Epithelial development dictates the shape of an organism. The metamorphic development of a Drosophila leg precursor into an adult leg is a well‐defined example of epithelial morphogenesis that can be analyzed from the perspectives of genetics and molecular and cell biology. The steroid hormone 20‐hydroxyecdysone induces and regulates the entire process. Mutants affecting Drosophila leg morphogenesis characteristically have short thick legs (the malformed phenotype) resulting from a failure to execute normal cell shape changes at a specific stage of development. Mutations (...) that cause the malformed phenotype have already led to the identification and cloning of genes encoding transcription factors, a transmembrane serine protease presumably required for modification of the apical extracellular matrix, and components of the contractile cytoskeleton and adherens junctions. All of these products are required for the execution of normal changes in leg cell shape. (shrink)

Intent and mitigating circumstances play a central role in moral and legal assessments in large-scale industrialized societies. Al- though these features of moral assessment are widely assumed to be universal, to date, they have only been studied in a narrow range of societies. We show that there is substantial cross-cultural variation among eight traditional small-scale societies (ranging from hunter-gatherer to pastoralist to horticulturalist) and two Western societies (one urban, one rural) in the extent to which intent and mitigating circumstances influence (...) moral judgments. Although participants in all societies took such factors into account to some degree, they did so to very different extents, varying in both the types of considerations taken into account and the types of violations to which such considerations were applied. The particular patterns of assessment characteristic of large-scale industrialized societies may thus reflect relatively recently culturally evolved norms rather than inherent features of human moral judgment. (shrink)

Decades of research conducted in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, & Democratic (WEIRD) societies have led many scholars to conclude that the use of mental states in moral judgment is a human cognitive universal, perhaps an adaptive strategy for selecting optimal social partners from a large pool of candidates. However, recent work from a more diverse array of societies suggests there may be important variation in how much people rely on mental states, with people in some societies judging accidental harms just (...) as harshly as intentional ones. To explain this variation, we develop and test a novel cultural evolutionary theory proposing that the intensity of kin-based institutions will favor less attention to mental states when judging moral violations. First, to better illuminate the historical distribution of the use of intentions in moral judgment, we code and analyze anthropological observations from the Human Area Relations Files. This analysis shows that notions of strict liability—wherein the role for mental states is reduced—were common across diverse societies around the globe. Then, by expanding an existing vignette-based experimental dataset containing observations from 321 people in a diverse sample of 10 societies, we show that the intensity of a society's kin-based institutions can explain a substantial portion of the population-level variation in people's reliance on intentions in three different kinds of moral judgments. Together, these lines of evidence suggest that people's use of mental states has coevolved culturally to fit their local kin-based institutions. We suggest that although reliance on mental states has likely been a feature of moral judgment in human communities over historical and evolutionary time, the relational fluidity and weak kin ties of today's WEIRD societies position these populations' psychology at the extreme end of the global and historical spectrum. (shrink)

Human moral judgement may have evolved to maximize the individual's welfare given parochial culturally constructed moral systems. If so, then moral condemnation should be more severe when transgressions are recent and local, and should be sensitive to the pronouncements of authority figures (who are often arbiters of moral norms), as the fitness pay-offs of moral disapproval will primarily derive from the ramifications of condemning actions that occur within the immediate social arena. Correspondingly, moral transgressions should be viewed as less objectionable (...) if they occur in other places or times, or if local authorities deem them acceptable. These predictions contrast markedly with those derived from prevailing non-evolutionary perspectives on moral judgement. Both classes of theories predict purportedly species-typical patterns, yet to our knowledge, no study to date has investigated moral judgement across a diverse set of societies, including a range of small-scale communities that differ substantially from large highly urbanized nations. We tested these predictions in five small-scale societies and two large-scale societies, finding substantial evidence of moral parochialism and contextual contingency in adults' moral judgements. Results reveal an overarching pattern in which moral condemnation reflects a concern with immediate local considerations, a pattern consistent with a variety of evolutionary accounts of moral judgement. (shrink)

Any set x is uniquely specified by the graph of the membership relation on the set obtained by adjoining x to the transitive closure of x. Thus any operation on sets can be looked at as an operation on these graphs. We look at the operations of ordinal arithmetic of sets in this light. This turns out to be simplest for a modified ordinal arithmetic based on the Zermelo ordinals, instead of the usual von Neumann ordinals. In this arithmetic, addition (...) of sets corresponds to concatenating graphs, and multiplication corresponds to replacing each edge of a graph by a copy of another graph. Characterizations for the von Neumann case are also given. (shrink)

