Examines how the modern city is portrayed in art and literature, discusses modernism, futurism, and expressionism, and looks at the work of Rilke, Eliot, Pound, Joyce, and Brecht.

BackgroundThe ARRIVE (Animal Research: Reporting of In Vivo Experiments) guidelines are widely endorsed but compliance is limited. We sought to determine whether journal-requested completion of an ARRIVE checklist improves full compliance with the guidelines.MethodsIn a randomised controlled trial, manuscripts reporting in vivo animal research submitted to PLOS ONE (March–June 2015) were randomly allocated to either requested completion of an ARRIVE checklist or current standard practice. Authors, academic editors, and peer reviewers were blinded to group allocation. Trained reviewers performed outcome adjudication (...) in duplicate by assessing manuscripts against an operationalised version of the ARRIVE guidelines that consists 108 items. Our primary outcome was the between-group differences in the proportion of manuscripts meeting all ARRIVE guideline checklist subitems.ResultsWe randomised 1689 manuscripts (control: n = 844, intervention: n = 845), of which 1269 were sent for peer review and 762 (control: n = 340; intervention: n = 332) accepted for publication. No manuscript in either group achieved full compliance with the ARRIVE checklist. Details of animal husbandry (ARRIVE subitem 9b) was the only subitem to show improvements in reporting, with the proportion of compliant manuscripts rising from 52.1 to 74.1% (X2 = 34.0, df = 1, p = 2.1 × 10−7) in the control and intervention groups, respectively.ConclusionsThese results suggest that altering the editorial process to include requests for a completed ARRIVE checklist is not enough to improve compliance with the ARRIVE guidelines. Other approaches, such as more stringent editorial policies or a targeted approach on key quality items, may promote improvements in reporting. (shrink)

The Nature of God explores a perennial problem in the philosophy of religion.

This is a book grounded in the real ethical challenges of modern business practice, with a world-religious perspective so necessary in an era of globalization.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is an open access, dynamic reference work designed to organize professional philosophers so that they can write, edit, and maintain a reference work in philosophy that is responsive to new research. From its inception, the SEP was designed so that each entry is maintained and kept up to date by an expert or group of experts in the field. All entries and substantive updates are refereed by the members of a distinguished Editorial Board before they (...) are made public. (shrink)

It was proposed that the data from Monte Carlo statistical investigations be subjected to analysis of variance methods rather than the conventional techniques of tabling, graphing, and inspecting the data. Two examples in which analysis of variance methods were applied to published Monte Carlo studies were presented. It was suggested that balanced factorial designs should be used whenever possible in Monte Carlo studies so that analysis of variance methods would be directly applicable. Finally, three advantages of analysis of variance methods (...) over conventional techniques were described and analysis of variance methods were contrasted with a possible alternative analytical method, multiple regression analysis. (shrink)

