Trinucleotide repeat expansions are now a well‐established mutational mechanism in human genetic disease. An unstable CAG repeat is known to be responsible for three neurodegenerative disorders: Huntington's disease, spinal and bulbar musclar atrophy and spinocerebellar ataxia type 1. Similarities in the genetics of these diseases, the size of the repeat expansions and the position of the unstable repeat within the gene (when known) suggest a common basis to the observed phenotypes. The cloning of two regions at which chromosome breakage (...) can be induced (FRAXA and FRAXE) has in each case uncovered an unstable CG‐rich triplet repeat which becomes methylated when fully expanded. In addition to these two classes of mutation, the presence of an expanded CTG repeat in the 3′ untranslated region of a protein kinase causes myotonic dystrophy. The size of the respective expansions, repeat stability, mutational origins and possible mechanisms of action are discussed. (shrink)

A goal of expanding life over time, space, and substrate requires that we look beneath the surface of technology and the universal norms placed on human nature to a vision of its future that could be realized. There is a visible fracturing of the personal and social behaviors of its hybrid users – a process that we might call data‐clatter. While life expansion seeks the continuation of persons over time and space and beyond the physical body, there is (...) no current method for backing up the brain and transferring its processes outside the biological system. The objectives of life expansion include developing a whole‐body prosthesis as both a device for mobility and sensory perception and a system that streams cognitive functions. These systems would provide the biosphere for biological systems of humans and the cybersphere for computational systems of digital persons. (shrink)

One of the major adaptations during the evolution of Homo sapiens was an increase in brain size. Here we present evidence that a significant and substantial proportion of variation in brain size may be related to changes in temperature. Based on a sample of 109 fossilized hominid skulls, we found that cranial capacities were highly correlated with paleoclimatic changes in temperature, as indexed by oxygen isotope data and sea-surface temperature. Indeed, as much as 52% of the variance in the cranial (...) capacity of these skulls could be accounted for by temperature variation at 100 ka intervals. As an index of more short-term seasonal fluctuations in temperature, we examined the latitude of the sites from which the crania originated. More than 22% of the variance in cranial capacity of these skulls could be accounted for by variation in equatorial distance. (shrink)

Like philosophy itself, Dune explores everything from politics to art to life to reality, but above all, the novels ponder the mysteries of mind. Voyaging through psychic expanses, Frank Herbert hits upon some of the same insights discovered by indigenous people from the Americas. Many of these ideas are repeated in mainstream American and European philosophical traditions like pragmatism and existential phenomenology. These outlooks share a regard for mind as ecological, which is more or less to say that minds extend (...) beyond the brain into the rest of the body and the surrounding environment. -/- The cross-cultural strands in Dune tie closely to Herbert’s life and interests. An outdoorsman born in the Pacific West, he had an abiding bond with a friend from the Quileute tribe, Howie Hansen. Herbert advocated for aboriginal rights and crafted well-intentioned if slightly stereotypical tales about indigenous characters, partly based on his visits with Northwest tribes. Carl Jung (1875-1961), whose idea of collective consciousness echoes aboriginal views, was among Herbert’s European influences. So was existential phenomenology, especially as developed by Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). The names of characters in one of Herbert’s novels—The Santaroga Barrier—in fact coincide with terms that Heidegger used to articulate how emotionally colored coping with our environment defines our existence. Many indigenous philosophers have treated phenomenology and its American cousin pragmatism in approving ways. Indeed, the ideas of North America’s first inhabitants seem to have been absorbed by pragmatists and even earlier by transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) and Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862). -/- These different philosophies all advance a place-based psychology. Anne Waters, herself of mixed tribal heritage, generalizes the mindset of her people this way: “American Indian consciousness, and hence American Indian identity is … interdependent with our land base.” Lee Hester, a Choctaw thinker, adds that practices—not mere beliefs—are most important for native thought. American transcendentalists and pragmatists, as well as European phenomenologists, similarly see hands-on practices and environmental interactions as the core of experience. Extending this a little, they sometimes suggest experience isn’t individual but instead cultural. “Culture” is here understood as interactions within communities that define our worlds and experiences, as when we talk about the “French experience,” “culture” or “world,” or the “experience of parenthood.” This theme also shows up in indigenous thought. -/- Exploring the Dune universe, we find everything from land-based concepts of personal identity, to the idea of sharpening the mind through hands-on training, to collective notions of experience in cooperative tribes or through the genetic memory of central characters. The stories explore fate versus free will in cosmic contexts, introducing views from indigenous thought and the pragmatic philosophy of William James (1842-1910). Different forms of spiritualism mingle to shape minds and cultural mixtures around the globe, and the same occurs in the Dune series. The customs and personalities of characters fuse elements from Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, Taoism, and especially Islam. The series not only highlights that religion shapes psychology, but also that faith connects to place, especially paralleling Judeo-Christian-Islamic desert faiths. In capturing these points, the Dune novels show that “our values, our lifestyles and even the ways we think and feel have been strongly influenced by our locations in history and geography. The study of the human mind is fundamentally the study of place.”. (shrink)

Life expansion means increasing the length of time a person is alive and diversifying the matter in which a person exists. For human life, the length of time is bounded by a single century and its matter is tied to biology.

