Investigation of the evolution of the DNA sequences that comprise a small gene cluster in five closely related species of Drosophila shows that it evolves as a mosaic, with adjacent subregions displaying very different rates and types of evolution. It appears that local differences in the influence of selectional and mutational forces result in the formation of these distinct subregions.

Elliot R. Wolfson is Professor of Religious Studies and the Marsha and Jay Glazer Chair of Jewish Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Children are not simply molded by the environment; through constant inference and interpretation, they actively shape their own social world. This book is about that process. Elliot Turiel's work focuses on the development of moral judgment in children and adolescents and, more generally, on their evolving understanding of the conventions of social systems. His research suggests that social judgements are ordered, systematic, subtly discriminative, and related to behavior. His theory of the ways in which children generate social knowledge through (...) their social experiences will be of interest to a wide range of researchers and students in child development and education. (shrink)

Elliot R. Wolfson intervenes in the debate over Martin Heidegger and Nazism from a unique perspective, as a scholar of Jewish mysticism and philosophy who has been profoundly influenced by Heidegger's work. He reveals crucial aspects of Heidegger's thinking that betray an affinity with dimensions of Jewish thought.

When proponents of Intelligent Design (ID) theory deny that their theory is religious, the minimalistic theory they have in mind (the mini-ID theory) is the claim that the irreducibly complex adaptations found in nature were made by one or more intelligent designers. The denial that this theory is religious rests on the fact that it does not specify the identity of the designer—a supernatural God or a team of extra-terrestrials could have done the work. The present paper attempts to show (...) that this reply underestimates the commitments of the mini-ID Theory. The mini-ID theory, when supplemented with four independently plausible further assumptions, entails the existence of a supernatural intelligent designer. It is further argued that scientific theories, such as the Darwinian theory of evolution, are neutral on the question of whether supernatural designers exist. (shrink)

In this erudite new work, Elliot R. Wolfson explores philosophical gnosis in the writings of Susan Taubes, Gillian Rose, and Edith Wyschogrod. The juxtaposition of these three extraordinary, albeit relatively neglected, philosophers provides a prism through which Wolfson scrutinizes the interplay of ethics, politics, and theology. The bond that ties together the diverse and multifaceted worldviews promulgated by Taubes, Rose, and Wyschogrod is the mutual recognition of the need to enunciate a response to the calamities of the twentieth century (...) based on an incontrovertible acknowledgment of the decadence and malevolence of human beings, without, however, succumbing to acrimony and despair. The speculation of each of these philosophers on melancholia and the tragicomedy of being is unquestionably intricate, exhibiting subtle variations and idiosyncrasies, but we can nevertheless identify a common denominator in their attempt to find the midpoint positioned between hope and hopelessness. As Wolfson articulates, Taubes, Rose, and Wyschogrod exemplify a philosophical sensibility informed by a nocturnal seeing, which is not merely a seeing in the night but rather a seeing of the night. Ultimately, the book reveals the potential for these thinkers' ideas to enhance our moral sensitivity and to encourage participation in the ongoing struggle for meaning and decency in the present. (shrink)

This article proposes that predicate order and coherence relations are the two major determining factors in copredication licensing, resolving a long-standing puzzle over the criteria for constructing acceptable copredications. The effects of predicate ordering are claimed to be anchored around semantic complexity, such that copredications with semantically Simple–Complex predicate orderings are more acceptable than the reverse. This motivates a parsing bias, termed Incremental Semantic Complexity. Particular ways of implementing this parsing bias are discussed. The effect of predicate coherence is claimed (...) to be anchored around a sense of causality and featural commonality. Lastly, a hierarchy of possible copredications is outlined (the Copredication Hierarchy), helping to delimit the modelling of copredications to a greater extent than has previously been possible. (shrink)

Environmentalists express concern at the destruction/exploitation of areas of the natural environment because they believe that those areas are of intrinsic value. An emerging response is to argue that natural areas may have their value restored by means of the techniques of environmental engineering. It is then claimed that the concern of environmentalists is irrational, merely emotional or even straightforwardly selfish. This essay argues that there is a dimension of value attaching to the natural environment which cannot be restored no (...) matter how technologically proficient environmental engineers become. The argument involves highlighting and discussing analogies between faking art and faking nature. The pivot of the argument is the claim that genesis is a significant determinant of an area's value. (shrink)

LOCKE IS FREQUENTLY CALLED AN EMPIRICIST. HOWEVER, THE\nROLES OF REASON AND EXPERIENCE IN LOCKE'S EPISTEMOLOGY\nHAVE, THEREBY, BEEN OBSCURED. IN THIS PAPER, DIFFERENT\nSENSES OF "EMPIRICISM" AND "RATIONALISM" ARE DISTINGUISHED,\nAND RELEVANT PASSAGES FROM LOCKE'S WRITINGS ARE SCRUTINIZED\nFOR PURPOSES OF EXPLICATING HIS EPISTEMOLOGY. THROUGH THIS\nEXAMINATION, IT IS SEEN THAT LOCKE, LIKE KANT, SEEKS A\n"REASON-EXPERIENCE SYNTHESIS" AND THAT THE BLANKET LABEL\n"EMPIRICIST," AS APPLIED TO LOCKE, IS MOST UNFORTUNATE.

