This uniquely fascinating volume is not merely a learned treatise in historical semantics; it is itself a stupendous display of world harmony as a creed-a vivid demonstration that "all is all.".

We contrast reactive and endogenously active perspectives on brain activity. Both have been pursued continuously in neurophysiology laboratories since the early 20thcentury, but the endogenous perspective has received relatively little attention until recently. One of the many successes of the reactive perspective was the identification, in the second half of the 20th century, of the distinctive contributions of different brain regions involved in visual processing. The recent prominence of the endogenous perspective is due to new findings of ongoing oscillatory activity (...) in the brain at a wide range of time scales, exploiting such techniques as single-cell recording, EEG, and fMRI. We recount some of the evidence pointing to ways in which this endogenous activity is relevant to cognition and behavior. Our major objective is to consider certain implications of the contrast between the reactive and endogenous perspectives. In particular, we relate these perspectives to two different characterizations of explanation in the new mechanistic philosophy of science. In a basic mechanistic explanation, the operations of a mechanism are characterized qualitatively and as functioning sequentially until a terminating condition is realized. In contrast, a dynamic mechanistic explanation allows for non-sequential organization and emphasizes quantitative modeling of the mechanisms's behavior. For example, with appropriate parameter values a set of differential equations can be used to demonstrate ongoing oscillations in a system organized with feedback loops. We conclude that the basic conception of mechanistic explanation is adequate for reactive accounts of brain activity, but dynamical accounts are required to explain sustained, endogenous activity. (shrink)

The present paper argues that there is ample corpus evidence of statistical preemption for learners to make use of. In the case of argument structure constructions, a verbi is preempted from appearing in a construction A, CxA, if and only if the following probability is high: P(CxB|context that would be suitable for CxA and verbi). For example, the probability of hearing a preemptive construction, given a context that would otherwise be well-suited for the ditransitive is high for verbs like explain (...) that overwhelmingly appear in the dative, and low for verbs like tell that readily appear in the ditransitive. Strength of statistical preemption is determined both by this probability, and by the frequency (ln (F)) of a verb in a preemptive construction when the context is at least as well suited to the preempted construction. The critiques of preemption by Stefanowitsch (Cognitive Linguistics 19: 513–531, 2008, this volume) are countered by arguing that the relevant probabilities were not considered. Moreover, we find evidence that constructions are somewhat less constrained when yoked to non-alternating verbs, as Stefanowitsch (cf. this volume) suggests should be the case. (shrink)

Wikipedia is known as a free online encyclopedia. Wikipedia uses largely transparent writing and editing processes, which aim at providing the user with quality information through a democratic collaborative system. However, one aspect of these processes is not transparent—the identity of contributors, editors, and administrators. We argue that this particular lack of transparency jeopardizes the validity of the information being produced by Wikipedia. We analyze the social and ethical consequences of this lack of transparency in Wikipedia for all users, but (...) especially students; we assess the corporate social performance issues involved, and we propose courses of action to compensate for the potential problems. We show that Wikipedia has the appearance, but not the reality, of responsible, transparent information production. (shrink)

A new theoretical approach to language has emerged in the past 10–15 years that allows linguistic observations about form–meaning pairings, known as ‘construc- tions’, to be stated directly. Constructionist approaches aim to account for the full range of facts about language, without assuming that a particular subset of the data is part of a privileged ‘core’. Researchers in this field argue that unusual constructions shed light on more general issues, and can illuminate what is required for a complete account of (...) language. (shrink)

In a well-known text called ‘The Communist Hypothesis’, first published in 2007, the renowned philosopher Alain Badiou breathed fresh life into the idea of communism as an intellectual representation that provides a critical perspective on existing politics and offers a systemic alternative to capitalism. Now, in the course of this wide-ranging conversation with Peter Engelmann, Alain Badiou explains why he continues to value the idea of communism against the background of current social crises and despite negative historical experiences. From the (...) anticipation of a communism without a state to the problem of the concept of democracy and an analysis of capitalism as a system, the two thinkers discuss the key political issues of our time. Whilst explaining his political philosophy, Badiou also reflects on current socio-political developments such as the turmoil in the Middle East and the situation in China. This compelling dialogue is both a highly topical contribution to the question of how we might organize our societies differently and an accessible introduction to Badiou's philosophical thinking. (shrink)

Introduction: The purpose, perspective, and method of this volume -- Part 1. Love and sexuality: True and false promises. Ch.1. True and false promises of happiness and freedom ; Ch.2. True and false promises of the homosexual lifestyle, pornography, gender change, and artificial birth control -- Part 2. Matters of life and death. Ch. 3. Abortion, eugenics, invitro fertilization and embryonic stem cells ; Ch. 4. Physician assisted suicide, euthanasia, self-defense and torture -- Part 3. Charity and social ethics. Ch. (...) 5 Honesty, charity, and the need for objective moral norms ; Ch. 6. How Christ and the Catholic Church transformed the world: institutions of charity and principles of social ethics ; Ch. 7. The social teaching of the Catholic Church -- Conclusion to the trilogy: reevangelizing the culture. (shrink)

