The expanding field of psychosocial online email counselling has created a demand for advanced tools to support counsellors in managing diverse client interactions. This paper introduces CAIA (Counsellor Artificial Intelligence Assistant), a comprehensive AI-driven system currently under active development, designed to condense and present information to counsellors in a structured manner. CAIA integrates several AI-based features, including Automatic Subject Generation, Case Summarisation, Timeline Management, Social Network Graph creation, and Case Classification. The features are designed to assist the counsellors, allowing them (...) to engage more deeply with each case while ensuring that the client’s needs remain paramount. Each feature presented in the paper addresses a specific problem in psychosocial online counselling, proposes a solution, discusses a technical implementation approach, and highlights the challenges encountered. Additionally, the paper discusses ethical considerations associated with an AI integration. (shrink)

Attention has a role in much of perception, thought, and action. On the erotetic theory, the functional role of attention is a matter of the relationship between questions and what counts as answers to those questions. Questions encode the completion conditions of tasks for cognitive control purposes, and degrees of attention are degrees of sensitivity to the occurrence of answers. Questions and answers are representational contents given precise characterizations using tools from formal semantics, though attention does not depend on language. (...) The erotetic theory proposes an integrated account of attention in cognitive control and of attentional focus in perception. The functional role of attentional focus on objects, properties, and locations has to do with picking out something that corresponds to what a task is ‘about’. The erotetic theory of attention opens new avenues in theorizing about the relationship between attention, representational content, phenomenal character, and practical reason. A novel representationalist account of salience is proposed. The theory also provides an account of distraction that suggests when distraction is a defect in practical reasoning. (shrink)

Barnett and Block (J Bus Ethics 18(2):179–194, 2011 ) argue that one cannot distinguish between deposits and loans due to the continuum problem of maturities and because future goods do not exist—both essential characteristics that distinguish deposit from loan contracts. In a similar way but leading to opposite conclusions (Cachanosky, forthcoming) maintains that both maturity mismatching and fractional reserve banking are ethically justified as these contracts are equivalent. We argue herein that the economic and legal differences between genuine deposit and (...) loan contracts are clear. This implies different legal obligations for these contracts, a necessary step in assessing the ethics of both fractional reserve banking and maturity mismatching. While the former is economically, legally, and perhaps most importantly ethically problematic, there are no such troubles with the latter. (shrink)

How ethical have recent banking practices been? We answer this question via an economic analysis. We assess the two dominant practices of the modern banking system – fractional reserves and maturity transformation – by gauging the respective rights of the relevant parties. By distinguishing the legal and economic differences between deposit and loan contracts, we determine that the practice of maturity transformation (in its various guises) is not only ethical but also serves a positive social function. The foundation of the (...) modern banking system – the holding of fractional reserves against deposits – is, however, problematic from economic, legal and ethical perspectives. Starting from a microanalysis of money's function, a reassessment of the current laws concerning the practice is encouraged, with the aim not only to rectify economic irregularities but also to realign depositors' rights with the obligations of the banking sector. (shrink)

Introduction: Historical background.--The law of causality and experience (1908)--The importance of Ernst Mach's philosophy of science for our times (1917)--Physical theories of the twentieth century and school philosophy (1929)--Is there a trend today toward idealism in physics? (1934)--The positivistic and the metaphysical conception of physics (1935)--Logical empiricism and the philosophy of the Soviet Union (1935)--Philosophical misinterpretations of the quantum theory (1936)--What "length" means to the physicist (1937)--Determinism and indeterminism in modern physics (1938)--Ernst Mach and the unity of science (1938).

