Plato and Hegel stay home

Plato and Innatism

Hegel and Peircean Abduction

‘Abduction’ was the term Charles Sanders Peirce used in his later writings for a type of inference that he had earlier called ‘hypothesis’ and that is now commonly called ‘inference to the best explanation’. According to Peirce, abduction constituted, alongside induction, a distinct second form of nondemonstrative or probabilistic inference. Especially in his later work, Peirce conceived of abd...

Plato and Innatism

Digestion, Habit, and Being at Home: Hegel and the Gut as Ambiguous Other

Feminist and posthumanist writers have described the need for a relational ontology that challenges the boundaries of the human self (see e.g. Braidotti, Wolfe, Shildrick). Further support for this comes from recent work in the philosophy of biology, which argues that we must rethink the biological individual beyond the boundary of the species. A key part of our essential functioning is carried...

Stay-at-home transcription factor saves axons

T he old saw that local actions can have global consequences holds true for neurons, too. Selvaraj et al. show that a transcription factor remains in the axon to help prevent neurodegeneration (1). In neurodegenerative diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), neurons usually die in stages, with axons deteriorating fi rst and the cells themselves perishing later (2). Axon degenerati...