The culmination of a lifetime’s preoccupation with crucial human concerns too often curiously marginalized by the history of philosophy, The Expansion of Metaphysics sheds new light on freedom and the will by making the phenomenon of novelty philosophically intelligible. The a priori synthesis of Kant is joined to Judeo-Christian themes (the kenosis of Christ in the incarnation and the tzimtzum of God in the creation) in order to develop a doctrine of “superabundance” (freedom and love) and “singularity” (with (...) the Work of Art and the Child as paradigms). Space and time are reanalyzed as structural forms of human existence as Vető guides the reader into the depths and heights of reality, climaxing in a metaphysics of good and evil. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.2 (2002) 153-174 [Access article in PDF] LSDNA: Rhetoric, Consciousness Expansion, and the Emergence of Biotechnology Richard Doyle I had to struggle to speak intelligibly. —Albert Hofmann on his self-experiment with LSD-25 Finding a place to start is of utmost importance. Natural DNA is a tractless coil, like an unwound and tangled audio tape on the floor of the car in the dark. —Kary Mullis (...) on the invention of Polymerase Chain Reaction 1. Undoing life What happened is this: Once upon a time there was a narrative of vitality. Ok, not a narrative, but an apprehension, a fear, a vision. It didn't have a beginning, middle, or end. It was. Its contours were no more determinable than those of consciousness. Indeed, our consciousness, as humans, was our sole alleged difference from it. From something called "life." We were more than life, but were also, tragically, confined to it. You know the story all too well. Some of its major authors were Cuvier, Lamarck, Darwin, Bichat. Even Shelley.Just because this sudden transformation happened on paper doesn't mean it was easy to endure. Enormous numbers of humans went on tranquilizers just to deal with the effects. Others, elsewhere, knew nothing but rumors. Nonetheless, they became increasingly implicated in its effects, the effects of understanding and experiencing both "life" and "consciousness" as informatic events. Suddenly—and it is sudden, a real surprise—both our vitality and our thought were distributed, scattered across a network and nowhere in particular. Timothy Leary and Francis Crick were speaking the same language, the language of information where the organic and the machinic enfold each other helically and, sometimes, the capacity for replication goes through the ceiling. This new language of information would [End Page 153] introduce a novel response and abyss: the pleasures and hells of eternal replication. The distribution of both life and consciousness enabled a dream of immortality from which we have not yet awakened, as the mere specter of infinite clonal replicants provokes entropies of identity even as it preserves the self from onslaughts of decay. 1In at least one of its characteristics this shift toward an informatic understanding of life is perhaps not really so novel. The seductions of control are hardly, historians of science tell us, foreign to the practices and effects of technoscience. Evelyn Fox Keller makes this point concisely and precisely in her not-quite eponymous essay, "From Secrets of Life to Secrets of Death," itself a self-professed sequel to her 1986 "Making Gender Visible." Here the scientific "impulse" is underwritten by a perennial motif that underlies much of scientific creativity, namely, the urge to fathom the secrets of nature and the collateral hope that, in fathoming the secrets of nature, we will fathom (and hence gain control of) our own mortality (Secrets, 29).Surely Keller is correct that the nascent practices of molecular biology were cryptographic in character, an espionage project unknowingly launched by Erwin Schrodinger during the Second World War. Surely it is crucial to this moment that while Schrodinger's 1943 Dublin lectures were introducing audiences to the concept of the code-script, Alan Turing again brilliantly decrypted a modified U-boat code, giving the Allies code superiority for the remainder of the war. 2 But in this segment on that strange growth called "biotechnology," I want to focus on what Keller has called the "collateral" of hope in this cryptographic impulse, namely the collateral equation between inquiry and control, specifically the control of mortality.For is "fathoming" a secret identical to the exercise of control? The very cadence and rhetorical encryption of Keller's formulation here, a general parenthetical syllogistic conclusion within and alongside a hyphenated invocation of particularity, suggest that concepts and practices of secrecy are more unstable than Keller implies with her invocation of Feynman's "disease" of lock picking: "One of my diseases, one of my things in life, is that anything that is secret, I try to undo" (40).For Keller, Feynman's confession is emblematic of a desire to control life and death... (shrink)

In The Expanse, the future of humanity is constantly at stake. In The Expanse vestiges of an ancient alien civilization with incredibly advanced technology have been found—which eventually permits human interstellar expansion through the gates. James Lenman argues that, even if we agree that biodiversity is a good thing, it only means that it's good that there should be natural diversity while life exists on Earth. While we might not be facing interplanetary war or the unpredictable consequences of (...) ancient alien technology, many serious dangers face the human species today. We are quite resilient and have survived numerous disasters in the past, including floods, earthquakes, famine, pandemics, and wars. Small population size and restricted distribution range are factors that increase a species’ extinction risk. Interplanetary expansion could potentially bring about speciation, which means the separation of Homo sapiens into different species. (shrink)

For centuries, the processes of social differentiation associated with Modernity have often been thought to intensify the need for site-specific forms of role training and knowledge production, threatening the university’s survival either through fragmentation or through failure to adapt. Other lines of argument emphasize the extent to which the Modern system creates and relies on an integrated knowledge system, but most of the literature stresses functional differentiation and putative threats to the university. And yet over this period the university has (...) flourished. In our view, this seeming paradox is explained by the fact that modern society rests as much on universalistic cosmological bases as it does on differentiation. The university expands over recent centuries because – as it has from its religious origins – it casts cultural and human materials in universalistic terms. Our view helps explain empirical phenomena that confound standard accounts: the university’s extraordinary expansion and global diffusion, its curricular and structural isomorphism, and its relatively unified structure. All of this holds increasingly true after World War II, as national state societies made up of citizens are increasingly embedded in a world society constituted of empowered individuals. The redefinition of society in global and individual terms reduces nationally bounded models of nature and culture, extends the pool of university beneficiaries and investigators, and empowers the human persons who are understood to root it all. The changes intensify universalization and the university’s rate of worldwide growth. For the university’s knowledge and “knowers,” and for the pedagogy that joins them together, the implications are many. The emerging societal context intensifies longstanding processes of cultural rationalization and ontological elaboration, yielding great expansions in what can and should be known, and in who can and should know. These changes in turn alter the menu of approved techniques for joining knowledge and knower as one. The “knowledge society” that results is distinguished by the extraordinary degree to which the university is linked to society. But it is also distinguished by the degree to which society is organized around the university’s abstracted and universalized understandings of the world and its degree-certified graduates. (shrink)

