How much bacterial evolution occurs in our intestines and which factors control it are currently burning questions. The formation of new ecotypes, some of which capable of coexisting for long periods of time, is highly likely in our guts. Horizontal gene transfer driven by temperate phages that can perform lysogeny is also widespread in mammalian intestines. Yet, the roles of mutation and especially lysogeny as key drivers of gut bacterial adaptation remain poorly understood. The mammalian gut contains hundreds of (...) bacterial species, each with many strains and ecotypes, whose abundance varies along the lifetime of a host. A continuous high input of mutations and horizontal gene transfer events mediated by temperate phages drives that diversity. Future experiments to study the interaction between mutations that cause adaptation in microbiomes and lysogenic events with different costs and benefits will be key to understand the dynamic microbiomes of mammals. Also see the video abstract here: https://youtu.be/Zjqsiyb5Pk0. (shrink)

Exploration of immune systems in prokaryotes, such as restriction‐modification or CRISPR‐Cas, shows that both innate and adaptive systems possess programmed cell death (PCD) potential. The key outstanding question is how the immune systems sense and “predict” infection outcomes to “decide” whether to fight the pathogen or induce PCD. There is a striking parallel between this life‐or‐death decision faced by the cell and the decision by temperate viruses to protect or kill their hosts, epitomized by the lysis‐lysogeny switch of (...) class='Hi'>bacteriophage Lambda. Immune systems and temperate phages sense the same molecular inputs, primarily, DNA damage, that determine whether the cell lives or dies. Because temperate (pro)phages are themselves components of prokaryotic genomes, their shared “interests” with the hosts result in coregulation of the lysis‐lysogeny switch and immune systems that jointly provide the cell with the decision machinery to probe and predict infection outcomes, answering the life‐or‐death question. (shrink)

In this paper I consider Kenneth Schaffner''s(1998) rendition of ''''developmentalism'''' from the point of viewof bacteriophage biology. I argue that the fact that a viablephage can be produced from purified DNA and host cellularcomponents lends some support to the anti-developmentalist, ifthey first show that one can draw a principled distinctionbetween genetic and environmental effects. The existence ofhost-controlled phage host range restriction supports thedevelopmentalist''s insistence on the parity of DNA andenvironment. However, in the case of bacteriophage, thedevelopmentalist stands on (...) less firm ground than when organismswith nervous systems, such as Schaffner''s C. elegans, areconsidered. (shrink)

The Australian scientist Frank Macfarlane Burnet—winner of the Nobel Prize in 1960 for his contributions to the understanding of immunological tolerance—is perhaps best recognized as one of the formulators of the clonal selection theory of antibody production, widely regarded as the ‘central dogma’ of modern immunology. His work in studies in animal virology, particularly the influenza virus, and rickettsial diseases is also well known. Somewhat less known and publicized is Burnet’s research on bacteriophages, which he conducted in the first decade (...) of his research career, immediately after completing medical school. For his part, Burnet made valuable contributions to the understanding of the nature of bacteriophages, a matter of considerable debate at the time he began his work. Reciprocally, it was while working on the phages that Burnet developed the scientific styles, the habits of mind and laboratory techniques and practices that characterized him for the rest of his career. Using evidence from Burnet’s published work, as well as personal papers from the period he worked on the phages, this paper demonstrates the direct impact that his experiments with phages had on the development of his characteristic scientific style and approaches, which manifested themselves in his later career and theories, and especially in his thinking regarding various immunological problems. (shrink)

