What makes up reality, and how? What kinds of entity are fundamental to reality, and how do dependent entities depend on the fundamental ones? How does one entity metaphysically ground another? These questions are central to contemporary metaphysics. The papers in this collection, written by a new generation of metaphysicians, address these and related questions. They investigate the metaphysical concepts of grounding and fundamentality, and the relationship between the fundamental and all the other parts of reality. Together, these papers represent (...) the cutting-edge of a central topic in contemporary metaphysics. (shrink)

Cancer viewed as a programmed, evolutionarily conserved life‐form, rather than just a random series of disease‐causing mutations, answers the rarely asked question of what the cancer cell is for, provides meaning for its otherwise mysterious suite of attributes, and encourages a different type of thinking about treatment. The broad but consistent spectrum of traits, well‐recognized in all aggressive cancers, group naturally into three categories: taxonomy (“phylogenation”), atavism (“re‐primitivization”) and robustness (“adaptive resilience”). The parsimonious explanation is not convergent evolution, but the (...) release of an highly conserved survival program, honed by the exigencies of the Pre‐Cambrian, to which the cancer cell seems better adapted; and which is recreated within, and at great cost to, its host. Central to this program is the Warburg Effect, whose malign influence permeates well beyond aerobic glycolysis to include biomass interconversion and genomic heuristics. Warburg‐type metabolism and genomic instability are targets whose therapeutic disablement is a major priority. (shrink)

Much recent work on cognition is characterized by an augmentation of the role of action coupled with an attenuation of the role of representation. This coupling is no accident. The appeal to action is seen either as a way of explaining representation or explaining it away. This paper argues that the appeal to action as a way of explaining, supplementing, or even supplanting, representation can lead to a serious dilemma. On the one hand, the concept of action to which we (...) appeal cannot, on pain of circularity, be a representational concept. Such an appeal would presuppose representation and therefore can neither explain it nor explain it away. On the other hand, I shall argue, if the concept of action to which we appeal is not a representational one, there is every reason for supposing that it will not be the sort of thing that can explain, or supplement, let alone supplant, representation. The resulting dilemma, I shall argue, is not fatal. But avoiding it requires us to embrace a certain thesis about the nature of action, a thesis whose broad outline this paper delineates. Anyone who wishes to employ action as a way of explaining or explaining away representation should, I shall argue, take this conception of action very seriously indeed. I am going to discuss these issues with respect to a influential recent contribution to this debate: the sensorimotor or enactive model of perception developed by Kevin O’Regan and Alva Noë. (shrink)

Moritz Schlick’s work shaped Logical Empiricism and thereby an important part of philosophy in the first half of the 20th century. A continuous thread that runs through his work is a philosophical diagnosis of the ‘great errors in philosophy’: philosophers assume that there is intuitive knowledge/knowledge by acquaintance. Yet acquaintance, it is not knowledge, but an evaluative attitude. In this paper I will reconstruct Schlick’s arguments for this conclusion in the light of his early practical philosophy and his reading of (...) Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea. Having the historical roots of Schlick’s position in view will put us in a position to explore and question its presuppositions. (shrink)

Ran is one of the most abundant and best conserved of the small GTP binding and hydrolyzing proteins of eukaryotes. It is located predominantly in cell nuclei. Ran is a member of the Ras family of GTPases, which includes the Ras and Ras‐like proteins that regulate cell growth and division, the Rho and Rac proteins that regulate cytoskeletal organization and the Rab proteins that regulate vesicular sorting. Ran differs most obviously from other members of the Ras family in both its (...) nuclear localization, and its lack of sites required for post‐translational lipid modification. Ran is, however, similar to other Ras family members in requiring a specific guanine nucleotide exchange factor (GEF) and a specific GTPase activating protein (GAP) as stimulators of overall GTPase activity. In this review, the multiple cellular functions of Ran are evaluated with respect to its known biochemistry and molecular interactions. (shrink)

