The US neutrino community gathered at the Workshop on the Intermediate Neutrino Program at Brookhaven National Laboratory February 4-6, 2015 to explore opportunities in neutrino physics over the next five to ten years. Scientists from particle, astroparticle and nuclear physics participated in the workshop. The workshop examined promising opportunities for neutrino physics in the intermediate term, including possible new small to mid-scale experiments, US contributions to large experiments, upgrades to existing experiments, R&D plans and theory. The workshop was organized into (...) two sets of parallel working group sessions, divided by physics topics and technology. Physics working groups covered topics on Sterile Neutrinos, Neutrino Mixing, Neutrino Interactions, Neutrino Properties and Astrophysical Neutrinos. Technology sessions were organized into Theory, Short-Baseline Accelerator Neutrinos, Reactor Neutrinos, Detector R&D and Source, Cyclotron and Meson Decay at Rest sessions.This report summarizes discussion and conclusions from the workshop. (shrink)

This landmark work provides a systematic introduction to systems of modal logic and stands as the first presentation of what have become central ideas in philosophy of language and metaphysics, from the "new theory of reference" and non-linguistic necessity and essentialism to "Kripke semantics.".

Appearing in English for the first time, Schelling’s 1842 lectures develop the idea that many philosophical concepts are born of religious-mythological notions.

With precision and profundity born of 30 years of devoted study, John Boyle offers an essential introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas on Scripture, shedding helpful light on the goals, methods, and commitments that animate the Angelic Doctor's engagement with the sacred page. Because the genius of St. Thomas's approach to the Bible lies not so much in its novelty but rather in the fidelity and clarity with which he recapitulates the riches of the preceding interpretive Tradition, this initiation into St. (...) Thomas's vision of Scripture is itself an orientation to the Church's vision of Scripture, from the Fathers through and beyond the Middle Ages. St. Thomas's embeddedness within the Church's Tradition and his own historical context is integral to his approach to Scripture, yet it sets him at some distance from modern readers, for whom his interpretive vision may seem perplexing or even impenetrable. In this Primer, Boyle first provides an acclimation to this medieval context through a survey and explanation of pertinent technical terminology used by St. Thomas and characteristic of the scholastic theology of the time. With an eye to the medieval practice of considering Scripture according to the fourfold division of causes, Boyle builds on this initial foundation by exploring in turn St. Thomas's accounts of the end or use of Scripture (final cause), its divine and human authorship (efficient cause), its order and division (material cause), and its literary styles or genres (formal cause). Drawing on writings from across St. Thomas's corpus, but especially his work On the Commendation and Division of Sacred Scripture and the prologues to his biblical commentaries, Boyle masterfully elucidates both the hermeneutical principles and deep wisdom of the Angelic Doctor's approach to Scripture, imparting invaluable guidance not only for reading and understanding St. Thomas and other great masters of the Tradition, but also-and ultimately-for understanding Scripture in light of this Tradition and reading it with greater benefit and joy. (shrink)

Algorithmic decision making is used in an increasing number of fields. Letting automated processes take decisions raises the question of their accountability. In the field of computational journalism, the algorithmic accountability framework proposed by Diakopoulos formalizes this challenge by considering algorithms as objects of human creation, with the goal of revealing the intent embedded into their implementation. A consequence of this definition is that ensuring accountability essentially boils down to a transparency question: given the appropriate reverse-engineering tools, it should be (...) feasible to extract design criteria and to identify intentional biases. General limitations of this transparency ideal have been discussed by Ananny and Crawford :973–989, 2018). We further focus on its technical limitations. We show that even if reverse-engineering concludes that the criteria embedded into an algorithm correspond to its publicized intent, it may be that adversarial behaviors make the algorithm deviate from its expected operation. We illustrate this issue with an automated news recommendation system, and show how the classification algorithms used in such systems can be fooled with hard-to-notice modifications of the articles to classify. We therefore suggest that robustness against adversarial behaviors should be taken into account in the definition of algorithmic accountability, to better capture the risks inherent to algorithmic decision making. We finally discuss the various challenges that this new technical limitation raises for journalism practice. (shrink)

French legal culture, from the Middle Ages to the present day, has had an impressive influence on legal norms and institutions that have emerged in Europe and the Americas, as well as in Asian and African countries. This volume examines the lives of twenty-seven key legal thinkers in French history, with a focus on how their Christian faith and ideals were a factor in framing the evolution of French jurisprudence. Professors Olivier Descamps and Rafael Domingo bring together this diverse (...) group of distinguished legal scholars and historians to provide a unique comparative study of law and religion that will be of value to scholars, lawyers, and students. The collaboration among French and non-French scholars, and the diversity of international and methodological perspectives, gives this volume its own unique character and value to add to this fascinating series. (shrink)

