What is the Bare Particular Theory? Is it committed, like the Bundle Theory, to a constituent ontology: according to which a substance’s qualities—and according to the Bare Particular Theory, its substratum also—are proper parts of the substance? I argue that Bare Particularists need not, should not, and—if a recent objection to ‘the Bare Particular Theory’ succeeds—cannot endorse a constituent ontology. There is nothing, I show, in the motivations for Bare Particularism or the principles that distinguish Bare Particularism from rival views (...) that entails a constituent ontology. I outline a version of Bare Particularism that in rejecting a constituent ontology avoids the New Objection. I argue against Theodore Sider that this really is a distinct theory to the version of Bare Particularism that endorses a constituent ontology, and not a mere terminological variant. I show that this, the best version of the Bare Particular Theory, is also defensible against the old objections. (shrink)

This theoretical paper argues for prioritarianism as an ethical underpinning for digital health in contexts of extreme disadvantage. In support of this claim, the paper develops three prioritarian principles for making ethical decisions for digital health programme design, grounded in the normative position that the greater the need, the stronger the moral claim. The principles are positioned as an alternative view to the prevailing utilitarian approach to digital health, which the paper argues is not sufficient to address the needs of (...) the worst off. As researchers of digital health, we must ensure that the most globally marginalised are not overlooked by overtly technocentric implementation practices. Consequently, the paper concludes by advocating for use of the three principles to support stronger critical reflection on the ethics involved in the design and implementation of digital health programmes. (shrink)

Can epistemic luck be captured by modal conditions such as safety from error? This paper answers ‘no’. First, an old problem is cast in a new light: it is argued that the trivial satisfaction associated with necessary truths and accidentally robust propositions is a symptom of a more general disease. Namely, epistemic luck but not safety from error is hyperintensional. Second, it is argued that as a consequence the standard solution to deal with this worry, namely the invocation of content (...) variation, fails. Third, it is considered whether the condition can serve some restricted theoretical role; the hypothesis is rejected. Finally, it is tentatively suggested that epistemic luck’s hyperintensionality derives from its being an explanatory notion, and an analogy is drawn with failures of probabilstic conceptions of explanation in the philosophy of science. (shrink)

The dramatic increase in the number of overseas students studying in the United Kingdom and other Western countries has required academics to reevaluate many aspects of their own, and their institutions', practices. This article considers differing cultural values among overseas students toward plagiarism and the implications this may have for postgraduate education in a Western context. Based on focus-group interviews, questionnaires, and informal discussions, we report the views of plagiarism among students in 2 postgraduate management programs, both of which had (...) a high constituency of overseas students. We show that plagiarist practices are often the outcome of many complex and culturally situated influences. We suggest that educators need to appreciate these differing cultural assumptions if they are to act in an ethical manner when responding to issues of plagiarism among international students. (shrink)

It is one of the central aims of the philosophy of science to elucidate the meanings of scientific terms and also to think critically about their application. The focus of this essay is the scientific term predict and whether there is credible evidence that animal models, especially in toxicology and pathophysiology, can be used to predict human outcomes. Whether animals can be used to predict human response to drugs and other chemicals is apparently a contentious issue. However, when one empirically (...) analyzes animal models using scientific tools they fall far short of being able to predict human responses. This is not surprising considering what we have learned from fields such evolutionary and developmental biology, gene regulation and expression, epigenetics, complexity theory, and comparative genomics. (shrink)

Ferdinand T nnies' Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, a work of global import and condensate of the history of ideas, was much influenced by the philosopher Friedrich Paulsen. The study of their friendship shows how these intellectuals chose to adopt and adapt paradigms of the European legacy—rationalism and empiricism on the one hand, rationalism and romantic historicism on the other—in achieving creative idiosyncratic syntheses of idealistic monism. Beyond the shared scientific agenda of monism, they were convinced of the vocation of intellectuals in (...) social legislation, which Paulsen pursued through pedagogy, while T nnies became a social activist. Their interest in forms of socialism, romanticism and pessimism had varying consequences due to the differences in temperament between the political realist Paulsen, whose choices were more expedient for career advancement, and the political idealist T nnies. Their relationship is an instance of the specific rapport that T nnies characterises as intellectual friendship. (shrink)

