Written by two of the leading figures in the field, this is a lucid and systematic introduction to semantics as applied to transformational grammars of the ...

The benefits of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in medicine are unquestionable and it is unlikely that the pace of its development will slow down. From better diagnosis, prognosis, and prevention to more precise surgical procedures, AI has the potential to offer unique opportunities to enhance patient care and improve clinical practice overall. However, at this stage of AI technology development it is unclear whether it will de-humanize or re-humanize medicine. Will AI allow clinicians to spend less time on administrative tasks and (...) technology related procedures and more time being present in person to attend to the needs of their patients? Or will AI dramatically increase the presence of smart technology in the clinical context to a point of undermining the humane dimension of the patient–physician relationship? In this brief commentary, we argue that technological solutions should be only integrated into clinical medicine if they fulfill the following three conditions: (1) they serve human ends; (2) they respect personal identity; and (3) they promote human interaction. These three conditions form the moral imperative of humanity. (shrink)

This study examines the influence of women in business using a sample of firms on Fortune's “100 Best Companies to Work For” list and is an extension of Bernardi et al.'s work. We use the data from Bernardi et al. to determine whether a higher representation of women on a board signals an increased commitment of a firm to a quality environment and employment characteristics necessary to establish the firm on Fortune's “100 Best Companies to Work For” list. Our findings (...) include a significant increase in the number of female directors on Fortune 500 companies between 1977 and 2001. The initial analysis of the 27 firms appearing on both Fortune's “100 Best Companies to Work For” list and the Fortune 500 in 2001 indicates a positive correlation between the number of female directors and a company's appearance on the “100 Best Companies to Work For” list. (shrink)

We propose a mentalistic and nativist view of human early mental and social life and of the ontogeny of mindreading. We define the mental state of sharedness as the primitive, one-sided capability to take one's own mental states as mutually known to an i nteractant. We argue that this capability is an innate feature of the human mind, which the child uses to make a subjective sense of the world and of her actions. We argue that the child takes all (...) of her mental states as shared with her caregivers. This a llows her to interact with her caregivers in a mentalistic way from the very beginning and provides the grounds on which the later maturation of mindreading will build. As the latter process occurs, the child begins to understand the mental world in terms of differences between the mental states of different agents; subjectively, this also corresponds to the birth of privateness. ? (shrink)

Introduction: Time and the shared world -- The "subject" of inquiry -- Mineness and the practical first-person -- Being and otherness: Sartre's critique -- Heideggerian aprioricity and the categories of being -- The temporality of care -- Fursorge: acknowledging the other Dasein -- Authenticity, inauthenticity, and the extremes of Fursorge -- Conclusion.

The paper aims to assess the theory of mind of sexual offenders. We administered to 21 sexual offenders and to 21 nonoffenders two classical first- and second-order ToM tasks, a selection of six Strange Stories, and a semi-structured interview, the Theory of Mind Assessment Scale , which provides a multi-dimensional evaluation of ToM, investigating first- vs. third-person and egocentric vs. allocentric perspectives. Results show that sexual offenders performed worse than controls on second-order ToM tasks, on Strange Stories and on each (...) of the Th.o.m.a.s dimensions, whereas they did as well as the control group on first-order ToM tasks. A detailed analysis of participants’ performance on Th.o.m.a.s. showed that sex offenders performed worse on the third-person than on the first-person ToM scale, and worse on the allocentric than on the egocentric perspective; these findings did not apply to the controls. Implications for future research and treatment are discussed. (shrink)

TThis paper aims to evidence the inherently metonymic nature of co-speech gestures. Arguing that motivation in gesture involves iconicity (similarity), indexicality (contiguity), and habit (conventionality) to varying degrees, it demonstrates how a set of metonymic principles may lend a certain systematicity to experientially grounded processes of gestural abstraction and enaction. Introducing visuo-kinetic signs as an umbrella term for co-speech gestures and signed languages, the paper shows how a frame-based approach to gesture may integrate different cognitive/functional linguistic and semiotic accounts of (...) metonymy (e.g., experiential domains, frame metonymy, contiguity, and pragmatic inferencing). The guiding assumption is that gestures metonymically profile deeply embodied, routinized aspects of familiar scenes, that is, the motivating context of frames. The discussion shows how gestures may evoke frame structures exhibiting varying degrees of groundedness, complexity, and schematicity: basic physical action and object frames; more complex frames; and highly abstract, complex frame structures. It thereby provides gestural evidence for the idea that metonymy is more basic and more directly experientially grounded than metaphor and thus often feeds into correlated metaphoric processes. Furthermore, the paper offers some initial insights into how metonymy also seems to induce the emergence of schematic patterns in gesture which may result from action-based and discourse-driven processes of habituation and conventionalization. It exemplifies how these forces may engender grammaticalization of a basic physical action into a gestural marker that shows strong metonymic form reduction, decreased transitivity, and interacting pragmatic functions. Finally, addressing basic metonymic operations in signed lexemes elucidates certain similarities regarding sign constitution in gesture and sign. English and German multimodal discourse data as well as German Sign Language (DGS) are drawn upon to illustrate the theoretical points of the paper. Overall, this paper presents a unified account of metonymy’s role in underpinning forms, functions, and patterns in visuo-kinetic signs. (shrink)