En bannissant les poètes de la Cité, Platon inaugurait une longue querelle entre philosophes et artistes. De fait, les artistes ont aimé se proclamer " instaurateurs ", " éducateurs ", " voyants ", " tenants de l'avant-garde ". Depuis Hölderlin, qui n'a en tête le poète-philosophe, depuis Nietzsche le philosophe-artiste? Pourtant le philosophique ne peut, sans renoncer au concept, être réduit à une poétique... Il est décisif d'articuler, aujourd'hui, les places philosophiques et artistiques. Au cours de ce séminaire, celles-là se (...) sont ancrées chez le Suger du XIIè siècle, dans la religion de l'art du XIXè siècle, dans la religion de l'art du XIXè siècle, chez les futuristes, les musiciens dodécaphonistes, Brecht, Pessoa ou Manoel de Oliveira. Au fond, il s'agit de penser nos configurations actuelles. (shrink)

La responsabilité est la condition de notre humanité. Elle est protéiforme avec une prédominance pour la responsabilité pénale et la responsabilité civile. En quête de leurs origines, la seconde étant née dans l’ombre de la première, l’histoire nous montre l’existence de règles communes à de nombreuses civilisations comme le neminem laedere et la sanction de l’acte dommageable. Déroulant le fil des évolutions depuis l’Antiquité jusqu’aux codifications, les apports de chaque période sur les notions essentielles d’imputation et de culpabilité, de faute, (...) de dommage, de peine et de réparation permet de mettre en perspective les dispositions des projets de recodification du début du xxi e siècle. (shrink)

En s ’ emparant de la question du clonage reproductif humain au milieu de la tourmente médiatique qui a suivi la naissance du premier mammifère cloné, le Comité consultatif national d ’ éthique (CCNE) a avancé un certain nombre d ’ arguments éthiques contre cette pratique, en tentant de montrer qu ’ elle ne pouvait que porter atteinte à la dignité de la personne. Pour cela, le CCNE a établi des correspondances entre les modalités de conception de l ’ individu (...) et quelques attributs moraux telles l ’ autonomie, la liberté et la dignité, nourrissant ainsi la confusion entre identité génétique et identité personnelle. Instituant un dialogue serré avec le Comité, le législateur de 2004 a rédigé le texte de la loi de bioéthique en assumant ce postulat d ’ une assise biologique des attributs de la personne et en reprenant, parfois au terme près, l ’ argumentation mise en place quelques années plus tôt par le CCNE. (shrink)

L’Esquisse du droit familial de Fichte est un texte rarement commenté et presque toujours jugé marginal. Or le considérer ainsi, c’est s’interdire de comprendre le dispositif particulier de cette annexe au Fondement du droit naturel et de réaliser quel péril Fichte a fait courir à sa philosophie du droit en rédigeant un tel opuscule. Dans la mesure où Fichte fait dépendre son droit familial des données biologiques imposées par la nature, ce ne sont pas en effet les conclusions de cette (...) Esquisse qui la rendent peu compatible avec son système du droit, mais ses prémisses. Cet article tente de montrer qu’un droit familial réellement fidèle à la doctrine fichtéenne du droit reste à écrire. Et, au-delà de l’exégèse philosophique, il s’agit aussi de montrer ici l’inconséquence de certaines dispositions du droit de la bioéthique visant à ériger la Nature en norme transcendante du droit.The Outline of Family Right by Fichte is generally considered as a minor text by most scholars when it is studied at all. However, such a point of view does not enable one to comprehend Fichte’s motives for this appendix to the Foundations of Natural Right and to realize how much he jeopardized his work on the philosophy of Right by writing such an opuscule. Indeed, as Fichte enslaves his family Right to biological data, what makes that Outline almost incompatible with his system of Right is its premisses, not its conclusions. What this article tries to demonstrate is that a fully Fichtean family Right remains to be written. Beyond the philosophical interpretation, the aim of this article is eventually to point out the inconsistency of some contemporary articles, e.g. in the French laws of Bioethics, seeking to hold Nature for the transcendent norm of Right. (shrink)

