This volume evaluates Thomas Bradwardine's view of time as a mathematical, philosophical and theological concept within the context of ancient and medieval ...

As philosophers of mind we seem to hold in common no very clear view about the relevance that work in psychology or the neurosciences may or may not have to our own favourite questions—even if we call the subject ‘philosophical psychology’. For example, in the literature we find articles on pain some of which do, some of which don't, rely more or less heavily on, for example, the work of Melzack and Wall; the puzzle cases used so extensively in discussions (...) of personal identity are drawn sometimes from the pleasant exercise of scientific fantasy, at times from surprising reports of scientific fact; and there are those who deny, as well as those who affirm, the importance of the discovery of rapid-eye-movement sleep to the philosophical treatment of dreaming. A general account of the relation between scientific, and philosophical, psychology is long overdue and of the first importance. Here I shall limit myself to just one area where the two seem to connect, discussing one type of neuropsychological research and its relevance to questions in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of psychology. (shrink)

Edith Wyschogrod presents the first full-length study in English of the important contemporary French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. It is a revision of the author’s earlier study and includes discussions of his recent writings as well as current scholarship. Dr. Wyschogrod’s extensive discussion of Levinas's relation to Judaism, especially his use of literature from the Torah and other religious writings, will be of interest to religious scholars. The author compares Levinas’s thought with that of his contemporaries, most notably Jacques Derrida (...) and Husserl. (shrink)

Employee misconduct is prevalent in organizations and may be counterproductive in social and material terms. It is thus important to better understand how misconduct is construed by employees and the factors that determine its ethical acceptability in specific cases. This study explores attitudes towards unethical and minor deviant behaviours by examining the degree of acquiescence towards them in a sample of employees. Based on previous studies it was hypothesized that both organizational commitment and job satisfaction would be negatively related to (...) the acceptance of such behaviours in organizational settings. Results show that there is a relationship between the degree of acquiescence and organizational commitment and a more modest relationship with job satisfaction. They further indicate that organizational tenure impacts very significantly on the degree of acceptance. Although differences were found for age, neither gender nor organizational variables were found to be significant. (shrink)

Linguistics. Artificial intelligence. Related fields. Computation.

Through analysis of film sequences focusing on DNA in two British Broadcasting Corporation nonfiction science television programs, Wonders of Life and Bang! Goes the Theory, first broadcast in 2013, contrasting “religious” and “secular” representations of science are identified. In the “religious” portrayal, immutable scientific knowledge is revealed to humanity by nature with minimal human intervention. Science provides a creation story, “explanatory omnicompetence,” and makes life existentially meaningful. In the “secular” portrayal, scientific knowledge is changeable; is produced through technical skill in (...) expert communities; and is ambiguous, potentially positive and negative for society. Television representations of science affect audience understandings, and this is particularly the case for nonfiction representations of science, as they are likely to be “taken more seriously” than fictional representations. The consequences of the “religious” representation of science are discussed, and it is argued that a widespread understanding of science as presented in the religious portrayal would negatively impact democracy. (shrink)

A general hypothesis of atom size effects for G.P. zone formation is discussed in this paper and results are presented of precipitation in the systems Fe-Au and Fe-Mo. Techniques used are resistivity measurements and electron microscopy. In the Fe-Mo system it is shown that after initial cluster formation during the early stages of ageing after the quench, further growth ceases and vacancies anneal out into dislocation loops. The activation energy for the initial clustering was 1·3 ev whilst the excess vacancy (...) concentration estimated from the loop area gave a vacancy formation energy of ∼1·5 ev. These results confirm recent quenching results on pure iron. The refusal of Mo zones to grow confirms the general hypothesis of size effects.In the Fe-Au system precipitation of gold platelets after quenching is shown to be associated with the high density of dislocations formed during quenching through the phase transformation of the iron matrix. The effect of the dislocations is shown by the low value of ∼0·5 for the Johnson—Mehl kinetic parameter and by the activation energy for growth which is ∼0·8 of the equilibrium diffusion energy for Au in Fe. As the size-effect hypothesis does not apply to precipitation on dislocations the growth of zones in Fe—Au does not affect its validity. (shrink)

La proposition de cet article est de se saisir du « temps de l’expérience » des parcs éoliens citoyens en Frise du Nord (Allemagne) en le confrontant à la fois aux pulsations politiques des expérimentations techniques et à la fois aux rythmes des vents, comme ce qui permettrait d’en prendre soin, pour penser la continuité des épreuves de transition dans le temps mais aussi dans l’espace, dans une perspective démocratique de multiplication des expériences de transition.