In 1936, Frank Macfarlane Burnet published a paper entitled “Induced lysogenicity and the mutation of bacteriophage within lysogenic bacteria,” in which he demonstrated that the introduction of a specific bacteriophage into a bacterial strain consistently and repeatedly imparted a specific property – namely the resistance to a different phage – to the bacterial strain that was originally susceptible to lysis by that second phage. Burnet’s explanation for this change was that the first phage was causing a mutation in (...) the bacterium which rendered it and its successive generations of offspring resistant to lysogenicity. At the time, this idea was a novel one that needed compelling evidence to be accepted. While it is difficult for us today to conceive of mutations and genes outside the context of DNA as the physico-chemical basis of genes, in the mid 1930s, when this paper was published, DNA’s role as the carrier of hereditary information had not yet been discovered and genes and mutations were yet to acquire physical and chemical forms. Also, during that time genes were considered to exist only in organisms capable of sexual modes of replication and the status of bacteria and viruses as organisms capable of containing genes and manifesting mutations was still in question. Burnet’s paper counts among those pieces of work that helped dispel the notion that genes, inheritance and mutations were tied to an organism’s sexual status. In this paper, I analyze the implications of Burnet’s paper for the understanding of various concepts – such as “mutation,” and “gene,” – at the time it was published, and how those understandings shaped the development of the meanings of these terms and our modern conceptions thereof. (shrink)

As social and ecological transition and climate change raise issues that go far beyond individual responses, how can these challenges be balanced with ethical and political responses? This article intends to show that the strength of virtue ethics lies in the fact that it translates these abstract issues into concrete biographical events that shape lifestyles. The search for the good life in these matters then finds in temperance, humility and hospitality three virtues, private and social, to operate this translation. Humility (...) makes explicit the deep interdependencies between the living, while temperance calls for practices that are attentive to these relationships, in the knowledge that our ways of life here have far-reaching consequences on the other side of the globe. This in turn invites us to restore hospitality to its cosmopolitical dimension. (shrink)

The ongoing conflict between the economic imperative of stimulating consumption as part of the proliferation of neoliberal ideals of consumer supremacy and growing concern to increase environmental protection presents an opportunity to focus on consumption with respect to ethical behavior. Ethical concerns regarding purchasing and consumption behavior are addressed here in relation to the adoption of principles associated with temperance as applied to self-restraint in food purchase and consumption. The paper outlines theological links to the concept of temperance as applied (...) to environmental and health concerns. Employing a virtue ethics perspective, it examines people’s proactive attitudes that value the environment by adopting waste reduction behaviors. Within the context of normative ethics, it is asked: “Is temperance able to fulfill the role of a lever in consumers’ hands and thereby contribute to minimizing negative environmental impacts associated with food waste?” The research bears witness to the role that consumer behavior may play in promotion and application of temperance in daily life. Study results from a survey conducted in Romania extend the scant information on people’s food waste behavior in relation to religion, underscoring the relationship between religion, temperance-oriented behavior and environmental concerns. (shrink)

The virtue of temperance with respect to food and drink is often assumed to be relatively straightforward, a matter of steering a mean between excess and deficiency. Given also that humans share the need to eat and drink with non-human animals, this topic might therefore seem promising to explore for possible connections between evolutionary research on morality and theological ethics. In this paper, however, I argue that many aspects of temperance go far beyond the Aristotelian account and can be understood (...) principally as reflecting the fact that human beings are embodied relational persons. This second-person account can indeed be connected to theological ethics, but it is also one that draws principally from the discontinuities of human and non-human behaviour. (shrink)

When it comes to invasive manipulation of animals on the biological level, reactions of disgust are common and often influential on people’s moral judgments. As a case in point, the Belgian Blue, a breed of hyper-enhanced cattle which will serve as a case study for the present article, has historically been met with revulsion. Traditionally, in bio- and animal ethics, this ‘yuck factor,’ has been denied any productive role in proper moral justification, since rationalism is still a dominant paradigm in (...) those disciplines. This is not surprising since rationalism offers the fulfilment of certain expectations we have of morality, like universality, intersubjective communicability, and objectivity. Increasingly, however, the preconceptions of rationalism have been brought into question, both through empirical as well as philosophical insights. In this paper, we will explore a way in which researchers who are, accordingly, critical of rationalism, and who wish to take seriously the role disgust plays in the formation of moral judgments when it comes to biological manipulation of animals, can do so without abandoning those virtues of rationalism which make it such an appealing position. We will do so by offering what we call a ‘tempered’ kind of rationalism, that is, one which conceives of rationality in the terms of Mary Midgley, not as distinct from, but as a possible function of, well-ordered emotion. (shrink)

