Rousseau -- Karl Marx -- Dostoevsky -- Friedrich Nietzsche -- Henry Adams -- Emmanuel Mounier -- Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Michel Foucault, de la fin des années 1970 au début des années 1980, au moment où le primat de la production cède le pas au primat de la consommation, sublime les problèmes politiques actuels en menant une vaste enquête sur les dilemmes propres à l'éthique classique (grecque, romaine, chrétienne). Emergent ainsi des notions qui nous fournissent des indications historiques et conceptuelles pour mettre en place des résistances inédites - résistances fondées sur le caractère exemplaire de formes de vie minoritaires - (...) face à un gouvernement de la vie qui n'admet dans son principe aucune opposition à sa diffusion capillaire. Il s'agit de mettre à jour des existences, des textes, des documents fragmentaires, oubliés et refoulés, situés sur le bord du temps, dans le sous-sol de l'histoire. L'hypothèse qui guide la composition de cet ouvrage est que, dans les dernières années de son travail, Foucault met à l'épreuve des formes de subjectivation capables de se soustraire à une condition telle que celle que nous vivons où la liberté elle-même est devenue un dispositif de contrôle subtile et puissant. Parrêsia, cynisme antique, esthétique de l'existence, désir, souci de soi, plaisirs, ascèse, Aristote, Deleuze, Hadot, Heidegger, Kant, Nietzsche, Platon sont les thématiques et les notions convoquées ici pour documenter comment s'organise chez Foucault un vocabulaire éthico-politique insoupçonné pour nous orienter dans la catastrophe du présent. (shrink)

Many older gay men experience diminished psychological well‐being (PWB) due to unique circumstances including discrimination, living with HIV, and aging through the HIV/AIDS crisis. However, there remains ambiguity as to how older gay men define and understand PWB. Our team interviewed and analyzed the accounts of 26 older (50+) self‐identifying English‐speaking men living in southwestern British Columbia, Canada. We drew on tenets of constructivist grounded theory and intersectionality to account for unique contextual considerations and power relations. Semi‐structured Zoom interviews were (...) conducted from August‐October 2022. Interview transcripts were compared to generate high‐order conceptual findings underpinned by processes understood as central to PWB. Three PWB temporal processes highlighted interlocking social and contextual circumstances intersecting with power and maturation: (1) being emotionally balanced, (2) living gratitude (3) and fully embracing self‐acceptance. Being emotionally balanced supported the affective and sustainable state of contentment, living gratitude drew from the wisdom of accrued experiences to cultivate a positive affective state inclusive to recognising social location privileges, whilst fully embracing self‐acceptance redressed the harms of anti‐gay discourses that men endured throughout their lives. The knowledge is relevant to service and resource development to deliver tailored PWB supports to older gay men. (shrink)

Descartes has been accused of reasoning in a circle since the publication of the Meditations. The Circle is easy to point out: it seems that Descartes employs clear and distinct perceptions to demonstrate God’s existence and benevolence, and the latter, in turn, validates the use of clear and distinct perceptions. But is Descartes really guilty of fallacious argument, or can we break the arc somehow?

Questions regarding what exists are central to various forms of Buddhist philosophy, as they are to many traditions of philosophy. Interestingly, there is perhaps a clearer consensus in Buddhist thought regarding what does not exist than there may be regarding precisely what does exist, at least insofar as the doctrine of anātman (no self, absence of self) is taken to be a fundamental Buddhist doctrine. It may be noted that many forms of Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy in particular are considered to (...) offer a quite austere ontology—a rather ‘empty’ account of what exists. Continuing in this vein of ontological austerity, here I will attempt to lay out a relatively novel approach to Buddhist ontology, viz. Buddhist fictionalism. (shrink)

Recent downward trends in corporate giving have renewed interest in the factors that shape corporate philanthropy. This paper examines the relationships between charitable contributions, firm size and industry. Improvements over previous studies include an IRS data base that covers a much broader range of firm sizes and industries as compared to previous studies and estimation using an instrumental variable technique that explicitly addresses potential simultaneity between charitable contributions and profitability. Important findings provide evidence of a cubic relationship between charitable giving (...) and firm size and evidence of strong industry effects. The plus-minus-plus regression coefficient sign pattern for the cubic firm size model suggests that small and large firms give more relative to total receipts with lower giving ratios among medium size firms. One interpretation for this finding is that small firms are close to the communities they serve while high visibility creates a need for large firm philanthropy. Strong industry effects provide evidence of inter-industry differences in giving culture and/or different public relations requirements across industries. (shrink)

