”The Barometer of Flaubert or Literature and Reality”. Discussing the relationship between literature and reality, this study focuses on the analysis of the“reality effect” (effet de réel) which is applied to the narrative technique in Gogol’s novel Dead Souls by revisiting it through a Nabokovian perspective.

”The Barometer of Flaubert or Literature and Reality”. Discussing the relationship between literature and reality, this study focuses on the analysis of the“reality effect” (effet de réel) which is applied to the narrative technique in Gogol’s novel Dead Souls by revisiting it through a Nabokovian perspective.

The study uncovers the drama of Stei Baita (Romania), a former uranium mine, which experienced during the communism period, an intensive industrialization. This shaped the territorial pattern, cultural, economic and social relationships, with a tremendous impact on the quality of the environment which was sacrificed against a rapid of a so-called economic growth. Stei Baita is a classic example of legacy mine land and the authors aim is to capture and assess all important aspects of sustainable development within this study-case (...) of disadvantaged community living in a radon prone area. More specifically, authors introduce their responses to several questions: (1) What do we know about social, economic and environmental capital of the selected settlement?; (2) Is the legacy of a uranium mine the platform of debate for negotiating for sustainable development?; and (3) What is the role of ethics in the current context of Stei Baita? Within the framework of analysis, equity, seen as part of ethics, is valued both as the premise of the debate and mandatory requirement for human development that should target sustainability. Authors have not discussed truths, but positions on identified problems by investigating community members’ perceptions. Thus, peculiarities of this community are dealt within a thematic context (e.g., resources and environment, individual development, social system). Finally, ethics is valued as social construct built by negotiating interpretations of morally desirable situations and behaviors accepted in a particular society at a certain historical moment. This view is consistent with ethical relativism which denies the existence of a unique moral truth and which sets the understanding of Stei Baita context on the path of the “new ethics”. The “new ethics” depicts the world in nuances, allowing society to surpass obstacles to the progress of understanding. (shrink)

Drawing on recent theories and debates concerning the everydayness of non-artistic and even private aesthetic experiences, this article aims at differentiating new ways of dealing with revulsion at the intersection of negative and everyday aesthetics, as another manner of extending or transcending the scope of traditional art-oriented aesthetics. The paradigms that I will trace in the history of negative aesthetics are not mere occurrences of disgust or repulsiveness in art and in everyday life, but ways of addressing the repulsive in (...) relation to the culturally variable scope of art and aesthetics. Besides the classical paradigm that associates repugnant subjects with their pleasure-inducing imitations in art, and the transgressions of modern and contemporary art that increasingly shocked their audience, revulsion can also be regarded as a form of displeasure linked to the quotidian, yet aesthetically relevant forms of life. By virtue of this ordinary nature, which is not unfamiliar to other (non-Western) cultures, revulsion could be placed at the core of everyday aesthetics, since it confirms both the transition from contemplation to action in recent aesthetics, that is, the practical preoccupation with the aesthetic quality of living, and the broader redefinition of aesthetics in terms of sensory reactions. (shrink)

Eliminativism assumes that commonsense psychology describes and explains the mind in terms of the internal design and operation of the mind. If this assumption is invalidated, so is eliminativism. The same conditional is true of intentional realism. Elsewhere (Bogdan 1991) I have argued against this 'folk- theory-theory' assumption by showing that commonsense psychology is not an empirical prototheory of the mind but a biosocially motivated practice of coding, utilizing, and sharing information from and about conspecifics. Here, without presupposing a specific (...) analysis of commonsense psychology, I want to challenge a key implication of the 'folk-theory-theory' assumption to the effect that commonsense psychology is committed to a definite architecture of the mind. (shrink)

