If we are to ensure the persistence of species in an increasingly warm world, of interest is the identification of drivers that affect the ability of an organism to resist thermal stress. Underpinning any organism's capacity for resistance is a complex interplay between biological and physical factors occurring over multiple scales. Tropical coral reefs are a unique system, in that their function is dependent upon the maintenance of a coral–algal symbiosis that is directly disrupted by increases in water temperature. A (...) number of physical factors have been identified as affecting the biological responses of the coral organism under broadscale thermal anomalies. One such factor is water flow, which is capable of modulating both organismal metabolic functioning and thermal environments. Understanding the physiological and hydrodynamic drivers of organism response to thermal stress improves predictive capabilities and informs targeted management responses, thereby increasing the resilience of reefs into the future. (shrink)

Graphical AbstractDriving patterns of coral bleaching over reefs are a suite of biophysical interactions where the physical environment modulates organism response through an interplay with intrinsic biological functioning. Flow conditions over reefs can mitigate the physiological impacts of thermal stress across multiple spatial scales. More details can be found in article number 1800226 by Charlotte E. Page et al., Seeking Resistance in Coral Reef Ecosystems: The Interplay of Biophysical Factors and Bleaching Resistance under a Changing Climate, DOI: 10.1002/bies.201800226.

Human aesthetic experiences are pervasive; they are triggered by faces, art, natural scenery, foods, ideas, theories, and decision-making situations, among many sources, and seem to be a distinctive trait of our species. Our moral sense, understood as our capacity to judge events, actions, or people as good or bad, appropriate or inappropriate, also seems to be an exclusively human endowment (Ayala 2010). As part of the scientific efforts to characterize the biological foundations of our human uniqueness, recently there has been (...) interest in the brain’s underpinnings of aesthetic reactions to art on the one hand, and in the neural correlates of moral judgment and decision-making on the other (Greene and Paxton .. (shrink)

Objective: The field of clinical ethics is relatively new and expanding. Best practices in clinical ethics against which one can benchmark performance have not been clearly articulated. The first step in developing benchmarks of clinical ethics services is to identify and understand current practices.Design and setting: Using a retrospective case study approach, the structure, activities, and resources of nine clinical ethics services in a large metropolitan centre are described, compared, and contrasted.Results: The data yielded a unique and detailed account of (...) the nature and scope of clinical ethics services across a spectrum of facilities. General themes emerged in four areas—variability, visibility, accountability, and complexity. There was a high degree of variability in the structures, activities, and resources across the clinical ethics services. Increasing visibility was identified as a significant challenge within organisations and externally. Although each service had a formal system for maintaining accountability and measuring performance, differences in the type, frequency, and content of reporting impacted service delivery. One of the most salient findings was the complexity inherent in the provision of clinical ethics services, which requires of clinical ethicists a broad and varied skill set and knowledge base. Benchmarks including the average number of consults/ethicist per year and the hospital beds/ethicist ratio are presented.Conclusion: The findings will be of interest to clinical ethicists locally, nationally, and internationally as they provide a preliminary framework from which further benchmarking measures and best practices in clinical ethics can be identified, developed, and evaluated. (shrink)

Philosophie et sciences: voila un theme difficile, central, de notre temps, ou il est necessairement question de son sens. C'est ce sens qu'interrogent, d'une facon a la fois historique et problematique, les essais du present volume. J. Merleau-Ponty questionne les rapports entre sciences et vulgarisation scientifique. J. Ladriere pose le probleme de La normativite de la pensee scientifique. J. Lambert met en evidence le probleme du Livre de la Nature chez Galilee et Kepler. P. Kerszberg confronte les structures internes de (...) la philosophie critique kantienne et de la theorie de la relativite sur la question cosmologique. M. Richir analyse L'illusion transcendantale dans la theorie cantorienne des ensembles. B. d'Espagnat et G. Hottois evoquent le problemes des rapports difficiles, aujourd'hui, entre science et philosophie. (shrink)

A metaphysical strand of C. S. Peirce’s American pragmatism resonates deeply in potential alliance with “incorporeal feminism”: a transcontinental philosophy with origins in Luce Irigaray’s ethics of sexual difference. A psychoanalyst trained by Lacan himself, Irigaray analyzes the unconscious of various philosophical systems, revealing dualism as an underlying phallic structure. In the dualism between idealism and materialism, she explains, the terms become sexually coded: idealism, paternal-masculine; materialism, maternal-feminine. Incorporeal feminism does not merely invert the roles, but radically reimagines the relation (...) between them, postulating the ideal as a maternal condition of possibility for birthing the material into existence; not separate substances but the inseparable activity of materiality making itself. For Peirce, ideas act; and though he was by no means a feminist, his metaphysics lend at least three insights to incorporeal feminism: an alternative to dualism in the trichotomic categories “firstness, secondness, and thirdness”; an evolutionary cosmology where the material universe is a gestating embryo within a womb; and an objective idealism: a model for addressing the dilemma of when sexual difference begins. Within “firstness,” sexual difference is ideal; an incorporeal activity pre-existing and latently imbuing materiality to varying degrees, ultimately expressing itself in certain life-forms as bodily differences. (shrink)

