The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 11, Page 31-38, November 2011.

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 1, Page W1-W2, January 2012.

Situation theory is the result of an interdisciplinary effort to create a full-fledged theory of information. Created by scholars and scientists from cognitive science, computer science, AI, linguistics, logic, philosophy, and mathematics, the theory is forging a common set of tools for the analysis of phenomena from all these fields. This volume presents work that evolved out of the Second Conference on Situation Theory and its Applications. Twenty-six essays exhibit the wide range of the theory, covering such topics as natural (...) language semantics, philosophical issues about information, mathematical applications, and the visual representation of information in computer systems.Jon Barwise is a professor of philosophy, mathematics, and logic at Indiana University in Bloomington. Jean Mark Gawron is a researcher at SRI International and a consultant at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories. Gordon Plotkin is a professor of theoretical computer science at the University of Edinburgh. Syun Tutiya is in the philosophy department at Chiba University in Japan. (shrink)

Situation theory is the result of an interdisciplinary effort to create a full-fledged theory of information. Created by scholars and scientists from cognitive science, computer science, AI, linguistics, logic, philosophy, and mathematics, the theory is forging a common set of tools for the analysis of phenomena from all these fields. This volume presents work that evolved out of the Second Conference on Situation Theory and its Applications. Twenty-six essays exhibit the wide range of the theory, covering such topics as natural (...) language semantics, philosophical issues about information, mathematical applications, and the visual representation of information in computer systems.Jon Barwise is a professor of philosophy, mathematics, and logic at Indiana University in Bloomington. Jean Mark Gawron is a researcher at SRI International and a consultant at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories. Gordon Plotkin is a professor of theoretical computer science at the University of Edinburgh. Syun Tutiya is in the philosophy department at Chiba University in Japan. (shrink)

Theories of sentence production that involve a convergence of activation from conceptual‐semantic and syntactic‐sequential units inspired a connectionist model that was trained to produce simple sentences. The model used a learning algorithm that resulted in a sharing of responsibility (or “division of labor”) between syntactic and semantic inputs for lexical activation according to their predictive power. Semantically rich, or “heavy”, verbs in the model came to rely on semantic cues more than on syntactic cues, whereas semantically impoverished, or “light”, verbs (...) relied more on syntactic cues. When the syntactic and semantic inputs were lesioned, the model exhibited patterns of production characteristic of agrammatic and anomic aphasic patients, respectively. Anomic models tended to lose the ability to retrieve heavy verbs, whereas agrammatic models were more impaired in retrieving light verbs. These results obtained in both sentence production and single‐word naming simulations. Moreover, simulated agrammatic lexical retrieval was more impaired overall in sentences than in single‐word tasks, in agreement with the literature. The results provide a demonstration of the division‐of‐labor principle, as well as general support for the claim that connectionist learning principles can contribute to the understanding of non‐transparent neuropsychological dissociations. (shrink)

Preface This volume represents the proceedings of the Second Conference on Situation Theory and its Applications, held at Loch Rannoch, Scotland, ...

This article argues that we can understand Jean Epstein's theory of photogénie as an instance of technics. Starting from a reading of Epstein's final fictional film Le Tempestaire, we can see that Epstein collapses the distinction between human and technological. This insight leads to a discussion of Epstein's theory of photogénie more generally, and one that highlights the term's relationship to temporality. This temporal dimension recalls Bernard Stiegler's discussion of technics in Technics and Time. As the series evolves, Stiegler (...) increasingly foregrounds cinema as technics, and the essay ends with a discussion of the ways that Epstein's understanding of photogénie can press on Stiegler's claims. (shrink)

