Legal text retrieval traditionally relies upon external knowledge sources such as thesauri and classification schemes, and an accurate indexing of the documents is often manually done. As a result not all legal documents can be effectively retrieved. However a number of current artificial intelligence techniques are promising for legal text retrieval. They sustain the acquisition of knowledge and the knowledge-rich processing of the content of document texts and information need, and of their matching. Currently, techniques for learning information needs, learning (...) concept attributes of texts, information extraction, text classification and clustering, and text summarization need to be studied in legal text retrieval because of their potential for improving retrieval and decreasing the cost of manual indexing. The resulting query and text representations are semantically much richer than a set of key terms. Their use allows for more refined retrieval models in which some reasoning can be applied. This paper gives an overview of the state of the art of these innovativetechniques and their potential for legal text retrieval. (shrink)

Argumentation mining aims to automatically detect, classify and structure argumentation in text. Therefore, argumentation mining is an important part of a complete argumentation analyisis, i.e. understanding the content of serial arguments, their linguistic structure, the relationship between the preceding and following arguments, recognizing the underlying conceptual beliefs, and understanding within the comprehensive coherence of the specific topic. We present different methods to aid argumentation mining, starting with plain argumentation detection and moving forward to a more structural analysis of the detected (...) argumentation. Different state-of-the-art techniques on machine learning and context free grammars are applied to solve the challenges of argumentation mining. We also highlight fundamental questions found during our research and analyse different issues for future research on argumentation mining. (shrink)

The SALOMON project is a contribution to the automatic processing of legal texts. Its aim is to automatically summarise Belgian criminal cases in order to improve access to the large number of existing and future cases. Therefore, techniques are developed for identifying and extracting relevant information from the cases. A broader application of these techniques could considerably simplify the work of the legal profession.A double methodology was used when developing SALOMON: the cases are processed by employing additional knowledge to interpret (...) structural patterns and features on the one hand and by way of occurrence statistics of index terms on the other. As a result, SALOMON performs an initial categorisation and structuring of the cases and subsequently extracts the most relevant text units of the alleged offences and of the opinion of the court. The SALOMON techniques do not themselves solve any legal questions, but they do guide the user effectively towards relevant texts. (shrink)

Aggregating individuals’ consistent attitudes might produce inconsistent collective attitudes. Some groups therefore need the capacity to form attitudes that are irreducible to those of their members. Such groups, group-agent realists argue, are agents in control of their own attitude formation. In this paper, however, I show how group-agent realism overlooks the important fact that groups consist of strategically interacting agents. Only by eliminating group agency from our social explanations can we see how individuals vote strategically to gain control of their (...) groups and produce collective attitudes we cannot make sense of if we treat groups as agents. (shrink)

In this chapter, we ask three questions about pedophilia: Is it immoral to be a pedophile? Is it immoral for pedophiles to seek out sexual contact with children? Is it immoral for pedophiles to satisfy their sexual preferences by using computer-generated graphics, sex dolls, and/or sex robots that mimic children? We argue that it is not immoral to be a pedophile, it is immoral for pedophiles to seek out sexual contact with children because of the expected harm to children, and (...) it is morally permissible for pedophiles to satisfy their sexual preferences in ways that do not involve any real children. (shrink)

Can groups really be agents or is group agency just a fiction? Christian List and Philip Pettit argue influentially for group-agent realism by showing how certain groups form and act on attitudes in ways they take to be unexplainable at the level of the individual agents constituting them. Group agency is therefore considered not a fiction or a metaphor but a reality we must account for in explanations of certain social phenomena. In this paper, I challenge this defence of group-agent (...) realism by showing how it is undermined by individual-level analysis of how individuals interact within groups. While group agency can be a useful fiction, real agents are at the individual level, not the collective level. (shrink)

The odds of encountering a senior citizen selling on the street have increased. The claim that they have no choice but to work and sell on the street, despite the dangers, illnesses, and psychological issues they may face, to provide for their family’s needs is very evident. Therefore, this study explores the quality of life, lived experiences, challenges, and coping mechanisms of senior citizen street vendors in Bulacan, Philippines. The study employed Heideggerian Phenomenology and Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). Moreover, the (...) following themes arise (1) Golden years, (2) Socially connected, and (3) Unknown journey. These themes highlighted the experiences and challenges faced by the participants. Moreover, it is highly suggested that local government agencies enhance and strictly monitor the existing program that alleviates mental and physical health concerns and senior citizens' safety and financial assistance. (shrink)

Three clinical cases of very ill neonates exemplifying extreme ethical situations for nurses are interpreted through Arendt's concepts of life and natality, and Agamben's critique of bare life. Agamben's notions of form-of-life, as the inseparability of zoe/bios, and testimony are offered as the potential foundation of nursing ethics.

