In their "traite de l'argumentation" perelman olbrechts indicate five factors contributing to the forces of arguments. the present paper is an analysis of each of these five factors taken in isolation; it indicates directions for operationalization of these factors. it stresses moreover that this multidimensional concept if it is to be used must lead to a weighted function of the five variables in order to be able to use the concept of "force of an argument." the absence of this weighted (...) function in po is deplored and it is argued that no theory of argumentation, even if it decides to remain completely descriptive, can be developed without definition of this weighted function. (shrink)

Trois objectifs sous-tendent cet article. Il s’agit tout d’abord d’apporter quelques éclaircissements sur le concept de « sectes », loin de l’acception courante. Les raisons susceptibles d’expliquer pourquoi tant les médias que l’acteur politique entretiennent un a priori négatif sur ce phénomène constituent l’objet d’un deuxième propos. Quant au troisième, il s’interroge sur les raisons qui attirent certains de nos contemporains vers ces sectes et « nouveaux mouvements religieux » tant décriés.

Taubes, Badiou, Agamben, Žižek, Reinhard, and Santner have found in the Apostle Paul's emphasis on neighbor-love a positive paradigm for politics. By thoroughly reexamining Pauline eschatology, L. L. Welborn suggests that neighbor-love depends upon an orientation toward the messianic event, which Paul describes as the "now time" and which he imagines as "awakening." Welborn compares the Pauline dialectic of awakening to attempts by Hellenistic philosophers to rouse their contemporaries from moral lethargy and to the Marxist idea of class consciousness, emphasizing (...) the apostle's radical spirit and moral relevance. (shrink)

It is in the scholium of thePrincipiaon time, space, place and motion that Newton delivers what is — arguably — a reluctant kiss of betrayal to empiricism. Right there, ‘in the main body of his chief work,’ as E.A. Burtt observes, the deed is done: ‘When we come to Newton's remarks on space and time … he takes personal leave of his empiricism.’ Reichenbach registers the event less charitably, dismissing the ‘crude reification of space that Newton shares with the epistemologically (...) unschooled mind in its naive craving for realism.’ Injury is then added to insult as Reichenbach holds Newtonian mechanics to task for arresting the analysis of the problems of space and time for more than two centuries. (shrink)

An Acquaintance of mine decided, in the late 1950s, to become an officer in the U.S. Navy, until he discovered a Navy regulation stating that ugly men would not be accepted as officer candidates. Surely there is something suspicious about such a policy. Yet, in a time when people are so conscious of the many forms of discrimination — race, colour, sex, age, religion — it is somewhat surprising that little serious attention is given to the practice of what I (...) shall call ‘aesthetic discrimination against persons’, discrimination on the basis of appearance or looks. It is true that, in recent years, some social scientists have conducted research leading them to the conclusion that human beings prefer and esteem good looking people over plain or ugly ones. A few of these researchers have even been willing to venture moral opinions on the subject. (shrink)

Up till now, China has not enacted any legal mechanisms governing certification or supervision for ethics committees. This article analyses deficiencies in the protection of subjects in clinical drug trials under China’s current laws and regulations; it emphasizes that investigators, as practitioners who have direct contact with subjects, play significant roles in protecting and safeguarding subjects’ rights and interests. The paper compares the status quo in China in this area to that of other countries and discusses ways China might enhance (...) the protection of rights and interests of trial subjects, such as enhancing the ethical awareness of investigators through training, improving laws and regulations, and strengthening the communication between investigators and ethics committees. (shrink)

Transcript of speeches by a Hindu philosopher, chiefly on Hindu philosophy and Hinduism.

A lo largo del mes de marzo de 1992, el profesor Aranguren dictó en la Residencia de Estudiantes de Madrid, ante un nutrido auditorio, las cuatro conferencias cuyo extracto ofrecemos a continuación. Con ellas se inauguraban las Conferencias Aranguren que el Instituto de Filosofía del Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas proyecta organizar anualmente con el fin, según rezaba el programa de mano de esta primera edición, «de acoger en el futuro el diálogo plural entre las muchas maneras de hacer filosofía (...) en nuestra lengua, en un momento en que se aprecian signos de renovada actualidad del pensamiento filosófico hispánico y en el que éste se encuentra requerido por la urgencia de hacer frente al desafío de un mundo en crisis». Isegoría desea agradecer a José Luis L. Aranguren, que ha estado vinculado al Instituto de Filosofía desde su fundación como presidente de su Patronato. la oportunidad de dar a conocer este texto inédito, al que en su momento seguirá la publicación de las sucesivas Conferencias, cuya próxima edición correrá a cargo del profesor Ernesto Garzón Valdés de la Universidad de Maguncia. (shrink)

