Um bei einer Wertung der Faktoren, die das Wachstum einer Population beeinflussen, zu einer richtigen Einsicht zu gelangen, empfiehlt es sich, nicht den relativen Wert dieser Faktoren in Bezug auf die in Rede stehende Insektenpopulation auszudrücken, sondern ihre absolute Grösse in Faktoreinheiten zum Ausdruck zu bringen — wie: Wärme in Grad Celsius, Luftfeuchtigkeit in Prozenten, Zahl der im Bevölkerungsmilieu vorgefundenen Raubinsekten oder Parasiten. Auf dieser Grundlage liessen sich Faktoren in folgender Weise aufteilen: Faktoren ersten Grades : Allgemeine Faktoren : Unabhängige (...) Faktoren : nicht mechanische Klimaeinflüsse , chemische Faktoren, Güte der Nahrung. Abhängige Faktoren : die internen Faktoren, die bei einer Zunahme der Dichtigkeit einen Rückgang des Zuwachses bewirken, mit Ausnahme des Kannibalismus, ferner die Menge der Nahrung. Selektive Faktoren : Unabhängige Faktoren : unersättliche Faktoren : mechanische Klimaeinflüsse, weitere mechanische Faktoren, Parasiten und Raubfeinde, die nicht mit töten aufhören, wenn sie gesättigt sind, insofern ihre Bevölkerungsdichte nicht durch die des fraglichen Insektes bedingt wird. ersättliche Faktoren: restliche Raubinsekten und Parasiten, insofern ihre Bevölkerungsdichte nicht durch die des fraglichen Insektes bedingt wird. Abhängige Faktoren : Kannibalismus. Wandelbare Faktoren : Raubinsekten und Parasiten, welche diesem Erfordernis entsprechen, pathogene Pilze und Bakterien. Faktoren zweiten Ranges . Faktoren des dritten Ranges .Afin d'obtenir une notion exacte de la valeur des facteurs qui influencent la croissance d'une population, il vaudra mieux ne pas exprimer ces facteurs en leur valeur relative quant à la population d'insectes en question, mais en unités de facteurs: degrés Celsius, pourcentage de l'humidité de l'air, nombre d'ennemis ou de parasites qui sont présents dans le milieu de la population. Sur cette base on pourra répartir les facteurs de la façon suivante: Facteurs du 1er ordre : Facteurs généraux : influences climatiques non mécaniques , facteurs chimiques, qualité de la nourriture. Facteurs dépendants : les facteurs internes qui font de sorte que la densité de la population diminue quand se présente une plus forte densité, en exceptant le cannibalisme, la quantité de nourriture. Facteurs selectifs ; seule une partie des individus est exposée à leur action; les animaux touchés sont mécaniquement endommagés et, dans la règle, tués. Facteurs indépendants : facteurs insatiables : des influences climatiques mécaniques, d'autres facteurs mécaniques, des parasites et des ennemis qui ne s'arrêtent pas de tuer quand ils sont rassasiés, pour autant que l'intensité de la population de l'insecte en question. facteurs rassasiables: autres ennemis et parasites pour autant que l'intensité de leur population ne se modifie pas sous l'influence de la densité de la population de l'insecte en question. Facteurs indépendants : cannibalisme. Facteurs modifiables : ennemis et parasites qui satisfont à cette exigence, champignons pathogènes, bactéries. Facteurs du 2ième ordre . Facteurs du 3iéme ordre. (shrink)

Entre 2010 et 2011, une fouille d’urgence a été menée sur la pente Sud de la colline de Viklèsà l’Est de l’acropole d’Amathonte, et a révélé un type de réservoir d’eau alimenté depuis la surface ; découverte à ce jour unique à Chypre. Ce dispositif est constitué d’une citerne creusée dans le rocher et partiellement construite, reliée, par un passage voûté, à un puits d’accès servant également pour puiser. Ce réservoir, d’une capacité de 30 m 3environ, devait desservir les besoins (...) en eau non pas d’un habitat, comme c’est souvent le cas, mais des espaces funéraire, cultuel ou économique implantés sur la colline de Viklèsdans l’Antiquité. Dans cette étude est présenté le mobilier archéologique mis au jour — céramique, lithique, figurines de terre cuite et ossements — qui atteste une occupation continue du lieu, allant de la fin de l’époque archaïque à la fin de l’époque protobyzantine, date d’abandon définitif de l’utilisation de la citerne. (shrink)

