The US neutrino community gathered at the Workshop on the Intermediate Neutrino Program at Brookhaven National Laboratory February 4-6, 2015 to explore opportunities in neutrino physics over the next five to ten years. Scientists from particle, astroparticle and nuclear physics participated in the workshop. The workshop examined promising opportunities for neutrino physics in the intermediate term, including possible new small to mid-scale experiments, US contributions to large experiments, upgrades to existing experiments, R&D plans and theory. The workshop was organized into (...) two sets of parallel working group sessions, divided by physics topics and technology. Physics working groups covered topics on Sterile Neutrinos, Neutrino Mixing, Neutrino Interactions, Neutrino Properties and Astrophysical Neutrinos. Technology sessions were organized into Theory, Short-Baseline Accelerator Neutrinos, Reactor Neutrinos, Detector R&D and Source, Cyclotron and Meson Decay at Rest sessions.This report summarizes discussion and conclusions from the workshop. (shrink)

The paper’s principal claim to originality lies in its deployment of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the ‘refrain’ in thinking the ‘resingularization’ of photography in the context of new media ecologies and the promise of what Guattari calls a ‘post-media era’. The paper itself constitutes a refrain and is structured according to the three moments of any refraining. Firstly, a refrain is a spatio-temporalization, a way of marking out space, keeping time and assembling and activating subjectivity. At its most rudimentary, (...) it is the establishment of a momentary centre, a point of order amidst chaos. We can conceive this in terms of the originary ‘cut’ of the photographic flash which – as in a familiar trope in horror films in which the flash of a camera guides the protagonist through a menacing darkness – illuminates one’s milieu, the spot on which one stands, and dispels the evils which gather on all sides. This flash is a singularity which, in rupturing darkness, does not merely constitute a representative image but is, as Guattari might say, a ‘vector of subjectivation’. Secondly, the refrain circumscribes a territory, a circle of control, ethos, interiority or home. Our media are architecture, part of the congealing and hardening of territory. Here emerges an ‘incorporeal Universe’ which signs itself ‘Photography’. We approach photographic territorialization principally in terms of genre. Photographic genres are refrains become clichés, habits, fictions which uncritically sustain and abet the ravages of capitalistic subjectivity. Adhering, photographically, to these affective algorithms – creatively reacting in the belief that There Is No Alternative – is to generatively maintain the existence of a virtually stable territory. It is this territory that, we insist, requires estrangement through the amplification of its moments of uncertainty. The third moment of the refrain is precisely the exacerbation of its instability, its transformation into a ‘music’ which is the cracking open of the territory to the world and its opening out onto futurity and alterity. We conceive this in two ways. On the one hand, the opening of the photographic refrain can be understood in terms of the ontology of mediation. Rather than a freezing of the moment, the photographic image is in and of the middle, medial – that is, it constitutes an event of interruptive time, the construction of an interval which is excessive and untimely. Here, we heed recent calls for a new ethics of photographic practice which understands and takes responsibility for the process of mediation ‘from within the process itself’. On the other hand, the opening of the photographic refrain can be understood in connection with the subjective pluralism which is the excess of the social. We are plural, polyphonic subjects, comprising affective communities which exist in relation to a ‘constellation of Universes’, at the intersection of refrains which variously harness anti-chaotic forces and can be resingularized and opened onto the forces of the future. Along lines intimated by Guattari, we commend the collective reappropriation and resingularization of photography in order to escape its impasse, to reflexively trigger ‘an existential agglomeration’. Mediation itself offers the promise of a ‘post-media era’ in which we liberate the creativity and virtuality of media in order to ‘bifurcate existence’, realizing the possibility of new constellations of Universes and an autopoiesis of subjectivity. Tapping into such excess requires a pedagogy of excess, too. For us, to respond ethically to the new powers of mediation means respecifying photography as a collective endeavour, beyond the principles of ‘self expression’ and ‘independence’ which have long dominated photography education. It also means going beyond the conventions of genre and ‘socially-engaged’ practice, not simply through the usual judgement and denunciation of territory but through its falsification. As we see it, photography’s ‘fabulatory function’ is to both make perceptible and betray the ‘working forces’ of territorial refrains, to both activate and ‘fail to satisfy’ them. Indeed, it is in this sense that photography might become a transversal tool with which to think the artistic and social simultaneously. (shrink)

