We wish here to consider the theory of a population or system made up of individuals whose number and size change with time. As usual, the description of these changes will be referred to as the kinetics, whereas the description of the special circumstances under which unchanging conditions subsist will be called the statics of the population. A third category, the conditions for a steady state, i.e., when the variables inside the system do not change, but linked variables outside do, (...) will be described by what we shall call the rheostatics of the system. All three, statics, rheostatics, and kinetics are subdivisions of the general dynamics of the system. (shrink)

_The Undiscovered Dewey_ explores the profound influence of evolution and its corresponding ideas of contingency and uncertainty on John Dewey's philosophy of action, particularly its argument that inquiry proceeds from the uncertainty of human activity. Dewey separated the meaningfulness of inquiry from a larger metaphysical story concerning the certainty of human progress. He then connected this thread to the way in which our reflective capacities aid us in improving our lives. Dewey therefore launched a new understanding of the modern self (...) that encouraged intervention in social and natural environments but which nonetheless demanded courage and humility because of the intimate relationship between action and uncertainty. Melvin L. Rogers explicitly connects Dewey's theory of inquiry to his religious, moral, and political philosophy. He argues that, contrary to common belief, Dewey sought a place for religious commitment within a democratic society sensitive to modern pluralism. Against those who regard Dewey as indifferent to moral conflict, Rogers points to Dewey's appreciation for the incommensurability of our ethical commitments. His deep respect for modern pluralism, argues Rogers, led Dewey to articulate a negotiation between experts and the public so that power did not lapse into domination. Exhibiting an abiding faith in the reflective and contestable character of inquiry, Dewey strongly engaged with the complexity of our religious, moral, and political lives. (shrink)

The main thesis of this dissertation is that John Dewey's conception of philosophy began and culminated with his concern about the problem of truth. It is asserted here that Dewey's mature conception of philosophy and his notion of truth may be quite profitable for resolving some of our more recent contemporary philosophical problems. To clarify his mature thoughts about philosophy and truth, this study surveys the stages of Dewey's development during his long life-time of ninety-three years. ;Using a general approach, (...) I trace the historical progression of his thinking and try to show the relevance of his conceptions of philosophy and truth to our contemporary problems. In doing so, I attempt to elucidate the terminological difficulties that he encountered with language while trying to communicate his own concept of philosophy and his notion of truth. Moreover, I examine criteria that may be used to judge Dewey's work in the field of philosophy in the Western tradition. Under the headings of Early, Middle and Later years, I provide a triadic survey of his life-work, focusing on his academic and religious views. My reflections try to provide information concerning the biological, semiotic, and psycholinguistic basis of his perspective, as it eventually evolved into a form of pragmatic naturalism. ;In concluding, I highlight Dewey's belief that the business of philosophy should deal with cultural problems. Focusing on the implications of his matured position, I try to show the importance of his perspective for solving some critical issues of our own time. A careful examination of his logic indicates that open-minded and honest communication must be the keystone to understanding his view. Therefore, I endeavor to illustrate the value of Dewey's mature concept of philosophy and his notion of truth for addressing some of our pressing problems in a practical manner. (shrink)

This book describes computability theory and provides an extensive treatment of data structures and program correctness. It makes accessible some of the author's work on generalized recursion theory, particularly the material on the logic programming language PROLOG, which is currently of great interest. Fitting considers the relation of PROLOG logic programming to the LISP type of language.

This is a thorough treatment of first-order modal logic. The book covers such issues as quantification, equality (including a treatment of Frege's morning star/evening star puzzle), the notion of existence, non-rigid constants and function symbols, predicate abstraction, the distinction between nonexistence and nondesignation, and definite descriptions, borrowing from both Fregean and Russellian paradigms.

