Both in the Netherlands and in Britain, practices of ‘life story work’ have emerged in nursing for persons with intellectual disabilities. The narrative approach to care and support may at the same time be considered as an attempt to compensate for the ‘disabled authorship’ of many persons with intellectual disabilities and as a sign of controversy with standard practices of diagnosis and treatment that tend to neglect the personal identities of both clients and care givers, their particular historical and relational (...) contexts and their spiritual needs. This paper argues that narrative ethics not only offers an appropriate moral framework for practices of life story work, but that these practices are a narrative ethics in action. Starting with an account of the concept of ‘life story work’ as it has been introduced in nursing practices in the field of intellectual disability, the paper explains its relationship with key characteristics of narrative ethics. The teleological dimension in narrative ethics and in practices of life story work sparks off a dialectic process of understanding of the client and self‐understanding of the care giver. It also invites a respect for life in its openness toward the future and presupposes an openness toward other possible versions of the life narrative. The phenomenological and hermeneutic‐interpretative methodologies in narrative ethics aim at a ‘sudden moment of intimacy’ in relationships of nurses and clients. The ‘epiphany’ of this essential moment of recognition, insight and engagement cannot, however, be brought about by methodology. (shrink)

To achieve impact, academics need to create personal impact development plans, focused on what and on whom to have an impact and the necessary competencies to do so. Profession and university leaders play a critical role in the successful implementation of such plans.

The paper attempts to provide a basis for exploring the continued relevance of Catholic social teaching to business ethics, byinterpreting the historic development of a Catholic work ethic and the traditions of Catholic social teaching in light of contemporary discussions of economic globalization, notably those of Robert Reich and Peter Drucker. The paper argues that the Catholic work ethic and the Church’s tradition of social teaching has evolved dynamically in response to the structural changes involved in the history of modern (...) economic development, and thus is well poised to speak to the ethical challenges implicit in the advent of a knowledge-based society. In order to test this thesis, the author sketches an approach to the ethical challenge of corporate downsizing that he believes illustrates the continued relevance of Catholic social teaching to business ethics. (shrink)

Type theory is a fast-evolving field at the crossroads of logic, computer science and mathematics. This gentle step-by-step introduction is ideal for graduate students and researchers who need to understand the ins and outs of the mathematical machinery, the role of logical rules therein, the essential contribution of definitions and the decisive nature of well-structured proofs. The authors begin with untyped lambda calculus and proceed to several fundamental type systems culminating in the well-known and powerful Calculus of Constructions. The book (...) also covers the essence of proof checking and proof development, and the use of dependent type theory to formalize mathematics. The only prerequisites are a good knowledge of undergraduate algebra and analysis. Carefully chosen examples illustrate the theory throughout. Each chapter ends with a summary of the content, some historical context, suggestions for further reading and a selection of exercises to help readers familiarize themselves with the material. (shrink)

Accounting for the Commandments in Medieval Judaism explores the discursive formation of the commandments as a generative matrix of Jewish thought and life in the posttalmudic period. Each study sheds light on how medieval Jews crafted the commandments out of theretofore underdetermined material. By systematizing, representing, or interrogating the amorphous category of commandment, medieval Jewish authors across both the Islamic and Christian spheres of influence sought to explain, justify, and characterize Israel's legal system, divine revelation, the cosmos, and even the (...) divine order. This volume correlates bodies of knowledge-such as jurisprudence, philosophy, ethics, pietism, and kabbalah-that are normally treated in isolation into a single conversation about a shared constitutional concern. (shrink)

A semantic theory T for a language L should assign content to utterances of sentences of L. One common assumption is that T will assign p to some S of L just in case in uttering S a speaker A says that p. We will argue that this assumption is mistaken.

