Formal Argument and Olympiodorus’ Development as a Plato-Commentator

Olympiodorus led the Platonist school of philosophy at Alexandria for several decades in the sixth century, and both Platonic and Aristotelian commentaries ascribed to him survive. During this time the school’s attitude to the teaching of Aristotelian syllogistic, originally owing something to Ammonius, changed markedly, with an early tendency to reinforce the teaching of syllogistic even in Platonist lectures giving way to a greater awareness of its limitations. The vocabulary for arguments and their construction becomes far commoner than the language of syllogistic and syllogistic figures, and also of demonstration. I discuss the value of these changes for the dating of certain works, especially where the text lectured on does not demand different emphases. The commitment to argument rather than to authority continues, but a greater emphasis eventually falls on the establishment of the premises than on formal validity.

Part 2 National and Regional Reports, Part 2.5 Latin America: Coordinated by Lauro Gama and José Antonio Moreno Rodríguez, 61 Mexico: Mexican Perspectives on the Hague Principles

This chapter explores Mexican perspectives on the Hague Principles. The Inter-American Convention on the Law Applicable to International Contracts (the Mexico Convention) includes party autonomy in Article 7, according to which ‘the contract shall be governed by the law chosen by the parties’. This rule admits express and also tacit choice of law, provided the latter is ‘evident from the parties’ behaviour and the clauses of the contract, considered as a whole’. Following this provision, the parties to the international contract can select the law applicable to the entire contract or to a part of it. Moreover, Article 8 establishes that the parties can at any time make or modify their choice, but such new choice ‘shall not affect the formal validity of the contract nor the right of third parties’. The chapter then considers the existence of a Project of Private International Law Act for Mexico, developed within the Mexican Academy of Private International and Comparative Law (AMEDIP). For the topic of international contracts, the project literally incorporates the provisions of the Mexico Convention. Here, the Hague Principles could bring enhanced precision on the lex mercatoria as the object of the parties’ choice.

From Discursive Practice to Logic? Remarks on Logical Expressivism

This paper investigates Robert Brandom's programme of logical expressivism and in the processattempts to clarify his use of the term practice, by means of a comparison with the works of sociologistand anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu. The key claim of logical expressivisim is the ideathat logical terms serve to make explicit the inferential relations between statements which alreadyhold implicitly in a discursive practice that lacks such terms in its vocabulary. Along with this, itis claimed that the formal validity of an argument is derivative on so-called material inference, inthat an inference is taken to be logically valid only if it is a materially good inference and cannotbe made into a bad inference by substituting nonlogical for nonlogical vocabulary in its premisesand conclusion. We note that no systematic account of logical validity employing this substitutionalmethod has been offered to date; rather, proposals by e.g. Lance and Kremer, Piwek, Kibbleand Brandom himself have followed the more conventional path of developing a formally definedsystem which is informally associated with natural language examples. We suggest a number of refinementsto Brandom’s account of conditionals and of validity, supported by analysis of linguisticexamples including material from the SNLI and MultiNLI corpora and a review of relevant literature.The analysis suggests that Brandom’s expressivist programme faces formidable challengesonce exposed to a wide range of linguistic data, and may not in fact be realisable owing to thepervasive context-dependence of linguistic expressions, including 'logical' vocabulary. A furtherclaim of this paper is that a purely assertional practice may not provide an adequate basis for conditionalreasoning, but that a more promising route is provided by the introduction of imperatives,as in so-called "pseudo-imperatives" such as "Get individuals to invest their time and the fundingwill follow". We conclude the resulting dialogical analysis of conditional reasoning is faithful toBrandom's Sellarsian intuition of linguistic practice as a game of giving and asking for reasons, andconjecture that language is best analysed not as a system of rules but as a Wittgensteinian repertoireof evolving micro-practices.

Development and psychometric properties of the HBM- based Substance Abuse Prevention Questionnaire (HBM-SAPQA) among Afghanian students

Background In Afghanistan, adolescents and young people are the most important at risk groups for substance abuse. Considering the importance of model-based interventions, this study aims to design and validate a questionnaire based on the Health Belief Model (HBM) for assessing the beliefs of Afghan students regarding substance abuse prevention behavior. Methods This study was conducted in two stages. Firstly, the items of the questionnaire were designed by conducting a combined documentary literature review and qualitative study. In the next step, its psychometric properties were evaluated through qualitative and quantitative formal validity (calculation of impact score), qualitative and quantitative content validity - Content Validity Ratio (CVR) and Content Validity Index (CVI)- and structural validity through Factor Explanatory Analysis (FEA). Finally, consistency compatibility through Cronbach’s alpha as well as reliability (internal correlation) test re-test were assessed. To above steps, the SPSS version 18 was applied. R esults 74 items were obtained for the questionnaire by performing a qualitative study and using existing scientific sources for literature review. In the study of formal validity of quantitative items, the effect coefficient of all above 1.5 was calculated. The CVR of each item was more than 0.8 (mean 0.93), and their CVI was more than 0.79. In this stage, 12 items related to cues to action hanged to 1 item with 12 options so all 63 remained items were retained in the questionnaire. In FEA 40 items related to main constructs of HBM were assessed by which, by eliminating 2 items, structural validity was confirmed for 38 items in 5 factors and covering about 40% of the variance for EFA 408 students with average age of 23 years old were assessed. In the internal compatibility process, the acceptable values ​​of Cronbach's alpha between 0.71 and 0.81 were calculated for all factors. Test re test approved to assess reliability of the instrument. Conclusion The HBM-SAPQA tool obtained the acceptable validity/reliability to apply the beliefs of Afghan students regarding substance abuse preventive behavior. Although the result of this study showed, this questionnaire has good validity and reliability, but this result should be confirmed in future studies.

La ley aplicable a la forma en las donaciones internacionales. En torno a la STSJ Cataluña de 18 marzo 2019 = Applicable law to the form requirements of international gifts. Around the sentence of The High Court of Cataluña of 18 March 2019

Resumen: La sentencia del Tribunal Superior de Justicia de Cataluña de 18 de marzo de 2019 resuelve sobre la validez de una donación entre esposos de un bien inmueble sito en Ingarö (Suecia). La sentencia se pronuncia sobre la aplicación al caso del Reglamento Roma I y del desplazamiento del art. 11CC como norma de conflicto aplicable a la validez formal de la donación, tampoco la considera ley de policía del foro.Palabras clave: requerimientos de forma, donaciones internacionales entre esposos, leyes de policía, Reglamento Roma I. art. 11CC. Abstract: The Judgment of the High Court of Cataluña of 18 March 2019 ruled on the formal validity of an international gift between spouses of a land situated in Ingarö (Sweden). The Judgment apply the Rome I Regulation and avoid the application of art. 11CC even as an overriding mandatory provision of the law of the forum.Keywords: form requirements, international gifts between spouses, overriding mandatory provisions, Rome I Regulation. art. 11CC.

A Cayman Islands update on wills and trusts

This article looks at the principal provisions of two pieces of recent Cayman Islands legislation that are now in force and that are likely to be of interest generally to international private client practitioners: the Formal Validity of Wills (Persons Dying Abroad) Law, 2018 and the Trusts (Amendment) Law, 2019.