In a recent article I detailed at length the methodology employed to explore the reflective and pre-reflective contents of singular intuitive experiences in contemporary mathematics in order to propose an essential structure of intuition arousal in mathematics. In this paper I present the phenomenological assessment of the essential structure according to the three formal structures as proposed by Sokolowski's scheme and show their relevance in the description of the intuitive experience in mathematics. I also show that this essential structure acknowledges (...) the perceptualist view of intuition, as proposed by Chudnoff, and discuss the analogy that is often proposed and argued between mathematical intuition and ordinary perceptive intuition. (shrink)

This study applied a method of assisted introspection to investigate the phenomenology of mathematical intuition arousal. The aim was to propose an essential structure for the intuitive experience of mathematics. To achieve an intersubjective comparison of different experiences, several contemporary mathematicians were interviewed in accordance with the elicitation interview method in order to collect pinpoint experiential descriptions. Data collection and analysis was then performed using steps similar to those outlined in the descriptive phenomenological method that led to a generic structure (...) that accounts for the intuition surge in the experience of mathematics which was found to have four irreducible structural moments. The interdependence of these moments shows that a perceptualist view of intuition in mathematics, as defended by Chudnoff, is relevant to the characterization of mathematical intuition. The philosophical consequences of this generic structure and its essential features are discussed in accordance with Husserl’s philosophy of ideal objects and theory of intuition. (shrink)

This paper presents a novel improved firefly algorithm (IFA) to deal the problem of the optimal operation of thermal generating units (OOTGU) with the purpose of reducing the total electricity generation fuel cost. The proposed IFA is developed based on combining three improvements. The first is to be based on the radius between two solutions, the second is updated step size for each considered solution based on different new equations, and the third is to slightly modify a formula producing new (...) solutions by using normally distributed random numbers and canceling uniform random numbers of conventional firefly algorithm (FA). The effect of each proposed improvement on IFA is investigated by executing five benchmark functions and two different systems. The performance of IFA is investigated on six other study cases consisting of different types of objective function and complex level of constraints. The objective function considers single fuel with quadratic form and nonconvex form, and multifuels with the sum of several quadratic and nonconvex functions while a set of constraints taken into account are power loss, prohibited zone, ramp rate limit, spinning reserve, and all constraints in transmission power networks. The obtained results indicate the proposed improvements in terms of high optimal solution quality, stabilization of search ability, and fast convergence compared with FA. In addition, the comparisons with other methods also lead to a conclusion that the proposed method is a very promising optimization tool for systems with quadratic fuel cost function and with complicated constraints. (shrink)

This paper aims to uncover the underlying metaphorical expressions regarding the importance of love to human life in English and Vietnamese poetry based on Conceptual Metaphor Theory, which suggests that metaphor is based on human thought as well as on language. For metaphor identification, the authors use a five-step procedure based on Pragglejaz Group’s method for metaphorical expressions and a self-proposed three-step procedure for conceptual metaphors. The findings reveal that love is metaphorically expressed to have a considerable influence on both (...) the physical and mental aspects of human life. This paper is also a comparative investigation showing both similarities and differences in the love-life metaphorical expressions between the two languages. The similarities are explained by the same grounding of metaphor-embodiment and the universality of conceptual metaphors. The differences are attributed to cultural distinction. (shrink)

Since 2013, Vietnam has implemented a plan to reform the whole education sector. However, there is little understanding on the status of educational research in Vietnam, which may lay the foundation for such plan. Thus, this research aims to analyze the whole picture of educational research from Vietnam, as seen from the Clarivate Web of Science (WOS) database: 215 publications were recorded, ranging from 1991 to 2018. These 215 publications were further analyzed from five perspectives: 1) number of publications by (...) year; 2) research fields and levels of education; 3) top institutions with the highest number of publications; 4) international collaboration; and 5) quality. Some of the most notable results are: 1) the educational sciences in Vietnam have been still under-developed until recently; 2) among different research topics research among educational sciences, some (e.g., Vocational Education and Training or Early Childhood Education) seemed to be overlooked whereas others (e.g., Higher Education and Teaching and Learning) seemed to receive more attention from educational scholars; 3) all the most major education – specialized universities did not appear among the top five institutions with highest number of publications; 4) Australia, Thailand, the USA, New Zealand and China were the countries with the highest number of co-publications with Vietnamese researchers; and 5) The majority of publications belonged to low-ranked journals. Implications would be withdrawn for Vietnamese policymakers, education leaders, educational researchers and teachers in order to adjust their policies and/or action plans; thus, enhancing the performance and impacts of educational research in the future. (shrink)

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion.

