Trees belong to humanity’s heritage, but they are more than that. Their loss, through catastrophic fires or under business-as-usual, is devastating to many forms of life. Moved by this fact, we begin with an assertion that heritage can have an active role in the design of future places. Written from within the field of architecture, this article focuses on structures that house life. Habitat features of trees and artificial replacement habitats for arboreal wildlife serve as concrete examples. Designs of such (...) habitats need to reflect behaviours, traditions and cultures of birds, bats, and other animals. Our narrative highlights the nonhuman aspect of heritage, seeking to understand how nonhuman stakeholders can act as users and consumers of heritage and not only as its constituents. Our working definition states that more-than-human heritage encompasses tangible and intangible outcomes of historical processes that are of value to human as well as nonhuman stakeholders. From this basis, the article asks how the established notions of heritage can extend to include nonhuman concerns, artefacts, behaviours and cultures. As a possible answer to this question, the hypothesis tested here is that digital information can (1) contribute to the preservation of more-than-human heritage; and (2) illuminate its characteristics for future study and use. This article assesses the potential of three imaging technologies and considers the resulting data within the conceptual framework of more-than-human heritage, illuminating some of its concrete aspects and challenges. (shrink)

This collection of current research on logic programming languages presents results from a three-year, ESPRIT-funded effort to explore the integration of the foundational issues of functional, logic, and object-oriented programming. It offers valuable insights into the fast-developing extensions of logic programming with functions, constraints, concurrency, and objects. Chapters are grouped according to the unifying themes of functional programming, constraint, logic programming, and object-oriented programming.

In recent years, the trend to present the notion of imperfection as a plus rather than a problem has resonated across a range of social and creative disciplines and a wealth of world localities. As digital tools allow media users to share ever more suave selfies and success stories, psychologists promote 'the gifts of imperfections' and point to perfectionism as a catalyst for rising depression and burnout complaints and suicide rates among millennials. As sound technologies increasingly permit musicians to 'smoothen' (...) their work, composers increasingly praise glitches, noise, and cracks. As genetic engineering upgrades with swift speed, philosophers, marketeers, and physicians plea 'against perfection' and supermarkets successfully advertize 'perfectly imperfect' vegetables. Meanwhile, cultural analysts point at skewed perspectives, blurry images, and other 'deliberate imperfections' in new and historical cinema, painting, photography, music, and literature. In less positive terms, scholars in fields ranging from disability studies to tourism critically interrogate a trend to fetishize imperfection and poverty. They rightfully warn against projecting privileged (and, often, emphatically western-biased) feel-good stories onto the less privileged, the distorted, or the frail. Imperfections synthesizes the swiftly growing but fragmented critical scholarship on mistakes, glitches, and other aesthetics and logics of imperfection into the first transdisciplinary, transnational framework of imperfection studies. With this framework, the editors offer scholars and students across various disciplines tools to craft more historically grounded and critically informed conceptualizations of the imperfect. (shrink)

Cette etude suppose un releve exhaustif des occurences d'aporia, et de douze autres mots etymologiquement apparentes, dans la litterature philosophique des Grecs, depuis les debuts jusqu'a Aristote. Les divers textes, que se sont repartis les collaborateurs du volume, sont etudies du point de vue de la grammaire et de la semantique. Chaque chapitre s'acheve sur des conclusions d'ordre philosophique, comme font aussi les trois grandes parties de l'ouvrage: philosophes preclassiques, Platon, Aristote. On trouvera en outre a la fin du volume (...) des etudes relatives au vocabulaire de l'aporia aussi bien dans la tradition arabe que chez les latins. Bibliographie et index des mots grecs etudies. (shrink)

"C'est un palimpseste : une succession de textes tirés des oeuvres complètes des auteurs à peu près complets. Le choix effectué par la lecture se trouve incarné dans l'ordre de l'écriture. Et cet ordre est porteur d'un message, il véhicule une thèse, il articule une idée dont le sens ne devient transparent que par le tout. Désormais les fragments extraits des texte ne représentent que le maillons d'une unique chaîne connexe de paroles, segmentss d'un entier : le texte du Palimpseste. (...) Derrière ce choix un axiome est caché, une assertion qui stimule et justifie la composition et, en dernière instance, garantit l'existence et légitime la subsistance autonome du texte. C'est ce que, par un terme emprunté à la théorie des ensembles de Georg Cantor, on pourra appeler "axiome du choix" ou encore, en une formulation quelque peu différente mais peut-être plus adéquate pour le traitement des textes, "axiome de sélection". L'axiome du choix permet donc l'assemblage d'un texte uniquement constitué de citations. Il permet aussi de citer des textes inexistants : ce sont alors des textes écrits exprès et pour l'unique raison d'être cités.... Le parler, comme l'a fait remarquer à plusieurs reprises Platon, est une praxis et l'axiome du choix confère au sujet le privilège d'exercer la fonction de choix : de sélectionner, de découper et d'assembler en un polymère verbal des fragments hétérogènes appartenant initialement à des textes préexistants. Le choix qui a présidé et guidé la navigation dans la métagalaxie des textes préexistants relève de cette liberté : sélectionner des "Propos" concernant le "Triangle", euclidien ou non, et de les assembler en un unique lieu et dans le présent indivisible d'une unique écriture étalée sur la surface du papier.". (shrink)

