Although legal terms are conventionally considered to have self-referential, self-closed meaning independent of context, a legal term only acquires its meaning within a given context. As long as the context varies, the meaning of the same legal term as a signifier may change correspondingly. Based on case studies by applying semiotics, we argue that a legal term is just a sign within its sign system; a legal term as an individual sign does not have any inherent meaning, and its meaning (...) can only exist in the relationship with other signs or sign systems. In other words, a legal term only denotes in a particular temporal and spatial context. Through this study, we conclude four propositions about a legal term as a sign: first, the connection of a legal term with a legal concept is relatively arbitrary; second, the meaning of a legal term exists in a sign system; third, a legal term can be subject to multiple interpretations; fourth, the defining of a legal term may be affected by other sign systems. (shrink)

Impacts of the economic development to the socio cultural changes in Vietnam.

Every human community creates its own representation of its surrounding world and of the men who constitute that world. It sets out in an orderly fashion the raison d’être of social and cultural organisation, it ritualises the ties between men and their relationship with their environment. Man creates the world while the world creates man, through a relationship which varies with each society; ethnography shows us innumerable versions. Human cultures consist of symbols. It is always a matter of reducing the (...) world to the human factor, but in line with a social imaginary quantity specific to a particular group, which is itself the tributary of its past and the possible influence of other groups. (shrink)

L'image de Pascal est souvent brouillée par la légende et par les commentaires maladroits ou malveillants. Or, on n'a jamais fini de scruter la personnalité et l'œuvre de Pascal. Il suffit de changer de point de vue pour apercevoir du nouveau, pour préciser des significations, pour repérer des sources inattendues, et parfois pour écarter des idées reçues. Michel Le Guern, après L'Image dans l'œuvre de Pascal, Pascal et Descartes, Les Pensées de Pascal de l'anthropologie à la théologie, les éditions des (...) Pensées et des Provinciales en Folio, l'édition des Œuvres complètes dans la Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, puis Pascal et Arnauld, souhaitait présenter d'autres points de vue, qui ont nécessairement varié en soixante ans de lectures et de relectures, et qui sont complémentaires des travaux d'Henri Gouhier, de Jean Mesnard et de Philippe Sellier. / Our image of Blaise Pascal is frequently blurred by legend and by clumsy or malicious commentary, but his personality and works bear continued scrutiny. A change of perspective is all that is required to glimpse something new, to clarify some finer points, and to brush aside a few common preconceptions. / Michel Le Guern, né en 1937, est professeur honoraire de l'Université Lumière-Lyon 2. Il est ancien président de l'Académie des sciences, belles-lettres et arts de Lyon. (shrink)

Loin des traites du gouvernement visant a definir les bornes du pouvoir legitime, le Discours de la servitude volontaire presente la tyrannie comme la negation radicale de toute communaute civile. La ou tout est a un, aucune chose publique ne saurait subsister.Or la racine de cette appropriation tyrannique, c'est, en chacun, l'alienation consentie ou la servitude volontaire. De ce fondement enigmatique et revoltant de toute domination, La Boetie tire une serie de paradoxes qui sont autant d'avertissements constamment adresses a la (...) philosophie politique des Modernes. (shrink)

This paper presents Jean Nicod (1893–1924) as a mediator in the dispute between Bergson and Russell. In La géométrie dans le monde sensible (1924), Nicod extensively discusses Bergson’s epistemology focusing on those aspects that Russell critically discusses in The Philosophy of Henri Bergson (1912) and Our Knowledge of the External World (1914). His aim is to establish a middle ground between synthesis and analysis: to show how most of the disagreements between Bergson and Russell can be resolved without compromising the (...) central principles of their thought. Throughout this paper, I explicate Nicod’s exposition of two points of contention between Bergson and Russell: (1) the nature of sense-data and analysis, and (2) the relation between geometry and the sensible world. I will also show that his attempt to reconcile synthesis and analysis results in an innovative account of representation inspired by an early reading of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. In the conclusion, I reflect on how Nicod’s proficiency to engage with two increasingly diverging philosophical programmes, namely early analytic philosophy and the French epistemological tradition, could have affected the development of early twentieth-century philosophy. (shrink)

