If some external enforcement agency compels us to honor deals reached in the original position, then Harsanyi has shown that the outcome will be utilitarian. Under the same hypotheses, Rawls claims that the outcome will be egalitarian. This chapter confirms that Harsanyi is correct. It goes on to use the concept of an empathy equilibrium to predict the standard of interpersonal comparison needed to operate a utilitarian norm that will evolve in the medium run.

The attempt to explicate the intuitive notions of confirmation and inductive support through use of the formal calculus of probability received its canonical formulation in Carnap's The Logical Foundations of Probability. It is a central part of modern Bayesianism as developed recently, for instance, by Paul Horwich and John Earman. Carnap places much emphasis on the identification of confirmation with the notion of probabilistic favorable relevance. Notoriously, the notion of confirmation as probabilistic favorable relevance violates the intuitive transmittability condition that (...) if e confirms h and h' is part of the content of h then e confirms h'. This suggests that, pace Carnap, it cannot capture our intuitive notions of confirmation and inductive support. Without transmittability confirmation losses much of its intrinsic interest. If e, say a report of past observations, can confirm h, say a law-like generalization, without that confirmation being transmitted to those parts of h dealing with the as yet unobserved, then it is not clear why we should be interested in whether h is confirmed or not. The following paper rehearses these difficulties and then proposes a new probabilistic account of confirmation that does not violate the transmittability condition. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Coase's now famous paper, ‘The Problem of Social Cost’, argues that social harms caused by industry are best addressed through a policy which would be optimal in terms of market efficiency. I argue that this narrowly based policy represents a classic example of the failure of many welfare economists to consider adequately the ethical implications of their recommendations. I also indicate the manner in which Coase's recommendations conflict with intuitively well‐established ethical principles. I conclude that only an approach that (...) considers many more features than market efficiency can produce an optimal policy for dealing with the social costs of production. (shrink)

A great deal of research has now established that written texts embody interactions between writers and readers. A range of linguistic features have been identified as contributing to the writer's projection of a stance to the material referenced by the text, and, to a lesser extent, the strategies employed to presuppose the active role of an addressee. As yet, however, there is no overall typology of the resources writers employ to express their positions and connect with readers. Based on (...) an analysis of 240 published research articles from eight disciplines and insider informant interviews, I attempt to address this gap and consolidate much of my earlier work to offer a framework for analysing the linguistic resources of intersubjective positioning. Attending to both stance and engagement, the model provides a comprehensive and integrated way of examining the means by which interaction is achieved in academic argument and how the discoursal preferences of disciplinary communities construct both writers and readers. (shrink)

To apply reinforcement learning to difficult classes such as real-environment learning, we need to use a method robust to perceptual aliasing problem. The exploitation-oriented methods such as Profit Sharing can deal with the perceptual aliasing problem to a certain extent. However, when the agent needs to select different actions at the same sensory input, the learning efficiency worsens. To overcome the problem, several state partition methods using history information of state-action pairs are proposed. These methods try to convert a (...) POMDP environment into an MDP environment, and thus they are sometimes very useful. However, their computation cost is very high especially in large state spaces. In contrast, memory-less approaches try to escape from the aliased states by outputting actions stochastically. However, these methods output actions stochastically even in unaliased states, and thus the learning efficiency is bad. If we desire to guarantee the rationality in POMDPs, it is efficient to output actions stochastically only in the aliased states and to output one action deterministically in the other unaliased states. Hence, to discriminate between aliased states and unaliased states, the utilization of χ² -goodness-of-fit test is proposed by Miyazaki et al. They point out that, in aliased states, the distributions of the state transitions by random search and a particular policy are different. This difference doesn't occur owing to non-deterministic actions. Hence, if the agent can collect enough samples to implement the test, the agent can distinguish between aliased states and unaliased states well. However, such a test needs a large amount of data, and it's a problem how the agent collects samples without worsening learning efficiency. If the agent uses random search in the course of learning, the learning efficiency worsens especially in unaliased states. Therefore, in this research, we propose a new method called Extended On-line Profit Sharing with Judgement (EOPSwJ) to detect important incomplete perception, which doesn't need large computation cost and numerous samples. We use two criterions for detecting important incomplete perceptions to attain a task. One is the rate of transitions to each state, and the other is the deterministic rate of actions. We confirm the availability of EOPSwJ using two simulations. (shrink)

Many philosophy majors are shocked by the gap between the relative ease of lower-level philosophy courses and the difficulty of upper-division courses. This book serves as a necessary bridge to upper-level study in philosophy by offering rigorous but concise and accessible accounts of basic concepts and distinctions that are used throughout the discipline. It serves as a valuable advanced introduction to any undergraduate who is moving into upper-level courses in philosophy. While lower-level introductions to philosophy usually deal with popular (...) topics accessible to the general student in a piecemeal fashion, The Philosophy Major's Introduction to Philosophy offers coverage of important general philosophical concepts, tools, and devices that may be used for a long time to come in various philosophical areas. The volume is helpfully divided between a focus on the relation between language and the world in the first three chapters and coverage of mental content in the final two chapters, but builds a coherent narrative from start to finish. It also provides ample study questions and helpful sign-posts throughout, making it a must-have for any student attempting to engage fully with the problems and arguments in philosophy. Key Features Integrates topics from various areas of philosophy, such as philosophy of language, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and philosophical logic Provides descriptions of logico-mathematical tools necessary for philosophical studies, such as propositional logic, predicate logic, modal logic, set theory, mereology, and mathematical functions Makes connections with modern philosophy, including discussions of Descartes's skepticism and dualism, Locke's theory of personal identity, Hume's theory of causation, and Kant's synthetic a priori. Includes well-known entertaining puzzles and thought experiments such as the Ship of Theseus, the Statue and the Clay, a Brain in a Vat, and Twin Earth Lists helpful Exercise Questions and Discussion Questions at the end of each chapter and answers selected questions at the back of the book. (shrink)

