Nowadays, the concepts of soldier and war have changed due to terrorism and the war on terrorism. According to the literature, to prevent terrorism, it is possible to use more violence, but how can we grant the safety of many versus the dignity of a few? In Israel, in order to protect civilians against possible terrorist attacks, Palestinian ambulances that would reach the Israeli hospitals must be quickly controlled. However, many times, at the checkpoint, patients have to wait for an (...) Israeli vehicle that will take them to Israel. This procedure causes many delays in medical emergency. How to avoid that terrorists may receive better care than Palestinian civilians may just because they are already on the Israeli side of the Separation Wall? How is it possible to ensure the life and safety of many, without denying the right to healthcare to somebody? How to decide when the State requirements conflict with traditional medical duties? Is it acceptable to provide health care to a terrorist? What should be done when it is uncertain whether the ambulance transports weapons besides patients? These questions call upon the core role of the doctor and of the medical profession: taking care of all sick persons. The care is the starting point of ethics. If we do not care about other human beings we do not have a real moral comprehension of any human ideal or action. For this reason we can say that the care is the premise of morality. The rights of all citizens, including the claim to public security, grounds on the care for each individual who needs help. (shrink)

Why would we ever take a picture of a dead person? This practice began as a way to perpetuate the image of the deceased, rendering their memory eternal – Victorians thought that it could be useful to have portraits of their dead loved ones. Certainly, subjects in post-mortem photos will be remembered forever. However, we must ask two more questions. Are they people portrayed as if they were still alive? Or on the other hand, are they bodies that represent death? (...) Our paper takes an in-depth look at different iconographical styles as well as photographic techniques and religious and ethical reasons behind memento mori photos during the Victorian Age. (shrink)

Nicola Guarino is widely recognized as one of the founders of applied ontology. His deep interest in the subtlest details of theoretical analysis and his vision of ontology as the Rosetta Stone for semantic interoperability guided the development and understanding of this domain. His motivations in research stem from the conviction that all science must be for the benefit of society at large, and his motto has always been that ontologies are not just for making information systems interoperable, but – (...) more importantly – for ensuring that systems’ users understand each other. He was among the first to recognize that applied ontology must be an interdisciplinary enterprise if it is to capture the intended meaning of the terms used by an information system. (shrink)

In written and spoken communications, figures of speech (e.g., metaphors and synecdoche) are often used as an aid to help convey abstract or less tangible concepts. However, the benefits of using rhetorical illustrations or embellishments in visualization have so far been inconclusive. In this work, we report an empirical study to evaluate hypotheses that visual embellishments may aid memorization, visual search and concept comprehension. One major departure from related experiments in the literature is that we make use of a dual-task (...) methodology in our experiment. This design offers an abstraction of typical situations where viewers do not have their full attention focused on visualization (e.g., in meetings and lectures). The secondary task introduces “divided attention”, and makes the effects of visual embellishments more observable. In addition, it also serves as additional masking in memory-based trials. The results of this study show that visual embellishments can help participants better remember the information depicted in visualization. On the other hand, visual embellishments can have a negative impact on the speed of visual search. The results show a complex pattern as to the benefits of visual embellishments in helping participants grasp key concepts from visualization. (shrink)

Cette étude examine quelques aspects de la conception de la richesse chez Sénèque et du rapport qu’il nous invite à entretenir avec celle-ci. Nous montrerons que le Cordouan, bien qu’il s’inscrive pleinement dans la voie déjà tracée par les maîtres stoïciens, ne se prive pas, comme c’est souvent le cas chez lui, de présenter le sujet de manière personnelle. Classification JEL : B11.

