Recent findings regarding the cellular biology and immunology of BST‐2 (also known as tetherin) indicate that its function could be exploited as a universal replication inhibitor of enveloped respiratory viruses (e.g., influenza, respiratory syncytial virus, etc.). BST‐2 inhibits viral replication by preventing virus budding from the plasma membrane and by inducing an antiviral state in cells adjacent to infection via unique inflammatory signaling mechanisms. This review presents the first comprehensive summary of what is currently known about BST‐2 anti‐viral function against (...) respiratory viruses, how these viruses construct countermeasures to antagonize BST‐2, and how BST‐2 function might be targeted to develop therapies to treat respiratory virus infections. The authors address the current gaps in knowledge, including the need for mechanistic understanding of BST‐2 antagonism by respiratory viruses, that should be bridged to achieve that goal. (shrink)

ABSTRACTDifficulties with inhibiting fear have been associated with the emergence of anxiety problems and poor response to cognitive–behavioural treatment. Fear inhibition problems measured using experimental paradigms involving aversive stimuli may be inappropriate for vulnerable samples and may not capture fear inhibition problems evident in everyday life. We present the Fear Inhibition Questionnaire, a self-report measure of fear inhibition abilities. We assess the FIQ’s factor structure across two cultures and how well it correlates with fear inhibition indices derived experimentally. Adolescent participants (...) from Hong Kong and England completed the FIQ, with the English participants also completing a conditioning and extinction task to assess fear inhibition problems. Across both cultures, the FIQ showed a single factor structure and low FIQ scores, or worse fear inhibition problems, were associated with self-reports of heightened anxiety. Correlation of FIQ scores with experimental indices, whi... (shrink)

The work of 6th century Indian logician Dharmakirti is explored in detail in series of twelve articles analyzing deviant logic, subject failure, andther important aspects of the Indo-Tibetan Buddhist logical tradition.riginal.

In an article published in 2009 titled "How Do Mādhyamikas Think?" I tried to go some distance with Yasuo Deguchi, Jay Garfield, and Graham Priest (henceforth "DGP") in reading certain Buddhist texts as dialetheist.1 The dialetheism that I saw as plausible for the Prajñāpāramitā-sūtras and Nāgārjuna was not the full-blown robust variety of DGP (i.e., acceptance of the truth of some statement of the form p & ¬p) but a non-adjunctive variety, acceptance of p and acceptance of ¬p. In short, (...) the adjunctive move to p & ¬p is blocked.In the article, I focused on texts like the Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā-sūtra ("Diamond Cutter Suūtra") with its famous "signature formulae" along the lines of "x does not exist / x is not .. (shrink)

Intro -- Title -- Contents -- Publisher's Acknowledgment -- Introduction -- Madhyamaka's Promise as Philosophy -- 1. Trying to Be Fair -- 2. How Far Can a Mādhyamika Reform Customary Truth? Dismal Relativism, Fictionalism, Easy-Easy Truth, and the Alternatives -- Logic and Semantics -- 3. How Do Mādhyamikas Think? Notes on Jay Garfield, Graham Priest, and Paraconsistency -- 4. "How Do Mādhyamikas Think?" Revisited -- 5. Prasaṅga and Proof by Contradiction in Bhāviveka, Candrakīrti, and Dharmakīrti -- 6. Apoha Semantics: What (...) Did Bhāviveka Have to Do with It? -- 7. What Happened to the Third and Fourth Lemmas in the Tibetan Madhyamaka? -- Ethics and the Spiritual Path -- 8. Madhyamaka Buddhist Ethics -- 9. Reason, Irrationality, and Akrasia (Weakness of the Will) in Buddhism: Reflections upon Śāntideva's Arguments with Himself -- 10. Yogic Perception, Meditation, and Enlightenment: The Epistemological Issues in a Key Debate between Madhyamaka and Chan -- Madhyamaka in Contemporary Debates -- 11. On Minds, Dharmakīrti, and Madhyamaka -- 12. Serious, Lightweight, or Neither: Should Madhyamaka Go to Canberra? -- Notes on the Articles -- Abbreviations -- Bibliography -- Index -- About the Author -- Studies in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism Titles Previously Published -- About Wisdom Publications -- Copyright. (shrink)

