Daniel Dennett, in Darwin's Dangerous Idea, argues that natural selection is a universal acid that eats through other theories, because it can explain just about everything, even the structure of the mind. Emanuel Schegloff in ‘Between Micro and Macro: Context and Other Connections’ opposes the importation of ‘macro’ factors into the ‘micro’, suggesting that one might reverse the strategy instead. Like Darwin, he is coy about whether he just wants his own turf, but the idea opens up the possibility of (...) interactional reductionism. I will argue against interactional reductionism on methodological grounds: Don't bite off more than you can chew! Instead I'll support the good old Durkheimian strategy of looking for intermediate variables between systems of different orders. I try and make the case with data from Rossel Island, Papua New Guinea. (shrink)

A simple introduction to numbers and their meanings.

At the very beginning of L’Homme-Machine, La Mettrie claims that Leibnizians with their monads have “rather spiritualized matter than materialized the soul”; a few years later Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, President of the Berlin Academy of Sciences and natural philosopher with a strong interest in the modes of transmission of ‘genetic’ information, conceived of living minima which he termed molecules, “endowed with desire, memory and intelligence,” in his Système de la nature ou Essai sur les corps organisés. This text first (...) appeared in Latin in 1751 under the title Dissertatio inauguralis metaphysica de universali naturae systemate, with the pseudonym Dr Baumann; it was translated by Maupertuis in 1754 as Essai sur la formation des corps organisés and was later included in his 1756 Œuvres under the title Système de la nature. Now, it is clear that Maupertuis was a kind of Leibnizian; and that his molecule possessed higher-level, ‘mental’ properties. In that sense he falls under the first category described by La Mettrie. But he was also involved in a debate on this issue with Diderot, who put forth a sustained critique of Maupertuis’ theory of the molecule in the additions to his 1753 Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature. Where Maupertuis attributes higher-level properties to his living minima, Diderot argues that these properties are ‘organizational’, i.e., they can only be properties of the whole. At issue here is the degree of commitment to a form of materialism. (shrink)

"This is an excellent textbook on Neoplatonism which gives the reader a very concise and lucid overview of the basic doctrines and leading thinkers of the last great philosophy to emerge before the Christianization of the Roman Empire. I’ve no doubt that my students next semester will benefit from the analyses contained in the book. The contents of the chapters are very informative and adequately place developments in their socio-cultural context." --Michael B. Simmons, Auburn University at Montgomery.

Colonial ascidians offer opportunities to investigate how developmental events are integrated to generate the animal form, since they can develop similar individuals (oozooids from eggs, blastozooids from pluripotent somatic cells) through very different reproductive processes, i.e. embryogenesis and blastogenesis. Moreover, thanks to their key phylogenetic position, they can help in the understanding of the molecular mechanisms of morphogenesis and their evolution in chordates. We review organogenesis of the ascidian neural complex comparing embryos and buds in terms of topology, developmental mechanisms (...) and terminology. We propose a new interpretation of bud territories, and reconsider nervous system development based on recent results suggesting that ascidians have vertebrate placodal and neural‐crest‐like cells. Comparing embryonic and blastogenic development in Botryllus schlosseri, we propose that the bud has territories with a placodal potentiality, suggesting that chordate ancestors possessed neurogenic placodes, and that the genetic pathways regulating neurogenic placode formation were co‐opted for new developmental processes, such as blastogenesis. BioEssays 28: 902–912, 2006. © 2006 Wiley periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to study the use of “UP–DOWN” metaphors in Russian and French material. A list of 10 conceptual metaphors expressing up–down movement was proposed by CitationLakoff and Johnson (1980), and this list has been reproduced many times since. However, this analysis shows that the list is not fully accurate. In addition to the conceptual metaphors proposed by Lakoff and Johnson, the authors find it important to include 5 more metaphorical models expressing vertical movement. On the (...) other hand, 5 of the conceptual metaphors in Lakoff and Johnson's list turned out not to be relevant to this analysis. The authors also attempt to describe the connections between different metaphoric models and observe that not all metaphoric models are equally important in their evidential and conceptual power. (shrink)