Biological understanding of human cognitive functions is incomplete because of failure to understand the evolution of complex functions and organisms in general. Here, that failure is attributed to an aspect of the standard neo-Darwinian synthesis, namely commitment to evolution by natural selection of genetic programs in stable environments, a position that cannot easily explain the evolution of complexity. When we turn to consider more realistic, highly changeable environments, however, another possibility becomes clearer. An alternative to genetic programs—dubbed “biogrammars”—is proposed here (...) to deal with complex, changing environments and explain evolving complexity from pre-genetic life to human socio-cognitive functions. (shrink)

On the Genealogy of Morals contains the puzzling claim that the will to truth is the last expression of the ascetic ideal. Part I of this essay argues that Nietzsche’s claim is that our will to truth functions as a tool allowing us to take a passive stance to the world, leading us to repress and split off part of our nature. Part II deals with Nietzsche’s account of the sovereign individual and his related, novel, account of free will. Both (...) these accounts hinge on the notion of the self as an integrated whole. In contrasting the integrated sovereign individual, who has genuine free will, and we splintered moderns, Nietzsche aims to unsettle us with uncanny suggestion that we have no genuine selves. Part III shows that the invocation of the uncanny is a central strategy Nietzsche uses to bring home his disturbing message that we are strangers to ourselves. (shrink)

While the artistic traditions of the various countries of East, Southeast and South Asia display distinctive aesthetic features, this volume examines the qualities of each area, and seeks commonalities that define the aesthetics of a broader Asian civilization. Contributors includes specialists in philosophy, literature, art history, religion and the comparative study of cultures. Some of them are writing from within their own cultural traditions while others approach their subjects as outside observers. The book is divided into five sections, dealing with (...) Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Indian and Southeast Asian aesthetics. Individual chapters provide in-depth investigations of specific traditions, embracing both classical as well as modern aesthetic forms. The author suggest that Japanese culture is characterized by an openness to diverse cultural influences, Korean culture by "peninsularity," Chinese culture by parallels with the West, Indian culture by "rasa", and Southeast Asian culture by dilemmas of modernization. The volume as a whole integrates these studies, clarifying essential elements of each aesthetic culture and drawing on this material to characterize an Asian civilization that transcends individual countries and cultures. (shrink)

This chapter explores the consequence of taking Rawls' concerns about the strains of commitment to their logical extreme. If there is no external enforcement at all, so that all agreements must be self-policing, it is shown that deals reached in the original position will generate an egalitarian outcome, as Rawls would wish. The conclusions are broadly consistent with the class of laboratory results that psychologists refer to as “modern equity theory”. The concept of an empathy equilibrium is used to predict (...) the standard of interpersonal comparison needed to operate an egalitarian norm that will evolve in the medium run. The manner in which this standard should be expected to respond to need, effort, ability, and status is then explored. (shrink)

Business ethics is a body of thought and practice which is of increasing relevance to business and society. This reader analyses the relationship between ethics and behavior, assessing the importance of ethical considerations in all the key function of any business: strategy, marketing, human resources, technological development. It conludes that ethics can play a key role in helping a company successfully deal with the rapid technological and structural change of today's business climate.

An increasing amount of data is now available from public and private sources. Furthermore, the types, formats, and number of sources of data are also increasing. Techniques for extracting, storing, processing, and analyzing such data have been developed in the last few years for managing this bewildering variety based on a structure called a knowledge graph. Industry has devoted a great deal of effort to the development of knowledge graphs, and knowledge graphs are now critical to the functions of (...) intelligent virtual assistants such as Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant. The goal of the Ontology Summit 2020 was to understand not only what knowledge graphs are but also where they originated, why they are so popular, the current issues, and their future prospects. The summit sessions examined many examples of knowledge graphs and surveyed the relevant standards that exist and are in development for knowledge graphs. The purpose of this Communiqué is to summarize our understanding from the Summit in order to foster research and development of knowledge graphs. (shrink)

Pictures of normal brain activity during human thought can be worth a great deal. Electrophysiology and functional neuroimaging together allow both temporal and spatial dimensions of neurocognitive functions to be explored. Although these techniqueshave their limitations, the Cognitive Neuroscience approach is well-suited to pursuing questions about how words are perceived, understood, and remembered.

