Several philosophers have argued that natural selection will favor reliable belief formation; others have been more skeptical. These traditional approaches to the evolution of rationality have been either too sketchy or else have assumed that phenotypic plasticity can be equated with having a mind. Here I develop a new model to explore the functional utility of belief and desire formation mechanisms, and defend the claim that natural selection favors reliable inference methods in a broad, but not universal, range of circumstances.

A large number of cellular proteins bind ATP, frequently utilizing the free energy of ATP hydrolysis to drive specific biological reactions. Recently, a family of closely related ATP‐binding proteins has been identified, the members of which share considerable sequence identity. These proteins, from both prokaryotic and eukaryotic sources, presumably had a common evolutionary origin and include the product of the white locus of Drosophila, the P‐glycoprotein which confers multidrug resistance on mammalian tumours, and prokaryotic proteins associated with such diverse processes (...) as membrane transport, cell division, nodulation and DNA repair. A comparison of these various proteins provides valuable insights into the function and evolution of the multicomponent systems with which they are associated. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie Jahrgang: 57 Heft: 1 Seiten: 138-154.

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)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave TradeStephen Auerbach (bio)Christopher L. Miller. The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2008. xvi + 571 pp.Over the last decade scholars have shown a new interest in reconstructing the history of the French slave trade and slaveholding Atlantic. A scholarly consensus is slowly emerging around the notion that the (...) history of French slavery and colonialism is central to any understanding of the larger themes in French and Francophone history from the seventeenth century to the present. Christopher Miller’s The French Atlantic Triangle is a welcome contribution to this important subject. Miller rightly argues that France, Africa, and the Caribbean are tied together in a shared history of colonialism, slavery, and the slave trade. His goal in The French Atlantic Triangle is to reconstruct this history and illuminate its impact on modern French and Francophone cultural life.The French Atlantic Triangle is a fascinating example of research that combines methods employed in history and Francophone literary studies in order to discuss the triangular slave trade that condemned 2 million Africans to slavery on France’s Caribbean sugar islands and an untold number to their deaths during the Middle Passage. Miller’s central interest here is exploring the ways in which the slave trade and its afterlife were represented in literature and in film from the eighteenth to the twentieth century in France, Africa, and the Caribbean. In the absence of any extant Francophone slave narratives, Miller persuasively argues that fiction and later film allowed writers and filmmakers to pour their “speculations and reflections” (92) into that void. French and Francophone writers separated by thousands of miles and hundreds of years were united by the desire to construct slave narratives and stories that played on the reader’s sense of pity and shame, or desire for adventure, or to convey a powerful longing for home. The result is an ambitious and substantive work. Miller clearly succeeds in demonstrating a legacy of slavery and the slave trade in France and Francophone literature, yet the picture that emerges is a muddled one; the reader is left to make sense of competing, diverse, and sometimes divergent claims. In the end, The French Atlantic Triangle is more suggestive than persuasive.The book is organized into fourteen chapters, divided into four sections, arranged chronologically and geographically. Part 1 (chaps. 1–4) is largely synthesis. Drawing heavily on the work of historians of slavery and the slave trade, Miller outlines the details of the triangular trade from its inception in the mid-seventeenth century to its first abolition in 1794, and final suppression in 1848. Chapters 1 and 2 will be a review for anyone familiar with the history of this period. Chapter 3 focuses on the Enlightenment and the slave trade. Miller rightly notes that the Enlightenment coincided with the height of French slaving activity. Examining works by Montesquieu, Rousseau, and [End Page 59] Voltaire, Miller argues that the philosophes were never much interested in the plight of African slaves, and when they did speak out on the issue it was with heavy irony or wit that only diluted their message. Miller’s analysis is convincing, though he seems unjustified in suggesting that Voltaire remained mostly quiet on the issue because he was heavily invested in the slave trade. There is no evidence for that assertion.Part 2 (chaps. 5–8) covers the period from the French Revolution to the Bourbon Restoration during which time France experienced complete upheaval from the slave rebellions in Martinique in 1789 and Saint Domingue in 1791, to the abolition of slavery in 1794 and its reimposition under Napoleon. Focusing on the writings of Olympe de Gouges, Germaine de Staël, and Claire de Duras, Miller labels the three as abolitionists because in their works they created sympathetic black characters, critiqued racial prejudice, and instilled pity in their readers. Miller brings a fresh analytical eye to well-known texts like Duras’ Ourika, and shines new light on little-known (or unknown) works like Gouge’s play Zamore et Mirza.Miller’s task here is not only to demonstrate the... (shrink)

