Cancers rely on multiple, heterogeneous processes at different scales, pertaining to many biomedical fields. Therefore, understanding cancer is necessarily an interdisciplinary task that requires placing specialised experimental and clinical research into a broader conceptual, theoretical, and methodological framework. Without such a framework, oncology will collect piecemeal results, with scant dialogue between the different scientific communities studying cancer. We argue that one important way forward in service of a more successful dialogue is through greater integration of applied sciences (experimental and clinical) (...) with conceptual and theoretical approaches, informed by philosophical methods. By way of illustration, we explore six central themes: (i) the role of mutations in cancer; (ii) the clonal evolution of cancer cells; (iii) the relationship between cancer and multicellularity; (iv) the tumour microenvironment; (v) the immune system; and (vi) stem cells. In each case, we examine open questions in the scientific literature through a philosophical methodology and show the benefit of such a synergy for the scientific and medical understanding of cancer. (shrink)

Russell Hardin produced a body of work of great breadth and richness on essential subjects of the social sciences and political and moral philosophy: collective action, trust, utilitarian ethics, groups and conflict, institutions, and knowledge. The volume of output, the engagement with cross-cutting fields of scholarship and myriad subjects, and his at-times conversational mode of analysis make a succinct encapsulation difficult. In this introduction, we give a brief account of three main areas of Hardin’s work: his distinctive take on the (...) moral and political philosophy of utilitarianism, his accounts of collective action and the nature of social life, and his account of the fundamental idea of trust and social capital. (shrink)

This book reflects on the research and career of political theorist Russell Hardin from scholars of Political Science, Philosophy, Sociology, Economics, and Law, among other disciplines. Contributions address core issues of political theory as perceived by Hardin, starting with his insistence that many of the basic institutions of modern society and their formative historical beginnings can be understood as proceeding primarily from the self-interested motives of the participants. Many of the contributions in this volume struggle with the constraints imposed on (...) political theorizing by the idea of self-interested agents, or homo economicus. Some reject the idea as empirically unfounded. Others try to show that homo economicus is even more versatile than Hardin depicts. And yet others accept the constraints and work within them. But all pay tribute to the lasting intellectual contribution of Russell Hardin and the challenge he poses. The book should appeal to scholars and students interested in collective action, public choice and democracy, moral reasoning and its limits, constitutionalism, liberalism, conventions and coordination, trust, identity politics, social epistemology, and methods in politics philosophy. (shrink)

In the bracket mushroom, Schizophyllum commune, a recessive genetic alteration, mnd, causes abnormally hyperplastic three‐dimensional mounds of hyphae to rise from the surface of both haploid and dikaryotic mycelia. mnd, although not a genetic block in the fruiting body developmental pathway, is at least partially epistatic to fruiting. Within dikaryons containing both mutant and wild‐type nuclei, [mnd + mnd+], a nonreciprocal somatic recombination event can lead to stable conversion of the mnd+ region of the wild‐type nucleus to mnd. This transformation (...) to the homoallelic [mnd + mnd] condition involves no genomic areas other than the mnd region and permanently prevents any further fruiting. Studies relating to the recombination mechanism have ruled out a diploid intermediate state and other concomitants of orthodox somatic recombination, as well as whole chromosome transfer. Instead, a novel form of internuclear genetic transfer is postulated whereby a nearby locus, mob+, controls the mobilization of the mnd chromosomal region alone from one nucleus to the other within the binucleate cells of dikaryotic mycelia. (shrink)

Examine the first-year student experience as so rarely seen from the community college perspective and increase the odds of the new-to-college students’ success. For three decades, U.S. higher education has paid increasing attention to the beginning college experience—to ensure that entering students make a successful transition to college. Yet, much of the extant research and practice literature focuses on the experience of first-year students entering four-year colleges and universities. Fulfilling the Promise of the Community College is an insightful publication that (...) provides a thought-provoking, idea-inspiring look at the unique characteristics of the community college and its students. In addition, it explores the barriers to success these students face as well as strategies for ensuring that their higher education goals can be achieved. Authors describe successful adaptations of faculty development initiatives, first-year seminars, common reading programs, academic and career advising, learning communities, and STEM initiatives in the community college setting. (shrink)

We show that a quantum system admits hidden variables if and only if there is a rich set of states which satisfy a Bayesian rule. The result is proved using a relationship between Bayesian type states and dispersion-free states. Various examples are presented. In particular, it is shown that for classical systems every state is Bayesian and for traditional Hilbert space quantum systems no state is Bayesian.

