The view of names that plantinga advances in "the nature of necessity" seems to have unacceptable consequences for names in propositional attitude contexts. In this paper, I argue that he is unsuccessful in his attempt to avoid these consequences.

Much progress has been made in recent years regarding the mechanisms of targeting of secretory proteins to, and across, the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) membrane. Many of the cellular components involved in mediating translocation across this bilayer have been identified and characterized. Polypeptide domains of secretory proteins, termed signal peptides, have been shown to be necessary, and in most cases sufficient, for entry of preproteins into the lumen of the ER. These NH2‐ terminal segments appear to serve multiple roles in targeting (...) and translocation. The structural features which mediate their multiple functions are currently the subject of intense study. (shrink)

This study was a preliminary exploration of the value changes taking place in the United States since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York, which was a significant emotional event or cultural upheaval. Rokeach told us that "a person's total value system may undergo change as a result of socialization, therapy, or cultural upheaval..." (Rokeach, The Nature of Human Values, 1973, p. 37). The researchers explored the value changes of 500 aviation industry employees (...) before the attack and 500 after the attack. The statistically significant research results showed a total of twenty-seven of thirty-six values changed. Before the attack respondents valued much higher self-esteem and self-actualization values like A Sense of Accomplishment and Self-Respect. After the attack respondents placed a much higher value importance on survival, safety and security values like A World at Peace, Freedom, Family Security, National Security, Mature Love, Salvation, and True Friendship. (shrink)

Objective: To assess the adequacy of the process of informed consent for surgical patients at the University Hospital of the West Indies. Method: The study is a prospective, cross-sectional, descriptive study. 210 patients at the University Hospital of the West Indies were interviewed using a standardised investigator-administered questionnaire, developed by the authors, after obtaining witnessed, informed consent for participation in the study. Data were analysed using SPSS V.12 for Windows. Results: Of the patients, 39.4% were male. Of the surgical procedures, (...) 68.6% were scheduled, 7.6% urgent and 23.8% emergency, 35.2% were minor and 64.8% major. Information imparted/received was acceptable in 40% of cases, good in 24% and inadequate (unacceptable) in 36% of cases. Almost all (97.6%) patients stated that they understood why an operation was planned and 93.3% thought that they had given informed consent. Most (95.2%) thought that they had free choice and made up their own mind. A quarter (25.2%) of all patients were told that it was mandatory for them to sign the form. There was a discussion of possible side effects and complications in 56.7% of patients. Conclusions: This study clearly indicates that surgical patients at the University Hospital of the West Indies feel that they have given informed consent. However, it also suggests that more information should be given to patients for consent to be truly informed. (shrink)

We are currently seeing a revival of interest in Aquinas's moral thought among Christian ethicists, both Protestant and Catholic. Although recent studies of his moral thought have touched on a number of topics, the majority of these have focused on his account of the virtues and their place in the Christian life. Probing the questions of the relation of virtue and law, the role of reason and will, and the place of the passions in Aquinas's moral theology, I will examine (...) recent studies by Diana Cates, Pamela Hall, Simon Harak, James Keenan, Daniel Nelson, Daniel Westberg, and Paul Waddell. In different ways these studies return us repeatedly to the vexed and unresolved question of the scope of human freedom. (shrink)

The juvenile hormones of insects regulate an unusually large diversity of processes during postembryonic development and adult reproduction. It is a long‐standing puzzle in insect developmental biology and physiology how one hormone can have such diverse effects. The search for molecular mechanisms of juvenile hormone action has been guided by classical models for hormone–receptor interaction. Yet, despite substantial effort, the search for a juvenile hormone receptor has been frustrating and has yielded limited results. We note here that a number of (...) lipid‐soluble signaling molecules in vertebrates, invertebrates and plants show curious similarities to the properties of juvenile hormones of insects. Until now, these signaling molecules have been thought of as uniquely evolved mechanisms that perform specialized regulatory functions in the taxon where they were discovered. We show that this array of lipid signaling molecules share interesting properties and suggest that they constitute a large set of signal control and transduction mechanisms that include, but range far beyond, the classical steroid hormone signaling mechanism. Juvenile hormone is the insect representative of this widespread and diverse system of lipid signaling molecules that regulate protein activity in a variety of ways. We propose a synthetic perspective for understanding juvenile hormone action in light of other lipid signaling systems and suggest that lipid activation of proteins has evolved to modulate existing signal activation and transduction mechanisms in animals and plants. Since small lipids can be inserted into many different pathways, lipid‐activated proteins have evolved to play a great diversity of roles in physiology and development. BioEssays 25:994–1001, 2003. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

