Philosophy, social problems, and global environmental change.

Renaissance logician, philosopher, humanist, and teacher, Peter Ramus (1515-72) is best known for his attack on Aristotelian logic, his radical pedagogical theories, and his new interpretation for the canon of rhetoric. His work, published in Latin and translated into many languages, has influenced the study of Renaissance literature, rhetoric, education, logic, and--more recently--media studies. Considered the most important work of Walter Ong's career, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue is an elegant review of the history of Ramist scholarship and (...) Ramus's quarrels with Aristotle. A key influence on Marshall McLuhan, with whom Ong enjoys the status of honorary guru among technophiles, this challenging study remains the most detailed account of Ramus's method ever published. Out of print for more than a decade, this book--with a new foreword by Adrian Johns--is a canonical text for enthusiasts of media, Renaissance literature, and intellectual history. (shrink)

The aim of the study was to develop a new comprehensive reading assessment battery for multi-ethnic and multilingual learners in Malaysia. Using this assessment battery, we examined the reliability, validity, and dimensionality of the factors associated with reading difficulties/disabilities in the Malay language, a highly transparent alphabetic orthography. In order to further evaluate the reading assessment battery, we compared results from the assessment battery with those obtained from the Malaysian national screening instrument. In the study, 866 Grade 1 children from (...) multi-ethnic and multilingual backgrounds from 11 government primary schools participated. The reading assessment battery comprised 13 assessments, namely, reading comprehension, spelling, listening comprehension, letter name knowledge, letter name fluency, rapid automatized naming, word reading accuracy, word reading efficiency, oral reading fluency, expressive vocabulary, receptive vocabulary, elision, and phonological memory. High reliability and validity were found for the assessments. An exploratory factor analysis yielded three main constructs: phonological-decoding, sublexical-fluency, and vocabulary-memory. Phonological-decoding was found to be the most reliable construct that distinguished between at-risk and non-at-risk children. Identifying these underlying factors will be useful for detecting children at-risk for developing reading difficulties in the Malay language. In addition, these results highlight the importance of including a range of reading and reading-related measures for the early diagnosis of reading difficulties in this highly transparent orthography. (shrink)

This article provides information about Berne's financial situation at the time the Economic Society was founded. The canton was in an exceptionally fortunate position, having accumulated a sizeable cash reserve that was in part used for loans and investments on the London capital market. Throughout the century, the Bernese government followed a very cautious investment strategy. The main reason for purchasing overseas securities was that they helped the patricians to become independent from tax-paying subjects. Economic imperatives ruled out increases of (...) the cash reserve or further involvement in the overcrowded domestic capital market. However, by investing abroad Berne became increasingly dependent on the goodwill of its debtors, for which it was criticised by the Economic Patriots amongst others. (shrink)

Open Dialogue is an approach to working with mental health problems that emphasises promoting dialogue between multiple perspectives within an individual person and between all the people present, including the therapists. Therapists’ own perspectives are often introduced during conversations called reflections, which present a potential source of different perspectives. Using conversation analysis we analysed 14 hours of video-recorded Open Dialogue sessions with a focus on therapists’ reflections. We noticed that therapists did not display explicit agreement with each other’s reflections. This (...) absence of explicit agreement was displayed through a variety of verbal and non-verbal forms. Eliding agreement facilitated deference to the epistemic authority of the client, assertion of epistemic rights from second position, emphasis of a positive perspective or to voice multiple perspectives. Therapists avoided consensus and thus presented multiple perspectives to the family while also attending to issues of contingency. The implications of epistemic primacy and asymmetry connected to sequential structures in talk pose a challenge to the generation of collaborative reflective dialogues. (shrink)

Peut-on tenter une nouvelle approche de Descartes? Penser philosophiquement la notion de creation, c'est la traduire dans le registre des quatre causes: ainsi la cause efficiente relie et separe a la fois le createur et le cree; mais Dieu est aussi cause formelle, ce qui sauve la continuite entre l'auteur et son ouvrage. Cette continuite se nomme analogie et cette analogie assure l'autonomie de la pensee finie. Ce transfert d'autorite dans la production meme, particulierement manifeste chez Descartes, permet de comprendre (...) la devolution a l'homme d'un certain pouvoir createur. L'agir humain peut etre inaugural. L'est-il en matiere de philosophie? La dette de Descartes envers la scolastique tardive semble indiquer qu'on ne pense qu'a partir de ce qu'on herite. L'ambivalence de la notion de creation ne nous permettrait-elle pas cependant de montrer que le commencement dans la pensee reste a tout moment possible? Telle pourrait etre l'explication du radicalisme cartesien. (shrink)

