How the formidable diversity of forms emerges from developmental and evolutionary processes is one of the most fascinating questions in biology. The homeodomain‐containing Hox proteins were recognized early on as major actors in diversifying animal body plans. The molecular mechanisms underlying how this transcription factor family controls a large array of context‐ and cell‐specific biological functions is, however, still poorly understood. Clues to functional diversity have emerged from studies exploring how Hox protein activity is controlled through interactions with PBC class (...) proteins, also evolutionary conserved HD‐containing proteins. Recent structural data and molecular dynamic simulations add further mechanistic insights into Hox protein mode of action, suggesting that flexible folding of protein motifs allows for plastic protein interaction. As we discuss in this review, these findings define a novel type of Hox‐PBC interaction, weak and dynamic instead of strong and static, hence providing novel clues to understanding Hox transcriptional specificity and diversity. (shrink)

Is suffering really bad? The late Derek Parfit argued that we all have reasons to want to avoid future agony and that suffering is in itself bad both for the one who suffers and impersonally. Nietzsche denied that suffering was intrinsically bad and that its value could even be impersonal. This paper has two aims. It argues against what I call ‘Realism about the Value of Suffering’ by drawing from a broadly Nietzschean debunking of our evaluative attitudes, showing that a (...) recently influential response to the debunking challenge (the appeal to phenomenal introspection) fails. It also argues that a Nietzschean approach is well suited to support the challenge and is bolstered by the empirical literature. As strangers to ourselves, we cannot know whether suffering is really intrinsically bad for us. (shrink)

Animals who live in cities must coexist with us. They are, as a result, entitled to the conditions of their flourishing. This article argues that, as the boundaries of cities and urban areas expand, the boundaries of our conception of captivity should expand too. Urbanization can undermine animals’ freedoms, hence their ability to live good lives. I draw the implications of an account of “pervasive captivity” against the background of the Capabilities Approach. I construe captivity, including that of urban animals, (...) as affecting a range of animal capabilities, understood as freedoms, and I address some tensions within Nussbaum’s treatment of human-animal conflicts. Using the Capabilities Approach as a guide, I will attempt to motivate a convergence between habitat preservation in urbanized environments, urban design guided by justice, and the individual freedoms of animals. (shrink)

Our discussion of the commentaries begins, at the evolutionary level, with issues raised by our account of the evolution of morality in terms of partner-choice mutualism. We then turn to the cognitive level and the characterization and workings of fairness. In a final section, we discuss the degree to which our fairness-based approach to morality extends to norms that are commonly considered moral even though they are distinct from fairness.

(in press, under contract with MIT Press, accepted on June 30th, 2006). Attention, Information and Epistemic Perception. In Terzis, G. & Arp, R. (Eds) Information and the Living Systems: Essays in the Philosophy of Biology. The MIT Press. (14,000 words).

The contemporary discussion of modesty has focused on whether or not modest people are accurate about their own good qualities. This essay argues that this way of framing the debate is unhelpful and offers examples to show that neither ignorance nor accuracy about the good qualities related to oneself is necessary for modesty. It then offers an attention-based account, claiming that what is necessary for modesty is to direct one’s attention in certain ways. By analyzing modesty in this way, we (...) can best explain the distinct features of modesty, keep much of what is intuitive in contemporary accounts, and better understand why modesty is a virtue at all. (shrink)

Le présent article revient sur le dernier ouvrage de Thomas Piketty, Capital et idéologie (2019). Nous commençons par inscrire l’ouvrage dans l’argument développé par l’auteur dans ses précédents ouvrages, avant d’en souligner un certain nombre de limites. Nous questionnons d’abord la manière dont Piketty pense le capitalisme, avant d’en venir à sa théorie de l’idéologie. Enfin, nous tenterons de définir les contours et limites du projet de dépassement du capitalisme de Piketty, c’est-à-dire sa vision d’une société juste, d’un « socialisme (...) participatif », développée au dernier chapitre de l’ouvrage. (shrink)

