The identification of molecules controlling embryonic patterning and their functional analysis has revolutionized the fields of Developmental and Cell Biology. The use of new sequence information and modern bioinformatics tools has enriched the list of proteins that could potentially play a role in regulating cell behavior and function during early development. The recent application of efficient methods for gene knockout in zebrafish has accelerated the functional analysis of many proteins, some of which have been overlooked due to their small size. (...) Two recent publications report on the identification of one such protein and its role in zebrafish embryogenesis. The protein, currently designated Apela, was shown to act as a secreted protein whose absence adversely affected various early developmental processes. Additional signaling proteins that have been identified in one of the studies are likely to open the way to unraveling hitherto unknown developmental pathways and have the potential to provide a more comprehensive understanding of known developmental processes. (shrink)

This book offers, for the first time in aesthetics, a comprehensive account of aestheticism of the 19<SUP>th</SUP> century as a philosophical theory of its own right. Taking philosophical and art-historical viewpoints, this cross-disciplinary book presents aestheticism as the foundational movement of modernist aesthetics of the 20<SUP>th</SUP> century. Emerging in the writings of the foremost aestheticists - Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, James Whistler, and their formalist successors such as Clive Bell, Roger Fry, and Clement Greenberg - aestheticism offers a uniquely synthetic (...) definition of art. It captures the artwork’s relations between form and content, art’s independent ontology and autonomy, art’s internal completeness, criticism, immunity to recruitment, the uniqueness of each medium, and musicality, as well as the logical-theoretical affiliation of art for art’s sake to epistemology, ethics and philosophy of language.<BR> Those are used by Michalle Gal to formulate a definition of art in terms of a theory of Deep Formalism, setting aestheticism, which aspires to preserve the artistic medium, as a critique of the current linguistic-conceptual aesthetics that developed after the linguistic turn of aesthetics. (shrink)

In view of the current progress of what has been named the ‘visual turn’ or the ‘pictorial turn’,1 it is exciting to witness Sam Rose’s return to early aesthetic formalist-modernism, which was so passionate about the medium, its appearance, and visuality. Rose’s project shares a recent inclination to think anew the advent of aesthetic modernism.2 It is founded on the presumption that visual art ought to be – and actually has always been – theoretically subsumed under one meta-project. This meta-project (...) does not necessarily have a clear telos, but it does have a history. In support of this view, Rose appeals to Stanley Cavell’s claim that ‘only masters of a game, perfect slaves to that project, are in a position to establish conventions which better serve its essence. This is why deep revolutionary changes can result from attempts to conserve a project, to take it back to its idea, keep it in touch with its history’ (p. 155). According to Rose’s post-formalist view, the idea of art’s meta-project is the idea of form. (shrink)

Investigates a complex structure of morality, the demands such morality places on individuals, and the behavioral consequences of the system of right and wrong.

'The infinite! No other question has ever moved so profoundly the spirit of man; no other idea has so fruitfully stimulated his intellect; yet no other concept stands in greater need of clarification than that of the infinite.' David Hilbert (1862-1943). This interdisciplinary study of infinity explores the concept through the prism of mathematics and then offers more expansive investigations in areas beyond mathematical boundaries to reflect the broader, deeper implications of infinity for human intellectual thought. More than a dozen (...) world-renowned researchers in the fields of mathematics, physics, cosmology, philosophy, and theology offer a rich intellectual exchange among various current viewpoints, rather than a static picture of accepted views on infinity. The book starts with a historical examination of the transformation of infinity from a philosophical and theological study to one dominated by mathematics. It then offers technical discussions on the understanding of mathematical infinity. Following this, the book considers the perspectives of physics and cosmology: Can infinity be found in the real universe? Finally, the book returns to questions of philosophical and theological aspects of infinity"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

In this article I discuss what I am calling “ally aesthetics.” I suggest a set of necessary, though not necessarily sufficient, considerations for the creation of successful instances of ally art. Focusing on three case studies, I propose some key characteristics of ally aesthetics, such as its contextual/temporal nature and how that relates to success and the importance of understanding the place of the ally aesthetic within the larger movements they are allying with.

