Developmental Neurobiology: Preventing Midline Crossings

AbstractA recent study has shown that EphB1, a receptor for ephrin-2, guides selected retinofugal axons into the pathway from the retina to the cerebral hemisphere on the same side of the body. Another shows that the transcription factor Zic2 is also important in this ‘uncrossed’ pathway. Does Zic2 regulate EphB1

Cavendish Square and Spencer House: Neo-classicism, opportunity and nostalgia

The Society of Dilettanti planned a temple-fronted academy of arts on the north side of Cavendish Square in the early 1750s. It can now be shown that stone bought and cut for this building was used in the Green Park elevation of Spencer House (1756–9), shedding new light on design there. The Cavendish Square site stayed empty until speculative pairs of houses were built in 1768–70. Their temple-fronted stone façades, hitherto explained as incorporating stone from the 1750s, must now be understood not as the result of salvage, but as a conscious echo of the abandoned academy project

Vernacular Revival and Ideology - What's Left?

This essay derives from a lecture first given at a Vernacular Architecture Group conference on vernacular revivals in 2015, reprised to generally younger audiences at the Bartlett School of Architecture and the University of Westminster. Its retrospection about vernacular architecture, anonymity, revival and left-wing ideologies was prompted primarily by a bemused awareness of recent advances in self-building. It seemed timely to try to get at how and why certain ideas retain traction. Then, coincidentally, young and old were recombining behind Jeremy Corbyn to reinvigorate Labour, and the self-styled design ‘collective’ Assemble won the Turner Prize. John Ruskin, William Morris, the Arts and Crafts Movement and Romanticism arise (how could they not?), but only in passing, for a revisionist view of what has come since. It is taken as read that a strong commitment to architectural design as being rooted in labour and everyday or subaltern agency tallied with the emergence of socialism and was an important part of architectural thinking and history in late-19th-century England. This is an attempt to relate that history to the present in a new overview for a new framework. It adopts an unconventional or purist definition of what vernacular means that will clash with many preconceptions

HOBBES: A VOLUNTARIST ABOUT THE PERMISSIBILITY OF STATE ENFORCEMENT?

Trato a questão de saber que argumento tem Hobbes a favor da legitimidade do Estado, um termo que uso para designar a permissão geral e exclusiva para impor a obediência com as directivas e leis que os Estados tipicamente têm. Irei argumentar que, ao contrário do que possamos imaginar, o fundamento da legitimidade do Estado para Hobbes não se encontra no contrato social ou na autorização dos súbditos do Estado, mas antes no facto de o soberano não estar sujeito ao tipo de leis que retiram aos súbditos a autoridade de impor. O direito do soberano impor a lei baseia-se exactamente no mesmo tipo de direito que todos têm quando não estão submetidos a um poder soberano superior. Embora isto deva ser qualificado (o soberano não mantém literalmente o seu direito natural a todas as coisas, uma vez que não existia qualquer soberano no estado de natureza), a permissibilidade da autoridade encontra-se, em Hobbes, simplesmente na falta de algo que poderia tornar essa autoridade inaceitável.I take up the question of what argument, if any, Hobbes has for state legitimacy, which term I stipulatively use to mean the general, exclusive permission to enforce compliance with their directives or laws that states are standardly taken to have. I will argue that, contrary to what one might imagine, the ground of state legitimacy for Hobbes is not to be found in the social contract or the authorisation of the state’s subjects, but rather in the sovereign’s simply not being subject to the kind of laws that rule out enforcement for subjects. The sovereign’s right to enforce is based in exactly the same sort of right that all have when not subject to any higher sovereign power. Though this must be nuanced (the sovereign does not literally retain its right to all things from the state of nature, since no sovereign existed in the state of nature), the permissibility of enforcement for Hobbes is to be found simply in the lack of anything that might make it impermissible

Subjective experience of episodic memory and metacognition: a neurodevelopmental approach.

Episodic retrieval is characterized by the subjective experience of remembering. This experience enables the co-ordination of memory retrieval processes and can be acted on metacognitively. In successful retrieval, the feeling of remembering may be accompanied by recall of important contextual information. On the other hand, when people fail (or struggle) to retrieve information, other feelings, thoughts, and information may come to mind. In this review, we examine the subjective and metacognitive basis of episodic memory function from a neurodevelopmental perspective, looking at recollection paradigms (such as source memory, and the report of recollective experience) and metacognitive paradigms such as the feeling of knowing). We start by considering healthy development, and provide a brief review of the development of episodic memory, with a particular focus on the ability of children to report first-person experiences of remembering. We then consider neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs) such as amnesia acquired in infancy, autism, Williams syndrome, Down syndrome, or 22q11.2 deletion syndrome. This review shows that different episodic processes develop at different rates, and that across a broad set of different NDDs there are various types of episodic memory impairment, each with possibly a different character. This literature is in agreement with the idea that episodic memory is a multifaceted process

The concept of feasibility and its role in moral and political philosophy

This thesis concerns the nature of the concept of feasibility and its role in constraining moral and political philosophy: to what extent and in what way facts about feasibility ought to constrain what moral and political theory say. I begin in my first chapter by giving an account of feasibility, that is, by attempting to understand what we mean when we say that some outcome is or isn’t feasible. I argue against the various attempts that have been made in the literature to give a binary definition (e.g. Gilabert and Lawford-Smith, Räikkä). There is a multiplicity of different possible sharpenings of the term ‘feasible’, no single one of which is obviously privileged. Different sharpenings hold fixed different ranges of facts, making different sets of proposals feasible. In the remainder of the thesis, I go on to relate this account of feasibility to moral and political theory. I argue that it is not clear which sharpenings of ‘feasibility’ constrain which sorts of moral theory. I engage with the literature on ‘ideal theory’, arguing that theory constrained only by expansive (permissive) sharpenings of ‘feasibility’ (which is one thing that could be meant by ‘ideal theory’) is useful and important for the purpose of practical action guidance. I thus draw two important conclusions. The first is the thesis of the first chapter about the concept of feasibility. I then build on this to get to a more substantive methodological conclusion, that theory constrained only by permissive (unrealistic) feasibility constraints is useful