Anaphora resolution is one of the most active research areas in natural language processing. This study examines focusing as a tool for the resolution of pronouns which are a kind of anaphora. Focusing is a discourse phenomenon like anaphora. Candy Sidner formalized focusing in her 1979 MIT PhD thesis and devised several algorithms to resolve definite anaphora including pronouns. She presented her theory in a computational framework but did not generally implement the algorithms. Her algorithms related to focusing and pronoun (...) resolution are implemented in this paper. This implementation provides a better comprehension of the theory both from a conceptual and a computational point of view. The resulting program is tested on different discourse segments, and evaluation and analysis of the experiments are presented together with the statistical results. (shrink)

In this study, the rational criticism directed by Ibn Tayymiyya (d. 1338) to the philosophical evidence used to prove the unity of the necessary existent in the book Kitāb al-Is̲h̲ārāt wa al-tanbīhāt, which is accepted as a constitutive text in the history of Islamic philosophy, is examined. Author of the aforementioned book Avicenna (d. 1037) tries to prove the unity of the necessary existent from different ways in his books. Kitāb al-Is̲h̲ārāt wa al-tanbīhāt is a book that includes one of (...) these ways. The evidence that Avicenna uses in that book comprises of two preliminaries. The first preliminary is made up of specifying the relation between the thing that the different perceptible particular entities are common and are different. The second one is based on proving the existence not to be the cause of essence by centering the difference of existence and essence. Ibn Taymiyya, who criticizes philosophers in many ways, criticizes this evidence used by Avicenna in his work Mes’eletün fî tevḥîdi’l-felâsife. Rejecting the logic of Mashshaiyyun as science, Ibn Taymiyya also tried to refute the philosophical and logical rules that philosophers accept and use. In this context, Ibn Taymiyya argues that not only the preliminary presuppositions of the philosopher's argument to prove the unity of the necessary being, but also that the logical principles and rules previously accepted by the philosopher are false. One of the most important issues criticized by the thinker in relation to the subject is the reality of concepts, the existence of universals, how universals are moved to particulars, and the state of quiddity. According to him, concepts are mental and universals do not have a reality in the external world. Again, he thinks that universals like humanity are attributed to particulars as attributes, and therefore, in a way, he denies the universal being universal. Because, according to Ibn Taymiyya, a certain attribute of a being that is particular cannot be universal unlike itself. According to the thinker, the commonality in the concepts that logicians call universal consists only of a linguistic partnership. Undoubtedly, it can be said that Ibn Taymiyya's thought on the issue of concepts is close to nominalistic approach in a way. But he does not directly deny the reality of the concepts. For, according to him, the concepts that are universally formed in the minds are actually realized particularly. That is to say, the universal humanity has been realized particularly in individuals such as Ahmet and Mehmet. In other words, because the humanity in individuals is particular, Ahmet's humanity is different from Mehmet's humanity. For this reason, there can be no real partnership among the examples given. In this context, the unity distinction made by Ibn Taymiyya in understanding his thoughts is helpful. According to him, unity is of two types, real and qualitative. Real unity is the unity that exists in the essence of the individual. The qualitative unity is the unity that exists between the things under the concept of the universal. However, the qualitative unity is not considered as a unity since it does not occur in the external world. In fact, this is what distinguishes Ibn Taymiyya from nominalist thinkers. If we turn back to the evidence of Avicenna, based on the objections that Ibn Taymiyya made to the logic and philosophical principles of Mashshaiyyun in general, we can say that the thinker criticized the precedents of this argument by emphasizing the knowledge that universal concepts are intellectual entities. He emphasizes the examples that Avicenna uses to show the affiliation among the things are only made up of universal notions and alleges them not to have perceptible entity. Thus, he says that there is not a real affiliation among different particular entities that have perceptible existence. As to the second preliminary, Ibn Taymiyya says that this preliminary is also inaccurate for the reason that it is, like the first preliminary, based on the knowledge that the intellectual entities had come true in the physical world. According to him, the essence is made up of intellectual conceptualization. Therefore, it has not physical reality. After criticizing the preliminaries in this manner, Ibn Taymiyya says that the analogy that consists of these preliminaries is also erroneous. Because the analogy that is based on erroneous preliminaries does not give a correct result. (shrink)

