This paper analyses the successive waves of penetration of oriental goddesses, assimilated to Aphrodite, by Greeks coming from the Near East (Syria, Phoenicia) to the Greek colonies on the Black Sea. The first stage, that of the cuit of Syrian Aphrodite, is assigned to the 6th c. BC in the Greek towns of Olbia, Berezan and perhaps Istros. In the 4th c. a second wave arrived, chiefly in the Kingdom of the Bosphorus, which introduced the cuit of Aphrodite Ourania. The (...) analysis is based on ancient texts, graffiti, inscriptions, reliefs and terracottas. (shrink)

Depuis Kant, les philosophes ont appris à parler, avec prudence, du surnaturel et de sa relation avec la nature. En général le surnaturel n’est meme pas reconnu comme faisant partie de la philosophie. La situation n’aurait pu être plus différente aux XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles, lorsque les philosophes comprenaient la relation entre Dieu et le monde comme l’un des problèmes les plus importants que la philosophie fût censée résoudre. Les solutions étaient bien sûr extrêmement diverses : Spinoza niera même que l’on puisse (...) faire la distinction entre principe créateur et création, tandis que d’autres, tel Robert Boyle, s’imagineront un maître horloger créant une machine absolument parfaite, qui depuis sa création ne requiert aucun acte supplémentaire de la part de son créateur. Jusque dans la pensée du jeune Kant, cette idée se rencontrera sous des formes diverses. Tous convenaient, tout de même, qu’il fallait rejeter l’ancien modèle aristotélicien d’une nature désirante, reconstruisant la nature comme un système reposant sur quelques lois fondamentales et repensant à nouveaux frais le rôle que Dieu peut, ou doit, jouer dans un tel système. Les contributions du présent volume traitent d’aspects historiques et systématiques des théories modernes de la nature et du surnaturel, tout en essayant de comprendre, dans ce contexte, l’importance des théories de la relation entre Dieu et le monde. (shrink)

Reshaping the neo-Aristotelian doctrines about the human soul was Descartes’s most spectacular enterprise, which gave birth to some of the sharpest debates in the Republic of Letters. Neverthe- less, it was certainly Descartes’s intention, as already expressed in the Discours de la méthode, to show that his new metaphysics could be supplemented with experimental research in the field of medicine and the conservation of life. It is no surprise then that several natural philosophers and doctors, such as Henricus Regius from (...) Utrecht, who had studied in Padua with William Harvey, rallied in support, in order to gain a more substantial theoretical basis for their research. Taking as his ground some general metaphysical assumptions, such as the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and perhaps the separability of the pure understanding, Regius intended to secure a new philosophy of man, which was able to reflect his medical interests and complement his account of human nature. This is the story that is now gaining currency, and it is surely accurate, at least in part. Desmond Clarke has recently defended the same view1, based on the remarkable studies of the Utrecht scholars Theo Verbeek and Erik-Jan Bos. Here I would like to challenge some aspects of this view and ask how Regius, who was perceived as the philosopher most closely associated with Descartes, became a betrayer of his mentor. (shrink)

Within Descartes' philosophy, the problem of the Eucharist provides scholars the occasion to investigate a nexus of questions belonging to different domains of his thought. In taking up this problem, about which there has been much written in the past few decades , I hope first of all to discern some order in the texts themselves, as well also as in their various interpretations, and then, from there, to propose a new perspective.

This study analyses the manuscript tradition of Pascal's work now known as De l'art de persuader and offers a historical, textual and conceptual criticism of the decisions that led to the privileging of one source (the P' manuscript) over another (the M manuscript and the D printed version) in the editorial history of the text. On the basis of this critique, the author formulates new genetic hypotheses and justifies the probity of the M copy for the establishment of the text (...) of De L'art de persuader that can lead towards a general interpretation of Pascalian epistemology. (shrink)

Delia Popa, Emmanuel Levinas, Les aventures de l’economie subjective et son ouverture a l’alterite (Eemmanuel Levinas, The adventures of the subjective economy and its opening towards alterity) Lumen Publishing House, Iasi, 2007.