Critical Inquiry’s Forum on Mikhail Bakhtin [Critical Inquiry 10 : 225-319] is the latest contribution to the spectacular effort of interpretation and assimilation that is being applied to the work of this recently recovered critic. In such a situation, analysis proceeds with one eye on the work in question and the other on current debates in the field; in the case of Bakhtin, interpretation is at the same time an attempt to come to grips with challenges posed by recent literary (...) theory to certain axiomatic critical assumptions about intentionality, textuality, and the human subject. But the matter is also complicated by the fact that we are dealing here with a critic who was active in the USSR. This brings into play additional ideological pressures, generated by the cold war, which bear on the scholarly assimilation of his work.The debate on Bakhtin is made yet more difficult by the nature of his writing: immensely varied stylistically and topically but also—and more importantly, I believe—writing which strives for solutions it cannot quite articulate. It moves between alternative and contradictory formulations in a single essay and thus produces a set of concepts whose explanatory importance is matched by an unnerving tendency to slide from one formulation to the next with disturbing ease. Such ambiguities are not the sign of an open and skeptical mind, but neither are they mere inconsistencies which can be safely ignored. These internal contradictions dictate that argument over concepts like “dialogism” and “heteroglossia” cannot be settled by a definitive decision as to what they ‘really’ mean; instead, we must discuss how to manage these complexities and contradictions, and to what ends. Certain definite strategies of management are emerging, and the articles presented in the forum, while by no means reducible to a single position, share key lines of interpretive strategy that I think ought to be brought out into the open and contested. With the notable exception of Susan Stewart’s article [“Shouts on the Street: Bakhtin’s Anti-Linguistics,” pp. 265-81], the contributions share an ideological drift, the ultimate effect of which is to evade the most radical aspects of Bakhtin’s work in favor of an interpretation that renders him useful in the argument against the recent advances of post-structuralism and recent literary theory in general. Ken Hirschkop is a postgraduate student at Saint Antony’s College, Oxford University, working on a book about Mikhail Bakhtin. (shrink)

Suppose you are at the gym trying to see some naked beauties by peeping through a hole in the wall. A policeman happens by, he asks you what you are doing, and you honestly tell him. He then arrests you for voyeurism. Are you guilty? We don’t know yet because there is one more fact to be considered: while you honestly thought that a locker room was on the other side of the wall, it was actually a squash court. Are (...) you guilty now? -/- Probably. You might argue that your scopophiliac ambition was impossible to satisfy given that you were peeping into a squash court, not a locker room. But this “Impossibility Defense” would fail because most jurisdictions follow the very influential Model Penal Code (MPC), which says that what is important about attempt is not the likelihood of success but rather what was going on in your head. You tried to peer into a locker room with the intention of seeing some nudity; that is enough for culpability. The fact that you were mistaken about the location does not exonerate you. -/- But now suppose that the particular jurisdiction you are in does not criminalize voyeurism. While most people think that voyeurism is just plain wrong, if not disgusting, the legislature just never got around to drafting a statute against it. Are you guilty now? The answer is no. But you might just be out of luck and convicted anyway. -/- The reason for this strange conclusion is that most jurisdictions have followed the Model Penal Code in yet another respect: along with the MPC’s “subjectivist” emphasis on what is in your head, they have followed the MPC’s lead in abolishing the Impossibility Defense entirely. As a result, people who believe that they are breaking laws when they really are not may still be subject to arrest, prosecution, and conviction respectively by police, prosecutors, and judges/juries merely if all three parties regard your conduct — especially your trying to violate a law that you mistakenly believed in — as morally reprehensible. The best, if not only, defense against this charge is the Impossibility Defense, but — again — most jurisdictions have decided to make this defense unavailable to defendants. -/- Depriving eligible defendants of the Impossibility Defense is unjust. It violates one of the most basic principles of criminal justice: the legality principle. The legality principle says that there cannot be just punishment without a crime, and there should not be a crime without an explicit law designating it as such. So you cannot be charged with, and convicted of, attempted voyeurism if voyeurism, reprehensible as it may be, was not explicitly prohibited at the time that you made the attempt. -/- If we believe in the legality principle, then we must restore the Impossibility Defense. Without the latter, too many defendants are being — and will continue to be — punished for attempts to perform acts that were not themselves illegal but which various parties in the criminal justice system (except the legislature) thought should be illegal based on their extralegal, moral prejudices. -/- In addition to the MPC, the principal obstacle to resurrecting the Impossibility Defense is a good deal of conceptual confusion that permeates relevant cases and scholarship. Too many courts and academics have conflated “factual impossibility” with “legal impossibility” and have fallaciously inferred “hybrid impossibility” from “hybrid mistakes” (that is, legal mistakes that derive from factual mistakes). One of the principal goals of this Article, then, is to clear up all of this confusion. I will explicate in the simplest possible terms (a) the difference between factual impossibility and legal impossibility, (b) why only legal impossibility qualifies as exculpatory, and (c) why hybrid impossibility simply does not exist. (shrink)

What’s the deal with the really, really, weird-acting stuff that everything is made of? Can we ever take in our everyday world the same way again if we fully understand the nature of the quantum world? With Jeffrey Bub , Tim Maudlin , and Drew Arrowood.

What’s the deal with the really, really, weird-acting stuff that everything is made of? Can we ever take in our everyday world the same way again if we fully understand the nature of the quantum world? With Jeffrey Bub, Tim Maudlin, and Drew Arrowood.

