The search for a quantum theory of the gravitational field is one of the great open problems in theoretical physics. This book presents a self-contained discussion of the concepts, methods and applications that can be expected in such a theory. The two main approaches to its construction - the direct quantisation of Einstein's general theory of relativity and string theory - are covered. Whereas the first attempts to construct a viable theory for the gravitational field alone, string theory assumes that (...) a quantum theory of gravity will be achieved only through a unification of all the interactions. However, both employ the general method of quantisation of constrained systems, which is described together with illustrative examples relevant for quantum gravity. There is a detailed presentation of the main approaches employed in quantum general relativity: path-integral quantisation, the background-field method and canonical quantum gravity in the metric, connection and loop formulations. The discussion of string theory centres around its quantum-gravitational aspects and the comparison with quantum general relativity. Physical applications discussed at length include the quantisation of black holes, quantum cosmology, the indications of a discrete structure of spacetime, and the origin of irreversibility. This book will be of interest to researchers and students working in relativity and gravitation, cosmology, quantum field theory and related topics. It will also be of interest to mathematicians and philosophers of science. (shrink)

Auf den ersten Blick könnten die Welten, die in diesem Buch aufeinandertreffen, kaum gegensätzlicher sein. Anselm Kiefer, einer der bedeutendsten und international erfolgreichsten Künstler der Gegenwart, beschäftigt sich in seinem Werk mit den wesentlichen Fragen der Gesellschaft. Seine Bilder sind geheimnisvolle Chiffren zur Entschlüsselung der Welt und ihrer immer neuen Rätsel, sie offenbaren Überlagerungen, Durchdringungen, Verschmelzungen. Peter Handke nannte ihn »einen stillen Wilden..., auf dem Sprung, eine Art neuen Alphabets der Malerei zu entwerfen«. Ihm gegenüber Mathias Döpfner, Vorstandsvorsitzender der (...) Axel Springer AG, ursprünglich jedoch Germanist, Musikwissenschaftler, Journalist. Aus dem Kontrast entsteht ein fesselnder, erhellender Dialog über Kunst und Politik, Natur und Mythos, Kultur und Geschichte, Theologie und Ökonomie, Philosophie und Literatur. (shrink)

C'est au croisement des personnalités et des événements que se structure progressivement une culture stratégique. Qu'en est-il de celle de la France, nation bâtie "à coups d'épée"? Quelles expériences l'ont forgée, quelles philosophies la sous-tendent? Telles sont les questions fondamentales auxquelles répond cet ouvrage. Car la stratégie militaire française constitue un objet d'étude à la fois bien et mal connu. Connu puisqu'inscrit dans une histoire intimement liée à la construction d'une identité nationale et internationale dont on constate aujourd'hui encore sur (...) les champs de guerre toute la vivacité. Mal connu cependant lorsqu'il s'agit d'en examiner les fondements idéels et culturels. Cette méconnaissance est liée à la complexité même de toute stratégie. Loin d'être un simple art des moyens, elle produit des concepts, doctrines ou représentations de la guerre qui résultent d'expériences militaires spécifiques mais qui trouvent leurs racines dans des conditions philosophiques à l'oeuvre dans la construction de toute stratégie. La stratégie militaire française constitue un fascinant terrain d'étude : cette indispensable histoire philosophique de la pensée stratégique française — du XVIIIème siècle à nos jours — en est le reflet. Ce premier tome traite de la stratégie continentale. Un second tome à paraître traitera de la stratégie africaine. (shrink)

