The objectives of this study were to develop a high-density chromosome bin map of homoeologous group 7 in hexaploid wheat, to identify gene distribution in these chromosomes, and to perform comparative studies of wheat with rice and barley. We mapped 2148 loci from 919 EST clones onto group 7 chromosomes of wheat. In the majority of cases the numbers of loci were significantly lower in the centromeric regions and tended to increase in the distal regions. The level of duplicated loci (...) in this group was 24% with most of these loci being localized toward the distal regions. One hundred nineteen EST probes that hybridized to three fragments and mapped to the three group 7 chromosomes were designated landmark probes and were used to construct a consensus homoeologous group 7 map. An additional 49 probes that mapped to 7AS, 7DS, and the ancestral translocated segment involving 7BS also were designated landmarks. Landmark probe orders and comparative maps of wheat, rice, and barley were produced on the basis of corresponding rice BAC/PAC and genetic markers that mapped on chromosomes 6 and 8 of rice. Identification of landmark ESTs and development of consensus maps may provide a framework of conserved coding regions predating the evolution of wheat genomes. (shrink)

In the last two decades few topics in philosophy of science have received as much attention as mechanistic explanation. A significant motivation for these accounts is that scientists frequently use the term “mechanism” in their explanations of biological phenomena. While scientists appeal to a variety of causal concepts in their explanations, many philosophers argue or assume that all of these concepts are well understood with the single notion of mechanism. This reveals a significant problem with mainstream mechanistic accounts– although philosophers (...) use the term “mechanism” interchangeably with other causal concepts, this is not something that scientists always do. This paper analyses two causal concepts in biology–the notions of “mechanism” and “pathway”–and how they figure in biological explanation. I argue that these concepts have unique features, that they are associated with distinct strategies of causal investigation, and that they figure in importantly different types of explanation. (shrink)

Is authoritarian power ever legitimate? The contemporary political theory literature—which largely conceptualizes legitimacy in terms of democracy or basic rights—would seem to suggest not. I argue, however, that there exists another, overlooked aspect of legitimacy concerning a government’s ability to ensure safety and security. While, under normal conditions, maintaining democracy and rights is typically compatible with guaranteeing safety, in emergency situations, conflicts between these two aspects of legitimacy can and often do arise. A salient example of this is the COVID-19 (...) pandemic, during which severe limitations on free movement and association have become legitimate techniques of government. Climate change poses an even graver threat to public safety. Consequently, I argue, legitimacy may require a similarly authoritarian approach. While unsettling, this suggests the political importance of climate action. For if we wish to avoid legitimating authoritarian power, we must act to prevent crises from arising that can only be resolved by such means. (shrink)

ABSTRACT A thriving project in contemporary epistemology concerns identifying and explicating the epistemic virtues. Although there is little sustained argument for this claim, a number of prominent sources suggest that curiosity is an epistemic virtue. In this paper, I provide an account of the virtue of curiosity. After arguing that virtuous curiosity must be appropriately discerning, timely and exacting, I then situate my account in relation to two broader questions for virtue responsibilists: What sort of motivations are required for epistemic (...) virtue? And do epistemic virtues need to be reliable? I will sketch an account on which curiosity is only virtuous when rooted in a non-instrumental appreciation of epistemic goods, before arguing that curiosity can exhibit intellectual virtue irrespective of whether one is reliable in satisfying it. (shrink)

Causal selection has to do with the distinction we make between background conditions and “the” true cause or causes of some outcome of interest. A longstanding consensus in philosophy views causal selection as lacking any objective rationale and as guided, instead, by arbitrary, pragmatic, and non-scientific considerations. I argue against this position in the context of causal selection for disease traits. In this domain, causes are selected on the basis of the type of causal control they exhibit over a disease (...) of interest. My analysis clarifies the principled rationale that guides this selection and how it involves both pragmatic and objective considerations, which have been overlooked in the extant literature. (shrink)

In this paper, Taylor series is used to solve neutrosophic multi-objective programming problem (NMOPP). In the proposed approach, the truth membership, Indeterminacy membership, falsity membership functions associated with each objective of multi-objective programming problems are transformed into a single objective linear programming problem by using a first order Taylor polynomial series. Finally, to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed method, a numerical experiment for supplier selection is given as an application of Taylor series method for solving neutrosophic multi-objective programming problem (...) at end of this paper. (shrink)

