Mapping Urban Morphology: A Classification Scheme for Interpreting Contributions to the Study of Urban Form

Urban morphology is a thriving field of enquiry involving researchers from a wide diversity of disciplinary, linguistic and cultural backgrounds. While this diversity has helped advance our understanding of the complexity of urban form, confusion and controversy has also arisen over the various theoretical formulations forwarded by researchers from different philosophical and epistemological backgrounds. With the aim of improving intelligibility in the field, this paper proposes a straightforward scheme to identify, classify and interpret, or ‘map’, individual contributions to the study of urban form according to their respective theoretical or epistemological perspectives. Drawing upon epistemological discussions familiar to the readers of this journal, the authors first distinguish between cognitive and normative studies. A second distinction is made between internalist studies that consider urban form as a relatively independent system, and externalist studies in which urban form stands as a passive product of various external determinants. Using these basic criteria, it is possible to interpret and synthesize a multitude of contributions and map them using a simple Cartesian grid. The paper highlights how contributions from seemingly different theoretical approaches to urban morphology are intrinsically similar in their treatment of urban form as an object of enquiry

Integrating holism and reductionism in the science of art perception

The contextualist claim that universalism is irrelevant to the proper study of art can be evaluated by examining an analogous question in neuroscience. Taking the reductionist-holist debate in visual neuroscience as a model, we see that the analog of orthodox contextualism is untenable, whereas integrated approaches have proven highly effective. Given the connection between art and vision, unified approaches are likewise more germane to the scientific study of ar

Affective justification: how emotional experience can epistemically justify evaluative belief

The idea that emotional experience is capable of lending immediate prima facie epistemic justification to evaluative belief has been amassing significant philosophical support in recent years. The proposal that it is my anger, say, that justifies my belief that I’ve been wronged putatively provides us with an intuitive and naturalised explanation as to how we receive immediate and defeasible justification for our evaluative beliefs. With many notable advocates in the literature, this justificatory thesis of emotion is fast becoming a central facet in how we conceive of the emotions’ epistemic role with respect to our everyday lives. Interestingly, however, despite the fact that the justificatory thesis is fundamentally an epistemological proposal, comparatively little of the philosophical literature has been dedicated to exploring the epistemological avenues through which emotions might be capable of delivering such an epistemic yield. Accordingly, the central purpose of this thesis is to provide a novel and thorough analysis of how emotional experience might be capable of playing this justificatory role. Here, I present and evaluate three broad models of emotional justification: emotional dogmatism, emotional reliabilism, and agent-based views. Emotional dogmatist views, I argue, fail in virtue of being vulnerable to over-generalisation worries and problematic commitments to the contents of emotional awareness. Emotional reliabilism, while possessing the resources to avoid some objections, is vulnerable to worrisome clairvoyance-style challenges which establish the insufficiency of emotional reliability for epistemic justification. Finally, having learned our lessons from the shortcomings of these views, I argue that an agent-based theory grounded in the development of learned emotional competences provides the most plausible account of how emotional experience can epistemically justify evaluative belief. This discussion, I believe, will both illuminate contemporary discussions of the justificatory thesis of emotion found in the literature, and provide novel insight into the epistemic capacities of the emotions

Fideism, Evidentialism, and the Epistemology of Religious Belief

Fideism is the theory that certain propositions can be held by faith without regard to evidence. Its epistemological underpinnings are often contrasted with evidentialism - the view that one is justified in holding a belief if and only if that belief is based on sufficient undefeated evidence. Recently, John Bishop and C. Stephen Evans have each forwarded new theories of fideism that oppose evidentialism. This dissertation examines these two theories, raising problems that threaten to undermine the epistemological claims of the fideist. A version of evidentialism is then advanced that addresses the problems identified by Evans and Bishop. Particularly important to this defense is a notion of evidence that includes private evidence. Through a broadly abductive argument, this dissertation concludes that evidentialism remains a better candidate for rationally holding religious beliefs, while fideism--even in these newly proposed forms--cannot adequately answer the challenges of the skeptic

Resolute Agency in Confucian Role Ethics.

