This paper provides a broad bibliometric overview of the important conceptual advances that have been published during COVID-19 within “e-learning in higher education.” E-learning as a concept has been widely used in the academic and professional communities and has been approved as an educational approach during COVID-19. This article starts with a literature review of e-learning. Diverse subjects have appeared on the topic of e-learning, which is indicative of the dynamic and multidisciplinary nature of the field. These include analyses of (...) the most influential authors, of models and networks for bibliometric analysis, and progress towards the current research within the most critical areas. A bibliometric review analyzes data of 602 studies published in the Web of Science database to fully understand this field. The data were examined using VOSviewer, CiteSpace, and KnowledgeMatrix Plus to extract networks and bibliometric indicators about keywords, authors, organizations, and countries. The study concluded with several results within higher education. Many converging words or sub-fields of e-learning in higher education included distance learning, distance learning, interactive learning, online learning, virtual learning, computer-based learning, digital learning, and blended learning. This research is mainly focused on pedagogical techniques, particularly e-learning and collaborative learning, but these are not the only trends developing in this area. The sub-fields of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning constitute new research directions for e-learning in light of COVID-19 and are suggestive of new approaches for further analysis. (shrink)

Algerian universities rely on total quality management. TQM is one of the most successful strategic options for improving the quality of higher education. In addition, achieving academic accreditation and progress in international rankings. The study aims to address relevant contemporary issues by examining the impact of total quality management on the quality of higher education. The data were analyzed using a mixed-method approach; the study was done as a survey, with data collected via questionnaires issued to 610 students. The questionnaire (...) included Likert scale items that were quantitatively evaluated and modeled using structural equation modeling using Amos to accomplish the path analysis of the research model. Furthermore, qualitative data were acquired through interviews with 24 professors who are members of the Quality Cells, and qualitative data were evaluated using content analysis with NVivo. The study findings revealed that TQM has a direct and significant impact on the quality of graduates, scientific research, and community service in Algerian universities. The main results have been presented, and recommendations for future research are made. (shrink)

When it was first published in France in 1961 as _Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la Folie à l'âge Classique_, few had heard of a thirty-four year old philosopher by the name of Michel Foucault. By the time an abridged English edition was published in 1967 as _Madness and Civilization_, Michel Foucault had shaken the intellectual world. This translation is the first English edition of the complete French texts of the first and second edition, including all prefaces and appendices, some (...) of them unavailable in the existing French edition. _History of Madness_ begins in the Middle Ages with vivid descriptions of the exclusion and confinement of lepers. Why, Foucault asks, when the leper houses were emptied at the end of the Middle Ages, were they turned into places of confinement for the mad? Why, within the space of several months in 1656, was one out of every hundred people in Paris confined? Shifting brilliantly from Descartes and early Enlightenment thought to the founding of the Hôpital Général in Paris and the work of early psychiatrists Philippe Pinel and Samuel Tuke, Foucault focuses throughout, not only on scientific and medical analyses of madness, but also on the philosophical and cultural values attached to the mad. He also urges us to recognize the creative and liberating forces that madness represents, brilliantly drawing on examples from Goya, Nietzsche, Van Gogh and Artaud. The _History of Madness_ is an inspiring and classic work that challenges us to understand madness, reason and power and the forces that shape them. (shrink)

Printbegrænsninger: Der kan printes 10 sider ad gangen og max. 40 sider pr. session.

The philosopher of Mathematics Jean Cavaillès plays an important role in Claude Imbert's thought. His published work had a significant impact after the war. It is largely a reflection on debates on the foundation of mathematics and on two opposed models of axiomatics, foundationalist and constructionist. The philosophy he announced was to be a study of the generativity of conceptual structures, as opposed to a phenomenology of knowledge. He derived from his reflection on invention in mathematics a great scepticism on (...) the ideas of the separateness and unity of consciousness and a criticism of the teleologies inherent in philosophies of consciousness. In that, his work, according to Claude Imbert, made possible the reflections on structures and symbolisms which were to dominate the French context in the following decades. (shrink)

