Epigenetic information is encoded by DNA methylation and by covalent modifications of histone tails. While defined epigenetic modification patterns have been frequently correlated with particular states of gene activity, very little is known about the integration level of epigenetic signals. Recent experiments have resulted in the characterization of several epigenetic adaptors that mediate interactions between distinct modifications. These adaptors include methyl‐DNA binding proteins, chromatin remodelling enzymes and siRNAs. Complex interactions between epigenetic modifiers and adaptors provide the foundation for the stability (...) of epigenetic inheritance. In addition, they also provide an explanation for the long‐range effects of epigenetic mechanisms. We propose that a major aspect of epigenetic regulation lies in the modification of chromosome architecture and that local changes in gene expression would be secondary consequences. This view is consistent with many results from recent genomic analyses. BioEssays 25:792–797, 2003. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

We enter here upon a history of conversational traffic between the respective departments of philosophy and law in the old academy of liberalism, where lawyers hear much from philosophers, yes-and philosophers hear from lawyers, too, in what has fruitfully been a both-ways exchange. Our philosophical protagonist is John Rawls. This book comprises a study of the rise and workings, within the Rawlsian political-liberal philosophy, of the idea of a country's higher-legal constitution as a public platform for the justification of political (...) coercion. A study of Rawls on constitutionalism can help us, I believe, in scoping out and managing a cluster of constitutional lawyers' debates-interminable ones, it seems, in the constitutional-democratic precincts of our times-that I will catalogue soon below. But conversely, I believe, those seeking the best and truest readings of Rawls might have something to learn from the controversies of the lawyers. My approach to Rawls has accordingly been that of a critically leavened (while no doubt broadly sympathetic) exegesis, while with the legal-discursive materials I take more of a diagnostic turn. My hope is that a treatment of these two discourses in relation to each other will prove an aid to both political-philosophical and legal-practical reflection. (shrink)

Does the practice of psychology make a significant and positive contribution to human welfare and the struggle for a good society? This book presents a reinvigorating look at psychology and its societal purpose, offering a bold new philosophical foundation from which professionals in the field can deeply examine their work.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Wellspring or Circuit?Commentary on Dewey and the Aesthetic UnconsciousnessFrank X. RyanEditor's note: This article contains material similar to a book review by the same author previously published in The Pluralist, vol. 18, no. 2, pp 114–21. The present article represents a further critical use of this material that we deem worthy of publication.in this vital and splendidly crafted work, Bethany Henning recovers a philosophy of aesthetic wisdom far richer (...) than the narrow epistemological lens dominant today. From its start, American philosophy looked beyond Europe's atomistic empiricism toward a continuity between our thought and nature's aesthetic splendor. Jonathan Edwards found beauty in the structure of being reflected in relations among ideas. For Emerson, each of us is a "transparent eyeball" in which nature's beauty fortifies our moral and spiritual agency. At the apex of this tradition is John Dewey, for whom "aesthetic experience [is] the highest mode of human experience" (Henning 55).Although aesthetic theory is usually associated with the cognitive evaluation of art, Dewey explores a broader non-reflective or unconscious dimension. Henning's appropriation of "unconscious"—the cradle of Freud's infantile id—is intentionally provocative. American culture, reflected in academic thought, has largely resisted appeals to subterranean urges and drives. In doing so, however, we perpetuate a myth of rational and moral exceptionalism masking a history of colonialism, oppression, and crass commercialism. In accepting the unconscious, European thought has taken strides to acknowledge and address such ills. Henning wonders whether America might accept "a dynamic unconscious, were it presented with an alternative mythology" (10) and finds a viable candidate in Dewey's underappreciated notion of qualitative immediacy: an "aesthetic (directly felt) connection between ourselves and [End Page 77] the world" (Henning 5). In affirming the unconscious depth of experience, this American reconfiguration welcomes "aesthetic experience back into our philosophical lives" (Henning 5).When embodied meaning supplements cognitive reflection, we come to champion "the sensuous, lived body" as "the primary reality" of qualitative immediacy—a felt aesthetic unity punctuated by "impulsions" arising from an organism's needs (Henning 69). As "a site of adaptive adjustments," Henning continues, "the body is responsive to the brink of coalescence at the point of contact with the world, in which things that are 'outside of it' belong to it" (71). "To move adeptly into aesthetic experience means to be skilled at loosening focal consciousness" so as to cultivate "the essential porousness of the world" (130).With this, the body-mind relation becomes a problem of normative aesthetics, not epistemology. The Cartesian detachment of intellect from nature perpetuated our cultural alienation from our bodies, our environments, and one another (Henning 81–84). With the re-emergence of the body, however, we can begin to acknowledge and heal this trauma.In tapping the significance of qualitative immediacy, of "having" beyond "knowing," Dewey and the Aesthetic Unconscious strives to recover Dewey's remarkable insight into our essential situatedness in the world. This alone establishes its importance. But Henning's book is equally ambitious in suggesting how Dewey's aesthetic understanding can(1). reconfigure the shadowy daemons of Freud's id;(2). replace the myth of American exceptionalism with authentic relationships rooted in pluralist values;(3). rehabilitate the body as an authentic vehicle of expression and communication;(4). vindicate the bold claim that all unified experience is aesthetic; and(5). identify and promote connections forged in shared human experiences.These aims are of inestimable value. I pledge to do whatever I can to defend and advance them. At the outset, however, I feel we must shore up the relationship between two different approaches to thinking about our situatedness in the world: (1) of organic beings existing in a porous world they dynamically interact with, and (2) a phenomenology of experience wherein nonreflective having is an unanalyzed totality from which thought and thing, subject and object, organism and environment, functionally emerge in what Dewey calls the pattern of inquiry. [End Page 78]The general consensus that Dewey failed to reconcile these two approaches—of existence with experience—was dubbed the "deep crack" in Dewey's thought, by Richard Bernstein in 1961. Bernstein laments Dewey's being caught between (1... (shrink)

