Originally published in 1972, Should Trees Have Standing? was a rallying point for the then burgeoning environmental movement, launching a worldwide debate on the basic nature of legal rights that reached the U.S. Supreme Court. Now, in the 35th anniversary edition of this remarkably influential book, Christopher D. Stone updates his original thesis and explores the impact his ideas have had on the courts, the academy, and society as a whole. At the heart of the book is an eminently (...) sensible, legally sound, and compelling argument that the environment should be granted legal rights. For the new edition, Stone explores a variety of recent cases and current events--and related topics such as climate change and protecting the oceans--providing a thoughtful survey of the past and an insightful glimpse at the future of the environmental movement. This enduring work continues to serve as the definitive statement as to why trees, oceans, animals, and the environment as a whole should be bestowed with legal rights, so that the voiceless elements in nature are protected for future generations. (shrink)

Environmental ethics has reached a certain level of maturity; further significant advances require reexamining its status within the larger realm of moral philosophy. It could aim to extend to nonhumans one of the familiar sets of principles subject to appropriate modifications; or it could seek to break away and put forward its own paradigm or paradigms. Selecting the proper course requires as the most immediate mission exploring the formal requirements of an ethical system. In general, are there constraints against bringing (...) our moral relations with different sorts of things under different mIes of govemance? In particular, how much independence can an environmental ethic (or ethics) aim to have? (shrink)

This essay explores the methodological contributions of leading ethicist, activist, and mujerista theologian Ada María Isasi-Díaz, for whom the category of lo cotidiano is central. Her work on lo cotidiano begs a basic epistemological question: How does one think critically from the standpoint of the everyday? What does conscientization look like from the perspective of lo cotidiano? In light of such questions, I explore what I find to be one of Isasi-Díaz’s most significant, yet underdeveloped, ideas — her articulation of (...) a ‘conscientized cotidiano.’ I expand this category further, drawing on the work of Agnes Heller, a major influence on Latin American and US Latina feminism, and John Dewey. Conversely, I show how Isasi-Díaz’s attention to issues of religion and gender serves as a constructive counterpoint to the work of these philosophers. (shrink)

Abstract:Ninety years ago, John Dewey’s discussion of “the religious”—as distinct from traditional “religion”—opened new ways of thinking about the connection between spirituality and everyday forms of human action. But in what ways does our contemporary religious landscape invite us to reimagine and reconstruct Deweyan approaches to religion? This essay addresses this question by focusing on how the community of El Paso, Texas came together to respond to one of the worst racially motivated mass shootings in recent history. This community’s use (...) of spirituality, art, and institutional religion all corroborate key Deweyan insights and invite us to stretch them further. (shrink)

We have only limited awareness of the system by which we control our actions and this limited awareness does not seem to be concerned with the control of action. Awareness of choosing one action rather than another comes after the choice has been made, while awareness of initiating an action occurs before the movement has begun. These temporal differences bind together in consciousness the intention to act and the consequences of the action. This creates our sense of agency. Activity in (...) the anterior cingulate cortex and medial prefrontal cortex is associated with awareness of our own actions and also occurs when we think about the actions of others. I propose that the mechanism underlying awareness of how our own intentions lead to actions can also be used to represent the intentions that underlie the actions of others. This common system enables us to communicate mental states and thereby share our experiences. (shrink)

Palmer=s main intuition pump, the Acolor machine, @ greatly underestimates the complexity of a system isomorphic in color experience to humans. The neuroscientific picture of this complexity makes clear that the brain actively produces our experiences by processes that science can investigate, thereby supporting functionalism and leaving no (color) room for a passive observer to witness subisomorphic experiential differences.

MutL family proteins contain an N‐terminal ATPase domain (NTD), an unstructured interdomain linker, and a C‐terminal domain (CTD), which mediates constitutive dimerization between subunits and often contains an endonuclease active site. Most MutL homologs direct strand‐specific DNA mismatch repair by cleaving the error‐containing daughter DNA strand. The strand cleavage reaction is poorly understood; however, the structure of the endonuclease active site is consistent with a two‐ or three‐metal ion cleavage mechanism. A motif required for this endonuclease activity is present in (...) the unstructured linker of Mlh1 and is conserved in all eukaryotic Mlh1 proteins, except those from metamonads, which also lack the almost absolutely conserved Mlh1 C‐terminal phenylalanine‐glutamate‐arginine‐cysteine (FERC) sequence. We hypothesize that the cysteine in the FERC sequence is autoinhibitory, as it sequesters the active site. We further hypothesize that the evolutionary co‐occurrence of the conserved linker motif with the FERC sequence indicates a functional interaction, possibly by linker motif‐mediated displacement of the inhibitory cysteine. This role is consistent with available data for interactions between the linker motif with DNA and the CTDs in the vicinity of the active site. (shrink)

gloria evangelina anzaldúa has been hailed as one of most important cultural theorists of the past fifty years. Her work, especially her groundbreaking Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, continues to animate many contemporary discourses, especially those concerned with cultural and linguistic hybridity, intersectionality, and women of color feminism. Yet one may ask: What is Anzaldúa's distinctive contribution to contemporary discourses of spirituality and religion? In a 1993 interview, Anzaldúa herself lays bare the relative inattention that critics have given to her (...) understanding of spirituality: One of the things that doesn't get talked about is the connection between body... (shrink)