Résumé — En réaction contre la diversité frappante des interprétations du concept de volonté générale chez Rousseau, cet article – qui entend aussi contribuer à cette interprétation – défend une lecture procédurale de la volonté générale qui serait donc le produit d’un vote majoritaire de l’assemblée ; il montre comment certains des passages du livre IV du Contrat social qui semblent se prêter le moins à cette interprétation peuvent cependant y être entièrement intégrés ; contre l’idée que la volonté générale (...) pourrait d’une certaine manière se déduire d’une conception du « bien commun » des citoyens, l’article montre que Rousseau considère globalement que c’est le vote des citoyens qui donne son contenu à l’idée de bien commun. Une partie de la littérature récente consacrée à Rousseau attire l’attention sur les épisodes où les citoyens pourraient ne pas ressentir subjectivement la volonté générale comme l’expression de leur liberté. En réponse à cette difficulté, souvent présentée comme un problème de dissidence politique, l’article soutient qu’aucune solution à ce problème qui se situerait au niveau de la théorie abstraite n’est convaincante ; la pensée politique de Rousseau fournit cependant un certain nombre de ressources qui nous aident à comprendre les différentes options qui s’offrent au dissident dans une république bien ordonnée. La triade classique de Stephen Dedalus – « silence, exil et ruse » – est une manière de nommer trois de ces solutions. L’article se conclut par quelques brèves remarques consacrées aux perspectives que nous ouvre la pensée de Rousseau sur la question de la désobéissance civile.— In response to the striking multiplicity of interpretations of Rousseau’s general will , this paper defends a procedural reading of the general will as one that is constructed through majority voting in the assembly ; it shows how some of the least promising passages of Rousseau’s text in Book Four of The Social Contract are fully assimilable to this interpretation ; and in opposition to the view that the general will is somehow derivable from the citizens’ common good, it contends that Rousseau generally considers that voting is in fact what gives the idea of the common good its content. Some of the best recent critical literature on Rousseau has focused on the moment when citizens might not subjectively experience the general will as an expression of their freedom. In response to this, often framed as the problem of political dissent, the paper argues that there is no persuasive solution on the level of abstract theory ; nevertheless, that Rousseau’s political thought provides us with a number of resources that help us to think about the problems and possibilities of dissent in a well-ordered republic. Stephen Dedalus’ classic trio of « silence, exile, and cunning » helps to provide a label for three of these, and the paper concludes with some brief remarks on the prospects for Rousseauvian civil disobedience. (shrink)

Edward Shils was a central figure in twentieth century social thought. He held appointments both at Chicago and Cambridge and was a crucial link between British and American intellectual life. This volume collects essays by distinguished contributors which deal with the major facets of Shils' thought, including his relations with Michael Polanyi, his parallels with Michael Oakeshott, his defense of the traditional university, his fundamental philosophical anthropology, and his important work on such topics as tradition, civility, and the nation. As (...) an introduction to this complex and original thinker, it will be of interest to scholars and students in a number of fields, including sociology and social theory, but also to anyone interested in the intellectual life as it was lived in the mid-twentieth century, in the face of the Cold War and ideological struggle. (shrink)

One of the reasons why there is no Hegelian school in contemporary ethics in the way that there are Kantian, Humean and Aristotelian schools is because Hegelians have been unable to clearly articulate the Hegelian alternative to those schools’ moral psychologies, i.e., to present a Hegelian model of the motivation to, perception of, and responsibility for moral action. Here it is argued that in its most basic terms Hegel's model can be understood as follows: the agent acts in a responsible (...) and thus paradigmatic sense when she identifies as reasons those motivations which are grounded in his or her talents and support actions that are likely to develop those talents in ways suggested by his or her interests. (shrink)

