In this work, we focus on the problem of selecting low-level heuristics in a hyperheuristic approach with offline learning, for the solution of instances of different problem domains. The objective is to improve the performance of the offline hyperheuristic approach, identifying equivalence classes in a set of instances of different problems and selecting the best performing heuristics in each of them. A methodology is proposed as the first step of a set of instances of all problems, and the generic characteristics (...) of each instance and the performance of the heuristics in each one of them are considered to define the vectors of characteristics and make a grouping of classes. Metalearning with statistical tests is used to select the heuristics for each class. Finally, we used the Naive Bayes to test the set instances with k-fold cross-validation, and we compared all results statistically with the best-known values. In this research, the methodology was tested by applying it to the problems of capacitated vehicle routing and graph coloring. The experimental results show that the proposed methodology can improve the performance of the offline hyperheuristic approach, correctly identifying the classes of instances and applying the appropriate heuristics in each case. This is based on the statistical comparison of the results obtained with those of the state of the art of each instance. (shrink)

BackgroundResearch has demonstrated that exposure to suicide can lead to increased vulnerability for self-harm or suicide. As a result, ideation-to-action models of suicide recognise exposure as a significant risk factor which may be implicated in the translation of thoughts into actions. However, few studies have tested this theoretical link explicitly within an adolescent population, and examined how it compares to other types of bereavements.MethodsA 6-month prospective questionnaire study was conducted with 185 Scottish adolescents aged 11–17. The questionnaire included measures on (...) experiences with bereavement and lifetime engagement in self-harm, as well as measures of defeat, entrapment, social support, coping, and other psychological variables.ResultsAt baseline, 11% of young people reported exposure to a suicide death, and 62% to a non-suicide death. In addition, 21% of pupils reported ever engaging in self-harm, while 24% had experienced self-harm ideation without engaging in it. Cross-sectional multivariate logistic regressions showed that maladaptive coping, family social support, glorifying/normalising beliefs about suicide, and family self-harm were significantly associated with self-harm group membership. At follow-up, 9% of pupils reported exposure to a suicide death and 11% to a non-suicide death for the first time. A total of 29% of the sample reported self-harm at T2, and 23% reported self-harm ideation without engaging in it. Multivariate analyses found that stigmatising beliefs about suicide, glorifying/normalising beliefs about suicide, and self-harm ideation at baseline were the only variables to predict self-harm group membership prospectively. Bereavement experiences, whether by suicide or non-suicide, did not predict self-harm group status at baseline nor at follow-up.ConclusionsThis study provides support for the validity of a theoretical model of suicide, even though predictive ability over the 6-months period was limited. Although difficulties with recruitment may have limited the statistical power, this study provides insight into the prevalence and experiences of suicide bereavement among adolescents and the factors related to the onset and maintenance of self-harm. (shrink)

Tuberculosis en América Latina y el Caribe: reflexiones desde la bioética Tuberculose na América Latina e no Caribe: reflexões da bioética The objective of this article is to analyze the conditions of access to health services by people with tuberculosis in Latin America and the Caribbean, reflecting on the public health aspects involved from a bioethical perspective. A literature review of the context of tuberculosis in LAC based on epidemiological data was performed. The results were analyzed from its relationship with (...) the social determinants of health and the ethical principles that guide medical practice. Tuberculosis is a pressing public health problem in the region because of its family, social, economic and health impact. It mainly affects vulnerable individuals and populations. Health services violate ethical principles. Tuberculosis is a serious ethics and public health problem in the region that causes death, disability and increased poverty. It is imperative to ensure the right to health services and to understand the individual and public health consequences of non-adherence to treatment. It is important that national tuberculosis control strategies include principles of dignity and non-discrimination of the sick, changes in the social determinants of the disease, and respect for the ethnicity, language culture and identity of patients. Para citar este artículo / To reference this article / Para citar este artigo Muñoz del Carpio-Toia A, Sánchez-Pérez HJ, Verges de López C, López-Dávila LM, Sotomayor-Saavedra MA, Sorokin P. Tuberculosis en América Latina y el Caribe: reflexiones desde la bioética. pers. bioét. 2018; 22: 331-357. DOI: 10.5294/pebi.2018.22.2.10. (shrink)