This article reconstructs Badiou’s oeuvre from the vantage point of the last volume of his Being and Event trilogy. It determines the perspective and task of The Immanence of Truths and demonstrates in what way an “absolute ontology” is the result of an act of forcing that serves as the measure for a truth’s truthness. This allows to argue that Badiou’s is and always was a philosophy of freedom.

In a modern, plural society, there can be no settled agreement on the concrete legal content of a country's constitution. The idea of the constitution is nonetheless pivotal in contemporary, liberal‐minded theories of political justification, such as the ones advanced by Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls. Justification in these theories depends finally on “constitutional patriotism,” a consciously shared sentiment arising from an ethical assessment of their country by the country's people, according to which the country credibly pursues a certain regulative (...) political ideal for which the constitution stands. (shrink)

For several decades, renewed interest in the connection between perception and knowledge has sustained a robust debate over external world skepticism. Recently, however, a growing consensus claims the skeptical challenge has been substantially met, and that realism in some robust form has emerged a clear victor. I invite us to rethink this consensus in a two-part response. The first forges a temporary alliance with skepticism against prominent forms of contemporary realism. That these fail to rebuff ews bolsters Barry Stroud’s call (...) for a new paradigm of objectivity. In the second part I sketch such a paradigm based upon a transactional interpretation of John Dewey’s pragmatism, and indicate its resilience to skeptical attacks. (shrink)

Our intention here is to present the essential character of classical, sunnm within a strictly formal perspective and to set out its basic aspects. It was conceived by the mutakallimm differed in a number of basic concepts and constructs and in its analytic system, the topical organisation of the major compendia parallels that of metaphysics as understood in the contemporary Aristotelian tradition. The debates between kalm, however, is theological in the strict sense of the term and it is as such (...) that its problematic and its procedures are primarily to be understood. Thus seen, the object of kalām is to rationalise the cognitive content presented to Believers in the symbolic language of the koranic revelation. It has, then, four principal tasks, sc, to conceptualise, to order, to explain, and where possible to justify the primary doctrines of the community whose belief is held to be normative. Within this framework the differences that characterise the major schools as such and the various tendencies of individual masters within each school may readily be brought to light. (shrink)

