The possible existence of extraterrestrials has provoked more than five centuries of theological speculation on how these beings, if they exist, relate to God. A certain stream of thought present in these debates argues that the eventual discovery of aliens would obligate human Christians to evangelize them for the salvation of their souls. Current research into humanity's prehistory suggests that, if this ever actually happens, it will have been partially facilitated by humanity's remarkable capacity for interspecies empathy—an ability that seems (...) to be genetic in nature and which stems from our species' ancient experience with dogs. In light of the above, recommendations are made concerning future potential exomissionary screening criteria and a concluding section touches on the role of animals in God's work. (shrink)

The author explores various pedagogical methods concerning how to teach Wittgenstein’s later work. A significant obstacle for the incorporation of Wittgenstein into an undergraduate curriculum is to decipher the major features of his philosophical ideas. The engagement with Wittgenstein’s work is not a task of mere comprehension or thought, but rather of discernment and observation of the ways language operates in the formulation of ideas. The distinction between observation and thought in Wittgenstein’s work on language is often overlooked. In order (...) to teach Wittgenstein effectively, the curriculum should focus on various methods to teach students not just to think but to observe. The author offers a series of classroom exercises and games to engage students with the text and to elucidate philosophical components necessary to understand the author. The games direct students’ attention to what they need to notice and observe in the function of language in Wittgenstein’s later work. (shrink)

The morbidity of tick‐borne encephalitis (TBE) varies yearly by as much as 10‐fold among the people of Western Siberia. This long‐term variation is dependent on many factors such as the density of the tick populations, the prevalence of TBE virus (TBEV) among sub‐adult ticks, the yearly virulence of the TBEV, and prophylactic measures. Here we highlight the role of small mammal hosts in the circulation of TBEV through the ecosystem. Refining classical models of non‐viremic horizontal transmission, we emphasize the recently (...) understood fact that the physiological and immunological status of the small mammal hosts affects the tick and virus‐host interactions. In addition to its theoretical interest, our approach may lead to some practical improvements in the precision of epidemiological forecasts and perhaps in forestalling the severity of outbreaks of TBE, or, at least, in forewarning medical authorities and the general public of impending TBE outbreaks. (shrink)

This article is a critique of the failure of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen. It considers this as a metaphysical problem rather than an aesthetic or formal one. The article, considering Wagner’s inheritance from Haydn, claims him as the first composer of the culture industry. This will lead the author to conclusions regarding a gendered Das Unheimlich, the distinction between technology and technique, and the philosophy of aesthetics.

The aim of this paper has been to draw attention to the non-cognitive aspects of Vygotsky's theoretical heritage. We hope that we have succeeded in presenting here his principal ideas on motivation and volition in the present-day problem context. It should be noted that the problem of human freedom and self-determination was of great importance for Vygotsky, though the explicit discussion of this problem is not common in his writings. Approaching this problem both as a philosopher and as a psychologist, (...) Vygotsky inevitably had first to get some idea of the general psychological regularities which could serve as a concrete-psychological basis for the constructive paradigm in the explanation of the phenomena of human freedom and “non-freedom.” It is highly probable that he planned to discuss this problem at length in his last uncompleted book,Doctrine of Affects. However, even the existing texts provide a weighty and insightful basis not only for scientific research but also for creating applied methods of enhancement of human will-power, or, more exactly, the talent to will. Some of the possibilities, revealed by the Vygotskian approach, are presented in the last section. Many other of Vygotsky's brilliant ideas still await an unbiased reading in the contemporary, rather than merely historical, context. (shrink)

Our first aim is to make the study of informal notions of proof plausible. Put differently, since the raison d'étre of anything like existing proof theory seems to rest on such notions, the aim is nothing else but to make a case for proof theory; ...

Bringing together Deleuze, Blanchot, and Foucault, this book provides a detailed and original exploration of the ideas that influenced Deleuze's thought leading up to and throughout his cinema volumes and, as a result, proposes a new definition of art. Examining Blanchot's suggestion that art and dream are "outside" of power, as imagination has neither reality nor truth, and Foucault's theory that power forms knowledge by valuing life, Eugene Brent Young relates these to both Deleuze's philosophy of time and his (...) work with Guattari on art. In doing so, he uses case studies from literature and popular film, including Kafka's Castle, Villeneuve's Arrival, and Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut. Providing important new insights for those working in literary and cinematic studies, this book advances a new definition of art as that which reverses the realities and truths of power to express obscure ideas and values beyond both our exterior and interior worlds. (shrink)

We examine the implications of the US government’s too-big-to-fail policy as it has been applied to banks. Using alternative measures of risk, we compare the risk-taking behavior of 11 TBTF banks, identified by the Comptroller of the Currency in 1984, to a number of non-TBTF banks. We provide both theory and new empirical evidence to support our argument that the TBTF policy leads management to significantly increase risk-taking, with no corresponding increase in performance. While prior studies have considered the effects (...) of the TBTF policy on limited, but risk-related aspects of bank behavior, such as the cost of funds, our study provides direct evidence about the risk-taking behavior associated with the TBTF policy. Our study has important implications for the current political debate regarding the too-big-to-fail policy. (shrink)

