Classical embryological studies have led to the suggestion that cells in developing tissues may be directed to differentiate along a particular pathway by the concentrations of molecules called morphogens. Studies of the slime mould Dictyostelium discoideum, which has a simple tissue pattern consisting of only two cell types, have revealed several molecules which may act as morphogens. Cyclic AMP and ammonia promote the formation of spores, while adenosine and a novel class of compounds called DIFs promote the formation of stalk (...) cells, the alternative cell fate. The constant proportions of the two differentiated cell types observed in this organism may result from a balance among the influences of these compounds. (shrink)

Good reasoning can lead to success; bad reasoning can lead to catastrophe. Yet, it's not obvious how we reason, and why we make mistakes. This new book by one of the pioneers of the field, Philip Johnson-Laird, looks at the mental processes that underlie our reasoning. It provides the most accessible account yet of the science of reasoning.

Millions of us increasingly seek happiness in fads and self-help books, reaching upward every day toward some enlightened state that we wish to attain. Surfing icon Laird Hamilton is more intent on looking inward and appreciating the brilliant creatures we already are. In Liferider, Laird uses five key pillars-Death & Fear, Heart, Body, Soul, and Everything Is Connected-to illustrate his unique worldview and life practices, offering inspiration to anyone who wants to elevate their ordinary, landlocked lives to do (...) extraordinary things. This is Laird Hamilton in his own words--raw, honest, and unvarnished--on topics he has rarely explored before. Based on extensive interviews and conversations between Laird and his coauthor, Julian Borra, with additional insights from Laird's wife, pro-volleyball player Gabby Reece, Liferider takes on human resilience, relationships, business, technology, risk-taking, and the importance of respecting the natural world, all through the lens of Laird's extraordinary life both in and beyond the ocean. (shrink)

Examines how the similarities of symbols and wisdom across many cultures point to an ancient civilizing plan and system of ancient instruction.

In this collection of papers by Laird Addis, published over approximately a quarter century, the main topics are the ontology of mind and the role of mind in the explanation of behavior. Addis defends a theory of natural signs, by which there is, in every conscious state including emotional states, an intrinsically intentional entity. He also argues that explanations of behavior by dispositional mental states, while not themselves causal explanations, presuppose the possibility of such explanations. The theory of dispositions (...) is applied also to the theories of Chomsky and Freud. In broad strokes, Addis holds that, while there is a distinct realm of mental properties, behaviors admit of purely physical explanations. (shrink)

Although there is a huge literature on Nietzsche s philosophy, this is the first study in English that focuses on his ontology. Before proceeding to that ontology, Addis argues that, contrary to many commentators, Nietzsche defends both the possibility and the desirability of objectivity in the search for knowledge, including knowledge of the basic features of reality, that is, of ontology. In separate chapters, Addis then sets out, analyzes, and evaluates the five essential components of Nietzsche s ontology: constant change, (...) substances and things, minds, causation, and will to power. In each case, Addis contributes an original understanding of the feature under discussion, with more detail than exists in other treatments, and defended with quotes from relevant texts of Nietzsche.". (shrink)

Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) was a philosopher in his own right. However, he was famous through the centuries due to his execution as a heretic. His pronouncements against teachings of the Catholic Church, his defence of the cosmology of Nicholas Copernicus, and his provocative personality, all this made him a paradigmatic figure of modernity. Bruno's way of philosophizing is not looking for outright solutions but rather for the depth of the problems; he knows his predecessors and their strategies as well as (...) their weaknesses, which he exposes satirically. This introduction helps to identify the original thought of Bruno who proudly said about himself: “Philosophy is my profession!” His major achievements concern the creativity of the human mind studied through the theory of memory, the infinity of the world, and the discovery of atomism for modernity. He never held a permanent office within or without the academic world. Therefore, the way of thinking of this “Knight Errant of Philosophy” will be presented along the stations of his journey through Western Europe. (shrink)

