In this review, we describe some of the central philosophical issues facing origins-of-life research and provide a targeted history of the developments that have led to the multidisciplinary field of origins-of-life studies. We outline these issues and developments to guide researchers and students from all fields. With respect to philosophy, we provide brief summaries of debates with respect to (1) definitions (or theories) of life, what life is and how research should be conducted in the absence of an accepted theory (...) of life, (2) the distinctions between synthetic, historical, and universal projects in origins-of-life studies, issues with strategies for inferring the origins of life, such as (3) the nature of the first living entities (the “bottom up” approach) and (4) how to infer the nature of the last universal common ancestor (the “top down” approach), and (5) the status of origins of life as a science. Each of these debates influences the others. Although there are clusters of researchers that agree on some answers to these issues, each of these debates is still open. With respect to history, we outline several independent paths that have led to some of the approaches now prevalent in origins-of-life studies. These include one path from early views of life through the scientific revolutions brought about by Linnaeus (von Linn.), Wöhler, Miller, and others. In this approach, new theories, tools, and evidence guide new thoughts about the nature of life and its origin.We also describe another family of paths motivated by a” circularity” approach to life, which is guided by such thinkers as Maturana & Varela, Gánti, Rosen, and others. These views echo ideas developed by Kant and Aristotle, though they do so using modern science in ways that produce exciting avenues of investigation. By exploring the history of these ideas, we can see how many of the issues that currently interest us have been guided by the contexts in which the ideas were developed. The disciplinary backgrounds of each of these scholars has influenced the questions they sought to answer, the experiments they envisioned, and the kinds of data they collected. We conclude by encouraging scientists and scholars in the humanities and social sciences to explore ways in which they can interact to provide a deeper understanding of the conceptual assumptions, structure, and history of origins-of-life research. This may be useful to help frame future research agendas and bring awareness to the multifaceted issues facing this challenging scientific question. (shrink)

Aworkshop was held August 26–28, 2015, by the Earth- Life Science Institute (ELSI) Origins Network (EON, see Appendix I) at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. This meeting gathered a diverse group of around 40 scholars researching the origins of life (OoL) from various perspectives with the intent to find common ground, identify key questions and investigations for progress, and guide EON by suggesting a roadmap of activities. Specific challenges that the attendees were encouraged to address included the following: What key (...) questions, ideas, and investigations should the OoL research community address in the near and long term? How can this community better organize itself and prioritize its efforts? What roles can particular subfields play, and what can ELSI and EON do to facilitate research progress? (See also Appendix II.) The present document is a product of that workshop; a white paper that serves as a record of the discussion that took place and a guide and stimulus to the solution of the most urgent and important issues in the study of the OoL. This paper is not intended to be comprehensive or a balanced representation of the opinions of the entire OoL research community. It is intended to present a number of important position statements that contain many aspirational goals and suggestions as to how progress can be made in understanding the OoL. The key role played in the field by current societies and recurring meetings over the past many decades is fully acknowledged, including the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life (ISSOL) and its official journal Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres, as well as the International Society for Artificial Life (ISAL). (shrink)

This book aims to answer two main questions about Aristotle’s theory of causality and causal explanation, especially in relation to natural science: (1) How does he answer the main philosophical questions about causes to which he thinks his predecessors’ answers are flawed? (2) How do his answers bear on the main questions we confront in thinking about causality in general? The texts that deal with causality directly are analyzed against the background of his criticisms of his predecessors and his broader (...) views about explanation, highlighting their theoretically important commitments. This allows us to reveal the conceptual architecture of his theory. The basic theory is then applied to two questions about causality, one metaphysical and one epistemological. The metaphysical question is how to account for the relation between causes and what they cause, in light of a fundamental tension between different desiderata for causal explanations. Aristotle’s answer is pluralistic: he does not think that there is one metaphysical relationship between causes and what they cause even within a given mode of causality. The epistemological question asks how we grasp causes, and grasp them in a way that yields scientific understanding. Aristotle’s answer is again a pluralist one: metaphysically different phenomena demand different cognitive resources, and some are more accessible than others. Nevertheless, there is a discernible path from simpler to more sophisticated types of cognitive grasp on causality, in such a way that Aristotle can plausibly satisfy the epistemological constraints he thinks his predecessors cannot. Aristotle thus aims to provide a non-reductionist account of causality that still leaves room for a substantive conception of understanding in natural science. (shrink)

We describe an approach to textual inference that improves alignments at both the typed dependency level and at a deeper semantic level. We present a machine learning approach to alignment scoring, a stochastic search procedure, and a new tool that finds deeper semantic alignments, allowing rapid development of semantic features over the aligned graphs. Further, we describe a complementary semantic component based on natural logic, which shows an added gain of 3.13% accuracy on the RTE3 test set.