This paper presents a literature review on the ethics of self-tracking technologies which are utilized by users to monitor parameters related to their activity and bodily parameters. By examining a total of 65 works extracted through a systematic database search and backwards snowballing, the authors of this review discuss three categories of opportunities and ten categories of concerns currently associated with self-tracking. The former include empowerment and well-being, contribution to health goals, and solidarity. The latter are social harms, privacy and (...) surveillance, ownership control and commodification of data, autonomy, data-facilitated harm, datafication and interpretability of data, negative impact on relation to self and others, shortcomings of design, negative impact on health perception, and regulation and enforcement of rules. The review concludes with a critical analysis of the existing literature and an overview of a future research agenda that could complement the current work on ethics of self-tracking. (shrink)

This article discusses translation as a technique of doing philosophy and introduces the concept of idiodiversity as an alternative to the current model of automated translation machines. The dominant functionalist approach to technology has made these machines the agents of linguistic homogenisation, which constitutes a threat for the diversity of idiomatic open systems this article advocates for. However, as this article argues, the challenge is not merely to accuse automated translation technologies of impoverishing the knowledge of how to translate but, (...) rather, to determine whether these technologies can be reappropriated for the purpose of preservation and revalorisation of translation and, more generally, as a conveyor of noodiversity. This challenge also involves the need to draw attention to the political significance of translation practices and to elaborate an alternative to the mechanistic approaches to translation, typical of computational linguistics and language engineering, through a heterodox approach to cybernetics. (shrink)

Consciousness can be measured in various ways, but different measures often yield different conclusions about the extent to which awareness relates to performance. Here, we compare five different subjective measures of awareness in the context of an artificial grammar learning task. Participants expressed their subjective awareness of rules using one of five different scales: confidence ratings , post-decision wagering , feeling of warmth , rule awareness , and continuous scale . All scales were equally sensitive to conscious knowledge. PDW, however, (...) was affected by risk aversion, and both RAS and SDS applied different minimal criteria for rule awareness. CR seems to capture the largest range of consciousness, but failed to indicate unconscious knowledge with the guessing criterion. We close by discussing the theoretical implications of scale sensitivity and propose that CR’s unique features enable a finer assessment of subjective states of awareness. (shrink)

Antonio Quesada (Public Choice 130:395–400, 2007) argues that a dictator has no more than two to three times the ‘average power’ of a non-dictatorial voter. If Quesada is correct, then his argument has major consequences for social choice theory; for instance, it warrants reconsidering the significance of Arrow’s Theorem. If Quesada is incorrect, however, then his position is dangerously misleading. This paper argues that Quesada is wrong. His argument depends on his own formal account of power, an account that is (...) implausible because it disregards a basic insight common to the standard characterisations of voting power: the idea that one has power over an outcome to the extent that one is able to change that outcome. Claims about power have a counterfactual component; to assert that an individual actually has determined an outcome is also to make an assertion about what would have been the case had that individual acted differently. We can employ David Lewis’s influential account of counterfactuals to show, contra Quesada, that in a dictatorship, nondictatorial individuals and groups cannot possibly determine a social preference. In short, Quesada is fundamentally mistaken about power, and thus also about the distribution of power in a dictatorship. (shrink)

