Este estudo pretende compreender a emblemática expressão «cultura do encontro», no marco do magistério e testemunho do Papa Francisco. Desde o início de seu pontificado, a categoria «encontro» recebe destaque em seus pronunciamentos e, principalmente, nos seus gestos. Em diversos momentos da história de Israel, as palavras e os gestos foram a forma escolhida por Deus para se revelar ao seu povo, especialmente por intermédio dos profetas. Pretende-se assim, também considerar a dimensão profética de seus ensinamentos e testemunho e, dessa (...) forma constatar como a cultura do encontro é uma atualização e epifania do Reino de Deus para os nossos dias. A abordagem consistirá em analisar como Francisco explica, descreve e propõe a cultura do encontro em seus pronunciamentos para identificar seu dinamismo. E, por fim, verificar como o próprio pontífice se exercita e promove a «cultura do encontro» mediante a consideração de suas 27 viagens apostólicas fora da Itália. (shrink)

No último século, os exegetas cristãos, para obter uma compreensão mais profunda dos escritos neotestamentários, despertaram progressivamente para a necessidade de conhecer as fontes, práticas e características da exegese judaica (do período do Segundo Templo e do período Rabínico). Esta mudança de perspectiva fez com que a exegese cristã entrasse em diálogo com o derás, a hermenêutica própria do judaísmo. Neste artigo apresentamos a complexa questão da definição e da distinção dos dois termos: derás e midrás. Seguimos o caminho histórico (...) percorrido pelos exegetas cristãos quanto à compreensão e à aplicação dos dois termos. Enfocamos, de modo particular, o debate sobre a compreensão do midrás/derás enquanto gênero literário específico (Wright) ou método exegético e hermenêutico (Bloch; Díez Macho; Le Déaut; etc). (shrink)

The Internet of Things (IoT) applied to intelligent transport systems has become a key element for understanding the way traffic flow behaves in cities, which helps in decision-making to improve the management of the transport system by monitoring and analyzing network traffic in real time, all with the aim of daily benefiting users of the city’s road infrastructure. Traffic volume estimation in real time, with high effectiveness, may help mobility management and improve traffic flow. Moreover, machine-learning algorithms have shown effectiveness (...) in various scientific fields and have provided a significant platform for achieving intelligent applications. Therefore, we applied various machine learning algorithms to classify the vehicular traffic status in the traffic network of two cities with more than 2 million inhabitants. It was first necessary to establish, from the attributes provided by the datasets, the object class from the LOS (Level of Services) thresholds proposed by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, for the basic segments of highways in an urban area. We then selected the attributes of interest using the Recursive Feature Elimination Method (RFE) to reduce the dimensionality of the data, and applied the DT, RF, ET, KNN, and MLP algorithms to train and classify the level of vehicular congestion, defining various volumes of training and validation data. The results show the high effectiveness of the algorithms, highlighting the MLP algorithm as the one that provides the highest effectiveness on average for the evaluated datasets, with a mean precision of 99.5%. (shrink)

Vladimir Arnold, an eminent mathematician of our time, is known both for his mathematical results, which are many and prominent, and for his strong opinions, often expressed in an uncompromising and provoking manner. His dictum that "Mathematics is a part of physics where experiments are cheap" is well known. This book consists of two parts: selected articles by and an interview with Vladimir Arnold, and a collection of articles about him written by his friends, colleagues, and students. The book is (...) generously illustrated by a large collection of photographs, some never before published. The book presents many a facet of this extraordinary mathematician and man, from his mathematical discoveries to his daredevil outdoor adventures. (shrink)

The presence of ibuprofen in wastewater is a topic of global interest, and the mechanisms and behavior of its correlation with its elimination in ecological systems, such as constructed wetlands, is a little known topic. The objective of this study was to perform a correlational analysis of the behavior of the emerging contaminant ibuprofen in a horizontally constructed wetland in a tropical climate planted with the ornamental plant Spathiphyllum blandum. 10 experimental units were used at the mesocosm level of 20 (...) L, 5 planted with Spathiphyllum B., and 5 without plants. The elimination of ibuprofen was measured and the correlation was analyzed using computational methods and neural networks. Spathiphyllum blandum was used in this study. The removal of ibuprofen in HC was significantly improved by up to 23% compared with that in non-planted systems. Based on the prediction obtained from ibuprofen in the effluent, it can be concluded that it has an exponential decay behavior tending to zero, and the model obtained explains in an acceptable way the relationship between the height of the plant and the concentration of ibuprofen in the effluent, reaffirming that this relationship is inverse. Further studies should be conducted to understand the behavior of these compounds in relation to different species of tropical plants. (shrink)