RESUMENLa posición de i.Berlin sobre el determinismo fue recibida por muchos como un ataque al alcance de las ciencias humanas. Su argumentación, sin embargo, sugiere nuevas y sugerentes relaciones entre el conocimiento y la libertad, además de una concepción específica de la lectura de la historia. En el presente ensayo, que constituye una primera parte del trabajo, se analiza el argumento de I. Berlin sobre el determinismo, situándolo en las dos discusiones sobre la historia que se desarrollaron tras la II (...) Guerra Mundial. PALABRAS CLAVEDETERMINISMO-BERLINABSTRACTI. Berlin's position on determinism was received by many authors as an attack on the human sciences. His interpretation, however, suggests novel and stimulating relations between knowledge and freedom, together with a specific philosophy of history. This paper, wich constitutes the first part of a whole essay, assesses Berlin's argument on determinism, placing it within the two debates on history held after world war II.KEYWORDSDETERMINISM-BERLIN. (shrink)

La oposición entre dos grupos de valores, como nos muestran determinantes casos del mapa geopolítico actual, sugiere los límites de las expectativas modernizadoras tanto del viejo imperialismo como de sus opositores: los nuevos pueblos parecen tan reacios a la administración racional colonial como a la autóctona, y exigen formas de dirección y encuadramiento acordes con la propia cultura. Todo ello parece abrir de nuevo el problema de la tradición, ante el cual, desde la perspectiva de la cultura occidental, parece necesario (...) un proceso reflexivo y crítico sobre la diversidad de valores y lenguajes. Reticentes ante los esquemas de la conciencia moderna, hemos de proceder de manera análoga a la que Geertz advierte en minorías pertenecientes a culturas no occidentales, identificadas con los valores modernos de racionalidad crítica y ética autónoma: atender a las "voces mezcladas" de las tradiciones, demorarnos en esa babel que es el suelo, movedizo pero real, de los valores ilustrados. En el presente trabajo se ofrece, siguiendo algunas ideas de Isaiah Berlin, un acercamiento a la tradición, desde el que examinar dos estrategias cruciales en su constitución: las de De Maistre y Burke. (shrink)

The notion that cerebellar cortex geometry may play a unique role in its function is explored by Braitenberg et al. in the form of a new theory about the distribution of cortical activity. The theory makes specific predictions which are not verified by an experimental study of hindlimb movement in the cat.

En donnant des informations sur les lieux et les moyens de la formation théologique autour des deux grands pôles que sont pour l’Afrique de l’Ouest la faculté catholique d’Abidjan et celle de Yaoundé, on est amené à repérer, sans doute, les insuffisances et les difficultés de ces institutions de création récente, mais l’article met surtout l’accent sur les spécificités africaines des cours proposés, s’ajoutant aux enseignements fondamentaux conformes aux exigences définies par la Constitution Apostolique Sapientia Christiana.

Nel contributo si analizzano le valutazioni che Ernst Cassirer e Jonas Cohn, in alcuni loro scritti pubblicati tra il 1903 e il 1918, espressero in modo esplicito o implicito l’uno del pensiero dell’altro nelle sfere della teoria della conoscenza e dell’estetica e a proposito della questione del rapporto fra la cultura tedesca e l’ebraismo. Si delineano, allo scopo di comprendere il loro dialogo, i diversi orientamenti della scuola neokantiana marburghese e della scuola neokantiana sud-occidentale, delle quali furono fondatori i loro (...) rispettivi maestri, Hermann Cohen e Wilhelm Windelband. Si ricorda infine l’interesse che ambedue gli autori mostrarono, nelle opere composte durante l’esilio dalla Germania, da cui Cassirer emigrò nel 1933, Cohn nel 1938, per la letteratura religiosa ebraica e cristiana come fonte di concetti filosofici quali l’individuo, l’amore verso l’altro, Dio come persona. (shrink)

