Inherited disorders of ion‐channels are associated with paroxysmal dysfunction of excitable tissues and manifest as diseases of the brain, heart and skeletal muscle. These so‐called channelopathies have now been described for most of the major categories of voltage‐dependent ion‐channels including those selectively permeable to sodium. Sodium channelopathies affecting the heart and brain are reviewed in this essay. They show striking differences and similarities including, for example, their responsiveness to changes in body temperature and sleep state. They represent a paradigm for (...) efforts to trace disturbed behaviour of physiological systems back to its molecular origins and understanding their molecular basis may provide clues to important health issues such as cardiac side effects of drugs and response to medication used to treat epilepsy. BioEssays 25:981–993, 2003. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

The steep rise in small boat crossings across the English Channel is deeply worrying. Ever more lives are put at risk in making the 21-mile journey. Human trafficking gangs trade in human misery. The UK’s asylum system is put under additional strain and at ever higher cost to taxpayers. The public has lost trust in the Government to put this right. In order to address the problem, we must understand it and grasp its underlying causes. A key issue is that (...) the Government did not see the problem of small boat crossings as a consequence of its policy failures, most notably its failure to secure a post-Brexit returns arrangement with the EU. An effective plan to deal with small boat crossings is urgently needed to win back public confidence, to save lives, to improve our asylum system and help put illegal human traffickers out of business. This Report is an attempt to outline such a plan with over a dozen recommendations. (shrink)

In 1738, Jacques Vaucanson unveiled his masterpiece before the court of Louis XV: a gilded copper duck that ate, drank, quacked, flapped its wings, splashed about, and, most astonishing of all, digested its food and excreted the remains. The imitation of life by technology fascinated Vaucanson's contemporaries. Today our technology is more powerful, but our fascination is tempered with apprehension. Artificial intelligence and genetic engineering, to name just two areas, raise profoundly disturbing ethical issues that undermine our most fundamental beliefs (...) about what it means to be human. In The Vital Machine, David Channell examines the history of our relationship with technology and argues that, while the resolution of these issues may not be imminent, a philosophical framework for dealing with them is already in place. The source of our fears, he suggests, lies in an outmoded distinction between organic life and machines, a distinction rooted in the two world-views that have defined and guided Western civilization: the mechanical and the organic. The mechanical view holds that the universe is basically a machine--we can understand it by breaking it down into its smallest components. Even organisms are machines. The organic view claims that there is something more, some vital, directive force. The whole is more than just the sum of its parts. Even machines are organisms. Channell presents these polar views in a fascinating chronicle of human thought and achievement, ranging over the discoveries of Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, and Einstein, the philosophies of Plato, Descartes, Kant, and Marx, the fields of alchemy, physics, astrology, and biology. We see not only how the two views progressed independently, but also how they influenced each other, not only how they persisted, but also how they changed. Most fascinating of all, we follow the emergence of a third, all-embracing world view as developments in genetics, relativity, quantum mechanics, and computer intelligence force both science and philosophy to come to a more complex understanding of the universe. As a central metaphor for this third view Channell proposes "the vital machine." And in this stimulating work by the same name, he reveals how this new metaphor may provide us with the philosophical understanding we need to address the ethical issues our science has created. (shrink)

The challenges raised in this article are not with information theory per se, but the assumptions surrounding it. Neuroscience isn't sufficiently critical about the appropriate ‘receiver’ or ‘channel’, focuses on decoding ‘parts’, and often relies on a flawed ‘veridicality’ assumption. If these problematic assumptions were questioned, information theory could be better directed to help us understand how the brain works.

In recent work, Bengson, Cuneo, and Shafer‐Landau (2020) develop a new social version of moral intuitionism that promises to explain why our moral intuitions are trustworthy. In this paper, we raise several worries for their account and present some general challenges for the broader class of views we call Social Moral Intuitionism. We close by reflecting on Bengson, Cuneo, and Shafer‐Landau's comparison between what they call the “perceptual practice” and the “moral intuition practice”, which we take to raise some difficult (...) normative and meta‐normative questions for theorists of all stripes. (shrink)

The primary aim of this paper is to defend the Lockean View—the view that a belief is epistemically justified iff it is highly probable—against a new family of objections. According to these objections, broadly speaking, the Lockean View ought to be abandoned because it is incompatible with, or difficult to square with, our judgments surrounding certain legal cases. I distinguish and explore three different versions of these objections—The Conviction Argument, the Argument from Assertion and Practical Reasoning, and the Comparative Probabilities (...) Argument—but argue that none of them are successful. I also present some very general reasons for being pessimistic about the overall strategy of using legal considerations to evaluate epistemic theories; as we will see, there are good reasons to think that many of the considerations relevant to legal theorizing are ultimately irrelevant to epistemic theorizing. (shrink)

Teaching ethics in public health programmes is not routine everywhere – at least not in most schools of public health in the European region. Yet empirical evidence shows that schools of public health are more and more interested in the integration of ethics in their curricula, since public health professionals often have to face difficult ethical decisions.

