Plants move in very different ways and for different reasons, but some active carnivorous plants perform extraordinary motion: Their snap‐, catapult‐ and suction traps perform very fast and spectacular motions to catch their prey after receiving mechanical stimuli. Numerous investigations have led to deeper insights into the physiology and biomechanics of these trapping devices, but they are far from being fully understood. We review concisely how plant movements are classified and how they follow principles that bring together speed, actuation and (...) architecture of the moving organ. In particular, we describe and discuss how carnivorous plants manage to execute fast motion. We address open questions and assess the prospects for future studies investigating potential universal mechanisms that could be the basis of key characteristic features in plant movement such as stimulus transduction, post‐stimulatory mechanical answers, and organ formation. (shrink)

Speck's biography examines Paine's work afresh, in light of new thinking about the role of religion in the formation of his political ideology, and also places Paine within the recently-developed context of 'Atlantic History'.

Contrary to the legend that evolved in late sixteenth century Recusant More hagiography, of a distancing or even a breach in the spiritual and intellectual friendship between Thomas More and Erasmus of Rotterdam, the primary texts point to the persistence of an intimate bond between them. Even More's late letter to Erasmus informing him of his resignation addresses the matter of Erasmus's churchmanship and doctrinal reliability. Here we find More defending and praising the writings of Erasmus, and not merely (...) against the rabid and ill-willed scholastic ignoramuses who had attacked his New Testament translation, but even against morally upright and well-meaning ecclesiastical scholars, who had failed to remove the beam from their own eyes before hypocritically endeavoring to pluck the speck out of Erasmus's. Thomas More adhered to the commendation of Erasmus published by Pope Leo X, and whether More's modern admirers like it or not, Thomas More remained for two decades Erasmus's first and best apologist. (shrink)

Introduction: the use and abuse of Thomas Paine in the transatlantic world / Sam Edwards and Marcus Morris -- Part I. The image and idea(s) of Paine: origins, use and reuse -- The image of Tom: Paine in print and portraiture / W.A. Speck -- "I am made to say what I never wrote": deism, spiritualism and ventriloquizing Paine, c.1790s-1850s / Patrick W. Hughes -- All Paine: the American mind and the creation of the League of Nations and (...) the U.N. / Michael Holm -- The distortion of Thomas Paine's philosophy of government / Gary Berton -- Part II. Discovering and using Paine's radicalism -- "Revolutions are the order of the day": Atlantic fragments of Thomas Paine, c.1819-1832 / Matteo Battistini -- Posthumous Paine in the United Kingdom, 1809-1832: Jacobin or loyalist cult? / Matthew Roberts -- "The neglect of Paine seems particularly strange at the present political juncture": explaining British socialists' relationship to Paine, c. 1884-1914 / Marcus Morris -- Citizens of the world: Paine and the political prisoners transported to Australia / Tony Moore -- Part III. Remembering and remaking Paine -- Common sense on the Lower East Side: Thomas Paine and the era of immigration, c.1900-1950 / Louis Mazzari -- "A monument in every city?": Thomas Paine in memoriam / Theodore Marotta -- "He came from America didn't he?": the Thetford Statue controversy and the problem of Paine in transatlantic memory, c.1909-1970 / Sam Edwards -- Afterword: the struggle for Paine's memory and the making of American democracy / Harvey J. Kaye. (shrink)

The purported fact that geometric theories formulated in terms of points and geometric theories formulated in terms of lines are “equally correct” is often invoked in arguments for conceptual relativity, in particular by Putnam and Goodman. We discuss a few notions of equivalence between first-order theories, and we then demonstrate a precise sense in which this purported fact is true. We argue, however, that this fact does not undermine metaphysical realism.

Texts and textures: approaching an age of human-made nature through the particulate, the volatile, and the radiant. We have entered the Anthropocene era—a geological age of our own making, in which what we have understood to be nature is made by man. We need a new way to understand the dynamics of a new epoch. These volumes offer writings that approach the Anthropocene through the perspectives of grain, vapor, and ray—the particulate, the volatile, and the radiant. The first three volumes—each (...) devoted to one of the three textures—offer a series of paired texts, with contemporary writers responding to historic writings. A fourth volume offers a guide to the project as a whole. Grain: Granular materials add up to concrete forms; insignificant specks accumulate into complex entities. The texts in this volume narrate some of the fundamental qualities of the granular. In one pairing of texts, Robert Smithson compares the accumulation of thoughts to the aggregation of sediment, and an environmental historian writes about the stakes for earthly knowledge today. Other authors include Alfred Russel Wallace, Denis Diderot, and Georges Bataille. Vapor: The vaporous represents matter's transformations. In this volume, a political scientist compares Kafka's haunting “Odradek” to “vibrant matter”; a media theorist responds to poems and diagrams by Buckminster Fuller; and more, including texts by Hippocrates, Italo Calvino, and James Clerk Maxwell. Ray: A ray is an act of propagation and diffusion, encompassing a chain of interdependencies between energy and matter. This volume includes texts by Spinoza (with a reconceptualization by a contemporary philosopher), Jacques Lacan (followed by an anthropologist's reflections on temporality), Thomas Pynchon (accompanied by an interpretation of Pynchon's “electro-mysticism”), and others. These volumes constitute a unique experiment in design and composition as well as content. The mingling of texts and the juxtaposition of different areas of knowledge represented in a variety of forms express the dynamics of a world in change. (shrink)

