Paradigmatic Instance Research Articles

Third-Kind Encounters in Biomedicine: Immunology Meets Mathematics and Informatics to Become Quantitative and Predictive.

The understanding of the immune response is right now at the center of biomedical research. There are growing expectations that immune-based interventions will in the midterm provide new, personalized, and targeted therapeutic options for many severe and highly prevalent diseases, from aggressive cancers to infectious and autoimmune diseases. To this end, immunology should surpass its current descriptive and phenomenological nature, and become quantitative, and thereby predictive.Immunology is an ideal field for deploying the tools, methodologies, and philosophy of systems biology, an approach that combines quantitative experimental data, computational biology, and mathematical modeling. This is because, from an organism-wide perspective, the immunity is a biological system of systems, a paradigmatic instance of a multi-scale system. At the molecular scale, the critical phenotypic responses of immune cells are governed by large biochemical networks, enriched in nested regulatory motifs such as feedback and feedforward loops. This network complexity confers them the ability of highly nonlinear behavior, including remarkable examples of homeostasis, ultra-sensitivity, hysteresis, and bistability. Moving from the cellular level, different immune cell populations communicate with each other by direct physical contact or receiving and secreting signaling molecules such as cytokines. Moreover, the interaction of the immune system with its potential targets (e.g., pathogens or tumor cells) is far from simple, as it involves a number of attack and counterattack mechanisms that ultimately constitute a tightly regulated multi-feedback loop system. From a more practical perspective, this leads to the consequence that today's immunologists are facing an ever-increasing challenge of integrating massive quantities from multi-platforms.In this chapter, we support the idea that the analysis of the immune system demands the use of systems-level approaches to ensure the success in the search for more effective and personalized immune-based therapies.

What Are Unnatural Narratives? What Are Unnatural Elements?

What Are Unnatural Narratives? What Are Unnatural Elements? Dan Shen (bio) The research on unnatural narrative theory as represented by Brian Richardson’s work over the past two or three decades has greatly expanded the scope of narrative studies, covering various phenomena neglected in previous investigations of narrative poetics. The works by Richardson and other scholars have devoted much space to explaining and defining what is unnatural. However, the picture is still not that clear. This article tries to [End Page 483] help clarify the issue by revealing the difference between the unnatural in Shakespeare/realist fiction and postmodernist fiction and by classifying different kinds of unnatural elements that break mimetic conventions without breaking the mimetic illusion. shakespeare, realism versus postmodernism In Unnatural Narrative (henceforth UN), Richardson observes that “the key criterion [for the unnatural] will always be the breaking of the mimetic illusion, in whatever form that may take” (93). Since different theorists have come up with different definitions of the unnatural, Richardson says in the Target Essay (henceforth TE): “In our practice, we often find it most useful to point to paradigmatic instances of the unnatural” (394). Here are two such cases offered in the TE: (1) “Outside, it is raining. Outside, it is not raining” (387); (2) “He’s got a car bomb. He puts the keys in the ignition and turns it—the car blows up. He gets out. He opens the hood and makes a cursory inspection. He closes the hood and gets back in. He turns the key in the ignition. The car blows up. He gets out and slams the door shut disgustedly” (Leyner 59). Significantly, the works by writers in the realist tradition, like Cervantes through Fielding and on through Austen and Trollope, preclude such impossible fictional events, which totally violate our understanding of the world. Such events can only appear in avant-garde, experimental fiction, like post-modernism, with essentially different conventions and licenses. In discussing unreliable narration, Tamar Yacobi observes that “the genetic mechanism relegates fictive oddities and inconsistencies to the production of the text; above all, where unresolved otherwise, they are blamed on the (e.g., wavering, negligent, or ideologically fanatic) author. [. . .] Just consider ‘one inconsistency [that] seems like a slip on Tolstoy’s part: in chap. 14, Pozdnysheva is said to have borne six children, while elsewhere it is five’ [Isenberg 167n29]” (111). Such mismatched narration is likely to be taken as a purposefully “unnatural” technique in postmodernist fiction, but tends to be regarded as a careless “slip” when found in a realist text.1 Similarly, no matter whether it is Fielding or Austen or Trollope, had he or she penned “Outside, it is raining. Outside, it is not raining,” we would not be in a position to take it as the unnatural technique of “denarration,” but have to treat it as a puzzling slip in an essentially realist narrative. Realist [End Page 484] fiction does enjoy certain licenses to break the mimetic illusion occasionally, such as a dramatized hetero-extradiegetic narrator’s entering the storyworld or such a narrator’s referring to his/her own narrating power. But usually these occasional elements are not significant enough to subvert the mimetic nature of the whole narrative. Then how about Shakespeare? In UN, Richardson defines Shakespeare as “one of the greatest fabricators of unnatural places, events, and sequences in the history of literature before postmodernism” (102). But we would not expect to find instances like “Outside, it is raining. Outside, it is not raining” in Shakespeare. In the first place, it is impossible to enact such denarration on the stage (if the two sentences concerned are enacted, they would be taken as being sequential: it first rains, then the rain stops). Secondly and more importantly, Shakespeare’s drama still aims at maintaining the mimetic illusion. One example of the unnatural chosen by Richardson is “the play with time” in Hamlet (UN 103–4). When Hamlet sees the ghost just after midnight, he asks, “What art thou that usurp’st this time of night?” (quoted in Richardson, UN 104). A few minutes later “the dawn starts to break and the ghost leaves, as the time of night does indeed seem...