Priming of lineage‐specific genes in pluripotent embryonic stem cells facilitates rapid and coordinated activation of transcriptional programmes during differentiation. There is growing evidence that pluripotency factors play key roles in priming tissue‐specific genes and in the earliest stages of lineage commitment. As differentiation progresses, pluripotency factors are replaced at some primed genes by related lineage‐specific factors that bind to the same sequences and maintain epigenetic priming until the gene is activated. Polycomb and trithorax group proteins bind many genes in pluripotent (...) cells generating bivalent domains that contain both active and repressive histone modifications. The properties of polycomb proteins suggest that they act as gatekeepers, helping to maintain silencing in pluripotent stem cells while establishing a chromatin environment that is permissive for priming by sequence‐specific factors. The overall effect of factor‐mediated priming is to initiate the input of information required for cell differentiation before the first lineage choices have been made. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Making the Aristophanic AudienceNiall W. SlaterAristophanic comedy is rich in address to its audience and comments on the audience's behavior. It must be said at once, however, that this is not dispassionate reporting: Aristophanes' purpose in commenting on his audience is nearly always to redirect its attention or to shape or reshape the behavior of that audience. A study of the full extent of Aristophanes' attempts to shape the (...) response of his audience is beyond the scope of discussion here, where the focus is primarily on his strategies for controlling and directing the attention and response of his audience in general. Let me also make one methodological assumption explicit at this point. When the characters or chorus in Aristophanes remark on audience behavior, these comments must have some basis in reality in order either to be humorous or to influence that behavior: if things are not quite as Aristophanes describes them, they nonetheless must be close enough to reality for the audience to understand and react to them.The most basic problem of audience response in the theater is to make sure there is a response. Let me therefore begin simply with the problem of attention and attention span in the theater. There is still dispute as to whether the program of the City Dionysia was shortened during the war years from five to three comedies. I believe (against Wolfgang Luppe) that it was, which helps explain the comedy of a passage in Birds.1 In the play's parabasis, the chorus issues an invitation to the spectators to join their new bird city. If they join the city of birds, the audience is told, they will acquire wings, which will allow them to escape human limitations. In a superb parody of the common tragic choral theme of "I wish I were a bird and could fly away from here," the chorus enumerates the advantages of wings. One is, they would allow the spectators to fly away from the boring performances of tragedy! [End Page 351].(Birds 785–89)There's nothing better or more pleasant than to grow wings. Now, if one of you spectators had wings, when he was hungry he could escape the tragic performances, fly off home, have lunch, and then when he was full, fly back here again to us.Another advantage would be to slip away for a quick sexual encounter:.(793–96)And if any of you happens to be carrying on an affair with a married woman, and he sees the lady's husband in the Boule's seats, he again could have flown away from you with his wings, then after screwing her flown from her place back here again.These jokes work best, I submit, if Birds comes on in the afternoon, for they suggest a certain waning of audience interest and distraction by hunger as the morning's tragic tetralogy marched on. The solution? Skip the boring tragedy bits, head home for lunch, but do come back for "us," that is, the comedy at the end of the day's program.2Aristophanes is of course far too sensible to suggest directly that the spectators might be bored by the comedies on offer. He does allude to the problem of attention span in another way. Ecclesiazusae was probably produced in 393 B.C., well after the end of the war, when the [End Page 352] Dionysia certainly offered a full five comedies. At the end of the play, the chorus says it has a small request:.(1154–62)I want to make a small request of the judges: that the clever ones, remembering the clever stuff in this play, vote for me; those having a good laugh, vote for me because of the laughs; in fact, I want just about everybody to vote for me; and don't let the lot be any fault for us, that we drew the first position, but you must remember all these things. Don't transgress your oath, but always judge the choruses fairly, and don't imitate those low–class trollops, who always only remember their most recent customers.We shall come back to this passage when we consider... (shrink)

That's according to Niall Lucy in his latest book, PoMo Oz. Pitting his humour and intellect against the conservative power brokers, Lucy champions the notion that free thought, not free trade, is the basis of democracy.