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Formal spaces have become commonplace conceptual and computational tools in a large array of scientific disciplines, including both the natural and the social sciences. Morphological spaces are spaces describing and relating organismal phenotypes. They play a central role in morphometrics, the statistical description of biological forms, but also underlie the notion of adaptive landscapes that drives many theoretical considerations in evolutionary biology. We briefly review the topological and geometrical properties of the most common morphospaces in the biological literature. In contemporary (...) geometric morphometrics, the notion of a morphospace is based on the Euclidean tangent space to Kendall’s shape space, which is a Riemannian manifold. Many more classical morphospaces, such as Raup’s space of coiled shells, lack these metric properties, e.g., due to incommensurably scaled variables, so that these morphospaces typically are affine vector spaces. Other notions of a morphospace, like Thomas and Reif’s skeleton space, may not give rise to a quantitative measure of similarity at all. Such spaces can often be characterized in terms of topological or pretopological spaces. (shrink)

Attention influences the character of conscious perceptual experience in intricate and surprising ways, including our experience of contrast, space, and time. These patterns of influence have been argued to cause trouble for the attractive thesis that differences in the character of conscious experience flow from differences in what we represent. I present a novel theory of the functional role of attention that has the resources for a systematic representationalist account of these phenomena. On the erotetic theory of attention, we bring (...) an interest to the task of perception, captured as a question we seek to answer. Questions, as understood here, are contents that cognitive systems can represent rather than sentences. We process perceptual input as a putative answer to our question in a way that is modulated by attentional focus; attentional focus aims to pick out something that matches what our question is “about.” In certain cases, this yields a form of predictive coding: if the contribution of focus matches what our question is about, we take it to select one of the possible answers we are entertaining, even though our perceptual input by itself does not supply a full answer. The proposed account also provides a new account of the phenomenology of salience. (shrink)

Every definably complete expansion of an ordered field satisfies an analogue of the Baire Category Theorem.

Extending previous results from work on the complexity of cut elimination for the sequent calculus LK, we discuss the role of quantifier alternations and develop a measure to describe the complexity of cut elimination in terms of quantifier alternations in cut formulas and contractions on such formulas.

Abstract.Carrying out a suggestion by Kreisel, we adapt Gödel’s functional interpretation to ordinary first-order predicate logic(PL) and thus devise an algorithm to extract Herbrand terms from PL-proofs. The extraction is carried out in an extension of PL to higher types. The algorithm consists of two main steps: first we extract a functional realizer, next we compute the β-normal-form of the realizer from which the Herbrand terms can be read off. Even though the extraction is carried out in the extended language, (...) the terms are ordinary PL-terms. In contrast to approaches to Herbrand’s theorem based on cut elimination orɛ-elimination this extraction technique is, except for the normalization step, of low polynomial complexity, fully modular and furthermore allows an analysis of the structure of the Herbrand terms, in the spirit of Kreisel ([13]), already prior to the normalization step. It is expected that the implementation of functional interpretation in Schwichtenberg’s MINLOG system can be adapted to yield an efficient Herbrand-term extraction tool. (shrink)

Frontmatter -- Inhalt -- Einleitung -- ERSTER TEIL. Phänomenologie der eigenen Natur: Gegenstand und Methode der Untersuchung -- 1. Der Gegenstand der Untersuchung: die eigene Natur, das Selbst-Natur-sein -- 2. Die Methode einer Phänomenologie der eigenen Natur und die Methode der Untersuchung -- ZWEITER TEIL. Phänomenologie der eigenen Natur in den Philosophien Husserls, Heideggers, Merleau-Pontys und Schmitzens -- 1. Die Leiblichkeit des cogito (Edmund Husserl) -- 2. Dasein und Natursein (Martin Heidegger) -- 3. Die Ichhaftigkeit des Leibes (Maurice Merleau-Ponty) -- (...) 4. Leibliches Befinden und Personsem (Hermann Schmitz) -- DRITTER TEIL. Auf dem Weg zu einer Phänomenologie der Natur: Die Ergebnisse der Untersuchung und deren praktische und theoretische Relevanz -- 1. Leibphänomenologie als Naturphilosophie: Die Ergebnisse der Untersuchung -- 2. Phänomenologie der Natur in ihrer Relevanz für Wissenschaft, Praxis und Philosophie -- Schluß -- Anhang -- Literaturverzeichnis -- Personenverzeichnis -- Sachregister. (shrink)

In this article we reply to George Selgin’s counterarguments to our article “Fractional Reserve Free Banking: Some Quibbles”. Selgin regards holding cash as saving while we focus on the real savings necessary to maintain investment projects. Real savings are unconsumed real income. Variations in real savings are not [...].