In this paper the very earliest relationship of mother and newborn will be described phenomenologically through an interlacing of Donald Winnicott''s work on maternal holding with Maurice Merleau-Ponty''s concepts of flesh and chiasm. Merleau-Ponty''s thinking suggests that the holding relationship described by Winnicott is formed as much by the infant''s holding of the mother as it is by mother''s holding of her infant. Both flex and bend towards each other and inscribe each other yet retain their own particularity. Further specification (...) and articulation of the lived body of both arises from the ongoing overlapping and sedimenting of past and current touches, movements, sounds, and sightings initiated internally and externally. Examples drawn from fieldwork and secondary sources will illustrate this ongoing embodied relationship. (shrink)

A moralised conception of freedom is based on a normative theory. Understanding it therefore requires an analysis of this theory. In this paper, I show how republican freedom as non-domination is moralised, and why analysing this concept therefore involves identifying the basic components of the republican theory of justice. One of these components is the non-moralised pure negative conception of freedom as non-interference. Republicans therefore cannot keep insisting that their freedom concept conflicts with, and is superior to, this more basic (...) concept. I demonstrate how we can use pure negative freedom to formulate the republican theory more precisely. This exercise is more fruitful than the common focus on the alleged conflict between the two freedom concepts. (shrink)

Lewis Carroll: Logic Charles L. Dodgson, 1832-1898, was a British mathematician, logician, and the author of the ‘Alice’ books, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. His fame derives principally from his literary works, but in the twentieth century some of his mathematical … Continue reading Lewis Carroll: Logic →.

Lewis Carroll: Logic Charles L. Dodgson, 1832-1898, was a British mathematician, logician, and the author of the ‘Alice’ books, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. His fame derives principally from his literary works, but in the twentieth century some of his mathematical … Continue reading Lewis Carroll: Logic →.

This paper explores Jean‐Luc Nancy's philosophical reflection on surviving his own heart transplant. In ‘The Intruder’, he raises central questions concerning the relations between what he refers to as a ‘proper’ life, that is, a life that is thought to be one's own singular ‘lived experience’, and medical techniques, shaped at this particular historical juncture by cyclosporine or immuno‐suppresssion. He describes the temporal nature of an ever‐increasing sense of strangeness and fragmentation which accompanies his heart transplant. In doing so, Nancy (...) opens up the concealed of transplantation in terms of the problematic ‘gift’ of a ‘foreign’ organ, the unremitting suffering intrusiveness of the treatment regimen, and the living of life as ‘bare life’. He uncovers and exposes the relentless uncanniness that pervades the post‐transplant experience, which for him is an example of our humanistic, never‐ending impulse, to alter ourselves. Nevertheless, Nancy offers no answer to this dilemma, but instead calls us to think about the meaning or ‘sense’ of the prolonging of life and deferring of death, which currently drives our medical interventions. (shrink)

This study intends to question the theoretical and epistemological basis of research practices that give rise to the production of spontaneous oral commentary by teachers watching their own teacher action. What clues can the researcher use to impart on these discourses their ability to reveal that which is related to the link between discourse, action and teacher thinking? To address this question, we propose to concentrate more specifically on planning incidents, challenging moments, dilemmas and regrets in which, according to Schütz’s (...) expression (1998), the teacher faces a world that is not self-evident. Here we will consider corpus sequences in which relationships to knowledge and opportunities - both missed and taken advantage of - play out. In these moments of fracture, hints of an evolving didactic repertoire seem to appear. This will bring us to question the discourses of self-confrontation as textual material, the study of which informs of the construction of professional knowledge and its evolution. (shrink)

Biography of the French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist Simone Weil (1909-1943). Unrevised and unpublished proofs.

