Current understanding of the development of quantity representations is based primarily on performance in the number‐line task. We posit that the data from number‐line tasks reflect the observer's underlying representation of quantity, together with the cognitive strategies and skills required to equate line length and quantity. Here, we specify a unified theory linking the underlying psychological representation of quantity and the associated strategies in four variations of the number‐line task: the production and estimation variations of the bounded and unbounded number‐line (...) tasks. Comparison of performance in the bounded and unbounded number‐line tasks provides a unique and direct way to assess the role of strategy in number‐line completion. Each task produces a distinct pattern of data, yet each pattern is hypothesized to arise, at least in part, from the same underlying psychological representation of quantity. Our model predicts that the estimated biases from each task should be equivalent if the different completion strategies are modeled appropriately and no other influences are at play. We test this equivalence hypothesis in two experiments. The data reveal all variations of the number‐line task produce equivalent biases except for one: the estimation variation of the bounded number‐line task. We discuss the important implications of these findings. (shrink)

Traditionally genetics is said to be the science of heredity. At least this was how William Bateson defined it in 1906. Today this is no longer the case. Since about ten years ago. when biologists learned to extract genes from cells, to transfer them from cell to cell, to dissect them, to analyze them biochemically, in short to manipulate them, the term genetics has tended rather to designate the science of the action of genes in cells. (This is what was (...) formerly called physiological genetics). In any case this is the form of genetics which today is in the forefront of biological research. (This is also called molecular genetics). This kind of genetics is also in the forefront in the media, because of its present or potential applications, in the realms of biotechnology, genetic therapy and so on. (shrink)

Ce volume rassemble les textes majeurs du confucianisme : " Les entretiens " de Confucius, " La grande étude " de Daxue et " Le classique de la Piété filiale " de Xiaojing.

The first part of this memoriam essay focuses on the author’s relationship with the famed Bajan intellectual George Lamming during his years at Brown University. The second part explores Lamming’s most famous work, In the Castle of My Skin (1953), which offers important tropes in Black existential thought that are synchronous with Frantz Fanon’s Peau noir, masques blancs (1952), but with a more detailed exploration of the concept of political complicity through Lamming’s portrait of the phenomenon of slime and its (...) correlate, the slimy individual. The author also discusses Lamming’s treatment of the Fanonian motif of colonizing notions of normative development. (shrink)

Scholars looking back to the earliest stirrings of the philosophical tradition in ancient Greece have often seen a rational approach to nature cleaving itself off from an older approach, that of the mythographer. If this account were right, we would have here a major (and perhaps the ?rst major) drawing of an epistemic boundary. There are, however, mounting reasons to question this narrative that have been accumulating across several modern disciplines. This paper explores the most important challenges to the myth-to-science (...) narrative and suggests that the different ways of framing the ancient debates have much to do with the boundaries between modern disciplines and/or academic cultures. (shrink)

Reason and Value collects 15 new papers by leading contemporary philosophers on themes from the work of Joseph Raz. Raz has made major contributions in a wide range of areas, including jurisprudence, political philosophy, and the theory of practical reason; but all of his work displays a deep engagement with central themes in moral philosophy. The subtlety and power of Raz's reflections on ethical topics make his writings a fertile source for anyone working in this area. Especially significant are his (...) explorations of the connections between practical reason and the theory of value, which constitute a sustained and penetrating treatment of a set of issues at the very center of moral philosophy as it is practiced today. The contributors to the volume acknowledge the importance of Raz's contributions by engaging critically with his positions and offering independent perspectives on the topics that he has addressed. The volume aims both to honour Raz's accomplishments in the area of ethical theorizing, and to contribute to an enhanced appreciation of the significance of his work for the subject. (shrink)

The Nature of God explores a perennial problem in the philosophy of religion.

The philosophical tradition in the West has always subjected life to conceptual divisions and questions about meaning. In Vital Nourishment, François Jullien contends that although this process has given rise to a rich history of inquiry, it proceeds too fast. In their anxiety about meaning, Western thinkers since Plato have forgotten simply to experience life. In this installment of his continuing project of plumbing the philosophical divide between Eastern and Western thought, Jullien slows down, and, using the third and fourth (...) century B.C.E. Chinese thinker Zhuanghi as a foil, begins to think about life from a point outside of Western inquiry.The question of how to "feed life," or nourish it, is the point of departure for the Chinese tradition that Jullien locates in Zhuanghi. Life passes through each of us, and we have a duty to become amenable to its ebbs and flows. We must cultivate a sense of being adequate to it so that we can house it. Exploring notions of breath, energy, and immanence, Jullien reopens a vibrant space of intellectual exchange between East and West. In doing so, he refuses to commit to a rigid framework of meaning, and his text unfolds as an elegant process that mirrors the very type of thought he explores. Pointing out that it seems intellectually and politically imperative today to reinvigorate Western thought with ideas from the East, Jullien seeks to create a space of mutual inquiry that maintains the integrity of both Eastern and Western thinking. Vital Nourishment is both a rich intellectual historical journey and a text very much attuned to the philosophical politics of the present.François Jullien is Professor at the Université Paris VII-Denis Diderot and director at the Institut de la Pensée Contemporaine. He is the author of Detour and Access: Stratgies of Meaning in Chna and Greece, The Propensity of Things: Toward a History of Efficacy in China, and In Praise of Blandness: Proceeding from Chinsese Thought and Aesthetics, all published by Zone Books. (shrink)

