Brain–machine interfaces combining visual, auditory, and tactile feedback have been previously used to generate embodiment experiences during spinal cord injury rehabilitation. It is not known if adding temperature to these modalities can result in discomfort with embodiment experiences. Here, comfort levels with the embodiment experiences were investigated in an intervention that required a chronic pain SCI patient to generate lower limb motor imagery commands in an immersive environment combining visual, auditory, tactile, and thermal feedback. Assessments were made pre-/ post-, throughout (...) the intervention, and at 7 weeks follow up. Overall, high levels of embodiment in the adapted three-domain scale of embodiment were found throughout the sessions. No significant adverse effects of VR were reported. Although sessions induced only a modest reduction in pain levels, an overall reduction occurred in all pain scales at follow up. A high degree of comfort in the comfort scale for the thermal-tactile sleeve, in both the thermal and tactile feedback components of the sleeve was reported. This study supports the feasibility of combining multimodal stimulation involving visual, auditory, tactile, and thermal feedback to generate embodiment experiences in neurorehabilitation programs. (shrink)

BackgroundHappiness is becoming increasingly relevant in recent research, including adolescents. Many studies are using the single-item measure for adolescent happiness, however, its validity is not well known. We aimed to examine the validity of this measure among adolescents in three countries from distinct European regions – Eastern, Southern, and Western.Materials and MethodsThe analysis included data from Health Behaviour in School-aged Children study from three countries and three last surveys. The total sample comprised 47,439 schoolchildren. For validity, the indicators reflecting subjective (...) health, life satisfaction, quality of life, well-being, social support, health complaints, bullying, and self-directed violence were assessed. The calculations were conducted in the total sample and by gender, age, survey year, and country.ResultsThe different indicators of concurrent and convergent validity revealed consistent correlations with happiness, with better well-being, health, and subjective perceptions being related to higher happiness. Meanwhile, health complaints, bullying behaviors, and self-directed violence were related to lower happiness. The subgroup differences were consistent across gender, age groups, countries, and survey rounds. The extent of differences was more expressed among girls.ConclusionThe single item for adolescent happiness measurement features a consistent pattern of validity concerning indicators of concurrent and convergent validity. Higher self-reported happiness is associated with better mental and physical health and well-being, and less expressed negative factors. In addition, among girls the correlations tend to be stronger than boys. (shrink)

The notion that nature is subject to laws is exciting from many different viewpoints. This paper is based on the context of modern cosmology. It will list the significant interdisciplinary implications generated by various aspects of the contemporary scientific discussion about the status of laws of nature, especially their dynamic nature. Recent work highlights how multiple aspects of the observed universe still lack explanation and that several problems of standard cosmology still form the object of debate. Considering these issues, several (...) proposals have been made that entail a revision of the concept of the law of nature, according to which the nature of time and of the relation between causality and natural laws ought to be reconsidered using approaches or viewpoints which point to philosophical issues. We argue that Tim Maudlin’s concept of Fundamental Law of Temporal Evolution (FLOTE) and Nancy Cartwright’s notion of the nomological machine provide new insights and valuable tools that can be used in the analysis of the status of laws in the context of cosmology and of complex systems theory. The limits of the traditional approach to laws of nature and their mathematical formulation are highlighted in this context, as well as the fact that many of the ultimate properties of nature may turn out to be formally unpredictable or uncomputable. (shrink)

Le terme ktitor accompagne souvent la représentation d'un acte de don dans la peinture murale byzantines et post-byzantines. Même si le terme "ktitor" a été traduit le plus souvent par "fondateur", sémantiquement et historiquement, on retrouve dans le mot le sens de possession. Les ktitores - des propriétaires modaux, offrent leurs dons, dont le destinataire final est Dieu. Les panneaux votifs de Théodore Métochite , du sebastokrator Kalojan , de Stefan Uroš III , de Mircea l'Ancien témoignent des droits, des (...) intentions et de la foi du ktitor. Avec le christianisme, le sens du don s'est inversé et out don humain n'est qu'un contre-don à Dieu pour son sacrifice premier. (shrink)