This essay is a critical review of two recent collections, Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, edited by Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby and Feminism as Critique: On the Politics of Gender, edited by Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell. While the collections differ in their manner of addressing the critical sources that have inspired them-the former relying upon a single theorist, the latter attempting to move through some of the philosophical history that constitutes our present theoretical terrain-both attempt to (...) think through and thus revisualize some of the categories of difference which we have inherited. Though the best essays from these collections are celebrated for demonstrating how "feminism as critique" can work to move us toward a clearer and more inclusive feminist theory, questions are raised about what the inattention to race in these volumes suggests about our own role in the construction of power and knowledge, and the erasures that help to secure them both. (shrink)

The approach to empower learners as the subject in the use of AI is in line with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)’s AI and Education Guidance for Policy-Makers and is pursued in recognition of the three paradigmatic shifts in the use of AI in educational setting. To strengthen the role of learners as leaders in the use of AI, this article uses the idea of the acting person from Karol Wojtyla. The concept of the acting person (...) focuses on moral responsibility founded in human consciousness and conducted through human actions. The moral act of an acting person leads to responsible use that requires the commitment to the common good. In the first part, I will describe the history and development of AI technologies. In the second part, I will discuss the idea of the acting person and the AI as an acting machine. In the last part, I will present an analysis of the importance of grounding educational policy on the use of AI in learners’ ethical role as the acting person. (shrink)

Resumo Como se organizam os meios para que seus produtos sejam oferecidos a seus usuários como produtos de comunicação? Esta é a pergunta que sustenta e justifica o estudo da gramática dos meios, segundo a articulação de códigos eletrônicos geradores das linguagens icônicas em processos perceptuais e cognitivos. Orienta-se pelas explorações que M.McLuhan formulou em suas análises e exercícios de seu projeto pedagógico e também na metodologia semiótica dos processos de articulação sintática, semântica e pragmática.

The “nature” of an artifact is often equated with its function. Clearly, an artifactual function must be an extrinsic property. This feature of functions has important implications on the semantics of artifactual kind terms: it enables us to vindicate that artifactual kind terms have an externalist semantics. Any alleged externalist theory, indeed, must show that the referents of the considered terms share a common nature (i.e., an extrinsic property), whether we know or could possibly ever know what that nature is. (...) However, the state of the art shows that function is not enough to represent such “nature”: function does not exhaustively account for important phenomena that characterize artifacts and artifactual kinds, nor does it thoroughly define what they are. Thus, extending the scope of externalism to artifactual kind terms seems doomed to fail. Pace opposite views, it could even be argued that artifacts are a sub-class of social kinds. If so, not only social but also artifactual kind terms cannot refer externalistically, since their referents constitutively depend on human intentions and norms. Either way, externalism fails to apply to those kinds of terms. (shrink)

This paper explores whether MacIntyrean virtue ethics concepts are applicable in non-Western business contexts, specifically in SMEs in Taiwan, a country strongly influenced by the Confucian tradition. It also explores what differences exist between different polities in this respect, and specifically interprets observed differences between the Taiwanese study and previous studies conducted in Europe and Asia. Based on case study research, the findings support the generalizability of the MacIntyrean framework. Drawing on the institutional logics perspective and synthesizing this with MacIntyrean (...) concepts, the paper explains the differences between the studies largely by reference to the Confucian tradition operating at both the micro-level within firms and at the macro-level as a means of harmonizing the potentially competing institutional logics to which firms are subject. The recent weakening of this tradition, however, suggests that increased conflict may characterize the future. (shrink)

Since the publication of Self Experiences in Groupin 1998-the first book to apply self psychology and intersubjectivity to group work-there have been tremendous advancements in the areas of affect, attachment, infant research, ...

With the turning of wilderness areas into wildlife parks and the returning of developed areas of land to the forces of nature, intermediate hybrid realms surface in which wild and managed nature become increasingly entangled. A partitioning of environmental philosophy into ecoethics and animal welfare ethics leaves these mixed territories relatively uncharted—the first dealing with wild (animals), the second with the welfare of captive or domestic animals. In this article, we explore an environmental philosophy that considers explicitly these mixed situations. (...) We examine a recent Dutch policy of introducing domesticated and semi-wild large herbivores in newly developed nature areas. Larger issues are at stake, such as the intertwinement of nature and culture, the dynamic character of de-domestication processes, and the relation between concepts of authenticity and the wild. We sketch a pluralistic, dynamic, and pragmatic environmental philosophy that is capable of dealing with the complicated ethicalproblems concerning creatures and land caught between domestication and the wild. (shrink)