Activating Transcription Factor-2 is a sequence-specific DNA-binding protein that belongs to the bZIP family of proteins and plays diverse roles in the mammalian cells. In response to stress stimuli, it activates a variety of gene targets including cyclin A, cyclin D and c-jun, which are involved in oncogenesis in various tissue types. ATF-2 expression has been correlated with maintenance of a cancer cell phenotype. However, other studies demonstrate an antiproliferative or apoptotic role for ATF-2. In this review, we summarize the (...) signaling pathways that activate ATF-2, as well as its downstream targets. We examine the role of ATF-2 in carcinogenesis with respect to other bZIP proteins, using data from studies in human cancer cell lines, human tumours and mouse models, and we propose a potential model for its function in carcinogenesis, as well as a theoretical basis for its utility in anticancer drug design. (shrink)

In Western thought, it has been persistently assumed that in moral and political matters, people should rely on the inner voice of conscience rather than on external authorities, laws, and regulations. This volume investigates this concept, examining the development of the Western politics of conscience, from Socrates to the present, and the formation of the Western ethico-political subject. The work opens with a discussion of the ambiguous role of conscience in politics, contesting the claim that it is the best defense (...) against totalitarianism. It then look back at canonical authors, from the Church Fathers and Luther to Rousseau and Derrida, to show how the experience of conscience constitutes the foundation of Western ethics and politics. This unique work not only synthesizes philosophical and political insights, but also pays attention to political theology to provide a compelling and innovative argument that the experience of conscience has always been at the core of the political Western tradition. An engaging and accessible text, it will appeal to political theorists and philosophers as well as theologians and those interested in the critique of the Western civilization. (shrink)

Dimitris Vardoulakis asks how it is possible to think of a politics that is not commensurate with sovereignty. For such a politics, he argues, sovereignty is defined not in terms of the exception but as the different ways in which violence is justified. Vardoulakis shows how it is possible to deconstruct the various justifications of violence. Such dejustifications can take place only by presupposing an other to sovereignty, which Vardoulakis identifies with agonistic democracy. In doing so, Sovereignty and Its (...) Other puts forward both a novel critique of sovereignty and an original philosophical theory of democratic practice. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

Dimitri Lorrain est chercheur en sciences humaines (EHESS), spécialisé dans l'étude de l'art et de la littérature (il a publié des articles sur Michel-Ange, Alberti, ainsi que sur l'art des «?nouveaux commanditaires?»). Installé à Francfort-sur-le-Main, il chronique la vie intellectuelle allemande pour la revue Panorama des idées.

Mobility robots may soon be among us, triggering a need for safety regulation. Robot safety regulation, however, remains underexplored, with only a few articles analyzing what regulatory approaches could be feasible. This article offers an account of the available regulatory strategies and attempts to theorize the effects of simulation-based safety regulation. The article first discusses the distinctive features of mobility robots as regulatory targets and argues that emergent behavior constitutes the key regulatory concern in designing robot safety regulation regimes. In (...) contrast to many accounts, the article posits that emergent behavior dynamics do not arise from robot autonomy, learning capability, or code unexplainability. Instead, they emerge from the complexity of robot technological constitutions coupled with near-infinite environmental variability and non-linear performance dynamics of the machine learning components. Second, the article reviews rules-based and performance-based regulation and argues that both will fail adequately constrain emergent robot behaviors. The article claims that controlling mobility robots requires a simulation-based regulatory approach. Simulation-based regulation is a novelty with significant theoretical and practical implications. The article argues that the approach signifies a radical break in regulatory forms of knowledge and temporalities. Simulations enact virtual futures to create a new regulatory knowledge type. Practically, the novel safety knowledge type may destabilize the existing conceptual space of safety politics and liability allocation patterns. (shrink)

Our lives take place within specific time-space contexts, and in everyday life these contexts are taken as self-evident. Simultaneously, we have accepted the classical idea of fixed, permanent and acontextual truths. This paper argues that people use and are aware of various time-space contexts, and have implicitly created knowledge and approaches that work within them. The paper further argues that explicit consideration of time-space contexts should influence the tools, techniques and methods we use when making sense of each situation, and (...) determining the management interventions we make. (shrink)

