Critics have maintained that John Rawls’s theory of justice is unrealistic and undemocratic. Andrius Gališanka’s incisive intellectual biography argues that in misunderstanding the origins and development of Rawls’s argument, previous narratives fail to explain the novelty of his philosophical approach and so misunderstand his political vision.

The Kuzari: In Defense of the Despised Faith is the first new translation into English of The Kuzari since 1905, annotated and explained based on the classic commentaries. Written by Rabbi Yehuda HaLevi of Spain over a period of twenty years and completed in 1140, The Kuzari has enthralled generations of Jews and non-Jews alike with its clear-cut presentation on Judaism, and its polemics against Greek philosophy, Christianity, Islam, and Karaism.

We initiate the study of definable [Formula: see text]-topologies and show that there is at most one such [Formula: see text]-topology on a [Formula: see text]-henselian NIP field. Equivalently, we show that if [Formula: see text] is a bi-valued NIP field with [Formula: see text] henselian, then [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] are comparable. As a consequence, Shelah’s conjecture for NIP fields implies the henselianity conjecture for NIP fields. Furthermore, the latter conjecture is proved for any field admitting (...) a henselian valuation with a dp-minimal residue field. We conclude by showing that Shelah’s conjecture is equivalent to the statement that any NIP field not contained in the algebraic closure of a finite field is [Formula: see text]-henselian. (shrink)

The evolutionary history of muscle development in the paired fins of teleost fish and the limbs of tetrapod vertebrates is still, to a large extent, uncertain. There has been a consensus, however, that in the vertebrate clade the ancestral mechanism of fin and limb muscle development involves the extension of epithelial tissues from the somite into the fin/limb bud. This mechanism has been documented in chondrichthyan, dipnoan, chondrostean and teleost fishes. It has also been assumed that in amniotes, in contrast, (...) individual progenitor cells of muscles migrate from the somites into the limb buds. Neyt et al.(1) now present the exciting finding that in zebrafishes this presumably derived mechanism involving individual cell migration, is present. They conclude, based on data on sharks, zebrafishes, chickens, quails and mice that the derived mechanism was present in the sarcopterygians. This conclusion, however, may be premature in the light of further data available in the literature, which show a highly mosaic distribution of this character in the vertebrate clade. Furthermore, a developmental mode exists that is intermediate between the supposed ancestral and derived modes in teleosts, reptiles and possibly amphibians. BioEssays 23:383–387, 2001. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Theologian's Doubts:Natural Philosophy and the Skeptical Games of GhazālīLeor HaleviIn the history of skeptical thought, which normally leaps from the Pyrrhonists to the rediscovery of Sextus Empiricus in the sixteenth century, Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad al-Ghazālī (1058-1111) figures as a medieval curiosity. Skeptical enough to merit passing acknowledgment, he has proven too baffling to be treated fully alongside pagan, atheist, or materialist philosophers. As a theologian defending certain Muslim (...) dogmas, Ghazālī has not met what historians consider the mark of the true skeptic, a mind doubting the possibility of all systems of knowledge. But what is fascinating about him is that he brought into practical operation the tools of what I call "functional skepticism."1He denied the claims to truth of Aristotelian physics—whose basis he showed to rest on groundless belief—then turned and argued for the possibility of the Resurrection tooth and nail. The scholarly debate on The Incoherence of the Philosophers (Tahāfut al-falāsifa) has concentrated on the extent to which Ghazālī qua Ashcarite theologian was seduced into Aristotelian philosophy despite himself.2 In my view this debate has been misguided in the attempt to distill the [End Page 19] essence of Ghazālī from the book's eclectic theology; I will argue for a different view of Ghazālī on the basis of a close reading of key passages. In the unusual sections where Ghazālī applies Aristotelian language to a world not following the ordinary laws of physics, some have found Ghazālī slipping, unconsciously perhaps, into an Aristotelian frame of mind. I will show that, as a skeptical theologian with a dialogic imagination, he was rather deconstructing Aristotelian discourse while playing a Wittgensteinian sort of language game.Natural Philosopher or Speculative Theologian?The disagreement about the extent to which philosophy infected Ghazālī is ancient. Ghazālī might have studied philosophy only in order to refute it. He himself defended his philosophizing with the claim that one cannot deconstruct a system of thought until one has understood it so deeply as to elaborate upon its fundamental principles.3 His Maqāṣid al-falāsifa was in fact received, especially in trans-Pyrenean Europe, as a philosopher's genuine summary of the object of philosophy.4 The book strikes me as suspiciously creative in its representation of philosophical discourse, but it appears in any case as an expert and surprisingly unbiased treatment.5 Arabic readers knew that Ghazālī had also written a polemical treatise against philosophy, Tahāfut al-falāsifa, but they still wondered about his engagement with the ideas he challenged. Abū Bakr Ibn al-cArabī, for example, commented that Ghazālī had been unable to extricate himself from philosophy.6 Other philosophers pondered whether or not he had been a closeted member of their charmed circle and sought in his writings traces of esoteric philosophy.7Averroës's own sober sense of distance between philosophy and theology was partially a reaction to what he perceived as Ghazālī's dangerous and carefree mixture of the two sciences.8 He attacked Ghazālī's book in The Incoherence [End Page 20] of the Incoherence to restore philosophy's sense of purity, an aim he sought to accomplish by separating religious concerns from the philosopher's field of inquiry.9 Ironically, such a separation is precisely what Ghazālī might have wished to provoke by crisscrossing and blurring the line between religion and philosophy.The modern debate on chapter 17 of Tahāfut al-falāsifa has concentrated on defining Ghazālī as either a natural philosopher or an occasionalist theologian. In his defense of the possibility of miracles Ghazālī presented two theories of causation, one denying the logical basis of Aristotelian notions of natural causality, and the other more or less adopting these notions. Jointly, the two theories have seemed incompatible, and for this reason scholars have attempted to sort Ghazālī out of the apparent confusion. In 1978 L. E. Goodman argued persuasively that Ghazālī exploited rather than denied the philosophers' ideas of causality. In two articles Michael Marmura challenged Goodman, contending... (shrink)