National Book Award Finalist. How did humanity originate and why does a species like ours exist on this planet? Do we have a special place, even a destiny in the universe? Where are we going, and perhaps, the most difficult question of all, "Why?" In The Meaning of Human Existence, his most philosophical work to date, Pulitzer Prize–winning biologist Edward O. Wilson grapples with these and other existential questions, examining what makes human beings supremely different from all other species. (...) Searching for meaning in what Nietzsche once called "the rainbow colors" around the outer edges of knowledge and imagination, Wilson takes his readers on a journey, in the process bridging science and philosophy to create a twenty-first-century treatise on human existence—from our earliest inception to a provocative look at what the future of mankind portends. Continuing his groundbreaking examination of our "Anthropocene Epoch," which he began with The Social Conquest of Earth, described by the New York Times as "a sweeping account of the human rise to domination of the biosphere," here Wilson posits that we, as a species, now know enough about the universe and ourselves that we can begin to approach questions about our place in the cosmos and the meaning of intelligent life in a systematic, indeed, in a testable way. Once criticized for a purely mechanistic view of human life and an overreliance on genetic predetermination, Wilson presents in The Meaning of Human Existence his most expansive and advanced theories on the sovereignty of human life, recognizing that, even though the human and the spider evolved similarly, the poet's sonnet is wholly different from the spider's web. Whether attempting to explicate "The Riddle of the Human Species," "Free Will," or "Religion"; warning of "The Collapse of Biodiversity"; or even creating a plausible "Portrait of E.T.," Wilson does indeed believe that humanity holds a special position in the known universe. The human epoch that began in biological evolution and passed into pre-, then recorded, history is now more than ever before in our hands. Yet alarmed that we are about to abandon natural selection by redesigning biology and human nature as we wish them, Wilson soberly concludes that advances in science and technology bring us our greatest moral dilemma since God stayed the hand of Abraham. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Book Reviews 137 The Meanings of Landscape: Essays on Place, Space, Environment and Justice BY KENNETH R. OLWIG London: Routledge, 2019 REVIEWED BY TIMM SCHÖNFELDER Landscape is more than spatial scenery that meets the eye: it is an anthropogenic artefact, an intellectual construct, a mirror of culture; it even has its own language.1 This broadness is reflected in the compilation of nine authoritative essays by the geographer and professor (...) of landscape architecture Kenneth R. Olwig that were published during the past quarter of a century and are now molded into a more coherent whole. In this regard, the present volume can be considered the pinnacle of Olwig’s intellectual oeuvre. In a fervent foreword, the anthropologist Tim Ingold sets the tone when he urges the reader to shed the contemporary notion of what he terms “topophobia”—­ a lack of bond betweenpeopleandplaces—­andtoreinstatephilologyasacentralfield of interest after it was “relegated by techno-­ science to the margins of scholarship” (xv). To achieve this, the essays deal with an eclectic set of themes ranging from Ptolemy’s notion of “choros” as something similar to today’s understanding of landscape, to the humanistic geographer Yi-­Fu Tuan’s concept of “topophilia,” which is hailed as a guiding ideal for much of Olwig’s work. The articles are bound together by an introduction that quickly transcendsthegeometricallimitationsoflandscape,ontologicallyquestioning whether these can be representative of the world itself at all (3). The first chapter thus delves right into the etymologies of “landscape” and its historical implications in the Nordic countries and England with detours through Italy and the German lands. In a cursory, highly associative manner Olwig fathoms the respective cultural implications. Central is the idea that the concept of landscape is more than the mere scenicrepresentationofspaceitcametobeknownasinRenaissance art and culture.2 Rather, the Nordic variants of the word, like the Swedish landskap, are used to denote natural regions with their own polity that were then gradually subjected to a monarchic state, not least through the surveying and mapping of their territory (see also chapter two). ENVIRONMENT, SPACE, PLACE / VOLUME 13 / ISSUE 2 / 2021 138 At times, Olwig’s philological musings appear rather stretched, as when he associates the German word Grundgesetz (the “basic/­ fundamental law” of 1949, which until today serves as Germany’s constitution ) with a biopolitical dimension of “ground” as in “soil” (41).3 In cases like this, his use of literature is selective. This culminates in a problematic assessment of Nazi ideology as being motivated by a specific understanding of landscape. Statements like “there can be no doubt that the modern German conception of Landschaft was implicated in the promotion of blood-­ and-­ soil fascist ideology” (42) neglect important literature on the topic.4 Such generalizations are owed to the author’s sweeping tour de force approach. The reviewer would have preferred more guidance through the theoretical thickets by way of a clear, chronologically ordered argument. This is not helped by the occasional seeming inconsistency, as in the claim that the U.S. “inherited the British scenic idea of landscape” as a former colony while also being “very much the inheritor of German romantic ideas concerning the relation of culture to nature as expressed in the physical landscape” (45), which, in turn, showed parallels to “fascist landscapes” in the “attempt to cleanse geography of its environmentalist taint by making it a science of space” (42). This truly is a lot of ground to cover for one essay. The ensuing chapters, however, try to disentangle this inspired jumble. The second article, “Landscape, Place, and the State of Progress,” identifies a switch since the Renaissance from the idea of circuitous development to linear progress towards utopia. For Olwig, there is a “darker, Faustian side” to it that he identifies as the “dialectic of modernity,” which “opposes cosmic dreams of a utopian future to the topian exigencies of present and past”: to advance, the path had to be cleared of traditional elements (52). This materialized in courteous theatre as well as in Shakespeare’s popular plays, and in the new architecture of parks where landscape was symbolic for cultural and social progress (64). “Choros, place, and the spatialization of landscape” traces important theoretical threads within geography... (shrink)

