Since Sidney Winter published his paper on “Knowledge and competence as Strategic assets”, the number of publications on the role of knowledge in economics has immensely grown. l-Iere we shall analyze that role from an evolutionary point of view, and try to show that the discussion about concepts like “evolution” is not closed, and that the Darwinian framework of evolutionary economics is in debate.

This article discusses some of the ways in which Darwinism has influenced a small minority of economists. It is argued that Darwinism involves a philosophical as well as a theoretical doctrine. Despite claims to the contrary, the uses of analogies to Darwinian natural selection theory are highly limited in economics. Exceptions include Thorstein Veblen, Richard Nelson, and Sidney Winter. At the philosophical level, one of the key features of Darwinism is its notion of detailed understanding in terms of (...) chains of cause and effect. This issue is discussed in the context of the problem of causality in social theory. At least in Darwinian terms, the prevailing causal dualism — of intentional and mechanical causality — in the social sciences is found wanting. Once again, Veblen was the first economist to understand the implications for economics of Darwinism at this philosophical level. For Veblen, it was related to his notion of 'cumulative causation'. The article concludes with a discussion of the problems and potential of this Veblenian position. (shrink)

The wide and complex range of technologies produced and used in the contemporary societies has challenged the analysis from the different fields of social sciences. In this sense, in order to elaborate a study that aim at understanding the relationship between technological progress and the ongoing institutional changes that mark the capitalist societies, we believe it is necessary to adopt an interdisciplinary approach combining methodologies from Economics and Sociology fields. Therefore, this study proposes the development of an interdisciplinary dialogue between (...) the economic sociology of Pierre Bourdieu and the evolutionary economics developed by authors such as Giovanni Dosi, Sidney Winter, Richard Nelson and Bhaven Sampat. In doing so, we intend to demonstrate that a theory guided by Marx’s historical materialism, as it is the case of evolutionary economics, can be enriched by a materialist theory of symbolic, such as that of Pierre Bourdieu. In searching the comprehension of the complementarity between material and symbolic forces, this study addresses the conflictual process surrounding the formulation of the regulatory institutions to the biotechnology sector in Brazil over the last two decades. More precisely, through a case study, we seek to demonstrate that the convergence of discourses and interests between prestigious scientific organizations and the multinational companies that control the agrobiotechnology industry has been relevant to allow this new technological paradigm to make progress. Finally, we raise some questions concerning this alliance between business and science and the conflicts that revolve around the rapid expansion of the genetically modified crops worldwide. (shrink)

IN THE winter and spring of 1031,1 was invited to give a series of ten lectures at Harvard University. The subject chosen was the Philosophy of Art; the lectures are the origin of the present volume. The Lectureship was founded in memory of William James and I esteem it a great honor to have this book associated even indirectly with his distinguished name. It is a pleasure, also, te recall, in connection with the lectures, the unvarying kindness and hospitality (...) of my colleagues in the department of philosophy at Harvard. I am somewhat embarrassed in an effort to acknowledge indebtedness to other writers on the subject. Some aspects of it may be inferred from authors mentioned or quoted in the text. I have read on the subject for many years, however, more or less widely in English literature, somewhat less in French and still less in German, and I have absorbed much from sources which I cannot now directly recall. Moreover, my obligations to a number of writers are much greater than might be gathered from allusions to them in the volume itself. My indebtedness to those who have helped me directly can be more easily stated. Dr. Joseph Ratner gave me a number of valuable references. Dr. Meyer Schapiro was good enough to read the twelfth and thirteenth chapters and to make suggestions which I have freely adopted. Irwin Edman read a large part of the book in manuscript and I owe much to his suggestions and criticism. Sidney Hook read many of the chapters, and their present form is largely the result of discussions with him; this statement is especially true of the chapters on criticism and the last chapter. My greatest indebtedness is to Dr. A. C. Barnes. The chaptershave been gone over one by one with him, and yet what I owe to his comments and suggestions on this account is but a small measure of my debt. I have had the benefit of con versations with him through a period of years, many of which occurred in the presence of the unrivaled collection of pictures he has assembled. The influence of these conversations, together with that of his books, has been a chief factor in shapingmy own thinking about the philosophy of esthetics. Whatever is sound in this volume is due more than I can say to the great educational work carried on in the Barnes Foundation. That work is of a pioneer quality comparable to the best that has been done in any field during the present generation, that of science not ex cepted. I should be glad to think of this volume as one phase of the widespread influence the Foundation is exercising. I am indebted to the Barnes Foundation for permission to reproduce a number of illustrations and to Barbara and Willard Morgan for the photographs from which the reproductions were made. J. D. (shrink)

