We conducted an integrative data analysis to examine the hedonic character of nostalgia. We combined positive and negative affect measures from 41 experiments manipulating nostalgia. Overall, nostalgia inductions increased positive and ambivalent affect, but did not significantly alter negative affect. The magnitude of nostalgia’s effects varied markedly across different experimental inductions of the emotion. The hedonic character of nostalgia, then, depends on how the emotion is elicited and the benchmark to which it is compared. We discuss implications for theory and (...) research on nostalgia and emotions in general. (shrink)

This study examines an important aspect of energy history and policy: the intertwinement of energy technologies with ideals. Ideals play an important role in energy visions and innovation pathways. Aspirations to realize technical, social, and political ideals indicate a long-term commitment in the design of energy systems, distinguishable from commitment to other abstract goals, such as values. This study offers an analytical scheme that could help to conceptualize these differences and their impact on energy policy. In the proposed model, two (...) spheres of interaction are highlighted: a material sphere in which values and technologies co-evolve, and an imaginary sphere in which ideals interact with idealized technologies. Furthermore, the relation between these two spheres can be understood in different ways. This study examines three cases that are illustrative of the different roles of ideals in the development of energy technologies and visions: (1) the evolution of safety in nuclear reactor design; (2) visions of atomic power in France; (3) the political idealization of a tidal power scheme in the Severn Estuary. Finally, the developed model implies more general insights for the development of sociotechnical systems. Amongst others, it shows why certain projects and technologies remain a political, but not a techno–economic option. (shrink)

Covers the entire field of philosophy and its history. It not only defines and describes philosophical terms and ideas, it also shows the connections between the different definitions of a term or idea. All the representative schools or systems of philosophy of the past are included, and contemporary thought is extensively covered. As well, all the important philosophers, both ancient and modern, are treated in the frame of their thought.

In the second half of the 18th century, Scottish Enlightenment philosophy spread to the Dutch Republic, where it found a favourable reception. The most popular Scottish philosopher among Dutch intellectuals arguably was James Beattie of Aberdeen. Almost all of his prose works were translated into Dutch, and the Zeeland Society of Sciences elected him a foreign honorary member. It made Beattie remark that he was ‘greatly obliged to the Dutch’, and a Dutch learned journal that he had ‘in a sense (...) become a native’. This article discusses why precisely the Dutch got interested in Beattie and what made his common sense philosophy appealing to a Dutch audience. It argues that it was the moderate and non-speculative nature of Beattie's moral philosophy that fitted well with the eclecticism of the Dutch Enlightenment. (shrink)

We approach the semantics of prepositions from the perspective of conceptual spaces. Focusing on purely spatial locative and directional prepositions, we analyze both types of prepositions in terms of polar coordinates instead of Cartesian coordinates. This makes it possible to demonstrate that the property of convexity holds quite generally in the domain of prepositions of location and direction, supporting the important role that this property plays in conceptual spaces.

This paper develops an account of committed beliefs: beliefs we commit to through reflection and conscious reasoning. To help make sense of committed beliefs, I present a new view of conscious reasoning, one of putting yourself in a position to become phenomenally consciously aware of evidence. By doing this for different pieces of evidence, you begin to make your up mind, making conscious reasoning, as such, a voluntary activity with an involuntary conclusion. The paper then explains how we use conscious (...) reasoning in reflection not just to form and change committed beliefs, but to become aware of existing ones. The paper concludes with an explanation of how the limitations of conscious reasoning require us to maintain committed beliefs in a system. It is our maintenance of this system that allows us to knit together individual episodes of conscious reasoning into one enduring performance as a committed systematic believer. (shrink)

