A legal trade in antiquities existed in Egypt until 1983. A recent publication on the antiquities trade provides the opportunity to scrutinize the process by which the Egyptian Service des Antiquités attempted to control the trade through the issuing of licenses to dealers. This offers a corrective view of Egyptology as something that is as much a bureaucratic process as an academic discipline.

To decode the function and molecular recognition of several recently discovered cytosine derivatives in the human genome – 5-hydroxymethylcytosine, 5-formylcytosine, and 5-carboxylcytosine – a detailed understanding of their effects on the structural, chemical, and biophysical properties of DNA is essential. Here, we review recent literature in this area, with particular emphasis on features that have been proposed to enable the specific recognition of modified cytosine bases by DNA-binding proteins. These include electronic factors, modulation of base-pair stability, flexibility, and radical changes (...) in duplex conformation. We explore these proposals and assess whether or not they are supported by current biophysical data. This analysis is focused primarily on the properties of epigenetically modified DNA itself, which provides a basis for discussion of the mechanisms of recognition by different proteins. 5-hydroxymethylcytosine, 5-formylcytosine, and 5-carboxylcytosine have recently been discovered in mammalian DNA and appear to have essential regulatory roles. Here, we summarize recent investigations into their effects on the structural, chemical, and biophysical properties of DNA, an understanding of which is essential to decoding their behavior in the genome. (shrink)

In this essay, I discuss why consent is invalidated by duress that involves attaching penalties to someone's refusal to give consent. At the heart of my explanation is the Complaint Principle. This principle specifies that consent is defeasibly invalid when the consent results from someone conditionally imposing a penalty on the consent‐giver's refusal to give the consent, such that the consent‐giver has a legitimate complaint against this imposition focused on how it is affects their incentives for consenting. The Complaint Principle (...) says that this consent is defeasibly invalid to make room for the Authorization Principle, which allows sincere authorizations to constitute valid consent, even when these are issued by an agent acting under duress. The Authorization Principle has application only in cases of third‐party duress because when the consent‐receiver is the source of the duress, the consent‐giver is not sincerely authorizing the action. (shrink)

In Section 1, I outline the history of natural law theory, covering Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and Aquinas. In Section 2, I explore two alternative traditions of natural law, and explain why these constitute rivals to the Aristotelian tradition. In Section 3, I go on to elaborate a via negativa along which natural law norms can be discovered. On this basis, I unpack what I call three 'experiments in being', each of which illustrates the cogency of this method. In Section (...) 4, I investigate and rebut two seminal challenges to natural law methodology, namely, the fact/value distinction in metaethics and Darwinian evolutionary biology. In Section 5, I then outline and criticise the 'new' natural law theory, which is an attempt to revise natural law thought in light of the two challenges above. I conclude, in Section 6, with a summary and some reflections on the prospects for natural law theory. (shrink)

The inequitable distribution of domestic and caring labour in different-sex couples has been a longstanding feminist concern. Some have hoped that having both partners at home during the COVID-19 pandemic would usher in a new era of equitable work and caring distributions. Contrary to these hopes, old patterns seem to have persisted. Moreover, studies suggest this inequitable distribution often goes unnoticed by the male partner. This raises two questions. Why do women continue to shoulder a disproportionate amount of housework and (...) childcare despite economic and cultural gains? And why is there a widespread one-sided misrepresentation within different-sex couples about how domestic and caring work is distributed between the two partners? We answer these questions by appealing to affordance perception – the perception of possibilities for action in one's environment. We propose an important gender disparity in the perception of affordances for domestic tasks such as the dishwasher affording emptying, the floor affording sweeping and a mess affording tidying. We argue that this contributes not only to the inequitable distribution of domestic labour but to the frequent invisibility of that labour. We explore the consequences of this hypothesis for resistance and social change. (shrink)