The article argues that mainstream value-sensitive approaches to design have been based on narrow understandings of personhood and social dynamics, which are biased toward Western Educated Industrialized Rich and Democratic cultures and contradicted by empirical evidence. To respond to this weakness, the article suggests that design may benefit from focusing on user behaviours from the joint perspective of values and norms, especially across cultural contexts. As such, it proposes Norm Sensitive Design as a complement to value-sensitive approaches when designing and (...) implementing new technologies. Versus values, norms serve as more accurate predictors or descriptors of behaviours and can thus support value-sensitive approaches to realize the aspiration of informing user behaviour via design. The article makes two key contributions. On the theoretical side, it promotes the consideration of norms in design. On the practical side, it offers designers and instructors prompts for reflecting on design ethics from the perspective of norms. (shrink)

This volume of essays offers direct comparisons of historic Western and Buddhist perspectives on ethics and metaphysics, tracing parallels and contrasts all the way from Plato to the Stoics, Spinoza to Hume, and Schopenhauer through to contemporary ethicists such as Arne Naess, Charles Taylor and Derek Parfit. It compares and contrasts each Western philosopher with a particular strand in the Buddhist tradition, in some chapters represented by individual writers such as Nagarjuna, Vasubandhu, Santideva or Tsong Khapa. It does so in (...) light of both analytic concerns and themes from the existentialist and phenomenological traditions, and often in an ecumenical spirit that bridges both analytic and continentalist approaches. Some of the deepest questions in ethics, dealing with the scope of agency, value-laden notions of personhood and the nature of value in general, are intertwined with questions in metaphysics. One set of questions addresses how varying conceptions of selfhood relate to moral values ; another set of questions addresses how a conception of oneself or one’s selves should or should not affect how one thinks of happiness, or eudaimonia, or – in classical Indian terms – artha, sukha or nirvana. Western philosophy has featured discussion of both, but some would argue that certain traditions of Asian philosophy have offered a more sustained and even treatment of both sets of questions. The Buddhist tradition in particular has not only featured much discussion on both fronts, but has attracted many contemporary philosophers to its distinctive spectrum of approaches, and to what is – from many ‘Western’ points of view – a seemingly subversive analysis of ego, selfhood and personhood, whether in metaphysical, phenomenological or other incarnations. (shrink)

The central claim of this book is that, early and late, Wittgenstein modelled his approach to existential meaning on his account of linguistic meaning. A reading of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy sets up Bearn’s reading of the existential point of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Bearn argues that both books try to resolve our anxiety about the meaning of life by appeal to the deep, unutterable essence of the world. Bearn argues that as Wittgenstein’s and Nietzsche’s thought matured, they both separately came (...) to believe that the answer to our existential anxiety does not lie beneath the surfaces of our lives, but in our acceptance—Nietzsche’s “Yes”—of the groundless details of those surfaces themselves: the wonder of the ordinary. (shrink)

Repetition plays a significant, productive role in the work of both Derrida and Deleuze. But the difference between these two philosophers couldn''t be greater: it is the difference between negation and affirmation, between Yes and No. In Derrida, the productive energy of repetition derives from negation, from the necessary impossibility of supplementing an absence. Deleuze recognizes the kind of repetition which concerns Derrida, but insists that there is another, primary form of repetition which is fully positive and affirmative. I will (...) argue that there is nothing in Derrida''s philosophy to match the affirmative, primary form of repetition articulated by Deleuze. Moreover, it is precisely this difference that accounts for the most exciting features of Deleuze''s work: the possibility of breaking through to the other side of representation, beyond authenticity and inauthenticity, becoming-becoming. (shrink)

