We show that, given extensive exploration of a three-dimensional volume, grid units can form with the approximate periodicity of a face-centered cubic crystal, as the spontaneous product of a self-organizing process at the single unit level, driven solely by firing rate adaptation.

The aim of the following report is to outline the content of the lectures given during the First IAOA Interdisciplinary Summer School on Ontological Analysis (July 16–20, 2012, Trento, Italy). The...

In the past decade, the availability of genetically modified animals has enabled the discovery of interesting roles for phosphatidylinositol 3‐kinase‐γ (PI3Kγ) and ‐δ (PI3Kδ) in different cell types orchestrating innate and adaptive immune responses. Therefore, these PI3K isoforms appear to be attractive drug targets for the treatment of diseases caused by unrestrained immune reactions. Currently, pharmacological targeting of PI3Kγ and/or PI3Kδ represents one of the most promising challenges for companies interested in the development of novel safe treatments for inflammatory diseases. (...) In this review we provide a general outline of PI3Kγ‐ and PI3Kδ‐specific functions in distinct subsets of inflammatory cells. We also discuss the therapeutic impact of novel compounds targeting PI3Kγ, PI3Kδ or both, in mouse models of autoimmune disorders (systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) and rheumatoid arthritis), respiratory diseases (allergic asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) and cardiovascular dysfunctions (atherosclerosis and myocardial infarction). (shrink)

Since its emergence, the contemporary environmental problem has become an object of analysis and intervention both for ecology (area of biology) and for different intergovernmental organizations with a global reach. In both fields, a series of conceptual frameworks have been developed aimed at addressing ecological changes, that is, those alterations that affect units that are the object of study of ecology. The aim of this paper is to clarify and contrast the ways in which disturbance ecology (a recent field within (...) ecology) and different intergovernmental organizations conceptualize and approach ecological change. To do this, we make an analytical comparison between the ecological concept of ‘disturbance’ and the notion of ‘driver’ coming from intergovernmental organizations. In the comparison, we observe that these concepts seek to explain similar processes of ecological change under the same causal logic, although they show important differences in the treatment of the initial conditions that allow them to be studied. We conclude that the notion of ‘driver’ leads to an epistemological impoverishment in relation to the concept of ‘disturbance’. Finally, we discuss some implications of this epistemological problem, given that it is the impoverished notion of ‘driver’ that is imposed on the international context when explaining an ecological change, and materialized in guidelines which are recognized by nations around the world. Thus, this impoverishment is transferred to the field of public policy. It is urgent to rethink to what extent we are contributing to the construction and reproduction of an epistemologically impoverished environmental problem. (shrink)

Agriculture occupies 38% of the planet’s terrestrial surface, using 70% of freshwater resources. Its modern practice is dominated by an industrial–productivist discourse, which has contributed to the simplification and degradation of human and ecological systems. As such, agricultural transformation is essential for creating more sustainable food systems. This paper focuses on discursive change. A prominent discursive alternative to industrial–productivist agriculture is regenerative agriculture. Regenerative discourses are emergent, radically evolving and diverse. It is unclear whether they have the potential to generate (...) the changes required to shift industrial–productivist agriculture. This paper presents a literature-based discourse analysis to illustrate key thematic characteristics of regenerative agricultural discourses. The analysis finds that such discourses: situate agricultural work within nested, complex living systems; position farms as relational, characterised by co-evolution between humans and other landscape biota; perceive the innate potential of living systems as place-sourced; maintain a transformative openness to alternative thinking and practice; believe that multiple regenerative cultures are necessary for deeply regenerative agriculture; and depart from industrialism to varying degrees. The paper concludes by reviewing three transformative opportunities for regenerative discourses—discourse coalitions, translocal organising and collective learning. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to deeply rethink the traditional notion of “ideological emendation”. By taking Taurus T27 as a test-case, I shall emphasise that Taurus’ intervention on Timaeus 27c5 is the result of a conjecture, and that such an emendation meets the requirements for a philological conjecture on Plato’s text. Indeed, Taurus’ fragment, which is usually taken as a typical example of “ideological emendation”, only reflects an effort to recover what Plato actually wrote, and is nothing but a (...) textual emendation. Accordingly, the ideological core of such an emendation is what must lie at the basis of any conjecture, that is an attempt to re-establish (what is assumed to be) Plato’s text in accordance with his consistent doctrine. (shrink)