Traditional theories construe approximate truth or truthlikeness as a measure of closeness to facts, singular facts, and idealization as an act of either assuming zero of otherwise very small differences from facts or imagining ideal conditions under which scientific laws are either approximately true or will be so when the conditions are relaxed. I first explain the serious but not insurmountable difficulties for the theories of approximation, and then argue that more serious and perhaps insurmountable difficulties for the theory of (...) idealization force us to sever its close tie to approximation. This leads to an appreciation of lawlikeness as a measure of closeness to laws, which I argue is the real measure of idealization whose main purpose is to carve nature at its joints. (shrink)

Les sentiments d'ordre temporel s'étalent dans chaque branche du fait musical et dans chacun de ses moments. Les pratiques musicales se présentent donc comme des actes de temporalisation qui mettent en jeu l'ensemble du monde vital du sujet et activent ses mécanismes fonciers : la foi en l'avenir, la peur de la mort, l'angoisse du futur, le regret du passé, l'ancrage dans le présent, la fuite devant le présent, tout un univers existentiel qui ne touche pas seulement la musique mais (...) la vie humaine dans toute sa magnitude. Qu'il s'agisse des dispositions psychologiques profondes ou de la fuite virtuelle devant des contraintes inévitables, telles que la mort elle-même, l'art musical secoue l'affectivité. Ce serait dans ce type d'émotion, où se réunissent expérience esthétique et vécu existentiel, qu'il faudrait plonger à la recherche d'une spécificité de la musique parmi les faits sociaux. (shrink)

Qu'est-ce que la "non-politique"? Est-elle pensable? Pourquoi l'évidence de la politique est-elle si forte? L'histoire de la philosophie occidentale est une tentation toujours renouvelée de "penser la politique depuis la non-politique". Nous pouvons indiquer qu'au moins, dans la modernité, les théoriciens du contrat social inventent déjà une idée révolutionnaire de "l'état de nature" qui est une notion non politique par excellence. Si nous admettons qu'il y a quelque chose de non politique, il y a au moins trois possibilités de penser (...) la non-politique qui nous conduisent à étudier trois théories radicalement distinctes : la "philosophie de l'avenir" de Nietzsche, la "psychanalyse" de Freud et la "non-philosophie" de François Laruelle. Non seulement ce sont les trois possibles conceptions de la non-politique, mais elles mettent en jeu le devenir historique de la notion non politique chez ces trois penseurs d'immanence. Nietzsche est le représentant du primat de la politique : la non-politique finit toujours par être surmontée et absorbée par le politique. Freud observe une différence irréductible entre politique et non-politique : l'une ne domine pas l'autre et vice versa. Enfin, Laruelle démontre que c'est la non-politique qui détermine en dernière instance la politique ; c'est l'Un qui fait un usage unilatéral du matériau occasionnel qu'est l'Autorité dont le coeur est la Pensée-Monde. (shrink)

Previous studies in Western contexts have examined the relationships between various board characteristics and CSR, yet the relationships need to be re-examined in non-Western contexts given differential theoretical premises across contexts. We specifically propose that the effects of board characteristics on CSR in Korea should be patterned distinctively from Western-based existing literature, focusing on three important board characteristics, such as a board’s independence, social ties, and diversity. Using a panel dataset from large Korean firms, we found that various relationships between (...) board characteristics and CSR were non-linear, whereas most of the previous research on Western contexts found that the same relationships were linear. Specifically, curvilinear relationships were found between CSR and board independence, CEO-outside director social ties, and educational diversity. Our findings suggest that there is no universal feature of CSR-supportive board characteristics due to the unique characteristics of various institutional contexts. (shrink)

Comme ses voisins, la Chine connaît depuis une quinzaine d'années une forte croissance des TIC. En même temps qu'elles ont favorisé la circulation de l'information et la liberté d'expression, elles ont contribué aux troubles de la personnalité chez les internautes chinois. On peut diviser ces derniers en introvertis et extravertis, correspondant éventuellement à la théorie lacanienne du stade du miroir. Dans un contexte où la tradition du collectivisme domine, les raisons de ce désordre sont analysées. Sans esprit de responsabilité ni (...) respect, les blogs sont remplis d'actes exhibitionnistes et de violence verbale, dépassant largement les limites habituelles des droits individuels. Le Web chinois est-il devenu le paradis de l'expression libre ou le cimetière de la démocratie?Like its neighbors, China has over the past fifteen years a strong ICT growth. At the same time they promoted the flow of information and freedom of expression, they have contributed to personality disorders among Chinese netizens. We can divide these into introverts and outgoing, corresponding possibly to the Lacanian theory of the mirror stage. In a context where the dominant tradition of collectivism, the reasons for this disorder are discussed. No sense of responsibility or respect, blogs are filled with exhibitionists and acts of verbal violence, far exceeding the usual limits of individual rights. The Web is China become a haven of free expression or the graveyard of democracy? (shrink)

