There is a growing appreciation of the extent of transcriptome variation across individual cells of the same cell type. While expression variation may be a byproduct of, for example, dynamic or homeostatic processes, here we consider whether single‐cell molecular variation per se might be crucial for population‐level function. Under this hypothesis, molecular variation indicates a diversity of hidden functional capacities within an ensemble of “identical” cells, and this functional diversity facilitates collective behavior that would be inaccessible to a homogenous population. (...) In reviewing this topic, we explore possible functions that might be carried by a heterogeneous ensemble of cells; however, this question has proven difficult to test, both because methods to manipulate molecular variation are limited and because it is complicated to define, and measure, population‐level function. We consider several possible methods to further pursue the hypothesis that “variation is function” through the use of comparative analysis and novel experimental techniques. (shrink)

Background -/- Innovative neurosurgical treatments present a number of known risks, the natures and probabilities of which can be adequately communicated to patients via the standard procedures governing obtaining informed consent. However, due to their novelty, these treatments also come with unknown risks, which require an augmented approach to obtaining informed consent. -/- Objective -/- This paper aims to discuss and provide concrete procedural guidance on the ethical issues raised by serious unexpected complications of novel deep brain stimulation treatments. -/- (...) Approach -/- We illustrate our analysis using a case study of the unexpected development of recurrent stereotyped events in patients following the use of deep brain stimulation (DBS) to treat severe chronic pain. Examining these unexpected complications in light of medical ethical principles, we argue that serious complications of novel DBS treatments do not necessarily make it unethical to offer the intervention to eligible patients. However, the difficulty the clinician faces in determining whether the intervention is in the patient's best interests generates reasons to take extra steps to promote the autonomous decision making of these patients. -/- Conclusion and recommendations -/- We conclude with clinical recommendations, including details of an augmented consent process for novel DBS treatment. (shrink)

The case for cadaveric surgical training benefitting patients is clear. Surgeons must be trained to the highest standards to provide the best possible quality of care, and cadaveric simulation training offers a way to help achieve this.1 What is less clear is how the increasing demand for cadaveric training can be met in a way that is ethically considerate to the body donors, without whom this valuable training would obviously not be possible. As Ms Walker2 says in her paper, body (...) donation is primarily driven by the altruistic motive for others to benefit after the donor’s own lifetime. The sense of pride and satisfaction …. (shrink)

Use of the term “agroecology” has greatly increased over the past few decades, with scholars, civil society actors, and intergovernmental organizations identifying agroecology as a promising pathway for realizing more just and sustainable food systems. Using a community-engaged approach, we explore how diverse agroecological actors in southern Brazil describe and define agroecology. We find that across a range of social differences, agroecological actors come together in describing agroecology as a philosophy of life that promotes well-being, positioning agroecology as a counter-narrative (...) to global discourses on “development” that promote economic growth and productivism as the path to a good life. Our findings suggest that the practice of agroecology can enhance diverse rural peoples’ well-being by providing a pathway to overcoming alienation, commodification, and exploitation, although broader political-economic conditions constrain this potential. As socioecological crises continue to accelerate and undermine human and environmental health and well-being, the capacity for agroecology to promote wellness from various ontological and epistemological positions warrants further attention. (shrink)

This is an invited submission from the Editor-in-Chief as the introductory piece for an ‘Ethics Roundtable’. This piece will include invited commentaries from experts in surgical education, medical ethics, law and the prospective body donor perspective.

In my professional role as anatomy administrator and bequeathal secretary at a large surgical training centre, I am the first point of contact both for people wishing to donate their body, and for newly bereaved relatives telling us that their registered loved-one has died. I am involved in every stage of the process from that first phone call, through to eventual funeral service, cremation of the body and return of the ashes to the family. I am also a registered body (...) donor myself, as I strongly believe in the value of cadaveric training having seen it first hand. When prospective donors and relatives find out that I am also a registered body donor they find this to be very reassuring to know that having ‘behind the scenes’ access has not put me off, and is a good endorsement for the process, …. (shrink)