In this article, I examine Peter Morgan's TV series The Crown (2016–present) through the lens of Sartrean and Beauvoirian existentialism. I argue that the character of Queen Elizabeth II holds a special place in the royal family, as the monarch who demonstrates the compatibility of duty and tradition with existential freedom and authenticity. I also demonstrate the series’ commitment to breaking the illusion of inhumanity that the royal family tries to maintain, by showing that the royals are not out-of-reach ideals, (...) but humans who struggle to transcend their exceptionally binding facticity. As portrayed in The Crown, Queen Elizabeth's lucidity on her situation leads to honest introspection, which dispels any attempt at self-deception, and therefore prevents her from slipping into bad faith. (shrink)

Artykuł poświęcony jest zagadnieniu możliwości przemiany moralnej w teorii Arystotelesa. Arystoteles twierdził, że cnota dostępna jest jedynie dla tych, którzy otrzymali już właściwe wychowanie i których charakter został odpowiednio ukształtowany. Celem artykułu jest pokazanie, że koncepcja funkcjonowania ludzkiej psychiki stworzona przez psychoanalityk Karen Horney jest spójna z teorią Arystotelesa, a jednocześnie umożliwia nam dostrzeżenie możliwości przemiany moralnej. Zmiana ta dokonuje się przez poznanie i zrozumienie własnych emocji i uczuć.

yamato sharply distinguishes itself from other existing upper ontologies in the following respects. Most importantly, yamato is designed with both engineering and philosophical minds. yamato is based on a sophisticated theory of roles, given that the world is full of roles. yamato has a tenable theory of functions which helps to deal with artifacts effectively. Information is a ‘content-bearing’ entity and it differs significantly from the entities that philosophers have traditionally discussed. Taking into account the modern society in which a (...) flood of information occurs, yamato has a sophisticated theory of informational objects. Quality and quantity are carefully organized for the sake of greater interoperability of real-world data. The philosophical contribution of yamato includes a theory of objects, processes, and events. Those features are illustrated with several case studies. These features lead to the intensive application of yamato in some domains such as biomedicine and learning engineering. (shrink)

In Turkey, the period after the establishment of the Republic saw archeological representations play an active role in defining the ancient past and producing new disciplinary knowledge. Visual practices emerged as important sites for the formation of a new conception of the ancient past in the larger context of the political and cultural discourse over the modernization of the country. Based on museum guidebooks, official publications, and archival documents, this paper focuses on the İzmir region after the establishment of the (...) Turkish Republic in 1923 and explores how the ancient past was perceived and displayed in relation to the historical and cultural transformations that occurred in Turkey after the Greco-Turkish War. (shrink)

words compose a significant part of speech. Despite this, learning them is complicated. Abstract concepts collect more heterogeneous exemplars and are more detached from sensory modalities than concrete concepts. Recent views propose that, because of their complexity, other people are pivotal for abstract concepts’ acquisition and use, e.g., to explain their meaning. We tested this hypothesis using a combined behavioral and thermal imaging paradigm. Twenty-one Italian children determined whether acoustic stimuli were or not correct Italian words. Concrete terms yielded faster (...) responses than abstract ones: for the first time, this effect appears with response times in very young children. More crucially, the higher increase in temperature of the nasal tip suggests that, with abstract concepts, children might be more socially and cognitively engaged. (shrink)

dolce, the first top-level ontology to be axiomatized, has remained stable for twenty years and today is broadly used in a variety of domains. dolce is inspired by cognitive and linguistic considerations and aims to model a commonsense view of reality, like the one human beings exploit in everyday life in areas as diverse as socio-technical systems, manufacturing, financial transactions and cultural heritage. dolce clearly lists the ontological choices it is based upon, relies on philosophical principles, is richly formalized, and (...) is built according to well-established ontological methodologies, e.g. OntoClean. Because of these features, it has inspired most of the existing top-level ontologies and has been used to develop or improve standards and public domain resources. Being a foundational ontology, dolce is not directly concerned with domain knowledge. Its purpose is to provide the general categories and relations needed to give a coherent view of reality, to integrate domain knowledge, and to mediate across domains. In these 20 years dolce has shown that applied ontologies can be stable and that interoperability across reference and domain ontologies is a reality. This paper briefly introduces the ontology and shows how to use it on a few modeling cases. (shrink)