The US neutrino community gathered at the Workshop on the Intermediate Neutrino Program at Brookhaven National Laboratory February 4-6, 2015 to explore opportunities in neutrino physics over the next five to ten years. Scientists from particle, astroparticle and nuclear physics participated in the workshop. The workshop examined promising opportunities for neutrino physics in the intermediate term, including possible new small to mid-scale experiments, US contributions to large experiments, upgrades to existing experiments, R&D plans and theory. The workshop was organized into (...) two sets of parallel working group sessions, divided by physics topics and technology. Physics working groups covered topics on Sterile Neutrinos, Neutrino Mixing, Neutrino Interactions, Neutrino Properties and Astrophysical Neutrinos. Technology sessions were organized into Theory, Short-Baseline Accelerator Neutrinos, Reactor Neutrinos, Detector R&D and Source, Cyclotron and Meson Decay at Rest sessions.This report summarizes discussion and conclusions from the workshop. (shrink)

Herman Parret and Jacques Bouveresse Introduction. As Rosenberg remarks, " Understanding ... is evidently difficult to understand" (in this volume, p. 29). ...

Philosophers of language and linguists tend to think of the interpreter as an essentially non-creative participant in the communicative process. There’s no room, in traditional theories, for the view that correctness of interpretation depends in some essential way on the interpreter. As a result, there’s no room for the possibility that while P is the correct interpretation of an utterance, u, for one interpreter, P* is the correct interpretation of that utterance for another interpreter. Recently, a number of theorists have, (...) for separate reasons, argued in favour of a radically different view of communication – a view in which the interpreter and her context play what should be thought of as a content-creating role. According to such views, natural languages contain what I’ll call interpretation sensitive terms: terms the correct interpretation of which varies across interpreters (or, more generally, contexts of interpretation).3 An interpretation sensitive sentence can have one content relative to one interpreter and another content relative to another interpreter. This paper is a development and (partial) defence of the view that interpretation sensitivity is ubiquitous in natural language. I call the view that there are interpretation sensitive terms content relativism. Before starting the discussion of content relativism, it is worth pointing out that recent attempts to develop semantically motivated versions of truth relativism should be seen as part of this trend of giving the interpreter a more active role. (shrink)

Paul Churchland has become famous for holding three controversial and interrelated doctrines which he put forward in early papers and in his first book. Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind (1979): eliminative materialism, the doctrine of the plasticity of perception, and a general network theory of language. In his latest book, The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul (1995), Churchland aims to make some results of connectionist neuroscience available to the general public and explores the philosophical and (...) social consequences that neuroscience is likely to have. I argue that these results of neuroscience refute the three doctrines that Churchland advocated in his earlier works. Yet youthful dreams do not die easily and Churchland is reluctant to relinquish his early views. (shrink)

