Various studies have shown a decrease in well-being and an increase in mental health problems during the COVID-19 pandemic; however, only a few studies have explored fear, depression, and well-being cross-culturally during this time. Accordingly, we present the results of a cross-cultural study that compares these mental health scores for German and South African students, compares the correlations among them, and identifies COVID-19 fear, well-being, and depression predictors. German and South African societies differ from each other socio-culturally, politically, and economically. (...) Their university systems also differ to a large extent. University students in both countries completed the Fear of COVID-19 Scale, the World Health Organization-Five Well-Being Index, and the Patient Health Questionnaire-9. Welch’s t-test, correlation, and multiple regression analyses were performed. German students were found to have statistically lower levels of COVID-19 fear and depression, but lower levels of general well-being than South African students. In both samples, fear of COVID-19 was negatively correlated with well-being and positively associated with female gender and depression. Additionally, female gender, depression, and lower well-being were identified as predictors of COVID-19 fear in both samples. The findings indicate that the fear of COVID-19 is associated with and varies according to gender, depression, and well-being across cultures, and that the difference in the intensity of fear between German and South African students may be partly explained by cultural and contextual differences. These findings can create a deeper understanding of the pandemic’s impact on student communities and may be used by mental health practitioners and researchers to develop and apply culture-specific interventions. (shrink)

Thomas Ricketts has developed a powerful interpretation of Frege on judgment, truth and logic. Recently, Ricketts has modified his reading, holding that judgment is an act of knowledge-acquisition; this rules out incorrect judgment. I argue that Ricketts goes too far here. I criticize the textual basis for Ricketts's new view, and show that the interpretive problems which led him to this change can be met without such extreme measures. Thus, I defend Ricketts' earlier view against his own later modification. (...) Along the way I discuss Kant and Brentano on judgment, and I explore Fregean argument concerning the objectivity of truth. (shrink)

Big Ideas for Little Kids includes everything a teacher, a parent, or a college student needs to teach philosophy to elementary school children from picture books. Written in a clear and accessible style, the book explains why it is important to allow young children access to philosophy during primary-school education. Wartenberg also gives advice on how to construct a "learner-centered" classroom, in which children discuss philosophical issues with one another as they respond to open-ended questions by saying whether they agree (...) or disagree with what others have said. (shrink)

Rorty claimed that politics is more important than science and philosphy, even his own philosophy. From pragmatist point of view science is also problemsolving and belongs to practice in broader sense.

Rorty claims that humans do not have absolute moral norms in metaphysical sense. There are important values and principles for him, but from his idea of contingency followes that he prefers the actual redescription and evaluation of every particular situation.

The integration of standardized biomedical terminologies into a single, unified knowledge representation system has formed a key area of applied informatics research in recent years. The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) is the most advanced and most prominent effort in this direction, bringing together within its Metathesaurus a large number of distinct source-terminologies. The UMLS Semantic Network, which is designed to support the integration of these source-terminologies, has proved to be a highly successful combination of formal coherence and broad scope. (...) We argue here, however, that its organization manifests certain structural problems, and we describe revisions which we believe are needed if the network is to be maximally successful in realizing its goals of supporting terminology integration. (shrink)

Fine and Kripke extended S5, S4, S4.2 and such to produce propositionally quantified systems , , : given a Kripke frame, the quantifiers range over all the sets of possible worlds. is decidable and, as Fine and Kripke showed, many of the other systems are recursively isomorphic to second-order logic. In the present paper I consider the propositionally quantified system that arises from the topological semantics for S4, rather than from the Kripke semantics. The topological system, which I dub , (...) is strictly weaker than its Kripkean counterpart. I prove here that second-order arithmetic can be recursively embedded in . In the course of the investigation, I also sketch a proof of Fine's and Kripke's results that the Kripkean system is recursively isomorphic to second-order logic. (shrink)

Issues of reliability are claiming center-stage in the epistemology of machine learning. This paper unifies different branches in the literature and points to promising research directions, whilst also providing an accessible introduction to key concepts in statistics and machine learning---as far as they are concerned with reliability.

Many philosophers of theistic religions claim (1) that there are powerful a posteriori arguments for God’s existence that make it rational to believe that He exists and at the same time maintain (2) that God always has the freedom to do otherwise. In this article, I argue that these two positions are inconsistent because the empirical evidence on which the a posteriori arguments for God’s existence rest can be explained better by positing the existence of a God-like being without the (...) freedom to do otherwise. (shrink)

v. 1. Editorial introduction -- v. 2. The English and Latin texts (i) -- v. 3. The English and Latin texts (ii).

Where humans can manipulate and integrate the information they receive in subtle and ever-changing ways from context to context, computers need structured and context-free background information of a sort which ontologies can help to provide. A domain ontology captures the stable, highly general and commonly accepted core knowledge for an application domain. The domain at issue here is that of the life sciences, in particular molecular biology and bioinformatics. Contemporary life science research includes components drawn from physics, chemistry, mathematics, medicine (...) and many other areas, and all of these dimensions, as well as fundamental philosophical issues, must be taken into account in the construction of a domain ontology. Here we describe the basic features of domain ontologies in the life sciences and show how they can be used. (shrink)

The words quoted above distill the common secular conception of death. If we decline the traditional religious reassurances of an afterlife, or their fuzzy new age equivalents, and instead take the hard-boiled and thoroughly modern materialist view of death, then we likely end up with Gonzalez-Cruzzi. Rejecting visions of reunions with loved ones or of crossing over into the light, we anticipate the opposite: darkness, silence, an engulfing emptiness. But we would be wrong.

