The debate about constructivism in physics has led to different kinds of questions that can be conventionally framed in two classes. One concerns the mathematics that is considered for the theoretical development of physics. The other is concerned with the experimental parts of physical theories. It is unnecessary to observe that the intersection between our two classes of problems is far from being empty. In this paper we will mainly deal with topics belonging to the second class. However, let us (...) briefly mention some important problems that have been debated in the framework of our first class. For instance, the following: to what extent do the undecidability and incompleteness results of classical mathematics affect fragments of physical theories, in such way as to have a “real physical meaning”? are the mathematical arguments that seem to be essential for physics justifiable in the framework of traditional mathematical constructivism?The first question has recently been investigated by Pitowski, Penrose, da Costa, Doria, Mundici, Svozil and others. As expected by most logicians, one can construct undecidable sentences whose physical meaning seems to be hardly questionable. This happens both in classical and in quantum mechanics. (shrink)

The standard Brouwer–Zadeh poset Σ(H) is the poset of all effect operators on a Hilbert space H, naturally equipped with two types of orthocomplementation. In developing the theory, the question occured if (when) Σ(H) fulfils the de Morgan property with respect to both orthocomplementation operations. In Ref.3 the authors proved that it is the case provided dimH<∞, and they conjectured that if dimH=∞, then the answer is in the negative. In this note, we first give a somewhat simpler proof of (...) the known result for dimH<∞, and then we give a proof to the conjecture: We show that if dimH=∞, then the de Morgan property is not valid. (shrink)

Constructibility and complexity play central roles in recent research in computer science, mathematics and physics. For example, scientists are investigating the complexity of computer programs, constructive proofs in mathematics and the randomness of physical processes. But there are different approaches to the explication of these concepts. This volume presents important research on the state of this discussion, especially as it refers to quantum mechanics. This `foundational debate' in computer science, mathematics and physics was already fully developed in 1930 in the (...) Vienna Circle. A special section is devoted to its real founder Hans Hahn, referring to his contribution to the history and philosophy of science. The documentation section presents articles on the early Philipp Frank and on the Vienna Circle in exile. Reviews cover important recent literature on logical empiricism and related topics. (shrink)

Two different generalizations of Brouwer–Zadeh posets (BZ posets) are introduced. The former (called pre-BZ poset) arises from topological spaces, whose standard power set orthocomplemented complete atomic lattice can be enriched by another complementation associating with any subset the set theoretical complement of its topological closure. This complementation satisfies only some properties of the algebraic version of an intuitionistic negation, and can be considered as, a generalized form of a Brouwer negation. The latter (called degenerate BZ poset) arises from the so-called (...) special effects on a Hilbert space. It is shown that the standard Brouwer negation for effect operators produces a degenerate BZ poset with respect to the order induced from the partial sum operation. (shrink)

Nineteenth-century Italy is a vast, unexplored territory in the history of modern political thought and liberal democratic theory. Apart from Mazzini, Pareto, and Mosca, the authors of this period are little read, even though their central concerns - the riddle of human liberation, progress, and liberty - are as important today as ever. This volume presents a selection of the writings of Carlo Cattaneo, one of the period's most important thinkers, as selected by an equally important personage of a (...) subsequent time, the anti-Fascist intellectual Gaetano Salvemini.Cattaneo had a profound sense of the historical contingencies underlying the quest both to understand human affairs and to realize a self-governing society. Cattaneo's ideas and framework of analysis - like those of John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville - were not shaped by a narrow intra-academic agenda but by the great social, economic, and political transformations of his time. The issues he addressed included problems of revolution, reform, and change in the passage to modernity, which extended far beyond the confines of nineteenth-century Italy.The selection of original pieces presented in this translation is preceded by an introduction by the editors, Carlo G. Lacaita and Filippo Sabetti, which guides the reader through Cattaneo's thinking and puts it in a comparative context. Ultimately, however, it is the editors' goal to let this profound Italian thinker speak for himself. (shrink)

