We consider the implications of trends in the number of U.S. farmers and food imports on the question of what role U.S. farmers have in an increasingly global agrifood system. Our discussion stems from the argument some scholars have made that American consumers can import their food more cheaply from other countries than it can produce it. We consider the distinction between U.S. farmers and agriculture and the effect of the U.S. food footprint on developing nations to argue there might (...) be an important role for U.S. farmers, even if it appears Americans don’t need them. For instance, we may need to protect U.S. farmland and, by implication, U.S. farmers, for future food security needs both domestic and international. We also explore the role of U.S. farmers by considering the question of whether food is a privilege or a right. Although Americans seem to accept that food is a privilege, many scholars and commentators argue that, at least on a global scale, food is a right, particularly for the world’s poor and hungry. If this is the case, then U.S. farmers might have a role in meeting the associated obligation to ensure that the poor of the world have enough food to eat. We look at the consequences of determining that food is a right versus a privilege and the implications of that decision for agricultural subsidies as well as U.S. agriculture and nutrition policies. (shrink)

Charles Sanders Peirce complained that James allowed pragmatism to become "infected" with "seeds of death" like the idea that truth is mutable. The Truth is What Works is an attempt to defend James's pragmatic theory of truth from a wide range of critics including Peirce, Betrand Russell, Hilary Putnam, and Cornel West. Cormier runs the gauntlet of historical and contemporary criticism in an attempt to show, not that Jamesian pragmatism does in fact contain a perfectly good theory of objective reality (...) after all, but rather that it doesn't, and is still a kind of realism anyway because it does not leave individuals and their subjective desires behind in an attempt to describe the real world. (shrink)

Consider the sentence “Lois knows that Superman flies, but she doesn’t know that Clark flies”. In this paper we defend a Millian contextualist semantics for propositional attitude ascriptions, according to which ordinary uses of this sentence are true but involve a mid-sentence shift in context. Absent any constraints on the relevant parameters of context sensitivity, such a semantics would be untenable: it would undermine the good standing of systematic theorizing about the propositional attitudes, trivializing many of the central questions of (...) epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of action. In response to this problem, we prove a series of tenability results. We show that, given certain constraints on the parameters of context sensitivity, there is a broad class of principles of propositional attitude psychology whose good standing follows from corresponding claims about people’s mental representations. But these constraints also have some surprising consequences: they are jointly incompatible with coarse-grained theories of propositions, and they are in tension with a natural picture of how speakers and hearers coordinate on the interpretation of attitude ascriptions. In light of these consequences we explore different ways in which the contextualist picture might be developed, and argue that our preferred way compares favorably with Fregeanism and neo-Russellianism. (shrink)

In a language for arithmetic with a predicate T, intended to mean “ x is the Gödel number of a true sentence”, a set S of axioms and rules of inference has the truth disjunction property if whenever S ⊢ T ∨ T, either S ⊢ T or S ⊢ T. Similarly, S has the truth existence property if whenever S ⊢ ∃χ T ), there is some n such that S ⊢ T ). Continuing previous work, we establish whether (...) these properties hold or fail for a large collection of possible axiomatic systems. (shrink)

S. Adams, W. Ambrose, A. Andretta, H. Becker, R. Camerlo, C. Champetier, J.P.R. Christensen, D.E. Cohen, A. Connes. C. Dellacherie, R. Dougherty, R.H. Farrell, F. Feldman, A. Furman, D. Gaboriau, S. Gao, V. Ya. Golodets, P. Hahn, P. de la Harpe, G. Hjorth, S. Jackson, S. Kahane, A.S. Kechris, A. Louveau,, R. Lyons, P.-A. Meyer, C.C. Moore, M.G. Nadkarni, C. Nebbia, A.L.T. Patterson, U. Krengel, A.J. Kuntz, J.-P. Serre, S.D. Sinel'shchikov, T. Slaman, Solecki, R. Spatzier, J. Steel, D. Sullivan, S. (...) Thomas, A. Valette, V.S. Varadarajan, B. Velickovic, B. Weiss, J.D.M. Wright, R.J. Zimmer. (shrink)

STARTLING OBSERVATION. Any two natural theories S,T, known to interpret EFA, are known (with small numbers of exceptions) to have: S is interpretable in T or T is interpretable in S. The exceptions are believed to also have comparability.

