: Urban bioethics seeks to broaden the traditional focus of bioethics to encompass questions about the interplay of individuals with family, group, community, and society. Urban bioethics will need to deal with cultural diversity, issues of equity, and the conflict between individual rights and the public good. Encouraging a multicultural ethical discernment, fostering an appreciation of the political, economic, sociological, and psychological issues that inform the question of urban moral choice, urban bioethics is essentially a multi-disciplinary, synthesizing enterprise. Several theoretical (...) models including social contract, rule utilitarian, communitarian, and feminist paradigms offer complementary conceptual frameworks. This paper is offered as a proposal, a road map for future study to place current bioethical analysis into a broader context. (shrink)

Urban bioethics seeks to broaden the traditional focus of bioethics to encompass questions about the interplay of individuals with family, group, community, and society. Urban bioethics will need to deal with cultural diversity, issues of equity, and the conflict between individual rights and the public good. Encouraging a multicultural ethical discernment, fostering an appreciation of the political, economic, sociological, and psychological issues that inform the question of urban moral choice, urban bioethics is essentially a multi-disciplinary, synthesizing enterprise. Several theoretical models (...) including social contract, rule utilitarian, communitarian, and feminist paradigms offer complementary conceptual frameworks. This paper is offered as a proposal, a road map for future study to place current bioethical analysis into a broader context. (shrink)

Over recent decades International Relations scholars have investigated norm dynamics processes at some length, with the norm entrepreneur concept having become a common reference point in the literature. The focus on norm entrepreneurs has, however, resulted in a bias towards investigating the agents and processes of successful normative change. This book challenges this inherent bias by explicitly focusing on those who resist normative change - norm antipreneurs. The utility of the norm antipreneur concept is explored through a series of case (...) studies encompassing a range of issue areas and contributed by a mix of well-known and emergent scholars of norm dynamics. In examining the complexity of norm resistance, particular attention is paid to the nature and intent of the actors involved in norm-contestation, the sites and processes of resistance, the strategies and tactics antipreneurs deploy to defend the values and interests they perceive to be threatened by the entrepreneurs, and whether it is the entrepreneurs or the antipreneurs who enjoy greater inherent advantages. This text will therefore be of interest to scholars and students of International Relations, International Law, Political Science, Sociology and History. ". (shrink)

The Canadian residential sector contributes approximately 80 megatons of GHGs to the environment yearly. With the ratification of Kyoto Protocol, Canada has committed to reduce its 1990 GHG emission levels by at least 5% between 2008 and 2012. To meet this target, Canada must evaluate and exploit all feasible means to reduce fossil fuel energy consumption and GHG emissions. Test-case Canadian houses were modeled in the building-energy simulation software ESP-r. Requisite housing stock data were extracted from Canada's residential end-use energy (...) surveys. Photovoltaic and wind-turbine energy systems were assessed for their contribution to electricity generation and GHG savings. Typical household electrical consumption versus renewable electricity generation was assessed to estimate the GHG reduction, cost saving in electricity, and the impact of these technologies on single detached houses. With the use of net-metering, 100% of electricity requirements can be met by these technologies in certain cases, resulting in significant reductions in GHG emissions. (shrink)

K. C. Klauer, J. Musch, and B. Naumer (2000) presented a general multinomial model of belief bias effects in syllogistic reasoning. They claimed to map a particular mental model account of belief bias (J. V. Oakhill, P. N. Johnson-Laird, & A. Garnham, 1989) onto this model and to show empirically that it is incorrect. The authors argue that this mental model account does not map onto the multinomial model and that it can account for the data presented by Klauer et (...) al. (Experiments 1–4). The authors further argue that additional data Klauer et al. presented in support of a new model of their own (Experiments 5– 8) are explained by this mental model account. The mental model account is, therefore, refuted neither by Klauer et al.’s theoretical analysis nor by any of the results they presented. Furthermore, the account can accommodate more recent findings on belief bias in a more satisfactory way than can alternative models that have been proposed. (shrink)

A reply to Klauer and Musch's reply to our commentary on their original article.

Like several other classes of hormones, the class of plant hormones called auxins exert myriad effects on cell development. While auxins are most noted for inducing cell elongation, they are also involved in cell division, cell differentiation, cell and organ polarity, and wound responsiveness. Consistent with this pleiotropy, is the recent identification of several putative auxin receptors that in theory could represent the primary elements of more than one auxin signal pathway leading to distinct responses or leading in parallel to (...) a single response. Our current working hypothesis is that some auxin‐mediated responses may be mediated by multiple receptors. We describe some of what is known about each of the new putative receptors and elaborate on the hypothesis using the example of cell elongation. Specifically for auxin‐induced elongation, we propose that two rapid events, specific gene transcription and cell wall acidification, are separately mediated by at least two receptors, acting in the nucleus and at the plasma membrane, respectively. (shrink)

