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How should we design AI systems that make moral decisions that affect us? When there is disagreement about which moral decisions should be made and which methods would produce them, we should avoid arbitrary design choices. However, I show that this leads to a regress problem similar to the one metanormativists face involving higher orders of uncertainty. I argue that existing strategies for handling this parallel problem give verdicts about where to stop in the regress that are either too arbitrary or too difficult to implement. I propose a new strategy for AI designers that is better than these alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Key message We present a case of pulmonary tuberculosis with a positive interferon‐gamma release assay showing spontaneous regression followed by progression of radiological findings. Physicians should be aware that tuberculosis lesions can temporarily regress and careful follow up should be done if there are suspicious radiological findings.

Key message: We present a case of pulmonary tuberculosis with a positive interferon‐gamma release assay showing spontaneous regression followed by progression of radiological findings. Physicians should be aware that tuberculosis lesions can temporarily regress and careful follow up should be done if there are suspicious radiological findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I argue for a commitment-discharging condition of reasoning, according to which to engage in reasoning is to discharge the theoretical and practical commitments one has undertaken. I highlight the ways in which this condition is distinct from other proposals, particularly the Taking Condition, and argue that it can explain certain intuitions about reasoning that otherwise remain elusive. In particular, I argue that the commitment-discharging condition can provide a unified account of attitude-formation and premise-discharging reasoning as well as practical and theoretical reasoning. It also provides a novel way to evade the regress that bedevils many accounts of inference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fichte assigns 'intellectual intuition' a new meaning after Kant. But in 1799, his doctrine of intellectual intuition is publicly deemed indefensible by Kant and nihilistic by Jacobi. I propose to defend Fichte's doctrine against these charges, leaving aside whether it captures what he calls the 'spirit' of transcendental idealism. I do so by articulating three problems that motivate Fichte's redirection of intellectual intuition from being to acting: (1) the regress problem, which states that reflecting on empirical facts of consciousness leads only to further facts and so cannot yield a first principle; (2) the rhapsody problem, which states that the categories form a haphazard set and so lack necessity unless they derive from a first principle; and (3) the nihilism problem, which states that a first principle cannot lie outside our cognition of it, lest it be the cause of our cognition and, being first, the cause of all our actions, reducing us to machines. Crucially, Fichte's three motivating problems are in fact aspects of a single problem. Leaving any aspect unsolved spoils putative solutions to the other two. Consequently, Fichte requires a single unified solution to all three, which his doctrine of intellectual intuition provides. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is structure a fundamental and indispensable part of the world? Is the question of ontology a question about structure? Structure is a central notion in contemporary metaphysics [Sider 2011. Writing the Book of the World. Oxford: Clarendon Press]. Realism about structure claims that the question of ontology is about the fundamental and indispensable structure of the world. In this paper, I present a criticism of the metaphysics of realism about structure based on a version of Russell's famous regress argument against nominalism [Russell 1911. "On the Relation of Universals and Particular." In Logic & Knowledge. Reprint, London: George Allen & Unwin]. First, I argue that the three general tests for the fundamentality of structure proposed by realism about structure rely on a particular empirical test for structure, namely, the so-called 'similarity test for structure.' Second, I argue that the similarity test is not well-founded because it leads to a vicious regress. Third, I argue that the regress affects the whole metaphysics of realism about structure, and that no structural notion can be said to be fundamental in connection with any of the other tests. Lastly, I argue that the question of ontology as a question about structure is not substantive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Zeitschrift für Gesellschaftsrecht is the property of Verlag Oesterreich GmbH and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