Cognitive science is, more than anything else, a pursuit of cognitive mechanisms. To make headway towards a mechanistic account of any particular cognitive phenomenon, a researcher must choose among the many architectures available to guide and constrain the account. It is thus fitting that this volume on contemporary debates in cognitive science includes two issues of architecture, each articulated in the 1980s but still unresolved: " • Just how modular is the mind? – a debate initially pitting encapsulated mechanisms against (...) highly interactive ones. • Does the mind process language-like representations according to formal rules? – a debate initially pitting symbolic architectures against less language-like architectures. " Our project here is to consider the second issue within the broader context of where cognitive science has been and where it is headed. The notion that cognition in general—not just language processing—involves rules operating on language-like representations actually predates cognitive science. In traditional philosophy of mind, mental life is construed as involving propositional attitudes—that is, such attitudes towards propositions as believing, fearing, and desiring that they be true—and logical inferences from them. On this view, if a person desires that a proposition be true and believes that if she performs a certain action it will become true, she will make the inference and perform the action. (shrink)

New Proofs for the Existence of God responds to these glaring omissions. / From universal space-time asymmetry to cosmic coincidences to the intelligibility of ...

This paper provides a concise overview of Constructions at Work (Goldberg 2006). The book aims to investigate the relevant levels of generalization in adult language, how and why generalizations are learned by children, and how to account for cross-linguistic generalizations.

Western culture has been moving away from its Christian roots for several centuries but the turn from Christianity accelerated in the 20th century. At the core of this decline is a loss of a sense of our own transcendence. Scientific materialism has so seriously impacted our belief in human transcendence that many people find it difficult to believe in God and the human soul. This anti-transcendent perspective has not only cast its spell on the natural sciences, psychology, philosophy, and literature, (...) it has also negatively impacted popular culture through the writings of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and many others. The warning signs of this loss of transcendence have been expressed by thinkers as diverse as Carl Jung (psychiatrist), Mircea Eliade (historian of religion), Gabriel Marcel (philosopher), C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. These warnings were validated by a 2004 study in the American Journal of Psychiatry which showed that the absence of religion alone was responsible for a marked increase in suicide rates, sense of meaningless, substance abuse, separation from family, and other psychiatric problems. Thus, the loss of transcendence is negatively affecting not only individuals’ sense of happiness, dignity, ideals, virtues, and destiny, but also the culture. Ironically, the evidence for transcendence is greater today than in any other period in history. The problem is – this evidence has not been compiled and propagated. Fr. Spitzer’s book provides a bright light in the midst of this cultural darkness by presenting both traditional and contemporary evidence for God and a transphysical soul from several major sources. He also shows how human consciousness and intelligence is completely special – and cannot be replicated by artificial intelligence or animal consciousness. We are transcendent beings with souls capable of surviving bodily death – self-reflective beings aware of perfect truth, love, goodness, and beauty. We are beings with an unrestricted capacity to know and create science, law, culture, art, music, literature, and so much more. The evidence reveals that we have the dignity of being created in the very image of God, and if we underestimate it, we will undervalue one another, underlive our lives, and underachieve our destiny. This work is the most comprehensive treatment of human transcendence available today. (shrink)

Grief and its Transcendence: Memory, Identity, Creativity is a landmark contribution that provides fresh insights into the experience and process of mourning. It includes fourteen original essays by pre-eminent psychoanalysts, historians, classicists, theologians, architects, art-historians and artists, that take on the subject of normal, rather than pathological mourning. In particular, it considers the diversity of the mourning process; the bereavement of ordinary vs. extraordinary loss; the contribution of mourning to personal and creative growth; and individual, social, and cultural means of (...) transcending grief. The book is divided into three parts, each including two to four essays followed by one or two critical discussions. Co-editor _Adele Tutter’s_ Prologue outlines the salient themes and tensions that emerge from the volume. Part I juxtaposes the consideration of grief in antiquity with an examination of the contemporary use of memorials to facilitate communal remembrance. Part II offers intimate first-person accounts of mourning from four renowned psychoanalysts that challenge long-held psychoanalytic formulations of mourning. Part III contains deeply personal essays that explore the use of sculpture, photography, and music to withstand, mourn, and transcend loss on individual, cultural and political levels. Drawing on the humanistic wisdom that underlies psychoanalytic thought, co-editor _Léon Wurmser’s_ Epilogue closes the volume. Grief and its Transcendence will be a must for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, psychiatrists, and scholars within other disciplines who are interested in the topics of grief, bereavement and creativity. (shrink)