Contemporary political economy debates tend to assume that an increase in productivity automatically leads to an equal increase in workers’ wages. This assumption shapes the way that many scholars think about economic globalization, as well as domestic policy reforms. This assumption is particularly widespread in the field of international political economy, where it is implicitly incorporated through the use of neoclassical economic models. Rather than explore the distributional struggle between capital and labor, these models use the assumption of full employment (...) to predict that policies that increases worker productivity automatically leads to an equal increase in workers’ wages. In contrast, this article argues that the degree to which wages increase along with productivity depends on the domestic institutions that protect workers’ rights to act collectively. This article tests the relationship between worker productivity and wages by analyzing data from twenty-eight manufacturing industries, in 117 countries, from 1986 to 2002. The results demonstrate that the degree to which an increase in worker productivity leads to an increase in wages depends on a country’s level of protection for labor rights. (shrink)

In this discourse analysis of a social-skills intervention, the narratives of a girl with autism and her female peers were analyzed. Some 162 narratives were identified in 12 hours of video, which documented an eight-week program. Using conversation/talk-in-interaction analysis methods, we determined that over 60% of peers’ narratives were cooperatively completed by group members compared to less than 20% of Cindy’s. In contrast, a majority of Cindy’s narratives were cooperatively sanctioned. Analysis of these unsuccessful narratives revealed that: 1) peers often (...) contest Cindy’s narratives if they are about a restricted interest; 2) Cindy often notices her peers’ resistance but persists with her storytelling activity; and 3) peers’ sanctioning becomes more intense over time. We claim that Cindy’s autism-related behaviors manifest themselves in inflexible interactions that systematically lead to her exclusion. This study emphasizes that storytelling is a fundamental tool that girls use to socialize with one another, which has implications for autism intervention practices. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in the abrupt closure of circus schools, venues, and companies, introducing a myriad of novel stressors. Performers and students must now attempt to maintain their technical, physical, artistic, creative, and cognitive abilities without in-person support from their coaches and must manage the isolation from their training and performing spaces. For circus artists, the transposition of the work space to a home environment is not possible, which creates novel stressors that could lead to the exacerbation and escalation (...) of mental health issues. The purpose of this study is to develop, implement and evaluate a holistic interventional program based on the socio-ecological model of resilience and operationalized through physical literacy. This will be a prospective longitudinal study with a retrospective comparison to data from a similar student cohort pre-pandemic. Interventions were designed using a population-specific, participant-based developmental model within a knowledge translation framework. The interventional program includes group webinars, small group information sessions, and one-on-one Zoom meetings, in addition to the distribution of electronic educational materials. The interventions will holistically provide psychological, physical, social, technical, artistic, and creative supports. Resources will be deployed throughout the closure period and through recovery, as transitions to return to training after prolonged hiatus will magnify known psychological and physical difficulties. Repeated, longitudinal assessment of students will be utilized to track changes over time at key transitions in the pandemic and school year and will be compared to a pre-pandemic school year. The framework for this program will be translatable to other performing arts and high-performance contexts. The program has implications for the mental health and overall wellbeing of artists and for cultural and economic recovery of the industry. (shrink)

‘Molinism’, in contemporary usage, is the name for a theory about the workings of divine providence. Its defenders include some of the most prominent contemporary Protestant and Catholic philosophical theologians.¹ Molinism is often said to be the only way to steer a middle..

