Un relief mélien en terre cuite a été trouvé lors de la fouille d'un cimetière d'époque classique à Trézène. Mesurant 0,218 x 0,185 m, il est bien conservé et garde des traces d'engobe blanc et de polychromie. Il représente Héraklès, Déjanire et le centaure Nessos, à l'instant où la femme est sauvée du rapt dont elle était menacée, sur le bord du fleuve Euhénos en Étolie, selon une version du mythe transmise par un fragment de poème lyrique attribué avec beaucoup (...) de vraisemblance à Bacchylide. Cette œuvre en terre cuite, petite mais néanmoins ambitieuse, allie la difficile réalisation d'une composition à trois personnages conforme aux habitudes des 2e et 3e quarts du Ve siècle av. J.-C, à un rendu iconographique des figures qui renvoie à une esthétique plus ancienne : celle de la fin de l'archaïsme et de la lre moitié du Ve s. av. J.-C. (shrink)

L’article présente les recollages réalisés au Musée épigraphique par D. Peppas Delmousou et les révisions de textes faites à cette occasion, soit 39 documents, souvent complétés par de nouveaux fragments : un fragment de décret et deux de lettres impériales, deux tables d’archontes et une liste du Ier siècle, peut-être de philoi, cinq listes de prytanes ou d’aïsitoi, cinq documents agonistiques, une liste de noms inscrite sur un chapiteau et un haut de colonne, quatre documents évoquant des constructions ou (...) réparations ou des épimélètes chargés de ces travaux, sept épitaphes, huit épigrammes, notamment pour Secundilla et Attikia, et deux brèves inscriptions paléo-byzantines. L’ensemble comprend quelques fragments inédits ou omis dans les corpora récents. Ces documents sont de l’époque romaine entendue au sens large, du IIe siècle av. J.-C. au VIe siècle apr. J.-C. Chacun est accompagné d’une description, d’une photographie et d’un commentaire. (shrink)

Aristotle's treatise De Interpretatione is one of his central works; it continues to be the focus of much attention and debate. C. W. A. Whitaker presents the first systematic study of this work, and offers a radical new view of its aims, its structure, and its place in Aristotle's system, basing this view upon a detailed chapter-by-chapter analysis.By treating the work systematically, rather than concentrating on certain selected passages, Whitaker is able to show that, contrary to traditional opinion, it forms (...) an organized and coherent whole. He argues that the De Interpretatione is intended to provide the underpinning for dialectic, the system of argument by question and answer set out in Aristotle's Topics; and he rejects the traditional view that the De Interpretatione concerns the assertion and is oriented towards the formal logic of the Prior Analytics. In doing so, he sheds valuable new light on some of Aristotle's most famous texts. (shrink)

Most whistleblowers talk as if they never had a choice about whether to blow the whistle. This doesn't mean they acted suddenly, or impulsively, only that they believe they could not have done otherwise. Trying to make sense of this near universal answer to the question "Why did you do it?" the essay draws on narrative theory. Narrative theory distinguishes between actant and sender—that is, between actor and his or her values. This distinction helps to explain what it means to (...) face a difficult choice over something about which one feels one never had a choice. (shrink)

Background and Aims The prevalence of religious faith among doctors and its relationship with decision-making in end-of-life care is not well documented. The impact of ethnic differences on this is also poorly understood. This study compares ethnicity and religious faith in the medical and general UK populations, and reports on their associations with ethically controversial decisions taken when providing care to dying patients. Method A postal survey of 3733 UK medical practitioners, of whom 2923 reported on the care of their (...) last patient who died. Findings Specialists in care of the elderly were somewhat more likely to be Hindu or Muslim than other doctors; palliative care specialists were somewhat more likely to be Christian, religious and ‘white’ than others. Ethnicity was largely unrelated to rates of reporting ethically controversial decisions. Independently of speciality, doctors who described themselves as non-religious were more likely than others to report having given continuous deep sedation until death, having taken decisions they expected or partly intended to end life, and to have discussed these decisions with patients judged to have the capacity to participate in discussions. Speciality was independently related to wide variations in the reporting of decisions taken with some intent to end life, with doctors in ‘other hospital’ specialities being almost 10 times as likely to report this when compared with palliative medicine specialists, regardless of religious faith. Conclusions Greater acknowledgement of the relationship of doctors' values with clinical decision-making is advocated. (shrink)

"A rich collection. Since it holds a number of introductory pieces along with advanced essays and review articles, the volume will be accessible to a broad audience and will work well in philosophy of science courses....Essential."--Lawrence Sklar, University of Michigan.

