A review of the achievements of Fr. Busa over the course of his 60 years of work in the area of computational linguistics: internal hypertexts, the systematization of allographs, lemmatization, homographs and typologies; the lexical system; the laws of economy for graphemes, for semantic typology, for heterogeneity among terms, and of the two lexical hemispheres. Finally, the project of disciplined languages is mentioned, a response to the linguistic challenge resulting from informational globalization.

We introduce a reciprocity criterion for coalition formation among goal-directed agents, which we call the indecomposable do-ut-des property. It refines an older reciprocity property, called the do-ut-des or give-to-get property by considering the fact that agents prefer to form coalitions whose components cannot be formed independently. A formal description of this property is provided as well as an analysis of algorithms and their complexity. We provide an algorithm to decide whether a coalition has the desired property, and we show that (...) the problem to verify whether a single coalition satisfies the property is tractable. Moreover, we provide an algorithm to search all the sub-coalitions of a given coalition satisfying the new property. Even if this problem is not computationally tractable, we show that in several cases, also the complexity of this problem may decrease considerably. (shrink)

The Renaissance perspective represents the three-dimensional space onto a bi-dimensional one. This cultural construction, which unifies real and virtual, like all simulations, has some limitations – the main one is that it only works from a precise viewpoint that rules the illusion. When moving away from this position the illusion becomes imperfect. Similar to physics, where reality depends on the observer’s position, perspective depends on the viewer’s position. Since perspective has been inherited by photography, cinema, video, computer images, virtual reality, (...) 3D videogames, we live in a perspective-based culture. In perception the boundaries between opposite qualities are often blurred and even indistinguishable. A screen is generally considered as rectangular, but it can be viewed as really rectangular only from its central perpendicular axis, at the crossing of the diagonals. When moving from this position it should appear as trapezoidal, but people still say it is rectangular: because they see it as rectangular or because they know it is rectangular? This threshold between vision and knowledge is imperceptible and obscure. Something similar happens with the senses. They are considered as separate entities: touch, hear, sight, smell and taste are described as distinct ways to detect the phenomenal world. But they are intermingled; the boundaries that are supposed to separate them are apparent: they are logically separable but not separate. The sensorial system is a cohesive and interrelated continuum where the senses act in synergy with each other. Continuity and discreteness, indistinguishability and distinction, inseparability and division are qualities to individuate, describe, classify and/or communicate the phenomena. These qualities are both theoretical and technical, since they depend on the general perspective of the analysis, on the goals to pursue, on the scale at which the phenomena are observed and on the accuracy of the instruments that are used. (shrink)

From the Proceedings of the meeting Mind and Life XII, 'What is matter, what is life?', held in Dharamsala, India, in 2002, in the presence of His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama.

1. Critica de capire e altri scritti. 2. Scritti kantiani. 3. L'analitica trascendentale. 4. Il problema della scienza e il giudizio storico.

Executive Summary There is a general perception that biomedical research has not given the same attention to the health problems of women that it has given ...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Women and Health Research:A Report from the Institute of MedicineAnna C. Mastroianni (bio), Ruth Faden (bio), and Daniel Federman (bio)In recent years, claims have been made by segments of the research community and by women's health advocacy groups that clinical research practices and policies have not benefitted women's health to the same extent as men's health. Central to these claims has been an assertion that women have been (...) inadequately represented as subjects of clinical studies and that as a result neither health conditions unique to women—e.g., menopause—nor women's manifestations of health problems affecting both sexes—e.g., heart disease—have been investigated sufficiently.The scientific community, including federal agencies that sponsor and regulate clinical studies, is increasingly responsive to these claims and is taking steps to raise the level of women's participation in clinical studies. Controversy and concern have surrounded these actions, however. Two of the claims that have been made are: (1) that women are more difficult to study than men because of their cyclical hormonal changes; and (2) that conducting gender-specific subgroup analyses would increase the size of study populations, raise the cost of studies, and thereby reduce the number of studies that could be performed with the limited resources available. In addition, controversy over the inclusion of women of childbearing potential and pregnant women has been particularly salient. Concerns have been expressed about avoiding potential harm to existing or potential fetuses and about the possible legal and financial ramifications of such harm. A further concern involves the perceived difficulties in enrolling women in studies and retaining them for the duration of the studies.Against this backdrop, the Office of Research on Women's Health at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) asked the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in October 1992 to establish the Committee on the Ethical and Legal Issues Relating to the Inclusion of Women in Clinical Studies. The Committee's charge was to: (1) consider the ethical and legal implications of including women, particularly pregnant women and women of childbearing potential, in clinical studies; (2) examine known instances of litigation regarding injuries to research subjects [End Page 55] and describe existing legal liabilities and protections; and (3) provide practical advice on these issues for consideration by NIH, institutional review boards (IRBs), and clinical investigators.The 16 Committee members came from diverse backgrounds: bioethics, law, epidemiology and biostatistics, public health policy, obstetrics and gynecology, clinical research, pharmaceutical development, social and behavioral sciences, and clinical evaluative sciences.1 Chaired by two of the authors of this article, Ruth Faden and Daniel Federman, and coordinated by the third, IOM Study Director Anna Mastroianni, the Committee met five times over a fourteen-month period, convened a one-and-one-half day invitational workshop, and commissioned several background papers. The Committee's deliberations were complicated by the announcement of new federal policies late in its term. Specifically, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued guidelines (FDA 1993) to replace its 1977 guidelines, which prohibited the inclusion of women of childbearing potential in early phases of most clinical drug trials. In addition, Congress passed the NIH Revitalization Act of 1993 (P.L. 103-43), which contains provisions mandating the inclusion of women and racial and ethnic minorities in NIH-sponsored clinical research. In February 1994, the IOM Committee publicly issued its final report and recommendations, Women and Health Research: Ethical and Legal Issues of Including Women in Clinical Studies, publishing the workshop presentations and commissioned papers in a separate volume.Deliberations of the CommitteeA number of issues arose at the outset as the Committee considered its charge. A few members initially believed that verification of the underrepresentation of women relative to men in clinical studies as a whole was a prerequisite to providing policy recommendations. Others believed that such an examination would be an important contribution to the knowledge base, but that it was not necessary for addressing the Committee's charge. As summarized in the Committee's report, the Committee's research indicated that firm conclusions about the relative underrepresentation of women could not be drawn from the available data because of the lack of systematic information... (shrink)