Nicht zufällig beginnt das theologische Nachdenken über Gut und Böse bis heute immer wieder mit den ersten Kapiteln der Genesis. Sie sind bewusst als Anfang der Tora konzipiert und wollen selbst vom Anfang erzählen - vom Anfang der Menschheit und darin auch vom Anfang des Guten und Bösen. Texte, die so im Fokus stehen, werden bekanntlich oft theologisch überfrachtet mit Interessen und Vorurteilen. Diese Untersuchung möchte die biblischen Texte von dogmatischem Ballast befreien und deren ureigenen Beitrag zu der immer noch (...) brisanten Frage nach Gut und Böse zur Sprache bringen. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on what’s novel in the perspective that the prediction error minimization (PEM) framework affords on the cognitive-scientific project of explaining intelligence by appeal to internal representations. It shows how truth-conditional and resemblance-based approaches to representation in generative models may be integrated. The PEM framework in cognitive science is an approach to cognition and perception centered on a simple idea: organisms represent the world by constantly predicting their own internal states. PEM theories often stress the hierarchical structure of (...) the generative models they posit. The novel explanatory power of the PEM account derives largely from the way in which pairs of generative and recognition models interact. “Predictive coding” refers to an encoding strategy in which predicted portions of an input signal are subtracted from the actual signal received, so that only the difference between the two is passed as output to the next stage of information processing. (shrink)

Pour comprendre l'importance de l'oeuvre de Rousseau, il est nécessaire de retracer la trajectoire de cette figure singulière et controversée, au coeur du XVIIIe siècle. Le lecteur est ici invité à voir comment Rousseau inaugure la forme la plus conséquente d'autocritique des Lumières, au point de se placer à l'épicentre de la modernité. Les Lumières en effet s'incarnaient à Paris dans les salons par un certain rapport à la culture et à la sociabilité mondaine, qui était devenu un modèle dans (...) toute l'Europe. Réagissant à ce monde brillant de la conversation et des privilèges, Rousseau a explicité les formes de justification sur lesquelles il reposait, en a produit une critique radicale et en a proposé une alternative intellectuelle globale dans son anthropologie, sa politique, sa théorie de l'éducation, son roman et ses écrits autobiographiques. (shrink)

L’objectif principal que nous poursuivons dans cet article est de montrer que pour un phénomène aussi complexe que le schwa, qui ne se laisse pas appréhender de manière triviale, la constitution de corpus s’appuyant sur une méthodologie rigoureuse et explicite est un élément indispensable de la construction des objets phonologiques. A cette fin, nous nous concentrons sur l’étude de la position finale, et plus spécifiquement de l’opposition /Cə#/ vs /C#/, à la lumière de trois enquêtes du projet « Phonologie du (...) français contemporain (PFC) : usages, variétés et structure » : un corpus de Douzens (Aude), un corpus de Biarritz (Pays Basque) et un corpus de Treize-Vents (Vendée). Après avoir resitué la problématique du schwa dans le débat général sur le traitement des positions finales, nous présentons le projet PFC, sa méthodologie et ses outils. Nous exposons enfin les résultats obtenus pour les trois corpus : le corpus de l’Aude représente un français du Midi très conservateur, où l’opposition /Cə#/ vs /C#/ est tenace malgré des variations entre générations ; le corpus du Pays Basque représente un français du Midi en évolution, où cette opposition tend à disparaître mais est résiduellement présente ; le corpus de Vendée (variété rarement décrite) se révèle plus proche du français de référence, et les données indiquent sans ambiguïté que l’opposition /Cə#/ vs /C#/ a été éliminée. Notre conclusion, si la démarche est correcte, est que ces résultats et les analyses qu’ils permettent (y compris l’étude des corrélations entre oral et écrit) seraient difficiles, voire impossible, à obtenir sur la base d’intuitions ou d’observations non contrôlées. (shrink)