El artículo sostiene que repensar un nuevo desarrollo es el reto en estos tiempos de encrucijadas, lo cual obliga a una relectura crítica de las teorías que permitirá aprender a desaprender. Señala que las nuevas realidades latinoamericanas se manifiestan como consecuencia de tres procesos-eje: La globalización y los efectos de los procesos de integración económica; las dificultades para la organización democrática de la vida colectiva de la sociedad, y las desigualdades sociales. Critica el hecho de que hoy se glorifica al (...) capitalismo liberal como el único modelo económico posible y deseable, el único que garantizaría la continuidad de la democracia, y postula que la nueva realidad entre la innovación social y el retorno al territorio requiere la modificación de las mentalidades individuales y colectivas e implica una vasta labor de formación de los agentes locales y de la población local. Tras exponer algunas experiencias en América Latina, concluye que sólo desde una nueva cultura del desarrollo con el compromiso de construir la gran obra de un mundo con armonía entre la vida urbana y los espacios rurales, entre el Sur y el Norte, es posible dar sentido a las políticas y las acciones. (shrink)

Se escribe que el tiempo y el espacio han perdido su significado tradicional. Por eso Manuel Castells habla de nueva Era y Alain Touraine de ruptura. El Norte está cada vez más disperso y fragmentado y el Sur también. Podría decirse que ahora hay muchos Nortesy muchos Sures. Por eso hay visiones tan distin­tas del intenso e imprevisible proceso iniciado hace apenas tres décadas. Nadie sabe hacia dónde nos va a conducir el proceso de cambio en esta nueva Era de (...) la información y la comunicaci.. (shrink)

Consequence is at the heart of logic, and an account of consequence offers a vital tool in the evaluation of arguments. This text presents what the authors term as 'logical pluralism' arguing that the notion of logical consequence doesn't pin down one deductive consequence relation; it allows for many of them.

Background: Research must respect ethical norms and informed consent, with appropriate cultural adaptation and verification of its understanding in indigenous communities of the Andean and Amazonian regions, including social and medical research. Objective: Determine to what extent IC is understood in an Aymara community in Peru, specifically as concerns a school nutrition project. Methodology: A prospective, quasi-experimental field study of an educational intervention was conducted in Puno during 2015. The objectives and procedures of the school nutrition project in question were (...) explained to the local Aymara leaders, and a questionnaire was prepared on knowledge and practices regarding healthy lunch boxes for Aymara children. An educational nutrition program and two IC formats were drawn up. The documentation was evaluated by a research ethics committee. Results: Seventy Aymara villagers participated in the research project. The extent to which they understood the IC was modified to a statistically significant degree subsequent to the educational intervention and adaption for cultural appropriateness. (shrink)

Providing an original and systematic treatment of foundational issues in philosophy of religion, J. L. Schellenberg's new book addresses the structure of..

What happens when someone acts? A familiar answer goes like this. There is something that the agent wants, and there is an action that he believes conducive to its attainment. His desire for the end, and his belief in the action as a means, justify taking the action, and they jointly cause an intention to take it, which in turn causes the corresponding movements of the agent's body. I think that the standard story is flawed in several respects. The flaw (...) that will concern me in this paper is that the story fails to include an agent-or, more precisely, fails to cast the agent in his proper role. (shrink)

Abstract I argue that meaning in life is importantly influenced by bioloical ties. More specifically, I maintain that knowing one's relatives and especially one's parents provides a kind of self-knowledge that is of irreplaceable value in the life-task of identity formation. These claims lead me to the conclusion that it is immoral to create children with the intention that they be alienated from their bioloical relatives?for example, by donor conception.

Retributive theories of punishment argue that punishing a criminal for a crime she committed is sufficient reason for a justified and morally permissible punishment. But what about when the state gets lucky in its decision to punish? I argue that retributive theories of punishment are subject to “Gettier” style cases from epistemology. Such cases demonstrate that the state needs more than to just get lucky, and as these retributive theories of punishment stand, there is no anti-luck condition. I’ll argue that (...) Gettier-style cases demonstrate an impermissible instance of punishment, even though they meet the conditions of retributive theories of punishment. Retributive theories are, therefore, too weak. The safety condition from epistemology provides the anti-luck condition needed for permissible punishment. I argue that two forms of retributivism, rights-forfeiture and what I call standard retributivism, are both subject to Gettier-style cases. Unlike the literature on standards of proof, this paper argues that safety is a condition on punishment itself, i.e., in all nearby possible worlds, the accuser must correctly accuse the convicted for the crime they actually committed. (shrink)

Supervaluationism is often described as the most popular semantic treatment of indeterminacy. There’s little consensus, however, about how to fill out the bare-bones idea to include a characterization of logical consequence. The paper explores one methodology for choosing between the logics: pick a logic thatnorms beliefas classical consequence is standardly thought to do. The main focus of the paper considers a variant of standard supervaluational, on which we can characterizedegrees of determinacy. It applies the methodology above to focus ondegree logic. (...) This is developed first in a basic, single-premise case; and then extended to the multipremise case, and to allowdegreesof consequence. The metatheoretic properties of degree logic are set out. On the positive side, the logic is supraclassical—all classical valid sequents are degree logic valid. Strikingly, metarules such as cut and conjunction introduction fail. (shrink)

