Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories and (...) On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action. (shrink)

The Health Protection Agency has recently attempted to create a postmortem tissue archive to determine the prevalence of abnormal prion protein. The success of this archive was prevented because the Health Protection Agency could not convince coroners to support the study’s methodology and participate on that basis. The findings of this paper detail and support the view that the Coroners’ Society of England and Wales’s refusal to participate was misguided and failed to appreciate that coroners have a moral obligation to (...) protect public health. Measures to assist coroners in fulfilling this role are proposed. (shrink)

For a variety of reasons, including the common use of deception in psychology experiments, participants often disbelieve experimenters' assertions about important task parameters. This can lead researchers to conclude incorrectly that participants are behaving non- normatively. The problem can be overcome by deriving and testing normative models that do not assume full belief in key task parameters. A real experimental example is discussed.

Two structures are said to be equimorphic if each embeds in the other. Such structures cannot be expected to be isomorphic, and in this paper we investigate the special case of linear orders, here also called chains. In particular we provide structure results for chains having less than continuum many isomorphism classes of equimorphic chains. We deduce as a corollary that any chain has either a single isomorphism class of equimorphic chains or infinitely many.

Dossier: L’humilité Présentation du dossier. Coordonné par Elisa Grimi. Essays and contributors: L’intelligence de l’humilité, Carla Canullo; La virtù dell’umiltà e l’eudemonismo, Mario Micheletti; Humility – A work of love?, Katharine Opalka; L’humilité intellectuelle, la foi et l’épistémologie, Roger Pouivet; L’irriducibile ragionevolezza di un paradosso. L’umiltà secondo Tommaso d’Aquino e Gilbert K. Chesterton, Marco Salvioli, O.P.; L’Humilité, une ontologie de l’identité, Elisa Grimi.

We present here a direct elementary construction of continuous utility functions on perfectly separable totally preordered sets that does not make use of the well-known Debreu’s open gap lemma. This new construction leans on the concept of a separating countable decreasing scale. Starting from a perfectly separable totally ordered structure, we give an explicit construction of a separating countable decreasing scale, from which we show how to get a continuous utility map.

The larval arms of echinoid plutei are used for locomotion and feeding. They are composed of internal calcite skeletal rods covered by an ectoderm layer bearing a ciliary band. Skeletogenesis includes an autonomous molecular differentiation program in primary mesenchyme cells (PMCs), initiated when PMCs leave the vegetal plate for the blastocoel, and a patterning of the differentiated skeletal units that requires molecular cues from the overlaying ectoderm. The arms represent a larval feature that arose in the echinoid lineage during the (...) Paleozoic and offers a subject for the study of gene co-option in the evolution of novel larval features. We isolated new molecular markers in two closely related but differently developing species, Heliocidaris tuberculata and Heliocidaris erythrogramma. We report the expression of a larval arm-associated ectoderm gene tetraspanin, as well as two new PMC markers, advillin and carbonic anhydrase. Tetraspanin localizes to the animal half of blastula stage H. tuberculata and then undergoes a restriction into the putative oral ectoderm and future location of the postoral arms, where it continues to be expressed at the leading edge of both the postoral and anterolateral arms. In H. erythrogramma, its expression initiates in the animal half of blastulae and expands over the entire ectoderm from gastrulation onward. Advillin and carbonic anhydrase are upregulated in the PMCs postgastrulation and localized to the leading edge of the growing larval arms of H. tuberculata but do not exhibit coordinated expression in H. erythrogramma larvae. The tight spatiotemporal regulation of these genes in H. tuberculata along with other ontogenetic and phylogenetic evidence suggest that pluteus arms are novel larval organs, distinguishable from the processes of skeletogenesis per se. The dissociation of expression control in H. erythrogramma suggest that coordinate gene expression in H. tuberculata evolved as part of the evolution of pluteus arms, and is not required for larval or adult development. (shrink)

Deficits in social cognition and more specifically in communication have an important impact on the real-life functioning of people with schizophrenia. In particular, patients have severe problems in communicative-pragmatics, for example, in correctly inferring the speaker’s communicative intention in everyday conversational interactions. This limit is associated with morphological and functional alteration of the left middle temporal gyrus, a cerebral area involved in various communicative processes, in particular in the distinction of ironic communicative intention from sincere and deceitful ones. We performed (...) an fMRI study on 20 patients with SZ and 20 matched healthy controls while performing a pragmatic task testing the comprehension of sincere, deceitful, and ironic communicative intentions. We considered the L-MTG as the region of interest. SZ patients showed difficulties in the correct comprehension of all types of communicative intentions and, when correctly answering to the task, they exhibited a higher activation of the L-MTG, as compared to HC, under all experimental conditions. This greater involvement of the L-MTG in the group of patients could depend on different factors, such as the increasing inferential effort required in correctly understanding the speaker’s communicative intentions, and the higher integrative semantic processes involved in sentence processing. Future studies with a larger sample size and functional connectivity analysis are needed to study deeper the specific role of the L-MTG in pragmatic processes in SZ, also in relation to other brain areas. (shrink)