The transcience of existence, the fragility of life and human transcience do nothing but remind each of us of the imminence of death, now experienced as an unparalleled tragedy, accompanied, often, by the anguish of witnessing a slow and gradual ageing of the body. In the post-modern era characterized by pervasive technology, a new religion is emerging that aims to halt the ageing process and defeat death once and for all. But what is the price to be paid: according to (...) some, we will witness the dissolution of the human being’s soul; according to others, the world will be populated by humanoids with severe psychic problems. (shrink)

Alessandro Capone Franco Lo Piparo Marco Carapezza Editors Perspectives on Pragmatics and Philosophy Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology Volume 1 Editor-in-Cheif Alessandro. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy ...

It is usually held that representative government is not strictly democratic, since it does not allow the people themselves to directly make decisions. But here, taking as her guide Thomas Paine’s subversive view that “Athens, by representation, would have surpassed her own democracy,” Nadia Urbinati challenges this accepted wisdom, arguing that political representation deserves to be regarded as a fully legitimate mode of democratic decision making—and not just a pragmatic second choice when direct democracy is not possible. As Urbinati (...) shows, the idea that representation is incompatible with democracy stems from our modern concept of sovereignty, which identifies politics with a decision maker’s direct physical presence and the immediate act of the will. She goes on to contend that a democratic theory of representation can and should go beyond these identifications. Political representation, she demonstrates, is ultimately grounded in a continuum of influence and power created by political judgment, as well as the way presence through ideas and speech links society with representative institutions. Deftly integrating the ideas of such thinkers as Rousseau, Kant, Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, Paine, and the Marquis de Condorcet with her own, Urbinati constructs a thought-provoking alternative vision of democracy. (shrink)

Сучасна філософія тяжіє до осмислення людської дійсності у дедалі ширших міждисциплінарних контекстах. Спочатку традиційні, а віднедавна й інтернет-медіа та інформаційні технології опинилися у полі зору філософів та стали джерелом для переосмислення чималої кількості так званих вічних філософських запитань. Серед них зокрема і найширші, як-от усвідомлення меж реального та розуміння, які саме явища й речі з тих, що конституюють людське, можна вважати реальними. Цю статтю присвячено дослідженню одного з понять, що є ключовим для осмислення реальності, – поняттю віртуальності. Авторка висвітлює його (...) витоки, особливості і специфіку вжитку в сучасному філософському дискурсі. Зокрема, показано конотації віртуального з усіма трьома часовими вимірами: минулим, теперішнім та майбутнім. Наголошено, що поняття віртуального спочатку було «перевідкрите» Жилем Дельозом, а потім пережило ще низку сутнісних змін у філософії ХХ–ХХІ століть. Тож віртуальне розглянуто як контрагент реального. Зокрема, у статті приділено увагу різноманітним конотаціям між поняттями віртуальності, реальності та фактичності. Крім того, розкрито моральні аспекти віртуальності – як у трансцендентному, так і в іманентному сенсі. Висвітлено підґрунтя для нерозрізнюваності «реального» та «віртуального». Зроблено висновок про те, що в ситуації так званої підміни реальності різноманіття конотацій поняття віртуальності може бути використане для перевідкриття вже самого поняття реальності. (shrink)

Redirecting attention to Mill as a political thinker, Nadia Urbinati argues that this claim misrepresents Mill's thinking.

This volume is part of the series ‘Pragmatics, Philosophy and Psychology’, edited for Springer by Alessandro Capone. It is intended for an audience of undergraduate and graduate students, as well as postgraduate and advanced researchers. This volume focuses on societal pragmatics. One of the main concerns of societal pragmatics is the world of language users. We are interested in the investigation of linguistic practices in the context of societal practices. It is clear that the world of users, including their (...) practices, their culture, and their social aims has to be taken into account and seriously investigated when we deal with the pragmatics of language. It is not enough to discuss principles of language use solely in the guise of abstract theoretical tools. Consequently, the present volume focuses explicitly on the interplay of abstract, theoretical principles and the necessities imposed by societal contexts often requiring a more flexible use of such theoretical tools. The volume includes articles on pragmemes, politeness and anti-politeness, dialogue, joint utterances, discourse markers, pragmatics and the law, institutional discourse, critical discourse analysis, pragmatics and culture, cultural scripts, argumentation theory, connectives and argumentation, language games and psychotherapy, slurs, the analysis of funerary rites, as well as an authoritative chapter by Jacob L. Mey on societal pragmatics. (shrink)