Socrates recognizes a distinction between formal and material definitional conditions. In this dissertation, I concentrate on the material conditions rather than the formal ones for two reasons: Socrates allows a great deal of syntactic flexibility, and many answers he regards as formally adequate resist classification by contemporary standards. I argue that Socrates is committed to four material adequacy conditions in answers to "what is F-ness?" He is committed to the extensional equivalence condition, that the definiens picks out all and only (...) instances of the definiendum, the property sameness condition, that the definiens is a property identical to the definiendum, the explanation condition, that the definiens explains instances of the definiendum, and the semantic completeness condition, that statements about F-nesses involving evaluative predicates do not change their truth-value, regardless of context. (shrink)

Descartes’s cogito – I am thinking, therefore I am – is an intuitive deduction. Contrary to Transparency, certainty of I am thinking does not come easily; it’s achieved by making introspection perfectly clear through radical doubt. Scientia – rational immunity to doubt – comes with the habit of intuiting with perfect clarity that skepticism is false. (This is the second of two companion entries; the prequel is called, "Descartes's Clarity First Epistemology.").

Elliot Eisner has spent the last 40 years researching, thinking and writing about some of the key and enduring issues in Arts Education, Curriculum Studies and Qualitative Research. He has contributed over 20 books and 500 articles to the field. In this book, Professor Eisner has compiled a career-long collection of his finest pieces-extracts from books, key articles, salient research findings and major theoretical contributions-so the world can read them in a single manageable volume. Starting with a specially written (...) Introduction, which gives an overview of Professor Eisner's career and contextualizes his selection, the chapters cover a wide range of issues, including: · Children and art · The use of educational connoisseurship · Aesthetic modes of knowing · Absolutism and relativism in curriculum theory · Education reform and the ecology of schooling · The future of education research This is a must-have book for anyone wishing to know more about the development of Arts Education, Curriculum Studies and Qualitative Research over the last four decades, and about Elliot Eisner's contribution to these exciting fields. This book is part of the World Library of Educationalists series, which celebrates the contributions made to education by leading figures. Each scholar has selected his or her own key writings from across numerous books and journal articles, and often spread across two or more decades to be presented in a single volume. Through these books, readers can chase up the themes and strands that have been lodged in a lifetime's work, and so follow the development of these scholars' contributions to the field, as well as the development of the fields themselves. Other scholars included in the series: Richard Aldrich, Stephen J. Ball, John Elliott, Howard Gardner, John Gilbert, Ivor F. Goodson, David Hargreaves, David Labaree, E.C. Wragg, John White. (shrink)

Introduction: imagination and the prism of the inapparent -- 1. Via negativa and the imaginal configuring of God -- 2. Apophatic vision and overcoming the dialogical -- 3. Echo of the otherwise and the lure of theolatry -- 4. Secrecy of the gift and the gift of secrecy -- 5. Immanent atheology and the trace of transcendence -- 6. Undoing (k)not of apophaticism: a Heideggerian afterthought.

Natural language syntax yields an unbounded array of hierarchically structured expressions. We claim that these are used in the service of active inference in accord with the free-energy principle (FEP). While conceptual advances alongside modelling and simulation work have attempted to connect speech segmentation and linguistic communication with the FEP, we extend this program to the underlying computations responsible for generating syntactic objects. We argue that recently proposed principles of economy in language design—such as “minimal search” criteria from theoretical syntax—adhere (...) to the FEP. This affords a greater degree of explanatory power to the FEP—with respect to higher language functions—and offers linguistics a grounding in first principles with respect to computability. While we mostly focus on building new principled conceptual relations between syntax and the FEP, we also show through a sample of preliminary examples how both tree-geometric depth and a Kolmogorov complexity estimate (recruiting a Lempel–Ziv compression algorithm) can be used to accurately predict legal operations on syntactic workspaces, directly in line with formulations of variational free energy minimization. This is used to motivate a general principle of language design that we term Turing–Chomsky Compression (TCC). We use TCC to align concerns of linguists with the normative account of self-organization furnished by the FEP, by marshalling evidence from theoretical linguistics and psycholinguistics to ground core principles of efficient syntactic computation within active inference. (shrink)

morethannothingis nothingmorethannothingthatnothing is Elliot R. Wolfson Let me begin by posing the obvious question: can anything be said about nothing other than nothing? Would it not be the case...