In the social world, multiple sensory channels are used concurrently to facilitate communication. Among human and nonhuman pri- mates, faces and voices are the primary means of transmitting social signals (Adolphs, 2003; Ghazanfar and Santos, 2004). Primates recognize the correspondence between species-specific facial and vocal expressions (Massaro, 1998; Ghazanfar and Logothetis, 2003; Izumi and Kojima, 2004), and these visual and auditory channels can be integrated into unified percepts to enhance detection and discrimination. Where and how such communication signals are integrated (...) at the neural level are poorly understood. In particular, it is unclear what role “unimodal” sensory areas, such as the auditory cortex, may play. We recorded local field potential activity, the signal that best correlates with human imaging and event-related potential signals, in both the core and lateral belt regions of the auditory cortex in awake behaving rhesus monkeys while they viewed vocalizing conspecifics. We demonstrate unequivocally that the primate auditory cortex integrates facial and vocal signals through enhancement and suppression of field potentials in both the core and lateral belt regions. The majority of these multisensory responses were specific to face/voice integration, and the lateral belt region shows a greater frequency of multisensory integration than the core region. These multisensory processes in the auditory cortex likely occur via recip- rocal interactions with the superior temporal sulcus. (shrink)

Summary John Frederic Daniell (1790–1845) invented the constant battery in 1836. He meant it to be a philosophical instrument to be utilized in both lecture demonstrations and electrochemical laboratory research. But the constant battery was taken up in electrometallurgy, not primarily as a source of electric current but more as an electrodeposition device. As such it became an essential tool in the development of galvanoplastics (electroforming). This article traces the tortuous transformation of this lecture demonstration apparatus into an electrometallurgical tool, (...) and includes some aspects of British and French patent laws, and the electrogilding industry. (shrink)

In this paper we carry out a comparative study of $\mathrm{I}\Sigma_1$ and PRA. We will in a sense fully determine what these theories have to say about each other in terms of provability and interpretability. Our study will result in two arithmetically complete modal logics with simple universal models.

This article examines the structure and processing of editorial cartoons appropriating Joe Rosenthal's famous Iwo Jima photograph in view of the theory of conceptual blending (Fauconnier & Turner, 2002 Fauconnier, G. and Turner, M. 2002. The way we think: Conceptual blending and the mind's hidden complexities, New York,, NY: Basic Books. [Google Scholar]). The main claim argued is that Blending theory accounts for complex processes of meaning constructing provoked by editorial cartoons that invoke several conceptual domains to define and evaluate (...) their topic, Iwo Jima cartoons being cases in point. The second section introduces the relevant aspects of Blending theory: mental spaces and types of blending networks. The third section addresses the Iwo Jima image as one particular input space; a moral criterion to which the selected sociopolitical topic of the cartoon is compared and judged. The fourth section isolates four types of graphic operations blending the Iwo Jima image with topical entities. The fifth section demonstrates how various kinds of blends give rise to either positive or negative evaluations. The final section argues that the study's scope of application extends to any kind of multi-domain cartoon, not just those addressed in this article. (shrink)

The semantics of directional prepositions is investigated from the perspective of aspect. What distinguishes telic PPs (like to the house) from atelic PPs (like towards the house), taken as denoting sets of paths, is their algebraic structure: atelic PPs are cumulative, closed under the operation of concatenation, telic PPs are not. Not only does this allow for a natural and compositional account of how PPs contribute to the aspect of a sentence, but it also guides our understanding of the lexical (...) semantics of prepositions in important ways. Semantically, prepositions turn out to be quite similar to nouns and verbs. Nominal distinctions (like singular and plural, mass and count) and verbal classes (like semelfactives and degree achievements) have their prepositional counterparts. (shrink)

In this article we describe two core ontologies of law that specify knowledge that is common to all domains of law. The first one, FOLaw describes and explains dependencies between types of knowledge in legal reasoning; the second one, LRI-Core ontology, captures the main concepts in legal information processing. Although FOLaw has shown to be of high practical value in various applied European ICT projects, its reuse is rather limited as it is rather concerned with the structure of legal reasoning (...) than with legal knowledge itself: as many other “legal core ontologies”, FOLaw is therefore rather an epistemological framework than an ontology. Therefore, we also developed LRI-Core. As we argue here that legal knowledge is based to a large extend on common-sense knowledge, LRI-Core is particularly inspired by research on abstract common-sense concepts. The main categories of LRI-Core are: physical, mental and abstract concepts. Roles cover in particular social worlds. Another special category are occurrences; terms that denote events and situations. We illustrate the use of LRI-Core with an ontology for Dutch criminal law, developed in the e-Court European project. (shrink)