'There is nothing outside the text.' Possibly no single statement has caused such a storm in critical theory as this famous observation by the French philosopher, Jacques Derrida. While it is often misunderstood as meaning that nothing is real and that political actions are therefore pointless, Debating Derrida demonstrates that Derrida's philosophy does not lack political conviction. Niall Lucy examines three key terms - text, writing and differance - as they are used in three famous debates: Derrida's disputes over (...) speech-acts with John R. Searle, over discourse with Michel Foucault and over apartheid. Lucy also takes up the issue of Derrida's relationship to postmodernism and questions the 'political imperative' of the need to justify philosophy and the humanities in general according to a notion of their 'usefulness'. Debating Derrida decisively shows that instead of disagreeing with Derrida, we should rather be defending him. (shrink)

In 1986, Gadamer was invited to Britain by The British Society for Phenomenology (BSP) and the Goethe Institute London. During these visits, he presented a talk on the topic of Ancient Philosophy a...

The Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Act 2018 was commenced on 01/01/2019 in Ireland. The Act provides for legal termination of pregnancy under defined circumstances including for any reason at < 12 weeks gestation; and where two doctors agree there is ‘a condition affecting the foetus that is likely to lead to the death of the foetus either before, or within 28 days of, birth’. As such, abortion for congenital anomaly (CA) can occur at a number of time points, (...) depending on the adjudged severity. Infants born with CAs frequently require significant medical intervention and account for a high proportion of admissions to paediatric intensive care units (PICUs). The purpose of this paper was to evaluate the number of infants with CAs admitted to an Irish PICU in the period before and after the implementation of the Act. All PICU admissions < 1 month of age to a single Irish paediatric hospital between 2012 and 2021 were analysed. CAs were recorded, and the periods before and after the commencement of the Act compared. We found a difference in admissions involving CAs, particularly those related to congenital heart disease involving single ventricle anatomy. It is plausible that this difference was as a result of improved access to abortion services following the implementation of the Act. This article explores the legal conditions related to the abortion of a foetus with a CA in Ireland, and the possible impact of the Independent Review of the Operation of the Health ( Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Act 2018. (shrink)

This paper argues that the inappropriate framing and implementation of plagiarism detection systems in UK universities can unwittingly construct international students as ‘plagiarists’. It argues that these systems are often implemented with inappropriate assumptions about plagiarism and the way in which new members of a community of practice develop the skills to become full members of that community. Drawing on the literature and some primary data it shows how expectations, norms and practices become translated and negotiated in such a way (...) that legitimate attempts to conform with the expectations of the community of practice often become identified as plagiarism and illegitimate attempts at cheating often become obscured from view. It argues that this inappropriate framing and implementation of plagiarism detection systems may make academic integrity more illusive rather than less. It argues that in its current framing – as systems for ‘detection and discipline’ – plagiarism detection systems may become a new micro-politics of power with devastating consequences for those excluded. (shrink)

For Heidegger, world is constitutively bound up with human being’s way of being. Yet after Being and Time he criticizes an excessively one-sided pragmatic reading of his concept of world, insisting that world is more than a referential totality of use involvements, tools, or existential projections. This article examines how Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis should be understood to promote both a practical orientation as well as a more transcendental dimension. The centrality of praxis in Heidegger’s work will not be contested. What (...) will be explored is whether what Heidegger calls “worldliness” or the “phenomenon of world” can be reduced to contexts of use relations or social practices and projects. The argument is made that world, for Heidegger, should be understood as an open space of meaning emergence through which diverse activities, some of which are practical, first become accessible to the human being. The claim will be advanced that world is more than the human being’s disclosive understanding and that an overly pragmatic interpretation circumvents the surpassive dimension of world. (shrink)

