In this paper, I analyse the works of Maria Gaetana Agnesi, an Italian mathematician of the eighteenth century. I specifically focus on the themes of proto-feminism, equality, and educational rights as persistent threads of her philosophical and scientific production. I emphasize her continuous efforts to highlight the place of women in the history of philosophy, presenting three chief texts in which these efforts are expressed. In her first work, the Academic oration, in which it is demonstrated that the studies of the liberal arts by the female sex are by no means inappropriate, I show how she articulates a rhetoric defence of women's educational rights. In her second work, the Philosophical propositions, I highlight how she combines Cartesian metaphysics and philosophy of mind to justify women's belonging to the history of philosophy. In analysing her final masterpiece, the Analytical institutions, I interpret the dedication to the Austrian empress Maria Theresa as a proto-feminist text, vindicating the leading role of women in history and society.

What is the best way to respond to monuments in our communities if they represent people who stood for harmful ideas and/or societal structures? I start with the assumption that it would be best for everyone if all of the harmful monuments were removed from our public squares. The more interesting question is: Why would it be best? I will examine critically two different explanations as to why it would be best: one, Plato's, which rests on the harmful non-intellectual influences of images and the other, Socrates’, which rests on the harmful intellectual influences of those images. In the end, I shall argue that Socrates got it right and Plato wrong due to the former's ability to explain human behaviour and the latter's surprising lack of that same ability, despite how widely it is believed. If the argument is correct, it will have deep and widespread implications for how we educate our children and ourselves about every important aspect of the human condition.

Most simple ailerons produce adverse yaw. However, with proper aileron placement and wing twist, an aileron can produce proverse or neutral yaw, eliminating the need for aileron-rudder mixing, differential aileron deflection or Frise ailerons. The relationship between wing planform, aileron placement and lift distribution is studied here for a special class of optimal lift distributions that minimise induced drag for a variety of design constraints. It is shown that a wing employing the elliptic lift distribution will always produce adverse yaw, independent of aileron design or operating condition. However, for wings employing other optimal lift distributions, the ailerons can be placed to produce proverse or neutral yaw. A numerical lifting-line algorithm is used to explore the impact of aileron design on a wide range of wing planforms and lift distributions. Results can be used in the early stages of design to correctly place ailerons with respect to desired roll-yaw coupling.

If a benevolent and all-powerful God exists, how can there be so much suffering? Could God have created a better world? Or is evil the price we pay for freedom of the will?

What's the best way to raise good citizens – individuals who will do the right thing even in the most challenging of circumstances? I argue that philosophy has an important role to play.

We present a new justification for methodological triangulation (MT), the practice of using different methods to support the same scientific claim. Unlike existing accounts, our account captures cases in which the different methods in question are associated with, and rely on, incommensurable theories. Using a nonstandard Bayesian model, we show that even in such cases, a commitment to the minimal form of epistemic conservatism, captured by the rigidity condition that stands at the basis of Jeffrey’s conditionalization, supports the practice of MT.

Aiming at the problems of small good workspace, many singular configurations, and limited carrying capacity of non-redundant parallel mechanisms, a full-redundant drive parallel mechanism is designed and developed, and its performance evaluation, good workspace identification, and scale optimization design are studied. First, the kinematics analysis of the planar 6R parallel mechanism is completed. Then, the motion/force transmission performance evaluation index of the mechanism is established, and the singularity analysis of the mechanism is completed. Based on this, the fully redundant driving mode of the mechanism is determined, and the good transmission workspace of the mechanism in this mode is identified. Then, the mapping relationship between the performance and scale of the mechanism is established by using the space model theory, and the scale optimization of the mechanism is completed. Finally, the robot prototype is made according to the optimal scale, and the performance verification is carried out based on the research of dynamics and control strategy. The results show that the fully redundant actuation parallel mechanism obtained by design optimization has high precision and large bearing capacity. The position repeatability and position accuracy are 0.053 mm and 0.635 mm, respectively, and the load weight ratio can reach 15.83%. The research results of this paper complement and improve the performance evaluation and scale optimization system of redundantly actuated parallel mechanisms.

