Academic achievement is a factor of interest in both psychology and education. Determining which factors have a negative or positive influence on academic performance has produced different investigations. The present study focuses on analyzing the relationship between resilience, emotional intelligence, self-concept and the academic achievement of university students. For this purpose, different self-report tools were administered to a sample of 1,020 university students from Southern Spain. The Structural Equation-based mediational analysis suggests that there is no direct relationship between resilience and (...) academic achievement, nor between emotional intelligence and academic achievement. Likewise, self-concept is positioned as a mediating factor in the relationship between resilience and academic achievement. The findings indicate that university students who exhibit high levels of resilience tend to cope better with difficult moments and understand and value the effort required and invested in study time. This study supports positive beliefs and behaviors for better academic achievement. (shrink)

Even though disquotationalism is not correct as it is usually formulated, a deep insight lies behind it. Specifically, it can be argued that, modulo implicit commitment to reflection principles, all there is to the notion of truth is given by a simple, natural collection of truth-biconditionals.

One question in moral psychology concerns the role of emotions to motivate moral action. This question has recently become more urgent, because it is now clearer that cognitive developmental theories cannot offer a complete explanation of moral functioning. This paper suggests that emotion, as is typically understood in psychology, cannot be seen as the basis for an acceptable explanation of moral behaviour and motivation. However, it is argued that it is possible to understand emotions as embedded in agentic processes, and (...) regulated by conscious concerns. So understood, emotions acquire an important role in the person's moral life. These conclusions are reached through an extensive review of psychological and philosophical conceptions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

We are walking too quickly down the road to physical and psychological utopia without pausing to assess the potential damage to our humanity from this brave new ...

In addition to its interest as one of Plato's most brilliant dramatic masterpieces, the Protagoras presents a vivid picture of the crisis of fifth-century Greek thought, in which traditional values and conceptions of man were subjected on the one hand to the criticism of the Sophists and on the other to the far more radical criticism of Socrates. The dialogue deals with many themes which are central to the ethical theories which Plato developed under the influence of Socrates, notably the (...) nature of human excellence, the relation of knowledge to right conduct, and the place of pleasure in the good life. This translation of the Protagoras was originally published in 1976. In this revised edition, C. C. W. Taylor has made a number of changes in the translation and commentary, and has added a new Preface and Introduction. The Bibliography has also been extended to include titles published up to 1990. (shrink)

Este artículo trata sobre la postura práctica de Aquino ante dos grandes dificultades filosóficas actuales que se encuentran en la base del debate ético contemporáneo. Como son la Is-ought thesis de Hume y la síntesis radical de Moore, la Open question. La posible solución tomista se puede encontrar en la triple función del intelecto humano, teórico y práctico a la vez: a) Aprehender las nociones ontológicas e intelectas ens, verum y bonum; b) Formular los primeros principios teóricos y prácticos; c) (...) E imperar que se haga el bien ontológico e intelecto y se evite lo contrario. (shrink)

This article concerns Aquinas’s practical doctrine on two philosophical difficulties underlying much contemporary ethical debate. One is Hume’s Is-ought thesis and the other is its radical consequence, Moore’s Open-question argument. These ethical paradoxes appear to have their roots in epistemological scepticism and in a deficient anthropology. Possible response to them can be found in that Aquinas’s human intellect (essentially theoretical and practical at the same time) naturally performs three main operations: 1º) To apprehend the intellecta and universal notions ens, verum (...) and bonum. 2º) To formulate the first theoretical and practical principles. 3º) To order that the intellectum and universal good be done and the opposite avoided. Thomistic philosophical response to both predicaments will not be exclusively ethical, but will harmonically embrace ontology, anthropology and epistemology. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationships between American phenomenology of music and conventional studies of musical analysis. The temporality of experience is a central topic in the phenomenology of music: recent research in USA has focused on musical time-consciousness (Schutz and Smith) or on analytical applications (Clifton, Lochhead, Ferrara). Many methods of musical analysis, like phenomenological methods, are concerned to study subjective temporal structures: Schenkerian and post-Schenkerian scholars (Salzer, Meyer, Narmour, Lewin) have elaborated specific systems for the explanation of musical form (...) on a experiential basis. Apart from any comparison with the different approaches, phenomenological analysis appears to be fundamental for the analytical interpretation of music. (shrink)

Professor Pompa's study of Vico has done a great deal to stimulate and inform the growing interest in the English-speaking world in this remarkable figure. It remains the only work devoted almost exclusively to an interpretation of the New Science and offers a comprehensive guide to the main theoretical problems to which the text gives rise. For this second edition Professor Pompa has responded to the reactions of reviewers and critics and added a new chapter which analyses Vico's conception of (...) the principles which govern the development of law. (shrink)