This work tells the story of the rise of the modern German environmental imagination, with particular emphasis on its narrative and visual components.

Diotima’s speech claims that philosophy ranks among the erōtica. The standard reading of this holds that erōs manifests in philosophical activity. This is puzzling. Eros has a reputation for overpowering the psyche, making reasoning impossible. The major interpretive discussion of this puzzle suggests that Diotima must therefore accept either non-rationalist philosophizing or rationalist erōs. This paper argues for an alternative. The “ancillary activities view” posits that the erōtica do not manifest erōs but are activities undertaken to achieve its telos. On (...) this view, love’s relationship to philosophy is as un-mysterious as wanting something and doing what it takes to get it. (shrink)

By formalizing recent syntactic theories for natural languages Stabler shows how their complexity can be handled without guesswork or oversimplification. By formalizing recent syntactic theories for natural languages in the tradition of Chomsky's Barriers, Stabler shows how their complexity can be handled without guesswork or oversimplification. He introduces logical representations of these theories together with special deductive techniques for exploring their consequences that will provide linguists with a valuable tool for deriving and testing theoretical predictions and for experimenting with alternative (...) formulations of grammatical principles. Stabler's novel approach allows results to be deduced with straightforward calculations and provides a systematic framework for tackling the problem of how speakers can infer the properties of an utterance from principles of the grammar. The special treatment of equality, induction principles, and inclusion of a general method for collecting structures from proofs means that sophisticated linguistic arguments can be carried out in detail, giving a rich perspective to issues in linguistic theory and parsing. (shrink)

Electoral control refers to attempts by an election's organizer to influence the outcome by adding/deleting/partitioning voters or candidates. The important paper of Bartholdi, Tovey, and Trick [1] that introduces control proposes computational complexity as a means of resisting control attempts: Look for election systems where the chair's task in seeking control is itself computationally infeasible.We introduce and study a method of combining two or more candidate-anonymous election schemes in such a way that the combined scheme possesses all the resistances to (...) control possessed by any of its constituents: It combines their strengths. From this and new resistance constructions, we prove for the first time that there exists a neutral, anonymous election scheme that is resistant to all twenty standard types of electoral control. (shrink)

Correspondence should be addressed to David A. Leopold [email protected] the viewing of certain patterns, widely known as ambiguous or puzzle figures, perception lapses into a sequence of spontaneous alternations, switching every few seconds between two or more visual interpretations of the stimulus. Although their nature and origin remain topics of debate, these stochastic switches are generally thought to be the automatic and inevitable consequence of viewing a pattern without a unique solution. We report here that in humans such perceptual alternations (...) can be slowed, and even brought to a standstill, if the visual stimulus is periodically removed from view. We also show, with a visual illusion, that this stabilizing effect hinges on perceptual disappearance rather than on actual removal of the stimulus. These findings indicate that uninterrupted subjective perception of an ambiguous pattern is required for the initiation of the brain-state changes underlying multistable vision.Visual perception involves coordination between sensory sampling of the world and active interpretation of the sensory data. Human perception of objects and scenes is normally stable and robust, but it falters when one is presented with patterns that are inherently ambiguous or contradictory. Under such conditions, vision lapses into a chain of continually alternating percepts, whereby a viable visual interpretation dominates for a few seconds and is then replaced by a rival interpretation. This multistable vision, or 'multistability', is thought to result from destabilization of fundamental visual mechanisms, and has offered valuable insights into how sensory patterns are actively organized and interpreted in the brain1, 2. Despite a great deal of recent research and interest in multistable perception, however, its neurophysiological underpinnings remain poorly understood. Physiological studies have suggested that disambiguation of ambiguous patterns. (shrink)