Les Burwood, Carol Brady; Changing and Explaining Behaviour by Reward, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 18, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 109–113, https.

Within the same pathogen-stress framework as proposed by Fincher & Thornhill (F&T), we argue further that pathogen stress promotes matrilocal rather than patrilocal family ties which, in turn, slow down the process of modernity; and that pathogen stress promotes social learning or copying, including the adoption of foreign religions.

Are we the people we were? If we are continuants, then the answer to this question is an affirmative one. But it is a moot point whether anything is a continuant. The debate over this issue—of whether there are such things as continuants—is often conducted in the context of theories concerning the apparent passage of time. Thus it has been argued that the tenseless theory of time, according to which time does not really pass, forces us to tear down part (...) of the basis for the intuitive distinction between ordinary, reidentifiable objects on the one hand, and processes on the other, and to regard such objects as mountains as persisting through time in exactly the way that thunderstorms do: by having distinct temporal parts at different times. I confess that I am a tenseless theorist of time, and take that theory to entail such a conclusion about the persistence of objects. But it is not just a certain stance over time’s passage that motivates sympathy towards temporal parts and suspicion of continuants. Thinking of objects as having temporal parts sits more comfortably than does the rival view with two natural assumptions concerning continuity: that beginning and ceasing to exist, at least for most objects, involves underlying changes which are continuous in nature; and that objects exhibit continuity through time, in the sense of not having gaps in their existence. Or so I shall argue in what follows. (shrink)

Le but de cet article est d'examiner le rôle de l'analogie du calcul dans la philosophie du langage de Wittgenstein pendant les périodes intermédiaires et finales. Ce rôle a changé parce que Wittgenstein est passé d'une interprétation stricte à une interprétation large de cette analogie. L'analogie revêt un sens large dès lors que l'on admet que le langage peut être comparé à un calcul d'une multitude de manières et pour une multitude de raisons différentes. Le trait commun aux deux interprétations (...) consiste en leur ambition d'éradiquer un mentalisme conduisant à prendre la pensée et la compréhension pour des processus et des états se produisant dans l'esprit du locuteur, mais Wittgenstein a progressivement découvert qu'une lecture stricte de l'analogie induisait une représentation fausse du rôle des règles dans le langage. (shrink)

Considered by many Taoists and non-Taoists alike to be an essential guide to living, Lao-tzu's Treatise on the Response of the Tao was written by the twelfth-century sage Le Ying-chang. Presenting foundational teachings and practices of the Action and Karma school of Taoism, it is replete with folk stories illustrating the teachings and an introductory essay that discusses the more esoteric meaning of the passages. Told with clarity and depth, these seminal Taoist teachings offer guidance on leading a balanced (...) healthy life. (shrink)

E. J. Lowe sets out in a recent paper1 to refute McTaggart's proof of the unreality of time, by exposing an ‘indexical fallacy’ in his disproof of the existence of tensed (i. e., A-series) facts.2 Lowe then develops an original account of what makes time the dimension of change, based on his own account of tensed facts. But in our opinion he fails on both counts: (1) he fails to refute McTaggart's perfectly sound disproof of tensed facts, which shows that (...) time can be real only if (Lowe and McTaggart not withstanding) it needs no tensed facts, and (2) he fails to explain the temporal character of change, since his account of it has an exact spatial analogue. In what follows we argue these two points in turn. (shrink)

Forty years after it first appeared, Sidney Shoemaker's much-read article, "Time without Change" , with its striking thought experiment, still dominates discussions of this intriguing topic. And rightly so: it is imaginative, subtle, and controversial. But times have changed, as they do, and in particular, the epistemological context in which Shoemaker was writing, overshadowed as it was by verificationism, no longer constrains our thinking as once it did. This is the age of bold and unashamedly realist metaphysical argument, in which (...) demands for evidential, as opposed to a priori, support for its theses are rarely made. (shrink)