The theme of this essay is rather simple, though its demonstration is not. It is that humans think reflexively or metamentally because -- and often in the forms in which -- they interpret each other. In this essay ‘metamental’ means ‘about mental’ and ‘reflexive mind’ means ‘a mind thinking about its own thoughts.’ To think reflexively or metamentally is to think about thoughts deliberately and explicitly, as in thinking that my current thoughts about metamentation are right. Thinking about thoughts requires (...) understanding thoughts as thoughts, as mental structures that represent; it also requires an ability to relate thoughts to other thoughts and to recognize such inter-thought relations. Since metamentation is essential to and uniquely distinctive of human minds, the idea that it originates in interpreting other minds can be encapsulated in the slogan that minds are minded because minds mind minds. This word play translates as: minds evolve into reflexive minds because they mind other minds -- where ‘minding other minds’ means interacting and bonding with other minds, being concerned or curious about them, representing their relations to the world, manipulating and using these relations for some purpose, and the like. All of this amounts (in my terminology) to interpreting other minds in social contexts of cooperation, communication, education, politics, and so on. It follows that intermental relations among individuals, handled by a distinct competence for interpretation, are essential to the evolution of abilities to represent intramental relations among thoughts, typical of a reflexive mind. I take ‘interpretation’ to be a convenient, short, and grammatically flexible label for what is known in philosophy as commonsense or folk psychology and in psychology as theory of mind, mindreading, or naive psychology. Interpretation is a cognitive rapport between an interpreter (she, in this book) and a subject (he), whereby she represents his mind-world relations, from the simplest, such as seeing.... (shrink)

"In the perspective of biocultural homogenization and the increasingly prominent use of technology, environmental ethics faces new challenges. Development policies, governance, and economic factors impose new ways of understanding and managing coexistence. Phenomena such as pandemics, global warming, migratory phenomena, the expansion of urban and rural areas, and the development of large-scale monocultures show us that human agency, resources, the environment, and surroundings are increasingly intertwined, both physically and metaphysically, in an increasingly encompassing organism where the dissociation between the local (...) and the global becomes difficult to achieve. With a wide range of actions and relationships, environmental psychology and ethics have the task of rethinking the relationship between cultural elements and the biosphere, in order to achieve a balance between sensibility, responsibility, and responsivity. In this article, I aim to illustrate that a biocultural ethical framework emphasizing socio-environmental justice, applied to geoengineering, not only promotes global socio-environmental sustainability but also recognizes the crucial significance of local ecosystems in climate regulation and biodiversity conservation. To do so, I will briefly present some theoretical elements related to the importance of environmental psychology in understanding the connection between individuals and the surrounding environment. Then, I will succinctly present the concept of the ”3Hs” and its implication on biocultural ethics, and subsequently integrate specific elements of biocultural ethics into the analysis of geoengineering ethics to illustrate the need for a perspective that takes this into account. Through this endeavor, I intend to emphasize the vital role of a holistic, multidimensional perspective that guides individual values and community policies towards sustainable practices, ensuring social cohesion and dialogue, respecting the coexistence of life forms, and protecting their habitats. Keywords: environmental ethics, geoengineering, sustainability, biocultural ethics, environmental psychology.". (shrink)

As Roger Ariew shows, one of the most fascinating challenges for the authors trying to create a Cartesian complete course on philosophy was coming up with a Cartesian Logic based on the existing texts of the master. Were the few simple rules from the Discourse on Method the "logic" of Descartes? Were the Rules for the Direction of the Mind "logic"? How can we even have a logic without syllogism? When looking at the authors studied by Ariew one finds that (...) the best that they could come up was adding some Cartesian elements on what remains basically a traditional Aristotelian Logic. It seems that there was no Cartesian Logic after all.I want to show here that Cartesian Logic is something else, not exactly... (shrink)