In the middle of the last century, it was common to explain the notion of necessity in linguistic terms. A necessary truth, it was said, is a sentence whose truth is guaranteed by linguistic rules. Quine famously argued that, on this view, de re modal claims do not make sense. “Porcupettes are porcupines” is necessarily true, but it would be a mistake to say of a particular porcupette that it is necessarily a porcupine, or that it is possibly purple. Linguistic (...) theories of necessity fell out of favour with the publication of Kripke’s Naming and Necessity, and Quine’s arguments were put aside. In her recent book, Norms and Necessity, Amie Thomasson presents her modal normativism, which is an updated version of the mid-century theories just described. Quine’s arguments are thus relevant once again. We recapitulate Quine’s central argument, in the context of modal normativism. We then criticise Amie Thomasson’s discussion of de re modality. We finish by briefly presenting an alternative account of de re modal statements, which is compatible with modal normativism. (shrink)

Readers of Nietzsche are not unfamiliar with the thought that his philosophical writings contain numerous at least apparent contradictions. We begin with one of them. On the one hand, Nietzsche takes pride of place in the canonical parade of theatre-haters. Indeed, he himself demands inclusion: ‘I am essentially anti-theatrical’. This antipathy appears to extend to the actor’s ‘inner longing for a role and mask’. On the other hand, Nietzsche is known as an advocate and admirer of the mask: ‘everything profound (...) loves masks’ reads one of his best-known lines. Mask-wearing, whatever that turns out to be, is not only a social strategy, but also a philosophical or intellectual one, as we shall see. The mask has a variety of associations, of course, but a salient one, for Nietzsche, was its relation to the actor, beginning with its use in Greek tragedy. Thus we seem to find a Nietzsche who on the one hand opposes the theatre and the actor’s role-playing and mask-wearing and, on the other hand, who encourages the mask, which he himself associates with acting and theatre. Of course, this tension has potential implications for our understanding of Nietzsche's antipathy to theatre. To take one example, he seems to connect theatre with lack of honesty, including to oneself (GS 368). And yet some have taken Nietzsche as ‘masking’ his own thoughts, as a means to avoid being honest with himself. This chapter looks in detail at the use of the mask in Nietzsche and at how it relates to questions of sincerity, interpretation and his later, naturalist project. (shrink)

One of the recurring themes in Čapek’s play is the existential question of whether the reductionist materialist worldview – the belief that we can fully explain the world, including ourselves, in terms of nothing but physical processes – can accommodate all that is essential to the human being. The materialist worldview triumphed with the scientific revolution, which in turn laid the foundations for the military-industrial complex. This historical shift is represented in the play by the business-minded young Rossum inheriting the (...) bio-engineering methodology from the mad scientist old Rossum. A key difference between the two is that old Rossum’s materialist stance is an ideological commitment, whereas for young Rossum working within a materialist framework is more a matter of convenience: for him it is sufficient for most practical purposes to replicate the machine-like aspects of a person. Where does this leave the soul, or what we today might prefer to call consciousness? The question of whether human nature goes beyond its physical aspects, and whether these subjective aspects can also be artificially replicated, is extremely challenging to address in scientific theory and practice –100 years ago as much as now. (shrink)

an article written with Tom Imbo for the forthcoming Compendium of Quantum Mechanics.

In today’s world driven by technological innovation and change, publisher John Brockman has proclaimed scientists as the new “humanists”. Many in the science arena have seized the public podium not only to discuss advances in their area of expertise, but often to speak almost ex cathedra, on the social and philosophical implications for humans and the planet itself. The break with The Church in the 15th & 16th century set in motion a secular humanism which began the movement within the (...) scholarly communities to separate knowledge into disciplines. Following the Enlightenment, many in the social arena turned from the theory based, deductive, approaches toward the sciences with the hope that this inductive methodology would yield the same success found in the bio-physical arena. While this approach has failed to achieve such heights, “science envy” is now driving academic institutions, particularly in the United States and manydeveloping countries, to reposition The Academy to become innovative and contribute to both the private and public sector much in the same manner that Science’s handmaiden, Technology, has contributed in the bio/physical arena.The Humanities, as sensed by Brockman and others, has turned inward or has been ineffective in responding except to utter the mantra that its area represents humanity’s soul and thus provides the critical knowledge needed to save the planet and thus humans. Yet philosophy has not been able, or is unwilling, to accept the challenge and enter the academic lists or command the public pulpit. In this default, a surrogate, religious fundamentalism, has raised its head above the trenches reminiscent of the ancient Science/ Church confrontation and seeks to restore the idea of salvation in the next world, hoping to destroy the Gnostic ideal of humans being able to create such peace on earth. (shrink)

In this book, a distinguished international group of legal theorists re-examine legal positivism as a prescriptive political theory and consider its implications for the constitutionally defined roles of legislatures and courts. The issues are illustrated with recent developments in Australian constitutional law.