Todorčević showed that Rado's Conjecture implies CC*, a strengthening of Chang's Conjecture. We generalize this by showing that also CC**, a global version of CC*, follows from RC. As a corollary we obtain that RC implies Semistationary Reflection and, i.e. the statement that all forcings that preserve the stationarity of subsets of ω1 are semiproper.

Rationality bashing has become a popular sport. Critiques have quite rightly challenged models of rational planning that follow a linear progression from predefined ends to achieved goals. There have been several alternative theoretical and empirical developments including incrementalist projects, networktheories, critical communication approaches, and heuristic models.Notwithstanding critiques of linear models of policy-making and planning, rationality as a general idea remains an important reference point for designing and evaluating policy-making and for orientating planning projects. We suggest that the concept of rationality (...) needs to be revised rather than abandonedand this article discusses how rationality in decision making may be reconstructed.We first review and critique some of the main preconceptions of rationality in policy-making and planning. We then discuss the nature and purpose of rationality from the perspective of John Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy and in light of contemporary theoretical and empirical analyses. We position rationality as a procedural standard of excellence that evolves and informs practices in the context of problematic situations. We propose that a theory of rationality, as a guide for planning and policy, should be developed for application in concrete problematic situations and at the same time should play a normative role and be orientated to moral, socio-historical, and ecological considerations. Dewey’s pragmatist theory is a promising source for such considerations.In this article we identify four ‘pillars’ of pragmatism to support such a revised rationality construct: (i) situationality, (ii) normativity, (iii) philosophical via media between foundationalism and relativism, and (iv) democratic inquiry. We discuss the application of a pragmatist rationality, that we refer to as ‘situational transactive’ rationality, using a model of decision making that builds on current understandings in planning and policy science. Finally, we discuss some of the possible advantages and challenges of undertaking such a pragmatist revision of rationality. (shrink)

In [U. Kohlenbach, Some logical metatheorems with applications in functional analysis, Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 357 89–128], the second author obtained metatheorems for the extraction of effective bounds from classical, prima facie non-constructive proofs in functional analysis. These metatheorems for the first time cover general classes of structures like arbitrary metric, hyperbolic, CAT and normed linear spaces and guarantee the independence of the bounds from parameters ranging over metrically bounded spaces. Recently ]), the authors obtained generalizations of these metatheorems which (...) allow one to prove similar uniformities even for unbounded spaces as long as certain local boundedness conditions are satisfied. The use of classical logic imposes some severe restrictions on the formulas and proofs for which the extraction can be carried out. In this paper we consider similar metatheorems for semi-intuitionistic proofs, i.e. proofs in an intuitionistic setting enriched with certain non-constructive principles. Contrary to the classical case, there are practically no restrictions on the logical complexity of theorems for which bounds can be extracted. Again, our metatheorems guarantee very general uniformities, even in cases where the existence of uniform bounds is not obtainable by straightforward functional analytic means. Already in the purely intuitionistic case, where the existence of effective bounds is implicit, the metatheorems allow one to derive uniformities that may not be obvious at all from a given constructive proof. Finally, we illustrate our main metatheorem by an example from metric fixed point theory. (shrink)

Buchkritik über: Michel Foucault: Geschichte der Gouvernementalität. Herausgegeben von Michel Sennelart. 2 Bände, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt/M. 2004.Bd. I: Sicherheit, Territorium, Bevölkerung. Vorlesung am Collège de France 1977–1978. Aus dem Französischen von Claudia Brede-Konersmann und Jürgen Schröder, 600 S. .Bd. II: Die Geburt der Biopolitik. Vorlesung am Collège de France 1978–1979. Aus dem Französischen von Jürgen Schröder, 517 S.

We present a unified diagnosis of three well-known puzzles about proper names, based on a new view of the metaphysics of words and proper names in particular adumbrated by David Kaplan in “Words”. While our solution comes at some metaphysical price, we think it is worth being considered a serious contender and may illustrate the promise of taking more seriously the metaphysical foundations of our semantic theories.

