Medical students newly arrived on the wards encounter frustrating ethical predicaments that are complicated by students' place in the hospital hierarchy. A careful scrutiny of medical social structure and culture may enable medical schools to offer their students a more effective ethics education.

The disciplinary differentiation of sciences attracted Leibniz’s attention for a long period of time. From nowadays prospects it looks very well grounded as soon as in Leibniz’s manuscripts a modern scholar finds clue ideas of any research field which would tempt him to consider Leibniz as one of the founders of this particular discipline. We argue that this is possible only in retrospection and would significantly distort the essence of Leibniz’s epistemology. Our approach implies, in contrary, the investigation of the (...) Leibniz doctrine of signs on the background of the related philosophical problem, that of expression. The choice of semiotics is justified by the fact that it took a central place in his theoretical constructions, both those of natural sciences and of philosophy. In Leibniz system of knowledge the concept of notes (notae) and sings (signa) served a theoretical foundation of his most important and long-life aspiration to build up practical science of universal characteristics (characteristica universalis). In his eyes this practical science was the science of sciences (Scientia scientiarum), and we can consider it as the matrix for all possible scientific knowledge. (shrink)

Pelczar and Rainsbury advance a theory of proper names which purports, inter alia, to implement Kripke’s causal theory of name reference in order to explain reference change. The key tool for accomplishing this is the notion of a dubbing-in-force. In this paper I aim to show that this special appeal to dubbings does not sustain any real advance over Kripke’s account at least with respect to the problem of inadvertent referential shift. I argue that this theory has not offered any (...) theory of reference transmission, which I take as a precondition for explaining the problem of reference change, and that the notion of a dubbing-in-force is unnecessary for name reference. (shrink)

Proper conduct of an AIDS vaccine trial in Africa must be informed not only by the epidemiology and biology of HIV infection in African settings, but also by the ethical norms and cultural constraints prevailing in African settings.

The paper demonstrates how Heidegger constructed his notion of an action without ends, or the ineffectual, through his early readings of Aristotle. Heidegger initially aligns the ineffectual with the notion of phronesis in Nicomachean Ethics, and later develops it further in Division 2 of Being and Time. The paper examines some of the implications of the conception of an action without ends. It shows that in fact the notion is absent from Aristotle and it is inconsistent. Finally, the paper briefly (...) explores the profound influence that the ineffectual has had on what came to be called in the United States ‘continental philosophy’. (shrink)

Mass drug screening offers a deceptively simple solution to the problem of drug use among workers. Even a very effective test is subject to error. In any given group of tested individuals, some will unavoidably be falsely accused. Even though scientific tests appear to provide efficient solutions to social and legal problems, these tests should not be accepted unless they also meet our standards for fair dealing.

Through a radical new reading of the Theological Political Treatise, Dimitris Vardoulakis argues that the major source of Spinoza’s materialism is the Epicurean tradition that re-emerges in modernity when manuscripts by Epicurus and Lucretius are rediscovered. This reconsideration of Spinoza’s political project, set within a historical context, lays the ground for an alternative genealogy of materialism. Central to this new reading of Spinoza are the theory of practical judgment (understood as the calculation of utility) and its implications for a theory (...) of democracy that is resolutely positioned against authority. (shrink)

In the expanding repertoire of practices designed to increase the supply of organs for transplantation, non-heart-beating cadaver organ donation has generated an ongoing debate in the literature. The continuing stream of articles is disquieting in part because it documents a troubling "trial-and-error ethics" approach to the formulation of organ procurement policy, and because it raises serious questions about the reasons that the development of this policy is being mediated by published communication. In the light of concerns about the implicit support (...) and credibility that professional publications give to organ procurement policies, restraint in publishing articles about non-heart-beating organ donation as well as in devising such policies is strongly advocated. (shrink)

We describe a neural monitor of environmental and physiological resources that informs effort expenditure. Depending on resources and environmental stability, serotonergic and dopaminergic neuromodulations favor different behavioral controls that are organized in corticostriatal loops. This broader perspective produces some suggestions and questions that may not be covered by the foraging approach to vigor of Shadmehr and Ahmed (2020).