This study describes a cost-effective screening protocol for parkinsonism based on combined objective and subjective monitoring of balance function. Objective evaluation of balance function was performed using a game industry balance board and an automated analyses of the dynamic of the center of pressure in time, frequency and non-linear domains collected during short series of stand up tests with different modalities and severity of sensorial deprivation. The subjective measurement of balance function was performed using the Dizziness Handicap Inventory questionnaire. Principal (...) component analyses on both objective and subjective measurements of balance function allowed to obtained a specificity and selectivity for parkinsonian patients (v.s. healthy subjects) of 0.67 and 0.71 respectively. The findings are discussed regarding the relevance of cost-effective balance-based screening system as strategy to meet the needs of broader and earlier screening for parkinsonism in communities with limited access to healthcare. (shrink)

Attempting to reconcile a robust sense of human freedom with entrenched Church doctrines, Luis de Molina espoused for the first time a complete formulation of the doctrine of divine middle knowledge. However, it immediately sparked vigorous theological and philosophical debate. The debate has been revived, with Robert Adams as the original leading opponent. Adams’s objection is that the doctrine cannot be true since its (alleged) propositional objects lack the requisite metaphysical grounds for their being true. Breaking with many contemporary Molinists, (...) I offer reasons for rejecting popular counterfactual semantics as a means to assess “conditionals of freedom.” I then discuss an alternative way to assess “conditionals of freedom” inspired by Suárez and revived by Richard Gaskin, anticipate an objection to it and argue that it is not as damaging as it first seems. I conclude that a Molinist can respond to Adams-type objections without relying upon popular semantics. (shrink)

Finding a way to come to terms with the disvalues in the evolutionary world is a particular challenge in the light of Neo‐Darwinian theories. In this article I trace the shift in Christopher Southgate's work from a focus on theodicy to a theologian of glory. I am critical of his rejection of the tradition of the Fall, his incorporation of disvalues into the work of divine Glory, and the specific theological weight given to scientific content. I offer a critique of (...) Holmes Rolston III's approach to the valuation of nature that I believe has influenced Southgate's theology. Constructively, I offer an alternative that seeks to recover an understanding of the origin of evil and the Adamic event that draws on the work of Paul Ricoeur. I also draw on the work of anthropologist Tim Ingold for an alternative philosophical approach to evolution which opens up a space for a recovery of the concepts of creaturely Sophia and shadow Sophia in the work of Sergius Bulgakov. (shrink)

Steady technological and economic progress gives science and the scientific method a distinguished position in today's culture. Therefore, there may be an impression that areas not belonging to science may hamper this progress of humanity. The views of Dean E. Wooldridge exemplify this position. The only hope is seen in the rational dimension of man in which there is no room for ethical considerations. This rational dimension is also the sole representation of man in the image created by artificial (...) intelligence. Before, AI was at least interested in philosophical issues concerning a model of man, now, AI has no interest in them; it has become an applied science trying to produce workable systems for military and industrial application. However, the model of rational man remained, and because of the prestige of computer science, the model is the most widely recognized as an official model of our epoch.There are three possible ways of improving the situation with regard to the moral dimension of man: saturating knowledge bases with moral values, carefully choosing the sponsor of each project, and saturating education with ethics by making it a part of each major on the undergraduate, and, in particular, the graduate levels. (shrink)

Dean Cocking and Steve Matthews’ article “Unreal Friends” argues that the formation of purely mediated friendships via the Internet is impossible. I critique their argument and contend that mediated contexts, including the Internet, can actually promote exceptionally strong friendships according to the very conceptual criteria utilized by Cocking and Matthews. I first argue that offline relationships can be constrictive and insincere, distorting important indicators and dynamics in the formation of close friends. The distance of mediated friendships mitigates this problem (...) by promoting the courage to be candid. Next, I argue that the offline world of largely oral exchanges is often too shallow and hasty to promote deep bonds. The deliberateness of written correspondence acts as a weight to submerge friendships to greater depths and as a brake to enhance attentiveness to and precision about one’s own and one’s friend’s character. Nonetheless, close friendships may fail to develop on the Internet. Insofar as this failure occurs, however, it would be for reasons other than those identified by Cocking and Matthews. (shrink)

Murray N. Rothbard (1926–1995) was dean of the Austrian School. He was an economist, economic historian, and libertarian political philosopher. See Murray N. Rothbard's article archives. This article is excerpted from An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, vol. 1, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith (1995).