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are arguably the most important period in philosophy’s history, given that they set a new and broad foundation for subsequent philosophical thought. Over the last decade, however, discontent among instructors has grown with coursebooks’ unwavering focus on the era’s seven most well-known philosophers—all of them white and male—and on their exclusively metaphysical and epistemological concerns. While few dispute the centrality of these figures and the questions they raised, the modern era also included essential contributions from (...) women—like Margaret Cavendish, Elisabeth of Bohemia, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Émilie Du Châtelet—as well as important non-white thinkers, such as Anton Wilhelm Amo, Julien Raimond, and Ottobah Cugoano. At the same time, there has been increasing recognition that moral and political philosophy, philosophy of the natural world, and philosophy of race—also vibrant areas of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—need to be better integrated with the standard coverage of metaphysics and epistemology. -/- A New Modern Philosophy: The Inclusive Anthology of Primary Sources addresses—in one volume—these valid criticisms. Weaving together multiple voices and all of the era’s vibrant areas of debate, this volume sets a new agenda for studying modern philosophy. It includes a wide range of readings from 34 thinkers, integrating essential works from all of the canonical writers along with the previously neglected philosophers. Arranged chronologically, editors Eugene Marshall and Susanne Sreedhar provide an introduction for each author that sets the thinker in his or her time period as well as in the longer debates to which the thinker contributed. Study questions and suggestions for further reading conclude each chapter. At the end of the volume, in addition to a comprehensive subject index, the book includes 13 Syllabus Modules, which will help instructors use the book to easily set up different topically structured courses, such as "The Citizen and the State," "Mind and Matter," "Education," "Theories of Perception," or "Metaphysics of Causation." -/- And an eresource offers a wide range of supplemental online resources, including essay assignments, exams, quizzes, student handouts, reading questions, and scholarly articles on teaching the history of philosophy. (shrink)

Cultural difference has been largely ignored within bioethics, particularly within the end-of-life discourses and practices that have developed over the past two decades in the U.S. healthcare system. Yet how should culturebe taken into account?

Modern technologies have enabled the development of dynamic game- and simulation-based assessments to measure psychological constructs. This has highlighted their potential for supplementing other assessment modalities, such as self-report. This study describes the development, design, and preliminary validation of a simulation-based assessment methodology to measure psychological resilience—an important construct for multiple life domains. The design was guided by theories of resilience, and principles of evidence-centered design and stealth assessment. The system analyzed log files from a simulated task to derive individual (...) trajectories in response to stressors. Using slope analyses, these trajectories were indicative of four types of responses to stressors: thriving, recovery, surviving, and succumbing. Using Machine Learning, the trajectories were predictive of self-reported resilience with high accuracy, supporting construct validity of the simulation-based assessment. These findings add to the growing evidence supporting the utility of gamified assessment of psychological constructs. Importantly, these findings address theoretical debates about the construct of resilience, adding to its theory, supporting the combination of the “trait” and “process” approaches to its operationalization. (shrink)

The CRISPR-Cas systems of bacterial and archaeal adaptive immunity have become a household name among biologists and even the general public thanks to the unprecedented success of the new generation of genome editing tools utilizing Cas proteins. However, the fundamental biological features of CRISPR-Cas are of no lesser interest and have major impacts on our understanding of the evolution of antivirus defense, host-parasite coevolution, self versus non-self discrimination and mechanisms of adaptation. CRISPR-Cas systems present the best known case in point (...) for Lamarckian evolution, i.e. generation of heritable, adaptive genomic changes in response to encounters with external factors, in this case, foreign nucleic acids. CRISPR-Cas systems employ multiple mechanisms of self versus non-self discrimination but, as is the case with immune systems in general, are nevertheless costly because autoimmunity cannot be eliminated completely. In addition to the autoimmunity, the fitness cost of CRISPR-Cas systems appears to be determined by their inhibitory effect on horizontal gene transfer, curtailing evolutionary innovation. Hence the dynamic evolution of CRISPR-Cas loci that are frequently lost and acquired by archaea and bacteria. Another fundamental biological feature of CRISPR-Cas is its intimate connection with programmed cell death and dormancy induction in microbes. In this and, possibly, other immune systems, active immune response appears to be coupled to a different form of defense, namely, “altruistic” shutdown of cellular functions resulting in protection of neighboring cells. Finally, analysis of the evolutionary connections of Cas proteins reveals multiple contributions of mobile genetic elements to the origin of various components of CRISPR-Cas systems, furthermore, different biological systems that function by genome manipulation appear to have evolved convergently from unrelated MGE. The shared features of adaptive defense systems and MGE, namely the ability to recognize and cleave unique sites in genomes, make them ideal candidates for genome editing and engineering tools. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on synaesthesia research in the 21st century. It begins by giving counts of publications and these are further broken down by type, focus, and measures used. Then, there is a review of major questions being addressed by current research in the area of synaesthesia. The amount of research being done in this area is growing rapidly, and is incorporating a number of different research approaches to address a wide variety of questions.