What is it that one thinks or believes when one thinks or believes something? A mental formula? A sentence in some natural language? Its truth conditions? Or perhaps an abstract proposition? The current story of content is fairly ecumenical. It says that a number of aspects, some mental, other semantic, go into our understanding of content. Yet the current story is incomplete. It leaves out a very important aspect of content, one which I call incremental information. It is information in (...) a specific format, information as a limited or local increment, structured by a number of underlying parameters. It is in the form of such increments that information drives cognition and behavior. This is why, perhaps of all aspects of content, it is incremental information which matters most when we want to understand cognitive attitudes and performances. This in turn must have an impact on our philosophical notions of content, propositional attitudes, inference, justification and knowledge. (shrink)

Many philosophers and a few psychologists think that we understand our own minds before we understand those of others. Most developmental psychologists think that children understand their own minds at about the same time they understand other minds, by using the same cognitive abilities. I disagree with both views. I think that children understand other minds before they understand their own. Their self-understanding depends on some cognitive abilities that develop later than, and independently of, the abilities involved in understanding other (...) minds. This is the general theme of this chapter. (shrink)

In this article, I will describe the evolution of capital punishment and the influence that ideology had during the founding years of Romania’s communist regime, until 1958, when the legislation and application of capital punishment reached its highest peak. Starting with the punishment of war criminals and fascists, I will then describe how the death penalty was used for political motives in a period when the regime had to consolidate, legitimate and fight different enemies. With ups and downs like The (...) Death Penalty Law of 1949 and the abolitionist attempt in 1956, it reached its climax in 1958-1959 after the enactment of Decree no. 318/1958. (shrink)

Our perceptions, beliefs, thoughts and memories have objects. They are about or of things and properties around us. I perceive her, have beliefs about her, think of her and have memories of her. How are we to construe this aboutness (or ofness) of our cognitive states?' There are four major choices on the philosophical market. There is an interaction approach which says that the object of cognition is fixed by and understood in terms of what cognizers physically and sensorily interact (...) with - or, alternatively, in terms of what the information delivered by such interaction is about. There is the satisfactional approach which says that the object of a cognitive state is whatever satisfies the representation constitutive of that state. There is also a hybrid approach which requires both physical/sensory interaction and representational satisfaction in the fixation of the object of cognition. And there is, finally, the direct acquaintance approach which says that only an immediate cognitive contact with things and properties can establish them as objects of cognition. The latter, as far as I can tell, goes the way perception goes, so only the remaining three approaches look like serious contenders. (shrink)

Heyes's (1998) skepticism about theory of mind (ToM) in nonhuman primates exploits the idea of a strong and unified theory of mind in humans based on an unanalyzed category of mental state. It also exploits narrow debates about crucial observations and experiments while neglecting wider evolutionary trends. I argue against both exploitations.

A few months before his death, Leibniz wrote to Des Bosses, My doctrine of composite substance seems to be the very doctrine of the Peripatetic school, except that their doctrine does not recognize monads. But I add them, with no detriment to the doctrine itself. You will hardly find another difference, even if you are bent on doing so.1 It is tempting to take Leibniz’s profession of Aristotelian orthodoxy as circumstantial: the entire correspondence he had with the Jesuit Father Bartholomew (...) Des Bosses is based on a project of reconciliation between his “system” and the dogmas of the Catholic Church, mediated by Aristotelian philosophy.2 But even so, this circumstantial... (shrink)

In this paper I provide a brief reconstruction of Otto Hölder’s conception of proof. My reconstruction focuses on Hölder’s critical assessment of David Hilbert’s account of axiomatics in general, and of Hilbert’s conception of metamathematics in particular. I argue that Hölder’s analysis of Hilbert’s general methodological ideas and, more importantly, Hölder’s analysis of the logical structure of the proofs provided by Hilbert in his Grundlagen der Geometrie of 1899 are helpful in reaching a clearer understanding of van der Waerden’s claim (...) linking Hölder’s conception of proof to the tradition established by Kurt Gödel. (shrink)