Following the “Encountering Human Rights” conference in January 2007, Emily Grabham interviewed Tania Pouwhare, a women’s rights activist working at the Women’s Resource Centre in London. Their discussion engaged with the professionalisation of activism, funding constraints and New Labour policies and their impact on immigrant women. Against a background of financial insecurity and huge demand for their services, many women’s organisations in the United Kingdom struggle to use human rights law to advance women’s rights. Nevertheless, the rhetoric of human (...) rights remains powerful within women’s activism, and law remains relevant as a potential form of ‘direct action’ and “another way of making a really big fuss”. (shrink)

Both philosophers and psychologists have argued for the existence of distinct kinds of explanations, including teleological explanations that cite functions or goals, and mechanistic explanations that cite causal mechanisms. Theories of causation, in contrast, have generally been unitary, with dominant theories focusing either on counterfactual dependence or on physical connections. This paper argues that both approaches to causation are psychologically real, with different modes of explanation promoting judgments more or less consistent with each approach. Two sets of experiments isolate the (...) contributions of counterfactual dependence and physical connections in causal ascriptions involving events with people, artifacts, or biological traits, and manipulate whether the events are construed teleologically or mechanistically. The findings suggest that when events are construed teleologically, causal ascriptions are sensitive to counterfactual dependence and relatively insensitive to the presence of physical connections, but when events are construed mechanistically, causal ascriptions are sensitive to both counterfactual dependence and physical connections. The conclusion introduces an account of causation, an "exportable dependence theory," that provides a way to understand the contributions of physical connections and teleology in terms of the functions of causal ascriptions. (shrink)

In 2007. Terence Tao wrote on his blog an essay about soft analysis, hard analysis and the finitization of soft analysis statements into hard analysis statements. One of his main examples was a quasi-finitization of the infinite pigeonhole principle IPP, arriving at the "finitary" infinite pigeonhole principle FIPP₁. That turned out to not be the proper formulation and so we proposed an alternative version FIPP₂. Tao himself formulated yet another version FIPP₃ in a revised version of his essay. We give (...) a counterexample to FIPP₁ and discuss for both of the versions FIPP₂ and FIPP₃ the faithfulness of their respective finitization of IPP by studying the equivalences IPP ↔ FIPP₂ and IPP ↔ FIPP₃ in the context of reverse mathematics ([9]). In the process of doing this we also introduce a continuous uniform boundedness principle CUB as a formalization of Tao's notion of a correspondence principle and study the strength of this principle and various restrictions thereof in terms of reverse mathematics, i.e., in terms of the "big five" subsystems of second order arithmetic. (shrink)

We adapt Streicher and Kohlenbach's proof of the factorization S = KD of the Shoenfield translation S in terms of Krivine's negative translation K and the Gödel functional interpretation D, obtaining a proof of the factorization U = KB of Ferreira's Shoenfield-like bounded functional interpretation U in terms of K and Ferreira and Oliva's bounded functional interpretation B.

Scientific and ‘intuitive’ or ‘folk’ theories are typically characterized as serving three critical functions: prediction, explanation, and control. While prediction and control have clear instrumental value, the value of explanation is less transparent. This paper reviews an emerging body of research from the cognitive sciences suggesting that the process of seeking, generating, and evaluating explanations in fact contributes to future prediction and control, albeit indirectly by facilitating the discovery and confirmation of instrumentally valuable theories. Theoretical and empirical considerations also suggest (...) why explanations may nonetheless feel intrinsically valuable. The paper concludes by considering some implications of the psychology of explanation for a naturalized philosophy of explanation. (shrink)

Traditional approaches to moral psychology assumed that moral judgments resulted from the application of explicit commitments, such as those embodied in consequentialist or deontological philosophies. In contrast, recent work suggests that moral judgments often result from unconscious or emotional processes, with explicit commitments generated post hoc. This paper explores the intermediate position that moral commitments mediate moral judgments, but not through their explicit and consistent application in the course of judgment. An experiment with 336 participants finds that individuals vary in (...) the extent to which their moral commitments are consequentialist or deontological, and that this variation is systematically but imperfectly related to the moral judgments elicited by trolley car problems. Consequentialist participants find action in trolley car scenarios more permissible than do deontologists, and only consequentialists moderate their judgments when scenarios that typically elicit different intuitions are presented side by side. The findings emphasize the need for a theory of moral reasoning that can accommodate both the associations and dissociations between moral commitments and moral judgments. (shrink)