Neuroscience is a multidisciplinary effort to understand the structures and functions of the brain and brain-mind relations. This effort results in an increasing amount of data, generated by sophisticated technologies. However, these data enhance our descriptive knowledge, rather than improve our understanding of brain functions. This is caused by methodological gaps both within and between subdisciplines constituting neuroscience, and the atomistic approach that limits the study of macro- and mesoscopic issues. Whole-brain measurement technologies do not resolve these issues, but rather (...) aggravate them by the complexity problem. The present article is devoted to methodological and epistemic problems that obstruct the development of human neuroscience. We neither discuss ontological questions nor review data, except when it is necessary to demonstrate a methodological issue. As regards intradisciplinary methodological problems, we concentrate on those within neurobiology and psychology. As regards interdisciplinary problems, we suggest that core disciplines of neuroscience can be integrated using systemic concepts that also entail human-environment relations. We emphasize the necessity of a meta-discussion that should entail a closer cooperation with philosophy as a discipline of systematic reflection. The atomistic reduction should be complemented by the explicit consideration of the embodiedness of the brain and the embeddedness of humans. The discussion is aimed at the development of an explicit methodology of integrative human neuroscience, which will not only link different fields and levels, but also help in understanding clinical phenomena. (shrink)

This collective paper on radicalization and violent extremism part of the ‘Philosophy of education in a new key’ initiative by Educational Philosophy and Theory brings together some of the leading contemporary scholars writing on the most pressing epistemological, ethical, political and educational issues facing post-9/11 scholarship on radicalization and violent extremism. Its overall aim is to move beyond the ‘conventional wisdom’ associated with this area of scholarly research best represented by its many slogans, metaphors and other thought-terminating clichés. By providing (...) conceptual lenses on issues previously compartmentalized primarily [or even exclusively] in security and intelligence studies or at the fringes of scholarly interest, radicalization and violent extremism turn out to be much more complex than ‘radicalization studies’ has been eager to acknowledge. (shrink)

We question the usefulness of Pylyshyn's dichotomy between cognitively penetrable and cognitively impenetrable mechanisms as the basis for his distinction between cognition and early vision. This dichotomy is comparable to others that have been proposed in psychology prompting disputes that by their very nature could not be resolved. This fate is inevitable for Pylyshyn's thesis because of its reliance on internal representations and their interpretation. What is more fruitful in relation to this issue is not a difficult dichotomy, but a (...) different look at perception such as proposed by Gibson (1979). (shrink)

This volume brings together the religious and philosophical writings of the founders of Russian religious philosophy, Aleksei Khomiakov and Ivan Kireevsky. Both began their intellectual careers in the literary world of the 1820s. The texts collected here make the philosophical concepts of Sobornost (community, universality, wholeness, ecumenicity) and integral knowledge, available to western readers. Based on the primacy of the heart, the spiritual wholeness of the human being and the cognitive will, integral knowing moves beyond rationality to union with the (...) object of knowledge in knowing. This book provides an introduction to Russian religious philosophy, and a profound, meditative text for anyone concerned with human and spiritual unity. Also included are two responses to Slavophile ideas by the prominent Russian philosophers Pavel Florensky and Nikolai Berdiaev. (shrink)

In this essay, I engage in an interpretive and critical analysis of Emerson’s The American Scholar (1837) essay wherein he states, “Our day of dependence, our longstanding apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close.” I assert that the educational philosophy Emerson posits in this essay on how to educate the new American intellectual of his time, which includes curricular engagement with nature, books, action, and the development of the human traits Emerson characterized as “man thinking,” continues (...) to be relevant for informing contemporary forms of liberal learning curricula; indeed, some of these curricula can represent a Transcendentalist response to the decaying effects of neo-liberal economic interests, anti-intellectual impulses, and the neglect of the perennial idea of learning for its own sake. I contemporize and critique Emerson’s ideas explored in The American Scholar by including the work of two philosophers namely Murray Miles and Iris Murdoch; and, Emerson and Transcendentalism scholars including Barbara Packer and Robert D. Richardson Jr. and others provide contextual insights about The American Scholar address’s implications for achieving self-reliance and a more autonomous creative impulse initiated through the liberal arts tradition, with special attention to the essential literary works of humanity. (shrink)

Despite its computational elegancy, Jackendoff's proposal to reconcile competing approaches by postulating a parallel architecture for phonological, syntactic, and semantic modules is disappointing. We argue that it is a pragmatic version of the leading module which Jackendoff would probably prefer, but which he does not explicitly acknowledge. This internal conflict leads to several shortcomings and even distortions of information presented in the book.

