We study the relationship between various properties of the real numbers and weak choice principles.

Psychotherapy clients read two consumer-oriented brochures: a general brochure on psychology and a brochure on the topic of client-therapist intimacy. Half of the participants read the general brochure first and the brochure on client-therapist intimacy second, and half the participants did the reverse. Participants reported favorable reactions to the brochures, indicating they thought both should be made available to psychotherapy clients; that neither were too long, too sensitive, or too difficult to read; and that the brochures should be made available (...) early during the therapeutic process. After reading the client-therapist intimacy brochure, participants also showed some changes in Likert-type scores measuring attitudes regarding intimate contact between clients and therapists. Although participants were more negative about issues of sexual misconduct after reading the client-therapist intimacy brochure, they did not indicate a decrease in trust of therapists, nor did they indicate a greater likelihood of filing a false complaint. We concluded that therapists' reservations about presenting clients with factual information regarding therapist sexual exploitation of clients are not empirically founded. (shrink)

We study the relationship between the countable axiom of choice and the Tychonoff product theorem for countable families of topological spaces.

The axiom of multiple choice implies that metric spaces are paracompact but the reverse implication cannot be proved in set theory without the axiom of choice.

The National Center for Biomedical Ontology is a consortium that comprises leading informaticians, biologists, clinicians, and ontologists, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Roadmap, to develop innovative technology and methods that allow scientists to record, manage, and disseminate biomedical information and knowledge in machine-processable form. The goals of the Center are (1) to help unify the divergent and isolated efforts in ontology development by promoting high quality open-source, standards-based tools to create, manage, and use ontologies, (2) to create (...) new software tools so that scientists can use ontologies to annotate and analyze biomedical data, (3) to provide a national resource for the ongoing evaluation, integration, and evolution of biomedical ontologies and associated tools and theories in the context of driving biomedical projects (DBPs), and (4) to disseminate the tools and resources of the Center and to identify, evaluate, and communicate best practices of ontology development to the biomedical community. Through the research activities within the Center, collaborations with the DBPs, and interactions with the biomedical community, our goal is to help scientists to work more effectively in the e-science paradigm, enhancing experiment design, experiment execution, data analysis, information synthesis, hypothesis generation and testing, and understand human disease. (shrink)

This article argues that we could improve the design of research protocols by developing an awareness of and a responsiveness to the social contexts of all the actors in the research enterprise, including subjects, investigators, sponsors, and members of the community in which the research will be conducted. ?Social context? refers to the settings in which the actors are situated, including, but not limited to, their social, economic, political, cultural, and technological features. The utility of thinking about social contexts is (...) introduced and exemplified by the presentation of a hypothetical case in which one central issue is limitation of the probability of injury to subjects by selection of individuals who are not expected to live long enough for the known risks of the study to become manifest as harms. Benefits of such considerations may include enhanced subject satisfaction and cooperation, community acceptance, and improved data quality, among other desirable consequences. (shrink)

This article argues that we could improve the design of research protocols by developing an awareness of and a responsiveness to the social contexts of all the actors in the research enterprise, including subjects, investigators, sponsors, and members of the community in which the research will be conducted. “Social context” refers to the settings in which the actors are situated, including, but not limited to, their social, economic, political, cultural, and technological features. The utility of thinking about social contexts is (...) introduced and exemplified by the presentation of a hypothetical case in which one central issue is limitation of the probability of injury to subjects by selection of individuals who are not expected to live long enough for the known risks of the study to become manifest as harms. Benefits of such considerations may include enhanced subject satisfaction and cooperation, community acceptance, and improved data quality, among other desirable consequences. (shrink)