The current COVID-19 pandemic and the previous SARS/MERS outbreaks of 2003 and 2012 have resulted in a series of major global public health crises. We argue that in the interest of developing effective and safe vaccines and drugs and to better understand coronaviruses and associated disease mechenisms it is necessary to integrate the large and exponentially growing body of heterogeneous coronavirus data. Ontologies play an important role in standard-based knowledge and data representation, integration, sharing, and analysis. Accordingly, we initiated the (...) development of the community-based Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology in early 2020. -/- As an Open Biomedical Ontology (OBO) library ontology, CIDO is open source and interoperable with other existing OBO ontologies. CIDO is aligned with the Basic Formal Ontology and Viral Infectious Disease Ontology. CIDO has imported terms from over 30 OBO ontologies. For example, CIDO imports all SARS-CoV-2 protein terms from the Protein Ontology, COVID-19-related phenotype terms from the Human Phenotype Ontology, and over 100 COVID-19 terms for vaccines (both authorized and in clinical trial) from the Vaccine Ontology. CIDO systematically represents variants of SARS-CoV-2 viruses and over 300 amino acid substitutions therein, along with over 300 diagnostic kits and methods. CIDO also describes hundreds of host-coronavirus protein-protein interactions (PPIs) and the drugs that target proteins in these PPIs. CIDO has been used to model COVID-19 related phenomena in areas such as epidemiology. The scope of CIDO was evaluated by visual analysis supported by a summarization network method. CIDO has been used in various applications such as term standardization, inference, natural language processing (NLP) and clinical data integration. We have applied the amino acid variant knowledge present in CIDO to analyze differences between SARS-CoV-2 Delta and Omicron variants. CIDO's integrative host-coronavirus PPIs and drug-target knowledge has also been used to support drug repurposing for COVID-19 treatment. -/- CIDO represents entities and relations in the domain of coronavirus diseases with a special focus on COVID-19. It supports shared knowledge representation, data and metadata standardization and integration, and has been used in a range of applications. (shrink)

"Cet ouvrage a pour objectif de proposer une histoire de ce que, après Descartes, on a appelé le cogito, le "Je pense, donc je suis". Le parti-pris est que sa valeur ne tient pas seulement à ce qu'il a pu affirmer de l'ego, de la nature de la pensée et de l'existence, mais à ce qui s'est ensuite écrit et qui peut prendre la forme d'une critique. Chaque étude constitue un échantillon du travail sur le cogito ; elle le déplie (...) selon un aspect de la méthode philosophique ou de la diversité des traditions historiques de la philosophie. L'ouvrage devrait permettre de parcourir les réécritures du cogito, en conduisant à porter une attention renouvelée à la formule cartésienne et en la désenclavant, pour ainsi dire, de ses réécritures."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

An important, but relatively neglected, aspect of human theory of mind is emotion inference: understanding how and why a person feels a certain why is central to reasoning about their beliefs, desires and plans. The authors review recent work that has begun to unveil the structure and determinants of emotion inference, organizing them within a unified probabilistic framework.

Terry Lectures. A religious philosopher's exploration of the nature and history of the word argues that the word is initially and always sound, that it cannot be reduced to any other category, and that sound is essentially an event manifesting power and personal presence. His analysis of the development of verbal expression, from oral sources through the transfer to the visual world and to contemporary means of electronic communication, shows that the predicament of the human word is the predicament of (...) man himself. (shrink)

‘If it bleeds, it leads’, events characterised by fatalities, are likely to attract high levels of media coverage. This study adopts a multidisciplinary approach to investigate public discourses on the MH17 tragedy in Malaysia and the United Kingdom. First, corpus-based discourse analysis was employed to explore the construction of the Malaysian Airlines tragedy MH17 in four selected Malaysian and British newspapers. In addition, an attitudinal study examining 50 Malaysian and 50 UK nationals’ perceptions of the tragedy was conducted. Keywords analysis (...) revealed an overall tendency for the news media to construct the air tragedy through classifications between ‘us’ and ‘others’. Specifically, important ‘Us’ and non-important ‘Other’ in the Malaysian newspapers, versus good ‘Us’ and evil ‘Others’ in the British newspapers. The attitudinal analysis shows, for both the Malaysian and the UK respondents, the most salient associations with the MH17 tragedy related to ‘conflicts’. (shrink)

