Can computer and information technology (IT), widely used in the development of livestock health and production, be of any benefit for Third World farmers and institutions? And if so, how can they be implemented on a large scale? The authors try to answer these and related questions based on experiences with computerized dairy herd health and production programs in Costa Rica. They conclude that IT is becoming a key instrument in the planning and operation of modern extension services and on-farm (...) research for meeting the farmers' increasing needs for information and for enhancing their ability to manage the available resources efficiently. IT enables private sector extension services provided by farmer groups and advisors to give farmers access to information that they previously lacked. These services facilitate bottom-up planning. Where IT does not allow the farmer or extension agent to solve the problem, IT can be used to articulate the problem for researchers or policy makers to address. For low-resource smallholders, access to IT can be provided through local farmer organizations. At the institutional level, IT is giving a strong impulse to the improvement of on-farm research, teaching programs, institutional and disciplinary cooperation, regional networking, and to a better linkage with the productive sector. (shrink)

The main aim of this paper is to articulate Politics of Development, constituted from the work of the Brazilian philosophers Álvaro Vieira Pinto and Roland Corbisier, with Politics of Liberation, as proposed by the Argentinean philosopher Enrique Dussel. The first step is the recompilation of the political theory related to Politics of Development, present in the work of the Brazilians, arguing favourably on the possibility of the conception of a Politics of Development as a branch of Philosophy of Development (...) as an autonomous philosophical discipline. Our main thesis is that Politics of Development has as one of its essential notes the nationalism with a liberating nature. Lastly, this subdiscipline is historically and geoepistemically situated in light of Politics of Liberation. As the concluding remarks of the paper, we highlight the new lines of research open by this investigation and the implications of the conception of this philosophical discipline as autonomous to the isebian studies. (shrink)

La textualidad de conferencias y seminarios pronunciados por Enrique Leff en los últimos años, en una errancia iluminada por el Diálogo de Saberes, se transforma en Discursos Sustentables, en una cartografía vital para navegar por las costas del archipiélago complejo de una época, donde todavía las señales, muchas veces signos evanescentes, apenas si son una velada luz amanecida, transida de misterios, cuyas voces iniciales gorjean los sonidos de “una nueva comprensión del mundo y de los pr..

Los comentarios a la última entrega del pensamiento de Enrique Leff, que ahora los reúne en este libro titulado Discursos sustentables, son totalmente subjetivos y muy locales, es decir, aquí les cuento lo que el pensar de Leff nos deja pensando, allá, lejos, en las pequeñas comunidades de la Costa de Sonora, que dan al Golfo de California, en donde he estado conviviendo una buena parte de mi vida.Para apreciar la voz de Leff, hay que procurar el silencio, aquel (...) que nos permite escuchar los l.. (shrink)

This is a unique guide to one of the most exciting develpments within contemporary jurisprudence. It systematically applies a critical philosophy to the substance of common law, overviewing its politics and cultural significance.

Human rights have become an important ideal in current times, yet our age has witnessed more violations of human rights than any previous less enlightened one. This book explores the historical and theoretical dimensions of this paradox. Divided into two parts, the first section offers an alternative history of natural law, in which natural rights are represented as the eternal human struggle to resist opression and to fight for a society in which people are no longer degraded or despised. At (...) the time of their birth in the 18th Century and again in the popular uprisings of the last decade, human rights became the dominant critique of law and society. The radical rhetoric of rights and its apparently endless expansive potential has led to its adoption by governments and individuals alike seeking to justify their actions on moral grounds and has undermined its radical edge. Part Two examines the philosophical logic of rights. The classical critiques of Kant, Burke, Hegel and Marx illuminate traditional aproaches to the concept of human rights. The work of Heidegger, Sartre and psychoanalysis is used to deconstruct the metaphisical essentialism of bothe universalists and cultural relativists. Finally, through a consideration of the ethics of otherness, and with reference to recent human rights violations, it is argued that the end of human rights is to judge law and politics from a moral stand point which both transcends the present and is historically relevant. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the indirect realists’ recourse to mental representations does not allow them to account for the possibility of hallucination, nor for the presentational character of visual experience. To account for the presentational character, I suggest a kind of intentionalism that is based on the interdependency between the perceived object and the embodied perceiver. This approach provides a positive account to the effect that genuine perception and hallucination are different kinds of states. Finally, I offer a (...) tentative suggestion as to how a hallucinatory experience may still be mistaken for a genuine perceptual experience. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to present a reading of Plato's utopianism, as expressed mainly through the 'big letters' of the Republic, which will lead us beyond Karl Popper's and Leo Strauss' modernist understandings of Plato and of his world. The author argues that, despite the 'transcendent' aspects of Platonic utopianism, the ideal city should be understood neither as a blueprint to be realized through some totalitarian political project nor as a mere fiction that cannot by definition give rise (...) to a viable existential prospect. The power of Platonic utopianism lies in its articulation to a value-laden cosmological continuum, which may be understood in terms of the self-instituting (through political persuasion and story-telling activites, among others) capacities of ancient Greek city. The utopian perspective is marked by shareability of political reason and by mutuality between participants in a common discursive venture rather than by individualist authoritarian projections or by harmless (that is, non-political in it orientation and ideological in its repercussions) day-dreaming. Even if Plato's philosophical project aspires to transcend the boundaries of ancient Greek cosmos, Platonic politics cannot be separated from its historical context, that is, the circumstances that gave rise to philosophy as a silent perhaps, but revolutionary, in it intentions political act. (shrink)