Surgical devices are often marketed before there is good evidence of their safety and effectiveness. Our paper discusses the ethical issues associated with the early marketing and use of new surgical devices from the perspectives of the six groups most concerned. Health Canada, which is responsible for licensing new surgical devices, should amend their requirements to include rigorous clinical trials that provide data on effectiveness and safety for each new product before it is marketed. Industry should comply with all Health (...) Canada requirements to obtain licenses for new products. Until Health Canada requires effectiveness and safety data, industry should cooperate with physicians in appropriate studies before releasing new products and should make balanced presentations of all the available evidence. Surgeons should, before using a new surgical device, assess the evidence on its effectiveness and safety and ensure they are properly trained and competent in using the device. Surgeons should provide their patients with an evaluation of the available evidence and inform them about possible complications and the surgeon's level of experience with the new device. Patients, who should be given an honest evaluation of the available evidence, possible complications, and the surgeon's experience, should be encouraged to evaluate the evidence and information to their own satisfaction to ensure that fully informed consent is given. Health institutions, responsible for regulating practice within their walls, should review new devices for safety, effectiveness, and economic impacts, before allowing their use. They should also limit the use of new surgical devices to surgeons trained and competent in the new technology. Professional societies should provide guidance on the early adoption of new surgical devices and technologies. We urge all those involved in the development, licensing, and use of new surgical devices to aim for higher ethical standards to protect the health and safety of patients requiring surgery. The lowest acceptable ethical standard would require device manufacturers to provide surgeons with accurate and timely information on the efficacy and safety of their products, allowing surgeons and patients to evaluate the evidence (and the significance of information not yet available) before surgery. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Hobbes: A Biography by A. P. MartinichMartin HarveyA. P. Martinich. Hobbes: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. xxxii + 384. Cloth, $34.95.In his most recent biography of Hobbes, A. P. Martinich informs the reader that he is “here to praise Hobbes, not to bury his theory”—a task which the author accomplishes with a great deal of literary dexterity (233). The work is chronological in structure with (...) each of the eleven chapters devoted to a specific period in Hobbes’s intellectual and personal development. The reader receives an in depth and well wrought treatment of Hobbes’s earliest years in Malmesbury, including a thorough discussion of his dissolute father and his tutelage in the classics under Robert Latimer. Martinich also goes into detail concerning Hobbes’s student life at Oxford, his lifelong relationship with the Cavendishes, Hobbes’s participation in the Great Tew Circle as well as his decade long exile in France and ultimate return to England. Hobbes’s later years, particularly his fruitless disputes with the Royal Society, are also admirably chronicled.Interwoven with the above is a detailed overview of most of Hobbes’s major and minor works, from his translation of Thucydides in 1629 to Behemoth, published in 1679. Martinich pays close attention to Hobbes’s foundational works in philosophy, particularly The Elements of Law, Leviathan, and De Corpore. The author provides a clear and concise introduction to all facets of Hobbes’s philosophical system and spends time explaining what Hobbes took his project to be; namely the construction of a tripartite Elementa Philosophiae devoted, respectively, to metaphysics/physics, psychology and ethics/politics (118–9). The critical exegesis of Anti-White is exceptional, providing as it does an excellent conceptual backdrop to Hobbes’s mature and considered philosophy of science as found in De Corpore. As such, Hobbes’s philosophical corpus is presented, rightly I believe, as a continuum, by no means seamless perhaps, but nonetheless exhibiting at base a considerable amount of theoretical integrity.As is well known, Hobbes was quite the cantankerous character engaging in numerous professional and, ultimately, personal rows with the great minds of his time. Hobbes’s acrimonious wranglings with René Descartes, Thomas White, Bishop Bramhall, Robert Filmer, Robert Boyle, Seth Ward, and John Wallis all receive their due. The comically churlish debate between Hobbes and Descartes is especially well presented. [End Page 680]Stylistically, Martinich adopts a somewhat pithy approach (e.g., William Cavendish is described as follows: “It was not that Cavendish was unprincipled; rather, his principle was opportunism.” [20]) which, for the most part, is quite successful in keeping the reader’s attention, even when complex philosophical ideas are being conveyed. The work, much to Martinich’s credit, is also punctuated with numerous amusing tidbits such as his listing of the oral exam questions which Hobbes and his fellow students adequately had to answer in order to receive their B.A., e.g., “Whether a new inundation of water [over the whole earth] would be a greater catastrophe than all of it freezing” (13). Hobbes would be happy to know that things haven’t changed all that much.Substantively, a few points are in order. First, as one might expect, Martinich spends a great deal of time discussing Hobbes’s theological views and he is at great pains to paint Hobbes as a committed Calvinist (137–43; see Martinich’s The Two Gods of Leviathan [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992]) for a fuller discussion of this issue. In all fairness, the author readily admits that his reading is a minority interpretation, but this being the case perhaps more time should have been devoted to discussing the received view, i.e., that Hobbes, if he is not an atheist, is at most a deist and not a theist. Second, Martinich portrays Hobbes’s sovereign as wholly absolute, unfettered not only by the civil, but the natural law as well. While quite correct in maintaining that the sovereign, since he or she (or they), is not subject to civil law, it does not follow that Hobbes necessarily believes that “whatever the sovereign says is law” (50). Indeed, in Chapter XXVI of Leviathan Hobbes... (shrink)