Ph.D. Thesis. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa 2018

Mental Health and Human Minds: Some Theoretical Criteria for Clinical Psychiatry

When it comes to the topic of mental illness, there are three broad areas of concern that are of interest to all of us as human beings—and to the theorists, researchers, and clinicians who wish to offer help—besides knowing what our symptoms are. First, we might be interested in finding out some normative facts about ourselves as individuals, such as whether or not we are mentally healthy, perhaps to what extent, and how this should affect our motivations. A second area of concern involves descriptive facts our minds. In what ways do we deviate from typical human psychological nature, and what implications does this have? A third concern is about diagnosis, the familiar labels like ‘bipolar 1’ and ‘obsessive compulsive’ which inform our very being. Ought any of these apply to us

Correspondences - Online Journal For The Academic Study of Western Esotericism, Volume 6(2)

Welcome to Correspondences, an international, peer-reviewed online journal devoted to the academic study of Western esotericism. By providing a wider forum of debate regarding issues and currents in Western esotericism than has previously been possible, Correspondences is committed to publishing work of a high academic standard as determined by a peer-review process, but does not require academic credentials as prerequisite for publication. Students and non-affiliated academics are encouraged to join established scholars in submitting insightful, well-researched articles that offer new ideas, positions, or information to the field

Reweaving urban fabrics : Urbanisation, industrialisation and regeneration in Southwest Montréal =

In the pages that follow, this thesis examines the urbanisation, industrialisation, and regeneration processes that have shaped the built landscape along Montréal's Lachine Canal. Adopting an approach that sees urban tissue as more than the simple result of agents' interventions, that is to say as a structuring influence itself, the thesis critically examines the history and geography of urban industrialisation, particularly in relation to Montréal, and takes a look at contemporary redevelopment paradigms. After putting forward a morphological methodology and offering a short history of the Canal, the thesis presents the results of an in-depth analysis of urban tissues in adjacent industrial sectors. Proposing a typology of industrial complexes and sectors rooted in the degree of differentiation between industrial elements and the surrounding urban tissue, this thesis argues that urbanisation, industrialisation, and regeneration are diffuse, incremental processes that dialectically engage with the landscapes left by the past. The thesis wraps up with a discussion of the historiographical and practical implications of such a perspective

A framework for structuring prerequisite relations between concepts in educational textbooks

In our age we are experiencing an increasing availability of digital educational resources and self-regulated learning. In this scenario, the development of automatic strategies for organizing the knowledge embodied in educational resources has a tremendous potential for building personalized learning paths and applications such as intelligent textbooks and recommender systems of learning materials. To this aim, a straightforward approach consists in enriching the educational materials with a concept graph, i.a. a knowledge structure where key concepts of the subject matter are represented as nodes and prerequisite dependencies among such concepts are also explicitly represented. This thesis focuses therefore on prerequisite relations in textbooks and it has two main research goals. The first goal is to define a methodology for systematically annotating prerequisite relations in textbooks, which is functional for analysing the prerequisite phenomenon and for evaluating and training automatic methods of extraction. The second goal concerns the automatic extraction of prerequisite relations from textbooks. These two research goals will guide towards the design of PRET, i.e. a comprehensive framework for supporting researchers involved in this research issue. The framework described in the present thesis allows indeed researchers to conduct the following tasks: 1) manual annotation of educational texts, in order to create datasets to be used for machine learning algorithms or for evaluation as gold standards; 2) annotation analysis, for investigating inter-annotator agreement, graph metrics and in-context linguistic features; 3) data visualization, for visually exploring datasets and gaining insights of the problem that may lead to improve algorithms; 4) automatic extraction of prerequisite relations. As for the automatic extraction, we developed a method that is based on burst analysis of concepts in the textbook and we used the gold dataset with PR annotation for its evaluation, comparing the method with other metrics for PR extraction