The article examines two cases of adoption of evolutionary ways of thinking by modern economists: Nelson and Winter’s (Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change, 1982), and evolutionary game theory (1990s and after). In both cases, the authors explicitly refer to natural selection in an economic context. I show that natural selection is taken in two different senses, which correspond to two general conceptions of the principle of natural selection, one of which contains reproduction and heredity as key elements, whereas the (...) other does not. (shrink)

While information technologies present organizations with opportunities to become more competitive, unsettled social norms and lagging legislation guiding the use of these technologies present organizations and individuals with ethical dilemmas. This paper presents two studies investigating the relationship between intellectual property and privacy attitudes, Machiavellianism and Ethical Ideology, and working in R&D and computer literacy in the form of programming experience. In Study 1, Machiavellians believed it was more acceptable to ignore the intellectual property and privacy rights of others. Programmers (...) and R&D workers considered violating intellectual property rights more acceptable. Programmers did not consider violating privacy rights more acceptable, but R&D workers did. Finally, there was an interaction between Machiavellianism, programming and R&D. Machiavellians who also had programming experience or worked in R&D found violations of intellectual property much more acceptable. The effect of Machiavellianism on attitudes toward violations of privacy was enhanced by working in R&D, but not by programming experience. In Study 2, idealists believed it was less acceptable to ignore the intellectual property and privacy rights of others. Relativists found it more acceptable to violate intellectual property rights, though they did not consider it more acceptable to violate privacy rights. Those with programming experience were more accepting of intellectual property rights violations, but not of privacy violations. Finally, programming experience moderated the relationship between idealism, relativism and attitudes toward these unethical information practices. Implications for diminishing unethical behavior among Machiavellians, Relativists, programmers and those in R&D are discussed. (shrink)

In this article, we explain the mechanisms that allow social enterprises to balance their missions, and the risk of mission drift as organizations grow. We empirically explore Incubator-BUS (I-BUS), a student organization within a private Brazilian university, which sought to incubate cooperatives for vulnerable groups. Although initially successful in balancing its missions, I-BUS then failed. We show how scaling-up can complicate the balancing of different missions within the same organization. We propose that, to balance their missions, social enterprises—especially recently formed (...) and democratically managed enterprises—need not only “spaces of negotiation,” as suggested in the literature, but also “herding spaces” that connect an organization to its institutional context. We indicate why herding spaces are critical, but then show how scaling-up can result in organizational “compartmentalization” that undermines them. (shrink)

Some spoken words are iconic, exhibiting a resemblance between form and meaning. We used native speaker ratings to assess the iconicity of 3001 English words, analyzing their iconicity in relation to part-of-speech differences and differences between the sensory domain they relate to. First, we replicated previous findings showing that onomatopoeia and interjections were highest in iconicity, followed by verbs and adjectives, and then nouns and grammatical words. We further show that words with meanings related to the senses are more iconic (...) than words with abstract meanings. Moreover, iconicity is not distributed equally across sensory modalities: Auditory and tactile words tend to be more iconic than words denoting concepts related to taste, smell and sight. Last, we examined the relationship between iconicity and systematicity. We find that iconicity in English words is more strongly related to sensory meanings than systematicity. Altogether, our results shed light on the extent and distribution of iconicity in modern English. (shrink)

Sentences with multiple occurrences of plural definites give rise to certain effects suggesting that distributivity should be modeled by polyadic operations. Yet in this paper it is argued that the simpler treatment of distributivity using unary universal quantification should be retained. Seemingly polyadic effects are claimed to be restricted to definite NPs. This fact is accounted for by the special anaphoric (dependent) use of definites. Further evidence concerning various plurals, island constraints, and cumulative quantification is shown to support this claim. (...) In addition, it is shown that the evidence against a simple atomic version of unary distributivity is not decisive either. In the (uncommon) cases where distributivity with definites is not strictly atomic, they can be analyzed as dependent on implicit quantifiers. (shrink)

