Recent articles in Religious Studies have underscored the questions of whether Buddhism presents any empirical doctrines, and whether, if it does, such doctrines are false or vacuous. In what follows I want to sketch an interpretation of Buddhism according to which it does not offer doctrines which are empirically false, on the one hand, or trivially true on the other. In doing so I take my cue from an earlier, and by now classic, paper by H. H. Price. For the (...) exposition of Buddhism I take the Pali Nikāyas, the single most significant collection of texts in the Buddhist tradition. The particular doctrine which is the focus of discussion here is the kammavāda or ‘karma view’ of early Indian Buddhism, for it is the focus of much of the recent literature cited above and a doctrine which some have thought amenable to statement in empirical terms. (shrink)

In discussing questions of free will, Soviet philosophers fail to distinguish conditions from causes. This makes them unable to understand the very opponents they like to criticize.

Una de las competencias importantes de un máster universitario de introducción a la investigación es la innovación y un aspecto importante es cómo gestionarla. Para responder a las necesidades que la Sociedad demanda a través de los diversos programas de investigación y desarrollo que las distintas empresas lanzan, hace falta personal técnico capaz de llevar a cabo dichos proyectos y de gestionarlos bien. Las universidades han lanzado diversos programas de enseñanza para cubrir estas necesidades de conocimientos técnicos pero hace falta (...) también dotar a los investigadores de formación adecuada en su gestión. En este artículo se presenta la experiencia de los autores tras dos años impartiendo la asignatura optativa “Gestión de proyectos de investigación electrónicos bajo criterios de calidad” en el Máster de Ingeniería Electrónica, con el objetivo de fomentar esta habilidad en los alumnos mediante el conocimiento y la práctica del proceso de gestión de los proyectos electrónicos de investigación, desarrollo e innovación tecnológica. (shrink)

This paper investigates connectionism's potential to solve the frame problem. The frame problem arises in the context of modelling the human ability to see the relevant consequences of events in a situation. It has been claimed to be unsolvable for classical cognitive science, but easily manageable for connectionism. We will focus on a representational approach to the frame problem which advocates the use of intrinsic representations. We argue that although connectionism's distributed representations may look promising from this perspective, doubts can (...) be raised about the potential of distributed representations to allow large amounts of complexly structured information to be adequately encoded and processed. It is questionable whether connectionist models that are claimed to effectively represent structured information can be scaled up to a realistic extent. We conclude that the frame problem provides a difficulty to connectionism that is no less serious than the obstacle it constitutes for classical cognitive science. (shrink)

Geannoteerde briefwisseling van de twee geleerden over het vraagstuk van de evolutie.

Il presente articolo ha come proprio oggetto specifico di indagine la questione dell’allattamento del bambino. L’autore si propone, più specificatamente, di sottolineare i vantaggi dell’allattamento naturale. Questi non si limitano a dei vantaggi per la salute del bambino, ma hanno anche una ricaduta psicologica sul rapporto madre-bambino.