The English Catholic philosopher Sir Kenelm Digby (1603–1665) has enjoyed a recent spate of scholarly attention as a prodigious traveller, political figure, and man of diverse intellectual interests. This article contributes to this scholarship by assessing the commentary on salvation at the heart of Digby’s philosophy of the soul and the historical contexts in which it was produced. It argues that Digby’s thinking on the soul was a meditation on the worldly interactions a Catholic must undertake or avoid in order (...) to achieve salvation. As such, our intellectual historical understanding of Digby is much improved when he is viewed as a scholar who constructed an identity as a thinker adept at advising others on the correct path to beatitude. This article also makes the broader argument for salvation as an important conceptual tool for early modern intellectual historians wishing to accurately map the complex relationship between theology, scholarly argument, and scholarly ambition in the seventeenth century. (shrink)

The term functional domain is often used to describe the region containing the cis acting sequences that regulate a gene locus. “Strong” domain models propose that the domain is a spatially isolated entity consisting of a region of extended accessible chromatin bordered by insulators that have evolved to act as functional boundaries. However, the observation that independently regulated loci can overlap partially or completely raises questions about functional requirements for physically isolated domain structures. An alternative model, the “weak” domain model, (...) proposes that domain structure is determined by the distribution of binding sites for positively acting factors, without a requirement for functional boundaries. The domain would effectively be the region that contains these factor-binding sites. Specificity of promoter-enhancer interactions would play a major role in maintaining the functional autonomy of adjacent genes. Sequences that interfere with these interactions (frequently characterised as insulators) would be selected against if they occurred within the domain but not at the edges, or in the interdomain regions. As a result, insulators would often be found near the borders of domains without necessarily being selected to act as boundaries. BioEssays 22:657–665, 2000. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Partial Truth (Poems 2015–19) by Christopher NorrisNiall GildeaNorris, Christopher. A Partial Truth (Poems 2015–19). The Seventh Quarry Press, 2019. 133pp.“No interval but some event takes place.”(Norris, “Freeze-Frame,” A Partial Truth)A Partial Truth, a collection of thirty-seven pieces, is the seventh volume of poetry by philosopher and literary theorist Christopher Norris. Nobody familiar with Norris’s distinguished career will be surprised to learn that his recent turn to versification (...) is not a repudiation of intellectual and rhetorical seriousness, but a re-emphasis of the same using resources not typically found in academic prose. Norris, an interdisciplinarian long before that term became a slogan, has in his work clocked up considerable epistemological mileage across diverse terrain, his critical friendship with deconstruction leading him to important interventions in analytic and Continental philosophy, institutional critique, philosophy of science and mathematics, legal studies, music, politics and, after all, creative criticism.Creative criticism is a relatively embryonic genre, until recently typified generally by a prose that owes a debt to Jacques Derrida’s Cir-confession, Glas and La carte postale. This is a style that foregrounds the philosophical unsaid – the repressed autobiographical, desirous, and otherwise messy constituents of that canon. It does so in part by jettisoning the academic politesse, and let’s say timidity, which help maintain such statutes of limitation. In a more specific way, creative criticism may be understood as a Romantic development set in train by the “Yale School” of deconstruction and its fellow travelers, straining in their own ways against the subordinate role of the reader and critic instituted by the likes of Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot.In the foreword to his 2017 volume The Winnowing Fan, Norris at once compliments this “strong” critical rebelliousness (xii), and critiques its ecstatic, quasi-apocalyptic hubris, provisionally aligning his own creative criticism with the “poetic diction” (xxi) of eighteenth-century figures such as Dryden and Pope. It is an analogy with caveats – not least Norris’s stated allergy to the “air of arrogance” (Tempus-Fugitives ix) of [End Page 122] their heavily end-stopped tendentiousness – but one which schematizes a poetics that both carries a definite argument and could not make this argument otherwise than in a manner reliant on verse’s formal properties.Note, however, the fact that Norris takes his distance from both strong criticism and those eighteenth-century essayists on the grounds of their shared self-assurance. A steadier presiding influence is William Empson, whose enmity towards Eliotic New Criticism, which “fixes a prescriptive gulf between poetry and other kinds of discourse,” makes him a political forebear, dissenting from modern forms of literary historical doctrinalism, specifically “that whole anti-rationalist complex of ideas that made the discontinuity between poetic and non-poetic language into a shibboleth of aesthetic, ethical, and (though rarely advertised as such) socio-political principle” (Tempus-Fugitives xix–xx). Norris is no straightforward disciple of Empson – who regarded Derrida, and the other “horrible Frenchmen” Norris used to invite him to read, as “so very disgusting, in a simple moral or social way, that I cannot stomach them” (qtd. in Haffenden 52). And yet, one constant quality of both Norris’s verse and prose criticism is a welcome sobriety of explication when it comes to the more recondite or outright flamboyant enclaves of modern European thought.A Partial Truth, and Norris’s books of verse generally, are explicit in outlining the ways in which his poetry functions as a reaction to the diaristic, mumbling slackness of much contemporary poetry; but does his turn to verse also indicate some reaction to contemporary theory? A Partial Truth’s “Foreword,” with modesty, states that “[i]f these poems have any distinctive merit then it lies in the treatment of interesting ideas in a way that deploys certain formal means to draw out complexities and further implications that would lie beyond the reach of a prose rendition” (14). We will specify some of the relations between form and discursive complexity presently, but for now, it is worth suggesting that Norris’s commitment to verse forms of historically recognizable kinds forecloses from him the mealy-mouthed, argumentatively fugitive character of... (shrink)

