‘Impersonal Personalism’: Kamala Das as a Confessional Poetess

The machine as psychotherapist : impersonal communication with a machine †

Machines will replace therapists and counsellors. This was the confident prediction made a decade ago. In this article, I discuss the inherent limitations of machines as conversationalists that have prevented the prediction from coming true. Machines can, however, be exploited to assist therapy and I consider the following digital tools: test administration; managing procedural, symptom-relievi...

Basel’s Rural Pastors as Mediators of Confessional and Social Discipline

Personalism for public health ethics.

In public health ethics, as in bioethics, utilitarian approaches usually prevail, followed by Kantian and communitarian foundations. If one considers the nature and core functions of public health, which are focused on a population perspective, utilitarianism seems still more applicable to public health ethics. Nevertheless, faulting additional protections towards the human person, utilitariani...

Impersonal Constructions in Balochi

Impersonal constructions are interesting from a typological perspective. Siewierska (2008: 3–4) finds that “[t]he semantic characterizations of impersonality centre on two notions”, either “the lack of a human agent controlling the depicted situation or event” or “situations or events which may be brought about by a human agent but crucially one which is not specified.” The present article focu...

Impersonal Failure Detection

What does it mean to solve a distributed task? In Paxos, Lamport proposed a definition of solvability in which every process is split into a proposer that submits commands to be executed, an acceptor that takes care of the command execution order, and a learner that receives the outcomes of executed commands. The resulting perspective of computation in which every proposed command can be execut...