Mathematical pluralism can take one of three forms: (1) every consistent mathematical theory consists of truths about its own domain of individuals and relations; (2) every mathematical theory, consistent or inconsistent, consists of truths about its own (possibly uninteresting) domain of individuals and relations; and (3) the principal philosophies of mathematics are each based upon an insight or truth about the nature of mathematics that can be validated. (1) includes the multiverse approach to set theory. (2) helps us to understand (...) the significance of the distinguished non‐logical individual and relation terms of even inconsistent theories. (3) is a metaphilosophical form of mathematical pluralism and hasn't been discussed in the literature. In what follows, I show how the analysis of theoretical mathematics in object theory exhibits all three forms of mathematical pluralism. (shrink)

Science provides us with representations of atoms, elementary particles, polymers, populations, genetic trees, economies, rational decisions, aeroplanes, earthquakes, forest fires, irrigation systems, and the world’s climate. It's through these representations that we learn about the world. This entry explores various different accounts of scientific representation, with a particular focus on how scientific models represent their target systems. As philosophers of science are increasingly acknowledging the importance, if not the primacy, of scientific models as representational units of science, it's important to (...) stress that how they represent plays a fundamental role in how we are to answer other questions in the philosophy of science (e.g. the scientific realism debate). This entry begins by disentangling ‘the’ problem of scientific representation, before critically evaluating the current options available in the literature. (shrink)

The so-called ergodic hierarchy (EH) is a central part of ergodic theory. It is a hierarchy of properties that dynamical systems can possess. Its five levels are egrodicity, weak mixing, strong mixing, Kolomogorov, and Bernoulli. Although EH is a mathematical theory, its concepts have been widely used in the foundations of statistical physics, accounts of randomness, and discussions about the nature of chaos. We introduce EH and discuss its applications in these fields.

The random nature of immunoglobulin gene segment rearrangement inevitably leads to the generation of self‐reactive B cells. Avoidance of destructive autoimmune reactions is necessary in order to maintain physiological homeostasis. However, current central and peripheral tolerance concepts fail to explain the massive number of autoantibody‐borne autoimmune diseases. Moreover, recent studies have shown that in physiological mouse models autoreactive B cells were neither clonally deleted nor kept in an anergic state, but were instead able to mount autoantibody responses. We propose that (...) activation of autoreactive B cells is induced by polyvalent autoantigen complexes that can occur under physiological conditions. Repeated encounter of autoantigen complexes leads to the production of affinity‐matured autoreactive IgM that protects its respective self‐targets from degradation. We refer to this novel mechanism as adaptive tolerance. This article discusses the discovery of adaptive tolerance and the unexpected role of high affinity IgM autoantibodies. (shrink)

Most accounts of cognitive scaffolding focus on ways that external structure can support or augment an agent’s cognitive capacities. We call cases where the interests of the user are served benign scaffolding and argue for the possibility and reality of hostile scaffolding. This is scaffolding which depends on the same capacities of an agent to make cognitive use of external structure as in benign cases, but that undermines or exploits the user while serving the interests of another agent. We develop (...) criteria for scaffolding being hostile and show by reference to examples including the design features of electronic gambling machines and casino management systems that hostile scaffolding exists and can be highly effective. In cases where the scaffolding is deep and permits the offloading of significant cognitive work, hostile scaffolding exploitatively manipulates cognitive processing itself. Given the extent of human reliance on scaffolding this is an important and neglected vulnerability. [This is an updated version of the paper, added in February 2023.]. (shrink)

In this entry, Frege’s logic is introduced and described in some detail. It is shown how the Dedekind-Peano axioms for number theory can be derived from a consistent fragment of Frege’s logic, with Hume’s Principle replacing Basic Law V.