This book contains new essays in honor of Melvin J. Lerner, a pioneer in the psychological study of justice. The contributors to this volume are internationally renowned scholars from psychology, business, and law. They examine the role of justice motivation in a wide variety of contexts, including workplace violence, affirmative action programs, helping or harming innocent victims and how people react to their own fate. Contributors explore fundamental issues such as whether people's interest in justice is motivated by self-interest (...) or a genuine concern for the welfare of others, when and why people feel a need to punish transgressors, how a concern for justice emerges during the development of societies and individuals, and the relation of justice motivation to moral motivation. How an understanding of justice motivation can contribute to the amelioration of major social problems is also examined. (shrink)

The purpose of this essay is to both discuss commands as a species of speech act and to discuss commands within the broader framework of how they are used and ...

Many principles of eukaryotic DNA replication and its relationship to transcription have been revealed by studying the replication of animal virus chromosomes. Now microinjection of viral DNA into eggs and embryos is providing clues about regulation of chromosomal replication and transcription during early mammalian development.

Contrary to the received understanding that Francisco de Vitoria and Francisco Suárez ruled out religious war by grounding just cause in natural law, they supported a robust view of papal authority for war when necessary for the defense of the church against heretics, schismatics, and pagans as well as for the spread of Christianity and Christendom throughout the world. They believed that religious wars were in accord with natural law as a means to its fulfillment in Christianity, as a justification (...) for the defense of the church as the one true faith, and as a moral obligation to provide all of humanity with the opportunity to receive Christian truth and grace. The neo‐Thomists' vigorous support for religious war was in the mainstream of the Christian just war tradition from the time of the wars against pagans in the early middle ages through their own time. This finding and the continuation into the modern era of sanctified patriotism stemming from the mixing of church and state especially during war that began in early Middle Ages, along with the historic roots of the recently prominent presumption against war, argue for a more complex understanding of the normative Christian just war tradition than that found among supporters of the classic interpretation of that tradition. (shrink)

How might we philosophize about the metaverse? It is traditionally held that the four main branches of philosophy are metaphysics, epistemology, axiology, and logic. In this article, I shall demonstrate how virtual walt-fictionalism, a particular version of virtual irrealism, is able to offer a straightforward, internally consistent, and powerful response about the metaphysics, epistemology, and axiology (ethics) of the metaverse. I will first characterize the metaverse in terms of a reality-virtuality (RV) continuum and distinguish between virtual realism and virtual irrealism, (...) before elaborating on the explanatory power and potential of virtual walt-fictionalism relative to the metaphysics, epistemology, and axiology (ethics) of the metaverse. (shrink)

This volume argues that the commitment to justice is a fundamental motive and that, although it is typically portrayed as serving self-interest, it sometimes takes priority over self-interest. To make this case, the authors discuss the way justice emerges as a personal contract in children's development; review a wide range of research studying the influences of the justice motive on evaluative, emotional and behavioral responses; and detail common experiences that illustrate the impact of the justice motive. Through an extensive critique (...) of the research on which some alternative models of justice are based, the authors present a model that describes the ways in which motives of justice and self-interest are integrated in people's lives. They close with a discussion of some positive and negative consequences of the commitment to justice. (shrink)

The new economy is characterized in the developing world by open capital markets and coordinated international regulation - neither of which existed in the colonial period.

David Walker’s famous 1829 Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World expresses a puzzle at the very outset. What are we to make of the use of “Citizens” in the title given the denial of political rights to African Americans? This essay argues that the pamphlet relies on the cultural and linguistic norms associated with the term appeal in order to call into existence the political standing of black folks. Walker’s use of citizen does not need to rely on (...) a recognitive legal relationship precisely because it is the practice of judging that illuminates one’s political, indeed, citizenly standing. Properly understood, the Appeal aspires to transform blacks and whites, and when it informs the prophetic dimension of the text, it tilts the entire pamphlet in a democratic direction. This is the political power of the pamphlet; it exemplifies the call-and-response logic of democratic self-governance. (shrink)

In this essay, I maintain that Dewey's 1888 article “The Ethics of Democracy” is the most immediate thematic and conceptual predecessor to The Public and Its Problems. Both texts revolve around a number of key themes at the heart of Dewey's thinking about democracy: the relationship between the individual and society, the legitimacy of majoritarianism, and the significance and meaning of political deliberation. When these themes are taken together we come to understand the anti-elitist core of Dewey's political thinking.