The deadly attacks on a public meeting and on a Jewish citizen in Copenhagen in February 2015 have given rise to a vast amount of public discussion and interpretation of the events themselves, their background, their causes, their significance, and their repercussions. During these discussions, various conceptions of publicness and public space have been articulated. Indeed, one may view the killings as a ‘critical discourse moment’ in which a range of discourses have been employed to help interpret, understand, and deal (...) with what happened. In several of these discourses, conceptions of publicness play a central part. This article sets out to investigate the conceptions of publicness that were articulated in the Danish public spheres following the attacks. The article maps out some of the key different and partly contradictory notions of publicness that the reactions to the killings brought to the fore. The investigation thus focuses on the articulation of normative expectations and ideals of public spheres, on the limitations and restrictions that were acknowledged, and on the main societal problems and national contexts to which publicness was viewed as related. The analysis will cover national newspapers and center on the discursive resources of the media elite in early responses to the attacks, for example in editorials, or comments by writers, academics, debaters, and intellectuals. (shrink)

In his article ‘God and Probability’, 1 Hugh Mellor introduced the notion of the ‘bridge-hand fallacy’, allegedly committed by those who think they can appeal to probabilities in arguments for design. I should like to give this notion another airing, partly because of its recent criticism in two interesting books - R. G. Swinburne' The Existence of God and D. J. Bartholomew's God of Chance - and partly because it seems worth asking how it fares in relation to the most (...) recent examples of design argument, namely those which appeal to the so-called ‘anthropic principle’ in cosmology. (shrink)

Les «ateliers palatiaux» constituent un chapitre très important de l'histoire et du fonctionnement des palais minoens. Selon l'opinion traditionnellement admise, formulée par A. Evans et largement reprise par ses successeurs, à l'intérieur des palais fonctionnaient en permanence des ateliers bien outillés, spécialisés dans la fabrication de certaines catégories d'objets. Cependant, une présentation sommaire des ateliers identifiés dans les palais de Cnossos, Phaistos et Malia, accompagnée d'une approche plus exhaustive des ateliers encore inédits de Zakros, conduit à réexaminer en partie l'opinion (...) première : les espaces de travail identifiés à ce jour n'étaient ni aménagés spécialement ni bien équipés, et n'abritaient pas d'ateliers à production strictement spécialisée. Il semble au contraire qu'y aient travaillé occasionnellement, en fonction de leurs besoins, des artisans habiles dans plus d'un art, pour répondre aux commandes de toutes sortes que passaient leurs fournisseurs de haut rang. Il est donc préférable d'employer le terme d'« artisans — ou artistes — palatiaux», qu'incarne parfaitement le personnage plus tard mythique de Dédale. (shrink)

The elements which every schoolboy learns on beginning Latin Verse Composition include a number of rules which seem arbitrarily designed to make the game harder. In hexameters, he is told, he must have a masculine caesura either in the third foot or in the second and fourth, and end normally with a disyllabic or a trisyllable; in pentameters he must end with a disyllabic; and in neither line may a single monosyllable stand at the end. Rarely, in my experience, is (...) any reason given him by way of redress, and he will search for one in vain in most of the school text-books, in introductions like Postgate's to Tibullus and Propertius, and in histories of Latin literature like Wight Duff's and Mackail's. This reticence may be due to the dissensions of experts on this subject and on the subject of Latin accentuation in general, but the theory that predominates in England, among those who hold a theory at all, explains so many of the phenomena that it deserves to be more widely and precisely known. The most detailed exposition of it is by E. H. Sturtevant, who summed up his analyses in a pair of articles in the Transactions of the American Philological Association in 1923–4. While his careful work is invaluable as marshalling the statistics and evidence, it errs on the side of excessive minuteness, and leaves room not merely for some additions, but for a different kind of treatment concerned less with bare statistics and more with poetic principles and historical development. Since Latin Verse Composition plays such an important part in English higher classical education, it seems desirable that a less technical and more accessible account should be available for English readers. Such an account I attempt to give here, keeping separate as far as possible the exposition and the consideration of the criticisms and rival theories that have been advanced. (shrink)

A study is made of some aspects of parallel evolution in Chelicerata. Definitions are given of parallel evolution, convergence, homology and analogy. It is pointed out that the concept of parallel evolution (parallelism) is initially formed in an empirical way, and that a judgment must be based on formal criteria. Particular attention is paid to the rôle of gene regulation in parallel evolution, to the special case of convergence as a result of heterologous regulatory mechanisms, to parallel evolution in homonomous (...) structures (and the superposition of parallelisms and divergences), and to parallelism in the evolution of characters used in higher classification. (shrink)