Introduction of O2 to Earth's early biosphere stimulated remarkable evolutionary adaptations, and a wide range of electron acceptors allowed diverse, energy-yielding metabolic pathways. Enzymatic reduction of O2 yielded a several-fold increase in energy production, enabling evolution of multi-cellular animal life. However, utilization of O2 also presented major challenges as O2 and many of its derived reactive oxygen species are highly toxic, possibly impeding multicellular evolution after the Great Oxidation Event. Remarkably, ROS, and especially hydrogen peroxide, seem to play a major (...) part in early diversification and further development of cellular respiration and other oxygenic pathways, thus becoming an intricate part of evolution of complex life. Hence, although harnessing of chemical and thermo-dynamic properties of O2 for aerobic metabolism is generally considered to be an evolutionary milestone, the ability to use ROS for cell signaling and regulation may have been the first true breakthrough in development of complex life. The importance of Earth's oxygen cycle and reactive oxygen species produced on the evolution of complex life. The ability to detoxify oxygen species is not a trait that emerged as a response to increased O2 levels but rather crucial adaptation to the early Earth's weakly oxic microenvironments. (shrink)

Thucydides and Aristophanes, austere historian and ribald comic playwright, lived in an Athens that had, since Themistocles, been moving from a regime of ancestral piety towards a secular empire. Thucydides suggests an agreement between his understanding and that of the pious Nicias -- over and against this move. Aristophanes too is a vigorous proponent of peace, and the conclusions of many of his plays appear to suggest or encourage a conservative disposition towards ancestral piety or the rule of ancestral, divine (...) law.While these first impressions are not entirely misleading, a careful examination of the two thinkers'works, with attention to Nicias and the question of the gods, suggests a more complicated and revealing picture. Neither thinker is in agreement with Nicias, who proves to be representative of a fundamental human delusion. Each, however, sees that delusion as inescapable for political life, and so makes his appeal to more serious readers inconspicuously. (shrink)

This study reassesses the concept of the Anthropocene as a new geological age as it is influencing contemporary debates in social theory. As a unit of geological time whose changes are allegedly caused, directly and indirectly, by human beings, this scientific concept challenges the existing constructions of theoretical binaries, such as nature/culture, environment/society, objectivity/subjectivity or happenstance/design, in social theory. The analysis suggests many understandings of the Anthropocene in social theory are politicized over-interpretations of natural events, and these moves appear to (...) be developing moral rhetorics of, and operational plans for, managing the Anthropocene to create specific outcomes for those who are the managers as well as the managed. The fact that human beings do not, in fact, have this measure of technical control is ignored by advocates of Anthropocenarian politics to advance their policy agendas. (shrink)

According to the Law of Non–Contradiction, no statement and its negation are jointly true. According to many critics, Christians cannot serve both the orthodox faith and the Law of Non–Contradiction: if they hold to the one they must despise the other. And according to an impressive number of these critics, Christians who cling to the traditional doctrine of the Trinity must despise the Law of Non–Contradiction. Augustine's statement of this doctrine poses the problem as poignantly as any.

Previous research has linked the concept of number and other ordinal series to space via a spatially oriented mental number line. In addition, it has been shown that in visual scene recognition and production, speakers of a language with a left-to-right orthography respond faster to and tend to draw images in which the agent of an action is located to the left of the patient. In this study, we aim to bridge these two lines of research by employing a novel (...) method that measures the spatial bias produced by transitive sentences that use a wide variety of abstract and concrete verbs. Across four experiments, participants read sentences and then responded to probe words appearing on either the left or right sides of the screen. Probe words consisted of agents, patients, other words in the sentence, or newly encountered words. We found consistent lateral biases to responding to agents and patients, which appears to be independent of order of mention in the sentence but which does reflect a correspondence between position in the sentence and role in the causal sequence of the action. Our results also show that this spatial bias is driven by the use of the hands in two different ways: The left hand shows a greater sensitivity to the spatial effect than the right hand, and vocal responses produce no spatial effect. (shrink)

Considerable effort has been devoted over the last fifteen years by faculty and administrators in numerous colleges and universities, and by organizations such as the Aspen Institute and Teagle Foundation, to enhancing business education through broad infusion of the perspectives and content of the liberal arts. The emphasis has been on integration of the social sciences and especially the humanities. The author—a natural scientist—recounts a seminal experience that motivated him to work more intensively on this initiative with his colleagues across (...) academic divisions at his home institution and beyond. He also argues for more engagement by natural science faculty in this process and examines the transdisciplinary re-visioning required to transform business teaching, learning, and practice into a new paradigm consistent with ecological reality. (shrink)

Students in the humanities have found Antigone intriguing ever since she was cast as the focal character in Sophocles's much contemplated tragedy. Antigone is enigmatic, to be sure; until comparatively recently, most interpretations of her focused on her role in the context of the tragic series of events unfolding in the play. These accounts relied heavily on her portrayal by Hegel, as representing the prepolitical ties of kinship coming into conflict with the ascending authority of the state.Richer life was breathed (...) into the 2,400-year-old play, however, by Jacques Lacan in his 1960 lecture "The Essence of Tragedy."1 As a result, over the past several decades an intense interest has developed in the persona of... (shrink)

