This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. We must find new and innovative ways of conceptualizing transboundary energy issues, of embedding concerns of ethics or justice into energy policy, and of operationalizing response to them. This book stems from the emergent gap; the need for comparative approaches to energy justice, and for those that consider ethical traditions that go beyond the classical Western approach. This edited volume unites the fields of energy justice and comparative philosophy to (...) provide an overarching global perspective and approach to applying energy ethics. We contribute to this purpose in four sections: setting the scene, practice, applying theory to practice, and theoretical approaches. Through the chapters featured in the volume, we position the book as one that contributes to energy justice scholarship across borders of nations, borders of ways of thinking and borders of disciplines. The outcome will be of interest to undergraduate and graduate students studying energy justice, ethics and environment, as well as energy scholars, policy makers, and energy analysts. (shrink)

Beginning in the 1970s and culminating in the first two decades of the 21st century, there has been a marked shift in the sciences from a predominantly reductionist and mechanistic approach to a broader and more holistic viewpoint. It goes without saying that such a shift in point of view will have significant implications, not only for the sciences but for our concepts of nature and of human beings. The present essay is an attempt to assess the significance of this (...) change in the focus of the sciences and to describe the nature of its components. Originally, it had a far more limited scope, that of comparing two of the parts of the new nonreductionist stance: brain plasticity and biological systems theory. Unfortunately, my understanding of one of these factors (systems theory) turned out to be incorrect, while the section on brain plasticity was incomplete. The result of this dual realization is an essay of far greater scope, taking in both new developments in the sciences far beyond that of plasticity, and reassessing the content and impact of systems theory, which is greater than I had thought. I will begin with a study of systems theory, dealing first with the unexpected mathematics which made its present status possible. Then I will deal with its history, which reaches back over a century. One of the confusions into which we are liable to fall is to fail to distinguish the old systems theory from the new. This is even more likely because the two versions of the theory have many features in common. (shrink)

The following introduction offers a broad survey of the history of quantum physics. It then outlines the position of each contributor in this Special Focus Section concerning the collapse of the quantum wave function and defines three important terms (Hilbert space, Schrödinger’s cat, and decoherence) used in discussing this topic.

John Mullarkey. Bergson and Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 206 pp. ISBN 0 7486 0957 1 (paperback), US$20; Keith Ansell Pearson, Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual : Bergson and the Time of Life (London: Routledge, 2002), 246 pp. ISBN 0 415 23727 0 (cloth), US$90, 0 415 23728 9 (paperback), US$27.95; Leonard Lawlor, The Challenge of Bergson: Phenomenology, Ontology, Ethics (New York: Continuum, 2003), 153 pp. ISBN 0 8264 6802 0 (cloth), US$73.50, 0 8264 6803 9 (paperback), (...) US$24.95; John Mullarkey, ed., The New Bergson [Angelaki Humanities] (New York: Manchester University Press, 1999), 235 pp. ISBN 0 7190 5380 3 (cloth), US$69.95; 0 7190 5553 9 (paperback), US$29.95; John Mullarkey and Keith Ansell Pearson, eds., Bergson: Key Writings [Athlone Contemporary European Thinkers], trans. Melissa McMahon (New York: Continuum, 2002), 402 pp. ISBN 0 8264 5728 2 (cloth), US$99.95, 0 8264 5729 0 (paperback), US$33.95. (shrink)

Our energy systems are truly international, and yet even now, our energy policies tend to be grounded at the national level and in many instances, remain ill-equipped to tackle transboundary energy issues. Our energy policy systems are also largely detached from the concerns of ethics or justice. It follows that we must find new and innovative ways of not conceptualising these normative issues, but of operationalising response to them. This book stems from the emergent gap: the need for comparative approaches (...) to energy justice, and for those that consider non-Western ethical traditions. Opening the edited volume, this chapter begins by giving context to the concept of “energy justice” itself and outlines our comparative philosophical approach to it, focusing specifically on “global philosophy” for its role in dialectically engaging with philosophies from around the world. We then show how the different chapters of the volume contribute to this purpose in four parts: setting the scene, practice, applying theory to practice and theoretical approaches. The final section of this chapter concludes with reflections on the contribution of global philosophy approaches to energy justice as with a set of future research recommendations. Through these recommendations, and all of those within, we position the book as one that contributes to energy justice scholarship across borders of nations, borders of ways of thinking and borders of disciplines. (shrink)