ArgumentThe discovery of the Alps in the second half of the eighteenth century spawned an aesthetics of sublimity that enabled overwhelmed beholders of mountains to overcome their confusion symbolically by transforming initial speechlessness into pictures and words. When travelers ceased to be content with beholding mountains, however, and began climbing them, the sublime shudder turned into something else. In the snowy heights, all attempts to master symbolically the challenging landscape was thwarted by vertigo, somnolence, and fatigue. After 1850, physiologists intervened, (...) using the Alpine terrain as a laboratory landscape that was ideally suited to examine one of the most threatening concerns offin de siècleindustrial societies: fatigue. This essay examines how the picturesque voyage turned into an experimental physiology of fatigue, and how the “wordless subjectivity” of romantic travelers turned into the “wordless objectivity” of life scientists. (shrink)

This chapter examines the neo-republican thesis of the compatibility between freedom and the state under conditions of ‘equally shared control’. It first considers the neo-liberal conception of the relation between freedom and the state as well as the socialist-social-democratic criticism of the neo-liberal understanding of freedom. It then discusses the neo-republicanism of Philip Pettit and the ‘republican thesis’ that freedom and political order are not contradictory to each other. It also analyses Robert Nozick's libertarianism and Friedrich Hayek's liberalism, along with (...) their argument that all actions of a government should be in strict accordance with the rule of law. Furthermore, it looks at the political philosophy of neo-liberalism, the implications of nondomination and the ‘neo-republican thesis’ that even a state's power and interferences can be controlled by its citizens. The chapter concludes by rejecting the thesis that freedom and the state are compatible. (shrink)

This article explores how a nonreductionist account of Nietzsche's influence on Michel Foucault can enrich our understanding of key concepts in singular works of both philosophers. I assess this exegetical strategy by looking at the two dichotomies Apollinian/Dionysian and ars erotica/scientia sexualis in The Birth of Tragedy and volume 1 of The History of Sexuality, respectively. After exploring the relation between these two dichotomies, I link the science of sexuality to the Apollinian art instinct via the existence of Socratic culture (...) and argue against the "pleasure of analysis" as a sublated form of (Dionysian) ars erotica. These considerations lead to the notions of history in Nietzsche's and Foucault's philosophies that result in situating the polyvalent Ursprung of Greek tragedy and the descent of ars erotica and scientia sexualis in an antimetaphysical and nonteleological picture of historical development.. (shrink)

The ideal scalar Aharonov–Bohm (SAB) and Aharonov–Casher (AC) effect involve a magnetic dipole pointing in a certain fixed direction: along a purely time dependent magnetic field in the SAB case and perpendicular to a planar static electric field in the AC case. We extend these effects to arbitrary direction of the magnetic dipole. The precise conditions for having nondispersive precession and interference effects in these generalized set ups are delineated both classically and quantally. Under these conditions the dipole is affected (...) by a nonvanishing torque that causes pure precession around the directions defined by the ideal set ups. It is shown that the precession angles are in the quantal case linearly related to the ideal phase differences, and that the nonideal phase differences are nonlinearly related to the ideal phase differences. It is argued that the latter nonlinearity is due to the appearance of a geometric phase associated with the nontrivial spin path. It is further demonstrated that the spatial force vanishes in all cases except in the classical treatment of the nonideal AC set up, where the occurring force has to be compensated by the experimental arrangement. Finally, for a closed space-time loop the local precession effects can be inferred from the interference pattern characterized by the nonideal phase differences and the visibilities. It is argued that this makes it natural to regard SAB and AC as essentially local and nontopological effects. (shrink)

The main theorem characterizes Mittag-Leffler modules as ‘positively atomic’ modules . This is applied to reduced products of Mittag-Leffler modules and pure-semisimple.

We revisit the notion of ontology localization, propose a new definition and clearly specify the layers of an ontology that can be affected by the process of localizing it. We also work out a numbe...