‘Sovereignty’, Arendt says, ‘is contradictory to’ the human condition. It is not, in any event, the kind of thing that can be shared across generations. Subsequent generations lack sovereignty to the precise degree that they are bound by the decisions of their predecessors. It is no answer to say that contemporary citizens participate in the sovereignty of a whole, transgenerational people. To paraphrase de Tocqueville, later generations are not free because they are not entirely equal, and they are not equal (...) because they are not entirely free. Where ‘sovereignty’ is a metaphysical concept that transcends time, recognition is an act of the imagination that extends empathy diachronically in both directions. An earlier generation treats its successors with recognition and respect by bequeathing the best system it can manage and entrusting later generations to exercise the same freedom that it enjoyed. Democratic law can exist across generations only through negation. Later citizens may accept as valid the law made by their predecessors. But, in doing so, they implicitly affirm their right to alter, amend, or abolish what came before. Only by freely affirming the choices of their predecessors can current citizens participate in something approaching freedom. (shrink)

This paper investigates the identity and function of τὰ μεταξύ in Aristotle and the Early Academy by focussing primarily on Aristotle’s criticisms of Xenocrates of Chalcedon, the third scholarch of Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s direct competitor. It argues that a number of passages in Aristotle’s Metaphysics (at Β 2, Μ 1-2, and Κ 12) are chiefly directed at Xenocrates as a proponent of theories of mathematical intermediates, despite the fact that Aristotle does not mention Xenocrates there. Aristotle complains that the (...) advocates for mathematical intermediates produce theories that are ontologically and epistemologically inefficient (related to, but not confined by, the “Uniqueness Problem”); that their so-called “intermediates” feature properties opposed to those of the forms on which those intermediates are thought to depend; and that what is μεταξύ must be between objects of a different genus. In all three cases, Aristotle’s criticisms are shown to be reactions to the metaphysics and cosmology of Xenocrates, especially his doctrine of the intermediary demonic isosceles triangle souls. Xenocrates emerges as a prime candidate for Aristotle’s critique of Platonist τὰ μεταξύ theories – equal to, and possibly even exceeding, Plato as target. (shrink)

There are three main types of number used in modern, industrialized societies. Cardinals count sets (e.g., people, objects) and quantify elements of conventional scales (e.g., money, distance), ordinals index positions in ordered sequences (e.g., years, pages), and nominals serve as unique identifiers (e.g., telephone numbers, player numbers). Many studies that have cited number frequencies in support of claims about numerical cognition and mathematical cognition hinge on the assumption that most numbers analyzed are cardinal. This paper is the first to investigate (...) the relative frequencies of different number types, presenting a corpus analysis of morphologically unmarked numbers (not, e.g., “eighth” or “21st”) in which we manually annotated 3,600 concordances in the Corpus of Contemporary American English. Overall, cardinals are dominant—both pure cardinals (sets) and measurements (scales)—except in the range 1,000–10,000, which is dominated by ordinal years, like 1996 and 2004. Ordinals occur less often overall, and nominals even less so. Only for cardinals do round numbers, associated with approximation, dominate overall and increase with magnitude. In comparison with other registers, academic writing contains a lower proportion of measurements as well as a higher proportion of ordinals and, to some extent, nominals. In writing, pure cardinals and measurements are usually represented as number words, but measurements—especially larger, unround ones—are more likely to be numerals. Ordinals and nominals are mostly represented as numerals. Altogether, this paper reveals how numbers are used in American English, establishing an initial baseline for any analyses of number frequencies and shedding new light on the cognitive and psychological study of number. (shrink)

The claim of liberal constitutionalism is that a text-like object or a ‘diplomatically abstract’ set of principles can work a deflection of disagreements within a pluralist polity. But this project assumes both that pluralism remains amenable to reason and that reason is a capacity independent of the profound differences of meaning, value, and forms of life that shape those disagreements. Neither assumption is correct. Differences in norms, values, and forms of life inevitably undergird and structure differences in meaning, perception, and (...) interpretation. Consequently, a constitution (even when written and accompanied by judicial review) will necessarily unfold in an ongoing process of political cooperation and contestation. Legitimacy can arise only from the practice of democracy itself – that is, self-governance under conditions that realistically accord equal recognition and respect to all participants. Law is not some abstract entity or prior fixation, special and above. It is not, as Michelman once said, ‘an autonomous force’ that provides ‘an external untouchable rule of the game’. It is just another social institution or performative practice that does (or does not) reflect our democratic nomos. To be committed, as a strong democrat, to the rule of law is to be committed to the idea that we make the rules by which we govern ourselves. Equal voice, equal power, and equal law are just self-government. They are internal to – that is, constitutive of – the game. They are not untouchable; indeed, they are being manhandled every day. But they nevertheless describe a democratic constitution that fully legitimates itself in its performance. (shrink)