Les études tentant de répondre à la question " Qu'est-ce que la justice? " et à cette autre, inséparable, " Qu'est-ce qu'une société juste? " sont assez nombreuses ces dernières années, mais elles ne sont pas toujours faciles d'accès, au contraire du livre d'Alain Durand. Par un discours systématique et structuré, il présente quelques réflexions occasionnées par des lectures ou par des événements et tendances de fond liés à l'actualité. L'auteur se confronte à de grands auteurs qui, depuis Aristote (...) jusqu'à John Rawls, sans oublier d'autres penseurs plus récents, ont substantiellement enrichi les approches de la justice sociale. Une attention particulière est accordée à l'apport du christianisme. La foi, en effet, ne cesse d'apparaître comme une force d'interrogations radicales pour l'élaboration d'une société plus juste. Et l'Eglise, qui doit être attentive aux priorités et aux dérives dans ce domaine, est ainsi conduite à des remises en question, tant en elle-même, que dans un monde devenu éthiquement pluraliste. La lecture de ce livre peut être faite assez librement, par les multiples portes d'entrée qu'il offre. (shrink)

Les sciences humaines sont en crise. Psychologies, sociologies, histoire et ethnologies ont confondu leur visée, l'Homo sapiens, avec une méthode unidimensionnelle héritée d'une physique périmée depuis l'apparition du " Nouvel Esprit Scientifique ". Gilbert Durand constate que cet échec péremptoire n'est dû qu'à un mirage pédagogique. A travers les recherches de pointe des anthropologues renaît l'aurore de retrouvailles avec le destin immémorial de l'Homo sapiens. Nous assistons progressivement à la résurgence d'une " Science de l'homme " qui, dans sa (...) singularité, retrouve bien des données transmises par les savoirs traditionnels : là où la Méthode exerçait son emprise totalitaire, le pluralisme des singularités - le " polythéisme des valeurs " - devient le garant de l'unité compréhensive du Sapiens. Une " raison autre " reconstitue lentement mais sûrement les assises prometteuses d'un " Nouvel Esprit Anthropologique ". (shrink)

No detailed description available for "La qualité de la vie".

We study the minimal complexity of tilings of a plane with a given tile set. We note that every tile set admits either no tiling or some tiling with.

Background: Informed consent in clinical research is mandated throughout the world. Both patient subjects and investigators are required to understand and accept the distinction between research and treatment.Aim: To document the extent and to identify factors associated with therapeutic misconception in a population of patient subjects or parent proxies recruited from a variety of multicentre trials .Patients and methods: The study comprised two phases: the development of a questionnaire to assess the quality of informed consent and a survey of patient (...) subjects based on this questionnaire.Results: A total of 303 patient subjects or parent proxies were contacted and 279 questionnaires were analysed. The median age was 49.5 years, sex ratio was 1 and 61% of respondents were professionally active. Overall memorisation of the oral or written communication of informed consent was good , and satisfaction with the process was around 70%. Therapeutic misconception was present in 70% of respondents, who expected to receive better care and ignored the consequence of randomisation and treatment comparisons. This was positively associated with the acuteness and severity of the disease.Conclusion: The authors suggest that the risk of therapeutic misconception be specifically addressed in consent forms as an educational tool for both patients and investigators. (shrink)

Depuis les années 1960, Gilbert Durand a fondé et développé une méthodologie et une épistémologie novatrices de l'étude des imaginaires individuels et culturels qui ont inspiré une Ecole de Grenoble, qui n'a cessé d'essaimer à travers un grand nombre de centres de recherches en France et dans le monde. Sa pensée, connue à travers la mythocritique et la mythanalyse, enrichie par une vaste culture historique et pluriculturelle, a été appliquée dans les domaines les plus divers des sciences humaines et (...) sociales. Loin d'être un système clos, son oeuvre a inspiré une épistémologie ouverte qui a permis, sur la base des acquis fondamentaux, de se préciser, de s'adapter à des champs nouveaux, de recevoir les apports d'autres écoles, courants ou traditions culturelles. Les contributions ici rassemblées permettront de mieux situer l'émergence de la problématique de l'imaginaire dans différentes disciplines ou champs d'études, de présenter les innovations théoriques apportées par l'anthropologie de l'imaginaire de G Durand, d'illustrer les innovations qu'elles auront permises, d'amorcer des éléments de prospective pour les chantiers actuellement en cours d'exploration. (shrink)