In this article, moving from being to becoming, we construe the ‘self’ as a dynamic process rather than as a static entity. To this end we draw on dialectics and Bayesian accounts of cognition. The former allows us to holistically consider the ‘self’ as the interplay between internalization and externalization and the latter to operationalize our suggestion formally. Internalization is considered here as the co-construction of bodily hierarchical models of the world and the organism, while externalization is taken as the (...) collective transformation of the world. We do not consider these processes as sequentially linked, but rather as a dialectic between the collective and the individual. This leads us to the suggestion of the self as a historical product of dialectical attunement across multiple time scales, from species evolution and culture to individual development and everyday learning. Subsequently, we describe concrete means for empirically testing our proposal in the form of two-person psychophysiology and multi-level analyses of intersubjectivity. Taken together, we suggest that a fine-grained analysis of social interaction might allow us to reconsider the ‘self’ beyond the static individual, i.e. how it emerges and manifests itself in social relations. Such an approach, we believe, could be relevant in multiple fields, from ethics and psychiatry to pedagogy and artificial intelligence. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

abstract: I argue that Merleau-Ponty's reading of Hegel's account of experience exerts a significant and hitherto overlooked influence on his attempt to recast Phénoménologie de la perception 's account of intentionality. This reading informs two important claims of his later projects: that intentional relations are more fundamental than their relata, and that a metaphysical condition irreducible to consciousness or object constitutes the structure of intentionality. I argue that these positions inform key tenets of reversibility, and that a revisionary interpretation of (...) Hegel's absolute offers Merleau-Ponty a model for the principle that individuates the basic conditions of experience. In addition to demonstrating that he was a more assiduous reader of Hegel than many commentators assume, and highlighting some overlooked debts to Hegel, these results show that Merleau-Ponty's later thought inherits significant idealist commitments, which should motivate us to reconsider its standing within post-Kantian philosophical currents. (shrink)

Debate on the nature of representation in cognitive systems tends to oscillate between robustly realist views and various anti‐realist options. I defend an alternative view, deflationary realism, which sees cognitive representation as an offshoot of the extended application to cognitive systems of an explanatory model whose primary domain is public representation use. This extended application, justified by a common explanatory target, embodies idealisations, partial mismatches between model and reality. By seeing representation as part of an idealised model, deflationary realism avoids (...) the problems with robust realist views, while keeping allegiance to realism. (shrink)

Activating Transcription Factor-2 is a sequence-specific DNA-binding protein that belongs to the bZIP family of proteins and plays diverse roles in the mammalian cells. In response to stress stimuli, it activates a variety of gene targets including cyclin A, cyclin D and c-jun, which are involved in oncogenesis in various tissue types. ATF-2 expression has been correlated with maintenance of a cancer cell phenotype. However, other studies demonstrate an antiproliferative or apoptotic role for ATF-2. In this review, we summarize the (...) signaling pathways that activate ATF-2, as well as its downstream targets. We examine the role of ATF-2 in carcinogenesis with respect to other bZIP proteins, using data from studies in human cancer cell lines, human tumours and mouse models, and we propose a potential model for its function in carcinogenesis, as well as a theoretical basis for its utility in anticancer drug design. (shrink)

Through close study of Avicenna's statements and major works, Dimitri Gutas traces Avicenna's own sense of his place in the Aristotelian tradition and the history of philosophy in Islam, and provides an introduction to reading his philosophical works by delineating the approach most consistent with Avicenna's intention and purpose in philosophy. The second edition of this foundational work, which has quickened fruitful research into the philosopher in the last quarter century, is completely revised and updated, and adds a new (...) final chapter summarizing Avicenna's philosophical project. It is also enlarged with the addition of a new appendix which offers a critical inventory of Avicenna's authentic works, updating the work of Mahdavi (1954) with additional information on all manuscripts and important editions and translations. Its usefulness enhanced, the book provides primary orientation to Avicenna's philosophy and works and constitutes an indispensable research tool for their study. (shrink)

We characterize Morita equivalence of theories in the sense of Johnstone in terms of a new syntactic notion of a common definitional extension developed by Barrett and Halvorson for cartesian, regular, coherent, geometric and first-order theories. This provides a purely syntactic characterization of the relation between two theories that have equivalent categories of models naturally in any Grothendieck topos.