This paper proposes an innovative approach to achieving real-time polymorphic behavior detection, and its direct application to blockchain-focused smart-contracts. We devise a method based on a non-deterministic finite state machine to perform approximate pattern-matching, using a look-ahead mechanism implemented through a concept similar to that of a sliding window, and using threshold-based similarity checking at every state in the automaton. We introduce and formalize our approach, discuss the challenges we faced and then test it in a real-world environment. The experimental (...) results obtained showed a significant speed-up of our approach, as compared to the classic similarity measures used commonly in such scenarios. (shrink)

Niccolo Machiavelli’s teachings have never gone out of fashion; no doubt because power remains a central aspect of modern political and corporate life. The writings of this 16th century thinker seem as relevant today as they were a half millennium ago. Given the immutable nature of human beings, this is hardly surprising. What is surprising is the regular stream of monographs published in the last third of the 20th century, and reaching a crescendo in the last decade, that argue for (...) Machiavelli’s relevance to modern management and corporate leadership. This essay will examine the structure, assumptions and conclusions of these manuals. After reviewing the manuals, this essay concludes that certain of these assumptions upon which these manuals are based are not transferable from a 16th century principality to a 21st century corporation. Not surprisingly, the teachings of these manuals concerning morality and the corporation are either inconsistent with the actual teachings of Machiavelli, or fail to acknowledge the teachings of Machiavelli most relevant to the modern corporate world. (shrink)

Fear can undermine cooperation. It may discourage individuals from collaborating with others because of concerns about potential exploitation; prompt them to engage in defensive aggression by launching a preemptive strike; and propel power-seeking individuals to act dominantly rather than compassionately. Therefore, accumulated evidence requires a more contextualized consideration of the link between fear and cooperation in adults.

This second installment in a chronologically arranged, three-part sequence continues the author's examination of Anglo-American literati who, in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, turned — in acts of combined xenophilia and xenophobia — to Russian literature and literary theory in order to escape the dominant influence of avant-garde movements in France. These Anglophone writers found in Russian exemplars a responsible, morally rigorous, and pragmatic, yet philosophically sophisticated, alternative to what they described as the amoral, superficial, and pretentious aestheticism of (...) French literary culture. Part 2 treats the poetry and criticism of the English “Movement” poet Donald Davie in light of his turn, in 1958, toward the example of Boris Pasternak as a way of escaping the influence of French Symbolist poetics and the post-Symbolist poetics of anglophone modernism. Although Davie understood that Pasternak was as much a modernist as T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound, he also argued that the Russian's poetry, unlike theirs, sought, on explicitly moral grounds, to maintain conventional syntax and purity of diction, with the result that Pasternak's verse communicates with the reader more as prose than as music does. (shrink)