Previous studies have shown cognitive task performance to be affected by tinnitus severity, but also that the literature is conflicted. This study sought to identify neuroticism as a possible confound, since severe tinnitus distress is associated with higher levels of neuroticism. A total of 78 participants undertook two cognitive tasks. It was found that when undertaking a Stroop paradigm, controlling for neuroticism rendered previously significant results not significant. It was also found that neuroticism was not a significant covariate for a (...) change blindness task. Gender, age, anxiety, and depression were all controlled for, and future implications for the literature discussed. (shrink)

The aim of this review is to show the fruitfulness of using images of facial expressions as experimental stimuli in order to study how neural systems support biologically relevant learning as it relates to social interactions. Here we consider facial expressions as naturally conditioned stimuli which, when presented in experimental paradigms, evoke activation in amygdala–prefrontal neural circuits that serve to decipher the predictive meaning of the expressions. Facial expressions offer a relatively innocuous strategy with which to investigate these normal variations (...) in affective information processing, as well as the promise of elucidating what role the aberrance of such processing might play in emotional disorders. (shrink)

All else being equal, most of us typically prefer to have positive experiences in the future rather than the past and negative experiences in the past rather than the future. Recent empirical evidence tends not only to support the idea that people have these preferences, but further, that people tend to prefer more painful experiences in their past rather than fewer in their future (and mutatis mutandis for pleasant experiences). Are such preferences rationally permissible, or are they, as time-neutralists contend, (...) rationally impermissible? And what is it that grounds their having the normative status that they do have? We consider two sorts of arguments regarding the normative status of future-biased preferences. The first appeals to the supposed arbitrariness of these preferences, and the second appeals to their upshot. We evaluate these arguments in light of the recent empirical research on future-bias. (shrink)

Although women’s words account for a small portion of biblical scripture, the Bible records two related prayerful songs that were sung by female prophets: the song of Hannah, in the Old Testament, and the Magnificat of Mary, in the New Testament. This essay uses typological methodology to explore the songs’ connections, including their shared literary precedents and nearly identical theological themes. Their fundamental similarities suggest Hannah’s song served as a harbinger of the Magnificat. Hannah and Mary’s shared (...) blessing, divinely ordained motherhood, and their shared inspiration, the Holy Spirit, explain the parallels of their prayerful verses and prophetic utterances, which were of great relevance for both covenants of the Judeo-Christian faith. (shrink)

This article explores the use of walking interviews as a research method. In spite of a wave of interest in methods which take interviewing out of the "safe," stationary environment, there has been limited work critically examining the techniques for undertaking such work. Curiously for a method which takes an explicitly spatial approach, few projects have attempted to rigorously connect what participants say with where they say it. The article reviews three case studies where the authors have used different techniques, (...) including GPS, for locating the interview in space. The article concludes by arguing that researchers considering using walking interviews need to think carefully about what kinds of data they wish to generate when deciding which approach to adopt. (shrink)

Current scholarship has focused on analyzing how Arendt's storytelling corresponds to her political arguments. In following up this discussion, I offer a closer examination of the unusual myth Arendt uses to explain the condition of the modern age, a myth she refers to as the ?political nature of history.? I employ literary terms along with the standard vocabulary of political theory in shaping this reading of Arendt. Following Robert C. Pirro, I also consider Arendt's story as a tragedy, but in (...) the broadest sense, that of a collision of two goods, freedom and security. By describing Arendt's thought in this manner, I hope to reveal another way in which Arendt represents the call to action that she believes so crucial to humanity, as a summons to we flawed antiheroes through the device of a heroic myth. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Hannah Arendt’s conception of “the social” offers a novel perspective on contemporary debates over social media. Both critics and defenders of social media giants such as Facebook construe the problem with social media as a proliferation of untruths that is either the cost of liberalism or a danger requiring regulations. Arendt would have us be dubious of both conclusions while also rejecting both sets of premises. Rather, Arendt’s framework allows a diagnosis of the problem with social media as (...) a deeper problem with the form of society itself, a problem that would remain untouched by increased regulatory measures against social media giants. (shrink)

