Many of the features that distinguish the vertebrates from other chordates are derived from the neural crest, and it has long been argued that the emergence of this multipotent embryonic population was a key innovation underpinning vertebrate evolution. More recently, however, a number of studies have suggested that the evolution of the neural crest was less sudden than previously believed. This has exposed the fact that neural crest, as evidenced by its repertoire of derivative cell types, has evolved through vertebrate (...) evolution. In this light, attempts to derive a typological definition of neural crest, in terms of molecular signatures or networks, are unfounded. We propose a less restrictive, embryological definition of this cell type that facilitates, rather than precludes, investigating the evolution of neural crest. While the evolutionary origin of neural crest has attracted much attention, its subsequent evolution has received almost no attention and yet it is more readily open to experimental investigation and has greater relevance to understanding vertebrate evolution. Finally, we provide a brief outline of how the evolutionary emergence of neural crest potentiality may have proceeded, and how it may be investigated. BioEssays 30:530–541, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Robert Donoghue ABSTRACT: G.W.F Hegel offers a thorough, complex, and unique theory of free will in the Philosophy of Right. In what follows, I argue that Hegel’s conceptualization of free will makes the mistake of collapsing the possibility of organic freedom into the potential for moral freedom ….

Despite the frequency of stillbirths, the subsequent implications are overlooked and underappreciated. We present findings from comprehensive, systematic literature reviews, and new analyses of published and unpublished data, to establish the effect of stillbirth on parents, families, health-care providers, and societies worldwide. Data for direct costs of this event are sparse but suggest that a stillbirth needs more resources than a livebirth, both in the perinatal period and in additional surveillance during subsequent pregnancies. Indirect and intangible costs of stillbirth are (...) extensive and are usually met by families alone. This issue is particularly onerous for those with few resources. Negative effects, particularly on parental mental health, might be moderated by empathic attitudes of care providers and tailored interventions. The value of the baby, as well as the associated costs for parents, families, care providers, communities, and society, should be considered to prevent stillbirths and reduce associated morbidity. (shrink)

The distinguished philosopher Robert M. Adams presents a major work on virtue, which is once again a central topic in ethical thought. A Theory of Virtue is a systematic, comprehensive framework for thinking about the moral evaluation of character, proposing that virtue is chiefly a matter of being for what is good, and that virtues must be intrinsically excellent and not just beneficial or useful.

Pollution is currently responsible for 16% of premature deaths worldwide and poses the greatest long-term threat to public health due to the effects of climate change. The current framework of publ...

The paper is an interpretation and defense of Kant's conception of things in themselves as noumena, along the following lines. Noumena are transempirical realities. As such they have several important roles in Kant's critical philosophy (Section 1). Our theoretical faculties cannot obtain enough content for a conception of noumena that would assure their real possibility as objects, but can establish their merely formal logical possibility (Sections 2-3). Our practical reason, however, grounds belief in the real possibility of some noumena, and (...) even knowledge of the noumenal reality of a free will (Section 4). Section 5 defends Kant's conception of noumena as a good piece of philosophy, particularly with respect to its distinction between logical and real possibility. Are noumena numerically identical with experienced (phenomenal) objects? Kantian principles yield the answers that human selves are, God isn't, and it's harder to say about bodies (Section 6). (shrink)

Moral arguments were the type of theistic argument most characteristic of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. More recently they have become one of philosophy’s abandoned farms. The fields are still fertile, but they have not been cultivated systematically since the latest methods came in. The rambling Victorian farmhouse has not been kept up as well as similar structures, and people have not been stripping the sentimental gingerbread off the porches to reveal the clean lines of argument. This paper is (...) intended to contribute to the remedy of this neglect. It will deal with quite a number of arguments, because I think we can understand them better if we place them in relation to each other. This will not leave time to be as subtle, historically or philosophically, as I would like to be, but I hope I will be able to prove something more than my own taste for Victoriana. (shrink)

The author's thesis is that there is a conceptually necessary connection between law and morality which means legal positivism must fail as a comprehensive theory. The substantiation of this thesis takes place within a conceptual framework which shows that there are at least 64 theses to be distinguished, concerning the relationship of law and morality. The basis for the author's argument in favour of a necessary connection, is formed by the thesis that individual legal norms and decisions as well as (...) whole legal systems necessarily make a claim to correctness. The explication of this claim within the frame of discourse theory shows that the law has a conceptually necessary, ideal dimension, which connects law with a procedural, universalistic morality. (shrink)

Contiene: Email and ethics -- Causation and laws of nature -- Internalism and epistemology -- Einstein, relativity, and absolute simultaneity -- Epistemology modalized -- Truth and speech acts -- Fiction, narrative, and knowledge -- A pragmatist philosophy of democracy.

Studie over de filosofie van de in Oostenrijk geboren Engelse wijsgeer.