The Art Type Theory of Art

The theory I present and defend in this paper—what I term the art type theory— holds that something is a work of art iff it belongs to an established art type. Something is an established art type, in turn, either because its paradigmatic instances standardly satisfy eight art-making conditions, or because the art world has seen fit to enfranchise it as such. It follows that the art status of certain objects is independent of what any individual or culture might say about it, while the art status of others fundamentally depends on the judgment of the art world. Because of the theory's quasi-institutional component, I conclude by defending it against four objections that have been raised against institutional definitions.

Aristocratic Rebellion: Ruben Darío and the Creation of Artistic Freedom in the World-System

The late 19th struggle for artistic freedom in the capitalist world-system put the artist in a contradictory position. This contradiction is particularly relevant for writers of the periphery. Freedom or autonomy to pursue purely intellectual projects required a certain aristocratic defense of the value of art. At the same time, however, artists and intellectuals did confront structural subordination: they belonged, as Pierre Bourdieu explained, to the dominated fractions of the dominant class, subordinated both to the state and the bourgeoisie. The life of Nicaraguan Ruben Darío (1867–1916), probably the most well-known poet in Latin American history, provides a paradigmatic instance of this dilemma. Moreover, it sheds light into a dilemma particular to the peripheral intellectual. Peripheral writers, in the 19th century and still today, are subject to world-systemic hierarchies, even cultural ones. This double subordination is clear in the case of Ruben Darío. He was in a subordinated position not only vis-à-vis the national state and the bourgeoisie. Darío was also in a subordinated position, even if symbolic, in relation to those same intellectuals that Bourdieu celebrated as creators of the autonomy of culture in France. One can account for this complex of hierarchies only through a 'world-systems biography' approach. World-systems biographies clearly examine the dialectic of personal, national and global levels of social life. Moreover, it can uncover the core-periphery dialectic in the realm of artistic production. Thus, this world-systems biography approach is shown to be a useful framework through a brief analysis of Darío's life and work.

Exotica on the Move: Birds of Paradise in Early Modern Holland

Exploring the interpretive potential of a study of exotica as objects on the move, this essay analyses a paradigmatic instance of the copious exotic objects that the Dutch mobilized in the seventeenth century -birds of paradise. Native of Papua New Guinea, these birds were prized throughout Europe for their stunning plumage, rarity, and distant origins. By reconstructing trade and interest in birds of paradise in the Netherlands, this essay describes how these exotic wares were were described and evaluated; how they were valued on and off market; and how the awe that they inspired served political purposes. In early modern Holland, the exotic depended for its value on the coordinates of the market control, entwined with the political aims of the emergent Republic. In ways that this essay delineates, birds of paradise exemplify early modern Dutch exoticism.

On the Ontology of Mechanically Reproduced Artworks

In this article, I introduce a hitherto un-articulated distinction that is relevant for understanding the ontology of mechanically reproduced artworks. The distinction concerns two distinct sorts of relationships that mechanically reproduced artworks can stand in to their sources: as instantiations or as representations. I argue that this distinction challenges (what I call) the dominant view about the ontology of sample-based musical works, which holds that samples are always instantiations of their sample sources. The dominant view is assumed by current copyright law, as well as by much of what is said in critical discussions of sample-based music. I give two related arguments against the dominant view. Negatively, I argue that the dominant view cannot accommodate many paradigmatic instances of sample-based music. Positively, I propose an alternative account of what is distinctive about the ontology of these paradigmatic examples of sample-based musical works. My account not only explains what is distinctive about these sample-based musical works, but also why their distinctiveness is so often overlooked.

