CpG islands (CGIs) are regions enriched in the dinucleotide CpG; they constitute the promoter of about 60% of mammalian genes. In cancer cells, some promoter‐associated CGIs become heavily methylated on cytosines, and the corresponding genes undergo stable transcriptional silencing. Hypermethylated CGIs attract methyl‐CpG‐binding proteins (MBPs), which have been shown to recruit chromatin modifiers and cause transcriptional repression. These observations have led to the prevalent model that methyl‐CpG‐binding proteins are promoter‐proximal transcriptional repressors. Recent discoveries challenge this idea and raise a number (...) of questions. Here we discuss the following issues: what are other possible roles for the known MBPs? Why are these proteins not essential in mammals? Are there other MBPs left to discover? Could CpG methylation be nonessential? (shrink)

Spiritualism designates a philosophy that lays claim to the separation of mind and body and the ontological and epistemological primacy of the former. In France, it is associated with the names of Victor Cousin and René Descartes, or more precisely with what Cousin made of Descartes as the founding father of a brittle rational psychology, closed off from the positive sciences, and as a critic in respect to the empiricist legacy of the idéologues. Moreover, by considering merely the end result, (...) severed from its polemical genesis, we are prevented from understanding how the category of experience constituted a crucial question for spiritualism itself. Through returning to the origin of these discussions in the 1826 preface to Cousin’s Fragments philosophiques, this essay pursues a threefold path: to show that the public birth of Cousinian spiritualism coincides with the affirmation of applying the experimental method, issuing from Bacon, to the study of facts of consciousness; that Cousin’s later evolution follows a process of radicalization—that is, in this context, of ontologization and of reduction; and that by recovering this genesis, we can distinguish many forms of spiritualisms committed to the experimental method, both in alliance with the early Cousin and against the later Cousin. In this way, we can rediscover the interwoven philosophical links, lost in the process of institutionalization, between metaphysical demands and empiricist concerns, or between “French” philosophy and the legacy of Condillac. (shrink)

In this volume, John Bacon argues that it is difficult to deny the existence of particularized properties and relations, which in modern philosophy are sometimes called `tropes'. In so doing, he advances a powerful and sophisticated metaphysical theory according to which both ordinary particulars and properties and relations are bundles of tropes.

Francis Bacon, lawyer, statesman, and philosopher, remains one of the most effectual thinkers in European intellectual history. We can trace his influence from Kant in the 1700s to Darwin a century later. The Advancement of Learning , first published in 1605, contains an unprecedented and thorough systematization of the whole range of human knowledge. Bacon’s argument that the sciences should move away from divine philosophy and embrace empirical observation would forever change the way philosophers and natural scientists interpret (...) their world. (shrink)

Les recompositions familiales touchent l’ensemble des liens familiaux et des liens intergénérationnels. Or, si l’on observe, tant sur le plan juridique que dans les pratiques des familles conjugales, une acception plus complexe et plus riche de la parentalité, les grands-parents restent souvent méconnus. Comment construisent-ils leurs rapports à leurs « beaux-petits-enfants »? Nous avons examiné la littérature et interrogé des « belles-grands-mères » pour tenter d’y voir plus clair. Quelles représentations le champ social offre-t-il des beaux-grands-parents? Et quelles sont concrètement (...) les conditions et les étapes qui rendent possible une identité « beau-grand-parentale »? (shrink)

Vagueness is the study of concepts that admit borderline cases. The epistemology of vagueness concerns attitudes we should have towards propositions we know to be borderline. On this basis Andrew Bacon develops a new theory of vagueness in which vagueness is fundamentally a property of propositions, explicated in terms of its role in thought.

