Titin, the largest protein identified to date (over 1 μm long, almost 3 million daltons in mass) is the third most abundant component of the sarcomere. In the mature myofibril, titin molecules span from M line to Z line, forming a third filament system which provides sarcomeric alignment and elastic recoil. In the developing sarcomere, accumulating evidence from studies both in vivo and in vitro implicates titin as part of a morphogenetic scaffolding, upon which critical events in myofibrillogenesis are coordinated (...) in a time‐ and spacedependent manner. (shrink)

This interpretive study proposes a framework with which to explore the ethical significance of classroom-based literacy practices. Overly narrow views of literature as a source of role models or moral precepts take insufficient account of the complexity of text and experience. Through analyses of telling examples from student writing and discussion in response to literature, the occurrence and interaction of six forms of ethical engagement are documented: judging, distancing, empathizing, affiliating, disclosing and resisting. The study concludes that ethical matters are (...) interwoven with the socially accomplished, situated work of engaging with literature and with specific pedagogical structures. (shrink)

The author reviews the contents of the ten articles by j l austin which appear in the volume "philosophical papers". She tries to "single out what is unique about his contribution, In particular what features of his procedure, Falling as it does under the general classification 'linguistic analysis', Were so distinctive as to win for it the attention accorded to a new departure." (staff).

This paper investigates the way in which the sexuality of women has been posited in relation to rats as experimental subjects, exploring the stakes of a scientific debate that takes the social world of female sexuality as its focus and as a political problem. Studies that purport to understand female sexuality by investigating rat behavior rely on problematic assumptions about sovereign agents motivating sexual behavior. Such studies also aim to do away with so-called deviant sexual behaviors and, as a consequence, (...) gay people. Theories of agential realism and hybridity serve as counterforces to these inherently repressive perspectives by insisting on the multiple determinations of sexuality and subjectivity among women. (shrink)

Much has changed since the beginnings of the gay liberation movement and the feminist movement in the 1970s in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Yet, to a degree, the invisibility of gay male, lesbian and transsexual lifestyles as well as individual struggles for rights and recognition remains. The diverse contributions in this book discuss how the reframing of ‘queer’ as a proud, border-crossing identity challenges conventional views of gay, lesbian, transsexual and heterosexual identities. At the heart of queer politics and theory lies the (...) double irony that ‘queers’ still experience different social positions and are confronted differently by public challenges, and they also seldom agree about how, and for what political reasons, sexuality should be defined and categorised. In this book, 'queer' brings together wide-ranging commentaries on the history, politics and culture of thirty years of sexual history in Aotearoa/New Zealand. (shrink)

The ArgumentThis paper applies the approach developed by the congnitive sciences to a classical field of social anthropology—i.e., the analysis of represetations and behaviors relative to misfortune in “traditional” societies.The initial argument is that the conceptual division and the modes of description and explanation of anthropology suffer from serious weaknesses: these concepts cannot serve to understand empirical phenomena ; they rely on a confused and erroneous conception of the different domains involved and the causalities between them; and they use simplistic (...) hypotheses about the existence and causal status of the entities that usually form the ultima ratio of anthropological reasoning. These entities would directly “cause” other individual representations or behaviors. This simplification also affects the analysis of states of belief in these entities, to which individuals would supposedly “adhere”.I argue here that the cognitivist approach, within a “methodological individualism” framework, provides a more adequate description of phenomena observed in the field. This enables the various levels and domains to be more finely defined. The analysis of “typical” utterances and inferences in a “tranditional” society, the Senufo of the Ivory Coast, is here used to clarify these anthropological problems. Two levels can be distinguished: a priori representations, which are underdetermined, enabling them to occur within valid inferences; perception and/or action, which obeys different cognitive constraints. The existential status of unobservable entities appearing in causal inferences is not equivalent depending on whether they are determined as antecedent or consequent.This paper suggests a theory of interpretive processes and beliefs having flexible references, because they are incomplete and domain-specific. It allows a comparison with facts observed in Western societies. It is also in contrast to the ordinary conception of religious states of belief — i.e., these states would be purely psychological, states of “adherence,” collective, autonomous, obligatory, part of a systemized set of knowledge; collective notions would here logically precede individual representations. (shrink)

Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein had an enormous influence on twentieth-century philosophy even though only one of his works, the famous Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, was published in his lifetime. Beyond this publication the impact of his thought was mainly conveyed to a small circle of students through his lectures at Cambridge University. Fortunately, many of his ideas have survived in both the dictations that were subsequently published, and the notes taken by his students, among them Alice Ambrose and the late Margaret Macdonald, (...) from 1932 to 1935. These notes, now edited by Professor Ambrose, are here published, and they shed much light on Wittgenstein's philosophical development. Among the topics considered are the meaning of a word and its relation to common usage, rules of grammar and their relation to fact, the grammar of first person statements, language games, and the nature of philosophy. This volume is indispensable to any serious discussion of Wittgenstein's work. (shrink)

In “The Bioethics of Environmental Injustice: Ethical, Legal, and Clinical Implications of Unhealthy Environments,” Ray and Cooper (2024) initiate needed discourse on environmental justice and the...

The paper addresses the work of Ukrainian artist Maria Kulikovska, who resorts to military equipment as artistic materials and to destruction as an artistic method. In the first section, I contextualize Kulikovska’s performative sculpture within art history, claiming that it can be regarded as Destruction Art. In the second section, I turn to Catherine Malabou’s concept of “destructive plasticity” as a philosophical tool of an aesthetics of war, which offers a sound theoretical framework to further understand the implications of Kulikovska’s (...) artistic activity. In the third section, I focus on the main material adopted by Kulikovska, ballistic soap, showing how the artist materially deconstructs inherited dichotomies that keep informing our understanding of wars. By considering the artistic practice of a feminist artist (M. Kulikovska) through the lens of feminist scholarship (K. Stiles, C. Malabou, J. Butler), the paper investigates the relations between war and the arts from a situated perspective. (shrink)

The aim of this talk/paper is to briefly describe the influences on a human being that result in the feelings of helplessness, selfish attachment to objects and/or people, indifference, and a tendency to seek refuge in political, corporate, or religious hierarchies. Man as a social being is today faced with a situation of having to realize his or her personality within a “sick society” that neglects its members and overemphasizes hierarchical structures. The paper also aims at detecting the impact of (...) the media on the production of depressive passivity that prevents empathy and creates a “prison without walls.” A special dimension of the presentation has been to connect Freud’s interpretation of narcissism with the contemporary spread of this phenomenon due to the powerful influence of modern mass media. Narcissism as a phenomenon goes beyond the field of psychology and becomes a kind of behavioural matrix that can have far-reaching effects on all dimensions and forms of organizing social communities. (shrink)

Ausgehend von Freuds Begriff des unbewussten Agierens spannt Alice Pechriggl ein semantisches Feld auf, in dem das Begriffspaar »Freiheit zu Handeln - Zwang zu Agieren« mit dem überkreuz gelegten Begriffspaar »freies Agieren - Handlungszwang/ Zwangshandlung« verknüpft wird. In sieben Anläufen entwirft sie unterschiedliche Szenarien dieses Spannungsfeldes und betrachtet dabei Denkakte zwischen Agieren und Deliberatio, Psyche und Körper als Handlungsschauplätze sowie Demokratie als die Regierungsform des deliberativen Handelns. Menschliches Handeln wird im breiteren Kontext unbewussten Agierens sowohl aus philosophischer als auch (...) aus gruppen-/psychoanalytischer Perspektive erhellt. (shrink)

This is the second of two parts of an interview with Alice Crary conducted in a single exchange in the first weeks of January 2022, where she discusses ordinary language philosophy and feminism, Wittgenstein’s conception of mind and its relation to feminist ethics, the link between Wittgenstein and Critical Theory, and her own views about efforts to bring about social and political transformations. The first part on “Wittgenstein and Feminism” is published in the NWR Special Issue “Wittgenstein and Feminism”, (...) forthcoming later this year. (shrink)

Au-delà de la question identitaire, l’extraterrestre interroge l’utopie du contact désintéressé avec cet Autre qui nous est étranger, donc avec le politique. Se situant dans un univers parallèle au nôtre, La Culture est au centre des romans de l’écrivain écossais Iain M. Banks. C’est une société pan-humaine d’envergure galactique, hédoniste et libertaire. Les aliens, les humains et les intelligences artificielles y sont des citoyens égaux.