Pylyshyn restricts cognitively penetrable vision to late vision, whereas he does not make any distinction between different kinds of penetrating cognition. I argue that this approach disconnects early vision content from late vision content and blurs the distinction between the latter and the content of thought. To overcome this problem I suggest that we should not distinguish between different kinds of visual content but instead introduce a restriction on the kind of cognition that can directly penetrate visual experience. In particular, (...) I suggest that visual experience, unlike thought, is directly penetrated only by practical non-propositional knowledge. I specify this weak cognitive penetrability in anti-representational terms. In particular, I suggest that the dependence of visual content on practical non-propositional knowledge should be conceived as a rational non-inferential relation, for it is in this way that we can account for the distinctive content of visual experience. (shrink)

According to McDowell’s transcendental empiricism, the world view depends on experience, which in turn depends on the world view. This seems to be in accord with the thesis that experience is theory-laden, but it also seems to introduce a problem of vicious circularity. I argue that McDowell’s account has the resources to avoid the problem of vicious circularity by exploiting the idea of a wider circle that involves more relata and more kinds of rational dependence. But the acceptance of this (...) idea entails that experience, though concept-laden, is not theory-laden. (shrink)

We give alternative proofs of results due to Paris and Wilkie concerning the existence of end extensions of countable models of $B\Sigma_{1}$, that is, the theory of $\Sigma_{1}$ collection.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 125.1 (2004) 152-155 [Access article in PDF] Victoria Rimell. Petronius and the Anatomy of Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. x + 239 pp. Cloth, $60. The jacket illustration of this book shows a detail from Dali's Autumnal Cannibalism(1936), now in the Tate Modern, London. This bleak picture shows the upper parts of two fluid bodies, one wearing a cream shirt and having an apple (...) on its head, the other clad in a red garment (a striking touch amongst the predominant dark-green colors); both hold cutlery and, set against the background of rocky mountains, cut pieces from each other while locked in a tender embrace. Critics have often seen this painting as an allusion to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, or as a representation of Dali (a latter-day William Tell) and his wife Gala, who did not meet with the approval of Dali's father. The choice of this disturbing illustration cannot have been accidental, for the horror of (the Roman) Civil War, the act of cannibalism, the concept of corporeal fluidity, and the implications of eating habits and eating hierarchies (we are ultimately eaten by what we eat) are central issues to Rimell's sophisticated Petronian study, which is sometimes as difficult to follow as Dali's painting.Influenced by Froma Zeitlin's "RomanusPetronius: A Study of the Troiae halosisand the Bellum civile" (Latomus30 (1971), 56-82) and Catherine Connors' Petronius the Poet(Cambridge University Press, 1998), Rimell views the Satyriconas a theatrical and highly metaphorical work in which the characters' role-playing corresponds to a disruptive process of metamorphosis, and literature is "imaged as a live body, a flesh or food ingested in the process of learning and spewed out from bodies in performance" (9). Petronius' metaphors, involving bodies presented as texts and texts as bodies, complicate our reading experience of this novel and create unifying patterns of images that evoke a chaotic world where borders melt and hierarchies (eater-eaten, text-context, author-narrator, book-reader) are confused. Even the narrative modes of prose and poetry, far from being fixed and rigidly defined, are seen to devour one another through the repeated image of recitation as a penetration of solid physical boundaries. Exteriors are deceitful (the dishes served by Trimalchio lend themselves easily to this view) and interiors menacing (what lies inside the belly of the Trojan horse, the devious creature of Eumolpus' Troiae Halosis?). The food Petronian characters eat (and hence the literature they read) affects and potentially threatens their [End Page 152] bodies (and hence their inner selves), because what they consume may gnaw them away from within (there seems to be no place in Rimell's argumentation for pleasure in the mere act of eating, which, according to her, equals penetration of physical boundaries and hence feminization of the consumer). Yet, poets and scholars in Petronius' world must stuff themselves, Rimell argues, with food (= literature) before they start ejecting it (= writing), for, once literature is consumed, it cannot stay trapped inside the human body for long. A complete list of the uses of fundereand cognates in the Satyricon(in Appendix I) is brought in to support Rimell's claim. The literature that comes out of the body has been transformed during its digestion: "as the consumed alters the consumer, as we become what we eat, so too Petronius' 'sources,' be they solid, liquid, or vaporous, are rewritten in the process of their incorporation" (47); and "Vomiting is always imaginable as recitation, an often violent ejection of contained knowledge" (170). I am not sure I follow Rimell here: this is not how human bodies process their food; are there any examples of defecation imaged as composing literature? Pursuing this line of enquiry, Rimell strongly argues against scholars who make clear-cut distinctions between the low and the high, the material and the spiritual, the physical and the intellectual worlds of the Satyriconand challenges interpretations of Petronius' novel as theatrical entertainment for its own sake.Rimell's views are articulated in detail in the... (shrink)