The Quaestiones super Physica Aristotelis traditionally attributed to Iohannes Canonicus survive in over 35 manuscripts and at least 8 printings from 1475 to 1520. Yet historians have disagreed about the century, the place of origin, the name and the institutional position of the author. This brief paper combines old and new evidence proving that the text was authored by an Augustinian Canon Regular of the Cathedral of Tortosa named Francesc Marbres, a Catalan from Barcelona, while he was Master of Arts (...) at the University of Toulouse around 1330. (shrink)

1 Boolean retrieval 1 2 The term vocabulary and postings lists 19 3 Dictionaries and tolerant retrieval 49 4 Index construction 67 5 Index compression 85 6 Scoring, term weighting and the vector space model 109 7 Computing scores in a complete search system 135 8 Evaluation in information retrieval 151 9 Relevance feedback and query expansion 177 10 XML retrieval 195 11 Probabilistic information retrieval 219 12 Language models for information retrieval 237 13 Text classification and Naive Bayes 253 (...) 14 Vector space classification 289 15 Support vector machines and machine learning on documents 319 16 Flat clustering 349 17 Hierarchical clustering 377 18 Matrix decompositions and latent semantic indexing 403 19 Web search basics 421 20 Web crawling and indexes 443 21 Link analysis 461.. (shrink)

In this book, Christopher D. Rodkey asks how the brain worships and responds by engaging ideas from neurological science, philosophy, ritual theory, and religious education. The Synaptic Gospel will prove to be a useful theoretical tool for pastors, religious educators, youth ministers, church music professionals, and seminary students.

We propose an approach to natural language inference based on a model of natural logic, which identifies valid inferences by their lexical and syntactic features, without full semantic interpretation. We greatly extend past work in natural logic, which has focused solely on semantic containment and monotonicity, to incorporate both semantic exclusion and implicativity. Our system decomposes an inference problem into a sequence of atomic edits linking premise to hypothesis; predicts a lexical entailment relation for each edit using a statistical classifier; (...) propagates these relations upward through a syntax tree according to semantic properties of intermediate nodes; and composes the resulting entailment relations across the edit sequence. We evaluate our system on the FraCaS test suite, and achieve a 27% reduction in error from previous work. We also show that hybridizing an existing RTE system with our natural logic system yields significant gains on the RTE3 test suite. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Der Islam Jahrgang: 94 Heft: 1 Seiten: 234-275.

Future practitioners of sustainable agriculture and agroecology must have the capacity to address the wicked problems in the food system to make progress toward sustainability. Undergraduate sustainable agriculture students from a variety of backgrounds may struggle with the question, is the challenging and complex work of addressing wicked problems of agroecology for me? Our case study investigated sociocultural tensions associated with identity encountered when wicked problems teaching units were integrated into the Advanced Practices of Sustainable Agriculture course at a large, (...) Midwestern Land Grant University. The research and course employed a four-part framework that focused on attending to individual needs and identities, facilitating practice-based and community-based learning, engaging in problems situated in regional contexts, and supporting awareness of local and global political and ecological issues. Researchers used a community of practice theoretical lens, and focused on the sociocultural tensions that may have impacted individual and community identity formation. Two wicked problems teaching units are described by drawing upon documentation and audio recordings from planning meetings, course sessions, student and instructor interviews, and course artifacts. Vignettes were constructed to situate four interrelated types of sociocultural tensions encountered by instructors and students. These tensions reflected forces at the individual, community, local, and global levels which interact to influence learners’ capacity to become full participants in sustainable agriculture. The study fills a gap related to affective dimensions of learning like identity in agroecology education. Dilemmas and implications related to identity, pedagogy, and epistemology are discussed. (shrink)

This book takes readers on a fascinating journey to the very heart of Tantra: its key teachings, foundational lineages, and transformative practices. Since the West's discovery of Tantra 100 years ago, there has been considerable fascination, speculation, and more than a little misinformation about this spiritual movement. Now, for the first time in the English language, Tantra Illuminated presents an accessible introduction to this sacred tradition that began 1,500 years ago, in the far north of India. The book uses translations (...) from primary Sanskrit sources, offers a profound look at spiritual practice, and reveals Tantra's rich history and powerful teachings. (shrink)

Discriminative feature-based methods are widely used in natural language processing, but sentence parsing is still dominated by generative methods. While prior feature-based dynamic programming parsers have restricted training and evaluation to artificially short sentences, we present the first general, featurerich discriminative parser, based on a conditional random field model, which has been successfully scaled to the full WSJ parsing data. Our efficiency is primarily due to the use of stochastic optimization techniques, as well as parallelization and chart prefiltering. On WSJ15, (...) we attain a state-of-the-art F-score of 90.9%, a 14% relative reduction in error over previous models, while being two orders of magnitude faster. On sentences of length 40, our system achieves an F-score of 89.0%, a 36% relative reduction in error over a generative baseline. (shrink)