Often described by byzantinists as primarily Aristotelian, the cosmological worldview of the Byzantines was in fact more varied. This is attested, in the 11th and 12th centuries, by the survival of the box-like universe, suggested by Antiochene Fathers in the 5th and 6th centuries. This system survived in the catenae to Genesis, particularly in passages related to the creation of the firmament and the stars. An echo of the use of these specific Antiochene passages in Byzantine monasteries also appears in (...) a letter of Michael Glykas. (shrink)

Heidegger a indiqué à plusieurs reprises l’importance particulière qu’a eue la doctrine husserlienne de l’intuition catégoriale à l’égard non seulement de son propre parcours philosophique, mais également et de façon plus générale pour la pensée phénoménologique en tant que telle. Comme Husserl l’avait fait avant lui, c’est la fonction méthodologique particulière et le rôle fondateur de la théorie des catégories que l’auteur d’ Être et temps met en avant à chaque fois qu’il revient sur son importance eu égard à la (...) découverte d’un champ d’analyse nouveau pour les recherches philo­sophiques, ouvert par la description phénoménologique. Cet article s’efforcera toutefois de montrer que Heidegger et Husserl ne célèbrent pas l’intuition catégoriale pour des raisons identiques. Derrière leur revendication commune du caractère fondamental et fondateur des analyses consacrées aux catégories dans la 6 e Recherche Logique de Husserl se cache une divergence fondamentale en ce qui concerne le sens de la méthode phénoménologique que cette théorie des catégories est censée fonder. L’analyse de l’usage fait par Husserl et Heidegger de la notion de catégories doit ainsi permettre de mettre en évidence la nature de ce désaccord opposant frontalement leur conception de la phénoménologie. Si l’intuition catégoriale doit constituer le « sol » nécessaire au type particulier d’herméneutique à laquelle doit nous conduire la méthode phénoménologique selon Heidegger, elle représente plutôt pour Husserl la « clé de voûte » garante de la solidité de la description phénoméno­logique des modes d’apparaître des choses, maintenant par-delà le raisonnement analogique qui en avait établi l’existence la tension irréductible devant opposer chez Husserl la sensibilité à l’entendement. (shrink)

Ocherk 1. Voprosy ontologii -- Ocherk 2. Voprosy ėtiki i ėstetiki -- Ocherk 3. Voprosy gnoseologii i aksiologii.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Consciousness and Machines:A Commentary Drawing on Japanese PhilosophyS. D. Noam Cook (bio)Viewed from within the great unity of consciousness, thinking is a wave on the surface of a great intuition.Kitarō NishidaIntroductionRecent developments in AI have made the long-standing debate about what computers can and can't do a major public concern. What we understand the properties of such machines to be, and consequently how we design [End Page 305] and (...) deploy them, will increasingly shape how we live and how we understand ourselves. Thus, there is an urgent need for better understanding of these issues.Susan Schneider, in her book Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind, offers an exceptionally careful and insightful examination of key issues entailed in how we understand AI and ourselves. One of her central concerns is how we might test for machine consciousness. Given the variations in design and function among current and projected AIs, Schneider sees no likely one-size-fits-all test. So, she offers a battery of different tests that she believes together will make such testing more reliable. This seems a wise approach, and reflects the conceptual and pragmatic care Schneider takes throughout the book.Similarly, it seems to me that the question of machine consciousness should also include various understandings of consciousness itself. What consciousness is taken to be has varied widely both historically and culturally. No commonly accepted single understanding has emerged, and may never emerge. Just as having a battery of tests might help us better assess possible machine consciousness, having different understandings of consciousness might give us a better understanding of what we are testing for. The two should work in tandem, each gauging and shaping the other.Like the development of computers themselves, the predominant thinking about AI has been shaped, in part, by key presuppositions of a scientific worldview, with its origins in Western thought and culture. Among these presuppositions are materialism, reductionism, and a primary focus on objective behavior. These are reflected in the common concern with observable behavior of physical aspects of the brain in efforts to understand human consciousness, which in turn has become a familiar model for work on machine consciousness. All this is important and valuable work. But, in the spirit of Schneider's cautions, it should not be taken as one-size-fits-all. Accordingly, I offer one view of consciousness from a different perspective.In what follows, I sketch out an understanding of consciousness that draws on Japanese philosophy, particularly that of the highly influential early twentieth-century Japanese philosopher Kitarō Nishida (1870–1945). I then explore how the tests for machine consciousness that Schneider proposes might be viewed from that perspective.Consciousness: A Perspective from Japanese PhilosophyConsciousness was a central concern for Nishida, whose philosophy is deeply informed by Japanese culture and by Zen theory and practice. As one might expect from such a philosopher, Nishida's exploration of consciousness is not concerned with properties of the brain, but with what we might discern through disciplined reflection on the experience of our own consciousness. Ultimately, he views consciousness as an organic whole [End Page 306] of systemically organized interrelationships of activities and sensations within our subjective experience. This may be understood by first considering 'nothingness'.For Nishida, nothingness does not suggest an ultimate and absolute vacuity, as is often understandably assumed. In Nishida's sense, it is a singular "place" that mirrors the multifaceted world of our common experience. In understanding this, I am told by native Japanese speakers that the English word 'nothingness' has an advantage over the Japanese equivalent, 'mu', in that 'nothingness' can usefully be broken down as 'nothing-ness'. This suggests that nothingness is a state of consciousness where what we commonly experience as distinct (self, other, world, blue, ache, joy, etc.) is indistinct, a state of unified experience. This is consciousness without our finding or discriminating in it the myriad "things" of common experience, but rather a "pure experience" of a singular whole. Nishida introduces his concept of "pure experience" as follows:To experience means to know facts just as they are, to know in accordance with facts by completely relinquishing one... (shrink)