La mia collaborazione con Massimo Campanini si è sviluppata su comuni interessi per i classici del pensiero islamico ma con competenze assai diverse, essendo io più orientato a studiare gli effetti e gli sviluppi che essi produssero sul pensiero occidentale medievale e moderno attraverso una pratica di traduzioni spesso creative per imprecisione – l’inverso dell’operazione che essi stessi avevano fatto rispetto a Platone e Aristotele. Averroè-Ibn Rushd è già un bell’esempio di deformazione del nome, ma proprio la formazione della sua (...) opera e i modi in cui è stata trasmessa al mondo ebraico e cristiano sono singolari testimonianze degli esiti ambigui del processo traduttivo. Cerchiamo infatti di mostrare come la lettura del _De substantia orbis_ abbia stimolato sia nel Medioevo che nel Rinascimento non solo il rifiuto del creazionismo ma anche posizioni panteistiche, mentre la famosa tesi dell’intelletto materiale unico contenuta nel _Commentarium Magnum_ al _De anima_ aristotelico ha stimolato molteplici varianti del monopsichismo, da Spinoza a Marx e alla più recente letteratura post-strutturalista. My collaboration with Massimo Campanini developed around our common interests in the classics of Islamic thought, but with very different approaches, since I am more oriented towards studying the effects and developments they produced on medieval and modern Western thought through a practice of translation that was often creative in terms of inaccuracy – so the opposite of what had been done with respect to Plato and Aristotle. The same Averroes-Ibn Rushd is a fine example of name distortion, and the very formation of his work and the ways in which it was transmitted to the Jewish and Christian world are singular testimonies to the ambiguous outcomes of this translation process. I try to show how the reading of _De substantia orbis_ in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance stimulated not only the rejection of creationism but also pantheistic beliefs, while the famous thesis on the material intellect exposed in the _Commentarium Magnum_ to Aristotle’s _De anima_ stimulated many variants of monopsychism, from Spinoza to Marx and the more recent post-structuralist literature. (shrink)

Cartography represents monsters at the borders of the known world. Those monsters are evoked by politics in order to denounce the dangers of revolution : the many-headed hydra which represents the nightmares of the dominant classes and that must be detroyed or subjugated. Heretics, sauvages, rebel slaves, the industrial proletariat and finally the precarious workers, whose anomaly is exploited to produce profit. But the ultimate cold monster, the Leviathan, is indeed the State….

Volume I provides a detailed analysis of cylindric algebras, starting with a formulation of their axioms and a development of their elementary properties, and proceeding to a deeper study of their interrelationships by means of general algebraic notions such as subalgebras, homomorphisms, direct products, free algebras, reducts and relativized algebras.

Personal positions and voices of a patient diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and the therapist during long-term psychotherapy were studied aiming to find differences in the patterns formed in these aspects of subjectivity according to the level of elaboration of the change episodes achieved by the patient. This case study considered a stage of qualitative analysis where change episodes of the patient were traced through the Change Episodes Model. Later, through the Model of Analysis of Discursive Positioning in Psychotherapy, the (...) voices and personal positions of the patient and her therapist were identified in each of the change episodes. In the stage of quantitative analysis, dynamic patterns in the voices and personal positions were established, accounting for hypothetical attractors using the Space State Grid technique in each of the three different levels of subjective elaboration that constitute the change episodes. The results established differentiated dynamic patterns in the change episodes, coherent with the patient’s change process, and formation of propositive/reflective specific patterns as the patient evolved in the three different levels of subjective elaboration. The above suggests that a subjective transformation process is displayed, and this is manifested in the different voices and personal positions that emerged as the change episodes evolve. The identified dynamic patterns can be considered nonlinear and emergent subjective exchanges between the patient and the therapist throughout the psychotherapy. (shrink)

Si de la manne tombait du ciel, quelle en serait la juste distribution? Dans une perspective de justice sociale rawlsienne, une telle question théologique paraît vaine, puisqu’elle se situe hors du cadre de la distribution équitable des résultats de la coopération entre des citoyens. Pour autant, deux des plus grands critiques de Rawls, Robert Nozick, du côté libertarien, et Gerald Cohen, du côté socialiste, introduisent le scénario hypothétique de la manne céleste dans leurs objections respectives au principe de différence. Ils (...) le font de manière opposée, le premier pour contester, le second pour accentuer l’égalitarisme de ce principe. Dans cet article, nous nous proposons d’analyser la nature de ces deux objections à la lumière de l’expérience de pensée qu’elles introduisent, afin de comprendre le prolongement donné à ces objections et le sens de la réponse que Rawls leur adresse. (shrink)

