C. James

There are two general senses of "post-truth." One is a contemporary, popular sense that captures the manner in which facts and truths have lost their power to inform public discussion and debate. This first sense is relatively new and is related to the explosion in the number of agencies and media by which truth claims are created and distributed and the corresponding monetization of the production of truth claims. There are so many news outlets, so many reports, so many conflicting versions of events, so many conflicting interpretations of the outcome of even scientifically conducted research, that a general diminishment of trust has taken hold. This multiplication of truth claims exacerbates the confusing effects...

Analytic epistemologists, over the last two decades, have been troubled by two vexing and seemingly unrelated problems. First they have been trying to describe the "structure" of justification of our knowledge claims; this enterprise has been called the "foundationalism debate." Secondly though, they have also been trying to formulate precisely the necessary and sufficient conditions for "knowing;" this difficulty has come to be known as the "Gettier Problem." The first project deals with epistemic justification and the second, with the analysis of knowledge. The connections, if there are any, between these two research programs remain most obscure at present. And the silence with which most philosophers greet this question leads one to suppose that perhaps there are no interesting connections after all. I argue, however, that there are strong links between the two projects and that together they point us toward a workable "theory of justification." The foundationalism debate teaches us what makes a belief justified. And the Gettier-related literature is best construed, I contend, as a somewhat confused attempt to show us what kinds of justified beliefs are also likely to be true. We could say then that the foundationalism dispute discloses what makes our beliefs "justified," while the Gettier problem takes our theory of justification somewhat further. Recognizing that a belief can be justified and yet be false, the Gettier literature teaches us how to identify beliefs that are more than merely justified--beliefs that are, shall we say, "completely justified" and therefore especially likely to be true. Consequently, our theory must make a distinction between "justified" and "completely justified" belief and provide us with a model of each. The threading insight that binds the two models and that lies at the heart of the essay is the idea that justification should be understood as an essentially dialectical affair in which one meets the challenges of a critic.

The aim of this thesis is to explore the place of physical geography in Scottish Enlightenment accounts of stadial theory. It does this through examining the historical works of the following authors: Adam Ferguson, Henry Home,, John Millar and Adam Smith. Stimulated by the 1748 publication of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws each of these individuals presented distinctive explanations for historical progress. Conventional interpretations of Scottish Enlightenment accounts of stadial theory have tended to stress how these were informed by debates over moral conduct and political practice in line with the rise of commercial society. However, these approaches have neglected to consider the place of physical geography within Scottish Enlightenment accounts of historical progress. Consequently, this thesis aims to amend this picture and demonstrate how physical geography provided further insight into the arguments deployed by stadial theorists. This thesis will therefore be structured in the following way. In the introductory chapter, the focus will be on Montesquieu’s understanding of physical geography within the Spirit of the Laws, in demonstrating that his account provided key insights into the differences between European and Asiatic societies which Scottish Enlightenment authors would draw from in order to develop their individual arguments. The second chapter will focus on the work of Adam Ferguson and his An Essay on the History of Civil Society. In the process, it will demonstrate how he used physical geography to illustrate the way social stability was rooted in civic virtue. In the third chapter, Henry Home’s Sketches of the History of Man will be examined. It will be argued that physical geography allowed Kames to demonstrate a sceptical interpretation of societal progress which culminated in an ambiguous view of humanity. The final chapter considers the place of physical geography in Adam Smith’s Lectures on Jurisprudence and the Wealth of Nations. In addition to this, this chapter will consider the work of John Millar as an example of the legacy of Smith’s argument and how it informed accounts of physical geography in stadial theory written after the Lectures. Doing so it demonstrates Smith’s understanding of physical geography to be concerned with the way historical progress was conditioned by local influences. This thesis will therefore argue that physical geography provides a way of viewing Scottish Enlightenment accounts of stadial theory which use the premise that societal development was intrinsically linked to a range of physical factors including location, climate, topography and fertility.