The relationship between “marginal” and “mainstream” science has, in recent decades, become a matter of discussion. Traditional perspectives must be reexamined in the wake of transformations in the international circulation of knowledge and the subsequent diversification of scientific “peripherality”. Argentina represents an interesting case with which to explore the structure of “peripheral centres” and new forms of scientific development. While it has recently experienced an expansion in terms of institutionalization, professionalization, and internationalization, that process has been coupled with entrenchment (...) of existing institutional asymmetries and persistent intra-national inequalities; academic prestige is distributed according to opposite principles of legitimation. Our main task is to explore the current state of research capacities pursuant to that expansion in order to analyze the diverse styles in which knowledge is produced. In our analysis, we make critical use of Bourdieu’s concept of field and the Latin American category of “structural heterogeneity,” while also focusing on the question of circulation. The paper outlines how professionalization has developed locally over time, and the historical tension between the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research and the public universities. It describes the current structure of the scientific field in terms of researchers, institutes, publishing circuits, and institutional evaluative cultures. It focuses on geographical asymmetries in order to assess the distribution of new human and material resources throughout the country. Finally, it addresses the current situation under the new government, and raises concern over recent regressive actions. (shrink)

Capitalism’s Expansion into the Realm of the Biosphere. The extension of the rule of industrial property over living organisms and their components – genes and cells, both human and non-human – since the end of the 1970s, has gone along with the emergence of new markets in science, biotechnology and in health. The article argues that the filing of patents to protect private claims on living matter is a development which promotes the establishment of a monopoly control (...) over inventions in the fields of medicine and agronomy, while at the same time fostering a restriction in exchanges within the scientific community. The article therefore argues the case for a declaration that genomes, human and non-human, be considered as a common good, in terms both of the research carried out for the improvement of plants and health and of the accessibility of the medical innovations resulting from such research. (shrink)

The exegetical stories of Genesis Rabbah 8 portray God as engaged in an ethical debate over the implications of humanity's creation. These stories narrativize the necessity of favoring mercy over justice. The Deity must mobilize the attribute of mercy to overcome the justice problem of human fallibility. These stories rehearse the conflict of values in an "organic" fashion as opposed to discursive argumentation over abstract principles, and suggest a virtue theory grounded in mercy and kindness without being inflexible or (...) absolutist. As such, mercy and kindness should be inculcated not over and above Jewish law but prior to the law. (shrink)

This paper examines the idea of human rights, and how they should be justified. It begins by reviewing Peter Jones?s claim that the purpose of human rights is to allow people from different cultural backgrounds to live together as equals, and suggests that this by itself provides too slender a basis. Instead it proposes that human rights should be grounded on human needs. Three difficulties with this proposal are considered. The first is the problem of whether (...) needs are sufficiently objective for this purpose, to which it responds by drawing a distinction between human needs proper and societal needs. The second is the problem of overshoot: human needs are more expansive than human rights. It responds to this by arguing that where needs conflict, we make trade-offs before specifying the optimum set of human rights. The third is the problem of undershoot: needs cannot be used to ground civil and political rights. Here it suggests that some of these rights can be grounded directly in needs, others can be justified instrumentally, and yet others grounded in the human need for recognition. Finally the paper returns to Jones, and asks which approach to human rights is better able to justify them within both liberal and non-liberal cultures. (shrink)

Enter The Expanse to explore questions of the meaning of human life, the concept of justice, and the nature of humanity, featuring a foreword from author James S.A. Corey The Expanse and Philosophy investigates the philosophical universe of the critically acclaimed television show and Hugo Award-winning series of novels. Original essays by a diverse international panel of experts illuminate how essential philosophical concepts relate to the meticulously crafted world of The Expanse, engaging with topics such as transhumanism, belief, culture, (...) environmental ethics, identity, colonialism, diaspora, racism, reality, and rhetoric. Conceiving a near-future solar system colonized by humanity, The Expanse provokes a multitude of moral, ethical, and philosophical queries: Are Martians, Outer Planets inhabitants, and Earthers different races? Is Marco Inaros a terrorist? Can people who look and sound different, like Earthers and Belters, ever peacefully co-exist? Should science be subject to moral rules? Who is sovereign in space? What is the relationship between human progress and aggression? The Expanse and Philosophy helps you answer these questions—and many more. Covers the first six novels in The Expanse series and five seasons of the television adaptation Addresses the philosophical issues that emerge from socio-economics and geopolitics of Earth, Mars, and the Outer Planets Alliance Offers fresh perspectives on the themes, characters, and storylines of The Expanse Explores the connections between The Expanse and thinkers such as Aristotle, Kant, Locke, Hannah Arendt, Wittgenstein, Descartes, and Nietzsche Part of the popular Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture series, The Expanse and Philosophy is a must-have companion for avid readers of James S.A. Corey’s novels and devotees of the television series alike. (shrink)

This work provides a psychological perspective on globalization. It argues that multicultural experience may facilitate a merge of different cultural values, which forms a distinctively new state of mind. Experience with multicultural settings expands conceptual category boundaries, interrupts categorical thinking, and subsequently creates a new frame of thought. Studies identifying the important role of the multicultural experience in cognitive development and enhancement of creative abilities are presented to support this argument. The article questions the validity a of common critique that (...) globalization brings the world to the unified model of thought. It argues that this critique is an oversimplification of the matter caused by individuals' closed-mindedness and unreceptiveness to a new experience. (shrink)