What did the Romans know about their world? Quite a lot, as Daryn Lehoux makes clear in this fascinating and much-needed contribution to the history and philosophy of ancient science. Lehoux contends that even though many of the Romans’ views about the natural world have no place in modern science—the umbrella-footed monsters and dog-headed people that roamed the earth and the stars that foretold human destinies—their claims turn out not to be so radically different from our own. Lehoux draws (...) upon a wide range of sources from what is unquestionably the most prolific period of ancient science, from the first century BC to the second century AD. He begins with Cicero’s theologico-philosophical trilogy _On the Nature of the Gods_, _On Divination_, and _On Fate_, illustrating how Cicero’s engagement with nature is closely related to his concerns in politics, religion, and law. Lehoux then guides readers through highly technical works by Galen and Ptolemy, as well as the more philosophically oriented physics and cosmologies of Lucretius, Plutarch, and Seneca, all the while exploring the complex interrelationships between the objects of scientific inquiry and the norms, processes, and structures of that inquiry. This includes not only the tools and methods the Romans used to investigate nature, but also the Romans’ cultural, intellectual, political, and religious perspectives. Lehoux concludes by sketching a methodology that uses the historical material he has carefully explained to directly engage the philosophical questions of incommensurability, realism, and relativism. By situating Roman arguments about the natural world in their larger philosophical, political, and rhetorical contexts, _What Did the Romans Know?_ demonstrates that the Romans had sophisticated and novel approaches to nature, approaches that were empirically rigorous, philosophically rich, and epistemologically complex. (shrink)

Despite All Critique (2014) -- World Politics and Western Reason (1980) -- The Doubled Outsides of the Modern International (2005) -- The Subject of Security (1995) -- The Protection of Nature and the Nature of Protection (2005) -- Social Movements/World Politics (1994) -- Europe is Not Where It is Supposed to Be (2000) -- They Seek it Here, They Seek it There : Looking for Politics in Clayoquot Sound (2003) -- Violence, Modernity, Silence : From Weber to International Relations (1993) (...) -- Hobbes, Origins, Limits (2011) -- War, Terror, Judgement (2002) -- International, Imperial, Exceptional (2005) -- Which Democracy for Which Demos? (2013) -- The Political Theory of Boundaries and the Boundaries of Political Theory : Interview With Raia Prokhovnik (2012). (shrink)

Lehoux contends that even though many of the Romans' views about the natural world have no place in modern science--the umbrella-footed monsters and dog-headed people that roamed the earth and the stars that foretold human destinies--their ...

The relationship between conceptions of law and conceptions of nature is a complex one, and proceeds on what appear to be two distinct fronts. On the one hand, we frequently talk of nature as being lawlike or as obeying laws. On the other hand there are schools of philosophy that seek to justify ethics generally, or legal theory specifically, in conceptions of nature. Questions about the historical origins and development of claims that nature is lawlike are generally treated as entirely (...) distinct from the development of ethical natural law theories. By looking at the many intersections of law and nature in antiquity, this paper shows that such a sharp distinction is overly simplistic, and often relies crucially on the imposition of an artificial and anachronistic suppression of the role of gods or divinity in the worlds of ancient natural philosophy. Furthermore, by tightening up the terms of the debate, we see that the common claim that a conception of ‘laws of nature’ only emerges in the Scientific Revolution is built on a superficial reading of the ancient evidence.Keywords: Ancient science; Philosophy of science; Philosophy of law; Ancient theology; Scientific Revolution. (shrink)