How might a human communication system be bootstrapped in the absence of conventional language? We argue that motivated signs play an important role (i.e., signs that are linked to meaning by structural resemblance or by natural association). An experimental study is then reported in which participants try to communicate a range of pre-specified items to a partner using repeated non-linguistic vocalization, repeated gesture, or repeated non-linguistic vocalization plus gesture (but without using their existing language system). Gesture proved more effective (measured (...) by communication success) and more efficient (measured by the time taken to communicate) than non-linguistic vocalization across a range of item categories (emotion, object, and action). Combining gesture and vocalization did not improve performance beyond gesture alone. We experimentally demonstrate that gesture is a more effective means of bootstrapping a human communication system. We argue that gesture outperforms non-linguistic vocalization because it lends itself more naturally to the production of motivated signs. (shrink)

Punitive behaviours are often assumed to be the result of an instinct for punishment. This instinct would have evolved to punish wrongdoers and it would be the evidence that cooperation has evolved by group selection. Here, I propose an alternative theory according to which punishment is a not an adaptation and that there was no specific selective pressure to inflict costs on wrongdoers in the ancestral environment. In this theory, cooperation evolved through partner choice for mutual advantage. In the ancestral (...) environment, individuals were in competition to be recruited in cooperative ventures and it was vital to share the benefits of cooperation in a mutually advantageous manner. If individuals took a bigger share of the benefits, their partners would leave them for more interesting partners. If they took a smaller share, they would be exploited by their partners who would receive more than what they had contributed to produce. This competition led to the selection of a sense of fairness, a cognitive adaptation aiming to share equally the benefits of cooperation in order to attract partners. In this theory, punishment is not necessary for the evolution of cooperation. Punitive behaviours are only a way to restore fairness by compensating the victim or penalizing the culprit. Drawing on behavioural economics, legal anthropology, and cognitive psychology, I show that empirical data fit better with this framework than with the theory of group selection. When people punish, they do so to restore fairness rather than to help the group. (shrink)

This paper compares two explanations of the process by which human communication systems evolve: iterated learning and social collaboration. It then reports an experiment testing the social collaboration account. Participants engaged in a graphical communication task either as a member of a community, where they interacted with seven different partners drawn from the same pool, or as a member of an isolated pair, where they interacted with the same partner across the same number of games. Participants’ horizontal, pair‐wise interactions led (...) “bottom up” to the creation of an effective and efficient shared sign system in the community condition. Furthermore, the community‐evolved sign systems were as effective and efficient as the local sign systems developed by isolated pairs. Finally, and as predicted by a social collaboration account, and not by an iterated learning account, interaction was critical to the creation of shared sign systems, with different isolated pairs establishing different local sign systems and different communities establishing different global sign systems. (shrink)

[R]eflection is a system of thought no less closed than insanity, with this difference that it understands itself and the madman too, whereas the madman does not understand it.– Merleau-Ponty, Phen...

The belief that the spirits of the dead can return to haunt the living exists either as a tenet or as a marginal conviction in all civilizations, whether ancient or modern. More often than not, the dead do not return to reunite the living with their loved ones but rather to lead them into some dreadful snare, entrapping them with disastrous consequences. To be sure, all the departed may return, but some are predestined to haunt: the dead who have been (...) shamed during their lifetime or those who took unspeakable secrets to the grave. From the brucolacs, the errant sprits of outcasts in ancient Greece, to the ghost of Hamlet’s vengeful father, and on down to the rapping spirits of modern times, the theme of the dead—who, having suffered repression by their family or society, cannot enjoy, even in death, a state of authenticity—appears to be omnipresent on the fringes of religions and, failing that, in rational systems. It is a fact that the “phantom,” whatever its form, is nothing but an invention of the living. Yes, an invention in the sense that the phantom is meant to objectify, even if under the guise of individual or collective hallucinations, the gap that the concealment of some part of a loved one’s life produced in us. The phantom is, therefore, also a metapsychological fact. Consequently, what haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others.Because the phantom is not related to the loss of a loved one, it cannot be considered the effect of unsuccessful mourning, as is the case of melancholics or of all those who carry a tomb within themselves. It is the children’s or descendants’ lot to objectify these buried tombs through diverse species of ghosts. What comes back to haunt are the tombs of others. The phantoms of folklore merely objectify a metaphor active within the unconscious: the burial of an unspeakable fact within the loved one.Here we are in the midst of clinical psychoanalysis and still shrouded in obscurity, an obscurity, however, that the nocturnal being of phantoms can, paradoxically, be called upon to clarify. The most recently published book of essays by Nicolas Abraham is Rythmes de l’oeuvre, de la traduction et de la psychanalyse . “Notes on the Phantom” is the preliminary statement of his theory of transgenerational haunting. Nicholas Rand, assistant professor of French at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, is the English-language editor of Abraham’s works. (shrink)