Martínková et al provide an overview of a tendency to use gender terms in key sports contexts, including eligibility criteria and testing, where gender is unintended. They argue that to avoid conceptual confusion and aid clarity, we should disentangle gender and sex, acknowledging that often gender talk should be interpreted as talk of sex. One of their recommendations is that the labels of competitive categories ‘women’s’/’men’s’ should change to ‘female’/’male’. I first make their argument against gendered labelling more precise by (...) showing that important yet neglected moral and practical reasons support their abandonment. I then argue that in the case of WA regulations, those moral reasons also cut against Martínková et al.’s relabelling proposal ‘female’/’male’. I sketch a testosterone-based proposal which circumvents the problem and which WA itself should accept. More generally, I argue we should be more mindful of the risk that competitive category labels unnecessarily harm athletes. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming part of the everyday. During this transition, people’s intention to use AI technologies is still unclear and emotions such as fear are influencing it. In this paper, we focus on autonomous cars to first verify empirically the extent to which people fear AI and then examine the impact that fear has on their intention to use AI-driven vehicles. Our research is based on a systematic survey and it reveals that while individuals are largely afraid of (...) cars that are driven by AI, they are nonetheless willing to adopt this technology as soon as possible. To explain this tension, we extend our analysis beyond just fear and show that people also believe that AI-driven cars will generate many individual, urban and global benefits. Subsequently, we employ our empirical findings as the foundations of a theoretical framework meant to illustrate the main factors that people ponder when they consider the use of AI tech. In addition to offering a comprehensive theoretical framework for the study of AI technology acceptance, this paper provides a nuanced understanding of the tension that exists between the fear and adoption of AI, capturing what exactly people fear and intend to do. (shrink)

The relational interpretation of quantum mechanics (RQM) has received a growing interest since its first formulation in 1996. Usually presented as an interpretational layer over the usual quantum mechanics formalism, it appears as a philosophical perspective without proper mathematical counterparts. This state of affairs has direct consequences on the scientific debate on RQM which still suffers from misunderstandings and imprecise statements. In an attempt to clarify those debates, the present paper proposes a radical reformulation of the mathematical framework of quantum (...) mechanics which is relational from the start: fact-nets. The core idea is that all statements about the world, facts, are binary entities involving two systems that can be symmetrically thought of as observed and observer. We initiate a study of the fact-nets formalism and outline how it can shed new relational light on some familiar quantum features. (shrink)

This work explores issues with the eliminativist formulation of ontic structural realism. An ontology that totally eliminates objects is found lacking by arguing, first, that the theoretical frameworks used to support the best arguments against an object-oriented ontology (quantum mechanics, relativity theory, quantum field theory) can be seen in every case as physical models of empty worlds, and therefore do not represent all the information that comes from science, and in particular from fundamental physics, which also includes information about local (...) interactions between objects. Secondly, by giving a critical assessment of the role of symmetries in these fundamental physical theories; and, lastly, by warning about unfounded metaphysical assumptions. An argument is made for a moderate form of structural realism instead, one in which objects play the fundamental role of representing symmetries and bearing their conserved charges, and of participating in the network of interactions observed in the world. (shrink)

Over recent years, various semantics have been proposed for dealing with updates in the setting of logic programs. The availability of different semantics naturally raises the question of which are most adequate to model updates. A systematic approach to face this question is to identify general principles against which such semantics could be evaluated. In this paper we motivate and introduce a new such principle the refined extension principle. Such principle is complied with by the stable model semantics for (single) (...) logic programs. It turns out that none of the existing semantics for logic program updates, even though generalisations of the stable model semantics, comply with this principle. For this reason, we define a refinement of the dynamic stable model semantics for Dynamic Logic Programs that complies with the principle. (shrink)