The title of our collection is owed to Hannah Arendt herself. Writing to Karl Jaspers on August 6, 1955, she spoke of how she had only just begun to really love the world and expressed her desire to testify to that love in the title of what came to be published as The Human Condition: "Out of gratitude, I want to call my book about political theories Arnor Mundi. "t In retrospect, it was fitting that amor mundi, love of (...) the world, never became the title of only one of Arendt's studies, for it is the theme which permeates all of her thought. The purpose of this volume's a- ticles is to pay a critical tribute to this theme by exploring its meaning, the cultural and intellectual sources from which it derives, as well as its resources for conte- porary thought and action. We are privileged to include as part of the collection two previously unpu- lished lectures by Arendt as well as a rarely noticed essay which she wrote in 1964. Taken together, they engrave the central features of her vision of amor mundi. Arendt presented "Labor, Work, Action" on November 10, 1964, at a conference "Christianity and Economic Man:Moral Decisions in an Affluent Society," which 2 was held at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. (shrink)

This new translation is an extremely welcome addition to the continuing Cambridge Edition of Kant’s works. English-speaking readers of the third Critique have long been hampered by the lack of an adequate translation of this important and difficult work. James Creed Meredith’s much-reprinted translation has charm and elegance, but it is often too loose to be useful for scholarly purposes. Moreover it does not include the first version of Kant’s introduction, the so-called “First Introduction,” which is now recognized as (...) indispensable for an understanding of the work. Werner Pluhar’s more recent translation, which does include the First Introduction, is highly accurate when it confines itself to rendering Kant’s German. However, it is often more of a reconstruction than a translation, containing so many interpretative interpolations that it is often difficult to separate out Kant’s original text from the translator’s contributions. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews have provided a translation that compares to or exceeds Pluhar’s in its literal approach to the German, but that confines all interpretative material to footnotes and endnotes, so that the text itself, with all its unclarities and ambiguities, lies open to view. In addition, Guyer, as editor of the volume, has provided a great deal of valuable supplementary material. This includes an introduction with an outline of the work and details of the history of its composition and publication, and a wealth of endnotes offering clarifications of the text, background information, and, most strikingly, many references to related passages in Kant’s voluminous writings, particularly in connection with Kant’s earlier writings related to aesthetics. The edition also records differences among the first three editions of the work, and—of particular interest—erasures from and additions to Kant’s manuscript of the First Introduction. Although the introduction and endnotes reflect interpretative views that are sometimes disputable, this supplementary material makes the present edition into a valuable resource even for those able to read the text in German. (shrink)

In the conclusion to this multi-part article I first review the discussions carried out around the six essential questions in psychiatric diagnosis – the position taken by Allen Frances on each question, the commentaries on the respective question along with Frances’ responses to the commentaries, and my own view of the multiple discussions. In this review I emphasize that the core question is the first – what is the nature of psychiatric illness – and that in some manner all further (...) questions follow from the first. Following this review I attempt to move the discussion forward, addressing the first question from the perspectives of natural kind analysis and complexity analysis. This reflection leads toward a view of psychiatric disorders – and future nosologies – as far more complex and uncertain than we have imagined. (shrink)

Two central strands in Arendt's thought are the reflection on the evil of Auschwitz and the rethinking in terms of politics of Heidegger's critique of metaphysics. Given Heidegger's taciturnity regarding Auschwitz and Arendt's own taciturnity regarding the philosophical implications of Heidegger's political engagement in 1933, to set out how these strands interrelate is to examine the coherence of Arendt's thought and its potential for a critique of Heidegger. By refusing to countenance a theological conception of the evil of Auschwitz, Arendt (...) consolidates the break with theology that Heidegger attempts through his analysis of the essential finitude of Dasein. In the light of Arendt's account of evil, it is possible to see the theological vestiges in Heidegger's ontology. Heidegger's resumption of the question concerning the categorical interconnections of the ways of Being entails an abandonment of finitude: he accommodates and tacitly justifies that which can have no human justification. (shrink)

In "Truth and Politics" Hannah Arendt defends opinion against the judgment of the philosophical tradition. This defense risks misinterpretation as epistemologically nihilistic unless read in conjunction with Arendt's position on facts and acting in concert. What Arendt prizes in opinion is its performative dimension rather than its constative dimension where it falls short of truth. It is opinion as action that Arendt rehabilitates: she subscribes to the philosophical tradition's harsh verdict on the pseudotruths of an anonymous and repressive public (...) opinion. For opinion to be an action, for action to be recognizable as such, there has to be a world beyond each given opinion and action on which they leave a mark. This world, irreducible in its diversity and historical contingency to rational truth, is the arena common to facts and action. To acknowledge the facts is to trust in the testimony of others, but if this trust is not to be gullibility, if it is not to mistake the facts for lies and vice versa, it stands in need of judgment. (shrink)