No overarching hypotheses tie the basic mechanisms of mitochondrial reactive oxygen species (ROS) production to activity dependent synapse pruning—a fundamental biological process in health and disease. Neuronal activity divergently regulates mitochondrial ROS: activity decreases whereas inactivity increases their production, respectively. Placing mitochondrial ROS as innate synaptic activity sentinels informs the novel hypothesis that: (1) at an inactive synapse, increased mitochondrial ROS production initiates intrinsic apoptosis dependent pruning; and (2) at an active synapse, decreased mitochondrial ROS production masks intrinsic apoptosis dependent pruning. Immature antioxidant defense may enable the developing brain to harness mitochondrial ROS to prune weak synapses. Beyond development, endogenous antioxidant defense constrains mitochondrial (ROS) to mask pruning. Unwanted age‐related synapse loss may arise when mitochondrial ROS aberrantly recapitulate developmental pruning. Placing mitochondrial ROS with their hands on the shears is beneficial in early but deleterious in later life.

Managed relocation (also known as assisted colonization, assisted migration) is one of the more controversial proposals to emerge in the ecological community in recent years. A conservation strategy involving the translocation of species to novel ecosystems in anticipation of range shifts forced by climate change, managed relocation (MR) has divided many ecologists and conservationists, mostly because of concerns about the potential invasion risk of the relocated species in their new environments. While this is indeed an important consideration in any evaluation of MR, moving species across the landscape in response to predicted climate shifts also raises a number of larger and important ethical and policy challenges that need to be addressed. These include evaluating the implications of a more aggressive approach to species conservation, assessing MR as a broader ecological policy and philosophy that departs from longstanding scientific and management goals focused on preserving ecological integrity, and considering MR within a more comprehensive ethical and policy response to climate change. Given the complexity and novelty of many of the issues at stake in the MR debate, a more dynamic and pragmatic approach to ethical analysis and debate is needed to help ecologists, conservationists, and environmental decision makers come to grips with MR and the emerging ethical challenges of ecological policy and management under global environmental change.

I have been interested for quite some time in the relevance of reference to ontology. Another who has shown equal interest is W. V. Quine. Surprisingly, because of many other disagreements, there is a large area in which we agree about reference and ontology, namely, that there is some reason to think that both are “inscrutable.” Not so surprisingly, there is a crucial point where we disagree, namely, concerning the relativity of reference and ontology. Although it is not clear, it seems that Quine holds that both reference and ontology are relative to what he calls a “background language” in a way that results in metaphysical questions, as I describe them, being senseless or meaningless. He argues for this relativity from inscrutability. I, however, explain it by postulating that ontological problems and certain referential problems are in a certain sense, “external.” In this paper I propose to lay out what I take to be the relevance of reference to ontological problems, show where Quine’s claims of inscrutability agree with my view, clarify Quine’s claims about relativity, and finally show that, given the inscrutability we both find acceptable, it is reasonable to reject the relativity only Quine accepts.

Leibniz’s De incerti aestimatione, which contains his solution to the division problem, has not received much attention, let alone much appreciation. This is surprising because it is in this work that the definition of probability in terms of equally possible cases appears for the first time. The division problem is used to establish and test probability theory; it can be stated as follows: if two players agree to play a game in which one has to win a certain number of rounds in order to win the pool, but if they break the game off before either of them has won the required number of rounds, how should the pool be distributed?Our article has two aims: it provides the readers with the first published English translation of De incerti aestimatione, and it also gives them a brief commentary that explains Leibniz’s philosophical and mathematical concepts necessary in order to understand this work. The translation is as literal as possible throughout; it shows how Leibniz struggled at times to find a solution to the division problem and how he approached it from different angles. The commentary discusses Leibniz’s views on four key concepts: fairness, hope, authority and possibility. The commentary then outlines how Leibniz attempted to solve the problem of division.