IntroductionClinical ethics committees (CECs) support and enhance communication and complex decision making, educate healthcare professionals and the public on ethical matters and maintain standards of care. However, a consistent approach to training members of CECs is lacking. A systematic scoping review was conducted to evaluate prevailing CEC training curricula to guide the design of an evidence-based approach.MethodsArksey and O’Malley’s methodological framework for conducting scoping reviews was used to evaluate prevailing accounts of CEC training published in six databases. Braun and Clarke’s (...) thematic analysis approach was adopted to thematically analyse data across different healthcare and educational settings.Results7370 abstracts were identified, 92 full-text articles were reviewed and 55 articles were thematically analysed to reveal four themes: the design, pedagogy, content and assessment of CEC curricula.ConclusionFew curricula employ consistent approaches to training. Many programmes fail to provide CEC trainees with sufficient knowledge, skills and experience to meet required competencies. Most programmes do not inculcate prevailing sociocultural, research, clinical and educational considerations into training processes nor provide longitudinal support for CEC trainees. Most CEC training programmes are not supported by host institutions threatening the sustainability of the programme and compromising effective assessment and longitudinal support of CEC trainees. While further reviews are required, this review underlines the need for host organisations to support and oversee a socioculturally appropriate ethically sensitive, clinically relevant longitudinal training, assessment and support process for CEC trainees if CECs are to meet their roles effectively. (shrink)

Governments are investing in precision medicine with the aim of improving healthcare through the use of genomic analyses and data analytics to develop tailored treatment approaches for individual patients. The success of PM is contingent upon clear public communications that engender trust and secure the social licence to collect and share large population-wide data sets because specific consent for each data re-use is impractical. Variation in the terminology used by different programmes used to describe PM may hinder clear communication and (...) threaten trust. Language is used to create common understanding and expectations regarding precision medicine between researchers, clinicians and the volunteers. There is a need to better understand public interpretations of PM-related terminology. This paper reports on a qualitative study involving 24 focus group participants in the multi-lingual context of Singapore. The study explored how Singaporeans interpret and understand the terms ‘precision medicine’ and ‘personalised medicine’, and which term they felt more aptly communicates the concept and goals of PM. Results suggest that participants were unable to readily link the terms with this area of medicine and initially displayed preferences for the more familiar term of ‘personalised’. The use of visual aids to convey key concepts resonated with participants, some of whom then indicated preferences for the term ‘precision’ as being a more accurate description of PM research. These aids helped to facilitate dialogue around the ethical and social value, as well as the risks, of PM. Implications for programme developers and policy makers are discussed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A View of Life:Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and the NovelYi-Ping OngI"My general task," Nietzsche scrawled, in the margins of his own copy of Cervantes's Don Quixote: "to show how life philosophy and art can have a deeper and affinitive relationship with each other."1 This enigmatic inscription commands a second reading not only because it seems to articulate the thread that links many of Nietzsche's philosophical projects together, but also because of (...) the very book in which it appears. The book is not a lofty tome of Schopenhauer's philosophy, as might be expected, but a mere novel: a fact which suggests that the novel itself was the art form that precipitated reflection on the relation of art to what Nietzsche calls here "life philosophy." In this essay, my aim is to deepen critical understanding of the novel's influence on Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, the two philosophers who are widely considered the fathers of existentialism. By means of a comprehensive overview of the novelistic reading and writing of these thinkers, I will show that both Nietzsche and Kierkegaard were profoundly influenced by the literary form of the novel and by its techniques for representing consciousness, subjectivity, and worldview.My focus in the analysis that follows is on the question of why Nietzsche and Kierkegaard read novels, and not on the more specific question of what they gained from particular novels. Isolating form from theme has three main advantages. First, it elucidates an important aspect of the intellectual context for these philosophers that has received little scholarly attention, namely the issue of why Nietzsche and Kierkegaard were drawn to fictional novelistic prose and how this literary form [End Page 167] affected their philosophy. Second, it allows the "deeper... affinitive" relationship between existentialist philosophy and the novel form to emerge, revealing the way in which existentialism and realism in the novel share a distinctive stylistic approach to the understanding of lived experience. Finally, it illuminates an intellectual precedent for the work of later existentialist thinkers such as Heidegger, Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus, who drew increasingly on novelistic forms as both vehicle and inspiration for their philosophy.There are no previous studies devoted entirely to the novels read by Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, despite the fact that Nietzsche lists Stendhal and Dostoevsky as two of the greatest influences upon his thinking and that Kierkegaard's first published work is the review of a novel. Why did Nietzsche read the works not only of "philosophical" novelists like Stendhal, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, but also of Eliot, Twain, Sterne, and Flaubert? Why did Kierkegaard's interest in the "life-view" of the individual crystallize through his reflections on Hans Christian Andersen's novel Only a Fiddler? How did both of these existentialist thinkers link the task of connecting life and philosophy with their reading of novels, and how is their reading of novels related to their attempt to write philosophy in novel and increasingly novelistic ways?These questions lead us to address anew the issue of how philosophy and literature are related in a way that is not simply thematic or allegorical. Furthermore, they ask us to take into account the importance of the novel to thinkers whose work has primarily been studied in the context of other "serious" philosophical texts, despite the stylistic and formal affinity of their work to the novels they read. As Thomas Brobjer points out in his recently published work on Nietzsche's reading habits and intellectual sources, Nietzsche's Philosophical Context: An Intellectual Biography (2008), none of the standard works on Nietzsche comment on his reading or library despite the fact that his private library has been more or less preserved in its entirety.2 Brobjer's work is the only large-scale study of Nietzsche's reading to date; however, it limits itself to "the philosophical influences on Nietzsche," even as it acknowledges that he "often was influenced by some who cannot conventionally be regarded as philosophers: by authors and literary critics" (NPC, p. 3). Although Brobjer mentions several of these authors and critics, even noting some of the marginalia found in these texts, he places them largely in the context of influences upon Nietzsche... (shrink)

