The paper provides an overview of the early considerations regarding the phenomenon of plagiarism – from Greco-Roman antiquity to the time when a thorough study examining literary theft in its textual, legal, and moral manifestations was printed, i. e. “Philosophical Dissertation on Literary Plagiarism” by Jacob Thomasius. Although the issue of plagiarism was very vital in ancient times, all the oldest considerations concerning the appropriation of other people’s texts were essentially pragmatic moves or reactions rather than purposeful theoretical interpretations (...) of the subject. However, in addition to the situational grounds of the accusation, they can reveal certain principles that, according to estimations of the time, could prevent or refute allegations of plagiarism. It was enough if the author stated, albeit generally but clearly, that the fragments of other people’s texts, whether altered or not, were used. It was also acceptable if the reader believed that the author considered his borrowings recognizable to educated readers. Another reason for the elimination of possible accusations was the factor of competition – the author’s desire to adapt the achievements of another cultural environment in his own one, significantly improving them. The medieval and early modern materials generally testify to the relevance of ancient views and reveal some new problems. This is, in particular, the incompatibility of new more formalized ideas about authorship and traditional educational practices, which encouraged the uncontrolled use of others’ texts. Some authors also emphasized that plagiarism was an obstacle to the development of science. The paper ends with examples that show how European ideas about the rules of using others’ writings may help interpret the writing methods of the early modern Ukrainian authors, including philosophers. (shrink)

Commentary on the first Ukrainian translation of Thomasius’ work entitled “Nucleus disputationis de plagio literario maxime theoreticus, thesibus paucis & brevibus comprehensus”, which is one of the Appendices to the famous “Philosophical dissertation on literary plagiarism”.

Models are of central importance in many scientific contexts. The centrality of models such as the billiard ball model of a gas, the Bohr model of the atom, the MIT bag model of the nucleon, the Gaussian-chain model of a polymer, the Lorenz model of the atmosphere, the Lotka-Volterra model of predator-prey interaction, the double helix model of DNA, agent-based and evolutionary models in the social sciences, or general equilibrium models of markets in their respective domains are cases in point. (...) Scientists spend a great deal of time building, testing, comparing and revising models, and much journal space is dedicated to introducing, applying and interpreting these valuable tools. In short, models are one of the principal instruments of modern science. -/- Philosophers are acknowledging the importance of models with increasing attention and are probing the assorted roles that models play in scientific practice. The result has been an incredible proliferation of model-types in the philosophical literature. Probing models, phenomenological models, computational models, developmental models, explanatory models, impoverished models, testing models, idealized models, theoretical models, scale models, heuristic models, caricature models, didactic models, fantasy models, toy models, imaginary models, mathematical models, substitute models, iconic models, formal models, analogue models and instrumental models are but some of the notions that are used to categorize models. While at first glance this abundance is overwhelming, it can quickly be brought under control by recognizing that these notions pertain to different problems that arise in connection with models. For example, models raise questions in semantics (what is the representational function that models perform?), ontology (what kind of things are models?), epistemology (how do we learn with models?), and, of course, in philosophy of science (how do models relate to theory?; what are the implications of a model based approach to science for the debates over scientific realism, reductionism, explanation and laws of nature?). (shrink)

Summary of the talk given to the 22nd Conference on the History of Logic, Cracow (Poland), July 5–9, 1976.

Gases reach equilibrium when left to themselves. Why do they behave in this way? The canonical answer to this question, originally proffered by Boltzmann, is that the systems have to be ergodic. This answer has been criticised on different grounds and is now widely regarded as flawed. In this paper we argue that some of the main arguments against Boltzmann's answer, in particular, arguments based on the KAM-theorem and the Markus-Meyer theorem, are beside the point. We then argue that something (...) close to Boltzmann's original proposal is true for gases: gases behave thermodynamic-like if they are epsilon-ergodic, i.e., ergodic on the entire accessible phase space except for a small region of measure epsilon. This answer is promising because there are good reasons to believe that relevant systems in statistical mechanics are epsilon-ergodic. (shrink)

Entropy is ubiquitous in physics, and it plays important roles in numerous other disciplines ranging from logic and statistics to biology and economics. However, a closer look reveals a complicated picture: entropy is defined differently in different contexts, and even within the same domain different notions of entropy are at work. Some of these are defined in terms of probabilities, others are not. The aim of this chapter is to arrive at an understanding of some of the most important notions (...) of entropy and to clarify the relations between them, After setting the stage by introducing the thermodynamic entropy, we discuss notions of entropy in information theory, statistical mechanics, dynamical systems theory and fractal geometry. (shrink)

