Une Vie de Jésus par Karl Heinrich Venturini développait deux hypothèses : Jésus était en rapport avec les Esséniens, et il avait survécu à la crucifixion. Dans son Geschichte der Leben-Jesu Forschung, A. Schweitzer montre que Venturini a été plagié durant tout le XIXe siècle. Le présent article passe en revue douze auteurs du XXe siècle qui ont reproduit les thèses de Venturini. L'article évalue ensuite de façon critique la dernière version de Venturini, le Jesus and the Riddle of the (...) Dead Sea Scrolls de Barbara Thiering. (shrink)

If validated, diet‐derived foreign microRNA absorption and function in consuming vertebrates would drastically alter our understanding of nutrition and ecology. RNA interference (RNAi) mechanisms of Caenorhabditis elegans are enhanced by uptake of environmental RNA and amplification and systemic distribution of RNAi effectors. Therapeutic exploitation of RNAi in treating human disease is difficult because these accessory processes are absent or diminished in most animals. A recent report challenged multiple paradigms, suggesting that ingested microRNAs (miRNAs) are transferred to blood, accumulate in tissues, (...) and exert canonical regulation of endogenous transcripts. Independent replication of these findings has been elusive, and multiple disconfirmatory findings have been published. In the face of mounting negative results, any additional positive reports must provide the proverbial “extraordinary proof” to support such claims. In this article, we review the evidence for and against a significant role for dietary miRNAs in influencing gene expression, and make recommendations for future studies.Also watch the Video Abstract. (shrink)

Bribery has previously been viewed as a two-party transaction between the bribe-offerer and the bribe-taker. But there is a third party: the one who has a prior claim on the bribe-taker's loyalty. Breaking the first contract in response to the offer of a bribe is alienation of agency (a category that strictly includes bribes): alienation of agency is the additional immorality of bribery beyond any immorality of the act solicited by the bribe.

In Theory Z-style management everybody participates in corporate decision making. This more open process should give us fewer Pintos, Love Canals, and massive international payoffs as executives are forced to expose their reasoning to the moral sensibilities of the whole corporation. So far everything looks good. But we are a long way from showing that only corporations so managed can be fully moral. Yet Dwiggins seems to believe this, putting his faith in the basic goodness of the many while virtually (...) dismissing the managers as mere technicians. This is too slick; even if it describes our average corporation today, there are plenty of less radical changes which can also produce the desired moral corporation. Good leadership which acts on their commitment to improve the company is surely one historically respectable alternative; cynicism about the present crop of leaders should not distract us from investigating this route. Finally, I wonder if Dwiggins can consistently urge us to embrace a full-scale Theory Z organizational structure, given his position on the place of ethics and profitability. (shrink)

The Machiavellian model is often praised as a realistic description of modern corporate life. My analysis of Tne Prince follows Rousseau in arguing that the prince can survive and prosper most easily by creating an environment in which almost all the citizens prosper. Far from licensing unrestrained self-aggrandizement, in this model success only comes from providing real value to almost every citizen for the entire period of one's leadership.Translation from the early sixteenth to the late twentieth century is far from (...) simple; for example, the CEO is in many ways far less powerful than a Medici prince. The closest approximation is a far less bureaucratic organization with very small units possessing maximum autonomy. Also, deciding who is, and who is not, a citizen is not nearly as straightforward as it was for Machiavelli; it probably includes every stakeholder on whom the corporation has a major impact. (shrink)

The prevailing opinion in our culture is that bribery is in principle wrong. I challenge that view and offer an analysis that suggests that bribery is a morally neutral concept. The analysis closely parallels the legal notions, suggesting that this analysis may have a firm grounding in our own tradition in spite of the prevailing views. To bribe someone is to offer something of value to another with the intent of inducing an action that is contrary to the positional duties (...) of the office or role of that other person. Whether offering or accepting a bribe is morally correct or incorrect, then, depends entirely upon whether the relevant positional duties have moral backing, all things considered. One virtue of the analysis is that it provides a definition that allows for a cross-cultural comparison that does not impose the standards of one society on those of another but allows for moral judgment. To determine whether a Japanese official has accepted a bribe, for example, one must determine the positional duties of the official as defined in that culture. The analysis also reveals why most believe bribery to be prima facie wrong. This is explained historically by the fact that the concept originally applied exclusively to positional duties in the judicial system, where all believed it to be morally unjustified to transgress duties of impartiality, etc. Finally, the analysis suggests that beliefs about the immorality of commercial bribery rest on the assumption that the positional duties of corporate managers and agents are to abide by the fictitious free-market rules and that the rules of the free market are morally justified. (shrink)