Although a large number of studies have explored the main causes of gender inequality in academia, less attention has been given to the processes underlying the failure of gender equality initiatives to enhance gender representation, especially at the professorial level. We offer a critical discourse analysis of recently promulgated gender policy documents of the five Flemish universities, and demonstrate that defensive institutional work is a fundamental process underlying resistance to gender equality in the academic profession. That is, powerful organizational actors (...) resist gender change by intentionally deploying a combination of discursive strategies that legitimate what we describe as non–time-bound gender equality initiatives: The expected outcomes are undetermined in time, and they delegitimate concrete, time-bound measures that define specific outcomes against well-defined deadlines. By explicitly bringing a temporal dimension into our analysis, we argue that defensive institutional work deflects questions regarding what ought to be achieved when, and contributes to the slow pace of gender change in academia. (shrink)

In contrast to the well-developed analysis of British feminism's implication in the late 19th-and early 20th-century reconstruction of the British national and imperial project, research into comparable areas of Dutch history are only just emerging. Taking as its starting point several conclusions drawn from postcolonial writing in the eld of British imperialism, this article investigates an important moment in the history of Dutch feminism, the Nationale Tentoonstelling van Vrouwenarbeid, to examine Dutch feminism's complicity in the Dutch imperial project. Simultaneously, it (...) examines the appropriation by colonial reformists of a `maternalist politics' to redene that project. In so doing, the article aims to focus attention on the interaction between metropolitan and colonial discourse and the place of maternalist politics in each. Further, the article briey reects on the signicance for Indonesian women of the operation of such discourses in the colonial context. (shrink)

This paper is a presentation of astatus quæstionis, to wit of the problemof the interpretability logic of all reasonablearithmetical theories.We present both the arithmetical side and themodal side of the question.Dedicated to Dick de Jongh on the occasion of his 60th birthday.

Turing progressions have been often used to measure the proof-theoretic strength of mathematical theories: iterate adding consistency of some weak base theory until you “hit” the target theory. Turing progressions based on n-consistency give rise to a \ proof-theoretic ordinal \ also denoted \. As such, to each theory U we can assign the sequence of corresponding \ ordinals \. We call this sequence a Turing-Taylor expansion or spectrum of a theory. In this paper, we relate Turing-Taylor expansions of sub-theories (...) of Peano Arithmetic to Ignatiev’s universal model for the closed fragment of the polymodal provability logic \. In particular, we observe that each point in the Ignatiev model can be seen as Turing-Taylor expansions of formal mathematical theories. Moreover, each sub-theory of Peano Arithmetic that allows for a Turing-Taylor expansion will define a unique point in Ignatiev’s model. (shrink)

In this book, Christiane L. Joost-Gaugier offers the first systematic study of Pythagoras and his influence on mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, religion, medicine, music, the occult, and social life-as well as on architecture and art-in the late medieval and early modern eras. Following the threads of admiration for this ancient Greek sage from the fourteenth century to Kepler and Galileo in the seventeenth, this book demonstrates that Pythagoras's influence in intellectual circles-Christian, Jewish, and Arab-was more widespread than has previously been (...) acknowledged. Joost-Gaugier shows that during this period Pythagoras was respected by many intellectuals in different areas of Europe. She also shows how this admiration was reflected in ideas that were applied to the visual arts by a number of well known architects and artists who sought, through the use of a visual language inspired by the memory of Pythagoras, to obtain perfect harmony in their creations. Among these were Alberti, Bramante, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael. Thus did, she suggests, some of the greatest art works in the Western world owe their modernity to an inspirational force that, paradoxically, had been conceived in the distant past. (shrink)