If panpsychism is true, it suggests that consciousness pervades not only our brains and bodies but also the entire universe, prompting a reevaluation of our existential attitudes. Hence, panpsychism potentially fulfills psychological needs typically addressed by religious beliefs, such as a sense of belonging and purpose but also transcendence. The discussion is organized into two main areas: the implications of panpsychism for basic human existential needs, such as feelings of kinship, ommunication, and loneliness; and for greater existential questions relating to (...) mystical experiences including transcendent unity and alleviation of the fear of death. In conclusion panpsychism may provide a deeper meaning in life for some people but its broader impact depends on individual dispositions and the cultural context in which it is embedded. (shrink)

This essay defends the possibility of preemptive forgiving, that is, forgiving before the offending action has taken place. This essay argues that our moral practices and emotions admit such a possibility, and it attempts to offer examples to illustrate this phenomenon. There are two main reasons why someone might doubt the possibility of preemptive forgiving. First, one might think that preemptive forgiving would amount to granting permission. Second, one might think that forgiving requires emotional content that is not available prior (...) to wrongdoing. If, however, preemptively forgiving is genuinely possible—as this essay hopes to illustrate—then this fact has implications for our understanding of both relational normativity and the nature of forgiveness. (shrink)

The claim that the observation of a violation of a Bell inequality leads to an alleged alternative between nonlocality and non-realism is annoying because of the vagueness of the second term.

Henrich et al.’s article fleshes out in a very useful and timely manner comments often heard but rarely published about the extraordinary cultural imbalance in the recruitment of participants in psychology experiments and the doubt this casts on generalization of findings from these “weird” samples to humans in general. The authors mention that one of the concerns they have met in defending their views has been of a methodological nature: “the observed variation across populations may be due to various methodological (...) artifacts that arise from translating experiments across contexts” (sect. 7.2, para. 1). Here we want to express a less sweeping methodological concern. While accepting the general conclusions and recommendations of the article, we believe they should be complemented with a.. (shrink)

Interest in the computational aspects of modeling has been steadily growing in philosophy of science. This paper aims to advance the discussion by articulating the way in which modeling and computational errors are related and by explaining the significance of error management strategies for the rational reconstruction of scientific practice. To this end, we first characterize the role and nature of modeling error in relation to a recipe for model construction known as Euler’s recipe. We then describe a general model (...) that allows us to assess the quality of numerical solutions in terms of measures of computational errors that are completely interpretable in terms of modeling error. Finally, we emphasize that this type of error analysis involves forms of perturbation analysis that go beyond the basic model-theoretical and statistical/probabilistic tools typically used to characterize the scientific method; this demands that we revise and complement our reconstructive toolbox in a way that can affect our normative image of science. (shrink)

In Study 1, we examined the moderating impact of alexithymia (i.e., a difficulty identifying and describing feelings to other people and an externally oriented cognitive style) on the automatic processing of affective information. The affective priming paradigm was used, and lower priming effects for high alexithymia scorers were observed when congruent (incongruent) pairs involving nonverbal primes (angry face) and verbal target were presented. The results held after controlling for participants' negative affectivity. The same effects were replicated in Studies 2 and (...) 3, with trait anxiety and depression entered as additional covariates. In Study 3, no moderating impact of alexithymia was found for verbal-facial pairs suggesting that the results cannot be merely explained in terms of transcoding limitations for high alexithymia scorers. Overall, the present results suggest that alexithymia could be related to a difficulty in processing and automatically using high arousal emotional information to respond to concomittant behavioural demands. (shrink)