The timeless brilliance of this exhaustive survey of the best classical writers of antiquity on Pythagoras was first published in 1687 in Thomas Stanley's massive tome, The History of Philosophy. It remains as contemporary today as it was over three hundred years ago. The text of the 1687 book has been reset and modernized to make it more accessible to the modern reader. Spelling has been regularized, obsolete words not found in a modern dictionary have been replaced, and (...) contemporary conventions of punctuation have been used. Biographical sketches of Thomas Stanley and Pythagoras by Manly Palmer Hall, founder of the Philosophical Research Society, have been included, along with a profound overview of Pythagorean philosophy by Platonic scholar Dr. Henry L. Drake. The extensive Greek language references throughout the text have been corrected and contextualized, and reset in a modern Greek font. Each quotation has been verified with the source document in Greek. An extensive annotated appendix of these classical sources is included. A complete bibliography details all the reference works utilized, and a small Glossary defines a number of terms, especially those from musical theory, which may be unfamiliar to the non-technical reader. (shrink)

Within each of these negational ranges two general facets of negation may be distinguished for analysis. I shall call them "free" and "bound." Negation, however, is never completely free nor completely bound, so "free" and "bound" shall refer to negation in a relative sense.

The Greeks could never have asked, "Why is there something; why not nothing?" Parmenides and Plato both held Absolute Non-Being to be inconceivable, and Aristotle's emphasis on the priority of the actual also excluded this question. The ex nihilo nihil fit of classical metaphysics may be taken as an implicit rejection of the why of Being. To say that nothing can come from nothing is to deny any priority for, or any ontological status to, Nothing.

The volume brings together a collection of original papers on some of the main tenets of Joseph Raz's legal and political philosophy: Legal positivism and the nature of law, practical reason, authority, the value of equality, incommensurability, harm, group rights, and multiculturalism.

The unexpected roles of the microbiota in cancer challenge explanations of carcinogenesis that focus on tumor-intrinsic properties. Most tumors contain bacteria and viruses, and the host’s proximal and distal microbiota influence both cancer incidence and therapeutic responsiveness. Continuing the history of cancer–microbe research, these findings raise a key question: to what extent is the microbiota relevant for clinical oncology? We approach this by critically evaluating three issues: how the microbiota provides a predictive biomarker of cancer growth and therapeutic responsiveness, the (...) microbiota’s causal role(s) in cancer development, and how therapeutic manipulations of the microbiota improve patient outcomes in cancer. Clarifying the conceptual and empirical aspects of the cancer-associated microbiota can orient future research and guide its implementation in clinical oncology. (shrink)

The presence and role of microbes in human cancers has come full circle in the last century. Tumors are no longer considered aseptic, but implications for cancer biology and oncology remain underappreciated. Opportunities to identify and build translational diagnostics, prognostics, and therapeutics that exploit cancer's second genome—the metagenome—are manifold, but require careful consideration of microbial experimental idiosyncrasies that are distinct from host‐centric methods. Furthermore, the discoveries of intracellular and intra‐metastatic cancer bacteria necessitate fundamental changes in describing clonal evolution and selection, (...) reflecting bidirectional interactions with non‐human residents. Reconsidering cancer clonality as a multispecies process similarly holds key implications for understanding metastasis and prognosing therapeutic resistance while providing rational guidance for the next generation of bacterial cancer therapies. Guided by these new findings and challenges, this Review describes opportunities to exploit cancer's metagenome in oncology and proposes an evolutionary framework as a first step towards modeling multispecies cancer clonality. Also see the video abstract here: https://youtu.be/-WDtIRJYZSs. (shrink)

This topically organized, interdisciplinary anthology provides competing perspective on the claim that western culture faces a moral crisis. Using clearly written, accessible essays by well-known authors in philosophy, the social sciences, and the humanities, the book introduces students to a variety of perspectives on the current cultural debate about values that percolates beneath the surface of most of our social and political controversies.

