In Section 1, we questioned the evidence for iteration of tenses, even with abstraction. To permit abstraction would in any case risk neutralizing our distinction between tensed and untensed sentences. Sequence of tense phenomena, far from supporting iteration, were incompatible with it. Instead, we argued, tense always retains its full deictic character; tenses never have scope over each other. The future modal WILL is exceptional (Section 2), but abstraction is not required to deal with this.An important suggestion, first made in (...) Section 1 and developed further in Section 3, would restrict quantification induced by the interpretation of Past to a domain determined by pragmatic factors. When Past serves as a reference time, e.g. when it forms part of would, as inSam believed that he would be in BostonJames bought a stamp that would be priceless then a previous occurrence of Past serves to define the domain relevant to the quantificational element of Past. Without semantic binding or reference, the two cases of Past in such sentences will thus be satisfied by the same interval in the past.The extension of this idea in Section 3, permits an account of the supposed incompleteness of the past tense without invoking a hidden THEN in e.g. I turned the lights off. In this case, restriction of the relevant domain does not proceed via an earlier occurrence of Past but depends solely on discourse factors.In Section 4, the analysis of have given in Part I is modified to introduce an element of ‘pastness’. The relevant sub-interval must be non-final-and perhaps need not even be a sub-interval of the evaluation interval itself. Empirically necessary, this change makes the incompatibility of Pres,have and a definite adverb like at 6 o'clock in a single sentence even harder to explain semantically. However, the vague restrictions on domain imposed by the present tense and relevant to the sub-interval required by an embedded have below it seem clearly pragmatically incompatible with the explicit restriction of that same interval to a very specific interval in the past — a restriction which, we argue, is imposed by a definite time adverb.Thus, Part II represents a consistent, though entirely informal plea for the embedding of the semantics of Part I in a framework in which pragmatic considerations can interact freely with the semantics, to restrict the domains within which quantification is permitted. It is in effect a plea for the introduction of partial models along the lines suggested by Barwise and Perry (1981). The advantages of the basic distinctions between tense, aspect and adverbs introduced in Part I would, we have suggested in the second part, be yet more obvious in such a framework. Formalization in a system of partial models must await further work. (shrink)

If we arrange in chronological order the various statements Darwin made about God, creation, design, plan, law, and so forth, that I have discussed, there emerges a picture of a consistent development in Darwin's religious views from the orthodoxy of his youth to the agnosticism of his later years. Numerous sources attest that at the beginning of the Beagle voyage Darwin was more or less orthodox in religion and science alike.78 After he became a transmutationist early in 1837, he concluded (...) that the doctrine of secondary causes must be extented even to the history of life and that after the first forms of life were created, there was no further need for divine intervention, except where man was concerned. Man's body, he thought, was produced by the process of transmutation, but he believed for a time that man's soul was “superadded.” By mid-1838 he had become convinced that nothing, after the creation of life, was due to miracles. God works only through laws, which are capable of producing “every effect of evey kind which surrounds us.” The existence of man, the idea of God in man's mind, and the harmony of the whole system were in his eyes prearranged goals of deterministic laws imposed by God. Such a conception excludes the miracles on which Christianity depends; but it is not possible to say whether Darwin's loss of Christian faith, which occurred at about this same time, preceded and made possible his “materialism” or was rather caused or hastened by it.79 In the weeks after his reading of Malthus, Darwin's belief in a plan of creation gave way to the belief that God created matter and life and designed their laws, leaving the details, however, to the workings of chance. This remained his view until the 1860s.There is no exact parallel between this development of Darwin's religious views and the development of his ideas on evolution, but there is a general correspondence. When he believed in a plan of creation, Darwin's theory of transmutation did not depend on struggle or the selection of chance variations. Adaptation was, for him, an automatic response to environmental chance. From late 1838 to 1859 he believed in designed laws and chance, and this belief, too, has its parallel in his theory. The element of chance in natural selection meant that there could be no detailed plan,in which even man's idea of God would be a necessary outcome of nature's laws (man himself is not a necessary outcome of the working of natural selection).80 But Darwin still believed nature was programmed to achieve certain general ends. We might say that he believed in a general, though not a special, teleology. Natural selection was for him a law to maximize utility, creating useful organs, retaining vestiges for future use. For many years it was a law designed to produce organisms perfectly adapted to their environments. Only later did Darwin come to doubt even this sort of design in nature.81 One way of describing the development of Darwin's evolutionary thought is to say that it shows a gradual abandoning of his “theistic” assumptions, so that by the late 1860s his theory was informed to a slighter extent by notions of purpose and design than it was in 1838 or 1844 or 1859. (shrink)