Most people agree that inflicting unnecessary suffering upon animals is wrong. Many fewer people, including among ethicists, agree that painlessly killing animals is necessarily wrong. The most commonly cited reason is that death (without pain, fear, distress) is not bad for them in a way that matters morally, or not as significantly as it does for persons, who are self-conscious, make long-term plans and have preferences about their own future. Animals, at least those that are not persons, lack a morally (...) significant interest in continuing to live. At the same time, some argue that existence itself can be good, insofar as one’s life is worth living. For animals, a good life can offset a quick, if early, death. So, it seems to follow that breeding happy animals that will be (prematurely) killed can be a good thing overall. Insofar as slaughter and sale makes it economically sustainable to raise new ones, who would otherwise not exist, raising and killing animals for food who will have lives worth living is good overall. It benefits them as well as consumers, and makes the world better by adding to the sum of happiness. The process of raising and killing animals with positive welfare produces a sequence of replacement that maintains or increases overall welfare, all else being equal (assuming in particular no overall negative impact on the welfare of other parties). Call this the Replaceability Argument (RA) and the ensuing controversy the Replaceability Problem (RP). This is a problem at the crossroads of the ethics of killing, agricultural ethics, procreation ethics, and population ethics. (shrink)

In a 1993 paper, I argued that empirical treatments of the epistemologyused by scientists in experimental work are too abstract in practice tocounter relativist efforts to explain the outcome of scientificcontroversies by reference to sociological forces. This was because, atthe rarefied level at which the methodology of scientists is treated byphilosophers, multiple mutually inconsistent instantiations of theprinciples described by philosophers are employed by contestingscientists. These multiple construals change within a scientificcommunity over short time frames, and these different versions ofscientific methodology (...) can determine the outcome of a controversy. Iillustrated with a comparatively detailed analysis of the methodologyused by biologists debating the existence of an entity called thebacterial mesosome between the mid-1950s and the mid-1970s. This 1993piece has drawn several critiques in the philosophical literature. Inthis present piece I respond to these critiques and argue that they failto address the core argument of the original paper, and I reflectfurther on the methodologies of philosophers of science pursuingempirical or `naturalistic' epistemology. (shrink)

The picture of moral development defended by followers of Aristotle takes moral cultivation to be like playing a harp; one gets to be good by actually spending time playing a real instrument. On this view, we cultivate a virtue by doing the actions associated with that virtue. I argue that this picture is inadequate and must be supplemented by imaginative techniques. One can, and sometimes must, cultivate virtue without actually performing the associated actions. Drawing on strands in Buddhist philosophy, I (...) explain several methods of moral development that rely on imagination and visualization rather than overt action. These techniques are essential in cases where cultivating virtue the way one practices the harp is impossible. In particular, I focus on single-event virtues, first-time virtuous acts, and morally dangerous situations. (shrink)

High and low alexithymia scorers were confronted with a modified visual oddball task that allowed the study of categorical perception of emotional expressions on faces. Participants had to quickly detect a deviant (rare) morphed face that shared or did not share the same emotional expression as the frequent one. Expected categorical perception effects, which were also neurophysiologically indexed, showed that rare stimuli were detected faster if they depicted a different emotional expression compared to rare stimuli depicting the same emotional expression (...) than the frequent one. Even if no differences were observed at a behavioural level, high alexithymia scorers evidenced overall delayed neurophysiological responses in components related to the attentional processing of rare emotional faces. Moreover, the categorical perception effects for event-related components associated with the attentional processing were smaller in high alexithymia scorers and were even absent for anger. These results show that high alexithymia scorers present discrimination delays that are already observed at the attentional level. (shrink)

