Quantum theory and relativity -- Some problems about restricted relativity -- Gravitation and relativity quantized atomic clocks -- A badly needed distinction between mathematical sets of coordinates and physical frames of reference -- Special relativity Doppler effect -- Relativity and gravitation -- A gravistatic problem with spherical symmetry -- Remarks and suggestions.

A classic source for understanding the connections between information theory and physics, this text was written by one of the giants of 20th-century physics and is appropriate for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students. Topics include the principles of coding, coding problems and solutions, the analysis of signals, a summary of thermodynamics, thermal agitation and Brownian motion, and thermal noise in an electric circuit. A discussion of the negentropy principle of information introduces the author's renowned examination of Maxwell's demon. Concluding chapters (...) explore the associations between information theory, the uncertainty principle, and physical limits of observation, in addition to problems related to computing, organizing information, and inevitable errors. 1962 ed. 81 figures. 14 tables. (shrink)

Even though disquotationalism is not correct as it is usually formulated, a deep insight lies behind it. Specifically, it can be argued that, modulo implicit commitment to reflection principles, all there is to the notion of truth is given by a simple, natural collection of truth-biconditionals.

We are walking too quickly down the road to physical and psychological utopia without pausing to assess the potential damage to our humanity from this brave new ...

Professor Pompa's study of Vico has done a great deal to stimulate and inform the growing interest in the English-speaking world in this remarkable figure. It remains the only work devoted almost exclusively to an interpretation of the New Science and offers a comprehensive guide to the main theoretical problems to which the text gives rise. For this second edition Professor Pompa has responded to the reactions of reviewers and critics and added a new chapter which analyses Vico's conception of (...) the principles which govern the development of law. (shrink)

Wilson and Kass talked about their book, The ethics of human cloning, which is about the ethical debate over human cloning.

The work of mathematician and logician Alfred Tarski (1901--1983) marks the transition from substantial to deflationary views about truth.

Phenomenal Difference' grants new attention to contemporary black British art, exploring its critical and social significance through attention to embodied experience, affectivity, the senses and perception. Much before scholars in the arts and humanities took their recent 'ontological turn' toward the new materialism, black British art had begun to expose cultural criticism's overreliance on the concepts of textuality, representation, identity and difference. Illuminating that original field of aesthetics and creativity, this book shows how black British artworks themselves can become the (...) basis for an engaged and widely-reaching philosophy. (shrink)

The Hungry Soul is a fascinating exploration of the natural and cultural act of eating. Kass brilliantly reveals how the various aspects of this phenomenon, and the customs, rituals, and taboos surrounding it, relate to universal and profound truths about the human animal and its deepest yearnings. "Kass is a distinguished and graceful writer. . . . It is astonishing to discover how different is our world from that of the animals, even in that which most evidently betrays that we (...) too are animals--our need and desire for food."--Roger Scruton, Times Literary Supplement "Yum."--Miss Manners. (shrink)

ArgumentIt seems theoretically convenient to construe knowledge practices in financial markets and organizations as “applied economics.” Alternatively or additionally, one might argue that practitioners draw on economic knowledge in order to systematically orient their actions towards profit-maximization; models, then, are understood as devices that make calculative rationality possible. However, empirical studies do not entirely confirm these theoretical positions: Practitioners’ actual calculations are often not “framed” by models; organizations and institutions influence the choice and adoption of models; and different professional groups (...) in financial markets have diverging attitudes towards model calculations. In order to account for this diversity, this article proposes the concept ofcultures of economic and financial expertise; the concept focuses on the patterns of knowledge practices and knowledge-related self-definitions of groups within financial organizations and markets; it also facilitates an analysis of the relations between and, more specifically, the hierarchies among different practices and identities. The article then goes on to explore the process of foreign exchange forecasting in a particular bank. The description immediately reveals that two groups are involved in this process: economists and analysts. These groups maintain quite different practices and self-descriptions in relation to models: While the economists in the bank use the models as organizational resources for consistent forecasting procedures and observe data with the help of simple model structures, analysts approach model forecasts from the perspective of critics: They see limits in the variable-centered, as opposed to a “thematic” approach and they disregard a model's imposed temporality. Nevertheless, analysts use model forecasts as anchors for developing their own “paths” and stories about possible future expectation changes in the markets. The specific division of labor between economists and analysts, and specifically the dominant role of analysts in the forecasting process, fit into a larger picture: The rise of institutional investors in the foreign exchange markets and their demand for genuine market knowledge for speculative investment projects has contributed to the rise and dominance of analysts’ culture. (shrink)

Volume I provides a detailed analysis of cylindric algebras, starting with a formulation of their axioms and a development of their elementary properties, and proceeding to a deeper study of their interrelationships by means of general algebraic notions such as subalgebras, homomorphisms, direct products, free algebras, reducts and relativized algebras.

What does woman mean? According to two competing views, it can be seen as a sex term or as a gender term. Recently, Jennifer Saul has put forward a contextualist view, according to which woman can have different meanings in different contexts. The main motivation for this view seems to involve moral and political considerations, namely, that this view can do justice to the claims of trans women. Unfortunately, Saul argues, on further reflection the contextualist view fails to do justice (...) to those moral and political claims that motivated the view in the first place. In this article I argue that there is a version of the contextualist view that can indeed capture those moral and political aims, and in addition, I use this case to illustrate an important and more general claim, namely, that moral and political considerations can be relevant to the descriptive project of finding out what certain politically significant terms actually mean. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss the question of what it means to say that a property is socially constructed. I focus on an influential project that many social constructivists are engaged in, namely, arguing against the inevitability of a trait, and I examine several recent characterizations of social construction, with the aim of assessing which one is more suited to the task.