In this research, I tried to collect and study Qur’anic verses related to the topic of tolerance temper in the prophets’ calling to their people, through the calling of the Prophet Muhammad, may God bless him and grant him peace, to his people. At the end of the research, it concluded with results, the most prominent of which were: that the Holy Qur’an is the constitution of morals and etiquettes, and it includes sublime etiquettes and refined morals, and that the (...) Prophet, may God bless him, was the most prominent worker of divine directives, especially with regard to tolerance temper with his people when calling them to Islam. The research also ended with a recommendation to conduct specialized studies on tolerance temper among the prophets in the rest of the Qur’anic surahs. (shrink)

Traditional neo-Aristotelian accounts hold that temperance and continence are distinct character traits that are distinguished by the extent to which their bearers experience motivational conflict. In this paper, I formulate two pairs of necessary conditions—which, collectively, I call the conformity thesis—that articulate this distinction. Then, drawing on work in contemporary social and personality psychology, I argue that the conformity thesis is false. Being highly self-controlled is the best, psychologically realistic candidate for continence. However, our best evidence suggests that highly self-controlled/continent (...) people do not experience more or stronger desires that conflict with their evaluative judgments than others, and they are not particularly good at directly resisting these desires. In this way, actual continent people exhibit motivational harmony that is more similar to the traditional picture of temperance. On the other hand, they achieve this harmony because they are able to effectively employ indirect strategies for handling motivational conflict. These strategies are correctly associated with continence. Recognizing that temperance and continence are overlapping character traits puts us in a better position to understand, and design interventions to improve, the neuropsychological capacities that enable humans to intelligently manage their desires. (shrink)

The predominant approach of public health experts to cigarette smoking might be described as behaviorist, for it aims to eliminate this behavior without attending to human agency and intention. The requirement that physicians address smoking cessation at every patient visit also constitutes physicians as “managers” who focus narrowly on technical means to achieve predetermined ends. In this paper, I contrast such an approach with the Aristotelian tradition, according to which physician and patient ought to develop the virtue of temperance that (...) would allow the patient to quit smoking. Although this model could potentially mitigate medicine’s behaviorist-managerial tendencies, I follow Aristotle to argue that it requires a moral friendship in which participants share a conception of the human good and pursue that good together. Due to the intractable moral pluralism that characterizes contemporary life, physicians and patients are unlikely to achieve this sort of friendship, making Aristotelian medicine impracticable at present. (shrink)

Darwinians are realists about the force of selection, but there has been surprisingly little discussion about what form this realism should take. Arguments about the units of selection in general and genic selectionism in particular reveal two realist assumptions: (1) for any selection process, there is a uniquely correct identification of the operative selective forces and the level at which each impinges; and (2) selective forces must satisfy the Pareto-style requirement of probabilistic causation. I argue that both assumptions are false; (...) we must temper realism about the force of selection and revise the way we think about probabilistic causation. (shrink)

In this paper, I present and explore an alternative to a standard prioritarian axiology. Equality-tempered prioritarianism holds that the value of welfare increases should be balanced against the value of equality. However, given that, under prioritarianism, the value of marginal welfare benefits decreases as the welfare of beneficiaries increases, equality-tempered prioritarianism holds that the intrinsic value of equality will be sufficient to alter a prioritarian verdict only in cases in which welfare benefits are granted to the very well-off. I argue (...) that this view, suitably refined, solves a persistent problem for prioritarianism, and is superior to alternatives. (shrink)

In this research, I tried to collect and study Qur’anic verses related to the topic of tolerance temper in the prophets’ calling to their people, through the calling of the Prophet Ibrahim, may God bless him and grant him peace, to his people. At the end of the research, it concluded with results, the most prominent of which were: that the Holy Qur’an is the constitution of morals and etiquettes, and it includes sublime etiquettes and refined morals, and that the (...) Prophet Ibrahim, may God bless him, was the most prominent worker of divine directives, especially with regard to tolerance temper with his people when calling them to Islam. The research also ended with a recommendation to conduct specialized studies on tolerance temper among the prophets in the rest of the Qur’anic surahs. (shrink)

Explores what Aristotelian sexual temperance and intemperance are.

