By using some classical reasoning we show that any countably presented formal topology, namely, a formal topology with a countable axiom set, is spatial.

Vocal bursts are non-linguistic affectively-laden sounds with a crucial function in human communication, yet their affective structure is still debated. Studies showed that ratings of valence and arousal follow a V-shaped relationship in several kinds of stimuli: high arousal ratings are more likely to go on a par with very negative or very positive valence. Across two studies, we asked participants to listen to 1,008 vocal bursts and judge both how they felt when listening to the sound (i.e. core affect (...) condition), and how the speaker felt when producing it (i.e. perception of affective quality condition). We show that a V-shaped fit outperforms a linear model in explaining the valence-arousal relationship across conditions and studies, even after equating the number of exemplars across emotion categories. Also, although subjective experience can be significantly predicted using affective quality ratings, core affect scores are significantly lower in arousal, less extreme in valence, more variable between individuals, and less reproducible between studies. Nonetheless, stimuli rated with opposite valence between conditions range from 11% (study 1) to 17% (study 2). Lastly, we demonstrate that ambiguity in valence (i.e. high between-participants variability) explains violations of the V-shape and relates to higher arousal. (shrink)

This article critiques the theological and moral foundations that undergird the approach of the document For the Life of the World: Toward a Social Ethos of the Orthodox Church to the question of the Church's role in the public sphere. The article's focus is essentially two-fold. First, it strives to clarify For the Life of the World's hermeneutical method through a consideration of its frequent appeals to the authority of the Orthodox tradition. Second, the article seeks to understand the document's (...) tacit reliance upon a Eucharistic model of ecclesiology and its connection to the recurring theme of the ‘transfiguring of the world’. (shrink)

Many political theorists defend the view that egalitarian justice should extend from the domestic to the global arena. Despite its intuitive appeal, this ‘global egalitarianism’ has come under attack from different quarters. In this article, we focus on one particular set of challenges to this view: those advanced by domestic egalitarians. We consider seven types of challenges, each pointing to a specific disanalogy between domestic and global arenas which is said to justify the restriction of egalitarian justice to the former, (...) and argue that none of them – both individually and jointly – offers a conclusive refutation of global egalitarianism. (shrink)

La pobreza tiene una base material, la penuria de recursos. Pero su naturaleza es moral, consiste en el reconocimiento de que ciertas situaciones son acreedoras de acciones preventivas o remediadoras. Las sociedades vienen colocando tradicionalmente el umbral de pobreza en el punto por debajo del cual esta en peligro la subsistencia. Pero la conciencia reformista del mundo occidental ha llegado a servirse de la idea de pobreza para señalar los fallos de su compromiso de igualdad social. No se trata tanto (...) de una benévola elevación del baremo, como de una reconceptualización acorde con la ideología política dominante. (shrink)

Much recent philosophical work on social freedom focuses on whether freedom should be understood as non-interference, in the liberal tradition associated with Isaiah Berlin, or as non-domination, in the republican tradition revived by Philip Pettit and Quentin Skinner. We defend a conception of freedom that lies between these two alternatives: freedom as independence. Like republican freedom, it demands the robust absence of relevant constraints on action. Unlike republican, and like liberal freedom, it is not moralized. We show that freedom as (...) independence retains the virtues of its liberal and republican counterparts while shedding their vices. Our aim is to put this conception of freedom more firmly on the map and to offer a novel perspective on the logical space in which different conceptions of freedom are located. (shrink)

This paper discusses the relationship between obesity, law, and public health preparedness as well as the relevant roles of public health practitioners, policymakers, and lawyers. Each group believes they have a unique role in this relationship although there can be overlap and/or lack of clarity as to what that role may be.The role of the lawyer in the public policy process is to identify relevant legal issues, to analyze them and give advice on the risks of taking a given action, (...) and to communicate legal advice in a clear manner. Simply put, the lawyer’s role is to dive deep into the law surrounding the topic at hand and to offer advice regarding the permissible limits of policymakers’ options and the associated risks. (shrink)

This paper discusses the relationship between obesity, law, and public health preparedness as well as the relevant roles of public health practitioners, policymakers, and lawyers. Each group believes they have a unique role in this relationship although there can be overlap and/or lack of clarity as to what that role may be.The role of the lawyer in the public policy process is to identify relevant legal issues, to analyze them and give advice on the risks of taking a given action, (...) and to communicate legal advice in a clear manner. Simply put, the lawyer’s role is to dive deep into the law surrounding the topic at hand and to offer advice regarding the permissible limits of policymakers’ options and the associated risks. (shrink)