On Malcolm Schofield's highly influential reading of the Similarity Regress in Part I of the Parmenides, the problem that the Regress poses is explanatory. Socrates posited the Similarity Form in order to explain why similar things are similar: similar things are similar because they participate in the Form Similarity as copies of the same original. Yet, the Similarity Regress generates an infinite series of Similarity Forms such that explanation is deferred ad infinitum. Schofield provides a philosophical incentive for adopting his reading. He argues that the treatment of similarity in Part II of the dialogue yields a complete explanation of similarity. If we adopt this account, we can avoid the Similarity Regress altogether since a Form of Similarity is not needed in order to explain why similar things are similar. Thus, his interpretation has a hugely important philosophical pay-off. However, there is a different way to read the argument. Socrates claims that each Form is only one. Yet, the Similarity Regress is an argument that generates an infinite series of Similarity Forms. This results in a violation of the principle of non-contradiction: there is both only one Similarity Form and infinitely many Similarity Forms. Yet, anything that is incompatible with the principle of non-contradiction is surely absurd. Nobody, as far as I am aware, has explored whether this reading also has philosophical pay-off if we look at it together with similarity in Part II. However, should this interpretation pay off, it would be a viable alternative to Schofield's. In this paper, I explore both views in the context of the treatment of similarity in Part II of the Parmenides. I argue for an account of similarity that differs from Schofield's. Although my account is not wholly dismissive of Schofield's, it renders the pay-off of Schofield's account less appealing than he suggests. Furthermore, I show that the account of similarity in Part II also yields important lessons for the proponent of the alternative reading of the Similarity Regress: similarity as treated in Part II simply leads to further infinite regresses, thereby pushing us to consider rejecting the account of similarity in Part II too and to look for some other account intead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is devoted to the question of whether unknowable obligations are possible. According to the popular view (known as Access), an act is obligatory only if its agent can know that this act is obligatory. Sorensen (1995) argues against Access, and Sider and Wieland both defend Access by suggesting (S) – For any obligation O, individual X must refrain from making O unknowable. We consider various difficulties concerning the possibility of (S) – an infinite regress, self-referential nature of (S), unprovability of (S). It is argued that (S), from a certain perspective, is itself the unknowable obligation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the motivation of cadets of higher military educational institutions has significantly decreased towards their own physical improvement. This leads to a deterioration in physical fitness, functional status, as a result of professional training of cadets and, and in general, therefore, a decrease in readiness for combat missions is noticed. The purpose of the study is the dynamics of the dominant motives of higher military educational institutions cadets and the level of their motivation for their own physical improvement. Materials and methods. The study was conducted at the National Ground Forces Academy. 348 people took part in the survey in 2010, and 364 in 2020. Results. According to the results of the research, we compiled hierarchical structures of motivation of academy cadets to their own physical improvement of both years of study. The motivation of cadets who were studied in 2010 is expressed by the formula PR2-3P5R0-1H0, in 2020 -- PR2-3P5R1- 2H0-1. Conclusions. Both formulas show that the motivation of cadets to their own physical improvement is at an average level. However, the analysis of the relationship and sequence of motives in their hierarchical structure suggests a negative trend of motivation of cadets of different years of study to physical improvement, and the difficulty in ensuring the proper level of efficiency of the educational process of their physical improvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Groundwater is considered the most important source for various uses in arid and semi-arid regions. Thus, evaluating the effects of human activities such as changes in land use/cover on groundwater resources plays a vital role in sustainable water management and, therefore, spatial planning. Accordingly, the need to integrate land use planning and water resources management is widely emphasized. In addition, perceiving the spatio-temporal relationship between land use changes and groundwater resources is crucial for the sustainable management of the plains in Iran. The present study aimed to assess this relationship in the Hamedan-Bahar Plain.Material and methods: In the study, the land use maps of 1989, 1997, 2005, 2013, and 2018 were prepared from Landsat satellite images, categorized, and evaluated with respect to accuracy. Further, six uses including irrigated and dry agricultural lands, rangelands and elevations, man-made areas, gardens, and surface water resources were extracted and classified. Furthermore, the distribution maps for groundwater depth were prepared through kriging for five years based on the piezometric data. Finally, the correlation and relationship between land use changes and groundwater depth fluctuations were determined by the REGRESS method.Results and discussion: The land use maps demonstrated an increase in the share of rangelands and elevations (9.68% in 1989 to 40.85% in 2018) and their conversion to dry agricultural lands. Additionally, the share of man-made and irrigated agricultural lands increased from 1.27 to 2.45% and 5.32 to 6.25% during the timespan, respectively. The trend of changes in groundwater level was more evident in the flatbed of the plain, in which groundwater level was less than 1800 m and important habitats and irrigated agricultural lands were available. In addition, the average annual depletion of groundwater level for a 29-year time span was 0.91 m, and the minimum