In this paper, I consider the role of perspective in Hegel’s metaphysics, and in particular the role that multiple perspectives play within the ultimate structure in Hegel’s metaphysics, which Hegel calls ‘the idea [die Idee].’ My (somewhat anachronistic) way into this topic will be to inquire about Hegel’s stance on what Adrian Moore has called ‘absolute representations.’ I argue for the claim that perspective is maintained, even in the absolute idea, which generates the task of understanding the nature of that (...) perspective and its compatibility with absoluteness. I attempt to accomplish this task by asking what a logical perspective could be, and how it might be related to visual perspective. Then I inquire into the relation that perspectives have to each other, i.e., to the system of perspectives. I construe those relations in reciprocal and dynamic terms, so that absoluteness takes the form of a structured round of perspectives rather than a relation to reality “once and for all”. (shrink)

This book is a groundbreaking history of balance, exploring how a new model of equilibrium emerged during the medieval period.

Our reception of Hegel’s theory of action faces a fundamental difficulty: on the one hand, that theory is quite clearly embedded in a social theory of modern life, but on the other hand most of the features of the society that gave that embedding its specific content have become almost inscrutably strange to us (e.g., the estates and the monarchy). Thus we find ourselves in the awkward position of stressing the theory’s sociality even as we scramble backwards to distance ourselves (...) from the particular social institutions that gave conceptualized form to such sociality in Hegel’s own opinion. My attempt in this article is to make our position less awkward by giving us at least one social-ontological leg to stand on. Specifically, I want to defend a principled and conceptual pluralism as forming the heart of Hegel’s theory of action. If this view can be made out, then we will have a social-ontological structure that might be filled out in different ways in Hegel’s time and our own while simultaneously giving real teeth to the notion that Hegel’s theory of action is essentially social. (shrink)

Phosphatidylinositol 3‐phosphate (PtdIns3P) is generated on the cytosolic leaflet of cellular membranes, primarily by phosphorylation of phosphatidylinositol by class II and class III phosphatidylinositol 3‐kinases. The bulk of this lipid is found on the limiting and intraluminal membranes of endosomes, but it can also be detected in domains of phagosomes, autophagosome precursors, cytokinetic bridges, the plasma membrane and the nucleus. PtdIns3P controls cellular functions through recruitment of specific protein effectors, many of which contain FYVE or PX domains. Cellular processes known (...) to be controlled by PtdIns3P and its effectors include endosomal fusion, sorting and motility, autophagy, cytokinesis, regulated exocytosis and signal transduction. Here we discuss how Ptdins3P is generated on specific cellular membranes, how its localizations and functions can be studied, and how its effectors serve to control cellular functions.Editor's suggested further reading in BioEssays:Phosphatidylinositol 4,5‐bisphosphate: Targeted production and signalingAbstractHow does SHIP1/2 balance PtdIns(3,4)P2 and does it signal independently of its phosphatase activity?AbstractPhosphatidylinositol‐3,4,5‐trisphosphate: Tool of choice for class I PI 3‐kinasesAbstractPhosphatidylinositol‐4‐phosphate: The Golgi and beyondAbstract. (shrink)

It was not so long ago that the dominant picture of Kant’s practical philosophy was formalistic, focusing almost exclusively on his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and Critique of Practical Reason. However, the overall picture of Kant’s wide-ranging philosophy has since been broadened and deepened. We now have a much more complete understanding of the range of Kant’s practical interests and of his contributions to areas as diverse as anthropology, pedagogy, and legal theory. What remains somewhat obscure, however, is (...) how these different contributions hang together in the way that Kant suggests that they must. This book explores these different conceptions of humanity, morality, and legality in Kant as main ‘manifestations’ or ‘dimensions’ of practical normativity. These interrelated terms play a crucial role in highlighting different rational obligations, their source, and their applicability in the face of changing circumstances. (shrink)

Introduction: Thinking, writing, and reading about the real -- Dialectic and the real : Lacan, Hegel, and the alchemy of après-coup -- 'Reality' and the real : culture as anamorphosis -- The real of sexual difference : imagining, thinking, being -- Ethics and the real : the ungodly virtues of psychoanalysis -- Politics, or, the art of the impossible.

