Adherens (AJ) and tight junctions (TJ) maintain cell‐cell adhesions and cellular polarity in normal tissues. Afadin, a multi‐domain scaffold protein, is commonly found in both adherens and tight junctions, where it plays both structural and signal‐modulating roles. Afadin is a complex modulator of cellular processes implicated in cancer progression, including signal transduction, migration, invasion, and apoptosis. In keeping with the complexities associated with the roles of adherens and tight junctions in cancer, afadin exhibits both tumor suppressive and pro‐metastatic functions. In (...) this review, we will explore the dichotomous roles that afadin plays during cancer progression. (shrink)

We identify two processes by which humans increase genetic exchange among groups of individuals: by affecting the distribution of groups and dispersal patterns across a landscape, and by affecting interbreeding among sympatric or parapatric groups. Each of these processes might then have two different effects on biodiversity: changes in the number of taxa through merging or splitting of groups, and the extinction/extirpation of taxa through effects on fitness. We review the various ways in which humans are affecting genetic exchange, and (...) highlight the difficulties in predicting the impacts on biodiversity. Gene flow and hybridization are crucially important evolutionary forces influencing biodiversity. Humans alter natural patterns of genetic exchange in myriad ways, and these anthropogenic effects are likely to influence the genetic integrity of populations and species. We argue that taking a gene-centric view towards conservation will help resolve issues pertaining to conservation and management.Editor's suggested further reading in BioEssays A systemic view of biodiversity and its conservation: Processes, interrelationships, and human culture Abstract. (shrink)

Recent studies suggest that vertebrate genetic material ingested by invertebrates (iDNA) can be used to investigate vertebrate ecology. Given the ubiquity of invertebrates that feed on vertebrates across the globe, iDNA might qualify as a very powerful tool for 21st century population and conservation biologists. Here, we identify some invertebrate characteristics that will likely influence iDNA retrieval and elaborate on the potential uses of invertebrate‐derived information. We hypothesize that beyond inventorying local faunal diversity, iDNA should allow for more profound insights (...) into wildlife population density, size, mortality, and infectious agents. Based on the similarities of iDNA with other low‐quality sources of DNA, a general technical framework for iDNA analyses is proposed. As it is likely that no such thing as a single ideal iDNA sampler exists, forthcoming research efforts should aim at cataloguing invertebrate properties relevant to iDNA retrieval so as to guide future usage of the invertebrate tool box. (shrink)

Aging is accompanied by changes in general cognitive functioning which may impact the learning rate of older adults; however, this is often not controlled for in cognitive aging studies. We investigated the contribution of differences in learning rates to age-related differences in landmark knowledge acquired from route learning. In Experiment 1 we used a standard learning procedure in which participants received a fixed amount of exposure to a route. Consistent with previous research, we found age-related deficits in associative cue and (...) landmark sequence knowledge. Experiment 2 controlled for differences in learning rates by using a flexible exposure learning procedure. Specifically, participants were trained to a performance criterion during route learning before being tested on the content of their route knowledge. While older adults took longer to learn the route than younger adults, the age-related differences in associative cue knowledge were abolished. The deficit in landmark sequence knowledge, however, remained. Experiment 3 replicated these results and introduced a test situation in which a deficit in landmark sequence knowledge yielded an increased likelihood of disorientation in older adults. The findings of this study suggest that age-related deficits in landmark associative cue knowledge are attenuated by controlling for learning rates. In contrast, landmark sequence knowledge deficits persist and are best explained by changes in the learning strategy of older adults to acquire task essential associative cue knowledge at the expense of supplementary sequence knowledge. (shrink)

