Metamorphosis in frogs is a critical developmental process through which a tadpole changes into an adult froglet. Metamorphic changes include external morphological transformations as well as important changes in the wiring of sensory organs and central nervous system. This review aims to provide an overview on the events that occur in the visual system of metamorphosing amphibians and to discuss recent studies that provide new insight into the molecular mechanisms that control changes in the retinal growth pattern as well as (...) the formation of new axonal pathways in the central nervous system. BioEssays 23:319–326, 2001. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

The doctrine of divine simplicity, the doctrine that God has no physical or metaphysical complexity whatsoever, is not a doctrine designed to induce immediate philosophical acquiescence. There are severe questions about its coherence. And even if those questions can be answered satisfactorily in favour of the doctrine, there remains the question why anyone should accept it. Thomas V. Morris raises both sorts of questions about a version of the doctrine which I have put forward. In the following pages I shall (...) respond to what I take to be the most serious of Morris's objections. I shall argue that the doctrine survives Morris's onslaught, but that one observation of his points it in a direction I had hitherto not taken seriously. The bulk of Morris's paper raises questions of the first sort; perforce the bulk of my paper will also. I shall offer, at the end, a reason for thinking that neither of us is yet in a position to pronounce categorically on the second question. My remarks in this paper constitute an interim report on how I think things presently stand with divine simplicity. (shrink)

Hutto and Myin claim that teleosemantics cannot account for mental content. In their view, teleosemantics accounts for a poorer kind of relation between cognitive states and the world but lacks the theoretical tools to account for a richer kind. We show that their objection imposes two criteria on theories of content: a truth-evaluable criterion and an intensionality criterion. For the objection to go through, teleosemantics must be subject to both these criteria and must fail to satisfy them. We argue that (...) teleosemantics meets the truth-evaluable criterion and is not required to meet the intensionality criterion. We conclude that Hutto and Myin’s objection fails. (shrink)

The free energy principle is notoriously difficult to understand. In this paper, we relate the principle to a framework that philosophers of biology are familiar with: Ruth Millikan’s teleosemantics. We argue that: systems that minimise free energy are systems with a proper function; and Karl Friston’s notion of implicit modelling can be understood in terms of Millikan’s notion of mapping relations. Our analysis reveals some surprising formal similarities between the two frameworks, and suggests interesting lines of future research. We hope (...) this will aid further philosophical evaluation of the free energy principle. (shrink)

The Relevance View, exemplified by Alex Voorhoeve's Aggregate Relevant Claims, has considerable appeal. It accommodates our reluctance to aggregate weak claims in canonical cases like Life for Headaches, while permitting aggregation of claims in a range of other cases. But it has been the target of significant criticism. In an important recent paper, Patrick Tomlin argues that the view suffers from failures of internal logic, violating plausible consistency constraints and generating incoherent combinations of verdicts on cases. And in cases resembling (...) real-world healthcare allocation problems, Tomlin argues that the view offers no guidance at all. In response, I argue that the internal logic of the Relevance View is sound, and the view's core principles, suitably clarified, support a significant extension of the view beyond the simple cases to which it is typically applied. (shrink)

This essay is written in two parts. The first is a commentary on the affective politics of philosophy as a discipline. The theme here is philosophy’s reverence problem, an affective bond to the teacher and the text, which is threatened or even injured by feminist philosophy. Feminist philosophy emerges as disruptive irreverence in the midst of the discipline, and injured reverence becomes a powerful prereflective motivation for resistance to feminist thought. The second part of the essay is an exploration of (...) the field of inquiry called feminist phenomenology. Is feminist phenomenology simply phenomenology from another point of view, that of the embodied female subject? Is it conducted, in other words, in a space beyond politics and power where the difference of this subject discloses values and meanings that have not yet been thematized in phenomenological inquiry, but which phenomenology is already competent to pursue? Or does feminist phenomenology disrupt or transform phenomenological practice as we traditionally understand it? In this paper, I claim that phenomenology must be critical in order to be feminist, that it must disrupt phenomenological practice rather than simply “applying” it to a new object, “woman.” In the work of Simone de Beauvoir we find a different phenomenological practice that feminists can count as a positive inheritance. The real difference of feminist phenomenology, however, only emerges in the practice itself. In order to capture something about this difference I take the phenomenon of shame as a case study, and compare three recent phenomenological accounts of shame. (shrink)