RESUMEN El objetivo de este trabajo es reconstruir los diferentes aportes realizados por David Hume al análisis del lenguaje moral y de la argumentación práctica, es decir, a las cuestiones que hoy se agrupan bajo de el nombre de Metaética. Muchas de sus puntualizaciones y argumentos son conocidos y tuvieron una notable influencia en la metaética contemporánea, pero otros pasajes de su obra no tuvieron tal atención, y es mi interés resaltarlos y destacar su importancia. En este artículo me ocuparé (...) de unos y de otros. PALABRAS CLAVEHUME–METAÉTICA–SUBJETIVISMO AXIOLÓGICO–GUILLOTINA DE HUME– LENGUAJE MORALABSTRACT The objective of this study is to reconstruct the different contributions made by David Hume to the analysis of moral language and practical argumentation, issues which today are grouped as Metaethics. Many of his points and arguments are known and had a remarkable influence on the contemporary metaethics, but other passages of his work had no such attention, and is my interest, highlight them and its importance. In this article I will deal with ones and othersKEY WORDSHUME METAETHICS–AXIOLOGICAL SUBJETIVISM–HUME´S GUILLOTINE–MORAL LENGUAGE. (shrink)

We present a new proof of soundness/completeness of tableaux with respect to dialogical games in Classical First-Order Logic. As far as we know it is the first thorough result for dialogical games where finiteness of plays is guaranteed by means of what we call repetition ranks.

Many of us, even on our happiest days, struggle to quiet the constant buzz of anxiety in the background of our minds. All kinds of worries--worries about losing people and things, worries about how we seem to others--keep us from peace of mind. Distracted or misled by our preoccupations, misconceptions, and, most of all, our obsession with ourselves, we don't see the world clearly--we don't see the world as it really is. In our search for happiness and the good life, (...) this is the main problem. But luckily there is a solution, and on the path to understanding it, we can make use of the rich and varied teachings that have developed over centuries of Buddhist thought. With clarity and compassion, Nicolas Bommarito explores the central elements of centuries of Buddhist philosophy and practice, explaining how they can improve your life and teach you to live without fear. Mining important texts and lessons for practical guidance, he provides a friendly guide to the very practical goals that underpin Buddhist philosophy. After laying out the basic ideas, Bommarito walks readers through a wide range of techniques and practices we can adopt to mend ingrained habits. Rare for its exploration of both the philosophy that motivates Buddhism and its practical applications, this is a compassionate guide to leading a good life that anyone can follow. (shrink)

I defend an account of when and why anger is morally virtuous or vicious. Anger often manifests what we care about; a sports fan gets angry when her favorite team loses because she cares about the team doing well. Anger, I argue, is made morally virtuous or vicious by the underlying care or concern. Anger is virtuous when it manifests moral concern and vicious when it manifests moral indifference or ill will. In defending this view, I reject two common views (...) about anger and moral character. First, I respond to several arguments that attempt to show that all anger is vicious. Then I respond to the view that some anger is required to be a virtuous person. Anger, on my view, can be morally virtuous but is not a necessary condition for being a virtuous person. This best accommodates not only morally irrelevant failures to get angry but also allows for emotional variation among virtuous people. (shrink)

What can be more fascinating than experimental metaphysics, to quote one of Abner Shimony’s enlightening expressions? Bell inequalities are at the heart of the study of nonlocality. I present a list of open questions, organised in three categories: fundamental; linked to experiments; and exploring nonlocality as a resource. New families of inequalities for binary outcomes are presented.

In Nietzsche's "mature" texts, we are witnessing a complete dissolution of the subject. At first glance, however, this appears highly paradoxical (Wotling 2015), leading some commentators to suggest that there is a real contradiction in Nietzsche's work (Gardner 2009), insofar as the author never ceases to speak of himself and at the same time invites his reader to become who he is. Are we to understand, then, that any self is illusory and constitutes a metaphysical illusion, i.e., that the becoming (...) in which we are always caught according to Nietzsche must make any position of a self impossible, and at the very least diminishing? Following in the footsteps of Alexander Nehamas (1985), we believe that we can overcome the contradiction identified by S. Gardner by showing that Nietzsche's conception of the self is not "realistic", but precisely also fictional and dynamically positive at the same time. (shrink)

