In this book, Leon ter Schure demonstrates the value of Bergson's philosophy of life for a more expansive understanding of history. Bergson is known for his explorations of time as duration, yet in his writings rarely referred to history. At the same time, historians and philosophers of history have not significantly incorporated Bergson's ideas about the nature of time into their work. Modernity has brought change at an ever-accelerating rate, and one of the results of this has been (...) a tendency toward presentism. Only the here and now matters, as past and future have been absorbed by the "omnipresent present" of the digital age. Rather than isolating human history from the history of the natural world, Bergsonism situates history within the broader framework of the evolution of life and allows us to imagine the past instead as a living resource for the invention of the future. This not only reveals a unique sense of history's creative potential, it also allows for a rethinking of important topics in the study of history, such as historical time, the survival of the past, and historical progress. (shrink)

O terceiro volume da biografia política de Álvaro Cunhal por Pacheco Pereira («O pri­sioneiro») centra-se no período 1949-1960, o do encarceramento mais longo a que Cunhal es­teve sujeito e do qual só saiu numa das mais céleres fugas prisionais da nossa história, a de Pe­niche. Curiosamente, os elogios desmedidos de que foram objecto os dois volumes anteriores começam agora a justificar-se, apesar de a recepção a este volume ter sido bem mais discreta, ainda que como de costume unanimista (ne...

S pamfletom Avtoemancipacija! (1882), temeljnim besedilom zgodnjega judovskega nacionalizma, je Leon Pinsker po nekaterih argumentih uveljavil sionizem kot nemško govoreče in pišoče gibanje. Kmalu po izidu pamfleta je priznani jidiš pisatelj Šolem Jankev Abramovič objavil njegov prevod v jidiš (1884). V Abramovičevi različici so nemški oziroma zahodnoevropski politični in kulturni koncepti ter besednjak prirejeni vzhodnoevropskemu, judovskemu, jidiš govorečemu okolju, kar vključuje spremembe v besedišču, retoričnih strategijah in kulturnih referencah. Abramovič je pamflet predelal v skladu s svojim razmislekom o stiski (...) Judov v Ruskem imperiju in njeni mogoči nacionalistični rešitvi, s čimer se je ukvarjal tudi v svojih sočasnih romanih. V članku primerjam, kako so v obeh besedilih izraženi nekateri družbenopolitični koncepti, da bi ugotovil, ali Abramovič s svojo ideološko skepso prefinjeno priredi tudi vsebino nacionalistične teze. (shrink)

BackgroundThere is increasing evidence that research misbehaviour is common, especially the minor forms. Previous studies on research misbehaviour primarily focused on biomedical and social sciences, and evidence from natural sciences and humanities is scarce. We investigated what academic researchers in Amsterdam perceived to be detrimental research misbehaviours in their respective disciplinary fields.MethodsWe used an explanatory sequential mixed methods design. First, survey participants from four disciplinary fields rated perceived frequency and impact of research misbehaviours from a list of 60. We then (...) combined these into a top five ranking of most detrimental research misbehaviours at the aggregate level, stratified by disciplinary field. Second, in focus group interviews, participants from each academic rank and disciplinary field were asked to reflect on the most relevant research misbehaviours for their disciplinary field. We used participative ranking methodology inducing participants to obtain consensus on which research misbehaviours are most detrimental.ResultsIn total, 1080 researchers completed the survey (response rate: 15%) and 61 participated in the focus groups (3 three to 8 eight researchers per group). Insufficient supervision consistently ranked highest in the survey regardless of disciplinary field and the focus groups confirmed this. Important themes in the focus groups were insufficient supervision, sloppy science, and sloppy peer review. Biomedical researchers and social science researchers were primarily concerned with sloppy science and insufficient supervision. Natural sciences and humanities researchers discussed sloppy reviewing and theft of ideas by reviewers, a form of plagiarism. Focus group participants further provided examples of particular research misbehaviours they were confronted with and how these impacted their work as a researcher.ConclusionWe found insufficient supervision and various forms of sloppy science to score highly on aggregate detrimental impact throughout all disciplinary fields. Researchers from the natural sciences and humanities also perceived nepotism to be of major impact on the aggregate level. The natural sciences regarded fabrication of data of major impact as well. The focus group interviews helped to understand how researchers interpreted ‘insufficient supervision’. Besides, the focus group participants added insight into sloppy science in practice. Researchers from the natural sciences and humanities added new research misbehaviours concerning their disciplinary fields to the list, such as the stealing of ideas before publication. This improves our understanding of research misbehaviour beyond the social and biomedical fields. (shrink)

