The Drosophila tracheal system is a branched tubular structure that supplies air to target tissues. The elaborate tracheal morphology is shaped by two linked inductive processes, one involving the choice of cell fates, and the other a guided cell migration. We will describe the molecular basis for these processes, and the allocation of cell fate decisions to four temporal hierarchies. First, tracheal placodes are specified within the embryonic ectoderm. Subsequently, branch fates are allocated within the tracheal placodes, prior to migration. (...) Localized presentation of the FGF ligand, Branchless, to tracheal cells that express the FGF receptor, Breathless, guides migration. Once cell migration is initiated, distinct cell fates are determined within each migrating branch. Finally, inhibitory feedback mechanisms ensure the correct assignment of these fates. Tracheal cell fate choices are determined by signaling cascades triggered by signals emanating from the tracheal cells, as well as by ligands produced by adjacent tissues. BioEssays 22:219–226, 2000. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 2, February 2022.

An examination of the statement, criticism, and reformulation of the Pirenne, Turner, and Weber theses as causal explanations makes possible a clarification of the nature and justification of causal theses in history. Criticisms of such theses typically attack either the description of the cause-phenomenon or the effect-phenomenon, or they attack the generalization or theory which justifies the claim of causal connection. Theses are defended by redescribing the phenomena so as to make the underlying theory a stronger justification. The analysis clarifies (...) the essential connection between description and explanation, and shows that "colligatory" descriptions are always theoretical relative to lower-level factual descriptions. (shrink)

Explores how republican political thought can make a constructive and distinctive contribution to our understanding of democracy and the challenges it faces.

This article reconstructs Adam Smith’s contribution to the conversation on the nature and value of free government in the eighteenth century. Smith contributes to this conversation in two ways. First, by embedding the idea of free government in a narrative of the progress of government, which traces the interplay between natural progress and social circumstances, and culminates in the establishment of modern free government in Britain. Second, by offering a theory of the form of free government fit for modern commercial (...) states. Drawing on the “rational system of liberty” established in Britain, the Smithian model of free government is based on a “happy mixture” of republicanism and monarchism. Looking beyond the rational system, it merges the traditional concern for constitutional security against arbitrary power with a new science of policy intended to moderate the oppressive inclinations of legislators. The article contests Duncan Forbes’ reading of Smith as questioning the relation between individual liberty and free government, and brings Smith closer to Quentin Skinner’s work on the neo-Roman understanding of liberty. It suggests that Smith’s work may offer insight into some of the ways in which neo-Roman ideas were being creatively reformulated in the eighteenth century. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Counterfactual Character of Historiography Understanding Metaphysical Preliminaries Causal Counterfactual Analysis in Historiography Counterfactuals and Practical Reasoning Science and Counterfactuals References Further Reading.

Summary According to the contemporary hermeneutical school the distinguishing feature of the humanities is the capability of the inquirer to communicate with the object of his inquiry. This idea underlies K.-O. Apel's model for the humanities adopted from psycho-analytical therapy. It is argued (1) that there is no sense in which the object of the historical inquiry can be regarded as aKommunikationspartner of the historian; and (2) that when the traditionalVerstehen doctrine is re-interpreted counterfactually (e.g., If I were Caesar, then (...) ... substantiates my explanations of Caesar's actions), then the doctrine has an acceptable application to history and the charge of psychologism is removed. (shrink)

“All history is the re-enactment of past thought in the historian’s own mind,” wrote Collingwood in one of his succinct expressions of what seemed to him a universal truth about history. Since the appearance of his posthumous book The Idea of History in 1946, allusions to the reenactment doctrine have been most popular among writers on methodology of history. In particular, re-enactment has evoked the warm response of working historians. In many cases, however, mention of re-enactment has not revealed any (...) serious interest in the question of its meaning and nature. Some clarifications have been made, but in my opinion, most of them have not been in the right direction. (shrink)

“All history is the re-enactment of past thought in the historian’s own mind,” wrote Collingwood in one of his succinct expressions of what seemed to him a universal truth about history. Since the appearance of his posthumous book The Idea of History in 1946, allusions to the reenactment doctrine have been most popular among writers on methodology of history. In particular, re-enactment has evoked the warm response of working historians. In many cases, however, mention of re-enactment has not revealed any (...) serious interest in the question of its meaning and nature. Some clarifications have been made, but in my opinion, most of them have not been in the right direction. (shrink)

This paper aims first and foremost to unravel and clarify an interesting 17th century controversy around superposition in projectiles, which allegedly existed between the French Jesuit Honoré Fabri and the Italian physicist and astronomer Giovanni Alfonso Borelli. This conflict – initially described by the English mathematician John Wallis in a letter from 1670 to the secretary of the Royal Society – has been erroneously identified with Fabri's Dialogi physici (1669), a work written in response to Borelli's De vi percussionis (1669). (...) In fact, this “conflict” was nothing but Wallis's account of a contradiction between Borelli's above mentioned work and Fabri's Tractatus physicus de motu locali from 1646, while Fabri's 1669 work expressed views very different from those contained in his Tractatus physicus. I will try here to reconstruct Fabri's change of heart between 1646 and 1669 concerning projectiles and superposition, while tracing the real bone of contention between (the later) Fabri and Borelli – superimposing contrary motions – to its Aristotelian origins. My analysis will lead me to problematize the way modern historians usually interpret the relation between Aristotle's physical thinking and projectile theories of early modern theoreticians (e.g. Nicollò Tartaglia's). (shrink)