The aim of this article is to provide a preliminary ethical evaluation of the effect of telesurgery on patient care. In order to accomplish this task we give a broad description of the state of the art in telesurgery and analyse it using Joan Tronto’s articulation of care as a structured process. This structure illuminates the significance of the patient-physician relationship as the buttress for establishing and preserving practices of care in the healthcare context, with the ultimate goal of safeguarding (...) patient dignity. The process of care combined with the moral aim of medicine—to fulfil the good of the patient—provides the ethical foundation for assessing telesurgery. By exploring various telesurgical scenarios we may assess its potential role in augmenting or diminishing patient care within the frame of the patient-physician relationship. The significance of conducting this evaluation lies in the fact that the practice of telesurgery may very shortly become routine and an evaluation has not yet been attempted. (shrink)

The authors explore whether the need for ethical reflection on the part of designing engineers is dependent on the type of design process. They use Vincenti's distinction between normal and radical design and different levels of design hierarchy. These two dimensions are coupled with the concept of ill-structured problems, which are problems in which possible solutions cannot be ordered on a scale from better to worse. Design problems are better structured at lower hierarchical levels and in cases of normal design. (...) Better structured design problems require less ethical reflection on the part of designing engineers if such situations are characterized by the existence of generally accepted normative frameworks. Engineers could then deal with moral problems within the bounds of such frameworks and without the need for further reflection. On the basis of a number of empirical cases, the authors explore whether these ideas hold water. They discuss four cases ranging from a high-level radical design process to a low-level normal design process. (shrink)

Thanks to the kind cooperation of Mrs. Elise Harding-Davis, director of the North American Black Historical Museum and Cultural Centre, we are able to reproduce the score of this famous melody which features so prominently in Sartre's Nausea. This museum is located in Amherstburg, Ontario, some thirty kilometers southwest of the Ambassador Bridge which links Detroit, Michigan with Windsor, Ontario. Shelton Brooks, who composed the melody in 1910, was a descendent of black slaves who made their way to freedom by (...) way of "the underground railway" and settled in Southwestern Ontario. He was born in Amherstburg; toured widely in Canada, the United States and Europe and he finally settled in Fontana, California where he died in 1975 at age 86. In the conclusion of Nausea Roquentin identifies him incorrectly as a New York Jew and refers to the singer as black. In fact the composer was an Afro-Canadian while the singer was New Yorker Sophie Tucker, who was Jewish. (shrink)

United Nations (UN) leaders suggest that the world is not on track to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030. The purpose of this paper is to explore whether the SDGs provide a valuable platform to call for a basic income (BI) globally. Adopting a critical historical studies approach, the article traces the evolution of ‘development’, including the UN decades of development, the Millennium Development Goals, and the SDGs. It subsequently describes the structural adjustment and poverty reduction efforts by (...) the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, and then outlines why the SDG framework may be helpful in advancing a BI. We argue that as climate-related disasters increase, a BI will be vital in providing a modicum of security in an increasingly unstable world. Calls for BI must be anchored to a broader change agenda that recognizes the causes of poverty and income inequality, and seeks their dismantling and redress. (shrink)

Emotions have traditionally been viewed as intrapersonal phenomena. Over the past decades, theory and research have shifted toward a more social perspective that emphasizes the role of emotional ex...

Oproep aan christenen om zich te bezinnen en terug te keren tot het wezenlijke van hun geloof.

The article investigates the extent to which recent developments in both the medical and the philosophical world have impacted on the nature and scope of medical ethics. A central question of the article has to do with the extent to which medical ethics itself is being transformed by that which it investigates. The author comes to the conclusion that these developments precipitate an ethics of responsibility. Such an ethics has the following characteristics: 1. It is a model according to which (...) people accept responsibility for all their actions, rather than hide behind heteronomous rules and regulations. 2. People are morally accountable in terms of the universal moral claim or appeal on us (in the Levinasian sense of the word). 3. Moral responsibility is also a responsibility toward future generations. 4. An ethics of responsibility must come to terms with the moral ambivalence of phenomena and developments. 5. It is an ethics that requires imaginative steps to empower people for the acceptance of their responsibilities, particularly in the higher education sector. S. Afr. J. Philos. Vol.21(1) 2002: 35-43. (shrink)

As humans, we frequently engage in mental time travel, reliving past experiences and imagining possible future events. This study examined whether similar factors affect the subjective experience associated with remembering the past and imagining the future. Participants mentally “re-experienced” or “pre-experienced” positive and negative events that differed in their temporal distance from the present , and then rated the phenomenal characteristics associated with their representations. For both past and future, representations of positive events were associated with a greater feeling of (...) re-experiencing than representations of negative events. In addition, representations of temporally close events contained more sensorial and contextual details, and generated a stronger feeling of re-experiencing than representations of temporally distant events. It is suggested that the way we both remember our past and imagine our future is constrained by our current goals. (shrink)

We prove linear and polynomial growth properties of sets and functions that are existentially definable in the ordered group of integers with divisibility. We determine the laws of addition with order and divisibility.