Nature is frequently operationalized as greenery or water to estimate the restorativeness of the environment. Pursuing a deeper understanding of the connection between representation of naturalness and its relationship with restoration, we conducted an experiment aimed to investigate if the sky is perceived as an element of nature. The main goal of this study was to understand how the composition of the environment guides people’s selection of sky as nature in an explicit task. Moreover, we investigated how the amount of (...) visible sky determines this relationship. One hundred five participants participated in a novel explicit judgment task conducted online. In this task, we prepared a set of images trimmed out of 360-degree high dynamic range images. The images were classified according to two primary independent variables representing type of environment and horizon level. Each participant was asked to select, by clicking on the image, what they consider as “nature.” In addition, they were asked to judge images on five visual analogue scales: emotional response, aesthetic preference, feeling of familiarity, the openness of the space and naturalness. For analysis, images were segmented into 11 semantic categories with each pixel being assigned one semantic label. Our results show that, sky is associated with selections of nature in a specific pattern. The relationship is dependent on the particular set of conditions that are present in the environment rather than the type of the environment. The availability of sky on the image affects the selection of other nature labels with selections more likely when only a small amount of sky was available. Furthermore, we found that the amount of sky had a significant positive association with the naturalness rating of the whole image, but the effect was small. Our results also indicate that subjective selections of sky predict the naturalness better than trees and water. On the other hand, objective presence of trees and water has a stronger positive association with naturalness while objective presence of sky is positively associated with naturalness. The results show that, relative to its availability sky is considered as nature. (shrink)

The starting point of these reflections on the personality-creating function of moral examples is a differentiation between two concepts of man: one, which puts stress on the fact that human nature is predetermined and the man’s task is therefore to develop his talents and endowments in order to become a compete man, and the other, which emphasizes the fact that man is himself a specific and uniquely precious value, and thus he should endeavor to learn about himself and how he (...) should realize himself to his own image. In the first instance we have “an ethics of examples”, in the second, “an ethics of authenticity”. In the first case we have a man who creates himself, in the second, a man who is in search for himself. These two conceptions describe different attitudes toward the world and toward oneself. We can reach for their synthesis, however, if we assume that through the search for himself man creates himself, by finding out what his authentic intentions are, man creates himself, and thereby avoids petrification in the established schemes, functioning in social life. Thus he becomes a more valuable individual in his society. (shrink)

The Eskimo language Kalaallisut (alias West Greenlandic) has traditionally been described as having a rich tense system, with three future tenses (Kleinschmidt 1851, Bergsland 1955, Fortescue 1984) and possibly four past tenses (Fortescue 1984). Recently however, Shaer (2003) has challenged these traditional claims, arguing that Kalaallisut is in fact tenseless.

This paper introduces a framework for direct surface composition by online update. The surface string is interpreted as is, with each morpheme in turn updating the input state of information and attention. A formal representation language, Logic of Centering, is defined and some crosslinguistic constraints on lexical meanings and compositional operations are formulated.

Rooth & Partee (1982) and Rooth (1985) have shown that the English-specific rule-by-rule system of PTQ can be factored out into function application plus two transformations for resolving type mismatch (type lifting and variable binding). Building on these insights, this article proposes a universal system for type-driven translation, by adding two more innovations: local type determination for gaps (generalizing Montague 1973) and a set of semantic filters (extending Cooper 1983). This system, dubbed Cross-Linguistic Semantics (XLS), is shown to account for (...) various phenomena — including scope relations in English and Greenlandic Eskimo, internally headed relative clauses in Lakhota, serial verbs in Yoruba and VP ellipsis in English. (shrink)