In the biblical Book of Ruth, Boaz instructs his workers not to molest Ruth. We draw insights on the problem of workplace sexual harassment in the family-firm setting from the Book of Ruth. We then integrate these insights with several discrete findings in the literatures on workplace sexual harassment and family firms: First, family firms are relatively strong when it comes to a culture of fairness and respect. Second, family firms sometimes lack formal codes of ethics, which could hamper integrity. (...) Third, religious exemplars can reinforce the positive culture of family firms and even substitute for a formal code of ethics. Fourth, religious exemplars can also attenuate excessive risk-taking behavior in family firms. (shrink)

Inductive Logic is number ten in the 11-volume Handbook of the History of Logic. While there are many examples were a science split from philosophy and became autonomous (such as physics with Newton and biology with Darwin), and while there are, perhaps, topics that are of exclusively philosophical interest, inductive logic — as this handbook attests — is a research field where philosophers and scientists fruitfully and constructively interact. This handbook covers the rich history of scientific turning points in Inductive (...) Logic, including probability theory and decision theory. Written by leading researchers in the field, both this volume and the Handbook as a whole are definitive reference tools for senior undergraduates, graduate students and researchers in the history of logic, the history of philosophy, and any discipline, such as mathematics, computer science, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence, for whom the historical background of his or her work is a salient consideration. (shrink)

Earlier investigations of the hormonal control of vitellogenin (egg‐yolk protein) synthesis in mosquitoes relied on microsurgical manipulations to identify organs that secrete the various hormones that stimulate or inhibit vitellogenesis. Advances in the last 10 years, using radioimmunoassays, HPLC, mass spectrometry and tissue‐culture incubations, have shown that the control mechanism involves a complex interaction between ecdysteroids, juvenile hormones and peptide hormones.

Culture and social structure may affect the testosterone–behavior link by shaping the way we construe events; by muting, channelling, or amplifying the drives that testosterone produces; and by affecting the distribution and level of testosterone in various parts of the population. Research on testosterone, culture, and social class has produced suggestive results, opening broad areas for research.

This paper investigates modular combinations of temporal logic systems. Four combination methods are described and studied with respect to the transfer of logical properties from the component one-dimensional temporal logics to the resulting combined two-dimensional temporal logic. Three basic logical properties are analyzed, namely soundness, completeness, and decidability. Each combination method comprises three submethods that combine the languages, the inference systems, and the semantics of two one-dimensional temporal logic systems, generating families of two-dimensional temporal languages with varying expressivity and varying (...) degrees of transfer of logical properties. The temporalization method and the independent combination method are shown to transfer all three basic logical properties. The method of full join of logic systems generates a considerably more expressive language but fails to transfer completeness and decidability in several cases. So a weaker method of restricted join is proposed and shown to transfer all three basic logical properties. (shrink)

Философ, который подобным образом озаглавил свою работу, тем самым утверждает, что он знает, как выглядит непротиворечивая онтология, теория познания, что такое реальность, как, скажем, решается проблема непротиворечивости математики и т.д.

Jewish ethics has more in common with the burgeoning field of virtue ethics than generally has been acknowledged within the discourse of contemporary religious ethics. This paper describes the virtue ethics present in the Talmud and other rabbinic texts. Missing from many of the arguments in support of virtue ethics is space for other approaches to ethics, including act-evaluation and the codification of at least some ethical decisions into law. The approach to virtue ethics found in the Talmud overcomes this (...) dichotomy. Therefore, it is advantageous to bring these Talmudic texts concerned with character and virtue into dialogue with contemporary virtue ethics. (shrink)

Judaism is often described as a religion that tolerates, even celebrates arguments with God. In Pious Irreverence, Dov Weiss has written the first scholarly study of the premodern roots of this distinctively Jewish theology of protest, examining its origins and development in the rabbinic age (70 CE-800 CE).

