Mit dem Erscheinen der ersten Untersuchung der Autorin zu diesem Thema im Jahre 1984 (Φ.Εὐαγγελάτου-Νοταϱᾶ, Συλλογὴ χϱονολογημένων „σημειωμάτων“ ἑλληνιϰως ϰωδίϰων. 13ος αἰ. Athen) wurde seinerzeit ein Nachschlagewerk geschaffen, das für die Erforschung der spätbyzantinischen Handschriftenkunde unentbehrliche Dienste leistet. In dem vorliegenden Buch sind nunmehr erneut die Notizen und Einträge spätbyzantinischer Handschriften zum Gegenstand gewählt. Dabei wurde der chronologische Rahmen der Arbeit erheblich erweitert, doch bleibt die Auswahl der erörterten und edierten Texte auf jene eingeschränkt, die eben von den Auftraggebern, Besitzern (...) und Schenkern der Handschriften handeln. (shrink)

The volume collects classics of Marxist historiography of science, including a new translation of Boris Hessen's “The Social and Economic Roots of Newton's ...

We identify two aspects of the problem of maintaining perceptual stability despite an observer's eye movements. The first, visual direction constancy, is the (egocentric) stability of apparent positions of objects in the visual world relative to the perceiver. The second, visual position constancy, is the (exocentric) stability of positions of objects relative to each other. We analyze the constancy of visual direction despite saccadic eye movements.Three information sources have been proposed to enable the visual system to achieve stability: the structure (...) of the visual field, proprioceptive inflow, and a copy of neural efference or outflow to the extraocular muscles. None of these sources by itself provides adequate information to achieve visual direction constancy; present evidence indicates that all three are used.Our final question concerns how information processing operations result in a stable world. The three traditionally suggested means have been elimination, translation, or evaluation. All are rejected. From a review of the physiological and psychological evidence we conclude that no subtraction, compensation, or evaluation need take place. The problem for which these solutions were developed turns out to be a false one. We propose a “calibration” solution: correct spatiotopic positions are calculated anew for each fixation. Inflow, outflow, and retinal sources are used in this calculation: saccadic suppression of displacement bridges the errors between these sources and the actual extent of movement. (shrink)

Starting from the idea that functions are formally similar to actions in that they are described and explained in a similar way, so that both admit of an accordion effect, I turn to Anscombe’s insight that the point of practical reasoning is to render explicit the relation between the different descriptions of an action generated by the accordion effect. The upshot is, roughly, that an item has a function if what it does can be accounted for by functional reasoning. Put (...) differently, a part of a system has a function if what it does is a functional part of what the system does. (shrink)

La quatrième de couverture indique : "Ils souffrent comme nous. Comme nous aussi, ils jouissent du bien-être. Mieux que nous parfois, ils s'imposent par la ruse et l'intelligence. Comment continuer à les traiter comme des " choses " dont on se contenterait de condamner l'abus? Mais faut-il pour autant leur accorder des droits, et si oui lesquels? Et qui veillera à leur application? Pour répondre à ces questions et à tant d'autres, Boris Cyrulnik l'éthologue, Elisabeth de Fontenay la philosophe, (...) Peter Singer le bioéthicien croisent leurs regards et confrontent leurs savoirs sur la question animale. Trois sensibilités, trois parcours, trois formes d'engagement : la voie est tracée, au-delà des divergences et des contradictions, et en partie grâce à elles, pour que le législateur s'attelle à la rédaction du contrat qu'il nous faut maintenant passer sans délai avec nos frères en animalité, au nom de la dignité humaine.". (shrink)

Boris Kment takes a new approach to the study of modality that emphasises the origin of modal notions in everyday thought. He argues that the concepts of necessity and possibility originate in counterfactual reasoning, which allows us to investigate explanatory connections. Contrary to accepted views, explanation is more fundamental than modality.

Recently, there has been a strong push for binding human rights due diligence (HRDD) legislation, both at the national and European levels. As empirical evidence of such legislation's impact gradually emerges, it is time to take stock. In this article, we conduct a systematic literature review to assess available empirical evidence on (1) how HRDD legislation affects the policies and practices through which companies engage with human rights; (2) how these policies and practices, in turn, affect different actors in companies’ (...) value chains. While it is too early to make conclusive judgements, existing evidence allows us to identify several worrying trends: most companies opt for managerialist and compliance-oriented approaches to HRDD; revert primarily to earlier (and flawed) private governance mechanisms; and try to cascade responsibilities and costs in their supply chain. This risks perpetuating or reinforcing marginalisation and exclusion dynamics. Based on these findings, we formulate some lessons for policy-makers. (shrink)

Moral Constraints on War offers a principle-by-principle presentation of the transcultural roots of the ethics of war in an age defined by the increasingly international nature of military intervention.