Emotion Review, Volume 14, Issue 1, Page 15-30, January 2022. We offer an account of mental health and well-being using the predictive processing framework. According to this framework, the difference between mental health and psychopathology can be located in the goodness of the predictive model as a regulator of action. What is crucial for avoiding the rigid patterns of thinking, feeling and acting associated with psychopathology is the regulation of action based on the valence of affective states. In PPF, valence (...) is modelled as error dynamics—the change in prediction errors over time. Our aim in this paper is to show how error dynamics can account for both momentary happiness and longer term well-being. What will emerge is a new neurocomputational framework for making sense of human flourishing. (shrink)

It is argued that the primary aim of institutional management is to protect the moral integrity of health professionals without significantly compromising other important values and interests. Institutional policies are recommended as a means to promote fair, consistent, and transparent management of conscience-based refusals. It is further recommended that those policies include the following four requirements: (1) Conscience-based refusals will be accommodated only if a requested accommodation will not impede a patient’s/surrogate’s timely access to information, counseling, and referral. (2) Conscience-based (...) refusals will be accommodated only if a requested accommodation will not impede a patient’s timely access to health care services offered within the institution. (3) Conscience-based refusals will be accommodated only if the accommodation will not impose excessive burdens on colleagues, supervisors, department heads, other administrators, or the institution. (4) Whenever feasible, health professionals should provide advance notification to department heads or supervisors. Formal review may not be required in all cases, but when it is appropriate, several recommendations are offered about standards and the review process. A key recommendation is that when reviewing an objector’s reasons, contrary to what some have proposed, it is not appropriate to adopt an adversarial approach modelled on military review boards’ assessments of requests for conscientious objector status. According to the approach recommended, the primary function of reviews of objectors’ reasons is to engage them in a process of reflecting on the nature and depth of their objections, with the objective of facilitating moral clarity on the part of objectors rather than enabling department heads, supervisors, or ethics committees to determine whether conscientious objections are sufficiently genuine. (shrink)

This dissertation is concerned with normativity both as an explanatory device in the philosophy of language, logic and epistemology and as a philosophical issue in its own right. Following later Wittgenstein and Sellars, it is argued that language is normative, in the first instance because of the fact that speech acts take place within a structure of social norms and institutions. This fact is then utilized to show that important features of semantic content can be explained in terms of such (...) norms. ;This Sellarsian conception of linguistic usage as the performance of acts within a linguistic game of giving and asking for reasons, leads us to focus on inferential proprieties as central to semantic content. It is, then, natural to look at logical vocabulary, paradigmatically 'entails', as expressing the very normative relations definitive of this content. An idea of Brandom's is developed in providing a formal theory of the inferential content of logical vocabulary. Such normative-inferentialist semantic analyses are developed for a wide range of logical systems. ;A certain conception of justification also falls naturally out of this general theory of language. If asserting is an act performed within a linguistic game, then justification can be thought of as a matter of winning such a game, a successfully defending one's assertion in the face of licensed challenges to it. This account is developed, drawing consequences for the theory of rationality and knowledge. ;The second major issue of the dissertation is the theory of the normative itself and much of the constructive work in the philosophy of language, philosophy of logic and epistemology forms a case study for a particular theory of the normative. On the basis of Wittgensteinian considerations, it is argued that normativity must be understood as resting ultimately on social practice. ;We solve problems of earlier accounts of norms by introducing a novel normative relation between assertions of normative propriety and social practices. Normative assertions do not describe existing social standards, but do nonetheless derive their semantic content from those standards. This argument carried through in detail for cases of logical and epistemic vocabulary in the dissertation. (shrink)

This book delivers a definitive contribution to the understanding of Habermas's oeuvre as it applies to education. The authors examine Habermas's contribution to pedagogy, learning and classroom interaction; the relation between education, civil society and the state; forms of democracy, reason and critical thinking; and performativity, audit cultures and accountability.