This article traces the development of the theory and practice of what is known as ‘community of inquiry’ as an ideal of classroom praxis. The concept has ancient and uncertain origins, but was seized upon as a form of pedagogy by the originators of the Philosophy for Children program in the 1970s. Its location at the intersection of the discourses of argumentation theory, communications theory, semiotics, systems theory, dialogue theory, learning theory and group psychodynamics makes of it a rich site (...) for the dialogue between theory and practice in education. This article is an exploration of those intersections, and a prospectus of its possible role in the formation and reformulation of school curriculum. It will be argued here that, when formulated as community of philosophical inquiry in particular, it offers the possibility of ‘philosophising’ the school curriculum in general, by extending the concept-work that doing philosophy entails to all of the disciplines. The article begins with an attempt at an operational definition of the term as, move to an analysis of its dynamics, offers an example of its use in a mathematics classroom, and finishes with a schematic view of its whole-curriculum and whole-school possibilities. (shrink)

Mitotic entry and exit are switch‐like transitions that are driven by the activation and inactivation of Cdk1 and mitotic cyclins. This simple on/off reaction turns out to be a complex interplay of various reversible reactions, feedback loops, and thresholds that involve both the direct regulators of Cdk1 and its counteracting phosphatases. In this review, we summarize the interplay of the major components of the system and discuss how they work together to generate robustness, bistability, and irreversibility. We propose that it (...) may be beneficial to regard the entry and exit reactions as two separate reversible switches that are distinguished by differences in the state of phosphatase activity, mitotic proteolysis, and a dramatic rearrangement of cellular components after nuclear envelope breakdown, and discuss how the major Cdk1 activity thresholds could be determined for these transitions. (shrink)

Recent media reports have drawn widespread attention to the experiences of patients who are denied reproductive services at Catholic hospitals. For some patients, such as those experiencing miscarriage, denial of appropriate treatment can lead to serious health consequences. However, many patients are unaware of the limitations on services available at religiously affiliated health care institutions. As a result, patients’ ability to make informed and autonomous decisions about where to seek treatment is hindered. There are currently no federal or state laws (...) requiring health care institutions to inform patients directly of the full scope of medical services they are unable to provide on the basis of religion or conscience. Given religious hospitals’ significant role in the provision of health care in the United States, it is essential that patients be clearly informed about institutional limitations on care. This goal would be best served by adopting a federal disclosure law similar to the Patient Self-Determination Act. (shrink)

Increasingly organizations have dedicated systems and personnel (recipients) to receive and handle internal whistleblower reports. Yet, the complexity of handling whistleblower reports is often underestimated, and there is a dearth of literature that attempts to describe or analyse the challenges internal recipients face. This paper uses an agency theory inspired lens to provide insight into the complexity of internal whistleblowing, with the aim to identify focal points for improving internal whistleblowing processes. We conceive of internal recipients as agents of two (...) principals in the event of whistleblowing: owner/top management as well as whistleblowers. We identify sources of agency problems and agency costs within these double-agent relationships. We provide avenues for solving these problems and reducing the agency costs. We close by offering paths for future research. (shrink)

This essay reclaims a political proceduralist vision of democracy as the best normative defense of democracy in contemporary politics. We distinguish this vision from three main approaches that are representative in the current academic debate: the epistemic conception of democracy as a process of truth seeking; the populist defense of democracy as a mobilizing politics that defies procedures; and the classical minimalist or Schumpeterian definition of democracy as a competitive method for selecting leaders.