Policy-makers use different decision-making strategies and base their decisions – more or less explicitly – on both expert knowledge and opinions in order to cope with the sheer complexity of societal challenges and the political environment. Most politicians rely to some extent on personal ideology in the implementation of public policies. Potential decision biases such as ‘repair service behavior’ – the human tendency to try fixing what appears to be most problematic at first – also influence decision-making. While ideology plays (...) a prominent role in politics, we know too little about its effect on political decision-making. Some researchers would argue that the use of ideology and repair service behavior facilitate the decision process, while others suggest that it adversely affects the ability to make objective decisions. Using a political microworld simulation that reproduces complex real-world problems, we investigate the effects of repair service behavior and personal ideology on performance in a dynamic decision-making task. Although repair service behavior was not associated with performance, the results suggest that personal ideology significantly impaired goal attainment. Despite clear instructions to be as objective as possible and think critically in completing the task, ideology was powerful enough to disrupt objective policy-making, as indicated by the deviation from optimal scores and the overall microworld task goal, i.e., to win votes and be re-elected by the end of the game. (shrink)

Cancers rely on multiple, heterogeneous processes at different scales, pertaining to many biomedical fields. Therefore, understanding cancer is necessarily an interdisciplinary task that requires placing specialised experimental and clinical research into a broader conceptual, theoretical, and methodological framework. Without such a framework, oncology will collect piecemeal results, with scant dialogue between the different scientific communities studying cancer. We argue that one important way forward in service of a more successful dialogue is through greater integration of applied sciences (experimental and clinical) (...) with conceptual and theoretical approaches, informed by philosophical methods. By way of illustration, we explore six central themes: (i) the role of mutations in cancer; (ii) the clonal evolution of cancer cells; (iii) the relationship between cancer and multicellularity; (iv) the tumour microenvironment; (v) the immune system; and (vi) stem cells. In each case, we examine open questions in the scientific literature through a philosophical methodology and show the benefit of such a synergy for the scientific and medical understanding of cancer. (shrink)

As we age, many physical, perceptual and cognitive abilities decline, which can critically impact our day-to-day lives. However, the decline of many abilities is concurrent; thus, it is challenging to disentangle the relative contributions of different abilities in the performance deterioration in realistic tasks, such as road crossing, with age. Research into road crossing has shown that aging and a decline in executive functioning is associated with altered information sampling and less safe crossing decisions compared to younger adults. However, in (...) these studies declines in age and EFs were confounded. Therefore, it is impossible to disentangle whether age-related declines in EFs impact on visual sampling and road-crossing performance, or whether visual exploration, and road-crossing performance, are impacted by aging independently of a decline in EFs. In this study, we recruited older adults with maintained EFs to isolate the impacts of aging independently of a decline EFs on road crossing abilities. We recorded eye movements of younger adults and older adults while they watched videos of road traffic and were asked to decide when they could cross the road. Overall, our results show that older adults with maintained EFs sample visual information and make similar road crossing decisions to younger adults. Our findings also reveal that both environmental constraints and EF abilities interact with aging to influence how the road-crossing task is performed. Our findings suggest that older pedestrians' safety, and independence in day-to-day life, can be improved through a limitation of scene complexity and a preservation of EF abilities. (shrink)