Extrait de la couverture : ""Here, for the first time, is a book that brings women's writings out of exile to rethink anthropology's purpose at the end of the century.... As a historical resource, the collection undertakes fresh readings of the work of well-known women anthropologists and also reclaims the writings of women of color for anthropology. As a critical account, it bravely interrogates the politics of authorship. As a creative endeavor, it embraces new Feminist voices of ethnography that challenge (...) prevailing definitions of theory and experimental writing.". (shrink)

This final section presents a literary excerpt and three personal reflections on the theme of Aboagora, as well as on the experience of taking part in Aboagora. It opens with a story written by Ruth Behar, dealing with her personal experience of mastering the English language. Professor Behar read this story as an artistic comment within a workshop entitled ‘Between Art and Research: Rethinking Professional Borderlands’, which dealt with the experiences of people who combine an academic professional career (...) with artistic work. The story is followed by a personal reflection by Bishop Björn Vikström, presented within the context of a session dealing with objectivity and the problem of combining academic research with personal engagement and activism. Finally, two of the organisers of the Aboagora conference, Professor Hannu Salmi and Dr Ruth Illman, reflect on the outcome of the event, evaluating the new insights and perspectives it has facilitated, as well as looking to the future and the potential of Aboagora to develop into a permanent forum for encounters between the arts and sciences. (shrink)

Less than two decades ago, Halpern (1998) presented a convincing approach for teaching critical thought. However, nowhere in her article did she explain how to “get” faculty to teach to thinking skills to transfer across domains of knowledge using: “(a) dispositional or attitudinal component, (b) instruction in and practice with critical thought, (c) structure–training activities, and (d) a metacognitive component used to direct and assess thinking.” (p. 451) It is an open question as to what type of strategies will faculty (...) need to demonstrate to create productive, knowledgeable, thinking citizenry? In this paper I focus on the faculty’s role in promoting the teaching of critical thought, that is, critical thought processes, with particular reference to dental education. Many students can develop processes of critical thought with frequent practice involving the active use of multiple types of ill-structured problems and situations designed to require the ability (1) to recall useful information, (2) to use pattern recognition, (3) to discern pertinent information, (4) to think ahead, and (5) to anticipate outcomes and problems while (6) remaining composed enough so that their emotions do not hinder decision-making skills. (shrink)

The essays in Object-Oriented Feminism explore OOF: a feminist intervention into recent philosophical discourses--like speculative realism, object-oriented ontology (OOO), and new materialism--that take objects, things, stuff, and matter as primary. Object-oriented feminism approaches all objects from the inside-out position of being an object too, with all of its accompanying political and ethical potentials. This volume places OOF thought in a long history of ongoing feminist work in multiple disciplines. In particular, object-oriented feminism foregrounds three significant aspects of feminist thinking in (...) the philosophy of things: politics, engaging with histories of treating certain humans (women, people of color, and the poor) as objects; erotics, employing humor to foment unseemly entanglements between things; and ethics, refusing to make grand philosophical truth claims, instead staking a modest ethical position that arrives at being "in the right" by being "wrong." Seeking not to define object-oriented feminism but rather to enact it, the volume is interdisciplinary in approach, with contributors from a variety of fields, including sociology, anthropology, English, art, and philosophy. Topics are frequently provocative, engaging a wide range of theorists from Heidegger and Levinas to Irigaray and Haraway, and an intriguing diverse array of objects, including the female body as fetish object in Lolita subculture; birds made queer by endocrine disruptors; and truth claims arising in material relations in indigenous fiction and film. Intentionally, each essay can be seen as an "object" in relation to others in this collection. Contributors: Irina Aristarkhova, University of Michigan; Karen Gregory, University of Edinburgh; Marina Gržinic, Slovenian Academy of Science and Arts; Frenchy Lunning, Minneapolis College of Art and Design; Timothy Morton, Rice University; Anne Pollock, Georgia Tech; Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Columbia University; R. Joshua Scannell, CUNY Graduate Center; Adam Zaretsky, VASTAL. (shrink)

We describe an experimental approach toward implementing a commonsense "microtheory" for buying and selling. Our prototype system characterizes how intelligent agents hold items and money, how they buy and sell items, and the way money and items are transferred. The ontology of the system includes money (cash, check, credit card), agents (people, organizations), items (movable, real estate, service), barter, and the notions of transfer, loan, buying by installments, profit, and loss.