Globalization, in its earlier stages, was expected to erode national and ethnic identities. In contrast, ethnicity and ethnic affiliations persisted, growing socially and politically. This paper examines the role of the globalizing new communications technologies on this process, focusing on Diasporas. The study of trans-state networks based on ethnic solidarity, connections and affinities in the framework of social and political science is quite recent. Following a clarification of the distinction between classical and modern Diasporas we analyse a particular case study, (...) that of the Jewish Diaspora. This diaspora was an early adopter of computer-based communications and the Internet for a wide range of purposes. Early events are described including the diffusion of the Internet to Israel, the planning of a Global Jewish Information Network, Israel 2020 macro scenarios for Israel and the Jewish People and the decision on Jewish Peoplehood through communication technologies. A survey of historical systems follows by a description of the Jewish population and the wide variety of Jewish Web based activities today. These include the Institutional landscape; Jewish media — press, radio, video and blogs; the impact on Jewish religious observance; Jewish genealogy; Online dating; Social networks; Jewish education; Online learning; Jewish Studies and Digital Humanities; Jewish memory. Judaica Europeana supports the activities previously described by aggregating and facilitating the access and the re-use of Jewish digital culture. Europeana is the leading global digital library for cultural heritage as well as a lively eco-system for relevant stakeholders. (shrink)

Intellectual property (IP) offices and courts around the world are debating whether machines are similar enough to humans in terms of their consciousness and creativity to be eligible for inventors...

Delaware’s famous corporate law and its highly respected specialized Court of Chancery attract entrepreneurs from all over the world, who choose the small state as their locus of incorporation and litigation forum, and global investors who choose Delaware law as the law governing their corporate investments and mergers and acquisitions. Other jurisdictions vie with Delaware in regard to these choices. This interjurisdictional competition makes Delaware a significant global norm exporter in the field of corporate law because jurisdictions emulate some of (...) its corporate law. Israel leads the global pack. For two decades, it has been approximating its corporate law to Delaware’s and emulating its principal institutions, including by establishing a specialized Chancery-like court whose judges seek guidance in Delaware’s case law in deciding open corporate law questions. This Article employs qualitative methods—interviews with M&A practitioners from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Israel. We use the interviews to assess whether the project of approximating Delaware corporate law has succeeded in shifting incorporation decision preferences away from Delaware to Israel and watering down the natural reluctance of global investors to accepting an unfamiliar corporate law when engaging in cross-border corporate M&A transactions involving an Israeli party. Our findings indicate that the approximation project has countervailing effects, opinions about its success being polarized and nuanced; that approximation increases the familiarity of domestic practitioners with the foreign law being emulated, making the emulated law easier to implement; and that approximation creates more room for other aspects of interjurisdictional competition to influence private choices. (shrink)

We motivate and introduce a new method of abduction, Matrix Abduction, and apply it to modelling the use of non-deductive inferences in the Talmud such as Analogy and the rule of Argumentum A Fortiori. Given a matrix $${\mathbb {A}}$$ with entries in {0, 1}, we allow for one or more blank squares in the matrix, say a i,j =?. The method allows us to decide whether to declare a i,j = 0 or a i,j = 1 or a i,j =? (...) undecided. This algorithmic method is then applied to modelling several legal and practical reasoning situations including the Talmudic rule of Kal-Vachomer. We add an Appendix showing that this new rule of Matrix Abduction, arising from the Talmud, can also be applied to the analysis of paradoxes in voting and judgement aggregation. In fact we have here a general method for executing non-deductive inferences. (shrink)

We introduce a methodology whereby an arbitrary logic system L can be enriched with temporal features to create a new system T(L). The new system is constructed by combining L with a pure propositional temporal logic T (such as linear temporal logic with Since and Until) in a special way. We refer to this method as adding a temporal dimension to L or just temporalising L. We show that the logic system T(L) preserves several properties of the original temporal logic (...) like soundness, completeness, decidability, conservativeness and separation over linear flows of time. We then focus on the temporalisation of first-order logic, and a comparison is make with other first-order approaches to the handling of time. (shrink)

Peter Winch and Ludwig Wittgenstein have opposed the idea that traditional religion and magic are practiced in order to gain practical, instrumental ends. Their argument rests on interpretive charity: other cultures would have to be unbelievably irrational to believe in magic's practical effectiveness. In this paper, I show that Winch's own philosopical doctrine makes room for the possibility of instrumental pluralism, the notion that different societies may possess different criteria of instrumental rationality. Judged in terms of a native criterion, the (...) instrumental use of magic and religion may be rationaL. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 11, Page 39-41, November 2011.