Of course you know the movie, just by cultural assimilation if not by having seen it. There’s this young elephant, Dumbo, who has laughably big ears and has been pitiably separated from his mom. He’s aided by a friendly talking mouse[ii] into translating those otherwise hapless ears into the power of flight, which he eventually uses to rescue his mom and live happily ever after. The way the wily mouse gets Dumbo to believe that he could fly is to give (...) him a “magic feather” which, held in his trunk, demonstrably imparts the gift of flight. Naturally the mouse believes throughout all this that Dumbo can fly anyway, but he also knows that Dumbo needs the feather as a confidence-builder to do so. At the critical juncture of the tale Dumbo loses the feather after being pushed off a precipice, and he thus plummets perilously towards earth—only to find at the last moment that he can indeed fly on his own. (shrink)

All right, first off I need to disappoint some people who despise reading the fine print on things or just plain love to speed-read only large fonts: this is not only not my last lecture, I m not even retiring anytime soon. So sorry to those of you poised to shout Good riddance to bad rubbish! at the end of this soliloquy. You re going to have to be patient a while longer.

Of course you know the movie, just by cultural assimilation if not by having seen it. There’s this young elephant, Dumbo, who has laughably big ears and has been pitiably separated from his mom. He’s aided by a friendly talking mouse2 into translating those otherwise hapless ears into the power of flight, which he eventually uses to rescue his mom and live happily ever after. The way the wily mouse gets Dumbo to believe that he could fly is to give (...) him a “magic feather” which, held in his trunk, demonstrably imparts the gift of flight. Naturally the mouse believes throughout all this that Dumbo can fly anyway, but he also knows that Dumbo needs the feather as a confidence-builder to do so. At the critical juncture of the tale Dumbo loses the feather after being pushed off a precipice, and he thus plummets perilously towards earth—only to find at the last moment that he can indeed fly on his own. (shrink)

After learning about the concept of determinism, a natural tendency is to conclude that if anyone actually believed in the determinism of human nature, then all future human actions are "set out for us" or "cut and dried" and, in some sense, utterly unavoidable. Another way of referring to such inevitability is that human action appears to be..

“Men can never be free, because they’re weak, corrupt, worthless and restless. The people believe in authority; they’ve grown tired of waiting for miracle or mystery. Science is their religion; no greater explanation exists for them.” (Cigarette Smoking Man, "Talitha Cumi" The X-Files 3X24).

Harry Frankfurt's famous examples of overdetermined moral agents who are nevertheless responsible for their actions and omissions have long been hailed as proofs that the ability and/or opportunity to do otherwise is not a necessary condition for moral responsibility. In this paper I use recent clarifications of some of these examples by Frankfurt himself to show that their force relies in part on tacit ceteris paribus assumptions concealing a reliance on PAP that concerns matters of fairness in assessing moral responsibility.

Analysis shows that statements of ability are disguised conditionals. More exactly, the correct analysis of 'X could have done A' is 'If X h decided (chosen, willed ...) to do A, X would have done A'. Therefore having acted freely--having been able to act otherwise than one fact did--is compatible with determinism (with the causal determination of one's acts).

It has been widely held that presentism cannot easily accommodate Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity account of the relativity of simultaneity because presentism privileges successively unique times ontologically. Recently Brogaard and Marlow argued that presentism does not deserve the attribution of this defect because it may well be that Einstein’s account of the relativity of simultaneity is defective, leaving it open to establishing a view of absolutist simultaneity friendlier to presentism. Specifically Brogaard and Marlow present an argument against one of (...) Einstein’s most famous accounts of the relativity of simultaneity, and moreover raise doubts about whether Einstein availed himself of absolutist frames in some of his explanations of relativity. I will dismiss both of these charges, and thus argue that the complaint against presentism from SR stands. (shrink)

The author examines the single topic approach to the construction of introductory philosophy courses. The author considers the single topic approach to be an alternative to more historically- and topically-based approaches. The traditional approach to philosophy is often broad and difficult for students to engage with in classroom discussion. A narrow and detailed treatment of a standard area or topic facilitates classroom discussion and allows students to transfer insights and skills in areas of their own disciplines. The author outlines a (...) methodology that treats philosophical texts in an interdisciplinary context, which emphasizes to students that philosophy is not a detached field of study. (shrink)

"If" and "then," wrapped around enough content to form at least two propositions that seem to be conditionally assertible together as antecedent and consequent, are, of course, the key denizens of this very deep work. It's a commonplace among philosophers that what so innocently malingers in indicative language as, "If Bennett didn't write this excellent Guide, then someone else did," can rapidly morph by a little fancy into the eyebrow-arching subjunctive/counterfactual, "If Bennett hadn't written this marvelous work, then someone else (...) would have." The hulking literature on the logic and semantics of conditionals is cunning and daunting, and few thinkers on the world stage are equipped to corral and tame the beast as Bennett has. Even given his nontruth-functional stance on indicative conditionals, one might still rightly call Bennett "The Horseshoe Whisperer.". (shrink)

We describe in detail the first experimental test that distinguishes between an event-based corpuscular model of the interaction of photons with matter and quantum mechanics. The test looks at the interference that results as a single photon passes through a Mach-Zehnder interferometer. The experimental results, obtained with a low-noise single-photon source, agree with the predictions of standard quantum mechanics.

