Substrate cycles are ubiquitous structures of the cellular metabolism (e.g. Krebs cycle, fatty acids -oxydation cycles, etc... ). Moiety-conserved cycles (e.g. adenine nucleotides and NADH/NAD, etc...) are also important.The role played by such cycles in the metabolism and its regulation is not clearly understood so far. However, it was shown that these cycles can generate multistationarity (bistability), irreversible transitions, enhancement of sensitivity, temporal oscillations and chaotic motions (Hervagault & Canu, 1987; Hervagault & Cimino, 1989; Reich & Sel'kov, 1981; Ricard & (...) Soulié, 1982). Fig. 1: Scheme of the open binary substrate cycle under study. The substrate S is converted into P with a net rate v2. Substrate P is converted in turn into S with a net rate v3. Step v2 is inhibited by excess of the substrate, S. In addition, the cycle operates under open conditions, that is zero-order input of S at rates \ga0(v1) and first order outputs of S and P at rates \gaS and \gaP(v4), respectively. (shrink)

The integrity of the human being made in the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1:26) has been a challenge confronting not just the theologian, but great rulers, politicians, reformers, scientists, poets, artists, composers and novelists over centuries. The Orthodox Tradition might note that our human condition in time and space is shaped and challenged by this journey from likeness to image. Biblically we journey to see the face of God. Less theologically, the human condition is shaped by the tensions (...) and contradictions as we journey to seek 'freedom'. Paradigms of Freedom explores, in the context of the unfolding of modern history, how this challenge has been compounded and enriched by the people and institutions who have sought to find and promote the concept of freedom (and issues of personal liberty) in the face of contrary or oppressive circumstances and systems. Importantly, it will examine the contribution of the artist to various models of freedom, some of which may be identified as vectors of transcendence; when image becomes likeness. The nature of human society, the sense of social harmony and paternalistic control that characterized society for centuries, and especially the emergence of Western culture, began to crumble in the fourteenth century with the cataclysmic onslaught of the Black Death; the challenge to the monolithic power of the Church and the nature of feudalism; the growth of new philosophical and political theories; and overall crumbling of authority. In the fifteenth century new developments like the invention of printing; the standardization of modern languages; and the global expansion of exploration, mercantilism and colonization presented unprecedented horizons of growth and challenges to the place and meaning of humanity in the world. These challenges are embodied in the Renaissance and Reformation, where the very foundations of belief and knowledge were questioned in new processes of discovery in both the world and the cosmos. The nature of freedom to search, to question and to discover new things brought about political and intellectual developments in an ever-expanding series of movements and interrogations. Moved by the annals of the times, individuals have sought to understand and perpetuate the heroic struggles through their own creative power. This in turn can draw us to share in those lost or sorrowful times, and reflect on the sacrifice and vision of those who have been prepared to witness fearlessly to the indomitable spirit of mankind, and his slow but inexorable movement or journey into the light. This exposition will examine various types/paradigms that have proposed and embodied concepts of freedom. These have tried, and often succeeded, in serving as vectors of transcendence, meditating on and mediating human aspiration. Such reflective movements of mind and heart are embodied both contemporaneously and retrospectively in various historical movements, political gestures and artistic creativity that have provoked thoughts on human liberty: political actions, decrees, philosophy, books, pictorial art, novels, poetry, theatre, opera and film. Representatives and examples (in words and imagery) of all these modes are exemplified in the chapters that explore certain iconic movements and personalities in some of the key historical and social events of the past six centuries. The process is of necessity selective. Religious conflict, freedom of thought and denomination, the wars fought over faith and control of the land, the desire for liberty of choice, challenging new discoveries in science and geography, cosmology, colonialism and slavery, Enlightenment, revolution and the search for national identity and independence-these are all areas that have absorbed human thought, knowledge and aspiration, and resulted in inevitable artistic reflection. This is not a history but a consideration of mankind's search to be free, and how this striving is embodied in the poetry of liberation. (shrink)