This collected volume is inspired by the work of Edward Halper and is historically focused with contributions from leading scholars in Ancient and Medieval philosophy. Though its chapters cover a diverse range of topics in epistemology, ethics, and political philosophy, the collection is unified by the contributors’ consideration of these topics in terms of the fundamental questions of metaphysics. The first section of the volume, “Knowing and Being,” is dedicated to the connection between metaphysics and epistemology and includes chapters on (...) Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, and the Ancient Daoists. The second section, “Goodness as Knowing How to Be,” addresses ethics as an outgrowth of human metaphysical concerns and includes chapters on Plato, Aristotle, and Maimonides. Contributors include William H. F. Altman, Luc Brisson, Ronna Burger, Miriam Byrd, Owen Goldin, Lenn Goodman, Mitchell Miller, Richard Parry, Richard Patterson, Nastassja Pugliese, John Rist, May Sim, Roslyn Weiss, and Chad Wiener. (shrink)

More than three centuries after Baruch Spinoza's excommunication from the Jewish community of Amsterdam, his legacy remains contentious. Born in 1632, Spinoza is one of the most important thinkers of the Enlightenment and arguably the paradigm of the secular Jew, having left Orthodoxy without converting to another faith. One of the most provocative critiques of Spinoza comes from an unexpected source, the influential twentieth-century political philosopher, Leo Strauss. Though Strauss was not an Orthodox Jew, in a well-known essay that prefaced (...) his study of Spinoza, he critically examines modern philosophy's challenge to traditional religion. There he argues that while the Enlightenment had failed to decisively refute Orthodoxy, at the same time, Orthodoxy could only claim to believe its core tenets were true but could not claim to know they were true. Strauss leaves the question at an impasse; both the Enlightenment and Orthodoxy rest on axioms that neither side can fully prove or fully refute. Curiously, Strauss never asks Orthodox Jewish thinkers if his approach to defending Judaism against the claims of the Enlightenment is the same as theirs. This volume poses the question to a group of serious Orthodox Jewish thinkers in an attempt to find out if Orthodoxy has a better answer to the questions raised by Strauss than the one Strauss advanced on its behalf. The seventeen essays in this volume use a variety of approaches, drawing on traditional primary Jewish sources like Scripture, Talmud, and Midrash; medieval rationalists like Maimonides; Enlightenment-era Orthodox sources; Jewish mystical writings like Kabbalah and Chasidut; modern philosophical movements including postmodernism and analytic philosophy; and contemporary Jewish Bible interpretation. While the answers differ, what unites these essays is the willingness to take Strauss' question seriously and to provide "inside" answers, that is, answers given by Orthodox Jews. Much of modern thought tries to square the circle of how to live in a world without belief. The better question is whether it is possible to recover authentic religious belief in the modern world. This volume is an Orthodox Jewish attempt to answer that question, one that no serious person can approach with indifference. (shrink)

Argues that there is no God and explains how the universe can pull off all the complexities that come with creation.

An examination of the earliest creation traditions and symbols of China and their similarities to those of other ancient cultures Reveals the deep parallels between early Chinese words and those of other ancient creation traditions such as the hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt Explores the 8 stages of creation in Taoism and the cosmological origins of Chinese ancestor worship, the zodiac, the mandala, and the I Ching Provides further evidence that the cosmology of all ancient cultures arose from a single now-lost (...) source Building on his extensive research into the sacred symbols and creation myths of the Dogon of Africa and those of ancient Egypt, India, and Tibet, Laird Scranton investigates the myths, symbols, and traditions of prehistoric China, providing further evidence that the cosmology of all ancient cultures arose from a single now-lost source. Scranton explores the fundamental similarities between the language that defined ancient Chinese cosmology and that of other creation traditions, revealing the connections between the phonetic structure of the words, their glyphs, and their use. He demonstrates striking parallels between the earliest systems of writing in China and the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt. He examines the 8 levels of creation in Taoism and the cosmological origins of Chinese ancestor worship, mythical emperors, the zodiac, the mandala, and the I Ching. He details the fundamental principles of land-use in ancient China in relation to the symbolism of a Buddhist stupa and the Dogon granary, ritual shrines that are also the central symbol of other creation traditions. Understanding the true meanings of these symbol complexes also reveals the sophisticated scientific understanding of these ancient cultures, for these creation symbols directly correlate with our modern understanding of atoms and the energetic makeup of matter. In exploring Chinese cosmological traditions, Scranton sheds new light on the contention that the sacred knowledge of the ancients is the legacy of an earlier culture who gave primitive humanity the tools they needed to birth the first known civilizations. (shrink)