The rule of law is a valuable human achievement. It is valuable not only instrumentally, but also for its own sake as a significant aspect of social justice. Only in a society that enjoys the rule of law is it possible for people to regard one another as fellow free citizens; no one the master of anyone else. Nevertheless, the rule of law is poorly understood. In this book, Frank Lovett develops a rigorous conception of the rule of law (...) that is grounded in legal positivism, and offers a civic republican argument for its value in terms of freedom from domination. Bridging persistent methodological gaps that divide legal philosophy, social science, and political theory, Lovett demonstrates how insights from all three can be united in a single powerful theory. This book will appeal to anyone interested in the rule of law, including scholars, legal officials, and policy-makers. (shrink)

The question of what is truly just in the matter of a country's currently established human-rights interpretations appears not to be the same as the question of what it is morally right to do by way of coercively effectuating a given set of such interpretations. There are grounds for contending that acts of support for a coercive political regime can be justified morally on the condition that the regime's prevailing human-rights interpretations are made continuously available to effective, democratic critical re-examination. (...) However, it is not possible ever finally to know whether that condition is satisfied. (shrink)

Ethical decision theory may not be sufficiently well developed to furnish reliable guidelines to people involved in complex decision making that involves conflict between ethical considerations and business imperatives such as making a profit. In conditions of ethical uncertainty hindsight bias may occur, and this study reports on an exploration of hindsight bias effects among participants in continuing education in business programmes. Perceptions of business ethics were found to differ among groups within the sample depending on what they thought had (...) been the outcome of the ethical decision concerned. (shrink)

Much of the plausibility of non-cognitivism in meta-ethics rests on the following argument derived from hume: 1) cognitive judgments alone can never have any motivational influence on our actions, 2) moral judgments have a motivational influence on our actions, and 3) therefore, no moral judgment is simply a cognitive judgment. this paper subjects various forms of this argument to criticism.

This article examines a contemporary proposal of how to conceive of materialism, more specifically of a materialist dialectics. This proposal was formulated by Alain Badiou and it is of huge interest for the contemporary discussion as it inscribes the very historical coordinates in which it was articulated into its own proposal. The article develops this by arguing that Badiou's materialist dialectic historically situates itself after idealist options seem to have become impossible. However, the very dialectical kernel of this materialism leads (...) Badiou to claim that after the perpetuated struggle between materialism and idealism is declared to have been overcome, the very split separating the two returns in an inverted form inside materialism, splitting it again into two. Thereby the immanent split in materialism leads to two options: either one defends a materialism devoid of any idealist reference or a materialism which seeks to rescue something of idealism. The article concludes by suggesting that only from a detailed reconstruction of the functioning of philosophy in Badiou's system does it become possible to conceive of the threats that any materialism today faces and to delineate the proposed option of how to avoid them consistently. The article demonstrates how, today, materialism can only be properly materialist by resurrecting something of idealism, which is why it deserves the name of what I call an “idealism without idealism.”. (shrink)