and maximum of the R–value related to five study periods was obtained 0.36 and 0.40 based on the REGRESS method, respectively. Further, the role of managerial factors should be considered as well as the relative relationship between groundwater level changes and land use. Furthermore, the correlation between the decrease in groundwater level and land use in each period relatively increased compared to the previous one by representing an R-value of 0.40 during 1989-2018, which can explain almost 16.2% of their changes. Due to the water resource scarcity, land use should be planned based on the scale, power, and extent of plains and watersheds in order to attain a sustainable regional water system.Conclusion: The results of the study can play an important role in understanding the importance of groundwater resources and emphasize the necessity of paying more attention to the effects and changes of land use on groundwater in arid and semi-arid regions. Additionally, the results indicated the sensitivity of groundwater, as the most important water resource in the plains located in arid and semi-arid regions, to the types of variations. Decreasing rangelands, gardens, aqueduct, and surface water-dependent thickets as well as expanding dry and irrigated agricultural and man-made lands are regarded as some of the factors reducing groundwater level in the region. It is worth noting that these factors should be integrally evaluated with respect to other factors such as irrigation systems, water pricing, cultivation pattern, agricultural economics, and an increase in runoff.

The “argument of the sincere” (burhān al-ṣiddīqīn) was first introduced by Avicenna as andirect proof for a creator. He tried to provide a nearly ideal and direct version of the proof for God’s existence. The argument from possibility and necessity found its way to the Western philosophy through translations, and then Thomas Aquinas made tremendous efforts to refine and supplement it as a proof for the source of the world. This paper seeks to provide a more clear account of Avicenna’s argument of the sincere in the Islamic world and Aquinas’s argument from possibility and necessity in the Western world as proofs for the creator. It will then be argued that, first of all, these are two different arguments, and despite their shared foundations, they have different structures. It seems that Aquinas’s argument is like the argument from possibility and necessity in Islamic philosophy and theology. Secondly, regardless of how persuasive it might be to the public, Thomas’s argument rests upon controversial philosophical assumptions and involves lengthy premises, whereas Avicenna’s argument has solid rational foundations and structure, achieving its goal through fewer mediating premises.

A number of philosophers uphold a metaphysical symmetry between time and hypertime, in this sense: in so far as hypertime exists, the nature of hypertime should agree with the nature of time. Others allow that we can mix and match the metaphysics of time and hypertime. Thus, it may be that time really passes, but hypertime does not or vice versa. In this paper, we provide a preliminary defense of the mix and match approach. We outline a number of arguments for the claim that time and hypertime must share a common nature and find them all wanting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An influential way of distinguishing inferential from non-inferential processes appeals to representational states: an agent infers a conclusion from some premises only if she represents those premises as supporting that conclusion. By contrast, when some premises merely cause an agent to believe the conclusion, there is no relevant representational state. While promising, the appeal to representational states invites a regress problem, first famously articulated by Lewis Carroll. This paper develops a novel account of inference that invokes representational states without succumbing to regress. The key move is to reject the tempting idea that the relevant representational states are causally prior to inferences. I argue, instead, that an inference constitutes the relevant representational state. To infer is thus—in the very drawing of the conclusion—to represent the premises as supporting the conclusion, and thereby to commit to that support relation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The structure of justification is one of the important subjects of epistemology. There are various views, on this problem, in which infinitism is one of them. This view was known since Aristotle's time and was declined by philosophers constantly. Avicenna, too, opposes the view, although different from Aristotle. In this inquiry, we, with an analytical-critical approach, explain and criticize Avicenna's objections to infinitism and indicate that his arguments do not reach an end. Avicenna poses three main objections: first, infinitism implicates that no knowledge is obtained; second, its requisite is that the restricted some stands equal to restricting whole, which is impossible; third, its requisite is that some principles of demonstration be unknown. But Avicenna's arguments are based on three presuppositions which are at stake: first, justification is of concepts that have not degrees, rather it is univocal; second, arguments are transferor of justification and not a generator of it; third, if the regress of our arguments is to come about knowledge, its components must be disciplined one after another and be gathered in existence and be actual. In addition, his second argument apart from these presuppositions is still corrupted.

