Proper wiring of the nervous system requires tight control of the number of nerve terminals that innervate a target tissue. Recent work by Deppmann et al.,1 now suggests that this is achieved by feedback‐mediated neuronal competition for target‐derived survival cues. The authors' model is inspired by the theory for pattern formation based on self‐activation and lateral inhibition, proposed by Meinhardt and Gierer more than 30 years ago.2 BioEssays 30:929–933, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Unlike explanation in science, explanation in mathematics has received relatively scant attention from philosophers. Whereas there are canonical examples of scientific explanations, there are few examples that have become widely accepted as exhibiting the distinction between mathematical proofs that explain why some mathematical theorem holds and proofs that merely prove that the theorem holds without revealing the reason why it holds. This essay offers some examples of proofs that mathematicians have considered explanatory, and it argues that these examples suggest a (...) particular account of explanation in mathematics. The essay compares its account to Steiner's and Kitcher's. Among the topics that arise are proofs that exploit symmetries, mathematical coincidences, brute-force proofs, simplicity in mathematics, merely clever proofs, and proofs that unify what other proofs treat as separate cases. (shrink)

In recent years, social workers have raised a new concern about the appearance of a new category among the working poor. Even employed, there are people so overburdened by the cost of living and so under compensated that they cannot afford a place to sleep. Contrary to popular opinion, according to the website for the Coalition for the Homeless, forty-four percent of the homeless in first world countries actually have jobs. In No Fixed Abode, Marc Augé's pathbreaking ethnofiction--a fictional (...) ethnography--a man named Henri narrates his strange existence in the margins of Paris. By day he walks the streets, lingers in conversation with the local shopkeepers, and sits writing in cafés, but at night he takes shelter in an abandoned house. From here, we see a progressive erosion of Henri's identity, a loss of bearings, and a slow degeneration of his ability to relate to others. But then he meets the artist Dominique, whose willingness to share her life with him raises questions about who he has become and about what a person needs in order to be a part of society. This is a book about how we live in geographical space and how work and patterns of domicile affect our status and our inner being. Despite the apparent simplicity of the fictional premise, Augé's book asks serious questions about the nature of our culture. (shrink)

Qu'y a-t-il de commun entre le personnage du Marchand de Venise de Shakespeare, Portia, le philosophe de la démocratie moderne, Spinoza, et le penseur de l'inconscient, Freud? Ils inventent tous les trois une manière " marrane " d'être juif, en jouant la comédie de l'universalité pour laquelle ils cryptent ce qu'ils cherchent. Persécutés par l'inquisition, obligés de mimer la vie chrétienne, les Marranes portent en eux et au-delà un double jeu, une comédie judéo-chrétienne. Il ne s'agit pas pour eux d'une (...) nouvelle religion, mais d'un secret et de nouvelles Lumières qui constituent peut-être un signe adressé aux temps à venir. La scène judéo-chrétienne, habitée par les Marranes, est comme l'inconscient de la démocratie européenne, elle a été enterrée par l'histoire et on a tenté d'effacer les traces. Les Marranes déjouent le trait d'union judéo-chrétien, en rejouant les équivoques des épîtres de Saint Paul. Ils nous invitent à repenser et à subvertir le théâtre qui commande, depuis ces épîtres, la pensée politique (notamment celle du sacrifice et de la guerre) et à libérer une tout autre idée de la démocratie : une vie libérée de la politique religieuse et de la religion politique (qui se développent, aujourd'hui, sur l'économie abyssale de la dette, de la pauvreté et de la misère). Les Marranes nous obligent aussi à interroger la philosophie contemporaine qui oscille entre l'anamnèse et l'amnésie du théâtre judéo-chrétien de la pensée politique. (shrink)

The paper focuses on violence, claiming that it is not action, but silence and inaction that become?murderous?, given that we are forced into a permanent and impossible process of choosing between responsibility for the other and the possibility of responding to a call for help. Still, this position is not final and the author offers certain alternative strategies, such as rebellion, goodness, critique and shame.

This book defends morality against the critiques of egoims, subjectivism, and relativism. It argues that we can and should construe some moral standards as objective and that justice and self-development are the cornerstones of healthy morality. Opening with a dialogue meant to tease and provoke the reader, the book's subsequent chapters treat misconceptions about morality, the possibility of unselfish action, the nature of free will and moral responsibility, and the identity of moral right and wrong.

L’auteur aborde l’approche synchronique en histoire des idées et développe la théorie du discours social qu’il a exposée dans nombre de ses livres en tant qu’analyse en totalité en coupe synchronique de ce qui s’écrit et se diffuse dans un état de société. Il définit dans le cadre de cette problématique les notions fondamentales d’hégémonie discursive, de topographie, d’interdiscursivité et de sociogramme notamment.

En I Corinthiens 13,2, l'apôtre Paul fait une allusion polémique au Commentaire d'Habacuc 7,4-5. Cette allusion, transparente pour certains des destinataires de l'Épître, est masquée à d'autres par des procédés rhétoriques. In I Corinthians 13,2 the apostle Paul alludes polemically to the Commentary on Habakkuk 7,4-5. This allusion is evident to some addressees of the Epistle, but to others it is concealed by rhetorical devices.