This five-step metaphysical proof borrows from the metaphysical thought of Aquinas as well as from Bernard Lonergan’s proof of God in Insight. It makes several advances to proofs of God. Most importantly, by showing that an unconditioned reality must be unrestrictedly intelligible, the second step of the proof is original and lays a stronger foundation than previous proofs for the uniqueness of an unconditioned reality as well as its identification with an unrestricted act of thinking. This point strengthens the argument (...) that this unique reality is a creator of everything else in reality. In so doing, it responds to contemporary criticisms of proofs of God by Richard Dawkins and others. This proof also adapts metaphysical ideas and terms to those arising out of the contemporary scientific world view, so that it is relevant and applicable to quantum and relativity theory, quantum cosmology, and other contemporary cosmological ideas, such as a multiverse and multidimensional physical realities. (shrink)

We contend that diagrams are tools not only for communication but also for supporting the reasoning of biologists. In the mechanistic research that is characteristic of biology, diagrams delineate the phenomenon to be explained, display explanatory relations, and show the organized parts and operations of the mechanism proposed as responsible for the phenomenon. Both phenomenon diagrams and explanatory relations diagrams, employing graphs or other formats, facilitate applying visual processing to the detection of relevant patterns. Mechanism diagrams guide reasoning about how (...) the parts and operations work together to produce the phenomenon and what experiments need to be done to improve on the existing account. We examine how these functions are served by diagrams in circadian rhythm research. (shrink)

This study aims at discussing Global Business Citizenship Experiments (GBCE) as adaptation and selection mechanisms in organizations. GBCE are processes used by companies operating abroad to deal with discrepancies between their own principles and values and local norms, or the lack of them. I argue that these processes lead to adaptation of the individual companies to their environment, and to the evolution of organizational forms in the population.

This is the most comprehensive scientific treatment of God and the afterlife to date. It combines natural scientific method, metaphysical method, medical studies, anthropological and genetics studies, and phenomenological descriptions, showing how each distinct method and data set reinforces the others.

The idea that correspondences relating grammatical relations and semantics (argument structure constructions) are needed to account for simple sentence types is reviewed, clarified, updated and compared with two lexicalist alternatives. Traditional lexical rules take one verb as ‘input’ and create (or relate) a different verb as ‘output’. More recently, invisible derivational verb templates have been proposed, which treat argument structure patterns as zero derivational affixes that combine with a root verb to yield a new verb. While the derivational template perspective (...) can address several problems that arise for traditional lexical rules, it still faces problems in accounting for idioms, which often contain specifications that are not appropriately assigned to individual verbs or derivational affixes (regarding adjuncts, modification, and inflection). At the same time, it is clear that verbs play a central role in determining their distribution. The balance between verbs and phrasal argument structure constructions is addressed via the Principles of Semantic Coherence and Correspondence together with a usage-based hierarchy of constructions that contains entries which can include particular verbs and other lexical material. (shrink)

In two experiments, participants had to choose between a sure and a risky option. The sure option was presented either in a gain or a loss frame. Need was defined as a minimum score the participants had to reach. Moreover, choices were made under two different time constraints and with three different levels of induced need to be reached within a fixed number of trials. The two experiments differed with respect to the specific amounts to win and the need levels. (...) The $$2 \times 2 \times 3$$2×2×3 design was a within-subject design. Data were evaluated on an overall and on a group level, the latter based on participants’ stated risk preference and on revealed preferences using cluster analysis across subjects. Overall, the results showed riskier behavior when the choice options were presented as losses as compared to gains and when the induced need was highest. Time limits enhanced the framing effect. (shrink)

This article juxtaposes Anna Pawełczyńska’s writings with the works of Meir Dworzecki and Dov Levin. It will adopt a threefold analytical lens: first, using Pawełczyńska’s writings to reassess the conception of the early resistance that Dworzecki elaborated, second utilising Dworzecki’s viewpoint as a means to articulate Pawełczyńska’s perspective of Amidah, and then looking at Levin’s perspective on Pawełczyńska’s use of partisan testimony as a historical source. The main aims are to contribute to today’s debates on the Jewish resistance and the (...) relevance of partisanship in Holocaust historiography. The article also highlights some debates on the relationship between history and memory, as well as the necessity of rethinking Catholic-Jewish relations in Poland before and after the war. It presses for a new discussion of Dan Michman’s discourse of Jewish resistance, or Yehuda Bauer’s conceptualisation of it, and underscores the originality of Levin’s thought on memory as an essential tool for history. By way of a conclusion, the reader is invited to rethink the Polish World War II historiography and to read Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik’s contribution about the blessings of the Amidah. (shrink)