This volume collects essays by philosophers and scholars working at the interface of Western philosophy and Buddhist Studies. Many have distinguished scholarly records in Western philosophy, with expertise in analytic philosophy and logic, as well as deep interest in Buddhist philosophy. Others have distinguished scholarly records in Buddhist Studies with strong interests in analytic philosophy and logic. All are committed to the enterprise of cross-cultural philosophy and to bringing the insights and techniques of each tradition to bear in order to (...) illuminate problems and ideas of the other. These essays address a broad range of topics in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, logic, epistemology, and metaphysics, and demonstrate the fecundity of the interaction between the Buddhist and Western philosophical and logical traditions. (shrink)

Through emotionally charged portraits and richly layered interior views, the photographs of Chicago-based artist Paul D Amato provide a genuine and complex perspective on life in some of the most challenging and troubled neighborhoods in the nation. This publication is supported in part by grants from the David C. and Sarajean Ruttenberg Arts Foundation and the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.".

This essay, written by a biologist, a microbial ecologist, a biological anthropologist, and an anthropologist‐historian, examines tensions and translations in microbiome research on animals in the laboratory and field. The authors trace how research questions and findings in the laboratory are extrapolated into the field and vice versa, and the shifting evidentiary standards that these research settings require. Showing how complexities of microbiomes challenge traditional standards of causation, the authors contend that these challenges require new approaches to inferences used in (...) ecology, anthropology, and history. As social scientists incorporate investigations of microbial life into their human studies, microbiome researchers venture into field settings to develop mechanistic understandings about the functions of complex microbial communities. These efforts generate new possibilities for cross‐fertilizations and inference frameworks to interpret microbiome findings. Microbiome research should integrate multiple scales, levels of variability, and other disciplinary approaches to tackle questions spanning conditions from the laboratory to the field. (shrink)

The extracellular‐signal regulated kinases 1/2 (ERK or ERKs) are involved in the regulation of important neuronal functions, including neuronal plasticity in normal and pathological conditions. We present findings that support the notion that the kinetics and localization of ERK are intrinsically linked, in that the duration of ERK activation dictates its subcellular compartmentalization and/or trafficking. The latter, in turn, dictates whether ERK‐expressing cells would enter a program of cell death, survival or differentiation. We summarize experimental data showing that chronic activation (...) of ERK plays a role in the mechanisms that trigger neurodegeneration. We also discuss how MKPs, members of the subclass of dual specificity phosphatases, might be the link between ERK kinetics and its subcellular localization. BioEssays 25:1085–1095, 2003. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

The discovery of neurogenesis and neural stem cells (NSC) in the adult CNS has overturned a long‐standing and deep‐routed “dogma” in neuroscience, established at the beginning of the 20th century. This dogma lasted for almost 90 years and died hard when NSC were finally isolated from the adult mouse brain. The scepticism in accepting adult neurogenesis has now turned into a rush to find applications to alleviate or cure the devastating diseases that affect the CNS. Here we highlight a number (...) of methodological, technical and conceptual drawbacks responsible for the historical denial of adult neurogenesis. Furthermore, we discuss old and new issues that need to be faced before NSC or endogenous neurogenesis can safely enter into the doctor's bag for therapies. BioEssays 30:135–145, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Diatoms are important protists that generate one fifth of the oxygen produced annually on earth. These aquatic organisms likely derived from a secondary endosymbiosis event, and they display peculiar genomic and structural features that reflect their chimeric origin. Diatoms were one of the first models of cell division and these early studies revealed a range of interesting features including a unique acentriolar microtubule‐organising centre. Unfortunately, almost nothing is known at the molecular level, in contrast to the advances in other experimental (...) organisms. Recently the full genome sequences of two diatoms have been annotated and molecular tools have been developed. These resources offer new possibilities to re‐investigate the mechanisms of cell division in diatoms by recruiting information from more intensively studied organisms. A renaissance of the topic is further justified by the current interest in diatoms as a source of biofuels and for understanding massive diatom proliferation events in response to environmental stimuli. (shrink)