Moral inversion, the fusion of skepticism and utopianism, is a preoccupying theme in Polanyi’s work from 1946 onward. In part 1, the author analyzes Polanyi’s complex account of the intellectual developments that are implicated in a cascade of inversions in which the good is lost through complicated, misguided, and unrealistic dedication to the good. Parts 2 and 3 then address two of the most basic of the objections to Polanyi’s theory voiced by Zdzislaw Najder. To Najder’s complaint that Polanyi is (...) not clear in his use of the term “moral,” the author replies that the pivotal distinction in Polanyi’s moral theory is not the moral against the intellectual, but the passions against the appetites. In considering Najder’s complaint that Polanyi’s argument represents a naive instance of ethnocentric absolutism, the author undertakes to show Polanyi’s consistency and perspectival self-awareness by focusing on Polanyi’s account of authority and dissent within a tradition, as well as on Polanyi’s treatment of persuasion as a heuristic passion. (shrink)

What place has poetry in the teaching or reflection of ethicists? Even poetry that has no obvious political edge can play an important role in refining a poetics of the will, where will is understood at once as the motive power of action and as the seat of both our freedom and our bondage. Poems by W. H. Auden, Anthony Hecht, Galway Kinnell, William Carols Williams, and others are examined against a background provided by the work of Erazim Kohák, H. (...) Richard Niebuhr, and Paul Ricoeur. A poetics of the will requires attention to affirmation, beauty, and wonder, but also to concrete embodiment, full recognition of the complex reality of persons and situations, and mature resistance to the temptation to righteousness and the seduction of despair. (shrink)

Ranging himself against philosophical and theological traditions that he considered “bankrupt,” William H. Poteat sought to set philosophy back on its feet by exemplifying the way one might reason philosophically from a different set of assumptions. His project can, in this respect, be usefully compared to that of F. H. Jacobi two centuries earlier. Poteat and Michael Polanyi offered attuned critiques of philosophical presuppositions and practices. Constructively, both were committed to bringing home the agent and knower who had been evacuated (...) by depersonalized and abstracted accounts of being and knowing. (shrink)

Ranging himself against philosophical and theological traditions that he considered “bankrupt,” William H. Poteat sought to set philosophy back on its feet by exemplifying the way one might reason philosophically from a different set of assumptions. His project can, in this respect, be usefully compared to that of F. H. Jacobi two centuries earlier. Poteat and Michael Polanyi offered attuned critiques of philosophical presuppositions and practices. Constructively, both were committed to bringing home the agent and knower who had been evacuated (...) by depersonalized and abstracted accounts of being and knowing. (shrink)

The Greeks and Romans have been charged with destroying the ecosystems within which they lived. In this book, however, M. D. Usher argues rather that we can find in their lives and thought the origin of modern ideas about systems and sustainability, important topics for humans today and in the future. With chapters running the gamut of Greek and Roman experience – from the Presocratics and Plato to Roman agronomy and the Benedictine Rule – Plato's Pigs brings together unlikely bedfellows, (...) both ancient and modern, to reveal surprising connections. Lively prose and liberal use of anecdotal detail, including an afterword about the author's own experiments with sustainable living on his sheep farm in Vermont, add a strong authorial voice. In short, this is a unique, first-of-its-kind book that is sure to be of interest to anyone working in Classics, environmental studies, philosophy, ecology, or the history of ideas. (shrink)

The author reconstructs the theory of F. Varela with relevance to the hard problem of consciousness. This problem was touched by Varela in relatively late period of his work. However, the implications for dissolution of this problem can be found in his earlier works with H. Maturana. Theory of autopoietic systems ties life and cognition together, resulting in natural historical comprehension of consciousness and its functioning. Autopoiesis, understood as network of processes of production of components used as resources for maintaining (...) these processes, sets organizational invariances, distinguishing living system from its milieu. The main criterion of living system is an ability to maintain autopoietic organization while undergoing structural transformations with environment. Structural plasticity leads to multiple realizability of autopoietic organizations, which, in turn, leads to radical conclusion on nature of knowledge. One can distinguish the knower and the known only contingently, as the structure of knowledge reflects cognitive structure of the knower. This intertwinement permits Varela to introduce the enactivist program, which presupposes not simply reform in the scientific research of consciousness but also rethinking the implications of scientific knowledge itself. Cognition is a sensorimotor constitution of the world. Therefore, consciousness is not an object of material nature among other objects but provides our cognitive access to nature. Varela intended to abandon the theoretical approach to the problem of consciousness. His aim was not to provide a new argument. This is a consequence of the enactivist position which, according to theory of autopoiesis, must be applicable to the knower himself. (shrink)