The TRIM/RBCC proteins are defined by the presence of the tripartite motif composed of a RING domain, one or two B‐box motifs and a coiled‐coil region. These proteins are involved in a plethora of cellular processes such as apoptosis, cell cycle regulation and viral response. Consistently, their alteration results in many diverse pathological conditions. The highly conserved modular structure of these proteins suggests that a common biochemical function may underlie their assorted cellular roles. Here, we review recent data indicating that (...) some TRIM/RBCC proteins are implicated in ubiquitination and propose that this large protein family represents a novel class of ‘single protein RING finger’ ubiquitin E3 ligases. BioEssays 27:1147–1157, 2005. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

This essay analyzes the first among the three moments of Georges Bataille’s reception of Nietzsche’s thought. During the 1930s, in the context of the review Acéphale, the French writer takes position in the debate about the relationship between Nietzscheism and fascism. He lays claim on the heritage of the German thinker as the source of a “heterogeneous” politics. This group of articles provides the context in which Bataille can start to delineate an original meditation on the relationship between work and (...) society. In this sense, they will mark a turning point in the path toward the post-war developments on the writers’ engagement. A new thematization of the relationship between text and context will emerge from the confrontation with Nietzsche and from the articulation of the fundamental duality of the forms of politics. (shrink)

L'histoire de l'interprétation des Ps 42-43 se révèle être une véritable Wirkungsgeschichte qui, dans l'évolution des méthodes de lecture, permet de percevoir la force d'une Parole Vivante, toujours actualisée dans les différentes époques de l'exégèse. Même dans la coexistence de tendances non parfaitement homogènes, on peut discerner deux orientations principales: une interprétation mystique et christologique, à partir des reprises néotestamentaires de ces psaumes, a cédé progressivement le pas, à partir des Maîtres Juifs du XIe siècle et de la Renaissance, à (...) une lecture toujours plus attentive aux questions philologiques/littéraires ainsi qu'à l'expérience du psalmiste et de son peuple. L'étude de ces différents horizons interprétatifs se révèle d'un grand intérêt aujourd'hui, lorsque l'on cherche une nouvelle herméneutique, qui permette à la Parole de «parler» encore. (shrink)

One key aspect of Phenomenology, i.e. the relationship between consciousness and phenomena, has been described, with regard to when this relationship be-gins to arise, as a co-emergence of the subject and the world. The aim of this article is to demonstrate how the theme of emergence may also be found in the philosophy of Mikel Dufrenne. First of all, strictly speaking, what emerges is what manifests itself and exerts influence due to the merging of some proper-ties, although what emerges cannot (...) be reduced to these properties. This dy-namic may be clearly seen in aesthetics, where affective or expressive qualities manifest themselves. Secondly, and more broadly, what emerges is that which begins to take shape from an indistinct, latent background. Hence, the plane of “presence” – a cognitive prereflective dimension of symbiosis with the world – may be understood as a place of originary co-emergence. (shrink)

Albert the Great’s Aristotelian paraphrases (De animalibus, Parva Naturalia) are famous for their extensive use of medical doctrines. Their use is not unprecedented in other Albertinian works, though. This article tries to show how Albert’s early theological works (De homine, Commentarium super libros Sententiarum) provide crucial evidence to understand the rationale behind Albert’s integration of medico-philosophical doctrines into his mature works of natural philosophy. In the first place, the early works assert that medicine – at least, its theoretical part – (...) treats a natural body subject to a natural process (healing), a view that leads Albert in his mature works to consider (this part of) medicine as a part of natural philosophy. Secondarily, the article moves on to show how Albert’s selective attitude towards medical doctrines and his position on the Galenic-Aristotelian quarrels about generation and origin of veins date back to his De homine and are strongly – although not entirely – dependent on Avicennian zoology and medicine. Unlike Avicenna, Albert would reshape in his mature works notions of Galenic and Avicennian medicine (spirit, radical, moisture) and zoology (formative power) into an original paradigm of ‘universal physiology’, meant to investigate the world of plants and minerals not only according to their parts and functions but also according to their species. (shrink)

For at least a century, light and homogeneous space, but also occluding and covering edges of surfaces, attract the interest of philosophers, psychologists and architectural theorists. In different fields, scholars and artists have explored the effects of edges and borders. Among them, the initiator of the ecological approach to visual perception, James J. Gibson, a visionary artist like James Turrell and Nordic and American architects imbued with phenomenological and Heideggerian suggestions. In their theories of perception and environmental psychology, these scholars (...) have explored the relationship between the observer and the natural environment, but also the effects of built places on the human mind and behavior. More or less openly declared, the influence of Gestalt psychology extends on all these conceptions, and this essay aims to trace the common origin of the many ideas that such distant scholars have elaborated on the concept of “looking” and on the “meaning of places”. (shrink)