En las últimas décadas el movimiento social a favor de los discapacitados o Disability Rights Movement (DRM) ha irrumpido en la arena pública. Como los feminismos de segunda y tercera ola y el movimiento GLBT, el DRM reivindica que el colectivo de personas con discapacidad, al igual que las mujeres y las minorías sexuales tienen una historia y una serie de valores e ideales de vida buena que permiten hablar, según los casos, de Cultura de la discapacidad (Disability Culture) o (...) de Identidad discapacitada (Disability Identity). El texto analiza las posibilidades y desafíos de esta apropiación del modelo etnocultural y del reconstructivismo, y más concretamente de las dificultades de la aplicación del paradigma del multiculturalismo central al tema de la discapacidad. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to review the articulation of politics and culture through social sciences, in the framework of the crisis of reason, and over a period that includes from negative modernity to post-modernity. In order to do this the changes produced in the scientific conception ..

Rule and Norm describe the distinctive ways in which power relates with human life either in Ancient Regime or in Modernity as Foucault described it. In its Foucauldian aception biopolitics is the management of Human being as a species. More recent account by Roberto Esposito makes of it a biologization of politics. This article discusses the strengths on Foucault’s approach to biopolitics.

Text explores the normative implications of the concept of normalcy from etimology, early XVIII century´s anatomical treatises and staticians point of view. The discourse that defines disability as a personal tragedy is discussed in relation with Adrianne Rich´s concept of compulsory heterosexuality, and purports the existence of a “disability dispositive” .The consequences of this normative oppression for people with disabilities are a form of failed citizenship.

Forests, cars and orchestras are very different ontological entities, and yet very similar in some aspects. The relationships they have with the elements they are composed of is often assumed to be reducible to standard ontological relations, like parthood and constitution, but how this could be done is still debated. This paper sheds light on the issue starting from a linguistic and philosophical analysis aimed at understanding notions like plurality, collective and composite, and propos- ing a formal approach to characterise (...) them. We conclude the presentation with a discussion and analysis of social groups within this framework. (shrink)

Humans are always interested in distinguishing natural and artificial entities although there is no sharp demarcation between the two categories. Surprisingly, things do not improve when the second type of entities is restricted to the arguably more constrained realm of physical technical artifacts. This paper helps to clarify the relationship between natural entities and technical artifacts by developing a conceptual landscape within which to analyze these notions. The framework is developed by studying three definitions of technical artifact which arise from (...) different perspectives. All these perspectives share two intuitions: that technical artifacts are physical objects that exist by human intervention; and that technical artifacts are entities to be contrasted to natural entities. Yet the perspectives are different in the way they spell out these intuitions: the relevant human intervention may range from intentional selection to intentional production; and the contrast between technical artifacts and natural entities may be introduced by a constitution relation or by defining properties that set technical artifacts apart. The three perspectives are compared and their similarities and dissimilarities are explored with the help of ontological analysis. (shrink)

The development of artificial agents for social interaction pushes to enrich robots with social skills and knowledge about (local) social norms. One possibility is to distinguish the expressive and the functional orders during a human-robot interaction. The overarching aim of this work is to set a framework to make the artificial agent socially-competent beyond dyadic interaction – interaction in varying multi-party social situations – and beyond individual-based user personalization, thereby enlarging the current conception of “culturally-adaptive”. The core idea is to (...) provide the artificial agent with the capability to handle different kinds of interactional disruptions, and associated recovery strategies, in microsociology. The result is obtained by classifying functional and social disruptions, and by investigating the requirements a robot’s architecture should satisfy to exploit such knowledge. The paper also highlights how this level of competence is achieved by focusing on just three dimensions: (i) social capability, (ii) relational role, and (iii) proximity, leaving aside the further complexity of full-fledged human-human interactions. Without going into technical aspects, End-to-end Data-driven Architectures and Modular Architectures are discussed to evaluate the degree to which they can exploit this new set of social and cultural knowledge. Finally, a list of general requirements for such agents is proposed. (shrink)