This essay develops and defends a diagnosis of Carroll's (Mind 4(14):278–280, 1895) regress of the premises according to which the moral of the regress is that arguments are constitutively presuppositional. It is argued that this diagnosis allows to vindicate the key insights of the rule-following account of the regress, while overcoming the main difficulties that the rule-following account faces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review summarizes literature data on phylogenomics, indicating genomic–morphogenetic correlations that determine the metazoan body plan and phenotypic complexity. Radical, macroevolutionary transformations of the bilaterian body plan, which correlate with duplications or losses of individual Hox genes of an ancestral cluster, or with its topological reorganization, are revealed. Regressive evolution is rather common in Metazoa; reduction and simplification of the genome and phenome occurred quite often in the evolution of metazoans. Since the system of cluster Hox genes has been shown to be the key regulatory node of genome–phenome relationships, regulating a wide range of developmental processes, as well as being the correlation node determining different evolutionary trajectories of various bilaterian taxa, it is a highly informative correlate and indicator of evolutionary changes of the body plan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Victorian period was characterized by scientific discoveries in various fields, most notably Darwin’s theory of evolution, which had an enduring influence and triggered various responses from the social and natural scientists of the period. This interdisciplinary dialogue on the topic paved the way for the emergence of the evolutionary discourse in which the terms “progression”, “regression”, and “degeneration” occupied a central place. Likewise, Dante Gabriel Rossetti problematized the dichotomy between progress and regress in his ballad “Eden Bower,” which revisits the biblical narrative of the Fall. This study argues that Dante Gabriel Rossetti actually comments on the Victorian discussions on the alternative routes of evolution through his treatment of Lilith as a metamorphosing protagonist. It explores how Rossetti represents Lilith’s mobility on the ladder of evolution to reveal the Victorian anxiety concerning the degenerative nature of women and present the reader his understanding of history. Delving into Rossetti’s juxtaposition of the metaphysical and the scientific accounts of the history of human kind, the essay responds to the existing scholarship on the poem that tends to interpret Rossetti’s treatment of Lilith in terms of moral conceptions and the stereotypical figure of the Victorian femme fatale.

A central debate in philosophy of action concerns whether agential knowledge, the knowledge agents characteristically have of their own actions, is inferential. While inferentialists like Sarah Paul hold that it is inferential, others like Lucy O'Brien and Kieran Setiya argue that it is not. In this paper, I offer a novel argument for the view that agential knowledge is non-inferential, by posing a dilemma for inferentialists: on the first horn, inferentialism is committed to holding that agents have only alienated knowledge of their own actions; on the second horn, inferentialism is caught in a vicious regress. Neither option is attractive, so inferentialism should be rejected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Homer and Langley, E.L. Doctorow’s 2009 novel of New York City, the author focuses on past Manhattan, which he sees as the epitome of his own self-destructive modern and contemporary society. I would argue that Doctorow acts here mainly to denounce excessive material culture in the context of egotistic, upper-class Manhattan dwelling at the end of the nineteenth century. I would also like to show that the novelist criticizes the idea of material progress along more than a hundred years, from the end of the nineteenth century, when the plot starts, to the beginning of the twenty-first century, when the novel was written. The self-contained, isolated world in the novel is the result of our society’s propensity for excessive production and consumption. At the same time, Homer and Langley brings to mind ideas of exhaustion of the human, who agrees to be literally replaced by objects. The fact that such a phenomenon occurs already at the end of the nineteenth century suggests that there might have never been a plenary moment of being human, as we have long entertained the closest possible relationship and even synthesis with the non-human world of objects and tools.