There are persons with disabilities in each society. Theinclusion of PWDs by society, as supported by the United Nation’s sustainabledevelopment goals, could be encouraged by advertising. Advertising’sinfluence on one’s worldview is obvious with cultivation theory espousing thephenomenon that prolonged viewing of television could fashion audiences’worldview by making them believe that the images projected are accuratedepictions of reality. PWDs not only nurture compassion within us but provideus with a wealth of opportunities by coming up with inventions that improvetheir quality of life. (...) These inventions could empower PWDs by giving themgreater independence. The global brand, Apple, through its technologicaldevices, gives PWDs jobs, a platform for expression and dignity. Apple hascreated a series of video advertisements that depict its embrace of inclusionthrough its technological innovations. The study examines selected Apple’svideo advertisements using critical discourse analysis. The outcomeof the study is a framework for brands to use as a guide when incorporatingadvertising images on the inclusion of PWDs. (shrink)

This Special Issue of Intellectual Discourse contains seven articleson the theme of disability studies. The goal of the Special Issue isto create awareness of research studies on the area of disability.The inclusion of persons with disabilities in various areas such aseducation, healthcare, access to buildings and information meets theUnited Nations Sustainable Development Goals which arefundamental to the focus of the articles. The scope of the theme is wideas it encompasses several perspectives namely the extra costs of havinga disability, advertisements and (...) their depiction of inclusion and personswith disabilities, the inclusiveness of Malaysian urban cities, parentingchildren with hearing impairment, an examination of stress in parents ofchildren with autism, the costs of different types of caregivers and thedesign of a speech delay screening mobile application for Malaysianparents. (shrink)

Most of the academic research in the field of consumer ethics has focused on the cognitive antecedents and processes of unethical consumer behavior. However, the specific roles of discrete emotions such as fear have not yet been investigated thoroughly. This research examines the role of the need for cognition, the three affective responses—fear, power, and excitement—and perceived issue importance on moral intensity, ethical perceptions, and ethical intentions for four types of unethical consumer behaviors. A sample of consumers from the two (...) cities of Alexandria and Cairo, Egypt participated in the survey. Most research hypotheses were supported. NFC, issue importance, and affect variables were all predictors of moral intensity, ethical perceptions, and ethical intentions in four different consumer ethics scenarios. The specific predictors varied from one consumer ethics scenario to another, however. (shrink)

Heart rate variability (HRV) is an indicator of the regulation of the heart, see Task Force (Circulation 93(5):1043–1065, 1996). This study compares the regulation of the heart in two cases of healthy subjects within real life situations: Marathon runners and shift workers. After an update on the state of the art on HRV processing, we specify our probabilistic model: We choose modeling heartbeat series by locally stationary Gaussian process (Dahlhaus in Ann Stat 25, 1997). HRV is then processed by the (...) combination of two statistical methods: (1) Continuous wavelet transform for calculating the spectral density energy in the high frequency (HF) and low frequency (LF) bands and (2) Change point analysis to detect changes of heart regulation. Next, we plot the variations of the HF and LF energy in extreme conditions for both populations. This puts in light, that physical activities (rest, moderate sport, marathon race) can be ordered in a logical continuum. This allows to define a new index based on HF and LF energy that is log HF + log LF which appears relevant to measure HR regulation. The results obtained are pertinent but have to be completed by further studies. (shrink)

Le conflit israélo-palestinien apporte un sérieux démenti à l’exaltation messianique des philosophies de l’Histoire qui conçoivent l’avènement de la paix, comme la réalisation d’un processus inéluctable. Si ce conflit douloureux perdure et prend parfois une intensité dramatique, c’est parce qu’il met aux prises deux mouvements de décolonisation en lutte pour la possession d’une..