According to the mythical-religious literature time is determined by the eternal nature of divinity or origin of all things. From this adagio, theological literature is provoked and studies on the eternal nature of divinity suggest that if the universe was created the image of its creator the first must also be eternal. Therefore the question arises: how to shape that which by nature is formless, infinite, namely eternity? To answer this question the following paper develops a brief history about the (...) Judeo-Christian tradition on the problem of time and its relationship with eternity and also tries to prepare at the end one logical answer to the question about the form of eternity. (shrink)

This article explains how Aquinas understood: a) apprehension of the first intellectual concepts: ens, verum et bonum simpliciter (Ens is understood metaphysically as composed of human nature and the act of being, ordered according to the bonum); b) establishment of the first and the second practical commandments in a genuinely human or rational person; c) ethics and natural law as essentially derived from ontology. Therefore, natural law only makes sense from a metaphysical point of view, not merely a physical or (...) material one. (shrink)

Phenomenal Difference' grants new attention to contemporary black British art, exploring its critical and social significance through attention to embodied experience, affectivity, the senses and perception. Much before scholars in the arts and humanities took their recent 'ontological turn' toward the new materialism, black British art had begun to expose cultural criticism's overreliance on the concepts of textuality, representation, identity and difference. Illuminating that original field of aesthetics and creativity, this book shows how black British artworks themselves can become the (...) basis for an engaged and widely-reaching philosophy. (shrink)

Foundational ontologies, central constructs in ontological investigations and engineering alike, are based on ontological categories. Firstly proposed by Aristotle as the very ur- elements from which the whole of reality can be derived, they are not easy to identify, let alone partition and/or hierarchize; in particular, the question of their number poses serious challenges. The late medieval philosopher Dietrich of Freiberg wrote around 1286 a tutorial that can help us today with this exceedingly difficult task. In this paper, I discuss (...) ontological categories and their importance for foundational ontologies from both the contemporary perspective and the original Aristotelian viewpoint, I provide the translation from the Latin into English of Dietrich's De origine II with an introductory elaboration, and I extract a foundational ontology–that is in fact a single-category one–from this text rooted in Dietrich's specification of types of subjecthood and his conception of intentionality as causal operation. (shrink)

Wilson and Kass talked about their book, The ethics of human cloning, which is about the ethical debate over human cloning.

Ontologies are some of the most central constructs in today's large plethora of knowledge technologies, namely in the context of the semantic web. As their coinage indicates, they are direct heirs to the ontological investigations in the long Western philosophical tradition, but it is not easy to make bridges between them. Contemporary ontological commitments often take causality as a central aspect for the ur-segregation of entities, especially in scientific upper ontologies; theories of causality and philosophical ontological investigations often go hand-in-hand, (...) and were essentially inseparable in medieval thought. This constitutes the foundation for a bridge, and this article analyzes the causality-based ontology of the late medieval philosopher Dietrich of Freiberg from the viewpoint of today's upper-ontology engineering. In this bridging attempt, it offers a translation into English of the first part of Dietrich's De origine (abbreviated title) that is a compromise between traditional scholarly translations of medieval Latin philosophical texts and contemporary ontology. (shrink)

The work of mathematician and logician Alfred Tarski (1901--1983) marks the transition from substantial to deflationary views about truth.

The van Wijngaarden grammars are two-level grammars that present many interesting properties. In the present article I elaborate on six of these properties, to wit, (i) their being constituted by two grammars, (ii) their ability to generate (possibly infinitely many) strict languages and their own metalanguage, (iii) their context-sensitivity, (iv) their high descriptive power, (v) their productivity, or the ability to generate an infinite number of production rules, and (vi) their equivalence with the unrestricted, or Type-0, Chomsky grammars.

Contemporary studies in unconscious cognition are essentially founded on dissociation, i.e., on how it dissociates with respect to conscious mental processes and representations. This is claimed to be in so many and diverse ways that one is often lost in dissociation. In order to reduce this state of confusion we here carry out two major tasks: based on the central distinction between cognitive processes and representations, we identify and isolate the main dissociation paradigms; we then critically analyze their key tenets (...) and reported findings. (shrink)

Prior studies in business ethics highlight the role of philanthropy in shaping stakeholders’ perceptions of a firm’s underlying moral tendencies and values. Scholars argue that philanthropy-based character inferences influence whether and how stakeholders engage with firms. We extend this line of reasoning to examine the impact of philanthropy on firms’ contracting costs in the capital market. We posit that philanthropy-based character inferences reduce investors’ agency concerns, thereby reducing firms’ cost of capital. We also posit that the strength of the philanthropy–cost (...) of capital relationship is contingent on uncertainty regarding a firm’s character, visibility of a firm, and prevailing philanthropic norms. We test and find support for our arguments in a longitudinal study of philanthropy and the cost of capital. Our findings have implications for business ethics research on corporate philanthropy and corporate social performance and for organizational research on social judgment. (shrink)

