"Orginally published by: Leiden, NV: Koninklijke Brill, 1993.".

Hai, Peter NV Lay people have always played a vital role in the life and mission of the church but it is only after the Second Vatican Council that the question of the laity has come into focus in a new way in Catholic theological reflection. Indeed, in the wake of Vatican II, the council that introduced a Copernican shift in the Catholic understanding of the laity, lay people have become the theme of a Synod of Bishops, the subject of (...) an Apostolic Exhortation, and the topic of several pastoral statements of national conferences of bishops. This paper begins with a review of the state of the question highlighting the need for a comparative investigation of the theologies of the laity according to John Paul II, the Federation of Asian Bishops' Conferences, and the Vietnamese Episcopal Conference. It then highlights the differences and convergences in these theologies. As all three theologies draw their inspiration from the teachings of Vatican II, and a prominent element of the council's concerns was the emphasis on the universal call to holiness, we will also provide a detailed comparison of this notable aspect across these theological systems. Our argument is that while some minor points of divergence and disagreement remain there is a greater convergence and agreement between these theologies of the laity. (shrink)

How to accept a conditional? F. P. Ramsey proposed the following test in . 'If A, then B' must be accepted with respect to the current epistemic state iff the minimal hypothetical change of it needed to accept A also requires accepting B. In this article we propose a formulation of , which unlike some of its predecessors, is compatible with our best theory of belief revision, the so-called AGM theory , chapters 1-5 for a survey). The new test, which, (...) we claim, encodes some of the crucial insights defended by F. P. Ramsey in , is used to study the conditionals epistemically validated by the AGM postulates. Our notion of validity is compared with the notion of negative validity used by Gärdenfors in . It is observed that the notions of PV and NV will in general differ and that when these differences arise it is the notion of PV that is preferable. Finally we compare our formulation of the Ramsey test with a previous formulation offered by Gärdenfors . We show that any attempt to interpret as delivering acceptance conditions for Ramsey's conditionals is doomed to failure. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sophie, Greta, Cuiyuan, and Feminist DesireStories by Ding Ling, Alice Munro, and Eileen ChangYuhui Bao (bio) and Ian Dennis (bio)Desire has a history and, for a literary criticism inflected by mimetic theory, novelistic prose fiction offers a privileged view of its unfolding. We study novelistic fiction, as opposed to various romance genres, to grasp that history, for what its authors have been able to see, understand, and dramatize—this is (...) the procedural model, indeed the authority established by René Girard and that has largely governed such criticism thereafter.1 But of the three short fictions we consider here—two Chinese and one Canadian—only two are fully novelistic in character, in that they attempt to describe and diagnose—rather than merely express—emergent and changing desires. Students of Girard, of course, recognize here the distinction between the romanesque and romantique. to which one might add the understandings of genre developed by a number of other theorists.2However, we might also concede that all fictions are invariably and to some degree romantic—some desire, necessarily mediated, is always operative, in writers and readers alike, before or even as it is demystified, if indeed it is. Furthermore, a passionate fictional commitment to that which Girard boldly [End Page 131] designated the mensonge romantique may actually reveal or clarify, at least for later readers, that which the author seeks half- or unconsciously to conceal. It is with this possibility in mind that we propose to consider our other subject fiction, "Miss Sophie's Diary" (莎菲女士的日记 sha fei nv shi de ri ji; 1927) by the pioneering Chinese woman writer Ding Ling (丁玲 ding ling).3 "Miss Sophie's Diary," to be clear, is no simple romance; it is at least hybrid, and in its brave if perhaps only partially successful pursuit of the truth of desire, subtly revelatory. Miss Sophie (莎菲 sha fei), chronically ill with tuberculosis and half-separated from a human world she both longs for and despises, with her aggrieved sense of superiority and desperate, shameful longing for those she passionately feels to be her inferiors, with her loquacious rationalizing and constant, perverse reversals of attitude, is a kind of Dostoyevskian "underground woman," afflicted as well with a touch of the "nausea" later made prestigious by J.-P. Sartre.4 She is clearly a harbinger of her own culture's precipitation into the world of internally mediated, indeed, metaphysical desire, what we might also call the market world, the modernity Girard credits the great European novelists from Stendhal onward with diagnosing. This story has long been described as an unprecedented and "frank" revelation "of a Chinese woman's sexual feelings and contempt for conventional views," expressing an "outspoken and unrelenting individualism."5 At the same time, it has been seen as a product of the fatally compromised and ultimately unsuccessful May Fourth literary movement,6 and not necessarily representative of its author's overall fictional production. From an orthodox Girardian critical perspective, however, the crucial interpretative question might be the degree to which Ding Ling is aware of the sources of the newly enfranchised desires her heroine wrestles with, or, as we might also put it, the degree of separation between the author's understanding and that of Miss Sophie. But such a question is perhaps easily enough answered. Ding Ling clearly does not share Girard's "novelistic" perspective on the operation of desire. But from our current perspective, does her best-known work nonetheless offer, however imperfectly, certain now-recognizable insights into historical processes of desire that our other two writers more fully realize?"Miss Sophie's Diary" is famous in China for the delicacy, depth, and explicitness with which those bold and passionate sexual desires of Sophie are exposed, even as such desires are (perhaps reassuringly) defeated, or at least revealed as illusory. Clearly the story reflects a period of cultural and personal crisis. "I was extremely confused at that time," she wrote in a later phase of self-critique. "On one hand, I was radically rebellious, believing blindly in social revolution; on the other hand, I indulged myself in a petty bourgeoisie sense, departing from revolution, so I was trapped in loneliness, struggle and misery [End... (shrink)

