Philosophical analyses of science tend to ignore illustrations, implicitly regarding them as theoretically dispensible. If challenged, it is suggested that such neglect is justifiable, because the use of illustrations only leads to faulty reasoning, and thus is the mark of bad or inadequate science. I take as an example one of the most famous illustrations in the history of evolutionary biology, and argue that the philosophers' scorn is without foundation. I take my conclusions to be support for a naturalistic approach (...) to philosophy. (shrink)

I consider recent uses of the notion of neutrality in evolutionary biology and ecology, questioning their relevance to the kind of explanation recently labeled ‘topological explanation’. Focusing on fitness landscapes and genotype-phenotype maps, I explore the explanatory uses of neutral subspaces, as modeled in two perspectives: hyperdimensional fitness landscapes and RNA sequence-structure maps. I argue that topological properties of such spaces account for features of evolutionary systems: respectively, capacity for adaptive evolution toward global optima and mutational robustness of (...) genotypes. Thus many models appealing to “neutral” manifolds provide topological alternatives to hypothetical mechanisms. (shrink)

Connects the work of Merleau-Ponty to environmental studies.

Since the mid-1980s and especially after the early 1990s, women's organizations have increased exponentially throughout Africa as have the arenas in which women have been able to assert their varied concerns. Women are organizing locally and nationally and are networking across the continent on an unprecedented scale. They have in many countries been aggressively using the media to demand their rights in a way not evident in the early 1980s. In some countries they are taking their claims to land, inheritance (...) and associational autonomy to court in ways not seen in the past. Women are challenging laws and constitutions that do not uphold gender equality. In addition, they are increasingly moving into government, legislative, party, NGO and other leadership positions previously the nearly exclusive domain of men. In these and other ways women have taken advantage of the new political openings that occurred in the 1990s, even if the openings were limited and precarious. This second generation of activism is markedly different from the earlier post-independence generation of women's mobilization. The reasons for these shifts are varied: the rise of multi-partyism and demise of military rule; the growing influence of the international women's movement; shifting donor strategies; the expansion of the use of the cell phone and the Internet in the late 1990s; coupled with a significant increase in secondary and university educated women. The article explores the major changes in women's mobilization in Africa by contrasting the current women's movements with those that emerged after independence. (shrink)

A Rhetoric of Ruins combines conceptual and theoretical frameworks to explore ghost towns, disaster sites, and environmental badlands as remnants of modernity. Methods of analysis include Jeremiadic, hauntological, psychogeographic, and heterotopian ways of reading U.S. and international sites.

Streets of Crocodiles is a walk on the wild side, an expedition down a melancholy boulevard of dreams.---J. Hoberman, film critic, Village Voice, author of The Red Atlantis: Communist Culture in the Absence of Communism --Book Jacket.

In Dark City, people live in a city that is constantly in the dark. The city is in fact a laboratory constructed by a race of Strangers who live below the urban surface to do experiments aimed at discovering what makes human beings human. The Strangers will survive only by becoming like them. To find out what humanity is, but assuming it is essentially related to memory, every day they paralyze all human activity, extract memories from individuals, mix them, and (...) inject them back. When people wake up, they are totally different persons – but do not know it. This article examines how, starting with such a situation, Dark City explores the role of memory in personhood, the problem of authenticity, and the status of “false” memories in making the self, and how the connect to the experimental psychology and the neuroscience of memory. (shrink)

Philosophy as Interplay and Dialogue is an original and stimulating collection of essays. It covers conceptual and critical works relevant to current theoretical developments and debates. An international group of philosophers of education come together each summer on a Greek island. This book is the product of their diligent philosophical analysis and extended dialogues. To deploy their arguments, the authors draw on classical thinkers and contemporary prominent theorists, such as Badiou and Malabou, with fresh and critical perspectives. This book thus (...) makes an original contribution to the field. (Series: Studies on Education, Vol. 5) [Subject: Philosophy of Education]. (shrink)