During the set-up phase of an international study of genetic influences on outcomes from sepsis, we aimed to characterise potential differences in ethics approval processes and outcomes in participating European countries. Between 2005 and 2007 of the FP6-funded international Genetics Of Sepsis and Septic Shock project, we asked national coordinators to complete a structured survey of research ethic committee approval structures and processes in their countries, and linked these data to outcomes. Survey findings were reconfirmed or modified in 2017. Eighteen (...) countries participated in the study, recruiting 2257 patients from 160 ICUs. National practices differed widely in terms of composition of RECs, procedures and duration of the ethics approval process. Eight countries used a single centralised process for approval, seven required approval by an ethics committee in each participating hospital, and three required both. Outcomes of the application process differed widely between countries because of differences in national legislation, and differed within countries because of interpretation of the ethics of conducting research in patients lacking capacity. The RECs in four countries had no lay representation. The median time from submission to final decision was 1.5 months; in nine approval was received within 1 month; six took over 6 months, and in one 24 months; had all countries been able to match the most efficient approvals processes, an additional 74 months of country or institution-level recruitment would have been available. In three countries, rejection of the application by some local RECs resulted in loss of centres; and one country rejected the application outright. The potential benefits of the single application portal offered by the European Clinical Trials Regulation will not be realised without harmonisation of research ethics committee practices as well as national legislation. (shrink)

Starting from a nonlinear relativistic Klein-Gordon equation derived from the stochastic interpretation of quantum mechanics (proposed by Bohm-Vigier, (1) Nelson, (2) de Broglie, (3) Guerra et al. (4) ), one can construct joint wave and particle, soliton-like solutions, which follow the average de Broglie-Bohm (5) real trajectories associated with linear solutions of the usual Schrödinger and Klein-Gordon equations.

Jean Hampton has argued that an important case of the free-rider problem has the structure of a battle-of-the-sexes game, rather than the Prisoner's Dilemma, as is often assumed. This case occurs when the collective good to be produced is a ‘step’ or ‘lumpy’ good, one that is produced in a single production step. Battle of the Sexes is a coordination game, with stronger equilibria than games such as the Prisoner's Dilemma or Chicken. Hampton argues that, because of this difference, (...) there is good reason to think that players facing a battle-of-the-sexes game can more easily reach mutually desirable outcomes than players facing these other games. An examination of Hampton's argument, however, shows that she has failed to specify a condition that would clearly distinguish her examples of battle-of-the-sexes games from chicken games. Consequently, Hampton's claim that free riding in the provision of step goods is less tempting than other analyses have suggested because of the presence of coordination equilibria is incorrect as it stands. (shrink)

This article explains what is meant by the creolizing of ideas and then demonstrates it through exploring a political observation about political illegitimacy made by eighteenth-century Genevan social and political thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau and creolized when the nineteenth-century African-American educator and social critic Anna Julia Cooper argued that the ideal of independence that lay at the core of political doctrines of republican self-governance relied on forms of willful blindness that cloaked the ongoing dependence of all human beings on one (...) another. In conclusion, the article considers what Cooper's expansion of Rousseau's insight and creolized readings of political philosophy imply for our pursuit of just political institutions today. (shrink)

Reflecting Alan Robinson's fundamental contribution to computational logic, this book brings together seminal papers in inference, equality theories, and logic programming. It is an exceptional collection that ranges from surveys of major areas to new results in more specialized topics. Alan Robinson is currently the University Professor at Syracuse University. Jean-Louis Lassez is a Research Scientist at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. Gordon Plotkin is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh. Contents: Inference. Subsumption, (...) A Sometimes Undervalued Procedure, Larry Wos, Ross Overbeek, and Ewing Lusk. The Markgraf Karl Refutation Procedure, Hans Jurgen Ohlbach and Jorg H. Siekmann. Modal Logic Should Say More than it Does, Melvin Fitting. Interactive Proof Presentation, W. W. Bledsoe. Intelligent Backtracking Revisited, Maurice Bruynooghe. A Science of Reasoning, Alan Bundy. Inductive Inference of Theories from Facts, Ehud Y. Shapiro. Equality. Solving Equations in Abstract Algebras: A Rule-based Survey of Unification, Jean-Pierre Jouannaud and Claude Kirchner. Disunification: A Survey, Hubert Comon. A Case Study of the Completion Procedure: Proving Ring Commutativity Problems, Deepak Kapur and Hantao Zhang. Computations in Regular Rewriting Systems I and II, Girard Huet and JeanJacques Levy. Unification and ML Type Reconstruction, Paris Kanellakis, Harry Mairson, and John Mitchell. Automatic Dimensional Analysis, Mitchell Wand. Logic Programming. Logic Programming Schemes and Their Implementations, Keith Clark. A Near-Horn Prolog for Compilation, Donald Loveland and David Reed. Unfold/Fold Transformations of Logic Programs, P. A. Gardner and J. C. Shepherdson. An Algebraic Representation of Logic Program Computations, Andrea Corradini and Ugo Montanari. Theory of Disjunctive Logic Programs, Jack Minker, Arcot Rajasekar, and Jorge Lobo. Bottom-Up Evaluation of Logic Programs, Jeffrey Naughton and Raghu Ramakrishnan. Absys, the First Logic Programming Language: A View of the Inevitability of Logic Programming, E. W. Elcock. (shrink)