The “high school algebra” laws of exponentiation fail in the ordinal arithmetic of sets that generalizes the arithmetic of the von Neumann ordinals. The situation can be remedied by using an alternative arithmetic of sets, based on the Zermelo ordinals, where the high school laws hold. In fact the Zermelo arithmetic of sets is uniquely characterized by its satisfying the high school laws together with basic properties of addition and multiplication. We also show how in both arithmetics the behavior of (...) exponentiation depends on whether the empty set is an element of the base. (shrink)

In diesem Aufsatz zeige ich, wie Leibniz' spätere Philosophie auf seine frühen Arbeiten und auf die spätscholastische Philosophie, insbesondere den Nominalismus von Suarez, zurückgreift. Zunächst behaupte ich, daß Leibniz Suarez' Ontologie der Relationen ebenso wie seine Auffassung der Begriffe, des Besonderen und des Allgemeinen übernommen hat. Ich verwende die Ergebnisse dieser Untersuchung, um einige Hauptthemen der Leibnizschen Philosophie (die Theorie der Monaden und ihrer individuellen Begriffe, die Kategorienlehre, die Wahrheitstheorie, die unendliche Analyse und das principium indiscernibilium) zu erklären. Dieser Aufsatz (...) soll die traditionelle Prägung von einem großen Teil des Leibnizschen Denkens aufzeigen und die Frage neu stellen: In welchem Sinne ist Leibniz ein Philosoph der modernen Tradition? (shrink)

This dissertation investigates the ways in which natural language restricts the domains of quantifiers. Adverbs of quantification are analyzed as quantifying over situations. The domain of quantifiers is pragmatically constrained: apparent processes of "semantic partition" are treated as pragmatic epiphenomena. The introductory Chapter 1 sketches some of the background of work on natural language quantification and begins the analysis of adverbial quantification over situations. Chapter 2 develops the central picture of "semantic partition" as a side-effect of pragmatic processes of anaphora (...) resolution. I argue that the apparent effects of topic/focus articulation and presuppositional information on the interpretation of quantifiers are not the result of a direct and local mechanism of sentence grammar. Instead, I develop an analysis where the link is established via the anaphoric dependence of quantifier domains on the discourse context. Chapter 3 discusses the analysis of conditional clauses as quantifier restrictors, concentrating on the question whether conditional clauses restrict quantifiers directly or indirectly. A treatment is explored which has if-clauses constrain the value of the hidden domain variable of the restricted quantifier. Chapter 4, on unless-clauses, and Chapter 5, on only if- and even if-clauses, present some issues in the compositional analysis of complex conditional clauses. These chapters significantly expand the data coverage of the theory of A-quantification. Building on previous work of mine on exceptives, I analyze unless-clauses as exceptive operators on A-quantifiers. The analysis of only if-clauses, treated as conditional clauses that combine if with the focus adverb only, unearthes some interesting new properties. Chapter 6, finally, examines the phenomenon of donkey-anaphora in the light of the results of the previous chapters. I show that a solution to the proportion problem may become possible once we combine the situation-semantic approach to adverbial quantification with the pragmatic theory developed in Chapter 2 and further elaborated in the analysis of donkey anaphora in complex conditionals. (shrink)

In this incisive new book one of Britain's most eminent philosophers explores the often overlooked tension between voluntariness and involuntariness in human cognition. He seeks to counter the widespread tendency for analytic epistemology to be dominated by the concept of belief. Is scientific knowledge properly conceived as being embodied, at its best, in a passive feeling of belief or in an active policy of acceptance? Should a jury's verdict declare what its members involuntarily believe or what they voluntarily accept? And (...) should statements and assertions be presumed to express what their authors believe or what they accept? Does such a distinction between belief and acceptance help to resolve the paradoxes of self-deception and akrasia? Must people be taken to believe everything entailed by what they believe, or merely to accept everything entailed by what they accept? Through a systematic examination of these problems, the author sheds new light on issues of crucial importance in contemporary epistemology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science. (shrink)

Hippel, author of Die Lebensläufe nach aufsteigender Linie (1778-1781), has been widely recognized as one of the best German authors to write in the manner of Laurence Sterne. This study places Hippel in the context of the theory of the novel and historiography in the eighteenth century. It re-examines the relationship between Hippel and Sterne (as well as Diderot), with emphasis on the contrast in the authors' use of narrators and documents. Hippel's indebtedness to Kant is well known, but (...) here his borrowing from Kant's lecture notes is discussed in detail and its relevance to Hippel's theory of the novel shown. (shrink)