Why do systems prepared in a non-equilibrium state approach, and eventually reach, equilibrium? An important contemporary version of the Boltzmannian approach to statistical mechanics answers this question by an appeal to the notion of typicality. The problem with this approach is that it comes in different versions, which are, however, not recognised as such, much less clearly distinguished, and we often find different arguments pursued side by side. The aim of this paper is to disentangle different versions of typicality-based explanations (...) of thermodynamic behaviour and evaluate their respective success. My conclusion will be that the boldest version fails for technical reasons, while more prudent versions leave unanswered essential questions. (shrink)

We introduce a tool for analysing models of $\text {CT}^-$, the compositional truth theory over Peano Arithmetic. We present a new proof of Lachlan’s theorem that the arithmetical part of models of $\text {CT}^-$ are recursively saturated. We also use this tool to provide a new proof of theorem from [8] that all models of $\text {CT}^-$ carry a partial inductive truth predicate. Finally, we construct a partial truth predicate defined for a set of formulae whose syntactic depth forms a (...) nonstandard cut which cannot be extended to a full truth predicate satisfying $\text {CT}^-$. (shrink)

Equilibrium is a central concept of statistical mechanics. In previous work we introduced the notions of a Boltzmannian alpha-epsilon-equilibrium and a Boltzmannian gamma-epsilon-equilibrium. This was done in a deterministic context. We now consider systems with a stochastic micro-dynamics and transfer these notions from the deterministic to the stochastic context. We then prove stochastic equivalents of the Dominance Theorem and the Prevalence Theorem. This establishes that also in stochastic systems equilibrium macro-regions are large in requisite sense.

Featuring contributions from leading experts, this book represents the first collection of essays on the topic of art and science in the analytic tradition of ...

The views on in vitro fertilization within Russian Orthodox Christian society are diverse. One reason for that variation is the ambiguity found in “The Basis of the Social Concept,” the document issued in 2000 by the Russian Orthodox Church and considered to be the primary guidelines for determining the Church’s stance on bioethics. This essay explores how the treatment of infertility reconciles with the Orthodox Christian faith and what methods of medical assistance for infertility may be appropriate for Orthodox Christians. (...) The focus here is on IVF because it is among the most widely used methods to overcome childlessness, and the permissibility of IVF is the object of disagreement among Orthodox. The article defines criteria that can help to discern what is absolutely wrong and must be avoided from what only falls short of the mark, but not very far, for Orthodox Christians. If treatment of the underlying causes of infertility has failed or promises no hope and a husband and a wife do not feel able to carry the Cross of infertility, then from pastoral dispensation they might be blessed to use ethically acceptable variants of IVF. IVF has many variants that are different in their spiritual influence on a person. Orthodox Christians pursuing IVF should seek spiritual guidance and a blessing to pursue IVF. They must not form more embryos than will be transferred in the same cycle. Freezing, discarding, or reduction of embryos is forbidden. Infertile couples ought to use only their reproductive cells. The use of donor gametes is unacceptable. Any embryo formed ought to be transferred into the wife’s womb, and the use of surrogates is impermissible. Only a husband and wife who are able to maintain their marital union and where the wife is still of childbearing age should be blessed to use IVF. (shrink)

A weakly o-minimal structure image expanding an ordered group is called nonvaluational iff for every cut left angle bracketC,Dright-pointing angle bracket of definable in image, we have that inf{y−x:xset membership, variantC,yset membership, variantD}=0. The study of nonvaluational weakly o-minimal expansions of real closed fields carried out in [D. Macpherson, D. Marker, C. Steinhorn,Weakly o-minimal structures and real closed fields, Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 352 5435–5483. MR1781273 (2001i:03079] suggests that this class is very close to the class of o-minimal expansions of (...) real closed fields. Here we further develop this analogy. We establish an o-minimal style cell decomposition for weakly o-minimal non-valuational expansions of ordered groups. For structures enjoying such a strong cell decomposition we construct a canonical o-minimal extension. Finally, we make attempts towards generalizing the o-minimal Euler characteristic to the class of sets definable in weakly o-minimal structures with the strong cell decomposition property. (shrink)

This study examines the impact of board of director gender diversity on corporate tax aggressiveness. Based on a sample of 418 U.S. firms covering the 2006–2009 period, our ordinary least squares regression results show a negative and statistically significant association between female representation on the board and tax aggressiveness after controlling for endogeneity. Our results are consistent across several measures of tax aggressiveness and additional robustness checks.

