Phosphoinositides modulate a plethora of functions including signal transduction and membrane trafficking. PtdInsPs are thought to consist of seven interconvertible species that localize to a specific organelle, to which they recruit a set of cognate effector proteins. Here, in reviewing the literature, we argue that this model needs revision. First, PtdInsPs can carry a variety of acyl chains, greatly boosting their molecular diversity. Second, PtdInsPs are more promiscuous in their localization than is usually acknowledged. Third, PtdInsP interconversion is likely achieved (...) through kinase-phosphatase enzyme complexes that coordinate their activities and channel substrates without affecting bulk substrate population. Additionally, we contend that despite hundreds of PtdInsP effectors, our attention is biased toward few proteins. Lastly, we recognize that PtdInsPs can act to nucleate coincidence detection at the effector level, as in PDK1 and Akt. Overall, better integrated models of PtdInsP regulation and function are not only possible but needed. Phosphoinositides are lipids that control many cellular functions. However, the field of PtdInsP signaling is dominated by several dogmatic notions. Here, we offer an updated glimpse on the current state of the field regarding molecular diversity, localization, organization of modifying enzymes, effector types, and effector organization. (shrink)

As physicians, the supreme importance of health and its integral role in any individual’s pursuit of life, liberty and happiness is exhibited on a daily basis. It is abundantly clear that without h...

This is the first complete, one-volume English translation of the ancient Chinese text Xunzi, one of the most extensive, sophisticated, and elegant works in the tradition of Confucian thought. Through essays, poetry, dialogues, and anecdotes, the Xunzi articulates a Confucian perspective on ethics, politics, warfare, language, psychology, human nature, ritual, and music, among other topics. Aimed at general readers and students of Chinese thought, Eric Hutton’s translation makes the full text of this important work more accessible in English than ever (...) before. Named for its purported author, the Xunzi has long been neglected compared to works such as the Analects of Confucius and the Mencius. Yet interest in the Xunzi has grown in recent decades, and the text presents a much more systematic vision of the Confucian ideal than the fragmented sayings of Confucius and Mencius. In one famous, explicit contrast to them, the Xunzi argues that human nature is bad. However, it also allows that people can become good through rituals and institutions established by earlier sages. Indeed, the main purpose of the Xunzi is to urge people to become as good as possible, both for their own sakes and for the sake of peace and order in the world. In this edition, key terms are consistently translated to aid understanding and line numbers are provided for easy reference. Other features include a concise introduction, a timeline of early Chinese history, a list of important names and terms, cross-references, brief explanatory notes, a bibliography, and an index. (shrink)

Stephen Davies taught philosophy at the University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand. His research specialty is the philosophy of art. He is a former President of the American Society for Aesthetics. His books include Definitions of Art (Cornell UP, 1991), Musical Meaning and Expression (Cornell UP, 1994), Musical Works and Performances (Clarendon, 2001), Themes in the Philosophy of Music (OUP, 2003), Philosophical Perspectives on Art (OUP, 2007), Musical Understandings and Other Essays on the Philosophy of Music (OUP, 2011), The Artful (...) Species: Aesthetics, Art, and Evolution (OUP, 2012), The Philosophy of Art (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016 second ed.), and Adornment: What Self-decorations Tells Us about Who We Are, (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020). (shrink)

Introduction: Platonic dramatology -- The political and philosophical problems. Using pre-Socratic philosophy to support political reform: the Athenian stranger ; Plato's Parmenides: Parmenides' critique of Socrates and Plato's critique of Parmenides ; Becoming Socrates ; Socrates interrogates his contemporaries about the noble and good -- Paradigms of philosophy. Socrates' positive teaching ; Timaeus-Critias: completing or challenging Socratic political philosophy? ; Socratic practice -- The trial and death of Socrates. The limits of human intelligence ; The Eleatic challenge ; The trial (...) and death of Socrates -- Conclusion: Why Plato made Socrates his hero. (shrink)

Evolutionary game theory and public goods games offer an important framework to understand cooperation during pandemics. From this perspective, the COVID-19 situation can be conceptualized as a dilemma where people who neglect safety precautions act as free riders, because they get to enjoy the benefits of decreased health risk from others’ compliance with policies despite not contributing to or even undermining public safety themselves. At the same time, humans appear to carry a suite of evolved psychological mechanisms aimed at curbing (...) free riding in order to ensure the continued provision of public goods, which can be leveraged to develop more effective measures to promote compliance with regulations. We also highlight factors beyond free riding that reduce compliance rates, such as the emergence of conspiratorial thinking, which seriously undermine the effectiveness of measures to suppress free riding. Together, the current paper outlines the social dynamics that occur in public goods dilemmas involving the spread of infectious disease, highlights the utility and limits of evolutionary game-theoretic approaches for COVID-19 management, and suggests novel directions based on emerging challenges to cooperation. (shrink)