For the relatively small number of scholars who have worked on him, the English Catholic philosopher, courtier, and pirate Sir Kenelm Digby (1603–1665) has proven a difficult figure to study compre...

In 1833, Henry Alford, a Cambridge don, writes to an ‘earthly friend’ entreating help to cure his intolerance for some of his fellow Cantabrigians. He is, subsequently, visited in dreams by an unearthly friend. One hundred and sixty years later, John Holloway writes Civitatula, a poem celebrating Cambridge University's history. The year before, Holloway had been busy protesting the award of Derrida's Honorary Doctorate there. Reflecting on the turbulence of 1968, Holloway's narrator suggests a Cantabrigian encounter with extra-terrestrials as tonic (...) to this agitation. These oneiric visitations coalesce around a certain saying otherwise, which is also the saying of the other. They thus come into the orbit of Bartleby the Scrivener, he whom Derrida considers ‘the secret of literature’. This post-critical work of conspiracy theory considers, then, the force of this ‘secret’ in both space and time, whilst posing the question of how fantastic might the search for meaning become. (shrink)

This is the first study of the Cambridge Affair. Drawing upon archival and unpublished material, little-known texts pertaining to the Affair, and Derrida’s own oeuvre, this original account offers an historical and philosophical reconstruction of this crucial debate.

Religiosity is a prominent feature of the Geschwind syndrome, a behavioural pattern found in some cases of temporal lobe epilepsy. Since the 1950s, when Wilder Penfield induced spiritual feelings by experimental manipulation of the temporal lobes, development of brain imaging technology has revealed neural correlates of intense emotional states, spurring the growth of neurotheology. In their secular empiricism, psychiatry, neurology and psychology are inclined to pathologise deviant religious expression, thereby reinforcing the dualism of objective and phenomenal worlds. Considering theological perspectives (...) and the idea of cosmic consciousness, the authors urge a holistic approach to the spiritual events of epileptic aura, potentially leading to a deeper understanding of the mind and its transcendent potential. (shrink)

Qualitative data typically contain multiple identifiable characteristics about people, places and events, in the unique voice of each participant. This short report considers sensitivity and security of audio-recordings, drawing attention to a lack of guidelines for researchers on the preservation or destruction of such data. The authors urge debate on this issue, with due consideration to both ethics and scientific rigour.