Frantz Fanon is principally known as a great theoretician of race relations and decolonization, in particular through the two main books he published during his lifetime Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. What is less known is that he was in parallel a pioneering psychiatrist and an early and recognized theoretician of ethnopsychiatry. A volume of about a thousand pages of texts either difficult to access or presumed lost was recently published, following more than a decade (...) of research in archives located in different parts of the world. It reveals first the importance and originality of his thought as a scientist, and secondly the importance of this dimension of his work for the understanding of his political texts. This is shown on two points: 1) the role of violence in the decolonization process, when compared with Fanon’s texts on psychiatric internment, the phenomenon of agitation and the alternative model of social therapy and 2) the use of «identity» as cultural foundation for newly decolonized states, which he strongly criticised, when compared with Fanon’s systematic questioning of any personal «constitution» in his psychiatric and ethnopsychiatric work. (shrink)

The Routledge Guidebook to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth offers an accessible, step-by step guide to Fanon’s original text, providing a clear and engaging account account of the theoretical and historical background that lead to its writing_. _It unites all elements of the work to produce a precise explanation of this important book, which presents the historicak impact of its publication, traces its ongoing influence and explains the interest it continues to elicit today.

This is a fascinating exploration of the nature and power of human intelligence, and the way it has singled us out from the rest of the animal kingdom. Human success in the face of the rigours of the physical world and human dominance within the animal kingdom are due to intelligence: those tools of the mind that give us access to the stored experience of humankind and allow us to reason, to test our ideas, and to plan for the future. (...) How we define intelligence, what it consists of, how it evolved, and how we can enhance it in the future are the questions addressed by the eight expert contributors to this remarkable book. The volume originates in the seventh annual series of Darwin College Lectures, delivered in Cambridge in 1992, and includes contributions from Simha Arom, George Butterworth, Daniel Bennett, Richard Gregory, Nicholas Mackintosh, Roger Penrose, Roger Schank and Lawrence Birnbaum. (shrink)

Parties, Trade-unions, SocialMovements : Relations and Articulations How are we to explain the resurgence of the question of political parties, when the question of socialmovements seemed to have eclipsed it ? What is the role to be played by parties, trade-unions andby social movements in a project of radical social transformation ? What are the modes of alliance,of collaboration and convergence, to be constructed between them ? These are some of the questionsaddressed in the present article.

DAVID KHALFA. — L’initiative de Genève a fait beaucoup parler d’elle dans le monde et plus particulièrement en Europe. Qu’en est-il aujourd’hui de cette initiative, quels ont été les échos de cette initiative politique sur le leadership palestinien et plus largement sur la société palestinienne ?ELIAS ZANANIRI. — Cette initiative..

A provocative critique of Western attitudes about the Orient, this history examines the ways in which the West has discovered, invented, and sought to control the East from the 1700s to the present.

Three experiments were conducted in order to validate 56 musical excerpts that conveyed four intended emotions (happiness, sadness, threat and peacefulness). In Experiment 1, the musical clips were rated in terms of how clearly the intended emotion was portrayed, and for valence and arousal. In Experiment 2, a gating paradigm was used to evaluate the course for emotion recognition. In Experiment 3, a dissimilarity judgement task and multidimensional scaling analysis were used to probe emotional content with no emotional labels. The (...) results showed that emotions are easily recognised and discriminated on the basis of valence and arousal and with relative immediacy. Happy and sad excerpts were identified after the presentation of fewer than three musical events. With no labelling, emotion discrimination remained highly accurate and could be mapped on energetic and tense dimensions. The present study provides suitable musical material for research on emotions.Keywords. (shrink)