Artykuł dotyczy językowych sposobów prezentowania osiągnięć kobiet, które w latach 1968–1977 znalazły się w finale plebiscytu organizowanego przez redakcję łódzkiego tygodnika społeczno-kulturalnego „Odgłosy”. Pomysłodawcom plebiscytu _Łodzianin Roku_ zależało na tym, by docenić wartościowe działania i ludzi, którzy przyczyniali się do rozwoju miasta. W czasie dziesięciu lat trwania konkursu w gronie stu osób pretendujących do tytułu znalazło się dwadzieścia sześć kobiet. Zagadnieniami wpływającymi na analizę są wybrane elementy teorii językowego obrazu świata, a także konceptualizacja należąca do zasadniczych pojęć z zakresu językoznawstwa (...) kognitywnego. Materiał badań stanowią sylwetki trzynastu łodzianek, które głosami mieszkańców zdobyły tytuł – _Łodzianin Roku_. Zgromadzony materiał został przyporządkowany do sześciu kategorii tematycznych, których nazwy są cytatami z omawianych tekstów prasowych: Kobiety, które „otwierają światy nawet nieprzeczuwalne”; „Liczą się minuty i sekundy…” – o ratowaniu życia najmłodszych; „Najrzadsze z operowych ptaków” – łódzkie śpiewaczki; „Jedna jedyna wybrana dziewczyna! Jadzia” – w kręgach teatru, filmu i tańca; „Oto ile może i potrafi jedna słaba kobieta” – kreatorki łódzkiego życia kulturalnego; „Wypełniałam tylko swój obowiązek”. Zgromadzony materiał pozwolił zaobserwować w jaki sposób opisywano dokonania kobiet ze środowiska naukowego (Anna Rynkowska, Stefania Skwarczyńska, Olga Olgina), które ukazywano jako wizytówki Łodzi, „wychowawczynie pokoleń”, „trwale zrośnięte z uczelniami”. Symbolem nadludzkiej siły i determinacji, osobą dokonującą rzeczy niemożliwych określano na łamach „Odgłosów” lekarza Halinę Krysińską, zaś kobietą – bohaterką była Irena Chojnacka. W gronie wyróżnionych postaci nie zabrakło silnych, zorganizowanych łodzianek mających zdolności przywódcze (Krystyna Kondratiuk – inicjatorka powstawania Muzeum Włókiennictwa, Maria Ryl – współtwórczyni Teatru „Arlekin”, Izabela Nagórko – dbająca o rozwój łódzkich bibliotek, Teresa Skoczylas – kierownik zakładowego ośrodka kulturalnego). Łódzkie śpiewaczki, Teresa Wojtaszek-Kubiak i Teresa May-Czyżowska, były na stronach „Odgłosów” przedstawiane jako „rzadkie operowe ptaki”, promujące Łódź i zachwycające świat talentem. Doceniono także pracę choreograf Jadwigi Hryniewieckiej, założycielki Reprezentacyjnego Zespołu Tańca Związków Zawodowych Włókniarzy im. Harnam oraz zasługi łódzkiej legendy – aktorki Jadwigi Andrzejewskiej. (shrink)

Crosslinguistically, causative constructions conform to the following generalization: If the causal relation is syntactically concealed, then it is semantically direct. Concealed causatives span a wide syntactic spectrum, ranging from resultative complements in English to causative subjects in Miskitu. A unified type-driven theory is proposed which attributes the understood causal relation—and other elements of constructional meaning—to type lifting operations predictably licensed by type mismatch at LF. The proposal has far-reaching theoretical implications not only for the theory of compositionality and causation, but (...) also for the underlying theory of events, space, and time, in natural language discourse. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss some rather puzzling facts concerning the semantics of Warlpiri expressions of cardinality, i.e. the Warlpiri counterparts of English expressions like one,two, many, how many. The morphosyntactic evidence, discussed in section 1, suggests that the corresponding expressions in Warlpiri are nominal, just like the Warlpiri counterparts of prototypical nouns, eg. child. We also argue that Warlpiri has no articles or any other items of the syntactic category D(eterminer). In section 2, we describe three types of readings— (...) "definite", "indefinite" and "predicative"—which are generally found with Warlpiri nouns, including those which correspond to English common nouns and cardinality expressions. A partial analysis of these readings is sketched i n section 3. Since Warlpiri has no determiner system, we hypothesize that the source of (in)definiteness in this language is semantic. More specifically, we suggest that Warlpiri nominals are basically interpreted as individual terms or predicates of individuals and that their three readings arise as a consequence of the interaction of their basic meanings, which are specific to Warlpiri, with certain semantic operations, such as type shifting (Rooth and Partee 1982, Partee and Rooth 1983, Partee 1986, 1987), which universally can or must apply in the process of compositional semantic interpretation. (shrink)

This paper presents an interview carried out with Maria Aparecida Viggiani Bicudo. Its main topic is the Philosophy of Mathematics Education. Other issues are linked to this central theme, such the interviewed’s experience in university management, the movement from her initial formation in Education till her studies in Philosophy, the creation of a recognized and well regarded PostGraduate Programm in Mathematics Education in Brazil, and the perspective of being woman and mother working in the academic world.

A Philosophy to Live By highlights Murdoch's distinctive conception of philosophy as a spiritual or existential practice and enlists the resources of her thought to explore a wide range of thinkers and debates at the intersections of moral philosophy, religion, art, and politics.