"No matter who you are or what you aim to achieve, power determines whether you succeed or fail. But while power dynamics permeate every interaction in the workplace, the concept is very poorly understood or managed in practice. Everyone has influence over some people and is under the influence of others, and must choose how to deal with these realities in daily interactions. This book offers a comprehensive and applied understanding of power in a professional scenario: where it comes from, (...) how it moves and what that means in practice for how professionals work together. Drawing on numerous recent case studies, this book offers a toolbox that anyone can apply, including explanations of the different forms of power, the two ways power can move between parties, the perils of power, how to create accountability, the intersection of power and ethics, and tools for maintaining power relationships with both superiors and subordinates. It provides employers and employees alike the means to understand, manage, and exert the power necessary to control their own circumstances."-Provided by publisher. (shrink)

The essay characterizes an anthropological impasse of political philosophy dividing those in a more liberal tradition from those in a more Hegelian tradition, and then it proceeds to sketch a political philosophy without any human or anthropological content. I rely on Foucault’s notion of parrhesia to activate such a political philosophy, and I rely on the philosophical life of the Cynic to make parrhesia possible. Finally by invoking exercises of ascent and of descent, I suggest that this kind of political (...) philosophy can not only solve the anthropological impasse of political philosophy, but also in practice, it can cool hateful passions and warm cold hearts. (shrink)

We present a formal, mathematical model of argument structure and evaluation, taking seriously the procedural and dialogical aspects of argumentation. The model applies proof standards to determine the acceptability of statements on an issue-by-issue basis. The model uses different types of premises (ordinary premises, assumptions and exceptions) and information about the dialectical status of statements (stated, questioned, accepted or rejected) to allow the burden of proof to be allocated to the proponent or the respondent, as appropriate, for each premise separately. (...) Our approach allows the burden of proof for a premise to be assigned to a different party than the one who has the burden of proving the conclusion of the argument, and also to change the burden of proof or applicable proof standard as the dialogue progresses from stage to stage. Useful for modeling legal dialogues, the burden of production and burden of persuasion can be handled separately, with a different responsible party and applicable proof standard for each. Carneades enables critical questions of argumentation schemes to be modeled as additional premises, using premise types to capture the varying effect on the burden of proof of different kinds of questions. (shrink)

In the nineteenth century, Henry Sidgwick struggled with the apparent paradox that utilitarians might only attain their goal if they renounced utilitarianism in practice; he also noticed a parallel problem that anticipated what has been called the ‘paradox of desire’ in Buddhist ethics – the paradox that desiring desirelessness is self-defeating. In fact, he regarded only the latter as a genuine paradox. I consider three approaches that might mitigate the problematicimplications for Buddhist ethics and certain forms of consequentialism. One approach (...) draws on recent defences of moral realism that find echoes in at least one Buddhist tradition. The other two draw on what I call the ‘comparative cartography of ethical concepts’; one is due to David Webster, who compares Western andPali-based Buddhist concepts, while the other offers an extension of his approach, comparing ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ ethical concepts, again mainly in the context of ancient Indian Buddhism. I argue that these latter two approaches offer promising defences of Buddhist ethics against objections based on the so-called ‘paradox of desire’. (shrink)