2015 Reprint of 1960 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition. Not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. The "Novum Organum," full original title "Novum Organum Scientiarum" or 'new instrument of science', is a Bacon's landmark work scientific method. First published in 1620, the title is a reference to Aristotle's work "Organon," which was his treatise on logic and syllogism. Bacon outlines a new system of logic he believes to be superior to the old ways of syllogism. This is (...) now known as the Baconian method.For Bacon, finding the essence of a thing was a simple process of reduction, and the use of inductive reasoning. In finding the cause of a 'phenomenal nature' such as heat, one must list all of the situations where heat is found. Then another list should be drawn up, listing situations that are similar to those of the first list except for the lack of heat. A third table lists situations where heat can vary. The 'form nature', or cause, of heat must be that which is common to all instances in the first table, is lacking from all instances of the second table and varies by degree in instances of the third table. Bacon's work was instrumental in the historical development of the scientific method. Includes Bacon's Essay on "Great Instauration," and "Preparative Toward a Material and Experimental History.". (shrink)

This is the first critical edition since the nineteenth century of Bacon's principal philosophical work in English, The Twoo Bookes of Francis Bacon. Of the proficience and advancement of Learning, divine and humane - traditionally known as The Advancement of Learning.

Mise en rapport de trois écrivains français qu'apparemment tout sépare mais dont les questions récurrentes - Dieu, le néant, le livre, l'histoire- se retrouvent en chacun d'eux.

Si la philosophie du droit a une très longue histoire, le bouleversement des conditions techniques, économiques, sociales et politiques nous impose aujourd'hui de renouveler en profondeur le traitement des questions qu'elle pose traditionnellement ainsi que les réponses qui y sont données. La définition de la justice, le partage des biens et des charges de la vie en société, les rôles respectifs de l'État, du marché et de la société civile, la mission des juges et l'application des lois, ou encore le (...) contenu et l'importance des droits de l'homme, doivent être réexaminés dans une perspective instruite par l'éclairage historique, mais résolument tournée vers les problèmes du présent et les choix qui engagent l'avenir. C'est dans une telle optique qu'a été conçu cet ouvrage. (shrink)

Nietzsche once proclaimed himself the 'Buddha of Europe', and throughout his life Buddhism held enormous interest for him. While he followed Buddhist thinking in demolishing what he regarded as the two-headed delusion of Being and Self, he saw himself as advocating a response to the ensuing nihilist crisis that was diametrically opposed to that of his Indian counterpart. In this book Antoine Panaïoti explores the deep and complex relations between Nietzsche's views and Buddhist philosophy. He discusses the psychological models (...) and theories which underlie their supposedly opposing ethics of 'great health' and explodes the apparent dichotomy between Nietzsche's Dionysian life-affirmation and Buddhist life-negation, arguing for a novel, hybrid response to the challenge of formulating a tenable post-nihilist ethics. His book will interest students and scholars of Nietzsche's philosophy, Buddhist thought and the metaphysical, existential and ethical issues that emerge with the demise of theism. (shrink)

A number of `no-proposition' approaches to the liar paradox find themselves implicitly committed to a moderate disquotational principle: the principle that if an utterance of the sentence `$P$' says anything at all, it says that $P$ (with suitable restrictions). I show that this principle alone is responsible for the revenge paradoxes that plague this view. I instead propose a view in which there are several closely related language-world relations playing the `semantic expressing' role, none of which is more central to (...) semantic theorizing than any other. I use this thesis about language and the negative result about disquotation to motivate the view that people do say things with utterances of paradoxical sentences, although they do not say the proposition you'd always expect, as articulated with a disquotational principle. (shrink)