1. Dal mito delle facoltà alle reti neurali «Neurophysiologica sunt, non leguntur!» Rifacendo il verso a una celebre battuta fregeana, questa esortazione sembra condensare il fastidio di molti filosofi di fronte all’ingerenza dei neuroscienziati, i quali s’illuderebbero di risolvere i massimi problemi di filosofia della mente, soprattutto quelli legati al sorgere della coscienza e agli aspetti qualitativi delle sensazioni. Viceversa, forse per sentirsi legittimati a trattare quei problemi, g...

1. Dal mito delle facoltà alle reti neurali «Neurophysiologica sunt, non leguntur!» Rifacendo il verso a una celebre battuta fregeana, questa esortazione sembra condensare il fastidio di molti filosofi di fronte all’ingerenza dei neuroscienziati, i quali s’illuderebbero di risolvere i massimi problemi di filosofia della mente, soprattutto quelli legati al sorgere della coscienza e agli aspetti qualitativi delle sensazioni. Viceversa, forse per sentirsi legittimati a trattare quei problemi, g...

In a science fiction story, the author finds clear cases of our tendency to attribute internal control, and various forms of thought and perception, when we are ignorant of the actual, environmental determiners of behavior.

Many experimental investigations of human sentence processing have shown that listeners do not wait until they reach the end of a sentence before they begin to compute an interpretation. Rather, listeners incrementally make commitments to an interpretation as the linguistic input unfolds in real time. A consequence of this property of sentence comprehension is that it sometimes gives rise to so-called garden-path effects. In the presence of a temporary ambiguity, listeners may assign an interpretation that later turns out to be (...) unviable and must, therefore, be abandoned in favor of an alternative interpretation. Various explanations have been proposed to account for garden- path effects that have been documented in certain experimental contexts (Frazier and Rayner, 1982; Trueswell and Tanenhaus, 1994; MacDonald, 1994, among others). One line of research has claimed, however, that the referential contexts in which sentences ordinarily appear often mitigate, or even completely eliminate, garden-path effects. This is the Referential Theory proposed by Crain and Steedman (1985) and extended by Altmann and Steedman (1988). According to the Referential Theory, people experience garden-path effects primarily when sentences are interpreted outside any referential context or in infelicitous contexts. If the Referential Theory is correct, garden-path effects are largely experimental artifacts. Recent work by Trueswell, Sekerina, Hill and Logrip, (1999) suggests that children might not be sensitive to features of the referential context to the same.. (shrink)

Bulletin de Philosophie Médiévale, Volume 62, Issue, Page 403-411, January 2020.

Bulletin de Philosophie Médiévale, Volume 62, Issue, Page 403-411, January 2020.

Studies of adult sentence processing have established that the referential context in which sentences are presented plays an immediate role in their interpretation, such that referential features of the context mitigate, and even eliminate, so-called ‘garden-path’ effects. Perceivers experience garden path effects almost exclusively when they are attempting to parse locally ambiguous linguistic structures in the absence of context, or in infelicitous contexts. The finding that the referential context ordinarily obviates garden path effects is compelling evidence for the Referential Theory (...) of parsing, advanced originally by Crain and Steedman, (1985) and extended in Altmann and Steedman (1988). (shrink)

Let me start by saying that on 1 December 2015, I left the university environment for the Roman Curia to become Secretary General of the Pontifical Missionary Union and Director of the International Center for Mission and Formation, in addition to my directing 'Fides', the News Agency of the Pontifical Mission Societies. Much time is required of me to renew these institutions and to research, together with others in charge of the PMS, possible ways of reform for the future of (...) these missionary societies that have arisen from faith, prayers, the charity of women and zealous pastors. (shrink)

We present two eye-tracking experiments on the interpretation of sentences like “The tall girl is the only one that …,” which are ambiguous between the anaphoric and the exophoric interpretation. These interpretations differ in informativeness: in a positive context, the exophoric reading entails the anaphoric, while in a negative context the entailment pattern is reversed and the anaphoric reading is the strongest one. We tested whether adults rely on considerations about informativeness in solving the ambiguity. The results show that participants (...) interpreted one exophorically in both positive and negative contexts. Given these findings, we cast doubts on the idea that Informativeness plays a role in ambiguity resolution and proposes a Principle of Maximal Exploitation: When a context is provided, adults extend their domain of evaluation to include the whole scenario, independently from truth-conditional considerations about informativity and strength. (shrink)