A syntactically correct number-specification may fail to specify any number due to underspecification. For similar reasons, although each sentence in the Yablo sequence is syntactically perfect, none yields a statement with any truth-value. As is true of all members of the Liar family, the sentences in the Yablo sequence are so constructed that the specification of their truth-conditions is vacuous; the Yablo sentences fail to yield statements. The ‘revenge’ problem is easily defused. The solution to the semantical paradoxes offered here (...) revives the mediaeval cassatio approach, one that largely disappeared due to its incomprehending rejection by influential contemporary writers such as William Shyreswood and Thomas Bradwardine. The diagnosis readily extends to the set-theoretic paradoxes. (shrink)

The Russell class does not exist because the conditions purporting to specify that class are contradictory, and hence fail to specify any class. Equally, the conditions purporting to specify the Liar statement are contradictory and hence, although the Liar sentence is grammatically in order, it fails to yield a statement. Thus the common source of these and related paradoxes is contradictory (or tautologous) specifying conditions-for such conditions fail to specify. This is the diagnosis. The cure consists of seeking and destroying (...) the deep-seated preconceptions that make almost irresistible our belief in the existence of items which provably do not exist. (shrink)

Over the past thirty-five years, there has been an explosive increase in scientists' ability to explain the structure and functioning of the human brain. While psychology has advanced our understanding of human behavior, various other sciences, such as anatomy, physiology, and biology, have determined the critical importance of synapses and, through the use of advanced technology, made it possible actually to see brain cells at work within the skull's walls. Here Jean-Pierre Changeux elucidates our current knowledge of the human brain, (...) taking an interdisciplinary approach and explaining in layman's terms the complex theories and scientific breakthroughs that have significantly improved our understanding in the twentieth century. (shrink)

The pantheon of classical liberal thinkers must honor the memory of one brilliant mathematician, scientist, and debunker of superstitious beliefs, the sound-money advocate Nicole Oresme. Although his opposition to the recoinage practices of the French monarchy was not unprecedented in the fourteenth century, Oresme must be credited with anticipating the “rational expectations” in economics when he distinguished quite forcefully between “preannounced debasement” and “secret debasement” and their effects on the distribution of wealth. Oresme explains that the king should not practice (...) secret debasement, and can appear as a pioneer for modern ideas on monetary surprises. (shrink)

Fondée en 1982 par un groupe d'étudiants de littérature française autour de Bernard Cerquiglini et publiée par les Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, Médiévales est aujourd'hui la seule revue généraliste d'histoire du Moyen Âge en France. Mais si elle a connu maints changements depuis sa création, elle est restée fidèle au choix de numéros thématiques : chaque numéro de cette revue semestrielle est consacré à un thème, qui n'exclut pas d'autres articles, longtemps qualifiés de « Hors-thème...

I argue for the use of the adjunction operator (adding a single new element to an existing set) as a basis for building a finitary set theory. It allows a simplified axiomatization for the first-order theory of hereditarily finite sets based on an induction schema and a rigorous characterization of the primitive recursive set functions. The latter leads to a primitive recursive presentation of arithmetical operations on finite sets.

The concept of medicine as a profession in the English-language literature of medical ethics is of recent vintage, invented by the Scottish physician and medical ethicist, John Gregory (1724-1773). Gregory wrote the first secular, philosophical, clinical, and feminine medical ethics and bioethics in the English language and did so on the basis of Hume's principle of sympathy. This paper provides a brief account of Gregory's invention and the role that Humean sympathy plays in that invention, with reference to key texts (...) in Gregory's work. The paper also considers two interesting and perhaps provocative ways in which Hume can be read through Gregory: first, sympathy as a principle of scientific discovery in Hume's science of man and moral physiology; and sympathy as gendered feminine in Hume's moral philosophy. Hume's principle of sympathy is at the core of Gregory's medical ethics and the histories of Western medical ethics and bioethics pivot on Gregory - and, therefore, on Hume - as it does on few other figures. (shrink)

(2001). The History of Medical Ethics Is Crucial for a Critical Perspective in the Continuing Development of Ethics Consultation. The American Journal of Bioethics: Vol. 1, No. 4, pp. 55-57.