It has been estimated that three species on the planet now go extinct every hour and that this rate is orders of magnitude higher than the planet has seen in previous catastrophic extinction events. We clearly are in the midst of a sixth extinction, and this one is different from the previous five. Why? This sixth extinction is caused by the activity of a single species—us. If there is any hope of ameliorating this extinction, it will entirely be up to (...) us, as the current stewards of this planet, to change the course. There are many challenges, though, to marshaling this effort. Two primary ones immediately come to mind. The first is that we simply haven't found the right biological tools to address this crisis. The second is that many humans on this planet don't even admit we have a problem. These are two very different problems. The first is primarily technological. Only recently has some of the more advanced biologically focused technology been available to conservation biology and extinction science. Humans are enthralled by cutting‐edge technology for the most part, and for the public, one of the more exciting possibilities in the realm of conservation biology is that some of the more charismatic species that have gone extinct might be resurrected through next‐generation technologies. While our discussion will articulate some weaknesses with the de‐extinction approach to conservation biology, we suggest that the “sexiness” of the technologies used in de‐extinction may simultaneously provide a definition of the techniques viable in conservation biology and afford a teachable moment. (shrink)

Background: Research suggests that humans have the tendency to increase the valence of events when these are imagined to happen in the future, but to decrease the valence when the same events are imagined to happen in the past. This line of research, however, has mostly been conducted by asking participants to value imagined, yet probable, events. Our aim was to re-examine this time-valence asymmetry using real-life data: a Reuter’s news and a Facebook status updates corpus. Method: We organized the (...) Reuter news (120,000,000 words) and the Facebook status updates data (41,056,346 words) into contexts grouped in chronological order (i.e., past, present, and future) using verbs and years as time markers. These contexts were used to estimate the valence of each article and status update, respectively, in relation to the time markers using natural language processing tools (i.e., the Latent Semantic Analysis algorithm). Results: Our results using verbs, in both text corpus, showed that valence for the future was significantly higher compared to the past (future > past). Similarly, in the Reuter year condition, valence increased approximately linear from 1994 to 1999 for texts written 1996-7. In the Facebook year condition, the valence of the future was also significantly higher than past valence. Conclusion: Generally, the analyses of the Reuters data indicated that the past is devaluated relative to both the present and the future, while the analyses of the Facebook data indicated that both the past and the present are devaluated against the future. On this basis, we suggest that people strive to communicate the promotion of a bright future and the prevention of a dark future, which in turn leads to a temporal-valence asymmetrical phenomenon (valence = pastshrink)

Depue & Morrone-Strupinsky's (D&M-S's) model of affiliation meets the criteria advanced for the definition of behavior systems and endophenotypes. We argue that its application in psychiatry could be useful for identifying a biological pathophysiology common to a variety of conditions that are currently classified in very different categories of psychiatric nosography, including autism, schizoid personality, primary psychopathy, and dismissing attachment.

This book conducts a timely inquiry into contemporary conscience and politics.

Le professeur Masnovo démontre que déjà dans l’agencement du système cartésien la synthèse a priori est implicite : par là, la voie est ouverte à Emmanuel Kant. Mais comme la position cartésienne est illégitime et contradictoire, de même donc est illégitime et contradictoire la position kantienne.

"La filosofia verso la religione", opera giudicata tra le "più notevoli espresse dalla neo-scolastica italiana, e non solo italiana" e che "concentra nelle sue poche pagine un intero trattato di filosofia; diciamo meglio: di metafisica" (Vanni Rovighi), merita di essere riproposta per più motivi. Anzitutto per l'idea di ricerca filosofica che l'anima, non altra da quella auspicata già dall'enciclica Fides et ratio (1998) come antidoto a un nichilismo pervasivo che, rinunciando al mito razionalistico, diventa ancora più insidioso per la verità (...) della fede: una filosofia che prende le mosse dalla domanda fondamentale di senso. Poi, per l'impegno a rispondere a tale domanda: generosa fiducia nelle possibilità della ragione, spirito critico e rigore argomentativo, che non sono mai alternativi alla fede, ma sempre suoi alleati. Quest'ultimo è un messaggio di cui il pensiero del credente ha oggi un estremo bisogno. La grande tradizione della filosofia cristiana di Agostino e di Tommaso, cari a Masnovo, è ripresa in questo libro e resa convincente dal serratissimo confronto con il pensiero moderno. (shrink)