Telling tales and reading have been a part of human activity for a very long time. We review in brief the anthropological evidence, then the emergence of the 'modern novel'. This explores in narratives the psychological reflections of the characters concerned with life circumstances including loss, abandonment, despair, illness, dying, and death. We report findings that the response of crying to a novel occurs as often as to music, not reported before: both 'move us'. We note what several critics and (...) authors imply about the imagined world of 'novel space' which emphasizes the active not passive nature of reading dramatic action, the latter being embedded and embodied within us. This touches on the mind–brain problem. We provide a brief introduction to neuroscientific work with brain imaging revealing how cerebral networks to do with theory of mind and brain structures that are the basis of our movements are involved with the very act of reading words and narratives. Emotional tearing is an exclusive attribute of Homo sapiens, and crying can have positive benefits for mental health. We argue that bibliotherapy needs greater attention than has been the case at present. We also suggest that telling tales and the 'modern novel' are closely allied to the development of the consciousness of Homo sapiens. (shrink)

La notion lacanienne de Réel semble a priori constituer un point de rupture entre Lacan et Merleau-Ponty. On chercherait en vain l’angoisse traumatique où se noie le sujet en proie au Réel dans les pages où Merleau-Ponty développe sa philosophie de la chair. Pourtant le philosophe y exprime avec acuité l’absence de frontière entre le moi et l’autre. Cette non-altérité de l’autre entre en singulière résonance avec la confusion du moi et de l’autre dans l’expérience du Réel. L’article revient sur (...) ce paradoxe et tente de le déplier pour montrer en quoi l’ontologie de la chair peut éclairer l’expérience du Réel.The Lacanian notion of the Real seems a priori to constitute a point of rupture between Lacan and Merleau-Ponty. We search in vain for the traumatic anxiety where the subject drowns in the grips of the Real in the pages where Merleau-Ponty develops his philosophy of the flesh. Yet, he insightfully explains the absence of a boundary between the self and the other. This non-alterity of the other enters into a deep resonance with the confusion of the self and the other in the experience of the Real. This article focuses on this paradox and attempts to unfold it in order to show what the ontology of the flesh can illuminate in the experience of the Real.La nozione lacaniana di Reale sembra a priori costituire un punto di rottura tra Lacan e Merleau-Ponty. Cercheremmo invano l’angoscia traumatica del soggetto in preda al Reale nelle pagine in cui Merleau-Ponty sviluppa la sua filosofia della carne. Tuttavia il filosofo arriva a esprimere in maniera penetrante l’assenza di frontiere tra l’io e l’altro. E questa non-alterità dell’altro entra in singolare risonanza con la confusione dell’io e dell’altro propria dell’esperienza del Reale. L’articolo affronta questo paradosso e tenta di dispiegarlo per mostrare in che modo l’esperienza della carne può illuminare l’esperienza del Reale. (shrink)

Fromental Halévy was thirty-six when his masterpiece, La Juive, a grand opera in five acts, was triumphantly produced at the Opéra , and at once secured for its author a European reputation. The opera was presented with unprecedented scenic splendor, the stage-setting alone having cost, it was said, 150,000 francs. La Juive , with Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots , marked the defining expression of French Grand Opera. Both operas used highly controversial and sensitive historical material as the very fabric of their (...) artistic medium. The explosive themes of religious and racial bigotry, leading to execution and massacre, were devised and sustained impressively by the playwright and librettist Eugène Scribe , whose fables of intolerance and death seized the public imagination. They presented parables for reflection on contemporary times and the dangers posed to humanity by politics and religion, woven into themes such as Orthodoxy and Purity, Justice and Mercy, the Fire of Truth. In terms of historical background, theological implication, and purely human tragedy, the scenario of La Juive provides a depth and richness of semiotic discourse, a sustained exploration of a complex and many-faceted subject, whose caveats on social intolerance become only ever more topical and pertinent. (shrink)

