The concept of a proposition is important in several areas of philosophy and central to the philosophy of language. This collection of readings investigates many different philosophical issues concerning the nature of propositions and the ways they have been regarded through the years. Reflecting both the history of the topic and the range of contemporary views, the book includes articles from Bertrand Russell, Gottlob Frege, the Russell-Frege Correspondence, Alonzo Church, David Kaplan, John Perry, Saul Kripke, Hilary Putnam, Mark Richard, Scott (...) Soames, and Nathan Salmon. (shrink)

Metaphysics, Mathematics, and Meaning brings together Nathan Salmon's influential papers on topics in the metaphysics of existence, non-existence, and fiction; modality and its logic; strict identity, including personal identity; numbers and numerical quantifiers; the philosophical significance of Godel's Incompleteness theorems; and semantic content and designation. Including a previously unpublished essay and a helpful new introduction to orient the reader, the volume offers rich and varied sustenance for philosophers and logicians.

В книге представлены статьи современных российских философов, писателей, литературоведов о творчестве и миросозерцании русского философа и писателя Василия Васильевича Розанова (1856-1919). Труды розановедов собраны за последние 25 лет.

«Desde el punto de vista del discurso moderno e ilustrado sobre el sujeto, para este todo es posible; sin embargo, el discurso contemporáneo sobre el sujeto devuelve la tesis de que todo lo posible es ya pasado. [...] De un modo intuitivo pensamos que ser niño es, en cierta medida, tener un campo de posibilidad abierto e indefinido ---todo es posible--- pero que ese campo de posibilidades no ha sido decidido ni elegido, ni siquiera creado por uno ---todo lo posible (...) es ya pasado---. Si queremos saber cómo salir de la perplejidad, tenemos que entrar en la infancia y quizá buscar en ella alguna salida». «La filosofía, que es el oficio vital de Úbeda, ha meditado sobre la muerte, o sea, sobre la madurez y sobre la decrepitud de la vida; pero apenas ha prestado atención frontal a la infancia, e incluso no ha sabido relacionar con ella, como sin duda tendría que haber hecho, su modo de entender la muerte. Este libro reflexiona largamente acerca de la desconfianza y la deslealtad con la que, sobre todo el pensamiento moderno, se ha comportado respecto de la infancia. Jorge Úbeda habla desde la experiencia que busca retomar los términos esenciales de lo real y desde el conocimiento de una cultura cuya profundidad no siempre ha estado a la altura de lo Simple. Es la suya una voz que no debemos ya desatender nunca». (Miguel García-Baró). (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to assess student perceptions of self-plagiarism. Students at three university campuses offering graduate and undergraduate classes in a residential and online format were queried; 284 students responded. Overwhelmingly, students perceived they owned their own previous published works and over half reported they believed self-plagiarism should not be considered an academic honesty offense. Most faculty members did not provide information about self-plagiarism to their students. Only about one-fourth of the students reported recycling parts of an (...) assignment in the past. Students who took online courses were more likely to have been educated about self-plagiarism than those who took residential courses. Understanding students’ perceptions about academic honesty offenses such as plagiarism can help institutions develop effective policies and interventions. (shrink)

Ingolf U. Dalferth studies the complexity of this procedure in three thought processes which deal with the central concepts in the Christian understanding of malum as privation (a lack of good), as evil-doing and as a lack of faith.

This article discusses the concept of God with a focus on the translation of God in the Chinese and Yoruba religious contexts. Translating the word God is of the essence when comparing concepts of god. The translation of the Christian God as Olodumare misrepresents the latter. As suggested by Africanists, there should be appropriate translations for God, Olodumare, and other African gods. As a preliminary comparative attempt, this article presents a case on the introduction of God to the Chinese people. (...) The translation of God into Chinese reflects different views regarding the correlation between the Christian God and the Chinese gods. (shrink)

The increasing global demand for energy necessitates devoted attention to the formulation and exploration of mechanisms of thermal heat exchangers to explore and save heat energy. Thus, innovative thermal transport fluids require to boost thermal conductivity and heat flow features to upsurge convection heat rate, and nanofluids have been effectively employed as standard heat transfer fluids. With such intention, herein, we formulated and developed the constitutive flow laws by utilizing the Rossland diffusion approximation and Stephen’s law along with the MHD (...) effect. The mathematical formulation is based on boundary layer theory pioneered by Prandtl. Governing nonlinear partial differential flow equations are changed to ODEs via the implementation of the similarity variables. A well-known computational algorithm BVPh2 has been utilized for the solution of the nonlinear system of ODEs. The consequence of innumerable physical parameters on flow field, thermal distribution, and solutal field, such as magnetic field, Lewis number, velocity parameter, Prandtl number, drag force, Nusselt number, and Sherwood number, is plotted via graphs. Finally, numerical consequences are compared with the homotopic solution as a limiting case, and an exceptional agreement is found. (shrink)

