The change in shape of the C. elegans embryo from an ovoid ball of cells into a worm-shaped larva is driven by three events within the cells of the hypodermis (epidermis): (1) intercalation of two rows of dorsal cells, (2) enclosure of the ventral surface by hypodermis, and (3) elongation of the embryo. While the behavior of the hypodermal cells involved in each of these processes differs dramatically, it is clear that F-actin and microtubules have essential functions in each of (...) these processes, whereas contraction of actomyosin structures appears to be involved specifically in elongation. Molecular analysis of these processes is revealing components specific to C. elegans as well as components found in other systems. Since C. elegans hypodermal cells demonstrate dramatically different behaviors during intercalation, enclosure and elongation, the study of cytoskeletal dynamics in these processes may reveal both unique and conserved activities during distinct epithelial morphogenetic movements. BioEssays 23:12–23, 2001. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

Rational choice and other accounts of trust base it in objective assessments of the risks and benefits of trusting. But rational subjects must choose in the light of what knowledge they have, and that knowledge determines their capacities for trust. This is an epistemological issue, but not at the usual level of the philosophy of knowledge. Rather, it is an issue of pragmatic rationality for a given actor. It is commonly argued that trust is inherently embedded in iterated, thick relationships. (...) But such relationships are merely one source of relevant knowledge in a street-level epistemological account. Early experience may heavily influence later capacity for trust. For example, bad experience may lead to lower levels of trust and therefore fewer opportunities for mutual gain. (shrink)

Jeff McMahan urges us to reject the view, dominant throughout history, that mere participation in an unjust war is not wrong.

In 2020, COVID-19, the Australia bushfires, and other global threats served as vivid reminders that human and nonhuman fates are increasingly linked. Human use of nonhuman animals contributes to pandemics, climate change, and other global threats which, in turn, contribute to biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and nonhuman suffering. Jeff Sebo argues that humans have a moral responsibility to include animals in global health and environmental policy. In particular, we should reduce our use of animals as part of our pandemic (...) and climate change mitigation efforts and increase our support for animals as part of our adaptation efforts. Applying and extending frameworks such as One Health and the Green New Deal, Sebo calls for reducing support for factory farming, deforestation, and the wildlife trade; increasing support for humane, healthful, and sustainable alternatives; and considering human and nonhuman needs holistically. Sebo also considers connections with practical issues such as education, employment, social services, and infrastructure, as well as with theoretical issues such as well-being, moral status, political status, and population ethics. In all cases, he shows that these issues are both important and complex, and that we should neither underestimate our responsibilities because of our limitations, nor underestimate our limitations because of our responsibilities. Both an urgent call to action and a survey of what ethical and effective action requires, Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves is an invaluable resource for scholars, advocates, policy-makers, and anyone interested in what kind of world we should attempt to build and how. (shrink)

Hume's place in history -- Moral psychology -- Strategic analysis -- Convention -- Political theory -- Justice as order -- Utilitarianism -- Value theory -- Retrospective.

This chapter is devoted to criticisms of the views of propositions defended by my co-authors, Jeff King and Scott Soames. The focus is on criticism of their attempts to explain the representational properties of propositions. The criticisms are varied, but one theme is a tension between their view that our actions can explain the representational properties of propositions and their commitment to the idea that propositions have their representational properties essentially.

This paper considers questions that small animals and AI systems raise for utilitarianism. Specifically, if these beings have more welfare than humans and other large animals, then utilitarianism implies that we should prioritize them, all else equal. This could lead to a ‘rebugnant conclusion’, according to which we should, say, create large populations of small animals rather than small populations of large animals. It could also lead to a ‘Pascal’s bugging’, according to which we should, say, prioritize large populations of (...) small animals even if they have a low chance of being sentient. I suggest that utilitarians should accept these implications in theory but might be able to avoid some of them in practice. (shrink)

Within the overarching framework of considering the purpose of education, this book addresses issues such as the standards movement, high-stakes testing and accountability, and corporate education reform. It raises ethical questions related to school practices and considers the question of who should decide the purpose of education.

