This article investigates the capacity of artificial intelligence (AI) systems to claim the right to self-determination while exploring the prerequisites for individuals or entities to exercise control over their own destinies. The paper delves into the concept of autonomy as a fundamental aspect of self-determination, drawing a distinction between moral and legal autonomy and emphasizing the pivotal role of dignity in establishing legal autonomy. The analysis examines various theories of dignity, with a particular focus on Hannah Arendt’s perspective. Additionally, the (...) article discusses the influence of societal perceptions on AI, illustrating how AI's interactions in social contexts can shape public attitudes and compliance with legal rights. Ultimately, the article emphasizes the necessity of a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between AI, dignity, and the legal framework governing human rights, stressing the significance of recognizing dignity and societal acceptance in determining AI’s right to self-determination. (shrink)

The Tang period (618–907) stands out as one of the most important chapters of the history of early Inner Asia, where bilateral diplomatic interactions on the Chinese – Inner Asian frontier reached a high point. Since its establishment, the Tang pursued close relations with the neighboring Türk Qaghanate and various other Turkic and Mongolic speaking groups in the Inner Asian steppes. These relations, sometimes friendly, other times hostile, were to a great extent recorded in the official histories, a genre of (...) historical writing that was systematized with the establishment of Historiography Office at the Tang court. As political texts written with particular agendas, official histories present certain limitations. Recent archaeological research in both China and Inner Asia provide a different line of evidence for the study of diplomatic relations between China and Inner Asia. This paper aims to discuss the history of Pugu, a Turkic speaking Inner Asian group who had submitted to the Tang in the seventh century, through an analysis of the tomb inscription of Pugu Yitu, then leader of the Pugu, and an army general and court official of the Tang. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungIn der Nachkriegszeit war die bevorzugte Methode zur Nutzbarmachung von Flüssen die sogenannte integrierte Flussgebietsplanung (integrated river basin planning – IRBP), die eine ganzheitliche Betrachtung des Flussgebiets für eine Mehrzweckentwicklung erforderte. Während das Flusseinzugsgebiet in den Definitionen des IRBP-Konzepts als selbstverständliche natürliche Einheit der Planung angesehen wird, problematisiert dieser Artikel die Flusseinzugsgebietsidee und enthüllt die Politik hinter dem, was als natürlich (oder wissenschaftlich) gilt, mit besonderem Schwerpunkt auf den Erfahrungen der Türkei mit IRBP. Er untersucht geopolitische und nationale Motivationen und (...) Herausforderungen im Zusammenhang mit politics of scale im Euphrat-Tigris-Becken. Indem es sich dem IRBP als einem Prozess der Skalenbildung nähert, stützt es sich auf Diskussionen über Skalenpolitik in der Literatur zur politischen Ökologie, und ergänzt diese Diskussionen um eine historische Tiefendimension hinzu. Dabei liegt der Schwerpunkt auf der politischen und ökologischen Geschichte der Südosttürkei, die zum Schauplatz des ersten und umfangreichsten IRBP-Projekts der Türkei wurde, dem Südostanatolien-Projekt (GAP).Der Artikel dehnt die chronologischen Grenzen des GAP auf die Jahrzehnte vor den 1970er Jahren aus, als das Projekt initiiert wurde. Die historischen Daten des Artikels basieren größtenteils auf den Sitzungsakten der Großen Nationalversammlung der Türkei, den Archiven einer Tageszeitung und den Expertenberichten zum GAP. Die Analyse hebt die Skalenpolitik als mächtigen Bestandteil der Politik der technologischen Entwicklung hervor und zeigt, wie wichtig die historische Analyse ist, um die Politik der Flusseinzugsgebiete in verschiedene Ebenen aufzuschlüsseln, darunter Geopolitik, territoriale Streitigkeiten und internationale Konflikte. (shrink)

We investigate the explanatory role of epistemic virtue in accounting for the success of science as a social institution that is characterized by predominantly epistemic ends. Several structural explanations of the epistemic success of science that commonly rule out virtue attributions to scientists are explored in reference to a case of collective epistemic vice; namely, the credibility crisis in the social and behavioral sciences. These accounts underline the social structure of science as the chief explanatory factor in its collective success, (...) and endorse a common conclusion, namely that individual virtue is neither necessary nor sufficient for science to be successful. While acknowledging that divergent motivations and behaviors might also serve the collective goals of science, our analysis of the credibility crisis shows that the presence of a significant proportion of epistemically virtuous scientists in a scientific community is a necessary condition for collective epistemic success in a scientific community. (shrink)