Reincarnation is a death-specific and forward-looking philosophico-religious phenomenon that enjoys a cross-cultural appeal. It represents the theory that when the soul separates from the body at death, it informs another body for another round of earthly life. The debate on reincarnation has, so far, revolved around the reality or otherwise of reincarnation and the associated claims. In this article, we undertake a holistic and critical examination and appraisal of the key arguments underlying the reincarnation debate, with emphasis on the nature (...) and structure of reincarnation, as well as the value of reincarnation belief. The aim is to determine who gets what among the contending parties. Although oral interviews were involved in the exercise, textual and doctrinal analysis of extant literatures on reincarnation formed the predominant source of data for the research. Our finding reveals that although the phenomenon of reincarnation is bedeviled by internal contradictions and belief in it hardly justifiable, belief in it has some positive values, including coping and unifying values that could be harnessed for the well-being of people and society. These observed values of reincarnation and the attendant belief in it, the article concludes, do not constitute a conclusive proof of the reality of reincarnation.Contribution: The contributive value of this paper lies in bringing to the fore the fact that contrary to popular assumption, the notion of belief is in reality, epistemically more powerful than knowledge, at least in the context of religion. Considering that HTS Theological Studies focuses on religious issues and that ‘belief’ and ‘knowledge’ are religious concepts, we consider this paper to be suitable to its objectives. (shrink)

A generalization of Ehrenfest''s urn model is suggested. This will allow usto treat a wide class of stochastic processes describing the changes ofmicroscopic objects. These processes are homogeneous Markov chains. Thegeneralization proposed is presented as an abstract conditional (relative)probability theory. The probability axioms of such a theory and some simpleadditional conditions, yield both transition probabilities and equilibriumdistributions. The resulting theory interpreted in terms of particles andsingle-particle states, leads to the usual formulae of quantum and classicalstatistical mechanics; in terms of chromosomes (...) and allelic types, it allowsthe deduction of many genetical models including the Ewens sampling formula;in terms of agents'' strategies, it gives a justification of the ``herdbehaviour'''' typical of a population of heterogeneous economic agents. (shrink)

This paper introduces a possible alternative model of gravity based on the theory of fractional-dimension spaces and its applications to Newtonian gravity. In particular, Gauss’s law for gravity as well as other fundamental classical laws are extended to a D-dimensional metric space, where D can be a non-integer dimension. We show a possible connection between this Newtonian Fractional-Dimension Gravity (NFDG) and Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND), a leading alternative gravity model which accounts for the observed properties of galaxies and other astrophysical (...) structures without requiring the dark matter hypothesis. The MOND acceleration constant $${a_{0}} \simeq 1.2 \times 10^{-10} \text {m}\, \text{s}^{-2}$$ can be related to a natural scale length $$l_{0}$$ in NFDG, i.e., $$a_{0} \approx GM/l_{0}^{2}$$, for astrophysical structures of mass M, and the deep-MOND regime is present in regions of space where the dimension is reduced to $$D \approx 2$$. For several fundamental spherically-symmetric structures, we compare MOND results, such as the empirical Radial Acceleration Relation (RAR), circular speed plots, and logarithmic plots of the observed radial acceleration $$g_{obs}$$ vs. the baryonic radial acceleration $$g_{bar}$$, with NFDG results. We show that our model is capable of reproducing these results using a variable local dimension $$D\left( w\right)$$, where $$w =r/l_{0}$$ is a dimensionless radial coordinate. At the moment, we are unable to derive explicitly this dimension function $$D\left( w\right)$$ from first principles, but it can be obtained empirically in each case from the general RAR. Additional work on the subject, including studies of axially-symmetric structures, detailed galactic rotation curves fitting, and a possible relativistic extension, will be needed to establish NFDG as a viable alternative model of gravity. (shrink)

Ėtika i metodologii︠a︡ nauki -- Filosofii︠a︡ tekhnonauki -- Gumanitarnai︠a︡ ėkspertiza -- Bioėtika kak prakticheskiĭ filosofskiĭ proekt -- Problemy "uluchshenii︠a︡" cheloveka.