In this article, we used the capability approach as normative grounding to analyse a particular faith-based intervention targeting ‘youth at the margins’ – in this instance, marginalised migrant youths from Zimbabwe living in Johannesburg, South Africa. We used Albert Street School (AS School), run by Johannesburg’s Central Methodist Church, as our case study to show how this faith-based organisation, through its focus on education, created not only spaces for marginalised youths to aspire towards a better life but also practical opportunities (...) to convert their aspirations into action. Drawing on first-hand accounts of 12 Zimbabwean migrant youths who had completed schooling at AS School, as well as of representatives of both the school and the CMC, the article first sketches the Zimbabwe-South Africa migration context post 2000. A discussion then follows of AS School as a faith-based intervention which addresses the constrained capability for education amongst marginalised migrant youths. (shrink)

Human dignity: social movements invoke it, several national constitutions enshrine it, and it features prominently in international human rights documents. But what is human dignity, why is it important, and what is its relationship to human rights? -/- This book offers a sophisticated and comprehensive defence of the view that human dignity is the moral heart of human rights. First, it clarifies the network of concepts associated with dignity. Paramount within this network is a (...) core notion of human dignity as an inherent, non-instrumental, egalitarian, and high-priority normative status of human persons. People have this status in virtue of their valuable human capacities rather than as a result of their national origin and other conventional features. Second, it shows how human dignity gives rise to an inspiring ideal of solidaristic empowerment, which calls us to support people's pursuit of a flourishing life by affirming both negative duties not to block or destroy, and positive duties to protect and facilitate, the development and exercise of the valuable capacities at the basis of their dignity. The most urgent of these duties are correlative to human rights. Third, this book illustrates how the proposed dignitarian approach allows us to articulate the content, justification, and feasible implementation of specific human rights, including contested ones, such as the rights to democratic political participation and to decent labour conditions. Finally, this book's dignitarian approach helps illuminate the arc of humanist justice, identifying both the difference and the continuity between the basic requirements of human rights and more expansive requirements of social justice such as those defended by liberal egalitarians and democratic socialists. -/- Human dignity is indeed the moral heart of human rights. Understanding it enables us to defend human rights as the urgent ethical and political project that puts humanity first. (shrink)

The first IVF baby was born in the 1970s. Less than 20 years later, we had cloning and GM food, and information and communication technologies had transformed everyday life. In 2000, the human genome was sequenced. More recently, there has been much discussion of the economic and social benefits of nanotechnology, and synthetic biology has also been generating controversy. This important volume is a timely contribution to increasing calls for regulation - or better regulation - of these and other (...) new technologies. Drawing on an international team of legal scholars, it reviews and develops the role of human rights in the regulation of new technologies. Three controversies at the intersection between human rights and new technology are given particular attention. First, how the expansive application of human rights could contribute to the creation of a brave new world of choice, where human dignity is fundamentally compromised; second, how new technologies, and our regulatory responses to them, could be a threat to human rights; and, third, how human rights could be used to create better regulation of these technologies. (shrink)

There are two competing conceptions of the nature and domain of ecological science in the popular and academic literature, an orthodox conception and a more expansive conception. The orthodox conception conceives ecology as a natural biological science distinct from the human social sciences. The more expansive conception views ecology as a science whose domain properly spans both the natural and social sciences. On the more expansive conception, non-traditional ecological disciplines such as ecological psychology , ecological anthropology and ecological economics (...) may legitimately be regarded as sub-disciplines of ecology, and the practitioners of such disciplines as ecologists. The orthodox-expansionist issue is significant both for the practice of ecology and for the self-identity of the philosophy of ecology. I argue in favour of the expansionist conception of ecology on general conceptual grounds, and by developing the case for one particular non-traditional ecological discipline, ecological psychology. (shrink)

One of the central pillars of Vygotsky’s contribution to social science is his concept of mediation: the process through which the social and the individual mutually shape each other. His rich, complex and challenging texts focus on a nuanced notion of mediation that was not necessarily visible to those active in the command-and-control climate of the Stalinist era. The article focuses on this notion of the lack of visibility in mediation.

The Shakespearean image of a tempest and its aftermath forms the beginning as well as a major guiding thread of Logic of Imagination. Moving beyond the horizons of his earlier work, Force of Imagination, John Sallis sets out to unsettle the traditional conception of logic, to mark its limits, and, beyond these limits, to launch another, exorbitant logic—a logic of imagination. Drawing on a vast range of sources, including Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud, as well as developments in (...) modern logic and modern mathematics, Sallis shows how a logic of imagination can disclose the most elemental dimensions of nature and of human existence and how, through dialogue with contemporary astrophysics, it can reopen the project of a philosophical cosmology. (shrink)

National Book Award Finalist. How did humanity originate and why does a species like ours exist on this planet? Do we have a special place, even a destiny in the universe? Where are we going, and perhaps, the most difficult question of all, "Why?" In The Meaning of Human Existence, his most philosophical work to date, Pulitzer Prize–winning biologist Edward O. Wilson grapples with these and other existential questions, examining what makes human beings supremely different from all other (...) species. Searching for meaning in what Nietzsche once called "the rainbow colors" around the outer edges of knowledge and imagination, Wilson takes his readers on a journey, in the process bridging science and philosophy to create a twenty-first-century treatise on human existence—from our earliest inception to a provocative look at what the future of mankind portends. Continuing his groundbreaking examination of our "Anthropocene Epoch," which he began with The Social Conquest of Earth, described by the New York Times as "a sweeping account of the human rise to domination of the biosphere," here Wilson posits that we, as a species, now know enough about the universe and ourselves that we can begin to approach questions about our place in the cosmos and the meaning of intelligent life in a systematic, indeed, in a testable way. Once criticized for a purely mechanistic view of human life and an overreliance on genetic predetermination, Wilson presents in The Meaning of Human Existence his most expansive and advanced theories on the sovereignty of human life, recognizing that, even though the human and the spider evolved similarly, the poet's sonnet is wholly different from the spider's web. Whether attempting to explicate "The Riddle of the Human Species," "Free Will," or "Religion"; warning of "The Collapse of Biodiversity"; or even creating a plausible "Portrait of E.T.," Wilson does indeed believe that humanity holds a special position in the known universe. The human epoch that began in biological evolution and passed into pre-, then recorded, history is now more than ever before in our hands. Yet alarmed that we are about to abandon natural selection by redesigning biology and human nature as we wish them, Wilson soberly concludes that advances in science and technology bring us our greatest moral dilemma since God stayed the hand of Abraham. (shrink)

