ፍትህ ለሁሉም / Justice for All
The Nobel Prize in physics this year has been awarded “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science”. Read more
Much of the debate about identity in recent decades has been about personal identity, and specifically about personal identity over time, but identity generally, and the identity of things of other kinds, have also attracted attention. Various interrelated problems have been at the centre of discussion, but it is fair to say that recent work …
The modeling of dynamic processes is at the forefront of research in numerous branches of science, including political science [1], sociology [2], and social psychology [3]. The aim of modeling a social system is not to reproduce it with its whole complexity, but rather to postulate causal relations which could be next confronted with statistical …
Recent attempts to understand the origin of social fragmentation on the basis of spin models include terms accounting for two social phenomena: homophily—the tendency for people with similar opinions to establish positive relations—and social balance—the tendency for people to establish balanced triadic relations. Spins represent attribute vectors that encode G different opinions of individuals whose …
Structural balance theory affirms that signed social networks, i.e., graphs whose signed edges represent friendly/hostile interactions among individuals, tend to be organized so as to avoid conflictual situations, corresponding to cycles of negative parity. Using an algorithm for ground state calculation in large-scale Ising spin glasses, in this paper we compute the global level of …
In social network theory, a community of individuals characterized by friendly/hostile relationships is usually modeled as a signed graph having the individuals as nodes and their pairwise relationships as edges: an edge of positive weight expresses friendship, one of negative weight aversion or hostility [1,2]. According to Heider’s theory of structural balance [3], in a …
It is not uncommon for certain social networks to divide into two opposing camps in response to stress. This happens, for example, in networks of political parties during winner-takes-all elections, in networks of companies competing to establish technical standards, and in networks of nations faced with mounting threats of war. A simple model for these …
John Dewey was a leading proponent of the American school of thought known as pragmatism, a view that rejected the dualistic epistemology and metaphysics of modern philosophy in favor of a naturalistic approach that viewed knowledge as arising from an active adaptation of the human organism to its environment. On this view, inquiry should not be …
Richard Rorty was an important American philosopher of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century who blended expertise in philosophy and comparative literature into a perspective called “The New Pragmatism” or “neopragmatism.” Rejecting the Platonist tradition at an early age, Rorty was initially attracted to analytic philosophy. As his views matured he came to believe …
Richard Rorty (1931–2007) developed a distinctive and controversial brand of pragmatism that expressed itself along two main axes. One is negative – a critical diagnosis of what Rorty takes to be defining projects of modern philosophy. The other is positive – an attempt to show what intellectual culture might look like, once we free ourselves …