An oft-repeated dictum in contemporary epistemology is that the epistemic goal minimally includes the acquisition of true beliefs and the avoidance of false beliefs. There is, however, a robust epistemological tradition in the Christian West that distinguishes between a virtuous and a vicious desire for and pursuit of cognitive contact with reality. The cognitive ideal for humans consists in epistemic temperance, an appetite for and pursuit of truth that is conducted in appropriate measure, and calibrated to appropriate objects and ends. (...) Here I explore this rich Christian tradition with an eye toward its application to contemporary Christian philosophy. (shrink)

The kind of temperance discussed is the virtue of moderation concerning the pleasures of eating and drinking. A person lacks this moderation if either his desire for such pleasures causes conflicts with his own standards of appropriate behaviour or the standards themselves attach too much importance to the pleasures concerned. Opinions vary about the proper status of these pleasures, but people surely value them too highly if they place them above their health or the moral duty not to cause unnecessary (...) suffering. Temperance concerns medicine because of its connection with health, ethics because it involves not only the good life for the individual but also the welfare of other creatures. (shrink)

Moral leadership matters. As world politics enters a new and dangerous era, judgment, constancy, moral purpose, and a willingness to overcome partisan politicking are essential for America's leaders. Tempered Strength finds the alternative standard of leadership that Americans are seeking in the classical philosophy of prudence. Ethan Fishman's new work brings together leading American political scientists—including Ronald Beiner, Kenneth L. Deutsch, and George Anastaplo—to discuss the evolution of a standard of prudential leadership both reasonable in nature and practical in scope. (...) Section One studies the meaning of prudence and its evolution in the history of political science from Aristotelian phronesis to Xenophon, Thomas Aquinas, Edmund Burke, and Michael Oakeshott. Section Two demonstrates how the theory of prudential leadership can be applied to practical political issues. (shrink)

The paper discusses Kant's view of sexual desire in connection with Aristotle's account of sexual temperance, arguing that if the Kantian view is correct, the Aristotelian account is false (or that if the Aristotelian account is true, then the Kantian view is false). One cannot be both an Aristotelian and a Kantian about the ethics of sexual desire.

This paper provides an account of the Aristotelian virtue of temperance in regards to food, an account that revolves around the idea of enjoying the right objects and not enjoying the wrong ones. In doing so, the paper distinguishes between two meanings of “taking (or not taking) pleasure in something,” one that refers to the idea of the activity and one to the experience of the activity. The paper then connects this distinction to the temperate person’s attitude towards enjoying (...) the right things and to hitting the mean by enjoying the right object, at the right time, and so on. Throughout, the paper uses eating meat as a case in point, to both illustrate and inform the discussion. In the penultimate section, the paper argues that temperance admits of various conceptions depending on what is right and wrong in regards to eating meat. The paper concludes by responding to three objections. (shrink)

The idea of epistemic temperance is introduced and explicated through a discussion of Plato's understanding of it. A variety of psychological and epistemic phenomena are presented which arise due to epistemic intemperance, or the inappropriate influence of conations on cognition. Two cases familiar to philosophers, self-deception and racial prejudice, are discussed as the result of epistemic intemperance though they are not typically seen as having a common cause. Finally, epistemic temperance is distinguished from epistemic justice, as these have been conflated.

In this paper we shall draw on Peirce’s four methods of fixating belief to provide a template for examining classroom experience. Such a template provides a context for understanding the dynamics that emerge at the intersection of existing belief and new experience. We shall develop several examples of tenacity as an impediment to student growth, discuss traditional responses to the irrationally tenacious student, develop Peirce’s four methods in the context of an educational setting, and draw conclusions from his work for (...) educational theory. Our belief is not that tenacity inevitably works against the cultivation of critical awareness, but that this virtue needs to be tempered by a full purview of educational aims and their attending virtues. (shrink)

This paper shows that temperance is the highest order risk preference condition for which spreading N independent and unfair risks provides the highest level of welfare than any other possible allocations of risks. These results are also interpreted through the concept of N-superadditivity of the utility premium. This paper provides a novel application of temperance, not in terms of two risks as it is common, but in terms of N risks.

