Stomata are microscopic pores on the surface of land plants used for gas and water vapor exchange. A pair of highly specialized guard cells surround the pore and adjust pore size. Studies in Arabidopsis have revealed that cell–cell communication is essential to coordinate the asymmetric cell divisions required for proper stomatal patterning. Initial research in this area identified signaling molecules that negatively regulate stomatal differentiation. However, genes promoting cell‐fate transition leading to mature guard cells remained elusive. Now, three closely related (...) basic helix–loop–helix (bHLH) proteins, SPEECHLESS, MUTE and FAMA have been identified as positive regulators that direct three consecutive cell‐fate decisions during stomatal development. The identification of these genes opens a new direction to investigate the evolution of stomatal development and the conserved functions of bHLH proteins in cell type differentiation adopted by plants and animals. BioEssays 29:861–870, 2007. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Beginning with Aristotle, philosophers have taken artifacts to be ontologically deficient. This paper proposes a theory of artifacts, according to which artifacts are ontologically on a par with other material objects. I formulate a nonreductive theory that regards artifacts as constituted by - but not identical to - aggregates of particles. After setting out the theory, I rebut a number of arguments that disparage the ontological status of artifacts.

In the large recent literature on the nature of human persons, persons are usually studied in isolation from the world in which they live. What persons are most fundamentally, philosophers say, are human animals, or brains, or perhaps souls -- without any consideration of the social and physical environments without which persons would not exist. In this article, I want to compensate for such overly narrow focus. Instead of beginning with the nature of persons cut off from any environment, I (...) shall begin with metaphysical consideration of the world of which persons are a part. I shall then briefly describe my view of persons, according to which persons are material objects like other concrete things in the world, but are unique in their first-person perspectives. Finally, I shall consider some of the special relations that persons, and only persons, have to other things in the world. (shrink)

Science and its philosophical companion, Naturalism, represent reality in wholly nonpersonal terms. How, if at all, can a nonpersonal scheme accommodate the first-person perspective that we all enjoy? In this volume, Lynne Rudder Baker explores that question by considering both reductive and eliminative approaches to the first-person perspective. After finding both approaches wanting, she mounts an original constructive argument to show that a non-Cartesian first-person perspective belongs in the basic inventory of what exists. That is, the world that contains (...) us persons is irreducibly personal.After arguing for the irreducibilty and ineliminability of the first-person perspective, Baker develops a theory of this perspective. The first-person perspective has two stages, rudimentary and robust. Human infants and nonhuman animals with consciousness and intentionality have rudimentary first-person perspectives. In learning a language, a person acquires a robust first-person perspective: the capacity to conceive of oneself as oneself, in the first person. By developing an account of personal identity, Baker argues that her theory is coherent, and she shows various ways in which first-person perspectives contribute to reality. (shrink)

What is a human person, and what is the relation between a person and his or her body? In her third book on the philosophy of mind, Lynne Rudder Baker investigates what she terms the person/body problem and offers a detailed account of the relation between human persons and their bodies. Baker's argument is based on the 'Constitution View' of persons and bodies, which aims to show what distinguishes persons from all other beings and to show how we can (...) be fully material beings without being identical to our bodies. The Constitution View yields answers to the questions 'What am I most fundamentally?', 'What is a person?', and 'What is the relation between human persons and their bodies'? Baker argues that the complex mental property of first-person perspective enables one to conceive of one's body and mental states as one's own. (shrink)

Lynne Rudder Baker presents and defends a unique account of the material world: the Constitution View. In contrast to leading metaphysical views that take everyday things to be either non-existent or reducible to micro-objects, the Constitution View construes familiar things as irreducible parts of reality. Although they are ultimately constituted by microphysical particles, everyday objects are neither identical to, nor reducible to, the aggregates of microphysical particles that constitute them. The result is genuine ontological diversity: people, bacteria, donkeys, mountains (...) and microscopes are fundamentally different kinds of things - all constituted by, but not identical to, aggregates of particles. Baker supports her account with discussions of non-reductive causation, vagueness, mereology, artefacts, three-dimensionalism, ontological novelty, ontological levels and emergence. The upshot is a unified ontological theory of the entire material world that irreducibly contains people, as well as non-human living things and inanimate objects. (shrink)