Jean Nicod, born in 1893, died far too young in 1924. He is remembered today as one of the foreign disciples (among them Ludwig Wittgenstein and Norbert Wiener) attracted to Cambridge by Russell after the publication of the Principia. We publish here a translation of “Les tendances philosophiques de M. Bertrand Russell”, which appeared in the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale in 1922. The article is testimony not only to Nicod’s philosophical talents, but also of how Russell’s philosophy could (...) be received in France at the beginning of the twentieth century. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Return of Scepticism: From Hobbes and Descartes to BayleSébastien CharlesGianni Paganini, editor. The Return of Scepticism: From Hobbes and Descartes to Bayle. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003. Pp. xxviii + 486. Cloth, $180.00.Cette édition des actes du congrès international « The Return of Scepticism », organisé par Gianni Paganini à l'Université du Piémont-Oriental de Vercelli en mai 2000, a pour ambition de faire le point sur l'état de la (...) recherche actuelle en cherchant à cerner au mieux les implications épistémologiques et les répercussions européennes du scepticisme à la période moderne. Placés sous le patronage de Richard H. Popkin, dont un essai ouvre l'ouvrage et pave la voie à de futures recherches sur la question, les textes rassemblés par Gianni Paganini ont pour trait commun d'insister sur la prégnance du scepticisme à l'époque moderne, tout en prenant garde au fait de bien replacer chaque stratégie sceptique dans l'environnement culturel et philosophique qui fut le sien. Divisé en sept sections, l'ouvrage fournit une vue d'ensemble de la question sceptique qui s'étale sur deux siècles, le XVIIe et le XVIIIe.Dans la première section, l'accent est mis sur un aspect délaissé de l'histoire du scepticisme moderne, à savoir le traitement particulier qui lui fut réservé dans la pensée anglaise des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Sont abordés ici les cas de Hobbes, dont le traitement du scepticisme est pensé en relation inversée avec celui de Descartes (G. Paganini), Locke, qui tend à faire sien le principe sceptique de la limitation du savoir (G. A. J. Rogers), et les Platoniciens de Cambridge, qui s'inspirent de la méthode sceptique pour compartimenter le champ du savoir (F. Tomasoni).Dans la deuxième section, c'est la pensée continentale qui est à l'honneur, avec des textes consacrés à Descartes spécifiquement ou à La Mothe le Vayer et Descartes, avec pour objectif commun de questionner l'originalité du travail cartésien en insistant notamment sur le rôle de l'epoché chez Charron comme source possible du cogito (J. R. Maia Neto) et sur une tradition sceptique non fidéiste présente dans les œuvres de La Mothe le Vayer comme de Descartes (J.-P. Cavaillé).La troisième section évoque la prise de conscience des enjeux sceptiques chez les sectateurs et les adversaires de Descartes, qui s'accordent tous à reconnaître l'insuffisance de la réfutation du scepticisme proposée par ce dernier. Ce point fait l'unanimité tant chez les opposants à Descartes—Martin Schoock (A. Del Prete), Pierre Villemandy (C. Borghero), Pierre-Daniel Huet (T. M. Lennon), et les philosophes italiens Fardella et Doria (M. T. Marcialis)—que chez ceux qui se sont inspirés de sa philosophie—Arnauld (G. Belgioioso), Malebranche, Foucher et Desgabets (E. Scribano).La prise en compte des enjeux sceptiques aux plans politique et religieux est intégrée dans la quatrième partie au sein de laquelle sont évoquées des thématiques plurielles comme la présence du probabilisme néo-académique chez Pascal (A. McKenna), l'interprétation sceptique, voire libertine, du pouvoir et de la liberté rattachée à la théorie hobbesienne de l'état de nature chez Samuel Sorbière (L. Bianchi), ou le rapport existant entre scepticisme et tolérance (L. Simonutti).La section suivante délaisse politique et religion pour aborder le cas de la science, et de l'effet du scepticisme au niveau épistémologique. Le cas de Martín Martínez témoigne du fait que le scepticisme peut être conciliable avec une vision empiriste de la science et qu'une physique sceptique reste possible (J. C. Laursen). De même, le rapport des savants italiens comme Redi, Magalotti ou Dati à l'égard du scepticisme est évocateur de la prise de conscience des dangers que le scepticisme pose pour le domaine du démontrable (M. Torrini), ce qui vaut également pour toute théorie de la signification, dont les implications sceptiques sont patentes (G. Hassler), ou pour toute approche historique minée par des considérations pyrrhoniennes (C. Grell... (shrink)

Clower, Jason: The Unlikely Buddhologist, Tiantai Buddhism in M ou Zongsan’s New Confucianism Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-4 DOI 10.1007/s11712-011-9261-y Authors Sébastien Billioud, Univ Paris Diderot, Sorbonne Paris Cité. UFR LCAO/East Asian Studies Department, Case 7009, 16 rue Marguerite Duras, 75205 Paris Cedex 13 Paris, France Journal Dao Online ISSN 1569-7274 Print ISSN 1540-3009.

