Pickering & Garrod deserve appreciation for their cogent argument that dialogue merits greater scientific consideration. Current models make little contact with behaviors of dialogue, motivating the interactive alignment theory. However, the theory is not truly “mechanistic.” A full account requires both representations and processes bringing those representations into harmony. We suggest that Grossberg 's adaptive resonance theory may naturally conform to the principles of dialogue.

Everyday most of us fail to perform many charitable or benevolent acts that would alleviate or prevent suffering somewhere in the world. Moral philosophers have tended to consider failures to prevent suffering to be less important than acts which directly produce it. For example, letting someone die whom we could save is generally thought to be less heinous than murder. In part, philosophers are hesitant to consider omissions to be as bad as actions because they do not want to adopt (...) a position which puts people under such boundless obligations that they could not or would not comply with them. In Violence and Responsibility, John Harris contends that despite the drastic revision required of our ordinary moral beliefs, we are responsible for any harm we could prevent and we should face the moral implications of such responsibility. To support his contention, Harris examines and rejects a number of arguments to show that acts are more important than omissions. He believes we should acknowledge both our almost boundless obligations to help others and our need to revise our usual moral beliefs. One such revision that Harris proposes is a "survival lottery" which requires the killing of a fairly selected dying person whenever his organs could be used to save at least two people. Although the lottery involves killing an innocent person, it saves lives. To fail to institute such a lottery makes us responsible for the deaths of all those who could be saved. Harris's book is directed at a very important but oft-neglected issue in moral theory; it deserves to be widely read and discussed. Harris includes a useful bibliography for those who wish to do additional reading on the topic.--Milton Goldinger, University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh. (shrink)

We applaud Norris et al.'s critical review of the literature on lexical effects in phoneme decision making, and we sympathize with their attempt to reconcile autonomous models of word recognition with current research. However, we suggest that adaptive resonance theory (ART) may provide a coherent account of the data while preserving limited inhibitory feedback among certain lexical and sublexical representations.

In the last thirty years, a relatively large group of cognitive scientists have begun characterising the mind in terms of two distinct, relatively autonomous systems. To account for paradoxes in empirical results of studies mainly on reasoning, Dual Process Theories were developed. Such Dual Process Theories generally agree that System 1 is rapid, automatic, parallel, and heuristic-based and System 2 is slow, capacity-demanding, sequential, and related to consciousness. While System 2 can still be decently understood from a traditional cognitivist approach, (...) I will argue that it is essential for System 1 processing to be comprehended in an Embodied Embedded approach to Cognition. (shrink)

Even Henry Ford knew that history is bunk, yet many leftists remain irresistably fascinated with speculating about the way “history” will view them. Sale's new book SDS feeds that fascination by treating historically the recent experience of many leftists who related to SDS. Rarely have revolutionaries been so flattered by having their experience sympathetically legitimized between hard covers so recently after the events happen. For that reason, the most read, and certainly the first read part of Sale's book is the (...) index where ex-SDS'ers will search for familiar names, places, and events. Those familiar areas will be covered with varying degrees of success depending on the reader's particular experience, yet for many this book will fail to serve that purpose adequately. (shrink)

La niche en conglomérat SD 108 est proche de l’entrée du sanctuaire delphique d’Apollon. Depuis sa découverte, on a beaucoup écrit au sujet de son architecture, de sa datation et surtout de sa destination première, mais la connaissance des réalités du terrain égalait rarement celle des textes. Au bout de près de soixante-dix ans, G. Roux a démontré, contre l’opinion commune, qu’elle ne pouvait pas avoir contenu les statues des «Navarques » érigées en mémoire de la victoire lacédémonienne d’Aigos-Potamoi, mais (...) il s’est trompé sur le reste. Le dossier archéologique constitué à partir de 1966 a permis d’établir que SD 108 était d’époque classique et comportait une colonnade prostyle irrégulière de douze colonnes doriques dressées sur un podium. Cette forme insolite se doublait d’un aménagement intérieur extraordinaire. Enfin l’orientation, différente de celle des autres niches, semble avoir correspondu à celle du monument des «Navarques » et découlé d’un remaniement de tout le secteur Sud-Est. (shrink)

In late 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic began to spread over the world, causing millions of deaths. In the first few months of the pandemic, several countries prevented the spread of the pandemic successfully. By contrast, the pandemic in many other countries was not controlled well. For example, India encountered a second serious outbreak of COVID-19 from April 2021 due to the poor resistance measures implemented by the government. To figure out the effective countermeasures to the pandemic, this research proposes a (...) COVID-19 pandemic and its response system, which consists of the infection subsystem, the quarantine subsystem, and the medical subsystem. On this basis, an improved SEIR-SD model is established which is utilized to analyze the response measures to the pandemic quantitatively. This model successfully simulates the actual epidemic scenarios in Wuhan, which verifies its effectiveness. Afterward, the impact of hospital administration rate, quarantine rate, average contact number, and contact infection rate on the cumulative number of infections and deaths are analyzed by simulation. The results show that both the medical and administrative efforts, especially in the early stage of the epidemic, are significant in reducing the number of infections and shortening the epidemic period. In the medical aspect, the more stringent quarantine brings the earlier inflection point of the epidemic; more importantly, improving the treatment rate significantly reduces the scale of the epidemic. In the administrative aspect, enforcing individual protection and strict community closure can effectively cut off the transmission of the virus and curb the spread of the epidemic. Finally, this research proposes several practical suggestions in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The main contribution of this research is that the effects of different response measures on the number of new infections daily and the cumulative number of deaths of a country or region in the COVID-19 pandemic are estimated quantitatively based on modeling and simulation. (shrink)

Delphica 6. Notes on the stairway of the theater at Delphi (SD 541) The stairway, made of limestone, by which one reached the theater at Delphi since its discovery (end of the 19th c.) was dismantled in 1974. Below it were discovered two earlier ones, made of poros, a third of the width and seemingly not related to the theater. The datings have varied according to time and author. The limestone stairway has even been considered a paleochristian construction. It is (...) true that its first narrow flight of steps resulted from a transformation of that date. But a trace still visible on the string wall permits documenting the original profile of this part and reconstituting a width equal to the rest of the structure, thus restoring a monumental aspect to the ensemble. The date must be that now attributed to the theater : 160-150. (shrink)

Roman Darowski. Philosophical Anthropology: Outline of Fundamental Problems. Translated from Polish by Łukasz Darowski SDS. Wydawnictwo Ignatianum [Editions of Ignatianum, The Jesuit University of Cracow, Wydawnictwo WAM: Cracow, 2014.—Author’s summary The translation of this book into English we are dealing with here is a somewhat changed and revised version of the 4th edition of Filozofia człowieka in Polish. The last section has been expanded, while the “History of Philosophical Anthropology” chapter and the Anthology of Texts section have both been omitted.

Last year marked the appearance of an English-language book entitled Philosophical Anthropology: Outline of Fundamental Problems. It is, in actuality, an English translation of the most frequently reprinted work of the distinguished philosopher and expert on the history of Jesuit philosophy in Poland, Father Professor Roman Darowski. Although Philosophical Anthropology: Outline of Fundamental Problems is, excluding some of its parts, a translation rather than a new book, the fact of its appearance in English deserves to be noted and discussed, as (...) the new English-language version will allow it to reach a significantly wider range of readers than before. (shrink)