The initial relationships between organisms leading to endosymbiosis and the first eukaryote are currently a topic of hot debate. Here, I present a theory that offers a gradual scenario in which the origins of phagocytosis and mitochondria are intertwined in such a way that the evolution of one would not be possible without the other. In this scenario, the premitochondrial bacterial symbiont became initially associated with a protophagocytic host on the basis of cooperation to kill prey with symbiont‐produced toxins and (...) reactive oxygen species (ROS). Subsequently, the cooperation was focused on the digestion stage, through the acidification of the protophagocytic cavities via exportation of protons produced by the aerobic respiration of the symbiont. The host gained an improved phagocytic capacity and the symbiont received organic compounds from prey. As the host gradually lost its membrane energetics to develop lysosomal digestion, respiration was centralized in the premitochondrial symbiont for energy production for the consortium. (shrink)

In the De mineralibus, Albert the Great clearly states that minerals do not possess life, since – following the Aristotelian path – life is always connected with the operations of the soul. Nevertheless, dealing with the virtues of stones, Albert speaks about a curious difference between “living” and “dead” stones: living stones are substances that possess virtues caused by their forms, while non-living stones are called stones only equivocally because their virtues have expired. Moreover, throughout his work, Albert often seeks (...) help from the biological world to explain the nature and the processes of mineral substances: the coming-into-being of stones and metals is often compared to the generation of plants and animals; places where minerals are formed act as the mother’s womb for the embryo; sulphur and quicksilver are said to be the father and the mother of all metals; etc. The tendency to biologise inorganic nature is a key strategy that Albert uses to explain the processes and functions of the mineral world. (shrink)

This paper seeks to establish whether the categories of MacIntyrean virtue ethics as applied to business organizations are meaningful in a non-western business context. It does so by building on research reported in Moore : 363–387, 2012) in which the application of virtue ethics to business organizations was investigated empirically in the UK, based on a conceptual framework drawn from MacIntyre’s work. Comparing these results with an equivalent study in Sri Lanka, the paper finds that the categories are meaningful but (...) that there are both similarities to and considerable differences in the content of these categories from the UK study. The paper draws on aspects of institutional theory to explore and explain these findings. Overall, there is supportive evidence that the categories of MacIntyrean virtue ethics are generalizable, and so can be used to characterize problems of organizational virtue and vice around the world, while providing evidence that there may be polities which are more conducive to the ‘practice-like conduct of production’ : 77–91, 2008). (shrink)

The relation between the moral account of the capital vices and the philosophical analysis of the passions of the human soul undergoes an important turning point from the 11th century onwards during the recovery of medical knowledge in the medieval West. In this wave of fervour towards a physiological approach in the investigation of the nature of man, the vice of acedia - as described by the Christian moral tradition - and the melancholic temperament - the result of a millenary (...) reworking and technicalisation of medical knowledge - found a point of contact in the passion of sadness. If authors such as Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, following the Christian heritage, characterised acedia as an escalation of the passion of sadness, the medical tradition from Hippocrates and Galen to Avicenna and Constantine recognised sadness as one of the most distinctive manifestations of the melancholic temperament. The aim of this study is to demonstrate, by retracing some aspects of this interweaving of traditions after the year 1000, how Dante’s description of the sinners of acedia in Canto VII of the Inferno takes up the legacy of this hybridisation between the Christian description of acedia and the physiological description of melancholy. (shrink)

Philosophy has not yet recovered from the "divine language" of theology, although in its historical search it gradually digressed from the search of God as a possible object of questioning. Eventually it accepted the "atheism in principle" of the scientific constitution of the world. The crucial turning points of this path are Plato, Aristotle, Mediaeval Scholastics with Aquinas at its front, Nietzsche and his ontic assertion of overman. The coexistence of philosophical and theological thought thereby mirrors itself in the creation (...) of the mutual conceptual constructions. When thought as transcendence and omnipotence, the metaphysical God is solely a God outside the world. Both philosophy and theology belong to a time of rejecting the world and nourishing a terrible thought of the absence of God. The hermeneutic reflection on the openness of the world keeps us safe from the temptation to comprehend God's absence as something terrifying. The absence is a sign of divine mystery, which no forceful investigation is in power of violating. (shrink)

The article presents the results of a more extensive work on soviet historiography of philosophy. the first thing to note is that there is a well-developed soviet historiography of philosophy. it has developed remarkably since 1947--including expansion of the history of the philosophy of the peoples of the soviet union. the article also discusses the principles that underlie soviet historiography of philosophy: partisanship, and the unity of historicism and internationalism. an examination of the discussions about the object of history of (...) philosophy as a science shows that the basic statement is that philosophy develops according to laws. (shrink)

Our account of the problem of the classical limit of quantum mechanics involves two elements. The first one is self-induced decoherence, conceived as a process that depends on the own dynamics of a closed quantum system governed by a Hamiltonian with continuous spectrum; the study of decoherence is addressed by means of a formalism used to give meaning to the van Hove states with diagonal singularities. The second element is macroscopicity represented by the limit $\hbar \rightarrow 0$ : when the (...) macroscopic limit is applied to the Wigner transformation of the diagonal state resulting from decoherence, the description of the quantum system becomes equivalent to the description of an ensemble of classical trajectories on phase space weighted by their corresponding probabilities. (shrink)

Here we prove the existence of sheaf cohomology theory in arbitrary o-minimal structures.