Formalising deontic concepts, such as obligation, prohibition and permission, is normally carried out in a modal logic with a possible world semantics, in which some worlds are better than others. The main focus in these logics is on inferring logical consequences, for example inferring that the obligation O q is a logical consequence of the obligations O p and O. In this paper we propose a non-modal approach in which obligations are preferred ways of satisfying goals expressed in first-order logic. (...) To say that p is obligatory, but may be violated, resulting in a less than ideal situation s, means that the task is to satisfy the goal p ∨ s, and that models in which p is true are preferred to models in which s is true. Whereas, in modal logic, the preference relation between possible worlds is part of the semantics of the logic, in this non-modal approach, the preference relation between first-order models is external to the logic. Although our main focus is on satisfying goals, we also formulate a notion of logical consequence, which is comparable to the notion of logical consequence in modal deontic logic. In this formalisation, an obligation O p is a logical consequence of goals G, when p is true in all best models of G. We show how this non-modal approach to the treatment of deontic concepts deals with problems of contrary-to-duty obligations and normative conflicts, and argue that the approach is useful for many other applications, including abductive explanations, defeasible reasoning, combinatorial optimisation, and reactive systems of the production system variety. (shrink)

Advances in machine learning and the development of very large knowledge graphs have accompanied a proliferation of ontologies of many types and for many purposes. These ontologies are commonly developed independently, and as a result, it can be difficult to communicate about and between them. To address this difficulty of communication, ontologies and the communities they serve must agree on how their respective terminologies and formalizations relate to each other. The process of coming into accord and agreement is called “harmonization.” (...) The Ontology Summit 2021 examined the overall landscape of ontologies, the many kinds of ontology generation and harmonization, as well as the sustainability of ontologies. The Communiqué synthesizes and summarizes the findings of the summit as well as earlier summits on related issues. One of the major impediments to harmonization is the relatively poor quality of natural language definitions in many ontologies. The summit surveyed the state of the art in natural language definition development, based on lexicographic principles, as well as examples of ongoing projects that are explicitly dealing with harmonization and sustainability. (shrink)

A surprisingly large number of scholars believe that (a) we are blameworthy, and therefore punishable, only for what we have control over; (b) we have control only over our actions and intentions, not the consequences of our actions; and therefore (c) if two agents perform the very same action (e.g., attempting to kill) with the very same intentions, then they are equally blameworthy and deserving of equal punishment – even if only one of them succeeds in killing. This paper argues (...) against these “equivalence theorists” that harmful consequences do make a moral difference, that the harm produced by the killer’s attempt retroactively makes her action more blameworthy, and therefore deserving of more punishment, than the failed attempter’s attempt. The primary argument for this “non-equivalence theory” is an analogy with gambling. Just as a gambler makes a deal with the casino to allow metaphysical luck to retroactively determine the “profit status” of her bet, so too the attempted killer makes a deal with “the casino of morality” to allow metaphysical luck to retroactively determine the moral status of her attempt. She makes the “moral deal” that if her attempt succeeds, her attempt was more blameworthy than if her attempt does not succeed. And it is the greater blameworthiness of the killer’s attempt that justifies our intuition that the killer should be punished more harshly than the failed attempter. (shrink)

Coherentism in epistemology has long suffered from lack of formal and quantitative explication of the notion of coherence. One might hope that probabilistic accounts of coherence such as those proposed by Lewis, Shogenji, Olsson, Fitelson, and Bovens and Hartmann will finally help solve this problem. This paper shows, however, that those accounts have a serious common problem: the problem of belief individuation. The coherence degree that each of the accounts assigns to an information set (or the verdict it gives as (...) to whether the set is coherent tout court) depends on how beliefs (or propositions) that represent the set are individuated. Indeed, logically equivalent belief sets that represent the same information set can be given drastically different degrees of coherence. This feature clashes with our natural and reasonable expectation that the coherence degree of a belief set does not change unless the believer adds essentially new information to the set or drops old information from it; or, to put it simply, that the believer cannot raise or lower the degree of coherence by purely logical reasoning. None of the accounts in question can adequately deal with coherence once logical inferences get into the picture. Toward the end of the paper, another notion of coherence that takes into account not only the contents but also the origins (or sources) of the relevant beliefs is considered. It is argued that this notion of coherence is of dubious significance, and that it does not help solve the problem of belief individuation. (shrink)

The use of charged-particle radiation therapy is an increasingly important development in the treatment of cancer. One of the most pressing controversies about the use of this technology is whether randomised controlled trials are required before this form of treatment can be considered to be the treatment of choice for a wide range of indications. Equipoise is the key ethical concept in determining which research studies are justified. However, there is a good deal of disagreement about how this concept (...) is best understood and applied in the specific case of CPRT. This report is a position statement on these controversies that arises out of a workshop held at Wolfson College, Oxford in August 2011. The workshop brought together international leaders in the relevant fields , including proponents on both sides of the debate, in order to make significant progress on the ethical issues associated with CPRT research. This position statement provides an ethical platform for future research and should enable further work to be done in developing international coordinated programmes of research. (shrink)

Many preventive intervention studies with adolescents address high-risk behaviors such as drug and alcohol use, and unprotected sex. Randomized controlled trials (RCT) are the gold standard methodology used to test the effectiveness of these behavioral interventions. Interventions outside the rigidly described protocol are prohibited. However, there are ethical challenges to implementing inflexible intervention protocols, especially when the target population is young, experiences many stressful events, and lives in a resource-poor environment. Teens who are at high risk for substance use or (...) sexual risk behaviors tend to be at risk for other problems such as exposure to violence, sexual and physical abuse, depression, and homelessness. How should investigators deal with the psychological and social needs of teenagers in prevention programs in an ethically appropriate way and at the same time preserve the validity of RCT results? We have identified program characteristics, participant characteristics, interaction with parents, and problems with adolescents not in the study as sources of ethical dilemmas in RCT with at-risk adolescents. As a result of our experience, we recommend that every behavioral intervention study develop an ethics protocol, which should include rules for providing help to participants, has contact information for experts to provide guidance, and an emergency procedure for dealing with life threatening situations. In addition, studies should have a resource manual, train research staff in these ethical issues, and work with a data safety and monitoring board or ethics committee. (shrink)

