In this paper, I discuss the distribution and the interpretation of the temporal suffix -kue in Mbyá, a Guaraní language that is closely related to Paraguayan Guaraní. This suffix is attested both inside noun phrases and inside clauses. Interestingly, its nominal uses give rise to inferences that are unattested in its clausal uses. These inferences were first identified in Paraguayan Guaraní by Tonhauser, who called them the existence property and the change of state property. Tonhauser further argued that these properties (...) are built into the lexical entry of the nominal temporal marker -kue. By contrast, I argue that -kue denotes a relative past tense both in its nominal and clausal uses, and that the existence and change of state properties are pragmatic inferences that arise from the interaction of the literal meaning of -kue with general constraints on the interpretation of noun phrases, notably constraints on the topicality of the time of evaluation of noun phrases. This allows me to maintain a uniform analysis of -kue across its nominal uses and its clausal uses. The analysis of -kue in Mbyá is relevant to a number of current debates on the expression of tense crosslinguistically. Firstly, the existence of relative tenses has sometimes been called into question. Klein notably argues that relative tenses are actually combinations of tense with the perfect aspect. Others have argued that there exist true relative tenses in certain languages. I argue that facts of Mbyá support the latter view. Secondly, Klein famously defined tenses as relations between topic times and the time of utterance. I argue, on the other hand, that relative tenses only denote relations between times, and that the topicality or non-topicality of their temporal arguments depends on their context of use, including their syntactic environment. Thirdly, this paper contributes to debates on the nature and reality of nominal tenses The Oxford handbook of tense and aspect, 2012), by arguing that tense in Mbyá is a genuinely nominal category, in the sense that temporal functional projections are part of the extended projection of the noun phrase. (shrink)

: This paper considers whether a physician is criminally liable for administering a dose of painkillers that hastens a patient's death. The common wisdom is that a version of the doctrine of double effect legally protects the physician. That is, a physician is supposedly acting lawfully so long as the physician's primary purpose is to relieve suffering. This paper suggests that the criminal liability issue is more complex than that. Physician culpability can be based on recklessness, and recklessness hinges on (...) whether a physician has taken an unjustifiable risk of hastening death. The authors identify three conditions of justifiability. Their analysis helps to explain the distinction between euthanasia, which is legally banned, and the use of risky analgesics, which is permitted in limited circumstances. (shrink)

Examining Thomas Hill Green's moral philosophy, Thomas defends a radically new perception of Green as an independent thinker rather than a devoted partisan of Kant or Hegel. Green's moral philosophy, argues Thomas, includes a widely misunderstood defense of free will, an innovative model of deliberation that rejects both Kantian and Humean conceptions of practical reason, a barely recognized theory of character, and an account of moral objectivity that involves no dependence on religion--all of which yield a coherent body of moral (...) philosophy that raises important problems neglected in contemporary ethics. (shrink)

Herbert Spencer was one of the most important contributors to the Victorian discourse on social evolution. His theory of evolution in nature and society has been the subject of countless scholarly works over the last hundred years. Nevertheless, not all of its dimensions have been studied in due depth. Contrary to a widespread belief, Spencer did not just design an evolutionary theory of upward, yet branched development. Searching for explanations for the social distance between presumably civilized and primitive societies and (...) between presumably well-conducted and pauperized Victorians, he introduced elements of retrogression into his theory of social evolution. In addition, he biologized social structures and social phenomena by constructing a causal relationship between social and somatic features. This article discusses Spencer's account of the social conditions of the so-called savages and paupers. It aims to shed light on the progressive and retrogressive modes of evolutionary development and the biologistic explanations he employed in his social theory to explain these conditions. (shrink)

We suggest that as people move to construe robots as social agents, interact with them, and treat them as capable of social ties, they might develop (close) relationships with them. We then ask what kind of relationships can people form with bots, what functions can bots fulfill, and what are the societal and moral implications of such relationships.

