From the New York Times bestselling author of Eating the Sun and Lost in Translation, a gorgeously illustrated love letter to everything that is beautiful, and a manifesto for those who are struggling to remember or recognize what beauty is. People are increasingly baffled as to what they can call beautiful, what they should call beautiful, and whether or not they are able to apply beautiful to themselves or to the things around them. Our outdated yet hugely pervasive modern notions (...) of beauty provide one of the greatest sadnesses of all-an intensely human emptiness that we are mistakenly trying to fill with objects and hollow promises. To be able to find our way back to beauty is a deceptively urgent task in the world today. Everyone deserves revelations, the kind that are daily, hugely personal, and very often ephemeral. We are surrounded by beauty-beauty that isn't something we can buy: spiderwebs only seen in the sunlight, the greenish glow of a fox's eyes watching in the dark, or the comforting screech of the subway that takes you to your many futures. Part meditation, part self-help guide, and part interactive journal, Everything, Beautiful explores what beauty is, why it matters, and how we can find it in our everyday lives. Filled with thoughtful, intimate, and brilliant insights, inspirational quotes, breathtaking illustrations, and space for readers to write, draw, and reflect on their own ideas of beauty, Everything, Beautiful is for anyone who feels they cannot point to beauty any longer, are struggling to see it, or feel that it has left them behind. (shrink)

In diesen Vorlesungen des Begründers des amerikanischen Pragmatismus, Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914), werden die Verknüpfungen von Logik und Praxis, Denken und Handeln in der Philosophie des "größten amerikanischen Denkers" (K. O. Apel) deutlich. Aus dem Inhalt: Pragmatismus: Die normativen Wissenschaften; Die universalen Kategorien; Weiteres über Kategorien; Die Realität der Drittheit; Die drei Arten des Guten; Drei Typen des Schließens; Pragmatismus und Abduktion; Anmerkungen von Peirce. - Anmerkungen der Herausgeberin; Bibliographie, Namen- und Sachregister.

In their important paper “Autonomous Agents”, Floridi and Sanders use “levels of abstraction” to argue that computers are or may soon be moral agents. In this paper we use the same levels of abstraction to illuminate differences between human moral agents and computers. In their paper, Floridi and Sanders contributed definitions of autonomy, moral accountability and responsibility, but they have not explored deeply some essential questions that need to be answered by computer scientists who design artificial agents. One (...) such question is, “Can an artificial agent that changes its own programming become so autonomous that the original designer is no longer responsible for the behavior of the artificial agent?” To explore this question, we distinguish between LoA1 (the user view) and LoA2 (the designer view) by exploring the concepts of unmodifiable, modifiable and fully modifiable tables that control artificial agents. We demonstrate that an agent with an unmodifiable table, when viewed at LoA2, distinguishes an artificial agent from a human one. This distinction supports our first counter-claim to Floridi and Sanders, namely, that such an agent is not a moral agent, and the designer bears full responsibility for its behavior. We also demonstrate that even if there is an artificial agent with a fully modifiable table capable of learning* and intentionality* that meets the conditions set by Floridi and Sanders for ascribing moral agency to an artificial agent, the designer retains strong moral responsibility. (shrink)

En este estudio nos proponemos determinarsemejanzas y diferencias entre el infinitivoen español y francés desde una perspectivasupraoracional con base en un corpus de 100textos de diferente asignación diafásica, 50en español y 50 en francés. Los infinitivos queobtuvimos de nuestros corpora presentaronrasgos en común, pero también diferenciasconsiderables. En ambas lenguas encontramoscláusulas de infinitivo desempeñando unadiversidad de funciones de junción con valoressemánticos de tiempo, causa, inclusión, exclusión,finalidad, condición y concesión; sin embargo,los nexos de enlace entre la cláusula principaly la de infinitivo resultaron (...) más variados enespañol que en francés. Asimismo, en ambaslenguas localizamos construcciones infinitivasindependientes fragmentarias, interrogativas,yusivas y enunciativas. Todas ellas desempeñaronfunciones semejantes tanto en español comoen francés. Cabe señalar que en francés noencontramos ninguna construcción infinitivaexclamativa, mientras que en español ubicamosun solo ejemplo. Finalmente, únicamente en elcorpus en francés registramos construcciones quelos estudiosos de esta lengua denominan infinitifde narration. (shrink)

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) is considered to be among the half dozen most important philosophers the United States has produced. The Charles S. Peirce Sesquicentennial International Congress opened at Harvard University on September 5, 1989 and concluded on the 10th - Peirce's birthday. The Congress was host to approximately 450 scholars from 26 different nations. Papers concerning Peirce's philosophy of science were given at the Congress by representatives from Italy, France, Sweden, Finland, Korea, India, Denmark, Greece, Brazil, Belgium, Spain, (...) Germany, and the United States. The present volume is a compilation of some of the papers that were presented at that Congress. (shrink)

Asserts the need for Americans to reclaim their traditional values of freedom, democracy and fairness and offers alternatives to accepting political and economic absolutes.

An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Taste and of the Origin of Our Ideas of Beauty (1785) was written by the portrait artist Frances Reynolds (1729-1807).

In Intricate Ethics, Kamm questions the moral importance of some non-consequentialist distinctions and then introduces and argues for the moral importance of ...