In A Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume presents an argument according to which all knowledge reduces to probability, and all probability reduces to nothing. Many have criticized this argument, while others find nothing wrong with it. In this paper we explain that the argument is invalid as it stands, but for different reasons than have been hitherto acknowledged. Once the argument is repaired, it becomes clear that there is indeed something that reduces to nothing, but it is something other than what, according to many, Hume had in mind. Thus two views emerge of what exactly it is that reduces. We surmise that Hume failed to distinguish the two, because he lacked the formal means to differentiate between a rendering of his argument that is in accordance with the probability calculus, and one that is not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pandispositionalists have not refuted the charge that their ideology precludes knowledge of the external world. Their replies boil down to the claim that some dispositions (viz introspectively accessible properties of epistemic subjects) can be detected without the mediation of their effects. But this reply is ineffective if the regress is restated in terms of mind-independent domains of science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I deploy an argument that I have developed in a number of recent papers to show that the most influential version of legal positivism - that associated with H.L.A. Hart - fails. The argument's engine is a requirement that a constitutive account of legal facts must meet. According to this rational-relation requirement, it is not enough for a constitutive account of legal facts to specify non-legal facts that modally determine the legal facts. The constitutive determinants of legal facts must provide reasons for the obtaining of the legal facts (in a sense of "reason" that I develop). I show that the Hartian account is unable to meet this requirement. That officials accept a rule of recognition does not by itself constitute a reason why the standards specified in that rule are part of the law of the community. I argue that it is false that understanding the explanatory significance of officials' acceptance of a rule is part of our reflective understanding of the nature of law.A second project of the paper is to respond to a family of objections that challenge me to explain why normative facts and descriptive facts together are better placed to provide reasons for legal facts than descriptive facts alone. A unifying theme of the objections is that explanations have to stop somewhere; descriptive facts, it is suggested, are no worse a stopping place than normative facts.The paper also spells out a consequence of the rational-relation requirement: if an account of what, at the most basic level, determines legal facts is true in any possible legal system, it is true in all possible legal systems. For example, if a Hartian account of legal facts is true in any possible legal system, it is true in all possible legal systems. I use this all-or-nothing result in my critique of a Hartian account, but the result is of interest in its own right.

Maintenance of progress and regress of social systems in different historical context is considered in the article. Being interdependent directions of movement, progress and regress can be considered as integral indicators of society viability and possibility of its further development. Correlation of progressive and regressive changes in post-industrial society is defined by transformation of the globalized world civilization including heterogeneous types of socio-political systems. Modern social realities demonstrate continuous interrelation of the progressive development with a regressive vector that defines changes of public relations. This difficult multi-aspect historical process covers all spheres of post-industrial society, including its structural organization, level of stability of social system, character of internal and external contradictions.

Thomas Reid's Essays on the Active Powers presents what is probably the most thoroughly developed version of agent-causal libertarianism in the modern canon. While commentators today often acknowledge Reid's contribution, they typically focus on what appears to be a serious problem for the view: Reid appears to commit himself to a position according to which acting freely would require an agent to engage in an infinite number of exertions of active power. In this essay, we maintain that, properly understood, Reid's version of agent-causal libertarianism generates no regress of exertion. Our discussion begins by presenting Reid's account of free action and why it appears vulnerable to a worrisome regress. We then consider three attempts to address the regress in the contemporary literature offered by William Rowe, Gideon Yaffe, and James Van Cleve, which we find unsatisfactory. We then develop a solution to the worry—one that takes very seriously both what Reid means by an 'efficient' cause and his appeal to normative features when explaining action. We call it the 'networked capacity' view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existence of God is such an important topic that has long preoccupied the human mind. In philosophy of religion, philosophers have tried in different ways to prove the existence of God. The proof of necessity and possibility is one of the cosmological demonstrations which involves proving the existence of God using a posterior approach. In Western philosophy, Thomas Aquinas, influenced by Islamic philosophy, has presented a particular version of this proof. In Islamic philosophy, the proof has been referred to as 'burhan al-siddiqin' (proof of the veracious) . One of the scholars who has especially discussed about it is Allamah Tabatabai. His version of this proof can be illustrated through the following points. 