Thomas Hobbes’ dispute with Dionysius of Halicarnassus over the study of Thucydides’ history allows us to understand both the ancient case for an ennobled public rhetoric and Hobbes’ case against it. Dionysius, concerned with cultivating healthy civic oratory, faced a situation in which Roman rhetoricians were emulating shocking attacks on divine justice such as that found in Thucydides’ Melian dialogue; he attempted to steer orators away from such arguments even as he acknowledged their truth. Hobbes, however, recommends the study of (...) Thucydides’ work for a new kind of political education, one that will benefit from Thucydides’ private, even ‘secret’, instruction, which permits the reader to admit to himself what vanity would otherwise hide from him. (shrink)

ExcerptWhat factors lead to any war being fought in a particular manner? How and why do those factors become institutionalized, or abandoned, as prime forms of war for typifying other armed conflicts in changing world orders? When and why do the prevailing parameters of world order shape the conduct of war? Questions about the forms of war became highly salient in 1945 when, by virtue of the United Nations Charter, “the peoples of the United Nations determined” to organize stronger institutions (...) for global governance with an elaborate apparatus of multiple functional agencies “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war” by establishing conditions “under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained” as well as to “promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom.”1. (shrink)

SOME PHILOSOPHERS RESORT TO RELATIVE IDENTITY IN ORDER TO DEFEND THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY AGAINST ACCUSATIONS OF INCOHERENCE: THEY CLAIM THAT FATHER, SON, AND HOLY SPIRIT ARE NUMERICALLY THE SAME DEITY BUT ALSO NUMERICALLY DISTINCT PERSONS. I ARGUE THAT THEIR CLAIM IS EITHER INCOHERENT OR IMPOSSIBLE TO MOTIVATE. I ALSO ARGUE THAT THE SOCIAL INTERPRETATION OF THE TRINITY, ACCORDING TO WHICH FATHER, SON, AND HOLY SPIRIT ARE DISTINCT "SIMPLICITER", IS NOT OBVIOUSLY UNORTHODOX.

Throughout much of his long life, Kenneth Burke was recognized as a leading American intellectual, perhaps the most significant critic writing in English since Coleridge. From about 1950 on, rhetoricians in both English and speech began to see him as a major contributor to the New Rhetoric. But despite Burke's own claims to be writing philosophy and some notice from reviewers and critics that his work was philosophically significant, Timothy W. Crusius is the first to access his work as (...) philosophy. Crusius traces Burke's commitment and contributions to philosophy prior to 1945, from Counter-Statement through The Philosophy of Literary Form. While Burke might have been a late modernist thinker, Crusius shows that Burke actually starts from a position closely akin to such postmodern figures as Michel Foucault and Richard Rorty. Crusius then examines Burke's work from A Grammar of Motives up to his last published essays, drawing most heavily on A Rhetoric of Motives, The Rhetoric of Religion, and uncollected essays from the 1970s. This part concerns Burke's contributions to human activities always closely associated with rhetoric-hermeneutics, dialectic, and praxis. Burke's highly developed notion of our species as the "symbol-using animal," argues Crusius, draws together the various strands of his later philosophy—his concern with interpretation, with dialectic and dialogue, with a praxis devoted to awareness and control of the self-deceiving and potentially self-destructive motives inherent in language itself. (shrink)

A collection of essays by Timothy W. Luke discussing social and political issues related to ecology, environmentalism, ecocriticism, global climate change, and the Anthropocene.

Composite beings (“monsters”) are those mythical creatures composed of a mix of different anatomical forms. There are several scholarly claims for why these appear in the imagery and lore of many societies, including claims that they are found near-universally as well as those arguments that they co-occur with particular sociocultural arrangements. In order to evaluate these claims, we identify the presence of composite monsters cross-culturally in a global sample of societies, the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample. We find that composite beings are (...) not universal, and that their presence or absence co-varies most significantly with social stratification and transportation technology. This supports hypotheses that the cultural evolution of composite monsters is driven by human concerns with social distinctions within societies as well as increased contact with distant peoples. (shrink)

A great many philosophers and theologians have recently maintained that we ought to adopt the following interpretation of the Christian Church’s proclamation that Jesus Christ is perfectly human and perfectly divine:(1) The one person Jesus Christ has every essential property of the kind humanity and every essential property of the kind divinity,where F is an essential property of a kind k just in case there is no possible world in which something belongs to k yet lacks F. I argue that (...) these writers need to do much more work if they are to convince us that their view is rationally preferable to rival interpretations of traditional Christology. To be specific, they must try to persuade us that (1) plays an indispensable rôle in our best available explanation of how Christ’s life, death, and resurrection atone for our sins. (shrink)

A great many philosophers and theologians have recently maintained that we ought to adopt the following interpretation of the Christian Church’s proclamation that Jesus Christ is perfectly human and perfectly divine:(1) The one person Jesus Christ has every essential property of the kind humanity and every essential property of the kind divinity,where F is an essential property of a kind k just in case there is no possible world in which something belongs to k yet lacks F. I argue that (...) these writers need to do much more work if they are to convince us that their view is rationally preferable to rival interpretations of traditional Christology. To be specific, they must try to persuade us that (1) plays an indispensable rôle in our best available explanation of how Christ’s life, death, and resurrection atone for our sins. (shrink)

. ‘Moving at the speed of life?’ A cultural kinematics of telematic times and corporate values. Cultural Values: Vol. 2, No. 2-3, pp. 320-339.

ExcerptWhat is “the place of truth at the university”? This is more than a metaphysical question. To address it, this analysis first considers broader facets of this question and then examines more specific qualities in the concern with truth by focusing on how particular universities in the United States situate themselves with respect to this issue. Only by considering their everyday operations, as the contemporary creators and curators of the truths they tout in their workings today, can a more concrete (...) critical sense of this question be crafted. (shrink)