Parte de la dificultad presentada a la hora de establecer la relación entre filosofia y filología en la teoría hermenéutica viquiana surge del hecho de que Vico vaciló entre dos formas de entender esa relación, las cuales dieron lugar a dos diferentes concepciones de la relación entre hermenéutica y metafísica: entre una hermenéutica metafísica (predominante en SNP) y una metafísica hermenéutica (predominante en SNS). La primera, conforme al deseo viquiano de elaborar un "arte diagnóstica", hace dependiente a la interpretación de (...) la metafísica y hoy es inviable. La segunda comporta una relación mucho más compleja entre interpretación y metafísica y ofrece un método de investigación hermenéutica de considerable relevancia para la filosofía actual. (shrink)

I. Confronted with the acuteness of the socio-economic problems the two major labour organizations have in 1976 strengthened their «Common Trade Unions' Front» in view of their negotiations with employers and with the government, to which the trade unions have submitted a common platform.The common front, that has its antecedents on the local, regional and professional level has never been and never will be of a permanent nature, some sort of organic unit. Each confederation maintains its own identity and the (...) front is meant to be re-animated according to the circumstances.II. From the employers' side representatives of employers' organizations have «as a personal point of view» and, no doubt, as a preliminary approach, launched the idea that a new and very comprehensive «social pact» should be negotiated. The socialist trade unions clearly tend to reject this idea, since it maywell lead to a further integration in the capitalist system, whereas the christiandemocratic union seems to be rather in favour of such a pact.In the present state of affairs the probability that it be realized is rather low indeed. (shrink)

There has been for some years a feeling in the philosophical world in this country that we have had enough of the unproductive working of the treadmill of linguistics and of the new logic and that Metaphysics is at least not criminal, and even justifiable; notable justifications of Metaphysics are Professor Emmet's The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking and Professor Barnes” The Philosophical Predicament . But what is Metaphysics about? That, it seems to me, is a question which has to be (...) looked into far more carefully than it has been, before we can think of justifying Metaphysics . “About the Whole” would appear to be the answer which no would-be metaphysician can avoid, however frightened he may be of being sent into a concentration camp by his Ayerian colleagues for giving it. What is this Whole and how is it to be got? Judging at least by most nineteenth-century metaphysics, it would seem that the Whole is some kind of totality , comparable, save in respect of comprehensiveness, to the totality say which Physics deals with, and that it is got by reflecting on the nature of any knowing and/or on all the branches of knowledge and their relations to each other; Metaphysics, we should conclude, is a synthesis or construct both crowning, and confirmed by, knowledge. (shrink)

This article gives an epistemological analysis of the reflection process by means of which you can come to know the consistency of a mathematical theory that you already accept. It is argued that this process can result in warranted belief in new mathematical principles without justifying them.

We combine two recent probabilistic approaches to natural language understanding, exploring the formal pragmatics of communication on a noisy channel. We first extend a model of rational communication between a speaker and listener, to allow for the possibility that messages are corrupted by noise. In this model, common knowledge of a noisy channel leads to the use and correct understanding of sentence fragments. A further extension of the model, which allows the speaker to intentionally reduce the noise rate on a (...) word, is used to model prosodic emphasis. We show that the model derives several well-known changes in meaning associated with prosodic emphasis. Our results show that nominal amounts of actual noise can be leveraged for communicative purposes. (shrink)

We investigate and classify the notion of final derivability of two basic inconsistency-adaptive logics. Specifically, the maximal complexity of the set of final consequences of decidable sets of premises formulated in the language of propositional logic is described. Our results show that taking the consequences of a decidable propositional theory is a complicated operation. The set of final consequences according to either the Reliability Calculus or the Minimal Abnormality Calculus of a decidable propositional premise set is in general undecidable, and (...) can be -complete. These classifications are exact. For first order theories even finite sets of premises can generate such consequence sets in either calculus. (shrink)