A three-variable biochemical prototype involving two enzymes with autocatalytic regulation proposed by Decroly and Goldbeter (1987) is analyzed using a topological approach. A two-branched manifold, a so-called template, is thus identified. For certain control parameter values, this template is a horseshoe template with a global torsion of two half-turns. This implies that the bifurcation diagram can be described using the usual sequences associated with a unimodal map with a differentiable maximum as well as exemplified by the logistic map. Moreover, a (...) type-I intermittency associated with a saddle-node bifurcation is exhibited. The dynamics from a single time series are also investigated to determine whether it is possible to investigate the dynamics of this biochemical model from the measure of a single concentration. (shrink)

La théorie du Contróle du Métabolisme décrit comment un réseau métabolique répond à de petites perturbations au voisinage d'un état stationnaire. Deux types de coefficients sont définis: les coefficients d'élaslicité qui quantifient les variations des vitesses des étapes isolées et les coefficients de contrôle qui expriment la réponse globale du réseau aux perturbations d'une étape donnée. Des relations entre ces coefficients existent ).On ne fait pas toujours la distinction entre Contrôle et Régulation. En fait, il apparait que la notion de (...) régulation, si elle est trés claire lorsqu'il s'agit de la régulation de l'activité d'un enzyme, West plus du tout définie lorsqu'il s'agit d'un réseau métabolique dans son ensemble.Le but de l'exposé est de proposer une définition de la régulation d'un réseau métabolique et de montrer quelles relations peuvent exister entre lee phénomènes de régulation et la théorie du contrôle du métabolisme.Quelques exemples seront donnés pour illustration. (shrink)

Some philosophers have thought that life could only be meaningful if there is no God. For Sartre and Nagel, for example, a God of the traditional classical theistic sort would constrain our powers of self-creative autonomy in ways that would severely detract from the meaning of our lives, possibly even evacuate our lives of all meaning. Some philosophers, by contrast, have thought that life could only be meaningful if there is a God. God and the Meanings of Life is interested (...) in exploring the truth in both these schools of thought, seeking to discover what God could and couldn't do to make life meaningful (as well as what he would and wouldn't do). Mawson espouses a version of the 'amalgam' or 'pluralism' thesis about the issue of life's meaning – in essence, that there are a number of different legitimate meanings of 'meaning' (and indeed 'life') in the question of life's meaning. According to Mawson, God, were he to exist, would help make life meaningful in some of these senses and hinder in some others. He argues that whilst there could be meaning in a Godless universe, there could be other sorts of meaning in a Godly one and that these would be deeper. (shrink)

T. A. Cavanaugh's Hippocrates' Oath and Asclepius' Snake: The Birth of the Medical Profession articulates the Oath as establishing the medical profession's unique internal medical ethic - in its most basic and least controvertible form, this ethic mandates that physicians help and not harm the sick. Relying on Greek myth, drama, and medical experience (e.g., homeopathy), the book shows how this medical ethic arose from reflection on the most vexing medical-ethical problem -- injury caused by a physician -- and argues (...) that deliberate iatrogenic harm, especially the harm of a doctor choosing to kill (physician assisted suicide, euthanasia, abortion, and involvement in capital punishment), amounts to an abandonment of medicine as an exclusively therapeutic profession. The book argues that medicine as a profession necessarily involves stating before others what one stands for: the good one seeks and the bad one seeks to avoid on behalf of the sick, and rejects the view that medicine is purely a technique lacking its own unique internal ethic. It concludes noting that medical promising (as found in the White Coat Ceremony through which U. S. medical students matriculate) implicates medical autonomy which in turn merits respect, including honoring professional conscientious objections. (shrink)

This text is designed to help students construct and evaluate arguments.