Background: Although convolutional neural networks (CNNs) achieve high diagnostic accuracy for detecting Alzheimer’s disease (AD) dementia based on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans, they are not yet applied in clinical routine. One important reason for this is a lack of model comprehensibility. Recently developed visualization methods for deriving CNN relevance maps may help to fill this gap as they allow the visualization of key input image features that drive the decision of the model. We investigated whether models with higher accuracy (...) also rely more on discriminative brain regions predefined by prior knowledge. Methods: We trained a CNN for the detection of AD in N = 663 T1-weighted MRI scans of patients with dementia and amnestic mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and verified the accuracy of the models via cross-validation and in three independent samples including in total N = 1655 cases. We evaluated the association of relevance scores and hippocampus volume to validate the clinical utility of this approach. To improve model comprehensibility, we implemented an interactive visualization of 3D CNN relevance maps, thereby allowing intuitive model inspection. Results: Across the three independent datasets, group separation showed high accuracy for AD dementia versus controls (AUC ≥ 0.91) and moderate accuracy for amnestic MCI versus controls (AUC ≈ 0.74). Relevance maps indicated that hippocampal atrophy was considered the most informative factor for AD detection, with additional contributions from atrophy in other cortical and subcortical regions. Relevance scores within the hippocampus were highly correlated with hippocampal volumes (Pearson’s r ≈ −0.86, p < 0.001). Conclusion: The relevance maps highlighted atrophy in regions that we had hypothesized a priori. This strengthens the comprehensibility of the CNN models, which were trained in a purely data-driven manner based on the scans and diagnosis labels. The high hippocampus relevance scores as well as the high performance achieved in independent samples support the validity of the CNN models in the detection of AD-related MRI abnormalities. The presented data-driven and hypothesis-free CNN modeling approach might provide a useful tool to automatically derive discriminative features for complex diagnostic tasks where clear clinical criteria are still missing, for instance for the differential diagnosis between various types of dementia. (shrink)

In this paper we develop a general theory of algorithmic fairness. Drawing on Johnson King and Babic’s work on moral encroachment, on Gary Becker’s work on labor market discrimination, and on Strawson’s idea of resentment and indignation as responses to violations of the demand for goodwill toward oneself and others, we locate attitudes to fairness in an agent’s utility function. In particular, we first argue that fairness is a matter of a decision-maker’s relative concern for the plight of people from (...) different groups, rather than of the outcomes produced for different groups. We then show how an agent’s preferences, including in particular their attitudes to error, give rise to their decision thresholds. Tying these points together, we argue that the agent’s relative degrees of concern for different groups manifest in a difference in decision thresholds applied to these groups. (shrink)

The aim of Modality and Explanatory Reasoning (MER) is to shed light on metaphysical necessity and the broader class of modal properties to which it belongs. This topic is approached with two goals: to develop a new and reductive analysis of modality, and to understand the purpose and origin of modal thought. I argue that a proper understanding of modality requires us to reconceptualize its relationship to causation and other forms of explanation such as grounding, a relation that connects metaphysically (...) fundamental facts to non-fundamental ones. While many philosophers have tried to give modal analyses of causation and explanation, often in counterfactual terms, I argue that we obtain a more plausible, explanatorily powerful and unified theory if we regard explanation as more fundamental than modality. The function of modal thought is to facilitate a common type of thought experiment – counterfactual reasoning – that allows us to investigate explanatory connections and which is closely related to the controlled experiments of empirical science. Necessity is defined in terms of explanation, and modal facts often reflect underlying facts about explanatory relationships. The study of modal facts is important for philosophy not because these facts are of much metaphysical interest in their own right, but largely because they provide evidence about explanatory connections. (shrink)

Exposure to pesticides during infancy is associated with numerous adverse health outcomes. The assessment of knowledge and perception of pesticides exposure and risk among children has not been thoroughly studied. The aim of the study was to evaluate the reliability and validity of a questionnaire that measures the knowledge and perception of exposure to organophosphate pesticides among rural schoolchildren. The questionnaire was administered to 151 schoolchildren between 9 and 13years from four Chilean rural schools. An internal consistency analysis of the (...) ordinal alpha coefficient and a polychoric factor analysis for categorical data were used. The results show that the ordinal alpha was 0.95. Polychoric matrices of rotated components show the 17 questions summarized pesticide knowledge in five factors extracted after promax rotation. This factorial model explains 56.3% of the variance. The questions were grouped as follows: knowledge about pesticides ; knowledge of health effects related to pesticides exposure ; pesticide exposure through the growing of fruits and vegetables ; perception and action against pesticides exposure at school ; and perception and action against pesticides exposure at home. The questionnaire provides a useful tool for examining pesticide exposure in agricultural regions, allowing younger community members to participate. (shrink)