The theory of valued difference fields (K, σ, υ) depends on how the valuation υ interacts with the automorphism σ. Two special cases have already been worked out - the isometric case, where υ(σ(x)) = υ(x) for all x Î G has been worked out by Luc Belair, Angus Macintyre and Thomas Scanlon; and the contractive case, where υ(σ(x)) > nv(x) for all x Î K x with υ(x) > 0 and n Î N, has been worked out by Salih (...) Azgin. In this paper we deal with a more general version, the multiplicative case, where υ(σ(x)) = p · υ(x), where p (> 0) is interpreted as an element of a real-closed field. We give an axiomatization and prove a relative quantifier elimination theorem for this theory. (shrink)

A REFERENCE UUH FOR Llb^nv, J'-t ONLY Operations Research With Special Reference to Non-Military Applications A Comprehensive Scientific Aid to Executive Decisions OPERATIONS Research (or, as the British say, Operational Research) is ...

The vestibulo-ocular reflex plays an important role in controlling the gaze at a visual target. Although patients with vestibular hypofunction aim to improve their VOR function, some retain dysfunction for a long time. Previous studies have explored the effects of direct current stimulation on vestibular function; however, the effects of random noise stimulation on eye–head coordination have not previously been tested. Therefore, we aimed to clarify the effects of high frequency noisy vestibular stimulation on eye–head coordination related to VOR function. (...) Thirteen healthy young adult participants with no serious disease took part in our study. The current amplitude and density used were 0.4 mA and 0.2 mA/cm2, respectively, with a random noise frequency of 100–640 Hz. The electrodes were located on both mastoid processes. The stimulus duration and fade in/out duration were 600 and 10 s, respectively. Subjects oscillated their head horizontally, gazing at the fixation point, at 1 Hz for 30 repetitions. The coordination of eye–head movements was measured by eye-tracking and a motion capture system. Peak-to-peak angles for eye and head movement and deviation of the visual line from the fixation target revealed no significant differences between HF-nVS and sham. The lag time between the eye and head movement with HF-nVS post-stimulation was significantly shorter than that of the sham. We found that HF-nVS can reduce the lag time between eye and head movement and improve coordination, contributing to a clear retinal image. This technique could be applied as a form of VOR training for patients with vestibular hypofunction. (shrink)

Generalizing the work of Einstein and Mayer, it is assumed that at each point of space-time there exists a vector-spinor space with Nv vector dimensions and Ns spinor dimensions, where Nv=2k and Ns=2 k, k⩾3. This space is decomposed into a tangent space with4 vector and4 spinor dimensions and an internal space with Nv−4 vector and Ns−4 spinor dimension. A variational principle leads to field equations for geometric quantities which can be identified with physical fields such as the electromagnetic field, (...) Yang-Mills gauge fields, and wave functions of bosons and fermions. (shrink)

Gerrie ter Haar, James J. Busuttil (eds.) Bridge or barrier: religion, violence and visions for peace Ed. Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands, 2005.

PurposeWe conducted a driving simulator study to investigate the effects of monitoring intersection cross traffic on gaze behaviors and responses to pedestrians by drivers with hemianopic field loss.MethodsSixteen HFL and sixteen normal vision participants completed two drives in an urban environment. At 30 intersections, a pedestrian ran across the road when the participant entered the intersection, requiring a braking response to avoid a collision. Intersections with these pedestrian events had either no cross traffic, one approaching car from the side opposite (...) the pedestrian location, or two approaching cars, one from each side at the same time.ResultsOverall, HFL drivers made more of cross-traffic on both the blind and seeing sides. They made more numerous and larger gaze scans when they fixated cars on both sides and had lower rates of unsafe responses to blind- but not seeing-side pedestrians. They were more likely to demonstrate compensatory blind-side fixation behaviors when there was no car on the seeing side. Fixation behaviors and unsafe response rates were most similar to those of NV drivers when cars were fixated on both sides.ConclusionFor HFL participants, making more scans, larger scans and safer responses to pedestrians crossing from the blind side were associated with looking at cross traffic from both directions. Thus, cross traffic might serve as a reminder to scan and provide a reference point to guide blind-side scanning of drivers with HFL. Proactively checking for cross-traffic cars from both sides could be an important safety practice for drivers with HFL. (shrink)