Expanded edition with new chapters and updates to the translation and bibliography. Borges cites innumerable authors in the pages making up his life’s work, and innumerable authors have cited and continue to cite him. More than a figure, then, the quotation is an integral part of the fabric of his writing, a fabric made anew by each reading and each re-citation it undergoes, in the never-ending throes of a work-in-progress. Block de Behar makes of this reading a plea for (...) the very art of communication; a practice that takes community not in the totalized and totalizable soil of pre-established definitions or essences, but on the ineluctable repetitions that constitute language as such, and that guarantee the expansiveness—through etymological coincidences of meaning, through historical contagions, through translinguistic sharings of particular experiences—of a certain index of universality. This edition includes a new introduction by the author and three entirely new chapters, as well as updated images and corrections to the original translation. Lisa Block de Behar is Professor of Communications at the Universidad de la República in Montevideo, Uruguay and is a renowned Jorge Luis Borges scholar. William Egginton is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and Chair of the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of several books, including In Defense of Religious Moderation. Christopher RayAlexander is a graduate student and language instructor in the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures at Johns Hopkins University. (shrink)

Recently, there have been some attempts towards developing programming languages based on situation theory. These languages employ situation-theoretic constructs with varying degrees of divergence from the ontology of the theory. In this paper, we review three of these programming languages.

O presente artigo investiga a relação entre a construção de formalizações e a criação de novidades na ação de projetar Ambientes Virtuais de Aprendizagem (AVAs). Para tanto, realiza um estudo de caso sobre a ação de projetar AVAs no Núcleo de Tecnologia Digital Aplicada à Educação (Nuted) da Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS). Entende-se que o debate acerca desse tema contribui para uma reflexão sobre os desenvolvimentos científico e tecnológico em informática na educação, bem como sobre sua (...) natureza interdisciplinar. Tal abordagem agrega uma perspectiva teóricometodológica piagetiana, a qual orientou os questionamentos, a elocução conceitual, a coleta e a análise dos dados. Com isso, enfoca-se o jogo entre forma e conteúdo que caracteriza a ação de projetar, de modo que os observáveis apontados e as coordenações realizadas pelos projetistas se configuram como os observáveis deste estudo. (shrink)

Im vierten und letzten Buch, mit dem die Edition des "Convivio" abgeschlossen ist, interpretiert Dante sein Gedicht "Le dolci rime d'amor ch' i' solia" und erörtert die komplexe Frage der wahren Edelkeit. In diesem Rahmen diskutiert er den Umfang der kaiserlicher Macht und die Bedeutung des Römischen Reiches sowie das Verhältnis von Philosophie und Politik bzw. von philosophischer und politischer Kompetenz.Die Bewertung des Römischen Reiches und die Erörterung der Autorität des Aristoteles für die Philosophie und das menschliche Denken schlechthin implizieren (...) eine Stellungnahme zur Beziehung zwischen christlicher und antik-heidnischer Weltauffassung. (shrink)

_Lisa Block de Behar explores the trope of quotation in the works of Jorge Luis Borges._.

The ‘Toward a Science of Consciousness’ conference – which has now become ‘The Science of Consciousness’ conference – recently (June 5-10, 2017) took place instead at the receptive venue of the Hyatt Regency in La Jolla, California. It was well-planned and organized, which is extraordinary considering that it had to be organized all over again within a month or two when the original Shanghai location was cancelled. Things ran smoothly at La Jolla and it was well attended for an odd-year, (...) non-Tucson setting. The Director of the Center for Consciousness Studies, Dr. Stuart Hameroff, and his able Assistant Director and logistics manager, Abi Behar Montefiore, deserve full credit for carrying off this last minute transfer, as do many others who worked in supporting capacities. (shrink)