In this paper I provide a brief reconstruction of Otto Hölder’s conception of proof. My reconstruction focuses on Hölder’s critical assessment of David Hilbert’s account of axiomatics in general, and of Hilbert’s conception of metamathematics in particular. I argue that Hölder’s analysis of Hilbert’s general methodological ideas and, more importantly, Hölder’s analysis of the logical structure of the proofs provided by Hilbert in his Grundlagen der Geometrie of 1899 are helpful in reaching a clearer understanding of van der Waerden’s claim (...) linking Hölder’s conception of proof to the tradition established by Kurt Gödel. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the effects of religious denomination and patterns of church-going on the construction of political values for high-school students. I argue that religion plays a role in the formation of political attitudes among teenagers and it influences their political participation. I examine whether this relationship is constructed along denominational lines. From a theoretical perspective, previous research heralded the compatibility between Western Christianity and the democratic form of government. Samuel Huntington, in his famous Clash of Civilization, argued (...) that there is a natural symbiosis between Western Christianity and democratic forms of government, going insofar as to separate the world into religious civilizations. While, this approach essentializes religion as a fixed and immutable entity, Huntington also neglects the importance of dynamic historical, political and social contexts that can, and, in fact, do affect the functioning of religion in different countries, and hence their ability and willingness to accommodate democracy. Much research followed the Clash of Civilizations, either qualifying the central argument, by showing evidence of support for procedural democracy in most of the World, but without its liberal component or even arriving at the opposite conclusion that irrespective of religion, every country is “democratizable”. While I do not attempt to disconfirm fundamental huntingtonian thinking, I do raise the questions of how context can and does influence the intimate relationship between religion and politics. The analysis is conducted on survey data collected by the Center for the Study of Democracy (CSD) at Babes-Bolyai University with subjects of 14-15 years old, and the results show that, while Greek Orthodox students do not seem to differ in their political values form their Catholic and Protestant counterparts, they are more prone to participate politically. Nevertheless, their active participatory behavior is only more pronounced in what voting is concerned, an opposite effect being recorder for any other acts of political participation. (shrink)

Hölder’s review of Robert Graßmann’s Theory of Number provides the first statement of Hölder’s most significant tenets concerning the distinction between the genetic and axiomatic presentation of mathematics, the mature expression of which is found in Hölder’s book The Mathematical Method of 1924. By translating Hölder’s review into English, I hope to make this unique document known to a wider public. In my introductory note I provide some context to Hölder’s paper and a few other remarks concerning the translation work.

Hölder’s review of Robert Graßmann’s Theory of Number provides the first statement of Hölder’s most significant tenets concerning the distinction between the genetic and axiomatic presentation of mathematics, the mature expression of which is found in Hölder’s book The Mathematical Method of 1924. By translating Hölder’s review into English, I hope to make this unique document known to a wider public. In my introductory note I provide some context to Hölder’s paper and a few other remarks concerning the translation work.

In various professional groups, experts send rookies on absurd tasks as a joke. The fool’s errand appears in factories and hospitals, in elite schools and scout camps, among soldiers, sailors, and airmen. Why are newcomers deceived and humiliated, and why are pranks relatively similar and remarkably persistent over time? I propose that the cultural success and the recurrent features of the fool’s errand are based on evolved cognitive mechanisms activated by apprenticeship as social learning and group induction. Epistemic vigilance explains (...) how novices are reliably deceived by experts using opaque statements erroneously perceived as pedagogical. Furthermore, coalitional psychology explains why insiders use the prank as strategic signalling of hierarchies based on epistemic asymmetry. The intersection of cognitive mechanisms and patterns of professional recruitment maintains a tradition of ritualised pranking in which insiders coordinate to humiliate newcomers to assert epistemic and coalitional dominance. (shrink)