'Ethics' was not developed as a separate branch of philosophy in Buddhist traditions until the modern period, though Buddhist philosophers have always been concerned with the moral significance of thoughts, emotions, intentions, actions, virtues, and precepts. Their most penetrating forms of moral reflection have been developed within disciplines of practice aimed at achieving freedom and peace. This Element first offers a brief overview of Buddhist thought and modern scholarly approaches to its diverse forms of moral reflection. It then explores two (...) of the most prominent philosophers from the main strands of the Indian Buddhist tradition – Buddhaghosa and Śāntideva – in a comparative fashion. (shrink)

El presente artículo analiza las primeras consideraciones de Ludwig Wittgenstein respecto de la percepción de figuras ambiguas, lo que posteriormente fue englobado por la más amplia noción de “percepción de aspectos”. El objetivo consiste en poner de manifiesto algunas las consideraciones del Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus respecto al carácter intrínsecamente representacional de la percepción en el caso del Cubo de Necker, para establecer de qué manera y en qué medida sus primeras observaciones críticas de la percepción de propiedades que admiten grados en (...) Some Remarks on Logical Form, en 1929, puede impactar análogamente sobre su propia descripción de esta clase particular de experiencias bajo consideración. (shrink)

: The Hamblin-Karttunen approach has led to many insights about questions in English. In this article the results of this rule-by-rule tradition are reconsidered from a crosslinguistic perspective. Starting from the type-driven XLS theory developed in Bittner (1994a, b), it is argued that evidence from simple questions (in English, Polish, Lakhota and Warlpiri) leads to certain revisions. The revised XLS theory then immediately generalizes to complex questions — including scope marking (Hindi), questions with quantifiers (English) and multiple wh-questions (English, Hindi, (...) Japanese). Eliminating language- and construction-specific information from the compositional rules, in favor of universal semantic filters, leads to analyses that not only generalize across unrelated languages but are also empirically more accurate, not less. (shrink)

Nursing, or caring science, is mainly concerned with developing knowledge of what constitutes ideal, good health care for patients as whole persons, and how to achieve this. The aim of this study was to find clinical empirical indications of good ethical care and to investigate the substance of ideal nursing care in praxis. A hermeneutic method was employed in this clinical study, assuming the theoretical perspective of caritative caring and ethics of the understanding of life. The data consisted of two (...) Socratic dialogues: one with nurses and one with nursing students, and interviews with two former patients. The empirical data are first described from a phenomenological approach. Observations of caregivers offering `the little extra' were taken to confirm that patients were `being seen', not from the perspective of an ideal nursing model, but from that of interaction as a fellow human being. The study provides clinical evidence that, as an ontological response to suffering, 'symbolic acts' such as giving the `little extra' may work to bridge gaps in human interaction. The fact that `little things' have the power to preserve dignity and make patients feel they are valued offers hope. Witnessing benevolent acts also paves the way for both patients and caregivers to increase their understanding of life. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to increase the understanding of how different types of experts with influence over the development of AI, in this role, reflect upon distribution of forward-looking responsibility for AI development with regard to safety and democracy. Forward-looking responsibility refers to the obligation to see to it that a particular state of affairs materialise. In the context of AI, actors somehow involved in AI development have the potential to guide AI development in a safe and democratic (...) direction. This study is based on qualitative interviews with such actors in different roles at research institutions, private companies, think tanks, consultancy agencies, parliaments, and non-governmental organisations. While the reflections about distribution of responsibility differ among the respondents, one observation is that influence is seen as an important basis for distribution of responsibility. Another observation is that several respondents think of responsibility in terms of what it would entail in concrete measures. By showing how actors involved in AI development reflect on distribution of responsibility, this study contributes to a dialogue between the field of AI governance and the field of AI ethics. (shrink)

The paper I gave at the Dublin conference celebrating Hilary Putnam’s 80th birthday was “Resurrecting Biological Essentialism” (2008). This was suitable for a celebratory event because it defended Putnam’s position on biological essentialism (1975) from the consensus in the philosophy of biology. This consensus has led to some severe criticisms of Putnam. Michael Ruse, for example, places Putnam, along with Saul Kripke and David Wiggins, “somewhere to the right of Aristotle” on essentialism and talks of them showing “an almost proud (...) ignorance of the organic world” (1987, 358n). John Dupré argues that the views of Putnam and Kripke are fatally divergent from “some actual biological facts and theories” (1981, 66). I argue that the consensus is quite wrong about essentialism and hence that these criticisms are misplaced. (shrink)