This paper concludes a special feature of Sustainability Science that explores a broad range of social value theoretical traditions, such as religious studies, social psychology, indigenous knowledge, economics, sociology, and philosophy. We introduce a novel transdisciplinary conceptual framework that revolves around concepts of 'lenses' and 'tensions' to help navigate value diversity. First, we consider the notion of lenses: perspectives on value and valuation along diverse dimensions that describe what values focus on, how their sociality is envisioned, and what epistemic and (...) procedural assumptions are made. We characterise fourteen of such dimensions. This provides a foundation for exploration of seven areas of tension, between: (1) the values of individuals vs collectives; (2) values as discrete and held vs embedded and constructed; (3) value as static or changeable; (4) valuation as descriptive vs normative and transformative; (5) social vs relational values; (6) different rationalities and their relation to value integration; (7) degrees of acknowledgment of the role of power in navigating value conflicts. In doing so, we embrace the 'mess' of diversity, yet also provide a framework to organise this mess and support and encourage active transdisciplinary collaboration. We identify key research areas where such collaborations can be harnessed for sustainability transformation. Here it is crucial to understand how certain social value lenses are privileged over others and build capacity in decision-making for understanding and drawing on multiple value, epistemic and procedural lenses. (shrink)

Nietzsche's use of metaphor has been widely noted but rarely focused to explore specific images in great detail. A Nietzschean Bestiary gathers essays devoted to the most notorious and celebrated beasts in Nietzsche's work. The essays illustrate Nietzsche's ample use of animal imagery, and link it to the dual philosophical purposes of recovering and revivifying human animality, which plays a significant role in his call for de-deifying nature.

This paper concludes a special feature of Sustainability Science that explores a broad range of social value theoretical traditions, such as religious studies, social psychology, indigenous knowledge, economics, sociology, and philosophy. We introduce a novel transdisciplinary conceptual framework that revolves around concepts of ‘lenses’ and ‘tensions’ to help navigate value diversity. First, we consider the notion of lenses: perspectives on value and valuation along diverse dimensions that describe what values focus on, how their sociality is envisioned, and what epistemic and (...) procedural assumptions are made. We characterise fourteen of such dimensions. This provides a foundation for exploration of seven areas of tension, between: (1) the values of individuals vs collectives; (2) values as discrete and held vs embedded and constructed; (3) value as static or changeable; (4) valuation as descriptive vs normative and transformative; (5) social vs relational values; (6) different rationalities and their relation to value integration; (7) degrees of acknowledgment of the role of power in navigating value conflicts. In doing so, we embrace the ‘mess’ of diversity, yet also provide a framework to organise this mess and support and encourage active transdisciplinary collaboration. We identify key research areas where such collaborations can be harnessed for sustainability transformation. Here it is crucial to understand how certain social value lenses are privileged over others and build capacity in decision-making for understanding and drawing on multiple value, epistemic and procedural lenses. (shrink)

Chronic pain is associated with high levels of mental health issues and alterations in cognitive processing. Cognitive-behavioral models illustrate the role of memory alterations in the development and maintenance of chronic pain as well as in mental health disorders which frequently co-occur with chronic pain. This study aims to expand our understanding of specific cognitive mechanisms underlying chronic pain which may in turn shed light on cognitive processes underlying pain-related psychological distress. Individuals who reported a history of chronic pain and (...) individuals who reported no history of chronic pain were recruited from MTurk to complete an online survey including standardized measures of anxiety and depression and two sentence completion tasks that assessed autobiographical memory and future thinking specificity and content. Chi square analyses revealed that participants who endorsed experiencing chronic pain were significantly more likely to recall at least one painful and negative event and to imagine at least one anticipated painful event in their future. Two ANCOVAs were performed to examine the degree to which chronic pain endorsement influenced specificity in memory and future imagining. Individuals with a history of chronic pain and higher levels of depression symptom severity generated autobiographical memories with significantly less specificity; whereas, individuals with a history of chronic pain also generated future autobiographical events with significantly less specificity. In addition, individuals with a history of chronic pain were more likely to generate episodes related to pain when asked to recall the past or imagine the future. Further research is needed to improve our understanding of the etiology of autobiographical memory and future thinking specificity and content in the pathogenesis of mental health conditions in the context of chronic pain. (shrink)