The ability to generalize from the known to the unknown is central to learning and inference. Two experiments explore the relationship between how a property is explained and how that property is generalized to novel species and artifacts. The experiments contrast the consequences of explaining a property mechanistically, by appeal to parts and processes, with the consequences of explaining the property functionally, by appeal to functions and goals. The findings suggest that properties that are explained functionally are more likely to (...) be generalized on the basis of shared functions, with a weaker relationship between mechanistic explanations and generalization on the basis of shared parts and processes. The influence of explanation type on generalization holds even though all participants are provided with the same mechanistic and functional information, and whether an explanation type is freely generated (Experiment 1), experimentally provided (Experiment 2), or experimentally induced (Experiment 2). The experiments also demonstrate that explanations and generalizations of a particular type (mechanistic or functional) can be experimentally induced by providing sample explanations of that type, with a comparable effect when the sample explanations come from the same domain or from a different domains. These results suggest that explanations serve as a guide to generalization, and contribute to a growing body of work supporting the value of distinguishing mechanistic and functional explanations. (shrink)

In his book Doing Without Concepts, Edouard Machery argues that cognitive scientists should reject the concept of “concept” as a natural, psychological kind. I review and critique several of Machery’s arguments, focusing on his definition of “concept” and on claims against the possibility and utility of a unified account of concepts. In particular, I suggest ways in which prototype, exemplar, and theory-theory approaches to concepts might be integrated.

Unscharfe Grenzen und fließende Übergänge kommen in allen Registern der Erfahrung vor. Von einer positiven Unbestimmtheit kann indes nur dort die Rede sein, wo diese gleichsam zur Sache selbst gehört und nicht nur unserem begrenzten Erkenntnisstand oder mangelnden Realisierungsmöglichkeiten zuzu-rechnen ist. Die gewachsene technologische Verfügungsmacht des Menschen, die sich mittlerweile auf die menschliche Lebenssubstanz selbst erstreckt, hat zu tiefgreifenden Veränderungen des Naturbegriffs geführt, in deren Verlauf die Grenzen zwischen Naturprodukten und Artefakten ständig verschoben werden. Damit tauchen neue Formen von Unbestimmtheit (...) auf, deren begriffliche Bewältigung uns vor besondere Probleme stellt. Wann genau beginnt das zu schützende menschliche Leben? Sind Hirntote wirklich tot? Kann ich eine Gehirntransplantation überleben, meine Existenz sogar in einem Klon fortsetzen? (shrink)

Machery emphasizes the centrality of explanation for theory-based approaches to concepts. I endorse Machery's emphasis on explanation and consider recent advances in psychology that point to the of explanation, with consequences for Machery's heterogeneity hypothesis about concepts.

L'opera è uno studio sugli aspetti teologici,metafisici, etici e politici della dottrina di Tommaso D'Aquino. Partendo dall'aspetto metafisico i principi della natura e l'ente e l'essenza scritti tra il 1252 e il 1256. L'opera verte sul rapporto tra l'ordine metafisico e quello logico. Affronta una serie di questioni centrali nel pensiero tomista: il principio di individuazione, il problema degli universali, il rifiuto dell'ilemorfismo universale, l'indefinibilità formale di Dio.

The Verb and the Paragraph in Biblical Hebrew: A Cognitive-Linguistic Approach. By Elizabeth Robar. Studies in Semitic Languages and Linguistics, vol. 78. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Pp. xii + 220. $142.