Aristotle often describes virtue in an idealized way, indicating that the virtuous person will never err or have a bad desire. Yet, drawing from empirical work on character and personality, many philosophers and psychologists believe that most people’s behavior stems from situational factors and that good behavior often stems from the wrong motives, such as maintaining a good mood or relieving feelings of guilt. Further, some suggest that the variability in most people’s behavior raises a challenge to traditional categories of (...) character such as virtue, vice, continence, and incontinence. Thus, it may seem impossible to develop virtue and that people lack character as Aristotle conceived of it. Drawing from Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Politics, I develop accounts of actual virtue and the character of ordinary people and respond to these two concerns. (shrink)

The globalism objection poses two distinct challenges to Aristotelian views of virtue. On the one hand, the consistency thesis demands that a virtue is behaviorally expressed in a wide range of trait-relevant situations. On the other hand, the evaluative integration thesis suggests that the presence of one virtue increases the probability of other, similar virtues, posing a problem for Aristotle’s reciprocity of the virtues thesis. I show that, by contrast to contemporary Aristotelian views and views attributed to Aristotle, Aristotle’s own (...) theory of virtue escapes the globalism objection. I address the consistency thesis by showing that each of Aristotle’s moral virtues are narrower than commonly assumed. I then address the evaluative integration thesis through a discussion of practical wisdom, showing that Aristotle believed one could fall short of perfect virtue, while still being fully virtuous. The upshot is that, despite idealizations of virtue throughout the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle held a realistic account of virtue, one that is different from contemporary Aristotelian views, and one that is empirically adequate insofar as it allows for more than a few virtuous people. (shrink)

In 'Een handvol filosofen' staan de filosofen centraal die sinds de oprichting van de Vrije Universiteit in 1880 aan deze instelling verbonden zijn geweest. Het gaat hierbij niet alleen om de inhoud van hun werk, maar ook om de personen zelf. Er waren filosofiedocenten die zich met de universiteit identificeerden en zich volledig konden ontplooien. Er waren er echter ook voor wie dit niet gold, die geïsoleerd of in gewetensnood raakten. Veel filosofiestudenten waren actief betrokken bij wat er in hun (...) faculteit gebeurde. Zij namen initiatieven, protesteerden soms tegen de gang van zaken en kozen partij in conflictsituaties. Sinds het eind van de jaren zestig van de twintigste eeuw verloor de Vrije Universiteit geleidelijk haar christelijk karakter. Tegenwoordig werken alle stafleden vanuit hun eigen motivatie mee aan een hoofdzakelijk seculier geworden universiteit, die ruimte biedt voor religieuze en levensbeschouwelijke diversiteit. (shrink)

What role does the wild duck play in Ibsen's famous drama? I argue that, besides mirroring the fate of the human cast members, the duck is acting as animal subject in a quasi-experiment, conducted in a private setting. Analysed from this perspective, the play allows us to discern the epistemological and ethical dimensions of the new scientific animal practice (systematic observation of animal behaviour under artificial conditions) emerging precesely at that time. Ibsen's play stages the clash between a scientific and (...) a romantic understanding of animals that still constitutes the backdrop of most contemporary debates over animals in research. Whereas the scientific understanding reduces the animal's behaviour, as well as its environment, to discrete and modifiable elements, the romantic view regards animals as being at one with (or violently disconnected from) their natural surroundings. (shrink)

A considerable body of evidence now documents, beyond reasonable doubt, biological and health risk factors for crime and violence. Nevertheless, intervention and prevention efforts with offenders have avoided biological interventions, in part due to past misuses of biological research and the challenges that biological predispositions to crime raise. This article reviews the empirical literature on two biological intervention approaches, omega-3 supplementation and transcranial direct current stimulation. Emerging research on these relatively benign interventions suggests that increased omega-3 intake through dietary intervention (...) and prefrontal upregulation using non-invasive brain stimulation may show some initial promise in reducing antisocial behavior. The ethical issues related to mandated and offered biological interventions within the criminal justice system are discussed. (shrink)

In State v. McKnight, the Supreme Court of South Carolina decided 3-2 to affirm McKnight’s conviction for homicide by child abuse based on the finding that her cocaine use during pregnancy caused her daughter to be stillborn. Under South Carolina law, a person is guilty of homicide by child abuse if he or she “causes the death of a child under the age of eleven while committing child abuse or neglect, and the death occurs under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to (...) human life.” During the trial, the pathologist who conducted the autopsy testified that the only way for the infant to have cocaine byproducts present in her system was ifthe mother had ingested cocaine, and the cause of death was intrauterine fetal demise. Another pathologist testified that there was a reasonable degree of medical certainty that the cause of death was intrauterine cocaine exposure. (shrink)