_Manual of Regulation-Focused Psychotherapy for Children with Externalizing Behaviors: A Psychodynamic Approach_ offers a new, short term psychotherapeutic approach to working dynamically with children who suffer from irritability, oppositional defiance and disruptiveness. _RFP-C_ enables clinicians to help by addressing and detailing how the child’s externalizing behaviors have meaning which they can convey to the child. Using clinical examples throughout, Hoffman, Rice and Prout demonstrate that in many dysregulated children, _RFP-C_ can: Achieve symptomatic improvement and developmental maturation as a result of (...) gains in the ability to tolerate and metabolize painful emotions, by addressing the crucial underlying emotional component. Diminish the child’s use of aggression as the main coping device by allowing painful emotions to be mastered more effectively. Help to systematically address avoidance mechanisms, talking to the child about how their disruptive behavior helps them avoid painful emotions. Facilitate development of an awareness that painful emotions do not have to be so vigorously warded off, allowing the child to reach this implicit awareness within the relationship with the clinician, which can then be expanded to life situations at home and at school. This handbook is the first to provide a manualized, short-term dynamic approach to the externalizing behaviors of childhood, offering organizing framework and detailed descriptions of the processes involved in _RFP-C_. Supplying clinicians with a systematic individual psychotherapy as an alternative or complement to PMT, CBT and psychotropic medication, it also shifts focus away from simply helping parents manage their children’s misbehaviors. Significantly, the approach shows that clinical work with these children is compatible with understanding the children’s brain functioning, and posits that contemporary affect-oriented conceptualizations of defense mechanisms are theoretically similar to the neuroscience construct of implicit emotion regulation, promoting an interface between psychodynamics and contemporary academic psychiatry and psychology. Manual of Regulation-Focused Psychotherapy for Children with Externalizing Behaviors: A Psychodynamic Approach is a comprehensive tool capable of application at all levels of professional training, offering a new approach for psychoanalysts, child and adolescent counselors, psychotherapists and mental health clinicians in fields including social work, psychology and psychiatry. (shrink)

Though many would prefer to have nothing to do with teleological explanations, it is evident that the writings of biologists and social scientists abound with them, and it is worth paying attention to the conditions under which they may be made responsibly. It emerges that responsible teleological statements would have to be made about instances of recurrent structures having specifiable characteristics, a situation which is patently the case for biology but still unsettled in, say, anthropology. In the final part of (...) the paper it is shown that satisfying this condition provides a basis for formulating general laws of the more orthodox kind. (shrink)

This article is concerned with the role of moral principles, specifically the Fundamental Principles of Olympism, in the judgements of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) on matters of performance enhancement. The article begins with two pairs of distinctions, that between moral judgements and morally-laden judgements, and that between the moral judgement of cases and the ethical environment of a society. The article is concerned with working through the implications of those distinctions in the context of the IOC's judgements on performance (...) enhancement. The article favours a particularist account of the moral judgement of cases, while preserving a place for meaningful general moral statements as contributions to the ethical environment of a society, but not as general action-guiding statements or principles that can be applied to judgements in specific cases. The article illustrates the implications of this conclusion in the context of the decision-making of the IOC on performance enhancement (the case of Alain Baxter is considered). It is argued that there is a danger of the decision-making of the IOC suffering deep confusion over the difference between general and particular statements, the nature of reasons and the logic of what it is to apply a general action-guiding statement. (shrink)

This article sets forth a compositional model of ideology by drawing on the tradition of historical materialism and further developing its insights into the aesthetic composition of reality. It demonstrates how ideology is not simply a set of false beliefs but is rather the process by which social agents are composed over time in every dimension of their existence, including their thoughts, practices, perceptions, representations, values, affects, desires, and unconscious drives. By working through a number of diverse debates and authors—ranging (...) from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to Louis Althusser, Eduardo Galeano, Rosaura Sánchez, and Paulo Freire—it thereby elucidates how ideology is best understood as an aesthetic process that includes aspect of sense and sense-making, and that therefore requires a collective, cultural revolution as its antidote. (shrink)