In this fast-paced, enlightening guide, Sharon M. Kaye takes us on a whistle-stop tour of medieval philosophy, revealing its astounding legacy to the discipline today.

One of the most important elements of Hegel’s philosophical anthropology is his moral psychology. In particular, his understanding of the relation between motivations and reason plays a crucial intermediate role in connecting his anthropological meditations on the complete nature of the human being with his political theory of actualized freedom. Whereas recent important work on Hegel’s moral psychology has detected a Kantian distinction between natural desires and the rational perspective, the activity of practical reason actually takes place within motivations themselves (...) on Hegel’s view. The exercise of the free, rational will is best understood in terms of its role in shaping the experience of malleable, indeterminate motivations. Rather than stepping back, the free agent on Hegel’s account delves further into the motivation, acting on it in the dual sense of being guided by and transforming it. This is what it means for Hegel to conceive of agency as self-expression while maintaining the centrality of reason for Free Will. Hegel says that when we go further into the motivations in this way, we should stop speaking of motivation in terms of drives and instead begin speaking of character. (shrink)

This undergraduate textbook covers the key material for a typical first course in logic, in particular presenting a full mathematical account of the most important result in logic, the Completeness Theorem for first-order logic. Looking at a series of interesting systems, increasing in complexity, then proving and discussing the Completeness Theorem for each, the author ensures that the number of new concepts to be absorbed at each stage is manageable, whilst providing lively mathematical applications throughout. Unfamiliar terminology is kept to (...) a minimum, no background in formal set-theory is required, and the book contains proofs of all the required set theoretical results. The reader is taken on a journey starting with König's Lemma, and progressing via order relations, Zorn's Lemma, Boolean algebras, and propositional logic, to completeness and compactness of first-order logic. As applications of the work on first-order logic, two final chapters provide introductions to model theory and nonstandard analysis. (shrink)

This paper starts by investigating Ackermann's interpretation of finite set theory in the natural numbers. We give a formal version of this interpretation from Peano arithmetic (PA) to Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory with the infinity axiom negated (ZF−inf) and provide an inverse interpretation going the other way. In particular, we emphasize the precise axiomatization of our set theory that is required and point out the necessity of the axiom of transitive containment or (equivalently) the axiom scheme of ∈-induction. This clarifies the (...) nature of the equivalence of PA and ZF−inf and corrects some errors in the literature. We also survey the restrictions of the Ackermann interpretation and its inverse to subsystems of PA and ZF−inf, where full induction, replacement, or separation is not assumed. The paper concludes with a discussion on the problems one faces when the totality of exponentiation fails, or when the existence of unordered pairs or power sets is not guaranteed. (shrink)

The doctrine of double effect, together with other moral principles that appeal to the intentions of moral agents, has come under attack from many directions in recent years, as have a variety of rationales that have been given in favor of it. In this paper, our aim is to develop, defend, and provide a new theoretical rationale for a secular version of the doctrine. Following Quinn (1989), we distinguish between Harmful Direct Agency and Harmful Indirect Agency. We propose the following (...) version of the doctrine: that in cases in which harm must come to some in order to achieve a good (and is the least costly of possible harms necessary), the agent foresees the harm, and all other things are equal, a stronger case is needed to justify Harmful Direct Agency than to justify Harmful Indirect Agency. We distinguish between two Kantian rationales that might be given for the doctrine, a “dependent right” rationale, defended by Quinn, and an “independent right” rationale, which we defend. We argue that the doctrine and the “independent right” rationale for it are not vulnerable to counterexamples or counterproposals, and conclude by drawing implications for the larger debate over whether agents' intentions are in any way relevant to permissibility and obligation. (shrink)