An increasing shortage of transplant donor organs currently results in an escalating number of preventable human deaths. Xenotransplantation. the use of animal organs for transplantation into humans, is now heralded as medicine's most viable answer to the urgent and insurmountable human organ scarcity. Although claimed to be a biomedical prerogative, xenotransplantation is a cultural phenomenon - a procedure engaging both the physical and symbolic manipulation of human and nonhuman bodies, thereby transforming corporeality, identity, and culture. Biomedical and scientific discourses about (...) xenografts have obscured issues related to nonhuman animals and also could be distressful to human organ recipients, revealing that the xenograft may not be widely embraced. (shrink)

Religious systems are organised semiotic structures providing people with values and rules, identities, regularity, and meaning. Consequently, a person moving out of a religious system might be exposed to meaning-ruptures. The paper presents the situation of young people who have been in Yeshiva, a rabbinic high-school, and who have to join secular university life. It analyses the changes to which they are exposed. On the bases of this case study, the paper examines the following questions: can the religious symbolic system (...) internalised by a person in a religious sphere of experience be mobilised as a symbolic resource once the person moves to a secular environment? If yes, how do religious symbolic resources facilitate the transition to a secular life? And if not, what other symbolic and social resources might facilitate such transitions? (shrink)

Michel Serres developed a strong core of his philosophical practice around the logic of parasitism. To illustrate this, I propose a bipartite reflection that plays on the external-internal relationship. In the first part I follow Serres in his reflection on the dynamic and unstable relationship between parasitism and symbiosis. The biological and ecological dimension of parasitism occurs in the relationship between viruses, humans and reservoirs. Serres tries to make explicit a parasitic function, irreducible in a single language, which allows to (...) relate the anthropological and sociological characteristics of the parasite to the biological and ecological dynamics. According to Serres, love, humility and a sense of limitation are the global virtues that humanity willhave to rediscover to transform parasitism into symbiosis, rewriting, after Rousseau, a new Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes. In the second part I put in perspective an extraordinarily global example of parasitism of our times: the spread of the Covid-19 virus in the context of the spillove. (shrink)

Self-confidence is associated with many positive outcomes, and training programs routinely seek to build participants’ self-efficacy. In this article, however, we consider whether self-confidence increases unethical behavior. In a series of studies, we explore the relationship between negotiator self-efficacy—an individual’s confidence in his or her negotiation ability—and the use of deception. We find that individuals high in negotiator self-efficacy are more likely to use deception than individuals low in negotiator self-efficacy. We also find that perceptions of the risk of deception (...) mediate this relationship. By identifying negotiator self-efficacy as an antecedent to unethical behavior, our findings offer important theoretical and empirical insights into the use of deception, the role of individual differences in ethical decision making, and the broader consequences of self-confidence in business and society. (shrink)

Desde la perspectiva de la metafísica tomasiana, el tema de la cultura se inscribe de lleno en la ontología de la causalidad intramundana, pero para emerger de ella trascendiéndola. La relevancia que aquí cobra el acontecer no es arbitraria. Le viene dada por el hecho de ser, en la esfera de lo generable y corruptible, la más eminente participación del acto creador, más íntimo a ella que ella misma.

‘Thinking liquid thoughts’ is an essay aiming at the aggregation of ideas and concepts which emerge and float when enquiring if there are characteristics related with the research of fields that artists could explore as new poetic venues for further works. Nanosciences and nanotechnologies will affect almost all features of everybody’s lives in the near future. What are the issues, either desirable or undesirable, we should try to point to considering the specific view related with art, architecture and design. We (...) also have to ask, which are the skills and tools that artists, architects and designers will need for developing research and creating work in these new fields. Opening with the idea of thinking liquid thoughts the essay also speculates about the possibility of creating interactive responsive works of art, extremely sensitive, exploring poetic possibilities for the creation of material products aiming a bi-univocal relationship between the computer simulation and the material realm. There is also research related with educational games and the programming of poetic journeys using virtual reality technologies, pointing to the convergence of silicon with carbon, which will bring about deep implications in the mode of production of things, thoughts ands processes.modelling, animation and VRML, Java Script and Java 3D languages. (shrink)

El presente artículo tiene como objetivo principal presentar y discutir el concepto de las hiperescrituras del yo como prácticas de producción de memorias. A partir de estas escrituras, practicadas y compartidas en la pandemia, se pretende pensar la ficción como táctica de (re)existencia. Finalmente se presenta una experiencia en la plataforma Moodle, diseñada con estudiantes durante el 2020, que tuvo la ficción como punto de partida de la propuesta didáctica.