Taking into consideration the concepts of „knowledge” and „power”, whose correlation authored the very idea of modernity, this study on Foucault traces their evolution through two cultural patterns: the archive and the diagram. A world picture can be constructed only by making appeal to the archives of knowledge. In every historical moment the structure and the quality of the archive actuate the initiatives of power, that is, the play of forces between actors, institutions, centres of decision in society, and between (...) agents and patients. The play of these forces, ever reshaping, allows the temporary drawing of the power diagram. It is in the precarious balance realized by a diagram that the social play happens, which, by reverting to its archive sources, transforms the cycle of knowledge. As a central idea, it can be asserted that it is between knowledge and power, between archive and diagram and that it is according to the actual schemes of their correlation that the evolutionary curve of a human world is decided. (shrink)

Vasile Frãteanu, Tratat de metafizicã Editura Dacia, Cluj-Napoca, 2002.

Istoria ideii de geniu.--Simbolul artistic.--Tezele unei filozofii a operei.

This article argues against Catton and Dunlap’s claims that the natural environment has been ignored or downplayed in American sociology before the emergence of environmental sociology in the 1970s. By reviewing a collection of 86 sociology textbooks between 1894 and 1980, the article provides quantitative evidence regarding the scope and types of references to the natural environment in mainstream sociology. The bulk of the article is based on an interpretive-historical analysis of the different representations of the environment in the textbook (...) literature. This analysis is carried out from the perspective of the sociology of knowledge, whereby sociological ideas about nature are interpreted in terms of their intellectual milieu and social context. The main finding is that the ‘natural environment’ has been interpreted in different ways and has been put to a variety of epistemological and ideological uses — particularly positivism and functionalism — throughout the history of the discipline. (shrink)

Depuis Kant, les philosophes ont appris à parler, avec prudence, du surnaturel et de sa relation avec la nature. En général le surnaturel n’est même pas reconnu comme faisant partie de la philosophie. La situation n’aurait pu être plus différente aux XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles, lorsque les philosophes comprenaient la relation entre Dieu et le monde comme l’un des problèmes les plus importants que la philosophie fût censé résoudre. Les solutions étaient bien sûr extrêmement diverses : Spinoza niera même que l’on puisse (...) faire la distinction entre principe créateur et création, tandis que d’autres, tel Robert Boyle, s’imagineront un maître horloger créant une machine absolument parfaite, qui depuis sa création ne requiert aucun acte supplémentaire de la part de son créateur. Jusque dans la pensée du jeune Kant, cette idée se rencontrera sous des formes diverses. Tous convenaient, tout de même, qu’il fallait rejeter l’ancien modèle aristotélicien d’une nature désirante, reconstruisant la nature comme un système reposant sur quelques lois fondamentales et repensant à nouveaux frais le rôle que Dieu peut, ou doit, jouer dans un tel système. Les contributions du présent volume traitent d’aspects historiques et systématiques des théories modernes de la nature et du surnaturel, tout en essayant de comprendre, dans ce contexte, l’importance des théories de la relation entre Dieu et le monde. (shrink)

In “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System” (Lugones 2007), I proposed to read the relation between the colonizer and the colonized in terms of gender, race, and sexuality. By this I did not mean to add a gendered reading and a racial reading to the already understood colonial relations. Rather I proposed a rereading of modern capitalist colonial modernity itself. This is because the colonial imposition of gender cuts across questions of ecology, economics, government, relations with the spirit world, and (...) knowledge, as well as across everyday practices that either habituate us to take care of the world or to destroy it. I propose this framework not as an abstraction from lived experience, but as a lens that enables us to see what is hidden from our understandings of both race and gender and the relation of each to normative heterosexuality. (shrink)

In 1960, E. P. Wigner, a joint winner of the 1963 Nobel Prize for Physics, published a paper titled On the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences [61]. This paper can be construed as an examination and affirmation of Galileo's tenet that “The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics”. To this effect, Wigner presented a large number of examples that demonstrate the effectiveness of mathematics in accurately describing physical phenomena. Wigner viewed these examples as (...) illustrations of what he called the empirical law of epistemology, which asserts that the mathematical formulation of the laws of nature is both appropriate and accurate, and that mathematics is actually the correct language for formulating the laws of nature. At the same time, Wigner pointed out that the reasons for the success of mathematics in the natural sciences are not completely understood; in fact, he went as far as asserting that “… the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and there is no rational explanation for it.”. (shrink)

