The aims and approaches of the emergent field of information history are explored in a Socratic dialogue. The philosopher Aspasia and her student Socrates are on their return to Athens from the harbor town of Piraeus when they begin discussing the proper subject of information history. After some deliberation, they come to realize that information history is not about information per se. Instead, information history seeks to provide a historical understanding of the nature of information practices—activities that include collecting, organizing, (...) and preserving, among others. In the end, they conclude that information history is the study of information becoming information. (shrink)

Textual entailment is a relationship that obtains between fragments of text when one fragment in some sense implies the other fragment. The automation of textual entailment recognition supports a wide variety of text-based tasks, including information retrieval, information extraction, question answering, text summarization, and machine translation. Much ingenuity has been devoted to developing algorithms for identifying textual entailments, but relatively little to saying what textual entailment actually is. This article is a review of the logical and philosophical issues involved in (...) providing an adequate definition of textual entailment. We show that many natural definitions of textual entailment are refuted by counterexamples, including the most widely cited definition of Dagan et al. We then articulate and defend the following revised definition: T textually entails H = df typically, a human reading T would be justified in inferring the proposition expressed by H from the proposition expressed by T. We also show that textual entailment is context-sensitive, nontransitive, and nonmonotonic. (shrink)

Rewatching on the Point of the Cinematic Index offers a reassessment of the cinematic index as it sits at the intersection of film studies, trauma studies, and adaptation studies. Author Allen H. Redmon argues that far too often scholars imagine the cinematic index to be nothing more than an acknowledgment that the lens-based camera captures and brings to the screen a reality that existed before the camera. When cinema's indexicality is so narrowly defined, the entire nature of film is (...) called into question the moment film no longer relies on a lens-based camera. The presence of digital technologies seemingly strips cinema of its indexical standing. This volume pushes for a broader understanding of the cinematic index by returning to the early discussions of the index in film studies and the more recent discussions of the index in other digital arts. Bolstered by the insights these discussions can offer, the volume looks to replace what might be best deemed a diminished concept of the cinematic index with a series of more complex cinematic indices, the impoverished index, the indefinite index, the intertextual index, and the imaginative index. The central argument of this book is that these more complex indices encourage spectators to enter a process of ongoing adaptation of the reality they see on the screen, and that it is on the point of these indices that the most significant instances of rewatching movies occur. Examining such films as John Lee Hancock's Saving Mr. Banks (2013); Richard Linklater's oeuvre; Paul Greengrass's United 93 (2006); Oliver Stone's World Trade Center (2006); Stephen Daldry's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2011); and Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk (2017), Inception (2010), and Memento (2000), Redmon demonstrates that the cinematic index invites spectators to enter a process of ongoing adaptation. (shrink)