Capability approach pioneers Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum both recognize empowerment as an important aspect of human development. They seem to disagree, however, about how empowerment should be represented within the capability approach (CA). This essay is concerned with the analysis of the foundational concepts at work within Sen and Nussbaum’s CAs. Part One concerns the key concepts of empowerment at work in Sen’s CA and has three goals. 1) Clarify Sen’s various empowerment concepts. 2) Argue that Sen’s concept (...) of Realize Agency Success is flawed. 3) Make clear that empowerment in Sen’s approach can be helpfully understood in terms of agency and capability set expansion. Part Two considers Nussbaum’s CA and the debate over whether it can account for empowerment. I conclude that not only can Nussbaum’s CA account for empowerment, but that the role of empowerment in both Sen’s and Nussbaum’s CAs can be understood in terms of agency and capability set expansion. In other words, Sen and Nussbaum actually agree about empowerment at the foundational level. (shrink)

Abstractabstract:Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009) is set in twenty-third-century Thailand, in a world in which climate change and the depletion of the oil supply have led to a collapse of the global economic system. Disease and famine are rampant. And yet, in this seemingly postapocalyptic world, there are numerous signs of hope. This text, in fact, contains strong utopian energies, driven partly by the motif of genetic engineering, which suggest the possibility of rebuilding the world in a way that (...) overcomes many of the limitations of the past in terms of the politics of race, gender, and class, but also in terms of more enlightened attitudes toward the relationship between humans and the natural world. (shrink)

Although many aspects of human cognition are likely to be passively affiliated with the primary impetus for hominid brain expansion during the Plio-Pleistocene, that expansion was most likely generated and maintained not by functions but by improved capacities of reproductive success, especially survivorship.

Human rights have become an important ideal in current times, yet our age has witnessed more violations of human rights than any previous less enlightened one. This book explores the historical and theoretical dimensions of this paradox. Divided into two parts, the first section offers an alternative history of natural law, in which natural rights are represented as the eternal human struggle to resist opression and to fight for a society in which people are no longer degraded (...) or despised. At the time of their birth in the 18th Century and again in the popular uprisings of the last decade, human rights became the dominant critique of law and society. The radical rhetoric of rights and its apparently endless expansive potential has led to its adoption by governments and individuals alike seeking to justify their actions on moral grounds and has undermined its radical edge. Part Two examines the philosophical logic of rights. The classical critiques of Kant, Burke, Hegel and Marx illuminate traditional aproaches to the concept of human rights. The work of Heidegger, Sartre and psychoanalysis is used to deconstruct the metaphisical essentialism of bothe universalists and cultural relativists. Finally, through a consideration of the ethics of otherness, and with reference to recent human rights violations, it is argued that the end of human rights is to judge law and politics from a moral stand point which both transcends the present and is historically relevant. (shrink)

Dating back to the early modern theories of Burke and Kant, philosophical accounts have made cognitive failure central to the experience of the sublime. This essay argues for a re-conception of the sublime in terms of the notion of epistemic expansion. Doing so not only provides a plausible account of traditional examples of the sublime, but also provides us with language that can capture an important but neglected aesthetic dimension of experimental science: the expansion of human perception. (...) Recognizing this dimension, it is argued, also enriches our understanding of the ways in which experimental science can facilitate broader public engagement with science. (shrink)

While there is extensive literature on both the expansion of human rights and solidarity movements, and on micro-solidarity and violent actions, here I ask what is the relationship between human rights, micro-solidarity and social action? Based on a case study of structured, face-to-face dialogue group encounters in the Israeli/Palestinian context, I draw on Randall Collins’s interaction ritual chain theory to demonstrate why emotional energy and the ritualization of historical narratives have very limited potential to translate into (...) class='Hi'>human rights-based moral actions. Instead, I suggest, these encounters produce micro-solidarity that ascribes additional weight to ethnic categories, serving to polarize and homogenize groups along ethnic lines. (shrink)

The expansion of the corpus of international human rights to include the right to water and sanitation has implications both for the process of recognizing human rights and for future developments in the relationships between technology, engineering and human rights. Concerns with threats to human rights resulting from developments in science and technology were expressed in the early days of the United Nations (UN), along with the recognition of the ambitious human right of everyone (...) “to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications.” This comment explores the hypothesis that the emerging concepts most likely to follow recognition of the human right to water primarily involve issues of science and technology, such as access to medicines or clean and healthy environment. Many threats to human rights from advances in science, which were identified in the past as potential, have become real today, such as invasion of privacy from electronic recording, deprivation of health and livelihood as a result of climate change, or control over individual autonomy through advances in genetics and neuroscience. This comment concludes by urging greater engagement of scientists and engineers, in partnership with human rights specialists, in translating normative pronouncements into defining policy and planning interventions. (shrink)