The Strongest Meaning Hypothesis of Dalrymple et al (1994,1998), which was originally proposed as a principle for the interpretation of reciprocals, is extended in this paper into a general principle of plural predication. This principle applies to complex predicates that are composed of lexical predicates that hold of atomic entities, and determines the pluralities in the extension of the predicate. The meaning of such a complex predicate is claimed to be the truth-conditionally strongest meaning that does not contradict lexical properties (...) of the simple predicates it contains. Weak interpretations of reciprocals (as in the books are stacked on top of each other), plural predicate conjunction (e.g. the books are old and new) and ’atomic’ distributivity in general are derived by a unified mechanism, which ’weakens’ the basic universal meanings of strong reciprocals, boolean conjunction and quantification over atomic entities. (shrink)

The sound system of a language must be able to support a perceptual contrast between different words in order to signal communicatively relevant meaning distinctions. In this paper, we use a simple agent-based exemplar model in which the evolution of sound-category systems is understood as a co-evolutionary process, where the range of variation within sound categories is constrained by functional pressure to keep different words perceptually distinct. We show that this model can reproduce several observed effects on the range of (...) sound variation. We argue that phonological systems can be seen as finding a relative optimum of variation: Efficient communication is sustained while at the same time, hidden category variation provides pathways for future evolution. (shrink)

In this article I begin by discussing the persistent problem of relations between educational inequality and the attainment gap in schools. Because benefits accruing from an education are substantial, the ‘gap’ leads to large disparities in the quality of life many young people can expect to experience in the future. Curriculum knowledge has been a focus for debate in England in relation to educational equality for over 40 years. Given the contestation surrounding views about curriculum knowledge and equality I consider (...) the thinking of two philosophers, Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas, and their work on justice, to trouble the curriculum framework and discourse of knowledge promoted through the policy text of The Importance of Teaching: The Schools White Paper (2010) and later associated policy reforms to the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) curriculum in England. The Schools White Paper aims to make the curriculum more challenging to students by introducing tight controls in terms of the assessment framework and curriculum knowledge. I argue that, when considered through Derrida's perspective on language and meaning and Levinas' view on the ethical responsibility for the other, the reforms present obstacles to the search for a just curriculum. I look to the work of Sharon Todd and Paul Standish for a re-imagination of curriculum as or through relations in the light of Derrida's and Levinas' philosophies. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 5, Page 655-673, June 2022. The standard account of the relation between democracy and the rule of law focuses on law’s liberty-enhancing role in constraining official action. This is a faint echo of the complex, constitutive relation between the two. The Greeks used one word – isonomia – to describe both. If democracy is the system in which people have an equal say in determining the rules that govern social life, then the rule (...) of law is simultaneously before, after, concurrent and synonymous with democracy: It contributes to the formation of citizens with the capacity for self-governance, serves as the instrument through which democratic decisions are implemented, functions as one of the central social practices that constitute citizens as equals and addresses the question of how to ensure that government by the people operates for the people. The rule of law has many independently valuable qualities, including impartiality and predictability. But, to valorise the rule of law for its own sake is to fetishize authority. The fundamental values of the rule of law are as the instrument of democratic self-governance and the expression of the equal dignity of all persons. Democracy thus entails the rule of law, but both implicate the yet more comprehensive ideal of equality. Core rule-of-law values require political norms and conditions of equality, generality and comprehensiveness. In a modern, differentiated society, however, the constitutive relation between democracy and the rule of law is fractured and law becomes the agent of authority. Courts in the modern constitutional state have contributed to the decline of rule-of-law values, supporting role specialization through judge-made immunity doctrines that protect officials at all levels. The crisis of police violence against minorities is a symptom of this breakdown. Greater accountability can ameliorate the problem. But an effective solution requires the fair and equal distribution of political power. (shrink)

In his Florentine Histories, Machiavelli offers an ambivalent portrayal of the revolt of the textile workers in late fourteenth-century Florence, known as the tumult of the Ciompi. On the face of it, Machiavelli's depiction of the insurgent workers is not exactly flattering. Yet this picture is undermined by a firebrand speech, which Machiavelli invents and attributes to an unnamed leader of the plebeian revolt. I interpret this speech as a radical and egalitarian vector of thought opened up by Machiavelli's text. (...) The revolutionary address reveals an untimely and not entirely self-conscious political radicalism, a plebeian politics that repudiates the logic of oligarchic privilege and is simultaneously not available for subsumption under the mantle of civic republicanism. (shrink)