Not limited to merely mathematics, probability has a rich and controversial philosophical aspect. _A Philosophical Introduction to Probability_ showcases lesser-known philosophical notions of probability and explores the debate over their interpretations. Galavotti traces the history of probability and its mathematical properties and then discusses various philosophical positions on probability, from the Pierre Simon de Laplace's “classical” interpretation of probability to the logical interpretation proposed by John Maynard Keynes. This book is a valuable resource for students in philosophy and mathematics and (...) all readers interested in notions of probability. (shrink)

Partee (1973) noted anaphoric parallels between English tenses and pronouns. Since then these parallels have been analyzed in terms of type-neutral principles of discourse anaphora. Recently, Stone (1997) extended the anaphoric parallel to English modals. In this paper I extend the story to languages of other types. This evidence also shows that centering parallels are even more detailed than previously recognized. Based on this evidence, I propose a semantic representation language (Logic of Change with Centered Worlds), in which the observed (...) parallels can be formally analyzed. (shrink)

The aim of this chapter is to explore the relationship between metaphor and reasoning, by claiming that argumentation might act as a bridge between metaphor and reasoning. Firstly, the chapter introduces metaphor as a framing strategy through which some relevant properties of a source domain are selected to understand a target domain. The mapping of properties from the source to the target domain implicitly forces the interpreter to consider the target from a specific perspective. Secondly, the chapter presents metaphor as (...) an implicit argument where some inferences can be drawn from the comparison between the source and the target domain. In particular, this chapter aims to understand whether and to what extent such an argument might be linked to analogical reasoning. The chapter argues that, in case of faulty analogy, this kind of argument might have the form of a quaternio terminorum, where metaphor is the middle term. Finally, the chapter presents the results of an experimental study, aiming to test the effect of the linguistic nature of the middle term on the detection of such faulty analogy. The chapter concludes that a wider context is needed to make sense of an analogical argument with novel metaphors, whilst in a narrow context, a lexicalised metaphor might be extended and the overall argument might be interpreted as metaphoric. (shrink)

The book examines how Darwinism has been used to explain novelty and change in culture through the Darwinian approach to creativity and the theory of memes. The first claims that creativity is based on a Darwinian process of blind variation and selection, while the latter claims that culture is based on and explained by units - memes - that are similar to genes. Both theories try to describe and explain mind and culture by applying Darwinism by way of analogies. Kronfeldner (...) shows that the analogies involved in these theories lead to claims that give either wrong or at least no new descriptions or explanations of the phenomena at issue. Whereas the two approaches are usually defended or criticized on the basis that they are dangerous for our vision of ourselves, this book takes a different perspective: it questions the acuteness of these approaches. Darwinian theory is not like a dangerous wolf, hunting for our self image. Far from it, in the case of the two analogical applications addressed in this book, Darwinian theory is shown to behave more like a disoriented sheep in wolf's clothing. - A revised and much shortened version of a dissertation (2007, Darwinism, Memes and Creativity: A Critique of Analogical Reasoning from Nature to Culture). (shrink)

Contempt and disgust share a number of features which distinguish them from other hostile emotions: they both present two distinct facets—a nonmoral facet and a moral one; they both imply a negative evaluation of the dispositional kind as well as disrespect towards the target of the feeling; and they trigger avoidance and exclusion action tendencies. However, while sharing a common core, contempt and disgust are in our view distinct emotions, qualified by different cognitive-motivational features. Contempt is felt exclusively towards human (...) targets, and implies sense of superiority over them, pessimistic feelings about their possibility of betterment, detachment from them, and avoidance driven by detachment; whereas disgust can be directed at a wide range of possible targets, and implies contamination sensitivity, fear of contamination, and fear-driven avoidance. The differences between contempt and disgust are related to the different kinds of standard against which the target is evaluated, and the different kinds of disrespect engendered by the negative evaluation. (shrink)

Over the last three quarters of a century, international guidelines and regulations have undergone significant changes in how children are problematised as participants in biomedical research. While early guidelines enacted children as vulnerable subjects with diminished autonomy and in need of special protection, beginning in the early 2000s, international regulatory frameworks defined the paediatric population as vulnerable due to unaddressed public health needs. More recently, ethical recommendations have promoted the active engagement of minors as research partners. In this paper, I (...) adopt a post-structuralist approach to policy analysis to examine deep-seated assumptions and presuppositions underlying the changes in the problematisation of children as biomedical research participants over time. While biomedical research ethics focuses on the autonomy and vulnerability of minors, ethical guidelines are situated in specific sociocultural contexts, shaped, among other things, by contingent public health needs and changing conceptions of the value of research and science for society. In the process, I demonstrate the challenge of moving away from an approach that in taking adults as the model overshadows the complexity of children’s lived experiences as well as their personal, cultural, and social lives. The lack of acknowledgement of this complexity makes children vulnerable to epistemic injustice, which is particularly crucial to address in public involvement initiatives. (shrink)