Este artículo explora el papel de la imitación en la enseñanza de las Artes visuales y la Literatura en educación básica por un lado y la Filosofía en educación media, por otro. Se inicia analizando el papel de la imitación en la enseñanza de las artes visuales y la literatura, donde se encuentra que aquélla debe ser entendida como una actividad de apropiación personal y no como una reproducción mecánica. Este hallazgo permite criticar la tendencia a considerar que el talento (...) es producto de una capacidad innata que desconoce la tradición creativa. Igualmente se evidencia que el resultado de la imitación, paradójicamente, es la creatividad y originalidad, en la medida en que provee al estudiante una base de estilos creativos diferentes, para combinarlos o mejorarlos, construyendo un estilo propio. Luego se ofrecen algunas ideas de cómo puede aplicarse dicha estrategia a la enseñanza de la Filosofía en educación media, a través de tres formas clásicas de hacer filosofía. La similitud entre los métodos pedagógicos permite establecer vínculos interesantes entre la naturaleza de las dos áreas de conocimiento, respecto al acto creativo. El artista crea su obra de manera similar a como el filósofo crea el concepto; en los dos casos, a pesar de que el producto es único y particular, posee pretensiones de universalidad. Tanto Arte como Filosofía se rebelan contra algunas características de la razón instrumental, en la medida en que valoran el aprender a demorarse en la contemplación y la reflexión, y valoran la imposibilidad de encerrar sus productos bajo alguna utilidad definida. En este sentido, tanto Arte como Filosofía se erigen como paradigmas de la libertad humana. (shrink)

This book explores how introductory methods shaped intellectual activity in various fields of thought of the post-Hellenistic Age and Late Antiquity by framing them in a wider interdisciplinary framework.

In the past 50 years nurse scheduling has received considerable attention in the research community. There are two cases regarding the nurse scheduling problem : the static and dynamic. Dynamic NSP, is often called nurse rerostering problem, which presents reconstruction or modification of the predetermined roster for the current scheduling horizon. The aim of this paper is to present new hybrid strategy for nurse NRRP problem. The proposed methodology is based on efficient cooperation between fuzzy logic, ordered weighted averaging and (...) variable neighbourhood descent search. Complete system is tested, and experimental results are based on real-world dataset obtained from the Oncology Institute of Vojvodina in Serbia. (shrink)

Novelty is a key concept to understand creativity. Evaluating a piece of artwork or other creation in terms of novelty requires comparisons to other works and considerations about the elements that have been reused in the creative process. Human beings perform this analysis intuitively, but in order to simulate it using computers, the objects to be compared and the similarity metrics to be used should be formalized and explicitly implemented. In this paper we present a study on relevant elements for (...) the assessment of novelty in computer-generated narratives. We focus on the domain of folk-tales, working with simple plots and basic narrative elements: events, characters, props and scenarios. Based on the empirical results of this study we propose a set of computational metrics for the automatic assessment of novelty. Although oriented to the implementation of our own story generation system, the measurement methodology we propose can be easily generalized to other creative systems. (shrink)

In this manuscript, we explore the potential therapeutic use of helminths. After analyzing helminths’ role in connection with human health from the perspective of their symbiotic and evolutionary relationship, we critically examine some studies on their therapeutic applications. In doing so, we focus on some prominent mechanisms of action and potential benefits, but also on the exaggerations and theoretical and methodological difficulties of such proposals. We conclude that further studies are needed to fully explore the potential benefits of this perspective, (...) and we encourage the scientific community in doing so. (shrink)

In this paper, we examine the authorship of the first review of Hume’s _Treatise of Human Nature_ (1739–40), published anonymously in the _History of the Works of the Learned_ in late 1739. We believe that William Warburton is the author of the review, as attested by various clues, partly dependent on the testimony of the editor of the _History of the Works of the Learned_, Jacob Robinson. Robinson states in 1742 that the author of Hume’s review is the same as (...) the one who sent him the review of Morgan’s _Physico-Theology_, and he describes this author in words similar to those he had already used to describe another anonymous writing by Warburton. Many other pieces of evidence, philosophical, phraseological, literary, and stylistic, amply support the attribution. (shrink)

