A natural extension theorem for strongly continuous mappings, the morphisms in the category of apartness spaces, is proved constructively.

The main purpose of this paper is to investigate constructively the relationship between proximal convergence, uniform sequential convergence and uniform convergence for sequences of mappings between apartness spaces. It is also shown that if the second space satisfies the Efremovic axiom, then proximal convergence preserves strong continuity.

The paper deals with proximal convergence and Leader's theorem, in the constructive theory of uniform apartness spaces.

An axiomatic development of the theory of apartness and nearness of a point and a set is introduced as a framework for constructive topology. Various notions of continuity of mappings between apartness spaces are compared; the constructive independence of one of the axioms from the others is demonstrated; and the product apartness structure is defined and analysed.

We investigate separation properties for neighbourhood spaces in some details within a framework of constructive mathematics, and define corresponding separation properties for quasi-apartness spaces. We also deal with separation properties for spaces with inequality.

In the constructive theory of uniform spaces there occurs a technique of proof in which the application of a weak form of the law of excluded middle is circumvented by purely analytic means. The essence of this proof-technique is extracted and then applied in several different situations.

The relation between near continuity and sequential continuity for mappings between metric spaces is explored constructively. It is also shown that the classical implications “near continuity implies sequential continuity” and “near continuity implies apart continuity” are essentially nonconstructive.

In the constructive theory of uniform spaces there occurs a technique of proof in which the application of a weak form of the law of excluded middle is circumvented by purely analytic means. The essence of this proof—technique is extracted and then applied in several different situations.

The theory of apartness spaces, and their relation to topological spaces (in the point–set case) and uniform spaces (in the set–set case), is sketched. New notions of local decomposability and regularity are investigated, and the latter is used to produce an example of a classically metrisable apartness on R that cannot be induced constructively by a uniform structure.

Uniform sequential continuity, a property classically equivalent to sequential continuity on compact sets, is shown, constructively, to be a consequence of strong continuity on a metric space. It is then shown that in the case of a separable metric space, uniform sequential continuity implies strong continuity if and only if one adopts a certain boundedness principle that, although valid in the classical, recursive and intuitionistic setting, is independent of Heyting arithmetic.

We extend the concept of apartness spaces to the concept of quasi-apartness spaces. We show that there is an adjunction between the category of quasi-apartness spaces and the category of neighbourhood spaces, which indicates that quasi-apartness is a more natural concept than apartness. We also show that there is an adjoint equivalence between the category of apartness spaces and the category of Grayson’s separated spaces.

In recent years, the microfinance industry has received a substantial amount of cross-border funding from both public and private sources. This funding reflects the increasing interest in microfinance as part of a more general trend towards socially responsible investments. In order to be able to secure sustained interest from these investors, it is important that the microfinance industry can show evidence of its contribution to reducing poverty at the bottom of the pyramid. For this, it is crucial to understand under (...) what conditions microfinance institutions are able to reduce poverty. This paper contributes to this discussion by investigating the relationship between the extent to which social capital formation is facilitated within different societies and the financial and social performance of MFIs. This focus on social capital formation is important, because in many cases MFIs use group loans with joint liability to incentivize asset-poor borrowers to substitute the lack of physical collateral by their social capital. Hence, the success of a large part of the loan relationship between MFIs and their borrowers depends on the social capital those borrowers can bring into the contract. We carry out a cross-country analysis on a dataset containing 100 countries and identify different social dimensions as proxies for how easy social capital can be developed in different countries. We hypothesize that microfinance is more successful, both in terms of their financial and social aims, in societies that are more conducive to the development of social capital. Our empirical results support our hypothesis. (shrink)

Trafficking in persons is a multi-sided phenomenon accompanying the current migration flows, therefore, the actions that must be undertaken in order to prevent, combat the phenomenon as well as to assist the victims of trafficking require a large partnership between all the actors involved: international organisations, governmental institutions and representatives of civil society. The special psychological, ethical issues raised especially by trafficking prevention and assistance to victims make the church and various religious organisations play a very important role in the (...) corresponding networks at both international and national level. Even if the integration of the church in the networks fighting against trafficking in persons has been quite largely addressed worldwide, there are but few studies undertaken in Romania in this area. Our paper opens the room for dialogue among the researchers interested in this topic from an interdisciplinary perspective to discuss the possibilities to establish sustainable partnerships between the state and the church against rafficking in persons. With this aim in view, we have first carried out a quantitative analysis of the scope and dynamics of trafficking in persons in Romania focusing on the victims’ profile by exploitation type. The main socio-demographic characteristics (gender, age, schooling, area of origin) have been considered in order to identify the vulnerability factors related to the risk involved by trafficking, both at national and regional level. We have also examined the responses in legislative and institutional terms, with a special emphasis on the collaboration between the state and the church in preventing and combating trafficking in persons. Of special relevance are the conclusions resulted from the field research undertaken in the area covered by the Diocese of Maramures and Satu Mare. (shrink)

