The coronavirus disease possesses an important threat to people's health and well-being. The purpose of the present study is to longitudinally examine whether meaning in life before the pandemic increases resilience and mental well-being during the coronavirus pandemic. The sample of the study comprised 172 young adults in a public university in an urban city of Turkey. Participants ranged in age between 18 and 40 years. Mediation analyses were performed to examine the impacts of meaning in life on the outcomes (...) across the two waves of data. Findings from these analyses revealed that meaning in life before the pandemic had a significant predictive effect on resilience and mental well-being of young adults during the coronavirus disease. Resilience also mediated the impacts of meaning in life on mental well-being indicators at the second time. These results suggest the importance of meaning-based preventions and interventions designed to build up resilience experiences for improving psychological health and well-being during a public health crisis. (shrink)

BLWith new text and full apparatus criticusThe Eudemian Ethics was one of two ethical treatises which Aristotle wrote on the subject of ethica or `matters to do with character'. Although the two works cover much the same ground, the Nicomachean Ethics is better known; the poor manuscript tradition of the Eudemian Ethics has made correct translation and interpretation of the text extremely difficult. The subject of the work is the choice of a certain means of conduct, made by a `man (...) of practical wisdom', between two extremes of behaviour: asceticism and yielding to uncontrolled impulses. Aristotle also stresses the notion of moral intention and the importance of virtue of character. This new Oxford Classical Text of the Eudemian Ethics is the result of many years of work. After Sir David Ross's death, his original text was substantially reworked and revised by his friend and colleague R. R. Walzer, who was aided in the revision by his former pupil Mrs Jean Mingay, who continued his work after his death in 1974. Mrs Mingay was fortunate in being able to make use of previously unpublished contributions from D. J. Allan after his death in the late seventies, and more recently has been helped in her work by the suggestions of Professor D. A. Russell, David Robinson, and Christopher Rowe. (shrink)

During the decades following the publication of Darwin's Origin of species in 1859, religious belief in England and in particular the Church of England experienced some of the most intense criticism in its history. The early 1860s saw the appearance of Lyell's Evidence of the antiquity of man , Tylor's research on the early history of mankind , Renan's Vie de Jésus , Pius IX's encyclical, Quanta cura, and the accompanying Syllabus errarum, John Henry Newman's Apologia , and Swinburne's notorious (...) Atalanta in Calydon ; it was in this period also that Arthur Stanley was appointed Dean of Westminster, and that Bills were introduced in Parliament to amend or repeal the ‘Test Acts’ as they affected universities. They were the years that witnessed Lyell present the case for geology at the British Association at Bath , the first meeting of the X-Club , and the award of the Royal Society's Copley Medal to Charles Darwin. These were the years in which, as Owen Chadwick has put it, ‘the controversy between “science” and “religion” took fire’. (shrink)

This paper describes an intelligent algorithm for traffic sign recognition which converges quickly, is accurate in its segmentation and adaptive in its behaviour. The proposed approach can segment images of traffic signs in different lighting and environmental conditions and in different countries. It is based on using Kohonen's Self-Organizing Maps as a clustering tool and it is developed for Intelligent Vehicle applications. The current approach does not need any prior training. Instead, a slight portion, which is about 1% of the (...) image under investigation, is used for training. This is a key issue to ensure fast convergence and high adaptability. The current approach was tested by using 442 images which were collected under different environmental conditions and from different countries. The proposed approach shows promising results; good improvement of 73% is observed in faded traffic sign images compared with 53.3% using the traditional algorithm. The adaptability of the system is evident from the segmentation of the traffic sign images from various countries where the result is 96% for the nine countries included in the test. (shrink)

In this article I examine the metaphysical foundations of Guido de Ruggiero’s liberalism and ask what these can tell us about his changing view of Giovanni Gentile's actualism, which was such an influence on de Ruggiero before the First World War. I argue that de Ruggiero’s ‘actualism’ was never the same as Gentile’s, but was drawn from the same intellectual sources; that the actualist conception of free and self-conscious agency runs through both versions of the doctrine, though interpreted in different (...) ways; and finally that the contrasts between de Ruggiero’s and Gentile’s political allegiances result from something other than their differing interpretations of actualism, which serves, in the end, not so much as a theory as a set of basic principles, images and ideals that each philosopher tried to modify and match to the political circumstances in which he found himself. (shrink)

In La filosofia dell’arte, Giovanni Gentile assigned a prominent new role to the sentiments. This change struck some critics as a major departure from the earlier, classic accounts of actual idealism, in which Gentile argued that thought and language comprise the entirety of reality. Sentiments do not fit cleanly into a theory so narrowly concerned with thought and thinking. Their introduction, runs the objection, only compounds certain existing ambiguities in Gentile’s conception of the relation between mind and world. This article (...) describes and criticizes Gentile’s attempts to integrate feeling into actual idealism. It is argued that the appearance of feeling in his mature theory does not undermine but instead clarifies his views on the relation between thought and the act of thinking. Yet it also shows the strain under which idealist language was being put by the late 1920s. Gentile’s attempts to lay out a comprehensive and phenomenologically accurate account of how thinkers actually experience... (shrink)