Though not often discussed as such, Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge is a work of queer utopianism. Myra herself is an entrancing figure—a self-created goddess who is determined to save humanity by abolishing gender itself. That her efforts ultimately fail is a testament to the queerness of her utopianism. Using Lee Edelman's discussion of “reproductive futurism” and José Esteban Muñoz's insights into the queerness of utopianism, this article analyzes the ways in which Myra Breckinridge channels both hopeful and destructive urges as (...) a way of imagining a counter-narrative to the human catastrophe represented by the atomic bomb and the threat of overpopulation. (shrink)

Let be the field of p‐adic numbers in the language of rings. In this paper we consider the theory of expanded by two predicates interpreted by multiplicative subgroups and where are multiplicatively independent. We show that the theory of this structure interprets Peano arithmetic if α and β have positive p‐adic valuation. If either α or β has zero valuation we show that the theory of has the NIP (“negation of the independence property”) and therefore does not interpret Peano arithmetic. (...) In that case we also prove that the theory is decidable if and only if the theory of is decidable. (shrink)

Aristotle opens his discussion of time in Physics 4.10-14 with a puzzle, an argument which purports to show that time does not exist, since its only parts – the past and future – do not exist. He does not discuss the puzzle again, and so we are left with the question of how he would or could solve it. A full solution would involve not only a justification of realism about time, but also an account of why the puzzle arises, (...) what must be corrected to prevent it from arising, and how much of our pre-theoretical picture of time survives these adjustments. This paper argues that we can provide such a solution by (i) distinguishing between two ways of being committed to the reality of past, present, and future, and (ii) examining Aristotle’s remarks in Physics 4.12 on the notions of being in time and being surrounded by time. (shrink)

いま、この危機と混迷の時代に、憲法学者・樋口陽一が、基本に立ち戻り、戦後日本を代表する英知・加藤周一と丸山眞男の「憲法論」と「思想」を再読し、その本質を語り尽くす。.

日本の戦後思想の核心とは、圧倒的な外来思想への、自己の戦争体験と近代日本の露わになった後進性を手がかりにした、ポストコロニアルな抵抗にある。非西洋世界が近代化にむけた苦闘にあるこのとき、日本の戦後思想 は、どのような可能性をもつのか。「リスク近代」の果てにせり上がってきた、世界が抱え込む「有限性」という概念を手がかりに、21世紀世界の思想的課題と、未来構想の可能性を問う。.

The third author has shown that Shelah's eventual categoricity conjecture holds in universal classes: class of structures closed under isomorphisms, substructures, and unions of chains. We extend this result to the framework of multiuniversal classes. Roughly speaking, these are classes with a closure operator that is essentially algebraic closure (instead of, in the universal case, being essentially definable closure). Along the way, we prove in particular that Galois (orbital) types in multiuniversal classes are determined by their finite restrictions, generalizing a (...) result of the second author. (shrink)

