Between 1950 and 1954 Belgium had a homogeneous catholic majority in Parliament. Theoretically this brings about a stable government, but in real term it caused a lot of trouble. The Christian People's Party changed its prime minister three times. Different reasons explain this attempt to further the particracy from a party one had not expected this. First, the outcome ofthe Royal Question creates a tension between the party and the government. The party can not fulfill its election promises. Second, the (...) homogeneous majority is based on a heterogeneous party, where progressives and conservatives, Flemish and Walloon politicians determine the decision-making. Moreover, the party as such claims its position in the decision-making process. The parliamentary groups and the government are considered as executors ofa partyprogram and must thereforebe subordinated to the party. The process where parties expanded to the dominant actor in the political system, becomes clear. (shrink)

Borrett, Kelly and Kwan [ Phenomenology, dynamical neural networks and brain function, Philosophical Psychology, 13, 000-000] claim that unbiased, self-evident, direct description is possible, and may supply the data that brain theories account for. Merleau-Ponty's [ Phenomenology of perception, London: Routledge] description of Schneider's apraxia is offered as a case in point. According to the authors, Schneider's apraxia justifies brain components of predicative and pre-predicative experience. The description derives from a bias, however, that parallels modularity's morphological reduction. The presence of (...) biasing presuppositions contradicts the goal of direct description. Moreover, the authors' brain account is not necessary to explain Schneider's apraxia, and morphological reduction is not sufficient to explain emergent phenomena of motor control. (shrink)

Deep neural networks (DNNs) provide a unique opportunity to move towards a generic modelling framework in psychology. The high representational capacity of these models combined with the possibility for further extensions has already allowed us to investigate the forest, namely the complex landscape of representations and processes that underlie human cognition, without forgetting about the trees, which include individual psychological phenomena.

Bergson concebeu sua teoria do conhecimento fundamentada numa teoria da vida: com base nos dados da experiência, defende que a vida desenvolve potenciais de consciência, liberdade, inteligência e intuição que culminam no ser humano. Neste artigo, após contextualizarmos sua vida e obra, buscamos mostrar como, a partir de sua teoria do conhecimento, delineia-se uma forma inovadora de se compreender a subjetividade e a educação.

This study evaluated the effects of an exergame program combined with traditional tennis training on autonomic regulation, tennis technique, gross motor skills, clinical reaction time, and cognitive inhibitory control in children. Sixty-three children were randomized into four groups and compared at baseline, 6-month immediately post intervention and at 1-year follow-up post intervention. At 6-month post intervention the combined exergame and regular training sessions revealed: higher breathing frequency, heart rate and lower skin conductance levels during exergaming; additional benefits in the point (...) of contact and kinetic chain elements of the tennis forehand and backhand technique ; negative impact on the shot preparation and the follow-through elements ; higher ball skills ; higher percentages of clinical reaction time improvement and cognitive inhibitory control improvement in both congruent and incongruent trials. The 1-year follow-up test showed no differences in the tennis technique, clinical reaction time and cognitive inhibitory control improvement between groups with the same number of trainings per week. The findings support exergaming as an additional training tool, aimed to improve important cognitive-motor tennis skills by adding dynamics to the standardized training process. Caution should be placed to planning this training, e.g., in a mesocycle, since exergaming might decrease the improvement of specific tennis technique parts of the trainees.. (shrink)

By focusing on the nineteenth-century debate between William Whewell and Augustus De Morgan on the nature and scope of scientific method and induction, this article captures an important episode in the history of Baconianism. More specifically, it sheds new light on the social and intellectual construction of Francis Bacon as an emblem of modern science and on British Baconianism as part of the creation of a vision of the modern enterprise. A critic of Whewell’s renovated Baconianism and an advocate of (...) an alternative anti-Baconian (or pro-Newtonian) view of science, De Morgan is presented for the first time as a philosopher of science (or metascientist), one who pioneered the application of probability theory to scientific reasoning. (shrink)