Standard models of the price specie flow do not consider credit. Yet Hume and preceding authors were reacting to the implosion of Law’s financial bubble. We delineate the anti-credit thesis contained within the evolution of eighteenth-century balance of payments analyses. A string of eighteenth-century authors argued over whether the balance of payments constituted a binding constraint on credit creation. As part of their analysis they considered how changes in the money supply might alter output, prices, employment, capital, and population. How new money entered the economy was often critical. We start with Law and then consider Melon, Gervaise, Vanderlint, Cantillon, Montesquieu, Hume, Steuart, Forbonnais, and Smith. In closing we pay particular attention to the idea that Hume and Smith effectively displaced preceding, often “mercantilist,” analyses of credit and the balance of payments.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, governments were mainly relaying on pre-pandemic policies when introducing changes to social policies. However, the crisis did lead to transformative action as well. In this article, we explored the novel direct payments, delivered beyond existing social risk categories such as unemployment or sickness. Our exploration demonstrates that most Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries did not introduce novel payments. Exceptions were Australia, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, Israel, Italy, Japan, Spain, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Seven countries also continued and modified payments while the crisis continued. All the novel direct payments met some of the characteristics of universal basic income (UBI). The idea of universality was realised in Japan and South Korea. The key findings of this study suggest that the COVID-19-related novel direct payments were primarily emergency benefits for people affected by the pandemic and interpreted as quasi-basic income in times of crisis.

Griefbots are chatbots designed to assist individuals in coping with the loss of a loved one by offering a digital replica of the departed. Navigating grief is a deeply transformative and vulnerable journey intricately tied to one's well-being. Do griefbots aid in the grieving process, or do they complicate it? To address these questions, this article blends insights from philosophy and neuroscience to explore the nature of grief as a means to clarify the ethical dimensions surrounding the use of griefbots.

Norwegian, like Swedish and Faroese, exhibits double definiteness: modified definite phrases normally contain both a prenominal determiner and a suffixed definite article on the noun. However, exceptions—phrases with only the determiner or only the suffixed article—can be found. This article investigates adjectives which do not need to be preceded by the prenominal determiner in Norwegian. Corpus data and acceptability judgments are used to describe these exceptions and to propose a syntactic analysis. The study shows that there are three types of adjectives in Norwegian: regular ones that require double definiteness, exceptional adjectives that allow determiner omission, and quantifier adjectives that never occur with a determiner. I argue that phrases with exceptional adjectives can be accounted for by the same movement that is proposed for determiner-less phrases in Icelandic and Northern Swedish (Julien 2002, 2005). Finally, the article presents a brief exploration of the patterns of variation in omission versus presence of the determiner, including historical and dialectal variation.

Research on psychiatry in the United States has shown how, since the 1980s, the discipline has sought to increase its prestige and preserve its jurisdiction by embracing biomedical models of treatment and arguing it is a medical specialty like any other. While this strategy is consistent with what the literature on professions would expect, this paper analyzes an alternative case: French public psychiatry, which has remained in a position of marginalized autonomy, combining low status and economic precarity with state recognition of its specificity. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of fields, I analyze how the persistence of specialized psychiatric hospitals in France—most of which have closed in the United States—has shaped the conflict between psychiatrists favoring autonomy and actors in university hospitals and the Ministry of Health seeking to reduce it. These specialized hospitals have functioned as institutional anchors that contribute to maintaining the discipline’s autonomous position in the medical field in three ways: by socializing psychiatrists into viewing themselves as a distinctive branch of medicine, linking psychiatry to powerful actors in the state interested in maintaining the discipline’s distinctive role in social control, and concentrating a population of chronically ill persons not amenable to traditional medical interventions. This analysis expands on the literature on professionals and field theory by emphasizing the role of institutions in structuring the reorganization of jurisdictions and relationships between fields.