La machine uniformisatrice de la mondialisation prétend respecter la diversité des langues et des cultures, qui est devenue l'un des nouveaux dogmes de ce temple socioculturel universel qu'est l'Unesco. Mais elle manque encore de profondeur et d'originalité dans sa manière de concevoir et de consolider cette diversité ; une profondeur et une originalité que l'on peut, par contre, découvrir dans les basses couches de la société mondiale, riches de leurs particularismes identitaires, fécondes par leurs métissages et innovantes grâce aux bouleversements (...) constants qu'elles subissent. Cette réflexion part de l'étude de quelques textes fondamentaux de l'Unesco qui donnent des orientations en vue de la sauvegarde et de l'optimisation de la diversité culturelle et linguistique du monde actuel. Elle est un regard critique porté sur les incohérences dans la démarche vers une démocratisation culturelle universelle.Standardizing the machine of globalization claims to respect the diversity of languages ​​and cultures, which became one of the dogmas of the new temple universal sociocultural what Unesco. But it still lacks depth and originality in its thinking and consolidate this diversity depth and originality that can, by cons, discovered in the lower layers of the global society, rich of their specific identity , productive and innovative by their interbreeding with the constant changes they undergo. This reflection on the study of some fundamental texts of Unesco which provide guidance for safeguarding and optimizing the cultural and linguistic diversity in the world today. It is a critical look focused on inconsistencies in the approach to a universal cultural democratization. (shrink)

At this point I should say something about one of the frequent criticisms addressed to me, and to which I have always wanted to respond, that in the process of characterizing the production of Europe’s inferior Others, my work is only negative polemic which does not advance a new epistemological approach or method, and expresses only desperation at the possibility of ever dealing seriously with other cultures. These criticisms are related to the matters I’ve been discussing so far, and while (...) I have no desire to unleash a point-by-point refutation of my critics, I do want to respond in a way that is intellectually pertinent to the topic at hand.What I took myself to be undertaking in Orientalism was an adversarial critique not only of the field’s perspective and political economy, but also of the sociocultural situation that makes its discourse both so possible and so sustainable. Epistemologies, discourses, and methods like Orientalism are scarcely worth the name if they are reductively characterized as objects like shoes, patched when worn out, discarded and replaced with new objects when old and unfixable. The archival dignity, institutional authority, and patriarchal longevity of Orientalism should be taken seriously because in the aggregate these traits function as a worldview with considerable political force not easily brushed away as so much epistemology. Thus Orientalism in my view is a structure erected in the thick of an imperial contest whose dominant wing it represented and elaborated not only as scholarship but as a partisan ideology. Yet Orientalism hid the contest beneath its scholarly and aesthetic idioms. These things are what I was trying to show, in addition to arguing that there is no discipline, no structure of knowledge, no institution or epistemology that can or has ever stood free of the various sociocultural, historical, and political formations that give epochs their peculiar individuality. Edward W. Said is Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His most recent contribution to Critical Inquiry is “An Ideology of Difference”. (shrink)

In this paper, we define a new cosine similarity between two interval valued neutrosophic sets based on Bhattacharya’s distance [19]. The notions of interval valued neutrosophic sets (IVNS, for short) will be used as vector representations in 3D-vector space. Based on the comparative analysis of the existing similarity measures for IVNS, we find that our proposed similarity measure is better and more robust. An illustrative example of the pattern recognition shows that the proposed method is simple and effective.

In this paper, the cosine similarity measure of neutrosophic refined (multi-) sets is proposed and its properties are studied. The concept of this cosine similarity measure of neutrosophic refined sets is the extension of improved cosine similarity measure of single valued neutrosophic. Finally, using this cosine similarity measure of neutrosophic refined set, the application of medical diagnosis is presented.

Derrida and Foucault are opposed to each other on a number of grounds, and perhaps the one specially singled out in Foucault's attack on Derrida—that Derrida is concerned only with "reading" a text and that a text is nothing more than the "traces" found there by the reader—would be the appropriate one to begin with here.1 According to Foucault, if the text is important for Derrida because its real situation is literally an abysmally textual element, l'écriture en abîme with which (...) criticism so far has been unable really to deal,2 then for Foucault the text is important because it inhabits an element of power with a decisive claim on actuality, even though that power is invisible or implied. Derrida's criticism therefore moves us into the text, Foucault's in and out of it. · 1. Michel Foucault's attack on Derrida is to be found in an appendix to the later version of Folie et déraison: Historie de la folie à l'âge classique , pp. 583-602; the earlier edition has been translated into English: Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard .· 2. Jacques Derrida, La Dissémination , p. 297. Edward W. Said, Parr Professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, is the author of Orientalism and The Question of Palestine, along with numerous publications on literature, politics, and culture; his Beginnings: Intention and Method received the first annual Lionel Trilling Memorial Award. "The Problem of Textuality" will appear in a slightly different form in his Criticism between Culture and System. (shrink)