The primary objective of this paper is to introduce a new epistemic paradox that puts pressure on the claim that justification is closed under multi premise deduction. The first part of the paper will consider two well-known paradoxes—the lottery and the preface paradox—and outline two popular strategies for solving the paradoxes without denying closure. The second part will introduce a new, structurally related, paradox that is immune to these closure-preserving solutions. I will call this paradox, The Paradox of the Pill. (...) Seeing that the prominent closure-preserving solutions do not apply to the new paradox, I will argue that it presents a much stronger case against the claim that justification is closed under deduction than its two predecessors. Besides presenting a more robust counterexample to closure, the new paradox also reveals that the strategies that were previously thought to get closure out of trouble are not sufficiently general to achieve this task as they fail to apply to similar closure-threatening paradoxes in the same vicinity. (shrink)

Recent years have seen the rise of a new family of non-probabilistic accounts of epistemic justification. According to these views—we may call them Normalcy Views—a belief in P is justified only if, given the evidence, there exists no normal world in which S falsely beliefs that P. This paper aims to raise some trouble for this new approach to justification by arguing that Normalcy Views, while initially attractive, give rise to problematic accounts of epistemic defeat. As we will see, on (...) Normalcy Views seemingly insignificant pieces of evidence turn out to have considerable defeating powers. This problem—I will call it the Easy-Defeat Problem—gives rise to a two-pronged challenge. First, it shows that the Normalcy View has counterintuitive implications and, second, it opens the door to an uncomfortable skeptical threat. (shrink)

One of the core doctrines of Mozi 墨子 is his teaching on jian'ai 兼愛, and this is discussed primarily in the three chapters bearing this term in their title.1 The term "jian'ai" and its theme also appear scattered throughout the Mozi, such as in chapters like "Standards and Rules" and the "Intention of Tian." Jian'ai has been translated into English as "Universal Love," "Inclusive Care," "Impartial Care," and other similar phrases. As these various translations suggest, there is not yet a (...) prevailing consensus on the exact meaning of jian'ai.2Despite his renowned clarity and simplicity and his skill at argumentation, those who try to pin down Mozi's teaching on jian'ai soon encounter difficulties. I think there are... (shrink)

This essay examines the role of virtue and the status of non-moral goods in conceptions of the good human life through an exploration of the thought of Confucius and Mencius. Both Confucius and Mencius lived in quite similar worlds, but their conceptualizations of the world differed from each another. This difference led them to hold different views on the role of virtue and the status of non-moral goods. On the one hand, Confucius highlighted the self-sufficiency of virtue, but he acknowledged (...) and appreciated the intrinsic and instrumental value of non-moral goods. On the other hand, while Mencius underscored the role of virtue as the best means to the best ends, he tried to depreciate the value of non-moral goods. As a consequence, even though their conceptions of the good life were essentially predicated on virtue, they parted company concerning the status of non-moral goods in human life. (shrink)

In his Parts of Animals, Aristotle distinguishes three modes of the necessary.However, it is not clear just what these three modes are.Nor is it clear how this passage fits with other texts where A...

This essay intends to criticize Hans-Georg Gadamer’s conception of language on the basis of which he justifies the proposition that learning is only possible through conversation. Although he understands as language non-verbal forms of communication such as gestures, physiognomic expressions, looks, Gadamer conceives language as word. However, I believe, and no one would deny it, language needs to be understood and, above all, learned. So here is the motivating problem of this essay: if language has to be understood as word, (...) how is it possible to learn it before mastering the word during childhood? To answer this problem, first, I clarify what I understand as philosophical conception of education. Then I demonstrate, in a broad examination of Gadamer’s essays written over five decades, the absence of a pre-predicative conception of language. Finally, I outline a pre-predicative conception of language by which I intend to show how it is possible to learn language before mastering the word. (shrink)

In ordinary discourse we often attribute beliefs not just to individuals but also to groups. But can groups really have genuine beliefs? This paper considers but ultimately rejects one of the main arguments in support of the claim that groups can be genuine believers – the Argument From Interpretationism – and concludes that we have good reasons to be sceptical about the existence of group beliefs. According to the Argument From Interpretationism, roughly speaking, groups qualify as genuine believers because we (...) can interpret their behaviour in much the same way that we can interpret the behaviour of individuals. While this argument may seem initially attractive, I argue that it is ultimately unsuccessful. In particular, I argue that the argument is unsuccessful even if one is generally sympathetic towards interpretationism. The reason for this, as we will see, is that a number of problems arise when we try to apply the interpretationist strategy – originally formulated with individual subjects in mind – to plural subjects or groups. In showing why the Argument From Interpretationism fails, the paper also brings into focus some more general constraints on the scope and applicability of interpretationism. (shrink)

