In this paper I argue that an encounter with a tick can produce both fear and wonder. I make a distinction between the legitimate danger of tick borne-diseases and the non-danger of our entanglement with the nature revealed by the tick’s bite in order to highlight the goodness of the tick and the possibilities for post-human existences beyond narratives of conquest and control. Ultimately, I argue that wonder is a helpful mechanism for thinking through the goodness of the tick by (...) allowing an ungrounding of our assumptions about climate change, hospitality, and the danger of non-human agencies. (shrink)

Recent discussions of “eco-anxiety” have brought attention to feelings of hopelessness and despair associated with climate change and ecological disaster. When we accept the claims made by science about climate change and realize that our near future is full of unprecedented ecological crisis it is difficult to avoid feelings of anxiety about the future of human life on our planet. While these discussions have largely taken place in the context of psychology and psychoanalysis, there is a need to engage in (...) ethical deliberation about both “eco-anxiety” and “eco-trauma.” In this paper, I argue that an environmental virtue of wonder can help to articulate the intersection of environmental ethics and “eco-anxiety” by offering a mean between the excess of anxiety and the deficiency of boredom. I situate this discussion within trauma studies and make connections between the pre-trauma of climate change, wonder, and eco-cinema. More specifically, I argue for a weird environmental ethic that embraces fuzzy boundaries of entangled environments and show that the virtue of wonder allows for flourishing within this context. I use cinema, and specifically Eco-Weird cinema, to argue for a shift in narratives about our present and our future as it relates to climate change. (shrink)

This book connects recent developments in speculative realism, new materialism, and eco-phenomenology to articulate an approach to wonder that escapes the connected traps of anthropocentrism and correlationism. Brian Onishi argues that wonder has explanatory power for the constitution of the world and the organization of meaning. To do this, he appeals to both fiction (speculative and Weird fiction in particular) and quantum physics. More specifically, he argues that the focus of Weird fiction on impossible experiences and a feeling of (...) something just beyond the limits of one’s grasp dramatizes the speculative reach beyond the limits of our understanding. But more than a tool for knowledge acquisition, wonder is an organizing property of objects. Like the collapse of superposition in quantum physics, reality is constituted when objects reveal themselves to other objects and thereby organize themselves into complex objects. Since no relation is exhaustive, the capacity to wonder remains at a material level, and the possibility of reorganization is ever present. Ultimately, Onishi argues for a speculative eco-phenomenology with wonder as an engine for a Weird environmental ethics. (shrink)

Authors have a lot of leeway with regard to what they can make true in their story. In general, if the author says that p is true in the fiction we’re reading, we believe that p is true in that fiction. And if we’re playing along with the fictional game, we imagine that, along with everything else in the story, p is true. But there are exceptions to these general principles. Many authors, most notably Kendall Walton and Tamar Szabó Gendler, (...) have discussed apparent counterexamples when p is “morally deviant”. Many other statements that are conceptually impossible also seem to be counterexamples. In this paper I do four things. I survey the range of counterexamples, or at least putative counterexamples, to the principles. Then I look to explanations of the counterexamples. I argue, following Gendler, that the explanation cannot simply be that morally deviant claims are impossible. I argue that the distinctive attitudes we have towards moral propositions cannot explain the counterexamples, since some of the examples don’t involve moral concepts. And I put forward a proposed explanation that turns on the role of ‘higher-level concepts’, concepts that if they are satisfied are satisfied in virtue of more fundamental facts about the world, in fiction, and in imagination. (shrink)

Normative Externalism argues that it is not important that people live up to their own principles. What matters, in both ethics and epistemology, is that they live up to the correct principles: that they do the right thing, and that they believe rationally. This stance, that what matters are the correct principles, not one's own principles, has implications across ethics and epistemology. In ethics, it undermines the ideas that moral uncertainty should be treated just like factual uncertainty, that moral ignorance (...) frequently excuses moral wrongdoing, and that hypocrisy is a vice. In epistemology, it suggests we need new treatments of higher-order evidence, and of peer disagreement, and of circular reasoning, and the book suggests new approaches to each of these problems. Although the debates in ethics and in epistemology are often conducted separately, putting them in one place helps bring out their common themes. One common theme is that the view that one should live up to one's own principles looks less attractive when people have terrible principles, or when following their own principles would lead to riskier or more aggressive action than the correct principles. Another common theme is that asking people to live up to their principles leads to regresses. It can be hard to know what action or belief complies with one's principles. And now we can ask, in such a case should a person do what they think their principles require, or what their principles actually require? Both answers lead to problems, and the best way to avoid these problems is to simply say people should follow the correct principles. (shrink)