Assembly of minimal genomes revealed many genes encoding unknown functions. Three overlooked functional categories account for some of them. Cells are prone to make errors and age. As a first key function, discrimination between proper and changed entities is indispensable. Discrimination requires management of information, an authentic, yet abstract, cur- rency of reality. For example proteins age, sometimes very fast. The cell must identify, then get rid of old proteins without destroying young ones. Implementing discrimination in cells leads to the (...) second set of functions, usually ignored. Being abstract, information must nevertheless be embodied into material entities, with unavoidable idiosyncratic properties. This brings about novel unmet needs. Hence, the buildup of cells elicits specific but awkward material implementations, ‘kludges’ that become essential under particular settings, while difficult to identify. Finally, a third functional category char- acterizes the need for growth, with metabolic implementations allowing the cell to put together the growth of its cytoplasm, membranes, and genome, spanning different spatial dimensions. Solving this metabolic quandary, critical for engineering novel synthetic biology chassis, uncovered an unexpected role for CTP synthetase as the coordinator of nonhomothetic growth. Because a significant number of SynBio constructs aim at creating cell factories we expect that they will be attacked by viruses (it is not by chance that the function of the CRISPR system was identified in industrial settings). Substantiating the role of CTP, natural selection has dealt with this hurdle via synthesis of the antimetabolite 30-deoxy-30,40-didehydro- CTP, recruited for antiviral immunity in all domains of life. (shrink)

This volume belongs to the first new critical edition of the works of Francis Bacon (1561-1626) to have been produced since the nineteenth century. The edition presents the works in broadly chronological order and according to the best principles of modern textual scholarship. The seven works in the present volume belong to the final completed stages (Parts III-V) of Bacon's hugely ambitious six-part sequence of philosophical works, collectively entitled Instauratio magna (1620-6). All are presented in the original Latin (...) with new facing-page translations. Three of the seven texts (substantial works in two cases, and all sharing a startlingly improbable textual history) are published and translated here for the first time: these are an early version of the Historia densi, the 'lost' Abecedarium, and the Historia de animato & inanimato. Another--the Prodromi sive anticipationes philosphiae secundae--has likewise never been translated before. Together with their commentaries and the introduction they open the way to important new understandings of Bacon's mature philosophical thought. (shrink)

Theories of knowledge as credit for true belief, or as cognitive achievement, have to face the following objection: in the famous Barn façades case, it seems that the truth of Barney's belief that he is in front of a barn is to be explained by the correct functioning of his cognitive capacities, although we are reluctant to say that he knows he is in front of a barn. Duncan Pritchard concludes from this that a safety clause, irreducible to the conditions (...) a true belief must satisfy in order to be credited to the believer, constitutes a necessary condition of knowledge. Because those who define knowledge as a cognitive achievement have not convincingly answered this objection, I intend, in the first section of this paper, to refute it by showing how practical and doxastic achievements differ. Then I defend the idea that we should also distinguish two kinds of environmental epistemic luck, and, correlatively, two kinds of safety, that are not equally incompatible with knowledge. Finally, I argue that this distinction is inevitably vague and I indicate some consequences of this vagueness for our knowledge‐intuitions. (shrink)

La présente étude rassemble les passages de l’Ab Vrbe condita de Tite-Live où un terme lié au rire est associé à un discours ou à une parole rapportée, afin de les confronter aux vues exprimées par Cicéron et Quintilien sur le rire en contexte rhétorique. Si tous les passages étudiés s’insèrent très bien dans la conception rhétorique du rire, l’historien latin s’appuie sur celle-ci pour offrir une répartition originale entre usages acceptables et formes abusives du rire qui participe à la (...) construction des portraits personnages et de l’œuvre. (shrink)

My main aim in this paper is to contribute to the elucidation of the nature of non-religious faith. I start by summarising several well-known arguments that belief is neither necessary nor sufficient for faith. I then try to identify the nature of the positive cognitive attitude towards p that is involved in having faith that p. After dismissing some candidates for the role, I explore the idea that faith and hope are similar attitudes. On this basis, I then advance a (...) new characterisation of faith. Finally, I turn to the question of the rationality of faith. I argue that faith is intrinsically irrational because it is an intrinsically incoherent propositional attitude, but that there is nonetheless a sense in which faith is neither intrinsically epistemically irrational nor intrinsically practically irrational. (shrink)