1- The objective reality of existence is its true being which lies against fallacy. 2- This reality is what every sentient being must inevitably accept and cannot take in any form of nullity. 3- When a reality cannot be null, it means it is necessary and because reality cannot be mixed with inexistence, it has eternal necessity and everything requires reality if they are to exists. Thus, the necessary existence of God is clear and evident for human beings and the proofs of God's existence function as reminding element. The version of the proof of necessity and possibility presented by Aquinas can be explained as follows: 1- There exist the possible beings (the being which can be existent or non-existent) 2- The possible existents are eternal which means if the entire universe is possible existent, it did not exist at a particular time. 3- If the entire universe were possible existent, it wouldn't exist even now, while it exists now. 4- Thus the whole universe cannot be just possible existent, and it must include a necessary existent as well. 5- Every necessary existent receives its existence either from its own or from others. 6- The necessary existents that receive their existence from others cannot rely on others in an endless manner (infinite regress is invalid) 7- There is a being who is necessary self-existent. In this essay after the analysis and criticism of both versions, the similar and different aspects will be stated, some of which are as follow: 1- In Aquinas's version, God is looked upon as only the creative cause, while in Allamah's version, besides being creative cause, God is considered as continuing cause as well. 2- Aquinas's argument is based upon the philosophical principle of invalidity of infinite regress, also he claims a regress of material causes which is not in fact invalid, while in Allamah's version no philosophical principle is presupposed. It is worth mentioning that in philosophy, the invalidity of regress in causes depends on three requirements: actualization, sequence and unity of existence of all causes, therefore the infinite regress of material causes which lacks the mentioned requirements is not invalid. Also Thomas's version of the proof, although does not concern any divine act or attribute, when it comes to proving the existence of necessary existent, cannot prove His absoluteness. As his argument consists of the concepts such as gradation or multiplicity of existence and… fails to prove the absoluteness of Creator, on the other hand, Allamah Tabatabai's version of the proof, first focuses on proving the absoluteness of God's essence and then considers the necessity as its initial determining quality. Thomas's version presupposes and applies the concepts of necessity and possibility, while in Allamah's version such concepts are not explicitly mentioned and although in his argument, the existents are divided into necessary and possible, the intended meaning is different from that inferred by Aquinas's version

The existence of God is such an important topic that has long preoccupied the human mind. In philosophy of religion, philosophers have tried in different ways to prove the existence of God. The proof of necessity and possibility is one of the cosmological demonstrations which involves proving the existence of God using a posterior approach. In Western philosophy, Thomas Aquinas, influenced by Islamic philosophy, has presented a particular version of this proof. In Islamic philosophy, the proof has been referred to as 'burhan al-siddiqin' (proof of the veracious) . One of the scholars who has especially discussed about it is Allamah Tabatabai. His version of this proof can be illustrated through the following points. 1- The objective reality of existence is its true being which lies against fallacy. 2- This reality is what every sentient being must inevitably accept and cannot take in any form of nullity. 3- When a reality cannot be null, it means it is necessary and because reality cannot be mixed with inexistence, it has eternal necessity and everything requires reality if they are to exists. Thus, the necessary existence of God is clear and evident for human beings and the proofs of God's existence function as reminding element. The version of the proof of necessity and possibility presented by Aquinas can be explained as follows: 1- There exist the possible beings (the being which can be existent or non-existent) 2- The possible existents are eternal which means if the entire universe is possible existent, it did not exist at a particular time. 3- If the entire universe were possible existent, it wouldn't exist even now, while it exists now. 4- Thus the whole universe cannot be just possible existent, and it must include a necessary existent as well. 5- Every necessary existent receives its existence either from its own or from others. 