Economics has become a monolithic science, variously described as formalistic and autistic with neoclassical orthodoxy reigning supreme. So argue Dimitris Milonakis and Ben Fine in this new major work of critical recollection. The authors show how economics was once rich, diverse, multidimensional and pluralistic, and unravel the processes that lead to orthodoxy’s current predicament. The book details how political economy became economics through the desocialisation and the dehistoricisation of the dismal science, accompanied by the separation of economics from the (...) other social sciences, especially economic history and sociology. It is argued that recent attempts from within economics to address the social and the historical have failed to acknowledge long standing debates amongst economists, historians and other social scientists. This has resulted in an impoverished historical and social content within mainstream economics. The book ranges over the shifting role of the historical and the social in economic theory, the shifting boundaries between the economic and the non-economic, all within a methodological context. Schools of thought and individuals, that have been neglected or marginalised, are treated in full, including classical political economy and Marx, the German and British historical schools, American institutionalism, Weber and Schumpeter and their programme of Socialökonomik, and the Austrian school. At the same time, developments within the mainstream tradition from marginalism through Marshall and Keynes to general equilibrium theory are also scrutinised, and the clashes between the various camps from the famous Methodenstreit to the fierce debates of the 1930s and beyond brought to the fore. The prime rationale underpinning this account drawn from the past is to put the case for political economy back on the agenda. This is done by treating economics as a social science once again, rather than as a positive science, as has been the inclination since the time of Jevons and Walras. It involves transcending the boundaries of the social sciences, but in a particular way that is in exactly the opposite direction now being taken by "economics imperialism". Drawing on the rich traditions of the past, the reintroduction and full incorporation of the social and the historical into the main corpus of political economy will be possible in the future. (shrink)

Little is known about when corporate social responsibility (CSR) leads to a sustainability case (i.e., to improvements in environmental and social performance). Building on various forms of decoupling, we develop a theoretical framework for examining pathways from institutional pressures through CSR management to sustainability performance. To empirically identify such pathways, we apply fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to an extensive dataset from 19 large companies. We discover that different pathways are associated with environmental and social performance (non)improvements, and that pathways (...) to success and failure are for the most part not symmetrical. We identify two pathways to improved environmental performance: an exogenous and an endogenous one. We find two pathways to improved social performance that both involve integrating social responsibility into the core business. Pathways to nonimprovements are multiple, suggesting that failure can occur in a number of ways, while there are only a few pathways to sustainability performance improvements. (shrink)

It is plausible to think that, in order to actively employ models in their inquiries, scientists should be aware of their existence. The question is especially puzzling for realists in the case of abstract models, since it is not obvious how this is possible. Interestingly, though, this question has drawn little attention in the relevant literature. Perhaps the most obvious choice for a realist is appealing to intuition. In this paper, I argue that if scientific models were abstract entities, one (...) could not be aware of them intuitively. I deploy my argumentation by building on Chudnoff’s elaboration on intuitive awareness. Furthermore, I shortly discuss some other options to which realists could turn in order to address the question of awareness. (shrink)

I argue that Sartre's Transcendence of the Ego draws on Kant's theory of spontaneity to articulate its metaphysical account of consciousness's mode of being, to defend its phenomenological description of the intentional structure of self‐consciousness, and to diagnose the errors that motivate views of consciousness qua person or substance. In addition to highlighting an overlooked dimension of Sartre's early relation to Kant, this interpretation offers a fresh account of how Sartre's argument for the primacy of pre‐personal consciousness works, and brings (...) the extent of his proximity to idealist models of mind into greater relief. It also affords Sartre the resources to respond to criticisms that his account of self‐consciousness relies on a spurious distinction and that his view of freedom cannot explain how consciousness is conditioned by its world. (shrink)