Antihaecceitists believe that all facts about specific individuals—such as the fact that Fred exists, or that Katie is tall—globally supervene on purely qualitative facts. Haecceitists deny that. The issue is not only of interest in itself, but receives additional importance from its intimate connection to the question of whether all fundamental facts are qualitative or whether they include facts about which specific individuals there are and how qualitative properties and relations are distributed over them. Those who think that all fundamental (...) facts are qualitative are arguably committed to antihaecceitism. The goal of this paper is to point out some problems for antihaecceitism (and therefore for the thesis that all fundamental facts are qualitative). The article focuses on two common assumptions about possible worlds: (i) Sets of possible worlds are the bearers of objective physical chance. (ii) Counterfactual conditionals can be defined by appeal to a relation of closeness between possible worlds. The essay tries to show that absurd consequences ensue if either of these assumptions is combined with antihaecceitism. Then it considers a natural response by the antihaecceitist, which is to deny that worlds play the role described in (i) and (ii). Instead, the reply continues, we can introduce a new set of entities that are defined in terms of worlds and that behave the way worlds do on the haecceitist position. That allows the antihaecceitist to formulate antihaecceitist friendly versions of (i) and (ii) by replacing the appeal to possible worlds with reference to the newly introduced entities. This maneuver invites an obvious reply, however. If the new entities are the things that play the role we typically associate with worlds, as partially described by (i) and (ii), then it is natural to conclude that they really are the entities we talk about when we speak of worlds, so that haecceitism is true after all. (shrink)

We continue the research of an extension of the divisibility relation to the Stone‐Čech compactification. First we prove that ultrafilters we call prime actually possess the algebraic property of primality. Several questions concerning the connection between divisibilities in and nonstandard extensions of are answered, providing a few more equivalent conditions for divisibility in. Results on uncountable chains in are proved and used in a construction of a well‐ordered chain of maximal cardinality. Probably the most interesting result is the existence of (...) a chain of type in. Finally, we consider ultrafilters without divisors in and among them find the greatest class. (shrink)

Aristotelian ideas have in the past been applied with mixed fortunes to quantum mechanics. One of the most persistent criticisms is that Aristotle’s notions of potentiality and actuality are burdened with a teleological character long ago abandoned in the natural sciences. Recently this criticism has been met with a model of the actualization of quantum potentialities in light of Aristotle’s doctrine of ‘spontaneous events’. This presumably restores the nowadays acceptable idea of efficient causation in place of Aristotle’s original doctrine of (...) the ‘four causes’. In this article I challenge the model by arguing that when properly scrutinized Aristotle’s final cause poses no problems for an Aristotelian reading of quantum mechanics. Final causes in fact provide a better ontology for quantum mechanics than spontaneous causation. The idea of ‘spontaneity’ is unanalyzable and therefore of little use in quantum mechanics. In addition, it is ontologically sterile in the context of quantum measurement, as shown by a historical and conceptual review of the role of efficient causation in experimental physics. (shrink)

On the received view, counterfactuals are analysed using the concept of closeness between possible worlds: the counterfactual 'If it had been the case that p, then it would have been the case that q' is true at a world w just in case q is true at all the possible p-worlds closest to w. The degree of closeness between two worlds is usually thought to be determined by weighting different respects of similarity between them. The question I consider in the (...) paper is which weights attach to different respects of similarity. I start by considering Lewis's answer to the question and argue against it by presenting several counterexamples. I use the same examples to motivate a general principle about closeness: if a fact obtains in both of two worlds, then this similarity is relevant to the closeness between them if and only if the fact has the same explanation in the two worlds. I use this principle and some ideas of Lewis's to formulate a general account of counterfactuals, and I argue that this account can explain the asymmetry of counterfactual dependence. The paper concludes with a discussion of some examples that cannot be accommodated by the present version of the account and therefore necessitate further work on the details. (shrink)

The current debate on artificial intelligence (AI) tends to associate AI imaginaries with the vision of a future technology capable of emulating or surpassing human intelligence. This article advocates for a more nuanced analysis of AI imaginaries, distinguishing “strong AI narratives,” i.e., narratives that envision futurable AI technologies that are virtually indistinguishable from humans, from "weak" AI narratives, i.e., narratives that discuss and make sense of the functioning and implications of existing AI technologies. Drawing on the academic literature on AI (...) narratives and imaginaries and examining examples drawn from the debate on Large Language Models and public policy, we underscore the critical role and interplay of weak and strong AI across public/private and fictional/non-fictional discourses. The resulting analytical framework aims to empower approaches that are more sensitive to the heterogeneity of AI narratives while also advocating normalising AI narratives, i.e., positioning weak AI narratives more firmly at the center stage of public debates about emerging technologies. (shrink)

