The yeast two‐hybrid system is a genetic method that detects protein‐protein interactions. One application is the detection by library screening of new interactors of a protein of known function. In the August issue of Nature Genetics, Fromont‐Racine et al.1 showed for the first time that the construction of the protein interaction map of a complex pathway, such as that of the mRNA splicing machinery, is now possible, because of the combination of recent technical improvements elaborated in several laboratories. With a (...) yeast cell mating procedure that increases screen efficiency, they used their complex yeast genomic library of 5 × 106 clones to test 700 × 106 interactions against 15 proteins. They identified and classified 170 potential interactors, including approximately 70 proteins of previously unknown function. More than 25% of the interactors are probably biologically relevant. The achievements of Fromont‐Racine et al. have opened the way to the systematic analysis of the protein interaction networks of the 6,000 open reading frames‐yeast proteome. This task requires, however, automation of the library screens and creation of a two‐hybrid library database. BioEssays 20:1–5, 1998. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

In Time Deposits, Dimension, and Fraud (2009), William Barnett and Walter Block argue that by borrowing short and lending long there is an over issuance of property rights. Their article, however, does not fully extend the consequences of their contribution. Once this is done, it becomes clearer that their argument suits a great impediment to banking, becoming a possible reason to support rather than to oppose fractional reserve banking. Bagus and Howden (J Bus Ethics 90(3):399–406, 2009) comment on Barnett and (...) Block (J Bus Ethics 88(4):711–716, 2009), the authors claim that while maintaining the illegitimacy of fractional reserve deposits, borrowing short and lending long it is actually not illegitimate. An extension on Bagus and Howden (2009) will show that their line of argumentation can be applied as a defense of fractional reserve banking as well. (shrink)

Ouvrage majeur de la philosophie de Malebranche, De la recherche de la verite constitue un moment cle dans la reflexion philosophique a l'age classique. Si son inspiration est cartesienne, Malebranche y soutient d'emblee une theorie originale de la connaissance, de la verite et de la causalite: notamment la these de la vision en Dieu des idees et l'analyse des causes de l'erreur. Plus qu'une theorie de la connaissance, c'est donc une theorie complete de l'esprit humain et de ses multiples fonctions (...) que nous livre l'ouvrage. Cette nouvelle edition de la Recherche de la verite donne a lire pour la premiere fois dans un format accessible a tous, un texte majeur de la pensee moderne, heritier de l'age classique et annonciateur des Lumieres: les textes sont etablis a partir des deux dernieres editions de 1700 et 1712 revues par Malebranche lui-meme, et des trois premiers volumes des oeuvres Completes publiees sous la direction d'Andre Robinet; l'orthographe a ete modernisee. La ponctuation a fait l'objet d'une revision systematique; les textes cites en langue etrangere ont ete traduits ou retraduits, et leurs references mises a jour afin de tenir compte des editions les plus recentes. Enfin, le lecteur trouvera, dans ce premier volume, une presentation eclairante de cette oeuvre par Jean-Christophe Bardout, offrant ainsi des grilles de lecture et de comprehension de cet ouvrage majeur du XVIIe siecle, qui n'avait jusqu'alors fait l'objet d'aucune etude specifique. (shrink)

We introduce a logic specifically designed to support reasoning about social choice functions. The logic includes operators to capture strategic ability, and operators to capture agent preferences. We establish a correspondence between formulae in the logic and properties of social choice functions, and show that the logic is expressively complete with respect to social choice functions, i.e., that every social choice function can be characterised as a formula of the logic. We prove that the logic is decidable, and give a (...) complete axiomatization. To demonstrate the value of the logic, we show in particular how it can be applied to the problem of determining whether a social choice function is strategy-proof. (shrink)

Etablie sur les dernieres editions revues par Malebranche, la presente edition des Conversations chretiennes et des Meditations sur l'humilite et la penitence reunit, selon les intentions de l'auteur, les textes disjoints par les editeurs modernes. Nous tenons compte d'une edition des petites meditations de 1701 jusqu'ici perdue. Par leur date de publication et par les enrichissements qu'ils apportent a la Recherche de la verite ces textes annoncent les Eclaircissements de 1678 et les oeuvres de la maturite. L'orthographe et la ponctuation (...) sont modernisees, et les citations retraduites. (shrink)

