Adrienne Martin

© 2016 American Chemical Society.High quality WSe2 films have been grown on bilayer graphene with layer-by-layer control of thickness using molecular beam epitaxy. The combination of angle-resolved photoemission, scanning tunneling microscopy/spectroscopy, and optical absorption measurements reveal the atomic and electronic structures evolution and optical response of WSe2/BLG. We observe that a bilayer of WSe2 is a direct bandgap semiconductor, when integrated in a BLG-based heterostructure, thus shifting the direct-indirect band gap crossover to trilayer WSe2. In the monolayer limit, WSe2 shows a spin-splitting of 475 meV in the valence band at the K point, the largest value observed among all the MX2 materials. The exciton binding energy of monolayer-WSe2/BLG is found to be 0.21 eV, a value that is orders of magnitude larger than that of conventional three-dimensional semiconductors, yet small as compared to other two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogennides semiconductors. Finally, our finding regarding the overall modification of the electronic structure by an alkali metal surface electron doping opens a route to further control the electronic properties of TMDCs.

© 2015 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. The AAA+ ATPase Vps4 disassembles ESCRT-III and is essential for HIV-1 budding and other pathways. Vps4 is a paradigmatic member of a class of hexameric AAA+ ATPases that disassemble protein complexes without degradation. To distinguish between local displacement versus global unfolding mechanisms for complex disassembly, we carried out hydrogen/deuterium exchange during Saccharomyces cerevisiae Vps4 disassembly of a chimeric Vps24-2 ESCRT-III filament. EX1 exchange behavior shows that Vps4 completely unfolds ESCRT-III substrates on a time scale consistent with the disassembly reaction. The established unfoldase ClpX showed the same pattern, thus demonstrating a common unfolding mechanism. Vps4 hexamers containing a single cysteine residue in the pore loops were cross-linked to ESCRT-III subunits containing unique cysteines within the folded core domain. These data support a mechanism in which Vps4 disassembles its substrates by completely unfolding them and threading them through the central pore.

Appreciation and gratitude get good press: They are central virtues in many religious and secular ethical frameworks, core in positive psychology research, and they come highly recommended by the self‐improvement set. Generally, appreciation and gratitude feature as good things, in popular consciousness. Of course, on an Aristotelian model, the belief that these are virtues implies they are something people can get right or wrong. This paper examines bad appreciation and bad gratitude, characterizing forms of appreciation and gratitude at the center of some major social norms and practices, and demonstrating that they mask familiar oppressive expectations and power relations.

I argue for adopting a conception of obligation that is broader than the conception commonly adopted by moral philosophers. According to this broader conception, the crucial marks of an obligatory action are, first, that the reasons for the obliged party to perform the action include an exclusionary reason and, second, that the obliged party is the appropriate target of blaming reactive attitudes, if they inexcusably fail to perform the obligatory action. An obligation is directed if the exclusionary reason depends on the relationship between the obliged person and the person to whom they owe the obligatory action, and the latter person is positioned to personally blame the obligated person for inexcusably failing to perform the obligatory action. Some direc- ted obligations are not owed as a matter of right, and the person to whom the obligatory action is owed is the only person positioned to blame nonperformance. Other directed obligations are owed as a matter of right, and people who are not part of the relationship grounding the obligation nevertheless are also positioned to (impersonally) blame non-performance. Only the rights-based form of directed obligation has received signifi- cant attention from moral philosophers, yet the former—which is at the heart of what I call “personal bonds”—is a pervasive and significant theme of our ordinary interpersonal lives.

The Routledge Handbook of Love in Philosophycollects 39 original chapters from prominent philosophers on the nature, meaning, value, and predicaments of love, presented in a unique framework that highlights the rich variety of methods and traditions used to engage with these subjects. This volume is structured around important realms of human life and activity, each of which receives its own section: I. Family and Friendship II. Romance and Sex III. Politics and Society IV. Animals, Nature, and the Environment V. Art, Faith, and Meaning VI. Rationality and Morality VII. Traditions: Historical and Contemporary. This last section includes chapters treating love as a subject in both Western and non-Western philosophical traditions. The contributions, all appearing in print here for the first time, are written to be accessible and compelling to non-philosophers and philosophers alike; and the volume as a whole encourages professional philosophers, teachers, students, and lay readers to rethink standard constructions of philosophical canons.