What cognitive abilities underpin the use of tools, and how are tools and their properties represented or understood by tool-users? Does the study of tool use provide us with a unique or distinctive source of information about the causal cognition of tool-users? -/- Tool use is a topic of major interest to all those interested in animal cognition, because it implies that the animal has knowledge of the relationship between objects and their effects. There are countless examples of animals developing (...) tools to achieve some goal-chimps sharpening sticks to use as spears, bonobos using sticks to fish for termites, and New Caledonian crows developing complex tools to extracts insects from logs. Studies of tool use have been used to examine an exceptionally wide range of aspects of cognition, such as planning, problem-solving and insight, naive physics, social relationship between action and perception. A key debate in recent research on animal cognition concerns the level of cognitive sophistication that is implied by animal tool use, and developmental psychologists have been addressing related questions regarding the processes through which children acquire the ability to use tools. In neuropsychology, patterns of impairments in tool use due to brain damage, and studies of neural changes associated with tool use, have also led to debates about the different types of cognitive abilities that might underpin tool use, and about how tool use may change the way space or the body is represented. -/- Tool Use and Causal Cognition provides a new interdisciplinary perspective on these issues with contributions from leading psychologists studying tool use and philosophers providing new analyses of the nature of causal understanding A ground-breaking volume which covers several disciplines, this volume will be of interest to psychologists, including animal researchers and developmental psychologists as well as philosophers, and neuroscientists. (shrink)

This study provides a survey of phenomena that present themselves during moments of naturally occurring inner experience. In our previous studies using Descriptive Experience Sampling we have discovered five frequently occurring phenomena—inner speech, inner seeing, unsymbolized thinking, feelings, and sensory awareness. Here we quantify the relative frequency of these phenomena. We used DES to describe 10 randomly identified moments of inner experience from each of 30 participants selected from a stratified sample of college students. We found that each of the (...) five phenomena occurred in approximately one quarter of sampled moments, that the frequency of these phenomena varied widely across individuals, that there were no significant gender differences in the relative frequencies of these phenomena, and that higher frequencies of inner speech were associated with lower levels of psychological distress. (shrink)

After using descriptive experience sampling to study randomly selected moments of inner experience, we make observations about feelings, including blended and multiple feelings. We observe that inner experience usually does not contain feelings. Sometimes, however, feelings are directly present. When feelings are present, most commonly they are unitary. Sometimes people experience separate emotions as a single experience, which we call a blended feeling. Occasionally people have multiple distinct feelings present simultaneously. These distinct multiple feelings can be of opposite valence, with (...) one pleasant and the other unpleasant. We provide examples that inform theories of emotions and discuss the important role observational methodology plays in the effort to understand inner experience including feelings. (shrink)

This chapter begins with a discussion of the significance of studies of aspects of tool use in understanding causal cognition. It argues that tool use studies reveal the most basic type or causal understanding being put to use, in a way that studies that focus on learning statistical relationships between cause and effect or studies of perceptual causation do not. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

Les États cheminent entre concurrence et convergence, les entreprises trans-nationales entre opportunisme et autorégulation. Il est futile d’imaginer qu’un ordre unifié et stable émerge de cette tension. Le monde normatif des entreprises transnationales doit plutôt être compris en appréhendant la direction de ses changements, et non pas en cher-chant à trouver un état d’équilibre. Pour l’auteur, les convections essentielles relèvent tant des efforts des États pour ajuster leur pouvoir normatif et promouvoir leur attractivité dans un monde globalisé, que de la (...) perméabilité croissante des entreprises et de leurs dirigeants à certains objectifs sociétaux qui vont au-delà du juridique et qui viennent se rajouter à la performance financière comme indicateurs complémentaires de la vitalité d’une entreprise. (shrink)