The purpose of the present study is that of examining what I call Robert Nozick’s “evolutionist turn” in ethics. More specifically, my aim is to provide an answer to the following question: what type of ethical theory does Robert Nozick sketch in his last book, Invariances? My first objective will be that of delineating the philosophical framework which will accommodate my future discussion, highlighting the distinction between the metaphysical and scientific approaches to ethics as proposed by Ken Binmore, but also (...) Emanuel Socaciu's taxonomy of ethical theories, which stems from the particular way in which moral philosophers tackle the nature of ethical norms and moral motivation. I then set forth to show that, in the philosophical framework previously described, Robert Nozick's approach from Anarchy, State, and Utopia should be seen as a metaphysical one. The last and most important part of my study aims to show how Nozick's “evolutionist turn” took place and developed, from his perspective on rationality in The Nature of Rationality, to his ethical theory advanced in Invariances. (shrink)

Kant identified in the “spectators’” enthusiastic response to the French Revolution the clear sign of a moral disposition in humankind. Following Hannah Arendt’s classic interpretation, but departing from it in important respects, I attempt to show in this paper that the “spectatorial” account of Kant’s view of the French Revolution makes sense only if it is understood in terms of a subject’s aesthetic response to objects of natural sublimity, and only if this aesthetic experience is instrumentalized for purposes of moral (...) education. (shrink)

Kant identified in the “spectators’” enthusiastic response to the French Revolution the clear sign of a moral disposition in humankind. Following Hannah Arendt’s classic interpretation, but departing from it in important respects, I attempt to show in this paper that the “spectatorial” account of Kant’s view of the French Revolution makes sense only if it is understood in terms of a subject’s aesthetic response to objects of natural sublimity, and only if this aesthetic experience is instrumentalized for purposes of moral (...) education. (shrink)

Can we still talk today about a therapeutically dimension of philosophy? To what extent does Heidegger's philosophy exhibit such a dimension? And how can we reconcile this aspect of Heidegger's thought with his political involvement in 1933? These are some of the questions starting from which I will try to show that Heidegger's philosophical thought presupposes indeed a therapeutic that the thinker assumed even in his own life, a life that is not reducible to his 'unforgivable failure' in 1933. I (...) will begin with an account of Being and Time's existential analytic, the main thread of which is the distinction between Dasein's authenticity and inauthenticity. Next I will try to grasp some of the importance of Heidegger's investigation regarding Dasein's determination as a 'thinker and speaker of being (Sein)', that is, regarding ec-sistence. I will then try to account for the meaning of the 'question regarding technology' and implicitly Heidegger's solution regarding overcoming the condition of a 'gregarious slave of Ge-stell' through cultivation of the so-called 'poetic theology.' I will conclude by signaling some life-file elements of the 'faithless monk from the Black Forest' (as Heidegger is sometimes called), elements that signal a certain correspondence between the philosopher's life and the therapeutic aspect present implicitly in his philosophy. (shrink)

A distinguished wise man, Emil Cioran, with whom I share a country of birth and the thought that follows, said once that the two most interesting things in life are gossip and metaphysics. I can hardly think of a more self evident and enjoyable truth, if wisely construed. This volume combines the two pleasures, for it is an exercise in the metaphysics of wise gossip, of how we make sense of each other, and how, as a result we interpret, explain, (...) rationalize and evaluate our representations and actions. The body of wisdom which allows us to do all this is currently currently called folk or common sense psychology. I will also call it psychofolklore or the folklore of the mind. (shrink)

William D’Alessandro has recently argued that there are no implicit truths in fiction. According to the view defended by D’Alessandro, which he terms explicitism, the only truths in fiction are the ones explicitly expressed therein. In this essay, I argue that explicitism is incorrect on multiple counts. Not only is the argument D’Alessandro gives for it invalid, but explicitism as a theory of truth in fiction fails drastically to account for a number of phenomena that are crucial to our understanding (...) and interpretation of fiction, such as pragmatic implicatures and speech acts occurring in fiction, psychological profiles of fictional characters, and fictional truths determined by literary conventions. (shrink)