The progression of research and scholarly inquiry does not occur in isolation and is wholly dependent on accurate reporting of methods and results, and successful replication of prior work. Without mechanisms to correct the literature, much time and money is wasted on research based on a crumbling foundation. These guidelines serve to outline the respective responsibilities of researchers, institutions, agencies, and publishers or editors in maintaining the integrity of the research record. Delineating these complementary roles and proposing solutions for common (...) barriers provide a foundation for best practices. (shrink)

Those who wish to defend the role of aesthetic values in science face a dilemma: Either aesthetic language is used metaphorically for what are ultimately epistemic features, or aesthetic language is used literally but it is difficult to see the importance of such values in science. I introduce a new account that gets around this problem by looking to an overlooked source of aesthetic value in science: the relation between form and content. I argue that a fit between the content (...) of a thought experiment, and the way in which that content is formulated, can have important epistemic pay offs through contributing to scientific understanding. (shrink)

This article focuses on possible convergences between phenomenology and anthropology and underlines their contributions to the analysis of a specific topic. In its reconstructive dimension it departs from Edmund Husserl’s positions in the letter he addressed to Lucien Lévy-Bruhl in 1935, in particular on the relationship between humanity and the surrounding word (Umwelt) and on the opposition between historical societies and primitive ahistorical societies. After having noted some critical points emerging from Husserl’s considerations, this text retraces some of its repercussions (...) on the thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jacques Derrida, whose diverging interpretations open up different ways of examining the relationship between the respective phenomenological and anthropological perspectives. Finally, with the aim of rethinking the contributions of these two fields to address the problem of the co-participation and the differentiations between the archaic and the current in descripted social structures by Lévy-Bruhl, this text turns to the specific temporality of totemic presentifications, which should become phenomenologically more detailed. (shrink)

Typically, the imagination in thought experiments has been taken to consist in mental images; we visualize the state of affairs described. A recent alternative from Fiora Salis and Roman Frigg main...

Is there a role for aesthetic judgements in science? One aspect of scientific practice, the use of thought experiments, has a clear aesthetic dimension. Thought experiments are creatively produced artefacts that are designed to engage the imagination. Comparisons have been made between scientific (and philosophical) thought experiments and other aesthetically appreciated objects. In particular, thought experiments are said to share qualities with literary fiction as they invite us to imagine a fictional scenario and often have a narrative form (Elgin 2014). (...) But philosophical discussions of aesthetics in science have focused mainly on the epistemic role of beauty and elegance when it comes to theories and mathematical proofs, and thought experiments have been widely overlooked. My aim in this chapter is to address how the aesthetic choices scientists make in the design of a thought experiment contribute to its function: to communicate, convince, or explain a theory or phenomenon. A key issue is whether any aesthetic features in science provide anything beyond catching our attention, or are at best, a mere heuristic aid. I respond to accounts that argue this way and show how formulation is important in scientific thought experiments and, similarly to literary fictions, there is more than one way of interpreting a thought experiment scenario. I end by considering which literary examples are most appropriate when making comparisons with thought experiments. As a result, the difference between representations in art and science raised in current discussions is not as stark as it has been made out to be, and science is a more heterogeneous practice than has been allowed. Part of the value of thought experiments in scientific practice includes the qualities they share with literary works. (shrink)

While the influence of emotion on individuals'' ethical decisions has been identified by numerous researchers, little is known about how emotions influence individuals'' ethical decision process. Thus, it is not clear whether different emotions promote and/or discourage ethical decision-making in the workplace. To address this gap, this paper develops a model that illustrates how emotion affects the components of individuals'' ethical decision-making process. The model is developed by integrating research findings that consider the two dimensions of emotion, arousal and feeling (...) state, into an applied cognitive-developmental perspective on the process of ethical decision-making. The model demonstrates that certain emotional states influence the individual''s propensity to identify ethical dilemmas, facilitate the formation of the individual''s prescriptive judgments at sophisticated levels of moral development, lead to ethical decision choices that are consistent with the individual''s prescriptive judgements, and promote the individual''s compliance with his or her ethical decision choices. In particular, the model suggests that individuals experiencing arousal and positive affect resolve ethical dilemmas in a manner consistent with more sophisticated cognitive moral structures. Implications for theory and practice are discussed. (shrink)

The paper explores whether the method of reflective equilibrium (RE) in ethics and political philosophy should be individual or public in character. I defend a modestly public conception of RE, in which public opinion is used specifically as a source of considered judgments about cases. Public opinion is superior to philosophical opinion in delivering judgments that are untainted by principled commitments. A case-based approach also mitigates the methodological problems that commonly confront efforts to integrate philosophy with the investigation of popular (...) attitudes. This conception of RE is situated in relation to alternative accounts, including those of Daniels, Rawls, and Wolff and de-Shalit. (shrink)

Wigner attempts to place Bacon within the perspectives of his time.