Major depression (MD) is a highly heterogeneous diagnostic category. Diverse symptoms such as sad mood, anhedonia, and fatigue are routinely added to an unweighted sum-score, and cutoffs are used to distinguish between depressed participants and healthy controls. Researchers then investigate outcome variables like MD risk factors, biomarkers, and treatment response in such samples. These practices presuppose that (1) depression is a discrete condition, and that (2) symptoms are interchangeable indicators of this latent disorder. Here I review these two assumptions, elucidate (...) their historical roots, show how deeply engrained they are in psychological and psychiatric research, and document that they contrast with evidence. Depression is not a consistent syndrome with clearly demarcated boundaries, and depression symptoms are not interchangeable indicators of an underlying disorder. Current research practices lump individuals with very different problems into one category, which has contributed to the remarkably slow progress in key research domains such as the development of efficacious antidepressants or the identification of biomarkers for depression. The recently proposed network framework offers an alternative to the problematic assumptions. MD is not understood as a distinct condition, but as heterogeneous symptom cluster that substantially overlaps with other syndromes such as anxiety disorders. MD is not framed as an underlying disease with a number of equivalent indicators, but as a network of symptoms that have direct causal influence on each other: insomnia can cause fatigue which then triggers concentration and psychomotor problems. This approach offers new opportunities for constructing an empirically based classification system and has broad implications for future research. (shrink)

The nonconsequentialist revival in tort theory has focused almost exclusively on one issue: showing that the rules governing compensation for acts reflect corrective justice rather than welfarist norms. The literature either is silent on what makes an act wrongful in the first place or suggests criteria that seem indistinguishable from some version of cost/benefit analysis. As a result, cost/benefit analysis is currently the only game in town for determining appropriate standards of conduct for socially useful but risky acts. This is (...) no small omission, and the failure of nonconsequentialists to acknowledge it or cure it can be traced to a number of recurring problems in the nonconsequentialist tort literature. Chief among them is the tendency to conflate prohibition and compensation, and to treat imposition of risk and imposition of harm as if they were distinct forms of conduct rather than the same conduct viewed from different temporal perspectives. (shrink)

Epistemologists have posed the following puzzle, known as the proof paradox: Why is it intuitively problematic for juries to convict on the basis of statistical evidence and yet intuitively unproblematic for juries to convict on the basis of far less reliable, non-statistical evidence? To answer this question, theorists have explained the exclusion of statistical evidence by arguing that legal proof requires certain epistemic features. In this paper, I make two contributions to the debate. First, I establish the Criminal Verdict Asymmetry, (...) a previously-unarticulated asymmetry between the epistemic norms of guilty and not guilty verdicts. I argue that the prosecution and defense’s different epistemic burdens influence whether statistical evidence can generate the type of verdict each side pursues. Second, I point out a mistake in how theorists have understood the role of statistical evidence in criminal trials. Though epistemologists have primarily focused on whether statistical evidence can generate specific epistemic features required for convictions, I consider whether statistical evidence can demonstrate a lack of such features. I find that there are epistemic advantages to allowing the defense to introduce statistical evidence which can reveal the prosecution’s failure to prove the defendant’s guilt. (shrink)

This study examined individual differences in spatial abilities of architecture students. Students at different educational levels were assessed on spatial ability tests that varied in their domain-specificity to architecture, with the hypothesis that larger differences between beginner and advanced students will emerge on more domain-specific tests. We also investigated gender differences in test performance and controlled for general reasoning ability across analyses. In a cross sectional study, master students (N= 91) outperformed beginners (N= 502) on two novel tests involving perspective (...) taking and object composition, as well as on a standardized visualization of cross-sections test, but not on a standardized mental rotations test. Longitudinally (N= 117), spatial performance improved after the first bachelor year on visualization of cross-sections, object composition and mental rotation. Although both genders showed higher spatial test performance with increased experience, male students outperformed females across tests and levels of education. The results overall confirmed improvements in spatial performance during architecture studies, with partial support for the domain-specificity hypothesis. A gender gap among advanced students calls for further examining architecture-specific spatial thinking. (shrink)

The Michael Heller’s article entitled “How is philosophy in science possible?” was originally published in Polish in 1986 and then translated into English by Bartosz Brożek and Aeddan Shaw and published in 2011 in the collection of essays entitled Philosophy in Science. Methods and Applications. This seminal paper has founded further growth of the ‘philosophy in science’ and become the reference point in the methodological discussions, especially in Poland. On the 40th anniversary of Philosophical Problems in Science we wanted to (...) make this paper freely available to the international public by reprinting its English version. In this issue it is followed by two additional articles-commentaries. (shrink)