Leibniz on Causation - Part 2

Leibniz is almost unique among early modern philosophers in giving final causation a central place in his metaphysical system. All changes in created substances, according to Leibniz, have final causes, that is, occur for the sake of some end. There is, however, no consensus among commentators about the details of Leibniz's views on final causation. The least perfect types of changes that created substances undergo are especially puzzling because those changes seem radically different from paradigmatic instances of final causation. Building on my more general discussion of efficient and final causation in ‘Leibniz on Causation – Part 1,’ I will examine and assess some of the rival interpretations of Leibniz's account of final causation.

Reluctant Ecology in Blake and Arendt: A Response to Robert Mitchell and Richard Sha

Previous articleNext article No AccessRomanticism and ExperimentReluctant Ecology in Blake and Arendt: A Response to Robert Mitchell and Richard ShaAmanda Jo GoldsteinAmanda Jo Goldstein Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 46, Number 3Summer 2015Romanticism and Experiment Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24888030 Views: 26Total views on this site © 2015 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Althusser lecteur de Gramsci

The paper examines Althusser’s readings of Gramsci, from the first critical notes and annotations to his writings on the crisis of Marxism. It highlights the profound ambivalence of Althusser’s interpretations. On the one hand, Gramsci is presented as a precursor, as the only figure within the Marxist tradition deemed to have attempted to think the superstructure, and in particular the political. On the other side, the Gramscian corpus is criticized as the paradigmatic instance of a conception of temporality and politics with which Althusser is in disagreement. Regarding the Althusserian critique, we here identify two distinct phases starting out from a critique of the lack of knowledge of the specific status of science in general, especially of the science of history, characteristic of the second half of the sixties, Althusser would, in the late seventies, formulate a critique of the Gramscian concept of hegemony which, in his view, erases the question of class domination.

“Sing it Like Poor Barbary”: Othello and Early Modern Women’s Performance

This essay examines the Folio version of Othello 4.3 via textual, performance and transnational analytic models in order to contextualize Desdemona’s Willow Song against the sung performances of English female ballad sellers and the Italian actress-singers of commedia and court fame. In this way, the essay argues that modes of female theatricality were contested at the heart of the dramatic and Shakespearean canon. The Folio Willow Song scene reworks the widely circulating trope of the lamenting abandoned woman, a figure whose virtuosic distress captivated audiences of the celebrated Italian commedia and court singers during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. One paradigmatic instance of virtuosic song and verbal dexterity, Isabella Andreini’s La Pazzia d’Isabell a (1589), is examined to propose Othello 4.3 as a bravura demonstration of the boy player’s practice in opposition to women’s performance, staking a claim for the virtuosity of the English boy in competition with the foreign actress. Further, given the ongoing scholarly debates over the absence of the Willow Song from the 1622 Quarto and its status in relation to the stage, the essay suggests that the virtuosity required of the English boy actor in the song’s performance feeds into casting practice and hence can illuminate the scene’s textual history.

Information Systems and the Translation of Transgender

Abstract Using the data systems of Utah Valley University as a representative case study, this research note discusses the sociotechnical process, which I term the translation regime, through which data systems interpret and construct the world, focusing on gender nonconformity as a paradigmatic instance of that process. Through both the technical structures of data systems and the social knowledge within which they operate, such regimes impose multiple substantive translations on the conditions that they purport to represent, translations that come with important political consequences for those who are gender nonconforming. So understood, information technology becomes an important locus for action in the pursuit of social justice for gender-nonconforming people.

Essence in abundance

Fine (1994 “Essence and Modality”;, Philosophical Perspectives, 8: 1–16) is widely thought to have refuted the simple modal account of essence, which takes the essential properties of a thing to be those it cannot exist without exemplifying. Yet, a number of philosophers have suggested resuscitating the simple modal account by appealing to distinctions akin to the distinction Lewis (1983. “New Work For a Theory of Universals”;, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 61: 343–377; 1986. On the Plurality of Worlds. Oxford: Blackwell) draws between sparse and abundant properties, treating only those in the former class as candidates for essentiality. I argue that ‘sparse modalism’ succumbs to counterexamples similar to those originally posed by Fine, and fails to capture paradigmatic instances of essence involving abundant properties and relations.

DIREITO NATURAL E HISTORICISMO EM LEO STRAUSS

O artigo pretende articular a tese de Strauss de que o Direito Natural é defensável,tendo em vista sua necessidade. Isso porque, para sustentação de um direito além do positivo deve haver uma instância paradigmática, que é o Natural. Dessa forma, Strauss irá tentar rechaçar o historicismo e o relativismo, desconstruindo a teoria de Weber, e sustentando a possibilidade do Direito Natural, como superior e fundador do Direito Positivo.

