Pancreatitis is a complex, progressively destructive inflammatory disorder. Alcohol was long thought to be the primary causative agent, but genetic contributions have been of interest since the discovery that rare PRSS1, CFTR and SPINK1 variants were associated with pancreatitis risk. We now report two associations at genome-wide significance identified and replicated at PRSS1-PRSS2 and X-linked CLDN2 through a two-stage genome-wide study. The PRSS1 variant likely affects disease susceptibility by altering expression of the primary trypsinogen gene. The CLDN2 risk allele is (...) associated with atypical localization of claudin-2 in pancreatic acinar cells. The homozygous CLDN2 genotype confers the greatest risk, and its alleles interact with alcohol consumption to amplify risk. These results could partially explain the high frequency of alcohol-related pancreatitis in men. © 2012 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

This article explores the psychological logics underpinning key perspectives in the ‘turn to affect’. Research on affect raises questions about the categorization of affective states, affective meaning-making, and the processes involved in the transmission of affect. I argue that current approaches risk depopulating affecting scenes, mystifying affective contagion, and authorizing questionable psychobiological arguments. I engage with the work of Sedgwick and Frank, Thrift, and Ahmed to explore these points and suggest that the concept of affective practice offers a more promising (...) social psychological grounding. Notions of affective practice are more commensurate with trends in contemporary psychobiology, explain the limits on affective contagion, and emphasize relationality and negotiation, attentive to the flow of affecting episodes. A practice approach positions affect as a dynamic process, emergent from a polyphony of intersections and feedbacks, working across body states, registrations and categorizations, entangled with cultural meaning-making, and integrated with material and natural processes, social situations and social relationships. (shrink)

In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas makes the claim that the unprecedented public use of critical reason was an essential constituent of the early modern European (bourgeois) public sphere (1991, 27-28, 105-6, and more generally 1-117). Narrating the history of the particular concept of critical reason that animated the public sphere, Habermas locates its origin in the practical reason (phronesis) of Aristotle but argues that Niccolò Machiavelli and Thomas More had drastically transformed the concept when they substituted (...) for phronesis a practical reason based instead on techne (1973, 42, 50-51). Machiavelli's role was central in this transformation, for he "reduces the practical .. (shrink)

May social unity - the unity of a society or social group - be a matter of sharing values? Political philosophers disagree on this topic. Kymlicka answers: No. Devlin and Rawls answer: Yes. It is argued that given one common 'summative' account of sharing values a negative answer is correct. A positive answer is correct, however, given the plural subject account of sharing values. Given this account, those who share values are unified in a substantial way by their participation in (...) a joint commitment. Some consequences of such sharing of values for the liberty of the people involved are noted. (shrink)

Along the way, she calls upon us to recognize the mysteries that lie at the heart of our lives and the metaphysical reality that gives meaning to life.The ...

I argued that the frameworks and mechanisms that produce unification do not enable us to explain why the unified phenomena behave as they do. That is, we need to look beyond the unifying process for an explanation of these phenomena. Anya Plutynski ([2005]) has called into question my claim about the relationship between unification and explanation as well as my characterization of it in the context of the early synthesis of Mendelism with Darwinian natural selection. In this paper I argue (...) that her methodological criticisms rest on a misinterpretation of my views on explanation and defend my historical interpretation of the work of Fisher and Wright. A statement of the problem Methodological differences: how to characterize explanation Historical matters: disagreements about details Explanation revisited: the possible versus the ‘merely actual’. (shrink)

Religious capacity is a highly elaborate, neurocognitive human trait that has a solid evolutionary foundation. This book uses a multidisciplinary approach to describe millions of years of biological innovations that eventually give rise to the modern trait and its varied expression in humanity’s many religions. The authors present a scientific model and a central thesis that the brain organs, networks, and capacities that allowed humans to survive physically also gave our species the ability to create theologies, find sustenance in religious (...) practice, and use religion to support the social group. Yet, the trait of religious capacity remains non-obligatory, like reading and mathematics. The individual can choose not to use it. The approach relies on research findings in nine disciplines, including the work of countless neuroscientists, paleoneurologists, archaeologists, cognitive scientists, and psychologists. This is a cutting-edge examination of the evolutionary origins of humanity’s interaction with the supernatural. It will be of keen interest to academics working in Religious Studies, Neuroscience, Cognitive Science, Anthropology, Evolutionary Biology, and Psychology. (shrink)