The construct of flexibility has been a focus for research and theory for over 100 years. However, flexibility has not been consistently or adequately defined, leading to obstacles in the interpretation of past research and progress toward enhanced theory. We present a model of socioemotional flexibility—and its counterpart rigidity—at three time scales using dynamic systems modeling. At the real-time scale (micro), moment-to-moment fluctuations in affect are identified as dynamic flexibility. At the next higher meso-time scale, adaptive adjustments to changes in (...) context are characterized as reactive flexibility. At the macro scale is flexibility that occurs across months or years, reflecting flexibility due to developmental or life transitions. Implications of the model and suggestions for future research are discussed. (shrink)

The work of Ezequiel Di Paolo and Hanne De Jaegher has helped to transform the enactive approach from relative obscurity into a hotly debated contender for the future science of social cognition and cognitive science more generally. In this short introduction I situate their contributions in what I see as important aspects of the bigger picture that is motivating and inspiring them as well as the rest of this young community. In particular, I sketch some of the social issues that (...) go beyond mere academic debate, including how the methods and assumptions that inform orthodox cognitive science are intrinsically related to the critical state of affairs in our world today. I conclude with some personal recollections in order to give an idea of the context in which their ideas, and mine as well, came to fruition. (shrink)

“Public health is directly shaped by war, conflict, and capitalism, yet exploring the connections between these processes remains neglected in scholarship and policymaking arenas.” This chapter five lede by social work professors Scott Harding and Kathryn Libal could serve as the epigraph to the entire volume. War and Health is edited by two prominent researchers from Brown University’s Watson Institute Costs of War Project, which seeks a meaningful aggregation of the actual cost of wars, especially those of the new millennium. (...) The volume presents significant findings from nineteen researchers at various institutions, including culturally competent anthropologists. The result is a deep exegesis of syndemics—or synergistic epidemics—that endanger the health of all combatants and civilians. (shrink)

An empirically based family assessment can help family therapists understand how a family functions. In systemic therapy a family is seen as a dynamic system in which the family members form interdependent subsystems. The Social Relations Model is a useful tool to study such interdependence within a family. According to the SRM, each dyadic score is viewed as the sum of an unobserved family effect, an individual actor and partner effect, and a relation-specific effect. If dyadic data are obtained for (...) a specific family using a round robin design, these different SRM effects can be calculated using an ANOVA-approach. To gain insight into the functioning of a particular family, the family-specific SRM effects can be compared to those from a norm sample and it can be deduced whether that family has deviating scores on a particular SRM effect. Currently, such a family assessment relies on the mean and variance of the SRM ANOVA scores in the norm sample. However, family therapists may not always have access to these data, making the current approach of SRM family assessment not as useful in practice. In this article, we introduce a user-friendly web application that uses an alternative method for SRM family assessment. This alternative strategy requires as input the population parameter estimates of SRM means and variances more commonly described in SRM family literature. (shrink)

Discussions of research involving vulnerable populations have left the homeless comparatively ignored. Participation by these subjects in drug studies has the potential to be upsetting, inconvenient, or unpleasant. Participation occasionally produces injury, health emergencies, and chronic health problems. Nonetheless, no ethical justification exists for the categorical exclusion of homeless persons from research. The appropriate framework for informed consent for these subjects of pharmaceutical research is not a single event of oral or written consent, but a multi-staged arrangement of disclosure, dialogue, (...) and permission-giving. Payments and other rewards in biomedical research raise issues of whether it is ethical to offer inducements to the homeless in exchange for participation in drug studies. Such inducements can influence desperate persons who are seriously lacking in resources. The key is to strike a balance between a rate of payment high enough that it does not exploit subjects by underpayment and low enough that it does not create an irresistible inducement. This proposal does not underestimate the risks of research, which are often overestimated and need to be appraised in light of the relevant empirical literature. (shrink)

An argument is presented which shows that coherence theories of justification are committed to a conception of epistemic support which conflicts with an axiom of probability theory.