"The chief business of twentieth-century philosophy” is “to reckon with twentieth-century history," claimed R. G. Collingwood. In this remarkable collection of essays, Frank Ankersmit demonstrates the prescience of that remark and goes a long way toward meeting its challenge. Responding to the work of Hayden White, Arthur Danto, and Hans-Georg Gadamer, he examines such issues as the difference between historical representation and artistic expression, the status of metaphor in historical description, and the relation of postmodernism to historicism. Ankersmit's fluent grasp (...) of European thought and his ability to incorporate concepts from literary theory, art history, the philosophy of science, and political thought into his analyses assure that this collection will interest readers throughout the humanities. (shrink)

The authors discuss law and ethics when medical decisions are to be taken by patients who are unable in any valid sense to express their own wishes. The main problem in legal terms is to protect an individual's free will as far as possible and ensure that his or her wishes, if known, are respected. If a patient's independent wishes cannot be known, then we must at least ensure that nothing is imposed which is not in his interest. Legal measures, (...) however, are far from adequate in resolving all the concrete problems that emerge. The field of ethics does bring some better adapted solutions, but none is laid down in law. One such approach, involving a multidisciplinary advisory group in a department of geriatrics, is discussed. (shrink)

Ethics for Enemies comprises three original philosophical essays on torture, terrorism, and war. F. M. Kamm deploys ethical theory in her challenging new treatments of these most controversial practical issues. First she considers the nature of torture and the various occasions on which it could occur, in order to determine why it might be wrong to torture a wrongdoer held captive, even if this were necessary to save his victims. In the second essay she considers what makes terrorism wrong--whether it (...) is the intention to harm civilians, rather than harm to them being 'collateral damage,' or something else--and whether terrorism is always wrong. The third essay discusses whether having a right reason, in the sense of a right intention, is necessary in order for a war to be just. Kamm then examines ways in which the harms of war can be proportional to the achievement of the just cause and other goods that war can bring about, so as to make the declaration of war permissible. (shrink)

This is an English translation of Schelling's Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (first published in 1797 and revised in 1803), one of the most significant works in the German tradition of philosophy of nature and early nineteenth-century philosophy of science. It stands in opposition to the Newtonian picture of matter as constituted by inert, impenetrable particles, and argues instead for matter as an equilibrium of active forces that engage in dynamic polar opposition to one another. In the revisions of (...) 1803 Schelling incorporated this dialectical view into a neo-Platonic conception of an original unity divided upon itself. The text is of more than simply historical interest: its daring and original vision of nature, philosophy, and empirical science will prove absorbing reading for all philosophers concerned with post-Kantian German idealism, for scholars of German Romanticism, and for historians of science. (shrink)

The limited aim here is to explain what John Dewey might say about the formulation of the grue example. Nelson Goodman’s problem of distinguishing good and bad inductive inferences is an important one, but the grue example misconstrues this complex problem for certain technical reasons, due to ambiguities that contemporary logical theory has not yet come to terms with. Goodman’s problem is a problem for the theory of induction and thus for logical theory in general. Behind the whole discussion of (...) these issues over the last several decades is a certain view of logic hammered out by Russell, Carnap, Tarski, Quine, and many others. Goodman’s nominalism hinges in essential ways on a certain view of formal logic with an extensional quantification theory at its core. This raises many issues, but the one issue most germane here is the conception of predicates ensconced in this view of logic. (shrink)

The essays in this collection address different aspects of Dewey's philosophy of logic, from his work at the beginning of the twentieth century to the culmination of his logical thought in the 1938 volume, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry.

Neuroscience has studied deductive reasoning over the last 20 years under the assumption that deductive inferences are not only de jure but also de facto distinct from other forms of inference. The objective of this research is to verify if logically valid deductions leave any cerebral electrical trait that is distinct from the trait left by non-valid deductions. 23 subjects with an average age of 20.35 years were registered with MEG and placed into a two conditions paradigm (100 trials for (...) each condition) which each presented the exact same relational complexity (same variables and content) but had distinct logical complexity. Both conditions show the same electromagnetic components (P3, N4) in the early temporal window (250–525 ms) and P6 in the late temporal window (500–775 ms). The significant activity in both valid and invalid conditions is found in sensors from medial prefrontal regions, probably corresponding to the ACC or to the medial prefrontal cortex. The amplitude and intensity of valid deductions is significantly lower in both temporal windows (p = 0.0003). The reaction time was 54.37% slower in the valid condition. Validity leaves a minimal but measurable hypoactive electrical trait in brain processing. The minor electrical demand is attributable to the recursive and automatable character of valid deductions, suggesting a physical indicator of computational deductive properties. It is hypothesized that all valid deductions are recursive and hypoactive. (shrink)