The view defended in this paper - I call it the No-Assertion view - rejects the assumption that it is theoretically useful to single out a subset of sayings as assertions: (v) Sayings are governed by variable norms, come with variable commitments and have variable causes and effects. What philosophers have tried to capture by the term 'assertion' is largely a philosophers' invention. It fails to pick out an act-type that we engage in and it is not a category we (...) need in order to explain any significant component of our linguistic practice. Timothy Williamson (2000) defends a theory of type (i). He says that a theory of assertion has as its goal "[…] that of articulating for the first time the rules of a traditional game that we play" (p. 240). Among those who think we play the game of assertion, there's disagreement about what the rules are. Some think it's a single rule and disagree about what that rule is. Others think the rules change across contexts. According to the No-Assertion view we don’t play the assertion game. The game might exist as an abstract object, but it is not a game you need to learn and play to become a speaker of a natural language. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Imagining Karma, Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek RebirthA. L. HermanImagining Karma, Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek Rebirth. By Gananath Obeyesekere. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. 448 pp.Gananath Obeyesekere, professor emeritus of anthropology at Princeton University, is probably one of the world's greatest living anthropologists. The proof of that assertion lies in this his latest work on comparative anthropology, a study of the concept (...) and practice of rebirth—"reincarnation" as he calls it—from ancient Greece and India to modern West Africa, Melanesia, and North America. In what follows let me briefly set forth what I understand his central thesis to be, the evidence for it, and the conclusions to be drawn from it. I will end with two very modest problems connected with this altogether intriguing and brilliant investigation into the doctrine of rebirth.As a modified structural anthropologist, Gananath Obeyesekere rejects the rationalist model structuralism of Claude Levi-Strauss. He follows instead the lead of two of his empiricist predecessors, Max Weber and Fernand Braudel, pointing out that structures, types, or models "are constructions of scholars, not universals waiting to be discovered" (p. 351). Consequently, as this book aptly proves, Obeyesekere's own "imagined" models are based on parole data following the actual language of the cultures being studied.Obeyesekere thus begins his book with an elementary rebirth structure based on such parole. He refers to this primitive, first structure as "rebirth eschatology," which entails the rebirth of a deceased's soul into the body of a newborn relative of the deceased but without any determining ethical component as found in the more sophisticated and complex "karmic eschatologies." Such ethically neutral kin group rebirths are found among certain small-scale societies in West Africa, the Trobriand Islands, the Northwest American coast tribes, and the Inuits (Eskimos). Obeyesekere [End Page 303] draws extensively on field studies of these groups to bolster his conclusions about them. This simple rebirth eschatology is non-Indic in origin, Obeyesekere claims, since no evidence of influences have been found between these practitioners of rebirth eschatology and work relating to the Indic religions (Hinduism and Buddhism). The entry of the soul into postdeath life, either in this world or the world of the ancestors, depends not at all, consequently, on one's this-worldly behavior such that "morality does not affect the fate of the soul after death" (p. 74).Obeyesekere turns next to the "transformation" of this rebirth eschatology. It occurs with the introduction of the concept of ethicization, "the processes whereby morally right or wrong action becomes a religiously right or wrong action that in turn affects a person's destiny after death" (p. 75). It is Obeyesekere's contention that when ethicization is systematically introduced into any rebirth eschatology the latter must logically transform itself into a so-called "karmic eschatology." In other words, this second topological model or conceptual structure, karmic eschatology, the new ethicized rebirth eschatology, says that the otherworld for the dead is not simply a way station for departed souls waiting to be reborn, but rather that otherworld is now a place of retribution and punishment. Kinship affiliation alone no longer determines who goes where after death but moral action does. My own guess is that rebirth eschatology was introduced to answer the question of why the grandchild resembles the deceased grandparent. Karmic eschatology, on the other hand, was probably introduced to solve a more complex and sophisticated puzzle: Why is it, if there really is justice in the universe, that the wicked never get appropriately punished and the good never get sufficiently rewarded? At this stage of transformation, the law of karma, or some other principle of universal justice, now says that everyone gets what's coming to them, either in this life or the next, and that rebirth is necessary to make that principle of justice workable.1 In arguing that "rebirth cannot be divorced from ethics; it looks as if it is generated from ethics" (p. 82), Obeyesekere would seem to concur that karmic eschatology was introduced to answer the question: Why do the wicked seem to prosper and the good appear to suffer?Following... (shrink)

Historical epistemology is a form of intellectual history focused on “the history of categories that structure our thought, pattern our arguments and proofs, and certify our standards for explanation”. Under this umbrella, historians have been studying the changing meanings of “objectivity,” “impartiality,” “curiosity,” and other virtues believed to be conducive to good scholarship. While endorsing this historicization of virtues and their corresponding vices, the present article argues that the meaning and relative importance of these virtues and vices can only be (...) determined if their mutual dependencies are taken into account. Drawing on a detailed case study—a controversy that erupted among nineteenth-century orientalists over the publication of R. P. A. Dozy'sDe Israëlieten te Mekka —the paper shows that nineteenth-century orientalists were careful to examine the degree to which Dozy practiced the virtues they considered most important, the extent to which these virtues were kept in balance by other ones, the extent to which these virtues were balanced by other scholars’ virtues, and the extent to which they were expected to be balanced by future scholars’ work. Consequently, this article argues that historical epistemology might want to abandon its single-virtue focus in order to allow balances, hierarchies, and other dependency relations between virtues and vices to move to the center of attention. (shrink)