"This book offers a prophetic vision of art in a digital future.

This vibrant collection of papers by an interdisciplinary group of authors -- psychologists, theologians, and social scientists -- presents brilliant new perspectives on spirituality, ethics, and relationship. In their diversity of views, their Intellectual and spiritual dynamism, the authors bring power and hope to this subject so central to the human experience.

Investigations with electrometers in the 1770s led Volta to envision mobile charge in electrical conductors as a compressible fluid. A pressure-like condition in this fluid, which Volta described as the fluid’s “effort to push itself out” of its conducting container, was the causal agent that makes the fluid move. In this paper I discuss Volta’s use of analogy and imagery in model building, and compare with a successful contemporary conceptual approach to introducing ideas about electric potential in instruction. The concept (...) that today is called “electric potential” was defined mathematically by Poisson in 1811. It was understood after about 1850 to predict the same results in conducting matter as Volta’s pressure-like concept—and to predict electrostatic effects in the exterior space where Volta’s concept had nothing to say. Complete quantification in addition to greater generality made the mathematical concept a superior research tool for scientists. However, its spreading use in instruction has marginalized approaches to model building based on the analogy and imagery resources that students bring into the classroom. Data from pre and post testing in high schools show greater conceptual and confidence gains using the new conceptual approach than using conventional instruction. This provides evidence for reviving Volta’s compressible fluid model as an intuitive foundation which can then be modified to include electrostatic distant action. Volta tried to modify his compressible fluid model to include distant action, using imagery borrowed from distant heating by a flame. This project remained incomplete, because he did not envision an external field mediating the heating. However, pursuing Volta’s strategy of model modification to completion now enables students taught with the new conceptual approach to add distant action to an initial compressible fluid model. I suggest that a partial correspondence to the evolving model sequence that works for beginning students can help illuminate Volta’s use of intermediate explanatory models. (shrink)

Could translation be fully automated? We must first acknowledge the complexity, ambiguity, and diversity of natural languages. These aspects of natural languages, when combined with a particular dilemma known as the computational dilemma, appear to imply that the machine translator faces certain obstacles that a human translator has already managed to overcome. At the same time, science has not yet solved the problem of how human brains process natural languages and how human beings come to acquire natural language understanding. We (...) will then distinguish between the task of translation and the responsibility of the translator. Thereafter, we will conduct a survey of the methods of machine translation (viz. RBMT, SMT, NMT, foundation models or large language models). These methods will then be critically evaluated both in general and relative to Bar-Hillel’s hypothesis about the impossibility of fully automatic, high-quality machine translation (F ahqmt ). Some concluding remarks will be made about the scope, prospects, and limits of machine translation. (shrink)

_Islamicate Occult Sciences in Theory and Practice_ presents the latest research on Islamic occult sciences from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, namely intellectual history, manuscript studies and material culture.

The revival of interest in pragmatism and its practical relevance for democracy has prompted a reconsideration of John Dewey’s political philosophy. Dewey’s _The Public and Its Problems _ constitutes his richest and most systematic meditation on the future of democracy in an age of mass communication, governmental bureaucracy, social complexity, and pluralism. Drawing on his previous writings and prefiguring his later thinking, Dewey argues for the importance of civic participation and clarifies the meaning and role of the state, the proper (...) relationship between the public and experts, and the source of democracy’s legitimacy. These themes remain as important today as they were when Dewey first engaged them, and this is the work to which scholars consistently turn when assessing Dewey’s conception of democracy and what might be imagined for democracy in our own time. In this carefully annotated edition, Melvin L. Rogers provides an introductory essay that elucidates the philosophical and historical background of _The Public and Its Problems_ while explaining the key ideas of the book. He also provides a biographical outline of Dewey’s life and bibliographical notes to assist student and scholar alike. (shrink)

This special section of Contemporary Pragmatism is about John Dewey's book The Public and Its Problems, published in 1927. Scholars consistently turn to this work when assessing Dewey's conception of democracy and what might be imagined for democracy in our own time. This special section contains four articles by James Bohman, Eric MacGilvray, Eddie Glaude, and myself.