Das Gewissen gilt heute als eines der vorrangigen Kennzeichen der menschlichen Person. Bis heute sind die Bestimmungen des Thomas von massgeblicher Bedeutung fur sein Verstandnis. Der fur seine Gewisssenslehre bedeutendste Text de verritate 16-17 wird hier erstmals in einer vollstandigen zweisprachigen Ausgabe vorgelegt.

Existing research suggests that people's judgments of actual causation can be influenced by the degree to which they regard certain events as normal. We develop an explanation for this phenomenon that draws on standard tools from the literature on graphical causal models and, in particular, on the idea of probabilistic sampling. Using these tools, we propose a new measure of actual causal strength. This measure accurately captures three effects of normality on causal judgment that have been observed in existing studies. (...) More importantly, the measure predicts a new effect ("abnormal deflation"). Two studies show that people's judgments do, in fact, show this new effect. Taken together, the patterns of people's causal judgments thereby provide support for the proposed explanation. (shrink)

Hobbes’s views on free will and action were radically revisionary of a well-established scholastic theory of the ethical significance of freedom and of freedom’s relation to law. At the heart of this scholastic theory was an account of freedom as a multiway power to determine alternatives and of human action as a distinctively practical mode of exercising reason. The chapter explains this theory as developed by Suarez and, following Suarez, by Bramhall, and examines Hobbes’s attack on the theory’s basis—the theory (...) of freedom as a metaphysical power and of action as a distinctively practical mode of exercising reason. (shrink)

Findings in dynamic unit formation suggest that completion processes reflect the optics of our world. Dynamic unit formation may depend on patterns of motion signals that are consistent with the causes of optical changes. In addition, dynamic completion conforms to a local curvature minimization constraint. Such relational aspects of vision are important to consider in linking perceptual experience and neural activity.

Dans sa violente charge contre la Révolution française, Edmund Burke avait élevé le débat politique à un niveau philosophique. Son argument le plus profond consistait à reprocher aux révolutionnaires de pécher par apriorisme, en cherchant à déduire, comme des géomètres, une nouvelle constitution à partir des principes abstraits énoncés dans la Déclaration des droits de l’homme. Reprise par les disciples allemands de Burke, cette critique de la méthode adoptée par la Constituante tirait des postulats empiristes des Lumières anglo-écossaises toutes les (...) implications conservatrices que recelaient déjà les textes politiques et historiques de Hume. Or c’est d’emblée sur ce terrain spéculatif que se joue, chez Fichte, la défense du droit de révolution. Reprochant à l’empirisme de réduire l’esprit au « mécanisme aveugle de l’association des idées », passivement déterminé par une extériorité en soi, Fichte entend au contraire fonder l’expérience elle-même sur l’activité d’un « Moi-en-soi », absolument indépendant. Conçu comme causalité libre, pouvant donc s’affranchir des « conjonctions coutumières » humiennes pour commencer une nouvelle série dans l’ordre des phénomènes, l’homme, pour Fichte, n’a pas seulement la « faculté de se perfectionner », mais la loi de sa liberté lui en fait même un devoir. Au regard de cet impératif catégorique de perfectionnement, il n’y a pas de Common Law qui tienne. Aussi Fichte ne recule-t-il pas devant la révolution, si les institutions du passé font obstacle à la destination de l’homme. (shrink)

Whether or not capitalism is compatible with ethics is a long standing dispute. We take up an approach to virtue ethics inspired by Adam Smith and consider how market competition influences the virtues most associated with modern commercial society. Up to a point, competition nurtures and supports such virtues as prudence, temperance, civility, industriousness and honesty. But there are also various mechanisms by which competition can have deleterious effects on the institutions and incentives necessary for sustaining even these most commercially (...) friendly of virtues. It is often supposed that if competitive markets are good, more competition must always be better. However, in the long run competition enhancing policies that neglect the nurturing and support of the bourgeois virtues may undermine the continued flourishing of modern commercial society. (shrink)

Social learning has been shown to be an evolutionarily adaptive strategy, but it can be implemented via many different cognitive mechanisms. The adaptive advantage of social learning depends crucially on the ability of each learner to obtain relevant and accurate information from informants. The source of informants’ knowledge is a particularly important cue for evaluating advice from multiple informants; if the informants share the source of their information or have obtained their information from each other, then their testimony is statistically (...) dependent and may be less reliable than testimony from informants who do not share information. In this study, we use a Bayesian model to determine how rational learners should incorporate the effects of shared information when learning from other people, conducting three experiments that examine whether human learners behave similarly. We find that people are sensitive to a number of different patterns of dependency, supporting the use of a sophisticated strategy for social learning that goes beyond copying the majority, and broadening the situations in which social learning is likely to be an adaptive strategy. (shrink)