The Internet is a huge form of social capital that is not reducible in its characteristics to other forms of social capital, such as ordinary networks of people who more or less know each other. It enables us to do many things with radically greater efficiency than we could without it. It can do some things better but other things much less well than traditional devices can. At both extremes, the differences are so great as to be not merely quantitative (...) but also qualitative. The things it can do better include things that can readily be checked and verified. The things that it often cannot do include securing commitments for action. A brief history of the forms of social cooperation suggests that relationships on the Internet are typically too thin to back trust and cooperation among those who do not have fairly rich relations hips off-line. (shrink)

Binmore analyzes the genetic basis of cooperation. Much of the literature doing this supposes that we must explain directly the cooperative tendency, whether by individual or group selection. A more effective way to go is to find something more general and likely more deeply embedded in personal traits that enables and even enhances cooperation. Hume, with whom Binmore claims affinities, long ago proposed a psychological phenomenon now called mirroring, which induces good relations through shared sentiments in a way that is (...) essentially hard-wired. Mirroring indirectly contributes to cooperativeness. There may be other similarly indirect ways to account for human cooperativeness. (shrink)

In this insightful set of essays, the concept of the psychological humanities is defined and explored. A clear rationale is provided for its necessity in the study and understanding of the individual and identity in a discipline that is largely occupied by empirical studies that report aggregated data and its analysis. Contributors to this volume are leading scholars in theoretical psychology who believe that psychology must be about persons and their lives. In these essays, they draw from a variety of (...) disciplines that include art, literature, life writing, and history to make a case for the psychological humanities. A final chapter provides a critical commentary on the value of the psychological humanities. It is argued that psychology must draw on the knowledge and practices of the humanities, as well as the sciences and social sciences, in order to attain a greater understanding of personhood. This book is aimed at upper level undergraduate and postgraduate students and scholars of psychology, particularly theoretical psychology, philosophy of the mind, and those from a humanities background interested in exploring the concept of the psychological humanities. (shrink)

A Russian in Paris -- Russian contexts -- Madmen -- The possessed -- Godmen -- The Hegel lectures -- The last revolution -- Time no more -- The book of the dead -- The later writings -- Nobodies -- Roads or ruins? -- Why finality? -- The grand inquisitor.

John Dewey's Experience and Education is an important book, but first-time readers of Dewey's philosophy can find it challenging and not meaningfully related to the contemporary landscape of education. Jeff Frank's Teaching in the Now aims to reanimate Dewey's text--for first-time readers and anyone who teaches the text or is interested in appreciating Dewey's continuing significance--by focusing on Dewey's thinking on preparation. Frank, through close readings of Dewey, asks readers to wonder: How much of what we justify as preparation (...) in education is actually necessary? That is, every time we catch ourselves telling a student--you need to learn this in order to do something else--we need to stop and reflect. We need to reflect, because when we always justify the present moment of a student's education in terms of what will happen in the future, we may lose out on the ability to engage students' attention and interest now, when it matters. Dewey asks his readers to trust that the best way to prepare students for an engaging and productive future is to create the most engaging and productive present experience for students. We learn to live fully in the future, only by practicing living fully in the present. Although it can feel scary to stop thinking of the work of education in terms of preparation, when educators reclaim the present for students, new opportunities--for teachers, students, schools, democracy, and education--emerge. Teaching in the Now explores these opportunities in impassioned and engaging prose that makes Experience and Education come alive for readers new to Dewey or who have taught and read him for many years. (shrink)

However much one may wish for nonviolent solutions to the problems of unjust and unrestrained human violence that Glover explores in Humanity, some of those problems at present require violent responses. One cannot read his account of the Clinton administration’s campaign to sabotage efforts to stop the massacre in Rwanda in 1994 – a campaign motivated by fear that American involvement would cost American lives and therefore votes – without concluding that Glover himself believes that military intervention was morally required (...) in that case. Military intervention in another state that is intended to stop one group within that state from brutally persecuting or violating the human rights of members of another group is now known as “humanitarian intervention.” Those against whom the intervention is directed are almost always the government and its supporters, though this is not a necessary feature of humanitarian intervention. It is, however, a conceptual condition of humanitarian intervention that it does not occur at the request or with the consent of the government. The use of force within another state with the consent of the government counts as assistance rather than intervention. The principal reason that humanitarian intervention is contentious is that it seems to violate the target state’s sovereign right to control its own domestic affairs. Because humanitarian intervention is a response to human rights violations within the target state, it is regarded as altogether different from wars of defense against aggression. Indeed, since aggression is normally understood to be war against a state that.. (shrink)

Davidson aimed to explain predication in terms of truth. I explain what is distinctive about his approach by contrasting it with the widely held view that predication and truth must both be explained in terms of the properties of propositions. I consider Davidson's arguments against this propositionalist alternative, and conclude by exploring some commonalities between Davidson's approach and the more recent propositionalist views of King and Soames.

Drawing on a range of sources in philosophy and literature, but with particular reference to the work of Heidegger, makes a compelling case for the importance of place in philosophical discourse.

Self-creation and autonomy -- Creation, society and the imaginary -- Self and world -- The living body -- The human psyche -- The whole world and more : the meaning of the monadic psyche and its fate -- Magmas -- Determination and the logic of indeterminate being -- Indeterminacy and interpretation -- Autonomy and meaning.