This article reconsiders Bentham’s theory of liberty in relation to republican and democratic ideas in the Age of Revolution. It reinterprets his jurisprudential definitions of liberty as ideological weapons intended to “cut the throat” of pro-American and proto-democratic discourse. In particular, his negative definition of individual liberty and his democratic and international definitions of political liberty were designed and used to caricature and draw to absurdity the republican ideal of self-government. The early Bentham, according to this interpretation, was a subversive (...) critic of republicanism, who occupied its language of liberty and security while trying to neutralize its democratic potential. (shrink)

In Explanation and Understanding von Wright argues that if, as he suggests, a practical inference schema is adopted as an explanation model for actions, then it follows that historical explanations are non?causal. My criticisms are principally directed against his version of the Logical Connection Argument which attempts to show that the verification of the action description to be explained and the verification of the intention description which explains it are interdependent. Von Wright blurs the important distinctions (1) between acting with (...) an intention and acting intentionally; (2) between intention to perform an action and intention to bring about a consequence of it; and (3) between verification of intention descriptions in general and of a description of a specific intention. The ?conclusion? of his practical inference schema cannot be the appropriate historical explanandum and the explaining procedure that he suggests is shown to be ultimately circular. (shrink)

After more than a decade Alexandre Métraux is leaving his post as a co-editor of Science in Context and will remain as a member of the editorial board.

ArgumentThis paper discusses the theory of motion of the philosopher Honoré Fabri (1608–1688), a senior representative of early modern Jesuit scientists. It argues that the consensus prevailing among historians – according to which Fabri's theory of impetus is diametrically opposed to Galileo's or Descartes' concept of inertia – is false. It shows: that Fabri carefully constructed his concept of impetus in order to easily incorporate the principle of linear conservation of motion (designated here as “limited inertia”), by adopting formal (rather (...) than efficient) causality between impetus and motion and by allowing impetus to act only along straight lines; that he explicitly deemed Aristotle's famous “inertial paradox” not as a paradox at all; and that linear conservation of motion was not limited to “counterfactual” circumstances but played a significant part in his discrete theory of free fall and constituted an integral component of his general physical (and even mathematical) philosophy. However, the paper also shows that Fabri's notion of inertia was restricted to one dimension only, and therefore should indeed be considered “limited.” In his analysis of horizontal projectiles, Fabri explicitly rejected Galileo's important principle of superposition, and thus revealed significant constraints to his “inertial” thinking. (shrink)

This article focuses on trans-linguistic relationships between the German aphoristic writings of Israeli, Hebrew poet, and rabbi Elazar Benyoëtz and his personal library, which is one of the last and largest private book collections in Israel to contain the German-Jewish literary canon. By reading traces from the library’s marginalia and paraphernalia, analyzed here for the first time, the article presents five case studies that sketch Benyoëtz’s transformation during the 1960s and 1970s from a Hebrew poet into the most influential (...) contemporary writer of aphorisms in German. The article also presents points of departure for future research into the development of the Archiv Bibliographia Judaica, the largest encyclopedia of Jewish authors in the German language. (shrink)

During long-term refugee displacements, it is common for the refugees’ country of origin to be called on to recognize a right of return. A long-standing tradition of philosophical theorizing is sceptical of such a right. Howard Adelman and Elazar Barkan are contemporary proponents of this view. They argue that, in many cases, it is not feasible for entire refugee populations to return home, and so the notion of a right of return is no right at all. We can call (...) Adelman and Barkan’s view the feasibility objection. Many defenders of rights will deny that empirical facts such as the kind to which Adelman and Barkan appeal are relevant to determining whether a moral entitlement amounts to a right. In contrast, I offer a response to the feasibility objection that does admit the relevance of facts. In my view, considerations of feasibility do matter when determining what rights human beings possess. Nevertheless, the feasibility objection is undone by its failure to acknowledge a distinction between two different kinds of feasibility constraints. ‘Hard’ constraints include logical, nomological and biological considerations. ‘Soft’ constraints include political, cultural and institutional factors. A necessary condition of a moral entitlement achieving the status of a right, I argue, is that it be feasible in the hard sense. Crucially, however, a right need not always be feasible in the soft sense. Refugees can have rights that it is not currently possible to implement politically. (shrink)

El artículo analiza la cristología de Thomas Hobbes con el propósito de entender una de las principales causas de su descrito como un pensador cristiano o, incluso, ateo, lo que afecta eventualmente la validez de su teología política. El autor sostiene que si bien Hobbes hace uso de la Biblia como fundamento de su filosofía política, su recepción del cristianismo en general no es enteramente correcta, debido a que está fuertemente influenciada por su decisión política en favor del absolutismo. Esta (...) posición política lo lleva a escoger textos ad-hoc que apoyan su teoría y a rechazar otros que no lo hacen, dejando así fuera importantes aspectos del cristianismo, uno de los cuales, el más central, es la naturaleza de Jesucristo como Dios-hombre y la interpretación contractualista del federalismo judío. El artículo hace uso de estudios de reconocidos investigadores (Elazar, Pangle, Kraynak, Ratzinger entre otros) y el autor concluye que Hobbes exhibe una visión reduccionista del cristianismo que influye en su teología política. (shrink)

A generous postdoctoral grant from the Cohn Institute for History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University enabled this research. I conducted the very earliest stage of the work while holding a postdoctoral position at the Minerva Humanities Center and the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at TAU, which I would also like very much to thank. Participants in the workshop of the School of Philosophy, Linguistics and Science Studies in TAU under the direction of Professor (...) Yossef Schwartz provided useful comments on an early draft. I reserve special thanks to Daniel Dovrat, Yiftah Elazar, Ori Belkind, Eyal Chowers, and Shaul Katzir for their perspicacious remarks and ongoing encouragement.When... (shrink)