This article looks at the Indian canonical sources for Mādhyamika Buddhist refusals to personally endorse truth claims, even about customary matters. These sources, on a natural reading, seem to suggest that customary truth is only widespread error and that the Buddhist should do little more than duplicate, or acquiesce in, what the common man recognizes about it. The combination of those Indian canonical themes probably contributed to frequent Indo-Tibetan Madhyamaka positions on truth, i.e., that the customary is no more than (...) surface level truth, mere consensus amongst the mistaken, or, similarly, that there can be no right answers or truth claims to endorse about customary matters, as there are no sources of knowledge that have them as objects. Tsong kha pa and the dGe lugs pa, by contrast, adopted what I consider to be a philosophically more promising stance, one that recognized the need for a robust normativity: things customary are not just reduced to accepted errors; there are right answers about them that should be endorsed and may well defy current consensus of opinion. Not surprisingly, however, they needed a quite different and even strained exegesis of that same Indian textual legacy. (shrink)

The paper looks at how Tsong kha pa, mKhas grub, and Go rams pa understood the third and fourth lemmas in the tetralemma, “both A and B” and “neither A nor B,” respectively.

Let it be granted that Buddhism has, e.g., in its logical literature, detailed canons and explicit rules of right reason that, amongst other things, ban inconsistency as irrational. This is the normative dimension of how people should think according to many major Buddhist authors. But do important Buddhist writers ever recognize any interesting or substantive role for inconsistency and forms of irrationality in their account of how people actually do think and act? The article takes as its point of departure (...) a recurring theme in the writings of the 8th Century Indian Buddhist thinker, Śāntideva, who subjects his own behaviour and thought to minute scrutiny in argumentation with himself, only to be puzzled at his own seemingly irrational persistence in ways of thinking that he knows to be wrong and actions that he knows to be worse courses. The Buddhist’s situation is profitably comparable to issues of akrasia, weakness of the will, that are taken up by Plato, Aristotle and many modern philosophers, including notably Donald Davidson and David Wiggins. (shrink)

This article looks at the Indian canonical sources for Mādhyamika Buddhist refusals to personally endorse truth claims, even about customary matters. These sources, on a natural reading, seem to suggest that customary truth is only widespread error and that the Buddhist should do little more than duplicate, or acquiesce in, what the common man recognizes about it. The combination of those Indian canonical themes probably contributed to frequent Indo-Tibetan Madhyamaka positions on truth, i.e., that the customary is no more than (...) surface level truth, mere consensus amongst the mistaken, or, similarly, that there can be no right answers or truth claims to endorse about customary matters, as there are no sources of knowledge that have them as objects. Tsong kha pa and the dGe lugs pa, by contrast, adopted what I consider to be a philosophically more promising stance, one that recognized the need for a robust normativity: things customary are not just reduced to accepted errors; there are right answers about them that should be endorsed and may well defy current consensus of opinion. Not surprisingly, however, they needed a quite different and even strained exegesis of that same Indian textual legacy. (shrink)

Towards the end of the eighth century CE there occurred a debate over the future direction of Buddhism in Tibet. It pitted an Indian side, with their Tibetan sympathizers, against a Chinese side, with their Tibetan and perhaps even some Indian sympathizers too. The philosophy of Kamalaśīla, the leader of the Indian side, of meditation and yogic perception concords by and large with mainstream Indo‐Tibetan Buddhist theoretical accounts. The exchange between Kamalaśīla and Heshang, the Chinese leader, was heatedly polemical. Details (...) of the debate and its historical context are found in the classic work of the Sinologist Paul Demiéville, Le Concile de Lhasa. The debate is in part about the efficacy of various types of meditation, but, more broadly, it is about the respective worth of analysis and meditation as approaches to knowledge and enlightenment. The debate, as the chapter shows, is fundamentally about epistemological issues, problems of knowledge. (shrink)

The question of how an individual firm's social and environmental performance impacts its firm risk has not been examined in any empirical UK research. Does a company that strives to attain good environmental performance decrease its market risk or is environmental performance just a disadvantageous cost that increases such risk levels for these firms? Answers to this question have important implications for the management of companies and the investment decisions of individuals and institutions. The purpose of this paper is to (...) examine the relationship between corporate environmental performance and firm risk in the British context. Using the largest dataset assembled so far, with community and environmental responsibility (CER) rankings for all rated UK companies between 1994 and 2006, we show that a company's environmental performance is inversely related to its systematic financial risk. However, an increase of 1.0 in the CER score is associated with only a 0.028 reduction in its β. (shrink)

The question of how an individual firm's social and environmental performance impacts its firm risk has not been examined in any empirical UK research. Does a company that strives to attain good environmental performance decrease its market risk or is environmental performance just a disadvantageous cost that increases such risk levels for these firms? Answers to this question have important implications for the management of companies and the investment decisions of individuals and institutions. The purpose of this paper is to (...) examine the relationship between corporate environmental performance and firm risk in the British context. Using the largest dataset assembled so far, with community and environmental responsibility (CER) rankings for all rated UK companies between 1994 and 2006, we show that a company's environmental performance is inversely related to its systematic financial risk. However, an increase of 1.0 in the CER score is associated with only a 0.028 reduction in its β. (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)

