This article examines two texts, each representative of a system of morality taught in nineteenth-century Ottoman morality textbooks: Risâle-i ahlâk by Sâdik Rifat and al-Risāla al-shāhiyya fī cilm al-akhlaq by cAḍud al-Dīn al-Ījī . So as to inform conclusions about the variety of moral traditions that inspired the authors of late Ottoman public school textbooks on morality, I analyse the organizing metaphors, moral rationalizations, types of moral agency, and techniques of inculcating morality utilized in these representative texts. Normally, texts such (...) as Sâdık Rifat's are taken as representing an Ottoman tradition of secular morality, whereas texts from the akhlâq tradition such as Ījī's are said to represent the religious tradition of Islamic ethical philosophy. I argue, however, that textbook writers in the late Tanzimat and early Hamidian Ottoman Empire drew on both of these ethical traditions uncritically, and that the heterogeneity of nineteenth-century Ottoman public school morality texts makes it inappropriate to characterize them as ‘religious’ or ‘secular’. I suggest, instead, that these types of morality text may be more fruitfully analysed with an eye to the types of subjectivity they seek to generate rather than their ‘religious’ or ‘secular’ content. (shrink)

A crucial debate currently raging in the fields of cognitive and social science centers around general and specific approaches to understanding the actions of others. When we understand the actions of another person, do we do so on the basis of a general theory of psychology, or on the basis of an effort to place ourselves in the particular position of that specific person? Hans Herbert Kögler and Karsten R. Stueber's Empathy and Agency addresses this other issues vital to current (...) social science in an advanced and diverse analysis of the foundations of social-scientific methodology based on recent cognitive psychology. The book serves as both an introduction to the debate for non-academic audiences and as a catalyst for further discussion for serious theorists. Empathy and Agency provides a solid foundation of the fundamental issues in social and cognitive science, but also presents the most influential paradigms in the field at this time. (shrink)

Introduction of deep neural networks to the machine translation research ameliorated conventional machine translation systems in multiple ways, specifically in terms of translation quality. The ability of deep neural networks to learn a sensible representation of words is one of the major reasons for this improvement. Despite machine translation using deep neural architecture is showing state-of-the-art results in translating European languages, we cannot directly apply these algorithms in Indian languages mainly because of two reasons: unavailability of the good corpus and (...) Indian languages are morphologically rich. In this paper, we propose a neural machine translation (NMT) system for four language pairs: English–Malayalam, English–Hindi, English–Tamil, and English–Punjabi. We also collected sentences from different sources and cleaned them to make four parallel corpora for each of the language pairs, and then used them to model the translation system. The encoder network in the NMT architecture was designed with long short-term memory (LSTM) networks and bi-directional recurrent neural networks (Bi-RNN). Evaluation of the obtained models was performed both automatically and manually. For automatic evaluation, the bilingual evaluation understudy (BLEU) score was used, and for manual evaluation, three metrics such as adequacy, fluency, and overall ranking were used. Analysis of the results showed the presence of lengthy sentences in English–Malayalam, and the English–Hindi corpus affected the translation. Attention mechanism was employed with a view to addressing the problem of translating lengthy sentences (sentences contain more than 50 words), and the system was able to perceive long-term contexts in the sentences. (shrink)

are ambiguous. In the mouth of someone who cannot remember whether it was Michael, or rather someone else, who was top scorer, can express the epistemic possibility that Michael led the league in scoring. But from someone who knows that Michael did not even play last season, but is wondering what would have happened if he had, means something quite different. Now where it has this quite different meaning, may still turn out to be the expression of some epistemic possibility. (...) Perhaps where does not express the epistemic possibility of ‘Michael led the league in scoring’, it expresses the epistemic possibility of ‘Michael would have led the league in scoring’. Analysis of this ‘would have’ statement, together with an exploration of the suspicion that the ‘might have’ statement is ambiguous between these two epistemic possibilities, will have to await another occasion. The important point for present purposes is that is ambiguous between an expression of the epistemic possibility of ‘Michael led the league in scoring’ and some quite different reading. (shrink)

Through qualitative surveys, a team of law students, law professors, physicians, and residents explored the perceptions of neurology residents towards referral to appropriate legal resources in an academic training program. Respondents reported feeling uncomfortable screening their patients for health-harming legal needs, which many attributed to a lack of training in this area. These findings indicate that neurology residents would benefit from training on screening for social factors that may be impacting their patients’ health.

Irreversibility, it is claimed, is a much broader concept than is entropy increase, as is shown by the occurrence of certain processes which are irreversible without seeming to involve any intrinsic entropy change. These processes include the spreading outwards into space of particles, or of radiation, and they also include certain biological and mental phenomena. For instance, the irreversible and treelike branching which is characteristic of natural evolution is not entropic when it is considered in itself—i.e. in abstraction from accompanying (...) biochemical and physiological activity. What appears to be the common feature of all forms of irreversibility is the fanning out of trajectories, new entities or new states, in the temporal direction towards the future. (shrink)

In mirror mark tests dolphins twist, posture, and engage in open-mouth and head movements, often repetitive. Because postures and an open mouth are also dolphin social behaviours, we used self-view television as a manipulatable mirror to distinguish between self-examination and social behavior. Two dolphins were exposed to alternating real-time self-view and playback of the same to determine if they distinguished between them. The adult male engaged in elaborate open-mouth behaviors in mirror mode, but usually just watched when playing back the (...) same material. Mirror mode behavior was also compared to interacting with real dolphins . Mark tests were conducted, as well as switches from front to side self-views to see if the dolphins turned. They presented marked areas to self-views to see if the dolphins turned. They presented marked areas to the self-view television and turned. The results suggest self-examination over social behavior. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the interpretation of the ontological argument as a theoretical construction that is connected with understanding of the reflexive relationship of thinking and existence. The author concludes that the consistent implementation of this approach requires an appeal to the historically transitory forms of the ontological argument which reconstructs the logic of the evolution of reflexive systems. The ontological argument is considered as a developing theoretical construct. Therefore, theoretical constructs conceptualized as non-classical versions of the ontological argument (...) will constantly re-emerge. Emergence of the first non-classical version of the ontological argument is related to need of overcoming apriority of introduction of the idea of the absolute being which is typical for Cartesianism. This issue was realized in the Kantian doctrine of transcendental ideas, which presented mind as an independent essence that creates its own content. Thus, the metaphysical construction, conditionally referred to as “the moral proof of the existence of God,” is revealed in the paper as a non-classical variant of the ontological argument. However, while Kant could be content with faith in reality of other subjectivity as an object of moral action, Fichte’s scientific doctrine demanded a proof of objective reality of the concept of the other I. This issue was identical to a basic problem of an ontological argument. “The ontological argument of the other I” offered by Fichte was devoid of mysticism as it is indissolubly connected with the disclosure of the social nature of the human subjectivity. The last step in formation of the concept “non-classical version of the ontological argument” was taken in Hegelian philosophy, where the reflexive relations between the multitude of I’s were transformed to reflexive interconnection between God and man. The versions of ontological argument are considered in the paper as necessary stages which any theoretical model of reflexive systems has to pass in its formation. (shrink)

It is, by now, a common-place, to point out that contemporary philosophy under the influence of Moore and Wittgenstein is concerned with language rather than with the ‘world’ There is, no doubt, a great deal of room to niggle at this rather broad characterization of recent philosophy, but anyone familiar with recent philosophical history in Britain and America will agree that such a generalization is as true as such generalizations can be. Thus, J. J. C. Smart points out that.