This article identifies problems with regard to providing criteria that regulate the matching of logical formulae and natural language. We then take on to solve these problems by defining a necessary and sufficient criterion of adequate formalization. On the basis of this criterion we argue that logic should not be seen as an ars iudicandi capable of evaluating the validity or invalidity of informal arguments, but as an ars explicandi that renders transparent the formal structure of informal reasoning.

Phenomenology’s return to lived experience and “to the things themselves” is often contrasted with the synthesized perspective of science and its “view from nowhere.” The extensive use of neuropsychological case reports in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, however, suggests that the relationship between phenomenology and science is more complex than a sheer opposition, and a fruitful one for the praxis of medicine. Here, I propose a new reading of how Merleau-Ponty justifies his use of Adhémar Gelb and Kurt Goldstein’s reports on (...) Johann Schneider for his phenomenology of embodied perception. I argue that for Merleau-Ponty these neuropsychological case reports represent a coherent deformation of the intercorporeally expressed existence of Schneider that through speech fall again onto the common ground of perception, thereby allowing Merleau-Ponty to understand, in the equivalent sense delivered by language, Schneider’s total being and fundamental illness. I then discuss what Merleau-Ponty’s method implies for a phenomenological praxis of medicine, and for the role of science in this praxis. (shrink)

Much of what we understand about heterochromatin formation in mammals has been extrapolated from forward genetic screens for modifiers of position‐effect variegation (PEV) in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. The recent identification of the HUSH (Human Silencing Hub) complex suggests that more recent evolutionary developments contribute to the mechanisms underlying PEV in human cells. Although HUSH‐mediated repression also involves heterochromatin spreading through the reading and writing of the repressive H3K9me3 histone modification, clear orthologues of HUSH subunits are not found in (...) Drosophila but are conserved in vertebrates. Here we compare the insights into the mechanisms of PEV derived from genetic screens in the fly, the mouse and in human cells, review what is currently known about the HUSH complex and discuss the implications of HUSH‐mediated silencing for viral latency. Future studies will provide mechanistic insight into HUSH complex function and reveal the relationship between HUSH and other epigenetic silencing complexes. (shrink)

One of the central logical ideas in Wittgenstein’sTractatus logico-philosophicusis the elimination of the identity sign in favor of the so-called “exclusive interpretation” of names and quantifiers requiring different names to refer to different objects and (roughly) different variables to take different values. In this paper, we examine a recent development of these ideas in papers by Kai Wehmeier. We diagnose two main problems of Wehmeier’s account, the first concerning the treatment of individual constants, the second concerning so-called “pseudo-propositions” (Scheinsätze) of (...) classical logic such as$a=a$or$a=b \wedge b=c \rightarrow a=c$. We argue that overcoming these problems requires two fairly drastic departures from Wehmeier’s account: (1) Not every formula of classical first-order logic will be translatable into asingleformula of Wittgenstein’s exclusive notation. Instead, there will often be a multiplicity of possible translations, revealing the original “inclusive” formulas to beambiguous. (2) Certain formulas of first-order logic such as$a=a$will not be translatable into Wittgenstein’s notation at all, being thereby revealed as nonsensical pseudo-propositions which should be excluded from a “correct” conceptual notation. We provide translation procedures from inclusive quantifier-free logic into the exclusive notation that take these modifications into account and define a notion of logical equivalence suitable for assessing these translations. (shrink)