Visual inspections have been typically used in condition assessment of infrastructure. However, they are based on human judgment and their interpretation of data can differ from acquired results. In psychology, this difference is called cognitive bias which directly affects Structural Health Monitoring -based decision making. Besides, the confusion between condition state and safety of a bridge is another example of cognitive bias in bridge monitoring. Therefore, integrated computer-based approaches as powerful tools can be significantly applied in SHM systems. This paper (...) explores the relationship between the use of advanced computational intelligence and the development of SHM solutions through conducting an infrastructure monitoring methodology. Artificial Intelligence -based algorithms, i.e., Artificial Neural Network, hybrid ANN-based Imperial Competitive Algorithm, and hybrid ANN-based Genetic Algorithm, are developed for damage assessment using a lab-scale composite bridge deck structure. Based on the comparison of the results, the employed evolutionary algorithms could improve the prediction error of the pre-developed network by enhancing the learning procedure of the ANN. (shrink)

Musical prodigies reach exceptionally high levels of achievement before adolescence. Despite longstanding interest and fascination in musical prodigies, little is known about their psychological profile. Here we assess to what extent practice, intelligence, and personality make musical prodigies a distinct category of musician. Nineteen former or current musical prodigies were compared to 35 musicians with either an early or late start but similar amount of musical training, and 16 non-musicians. All completed a Wechsler IQ test, the Big Five Inventory, the (...) Autism Spectrum Quotient, the Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire, the Dispositional Flow Scale, and a detailed history of their lifetime music practice. None of the psychological traits distinguished musical prodigies from control musicians or non-musicians except their propensity to report flow during practice. The other aspects that differentiated musical prodigies from their peers were the intensity of their practice before adolescence, and the source of their motivation when they began to play. Thus practice, by itself, does not make a prodigy. The results are compatible with multifactorial models of expertise, with prodigies lying at the high end of the continuum. In summary, prodigies are expected to present brain predispositions facilitating their success in learning an instrument, which could be amplified by their early and intense practice happening at a moment when brain plasticity is heightened. (shrink)