Dean Pettit recently argued in Mind that understanding a word did not require knowing what it meant. Adam and I show that his core arguments, which mostly turn on showing that some particular cases are cases of understanding without knowledge, do not work.

In On the People’s Terms, Philip Pettit incorporates the Sieyèsian notion of constituent power into his constitutional theory of non-domination. In this article, I argue that Emmanuel Sieyès’s understanding of liberty precludes such an appropriation. While a republican, his conceptualisation of liberty in the face of commercial society stood apart from theories of civic vigilance, preferring instead to disentangle individuals from politics and maximise what he understood to be their non-political freedoms. Sieyès saw that liberty was heightened through relations of (...) representation and commercial dependency. This conception of liberty was pivotal to the identity of the nation, and so allowed Sieyès to assess forms of collective injustice committed by the French nobility. It also provided the normative foundation of his theory of constituent power. For Sieyès, constituent power guarded against legislative excess in a decidedly minimal sense, intending instead to separate citizens from the political sphere so they were not burdened with ongoing participation or public vigilance. (shrink)

What is life and what does it mean to be in the living political universe of entitiness without rhyme or reason? Flappy exudate, a bag in a bag, corpuscles of corporeality, worms (or flesh tubes) with appendages, even the cult of first involution – these are our body pods and the hunger and thirst of being-in. How can the situation of anatomical form be analysed without the illusion of instrumentalized reflection? Perhaps by amalgamating the categories and their issues. The issuance (...) of taxonomy is the actual fine muck of excrement, which every brick of ordered life leaks as exudence and decay. Deep thoughts leave a mucal snail trail of what was tabular-seeming about our bodily situation, our environs, our friends, our experiments and our nourishment. Especially in this current age of 露 露 and 娜娜 (Lulu and Nana), our first officially public transgenic kindred, the question becomes, ‘who are these free-living divergences and what does it mean to be the uber-ding beyond geoengineering’s capabilities?’. (shrink)

In the Typic chapter of the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant aims to enable moral judgment by means of the law of nature, which serves as the ‘type’, or formal analogue, of moral law. The present monograph is the first comprehensive study of this key text. It provides a detailed commentary on the Typic, situates it within Kant’s ethics and his theory of symbolic representation, and critically engages with the relevant secondary literature.

Walker, David 'When our first parents were driven out of Paradise, Adam is believed to have remarked to Eve; My dear, we live in an age of transition'. When we look back at the past decades, and look ahead, we could consider we too are living in an age of transition. Looking back we often take the Second Vatican Council as the point where change began. However, the seeds of what flowered at the council and have continued to bear (...) fruit after it were planted well before it. The future is not clear, yet we can expect that significant change will be part of it. As we reflect on our changing situation, it would be helpful to keep in mind another comment of Dean Inge: 'There are two kinds of fools: one says, "This is old, therefore it is good"; the other says, "This is new, therefore it is better" '. (shrink)

If p is false, it isn't evidence for anything. This view is central in one important response to a familiar sceptical argument. I consider and reject various motivations for refusing to accept this view – proposals arising from, e.g., our practice of providing rationalising explanations of people's beliefs, various locutions appearing to relativise evidence to persons, the significance of people's mental states for attributions of reasons to them, and the role of evidence in epistemic principles and requirements. I close by (...) considering responses to the ‘New Evil Demon Argument’. What emerges is an affirmation of the principle that p doesn't provide evidence unless it is true, a response to an important version of the Evil Demon argument for scepticism, and also a deeper interpretation of our epistemic practice. (shrink)

Just as tariffs lead to economic distortions and provide incentives for corruption, so do patent monopolies on prescription drugs, except the impact is often an order of magnitude larger.