This paper explores a philosophical argument about the use of natural light in films. I argue that directors use sunlight as a visual metaphor to induce a sublime experience from the viewer to elevate the narrative. While it is more efficient in terms of time management and finances to use electric lights, sunlight creates a successful emotional effect on the viewer placing them in contemplation of the relationship between humanity, nature, and humility. Essentially, I am concerned with what it is (...) that the capturing of sunlight accomplishes in these works of art that a light bulb can’t. In this paper, I consider how natural light is used to guide the viewer’s eye and how natural light makes us feel. I believe motion pictures are the perfect artistic medium to explore our emotional understanding of the sun as it not only captures objects in motion in the light of the sun it also captures the sun itself in motion. My intention is to provide a better understanding of the powerful psychological effect that the use of sunlight has on the viewer of a film. (shrink)

Souvenir du passé, variation sur le présent, imagination de l'avenir : la littérature s'est toujours nourrie de ces ressorts immémoriaux de l'art du récit. Mais qu'en est-il de la littérature contemporaine? Comment agence-t-elle la mémoire et l'espérance, le " déjà plus " et le " pas encore ", le maintenant et l'autrefois? Quels sont les rythmes et les durées, les passés et les futurs qui fondent la singularité de la littérature du présent, de notre présent? Ce cahier de recherche, qui (...) rassemble les interventions de douze jeunes chercheurs, interroge la manière dont les littératures québécoise et française disent notre contemporanéité et son imaginaire du temps. (shrink)

In this paper we suggest a revisionist perspective on two significant figures in early modern life science and philosophy: William Harvey and John Locke. Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, is often named as one of the rare representatives of the ‘life sciences’ who was a major figure in the Scientific Revolution. While this status itself is problematic, we would like to call attention to a different kind of problem: Harvey dislikes abstraction and controlled (...) experiments (aside from the ligature experiment in De Motu Cordis), tends to dismiss the value of instruments such as the microscope, and emphasizes instead the privileged status of ‘observed experience’. To use a contemporary term, Harvey appears to rely on, and chiefly value, ‘tacit knowledge’. Secondly, Locke’s project is often explained with reference to the image he uses in the Epistle to the Reader of his Essay, that he was an “underlabourer” of the sciences. In fact, despite the significant medical phase of his career, Locke’s ‘empiricism’ turns out to be above all a practical (i.e. ‘moral’) project, which focuses on the delimitation of our powers in order to achieve happiness, and rejects the possibility of naturalizing knowledge. When combined, these two cases suggest a different view of some canonical moments in early modern natural philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper I try to sort out a tangle of issues regarding time, inertia, proper time and the so-called “clock hypothesis” raised by Harvey Brown's discussion of them in his recent book, Physical Relativity. I attempt to clarify the connection between time and inertia, as well as the deficiencies in Newton's “derivation” of Corollary 5, by giving a group theoretic treatment original with J.-P. Provost. This shows how both the Galilei and Lorentz transformations may be derived from the (...) relativity principle on the basis of certain elementary assumptions regarding time. I then reflect on the implications of this derivation for understanding proper time and the clock hypothesis. (shrink)