This paper investigates the influence of contrastive stress in resolving potential semantic ambiguities. The sentences under investigation contain the focus operator only. Sentences with only have three main properties: (a) some sentential element is typically in focus, (b) the speaker presupposes that a set of alternatives to the focus element (the contrast set) has previously been introduced in the context; and (c) the speaker makes the assertion that the focus element has some unique property which other members of the reference (...) set lack. Previous literature on focus has concluded that stress plays a role in the interpretation of only-sentences in many natural languages, including English (Rooth, 1992). In processing terms, this suggests that contrastive stress could immediately determine which NP bears the semantic focus (and therefore the NP that presupposes a contrast set in the context). On this scenario, the processing cost associated with contrastive stress should be no greater than the cost associated with neutral stress. There is, however, a theoretically motivated proposal that makes the opposite prediction (Reinhart, 1999). As we understand it, in this model the parser is expected calculate default stress first, with its associated interpretation, and only later reanalyze the sentence, if necessary, based on the contrastive stress pattern. Since in English the default stress falls on the last NP of the sentence, any deviation from this pattern will be more costly. In processing sentences with contrastive stress, the model implies that the parser first calculates the interpretation that is associated with the default stress pattern. In this regard, young children’s interpretation of sentences with stress and the focus operator only is of special interest. Because young children are in the throes of grammar formation, their behavior can reveal default strategies for sentence processing, as well as the extent to which the parser’s sensitivity to contrastive stress is universal, i.e., includes child languages.. (shrink)

: How do people make decisions? Previous psychological research consistently shed light on the fact that decisions are not the result of a pure rational reasoning, and that emotions can assume a crucial role. This is particularly true in the case of moral decision-making, which requires a complex integration of affective and cognitive processes. One question that is still open to debate concern the individual factors that can affect moral decisions. Gender has been consistently identified as a possible variable of (...) interest for the adoption of different strategic behaviors, with men using more rational processes and women more deontological principles. In the present study we aimed at exploring the presence of gender differences in different decision-making scenarios. Results showed that the moral scenario led to a similar acceptance rate in both genders, while economic and shopping offers were more likely to be accepted by men. Also, women were more inclined to refuse unfair offers, which included a higher personal benefit at the expense of the opponent, even if this meant a total loss for both parties. Finally, correlational analyses revealed a different relation between risk propensity and decision-making in men and women in different scenarios. Keywords: Decision-making; Utilitarianism; Altruism; Moral Decision-making; Economic Decision-making Decisioni morali, economiche e d’acquisto a confronto. Effetti di genere e utilitarismo Riassunto: Come prendiamo le decisioni? La letteratura psicologica disponibile ha chiarito in ampia misura come le decisioni non siano il risultato di un ragionamento puramente razionale e che le emozioni possono assumere un ruolo cruciale. Questo è particolarmente vero nel caso delle decisioni morali, che richiedono una complessa integrazione tra processi affettivi e cognitivi. Una questione ancora aperta riguarda i fattori individuali che possono incidere sulle decisioni morali. Il genere è stato identificato come una possibile variabile da considerare rispetto all’adozione di comportamenti strategici differenti, in cui gli uomini sembrano più inclini a far uso di processi razionali e le donne a considerare principi deontologici. In questo lavoro abbiamo provato a esplorare la presenza di differenze di genere in diversi contesti decisionali. I risultati hanno mostrano come in ambito morale entrambi i generi siano portati ad accettare opzioni simili, mentre offerte economiche e commerciali sono accettate in misura maggiore dagli uomini. Le donne sarebbero più inclini a rifiutare offerte inique che comprendono benefici personali maggiori a discapito di una controparte, anche se questo implica una perdita totale da ambo le parti. Infine, le analisi correlazionali hanno mostrato una diversa relazione tra propensione al rischio e processi decisionali tra uomini e donne in contesti diversi. Parole chiave: Processi decisionali; Utilitarismo; Altruismo; Processi decisionali morali; Processi decisionali economici. (shrink)

The topic of this essay concerns the interest that the conception of nature in Schelling has aroused in the philosophical culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I propose to examine the retrieval of the philosophy of the nature of Schelling from the history of philosophy and history of science standpoints. Therefore, my paper will be divided into three parts. In particular, I will start by examining the state of the art on the reevaluation of Schelling in the context of (...) the contemporary philosophy of science; then I will pass by analyzing the relationship between Schelling’s thought and the quantum physics according to Slavoj Žižek and Karen Barad approach; finally, I will conclude by going back to the Kantian source of this branch of study. (shrink)