I discuss two forms of the thesis that to have a sensation is to token a sentence in a language of thought-what I call, following Georges Rey, the sensational sentences thesis. One form of the thesis is a version of standard functionalism, while the other is a version of the increasingly popular thesis that for a sensation to have qualia is for it to have a certain kind of intentional content-that is, intentionalism. I defend the basic idea behind the sensational (...) sentences thesis, and argue that the intentionalist version is either false or collapses into the standard functionalist thesis. (shrink)

A fascinating exploration of the nature of consciousness This engaging and readable book provides an introduction to consciousness that does justice both to the science and to the philosophy of consciousness, that is, the mechanics of the mind and the experience of awareness. The book opens with a general discussion of the brain and of consciousness itself. Then, exploring the areas of brain science most likely to illuminate the basis of awareness, Zeman focuses on the science of sleep and waking (...) and on the science of vision. He describes healthy states and disorders--epilepsy, narcolepsy, blindsight and hallucinations after stroke--that provide insights into the capacity for consciousness and into its contents. And he tracks the evolution of the brain, the human species, and human culture and surveys the main current scientific theories of awareness, pioneering attempts to explain how the brain gives rise to experience. Zeman concludes by examining philosophical arguments about the nature of consciousness. A practicing neurologist, he animates his text with examples from the behavioral and neurological disorders of his patients and from the expanding mental worlds of young children, including his own. His book is an accessible and enlightening explanation of why we are conscious. (shrink)

[opening paragraph]: A colleague of mine at Southern Methodist University recently shared a story with me. Several years ago my colleague was hired as the chairman of a new department of religious studies at a major research university. It was his job to interview candidates to fill several positions in the department. The Dean was adamant that, in order to ensure scholarly objectivity, anyone hired to teach religious studies should not have deeply held religious beliefs; however my colleague went (...) to the Dean in hopes of convincing him otherwise. `You can certainly say whatever you want to', the Dean responded, `but you should know in advance that my mind is already made up.' My colleague did not share with me his whole argument, but he did mention what must have given even that hard-nosed Dean a moment's pause: `It seems that, in this department', my colleague pointedly remarked, `it would be fine to hire an historian who is an expert on Thomas Aquinas; but, according to your rules, we couldn't hire Thomas Aquinas himself.'. (shrink)

Records of certain Government Departments known to have purchased scientific instruments from designated suppliers over long periods are potentially important sources of information on both instruments and their makers. The Office of Ordnance was one such Department. Investigation of its financial and administrative records has shown that the appointment ‘Mathematical Instrument Maker to his Majesty's Office of Ordnance’ brought the holder a substantial trade in instruments for drawing, surveying, and military purposes. Detailed entries in the Bill Books enable not only (...) types, quantities, and prices of instruments supplied to be determined, but also the purposes for which they were required. In many cases the actual users of the instruments are named, with their locations in Great Britain and overseas.The records of the Office of Ordnance are extensive, covering the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century in over ten thousand volumes or bundles. This paper provides an introduction to what is available, and examines in particular the period 1748–1772 when George Adams senior was Mathematical Instrument Maker to this Office. It is shown that during this period Adams supplied over 1500 instruments, ranging from drawing pens to theodolites, detailed in 148 bills amounting to a total value of £2425. Some other well-known instrument makers, such as Thomas Wright, Benjamin Cole & Son, and Jesse Ramsden, were also occasional suppliers of instruments in the same period, while from 1765 onwards the records include bills for instruments purchased by the Office of Ordnance for the Royal Observatory from makers such as Dollond and Bird. The total number of instrument makers' bills located and examined in the period searched, including the 148 by Adams, was 166. In addition, though not within the scope of this paper it was observed that the records contain numerous bills by William Deane before, and by Jeremiah Sisson after, the period of Adams' appointment respectively. (shrink)