Kit Fine (2000) breaks with tradition, arguing that, pace Russell (e.g., 1903: 228), relations have neither directions nor converses. He considers two ways to conceive of these new "neutral" relations, positionalism and anti-positionalism, and argues that the latter should be preferred to the former. Cody Gilmore (2013) argues for a generalization of positionalism, slot theory, the view that a property or relation is n-adic if and only if there are exactly n slots in it, and (very roughly) that each slot (...) may be occupied by at most one entity. Slot theory (and with it, positionalism) bears the full brunt of Fine's (2000) symmetric completions and conflicting adicities problems. I fully develop an alternative, plural slot theory (or pocket theory), which avoids these problems, key elements of which are first considered by Yi (1999: 168 ff.). Like the slot theorist, the pocket theorist posits entities (pockets) in properties and relations that can be occupied. But unlike the slot theorist, the pocket theorist denies that at most one entity can occupy any one of them. As a result, she must also deny that the adicity of a property or relation is equal to the number of occupiable entities in it. By abandoning these theses, however, the pocket theorist is able to avoid Fine's problems, resulting in a stronger theory about the internal structure of properties and relations. Pocket theory also avoids a serious drawback of anti-positionalism. (shrink)

How do we think about animals? How do we decide what they deserve and how we ought to treat them? Subhuman takes an interdisciplinary approach to these questions, drawing from research in philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, law, history, sociology, economics, and anthropology. Subhuman argues that our attitudes to nonhuman animals, both positive and negative, largely arise from our need to compare ourselves to them.

_Purpose._ This paper aims to investigate the phenomenon of a human being within the Confucian tradition as well as its interpretations from intercultural perspective. _Theoretical basis._ One of the ways to understand the deepest level of the intercultural dialogue is to reveal the interpretations of a human being in philosophical traditions, since they refer to the formation of personality and identity within a given culture including interpersonal, intergroup, and intercultural relations. Humanism based on the unity of Human and Heaven runs (...) like a red thread through the philosophical teachings of Confucius, Mencius, Xunzi, Zhu Xi, Wang Yangming defining the ideas of human nature, his/her duties, his/her place and roles in society that shaped the Chinese mentality. _Originality._ Quite often, Chinese concepts (for example, human dignity beyond the ideas of democracy and mass political participation, guanxi, mianzi) are incomprehensible to the representatives of the Western civilization, which leads to the challenges in intercultural communication. The interpretation of these ideas in the context of Confucianism allows to understand them from the perspective of Others and expand the set of patterns of cultural perception. This ultimately leads to the awareness that there are many social, political, cultural realities, which we perceive through the lens of our own concepts and attitudes. The participants of an intercultural dialogue realize that each of them has a unique experience, own way of posing a problem and resolving it, and no one is better or worse. _Conclusions._ Confucian philosophy shaped the worldview of Chinese people, defined values, goals, meanings, attitudes, communication models, which affected all spheres of Chinese life and culture. The study of the philosophical heritage of the great Chinese civilization enhances the cultural competence of the intercultural communicators and expands the field of dialogue to the level of global communication. (shrink)

Knowledge, theory of; Islamic philosophy; philosophy, Arab; interpretation and construction.

Logic; Islamic philosophy; Islam--doctrines.

This book includes critical editions, Turkish translations and short studies of two treatises by Taşköprüzade, one of the most important Ottoman philosophers of the sixteenth century.

This book includes a critical edition and a Turkish translation and a study of an Arabic treatise by Taşköprüzade, one of the most important Ottoman philosophers of the sixteenth century.

Modernism; influence; social and economic aspects; Arab countries; 21st century.

Thinking about Animals in the Age of the Anthropocene makes connections between the Anthropocene discourse and human-animal studies, thus facilitating further interdisciplinary work on the topic of animals in the Anthropocene.

T.J. Reed's study has long established itself as the standard work in English on Thomas mann, and offers as comprehensive a view of Mann's fiction and thought as is available in any language. It is based on a coherent close reading of Mann's oeuvre, literary and political, and also on manuscripts and sources, and was part of the first phase of literary scholarship that opened up the resources of the Zurich Thomas Mann Archive. Further documents that have appeared since then (...) - Mann's diaries, notebooks, and other correspondences - have not fundamentally altered the individual interpretations or the overall picture the study offers, and in some respects have emphatically confirmed them. A further chapter added to this edition covers the new documentation, gives a vigorous account of the main curents in Mann scholarship and criticism over the last two decades suggesting how we should now see the writer, the man, and the political figure, and above all the complex relationship between the three. (shrink)