This paper aims to construct a comprehensive theory of royal succession of Mencius. Basically, there are three distinct modes of royal succession described in the Mencius: abdication, hereditary succession, and revolution. Abdication involves the voluntary transfer of power by the incumbent ruler to a virtuous minister. Hereditary succession entails the transmission of power to the son of the incumbent ruler. Revolution marks the foundation of a new dynasty by deposing the incumbent ruler. What are their exact relationships? In contrast to (...) hereditary succession, which represents “rule by heredity,” abdication and revolution are often categorized together as “rule by virtue,” which became the backbone of the Confucian virtue politics. However, Mencius' writings, especially 5A5 and 5A6, suggest his clear intention to establish a coherent, or at least, compatible relationship between abdication and hereditary succession. This paper analyzes Mencius' discussions on royal succession to elucidate how he perceived the connection between abdication and hereditary succession, and to explore why he considered revolution as a separate category. In this study, I refer to the former as the “entrenched‐trust model” and distinguish the latter as “anticipated‐trust model.” The final section of the paper compares the three modes of royal succession in terms of the nature of the people's trust, the susceptibility of the people's approval, and the candidate's disinterest in power. (shrink)

The likelihood principle of Bayesian statistics implies that information about the stopping rule used to collect evidence does not enter into the statistical analysis. This consequence confers an apparent advantage on Bayesian statistics over frequentist statistics. In the present paper, I argue that information about the stopping rule is nevertheless of value for an assessment of the reliability of the experiment, which is a pre-experimental measure of how well a contemplated procedure is expected to discriminate between hypotheses. I show that, (...) when reliability assessments enter into inquiries, some stopping rules prescribing optional stopping are unacceptable to both Bayesians and frequentists. (shrink)

This paper responds to Love's Labor, Eva Feder Kittay's seminal contribution to feminist disability theory, arguing that Kittay's “nested obligations” approach creates a two-tiered system of justice in which care relationships built around private dependence and private obligation are figured as wholly prepolitical, to the detriment of both gender justice and disability justice. I suggest that centering the civic membership of the disabled person allows us to keep what is valuable in Kittay's contribution, namely her theorization of the nature of (...) care and its political significance, and her call for collective support of care relationships, while omitting the nesting of obligations and resituating care recipients and care workers as equal and interdependent. (shrink)

Medieval theologians discussed the logical structure of reduplicative propositions in the midst of their discussions of the Incarnation and the Trinity. Aquinas has the usual medieval analyzes of reduplicative propositions: the specificative and the strictly reduplicative. But neither analysis resolves successfully the problems of the consistency of the statements about God while avoiding making the Trinity or the Incarnation a merely accidental feature of Him. However, Scotus introduces another analysis: abstractive. I shall conclude that Scotus’s view of reduplication, one, if (...) not invented by him, as least stressed and developed by him, offers a better solution of the consistency of the Incarnation and the Trinity than that of Aquinas. (shrink)

Mozi’s 墨子 doctrine of impartial care has been interpreted predominantly through the lens of Mengzi 孟子, that is, as “love without distinctions” versus “love with distinctions.” However, I think Mengzi saw only half of the picture, as his focus was exclusively on the difference between Confucianism and Mohism in regard to the scope, intensity, and sequence of love. In this essay, I argue that Mozi’s impartial care is also characteristically different in kind from the Confucian notion of humaneness. My analysis (...) and comparison of their usage of the word ai 愛 shows that Mozi’s ai is material-oriented care, while the Confucian ai is emotion-oriented care. I further argue that Mozi had this particular understanding of care largely because he held a quite negative view of human emotions. For him, human emotions are unreliable and harmful for the practice of care. (shrink)

ABSTRACTOne significant feature of Jeong Yakyong’s丁若鏞 thought is his deconstruction of Zhu Xi’s 朱熹 moral universe based on li 理 and qi 氣. For Zhu Xi, the world in its entirety was a moral place, but Jeong Yakyong distinguished nonmoral domains from the moral domain. One question that follows in pursuing a comparison of their philosophies on this topic is what each thinker meant by ‘moral’ and, in particular, whether they meant the same thing. In this paper, I delve deeper (...) into this topic by comparing their respective perspectives on whether nonhuman animals are moral. Interestingly, they held exactly opposite views: Zhu Xi believed that certain actions on the part of nonhuman animals manifest moral values, whereas Jeong Yakyong claimed that none of the actions of nonhuman animals has moral value. In comparing their views, I introduce Mark Rowlands’ distinction between ‘moral subjects’ and ‘moral agents.’. (shrink)

Although he does not have an explicit theory of supposition as is found in the works of Latin medieval philosophers, Avicenna has two doctrines giving something equivalent: the threefold distinction of quiddity, corresponding to a division of simple, personal and material supposition, and his analyses of truth conditions for categorical propositions, where sentential context determines in part the reference of their terms. While he does address which individuals are being referred to by the universal terms used there, Avicenna concentrates more (...) on the varied temporal durations of the predications being made. In Western terms, he has incorporated ampliation and restriction into the theory of supposition itself. (shrink)