Research on an expert system regarding unemployment insurance law has pointed to the difficulties of explicitly representing temporal relations. The question has been addressed in the artificial intelligence literature with respect to planning systems and linguistic analysis. The approaches adopted do not appear to be directly transposable to legal discourse. The problem seems so far to have escaped notice amongst researchers attempting to develop legal expert systems. The paper explores in a preliminary way how lawyers use temporal concepts. It is (...) submitted that “legal time” only partly overlaps with real time. A sketch of a formalization of temporal relations in law, following J. F. Allen's approach, is presented. (shrink)

Deprescribing is the term used to describe the process of withdrawal of an inappropriate medication supervised by a clinician. This article presents a discussion of how the Four Principles of biomedical ethics that may guide medical practitioners’ prescribing practices apply to deprescribing medications in older adults. The view of deprescribing as an act creates stronger moral duties than if viewed as an omission. This may explain the fear of negative outcomes which has been reported by prescribers as a barrier to (...) deprescribing. Respecting the autonomy of older adults is complex as they may not wish to be active in the decision-making process; they may also have reduced cognitive function and family members may therefore have to step in as surrogate decision-makers. Informed consent is intended as a process of information giving and reflection, where consent can be withdrawn at any time. However, people are rarely updated on the altered risks and benefits of their long-term medications as they age. Cessation of inappropriate medication use has a large financial benefit to the individual and the community. However, the principle of justice also dictates equal rights to treatment regardless of age. (shrink)

Deprescribing is the term used to describe the process of withdrawal of an inappropriate medication supervised by a clinician. This article presents a discussion of how the Four Principles of biomedical ethics that may guide medical practitioners’ prescribing practices apply to deprescribing medications in older adults. The view of deprescribing as an act creates stronger moral duties than if viewed as an omission. This may explain the fear of negative outcomes which has been reported by prescribers as a barrier to (...) deprescribing. Respecting the autonomy of older adults is complex as they may not wish to be active in the decision-making process; they may also have reduced cognitive function and family members may therefore have to step in as surrogate decision-makers. Informed consent is intended as a process of information giving and reflection, where consent can be withdrawn at any time. However, people are rarely updated on the altered risks and benefits of their long-term medications as they age. Cessation of inappropriate medication use has a large financial benefit to the individual and the community. However, the principle of justice also dictates equal rights to treatment regardless of age. (shrink)

La morale pratique dans les lettres de Sénèque.--Un poëte stoĩcien. Perse.--La vertu stoĩque. Epictète.--L'examen de conscience d'un empereur romain. Marc-Aurèle.--La prédication morale populaire. Dion Chrysostome.--La société remaine. Juvénal.--Le scepticisme religieux et philosophique. Lucien.

Heloise and the Paraclete. This chapter considers Abelard’s decision to entrust his foundation of the Paraclete to Heloise and his writing of the Historia calamitatum in 1132–33, as well as Heloise’s reaction to this autobiographical narrative. It examines the impact of Heloise’s arguments about their past relationship and about the religious life for women on Abelard’s writings for the Paraclete. It also considers Abelard’s poetic laments in the light of Heloise’s interest in the human side of the Bible.

Faith, Sacraments and Charity. This chapter considers Abelard’s lectures or sententie on faith, sacraments and charity in which he formulated a synthetic vision of theology, recorded by students. It also reviews Abelard’s theology through the perspective of one of his foremost critics, Hugh of St. Victor, in the De sacramentis. While Abelard was always known as a logician, he emerged in the 1130s as one of the most original theologians and theorist of ethics of his generation. The chapter considers the (...) evolution of the Theologia ‘Scholarium’ in the context of his teaching in the schools. It concludes by looking at the evolution of his thinking about the distinction between vice and sin in his Ethics or Scito teipsum, arguing that here he is responding to a longstanding concern of Heloise. (shrink)

Volume X presents a critical edition with commentary of all the texts published by Constant between July 1815 and April 1818. We are dealing here with political journalism, an instrument of public opinion deployed with great virtuosity by Constant to realise his liberal programme, with texts on political theory and the fundamental debates on the state budget, with publications composed in connection with the 1817 parliamentary elections. This volume contains an engagement with one of Chateaubriand’s key works (La (...) Monarchie selon la Charte), articles on the politics of the day and publications on important contemporary personalities such as Madame de Staël or Joseph Fouché. The importance of the texts always reaches beyond their particular concern to encompass fundamental principles of liberalism in Restoration Europe. (shrink)

For María Zambrano all forms of knowledge are articulated from tradition, because what is essential is located in the past, as if it were a question of a substratum per se which is always known and transmitted. Wisdom increases by accumulation: knowledges add up, they become part of a ..