The goal of this article is to bring into wider attention the often neglected important work by Bertrand Russell on the philosophy of nature and the foundations of physics, published in the year 1927. It is suggested that the idea of what could be named Russell space, introduced in Part III of that book, may be viewed as more fundamental than many other types of spaces since the highly abstract nature of the topological ordinal space proposed by Russell there would (...) incorporate into its very fabric the emergent nature of spacetime by deploying event assemblages, but not spacetime or particles, as the fundamental building blocks of the world. We also point out the curious historical fact that the book The Analysis of Matter can be chronologically considered the earliest book-length generic attempt to reflect on the relation between quantum mechanics, just emerging by that time, and general relativity. (shrink)

Background Behavior is known as misconduct when individuals do not adhere to ethical standards, rules, or regulations. Several factors lead to misconduct, including the lack of understanding of what misconduct is among undergraduate students. However, misconduct as a concept needs more clarity and specificity. Objective This study aimed to examine the concept of misconduct from the literature and establish an operational definition for application to nursing education. Research design A concept analysis using Rodger’s evolutionary view was used to analyze the (...) literature from the disciplines of: academics, business, law, and religious perspectives. Findings and discussion An operational definition was developed based on the multidisciplinary concept analysis. A concept map was designed to help visualize the antecedents, attributes, and consequences and to assist in the conceptualization of misconduct. Implications for nursing science, administration, and education are provided. Conclusion Understanding misconduct is necessary for nurse educators to ensure ethical practice within the academic context. (shrink)

I do not want to be misunderstood as saying that the cultural situation I describe here caused Reagan, or that it typifies Reaganism, or that everything about it can be ascribed or referred back to the personality of Ronald Reagan. What I argue is that a particular situation within the field we call "criticism" is not merely related to but is an integral part of the currents of thought and practice that play a role within the Reagan era. Moreover, I (...) think, "criticism" and the traditional academic humanities have gone through a series of developments over time whose beneficiary and culmination is Reaganism. Those are the gross claims that I make for my argument.A number of miscellaneous points need to be made here. I am fully aware that any effort to characterize the present cultural moment is very likely to seem quixotic at best, unprofessional at worst. But that, I submit, is an aspect of the present cultural moment, in which the social and historical setting of critical activity is a totality felt to be benign , uncharacterizable as a whole and somehow outside history. Thus it seems to me that one thing to be tried–out of sheer critical obstinacy–is precisely that kind of generalization, that kind of political portrayal, that kind of overview condemned by the present dominant culture to appear inappropriate and doomed from the start.It is my conviction that culture works very effectively to make invisible and even "impossible" the actual affiliations that exist between the world of ideas and scholarship on the one hand, and the world of brute politics, corporate and state power, and military force, on the other. The cult of expertise and professionalism, for example, has so restricted our scope of vision that a positive doctrine of noninterference among fields has set in. This doctrine has it that the general public is best left ignorant, and the most crucial policy questions affecting human existence are best left to "experts," specialists who talk about their specialty only, and–to use the word first given wide social approbation by Walter Lippman in Public Opinion and The Phantom Public–"insiders," people who are endowed with the special privilege of knowing how things really work and, more important, of being close to power1.1. See Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century , pp. 180-85 and 212-6. (shrink)

Both neutrosophic sets theory and rough sets theory are emerging as powerful tool for managing uncertainty, indeterminate, incomplete and imprecise information .In this paper we develop an hybrid structure called “ rough neutrosophic sets” and studied their properties.