In this article, moving from being to becoming, we construe the ‘self’ as a dynamic process rather than as a static entity. To this end we draw on dialectics and Bayesian accounts of cognition. The former allows us to holistically consider the ‘self’ as the interplay between internalization and externalization and the latter to operationalize our suggestion formally. Internalization is considered here as the co-construction of bodily hierarchical models of the world and the organism, while externalization is taken as the (...) collective transformation of the world. We do not consider these processes as sequentially linked, but rather as a dialectic between the collective and the individual. This leads us to the suggestion of the self as a historical product of dialectical attunement across multiple time scales, from species evolution and culture to individual development and everyday learning. Subsequently, we describe concrete means for empirically testing our proposal in the form of two-person psychophysiology and multi-level analyses of intersubjectivity. Taken together, we suggest that a fine-grained analysis of social interaction might allow us to reconsider the ‘self’ beyond the static individual, i.e. how it emerges and manifests itself in social relations. Such an approach, we believe, could be relevant in multiple fields, from ethics and psychiatry to pedagogy and artificial intelligence. (shrink)

We re-examine the long-held postulate that there are two modes of thought, and develop a more fine-grained analysis of how different modes of thought affect conceptual change. We suggest that cognitive development entails the fine-tuning of three dimensions of thought: abstractness, divergence, and context-specificity. Using a quantum cognition modeling approach, we show how these three variables differ, and explain why they would have a distinctively different impacts on thought processes and mental contents. We suggest that, through simultaneous manipulation of all (...) three variables, one spontaneously, and on an ongoing basis, tailors one's mode of thought to the demands of the current situation. The paper concludes with an analysis based on results from an earlier study of children's mental models of the shape of the Earth. The example illustrates how, through reiterated transition between mental states using these three variables, thought processes unfold, and conceptual change ensues. While this example concerns children, the approach applies more broadly to adults as well as children. (shrink)

Cognitive representations are typically analysed in terms of content, vehicle and format. While current work on formats appeals to intuitions about external representations, such as words and maps, in this paper we develop a computational view of formats that does not rely on intuitions. In our view, formats are individuated by the computational profiles of vehicles, i.e., the set of constraints that fix the computational transformations vehicles can undergo. The resulting picture is strongly pluralistic, it makes space for a variety (...) of different formats, and is intimately tied to the computational approach to cognition in cognitive science and artificial intelligence. (shrink)

This paper proposes a methodological synthesis in order to study multimodal media discourse and argumentation in the context of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in Greece. It follows the framework of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, integrating this with argumentation studies, with a particular emphasis on the analysis of inference. Our data come from the Greek newspapers Kathimerini and Ta Nea. We contend that the proposed methodological synergy enables scrutiny of (a) racist conceptualizations cultivated by the representation of migrants and refugees in (...) headlines and photographs in newspaper articles along with (b) the argumentative potential that is implicitly sustained in these multimodal representations. (shrink)

In this article, moving from being to becoming, we construe the ‘self’ as a dynamic process rather than as a static entity. To this end we draw on dialectics and Bayesian accounts of cognition. The former allows us to holistically consider the ‘self’ as the interplay between internalization and externalization and the latter to operationalize our suggestion formally. Internalization is considered here as the co-construction of bodily hierarchical models of the world and the organism, while externalization is taken as the (...) collective transformation of the world. We do not consider these processes as sequentially linked, but rather as a dialectic between the collective and the individual. This leads us to the suggestion of the self as a historical product of dialectical attunement across multiple time scales, from species evolution and culture to individual development and everyday learning. Subsequently, we describe concrete means for empirically testing our proposal in the form of two-person psychophysiology and multi-level analyses of intersubjectivity. Taken together, we suggest that a fine-grained analysis of social interaction might allow us to reconsider the ‘self’ beyond the static individual, i.e. how it emerges and manifests itself in social relations. Such an approach, we believe, could be relevant in multiple fields, from ethics and psychiatry to pedagogy and artificial intelligence. (shrink)