In liberal political theory, meaningful work is conceptualised as a preference in the market. Although this strategy avoids transgressing liberal neutrality, the subsequent constraint upon state intervention aimed at promoting the social and economic conditions for widespread meaningful work is normatively unsatisfactory. Instead, meaningful work can be understood to be a fundamental human need, which all persons require in order to satisfy their inescapable interests in freedom, autonomy, and dignity. To overcome the inadequate treatment of meaningful work by liberal political (...) theory, I situate the good of meaningful work within a liberal perfectionist framework, from which standpoint I develop a normative justification for making meaningful work the object of political action. To understand the content of meaningful work, I make use of Susan Wolf’s distinct value of meaningfulness, in which she brings together the dimensions of objectivity and subjectivity into the ‘bipartite value’ of meaningfulness (BVM) (Wolf, Meaning in life and why it matters, 2010). However, in order to be able to incorporate the BVM into our lives, we must become valuers, that is, co-creators of values and meanings. This demands that we acquire the relevant capabilities and status as co-authorities in the realm of value. I conclude that meaningful work is of first importance because it is a fundamental human need, and that society ought to be arranged to allow as many people as possible to experience their work as meaningful through the development of the relevant capabilities. (shrink)

In this fascinating study, the author analyzes the conceptual roots of molecular biology and the social matrix in which it was developed.

Recently, there has been a debate focusing on the question of whether groups can literally have beliefs. For the purposes of epistemology, however, the key question is whether groups can have knowledge. More specifi cally, the question is whether “group views” can have the key epistemic features of belief, viz., aiming at truth and being epistemically rational. I argue that, while groups may not have beliefs in the full sense of the word, group views can have these key epistemic features (...) of belief. However, I argue that on Margaret Gilbert's infl uential “plural subject” account of group belief, group views are unlikely to be epistemically rational. (shrink)

Objectives—To assess perceptions of the informed consent process in patients undergoing urgent abdominal surgery.Design—A prospective observational study was carried out using structured questionnaire-based interviews. Patients who had undergone urgent abdominal surgery were interviewed in the postoperative period to ascertain their perceptions of the informed consent process. Replies were compared to responses obtained from a control group undergoing elective surgery, to identify factors common to the surgical process and those specific to urgent surgery. Patients' perceptions of received information were also compared (...) to the information perceived to have been provided by the consent obtainers. Setting—Gastrointestinal surgical service of a university teaching hospital.Patients—Seventy-four consecutive patients undergoing urgent abdominal surgery and 80 control patients undergoing elective surgery. Main measurements—Principal outcome measures were patients' perceptions of factors interfering with the ability to give informed consent, assessment of the quality of informed consent and the degree of discussion of the expected outcomes. Results—Forty-nine of the seventy-four (66%) patients undergoing urgent surgery perceived that pain did not affect their ability to give informed consent. Twenty-seven reported an adverse effect of analgesia on the ability to give informed consent. Only 22% of patients undergoing urgent surgery perceived that there had been any discussion of potential side effects and complications of surgery. Conclusion–The majority of patients in this series with acute intra-abdominal surgical conditions perceive that they retain the ability to give informed consent for surgery. There is a need for improved discussion of therapeutic options and likely outcomes. (shrink)

In this paper I take up a critical position in regard to the theme of debility around which this collection is framed. I argue that theorisations of ‘debility’ do little to progress theory and policy in regard to disability and share many of the problems inherent to the social model. I also suggest that the theorisation of debility is rooted in and reinforces ablebodied privilege. I begin with a critical analysis of the social model of disability and explore the dualisms (...) by which it either negates the body altogether or can only conceive the disabled body in negative terms. I then go on to explore how Puar's work on debility continues this negation of the disabled body. From this position I use the work of Inahara to excavate the foundations of ablebodied privilege. In Inahara's work gender is the analytic starting point, but for me white privilege is a much more effective mechanism through which to understand the impact and reproduction of ablebodied privilege— what McRuer refers to as ‘compulsory ablebodiedness'—which I argue underpins Puar's work. I conclude with some reflections upon how a critical analysis of ablebodied privilege might function and I reiterate its importance for a critical theory that goes beyond the mere repetition of binary structures of ablebodiedness and disability. (shrink)