Software application ontologies have the potential to become the keystone in state-of-the-art information management techniques. It is expected that these ontologies will support the sort of reasoning power required to navigate large and complex terminologies correctly and efficiently. Yet, there is one problem in particular that continues to stand in our way. As these terminological structures increase in size and complexity, and the drive to integrate them inevitably swells, it is clear that the level of consistency required for such navigation (...) will become correspondingly difficult to maintain. While descriptive semantic representations are certainly a necessary component to any adequate ontology-based system, so long as ontology engineers rely solely on semantic information, without a sound ontological theory informing their modeling decisions, this goal will surely remain out of reach. In this paper we describe how Language and Computing nv (L&C), along with The Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Sciences (IFOMIS), are working towards developing and implementing just such a theory, combining the open software architecture of L&C’s LinkSuiteTM with the philosophical rigor of IFOMIS’s Basic Formal Ontology. In this way we aim to move beyond the more or less simple controlled vocabularies that have dominated the industry to date. (shrink)

The collaboration of Language and Computing nv (L&C) and the Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science (IFOMIS) is guided by the hypothesis that quality constraints on ontologies for software ap-plication purposes closely parallel the constraints salient to the design of sound philosophical theories. The extent of this parallel has been poorly appreciated in the informatics community, and it turns out that importing the benefits of phi-losophical insight and methodology into application domains yields a variety of improvements. L&C’s LinKBase® (...) is one of the world’s largest medical domain ontologies. Its current primary use pertains to natural language processing ap-plications, but it also supports intelligent navigation through a range of struc-tured medical and bioinformatics information resources, such as SNOMED-CT, Swiss-Prot, and the Gene Ontology (GO). In this report we discuss how and why philosophical methods improve both the internal coherence of LinKBase®, and its capacity to serve as a translation hub, improving the interoperability of the ontologies through which it navigates. (shrink)

The virtual community under consideration is called theNigerian Village Square, ‘…a marketplace of ideas’. As an online discussion forum, NVS combines the features of listservs and newsgroups with a more elegant and user-friendly interface. While computer-mediated communication technologies augment political discourse in established democracies, new media and mobile technologies create avenues for a virtual sphere among Nigerians. Therefore, the ideal virtual sphere guarantees equal access to all connected netizens, equal right for all languages in netizens’ linguistic repertoire, and it fosters (...) democratic deliberation through policy debates, public dialogues and ‘online polylogues’. By linguistic marketing is meant discourse as a vehicle for ‘promotional acts’ and for ‘selling’ particular cultures and ideologies to multicultural and multilingual readers/audiences. One interpretation of this is in terms of asserting language rights and linguistic equality. The use of Nigerian languages with Nigerian Pidgin online is promotional and forexistential negotiation. This results in language mixture which is an instantiation of freedom of speech, freedom of switch and freedom to switch. The underlying pragmatic motivation for top-down language mixture and alternation in Nigerian virtual discourse is attention-getting with the aim of inducing an interdiscursive writer-reader cognitive as well as communicative interaction. Other pragmatic functions of code switching discussed in the paper include allusive textuality, amusing phaticity, anticipated interactivity, affective expressivity and audience affiliation or alienation, among others. Thus, intertextuality is an explanatory technique for investigating previously unexplored phenomena in digital code switching. (shrink)

The integration of information resources in the life sciences is one of the most challenging problems facing bioinformatics today. We describe how Language and Computing nv, originally a developer of ontology-based natural language understanding systems for the healthcare domain, is developing a framework for the integration of structured data with unstructured information contained in natural language texts. L&C’s LinkSuite™ combines the flexibility of a modular software architecture with an ontology based on rigorous philosophical and logical principles that is designed to (...) comprehend the basic formal relationships that structure both reality and the ways humans perceive and communicate about reality. (shrink)

Equipped with the ultimate query answering system, computers would finally be in a position to address all our information needs in a natural way. In this paper, we describe how Language and Computing nv (L&C), a developer of ontology-based natural language understanding systems for the healthcare domain, is working towards the ultimate Question Answering (QA) System for healthcare workers. L&C’s company strategy in this area is to design in a step-by-step fashion the essential components of such a system, each component (...) being designed to solve some one part of the total problem and at the same time reflect well-defined needs on the prat of our customers. We compare our strategy with the research roadmap proposed by the Question Answering Committee of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), paying special attention to the role of ontology. (shrink)

