The World Health Organisation recently listed air pollution as the most significant threat to human health. Air pollution comprises particulate matter (PM), metals, black carbon and gases such as ozone (O3), nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and carbon monoxide (CO). In addition to respiratory and cardiovascular disease, PM exposure is linked with increased risk of neurodegeneration as well as neurodevelopmental impairments. Critically, studies suggest that PM crosses the placenta, making direct in utero exposure a reality. Rodent models reveal that neuroinflammation, neurotransmitter imbalance (...) and oxidative stress are triggered following gestational/early life exposure to PM, and may be exacerbated by concomitant mitochondrial dysfunction. Gestational PM exposure (potentiated by mitochondrial impairment in the metabolically active neonatal brain) not only impacts neurodevelopment but may sensitise the brain to subsequent cognitive impairment. Having reviewed this field, we conclude that strategies are urgently required to reduce exposure to PM during this sensitive developmental period. (shrink)

Rare copy number variants have a prominent role in the aetiology of schizophrenia and other neuropsychiatric disorders. Substantial risk for schizophrenia is conferred by large CNVs at several loci, including microdeletions at 1q21.1, 3q29, 15q13.3 and 22q11.2 and microduplication at 16p11.2. However, these CNVs collectively account for a small fraction of cases, and the relevant genes and neurobiological mechanisms are not well understood. Here we performed a large two-stage genome-wide scan of rare CNVs and report the significant association of copy (...) number gains at chromosome 7q36.3 with schizophrenia. Microduplications with variable breakpoints occurred within a 362-kilobase region and were detected in 29 of 8,290 patients versus 2 of 7,431 controls in the combined sample. All duplications overlapped or were located within 89 kilobases upstream of the vasoactive intestinal peptide receptor gene VIPR2. VIPR2 transcription and cyclic-AMP signalling were significantly increased in cultured lymphocytes from patients with microduplications of 7q36.3. These findings implicate altered vasoactive intestinal peptide signalling in the pathogenesis of schizophrenia and indicate the VPAC2 receptor as a potential target for the development of new antipsychotic drugs. © 2011 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Le projet ambitieux de David Morris dans ce nouvel ouvrage se mesure à l’élaboration des concepts qu’il met en œuvre pour comprendre la genèse du sens. Connu pour l’ouvrage The Sense of Space, paru en 2004, David Morris poursuit ici son investigation de la profondeur merleau-pontienne en direction de ce qu’il nomme la « temporalité profonde » (Deep Temporality). S’inscrivant dans une filiation merleau-pontienne comme l’atteste son titre, l’ouvrage n’en constitue pas pour autant un opuscule de...

Dans son introduction à la collection Moving Words. Writing Dance consacrée à une analyse des évolutions de la recherche anglophone des années 1990 sur la danse, Gay Morris souligne l’héritage d’une historiographie « anecdotique, sans théorisation, et avec un appareil critique très rudimentaire ». Carol Brown confirme que l’histoire de la danse est fondée essentiellement sur l’écriture des « balletomanes » qui ont idéalisé le corps de la danseuse comme une entité anhistorique. Rattachée à un...

Achieving an ambitious goal frequently requires succeeding in a sequence of intermediate tasks, some being critical for the final outcome, and others not. However, individuals are not always able to provide a level of effort sufficient to guarantee success in all such intermediate tasks. The ability to manage effort throughout the sequence of tasks is, therefore, critical when resources are limited. In this paper, we propose a criterion of importance that is person- and context-specific, as it is based on how (...) an individual should optimally allocate a limited stock of exhaustible efforts over tasks. We test this importance criterion in a laboratory experiment that reproduces the main features of a tennis match. We show that our importance criterion is able to predict the individuals’ performance and it outperforms the Morris-importance criterion that defines the importance of a point in terms of its impact on the probability of achieving the final outcome. (shrink)

Incoherence is usually regarded as a bad thing. Incoherence suggests irrationality, confusion, paradox. Incoherentism disagrees: incoherence is not always a bad thing, sometimes we ought to be incoherent. If correct, Incoherentism has important and controversial implications. It implies that rationality does not always require coherence. Dilemmism and Incoherentism both embrace conflict in epistemology. After identifying some important differences between these two ways of embracing conflict, I offer some reasons to prefer Incoherentism over Dilemmism. Namely, that Incoherentism allows us to deliberate (...) about what we ought to believe using ordinary epistemology, and it does a better job of accommodating the positive features of incoherence. (shrink)

We become ill in ways our parents and grandparents did not, with diseases unheard of and treatments undreamed of generations ago. This text tells the story of the modern experience of illness, linking ideas of illness, health, and postmodernism.

Science and the End of Ethics examines some of the most important positive and negative implications that science has for ethics. Addressing the negative implications first, author Stephen Morris discusses how contemporary science provides significant challenges to moral realism. One threat against moral realism comes from evolutionary theory, which suggests that our moral beliefs are unconnected to any facts that would make them true. Ironically, many of the same areas of science (e.g. evolutionary biology, neuroscience, psychology) that present difficulties (...) for moral realism point to a new ethical approach that focuses on achieving some of the key practical goals shared by ethicists. Chief among these is how to increase amicable behavior among people. (shrink)