While much emphasis is placed on the need to improve critical thinking (CT) among college students (Abrami, Bernard, Borokhovski, Wade, Surkes, Tamim, & Zhang, 2008, p. 1102), few studies describe precise methodologies for doing so (Behar-Horenstein & Niu, 2011, p. 36) and even fewer identify improvements in CT dispositions as a desired course outcome (Perkins, Tishman, Ritchhart, Donis, & Andrade, 2000, p. 288). This study attempts to fill a gap in the studies of CT methodologies aimed at improving CT (...) dispositions. In this study, 78 community college students enrolled in a CT course that emphasized targeted CT interventional strategies. The students took the California Critical Thinking Dispositions Inventory (CCTDI) as a pre-test and as a post-test. Results indicate that the targeted instruction significantly influenced overall scores, as well as four of the seven subscale categories. (shrink)

Love stories in photos and life stories in words from celebrities like Joy Behar, Judy Collins, Jerry Stiller, Susie Essman, and Cat Cora. A celebration of love and commitment, these stories from renowned figures span the bridge from love at first sight to a reluctant proposal acceptance – sometimes in the same relationship. These are love stories of legend told in photos by Mort Hamburg and life stories of people destined to be with one another for the long haul, (...) written by Kashmir Hill. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Place for Healing:A Hospital Art Class, Writing, and a Researcher's TaskJulia Kellman (bio)Introduction[O]bjects transform the top of our chest into a site of memory. I think of private landscapes like this one as querencias, places that hold the heart. The word has been translated as homing instinct and affection. Expatriate Alastair Reid introduced me to it in 1965, writing about the Spanish bullfight in The New Yorker. After (...) the first wound the bull chooses his querencia, the place in the ring where he returns for a moment to rest before the fight goes on, and where he finally dies. Querencia comes from the common Spanish verb querer; among its many meanings are to love, to want, to hold, and to command. Reid spoke of hometowns and native countries as querencias; exiles cling to their memories of them.1Place, "space that has the capacity to be remembered and to evoke what is most precious,"2 by its nature orients us to a particular perspective, to a way of looking at the world. Each place has its own local accent, its own constellation of habits, its own rhythm of language and thought. We are grounded in landscape in the same manner that we are situated in our social world, imprinted like other creatures on a typography, pattern of weather, cycle of seasons, scents, and colors.3Our hearts, too, are embedded in such places; and in this article, through this "act of personal witness," this "inscription of a self and a description of an object" as the anthropologist and writer Ruth Benhar4 describes it, we will see how the members of an art class for people with HIV/AIDS at a local hospital have similarly become grounded in their art space and in the tiny art community that has grown up around it. Additionally, we will discover the importance of a more descriptive style of writing as means for examining the role of art in the lives of people who are ill, for their various difficult [End Page 106] situations call for particular clarity and empathy that both honors and relates the stories of their lives. It will become clear as this article proceeds that the personal engagement of a researcher/writer in such a situation is critical as well. For not only must she be open—vulnerable, as Behar suggests—to the people with whom she works as a means of spanning the chasm between a life of illness and a life of health, but she must also be sensitive to the reader's needs, for she is the reader's guide and surrogate.5 This role as guide and alter-ego demands that the researcher tell the story of other lives in a manner that enables the reader to empathetically and eagerly undertake a journey with the researcher into a world unlike her own.6Personal Engagement: The Researcher/WriterHoward Brody, doctor and medical ethicist, explains the necessity for stories of illness to be descriptive.7 He asserts that the stories in which we are most interested are not merely factual recitations; they are about what the illness means to the individual—they include how that person understands events. "It is far too simple-minded" he writes, to assume that "the writer of literature presents to us a world of fantasy that never existed whereas the author of a nonfictional pathography has some special insight into the world as it really exists, even if the relevant world is nothing but his own subjective experiences."8 He concludes "in stories of that sort (stories of the meaning of things) the line between so-called truth and fiction becomes more blurred and ceases to affect the uses we make of the stories for the deeper understanding of the human response to illness."9 Further, Brody continues, one must understand stories of sickness in order to truly develop a philosophical understanding of what it means to be ill. Such an understanding, Brody suggests, not only provides ethical guidance for health care workers and others but also will lead to improved care for patients and better education of health professionals.10 This view of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:HIV, Art, and a Journey toward