This article describes the creation of a lightweight ontology of European Union (EU) criminal procedural rights in judicial cooperation. The ontology is intended to help legal practitioners understand the precise contextual meaning of terms as well as helping to inform the creation of a rule ontology of criminal procedural rights in judicial cooperation. In particular, we started from the problem that directives sometimes do not contain articles dedicated to definitions. This issue provided us with an opportunity to explore a phenomenon (...) typically neglected in the construction of domain-specific legal ontologies. Whether classical definitions are present or absent, laws and legal sources in general are typically peppered with a number of hidden definitions (in the sense that they are not clearly marked out as such) as well as incomplete definitions, which may nevertheless help legal practitioners (and legal reasoning systems) to reason on the basis of analogy or teleology. In this article we describe the theoretical basis for building an analogical lightweight ontology in the framework of an EU project called _CrossJustice_. We present our methodology for collecting the data, extracting the data fields and creating the ontology with WebProtégé, followed by our conclusions and ideas for future work. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty’s article, “La guerre a eu lieu”, contains, as has been said, a kind of new phenomenology of perception. Its research question could be formulated as follows. What prevented German-occupied France from perceiving the enemy as an enemy for so many months or years of alienating cohabitation? The “drôle de guerre” would, among other things, be linked to this singular perceptual impasse. An impasse that is as dramatic as instructive, since it shows that war and politics have nothing to do (...) with handling the friend/enemy dialectical opposition Carl Schmitt situated at the center of his philosophy. Rather, they have to do with handling an adialectical field in which that opposition is not yet delineated and perceptible, but is rather evolving in a continuity and ambiguity that constitute the real (and in this sense immoral) matter of politics and war. (shrink)

Carl Schmitt está de moda. Sin embargo, pocos conocen su faceta de organizador de congresos antisemitas 1. Muchos alaban la finura de sus análisis, el poder descriptivo de sus conceptos, su estilo literario, su carácter de jurista polémico. No sólo se trata de una proliferación de lectores entre los más jóvenes, sino de un reconocimiento por parte de los más afamados y de un uso un tanto miope de sus conceptos (por ejemplo, la idea de estado de excepción, su idea (...) de constitución material 2, etc.). (shrink)

Lo scopo del presente lavoro è indagare la peculiare legittimazione dell’impegno politico per i filosofi proposta da Platone e accolta dai suoi immediati discepoli nella cosiddetta Prima Accademia: particolare attenzione sarà rivolta, soprattutto, alla «terza ondata» della _Repubblica_. Attraverso opportuni riferimenti alla _Lettera VII_, si mostrerà come la terza ondata costituisca il cuore del progetto di riforma politica e sociale di Platone, il quale invita l’intellettuale a concepire la propria missione politica o come istituzione di un regno filosofico o come (...) consiglio e aiuto da prestare a un re o a un signore: in entrambi i casi, l’immagine del governo di un solo uomo serve a connotare lo scenario preferibile per garantire l’istituzionalizzazione politica della filosofia. È così che, allora, i discepoli di Platone tentarono di stabilire contatti con realtà monarchiche o tiranniche accettando di farsi legislatori o consiglieri di un singolo individuo al comando, il quale veniva concepito come il perfetto connubio tra sapere e potere nel solco delle teorie del maestro. (shrink)

El presente estudio propone un enfoque crítico de la cuestión del mal y del sufrimiento humano. En el marco del pensamiento ético de Levinas y desde una nueva perspectiva respecto de la concepción actual del lenguaje y del cuerpo, pretendemos cuestionar todas las formas de racionalismo y comprensión metafísica acerca del dolor y del sufrimiento humano. El propósito del presente estudio consiste en delinear una nueva forma de comportamiento en torno a la cuestión del mal y la debilidad humana, buscando (...) alternativas conceptuales para esclarecer este complejo problema ético. (shrink)