This is a review of Survey of the State of the Art in Human Language Technology, [editorial board: Ronald Cole (editor-in-chief), Joseph Mariani, Hans Uszkoreit, Annie Zaenen, Victor Zue], Cambridge University Press (Studies in Natural Language Processing) and Giardini Editori e Stampatori in Pisa (Linguistica Computazionale, volumes XII-XII1), managing editors: Giovanni Battista Varile and Antonio Zampolli, Cambridge University Press, 1997.

This second volume completes the biography of the influential philosopher, following Whitehead's move first from Trinity College, Cambridge to London, and then, at the age of 63, to America, where the focus of his work shifted from mathematics to philosophy. Lowe (philosophy emeritus, Johns Hopkins U.) died in 1988 with this biography not quite completed. Vol.2 was edited and seen through publication by J.B. Schneewind, chairman of the Philosophy Department at Johns Hopkins. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

A widespread view in moral, legal, and political philosophy, as well as in public discourse, is that responsibility makes a difference to the fair allocation or distribution of things that are valuable or disvaluable independently of responsibility. For example, the fairness of punishing a person for wrongdoing varies with her responsibility for wrongdoing; the fairness of requiring a person to pay compensation varies with her responsibility for the harm that she caused; the fairness of one person being worse off than (...) another varies with her responsibility for being worse off; the fairness of inflicting defensive harm on a person to avert a threat varies with her responsibility for causing or posing the threat; and so on. (shrink)

This book explores three worlds shared by the humans in their collective experiences. It identifies and explores the world of commonsense, the world of religion, and the world of science as three essential dimensions of human experience. The book helps understand that humans can gain comfort and pleasure in commonsense, achieve meaning and purpose from religion, and attain truth and rationality through science. It actively applies theories to and develops theoretical explanations from different domains or situations of human existence. This (...) book is of interest to theorists, researchers, instructors, and students across major academic disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. (shrink)

In the light of partial (mis)understanding, we examine the thesis that concepts are individuated in terms of possession conditions and show that adherents face a fatal dilemma: Either concept‐individuating possession conditions include cases of partially (mis)understood concepts or not. If yes, possession conditions do not individuate concepts. If no, the thesis is too restricted and lacks a minimally satisfactory level of generalization.

Empirical studies of gesture in a subject who has lost proprioception and the sense of touch from the neck down show that specific aspects of gesture remain normal despite abnormal motor processes for instrumental movement. The experiments suggest that gesture, as a linguistic phenomenon, is not reducible to instrumental movement. They also support and extend claims made by Merleau-Ponty concerning the relationship between language and cognition. Gesture, as language, contributes to the accomplishment of thought.

In the fall semester of 1772/73 at the Albertus University of Königsberg, Immanuel Kant, metaphysician and professor of logic and metaphysics, began lectures on anthropology, which he continued until 1776, shortly before his retirement from public life. His lecture notes and papers were first published in 1798, eight years after the publication of the _Critique of Judgment, _the third of his famous _Critiques. _The present edition of the _Anthropology _is a translation of the text found in volume 7 of _Kants (...) gesammelte Schriften, _edited by Oswald Külpe. Kant describes the _Anthropology _as a systematic doctrine of the knowledge of humankind. Kant’s lectures stressed the "pragmatic" approach to the subject because he intended to establish pragmatic anthropology as a regular academic discipline. He differentiates the physiological knowledge of the human race—the investigation of "what Nature makes of man"—from the pragmatic—"what man as a free being makes of himself, what he can make of himself, and what he ought to make of himself." Kant believed that anthropology teaches the knowledge of humankind and makes us familiar with what is pragmatic, not speculative, in relation to humanity. He shows us as world citizens within the context of the cosmos. Summarizing the cloth edition of the _Anthropology_,_ Library Journal_ concludes: "Kant’s allusions to such issues as sensation, imagination, judgment, taste, emotion, passion, moral character, and the character of the human species in regard to the ideal of a cosmopolitan society make this work an important resource for English readers who seek to grasp the connections among Kant’s metaphysics of nature, metaphysics of morals, and political theory. The notes of the editor and translator, which incorporate material from Ernst Cassirer’s edition and from Kant’s _marginalia _in the original manuscript, shed considerable light on the text.". (shrink)

El propósito de esta investigación es hacer una relectura histórico-crítica de la Ética de la Liberación como ética de la vida. Este planteamiento se hace desde la memoria política crítica que permitirá ver la influencia que ella ha tenido con otras éticas que hoy pueden agruparse en torno al concepto de convivencia: la ética intercultural, la ética ecológica, la ética de la economía solidaria, la ética de una ciencia construida socialmente y de una tecnología al servicio de las personas, la (...) ética educativa como expresión de apertura y diálogo y no como adoctrinamiento, la ética religiosa separada de todo fanatismo, la ética civil más allá de todo militarismo, la ética del género más allá de toda exclusión. Lo que implica la necesidad de consolidar una ética de la convivencia, como eje central de la cultura y de la vida de los habitantes de América Latina que no es sólo necesario estudiar sino practicar. (shrink)

We show that plane hyperbolic geometry, expressed in terms of points and the ternary relation of collinearity alone, cannot be expressed by means of axioms of complexity at most ∀∃∀, but that there is an axiom system, all of whose axioms are ∀∃∀∃ sentences. This remains true for Klingenberg's generalized hyperbolic planes, with arbitrary ordered fields as coordinate fields.