Nicola Guarino is widely recognized as one of the founders of applied ontology. His deep interest in the subtlest details of theoretical analysis and his vision of ontology as the Rosetta Stone for semantic interoperability guided the development and understanding of this domain. His motivations in research stem from the conviction that all science must be for the benefit of society at large, and his motto has always been that ontologies are not just for making information systems interoperable, but – (...) more importantly – for ensuring that systems’ users understand each other. He was among the first to recognize that applied ontology must be an interdisciplinary enterprise if it is to capture the intended meaning of the terms used by an information system. (shrink)

This special issue of Applied Ontology is devoted to the foundation, the comparison and the application of functional theories in all areas, with particular attention to the biological and engineering domains. It includes theoretical and technical contributions related to the description, characterization, and application of functions.

We show that logic has more to offer to ontologists than standard first order and modal operators. We first describe some operators of linear logic which we believe are particularly suitable for ontological modeling, and suggest how to interpret them within an ontological framework. After showing how they can coexist with those of classical logic, we analyze three notions of artifact from the literature to conclude that these linear operators allow for reducing the ontological commitment needed for their formalization, and (...) even simplify their logical formulation. (shrink)

Dans cet aperçu, la notion de corps, qui joue un rôle majeur dans la théologie de l’Aquinate, de la création à l’eschatologie, est étudiée dans une perspective philosophique. Les différents sens que Thomas attribue au mot « corps » sont notamment caractérisés, selon qu’il se réfère aux réalités extra-mentales ou à notre manière d’en comprendre et d’en analyser la structure. S’inspirant d’Aristote et Porphyre d’un côté, d’Avicenne de l’autre, Thomas distingue ainsi non seulement entre le corps en tant qu’accident quantitatif (...) et en tant que détermination substantielle, mais aussi entre le corps pris en tant que partie d’un être corporel et en tant que tout. Parmi d’autres aspects, la relation que le corps entretient avec la matière est précisée. (shrink)

We analyze and compare geometrical theories based on mereology (mereogeometries). Most theories in this area lack in formalization, and this prevents any systematic logical analysis. To overcome this problem, we concentrate on specific interpretations for the primitives and use them to isolate comparable models for each theory. Relying on the chosen interpretations, we introduce the notion of environment structure, that is, a minimal structure that contains a (sub)structure for each theory. In particular, in the case of mereogeometries, the domain of (...) an environment structure is composed of particular subsets of Rn. The comparison of mereogeometrical theories within these environment structures shows dependencies among primitives and provides (relative) definitional equivalences. With one exception, we show that all the theories considered are equivalent in these environment structures. (shrink)

We aim to show that far-related primates like humans and the capuchin monkeys show interesting correspondences in terms of artifact characterization and categorization. We investigate this issue by using a philosophically-inspired definition of physical artifact which, developed for human artifacts, turns out to be applicable for cross-species comparison. In this approach an artifact is created when an entity is intentionally selected and some capacities attributed to it (often characterizing a purpose). Behavioral studies suggest that this notion of artifact is not (...) specific to the human kind. On the basis of the results of a series of field observations and experiments on wild capuchin monkeys that routinely use stone hammers and anvils, we show that the notions of intentional selection and attributed capacity appear to be at play in capuchins as well. The study also suggests that functional criteria and contextualization play a fundamental role in terms of artifact recognition and categorization in nonhuman primates. (shrink)

In written and spoken communications, metaphors are often used as an aid to help convey abstract or less tangible concepts. However, the benefits of using visual metaphors in visualization have so far been inconclusive. In this work, we report an empirical study to evaluate hypotheses that visual metaphors may aid memorization, visual search and concept comprehension. One major departure from previous metaphor-related experiments in the literature is that we make use of a dual-task methodology in our experiment. This design offers (...) an abstraction of typical situations where viewers do not have their full attention focused on visualization (e.g., in meetings and classes). The use of the secondary task introduces “divided attention”, and makes the effects of visual metaphors more observable. In addition, it also serves as additional masking in memory-based trials. The results of this study show that visual metaphors can help participants better remember the information depicted in visualization. On the other hand, visual metaphors can have a negative impact on the speed of visual search. The results also show a complex pattern as to the benefits of visual metaphors in helping participants grasp key concepts from visualization. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Logic and Logical Philosophy Jahrgang: 22 Heft: 3 Seiten: 255-293.

