Although the first thing coming to mind when called Alghazali is theologian celebrated for criticism of philosophy, we only will not mention his critical thinking. It can be thought that this famous thinker of Islamic world has purely attempted to criticism of metaphysics but in our opinion this is not exactly true. With reference to traditional commentaries on Alghazali is not quite well, we desire to try in order to show a reliable approach. In this paper we will argue whether (...) or not the coherence of some commentaries on Alghazali such as destruction philosophy, inhibition to the intellectual development, prohibition to scientific and ideational advancement and so on. (shrink)

The innate knowledge problem is a classical problem in philosophy, which has been known since the classical antiquity. Plato in his dialogues Meno and Phaedo formulated the doctrine of innate ideas and proposed an early version of the poverty of the stimulus argument, which is the most frequently used argument in innate knowledge debates. In the history of philosophy there was also an opposite view. This approach is often associated with J. Locke’s philosophy. Locke thought that all our knowledge about (...) the world is a product of the universal learning mechanisms whose functioning is based on perception. The question about the presence of innate ideas in the human mind still remains relevant. New findings in cognitive science and neurosciences and also some recent arguments from philosophers contribute to the contemporary discussion between the spokesmen of the rival approaches to this problem. The paper presents the investigation of one of the approaches to solving the problem of innate concepts, which is called a “concept nativism.” It highlights the outstanding characteristics of the concept nativism: (a) domain specificity position, (b) belief that domain-specific mechanisms of learning are innate and (c) belief that at least some concepts are innate. The article also proposes an analysis of notions “innateness” and “idea” which is important for understanding nativists’ approach to innate ideas theory. And finally, it describes the most popular nativists’ arguments: (a) references to empirical studies using the preferential looking technique, (b) the poverty of the stimulus argument and (c) the argument from animals. (shrink)

In this chapter, I argue that communication in partnering is a physical exchange of information on the basis of ethically-bound conditions. Simply put, partners can cause each other harm. Thus, the criteria of communication in partnering is always within an ethical domain, where action runs along a continuum ranging from the ethical to the unethical. To make this argument, I will first lay out the conditions to which the relevant norms of evaluation can adhere. These conditions include proximity, orientation, and (...) point(s) of contact. Rather than provide a how-to guide for communication, I will examine a critical vocabulary for practically approaching communication in partnering. Section I begins with the conditions of communication, followed by Section II which examines the norms of communicating well. (shrink)

Is the societal-level of analysis sufficient today to understand the values of those in the global workforce? Or are individual-level analyses more appropriate for assessing the influence of values on ethical behaviors across country workforces? Using multi-level analyses for a 48-society sample, we test the utility of both the societal-level and individual-level dimensions of collectivism and individualism values for predicting ethical behaviors of business professionals. Our values-based behavioral analysis indicates that values at the individual-level make a more significant contribution to (...) explaining variance in ethical behaviors than do values at the societal-level. Implicitly, our findings question the soundness of using societal-level values measures. Implications for international business research are discussed. (shrink)

The article focuses on the nature of the modern knowledge society, which is characterized, first of all, by a sharp increase in intellectual capital (education, experience, skills, competencies, know-how, the price of personnel in the labor market, patents, etc.) in the amount of capitalization of large business. The knowledge society is a society of high social dynamics, the embodiment of the migration archetype, of rational discourse and intellectual work, which realizes the well-known thesis “Knowledge is power” in a new way. (...) The last three decades, Nico Stehr, a well-known German sociologist and philosopher has been rethinking, reformulating, and substantiating the theories of the knowledge society, which appeared in the 1960s. The article investigates Stehr’s concept, expresses arguments in its support, and highlights some blank spots that remain inexplicable for him in the light of the social realities of recent years. The conclusion runs that the knowledge society represents a significant social trend in the formation of science and technology as a leading productive force. It also manifests a form of the urban discourse of freedom — the cognitive self-realization of the individual in the spectrum of wide possibilities of the public good as a subject-matter of epistemological urban studies. However, this trend is countered by modern knowledge capitalism (privatization, fencing off of knowledge, including that with the help of patents), as well as by the high degree of risk and uncertainty that dominates the modern world. (shrink)