This article presents and compares various algebraic structures that arise in axiomatic unsharp quantum physics. We begin by stating some basic principles that such an algebraic structure should encompass. Following G. Mackey and G. Ludwig, we first consider a minimal state-effect-probability (minimal SEFP) structure. In order to include partial operations of sum and difference, an additional axiom is postulated and a SEFP structure is obtained. It is then shown that a SEFP structure is equivalent to an effect algebra with an (...) order determining set of states. We also consider σ-SEFP structures and show that these structures distinguish Hilbert space from incomplete inner product spaces. Various types of sharpness are discussed and under what conditions a Brouwer complementation can be defined to obtain a BZ-poset is investigated. In this case it is shown that every effect has a best lower and upper sharp approximation and that the set of all Brouwer sharp effects form an orthoalgebra. (shrink)

Starting from the first centenary of Carlo Cattaneo's birth in 1901, the Author reviews the publication of his works in concomitance with the interpretation and diffusion of his thinking. From the first ample collection of writings, down to Bertani and other friends, to the anthology by Gaetano Salvemini, from Alessandro Levi's monograph to the interpretations of Norberto Bobbio and Luigi Ambrosoli, the article shows the interweaving between the exegesis and the piecing together of Cattaneo's dispersed works, the complete (...) retrieval of which is being undertaken by the Italo-Swiss Committee set up in 1946. It ends with the new national edition of his works, which on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of his death in 2019 saw the publication of the fourth volume of his Lettere, the eighth volume in the entire collection. (shrink)

This is a welcome reprint of a book that continues to grow in importance.

Training residents to become humanistic physicians capable of empathy, compassionate communication, and holistic patient care is among our most important tasks as physician educators. Narrative medicine aims to foster those highly desirable characteristics, and previous studies have shown it to be successful in fostering self-reflection, emotional processing, and preventing burnout. We aimed to evaluate pediatric residents’ perceptions of a novel narrative medicine curriculum. After the initiation of a longitudinal narrative medicine curriculum, focus groups were conducted with residents who participated in (...) at least one narrative medicine session. The curriculum was viewed positively, and residents found the sessions to be helpful in developing empathy, offering a space for reflection, and introducing new perspectives. Challenges noted were perception of relevance, timing of sessions, and interpretation by non-native English-speaking residents. With attention to linguistics and thematic undertones, narrative medicine is a feasible, replicable, and accepted teaching modality for pediatric residents to foster empathy, process emotions, and participate in self-reflection. (shrink)

The author presents and defends three theses: (1) "the first is that it is not profitable for us at present to do moral philosophy; that should be laid aside at any rate until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology." (2) "the second is that the concepts of obligation, And duty... And of what is morally right and wrong, And of the moral sense of 'ought', Ought to be jettisoned if this is psychologically possible...." (3) "the third thesis is that (...) the differences between the well-Known english writers on moral philosophy from sidgwick to the present day are of little importance." (staff). (shrink)

Nineteenth-century Italy is a vast, unexplored territory in the history of modern political thought and liberal democratic theory. Apart from Mazzini, Pareto, and Mosca, the authors of this period are little read, even though their central concerns - the riddle of human liberation, progress, and liberty - are as important today as ever. This volume presents a selection of the writings of Carlo Cattaneo (1801-1869), one of the period's most important thinkers, as selected by an equally important personage of (...) a subsequent time, the anti-Fascist intellectual Gaetano Salvemini.Cattaneo had a profound sense of the historical contingencies underlying the quest both to understand human affairs and to realize a self-governing society. Cattaneo's ideas and framework of analysis - like those of John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville - were not shaped by a narrow intra-academic agenda but by the great social, economic, and political transformations of his time. The issues he addressed included problems of revolution, reform, and change in the passage to modernity, which extended far beyond the confines of nineteenth-century Italy.The selection of original pieces presented in this translation is preceded by an introduction by the editors, Carlo G. Lacaita and Filippo Sabetti, which guides the reader through Cattaneo's thinking and puts it in a comparative context. Ultimately, however, it is the editors' goal to let this profound Italian thinker speak for himself. (shrink)

This book offers an introduction to the Sophists of fifth-century Athens and a new overall interpretation of their thought. Since Plato first animadverted on their activities, the Sophists have commonly been presented as little better than intellectual mountebanks - a picture which Professor Kerferd forcefully challenges here. Interpreting the evidence with care, he shows them to have been part of an exciting and historically crucial intellectual movement. At the centre of their teaching was a form of relativism, most famously expressed (...) by Protagoras as 'Man is the measure of all things', and which they developed in a wide range of views - on knowledge and argument, virtue, government, society, and the gods. On all these subjects the Sophists did far more than simply provoke Plato to thought. Their contributions were substantial and serious; they inaugurated the debate on many central philosophical questions and decisively shifted the focus of philosophical attention from the cosmos to man. (shrink)