University rankings and the scientification of social sciences and humanities

ESEP Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics Contact the journal RSS Mailing List Subscribe to our mailing list via Mailchimp HomeLatest VolumeAbout the JournalEditorsTheme Sections ESEP 13:177-192 (2014) - DOI: https://doi.org/10.3354/esep00144 University rankings and the scientification of social sciences and humanities Costas Stratilatis* Department of Law, University of Nicosia, 46 Makedonitissas Ave., 1700 Nicosia, Cyprus *Corresponding author: stratilatis.c@unic.ac.cy ABSTRACT: The aim of this article is to render global university rankings (GURs) as a paradigmatic instance of knowledge/power (Foucault) within our post-industrial ‘knowledge societies’. At the same time, I examine a possible connection between GURs and ‘scientification’ of social sciences and humanities (SSH), i.e. promotion of the belief that if SSH are to count as ‘sciences’ proper, they must subscribe to the epistemological and methodological tenets of positivist-empiricist natural sciences. Based on recent literature and on the methodological information that is provided by the compilers of GURs on the relevant websites, the second part of the article traces some structural features (such as underestimation of teaching and systematic biases of bibliometrics) which might be taken as supporting the hypothesis that GURs are connected with the the wider trend of scientification of social sciences and humanities. I conclude that, even if we could ever overcome the deficiencies of existing rankings, we should take seriously that there can be no ranking system that would be epistemically objective, value neutral, and politically incontestable. KEY WORDS: Ratings · Critical theory · Knowledge · Power · Discourse Full text in pdf format PreviousNextCite this article as: Stratilatis C (2014) University rankings and the scientification of social sciences and humanities. Ethics Sci Environ Polit 13:177-192. https://doi.org/10.3354/esep00144 Export citation RSS - Facebook - Tweet - linkedIn Cited by Published in ESEP Vol. 13, No. 2. Online publication date: May 15, 2014 Print ISSN: 1863-5415; Online ISSN: 1611-8014 Copyright © 2014 Inter-Research.

Public Procurement and Private Certification: The Case of the UK TPP

Forestry certification schemes have been considered the paradigmatic instance of a new form of private governance that may challenge state-centered authority and public policy-making. Although governments and intergovernmental organizations are certainly not the schemes' main architects, they are more involved in the overall effects of forestry certification than is often emphasized, notably through procurement policies. This paper examines a particular interaction of private and public governance organizations, in the realm of forestry certification, among the UK government’s Timber Procurement Policy (TPP), a governmental demand-side policy tool, and two major certification schemes – the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and the Program for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC). The analysis applies a broadly conceived framework of supply and demand to consider how the TPP interacts with these private schemes to impact both markets for certified timber and the private schemes’ substantive and procedural content. This framework illustrates how the UK government relies on predominantly private regulation -- for expertise, convenience and advantages in terms of international trade law -- as well as influencing it through both the TPP and more traditional regulation. It is shown that a restricted approach to public procurement can enhance the overall quality of this inter-institutional regulatory framework.

Interrogational Torture as a Human Rights Issue: A Brief Further Reflection on the Morality of Human Rights

The morality of human rights consists not only of various rights recognized by the great majority of the countries of the world as human rights, but also of a fundamental imperative that directs “all human beings” to “act towards one another a spirit of brotherhood.” The imperative — articulated the very first article of the foundational human rights document of our time, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) — is fundamental the sense that it serves, the morality of human rights, as the normative ground of human rights. I have explained all this at length an earlier paper, “The Morality of Human Rights” (2013), which I have posted to SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2274381.In the earlier paper, I addressed (inter alia) this question: Why should one take seriously the normative ground of human rights; that is, what reason or reasons does one have, if any, to live one’s life accord with the imperative to “act towards all human beings a spirit of brotherhood”? In this brief paper — which serves as a kind of addendum to the earlier paper — I address a version of a related, followup question: Should we want governments always to “act towards all human beings a spirit of brotherhood”, no matter what the consequences? Specifically, I address this question: Should we want governments never to subject a human being to torture, no matter what the likely consequences of not subjecting him (or her) to torture? In the earlier paper, I explained that as the concept “human right” is understood both the UDHR and all the various international human rights treaties that have followed the UDHR’s wake, a right is a human right if the rationale for establishing and protecting the right — for example, as a treaty-based right — is, part, that conduct that violates the right violates the imperative to “act towards all human beings a spirit of brotherhood”. Each of the human rights articulated the UDHR and/or one or more international human rights treaties is a specification of what, conjunction with other considerations, the imperative is thought to forbid or to require. The right at issue this paper — the right not to be tortured — is a specification of what governments must refrain from doing lest they violate the “in a spirit of brotherhood” imperative — lest they, short, treat a human being inhumanely. Torturing a human being is an instance — indeed, a paradigmatic instance — of treating a human being inhumanely. The question-in-chief this paper: Should we want governments never to subject a human being to torture, no matter what the likely consequences of not subjecting him (or her) to torture?The conclusion I reach: Even if we assume that some imaginable and sufficiently extreme circumstances it would be morally permissible — even, perhaps, morally obligatory — for government officials to subject a human being to interrogational torture, there are nonetheless conclusive reasons for lawmakers and treaty-drafters to make bans on torture exceptionless. It is optimal, all things considered, that laws and treaties do just what both the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention against Torture do: make the right against torture, even interrogational torture, nonderogable. There are conclusive reasons, that is, for laws and treaties to require that governments never violate the normative ground of human rights — that governments never violate the in a spirit of brotherhood imperative, that they never treat any human being inhumanely — even if we assume that it is not the case, as a moral matter, that governments should never violate the normative ground of human rights.