This book contains two previously unpublished phenomenological studies by Gurwitsch: "Marginal Consciousness" and "The Phenomenology of Signals and Significations". Each is preceded by an editor's introduction which recounts the history of the text, outlines its content, and sets the findings of these investigations within the context of the development of Gurwitsch's phenomenology.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"And They Sang A New Song":Reading John's Revelation From The Position Of The LambJ.A. Jackson (bio) and Allen H. Redmon (bio)Then one of the elders said to me, "Do not weep. See, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and the seven seals." Then I saw between the throne and the four living creatures and (...) among the elders a Lamb standing as if it had been slaughtered.—Revelation 5:5–6In an interview with Markus Müller, René Girard asserts the importance of taking into account the apocalypticism of Christianity. Apocalypse, Girard reminds us, "means revelation: apocalypto means to open up and to show the truth. But it also means absolute violence, so the apocalypse is a violent revelation and a revelation of violence" (Girard 1996). That the Revelation is a violent revelation has been well established. Despite textual evidence that would beg those who approach the text to do just the opposite, readers have fixated on the violence of the Revelation since its inception, finding in it God's final retribution against those who persecute the Church.1 Commentators such as Dennis E. Johnson, William Hendricksen, and George Elden Ladd have produced recent, full-length commentaries that champion the appearance of a Christ in Revelation ready to establish himself as a military champion and exact his revenge on those who persecute him (see, for example, Johnson 2001; Hendricksen 1998; and Ladd 1993). These accounts, and those that follow suit, are blinded by the violent revelation of John's apocalyptic narrative and fail to see the poem's revelation of violence—the other, prophetic half of what Girard rightly contends exists in Christian apocalypse.This error is understandable to some extent. Read in its own light and apart from the Gospel revelation as understood by those familiar with mimetic [End Page 99] theory, one has no hermeneutical principle for recognizing the end to which John is writing. The victims of the text can be ignored in the precise way that all victims are disregarded when the scapegoat mechanism functions properly. Such should not be the case in the Revelation, though, a text in which the scapegoat mechanism is exposed and pushed to its logical conclusions. John offers his reader a glimpse into the way this mechanism will function when all that is left is wall-to-wall violence, when one is left with only two alternatives: succumb to the mechanism and reciprocate its violence, or extricate oneself through nonreciprocation (and potentially die).In the margins of the violent revelation in John's apocalyptic vision, a revelation of violence emerges that can expose humankind's potential to annihilate itself and the mechanism with which it will do so. When read through the lens of mimetic theory, one discovers that John's narrative delivers a revelation of violence, an explicit naming and unmasking of the sacrificial mechanism that can capture for the reader not only the machinations of the sacrificial apparatus but one's own potential participation in it as well. As such, the poem can posit itself as a commandment (a Thou-shall-not-murder) that ultimately refuses the temptation to respond to violence in violence.The fact that John uses the apocalyptic to present this directive should not be surprising. Girard writes: "Only through the mediation of the scapegoat mechanism can violence become its own remedy, and the victimage mechanism can only be triggered by the frenetic paroxysm of the 'crisis.' This means that the violence, having lost its vitality and bite, will paradoxically be more terrible than before its decline. As the whole of humanity makes the vain effort to reinstate its reconciliatory and sacrificial virtues, this violence will without doubt tend to multiply its victims, just as happened in the time of the prophets" (Girard 1978, 195–96). While Girard's commentary on biblical eschatology and apocalypse refers mainly to the scapegoat mechanism as it applies to and is revealed in the Gospel texts, we see the immediacy and the frenzy of the apocalyptic and the ubiquitous violent mimetic appropriations also performed in John's Revelation.2 John captures... (shrink)

Research has shown that minimally counterintuitive concepts are more memorable than concepts that are simply bizarre. However, this disparity may exist only in studies using cross-cultural samples. To test the impact of bizarreness on culturally homogeneous populations, we read a fictional narrative to 33 college-age students at a Midwestern university. This narrative featured 18 sets of target items – six which were intuitive, six which were counterintuitive, and six which were bizarre. After hearing the story, experimenters administered a written recall (...) task. As hypothesized, students did not differ in their recall of counterintuitive or bizarre target items. Therefore, we propose a minimally distinctive model of memorability, encompassing both counterintuitiveness and bizarreness. This model may help us better understand the memorability of expectation violations, especially those within religious stories. (shrink)

An edition of the letters of Erasmus, regarded as one of the greatest humanist writers. All 12 volumes of this work have been reissued, complete with their scholarly apparatus of commentary and notes, as well as plates.

An edition of the letters of Erasmus, regarded as one of the greatest humanist writers. All 12 volumes of this work have been reissued, complete with their scholarly apparatus of commentary and notes, as well as plates.

An edition of the letters of Erasmus, regarded as one of the greatest humanist writers. All 12 volumes of this work have been reissued, complete with their scholarly apparatus of commentary and notes, as well as plates.

An edition of the letters of Erasmus, regarded as one of the greatest humanist writers. All 12 volumes of this work have been reissued, complete with their scholarly apparatus of commentary and notes, as well as plates.

An edition of the letters of Erasmus, regarded as one of the greatest humanist writers. All 12 volumes of this work have been reissued, complete with their scholarly apparatus of commentary and notes, as well as plates.