Besides Dracula, Ceauşescu, and Nadia Comăneci, monasteries constitute a permanent Romanian brand, inextricably linked in every foreign visitor's mind to Romanianness. Specific to Moldavia and Bucovina—the Eastern and Northern parts of Romania—these monasteries have attracted visitors for the past 500 years. The person visiting a sacred site is transformed from being merely a tourist into a pilgrim. The painting “The Ladder towards Heaven” at the Pângăraţi Monastery, for example, highlights the importance of the mental and physical involvement of the tourist-pilgrim (...) as an interactive participant in the process of self-discovery. (shrink)

The main aim of this article is to discuss both the concept of secularism among the Ottoman intellectuals and the principle of secularism during the period of the Turkish Republic based on ideas rather than practice. We can analyze “secularism in Turkey” in two separate periods of time: First, “The Ottoman Empire and Secularism” which discusses the ideas of secularism before the foundation of the Turkish Republic, and second “A Brief Analysis of the Turkish Republic and the Principle of Secularism” (...) in which the idea of secularism related to the ideology of the state in the course of the Turkish Republic are shortly examined. In this article, we generally state the consistent development of secularism practiced in Turkey. (shrink)

It is shown, within constructive mathematics, that the unit ball B1 of the set of bounded operators on a Hilbert space H is weak-operator totally bounded. This result is then used to prove that the weak-operator continuity of the mapping T → AT on B1 is equivalent to the existence of the adjoint of A.

Life expansion means increasing the length of time a person is alive and diversifying the matter in which a person exists. For human life, the length of time is bounded by a single century and its matter is tied to biology.

This article concerns sound aesthetic preferences for European foreign languages. We investigated the phonetic-acoustic dimension of the linguistic aesthetic pleasure to describe the “music” found in European languages. The Romance languages, French, Italian, and Spanish, take a lead when people talk about melodious language – the music-like effects in the language (a.k.a., phonetic chill). On the other end of the melodiousness spectrum are German and Arabic that are often considered sounding harsh and un-attractive. Despite the public interest, limited research has (...) been conducted on the topic of phonaesthetics, i.e., the subfield of phonetics that is concerned with the aesthetic properties of speech sounds (Crystal, 2008). Our goal is to fill the existing research gap by identifying the acoustic features that drive the auditory perception of language sound beauty. What is so music-like in the language that makes people say “it is music in my ears”? We had 45 central European participants listening to 16 auditorily presented European languages and rating each language in terms of 22 binary characteristics (e.g., beautiful – ugly and funny – boring) plus indicating their language familiarities, L2 backgrounds, speaker voice liking, demographics, and musicality levels. Findings revealed that all factors in complex interplay explain a certain percentage of variance: familiarity and expertise in foreign languages, speaker voice characteristics, phonetic complexity, musical acoustic properties, and finally musical expertise of the listener. The most important discovery was the trade-off between speech tempo and so-called linguistic melody (pitch variance): the faster the language, the flatter/more atonal it is in terms of the pitch (speech melody), making it highly appealing acoustically (sounding beautiful and sexy), but not so melodious in a “musical” sense. (shrink)

This article explores the link between CEOs’ language and hubristic leadership. It is based on the precepts that leaders’ linguistic utterances provide insights into their personality and behaviours; hubris is associated with unethical and potentially destructive leadership behaviours; if it is possible to identify linguistic markers of CEO hubris then these could serve as early warnings sign and help to mitigate the associated risks. Using computational linguistics, we analysed spoken utterances from a sample of hubristic CEOs and compared them with (...) non-hubristic CEOs. We found that hubristic CEOs’ linguistic utterances show systematic and consistent differences from the linguistic utterances of non-hubristic CEOs. Demonstrating how hubristic leadership manifests in CEO language contributes to wider research regarding the diagnosis and prevention of the unethical and potentially destructive effects of hubristic leadership. This research contributes to the wider study of hubris and unethical leadership by applying a novel method for identifying linguistic markers and offers a way of militating against the risk of unethical and destructive CEO behaviours induced or aggravated by hubristic leadership. (shrink)