We further investigate a divisibility relation on the set of BN ultrafilters on the set of natural numbers. We single out prime ultrafilters (divisible only by 1 and themselves) and establish a hierarchy in which a position of every ultrafilter depends on the set of prime ultrafilters it is divisible by. We also construct ultrafilters with many immediate successors in this hierarchy and find positions of products of ultrafilters.

If definitive evidence concerning treatment effectiveness becomes available from an ongoing randomized clinical trial, then the trial could be stopped early, with the public release of results benefiting current and future patients. However, stopping an ongoing trial based on accruing outcome data requires methodological rigor to preserve validity of the trial conclusions. This has led to the use of formal interim monitoring procedures, which include inefficacy monitoring that will stop a trial early when the experimental treatment appears not to be (...) working. For participants, inefficacy monitoring is especially important as it ensures that they are not being treated worse than if they had not enrolled on the trial. We discuss the importance of reporting with trial results the formal interim inefficacy monitoring guidelines that were utilized, and, if none were used, the reasons for their absence. A survey of two leading medical journals suggests that this is not current practice. (shrink)

The sensorimotor account of perception is akin to Gibsonian direct realism. Both emphasize external properties of the world, challenging views based on the analysis of internal visual processing. To compare the role of distal and retinotopic parameters, distractor effect – an optomotor reaction of midbrain origin – is considered. Even in this case, permanence in the environment, not on the retina, explains the dynamics of habituation.

Philosophy is traditionally understood as the search for universal truths, and philosophers are supposed to transmit those truths beyond the limits of their own culture. But, today, we have become skeptical about the ability of an individual philosopher to engage in "universal thinking," so philosophy seems to capitulate in the face of cultural relativism. In Introduction to Antiphilosophy, Boris Groys argues that modern "antiphilosophy" does not pursue the universality of thought as its goal but proposes in its place the (...) universality of life, material forces, social practices, passions, and experiences --angst, vitality, ecstasy, the gift, revolution, laughter or "profane illumination" --and he analyzes this shift from thought to life and action in the work of thinkers from Kierkegaard to Derrida, from Nietzsche to Benjamin. Ranging across the history of modern thought, Introduction to Antiphilosophy endeavors to liberate philosophy from the stereotypes that hinder its development. --Publisher. (shrink)

En règle générale, l’office du juge est réduit aux possibilités techniques offertes au juge par les codes pour exercer sa fonction. Or, l’office du juge est bien plus que cela. Il est l’expression d’un pouvoir autonome d’une force considérable, distinct du pouvoir qui offre au juge sa légitimité. Qu’est-ce qui fonde alors ce pouvoir propre? Il apparaît que ce « mystère », ainsi que l’évoquait Pierre Ayrault au XVI e siècle, se niche au cœur de la dimension liturgique de la (...) forme de procéder. Or, cette théorie de l’office du juge prend un sens particulier aujourd’hui, dans un monde où l’autorité des normes se renverse. (shrink)

Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal (Ed.): Nietzsche and Soviet Culture: Ally and Adversary. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1994. Pp. xvi + 421. ISBN 0-521-45281-3.

I will in this paper attempt to extract a positive doctrine on the substantiality of the human soul from Ghazali"s critique of the Aristotelian philosophical tradition. Rather than reflecting on the possibilities and limitations of intercultural dialogue, my aim is to directly engage in such dialogue. Accordingly, I will not suppose that we need to develop and apply external standards according to which one of the two philosophical traditions addressed here, Western and Islamic, may turn out to be superior. Up (...) to a certain point, Western and Islamic philosophy are virtually indistinguishable regarding their style, the main topics, and the arguments discussed, which both take over from Aristotle and the Neoplatonists. Further, at least up to Ghazali, no Islamic philosopher actually employs standards of rationality that would differ from the standards also accepted in the West. Ghazali himself would certainly be at least as disturbed by a valid philosophical objection to his claims as any other serious philosopher. He does not pursue another kind of project, but submits to the same standards of truth and validity, as far as philosophical argument reaches. His point is, of course, that these standards do not reach as far as some philosophers suppose. But this, again, is not a particularly "Islamic� insight. (shrink)