The Milgram obedience studies are widely presented in psychology textbooks as integral to understanding the behavior of Holocaust perpetrators. Recent appraisals of the Milgram legacy have not challenged this view. Discussions of the Holocaust in the historical literature are often cited by psychologists to support the claim of the centrality of the Milgram studies to understanding the Holocaust. More recent historical literature presents a different view of the Holocaust, one that directly questions the relevance of Milgram's obedience studies in understanding (...) the Holocaust. This view has not been well represented in discussions of Milgram in psychology, and is discussed here. The nature of the evidence for the ecological validity of the Milgram studies, and the broader issue of the role of the Milgram studies as "scientific parables" are also discussed. Authors of future psychology textbooks may wish to examine the controversial nature of the claim that Milgram's studies are central to understanding the Holocaust more fully. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Luigi Giussani, a high school religion teacher throughout the 1950s and 1960s, grounded his teachings in the vast body of experience to be found in Christianity's two-thousand-year history. He told his students, “I'm not here to make you adopt the ideas I will give you as your own, but to teach you a method for judging the things I will say.” Throughout his life, education was one of Giussani's primary intellectual interests. He believed that effective education required an adequate (...) background in the Christian tradition, presented within a lived experience that underscored the capacity of the faith to answer universal questions. What he proposed was a process that allowed one to sift through tradition, critically examining it and comparing it against the ultimate criteria for judgment: the desires of the heart. In Giussani's view, the primary concern was to “educate the human heart as God made it.” In The Risk of Education he states that fear leads students to associate this process of criticism with negativity or doubt. Yet, without an education in criticism, students cannot develop conviction. At a time when young people are abandoning the church and questioning the value of faith, Giussani's method of judging and verifying Christianity as an experience seems a necessary intervention. In The Risk of Education he argues that, ultimately, education and the Christian message reveal themselves through human freedom. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that 1) Kant’s power of judgment is constitutively always reflecting, as its lawful employments involve a preliminary self-reference of the faculties the power of judgment itself is required to connect and let them match with each other. Accordingly, I claim that 2) the principle of purposiveness is the principle of the power of judgment as such, and not just of an allegedly self-standing reflecting branch of this faculty. I criticize the view that Kant draws a (...) dichotomy between reflecting and determining judgments and argue that 3) Kant’s point in the third Critique is to rule out the amphiboly between the reflecting and the determining employment of the principle of purposiveness. The power of judgment is, as such, always reflecting: while in the case of cognition it also works in a determining way, in the case of both aesthetics and teleology it is only reflecting, i.e., self-purposive – as it sets its function as its own end. (shrink)

Federal policies on human subjects research have undergone a progressive transformation. In the early decades of the twentieth century, federal policies largely relied on the discretion of investigators to decide when and how to conduct research. This approach gradually gave way to policies that augmented investigator discretion with externally imposed protections. We may now be entering an era of even more stringent external protections. Whether the new policies effectively absolve investigators of personal responsibility for conducting ethical research, and whether it (...) is wise to do so, remains to be seen. (shrink)

At a White House ceremony in October 1995, the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments presented its Final Report to President Bill Clinton. The 925-page report and the over 2,000 pages of supplemental volumes summarized eighteen months of investigative research, debate, and deliberation on historical and contemporary issues in human subjects research. The Advisory Committee's efforts were aided by unprecedented support from the highest levels of the executive branch, including the heads of eight cabinet-level agencies and their departments' resources. The (...) presidentially appointed committee and its staff delved into long-forgotten Cold Warera government archives, listened to hours of public testimony, interviewed key players in the development of medical therapies and nuclear weapons, and studied ethical issues arising in today's research.In this article we focus on a critical, but narrowly defined, part of the Advisory Committee's Final Report: remedying harms or wrongs to subjects of human radiation experiments conducted or sponsored by the U.S. government between 1944 and 1974. (shrink)

Public health raises critical ethics issues and concerns, making public heath ethics an essential topic for students and public health professionals. The 73 chapters in this volume examine public health ethics across a broad range of public health topics both in the U.S. and globally. It is the first ever comprehensive collection devoted to public health ethics.

In this paper I argue that 1) art is, for Cassirer, a symbolic language whereby images (or poetic expressions) work analogously to verbal signs in order to frame and codify meaningful objective contents, namely symbolic formations that constitute objects in a specific region of culture. I claim that 2a) both art and language rely on what I call symbolic-poietic mimesis: a function meant to 2b) combine imitative and constructive states in order to shape a proto-meaningful core according to its symbolic (...) pregnance and 3a) employ forms that are, on the one hand, pure (not derived from experience) and, on the other hand, sensuous (figurative signs). The idea is that while 4a) both language and art are oriented towards objectivity as the constitution of cultural objects, 4b) they also differ in their respective directions. On the one hand, language pursues stable and fixed verbal references. On the other, art relies on moving and living forms meant to codify a dynamic weft of aesthetic values. (shrink)