If only implicitly, social anthropology has long incorporated joint attention as a research technique employed in what anthropologists call “the field”. This paper outlines the crucial role joint attention plays in anthropolgical fieldwork—specifically in Participant Observation—and advances the position that joint attention is a goal rather than a starting point of fieldwork practice. Exploring how anthropologists tentatively use attention as a methodological tool to understand other people’s lifeworlds, this paper draws parallels between Participant Observation and ordinary everyday interactions, thus teasing (...) out a view of _joint_ attention as a goal to be reached only by means of knowing what matters to others in the context of the lifeworld they inhabit. (shrink)

Many people have argued that the evolution of the human language faculty cannot be explained by Darwinian natural selection. Chomsky and Gould have suggested that language may have evolved as the by-product of selection for other abilities or as a consequence of as-yet unknown laws of growth and form. Others have argued that a biological specialization for grammar is incompatible with every tenet of Darwinian theory – that it shows no genetic variation, could not exist in any intermediate forms, confers (...) no selective advantage, and would require more evolutionary time and genomic space than is available. We examine these arguments and show that they depend on inaccurate assumptions about biology or language or both. Evolutionary theory offers clear criteria for when a trait should be attributed to natural selection: complex design for some function, and the absence of alternative processes capable of explaining such complexity. Human language meets these criteria: Grammar is a complex mechanism tailored to the transmission of propositional structures through a serial interface. Autonomous and arbitrary grammatical phenomena have been offered as counterexamples to the position that language is an adaptation, but this reasoning is unsound: Communication protocols depend on arbitrary conventions that are adaptive as long as they are shared. Consequently, language acquisition in the child should systematically differ from language evolution in the species, and attempts to analogize them are misleading. Reviewing other arguments and data, we conclude that there is every reason to believe that a specialization for grammar evolved by a conventional neo-Darwinian process. (shrink)

In this study on deduction, the authors argue that people reason by imagining the relevant state of affairs, ie building an internal model of it, formulating a tentative conclusion based on this model and then searching for alternative models.

I contend that a great deal of western philosophical thought is based upon a mistaken assumption, and that is: there is something real that we can know. I argue that, on the contrary, insofar as our experience is of a world that has meaning, this experience is not of the world "as it really is," but of the world as we perceive it through language. The very process of making the world meaningful, or learning about it, is at the same (...) time a mediation of the world. ;Because the self has, for the most part, been conceived as some kind of object, in Part One I discuss the relationship between language and our experience of objects, and our experience of objects in time. In Part Two I examine the two traditional approaches to knowledge, and attempt to show that empiricism yields no knowledge of "reality" and that metaphysics is unmeaningful. I conclude that, while we cannot know what is real, we continue to desire to do so, and so continue to make the world meaningful in various ways. ;In Part Three I claim that the self is something that we cannot know--although we try to know ourselves by telling stories about ourselves to ourselves--and that all attempts to describe the self result in the creation of models. I define 'models' as broad, compelling representations of what the self is, but which are incapable of accommodating one or another obvious feature of human experience. ;In Part Four I apply all of the above to the disciplines of psychology and literary criticism. Specifically, I criticize Stanley Fish's notion of the interpretation of texts, and analyze what is called 'dissociative identity disorder' --a disorder that makes sense only on the assumption that many selves can inhabit a single body. ;Finally, in Part Five, I admit that this entire thesis is nonsense, insofar as it is an attempt to say: "This is how things are." I conclude, however, that there are greater and lesser pieces of nonsense in the world, and that the value of philosophy resides in being able to expose great nonsense as nonsense. (shrink)

