While e-commerce has witnessed extensive growth in recent years, so has consumers' concerns regarding ethical issues surrounding online shopping. The vast majority of earlier research on this area is conceptual in nature, and limited in scope by focusing on consumers' privacy issues. This study develops a reliable and valid scale to measure consumers' perceptions regarding the ethics of online retailers. Findings indicate that the four factors of the scale - security, privacy, non-deception and fulfillment/reliability - are strongly predictive of online (...) consumers' satisfaction and trust. The results offer important implications for e-retailers and are likely to stimulate further research in the area of e-ethics from the consumers' perspective. (shrink)

Consider a gas that is adiabatically isolated from its environment and confined to the left half of a container. Then remove the wall separating the two parts. The gas will immediately start spreading and soon be evenly distributed over the entire available space. The gas has approached equilibrium. Thermodynamics (TD) characterizes this process in terms of an increase of thermodynamic entropy, which attains its maximum value at equilibrium. The second law of thermodynamics captures the irreversibility of this process by positing (...) that in an isolated system such as the gas entropy cannot decrease. The aim of statistical mechanics (SM) is to explain the behavior of the gas and, in particular, its conformity with the second law in terms of the dynamical laws governing the individual molecules of which the gas is made up. In what follows these laws are assumed to be the ones of Hamiltonian classical mechanics. We should not, however, ask for an explanation of the second law literally construed. This law is a universal law and as such cannot be explained by a statistical theory. But this is not a problem because we.. (shrink)

The paper is devoted to the discussion of some philosophical and historical problems connected with the theorem on the undefinability of the notion of truth. In particular the problem of the priority of proving this theorem will be considered. It is claimed that Tarski obtained this theorem independently though he made clear his indebtedness to Gödel’s methods. On the other hand, Gödel was aware of the formal undefinability of truth in 1931, but he did not publish this result. Reasons for (...) that are also considered. (shrink)

Ethical concerns of Internet users continue to rise. Accordingly, several scholars have called for systematic empirical research to address these issues. This study examines the conceptualization and measurement of consumers' perceptions regarding the ethics of online retailers. Also, this research represents a first step into the analysis of the relationship between CPEOR, consumers' general Internet expertise and reported positive word of mouth. Results, from a convenience sample of 357 online shoppers, suggest that CPEOR can be operationalized as a second-order construct (...) composed of four dimensions: security, privacy, fulfillment, and non-deception. Our findings also indicate that consumers' general Internet expertise significantly improves CPEOR and CPEOR are strongly predictive of consumers' WOM. Managerial and research implications are offered. (shrink)

Siempre se ha reconocido en Pirrón de Élide el inicio puntual del escepticismo griego. Sabemos ya hoy que esta información, sesgada, proviene más de la necesidad de Enesidemo de refundar el movimiento, que de la realidad filosófica. En este artículo demostramos que Pirrón, ni tuvo consciencia de ser un escéptico, ni, en rigor, inició ninguna nueva corriente. Su deslizamiento, y posterior reconocimiento, hacia el escepticismo, debe más bien encuadrarse en el natural desarrollo de la filosofía abderita, a través de Metrodoro (...) de Quíos, discípulo de Demócrito, Anaxarco maestro de Pirrón y Nausífanes su discípulo. Y todo debido al afán aventurero del personaje de Élide al enrolarse en el séquito de Alejandro Magno. (shrink)

The paper presents an outline of the general theory of countable arithmetically saturated models of PA and some of its applications. We consider questions concerning the automorphism group of a countable recursively saturated model of PA. We prove new results concerning fixed point sets, open subgroups, and the cofinality of the automorphism group. We also prove that the standard system of a countable arithmetically saturated model of PA is determined by the lattice of its elementary substructures.

Philosophical skepticism is identified by several signs or names: Aporētikoí, Ephektikoí, Pyrrhōneioi, Skeptikoí and Zētētikoí, with significant all of them valid and some confusion in meaning. The objective of this work is threefold: first, to clarify why some of these names have been more successful than others, second, what are the reasons why one of them has been fixed as a name, in general for all belonging to this philosophical movement, and third to what is due that recognizing the tradition (...) a clear initiator, Pirrón de Elis, and being the name "Pirrónicos" one of the most popular and one of the most used by the writers who speak about this movement, has not been the most successful, as it has been traditional in most other doctrines. (shrink)

Parece que Platón enseñó en la Academia otras doctrinas diferentes de las expuestas por él en los diálogos. Además, parece también que voluntariamente se abstuvo de consignarlas por escrito al creer que la palabra, la enseñanza oral, era un medio más eficaz que la escritura para transmitir aquello que "tenía importancia". Dicho así, puede resultar una paradoja que el mejor prosista griego, sea un detractor, al menos en parte, de la prosa escrita. A partir de aquí, las interpretaciones novedosas que (...) han provocado las doctrinas no-escritas de Platón han generado debates a veces imposibles de resolver. Añadir unas breves notas a estas discusiones es la intención de este artículo. (shrink)