John Rawls’ use of a contractarian strategy for justifying basic principles of justice has raised the hope that a similar strategy might work for a theory of right and moral principles generally. I want to show that this hope cannot be fulfilled.In what follows I interpret contractarianism in a Rawlsian way on the grounds that his is the most plausible version of the doctrine we are likely to get. I am not however concerned with the details of Rawls’ argument for (...) justice but instead with an idea that appears to underlie the contractarian strategy. In order to avoid the complications of Rawlsian exegesis, I choose to discuss the doctrine as it might be used to justify a moral principle of mutual assistance and not as Rawls in fact uses it to justify principles of justice. (shrink)

Este trabajo se propone mostrar cómo la Teoría Neoclásica de la Ley Natural fundamenta la existencia de normas morales absolutas, cuál es su relevancia para la filosofía moral, y qué críticas pueden ser formuladas a la argumentación de los autores. Ellos postulan que la ley natural, mediante normas, lleva a elegir y proteger bienes humanos básicos, correspondientes a los diversos aspectos de la naturaleza humana, evitando su destrucción, daño o impedimento. Aunque la mayoría de las normas morales admiten excepción, nunca (...) lo hacen las que prohíben realizar un acto que siempre daña directamente un bien básico, pues tal acto no puede compatibilizarse con la propia autorrealización, y atenta contra la dignidad humana. La división del trabajo tomará la siguiente forma: en los primeros cuatro apartados se abordarán los conceptos clave para la defensa de una norma absoluta en la Teoría Neoclásica, en el quinto se enlazarán los conceptos al modo que los autores lo hacen para demostrar la existencia de absolutos morales y someter el consecuencialismo a crítica, y en el sexto se hará una breve revisión crítica de los argumentos presentados. (shrink)

It has generally been observed that cells grow to a certain size before they divide. In the last few years, the PI3K signal transduction pathway has emerged as one of the main signaling routes utilized by cells to control their increase in size. Here we focus on two components of this pathway, PKB and S6K, and briefly review the experiments that initially uncovered their roles in cell size control. In addition, we discuss a number of recent observations suggesting that the (...) generic models used to describe this pathway to date may have been oversimplified. Indeed, recent observations in Drosophila and mouse support a more complex interaction between these signaling components in development. Finally, we have utilized two contemporary studies involving PKB‐ and S6K‐deficient mice as a paradigm to underscore the importance of cell size and to accurately delineate the connections between signaling pathways for human disease, such as diabetes mellitus. BioEssays 24:65–71, 2002. © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungDer Beitrag bringt Gründe für die These vor, dass aktive Sterbehilfe – die Tötung eines einwilligungsfähigen Patienten auf sein ausdrückliches, ernsthaftes und stabiles Verlangen hin – unter bestimmten Umständen moralisch erlaubt ist und rechtlich erlaubt sein sollte. Autonome Personen haben ein zentrales, von ihrem Anspruch auf Wahrung ihrer Menschenwürde geschütztes Interesse daran, „ihren” Tod sterben zu können. Aus diesem geschützten Interesse resultieren Dispositionsbefugnisse über das eigene Sterben, die auch das Recht beinhalten, sich hierzu der freiwillig geleisteten Hilfe Dritter zu bedienen. (...) Soweit das Argument eines möglichen Missbrauchs erlaubter aktiver Sterbehilfe ernst zu nehmen ist, stehen wir jedoch einer unausweichlich dilemmatischen Entscheidung gegenüber, die das bisherige Verständnis des Menschenwürdeprinzips des Grundgesetzes in Frage stellt. Dieser Konflikt kann, wenn überhaupt, nur durch rechtlich institutionalisierte Verfahren zur Prüfung jedes Einzelfalles gelöst werden. (shrink)

From the schools of ancient times to the present day, Gary Thomas looks at how and why education evolved as it has. By exploring some of the big questions, he examines the ways in which schools work, considers the differences around the world, and concludes by considering the future of education worldwide.

Neurons of organisms with complex and flexible behavior, especially humans, must precisely control protein localization and activity to support higher brain functions such as learning and memory. In contrast, simpler organisms generally have simpler individual neurons, less complex nervous systems and display more limited behaviors. Strikingly, however, many key neuronal proteins are conserved between organisms that have very different degrees of behavioral complexity. Here we discuss a possible mechanism by which conserved neuronal proteins acquired new attributes that were crucial in (...) the evolution of complexity of nervous system structure and function. Specifically, we hypothesize that vertebrate‐specific post‐translational palmitoylation sites and PDZ‐binding protein‐protein interaction motifs act as gain‐of‐function mutations, increasing the regulatory potential of conserved proteins without affecting their core functions. We further hypothesize that the additional regulation of neurotransmitter receptors and other membrane proteins made possible by these sites and motifs is critical for the function of complex nervous systems. (shrink)

