We introduce the notions of a generalised category and of an inductive generalised category over a band. Our purpose is to describe a class of semigroups which we name weakly B-orthodox. In doing so we produce a new approach to characterising orthodox semigroups, by using inductive generalised groupoids. Here B denotes a band of idempotents; we note that if B is a semilattice then a weakly B-or...

Reproductive technology offers a bewildering number of options for infertile men and women to have children, including ovary and testis freezing, transplantation, in vitro fertilization (IVF), donor sperm, donor eggs, stem cells, gestational surrogacy, genetic diagnosis of embryos, and, of course, birth control. These technologies cut to the very core of personal and religious belief systems. T...

Introduction Naturalism in philosophy demands that philosophical proposals exhibit a healthy respect for the methods and findings of the empirical sciences, especially when those proposals address the same domains those sciences do. In the twentieth century philosophers became a good deal more circumspect about their physical and biological speculations. If philosophy of science has not largely...

Aristotle’s On Generation and Corruption raises a vital question: how is mixture, or what we would now call chemical combination, possible. It also offers an outline of a solution to the problem and a set of criteria that a successful solution must meet. Understanding Aristotle’s solution and developing a viable peripatetic theory of chemical combination has been a source of controversy over th...

Adaptation of a component-based system can be achieved in the coordination modelling language Paradigm through the special component McPal. McPal regulates the propagation of new behaviour and guides the changes in the components and in their coordination. Here we show how McPal may delegate part of its control to local adaptation managers, created on-the-fly, allowing for distribution of the a...

Version antérieure d'un article paru dans Rivista di filosofia neo-scolastica, Milano 2002 0. Introduction Epistemology is a normative discipline. Traditionally it is supposed to tell us what we ought to believe, and under what conditions we can be said to know, in contrast to how we believe, and how we come to know. The latter questions call for descriptions of the origins of our knowledge in ...