In recent decades, a new scientific approach to understand, explain, and predict many features of religion has emerged. The cognitive science of religion has amassed research on the forces that shape the tendency for humans to be religious and on what forms belief takes. It suggests that religion, like language or music, naturally emerges in humans with tractable similarities. This new approach has profound implications for how we understand religion, including why it appears so easily, and why people are willing (...) to fight-and die for it. Yet it is not without its critics, and some fear that scholars are explaining the ineffable mystery of religion away, or by showing that religion is natural proves or disproves the existence of God. An Introduction to the Cognitive Science of Religion offers students and general readers an accessible introduction to the approach, providing an overview of key findings and the debates that shape it. The volume includes a glossary of key terms, and each chapter includes suggestions for further thought and further reading as well as chapter summaries highlighting key points. This book is an indispensable resource for introductory courses on religion and a much-needed option for advanced courses. (shrink)

Although the concept of HAPPINESS plays a central role in ethics, contemporary philosophers have generally given little attention to providing a robust account of what this concept entails. In a recent paper, Dan Haybron sets out to accomplish two main tasks: the first is to underscore the importance of conducting philosophical inquiry into the concept of HAPPINESS; the second is to defend a particular account of happiness—which he calls the ‘emotional state conception of happiness’—while pointing out weaknesses in the primary (...) competing accounts of happiness, including the hedonistic account. I argue against his claim that the emotional state conception of happiness is superior to the hedonistic conception of happiness. In the course of defending the hedonistic account of happiness against Haybron's attacks, I provide my own explanation for why the study of happiness is important to ethics. (shrink)

Eros and Illness explores the place of desire in illness. We urgently need such an exploration because illness is no longer simply a natural feature of the human condition. Most people fall ill, but illness now falls under the supervision of biomedicine, a science-based, state-regulated system dominated by the new molecular gaze. The use of a person's distinctive genetic data to guide treatment and to forestall disease--called "personalized medicine"-- reflects how the molecular gaze can produce valuable advances in biomedical healthcare. (...) What does this indispensable super-vision, however, tend to overlook? Eros and Illness proposes that biomedicine ignores, in clinical practice and in bench science, the powerful role of desire in illness. Desire, always double-edged, requires attention because it can do both great harm and great good. Patients, caregivers, family members, and physicians, as they recognize the role of desire, gain access to a power that can make the passage through illness much less onerous and far more healing: truly "personalized. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: The Problem of Induction: Hume's Problem The Regularity Theory of Causation Hume and Cognitive Science Hume and Naturalized Epistemology Hume as anti‐Metaphysician References Further Reading.

This work examines the concept of the "philosophical life" by looking at Socrates and his relationships to his interlocutors.

A who's who of Sartre scholars contribute to a collection of multidisciplinary perspectives from sociology, religion, and bioethics, on a hitherto neglected area of Sartre's philosophy.

This essay explores the problem of trust and truth in states of emergency. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s theory of biopolitics and his objections to political managerialism I argue that the real problem exposed by the pandemic was not a lack of trust in authority but an unscientific and uncritical attachment to expertise.

This chapter contains section titled: The ‘Essence’ of a Philosophical Prejudice One Philosophical Task or Two? Techniques for Ridding People of Philosophical Prejudices.

In this chapter, the author's unplanned venture into public philosophy began in the mid‐to‐late 1980s, just as Ronald Reagan was insisting that a certain famous wall be torn down. Various European thinkers and political philosophers in America, along with a few people working in the author's own tradition, like Robert Nozick and Peter Singer, had already begun to work in the nascent movement of “applied philosophy,” and in a public way. The author's early work in philosophy had been solidly within (...) the analytical tradition, with a special interest in religion, focused mainly on metaphysics and, secondarily, epistemological issues. Public philosophy can be rekindled in our time by any number of means and across a wide variety of topics. Many of the philosophers who had the biggest public impact in their own time and into our own have been good storytellers, and some have used the power of humor well. (shrink)

The original accounts of twenty-four experiments that created modern physics, retaining the original illustrations where possible.

Is logic normative for belief? A standard approach to answering this question has been to investigate bridge principles relating claims of logical consequence to norms for belief. Although the question is naturally an epistemic one, bridge principles have typically been investigated in isolation from epistemic debates over the correct norms for belief. In this paper we tackle the question of whether logic is normative for belief by proposing a Kripkean model theory accounting for the interaction between logical, doxastic, epistemic and (...) deontic notions and using this model theory to show which bridge principles are implied by epistemic norms that we have independent reason to accept, for example, the knowledge norm and the truth norm. We propose a preliminary theory of the interaction between logical, doxastic, epistemic and deontic notions that has among its commitments bridge principles expressing how logic is normative for belief. We also show how our framework suggests that logic is exceptionally normative. (shrink)

This work stresses the illogical manner in which mathematics has developed, the question of applied mathematics as against 'pure' mathematics, and the challenges to the consistency of mathematics' logical structure that have occurred in the twentieth century.

The Expanse does not provide an easy answer to the vexing question on making a decision when competing, but considering conflicts of values on the show can help us reason about tough choices in real life. Sometimes, scientific progress conflicts with the prudential value of self‐preservation. This chapter explains three ways of understanding value conflicts: as situations in which every option is forbidden, situations in which every option is permissible, or situations in which some options are obligatory and some options (...) are forbidden. The idea that all these different kinds of value can be traded with a common currency is tempting. But contra Keats, beauty is not truth; and it certainly is not goodness, as Tolstoy says. Epistemic, moral, prudential, and aesthetic values are very different. (shrink)

Believing Philosophy introduces Christians to philosophy and the tools it offers believers, helping them understand, articulate, and defend their faith in an age of unbelief.