Growth in racial and ethnic diversity among public school P-12 students stands in stark contrast to the teaching population who tend to be monolingual, White females. Secondary social studies teachers defy demographic teacher trends, as they tend to be male, albeit White males who still are not representative of the students they teach. What is missing from the discourse of student–teacher imbalance however is discussion surrounding diversity among social studies teacher educators. The purpose of this study was to examine racial, (...) ethnic, and gender demographics for social studies teacher educators using a framework of critical teacher demography. Findings revealed that social studies teacher educators tend to reflect the population of social studies teachers with many being White males. Furthermore, social studies teacher educators tend to focus their research on concepts such as democratic citizenship with little focus dedicated to critical multicultural issues. The paucity of diversity in demographics and research is critical for social studies teacher educators to consider if we are to reflect multiculturalism in 21st century schools. (shrink)

Histories of ocean science have emphasized the ways that state-sponsored deep-sea expeditions ushered in a new age of oceanic understanding during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This essay, on the other hand, examines the ways that shallow waters played host to less formal but nevertheless important efforts to create oceanic natural knowledge, often centuries earlier. By documenting the legends and experiences of people who worked on and lived by the ocean—divers, sailors, and fishermen, among others—and corroborating their stories (...) with firsthand observation, seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century natural historians built a nascent science of the sea. In its close focus on “sea beans” and “barnacle geese,” subjects of wide conjecture and earnest curiosity, the essay shows how shallow waters welcomed new actors onto the scientific stage and decentered the geographies of knowledge production, thereby advancing contemporary knowledge of oceanic circulation as well as the taxonomies and ecologies of coastal creatures. (shrink)

The Legacies of Ursula K. Le Guin explores how Le Guins fiction and essays have built a speculative ethical practice engaging indigenous knowledge and feminism, while crafting utopias in which human and other-than-human life forms enter into new relations. Her work also delineates new ways of making sense of the "science" of science fiction. The authors of this collection provide up-to-date discussions of well-known works as well as more experimental writings. Written in an accessible style, Legacies will appeal to any (...) readers interested in literature, science fiction and fantasy, as well as specialists of science and technology studies, philosophy of science, ethics, gender studies, indigenous studies and posthumanism."--Publisher's description. (shrink)

Throughout his writings, Karl Rahner remained open to the prospect that the process of cosmic evolution had yielded sentient life form in other galaxies. He argued against any theological veto on this notion, while also distinguishing the existential significance of such life forms from that of angles. Furthermore, the possibility of multiple incarnations is raised though not affirmed. With its Christological intensity, his theology seems to militate against any repetition of the incarnation. This essay examines some of the arguments for (...) and against the possibility of multiple incarnations, before assessing the current state of the extraterrestrial intelligence debate. In the light of inconclusive scientific findings, the cautionary position of Rahner is reaffirmed. (edited). (shrink)

"Using important themes from school character education programs, this picture book features vivid illustrations to teach young readers all about perseverance."--Provided by publisher.

This essay argues for the efficacy of teaching Feodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment as a hedge against cultural predispositions to legitimize violence in history, contemporary society, and popular entertainment. Describing how high school students have been conditioned to accept certain kinds of violence, the essay also shows how a class of high school students responds to four key scenes from the novel. The essay asserts that both the historical context of Crime and Punishment and Dostoyevsky’s creative brilliance make this novel (...) a particularly potent work for encouraging students to rethink casual acceptance and uses of violence. (shrink)

This essay argues for the efficacy of teaching Feodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment as a hedge against cultural predispositions to legitimize violence in history, contemporary society, and popular entertainment. Describing how high school students have been conditioned to accept certain kinds of violence, the essay also shows how a class of high school students responds to four key scenes from the novel. The essay asserts that both the historical context of Crime and Punishment and Dostoyevsky’s creative brilliance make this novel (...) a particularly potent work for encouraging students to rethink casual acceptance and uses of violence. (shrink)