O século XX trouxe uma ciência impossível: a ciência da mente. Esta ciência ignora os problemas semiológico, nosológico e sociocultural a ela inerentes e que a inviabilizam. Como resultado, observamos a criação de uma pandemia global de transtornos mentais, majoritariamente administrados através de psicofármacos. Em contraponto, o pensamento filosófico desafia esta logica desde Canguilhem, passando por Michel Foucault, Deleuze & Guattari, dentre tantos outros. E da Éticaespinosana dos afetos e afecções, nasceu a Heterogênese Urbana (HU), que tem como objeto original (...) a revitalização criativa das potências humanas através do contato entre subjetividades diversas. Etimologicamente, “criação a partir e com a diversidade”. Com a circulação dos afetos, dos desejos, das ideias nos espaços públicos, a HU promove, fenomenologicamente, a expressão daquilo que, antes permanecia invisível e indizível face o silêncio da vida da cidade. Os campos de afetações intersubjetivo e intercorpóreo entre vidas tão distintas desloca e descola o olhar fundado na psicopatologia clássica para atravessar a vida da cidade pelas potências que cada indivíduo é capaz nas experiências coletivas.A HU denuncia a multicomplexidade do conceito “produção de saúde”, que apenas inicia-se nas práticas biomédicas, compreendendo todos os saberes para a construção do cidadão autônomo e afetivo. (shrink)

Myth of Rebellious Angels: Studies in Second Temple Judaism and New Testament Texts. By Loren T. Stuckenbruck. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2017. Pp. xx + 427. $50.

Novalis, the Early German Romantic poet and philosopher, had at the core of his work a mysterious depiction of the ‘absolute’. The absolute is Novalis’ name for a substance that defies precise knowledge yet calls for a tentative and sensitive speculation. How one asserts a truth, represents an object, and sets about encountering things in the world, is in the first instance the domain of the absolute, which diffuses through all things in the world. In this article, I begin by (...) describing the absolute in general and I outline its importance in Novalis’ works. I then speculate on its natural tendency to render an object mysterious and fundamentally unknowable. Although the absolute also allows us an insight into an object, my attention in this article is drawn to its concealment in mystery because, as Novalis was at pains to indicate, the Enlightenment has been more than generous to the clear perception of an object. I turn to consider the poet—a most important political character in Novalis’ works—and their Bildung of themselves and their communities. They bring their communities to continual maturation through their role in romanticising the ordinary world and through their need to consistently reflect on, and be aware of, the absolute. They also develop themselves in their ongoing state of mystery as they carry out their political and poetic responsibility. (shrink)

ObjectiveThe use of nanotechnologies is important to reduce environmental health problems in Iran, so the present study was conducted to determine the effectiveness of nanotechnologies in environmental health. This is a cross-sectional descriptive study for 11-year periods (2008–2018) on all articles published in three specialized journals of environmental health with emphasis on the use of nanotechnologies in various fields of environmental health (water, air, sewage, waste, food, radiation, etc).ResultsIn this study, 774 articles related to 114 issues of 3 specialized environmental (...) health journals were reviewed. A review of 774 articles showed that 80 articles (10.3%) were published in the field of nanotechnologies. Out of 80 articles published in the field of nanotechnology, 66 articles (82.5%) were published on the subject of water, 9 articles (11.3%) on wastewater and 5 articles (6.2%) on air pollution. Subject review of articles showed that articles using carbon nanotubes to remove natural organic pollutants, surfactants, hydroxybenzenes, phenol, dimethyl phthalates, use of titanium dioxide nanoparticles, iron-magnesium nanoparticles for wastewater treatment, Silver nanoparticles were used to remove air pollution. The results showed that published articles on nanotechnology in the field of environmental health were few. (shrink)

Through a radical new reading of the Theological Political Treatise, Dimitris Vardoulakis argues that the major source of Spinoza’s materialism is the Epicurean tradition that re-emerges in modernity when manuscripts by Epicurus and Lucretius are rediscovered. This reconsideration of Spinoza’s political project, set within a historical context, lays the ground for an alternative genealogy of materialism. Central to this new reading of Spinoza are the theory of practical judgment (understood as the calculation of utility) and its implications for a (...) theory of democracy that is resolutely positioned against authority. (shrink)

_Theological and Philosophical Responses to Syncretism: Beyond the Mirage of Pure Religion_ by Patrik Fridlund and Mika Vähäkangas elaborates the consequences of admitting the unavoidable syncretic nature of religions in theology and philosophy of religion.