The species concept is one of the oldest and most fundamental in biology. And yet it is almost universally conceded that no satisfactory definition of what constitutes a species has ever been proposed. The present article is devoted to an attempt to review the status of the problem from a methodological point of view. Since the species is one of the many taxonomic categories, the question of the nature of these categories in general needs to be entered into.

I propose a new argument for the existence of God. God is defined as a conscious being that is the first cause of reality. In its simplified initial form, the argument has two premises: all possible truths are knowable, and it is impossible to know that the proposition that God does not exist is true. From and it follows that the proposition that God exists is necessarily true. After introducing the argument in its crude initial form and laying out the (...) core intuitions behind its premises, I point to two difficulties that this simplified version faces. I then go on to show how the argument can be revised to handle these difficulties. I defend the revised argument from various objections. (shrink)

This article examines land-use changes by large-scale plantations in Ethiopia and evaluates the impacts thereof on soil organic carbon, micronutrients and bulk density. Remote sensing analysis and field research activities were undertaken at four large-scale plantation projects in Benshanguel Gumuz, Gambella, and Oromia regional states. Results show that the projects largely involved the conversion of both closed and open to closed forests and grasslands, which in turn reduced soil carbon stock and micronutrient levels and increased soil compaction. We argue that (...) unless appropriate soil management activities and impact mitigation strategies are adopted by plantation proponents, these land-use changes will pose a serious threat to the long-term economic viability and sustainability of plantation agriculture in Ethiopia. This could undermine long-term ecosystem health and national food security. (shrink)

Alasdair MacIntyre criticises the ethics of modernity as fallacious, and wants it replaced by Aristotelian virtue ethics. He is particularly critical concerning modernity’s non-contextual understanding of reason, and wants to renew the ethical significance of concepts like tradition and context.

Over the last few decades there has been a strong narrative turn within the humanities and social sciences in general and educational studies in particular. Especially Jerome Bruner’s theory of narrative as a specific ‘mode of knowing’ was very important for this growing body of work. To understand how the narrative mode works Bruner proposes to study narratives ‘at their far reach’—as an art form—and on several occasions he refers to the dramatistic pentad as an important method for ‘unpacking’ narratives. (...) The pentad proposed by Bruner to study narratives was developed by the American philosopher and rhetorician Kenneth Burke and is embedded in his general linguistic theory of dramatism. From an educational perspective Bruner’s reference to the work of Burke has not been elaborated upon thus far. In this paper we aim to take Bruner’s suggestion at hand and explore how his educational theory of narrative as a mode of knowing can indeed be enriched by Kenneth Burke’s theory and method of dramatism. We claim that specifically the rhetorical framework that is developed by dramatism offers an important perspective about perspectives for education in a context that is increasingly confronted with a plurality of interpretive frameworks. (shrink)

Carolvs Praechter, uir clarissimus, optime exposuit quo modo rumores et fabulae de Platoni s itineribus gradatim orerentur, augerentur, firmarentur.1 Inter scriptores, qui nobis tales narrationes tradiderunt, est Valerius Maximus, qui her Aegyptiacum et Italicum his uerbis narra.

The present thesis considers, in the light of Heisenberg's interpretation of the uncertainty formulas, the conditions necessary for the derivation of the quantitative statement or law of momentum conservation. The result of such considerations is a contradiction between the formalism of quantum physics and the asserted consequences of Heisenberg's interpretation. This contradiction decides against Heisenberg's interpretation of the uncertainty formulas on upholding that the formalism of quantum physics is both consistent and complete, at least insofar as the statement of momentum (...) conservation can be proved within this formalism. A few comments are also included on Bohr's “complementarity interpretation” of the formalism of quantum physics. A suggestion, based on a statistical mode of empirical testing of the “uncertainty” formulas, does not give rise to any such contradiction. (shrink)