Contracts play an important role in business management where relationships among different parties are dictated by legal rules. Electronic contracts have emerged mostly due to technological advances and electronic trading between companies and customers. New challenges have then arisen to guarantee reliability among the stakeholders in electronic negotiations. In this scenario, automatic verification of electronic contracts appeared as an imperative support, specially the conflict detection task of multi-party contracts. The problem of checking contracts has been largely addressed in the literature, (...) but there are few, if any, methods and practical tools that can deal with multi-party contracts using a contract language with deontic and dynamic aspects as well as relativizations, over the same formalism. In this work we present an automatic checker for finding conflicts on multi-party contracts modeled by an extended contract language with deontic operators and relativizations. Moreover a well-known case study of sales contract is modeled and automatically verified by our tool. Further, we performed practical experiments in order to evaluate the efficiency of our method and the practical tool. (shrink)

This brief note discusses the previous interpretations proposed for the list of dishes in Ar. fr. 264 K.-A.. By examining the sources provided by the scholars (Suet. Nero 25; Eratosth. FGrHist 14; Plut. Glor. Ath. 6, 349a 10-13), it is argued that the fragment is neither centered on an unspecified ritual nor on the habit of φυλλοβολία. A figured interpretation of the fragment in a meta-literary sense is eventually recommended.

Passed away in the early summer of 2021, Virgilio Mura practiced political philosophy following the method of conceptual analysis, in the wake of the tradition generated by neo-empiricism and far from “analytical philosophy” that become dominant in the last half century. In Mura’s thought, seriousness as rigor in the application of the analytical method is combined with the defence of secularism, expressed in his stance in favour of a form of relativism that should not be confused with indifferentism.

The present paper aims at reviewing the complex of “Santa Agnese fuori le mura”, the most important architectural ensemble along the Via Nomentana, and one of the most renowned sanctuaries of the suburban landscape of Rome. This paper focuses, in particular, on today’s church, built right over the martyr’s burial by Pope Onorius between 628 and 635 A.D., and attempts to reconstruct its original appearance, taking into account both the status quaestionis and literary sources. Finally, research findings have been (...) translated into a 3-D reconstruction of the church, in order to highlight the ancient close relationship between the building and the adjacent land, which was compromised following the renovation works carried out at the beginning of the 17th century. (shrink)

In 1979 Bruno de Finetti gave a course at the “National Institute for Advanced Mathematics” in Rome. Alberto Mura took part in that course and agreed with de Finetti to record it on tape. What appears in this volume is Mura’s transcription of the 19 course sessions, taking the form of a seminar. The result is a very interesting book, containing many insightful remarks, which throw new light on the thought of the most outstanding representative of the subjectivist (...) approach to probability. (shrink)

El presente artículo es una traducción comentada de la Causa de la fundación de las escuelas, una particular “historia de la filosofía”, obra de Bahadbeshabba, intelectual nestoriano de la Escuela de Nisibi, del siglo VI-VII. Ésta es la continuación del artículo aparecido en el número anterior de ‘Ilu, que contiene la introducción y la bibliografía. Palabras clave: Bahadbeshabba (cArbayâ / de Halwan), Escuela de Nisibi, Cristianismo siro-nestoriano, filosofía siríaca, recepción de la filosofía griega en la cultura siríaca.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Doctor at War, Doctor Washing FeetLuke MillerThis man is any one of my patients. Cancer is in his body, he has been told, and now this story has become connected with some fact of bodily functioning. The tumor is now in his brain, the MRI report says, and now some weakness, headache, confusion, or dimming of his sight corroborates this finding. In the white–walled clinic room he speaks with (...) me, the resident doctor, as the attending doctor studies the pictures of his brain on a computer screen. He sits on the edge of the examining table, and his wife, or daughter, or concerned friend looks on. She is the one with the anxious face, the tightened lips; he is more open and still, relaxed into his position, sitting on the edge of this table in this white room, as the cancer sits inside him, growing and changing.The neurologic exam starts from the head and works its way down, to the very end of the big toes; at least, that is how I was taught to perform it, and that is how it is organized in my mind, so that is how I must carry it out. There is the high-est—the thinking skills that process the world and express it in intelligible language—and the lowest, the most distant nerves I imagine as simple conduits of a binary signal: off or on, yes or no. My exam, however, betrays this simple hierarchy of nerves. In everything I measure, there is some [End Page 202] participation of high and low, of brain and distant simple nerve.Two years bridged college and medical school. I lived in Rome for four months during this time, learning Italian, visiting churches large (Saint Peter’s, San Paolo Fuori le Mura) and small (San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, Santa Maria della Vittoria). I had graduated from a small Midwestern Mennonite college, where most of the people I passed and greeted on campus every day were my friends (and relatives, given the tight–knit ethnic heritage of most Mennonites in the United States.) In my previous travel to Europe I had been studying Mennonite history with a class, tracing the stories of the Anabaptist martyrs, the ancestors of the Mennonites, and the centuries of persecution that started in the time of the Reformation and stretched to living memory. In my childhood their stories had mixed with stories from the Bible: the fires of the faithful burned at the stake, the tongue screws to keep them from witnessing to their beliefs as they burned, the Anabaptist prisoner who turned back during his own escape across a frozen river to save his drowning pursuer, giving his own life for his enemy’s, like Christ. We are not a people of war, these stories taught us; we are a people of God’s peace. We are not a people of this world, we were taught; my ancestors emigrated to Russia and North America to found their own separate communities to live out their vision of God’s kingdom on the earth. We are citizens of a country, but do not pledge allegiance to a national flag. We will give our lives to save others, even our enemies, we are taught, but will not kill or do violence even to protect our own. In my travels after college, my story, the martyr stories, the story of my small people, seemed so minor next to the beauty of Rome, the aqueducts, fountains, bright mosaics, ancient churches made of heavy stone.New images and new stories continued to fill my world as I began medical school. In a single afternoon’s lecture the embryo became a blastocyst, and then exploded into a multitude of cells, folding as it grew. “My” cadaver, opened with a simple blade, presented new lessons for me every day: nerves to trace, organs to map, muscles and vessels to name. Inside the whole, the human, were a hundred organs, each with its own secrets and sicknesses, a trillion cycling cells.Mennonites wash feet. It’s a ritual, or as close as a non–sacramental, non–clerical community might have to a ritual. We do... (shrink)