This paper aims to make a proposal to govern the Peruvian State under the umbrella of management cybernetics, following the paths of the viable system model, proposed by Prof. Stafford Beer, enriched with other soft and hard systemic methodologies and technologies, to cover the soft and hard issues that are part of the complex Peruvian reality at different levels of recursion. For doing this, four defined perspectives were adopted to understand the complexity of Peru: the sectoral view, the regions view, (...) the river basins view and the macroregions view. Peru is seen as a system in focus, defining, for each of these four perspectives, the five systems that VSM has. The application of the VSM in each perspective serves to apply it in two modes: diagnosis and design, according to the respective perspective. Then an integrative analysis and reflection is done considering the four perspectives, to analyze the viability of the VSM approach in the governance of the Peruvian State to establish some conclusions and recommendations in relation to the proposal, appearing at the end of the paper. (shrink)

Starting from the idea that functions are formally similar to actions in that they are described and explained in a similar way, so that both admit of an accordion effect, I turn to Anscombe’s insight that the point of practical reasoning is to render explicit the relation between the different descriptions of an action generated by the accordion effect. The upshot is, roughly, that an item has a function if what it does can be accounted for by functional reasoning. Put (...) differently, a part of a system has a function if what it does is a functional part of what the system does. (shrink)

The volume collects classics of Marxist historiography of science, including a new translation of Boris Hessen's “The Social and Economic Roots of Newton's ...

When we discuss skepticism, we generally mean a certain philosophical movement with a fundamental basis in doubt. At the same time, the history of philosophy gives us another highly productive, met...

I propose a general alethic theory of epistemic risk according to which the riskiness of an agent’s credence function encodes her relative sensitivity to different types of graded error. After motivating and mathematically developing this approach, I show that the epistemic risk function is a scaled reflection of expected inaccuracy. This duality between risk and information enables us to explore the relationship between attitudes to epistemic risk, the choice of scoring rules in epistemic utility theory, and the selection of priors (...) in Bayesian epistemology more generally. (shrink)

Instead of the usual asymptotic passage from quantum mechanics to classical mechanics when a parameter tended to infinity, a sharp boundary is obtained for the domain of existence of classical reality. The last is treated as separable empirical reality following d'Espagnat, described by a mathematical superstructure over quantum dynamics for the universal wave function. Being empirical, this reality is constructed in terms of both fundamental notions and characteristics of observers. It is presupposed that considered observers perceive the world as a (...) system of collective degrees of freedom that are inherently dissipative because of interaction with thermal degrees of freedom. Relevant problems of foundation of statistical physics are considered. A feasible example is given of a macroscopic system not admitting such classical reality.The article contains a concise survey of some relevant domains: quantum and classical Bell-type inequalities; universal wave function; approaches to quantum description of macroscopic world, with emphasis on dissipation; spontaneous reduction models; experimental tests of the universal validity of the quantum theory. (shrink)

When interacting with others, we often use bodily signals to communicate. Among these signals, pointing, whether with the eyes or the hands, allows coordinating our attention with others, and the perception of pointing gestures implicates a range of social cognitive processes. Here, we review the brain mechanisms underpinning the perception and understanding of pointing, focusing on eye gaze perception and associated joint attention processes. We consider pointing gesture perception, but leave aside pointing gesture execution as it relates to a distinct (...) area of cognitive neuroscience research. We describe the attention orienting effects of pointing and the neural substrates for the perception of biological cues. We consider the multiple high-level social cognitive processes elicited by pointing gesture perception and examine how pointing gestures are related to the general taxonomy of gestures. We conclude by emphasizing that pointing is a social phenomenon and that a full account of pointing will require an integrative approach taking into account the distinct perspectives from which this phenomenon can be investigated. (shrink)

In this article we present a notion of “logical perfection”. We first describe through examples a notion oflogical perfectionextracted from the contemporary logical concept of categoricity. Categoricity (in power) has become in the past half century a main driver of ideas in model theory, both mathematically (stability theory may be regarded as a way of approximating categoricity) and philosophically. In the past two decades, categoricity notions have started to overlap with more classical notions of robustness and smoothness. These have been (...) crucial in various parts of mathematics since the nineteenth century. We postulate and present the category of logical perfection. We draw on various notions of perfection from mathematics of the 19th and 20th centuries and then trace the relation to the concept of categoricity in power as a logical notion of what a “mathematically perfect” structure is. (shrink)