In the article by Vita Titarenko «Experience and prospects of religious organizations in Ukraine: prisma of independence» on the basis of the analysis of the newest sociological researches the features of the post-Soviet religious society in Ukraine are considered. The formation of a specific model of religiosity of modern Ukrainian society, its new value matrix is noted. The distinctive characteristic is the nonconfessional self-determination of Ukrainians, the development of extra-religious religiosity during complex socio-political events in the country, the formation of (...) such a phenomenon as a civil religion and a civil "ecclesia". (shrink)

The aim of this work is to investigate the problem of Logical Omniscience in epistemic logic by means of truthmaker semantics. We will present a semantic framework based on $$\varvec{W}$$ W -models extended with a partial function, which selects the body of knowledge of the agents, namely the set of verifiers of the agent’s total knowledge. The semantic clause for knowledge follows the intuition that an agent knows some information $$\varvec{\phi }$$ ϕ, when the propositional content that $$\varvec{\phi }$$ ϕ (...) is contained in her total knowledge. We will argue that this idea mirrors the philosophical conception of immanent closure by Yablo (2014), giving to our proposal a strong philosophical motivation. We will discuss the philosophical implications of the semantics and we will introduce its axiomatization. (shrink)

Explaining the emergence of life is perhaps central and the most challenging question in modern science. Within this area of research, the emergence and evolution of the genetic code is supposed to be a critical transition in the evolution of modern organisms. The canonical genetic code is one of the most dominant aspects of life on this planet, and thus studying its origin is critical to understanding the evolution of life, including life’s emergence. In this sense it is possible to (...) view the ribosome as a digital-to-analogue information converter. Why the translation apparatus evolved, is one of the enduring mysteries of molecular biology. Assuming the hypothesis that during the emergence of life evolution had to first involve autocatalytic systems, which only subsequently acquired the capacity of genetic heredity, in the present article we discuss some aspects and causes of the possible emergence of digital, discrete information arising from analogue information realized in the intra- and inter-molecular interactions throughout molecular evolution. How such reverse translation was achieved at a molecular level is still unclear. The results of such debates and investigations might shift current biological paradigms and might also have a momentous significance for modern philosophy in understanding our place in the universe. (shrink)

This paper describes the Gender Equity Project at Hunter College of the City University of New York, funded by the U. S. NSF ADVANCE Institutional Transformation Award program. ADVANCE supports system-level strategies to promote gender equity in the social and natural sciences, but has supported very few teaching-intensive institutions. Hunter College is a teaching-intensive institution in which research productivity among faculty is highly valued and counts toward tenure and promotion. We created the GEP to address the particular challenges that faculty, (...) especially White women and faculty of color, face in maintaining research programs and advancing in their careers at teaching-intensive institutions. During the course of the ADVANCE award, its centerpiece was the Sponsorship Program, a multifaceted paid mentorship/sponsorship program that paired each participant with a successful scholar in her discipline. It offered extensive professional development opportunities, including interactive workshops and internal grants to support research. The GEP helped change key policies and practices by ensuring that all faculty were treated fairly in areas like provision of research start-up funds and access to guidance on how to prepare for tenure and promotion. Qualitative and quantitative evidence suggests that participation in the Sponsorship Program boosted research productivity and advanced the careers of many of the women who participated; the Program was highly rated by all participants. Some of the policy and practice changes that the GEP helped bring about were sustained at Hunter beyond the award period and some were adopted and disseminated by the central office of CUNY. However, we were not able to sustain the relatively expensive Sponsorship Program. We share the lessons we learned, including that creating a diverse, successful social and natural scientific workforce requires sustained support of female faculty employed at teaching-intensive colleges. We acknowledge the difficulties of sustaining gains, and offer ideas about how to make the case for gender equity when women seem to be doing “well enough.” We underscore the imperative of building support for women’s research in teaching-intensive institutions, where most women scientists are employed, and well over 90% of all college students—a disproportionate percentage of whom are female, minoritized, or both—are educated. (shrink)