La philosophie contemporaine et la phénoménologie du corps, en visant à rendre le corps plus multiple, plus habité par l'altérité y compris technique (J. Derrida, J.-L. Nancy), ont fait évoluer profondément le problème du lien entre "l'âme" et le corps ; et cela au-delà des contours de la problématique marquée par les recherches cognitives du XXe siècle, qui ont pourtant donné une accélération remarquable à l'étude des rapports entre le cerveau et la machine corporelle. Ces perspectives ont introduit dans le (...) cadre de l'ancien débat, d'origine cartésienne, des variantes liées surtout à l'art, l'écriture et la pensée environnementale. L'Orient et l'Occident se retrouvent ainsi confrontés à un corps aux multiples "décors", qui le spécifient, l'entourent, l'enrichissent, etc. Le Mind Body Problem d'ordre simplement épistémologique, suivant la tradition jusqu'à la seconde moitié du siècle dernier, s'est changé en problème culturel, cognitif, écologique qui récupère de façon critique la notion générale de "vie", de "contexte phénoménologique de vie", d'existence également. Ce volume, issu d'un Colloque organisé par le Collège International de Philosophie, a voulu reconsidérer les tenants et aboutissants de ce changement, pour le développement d'une perspective de philosophie du corps impliquant une multitude d'intersections trans-et multidisciplinaires et trans- et multiculturelles : entre esthétique, arts du spectacle, phénoménologie, écologie, histoire de l'art et de la pensée de l'art, pensée orientale, nouvelles sciences cognitives, Cultural Studies. (shrink)

Space and time are the most fundamental features of our experience of the world, and yet they are also the most perplexing. Does time really flow, or is that simply an illusion? Did time have a beginning? What does it mean to say that time has a direction? Does space have boundaries, or is it infinite? Is change really possible? Could space and time exist in the absence of any objects or events? What, in the end, are space and time? (...) Do they really exist, or are they simply the constructions of our minds? Robin Le Poidevin provides a clear, witty, and stimulating introduction to these deep questions and many other mind-boggling puzzles and paradoxes. He gives a vivid sense of the difficulties raised by our ordinary ideas about space and time, but he also gives us the basis to think about these problems independently, avoiding large amounts of jargon and technicality. His book is an invitation to think philosophically rather than a sustained argument for particular conclusions, but Le Poidevin does advance and defend a number of controversial views. He argues, for example, that time does not actually flow, that it is possible for space and time to be both finite and yet be without boundaries, and that causation is the key to an understanding of one of the deepest mysteries of time: its direction. Drawing on a variety of vivid examples from science, history, and literature, Travels in Four Dimensions brings to life some of the most profound questions imaginable. (shrink)

We present a model of rational behavior by which we characterize business ethical dilemmas as trade-offs between processes and consequences. As an illustration, we formulate the oil industry's business ethical dilemma as a trade-off between a socially detrimental process (emitting greenhouse gases, hence inducing a risk of climate change) and a self-interested consequence (profits). The proposed framework allows us to specify two types of strategies, differing by whether priority is given to the consequences or to the processes. We analyze and (...) illustrate these strategies at both the behavioral and the discursive levels. In particular, communication strategies raise questions about good faith in business argumentation, in the sense that business discourse may or may not be consistent with actual assumptions and/or actual behaviors. We conclude on possible drivers of more ethical business behavior. (shrink)

Riassunto: La filosofia originale cinese è una sublimazione della coscienza culturale umana di base - la coscienza della vita e della riproduzione - che è l’unificazione del “Concetto di yin e yang” e del “Concetto di ciclo di vita “ in cui “lo yin e lo yang si uniscono per creare tutte le cose, e il ciclio dà una vita senza fine. La cultura originale cinese determina la visione filosofica, la visione artistica, il temperamento emotivo, la benessere psicologica e lo (...) spirito nazionale della nazione cinese. Il sistema filosofico cinese, che rappresenta l’unificazione della cosmologia, dell’epistemologia e della metodologia della nazione cinese, è un sistema filosofico completo e maturo che si è formato nella società tardo primitiva molto prima delle Dinastie Xia, Shang e Zhou. La cultura originale cinese, dalla cultura della ceramica dipinta di 7.000 anni fa fino ai giorni nostri, dalla cultura archeologica sotterranea alla cultura di massa terrestre, è un concetto ampio di belle arti, determinato da una visione filosofica dell’arte plastica di osservare gli oggetti e prendere immmagini. La cultura originale e la filosofia originale della Cina primitiva sono ancora conservate in un’eredità storica estremamente ricca e completa nella vita sociale della cultura di massa. Per questo motivo la Cina è l’unico Paese tra le civiltà antiche che non aver subito una frattura culturale. (shrink)