Case law retrieval is the task of locating truly relevant legal cases given an input query case. Unlike information retrieval for general texts, this task is more complex with two phases (legal case retrieval and legal case entailment) and much harder due to a number of reasons. First, both the query and candidate cases are long documents consisting of several paragraphs. This makes it difficult to model with representation learning that usually has restriction on input length. Second, the concept of (...) relevancy in this domain is defined based on the legal relation that goes beyond the lexical or topical relevance. This is a real challenge because normal text matching will not work. Third, building a large and accurate legal case dataset requires a lot of effort and expertise. This is obviously an obstacle to creating enough data for training deep retrieval models. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called supporting model that can deal with both phases. The underlying idea is the case–case supporting relation and the paragraph–paragraph as well as the decision-paragraph matching strategy. In addition, we propose a method to automatically create a large weak-labeling dataset to overcome the lack of data. The experiments showed that our solution has achieved the state-of-the-art results for both case retrieval and case entailment phases. (shrink)

Education is essential to life, and the epidemic affected everything. Parents want to get their kids the most important teaching. However, since COVID-19 has affected schools and other institutions, providing education has become the most significant issue. Online learning pedagogy uses technology to provide high-quality learning environments for student-centered learning. Further, this study explores the experiences and challenges faced by Filipino tertiary students regarding the lack of gadgets amidst online learning. Employing the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, the findings of this study (...) were: Some college students still have difficulty with online learning. Attending online classes is difficult, especially for students with limited resources. Smartphones, other gadgets, and internet connections play a significant role in online classrooms because they are the ones that students utilize while learning online, which is essential for successful participation in online higher education as well as for solving a variety of other difficulties in the new normal. Further, College students face similar health challenges. Having an online learning setup is not just about students' struggles with learning resources but also about their health issues. When our respondents used their smartphones for an extended period, they reported eye aches and blurred vision. They also said that some of their body parts, such as their legs and back, are aching, and feel pressured because they tend to overthink things in their surroundings, which causes them incredible difficulty in performing their best in attending online classes. Even though college students continue to suffer from a lack of learning resources during online sessions, they do their best to manage their needs and the scarcity of learning resources. Students have unique coping methods for dealing with difficulties in online classes. (shrink)

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, preschool teachers must quickly adjust to online education. During COVID-19, teachers have been forced to embrace technology. This study investigates the lived experiences and challenges of preschool teachers. Employing the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, the findings of this study were: It was found that managing parent expectations and dealing with challenging parent behavior were among the sources of stress for preschool teachers. This fear of being judged or criticized by parents could influence their teaching practices and (...) interactions with students, leading to feelings of anxiety or insecurity. Further, preschool teachers faced challenges in implementing blended learning, including technological issues, a lack of support and resources, and difficulties creating engaging online content. However, as teachers gained more experience and knowledge about effectively using online tools and technologies for instruction, these challenges became more manageable. Also limited or unreliable internet connectivity was also a significant challenge faced by teachers and students in the transition to online learning. The digital divide and various technical, bandwidth, and security concerns exacerbated it. Internet connection was a major frustration for her during online classes as it affected her ability to communicate and teach her students effectively. Moreover, preschool teachers have had to adapt to the challenges of blended learning by implementing various strategies and making preparations to guide and support their students effectively. These strategies have included using games and other engaging activities to keep students motivated and engaged, developing online lesson plans, and using online teaching platforms and tools. However, the transition to blended learning has also been a source of stress for preschool teachers. They have had to manage additional workloads and responsibilities and deal with challenges such as supporting students with varying technology access and skills. (shrink)

In the 21st century, the screen - the Internet screen, the television screen, the video screen and all sorts of combinations thereof - will be booming in our visual and infotechno culture. Screen-based art, already a prominent and topical part of visual culture in the 1990s, will expand even more. In this volume, digital art - the new media - as well as its connectedness to cinema will be the subject of investigation. The starting point is a two-day symposium organized (...) by the Netherlands Media Art Institute Montevideo/TBA, in collaboration with the _L&B _ series and the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis. Issues which emerged during the course of investigation deal with questions such as: How could screen-based art be distinguished from other art forms? Could screen-based art theoretically be understood in one definite model or should one search for various possibilities and/or models? Could screen-based art be canonized? What are the physical and theoretical forms of representation for screen-based art? What are the idiosyncratic concepts geared towards screen-based art? This volume includes various arguments, positions, and statements by artists, curators, philosophers, and theorists. The participants are Marie-Luise Angerer, Annette W. Balkema, René Beekman, Raymond Bellour, Peter Bogers, Joost Bolten, Noël Carroll, Sean Cubitt, Cãlin Dan, Chris Dercon, Honoré d'O, Anne-Marie Duquet, Ken Feingold, Ursula Frohne, hARTware curators, Heiner Holtappels, Aernout Mik, Patricia Pisters, Nicolaus Schafhausen, Jeffrey Shaw, Peter Sloterdijk, Ed S. Tan, Barbara Visser and Siegfried Zielinski. (shrink)