Avec The First Reception of Berkeley’s Immaterialism, paru en 1959 et réédité par la suite en 1965, Harry M. Bracken tentait de donner une explication crédible à la transformation radicale au sein de la modernité d’une forme d’empirisme très particulière, l’immatérialisme, en pur et simple solipsisme. C’est dans cet horizon de pensée que s’inscrit l’ouvrage commun de Charles J. McCracken et de Ian C. Tipton, puisqu’il vise à rassembler des textes des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles qui «illuminate the background from (...) which Berkeley’s philosophical views emerged or illustrate the reactions those views provoked». Il s’agit donc avant tout d’un recueil de textes et non d’une analyse d’ensemble, quoique les différentes présentations mettant en contexte chacun des extraits choisis permettent de fournir une interprétation globale du travail accompli. Et ce travail se déploie sous deux champs d’analyse, dont la figure même de Berkeley marque la rupture. (shrink)

This chapter examines two ways in which liberal thinkers have appealed to claims about disagreement in order to defend a principle of free speech. One argument, from Mill, says that free speech is a necessary condition for healthy disagreement, and that healthy disagreement is conducive to human flourishing. The other argument says that in a community of people who disagree about questions of value, free speech is a necessary condition of legitimate democratic government. We argue that both of these arguments, (...) in their standard guises, are premised upon contestable views about the realpolitik of disagreement in a liberal society. (shrink)

This study described the relationships between academic class and student moral sensitivity and reasoning and between curriculum design components for ethics education and student moral sensitivity and reasoning. The data were collected from freshman (n = 506) and senior students (n = 440) in eight baccalaureate nursing programs in South Korea by survey; the survey consisted of the Korean Moral Sensitivity Questionnaire and the Korean Defining Issues Test. The results showed that moral sensitivity scores in patient-oriented care and conflict were (...) higher in senior students than in freshman students. Furthermore, more hours of ethics content were associated with higher principled thinking scores of senior students. Nursing education in South Korea may have an impact on developing student moral sensitivity. Planned ethics content in nursing curricula is necessary to improve moral sensitivity and moral reasoning of students. (shrink)

L'Europe des XVe et XVIe siècles voit émerger puis triompher le mouvement humaniste. Comment l'humanisme, né comme une contre culture et diffusé par des réseaux intellectuels italiens épris de la redécouverte des classiques, s'impose-t-il aussi vite comme un modèle dominant? A cette question classique, ce livre apporte des réponses nouvelles. Il montre que l'humanisme triomphe à travers l'Europe selon des formes, des expressions et des degrés variables selon les espaces, les publics et les écosystèmes socio -politiques et socio - intellectuels. (...) Il évoque les résistances parfois farouches que ce système d'interprétation du monde rencontra. Il brosse, en laissant toute leur place aux multiples capacités d'adaptation de cette culture, le tableau bigarré des humanismes européens. Ce livre est issu d'un colloque qui s'est tenu en Sorbonne et à l'université de Chicago à Paris les 26 et 27 janvier 2018. Ce sont parmi les plus grands spécialistes de l'humanisme qui y ont participé."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Whether unconscious stimuli can modulate the preparation of a cognitive task is still controversial. Using a backward masking paradigm, we investigated whether the modulation could be observed even if the prime was made unconscious in 100% of the trials. In two behavioral experiments, subjects were instructed to initiate a phonological or semantic task on an upcoming word, following an explicit instruction and an unconscious prime. When the SOA between prime and instruction was sufficiently long , primes congruent with the task (...) set instruction led to speedier responses than incongruent primes. In the other condition , no task set priming was observed. Repetition priming had the opposite tendency, suggesting the observed task set facilitation cannot be ascribed solely to perceptual repetition priming. Our results therefore confirm that unconscious information can modulate cognitive control for currently active task sets, providing sufficient time is available before the conscious decision. (shrink)

Belief merging aims at combining several pieces of information coming from different sources. In this paper we review the works on belief merging of propositional bases. We discuss the relationship between merging, revision, update and confluence, and some links between belief merging and social choice theory. Finally we mention the main generalizations of these works in other logical frameworks.