As interest in aesthetic experience evolved in the eighteenth century, discussions of the sublime located two opposed accounts of its place and use. Ferguson traces these two positions - the Burkean empiricist account and the Kantian formalist one - to argue that they had significance of aesthetics, including recent deconstructive and New Historicist criticism.

Connections are drawn here between the writings of Mexico's most important seventeenth-century poet, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the development of the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe, still today a dominant feature of Catholic worship in Latin America. Techniques of conversion used by the Spanish missions are examined as background to the apparition of the Virgin, in 1531, and to clarify Sor Juana's response in her public verse. Later uses of the synecdoche are set out to illustrate (...) the Guadalupe's shape-shifting powers besides those of other legendary women in Mexican myth and history. A final section looks at the possibilities for new, creative aspects of feminist spirituality and liberation theology challenging Latin American Catholicism, and suggests ways in which women worshipping, and the worship of woman, are evolving in modem Mexico. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Prayer in Greek ReligionFrances Hickson–HahnSimon Pulleyn. Prayer in Greek Religion. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. xvi + 245 pp. Cloth, $75.The study of prayer in ancient Greece faces rather daunting obstacles. Only four brief texts remain which scholars agree may represent authentic examples of cultic prayer: the twoword prayer of Eleusinian initiates, the Athenian [End Page 632] prayer to Zeus for rain, a prayer to Demeter for the barley (...) sheaf, and the dithyramb of Elis, for a grand total of forty words. In addition, there are three fifth–century hymns from Epidaurus, a form not universally agreed to be prayer. In the area of epigraphic evidence, the largest body of prayer–like addresses derives from curse tablets which mostly postdate the classical period and which arguably belong not to the study of religion but to that of magic. Votive inscriptions, while plentiful, are rarely in prayer form. Thus, of necessity, the scholar is largely dependent on literary evidence, most of which is poetic.Thus it is a challenging task which Simon Pulleyn took on in this revised version of his doctoral thesis: to describe and interpret the mentality of all types of prayer in archaic and classical Greece in a relatively slight volume (216 pages plus appendices, etc.). The resulting monograph, "the first book–length study of Greek prayer to appear in English" (jacket), will prove a useful introduction to the body of evidence and major lines of research on Greek prayer. His work will be especially welcome to those not competent in the ancient languages, for Pulleyn translates all of the prayers proffered as examples, as well as modern foreign–language quotations. He also includes a brief glossary of fifteen Greek words especially important in the study of prayers. While he quotes an abundance of illustrative prayers, both literary and epigraphic, and devotes considerable space to lexicographic discussions, nevertheless he produces a quite readable text.Rejecting the broader definition of prayer as any address or appeal to supernatural powers, used by Aubriot–Sevin (Prière et conceptions religieuses en Grèce ancienne, Lyon, 1992), Pulleyn defines Greek prayers as "articulate requests directed toward the gods" and proposes a four–part classification of (1) prayers based on ξενία (2) curses (), (3) entreaties (λιταί), and (4) supplications ().While there is considerable ancient evidence to support the association of prayer with petition, such a narrow description leaves in limbo other types of address to the gods, such as thanksgivings and greetings, which are too important to be left out of this or any comprehensive study of prayer. And so Pulleyn is forced to devote much space to the discussion of material which he does not technically consider prayer. In fact, he himself varies between the technical use of the term "prayer" and the more common modern definition, a practice which naturally leads to some confusion. On occasion, he resorts to the term "prayer–like" to describe nonpetitionary addresses to gods.Perhaps the reason for this emphasis on petition is the author's main thesis that is the primary characteristic of the relationship between the ancient Greeks and their gods, and thus of prayer as well. Pulleyn explains thus: "it refers to a whole nexus of related ideas that we would call reciprocity. When one gives something to a god, one is giving in the sense that the offering is pleasing; but equally one is storing up for oneself a feeling of gratitude on the part of the god, which is also The whole two–way relationship can be called one of " (4). [End Page 633]This thesis, which is prominent in the first half of the book, is most fully developed in the second chapter, where Pulleyn examines prayers of the type, known particularly from the Homeric epics. He is especially concerned with the da quia dedi(t) model, which presents an argument for fulfillment of the accompanying request based on sacrifices previously offered. Numerically, in Homer and elsewhere, this is not a common prayer type. Although it would seem to violate the typical pattern of sacrifice offered in conjunction with prayer requests, Pulleyn argues convincingly for interpretation of this prayer type within the context of reciprocity. The connection with... (shrink)

Among the cognitive capacities of evolved creatures is the capacity to represent. Theories in cognitive neuroscience typically explain our manifest representational capacities by positing internal representations, but there is little agreement about how these representations function, especially with the relatively recent proliferation of connectionist, dynamical, embodied, and enactive approaches to cognition. In this talk I sketch an account of the nature and function of representation in cognitive neuroscience that couples a realist construal of representational vehicles with a pragmatic account of (...) mental content. I call the resulting package a deflationary account of mental representation and I argue that it avoids the problems that afflict competing accounts. (shrink)

Decreasing philanthropic funding from governments and foundations and increasing social needs are putting pressure on nonprofits to generate financial resources in more entrepreneurial ways. This type of social innovation within the nonprofit sector can be facilitated through collaborative alliances with universities, corporations and other public/private partnerships. This paper presents a case study of a university partnership between Institute of Social Innovation at Carnegie Mellon University and the Pittsburgh Social Innovation Accelerator.