This paper engages the debate within the ‘democratic turn’ in Machiavelli scholarship, where an ‘institutional’ approach has celebrated Machiavelli's theorisation of the institutions under which the people can rule while a ‘no-rule’ approach has traced Machiavelli's attention to the popular capacity to subvert all relations of rule. What do we make of Machiavelli's concurrent reception as a champion of popular rule and an antagonist to all rule? I argue that both institutionalising and subversive impulses appear simultaneously in Machiavelli's works, though (...) in a dynamic for which neither of the democratic approaches adequately accounts – namely, a rhetorical dimension of Machiavelli's works wherein political knowledge unfolds from a continuous multiplicity of perspectives and the ensuing implication that perspective is crafted and shaped through political action. Perspectival readings of Machiavelli's accounts of the Capuan debate and the Ciompi rebellion thus reveal that both democratic approaches have neglected to question certain ‘princely’ orientations toward political action inherited in their conceptualisations of Machiavellian democracy. In contrast, I suggest that Machiavelli's comedy La Mandragola offers an opportunity to reframe perspective as a uniquely democratic phenomenon. Reading the comedy alongside the democratic turn, I argue that it enacts, satirises and even casts doubts on Machiavelli's princely lessons, in turn proposing a popular capacity to cultivate perspective in a newly organised public space. (shrink)

"PHENOMENON OF RELIGION" - under this name on June 20-21, 1996, the All-Ukrainian Colloquium, convened by the Department of Religious Studies and the Ukrainian Association of Religious Studies took place at the Institute of Philosophy of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. The purpose of the colloquium is to discuss the topical issues of Ukrainian religious studies concerning the nature, essence and functionality of religion as a social and historical phenomenon.

The existing variants of the classification of sciences differentiate and correlate the types of cognitive practices on various grounds. At the same time, the attention of epistemologists is usually concentrated on the instrumental logical and methodological functions of the proposed classifications, which guide scientists in the holistic cognitive space of rational cognition. As for the sociocultural dimensions of scientific and cognitive activity, they mostly correlate with the typological features of research practices only slightly. Meanwhile, science as a whole is undergoing (...) significant changes today, affecting, among other things, the status and methodological functions of its socio-cultural parameters, which significantly change the configuration of the cognitive space of scientific and cognitive activity. The article attempts to demonstrate the features of the problematization of contemporary science’s philosophical and methodological foundations. When discussing these issues, it is fundamentally important to consider how a scientist realizes his methodological tools and the socio-cultural status of scientific and cognitive activity. According to the author, these problematics are stepping into the center of today’s philosophical and methodological reflection on science, forcing us to take a fresh look at the meaning of science as a holistic cognitive phenomenon, accordingly, the typological features of its cognitive practices. (shrink)

In this handbook, I put into practice my philosophical views on children's mathematics. The handbook contains brief instructions and examples of mathematical activities. In the INSTRUCTIONS section, instructions are given on how, and in part why that way, to help preschool children in their mathematical development. In the ACTIVITIES section, there are examples of activities through which the child develops her mathematical abilities.

We continue the research of the relation $\hspace {1mm}\widetilde {\mid }\hspace {1mm}$ on the set $\beta \mathbb {N}$ of ultrafilters on $\mathbb {N}$, defined as an extension of the divisibility relation. It is a quasiorder, so we see it as an order on the set of $=_{\sim }$ -equivalence classes, where $\mathcal {F}=_{\sim }\mathcal {G}$ means that $\mathcal {F}$ and $\mathcal {G}$ are mutually $\hspace {1mm}\widetilde {\mid }$ -divisible. Here we introduce a new tool: a relation of congruence modulo an (...) ultrafilter. We first recall the congruence of ultrafilters modulo an integer and show that $=_{\sim }$ -equivalent ultrafilters do not necessarily have the same residue modulo $m\in \mathbb {N}$. Then we generalize this relation to congruence modulo an ultrafilter in a natural way. After that, using iterated nonstandard extensions, we introduce a stronger relation, which has nicer properties with respect to addition and multiplication of ultrafilters. Finally, we introduce a strengthening of $\hspace {1mm}\widetilde {\mid }\hspace {1mm}$ and show that it also behaves well with respect to the congruence relation. (shrink)

I argue that a tripartite analysis of simple statements such as “Bucephalus is a horse”, according to which they divide into two terms and a copula, requires the notion of a repeatable: something such that more than one particular can literally be it. I pose a familiar dilemma with respect to repeatables, and turn to Avicenna for a solution, who discusses a similar dilemma concerning quiddities. I conclude by describing how Avicenna’s quiddities relate to repeatables, and how both quiddities and (...) repeatables may contribute to a tripartite analysis of predication. (shrink)