The Turing Test is one of the most disputed topics in artificial intelligence, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science. This paper is a review of the past 50 years of the Turing Test. Philosophical debates, practical developments and repercussions in related disciplines are all covered. We discuss Turing's ideas in detail and present the important comments that have been made on them. Within this context, behaviorism, consciousness, the 'other minds' problem, and similar topics in philosophy of mind are discussed. We (...) also cover the sociological and psychological aspects of the Turing Test. Finally, we look at the current situation and analyze programs that have been developed with the aim of passing the Turing Test. We conclude that the Turing Test has been, and will continue to be, an influential and controversial topic. -/- (This paper was reprinted in: The Turing Test: The Elusive Standard of Artificial Intelligence, J. H. Moor, ed., Kluwer Academic, pp. 23-78, 2003.). (shrink)

In the paper two forms of human dealing with the notion of the sacred are compared — manifestation and proclamation. Author suggests that proclamation is a characteristic for modern monotheistic religions based on the Old Testament theology. In particular, a vivid example of proclamation is a teaching of Jesus Christ, as presented in synoptic Gospels. In Ricouer’s view, a decline of the sacred in modern Western civilization is connected with an unjustified absolutization of the scientific and technical achievements and must (...) be overcome in the course of the further social development. (shrink)

The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has imperatively shaken the behavior of the global financial markets. This study estimated the impact of COVID-19 on the behavior of the financial markets of Europe and the US. The results revealed that the returns of the S&P 500 index have been greatly affected by a lockdown in the US owing to COVID-19. However, the health crisis generated due to the novel coronavirus significantly decreased the stock returns of the Nasdaq Composite index. The results also showed (...) that the economic crisis generated from the pandemic in Spain has had more impact on the IBEX 35 as compared to the health crisis itself. On the other hand, in the long-run, Italy’s stock markets are more affected by the health crisis as contrasted with the economic crisis, while, in the short-run, both lockdown conditions and economic instability lower the stock returns of FTSE MIB. The UK stock markets witnessed that in the short-run, deficiency of health management systems imperatively damaged the stock returns of the London Stock Exchange. The investigation revealed that deficiency of health systems and lockdown conditions have imperatively damaged the structure of financial markets, inferring that sustainable development of these nations is at risk due to COVID-19. The study suggested that governments should allocate more of their budget to the health sector to overcome a health crisis in the future. (shrink)

Problem of the existence of God and His relation to the world and human being is seen as one of quite old and main problems of philosophy. Though the existence of God and His essence as a knowledge subject is related to a transcendent being over this universe, human being can find rules made by Him in physical world in which stands. The concept of God constitutes one of the most involved points of Descartes’ philosophy. In fact, for Descartes, who (...) built his philosophy on physical bases or mechanical world, to place God as condition to his metaphysics originates from the conception that if God does not exist a being does not. In this paper, we will try to explain the relation of God and human and the world in Descartes’ philosophy. (shrink)

Abilitism is an approach to the metaphysics of concepts according to which each concept consists of a managing cognitive ability coordinating other abilities (cognitive and non-cognitive) and a set of subordinate abilities associated with this managing ability. As I argue here, if we accept the abilitist approach, we can efficiently solve such puzzles in the metaphysics of concepts as the partial possession problem, the concept pluralism problem, etc. However, there are some possible objections to abilitism, concerning the abilitist explanation of (...) compositional properties of concepts, knowledge-that, an extension/intension of concepts, and the idea that concepts are constituents of thought. As I demonstrate here, these objections can be answered. (shrink)

Bodily rhetoric is a burgeoning field, with scholars investing attention to the ways in which non-verbal communication mediates change between individuals and groups in complex scenarios, including political settings. Scenarios in which individuals move together – whether in completely extemporaneous situations or in existing forms such as Contact Improvisation, Argentinian Tango, or Classical Pas de Deux – pose a similarly complex communicative problem. Drawing on the work of Lloyd Bitzer, I demonstrate how rhetorical theory provides methodological insight by which we (...) can better understand the dynamic practice that is always already happening in situations where individuals move together. (shrink)

The article is dedicated to the popular argument among nativists, who use it against the empiricist approach. We analyze the strongest objection against the poverty of the stimulus argument which is the curry argument. As a result of the critical consideration of the poverty of the stimulus discussion, we conclude that the curry argument is quite sound.