Despite the rekindling of an often bitter debate as to the meaning of Martin Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialism, little has been done to address afresh the texts themselves of the period in question and the problematic to which Heidegger conceived he was applying himself. Defying Enlightenment universalism, Heidegger asserts that meaningful human existence requires a belonging in a particular historical community whose integrity must be sustained in what he calls “Auseinandersetzung,”---confrontation. This paper attempts to show how “Auseinandersetzung,” itself Heidegger’s (...) translation of the Greek word “polemos,” underlies central concepts of Heidegger”s ontology, influencing his views on work, art, and great creators. The current controversy lends us an opportunity to reflect on the meaning of fascism and the foundation for politics in a global era. (shrink)

Many bioethical arguments rely implicitly on the assumption that the concept of “human part” is one on which everyone must agree, because it is unambiguous. But various parties interpret this “unambiguous” term in incompatible ways, leading to contention. This article is an informal presentation of a topomereological system on whose preferred interpretation several distinct but related meanings of “human part” can be isolated: part of a human body, part of the completion of a human body, and part of a human (...) being. A case is analyzed (the first total artificial heart (TAH) implantation), demonstrating in the process much of the apparatus of the system. By means of a casuistic methodology, the analysis is translated into recommendations for the ethical conduct of future TAH research. The more general conclusion, however, is that formal methods may provide useful tools for clarifying thought processes and organizing arguments in debates over bioethical issues. (shrink)

The skeptical solution is based on two assumptions — the rejection of semantic facts and the denial of semantic nihilism. On the basis of the non-factualist interpretation of this solution, these two assumptions are reconciled by stating that meaning ascriptions possess non-descriptive function. Nonetheless, Alexander Miller argues that this position is self-refuting since, as despite its non-descriptivism, by rejecting any kind of semantic facts, it inevitably leads to semantic nihilism. In this text, I demonstrate that Miller’s argument is not sound. (...) I argue that a coherent non-factualist way of formulating the conditions of correct use of meaning ascriptions may be performed by rejecting the closure principle of assertibility of meaning ascriptions. On this basis, I demonstrate that argument formulated against non-factualist interpretation by Miller may be refuted. What is more, I argue that rejection of the closure principle should be regarded as the central aspect of Kripke’s skeptical solution. (shrink)

So there will be no mistake, I don’t deny, why would I wish to, that a thematic of racial difference is crucial to the overall plot of Almayer’s Folly. What I claim is that that thematic falls short of significantly determining or even, to use Brown’s word, appreciably “complicating” the problematic of erasure that surfaces in the closing chapters. It’s as though the rest of the novel is there chiefly to stage those chapters and their dramatization of erasure; something similar (...) takes place in Powell’s narrative of spying into Captain Anthony’s cabin toward the end of Chance and even, to a lesser degree, in the climactic encounter between Winnie Verloc and her husband in chapter 11 of The Secret Agent. It’s worth noting, too, that the opening paragraphs of A Personal Record, Conrad’s autobiographical account of the beginnings and origins of his “writing life,” describe the circumstances under which “the tenth chapter of ‘Almayer’s Folly’ was begun.”8 This in itself suggests that Conrad has a special stake in the last three chapters of his first novel, and one of my aims in “Almayer’s Face” was to discover what that stake may have been.9 8. Joseph Conrad, A Personal Record , pp. 72: my emphasis.9. Again, so there will be no mistake, I would distinguish Almayer’s Folly sharply in this respect from, for example, The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” in which effects of erasure are disseminated throughout the text and in which the title character’s blackness is crucial to their production. Michael Fried, J. R. Herbert Boone Professor of Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University, is currently at work on books on Manet and on literary “impressionism.” His most recent book is Courbet’s Realism. (shrink)

Fazekas and Overgaard () present a novel, multidimensional model that explains different ways in which conscious representations can be degraded. Moreover, the authors discuss possible mechanisms that underlie different kinds of degradation, primarily those related to attentional processing. In this letter, we argue that the proposed mechanisms are not sufficient. We propose that attentional mechanisms work differently at various processing stages; and factors that are independent of attentional ones, such as expectation, previous experience, and context, should be accounted for if (...) we are aiming to construct a comprehensive model of conscious visual perception. (shrink)