A defining characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease is difficulty in retrieving semantic memories, or memories encoding facts and knowledge. While it has been suggested that this impairment is caused by a degradation of the semantic store, the precise ways in which the semantic store is degraded are not well understood. Using a longitudinal corpus of semantic fluency data, we derive semantic network representations of patients with Alzheimer’s disease and of healthy controls. We contrast our network-based approach with analyzing fluency data with (...) the standard method of counting the total number of items and perseverations in fluency data. We find that the networks of Alzheimer’s patients are more connected and that those connections are more randomly distributed than the connections in networks of healthy individuals. These results suggest that the semantic memory impairment of Alzheimer’s patients can be modeled through the inclusion of spurious associations between unrelated concepts in the semantic store. We also find that information from our network analysis of fluency data improves prediction of patient diagnosis compared to traditional measures of the semantic fluency task. (shrink)

This paper examines the realist interpretation of Vedānta that Rasvihari Das explicated in two of his celebrated treatises, namely, “The Theory of Ignorance in Advaitism” and “The Falsity of the World.” Rasvihari Das, unlike many of his contemporary thinkers of India, took a contrary position against the uninformed generalization about Indian thought that the philosophical tradition of India was one of an unbroken idealism and spiritualism. Though Rasviahari Das was influenced by his senior peer-thinkers of India like Hiralal Haldar, B. (...) N. Seal, and K. C. Bhattacharyya, Rasvihari Das had his own independent view on and interpretation of Vedānta. The paper argues that in the Vedāntic realism of Rasvihari Das there is no rejection of the world or the individuals. In the first part of the paper, I suggests the possible influence of Indian realism on Rasvihari Das. In the second part, I make an attempt to unearth and examine the interpretation of Rasvihari Das that unravels his Vedāntic realism. The third part is the concluding appraisal of Rasvihari Das who could take Vedānta forward from its religious moorings and place it resolutely on a philosophical candour. (shrink)

Okasha claims at the outset of his book "Evolution and the Levels of Selection" that the Price equation lays bare the fundamentals underlying all selection phenomena. However, the thoroughness of his subsequent analysis of multi-level selection theories leads him to abandon his fundamentalist commitments. At critical points he invokes cost benefit analyses that sometimes favors the Price approach and sometimes the contextual approach, sometimes favors MLS1 and sometimes MLS2. And although he doesn’t acknowledge it, even the Price approach breaks down (...) into a family of alternative equations that parse the causes in different ways, none of which is uniquely correct and none of which achieves the ultimate isolation of effects due to what Okasha believes are the fundamental causes. I argue that his book provides good reason to re-conceive our understanding of evolutionary theorizing in terms of a toolbox view and to stop subjecting the analyses of evolutionary concepts to a universalist standard. (shrink)

A study in philosophical logic of the meaning of 'true'. Dr Williams demonstrates the shortcomings of various analyses which interpret 'true' as a predicate or truth as a relational property, and clears up a number of important points about propositions, quantification, definite descriptions and correspondence. This 'deflationary metaphysics' is interwoven with a positive theory of his own, which seeks to develop ideas about the late Arthur Prior. The work is marked throughout by great clarity, precision and thoroughness.

Yvonne C. Zimmerman offers a groundbreaking exploration of the relationship between freedom and sexual regulation in American approaches to human trafficking.

The development of gene-editing technologies, such as the clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats and associated Cas9 endonuclease system, coincides with a rapidly expanding knowledge of the role of genes in the human ageing process. This raises the prospect that, in addition to the treatment of genetic diseases and disorders, it may become possible to use gene-editing technologies to alter the ageing process and significantly extend the maximum human lifespan. Germline editing poses distinctive problems due to its implications for individual (...) members of future, unborn generations. In this essay, I wish to home in, narrowly, on a single ethical objection to extending the lifespan of future generations by editing the human germline. The objection suggests that to extend lifespans is to unethically inflict the harm of loneliness on future people. I claim that the argument rests on assumptions that ought to be rejected. (shrink)

Chalmers' (2018) meta-problem of consciousness emphasizes unexpected common ground between otherwise incompatible positions. We argue that the materialist should welcome discussion of the meta-problem. We suggest that the core of the metaproblem is the seeming arbitrariness of subjective experience. This has an unexpected resolution when one moves to an interventionist account of scientific explanation: the same interventions that resolve the hard problem should also resolve the meta-problem.