pt. 1. Collection of Sastri's writings and a kavya on him -- pt. 2. Select research papers presented at the birth centenary seminars.

Can philosophy offer reasonable grounds for the existence of a God possessing genuine religious significance and not proposed simply as the solution to a purely intellectual philosophical problem? Certainly many contemporary thinkers have insisted that no genuine religion could be based upon metaphysics. In this book, however, T. L. S. Sprigge examines sympathetically the most notable metaphysical systems of the last four centuries which purport to put religion on a rational footing and, after a thorough examination of their claims, considers (...) what kind of religious outlook they might support and how they actually affected the lives of their proponents. The thinkers studied include Spinoza, Hegel, T. H. Green, Bernard Bosanquet, Josiah Royce, A. N. Whitehead, and Charles Hartshorne, concluding with an exposition of the author's own viewpoint and a general discussion on the relation between metaphysics and religion. There is also a chapter on Kierkegaard as the most important critic of metaphysical religion. (shrink)

Ariès traces Western man's attitudes toward mortality from the early medieval conception of death as the familiar collective destiny of the human race to the modern tendency, so pronounced in industrial societies, to hide death as if it were an embarrassing family secret.

This remarkable book--the fruit of almost two decades of study--traces in compelling fashion the changes in Western attitudes toward death and dying from the earliest Christian times to the present day. A truly landmark study, The Hour of Our Death reveals a pattern of gradually developing evolutionary stages in our perceptions of life in relation to death, each stage representing a virtual redefinition of human nature. Starting at the very foundations of Western culture, the eminent historian Phillipe Aries shows how, (...) from Graeco-Roman times through the first ten centuries of the Common Era, death was too common to be frightening; each life was quietly subordinated to the community, which paid its respects and then moved on. Aries identifies the first major shift in attitude with the turn of the eleventh century when a sense of individuality began to rise and with it, profound consequences: death no longer meant merely the weakening of community, but rather the destruction of self. Hence the growing fear of the afterlife, new conceptions of the Last Judgment, and the first attempts (by Masses and other rituals) to guarantee a better life in the next world. In the 1500s attention shifted from the demise of the self to that of the loved one (as family supplants community), and by the nineteenth century death comes to be viewed as simply a staging post toward reunion in the hereafter. Finally, Aries shows why death has become such an unendurable truth in our own century--how it has been nearly banished from our daily lives--and points out what may be done to "re-tame" this secret terror. The richness of Aries's source material and investigative work is breathtaking. While exploring everything from churches, religious rituals, and graveyards (with their often macabre headstones and monuments), to wills and testaments, love letters, literature, paintings, diaries, town plans, crime and sanitation reports, and grave robbing complaints, Aries ranges across Europe to Russia on the one hand and to England and America on the other. As he sorts out the tangled mysteries of our accumulated terrors and beliefs, we come to understand the history--indeed the pathology--of our intellectual and psychological tensions in the face of death. (shrink)

"Sir Hermann Bondi, NatureThe late S. Chandrasekhar was best known for his discovery of the upper limit to the mass of a white dwarf star, for which he received ...