Hedge funds are targets of mounting ethical criticism. The most salient focuses on their opacity. Hedge funds are structured to block transparency for strategic reasons: that is, they systematically deny information to their own investors and to governments in order to protect their competitive advantage, even though the information they hide holds tremendous significance for the interests of both groups. In this article I will detail the ethical allegations made against hedge funds, showing why their opacity creates intractable conflicts that (...) cannot be resolved through government regulation. Sometimes opacity be regulated away; but with hedge funds I show why it cannot because of “regulatory recalcitrance.” In the end a form of voluntary moral coordination, a form of “microsocial contract” instituted as an industry standard, is required relief. In a word, the solution to hedge fund opacity is ethical. (shrink)

In der 1970 gegründeten Reihe erscheinen Arbeiten, die philosophiehistorische Studien mit einem systematischen Ansatz oder systematische Studien mit philosophiehistorischen Rekonstruktionen verbinden. Neben deutschsprachigen werden auch englischsprachige Monographien veröffentlicht. Gründungsherausgeber sind: Erhard Scheibe (Herausgeber bis 1991), Günther Patzig (bis 1999) und Wolfgang Wieland (bis 2003). Von 1990 bis 2007 wurde die Reihe von Jürgen Mittelstraß mitherausgegeben.

In this paper we critically evaluate an argument put forward by William Lane Craig for the existence of God based on the assumption that if there were no God, there could be no objective morality. Contrary to Craig, we show that there are some necessary moral truths and objective moral reasoning that holds up whether there is a God or not. We go on to argue that religious faith, when taken alone and without reason or evidence, actually risks undermining morality (...) and is an unreliable source of moral truths. We recommend a viewpoint on morality that is based on reason and public consensus, that is compatible with science, and that cuts across the range of religious and non-religious positions. (shrink)

Thomas Joseph; Secular vs. Orthodox Chaplaincy: Taking the Kingdom of Heaven Seriously, Christian bioethics: Non-Ecumenical Studies in Medical Morality, Volume.

It seems generally agreed that a theory of sensory episodes that mentions sensory objects and a sensing relation — the ‘act-object’ theory — is unacceptable and should be replaced by some other account. A chief competitor is the Adverbial Theory, and one of its chief advocates is Wilfrid Sellars. While it is clear that there are serious difficulties for the act-object theory not facing the adverbial theory, I will argue that the latter has difficulties of its own.

Nineteenth-century spiritism was a blend of religious elements, the philosophy of mind, science and popular science and contacts with extraterrestrials were a commonplace phenomenon during spiritistic séances. Using the example of Carl du Prel I show how his comprehensive mystic philosophy originated in a theory of extraterrestrial life. Carl du Prel used a Darwinian and monistic framework, theories of the unconscious and a Neo-Kantian epistemology to formulate a philosophy of astronomy and extraterrestrial life. He claimed that the mechanism of Darwinian (...) selection is responsible for the distribution of stars and the orbits of the planets. In his speculations on the nature of extraterrestrial life he used the concept of organ projection to argue that technical solutions on earth will be realized organically on other planets and claimed that superior extraterrestrials have quantitatively and qualitatively different senses and thus different forms of intuition. A comparison with Camille Flammarion, spiritist and populariser of astronomy, demonstrates the contextual complexities of spiritism. In contrast to du Prel’s sober Neo-Kantian philosophical speculations, Flammarion was a late proponent of a French esoteric tradition that was rooted in romantic socialism, painted grand cosmological vistas and emphasized reincarnation. I put forward the hypothesis that current discourses on extraterrestrial life are affected by the spiritist tradition mainly through the ‘Golden Age’ science fiction literature of the 1940s and 50s and its successors. However, neither Carl du Prel nor Camille Flammarion contributed significantly to this tradition, which is mainly shaped by the psychical research of J. B. Rhine.Keywords: Spiritism; Carl du Prel; Camille Flammarion; Organ projection; Science fiction. (shrink)

We treat science as a Hayekian social order whose distinctive emergent characteristic is the generation of knowledge. We model modern science as an institutional form that principally relies on publication with citation and its effects on individual reputation in order to study the possible effects of funding on science. We develop a taxonomy of three broad categories of effect: those having to do with the direction followed by scientific activity, those involving the operational and financial stability of both the physical (...) institutions integral to scientific work and the scientists themselves, and those due to distortions of the basic knowledge-generating procedures of science. It is argued that, while directional effects of funding are ubiquitous, destabilizing and distorting effects are much more likely to emerge when funding sources are concentrated than when they are decentralized. Further, when funding is accompanied by regulatory oversight, the possibilities for distortion are significantly increased. Examples of such effects actually occurring under the current U.S. funding regime are discussed. (shrink)