While remaining rooted in a comparison of some of the primary texts of the thinkers under scrutiny, my thesis also discusses several issues which arise in the mutual consideration of Heidegger and Strauss, specifically the questions of the ontological and political status of nature, the problem of ‘first philosophy,’ and the method by which to interpret philosophical texts, as well as a continuous analysis of Strauss’s appellation of ‘modern,’ as opposed to ‘ancient,’ and ‘religious,’ as opposed to ‘philosophical,’ to Heidegger’s thought. I first consider every moment in Strauss’s corpus where he discusses Heidegger’s thought. From this discussion, I identify four main lines of critique which may be extracted from Strauss’s writings on Heidegger. Then, I turn to Heidegger’s texts themselves in order to determine if Strauss’s critique indeed finds purchase there, addressing each of the lines of critique in turn. Finally, I consider Strauss and Heidegger in tandem, in light of the three questions identified above. I show that many of what Strauss determines to be Heidegger’s errors arose as a result of the way that Heidegger read ancient philosophical texts, and I suggest that Strauss’s approach, i.e., to consider the possible esoteric meaning of a text, in fact permits the reader to access an interpretation that is truer to the textual phenomena. This claim, however, is not intended to obscure the remarkable similarities between each thinker’s respective interpretive methods. I conclude that Strauss’s critique of Heidegger, vehement as it is, also indicates Strauss’s dependence on Heidegger’s thought for the inspiration of Strauss’s own philosophical project. The relation between Strauss and Heidegger, then, remains profoundly ambiguous.

Advantages of applying information and communication technologies to support complex team practices in healthcare domain have often been supported in the extant literature. The primary assumption is that before putting any technologies in place to support team functions, the team-based environment should be completely modeled. To date, many frameworks have been proposed for modeling healthcare teams; however, most of the frameworks only focus on single or a few aspects of teamwork and the outcomes usually present overlaps, limitations and inconsistencies. As a result, there is an increasing demand for offering an overarching framework that integrates the multiple dimensions of healthcare teamwork into a synthetic whole and clearly conceptualizes the potentially important relationships and dependencies that exist over those dimensions. In order to properly address the aforementioned challenge, this thesis applies ontological engineering to develop an overarching framework for integrating the multiple dimensions of teamwork concept in healthcare domain. For this purpose, we first illustrate a set of four stage methodological approach to provide explicit details on how to incorporate a theatrical foundation into the ontology. Then, the proposed approach is used to develop a derived ontological framework. Finally, accuracy and completeness of the proposed ontology based framework is validated to show that it is able to accurately represent the domain is it being employed for. The values and capabilities of ontology have already been studied and approved, and this technology is known as the best sources to represent a knowledge domain by means of concepts and accurately define the relationships among them. Our aim in this thesis is to further research how to develop and evaluate a standard ontology based framework to facilitate the healthcare team modeling.

While remaining rooted in a comparison of some of the primary texts of the thinkers under scrutiny, my thesis also discusses several issues which arise in the mutual consideration of Heidegger and Strauss, specifically the questions of the ontological and political status of nature, the problem of ‘first philosophy,’ and the method by which to interpret philosophical texts, as well as a continuous analysis of Strauss’s appellation of ‘modern,’ as opposed to ‘ancient,’ and ‘religious,’ as opposed to ‘philosophical,’ to Heidegger’s thought. I first consider every moment in Strauss’s corpus where he discusses Heidegger’s thought. From this discussion, I identify four main lines of critique which may be extracted from Strauss’s writings on Heidegger. Then, I turn to Heidegger’s texts themselves in order to determine if Strauss’s critique indeed finds purchase there, addressing each of the lines of critique in turn. Finally, I consider Strauss and Heidegger in tandem, in light of the three questions identified above. I show that many of what Strauss determines to be Heidegger’s errors arose as a result of the way that Heidegger read ancient philosophical texts, and I suggest that Strauss’s approach, i.e., to consider the possible esoteric meaning of a text, in fact permits the reader to access an interpretation that is truer to the textual phenomena. This claim, however, is not intended to obscure the remarkable similarities between each thinker’s respective interpretive methods. I conclude that Strauss’s critique of Heidegger, vehement as it is, also indicates Strauss’s dependence on Heidegger’s thought for the inspiration of Strauss’s own philosophical project. The relation between Strauss and Heidegger, then, remains profoundly ambiguous.

Weblogs have been growing quickly and transforming the World Wide Web toward a dynamic environment that Web pages are frequently updated. Although, Google has developed the search engine successfully in cope with the traditional web pages, it cannot effectively handle the dynamic blogspace. This research proposes an ontology-based semantic annotation framework based on concepts level in order to adaptively recommend blogrolls. The keyword match is being replaced by the semantic annotation technology of IE (Information Extraction) domain to implement a recommendation system. The objective of the recommendation system is to produce a recommended blogroll to the target weblog based on the weblog¡¦s concept affinities. Data sources of this research are from java.blogs community. The experiment of recommendation system is evaluated by Java programmers. The recommended blogrolls are evaluated by relevance that subjects score the degree of relevance between a target blogger and the recommended blogroll. The reliability of relevance among subjects is also tested. The results show that the recommended blogrolls obtain the middle level of relevance measured by subjects. The relevance evaluation of the recommended blogroll is independent from the concept density of the target blogger. The recommendation system is also reliable. Moreover, this study shed light on directions to improve the automated blogroll recommendation.

The just war tradition as we know it has its origins with Christian theology. In this dissertation, I examine the theological, in particular ontological, presuppositions of St. Augustine of Hippo in his elucidation of just war. By doing so, I show how certain metaphysical ideas of St. Augustine (especially those on existence, love, and the sovereignty of God) shaped the just war tradition. Following this, I examine the slow evacuation of his metaphysics from the just war tradition. Through the systemization of just war by St. Thomas Aquinas, aided later on by Bartolomé de Las Casas and Hugo Grotius, the doctrine became a shadowy reflection of the tradition. By analyzing the notions of morality in warfare by political realists (Waltz, Morgenthau), international law, and liberal thinkers (Rawls, Walzer), I show the incoherence of the doctrine when it is separated from its ontological and metaphysical roots.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI Company.

Thesis (Ph. L.)--Catholic University of America, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 69-73).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong. / Typewritten.

The creation of a requirements model (explicitly representing functional, data, and timing requirements) typically involves accommodating viewpoints from multiple system stakeholders (e.g. multiple end-users and system maintainers). Viewpoint-oriented requirements analysis methods have been proposed by other researchers to ensure the capture of requirements imposed by all user perspectives. However, domain-modeling methodologies and CASE tools poorly address how to construct a single model given input from a variety of sources and how to maintain traceability through the synthesis process. Rather than making incremental changes to a single requirements model in response to new information, this work suggests the creation of independent models to capture the input from each viewpoint. This research provides a semi-automated method of resolving the differences between viewpoints and producing a single, traceable requirements model that embodies the merged viewpoints. Computer assistance includes the detection of consistency and completeness conflicts, the enactment of conflict resolutions, the maintenance of traceability information, and the gathering of statistics regarding the content and resolution of viewpoints. This data can provide previously unavailable insight into the progress of the requirements acquisition process and characteristics of the domain. A case study is presented to demonstrate the method and the usefulness of gathered data to software engineers and software development managers. / text

published_or_final_version / Philosophy / Master / Master of Arts