Network motifs are small patterns of connections, found over‐represented in gene regulatory networks. An example is the negative feedback loop (e.g. factor A represses itself). This opposes its own state so that when ‘on’ it tends towards ‘off’ – and vice versa. Here, we argue that such self‐opposition, if considered dimensionlessly, is analogous to the liar paradox: ‘This statement is false’. When ‘true’ it implies ‘false’ – and vice versa. Such logical constructs have provided philosophical consternation for over 2000 years. (...) Extending the analogy, other network topologies give strikingly varying outputs over different dimensions. For example, the motif ‘A activates B and A. B inhibits A’ can give switches or oscillators with time only, or can lead to Turing‐type patterns with both space and time (spots, stripes or waves). It is argued here that the dimensionless form reduces to a variant of ‘The following statement is true. The preceding statement is false’. Thus, merely having a static topological description of a gene network can lead to a liar paradox. Network diagrams are only snapshots of dynamic biological processes and apparent paradoxes can reveal important biological mechanisms that are far from paradoxical when considered explicitly in time and space. (shrink)

ABSTRACT One of Murray Edelman’s most important insights was that understanding public ignorance about politics and policy requires an analysis of how symbolic communication and popular culture shape public knowledge and opinion. Approaches that simply dismiss the public as ignorant or idiotic make a similar error as those that simply embrace the modern public as capable of engaging in the work of a competent demos, insofar as both simplify complex social and cultural processes of meaning‐making and comprehension. The problem for (...) those who wish to take Edelman’s insight seriously—a problem that Edelman failed to resolve—is precisely how to study and theorize the public as something less than deliberative and knowledgeable, but more than simply ignorant. (shrink)

In a recent article Richard Rorty has attempted to juxtapose Heidegger and Dewey. While finding significant points of agreement between the two, and by implication praising much of Heidegger’s work, Rorty also suggests a series of criticisms of Heidegger. The problems which Rorty finds with Heidegger can, I think, all be reduced to one basic criticism, which has two main sides. In Rorty’s view Heidegger can not really differentiate between Being and beings in the way that he wants, and thus (...) can give no sense to the word ‘Being’ other than the old metaphysical one. That is, Being and the ontological difference are metaphysical remnants, the last evaporating presence of the Platonic distinction of the real world and the apparent world. This is indicated in two ways. First, Rorty feels that Heidegger can make no real distinction between philosophy, which they both agree has ended, and ‘thinking’ in the specifically Heideggerian sense. Second, Rorty claims that it is impossible to distinguish ontic from ontological becoming. That is, the various epochs of Being which Heidegger distinguishes are, for Rorty, parasitic upon and reducible to the ordinary history of man’s activity in relation to things, material and social. As such, Heidegger’s account of ontological epochs is a species of idealistic reflection upon the history of man’s activity upon things. (shrink)

I offer an appreciation and critique of Ernst Fehr’s altruism research in experimental economics that challenges the "selfishness axiom" as an account of human behavior. I describe examples of Fehr’s experiments and their results and consider his conceptual terminology, particularly his "biological" definition of altruism and its counterintuitive implications. I also look at Fehr’s experiments from a methodological perspective and examine his explanations of subjects’ behavior. In closing, I look at Fehr’s neuroscientific work in experimental economics and question his adherence (...) to a subjective expected utility interpretation of subjects’ behavior. Key Words: altruism • Ernst Fehr • strong reciprocity • neuroeconomics • experimental economics. (shrink)

Robert Roberts’s fourth secular and eleventh total monograph, Emotions in the Moral Life, exemplifies his characteristic insight, depth, earnestness, humanity, and religious commitment. Poised midway between Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) and Attention to Virtues (in progress), Emotions in the Moral Life draws on the resources Roberts has already developed for analysing emotions as concerned-based construals in order to show how such construals contribute in diverse ways to moral (and immoral) cognition, action, (...) relationships, and character. (shrink)