Here is presented for the first time a comprehensive review and analysis of the several roles played by idealization procedures in the logic, mathematics and models that lie at the heart of modern, twentieth century physics. It is only through idealization of one form or another that the objects and processes of modern physics become tractable. The essays in this volume will be of interest to all those who are concerned with the uses of models in physics, and the relationships (...) between models and the real world. The essays in this volume cover the role of idealization in all the main areas of modern physics, ranging from quantum theory, relativity theory and cosmology to chaos theory. (shrink)

Knowledge excludes luck. According to the received view, this intuition reveals that knowing is essentially modal in character. This paper demurs. Either knowledge does not exclude luck, or the entailment reveals nothing about its conceptual character. It is argued that knowledge excludesaccidentality, and that this notion is not modal but causal‐explanatory. There are three central tasks. The first is to explicate the concept of accident. The second is to argue that the concepts of luck and accident are “intensionally distinct,” which (...) is to say that no member of the intension of either holds on both. The third is to argue that an anti‐accident requirement on knowledge is preferable to an anti‐luck analogue on abductive grounds. (shrink)

_Brute Science_ investigates whether biomedical research using animals is, in fact, scientifically justified. Hugh LaFollette and Niall Shanks examine the issues in scientific terms using the models that scientists themselves use. They argue that we need to reassess our use of animals and, indeed, rethink the standard positions in the debate.

Biological systems exhibit complexity at all levels of organization. It has recently been argued by Michael Behe that at the biochemical level a type of complexity exists--irreducible complexity--that cannot possibly have arisen as the result of natural, evolutionary processes and must instead be the product of (supernatural) intelligent design. Recent work on self-organizing chemical reactions calls into question Behe's analysis of the origins of biochemical complexity. His central interpretative metaphor for biochemical complexity, that of the well-designed mousetrap that ceases to (...) function if critical parts are absent, is undermined by the observation that typical biochemical systems exhibit considerable redundancy and overlap of function. Real biochemical systems, we argue, manifest redundant complexity--a characteristic result of evolutionary processes. (shrink)

This paper maintains (following Yougrau 1987; 2000 and Hinchliff 1996) that the dead and other former existents count as examples of non-existent objects. If the dead number among the things there are, a further question arises: what is it to be dead—how should the state of being dead be characterised? It is argued that this state should be characterised negatively: the dead are not persons, philosophers etc. They lack any of the (intrinsic) qualities they had while they lived. The only (...) facts involving the dead are facts about the relations they stand in—including the relations they bear to the qualities they formerly instantiated, and the intentional relations they stand in to us. Given an appropriate conception of qualities the dead can be said to be quality-less objects: bare particulars. The ‘Bare Particular Theory’ of individuals, it is argued, is coherent if and only if it concedes that the bare particulars it allows for don’t exist. The account of the dead and other former existents as bare particulars does justice to the misfortune of death, and points the way to a general theory of nonexistent objects. (shrink)

Following the deaths of ten Irish republican hunger strikers in 1981, radical Basque nationalists and Irish republicans of the Basque izquierda abertzale and Irish republican movement respectively, began to develop ever closer ties of transnational “solidarity”. In addition to the relationship between Herri Batasuna and Sinn Féin, more ad hoc organisational links in areas such as youth, prisoner, and language advocacy, fostered a shared political culture at the intersection of both movements, which was periodically reflected through the prism of cultural (...) expression. Utilising a wide array of primary sources, this article explores and analyses, for the first time, the emergence and development of this transnational nexus, from the hunger strikes of 1981 to the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. (shrink)

Francis Crick once remarked, "...the ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is in fact to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry" [1966:10]. Arguments to the contrary have been marshalled by many biologists and philosophers, notably Mayr [1986, 1988], and Rosenberg [1985]. Such arguments notwithstanding, reductionist hopes are still alive and well in both biological and philosophical circles. It seems reasonable to suppose that a first step in a reductionist programme would be the reduction or elimination (...) of non-biochemical, biological properties to biochemical properties. (shrink)