This note makes a contribution to the issue raised in a paper by Popper and Miller (1983) in which it was claimed that probabilistic support is purely deductive. Developing R. C. Jeffrey's remarks, a new general approach to the crucial concept of "going beyond" is here proposed. By means of it a quantitative measure of the inductive component of a probabilistic inference is reached. This proposal leads to vindicating the view that typical predictive probabilistic inferences by enumeration and analogy are (...) purely inductive. (shrink)

Today philosophical discussion on indicative conditionals is dominated by the so called Lewis Triviality Results, according to which, tehere is no binary connective '-->' (let alone truth-functional) such that the probability of p --> q equals the probability of q conditionally on p, so that P(p --> q)= P(q|p). This tenet, that suggests that conditonals lack truth-values, has been challenged in 1991 by Goodman et al. who show that using a suitable three-valued logic the above equation may be restored. In (...) this paper it is first analysed a long neglected paper by Bruno de Finetti, written in 1935, where the essentials of Goodman's theory was clearly outlined. It is also stressed that de Finetti anticipated Kleene's as well as Bochvar and Blamey ideas. In the second part of the paper it is argued that the de Finetti-Goodman's original theory is defective and leads to absurd results. However, a new semantics, called semantics of hypervaluations, is here defined, that avoids the defects of the original theory. This appears to be a powerful challenge to Lewis Triviality results and to the thesis by which conditionals lack truth-values as well. (shrink)

In this article a reference to Jacques Lacan’s ‘capitalist discourse’ will help highlight the bio-political workings of neo-liberalism in times of austerity, detecting the transition from so-called ‘debt economy’ to an ‘economy of anxiety.’ An ‘il-liberal’ turn at the core of neoliberal discourses will be examined in particular, which pivots on an ‘astute’ intersecting between outbursts of renunciation; irreducible circularity of guilt and satisfaction; persistent attachment to forms of dissipative enjoyment; and a pervasive blackmail under the register of all-encompassing regulations (...) and evaluations — all of which elevates the production of success up to the point of a production and consumption of failure. (shrink)