In many areas of scientific inquiry, the phenomena under investigation are viewed as functions on the real numbers. Since observational precision is limited, it makes sense to view these phenomena as bounded functions on the rationals. One may translate the basic notions of recursion theory into this framework by first interpreting a partial recursive function as a function on Q. The standard notions of inductive inference carry over as well, with no change in the theory. When considering the class of (...) computable functions on Q, there are a number of natural ways in which to define the distance between two functions. We utilize standard metrics to explore notions of approximate inference — our inference machines will attempt to guess values which converge to the correct answer in these metrics. We show that the new inference notions, NV∞, EX∞, and BC∞, infer more classes of functions than their standard counterparts, NV, EX, and BC. Furthermore, we give precise inclusions between the new inference notions and those in the standard inference hierarchy. We also explore weaker notions of approximate inference, leading to inference hierarchies analogous to the EXn and BCn hierarchies. Oracle inductive inference is also considered, and we give sufficient conditions under which approximate inference from a generic oracle G is equivalent to approximate inference with only finitely many queries to G. (shrink)

In this paper I propose to link [Hesiod] fr. 276 M.-W. with the mythological narrative preserved on PSI 14. 1398, which relates the death of Teiresias. This narrative belong to a work that drew on the lost Melampodia and provides information regarding this Hesiodic poem that had hitherto escaped our notice. Regarding the type of text preserved on PSI 14. 1398, the scanty remnants of the papyrus’ second column, where we read traces of what appears to be κeuqein and dendroκomov, (...) both poetic words, suggest that it must have been a prose text quoting poetry. Possibilities include a text on the history of divination, such as Philochorus peri mantiκnv, which offered a historical overview of famous exponents of the mantic art and included poetic quotations, or alternatively a text that belongs to the commentary genre broadly conceived, perhaps even a text akin to the so-called ‘Homeric anthologies’. (shrink)

Contemporary moral philosophers generally claim that there is both a moral and a nonmoral sense of such key terms as "ought" and "right." Professor Wertheimer attempts to disprove this claim as well as the significance of contemporary metaethical investigations by establishing that such terms, especially the modal auxiliary verb "ought," are univocal, and, as a result, that a proper understanding of them will reveal nothing about the nature of morality. Wertheimer defines "n ought to v" as a conjunction of the (...) following clauses: 1) There exists an adequate relevant System y; 2) there exists a property F such that "Fn" is true; and 3) according to y, F is such that if "Fn" is true, and C obtains then "nv" is true. A crucial point about this definition is that the truth of "ought" statements is always defended by an implicit reference to the existence of an adequate relevant system; "ought" statements in science are based on an adequate scientific system, moral "ought" statements on an adequate moral system. Thus, a decision about the truth of such statements is not a semantic issue, but one of assessing the adequacy of the system appealed to. This view of "ought" statements along with a similar one of other moral terms is the basis of Wertheimer’s provocative contention that metaethics, which has received the major share of moral philosophers’ attention in the twentieth century, is bound to be unproductive. (shrink)

It is a relatively uncontroversial proposition that without “ethics,” an “ethics of homelessness” is impossible. What is less uncontroversial, though, is that philosophy—or at least philosophical analysis—is a necessary condition of ethical discourse. The distrust—or skepticism regarding the utility of— philosophical analysis is predicated on rendering philosophy as useless. This, though, should create a sense of cognitive dissonance, since we universally acknowledge that ethics informs how we interact with ourselves and others, while we also accept, and rightly so, the uselessness (...) of philosophy. While pop- ular parlance has it that uselessness is logically and semantically equivalent to not needed or conceptually irrelevant, this, I will argue, is mistaken. This mis- take, as I see it, is a result of the failure to recognize that liberal arts are intrinsi- cally useless—and ought to be treated as such. To mend this mistake, I will outline the liberal arts in contrast to the servile arts and explain how Aristotle, and his later defender Josef Pieper, correctly understood the distinction. I will then move onto suggest that while philosophy—as a liberal art—is useless, and rightfully so, it is a conceptually relevant, necessary condition for dealing with conceptual problems which arise in ethics—and therefore in the ethics of homelessness. To explicate and defend this thesis, I argue that Plato’s three- fold division of goods, originating in Book ii of his Republic, helps to amalgamate our reservations in accepting philosophy as useless—strictly speaking—and simultaneously useful. From this, I move on to provide various ways in which philosophy is relevant to questions of home and homelessness generally, and display how philosophers themselves have, historically, taken seriously the question of home and homelessness as serious philosophical concepts. Finally, I outline how philosophers can work on the ethics of home- lessness by taking seriously the necessary presuppositions which make work- ing on the alleviation of homelessness not merely possible, but morally obligatory. Having sketched a broad picture of how philosophy interacts with the practical problems of homelessness, I conclude that progress in the field of the ethics of homelessness—as a conceptual endeavor—will ultimately arise from overcoming our prima facie interpretation of the liberal/servile arts distinction and thereby preserve its original meaning. (shrink)