Ender's Game, at face value, is a story about a young yet mature and extraordinarily gifted boy manipulated into saving the world. At another level, though, Ender's story raises ethical questions about war, leadership, and character. Perhaps the most important thing about the story is what it says about the virtues that make for good leadership. This chapter looks at Ender's story through the eyes of Plato and Aristotle, two philosophers deeply concerned with the virtues of leadership. Plato's concept of (...) virtue rests on two ideas: his analogy between the three‐part human soul and the state, and his four cardinal virtues: wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice. Aristotle's virtues fall into two broad categories: intellectual and moral. Intellectual virtues sharpen our capacity to reason, whereas moral virtues order the “passive” part of the soul that only acts rationally by following the lead of others. (shrink)

The Federation's abandonment of a profit‐and‐growth‐based economic system and money in favor of an economic system designed to facilitate personal development is a product of future successes in overcoming scarcity. Federation trekonomics can be well described in terms of Karl Marx's own vision of the first stage of a postscarcity, money‐free, classless society. The difficulties of interpretation that have provoked debate, the existence of Federation credits, the visible hierarchy in Starfleet, and the family ownership of some specialized means of production, (...) such as restaurants and vineyards, can be resolved if one acknowledges that Marx consistently described a first, complex transitional stage to full communism. For Marx, one of the primary social causes of stifled self‐creation is the rigid division of labor, both detailed and social. The social division of labor, involving a clear demarcation of different positions within a total economy, occurs in economic systems before capitalism (like feudalism). (shrink)

When assessing North American students' oral participation in classes, should all students be subject to the same evaluation criteria or should teachers make reasonable allowances for Asian students practicing humility? How do we weigh the promotion of 'courage' through character education initiatives with traditional Asian dispositions? Viewing Asian humility in Western classrooms and as it rubs up against liberal principles of equality or justice, and a virtue ethic raises a number of philosophical questions around authenticity, polyvalence, and relativity. I approach (...) first through the lens of liberal philosophy as the 'dilemma of diversity' meets a boundary with communitarianism, and then through the contextualist lenses of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Foucault. Drawing on Tully's political philosophy, I inspect humility as embedded in language-games and then open it to revision through comparative history, inviting participants in the teacher's game of assessment to renegotiate the rules: a process complicated by their reticence to speak up. I also use Medina and Scheman's political reading of Wittgenstein to discuss how teachers can discern humility as performative silence within the classroom, distinguishing between genealogical accounts that show how comportments could be otherwise from perspicuous inspection of interconnected language-games in current educational settings. (shrink)

This book engages the perspective of public reason and the position of religious believers through a mutual confrontation of Rawlsian political liberalism and Gandhian ideas. By teasing out concords and discords between Rawls and Gandhi, Jeff Shawn Jose innovatively advances the debate about the role of religion in the public sphere.

I argue that Husserlian phenomenology is metaphysically neutral, in the sense of being compatible with multiple metaphysical frameworks. For example, though Husserl dismisses the concept of an unknowable thing in itself as “material nonsense”, I argue that the concept is coherent and that the existence of such things is compatible with Husserl’s phenomenology. I defend this metaphysical neutrality approach against a number of objections and consider some of its implications for Husserl interpretation.

According to our traditional conception of agency, most human beings are agents and most, if not all, nonhuman animals are not. However, recent developments in philosophy and psychology have made it clear that we need more than one conception of agency, since human and nonhuman animals are capable of thinking and acting in more than one kind of way. In this paper, I make a distinction between perceptual and propositional agency, and I argue that many nonhuman animals are perceptual agents (...) and that many human beings are both kinds of agent. I then argue that, insofar as human and nonhuman animals exercise the same kind of agency, they have the same kind of moral status, and I explore some of the moral implications of this idea. (shrink)

This paper proposes that the relation between property instances and token causal powers is akin to the relation between primary substances and property instances on the Aristotelian account of property instantiation. This view permits an individual to have two tokens of the same type of causal power. Paul Audi has argued that this cannot be: two tokens of the same power type are discernible, he claims, only if they are borne by discernible individuals. In the context of this criticism, he (...) proposes that power tokens are individuated in part by the individuals bearing them. This paper responds to Audi’s criticism and argues against his preferred view. This paper thus establishes a theory of token causal powers where previously the literature contained only a presumed view and Audi’s objections. (shrink)

"Nietzche and Dostoevsky"are collectedessays on Nietzsche Dostoevsky andtwentieth-century intellectual history.".

The first interdisciplinary study of place, bringing together many of the key thinkers writing on the concept in the twenty-first century.