6- The necessary existents that receive their existence from others cannot rely on others in an endless manner (infinite regress is invalid) 7- There is a being who is necessary self-existent. In this essay after the analysis and criticism of both versions, the similar and different aspects will be stated, some of which are as follow: 1- In Aquinas's version, God is looked upon as only the creative cause, while in Allamah's version, besides being creative cause, God is considered as continuing cause as well. 2- Aquinas's argument is based upon the philosophical principle of invalidity of infinite regress, also he claims a regress of material causes which is not in fact invalid, while in Allamah's version no philosophical principle is presupposed. It is worth mentioning that in philosophy, the invalidity of regress in causes depends on three requirements: actualization, sequence and unity of existence of all causes, therefore the infinite regress of material causes which lacks the mentioned requirements is not invalid. Also Thomas's version of the proof, although does not concern any divine act or attribute, when it comes to proving the existence of necessary existent, cannot prove His absoluteness. As his argument consists of the concepts such as gradation or multiplicity of existence and… fails to prove the absoluteness of Creator, on the other hand, Allamah Tabatabai's version of the proof, first focuses on proving the absoluteness of God's essence and then considers the necessity as its initial determining quality. Thomas's version presupposes and applies the concepts of necessity and possibility, while in Allamah's version such concepts are not explicitly mentioned and although in his argument, the existents are divided into necessary and possible, the intended meaning is different from that inferred by Aquinas's version

The article analyzes Marx’s concept of General Intellect in the perspective of the misfortunate transition of Bulgarian state and society to democracy and the market economy. The author reveals some of the most important reasons and factors for the intentional blocking of the possibilities for a normal and beneficial reach of ordinary people to the treasures of the General Intellect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To justify the inductive rules of inference--the problem of induction--leads to various answers, none of them problem-free according to the majority of philosophers. John Norton has proposed a dissolution of such difficulty. He claims that the problem arises since if we try to justify inductive rules of inference, we end with a rule circularity (something considered as vicious). It will be argued that Norton's approach ends with a new type of circularity, one inside the web of facts of mature science. How then is this new circularity epistemically better than rule circularity? We posit that Norton does not offer an adequate answer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Law No 136/1995 on insurance and reinsurance in Romania did not expressly mention that the insurer acquires a right of regress against the person responsible for causing the prejudice, but only that the former is subrogated in all rights of the insured or of the beneficiary of the insurance. The wording has generated some different interpretations in practice as regards the action of the insurer to the reparation of the prejudice, this being classified either as special action, founded on the civil tort liability, or as action of common law, based on the civil contractual liability. These interpretations have led to the express regulation of the action for regress within Article 31 (6) of the Government Emergency Ordinance No 54/2016 concerning the compulsory motor vehicle insurance for civil liability for the prejudices caused to third parties by vehicle and tram accidents, which has repealed the Law No 136/1995, but which does not have a law for adoption yet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Română de Drept al Afacerilor is the property of Wolters Kluwer Romania and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

We present a new program, gvselect, that helps users perform variable selection in regression. Best subsets variable selection is performed and provides the user with the best combinations of predictors for each level of model complexity. The leaps-and-bounds (Furnival and Wilson, 1974, Technometrics 16: 499-511) algorithm is applied using the log likelihoods of candidate models. This allows the user to perform variable selection on a wide variety of normal and nonnormal regression models. Our method is described in Lawless and Singhal (1978, Biometrics 34: 318-327). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can a belief source confer justification when we lack antecedent justification for believing that it's reliable? A negative answer quickly leads to skepticism. A positive answer, however, seems to commit one to allowing pernicious reasoning known as 'epistemic bootstrapping.' Puzzles surrounding bootstrapping arise because we illicitly assume either that justification requires doxastic awareness of a source's epistemic credentials or that there is no requirement that a subject be aware of these credentials. We can resolve the puzzle by splitting the horns and requiring a non-conceptual awareness of, or direct acquaintance with, a source's legitimacy. Requiring non-conceptual as opposed to doxastic awareness halts the regress and avoids the skeptical results. On the other hand, requiring non-conceptual awareness also guarantees that we are aware of evidence for a source's reliability prior to using that source to form justified beliefs; we thereby avoid the problem of allowing epistemic bootstrapping to generate the illicit gains in justification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]