RATIONALE: The concept of evidence-based medicine is important in providing efficient health care. The process uses research findings as the basis for clinical decision making. Evidence-based practice helps optimize current health care and enables the practitioners to be suitably accountable for the interventions they provide. Little work has been undertaken to examine how allied health professionals change their clinical practice in light of the latest evidence. The use of opinion leaders to disseminate new evidence around the management of low back (...) pain into practice has been proposed. AIMS: The aim of this study was to investigate if physiotherapists' clinical management of patients with low back pain would change following an evidence-based education package, which utilized local opinion leaders and delivered the best evidence. METHOD: Thirty musculoskeletal physiotherapists from a Community Trust in North Staffordshire were cluster randomized by location of work, to two groups. The intervention group received an evidence-based programme on the management of low back pain, including advice regarding increasing activity levels and return to normal activity and challenging patients' fears and beliefs about their pain. The control group received a standard in-service training package on the management of common knee pathologies. The physiotherapists' clinical management of patients with low back pain was measured prior to training and 6 months post training. Outcome measures were based on physiotherapists completing 'discharge summary' questionnaires, which included information relating to the use and importance of therapies for treating their low back pain patients. RESULTS: There were few significant differences in treatment options between the intervention and control groups post training. Whilst there was some indication that physiotherapists were already utilizing aspects of psychosocial management for patients with low back pain, there was little change in what physiotherapists perceived to be important to patient recovery and actual clinical practice following the intervention. CONCLUSIONS: Psychosocial factors have been identified as an important factor in the recovery of patients with low back pain. This project incorporated the latest evidence on the management of low back pain and utilized the theory of opinion leaders to disseminate this evidence into clinical practice. Whilst there were some limitations in the overall size of the study, the results help to give an insight into the challenges faced by the health care system and researchers alike to ensure quality evidence is actually utilized by practitioners for the benefits of patient care. (shrink)

This paper argues that current iterations of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex rights are limited by an overreliance on particular representations of sexuality, in which homosexuality is defined negatively through a binary of homosexual/heterosexual. The limits of these representations are explored in order to unpick the possibility of engaging in a form of sexuality politics that is grounded in difference rather than in sameness or opposition. The paper seeks to respond to Braidotti’s call for an “affirmative politics” that is (...) open to forms of creative, future-oriented action and that might serve to answer some of the more common criticisms of current LGBTI rights activism. (shrink)

Hegel’s Logic reveals an insightful and subtle engagement with the traditional problem of free will as it emerges from our basic commitment to the explicability of the world. While the dominant current interpretations of Hegel’s theory of agency find little of significance in the Logic and suggest that Hegel avoided the traditional problem, Yeomans argues both that the problem is unavoidable, and that the two versions of the Logic fruitfully engage the tensions between explicability and both the control and alternate (...) possibilities constitutive of free agency. In particular, Yeomans examines Hegel’s response to three different versions of the principle of sufficient reason that have historically seemed to make free will problematic. The central three chapters take up each of these versions in turn. For each, Yeomans first explores the nature of its challenge to free will with glances both at Hegel’s precursors and contemporaries and at the philosophy of action of our own time. Then Yeomans delves into the arguments of Hegel’s Logic to see how he construed the problematic concepts in question. Finally, Yeomans returns to the issue of free will to bring Hegel’s interpretations of the concepts in the Logic together with elements of his moral psychology from his practical philosophy both to show how the problem of free will can be resolved, and to trace in outline the shape of free will that such a resolution produces. The key connection between the Logic’s reflections on the form of explanation and the practical philosophy’s theory of the will is that both attempt to do justice to the mutual necessity of self-determination and external influence. (shrink)

Sociology and Animals : Beginnings -- Animals and Biology as Destiny -- Animals, Social Inequalities and Oppression -- Animals, Crime and Abuse -- Town and Country : Animals, Space and Place -- Consumption of the Animal -- Animals, Leisure and Culture -- Animal Experiments and Animal Rights -- Conclusion: Sociology for Other Animals.

Personal narratives have become one of the most potent vehicles for advancing human rights claims across the world. Human Rights and Narrated Lives explores what happens when autobiographical narratives are produced, received, and circulated in the field of human rights. It asks how personal narratives emerge in local settings how international rights discourse enables and constrains individual and collective subjectivities in narration how personal narratives circulate and take on new meanings in new contexts and how and under what conditions they (...) feed into, affect, and are affected by the reorganization of politics in post-cold war, postcolonial, globalizing human rights contexts. (shrink)