This essay attends to the place of virginity at the center of the fourth volume of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Confessions of the Flesh. Reading virginity through a rhetorical lens, the essay argues for an ethics and a politics of counter-conduct in Foucault characterized by chiasmus, a rhetorical structure of inverted parallelism. That chiastic structure frames Foucault’s Confessions, and all of his work, as a fragmented, self-hollowing speech haunted by death and the dissolution of the subject. The essay reads (...) Foucault as apophatic speech that returns to us, no longer itself, made strange. In that deathly movement of eternal recurrence, Foucault’s Confessions speak after death from the x’d out place of the queer virgin: on a threshold that separates life from death, in a movement of metanoia or ethical conversion. As an unfinished history in fragments, the essay’s form brings attention to incompletion as a crucial aspect of Foucault’s work. The fragmentation that characterizes an unfinished history underscores poetic discontinuity as the hallmark of Foucault’s genealogical method and thought. (shrink)

Explaining Attitudes offers an important challenge to the dominant conception of belief found in the work of such philosophers as Dretske and Fodor. According to this dominant view beliefs, if they exist at all, are constituted by states of the brain. Lynne Rudder Baker rejects this view and replaces it with a quite different approach - practical realism. Seen from the perspective of practical realism, any argument that interprets beliefs as either brain states or states of immaterial souls is (...) a 'non-starter'. Practical realism takes beliefs to be states of the whole persons, rather like states of health. What a person believes is determined by what a person would do, say and think in various circumstances. Thus beliefs and other attitudes are interwoven into an integrated, commonsensical conception of reality. (shrink)

. The extended‐mind thesis is the claim that mentality need not be situated just in the brain, or even within the boundaries of the skin. Some versions take “extended selves” be to relatively transitory couplings of biological organisms and external resources. First, I show how EM can be seen as an extension of traditional views of mind. Then, after voicing a couple of qualms about EM, I reject EM in favor of a more modest hypothesis that recognizes enduring subjects of (...) experience and agents with integrated bodies. Nonetheless, my modest hypothesis allows subpersonal states to have nonbiological parts that play essential roles in cognitive processing. I present empirical warrant for this modest hypothesis and show how it leaves room for science and religion to coexist. (shrink)

Self-consciousness, many philosophers agree, is essential to being a person. There is not so much agreement, however, about how to understand what self-consciousness is. Philosophers in the field of cognitive science tend to write off self-consciousness as unproblematic. According to such philosophers, the real difficulty for the cognitive scientist is phenomenal consciousness--the fact that we have states that feel a certain way. If we had a grip on phenomenal consciousness, they think, self-consciousness could be easily handled by functionalist models. For (...) example, recently Ned Block commented. (shrink)

Many Christians who argue against Christian materialism direct their arguments against what I call ‘Type-I materialism’, the thesis that I cannot exist without my organic body. I distinguish Type-I materialism from Type-II materialism, which entails only that I cannot exist without some body that supports certain mental functions. I set out a version of Type-II materialism, and argue for its superiority to Type-I materialism in an age of science. Moreover, I show that Type-II materialism can accommodate Christian doctrines like the (...) Resurrection of the Body, the Incarnation, and the intermediate state (if there is one). (shrink)

Toxic speech inflicts damage to mental and physical health. This process can be chronic or acute, temporary or permanent. Understanding how toxic speech inflicts these harms requires both an account of linguistic practices and, because language is inherently social, tools from epidemiology. This paper explores what we can learn from two epidemiological models: a common source model that emphasizes poisons, and a propagated transmission model that better fits contagions like viruses.

Michel Foucault was the first to embed the roots of human sexuality in discipline and biopolitics, therefore revolutionizing our conception of sex and its relationship to society, economics, and culture. Yet over the past two decades, scholars have limited themselves to the study of Foucault's _History of Sexuality_, volume 1 paying lesser attention to his equally explosive _History of Madness_. In this earlier volume, Foucault recasts Western rationalism as a project that both produces and represses sexual deviants, calling out the (...) complicity of modern science and the exclusionary nature of family morality. By reclaiming these deft moves, Lynne Huffer teases out exciting new strands of Foucauldian thought. She then revisits the theorist's ethical work in light of these discoveries, divining an ethics of eros that sees sexuality as a lived experience we are repeatedly called on to remember. Throughout her study, Huffer weaves her own experiences together with Foucault's, sampling from unpublished interviews and other archived materials in order to intimately rework the problem of sexuality as a product of reason. (shrink)