The paper is aimed at studying the topological dimension for sets definable in weakly o-minimal structures in order to prepare background for further investigation of groups, group actions and fields definable in the weakly o-minimal context. We prove that the topological dimension of a set definable in a weakly o-minimal structure is invariant under definable injective maps, strengthening an analogous result from [2] for sets and functions definable in models of weakly o-minimal theories. We pay special attention to large subsets (...) of Cartesian products of definable sets, showing that if X, Y and S are non-empty definable sets and S is a large subset of X × Y, then for a large set of tuples $\langle \overline{a}_{1},\ldots,\overline{a}_{2^{k}}\rangle \in X^{2^{k}}$ , where k = dim(Y), the union of fibers $S_{\overline{a}_{1}}\cup \cdots \cup S_{\overline{a}_{2^{k}}}$ is large in Y. Finally, given a weakly o-minimal structure ������, we find various conditions equivalent to the fact that the topological dimension in ������ enjoys the addition property. (shrink)

This study examines the impact of corporate tax avoidance on board of directors and chief executive officer reputation. Our regression results show that when firms engage in tax avoidance, both directors and CEOs, on average, are rewarded by improvements in their reputations as proxied by an increased number of outside board seats. In particular, both independent directors and non-CEO executive directors undergo positive changes in reputation. We also find that CEOs of tax-aggressive firms experience enhanced reputations by gaining extra board (...) seats. Our main regression results hold based on additional analyses. Overall, this study provides important empirical evidence confirming an association between tax avoidance and the individual reputations of directors and CEOs. (shrink)

The article explores specificities of thematization of science and scientific rationality in Martin Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. This analysis focuses on the concept of scienticity, character- istic for Heidegger’s “early” line of thought, as well as continuation and divergence of exposition of “science” and the nature of “theoretical attitude” as the subject of interpretation of transcen- dental phenomenology of E. Husserl. This research places an emphasis on particularity of Hei- degger’s explication of existential concept of science as opposed to prevailing logico-epistemolog- (...) ical philosophy of science, and foundation of thematization of scientific “subject matters” and theoretical attitude upon the universe of ontological understanding of being of entities (regional ontologies). It also focuses on Heidegger’s assertion of fundamental ontological projection in a status of a peculiar “science of knowledge”, which gives ground for a priori pre-conditions of specific sciences. Separate attention is paid to a specifically Heideggerian approach to explication of the rooting of initial scientific orientation in the sphere of pre-scientific experience, which ar- ticulates itself in so called “fundamental concepts”, as well as positioning of contemplative ‘present-at-hand’ paradigm of theoretical knowledge as a derivative modus of a primary use of ‘ready-to-handness’ as a phenomenological founding basis of everydayness’ experience. The author came to the attention that scientific knowledge is a project Dasein. It is within the framework of self-design that Dasein thematizes what happens to another region of being that is the subject of scientific knowledge. In other words, making things available in researching, applying themes, provided that the design allowed late as the systematic development of the most modern buildings, such as is done in the world, and possibly everyday greeting improvised performance. (shrink)

The concept of information can be viewed from two perspectives, namely epistemic and ontological. In the epistemic view, information is associated with meaning, semantics, and knowledge, while in the ontological view, it is understood as structures and forms of objects. Information is most often perceived as epistemic information, yet a closer look at epistemic information reveals that this concept does not account for ontological information. This paper poses the following question: Should we select epistemic or ontological information as our primary (...) concept of information, or should we acknowledge that both kinds of information are required for a full comprehension? The discussion here is supported by references to modern research in physics, computing, cosmology, and information sciences. (shrink)

We prove that the two-variable fragment of first-order intuitionistic logic is undecidable, even without constants and equality. We also show that the two-variable fragment of a quantified modal logic L with expanding first-order domains is undecidable whenever there is a Kripke frame for L with a point having infinitely many successors (such are, in particular, the first-order extensions of practically all standard modal logics like K, K4, GL, S4, S5, K4.1, S4.2, GL.3, etc.). For many quantified modal logics, including those (...) in the standard nomenclature above, even the monadic two-variable fragments turn out to be undecidable. (shrink)