In _Fairfax Media Publications Pty Ltd v Voller_ (‘_Voller_’) the Australian High Court held that media companies maintaining Facebook comment pages could be liable for the defamatory posts of commenters on those sites. The decision focussed entirely on whether, by maintaining the Facebook page, the companies had ‘published’ the statements of commenters. Hearings on other aspects of the tort litigation continue. This paper considers the implications of the tort of defamation on public participation on political will formation where, as is (...) increasingly the case, the participation occurs virtually. Australian law has already tackled the law of defamation as a threat to freedom of political communication; _Voller_ continues the jurisprudence by considering whether hosting an online forum for debate amounts to publication. The more recent High Court judgment in _Google LLC v Defteros_ demonstrated the necessity of the law to align the ‘acts’ necessary to found legal action with the new environment of automated search engines. The troubled intersection of dematerialised practices of political and cultural discourse and jurisdictionally bound laws of defamation challenges participatory governance as tribes form and dissolve and shift between geographical interests. Defamation in Australia is a tort of strict liability; and, absenting applicable defences, any participation in communication is sufficient to make that participant a publisher and a party to the defamation. The online environment stretches words across geographical and jurisdictional boundaries, but it also stretches and contorts concepts of fault and responsibility. Participatory digital cultural practices integrating users in the creation of cultural heritage simultaneously draw participants into transgressions, both cultural and legal, which are amplified by the medium. Questions of collective guilt, ‘shades’ of moral responsibility and disproportionality between blameworthiness and legal liability challenge laws formulated for the printing press but now deployed in the online environment. In this way the digitized participatory environment presents deep challenges to law and legal systems, which are chained to geography. This paper considers the concept of innocent publication in the context of the digitized participatory environment and the way in which the virtual experience is dissolving concepts of geographically defined jurisdictions. (shrink)

This thought-provoking book will ask what it is to be human, what to be animal, and what are the natures of the relationships between them. This is accomplished with philosophical and ethical discussions, scientific evidence and dynamic theoretical approaches. Attitudes to Animals will also encourage us to think not only of our relationships to non-human animals, but also of those to other, human, animals. This book provides a foundation that the reader can use to make ethical choices about animals. It (...) will challenge readers to question their current views, attitudes and perspectives on animals, nature and development of the human-animal relationship. Human perspectives on the human-animal relationships reflect what we have learned, together with spoken and unspoken attitudes and assumptions, from our families, societies, media, education and employment. (shrink)

Examines from a Jewish point of view such topics as love, sex, marriage, business ethics, health and medicine, the environment, faith, birth control, civil disobedience, scholarship, and death.

John Venn and Charles L. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) created systems of logic diagrams capable of representing classes (sets) and their relations in the form of propositions. Each is a proof method for syllogisms, and Carroll's is a sound and complete system. For a large number of sets, Carroll diagrams are easier to draw because of their self-similarity and algorithmic construction. This regularity makes it easier to locate and thereby to erase cells corresponding with classes destroyed by the premises of an (...) argument, a particularly difficult task in Venn diagrams for more than four sets. Carroll diagrams can represent existential propositions easily, so they are capable of clearly representing more complex problems than Venn's system can. Finally, both Carroll and Venn diagrams are maximal, in the sense that no additional logic information like inclusive disjunctions is able to be represented by them. Carroll's logic diagrams and logic trees constitute his visual logic system. (shrink)

“Doing Gender,” West and Zimmerman's landmark article, highlighted the importance of social interaction, thus revealing the weaknesses of socialization and structural approaches. However, despite its revolutionary potential for illuminating how to dismantle the gender system, doing gender has become a theory of gender persistence and the inevitability of inequality. In this article, the author argues that we need to reframe the questions to ask how we can undo gender. Research should focus on when and how social interactions become less gendered, (...) whether gender can be irrelevant in interaction, whether gendered interactions always underwrite inequality, how the institutional and interactional levels work together to produce change, and interaction as the site of change. (shrink)

Charles L. Dodgson's reputation as a significant figure in nineteenth-century logic was firmly established when the philosopher and historian of philosophy William Warren Bartley, III published Dodgson's ?lost? book of logic, Part II of Symbolic Logic, in 1977. Bartley's commentary and annotations confirm that Dodgson was a superb technical innovator. In this paper, I closely examine Dodgson's methods and their evolution in the two parts of Symbolic Logic to clarify and justify Bartley's claims. Then, using more recent publications and unpublished (...) letters, I argue that Dodgson approached the elimination problem in class logic differently than his contemporaries, and in doing so, anticipated several important concepts and techniques in automated deductive reasoning. These materials also provide additional insight into his reasons for writing this book. (shrink)

Dans une lettre adressée à Bertrand Russell, le 17 mai 1905, Hugh MacColl raconte avoir abandonné l’étude de la logique après 1884, pendant près de treize ans, et explique que ce fut la lecture de l’ouvrage de Lewis Carroll, Symbolic Logic (1896), qui ralluma le vieux feu qu’il croyait éteint. Dès lors, il publie de nombreux articles contenant certaines de ses innovations majeures en logique. L’objet de cet article est de discuter la familiarité de MacColl et son appréciation du travail (...) de Carroll, et de comprendre comment cela l’amena à réinvestir le domaine de la logique. Rien n’indique que les deux hommes se soient jamais rencontrés ou aient échangé une correspondance personnelle. Cependant, MacColl recensa dans le journal The Athenaeum plusieurs ouvrages de Carroll, essentiellement en géométrie et en logique. Souvent, Carroll répondait aux critiques de MacColl dans les éditions suivantes de ses ouvrages. Une discussion de ces sources fournit des éclaircissements intéressants sur les investigations mathématiques et logiques de MacColl et Carroll. (shrink)