Trafficking in women’ has, in recent years, been the subject of intense feminist debate. This article analyses the position of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) and the writings of its founder, Kathleen Barry. It suggests that CATW's construction of ‘third world prostitutes’ is part of a wider western feminist impulse to construct a damaged ‘other’ as justification for its own interventionist impulses. The central argument of this article is that the ‘injured body’ of the ‘third world trafficking victim’ (...) in international feminist debates around trafficking in women serves as a powerful metaphor for advancing certain feminist interests, which cannot be assumed to be those of third world sex workers themselves. This argument is advanced through a comparison of Victorian feminist campaigns against prostitution in India with contemporary feminist campaigns against trafficking. The term ‘injured identity’ is drawn from Wendy Brown's (1995) States of Injury, Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Brown argues that certain groups have configured their claims to inclusion in the liberal state in terms of ‘historical ‘injuries’. Antoinette Burton (1998) extends Brown's analysis to look at Victorian feminists’ relationship to Empire, arguing that the ‘injured identities’ of colonial ‘others’ were central to feminist efforts to mark out their own role in Empire. This paper builds on Burton's analysis, asking what role the ‘injured identities’ of third world sex workers play in the construction of certain contemporary feminist identities. The notion of ‘injured identities’ offers a provocative way to begin to examine how CATW feminists position the ‘trafficking victim’ in their discourse. If ‘injured identity’ is a constituent element of late modern subject formation, this may help explain why CATW and Barry rely so heavily on the ‘suffering’ of ‘third world trafficking victims’ in their discourses of women's subjugation. It also raises questions about the possible repressive consequences of CATW's efforts to combat ‘trafficking in women’ through ‘protective’ legislation. (shrink)

Nonphilosophers, if they think of philosophy at all, wonder why people work in metaphysics. After all, metaphysics, as Auden once said of poetry, makes nothing happen.1 Yet some very intelligent people are driven to spend their lives exploring metaphysical theses. Part of what motivates metaphysicians is the appeal of grizzly puzzles (like the paradox of the heap or the puzzle of the ship of Theseus). But the main reason to work in metaphysics, for me at least, is to understand the (...) shared world that we all encounter and interact with. And the shared world that we all encounter includes us self-conscious beings and our experience. The world that we inhabit is unavoidably a temporal world: the signing of the Declaration of Independence is later than the Lisbon earthquake; the Cold War is in the past; your death is in the future. There is no getting away from time. (shrink)

In recent years, folk psychology has become a topic of debate not just among philosophers, but among development psychologists and primatologists as well.

"This book is a comprehensive attack on several of the views that have been most influential in the philosophy of psychology during the last two decades. Professor Baker argues that mentalistic notions should not be eliminated, and need not be explained in terms of other notions, in cognitive science.' The book is interesting and shows an honest concern for clear argumentation. It deserves a wide readership." --Tyler Burge, University of California at Los Angeles"This book is a provocative and relentlessly argued (...) treatment of a deep and important topic: the fate of intentionality. Baker's arguments oblige those who wish to defend the current conception of cognitive science to rethink the discipline. She has put the ball squarely in the physicalists' court. ... Despite the technical character of the topic, the book is wonderfully readable."--John Heil, Visiting Fellow, University of California, BerkeleyThis stimulating book critically examines a wide range of physicalistic conceptions of mind in the works of Jerry A. Fodor, Stephen P. Stich, Paul M. Churchland, Daniel C. Dennett, and others. Part I argues that intentional concepts cannot be reduced to nonintentional (and nonsemantic) concepts; Part II argues that intentional concepts are nevertheless indispensable to our cognitive enterprises and thus need no foundation in physicalism.As a sustained challenge to the prevailing interpretation of cognitive science, this timely book fills a large gap in the philosophical literature. It is sure to spark controversy, yet its clarity makes it attractive as a text in upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Saving Belief should be read byphilosophers, psychologists, and others interested in the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science. (shrink)

Speech is a major vehicle for enacting and enforcing misogyny, so can counter-speech stop the harms of misogynist speech? This paper starts with a discussion of the nature of misogyny, from Dworkin, MacKinnon, and Frye, up to K. Manne’s new work, here emphasizing the ways that women are attacked or undermined through speech and images. Misogyny becomes toxic when it sharply and steadily limits the life prospects, including daily functioning, of the women it targets. To address the questions of counter-speech, (...) one first needs a robust account of language—it’s power, how it functions, whether it can actually be gainsaid. Once the speech act is issued, can its damage be un-done, or substantially mitigated? To answer this, one must understand the kinds of harms that language achieves, and the kinds of counter-speech available. That is, one needs an understanding of how the speech of misogyny functions, rooted in a theory of how language works. This article offers a brief account of language as a complex set of social practices, which includes the speech of law, and an account of the power and limits of counter-speech. I argue that it is unhelpful to think in terms of free speech vs. censorship. Speech is not completely free, and censorship is a blunt tool. Instead, we should look at the ways that discursive harms are enacted and what kinds of normative changes could minimize the frequency of assault, and which changes might minimize the power of misogyny. (shrink)