Averroes, considered to be the greatest Aristotelian commentator in the Middle Ages, has written three different types of commentary on almost all the works of this great philosopher: short, middle and long. These commentaries have been translated into Latin and Hebrew in the early period, and profoundly influenced both Medieval Europe and Jewish thought for centuries. The effect of Averroes in the West was to spread the whole of Europe under the name of Latin Averroism. The text what you have (...) consists of some remarks about the translation of the commentary on the ‘Book Alpha Meizon’, the second book of Averroes’ Tafsīr Mā Ba’d at-Tabī’a. (shrink)

How partners encounter each other plays a role in whether they will be able to sustain their interaction. How partners go about maintaining their interaction reveals features of their epistemological system, particularly with respect to factors like what they know, what they take to be relevant to the interpretation, and what they value. In this way, the value system (what partners want) and the epistemological system (what partners know) intersect. By focusing on the role of reasoning and understanding, I believe (...) we stand to gain a clearer picture of how expectations about interactions inform the dynamics between partners. This, in turn, affords a picture of what partners can actually achieve in and through their connection. I am particularly interested in considering what features of interaction are necessary for maximizing the affordances of the partnership. I say this not as a utilitarian interested in maximizing good simpliciter, but as a social epistemologist thinking about the contingent goods that are present in relation (e.g. care). The epistemic picture assumes that there are things that are knowable in dancing together, while the ethical picture assumes that partners are responsible for the things they ought to know. -/- . (shrink)

Dance, as a mode of physical interaction, offers opportunities to care and be cared for, but this does not mean that dancers will, in fact, care. There may be no moral motivation underlying a lift, dip or intricate sequence of coordinated action. Choreographic scores may (knowingly or not) encourage merely perfunctory movements that are a poor simulacrum to care. Moreover, the caring that is expressed through dance need not transfer to other walks of life. I am not alone in knowing (...) spectacularly talented dancers whose behaviour off the dance floor is far from ethical – from the arrogant and petty to the flagrant abuse that plagues institutions of art and culture. This article considers how dance can illuminate both the acts and sentiments of care, conveying particular ethical orientations that trouble straightforward, absolute moral reasoning. The article frames an enquiry into the relation between ethics and aesthetics of care, drawn from feminist epistemologists Joan Tronto, Maurice Hamington, and Nel Noddings, as well as my own performance research on partnering. I frame a zone between technique and competence, foregrounding care in dance as both a technical and ethical issue. I will consider the necessary conditions by which dancing together can manifest care, rather than suggest blanketly that it always does or even that it should. To make this argument, I will describe and analyse Considered Care, a duet I created in the autumn of 2021 in collaboration with Boston Ballet. This performance research project provided the material from which to consider the concept of need, a condition of care in a dancing situation. I will conclude by considering the relationship between needs and trust in conceptualizing care within partnering. (shrink)

Our study aims to deal with different and similar conditions between Ghazzali and Kant, as characters at whom can show two different thinking form and two different cultural structure in their thoughts, in the context of the same subject. The article investigates the stages of these two thinkers approaches to the topic of transcendental dialectic and tries to display that why and how two different cultural worlds incline to this subject.

Trust is often considered valuable in a broad range of rela- tionships, from professional collaborations to personal part- nerships. This article examines the possibility of trust in a robotic system. By posing the question “can a robot do a trust fall?”, an investigation on the issues embedded in de- signing trusting systems is presented, using methods and per- spectives from philosophy and engineering. Posing such a question helps us understand the physicality and embodiment of trust, as well as the limits (...) and resources of robotics. (shrink)

The paper presents an analysis of the ethics of abortion and infanticide. The work considers two main approaches: the argument of J.J. Thomson on the right to use his body and the absence of responsibilities regarding the fetus, and the argument about the difference in the moral status of the fetus and the adult, which are used both in the argumentation of supporters and opponents of abortion. The paper shows the fallacy of the first approach, and also, in order for (...) the second approach to remain internally consistent, we must agree that infanticide is permissible. (shrink)

Abstract: Potatoes are edible tubers, available worldwide and all year long. They are relatively cheap to grow, rich in nutrients, and they can make a delicious treat. The humble potato has fallen in popularity in recent years, due to the interest in low-carb foods. However, the fiber, vitamins, minerals, and phytochemicals it provides can help ward off disease and benefit human health. They are an important staple food in many countries around the world. There are an estimated 200 varieties of (...) potatoes, which can be classified into a number of categories based on the cooked texture and ingredient functionality. Using a public dataset of 2400 images of potatoes, we trained a deep convolutional neural network to identify 4 types (Red, Red Washed, Sweet, and White).The trained model achieved an accuracy of 99.5% of test set, demonstrating the feasibility of this approach. (shrink)