Recent experiments in normal subjects using neuroimaging demonstrate that the dorsal cortico-cortical pathway is involved during purely perceptual activities. Pathological cases with right posterior parietal lesions show deficits in visuospatial perception. It is argued that the radical dichotomy between perception and action pathways, as heralded in Milner and Goodale's book should be reexamined. The idea of distributed networks using resources in both visual pathways and recruited as a function of task demands is presented.

Nevin & Grace's approach is an interesting and useful attempt to find ways to measure “core” effects of a history of exposure to reinforcement. The momentum analogy makes intuitive sense, and the evidence for its utility is increasing. Several questions remain, however, about how the analogy will fare in the case of concurrent rather than sequential activities, about the use of extinction as a method to test resistance to change, and about the generality of some of the effects.

La langue dans laquelle ils ecrivent n'est-elle pour les philosophes que l'instrument indispensable, mais indifferent, de la communication de leurs pensees? Ce pourrait etre le cas, s'ils n'etaient exposes, a chaque pas, au caractere particulier de cette langue, et s'ils ne devaient inventer des stategies diverses pour l'affronter, comme, par exemple, leur enracinement avere et declare dans une culture, voire dans un sol determine, devenu patrie de la philosophie - mais tout aussi bien le parti-pris de la traduction, de la (...) desappropriation de la langue, et meme de la culture, dans ce qu'elles ont de national. Or quelles que soient ces strategies opposees, elles investissent toutes le rapport a la langue, aux langues ou au langage d'une promesse eschatologique. C'est de la langue que vient le malheur, mais c'est aussi un autre rapport au langage qui est source de salut, ou de redemption, voire de revolution. C'est donc une autre philosophie du langage, qui se decouvre a travers les oeuvres de Nieztsche, Kraus, Benjamin, Rosenzweig, Heidegger ou Derrida, une philosophie qui n'est exempte de considerations theologiques et politiques. Qu'attend-on des langues? Au fil conducteur de la promesse, c'est a cette question que les etudes qui composent le present volume entendent reconduire. (shrink)

Relaying reflections from Les Mouches, Morts sans sépulture, Les mains sales and Huis-clos to some important arguments concerning death in L’Etre et le néant, the author discusses the relation between death and freedom. Criticizing Martin Heidegger’s views on Sein zum Tode, Jean-Paul Sartre argues that one’s relation to death deeply implies relations with the others, the living, but also the dead ones. The experience of death being absurd, the others are those who can make it meaningful, in the same way (...) that I do for their own death. Sartre’s philosophy of freedom defends the original choice of the ones that I will remember and cherish, in a community that is more important than the living one: the community established beyond death. (shrink)

This paper proposes a model of human uniqueness based on an unusual distinction between two contrasted kinds of political competition and political status: (1) antagonistic competition, in quest of dominance (antagonistic status), a zero-sum, self-limiting game whose stake—who takes what, when, how—summarizes a classical definition of politics (Lasswell 1936), and (2) synergistic competition, in quest of merit (synergistic status), a positive-sum, self-reinforcing game whose stake becomes “who brings what to a team’s common good.” In this view, Rawls’s (1971) famous virtual (...) “veil of ignorance” mainly conceals politics’ antagonistic stakes so as to devise the principles of a just, egalitarian society, yet without providing any means to enforce these ideals (Sen 2009). Instead, this paper proposes that human uniqueness flourished under a real “adapted veil of ignorance” concealing the steady inflation of synergistic politics which resulted from early humans’ sturdy egalitarianism. This proposition divides into four parts: (1) early humans first stumbled on a purely cultural means to enforce a unique kind of within-team antagonistic equality—dyadic balanced deterrence thanks to handheld weapons (Chapais 2008); (2) this cultural innovation is thus closely tied to humans’ darkest side, but it also launched the cumulative evolution of humans’ brightest qualities—egalitarian team synergy and solidarity, together with the associated synergistic intelligence, culture, and communications; (3) runaway synergistic competition for differential merit among antagonistically equal obligate teammates is the single politically selective mechanism behind the cumulative evolution of all these brighter qualities, but numerous factors to be clarified here conceal this mighty evolutionary driver; (4) this veil of ignorance persists today, which explains why humans’ unique prosocial capacities are still not clearly understood by science. The purpose of this paper is to start lifting this now-ill-adapted veil of ignorance, thus uncovering the tight functional relations between egalitarian team solidarity and the evolution of human uniqueness. (shrink)

The Legal Services Act 2007 provided a framework for a liberalised marketplace for legal services. The most significant responses to this by the Bar appear in the Bar Standards Board Handbook, whic...

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« Alles Ständische und Stehende verdampft, alles Heilige wird entweiht, und die Menschen sind endlich gezwungen ihre Lebensstellung, ihre gegenseitigen Beziehungen mit nüchternen Augen anzusehen. » « Tout ce qui était stable et établi se volatilise, tout ce qui était sacré se trouve profané et les humains sont enfin forcés de considérer d’un regard sobre leur position dans la vie..