We present some techniques in c.c.c. forcing, and apply them to prove consistency results concerning the isomorphism and embeddability relations on the family of ℵ 1 -dense sets of real numbers. In this direction we continue the work of Baumgartner [2] who proved the axiom BA stating that every two ℵ 1 -dense subsets of R are isomorphic, is consistent. We e.g. prove Con). Let K H , be the set of order types of ℵ 1 -dense homogeneous subsets of (...) R with the relation of embeddability. We prove that for every finite model L , : Con iff L is a distributive lattice. We prove that it is consistent that the Magidor-Malitz language is not countably compact. We deal with the consistency of certain topological partition theorems. E.g. We prove that MA is consistent with the axiom OCA which says: “If X is a second countable space of power ℵ 1 , and { U 0 ,\h.;, U n−1 } is a cover of D ▪ X x X -} x,x> ¦ x ϵ X } consisting of symmetric open sets, then X can be partitioned into { X i \brvbar; i ϵ ω } such that for every i ϵ ω there is l such that D ⊇ U l ”. We also prove that MA+OCA [xrArr] 2 ℵ 0 = ℵ 2. (shrink)

Thomas Aquinas consistently maintains that there are two kinds of beauty: bodily or sensible beauty and spiritual or intelligible beauty. Due to the lively debate over whether intelligible beauty is a transcendental for Thomas, discussions of his aesthetics have tended either to ignore his views on sensible beauty or to mention them only in passing. The present paper will therefore give a brief overview of Thomas’s thought on bodily beauty. The first section will discuss the objective aspects of sensible beauty (...) for Thomas, i.e., its definition and three conditions, while the second will present his views on its subjective aspects, i.e., how we experience it, why it pleases us, and its importance for human flourishing. The third and final section will examine how Thomas’s account of sensible beauty affects his views on the beauty of the glorified human body and of the universe as a whole after the Last Judgment. (shrink)

We study statements about countable and well-ordered unions and their relation to each other and to countable and well-ordered forms of the axiom of choice. Using WO as an abbreviation for “well-orderable”, here are two typical results: The assertion that every WO family of countable sets has a WO union does not imply that every countable family of WO sets has a WO union; the axiom of choice for WO families of WO sets does not imply that the countable union (...) of countable sets is WO. (shrink)

Este artigo apresenta considerações sobre possíveis infl uências teóricas de Theodule A. Ribot sobre S. Freud por ocasião de suas formulações teóricas iniciais sobre o psiquismo. Infl uências a partir de noções como memória e consciência, mas especialmente de cerebração inconsciente. Essas serão investigadas especialmente nas obras Les maladies de la mémoire e Projeto de psicologia, respectivamente. Destacamos que essa influência se deu pela contribuição e mediação de J. M. Charcot, tal como apresentada em Leçons sur les maladies du système (...) nerveux faites a la Salpêtrière – Tome III, 1887), dedicada à abordagem da histeria psíquica/ideativa. Apresentaremos as duas primeiras obras destacando o que entendemos como infl uências, heranças e inclusive divergências entre os autores, mas especialmente destacando uma linha de continuidade entre eles, para a qual Charcot teve papel fundamental. Esperamos que nossa pesquisa proporcione melhor esclarecimento sobre o estatuto inicial do psiquismo concebido por Freud bem como sobre a emergência de uma explicação alternativa que propiciou a introdução de uma instância psíquica inconsciente tal como a conhecemos. (shrink)

This book is available either individually, or as part of the specially-priced Arguments of the Philosphers Collection.

Analogies must be symmetric. If a is like b, then b is like a. So if a has property R, and if R is within the scope of the analogy, then b (probably) has R. However, analogical arguments generally single out, or depend upon, only one of a or b to serve as the basis for the inference. In this respect, analogical arguments are directed by an asymmetry. I defend the importance of this neglected – even when explicitly mentioned – (...) feature in understanding analogical arguments. (shrink)

L’on considère quelques raisons en faveur du pessimisme et de l’optimisme ; et l’on arrive à ce résultat, qu’elles restent sur un terrain subjectif, où une décision scientifique entre les diverses conceptions est impossible. Pour faire de la question du pessimisme et de l’optimisme une question scientifique, il faut prendre pour problème la possibilité et la validité de l’évaluation, dans toute son étendue. Pessimisme et optimisme se transforment alors en positions, opposées l’une à l’autre, de la philosophie des valeurs, le (...) pessimisme niant totalement la validité des jugements de valeur, que l’optimisme affirme. (shrink)

The temporal pattern of the terminal response on periodic schedules depends on when responding begins. Pigeons pecking on fixed-interval and fixed-time schedules of food reinforcement responded, or accelerated, faster the later in an interval they began responding.