This thesis presents a communicative account of personhood that argues for the inseparability of the metaphysical and the practical concepts of a person. It connects these two concepts by coupling the question “what is a person” with the question "how does one become a person". It argues that participation in social interactions that are characterized by mutual recognition and giving-and-taking reasons implied by the practical concept of a person is in fact an ecological and developmental condition for an entity to (...) possess the kind of characteristics and capacities such as reflexive self-consciousness addressed by the metaphysical concept. The chief theoretical contribution of the dissertation research lies, accordingly, in demonstrating that an adequate metaphysical concept of a person has to make reference to the kind of social processes that are necessary for the emergence and development of the distinguishing attributes of persons among other moving, perceiving, desiring and cognizing agents. Methodologically, it undertakes an original philosophical analysis that is enriched by an interdisciplinary investigation of several notions and insights from semiotics, comparative and developmental psychology, cognitive science and anthropology. The main argument of the thesis is that one becomes a person through internally recreating a social, communicative process; namely, that of dialogical transformation of habits. We find the paradigmatic case of this social process in mutual persuasion. The internalization of this process in the form of an inner dialogue cultivates a social self that is in ongoing communication with the embodied, organismic self of uncritically habituated attitudes, convictions and desires. This inner dialogue can be conceived as a temporally extended process of self-persuasion, which is characterized by an ongoing strive for attaining higher degrees of self-control; that is, for achieving a more coherent alignment between our habits and the kind of person we would like to be. It starts with self-interpretation and self-evaluation, and culminates in the formation of higher-order desires that facilitate habit-change and novel habit formation in accordance with certain social, moral, aesthetical or intellectual categories and norms one comes to endorse. For this reason, self-induced, deliberate habit-change is also a process of appropriation or self-appropriation, through which we strive to cultivate habits of feeling, thinking, acting that we can deem more truly ours. The thesis demonstrates that the capacity for engaging in this kind of self-persuasion consists chiefly in the capacities for metasemiosis, perspective-taking, and for cultivating habits of reflexivity. It explicates how all these capacities have a social origin and ultimately a social function by showing that they all presuppose certain higher-order communicative patterns that arose through an evolutionary and cultural history, and develop through the internal reconstruction of these patterns as cognitive-semiotic processes. The thesis concludes that becoming a kind of being who can engage in self-persuasion, thus a person, consists ultimately in internalizing the patterns of communicative social interactions in the form of an ongoing auto-communication. (shrink)

The epistemic subject of collective scientific knowledge has been a matter of dispute in recent philosophy of science and epistemology. Following the distributed cognition framework, both collective-subject accounts (most notably by Knorr-Cetina, in _Epistemic Cultures_, Harvard University Press, 1999) as well as no-subject accounts of collective scientific knowledge (most notably by Giere, Social Epistemology 21:313–320, 2007; in Carruthers, Stich, Siegal (eds), _The Cognitive Basis of Science_, Cambridge University Press, 2002a) have been offered. Both strategies of accounting for collective knowledge are (...) problematic from the perspective of mainstream epistemology. Postulating genuinely collective epistemic subjects is a high-commitment strategy with little clear benefit. On the other hand, eliminating the epistemic subject radically severs the link between knowledge and knowers. Most importantly, both strategies lead to the undesirable outcome that in some cases of scientific knowledge there might be no individual knower that we can identify. I argue that distributed cognition offers us a fertile framework for analyzing complex socio-technical processes of contemporary scientific knowledge production, but scientific knowledge should nonetheless be located in individual knowers. I distinguish between the production and possession of knowledge, and argue that collective knowledge is collectively produced knowledge, not collectively possessed knowledge. I then propose an account of non-testimonial, expert scientific knowledge which allows for collectively produced knowledge to be known by individuals. (shrink)

An expert is commonly considered to be somebody who possesses the right kind of knowledge and skills to find out true answers for questions in a domain. However, this common conception that focuses only on an individual’s knowledge and skills is not very useful to understand the epistemically interdependent nature of contemporary scientific expertise, which becomes increasingly more relevant due to the rise of large interdisciplinary research collaborations. The typical scientific expert today relies substantially on complex scientific instruments and numerous (...) other experts in forming expert judgment. Moreover, we have research collaborations where multiple scientists interact in a way that gives rise to distributed cognitive systems, which can act as a single informant. Accordingly, our concept of scientific expertise should not consist only in individual knowledge and skills, but also accommodate epistemic dependence and collective knowledge production. To this aim, this paper proposes a reconstruction of the concept of scientific expertise as informant reliability by building on the virtue-epistemological account of epistemic competences and theories of extended and distributed cognition. Considered in reference to the social epistemic function of expertise, a scientific expert should be conceived as a reliable informant in a scientific domain, which implies that when consulted on matters in that domain they assert competently, honestly, and completely. Competent expert assertion involves the epistemic responsibility to draw on nothing but the highest degree of epistemic competence relevant to the given context. Thus, being a reliable informant may require one to draw on an extended epistemic competence that goes beyond one’s individual competence, or to form supra-individual or group-informants that manifest collectively the kind of complex epistemic competence required for the investigation of certain research questions. (shrink)

Integrative experiment design assumes that we can effectively design a space of factors that cause contextual variation. However, this is impossible to do so in a sufficiently objective way, resulting inevitably in observations laden with surrogate models. Consequently, integrative experiment design may even deepen the problem of incommensurability. In comparison, one-at-a-time approaches make much more tentative assumptions about the factors excluded from experiment design, hence still seem better suited to deal with incommensurability.