In his classic work The Mind and its Place in Nature published in 1925 at the height of the development of quantum mechanics but several years after the chemists Lewis and Langmuir had already laid the foundations of the modern theory of valence with the introduction of the covalent bond, the analytic philosopher C. D. Broad argued for the emancipation of chemistry from the crass physicalism that led physicists then and later—with support from a rabblement of philosophers who knew as (...) much about chemistry as etymologists—to believe that chemistry reduced to physics. Here Broad’s thesis is recast in terms more familiar to chemists. In the hard sell of particle physics, several prominent figures in chemistry—Hoffmann, Primas, and Pauling—have had their views interpreted to imply that they were sympathetic to greedy reductionism when in fact they were not. Indeed, being chemists without physicists as alter egos, they could not but side with Broad’s contention that chemistry, as a science that deals primarily in emergent phenomena which are beyond the purview of physicalism, owes no acquiescence to particle physics and its ethereal wares. Historically, among the most widely used expediencies in chemistry and materials science are additivity or mixture rules and their cohort transferability, all of which are devised and used under the mantle of naive reductionism. Here it is argued that while the transfer of functional groups between molecules works empirically to an extent, it is strictly outlawed by the no-cloning theorem of quantum mechanics. Several illustrative examples related to chemistry’s irreducibility to physics are presented and discussed. The failure of naive reductionism exhibited by the deep-inelastic scattering of leptons by A > 2 nuclei is traced to the same flawed reasoning that was the original basis of Moffitt’s ‘atoms in molecules’ hypothesis, the neglect of context, nuclei in the case of high-energy physics and molecules in the case of chemistry. A non-exhaustive list of other contexts from physics, chemistry, and molecular biology evidencing similar departures from the ideal of additivity or reductionism is provided for the perusal of philosophers. Had the call by the mathematician J. T. Schwartz for developments in mathematical linguistics possessed of a less single, less literal, and less simple-minded nature been met, perhaps it might have persuaded scientists to abandon their regressive fixation with unphysical reductionism and to adapt to new methodologies that engender a more nuanced handling of ubiquitous emergent phenomena as they arise in Nature than is the case today. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Criminal Law, Pain Relief, and Physician Aid in DyingFaye Girsh, Ed.D., Executive DirectorMadam:The article by Cantor and Thomas on “Pain Relief, Acceleration of Death, and Criminal Law” (KIEJ, June 1996) was a tortured attempt to develop criteria for the humane and compassionate physician who tries to serve the needs of a patient in unremitting pain. There are three areas that merit comment.The authors dealt with pain medications that might (...) have the undesirable side effect of causing death. They did not mention tolerance, which usually occurs in a patient with chronic pain and which would require exceedingly high doses to be effective. They did not mention barbiturates, which are preferable to opiates in causing death and which are used increasingly by compassionate physicians to answer the pleas of their suffering patients, but for which there is no excuse about alleviating pain. Would the criminal law just call the prescription of a lethal dose of barbiturates a reckless act and require conviction? Fortunately, juries, as the authors point out, do not balance these formulas on the head of a pin. When they see the circumstances under which these doctors do help their patients, they choose to nullify the law and would ignore the suggestions made in this article.The authors refer to the “consent” of the patient. They do not mention that these doctors are operating with more than consent; they are administering these medications because suffering patients are begging them to put them out of their pain and the indignities of the dying process. The article discusses the process as though it were the same as consent to elective surgery. These patients—with AIDS, cancer, and hopeless neurological degeneration—are not simply agreeing to a procedure; they are desperately seeking a way out. If the criminal law were to develop criteria for physician aid in dying, certainly one of them should be the active, witnessed, repeated request of such a patient for a certain, quick, painless, gentle death.The third point is that physicians do not face prosecution when administering no treatment to a patient whose life could be saved with treatment but who chooses not to receive it. This has been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court; no criteria for suffering, alternatives, terminality, justifiability, or unbearability are required. The doctor can stand by while the patient dies what may be a protracted, difficult death, but it is within the law. What matters in this situation is the decision of the patient to refuse treatment, and that is absolute. How ironic that the patient who cannot refuse treatment must, with his or her doctor, jump through all these hoops to achieve a peaceful death.One worries that the physician who must balance the risk of “risky pain relief” against the accusation of recklessness will err in the direction of allowing [End Page 103] the patient to bear the pain rather than help with a dose of analgesics that might be considered beyond the stipulated “risk.”Why don’t we just be honest about it? Allow dying or hopelessly ill patients to make the decision about what they want by passing a carefully defined law allowing euthanasia rather than balancing the risk and trying to determine the “purpose” of the physician’s ministrations. We protect some patients from themselves while allowing others almost complete autonomy to make the choice of ending their lives. The authors were right in saying that proponents of rational laws consider this sheer hypocrisy.Faye Girsh, Executive DirectorHemlock Society U.S.A. Denver, COFaye Girsh misconceives our article’s objective as an “attempt to develop criteria” for the humane physician. Our goal in writing the paper was to analyze the current criminal law framework in the hope of sharpening debate and engendering normative critiques. We readily acknowledge tensions in the current legal framework and would support changes in that framework.Copyright © 1997 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