Deleuze's publications have attracted enormous attention, but scant attention has been paid to the existential relevance of Deleuze's writings. In the lineage of Nietzsche, Life Drawing develops a fully affirmative Deleuzean aesthetics of existence. For Foucault and Nehamas, the challenge of an aesthetics of existence is to make your life, in one way or another, a work of art. In contrast, Bearn argues that art is too narrow a concept to guide this kind of existential project. He turns instead to (...) the more generous notion of beauty, but he argues that the philosophical tradition has mostly misconceived beauty in terms of perfection. Heraclitus and Kant are well-known exceptions to this mistake, and Bearn suggests that because Heraclitean becoming is beyond conceptual characterization, it promises a sensualized experience akin to what Kant called free beauty. In this new aesthetics of existence, the challenge is to become beautiful by releasing a Deleuzean becoming: becoming becoming. Bearn's readings of philosophical texts--by Wittgenstein, Derrida, Plato, and others--will be of interest in their own right. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Effecting AffectionThe Corporeal Ethics of Gins and ArakawaGordon C. F. Bearn (bio)No one has yet determined what the body can do …—Spinoza, Ethics, 1677, Part III, proposition 2, ScholiumWhat could be the educational relevance of an architecture designed to make its inhabitants live forever? At first, it is hard to take seriously that Madeline Gins and Arakawa, in their work Architectural Body, are trying to escape mortality. Many are (...) those who smile and say that what they call "the architectural surrounds" that they have designed and built for what they call "organisms that person" are intriguing enough, but this idea of slipping death's grip… Really. They say. Hmmm. And they clear their throats. But is it really that unusual to think that what inspires philosophical thinking is death? And insofar as death has inspired philosophy, hasn't it inspired escape—and if not escape from death itself then at least escape from its terrors? Plato's Phaedo is an early instance of this, and Wittgenstein's Tractatus is a more recent one, no less explicit in its discussion of death. Gins and Arakawa are therefore part of a long and traditional line of philosophers who's thinking never quite loses sight of death. But why are philosophers concerned with death?The reason is simple. By and large, philosophers don't like it here. They would rather be somewhere else. And what don't they like about it here? Often, almost invariably, it is becoming that bothers them. Becoming. And they don't like becoming both for existential and metaphysical reasons. Existentially, "becoming" means change. Today's friends may betray you tomorrow, or the next day. And even if they don't, they will die. And be gone. You too. Soon enough. Dead. Existentially, change and becoming ruin everything we care about—people and projects. Metaphysically, "becoming" is a threat to the dream of understanding, the dream of forming a precise [End Page 40] picture of the world. I learned this from the opening pages of Deleuze's Logic of Sense. On top of the cake, beautifully marked in currants, are the words "EAT ME," and Alice did. She ate the cake and grew taller. And what, you may wonder, is the problem with that? It happens at children's parties every day, even after eating normal cake.Common sense assumes that at any moment Alice will be a certain height, and that as the moments pass her height will increase. But this is just as if we had taken an egg-slicer to her becoming taller, turning becoming into a succession of unchanging slices of being. This egg-sliced reality is good enough for ordinary work, and it is good enough, by means of the calculus, for science and for physics. But it is not good enough for metaphysics. If at a given moment Alice is really becoming taller, then at that moment, while she is becoming, she must paradoxically be both a definite height h, and also not h. If there is becoming, then the world cannot be completely conceptually represented. And if everything is becoming, then nothing can be conceptually represented. That is the metaphysical difficulty with becoming, and so philosophers run from becoming. They run both from death and from what is beyond representation.They tend to go in either of two directions. Up or down. Either up to eternity if you are drawn to the transcendent, or down to the rough ground, the earth, if you are drawn to the ordinary. In either case, the negation implicit in becoming, whether it is the negation of life or the negation of our dreams of conceptual representation, both of these negations are themselves negated. It is the old philosophical gambit: backing by double negation into an ersatz affirmation. Gins and Arakawa join neither of these two ways of escaping becoming. But first let us see why these two negations are disappointing.Take the way up first. This is famously the technique of Plato's Phaedo. Worried that your lover or your mother or you yourself is going to die, Plato's Socrates carves out room for the eternity of the form of human... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Possibility Of Puns: A Defense of DerridaGordon C. F. BearnHow is a pun possible?—J. Derrida 1Puns are not high on the philosophical horizon. 2 Wittgenstein, it is true, thought that the depth of grammatical jokes was the same as the depth of philosophy, but it is not unusual to smile politely at this remark, and move on. 3 Jokes, like puns, are philosophically puny. Or worse. The air (...) of crime clings to puns. In some contexts the use of a pun is enough to convict one of the fallacy of equivocation, and even where “simply” fun, we refuse to laugh. By groaning, we punish the punster. Apparently we take puns more seriously than we consistently insist.Puny or not, puns do exist, and any adequate account of linguistic communication should allow for the possibility of puns. Surprisingly enough, one natural way to account for this possibility brings us very close to a Derridean domain most philosophers of language make every effort to avoid. But with this result in hand, we may be better placed to understand the seriousness which by scoffing at puns we mask.Puns can be made, but more often they are found. We can find ourselves surprised, sometimes embarrassed, by puns we have inadvertently put into play while thinking about some other, more serious, linguistic business. These are the puns I want to consider: inadvertent puns. 4 How are they possible? It is easy to think that in ordinary cases of using a word, we intentionally or contextually invoke some one of that [End Page 330] word’s possible significances and put that significance into play in our sentence. Successful communication would then consist in successfully transmitting that significance—and only that significance—to the receiver of our communication. The possibility of inadvertent puns shows that more meanings of a word are in play than those we have intentionally put into play. The possibility of puns which are not only inadvertent but also inappropriately sexual shows, in addition, that more meanings of a word are in play than are contextually called for. Inadvertent puns draw our attention to the occasional powerlessness of either context or intention to narrow down the possible significances of our spoken or written words to one. What are we to make of these facts?At a minimum, the possibility of inadvertent puns shows that more meanings of our words can be in play than we normally suppose. We might want to say that only those meanings were in play which surfaced with the inadvertent pun itself. But is there any justification for drawing the line there? The only thing that makes the situation of the inadvertent pun different from the more usual one is that we noticed the intentionally and contextually surprising meanings. But the possibility of inadvertent puns is perfectly general, so the most straightforward account of the possibility of inadvertent puns is to say that all possible significances of a word are always in play whenever it is being used. The fact that we don’t normally notice this is no more remarkable than the fact that we don’t normally notice the size of people’s ears. Inadvertent puns draw our attention to what was there all along.Immediately smelling trouble, we might consider backpedalling: insisting that the only meanings invoked by an inadvertent pun were those intentionally invoked by the producer of the pun. But that would be to deny the existence of inadvertent puns altogether; it would be to insist that they were illusory, merely apparent, artifacts of the circumstances, not really real, at all. This is as unpalatable a suggestion as that according to which the spinach was only apparently good for playing spinach tennis, simply because the cook did not intend to produce projectiles. The cook’s intentions make these qualities of the spinach unintentional, but not unreal. So, pedalling forward once again: what are the consequences of saying that whenever we use a word all of its possible significances are in play?(a) We will have to reconceive our account of interpretation. When it is a question of providing an interpretation of a spoken or written text, this hermeneutical process... (shrink)