This paper provides an overview of recent US Department of Health and Human Services initiatives and efforts — under the leadership of the General Counsel, the Secretary, and the President — regarding legal preparedness for public health emergencies. In addressing this topic, the paper focuses on four core elements comprising public health legal preparedness:effective legal authorities to support necessary public health activities;competencies of public health professionals to know and then to apply those laws;coordination of the application of laws across jurisdictions (...) and across multiple sectors; andinformation and best practices in public health law. (shrink)

This paper provides an overview of recent US Department of Health and Human Services initiatives and efforts — under the leadership of the General Counsel, the Secretary, and the President — regarding legal preparedness for public health emergencies. In addressing this topic, the paper focuses on four core elements comprising public health legal preparedness:effective legal authorities to support necessary public health activities;competencies of public health professionals to know and then to apply those laws;coordination of the application of laws across jurisdictions (...) and across multiple sectors; andinformation and best practices in public health law. (shrink)

When and why do socially constructed norms—including the laws of the land, norms of etiquette, and informal customs—generate moral obligations? I argue that the answer lies in the duty to respect others, specifically to give them what I call “agency respect.” This is the kind of respect that people are owed in light of how they exercise their agency. My central thesis is this: To the extent that (i) existing norms are underpinned by people’s commitments as agents and (ii) they (...) do not conflict with morality, they place moral demands on us on agency-respect grounds. This view of the moral force of socially constructed norms, I suggest, is superior to views that deny the moral force of such norms, and it elegantly explains certain instances of wrongdoing that would otherwise remain unaccounted for. (shrink)

This article examines the methodology of a core branch of contemporary political theory or philosophy: “analytic” political theory. After distinguishing political theory from related fields, such as political science, moral philosophy, and legal theory, the article discusses the analysis of political concepts. It then turns to the notions of principles and theories, as distinct from concepts, and reviews the methods of assessing such principles and theories, for the purpose of justifying or criticizing them. Finally, it looks at a recent debate (...) on how abstract and idealized political theory should be, and assesses the significance of disagreement in political theory. The discussion is carried out from an angle inspired by the philosophy of science. (shrink)

Global properties of canonical derivability predicates in Peano Arithmetic) are studied here by means of a suitable propositional modal logic GL. A whole book [1] has appeared on GL and we refer to it for more information and a bibliography on GL. Here we propose a sequent calculus for GL and, by exhibiting a good proof procedure, prove that such calculus admits the elimination of cuts. Most of standard results on GL are then easy consequences: completeness, decidability, finite model property, (...) interpolation and the fixed point theorem. (shrink)

We provide a new and elementary proof of strong normalization for the lambda calculus of intersection types. It uses no strong method, like for instance Tait-Girard reducibility predicates, but just simple induction on type complexity and derivation length and thus it is obviously formalizable within first order arithmetic. To obtain this result, we introduce a new system for intersection types whose rules are directly inspired by the reduction relation. Finally, we show that not only the set of strongly normalizing terms (...) of pure lambda calculus can be characterized in this system, but also that a straightforward modification of its rules allows to characterize the set of weakly normalizing terms. (shrink)

Principles of distributive justice bind macro-level institutional agents, like the state. But what does justice require in non-ideal circumstances, where institutional agents are unjust or do not e...

One of the distinctive features of the obligation to obey the law is its content-independence. We ought to do what the law commands because the law commands it, and not because of the law's content—i.e., the independent merits of the actions it prescribes. Despite its popularity, the notion of content-independence is marked by ambiguity. In this paper, I first clarify what content-independence is. I then develop a simple test—the “content-independence test”—which allows us to establish whether any candidate justification of the (...) obligation to obey the law delivers genuine content-independence. I apply this test to prominent such justifications and conclude that several of them, surprisingly, fail it. (shrink)

El trabajo tiene por objeto reflexionar críticamente sobre el retribucionismo como fin de la pena en el Estado constitucional de Derecho. Tomando como punto de partida el idealismo alemán, se analizan las reformulaciones más recientes de esta corriente de pensamiento aparentemente superada. Se propone una distinción metodológica entre los términos retribución, reprobación y venganza, en orden a la defensa de una teoría de la pena secularizada.