We provide a quantifier-free axiom system for plane hyperbolic geometry in a language containing only absolute geometrically meaningful ternary operations (in the sense that they have the same interpretation in Euclidean geometry as well). Each axiom contains at most 4 variables. It is known that there is no axiom system for plane hyperbolic consisting of only prenex 3-variable axioms. Changing one of the axioms, one obtains an axiom system for plane Euclidean geometry, expressed in the same language, all of whose (...) axioms are also at most 4-variable universal sentences. We also provide an axiom system for plane hyperbolic geometry in Tarski's language L B which might be the simplest possible one in that language. (shrink)

Introduction.- Conclusions.- Chronology.- Political activities of Barlow.- Political writings of Barlow.- An evaluation.- Bibliography.- Appendix: The conspiracy of kings, by Joel Barlow.

This article is about reductionism; as a tendency of thought, reductionism tells us that the hole can be explained as the sum of its parts. From this principle, one can deduce that the properties and laws of complex systems can be explained by the laws and properties of simple systems. On the other ..

The story is frequently told about how with the publication of De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) in 1543 Nicolaus Copernicus (d. 1543) looked beyond the vanity of human self-centeredness and perceived that Earth was just one of several planets revolving around the sun. In doing so, he triggered the modern scientific revolution as people began to look at themselves and their place in the universe in a more objective light.

Since the beginning of the scientific revolution, believers have had to reconcile their beliefs with science. This has always proved difficult. If an all-perfect God created the universe and its physical laws, why would he have to step in to perform miracles and answer prayers? If, as all the evidence indicates, the universe, including humans and their brains, is matter and nothing more, how can we possibly live forever? Theologians try hard, but never come up with satisfactory answers.

Reverse analyses of three proofs of the Sylvester-Gallai theorem lead to three different and incompatible axiom systems. In particular, we show that proofs respecting the purity of the method, using only notions considered to be part of the statement of the theorem to be proved, are not always the simplest, as they may require axioms which proofs using extraneous predicates do not rely upon.

All the social sciences are now in flux and Soviet studies even more so. Many traditional approaches prove to be useless for understanding the changed world and there is a search for new explanatory models, and even for “alternative organizing myths.” All this fosters confusion and during such periods of “paradigm change” debates assume predictable characteristics. First of all, there appears a large gap between, in John Stuart Mill's words, “the meaning which a term bears in common acceptation” and that (...) which the writer “intends to annex to it.” It provides a great opportunity for sniping and passionately accusing opponents of lack of conceptual rigor. (shrink)

In the Spanish-Indian controversies, special attention was given to the subject of the education of the Indians, understood in a first approach as the necessary procedure to enable them to overcome their barbarianism, that is, to better adapt themselves to the natural law. This generated a philosophy of education which, in spite of being directly inspired by the circumstances of the Indians, nonetheless had permanent value by virtue of its anthropological soundness and its classical approach. This article deals with the (...) notions of barbarianism, education, natural law, and their interplay in the educational works of Bartolomé de las Casas and José de Acosta. (shrink)

Certain distinctively patristic and medieval features may be traced in Spanish-Renaissance thought, a tradition in which Aristotelianism played an otherwise dominant role. The study of these features may help to better understand the place of Hispanic thought in Renaissance intellectual history. I focus on one such a feature, providentialism, as it can be seen in two representative authors of sixteenth-century Spanish historiography. By discussing their differing providentialist views, and their motives for adopting them in each author’s historical and political circumstances, (...) it is argued that the zeal for justice constitutes a distinctive trait of Spanish-Renaissance thought. (shrink)

Se presenta la fase inicial de una investigación que trata la despoblación como tema controversial desde una perspectiva interdisciplinar y tratando de identificar el valor de la Historia para el conocimiento de esta temática. Esta primera fase se plantea desde un cuestionario destinado a identificar la percepción del alumnado de Segundo curso de ESO sobre el aprendizaje de la Historia y su relación con temas del presente, su percepción sobre la despoblación y su opinión sobre tópicos. En este artículo se (...) analizan tres preguntas del cuestionario para identificar si existen diferentes percepciones en el ámbito urbano y rural y también entre centros y su ubicación. Mediante un análisis mixto se plantea la detección de diferencias de percepción tanto entre el alumnado de las ciudades de Segovia y Madrid como entre cada uno de los centros. (shrink)