Cet ouvrage donne une place importante à l'idée de la justice selon deux philosophes : selon la théorie de Thomas Hobbes elle est prise dans un cercle entre la loi, le souverain et la violence, tandis que pour Jacques Derrida, elle ne doit pas être limitée à la loi. L'intention de l'auteure, n'est pas d'apporter une nouvelle théorie, mais de montrer qu'une idée philosophique peut avoir une influence en politique ou en droit selon les propositions des Critical Legal Studies.

While fetal surgery—and pregnancy termination as a possible therapeutic alternative—have been examined in a number of studies, very few have addressed the issues and tensions that arise when prenat...

Between 1935 and 1942, a total of 130 men, aged seventeen to twenty-four, mostly of indigenous Hawaiian heritage, colonized Howland, Baker, and Jarvis Islands for the United States, in rotation, over the course of twenty-six expeditions. As part of the American Equatorial Islands Colonization Project (AEICP), they compiled meteorological data, observed and recorded the natural life of their surroundings, collected specimens for the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, mapped the islands, and built a landing strip on Howland for Amelia Earhart. In (...) doing so, they confirmed U.S. possession of the islands, its imperial and military power in the Pacific, and helped establish aviation routes in the South Seas, all of which assisted American efforts during World War II. At the time, the AEICP colonists did not know the role they were playing in this larger project. While some thought they were recruited as part of the museum’s scientific research, others were under the impression that they were stationed on the islands to contribute to commercial air travel. This article will examine the AEICP’s scientific framework, how it was deployed as a pretext for larger military and imperial goals, and the ways in which it is an example of the hidden or invisible labor of science that dominated the interwar years, World War II, and the Cold War era. Moreover, it will also expose the underlying scientific racist hierarchy of the AEICP wherein the colonists themselves were classified as “types” and “specimens” to be studied. (shrink)

With the economic and political support of the United States, in July 1947, Turkey signed contracts with the Westinghouse Electric International Company and J.G. White Engineering Corporation to construct its first international civilian airport, Istanbul's Yeşilköy Airport. As this article will argue, the building of Yeşilköy (1949–53), through a partnership with two American engineering firms, is essentially an early Cold War narrative of transnational exchange involving the multidirectional flow of technical knowledge, expertise and resources between the United States and Turkey; (...) the circulation of geopolitically significant (and frequently competing) military, civilian and government actors; and the local and global implications of these transmissions. Yet the Yeşilköy construction narrative also illustrates how post-war technology transfer was a highly political process of constant adaptation, modification and negotiation. Fraught with unforeseen friction and thorny challenges, Yeşilköy exemplifies the complicated American Cold War strategy of creating and maintaining alliances through engineering knowledge, personnel and practices, often with unintended consequences. Moreover, as a case study, Yeşilköy opens a new window into the cautious science diplomacy that occurred along the Iron Curtain, while filling a notable historiographic gap with respect to aviation in early Cold War Turkey. (shrink)

On July 16, 1938, Franklin Delano Roosevelt boarded the USS Houston in San Diego and embarked on what would come to be known as the Third Presidential Cruise. Publicized as a presidential fishing trip, the 1938 excursion was considerably more than a summer vacation. Covering 5,888 miles in twenty-four days, it comprised fourteen stops in the territories of five different countries: Mexico, France, Ecuador, Costa Rica, and Colombia. Concluding in Pensacola, Florida, after passing through the Panama Canal, it was an (...) ambitious voyage that involved the intensive use of science as diplomacy, a mere thirteen months before the onset of World War II. On the surface, the cruise, whose collecting activities were supervised by the Smithsonian’s Division of Marine Invertebrates, was a major scientific coup. However, the expedition also had a clear geopolitical goal: to assess the United States’ naval capabilities in the Pacific and to formulate potential military strategies in the event of global war. Thus, the excursion illustrates how science and diplomacy can intersect at pivotal historical moments, and how it can be deployed to implement foreign policy based on military interests. (shrink)

Falsificationist and confirmationist approaches provide two well-established ways of evaluating generalizability. Yarkoni rejects both and invents a third approach we call neo-operationalism. His proposal cannot work for the hypothetical concepts psychologists use, because the universe of operationalizations is impossible to define, and hypothetical concepts cannot be reduced to their operationalizations. We conclude that he is wrong in his generalizability-crisis diagnosis.