The consideration of normative ethics and methodology is a relatively recent phenomena in Catholic moral theology. Similar to any nascent discussion, having adopted terms and concepts from one conceptual genre, Britisch-analytic philosophy, into a radically other genre, Catholic moral theology, one then needs to begin the work of clarifying how, and to what extent, those terms and concepts contribute to the overall project of moral theology as a science. As Pope John Paul II's encyclical Veritatis Splendor attests, this incorporation has (...) met with a great deal of resistance based on misunderstandings of the nature and purpose of normative ethics and methodology. Deontology and Teleology is a pioneer account which exposes and clarifies many of the terminological and conceptual ambiguities inherent to this discussion. It begins with an investigation of C.D. Broad's meta-ethical division of theories into deontology and teleology, and the epistemological/ontological foundations on which he established this division. An analysis of how and why Broad's theory has been incorporated into Catholic discussions on the foundation and formulation of norms along with the inherent difficulties of such an incorporation is then taken up. Finally, this study argues and substantiates through detailed historical analysis that a fundamental difference between traditionalists and revisionists in their relative perspectives on norms rest in the traditional understanding and moral evaluation of the human act, specifically, the objectum, circumstantiae and finis (fontes moralitates). This is an indispensable resource work for those interested in fundamental moral theology and lays the foundation for pursuing further the complex question of normative ethics in Catholic moral theology. (shrink)

There is a history of thinking that photographs provide a special kind of access to the objects depicted in them, beyond the access that would be provided by a painting or drawing. What is included in the photograph does not depend on the photographer’s beliefs about what is in front of the camera. This feature leads Kendall Walton to argue that photographs literally allow us to see the objects which appear in them. Current generative algorithms produce images in response (...) to users’ text prompts. Depending on the parameters, the output can resemble specific people or things which are named in the prompt. This resemblance does not depend on the user’s beliefs, so generated images are in this sense like photographs. Given this parallel, how should we think about AI-generated images? (shrink)

Mimesis as Make-Believe is important reading for everyone interested in the workings of representational art.

I propose a way of understanding empathy on which it does not necessarily involve any-thing like thinking oneself into another’s shoes, or any imagining at all. Briefly, the empa-thizer uses an aspect of her own mental state as a sample, expressed by means of a phenomenal concept, to understand the other person. This account does a better job of explaining the connection between empathetic experiences and the objects of empathy than most traditional ones do. And it helps to clarify the (...) relations among different varieties of empathy and empathy-like experiences, including empathy with fictional characters. -/- . (shrink)

Technology design has social as well as technical determinants. These social factors, such as the political context and social philosophy, vary historically and cross-nationally. The work upon which this paper is based addresses the nature of process technology design in the United States and focuses on the underlying assumptions that guide technology design, based on both historical analysis and survey and case studies of current design practices. Central to this work is an analysis of how the US approaches compare to (...) some of the other industrial nations and the assumptions and implications of different social design concepts such as human-centered design, skill-based design, and human factors. (shrink)

That photography is a supremely realistic medium may be the commonsense view, but—as Edward Steichen reminds us—it is by no means universal. Dissenters note how unlike reality a photograph is and how unlikely we are to confuse the one with the other. They point to “distortions” engendered by the photographic process and to the control which the photographer exercises over the finished product, the opportunities he enjoys for interpretation and falsification. Many emphasize the expressive nature of the medium, observing that (...) photographs are inevitably colored by the photographer’s personal interests, attitudes, and prejudices.1 Whether any of these various considerations really does collide with photography’s claim of extraordinary realism depends, of course, on how that claim is to be understood.Those who find photographs especially realistic sometimes think of photography as a further advance in a direction which many picture makers have taken during the last several centuries, as a continuation or culmination of the post-Renaissance quest for realism.2 There is some truth in this. Such earlier advances toward realism include the development of perspective and modeling techniques, the portrayal of ordinary and incidental details, attention to the effects of light, and so on. From its very beginning, photography mastered perspective. Subtleties of shading, gradations of brightness nearly impossible to achieve with the brush, became commonplace. Photographs include as a matter of course the most mundane details of the scenes they portray—stray chickens, facial warts, clutters of dirty dishes. Photographic images easily can seem to be what painters striving for realism have always been after. 2. See André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” What is Cinema?, trans. Hugh Gray, vol. 1, p. 12; all further references to this work, abbreviated “OPI,” will be included in the text. See also Rudolf Arnheim, “Melancholy Unshaped,” Toward a Psychology of Art: Collected Essays, p. 186. Kendall L. Walton is professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan. He is currently completing a book on representation in the arts. (shrink)