It is usually taken for granted, in discussions about fiction, that real things or events can occur as referents of fictional names . In this paper, I take issue with this view, and provide several arguments to the effect that it is better to take the names in fiction to refer to fictional surrogates of real objects. Doing so allows us to solve a series of problems that arise on the reference-continuity view. I also show that the arguments philosophers usually (...) rely on in order to ban surrogates are not as serious as they have been taken to be. In the first part of the paper, I describe the two conflicting views. In the second part, I discuss several specific arguments in favor of surrogates. In the third part I take up the kind of reasons ordinarily offered against them. (shrink)

In spite of of its name, cognitive science is not yet a fully coherent and integrated science but rather a fairly loose coalition of largely independent disciplines, some descriptive and empirical (cognitive psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, cognitive anthropology), some speculative and foundational (philosophy), others both speculative and applied (artificial intelligence). What brought these disciplines together and still sustains their interdisciplinary cooperation is the dedication to explain, simulate and technically reproduce the workings of the human mind according to a distinct and rather (...) well defined research program. This program has been so far the animating spirit and the integrative force in the formation and development of cognitive science. I will call it the 'core program.' Around the core program there is a much looser and less coherent outer paradigm, or set of paradigms, which historically has prepared the ground for the core program, to which the participating disciplines have contributed their insights, results and methods, and still do, and from which challenges to the core program have emerged and are likely to do so in the future. (shrink)

Heyes’s skepticism about theory of mind (ToM) in nonhuman primates exploits the idea of a strong and unified theory of mind in humans based on an unanalyzed category of mental state. It also exploits narrow debates about crucial observations and experiments while neglecting wider evolutionary trends. I argue against both exploitations.

There is a wide and puzzleful gap between the child’s mastery of first- and recursive or higher-order attributions of attitudes, measured not only in years but also in the cognitive resources involved. Some accounts explain the gap in terms of the maturation of the competencies involved, others invoke the slow development of enabling resources, such as short-term memory, the syntax of sentence embedding or sequential reasoning. All these accounts assume a continuity of competence between first- and higher-order attributions. I disagree (...) and argue, with psychological and neuroscientific support, that there are two distinct (though developmentally overlapping and interacting) competencies, one metaintentional and the other metarepresentational. I focus below on the former and argue that it is egocentric, situated, nonpropositional and thus intrinsically limited to first-order attributions, even when all the enabling resources are in place. (shrink)

This article is a reaction to the following argument that has been offered in favor of abstract realism about fictional characters: fictional characters do not impose any extra ontological cost on our ontology, because they belong to the same ontological kind as literary works, which we already accept. I address arguments that have been adduced by Jeffrey Goodman in defense of this argument, and I show that there is no relevant parallelism between fictional entities and literary works that the abstract (...) fictional realist can use to bolster her theory. (shrink)

There are two main questions that any account of corporate lawyers’ moral obligations needs to answer: (1) Do corporate lawyers have moral obligations to third parties? and (2) In cases of conflict between obligations to the corporation and obligations to third parties, which should prevail? This Article offers answers to these questions in the context of lawyers working in medical corporations. I argue that lawyers do have moral obligations to third parties, and that in cases where patients’ rights are being (...) violated by a medical company, patients’ rights should prevail. Consequently, attorney–client confidentiality rules should be relaxed to allow for attorney disclosures in egregious cases of potential harm to third parties. (shrink)

It is customary for institutions that organize sporting competitions and events to exercise a considerable degree of authority over the participants. That authority is often manifested in the enforcement of penalties for infringements of fair play. This paper focuses on one concrete case from soccer, although I take the discussion to extend to other sports as well. I argue that not all fair play rules should be enforced by the respective organizing institutions, and that enforcing all of them indiscriminately is (...) a cause of injustice, rather than promoting fairness in sports. I propose a principled way of making the necessary distinction between those fair play rules that are enforceable and those that are not. (shrink)