Photographs, paintings, rigid sculptures: all these provide examples of static images. It is true that they change—photographs fade, paintings darken and sculptures crumble—but what change they undergo is irrelevant to their representational content. A static image is one that represents by virtue of properties which remain largely unchanged throughout its existence. Because of this defining feature, according to a long tradition in aesthetics, a static image can only represent an instantaneous moment, or to be more exact the state of affairs (...) obtaining at that moment'. It cannot represent movement and the passage of time. This traditional view mirrors a much older one in metaphysics: that change is to be conceived of as a series of instantaneous states and hence that an interval of time is composed of extensionless moments. The metaphysical view has been involved in more controversy than its aesthetic counterpart. Aristotle identified it as one of the premises of Zeno's arrow paradox and Augustine employed it in his proof of the unreality of time. (shrink)

Humankind is facing many existential global problems that require international and transgenerational efforts to be solved. Preparing our next generation with sufficient knowledge and skills to deal with such problems is imperative. Fortunately, the digital environment provides foundational conditions for children’s and adolescents’ exploration and self-learning, which might help them cultivate the necessary knowledge and skills for future survival. We conducted the Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) analytics on a dataset of 2069 students from 54 Vietnamese elementary, secondary, and high schools (...) to test this presumption. The results showed that students with higher digital literacy are more curious and have better knowledge regarding global issues (i.e., climate change, disease, overpopulation, aging, etc.). Students’ curiosity also mediates the relationship between digital literacy and global issues knowledge. Based on these findings, we argue that digital explorative space is essential for digital natives’ education for survival, individually (i.e., for future employment requirements) and socially (i.e., for making informed decisions and creating innovations that can be helpful to society). Children’s and adolescents’ exposure to digital explorative space should be promoted to improve their digital literacy rather than prohibition. During the exploration, emotional intelligence is critical in mitigating existential risks, or threats, to digital natives to navigate and overcome chaotic processes occurring in unchartered waters in the virtual world. (shrink)

Neurophenomenology (Varela 1996) is not only philosophical but also empirical and experimental. Our purpose in this article is to illustrate concretely the efficiency of this approach in the field of neuroscience and, more precisely here, in epileptology. A number of recent observations have indicated that epileptic seizures do not arise suddenly simply as the effect of random fluctuations of brain activity, but require a process of pre-seizure changes that start long before. This has been reported at two different levels of (...) description: on the one hand, the epileptic patient often experiences some warning symptoms that precede seizures from several minutes to hours in the form of very specific lived events. On the other hand, the analyses of brain electrical activities have provided strong evidence that it is possible to detect a pre-seizure state in the neuronal dynamics several minutes before the electro-clinical onset of a seizure. We review here some of the ongoing work of our research group concerning seizure anticipation. In particular, we discuss experimental evidence of upward (local-to-global) formation of conscious experience and its neural substrate, but also of the downward (global-to-local) determination of local neuronal activity by situated conscious activity and its substrate large-scale neural assemblies. This causal role of conscious experience may lead to new kinds of therapy for epileptic patients. (shrink)