Economic approaches to science underline the social structure of science as the chief explanatory factor in its collective epistemic success, and typically endorse a common conclusion, namely that individual virtue is neither necessary nor sufficient for science to be successful. We analyze a central example, the invisible hand argument, in reference to a case of collective epistemic failure, namely the credibility crisis. While divergent motivations might also serve the collective goals of science, our analysis shows that the presence of a (...) significant proportion of virtuous scientists in a scientific community is a necessary condition for its success. (shrink)

Large research collaborations constitute an increasingly prevalent form of social organization of research activity in many scientific fields. In the last decades, the concept of distributed cognition has provided a suitable basis for thinking about collective knowledge in the philosophy of science. Karin Knorr-Cetina’s and Ronald Giere’s analyses of high energy physics experiments are the most prominent examples. Although they both conceive the processes of knowledge production in these experiments in terms of distributed cognition, their accounts regarding the epistemic subject (...) of knowledge thus produced are quite different. While Knorr-Cetina argues for an irreducibly collective subject, Giere argues for eliminating the epistemic subject and opting for using the passive voice in describing collectively produced knowledge. Neither of these views are easy to assimilate within an epistemological account, since epistemology traditionally operates within an individualist framework. They both entail that we should deny knowledge to individuals when the processes of knowledge production are distributed. I will argue that epistemology should be extended in a way that can accommodate collectively produced knowledge, but that we would have a serious problem if we deny scientific knowledge to individuals. If the members of a large collaboration cannot be said to know, we have to accept the absurd conclusion that either no one or only a supra-individual entity learns from the most successful research collaborations we have. I will argue instead for conceiving research collaborations in terms of a cognitive system that produces knowledge, which can eventually be possessed by constituent individuals when certain conditions are met. Firstly, the distributed research process should be reliable in producing scientific evidence and secondly, there should be a reliable distributed process of criticism for scrutinizing the reliability of the scientific evidence that is collectively produced. I will analyze both conditions in terms of distributed first-order and second-order justification, where I put forward a reliabilist account of justification that is compatible with epistemic dependence. I will conclude that the notion of justified epistemic dependence enables us to attribute knowledge to individuals when knowledge production is irreducibly social. (shrink)

Hinduizm’de ibadet genellikle bireysel bir şekilde gerçekleştirilmekle birlikte topluca uygulanan biçimleri de bulunmaktadır. Yıllık festivaller toplu ibadetlerin en belirgin örnekleridir. Dini ve kültürel yaşamın önemli bir parçasını oluşturan bu festivallerin her biri farklı tanrılarla yahut tanrıçalarla ve mitolojik olaylarla ilişkilidir. Hindu festivalleri ritüelleri, duaları, dansları, festivalle ilişkili heykellerin yapılmasını, kutlamanın konusuyla ilgili olayların sergilendiği çadırların hazırlanmasını ve birlikte yenilen yemekleri içerir. Birlik ve beraberlik içinde kutlanan festivaller bir yandan tapınılan tanrıya, tanrıçaya bağlılığı kuvvetlendirirken diğer yandan toplumsal birliği pekiştirir. Hinduizm’deki festivallerin (...) kutlama biçimleri bölgeden bölgeye değişiklik gösterdiği gibi dini geleneklere göre de farklılıklar ihtiva eder. Çalışmamızın konusu olan Durgā Pūcā ve Kālī Pūcā festivalleri tüm Hindular tarafından kutlanan önemli bir festivaldir. Tanrıçaya adanan bu festivallerden Durgā Pūcā tüm Hindistan’da Kālī Pūcā ise Batı Bengal, Assam, Odişa/Orissa ve Tripura gibi doğu Hindistan bölgelerinde kutlanır. Makale Durgā Pūcā ve Kālī Pūcā festivallerini ve bu festivallerde yer alan tantracı unsurları incelemeyi amaçlar. İnceleme konusu olarak bu iki festivalin seçilmesinin sebebi genel olarak Hinduizm’deki temel kutlama şekillerini devam ettirmekle beraber tanrıçaya tapımın ve hayvan kurbanının festivalin merkezinde yer almasıdır. Makalede Durgā Pūcā ve Kālī Pūcā festivallerinden söz edildikten sonra Tantracılığın ne zaman ve nerede ortaya çıktığından ve tantracı unsurlardan bahsedilecektir. Durgā Pūcā ve Kālī Pūcā festivallerinde tantracı unsurların nasıl yer aldığı ve bu unsurların dini açıdan ne anlama geldiği üzerinde durulacaktır. Bu bağlamda tanrıçaya tapım ve hayvan kurbanının bu festivallerin merkezinde yer alması tantracı düşüncenin etkisini anlamak açısından önemlidir. Zira Tantracılık yüce varlık anlayışında şaktiye önem verir ve onun tezahürleri olarak görülen tanrıçayı merkeze koyar, geleneksel Hindu düşüncesinin kabul etmediği ibadetleri kabul eder ve uygular. Zaman içerisinde bu ibadetler belirli gruplar tarafından devam ettirilmekle birlikte bazı ibadetlerin ve festivallerin kutlanış biçimlerinde kendini gösterir. Çalışmada dinler tarihinin betimleyici yöntemi kullanılarak festivaller, kavramlar ve fenomenler tanımlanmaya çalışılmıştır. Din fenomenolojisi metodundan faydalanarak Durgā Pūcā ve Kālī Pūcā festivallerinde gerçekleştirilen ritüellerin incelemesi yapılmıştır. Kavramların Türkçe’ye doğru ve eksiksiz bir şekilde aktarılabilmesi için Türkçe’de karşılığı olan harflerin yanında Hint hükümeti tarafından kabul edilen ISO 15019 çeviri yazım tablosu kullanılmıştır. (shrink)