The periodic table represents and organizes all known chemical elements on the basis of their properties. While the importance of this table in chemistry is uncontroversial, the role that it plays in scientific reasoning remains heavily disputed. Many philosophers deny the explanatory role of the table and insist that it is “merely” classificatory (Shapere, in F. Suppe (Ed.) The structure of scientific theories, University of Illinois Press, Illinois, 1977; Scerri in Erkenntnis 47:229–243, 1997). In particular, it has been claimed that (...) the table does not figure in causal explanation because it “does not reveal causal structure” (Woody in Science after the practice turn in the philosophy, history, and social studies of science, Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, New York, 2014). This paper provides an analysis of what it means to say that a scientific figure reveals causal structure and it argues that the modern periodic table does just this. It also clarifies why these “merely” classificatory claims have seemed so compelling–this is because these claims often focus on the earliest periodic tables, which lack the causal structure present in modern versions. (shrink)

Modern medicine is often said to have originated with nineteenth century germ theory, which attributed diseases to bacterial contagions. The success of this theory is often associated with an underlying principle referred to as the “doctrine of specific etiology”. This doctrine refers to specificity at the level of disease causation or etiology. While the importance of this doctrine is frequently emphasized in the philosophical, historical, and medical literature, these sources lack a clear account of the types of specificity that it (...) involves and why exactly they matter. This paper argues that nineteenth century germ theory involves two types of specificity at the level of etiology. One type receives significant attention in the literature, but its influence on modern medicine has been misunderstood. A second type is present in this model, but it has been completely overlooked in the extant literature. My analysis clarifies how these types of specificity led to a novel conception of etiology that continues to figure in medicine today. (shrink)

This paper critically evaluates Foucault’s relation to Bachelard and Canguilhem. It reconsiders the relevance of the concept of “influence” for treating this relation in order to register the more sceptical position Foucault adopts towards knowledge practices than either of these figures from twentieth-century French epistemology.

This is a general account of metavaluations and their applications, which can be seen as an alternative to standard model-theoretic methodology. They work best for what are called metacomplete logics, which include the contraction-less relevant logics, with possible additions of Conjunctive Syllogism, & →.A→C, and the irrelevant, A→.B→A, these including the logic MC of meaning containment which is arguably a good entailment logic. Indeed, metavaluations focus on the formula-inductive properties of theorems of entailment form A→B, splintering into two types, M1- (...) and M2-, according to key properties of negated entailment theorems. Metavaluations have an inductive presentation and thus have some of the advantages that model theory does, but they represent proof rather than truth and thus represent proof-theoretic properties, such as the priming property, if ├ A $\vee$ B then ├ A or ├ B, and the negated-entailment properties, not-├ ∼ and ├ ∼ iff ├ A and ├ ∼ B. Topics to be covered are their impact on naive set theory and paradox solution, and also Peano arithmetic and Godel’s First and Second Theorems. Interesting to note here is that the familiar M1- and M2-metacomplete logics can be used to solve the set-theoretic paradoxes and, by inference, the Liar Paradox and key semantic paradoxes. For M1-logics, in particular, the final metavaluation that is used to prove the simple consistency is far simpler than its correspondent in the model-theoretic proof in that it consists of a limit point of a single transfinite sequence rather than that of a transfinite sequence of such limit points, as occurs in the model-theoretic approach. Additionally, it can be shown that Peano Arithmetic is simply consistent, using metavaluations that constitute finitary methods. Both of these results use specific metavaluational properties that have no correspondents in standard model theory and thus it would be highly unlikely that such model theory could prove these results in their final forms. (shrink)

I reply to Miller, Sider and Skow’s comments on my book The Moving Spotlight. I aim to make clearer the epistemic argument against non-presentist A-theories of time, and why I avoid it. I provide further elaboration of the moving spotlight view, and why I think there is real change in important features of things on this metaphysic. I explain further what I think is required for there to be genuine temporal passage, and why there is such a thing according to (...) the moving spotlight view. I defend my argument that endurantism is incompatible with the B-theory. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Descartes Malebranche.