The present article analyzes the world order in the past, present and future as well as the main factors, foundations and ideas underlying the maintaining and change of the international and global order. The first two sections investigate the evolution of the world order starting from the ancient times up to the late twentieth century. The third section analyzes the origin and decline of the world order based on the American hegemony. The authors reveal the contradictions of the current unipolar (...) world and explain in what way globalization has become more profitable for the developing countries but not for the developed ones. The authors also explain the strengthening belief that the US leading status will inevitably weaken. In this connection we discuss the alternatives of the American strategy and the possibility of the renaissance of the American leadership. The last section presents a factor analysis which allows stating that the world is shifting toward a new balance of power and is likely to become the world without a leader. The new world order will consist of a number of large blocks, coalitions and countries acting within a framework of rules and mutual responsibility. However, the transition to a new world order will take certain time (about two decades). This period, which we denote as the epoch of new coalitions, will involve a reconfiguration of the World System and bring an increasing turbulence and conflict intensity. (shrink)

The present volume is the fifth in the series of yearbooks with the title Globalistics and Globalization Studies. The subtitle of the present volume is Global Transformations and Global Future. We become more and more accustomed to think globally and to see global processes. And our future can all means be global. However, is this statement justified? Indeed, in recent years, many have begun to claim that globalization has stalled, that we are rather dealing with the process of anti-globalization. Will (...) not we find ourselves at some point again in an edifice spanning across the globe, but divided into national apartments, separated by walls of high tariffs and mutual suspicion? Of course, some setbacks are always possible, because the process of globalization cannot develop smoothly. It is a process which is itself emerging from contradictions and is shaped by a new contradiction. They often go much further than underlying systemic changes allow. They break forward, as the vanguard of a victorious army, and then often meet resistance of various social and political forces and may suddenly start to roll back just at the moment when everyone expects their further offensive. We believe that this is what is happening with globalization at present. The yearbook will be interesting to a wide range of researchers, teachers, students and all those who are concerned about global issues. (shrink)

How does consciousness vary across the animal kingdom? Are some animals ‘more conscious’ than others? This article presents a multidimensional framework for understanding interspecies variation in states of consciousness. The framework distinguishes five key dimensions of variation: perceptual richness, evaluative richness, integration at a time, integration across time, and self-consciousness. For each dimension, existing experiments that bear on it are reviewed and future experiments are suggested. By assessing a given species against each dimension, we can construct a consciousness profile for (...) that species. On this framework, there is no single scale along which species can be ranked as more or less conscious. Rather, each species has its own distinctive consciousness profile. (shrink)

The purpose of this research is to identify the extent of the efficiency of the internal control environment in the Palestinian higher educational institutions in Gaza Strip from the perspective of employees in the Palestinian universities in Gaza Strip, where researchers used in the study five universities. The researchers adopted in their study the descriptive and analytical approach. The research community consists of administrative employees and academic employees with administrative duties. Senior management or the University Council was excluded. The study (...) population compromises of (392) employees. A stratified random sample was chosen and (197) questionnaires were distributed. (160) questionnaires were received back with a return rate of (81.2%).The researchers used a questionnaire to collect that which then was analyzed using (SPSS) to get the results. The research found the following results: the absence of a fundamental difference between the responses of males and females. The lack of significant difference between the responses of the respondents attributed to the variable age. The lack of significant difference between the responses of the respondents attributed to the variable of years of service. And the existence of a fundamental difference between the responses of the respondents attributed to the university variable. The existence of a fundamental difference between the responses of the respondents attributed to the Qualification variable. The existence of a fundamental difference between the responses of the respondents attributed to the administrative level variable. The research found a group of recommendations including: the need to raise awareness of censorship as the basis for the protection of employees in all administrative levels from making mistake.Updating the systems and instructions of control periodically and parallel with the scientific progress and technology.Benefit from regional and international experiences in the application of internal control standards which commensurate with the administrative system of the institution. (shrink)