ArgumentIt seems theoretically convenient to construe knowledge practices in financial markets and organizations as “applied economics.” Alternatively or additionally, one might argue that practitioners draw on economic knowledge in order to systematically orient their actions towards profit-maximization; models, then, are understood as devices that make calculative rationality possible. However, empirical studies do not entirely confirm these theoretical positions: Practitioners’ actual calculations are often not “framed” by models; organizations and institutions influence the choice and adoption of models; and different professional groups (...) in financial markets have diverging attitudes towards model calculations. In order to account for this diversity, this article proposes the concept ofcultures of economic and financial expertise; the concept focuses on the patterns of knowledge practices and knowledge-related self-definitions of groups within financial organizations and markets; it also facilitates an analysis of the relations between and, more specifically, the hierarchies among different practices and identities. The article then goes on to explore the process of foreign exchange forecasting in a particular bank. The description immediately reveals that two groups are involved in this process: economists and analysts. These groups maintain quite different practices and self-descriptions in relation to models: While the economists in the bank use the models as organizational resources for consistent forecasting procedures and observe data with the help of simple model structures, analysts approach model forecasts from the perspective of critics: They see limits in the variable-centered, as opposed to a “thematic” approach and they disregard a model's imposed temporality. Nevertheless, analysts use model forecasts as anchors for developing their own “paths” and stories about possible future expectation changes in the markets. The specific division of labor between economists and analysts, and specifically the dominant role of analysts in the forecasting process, fit into a larger picture: The rise of institutional investors in the foreign exchange markets and their demand for genuine market knowledge for speculative investment projects has contributed to the rise and dominance of analysts’ culture. (shrink)

The representational nature of human cognition and thought in general has been a source of controversies. This is particularly so in the context of studies of unconscious cognition, in which representations tend to be ontologically and structurally segregated with regard to their conscious status. However, it appears evolutionarily and developmentally unwarranted to posit such segregations, as,otherwise, artifact structures and ontologies must be concocted to explain them from the viewpoint of the human cognitive architecture. Here, from a by-and-large Classical cognitivist viewpoint, (...) I show why this segregation is wrong, and elaborate on the need to postulate an ontological and structural continuity between unconscious and conscious representations. Specifically, I hypothesize that this continuity is to be found in the symbolic-based interplay between the syntax and the semantics of thought, and I propose a model of human information processing characterized by the integration of syntactic and semantic representations. (shrink)

The Hungry Soul is a fascinating exploration of the natural and cultural act of eating. Kass brilliantly reveals how the various aspects of this phenomenon, and the customs, rituals, and taboos surrounding it, relate to universal and profound truths about the human animal and its deepest yearnings. "Kass is a distinguished and graceful writer. . . . It is astonishing to discover how different is our world from that of the animals, even in that which most evidently betrays that we (...) too are animals--our need and desire for food."--Roger Scruton, Times Literary Supplement "Yum."--Miss Manners. (shrink)

We formulate and explore two basic axiomatic systems of type-free subjective probability. One of them explicates a notion of finitely additive probability. The other explicates a concept of infinitely additive probability. It is argued that the first of these systems is a suitable background theory for formally investigating controversial principles about type-free subjective probability.

The traditional model of human cognition (TMHC) postulates an ontological and/or structural gap between conscious and unconscious mental representations. By and large, it sees higher-level mental processes as commonly conceptual or symbolic in nature and therefore conscious, whereas unconscious, lower-level representations are conceived as non-conceptual or sub-symbolic. However, experimental evidence belies this model, suggesting that higher-level mental processes can be, and often are, carried out in a wholly unconscious way and/or without conceptual representations, and that these can be processed unconsciously. (...) This entails that the TMHC, as well as the theories on mental representation it motivates and that in turn support it, is wrong. (shrink)

3rd ed, 2021. A circumscription of the classical theory of computation building up from the Chomsky hierarchy. With the usual topics in formal language and automata theory.

For millennia, knowledge has eluded a precise definition. The industrialization of knowledge (IoK) and the associated proliferation of the so-called knowledge communities in the last few decades caused this state of affairs to deteriorate, namely by creating a trio composed of data, knowledge, and information (DIK) that is not unlike the aporia of the trinity in philosophy. This calls for a general theory of knowledge (ToK) that can work as a foundation for a science of knowledge (SoK) and additionally distinguishes (...) knowledge from both data and information. In this paper, I attempt to sketch this generality via the establishing of both knowledge structures and knowledge systems that can then be adopted/adapted by the diverse communities for the respective knowledge technologies and practices. This is achieved by means of a formal–indeed, mathematical–approach to epistemological matters a.k.a. formal epistemology. The corresponding application focus is on knowledge systems implementable as computer programs. (shrink)