In Plato's "Hippias Major" 292e6-7, we can find a self-predication sentence; "The fine is always fine." (We have similar expressions in "Protagoras" 330c4-6, 330d8-el, "Lysis" 220b6-7.) How should we interpret this sentence? We cannot give it any metaphysical meaning drawn from Plato's own theory of Form, which is explicit in his middle dialogues. "The fine" here should be the logical cause, not the one of the metaphysical essentials (cf. Paul Woodruff's "Plateo Hippias Major", p. 150). So taking a sentence like (...) "parthenos kale kalon" (287e4), we can safely paraphrase it in Woodruff's manner: "a fine girl is a fine thing." This can avoid reading the metaphysical meaning into the text. And I would like to make a new proposal for reading of 292e6-7: "the fine thing is what is to be called fine." This is to emphasize the unique character of the self-predication sentences in the early dialogues. In the Socratic way of discourse, Socrates and his partner get involved into "trial and error" during their pursuit of the knowledge. What they can do then is to give their opinions which seem to them true (so-called alethes doxa", cf. "Meno" 85c), and to get close examinations of them. And in this way they are getting closer to the knowledge. My interpretation well describes these activities. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:arrêt sur visagefrom Hatred of Translation1Nathanaël (bio)or else isolated in silence—Danielle Collobert, Ça des motsIn the language of film there are often extraordinary divergences between English and French, which prove at times to be irreconcilable.2 If this tendency toward discrepancy is true of translation as a rule, it reveals itself to be particularly true in the case of this work in translation. Danielle Collobert's Recherche,3 rendered as Research, in (...) which the search of re-search must be read as detachable, with emphasis on its repetitive motion—but also in its slide from substantive to predicate (search>searches)—makes salient such divergences, through the implied camera movement panning over the evacuated faces of A and B and the marked distances especially that define the space of their bodies, in proximity and in remove, as though the text were annotating a form of recusal that is implicit in the spaces of desire to which their mortiferous movements owe everything; an intimacy of anticipated death, and seizure, from which the camera extracts movements of degradation through violent stillness.Indeed the term still here is adopted to render the French arrêt, proposing a false equivalency between the (film) still and its seemingly concordant locution, the arrêt (sur image). These are "attested" terms that reveal something of the contexts in which each seeks to function. In Recherche Collobert limits herself [End Page 138] to the use of arrêt sur, designating in each instance a specific detail on which the camera is to stop. "Stop" of course is one of the translations of the lone substantive "arrêt," which also implies "arrest" (from the verb arrêter), replete with its juridical (enforceable/enforcible) intent.4One might just as readily translate "arrêt sur" as "stop at," stopping at nothing to achieve the irresistible demands of such a transitive language that subverts its own objectivity through a persistent preference for passive forms, abdicating one's responsibility to the law in abject deference to its capital aims. Regimens of grammar are coincident with regimens of power now as always.5More than one frontier has now been crossed, and reading the three works6 gathered by Françoise Morvan under the title Expériences (experiments and/ or experiences) in this so-called America is a serious transposition indeed in which the sands of north-western France adjoining the virulent Atlantic, may readily allow themselves to be supplanted by an imagined far-ouest of burnt deserts shimmering with radioactive particulate, under some gun. These are voided investigations that succeed only in subtracting the body from its criminality—a condemnation of ages pressed into moments, a crime committed to each and every one.Meurtre (Murder), the title of Collobert's first acknowledged work,7 is just as operative in these cinematic and radiophonic works; indeed, it can be read as a mot d'ordre for her entire oeuvre,8 and with which its entire topography is suffused. The stills of Recherche and "Polyphonie" attest to this, as does the recurrence of the isolate arrêt, whether in its designation of a bus stop or a pause in action (breaks in the fight, for example, between B and the man on the dock), toppling into the near untranslatable arrêts in the plural, stops, which invites, again, a transitive reading rather than the congealment of the plural substantive, and this, in keeping with the stares that transfix and bore into the faces verging on the dunes. The polysemic displacement of arrêt is such that the cumulative effect of its multiply transposed sense is that of a filmstrip caught in a projector, and it isn't clear whether the image is held or whether it is caught in the mechanism; in either case, the reader is among those held captive by a language that forbids release, burrowing instead, more deeply, into a thickeningly menacing interiority with its inscription of fear similar to that elicited by the perceived approach of the beast in Kafka's "The Burrow." The time of exposure holds the permanent promise of such a threat. [End Page 139]Nathanaël Nathanaël... (shrink)