In this paper, we consider how certain longstanding philosophical questions about mental representation may be answered on the assumption that cognitive and perceptual systems implement hierarchical generative models, such as those discussed within the prediction error minimization framework. We build on existing treatments of representation via structural resemblance, such as those in Gładziejewski :559–582, 2016) and Gładziejewski and Miłkowski, to argue for a representationalist interpretation of the PEM framework. We further motivate the proposed approach to content by arguing that it (...) is consistent with approaches implicit in theories of unsupervised learning in neural networks. In the course of this discussion, we argue that the structural representation proposal, properly understood, has more in common with functional-role than with causal/informational or teleosemantic theories. In the remainder of the paper, we describe the PEM framework for approximate Bayesian inference in some detail, and discuss how structural representations might arise within the proposed Bayesian hierarchies. After explicating the notion of variational inference, we define a subjectively accessible measure of misrepresentation for hierarchical Bayesian networks by appeal to the Kullbach–Leibler divergence between posterior generative and approximate recognition densities, and discuss a related measure of objective misrepresentation in terms of correspondence with the facts. (shrink)

To be able to make “change” happen in the lives of patients entrusted to his care, Watzlawick says he tried to produce a theory about it. He was forced to acknowledge that the mechanisms of change resist systematization and, therefore, all wishes to elicit them as well.Well-being is to therapy what discovery is to thought and the event is to History: the position – unforeseen, unforeseeable – in reality of what did not hitherto exist. And heuristics would be, if not (...) a science, since there could be no science of change, then at least the name given to reflection on its mystery. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the processing of informal arguments, that is, arguments involving “probable truth.” A model of informal argument processing is presented that is based upon Hample's (1977) expansion of Toulmin's (1958) model of argument structure. The model postulates that a claim activates an attitude, the two components forming a complex that in turn activates reasons. Furthermore, the model holds occurrence of the reason, or possibly the claim and the reason, activates values. Three experiments are described that provide (...) support for the model. (shrink)

This paper serves two purposes: first, the proposition of an ethical fiduciary theory that substantiates the often-cited assertion that the patient–physician relationship is fiduciary in nature; and second, the application of this theory to the case of informed consent. Patients’ decision-making preferences vary significantly. While some seek fully autonomous decision-making, others prefer to delegate parts of their decision. Therefore, we propose an ethical fiduciary theory that allows physician and patient to jointly determine the physician’s role on a spectrum from fiduciary (...) as advisor to fiduciary as agent. Drawing on legal concepts of the fiduciary relationship and on phenomenological accounts of obligation by Lévinas and Løgstrup, our theory relies on the key attributes of trust, vulnerability and otherness. Finally, practical implications of this theory for the informed consent process are developed: we propose a preassessment of patients’ risk and value profiles as well as a restructuring of the oral consent interview and the written consent materials. (shrink)

Prominent philosophers have argued that contradictions contain either too much or too little information to be useful. We dispute this with what we call the “Paradox of the Two Firefighters.” Suppose you are awakened in your hotel room by a fire alarm. You open the door. You see three possible ways out: left, right, straight ahead. You see two firefighters. One says there is exactly one safe route and it is to your left. The other says there is exactly one (...) safe route and it is to your right. While the two firemen are giving you contradictory information, they are also both giving you the perhaps useful information that there is a safe way out and it is not straight ahead. We give two analyses. The first uses the “Opinion Tetrahedron,” introduced by Dunn as a generalization of Audun Jøsang’s “Opinion Triangle.” The Opinion Tetrahedron in effect embeds the values of the “Belnap-Dunn 4-valued Logic” into a context of subjective probability generalized to allow for degrees of belief, disbelief, and two kinds of uncertainty—that in which the reasoner has too little information and that in which the reasoner has too much information. Jøsang had only a single value for uncertainty. We also present an alternative solution, again based on subjective probability but of a more standard type. This solution builds upon “linear opinion pooling.” Kiefer had already developed apparatus for assessing risk using expert opinion, and this influences the second solution. Finally, we discuss how these solutions might apply to “Big Data” and the World Wide Web. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that theories of perception that appeal to Helmholtz’s idea of unconscious inference (“Helmholtzian” theories) should be taken literally, i.e. that the inferences appealed to in such theories are inferences in the full sense of the term, as employed elsewhere in philosophy and in ordinary discourse. -/- In the course of the argument, I consider constraints on inference based on the idea that inference is a deliberate acton, and on the idea that inferences depend on the (...) syntactic structure of representations. I argue that inference is a personal-level but sometimes unconscious process that cannot in general be distinguished from association on the basis of the structures of the representations over which it’s defined. I also critique arguments against representationalist interpretations of Helmholtzian theories, and argue against the view that perceptual inference is encapsulated in a module. (shrink)