BackgroundAmidst expanding roles in education and policy making, questions have been raised about the ability of Clinical Ethics Committees (CEC) s to carry out effective ethics consultations (CECons). However recent reviews of CECs suggest that there is no uniformity to CECons and no effective means of assessing the quality of CECons. To address this gap a systematic scoping review of prevailing tools used to assess CECons was performed to foreground and guide the design of a tool to evaluate the quality (...) of CECons.MethodsGuided by Levac et al’s (2010) methodological framework for conducting scoping reviews, the research team performed independent literature reviews of accounts of assessments of CECons published in six databases. The included articles were independently analyzed using content and thematic analysis to enhance the validity of the findings.ResultsNine thousand sixty-six abstracts were identified, 617 full-text articles were reviewed, 104 articles were analyzed and four themes were identified – the purpose of the CECons evaluation, the various domains assessed, the methods of assessment used and the long-term impact of these evaluations.ConclusionThis review found prevailing assessments of CECons to be piecemeal due to variable goals, contextual factors and practical limitations. The diversity in domains assessed and tools used foregrounds the lack of minimum standards upheld to ensure baseline efficacy.To advance a contextually appropriate, culturally sensitive, program specific assessment tool to assess CECons, clear structural and competency guidelines must be established in the curation of CECons programs, to evaluate their true efficacy and maintain clinical, legal and ethical standards. (shrink)

Despite the significant contribution of cognitive-behavioral therapy to effective treatment options for specific syndromes, treatment progress has been stagnating, with response rates plateauing over the past several years. This stagnation has led clinical researchers to call for an approach that instead focuses on processes of change and the individual in their particular context. Process-based therapy is a general approach representing a model of models, grounded in evolution science, with an emphasis on idiographic methods, network models of case conceptualization, and enhancing (...) wellbeing. In this paper, we describe the theory underlying PBT and present a case study for how to apply PBT tools and principles to deliver process-informed and person-centered evidence-based treatment. In addition, we discuss lessons learned from our case and provide suggestions for future considerations when implementing PBT in clinical settings. (shrink)

What fundamental changes in the state, and in the analysis of the state, have been stimulated by economic globalization? In the course of interactions with global markets and regulatory agencies, so-called Asian tiger countries like Malaysia and Indonesia have created new economic possibilities, social spaces and political constellations, which in turn condition their further actions. The shifting relations between market, state, and society have resulted in the state's flexible experimentations with sovereignty. Graduated sovereignty refers to a) the different modes of (...) governing segments of the population who relate or do not relate to global markets; and b) the different mixes of legal compromises and controls tailored to the requirements of special production zones. The Asian financial crisis further demonstrates the concept of graduation in that the market-oriented agenda can mean different things, strengthening state power and protections in certain areas, but not in others. (shrink)

This study evidences turn actions done by ellipsis marks-only turns and blank turns as employed in quasisynchronous chats that are not discussed in prior literature. A brief introduction to the research background of ellipsis marks in online chats is followed by a description of the data collected before delving into the actions done by ellipsis marks-only turns and blank turns. Data were culled from multi-party chats among tertiary students during a critical reasoning class. A Conversation Analysis-informed approach is applied in (...) this article to analyze the preference organization of elliptical turns that illustrate several turn actions which include responses signaling disagreement, confusion and disapproval besides initial actions of eliciting responses and holding the floor. More than punctuation marks or paralinguistic restitution of silences, their interpersonal meaningfulness in sequential context and differentness/similarity vis-a-vis temporal silences are demonstratively shown in microscopic and interpretive description of chat excerpts. (shrink)

With the increasing importance of the internet to our everyday lives, questions are rightly being asked about how its' use affects our wellbeing. It is important to be able to effectively measure the effects of the online context, as it allows us to assess the impact of specific online contexts on wellbeing that may not apply to offline wellbeing. This paper describes a scoping review of English language, peer-reviewed articles published in MEDLINE, EMBASE, and PsychInfo between 1st January 2015 and (...) 31st December 2019 to identify what measures are used to assess subjective wellbeing and in particular to identify any measures used in the online context. Two hundred forty studies were identified; 160 studies were removed by abstract screening, and 17 studies were removed by full-text screening, leaving 63 included studies. Fifty-six subjective wellbeing scales were identified with 18 excluded and 38 included for further analysis. Only one study was identified researching online wellbeing, and no specific online wellbeing scale was found. Therefore, common features of the existing scales, such as the number and type of questions, are compared to offer recommendations for building an online wellbeing scale. Such a scale is recommended to be between 3 and 20 questions, using mainly 5-point Likert or Likert-like scales to measure at least positive and negative affect, and ideally life satisfaction, and to use mainly subjective evaluation. Further research is needed to establish how these findings for the offline world effectively translate into an online measure of wellbeing. (shrink)

