Here we present and develop the hypothesis that the derepression of endogenous retrotransposable elements (RTEs) – “genomic parasites” – is an important and hitherto under‐unexplored molecular aging process that can potentially occur in most tissues. We further envision that the activation and continued presence of retrotransposition contribute to age‐associated tissue degeneration and pathology. Chromatin is a complex and dynamic structure that needs to be maintained in a functional state throughout our lifetime. Studies of diverse species have revealed that chromatin undergoes (...) extensive rearrangements during aging. Cellular senescence, an important component of mammalian aging, has recently been associated with decreased heterochromatinization of normally silenced regions of the genome. These changes lead to the expression of RTEs, culminating in their transposition. RTEs are common in all kingdoms of life, and comprise close to 50% of mammalian genomes. They are tightly controlled, as their activity is highly destabilizing and mutagenic to their resident genomes. (shrink)

Michael Huemer has argued for the justification principle known as phenomenal conservativism by employing a transcendental argument that claims all attempts to reject phenomenal conservativism ultimately are doomed to self-defeat. My contribution presents two independent arguments against the self-defeat argument for phenomenal conservativism after briefly presenting Huemer’s account of phenomenal conservativism and the justification for the self-defeat argument. My first argument suggests some ways that philosophers may reject Huemer’s premise that all justified beliefs are formed on the basis of seemings. (...) In the second argument I contend that phenomenal conservativism is not a well-motivated account of internal justification, which is a further reason to reject the self-defeat argument. Consequently, the self-defeat argument fails to show that rejecting phenomenal conservativism inevitably leads one to a self-defeating position. (shrink)

Plato is associated with the idea that the body holds us back from knowing ultimate reality and so we should try to distance ourselves from its influence. This sentiment appears is several of his dialogues including Theaetetus where the flight from the physical world is compared to becoming like God. In some major dialogues of Plato's later career such as Philebus and Laws, however, the idea of becoming like God takes a different turn. God is an intelligent force that tries (...) to create order in the physical world. I argue that likeness to God in these dialogues involves imitating God's effort by trying to order our bodies, souls, and societies as intelligence directs. Becoming like Plato's God is not to abandon the world. It is to improve it. (shrink)

When a collective is blamed, the responsibility does not escape individuals. Spheres of influence are designed to determine the scale of blame; namely, by proximity and ability to influence a different result. Agents in the respective role types will be responsible upon our examining their extent of influence. Although you may be inclined to say that the responsibility lies with those who have access to policy-making, this doesn't allow for the deviants we expect at appropriate times. Here we are compelled (...) to seek a new moral outlook that maintains our perception of ourself: “what is not worthy of me must not be confused with special requirements of my ‘station and its duties’.”This essay offers a direction to assuage Lewis's fears toward collective responsibility. The challenges to individual responsibility behind such an ascription is complex but need not obliterate it. The delineation of roles by spheres of influence and activity gives some markers to the culpable agents. (shrink)

The value foundation for a global society -- Ethics and international business -- Human rights concepts and principles -- Political involvements by business -- The foreign production process -- Product and export controls -- Marketing motives and methods -- Culture and the human environment -- Nature and the physical environment -- Business guidance and control mechanisms -- Deciding ethical dilemmas.

The often turbulent but nevertheless short history of psychology as a science reveals a strange and often strained relationship with its parent, philosophy. Martin Heidegger played a prominent role in the developing dialogue between philosophy and psychology in this country. As such, he was identified as a principal contributor to the philosophy of existentialism. And Ludwig Binswanger was seen as being the bridge between existential philosophy and psychotherapy. Heidegger's method of inquiry, meticulously thought through and developed, has become an eloquent (...) expression of man's never-ending search for knowledge and the clarification of what "is." This method, along with the scope of his questioning, has generated the development of a phenomenological foundation for medicine and psychology. In this paper, the author attempts to demonstrate Heidegger's work as remarkably poignant for the human condition. He shows how Binswanger, seeing and sensing these new insights, nevertheless remained captive to traditional expressions of thought. And, he shows how Medard Boss, having access to Heidegger himself in dialogue, has expressed the need for a new type of thinking in a frenetic world which tenaciously holds onto and refines one world-relationship to the neglect of others as the only avenue to truth. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