A re-examination of determinism and compatibilism and incompatibilism in free will debates.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Dewey and the Aesthetic Unconsciousness: The Vital Depths of Experience by Bethany HenningFrank X. RyanDewey and the Aesthetic Unconsciousness: The Vital Depths of Experience Bethany Henning. Lexington Books, 2022.In this important and splendidly crafted book, Bethany Henning recovers a philosophy of aesthetic wisdom distinct from the narrow epistemological lens dominant today. Unlike the psychological atomism of European Empiricism, from its outset, American philosophy embraced nature's aesthetic splendor and (...) the continuity between our thought and our world. Jonathan Edwards held that relations among ideas reflect beauty in the structure of being. For Ralph Waldo Emerson, each of us is a "transparent eyeball" where the cultivation of nature's spontaneous beauty fortifies our moral and spiritual agency. At the apex of this tradition is John Dewey, for whom Henning touts "aesthetic experience as the highest mode of human experience" (55).Although the aesthetic is generally associated with the cognitive evaluation of art, of special significance for Dewey is its non-reflective or unconscious dimension. Henning's appropriation of "unconscious"—the cradle of Freud's infantile id—is intentionally provocative. American culture, reflected in academic thought, has largely resisted appeals to subterranean urges and drives. In so doing, however, we perpetuate a myth of rational and moral exceptionalism that masks our history of colonialism, oppression, and crass commercialism. In accepting the unconscious, European thought has taken strides to acknowledge and address such ills. Despite America's disdain for psychoanalysis, Henning wonders whether it "could have accepted a dynamic unconscious, were it presented with an alternative mythology" (10).Dewey's alternative, says Henning, arises from his underappreciated notion of qualitative immediacy. In Henning's interpretation of this, meaning is embodied as a "sense of fulfillment" among accumulated habits—a "coming to terms with the world around us" through an "aesthetic (directly felt) connection between ourselves and the world." As such, to appreciate meaning, we must affirm the tacit, unconscious depth of experience; that is, we must "welcome aesthetic experience back into our philosophical lives" (5).Embodied meaning signifies that "the sensuous, lived body" is "the primary reality" (69). In this reality, qualitative immediacy is a non-reflective, aesthetic unity punctuated by "impulsions" arising from an organism's needs. Such needs are satisfied in organism-environment interactions where, says Dewey, "the epidermis is only in the most superficial way an indication of where an organism ends and its environment begins" (LW 10:61). As "a site of adaptive adjustments," Henning continues, "the body is responsive to the [End Page 114] brink of coalescence at the point of contact with the world, in which things that are 'outside of it' belong to it" (71). As such, the body-mind relation is a problem of aesthetics, not epistemology. For Dewey, as for Merleau-Ponty, the body "is the organic and dynamic condition of my thought" (75). The body is not a thing, however, but a process "always organically involved in exchanges" (86).Following the feminist thought of Susan Bordo, Henning agrees that the ascendance of the body amounts to a kind of philosophical recovery. Seventeenth-century science eviscerated the organic "female" universe of the Middle Ages. But this loss of an integrated world evoked existential fright, which Descartes tried to calm by subjugating feminine vagaries of the body to a masculine cognitive certitude bent upon controlling the whole of nature. In America today, this neurosis perpetuates our cultural alienation from our bodies, our environments, and one another (81–84). With the re-emergence of the body, however, it is possible to acknowledge and address this trauma."Feeling," in Dewey's sense, is unconsciously affective: a constant rhythm of disequilibrium and equilibrium, of need and resolution noticed only when a problem rises to the point of requiring our conscious attention. This affective "charge," this rhythm of sensed need and the desire to overcome it, is Dewey's appropriation of Plato's Erōs. Thomas Alexander casts Dewey's Erōs broadly as humanity's aesthetic investment in our world—our collective effort "to transform a biophysical environment into a world filled with meaning" (Alexander 11). But Henning turns to the more familiar sense of Erōs attuned not to the world at... (shrink)

We have developed a process model that learns in multiple ways while finding faults in a simple control panel device. The model predicts human participants' learning through its own learning. The model's performance was systematically compared to human learning data, including the time course and specific sequence of learned behaviors. These comparisons show that the model accounts very well for measures such as problem‐solving strategy, the relative difficulty of faults, and average fault‐finding time. More important, because the model learns and (...) transfers its learning across problems, it also accounts for the faster problem‐solving times due to learning when examined across participants, across faults, and across the series of 20 trials on an individual participant basis. The model shows how learning while problem solving can lead to more recognition‐based performance, and helps explain how the shape of the learning curve can arise through learning and be modified by differential transfer. Overall, the quality of the correspondence appears to have arisen from procedural, declarative, and episodic learning all taking place within individual problem‐solving episodes. (shrink)