Genetic information affects patients’ families differently than other types of medical information. Family members might have a compelling interest in patients’ genetic information, but who counts as family? In this article, I assess current definitions of family and propose a pluralistic account of family, which comprises definitions of family based on biomedical, legal, and functional aspects. Respectful of various forms of family, a pluralistic account includes those with interests in genetic information. Finally, I apply it in the hypothetical case of (...) a sperm donor with a hereditary condition. (shrink)

We report one production and one comprehension experiment investigating the effect of animacy in relative clause attachment in Chinese. Experiment 1 involved a fill-in-the-blank task that manipulated the order of an animate noun phrase in a complex NP construction. The results showed that while low attachment responses exceeded high attachment responses overall (cf. Shen, 2006), a tendency exists to attach a relative clause to an animate NP in Chinese (cf. Desmet et al., 2002). Experiment 2 used a rating task to (...) examine the interplay between animacy and structural information by manipulating the order of the animate NP as well as the relative clause type (i.e., subject vs. object relative clauses). The results showed that the animate NP modification tendency found in Experiment 1 was limited to subject-relative clauses and that no animacy-related effect was found with object-relative clauses. These results are incompatible with purely structural parsing strategies such as Late Closure (Frazier, 1987) and the Predicate Proximity Principle (Gibson et al., 1996). Instead, the current results suggest that attachment ambiguity resolution in Chinese relative clauses is sensitive to animacy as well as structural information. (shrink)

Ong, Caroline Whilst the reason and purpose of suffering may never be fully understood, there are ways of enduring, transcending and growing resilience to how it affects us. Our experience of suffering lies in the web of perceptions that involve our physical, spiritual and cosmological beliefs. Referencing Pain Seeking Understanding: Suffering, Medicine and Faith, edited by Margaret E. Mohrmann and Mark J. Hanson, this article gives a brief exploration of some propositions as to why an all-powerful, good God would allow (...) suffering to exist. From these various perspectives and using examples cited in the book, the article proposes that the healing art of medicine, honed through years of experience, knowledge and wisdom, can help individual patients endure and transcend suffering, and be whole once again. (shrink)

Ong, Caroline As health systems become more complex, moral distress is increasingly being recognised as a significant phenomenon amongst health professionals. It can be described as the state of being distressed when one is unable to act according to what one believes to be morally right. It may compromise patient care, the health professional involved and the organisation. Cumulative experiences of incompletely resolved moral distress - a phenomenon which is called moral residue - may leave us susceptible to more frequent (...) and more severe moral distress. Clear open communication, respect, inclusivity, openness to differences, compassion, support, education and the capacity to grow in self-awareness are key aspects in minimising moral distress. Early recognition of its symptoms and addressing both personal and external constraints of actions can also minimise moral residue and build resilience to further distress. (shrink)

Ong, Caroline In the debate about euthanasia, it is important that we consider all views, including those which might not at first seem attractive to us. Whether we believe in God or not, the views of the Catholic Church make a significant contribution to this debate. The Church does not support the deliberate killing either of oneself or another person. It also emphasises our moral obligation to respect life and to uphold the dignity of each person.

The distinctness of each person’s life and experience is an important consideration in dominant accounts of how democratic institutions should distribute basic rights and liberties. Drawing on recent social movements, philosophers like Iris Marion Young, Miranda Fricker, and Axel Honneth have nonetheless drawn attention to the distinctive claims and challenges that plurality and difference entrain in democratic societies by analysing how the dominant discourses on rights and justice tend to elide, obscure, or reify the lived experiences of individuals belonging to (...) disadvantaged and oppressed groups. In this essay, I offer an independent justification for why we should take such lived experiences seriously. I show how the lived experiences of disadvantaged and oppressed individuals can be a resource for deep and meaningful social change. I propose a distinctive kind of social change in which the disadvantaged and oppressed themselves drive the process of transformation whereby they change the oppressive frames of difference relating to their race, class, sex, or ability. I call this kind ‘organic social change’. I also show that organic social change is distinctively important in that the disadvantaged and oppressed get to enact an empowering mode of cooperation that harnesses their singularities when they are the ones driving the process of their own and one another’s transformations. (shrink)