"He completed the assignment in two phases: The photographs made during the first phase capture the natural ruggedness of the terrain and establish its relationship to the developed neighboring enclaves. Those made during the second phase not only record the actual construction process but also reveal Deal's personal perspective on the qualities of light and the creation of form. Represented in this book as a selection from the resulting portfolio, Topos, a Greek word meaning place, site, position, and occasion (...) - Deal's artistic legacy to the Gerry Center."--BOOK JACKET. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Overcoming Greed:Buddhists and Christians in Consumerist SocietyPaul F. KnitterAs I understand my assignment, I don't find it an easy one. I've been instructed to carry on a lopsided dialogue. Generally, what generates productive dialogue is a proper balance of learning and questioning. My assigned job in this exchange is to question more than learn—to offer some Christian queries about how Buddhists think we can overcome greed and find a (...) path out of the consumerist jungle that surrounds us. Actually, I'd prefer it the other way around, for I'm convinced that we Christians have some very important, if not absolutely vital, things to learn from Buddhists in our own efforts to deal with the jungle. And I will mention some of them. But, following instructions, my main focus in what follows will be on areas where I suspect that Buddhists can learn something, maybe something very helpful, in our shared efforts to deal with greed and the havoc it is working on people and planet.I need to specify my Christian voice in this conversation—or, as they say, where I'm coming from within the many and diverse neighborhoods that make up the Christian community. I'll be reflecting and speaking out of my knowledge of and experience with Christian liberation theology, especially as it has been born, developed, and taken new shapes among the poor and suffering of Latin America. The voices and concerns you will hear in my own remarks are originally those of Christian thinkers and activists such as Jon Sobrino, Gustavo Gutiérrez, Leonardo Boff.In order to bring some order into the swarm of insights and questions that these extremely rich presentations have stirred up in me, I'll gather my comments around two broad topics.The Inner and the Outer: Enlightenment and the Reign of GodMy first general area of conversation is a familiar one not just for the Buddhist-Christian conversation but also for all activists who call themselves religious: the need for, but the difficulty of, holding together the "inner and the outer"—action and [End Page 65] contemplation, personal and social transformation, or what I will term Buddha's enlightenment and Jesus' vision of the Reign of God.What Christian Liberation Theologians Need to Hear from BuddhistsFirst, let me simply list, and hold back from delving into, some crucial lessons that we Christians not only can but drastically need to learn.First, what Jesus and his followers call the Reign of God will be built on sand unless it is grounded in the personal, inner conversion of those who are trying to build it. The church will be only a empty building—or worse, a den of thieves—if its members, and that includes its leaders, are not transformed by the Spirit. Or, in Judith Simmer-Brown's words, "No fundamental transformation can take place anywhere without the joining of inner change and outer change" (emphasis mine). Or, in Ken Barnhill's words (quoted by Brown), "Social work entails inner work.... social change and inner change are inseparable." Or, in the powerful and widely quoted admonition of Thich Nhat Hanh: We have to be peace if we want to make peace. Christians know this, and they talk about it. But in my own life and in what I see in my church, how often we forget it in our efforts to get things done, in our concern for the institution, in our determination to bring about political change.Second, I both cringed and nodded approvingly when I read about Judith Simmer-Brown speaking about "idiot compassion." In opposing wealthy landowners in El Salvador, or in a business-controlled city council in Cincinnati, how often I have felt but perhaps not identified in myself and in my fellow Christian activists "...unskillful acts...the impulsive response based on insufficient knowledge [that] can quickly become ineffective, causing personal burnout." Such idiocy, grounded in goodwill, derives, again, from an insufficient balancing of the inner and the outer.Third, and more sharply focused on the suffering caused by greed, Judith offers a hope, or deep belief, that is often not clearly present among liberation theologians since... (shrink)