Le maintien des relations parent-enfant en prison représente un véritable défi au regard des différentes formes d’empêchement – véritable mise en suspens de la parentalité – auxquels se trouvent confrontés les parents détenus et les enfants ainsi que leurs accompagnants. Membre d’une recherche inter-disciplinaire (droit et psychologie), menée en France dans trois établissements pénitentiaires en appui sur des questionnaires et la conduite de focus-groups, l’auteur met en évidence, au travers d’une approche clinique psychodynamique, la tension qui s’exerce entre les attentes (...) exprimées par les parents détenus à l’égard de leurs enfants et la disqualification dont leur lien est l’objet, en raison du vécu des conditions de détention et d’accueil des enfants ainsi que de l’accès à la prison des personnes qui, de l’extérieur, sont en mesure de soutenir les relations parent-enfant (conjoint ou ex-conjoint, famille...). (shrink)

Teksty są co najmniej w dwójnasób transcendentne. Z jednej strony poprzez język, tworzywo tekstu, który konstytuując się w diachronii i funkcjonując w synchronii, transcenduje – żeby użyć sformułowania Karla Jaspersa – przeszłą rzeczywistość w postaci powstałych wtedy znaków i ich znaczeń w nieznaną z tamtej perspektywy przyszłość, a więc i w naszą teraźniejszość. Z drugiej zaś istniejące już teksty wchodzą z sobą w interakcję, co powoduje, że tworzą się niejako hiperteksty w czasie i w przestrzeni. Jest jeszcze i trzeci wymiar (...) – to autor tekstu i czytelnik, którym tekst pozwala – jak mówi Gerhard Kurz – wyjść „poza siebie”, bo tylko wtedy odczuwamy potrzebę powrotu do „własnego ja”, odrzucając po drodze kolejną maskę. W artykule pokazano to na przykładzie tekstów Franza Kafki. Spośród wielu poruszonych tam wątków ograniczmy się tutaj jedynie do toposu syren, które zniewalały żeglarzy swym śpiewem. U Kafki syreny już definitywnie nie śpiewają, wobec czego Odyseusz niepotrzebnie kazał zatykać sobie uszy woskiem. Kafka stawia tylko kropkę nad i, bo już i we wcześniejszej literaturze niemieckiej ten śpiew cichł coraz bardziej. I tak w znanej pieśni Heinego Loreley poeta już nie jest pewny skuteczności śpiewu syren – on jedynie chce w to wierzyć: „Wierzę, że fale w końcu pochłoną i żeglarza i łódź”. Bo w czasach nihilizmu śpiew – i sztuka w ogóle – traci swą moc. W balladzie Rybak Goethego syrena wprawdzie jeszcze tryumfuje, ale to nie za sprawą śpiewu. Śpiew bowiem dominuje w drugiej zwrotce, natomiast rybak pogrąża się w odmętach morza dopiero w czwartej zwrotce, gdzie dominuje perswazja słowna. Ta inwersja – notabene brak jej w polskim tłumaczeniu Hanny Januszewskiej w Dziełach wybranych J. W. Goethego – nie mogła być u Goethego przypadkowa: symbolizuje ona typową dla lustrzanego odbicia odwróconą proporcję – rybak tak naprawdę ujrzał własne odbicie w wodzie, biorąc je za postać syreny. Śmierć w odmętach morza była ceną za brak samowiedzy. Nie darmo zatem napis na świątyni Apollina w Delfach głosił: „Γνῶθι σεαυτόν – Poznaj samego siebie”. (shrink)

La preocupación ecológica es hoy uno de los signos de los tiempos. Es también un desafío a la responsabilidad humana, a las políticas sociales y al compromiso cristiano. El autor nos presenta en este estudio un decálogo en el que subraya los fundamentos de una ética del medio ambiente. Y resume también los puntos fundamentales de una Ecoética cristiana, en los que se evoca la seriedad de la fe, el dinamismo de la esperanza y la generosidad del amor.

Consider the claim: Our actions are free if and only if we could have done otherwise; or the claim, We are essentially mental substances because we can exist without our bodies. Both of these claims, along with countless others, employ a notion of possibility. If this notion is to have a place in philosophy, we must be able to justify our modal claims. We need an epistemology of possibility. It is often assumed that the imagination is the key here. The (...) assumption is this; if I can imagine that a proposition is the case, then p is possible. Suppose I am wondering whether Kant Critique could float above my desk; if I can imagine this book floating, then it is possible. But is the imagination a guide to the modal status of propositions? ;To answer this question we must first consider what it is to imagine a proposition. We can distinguish five main methods of imagining: to imagine is to form a mental image, to evoke experiences, to suppose, to pretend, or it is to tell a story. Can any of these methods provide us with a guide to possibility? I contend that only the last two methods are up to this task insofar as they provide us with evidence of p's modal status. Moreover, how good that evidence is depends on our ability to satisfy the requirements of completeness, coherence, and accuracy. Finally, I argue that we will have the best evidence for the possibility of p, if we combine these two methods. For by combining our evoked experiences with a story, we will generate experiences of p, the best possible explanation of a world in which p is true, and an account of p's truth that complements this explanation. Thus, given explanationist standards, we will have what we need to be justified in concluding that p is possible. (shrink)