As with biological systems, spoken languages are strikingly robust against perturbations. This paper shows that languages achieve robustness in a way that is highly similar to many biological systems. For example, speech sounds are encoded via multiple acoustically diverse, temporally distributed and functionally redundant cues, characteristics that bear similarities to what biologists call “degeneracy”. Speech is furthermore adequately characterized by neutrality, with many different tongue configurations leading to similar acoustic outputs, and different acoustic variants understood as the same by recipients. (...) This highlights the presence of a large neutral network of acoustic neighbors for every speech sound. Such neutrality ensures that a steady backdrop of variation can be maintained without impeding communication, assuring that there is “fodder” for subsequent evolution. Thus, studying linguistic robustness is not only important for understanding how linguistic systems maintain their functioning upon the background of noise, but also for understanding the preconditions for language evolution. (shrink)

In his 2011 book Justice for Hedgehogs, Ronald Dworkin makes a case for the view that genuine values cannot conflict and, moreover, that they are necessarily mutually supportive. I argue that by prioritizing coherence over the conceptual authenticity of values, Dworkin’s ‘interpretivist’ view risks neglecting what we care about in these values. I first determine Dworkin’s position on the monism/pluralism debate and identify the scope of his argument, arguing that despite his self-declared monism, he is in fact a pluralist, but (...) unusual in denying conflict between plural values. I then set out the structure of his interpretive theory of value relations and present a case of value conflict which I think interpretivism cannot deal with. Following this I argue that there are structural reasons why cases like this are liable to occur and suggest that interpretivism will frequently fail to properly reflect people’s moral commitments because reinterpretation of values has the side effect of excluding important moral commitments from our conceptions of values. While, as Dworkin argues, there are no brute moral facts concerning values, moral psychology constrains the range of acceptable conceptions of values. Given the shortcomings of interpretivism I conclude that we should acknowledge that values may conflict. (shrink)

In this paper we introduce a theoretical framework and a logical application for analysing the semantics and pragmatics of contrastive conjunctions in natural language. It is shown how expressions like although, nevertheless, yet, and but are semantically definable as connectives using an operator for implication in natural language and how similar pragmatic principles affect the behaviour of both contrastive conjunctions and indicative conditionals. Following previous proposals, conditions on contrast in a conjunction are analysed as presuppositions of die conjunction. Further linguistic (...) evidence leads to a distinction between restrictive and non-restrictive connectives of contrast, and consequently between direct and indirect contrast, which are given a precise definition. A general interface for a theory of contrast using possible world semantics for implication is then presented. As a test case, we show how this interface is applicable to the semantics for conditionals that was introduced by Veltman in his article 'Data semantics and the pragmatics of indicative conditionals' (1986). This application yields an extension of Veltman's Data Logic, called Contrastive Data Logic Once appropriate modifications are added to Veltman's pragmatic considerations, we show that contrastive data logic provides an adequate tool for the analysis of substantial linguistic data concerning contrast and implication in natural language. (shrink)

The human masticatory system is a complex functional unit characterized by a multitude of skeletal components, muscles, soft tissues, and teeth. Muscle activation dynamics cannot be directly measured on live human subjects due to ethical, safety, and accessibility limitations. Therefore, estimation of muscle activations and their resultant forces is a longstanding and active area of research. Reinforcement learning (RL) is an adaptive learning strategy which is inspired by the behavioral psychology and enables an agent to learn the dynamics of an (...) unknown system via policy-driven explorations. The RL framework is a well-formulated closed-loop system where high capacity neural networks are trained with the feedback mechanism of rewards to learn relatively complex actuation patterns. In this work, we are building on a deep RL algorithm, known as the Soft Actor-Critic, to learn the inverse dynamics of a simulated masticatory system, i.e., learn the activation patterns that drive the jaw to its desired location. The outcome of the proposed training procedure is a parametric neural model which acts as the brain of the biomechanical system. We demonstrate the model’s ability to navigate the feasible three-dimensional (3D) envelope of motion with sub-millimeter accuracies. We also introduce a performance analysis platform consisting of a set of quantitative metrics to assess the functionalities of a given simulated masticatory system. This platform assesses the range of motion, metabolic efficiency, the agility of motion, the symmetry of activations, and the accuracy of reaching the desired target positions. We demonstrate how the model learns more metabolically efficient policies by integrating a force regularization term in the RL reward. We also demonstrate the inverse correlation between the metabolic efficiency of the models and their agility and range of motion. The presented masticatory model and the proposed RL training mechanism are valuable tools for the analysis of mastication and other biomechanical systems. We see this framework’s potential in facilitating the functional analyses aspects of surgical treatment planning and predicting the rehabilitation performance in post-operative subjects. (shrink)

