Topological Foundations of Cognitive Science

A collection of papers presented at the First International Summer Institute in Cognitive Science, University at Buffalo, July 1994, including the following papers: ** Topological Foundations of Cognitive Science, Barry Smith ** The Bounds of Axiomatisation, Graham White ** Rethinking Boundaries, Wojciech Zelaniec ** Sheaf Mereology and Space Cognition, Jean Petitot ** A Mereotopological Definition of 'Point', Carola Eschenbach ** Discreteness, Finiteness, and the Structure of Topological Spaces, Christopher Habel ** Mass Reference and the Geometry of Solids, Almerindo E. Ojeda ** Defining a 'Doughnut' Made Difficult, N .M. Gotts ** A Theory of Spatial Regions with Indeterminate Boundaries, A.G. Cohn and N.M. Gotts ** Mereotopological Construction of Time from Events, Fabio Pianesi and Achille C. Varzi ** Computational Mereology: A Study of Part-of Relations for Multi-media Indexing, Wlodek Zadrozny and Michelle Ki

Reaction Based Grasp Force Assignment

An iterative method is developed by which the contact forces required to apply an arbitrary wrench (six elements of force and moment) to a stably grasped object may be calculated quickly. The assignment of contact forces, given a required object wrench, is accomplished with the use of fuzzy logic. This concept is referred to as the fuzzy logic reactive system (FLRS). The solution is versatile with respect to goals inherent in the rulebase and the input parameters, and is also applicable for an arbitrary number of contacts. The goal presented in this research, to illustrate the concept of the FLRS, is the minimization of the norm of the contact forces using point contacts with friction. The results comparing the contact force assignment for this method and the optimal method proposed by Nakamura are presented. The results show that FLRS will satisfy the object wrench and frictional contacts while achieving near optimal contact force assignment. This method is shown to require significantly fewer floating point operations than the solution calculated using numerical constrained optimization techniques

The Knowledge of Good

This book presents Robert S. Hartman’s formal theory of value and critically examines many other twentieth century value theorists in its light, including A.J. Ayer, Kurt Baier, Brand Blanshard, Paul Edwards, Albert Einstein, William K. Frankena, R.M. Hare, Nicolai Hartmann, Martin Heidegger, G.E. Moore, P.H. Nowell-Smith, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Charles Stevenson, Paul W. Taylor, Stephen E. Toulmin, and J.O. Urmson

English Renaissance paradox : intellectual contexts and traditions with particular reference to John Donne's ̀Paradoxes' and ̀Biathanatos'

This study examines the intellectual background of the paradoxes of John Donne. In the first chapter, the classical foundations of the concept of paradox are detailed. These foundations reflect basic philosophical differences which are manifest in a writer's approach to the defence of a paradox or uncommon opinion. The first chapter also discusses the derivation of classical concepts of paradox by sixteenth century writers in an effort to correlate these concepts with the respective philosophical positions with which Donne would have been familiar. The second chapter focuses on the dialectical procedure of the thesis. Aristotle explicitly associated the thesis with paradox, and he delineated its fundamental role in the investigation of contested speculative questions. Cicero adapted it to his rhetorical theory but continued to observe its essentially dialectical character. In the sixteenth century, writers on both rhetoric and logic drew heavily on the works of Aristotle and Cicero for their own formulations of the thesis. These formulations reflect precisely the relationship which Aristotle and Cicero observed between the paradox and the thesis. The third chapter begins by examining the challenge posed by Peter Ramus to the Aristotelian dialectic upon which the scholastic curricula of European universities was based. Donne's English contemporaries, Gabriel Harvey and Thomas Nashe, disagreed on the value of Ramus' innovations, and their comments on them in their quarrel reveal an awareness of the profound epistemological ramifications of Ramus' denial of the sceptical use of the thesis which Aristotle had observed in his Topics. The fourth chapter details those epistemological theories which competed with Ramus' neoaristotelianism. The majority of these theories are neoplatonic; they exhibit the characteristic features of Platonic Idealism which Aristotle had rejected in his Metaphysics, and which would be later rejected by Aquinas. Donne was familiar with these neoplatonic alternatives and was not wholly unreceptive to them. However, he explicitly denies the value of neoplatonic theories of mind for the practical affairs of Christian life, and maintains that the doubt implicit in matters to which revelation and reason have not delivered absolute precepts insures the viability of paradoxical opinions. The fifth chapter compares Donne's Aristotelian notion of paradox with other paradoxes of the sixteenth century. Through this comparison, the scholastic foundation of Donne's dialectical argumentation is exposed. Once exposed, his characteristic tentativeness with regard to the doctrinal differences of his day is understood to be a consequence of his Aristotelian and Thomist regard for the difficulty with which reason attains knowledge. The sixth chapter examines Donne's paradox and thesis, Biathanatos, in light of the Thomist principles which it employs in its exposition of the problem of suicide. Throughout Biathanatos Donne criticizes the value of Augustine's moral doctrine in practical life, and accepts an epistemological doctrine which accommodates doubt and error in the manner detailed by Aquinas and denied by Augustine. It is with this doubt and error in mind that Donne's paradox proceeds towards its conclusion's request for charitable interpretation, an interpretation which is informed specifically by Aquinas' doctrine of charity