Dans une lettre adressée à Bertrand Russell, le 17 mai 1905, Hugh MacColl raconte avoir abandonné l’étude de la logique après 1884, pendant près de treize ans, et explique que ce fut la lecture de l’ouvrage de Lewis Carroll, Symbolic Logic (1896), qui ralluma le vieux feu qu’il croyait éteint. Dès lors, il publie de nombreux articles contenant certaines de ses innovations majeures en logique. L’objet de cet article est de discuter la familiarité de MacColl et son appréciation du travail (...) de Carroll, et de comprendre comment cela l’amena à réinvestir le domaine de la logique. Rien n’indique que les deux hommes se soient jamais rencontrés ou aient échangé une correspondance personnelle. Cependant, MacColl recensa dans le journal The Athenaeum plusieurs ouvrages de Carroll, essentiellement en géométrie et en logique. Souvent, Carroll répondait aux critiques de MacColl dans les éditions suivantes de ses ouvrages. Une discussion de ces sources fournit des éclaircissements intéressants sur les investigations mathématiques et logiques de MacColl et Carroll. (shrink)

Part of a series of highly entertaining books on the history of sinning. Eating too much is one of the Western world's greatest problems, but relatively few people would consider it a crime against God. Yet even as gluttony has ceased to be an evil, food and dieting have become a cultural obsessions, with millions of pounds expended on mortifying the flesh with punishing diet and exercise regimes. This brief history of gluttony traces the changing cultural attitudes towards food and (...) pleasure, scarcity and abundance. It reveals how notions of saintliness and purity have helped form modern views of enjoyment, self-mortification, and ultimately nutrition. Restaurant-goers and readers of gourmet magazines rationalize their pursuit of too much food in many ways, but does a slight tinge of guilt makes your meal taste that much better? This book provides the answer, thoroughly exploring humankind's attempts to quell its chief survival strategy - eating. (shrink)

Au xvie siècle, l’autobiographie et le récit de voyage étaient étroitement liés et suivirent pendant quelques décennies une évolution parallèle. Thomas Platter l’aîné essaya de fournir dans sesMémoires la description d’une vie exemplaire retraçant ses expériences multiples sur les routes d’Europe. Son fils Felix nous laissa un ouvrage disparate (un mélange de journal, de récit de voyage et de mémoires) où l’auteur paraît omniprésent. Sa conception de l’écriture autobiographique rappelle celle de Montaigne. Le jeune frère Thomas suivit rigoureusement les règles (...) émises par les théoriciens du voyage, condamnant toute opinion subjective. Les ouvrages des Platter nous donnent le meilleur exemple de l’évolution du genre (auto-)biographique entre la Renaissance classique et le Baroque dit sauvage. (shrink)

This paper critically evaluates current conceptions of pregnancy as a possession of either mother or infant. In opposition to the more common stance that marks birth as the beginning of intercorporeality and perception, pregnancy is instead phenomenologically delineated as a chiasmic relationship between mother and her pre‐infant from a Merleau‐Pontian perspective. This paper maintains that during pregnancy a mother‐to‐be and her pre‐infant are deepened and modified through their intertwining.

Returning to the much-neglected work of George Herbert Mead, this book defines the self and links it to identity and collective action.

Several DNA-damage detection and repair mechanisms have evolved to repair double-strand breaks induced by mutagens. Later in evolutionary history, DNA single- and double-strand cuts made possible immune diversity by V(D)J recombination and recombination at meiosis. Such cuts are induced endogenously and are highly regulated and controlled. In meiosis, DNA cuts are essential for the initiation of homologous recombination, and for the formation of joint molecule and crossovers. Many proteins that function during somatic DNA-damage detection and repair are also active during (...) homologous recombination. However, their meiotic functions may be altered from their somatic roles through localization, posttranslational modifications and/or interactions with meiosis-specific proteins. Presumably, somatic repair functions and meiotic recombination diverged during evolution, resulting in adaptations specific to sexual reproduction. BioEssays 27:795–808, 2005. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

In the period 1893–1897 Charles Dodgson, writing as Lewis Carroll, published two books and two articles on logic topics. Manuscript material first published in 1977 together with letters and diary entries provide evidence that he was working toward a visual proof system for complex syllogistic propositional logic based on a mechanical tree method that he devised.