Je crois devoir avertir que ceux qui savent bien les principes que j'ai prouves dans la Recherche de la verite et ailleurs, n'ont pas besoin de lire les additions qui suivent, ni meme les eclaircessements qui sont a la fin de ce traite, dans lesquels on peut fort bien entendre ma pensee. Mais ils seront peut-etre utiles a ceux que je n'avais pas en vue, lorsque j'ecrivais le traite De la nature et de la Grace, et que je souhaiterais extremement (...) de pouvoir contenter aussi bien que les autres. Dans ces oeuvres completes de Malebranche, nous presentons le texte de la meilleure edition designee par Malebranche. (shrink)

How Technologies of Imaging are Shaping Clinical Research and Practice in Neurology Content Type Journal Article Category Past & Present Pages 315-328 DOI 10.1007/s12376-010-0037-1 Authors Nicolas Kopp, Hôpital de l’HotelDieu Lyon University Hospitals, EspaceEthique Inter-régional 69288 Lyon, Cedex 02 France Journal Medicine Studies Online ISSN 1876-4541 Print ISSN 1876-4533 Journal Volume Volume 1 Journal Issue Volume 1, Number 4.

Copyright ©2005–2010 All rights reserved. Jonathan Bennett [Brackets] enclose editorial explanations. Small ·dots· enclose material that has been added, but can be read as though it were part of the original text. Occasional •bullets, and also indenting of passages that are not quotations, are meant as aids to grasping the structure of a sentence or a thought. Every four-point ellipsis . . . . indicates the omission of a brief passage that seems to present more difficulty than it is worth. (...) Larger omissions are reported, between brackets, in normal-sized type. The numbering of the segments of each dialogue is Malebranche’s. (shrink)

This paper offers a framework for consciousness of internal reality. Recent PET experiments are reviewed, showing partial overlap of cortical activation during self-produced actions and actions observed from other people. This overlap suggests that representations for actions may be shared by several individuals, a situation which creates a potential problem for correctly attributing an action to its agent. The neural conditions for correct agency judgments are thus assigned a key role in self/other distinction and self-consciousness. A series of behavioral experiments (...) that demonstrate, in normal subjects, the poor monitoring of action-related signals and the difficulty in recognizing self-produced actions are described. In patients presenting delusions, this difficulty dramatically increases and actions become systematically misattributed. These results point to schizophrenia and related disorders as a paradigmatic alteration of a ''Who?'' system for self-consciousness. (shrink)

Nicola Lacey presents a new approach to the question of the moral justification of punishment by the State. She focuses on the theory of punishments in context of other political questions, such as the nature of political obligation and the function and scope of criminal law. Arguing that no convincing set of justifying reasons has so far been produced, she puts forward a theory of punishments which places the values of the community at its centre.

This article maps current thinking in the emerging field of responsible leadership. Various environmental and social forces have triggered interest in both research and practices of responsible leadership. This article outlines the main features of the relevant research, specifies a definition of the concept, and compares this emergent understanding of responsible leadership with related leadership theories. Finally, an overview of different articles in this special issue sketches some pathways for ongoing research.

This paper demonstrates the central role of the Socratic elenchus in the Sophist. In the first part, I defend the position that the Stranger describes the Socratic elenchus in the sixth division of the Sophist. In the second part, I show that the Socratic elenchus is actually used when the Stranger scrutinizes the accounts of being put forward by his predecessors. In the final part, I explain the function of the Socratic elenchus in the argument of the dialogue. By contrast (...) with standard scholarly interpretations, this way of reading the text provides all the puzzles about being (241c4–251a4) with a definite function in the dialogue. It also reveals that Plato’s methodology includes a plurality of method and is more continuous than what is often believed. (shrink)

We challenge an argument that aims to support Aesthetic Realism by claiming, first, that common sense is realist about aesthetic judgments because it considers that aesthetic judgments can be right or wrong, and, second, that becauseAesthetic Realism comes from and accounts for “folk aesthetics,” it is the best aesthetic theory available.We empirically evaluate this argument by probing whether ordinary people with no training whatsoever in the subtle debates of aesthetic philosophy consider their aesthetic judgments as right or wrong. Having shown (...) that the results do not support the main premise of the argument, we discuss the consequences for Aesthetic Realism and address possible objections to our study. (shrink)