The Pleadings Game is a normative formalization and computational model of civil pleading, founded in Roberty Alexy''s discourse theory of legal argumentation. The consequences of arguments and counterarguments are modelled using Geffner and Pearl''s nonmonotonic logic,conditional entailment. Discourse in focussed using the concepts of issue and relevance. Conflicts between arguments can be resolved by arguing about the validity and priority of rules, at any level. The computational model is fully implemented and has been tested using examples from Article Nine of (...) the Uniform Commercial Code. (shrink)

During 2012 students enrolled in a Master’s management accounting unit were invited to complete a compulsory class quiz, which was arranged to include a mild form of deception allowing them an opportunity to cheat. Prior to the test students were coached concerning the importance of the ICMA code of ethical conduct, which formed the basis of the quiz. Following the test, students were made aware of the deception and asked to judge the propriety of their actions using a research instrument (...) based on moral intensity theory (Jones in The Academy of Management Review, 16(2), 366–395, 1991). Academic dishonesty, in its many forms is endemic in universities and in this study a significant number of students take advantage of an opportunity to maximise test scores and earn an advertised reward by cheating. Others adopted a virtuous position and opted not to use the information. As reported from an earlier investigation, Woodbine and Amirthalingam (2013) again demonstrate the effect of cognitive dissonance (Festinger 1957) although previously the research instrument did not clearly differentiate between respondent types. A logistic regression of subsequent data establishes that high achievers (in terms of their test scores) are more likely to take advantage of the disclosed information to maximise scores and that this is somewhat offset by aspects of their moral character. Immediately following the field experiment, students met to reflect on their actions. A summary of their responses is provided, which tends to support prior evidence that many are somewhat blasé in their attitude to this form of opportunistic behaviour. These findings have ramifications in terms of the way tertiary institutions emphasise academic excellence before moral development, while acting to manage the incidence of misbehaviour. (shrink)

Macphail’s comparative approach to intelligence focused on associative processes, an orientation inconsistent with more multifaceted lay and scientific understandings of the term. His ultimate emphasis on associative processes indicated few differences in intelligence among vertebrates. We explore options more attuned to common definitions by considering intelligence in terms of richness of representations of the world, the interconnectivity of those representations, the ability to flexibly change those connections, knowledge, and individual differences. We focus on marine mammals, represented by the amphibious pinnipeds (...) and the aquatic cetaceans and sirenians, as animals that transitioned from a terrestrial existence to an aquatic one, experiencing major changes in ecological pressures. They adapted with morphological transformations related to streamlining the body, physiological changes in respiration and thermoregulation, and sensory/perceptual changes, including echolocation capabilities and diminished olfaction in many cetaceans, both in-air and underwater visual focus, and enhanced senses of touch in pinnipeds and sirenians. Having a terrestrial foundation on which aquatic capacities were overlaid likely affected their cognitive abilities. Vocal and behavioral observational learning capabilities in the wild and in laboratory experiments suggest versatility in group coordination. Empirical reports on aspects of intelligent behavior like problem-solving, spatial learning, and concept learning by various species of cetaceans and pinnipeds, suggest rich cognitive abilities. The high energy demands of the brain suggest brain-intelligence relationships might be fruitful areas for the study when specific hypotheses are considered, e.g., brain mapping indicates hypertrophy of specific sensory areas in marine mammals. Modern neuroimaging techniques provide ways to study neural connectivity, and the patterns of connections between sensory, motor, and other cortical regions provide a biological framework for exploring how animals represent and flexibly use information in navigating and learning about their environment. At this stage of marine mammal research, it would still be prudent to follow Macphail’s caution that it is premature to make strong comparative statements without more empirical evidence, but an approach that includes learning more about how animals flexibly link information across multiple representations could be a productive way of comparing species by allowing them to use their specific strengths within comparative tasks. (shrink)

This essay argues for a convergence between, on the one side, Foucault’s characterization of the care of the self as a way of overcoming the traps of anthropological sleep, and on the other side, Deleuze’s characterization of initiating becomings as a way of fleeing the traps of organization, a line of flight, becoming becoming. This convergence is defended on the basis of a Bergsonian ontology of becoming, and in particular, Bergson’s opposition to what he calls the retrograde motion of truth. (...) One result of this convergence is that a Wittgensteinian approach to the sense of life floats to the surface. A kind of mysticism. (shrink)

No one has yet determined what the body can do …What could be the educational relevance of an architecture designed to make its inhabitants live forever? At first, it is hard to take seriously that Madeline Gins and Arakawa, in their work Architectural Body, are trying to escape mortality. Many are those who smile and say that what they call "the architectural surrounds" that they have designed and built for what they call "organisms that person" are intriguing enough, but this (...) idea of slipping death's grip… Really. They say. Hmmm. And they clear their throats. But is it really that unusual to think that what inspires philosophical thinking is death? And insofar as death has inspired philosophy, hasn't it inspired .. (shrink)