This volume addresses the intriguing issue of indirect reports from an interdisciplinary perspective. The contributors include philosophers, theoretical linguists, socio-pragmaticians, and cognitive scientists. The book is divided into four sections following the provenance of the authors. Combining the voices from leading and emerging authors in the field, it offers a detailed picture of indirect reports in the world’s languages and their significance for theoretical linguistics. Building on the previous book on indirect reports in this series, this volume adds an empirical (...) and cross-linguistic approach that covers an impressive range of languages, such as Cantonese, Japanese, Hebrew, Persian, Dutch, Spanish, Catalan, Armenian, Italian, English, Hungarian, German, Rumanian, and Basque. (shrink)

This paper describes one way in which a precise reason model of precedent could be developed, based on the general idea that courts are constrained to reach a decision that is consistent with the assessment of the balance of reasons made in relevant earlier decisions. The account provided here has the additional advantage of showing how this reason model can be reconciled with the traditional idea that precedential constraint involves rules, as long as these rules are taken to be defeasible. (...) The account presented is firmly based on a body of work that has emerged in AI and Law. This work is discussed, and there is a particular discussion of approaches based on theory construction, and how that work relates to the model described in this paper. (shrink)

This paper is an introduction to a virtual special issue of AI and Law exploring the legacy of the influential HYPO system of Rissland and Ashley. The papers included are: Arguments and cases: An inevitable intertwining, BankXX: Supporting legal arguments through heuristic retrieval, Modelling reasoning with precedents in a formal dialogue Game, A note on dimensions and factors, An empirical investigation of reasoning with legal cases through theory construction and application, Automatically classifying case texts and predicting outcomes, A factor-based definition (...) of precedential constraint and An improved factor based approach to precedential constraint. After describing HYPO, in this introduction to the special issue I look at various aspects of its influence on AI and Law: the developments led by Rissland at Amherst; the developments led by Ashley in Pittsburgh; the expression of these ideas in terms of rule based systems, and their subsequent formalisation; value based theories, which were inspired by a critique of HYPO; and contemporary approaches which revive the idea of dimensions. (shrink)

Résumé La pratique de la psychologie clinique en Algérie a connu un développement lent et difficile. Le fonctionnement traditionnel des familles, peu habituées à se dévoiler, et une administration sanitaire peu encline à faire une place à une spécialité nouvelle sans tradition médicale ont longtemps freiné son évolution. Cet article tente de retracer le combat des premières psychologues cliniciennes algériennes pour faire accepter leur profession. La mobilisation exemplaire de ce groupe et sa vigilance toute maternelle ont permis à cette profession (...) de trouver sa place, appuyée en cela, bien malgré elle, par les différentes catastrophes naturelles et humaines que le pays a traversées. (shrink)

Despite the overwhelming grey clouds of anxiety due to the Coronavirus pandemic, this could be a golden opportunity for disabled academics like myself working under self-isolation, to be recognised by our peers, to overcome inequities and to challenge the able body norms and models we face in universities academic life. I have recently completed a PhD research regarding the experience of disabled academics, investigating and discussing the difficulties and hurdles we routinely face in academi...

This book builds on the idea that pragmatics and philosophy are strictly interconnected and that advances in one area will generate consequential advantages in the other area. The first part of the book, entitled ‘Theoretical Approaches to Philosophy of Language’, contains contributions by philosophers of language on connectives, intensional contexts, demonstratives, subsententials, and implicit indirect reports. The second part, ‘Pragmatics in Discourse’, presents contributions that are more empirically based or of a more applicative nature and that deal with the pragmatics (...) of discourse, argumentation, pragmatics and law, and context. The book presents perspectives which, generally, make most of the Gricean idea of the centrality of a speaker’s intention in attribution of meaning to utterances, whether one is interested in the level of sentence-like units or larger chunks of discourse. (shrink)

Introduction: "are you a feminist?" -- Three waves of feminism -- All things equal -- Violence against women -- Sex and beauty -- Reproductive justice -- What's next? -- Feminist terms -- Source notes -- Selected bibliography -- For further information -- Index.