Challenging Tradition: the Dialectica. This chapter examines Abelard’s Dialectica, his first major treatise on dialectic. The treatise is structured around an analysis both of the major parts of speech, categories and of different kinds of argument, categorical and hypothetical. It argues that a driving theme is Abelard’s desire to counter the philosophically realist arguments presented by William of Champeaux.

Drewermann himself typifies his whole literary theological activity as a therapy. Therefore, we may consider his therapeutic concern as the structural principle of this synthetic survey of his fundamental ideas. Therapy means deliverance from an evil situation. Throughout Drewermann’s oeuvre this evil situation is being approached from a double standpoint. Now it is described as anxiety , then again as psychic imperfection of man who suppresses essential elements of his inner life in the unconscious. This two perspectives are at the (...) origin of two distinctive trains of thought which run like a seam trough Drewermann’s oeuvre. Either develops its own logic which leads to divergent standpoint with regard to religious fundamental convictions which do not lend themselves to one synthesis. The vision on God as deliverer from anxiety maintains the fundamental ideas of traditional Christian theology like the belief in a transcendent personal God and in the unique role of Christ in the mystery of salvation. Typical of this vision is also the pessimistic outlook on man’s natural existence as they are made explicit in the myths of the Jahwistic primitive history. Mythology is to be surpassed by theology. In contrast, archetypal hermeneutics are in the service of man’s perfection, and have totally different, even opposite, theological implication with regard to the essence of man and his relationship with God. Obviously, hermeneutics are based on an optimistic view of man’s natural existence as it is made explicit in the archetypes. At the same time this perspective calls God’s transcendence into question. We find many statements that point to a coincidence of ‘Gottfindung’ and 'Selbstfindung’, Christ’s unique role in the mystery of salvation according to traditional theology runs the risk to get lost. Christ is reduced to one of the many possible phenomena of a generally human retigion which comes to light in the archetypes. Confronted with these fundamental problems, Drewermann claims that Bible reading in the line of depth psychology must be surpassed by theological explanation. The concomitant emphasis on shortcomings, even aberrations which the interpretation of depth psychology exposes leads Drewermann’s line of thought into insoluble aporia. In the healing process as a coming to perfection of fragmented man, the archetypes are considered as components of a human psyche , good as such, which have to be integrated with conscious life. In man’s striving for deliverance from existential anxiety , the myths and archetypes are seen as a description of an inherently disastrous human existence labouring under anxiety. Thus, the interpretation of Drewermann’s theology is faced with an apparently insoluble contradiction: on the one hand, the archetypal dream of mankind is the ‘language of God’; on the other, Drewermann takes the ‘overcoming of the myths’ the starting point of his theology. What comes to light about the relationship between God and man in both the interpretations in depth psychology and in theology runs not not only directly parallel, but the theological interpretation gives a verdict on the ‘archetypal hermeneutics’ which Drewermann’s new contribution to theology wants to be and to which the bulk of his oeuvre is devoted. (shrink)

Accusations of heresy. This chapter considers accusations of heresy made against Abelard by William of St Thierry and Bernard of Clairvaux in 1140/41. It considers how Abelard sought to respond to accusations that he was imprecise in his arguments by refining the text of the Theologia ‘Scholarium’. He felt that these accusations were based on an inaccurate understanding of his arguments. It examines the opinions of Abelard’s contemporaries and the polarized political circumstances that led up to the confrontation between Bernard (...) and Abelard at the Council of Sens in 1141. (shrink)

Usury is a concept often associated more with religiously based financial ethics, whether Christian or Islamic, than with the secular world of contemporary finance. The problem is compounded by a tendency to interpret riba, prohibited within Islam, as both usury and interest, without adequately distinguishing these concepts. This paper argues that in Christian tradition usury has always evoked the notion of money demanded in excess of what is owed on a loan, disrupting a relationship of equality between people, whereas interest (...) was seen as referring to just compensation to the lender. Although it is often claimed that hostility towards ‘usury’ has been in retreat in the West since the protestant Reformation, we would argue that the crucial break came not with Calvin, but with Jeremy Bentham, whose critique of the arguments of Adam Smith, upholding the reasonableness of the laws against usury, led to the abolition of the usury laws in England in 1854. There has to be a role for law, whether Islamic or secular, in regulating financial relationships. We argue that by retrieving the necessary distinction between demanding usury as illegitimate predatory lending and interest as legitimate compensation, we can discover common ground behind the driving principles of financial ethics within both Islamic and Christian tradition that may still be of relevance today. By re-examining past ethical discussions of the distinction between usury and just compensation, we argue that the world’s religious traditions can make significant contributions to contemporary debate. (shrink)