For the last 25 years, human development has become part of official development discourses. It takes the normative position that the success of policies depends on whether they have expanded human flourishing, or expanded the 'freedoms' or 'capabilities' people have 'reason to value', as Amartya Sen would put it. It emphasises the importance of institutions to facilitate such expansion, and the agency of people to create such institutions. The ability of institutions to be conducive to human (...) flourishing depends on the nature of human interaction. When human interaction no longer has the flourishing of other persons as its aim, it can create structures which then constrain human agency. The article argues that the human development perspective could be enriched by theological insights such as structural sin and the contribution of religious narratives to public reasoning. It concentrates on the idea of justice of one biblical parable, and illustrates its argument with examples from the Argentine labour context. (shrink)

"This is a book about humanists, but even humanists cannot agree on what a humanist is," declares Sarah Bakewell. Indeed, for centuries now, thinkers, writers, scholars, politicians, activists, artists, and countless others have been searching for and refining a philosophy of the human spirit. Humanism can be found in writings of Plato and Protagoras and in the thought of Confucius. It is ever-present in the work of Michel de Montaigne, and guided the thinking and activism of Harriet Taylor Mill. (...) When Zora Neale Hurston writes, "Somebody else may have my rapturous glance at the archangels. The springing of the yellow line of morning out of the misty deep of dawn, is glory enough for me." That is humanism par excellence. In Humanly Possible, Bakewell puts forward that all the different meanings of "humanism" are worth looking at together because they are all concerned with humanitas, or, as she puts it, "our culture and learning, our words and art, our good manners and sociable desire to say hello to the universe." What unites humanists, religious or not, scholarly or not, philosophical or not, is that they all put the human world of culture and morality at the center of their concerns. What could be more human than that? Embracing and indeed celebrating humanism's swirling, kaleidoscopic, rich ambiguity, Bakewell sets out not just to trace this vital philosophical lineage through the lives of its major protagonists but in fact to make her own dazzling contribution to its expansive literature. The result is an intoxicating, joyful celebration of the human spirit from one of our most beloved and charming writers. (shrink)

Pericytes, like vascular smooth muscle cells, are perivascular cells closely associated with blood vessels throughout the body. Pericytes are necessary for vascular development and homeostasis, with particularly critical roles in the brain, where they are involved in regulating cerebral blood flow and establishing the blood-brain barrier. A role for pericytes during neurovascular disease pathogenesis is less clear—while some studies associate decreased pericyte coverage with select neurovascular diseases, others suggest increased pericyte infiltration in response to hypoxia or traumatic brain injury. Here, (...) we used an endothelial loss-of-function Recombination signal binding protein for immunoglobulin kappa J region (Rbpj)/Notch mediated mouse model of brain arteriovenous malformation (AVM) to investigate effects on pericytes during neurovascular disease pathogenesis. We tested the hypothesis that pericyte expansion, via morphological changes, and Platelet-derived growth factor B/Platelet-derived growth factor receptor β (Pdgf-B/Pdgfrβ)-dependent endothelial cell-pericyte communication are affected, during the pathogenesis of Rbpj mediated brain AVM in mice. Our data show that pericyte coverage of vascular endothelium expanded pathologically, to maintain coverage of vascular abnormalities in brain and retina, following endothelial deletion of Rbpj. In Rbpj-mutant brain, pericyte expansion was likely attributed to cytoplasmic process extension and not to increased pericyte proliferation. Despite expanding overall area of vessel coverage, pericytes from Rbpj-mutant brains showed decreased expression of Pdgfrβ, Neural (N)-cadherin, and cluster of differentiation (CD)146, as compared to controls, which likely affected Pdgf-B/Pdgfrβ-dependent communication and appositional associations between endothelial cells and pericytes in Rbpj-mutant brain microvessels. By contrast, and perhaps by compensatory mechanism, endothelial cells showed increased expression of N-cadherin. Our data identify cellular and molecular effects on brain pericytes, following endothelial deletion of Rbpj, and suggest pericytes as potential therapeutic targets for Rbpj/Notch related brain AVM. (shrink)

ABSTRACT I argue for a broader understanding of the morally considerable. I propose a neo‐Aristotelian account of individuals wherein some entities, often precluded from those deserving of moral consideration, are deemed proper subjects of such treatment. The criterion suggested is, roughly, that of self‐regulatory development, a teleological notion, that I argue should not be viewed as archaic and useless. Not only do many non‐human animals then become legitimate subjects of moral concern, but objects outside the animal kingdom, such as (...) plants and trees, also are to be included in our ethical arena. (shrink)

This uniquely inspirational and practical book explores human simulation, which is the application of computational modeling and simulation to research subjects in the humanities disciplines. It delves into the fascinating process of collaboration among experts who usually don’t have much to do with one another – computer engineers and humanities scholars – from the perspective of the humanities scholars. It also explains the process of developing models and simulations in these interdisciplinary teams. Each chapter takes the reader on a (...) journey, presenting a specific theory about the human condition, a model of that theory, discussion of its implementation, analysis of its results, and an account of the collaborative experience. Contributing authors with different fields of expertise share how each model was validated, discuss relevant datasets, explain development strategies, and frankly discuss the ups and downs of the process of collaborative development. Readers are given access to the models and will also gain new perspectives from the authors’ findings, experiences, and recommendations. Today we are in the early phases of an information revolution, combining access to vast computing resources, large amounts of human data through social media, and an unprecedented richness of methods and tools to capture, analyze, explore, and test hypotheses and theories of all kinds. Thus, this book’s insights will be valuable not only to students and scholars of humanities subjects, but also to the general reader and researchers from other disciplines who are intrigued by the expansion of the information revolution all the way into the humanities departments of modern universities. (shrink)