We provide a new interpretation of Zeno’s Paradox of Measure that begins by giving a substantive account, drawn from Aristotle’s text, of the fact that points lack magnitude. The main elements of this account are (1) the Axiom of Archimedes which states that there are no infinitesimal magnitudes, and (2) the principle that all assignments of magnitude, or lack thereof, must be grounded in the magnitude of line segments, the primary objects to which the notion of linear magnitude applies. Armed (...) with this account, we are ineluctably driven to introduce a highly constructive notion of (outer) measure based exclusively on the total magnitude of potentially infinite collections of line segments. The Paradox of Measure then consists in the proof that every finite or potentially infinite collection of points lacks magnitude with respect to this notion of measure. We observe that the Paradox of Measure, thus understood, troubled analysts into the 1880’s, despite their knowledge that the linear continuum is uncountable. The Paradox was ultimately resolved by Borel in his thesis of 1893, as a corollary to his celebrated result that every countable open cover of a closed line segment has a finite sub-cover, a result he later called the “First Fundamental Theorem of Measure Theory.” This achievement of Borel has not been sufficiently appreciated. We conclude with a metamathematical analysis of the resolution of the paradox made possible by recent results in reverse mathematics. (shrink)

In bacteria, PriA protein, a conserved DEXH‐type DNA helicase, plays a central role in replication restart at stalled replication forks. Its unique DNA‐binding property allows it to recognize and stabilize stalled forks and the structures derived from them. Cells must cope with fork stalls caused by various replication stresses to complete replication of the entire genome. Failure of the stalled fork stabilization process and eventual restart could lead to various forms of genomic instability. The low viability of priA null cells (...) indicates a frequent occurrence of fork stall during normal growth that needs to be properly processed. PriA specifically recognizes the 3′‐terminus of the nascent leading strand or the invading strand in a displacement (D)‐loop by the three‐prime terminus binding pocket (TT‐pocket) present in its unique DNA binding domain. Elucidation of the structural basis for recognition of arrested forks by PriA should provide useful insight into how stalled forks are recognized in eukaryotes. (shrink)

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract also in English. 世界衛生組織(WHO)在歷經自1976年伊波拉病毒病(EbolaHemorrhagicFever, 伊波拉出血熱)爆發以來，處理疫情爆發當中出現的種種倫理問題之後，於2016年出版“Guidance for Managing Ethical Issues in Infectious Disease Outbreaks”（中文暫譯：《傳染病爆發處理倫理議題之指引》）一書，其中整理出「正義、行善、效益、尊重自主、自由、團結、互惠」等七項倫理原則，於今面對新冠肺炎（COVID-19）的疫情上，各國防疫 政策，亦可作為應對。作為一名當代墨者，本文即以此為基礎，由醫療的角度，結合國內情況，企欲在墨學義理內作一生命倫理的反思，並試圖對後疫情時代給予具體作為之建議。 In response to various ethical problems that emerged after the 1976 Ebola hemorrhagic fever epidemic, WHO published the book Guidance for Managing Ethical Issues in Infectious Disease Outbreaks in 2016. The content of the book was organized around seven ethical principles, namely, justice, beneficence, benefit, respect for autonomy, freedom, reciprocity, and unity. These seven ethical principles can be used as (...) a framework for countries to develop policies for coping with the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing from contemporary Mohism, this paper reflects on the situation in Taiwan through the lens of these seven ethical principles. It aims to arrive at a Mohist understanding of bioethics and proposes concrete actions for the post-epidemic era. (shrink)

I am honored to have been invited to participate in this Workshop on Comparative Studies of Building Molecular Biology, with a discussion of Japanese experiences in constructing a science — in this case, the discipline of molecular biology. As I understand it, the construction of a science must be equivalent to building a new culture. My having given this title to my paper suggests that I have enough knowledge about the subject to perhaps even extrapolate its course into the future (...) — which I do not. What I do have is a sincere admiration of my old friends and colleagues, in Japan and elsewhere, who together tried to build a new science of molecular biology in Japan. (shrink)

狂信的な国粋主義者か、はたまた魂の尊厳を問うた求道者か。民俗学と国粋主義の親和性とは。多角的な視点からファシズムを再考する。.