RESUMEN:El siguiente escrito ensaya una interpretación del rendimiento del mito de los metales expuesto por Platón en su diálogo llamado Politeia a propósito de la siguiente interrogación: ¿Cómo se constituye el orden social en la pólis platónica? Para responder a esta pregunta debemos esclarecernos respecto de: i) El papel de la educación en la constitución del orden social. ii) La correlación entre el mito de los metales y el orden social. iii) La constitución tripartita de la psykhḗ humana. Una vez (...) aclarado estos distintos puntos podremos comprender la oculta pero significativa función del mito de los metales en la constitución del orden social platónico. ABSTRACT:This article attempts an interpretation of the account of the myth of the metals as expounded by Plato in the Politeia. We address the following question: How is the social order established in the Platonic polis? To answer this question we must clarify: i) the role of education in the constitution of the social order; ii) the correlation between the myth of the metals and the social order; iii) the tripartite constitution of the human psyche. Once these various points have been made clear, we can understand the hidden but significant function of the myth of the metals in the constitution of the Platonic social order. (shrink)

First published in 1953, this seminal introduction to political philosophy is intended for both the student of political theory and for the general reader. After an introduction which explains the nature and purpose of philosophy, Dr Murray provides a critical examination of the principle theories advanced by political philosophers from Plato to Marx, paying special attention to contemporary issues. The book also makes an attempt to define the essential issues of philosophical significance in contemporary politics, with special reference to the (...) conflict between political authority and individual rights, and to show how the different moral assumptions underlying authoritarian and democratic systems of government are ultimately based upon different theories of logic. (shrink)

I am going in this lecture on ‘Philosophy and Practice’ first to say something about philosophy and then something about practice, in order to show you how they bear on one another. But I must start by paying a tribute to the President of the Society for Applied Philosophy, Professor Sir A. J. Ayer, who has kindly agreed to take the chair at this lecture. I can honestly say that he is more responsible than anybody else for putting me on (...) the right track in moral philosophy. He did this by convincing me, when young, that the ways people were doing it at that time had no future. In the famous chapter on ethics in his marvellously readable and exciting book,Language, Truth and Logic, Ayer was thought to be trying to show that moral philosophy itself, and perhaps even ordinary first-order moral thinking, was a waste of time. From later work of his, and from his occasional pronouncements about moral and political questions, it is evident that the second of these slanders was false. But even on the theoretical side the lessons I learnt from his book were positive as well as negative. That is not to say that the negative lessons were unimportant. Some people have still not absorbed them, and continue to waste our time. But here are two positive points which you will find in Ayer's book, and which for me were crucia. (shrink)

The Body as Gift, Resource, and Commodity, edited by Martin Gunnarson and Fredrik Svenaeus, is a volume containing 11 research pieces about organ transplants and organ trade in current times, and is the outcome of a research project at the Centre for Studies in Practical Knowledge, Södertörns University in Stockholm. The main contributors include a philosopher, a historian, and three ethnologists, assisted by medical researchers and physicians and other scholars from the Baltic region. As such, the range of focus is (...) generally limited to the prevailing practices in that region, although their connections with practices in other parts of the world are discussed where directly relevant.The authors’ aim, as mentioned in the introduction of the book, is to add to the growth of knowledge and reflection in the field of reference and thus help to build sound political judgment and policies on organ, tissue, and cell donation, both in view of the need to save lives and their impac .. (shrink)

This book is divided into three parts: in Part I, R. M. Hare offers a justification for the use of philosophy of language in the treatment of moral questions, together with an overview of his moral philosophy of ‘universal prescriptivism’. The second part, and the core of the book, consists of five chapters originally presented as a lecture series under the title ‘A Taxonomy of Ethical Theories’. Hare identifies descriptivism and non‐descriptivism as the two main positions in modern moral philosophy. (...) The former he divides into Naturalism and Intuitionism, and the latter into Emotivism and Rationalism. Hare argues that all forms of descriptivism tend to lead to Relativism because the truth conditions of moral statements are culturally variant. Of the positions discussed, only Hare's own position, a form of Rationalism, which he calls Universal Prescriptivism, meets all of the requirements that an adequate ethical theory should meet. Part III consists of Hare's previously published essay ‘Could Kant have been a Utilitarian?’ (Utilitas 5, 1993). Here, Hare puts forward the controversial thesis that Kant's moral philosophy is, in its basic principles, compatible with utilitarianism. (shrink)