Fission of cellular membranes is ubiquitous and essential for life. Complex protein machineries, such as the dynamin and ESCRT spirals, have evolved to mediate membrane fission during diverse cellular processes, for example, vesicle budding. A new study suggests that non-specialized membrane-bound proteins can induce membrane fission through mass action due to protein crowding. Because up to 2/3 of the mass of cellular membranes is contributed by proteins, membrane protein crowding is an important physiological parameter. Considering the complexity of membrane shape (...) transitions during a fission reaction, spatial and temporal variability in protein distribution, and the abundance of intrinsically disordered regions in proteins on an invaginating membrane, protein crowding can have diverse consequences for fission in the cell. The question is, how and to what extent this mechanism combines with the action of dedicated fission machineries. Membrane fission, which is required for formation of vesicles or cytokinesis, can be carried out by specialized proteins like dynamin and the ESCRT complex. Recent work suggests that fission of cellular membranes, which are densely packed with proteins, can also be induced by protein crowding due to high entropic tension. (shrink)

Denis Diderot’s ideas about war and peace crystalize many of the contradictions in the world that he identified. On the one hand, war is a natural product of contradictions between natural law and human developments. On the other hand, it can and should always be subject to moral judgment based on a wide-ranging knowledge of history and context. War can be good if it eliminates tyranny, and bad if it limits freedom, equality, and prosperity. Peace can be good if it (...) cultivates the latter, and bad if it freezes inequality. Diderot never allows himself to rest on universal judgments for all times and all places, but insists upon never-ending comparisons and contrasts between the moral world and the natural world. Philosophical materialism provides the basis for his understanding of the world, but morals provide the instruments of judgment. (shrink)

REM sleep behaviour disorder is a REM sleep-related parasomnia which may be considered a “dissociated state of wakefulness and sleep”, given that conflicting elements of REM sleep and of wakefulness coexist during the episodes, leading to motor and behavioural manifestations reminiscent of an enacted dream. RBD has been reported in association with α-synucleinopathies: around a third of patients with Parkinson’s disease have full-blown RBD.Recent data indicate that PD patients with RBD are more prone to hallucinations than PD patients without this (...) parasomnia. However it is still not clear why RBD in PD is associated with an increased prevalence of VHs.Data exist which suggest that visual hallucinations in PD may be the result of untimely intrusions of REM visual imagery into wakefulness. RBD, which is characterised by a REM sleep dissociation pattern, might be a condition that particularly favours such intrusions. However, other hypotheses may be advanced. In fact, deficits in attentional, executive, visuoperceptual and visuospatial abilities have been documented in RBD and found to occur far more frequently in PD with RBD than in PD without RBD. Neuropsychological deficits involving visual perception and attentional processes are thought to play an important role in the pathophysiology of VHs. On this basis, RBD in PD could be viewed as a contributory risk factor for VHs. (shrink)

New Blackfriars, Volume 103, Issue 1104, Page 309-316, March 2022.

Jacques le fataliste et son maître,1 Diderot’s “novel that is not a novel,” has no beginning and multiple endings. The narrator lacks credibility, is dismissive or even rude to the reader, and actually strives to be boring. The flow of narration is interrupted no less than fifty-one times, often just so the narrator can relish his power to direct the story. The fictional reader, a character embedded in the narrative, asks no fewer than forty-seven questions, usually requesting clarification, sometimes registering (...) complaints. Entire sections of Jacques have been unceremoniously copied from Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. It was generally judged a critical failure: for a hundred years after Jacques’s.. (shrink)

In his Philosophical Inquiry concerning Human Liberty (1717), the English deist Anthony Collins proposed a complete determinist account of the human mind and action, partly inspired by his mentor Locke, but also by elements from Bayle, Leibniz and other Continental sources. It is a determinism which does not neglect the question of the specific status of the mind but rather seeks to provide a causal account of mental activity and volition in particular; it is a ‘volitional determinism’. Some decades later, (...) Diderot articulates a very similar determinism, which seeks to recognize the existence of “causes proper to man” (as he says in the Réfutation d’Helvétius). The difference with Collins is that now biological factors are being taken into account. Obviously both the ‘volitional’ and the ‘biological’ forms of determinism are noteworthy inasmuch as they change our picture of the nature of determinism itself, but my interest here is to compare these two determinist arguments, both of which are broadly Spinozist in nature – and as such belong to what Jonathan Israel called in his recent book “the radical Enlightenment,” i.e. a kind of underground Enlightenment constituted by Spinozism – and to see how Collins’ specifically psychological vision and Diderot’s specifically biological vision correspond to their two separate national contexts: determinism in France in the mid-1750s was a much more medico-biological affair than English determinism, which appears to be on a ‘path’ leading to Mill and associationist psychology. (shrink)