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)

The mechanisms by which sex is genetically determined are bewilderingly diverse and appear to change rapidly during evolution.(1) What makes the sex‐determining process so prone to perturbations? Two recent articles(2,3) explore theoretically the role of genetic conflict in sex determination evolution. Both studies use the idea that selection on sex‐determining genes may act differently in parents and in offspring and they suggest that the resulting conflict can drive changes in sex‐determining mechanisms. BioEssays 23:477–480, 2001. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, (...) Inc. (shrink)

Comparisons are drawn between two theories of visual perception and two modes of information processing. Characteristics delineating dorsal and ventral visual systems lack internal consistency, probably because they are not completely separable. Mechanism is inherent when distinguishing these systems, and becomes more apparent with different processing domains. What is lacking is a more explicit means of linking these theories.

Theoretical models propose that attentional biases might account for the maintenance of social anxiety symptoms. However, previous eye-tracking studies have yielded mixed results. One explanation i...

The field of emotion regulation has developed rapidly, and a number of emotion regulatory strategies have been identified. To date, empirical attention has focused on contrasting specific regulatio...

Discussions of research involving vulnerable populations have left the homeless comparatively ignored. Participation by these subjects in drug studies has the potential to be upsetting, inconvenient, or unpleasant. Participation occasionally produces injury, health emergencies, and chronic health problems. Nonetheless, no ethical justification exists for the categorical exclusion of homeless persons from research. The appropriate framework for informed consent for these subjects of pharmaceutical research is not a single event of oral or written consent, but a multi-staged arrangement of disclosure, dialogue, (...) and permission-giving. Payments and other rewards in biomedical research raise issues of whether it is ethical to offer inducements to the homeless in exchange for participation in drug studies. Such inducements can influence desperate persons who are seriously lacking in resources. The key is to strike a balance between a rate of payment high enough that it does not exploit subjects by underpayment and low enough that it does not create an irresistible inducement. This proposal does not underestimate the risks of research, which are often overestimated and need to be appraised in light of the relevant empirical literature. (shrink)

In the United States, hate speech sits at the intersection of ethical and legal debates and has a complex relationship with journalism. The First Amendment provides broad legal protections for hate...

The authors demonstrate that ethical judgments can be biased when previous judgments serve as a point of reference against which a current situation is judged. Scenarios describing ethical or unethical sales practices were used in an experiment to prime subjects who subsequently rated the ethics of an ethically ambiguous target scenario. The target tended to be rated as more ethical by subjects primed with unethical scenarios, and less ethical by subjects primed with ethical scenarios. This "contrast effect," however, is contingent (...) upon individual differences. Specifically, subjects with high (versus low) needs for cognition are more likely to process and use the information presented in the priming scenarios as a point of reference against which to judge the target situation, and hence more prone to the contrastive bias. Implications for avoiding unintentional moral relativism in business decision-making are discussed. (shrink)

The extent to which we generalize a novel property from a sample of familiar instances to novel instances depends on the sample composition. Previous property induction experiments have only used samples consisting of novel types (unique entities). Because real‐world evidence samples often contain redundant tokens (repetitions of the same entity), we studied the effects on property induction of adding types and tokens to an observed sample. In Experiments 1–3, we presented participants with a sample of birds or flowers known to (...) have a novel property and probed whether this property generalized to novel items varying in similarity to the initial sample. Increasing the number of novel types (e.g., new birds with the target property) in a sample produced tightening, promoting property generalization to highly similar stimuli but decreasing generalization to less similar stimuli. On the other hand, increasing the number of tokens (e.g., repeated presentations of the same bird with the target property) had little effect on generalization. Experiment 4 showed that repeated tokens are encoded and can benefit recognition, but appear to be given little weight when inferring property generalization. We modified an existing Bayesian model of induction (Navarro, Dry, & Lee, 2012) to account for both the information added by new types and the discounting of information conveyed by tokens. (shrink)

This paper concerns the translation and interpretation of a succinct quip of Sextus Clodius, a rhetorician in Antony's entourage, on the subject of Fulvia's swollen cheek. The jest is often interpreted as having suggested that she tempted Clodius’ pen, and various double meanings have been proposed. Contextualization may supply a key. The remark could mean that Fulvia seemed to be testing the point of her stylus, and the dark allusion might then be to reports of the manner in which Fulvia (...) had allegedly mistreated the severed head of Cicero. (shrink)