This article is the first installment of a three-part contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium on xenophilia. The series of three examines the ways in which Anglo-American writers, from the mid-nineteenth until the late twentieth century, turned to Russian literature and literary theory to escape the otherwise inevitable influence of French avant-garde literary movements. These writers—Henry James in part 1, Donald Davie in part 2, and the “American Bakhtinian” critics in part 3—found in Russian examples a responsible yet radical and (...) morally oriented alternative to what they considered the extravagant, haughty, and corrupt aestheticism of French literary culture. Thus, these essays concern the interplay of xenophilia with xenophobia. Part 1 treats James's turn, commencing around 1875, to the example of Ivan Turgenev as a way of getting beyond the example of Flaubert and the other “grandsons of Balzac” with whom he was then keeping company in Paris. Turgenev and Flaubert were both Realists, but the Russian writer, in contrast to the French, cared not only for verbal beauty but also for what James called “moral glamour” in the art of fiction. (shrink)

Is reducing large-scale intergroup conflict the business of corporations? Although large corporations can use their power and prominence to reduce intergroup conflict in society, it is unclear to what extent stakeholders support corporate Intergroup Responsibility. Study 1 showed that support for CIR correlates in theoretically meaningful ways with relevant economic, social, and moral attitudes, including fair market ideology, consumer support for corporate social responsibility, social dominance orientation, symbolic racism, and moral foundations. Studies 2 and 3 employed experimental designs to test (...) the hypothesis that business leaders who advocate for intergroup tolerance boost perceptions of corporations and their leaders as moral, just, and fair, which in turn, increases stakeholders’ support for CIR. We found support for this hypothesis across two highly publicized and contentious events related to racial conflict in the U.S.: The White supremacy rally in Charlottesville and the federal government’s announcement about the planned rescinding of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals immigration policy. Specifically, exposing participants to real-world tweets by CEOs who advocated intergroup tolerance following these events increased participants’ support for CIR. This effect was mediated by heightened perceptions of corporations and their leaders as moral, just, and fair. Taken together, these findings enhance our understanding of the factors that shape stakeholders’ reactions to CIR; highlight intergroup conflict as an emerging arena for CSR; and illustrate the power of ethical intergroup leadership. (shrink)

The aim of this chapter is to identify the most representative measures of subjective and objective mental workload in driving, and to understand how the subjective and objective levels of mental workload influence the performance as a function of situation complexity and driving experience, i.e. to verify whether the increase of situation complexity and the lack of experience increase the subjective and physiological levels of mental workload and lead to driving performance impairments. This chapter will be useful to carry out (...) an experimental study and to improve the driver training. In the first part, we will broach the theoretical approach with two factors of mental workload and performance, i.e. situation complexity and driving experience. Indeed, a low complex situation (e.g., highways), or conversely a high complex situation (e.g., town) can provoke an overload. Additionally, performing the driving tasks implies producing a high effort for novice drivers who have not totally automated the driving activity. In the second part, we will focus on subjective measures of mental workload. A comparison of questionnaires usually used in driving will allow identifying the most appropriate ones as a function of different criteria. Moreover, we will review the empirical studies to verify if the subjective level of mental workload is high in simple and very complex situations, especially for novice drivers compared to the experienced ones. In the third part, we will focus on physiological measures. A comparison of physiological indicators will be realized in order to identify the most correlated to mental workload. An empirical review will also take the effect of situation complexity and experience on these physiological indicators into consideration. Finally, a more nuanced comparison between subjective and physiological measures will be established from the impact on situation complexity and experience. (shrink)

This paper distinguishes four major types of futility (physiological, imminent demise, lethal condition, and qualitative) that have been advocated in the literature either in a patient dependent or a patient independent fashion. It proposes five criteria (precision, prospective, social acceptability, significant number, and non-agreement) that any definition of futility must satisfy if it is to serve as the basis for unilaterally limiting futile care. It then argues that none of the definitions that have been advocated meet the criteria, primarily because (...) their proponents have not paid sufficient attention to the problematic nature of the data supporting the use of their definitions. (shrink)

The New Keynesian framework has emerged as the workhorse for the analysis of monetary policy and its implications for inflation, economic fluctuations, and welfare. It is the backbone of the new generation of medium-scale models under development at major central banks and international policy institutions, and provides the theoretical underpinnings of the inflation stability-oriented strategies adopted by most central banks throughout the industrialized world. This graduate-level textbook provides an introduction to the New Keynesian framework and its applications to monetary policy. (...) Using a canonical version of the New Keynesian model as a reference framework, Jordi Galí explores issues pertaining to the design of monetary policy, including the determination of the optimal monetary policy and the desirability of simple policy rules. He analyzes several extensions of the baseline model, allowing for cost-push shocks, nominal wage rigidities, and open economy factors. In each case, the implications for monetary policy are addressed, with a special emphasis on the desirability of inflation targeting policies.The most up-to-date and accessible introduction to the New Keynesian framework available Uses a single benchmark model throughout Concise and easy to use Includes exercises An ideal resource for graduate students, researchers, and market analysts. (shrink)

We survey the history of Shelah’s conjecture on strongly dependent fields, give an equivalent formulation in terms of a classification of strongly dependent fields and prove that the conjecture implies that every strongly dependent field has finite dp-rank.

