This article examines an appendix to the Doctrine of Virtue which has received little attention. I argue that this passage suggests that Kant makes it a duty, internal to his system of duties, to ‘join the graces with virtue’ and so to ‘make virtue widely loved’ (MM, 6: 473). The duty to make virtue widely loved obligates us to bring the standards of respectability, and so the social graces, into a formal agreement with what morality demands of us, such that (...) the social graces give the illusion of virtue. The existence of such a duty can answer Schiller’s persistent objection that Kant’s ethics scares away the Graces with Duty. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article examines the under-researched figure A.W. Rehberg in his exchange with Kant over the relationship between theory and practice in the philosophy of right. I argue that Rehberg raises, what I call, two problems of political matter which attempt to show that Kant's overly formal approach to political theory cannot justifiably determine political practice. The first problem is the problem of positive determinations of right, rather than merely negative prohibitions. Rehberg takes this to mean that Kant cannot determine (...) us to a specific form of constitution. I argue that Kant's innovation of intelligible property functions as a response to this critique in that it provides the possibility of synthetic propositions of right a priori. Second, Rehberg insists that an a priori system of right cannot relate to already formed historical communities. Here Kant's response comes close to agreeing with Rehberg as Kant takes prudential or historical reasoning to harmonize with the demands of a priori right in order to applied to the sensible world. Kant, in this instance, comes closer to Rehberg by denying centralized enlightened monarchy and the reliance on natural and historical development for the application of right. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This is the first English translation of A.W. Rehberg's Über das Verhältnis der Theorie zur Praxis which was a published as a response to Immanuel Kant's On the Common Saying: That may be correct in theory, but is of no use in practice. Rehberg's response appeared originally in February 1794.

. In Minding God Gregory Peterson takes a careful look at the kind of freedom that human persons have. He concludes that humans are constrained to be free and unpacks this into a version of compatibilism. That is, humans are not metaphysically free under current existence because of the causal determination inherent in their physical nature, but they can take credit for the origination of selfforming decisions because the causes occur inside of us. Peterson does advocate an eschatological hope (...) looking forward to the breaking of causal determination by God's own action. Thus, Minding God presents an eschatologically limited compatibilism. Compatibilism of any kind, however, presents serious challenges to most Christian theologies and to many religious traditions broadly considered. After I interpret Peterson's position I make the argument that compatibilism is neither desirable nor required for a theological anthropology intent on serious engagement of cognitive science. (shrink)

The tetratricopeptide repeat (TPR) motif is a protein-protein interaction module found in multiple copies in a number of functionally different proteins that facilitates specific interactions with a partner protein(s). Three-dimensional structural data have shown that a TPR motif contains two antiparallel α-helices such that tandem arrays of TPR motifs generate a right-handed helical structure with an amphipathic channel that might accommodate the complementary region of a target protein. Most TPR-containing proteins are associated with multiprotein complexes, and there is extensive evidence (...) indicating that TPR motifs are important to the functioning of chaperone, cell-cycle, transcription, and protein transport complexes. The TPR motif may represent an ancient protein-protein interaction module that has been recruited by different proteins and adapted for specific functions. BioEssays 1999;21:932–939. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

The tetratricopeptide repeat (TPR) motif is a protein-protein interaction module found in multiple copies in a number of functionally different proteins that facilitates specific interactions with a partner protein(s). Three-dimensional structural data have shown that a TPR motif contains two antiparallel α-helices such that tandem arrays of TPR motifs generate a right-handed helical structure with an amphipathic channel that might accommodate the complementary region of a target protein. Most TPR-containing proteins are associated with multiprotein complexes, and there is extensive evidence (...) indicating that TPR motifs are important to the functioning of chaperone, cell-cycle, transcription, and protein transport complexes. The TPR motif may represent an ancient protein-protein interaction module that has been recruited by different proteins and adapted for specific functions. BioEssays 1999;21:932–939. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

Responding to volatile criticisms frequently leveled at Leo Strauss and those he influenced, the prominent contributors to this volume demonstrate the profound influence that Strauss and his students have exerted on American liberal democracy and contemporary political thought. By stressing the enduring vitality of classic books and by articulating the theoretical and practical flaws of relativism and historicism, the contributors argue that Strauss and the Straussians have identified fundamental crises of modernity and liberal democracy.