Bypassing Lewis’ Triviality Results. A Kripke-Style Partial Semantics for Compounds of Adams’ Conditionals Alberto Mura University of Sassari Abstract According to Lewis’ Triviality Results (LTR), conditionals cannot satisfy the equa­tion (E) P(C if A) = P(C | A), except in trivial cases. Ernst Adams (1975), however, provided a probabilistic semantics for the so-called simple conditionals that also sat­isfies equation (E) and provides a probabilistic counterpart of logical consequence (called p-entailment). Adams’ probabilistic semantics is coextensive to Stalnaker­Thomason’s (1970) and Lewis’ (...) (1973) semantics as far as simple conditionals are concerned. A theorem, proved in McGee 1981, shows that no truth-functional many-valued logic allows a relation of logical consequence coextensive with Adams’ p-entailment. This paper presents a modified modal (Kripke-style) version of de Finetti’s se­mantics that escapes McGee’s result and provides a general truth-conditional se­mantics for indicative conditionals. It agrees with Adams’ logic and is not affected by LTR. The new framework encompasses and extends Adams’ probabilistic se­mantics (APS) to compounds of conditionals. A generalised set of axioms for prob­ability over the set of tri-events is provided, which coincide with the standard axioms over the set of the two-valued ordinary sentences. -/- Keywords: Conditionals, Probability logic, de Finetti, Tri-events, Adams’ logic, Stal­naker’s thesis, Partial logic, Lewis’ triviality results, Ramsey test. (shrink)

Carl Schmitt’s critical insights into ‘economic-technical thinking’ and the dominant role that a ‘magical technicity’ is said to assume in the social horizon of his times offers an opportunity to reframe contemporary debates on political and economic theology, exposing a theological core behind technocratic administration. Starting from this premise, the article engages with recent inquiries into so-called ‘debt economy’, assessing the affective function that ‘deferment’ and ‘confession’ perform as dominant operators in the social imaginary of neoliberal governance.

This article inquires into the clinical figure of paranoia and its constitutive role in the articulation of the nation-state discourse in Europe, uncovering a central tension between a principle of integrity and a dualist spatial configuration. A conceptual distinction between ‘border’ (finis) and ‘frontier’ (limes) will help to expose the political effects of such a tension, unveiling the way in which a solid and striated organisation of space has been mobilised in the topographic antagonism of the nation, sustaining the phantasm (...) of a self-enclosed, self-sufficient finitude. (shrink)

This article pursues a topological reading of Milestones, one of the most influential books in the history of Islamism. Written by Muslim thinker Sayyid Qutb, the general interest in this crucial text has largely remained restricted to the fields of Islamic Studies and Security Studies. This article aims to make the case for assuming a philosophical standpoint, relocating its significance beyond the above-mentioned fields. A creative and topological reading of this text will allow the spatial complexity of Qutb’s eschatological vision (...) to be fully exposed, while also unpacking the way in which antagonistic relations have variously been articulated by this thinker. The underlying conviction is that such an examination can offer new perspectives from which to examine and develop current debates on political universalism and antagonism in the tradition of continental philosophy. (shrink)

Thirty-four scholars from 18 countries on five continents met in Cairo to debate for the first time the ideals of the Enlightenment and secularism while celebrating the 800th anniversary of the death of one of Islam's greatest philosophers. Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd (1126-1198), known in the West as Averroës, may be viewed as a medieval precursor of the European Enlightenment and as a rallying point for dialogue between East and West. Averroës's attempt to harmonise philosophy and religion, reason and faith, (...) led to a rethinking of the tenets of Christianity. His work spurred on some of the great rational syntheses of Christian thought, such as Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica. This book offers a rare opportunity to learn about the contemporary Arab world and its efforts to dialogue with the West. (shrink)

This paper presents a new account of Hume’s “probability of causes”. There are two main results attained in this investigation. The first, and perhaps the most significant, is that Hume developed – albeit informally – an essentially sound system of probabilistic inductive logic that turns out to be a powerful forerunner of Carnap’s systems. The Humean set of principles include, along with rules that turn out to be new for us, well known Carnapian principles, such as the axioms of semiregularity, (...) symmetry with respect to individuals (exchangeability), predictive irrelevance and positive instantial relevance. The second result is that Hume developed an original conception of probability, which is subjective in character, although it differs from contemporary personalistic views because it includes constraints that are additional to simple consistency and do not vary between different persons. The final section is a response to Gower’s thesis, by which Hume’s probability of causes is essentially non-Bayesian in character. It is argued that, on closer examination, Gower’s reading of the relevant passages is untenable and that, on the contrary, they are in accordance with the Bayesian reconstruction presented in this paper. (shrink)

We discuss the possible nature and role of non-physical entanglement, and the classical vs. non-classical interface, in models of human decision-making. We also introduce an experimental setting designed after the double-slit experiment in physics, and discuss how it could be used to discriminate between classical and non-classical interference effects in human decisions.

كتاب مهم موجه إلى كل معلم ومتعلم في عصر اندثرت به هذه الآداب أو تكاد تندثر مما يؤثر على سير عمليتي التعليم والتعلم.

Choice (Psychology); social psychology; Arab countries.

Papers from a conference on Averroës influence on the Enlightenment in Europe and the Arab world.