Roots presents articles on major discoveries that laid the basis for contemporary molecular and cellular biology. In this article, Norton D. Zinder reviews the first findings about the single‐stranded DNA‐containing bacteriophages and what is known today about the genetics and molecular biology of these phages.

I offer this essay not as a “reply to my critics,” but as a contribution to a conversation about the rule of law to which they have richly contributed. After a brief outline of key features of Law’s Rule, it considers whether it is committed to a “thin” or “thick” concept of the rule of law. It then explores the ideas of arbitrary power, accountability, and recourse; and it addresses the question whether the rule of law’s concern is restricted to (...) the exercise of governmental power. It concludes with consideration of a number of tensions that lie at the heart of the rule of law ideal. (shrink)

"Application of the possibilities for this renewal of temperance comes with an examination of how emotion will help moral deliberation in the clinical practice of medicine. Sir William Osler (1849-1919) and his doctrine of aequanimitas is greatly misunderstood to be the founder of emotional detachment in physician/patient relations. This book offers the most detailed look at aequanimitas in print and equates it with a normative view of temperance as a moral virtue." "For upper-level undergraduate and graduate-level students interested in ethics, (...) bioethics, and moral psychology; Oslerians; and students of Aristotle's and Aquinas' views of the moral virtues."--BOOK JACKET. (shrink)

This paper assesses the prospects of a pragmatist theory of content. I begin by criticising the theory presented in D.H. Mellor’s essay ‘Successful Semantics’. I then identify problems and lacunae in the pragmatist theory of meaning sketched in Chapter 13 of Dummett’s The Logical Basis of Metaphysics. The prospects are brighter, I contend, for a tempered pragmatism, in which the theory of content is permitted to draw upon irreducible notions of truth and falsity. I sketch the shape of such a (...) theory and illustrate the role of its pragmatist elements by showing how they point towards a promising account of the truth conditions of indicative conditionals. A feature of the account is that it validates Modus Ponens whilst invalidating Modus Tollens. (shrink)

It is not easy to find a fair balance between inappropriate speech on the one hand and the appearance of constraint and inaccessibility on the other. Also judges must deal with this difficult task. They must take care not to endanger values that are protected to secure the functionality of justice. This article deals with questions of why and how judges can fulfil this task and what might happen if they fail to do so. The article argues in favour of (...) temperate speech using arguments from the fields of judicial ethics and normative ethics. It also offers examples of intemperate speech that might be dangerous to justice. Last but not least, the article mentions the relevance of judicial temperate speech for the concept of open justice thanks to which the judiciary might seek public confidence. (shrink)

The basic idea of expressivism is that for some sentences ‘P’, believing that P is not just a matter of having an ordinary descriptive belief. This is a way of capturing the idea that the meaning of some sentences either exceeds their factual/descriptive content or doesn’t consist in any particular factual/descriptive content at all, even in context. The paradigmatic application for expressivism is within metaethics, and holds that believing that stealing is wrong involves having some kind of desire-like attitude, with (...) world-tomind direction of fit, either in place of, or in addition to, being in a representational state of mind with mind-to-world direction of fit. Because expressivists refer to the state of believing that P as the state of mind ‘expressed’ by ‘P’, this view can also be described as the view that ‘stealing is wrong’ expresses a state of mind that involves a desire-like attitude instead of, or in addition to, a representational state of mind. According to some expressivists - unrestrained expressivists, as I’ll call them - there need be no special relationship among the different kinds of state of mind that can be expressed by sentences. Pick your favorite state of mind, the unrestrained expressivist allows, and there could, at least in principle, be a sentence that expressed it. Expressivists who seem to have been unrestrained plausibly include Ayer in Language, Truth, and Logic, and Simon Blackburn in many of his writings, including his [1984], [1993], and.. (shrink)