Healing:One Man's StoryJulia Kellman (bio)Some of the territory is wilder and reports do not tally. The guides are good for only so much. In these wild places I become part of the map, part of the story, adding my versions there. This Talmudic layering of story on story, map on map, multiplies possibilities, but also warns me of the weight of accumulation. I (...) live in one world—material, seemingly solid—and the weight of that is quite enough.1I have just reread anthropologist Ruth Behar's2 essay, "Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart." It started me thinking about several things—the outer limits of psychic pain, for example, or the relationship of the researcher and the researched, of bearing witness and giving testimony, and of the "ethnographic experience of talking, listening, transcribing, translating, and interpreting" that forms the core of enquiry about people and their lives.3 What can I say, I wonder, to touch readers in such a way that they see the indispensable truth in the individual stories that develop from such enquiries? How can my role as interpreter and witness lead to the understanding that the buffeting winds of lived experience (those of the researcher and of those who are researched) are not inconveniences but an essential quality of humanistic research? How can I use the accretion of stories that make up my research and my life (as if there were a difference), I muse, as I sit at my computer screen reading a text as "it in its turn reads me," as the writer Jeanette Winterson4 describes this experience. For over the years, I, too, not only have come to feel this pulse of the systole and diastole of telling and being told, but I have also used this alternating relationship to develop insight into the nature of the connection of researcher and researched, teacher and taught.There are two main narratives that form the core of this particular undertaking—one personal and the other the result of informal conversations, [End Page 33] formal interviews, casual interactions, social events, and interchanges during the art class for people with HIV/AIDS that I teach weekly at a local hospital. The stories both probe the mystery of disease, expression, and the search for coherence, and, in my case, the role of "the wild places on the map"5 where the researcher/writer adds her witness and testimony to the narrative to become part of the story.Individual ExperienceBefore we begin this discussion of individual experience, art, and illness, it is important to point out that there are only two general types of humanities enquiry: One enumerates, compares and contrasts, creates and tests hypotheses, reads literature, and/or examines the minutiae of materials or systems of one sort or another. The other is engaged in exploring the individual, the idiosyncratic, and the unique. Its subject is that which is particular. My research consists of the second type, qualitative to its core, and deeply sunk in the narrative, personal world of lived experience.The privacy of individual situations, our utter singularity, is one of the factors that most marks our lives as creatures. We can share our stories, describe our impressions, explain our sensations, but unless we participate in an actual experience in which our boundaries momentarily disappear, the most we can hope for is the simultaneous partaking of similar feelings with a sensitive, empathetic companion in what philosopher-sociologist Alfred Schutz6 describes as a We-relationship, an intersubjective experience that leads to sharing time, mutuality, and growing old together. Thus the ticklish nature of achieving actual interpersonal congruence makes enquiries into the specifics of actual lived experience difficult. If one is to learn anything useful from such considerations, one must focus on the individual and the story of his/her particular life journey in an intimate, extended, multifaceted manner and content one's self with the fact that all one will ever be able to report about in such an undertaking are discrete events and single people, never grand numerical accumulations or demographically significant quantities.Researcher's DisclaimerFor a reader to orient herself in... (shrink)

Ezezkoa dirudi izenburuko galderari eman behar zaion erantzuna, gutxienez iraultza zientifikoa geroztik, Natura hizkuntza matematikoan idatzita dagoen liburu bat omen denetik. Ikuspegi hori aurrera egingo du eta XX. menderako harridura alaia deitu dudana ekarriko du, Wigner 1960-en kasuan eta beste batzuenean ikusten denez. Jarrera hori biologiaren hainbat arloetan aurkitu ditzazkegunekin alderatzen dut eta hor lilura hori ez da inondik agertzen eta, gehienez, oso ikuspegi utilitarista bat hartzen da. Bukatzeko, biologiaren erdian bertan daukagun mugagabetasunaren kasu natural agian aipagarriena azaltzen dut (...) modu laburrean: eboluzio mugagabea.The answer to the title questions appears to be in the negative, at least since the scientific revolution when nature began to be seen as a book written in the language of mathematics. This approach is going to develop further and, by the xxth century, brings forward what I will call a cheerful amazement as exemplified in Wigner 1960 and others. I contrast this attitude with those we my find in several areas of biology where the charm is clearly absent and, as much, a very utilitarian approach is taken. I end up with a brief mention to open-ended evolution as a material case of infinity right at the center of biology. (shrink)