The present essay examines the conflicting ontological assumptions that one can find behind the word dao in the texts of the Laozi and Zhuangzi and argues that the relative indifference to these texts toward whether or not dao has an ontic reality should not be considered a flaw of early Daoism. Rather, the historical process by which the term dao collects various possible ontological implications can be thought of as a philosophical stance in its own right. That is, if the (...) terms which one is obliged to use in discussing the immaterial necessarily hide, at least as much as they explain, the nature of Being, then it is a reasonable response to decline to ground one’s ethics in an ontology, and that while the resulting philosophy may not qualify as a fully-adumbrated system, this does not diminish its potential usefulness. (shrink)

Despite the fact that Husserl did not write a book on aesthetics, it is widely accepted that a Husserlian aesthetics can be developed from his writings. In this article, I describe and analyze a feature of Husserlian aesthetics which I call the “radical individuality of the aesthetic object.” This radical individuality stems from Husserl’s interpretation of aesthetic consciousness in terms of the neutrality modification. I make the case for a radical reading of the neutrality modification by contrasting it with the (...) inactuality modification and the notion of foundation and I argue that the neutrality modification must be kept distinct from these concepts. I further describe the concept of the radical individuality of the aesthetic object by reference to Ingarden’s notion of the aesthetic object as monosubjective. The thesis of the radical individuality of the aesthetic object prima facie leads Husserlian aesthetics close to axiological relativism expressed in the adage that de gustibus non est disputandum. I explain that despite such proximity, Husserlian aesthetics does not entail an axiological relativism and does not preclude discussions concerning aesthetic values. On the contrary, Husserlian aesthetics ultimately shows that such discussions are necessary for keeping the possibility of aesthetic perception itself alive, and thereby encourages such discussions. I conclude with a practical demonstration of the results of my Husserlian analyses by critically engaging some aspects of Proust’s theory of art in À la recherche du temps perdu. (shrink)

From the perspective of philosophy of science and technologies, we firstly attend to the issue of the role of nanotechnologies within the evolution of technologies. We recognize their utmost importance in the respect that they are technologies of life itself. We further explain that the nano-level is the domain of intersection of the rules of quantum physics and traditional Newtonian physics. This is our starting point from which we discuss the issue of conditions under which minimizing things also changes their (...) functional essence. We use the example of the Drexler vs. Smalley debate to demonstrate the paradigmatic incomparability of the two perspectives and the physical-chemical and engineering-related limits of nanotechnologies. We discuss to what extent are the dangers and ethical implications emerging from Drexler’s contemplations real, be it what he calls the “grey goo” problem or the issues of molecular production. We regard certain problems linked to synthetic biology as more serious. We conclude our text with the consideration that the human civilization should think of the possibilities of nanotechnologies in the development of life as an existential challenge. (shrink)

Classical liberalism stipulates that individuals may only reliably escape a state of war by joining a body politic whose unity is consolidated and preserved by the formation of a sovereign government. Frederick Douglass, through his own experience of slavery and then as a radical abolitionist critiquing the racialized laws and society of the United States, shows that there is an inherent scandal, a schism in the very idea of a body politic. This scandal cannot be overcome, but Douglass enacts a (...) treatment for it through a polemical ethic that endeavors to reconstruct political community, expansively and inclusively understood, by ever again bringing the ideal, as a regulative idea, into confrontation with the real. By putting Douglass and the historical situation of his time into dialogue with the natural law tradition of Aquinas, Locke, and the American Founding, this essay argues that Douglass’s thought and example provide a fresh way to address the crisis of liberal democracy in our time. This requires understanding the instability of the body politic as a source of strength rather than weakness, if properly confronted in a polemical ethics. (shrink)