An edition of the letters of Erasmus, regarded as one of the greatest humanist writers. All 12 volumes of this work have been reissued, complete with their scholarly apparatus of commentary and notes, as well as plates.

An edition of the letters of Erasmus, regarded as one of the greatest humanist writers. All 12 volumes of this work have been reissued, complete with their scholarly apparatus of commentary and notes, as well as plates.

Respiratory rhythms sustain biological life, governing the homeostatic exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide. Until recently, however, the influence of breathing on the brain has largely been overlooked. Yet new evidence demonstrates that the act of breathing exerts a substantive, rhythmic influence on perception, emotion, and cognition, largely through the direct modulation of neural oscillations. Here, we synthesize these findings to motivate a new predictive coding model of respiratory brain coupling, in which breathing rhythmically modulates both local and global neural (...) gain, to optimize cognitive and affective processing. Our model further explains how respiratory rhythms interact with the topology of the functional connectome, and we highlight key implications for the computational psychiatry of disordered respiratory and interoceptive inference. (shrink)

The principles of ecological integration -- The landscape criterion -- The ecosystem criterion -- The community criterion -- The organism criterion -- The population criterion -- The biome and biosphere criteria -- Narratives for complexity -- Management of ecological systems -- A unified approach to basic research.

Orr argues that the latest attack on evolution is cleverly argued, biologically informed — and wrong. This is his review of Behe's book, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution.‘Just don't pull the knot tight before being certain that you have got hold of the right end.’ Wittgenstein.

A difference of opinion exists among some philosophers who have recently inquired whether Marx thinks that capitalism is distributively unjust. What has to be determined is whether in Marx's view the wage worker suffers an injustice in not receiving most or all of the surplus value he creates. Allen Wood argues that this is not Marx's view, and George Brenkert agrees, for quite similar reasons; but Ziyad Husami and Gary Young, on the other hand, argue in reply to Wood, (...) and on overlapping grounds, for the opposite interpretation; Wood, in turn, has defended himself against Husami. (shrink)

Strangers to Nature brings together many of the leading scholars who are working to redefine and expand the discourse on animal ethics. This volume will engage both scholars and lay-people by revealing the breadth of theorizing about the human/non-human animal relationship that is currently taking place.

Description from a book review by J. G. Beebe-Center: "Mr. Allen's book develops in detail the view that pleasure and unpleasure are essentially manifestations of the progression and thwarting of impulses. Part one is a brief summary of the principal theories of feeling. Part two is devoted to "sensory" or "bodily" pleasure and unpleasure. These forms of feeling, it is argued, 'depend on an analogue of conation existing in the organism, a nisus to maintain, or to carry out to (...) the full extent, the functioning proper to the bodily system.' Part three -- the piece de resistance (about half the book) -- deals with the relation of pleasure and unpleasure to the main instincts. Parts four, five and six take up a number of classical problems: the relation of pleasure and unpleasure to sensation, their relation to desire, the relativity of feelings, the qualitative variety of feelings, and the psychology of values. The author shows throughout a rare combination of historicophilosophical sophistication and of first-hand familiarity with the modern experimental literature.". (shrink)

A difference of opinion exists among some philosophers who have recently inquired whether Marx thinks that capitalism is distributively unjust. What has to be determined is whether in Marx's view the wage worker suffers an injustice in not receiving most or all of the surplus value he creates. Allen Wood argues that this is not Marx's view, and George Brenkert agrees, for quite similar reasons; but Ziyad Husami and Gary Young, on the other hand, argue in reply to Wood, (...) and on overlapping grounds, for the opposite interpretation; Wood, in turn, has defended himself against Husami. (shrink)

The use of negative probabilities is discussed for certain problems in which a stochastic process approach is indicated. An extension of probability theory to include signed (negative and positive) probabilities is outlined and both philosophical and axiomatic examinations of negative probabilities are presented. Finally, a class of applications illustrates the use and implications of signed probability theory.