The homeostatic property cluster theory is widely influential for its ability to account for many natural-kind terms in the life sciences. However, the notion of homeostatic mechanism has never been fully explicated. In 2009, Carl Craver interpreted the notion in the sense articulated in discussions on mechanistic explanation and pointed out that the HPC account equipped with such notion invites interest-relativity. In this paper, we analyze two recent refinements on HPC: one that avoids any reference to the causes of the (...) clustering of properties and one that replaces homeostatic mechanisms with causal networks represented by causal graphs. We argue that the former is too slender to account for some inductive inference in science and the latter, thicker account invites interest-relativity, as the original HPC does. This suggests that human interest will be an un-eliminative part of a satisfactory account of natural kindness. We conclude by discussing the implication of interest-relativity to the naturalness, reality, or objectivity of kinds and indicating an overlooked aspect of natural kinds that requires further studies. (shrink)

The paper is divided into two parts, each with subsections. In the first part, I shall discuss some matters that have been extensively examined by Kim, namely what the basic types of supervenience are and how they are pairwise logically related; in the course of this discussion, I shall distinguish a weak from a strong notion of global supervenience. In the second part, I shall examine supervenience in a context in which Kim has not: I shall attempt to solve a (...) puzzle that arises when we consider supervenience relations involving vague properties and/or predicates. This is, of course, not a special case of property/predicate super- venience, but the typical one: for virtually all properties/predicates are vague. The two parts of the paper stand independently of each other. Of the discussion in the first part, essentially all that is presupposed in the second is the notion of “world strong supervenience” defined in section 1 of part I. (shrink)

The paper identifies in the literature two categories of codes of ethics, inspirational and prescriptive, and introduces new classification categories of allodial and decretal. The first classification is based on the identity of the ethics decision‐maker – the authors or the addressees of codes. The second classification is based on whether operational definitions are applied by the codes. Such concrete definitions may be in the rules themselves, in related documents or be known from shared knowledge. The second classification has importance (...) if national associations of accountants use codes as a means for assurance of specific outcomes of defined ethical behaviours. For the study, a survey of 57 codes of ethics issued by national associations of professional accountants was undertaken to determine the basic features of codes and to analyse their content. The areas of ethical concern in national associations were identified and compared to the IFAC model code for professional accountants. The paper reports that national organisations of accountants have promulgated decretal codes in 96% of cases examined. As these codes contain operational definitions, their outcomes can be scientifically measured and sanctions for breaches fairly and reasonably imposed. (shrink)

Scientific Essentialism defends the view that the fundamental laws of nature depend on the essential properties of the things on which they are said to operate, and are therefore not independent of them. These laws are not imposed upon the world by God, the forces of nature or anything else, but rather are immanent in the world. Ellis argues that ours is a dynamic world consisting of more or less transient objects which are constantly interacting with each other, and whose (...) identities depend on their roles in these processes. Natural objects must behave as they do, because to do otherwise would be contrary to their natures. The laws of nature are, therefore, metaphysically necessary, and consequently, there are necessary connections between events. Brian Ellis calls for the rejection of the theory of Humean Supervenience and an implementation of a new kind of realism in philosophical analysis. (shrink)

Cellular pattern formations of some epithelia are believed to be governed by the direct lateral inhibition rule of cell differentiation. That is, initially equivalent cells are all competent to differentiate, but once a cell has differentiated, the cell inhibits its immediate neighbors from following this pathway. Such a differentiation repeats until all non-inhibited cells have differentiated. The cellular polygonal patterns can be characterized by the numbers of undifferentiated cells and differentiated ones. When the differentiated cells become large in size, the (...) polygonal pattern is deformed since more cells are needed to enclose the large cell. An actual example of such a cellular pattern was examined. The pupal wing epidermis of a butterfly Pieris rapae shows a transition of the equivalent-size cell pattern to the pattern involving large cells. The process of the transition was analyzed by using the method of weighted Voronoi tessellation that is useful for treatment of irregularly sized polygons. The analysis supported that the pattern transition of the early stage of the pupal wing epidermis is governed by the lateral inhibition rule. The differentiation takes place in order of largeness, but not smallness, of the apical polygonal area in the differentiating region of the pupal wing. (shrink)