Objectives: To investigate whether Chinese adolescents in Hong Kong share similar perceptions with their Western counterparts regarding their capacity for autonomous decision-making, and secondarily whether Chinese parents underestimate their adolescent children's desire and capacity for autonomous decision-making.Method:‘Healthy Adolescents’ and their parents were recruited from four local secondary schools, and ‘Sick Adolescents’ and their parents from the pediatric wards and outpatient clinics. Their perceptions of adolescents' understanding of illnesses and treatments, maturity in judgment, risk-taking, openness to divergent opinions, pressure from parents (...) and doctors, submission to parental authority and preference for autonomy in medical decision-making are surveyed by a 50-item questionnaire on a five-point Likert scale.Results: Findings indicate that Chinese adolescents aged 14–16 perceive themselves to possess the necessary cognitive abilities and maturity in judgment to be autonomous decision-makers like their Western counterparts. Paradoxically, although they hesitate to assert their autonomy, they are also unwilling to surrender that autonomy to their parents even under coercion or intimidation. Parents tend to underestimate their adolescents' preferences for making autonomous decisions and overestimate the importance of parental authority in decision-making.Conclusion:‘14-and-above’ Chinese adolescents in Hong Kong perceive themselves as capable of autonomous decision-making in medically-related matters, but hesitate to assert their autonomy, probably because of the Confucian values of parental authority and filial piety that are deeply embedded in the local culture. (shrink)

Jesus the Jew is the primary signifier of Christianity's indebtedness to Judaism. This connection is both historical and continuous. In this book, Barbara Meyer shows how Christian memory, as largely intertwined with Jewish memory, provides a framework to examine the theological dimensions of historical Jesus research. She explores the topics that are central to the Jewishness of Jesus, such as the Christian relationship to law, and otherness as a Christological category. Through the lenses of the otherness of the Jewish Jesus (...) for contemporary Christians, she also discusses circumcision, natality, vulnerability, and suffering in dialogue with thinkers seldom drawn into Jewish-Christian discourse, notably Hannah Arendt, Julia Kristeva, Martha Nussbaum and Adi Ophir. Meyer demonstrates how the memory of Jesus' Jewishness is a key to reconfiguring contemporary challenges to Christian thought, such as particularity and otherness, law and ethics after the Shoah, human responsibility, and divine vulnerability. (shrink)

In this work, a co-infection model for human papillomavirus and Chlamydia trachomatis with cost-effectiveness optimal control analysis is developed and analyzed. The disease-free equilibrium of the co-infection model is shown not to be globally asymptotically stable, when the associated reproduction number is less unity. It is proven that the model undergoes the phenomenon of backward bifurcation when the associated reproduction number is less than unity. It is also shown that HPV re-infection induced the phenomenon of backward bifurcation. Numerical simulations of (...) the optimal control model showed that: focusing on HPV intervention strategy alone, in the absence of C. trachomatis control, leads to a positive population level impact on the total number of individuals singly infected with C. trachomatis, Concentrating on C. trachomatis intervention controls alone, in the absence of HPV intervention strategies, a positive population level impact is observed on the total number of individuals singly infected with HPV. Moreover, the strategy that combines and implements HPV and C. trachomatis prevention controls is the most cost-effective of all the control strategies in combating the co-infections of HPV and C. trachomatis. (shrink)

The overall objective of this research is to determine the religious perceptions and its levels of university youth and to interpret the findings from the point of view of their psychological features. This research consists of four chapter. These are: introduction, first chapter consist of discussions of the basic concepts such as religiosity, spirituality, second chapter that the data obtained from the survey was assessed the relationships with hypotheses and conclusions in which the findings were interpreted. The study’s population consists (...) of the students at the undergraduate level in faculties of the Erciyes University in 2011-2012. A questionnaire was administered on 553 students, chosen randomly in this population. The survey contains descriptive and Likert style items. As independent variables in this study, branches of science, faculty, department, class, age, gender, living environment for the longest time before coming to university, graduated high school, mother's and father's education level and the accommodation place during training have been taken. When analyzing the data, percentages, frequency distributions, descriptive statistics, analysis of variance (one-way ANOVA) and T-Tests and Chi-Square (x²) techniques were used. As a result of this research hypotheses associated with gender, age, branches of science, faculty and department were confirmed on the other hand the others were rejected. (shrink)

The building blocks and origins of life have fascinated scientists since the earliest of times. What is required for life to work in terms of building blocks? An outline of the building blocks that have to be present in living systems to allow the processes that are required for life is given. These building blocks have to be organised in a specific way to allow living processes to be functional, which are summarised in what is referred to as the seven (...) pillars of life. In essence, these are the fundamental characteristics of all living systems. Evidences of when and how living systems developed on the Earth shortly after the Earth established itself as a planet are discussed. This comes from the growing body of geological evidence of the age of rocks and rock formations in different places on the Earth. This review is concluded with the latest evidence of where on Earth living systems may have started. A large amount of uncertainty exists about these processes, but more and more consilient evidence is giving us important pointers as to the origins of life on the planet Earth.Contribution: As part of this special collection, the building blocks or origins of life give insights into the chemical principles and constituents of living organisms and how their interactions allow life to function on earth. (shrink)