J. L. Austin’s attitude towards traditional epistemological problems was largely negative. They arise and are maintained, he charged, by “sleight of hand,” “wile,” “concealed motives,” “seductive fallacies,” fixation on a handful of “jejune examples” and a host of small errors, misinterpretations, and mistakes about matters of fact (1962: 3- 6, 1979: 87). As these charges indicate, he did not offer a general critical theory of traditional epistemological theorizing or of the intellectual motivations that lead to it. Instead, he subjected individual (...) arguments to piecemeal criticism, patiently showing how things go awry in conception, motivation, argumentation, and plain fact. The work was incremental, but the goal was radical: to reduce large edifices to rubble. As he put it regarding certain sense datum theories, “the right policy is to go back to a much earlier stage, and to dismantle the whole doctrine before it gets off the ground” (1962: 142). It is often said that Austin’s criticisms were linguistic, but this is only partly right. While he occasionally charges traditional epistemologists with misusing crucial words and relying on unregulated and inadequately motivated technical terms, he also charges them with factual errors and with distorting or misunderstanding the procedures involved in epistemically evaluating people’s claims and beliefs. For this reason, it is best to see Austin as criticizing traditional epistemological puzzles and projects from the point of view of our ordinary lives (including our best scientific theories and practices). He starts with a commitment to our ordinary ways of using words, our ordinary convictions about.. (shrink)

In this article, I suggest that an open mind wholly unburdened by preconceptions and prejudgments is a mistaken ideal. Not only is it unrealistic; it deprives us of context and background knowledge relevant to judging well. I begin with two cases that show how the ideal of the “prejudice-free” mind, though appealing, may end up thwarting good judgment: blind assessment and “blank-slate” jury selection. I then trace the prejudice-free ideal to the Enlightenment, exposing its roots in the subject-object worldview. Drawing (...) on Heidegger, I suggest that the subject-object worldview is misguided and that all judgment involves a prior understanding of the matter we judge. To have an open mind, paradoxically, is to have a stake in defending a prior understanding, to be possessed of an understanding of the good that one wishes to promote. I then draw out the implications of this view for how we might make sense of cultural differences,... (shrink)

Noise in behavior is often viewed as a nuisance: while the mind aims to take the best possible action, it is let down by unreliability in the sensory and response systems. How researchers study cognition reflects this viewpoint – averaging over trials and participants to discover the deterministic relationships between experimental manipulations and their behavioral consequences, with noise represented as additive, often Gaussian, and independent. Yet a careful look at behavioral noise reveals rich structure that defies easy explanation. First, both (...) perceptual and preferential judgments show that sensory and response noise may potentially only play minor roles, with most noise arising in the cognitive computations. Second, the functional form of the noise is both non-Gaussian and non-independent, with the distribution of noise being better characterized as heavy-tailed and as having substantial long-range autocorrelations. It is possible that this structure results from brains that are, for some reason, bedeviled by a fundamental design flaw, albeit one with intriguingly distinctive characteristics. Alternatively, noise might not be a bug but a feature: indeed, we suggest that noise is fundamental to how cognition works. Specifically, we propose that the brain approximates probabilistic inference with a local sampling algorithm, one that uses randomness to drive its exploration of alternative hypotheses. Reframing cognition in this way explains the rich structure of noise and leads to a surprising conclusion: that noise is not a symptom of cognitive malfunction but plays a central role in underpinning human intelligence. (shrink)