In cases where the claims of different groups of people compete, the Relevance View occupies a middle ground between aggregation and nonaggregation. It allows weaker claims to aggregate to outweigh a stronger claim just when the competing claims, compared pairwise, are sufficiently close in strength. The view has strong intuitive appeal when applied to simple binary choices, but I argue that attempts to extend it to nonbinary choices have been unsuccessful. I propose a new extension of the Relevance View to (...) nonbinary choices based on a “binary contrastive” account of the moral reasons that obtain in the cases of interest. (shrink)

Prominent views about representation share a premise: that mathematical communication theory is blind to representational content. Here I challenge that premise by rejecting two common misconceptions: that Claude Shannon said that the meanings of signals are irrelevant for communication theory (he didn't and they aren't), and that since correlational measures can't distinguish representations from natural signs, communication theory can't distinguish them either (the premise is true but the conclusion is false; no valid argument can link them).

Rhetorical Structure Theory has enjoyed continuous attention since its origins in the 1980s. It has been applied, compared to other approaches, and also criticized in a number of areas in discourse analysis, theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics. In this article, we review some of the discussions about the theory itself, especially addressing issues of the reliability of analyses and psychological validity, together with a discussion of the nature of text relations. We also propose areas for further research. A follow-up (...) article will discuss applications of the theory in various fields. (shrink)

Normal.dotm 0 0 1 66 378 Thorbjoern Mann Consulting 3 1 464 12.256 0 false 18 pt 18 pt 0 0 false false false Normal.dotm 0 0 1 80 459 Thorbjoern Mann Consulting 3 1 563 12.256 0 false 18 pt 18 pt 0 0 false false false Arguments commonly used in discussions about design, planning, policy-making issues have not been adequately analyzed in the literature. The structure of such ‘planning arguments’ is discussed. Based on the conceptual framework (...) of the ‘argumentative model of planning’ proposed by H. Rittel, an approach for their systematic and transparent evaluation by discourse participants is presented. Procedural implications for its application in the planning process are discussed, and the potential for information technology support for such processes explored. (shrink)

This excellent book is a revision of Kretzmann’s Wilde Lectures in Comparative and Natural Religion delivered at Oxford in 1994. As the subtitle suggests, the book is a study of book 1 of Aquinas’s Summa contra gentiles. Kretzmann envisions the book as the first in a trilogy on SCG, with one volume devoted to each of SCG’s first three books.

This article examines the regulation of Latina youth sexualities in the context of sexual and reproductive health care provision. In-depth interviews with health care providers working in two Latino-serving community health centers are analyzed for how they interpret and respond to the sexual and reproductive practices of their low-income Latina teen patients. The author finds that providers emphasize teenage pregnancy as a social problem among this population to the exclusion of other dimensions of youth sexualities and encourage Latina girls’ adherence (...) to a life course trajectory that conforms to middle-class, heteronormative ideals as a solution to this problem. By relying on such understandings, providers construct meanings of sexual citizenship that require participation in bourgeois heteronormativity. These findings suggest that Latino-serving community health centers, their providers, and their teen patients could benefit from questioning the assumptions that inform providers’ appraisals of Latina youth and developing a more inclusive approach to Latina youth sexualities beyond a discourse of pregnancy prevention. Such efforts could allow community health centers to actively participate in disrupting the structural inequalities that shape their young patients’ lives. (shrink)

Many philosophers take the point of Plato's Euthyphro to be an indictment of attempts to ground morality in religion, specifically in the attitudes of a deity or deities. It has been argued cogently in recent essays that Plato's case is far from conclusive. This essay suggests instead that the Euthyphro can be read more narrowly as raising critical questions about a specific religious virtue, Piety. Then it presents the ingredients of a reply to those questions. The reply proceeds by suggesting (...) that one need not accept the standards of definition used by Plato, and that one can provide an explanation of what Piety is by embedding Piety in a more comprehensive picture of the human, the divine, and the relations between the two. The picture makes use of a doctrine of divine sovereignty and a doctrine concerning love between God and humans. (shrink)

The doctrine of mens rea can be expressed in this way: MRP: If A is culpable for performing phi, then A performs phi intentionally in circumstances in which it is impermissible to perform phi. The Sermon on the Mount suggests the following principle: SMP: If A intends to perform phi in circumstances in which it would be impermissible for A to perform phi, then A’s intending to perform phi makes A as culpable as A would be were A to perform (...) phi. MRP and SMP are principles representative of intentionalism, a family of views that emphasizes the importance of intention to judgments about culpability. This essay examines an intentionalist’s defense of MRP with respect to lying, strict criminal liability, and the distinction between intention and foreseeability, along with a defense of SMP with respect to failed attempts, and self-defense. (shrink)

(2002). Therapeutic Beneficence and Patient Recruitment in Randomized Controlled Clinical Trials. The American Journal of Bioethics: Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 35-36.