The concepts of placebos and placebo effects refer to extremely diverse phenomena. I recommend dissolving the concepts of placebos and placebo effects into loosely related groups of specific mechanisms, including (potentially among others) expectation-fulfillment, classical conditioning, and attentional-somatic feedback loops. If this approach is on the right track, it has three main implications for the ethics of informed consent. First, because of the expectation-fulfillment mechanism, the process of informing cannot be considered independently from the potential effects of treatment. Obtaining informed (...) consent influences the effects of treatment. This provides support for the authorized concealment and authorized deception paradigms, and perhaps even for outright deceptive placebo use. Second, doctors may easily fail to consider the potential benefits of conditioning, leading them to misjudge the trade-off between beneficence and autonomy. Third, how attentional-somatic feedback loops play out depends not only on the content of the informing process but also on its framing. This suggests a role for libertarian paternalism in clinical practice. (shrink)

Suppose that two nations A and B each possess a nuclear arsenal and are rational utility-maximizers. Suppose further that B has some interest in provoking A, possibly by attacking her with nuclear weapons. In the hope of preventing this from happening, A informs B of à conditional intention on her part to retaliate against B with nuclear weapons should B in fact attack A. By doing so A attempts to lower the probability of B's attacking A by increasing B's estimate (...) of the conditional probability of A's retaliating once provoked. Problematic deterrent situations are those in which B prefers to attack A without retaliation, A prefers most of all that she not be attacked, and A prefers an attack-with-no-retaliation scenario to an attack-with-retaliation scenario. Feature is à result of the fact that A prefers to minimize nuclear devastation, i.e., A would herself be worse off retaliating than not retaliating to an attack. Now, if B knows all of this to be the case then A's expression of a conditional intention to retaliate will not in fact deter B from attacking, since A is rational and will not act contrary to her own best interests. B has no reason to fear A's retaliation and therefore B has no reason not to attack. Deterrence, it seems, is an irrational policy among fully rational actors. This is one version of the so-called paradox of deter-rence. If expressing a conditional retaliatory intention is the best way for A to ward off an attack, then the paradox can be strengthened as follows: It is rational for A to intend to act irrationally. (shrink)

This paper discusses Heidegger's 1931-32 lecture course on The Essence of Truth. It argues that Heidegger read Platonic ideas, not only as stage-setting for the western philosophical tradition's privileging of conceptualization over practice, and its correlative treatment of truth as correctness, but also as an early attempt to work through truth as the fundamental experience of unhiddenness. Wrathall shows how several of Heidegger's more-famous claims about truth, e.g. that propositional truth is grounded in truth as world-disclosure, and including Heidegger's critique (...) of the self-evidence of truth as correspondence, are first revealed in a powerful (if iconoclastic) reading of Plato. (shrink)

The article is devoted to a rethinking of the state as a political form from theperspective of Slavoj Žižek’s psychoanalytical understanding of ideology and Mikhail Reisner’s theory of the state. The paper systematically outlines Žižek’s ideas from the early period of his work and Reisner’s theory of the state. Žižek, rejecting the traditional understanding of ideology as false consciousness, presents it as a necessity that structures reality. In turn, Reisner views the state not only as an instrument of oppression but (...) also as a psychological phantasm based on the ideas and unconscious attitudes of the masses. Synthesising Žižek’s ideas with Reisner’s legacy forms the main aim of this article. In combining the two perspectives, the state turns out to be the ideology that organises contemporary political experience and conceals a certain traumatic impossibility of symbolising the Real. The attempt to look at the state-as-ideology through the prism of psychoanalysis reveals the mechanisms of its functioning as the main signifier around which political-legal discourse and political practice are centered. It turns out that the state-as-ideology replaces other forms of political communities both temporally and spatially. Overcoming this situation is possible through bringing the phantasm of the state back to the human psyche. This, in turn, requires a recognition of the presence of an unsymbolised lack at the very heart of the symbolic order, undermining the absolute power of the state-as-ideology to determine the structure of political reality. The non-obvious intellectual connection between Žižek and Reisner and their original views on the nature of ideology and the state provide an opportunity to take a fresh look at the principles of the structure of the contemporary political form and to contribute to the ongoing debate on the state. (shrink)