Is Heidegger a temporal idealist or a temporal realist? That is, does he believe that time is supplied by the human standpoint, or that we derive it from the structure of the world around us? Blattner makes a compelling case that Heidegger is a temporal idealist, but a failed one. Rousse, however, argues that Heidegger’s position is more promising when he is interpreted not as an unsuccessful idealist, but as an underdeveloped realist. In contrast, we offer arguments grounded in German (...) Idealist treatments of time that Heidegger is a successful idealist who can derive sequential time from nonsequential human temporality. (shrink)

Despite claims of ‘evidence based policy’, the place of empirical evidence in family law reform is ambiguous. There is ongoing socio-legal analysis of the differential value and uses of quantitative data and anecdote in detailing women’s experiences and advocating for change. In this paper, we engage with these issues through a focus on how data were constructed in a key government report, Every Picture Tells a Story, which was used to officially define the problem and outline recommendations in the controversial (...) 2006-08 reform of the Australian Child Support Scheme. Our discussion focuses on two questions: what legitimacy is accorded to different kinds of evidence in family law reform processes?; and, how is this legitimacy gendered? We applied feminist critical discourse analysis to the type, source and claims of the data included in the child support chapter of the report. Our findings indicate that both quantitative data and anecdote were used to privilege fathers’ financial interests and autonomy; in contrast, women’s voices and interests were marginalised. Thus, we argue the legitimacy of data is ascribed through its relationship to the gendered definition of the ‘problems’ of child support, rather than the type of data per se. (shrink)

In this paper we present an equivalence between the category of commutative regular rings and the category of Boolean-valued fields, i.e., Boolean-valued sets for which the field axioms are true. The author used this equivalence in [12] to develop a Galois theory for commutative regular rings. Here we apply the equivalence to give an alternative construction of an algebraic closure for any commutative regular ring.Boolean-valued sets were developed in 1965 by Scott and Solovay [10] to simplify independence proofs in set (...) theory. They later were applied by Takeuti [13] to obtain results on Hilbert and Banach spaces. Ellentuck [3] and Weispfenning [14] considered Boolean-valued rings which consisted of rings and associated Boolean-valued relations. To the author's knowledge, the present work is the first to employ the Boolean-valued sets of Scott and Solovay to obtain results in algebra.The idea that commutative regular rings can be studied by examining the properties of related fields is not new. For several years algebraists and logicians have investigated commutative regular rings by representing a commutative regular ring as a subdirect product of fields or as the ring of global sections of a sheaf of fields over a Boolean space. These representations depend, as does the work presented here, on the fact that the set of central idempotents of any ring with identity forms a Boolean algebra. The advantage of the Boolean-valued set approach is that the axioms of classical logic and set theory are true in the Boolean universe. Therefore, if the axioms for a field are true for a Boolean-valued set, then other properties of the set can be deduced immediately from field theory. (shrink)

In this essay, I explore this idea of a collective consciousness. I propose that individuals can share in a collective consciousness by forming a collective subject. I begin the essay by considering and rejecting three possible pictures of collective subjectivity: the group mind, the emergent mind, and the socially embedded mind. I argue that each of these accounts fails to provide one of the following requirements for collective subjectivity: (1) plurality, (2) awareness, and (3) collectivity. I then look to Edmund (...) Husserl’s idea of ‘social subjectivities’ for a possible account, but I agree with Alfred Schutz that Husserl fails to explain how such subjectivities are constituted by the conscious acts of individuals. In an effort to provide such an explanation, I turn to a discussion of our basic capacities for social intentionality: empathy, intersubjectivity, and co-subjectivity. In the final section of the essay, I argue that individuals can form a collective subject by taking a first-person plural perspective and ‘simulating’ the consciousness of the collective that they form. This account has the required features of plurality, awareness, and collectivity. (shrink)

The work reported in this monograph was begun in the winter of 1967 in a graduate seminar at Berkeley. Many of the basic data were gathered by members of the seminar and the theoretical framework presented here was initially developed in the context of the seminar discussions. Much has been discovered since1969, the date of original publication, regarding the psychophysical and neurophysical determinants of universal, cross-linguistic constraints on the shape of basic color lexicons, and something, albeit less, can now also (...) be said with some confidence regarding the constraining effects of these language-independent processes of color perception and conceptualization on the direction of evolution of basic color term lexicons. (shrink)