British capitalism has from the very beginning entertained an ambivalent relationship with the process of European unification. But that ambivalence has gone through different stages and since the outbreak of the financial crisis in 2008 a new, conflictual, stage in that relationship began. This is the essential backdrop against which the Brexit referendum should be understood and its consequences evaluated.

This paper proposes a methodological synthesis in order to study multimodal media discourse and argumentation in the context of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in Greece. It follows the framework of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, integrating this with argumentation studies, with a particular emphasis on the analysis of inference. Our data come from the Greek newspapers Kathimerini and Ta Nea. We contend that the proposed methodological synergy enables scrutiny of (a) racist conceptualizations cultivated by the representation of migrants and refugees in (...) headlines and photographs in newspaper articles along with (b) the argumentative potential that is implicitly sustained in these multimodal representations. (shrink)

In this article, moving from being to becoming, we construe the ‘self’ as a dynamic process rather than as a static entity. To this end we draw on dialectics and Bayesian accounts of cognition. The former allows us to holistically consider the ‘self’ as the interplay between internalization and externalization and the latter to operationalize our suggestion formally. Internalization is considered here as the co-construction of bodily hierarchical models of the world and the organism, while externalization is taken as the (...) collective transformation of the world. We do not consider these processes as sequentially linked, but rather as a dialectic between the collective and the individual. This leads us to the suggestion of the self as a historical product of dialectical attunement across multiple time scales, from species evolution and culture to individual development and everyday learning. Subsequently, we describe concrete means for empirically testing our proposal in the form of two-person psychophysiology and multi-level analyses of intersubjectivity. Taken together, we suggest that a fine-grained analysis of social interaction might allow us to reconsider the ‘self’ beyond the static individual, i.e. how it emerges and manifests itself in social relations. Such an approach, we believe, could be relevant in multiple fields, from ethics and psychiatry to pedagogy and artificial intelligence. (shrink)

Economics has become a monolithic science, variously described as formalistic and autistic with neoclassical orthodoxy reigning supreme. So argue Dimitris Milonakis and Ben Fine in this new major work of critical recollection. The authors show how economics was once rich, diverse, multidimensional and pluralistic, and unravel the processes that lead to orthodoxy’s current predicament. The book details how political economy became economics through the desocialisation and the dehistoricisation of the dismal science, accompanied by the separation of economics from the other (...) social sciences, especially economic history and sociology. It is argued that recent attempts from within economics to address the social and the historical have failed to acknowledge long standing debates amongst economists, historians and other social scientists. This has resulted in an impoverished historical and social content within mainstream economics. The book ranges over the shifting role of the historical and the social in economic theory, the shifting boundaries between the economic and the non-economic, all within a methodological context. Schools of thought and individuals, that have been neglected or marginalised, are treated in full, including classical political economy and Marx, the German and British historical schools, American institutionalism, Weber and Schumpeter and their programme of Socialökonomik, and the Austrian school. At the same time, developments within the mainstream tradition from marginalism through Marshall and Keynes to general equilibrium theory are also scrutinised, and the clashes between the various camps from the famous Methodenstreit to the fierce debates of the 1930s and beyond brought to the fore. The prime rationale underpinning this account drawn from the past is to put the case for political economy back on the agenda. This is done by treating economics as a social science once again, rather than as a positive science, as has been the inclination since the time of Jevons and Walras. It involves transcending the boundaries of the social sciences, but in a particular way that is in exactly the opposite direction now being taken by "economics imperialism". Drawing on the rich traditions of the past, the reintroduction and full incorporation of the social and the historical into the main corpus of political economy will be possible in the future. (shrink)