In this paper I examine the moral psychology of the Phaedo and argue that the philosophical life in this dialogue is a temperate life, and that temperance consists in exercising epistemic discernment by actively withdrawing assent from incorrect evaluations the body inclines us to make. Philosophers deal with bodily affections by taking a correct epistemic stance. Exercising temperance thus understood is a necessary condition both for developing and strengthening rational capacities, and for fixing accurate beliefs about value. The purification (...) philosophers strive for, and the purifying role of philosophy, should then be understood as a clarificatory act consisting in making one’s thoughts clear and withdrawing assent from erroneous evaluative content in our desires and pleasures. Along the way, I argue that philosophers must neither avoid situations and activities that cause bodily affections as much as possible, nor ignore or care little about them. (shrink)

In technological societies where excessive screen use and internet addiction are becoming constant temptations, the valuable yet intoxicating pleasures of digital technology suggest a need to recover and repurpose temperance, a virtue emphasized by ancient and medieval philosophers. This article reconstructs this virtue for our technological age by reclaiming the most relevant features of Aristotle’s and Aquinas’s accounts and suggesting five critical revisions needed to adapt the virtue for a contemporary context. The article then draws on this critical interpretation, along (...) with empirical research analyzing the value and dangers of digital technology, to construct a normative account of digital temperance, a virtue that finds a mean between “digital insensibility,” the vice of deficiency, and “digital overindulgence,” the vice of excess. We conclude by showing how this virtue of digital temperance can help to promote human flourishing in a world saturated with tempting technology. (shrink)

“There are strong temptations for those at the top of an organisational hierarchy to appropriate to themselves a disproportionate share of the resources of the organisation and to exercise too much power over the activities of other organisational members.” Hence the case for taking a cool look at executive remuneration and other possible breaches of applying the classical virtue of temperance to corporate behaviour. The author is Principal Lecturer in the Business Studies Department, Manchester Metropolitan University, Aytoun Building, Aytoun Street, (...) Manchester M1 3GH. (shrink)

My own life -- Selections from Hume's letters concerning virtue, religion and matters literary -- Selections from Hume's letters on history, politics, law, commerce and Scottish affairs -- Hume's last letter : to Adam Smith -- Selections from An enquiry concerning the principles of morals -- Extracts from Of the liberty of the press.

Often a concern for truthfulness becomes the celebration of radical truthfulness, where this involves both the utter refusal of deception and that all moral and political beliefs be fit to survive publicity. An unfortunate consequence of this is that it has blinded us to a fair and accurate understanding of the nature and role of an important technique of virtue—temperance. Temperance implies a strategy of renunciation and withdrawal from the full content of our psychological lives. It involves us in pursuing (...) and sustaining a practice of deliberative silence about those purposes and ends which, as we see things, threaten us with corruption and the world with evil. (shrink)

The purpose of this essay is to explore, and clarify, some key features in Aquinas’ account of the virtue of temperance, with an eye to answering some common objections raised against a positive evaluation of temperance. In particular, I consider three features of Aquinas’ understanding of temperance: First, the role of the rational mean in temperance; second, the role of rightly ordered passions in temperance; and third, the ‘despotic’ control of reason over the passions in temperance. Along the way I (...) consider three common objections to Aquinas’ account of temperance: the objection that temperance can be misused for evil, the objection that temperance devalues effort, and the objection that temperance devalues strong passions and thereby implicitly devalues the goodness of sexuality. In responding to these objections on behalf of Aquinas, I take the opportunity to clarify and slightly extend Aquinas’ account of temperance. (shrink)

SummaryIn the 1940s a controversy developed between John H. Northrop (Nobel Laureate, 1946) and Max Delbrück (Nobel Laureate, 1969) on the formation of bacteriophage. From the historiography of molecular biology there emerges a picture of an obstinate Northrop who repudiated the ‘correct’ insights revealed by the experiments of Delbrück. The established reputation of Northrop confronts one with the question of why Delbrück's epoch-making experiments were not convincing for Northrop. It will be argued that this was a consequence of local (...) incommensurability between Northrop's physiological/chemical research style and Delbrück's bacteriological/genetic research style. The analysis of this controversy reveals the elements that made up these two research styles. (shrink)