Plato is one of the key ancient authors studied by both classicists and philosophers. This long-awaited new edition contains seven of the dialogues of Plato, and is the first in the five-volume complete edition of his works in the Oxford Classical Texts series. The result of many years of painstaking scholarship, the new volume will replace the now nearly 100 year old original edition, and is destined to become just as long-lasting a classic.

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)

Rapid developments in Artificial Intelligence are leading to an increasing human reliance on machine decision making. Even in collaborative efforts with Decision Support Systems (DSSs), where a human expert is expected to make the final decisions, it can be hard to keep the expert actively involved throughout the decision process. DSSs suggest their own solutions and thus invite passive decision making. To keep humans actively ‘on’ the decision-making loop and counter overreliance on machines, we propose a ‘reflection machine’ (RM). This (...) system asks users questions about their decision strategy and thereby prompts them to evaluate their own decisions critically. We discuss what forms RMs can take and present a proof-of-concept implementation of a RM that can produce feedback on users’ decisions in the medical and law domains. We show that the prototype requires very little domain knowledge to create reasonably intelligent critiquing questions. With this prototype, we demonstrate the technical feasibility to develop RMs and hope to pave the way for future research into their effectiveness and value. (shrink)

For about a hundred years there has been an intermittent but sometimes vigorous debate1 on the question whether Quintus Smyrnaeus and Tryphiodorus directly used the Second Aeneid as a source for their epic descriptions “of the capture and destruction of Troy. Heyne thought that they did not; but towards the end of the nineteenth century it appeared more likely that they did. Heinze opposed the general belief: but it was reaffirmed for Quintus by Paschal and Becker4 and for Tryphiodorus by (...) Dr. E. Cesareo on internal evidence. Meanwhile Professor Samuel E. Bassett had concluded that Quintus was not after all dependent on Vergil: and still more recently Dr. J. W. Mackail, reviewing Cesareo's monograph, has maintained with emphasis that the Aeneid is certainly not the source of the late epic. Accordingly the controversy cannot even now be considered closed. (shrink)

For about a hundred years there has been an intermittent but sometimes vigorous debate1 on the question whether Quintus Smyrnaeus and Tryphiodorus directly used the Second Aeneid as a source for their epic descriptions “of the capture and destruction of Troy. Heyne thought that they did not; but towards the end of the nineteenth century it appeared more likely that they did. Heinze opposed the general belief: but it was reaffirmed for Quintus by Paschal and Becker4 and for Tryphiodorus by (...) Dr. E. Cesareo on internal evidence. Meanwhile Professor Samuel E. Bassett had concluded that Quintus was not after all dependent on Vergil: and still more recently Dr. J. W. Mackail, reviewing Cesareo's monograph, has maintained with emphasis that the Aeneid is certainly not the source of the late epic. Accordingly the controversy cannot even now be considered closed. (shrink)

Dr. Cyril Bailey and Dr. C. M. Bowra have most recently analysed Virgil's method of using the expressions of Lucretius and Ennius respectively, and Mile A.-M. Guillemin has lately added significant considerations to Father F.-X. M. J. Roiron's long examination of Virgil's method of using again his own former expressions. Since then other work has been done with the purpose of clarifying the less rational part of Virgil's self-repetition; it might be called complementary to the well-known researches of Mr. John (...) Sparrow. With such a purpose I have tried to suggest how Virgil reached the strange phrase in the first Eclogue, rapidum Cretae, or cretae, Oaxen, by a not unparalleled confusion of the names of several different rivers and at least one town. (shrink)