We start this article from Gilbert Ryle’s distinction between propositional knowledge, ‘knowing-that’, and procedural knowledge, ‘knowing-how’, and investigate how participants in interaction display orientation to the latter in various settings. As the knowledge of how things are done, know-how can be analyzed in terms of its relevance and consequentiality for parties in interaction. Similarly, as participants adjust their actions and understandings according to their sense of what they know and assume others to know, their know-how and its distribution may form (...) the basis for adjusting and reshaping their actions, forms of participation and identities. In this sense, we aim at opening an investigation of know-how, and its conventionalized form, expertise, in interaction. In as much as it forms a distinct domain, a new research object – expertise in interaction – is formulated. Methodological issues of how to study expertise in interaction are discussed. The data are in English and Finnish. (shrink)

Carl Mika claims in the symposium’s lead essay that we need more myth today. In fact, an “unscientific” attitude can potentially reorient the alienation from the world. For Mika, a philosophical mātauranga Māori incorporates such a way of being in the world. Through it, an unmediated and co-existent relationship with the world can be built up. Some of Mika’s co-symposiasts invite Mika to substantiate aspects about this bold claim. Carwyn Jones nudges Mika to discuss the parallels between tikanga Māori—a system (...) that seeks to incorporate Māori law—and the common-law tradition that is adopted in New Zealand today. W. Julian Korab-Karpowicz agrees with Mika that to understand the world through an indifferent “scientific” investigation is to understand the world only partially, while the Māori scientist Ocean Ripeka Mercier illustrates how she seeks to develop a third space in her work that reconciles the fear of the unknown with the propensity to control the world through knowing. Helen Verran invites Mika to think about whether, and how, his understanding of a philosophical mātauranga Māori can help to facilitate the cultivation of a naturalism that is able to generate a cosmopolitics in New Zealand. (shrink)

The rhetoric of the social model of disability is presented, and its basic claims are critiqued. Proponents of the social model use the distinction between impairment and disability to reduce disabilities to a single social dimension—social oppression. They downplay the role of biological and mental conditions in the lives of disabled people. Consequences of denying biological and mental realities involving disabilities are discussed. People will benefit most by recognizing both the biological and the social dimensions of disabilities.

In order to study whether there exist a period of activity in the human early visual cortex that contributes exclusively to visual awareness, we applied transcranial magnetic stimulation over the early visual cortex and measured subjective visual awareness during visual forced-choice symbol or orientation discrimination tasks. TMS produced one dip in awareness 60–120 ms after stimulus onset, while forced-choice orientation discrimination was suppressed between 60 and 90 ms and symbol discrimination between 60 and 120 ms. Thus, a time window specific (...) to visual awareness was found only in the orientation condition at 120 ms. The results imply that both conscious and unconscious perception depend on activity in early visual areas. On the basis of previous estimates of neural processing speed, we suggest that the late part of the activity period most likely involve local extrastriate–striate interactions which provide the contents for visual awareness but are not themselves sufficient for awareness to arise. (shrink)

