Abstract: The State of Nature, Prehistory, and Mythmaking Karl Widerquist This chapter provide an overview of two books, in which Grant S. McCall and I name, define, and debunk the following false claims that still play important roles in contemporary political theories although they are not always defined and defended explicitly: 1. The Hobbesian hypothesis: sovereign states and/or the liberal private property rights system benefits everyone (or at least harms no one) relative to how well they could reasonably expect (...) to live in the state of nature—i.e. a society lacking one or both of these institutions. 2. The appropriation hypothesis: private property in the form of liberal ownership rights develops naturally while collective, communal, common, or government-held property rights systems do not. 3. The natural inequality hypothesis: inequality is natural and inevitable, i.e. economic, social, and/or political equality cannot exist and/or cannot be created without a significant loss in negative freedom. 4. The market-freedom hypothesis: a market economy (and/or capitalism) is more consistent with negative freedom than any other economic system. The third and fourth of these claims are not obviously claims about prehistoric or small-scale societies, but they are universal claims about all societies and so they include claims about even the most remote and distant societies from contemporary thinking. (shrink)

Vizantiĭsʹkyĭ neoplatonizm i︠a︡k predmet relihii︠e︡znavchoho ta istoryko-filosofsʹkoho doslidz︠h︡enni︠a︡ -- Formuvanni︠a︡ vizantiĭsʹkoho neoplatonizmu u tvorakh Ĭoana Filopona (Dionisii︠a︡ Areopahita) -- Filosofii︠a︡ butti︠a︡ Maksyma Spovidnyka--kulʹminat︠s︡ii︠a︡ rozvytku vizantiĭsʹkoho neoplatonizmu -- Vizantiĭsʹkyĭ neoplatonichnyĭ esent︠s︡ializm kint︠s︡i︠a︡ VII-pochatku XIV stolitʹ -- Palamizm i︠a︡k osoblyva forma vizantiĭsʹkoho neoplatonizmu.

The roles played by physics in the study of the life sciences have taken many forms over the past 100 years. Here we analyze how physics can be brought to bear on the contemporary study of morphogenesis, where new tissue-scale forms arise out of simpler, more homogenous, initial structures. We characterize how morphogenesis has been studied through reductionist approaches and discuss their limitations. We suggest that an alternative way of approaching morphogenesis that begins with a consideration of the whole may (...) also serve as a fruitful mode of scientific inquiry. Through historical analysis of concepts relevant for contemporary systems biology, we illustrate how physical thinking oriented toward the biological whole (“holistic biophysical thinking”) was exemplified in the biological theories presented earlier by D’Arcy Thompson (1860–1948) and Pere Alberch (1954–1998). We contrast the use of physics to develop the conceptual foundations of holistically oriented systems biology with the more prevalent contemporary use of physics that focuses on technological development and quantification, embedded within reductionist strategies. As an in-depth contemporary case study, we describe how in our research we have used holistic biophysical thinking to develop biological theories of vertebrate morphogenesis that account for and extend beyond genetic, molecular, and cellular processes. We propose a theory of skin development where _both_ molecular _and_ morphological patterns are orchestrated by emergent physical processes at the supracellular scale. We further posit that holistic biophysical thinking at the supracellular scale may advance theories of diseases such as cancer. (shrink)

If anthropogenesis was a transition from nature to society and the Neolithic revolution culminated in the breakthrough of human beings into history, then the appearance of cities on our planet, the "urban revolution," marked the rise of civilization, mankind's induction into the spiritual universe. The rise of cities marks the onset of what K. Jaspers called the Axial Period" (eighth-second centuries B.C.). This is the period in which the spiritual preconditions of humanity took shape: the Bible, the Iliad and Odyssey, (...) ancient philosophy and Greek culture, the Upanishads, Zoroastrianism, Taoism, and Confucianism. In world culture the city proved itself as a powerful mediator between the earth and the heavens. (shrink)

Microbiologists are transitioning from the study and characterization of individual strains or species to the profiling of whole microbiomes and microbial ecology. Equipped with high-throughput methods for studying the taxonomic and functional characteristics of diverse samples, they are just beginning to encounter the conceptual, theoretical, and experimental problems of comparing taxonomy to function, and extracting useful measures from such comparisons. Although still unresolved, these problems are well studied in macro-ecology and are reiterated here as an historical precautionary for microbial ecologists. (...) Beyond expected and unresolved terminological vagueness, we argue that assessments and comparisons of taxonomic and functional profiles in micro-ecology suffer from theoretically unresolvable arbitrariness and ambiguities. We divide these into problems of scale, individuation, and commensurability. We argue that there is no technically/theoretically “correct” scale, individuation, or comparison of taxonomy and function, but there are nonetheless better and worse methodologies for profiling. (shrink)

Cell biologists, including those seeking molecular mechanistic explanations of cellular phenomena, frequently rely on experimental strategies focused on identifying the cellular context relevant to their investigations. We suggest that such practices can be understood as a guided decomposition strategy, where molecular explanations of phenomena are defined in relation to natural contextual (cell) boundaries. This “top-down” strategy contrasts with “bottom-up” reductionist approaches where well-defined molecular structures and activities are orphaned by their displacement from actual biological functions. We focus on the central (...) role of microscopic imaging in cell biology to uncover possible constraints on the system. We show how identified constraints are used heuristically to limit possible mechanistic explanations to those that are biologically meaningful. Historical examples of this process described here include discovery of the mechanism of oxidative phosphorylation in mitochondria, molecular explanation of the first steps in protein secretion, and identification of molecular motors. We suggest that these instances are examples of a form of downward causation or, more specifically, constraining relations, where higher-level structures and variables delimit and enable lower-level system states. The guided decomposition strategy in our historical cases illustrates the irreducibility of experimentally identified constraints in explaining biological activities of cells. Rather than viewing decomposition and recomposition as separate epistemic activities, we contend that they need to be iteratively integrated to account for the ontological complexity of multi-level systems. (shrink)

The technique of covers is now well established in semigroup theory. The idea is, given a semigroup S, to find a semigroup having a better understood structure than that of S, and an onto morphism of a specific kind from to S. With the right conditions on , the behaviour of S is closely linked to that of . If S is finite one aims to choose a finite . The celebrated results for inverse semigroups of McAlister in the 1970s (...) form the flagship of this theory.Weakly left quasi-ample semigroups form a quasivariety (of algebras of type(2, 1)), properly containing the classes of groups, and of inverse, left ample, and weakly left ample semigroups. We show how the existence of finite proper covers for semigroups in this quasivariety is a consequence of Ashs powerful theorem for pointlike sets. Our approach is to obtain a cover of a weakly left quasi-ample semigroup S as a subalgebra of S × G, where G is a group. It follows immediately from the fact that weakly left quasi-ample semigroups form a quasivariety, that is weakly left quasi-ample. We can then specialise our covering results to the quasivarieties of weakly left ample, and left ample semigroups. The latter have natural representations as (2, 1)-subalgebras of partial (one-one) transformations, where the unary operation takes a transformation to the identity map in the domain of . In the final part of this paper we consider representations of weakly left quasi-ample semigroups. (shrink)

Selection of author's works on Svātantrika Madhyamika philosophy and logic.

With selections from Parts Two and Three, together with Marx's "Introduction to a Critique of Political Economy".