Modern commentators recognize the irony of Aristotle’s Categories becoming a central text for Platonic schools. For similar reasons, these commentators would perhaps be surprised to see Aquinas’s In VII Metaphysics, where he apparently identifies the secondary substance of Aristotle’s Categories with a false Platonic sense of “substance” as if, for Aristotle, only Platonists would say secondary substances are substances. This passage in Aquinas’s commentary has led Mgr. Wippel to claim that, for Aquinas, secondary substance and essence are not the same (...) thing and that Aristotle’s notion of essence is absent from the Categories. This paper—by closely analyzing the apparently contradictory divisions of “substance” in Aquinas’s In V and VII Metaphysics—shows that essence and secondary substance are not altogether distinct for Aquinas. Moreover, when the Categories is viewed by Aquinas as a work of logic, it is found largely to cut across the disputes between Platonism and Aristotelianism. (shrink)

Creativity pervades human life. It is the mark of individuality, the vehicle of self-expression, and the engine of progress in every human endeavor. It also raises a wealth of neglected and yet evocative philosophical questions. The Philosophy of Creativity takes up these questions and, in doing so, illustrates the value of interdisciplinary exchange.

No one theory of time is pursued in the essays of this volume, but a major theme that threads them together is Wolfson’s signature idea of the timeswerve as a linear circularity or a circular linearity, expressions that are meant to avoid the conventional split between the two temporal modalities of the line and the circle.

This article explores the diminished role of the superego in contemporary psychoanalysis, and it focuses on Loewald’s perspective on the superego as original and as a possible way to rethink the meaning of the concept. Loewald saw the superego as representing the modality of the future; so, it beckons us forward and ought not be construed as merely critical. I also argue that Loewald’s perspective on the superego anticipates the emerging literatures on mentalization (especially mentalized affectivity) and autobiographical memory. (PsycINFO (...) Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

There is currently a burgeoning interest in affects across a number of disciplines--philosophy, psychology, neuroscience and psychoanalysis. Yet, it remains unclear to what extent one can infer that a common set of problems and concerns exists. In this project, therefore, I undertake an interdisciplinary inquiry with the aim of providing conceptual clarity about the meaning and function of affects. In particular, I begin with the history of philosophy; then I turn to focus upon psychology--exploring the notion of "basic emotions" as (...) well as the question of whether affects can exist without cognition. This leads to an examination of recent work in neuroscience. My conclusion is that the perspectives of psychologists and neuroscientists are a necessary, but insufficient way to conceive of affects, and that to understand affects fully, one must consider the theme of agency. ;The capacity for regulation is a rich area in which to investigate how affects and agency are connected. I synthesize literature about regulation from developmental psychology, infant research and psychoanalysis, delineating three stages of development: pre-agency, agency proper, and self-conscious agency. More specifically, I propose that agency comes into being through "affect regulation." In enabling an infant to identify and modulate his/her affect states, affect regulation fosters the unfolding of a sense of agency. Affects are not simply found states in the mind; it is possible for them to be crafted and refined. Thus, I suggest that a new term, "affectivity," is required to characterize the ability that adults have to self-regulate affects. Clinical material is introduced to illustrate the concept of affectivity. ;My view supports the psychoanalytic assumption that affects contribute to the emergence of a sense of agency and that a sense of agency allows us to experience new and more differentiated affects. The claim that there is an integral relation between affects and agency depends upon a range of perspectives--about the brain and behavior, but also about subjective experience, which is both influenced by culture and is radically unique. In my conclusion, I stress the importance of preserving the scientific and hermeneutic aspects of psychoanalysis. (shrink)

Time is of increasing concern in Black studies, with scholars studying the ways in which standardized narratives of time are historically imposed on racialized populations. This essay reads Safiya Sinclair’s 2016 poetry collection Cannibal as offering a fugitive temporality that ruptures the stability of the racializing present. In Cannibal, Sinclair’s speaker does not attempt to release herself from the racializing condemnation of the past. Rather, she summons a fugitive social past in the present, antagonizing the homogeneity of the present by (...) exposing it to the repressed and relegated wounds that haunt the foundations of modernity’s racializing program. In Cannibal, this summoning is occasioned through a practice of faith. Following J. Kameron Carter and Fred Moten, among others, this essay studies the ways in which this fugitive poetic temporality of faith builds on contemporary developments in the critique of time, religion, and whiteness in Black studies. (shrink)