Research in the area of intellectual property (IP) is increasingly relevant to the rapidly growing artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics industries, affecting the legal, business, manufacturing, and healthcare sectors. This contributed volume aims to develop our understanding of the legal and ethical challenges posed by artificial intelligence and robotics technologies and the appropriate intellectual property based legal and regulatory responses. It provides a philosophical and legal framework for considering concepts and principles that relate to the development and use of such (...) technologies at the international, regional, and national levels. The legal discourse in IP concerns the ever-growing AI sector and how businesses can protect their IP and incorporate AI. Moral sentiments often take a back seat to market sentiments, even in shaping the direction of ethical business strategy. This anomaly persists despite growing interest in ethics and IP. Taking an interdisciplinary and diverse perspective, this book enriches the evolving definition and scope of IP literature by focusing on actors, products and regulation that shape the business sector. Considering the gap between theory and practice, this book bridges academic and professional knowledge in unpacking legal, ethical and governance issues in the intellectual property industry. In an effort to include as many viewpoints as possible, contributions have been gathered from diverse fields, including business, ethics, governance, law, philosophy and technology studies. This book will appeal to academics in the field of intellectual property, business ethics, AI, emerging technologies and strategic innovation, as well as practitioners and policy makers. (shrink)

This paper studies the use of hypothetical and value-based reasoning in US Supreme-Court cases concerning the United States Fourth Amendment. Drawing upon formal AI & Law models of legal argument a semi-formal reconstruction is given of parts of the Carney case, which has been studied previously in AI & law research on case-based reasoning. As part of the reconstruction, a semi-formal proposal is made for extending the formal AI & Law models with forms of metalevel reasoning in several argument schemes. (...) The result is compared with Rissland’s (1989) analysis in terms of dimensions and Ashley’s (2008) analysis in terms of his process model of legal argument with hypotheticals. (shrink)

Before proceeding, I would like to clarify briefly two interpretative premises, one methodological and one normative, which sustain my argument. Understanding the transformations facing constitutional democratic societies is a demanding task. These transformations, whose multiple causes are socio-economic not merely political, reflect on the one hand in the decline of mass party form of organization and on the other in the success of populism as not simply a movement of contestation but as a ruling power. In this article, I will (...) suggest that the successes of populism are connected to the decline of organized parties, the pillar of constitutional democracy as it emerged after 1945. It is impossible to predict whether populism will succeed in becoming the new form of democracy. It is, however, certain that contemporary representative governments are facing astonishing mutations and the decline of the party form of representative unification of claims and ideas is one of them. My argument relies upon a phenomenology of populism as a movement that is strong in proportion as organized parties are weak, which actually capitalizes on a revolt against intermediary bodies such as parties. 1. (shrink)

L’étude des fortifications crétoises d’époque classique et hellénistique est rendue difficile par l’absence généralisée de fouille stratigraphique. Pour leur datation, il est nécessaire de se fonder sur le type d’appareil, dont il est pourtant bien connu que sa valeur chronologique n’est que toute relative, voire discutable. Néanmoins, à l’échelle de la Crète, des identités régionales apparaissent, en terme d’appareil. On peut ainsi observer que l’appareil rectangulaire est cantonné à la partie occidentale de la Crète, spécialement entre le mont Ida et (...) les monts Blancs, tandis que l’extrémité orientale de l’île semble avoir eu une prédilection pour les murs non appareillés. La cité d’Aptera, en Crète occidentale, constitue un cas exceptionnel et une énigme, puisque son enceinte, datée dans son ensemble du milieu du ive siècle av. J.‑C., présente deux types d’appareil.Nous présentons ici les différentes explications de l’usage en Crète des différents types d’appareil, qui peuvent être de nature historique aussi bien que géographique. Pour ce dernier point, l’apport des nouvelles technologies, au travers de l’élaboration d’un SIG, pourrait être décisif. (shrink)