J.L. Schellenberg offers a path to a new kind of religious outlook. Reflection on our early stage in the evolutionary process leads to skepticism about religion, but also offers a new answer to the problem of faith and reason, and the possibility of a new, evolutionary form of religion.

v. 1. Nicomachean ethics. Politics. The Athenian Constitution. Rhetoric. On Poetics.--v. 2. Logic.--v. 3. Physics. Metaphysics. On the soul. Short physical treaties.--v. 4. On the heavens. On generation and corruption. Meteorology. Biological treatises.

The aim of this paper is to elaborate on the phenomenological approach to expertise as proposed by Dreyfus and Dreyfus and to give an account of the extent to which their approach may contribute to a better understanding of how athletes may use their cognitive capacities during high-level skill execution. Dreyfus and Dreyfus's non-representational view of experience-based expertise implies that, given enough relevant experience, the skill learner, when expert, will respond intuitively to immediate situations with no recourse to deliberate actions (...) or mental representations. The paper will subsequently outline some implications and consequences of such an approach and will also examine to what extent Dreyfus and Dreyfus's skill model is capable to resist different attacks that have been made against their view, and in particular regarding the practical application of their approach to the skill domain of competitive sport. (shrink)

This paper offers an alternate explanation of cases from the doxastic wronging literature. These cases violate what I call the degree of inquiry right—a novel account of zetetic obligations to inquire when interests are at stake. The degree of inquiry right is a moral right against other epistemic agents to inquire to a certain threshold when a belief undermines one’s interests. Thus, the agents are sometimes obligated to leave inquiry open. I argue that we have relevant interests in reputation, relationships, (...) and the well-being of our social groups. These interests generate obligations against others to “do their homework” before closing inquiry. This alternate account makes better sense of puzzles that accounts of doxastic wronging fall prey to. (shrink)

This volume provides discussions of both the concept of responsibility and of punishment, and of both individual and collective responsibility. It provides in-depth Socratic and Kantian bases for a new version of retributivism, and defends that version against the main criticisms that have been raised against retributivism in general. It includes chapters on criminal recidivism and capital punishment, as well as one on forgiveness, apology and punishment that is congruent with the basic precepts of the new retributivism defended therein. Finally, (...) chapters on corporate responsibility and punishment are included, with a closing chapter on holding the U.S. accountable for its most recent invasion and occupation of Iraq. The book is well-focused but also presents the widest ranging set of topics of any book of its kind as it demonstrates how the concepts of responsibility and punishment apply to some of the most important problems of our time. “This is one of the best books on punishment, and the Fourth Edition continues its tradition of excellence. The book connects punishment importantly to moral responsibility and desert, and it is comprehensive in its scope, both addressing abstract, theoretical issues and applied issues as well. The topics treated include collective responsibility, apology, forgiveness, capital punishment, and war crimes. Highly recommended.”—John Martin Fischer, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, University of California, Riverside. (shrink)

A common objection to Sosa’s epistemology is that it countenances, in an objectionable way, unsafe knowledge. This objection, under closer inspection, turns out to be in far worse shape than Sosa’s critics have realised. Sosa and his defenders have offered two central response types to the idea that allowing unsafe knowledge is problematic: one response type adverts to the animal/reflective knowledge distinction that is characteristic of bi-level virtue epistemology. The other less-discussed response type appeals to the threat of dream scepticism, (...) and in particular, to the idea that many of our everyday perceptual beliefs are unsafe through the nearness of the dream possibility. The latter dreaming response to the safety objection to Sosa’s virtue epistemology has largely flown under the radar in contemporary discussions of safety and knowledge. We think that, suitably articulated in view of research in the philosophy and science of dreaming, it has much more going for it than has been appreciated. This paper further develops, beyond what Sosa does himself, the dreaming argument in response to those who think safety (as traditionally understood) is a condition on knowledge and who object to Sosa’s account on the grounds that it fails this condition. The payoffs of further developing this argument will be not only a better understanding of the importance of insights about dreaming against safety as a condition on knowledge, but also some reason to think a weaker safety condition, one that is relativised to SSS (i.e., skill/shape/situation) conditions for competence exercise, gets better results all things considered as an anti-luck codicil on knowledge. (shrink)