This article traces a discontinuous tradition of council thought from the Dutch and German council communist tendencies of the 1920s to its re-emergence in the writings of three important mid-twentieth-century political theorists: Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort, and Hannah Arendt. It connects an intellectual history of the council concept in post-war Europe with a political history of the small revolutionary groups that fostered council-related political activity during this era. It claims that, as the experience of the European council movements began (...) to be interpreted within a new political context, this gave rise to several radically altered forms of council thought. In this more subjectivist and praxis-oriented tradition, the councils became a utopian placeholder for theorists to explore their particular interests in human creativity (Castoriadis), self-limiting power (Lefort), and political freedom (Arendt). This analysis develops our understanding of the continuities and ruptures of the council tradition within political thought. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that archism, a form of political power that is ubiquitous in the world and is based on hierarchy and violence, effectively denies us a future. Archism in invested in continuing the current power dynamics. Accordingly, it projects a false sense of the future which is actually only a continuation of the present on and on forever. I look at two thinkers, Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt, who try to take the future back from archism (...) (my word, not theirs). In doing so, they do not seek to determine the future but on the contrary, to allow it to actually occur in all of its infinite complexity and unpredictability, that is to say, to submit it to anarchist forms of temporality. (shrink)

I argue that transnational democracy provides the basis for a solution to the problem of the “democratic circle”—that in order for democracy to promote justice, it must already be just—at the international level. Transnational democracy could be a means to global justice. First, I briefly recount my argument for the “democratic minimum.” This minimum is freedom from domination, understood in a very specific sense. Employing Hannah Arendt's conception of freedom as “the capacity to begin,” the form of nondomination sufficient (...) for the democratic minimum is the capability to initiate deliberation and thus democratic decision-making processes. My point in developing this argument further concerns the political form of a transnational polity: its citizens enjoy the democratic minimum as members of variousdemoi. In the case of the European Union, this leads to a potential for democratic domination. I call this thedemoiproblem, a difficulty that holds for any multilevel polity, for bounded as well as transnational political communities. Second, I argue that such domination is overcome so long as the capacity to initiate deliberation is distributed among various units and various levels. The democratic minimum could fail to obtain not only because individuals or groups are dominated by nondemocratic means, but also because they are dominated democratically to the extent that the demos of one unit lacks the normative power to initiate deliberation and thus is subordinated to others. (shrink)

I. The Naturalization of the Nation-State In her 1946 review of Joseph T. Delos's La Nation, Hannah Arendt describes the appearance of the early modern nation-state in terms of the new shape of civilization in the modern period: One of the main phenomena of the modern world is that civilization has renounced its old claim to universality and presents itself in the form of a particular, a national civilization. Another aspect of modern civilization is its reconstitution of the state (...) (after the period of feudalism), reconstitution however, which does not solve the fundamental problem of the state: the origin and…. (shrink)

This book pursues the problem of whether violence can be understood to be constitutive of its own sense or meaning, as opposed to being merely instrumental. Dodd draws on the resources of phenomenological philosophy, and takes the form of a series of dialogues between figures both inside and outside of this tradition. The central figures considered include Carl von Clausewitz, Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernst Jünger, and Martin Heidegger, and the study concludes with an analysis of the (...) philosophy of Jan Patocka. (shrink)

Gilles Deleuze and Hannah Arendt are two thinkers who have theorised the exceptionalism of the revolutionary moment. For Deleuze, it is the moment of the people to come. For Arendt, it is the moment of the freedom of political action. In the decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall there has been extensive debate on how to remember the German Democratic Republic (DDR) and how to understand the events leading up to its demise. Arendt's analyses of totalitarianism, natality (...) and the public sphere provide points of orientation in an attempt to clarify the nature of the DDR, the dishonesty of its evaluation in the West as well as the transitory purchase of its legitimating discourse on later generations of its citizens. Deleuze's reinvigoration of the revolutionary sense of the term ‘people’ sets it in defiance of prevalent notions of popular sovereignty and therefore facilitates a different reading of the protests against the so-called people's republic of the DDR: something else was at issue besides the substitution of one state form for another. (shrink)