Let it be allowed, though virtue or moral rectitude does indeed consist in affection to and pursuit of what is right and good, as such; yet, that when we sit down in a cool hour, we can neither justify to ourselves this or any other pursuit, till we are convinced that it will be for our happiness, or at least not contrary to it.—Butler, Sermon XIThere are a number of different grounds on which philosophers have argued that the question “Should (...) I be moral?” is unintelligible or at least somewhat odd. Some evidently are unable to understand ‘should’ in any other way than ‘morally ought’, with the consequence that the question can admit of no answer but the affirmative. Others, influenced by the later Wittgenstein, hold that, although ‘should ’-questions have a role within the moral language game, the ‘should’ in the question above has no real function, it is like a ‘machine idling,’ and we can attribute no real sense to it. Now I consider neither of these arguments to be successful or even very plausible, but I do wish to consider a further argument which is logically independent of the above and which appears, initially at least, to be quite plausible. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Some beings, including children, animals and the mentally handicapped, seem to deserve moral consideration, despite the fact that they are not rational or moral agents. These so‐called marginal cases create a problem for theories that heavily stress the role of moral and/or rational agency in ethics: the latter seem unable to account for the former's moral status. This paper discusses the recent and original attempt of Loren Lomasky to solve this problem. It is argued that Lomasky's arguments are self‐defeating (...) because they can only succeed by relying on common‐sense morality and, thus, by giving up the heavy stress on the role of rational agency in ethics. (shrink)

Structured interviews were carried out with 176 secondary school teachers to elicit their views/opinions about their initial professional training and their later practical experience, with particular reference to classroom behaviour management. The results showed that the vast majority of teachers believe classroom management skills to be of major importance to them professionally. Nearly three‐quarters of them were dissatisfied with the preparation in this area of professional skills provided by their initial training courses. Many thought that their colleagues spent too much (...) time on matters of order and control and 38% thought that they, themselves, did also. Generally, they showed an interest in attending training courses in classroom behaviour management. Many felt that such training could reduce stress among teachers and might help to reduce troublesome behaviour among their pupils. Nearly all of them thought that it would be of benefit to their younger colleagues who were just beginning their careers. (shrink)

Summary Twenty?four primary schools were randomly selected from all those listed in a local education authority in the West Midlands of England. Heads or deputy headteachers of 21 of these schools were interviewed using a structured interview schedule very similar to the one used for a recent survey of secondary schools. Data were obtained about the general rule structures of the schools and the system of sanctions and rewards used to maintain them. The findings were then compared with those from (...) the secondary survey. Primary schools were less likely than secondary schools to have written rule structures but most were in the process of producing them in response to new pressures. It was more common for all the teachers in the primary school to be considered responsible for seeing that rules were kept. Generally, primary school headteachers identified fewer sanctions being used to uphold their rules than in secondary schools. The number of rewards used in both types of school was about equal. Comment is made on the difference between sanctions and rewards identified as being used in schools and some observed classroom practice. (shrink)

Psychology may have to get seriously political as human aims in living and selfhood itself are increasingly influenced in a deleterious manner by the vicissitudes of living in a neoliberal political economy and one-sided “enterprise culture” (Martin & McLellan, 2013; Sugarman, 2015). This article reviews recent writings of several social critics, including Jackson Lears (2015), Sebastion Junger (2015), Philip Blond (2010), and Christopher Lasch (1995), who richly flesh out the picture of this detrimental state of affairs. We note that many (...) of these critics have little to say about credible alternatives to neoliberalism. The article then seeks to identify resources within theoretical and philosophical psychology, including hermeneutic philosophy and interpretive social science, for helping to overcome neoliberalism. They might help clarify and nurture a renewed democratic populism or engaged democratic politics and contribute to gaining what Lasch termed a much-needed “wisdom of limits” in today’s society. (shrink)

THE PROJECT OF THIS PAPER IS TO GIVE AN EXPLICIT DEFINITION OF 'PRIMA FACIE' DUTY EMPLOYING THE NOTION OF DUTY (SIMPLICITER) AS THE ONLY MORAL NOTION. THIS DEFINITION AVOIDS THE CIRCULARITY OF SOME DEFINITIONS WHILE ALSO BEING SUFFICIENTLY GENERAL SO AS NOT TO DEPEND ON THE ADOPTION OF ANY PARTICULAR MORAL VIEWPOINT. THIS PAPER ATTACKS THE VIEW THAT A MORAL PHILOSOPHER (OR AN ANTHROPOLOGIST DESCRIBING A MORAL CODE) CAN ALWAYS IN PRINCIPLE AVOID EMPLOYING THE NOTION OF A 'PRIMA FACIE' DUTY (...) SIMPLY BY GIVING A CAREFUL STATEMENT OF EACH RULE MAKING EXPLICIT ITS EXCEPTIONS. (shrink)