. Enframing geography: subject, curriculum, knowledge, responsibility. Ethics and Education: Vol. 7, Creating spaces, pp. 277-290. doi: 10.1080/17449642.2013.767004.

ArgumentThis paper explores the relationship between the medium of motion-picture film and the representation of autobiographical memory during the middle decades of the twentieth century. The paper argues that a reciprocal relationship developed between film and memory, in which film was understood as an externalized form of memory, and memory an internalized record of personal experience similar in many respects to film. Memory was often represented as an object-like entity, preserved in stable form within the body, and able to be (...) extracted by the right stimulus or trigger. A particularly important community in which this representation was developed was psychotherapeutic practitioners with psychoanalytic orientations, particularly during and shortly after the Second World War. In special circumstances, therapists and others claimed, records of past life events could be projected, film-like, onto the screen of an individual's conscious, replaying previous experiences in real time. The paper develops a social historical account of this relationship, and reflects on its significance for the history of selfhood in the twentieth century. (shrink)

In 2007, a private corporation specializing in deep-sea salvage retrieved a treasure-laden shipwreck in international waters southwest of the Iberian Peninsula. The wreck was that of a Spanish warship that sunk during the Napoleonic wars. Following the discovery, a legal dispute arose in U.S. federal courts, between the corporate salvors, the Kingdom of Spain, and other litigants. At issue in the legal proceedings was the status of the shipwreck and whether it was protected by sovereign immunity. At the heart of (...) this case are differing political imaginations concerning the authority of states and the role of corporations in the contemporary global order. Through a close reading of court documents and the narratives in which the courts’ rulings are embedded, we demonstrate that the case is symptomatic of the tension in neoliberal sovereignty between two overlapping and at times competing political rationalities: the neoliberal logic of capital and commerce and the logic of sovereign prerogative. (shrink)

More attention has been paid in recent years to the relationship between Aristotle’s science and his ethics, but little effort has been directed toward constructing a concrete model of a science of Aristotle’s ethics. I offer a proposal about how we might go about constructing a science of Aristotle’s ethics. I argue that constructing an axiomatic model for a portion of Aristotle’s ethics is not only possible, but helpful in making explicit relationships among concepts at the core of Aristotle’s theory. (...) The model of an axiomatic approach to Aristotle’s ethics, which I propose in this paper, is only a small first step in constructing a full-blown science of Aristotle’s ethics, but taking this first step goes a long way toward showing that this project is promising. (shrink)

This essay discusses the yoked history of witnessing in science and the law and examines the history of attempts, over the past century, to use science to improve the surety of witness testimony. It examines some of these projects, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s. The essay argues that modern psychology offers a particularly problematic form of expertise because its focus is a task central to the jury’s mandate, the evaluation of a witness and his or her testimony. It concludes (...) that a key feature of modern disputes over the legal relevance of psychological techniques is not the quality or character of the expertise being offered to the court but, rather, the question of whether expertise is needed at all and under what circumstances it should impinge on the jury’s decision making. (shrink)

This article presents a case for thinking that moral principles within Aristotle's ethical theory can be both codifiable and action-guiding without minimizing the role of practical reason in determining what should be done. I argue that McDowell dismisses this possibility too hastily. Much of the force of this case rests on my interpretation of "for the most part" relationships in Aristotle.

About one in forty babies is born with a recognisable congenital anomaly at birth. Rapid progress is being made in recognising the genetic contribution to these defects. From over 2000 likely single gene malformation syndromes in humans the gene has been isolated or mapped in about 10%. Despite the availability of animal models, the study of malformations in humans continues to reveal novel genes and unpredicted functions for known genes. The importance of the study of clinical malformations to the understanding (...) of embryological development in humans and other organisms is discussed and reviewed. (shrink)