Problematic substance use (PSU) among nurses has wide‐ranging adverse implications. A critical integrative literature review was conducted with an emphasis on building knowledge regarding the influence of structural factors within nurses' professional environments on nurses with PSU. Five thematic categories emerged: (i) access, (ii) stress, and (iii) attitudes as contributory factors, (iv) treatment policies for nurses with PSU, and (v) the culture of the nursing profession. Conclusions were that an overemphasis on individual culpability and failing predominates in the literature and (...) that crucial knowledge gaps exist regarding the influence of structural factors on driving and shaping nurses' substance use. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Women & Children in Health Care: An Unequal Majority. By Mary Briody Mahowald.

Skow argues that the best metaphysic of objective becoming is the moving spotlight theory. I agree, but I think the best version of the moving spotlight theory is not amongst the theories Skow describes. I look at Skow's moving spotlight theories that invoke an extra dimension of supertime, or new primitive supertense operators, or that make presentness a fundamentally relational phenomenon, and I raise some problems for these views. I argue that the moving spotlighter should take presentness to be an (...) absolute phenomenon that changes in time. This has consequences for what it means to say the past is real. (shrink)

Orthodox Judaism is one of the fastest-growing religious communities in contemporary American life. According to the 2013 Pew Center Survey on American religious life, Orthodox Judaism is poised to surpass all other denominations of Judaism in the United States by 2050. Anyone who wishes to understand more about Judaism in America will need to consider the tenets and practices of Orthodox Judaism: who its adherents are, what they believe in, what motivates them, and to whom they turn for moral, intellectual, (...) and spiritual guidance. Among those spiritual leaders none looms larger than Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, heir to the legendary Talmudic dynasty of Brisk and a teacher and ordainer of thousands of rabbis during his time as a Talmud teacher at Yeshiva University from the Second World War until the 1980s. Soloveitchik was not only a Talmudic authority but a scholar of Western philosophy. While many books and articles have been written about Soloveitchik's legacy and his influence on American Orthodoxy, few have looked carefully at his disciples in Torah and Talmud study, and even fewer at his Jewish thought and philosophy. "Soloveitchik's Children: Irving Greenberg, David Hartman, Jonathan Sacks, and the Future of Jewish Theology in America" is the first book to study closely three of Soloveitchik's major disciples in Jewish thought and philosophy: Rabbis Irving ("Yitz") Greenberg, David Hartman, and Jonathan Sacks. These three figures hold unique places in modern and contemporary American Jewish life. Each has been highly influential not only within American Orthodoxy but within American Judaism more broadly; each has contributed significantly in the development of Jewish philosophy and theology in the postwar era; each has founded and presided over institutions of their own. David Ross Goodman narrates how each of these three major modern Jewish thinkers learned from and adapted Soloveitchik's teachings in their own ways, even while advancing his philosophical and theological legacy. Goodman highlights the approaches taken by Greenberg, Hartman, and Sacks to some of the most critical religious and philosophical issues of our time: Jewish-Christian relations and interfaith theology; the proper religious response to the Holocaust; the place of creativity in religious life; and the primacy of life in the Jewish tradition. The story of religious life and Judaism in contemporary America is incomplete without an understanding of how three of the most consequential Jewish thinkers of this generation adapted the teachings of one of the most consequential Jewish thinkers of the previous generation. "Soloveitchik's Children" tells this gripping intellectual and religious story in a learned, and engaging manner, shining a light on where Jewish religious thought in the United States currently stands-and where it may be heading in the coming generations. (shrink)

In this paper, we introduce the integer programming in neutrosophic environment, by considering coffecients of problem as a triangulare neutrosophic numbers. The degrees of acceptance, indeterminacy and rejection of objectives are simultaneously considered. The Neutrosophic Integer Programming Problem (NIP) is transformed into a crisp programming model, using truth membership (T), indeterminacy membership (I), and falsity membership (F) functions as well as single valued triangular neutrosophic numbers. To measure the efficiency of the model, we solved several numerical examples.

This edited collection of original essays explores the irreducible role of aesthetic forms of experience and activity in the philosophies of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno.