According to a particular view of political realism, political expediency must always override moral considerations. Perhaps the strongest defense of such a theory is offered by Carl Schmitt in The Concept of the Political. A close examination of Schmitt’s main presuppositions can therefore help to shed light on the tenuous relation between politics and morality. Schmitt’s theory rests on two keystones. First, the political is seen as independent of and prior to morality. Second, genuine political theory depends on a view (...) of human beings as evil by nature. I will argue that both claims are incomplete. Just as the political sometimes demands that morality be overridden, so morality can demand the overriding of political expediency. Moreover, the view of human beings as evil, which serves as the foundation of political realism, itself depends on affirming that human nature must also be, in some sense, good. Political realism is thus shown to have its theoretical foundation within a normative framework that demands the political pursuit of at least some moral aims. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to present and discuss the philosophical views concerning mathematics of the founders of the so called Warsaw Mathematical School, i.e., Wacław Sierpiński, Zygmunt Janiszewski and Stefan Mazurkiewicz. Their interest in the philosophy of mathematics and their philosophical papers will be considered. We shall try to answer the question whether their philosophical views influenced their proper mathematical investigations. Their views towards set theory and its rôle in mathematics will be emphasized.

The paper presents four open problems concerning recursively saturated models of Peano Arithmetic. One problems concerns a possible converse to Tarski's undefinability of truth theorem. The other concern elementary cuts in countable recursively saturated models, extending automorphisms of countable recursively saturated models, and Jonsson models of PA. Some partial answers are given.

The formalism of quantum mechanics provides us with the probabilities for certain events to occur—this much is uncontroversial. But how are we to understand these probabilities? The essays in this special issue approach this question from different angles. The first three contributions take as their point of departure the philosophy of probability and discuss what the two main outlooks—objective and subjective interpretations of probability—have to offer in the context of quantum mechanics. The following five papers explore the question of how (...) probabilities in particular interpretations of quantum mechanics—modal interpretations, relative state interpretations, Bohmian mechanics, and GRW theory—can be interpreted. The last three essays address specific issues: non-standard probability and algebraic quantum field theory, quantum propensities, and the relation between decoherence and the interpretation of probability. (shrink)

Some initial considerations on film in documentary form are discussed, along with its relationships with reality and fiction in cinema language. Found footage genre is explained, pointing its most important technical and aesthetical characteristics. The text points the importance of the movie camera in documentary and found footage, not only as a technical device that objectivizes the information in a static manner, but also as an axis that configures dynamism and subjectivity on films. Redacted (2007) by Brian De Palma is (...) analyzed as an example of hybrid forms of fiction and reality in cinema. Beyond a traditional analysis of narrative of films, this text emphasizes the forms in which they are developed, which affect and determine the substance of films. (shrink)

Wittgenstein's conception of the general form of a truth function given in thesis 6 can be presented as a sort of a trade-off: the author of the Tractatus is unable to reconcile the simplicity of his original idea of a series of forms with the simplicity of his generalisation of Sheffer's stroke; therefore, he is forced to sacrifice one of them. As we argue in this paper, the choice he makes – to weaken the logical constraints put on the concept (...) of a series of forms, thus effectively metaphorising that concept for the sake of upholding the N-operation's role of generating the series – is unfortunate. An actual expansion of a series of truth functions as defined in 6 would require either making decisions at each step (Anscombe) or outwardly rejecting the concept of a series (Sundholm). However, neither is faithful to Wittgenstein's own fundamental intuitions regarding the nature of logic. For this reason, a different trade-off that prioritises upholding the basic features of a series of forms over the simplicity of the operation that generates that series seems to be much more reasonable. We offer such a trade-off by developing the schema already present in the Tractatus (5.101). The key element of our alternative solution is the construction of an operation that can perform the task of producing all consecutive truth functions of a given collection of atomic propositions as an invariant difference between any base and its successor throughout the series. We define it as a composition of three functions (in an algebraic sense): the first turns a symbol of a given truth function into a binary number, the second increments that number, the third turns the result back into a symbol of another truth function. We also show how the operation can be defined by means of a different notation without invoking binary arithmetic. (shrink)

The number of scientific publications is growing exponentially. Research articles cite other work for various reasons and, therefore, have been studied extensively to associate documents. It is argued that not all references carry the same level of importance. It is essential to understand the reason for citation, called citation intent or function. Text information can contribute well if new natural language processing techniques are applied to capture the context of text data. In this paper, we have used contextualized word embedding (...) to find the numerical representation of text features. We further investigated the performance of various machine-learning techniques on the numerical representation of text. The performance of each of the classifiers was evaluated on two state-of-the-art datasets containing the text features. In the case of the unbalanced dataset, we observed that the linear Support Vector Machine achieved 86% accuracy for the “background” class, where the training was extensive. For the rest of the classes, including “motivation,” “extension,” and “future,” the machine was trained on less than 100 records; therefore, the accuracy was only 57 to 64%. In the case of a balanced dataset, each of the classes has the same accuracy as trained on the same size of training data. Overall, SVM performed best on both of the datasets, followed by the stochastic gradient descent classifier; therefore, SVM can produce good results as text classification on top of contextual word embedding. (shrink)