There are times when a curiously odd relic of language presents us with a thread, which when pulled, reveals deep and general facts about human language. This paper unspools such a case. Prior to 1930, English speakers uniformly preferred male-before-female word order in conjoined nouns such asuncles and aunts; nephews and nieces; men and women. Since then, at least a half dozen items have systematically reversed their preferred order (e.g.,aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews) while others have not (men and (...) women). We review evidence that the unusual reversals began withmother and dad(dy)and spread to semantically and morphologically related binomials over a period of decades. The present work proposes that three aspects ofcognitive accessibilitycombine to quantify the probability of A&B order: (1) the relative accessibility of the A&B terms individually, (2) competition from B&A order, and critically, (3) cluster strength (i.e., similarity to related A'&B' cases). The emergent cluster of female-first binomials highlights the influence of semantic neighborhoods in memory retrieval. We suggest that cognitive accessibility can be used to predict the word order of both familiar and novel binomials generally, as well as the diachronic change focused on here. (shrink)

Provides an account of how necessary subjective syntactic investments on the part of speakers affect the semantic contents of their words and the possibilities for their thought-contents.

February 1, 2000 TABLE OF CONTENTS TABLE OF AUTHORITIES......................................................................................... .......................ii STATEMENT OF INTEREST............................................................................................ ................. v..

With the increasing volume of data transmission through insecure communication channels, big data security has become one of the important concerns in the cybersecurity domain. To address these concerns and keep data safe, a robust privacy-preserving cryptosystem is necessary. Such a solution relies on chaos encryption algorithms over standard cryptographic methods that possess multistage encryption levels, including high speed, high security, low compute overheads, and procedural power, among other characteristics. In this work, a secure image encryption scheme is proposed using (...) linear feedback shift register and chaos-based quantum chaotic map. The focus of the scheme is mainly dependent on the secret keys from the input of the algorithm. The threat landscape, the statistical test analysis, along critical comparisons with other schemes indicate that the presented algorithm is significantly secure and is resistant to a wide range of different attacks such as differential and statistical attacks. The proposed method has sufficiently higher sensitivity and security when compared to existing encryption algorithms. Several security parameters validated the security of proposed work such as correlation coefficient analyses among the neighboring pixels, entropy, the number of pixels change rate, unified average change intensity, mean square error, brute force, key sensitivity, and peak signal to noise ratio analyses. The randomness of the ciphers produced by the proposed technique is also passed through NIST-800-22. The results of NIST indicate that the ciphers are highly random and do not produce any type of periodicity or pattern. (shrink)

The purpose of this essay is to formulate a sociological critique of the concept of scarcity in mainstream economics by synthesising necessary conceptions in the construction of a theoretical structure with greater explanatory power than the current mainstream articulation. Mainstream economics asserts the universality of scarcity. A critical scrutiny of this assertion is conducted by discussing the empirical phenomenon of global hunger in relation to a theoretical elaboration of the concepts of scarcity and abundance. The historical origins of the scarcity (...) postulate is traced to the work of Carl Menger. The concern of global hunger shows that there is abundance of food goods, but still frustration of human needs occurs. An alternative approach is developed through a theoretical synthesis of Menger, Amartya Sen and critical realism, which asserts an ontologically stratified, differentiated and geo-historically conditioned understanding of scarcity and abundance. It is proposed that this approach is more fruitful than the scarcity postulate in explaining the process and conditions of frustration and satisfaction of human needs. Merely postulating scarcity tends to veil the underlying causes of poverty in general and hunger in particular. Central implications of the new model for socioeconomic analysis are considered. (shrink)

Different from other books on Fanon, this book approaches him as both a political philosopher and political sociologist of the African experience.

The sequencing of the entire human genome has opened up unprecedented possibilities for healthcare, but also ethical and social dilemmas about how these can be achieved, particularly in developing countries. UNESCO's Bioethics Programme was established to address such issues in 1993. Since then, it has adopted three declarations on human genetics and bioethics (1997, 2003 and 2005), set up numerous training programmes around the world and debated the need for an international convention on human reproductive cloning. Negotiating Bioethics presents Langlois' (...) research on the negotiation and implementation of the three declarations and the human cloning debate, based on fieldwork carried out in Kenya, South Africa, France and the UK, among policy-makers, geneticists, ethicists, civil society representatives and industry professionals. The book examines whether the UNESCO Bioethics Programme is an effective forum for (a) decision-making on bioethics issues and (b) ensuring ethical practice. Considering two different aspects of the UNESCO Bioethics Programme - deliberation and implementation - at international and national levels, Langlois explores: - how relations between developed and developing countries can be made more equal - who should be involved in global level decision-making and how this should proceed - how overlap between initiatives can be avoided - what can be done to improve the implementation of international norms by sovereign states - how far universal norms can be contextualized - what impact the efficacy of national level governance has at international level Drawing on extensive empirical research, Negotiating Bioethics presents a truly global perspective on bioethics. (shrink)