When a widely reused ontology appears in a new version which is not compatible with older versions, the ontologies reusing it need to be updated accordingly. Ontobull has been developed to automatically update ontologies with new term IRI(s) and associated metadata to take account of such version changes. To use the Ontobull web interface a user is required to (i) upload one or more ontology OWL source files; (ii) input an ontology term IRI mapping; and (where needed) (iii) provide update (...) settings for ontology headers and XML namespace IDs. Using this information, the backend Ontobull Java program automatically updates the OWL ontology files with desired term IRIs and ontology metadata. The Ontobull subprogram BFOConvert supports the conversion of an ontology that imports a previous version of BFO. A use case is provided to demonstrate the features of Ontobull and BFOConvert. (shrink)

Ong, Caroline There was once a strong belief amongst global HIV/AIDS organisations that the key to the prevention of the sexual transmission of HIV was condom use. Other measures such as abstinence and being loyal to one partner were seen as beneficial, but secondary. Thirty years later, the evidence is mounting that behavioural change is much more effective in halting the spread of HIV than condoms.

Between 1946 and 1965, a period during which her contemporaries are calling into question the value of traditional novelistic realism, Simone de Beauvoir develops an extended and nuanced account of the philosophical significance of the realist novel in essays such as “Littérature et métaphysique”, “An American Renaissance in France”, and “Que peut la littérature?”. Beauvoir’s central claim is that novels do philosophical work not by articulating theoretical positions or illustrating abstract themes but by reorienting philosophical ways of understanding truth, world, (...) and reality in and through their very form. Her analysis delineates key.. (shrink)

The Art of Being: Poetics of the Novel and Existential Philosophy offers an account of the poetics of the realist novel, based on how the novel reorients philosophy in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Philosophers such as Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Beauvoir not only read novels and use novelistic techniques of representation in their work, but also discover a radically new way of thinking about the relation between the form of the novel and the nature of self-knowledge, freedom, and world. Drawing (...) upon a rich archive of existentialists writing on the novel, Ong argues that for these thinkers the poetics of the novel in its classic phase - the nineteenth- and twentieth-century realist novel - discloses the conditions for thinking about the meaning of existence. Bringing together philosophy, novel theory, and intellectual history with groundbreaking readings of the novels of Tolstoy, Eliot, Austen, James, Flaubert, and Zola, this study reveals how the novel engages with philosophically rich notions of freedom, world, and the unfinished character of human life in its very form. (shrink)

A lire attentivement Descartes, on se surprend à constater que l'inventeur de la philosophie du sujet pensant emploie rarement le mot de " sujet ", si ce n'est au sens traditionnel et scolastique de sujet des accidents ou des qualités, ou encore de substance. Le but de ce volume est donc d'aborder à nouveaux frais la question à partir de l'inventaire du vocabulaire cartésien de la " subjectivité ". Devons-nous dire ainsi que l'ego du cogito est sujet? Ou bien la (...) res cogitans? Ou encore la mens? Y a-t-il un sujet corporel chez Descartes, ou alors l'union est-elle le sujet? Y a-t-il, de la même manière, un sujet des passions? Un ipse, une ipséité serait-elle enfin le sujet chez Descartes? Multiples formes de la question de savoir s'il y a bien une philosophie du sujet chez Descartes. (shrink)

We prove that the observational equivalence of third-order finitary Idealized Algol is decidable using Game Semantics. By modelling the state explicitly in our games, we show that the denotation of a term M of this fragment of IA is a compactly innocent strategy-with-state, i.e. the strategy is generated by a finite view function fM. Given any such fM, we construct a real-time deterministic pushdown automaton that recognizes the complete plays of the knowing-strategy denotation of M. Since such plays characterize observational (...) equivalence, and there is an algorithm for deciding whether any two DPDAs recognize the same language, we obtain a procedure for deciding the observational equivalence of third-order finitary IA. Restricted to second-order terms, the DPDA representation cuts down to a deterministic finite automaton; thus our approach gives a new proof of Ghica and McCusker’s regular-expression characterization for this fragment. Our algorithmic representation of program meanings, which is compositional, provides a foundation for model-checking a wide range of behavioural properties of IA and other cognate programming languages. Another result concerns second-order IA with full recursion: we show that observational equivalence for this fragment is undecidable. (shrink)