A textbook on modal logic, intended for readers already acquainted with the elements of formal logic, containing nearly 500 exercises. Brian F. Chellas provides a systematic introduction to the principal ideas and results in contemporary treatments of modality, including theorems on completeness and decidability. Illustrative chapters focus on deontic logic and conditionality. Modality is a rapidly expanding branch of logic, and familiarity with the subject is now regarded as a necessary part of every philosopher's technical equipment. Chellas here offers (...) an up-to-date and reliable guide essential for the student. (shrink)

The paper identifies in the literature two categories of codes of ethics, inspirational and prescriptive, and introduces new classification categories of allodial and decretal. The first classification is based on the identity of the ethics decision‐maker – the authors or the addressees of codes. The second classification is based on whether operational definitions are applied by the codes. Such concrete definitions may be in the rules themselves, in related documents or be known from shared knowledge. The second classification has importance (...) if national associations of accountants use codes as a means for assurance of specific outcomes of defined ethical behaviours. For the study, a survey of 57 codes of ethics issued by national associations of professional accountants was undertaken to determine the basic features of codes and to analyse their content. The areas of ethical concern in national associations were identified and compared to the IFAC model code for professional accountants. The paper reports that national organisations of accountants have promulgated decretal codes in 96% of cases examined. As these codes contain operational definitions, their outcomes can be scientifically measured and sanctions for breaches fairly and reasonably imposed. (shrink)

The relation between the Greek and Judeo-Christian traditions is "the great problem" of Western philosophy, according to Emmanuel Levinas. In this book Brian Schroeder, Silvia Benso, and an international group of philosophers address the relationship between Levinas and the world of ancient thought. In addition to philosophy, themes touching on religion, mythology, metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, ethics, and politics are also explored. The volume as a whole provides a unified and extended discussion of how an engagement between Levinas and thinkers (...) from the ancient tradition works to enrich understandings of both. This book opens new pathways in ancient and modern philosophical studies as it illuminates new interpretations of Levinas' ethics and his social and political philosophy. (shrink)

At the start of the twenty-first century, warnings have been raised in some quarters about how - by intent or by mishap - advances in biotechnology and related ...

Discussion of the posthuman has emerged in a wide set of fields through a diverse set of thinkers including Donna Haraway, Ray Kurzweil, Nick Bostrom, N. Katherine Hayles, and Francis Fukuyama, just to name a few. Despite his extensive critique of technology, commentators have not explored the fruitfulness of Heidegger's work for deciphering the various strands of posthumanism recently formulated in response to contemporary technological developments. Here, I employ Heidegger's critique of technology to trace opposing visions of the posthuman, visions (...) that are both tied intimately to new information technologies. For those seeking to extend humanist ideals, information technologies are employed to extend the vision of an ultra-humanist view of a ‘scientific posthuman’ that dangerously understands the body to be a forfeitable nuisance, rather than an inherent aspect of being human. Along Heideggerian lines, thinkers such as N. Katherine Hayles and Thomas Carlson have developed an alternative trajectory related to Dasein's Being-in-the-world. This trajectory posits the self as constituted by a lack or abyss, enabling the formulation of a ‘mystical posthuman,’ celebrating, rather than forfeiting, humanity's embodied existence. (shrink)

As philosophers in the continental tradition have taken an interest in the return of religion, anthropologists and sociologists have rejected the once-dominant secularization thesis. Bradley B. Onishi connects these lines of thought to reveal how philosophy's religious investigations have enabled critical reflections on the category of the secular.

We present substructural negations, a family of negations classified in terms of structural rules of an extended kind of sequent calculus, display calculus. In considering the whole picture, we emphasize the duality of negation. Two types of negative modality, impossibility and unnecessity, are discussed and "self-dual" negations like Classical, De Morgan, or Ockham negation are redefined as the fusions of two negative modalities. We also consider how to identify, using intuitionistic and dual intuitionistic negations, two accessibility relations associated with impossibility (...) and unnecessity. (shrink)