This paper shows that the inhabitation problem in the lambda calculus with negation, product, polymorphic, and existential types is decidable, where the inhabitation problem asks whether there exists some term that belongs to a given type. In order to do that, this paper proves the decidability of the provability in the logical system defined from the second-order natural deduction by removing implication and disjunction. This is proved by showing the quantifier elimination theorem and reducing the problem to the provability in (...) propositional logic. The magic formulas are used for quantifier elimination such that they replace quantifiers. As a byproduct, this paper also shows the second-order witness theorem which states that a quantifier followed by negation can be replaced by a witness obtained only from the formula. As a corollary of the main results, this paper also shows Glivenko’s theorem, Double Negation Shift, and conservativity for antecedent-empty sequents between the logical system and its classical version. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:April 3, 2010 (11:17 am) C:\Users\Milt\Desktop\backup copy of Ken's G\WPData\TYPE2902\russell 29,2 050 red.wpd 1 Gabbay and Woods, eds., The Rise of Modern Logic from Leibniz to Frege, Vol. 3 of the Handbook of the History of Logic (Amsterdam, etc.: North-Holland, 2004). russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies n.s. 29 (winter 2009–10): 167–90 The Bertrand Russell Research Centre, McMaster U. issn 0036-01631; online 1913-8032 eviews BERTRAND RUSSELL IN RECENT (...) BOOKS ON LOGIC HISTORY Irving Anellis Peirce Edition / Indiana U.–Purdue U. Indianapolis, in 46202–5157, usa [email protected] Dov M. Gabbay and John Woods, eds. Logic from Russell to Church. Vol. 5 of The Handbook of the History of Logic. Amsterdam, etc.: North-Holland, 2009. Pp. xii + 1056. us$260; £157.99; ¤185.95. Leila Haaparanta, ed. The Development of Modern Logic. Oxford and New York: Oxford U. P., 2009. Pp. x + 904. us$150.00. The essay “Bertrand Russell’s Logic” by Andrew D. Irvine in Volume 5 of the Handbook of the History of Logic is one of the shortest in the volume (pp. 1–28). But something of Russell pervades many of the other essays as well, as we might expect given the centrality that Principia Mathematica has occupied in the historiography of logic through much of the twentieth century. This is especially evident in the lengthiest of the essays, Andrea Cantini’s “Paradoxes, Self-reference and Truth in the 20th Century” (pp. 875–1013), and more than tangentially in Dale Jacquette’s “Logic for Meinongian Object Theory Semantics” (pp. 29–76) and Michael Potter’s “The Logic of the Tractatusz” (pp. 255–304). In their preface, the editors of the Handbook explain (p. vii) the rationale for treating Frege and Russell in separate volumes.1 One reason is that it was a matter of simple conveniencez—zto keep the volume covering logic from Leibniz to Frege of manageable size. The other is historical: while admitting that Frege and Russell shared important goals and the philosophical position of logicism, it is noted that Frege’s most important work in logic and foundations was carried out prior to his learning of Russell’s paradox, whereas the entire corpus of Russell’s work, Principiaz included, was designed to a considerable extent in eTorts to deal with the paradox, as was much of the work in logic, set theory, and philosophy of logic that came as a consequence of the discovery of that paradox. Gabbay April 3, 2010 (11:17 am) C:\Users\Milt\Desktop\backup copy of Ken's G\WPData\TYPE2902\russell 29,2 050 red.wpd 168 Reviews and Woods also make explicit the philosophical diTerences between Frege and Russell regarding the epistemological status of axioms as one of the signiWcant diTerences between these two. More particularly, the editors assert (p. viii) that, in the very brief period between publication of the second volume of Frege’s Grundgesetze (1903) and Russell’s Principles of Mathematics (1903), there was a pronounced shift initiated in the goals of mathematical logic, away from naïve apriority of axiom systems, towards study of the limits and properties of formal systems.Thecontributors to these metalogical concerns, Herbrand, Hilbert, and Gödel, among others, are the subject of the bulk of the essays included in Volume 5 of the Handbook. The task that Irvine undertakes is initiated by the eTort to understand the unity of Russell’s technical body of work in mathematics, logic, metaphysics, and epistemology. Thus the discrepancy between the neo-Hegelian concept of relations, inherited from Bradley, with certain types of relationsz—zlogical, spatial, temporal, for examplez—zwith the mathematical understanding of relations, is given as the ground for Russell’s abandonment of idealism in favour of realism (pp. 4–5). For example, there is nothing inherent in two relata, say Abelard and Héloise, which contributes to the relation of love between the pair; rather, its root is found in the mental states of one or the other of the lovers, so that the relation itself is not an intrinsic property of one of the pair. Likewise, Russell reaches this position... (shrink)

In this paper we describe the Curry-Howard-De Bruijn isomorphism between Higher Order Many Sorted Intuitionistic Predicate Logic PREDω and the type system λPREDω, which can be considered a subsystem of the Calculus of Constructions. The type system is presented using the concept of a Pure Type System, which is a very elegant framework for describing type systems. We show in great detail how formulae and proof trees of the logic relate to types and terms of the type system, respectively. Finally, (...) we discuss some consequences of the isomorphism with respect to the relation between the systems discussed in this paper. (shrink)

Offers a vivid, nuanced, and chronological account of Buddhistreligion in Japan -- from its emergence in the sixth centuryright through to the present day.

This chapter contains sections titled: Serial Killers, Real and Imagined Dexter Gacy Are Serial Killers Morally Responsible? Moral Responsibility: Emotions and Cognitive Frames.

Late Medieval and Early Modern Fight Books offers insights into the cultural and historical transmission and practices of martial arts, based on the corpus of the Fight Books (Fechtbücher) in 14th- to 17th-century Europe. The first part of the book deals with methodological and specific issues for the studies of this emerging interdisciplinary field of research. The second section offers an overview of the corpus based on geographical areas. The final part offers some relevant case studies. This is the first (...) book proposing a comprehensive state of research and an overview of Historical European Martial Arts Studies. One of its major strengths lies in its association of interdisciplinary scholars with practitioners of martial arts. Contributors are Sydney Anglo, Matthias Johannes Bauer, Eric Burkart, Marco Cavina, Franck Cinato, John Clements, Timothy Dawson, Olivier Dupuis, Bert Gevaert, Dierk Hagedorn, Daniel Jaquet, Rachel E. Kellet, Jens Peter Kleinau, Ken Mondschein, Reinier van Noort, B. Ann Tlusty, Manuel Valle Ortiz, Karin Verelst, and Paul Wagner. (shrink)