There has been much recent debate about women's rights and their relation to human rights. Debates about domestic violence in Vanuatu are situated in this global frame but also in a regional and historical context dominated by the relation between kastom (tradition) and Christianity. This article depicts the dynamics of a conference on Violence and the Family in Vanuatu held in Port Vila in 1994, in terms of the competing claims of universal human rights and cultural relativism. The allegedly western (...) character of human rights which focus on the individual and civil and political rights is often contrasted with the non-western stress on collectivities and the rights to economic development and self-determination. These sorts of ideological oppositions in international politics reverberate in domestic politics as well, and especially in those which situate women and men as subjects in conflict, as they are in many domestic disputes. (shrink)

: This response to the preceding five articles highlights the stubborn persistence of the philosophical perplexities surrounding commodification in the realm of medicine and biotechnology.

Volume 18, Issue 5, October 2019, Page 535-544.

Stratton's photographs show that, unlike the rigid class system that governed medieval Naples, there is a virtually classless society within the catacombs, where noblemen and peasants were laid to rest side by side, their remains indistinguishable from one another. Skulls were placed in seemingly endless rows, stretching far back into the depths of the cavern, each skull identical to those surrounding it.

This article uses a case-study of the relationship between the British suffrage organization, the Women's Social and Political Union, and its equivalent on the Irish side, the Irish Women's Franchise League, in order to illuminate some consequences of the colonial relationship between Britain and Ireland. As political power was located within the British state, and the British feminist movement enjoyed superior resources, the Irish movement was at a disadvantage. This was compounded by serious internal divisions within the Irish movement — (...) a product of the dispute over Ireland's constitutional future — which prevented the Franchise League, sympathetic to the nationalist demand for independence — from establishing a strong presence in the North. The consequences of the British movement organizing in Ireland, in particular their initiation of a militant campaign in the North, are explored in some detail, using evidence provided by letters from the participants. British intervention was clearly motivated from British-inspired concerns rather than from any solidarity with the situation of women in Ireland, proving to be disastrous for the Irish, accentuating their deep-rooted divisions. The overall argument is that feminism cannot be viewed in isolation from other political considerations. This case-study isolates the repercussions of Britain's imperial role for both British and Irish movements: ostensibly with a common objective but in reality divided by their differing response to the constitutional arrangement between the two countries. For this reason, historians of Irish feminist movements must give consideration to the importance of the ‘national question’ and display a more critical attitude towards the role played by Britain in Irish affairs. (shrink)

This essay seeks to understand the domain and demands of reparative justice in terms of moral vulnerability. Significant harms raise the question of whether victims stand in truly reciprocal practices of accountability; if they do, they enjoy the power of calling others to account as well as bearing the liability of being accountable to others. In the aftermath of harms, victims’ moral vulnerability is tested: they may be exposed to the insult and injury of discovering that they do not enjoy (...) the moral standing of holding others accountable. While the occasion of reparative justice is significant wrongs and wrongful harms and losses, this essay argues that the aim of reparative practices is not only or even primarily to redress those harms and losses, but to address the moral vulnerability of victims by affirming their status in accountability relations. (shrink)

Clough's theological account of animals critiques the familiar negative identification of animals as not-human. Instead, Clough highlights both the distinctive particularity of each animal as created by God and the shared fleshly creatureliness of human and nonhuman animals. He encourages Christians to recognize Jesus Christ as God enfleshed more than divinely human, and consequently to care for nonhuman animals as those who share with human animals in the redemption of all flesh. This move risks downplaying the possibilities for creaturely specific (...) forms of redemption; limiting the cosmic efficacy of salvation in Christ; and losing the particularity of Christ's divine and human natures. Another, possibly less risky, direction to take Clough's insights about creatureliness and well-formed theological ethics might attend to the perverse ways that humans assess the worthiness of human and nonhuman animals by substituting particularities of use and abuse for the particularities of creation and salvation. (shrink)

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Courts in the United States are finding that recipients can be bound by fine-print terms if they had notice of them. Without directly confronting the overarching normative question whether notice can cause contractual obligation, this Article takes notice seriously by focusing on how psychological characteristics of “HUMANs” suggest rethinking of when effective notice is likely to occur.