That photography is a supremely realistic medium may be the commonsense view, but—as Edward Steichen reminds us—it is by no means universal. Dissenters note how unlike reality a photograph is and how unlikely we are to confuse the one with the other. They point to “distortions” engendered by the photographic process and to the control which the photographer exercises over the finished product, the opportunities he enjoys for interpretation and falsification. Many emphasize the expressive nature of the medium, observing that (...) photographs are inevitably colored by the photographer’s personal interests, attitudes, and prejudices.1 Whether any of these various considerations really does collide with photography’s claim of extraordinary realism depends, of course, on how that claim is to be understood.Those who find photographs especially realistic sometimes think of photography as a further advance in a direction which many picture makers have taken during the last several centuries, as a continuation or culmination of the post-Renaissance quest for realism.2 There is some truth in this. Such earlier advances toward realism include the development of perspective and modeling techniques, the portrayal of ordinary and incidental details, attention to the effects of light, and so on. From its very beginning, photography mastered perspective . Subtleties of shading, gradations of brightness nearly impossible to achieve with the brush, became commonplace. Photographs include as a matter of course the most mundane details of the scenes they portray—stray chickens, facial warts, clutters of dirty dishes. Photographic images easily can seem to be what painters striving for realism have always been after. 2. See André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” What is Cinema?, trans. Hugh Gray, vol. 1 , p. 12; all further references to this work, abbreviated “OPI,” will be included in the text. See also Rudolf Arnheim, “Melancholy Unshaped,” Toward a Psychology of Art: Collected Essays , p. 186. Kendall L. Walton is professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan. He is currently completing a book on representation in the arts. (shrink)

Leading scholars offer new readings of Degas1 representations of the family, prostitution, city life and leisure in which looking at women is shown to be a complex and ambiguous process. One major topic of the book is the encounter between feminism and art history. Having put images of women1 on the agenda of cultural analysis, feminist interventions in the theory and analysis of representation have created a diverse and intricate field of interpretation which now supersedes that formulation. These essays challenge (...) art history to confront issues of spectatorship, the interface of class and gender, identification and the politics of vision. This illustrated collection is thus a major contribution to debates on representation and sexuality. (shrink)

Realist theories about fictional entities must explain the fact that, in ordinary contexts people deny, apparently in all seriousness, that there are such things as the Big Bad Wolf and Santa Claus. The usual explanation treats these denials as involving restricted quantification: The speaker is said to be denying only that the Big Bad Wolf and Santa Claus are to be found among real or actual things, not that there are no such things at all. This is unconvincing. The denials (...) may just as naturally be phrased as “The Big Bad Wolf and Santa Claus don't exist”, and claims of nonexistence seem not to admit of interpretations corresponding to statements of restricted quantification. Ordinary denials of the existence of fictional entities constitute a severe difficulty for realist theories. (shrink)

Pope John Paul II called for an intense dialogue between science and theology, “a common interactive relationship,” in which each discipline is “open to the discoveries and insights of the other” while retaining its own integrity. This essay seeks to be responsive to that call and is an initial exploration of relationships between contemporary neuroscience and Catholic theological ethics. It examines neuroscientific data on the bicameral brain and theological ethical data on marital ethics, including divorce and remarriage, and asks what (...) insight the former might provide into both the latter and the different ethical methods that respond to marital ethics. The analysis is undertaken in the hope of illuminating a pathway that opens the insights of one way of doing theological ethics to the insights of another way, thereby eliminating the unnecessary, unhelpful, and sometimes un‐Christian polarizations that presently separate them. (shrink)