What exactly is hope and how does it influence our decisions? In How We Hope, Adrienne Martin presents a novel account of hope, the motivational resources it presupposes, and its function in our practical lives. She contends that hoping for an outcome means treating certain feelings, plans, and imaginings as justified, and that hope thereby involves sophisticated reflective and conceptual capacities. Martin develops this original perspective on hope--what she calls the "incorporation analysis"--in contrast to the two dominant philosophical conceptions of hope: the orthodox definition, where hoping for an outcome is simply desiring it while thinking it possible, and agent-centered views, where hoping for an outcome is setting oneself to pursue it. In exploring how hope influences our decisions, she establishes that it is not always a positive motivational force and can render us complacent. She also examines the relationship between hope and faith, both religious and secular, and identifies a previously unnoted form of hope: normative or interpersonal hope. When we place normative hope in people, we relate to them as responsible agents and aspire for them to overcome challenges arising from situation or character. Demonstrating that hope merits rigorous philosophical investigation, both in its own right and in virtue of what it reveals about the nature of human emotion and motivation, How We Hope offers an original, sustained look at a largely neglected topic in philosophy.

The extent of the approval with which Western culture views the attitude of hope can scarcely be exaggerated. Hope is seen as that which sustains us through wartime, death camps, slavery, natural disaster, extreme disease and disability—it is a light, a beacon, the last spark that fuels us when all else has failed. Hope is also seen as a moral and spiritual virtue—hoping for moral progress in this world, and salvation in the next, is at the heart of a meaningful human life. A positive view of hope infuses Western theology since Aquinas; utopian political philosophy, positive psychology, the self-help culture, the clinical research community, a wide range of activist groups, and a great deal of political rhetoric all maintain the affirmation of hope. The only qualm commonly expressed about hope is that it is sometimes “false:” that is, based on lies or misconceptions. False hope is bad because, first, it is bad to be deceived and, second, it may suck up resources better spent elsewhere. False hope, though, is not genuine hope, and genuine hope is an essential human good. My book Wanting to Pull Clouds will argue that the popular view of hope is vastly and dangerously oversimplified. Much more insidious than false hope is hope that is “genuine” and not based on lies or misconceptions, but that nevertheless bears important conceptual and empirical connections to passivity, inattention, excuse-making and wishful thinking. To be clear, this is not an anti-hope project. Rather, it examines the mechanisms that make hope desirable and virtuous, when it is these things; it becomes clear in the course of this examination that these very..

The standard foil for recent theories of hope is the belief-desire analysis advocated by Hobbes, Day, Downie, and others. According to this analysis, to hope for S is no more and no less than to desire S while believing S is possible but not certain. Opponents of the belief-desire analysis argue that it fails to capture one or another distinctive feature or function of hope: that hope helps one resist the temptation to despair;2 that hope engages the sophisticated capacities of human agency, such as planning;3 or that hope involves the imagination in ways desire need not.4 Here, I focus on the role of imagination in hope, and discuss its implications for hope’s relation to practical commitment or end-setting.

Many people believe hope’s most important function is to bolster us in despairinducing circumstances. A related but less dramatic view is that instilling or reinforcing hope for a state of affairs is a good way to get people to act to promote that state of affairs. I propose that we conceive of hope as, most paradigmatically, the expression of desire in imagination. I then trace through the implications of this conception for, first, how hope influences motivation and, second, what forms of hope are rational.

Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, March 2006. Significant effort has been devoted to locating a good argument for Kant ’s Formula of Humanity. In this paper, I contrast two arguments, based on Kant ’s text, for the Formula of Humanity. The first, which I call the “Valued Ends” argument, is an influential and appealing argument developed most notably by Christine Korsgaard and Allen Wood. Notwithstanding the appeal and influence of this argument, it ultimately fails on several counts. I therefore present as an alternative the “Autonomy” argument, which is largely inspired by the failings of the Valued Ends argument.