One of the three central issues in Lloyd Humberstone's ‘Sufficiency and Excess’ is what he calls ‘the Complete Thought Issue’ (CTI, for short). This is the question of whether some declarative sentences have proposition radicals, rather than full-blown propositions, as their semantic values. My focus in this reply is exclusively on Humberstone's comments about CTI and on CTI more generally. The goal of Humberstone's discussion of CTI is to defend ‘[Kent] Bach's claim against Cappelen and Lepore's attacks’ (Humberstone, 2006, p. (...) 316). These ‘attacks’ on Bach are found in Cappelen and Lepore (2004). In section one I present CTI, in section two I evaluate Humberstone's defence of Bach, and in section three I discuss two solutions to CTI. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:258 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY To make this theme conspicuous to the reader, the author deals with three topics in Aristotle's first philosophy: the path from beings to the primary instance of being, the study of sensible substance, and the distinction between the potential and the actual. Grene's essay on the most perplexing of Aristotle's works is the least satisfactory in her study. Though she acknowledges that the path of (...) thg Aristotelian first philosopher is not easy, her analysis of the school X67oLmakes the road more facile than it, in fact, is. For example, what is the relation between Wisdom (the science of principles and causes), the science of being-qua-being, and the science of immovable substance? How can the latter be universal and, at the same time, have as its object one kind of being? Why does Aristotle dismiss substrate in the sense of compound of form and matter as a candidate for substance? It would seem to satisfy his criteria of thisness and separability better (or at least in more instances) than substrate in the sense of form. Finally, it is hard to avoid Ross's conclusion (Aristotle's Metaphysics, Vol. 1, pp. ci) that Aristotle in Book Z moves away from the view that the primary ontological units are sensible individuals toward the view that they are pure forms. The real is either the object of definition (and this appears to be Aristotle's view for the most part in Book Z) or it is the individual (the doctrine of the Categories); it cannot, on Aristotelian grounds, be both. Grene's resolution of the difficulty will not bear scrutiny. She says (p. 205): "Definition is of the universal. But the object of definition is the real substance, the being-what-it-is of the thing. This is substance and not universal." The incompatibility of the first and third sentences in this passage constitutes what Grene refers to (p. 205) as "a very perplexing situation indeed;" and they also reflect the "double meaning" which "pervades Aristotle's whole treatment of substance" (Ross, Aristotle, p. 166). It is the doctrine of the first sentence which comes to the fore in Book Z, for there Aristotle concludes (i) that ot~r is r6 I"L~Tv e~tL and maintains (ii) that rb rl ~v rival 'will belong to nothing which is not a species of a genus' (1030"12-13). And we hardly need be reminded that an Aristotelian species is not an individual. Grene, it seems to me, relieves our perplexity somewhat, but only by blurring the oscillation in Aristotle's mind on this point, e.g., when she implies that the unambiguous doctrine of Book Z is that "as far as the perceived world goes, the naturalist's specimen, the individual of a type, the member of a class, is the prototype of the real" (p. 205). In very readable prose Grene has given us a picture of Aristotle that is at once engaging and in most respects faithful to the interests and outlook of her model. She says in a bibliographical note that her book is "meant more for the undergraduate reader or the general public than for scholars already conversant both with the text and the tradition" (p. 257). I suggest that the account Grene has given us is stimulating and refreshing also for the scholar. JosxAtt B. GOULD,JR. Glaremont Graduate School La filosofia medievale: Antologia di testi. Edited by Nicola Abbagnan0. (Bari: Editori Laterza, 1963. Pp. 440. -----Coll. del Candelaio. L. 2700.) it is the purpose of this, the second volume in the Antologia di testi filosofici to appear under the general editorship of the fine Italian scholar, Nicola Abbagnano, to provide an introduction to the history of mediaeval philosophy through the presentation of selected primary source materials in Italian translation. The book could have been a significant addition to the sparse philosophical literature of the period that is now available BOOK REVIEWS 259 to the non-Latin reader; instead, it turns out to be a sort of catalogue of opinions on a wide variety of philosophical topics held by many of the thinkers active in the period: between St... (shrink)