The problem of other minds has a distinguished philosophical history stretching back more than two hundred years. Taken at face value, it is an epistemological question: it concerns how we can have knowledge of, or at least justified belief in, the existence of minds other than our own. In recent decades, philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, anthropologists and primatologists have debated a related question: how we actually go about attributing mental states to others (regardless of whether we ever achieve knowledge or rational (...) justification in this domain). Until the mid-nineties, the latter debate – which sometimes goes under the name of the “mindreading” debate – was characterized by a fairly clear-cut opposition between two theoretical outlooks: “theory-theory” (TT) and “simulation theory” (ST). Theory-theorists typically argued that we attribute mental states to others on the basis of a “theory of mind” that is either constructed in early infancy and subsequently revised and modified (Gopnik 1996), or else is the result of maturation of innate mindreading “modules” (Baron-Cohen 1995). (shrink)

The aim of this study is to proof the argument – i.e. ‘there are significant linkages amongst tolerance, hybrid identities and migration.’ These linkages can be comprehended by means of conceptualising extensions of hybrid identities in aggregate trans/inter-migration processes. It can be put forward that arising hybrid identities are embedded in a blurring structure of thoughts, beliefs, states of affairs, facts, belongings and so forth. From multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism viewpoints, it is argued that tolerance and migration ought to be analysed (...) in frame of sociology of law, human rights, international migration law, and of course the European Union law. So far, normative arguments and soft law approaches are very much well integrated with social aspects of migration, tolerance, identity and culture. In this context, the study examines to what extent cultural and human components are protected by law in multiple levels from an interdisciplinary perspective. In this framework, it is crucial to raise the research enquiries: What are possible criteria for the limits of tolerance? To what extent tolerance is related to human rights and morality? What ought to be the limit of tolerance towards hybrid identities in multicultural and cosmopolitan societies? In a consistent manner, the criteria and standards developed by some leading scholars were reconstructed and discussed throughout this paper. These criteria and standards are both moral (part of a universal system of morality) and legal (international, supranational, or national – i.e. constitutional). In order to apply such standards their validity was discussed (i.e. the respective normative power has the norms at the various levels). In the case of morals, their difference to particular ethnic systems was established (i.e. criteria by which the two can be distinguished). Then the research argument was elaborated on whether and how the legal standards comply with the moral standards, how national standards comply with supranational or international standards. Likewise, the study highlights the crucial contributions of “World Society and World System Paradigms” that are associated with social space, global civil society, cosmopolitanism, ethnic diversity, cultural hybridity, human rights activism and public sphere. Recent debates in Refugee Studies (e.g. Syrian Refugee Crisis, Dual and Multiple Citizenship Issues and so forth) highlight the fact that the European Union needs to consider new aspects of tolerance for hybrid identities and tolerate cultural rights of hybrid identities, create cohesion in communities and establish intercultural dialogue amongst home-states and host-states. Sanguinely, the efforts of hybrid identities are strengthening the relations between home-host states and these ought to attract some considerable attention. The authors of this study hope that their endeavours may contribute somewhat towards that. (shrink)

This paper critically examines coincidence arguments and evolutionary debunking arguments against non-naturalist realism in metaethics. It advances a version of these arguments that goes roughly like this: Given a non-naturalist, realist metaethic, it would be cosmically coincidental if our first order normative beliefs were true. This coincidence undermines any prima facie justification enjoyed by those beliefs.

Biological evolution is a complex blend of ever changing structural stability, variability and emergence of new phe- notypes, niches, ecosystems. We wish to argue that the evo- lution of life marks the end of a physics world view of law entailed dynamics. Our considerations depend upon dis- cussing the variability of the very ”contexts of life”: the in- teractions between organisms, biological niches and ecosys- tems. These are ever changing, intrinsically indeterminate and even unprestatable: we do not know ahead of (...) time the ”niches” which constitute the boundary conditions on selec- tion. More generally, by the mathematical unprestatability of the ”phase space”, no laws of mo- tion can be formulated for evolution. We call this radical emergence, from life to life. The purpose of this paper is the integration of variation and diversity in a sound concep- tual frame and situate unpredictability at a novel theoretical level, that of the very phase space. Our argument will be carried on in close comparisons with physics and the mathematical constructions of phase spaces in that discipline. The role of symmetries as invariant preserving transformations will allow us to under- stand the nature of physical phase spaces and to stress the differences required for a sound biological theoretizing. In this frame, we discuss the novel notion of ”enablement”. Life lives in a web of enablement and radical emergence. This will restrict causal analyses to differential cases. Mutations or other causal differ- ences will allow us to stress that ”non conservation princi- ples” are at the core of evolution, in contrast to physical dynamics, largely based on conservation principles as sym- metries. Critical transitions, the main locus of symmetry changes in physics, will be discussed, and lead to ”extended criticality” as a conceptual frame for a better understanding of the living state of matter. (shrink)