Aristotle thinks that we understand something when we know its causes. According to Aristotle but contrary to most recent approaches, causation and explanation cannot be understood separately. Aristotle complicates matters by claiming that there are four causes, which have come to be known as the formal, material, final, and efficient causes. To understand Aristotelian causation and its relationship to explanation, then, we must come to a precise understanding of the four causes, and how they are supposed to be explanatory. Aristotle’s (...) discussion of the causes, however, is compact, and he typically presents them without arguing for them. He thus leaves us with a number of questions, ranging from the highly specific to the highly general. One question in particular has captured the attention of scholars and philosophers over the last century, and it has had a strong influence on recent treatments of the four causes – namely, whether we are right to understand Aristotle as committed to a plurality of kinds of causation, or rather a plurality of kinds of explanation. Sometimes the question is raised as one of whether it would be more accurate to speak of the four ‘becauses’ rather than the four ‘causes’. This worry is highly general, and there are in fact several ways in which it might be formulated; nonetheless, it is important to clarify the precise nature of the problem, and the possible ways of responding to it. At issue is not just whether Aristotle’s notions are sufficiently like the modern notion of causation to be relevant to our concerns, but, more importantly, whether the distinctions he draws are ultimately metaphysical or epistemological in character. (shrink)

Central to Aristotle's metaphysics and epistemology is the claim that ‘aitia’ – ‘cause’ – is “said in many ways”, i.e., multivocal. Though the importance of the four causes in Aristotle's system cannot be overstated, the nature of his pluralism about aitiai has not been addressed. It is not at all obvious how these modes of causation are related to one another, or why they all deserve a common term. Nor is it clear, in particular, whether the causes are related to (...) one another as species under a single genus, such that there is a univocal definition of ‘aitia’ which applies to all of them, or whether Aristotle means to assert that the four causes are homonyms. It is argued here that although there are strong reasons to group the four causes together, there are also powerful considerations on the side of homonymy. It is further argued that the four causes are more closely tied to the ontological theory of categories and predication than is often recognized. As a result, we can reconcile the competing demands of unity and plurality by taking one mode of causation, the formal cause, as basic, and accounting for the other modes with reference to it, in the manner of so-called pros hen homonyms. (shrink)

Let G be a model of Presburger arithmetic. Let be an expansion of the language of Presburger. In this paper, we prove that the ‐theory of G is ‐minimal iff it has the exchange property and is definably complete (i.e., any bounded definable set has a maximum). If the ‐theory of G has the exchange property but is not definably complete, there is a proper definable convex subgroup H. Assuming that the induced theories on H and are definable complete and (...) o‐minimal respectively, we prove that any definable set of G is ‐definable. (shrink)

Sartre analyse l’imagination dans le contexte d’une radicalisation de l’intentionnalité husserlienne. Alors que Husserl opérait avec un concept de constitution qui explicitait le statut de la transcendance à partir de l’immanence, la phénoménologie sartrienne semblerait faire l’économie de la notion de constitution. Mais ce point est plus délicat qu’il n’y paraît. Sartre rencontre plusieurs types de transcendances problématiques : celle de l’Ego (en 1936), de certaines images (1940), et celle du « soi » (1943). Cette étude vise à montrer comment (...) ces transcendances amènent à un remaniement implicite : il existerait un concept de constitution opératoire chez Sartre qui se passe de toute référence à l’immanence. Au moyen de l’imagination, nous proposons de clarifier le lexique sartrien : unité, identité et individualité sont des termes impliqués dans une analyse de la constitution. On montrera en quoi la « constitution sartrienne » met en évidence une dimension transcendantale de la phénoménologie de Sartre qui permet d’apprécier à nouveaux frais l’enjeu et les limites de ses prétentions ontologiques. (shrink)

Sartre analyse l’imagination dans le contexte d’une radicalisation de l’intentionnalité husserlienne. Alors que Husserl opérait avec un concept de constitution qui explicitait le statut de la transcendance à partir de l’immanence, la phénoménologie sartrienne semblerait faire l’économie de la notion de constitution. Mais ce point est plus délicat qu’il n’y paraît. Sartre rencontre plusieurs types de transcendances problématiques : celle de l’Ego (en 1936), de certaines images (1940), et celle du « soi » (1943). Cette étude vise à montrer comment (...) ces transcendances amènent à un remaniement implicite : il existerait un concept de constitution opératoire chez Sartre qui se passe de toute référence à l’immanence. Au moyen de l’imagination, nous proposons de clarifier le lexique sartrien : unité, identité et individualité sont des termes impliqués dans une analyse de la constitution. On montrera en quoi la « constitution sartrienne » met en évidence une dimension transcendantale de la phénoménologie de Sartre qui permet d’apprécier à nouveaux frais l’enjeu et les limites de ses prétentions ontologiques. (shrink)