The expressive power of logic is believed to be able to model most of the fundamental aspects of information retrieval. However, it is also understood that classical logic is ineffective for handling partiality and uncertainty in IR. Applying non-classical logics such as the AGM belief revision logic and the possibilistic logic to adaptive information retrieval is appealing since they provide a powerful and rigorous framework to model partiality and uncertainty inherent in any IR processes. The maxi-adjustment method, which is an (...) effective computational apparatus of the AGM paradigm, is applied to develop the learning components of the adaptive information agents. Essentially, maxi-adjustment allows the partial representation K of a user's information needs N to be refined gradually based on the user's relevance feedback t. Generally speaking, learning in adaptive information agents is characterised by the AGM belief revision Kt*. On the other hand, possibilistic logic supports a gradated assessment of the uncertainty arising from matching K with the imperfect characterisation d of an information object D. Information matching in adaptive information agents is underpinned by K ƕ d, where ƕ is the possibilistic inference relation. This paper illustrates how maxi-adjustment and possibilistic deduction can be applied to develop the adaptive information agents. Their impact on the agents learning autonomy and explanatory power is also discussed. (shrink)

This paper outlines a framework for the abstract investigation of the concept of canonicity of names and of naming systems. Degrees of canonicity of names and of naming systems are distinguished. The structure of the degrees is investigated, and a notion of relative canonicity is defined. The notions of canonicity are formally expressed within a Carnapian system of second-order modal logic.

We propose that observables in quantum theory are properly understood as representatives of symmetry-invariant quantities relating one system to another, the latter to be called a reference system. We provide a rigorous mathematical language to introduce and study quantum reference systems, showing that the orthodox “absolute” quantities are good representatives of observable relative quantities if the reference state is suitably localised. We use this relational formalism to critique the literature on the relationship between reference frames and superselection rules, settling a (...) long-standing debate on the subject. (shrink)

The confinement that COVID-19 has brought about has had a negative influence on people’s psychological health. However, this impact is not widespread throughout the population, and men and women may be affected differently and it is not known what protective factors may exist. In this sense, physical activity has classically been shown to be a habit associated with psychological health. The study aimed to analyze the impact of confinement on psychological health, taking into account gender, and perceived changes in physical (...) activity. After the project was approved by the University’s Ethics Commission, the participants, after signing the informed consent, completed the online questionnaires during the days from 6 to 20 April, the time when, in Spain, confinement was in place and the highest peak of deaths and infections from COVID-19 occurred. A total of 457 Spanish participants were evaluated in psychological well-being, in its adaptation to Spanish, in coping, with the Spanish adaptation of the COPE Inventory, in daily habits and difficulties and the level of physical activity they had was recorded. Besides, the perceived change in physical activity due to confinement was recorded. The results showed that perceived emotions, difficulties for certain routines, psychological well-being, and coping differed according to sex. On the other hand, depending on the change in physical activity habits, it was observed that participants who increased their physical activity responded differently in the perception of emotions, and difficulties for routines and in psychological well-being. Finally, differences were also observed in most variables between sedentary, active, and federated participants. Results are discussed highlighting the importance of physical activity as a moderating factor of the impact of confinement. (shrink)

In this article, we offer a rebuttal to a key thesis in Chapter 5 of Engelhardt’s After God: namely, that there exists an “unbridgeable gap” between the dominant secular culture and traditional religious believers. Contra Engelhardt, we argue that it is possible to bridge the gap by employing a strategy that includes, but is not limited to, methods for cultivating understanding and respect and a sense of solidarity. Our argument proceeds in three steps. First, we elucidate Engelhardt’s thesis in light (...) of some of the key concepts he discusses elsewhere in After God. Second, in the hope of developing understanding and respect, we elucidate the history and teachings that form the consciences of traditional Christian medical professionals concerning abortion, euthanasia, and disfiguring surgeries. Third, in the hope of developing a sense of solidarity, we explain the broad scope of the dominant secular culture’s attempt to limit people’s freedom of conscience rights, showing that it includes not only traditional Christians but also members of other traditional religions, members of mainline religious groups, people with alternative conceptions of secularity, and even faithful members of the dominant secular culture. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the conceptual relationship between rationality and progress as applied to scientific development. The concept of methodology is used in the sense of a model of scientific change. It is argued, as against e.g. recent discussion by Larry Laudan, that progress implies rationality. The notion of rationality useful for this conception of scientific development includes instrumental rationality, butalso the idea of rational paradigm-shift, which is analysed in terms of changes of conceptual frameworks. The key idea is the (...) posibility of a rational reconstruction of series of conceptual frameworks, where the shift from one framework to its successor may be reconstructed as rational in the sense of there being reasons in the successor for accepting the change, and thus the whole series being rational. (shrink)