Fractal time fluctuations of the spectral “1/f” form are universal in natural self-organizing systems. Neurobiology is uniquely infused with fractal fluctuations in the form of statistically self-similar clusters or bursts on all levels of description from molecular events such as protein chain fluctuations, ion channel currents and synaptic processes to the behaviors of neural ensembles or the collective behavior of Internet users. It is the thesis of this essay that the brain self-organizes via a vertical collation of these spontaneous events (...) in order to perceive the world and generate adaptive behaviors. REM sleep, which coalesces from self-similar clusters of burst-within-burst behavior during ontogeny, is essential to cognitive-emotional function, and has recurrent fractal organization. Empirical fMRI observations further support the association of fractal fluctuations in the temporal lobes, brainstem and cerebellum during the expression of emotional memory, spontaneous fluctuations of thought and meditative practice. Cognitive-emotional integration arises as amygdaloid-brainstem-cerebellar systems harmonize the vertical “1/f” symphony of coupled isochronous cortical oscillations in the pursuit of mindfulness. (shrink)

Any theory of information needs to comply with what we call the implementation, formalization, and representation constraints. These constraints are justified by basic considerations concerning scientific modelling and methodology. In the first part of this paper, we argue that the implementation and formalization constraints cannot be satisfied because the relation between Shannon information and IIT must be clarified. In the second part of the paper, we focus on the representation constraint. We argue that IIT cannot succeed in satisfying this constraint (...) for semantic contents without offering models for concepts, conceptual roles, and context sensitivity. In the final part of the paper, further complications are raised with respect to the distinction between consciousness and attention, which apply more specifically to the representation constraint. We conclude with some recommendations as to how IIT may succeed in solving these problems, highlighting the advantages and enormous potential of IIT as a scientific theory. (shrink)

The Holocaust marks a decisive moment in modern suffering in which it becomes almost impossible to find meaning or redemption in the experience. In this study, C. Fred Alford offers a new and thoughtful examination of the experience of suffering. Moving from the Book of Job, an account of meaningful suffering in a God-drenched world, to the work of Primo Levi, who attempted to find meaning in the Holocaust through absolute clarity of insight, he concludes that neither strategy works well (...) in today's world. More effective are the day-to-day coping practices of some survivors. Drawing on testimonies of survivors from the Fortunoff Video Archives, Alford also applies the work of Julia Kristeva and the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicot to his examination of a topic that has been and continues to be central to human experience. (shrink)

Din-bilim ilişkisi tarihsel süreçte olduğu gibi günümüzde de tartışılmaya devam etmektedir. Hristiyan Avrupa’sında ortaya çıkan tartışmaların İslam dünyasını da etkilediği bir vakıadır. İslam kelamcıları, İslam dini ile bilim arasında bir çatışmanın olmadığı genel kabulüyle hareket ederler. Özellikle bu noktada kelamın vesâil alanı, metafiziğin desteklendiği alan olarak kabul görmektedir. Modern dönemde vesâil alanında önemli bilimsel çalışmaların olduğu görülmektedir bunlardan biri de Nöroteolojidir. Nöroteoloji, davranışı nöral (sinirsel) temelde inceleyip açıklamaya çalışan bilim dalıdır. Bu noktada özellikle dindarlığın nörolojik temelleri ve evrimsel işlevi hakkında (...) önemli bilgiler sunmaktadır. Bu çalışmada kelamın en önemli tartışma konularından biri olan kesb nazariyesi, Nöroteolojik açıdan Benjamin libet deneyiyle değerlendirilmektedir. Deney sonuçları yayınlandığında o güne kadar felsefe ve bilim dünyasında tartışılagelen insanın irade özgürlüğü meselesine yeni bir tartışma zemini hazırlamıştır. Özellikle Eş’ârî’nin kesb anlayışının da ciddi tartışmalara sebebiyet verdiği bilinmektedir. Allah’ın mutlaklığı açısından ele alınan bu düşünce, insan özgürlüğü ve sorumluluğunu ortadan kaldırır düşüncesiyle eleştirilmiştir. Ancak Benjamin libet deneyinin, Eş’ârî’nin kesb anlayışına uygun veriler içermesi dikkat çeken bir husus olarak göze çarpmaktadır. (shrink)