Newton claims to have proven the heterogeneity of light through his experimentum crucis. However, Olaf Müller has worked out in detail Goethe’s idea that one could likewise prove the heterogeneity of darkness by inverting Newton’s famous experiment. Müller concludes that this invalidates Newton’s claim of proof. Yet this conclusion only holds if the heterogeneity of light and the heterogeneity of darkness is logically incompatible. This paper shows that this is not the case. Instead, in Quine’s terms, we have two logically (...) compatible theories based on mutually irreducible theoretical terms. From a Quinean point of view, this does no harm to the provability of the corresponding statements. (shrink)

Das Buch entwickelt einen neuartigen, physikalistischen Interpretationsansatz zu Wittgensteins Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Das traditionelle Urteil, Wittgenstein habe im Tractatus keine klare Vorstellung der Analyse gehabt, wird widerlegt. Auf der Basis der Rekonstruktion der um die Jahrhundertwende etablierten Sinnesdatenanalysen im allgemeinen und der Farbanalysen im besonderen wird nachgewiesen, daß Wittgensteins Tractatus eine physikalische Sinnesdatenanalyse voraussetzt. Auf diesem Hintergrund werden Wittgensteins allgemeine Auffassungen zur Analyse der Welt und Sprache gedeutet, begründet und exemplifiziert. Der Tractatus liefert die philosophische Klärung des mechanistischen Weltbildes von Boltzmann (...) und Hertz. Er stellt die Mittel bereit, um den Sinn der Sätze zu analysieren und die logische Zulässigkeit von Aussagen zu prüfen. Die Anwendung dieser Mittel ist Aufgabe der Philosophie. Daß sie anwendbar sind und wie sie anzuwenden sind, demonstriert dieses Buch. (shrink)

According to some scholars, such as Rodych and Steiner, Wittgenstein objects to Gödel’s undecidability proof of his formula $$G$$, arguing that given a proof of $$G$$, one could relinquish the meta-mathematical interpretation of $$G$$ instead of relinquishing the assumption that Principia Mathematica is correct. Most scholars agree that such an objection, be it Wittgenstein’s or not, rests on an inadequate understanding of Gödel’s proof. In this paper, I argue that there is a possible reading of such an objection that is, (...) in fact, reasonable and related to Gödel’s proof. (shrink)

Es wird anhand von Fallbeispielen aus der Geschichte der Farbenlehre inwissenschaftstheoretische Probleme eingeführt. Das Buch dient als Grundlagefür eine anwendungsbezogene Lehre und als Einführung in folgende ThemenbereicheNewton vs. Goethe; Theorie und Experiment, Colormetrie; Empfindungsmessung;Helmholtz vs. Hering; Theorienevaluation, Psychologische Farbenlehre; Phänomenologie,Farbausschluss; Beweistheorie, Farbdefinitionen; Theorien- und Begriffsbildung.Neben Aufgaben, Texten und Lösungsvorschlägen finden sich eine Bibliographiesowie Einleitungen zu den behandelten Fragen und Lösungsvorschlägen derjeweiligen Themen.

This book tackles the issues that arise in connection with intensional logic -- a formal system for representing and explaining the apparent failures of certain important principles of inference such as the substitution of identicals and existential generalization -- and intentional states --mental states such as beliefs, hopes, and desires that are directed towards the world. The theory offers a unified explanation of the various kinds of inferential failures associated with intensional logic but also unifies the study of intensional contexts (...) and intentional states by grounding the explanation of both phenomena in a single theory. When an axiomatized realm of abstract entities is added to the metaphysical structure of the world, we can use them to identify and individuate the contents of directed mental states. The special abstract entities can be viewed as the objectified contents of mental files, and they play a crucial role in the analysis of truth conditions of the sentences involved in inferential failures. (shrink)

In contrast to Hintikka’s enormously complex distributive normal forms of first- order logic, this paper shows how to generate minimized disjunctive normal forms of first-order logic. An effective algorithm for this purpose is outlined, and the benefits of using minimized disjunctive normal forms to explain the truth conditions of propo- sitions expressible within pure first-order logic are presented.