This essay introduces a special report from The Hastings Center entitled Democracy in Crisis: Civic Learning and the Reconstruction of Common Purpose, which grew out of a project supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. This multiauthored report offers wide‐ranging assessments of increasing polarization and partisanship in American government and politics, and it proposes constructive responses to this in the provision of objective information, institutional reforms in government and the electoral system, and a reexamination of cultural and (...) political values needed if democracy is to function well in a pluralistic and diverse society. The essays in the special report explore the norms of civic learning and institutions, social movements, and communal innovations that can revitalize civic learning in practice. This introductory essay defines and explains the notion of civic learning, which is a lynchpin connecting many of the essays in the report. Civic learning pertains to the ways in which citizens learn about collective social problems and make decisions about them that reflect the duties and responsibilities of citizenship. Such learning can occur in many social settings in everyday life, and it can also be facilitated through participation in the processes of democratic governance on many levels. Civic learning is not doctrinaire and is compatible with a range of public goals and policies. It is an activity that increases what might be called the democratic capability of a people. (shrink)

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Pancreatitis is a complex, progressively destructive inflammatory disorder. Alcohol was long thought to be the primary causative agent, but genetic contributions have been of interest since the discovery that rare PRSS1, CFTR and SPINK1 variants were associated with pancreatitis risk. We now report two associations at genome-wide significance identified and replicated at PRSS1-PRSS2 and X-linked CLDN2 through a two-stage genome-wide study. The PRSS1 variant likely affects disease susceptibility by altering expression of the primary trypsinogen gene. The CLDN2 risk allele is (...) associated with atypical localization of claudin-2 in pancreatic acinar cells. The homozygous CLDN2 genotype confers the greatest risk, and its alleles interact with alcohol consumption to amplify risk. These results could partially explain the high frequency of alcohol-related pancreatitis in men. © 2012 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

The history of evolutionary thought / Michael Ruse -- The origin of life / Jeffrey L. Bada and Antonio Lazcano -- Paleontology and the history of life / Michael Benton -- Adaptation / Joseph Travis and David N. Reznick -- Molecular evolution / Francisco J. Ayala -- Evolution of the genome / Brian Charlesworth and Deborah Charlesworth -- The pattern and process of speciation / Margaret B. Ptacek and Shala J. Hankison -- Evolution and development / Gregory (...) A. Wray -- Social behavior and sociobiology / Daniel J. Rubenstein -- Human evolution / Henry M. McHenry -- Evolutionary biology of disease and Darwinian medicine / Michael F. Antolin -- Beyond the Darwinian paradigm : understanding biological forms / Brian Goodwin -- Philosophy of evolutionary thought / Kim Sterelny -- Evolution and society / Manfred D. Laubichler and Jane Maienschein -- Evolution and religion / David N. Livingstone -- American antievolutionism : retrospect and prospect / Eugenie C. Scott. (shrink)

In this paper, I summarize an emerging debate in the cognitive sciences over the right taxonomy for understanding cognition – the right theory of and vocabulary for describing the structure of the mind – and the proper role of neuroscientific evidence in specifying this taxonomy. In part because the discussion clearly entails a deep reconsideration of the supposed autonomy of psychology from neuroscience, this is a debate in which philosophers should be interested, with which they should be familiar, and to (...) which they should contribute. Here, I outline some of the positions being advocated, and reflect on some of the possible implications of this work both for scientific and folk psychology. (shrink)

Fabi and Goldberg investigate how funding availability influences the landscape of bioethics as a field, and perpetuates forms of social and epistemic injustice while limitin...