My main intention in this article is to settle the question whether having the ability to \ is, as Ryleans think, necessary for knowing how to \, and to determine the kind of role played by procedural knowledge in knowing how to \ and in acquiring and possessing the ability to \. I shall argue, in a seemingly anti-Rylean fashion, that when it comes to know-hows that are ordinarily categorised as physical skills, or—to be, for the moment, philosophically neutral—as enabling (...) one to possess such skills, it is necessary to have procedural knowledge of how to \ in order to possess those know-hows. However, I shall contend that this knowledge cannot be acquired without acquiring the kind of ability to \ in which having the skill to \ consists. And that having acquired the ability to \ is not only necessary but also sufficient for having acquired procedural knowledge of how to succeed in \-ing. (shrink)

To fulfill their crucial duty of relieving suffering in their patients, physicians may have to administer palliative sedation when they implement treatment-limitation decisions such as the withdrawal of life-supporting interventions in patients with poor prognosis chronic severe brain injury. The issue of palliative sedation deserves particular attention in adults with serious brain injuries and in neonates with severe and irreversible brain lesions, who are unable to express pain or to state their wishes. In France, treatment limitation decisions for these patients (...) are left to the physicians. Treatment-limitation decisions are made collegially, based on the presence of irreversible brain lesions responsible for chronic severe disorders of consciousness. Before these decisions are implemented, they are communicated to the relatives. Because the presence and severity of pain cannot be assessed in these patients, palliative analgesia and/or sedation should be administered. However, palliative sedation is a complex strategy that requires safeguards to prevent a drift toward hastening death or performing covert euthanasia. In addition to the law on patients' rights at the end of life passed in France on April 22, 2005, a recent revision of Article 37 of the French code of medical ethics both acknowledges that treatment-limitation decisions and palliative sedation may be required in patients with severe brain injuries and provides legal and ethical safeguards against a shift towards euthanasia. This legislation may hold value as a model for other countries where euthanasia is illegal and for countries such as Belgium and Netherlands where euthanasia is legal but not allowed in patients incapable of asking for euthanasia but in whom a treatment limitation decision has been made. (shrink)

Deux décennies après les premières vagues de démocratisation en Afrique, le temps n'est-il pas venu d'instruire le " procès " de la démocratie ?

The epistemology of models has to face a conundrum: models are often described as highly idealised, and yet they are considered to be vehicles for scientific explanations. Truth-oriented—veritist—conceptions of explanation seem thereby undermined by this contradiction. In this article, I will show how this apparent paradox can be avoided by appealing to the notion of fiction. If fictionalism is often thought to lead to various flavours of instrumentalism, thereby weakening the veritist hopes, the fiction view of models offers a framework (...) much richer than it seems at first sight. To do so, I will call upon the concepts of modality, counterfactual structure and credible worlds. In the end, veritism of explanation and fiction can indeed go hand in hand, but the scope of explanations we can hope to draw from models must be more precisely delineated. (shrink)

The reception of René Girard’s work in France deserves book-length treatment to fully describe the heated debates, conflicting expectations, and controversy that it inspired before its lasting importance was eventually recognized. We must keep in mind that, although he lived in the US and became a citizen in 1956, he always kept his sights on his native land. He watched the transformations of French thought from the other side of the ocean; he forged his own writing strategies in response to (...) French thought; and it was within the context of French debates that he chose to formulate, through the conjoined hypotheses concerning mimetic desire, the scapegoat, and Judeo-Christian writing, the founding event of his... (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in (...) the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

In this paper the logic of broad necessity is explored. Definitions of what it means for one modality to be broader than another are formulated, and it is proven, in the context of higher-order logic, that there is a broadest necessity, settling one of the central questions of this investigation. It is shown, moreover, that it is possible to give a reductive analysis of this necessity in extensional language. This relates more generally to a conjecture that it is not possible (...) to define intensional connectives from extensional notions. This conjecture is formulated precisely in higher-order logic, and concrete cases in which it fails are examined. The paper ends with a discussion of the logic of broad necessity. It is shown that the logic of broad necessity is a normal modal logic between S4 and Triv, and that it is consistent with a natural axiomatic system of higher-order logic that it is exactly S4. Some philosophical reasons to think that the logic of broad necessity does not include the S5 principle are given. (shrink)