Cognitive niche construction is the process whereby organisms create and maintain cause–effect models of their niche as guides for fitness influencing behavior. Extended mind theory claims that cognitive processes extend beyond the brain to include predictable states of the world. Active inference and predictive processing in cognitive science assume that organisms embody predictive (i.e., generative) models of the world optimized by standard cognitive functions (e.g., perception, action, learning). This paper presents an active inference formulation that views cognitive niche construction as (...) a cognitive function aimed at optimizing organisms' generative models. We call that process of optimization extended active inference. (shrink)

In evolutionary biology, niche construction is sometimes described as a genuine evolutionary process whereby organisms, through their activities and regulatory mechanisms, modify their environment such as to steer their own evolutionary trajectory, and that of other species. There is ongoing debate, however, on the extent to which niche construction ought to be considered a bona fide evolutionary force, on a par with natural selection. Recent formulations of the variational free-energy principle as applied to the life sciences describe the properties of (...) living systems, and their selection in evolution, in terms of variational inference. We argue that niche construction can be described using a variational approach. We propose new arguments to support the niche construction perspective, and to extend the variational approach to niche construction to current perspectives in various scientific fields. (shrink)

El 3 de enero de 1889, en Turín, se produjo la primera crisis que callaría a aquel que se llamaba a sí mismo Dionisos o el Crucificado, o ambos a la vez. Ya en Basilea, a Nietzsche se le había diagnosticado "parálisis progresiva". En Jena, los médicos supusieron una infección sifilítica que se remontaba hacia 1866. Paradójicamente, a fines del mismo mes de enero se publicaba El ocaso de los ídolos y en la primavera de ese mismo año, cuando Nietzsche (...) parecía haberse olvidado de todo lo referente a su obra y de sí mismo, se publicaba Nietzsche contra Wagner. (shrink)

La terre est ronde.--La légalité et le droit.--L'ornière.--La cōte d'amour.--L'éternel bourgeois.--Les nations suisses.--L'étranger toléré.--La ligne de chance.

La polémica Constant-Kant tuvo lugar cuando Inmanuel Kant replico directamente a una observación crítica formulada por Constant en su panfleto Des Réactions Politiques. El tema sobre el que se debatía era la existencia de un deber incondicionado de decir siempre y en cualquier situación la verdad. Frente a las tesis del imperativo universal moral de la verdad del filósofo de Koënisberg, Constant opone los ejemplos concretos de situaciones en las que decir la verdad puede equivaler a hacer (...) el mal. Gabriel Albiac no explica en el Estudio introductorio que precede a la edición de los textos completos de la querella, cuanto anticipan las tesis que aquí se debaten, los problemas que generará el totalitarismo y el terror en el mundo de las ideologías holistas. Pero más allá de las consecuencias que pueden deparar las reflexiones en este libro relativas al derecho a decir y exigir la verdad - que es un de los postulados de la sacralización de la teología operada a partir del Renacimiento y de la Ilustración-, la polémica Constant/ Kant oculta otro segundo debate sobre el valor de los principios, la forma de construirlos y su eficacia para regir y explicar la realidad que se demuestra de excepcional interés en un siglo como el XXI, desbordado por su incapacidad de comprender los hechos que todos los días ofrece un mundo empírico en continua efervescencia, debido a la carencia de un sistema de categorías de principio generalmente aceptados que pueda servir de referente para unificar la multiplicidad de lo singular. En esta polémica que surge entre, un gran filósofo consagrado, que no tuvo reparo en salir al quite de un argumento que consideraba digno de réplica, y un joven aventurero dotado de extraordinaria inteligencia que iba a demostrarse capaz de comprender el mundo en que iniciaba su singladura, están contenidos en ciernes los supuestos básicos de alguno de lo problemas centrales de nuestra difícil postmodernidad. (shrink)

The first English translation of the major political works of Benjamin Constant (1767-1830), one of the most important of the French political figures in the aftermath of the revolution of 1789, and a leading member of the liberal opposition to Napoleon and later to the restored Bourbon monarchy. The texts included in this volume are widely regarded as one of the classic formulations of modern liberal doctrine.