This thesis addresses the surprising features of zero-temperature statics and dynamics of several spin glass models, including correlations between soft spins that arise spontaneously during avalanches, and the discovery of localized states that involve the presence of two-level systems. It also presents the only detailed historiographical research on the spin glass theory. Despite the extreme simplicity of their definition, spin glasses display a wide variety of non-trivial behaviors that are not yet fully understood. In this thesis the author sheds light (...) on some of these, focusing on both the search for phase transitions under perturbations of Hamiltonians and the zero-temperature properties and responses to external stimuli. After introducing spin glasses and useful concepts on phase transitions and numerics, the results of two massive Monte Carlo campaigns on three-dimensional systems are presented: The first of these examines the de Almeida-Thouless transition, and proposes a new finite-size scaling ansatz, which accelerates the convergence to the thermodynamic limit. The second reconstructs the phase diagram of the Heisenberg spin glass with random exchange anisotropy. (shrink)

This book explores comparative political theory through the study of a range of places and periods with contributions from a diverse group of scholars. The volume builds on recent work in political theory, seeking to focus scholarly attention on non-Western thought in order to contribute to both political theory and our understanding of the modern globalized world. Featuring discussions of international law and imperialism, regions such as South Asia and Latin America, religions such as Buddhism and Islam, along with imperialism (...) and revolution, the volume also includes an overview of comparative political theory. Contributing scholars deploy a variety of methodological and interpretive approaches, ranging from archival research to fieldwork to close studies of texts in the original language. The volume elucidates the pluralism and dissensus that characterizes both cross-national and intra-national political thought. (shrink)

The 2003 SARS pandemic heralded the return of quarantine as a vital part of twenty-first century public health practice. Over the last two decades, MERS, Ebola, and other emerging infectious diseases each posed unique challenges for applying quarantine ethics lessons learned from the 2003 SARS-CoV-1 outbreak. In an increasingly interdependent and connected global world, the use of quarantine to contain the spread of SARS-CoV-2, or COVID-19, similarly poses new and unexpected ethical challenges. In this essay, we look beyond standard debates (...) about the ethics of quarantine and state power to explore a key quarantine principle, Reciprocity, and how it is being negotiated by healthcare workers, volunteers, and citizens in the context of the Wuhan, China, quarantine. We analyze Reciprocity through the lens of two Wuhan case studies: healthcare workers, particularly nurses, who are simultaneously essential workers and quarantined citizens, asked by their hospital administration to shave their heads because adequate PPE was not available, and citizen-to-citizen mutual aid societies attempting to fill gaps in essential supplies left unfilled by the state. We analyze social media and video-blogs from Wuhan, on the platforms of Douyin and Sina Weibo, to understand how people define and respond to ethical and legal obligations in the wake of COVID-19. It is no surprise that quarantine principles from the 2003 SARS outbreak are inadequate for COVID-19 and that both infectious disease outbreak responses and ethics must adapt to the virtual age. We offer ideas to strengthen and clarify Reciprocal obligations for the state, hospital administrators, and citizens as the globe prepares for the next wave of COVID-19 circulating now. (shrink)

When dealing with the moving worlds of migration among the Persian diaspora in Australia, memories cannot simply be removed to dusty attic boxes to be stored as an archive. Rather, this analysis takes the body and its sensory engagement with the world as a central focus, arguing that memories are crafted, tasted, smelt and touched in everyday temporalities. In the kitchens and lounges of Persian migrant women the lived past refuses to become undone from the countless revolutions of food, talk (...) and domestic activity that are central to the patterning of memory. In this paper, we argue that these intimate practices have references beyond their domestic dimensions, for they point to a worldly movement of life writ domestically small. It is via a sensory network that the spatially and temporally disparate worlds of homeland and new homes are remembered and forgotten, and where miniature worlds call out to the movement of migration. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 7, Edition 2 September 2007. (shrink)

Forests in Nepal are central in people's imaginations and daily lives and are a key means to social, political and economic power. This paper explores how an aesthetic appreciation of forests is tied in to other knowledges and experiences including the social-politics of resource use and management in the context of community forestry in Nepal. As such, more than one 'forest' inhabits the same spatial extent and these socially and politically framed views are central to aesthetic valuing of forests. The (...) paper thus argues for a 'thick' aesthetics that ties together an understanding of the forest as an ecologically and socially emergent entity with a variety of knowledges that inform aesthetic valuing to analyse how competing visions of what the forest ought to be materialise. (shrink)