As a remedy for the bad computational behaviour of first-order temporal logic (FOTL), it has recently been proposed to restrict the application of temporal operators to formulas with at most one free variable thereby obtaining so-called monodic fragments of FOTL. In this paper, we are concerned with constructing tableau algorithms for monodic fragments based on decidable fragments of first-order logic like the two-variable fragment or the guarded fragment. We present a general framework that shows how existing decision procedures for first-order (...) fragments can be used for constructing a tableau algorithm for the corresponding monodic fragment of FOTL. Some example instantiations of the framework are presented. (shrink)

A model M of PA has the omega-property if it has a subset of order type omega that is coded in an elementary end extension of M. All countable recursively saturated models have the omega-property, but there are also models with the omega-property that are not recursively saturated. The papers is devoted to the study of structural properties of such models.

Enesidemo ha sido considerado, tradicionalmente, como figura mediadora entre el escepticismo pirroniano y el escepticismo académico. En el Códice 212 de su Bibliotheca, Focio proporciona alguna infonnación fundamental para reconocer a Enesidemo como figura clave del escepticismo entre Timón de Filunte y Sexto Empírico. Así, es corriente hablar de la pertenencia de Enesidemo a la academia platónica, y de su separación, cuando Filón de Larisa y su sucesor Clitx5maco empiezan a renunciar a los principios académicos y adoptan principios estoicos2, A (...) partir de aquí es corriente concluir que trabajaba por restaurar cierta originalidad de la especulación filosófica, basada en Pirrón, frente a todo el trabajo de reflexión y de análisis que él mismo había realizado en la academia en contra de los dogmáticos estoicos. La hipótesis de este artículo rompe esta ortodoxa interpretachin. Enesidemo es el primero en recuperar sistemáticamente los presupuestos del pensamiento pirroniano, generando un movimiento desconocido como tal hasta ese momento, el pirronismo shrink)

The Cell Cycle Ontology (CCO) has the aim to provide a 'one stop shop' for scientists interested in the biology of the cell cycle that would like to ask questions from a molecular and/or systems perspective: what are the genes, proteins, and so on involved in the regulation of cell division? How do they interact to produce the effects observed in the regulation of the cell cycle? To answer these questions, the CCO must integrate a large amount of knowledge from (...) diverse sources; the irregularity and incompleteness of this information suggests an ontology can act as the means of this integration. The volatility and continued expansion of biological knowledge means the content and modelling of the CCO will have to be frequently changed and updated. The CCO is generated from the input data automatically once every two months. This makes it easy to change the representation to enable certain queries; incorporate new knowledge; and consistently apply design patterns across the CCO. The automatic process also allows the CCO to be delivered in a variety of representations that suit the needs of various CCO customers and the abilities of existing toolsets. In this paper we present the CCO and its characteristics of utility and flexibility, that, from our perspective, make it a beautiful ontology. (shrink)

Millions of animals are used every year in oftentimes extremely painful and distressing scientific procedures. Legislation of animal experimentation in modern societies is based on the supposition that this is ethically acceptable when certain more or less defined formal (e.g. logistical, technical) demands and ethical principles are met. The main parameters in this context correspond to the “3Rs” concept as defined by Russel and Burch in 1959, i.e. that all efforts to replace, reduce and refine experiments must be undertaken. The (...) licensing of animal experiments normally requires an ethical evaluation process, oftentimes undertaken by ethics committees. The serious problems in putting this idea into practice include inter alia unclear conditions and standards for ethical decisions, insufficient management of experiments undertaken for specific (e.g. regulatory) purposes, and conflicts of interest of ethics committees’ members. (shrink)

We develop multi-conclusion nested sequent calculi for the fifteen logics of the intuitionistic modal cube between IK and IS5. The proof of cut-free completeness for all logics is provided both syntactically via a Maehara-style translation and semantically by constructing an infinite birelational countermodel from a failed proof search. Interestingly, the Maehara-style translation for proving soundness syntactically fails due to the hierarchical structure of nested sequents. Consequently, we only provide the semantic proof of soundness. The countermodel construction used to prove completeness (...) required a completely novel approach to deal with two independent sources of non-termination in the proof search present in the case of transitive and Euclidean logics. (shrink)