This article identifies the structural and conceptual aspects of a visual construction often used in advertisements to establish a metaphoric or associative relation, that is, symmetric object alignment (SOA). It offers an account of the formal ingredients of SOA, which fall into two groups: object-constitutive factors (like size, shape, and color) and object-depictment factors (like perspective, orientation, and distance from viewing point). Both factors allow us to treat SOA as a visual rhetorical scheme. We also discuss how SOA relates to (...) conceptual structure, metaphoric or otherwise. Four types of relations are distinguished, based on the way in which perceptual and conceptual characteristics interact. Finally, we discuss the way in which these characteristics relate to the processing of such visual messages. One depictment factor will be focused on in particular: one-to-one versus one-to-many alignments. An attempt is made to connect these 2 patterns to the much-discussed topic in verbal metaphor theory, object comparison versus categorization. (shrink)

By Solovay’s celebrated completeness result [31] on formal provability we know that the provability logic ${\textbf {GL}}$ describes exactly all provable structural properties for any sound and strong enough arithmetical theory with a decidable axiomatisation. Japaridze generalised this result in [22] by considering a polymodal version ${\mathsf {GLP}}$ of ${\textbf {GL}}$ with modalities $[n]$ for each natural number n referring to ever increasing notions of provability. Modern treatments of ${\mathsf {GLP}}$ tend to interpret the $[n]$ provability notion as “provable in (...) a base theory T together with all true $\Pi ^0_n$ formulas as oracles.” In this paper we generalise this interpretation into the transfinite. In order to do so, a main difficulty to overcome is to generalise the syntactical characterisations of the oracle formulas of complexity $\Pi ^0_n$ to the hyper-arithmetical hierarchy. The paper exploits the fact that provability is $\Sigma ^0_1$ complete and that similar results hold for stronger provability notions. As such, the oracle sentences to define provability at level $\alpha $ will recursively be taken to be consistency statements at lower levels: provability through provability whence the name of the paper. The paper proves soundness and completeness for the proposed interpretation for a wide class of theories, namely for any theory that can formalise the recursion described above and that has some further very natural properties. Some remarks are provided on how the recursion can be formalised into second order arithmetic and on lowering the proof-theoretical strength of these systems of second order arithmetic. (shrink)

Research under real-world conditions is crucial to the development and deployment of robust AI systems. Exposing large language models to complex use settings yields knowledge about their performance and impact, which cannot be obtained under controlled laboratory conditions or through anticipatory methods. This epistemic need for real-world research is exacerbated by large-language models’ opaque internal operations and potential for emergent behavior. However, despite its epistemic value and widespread application, the ethics of real-world AI research has received little scholarly attention. To (...) address this gap, this paper provides an analysis of real-world research with LLMs and generative AI, assessing both its epistemic value and ethical concerns such as the potential for interpersonal and societal research harms, the increased privatization of AI learning, and the unjust distribution of benefits and risks. This paper discusses these concerns alongside four moral principles influencing research ethics standards: non-maleficence, beneficence, respect for autonomy, and distributive justice. I argue that real-world AI research faces challenges in meeting these principles and that these challenges are exacerbated by absent or imperfect current ethical governance. Finally, I chart two distinct but compatible ways forward: through ethical compliance and regulation and through moral education and cultivation. (shrink)

In this paper we present a new proposal for defining actual causation, i.e., the problem of deciding if one event caused another. We do so within the popular counterfactual tradition initiated by Lewis, which is characterised by attributing a fundamental role to counterfactual dependence. Unlike the currently prominent definitions, our approach proceeds from the ground up: we start from basic principles, and construct a definition of causation that satisfies them. We define the concepts of counterfactual dependence and production, and put (...) forward principles such that dependence is an unnecessary but sufficient condition for causation, whereas production is an insufficient but necessary condition. The resulting definition of causation is a suitable compromise between dependence and production. Every principle is introduced by means of a paradigmatic example of causation. We illustrate some of the benefits of our approach with two examples that have spelled trouble for other accounts. We make all of this formally precise using structural equations, which we extend with a timing over all events. (shrink)