A descriptive, cross-sectional study aimed to determine the inclination of nursing students towards ethical values and the effects of these values on care behaviours. The data for this study were collected from 466 students studying from May 13–24, 2019. The data were collected using a questionnaire on the sociodemographic characteristics of the students, Inclination to Ethical Values Scale (IEVS), and Caring Behaviors Inventory-24 (CBI-24). In this study, 43.1 per cent of them belonged to families who had a protective attitude. The (...) total mean (SD) IEVS and CBI-24 scores were 63.99 (12.68) and 117.19 (17.95), respectively. The mean item score was 4.88 (0.74). A moderate positive correlation was observed between the inclination of the students towards ethical values and their care behaviours. The general family structure of the nursing students and their participation in an ethics class affected the inclination of the nursing students to ethical values and their care behaviours. This study showed that the ethical values of the students positively affected their care behaviours. (shrink)

The KCTD family includes tetramerization (T1) domain containing proteins with diverse biological effects. We identified a novel member of the KCTD family, BTBD10. A comprehensive analysis of protein‐protein interactions (PPIs) allowed us to put forth a number of testable hypotheses concerning the biological functions for individual KCTD proteins. In particular, we predict that KCTD20 participates in the AKT‐mTOR‐p70 S6k signaling cascade, KCTD5 plays a role in cytokinesis in a NEK6 and ch‐TOG‐dependent manner, KCTD10 regulates the RhoA/RhoB pathway. Developmental regulator KCTD15 (...) represses AP‐2α and contributes to energy homeostasis by suppressing early adipogenesis. TNFAIP1‐like KCTD proteins may participate in post‐replication DNA repair through PCNA ubiquitination. KCTD12 may suppress the proliferation of gastrointestinal cells through interference with GABAb signaling. KCTD9 deserves experimental attention as the only eukaryotic protein with a DNA‐like pentapeptide repeat domain. The value of manual curation of PPIs and analysis of existing high‐throughput data should not be underestimated. (shrink)

BackgroundInformation and communication technology solutions have the potential to support active and healthy aging and improve monitoring and treatment outcomes. To make such solutions acceptable, all stakeholders must be involved in the requirements elicitation process. Due to the COVID-19 situation, alternative approaches to commonly used face-to-face methods must often be used. One aim of the current article is to share a unique experience from the Pharaon project where due to the COVID-19 outbreak alternative elicitation methods were used. In addition, an (...) overview of common functional, quality, and emotional goals identified by six pilot sites is presented to complement the knowledge about the needs of older adults.MethodsOriginally planned face-to-face co-creation seminars were impossible to carry out, and all pilot sites chose alternative requirements elicitation methods that were most suitable in their situation. The elicited requirements were presented in the form of goal models. In one summary goal model, we provide an overview of common functional, quality, and emotional goals.ResultsDifferent elicitation methods were combined based on the digital literacy of the target group and their access to digital tools. Methods applied without digital technologies were phone interviews, reviews of literature and previous projects, while by means of digital technologies online interviews, online questionnaires, and virtual co-creation seminars were conducted. The combination of the methods allowed to involve all planned stakeholders. Virtual and semi-virtual co-creation seminars created collaborative environment comparable to face-to-face situations, while online participation helped to save the time of the participants. The most prevalent functional goals elicited were “Monitor health,” “Receive advice,” “Receive information.” “Easy to use/comfortable,” “personalized/tailored,” “automatic/smart” were identified as most prevalent quality goals. Most frequently occurring emotional goals were “involved,” “empowered,” and “informed.”ConclusionThere are alternative methods to face-to-face co-creation seminars, which effectively involve older adults and other stakeholders in the requirements elicitation process. Despite the used elicitation method, the requirements can be easily transformed into goal models to present the results in a uniform way. The common requirements across different pilots provided a strong foundation for representing detailed requirements and input for further software development processes. (shrink)