In this article, I set out a theoretical framework for analyzing fictional copyright protection of fictional characters in literature. Using this framework, I argue that the two most prominent approaches that U.S. courts have adopted with respect to fictional character copyright (the Nichols test and the Sam Spade “Story Being Told” test) are unsustainable. The idea of distinct delineation that came out of Nichols may be understood in two ways: on one view, fictional characters are distinctly delineated if they deviate (...) from a literary type. On the other view, they are distinctly delineated if they are attributed a sufficient number of properties in the fictions where they appear. Both views succumb to serious objections, while the test in Sam Spade is no better. The failure of the two judicial tests suggests that, instead of asking questions about fictional character copyrightability, courts should instead focus on the substantial similarity question. In the last part of the paper, I draw a distinction between two types of fictional character copyright infringement cases (transformations and transfers), and suggest that a Nichols-type substantial similarity analysis is all that is required in transformation situations. Although the focus of this article is U.S. law, the issues discussed and the analyses proposed may prove helpful in addressing fictional copyright in other jurisdictions as well. (shrink)

Hans-Georg GADAMER, Hermeneutische Entwürfe. Vorträge und Aufsätze ; Pascal MICHON, Poétique d’une anti-anthropologie: l’herméneutique deGadamer ; Robert J. DOSTAL, The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer ; Denis SERON, Le problème de la métaphysique. Recherches sur l’interprétation heideggerienne de Platon et d’Aristote ; Henry MALDINEY, Ouvrir le rien. L’art nu ; Dominique JANICAUD, Heidegger en France, I. Récit; II. Entretiens ; Maurice MERLEAU-PONTY, Fenomenologia percepţiei ; Trish GLAZEBROOK, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Science ; Richard WOLIN, Heidegger’s Children. Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas (...) and Herbert Marcuse ; Ivo DEGENNARO, Logos – Heidegger liest Heraklit ; O. K. WIEGAND, R. J. DOSTAL, L. EMBREE, J. KOCKELMANS and J. N. MOHANTY, Phenomenology on Kant, German Idealism, Hermeneutics and Logic ; James FAULCONER and Mark WRATHALL, Appropriating Heidegger. (shrink)

Hans-Georg GADAMER, Hermeneutische Entwürfe. Vorträge und Aufsätze ; Pascal MICHON, Poétique d’une anti-anthropologie: l’herméneutique deGadamer ; Robert J. DOSTAL, The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer ; Denis SERON, Le problème de la métaphysique. Recherches sur l’interprétation heideggerienne de Platon et d’Aristote ; Henry MALDINEY, Ouvrir le rien. L’art nu ; Dominique JANICAUD, Heidegger en France, I. Récit; II. Entretiens ; Maurice MERLEAU-PONTY, Fenomenologia percepţiei ; Trish GLAZEBROOK, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Science ; Richard WOLIN, Heidegger’s Children. Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas (...) and Herbert Marcuse ; Ivo DEGENNARO, Logos – Heidegger liest Heraklit ; O. K. WIEGAND, R. J. DOSTAL, L. EMBREE, J. KOCKELMANS and J. N. MOHANTY, Phenomenology on Kant, German Idealism, Hermeneutics and Logic ; James FAULCONER and Mark WRATHALL, Appropriating Heidegger. (shrink)

Nine selection‐survival strategies were implemented in a genetic algorithm experiment, and differences in terms of evolution were assessed. The moments of evolution (expressed as generation numbers) were recorded in a contingency of three strategies (i.e., proportional, tournament, and deterministic) for two moments (i.e., selection for crossover and mutation and survival for replacement). The experiment was conducted for the first 20,000 generations in 46 independent runs. The relative moments of evolution (where evolution was defined as a significant increase in the determination (...) coefficient relative to the previous generation) when any selection‐survival strategy was used fit a Log‐Pearson type III distribution. Moreover, when distributions were compared to one another, functional relationships were identified between the population parameters, revealing a degeneration of the Log‐Pearson type III distribution in a one‐parametrical distribution that can be assigned to the chosen variable—evolution strategy. The obtained theoretical population distribution allowed comparison of the selection‐survival strategies that were used. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Complexity, 2012. (shrink)