All programs interact with their environments in one way or another: they read and write to memory, query users for input, print out results, send data to remote servers, etc. Because increasingly complex environments result in increasingly difficult and error-prone programming, programming languages should facilitate compile-time detection of erroneous interactions with environments. In this d...

I wish to lay out the emerging trends in law and economics as a call to give up what was so appealing about the first wave of law and economics – namely the illusion of resolution, certainty and mastery over complex legal issues – in favour of greater partiality, imperfection, and multiplicity, but also greater wisdom. The emerging law and economics – what I am calling the second wave of law an...

In this paper, we propose a general model for representing sensorial information and its uncertainty, the Symmetries and Perturbation model (SPmodel). In it, the intrinsic partiality of geometric information is represented in terms of the symmetries of the involved geometric elements. Location uncertainty due to sensor imprecision is represented by means of a local perturbation, expressed in a ...

Connector colouring provided an intuitive semantics of Reo connectors which lead to effective implementation techniques, first based on computing colouring tables directly, and later on encodings of colouring into constraints. One weakness of the framework is that it operates globally, giving a colouring to all primitives of the connector in lock-step, including those not involved in the intera...

Existing treatments of Dijkstra’s guarded-command language treat divergence and failure as equivalent, even though Dijkstra clearly states they are not. We reexamine Dijkstra’s language, redefining its denotational semantics with powerdomains formulated in topological terms. The results refine existing work, give a sound semantics of guards, failure, and divergence for non-flat storage domains,...

Much work in contemporary bioethics defends a broadly liberal view of human reproduction. I shall take this view to comprise (but not to be exhausted by) the following four claims. First, it is permissible both to reproduce and not to reproduce, either by traditional means or by means of assisted reproductive techniques such as IVF and genetic screening. Second, it is permissible either to repr...

Partial functions are frequently used when specifying and reasoning about computer programs. Using partial functions entails reasoning about potentially ill-defined expressions. In this paper we show how to formally reason about partial functions without abandoning the well understood domain of classical two-valued predicate calculus. In order to achieve this, we extend standard predicate calcu...

Sigmund Freud's work continues to attract interest from philosophers, analysts and historians, and the earliest formulation of his theory of the unconscious and the 'seduction hypothesis' have recently received particular attention. While Freud's intellectual debt to such $gures as Darwin, Nietzsche, Helmholtz and Briicke has been well documented, the influence of Heinrich Schliemann on him and...

In this paper we propose to re-read the past work on formalizing context as the search for a logic of the relationships between partial, approximate, and perspectival theories of the world. The idea is the following. We start from a very abstract analysis of a context dependent representation into three basic elements. We briefly show that all the mechanisms of contextual reasoning that have be...