PurposeTo investigate spontaneous brain activity in patients with dry eye and healthy control using the fractional amplitude of low frequency fluctuation technique with the aim of elucidating the relationship between the clinical symptoms of DE and changes in brain function.Material and MethodsA total of 28 patients with DE and 28 matched healthy volunteers were enrolled. Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging scans were performed in both groups. Then all subjects were required to complete a comprehensive Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale. Receiver (...) operating characteristic curve analysis was used to evaluate the differences in fALFF values between the two groups and their diagnostic value. Linear correlations between HADS and fALFF values in different brain regions of DE patients were analyzed using the Pearson correlation coefficient.ResultsPatients with DE had significantly higher fALFF values in the left calcarine sulcus than the HC group, while fALFF values in the bilateral middle frontal gyrus and right MFG/right inferior frontal gyrus were significantly lower in DE patients than in HC group. fALFF values had a high diagnostic value for differentiating patients with DE from the HC group. Right MFG and right MFG/IFG were significantly correlated with HADS values.ConclusionOur study found that DE mainly involved functional disorders in the brain areas of the left CS, bilateral MFG and right MFG/right IFG, which helped us to find possible clinical features of DE disease and reflected the potential pathological mechanism of DE. (shrink)

In her recent book _A Duty to Resist_ (2018), Candice Delmas contends that both beneficiaries and victims of injustices have a duty to resist unjust laws and to try to change them, and proposes several ways of grounding this duty. One of these proposed groundings appeals to considerations of fairness. Delmas holds that anyone who refuses to participate in resisting some injustice, including victims of that injustice, can be accused of free-riding and thus of unfair conduct that violates the duty (...) of fair play, which means that they have a fairness-based duty to resist. In this paper, I critique this attempt to ascribe a duty to resist grounded in considerations of fairness specifically to victims of injustice. Against Delmas, I argue that victims of injustice do not have this fairness-based duty to resist because, unlike the beneficiaries of an injustice, they cannot be considered free-riders when they do not participate in resistance to the injustice. I then discuss additional problematic implications of Delmas’s view, focusing on the issue of victim-blaming, and show how these problems can be avoided. In this way, I hope to contribute to the urgent project of determining who has a duty to resist injustice. (shrink)

L’examen du « canon des Ecritures », après la consécration de l’expression par Athanase au IVe siècle, révèle d’abord une époque où une certaine fluidité caractérisait la réflexion sur l’extension des Ecritures et sur leurs limites. A partir du IVe siècle, une mutation décisive se produit, à laquelle il faut adjoindre une autre évolution sémantique préparée de longue date à travers l’emploi de diatèkè, traduit en latin par testamentum. Ainsi apparaissent deux temps forts dans l’histoire des Ecritures aux premiers siècles (...) du christianisme. Le premier est celui de l’extension du concept de livre saint à d’autres textes que les écrits hérités du judaïsme ; le second, dans la seconde moitié du IVe siècle, est celui des efforts de délimitation de l’Ancien et du Nouveau Testament, des décisions prises pour trancher les débats, commencés deux siècles plus tôt. L’examen de quelques-uns des problèmes que pose l’extension du canon et qui s’offrent ici à l’historien confirme qu’ils ne sont pas résolus définitivement par les Eglises.An examination of the ³canon of the Scriptures,² after the consecration of Athanasius¹ expression in the 4th century, first of all reveals a period when a certain fluidity characterized reflection on the extension of the Scriptures and their limits. From the 4th century a decisive change came about, to which must be added another semantic evolution, which was prepared for a long time through the use of diatéké, translated in Latin by testamentum. Thus, two important periods in the history of the Scriptures appear in the first centuries of Christianity. In the first there was an extension of the concept of the sacred book to texts other than the inherited writings of Judaism. The second period, in the second half of the 4th century, concerns efforts to demarcate the Old and New Testaments, and decisions taken to settle the debates begun two centuries earlier. The examination of some of these problems about the extension of the canon is offered here to the historian and confirms that they are not definitively resolved by the Churches. (shrink)

Are we the people we were? If we are continuants, then the answer to this question is an affirmative one. But it is a moot point whether anything is a continuant. The debate over this issue—of whether there are such things as continuants—is often conducted in the context of theories concerning the apparent passage of time. Thus it has been argued that the tenseless theory of time, according to which time does not really pass, forces us to tear down part (...) of the basis for the intuitive distinction between ordinary, reidentifiable objects on the one hand, and processes on the other, and to regard such objects as mountains as persisting through time in exactly the way that thunderstorms do: by having distinct temporal parts at different times. I confess that I am a tenseless theorist of time, and take that theory to entail such a conclusion about the persistence of objects. But it is not just a certain stance over time’s passage that motivates sympathy towards temporal parts and suspicion of continuants. Thinking of objects as having temporal parts sits more comfortably than does the rival view with two natural assumptions concerning continuity: that beginning and ceasing to exist, at least for most objects, involves underlying changes which are continuous in nature; and that objects exhibit continuity through time, in the sense of not having gaps in their existence. Or so I shall argue in what follows. (shrink)