Deferred prosecution agreements (DPAs) are legal means, alternative to trial, for the resolution of criminal business cases. Although DPAs are increasingly used in the US and are spreading to other jurisdictions, the ethics of DPAs has hardly been subjected to critical scrutiny. We use a multidisciplinary approach straddling the line between philosophy and law to examine the ethics of DPAs used to resolve cases of multinational enterprises’ (MNEs) foreign corruption. Deontologically, we argue that the normativity of DPAs raises critical concerns (...) related to the notion of justice as punishment, with serious cases of international corruption resolved with minimal retribution for offending MNEs. Taking a utilitarian ethical perspective, we also evaluate the effect of DPAs on MNEs’ tendency to self-regulate or re-offend. Our conclusion, supported by critical analysis of the juridical literature and case evidence on MNEs’ recidivism, is that DPAs do not foster ethical behavior. (shrink)

This paper argues that Hesiod's Myth of the Golden Race (Op. 109-126) influenced Plato's Myth of the Cicadas from the Phaedrus (258e-259d). Among other parallels, Hesiod's Golden Race and Plato's Cicadas have a similar diet and a similar rapport with the gods, they die in a similar way and enjoy similar benefits after death. The paper further argues that Plato used the inherent ambiguity of the Golden Age myths to draw attention to the ambiguity of the Cicadas themselves, who bring (...) both benefits and rewards to humans, depending on their behavior. (shrink)

A goal of expanding life over time, space, and substrate requires that we look beneath the surface of technology and the universal norms placed on human nature to a vision of its future that could be realized. There is a visible fracturing of the personal and social behaviors of its hybrid users – a process that we might call data‐clatter. While life expansion seeks the continuation of persons over time and space and beyond the physical body, there is no current (...) method for backing up the brain and transferring its processes outside the biological system. The objectives of life expansion include developing a whole‐body prosthesis as both a device for mobility and sensory perception and a system that streams cognitive functions. These systems would provide the biosphere for biological systems of humans and the cybersphere for computational systems of digital persons. (shrink)

Alessandro Maurini's book follows in the stream of a series of recent studies that have attempted to reread Aldous Huxley's thought, highlighting the extent to which, especially in his later essays and his novel Island, he expressed ideas and proposals that were to become extremely topical in the latter half of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first. Read from this perspective, Huxley becomes a utopian writer who anticipated not just some of the fundamental principles of ecology (...) but also those of pacifism, as well as forms of ecological and pacifist communitarian thought. In his introduction, Maurini exposes his work hypothesis and his lines... (shrink)

Gilberta Golinelli's book is set within an important area of utopian studies that, from the 1990s, also via archival studies, started to focus on the numerous utopias penned by women in the early modern English period. The book, significantly titled Gender Models, Alternative Communities and Women's Utopianism, analyzes some of the utopian writings by Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, and Mary Astell. Golinelli did not choose to use the term utopianism on a whim, since the utopias of these authors are hybrids, (...) mixing other genres in their makeup: travel reports, theater, romance, letters.... (shrink)

Gilberta Golinelli’s book is set within an important area of utopian studies that, from the 1990s, also via archival studies, started to focus on the numerous utopias penned by women in the early modern English period. The book, significantly titled Gender Models, Alternative Communities and Women’s Utopianism, analyzes some of the utopian writings by Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, and Mary Astell. Golinelli did not choose to use the term utopianism on a whim, since the utopias of these authors are hybrids, (...) mixing other genres in their makeup: travel reports, theater, romance, letters.... (shrink)

The Italian tradition of utopian studies is indebted to Luigi Firpo, who investigated Thomas More’s Utopia and the utopias of the Italian Counter-Reformation. Although Firpo was a scholar of political science, he highlighted the importance of the literary aspects of utopias. The ability to combine the political aspects of utopias with their fictional and literary aspects may be seen in his important introduction to More’s Utopia. Thus, Firpo’s school has tried to keep these two aspects united, while other political and (...) social scientists who have devoted themselves to utopianism have observed how the present is opposed to a radically alternative project. Utopianism defines the specific mental attitude... (shrink)

Quando la fantascienza è donna by Eleonora Federici is a book of many merits: its theoretical framework is informed by recent perspectives from gender studies, it boasts an extensive bibliography, and it is written in captivating and accessible prose. It is an intelligent book that fills an important gap in the literature, as few works on women science fiction writers have been published in Italian. Indeed, while much has been written on women’s science fiction in the English language, such a (...) tradition has yet to develop in Italian, with one of the first exceptions being Ida Magli’s 1980 essay “L’immagine simbolica femminile e le sue costanti mitico-culturali nella fantascienza”... (shrink)