The phenomenon of ambivalence is an important one for any philosophy of action. Despite this importance, there is a lack of a fully satisfactory analysis of the phenomenon. Although many contemporary philosophers recognize the phenomenon, and address topics related to it, only Harry Frankfurt has given the phenomenon full treatment in the context of action theory – providing an analysis of how it relates to the structure and freedom of the will. In this paper, I develop objections to Frankfurt's account, (...) all revolving around the charge that his account contains a serious ambiguity between willing and identifying. With such objections in place, I then develop an analysis that avoids the difficulties and ambiguities that Frankfurt's analysis is prey to. I briefly distinguish ambivalence from other types of internal conflict. This paper aims to offer conceptual clarification on the phenomenon of ambivalence, which will then allow for discussions about the normative merits and demerits of ambivalence, the effects of ambivalence on autonomous action, and methods of resolution of ambivalence. (shrink)

According to the cognitive model of psychopathology, maladaptive beliefs about oneself, others, and the world are the main factors contributing to the development and persistence of various forms of mental suffering. Therefore, the key therapeutic process of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)—a therapeutic approach rooted in the cognitive model—is cognitive restructuring, i.e., a process of revision of such maladaptive beliefs. In this paper, I examine the philosophical assumptions underlying CBT and offer theoretical reasons to think that the effectiveness of belief revision (...) in psychotherapy is very limited. This is the case, I argue, because the cognitive model wrongly assumes that our body of beliefs is unified, while it is in fact fragmented. (shrink)

J. David Archibald explores how Darwin first came to the conclusion that species had evolved in different regions throughout the world. Carefully retracing Darwin's gathering of evidence and the evolution of his thinking, Origins of Darwin's Evolution achieves a new understanding of how Darwin crafted his transformative theory.

Abstract: Might knowledge normatively govern conversations and not just their discrete constituent thoughts and (assertoric) actions? I answer yes, at least for a restricted class of conversations I call aimed conversations. On the view defended here, aimed conversations are governed by participatory know-how - viz., knowledge how to do what each interlocutor to the conversation shares a participatory intention to do by means of that conversation. In the specific case of conversations that are in the service of joint inquiry, the (...) view defended is that interlocutors (A, B, ... n) must intentionally inquire together into whether p, by means of an aimed conversation X, only if A,B, ... n know how to use X to find out together whether p. The view is supported by considerations about instrumental rationality, shared intentionality, the epistemology of intentional action, as well as linguistic data. (shrink)

XLRI, in association with a few Tata Group companies, established the XLRI-JRD Tata Foundation in Business Ethics in 1991 to mark their long-standing commitment and contribution to business ethics in India. The foundation seeks to address this by publicly affirming the urgent need for ethics in business and the need to bring about a conducive culture in which it can thrive.

Lanczos, C. Einstein's path from special to general relativity.--Balazs, N. L. The acceptability of physical theories: Poincaré versus Einstein.--Ellis, G. F. R. Global and non-global problems in cosmology, by G. F. R. Ellis and D. W. Sciama.--Ehlers, J. The geometry of free fall and light propagation, by J. Ehlers, F. A. E. Pirani and A. Schild.--Trautman, A. Invariance of Lagrangian systems.--Penrose, R. The geometry of impulsive gravitational waves.--Exact solutions of the Einstein-Maxwell equations for an accelerated charge.--Taub, A. H. Plane-symmetric similarity (...) solutions for self-gravitating fluids.--Robinson, I. Equations of motion in the linear approximation, by I. Robinson and J. R. Robinson.--Florides, P. W. Rotating bodies in general relativity.--Chandrasekhar, S. A limiting case of relativistic equilibrium.--Israel, W. The relativistic Boltzmann equation.--Thompson, W. B. The self-consistent test-particle approach to relativistic kinetic theory. (shrink)

Every soul has an unconscious knowledge of the ultimate truth of things, a premise long taught by all great spiritual teachers, East and West, regularly experienced by those who follow the spiritual path. In the quest to help reestablish that universal connection, editor J. Douglas Kenyon has culled from the pages of Atlantis rising magazine this compilation of concise and well-illustrated articles by world-class researchers and theoreticians."--Back cover.

Welcome to the family -- The sources of new phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger -- How to be a phenomenological heretic: the origins and development of new phenomenology -- Phenomenology and onto-theology -- Phenomenology and theology reconsidered -- New phenomenology on the existence and nature of God -- The call, prayer, and Christian philosophy -- Proposals for new phenomenology and analytic philosophy of religion -- Normativity: ethics, politics, and society -- Possible futures for new phenomenology.

Greek Natural Philosophy presents the primary sources on the Presocratics in a straightforward way in order to tell a coherent story about the astonishing development of natural philosophy in ancient Greece and its relevance today... Greek Natural Philosophy is suitable for undergraduate and graduate courses in ancient Greek philosophy or in environmental philosophy, and will be of interest to scholars in this field.