'At last, a volume on civilization that truly reflects the complexity of multiple civilizations. The wealth of contributions Arjomand and Tiryakian have assembled demonstrates the value of an old concept for understanding the awful dilemmas confronting human kind in the global age. Its thoroughgoing renewal here establishes this book as the essential benchmark for future scholars of civilization' - Martin Albrow, Founding Editor of International Sociology and author of The Global Age - winner of the European Amalfi Prize, 1997 'In (...) our tension filled world, many are heralding, and others fearing, a"clash of civilizations." The contributors to this volume provides a healthy and persuasive argument about why this clash need not, and certainly should not, take place. They do so, moreover, not by rejecting the concept of civilization, but by developing a less primordial, homogenous, and essentialist concept of it. An important collection that provides illumination in this sometimes frighteningly dark time' - Jeffrey Alexander, Professor and Chair of Sociology at Yale University 'The concept of civilization may well replace the notions of globalization and identity as the core component in the vocabulary of 21st century sociology. The authors contribute a great deal to the clarification of fashionable controversies around the "clash of civilizations" and "multiculturalism". They go a long way toward purging the concept of civilization of its ideological overtones, and they suceed admirably in turning it into powerful analytic tool of an emerging fleld of macrosociology, known already as civilizational analysis' - Piotr Sztompka, President, International Sociological Association Although the concept of 'civilization' has deep roots in the social sciences, there is an urgent need to re-think it for contemporary times. This book points to an exhaustion in using 'the nation state' and 'world system' as the basic macro-units of social analysis because they do not get to grips with the 'soft power' variable of cultural factors involved in global aspects of development. Also, globalization requires us to reconsider the link between civilization and a fixed or given territory. This book focuses upon the dynamic aspect of civilizations. Among the topics covered are: · Civilizational analysis and social theory · Global civilization and local cultures · Civilizational forms · Rationalization and Civilization · Civilizations as zones of prestige · Historical and comparative dimensions of civilization · The clash of civilizations. (shrink)

The current study examined the impact of religious socialization practices and parents’ concepts on the development of an abstract religious concept in young children, and whether or not children’s socio-cognitive ability moderates the relationship between their religious concept and sources of information about the concept. 215 parent-child dyads from diverse religious backgrounds participated. Children were between the ages of 3.52 and 6.98 years of age. Four main findings emerged from this study. First, children conceptualized God as more humanlike than their (...) parents did. Second, younger children were more likely to have a humanlike conception of God than older children. Third, parents’ concept of God and children’s concept of God had a stronger relationship when the child’s mental-state reasoning was more accurate. Fourth, the frequency of children’s engagement in religious practices was unrelated to children’s concept of God after controlling for child’s age. Taken together, these findings lend support for the view that social cognition is an important factor in young children’s acquisition of cultural information about abstract entities. (shrink)

Since neither of these two inordinately long responses deals seriously with what I said in “An Ideology of Difference” , both the Boyarins and Griffin are made even more absurd by actual events occurring as they wrote. The Israeli army has by now been in direct and brutal military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza for twenty-one years; the intifadah, surely the most impressive and disciplined anticolonial insurrection in this century, is now in its eleventh month. The daily (...) killings of unarmed Palestinians by armed Israelis, soldiers and settlers, numbers several hundred; yesterday two more Palestinians were killed, the day before four were killed. The beatings, expulsions, wholesale collective punishments, the closure of schools and universities, as well as the imprisonment of dozens of thousands in places like Ansar III, a concentration camp, continue. A V sign flashed by a young Palestinian carries with six months in jail; a Palestinian flag can get you up to ten years; you risk burial alive by zealous Israel Defense Forces soldiers; if you are a member of a popular committee you are liable to arrest, and all professional, syndical, or community associations are now illegal. Any Palestinian can be put in jail without charge or trial for up to six months, renewable, for any offense, which needn’t be revealed to him or her. For non-Jews, approximately 1.5 million people on the West Bank and Gaza, there are thus no rights whatever. On the other hand, Jews are protected by Israeli law on the Occupied Territories. In such a state of apartheid—so named by most honest Israelis—the intifadah continues, as does the ideology of difference vainly attempting to repress and willfully misinterpret its significance. Edward W. Said is Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His most recent contribution to Critical Inquiry is “Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors”. (shrink)