En los últimos años y por diversos motivos los filósofos han exhibido un creciente interés por la reflexión metafilosófica (una amplia bibliografía así lo manifiesta). Una de las cuestiones metafilosóficas que ha suscitado especial dedicación y ha atraído la atención de filósofos de distintas filiaciones es la cuestión acerca del canon filosófico. ¿En qué consiste? ¿Cómo debe ser concebido? ¿Cómo se constituye? ¿Cómo funciona? ¿Dónde está? ¿Qué relación guarda con la historia de la filosofía y con la historia de las (...) ideas en general? ¿Cuáles son sus vínculos con la institucionalización y profesionalización de la filosofía y con la comunidad filosófica? son algunas de las preguntas planteadas.En nuestro medio y en general en la comunidad filosófica hispano parlante, la aparición de la obra póstuma de Eduardo Rabossi En el comienzo Dios creó el canon. Biblia berolinensis en la que su autor aborda con originalidad y agudeza esta temática, ha resultado ser un estimulante disparador para el examen y discusión de la cuestión que nos ocupa. Rabossi declaró que se daba por satisfecho si lograba incentivar la polémica. Creemos que lo ha logrado ampliamente. Este número de Análisis Filosófico es una prueba de ello; en él recogemos parte de la reflexión que ha provocado el desafío lanzado por Rabossi. (shrink)

Asking students to generate a prediction before presenting the correct answer is a popular instructional strategy. This study tested whether a person’s degree of confidence in a prediction is related to their curiosity and surprise regarding the answer. For a series of questions about numerical facts, participants (N = 29) generated predictions and rated their confidence in the prediction before seeing the correct answer. The increase in pupil size before viewing the correct answer was used as a physiological marker of (...) curiosity, and the increase in pupil size after viewing the correct answer was used as a physiological marker of surprise. The results revealed that the pupillometric marker of curiosity was most pronounced if students were slightly more confident in their prediction than usual, and it was lower for predictions made with either very high or very low confidence. Furthermore, the results showed that high-confidence prediction errors and low-confidence correct responses yielded a pupillary surprise response, suggesting that highly unexpected results evoke surprise, independent of the correctness of the prediction. Together, results suggest that confidence in a prediction plays an important role in the occurrence of epistemic emotions such as curiosity and surprise. (shrink)

The present study examines the processing of subject-verb (SV) number agreement with coordinate subjects in pre-verbal and post-verbal positions in Greek. Greek is a language with morphological number marked on nominal and verbal elements. Coordinate SV agreement, however, is special in Greek as it is sensitive to the coordinate subject's position: when pre-verbal, the verb is marked for plural while when post-verbal the verb can be in the singular. We conducted two experiments, an acceptability judgment task with adult monolinguals as (...) a pre-study (Experiment 1) and a self-paced reading task as the main study (Experiment 2) in order to obtain acceptance as well as processing data. Forty adult monolingual speakers of Greek participated in Experiment 1 and a hundred and forty one in Experiment 2. Seventy one children participated in Experiment 2: 30 Albanian-Greek sequential bilingual children and 41 Greek monolingual children aged 10–12 years. The adult data in Experiment 1 establish the difference in acceptability between singular VPs in SV and VS constructions reaffirming our hypothesis. Meanwhile, the adult data in Experiment 2 show that plural verbs accelerate processing regardless of subject position. The child online data show that sequential bilingual children have longer reading times (RTs) compared to the age-matched monolingual control group. However, both child groups follow a similar processing pattern in both pre-verbal and post-verbal constructions showing longer RTs immediately after a singular verb when the subject was pre-verbal indicating a grammaticality effect. In the post-verbal coordinate subject sentences, both child groups showed longer RTs on the first subject following the plural verb due to the temporary number mismatch between the verb and the first subject. This effect was resolved in monolingual children but was still present at the end of the sentence for bilingual children indicating difficulties to reanalyze and integrate information. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that (a) 10–12 year-old sequential bilingual children are sensitive to number agreement in SV coordinate constructions parsing sentences in the same way as monolingual children even though their vocabulary abilities are lower than that of age-matched monolingual peers and (b) bilinguals are slower in processing overall. (shrink)