Electoral control refers to attempts by an election's organizer to influence the outcome by adding/deleting/partitioning voters or candidates. The important paper of Bartholdi, Tovey, and Trick [1] that introduces control proposes computational complexity as a means of resisting control attempts: Look for election systems where the chair's task in seeking control is itself computationally infeasible.We introduce and study a method of combining two or more candidate-anonymous election schemes in such a way that the combined scheme possesses all the resistances to (...) control possessed by any of its constituents: It combines their strengths. From this and new resistance constructions, we prove for the first time that there exists a neutral, anonymous election scheme that is resistant to all twenty standard types of electoral control. (shrink)

Originally published: New York: Random House, 1972.

This article discusses the extension of ViewGen, an algorithm derived for belief ascription, to the areas of intensional object identification and metaphor. ViewGen represents the beliefs of agents as explicit, partitioned proposition sets known as environments. Environments are convenient, even essential, for addressing important pragmatic issues of reasoning. The article concentrates on showing that the transformation of information in metaphors, intensional object identification, and ordinary, nonmetaphorical belief ascription can all be seen as different manifestations of a single environment-amalgamation process. The (...) article also briefly discusses the extension of ViewGen to speech-act processing and the addition of a heuristic-based relevance-determination procedure, and justifies the partitioning approach to belief ascription. (shrink)

No other thinker so engaged the Russian cultural imagination of the early twentieth century as did Friedrich Nietzche. The Revolution of Moral Consciousness shows how Nietzschean thought influenced the brilliant resurgence of literary life that started in the 1890s and continued for four decades. Through an analysis of the Russian encounter with Nietzsche, Edith Clowes defines the shift in ethical and aesthetic vision that motivated Russia's unprecedented artistic renascence and at the same time led its followers to the brink (...) of cultural despair. Clowes shows how in the last years of the nineteenth century a diverse array of writers and critics discovered Nietzsche's thought, embracing or repudiating it with equal vigor. The literary storm brewing around Nietzsche and the concurrent relaxation of censorship combined to attract a public eager to follow the new intellectual fashion. Young writers, such as Andreev and Kuprin, welcomed the idea of the "superman" as a promising path to personal fulfillment. The tragic fates of their protagonists and the alluring gospel of the vulgar Zarathustra-like characters of such bestselling authors as Boborykin, Artsybashev, and Verbitskaia found enthusiastic, if indiscriminating, audiences ready to be "taught" how to "find themselves." By considering this Nietzschean cult, Clowes draws fresh insight into the nature of the budding popular-culture industry in Russia and the fast-growing reading public. From this ferment emerged the greatest Russian literary voices of the early twentieth century. The revolutionary romantics, Gorky and Lunacharsky, sought in Nietzsche's writing a new vision of total social and cultural change. Merezhkovsky led a generation of mystic symbolists in the search for a literary myth of resurrection. Ivanov, Blok, and Belyi appropriated the image of the "crucified Dionysus" as the central symbol of spiritual transfiguration. Their encounters with Nietzschean thought disclose an even more profound creative struggle with their own cultural past and its established formulations of nation and individual, culture and history. Clowes uses the term future anxiety to speak of a creative mentality that strove to assert itself by diminishing the impact of powerful literary precursors, such as Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, and Solovyov, and opening to the imagination the vision of a future full of vast creative possibility. (shrink)

The largest source of new information about Graeco-Roman antiquity is from newly discovered inscriptions. Epigraphic information gained through use of new techniques and technologies is helping to reshape and extend our knowledge of the religious life, languages, populations, governmental systems, and economies of the Greek and Roman world.

The tendency in the past has been for aruhropobgists to rationalize away the native claim that spirits exist. But in this study, a number of incidents, some of which happened to the author, are described and used to bring this positwistic assumption into question. The author shows that "participant observation" in the fullest sense requires taking the final leap and "going native" in the most complete way possible.