Argumentation Frameworks provide a fruitful basis for exploring issues of defeasible reasoning. Their power largely derives from the abstract nature of the arguments within the framework, where arguments are atomic nodes in an undifferentiated relation of attack. This abstraction conceals different senses of argument, namely a single-step reason to a claim, a series of reasoning steps to a single claim, and reasoning steps for and against a claim. Concrete instantiations encounter difficulties and complexities as a result of conflating these senses. (...) To distinguish them, we provide an approach to instantiating AFs in which the nodes are restricted to literals and rules, encoding the underlying theory directly. Arguments in these senses emerge from this framework as distinctive structures of nodes and paths. As a consequence of the approach, we reduce the effort of computing argumentation extensions, which is in contrast to other approaches. Our framework retains the theoretical and computational bene.. (shrink)

As the functional capabilities of high-tech medical products converge, supplying organizations seek new opportunities to differentiate their offerings. Embracing product sustainability-related differentiators provides just such an opportunity. This study examines the challenge organizations face when attempting to understand how customers perceive environmental and social dimensions of sustainability by exploring and defining both dimensions on the basis of a review of extant literature and focus group research with a leading supplier of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanning equipment. The study encompasses seven (...) hospitals and one private imaging center in the Netherlands and identifies five social aspects that cover 11 indicators. The authors conduct 22 customer perception interviews with key decision-making stakeholders involved in purchasing MRI scanning equipment. Respondents find environmental and social sustainability dimensions personally relevant but professionally secondary to cost, performance, and ability to use the equipment in their organizations' physical infrastructure. Finally, incorporating a product's environmental and social credentials within the marketing of MRI scanning equipment enhances the perception of the product offering in decisionmaking stakeholders' minds and provides a means of differentiation. (shrink)

We extend Newell & Shanks' (N&S's) arguments to the question of whether implicit evaluations reflect unconscious attitudes. We argue that correspondence to explicit evaluations fails to meet the criteria of relevance and sensitivity. When awareness is measured adequately and in line with N&S's criteria, there is compelling evidence that people are consciously aware of their implicit evaluations.

The phenomenon of ‘canalization’ ‐ the genetic capacity to buffer developmental pathways against mutational or environmental perturbations ‐ was first characterized in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Despite enormous subsequent progress in understanding the nature of the genetic material and the molecular basis of gene expression, there have been few attempts to interpret the classical work on canalization in molecular genetic terms. Some recent findings, however, bear on one form of canalization, ‘genetic canalization’, the stabilization of development against mutational (...) effects. These data indicate that co‐expressed paralogous genes can function as mutual ‘back‐up’ elements in developmental processes. Paralogues, however, are far from the only basis of canalization: other genetic sources can be readily envisaged and some of these are described here. The evolutionary questions about genetic canalization and the mechanistic questions about developmental instability that still need to be addressed are also briefly discussed. (shrink)

The author offers a comprehensive interpretation of Aquinas's claim that the human intellect is immaterial and assessment of his arguments on behalf of this claim, also positioning Aquinas's thought alongside recent work in hylomorphic metaphysics and philosophy of mind.

This paper highlights the significance of popular astronomy lectures in British theatres during the first half of the nineteenth century. The popular astronomy lecturing trade inherited from Enlightenment natural philosophy discourses. A ‘theatrical turn’ developed in the late eighteenth century and became extensive by the 1820s. Lecturers moved astronomy displays into theatres and used theatrical facilities, which resulted in a distinct type of show blending scientific instruction with sensational amusement. Lent was especially high season for this business in a metropolitan (...) entertainment market. Pre–eminent cases of private entrepreneurs in this trade included William Walker, Deane Franklin Walker, George Bartley, and C. H. Adams. By exploring astronomy lectures in theatres, this paper also shows the spatial influence of the site on the format and style of the performance: the benefits and constraints of a theatre made a theatrical astronomy lecture distinct from others at a formal institution. (shrink)

This article seeks to challenge the regnant liberal orthodoxy that human rights are the highest and most important of our social virtues. It questions the individualist assumptions of such universa...