Purpose. The research is aimed at substantiation of the process of formation of various human images in the postmodernism era in the context of biophilosophy, taking into account the need to find an adequate response to historical challenges and the production of new value orientations reflecting succession of civilization development. Theoretical basis. The author in his theoretical constructs proceeds from the need of taking into account the biophilosophical aspect of postmodern man, as the one who, remaining a representative of (...) the species Homo sapiens, began to dynamically change, losing its own natural and functional qualities, acquiring to a large extent the socio-technology-related qualities. The thesis that in the postmodern society the moral and legal foundations of existence of human being, as the subject of actions and responsibility for these actions, practically coincide with the biological foundations is taken as initial argument. New biological knowledge, as well as the related technologies, orient the public consciousness towards production of fundamentally new or modernization of the existing bio-philosophical ideas. The author's vision of the anthropological collision of the Post-Modernism era is caused by the fact that the issues of a postmodern man acquire a special urgency at the end of the ХХ – early XXI century. A progressive disproportion between a human being, whose abilities as a representative of the species Homo sapiens are biologically limited, and the human community, which sees no limits in its information and technological expansion, is of current interest. Originality. The author reveals the key features of the Post-Modernism era, in which a fundamentally different civilizational space originates, and where a new type of person emerges in its internal culture, which is called the postmodern man. The postmodern man was considered through the prism of bio-philosophy. Its interest in man is caused by his or her place in nature, the prospects of development at the individual, population and species levels. Conclusions. In the process of development of bio-philosophy, its research field will be naturally expanded with the use of philosophical means of perception of life as such and filling the bio-philosophy with philosophical and biological issues. In contemporary conditions, the study of the boundaries of biological reality and its previously unknown properties, definition of new horizons of theoretical knowledge in the science of life, the critical rethinking of the concepts of biocentrism and anthropocentrism in the space of modern scientific knowledge, the definition of perspective trends in the study of man, his or her place and role in the planetary being is of great importance. (shrink)

James Holden manages to convince an alien technology—Abaddon's Gate, created by the protomolecule—that human beings are not a threat. It opens up 1,300 Einstein‐Rosen bridges, providing humanity access to at least as many habitable worlds. Humanity faces a dilemma at the start of the fourth season of The Expanse. The very first words of The Expanse appear on a title card: In the twenty‐third century, humans have colonized the solar system. Of course, The Expanse is a work of science (...) fiction, and its success or failure rests primarily on whether it entertains us, not whether it tells us something significant about our own world. And we certainly do not face the threat of extinction because of accidental exposure to alien technology! However, we would do well to recognize the actual threats to our existence. (shrink)

I briefly present and motivate a ‘skill hypothesis’ regarding the evolution of human normative cognition. On this hypothesis, the capacity to internally represent action-guiding norms evolved as a solution to the distinctive problems of standardizing, learning and teaching complex motor skills and craft skills, especially skills related to toolmaking. We have an evolved cognitive architecture for internalizing norms of technique, which was then co-opted for a rich array of social functions. There was a gradual expansion of the normative (...) domain, with ritual playing an important role in bridging the gap between concrete, enacted norms and general, abstract norms, such as kinship norms. I conclude by stating nine predictions arising from the skill hypothesis. (shrink)

The expansion of human rights provisions has produced an increasing number of human rights practitioners and delineated human rights as a field of its own. Questions of who is practicing human rights and how they practice it have become important. This paper considers the question of human rights practice and the agency of practitioners, arguing that practice should not be conceived as the application of philosophy, but instead approached from a sociological point of view. (...) Whatever the structuring effect of political institutions, human rights is being defined more expansively by practitioners. The weakness of international institutions and the interpretive scope of human rights discourse produce significant opportunity for practitioners to interpret the meaning of human rights. Our exploratory interviews of a small sample of practitioners reveal widely varying histories, in which they interpret their own work as “human rights” practice in differing ways. Practitioners who in the past thought of themselves differently, now identify as human rights activists. They are also becoming more professional, but concerned about professionalization. Their self-interpretations reflect these concerns and also respond to the necessities of career events. Through the conscious and unconscious aspects of their practice, practitioners exercise considerable agency in adapting human rights discourse to their own concerns while also being critical of it. (shrink)

Buber’s distinction between the ‘I-It’ mode and the ‘I-Thou’ mode is seminal for dialogic education. While Buber introduces the idea of dialogic space, an idea which has proved useful for the analysis of dialogic education with technology, his account fails to engage adequately with the role of technology. This paper offers an introduction to the significance of the I-It/I-Thou duality of technology in relation with opening dialogic space. This is followed by a short schematic history of educational technology which reveals (...) the role technology plays, not only in opening dialogic space, but also in expanding dialogic space. The expansion of dialogic space is an expansion of what it means to be ‘us’ as dialogic engagement facilitates the incorporation, into our shared sense of identity, of aspects of reality that are initially experienced as alien or ‘other’. Augmenting Buber with an alternative understanding of dialogic space enables us to see how dialogue mediated by technology, as well as dialogue with monologised fragments of technology, can, through education, lead to an expansion of what it means to be human. (shrink)

This article explores the development of a novel biomedical research organism, and its potential to remake the species and spaces of translational medicine. The humanized mouse is a complex experimental object in which mice, rendered immunodeficient through genetic alteration, are engrafted with human stem cells in the hope of reconstituting a human immune system for biomedical research and drug testing. These chimeric organisms have yet to garner the same commentary from social scientists as other human–animal hybrid forms. (...) Yet, they are rapidly being positioned as central to translational medicine in immunological research and pharmaceutical development. This article explores the complex relations between species and spaces they seek to enact. Humanizing mice simultaneously moves these animal forms towards the intimate geographies of corporeal equivalence with humans and the expansive geographies of translational research. These multiple trajectories are achieved by the way humanized mice function as both uncertain ‘epistemic things’ and as expansive ‘collaborative things’, articulating mouse genetics with other research, notably stem cell science. In the context of post-genomics, their indeterminacy is critical to their collaborative value; their expansive potential follows as much from their biological openness as from specific expectations. Yet, these new research organisms have both accumulative and disruptive capacities, for there are patterns of interference between these trajectories, remaking boundaries between experimental practices and clinical contexts. (shrink)

