This paper examines the value awarded by Duns Escoto to the defence of god -understood as Lave- who acts in a completely free mannner and is omnipotent. I also studies the implications of his philosophical position when confrontingthe relationships between faith and reason, theology and philosophy, intellect and will, necessity and contingency. His analysis of The Philosopher, Aristotle, is also discussed.

The paper examines Frege’s argument based on the problem of cognitive value. This argument is opposed to Millian semantics on proper names and sustains Frege’s owns proposal. I point out a general flaw in the argument and elucidate the difficulty embodied by the ‘Paderewski’ example. I also defend the relevance of the example from a contention suggested in a recent paper by David Sosa.

We argue that in implanted neurotechnology research, participants and researchers experience what Henry Richardson has called “moral entanglement.” Participants partially entrust researchers with access to their brains and thus to information that would otherwise be private, leading to created intimacies and special obligations of beneficence for researchers and research funding agencies. One of these obligations, we argue, is about continued access to beneficial technology once a trial ends. We make the case for moral entanglement in this context through exploration of (...) participants’ vulnerability, uncompensated risks and burdens, depth of relationship with the research team, and dependence on researchers in implanted neurotechnology trials. (shrink)

This chapter introduces the subject of personhood and its significance to Indic traditions and academic discourses. The category of 'person' is distinguished from the categories of 'self' and 'body' by virtue of its relational, permeable, and "extensional" or "expansive" character. The scholarly tendency to frame persons as "microcosms"-bodies that contain within the replication of the cosmos-at-large-is problematized. Indic persons are most often conceived as outward-facing, phenomenalistic, world-wide entities. Chapters of the work are summarized. Significance of Indic theories of personhood to (...) modern debates on environmental personhood and legal personhood is discussed. (shrink)

All parts of Heraclitus’ cosmos are simultaneously living and dying. Its constituent stuffs (“biomasses”) cycle endlessly through physical changes in sweeping patterns (“biorhythms”) that are reflected in the dynamic rhythms of Heraclitus’ own thought and language. These natural processes are best examined at a more-than-human level that exceeds individuation, stable identity, rational comprehension, and linguistic capture. B62 (“mortals immortals”), one of Heraclitus’ most perplexing fragments, models these processes in a spectacular fashion: it describes the imbrication not only of humans and (...) gods but of cosmic masses more generally, and its language mimics the natural relations that it names, or rather intimates through its grammatical and syntactical indeterminacy. The remaining fragments amplify the uncertainties and the exhilarations of Heraclitus’ worldview along the same lines. His approach to nature raises urgent questions about how human beings fit into the cosmos, not least by challenging our intuitive conceptions of life and death, our material makeup, and our entanglements with our natural surroundings. In doing so, he provides vital lessons for contemporary ecological awareness, and proves to be an unexpected ally. (shrink)

The research analyzes the process of formation of the ethics committee as a new institution in the system of regulation of genetic research. The external factors of this process are the increasing digitalization of medical and research practices, as well as the special situation that is developing in the field of genomic research and the use of genetic technologies, where issues of philosophy, jurisprudence and administration have generated many fundamentally new, and sometimes unexpected contexts. The author shows the similarity and (...) difference of approaches to the inclusion of the ethics committee in the national regulatory systems of different countries and determines the prospects for further integration of the new institution into normative and administrative-regulatory and law enforcement practices. The research applies all the main methods of system analysis and structural and functional analysis, as well as the comparative legal method. At the stage of generalization of empirical material, the author turns to the means and methods of philosophical phenomenology and phenomenological sociology. The study revealed that the ethics committee may have different institutional and regulatory functions in a variety of management and legal systems. Being hybrid in nature, the ethics committee performs various functions, and in various state legal systems and traditions it can combine elements of legislative, executive and judicial power. At times, the ethics committee may go beyond the scope of both a purely administrative and exclusively legal regulator. All this indicates that the integration of this institution into the legal system and into a variety of social practices is far from being completed. (shrink)

It is argued that the legacy of the Vienna Circle played a very important role in the intellectual quest of modern philosophy. No matter how the concept of logical positivism is buried by “continental philosophy”, or ideologically motivated philosophers, or even the latest initiatives of the contemporary philosophy of science, the scientific worldview remains invariant. The traditions of the work of logical positivists remain relevant both for the development of modern philosophy of science and as guidelines indicating the way to (...) get rid of the idle talk (“meaninglessness”) of political slogans and manifestos. (shrink)

We present PhrasIS, a benchmark dataset composed of natural occurring Phrase pairs with Inference and Similarity annotations for the evaluation of semantic representations. The described dataset fills the gap between word and sentence-level datasets, allowing to evaluate compositional models at a finer granularity than sentences. Contrary to other datasets, the phrase pairs are extracted from naturally occurring text in image captions and news headlines. All the text fragments have been annotated by experts following a rigorous process also described in the (...) manuscript achieving high inter annotator agreement. In this work we analyse the dataset, showing the relation between inference labels and similarity scores. With 10K phrase pairs split in development and test, the dataset is an excellent benchmark for testing meaning representation systems. (shrink)

This article proposes a theological emphasis to the definition of προσλαμβάνω in Romans 14–15. Previous accounts have emphasised the domestic and social implication of Paul's imperative—‘welcome one another’ (Rom. 15:7a). The result has been that what Paul might have meant by God's and Christ's ‘welcome’ (Rom. 14:3 and 15:7b) has been governed by the ethical imperative. In order to investigate the ‘welcome’ of God and Christ, this article proposes a context of three important Septuagintal antecedents as yet unconsidered: 1 Samuel (...) 12, Psalm 18, and Psalm 65: In this context, God's and Christ's ‘welcome’ in Rom. 14–15 incorporates notions of justification, election, salvation, and unified worship. A theological reading of προσλαμβάνω, using these intertextual resources, therefore provides a stronger position from which to understand Paul's imperative—‘welcome one another’. (shrink)