For any ordinal $\Lambda$, we can define a polymodal logic $\mathsf{GLP}_\Lambda$, with a modality $[\xi]$ for each $\xi < \Lambda$. These represent provability predicates of increasing strength. Although $\mathsf{GLP}_\Lambda$ has no Kripke models, Ignatiev showed that indeed one can construct a Kripke model of the variable-free fragment with natural number modalities, denoted $\mathsf{GLP}^0_\omega$. Later, Icard defined a topological model for $\mathsf{GLP}^0_\omega$ which is very closely related to Ignatiev's. In this paper we show how to extend these constructions for arbitrary $\Lambda$. (...) More generally, for each $\Theta,\Lambda$ we build a Kripke model $\mathfrak I^\Theta_\Lambda$ and a topological model $\mathfrak T^\Theta_\Lambda$, and show that $\mathsf{GLP}^0_\Lambda$ is sound for both of these structures, as well as complete, provided $\Theta$ is large enough. (shrink)

Publication in the biomedical literature is important because it is the major pathway by which new concepts and discoveries are disseminated amongst scientists. In the last 30 years there has been a dramatic increase, not only in the volume of publications but in the number of authors per article as well. This paper summarizes the current literature on authorship and its proliferation in medicine. From the literature it becomes clear that for biomedical articles, the mean number of authors increased from (...) 1.7 in 1960 to 3.1 in 1990, and there are indications that this trend is even greater in clinical medicine such that single authorship almost has disappeared. Formal guidelines of who should be considered an author have been set by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. There are studies suggesting that not all authors on multiauthor papers fulfill these criteria. Inappropriate multiple authorship leads to dilution of authorship responsibility and unjustified citation in curriculum vitae. Recommendations regarding the prevention of inappropriate authorship are given in this paper. (shrink)

Being more than mere passive objects used at human will, technologies co-determine the values and structures that shape the EU agricultural system. Technologies actively shape human interpretation, human action and co-shape our moral standards and routines. It is therefore important to account for the moral significance of agricultural technologies when characterising the structures in place within EU agriculture as well as when trying to understand why a particular agricultural technology is favoured or strongly opposed. From this perspective on technology, an (...) interesting question to pose, is how, within their current use context, genetically modified crops mediate human interpretation and human practice? This technology is of particular interest, because after more than 30 years, the debate on GM crops is still profound and highly polarised within EU society. Yet, too often, this debate is devalued as being irrational or irrelevant, while we show in this article, based on a technological mediation analysis, how ethical concerns about agricultural practices have co-evolved with the technological development of GM crops. This qualifies public debate on GM crops in the EU as both legitimate and relevant, as, from this perspective on technology, it can be seen as an important way to both characterise and discuss how EU agriculture is and should be organised. Analysing technology in terms of the myriad ways in which it mediates the relationship between humans and their world, further allows us to make some suggestions about how to broaden the ongoing EU discussion beyond the current dichotomous Yes/no framing. (shrink)

Ordinal functions may be iterated transfinitely in a natural way by taking pointwise limits at limit stages. However, this has disadvantages, especially when working in the class of normal functions, as pointwise limits do not preserve normality. To this end we present an alternative method to assign to each normal function f a family of normal functions Hyp[f]=〈fξ〉ξ∈OnHyp[f]=〈fξ〉ξ∈On, called its hyperation, in such a way that f0=idf0=id, f1=ff1=f and fα+β=fα∘fβfα+β=fα∘fβ for all α, β.Hyperations are a refinement of the Veblen hierarchy (...) of f. Moreover, if f is normal and has a well-behaved left-inverse g called a left adjoint, then g can be assigned a cohyperationcoH[g]=〈gξ〉ξ∈OncoH[g]=〈gξ〉ξ∈On, which is a family of initial functions such that gξgξ is a left adjoint to fξfξ for all ξ. (shrink)