Abstract: Tomatoes are part of the major crops in food security. Tomatoes are plants grown in temperate and hot regions of South American origin from Peru, and then spread to most countries of the world. Tomatoes contain a lot of vitamin C and mineral salts, and are recommended for people with constipation, diabetes and patients with heart and body diseases. Studies and scientific studies have proven the importance of eating tomato juice in reducing the activity of platelets in diabetics, which (...) helps in protecting them from developing deadly blood clots. A tomato classification approach is presented with a data set containing approximately 5,266 images with 7 species belonging to tomatoes. The Neural Network Algorithms (CNN), a deep learning technique applied widely in image recognition, is used for this task. (shrink)

The present article analyzes the world order in the past, present and future as well as the main factors, foundations and ideas underlying the maintaining and change of the international and global order. The first two sections investigate the evolution of the world order starting from the ancient times up to the late twentieth century. The third section analyzes the origin and decline of the world order based on the American hegemony. The authors reveal the contradictions of the current unipolar (...) world and explain in what way globalization has become more profitable for the developing countries but not for the developed ones. In the paper also explains the strengthening belief that the US leading status will inevitably weaken. In this connection we discuss the alternatives of the American strategy and the possibility of the renaissance of the American leadership. The last section presents a factor analysis which allows stating that the world is shifting toward a new balance of power and is likely to become the world without a leader. The new world order will consist of a number of large blocks, coalitions and countries acting within a framework of rules and mutual responsibility. However, the transition to a new world order will take certain time (about two decades). This period, which we denote as the epoch of new coalitions, will involve a reconfiguration of the World System and bring an increasing turbulence and conflict intensity. (shrink)

Papaya is a tropical fruit with a green cover, yellow pulp, and a taste between mango and cantaloupe, having commercial importance because of its high nutritive and medicinal value. The process of sorting papaya fruit based on maturely is one of the processes that greatly determine the mature of papaya fruit that will be sold to consumers. The manual grading of papaya fruit based on human visual perception is time-consuming and destructive. The objective of this paper is to the status (...) classification of papaya fruits if it's mature or partially matured or unmatured. A deep learning technique that was extensively applied to image recognition was used. The trained model achieved an accuracy of 100% on a held-out test set, demonstrating the feasibility of this approach. Classification model of VGG16 achieved a 100% accuracy and 112 seconds of training time. (shrink)

Ontologies, as the term is used in informatics, are structured vocabularies comprised of human- and computer-interpretable terms and relations that represent entities and relationships. Within informatics fields, ontologies play an important role in knowledge and data standardization, representation, integra- tion, sharing and analysis. They have also become a foundation of artificial intelligence (AI) research. In what follows, we outline the Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology (CIDO), which covers multiple areas in the domain of coronavirus diseases, including etiology, transmission, epidemiology, pathogenesis, diagnosis, (...) prevention, and treatment. We emphasize CIDO development relevant to COVID-19. (shrink)

Corruptionism is the view that following physical death, the human being ceases to exist but their soul persists in the afterlife. Survivalism holds that both the human being and their soul persist in the afterlife, as distinct entities, with the soul constituting the human. Each position has its defenders, most of whom appeal both to metaphysical considerations and to the authority of St Thomas Aquinas. Corruptionists claim that survivalism violates a basic principle of any plausible mereology, while survivalists tend to (...) reject the principle, though without as much detail as one would like. In this paper I examine both the key exegetical issues and the mereological question, arguing that Aquinas cannot be shown to have supported the principle in question, and that the principle should be rejected on independent grounds. If correct, some key planks in support of survivalism are established, with others to await further examination. (shrink)

Every person has his/her own unique signature that is used mainly for the purposes of personal identification and verification of important documents or legal transactions. There are two kinds of signature verification: static and dynamic. Static(off-line) verification is the process of verifying an electronic or document signature after it has been made, while dynamic(on-line) verification takes place as a person creates his/her signature on a digital tablet or a similar device. Offline signature verification is not efficient and slow for a (...) large number of documents. To overcome the drawbacks of offline signature verification, we have seen a growth in online biometric personal verification such as fingerprints, eye scan etc. In this paper we created CNN model using python for offline signature and after training and validating, the accuracy of testing was 99.70%. (shrink)