This roundtable brings together contributions from nine senior, mid-career and junior scholars who work on the history of science in pre-1800 Islamicate societies. The contributions reflect upon some of the challenges that have historically constrained the subfield, how they have sought to overcome them, and what they see as some of the more productive and fruitful turns the field has taken and/or should take in the future. A central trend in all contributions is how they seek to confront the combined (...) weight of colonialism, Orientalism, and the teleological history of science that continues to haunt contemporary discussions in both academia and the general public with regards to science in pre-1800 Islamicate societies. Without diminishing the pioneering achievements of the generations of historians who have preceded us, and upon whose work we continue to rely, this combined weight has tended a) to marginalize the study of occult sciences in Islamicate societies; b) to emphasize investigations of content from an etic perspective of how we got to the present, which is primarily seen as how the scientific content is connected to the rise of modern science in Europe; and c) to concomitantly marginalize the study of science in post-1200 Islamicate societies, particularly those with little to no connection to the rise of “Western” science. The contributions build upon conversations that took place among participants in December 2019 at a workshop at New York University (NYU), Abu Dhabi Institute in New York City, funded by a grant from NYU Abu Dhabi. (shrink)

Purpose The manner in which people, businesses and governments perform is changing because of the spread of technology. Digitalization of governments can be considered a necessity as we are now entering the era of the Internet-of-Things. The advantages and disadvantages of electronic governments have been examined in several research studies. This study aims to examine the attitudes of decision-makers towards e-government. The research aims are as follows: to determine the problems related with e-government usage, to establish the factors which decrease (...) the usage of e-government services and to propose recommendations for the effective application of e-government practices. Design/methodology/approach Qualitative research has been used for the study. Participants were chosen by the snowball sampling method, and face-to-face in-depth interviews were conducted with all decision-makers. In-depth interviews are more efficient and enable the acquisition of better qualitative information, in-depth knowledge and statistics, as the distance between the interviewer and interviewee is reduced. Questions asked can be categorized under two sections, where the questions in the first section are related to the decision-maker’s management style/managerial proposition, and in the second section, technological questions are asked in terms of the preferred communication method and the decision-makers’ attitudes towards e-government practices. Findings Decision-makers perceive electronic government to be important, while the level of importance is observed to be different among the decision-makers. Chronic problems exist in many countries, such as nepotism, where the decision-makers have conflicting arguments about e-government and the resulting effect on nepotism. Furthermore, the study also indicates that decision-makers are aware of the importance of mobile government, although they acknowledge that more time is required, as their country is still developing. Electronic voting is also perceived to be important, although the decision-makers believe that security and privacy issues need to be solved before related projects can be initiated. Originality/value This research can be a benchmark study for the decision-makers of small island developing states by means of e-government. The impediments preventing the effective application of e-government practices are also discussed in the study. This study will be useful to highlight the triggers and obstacles for e-government development in the context of a developing country. Internet penetration has increased significantly since the 2000s, and therefore, decision-makers need to consider the shift in citizens’ behaviour, such as the high usage of smartphones and the emergence of the Internet-of-Things. (shrink)

In this paper, I present a problem for the realist with respect to the institutional sphere, and suggest a solution. Roughly, the problem lies in a contradiction that arises as soon as institutional contexts are allowed to influence the institutional profile of objects and events not only in the present, but also in the past. If such “retroactive enactments” are effective, in order to avoid contradiction the realist seems to have to accept the unpleasant conclusion that institutions can create a (...) past that has never been present. I will defend a solution which involves a distinction between temporal and atemporal types of institutional kinds that has, I maintain, independent interest. (shrink)

The MS. hie tunc of V. 6 has no friends. L. Mueller's hoc tunc is weak and flat, and L. Rank, Mnemosyne 40. 51, is justly dissatisfied with the hietans of M. Havet's larger and smaller editions, to which the hians of Verg. Aen. 12. 754 lends no sufficient support, as there the dog is opening its mouth before it bites. Add to this that it is by no means certain that Phaedrus would either have used the word or used (...) it in the simple sense of opening the mouth. Rank's own proposal, ‘heu’ tunc, fails also to carry conviction. There is however a word which belongs to our author's vocabulary and is as near to the manuscripts as either of the above, and which hits the sense at which hietans aims. This is rictus. The word is often used of the opened mouths of dogs, Lucr. 5. 1064, Ovid Met. 13. 568. Juvenal 10. 271 sq. ‘canino latrauit rictu,’ and of other animals. That it is appropriate with dimisit ‘let go’ may be seen from the counterpart expression of Martial 1. 48. 1 ‘rictibus his tauros non eripuere magistri.’. (shrink)