L’examen de certains manuscrits inédits du Fonds Foucault déposé par Daniel Defert à la BnF, en 2013, montre que le Descartes de Foucault est une variante simplifiée de celui de Heidegger. Foucault reprend en effet à la lecture heideggérienne de Descartes la liaison que le philosophe allemand met en place entre la mathesis universalis et le cogito, qui ne se trouve assurément pas chez Descartes. C’est de cette manière que ces deux auteurs critiquent ce qu’ils mettent eux-mêmes au jour chez (...) Descartes – le sujet de la certitude – et qu’ils font de l’inquiétude l’affect historique propre à la pensée. La présente étude reconstruit le lien entre la mathesis et le cogito et la critique de la vérité comme certitude, tel qu’il est élaboré dans les cours de Heidegger sur Descartes, Augustin et Aristote, au début des années 20. La manière dont Heidegger établit ce lien suit l’évolution de la pensée de Heidegger, mais nous prenons le parti de mettre l’accent sur le cours sur Descartes de 1922-1923 (Introduction à la recherche phénoménologique), car dans les années 20, Heidegger fait de l’inquiétude la figure de l’ipséité. Nous reconstruisons en parallèle la manière dont Foucault intègre la lecture heideggérienne de Descartes à la sienne et comment il en déplace la signification, en évoquant certains textes connus de l’Histoire de la folie, mais aussi en analysant des manuscrits inédits de Foucault. Car le rapprochement que nous proposons entre les deux auteurs, tout comme la mise en relief de ce qui les distingue, se fait à la faveur de l’occasion historique que constitue la mise à disposition de textes qui étaient auparavant inédits. Et, en effet, les cours de Heidegger que nous analysons ont été publiés dans la Gesamtausgabe après la mort de Foucault, et leur traduction en français est toute récente. En procédant ainsi, nous voulons montrer comment la redéfinition contemporaine de la subjectivité s’est élaborée, au XXe siècle, à partir de la notion d’inquiétude, et plus spécifiquement de l’inquiétude historique. (shrink)

Critique and subjectivation. Foucault and Butler on the subject In her paper “What is Critique ? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue”, Judith Butler reads Foucault’s “What is Critique ?” According to Foucault, critique is a practice of desubjugation of the subject, which would provide for it a certain form of autonomy. But what kind of autonomy is really possible for the subject, when Foucault rejects the notion of the sovereign subject ? Butler’s reading wants to solve that difficulty in Foucault’s (...) position with the notions of virtue and of speech acts. But Foucault tends more to consider the courage of the truth as a critical mode of philosophical intervention in politics, and he thinks of it as a virtue or as an êthos. Butler’s conception of the subject refuses the whole notion of an originary freedom and she prefers to think an agency which would take place in the context of the subjectivation itself, where being produced as a subject is originally being subjected to different modes of interpellation by the norms. In reading Althusser’s conception of ideology with Foucault’s desubjugation, she considers the critique as the critique of norms of recognition and the subject as vulnerable. (shrink)

Dans Le Langage de la perception, Austin critique la conception habituelle de la perception qui pose que nous ne percevons pas directement les objets, mais des sense data, nos idées, ou des impressions sensibles. Il souligne, contre Descartes, que nos sens sont muets et il montre que le but de l’argument de l’illusion est de rendre réelles les entités intermédiaires. Dans cet article, j’examine les analyses du bâton qui paraît cassé dans l’eau dans les Sixièmes Réponses pour montrer en quoi (...) elles diffèrent de celles fournies par Austin et je montre que dans la philosophie cartésienne des idées, traiter la perception comme un acte mental n’implique pas de considérer les représentations comme des objets qui sont perçus. Grâce à la notion arnaldienne de « réflexion virtuelle », je présente une conception cartésienne de la réalité objective des idées qui ne pose pas d’« êtres représentatifs » dans la perception. Et c’est à la lumière de la mémoire de soi que j’interroge la radicalité de la conception austinienne de la perception. (shrink)

It is somehow usual to grant that Augustine has given a former presentation of the famous argument of Descartes named the Cogito, and we ordinary think that the difference between the two authors is that the first one thinks of the inhabitation of Truth or Verbum, which transcends the ego. The paper is an attempt to think in a different way the sources of interiority in Augustine and Descartes. Based on Confessions and on De Trinitate, I trace the Greek sources (...) of the scheme of the movement of return and elevation, which defines the reflection and the access to the interior through verbum mentis. The distance that Descartes takes with the notion of reflection, in his definition of the thought, indicates an important difference in their conceptions of the interiority. (shrink)