This research aims to identify the ethical issues perceived by intensive care nurses in their everyday practice. It also aims to understand why these situations were considered an ethical issue and what interventions/strategies have been or are expected to be developed so as to minimize them. Data were collected using a semi-structured interview with 15 nurses working at polyvalent intensive care units in 4 Portuguese hospitals, who were selected by the homogenization of multiple samples. The qualitative content analysis identified end-of-life (...) decisions, privacy, interaction, team work, and health-care access as emerging ethical issues. Personal, team, and institutional aspects emerge as reasons behind the experience of these issues. Personal and team resources are used in and for solving these issues. Moral development and training are the most significant strategies. (shrink)

Concealed questions are determiner phrases that are naturally paraphrased as embedded questions (e.g., John knows the capital of Italy ≈ John knows what the capital of Italy is). This paper offers a novel account of the interpretation of concealed questions, which assumes that an entity-denoting expression α may be type-shifted into an expression ?z.P(α), where P is a contextually determined property, and z ranges over a contextually determined domain of individual concepts. Different resolutions of P and the domain of z (...) yield a wide range of concealed question interpretations, some of which were not noted previously. On the other hand, principled constraints on the resolution process prevent overgeneration. (shrink)

Some business schools have come under considerable criticism for what observers see as their complicit involvement in the corporate scandals and financial crises of the last 15 years. Much of the discussion about changes that schools might undertake has been focused on curriculum issues. However, revisiting the curriculum does not get at the root cause of the problem. Instead, it might create a new challenge: the risk of decoupling the discussion of the curriculum from broader issues of institutional purpose. In (...) this article, we argue that the most pressing need facing business schools is not to teach new courses to be responsive to social demands and stay relevant. Instead, it is to revisit their basic mission—the principles and beliefs on which they were founded—and then to re-evaluate their curriculum design choices in this light. We contrast the Spartan and Athenian educational paradigms as a way of shedding light on the nature of a coherent response. (shrink)

This article explores the proposal offered by Ian Hacking for the distinction between natural and social sciences—a proposal that he has defined from the outset as complex and different from the traditional ones. Our objective is not only to present the path followed by Hacking’s distinction, but also to determine if it constitutes a novelty or not. For this purpose, we deemed it necessary to briefly introduce the core notions Hacking uses to establish his strategic approach to social sciences, under (...) the assumption that they are less well known that the ones corresponding to his treatment of natural sciences. (shrink)

This paper seeks a better understanding of the elements of practical reasoning: premises and conclusion. It argues that the premises of practical reasoning do not normally include statements such as ‘I want to ϕ’; that the reasoning in practical reasoning is the same as in theoretical reasoning and that what makes it practical is, first, that the point of the relevant reasoning is given by the goal that the reasoner seeks to realize by means of that reasoning and the subsequent (...) action; second, that the premises of such reasoning show the goodness of the action to be undertaken; third, that the conclusions of such reasoning may be actions or decisions, that can be accompanied by expressions of intention, either in action, or for the future; and that these are justified, and might be contradicted, in ways that are not only peculiar to them (i.e. in ways that diverge from those found in theoretical reasoning), but are distinctively practical, in that they involve reference to reasons for acting and to expressions of intention, respectively.1. (shrink)

We analyze Case in terms of independent constraints on syntactic structures — namely, the Projection Principle (inherent Case), the ECP (marked structural Case), and the theory of extended projections (the nominative, a Caseless nominal projection). The resulting theory accounts for (1) the government constraint on Case assignment, (2) all major Case systems (accusative, ergative, active, three-way, and split), (3) Case alternations (passive, antipassive, and ECM), and (4) the Case of nominal possessors. Structural Case may correlate with pronominal agreement because the (...) former can, and the latter must, involve antecedent-government by a functional head. However, neither phenomenon implies the other. (shrink)