Prologue, invitation to thinking about God In the Hebrew Bible? -- Part I, questions about God? -- Why does God in the Bible have a body? -- What do God's body parts in the Bible mean? -- Why is God angry in the Bible? -- Does God in the Bible have gender or sexuality? -- Part II, questions about God in the world? -- What can creation tell us about God? -- Who-or what-is the Satan? -- Why do people suffer (...) according to the Hebrew Bible? -- Epilogue, God in the Bible and beyond. (shrink)

This chapter develops a perceptual solution to the epistemological problem of other minds, relying on central ideas from Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology. The Merleau-Pontian account is contrasted with another attempted perceptual solution to the other minds problem, and it is argued that only the former meets the phenomenologists' desideratum of providing an alternative to inferential solutions. The chapter also provides responses to various objections to the perceptual solution, including a pair of objections recently put forward by Alec Hyslop.

Richard Janko's acclaimed translation of Aristotle's _Poetics_ is accompanied by the most comprehensive commentary available in English that does not presume knowledge of the original Greek. Two other unique features are Janko's translations with notes of both the _Tractatus Coislinianus_, which is argued to be a summary of the lost second book of the Poetics, and fragments of Aristotle’s dialogue On Poets, including recently discovered texts about catharsis, which appear in English for the first time.

Many books explain what is known about the universe. This book investigates what cannot be known. Rather than exploring the amazing facts that science, mathematics, and reason have revealed to us, this work studies what science, mathematics, and reason tell us cannot be revealed. In The Outer Limits of Reason, Noson Yanofsky considers what cannot be predicted, described, or known, and what will never be understood. He discusses the limitations of computers, physics, logic, and our own thought processes. Yanofsky describes (...) simple tasks that would take computers trillions of centuries to complete and other problems that computers can never solve; perfectly formed English sentences that make no sense; different levels of infinity; the bizarre world of the quantum; the relevance of relativity theory; the causes of chaos theory; math problems that cannot be solved by normal means; and statements that are true but cannot be proven. He explains the limitations of our intuitions about the world -- our ideas about space, time, and motion, and the complex relationship between the knower and the known. Moving from the concrete to the abstract, from problems of everyday language to straightforward philosophical questions to the formalities of physics and mathematics, Yanofsky demonstrates a myriad of unsolvable problems and paradoxes. Exploring the various limitations of our knowledge, he shows that many of these limitations have a similar pattern and that by investigating these patterns, we can better understand the structure and limitations of reason itself. Yanofsky even attempts to look beyond the borders of reason to see what, if anything, is out there. (shrink)

A concise, easy-to-read introduction to informal logic, "With Good Reason" offers both comprehensive coverage of informal fallacies and an abundance of engaging examples of both well-conceived and faulty arguments. A long-time favorite of both students and instructors, the text continues in its sixth edition to provide an abundance of exercises that help students identify, correct, and avoid common errors in argumentation.

This comprehensive and important volume includes contributions by activists, journalists, lawyers and scholars from twenty-one countries. The essays map the directions the movement for women's rights is taking--and will take in the coming decades--and the concomittant transformation of prevailing notions of rights and issues. They address topics such as the rapes in former Yugoslavia and efforts to see that a War Crimes Tribunal responds; domestic violence; trafficking of women into the sex trade; the persecution of lesbians; female genital mutilation; and (...) reproductive rights. (shrink)

"Williams's masterful translation satisfies (at last!) a long-standing need. There are lots of good translations of Augustine's great work, but until now we have been forced to choose between those that strive to replicate in English something of the majesty and beauty of Augustine's Latin style and those that opt instead to convey the careful precision of his philosophical terminology and argumentation. Finally, Williams has succeeded in capturing both sides of Augustine's mind in a richly evocative, impeccably reliable, elegantly readable (...) presentation of one of the most impressive achievements in Western thought--Augustine's Confessions." --Scott MacDonald, Professor of Philosophy and Norma K. Regan Professor in Christian Studies, Cornell University. (shrink)

This volume gathers together for the first time are all the key texts in a crucial debate in modern philosophy, centered on Leibniz's famous 1695 essay, the "New System of the Nature of Substances and their Communication," in which he introduced his strikingly original theory of metaphysics. His "system" became increasingly famous and drew him into discussion and development of these ideas, both in public and in private, with a variety of thinkers, most notably the great French philosopher Pierre Bayle. (...) Woolhouse's and Francks's new English edition gives the only full representation of this debate, and will therefore be essential reading for anyone who wishes to gain a proper understanding of Leibniz's philosophy and its intelletual context. All the texts are newly translated and extensively annotated; many appear in English for the first time. (shrink)

Study of Hans-Georg Gadamer's and Julius Stenzel's interpretations of Plato.