: For many reasons, and more than its predecessors, the President's Council on Bioethics has been the subject of much public attention and heated controversy. But little of that attention and controversy has been informed by knowledge of the Council's mission, its ways of working, and, most importantly, its actual work. This essay describes the Council's mission, discusses its public ways of working, and reviews the five major works produced during the Council's first term. In all its activities, the Council (...) has sought to develop a richer bioethics, one that recognizes and tries to do justice to the deep issues of our humanity raised by the age of biotechnology. Believing that these issues are properly matters to be discussed and governed by the polity as a whole, the Council also has sought to contribute to a genuinely public or political bioethics, beyond the rule of "experts," scientific and bioethical. (shrink)

Prior studies in business ethics highlight the role of philanthropy in shaping stakeholders’ perceptions of a firm’s underlying moral tendencies and values. Scholars argue that philanthropy-based character inferences influence whether and how stakeholders engage with firms. We extend this line of reasoning to examine the impact of philanthropy on firms’ contracting costs in the capital market. We posit that philanthropy-based character inferences reduce investors’ agency concerns, thereby reducing firms’ cost of capital. We also posit that the strength of the philanthropy–cost (...) of capital relationship is contingent on uncertainty regarding a firm’s character, visibility of a firm, and prevailing philanthropic norms. We test and find support for our arguments in a longitudinal study of philanthropy and the cost of capital. Our findings have implications for business ethics research on corporate philanthropy and corporate social performance and for organizational research on social judgment. (shrink)

Telic monism in logic is the thesis that there is one single philosophically primary goal to logic. A different way to put it is that there is only one canonical application to logic. This thesis is widely present—implicitly or more explicitly—in the literature on the philosophy of logic, yet has not been examined nor argued for extensively. In this paper I will present and critically examine telic monism. One prominent candidate for the canonical application of logic, namely the formal codification (...) of logical consequence in natural language, will be challenged directly. The critique will then be generalized by appealing to a practice-based philosophy of logic. The general argument I put forth here claims that we have no principled reason to assume there to be just one primary goal to logic. Rather, I claim that it is more plausible that there actually is a variety of goals, purposes and applications to logic, without one of them enjoying primacy over the others. If this argument succeeds, at least one of the consequences is that it allows for a kind of logical pluralism that has previously been deemed insignificant, namely logical instrumentalism. (shrink)

The logician Kurt Godel in 1951 established a disjunctive thesis about the scope and limits of mathematical knowledge: either the mathematical mind is equivalent to a Turing machine (i.e., a computer), or there are absolutely undecidable mathematical problems. In the second half of the twentieth century, attempts have been made to arrive at a stronger conclusion. In particular, arguments have been produced by the philosopher J.R. Lucas and by the physicist and mathematician Roger Penrose that intend to show that the (...) mathematical mind is more powerful than any computer. These arguments, and counterarguments to them, have not convinced the logical and philosophical community. The reason for this is an insufficiency if rigour in the debate. The contributions in this volume move the debate forward by formulating rigorous frameworks and formally spelling out and evaluating arguments that bear on Godel's disjunction in these frameworks. The contributions in this volume have been written by world leading experts in the field. (shrink)

In this article, the prospects of deflationism about the concept of truth are investigated. A new version of deflationism, called inferential deflationism, is articulated and defended. It is argued that it avoids the pitfalls of earlier deflationist views such as Horwich’s minimalist theory of truth and Field’s version of deflationism.

It’s constitutive of classical theism that there is a necessarily existent personal god who is also the creator of the universe, where the latter claim includes at least the following three theses: (i) God is wholly distinct from the natural world; (ii) God is the originating or sustaining cause of the natural world; and (iii) God created the natural world ex nihilo, i.e., without the use of pre-existing materials. Call this tripartite component of classical theism the classical view of creation. (...) In this paper, I offer a new argument against classical theism. In particular, I argue that creation ex nihilo is prima facie impossible, and that since the doctrine of creation ex nihilo is constitutive of classical theism, classical theism is false. (shrink)

Christopher Hom has recently argued that the best-overall account of the meaning of pejorative terms is a semantic account according to which pejoratives make a distinctive truth-conditional contribution, and in particular express complex, negative socially constructed properties. In addition, Hom supplements the semantic account with a pragmatic strategy to deal with the derogatory content of occurrences of pejorative terms in negations, conditionals, attitude reports, and so on, according to which those occurrences give rise to conversational implicatures to the effect that (...) the pejorative terms are non-empty, which explains the offensiveness of those occurrences. In this paper, I aim to defend this semantic strategy from several recent objections, and I will also present a novel objection, which in my view shows that we should understand the semantic account as a version of inferentialism, rather than radical externalism. (shrink)

THEIR MORALS AND OURS By Leon Trotsky MORAL EFFLUVIA During an epoch of triumphant reaction, Messrs. Democrats, Social-Democrats, Anarchists, ...

Everyone's favorite houseguest who never left, Leon Black (played by award-winning comedian JB Smoove on HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm) drops his wisdom and good-bad advice for the masses. Learn the secrets Larry David has gleaned from the Falstaff of television."--Amazon.

This paper critically examines logical instrumentalism as it has been put forth recently in the anti-exceptionalism about logic debate. I will argue that if one wishes to uphold the claim that logic is significantly similar to science, as the anti-exceptionalists have it, then logical instrumentalism cannot be what previous authors have taken it to be. The reason for this, I will argue, is that as the position currently stands, first, it reduces to a trivial claim about the instrumental value of (...) logical systems, and second, by its denial that logic aims to account for extra-systemic phenomena it significantly differs from science, in contrast with the AEL agenda. I will conclude by proposing a different kind of logical instrumentalism that I take to have a broad appeal, but especially for anti-exceptionalists, for it is developed as analogous to—and thus much closer aligned with—scientific instrumentalism. (shrink)