Unlimited paid time off policies are currently fashionable and widely discussed by HR professionals around the globe. While on the one hand, paid time off is considered a key benefit by employees and unlimited paid time off policies are seen as a major perk which may help in recruiting and retaining talented employees, on the other hand, early adopters reported that employees took less time off than previously, presumably leading to higher burnout rates. In this conceptual review, we discuss the (...) theoretical and empirical evidence regarding the potential effects of UPTO on leave utilization, well-being and performance outcomes. We start out by defining UPTO and placing it in a historical and international perspective. Next, we discuss the key role of leave utilization in translating UPTO into concrete actions. The core of our article constitutes the description of the effects of UPTO and the two pathways through which these effects are assumed to unfold: autonomy need satisfaction and detrimental social processes. We moreover discuss the boundary conditions which facilitate or inhibit the successful utilization of UPTO on individual, team, and organizational level. In reviewing the literature from different fields and integrating existing theories, we arrive at a conceptual model and five propositions, which can guide future research on UPTO. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical and societal implications of UPTO. (shrink)

Many people have argued that the evolution of the human language faculty cannot be explained by Darwinian natural selection. Chomsky and Gould have suggested that language may have evolved as the by-product of selection for other abilities or as a consequence of as-yet unknown laws of growth and form. Others have argued that a biological specialization for grammar is incompatible with every tenet of Darwinian theory – that it shows no genetic variation, could not exist in any intermediate forms, confers (...) no selective advantage, and would require more evolutionary time and genomic space than is available. We examine these arguments and show that they depend on inaccurate assumptions about biology or language or both. Evolutionary theory offers clear criteria for when a trait should be attributed to natural selection: complex design for some function, and the absence of alternative processes capable of explaining such complexity. Human language meets these criteria: Grammar is a complex mechanism tailored to the transmission of propositional structures through a serial interface. Autonomous and arbitrary grammatical phenomena have been offered as counterexamples to the position that language is an adaptation, but this reasoning is unsound: Communication protocols depend on arbitrary conventions that are adaptive as long as they are shared. Consequently, language acquisition in the child should systematically differ from language evolution in the species, and attempts to analogize them are misleading. Reviewing other arguments and data, we conclude that there is every reason to believe that a specialization for grammar evolved by a conventional neo-Darwinian process. (shrink)

This paper will argue that there is no such thing as introspective access to judgments and decisions. I t won't challenge the existence of introspective access to perceptual and imagistic states, nor to emotional feelings and bodily sensations. On the contrary, the model presented in Section 2 presumes such access. Hence introspection is here divided into two categories: introspection of propositional attitude events, on the one hand, and introspection of broadly perceptual events, on the other. I shall assume that the (...) latter exists while arguing that the fonner doesn't. Section I makes some preliminary points and distinctions, and outlines the scope of the argument. Section 2 presents and motivates the general model of introspection that predicts a divided result. Section 3 provides independent evidence for the conclusion that judgments and decisions aren't introspectable. Section 4 then replies to a number of objections to the argument, the most important of which is made from the perspective of so-called "dual systems theories" of belief formation and decision making, The upshot is a limited form of eliminativism about introspection, in respect of at least two core categories of propositional attitude. (shrink)