As it is currently understood, the notion of autonomy, both as something that belongs to human beings and human nature, as such, and also as the source or basis of morality , is bound up inextricably with the philosophy of Kant. The term “autonomy” itself derives from classical Greek, where it was applied primarily or even exclusively in a political context, to civic communities possessing independent legislative and self-governing authority. The term was taken up again in Renaissance and early modern (...) times with similar political applications, but was applied also in ecclesiastical disputes about the independence of reformed churches from the former authority in religious matters of the church of the Roman popes. Kant's innovation consisted in conceiving of individual rational persons, as such, as lawgivers or legislators to themselves, and to all rational beings , for their individual modes of behavior. For Kant, rational beings possess a power of legislating for themselves individually, according to which they each set their own personal ends and subject that selection, and their pursuit of the ends in question, to a universal principle, which is expressed in Kant's categorical imperative. The categorical imperative requires that one set one's own ends only within a framework that would warrant acceptance by all other such beings. (shrink)

If God had looked into our minds he would not have been able to see there whom we were speaking of.

Animals depleting one patch of resources must decide when to leave and switch to a fresh patch. Foraging theory has predicted various decision mechanisms; which is best depends on environmental variation in patch quality. Previously we tested whether these mechanisms underlie human decision making when foraging for external resources; here we test whether humans behave similarly in a cognitive task seeking internally generated solutions. Subjects searched for meaningful words made from random letter sequences, and as their success rate declined, they (...) could opt to switch to a fresh sequence. As in the external foraging context, time since the previous success and the interval preceding it had a major influence on when subjects switched. Subjects also used the commonness of sequence letters as a proximal cue to patch quality that influenced when to switch. Contrary to optimality predictions, switching decisions were independent of whether sequences differed little or widely in quality. (shrink)

Mark Johnson argues in favour of embodied experience as the basis for knowledge. An important implication of his analysis is that these experiences instigate pervasive metaphorical systems. Johnson 's argument involves reductionist problems, chicken-and-egg problems and, at times, unclear criteria for what counts as a basic experience and a metaphor.

Ever since Darwin, scholars have noted that cultural entities such as languages, laws and theories seem to evolve through variation, selection and replication. These essays consider whether this comparison is just a metaphor.

Ed. Daniel Greenberger, 750pp May 1995 164.95.

Jesse Prinz’s The Emotional Construction of Morals is among the most significant of illuminations of human morality to appear in recent years. This embarrassment of riches presents the space-starved commentator with a dilemma: survey the book’s extraordinary sweep, and slight the textured argumentation, or engage a fraction of the argumentation, and slight the sweep. I’ll fall on the second horn, and focus mostly on Chapter 7, ‘The Genealogy of Morals’. Like Prinz , 1 I think that genealogical arguments have not, (...) despite their frequent appearance, received enough self-conscious discussion in ethical theorizing; I’ll try to extend Prinz’s amelioration of this neglect, by making some recurring themes explicit. In so doing, I indulge myself in a bit of therapy. I’ve always regarded genealogical arguments with certain ambivalence: genealogies frequently make a beguiling first impression, but just as often, when one gets to know them, their appeal turns out to be superficial. In articulating the contrasting uses to which genealogical arguments might be put, I hope to distinguish uses that deliver real substance from uses where the promise is not realized in the practice.Genealogical arguments are indelibly associated with Nietzsche, so it is unsurprising that Prinz in this chapter parts company with Hume, his usual muse, 2 and takes up, somewhat ambivalently , a Nietzschean torch. I won’t fret the historical details, nor will I trouble myself over where Nietzsche ends and Prinz begins; I’ll simply raise some general issues about genealogy and ethics. 3The Nietzschean insight, according to Prinz , is that ‘the values we currently cherish have a history’ and this history ‘may not be pretty’. Notoriously, Nietzsche was a bit grumpy about Christianity, and he supposed that tracing morality through the dark and labyrinthine history of the Church would unmask the attendant values …. (shrink)

