Natural Law: Practical Reason and Creative Information

Two Dualisms of Practical Reason

Dualism is one way to put the traditional dualism of practical reason, i.e., that practical reason can never declare that there is greater overall reason to conform to moral, or prudential, requirements in a case of conflict between our own self-interest and our obligations to others.1 In this paper, I distinguish two methods by which one might accept Dualism. First, I discuss a substantive dua...

Practical Constraints on Collaterals under Iranian Law

Practical Reason and the Possibility of Error

Creative Natural Language Processing

Dealing with creative language and in particular with affective, persuasive and even humorous language has often been considered outside the scope of computational linguistics. Nonetheless it is possible to exploit current NLP techniques starting some explorations about it. We briefly review some computational experiences about these typical creative genres. Then we will talk about the exploita...

On Reason , Mythologies and Natural Resource Conservation

In 1971, I spent five months in Ghana, West Africa, collecting data for an MSc thesis, "On the Ecology and Fishery of a Small West African Lagoon". I was puzzled at the time by the behavior of the fishermen who exploited the Sakumo lagoon, near Tema (Fig. 1). Based in a nearby village, they were part-timers or full-timers, but fished in either case rarely more than about 4 hours at a time, then...