Ronna Burger offers a reading of the Ethics that views the text as a dialogue with, and very much in the spirit of, the Platonic Socrates. In reading the text as a dialogue, Burger is not making a claim about Aristotle’s intentions. She is proposing “a tool of interpretation, to be judged by the philosophical result it yields, in particular, the underlying argument it discloses whose movement makes the work a whole”. Treating the text this way entails focusing as much (...) on the action, or, as she refers to it, the deed of the text, as on any alleged conclusions or doctrines. This deed turns out to be the very energeia of theoria concerning the best life for a human being that Aristotle, like Socrates, takes to be the activity conducive to living the happiest human life. Consequently, Burger is far more inclined to open issues up than she is to close them off.The dialogue with Socrates, Burger argues, has two distinct but related phases. Each phase begins by putting forward a view that differs from the Socratic view but which, upon examination, ends up motivating a position much like that of Socrates. The first phase begins with an understanding of ethics that separates the. (shrink)

For the last thirty years, the nation's mental health and social service systems have been under relentless assault, with dramatically rising costs and the fragmentation of service delivery rendering them incapable of ensuring the safety, security, and recovery of their clients. The resulting organizational trauma both mirrors and magnifies the trauma-related problems their clients seek relief from. Just as the lives of people exposed to chronic trauma and abuse become organized around the traumatic experience, so too have our social service (...) systems become organized around the recurrent stress of trying to do more under greater pressure: they become crisis-oriented, authoritarian, disempowered, and demoralized, often living in the present moment, haunted by the past, and unable to plan for the future.Complex interactions among traumatized clients, stressed staff, pressured organizations, and a social and economic climate that is often hostile to recovery efforts recreate the very experiences that have proven so toxic to clients in the first place. Healing is possible for these clients if they enter helping, protective environments, yet toxic stress has destroyed the sanctuary that our systems are designed to provide.This thoughtful, impassioned critique of business as usual begins to outline a vision for transforming our mental health and social service systems. Linking trauma theory to organizational function, Destroying Sanctuary provides a framework for creating truly trauma-informed services. The organizational change method that has become known as the Sanctuary Model lays the groundwork for establishing safe havens for individual and organizational recovery. The goals are practical: improve clinical outcomes, increase staff satisfaction and health, increase leadership competence, and develop a technology for creating and sustaining healthier systems. Only in this way can our mental health and social service systems become empowered to make a more effective contribution to the overall health of the nation.Destroying Sanctuary is a stirring call for reform and recovery, required reading for anyone concerned with removing the formidable barriers to mental health and social services, from clinicians and administrators to consumer advocates. (shrink)

In this paper we investigate the locus of believability effects in syllogistic reasoning. We identify three points in the reasoning process at which such effects could occur: the initial interpretation of premises, the examination of alternative representations of them (in all of which any valid conclusion must be true), and the “filtering” of putative conclusions. The effect of beliefs at the first of these loci is well established. In this paper we report three experiments that examine whether beliefs have an (...) effect at the other two loci. In experiments 1 and 2 subjects drew their own conclusions from syllogisms that suggested believable or unbelievable ones. In the third experiment they evaluated conclusions that were presented to them. The data show that beliefs both affect the examination of alternative models and act as a filter on putative conclusions. We conclude by showing how some types of problem and some problem contents make the existence of alternative models more obvious than others. (shrink)

I Introduction In recent years there have arisen from several quarters, even within analytic philosophy itself, various challenges to the "positivist" ...

AN entity is a natural sign if by its very nature it represents some other entity or would-be entity. Many different kinds of things are said to represent other things, and in many cases it is recognized that the connection is purely conventional, in others that it is partly conventional being based in some sense on natural relations, and perhaps in yet others purely natural. My thesis is that a thought and a thought alone is, or contains as a constituent, (...) an entity that is a natural sign. This could be denied by rejecting either the existential claim or the uniqueness claim: most who deny it, which appears to be the overwhelming majority of contemporary philosophers who worry about such matters, say that there are no natural signs. As for the uniqueness claim, I shall for the moment merely register my conviction that an entity that is or contains a natural sign is necessarily a state of consciousness, and indeed the common feature of states of consciousness. (shrink)