In the longstanding debate between liberals and libertarians over the morality of redistributive labor taxation, liberals such as John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin have consistently taken the position that such taxation is perfectly compatible with individual liberty, whereas libertarians such as Robert Nozick and Murray Rothbard have adopted the (very) contrary position that such taxation is tantamount to slavery. In this paper, I argue that the debate over redistributive labor taxation can be usefully reconstituted as a debate over the incidents (...) (or components) of self-ownership, with liberals arguing for a narrow definition of the concept and libertarians arguing for a broad one. By using what Alan Ryan has called the “language of proprietorship,” I pinpoint precisely the source of the disagreement between liberals and libertarians and assess the relative strengths of their arguments. I also show that the respective definitions of self-ownership used by liberals and libertarians are deeply problematic—though for strikingly different reasons. (shrink)

This paper defends the idea that phenomenological approaches to self-consciousness can enrich the current analytic philosophy of perception, by showing how phenomenological discussions of minimal self-consciousness can enhance our understanding of the phenomenology of conscious perceptual experiences. As a case study, I investigate the nature of the relationship between naïve realism, a contemporary Anglophone theory of perception, and experiential minimalism (or, the ‘minimal self’ view), a pre-reflective model of self-consciousness originated in the Phenomenological tradition. I argue that naïve realism is (...) not only compatible with, but can be supplemented with experiential minimalism in a novel way. The suggestion is that there are reasons to combine naïve realism and experiential minimalism. My focus here will be on drawing a connection between the notion of minimal self and two core theoretical commitments of naïve realism, relationalism and transparency. (shrink)

How can we have a sense of the presence of ordinary three-dimensional objects (e.g., an apple on my desk, a partially occluded cat behind a picket fence) when we are only presented with some parts of objects perceived from a particular egocentric viewpoint (e.g., the facing side of the apple, the unoccluded parts of the cat)? This paper presents and defends a novel answer to this question by incorporating insights from two prominent contemporary theories of perception, naïve realism and sensorimotor (...) theory. Naïve realism is the view that perception is fundamentally a matter of obtaining a relation of ‘acquaintance’ with some mind-independent entities (e.g., objects, properties, events). Sensorimotor theory holds that perception involves implicit practical understanding or ‘anticipation’ of the covariance between movements and sensory changes. I argue that perceptual presence is best accounted for in terms of the combination of our direct ‘acquaintance’ with some parts of perceived objects and sensorimotor ‘anticipations’ of how the objects would look different depending on some movements and actions. (shrink)

Although social scientists have identified diverse behavioral patterns among children from dissimilarly structured families, marketing scholars have progressed little in relating family structure to consumption-related decisions. In particular, the roles played by members of single-mother families—which may include live-in grandparents, mother’s unmarried partner, and step-father with or without step-sibling(s)—may affect children’s influence on consumption-related decisions. For example, to offset a parental authority dynamic introduced by a new stepfather, the work-related constraints imposed on a breadwinning mother, or the imposition of adult-level (...) household responsibilities on children, single-mother families may attend more to their children’s product preferences. -/- Without a profile that includes socio-economic, behavioral, and psychological aspects, efficient and socially responsible marketing to single-mother households is compromised. Relative to dual-parent families, single-mother families tend to have fewer resources and less buying power, children who consume more materialistic and compulsively, and children who more strongly influence decision making for both own-use and family-use products. Timely research would ensure that these and other tendencies now differentiate single-mother from dual-parent families in ways that marketers should address. Hence, our threefold goal is (1) to consolidate and highlight gaps in existing theory applied to studying children’s influence on consumption-related decision making in single-mother families, and (2) to propose a hybrid framework that merges two theories conducive to such research, and (3) to identify promising research propositions for future research. (shrink)

Ontology is one strategy for promoting interoperability of heterogeneous data through consistent tagging. An ontology is a controlled structured vocabulary consisting of general terms (such as “cell” or “image” or “tissue” or “microscope”) that form the basis for such tagging. These terms are designed to represent the types of entities in the domain of reality that the ontology has been devised to capture; the terms are provided with logical defi nitions thereby also supporting reasoning over the tagged data. Aim: This (...) paper provides a survey of the biomedical imaging ontologies that have been developed thus far. It outlines the challenges, particularly faced by ontologies in the fields of histopathological imaging and image analysis, and suggests a strategy for addressing these challenges in the example domain of quantitative histopathology imaging. The ultimate goal is to support the multiscale understanding of disease that comes from using interoperable ontologies to integrate imaging data with clinical and genomics data. (shrink)