The book introduces to the analytic philosophy of language by presenting the main classical authors and texts of the XX Century, as well as the key problems and concepts of this discipline in their historical context. Ch. I: general introduction to the philosophy of language. Ch. II: Frege. Ch. III: Russell. Ch. IV: Wittgenstein's Tractatus. Ch: V: Neopositivism and verificationism. Ch. VI: Carnap's intensional semantics. Ch. VII: Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. Ch. VIII: Quine. Ch. IX: theories of direct reference. Everything is (...) explained in plain but precise language, with many examples. Thus, the reader realizes how each author addresses the problems set by earlier investigations, in turn opening new problems for discussion and advancing the state of the art. The critical comparison among different positions raises possible objections and answers, introducing to the rational debate in the style of analytic philosophy. Whenever required the book also introduces basic notions of logics, metaphysics, philosophy of science, foundations of mathematics, epistemology and philosophy of mind. Each argument is dealt with on three distinct levels: introductory, intermediate, advanced. Therefore, the book can be helpful to beginners, to graduate students, and to researchers. (shrink)

The contributions to this book touch the different aspects of Popper's philosophy of science.

The Henry’s exigency of one absolute manifest of the fundament takes him from his first big work L’essence de la manifestation (1963) to subordinate the ontology to the phenomenology. A phenomenology that has to abandon the Greek phainomenon –inevitable limited and determined by the environment i..

Kelsen's monistic theory of international law was shaped during his exile in Geneva, but its deep roots are to be found in his Pure Theory of Law, centred on the neo-Kantian notion of “system.” According to this conception, a legal system can only descend from a single principle. Consequently, Kelsen constructed a monistic theory of law, i.e., a legal system incorporating all norms into a pyramidal structure culminating in a single principle: the fundamental norm. This Kelsenian pyramid must also include (...) international law, considering that if international law were a legal system different from national law, the theoretical construction would need two fundamental norms. This dualism is as incompatible with Kelsen's monistic vision as Schmitt's theory of “Great Spaces,” creating a hierarchical system of international relations. In the Kelsenian pyramid, international law occupies a position superior to national law: The consequences of this assumption are discussed in some documents recently published in German and French. (shrink)

Generalmente los comentadores han abordado la temática de la intuición en la filosofía de Spinoza desde la perspectiva de la problemática de lo que en la Ética aparece como ciencia intuitiva o tercer genero de conocimiento. En el presente artículo, en cambio, intentamos mostrar que hay en los escritos de Spinoza un concepto de intuición más amplio que el que está implícito en la ciencia intuitiva, del cual esta no sería más que una subespecie. Como paso previo para alcanzar dicho (...) fin, intentaremos mostrar que la concepción de la intuición que sostiene Spinoza está estrechamente emparentada con la concepción cartesiana -de la cual ofrecemos un breve esbozo en el primer apartado- y que ambas concepciones tienen como fundamento la naturaleza de la idea. Generally, critics had tackle the issue of intuition in Spinoza’s philosophy from the point of view of the problem of what in the Ethics is called intuitive science or third kind of knowledge. In the present paper, instead, we try to show that there is in Spinoza`s writings a wider concept of intuition than that which is implied in the intuitive science, being the later no more than a sub-kind of the former. As a previous step to achieve this target, we try to show that Spinoza`s conception of intuition is narrowly tied with the Cartesian conception -of which we offer a brief draft in the first part- and that both conceptions are based on the nature of the idea. (shrink)

En este artículo se presenta una exposición sistemática del concepto de ideología que Luis Villoro construye a lo largo de su trayectoria filosófica, como base para plantear la crítica de las ideologías y la crítica de la forma-ideología en tanto tarea práctico-social del pensamiento filosófico, en ..

The mental representation of brief temporal durations, when assessed in standard laboratory conditions, is highly accurate. Here we show that adding or subtracting temporal durations systematically results in strong and opposite biases, namely over-estimation for addition and under-estimation for subtraction. The difference with respect to a baseline temporal reproduction task changed across durations in an operation-specific way and survived correcting for the effect due to operation sign alone, indexing a reliable signature of arithmetic processing on time representation. A second experiment (...) replicated these findings with a different set of stimuli. This novel behavioral marker conceptually mirrors in the time domain the representational momentum found with motion, whereby the estimated spatial position of a visual target is displaced in the direction of motion itself. This momentum effect in temporal arithmetic suggests a striking analogy between time processing and visuospatial processing, which might index the presence of common computational principles. (shrink)

This book will undoubtedly be useful to scholars and graduate students interested in the relationships between self-consciousness, emotion, the brain, and the...

This article applies Bakhtinian dialogism and the idea of centripetal and centrifugal forces in struggle to critical discourse studies to analyse how powerful and marginalised discourses are brought into competition in political language to justify paradigm changes. I analyse German chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Zeitenwende (‘watershed’) speech, which he gave as a response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, announcing a radical armament programme and change in foreign policy, paradigm shifts that had previously been unthinkable in German politics. Based on a (...) qualitative analysis using the Appraisal Theory strategies Attitude and Engagement, I identify how Scholz aligns himself with particular powerful discourses, centring some and marginalising others, to construct an existential threat for Germany and a ‘watershed’ moment, a new situation which casts his policies of armament as without alternative. I use a dialogic approach to analyse how the speech responds to and anticipates past (already-spoken) and future (not-yet-spoken) discourses, to position itself both in terms of the immediate and the historical function of a policy statement. The paper demonstrates the strength of Bakhtinian analysis of how utterances are shaped by past and envisaged future uses of particular discourses and of dialogically contractive and expansive strategies in critical discourse studies. (shrink)

Recueil d'essais qui sont autant de jalons d'une réflexion sur les relations complexes qui se sont établies depuis une vingtaine d'années entre l'informatique et les sciences de l'homme. Point de vue opératoire: impact sur les conditions matérielles de la recherche. Point de vue conceptuel: facteur d'évolution des structures du raisonnement. SDM.