Life as a complicated process is composed of causal phenomena. But even if we know the reasons of all that happens in a living organism, we do not know what life really is. The problem of intercausal relation, of “causal structure” remains. The reason why a process takes place, must be found by analysis, causal structures are found by synthesis of the results of this analysis. Causal structures are characterized by two kinds of equilibrium: energetic and specific equilibrium. A state (...) of physical equilibrium is characterized by a minimum of free energy; a biological energetic equilibrium is an organized one, where the vital factors activate the production of energy by each other and force each other to limit that production to the necessary measure. A specific equilibrium is characterized by the properties of its factors, properties by which those factors act as a cause after having received a specific stimulation. Every factor possesses two specific properties, in accordance with the properties of two neighbouring factors, as a link between two other links in a chain . Both forms of equilibrium authorise us to speak of living systems as a “whole”. In the second part of this paper we treat the dynamic aspect of the functions of living systems as a “whole”. This dynamic aspect manifests itself in growth and probably in cortical functions. Blastomeres represent, when isolated, the “whole” of growing potentialities of a germe. In normal contact with each other they restrict themselves to produce a part of that “whole”, in harmony with that which other blastomeres produce. This harmonious restriction can be explained by interaction between all the blastomeres by which every blastomere suppresses in other blastomeres all that it will produce itself. Blastomeres must therefore act on other blastomees not according to their isolate “being”, but according to the influences which they undergo by all other blastomeres, that means according to their “rôle”. There must be a causal net of interaction between all the blastomeres and that net “as a whole” determines every step of growth. Such a net of relation determines also human history and sociology. Materialism only took account of isolated causes, vitalism only of the effect of the net of causal relations without understanding that such a net might be analysed. In reality there is neither materialism nor vitalism.La vie est un phénomène complexe, se composant de différents phénomènes causals, qui un jour peut-être seront réduits à la causalité physique et chimique. Cependant connaitre toutes les causes des phénomènes vitaux ne signifie pas connaître la vie. Le problème de la vie ne se borne pas aux rapports causals, mais implique surtout les rapports intercausals, c'est à dire l'harmonie ou l'équilibre de ses parties constituantes. La vie comme phénomène est provoquée par une „structure causale”. Tandis que les causes sont trouvées par l'analyse, les rapports intercausals doivent être recherchés par la synthèse, c'est-à-dire par la réconstruction de la réalité de l'organisme vivant en se servant des données analytiques. Le système vivant est en équilibre énergétique et spécifique. Les facteurs énergétiques sont interlacés de telle façon, qu'ils s'activent entre eux et qu'ils se forcent entre eux à se resteindre au développement de l'énergie nécessaire. Un équilibre physique c'est l'état d'énergie libre minimum, tandis que l'équilibre biologique c'est un état d'énergie organisée. Dans un équilibre spécifique on ne peut se borner aux effects causals se manifestant par un phénomène. Il faut décrire les rapports des propriétés spécifiques de tous les facteurs; ce sont ces propriétés qui leur permettent d'agir comme cause, lorsqu'-ils sont atteint d'une excitation spécifique. Les facteurs possèdent au moins deux propriétés spécifiques, adaptées à deux facteurs voisins, comme chaque anneau d'une chaine s'adaptant à deux anneaux voisins . Le fait que l'on trouve dans chaque individu ces deux formes d'équilibre nous donne le droit de créer le concept du „tout” par rapport auquel on peut constater l'harmonie de tous les tacteurs.C'est là le „tout statique”, reste encore le „tout dynamique” qui se manifeste par la croissance et probablement par les phénomènes se produisant dans l'écorce cérébrale, base des actes psychiques. Les parties représentent beaucoup de possibilités qui ne se réalisent pas; p.e. les blastomères peuvent représenter le „tout” de l'organisme, tandis qu'ils se borneront dans la croissance normale à la production d'une part de l'individu. Il y a une interaction entre tous les blastomères, de façon que, par la suppression ou par l'activation mutuelle, chaque partie réalise ce que lui laissent les autres et ce qui est en harmonie avec ce que produiront les autres. De cette façon il y aura de l'harmonie dans tout ce qui sera produit. Les parties agissent par cette interaction, non selon leur „être”, en tant que cellule isolée, mais selon leur „rôle” dans le „tout” du germe, rôle qui est déterminé par cette interaction mutuelle universelle. C'est cette interaction qui détermine le „patron causal”, responsable de chaque étappe de la coissance. Ainsi ce ne sont pas les facteus isolés, mais le réseau des rapports établis entre tous les facteurs, qui gouvernent les phénomènes de la croissance. Ce réseau, par activation ou par suppression, détermine à chaque instant les propriétés causales des parties, d'entre toutes les multiples possibilités. Les possibilités étant données dans les cellules, c'est le „tout” du réseau des rapports qui détermine la croissance. Le matérialisme n'a vu que les causes isolées, telles qu'ellés se manifestent dans les expériences des physiciens, grâce à la technique; le vitalisme n'a vu que le „tout”, sans tâcher de l'analyser afin de trouver à sa base le système causal compliqué, que nous avons tâché de décrire. Dans la réalité la théorie du causalisme ni celle du vitalisme le tiennent plus de bout. (shrink)

