Private Revenge and its Relation to Punishment

In contrast to the vast literature on retributive theories of punishment, discussions of private revenge are rare in moral philosophy. This paper reviews some examples, from both classical and recent writers. It detects, both in the philosophical tradition and in contemporary moral discourse, uncertainty and equivocation over the ethical significance of acts of revenge, and in particular over their possible resemblances, in motive, purpose or justification, to acts of lawful punishment. A key problem for the coherence of our ethical conception of revenge, it suggests, is the consideration that certain acts of revenge may be just (at least in the minimal sense that the victim of revenge has no grounds for complaint against the revenger) and yet be generally agreed to be morally wrong. It argues that the challenge of explaining adequately why private revenge is morally wrong poses particular difficulty for purely retributive theories of punishment, since without invoking consequentialist reasons it does not seem possible adequately to motivate an objection to just and proportionate acts of revenge. The paper concludes by identifying some of the directions in which further reflection on the moral and political significance of revenge might proceed

Self-Deception as Affective Coping. An Empirical Perspective on Philosophical Issues

In the philosophical literature, self-deception is mainly approached through the analysis of paradoxes. Yet, it is agreed that self-deception is motivated by protection from distress. In this paper, we argue, with the help of findings from cognitive neuroscience and psychology, that self-deception is a type of affective coping. First, we criticize the main solutions to the paradoxes of self-deception. We then present a new approach to self-deception. Self-deception, we argue, involves three appraisals of the distressing evidence: (a) appraisal of the strength of evidence as uncertain, (b) low coping potential and (c) negative anticipation along the lines of Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis. At the same time, desire impacts the treatment of flattering evidence via dopamine. Our main proposal is that self-deception involves emotional mechanisms provoking a preference for immediate reward despite possible long-term negative repercussions. In the last part, we use this emotional model to revisit the philosophical paradoxes

Reading Phoebe Gloeckner's A Child's Life and Other Stories at the Time of #MeToo

In this essay, I analyze the autobiographical subject’s sexual suffering in Phoebe Gloeckner’s graphic memoir, A Child’s Life and Other Stories (2000), through an investigation of the cartoonist’s intertextual reference to Marcel Duchamp’s installation, Étant Donnés: 1° la Chute d'Eau, 2° le Gaz d'Eclairage (1944-66), and the tradition in which it is situated, which spans back to Gustave Gourbet’s infamous painting L’Origine du Monde (1866). I propose that to complicate the representation of Minnie’s sexual objectification, Gloeckner fuses traces related to the negotiation of the female nude body traced in Duchamp’s and Courbet’s patriarchal, canonical art, and in Carolee Schneeman’s and Judy Chicago’s second-wave feminist art. I argue that the graphic memoir introduces Gloeckner as an active consumer of past artworks by performing her feminist reading and reinterpretation of them, and thus, it proposes ways of critically consuming gender formations that reach us via art, literature and social media. My aim is to stress the value of A Child’s Life, particularly at the time of #MeToo, a period when we are surrounded by testimonies of sexual abuse told by girls and women, while simultaneously being bombarded with their sexualizing images reaching us through the media

Induction of cell-cell fusion by ectromelia virus is not inhibited by its fusion inhibitory complex

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Ectromelia virus, a member of the Orthopox genus, is the causative agent of the highly infectious mousepox disease. Previous studies have shown that different poxviruses induce cell-cell fusion which is manifested by the formation of multinucleated-giant cells (polykaryocytes). This phenomenon has been widely studied with vaccinia virus in conditions which require artificial acidification of the medium.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We show that Ectromelia virus induces cell-cell fusion under neutral pH conditions and requires the presence of a sufficient amount of viral particles on the plasma membrane of infected cells. This could be achieved by infection with a replicating virus and its propagation in infected cells (fusion "from within") or by infection with a high amount of virus particles per cell (fusion "from without"). Inhibition of virus maturation or inhibition of virus transport on microtubules towards the plasma membrane resulted in a complete inhibition of syncytia formation. We show that in contrast to vaccinia virus, Ectromelia virus induces cell-cell fusion irrespectively of its hemagglutination properties and cell-surface expression of the orthologs of the fusion inhibitory complex, A56 and K2. Additionally, cell-cell fusion was also detected in mice lungs following lethal respiratory infection.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Ectromelia virus induces spontaneous cell-cell fusion in-vitro and in-vivo although expressing an A56/K2 fusion inhibitory complex. This syncytia formation property cannot be attributed to the 37 amino acid deletion in ECTV A56.</p

Reconstructing biblical military campaigns using geomagnetic field data.

The Hebrew Bible and other ancient Near Eastern texts describe Egyptian, Aramean, Assyrian, and Babylonian military campaigns to the Southern Levant during the 10th to sixth centuries BCE. Indeed, many destruction layers dated to this period have been unearthed in archaeological excavations. Several of these layers are securely linked to specific campaigns and are widely accepted as chronological anchors. However, the dating of many other destruction layers is often debated, challenging the ability to accurately reconstruct the different military campaigns and raising questions regarding the historicity of the biblical narrative. Here, we present a synchronization of the historically dated chronological anchors and other destruction layers and artifacts using the direction and/or intensity of the ancient geomagnetic field recorded in mud bricks from 20 burnt destruction layers and in two ceramic assemblages. During the period in question, the geomagnetic field in this region was extremely anomalous with rapid changes and high-intensity values, including spikes of more than twice the intensity of today's field. The data are useful in the effort to pinpoint these short-term variations on the timescale, and they resolve chronological debates regarding the campaigns against the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, the relationship between the two kingdoms, and their administrations

Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books

We constructed a corpus of digitized texts containing about 4% of all books ever printed. Analysis of this corpus enables us to investigate cultural trends quantitatively. We survey the vast terrain of ‘culturomics,’ focusing on linguistic and cultural phenomena that were reflected in the English language between 1800 and 2000. We show how this approach can provide insights about fields as diverse as lexicography, the evolution of grammar, collective memory, the adoption of technology, the pursuit of fame, censorship, and historical epidemiology. Culturomics extends the boundaries of rigorous quantitative inquiry to a wide array of new phenomena spanning the social sciences and the humanities.MathematicsPsycholog

Pelvic plastron secondary to acute appendicitis in a child presented as appendiceal intussusception. A case report

We report an unusual case of an 11-year-old Greek girl with complicated acute appendicitis. The pelvic plastron that had been formatted secondary to appendix perforation was mimicking appendiceal intussusception in the preoperative ultrasound and computed tomography images. Although acute complicated appendicitis and appendiceal intussusception may represent possible causes of acute abdomen no similar cases have reported in the literature