Se propone un método paradójico para el análisis del Derecho. Este método de conocimiento consiste en una mirada a la complejidad del fenómeno jurídico, presentando sus aspectos complejos en forma de aparentes contradicciones. No son contradicciones reales, sino elementos complejos que, al constatarlos como0 dándose conjuntamente, nos permite dotar de profundidad nuestra reflexión. Hay diferentes maneras de definir la paradoja, pero aquí nos centramos en las cualidades literarias, retóricas y filosóficas que ofrece el tipo o tipos de paradoja utilizados, de (...) forma magistral, por el escritor inglés G.K. Chesterton. De las funciones de las paradojas (desde esta perspectiva, pero no solamente) son especialmente útiles para el análisis jurídico: criticar el sistema de pensamiento y abrir a la realidad. La primera se relaciona con el Derecho porque este siempre está bajo la amenaza del formalismo. La segunda se relaciona con él porque el Derecho es un fenómeno humano, de forma que, cuando hablamos de Derecho, estamos analizando la realidad compleja de la persona humana. Esta nos e puede reducir a una sola de sus dimensiones, y por ello es necesaria la paradoja, para equilibrar los distintos enfoques del análisis. Tras explicar todo esto, se procede en el artículo a sugerir siete paradojas que muestran la complejidad del fenómeno jurídico y pretenden ser retos al pensamiento. (shrink)

One of the key concepts in modern science is force (F). In present studies on the history of dynamics, Patricius is either completely omitted or only cursorily mentioned. The aim of this text is to show that Patricius’s concept of the soul, as he developed it in his Nova de universis philosophia from 1591, comes close to the modern (i.e. Newtonian) understanding of force. This should support the more general position that one of the most intriguing aspects of Patricius’s philosophy (...) is his contribution to the emergence of modern science. (shrink)

This article presents and discusses for the first time an excerpt from Censorinus’ “De die natali” (12,3-13,1) which forms part of a Carolingian collection of Latin texts on music. The relevant collection, which is extant in at least five manuscripts ranging from the 9th to the 13th century, has not been recognized as such in the past. It was assembled between ca. 750 and 830 in Northeastern France, and its compiler might also be responsible for an ‘edition’ of the so-called (...) “Notitia Galliarum” found in MS Città del Vaticano, Reg. lat. 982. The Censorinus excerpt offered by the collection is negligible for the constitution of the text, but it enlarges our knowledge of the Carolingian reception of the “De die natali”. (shrink)

Law is perceived as a stabilising mechanism in an everchanging world and, as such, is founded on the quest for the one “true” meaning of legal norms as a basis for the rule of law. But I shall suggest that it is futile to seek a fixed meaning of legal norms or the one “true” method for interpreting them. The argument will be built by first considering the “trialectics” between hermeneutics, linguistics, and jurisprudence, and then taking a systematic approach to (...) law itself, to this end drawing inspiration from the work of Ferdinand de Saussure. I shall finally argue for the necessity of a more procedural understanding of the rule of law. (shrink)

O presente artigo aborda o problema do fracasso da cristianização da Escandinávia nos séculos iniciais da missão, especialmente entre a segunda metade do século IX e início do século X, a partir da narrativa apresentada por Adam de Bremen. O trabalho parte de uma abordagem ligada à Vorstellungsgeschichte, uma proposta originada no contexto historiográfico alemão no intuito de incorporar as contribuições da reflexão antropológica nas análises históricas referentes ao troisième niveau. Nesse sentido, a narrativa de Adam é analisada primeiramente enquanto (...) testemunho da visão de mundo de seu autor, sendo o conteúdo narrado entendido como plataforma para a expressão das ideias do cônego bremense. Destacam-se as estratégias utilizadas pelo historiógrafo medieval para lidar com acontecimentos delicados na história da diocese e seus catedráticos enaltecidos na obra de Adam. A forma como ele trabalha os fracassos e retrocessos, assim como opõe a esses os sucessos da empresa missionária refletem principalmente os problemas enfrentados por Hamburgo-Bremen no século XI. A visão retrospectiva apresenta-se como potencial-legitimadora das ações contemporâneas à composição da obra. (shrink)

In 2016 Justin Stover published an important editio princeps of a fragmentarily preserved text that was originally discovered by Raymond Klibansky in the first half of the twentieth century: a kind of Summarium librorum Platonis which Klibansky took as a Latin translation of a lost Greek original, whereas Stover argues it was written by Apuleius, namely as the third book of his De Platone. The following notes deal primarily with details pertaining to the constitution of the text, but I will (...) start with one remark on a detail of Stover's translation and close with a discussion concerning the alleged medieval reception of the so-called ‘New Apuleius’. Chapters, pages, Latin text, apparatus criticus entries, and translations are quoted according to Stover's edition; all bold highlights are mine, as are all translations from works other than the ‘New Apuleius’ if not indicated otherwise. (shrink)