IntroductionThe prefrontal cortex plays a crucial role in cognition, particularly in executive functions. Cortical reactivity measured with Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation combined with Electroencephalography is altered in pathological conditions, and it may also be a marker of cognitive status in middle-aged adults. In this study, we investigated the associations between cognitive measures and TMS evoked EEG reactivity and explored whether the effects of this relationship were related to neurofilament light chain levels, a marker of neuroaxonal damage.MethodsFifty two healthy middle-aged adults from (...) the Barcelona Brain Health Initiative cohort underwent TMS-EEG, a comprehensive neuropsychological assessment, and a blood test for NfL levels. Global and Local Mean-Field Power, two measures of cortical reactivity, were quantified after left prefrontal cortex stimulation, and cognition was set as the outcome of the regression analysis. The left inferior parietal lobe was used as a control stimulation condition.ResultsLocal reactivity was significantly associated with working memory and reasoning only after L-PFC stimulation. No associations were found between NfL and cognition. These specific associations were independent of the status of neuroaxonal damage indexed by the NfL biomarker and remained after adjusting for age, biological sex, and education.ConclusionOur results demonstrate that TMS evoked EEG reactivity at the L-PFC, but not the L-IPL, is related to the cognitive status of middle-aged individuals and independent of NfL levels, and may become a valuable biomarker of frontal lobe-associated cognitive function. (shrink)

In recent years, supported by new scientific evidence, the conceptualization of cognitive reserve has been progressively enriched and now encompasses not only cognitive stimulating activities or educational level, but also lifestyle activities, such as leisure physical activity and socialization. In this context, there is increasing interest in understanding the role of psychological factors in brain health and cognitive functioning. In a previous study, we have found that these factors mediated the relationship between CR and self-reported cognitive functioning. In this study, (...) we have confirmed an association between two important constructs included in the psychological wellbeing and salutogenic models, “purpose in life” and “sense of coherence,” CR, as assessed using a questionnaire, and cognitive functioning, as evaluated using a comprehensive neuropsychological battery. Results from 888 middle-aged healthy participants from the Barcelona Brain Health Initiative indicate that both sense of coherence and CR were positively associated with verbal memory, reasoning and attention, working memory, and global cognition. Moreover, the relation between CR and cognitive functioning in the different domains is partially mediated by SoC. When we controlled for brain integrity, introducing into the model neurofilament light chain measures, the mediator role of SoC was confirmed for reasoning and attention and global cognition. However, purpose in life was not associated with cognitive functioning. These results reveal the central role of the SoC construct, which mediates the association between classic CR estimates and cognitive functions, potentially representing a modifiable target for interventions that aim to promote brain health. (shrink)

Werner Hamacher's thought, despite its relevance and scope in other languages, has had a rather tenuous reception in the Spanish-speaking world to date. It is even possible to speak of the obstruction, in some of its points, of the circulation of his thought, as a product of the complexity of its translation. These difficulties, far from being reducible to a merely technical problem, are discussed hand in hand with the comparative reading of some of his texts in Spanish. His thought (...) from and in the language, sometimes despite it, illustrates the relevance of considering translation as a key operation for the philosophical debate in general and in Spanish-speaking countries in particular. (shrink)

On the basis of Mackey's axiomatic approach to quantum physics or, equivalently, of a “state-event-probability” (SEVP) structure, using a quite standard “fuzzification” procedure, a set of unsharp events (or “effects”) is constructed and the corresponding “state-effect-probability” (SEFP) structure is introduced. The introduction of some suitable axioms gives rise to a partially ordered structure of quantum Brouwer-Zadeh (BZ) poset; i.e., a poset endowed with two nonusual orthocomplementation mappings, a fuzzy-like orthocomplementation, and an intuitionistic-like orthocomplementation, whose set of sharp elements is an (...) orthomodular complete lattice. As customary, by these orthocomplementations the two modal-like necessity and possibility operators are introduced, and it is shown that Ludwig's and Jauch-Piron's approaches to quantum physics are “interpreted” in complete SEFP. As a marginal result, a standard procedure to construct a lot of unsharp realizations starting from any sharp realization of a fixed observable is given, and the relationship among sharp and corresponding unsharp realizations is studied. (shrink)