It is commonly hypothesized that scientists are more likely to engage in data falsification and fabrication when they are subject to pressures to publish, when they are not restrained by forms of social control, when they work in countries lacking policies to tackle scientific misconduct, and when they are male. Evidence to test these hypotheses, however, is inconclusive due to the difficulties of obtaining unbiased data. Here we report a pre-registered test of these four hypotheses, conducted on papers that were (...) identified in a previous study as containing problematic image duplications through a systematic screening of the journal PLoS ONE. Image duplications were classified into three categories based on their complexity, with category 1 being most likely to reflect unintentional error and category 3 being most likely to reflect intentional fabrication. We tested multiple parameters connected to the hypotheses above with a matched-control paradigm, by collecting two controls for each paper containing duplications. Category 1 duplications were mostly not associated with any of the parameters tested, as was predicted based on the assumption that these duplications were mostly not due to misconduct. Categories 2 and 3, however, exhibited numerous statistically significant associations. Results of univariable and multivariable analyses support the hypotheses that academic culture, peer control, cash-based publication incentives and national misconduct policies might affect scientific integrity. No clear support was found for the “pressures to publish” hypothesis. Female authors were found to be equally likely to publish duplicated images compared to males. Country-level parameters generally exhibited stronger effects than individual-level parameters, because developing countries were significantly more likely to produce problematic image duplications. This suggests that promoting good research practices in all countries should be a priority for the international research integrity agenda. (shrink)

S4.2 is the modal logic of directed partial pre-orders and/or the modal logic of reflexive and transitive relational frames with a final cluster. It holds a distinguished position in philosophical...

Pylyshyn restricts cognitively penetrable vision to late vision, whereas he does not make any distinction between different kinds of penetrating cognition. I argue that this approach disconnects early vision content from late vision content and blurs the distinction between the latter and the content of thought. To overcome this problem I suggest that we should not distinguish between different kinds of visual content but instead introduce a restriction on the kind of cognition that can directly penetrate visual experience. In particular, (...) I suggest that visual experience, unlike thought, is directly penetrated only by practical non-propositional knowledge. I specify this weak cognitive penetrability in anti-representational terms. In particular, I suggest that the dependence of visual content on practical non-propositional knowledge should be conceived as a rational non-inferential relation, for it is in this way that we can account for the distinctive content of visual experience. (shrink)

In June 2012, the conference Trends in Logic XI, whose main theme was Advances in Philosophical Logic, took place at the Ruhr University in Bochum. Eight of the invited papers were published in a special issue of the journal Studia Logica. The present volume contains fourteen papers, which the editors selected out of the contributed papers presented at the conference, in order to offer a panorama of the themes developed in philosophical logic in the last two decades or so, as (...) well as to indicate some promising directions for further research. In what follows, we give a brief description of each contribution, following the order in the list of contents.In the first paper, B. Armour-Garb and J.A. Woodbridge discuss a manner in which one can treat semantic pathologies, such as the Liar Paradox. According to their approach, semantically pathological sentences are s-defective, i.e. they can be understood in a sense, but they bear no content, which we can accept or reject. The a .. (shrink)

Este artículo tiene como objetivo presentar un análisis bioético claro de las consecuencias que tiene la legalización de la eutanasia sobre tres sectores: la sociedad, los enfermos y el personal médico. Para plasmarlo se desarrolla un análisis crítico a partir de un caso reciente de público conocimiento, además de una amplia revisión bibliográfica en torno a la temática. Así, se presenta de manera práctica y cercana el impacto de la legalización de la eutanasia. Se argumenta y concluye que el camino (...) hacia una muerte digna no es la eutanasia, sino un acompañamiento activo e integral del paciente. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explore the peculiar case of infectious logics, a group of systems obtained generalizing the semantic behavior characteristic of the -fragment of the logics of nonsense, such as the ones due to Bochvar and Halldén, among others. Here, we extend these logics with classical negations, and we furthermore show that some of these extended systems can be properly regarded as logics of formal inconsistency and logics of formal undeterminedness.

Temporal Type Theory (TTT) has been recently introduced as a topos-theoretic approach to understanding the behaviour of systems over time. A truly innovative point of TTT is that it makes truth inherently dependent on time; this is to be contrasted with the classical approach in which past, present and future are related via logical operators. Further on this line of research, the notion of truth is substituted by the ‘time duration’ over which a proposition is true, giving rise to the (...) logic of temporal landscapes. In this paper, we embed the main notions of the Calendar and Time Type System (a framework that was built for reasoning about calendric notions in the context of the Web and is centred around the notion of time granularity) in Temporal Type Theory, attempting to address a common requirement in the practical use of temporal formalisms: the ability to speak about certain time moments and appropriate time windows in (past and future) time, in the form of hours, dates, holidays, etc. With a view to concrete applications, we provide examples on how calendar types can be combined with temporal operators of TTT to augment the expressive power of this framework. In that respect, the addition of calendar types genuinely adds to the range of Temporal Type Theory as a powerful specification language. (shrink)