Many feel a sense of aversion and tragedy about proposals for engineering the climate. Precautionary concerns only partly explain these feelings. For a fuller understanding, we need a thicker conception of the values and ends of political society than “neutralitarian” political theories offer. To this end, I examine how Buddhist and Greek notions of temperance, justice, and freedom bear on the question of geo-engineering. My intention is not to pronounce on whether geo-engineering is morally “right” or “wrong,” but to highlight (...) reasons for thinking it unattractive in a broader sense, thereby strengthening the case for exhausting conventional emissions-reductions options. (shrink)

The new economy is characterized in the developing world by open capital markets and coordinated international regulation - neither of which existed in the colonial period.

Science requires postformal capabilities to compare competing explanations and conceptualize how to coordinate or integrate them. With conflicts thus reconciled, science advances. The Model of Hierarchical Complexity facilitates the coordination of current arguments about intelligence. A cross-species measurement theory of comparative cognition is proposed. It has potential to overcome the lack of a general measurement theory for the science of comparative cognition, and the lack of domain-general mechanisms for evolutionary psychologists. The hierarchical complexity of concepts and debates as well as (...) the new theory are scored, and demonstrate the postformal hierarchical complexity of the proposed theory. (shrink)

Professor Kenneth J. Arrow is one of the most distinguished economic theorists. He has played a major role in shaping the subject and is honoured by the publication of three volumes of essays on economic theory. Each volume deals with a different area of economic theory. The books include contributions by some of the best economic theorists from the United Stated, Japan, Israel and Europe. This third volume is entitled Uncertainty, Information, and Communication.

Edward Peters, Torture Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985, viii + 202 pp.

The problem with remembering Auschwitz is that the neoliberal paradigm of economic utility, demotic happiness, and programmed consumption has tended to erase its facticity from public consciousness. Technoscientific capitalism functions as a regime of amnesic performance that prevents a ‘working through’ of the Nazi genocide. I argue that Agamben’s work on the implicit violence of the biopolitical paradigm gives a crucial insight into the fate of humanity in the time of global capitalism. However, I contend that the idea of testimony (...) he presents in Remnants of Auschwitz recapitulates a Heideggerian ontology of experience that is enacted outside of the technological dynamics of trauma and memory. I employ Stiegler’s concept of epiphylogenetic memory, first, to explore the economy of fascisms that has emerged within the networks of global capitalism (hyper-nationalisms, religious fundamentalisms, technological transhumanisms) and, second, to examine the material affects through which Auschwitz returns to the scene of this economy. (shrink)

Illusionism about phenomenal properties has the potential to leave us with all the benefit of taking consciousness seriously and far fewer problems than those accompanying phenomenal realism. The particular problem I explore here is an epistemological puzzle that leaves the phenomenal realist with a dilemma but causes no trouble for the illusionist: how can we account for false beliefs about our own phenomenal properties? If realism is true, facts about our phenomenal properties must hold independent of our beliefs about those (...) properties, so mistaken phenomenal beliefs must always remain an open possibility. But there is no way to identify the phenomenal facts that make these beliefs false other than by mere stipulation. If illusionism is true, then the state of affairs regarding what a subject's experience seems like is just the illusion itself; there are no further facts of the matter about which the subject might have mistaken beliefs, so the problem does not arise. (shrink)

Anonymising technologies are cyber-tools that protect people from online surveillance, hiding who they are, what information they have stored and what websites they are looking at. Whether it is anonymising online activity through ‘TOR’ and its onion routing, 256-bit encryption on communications sent or smart phone auto-deletes, the user’s identity and activity is protected from the watchful eyes of the intelligence community. This represents a clear challenge to intelligence actors as it prevents them access to information that many would argue (...) plays a vital part in locating and preventing threats from being realised. Moreover, such technology offers more than ordinary information protections as it erects ‘warrant-proof’ spaces, technological black boxes that no matter what some authority might deem as being legitimately searchable is protected to the extent that there are very limited or non-existent means of forcing oneself in. However, it will be argued here that not only is using such anonymising technology and its extra layer of protection people’s right, but that it is ethically mandatory. That is, due to the en masse surveillance—from both governments and corporations—coupled with people’s limited awareness and ability to comprehend such data collections, anonymising technology should be built into the fabric of cyberspace to provide a minimal set of protections over people’s information, and in doing so force the intelligence community to develop more targeted forms of data collection. (shrink)