This paper argues that research on the business case for corporate social responsibility (CSR) must account for the path dependent nature of firm-stakeholderrelations, and develops the construct of stakeholder influence capacity (SIC) to fill this void. SIC helps to explain why the effects of CSR on corporate financial performance (CFP) vary across firms and across time, therein providing a missing link in the study of the business case. This paper distinguishes CSR from related and confounded corporate resource allocations and from (...) corporate social performance (CSP), then incorporates SIC into a model that explains how acts of CSR are transformed into CFP through stakeholder relationships. This paper also develops a set of propositions to aid future research on the contingencies that produce variable financial returns to investments in CSR. (shrink)

An emerging class of theories concerning the functional structure of the brain takes the reuse of neural circuitry for various cognitive purposes to be a central organizational principle. According to these theories, it is quite common for neural circuits established for one purpose to be exapted (exploited, recycled, redeployed) during evolution or normal development, and be put to different uses, often without losing their original functions. Neural reuse theories thus differ from the usual understanding of the role of neural plasticity (...) (which is, after all, a kind of reuse) in brain organization along the following lines: According to neural reuse, circuits can continue to acquire new uses after an initial or original function is established; the acquisition of new uses need not involve unusual circumstances such as injury or loss of established function; and the acquisition of a new use need not involve (much) local change to circuit structure (e.g., it might involve only the establishment of functional connections to new neural partners). Thus, neural reuse theories offer a distinct perspective on several topics of general interest, such as: the evolution and development of the brain, including (for instance) the evolutionary-developmental pathway supporting primate tool use and human language; the degree of modularity in brain organization; the degree of localization of cognitive function; and the cortical parcellation problem and the prospects (and proper methods to employ) for function to structure mapping. The idea also has some practical implications in the areas of rehabilitative medicine and machine interface design. (shrink)

This essay introduces the massive redeployment hypothesis, an account of the functional organization of the brain that centrally features the fact that brain areas are typically employed to support numerous functions. The central contribution of the essay is to outline a middle course between strict localization on the one hand, and holism on the other, in such a way as to account for the supporting data on both sides of the argument. The massive redeployment hypothesis is supported by case studies (...) of redeployment, and compared and contrasted with other theories of the localization of function. (shrink)

Louis Althusser remained until his death in 1990 the most controversial of the “master thinkers” who emerged from the turbulent Parisian intellectual scene of the 1960s. The publication of his bestselling posthumous “autobiography”, L'avenir dure longtemps, has now refueled some of these controversies. Hugely influential, whether lauded or vilified, Althusser occupies a unique place in contemporary philosophy. What is certain is that Althusserian themes and motifs continue to constitute a vital region in materialist thought. The Althusserian Legacy is the first (...) collective attempt to draw up a balance sheet, not on Althusser alone but on the questions that his work helped to bring to the forefront of Marxist theory. The volume brings together work in history, philosophy, economics, sociology, and literary criticism, all of it derived from or significantly inflected by Althusser. Taken together, the essays assess soberly, critically, but always generously, the full extent of his legacy. The volume contains a lengthy interview with Jacques Derrida, a long-time friend and colleague of Althusser at the Ecole Normale in Paris, and concludes with obituaries by Derrida and Gregory Elliott. Perhaps only now, more than a decade after his active intellectual life has come to a close, is it possible to render sound, just judgments on the meaning and significance of this much-debated body of work. The Althusserian Legacy is a rich beginning to that important task. (shrink)

The nature of cognition is being re-considered. Instead of emphasizing formal operations on abstract symbols, the new approach foregrounds the fact that cognition is, rather, a situated activity, and suggests that thinking beings ought therefore be considered first and foremost as acting beings. The essay reviews recent work in Embodied Cognition, provides a concise guide to its principles, attitudes and goals, and identifies the physical grounding project as its central research focus.

However, other leading philosophers of the era--such as David Hume, Adam Smith, and J.G. Herder--placed greater emphasis on feeling, seeing moral and political ...