The social environment influences what information individuals sample: people are often exposed to alternatives that are popular. This can systematically change an individual's evaluation of an alternative if she had previously been avoiding it due to a negative evaluation. The authors show that social exposure can have positive or negative effects on evaluation, depending on how popularity and prior evaluations interact. This theory was supported by a large‐scale analysis of data from a hotel chain.

The rhetorical and demonstrative function of images and comparisons in Gregory of Nyssa’s De anima et resurrectione is well known. They aim at warranting the faith in resurrection and making it desirable. The prospect of this study is to show that they belong to the progress of the debate such as Gregory has composed it. Their quality changes while the author moves from the philosophical likelihood to the truth of the Scriptures. He opposes one secular image to a biblical one (...) : at the beginning of the dialogue he refuses the comparison which reduces man to a bubble ; in the last part he chooses the solid composition (pukasmos) of the skènopègia (Ps. 117, 27). Other pictures are partly accepted, specially those which are borrowed from the sphere of tekhnè, whereas Macrina dismisses the Platonic myth of the soul’s chariot. Nevertheless, the end of the dialogue becomes pregnant with images derived from the Bible, when Macrina and his brother are discussing resurrection itself. Then by the means of the comparisons which they select, the biblical revelation and the facts of the phusis finally unite. Nature in some way supplants tekhnè, which has been honoured in the first half of the dialogue. (shrink)

The rhetorical and demonstrative function of images and comparisons in Gregory of Nyssa’s De anima et resurrectione is well known. They aim at warranting the faith in resurrection and making it desirable. The prospect of this study is to show that they belong to the progress of the debate such as Gregory has composed it. Their quality changes while the author moves from the philosophical likelihood to the truth of the Scriptures. He opposes one secular image to a biblical one (...) : at the beginning of the dialogue he refuses the comparison which reduces man to a bubble ; in the last part he chooses the solid composition (pukasmos) of the skènopègia (Ps. 117, 27). Other pictures are partly accepted, specially those which are borrowed from the sphere of tekhnè, whereas Macrina dismisses the Platonic myth of the soul’s chariot. Nevertheless, the end of the dialogue becomes pregnant with images derived from the Bible, when Macrina and his brother are discussing resurrection itself. Then by the means of the comparisons which they select, the biblical revelation and the facts of the phusis finally unite. Nature in some way supplants tekhnè, which has been honoured in the first half of the dialogue. (shrink)

As an important factor related to the interests of enterprises, the attitude and behavior of employees are related to the company’s survival and the realization of business objectives. However, in recent years, with the rapid development of emerging industries and industry changes, the turnover rate of employees in the whole enterprise has been greatly improved. Frequent turnover of personnel will have a great impact on the stability of the company, the competitiveness of the enterprise, and the operating cost. Employee loyalty (...) and corporate culture satisfaction assessment is the core of sustainable corporate development, but most of the traditional analysis studies are based on the performance approach, using employee overtime, employee achievement, and company effectiveness as data sources, the former performance data is only a side view of the company’s situation, the latter as the data source of this study is a one-sided and involute form, and the data is not stable. Therefore, this paper proposes an analysis of employee loyalty and corporate culture satisfaction assessment based on sentiment analysis, using association rules and sentiment lexicons from anonymous employee evaluations to analyze the actual data. (shrink)

In the past decade the central principles of western feminist theory have been dramatically challenged. many feminists have endorsed post-structuralism's rejection of essentialist theoretical categories, and have added a powerful gender dimension to contemporary critiques of modernity. Earlier 'women' have been radically undermined, and newer concerns with 'difference', 'identity', and 'power' have emerged. Destabilizing Theory explores these developments in a set of specially commissioned essays by feminist theorists. Does this change amount to a real shift within feminist theory, or will (...) feminism's links with an emancipatory modernism reinstate an older political agenda? Can we transcend the common counterposition of equality and difference, or is feminism condemned to argue within the terms of this binary opposition? (shrink)