Thomas Reid is now recognized as one of the towering figures of the Enlightenment. Best known for his published writings on epistemology and moral theory, he was also an accomplished mathematician and natural philosopher, as an earlier volume of his manuscripts edited by Paul Wood for the Edinburgh Reid Edition, Thomas Reid on the Animate Creation, has shown. The Correspondence of Thomas Reid collects all of the known letters to and from Reid in a fully annotated form. (...) Letters already published by Sir William Hamilton and others have been reedited, and roughly half of the letters included appear in print for the first time. Writing in 1802, Reid's disciple and biographer Dugald Stewart doubted that Reid's correspondence &"would be generally interesting.&" This collection proves otherwise, for the letters illuminate virtually every aspect of Reid's life and career and, in some instances, provide us with invaluable evidence about activities otherwise undocumented in his manuscripts or published works. Through his correspondence we can trace Reid's relations with contemporaries such as David Hume and his colleagues at both King's College, Aberdeen, and the University of Glasgow, as well as his engagement with the most controversial philosophical, scientific, and political issues of his day. If anything, the letters assembled here serve as the starting point for understanding Reid and his place in the Enlightenment. (shrink)

This paper is an exposition and evaluation of the Agustín Rayo's views about the epistemology and metaphysics of mathematics, as they are presented in his book The Construction of Logical Space.

This volume is a study of the influence of Timaeus on the development of Western cosmology in three axial periods of European culture: Late Antiquity, Middle Ages and Renaissance.

Moral Case Deliberation is an up and coming form of ethics support wherein clinical professionals deliberate about moral questions they face in their work. So far, it has been unclear what quality of deliberation in MCD is entailed and how to evaluate this quality. This article proposes a coding scheme that fits the theoretical background of MCD and allows researchers to evaluate the quality of the deliberation in MCDs. We consider deliberation in MCD to be of good quality when participants (...) enrich their own understanding of a case by being exposed to the viewpoints of others. In order to have such an enriching effect, the deliberation in an MCD ought to involve different kinds of arguments from the perspectives of different stakeholders and in favour of different resolutions to the case; and the process of deliberation ought to be critical but constructive. (shrink)

The article considers approaches in order to study large municipal entities and their economic potential. The authors specify that large municipal entities in modern conditions have a multifunctional structure, so they propose an interdisciplinary approach to their study. The article discusses such approaches to analyzing large municipalities as: philosophical; research from the perspective of social sciences and the humanities (political science, sociological, psychological, historiographic and ethnographic approaches). The authors analyze large municipalities from the perspective of the geographical approach; urban theory; (...) urban planning and architecture. The problem of studying large municipalities in the legal sciences is separately investigated. With the help of the economic approach the authors show that at the core of urbanization and the emergence of large municipalities there are three effects: comparative advantage, concentration effect, and localization effect. The authors give classification of large municipalities. The authors propose a systematic approach to analyzing large cities, representing the unity of the functional approach, open systems methodology and the factor approach. Under the latter, it is proposed to understand the economic potential of the city, which presupposes the possibility of efficient use of available resources and their maximum inclusion in social reproduction in order to meet the needs of the municipality population. The authors substantiate the classification of the economic potential of a large municipal formation, which consists of: the resource (basic and used), innovative and infrastructural potentials. (shrink)

This chapter examines Richard Rorty's conception of what it means to be a public intellectual in the modern world and how this conception is related to his pragmatist approach to philosophy. It also discusses the influence that this conception and approach had on Central Europe. In doing so, it outlines for the first time, and in some detail, the close contact that Rorty had, through his books, and more personally through conferences, lectures, and seminars, with philosophers in countries such as (...) Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland. (shrink)

Examines how the educations of America's first four presidents, and in particular their scholarly devotion to ancient Greek and Roman classics, informed the beliefs and ideals that shaped the nation's constitution and government.

O presente artigo tem o escopo de analisar as influências deixadas por Hans Kelsen e sua Teoria Pura do Direito para a Hermenêutica Jurídica e as incertezas ainda presentes em sua clássica obra sobre o processo interpretativo. O positivismo kelseniano, reconhecido pela separação entre direito e moral, não se omitiu quanto à realidade da interpretação jurídica, e, sem desconsiderar suas bases teóricas, deixou diretrizes para a consolidação de uma teoria da interpretação. Kelsen desenvolveu o conceito de moldura normativa como um (...) limite para o intérprete autêntico da norma cuja subjetividade influenciaria o processo interpretativo, mas também viu possibilidades de interpretações fora desta moldura. O trabalho pretende entender estas possibilidades de interpretação, analisando Hans Kelsen e seus ensinamentos sobre interpretação jurídica. (shrink)

Stephen Maitzen argues that divine command metaethics must be mistaken because it is committed to the implausible assumption that the sentence ‘God is good’ is a tautology. In this article, I show that a charitable interpretation of R. M. Adams’ version of divine command metaethics is not committed to accept this assumption. I conclude that Maitzen’s objection merely manages to refute a strawman version of divine command metaethics.

Thomas Hill, a leading figure in the recent development of Kantian moral philosophy, presents a set of essays exploring the implications of basic Kantian ideas for practical issues. The first part of the book provides background in central themes in Kant's ethics; the second part discusses questions regarding human welfare; the third focuses on moral worth-the nature and grounds of moral assessment of persons as deserving esteem or blame. Hill shows moral, political, and social philosophers just how valuable moral (...) theory can be in addressing practical matters. (shrink)