Several of the most compelling anti-materialist arguments are motivated by the supposed existence of an unbridgeable epistemic gap between first-person subjective knowledge about one’s own conscious experience and third-personally acquired knowledge. The two with which this paper is concerned are Frank Jackson’s ‘knowledge argument’ and David Chalmers’s ‘modal argument’. The knowledge argument and the modal argument are often taken to function as ‘two sides of the same coin … in principle each succeeds on its own, but in practice they work (...) best in tandem’. This paper disagrees with the above claim, and argues that when considered together the knowledge argument and modal arguments illuminate each other’s weaknesses. These weaknesses become apparent when we acknowledge the epistemic richness of the cognitive aspect of perceptual experience, and question the epistemic role that any non-cognitive aspect might play. Closer examination of judgments about what it’s like to have a perceptual experience reveals fundamental problems with the knowledge argument, and when these problems are exposed, the two arguments can no longer ‘buttress each other where help is needed’. It becomes clear that neither is likely to succeed on its own, and when taken together both are destabilized. (shrink)

This is an imagined dialogue between one of the more famous skeptics regarding moral attribution, Thrasymachus, and an imagined Socrates who, through the convenient miracle of time travel, returns to Athens after exposure to contemporary metaethics, now a devoted and formidable quasi-realist expressivist. The dialogue focuses on the characterization of moral conflict and moral justification available to the expressivist, and the authors attempt to lay out the distinctive strengths and weaknesses of the expressivist view.

Approximately thirty almost entirely overlooked books appeared in Europe between 1500 and 1700 that include the word anthropologia in their titles. At first glance, the content of these works bears no resemblance to anthropology as we think of it. They present a combination of medieval traditions, cutting-edge medical practices, and evolving natural philosophical and theological systems found in universities of all confessions across Europe. But these largely overlooked sources reveal that the disciplines we use to study ourselves may have developed (...) from an intertwined natural philosophical and religious system. They suggest that anthropology’s typical origin narrative should be reconsidered. (shrink)

The following article defines Castoriadis’ concepts of the radical imagination and the social imaginary as a platform for a discussion of some motifs important to Castoriadis: the nature of human subjectivity, the nature of ‘reality’, the role and scope of the human imagination, the importance of freedom, the question of whether or not we are free (i.e. how sick/diminished/vulnerable is the second epoch of autonomy that broke open in/as modernity), and the roles of science, politics and philosophy in human social (...) life. The central work on the radical imagination and the social imaginary is of course more than an arbitrary jumping-off point: this paper argues that understanding these concepts is vital if one is to understand the core elements of Castoriadis’ writings and his broader emancipatory project. (shrink)

Critical reflection helps professionals to learn directly from their practice experience, so that they can improve their own work in an ongoing and flexible way - something essential in today's complex and changing organisations. It allows change to be managed in a way which enables individuals to preserve a sense of what is fundamentally important to them as professionals. It is particularly important as it can also help make sense of some fundamental issues, and so also has implications for how (...) we live our lives. However, more systematic research on critical reflection is needed to help us understand what works best for professionals in different settings. This timely work explores how critical reflection is researched, evaluated and used as a research method itself, with the aim of improving how it is taught and practised in a rigorous and transferable way. Developing a more comprehensive and multi-disciplinary view of the current state of critical reflection and the research directions which need to be taken, the book is divided into four parts. It: - Provides an overview of different perspectives on critical reflection and stimulates dialogue between them - Establishes some common platforms from which to develop further research directions - Identifies the major issues in evaluating critical reflection teaching, and main methods for doing so - Contributes to social science methodological innovations by exploring how methods based on critical reflection can be used for researching professional practice - Contains contributions from academics who are internationally known and highly experienced in different aspects of critical reflection. Researching Critical Reflectionis an important reference for all students, practitioners, and researchers - including in the areas of education, management, health and social work - who engage with critical reflection to develop their practice. (shrink)

Professor Kenneth J. Arrow is one of the most distinguished economic theorists. He has played a major role in shaping the subject and is honoured by the publication of three volumes of essays on economic theory. Each volume deals with a different area of economic theory. The books include contributions by some of the best economic theorists from the United States, Japan, Israel and Europe.