On December 15, 2011, a final report was issued by the Committee on the Use of Chimpanzees in Biomedical and Behavioral Research, which had been convened by the U. S. Institute of Medicine (IOM) in collaboration with National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academies. Within a month of its release, this report was designated by Wired Science one of the “top scientific discoveries of 2011” (Wired Science Staff 2011). The ad hoc Committee responsible for this report was formed at (...) the request of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in response to congressional inquiry that had been prompted by expressions of public concern.1 The issues addressed in the report are profoundly ethical, despite NIH’s .. (shrink)

This book explores how the figure of the slave has been used to construct ideas of freedom in Western political and legal philosophy. The figure of the slave has supported philosophical and legal defences of colonialism, coloniality and the supremacy of the white subject. Yet for Giorgio Agamben, the slave stands (almost counterintuitively) as an exemplar of a potential form of future positive political existence. Developing this line of thought, the book reads key thinkers Agamben engages with in his thought (...) and writings - including Aristotle, Saint Paul and G W F Hegel - and draws on decolonial theory to argue that the lives of people who were enslaved and unfree, and their actions and gestures, can point towards a paradigmatic form of political belonging. By reading Agamben in a decolonial direction, we can imagine alternative forms of agency, recognition and subjectivity, which can challenge the necropolitical world of racial capitalism in which we live. This study will appeal to scholars, researchers and graduate students with an interest in the thought of Giorgio Agamben, radical politics, legal and political philosophy and decolonial theory. (shrink)

Early voting behavior research confronted liberal democratic theory with the average American citizen's meager ability to think politically. Since then, several lines of analysis have tried to vindicate the mass electorate. Most recently, some researchers have attempted to reconceptualize the political reasoning process by viewing it in the aggregate, while others describe individuals as effective—albeit inarticulate—employers of cognitive shortcuts. While mass publics may, in these ways, be described as “rational,” they still fail to meet the basic requirements of democratic theory.

Essays raise and discuss moral questions concerning euthanasia, suicide, war, capital punishment, abortion, famine relief, and the environment.

In this book Tom Sorell argues that emergencies can justify types of action that would normally be regarded as wrong. Beginning with the ethics of emergencies facing individuals, he explores the range of effective and legitimate private emergency response and its relation to public institutions, such as national governments. He develops a theory of the response of governments to public emergencies which indicates the possibility of a democratic politics that is liberal but that takes seriously threats to life and limb (...) from public disorder, crime or terrorism. Informed by Hobbes, Schmitt and Walzer, but substantially different from them, the book widens the justification for recourse to normally forbidden measures, without resorting to illiberal politics. This book will interest students of politics, philosophy, international relations and law. (shrink)

Jecker’s paper focuses on the value of sex and sexuality in the lives of older people, and she argues that there is nothing wrong with the use of sex robots to realise that value. She concedes that sex robots marketed today are overwhelmingly designed for heterosexual males, and that their appearance corresponds to certain objectionable stereotypes of sexually attractive women, and of exciting sexual practices. Still, she says, sex robots do not have to be like that, and a less stereotype-ridden (...) design could take away the sexism, heterosexualism and ageism of current ones. I am sympathetic to these conclusions. But I believe that they are not general enough, and I want to take issue with the argumentative strategy that leads to them. The conclusions are not general enough, because disability or bad circumstantial luck can lead to the damaging absence of sex in the lives of people from many adult age groups, not just people in their 70s and 80s. Jecker’s paper starts with the case of couples whose sex life deteriorates with old age. But there are also many people, whether disabled or not, who fail to acquire a sex life, and who want one, sometimes desperately. They, too, have a problem that a suitable sex robot might help …. (shrink)

I aim to draw the reader's attention to an easily overlooked account of perception, namely that there are no perceptual experiences, that to perceive something is to stand in an external, purely non-Leibnizian relation to it. I introduce the Purely Relational account of perception by discussing a case of it being overlooked in the writings of G.E. Moore, though we also find the same move in J. Cook Wilson, so it has nothing to do with an affection for sense-data. I (...) then discuss the relation between the PR account and recent disjunctive accounts of perceptual experience, and note that the PR account has some claim to be the only one that truly respects the directness of perception. The paper does not aspire to persuade the reader of the correctness of the neglected PR account, merely that it should be treated as a serious candidate in philosophical debates about perception. (shrink)

The evidence for rationalisation, which motivates the target article, is exaggerated. Experimental evidence shows that rationalisation effects are small rather than gross and, I argue, largely silent on the pervasiveness and persistence of the phenomenon. At least some examples taken to show rationalisation also have an interpretation compatible with deliberate, knowing reason-responsiveness on the part of participants.