This study concerns the ideas of one particular philosopher, Henri Bergson, whose views of time, intuition, and creativity have had a significant impact on art, literature, and the humanities, both in his time and in our own. Although it is generally recognized that Bergson's ideas have significantly impacted the arts and the humanities, it has not been recognized how they have also had a creative influence on the sciences as well. Nor has it been realized that this was one of (...) his most basic contentions. Bergson's conception of intuition--his fundamental insight into reality--was not limited to fugitive insights into human existence. By realizing previously unsuspected possibilities for research and discovery, his endeavors were also meant to make possible new advances in the sciences. If it enabled his cousin by marriage, Marcel Proust, to explore human memory in depth, it also inspired psychologists like Daniel Schachter to use Bergson's ideas to make real contributions to contemporary memory science. If his notion of creative evolution brought many thinkers to a belief in human creative freedom, it brought others (notably Alexis Carrel and Pierre Lecomte de Noüy) to a scientific study of biological time. Among his successful speculations was the theory of the Big Bang cosmology. 'Getting Bergson Straight' shows many points at which Bergson's ideas anticipated future developments in the sciences. This was seen clearly by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis de Broglie who viewed Bergson's physics as presaging quantum physics. Thus, the text is well situated for arts, humanities, social science, and natural science classrooms studying creative thinking and/or intellectual history. (shrink)

The main contributor to this volume is David Louis Miller of the University of Texas at Austin. Both a student of Mead's and an editor and defender of his thought, Miller attempts in his essay and subsequent responses to demonstrate both the overall coherence of Mead's philosophy and the extent to which that philosophy makes room for the concept of individual creativity. Miller thus corrects many false or otherwise superficial interpretations of Mead's social psychology, and of, by implication, contemporary symbolic (...) interactionism. (shrink)

This essay summarizes recent advances made in the analysis of mosaic patches in chimaeric epithelia of the mouse. The conclusions drawn from the observed patterns are relevant to the behaviour of expanding cell populations during tissue growth and homeostasis. References are made to clonal analysis of Drosophila.

Theories of perception and of memory are closely allied. The binding problem (which considers how bits of perception are reassembled by the brain) leads to neurophysiological subjectivism. This could be outflanked by arguing with Bergson that perceiving consciousness is out in the world. Thus the brain would bind only behavioral “maps.” In turn, consciousness would retain our personal pasts. Such personal (episodic) memories both help us to recognize present objects and to perform creative acts. Memory, although retentive, is also creative. (...) This is important in rethinking biological and evolutionary memory. (shrink)

Audio recording of "a group of Philosophical and Environmental Songs," as described by Gunter.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Creativity and the Context of NoveltyPete A. Y. GunterAn article might have many virtues: breadth, novel perspective, conceptual background, to name a few. The strongest virtue of Professor Crosby's article is in the sharpening of arguments. In both his book, Novelty, and in the present article, he sharpens arguments which surround the concepts of determinism, novelty, and freedom. The end result is increased clarity; it is also, or so (...) it seems to this writer, the increased plausibility of arguments for novelty and indeterminism.I.It has often been argued that strict determinism (henceforth, determinism) has paradoxical implications. Thus William James protests that it leads inescapably to a "Block Universe": one in which everything is given at once—past, present, and future. In such a world, Crosby points out, nothing can happen at all. But Crosby adds to this a second, crucial point. If determinism is true, he insists, we must give up not only the belief that anything actually happens but also the commonsense belief that cause precedes effect. This result of strict determinism has not been stressed by either its opponents or its proponents.Quite probably, those who have argued for determinism have not reflected on the unpalatable idea that cause does not precede effect. Our ordinary experience exhibits the billiard ball falling into the side pocket after we have hit it with the cue stick. If we dive into a swimming pool, we enter the water dry and then become wet. And, the splash occurs after we separate ourselves from the board. Determinism, however useful in helping us to bring order out of our experience, radically conflicts with fundamental features in nature that lead us to think and examine cause and effect to begin with.There is another respect in which Crosby sharpens our assumptions. Ordinarily [End Page 60] we think of novelty and causality as contradictories. In fact, Crosby insists, they are correlatives. Neither is reducible to the other, nor is either alternative prior to the other. The two together constitute a primordial feature of the universe, such that where in some contexts indeterminism is reduced to a minimum, perhaps an infinitesimal, in others (presumably those in which creativity plays a major role) causality is reduced to a minimum and novelty predominates. Hence philosophy is not saddled with the task of trying to show how novelty can possibly find a place in an exclusively deterministic world. Novelty and determinism are, from the beginning, both present throughout.This viewpoint, if accepted, would obviate any attempt to graft indeterminism into a deterministic universe, so to speak, from without. It would also tend to dissolve the dualisms foisted on us by Descartes and, in another way, by Kant, which radically separate mind (or free will) from matter (or, in Kant's case, "phenomena") on the grounds that the former contains novelty and the latter does not. In Crosby's view some element of novelty is already present in matter. Equally, in his view, "mind" in many, perhaps most, contexts contains a strong element of determinism.There is still a further way of taking Crosby's arguments. It is this. Strict determinists must, he shows, hold that the universe is timeless. Past, present, and future coexist and, literally, nothing happens. It then follows that if one accepts the reality of motion, growth, and dissolution in the world, then in doing so one has decreed the falsehood of strict determinism. It does not (and on Crosby's grounds cannot) follow that there is no determinism in nature. There must, on his grounds, be degrees of causal determinism. But there must also be real novelty. One thus has a transcendental argument, beginning from the simple acceptance of real mobility in the world. That is, "If there is real transformation in the world, then strict determinism must be wrong. There is real transformation in the world. Therefore strict determinism must be wrong." This would make life very hard for the strict determinist, for whom the slightest lapse into a commonsense acceptance of the restless mobility of nature entails the denial of his or her basic thesis.A further argument of Crosby's, however, gives me difficulties. He argues that strict determinism... (shrink)