Grice introduced generalized conversational implicatures with the following example: "Anyone who uses a sentence of the formX is meeting tz woman this evening would normally implicate that the person to be met was someone other than X’s wife, mother, sister, or perhaps even close platonic friend" (1975 : 37). Concerning this example, he suggested the following account: When someone, by using the form of expression an JQ implicates that the X does not belong to or is not otherwise closely connected (...) with some identifiable person, the implicature is present because the speaker has failed to be specific in a way in which he might have been expected to be specific. (Grice 1975: 38.) Grice went on to sketch an explanation as to why such an implicature should arise, involving the different ways in which we behave towards things that are closely related to.. (shrink)

Judith Butler hat die feministische Theorie revolutioniert und entscheidende Beiträge zur Philosophie des Subjekts geleistet. In ihren jüngsten Schriften, die sich gegen Krieg und staatliche Gewalt wenden, überführt sie ihre Subjekttheorie schließlich in eine Ethik der Gewaltlosigkeit. Ihre Analysen eint der Blick darauf, wie Gewalt nicht erst in offenkundigen Übergriffen beginnt, sondern auf der Ebene sozialer Normen und Kategorien vorstrukturiert, welche Leben überhaupt als wahrnehmbar und anerkennungswürdig gelten können. Die vorliegende Einleitung macht verständlich, mit welchen Anliegen und welchen theoretischen Mitteln (...) Butler solche „Gewalt vor der Gewalt“ auf diversen Gebieten kritisiert. Ihre zentralen Begriffe wie „Performativität“, „Melancholie“ und „Verletzlichkeit“ werden jeweils in Bezug auf ihre Konzeptionen von Geschlecht, Subjekt und Widerstand hin erklärt und ermöglichen einen versierten Überblick über und Einstieg in das Werk der vielleicht provozierendsten und faszinierendsten Denkerin der Gegenwart. (shrink)

Managed care employs two business tools of managed practice that raise important ethical issues: paying physicians in ways that impose conflicts of interest on them; and regulating physicians' clinical judgment, decision making, and behavior. The literature on the clinical ethics of managed care has begun to develop rapidly in the past several years. Professional organizations of physicians have made important contributions to this literature. The statements on ethical issues in managed care of four such organizations are considered here, the American (...) Medical Association, the American College of Physicians, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and the American Academy of Pediatrics. Three themes common to these statements are identified and critically assessed: the primacy of meeting the medical needs of each individual patient; disclosure of conflicts of interest in how physicians are paid; and opposition to gag orders. The paper concludes with an argument for a basic concept in the clinical ethics of managed care: physicians and institutions as economically disciplined moral co-fiduciaries of populations of patients. (shrink)

Several approaches to clinical ethics consultation (CEC) exist in medical practice and are widely discussed in the clinical ethics literature; different models of CECs are classified according to their methods, goals, and consultant’s attitude. Although the “facilitation” model has been endorsed by the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH) and is described in an influential manual, alternative approaches, such as advocacy, moral expertise, mediation, and engagement are practiced and defended in the clinical ethics field. Our Clinical Ethics Center in (...) Paris was founded in 2002 in the wake of the Patients’ Rights Act, and to date it is the largest center that provides consultation services in France. In this article we shall describe and defend our own approach to clinical ethics consultation, which we call the “Commitment Model,” in comparison with other existing models. Indeed commitment implies, among other meanings, continuity through time, a series of coherent actions, and the realization of important social goals. By drawing on a recent consultation case, we shall describe the main steps of our consultation procedure: interviews with major stakeholders, including patients and proxies; case conferences; and follow up. We shall show why we have chosen the term “commitment” to represent our approach at three different but interrelated levels: commitment towards patients, within the case conference group, and towards society as a whole. (shrink)

Nancy Jecker (2013) mounts a sustained and formidable critique of Norman Daniels's prudential lifespan account (PLA) as a reliable basis for justice between age groups in the responsible allocation...

Buson, Nardy, Muller & Chevrot (2018) report two experiments ‐ a repetition task and a judgment task ‐ based on the phenomenon of sociolinguistic restoration. When people repeat utterances mixing standard and non‐standard variants, they make them homogeneous. The results suggest that coherent cognitive representation of the sociolinguistic varieties influences the reconstruction of the mixed heard utterance during the repetition. Using the repetition task could help understanding how sociolinguistic cues are organized in memory.

According to some commentators, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is all one big joke: we plough through the text trying to extract the sense out of each spare and heroic proposition, only to be told at the end, that anyone who understands the author will realize that all of his propositions are nonsensical and so are not even propositions. The whole work is a kind of hoax; the readers are ridiculed, but, with luck, will eventually have to laugh when they come to recognize (...) that what they had taken for deep philosophy was all so much gibberish. As a result of this revelation, they will be cured for ever of the urge to philosophize. (shrink)