In this essay, we examine certain key aspects of Nietzsche’s contribution to the ongoing debate concerning the nature and status of philosophical wisdom. We argue that, for Nietzsche, philosophical wisdom is tantamount to a “disruptive wisdom” which is expressed in a “permanent critique of ourselves” and our entire mode of existence. Philosophical wisdom, so construed, is not a matter of finding “metaphysical comfort” in consoling theories, images, or ideas; nor is it a matter of offering consolation for frustration and suffering. (...) Instead, it is about disrupting or rupturing those prevailing “human, all too human” myths and illusions that perpetuate human frustration and suffering—especially the myths and illusions associated with what Nietzsche terms the “hitherto reigning ascetic ideal” in the West. By disturbing our “dogmatic slumber” in common-place beliefs and values, Nietzsche’s “untimely” atopic philosophers of “disruptive wisdom” evoke the promise of alternate forms of humanity: new ways of valuing the earth and our life on it, new paradigms for a way of life to be achieved in the future. Disruptive philosophers and the wisdom they impart, help liberate and inspire us to experiment with new ways of thinking and valuing, all of which contribute, as Nietzsche sees it, to the reconstituting and “fashioning of the self” as a transformed “second nature”. (shrink)

In this critical review essay, we examine Rüdiger Safranski’s “philosophical biography” approach to interpreting Nietzsche. We analyze Safranski’s various attempts tobring the biographical facts of Nietzsche’s life to bear on the philosophical narration in order to shed light on the development of Nietzsche’s philosophical thinking. We argue that there are a number of limitations to Safranski’s “philosophical biography” approach to reading Nietzsche, such as Safranski’s tendency to focus almost exclusively on the earlier stages in the development of Nietzsche’s philosophical thinking. (...) However, we also try to show that the one redeeming virtue of Safranski’s book is that it focuses on the intriguing, but often overlooked, concept of “self-configuration” or “selffashioning”, and it treats this concept as a unifying thread that runs throughout the maze of Nietzsche’s various multifarious writings. We argue, in conclusion, that Safranski successfully connects Nietzsche’s “highly personal philosophy” to the multifaceted “maneuvers of self-configuration” and to the overall Nietzschean project of “fashioning one’s own identity” in an otherwise meaningless world. (shrink)

The concept of free will is fraught with controversy, as readers of this volume likely know. Philosophers disagree about what free will is, whether we have it, what mitigates or destroys it, and what it's good for. Indeed, philosophers even disagree about how to fix the referent of the term 'free will' for purposes of describing and exploring these disagreements. What one person considers a reasonably neutral working definition of 'free will' is often considered question-begging or otherwise misguided by another. (...) Such disputes make it difficult to summarize the problem of free will, roughly the debate over the nature and existence of free will, in a clear and uncontentious way. In generic terms, however, the two basic solutions to the problem of free will are free-willism, the view that we have free will, and free-will denialism, i.e. the view that we do not have free will. As stated here, neither denialism nor free-willism constitutes a complete solution to the problem of free will; to be complete, a proposed solution must also tell us a convincing story about what free will is and that, as it turns out, is a very difficult task indeed. One historically popular way of approaching the problem of free will is to ask about the relationship between free will and determinism: "Does free will stand in relation R to determinism: yes or no?" This is just a template for a question, of course. To transform this template-question into a substantive question with a clear meaning, we need to flesh out the template's free-will relatum, its determinism relatum, and give a precise value to relation R. There is, however, no uncontroversial way to do this. In addition to the standard difficulties raised by fixing the referent of 'free will', philosophers hold radically different views about what is-or should be-meant by 'determinism', Shabo ), and they identify relations which are as substantively different as correlation and causation when characterizing relation R. In practical terms, then, it may be best to think of the problem of determinism as a loose collection of disagreements about how to best spell out and answer the template-question, and how asking and answering such questions would help us to solve the problem of free will. (shrink)

"We wish this volume to be a sure companion to the study of free will, broadly construed to include action theory, moral and legal responsibility, and cohort studies feathering off into adjacent fields in the liberal arts and sciences. In addition to general coverage of the discipline, this volume attempts a more challenging and complementary accompaniment to many familiar narratives about free will. In order to map out some directions such accompaniment will take, in this introduction we anchor the thirty (...) contributions to this volume in some common history from which they arise, and attempt to indicate where future work in free will and moral responsibility will–and has already begun to–depart from that history." -Excerpt from Introduction. ... ... To read full introduction, (1) download attached file or (2) follow wiley_dot_com link below, click "Read An Excerpt", then click :Excerpt 3:(pdf)". (shrink)

Throughout his life, John Tyler Bonner contributed to major transformations in the fields of developmental and evolutionary biology. He pondered the evolution of complexity and the significance of randomness in evolution, and was instrumental in the formation of evolutionary developmental biology. His contributions were vast, ranging from highly technical scientific articles to numerous books written for a broad audience. This historical vignette gathers reflections by several prominent researchers on the greatness of John Bonner and the implications of his work.