What makes someone responsible for a crime and therefore liable to punishment under the criminal law? Modern lawyers will quickly and easily point to the criminal law's requirement of concurrent actus reus and mens rea, doctrines of the criminal law which ensure that someone will only be found criminally responsible if they have committed criminal conduct while possessing capacities of understanding, awareness, and self-control at the time of offense. Any notion of criminal responsibility based on the character of the offender, (...) meaning an implication of criminality based on reputation or the assumed disposition of the person, would seem to today's criminal lawyer a relic of the 18th Century. In this volume, Nicola Lacey demonstrates that the practice of character-based patterns of attribution was not laid to rest in 18th Century criminal law, but is alive and well in contemporary English criminal responsibility-attribution. Building upon the analysis of criminal responsibility in her previous book, Women, Crime, and Character, Lacey investigates the changing nature of criminal responsibility in English law from the mid-18th Century to the early 21st Century. Through a combined philosophical, historical, and socio-legal approach, this volume evidences how the theory behind criminal responsibility has shifted over time. The character and outcome responsibility which dominated criminal law in the 18th Century diminished in ideological importance in the following two centuries, when the idea of responsibility as founded in capacity was gradually established as the core of criminal law. Lacey traces the historical trajectory of responsibility into the 21st Century, arguing that ideas of character responsibility and the discourse of responsibility as founded in risk are enjoying a renaissance in the modern criminal law. These ideas of criminal responsibility are explored through an examination of the institutions through which they are produced, interpreted and executed; the interests which have shaped both doctrines and institutions; and the substantive social functions which criminal law and punishment have been expected to perform at different points in history. (shrink)

In order to describe the logic of morality, "contractualist" philosophers have studied how individuals behave when they choose to follow their moral intuitions. These individuals, contractualists note, often act as if they have bargained and thus reached an agreement with others about how to distribute the benefits and burdens of mutual cooperation. Using this observation, such philosophers argue that the purpose of morality is to maximize the benefits of human interaction. The resulting "contract" analogy is both insightful and puzzling. On (...) one hand, it captures the pattern of moral intuitions, thus answering questions about human cooperation: why do humans cooperate? Why should the distribution of benefits be proportionate to each person's contribution? Why should the punishment be proportionate to the crime? Why should the rights be proportionate to the duties? On the other hand, the analogy provides a mere as-if explanation for human cooperation, saying that cooperation is "as if" people have passed a contract-but since they didn't, why should it be so? To evolutionary thinkers, the puzzle of the missing contract is immediately reminiscent of the puzzle of the missing "designer" of life-forms, a puzzle that Darwin's theory of natural selection essentially resolved. Evolutionary and contractualist theory originally intersected at the work of philosophers John Rawls and David Gauthier, who argued that moral judgments are based on a sense of fairness that has been naturally selected. In this book, Nicolas Baumard further explores the theory that morality was originally an adaptation to the biological market of cooperation, an arena in which individuals competed to be selected for cooperative interactions. In this environment, Baumard suggests, the best strategy was to treat others with impartiality and to share the costs and benefits of cooperation in a fair way, so that those who offered less than others were left out of cooperation while those who offered more were exploited by their partners. It is with this evolutionary approach that Baumard ultimately accounts for the specific structure of human morality. (shrink)

In recent years much research has been undertaken regarding the feasibility of the human uterine transplant as a treatment for absolute uterine factor infertility. Should it reach clinical application this procedure would allow such individuals what is often a much-desired opportunity to become not only social mothers, or genetic and social mothers but mothers in a social, genetic and gestational sense. Like many experimental transplantation procedures such as face, hand, corneal and larynx transplants, UTx as a therapeutic option falls firmly (...) into the camp of the quality of life transplant, undertaken with the aim, not to save a life, but to enrich one. However, unlike most of these novel procedures – where one would be unlikely to find a willing living donor or an ethics committee that would sanction such a donation – the organs to be transplanted in UTx are potentially available from both living and deceased donors. In this article, in the light of the recent nine-case research trial in Sweden which used uteri obtained from living donors, and the assertions on the part of a number of other research teams currently preparing trials that they will only be using deceased donors, I explore the question of whether, in the case of UTx, there exist compelling moral reasons to prefer the use of deceased donors despite the benefits that may be associated with the use of organs obtained from the living. (shrink)