There is an increasing need for norms to be embedded in technology as the widespread deployment of applications such as autonomous driving, warfare and big data analysis for crime fighting and counter-terrorism becomes ever closer. Current approaches to norms in multi-agent systems tend either to simply make prohibited actions unavailable, or to provide a set of rules which the agent is obliged to follow, either as part of its design or to avoid sanctions and punishments. In this paper we argue (...) for the position that agents should be equipped with the ability to reason about a system’s norms, by reasoning about the social and moral values that norms are designed to serve; that is, perform the sort of moral reasoning we expect of humans. In particular we highlight the need for such reasoning when circumstances are such that the rules should arguably be broken, so that the reasoning can guide agents in deciding whether to comply with the norms and, if violation is desirable, how best to violate them. One approach to enabling this is to make use of an argumentation scheme based on values and designed for practical reasoning: arguments for and against actions are generated using this scheme and agents choose between actions based on their preferences over these values. Moral reasoning then requires that agents have an acceptable set of values and an acceptable ordering on their values. We first discuss how this approach can be used to think about and justify norms in general, and then discuss how this reasoning can be used to think about when norms should be violated, and the form this violation should take. We illustrate how value based reasoning can be used to decide when and how to violate a norm using a road traffic example. We also briefly consider what makes an ordering on values acceptable, and how such an ordering might be determined. (shrink)

Recent work has shown that preschool-aged children and adults understand freedom of choice regardless of culture, but that adults across cultures differ in perceiving social obligations as constraints on action. To investigate the development of these cultural differences and universalities, we interviewed school-aged children (4–11) in Nepal and the United States regarding beliefs about people's freedom of choice and constraint to follow preferences, perform impossible acts, and break social obligations. Children across cultures and ages universally endorsed the choice to follow (...) preferences but not to perform impossible acts. Age and culture effects also emerged: Young children in both cultures viewed social obligations as constraints on action, but American children did so less as they aged. These findings suggest that while basic notions of free choice are universal, recognitions of social obligations as constraints on action may be culturally learned. (shrink)

Reasoning with cases has been a primary focus of those working in AI and law who have attempted to model legal reasoning. In this paper we put forward a formal model of reasoning with cases which captures many of the insights from that previous work. We begin by stating our view of reasoning with cases as a process of constructing, evaluating and applying a theory. Central to our model is a view of the relationship between cases, rules based on cases, (...) and the social values which justify those rules. Having given our view of these relationships, we present our formal model of them, and explain how theories can be constructed, compared and evaluated. We then show how previous work can be described in terms of our model, and discuss extensions to the basic model to accommodate particular features of previous work. We conclude by identifying some directions for future work. (shrink)

This paper analyzes critically the appeal the unpolitical is enjoying among contemporary political philosophers who are democracy's friends. Unlike a radical critique of democracy, what I propose to call "criticism from within," takes the form of dissatisfaction with the erosion of an independent mind and impartial judgment per effect of the partisan character of democratic politics. This paper proposes three main criticisms of the actual trend toward unpolitical views of democracy: the first points to the strategic use of deliberation as (...) an antidote against democratic procedures themselves ; the second to the negative conception of democracy that the unpolitical aspiration makes visible; and the third to the dissolution of political judgment within a model of judgment that is tailored around justice. (shrink)

This paper discusses some engineering considerations that should be taken into account when building a knowledge based system, and recommends isomorphism, the well defined correspondence of the knowledge base to the source texts, as a basic principle of system construction in the legal domain. Isomorphism, as it has been used in the field of legal knowledge based systems, is characterised and the benefits which stem from its use are described. Some objections to and limitations of the approach are discussed. The (...) paper concludes with a case study giving a detailed example of the use of the isomorphic approach in a particular application. (shrink)

Modelling reasoning with legal cases has been a central concern of AI and Law since the 1980s. The approach which represents cases as factors and dimensions has been a central part of that work. In this paper I consider how several varieties of the approach can be applied to the interesting case of Popov v Hayashi. After briefly reviewing some of the key landmarks of the approach, the case is represented in terms of factors and dimensions, and further explored using (...) theory construction and argumentation schemes approaches. (shrink)