In this paper I ask how we should treat other beings in cases of uncertainty about sentience. I evaluate three options: an incautionary principle that permits us to treat other beings as non-sentient, a precautionary principle that requires us to treat other beings as sentient, and an expected value principle that requires us to multiply our subjective probability that other beings are sentient by the amount of moral value they would have if they were. I then draw three conclusions. First, (...) the precautionary and expected value principles are more plausible than the incautionary principle. Second, if we accept a precautionary or expected value principle, then we morally ought to treat many beings as having at least partial moral status. Third, if we morally ought to treat many beings as having at least partial moral status, then morality involves more cluelessness and demandingness than we might have thought. (shrink)

A comprehensive study of the ethics of killing in cases in which the metaphysical or moral status of the individual killed is uncertain or controversial. Among those beings whose status is questionable or marginal in this way are human embryos and fetuses, newborn infants, animals, anencephalic infants, human beings with severe congenital and cognitive impairments, and human beings who have become severely demented or irreversibly comatose. In an effort to understand the moral status of these beings, this book develops and (...) defends distinctive accounts of the nature of personal identity, the evaluation of death, and the wrongness of killing. The central metaphysical claim of the book is that we are neither nonmaterial souls nor human organisms but are instead embodied minds. In ethical theory, one of the central claims is that the morality of killing is not unitary; rather, the principles that determine the morality of killing in marginal cases are different from those that govern the killing of persons who are self‐conscious and rational. Another important theme is that killing in marginal cases should be evaluated in terms of the impact it would have on the victim at the time rather than on the value of the victim's life as a whole. What primarily matters is how killing would affect that which would be rational for the victim to care about at the time of death. By appealing to various foundational claims about identity, death, and the morality of killing, this book yields novel conclusions about such issues as abortion, prenatal injury, infanticide, the killing of animals, the significance of brain death, the termination of life support in cases of persistent vegetative state, the use of anencephalic infants as sources of organs for transplantation, euthanasia, assisted suicide, and advance directives in cases of dementia. In particular, the book defends the moral permissibility of abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia in certain cases and argues that brain death is not the appropriate criterion of death either for a person or a human organism. (shrink)

This book charges that just about every philosophical theory of mind or language developed over the past 50 years in the West is systematically inaccurate. Systemic oppression has influenced the processes that theories of mind or language purport to identify; however, that same systemic oppression has also made it so that most middle-to-upper class White men (including most philosophers of mind or language) are ignorant of systemic oppression. Consequently, most theories of mind or language are systematically inaccurate because they fail (...) to account for the influences of systemic oppression. Philosopher Jeff Engelhardt argues for the de-idealization of two influential theories in the philosophy of mind and language--social externalism and objective type externalism--and considers some consequences of the de-idealization project. -/- Following the work of Charles Mills, Engelhardt argues that ideal theories adopt oppression-obscuring assumptions while nonideal theories avoid them (or at least try to). Ideal theories assume that language users are basically equal, and that social institutions and structures are basically just, but scholarship on Western social relations, institutions, and structures shows that in fact each of these is systematically influenced by oppression. Consequently, ideal theories tend to be systematically inaccurate. Moreover, since oppression systematically produces ignorance of systemic oppression, such systematically inaccurate theories are likely the norm rather than the exception. -/- Engelhardt shows that once we've shown that oppression systematically influences the processes that determine linguistic meanings (according to content externalism), then we have reason to expand our notion of hermeneutical injustice, we have evidence that hermeneutical injustice occurs systematically, and we have grounds for expanding discussions of conceptual engineering to include questions about engineering the processes that determine concepts, not just concepts themselves. (shrink)

Aron Gurwitsch’s theory of the structure and dynamics of consciousness has much to offer contemporary theorizing about consciousness and its basis in the embodied brain. On Gurwitsch’s account, as we develop it, the field of consciousness has a variable sized focus or "theme" of attention surrounded by a structured periphery of inattentional contents. As the field evolves, its contents change their status, sometimes smoothly, sometimes abruptly. Inner thoughts, a sense of one’s body, and the physical environment are dominant field contents. (...) These ideas can be linked with (and help unify) contemporary theories about the neural correlates of consciousness, inattention, the small world structure of the brain, meta-stable dynamics, embodied cognition, and predictive coding in the brain. (shrink)

_How to Think Critically_ begins with the premise that we are all, every day, engaged in critical thinking. But just as we may develop bad habits in daily life if we don’t scrutinize our practices, so are we apt to develop bad habits in critical thinking if we are careless in our reasoning. Readers are presented with a traditional step-by-step method for analysis that can be applied to all argument forms. Hundreds of exercises (with solutions) are included, as are several (...) random statement generators that can be used to create thousands of additional examples. Truth tables, Venn diagrams, and other essential concepts are introduced not merely as objects for academic study but also as tools for better thinking and living. At a time when the value of critical thinking is recognized to be greater than ever, this book is an important resource both inside and outside the classroom. (shrink)