This essay presents an apology for theological humanism drawn from Christian sources as the most adequate ethical stance for respecting and enhancing the integrity of human and nonhuman life into the global future. After clarifying the meaning and task of an apology, the essay begins with the ethical challenge posed by global dynamics and then explores the endangerment to future life by the expansion of human power. In order to formulate an ethics in this fraught context, the (...) essay then explores the relation between the discourses of identity and responsibility as two dominant patterns of thought in current ethics and argues that claims about “identity” must be situated within an ethics of responsibility. The apology concludes by uncovering the ethical meaning of theological humanism in terms of Christian affirmation of being fully alive in love through Christ and before God. (shrink)

Since their derivation, human embryonic stem (hES) cells have been used for a variety of applications including developmental biology, pathology, chemical biology, genomics, and proteomics. However, their most important potential application is the generation of cells and tissues, which can be used for cell‐based therapies. One of the main drawbacks of hES cell culture is that they are particularly sensitive to dissociation, which is required for passaging, expansion, cryopreservation, and other applications. Recently, it has been discovered that an (...) inhibitor of Rho kinase (ROCKi; Y‐27632) increases the survival rate of dissociated, single hES cells. This breakthrough has allowed new methods in hES cell culture to be developed, with the promise of increasing hES cell numbers into the realm of clinical relevance. In our studies demonstrating that ROCKi dramatically increases hES cell cryopreservation efficiency, we have observed that ROCKi treatment does not decrease hES cell's susceptibility to apoptosis. Rather, we hypothesize that ROCKi treatment desensitizes single hES cells to their environment reducing the odds that individual cells will undergo anoikis. (shrink)

As sociologists deepen their examinations of human rights in their teaching, research, and thinking, it is essential that such work is conducted in a manner that is both mindful and critical of the knowledge we are building upon in sociology and human rights. As the authors of this volume reveal, creating sociological knowledge that examines human rights for the expansion of human rights is something that sociologists are well equipped to undertake, whether through the use (...) of mathematics, comparative-historical analysis, the study of emotions, conversations, or social psychology. In these chapters you will find the roots of the study of human rights deep within sociological research and thinking as well as emerging techniques that will push the discipline as it seeks to expand understanding of human rights together with so many other aspects of the social condition. (shrink)

In his book, World Poverty and Human Rights, Pogge sets out to articulate an approach to basic justice that is inversal and cosmopolitan. This notion of justice is to be articulated through the language of human rights. Pogge’s arguments about justice, moral universalism and cosmopolitanism are impressive and reward serious study. It is to be hoped. indeed, that many aspects of his argument might be adopted by the elite ruling classes of world politics; they have much to offer (...) in the project of creating a world that is humane for all. The issues that I have raised in the foregoing argument however are central to the integrity of Pogge’s project. I have argued, in sum that it is not possible to advance a program for the expansion of justice and the implementation of human rights in world politics without making an appeal to a specific account of the nature of justice and of human rights. The account that informs Pogge’s argument is that of political liberalism, and this is an account that has much in its favor as a preferred vehicle for justice in world politics. However, this account makes itself vulnerable when it argues for universal principles without acknowledging their partisan and normative base. My argument has been that this issue is at the center of Pogge’s attempt to isolate the conception of human rights he explicates, which he wants to serve as the language for his global ethical universalism, from the ontological affirmations which make that conception of human rights possible, and which of necessity tie human rights to a specific conception of the nature of the good for human persons and groups. The attempt to establish a single, universal criterion of justice, and to express it in the language of human rights, is undermined from within for as long as it fails to engage with ontological concerns. (shrink)

This article examines recent controversies over the relationship between human rights and intellectual property rights (IPRs). Many activists have claimed that IPRs conflict with human rights. Others have argued that IPRs are themselves human rights. The article approaches the debate as an opportunity to clarify the nature of IPRs in relation to human rights, as well as the nature of contemporary struggles over these rights. After surveying the dual expansion of both human rights and (...) IPRs and rejecting the view that IPRs are rooted in human rights, the author investigates the example of the HIV/AIDS crisis and the global Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines in order to illustrate attempts to represent IPRs as an outright threat to human rights. Highlighting the limitations of a human rights-based critique of IPRs, he concludes by proposing to study contemporary conflicts over IPRs and human rights as struggles for recognition and as struggles over the institutionalization of a transnational “recognition order.”. (shrink)

Modern humanities are in an ambiguous situation. Their organization is experiencing a radical challenge from the expansion of science-based assessment methods from modern business. We are talking about evaluating the results of researchers’ work on indicators from scientometrics. As a result, the evaluation subject is not the content of the research result, but their popularity and relevance to dominant views and approaches. The science organization turned upside down: it turns out not scientometrics for science, but rather science for the (...) sake of scientometrics. At the same time, digitalization and related information and communication technologies are a great achievement of civilization. Therefore, it is all the more important and useful to resist the thoughtless digitized bureaucracy using the digitization itself. This article is an attempt not to criticize digital methods, but to consider the possibilities of using blockchain technology, its advantages and the problems it generates. There are such opportunities as transparent self-organization of scientific communities, assessing the contribution and its priority, encouraging researchers. At the same time, the implementation of the blockchain implies the interest of a critically significant group of scientists with a high reputation. It is equally important to demonstrate the convenience and effectiveness of scientific work using the blockchain. The article draw attention to the significance to propose and discuss approaches to methods for assessing the quality of humanitarian and interdisciplinary studies that are adequate to the scientific practice itself, that arouse the general confidence of scientists. (shrink)