The present paper stems from the biosemiotic modelling of individual artificial cognition proposed by Ferreira and Caldas (2012) but goes further by introducing the concept of Umwelt Overlap. The introduction of this concept is of fundamental importance making the present model closer to natural cognition. In fact cognition can only be viewed as a purely individual phenomenon for analytical purposes. In nature it always involves the crisscrossing of the spheres of action of those sharing the same environmental bubble. Plus, the (...) incorporation of that concept is vital to understand the complex semiosis that sustains collective tissues, societies, regulating collective cognition and consequently cooperative action. The concept of Umwelt Overlap broadens the range of applicability of the previous model to several distinct domains allowing for example for its application to multi-agent cooperative autonomous systems. In this paper a Middle Size League RoboCup soccer team is used as an example of a possible application. (shrink)

Motor learning can be defined as a process that leads to relatively permanent changes in motor behavior through repeated interactions with the environment. Different strategies can be adopted to achieve motor learning: movements can be overtly practiced leading to an amelioration of motor performance; alternatively, covert strategies (e.g., action observation) can promote neuroplastic changes in the motor system even in the absence of real movement execution. However, whether a training regularly alternating action observation and execution (i.e., Action Observation Training, AOT) (...) may surpass the pure motor practice (MP) and observational learning (OL) remains to be established. To address this issue, we enrolled 54 subjects requiring them to learn tying nautical knots via one out of three types of training (AOT, MP, OL) with the scope to investigate which element mostly contributes to motor learning. We evaluated the overall improvement of each group, along with the predictive role that neuropsychological indexes exert on each treatment outcome. The AOT group exhibited the highest performance improvement (42%), indicating that the regular alternation between observation and execution biases participants toward a better performance. The reiteration of this sequence provides an incremental, adjunct value that super-adds onto the efficacy of motor practice or observational learning in isolation (42% > 25% + 10%, i.e., OL + MP). These findings extend the use of the AOT from clinical and rehabilitative contexts to daily routines requiring the learning and perfectioning of new motor skills such as sports training, music, and occupational activities requiring fine motor control. (shrink)

The central claim of this paper is that surface-faithful word-by-word update is feasible and desirable, even in languages where word order is supposedly free. As a first step, in sections 1 and 2, I review an argument from Bittner 2001a that semantic composition is not a static process, as in PTQ, but rather a species of anaphoric bridging. But in that case the context-setting role of word order should extend from cross-sentential discourse anaphora to sentence-internal anaphoric composition. This can be (...) spelled out as a two-part hypothesis. First, in all languages anaphoric composition derives incremental updates based on the topological order rather than the syntactic hierarchy. And secondly, rigid vs. free word order is simply rigid vs. free mapping from syntax to topology. To formalize this hypothesis, I first present, in section 3, Sevensorted Logic of Change with Centering. This makes it possible, in section 4, to articulate a system of constraints on basic meanings in Kalaallisut — a polysynthetic language with free word order, ideally suited to test the hypothesis of incremental update. The key assumptions about topology as the input to anaphoric composition are spelled out in section 5, which concludes the development of a general formal framework. This formal framework then serves, in sections 6 through 8, t o explicate topologically based incremental updates for increasingly more complex samples of an actual Kalaallisut text. This reveals ubiquitous patterns of prominence-guided anaphora, in all semantic domains, t o increasingly more complex types of discourse referents. These anaphoric patterns show that the context-setting role of word order indeed does extend from discourse to word-to-word anaphora. And this, in turn, strongly supports the hypothesis of topologically based anaphoric composition. Finally, in section 9 I adduce evidence from English that this hypothesis also holds for languages with rigid word order, albeit the fixed mapping keeps the topology close to the syntax. I conclude that both free and rigid word orders receive a natural account if semantic composition is viewed as topologically based anaphoric bridging.. (shrink)

Ante ciertos modelos causales del agente libre inspirados en Tomás de Aquino, resulta interesante atender al modelo causal presentado por Tomás mismo, especialmente en un texto a partir del cual se puede rastrear la exposición de la acción libre como el efecto de los cuatro sentidos causales aristotélicos. Se trata de la cuestión sobre los actos imperados (ST I–II, q. 17); en cuyos primeros cuatro artículos –y en sus textos paralelos– determina que la voluntad es causa agente; la razón práctica, (...) causa ordenadora; y el imperium de ambas (razón y voluntad) se relaciona con el acto imperado como lo formal con lo material. (shrink)