Programmed cell death (PCD) in unicellular organisms is in some instances an altruistic trait. When the beneficiaries are clones or close kin, kin selection theory may be used to explain the evolution of the trait, and when the trait evolves in groups of distantly related individuals, group or multilevel selection theory is invoked. In mixed microbial communities, the benefits are also available to unrelated taxa. But the evolutionary ecology of PCD in communities is poorly understood. Few hypotheses have been offered (...) concerning the community role of PCD despite its far-reaching effects. The hypothesis we consider here is that PCD is a black queen. The Black Queen Hypothesis (BQH) outlines how public goods arising from a leaky function are exploited by other taxa in the community. Black Queen (BQ) traits are essential for community survival, but only some members bear the cost of possessing them, while others lose the trait In addition, BQ traits have been defined in terms of adaptive gene loss, and it is unknown whether this has occurred for PCD. Our conclusion is that PCD fulfils the two most important criteria of a BQ (leakiness and costliness), but that more empirical data are needed for assessing the remaining two criteria. In addition, we hold that for viewing PCD as a BQ, the original BQH needs to include social traits. Thus, despite some empirical and conceptual shortcomings, the BQH provides a helpful avenue for investigating PCD in microbial communities. (shrink)

The compact and, with \ M\, very massive object located at the center of the Milky Way is currently the very best candidate for a supermassive black hole in our immediate vicinity. The strongest evidence for this is provided by measurements of stellar orbits, variable X-ray emission, and strongly variable polarized near-infrared emission from the location of the radio source Sagittarius A* in the middle of the central stellar cluster. Simultaneous near-infrared and X-ray observations of SgrA* have revealed insights into (...) the emission mechanisms responsible for the powerful near-infrared and X-ray flares from within a few tens to one hundred Schwarzschild radii of such a putative SMBH. If SgrA* is indeed a SMBH it will, in projection onto the sky, have the largest event horizon and will certainly be the first and most important target for very long baseline interferometry observations currently being prepared by the event horizon telescope. These observations in combination with the infrared interferometry experiment GRAVITY at the very large telescope interferometer and other experiments across the electromagnetic spectrum might yield proof for the presence of a black hole at the center of the Milky Way. The large body of evidence continues to discriminate the identification of SgrA* as a SMBH from alternative possibilities. It is, however, unclear when the ever mounting evidence for SgrA* being associated with a SMBH will suffice as a convincing proof. Additional compelling evidence may come from future gravitational wave observatories. This manuscript reviews the observational facts, theoretical grounds and conceptual aspects for the case of SgrA* being a black hole. We treat theory and observations in the framework of the philosophical discussions about “realism and underdetermination”, as this line of arguments allows us to describe the situation in observational astrophysics with respect to supermassive black holes. Questions concerning the existence of supermassive black holes and in particular SgrA* are discussed using causation as an indispensable element. We show that the results of our investigation are convincingly mapped out by this combination of concepts. (shrink)