Examining alumni perspectives from three multi-term service-learning programs, this study highlights the dimensions of the cohort experience that alumni credit as critical to their learning and dev...

In the last two decades Information and Computer Technology has come to play an increasingly important role in medicine and health care. Many medical practitioners and scholars wonder: will e-health cause a paradigm shift in health care? To answer this question we provide a philosophical analysis of the concept of the 'paradigm shift' through the work of Michel Foucault, Thomas Kuhn and Larry Laudan. Their work offers key insights to a comprehensive understanding of major evolutions in medicine. Nowadays the long-standing (...) curative paradigm in medicine is facing important challenges due to an aging population, a significant increase in chronic diseases and the development of more expensive diagnostic tools and therapies. This promotes the evolution towards a new paradigm in medicine with an emphasis on preventive, predictive and personalized care. E-health constitutes an essential part of this new paradigm that seeks to solve the challenges presented by an aging population, skyrocketing costs and so forth. On the other hand the characteristics of e-health will be strongly determined by this new paradigm. 'Will e-health cause a paradigm shift in medicine?' might not be the right question to pose. Rather, we should ask how the underlying paradigm shift, from discovery and cure to prevention and prediction, acts as a facilitator to embrace ICT in health care. This analysis is of crucial importance in understanding the impact of digital health care applications and provides a necessary framework for the emerging, dynamic system of e-health. (shrink)

This article is based on the corpus of Aramaic epigraphic cadastral documents published in Bezalel Porten and Ada Yardeni, Textbook of Aramaic Ostraca from Idumea, vol. 5 (University Park, PA: Eisenbrauns, 2023). The lexicon and syntax of these texts present a number of intriguing phenomena, and the examination of these phenomena allows the clarification of the reality behind the words. In particular, this article discusses ellipsis, omissions, and the syntax of captions as part of scribal conventions, as well as some (...) technical terms and groups of lexemes that belong to the vocabulary of the land descriptions. (shrink)

This paper deals with different textual versions of the important Mandaic magic scroll called Zarazta ḏ-Hibil Ziua. There are around thirteen manuscripts in different Western collections that attest to the text of this talisman. These manuscripts reveal great diversity. The general textual scope and literary structure of each manuscript are investigated. This allows an initial grouping of the texts into several text-types. The textual groupings are evaluated in light of various sorts of meta-textual data: the headings of the manuscripts, editorial (...) comments, and colophons. As a result, a working hypothesis about the possible relationship among different texts-types and the possible literary evolution of the work is suggested. (shrink)

Título: La enseñanza de la historia en el Siglo XXI. Desarrollo y evaluación de competencias históricaspara una ciudadanía democráticaEditores: Miralles Martínez, P.; Gómez Carrasco, C. J.; Rodríguez Pérez, R. A.Editorial: Editum. Ediciones de la Universidad de MurciaIdioma: español y portuguésAño: 2017ISBN: 978-84-697-3352-3Páginas: 273.

Pensar, hablar y ser conforman una unidad indisoluble desde el mismo surgimiento del logos en Occidente. En Iberoamérica, esta tiple condición se ha expresado, sobre todo, como un anhelo profundo de libertad y justicia ligado a una angustia existencial. Buen ejemplo de ello es la voz del criollo, que a través de filósofos como Eguiara y Eguren, Díaz de Gamarra o Espejo, entre otros, se rebelaron contra el autoritarismo de España y el despotismo de Europa.

A questão que se coloca nesse texto é refletir sobre as contribuições que Marx formula para pensar a respeito da educação, a escola e a luta trabalhadora. Nosso intuito é, pois, a partir do “beber da fonte” da filosofia de práxis, pensar em que medida, o projeto de emancipação social, tal como propôs Marx, se realiza numa escola em crise, aonde muita coisa, aliás, muda na aparência para manter a essência íntegra. Nossas reflexões se voltam para compreender também, como por (...) meio do trabalho, as experiências de autoformação política da classe trabalhadora passam por uma radicalização vertiginosa do direito ao acesso, comprometedora, no entanto, do saber produzido socialmente. (shrink)