In this article, I study the concept of brahman—the exhaustive formulation of truth about the world—in the early Upaniṣads. Based on close reading of two stories appearing in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka, the Kauṣītaki and the Chāndogya Upaniṣads, I reconstruct two competing theories about brahman, namely the “theory of puruṣa ” and the “theory of ātman.” While the theory of puruṣa refers to the creation of human and divine beings as a result of duplication of the anthropomorphic form of the universe, the (...) theory of ātman traces the phenomenal reality in its various forms to the inner, formless self “made of consciousness” capable of creating and projecting forms out of itself. These two theories are discussed in the dialogue between Gārgya Bālāki and Ajātaśatru, the king of Kāśi appearing in two versions in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka and the Kauṣītaki Upaniṣads. Bālāki’s theory of puruṣa is further revised and modified in the light of Ajātaśatru’s criticism in the story from the Chāndogya Upaniṣads, in which the god Prajāpati teaches Indra and Virocana about the self. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉLe mot «migrants» n'existait pas dans la langue des Hellènes; ils étaient plus familiers avec le vocable de l'exil et de l'asile. D'ailleurs, l'exil ne saurait se penser sans son corollaire, l'asile, comme le citoyen antique sans le barbare et la démocratie sans la tyrannie. À travers une métaphore située au carrefour de la fiction historique, de la philosophie politique et de la psychanalyse, cet article propose une réflexion sur l'exil comme condition fondamentale du sujet. L'exil est d'origine, car la (...) langue de l'enfance, la langue dite maternelle est d'abord une langue étrangère. L'exil intime porte la marque d'une universalité qui fonde l'expérience subjective.ABSTRACTThe word ‘migrants’ did not exist in the language of the Hellenes; they were more familiar with the terms ‘exile’ and ‘political asylum.’ Indeed, exile cannot be thought of without its corollary, political asylum, as the Ancient citizen cannot be thought of without the barbarian, and democracy without tyranny. Through a metaphor located at the crossroads of historical fiction, political philosophy and psychoanalysis, this article offers a reflection on exile as a fundamental condition of the subject. Exile is originary because the language of childhood, the so-called mother tongue, is originally a foreign language. Intimate exile bears the mark of a universality that founds subjective experience. (shrink)

L'A. mette in parallelo quattro fonti interrelate della tradizione narrativa relativa al passaggio delle conoscenze filosofiche e mediche da Alessandria a Baghdad. I testi esaminati, presentati in traduzione inglese, sono di Alfarabi , dello storico al-Masudi , del medico ibn-Ridwan del Cairo e del medico ibn-Gumay . Le origini della tradizione testuale sono individuate in un canone di insegnamenti ippocratici e galenici originatosi ad Alessandria poco prima della conquista araba, e comprendente i cosiddetti Summaria alexandrinorum. L'A. si sofferma inoltre sulla (...) propaganda anticristiana connessa a tali testi e sugli insegnamenti di logica e filosofia aristotelica, con particolare riferimento alla redazione di Alfarabi. Una bibliografia chiude il saggio. (shrink)

The rhetoric of the social model of disability is presented, and its basic claims are critiqued. Proponents of the social model use the distinction between impairment and disability to reduce disabilities to a single social dimension—social oppression. They downplay the role of biological and mental conditions in the lives of disabled people. Consequences of denying biological and mental realities involving disabilities are discussed. People will benefit most by recognizing both the biological and the social dimensions of disabilities.

Brenner's ‘The Economics of Global Turbulence’ has induced a flood of responses, the vast majority of them critical, especially on grounds of method and theory. Tony Smith1 is an exception in seeking to defend Brenner, mostly by pushing his arguments further and by attacking his critics, including ourselves. In part, Smith interprets Brenner and credits him with positions that he can either defend for himself or, as we suspect, reject. Our concern in this reply is not to address issues through (...) the prism of Brenner but to assess Smith's own contribution critically on its own terms and merits. (shrink)

The irreducibility thesis -- The facticity of practices -- Constructing practice theory through double hermeneutics -- The trans-subjectivity of social practices -- The dialogical self as thrown projection in practices -- Epilogue -- Bibliography -- Index.