Managers conduct open market repurchases for many different reasons, including to distribute excess cash. However, the most widely discussed explanation for OMRs is the “signaling theory:” that managers announce OMRs to signal that the stock is underpriced. The first purpose of this paper is to show that the signaling theory is theoretically problematic—in part because it assumes managers deliberately sacrifice their own wealth to increase that of shareholders—as well as inconsistent with much of the empirical evidence. The second purpose of (...) the paper is to put forward an alternative explanation for managers’ use of OMRs: the managerial-opportunism theory. This theory, which assumes that managers seek to maximize their own wealth, predicts that managers announce OMRs both when the stock is underpriced and when it is not. When the stock is underpriced, managers may announce and conduct an OMR to transfer value to themselves and other remaining shareholders. When managers wish to sell a large portion of their shares, they announce an OMR to boost the stock price before selling their shares. The paper shows that managerial opportunism is not only a more plausible motive for OMRs than is signaling, it is also more consistent with the empirical data. The paper concludes by describing some testable predictions of the theory. (shrink)

There is an ethical dilemma present when considering updating predictive clinical artificial intelligence (AI) models, which should be part of the departmental quality improvement process. One needs to consider whether withdrawing the AI model is necessary to obtain the relevant information from a naive patient population or whether to use causal inference techniques to obtain this information. Withdrawing an AI model from patient care might pose challenges if the AI model is considered standard of care, while use of causal inference (...) will not be reliable if the relevant statistical assumptions do not hold true. Hence, each of these two updating strategies is associated with patient risks, but lack of reliable data might endanger future patients. Similarly, not withdrawing an outdated AI might also expose patients to risk. Here I propose a high level ethical framework – epistemic risk management - that provides guidance for which route of model updating should be taken based on the likelihood of the assumptions used during the creation of the original AI model and the assumptions required for causal inference holding true. This approach balances our uncertainty about the status of the AI as standard of care with the risk of not obtaining the necessary data, so as to increase the probability of benefiting current and future patients for whose care the AI is being used. (shrink)

Stať se snaží analyzovat myšlenky málo známého rukopisu Sigmunda Freuda z roku 1895, v němž usiloval o nalezení biologických základů lidské psychiky. Tato práce je pozoruhodná ze dvou důvodů. Jednak představuje úvahy, které se výrazně od- lišují od toho, co je pro Freuda v oblasti psychologie tak typické. Freud se zde, až na výjimky, nezabývá psychoanalýzou či studiemi o hysterii, nýbrž popisuje, co by mohlo být základem těchto psychologických jevů na neurofyziologické úrovni. Druhým pozoruhodným faktem je, že tento manuskript byl (...) pozapome- nut až do poloviny 20. století, kdy byl vytištěn pod názvem Projekt vědecké psychologie. A jak je známo, neurofyziologická studia lidské mysli spojená s analýzou kognitivních funkcí se v ri- gorózní podobě objevují až na počátku 60. let. Stať se proto pokouší ukázat základní principy Projektu a naznačit, v čem byl Freud inspirativním průkopníkem moderních neurofyziologických přístupů k lidské mysli. (shrink)

This very short introduction will first outline how ontological investigations and questions of practice go together. The second section will bring in the next pole of this entire book, history of mathematics. How do ontology, practice, and history go together? Is this a forced marriage or one born in true love? That is, do these three belong together in some very basic way? One chapter in the section argues that the philosophy of mathematical practice intersects with the history of mathematics (...) essentially. If the first section of this introduction is persuasive that will also show that the history of mathematics intersects with ontological questions as well, specifically, that historical questions are very much about the ontological commitments of past mathematicians. The last section will take up what might seem a very different theme, namely, how these things matter to mathematics education. This section is connected closely to the second section since mathematics education has taken an interest in the role of history of mathematics in mathematics education, and much insight can be gained by seeing the issues in relation to the ontology-practice-history triad. The question of education is also important since teachers must consider what it is exactly that they are teaching, or, to adapt the title of Reuben Hersh’s well-known book, “What is mathematics really about?” And the “aboutness” of mathematics is really the ontological question. (shrink)