scholarly journals Reflections on a footnote: implications for the study of emotions in animals

2015 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 286-295 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Otta

<p>A footnote (FN) originally submitted as a comment to the article "Parsing Reward" led me to write this essay. The comment was rejected by the editor of a prestigious scientific journal in the area of behavioral neuroscience with the suggestion that it would be more appropriate for an "idle talk". I believe that the core issues involved are important to address explicitly in a debate within the broad domain of the frontiers of human and biological sciences. The protagonists involved in the didactic episode of the FN, whose articles and books I have been reading over the years, are leaders in the field of neuroscience. In this essay the episode is historically contextualized and discussed in terms of potential implications for ethology, psychology and neuroscience.</p>

Author(s):  
Samir Okasha

Philosophy of Biology: A Very Short Introduction outlines the core issues with which contemporary philosophers of biology grapple. Over the last forty years the philosophy of biology has emerged as an important sub-discipline of the philosophy of science. Addressing difficult conceptual issues that arise within the biological sciences, it also encompasses areas where biology has impinged on traditional philosophical questions, such as free-will, essentialism, and nature vs nurture. The book also explores topics such as the logic of Darwinian evolution; the concepts of function and design; the nature of species; and the debate over adaptationism.


Author(s):  
Stéphane Schmitt

The problem of the repeated parts of organisms was at the center of the biological sciences as early as the first decades of the 19th century. Some concepts and theories (e.g., serial homology, unity of plan, or colonial theory) introduced in order to explain the similarity as well as the differences between the repeated structures of an organism were reused throughout the 19th and the 20th century, in spite of the fundamental changes during this long period that saw the diffusion of the evolutionary theory, the rise of experimental approaches, and the emergence of new fields and disciplines. Interestingly, this conceptual heritage was at the core of any attempt to unify the problems of inheritance, development, and evolution, in particular in the last decades, with the rise of “evo-devo.” This chapter examines the conditions of this theoretical continuity and the challenges it brings out for the current evolutionary sciences.


Author(s):  
Sakiko Fukuda-Parr ◽  
Thea Smaavik Hegstad

Abstract One of the most important elements of the 2030 Agenda and the SDGs is the strong commitment to inclusive development, and “leaving no one behind” has emerged as a central theme of the agenda. How did this consensus come about? And what does this term mean and how is it being interpreted? This matters because SDGs shift international norms. Global goals exert influence on policy and action of governments and stakeholders in development operates through discourse. So the language used in formulating the UN Agenda is a terrain of active contestation. This paper aims to explain the politics that led to this term as a core theme. It argues that LNOB was promoted to frame the SDG inequality agenda as inclusive development, focusing on the exclusion of marginalized and vulnerable groups from social opportunities, deflecting attention from the core issues of distribution of income and wealth, and the challenge of “extreme inequality.” The term is adequately vague so as to accommodate wide ranging interpretations. Through a content analysis of LNOB in 43 VNRs, the paper finds that the majority of country strategies identify LNOB as priority to the very poor, and identify it with a strategy for social protection. This narrow interpretation does not respond to the ambition of the 2030 Agenda for transformative change, and the principles of human rights approaches laid out.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Qiang Zha

Abstract This paper examines several research questions relating to equality and equity in Chinese higher education via an extended literature review, which in turn sheds light on evolving scholarly explorations into this theme. First, in the post-massification era, has the Chinese situation of equality and equity in higher education improved or deteriorated since the late 1990s? Second, what are the core issues with respect to equality and equity in Chinese higher education? Third, how have those core issues evolved or changed over time and what does the evolution indicate and entail? Methodologically, this paper uses a bibliometric analysis to detect the topical hotspots in scholarly literature and their changes over time. The study then investigates each of those topical terrains against their temporal contexts in order to gain insights into the core issues.


2009 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 563-589 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raf Gelders

In the aftermath of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), European representations of Eastern cultures have returned to preoccupy the Western academy. Much of this work reiterates the point that nineteenth-century Orientalist scholarship was a corpus of knowledge that was implicated in and reinforced colonial state formation in India. The pivotal role of native informants in the production of colonial discourse and its subsequent use in servicing the material adjuncts of the colonial state notwithstanding, there has been some recognition in South Asian scholarship of the moot point that the colonial constructs themselves built upon an existing, precolonial European discourse on India and its indigenous culture. However, there is as yet little scholarly consensus or indeed literature on the core issues of how and when these edifices came to be formed, or the intellectual and cultural axes they drew from. This genealogy of colonial discourse is the subject of this essay. Its principal concerns are the formalization of a conceptual unit in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, called “Hinduism” today, and the larger reality of European culture and religion that shaped the contours of representation.


2009 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joel Michael ◽  
Harold Modell ◽  
Jenny McFarland ◽  
William Cliff

The explosion of knowledge in all of the biological sciences, and specifically in physiology, has created a growing problem for educators. There is more to know than students can possibly learn. Thus, difficult choices have to be made about what we expect students to master. One approach to making the needed decisions is to consider those “core principles” that provide the thinking tools for understanding all biological phenomena. We identified a list of “core principles” that appear to apply to all aspects of physiology and unpacked them into their constituent component ideas. While such a list does not define the content for a physiology course, it does provide a guideline for selecting the topics on which to focus student attention. This list of “core principles” also offers a starting point for developing an assessment instrument to be used in determining if students have mastered the important unifying ideas of physiology.


Author(s):  
Christian Dahlman ◽  
Alex Stein ◽  
Giovanni Tuzet

Philosophical Foundations of Evidence Law presents a cross-disciplinary overview of the core issues in the theory and methodology of adjudicative evidence and factfinding, assembling the major philosophical and interdisciplinary insights that define evidence theory, as related to law, in a single book. The volume presents contemporary debates on truth, knowledge, rational beliefs, proof, argumentation, explanation, coherence, probability, economics, psychology, bias, gender, and race. It covers different theoretical approaches to legal evidence, including the Bayesian approach, scenario theory, and inference to the best explanation. The volume’s contributions come from scholars spread across three continents and twelve different countries, whose common interest is evidence theory as related to law.


Global Jurist ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Cesare Cavallini

Abstract Why might one argue that the arbitral tribunal should have the “competence” to rule, as of right, upon its own jurisdiction? Is this natural power consistent with the legitimacy of arbitration? Can it unquestionably achieve the greatest level of efficiency for the parties? Although a considerable body of literature has attempted to answer these questions, this article aims to address (and partially reframe) the core issues relating to arbitral jurisdiction by comparing different legal systems and operative solutions in order to search for new and valuable insights on the topic . There is no doubt, in fact, that the orthodox position traditionally starts from the assumption that access to the courts within parallel proceedings, which (also) questions the allocation of jurisdiction, is problematic also due to the risk of delaying tactics by one party. According to this line of reasoning, when the authority of the arbitrators is challenged, the balance between the legitimacy and the efficiency of the arbitration process could be conditioned by prejudices relating to the (necessary) interference of the courts with the power of the arbitral tribunal to determine its own potestas judicandi (or its lack thereof) on the merits. In an attempt to move on from the classical framing of this issue and towards a comparative evaluation of the rationales and values underlying domestic legislation on arbitral jurisdiction, considered also with reference to the provisions of the UNCITRAL Model Law, this article will seek to provide a solution that is rooted in the complementary role of the courts and of arbitral tribunals. The complementarity between arbitral tribunals and the courts will be shown to be key in securing the legitimacy of arbitration and the actual pre-eminence of this source of alternative private justice and, accordingly, also as a way of striking the optimum balance with the efficiency of the arbitration process.


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