We argue that political propaganda is a negative phenomenon, against a recent strain of philosophical theorizing that argues that political propaganda can sometimes be neutral or even positive. After an exploration of the sense and connotation of the word ‘propaganda’ in ordinary use and in the scholarly literature, we discuss Ross’s (2002) account of propaganda as an epistemically defective form of political communication. We claim that, with some refinements, it is an explanatorily useful analysis. We then assess two prominent attempts (...) that aim at classifying legitimate cases of public communication as cases of propaganda, namely Ross’s (2013) revision of her previous model, and Stanley’s (2015) influential account. We show that some of the cases in contention are problematic and that the arguments the authors offer for classifying other non-problematic cases as propaganda are inconclusive. We also argue that the idea of considering legitimate public communication as propaganda is unmotivated. (shrink)

Together, the code and inferential models of communication are often thought to range over all cases of communication. However, their prevailing versions seem unable to fully explain what I call underdeterminacy without ostension. The latter is constituted by communication where stimuli that are not (nor appear to be) produced with communicative or informative intentions nevertheless communicate information underdetermined by the relevant codes. Though the prevailing accounts of communication cannot fully explain how communication works in such cases, I suggest that some (...) version of the inferential model can—if we allow it to extend to non‐ostensive, non‐intentional behaviors. (shrink)

Over the last 30 years, representationalist and dynamicist positions in the philosophy of cognitive science have argued over whether neurocognitive processes should be viewed as representational or not. Major scientific and technological developments over the years have furnished both parties with ever more sophisticated conceptual weaponry. In recent years, an enactive generalization of predictive processing – known as active inference – has been proposed as a unifying theory of brain functions. Since then, active inference has fueled both representationalist and dynamicist (...) campaigns. However, we believe that when diving into the formal details of active inference, one should be able to find a solution to the war; if not a peace treaty, surely an armistice of a sort. Based on an analysis of these formal details, this paper shows how both representationalist and dynamicist sensibilities can peacefully coexist within the new territory of active inference. (shrink)

Autism Spectrum Condition presents a challenge to social and relational accounts of the self, precisely because it is broadly seen as a disorder impacting social relationships. Many influential theories argue that social deficits and impairments of the self are the core problems in ASC. Predictive processing approaches address these based on general purpose neurocognitive mechanisms that are expressed atypically. Here we use the High, Inflexible Precision of Prediction Errors in Autism approach in the context of cultural niche construction to explain (...) atypicalities of the relational self, specifically its minimal, extended, and intersubjective aspects. We contend that the social self in ASC should not be seen as impaired, but rather as an outcome of atypical niche construction. We unpack the scientific, ethical, and practical consequences of this view, and discuss implications for how the challenges that autistic persons face should be approached. (shrink)

Il volume contiene la traduzione della Prefazione e del Libro I dell'opera di Benjamin Constant (1767-1830) - teorico della democrazia liberale, storico e filosofo nel dominio delle religioni, romanziere, politico che debutta nella Rivoluzione francese, matura sotto il regime napoleonico, invecchia durante la monarchia della Restaurazione - De la Religion, pubblicata in cinque tomi tra il 1824 e il 1831. Corredato di un ampio saggio introduttivo del curatore, il libro colma una lacuna della cultura filosofica italiana, ossia l'assenza di (...) una traduzione dell'opera religiosa di Constant, di cui viene proposta la parte iniziale contenente l'introduzione generale alla vasta storia comparata delle religioni antiche - dal feticismo al politeismo - che compone il lavoro constantiano. "Opera capitale per intendere compiutamente il Constant" - scrive Fulvio Tessitore nella Presentazione - e, ancor più, l'età nevralgica in cui essa apparve e della quale è uno dei vertici letterari e teoretici--OCLC. (shrink)

Returning to Logica. This chapter examines the Logica ‘Ingredientibus’, a series of commentaries on Porphyry, Aristotle, and Boethius more profound than any of his earlier glosses. I argue that in these commentaries Abelard adopts a much more profound theory of universals and of other parts of speech than in the Dialectica. Rather than emphasizing differences of opinion with William of Champeaux, they demonstrate how far Abelard had come to distance himself from the arguments of Boethius. Instead of speaking uniquely about (...) dialectic, he is now interested in logica, the arts of language in general. (shrink)

This short article aims to reflect on the impacts of Ulrich Beck’s work in Brazilian sociology. Particularly, it will be argued that Beck’s work has had a significant impact on the establishment of the conceptual field of environmental sociology in Brazil. His book Risk Society, for instance, had a great influence – since the late 1980s – among the Brazilian research groups dedicated to the debate on the relationship between society and nature in modern contexts. Although placed in the critical (...) target condition through the years, the notion of risk developed by Beck is still undoubtedly an important pillar in the constitution of the field of socioenvironmental studies at an international level and in Brazil, in particular. (shrink)