Winner of the 2015 Pierre-Antoine Bernheim Prize for the History of Religion by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-LettresAfter a century during which Confucianism was viewed by academics as a relic of the imperial past or, at best, a philosophical resource, its striking comeback in Chinese society today raises a number of questions about the role that this ancient tradition might play in a contemporary context. The Sage and the People is the first comprehensive enquiry into the "Confucian revival" that (...) began in China during the 2000s. Based on extensive anthropological fieldwork carried out over eight years in various parts of the country, it explores the re-appropriation and reinvention of popular practices in fields as diverse as education, self-cultivation, religion, ritual, and politics.The book analyzes the complexity of the "Confucian revival" within the broader context of emerging challenges to such categories as religion, philosophy, and science that prevailed in modernization narratives throughout the last century. Exploring state cults both in Mainland China and Taiwan, authors Sébastien Billioud and Joël Thoraval compare the interplay between politics and religion on the two shores of the Taiwan strait and attempt to shed light on possible future developments of Confucianism in Chinese society. (shrink)

La recherche présentée propose de prendre de la distance par rapport aux modèles classiques familiaux en s’ouvrant sur les relations affectives qui se tissent en accueil familial, positionnant les familles d’accueil au cœur de la pluriparentalité. À partir d’une enquête auprès d’assistantes maternelles de l’aide sociale à l’enfance, nous analysons les relations affectives au quotidien des familles d’accueil à partir d’une approche novatrice des modes de suppléance.

In a globalizing world, governments are not always able or willing to regulate the social and environmental externalities of global business activities. Multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSI), defined as global institutions involving mainly corporations and civil society organizations, are one type of regulatory mechanism that tries to fill this gap by issuing soft law regulation. This conceptual paper examines the conditions of a legitimate transfer of regulatory power from traditional democratic nation-state processes to private regulatory schemes, such as MSIs. Democratic legitimacy is (...) typically concerned with input legitimacy (rule credibility, or the extent to which the regulations are perceived as justified) and output legitimacy (rule effectiveness, or the extent to which the rules effectively solve the issues). In this study, we identify MSI input legitimacy criteria (inclusion, procedural fairness, consensual orientation, and transparency) and those of MSI output legitimacy (rule coverage, efficacy, and enforcement), and discuss their implications for MSI democratic legitimacy. (shrink)

ABSTRACT We consider in this work the problem of iterated belief revision. We propose a family of belief revision operators called revision with memory operators and we give a logical (both syntactical and semantical) characterization of these operators. They obey what we call the principle of strong primacy of update: when one revises his beliefs by a new evidence, then all possible worlds that satisfy this new evidence become more reliable than those that do not. We show that those operators (...) have a satisfying behaviour concerning the iteration of the revision process. Then we provide four particular operators of this family. (shrink)

In a globalizing world, governments are not always able or willing to regulate the social and environmental externalities of global business activities. Multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSI), defined as global institutions involving mainly corporations and civil society organizations, are one type of regulatory mechanism that tries to fill this gap by issuing soft law regulation. This conceptual paper examines the conditions of a legitimate transfer of regulatory power from traditional democratic nation-state processes to private regulatory schemes, such as MSIs. Democratic legitimacy is (...) typically concerned with input legitimacy (rule credibility, or the extent to which the regulations are perceived as justified) and output legitimacy (rule effectiveness, or the extent to which the rules effectively solve the issues). In this study, we identify MSI input legitimacy criteria (inclusion, procedural fairness, consensual orientation, and transparency) and those of MSI output legitimacy (rule coverage, efficacy, and enforcement), and discuss their implications for MSI democratic legitimacy. (shrink)

Here we question the mechanisms underlying the emergence of the feeling of control that can be modulated even when the feeling of being the author of one’s own action is intact. With a haptic robot, participants made series of vertical pointing actions on a virtual surface, which was sometimes postponed by a small temporal delay (15 or 65 ms). Subjects then evaluated their subjective feeling of control. Results showed that after temporal distortions, the hand-trajectories were adapted effectively but that the (...) feeling of control decreased significantly. This was observed even in the case of subliminal distortions for which subjects did not consciously detect the presence of a distortion. Our findings suggest that both supraliminal and subliminal temporal distortions that occur within a healthy perceptual–motor system impact the conscious experience of the feeling of control of self-initiated motor actions. (shrink)