This book's thirty essays explore philosophically the nature and morality of sexual perversion, cybersex, masturbation, homosexuality, contraception, same-sex marriage, promiscuity, pedophilia, date rape, sexual objectification, teacher-student relationships, pornography, and prostitution. Authors include Martha Nussbaum, Thomas Nagel, Alan Goldman, John Finnis, Sallie Tisdale, Robin West, Alan Wertheimer, John Corvino, Cheshire Calhoun, Jerome Neu, and Alan Soble, among others. A valuable resource for sex researchers as well as undergraduate courses in the philosophy of sex.

Biological evolution provides a creative fount of complex and subtle adaptations, often surprising the scientists who discover them. However, because evolution is an algorithmic process that transcends the substrate in which it occurs, evolution’s creativity is not limited to nature. Indeed, many researchers in the field of digital evolution have observed their evolving algorithms and organisms subverting their intentions, exposing unrecognized bugs in their code, producing unexpected adaptations, or exhibiting outcomes uncannily convergent with ones in nature. Such stories routinely reveal (...) creativity by evolution in these digital worlds, but they rarely fit into the standard scientific narrative. Instead they are often treated as mere obstacles to be overcome, rather than results that warrant study in their own right. The stories themselves are traded among researchers through oral tradition, but that mode of information transmission is inefficient and prone to error and outright loss. Moreover, the fact that these stories tend to be shared only among practitioners means that many natural scientists do not realize how interesting and lifelike digital organisms are and how natural their evolution can be. To our knowledge, no collection of such anecdotes has been published before. This paper is the crowd-sourced product of researchers in the fields of artificial life and evolutionary computation who have provided first-hand accounts of such cases. It thus serves as a written, fact-checked collection of scientifically important and even entertaining stories. In doing so we also present here substantial evidence that the existence and importance of evolutionary surprises extends beyond the natural world, and may indeed be a universal property of all complex evolving systems. (shrink)

The volume brings together a collection of original papers on some of the main tenets of Joseph Raz's legal and political philosophy: Legal positivism and the nature of law, practical reason, authority, the value of equality, incommensurability, harm, group rights, and multiculturalism. James Griffin and Yael Tamir raise questions concerning Raz's notion of group rights and its application to claims of cultural and political autonomy, while Will Kymlicka and Bernhard Peters examine Raz's theory of multicultural society. Lukas Meyer investigates the (...) applicability of the notion of harm in the intergenerational context. Other papers are devoted to fundamental theoretical tenets of Raz's work. Hillel Steiner and Andrei Marmor examine Raz's account of value pluralism and incommensurability in light of what these authors consider to be goods whose equal distribution must be valued for its own sake. Robert Alexy and Timothy Endicott discuss traditional issues of jurisprudence and legal philosphy with special attention to Raz's contribution. Rüdiger Bittner, Bruno Celano, and J. E. Penner discuss and criticize aspects of Raz's theory of practical reason. Jeremy Waldron presents a critique of Raz's interpretation of authority.This volume concludes with a chapter by Joseph Raz in which he responds to arguments in the foregoing essays. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAnxiety and depression diagnoses are associated with suicidal thoughts and behaviours. However, a categorical understanding of these associations limits insight into identifying dimensional mechanisms of suicide risk. This study investigated anxious and depressive features through a lens of suicide risk, independent of diagnosis. Latent class analysis of 97 depression, anxiety, and suicidality-related items among 616 psychiatric outpatients indicated a 3-class solution, specifically: a higher suicide-risk class uniquely differentiated from both other classes by high reported levels of depression and anxious arousal; (...) a lower suicide-risk class that reported levels of anxiety sensitivity and generalised worry comparable to Class 1, but lower levels of depression and anxious arousal; and a low to non-suicidal class that reported relatively low levels across all depression and anxiety measures. Discriminants of the higher suicide-risk class included borderline personality disorder; report... (shrink)