How Material Practices and their Symbolic and Physical Meanings Form a Colonising Logic

This PhD thesis is the outcome of three-year doctoral study of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and stakeholder engagement in the water sector. This study contributes to new knowledge about water companies formed as hybrid organisations in the aftermath of the new public management (NPM) era worldwide. Today we see different hybrid organisations of water companies around the world that have either been fully privatised or quasi-privatised. Quasiprivatisation in Denmark means that water utilities are still perceived as natural monopolies, which has not made them into for-profit driven companies. Instead a simulated market and state regulation has been introduces with annual, national benchmarking to set a price cap as an upper limit for the consumer-price of water. Similar systems are seen in fully privatised water companies in the United Kingdom, the United States, and partially in South Africa. However, here the water companies are typically owned by private companies and not established as municipalityowned limited liabilities1 as in Denmark and elsewhere in Scandinavia. This PhD thesis proposes new models and principles and corporate social responsibility and stakeholder engagement of these water companies. The findings of the study suggest a new definition of a colonising logic of CSR competing and coexisting with the regulators’ colonising logic of NPM. Through the study and definition of these logics as colonising the water sector this PhD theisis provides an understand of new perspectives of how CSR is enacted through stakeholder engagement and how the logic of CSR frames the top managers’ claim: ”We are CSR!” (Interview B, March 2011) and the consequences of this logic. Both the logic of CSR and the logic of NPM is found to be based on the materials that the water companies are organised around, namely water. Water is perceived as a natural good that should ideally be free and plentiful for all citizens around the world. However, the competition between the two colonising logics stems from another material, namely the money or price that providing clean and pure water for all are allowed to cost the citizens. Through the dialectical interaction of these in terms of material practices between producing water and infrastructure to distribute it and collecting money as a payment for it and the regulation of this, this PhD thesis proposes a new definition of the role of materials and material practices underlying several institutional logics such as the institutional logic of capitalism, state, democracy, family, religion/science, profession, and corporation (Friedland & Alford, 1991; Thornton et al., 2012; Friedland, 2013)

Nihilism Inc.: Environmental Destruction and the Metaphysics of Sustainability

The spectre of global environmental destruction is before us, the legacy of the expansion and domination of the world by European civilization. Not even the threat to the continued existence of humanity is enough to move the members of this civilization to alter its trajectory. And Marxism, which had held out the possibility of creating a new social order, has been swept from the historical stage by the failure of Eastern European communism. Nihilism Inc. is an attempt to overcome this crisis. Examining the relationship between metaphysical assumptions, ideas, social practices, institutions and economic processes in the formation and evolution of European civilization, it offers a genealogy of its current nihilism. The theory and practice of Marxism are analysed to show why the Soviet Union proved even more environmentally destructive and even less responsive to the environmental crisis than the West. These analyses reveal the need for a radical cultural transformation, a transformation which can only be effected on the foundation of a new metaphysics. The final part of this work offers the required metaphysics, clearing the way for the creation of an environmentally sustainable civilization

O problema dos futuros contingentes

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