Can one and the same quotation be used on different occasions to quote distinct objects? The view that it can is taken for granted throughout the literature (e.g. Goddard & Routley 1966, Christensen 1967, Davidson 1979, Goldstein 1984, Jorgensen et al 1984, Atlas 1989, Clark & Gerrig 1990, Washington 1992, García-Carpintero 1994, 2004, 2005, Reimer 1996, Saka 1998, Wertheimer 1999). Garcia-Carpintero (1994, p. 261) illustrates with the quotation expression ''gone''. He says it can be used to quote any of the (...) following items. (shrink)

The essence of expressionism.--The vivifying of space.--A candidate for immortality [Otto Braun]--The machine as slave and master.--The "absolute" poem--A pæau against the age.--The architecture of aspiration.--The visible symphony.--Figures of war and forces of death.--The laughing synthesis.--Activistic architecture.--The dynamic dramatist.--The intensive Shakespeare.--The chromatic "Othello".--The drama on fire.--"The machine-storemers."--The organization of the spirit.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Archive TraumaHerman Rapaport (bio)Jacques Derrida. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996. Trans. of Mal d’archive. Paris: Galilée, 1995.The occasion for Archive Fever (Mal d’archive) was a conference held at the Freud archives in England and the society that it serves. Throughout his lecture, Derrida returns to a number of problematics that he had considered earlier in his career with respect to (...) writing, in particular, issues raised in The Post Card that concern the destiny of the letter as legacy. No doubt the post cards, such as Derrida had considered them, were already a fascicle or archive of some sort, a sheaf of papers burning with some kind of fever or madness. So, for example, on September 7, 1977, one of the envois, as if cut to ribbons, reads in part as follows. And yet— No literature, yes, but still. Our delinquency, mylove, we are the worst criminals and the first victims. I would like not to kill anyone, and everything that I send you goes through meurtrières [murderesses; fortification openings for weapons]. As for the children, the last ones I might touch, the holocaust has already begun.We have never yet seen each other. Only written.[67–68]What exactly has Derrida archived here? Toward the back of the fascicle of cards Derrida will admit “that I will die without having understood anything” [247]. One wonders. Is this inevitable failure to understand constitutive of archive fever?Let’s start again. There is misunderstanding in the archive. It’s inevitable. And moreover, we have archives—we preserve archives—because there is something in them that defies understanding but that we want to grasp. In the archive that is Derrida’s fascicle of missives, the matter that defies understanding is as conspicuous as it is feverish. There is, for example, a rampant death wish that cannot decide whether to act or be acted upon, hence the wish not to kill and yet the wish to shoot something through the meurtrière. This, by way of verbal association, links up with the sending of something by way of a murderess. And then, the fragment of yet another fantasy, the holocaust of children and their being touched—by way of the murderesses? the malicious missives or orders that the subject has passed on to them? the kindness of the one who fantasizes and nostalgically holds on to them before the end? Obviously, one could speculate at length; indeed, we are supposed to speculate at length. Then the final scrap, “We have never yet seen each other. Only written.” Does this refer to the desk murderer and his accomplice? Or something more benign?Consider The Post Card to be the displaced main act of Archive Fever. As such The Post Card may well be Archive Fever’s phantom limb, something essential that has been cut off and that haunts the text. What sets Archive Fever apart, however, is that whereas the envois of The Post Card were, in essence, staged as a private correspondence inhospitable to onlookers, the Freud archives are being thought through from the [End Page 68] perspective of a public institution or apparatus that houses and is hospitable to that which it capitalizes upon, namely, the memory of something that would otherwise be lost. Still, as Derrida reminds us, perhaps with Archive Fever’s phantom limb in mind, archives occur at that moment when there is a structural breakdown in memory. This contrasts rather sharply with Michel Foucault’s view in The Archaeology of Knowledge that archives are, in essence, the textual systematization of their own enunciability and that, as such, they are predicated upon mnemonic reliability. Derrida’s archive, in contrast, is mnemonically unreliable insofar as it is somewhat feverish, hallucinatory, fragmentary, and, as in the case of The Post Card, somewhat sick (“as for the children... the holocaust has already begun”). In short, where there is regularity and efficiency in Foucault’s archive, there is trauma in Derrida’s.This trauma in the archive is what, I think, Derrida is referring to when he speaks of there being a mal d’archive. After all... (shrink)