Advancing a creolizing reading of the eighteenth-century philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, this volume explores Rousseau’s strong resonances in Caribbean thought and politics.

De nombreux philosophes noirs donneraient cher pour avoir pris un café avec Jean-Paul Sartre. Si nous en avions la possibilité, beaucoup d’entre nous commenceraient par le remercier de son courage. Il a lutté non seulement contre les forces anti-humaines de la société française et de la société américaine, mais aussi contre ces forces en lui qui proposaient toujours la séduction d’une...

Jean-Paul Sartre is probably the only existentialist who describes in detail, mainly in Being and Nothingness, the problems arising from the concept of 'motivation'. More precisely, Sartre describes a group of notions - motivation is one of them - that reveal the same basic ontological problem. Like these other notions, he states, the concept of 'motivation' ignores the primordial freedom that is central to human existence, that the human being is freedom, that every person is condemned to be free. (...) I acknowledge that there may be a minor linguistic problem with the term 'motivation'. In translations of Sartre, 'motivation' is used, alongside 'motive', to render a number of terms used in the original French, such as 'motif' and 'mobile'. In this essay, however, I relate only to the English term 'motivation', as it is used in contemporary psychological and educational research. In short, in what follows I do not relate to the other possible translations of the French term for motivation, but rather to its accepted scholarly use in English-speaking countries. (shrink)

De nombreux philosophes noirs donneraient cher pour avoir pris un café avec Jean-Paul Sartre. Si nous en avions la possibilité, beaucoup d’entre nous commenceraient par le remercier de son courage. Il a lutté non seulement contre les forces anti-humaines de la société française et de la société américaine, mais aussi contre ces forces en lui qui proposaient toujours la séduction d’une..

It is usually claimed that the Laguerre polynomials were popularized by Schrödinger when creating wave mechanics; however, we show that he did not immediately identify them in studying the hydrogen atom. In the case of relativistic Dirac equations for an electron in a Coulomb field, Dirac gave only approximations, Gordon and Darwin gave exact solutions, and Pidduck first explicitly and elegantly introduced the Laguerre polynomials, an approach neglected by most modern treatises and articles. That Laguerre polynomials were not very (...) popular before their use in quantum mechanics, probably because they had been little used in classical mathematical physics, is confirmed by the fact that, as we show, they had been rediscovered independently several times during the nineteenth century, in published or unpublished studies of Abel, Murphy, Chebyshev, and Laguerre. (shrink)

Bathos - remarque -- Pt. 1. Le champ de bataille -- Pt. 2. Kant et ses juges -- Pt. 3. Traité de bathologie.

_Being and Nothingness_ is without doubt one of the most significant books of the twentieth century. The central work by one of the world's most influential thinkers, it altered the course of western philosophy. Its revolutionary approach challenged all previous assumptions about the individual's relationship with the world. Known as 'the Bible of existentialism', its impact on culture and literature was immediate and was felt worldwide, from the absurd drama of Samuel Beckett to the soul-searching cries of the Beat poets. (...) _Being and Nothingness_ is one of those rare books whose influence has affected the mind-set of subsequent generations. Sixty years after its first publication, its message remains as potent as ever - challenging the reader to confront the fundamental dilemmas of human freedom, responsibility and action. (shrink)

This major study of Hobbes' political philosophy draws on recent developments in game and decision theory to explore whether the thrust of the argument in Leviathan, that it is in the interests of the people to create a ruler with absolute power, can be shown to be cogent. Professor Hampton has written a book of vital importance to political philosophers, political and social scientists, and intellectual historians.