To accept that cognition is embodied is to question many of the beliefs traditionally held by cognitive scientists. One key question regards the localization of cognitive faculties. Here we argue that for cognition to be embodied and sometimes embedded, means that the cognitive faculty cannot be localized in a brain area alone. We review recent research on neural reuse, the 1/f structure of human activity, tool use, group cognition, and social coordination dynamics that we believe demonstrates how the boundary between (...) the different areas of the brain, the brain and body, and the body and environment is not only blurred but indeterminate. In turn, we propose that cognition is supported by a nested structure of task-specific synergies, which are softly assembled from a variety of neural, bodily, and environmental components (including other individuals), and exhibit interaction dominant dynamics. (shrink)

Do firms benefit from their voluntary efforts to alleviate the many problems confronting society? A vast literature establishing a “business case” for corporate social responsibility appears to find that usually they do. However, as argued herein, the business case literature has established only that firms usually benefit from responding to the demands of their primary stakeholders. The nature of the relationship between the interests of business and those of broader society, beyond a subset of powerful primary stakeholders, remains an open (...) question despite this vast literature. This article develops a set of propositions that highlight constraints on firms’ ability to profit from CSR and outlines a set of managerial challenges on which researchers must focus their attention to truly determine whether and when firms can profit by responding to the needs of society. (shrink)

In Discovering Levinas, Michael L. Morgan shows how this thinker faces in novel and provocative ways central philosophical problems of twentieth-century philosophy and religious thought. He tackles this task by placing Levinas in conversation with philosophers such as Donald Davidson, Stanley Cavell, John McDowell, Onora O'Neill, Charles Taylor, and Cora Diamond. He also seeks to understand Levinas within philosophical, religious, and political developments in the history of twentieth-century intellectual culture. Morgan demystifies Levinas by examining his unfamiliar and surprising vocabulary, (...) interpreting texts with an eye to clarity, and arguing that Levinas can be understood as a philosopher of the everyday. Morgan also shows that Levinas's ethics is not morally and politically irrelevant nor is it excessively narrow and demanding in unacceptable ways. Neither glib dismissal nor fawning acceptance, this book provides a sympathetic reading that can form a foundation for a responsible critique. (shrink)

Neural reuse is a form of neuroplasticity whereby neural elements originally developed for one purpose are put to multiple uses. A diverse behavioral repertoire is achieved by means of the creation of multiple, nested, and overlapping neural coalitions, in which each neural element is a member of multiple different coalitions and cooperates with a different set of partners at different times. Neural reuse has profound implications for how we think about our continuity with other species, for how we understand the (...) similarities and differences between psychological processes, and for how best to pursue a unified science of the mind.After Phrenology: Neural Reuse and the Interactive Brain surveys the terrain and advocates for a series of reforms in psychology and cognitive neuroscience. The book argues that, among other things, we should capture brain function in a multidimensional manner, develop a new, action-oriented vocabulary for psychology, and recognize that higher-order cognitive processes are built from complex configurations of already evolved circuitry. (shrink)

Since the early 1990s, the extractive industries have increasingly valued corporate social responsibility in the communities where they operate. More recently, these industries have begun to recognize the importance of adapting CSR efforts to unique local contexts rather than applying a one-size-fits-all model. However, firms understand local context to mean culture and treat the physical properties of the host region—topography, geology, hydrology, and climate—as the exclusive purview of mineral geologists and engineers. In this article, we examine the organization of CSR (...) at two industrial-scale gold mines in Guatemala, owned by the same firm, which yielded starkly distinct levels of support among host community residents. We develop the idea of social terrain to convey the way in which the biophysical environment informs local social relations and imbues phenomena with particular social meanings. We argue that firms must account for social terrain in organizing for CSR. The literature struggles to provide guidelines for identifying and understanding stakeholders. Social terrain, we argue, can begin to bridge this gap between theory and practice. (shrink)

The use of human brain tissue in neuroscience research is increasing. Recent developments include transplanting neural tissue, growing or maintaining neural tissue in laboratories and using surgically removed tissue for experimentation. Also, it is likely that in the future there will be attempts at partial or complete brain transplants. A discussion of the ethical issues of using human brain tissue for research and brain transplantation has been organized around nine broadly defined topic areas. Criteria for human brain tissue transplantation and (...) laboratory use of brain tissue are proposed. (shrink)