The MS. hie tunc of V. 6 has no friends. L. Mueller's hoc tunc is weak and flat, and L. Rank, Mnemosyne 40. 51, is justly dissatisfied with the hietans of M. Havet's larger and smaller editions, to which the hians of Verg. Aen. 12. 754 lends no sufficient support, as there the dog is opening its mouth before it bites. Add to this that it is by no means certain that Phaedrus would either have used the word or used (...) it in the simple sense of opening the mouth. Rank's own proposal, ‘heu’ tunc, fails also to carry conviction. There is however a word which belongs to our author's vocabulary and is as near to the manuscripts as either of the above, and which hits the sense at which hietans aims. This is rictus. The word is often used of the opened mouths of dogs, Lucr. 5. 1064, Ovid Met. 13. 568. Juvenal 10. 271 sq. ‘canino latrauit rictu,’ and of other animals. That it is appropriate with dimisit ‘let go’ may be seen from the counterpart expression of Martial 1. 48. 1 ‘rictibus his tauros non eripuere magistri.’. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Constituer le Réel. Noétique et Métaphysique chez Dietrich de Freiberg by Véronique DecaixBrian Francis ConollyVéronique Decaix. Constituer le Réel. Noétique et Métaphysique chez Dietrich de Freiberg. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 2021. Pp. 336. Paperback, $48.00.Dietrich of Freiberg's theory of the constitutive power of the intellect, as presented in his De origine rerum praedicamentalium, has proved unusually resistant to contextualization within the philosophical and theological discussions at the (...) University of Paris in the last two decades of the thirteenth century. There is little indication in the quodlibet literature that any of his contemporaries were aware of his unusual doctrine, let alone interested in responding to it, and Dietrich himself provides few hints as to which quaestiones of contemporary interest he is responding to. One therefore welcomes this study by Véronique Decaix in which it is argued that "il est irréfutable que les concepts centraux du De origine ont été forgés dans une discussion permanente avec Henri de Gand" (223). Drawing upon and developing the work of Pasquale Porro, Jan Aersten, and others, Decaix establishes Dietrich's indebtedness to Henry of Ghent, all while providing a comprehensive and remarkably clear, detailed, and precise presentation of Dietrich's theory of the constitutive power of the intellect. [End Page 706]Particularly noteworthy is the manner in which Decaix clarifies that there are several distinct ways in which the intellect, on Dietrich's theory, exercises its constitutive power. Thus, for instance, "categorial constitution," whereby certain relations and the six posterior relative categories are constituted, is distinguished from "quidditative constitution," wherein a real natural thing is constituted in its quidditative being, which is at the same time the mode or manner in which the intellect constitutes its own proper object. Decaix clarifies that such modes of constitution differ not only with respect to what is constituted, but by the kind of causality exercised by the intellect. Categorial constitution is a kind of formal causality—because it concerns only accidents, and because intellect grasps these accidents "sur une modalité déduite d'un élément extrinsèque" (284)—whereas quidditative constitution is efficient—it is "plus fondamentale, car elle est plus essentielle et plus intérieure" and "s'exerce sur la forme substantielle et cause l'étant en tant qu'étant" (286). In either case, whether the mode of constitution is categorial or quidditative, Decaix makes clear that constitution is not creation, and does not pertain to the reality or absolute entity of the thing affected by the intellect's constitutive power. Rather, constitution in the relevant sense here entails introducing and imposing upon the real natural thing a new mode of being: with respect to categorial constitution, that mode of being is ad aliud (to be in relation to another); with respect to quidditative constitution, the constituted mode of being is quidditative being.Decaix argues that Dietrich consciously develops his theory of categorial relation within the framework provided by Henry of Ghent. She cites as evidence, among other factors, that Dietrich concludes his analysis of categorial relation with what Decaix calls the "exacte contre-pied" (154) to question 3 of Henry's Quodlibet IX: "Utrum circumscripta re sui fundamenti relatio possit signari per nomen primae impositionis?" Dietrich in effect responds: "Si autem ab huiusmodi entibus removeamus actum rationis, tunc secundum nullum modum sunt entia quantum ad id, quod significatur per nomen, sed relinquitur sola realitas et entitas fundamenti" (160).Question 3 of Henry's Quodlibet IX is still more important for Decaix's argument. For she sees herein more than a germ of Dietrich's doctrine of the constitutive power of the intellect. As Decaix explains, in addition to the real foundation (quantity or quality) provided by nature, and the pure ratio of relation, provided by the intellect, Henry introduces the modus characterizatus a re, whereby the peculiar nature of the foundation (e.g. the length or the color) particularizes the general notion of the pure relation (157–58). Thus, the real, particular relation, for example, "is shorter than" or "is similar to," arises only from both nature and the intellect as joint contributing causes. In this... (shrink)