Cyclin-dependent kinase 5 has been implicated in Alzheimer's disease pathogenesis. Here, we demonstrate that overexpression of p25, an activator of cdk5, led to increased levels of BACE1 mRNA and protein in vitro and in vivo. A p25/cdk5 responsive region containing multiple sites for signal transducer and activator of transcription was identified in the BACE1 promoter. STAT3 interacts with the BACE1 promoter, and p25-overexpressing mice had elevated levels of pSTAT3 and BACE1, whereas cdk5-deficient mice had reduced levels. Furthermore, mice with a (...) targeted mutation in the STAT3 cdk5 responsive site had lower levels of BACE1. Increased BACE levels in p25 overexpressing mice correlated with enhanced amyloidogenic processing that could be reversed by a cdk5 inhibitor. These data demonstrate a pathway by which p25/cdk5 increases the amyloidogenic processing of APP through STAT3-mediated transcriptional control of BACE1 that could have implications for AD pathogenesis. (shrink)

Preliminary summaries of a few empirio?semantical investigations1 concerning such sentences as: can we say x, should we ever (ordinarily) say x, x is self?evident (tautological, contradictory, nonsensical), P does not know what be is talking about, x is voluntary (involuntary) and: that is no excuse.

Sex is a fundamentally important biological variable. Recent years have seen significant progress in the integration of sex in many aspects of basic and clinical research, including analyses of sex differences in brain function. Significant advances in the technology available for studying the endocrine and nervous systems are now coupled with a more sophisticated awareness of the interconnections of these two communication systems of the body. A thorough understanding of the current knowledge, conceptual approaches, methodological capabilities, and challenges is a (...) prerequisite to continued progress in research and therapeutics in this interdisciplinary area. Sex Differences in the Brain provides scientists with the basic tools for investigating sex differences in brain and behavior and insight into areas where important progress in understanding physiologically relevant sex differences has already been made. This book was edited and co-authored by members of the Isis Fund Network on Sex, Gender, Drugs and the Brain, sponsored by the Society for Womens Health Research. The book is arranged in three parts. The first part of the book introduces the study of sex differences in the brain, with an overview of how the brain, stress systems, and pharmacogenetics differ in males and females and how this information is important for the study of behavior and neurobiology of both genders. The second part presents examples of sex differences in neurobiology and behavior from both basic and clinical research perspectives, covering both humans and nonhuman animals. The final part discusses sex differences in the neurobiology of disease and neurological disorders. For interested individuals as well as those who are considering conducting research at the intersections of endocrinology, neuroscience, and other areas of biomedicine, the study of sex differences offers exciting and challenging questions and perspectives. This book is intended as a guide and resource for clinicians, scientists, and students. (shrink)

There can be no doubt that a closer study of avidity will be an indispensable step towards understanding the mechanisms of immunity. N. K. Jerne, 1951, p. 1403.

Starting with Frege, the semantics (and pragmatics) of quotation has received a steady flow of attention over the last one hundred years. It has not, however, been subject to the same kind of intense debate and scrutiny as, for example, both the semantics of definite descriptions and propositional attitude verbs. Many philosophers probably share Davidson's experience: ‘When I was initiated into the mysteries of logic and semantics, quotation was usually introduced as a somewhat shady device, and the introduction was accompanied (...) by a stern sermon on the sin of confusing the use and mention of expressions’ (Davidson 1979, p. 79). Those who leave it at that, however, miss out on one of the most difficult and interesting topics in the philosophy of language. (shrink)