This article shows how attention to extended metaphors provides the basis for a substantive account of what it is to understand a metaphor. Offering an analysis of extended metaphors modeled on an analysis of co-referential anaphoric chains, this article presents an account of how contexts makes metaphors. The analysis introduces the concept of expressive commitment, commitment to the viability and value of particular modes of discourse. Unlike literal interpretation, metaphorical interpretation puts the expressive commitment in the forefront of the interpretive (...) process. The analogy between extended metaphors and anaphora provides a structure for describing what it is to interpret expressions metaphorically. It generates an account that explains the affinities and differences between extension and explication, and hence of the age-old problem of paraphrase. Further, the account allows for the open-endedness of metaphor without succumbing to the view that metaphor is non-cognitive. Finally, the account developed here underscores the role of expressive commitment in metaphorical interpretation. (shrink)

This book is a study of Aristotle's metaphysics in which the central argument is that Aristotle's views on substance are a direct response to Plato's Theory of Forms. The claim is that Aristotle believes that many of Plato's views are tenable once one has rejected Plato's notion of separation. There have been many recent books on Aristotle's theory of substance. This one is distinct from previous books in several ways: firstly, it offers a completely new, coherent interpretation of Aristotle's claim (...) that substances are separate in which substances turn out to be specimens of natural kinds. Secondly, it covers a broad range of issues, including Aristotle's criticism of Plato, his views on numerical sameness and identity, his epistemology and his account of teleology. There is also a discussion of much of the recent literature on Aristotle. (shrink)

This paper is based on a literature review of articles discussing the teaching and learning of philosophy in primary and secondary schools. The purpose of this review was to address two research questions: What 'is 'philosophy? What does philosophy do? This paper addresses the first research question—What 'is' philosophy?—by gathering together the various understandings of the word ‘philosophy’ circulating in the literature. There are ten understandings of what philosophy 'is' that have arisen from the literature: philosophy as a foundational concept; (...) philosophy as thinking—a skill, a disposition, a practice; philosophy as method or process; philosophy as a tool or instrument; philosophy as a creative task; philosophy as inquiry; philosophy as search for truth; philosophy as non-dogmatic teaching and hence the emancipation of thought; philosophy as communal activity; philosophy as a way of life. These ten understandings have been consistent over time, from writing in the field in the 1970s through to the present day. Many commentators hold and work with multiple understandings of what philosophy 'is' in their writing. (shrink)

The editor of this volume takes it to mean that a prior experience affects behavior without the individual's appreciation (ability to report) of this...

Mark Johnston takes reality to be wholly objective or impersonal, and aims to show that the inevitability of death does not obliterate goodness in such a naturalistic world. Crucial to his argument is the claim that there are no persisting selves. After critically discussing Johnston's arguments, I set out a view of persons that shares Johnston's view that there are no selves, but disagrees about the prospects of goodness in a wholly impersonal world. On my view, a wholly objective world (...) is ontologically incomplete: Persons have irreducible first-person properties. My aim is to show that we can reject selves, but that we can retain persons and their essential first-person properties as ontologically significant. (shrink)

Except for _Democracy and Education, _the 53 items in Volume 10 include all of Dewey’s writings from 1916–1917, the years when he moved into politics and began to write about topics of general public interest. The best known of Dewey’s writings in this volume is the essay from _Creative Intelligence_,_ _“The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy.” Here Dewey asserts that “Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a de­vice for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a (...) method for dealing with the problems of men.” Dewey put that idea into practice, as Lewis E. Hahn points out in his intro­duction. “In 1916–1917 [Dewey] com­mented on quite a range of issues from compulsory universal military training to the Wilson-Hughes presidential cam­paign, from conscription of thought to the future of pacifism, from what Amer­ica will fight for to appropriate peace terms... and from American educa­tion and culture to contemporary issues in education, with the war casting a shadow over most of the items.”. (shrink)