Tuesday evening, December 27, 1983 …I did go skiing today, though, which is what I want to write about. The temperature is down to –10°C again, on my thermometer, which probably means –12 to –13°C, in real terms. The visibility is still very poor though the wind has stopped. I set off at 2 pm and got home at about 4 pm, which meant skiing in the dark all the time. This wouldn’t have bothered me except that I had an (...) unpleasant adventure in Torssukataq fiord, on the intended route for me New Year’s hike. No more and no less but one of my ski poles went through the ice. I am not sure whether it would have continued all the way down, but it went in deeper than I liked, and I heard and saw water coming up around where it had gone in. I didn’t feel like probing any further, especially in the dark, [so I] just turned in my tracks and, carefully testing the ice with my ski poles, went back as fast as I could. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper intends to analyze Walter Benjamin’s critique of Heidegger’s habilitation thesis Duns Scotus’s Doctrine of Categories and Meaning. This objective will be carried out from a contrast between Heidegger’s thesis and the essay that Benjamin writes at the same time entitled On Language as Such and on the Language of Man. Likewise, the reasons that lead Benjamin to critically comment on Heidegger’s thesis will be studied from two perspectives: the problem of translation and the Heideggerian recovery of Neo-Kantianism. (...) Considering the rehabilitation of scholasticism and phenomenology at the beginning of the 20th century, an attempt will be made to reconstruct an implicit debate between the authors around 1916 to account for the distance between Heidegger’s logical conception of language and Benjamin’s theological conception of language. (shrink)

En el presente trabajo, discutiremos algunas lecturas posibles de Física IV 2, donde Aristóteles identifica la χώρα platónica del Timeo con ὕλη, μεταληπτικόν y μεθεκτικόν. Estudiaremos rasgos comunes que acercan el receptáculo del Timeo con la materia y el espacio aristotélicos, y que hacen que Aristóteles encuentre natural identificar la χώρα con la materia. Sin embargo, intentaremos mostrar que, a pesar de las semejanzas entre el receptáculo y lo que Aristóteles entiende por lugar y materia, la mecánica de apropiación del (...) texto platónico que opera el Estagirita, forzando una equivalencia con sus propios términos técnicos, posiblemente implique una distorsión que no termina de hacer justicia a las formulaciones del maestro. (shrink)

Maria Dimitrova (Sofia University, Bulgaria) in response to Jerard Bensussan (University of Strasbourg, France), Jeffrey Andrew Barash (University of Amiens, France), Jacob Rogozinski (University of Strasbourg, France) and Ernst Wolff (University of Pretoria, South Africa) commenting on Emmanuel Levinas' philosophy. This book is essential reading for those interested in the current debates in ethics, metaphysics, and social and political philosophy. The discussed issues are presented from the perspective of phenomenology. This publication is not simply a pure and abstract academic (...) work but has a much broader scope, touching upon the most important dimensions of human relationships. The book tries to find a new way to articulate these. It will be of significant help to scholars and graduate students in all fields of the humanities, as well as to policy makers and social workers who feel themselves challenged by the question of humanism and justice. (shrink)

The German-Jewish writer and poetess, Rose Ausländer, who came from Chernivtsi, capital of Bukovina, one of the former provinces of the Hapsburg Empire, is one of the most highly acclaimed lyric poets to have written in German in the 20th century. Throughout her whole life she was an adherent of the philosophy of Spinoza, first becoming acquainted with it in the so-called “ethics seminar” of the secondary-school teacher Friedrich Kettner. In the wake of the First World War the youth of (...) Chernivtsi were in need of new sources of intellectual stimulation, so he set out to introduce them to the philosophy of Spinoza, as well as to that of Constantin Brunner, a contemporary German philosopher influenced by him. Rose Ausländer remained a follower of Spinoza right up to the end of her life. This is confirmed by her two very different poems of the same name, “Spinoza”—the first composed before 1939, the second in 1979—as well as by her many explorations of topics drawn from his ethics, ranging from her very first printed poem, “Amor Dei,” up to her lyrics written in old age, in the 1970s and 1980s. In this short paper I will attempt to chart the course of, and analyze, her interest in Spinoza's philosophical system and life. (shrink)

Topic modelling is a popular unsupervised method for text processing that provides interpretable document representation. One of the most high-level approaches is additively regularized topic models (ARTM). This method features better quality than other methods due to its flexibility and advanced regularization abilities. However, it is challenging to find an optimal learning strategy to create high-quality topics because a user needs to select the regularizers with their values and determine the order of application. Moreover, it may require many real runs (...) or model training which makes this task time consuming. At the current moment, there is a lack of research on parameter optimization for ARTM-based models. Our work proposes an approach that formalizes the learning strategy into a vector of parameters which can be solved with evolutionary approach. We also propose a surrogate-based modification which utilizes machine learning methods that makes the approach for parameters search time efficient. We investigate different optimization algorithms (evolutionary and Bayesian) and their modifications with surrogates in application to topic modelling optimization using the proposed learning strategy approach. An experimental study conducted on English and Russian datasets indicates that the proposed approaches are able to find high-quality parameter solutions for ARTM and substantially reduce the execution time of the search. (shrink)