We are naturally inclined to judge that it is better to know that p than to merely truly believe that p. How to account for this intuition? In this paper, I examine Williamson, Goldman and Olsson, and Pritchard's answers, and agree with Pritchard that it cannot be consistently claimed that knowledge is epistemically superior to mere true belief, and that truth is the only finally valuable epistemic good. Contrary to Pritchard, I argue that the latter claim is deeply mistaken. I (...) do so by showing that mere true beliefs have no epistemic value at all. I sketch the consequences of this point concerning the epistemic value of knowledge, and answer some objections to the thesis that mere true beliefs do not possess epistemic value. (shrink)

When one tries to determine what the iconic dimension of thought consists in for Peirce and what its range is, one might have the impression that his remarks on this matter are inconsistent. For instance, on the one hand he writes the following: Remember it is by icons only that we really reason, and abstract statements are valueless in reasoning except so far as they aid us to construct diagrams. The sectaries of the opinion I am combating seem, on the (...) contrary, to suppose that reasoning is performed with abstract "judgments," and that an icon is of use only as enabling me to frame abstract statements as premisses. In an apparently similar fashion, Peirce argues that the predicate of a... (shrink)

Benoit Delbecq reflects upon the conditions under which his creative activity, as a pianist, a composer and an improviser, has to take place within the French context. Status of the copyrights, contribution of public funding, new modes of distribution, ambiguous irruptions of the show business mega-machine, fictions of freedom generated within the creative moment, polymorphous collective structures: this concrete work of knitting a new autonomous artistic network sheds light, beyond the microcosm of jazz, on the production of sociality in (...) today’s France. (shrink)

In the present article I attribute to the common topic in the Rhetoric a two-fold suggestive function and a guarantee function. These three functions are possible because this type of topic, while often quite abstract, nevertheless contains thought-steering, substantial terms, and formulates a generally empirical or normative endoxon. Assuming that according to Aristotle an enthymeme has at least two premises, it would appear that a common topic is the abstract principle behind the often implicit major premise. This means that the (...) topic may be regarded as the – generalizing – if-then statement in a modern argumentation scheme. Therefore it should be possible to see the enthymemes of Rhetoric 2.23 as a combination of a logical argument form (which can usually be reconstructed as modus ponens) and an argumentation scheme – even though we may not attribute this idea to Aristotle himself. (shrink)

This paper argues that the theory of structured propositions is not undermined by the Russell-Myhill paradox. I develop a theory of structured propositions in which the Russell-Myhill paradox doesn't arise: the theory does not involve ramification or compromises to the underlying logic, but rather rejects common assumptions, encoded in the notation of the $\lambda$-calculus, about what properties and relations can be built. I argue that the structuralist had independent reasons to reject these underlying assumptions. The theory is given both a (...) diagrammatic representation, and a logical representation in a novel language. In the latter half of the paper I turn to some technical questions concerning the treatment of quantification, and demonstrate various equivalences between the diagrammatic and logical representations, and a fragment of the $\lambda$-calculus. (shrink)

Charles S. Peirce holds some views about science and inquiry whose exact significance and ratio essendi are notoriously hard to grasp. One of these is particularly intriguing, namely, his frequently inferring from the intuitive ideas that science consists “in diligent inquiry into truth for truth’s sake”, and that the greatest threat to science is to “block the way of inquiry”, the conclusions that “belief […] has no place in science” and that the “scientific man”, when inquiring, has only “provisional” opinions. (...) In this article, I examine the ground and validity of the infamous and, arguably, strongly counterintuitive thesis that “belief has... (shrink)