ABSTRACT This essay is a critical study of Jason Brennan's Against Democracy. We make three main points. First, we argue that Brennan's proposal of a right to competent government only works if one considers the absence of government a viable proposition, something most of his opponents are not prepared to do. Second, we suggest that Brennan's account of competent decision-making is blind to forms of oligarchic power that work against the very ideals of justice and epistemic virtue that competence is (...) meant to safeguard. Third, we muster empirical evidence to argue that, in the real world, democracy is not just about making decisions and selecting policies, in which case Brennan's argument misses its mark. (shrink)

I develop a phenomenological account of racialized encounters with works of art and film, wherein the racialized viewer feels cast as perpetually past, coming “too late” to intervene in the meaning of her own representation. This points to the distinctive role that the colonial past plays in mediating and constructing our self-images. I draw on my experience of three exhibitions that take Muslims and/or Arabs as their subject matter and that ostensibly try to interrupt or subvert racialization while reproducing some (...) of its tropes. My examples are the Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (2015), the exposition Welten der Muslime at the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin (2011–2017), and a sculpture by Bob and Roberta Smith at the Leeds City Art Gallery, created in response to the imperial power painting, General Gordon’s Last Stand, that is housed there. My interest is in how artworks contribute to the experience of being racialized in ways that not only amplify the circulation of images but also constitute difficult temporal relations to images. Drawing on Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, I argue that such racialized images are temporally gluey, or stuck, so that we are weighted and bogged down by them. This essay received Honorable Mention from the American Society for Aesthetics Feminist Caucus Committee in the Feminist Research Essay prize in 2020. (shrink)

It was to correct common misconceptions about his thought that Jean-Paul Sartre, the most dominent European intellectual of the post-World War II decades, accepted an invitation to speak on October 29, 1945, at the Club Maintenant in Paris. The unstated objective of his lecture (“Existentialism Is a Humanism”) was to expound his philosophy as a form of “existentialism,” a term much bandied about at the time. Sartre asserted that existentialism was essentially a doctrine for philosophers, though, ironically, he was (...) about to make it accessible to a general audience. The published text of his lecture quickly became one of the bibles of existentialism and made Sartre an international celebrity. The idea of freedom occupies the center of Sartre’s doctrine. Man, born into an empty, godless universe, is nothing to begin with. He creates his essence—his self, his being—through the choices he freely makes (“existence precedes essence”). Were it not for the contingency of his death, he would never end. Choosing to be this or that is to affirm the value of what we choose. In choosing, therefore, we commit not only ourselves but all of mankind. This book presents a new English translation of Sartre’s 1945 lecture and his analysis of Camus’s _The Stranger_, along with a discussion of these works by acclaimed Sartre biographer Annie Cohen-Solal. This edition is a translation of the 1996 French edition, which includes Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre’s introduction and a Q&A with Sartre about his lecture. (shrink)

It was to correct common misconceptions about his thought that Jean-Paul Sartre, the most dominent European intellectual of the post-World War II decades, accepted an invitation to speak on October 29, 1945, at the Club Maintenant in Paris. The unstated objective of his lecture was to expound his philosophy as a form of “existentialism,” a term much bandied about at the time. Sartre asserted that existentialism was essentially a doctrine for philosophers, though, ironically, he was about to make it (...) accessible to a general audience. The published text of his lecture quickly became one of the bibles of existentialism and made Sartre an international celebrity. The idea of freedom occupies the center of Sartre’s doctrine. Man, born into an empty, godless universe, is nothing to begin with. He creates his essence—his self, his being—through the choices he freely makes. Were it not for the contingency of his death, he would never end. Choosing to be this or that is to affirm the value of what we choose. In choosing, therefore, we commit not only ourselves but all of mankind. This book presents a new English translation of Sartre’s 1945 lecture and his analysis of Camus’s _The Stranger_, along with a discussion of these works by acclaimed Sartre biographer Annie Cohen-Solal. This edition is a translation of the 1996 French edition, which includes Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre’s introduction and a Q&A with Sartre about his lecture. (shrink)

Based on Michel Foucault's 1978 and 1979 lectures at the Collège de France on governmental rationalities and his 1977 interview regarding his work on imprisonment, this volume is the long-awaited sequel to Power/Knowledge.