So Close, Yet So Far: Why Solutions to the Closeness Problem for the Doctrine of Double Effect Fall Short

According to the classical Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE), there is a morally significant difference between intending harm and merely foreseeing harm. Versions of DDE have been defended in a variety of creative ways, but there is one difficulty, the so‐called “closeness problem”, that continues to bedevil all of them. The problem is that an agent's intention can always be identified in such a fine‐grained way as to eliminate an intention to harm from almost any situation, including those that have been taken to be paradigmatic instances in which DDE applies to intended harm. In this paper, we consider and reject a number of recent attempts to solve the closeness problem. We argue that the failure of these proposals strongly suggests that the closeness problem is intractable, and that the distinction between intending harm and merely foreseeing harm is not morally significant. Further, we argue that there may be a deeper reason why such attempts must fail: the rationale that makes the best fit with DDE, namely, an imperative not to aim at evil, is itself irredeemably flawed. While we believe that these observations should lead us to abandon further attempts to solve the closeness problem for DDE, we also conclude by showing how a related principle that is supported by a distinct rationale and avoids facing the closeness problem altogether nevertheless shares with DDE its most important features, including an intuitive explanation of a number of cases and a commitment to the relevance of intentions.

Towards a Conflict Theory of Recognition: On the Constitution of Relations of Recognition in Conflict

AbstractIn this paper, we develop an understanding of recognition in terms of individuals’ capacity for conflict. Our goal is to overcome various shortcomings that can be found in both the positive and negative conceptions of recognition. We start by analyzing paradigmatic instances of such conceptions—namely, those put forward by Axel Honneth and Judith Butler. We do so in order to show how both positions are inadequate in their elaborations of recognition in an analogous way: Both fail to make intelligible the fundamental nexus between relations of recognition and individuals’ capacity for conflict. We then move on to reconsider aspects of Hegel's view of recognition—ones that, from our viewpoint, have been unjustly neglected in the debate about recognition: his focus on the constitution of relations of recognition in conflict and on the status of being an author of acts of recognition. On this basis, we then spell out in a more systematic way what we take to be a more convincing conception of recognition. This puts us in the position to gesture at some consequences of this conception in practical contexts, above all with regard to the justification, role and structure of political institutions..

Search and Homophily in Social Networks

Biases in meeting opportunities have been recently shown to play a key role for the emergence of homophily in social networks (see Currarini, Jackson and Pin 2009). The aim of this paper is to provide a simple micro-foundation of these biases in a model where the size and type-composition of the meeting pools are shaped by agents' socialization decisions. In particular, agents either inbreed (direct search only to similar types) or outbreed (direct search to population at large). When outbreeding is costly, this is shown to induce stark equilibrium behavior of a threshold type: agents ``inbreed'' (i.e. mostly meet their own type) if, and only if, their group is above certain size. We show that this threshold equilibrium generates patterns of in-group and cross-group ties that are consistent with empirical evidence of homophily in two paradigmatic instances: high school friendships and interethnic marriages.

A quantum non-Markovian collision model: incoherent swap case

We have recently presented a collision-model-based framework to tackle non-Markovian quantum dynamics (Ciccarello et al 2012 arXiv:1207.6554). As a distinctive feature, memory is introduced in a dynamical way by adding extra inter-ancillary collisions to a standard (memoryless) collision model. In this paper, we focus on the case where such intra-bath collisions are described by incoherent partial swap operations. After briefly reviewing the model, we show how to include temperature as an additional parameter by relaxing the assumption that each bath ancilla is initially in a pure state. We also calculate explicitly the dynamical map entailed by the master equation in the paradigmatic instance of a Jaynes–Cummings system–ancilla coupling.