Recently at least two papers1,2have appeared that look at cancer from an evolutionary perspective. That cancer has a negative effect on fitness needs no argument. However, cancer origination is not an isolated process, but the potential for it is linked in diverse ways to other genetically determined developmental events, complicating the way selection acts on it, and through it on the evolution of development. The two papers take a totally different line. Kavanagh argues that anti‐cancer selection has led to developmental (...) constraints. Leroi et al. argue that cancer is a side‐effect of recent evolutionary changes that usually will disappear over time through anti‐cancer selection. Here we place the papers in a wider perspective, and in so doing discuss various alternative developmental links cancer may have together with their evolutionary implications. BioEssays 25:1035–1039, 2003. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Professors Hildt (2023), Shepherd (2023), and Zilio and Lavazza (2023) jointly considered the ethical and philosophical implications of acknowledging non-human (e.g., machine) consciousness. Althou...

An equation to compute the dp-rank of any abelian group is given. It is also shown that its dp-rank, or more generally that of any one-based group, agrees with its Vapnik–Chervonenkis density. Furthermore, strong abelian groups are characterised to be precisely those abelian groups A such that there are only finitely many primes p such that the group A / pA is infinite and for every prime p, there are only finitely many natural numbers n such that $\left[p]/\left[p]$ is infinite.Finally, (...) it is shown that an infinite stable field of finite dp-rank is algebraically closed. (shrink)

The process of translation has both an excluding and including character. The analysis of actor networks, the process of mobilizing alliances, and constructing networks is a common and worthwhile focus. However, the simultaneous betrayals, dissidences, and controversies are often only implied in network construction stories. We aim to nuance the construction aspect of actor–network theory by shining the analytical searchlight elsewhere, where the theoretical tools of ANT have not yet systematically ventured. We argue that we need to understand every process (...) of translation in relation to its simultaneous process of treason, and to add antonyms for Callon’s problematization, intressement, enrollment, and mobilization. This enables us to describe powerlessness not as a state but as a process. Our case focuses on the network building around measures for disabled people in the construction of the Athens Metro, during the period 1991-1993. The discussion highlights the efforts of disability organizations to intervene in the initial construction works of the metro project and the simultaneous actions of the Greek government to exclude disability organizations from the design process and to disrupt the accessibility-metro actor network. (shrink)

We put in print a classical result that states that for most purposes, there is no harm in assuming the existence of saturated models in model theory. The presentation is aimed for model theorists with only basic knowledge of axiomatic set theory.

In his introduction to part 2 of the Common Knowledge symposium on xenophilia, the journal's editor tours the reader through two private apartments and through two public art collections in an effort to establish that aesthetically coherent mixtures of apparently immiscible objects from widely divergent cultures are possible and also morally glamorous. Xenophobia at its least reprehensible, he argues, is a fear of ecumenism and its consequences, as well as a fear of one's own conversion — of “turning Turk.” Xenophilia (...) at its most admirable is a pursuit of coherent mixtures where others cannot imagine their possibility. Bits lifted from reputedly pure and organic wholes may be transformed by means of overlap and mediated juxtaposition into a novel milieu that has a wholeness, authenticity, and charisma of its own. Such coherence depends on minds that are capable of loving what does not satisfy their narcissism and that can sense in the products of their own culture elements or signs of enervation, anomie, lack, derangement, waywardness, rigidity, preciousness, or warping. The author concludes that xenophilia neither signals nor facilitates the adulteration that xenophobes so fear. (shrink)

Résumé Jacques Serrano conçoit un système d’échange économique structurellement de même nature que sa production artistique non-matérialisée, qui permet de repenser la fonction et le statut de collectionneur. Cette réflexion s’accompagne d’un exemple de mise en application. Marc Halévy éclaire les enjeux économiques de cette proposition, et Ghislain Mollet-Viéville en analyse l’originalité en termes de collection.

This collection of essays, originally published in 1970 by Random House, gathers together some of the best initial responses to the problems raised by Edmund Gettier's celebrated critique of the traditional analysis of knowledge. Designed for upper-level courses and seminars in undergraduate philosophy programs and is intended as an introduction to epistemology from the analytic point of view.