The current industrial revolution is said to be driven by the digitization that exploits connected information across all aspects of manufacturing. Standards have been recognized as an important enabler. Ontology-based information standard may provide benefits not offered by current information standards. Although there have been ontologies developed in the industrial manufacturing domain, they have been fragmented and inconsistent, and little has received a standard status. With successes in developing coherent ontologies in the biological, biomedical, and financial domains, an effort called (...) Industrial Ontologies Foundry (IOF) has been formed to pursue the same goal for the industrial manufacturing domain. However, developing a coherent ontology covering the entire industrial manufacturing domain has been known to be a mountainous challenge because of the multidisciplinary nature of manufacturing. To manage the scope and expectations, the IOF community kicked-off its effort with a proof-of-concept (POC) project. This paper describes the developments within the project. It also provides a brief update on the IOF organizational set up. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Kant regarded ecosphere as having the highest degree of beauty, as opposed to other aesthetical objects such as painting, sculpture, buildings, and we could infer, the built environment. His arguments hinges heavily on his transcendental philosophy, where he stressed that pure beauty could only be achieved through disinterested judgement, without concept, and others. Though his proposition for ecosphere is valid, it could not be used to justify other cases, such as determining the degree of beauty of the built environment. (...) Thus, a modified version of Kant's aesthetics needs to be adopted, as it opens space for the built environment. This research uses Kant's overarching aesthetical arguments to justify the degree of beauty of the built environment. It is found that the built environment could have similar, if not same to, the degree of beauty of ecosphere by way of bioregionalism and ecomimicry, where the totality of the built environment encompases the natural law of local environment, making its degree of beauty as high as ecosphere. Keywords: bioregionalism, ecomimicry, the built environment, ecosphere, degree of beauty ABSTRAK Kant memandang tinggi atas lingkungan alam dan menobatkannya sebagai derajat keindahan tertinggi bila dibandingkan dengan objek estetis lainnya seperti lukisan, patung, gedung, dan kita dapat inferensikan, lingkungan buatan manusia. Argumen dia terjangkar kepada pemikiran transendentalnya, di mana keindahan murni hanya dapat didapatkan melalui penilaian tanpa ketertarikan, tanpa konsep, dan lain-lain. Walaupun proposisinya terhadap lingkungan alam valid, kita tidak dapat menggunakannya untuk menjustifikasi derajat keindahan lingkungan buatan manusia. Dengan itu, sebuah modifikasi dari pemikiran Kant diperlukan untuk dapat menilai lingkungan buatan manusia. Penelitian ini menggunakan teori estetika Kant untuk menjustifikasi derajat keindahan lingkungan buatan alam. Dipertahankan bahwa lingkungan buatan manusia memiliki derajat keindahan yang sangat mendekati, bahkan sama, dengan lingkungan buatan alam jika, dan hanya jika, lingkungan buatan tersebut mengadopsi konsep bioregionalisme dan ecomimicry, di mana totalitas dari lingkungan buatan manusia mencakupi hukum alam yang terdapat di daerah lokal, meningkatkan derajat keindahan lingkungan buatan tersebut. Keywords: bioregionalisme, ecomimicry, lingkungan buatan manusia, lingkungan alam, derajat keindahan. (shrink)

Visual feature binding has been suggested to depend on reentrant processing. We addressed the relationship between binding, reentry, and visual awareness by asking the participants to discriminate the color and orientation of a colored bar and to report their phenomenal awareness of the target features. The success of reentry was manipulated with object substitution masking and backward masking. The results showed that late reentrant processes are necessary for successful binding but not for phenomenal awareness of the bound features. Binding errors (...) were accompanied by phenomenal awareness of the misbound feature conjunctions, demonstrating that they were experienced as real properties of the stimuli . Our results suggest that early preattentive binding and local recurrent processing enable features to reach phenomenal awareness, while later attention-related reentrant iterations modulate the way in which the features are bound and experienced in awareness. (shrink)

Through an argumentation analysis can one show how it is feasible to view a narrative religious text such as the Gospel of Matthew as a literary argument. The Gospel is not just good news but an elaborate argument for the standpoint that Jesus is the Son of God, the Messiah. It is shown why an argumentation analysis needs to be supplemented with a pragmatic literary analysis in order to describe how the evangelist presents his story so as to reach his (...) argumentative objective. The analysis also shows why in the case of historical religious literary texts, certain demands are put on the analyst that are not normally present. (shrink)