Borrowing from epidemiological and economic analysis, we argue that the central constructs by which children are judged educationally rest in contrastive judgements and that such judgements are based on 'everyday' constructs - not objective descriptors. But because these everyday constructs become seemingly objectified by the procedures and discourses of education, they appear reliable and objective. The insistent process of contrastive judgement based on these everyday constructs has its result in cohorts of children forever being judged unfavourably next to others. A (...) model to frame the process is outlined and consequences for children's acceptance and inclusion are discussed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Criminal Law, Pain Relief, and Physician Aid in DyingFaye Girsh, Ed.D., Executive DirectorMadam:The article by Cantor and Thomas on “Pain Relief, Acceleration of Death, and Criminal Law” (KIEJ, June 1996) was a tortured attempt to develop criteria for the humane and compassionate physician who tries to serve the needs of a patient in unremitting pain. There are three areas that merit comment.The authors dealt with pain medications that might (...) have the undesirable side effect of causing death. They did not mention tolerance, which usually occurs in a patient with chronic pain and which would require exceedingly high doses to be effective. They did not mention barbiturates, which are preferable to opiates in causing death and which are used increasingly by compassionate physicians to answer the pleas of their suffering patients, but for which there is no excuse about alleviating pain. Would the criminal law just call the prescription of a lethal dose of barbiturates a reckless act and require conviction? Fortunately, juries, as the authors point out, do not balance these formulas on the head of a pin. When they see the circumstances under which these doctors do help their patients, they choose to nullify the law and would ignore the suggestions made in this article.The authors refer to the “consent” of the patient. They do not mention that these doctors are operating with more than consent; they are administering these medications because suffering patients are begging them to put them out of their pain and the indignities of the dying process. The article discusses the process as though it were the same as consent to elective surgery. These patients—with AIDS, cancer, and hopeless neurological degeneration—are not simply agreeing to a procedure; they are desperately seeking a way out. If the criminal law were to develop criteria for physician aid in dying, certainly one of them should be the active, witnessed, repeated request of such a patient for a certain, quick, painless, gentle death.The third point is that physicians do not face prosecution when administering no treatment to a patient whose life could be saved with treatment but who chooses not to receive it. This has been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court; no criteria for suffering, alternatives, terminality, justifiability, or unbearability are required. The doctor can stand by while the patient dies what may be a protracted, difficult death, but it is within the law. What matters in this situation is the decision of the patient to refuse treatment, and that is absolute. How ironic that the patient who cannot refuse treatment must, with his or her doctor, jump through all these hoops to achieve a peaceful death.One worries that the physician who must balance the risk of “risky pain relief” against the accusation of recklessness will err in the direction of allowing [End Page 103] the patient to bear the pain rather than help with a dose of analgesics that might be considered beyond the stipulated “risk.”Why don’t we just be honest about it? Allow dying or hopelessly ill patients to make the decision about what they want by passing a carefully defined law allowing euthanasia rather than balancing the risk and trying to determine the “purpose” of the physician’s ministrations. We protect some patients from themselves while allowing others almost complete autonomy to make the choice of ending their lives. The authors were right in saying that proponents of rational laws consider this sheer hypocrisy.Faye Girsh, Executive DirectorHemlock Society U.S.A. Denver, COFaye Girsh misconceives our article’s objective as an “attempt to develop criteria” for the humane physician. Our goal in writing the paper was to analyze the current criminal law framework in the hope of sharpening debate and engendering normative critiques. We readily acknowledge tensions in the current legal framework and would support changes in that framework.Copyright © 1997 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

Samuel H. Pillsbury, Judging Evil: Rethinking the Law of Murder and Manslaughter New York: New York University Press, 1998, vii + 264pp.

It has been known for 20 years that the ribosomal protein S6 is rapidly phosphorylated when cells are stimulated to grow or divide. Furthermore, numerous studies have documented that there is a strong correlation between increases in S6 phosphorylation and protein synthesis, leading to the idea that S6 phosphorylation is involved in up‐regulating translation. In an attempt to define a mechanism by which S6 phosphorylation exerts translational control, other studies have focused on characterizing the sites of phosphorylation of this protein (...) and its location within the ribosome. Recent data show that S6 is a protein which may have diverse cellular functions and is essential for normal development, and that it may be involved in the translational regulation of a specific class of messages. (shrink)