Four critical essays (on De Anima, on In Illud: Tunc et Ipse Filius, on Patristic Platonism, and on the doctrine of apokatastasis in Gregory of Nyssa and Origen), new Greek edition of De anima also based on the Coptic version predating every Greek manuscript, translations of, and commentaries on, both De Anima and In Illud: Tunc et Ipse Filius, appendixes (on the Syriac and Coptic translations of De Anima and on its reception among the Cambridge Platonists, with the first Italian (...) translation of an essay by Jane Lead[e]), bibliographies. (shrink)

Thurneysen 이래 1차 엔딩과 오그먼트가 지시사에서 기원한 독립적 파티클이라는 주장은 학계의 암묵적 전제가 되었다. 각각은 어간의 뒤와 앞에 붙어 현재(hic-et-nunc, here & now)와 과거(illic-et-tunc, there & then)를 지시한다. 그러나 전통적 이론 및 최근의 이론에는 몇 가지 모순점들이 존재한다. 첫째, 근접과 원접의 의미를 갖는 1차 엔딩과 오그먼트가 모두 근접 지시사에서 기원하는 모순이 있다. 둘째, 후두음 이론(laryngeal theory)에 따라 복원된 지시사 *h1e-와 *h1i-가 반드시 1차 엔딩 *-i로 전환되지는 않는다. 셋째, 의미론적으로 대칭되며 현재와 과거를 지시하는 접사가 각각 어미와 어두에 오는 형태론적 비대칭성이 존재한다. (...) 어순을 중시하는 Lehmann의 완료 어미 기원론과 Kiparsky의 Conjunction Reduction 이론도 오그먼트와 1차 엔딩의 기원과 비대칭성에 대하여 충분한 설명을 주지 못한다. 필자는 ‘현재가 과거의 열쇠’라는 Uniformitarian Principle에 따라 현재 관찰할 수 있는 일반적 언어현상과 아르메니아어의 화석 언어적 특성에서 오그먼트의 기원을 찾고자 하였다. 엑센트는 문법적 범주라는 전제하에 엑센트에 수반되는 모음약화 및 무게보상 현상으로 오그먼트와 2차 엔딩의 관계를 해석하고, 그 근거를 화석 언어로 가정한 아르메니아어에서 찾고자 하였다. (shrink)

Columella invites his readers to plant different flowers, including violets—which will be the main focus of the following discussion :uerum ubi iam puro discrimine pectita tellusdeposito squalore nitens sua semina poscet, 95pangite tunc uarios, terrestria sidera, flores:candida leucoia et flauentia lumina caltae,narcissique comas et hiantis saeua leonisora feri, calathisque uirentia lilia canis,necnon uel niueos uel caeruleos hyacinthos. 100tum quae pallet humi, quae frondes purpurat auro,ponatur uiola, et nimium rosa plena pudoris.96 pangite Heinsius: pingite SAR || 99 nitentia Gesner || 101 (...) frondes SA: frondens R | purpurat auro ϛ: purpura tabo SAR: purpura et auro Ursinus: purpurat albo HeinsiusThis is the text of Rodgers's recent OCT, but with a somewhat modified apparatus criticus. For the purposes of my argument, it will be useful also to quote from the outset a related catalogue of melliferous flowers from another book of Columella's treatise : mille praeterea semina uel crudo caespite uirentia uel subacto sulco flores amicissimos apibus creant, ut sunt in uirgineo solo […] gladiolus narcissi. at in hortensi lira consita nitent candida lilia nec his sordidiora leucoia, tum Punicae rosae luteolaeque et Sarranae uiolae, nec minus caelestis luminis hyacinthus.There are a number of more general similarities, but the relevant point is that the two catalogues list many of the same flowers and describe them in similar ways, which means that one catalogue can serve as an interpretative guide to the other. The first two items in the prose list of garden flowers correspond to candida leucoia and calathisque uirentia lilia canis, similarly listed in the first half of the verse catalogue; nitent can thus support Gesner's emendation nitentia for uirentia, unduly neglected by recent editors. The metaphoric periphrasis gladiolus narcissi can be compared with narcissique comas. Both texts describe the hyacinth as sky-blue, which seems to be otherwise unparalleled. Finally, just like the prose list, Columella's poem groups roses with two varieties of violet :tum quae pallet humi, quae frondes purpurat auro,ponatur uiola, et nimium rosa plena pudoris.The prose version makes it all but certain that the poem should likewise refer to a yellow and a purple varieties of violet. While Columella's verse description of the former variety is fairly unambiguous, that of the latter raises questions. (shrink)