Grammatical theory has long wrestled with the fact that causative constructions exhibit properties of both single words and complex phrases. However, as Paul Kiparsky has observed, the distribution of such properties of causatives is not arbitrary: ‘construal’ phenomena such as honorification, anaphor and pronominal binding, and quantifier ‘floating’ typically behave as they would if causatives were syntactically complex, embedding constructions; whereas case marking, agreement and word order phenomena all point to the analysis of causatives as single lexical items.1 Although an (...) analysis of causatives in terms of complex syntactic structures has frequently been adopted in an attempt to simplify the mapping to semantic structure, we believe that motivating syntactic structure based on perceived semantics is questionable because in general a syntax/semantics homomorphism cannot be maintained without vitiating syntactic theory (Miller 1991). Instead, we sketch a strictly lexical theory of Japanese causatives that deals with the evidence offered for a complex phrasal analysis. Such an analysis makes the phonology, morphology and syntax parallel, while a mismatch occurs with the semantics. The conclusions we will reach are given in (1). (shrink)

Christopher Frith is a research professor at the Functional Imaging Laboratory of the Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience at University College, London. He explores, experimentally, using the techniques of functional brain imaging, the relationship between human consciousness and the brain. His research focuses on questions pertaining to perception, attention, control of action, free will, and awareness of our own mental states and those of others. As the following discussion makes clear, Frith investigates brain systems involved in the choice of (...) one action over another and in the understanding of other people. Such investigations are aimed at understanding brain basis of autism and schizophrenia. In his widely cited study of schizophrenia, The Cognitive Neuropsychology of Schizophrenia , Frith argues that many of the positive symptoms of schizophrenia, such as delusions of control, auditory hallucinations, and thought insertion, involve problems of self-monitoring. Patients, in effect, lose track of their own intentions and mistakenly attribute agency for their own actions to someone else. Frith employs models of motor control, involving comparator mechanisms and efference copy, not only to explain delusions that involve movement, but also to develop a neurocognitive explanation of delusional cognition. (shrink)

In Lyon in 1497 Badius printed the Sentences questions and other material attributed to the Dominican Robert Holcot, active at Oxford in the early 1330s. It turns out that the so-called De imputabi...

Bulletin de Philosophie Médiévale, Volume 62, Issue, Page 335-338, January 2020.

This is Part II of a two-part study on the questions on Aristotles’ Physics by Francesc Marbres, the artist commonly known as “John the Canon.” Although written around 1330, only two fourteenth-century manuscripts preserve the work, but it became so popular around 1450 that dozens of fifteenth-century manuscripts containing the work survive and it was printed eight times from 1475 to 1520. Here the manuscripts and early prints are described, and then an attempt is made to trace the tradition of (...) the text using structural differences, the colophons and variant readings in the question-titles and small passages. These three sets of data turn out to be insufficient for constructing a stemma; instead they provide evidence of extensive contamination, suggesting that many scribes and printers employed more than one witness. This conclusion reinforces what we learn from marginalia and from information about the Oxford curriculum: the questions on the Physics by the mysterious “John the Canon” played an active rol... (shrink)

This is Part II of a two-part study on the questions on Aristotles’ Physics by Francesc Marbres, the artist commonly known as “John the Canon.” Although written around 1330, only two fourteenth-century manuscripts preserve the work, but it became so popular around 1450 that dozens of fifteenth-century manuscripts containing the work survive and it was printed eight times from 1475 to 1520. Here the manuscripts and early prints are described, and then an attempt is made to trace the tradition of (...) the text using structural differences, the colophons and variant readings in the question-titles and small passages. These three sets of data turn out to be insufficient for constructing a stemma; instead they provide evidence of extensive contamination, suggesting that many scribes and printers employed more than one witness. This conclusion reinforces what we learn from marginalia and from information about the Oxford curriculum: the questions on the Physics by the mysterious “John the Canon” played an active rol... (shrink)

This paper presents the first use of a computational model of natural logic—a system of logical inference which operates over natural language—for textual inference. Most current approaches to the PAS- CAL RTE textual inference task achieve robustness by sacrificing semantic precision; while broadly effective, they are easily confounded by ubiquitous inferences involving monotonicity. At the other extreme, systems which rely on first-order logic and theorem proving are precise, but excessively brittle. This work aims at a middle way. Our system finds (...) a low-cost edit sequence which transforms the premise into the hypothesis; learns to classify entailment relations across atomic edits; and composes atomic entailments into a top-level entailment judgment. We provide the first reported results for any system on the FraCaS test suite. We also evaluate on RTE3 data, and show that hybridizing an existing RTE system with our natural logic system yields significant performance gains. (shrink)