In this study, Tom Sorell seeks to rehabilitate views that are often instantly dismissed in analytic philosophy. His book serves as a reinterpretation of Cartesianism and responds directly to the dislike of Descartes in contemporary philosophy. To identify what is defensible in Cartesianism, Sorell starts with a picture of unreconstructed Cartesianism, which is characterized as realistic, antisceptical but respectful of scepticism, rationalist, centered on the first person, dualist, and dubious of the comprehensiveness of natural science and its supposed independence of (...) metaphysics. Bridging the gap between history of philosophy and analytic philosophy, Sorell also shows for the first time how some contemporary analytic philosophy is deeply Cartesian, despite its outward hostility to Cartesianism. (shrink)

In Art and Truth after Plato, Tom Rockmore argues that Plato has in fact never been satisfactorily answered—and to demonstrate that, he offers a comprehensive account of Plato’s influence through nearly the whole history of Western ...

This chapter is divided into three parts. In the first, I ask whether there is a human right to be spared extreme poverty. The answer is ‘Not necessarily’ if a human right is a legal right, and I argue that ‘human right’ either means a right in international law and associated policy, or else the term has an unacceptably wide sense. In the second section I consider microcredit as a poverty-alleviating mechanism, distinguishing between extreme and relative poverty in developing countries. (...) I argue that credit may not be a good way of alleviating extreme poverty, and that methods of collecting debt used by microcredit providers may have moral drawbacks. In the third section I consider the fit between the class of agents currently involved in offering financial services to the poor, and the class of agents recognized as duty-bearers by human rights law and policy. Unless states become highly involved in microcredit, it is not clear that microfinance providers are or can be human rights duty bearers. (shrink)

The sense in which Hobbes produced a science of politics is often misunderstood. It was not a science because it was derived somehow from scientific psychology or mechanics. It was not a science in the sense that he broke down states into their component systems and their properties. Instead, it is a normative doctrine. It states precepts for citizens to escape the condition of total war, and it states precepts for sovereigns to legislate well (frame "good laws" in the sense (...) of Leviathan, ch. 30.) The normativity of Hobbes's science is often missed. It contributes to what I call the "autonomy" of Hobbes politics within his system. (shrink)

The newest deluxe edition in the bestselling Capstone Classics Series This ancient classic has had a make-over. In recent years these Capstone Classic deluxe editions have caught the book buying public's imagination. The volumes of international bestsellers such as Think and Grow Rich and The Art of War have quickly become the market leaders. Now Plato's best known work, one of the most intellectually and historically influential works of philosophy and political theory, has been brought to life in this luxury, (...) hardback, keep-sake edition. This edition includes: Plato's plans for a perfect society characterised by a blend of wisdom, courage, self-discipline and justice Lessons to learn about living according to eternal truths, instead of existing simply for survival and pleasure A new introduction by Tom Butler Bowdon, the classic personal development expert. (shrink)

Since anecdotal evidence for a clash of culture between philosophy and business would appear to exist, it is hardly surprising that some business academics should be inclined to question the value of philosophical business ethics in general andmoral theory in particular. John Kaler's approach to questioning philosophical business ethics is surprising partly because it does not rely on considerations of this kind (Kaler 1999). He claims that ethical theories are open to a kind of internal criticism, and that this criticism (...) justifies people in dispensing with moral theories. The argument is strikingly abstract and general for a criticism of moral philosophy, surprisingly `philosophical' or `theoretical', and if it is supposed to contribute to business ethics partly by drawing on negative arguments from the ethical theory it attacks, it may be self-refuting. (shrink)