This text by an established specialist in French deconstruction, written after his many years in Asia and in the West, celebrates both Buddhist and Christian cultures and the negative but fertile differences between them.

How can we experience real emotions when viewing a movie or reading a novel or watching a play when we know the characters whose actions have this effect on us do not exist? This is a conundrum that has puzzled philosophers for a long time, and in this book Robert Yanal both canvasses previously proposed solutions to it and offers one of his own. First formulated by Samuel Johnson, the paradox received its most famous answer from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, (...) who advised his readers to engage in a "willing suspension of disbelief." More recently, philosophers have argued that we are irrational in emoting toward fiction, or that we do not emote toward fiction but rather toward factual counterparts, or that we do not have real but only quasi-emotion toward fiction, generated by our playing games of make-believe. All of these proposed solutions are critically reviewed. Finding these answers unsatisfactory, Yanal offers an alternative, providing a new version of what has been dubbed "thought theory." On this theory, mere thoughts not believed true are seen as the functional equivalent of belief at least insofar as stimulating emotion is concerned. The emoter's disbelief in the actuality of components of the thoughts must be rendered relatively inactive. Such emotion is real and typically has the character of being richly generated yet unconsummated. The book extends this theory also to resolving other paradoxes arising from emotional response to fiction: how we feel suspense over what comes next in a story even when we are re-reading it for a second or third time; and how we take pleasure in narratives, such as tragedy, that excite unpleasant emotions such as fear, pity, or horror. (shrink)

A brief synopsis of Overdoing Democracy: Why We Must Put Politics in its Place (Oxford University Press, 2019), which introduces the book.

This long-awaited book by one of the world's leading philosophers offers a systematic account of kinds of being, ways in which things can be or can fail to be.

This chapter focuses on one of the common fallacies in Western philosophy called 'sunk cost'. In economics, a sunk cost is an investment that can never be recovered. Prime examples include money spent on research and development or advertising for a product. However, there is a way to think of cost in terms of time, energy, and even emotion. The way to avoid this fallacy is to not allow the fear of losing what was already invested in something to influence (...) one's rational, objective decision about a present or future investment. In Eric Nielsen's words, when making any decision, economic or otherwise, it “makes no sense to factor in sunk costs precisely because they are sunk; no present action can change them. No matter what happens, the sunk costs are always there”. (shrink)

The ontology of fictional objects in fictional literary texts is one of the most debated issues of a general theory of fiction. This contribution starts out from considerations by Rudolf Haller, connecting them with the model of the Possible Worlds Theory (PWT). A particular strength of this theory is that it does not only analyse the borders of fiction, which lie between the real and the text world, but that it offers in particular a more accurate differentiation within the text (...) world itself by drawing attention to the issue of what is possible, impossible and necessary within a Textual actual world (TAW). In this way, for example, the ‘Wunschwelt’ of individual characters and their confrontation with what will be possible or actual within a particular text world, can be described in detail and, as in the case of Ovid’s exile poems Tristia, the literary play with different levels of fictitiousness can be analysed. (shrink)

This book is an analysis of a selection of Adorno s work distinguishing his dialectics from Hegel, Marx and other members of the Frankfurt School (Benjamin, Kracauer, Marcuse) in the analysis of jazz, popular music, radio and pre-war pro-fascist propaganda.".

There is an unusual link between the two most prominent themes in Proust’s In Search of Time Past: the psychological dimensions of love and the experience of lived temporality. Each experience is shadowed by, and intensified by, even seems to require, absence. The absence of the beloved is the source of jealousy, and that experience is treated as inseparable, and sometimes as indistinguishable, from love itself. And the absence of reliable access to the past, or the vanishing of the past (...) into a realm of fantasy and projection, undermines any confidence in our mutual interpretability. At the extreme, jealousy is depicted as sustaining a love all by itself, something captured in Swann’s famous, puzzling closing statement at the end of the “Swann in Love” section of the first novel: “To think that I have wasted years of my life, that I’ve longed to die, that I have experienced my greatest love, for a woman who didn’t appeal to me, who wasn’t even my type.” The aim of this paper is to understand the dynamic of presence and absence, its role in the link between these two themes, and thereby to understand such a claim as much more than a singular character’s expression of a neurotic obsession. (shrink)

Cities as we know them are built on layers of their own pasts. Moreover, cities remember themselves by preserving historic buildings, erecting statues, writing history into the names of streets, and otherwise conserving and commemorating local heritage. With widespread computerisation and computer networks come new and diverse layers of the city: digital geographies that overlie physical urban sprawl. The city of tomorrow will blend data deeply into its culture and administration; the day after tomorrow, such data will have joined the (...) layers of its historic past. Digitisation promises to become so intimately involved in the city that its layers of data invite consideration as part of the city itself. This chapter traces how the cultural geography of a city will encompass its digital geography, and what the limitless layers of networked data portend for the cultural significance of public urban space. (shrink)