This book deserves the attention of philosophers of religion. Tracy presents a monumental synthesis of philosophy and history within the context of a "revisionist" theological model. Part I attempts adequately to articulate a method of inquiry by outlining the sets of evaluative criteria, the uses of evidence, and the place of the various philosophical and historical methods within this model. Not only must the method be responsive to the historical tradition, but it also must heed the non-Christian scrutiny of what (...) Van A. Harvey calls the "morality of scientific knowledge," which demands a critical posture toward beliefs and tradition. Tracy’s model involves three steps: 1) phenomenology of the "religious dimension" of our "common experience and language," 2) an "historical and hermeneutical investigation" of the Christian tradition, and 3) "transcendental or metaphysical reflection" in order both to determine the "truth-status" of the previous steps and to effect a critical correlation of philosophy and hermeneutics. (shrink)

Although Marx dubbed landowners one of the ‘three great classes’ of modern society, the most prominent Marxian and socialist thinkers of capitalism and land over the past century – from Lefebvre to Massey to Harvey – have implicitly or explicitly argued that landowners are not capitalism’s ‘third class’, and that the social relations of land are marginal or contingent to the mode of production as a whole. Through assessing the work of Marxist geographers, political economists, value-form theorists, and others (...) who have dismissed the class-status of landowners and blurred the line between ground rent and interest, this article argues that the theory of the landowning class is fundamental to the understanding of the totality of capitalist social relations, as well as to developing more incisive analyses of struggles around housing, land, and movement today. (shrink)

Well prior to the invention of the term ‘biology’ in the early 1800s by Lamarck and Treviranus (and lesser-known figures in the decades prior), and also prior to the appearance of terms such as ‘organism’ under the pen of Leibniz and Stahl in the early 1700s, the question of ‘Life’, that is, the status of living organisms within the broader physico-mechanical universe, agitated different corners of the European intellectual scene. From modern Epicureanism to medical Newtonianism, from Stahlian animism to the (...) discourse on the ‘animal economy’ in vitalist medicine, models of living being were constructed in opposition to ‘merely anatomical’, structural, mechanical models. It is therefore striking that the classic narratives of the Scientific Revolution conspicuously avoid any consideration of what status to grant living beings in a newly physicalized universe (I discuss this in Wolfe 2011, 2019 chapt. 1). Neither Harvey, nor Boyle, nor Locke (to name some likely candidates, the latter having studied with Willis and collaborated with Sydenham) ever ask what makes organisms unique, or conversely, what does not. In this chapter I seek to establish how something we might call ‘the knowledge of Life’, to use an expression of Georges Canguilhem’s, emerged as part of early modernity without being part of the mainstream history of life science. This leads to the question, can one can correlate early modern “knowledge of life” with the emergence of a science called ‘biology’? (see Zammito 2018, Wolfe 2019, Bognon-Küss and Wolfe eds. 2019). It was once fashionable to speak of, e.g. ‘precursors of Darwin’, and then Canguilhem and Foucault famously did away with the category of precursor. But how then do we account for the phase that precedes the constitution of a science? With the case of biology, how do we account for the increasing fascination with the ontology of Life during the decades prior to the ‘naming of biology’, as McLaughlin has called it, at the end of the eighteenth century? This increased focus on Life and the ontology of Life sits awkwardly, both with mainstream narratives of the Scientific Revolution and of the history of biology. In seeking to address this increased focus (in which vitalism plays a role but was by no means the only conceptual actor: Wolfe 2020), I critically examine Foucault’s notorious claim (Foucault 1966) that there was no such thing as ‘Life’ in the eighteenth century and thus no such thing as biology. (shrink)

Memoirs and papers presented at a conference held on the occasion of the 90th birthday of the Mongolian philosopher Ts. Balkhaajav.

Logical Forms explains both the detailed problems involved in finding logical forms and also the theoretical underpinnings of philosophical logic. In this revised edition, exercises are integrated throughout the book. The result is a genuinely interactive introduction which engages the reader in developing the argument. Each chapter concludes with updated notes to guide further reading.

We investigate the class of those algebras in which is a de Morgan algebra, is a quasi-Stone algebra, and the operations \ and \ are linked by the identity x**º = x*º*. We show that such an algebra is subdirectly irreducible if and only if its congruence lattice is either a 2-element chain or a 3-element chain. In particular, there are precisely eight non-isomorphic subdirectly irreducible Stone de Morgan algebras.

We identify the \-ideals of a distributive demi-pseudocomplemented algebra L as the kernels of the boolean congruences on L, and show that they form a complete Heyting algebra which is isomorphic to the interval \ of the congruence lattice of L where G is the Glivenko congruence. We also show that the notions of maximal \-ideal, prime \-ideal, and falsity ideal coincide.