The release of over 6,000 genetically modified mosquitoes (GMM) into uninhabited Malaysian forests in 2010 was a frantic step on the part of the Malaysian government to combat the spread of dengue fever. The field trial was designed to control and reduce the dengue vector by producing offspring that die in the early developmental stage, thus decreasing the local Aedes aegypti population below the dengue transmission threshold. However, the GMM trials were discontinued in Malaysia despite being technologically feasible. The lack (...) of systematic studies in terms of cost-benefit analysis, questionable research efficacy and safety-related concerns might have contributed to the termination of the field trial. Hence, this research aims to evaluate the feasibility of GMM release in Malaysia by using a holistic approach based on an Islamic ethical-legal assessment under the maslahah-mafsadah (benefit-risk) concept. Three main strategies based on the maslahah-mafsadah concept approach have been applied: 1) an evidence-based approach, 2) an impact-based approach and, 3) a priority approach. The analysis concluded that GMM could be categorised as zanniyyah (probable). GMM is a promising alternative for dengue control, but many issues must be addressed before its widespread adoption. (shrink)

The question why natural processes tend to flow along a preferred direction has always been considered from within the perspective of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, especially its statistical formulation due to Maxwell and Boltzmann. In this article, we re-examine the subject from the perspective of a new historico-philosophical formulation based on the careful use of selected theoretical elements taken from three key modern thinkers: Hans Reichenbach, Ilya Prigogine, and Roger Penrose, who are seldom considered together in the literature. We (...) emphasize in our analysis how the entropy concept was introduced in response to the desire to extend the applicability of the Second Law to the cosmos at large (Reichenbach and Penrose), and to examine whether intrinsic irreversibility is a fundamental universal characteristics of nature (Prigogine). While the three thinkers operate with vastly different technical proposals and belong to quite distinct intellectual backgrounds, some similarities are detected in their thinking. We philosophically examine these similarities but also bring into focus the uniqueness of each approach. Our purpose is not providing an exhaustive derivations of logical concepts identified in one thinker in terms of ideas found in the others. Instead, the main objective of this work is to stimulate historico-philosophical investigations and inquiries into the problem of the direction of time in nature by way of crossdisciplinary examinations of previous theories commonly treated in literature as disparate domains. (shrink)

We investigate the fundamental relationship between philosophical aesthetics and the philosophy of nature, arguing for a position in which the latter encompasses the former. Two traditions are set against each other, one is natural aesthetics, whose covering philosophy is Idealism, and the other is the aesthetics of nature, the position defended in this article, with the general program of a comprehensive philosophy of nature as its covering theory. Our approach is philosophical, operating within the framework of the ontology of the (...) process of the production of art, inspired especially by the views of Antonin Artaud, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Bakhtin, Deleuze, and Guattari. We interrogate Dilthey and Worringer while outlining an ontology of art based on the production of nonhuman images and a nonpersonal experiential field of nature. (shrink)

The philosopher is a fundamental mode of existence of the human being, yet it is experienced only by a minority, an elite. Those constitute, among themselves, a subspecies of _Homo sapiens_ that is sometimes dubbed _Homo philosophicus_. Our goal here is to investigate, in depth, the philosophical foundations of this ontological-anthropological concept. We analyze the concept of the philosopher into three basic components: the thinker, the artist, and the mathematician, arguing that the three fundamentally participate in maintaining the operation of (...) the philosopher machine. The following text can be considered a contribution to metaphilosophy, written as a structured opinion piece, encompassing a series of reflections drawn from the writer’s own experience as a philosopher. The mode of the presentation is a mixture of personal and experimental writing styles, intentionally avoiding the rigid form of overtly analytical and argumentative discussions. Although numerous philosophers will be discussed below, four key figures, Nietzsche, Russell, Heidegger, and Guattari, occupy a special position in our overall opinionated view on the nature of philosophy. (shrink)