This qualitative classroom study investigated the development of pragmatic competence in academic discussions through content analysis of student reflective writing. The aims of the study were: to understand the greatest challenges that students faced during the learning process, the causes of those challenges, and the most successful strategies that students employed to overcome the challenges. In addition, the analysis investigated other significant themes in the reflective writing that related to the students’ experiences in developing their pragmatic competence in discussions. Five (...) advanced English for Academic Purposes (EAP) students at a Sino-US institution in China participated over the course of a semester. Results showed that common challenges included: hesitation resulting in missed opportunities to speak, lack of clarity when speaking, inability to repair communication breakdowns, and difficulty with listening comprehension. Self-reflection allowed the learners to understand the various reasons for the challenges they faced and to develop appropriate pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic strategies for coping with them. It also enabled the instructor to make suggestions suited to learners’ specific needs. In addition to revealing specific challenges, causes, and strategies that students employed, themes that emerged through content analysis included the impact of students’ emotional lives on their learning and performance, as well as the value of authentic communication in the development of pragmatic competence for academic discussions. This exploratory classroom investigation provides suggestions for teaching pragmatic competence in academic discussions and for additional classroom explorations that empower learners to develop autonomy. (shrink)

This contribution contextualizes the relationship between fragility and education in the light of people’s changing conditions and perspectives, and their impact on educational processes, focusing in particular on the consequences of the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. By doing so, it introduces this focus, illustrates its coherence, and explains the basic methodological choice, namely the adoption of the Systematic Review, to explore different aspects of the relationship between fragility and education.

The article proposes looking at children's literature, particularly the form of the picture book, as an educational resource for producing body awareness in school. Eight reading steps for as many bodily actions aimed at naming the body, activating it, getting to know it and moving it in space, on and off the pages; between grounding, listening, breathing, playing and moving, the rediscovery of gestures and anatomical truths invites to deepen self-knowledge as a preliminary act to the encounter and relationship with (...) the other and with the environment. The picture books by their specificities of short form and cross-over, offer, even in non-fiction production, the possibility of bringing attention back to the body dimension within the school and educational debate, where it lives today in a state of malaise and oblivion. Meaningful conversations, explorations and relationships flow from the pages of the albums: research on language as a tool that gives dignity and value to each person, and encounters with the artistic representation of the world as an infinite mirror of its multiplicity and variety, constitute valuable opportunities for an education that is aware of the wholeness of learners and teachers and the integrated, erotic and embodied dimension of their relationship. (shrink)

As a scientific, materialist worldview becomes increasingly difficult to repudiate, and as philosophers increasingly uncover and articulate the conceptual nature of morality and distinctively moral normativity, the threat of moral anti-realism becomes more and more real. This perspective is argued in Chapter One. Chapter Two discusses how laws and bioethical trends that pertain to the clinical management of patients in a vegetative coma differ from country to country and continue to give rise to unresolved legal debates and scientific controversy. Chapter (...) Three covers how caregivers in palliative care must be supported to better understand patients hopes and needs, making them comfortable to decide when or how much they want to eat. Chapter Four synthesises findings from four empirical studies conducted in Western Africa (Togo) on topics related to the autonomy (end of life decision-making among terminally-ill patients), benevolence and non-malevolence (breaking bad news to elderly patients and their families), and justice (informal payments to physicians, criminal prosecution in cases of HIV transmission) principles of bioethics. Finally, Chapter Five argues that expert members in Ethics committees have an unfair upper-hand, with their decisions trumping other debates in committee deliberations. Qualitative research is brought to bear which illustrates this and which also notes how expertise dilutes the training given to newly appointed ethics committee members. (shrink)

Increasingly, biologists are using computers to model and to create biological representations. However, the exponential growth in available biological dataposes a challenge for experimental and theoretical researchers in both Biology and in Computer Science. In short, when even the simple retrieval of relevant biological information for a researcher becomes a complex task — its analysis and synthesis with other biological information will become even more daunting and unlikely. In this context, specially organized ‘structures of representation’ are needed for the efficient (...) interpretation of experimentally generated data. The “semantic Web” is a recent trend in networking techniques that we will examine here as a possible strategy for the computation of biological data — one that may allow us to take into account both the semiotic dimensions of biological processes, as well as their dynamic organization into stable and systemic levels. Thereupon, we propose that a semantic network for biology could benefit from principles rooted in such previous representation efforts as computer-generated ‘landscapes’ and ‘physical attractors’ — and that such principles could, in turn, then be better integrated into biological research through the development of a more semiotically informed user / computer interface design. (shrink)