In this article, I sketch a Kant-inspired liberal account of human rights: the freedom-centred view. This account conceptualizes human rights as entitlements that any political authority—any state in the first instance—must secure to qualify as a guarantor of its subjects' innate right to freedom. On this picture, when a state (or state-like institution) protects human rights, it reasonably qualifies as a moral agent to be treated with respect. By contrast, when a state (or state-like institution) fails to protect human rights, (...) it loses its moral status and becomes liable to both internal and external interference. I argue that this account not only steers a middle course between so-called natural-law and political approaches to human rights but also satisfies three important theoretical desiderata— explanatory power, functional specificity, and critical capacity. (shrink)

This article is an investigation into the field of neurotheology, a controversial field which has attracted criticism from both the scientific and religious community and which is often quite divided among its own practitioners. Regretfully, but not too unexpectedly, science has gotten entangled with ideology, as we shall see, with proponents on all sides of the spectrum using findings from the laboratory in support of their own philosophical positions. We will begin by exploring some definitions of the field and then (...) move on to examine the claims made by the different scientists working in this area, before examining what conclusions we can draw for spirituality. (shrink)

The Queen's College, Oxford, UK In his article `Facts and Principles', G.A. Cohen attempts to refute constructivist approaches to justification by showing that, contrary to what their proponents claim, fundamental normative principles are fact- in sensitive. We argue that Cohen's `fact-insensitivity thesis' does not provide a successful refutation of constructivism because it pertains to an area of meta-ethics which differs from the one tackled by constructivists. While Cohen's thesis concerns the logical structure of normative principles, constructivists ask how normative principles (...) should be justified . In particular, their claim that justified fundamental normative principles are fact-sensitive follows from a commitment to agnosticism about the existence of objective moral facts. We therefore conclude that, in order to refute constructivism, Cohen would have to address questions of justification, and take a stand on those long-standing meta-ethical debates about the ontological status of moral notions (for example, realism versus anti-realism) with respect to which he himself wants to remain agnostic. Key Words: John Rawls • normative justification • realism versus anti-realism • methodological versus substantive principles. (shrink)

In this paper we analyze an extension of Martin-Löf s intensional set theory by means of a set contructor P such that the elements of P are the subsets of the set S. Since it seems natural to require some kind of extensionality on the equality among subsets, it turns out that such an extension cannot be constructive. In fact we will prove that this extension is classic, that is “ true holds for any proposition A.

This article examines the methodology of a core branch of contemporary political theory or philosophy: “analytic” political theory. After distinguishing political theory from related fields, such as political science, moral philosophy, and legal theory, the article discusses the analysis of political concepts. It then turns to the notions of principles and theories, as distinct from concepts, and reviews the methods of assessing such principles and theories, for the purpose of justifying or criticizing them. Finally, it looks at a recent debate (...) on how abstract and idealized political theory should be, and assesses the significance of disagreement in political theory. The discussion is carried out from an angle inspired by the philosophy of science. (shrink)

We investigate whether small perturbations can cause relaxation to quantum equilibrium over very long timescales. We consider in particular a two-dimensional harmonic oscillator, which can serve as a model of a field mode on expanding space. We assume an initial wave function with small perturbations to the ground state. We present evidence that the trajectories are highly confined so as to preclude relaxation to equilibrium even over very long timescales. Cosmological implications are briefly discussed.

A conversation between the artist Mimmo Paladino, the philosopher and art critic Arthur C. Danto and the curator Demetrio Paparoni on topics such as beauty, icons, projectuality in art, history of art and its supposed end - the main thread being, obviously, Paladino’s entire corpus.

Abstract.Formal topologies are today an established topic in the development of constructive mathematics. One of the main tools in formal topology is inductive generation since it allows to introduce inductive methods in topology. The problem of inductively generating formal topologies with a cover relation and a unary positivity predicate has been solved in [CSSV]. However, to deal both with open and closed subsets, a binary positivity predicate has to be considered. In this paper we will show how to adapt to (...) this framework the method used to generate inductively formal topologies with a unary positivity predicate; the main problem that one has to face in such a new setting is that, as a consequence of the lack of a complete formalization, both the cover relation and the positivity predicate can have proper axioms. (shrink)