The virtue of mercy is widely admired, but is now marginalized in contemporary public life. Yet for centuries it held a secure place in western public discourse without implying a necessary contradiction with justice. Alex Tuckness and John M. Parrish ask how and why this changed. Examining Christian and non-Christian ancient traditions, along with Kantian and utilitarian strains of thought, they offer a persuasive account of how our perception of mercy has been transformed by Enlightenment conceptions of impartiality and (...) equality that place justice and mercy in tension. Understanding the logic of this decline, they argue, will make it possible to promote and defend a more robust role for mercy in public life. Their study ranges from Homer to the late Enlightenment and from ancient tragedies to medieval theologies to contemporary philosophical texts, and will be valuable to readers in political philosophy, political theory, and the philosophy of law. (shrink)

How does deductive logic constrain probability? This question is difficult for subjectivistic approaches, according to which probability is just strength of (prudent) partial belief, for this presumes logical omniscience. This paper proposes that the way in which probability lies always between possibility and necessity can be made precise by exploiting a minor theorem of de Finetti: In any finite set of propositions the expected number of truths is the sum of the probabilities over the set. This is generalized to apply (...) to denumerable languages. It entails that the sum of probabilities can neither exceed nor be exceeded by the cardinalities of all consistent and closed (within the set) subsets. In general any numerical function on sentences is said to be logically coherent if it satisfies this condition. Logical coherence allows the relativization of necessity: A function p on a language is coherent with respect to the concept T of necessity iff there is no set of sentences on which the sum of p exceeds or is exceeded by the cardinality of every T-consistent and T-closed (within the set) subset of the set. Coherence is easily applied as well to sets on which the sum of p does not converge. Probability should also be relativized by necessity: A T-probability assigns one to every T-necessary sentence and is additive over disjunctions of pairwise T-incompatible sentences. Logical T-coherence is then equivalent to T-probability: All and only T-coherent functions are T-probabilities. (shrink)

The virtue of mercy is widely admired, but is now marginalized in contemporary public life. Yet for centuries it held a secure place in western public discourse without implying a necessary contradiction with justice. Alex Tuckness and John M. Parrish ask how and why this changed. Examining Christian and non-Christian ancient traditions, along with Kantian and utilitarian strains of thought, they offer a persuasive account of how our perception of mercy has been transformed by Enlightenment conceptions of impartiality and (...) equality that place justice and mercy in tension. Understanding the logic of this decline, they argue, will make it possible to promote and defend a more robust role for mercy in public life. Their study ranges from Homer to the late Enlightenment and from ancient tragedies to medieval theologies to contemporary philosophical texts, and will be valuable to readers in political philosophy, political theory, and the philosophy of law. (shrink)

Martha Nussbaum proposes a universal list of human capabilities as the basis for fundamental political principles. She claims that the list, in an Aristotelian spirit, might be justified by an ongoing inquiry into valuable human functionings for the good life. Here I argue that the attractiveness of Nussbaum’s theory crucially depends on the philosophical possibility of a non-reductionist understanding of naturalism and on resolving the tensions between ethical and political aspects of the role of capabilities. Through a comparison of Nussbaum’s (...) approach with those of Aristotle and (less familiarly) Hume, I try to show that in these alternative versions we find valuable resources for the kind of non-reductionist model which might, in line with Nussbaum’s own objectives, provide the basis for a capabilities-based critique of dominant modes of normative theorizing and their influence in public discourse. (shrink)

As a corrective, the systematic study and practice of conscious individual living develops mental insight which is the essence of mental health. ...