Résumé En tant que hotspot de la diversité culturelle et du réchauffement climatique, la Méditerranée apparait particulièrement exposée aux chocs provoqués par l’anthropocène. Sur cette île de la Méditerranée occidentale, l’analyse d’échantillons de discours relatifs à l’imaginaire corse et de mobilisations sociales et d’innovations juridiques relatives à l’écologie peut-elle nous informer quant à l’avènement d’une communauté méditerranéenne susceptible de transformer le rapport des Méditerranéens à la nature et aux vivants humains ou non-humains? Ce travail s’appuie notamment sur les travaux d’Achille (...) Mbembé, Philippe Descola et Bruno Latour. (shrink)

Psychopathy is a personality disorder frequently associated with immoral behaviors. Previous behavioral studies on the influence of psychopathy on moral decision have yielded contradictory results, possibly because they focused either on judgment (abstract evaluation) or on choice of hypothetical action, two processes that may rely on different mechanisms. In this study, we explored the influence of the level of psychopathic traits on judgment and choice of hypothetical action during moral dilemma evaluation. A population of 102 students completed a questionnaire with (...) ten moral dilemmas and nine non-moral dilemmas. The task included questions targeting both judgment (“Is it acceptable to … in order to …?”) and choice of hypothetical action (“Would you … in order to …?”). The level of psychopathic traits of each participant was evaluated with the Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy (LSRP) scale. Logistic regression fitted with the generalized estimating equations method analyses were conducted using responses to the judgment and choice tasks as the dependent variables and psychopathy scores as predictor. Results show that a high level of psychopathic traits, and more specifically those related to affective deficit, predicted a greater proportion of utilitarian responses for the choice but not for the judgment question. There was no first-order interaction between the level of psychopathic traits and other potential predictors. The relation between a high level of psychopathic traits and increased utilitarianism in choice of action but not in moral judgment may explain the contradictory results of previous studies where these two processes were not contrasted. It also gives further support to the hypothesis that choice of action endorsement and abstract judgment during moral dilemma evaluation are partially distinct neural and psychological processes. We propose that this distinction should be better taken into account in the evaluation of psychopathic behaviors. (shrink)

Methodological innovations have a special status in disciplinary histories, because they can be widely adopted and anonymised. In the 1950s, this occurred to Georges Laplace’s innovative use of 3-dimensional metric Cartesian coordinate system to record the positions of archaeological objects. This paper proposes a conceptual and social history of this process, with a focus on its spatial context, the Pyrenean region (Spain, Basque Country, and France). Main results of this research based on archives, publications, and bibliometric data, include: 1) a (...) critical discussion of the notions concerning authorship of such methodological innovations; 2) a presentation of the lesser-known aspects of Laplace’s method, showing its contribution to the abstraction and formalisation of archaeological observations and data recording; and 3) the identification of an international Pyrenean intellectual lineage of innovation regarding stratigraphy and excavation methods, from the late 19th century to the early 21th century. (shrink)

We propose in this paper a new family of belief merging operators, that is based on a game between sources : until a coherent set of sources is reached, at each round a contest is organized to find out the weakest sources, then those sources has to concede. This idea leads to numerous new interesting operators and opens new perspectives for belief merging. Some existing operators are also recovered as particular cases. Those operators can be seen as a special case (...) of Booth's Belief Negotiation Models [BOO 02], but the achieved restriction forms a consistent family of merging operators that worths to be studied on its own. (shrink)

Williams and J. Fraser have recently argued that effective field theory methods enable scientific realists to make more reliable ontological commitments in quantum field theory than those commonly made. In this paper, I show that the interpretative relevance of these methods extends beyond the specific context of QFT by identifying common structural features shared by effective theories across physics. In particular, I argue that effective theories are best characterized by the fact that they contain intrinsic empirical limitations, and I extract (...) from their structure one central interpretative constraint for making more reliable ontological commitments in different subfields of physics. While this is in principle good news, this constraint still raises a challenge for scientific realists in some contexts, and I bring the point home by focusing on Williams’s and J. Fraser’s defense of selective realism in QFT. (shrink)