Competitive quiz shows, and Jeopardy! in particular, occupy a unique place among TV game shows. The most successful Jeopardy! contestants—Ken Jennings, Brad Rutter, Frank Sparenberg, and so on—have appeared on late night talk shows, been given book contracts, and been interviewed by major newspapers. This sort of treatment is substantially different than, say, the treatment that the winners of The Price is Right or Deal or No Deal are afforded. The distinctive status of quiz shows is evidenced in (...) other ways as well; for instance, consider the widespread public outrage that accompanied the discovery of fixed quiz shows in the 1950s of the fact that, when IBM wanted to find a task to test the latest developments of artificial intelligence, they chose the game of Jeopardy. In this essay, I’ll take a look at Jeopardy! as an exemplar of a certain sort of game, and will suggest that part of what gives Jeopardy! its distinctive status is that it is a qualitatively good game—that is, it is a game that that fulfills just those functions a game is supposed to fulfill. I’ll begin by showing how Jeopardy! meets Bernard Suits’ (1967, 1988, 2005) definition of games, according to which games are characterized as activities that have certain sorts of rules and in which participants are required to have the right attitude toward these rules. Among other things, I’ll talk about the role played by some of Jeopardy’s distinctive rules (“remember to phrase your answer in the form of a question”) and about the possible differences a monetary reward makes to game players’ attitudes. I’ll then go on to talk about what distinguishes Jeopardy! from other, superficially similar sorts of games. I’ll concentrate on three factors in particular: (1) the fact that the skills required by Jeopardy! have value outside of the game, (2) the fact that observers in Jeopardy! can “play along” with the contestants on TV, and (3) the fact that success in the game is determined, to a very great extent, by the skills of the participant and not by other facts (such as luck). To close, I’ll talk more generally about the distinction between good games and not-so-good games, and will discuss why it is that good games are worth taking seriously. In this section, I’ll discuss some recent work on the value of games and sports, and will make some suggestions about how these accounts might be tailored to account for the specific virtues of a game like Jeopardy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Shōbōgenzō: Yui Butsu yo Butsu [and] ShōjiJoan StambaughShōbōgenzō: Yui Butsu yo Butsu [and] Shōji = [parallel French title:] Shōbōgenzō :Seul Bouddha connaît Bouddha [and] Vie-mort: Extrait de Shōbōgenzō de Dōgen Zenji[,] Maître Zen de XIIièème Sieècle = [parallel English title:] Shōbōgenzō: Only Buddha Knows Buddha [and] Life-death: Extract from Shōbōgenzō by Dōgen Zenji[,] XIIth Century Zen Master. By Dōgen. Traduit du japonais et annoté par Eido Shimano Rō (...) shi et Charles Vacher = Translated from Japanese and annotated by Eido Shimano Rō shi and Charles Vacher [trilingual edition]. La Versanne, France: Encre Marine, 1999. Pp. 152.Eidō Shimano Rōshi and Charles Vacher have completed their second effort at translating selections from Dōgen's Shōbōgenzō into English and French. Their first effort was a translation of Uji (Being-time), an early work. Now later works follow: Yui Butsu yo Butsu (Only Buddha knows Buddha) and Shōji (Life-death).The most striking feature of the translation here of the "Yui Butsu yo Butsu" fascicle is a more meaningful rendering of the title. Whereas most other translations read "Only Buddha and Buddha"—which is at best enigmatic, if not [End Page 320] unintelligible—this translation has "Only Buddha knows Buddha," a distinct improvement. The fascicle deals with the ability to know and recognize other beings of the same kind: fish knowing the fishes' heart, birds finding the birds' trail. Four-legged animals have no inkling of the birds' trail; it lies outside their ken. Similarly, an ordinary person, lacking the Buddha-eye, cannot recognize a buddha, able to see only the outside surface, only attributes and not the traces or trails. "Trace" or "trail" is intended here in the sense not of anything left over or behind—a kind of defilement—but rather of an indicator of where a buddha has gone.The phrase immediately following "Only Buddha knows Buddha" and repeated throughout the fascicle much like a Leitmotif reads: naino gūjin, complete combustion. These words are not to be found in the Sanskrit "original" text of the Lotus Sūtra, but were formulated by Kumārajīva, the translator of the Lotus Sūtra into Chinese. He was thus inspired to capture the gist of the Suō tra: only Buddha knows Buddha: complete combustion. With these words the nonduality of the working and presencing of Buddha with that of the entire universe is given expression.It is the particular merit of this translation to formulate "Only Buddha knows Buddha," in contrast to other translations that have a nearly meaningless "Only Buddha and Buddha," and to recapture Kumārajīva's brilliant interpretive words "complete combustion." The two are inseparable. When only Buddha knows Buddha, complete combustion, that is, penetration and presencing, takes place, the nonduality of samsāra and nirvāna.To say that searching for the true self is the unavoidable fate of human beings (p. 79) sounds a bit deterministic. It would perhaps be preferable to say that it is the wish or desire of all human beings.Shōji (life-death) has been used in China and Japan to translate samsāra, the repeated cycles of birth and death. The brief fascicle "Shōji" emphasizes the non-duality of samsāra and Buddha (nirvāna). Buddha or awakening is to be found in samsāra, nowhere else. The commonsense attitude is that life turns into—becomes—death. In contrast, Doōgen states that life is a temporary condition with its before and after. Thus, life is beginningless. Death is a temporary condition with its before and after. Thus, death is deathless. If we crave life and abhor death, we lose the very life of the Buddha that is to be found nowhere else than in the midst of the whole of birth-life-death.The fascicle concludes with the admonition to remain unattached, yet to have compassion for all beings.This process of birth-life-death is not something that begins at physical birth and terminates with physical death, but is ongoing from moment to moment. Thus... (shrink)