This paper argues that it is prudentially wise to defer to groups about how they are essentially constituted and defined. After a few words situating the paper in my greater research project (§1), I articulate the kind of deference I have in mind (§2). Then I offer two conditional arguments on why it is epistemically desirable to let other people tell you how they ought to be identified (§3). The first argument is that people are owed lexical sovereignty because denying (...) it is absurd; the second is that modest skeptics ought to agree with it on the basis of some relatively anodyne and plausible epistemic considerations. (shrink)

Clark and Chalmers (1998) defend the hypothesis of an ‘Extended Mind’, maintaining that beliefs and other paradigmatic mental states can be implemented outside the central nervous system or body. Aspects of the problem of ‘language acquisition’ are considered in the light of the extended mind hypothesis. Rather than ‘language’ as typically understood, the object of study is something called ‘utterance-activity’, a term of art intended to refer to the full range of kinetic and prosodic features of the on-line behaviour of (...) interacting humans. It is argued that utterance activity is plausibly regarded as jointly controlled by the embodied activity of interacting people, and that it contributes to the control of their behaviour. By means of specific examples it is suggested that this complex joint control facilitates easier learning of at least some features of language. This in turn suggests a striking form of the extended mind, in which infants’ cognitive powers are augmented by those of the people with whom they interact. (shrink)

Abstract: This study aims to identify the level of creativity in the University of Palestine from the point of view of the employees, as the researchers used the descriptive and analytical method, through a questionnaire distributed to a sample of employees at the University of Palestine, where the size of the study population is (234) employees, and the size of the sample (117) employees, of which (90) employees responded. The study reached a set of results, the most important of which (...) are: A high degree of creativity from the employees 'point of view, and the study confirmed that there were no differences in the level of creativity at the University of Palestine from the Employees point of view, according to demographic variables. The study presented a set of recommendations, the most important of which are: The need for universities to enhance creativity. (shrink)

This work presents the design of an expert system that aims to provide the patient with background for suitable diagnosis of some of the eye diseases. The eye has always been viewed as a tunnel to the inner workings of the body. There are many disease states that may produce symptoms from the eye. CLIPS language is used as a tool for designing our expert system. An initial evaluation of the expert system was carried out and a positive feedback was (...) received from the users. (shrink)

Early Confucian “moral psychology” developed in the context of undoing reactive emotions in order to promote relationships of reciprocal recognition. Early Confucian texts diagnose the pervasiveness of reactive emotions under specific social conditions and respond with the ethical-psychological mandate to counter them in self-cultivation. Undoing negative affects is a basic element of becoming ethically noble, while the ignoble person is fixated on limited self-interested concerns and feelings of being unrecognized. Western ethical theory typically accepts equality and symmetry as conditions of (...) disentangling resentment; yet this task requires the asymmetrical recognition of others. Confucian ethics integrates a nuanced and realistic moral psychology with the normatively oriented project of self-cultivation necessary for dismantling complex negative emotions in promoting a condition of humane benevolence that is oriented toward others and achieved through self-cultivation. (shrink)

This article argues, against contemporary experimentalist criticism, that conceptual analysis has epistemic value, with a structure that encourages the development of interesting hypotheses which are of the right form to be valuable in diverse areas of philosophy. The article shows, by analysis of the Gettier programme, that conceptual analysis shares the proofs and refutations form Lakatos identified in mathematics. Upon discovery of a counterexample, this structure aids the search for a replacement hypothesis. The search is guided by heuristics. The heuristics (...) of conceptual analysis are similar to those in other interesting areas of scholarship, and so hypotheses generated by it are of the right form to be applicable to diverse areas. The article shows that the explanationist criterion in epistemology was developed and applied in this way. The epistemic value of conceptual analysis is oblique because it contributes not towards the main purpose of conceptual analysis but towards the reliable development of epistemically valuable hypotheses in philosophy and scholarship. (shrink)

An exploration of the nexus between ecology, evolutionary biology and molecular biology, via the concept of phenotypic plasticity.