This essay introduces the massive redeployment hypothesis, an account of the functional organization of the brain that centrally features the fact that brain areas are typically employed to support numerous functions. The central contribution of the essay is to outline a middle course between strict localization on the one hand, and holism on the other, in such a way as to account for the supporting data on both sides of the argument. The massive redeployment hypothesis is supported by case studies (...) of redeployment, and compared and contrasted with other theories of the localization of function. (shrink)

We all have a mind, but how much do we know about what it is, and how it works? How do philosophers, physiologists, pyschologists and psychiatrists differ in their understanding of its processes? This second edition of the highly acclaimed Oxford Companion to the Mind attempts to answer these questions, and raises more, as it explores this most-intriguing of subjects. Includes Roger Penrose and Steven Rose on consciousness; Beryl Bainbridge on construction of fiction; Raj Persaud on depression; Richard Gregory (...) on facial expression, illusions of vision and consciousness; Ted Honderich on free will; and Noam Chomsky on language. New to this edition Three new mini symposia – on consciousness, brain imaging and artificial intelligence – with contributions from a range of specialists, representing the variety of approaches to these major subjects in a balanced but lively and personal way New entries include artificial life, attachment theory, caffeine, conjuring, cruelty, drama, extra-terrestrial intelligence, face-to-face communication, genetics of mental illness, imagination, lying, puzzles and twins. (shrink)

As part of the ongoing attempt to fully naturalize the concept of human being--and, more specifically, to re-center it around the notion of agency--this essay discusses an approach to defining the content of representations in terms ultimately derived from their central, evolved function of providing guidance for action. This 'guidance theory' of representation is discussed in the context of, and evaluated with respect to, two other biologically inspired theories of representation: Dan Lloyd's dialectical theory of representation and Ruth Millikan's biosemantics.

Multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) is a popular analytical technique in neuroscience that involves identifying patterns in fMRI BOLD signal data that are predictive of task conditions. But the technique is also frequently used to make inferences about the regions of the brain that are most important to the tasks in question, and our analysis shows that this is a mistake. MVPA does not provide a reliable guide to what information is being used by the brain during cognitive tasks, nor where (...) that information is. This is due in part to inherent run to run variability in the decision space generated by the classifier, but there are also several other issues, discussed below, that make inference from the characteristics of the learned models to relevant brain activity deeply problematic. These issues have significant implications both for many papers already published, and for how the field uses this technique in the future. (shrink)

Medical rules of eligibility permit severely injured Iraqi and Afghan nationals to receive care in Coalition medical facilities only if bed space is available and their injuries result directly from Coalition fire. The first rule favors Coalition soldiers over host-nation nationals and contradicts the principle of impartial, needs-based medical care. To justify preferential care for compatriots, wartime medicine invokes associative obligations of care that favor friends, family, and comrades-in-arms. Associative obligations have little place in peacetime medical care but significantly affect (...) wartime medicine. The second rule suggests liability for collateral harm that is unsupported by international law and military ethics. Absent liability, there are pragmatic reasons to offer medical care to injured local civilians if it quells resentment and cements support for Coalition forces. In contrast to peacetime medicine, military necessity and associative obligations outweigh distributive principles based on medical need during war. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas emerged as an influential philosophical voice in the final decades of the twentieth century, and his reputation has continued to flourish and increase in our own day. His central themes--the primacy of the ethical and the core of ethics as our responsibility to and for others--speak to readers from a host of disciplines and perspectives. However, his writings and thought are challenging and difficult. The Oxford Handbook of Levinas contains essays that aim to clarify and engage Levinas and (...) his writings in a number of ways. Some focus on central themes of his work, others on the ways in which he read and was influenced by figures from Plato, Hobbes, Descartes, and Kant to Blanchot, Husserl, Heidegger, and Derrida. And there are essays on how his thinking has been appropriated in moral and political thought, psychology, film criticism, and more, and on the relation between his thinking and religious themes and traditions. Finally, several essays deal primarily with how readers have criticized him and found him wanting. The volume exposes and explores both the depth of Levinas's philosophical work and the range of applications to which it has been put, with special attention to clarifying why his interests in the human condition, the crisis of civilization, the centrality and character of ethics and morality, and the very meaning of human experience should be of interest to the widest range of readers. (shrink)