This volume emphasizes the diversity and fruitfulness of early modern mechanism as a program, as a concept, as a model. Mechanistic study of the living body but also of the mind and mental processes are examined in careful historical focus, dealing with figures ranging from the first-rank (Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Cudworth, Gassendi, Locke, Leibniz, Kant) to less well-known individuals (Scaliger, Martini) or prominent natural philosophers who have been neglected in recent years (Willis, Steno, etc.). The volume moves from early modern (...) medicine and physiology to late Enlightenment and even early 19th-century psychology, always maintaining a conceptual focus. It is a contribution to a newly active field in the history and philosophy of early modern life science. It is of interest to scholars studying the history of medicine and the development of mechanistic theories. (shrink)

The living body appears like an endlessly renewable reservoir of authenticity, hope, and taboo. But, for the sake of conceptual clarity, we are often been told that the (mere) body should be distinguished from the flesh. That is, it’s undeniable that I have a body; that I notice yours; that we worry about their birth and death and upkeep. But the flesh is a more transcendentalized, loaded concept – not least given its frequently religious background (incarnation: the Word made Flesh). (...) It is the body ‘kicked upstairs’, ‘bumped up’ one ontological level. Flesh is like a mantra, an obsessive leitmotif. Is the difference just one of abstraction? Indeed, crucial to the narrative of phenomenology (most obviously in Merleau-Ponty but really, throughout, including in enactivism), to the story of ancestor worship and identity it tells itself and its acolytes around the campfire, is a basic distinction between the merely physical body and the flesh as something requiring ‘mineness’, namely, an understanding of it as uniquely ‘my own’, a feeling of ‘what it is like to be embodied’. This goes back to the Husserlian distinction between Körper, ‘body’ in the sense of one body among others in a vast mechanistic universe of bodies, and Leib, ‘flesh’ in the sense of a subjectivity which is the locus of experience. In this essay I reflect on this vision of the body’s authenticity and its costs, and contrast it with insights derived from Georges Canguilhem, whose critique of mechanism/mechanicism is not done in the name of a wholescale organicism and/or an unproblematized éloge of embodiment and privacy. (shrink)

Ce livre étudie, à travers une série d'épisodes allant de la philosophie des Lumières à notre époque, le problème du matérialisme dans l'histoire de la philosophie et l’histoire des sciences. Comment comprendre les spécificités de l’histoire du matérialisme, des Lumières à nos jours, au sein de la grande histoire de la philosophie et de l’histoire des sciences ? Quelle est l’actualité de l’opposition classique entre le corps et l’esprit ? Qu’est-ce que le rire ou le rêve peuvent nous apprendre du (...) matérialisme ? En traversant l’histoire de ce concept jusqu’à l’émergence d’un « nouveau matérialisme » contemporain, l’ouvrage vise à revitaliser le matérialisme et sa lecture. -/- . (shrink)

Developing countries are endeavoring to advance into the 21st century information age. Their progress, however, is hamstrung by the dire lack of trained, skilled and knowledgeable IS workers who are able to interact with online and off‐line information sources. These countries can tap from the rich intellectual capital lying dormant within the ranks of disabled people to boost the pool of IS workers in their societies. However, before developing countries can draw on the information systems capabilities of disabled workers, these (...) workers themselves must be able to function at par with their able‐bodied counterparts as information workers. This presupposes the availability of special‐purpose information systems devices and approaches developed for disabled users. In this paper, therefore, we examine several issues that are pertinent to IS and disabled people in developing countries, and propose an integrated infrastructure to enhance the interaction of disabled people with on‐line information sources. The study includes issues related to the suitability of different interaction methodologies and technologies for people with disabilities. Additionally, we propose the design of customized interfaces that can be used by disabled people to develop Web‐based database applications and to access and query on‐line databases. (shrink)

"A beautiful piece of work on the theory of altered states of consciousness ." "Stanislav Grof, M.D. author of Realms of the Human Unconsciousness".