation with Vanderbilt because of a dispute about church governance of the university (Bailey 9-10, 31-4). When the Scopes Trial caused a furor in 1925, Ransom was invited by Vanderbilt to condemn the Fundamentalists to the southeast in Dayton. He refused-not because he sided with the anti-Darwinists but because he believed that the tyranny of science was threateningthe poetic foundation ofreligion (Quinlan 40, n. 3). Ransom's thunderless plight was virtually imagined by H.L. Mencken, one of the most stinging critics of the creationists, when in 1922 he penned a tongue-in-cheek lament forthe passing ofthe ancient deities. "Where is the graveyard of dead gods? What lingering mourner waters their mounds? There was a time when Jupiter was the king ofthe gods, and any man who doubted his puissance was ipso facto a barbarian and an ignoramus," Mencken mock-elegized in "Memorial Service." "But where in all the world is there a man who worships Jupiter today?" (95). God Without Thunder provides the answer to Mencken's archly lugubrious question: it is John Crowe Ransom. Grieving the demise ofthe deity ofyore, Ransom's treatise on the religious imagination heralds a one-man revival of Jupiter Tonans. Ransom believes that the god ofantiquity has been muffled bythe spirit of scientific abstraction that reigns notjust in Tennessee but across all of America.7 Hetraces this modern cult ofthe mind beyond the current efforts ofreligion to seek a rapprochement with biology and physics; beyond the science-driven Prometheus of Shelley, the rationalism of the Protestant Reformation, and the inquiry of Copernicus; beyond the errors of early Christianity, to a kind of primal sin. Humans have used their intelligence first to set themselves above nature, then to order the world according to their ways, and finally to exploit all ofcreation for their use. Demystified by science, thunder has become not the mighty weapon ofthe ancient God who tolerated no rivals but only the noise of heated and expanding air. Ransom views science as having such ultimacy that it exercises a mimetic function: it provides Girardian models for desire. "Science directs us to amuse ourselves, between desires," Ransom writes, "by simulating 7 Louis Rubin reads Ransom's "Armageddon" as a poetic companion piece to God Without Thunder, for it tells how divine wrath has been compromised amid the suavities of the modern world At the apocalyptic battle of the poem's title, a militant... (shrink)

The sociobiology of bacteria, largely unappreciated and ignored by the microbiology research community two decades ago is now a major research area, catalyzed to a significant degree by studies of communication and cooperative behavior among the myxobacteria and in quorum sensing (QS) and biofilm formation by pseudomonads and other microbes. Recently, the topic of multicellular cooperative behaviors among bacteria has been increasingly considered in the context of evolutionary biology. Here we discuss the significance of two recent studies1,2 of the phenomenon (...) of “cheating” mutants and their exploitation of cooperating microbial populations of Pseudomonas aeruginosa. BioEssays 30:296–298, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Plotinus’ account of matter in Ennead III 6[26] 11-15 serves two purposes. The terms, evil and ugly, present the negative side of matter’s causality, providing for the change characteristic of the sensible world and the possibility of ontological evil and privation as well as of moral evil among human beings. The receptacle and other images from Plato’s Timaeus present the positive side of this causality, matter as allowing for the presence of forms in the bodies of the sensible world. Plotinus (...) explicitly articulates the linguistic problem surrounding the nature of matter, since language is derived from the corporeal and thus needs constant correction when applied to matter as incorporeal. His use of language, thus, always has two phases, first, capturing the nature of matter as aptly as possible, and second, highlighting the difference between matter and the image, analogy, or metaphor used to help explain it. (shrink)

Volume 35 contains papers and commentaries presented to the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy during academic year 2018-19. Works: Commentary on _De Anima_, Nicomachean Ethics. Topics: Humean motivation, memory-oblivion & myth, final causality and ontology of life.