In this paper we disambiguate the design stance as proposed by Daniel C. Dennett, focusing on its application to technical artefacts. Analysing Dennett’s work and developing his approach towards interpreting entities, we show that there are two ways of spelling out the design stance, one that presuppose also adopting Dennett’s intentional stance for describing a designing agent, and a second that does not. We argue against taking one of these ways as giving the correct formulation of the design stance in (...) Dennett’s approach, but propose to replace Dennett’s original design stance by two design stances: an intentional designer stance that incorporates the intentional stance, and a teleological design stance that does not. Our arguments focus on descriptions of technical artefacts: drawing on research in engineering, cognitive psychology and archaeology we show that both design stances are used for describing technical artefacts. A first consequence of this disambiguation is that a design stance, in terms of interpretative assumptions and in terms of the pragmatic considerations for adopting it, stops to be a stance that comes hierarchically between the physical stance and the intentional stance. A second consequence is that a new distinction can be made between types of entities in Dennett’s approach. We call entities to which the intentional designer stance is applied tools and entities to which the teleological design stance is applied instruments, leading to a differentiated understanding of, in particular, technical artefacts. (shrink)

The arising of smart cities has shown the limitations of the traditional attempts to understand and characterize cities. The smart city marks a relevant step in the evolution of urban systems which is expected to have disruptive impacts in the near future. Indeed, the ‘smartness’ qualification of cities points to relevant changes in the possibilities these complex systems offer mainly due to changes in the information which is made available. This chapter studies the notion of city from an ontological viewpoint, (...) and provides the first elements of a general framework aimed to characterize and unify how to understand the city and its evolution. It starts from historical considerations to isolate the factors that drove the changes from ancient to modern cities, and the complexity that characterizes the nature of cities. Our analysis departs from the traditional views and leads to distinguish three ontological components in the city: the modified physical place, the distributed agentivity, and the knowledge present in the system. The analysis of these components and their interactions, we argue, provides a coherent reading of the city across its evolution steps, and may be used to establish the maturity of today’s smart cities. (shrink)

What is the ultimate structure of the material world? Brower’s monograph provides a well-argued reconstruction of Aquinas’s Aristotelian answer to this question: the fundamental contents of the material world are prime matter, substantial and accidental forms, substances, and accidental unities.Brower’s aim is twofold: presenting Aquinas’s ontology of the material world, and also emphasizing its relevance—as a mixed ontology and a peculiar two-tier structured substratum theory, combining elements of both thin and thick particularism—to current metaphysical debates. These two perspectives intermingle in (...) the five sections of the book. In part 1, Brower provides a clear roadmap and lucidly condenses the key elements.. (shrink)

En su comentario al Segundo libro de las Sentencias de Pedro Lombardo, Tomás de Aquino enfrenta el problema de la materia desde distintos puntos de vista. En este artículo, algunos textos relevantes del Comentario sobre las distinciones 3, 12 y 18 son analizados con un triple propósito. En primer lugar, se presenta la perspectiva temprana de Tomás de Aquino sobre la materia, con particular atención a sus implicaciones físicas y metafísicas. En segundo lugar, las tesis del Aquinate son rastreadas hasta (...) sus raíces peripatéticas, con la finalidad de mostrar el papel crucial que juegan Avicena y Averroes en su replanteamiento de la física y metafísica aristotélicas. En tercer lugar, el pensamiento de Tomás de Aquino es puesto en el contexto del debate sobre la materia que surgió desde la recepción de la Física y la Metafísica del Aristóteles latino. Desde esta triple perspectiva, se puede apreciar la consistencia y originalidad de la propuesta temprana de Tomás de Aquino sobre la materia. (shrink)