IFG logic is a variant of the independence-friendly logic of Hintikka and Sandu. We answer the question: “Which IFG-formulas are equivalent to ordinary first-order formulas?” We use the answer to prove the ordinary cylindric set algebra over a structure can be embedded into a reduct of the IFG-cylindric set algebra over the structure.

Williams’s well-known critique of the ‘moralism’ of liberal political philosophy—its disconnect from political reality—holds special significance for the theory and practice of constitutional adjudication, where calls for ‘realism’ increasingly resound. Is constitutional discourse also guilty of moralism—as Williams himself thought—or might it succeed where political philosophy has failed? This paper reconstructs Williams’s critique of political moralism as one that decries the empty idealism of the philosophical project of abstraction: the quest for general, timeless, and universal principles drains theory of its (...) prescriptive force. It then argues that legal-constitutional reasoning, even in its most ambitious ‘forum of principle’ conception, is not a flight to abstraction but precisely a pragmatist negotiation of the concreteness-abstraction tension through acts of justification. But constitutional discourse in its current form remains moralistic in another distinct sense: it idealizes the political, thereby failing to account for the social and political pressures on courts and the proper normative significance of institutional considerations. Constitutional discourse could only offer a solution to the ailments of political philosophy if it cures its own chronic idealization. (shrink)

This essay examines Marcin Tkaczyk’s “The antinomy of future contingent events,” with an eye towards clarifying the roles played by philosophical notions of propositions, events, the present, the relativity of time, and Tkaczyk’s notion of a “sphere of culture.” The essay concludes by examining what support might be offered for Tkaczyk’s claim that people can to some degree change the past.

To those who reenact the drama, the Passover narrative and ritual mediate the experience of both oppression and liberation. The Passover ritual provides an “order” by which the reality of suffering may be confronted and the earnest of hope celebrated. The sacred time of the Passover meal provides a rich spiritual heritage that nurtures not only Jews but also Christians.

We show how Berry phase can be used to construct a precision quantum thermometer. An important advantage of our scheme is that there is no need for the thermometer to acquire thermal equilibrium with the sample. This reduces measurement times and avoids precision limitations. We also discuss how such methods can be used to detect the Unruh effect.

Name der Zeitschrift: Klio Jahrgang: 99 Heft: 1 Seiten: 334-336.

In the early 1920s, a time of significant technical change in the lumber industry, hundreds of African American workers migrated from the South to work in the mills of Siskiyou County, in northern California. White workers, who dominated working-class politics in the western timber industry, understood this as the arrival of the South in the western woods. This involved the construction of a historically particular logic of racial privilege founded on local understandings of technical and environmental change, labor organization, and (...) the broader political economic experience of the U.S. working class. The specific racism of the moment demonstrates how labor relations, occupational opportunities, and skill not only reflect racial politics but are simultaneously manipulated to produce and naturalize racial stratification. (shrink)

Annotation A challenge to our perception of how cultures and ideals are formed, this book shows that while structural ideals allow people to co-operate as they work toward goals - their own or those of their community - these images of perfection, so easily accepted as the unalterable structure of our society, can be changed, and are changed by individuals.

_ Source: _Volume 5, Issue 2, pp 290 - 322 Einstein's special theory, as interpreted by Herman Minkowski, suggests that an understanding of space and time requires the replacement of three-dimensional space and one dimensional time with a four-dimensional spacetime continuum, as a natural kind of thing with a characteristic, geometrical, structure. Issues of space and time in general, and of special relativity in particular, are not addressed in Bhaskar's _A Realist Theory of Science_, and their treatment in subsequent realist (...) writings has been patchy and indecisive. Some of Bhaskar's observations in later writings, including his defence of fundamental ontological asymmetries between space and time, and between present, past and future, appear incompatible with a relativistic perspective. Equally problematic, from a critical realist perspective, is the apparent ontological prioritisation of events, and causation as action-by-contact, within the Minkowski interpretation of special relativity. This paper argues that the four-dimensional spacetime continuum of special relativity occupies its own level at the base of the ontological hierarchy of natural kinds, providing lower-order components and laws for higher-order physical, chemical, biological and social structures. While providing no definitive reconciliation of relativistic and realist perspectives, this paper does suggest that A. N. Whitehead's idea of atomic events, or ‘actual occasions’, could pave the way for some possible future reconciliation. (shrink)