Progressive supranuclear palsy is a movement disorder with prominent tau neuropathology. Brain diseases with abnormal tau deposits are called tauopathies, the most common of which is Alzheimer's disease. Environmental causes of tauopathies include repetitive head trauma associated with some sports. To identify common genetic variation contributing to risk for tauopathies, we carried out a genome-wide association study of 1,114 individuals with PSP and 3,247 controls followed by a second stage in which we genotyped 1,051 cases and 3,560 controls for the (...) stage 1 SNPs that yielded P ≤ 10-3. We found significant previously unidentified signals associated with PSP risk at STX6, EIF2AK3 and MOBP. We confirmed two independent variants in MAPT affecting risk for PSP, one of which influences MAPT brain expression. The genes implicated encode proteins for vesicle-membrane fusion at the Golgi-endosomal interface, for the endoplasmic reticulum unfolded protein response and for a myelin structural component. © 2011 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

The author informs us that he would have preferred to title his book Time, the Forgotten Dimension. It is not, he cautions, that scientists fail to consider time or forget to include the term "t" in their equations. But, he insists, from Thales to Einstein and even to Planck and Schroedinger, Western thought has been dominated by the tendency to treat time as a kind of illusion or appearance cloaking a timeless reality. This tendency, taken at the extreme, would treat (...) past, present, and future as if they coexisted and deny to irreversibility, indeterminacy, and creativity the slightest shred of reality. The author, an important contributor to recent "nonequilibrium" thermodynamics, believes that this age-old tendency has finally run its course and needs to be supplemented by a newer and potentially more fruitful tendency to "take time seriously": that is, to study irreversibility and indeterminacy on their own terms, as fundamental features of the real world. The result, he argues, may be the resolution of many heretofore unresolvable problems. (shrink)

Although the topic of value congruence has attracted considerable attention from researchers and practitioners, evidence for the link between person–supervisor value congruence and followers’ reactions is less robust than often assumed. This study addresses three central issues in our understanding of person–supervisor value congruence by assessing the impact of objective person–supervisor value congruence rather than subjective value congruence, by examining the differential effects of value congruence in strongly versus moderately held values, and by exploring perceived empowerment as a central mediating (...) mechanism. Results of a multi-source study comprising 116 person–supervisor dyads reveal that objective value congruence relates to followers’ job satisfaction and affective commitment and that this link can be explained by followers’ perceived empowerment. Moreover, polynomial regression and response surface analyses reveal that congruence effects vary with the importance that leaders and followers ascribe to a certain value: Congruency in strongly held values have more robust relations with followers’ outcomes than congruence in moderately held values. (shrink)

Exploring the construct of social-responsibility orientation across three Asian and two Western societies, we show evidence that top-level executives in these societies hold fundamentally different beliefs about their responsibilities toward different stakeholders, with concomitant implications for their understanding and enactment of responsible leadership. We further find that these variations are more closely aligned with institutional factors than with cultural variables, suggesting a need to clarify the connection between culture and institutions on the one hand and culture and social-responsibility orientations on (...) the other. (shrink)