Em texto bem conhecido. interpreta Heidegger a "Ciência da Lógica" de Hegel como o expoente e a expressão mais acabada do modo de pensar onto-teo-lógico. caracteristico da metafisica. porquanto faz reenviar uma à outra as questões ontológica e teológica numa relação de determinação recíproca. Assim. nào só o que é primeiro - o ser na sua imediatez e universalidade — funda à sua maneira o que é último, a saber, a Ideia (Idee), que é o apelativo hegeliano para o Divino. (...) como o que é último funda à sua maneira o que é primeiro. fazendo-o existir. totalizando-o e unificando-o. Não é eerto. porém. que a leitura de Heidegger faça jus ao sentido mais profundo do pensamento hegeliano. Na verdade. embora iniludivel. parece-nos que a relação de determinagao recíproca entre ser e fundamento que ali se apresenta em termos de causa sui. aponta para um pensar já excedentário relativamente ao espaço antinómico da metafisica, antecipando-se á contemporaneidade pela valoração da imanêneia. a que o Absoluto acaba por se exaurir no seu processo de auto-constituição. Tal é, pelo menos. o que nos propomos mostrar atraves de uma apresentação sucinta dos grandes tópicos da Lógica de Hegel, presentes na versão abreviada da sua "Enciclopédia das Ciencias Filosóticas em Epitome". /// In a well known text, Heidegger interprets Hegel's "Science of Logic" as the greatest expression of the onto-teo-logical way of thinking, characteristics of metaphysics, because of his understanding of the ontological and theological questions in an interconnected way. In fact, not only what is first - being in his immediacy and universality - grounds in his own way what is last - the Idea (Idee), which the hegelian term that stands for the Divine - but also what is last explains in his own way what is first, giving it existence. totalizing and unifying it. It is not clear whther Heidegger's reading is correct in what the most profound meaning of the hegelian thought concerns. It seems to us. in fact, that the relation of mutual dependence between being and ground, there formulated in terms of Causa sui. points to a way of thinking that exceeds tha antonomical space of metaphysics, thus anticipating contemporary thought by the valoration of immanence, to which the Absolute confines in his process of realization. In any way. this is what we intend to show through a concise presentation of the main topics of Hegel' Logic, as they are exposed in his "Enciclopedy of Philosophical Sciences". (shrink)

Concluding his discussion of bee reproduction in Book 3 ofGeneration of Animals, Aristotle makes a famous methodological pronouncement about the relationship between sense perception and theory in natural history. In the very next sentence, he casually remarks that the unique method of reproduction that he finds in bees should not be surprising, since bees have something ‘divine’ about them. Although the methodological pronouncement gets a fair bit of scholarly attention, and although Aristotle's theological commitments in cosmology and metaphysics are well (...) known, scholars have almost universally passed over the comment about bees and divinity in silence. This paper aims to show why that comment is no mere throwaway, and offers an exploration and elaboration of the ways in which divinity operates even at fairly mundane levels in his natural philosophy, as an important Aristotelian explanation for order, proportion and rationality, even in the lowest of animals. (shrink)

Le mot « héroïne » en grec apparaît assez tardivement dans la littérature comme dans les inscriptions (début du ve s. av. J.-C). Il s’agit de réévaluer l’apport des épopées homériques à la question de la définition d’un héros au féminin. Jusqu’ici, la problématique historique s’était orientée autour de la question de l’attestation chez Homère de cultes héroïques, phénomène particulièrement florissants au viiie s. av. J.-C., souvent associé à la diffusion des poèmes épiques. Une autre approche consistait à chercher dans (...) l’Iliade et l’Odyssée des traces de cultes rendus à des héros morts ou des preuves de l’existence chez Homère de la catégorie religieuse des demi-dieux. Le problème est ici renversé : partant des caractéristiques du héros homérique, l’objectif est de vérifier l’existence d’un héroïsme au féminin et de souligner les liens entre héroïnes et héros dans les épopées. (shrink)

Le mot « héroïne » en grec apparaît assez tardivement dans la littérature comme dans les inscriptions. Il s’agit de réévaluer l’apport des épopées homériques à la question de la définition d’un héros au féminin. Jusqu’ici, la problématique historique s’était orientée autour de la question de l’attestation chez Homère de cultes héroïques, phénomène particulièrement florissants au viiie s. av. J.-C., souvent associé à la diffusion des poèmes épiques. Une autre approche consistait à chercher dans l’Iliade et l’Odyssée des traces de (...) cultes rendus à des héros morts ou des preuves de l’existence chez Homère de la catégorie religieuse des demi-dieux. Le problème est ici renversé : partant des caractéristiques du héros homérique, l’objectif est de vérifier l’existence d’un héroïsme au féminin et de souligner les liens entre héroïnes et héros dans les épopées. (shrink)

. Once constituted, scientific facts have a way of roaming about on their own in the world, much divorced from the circumstances of their original constitution. An important part of Latour and Woolgar's discussion in Laboratory Life was to draw attention to how facts are used once they are at the final stage of their constitution. What I propose to do here is to go one step further, and to follow a single fact around in the wild—to tag it, as (...) it were, much as a biologist might tag an animal with a radio collar—and then look to see where it turns up. The fact I have chosen is especially taggable, simply because it happens to be fantastic: I refer to the fact that magnets will lose their power of attraction if they are rubbed with garlic. This fact is also useful because it shows up in authors spanning fifteen centuries, from Plutarch through Rabelais and beyond, and over this time it shows some interesting behaviors. Of course, in the end, the garlic-magnet antipathy was disproved, and so changed its epistemological status, moving from one extreme to the other: from the obviously true to the obviously ridiculous. What struck Rabe-. (shrink)

The present study emphasizes Chapter Six of Huai-nan Tzu in expounding the theory of kan-ying STIMULUS-RESPONSE; RESONANCE, which postulates that all things in the universe are interrelated and influence each other according to pre-set patterns.