Abstract:This paper examines the American sojourn of the Enlightenment philosopher and theologian George Berkeley. While living in coastal Rhode Island between 1729 and 1731, Berkeley penned his longest philosophical tract, Alciphron: Or, the Minute Philosopher (1732), which criticized “freethinking,” mechanical conceptions of nature in favor of those that emphasized God's providence. To illustrate these two ways of knowing nature, Berkeley, a careful prose stylist, evoked nearby coastal landscapes for contrast. Accordingly, his work broke down dichotomies between ideas and matter and, (...) by extension, culture and nature, which could, this paper argues, inform an environmental ethic for a “hybrid” world. (shrink)

Literary criticism at the present moment seems ready to open its doors once again to the outside world, even if that world is only a series of other academic disciplines, each cloistered in its own way. For the reader of black African literature in French, the opening comes none too soon. The program for reading Camara Laye, Ahmadou Kourouma, and Yambo Ouologuem should never have been the program prescribed for Rousseau, Wordsworth, or Blanchot. If one is willing to read a (...) literature that might not be a rewriting of Hegel , and if the negative knowledge of recent theoretical criticism is questioned in the universality of its applications, then what is really open to a Western reader of non-Western literature? Claiming a break with his/her own culture and critical upbringing, can he/she the Other, the African, as if from an authentically African point of view, interpreting Africa in African terms, perceiving rather than projecting?The goal of breaking through the nets of Western criticism, of reading African literature in a nonethnocentric, nonprojective fashion, will remain both indisputably desirable and ultimately unattainable. No matter how many languages I learn or ethnologies I study, I cannot make myself into an African. The Western scholar’s claim to mastery of things African, albeit motivated by xenophilia rather than xenophobia, risks subjugation of the object to a new set of Western models. J. P. Makouta-M’Boukou rightly scolds Western critics who refuse to take into account the distance between themselves and African culture, and who read African literature only in function of their own cultural context.1 Wole Soyinka, more forbiddingly, complains: “We black Africans have been blandly invited to submit ourselves to a second epoch of colonisation—this time by a universal-humanoid abstraction defined and conducted by individuals whose theories and prescriptions are derived from the apprehension of their world and their history, their social neuroses and their value systems.”2 1. See J. P. Makouta-M’Boukou, Introduction à l’étude du roman négro-africain de langue française , p. 9.2. Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature, and the African World , p. x. Christopher L. Miller, Charles B. G. Murphy Assistant Professor of French and of African and Afro-American Studies at Yale University, is author of Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French . He is working at present on a study of francophone black African literature, for which he will have a Fulbright Africa Research grant. (shrink)

In Reason, Tradition, and the Good, Jeffery L. Nicholas addresses the failure of reason in modernity to bring about a just society, a society in which people can attain fulfillment. Developing the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, Nicholas argues that we rely too heavily on a conception of rationality that is divorced from tradition and, therefore, incapable of judging ends. Without the ability to judge ends, we cannot engage in debate about the good life or the proper goods that (...) we as individuals and as a society should pursue. Nicholas claims that the project of enlightenment—defined as the promotion of autonomous reason—failed because it was based on a deformed notion of reason as mere rationality, and that a critical theory of society aimed at human emancipation must turn to substantive reason, a reason constituted by and constitutive of tradition. To find a reason capable of judging ends, Nicholas suggests, we must turn to Alasdair MacIntyre’s Thomistic-Aristotelianism. Substantive reason comprises thinking and acting on the set of standards and beliefs within a particular tradition. It is the impossibility of enlightenment rationality to evaluate ends and the possibility of substantive reason to evaluate ends that makes the one unsuitable and the other suitable for a critical theory of society. Nicholas’s compelling argument, written in accessible language, remains committed to the promise of reason to help individuals achieve a good and just society and a good life. This requires, however, a complete revolution in the way we approach social life. “Jeffery Nicholas has written an important and valuable book that invites its readers to discover the difficulties of late modern Western thought from the perspective of twentieth-century critical theory, and to consider a response to those difficulties drawn from the work of Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor.” —Christopher Stephen Lutz, Saint Meinrad Seminary and School of Theology. (shrink)