This article compares the ability to track individuals lacking mental states with the ability to track intentional agents. It explains why reference to individuals raises the problem of explaining how cognitive agents track unique individuals and in what sense reference is based on procedures of perceptual-motor and epistemic tracking. We suggest applying the notion of singular-files from theories in perception and semantics to the problem of tracking intentional agents. In order to elucidate the nature of agent-files, three views of the (...) relation between object- and agent-tracking are distinguished: the Independence, Deflationary and Organism-Dependence Views. The correct view is argued to be the latter, which states that perceptual and epistemic tracking of a unique human organism requires tracking both its spatio-temporal object-properties and its agent-properties. (shrink)

As Russell's paradox of "the set of all sets that do not contain themselves" indicated long ago, matters go seriously amiss if one operates an ontology of unrestricted totalization. Some sort of restriction must be placed on such items as "the set of all sets that have the feature F' or "the conjunction of all truths that have the feature G." But generally, logicians here introduce such formalized and complex devices as the theory of types or the doctrine of impredictivity. (...) The present paper argues for the informal and elementary idea that the items invoked in a proper identification have themselves already been identified. Even as an explanation is not satisfactory that proceeds in terms of items that themselves require prior explanation, so the same holds with identification. And heed of this elementary idea suffices to sideline those otherwise paradoxical perplexities. (shrink)

El Ethos es el fenómeno de la moralidad en su sentido más amplio. El presente trabajo –de naturaleza programática– esboza la idea de una fenomenología integral del ethos capaz de pensar, evitando toda forma de reduccionismo, sus diversos niveles de sentido. Procedemos en cinco pasos: en primer lugar, sostenemos que las experiencias humanas fundamentales –en particular la experiencia ética– son del orden de la contingencia y que, en consecuencia, sus verdades no se dejan captu-rar por el análisis fenomenológico-transcendental. En segundo (...) término, presentamos la noción de experiencia ética, a la que describimos como la experiencia del contacto traumático de la Ley en su cuádruple carácter: singular, universal, verdadero, y contingente. En tercer lugar, vía la lectura del ensayo de Derrida Violencia y metafísica. Ensayo sobre el pensamiento de Emmanuel Levinas, ponemos en cuestión la tesis de la supuesta preeminencia de la fenomenología –en tanto que idealismo transcendental– respecto del discurso ético. En cuarto término, introducimos la noción de testimonio como la modalidad narrativa, “pre-filosófica”, capaz de expresar de la manera más fiel el sentido de la experiencia ética. Por último, distinguimos cinco niveles fundamentales del ethos y, sobre esta base, señalamos algunas de las tareas específicas de una fenomenología integral del ethos.The Ethos is the phenomenon of morality in its broadest sense. Our programmatic essay sketches the idea of a comprehen-sive phenomenology of the ethos capable of thinking –non-reductively– its different layers of meaning. We proceed in five steps: first, we claim that fundamental human experiences –in particular, ethical experience– are contingent in nature and that, as a consequence, their truths cannot be grasped by a phenomenologico-transcendental analysis. Second, we describe the notion of ethical experience as a traumatic experience of contact with the Law in its quadruple character: singular, universal, true, and contingent. Third, through a reading of Derrida’s Violence and Metaphysics. An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas, we question the alleged preeminence of phenomenology –as transcendental idealism– over ethical discourse and praxis. Fourth, we introduce the notion of testimony as the kind of “pre-philosophical” narrative able to convey most faithfully the meaning of ethical experience. Finally, we distinguish five fundamental layers of the ethos and, on the basis of these distinctions, we identify some of the specific tasks of a comprehensive phenomenology of the ethos. (shrink)

I take 'informal logic' to be the (descriptive and normative) study of 'real arguments'-arguments which are or have been used with the aim of convincing others of a point of view. I argue that the informal logic tradition thus conceived (i) lends strong support to something like Quine's view that our beliefs really support one another like the filaments in a spider's web--and thus that the traditional view that implication is an asymmetric relation is false; (ii) suggests that the classic (...) division of arguments into deductive and inductive has distorted our thinking about the evaluation of real arguments; and (iii) implies that naturalised epistemology is on the right track. (shrink)