In a 1993 paper, I argued that empirical treatments of the epistemologyused by scientists in experimental work are too abstract in practice tocounter relativist efforts to explain the outcome of scientificcontroversies by reference to sociological forces. This was because, atthe rarefied level at which the methodology of scientists is treated byphilosophers, multiple mutually inconsistent instantiations of theprinciples described by philosophers are employed by contestingscientists. These multiple construals change within a scientificcommunity over short time frames, and these different versions ofscientific methodology (...) can determine the outcome of a controversy. Iillustrated with a comparatively detailed analysis of the methodologyused by biologists debating the existence of an entity called thebacterial mesosome between the mid-1950s and the mid-1970s. This 1993piece has drawn several critiques in the philosophical literature. Inthis present piece I respond to these critiques and argue that they failto address the core argument of the original paper, and I reflectfurther on the methodologies of philosophers of science pursuingempirical or `naturalistic' epistemology. (shrink)

Has the time come to put to bed the concept of a harm threshold when discussing the ethics of reproductive decision making and the legal limits that should be placed upon it? In this commentary, we defend the claim that there exist good moral reasons, despite the conclusions of the non-identity problem, based on the interests of those we might create, to refrain from bringing to birth individuals whose lives are often described in the philosophical literature as ‘less than worth (...) living’. (shrink)

This book is the first extensive treatment of Husserl's phenomenology of time-consciousness. Nicolas de Warren uses detailed analysis of texts by Husserl, some only recently published in German, to examine Husserl's treatment of time-consciousness and its significance for his conception of subjectivity. He traces the development of Husserl's thinking on the problem of time from Franz Brentano's descriptive psychology, and situates it in the framework of his transcendental project as a whole. Particular discussions include the significance of time-consciousness for (...) other phenomenological themes: perceptual experience, the imagination, remembrance, self-consciousness, embodiment, and the consciousness of others. The result is an illuminating exploration of how and why Husserl considered the question of time-consciousness to be the most difficult, yet also the most central, of all the challenges facing his unique philosophical enterprise"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Shortlisted for the 2005 British Academy Book prize, Nicola Lacey's entrancing biography recounts the life of H.L.A. Hart, the pre-eminent legal philosopher of the twentieth century. Following Hart's life from modest origins as the son of Jewish tailor parents in Yorkshire to worldwide fame as the most influential English-speaking legal theorist of the post-War era, the book traces his successive metamorphoses; from Yorkshire schoolboy to Oxford scholar, from government intelligence officer to Professor of Jurisprudence, from awkward batchelor to family figurehead. (...) In the tradition of Ray Monk's biography of Wittgenstein, Nicola Lacey paints an absorbing picture of intellectual and psychological development, of a mind struggling to cope with intellectual self-doubt, uncertain sexuality, a difficult marriage and an anti-semitic society. In depicting the evolution of Hart's life and mind, Lacey provides a vivid recreation of both the intellectual and social climate of Oxford in the post-War era. (shrink)

In the past decade, experiments on altruistic punishment have played a central role in the study of the evolution of cooperation. By showing that people are ready to incur a cost to punish cheaters and that punishment help to stabilise cooperation, these experiments have greatly contributed to the rise of group selection theory. However, despite its experimental robustness, it is not clear whether altruistic punishment really exists. Here, I review the anthropological literature and show that hunter-gatherers rarely punish cheaters. Instead, (...) they avoid dealing with them and switch to other partners. I suggest that these data are better explained by individual selection, and in particular by partner choice models, in which individuals are in competition to be recruited by cooperative partners. I discuss two apparent problems for partner choice theories: large-scale cooperation and punishments in economic games. I suggest that rather than favouring group selection theory, these two phenomena provide evidence in favour of individual selection: (1) people produce large-scale cooperation through institutions in which punishment is not altruistic but rewarded on an individual basis; (2) punishment in experimental games can be explained without altruism and is indeed often better explained by individual interests. (shrink)

C’est à coup sûr un document hors du commun que Mélanie Traversier a mis à la disposition des historiens. La reine Marie-Caroline de Naples est bien connue des spécialistes de l’Italie méridionale et de l’ère napoléonienne comme une souveraine qui a eu vocation à se mêler de politique : à vrai dire, si les circonstances y ont aidé (Charles III de Bourbon étant passé en Espagne, la couronne de Naples échut à Ferdinand, qu’elle avait épousé en 1767 et qui n’avait (...) aucune disposition pour un méti... (shrink)