Dans cet article, je reviens sur l’héritage laissé par Karl Marx dans la pensée de Michel Foucault. Organisant l’analyse autour de quelques « oppositions » conceptuelles cruciales – accumulation et discipline, reproduction et biopouvoir, régime de vérité et idéologie, révolution et ascèse –, je tente de mettre au point quatre grands schèmes relationnels susceptibles d’éclairer leurs rapports : la complémentarité, la confrontation productive, le rejet, et la réconciliation. L’objectif de cette analyse est de proposer une alternative à un nombre croissant (...) d’interprétations conservatrices de Foucault en montrant que d’autres grilles de compréhension de son œuvre sont possibles, tout en essayant de mettre en lumière ce que cette lecture « minoritaire » pourrait amener en termes de stratégie et de luttes politiques. (shrink)

Extreme self-sacrifice in the context of phenomena, such as sports hooliganism, combines aspects of local and extended fusion. How can we best account for such phenomena in the light of the theory presented here, and how can we make a tangible distinction between the two types? I propose ways to explore and operationalize this distinction and the concept of fusion more generally.

Dimitris Vardoulakis asks how it is possible to think of a politics that is not commensurate with sovereignty. For such a politics, he argues, sovereignty is defined not in terms of the exception but as the different ways in which violence is justified. Vardoulakis shows how it is possible to deconstruct the various justifications of violence. Such dejustifications can take place only by presupposing an other to sovereignty, which Vardoulakis identifies with agonistic democracy. In doing so, Sovereignty and Its Other (...) puts forward both a novel critique of sovereignty and an original philosophical theory of democratic practice. (shrink)

This chapter reconstructs Dufrenne’s phenomenological interpretation of the aesthetic attitude. I argue that Dufrenne develops a fecund alternative to competing formulations, advances an innovative proposal for how artworks are perceived on their own terms, and undercuts the claim that a reliance on the subject-object frame- work in aesthetics entails a commitment to ‘subjectivism.’ On Dufrenne’s view, the aesthetic attitude is an intentional stance toward a special category of perceived object, which is defined by a ‘purposive’ mode of appearance. Whereas aesthetic (...) attitude theorists argue that a subjective ability to attend disinterestedly to objects is a sufficient condition for aesthetic experience, Dufrenne locates decisive condi- tions for aesthetic experience in the object-term. This innovative approach develops a novel take on the aesthetic attitude, blunts the edge of aesthetic anti-subjectivist arguments, advances an original interpretation of Kant’s relevance for phenomeno- logical aesthetics, and offers a plausible philosophical account of art’s objectivity and world-disclosive power. (shrink)

K. Marx’s 200th jubilee coincides with the celebration of the 85 years from the first publication of his “Mathematical Manuscripts” in 1933. Its editor, Sofia Alexandrovna Yanovskaya (1896–1966), was a renowned Soviet mathematician, whose significant studies on the foundations of mathematics and mathematical logic, as well as on the history and philosophy of mathematics are unduly neglected nowadays. Yanovskaya, as a militant Marxist, was actively engaged in the ideological confrontation with idealism and its influence on modern mathematics and their interpretation. (...) Concomitantly, she was one of the pioneers of mathematical logic in the Soviet Union, in an era of fierce disputes on its compatibility with Marxist philosophy. Yanovskaya managed to embrace in an originally Marxist spirit the contemporary level of logico-philosophical research of her time. Due to her highly esteemed status within Soviet academia, she became one of the most significant pillars for the culmination of modern mathematics in the Soviet Union. In this paper, I attempt to trace the influence of the complex socio-cultural context of the first decades of the Soviet Union on Yanovskaya’s work. Among the several issues I discuss, her encounter with L. Wittgenstein is striking. (shrink)

I examine a major objection to the mechanistic view of concrete computation, stemming from an apparent tension between the abstract nature of computational explanation and the tenets of the mechanistic framework: while computational explanation is medium-independent, the mechanistic framework insists on the importance of providing some degree of structural detail about the systems target of the explanation. I show that a common reply to the objection, i.e. that mechanistic explanation of computational systems involves only weak structural constraints, is not enough (...) to save the standard mechanistic view of computation—it trivialises the appeal to mechanism, and thus makes the account collapse into a purely functional view. I claim, however, that the objection can be put to rest once the account is appropriately amended: computational individuation is indeed functional, while mechanistic explanation plays a role in accounting for computational implementation. Since individuation and implementation are crucial elements in a satisfying account of computation in physical systems, mechanism keeps its central importance in the theory of concrete computation. Finally, I argue that my version of the mechanistic view helps to provide a convincing reply to a powerful objection against non-semantic theories of concrete computation: the argument from the multiplicity of computations. (shrink)