The standard Pawlak approach to rough set theory, as an approximation space consisting of a universe U and an equivalence (indiscernibility) relation R U x U, can be equivalently described by the induced preclusivity ("discernibility") relation U x U \ R, which is irreflexive and symmetric.We generalize the notion of approximation space as a pair consisting of a universe U and a discernibility or preclusivity (irreflexive and symmetric) relation, not necessarily induced from an equivalence relation. In this case the "elementary" (...) sets are not mutually disjoint, but all the theory of generalized rough sets can be developed in analogy with the standard Pawlak approach. On the power set of the universe, the algebraic structure of the quasi fuzzy-intuitionistic "classical" (BZ) lattice is introduced and the sets of all "closed" and of all "open" definable sets with the associated complete (in general nondistributive) ortholattice structures are singled out. (shrink)

Fuzzy intuitionistic quantum logics (called also Brouwer-Zadeh logics) represent to non standard version of quantum logic where the connective not is split into two different negation: a fuzzy-like negation that gives rise to a paraconsistent behavior and an intuitionistic-like negation. A completeness theorem for a particular form of Brouwer-Zadeh logic (BZL 3) is proved. A phisical interpretation of these logics can be constructed in the framework of the unsharp approach to quantum theory.

Normal propositional modal systems This first chapter has two main aims. One is to give a general account of the propositional modal systems that we shall ...

The present article concerns the problem of the different endings of the Gospel of Mark according to Eusebius of Caesarea, Quaestiones ad Marinum, 1, 1-3 and Severus of Antioch, Homily 77, 16, 1, which is largely based on Eusebius’ Quaestiones ad Marinum. The author proposes a new interpretation of Eusebius’ passage by comparing it with what Severus of Antioch says in his Homily. The final chapter deals with a possible allusion to a lost Quaestio ad Marinum in Severus’ Homily.

The theoretical scheme proposed by Aerts for describing two separated entities as a whole within a question-state structure is considered. The quoted author claims that two relevant axioms characterizing quantum physics cannot hold for a quantum, nonclassical entity consisting of two quantum separate entities. We suggest that Aerts' theory is not adequate, from the empirical point of view, to describe this situation.

The notion of coexistence between questions is introduced in the framework of Piron's approach to quantum physics, using Aerts' notion of performable-together questions. Relationships between coexistence of questions and Piron's compatibility of propositions are investigated. In particular, properties generated by coexistent and primitive questions are compatible.

Para Habermas, “el fenómeno que nos inquieta es la imprecisión de lasfronteras entre la naturaleza que somos y la dotación orgánica que nosdamos” (Habermas, 2002, pág. 37). Resalta insistentemente la diferenciaentre “lo que somos por naturaleza” de lo “hecho” o “crecido”, evitandoa toda costa que se pueda dar cualquier ambigüedad en los límites. Seexpondrá qué procesos culturales, además de la “naturaleza”, han estadodándonos tanto cuerpo físico como cuerpo social; por lo tanto, la fronterase ha desvanecido. Urge entonces preguntarse si bajo (...) estas circunstancias seestaría modificando, en sus términos, la autocomprensión ética de la especie. (shrink)

The mathematical description of the three distinct fundamental notions of “individual sample” of “preparing procedure,” and of “Piron's state” of a physical entity are precisely introduced in the framework of the Piron's “preparation-question structure” (without specific axioms C, P, A) based on Ludwig's “selection structure.” We compare our realization of the above notions with a similar use of the standard terminology of the “Geneva School” adopted by Pykacz and Santos in a recent paper.

Some algebraic structures determined by the class σ(þ) of all effects of a Hilbert space þ and by some subclasses of σ(þ) are investigated, in particular de Morgan-Brouwer-Zadeh posets [it is proved that σ(þ n )(n<∞) has such a structure], Brouwer-Zadeh * posets (a quite trivial example consisting of suitable effects is given), and Brouwer-Zadeh 3 posets which are both de Morgan and *.It is shown that a nontrivial class of effects of a Hilbert space exists which is a BZ (...) 3 poset. An ɛ-preclusivity relation on the set of all vectors of þ is introduced, and it is shown that it satisfies the regularity condition also for ε∃ [1/2, 1]. (shrink)