We say that an n-argument predicate P n is finite, if P is a finite set. Note that the set of individuals is infinite! Finite predicates are useful in data bases and in finite mathematics. The logic DBL proposed here operates on finite predicates only. We construct an imbedding for DBL in a special modal logic MPL. We prove that if a finite predicate is expressible in the classical logic, it is also expressible in DBL. Quantifiers are not necessary in (...) DBL. Some simple algebraic properties of DBL are indicated. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy by Wolfram EilenbergerDavid HermanTime of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy, by Wolfram Eilenberger, trans. Shaun Whiteside; 432 pp. New York: Penguin Press, 2020.Is it possible to write a deeply researched and technically precise contribution to the history of philosophy that reads like a gripping novel? Time of (...) the Magicians, originally published in German in 2018 as Zeit der Zauberer, convincingly demonstrates that this feat can indeed be accomplished. However, it may be achievable only by the rare expert who, like Wolfram Eilenberger, combines a thoroughgoing knowledge of the field, an unstinting commitment to recreating a public forum for philosophy, and a gift for the exposition—and dramatization—of philosophical debates, the broader circumstances in which they took place, and the motivations and aims of those who participated in them.The book, stylishly translated by Shaun Whiteside, begins by plunging us into the middle of things. Eilenberger provides snapshots of what his four focal thinkers were up to in 1929, before backtracking, in subsequent chapters, to cover key events in the decade that brought them to this point. Then, in the epilogue, he briefly sketches their post-1929 lives and careers. The book's readability is further enhanced by the way the text is broken up into short sections with eye-catching titles ("A Hut of One's Own," "Existential Health Check," "Self-Fashioning through Openness").The opening pages center on June 1929, when Ludwig Wittgenstein, having previously renounced his portion of his family's fortune and taught for several years at primary schools in rural Austria, undertook an oral defense of his doctoral thesis at the University of Cambridge at age forty. Wittgenstein's "thesis" just so happened to be Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the influential, sometimes gnomic book he had published in 1921; and at the conclusion of the defense, the candidate is rumored to have said to his examiners, Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore, "Don't worry, I know you'll never understand it."In fact, as Eilenberger discusses in a later chapter, by 1929 Wittgenstein's own thinking was no longer where it had been when he wrote the Tractatus. The [End Page 492] philosopher's primary concern had shifted away from identifying the logical structure of meaningful propositions; instead, he had become interested in how meaning emerges from the way language is used in particular, concrete contexts. Apropos the evolving nature of Wittgenstein's ideas, one of the funniest parts of the book describes the philosopher's meetings with members of the Vienna Circle, a group that, in seeking to reorient philosophy around the natural sciences, had come to see the Tractatus as a touchstone for their work. During his first meeting with the group, in 1927, Wittgenstein, instead of talking shop, recited poems by Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, standing with his back turned to the audience. Later discussions did involve philosophy, but eventually, as Eilenberger puts it, although the "Vienna Circle had hoped for something that coincided with their ideal of objective research," they "were instead left to grapple with an extremely idiosyncratic style of thinking that, in both execution and results, seemed directly contrary to it" (p. 274).Meanwhile, a few months prior to Wittgenstein's defense of a thesis that no longer reflected his real tendencies of mind, two of Eilenberger's other focal thinkers, Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger, engaged in a much-anticipated public debate at the Grand Hôtel Belvédère in Davos, Switzerland. When he first mentions it, Eilenberger furnishes just enough detail to whet readers' curiosity about this epochal contest between the eminent neo-Kantian Cassirer, whose reputation for encyclopedic erudition had just been sealed by the publication of the final volume of his masterwork, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, and the considerably younger Heidegger, a one-time student of Edmund Husserl who had made a radical departure from Husserlian phenomenology in Being and Time.By the time readers return to the debate, some three hundred pages later, Eilenberger has provided a decade's worth of historical context, which casts a... (shrink)

ExcerptIn 1959, C. P. Snow delivered the Rede Lecture on “The Two Cultures.”1 Snow’s fundamental point was that humanists and scientists speak past each other, assuming that they communicate at all. “[I]ntellectual life,” Snow writes, “is increasingly being split into two polar groups.” At one end, “literary intellectuals,” at the other, “scientists,” and between the two “a gulf of mutual incomprehension—sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding.” Scientists don’t read any imaginative literature (...) because it has no practical application; and humanists ignore science because they think it is “of no interest either in its own value or its consequences.” The result is a split that does nobody any good. (shrink)