BackgroundCognitive dysfunctions, both subjective and detectable at psychometric testing, may follow SARS-CoV-2 infection. However, the ecological-functional relevance of such objective deficits is currently under-investigated. This study thus aimed at investigating the association between objective cognitive measures and both physical and cognitive, ecological-functional outcomes in post-COVID-19.MethodsForty-two COVID-19-recovered individuals were administered the Mini-Mental State Examination and the Montreal Cognitive Assessment. The Functional Independence Measure was adopted to assess functional-ecological, motor/physical and cognitive outcomes at admission and discharge.ResultsWhen predicting both T0/T1 FIM-total and-Motor scores (...) based on MMSE/MoCA scores, premorbid risk for cognitive decline and disease-related features, no model yielded a significant fit. However, the MoCA - but not the MMSE significantly predicted T0/T1 FIM-Cognitive scores. The MoCA was significantly related only to T0/T1 FIM-Cognitive Memory items.DiscussionCognitive measures are not associated with physical/motor everyday-life outcomes in post-COVID-19 patients. The MoCA may provide an ecological estimate of cognitive functioning in this population. (shrink)

Aim of this study was to investigate whether parental mental representations during pregnancy and after delivery differed between parents who conceived after Assisted Reproductive Treatments and spontaneous conceiving parents. Effects of specific ART variables were also taken into account. Seventeen ART couples and 25 SC couples were recruited at Santa Maria Nuova Hospital. At both 32 weeks of gestation and 3 months postpartum participants completed the Semantic Differential of the IRMAG, a self-report tool which measures specific domains of mental representations (...) pertaining either individual or parental characteristics. Results showed that ART parents had significantly more positive representations of the child compared to SC parents, while the scores at Partner dimension improved from T1 to T2 for SC parents only. With regards to ART history, scores at the Self-as-woman/man dimension were significantly less positive for ICSI than IVF parents and improved substantially from T1 to T2 only in case of mothers with previous ART attempts and of fathers at the first ART cycle. The representation of own parents increased from T1 to T2 in case of infertility diagnosis due to male factors, while a decrease emerged when infertility was due to female factors. Findings suggest the need to investigate parental mental representations after ART, in order to improve the understanding on the transition to parenthood of infertile couples and to target more specific intervention for parenting support. (shrink)

Previous empirical research has found mixed results for the impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) investments on corporate financial performance (CFP). This paper contributes to the literature by exploring in a two stage investor decision-making model the relationship between a firm’s innovation effort, CSR, and financial performance. We simultaneously examine the impact of CSR on both accounting-based (financial health) and market-based (Tobin’s Q) financial performance measures. From a sample of top corporate citizens, we find that: (1) a firm’s social responsibility (...) commitment (CSR) contributes to its financial performance; (2) after controlling for investment in innovation activities, CSR continues to have a positive impact on a firm’s financial performance; (3) the customer dimension of CSR has a positive effect on both CFP measures, whereas the employee dimension indicates a significant impact only on financial heath; and (4) the community relation dimension of CSR only affects the market-based CFP measure of firms with high innovation intensity. (shrink)

This article presents a response to Richard Rorty's paper "Is Philosophy Relevant to Business Ethics?" The author questions Rorty's views on the depreciation of the role of philosophy in applied ethics, and outlines four reasons why philosophy retains its relevance. The author addresses the role of moral reasoning in the development of the moral imagination. The author also concludes that humans have the means necessary to make moral progress and are capable of moral reasoning, and need only to develop a (...) strong moral imagination. (shrink)

The tropical rain-forest regions in Borneo Island have in place various tough environmental policies to manage the economic use of natural resources sustainably. Nevertheless, their biological landscapes are struggling against unprecedented ecological assault amid rapid industrial transformations which have involved massive and irreversible exploitation of land resources. The main reason behind this mismatch of sustainable resource management vis-à-vis unsustainable resource use is the failure on the part of the policy makers to act under the guidance of certain ethical virtues when (...) attempting to translate environmental rhetoric in print to concrete actions in reality. Ethical engagement with nature is pivotal in helping to stimulate genuine efforts in environmental conservation. Field research in the Borneo tropical rain-forest state of Sarawak, Malaysia is able to identify and evaluate the distinctive environmental attitudes, values, and practices of the indigenous communities, and their implications on Sarawak’s sustainable land-resource use and to reinforce the importance of ethical leadership in addressing a myriad of today’s environmental challenges. (shrink)