Like many realists about causation and causal powers, Aristotle uses the language of necessity when discussing causation, and he appears to think that by invoking necessity, he is clarifying the manner in which causes bring about or determine their effects. In so doing, he would appear to run afoul of Humean criticisms of the notion of a necessary connection between cause and effect. The claim that causes necessitate their effects may be understood—or attacked—in several ways, however, and so whether the (...) view or its criticism is tenable depends on how we understand the necessitation claim. In fact, Aristotelian efficient causation may be said to involve two distinct necessary connections: one is a relation between causes considered as potential, while the other relates them considered as active. That is, the claims that (1) what has the power to heat necessarily heats what has the power to be heated, and that (2) a particular flame which is actually under a pot necessarily heats it, both of which appear to be true for Aristotle, involve distinct notions of necessity. The latter kind of necessity is based on the facts, as Aristotle sees them, about change, whereas the former is based in the nature of properties. Though different, both kinds of necessity are instances of what contemporary philosophers would call metaphysical necessity, and together they also amount to a theory of causal determination. (shrink)

Aristotle presents four causes in Posterior Analytics 2.11, but where we expect matter we find instead the confusing formula, ‘what things being the case, necessarily this is the case’, and an equally confusing example. Some commentators infer that Aristotle is not referring to matter, others that he is but in a non-standard way. I argue that APo. 94a20-34 presents not matter, but determination by general features or facts, including facts about something’s genus. The closest connection to matter is Aristotle’s view (...) that the relation between genus and species is analogous to that between matter and a hylomorphic compound. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage est d'une grande actualité. il propose une étude riche et originale sur la signification des concepts d'Éthique et de Morale, sur le plan anthropo-philosophique et théologique. Partant de la problématique selon laquelle ce qui est important, ce n'est pas " un prétendu absolu de chaque racine ", de chaque culture, mais le rapport avec " d'autres racines ", la relation avec d'autres cultures, l'auteur enrichit la réflexion sur les concepts d'Éthique et de Morale au confluent de la pensée (...) de plusieurs cultures et courants philosophiques contemporains. La réflexion a l'intérêt de poser avec courage le problème de l'inculturation de l'Ethique Chrétienne. Elle montre que la pratique du Nazaréen invite à reconsidérer aujourd'hui dans l'Eglise la problématique du rapport entre Foi et Culture. L'inculturation de l'Ethique Chrétienne ouvre le débat de la rencontre de l'homme en quête de sens et de vie avec le Nazaréen. Une telle rencontre est le lieu de la transformation totale de la personne et de sa réponse à vivre ce que signifie le Nom de Dieu incarné dans notre histoire. Cette approche permet à l'auteur d'enrichir la recherche sur la question de la spécificité de l'Ethique Chrétienne. Le Professeur Bénezet Bujo écrit au sujet de la portée théologique africaine de cet ouvrage : " L'étude de Nathanaël Soédé nous montre avec évidence que les réflexions éthiques chrétiennes en Afrique n'ont plus rien à envier aux autres disciplines théologiques en matière d'inculturation et de systématisation. Avec elle, la morale africaine entre en profondeur dans le processus théologique de l'inculturation ". (shrink)

Présente le parcours philosophique de Merleau-Ponty tant dans sa formation que dans ses objectifs. Ses références : Descartes, Leibniz, Gabriel Marcel. Ses concepts opératoires : le concret, l'incarnation, l'intentionnalité, les chiasmes.

We have reason to think that a fundamental goal of natural science, on Aristotle’s view, is to discover the essence-specifying definitions of natural kinds—with biological species as perhaps the most obvious case. However, we have in the end precious little evidence regarding what an Aristotelian definition of the form of a natural kind would look like, and so Aristotle’s view remains especially obscure precisely where it seems to be most applicable. I argue that if we can get a better understanding (...) of how the forms of natural kinds are or come to be known, and how they make things intelligible, we can get a better appreciation of the nature of form in general, as well as solve certain puzzles about form and definition. (shrink)