The thesis that observation necessarily fails to determine theory is false in the sense that observation can provide overwhelming evidence for a particular theory or even a hypothesis within the theory. The saga of quantum discontinuity illustrates the power of evidence to determine theory and shows how that power can be underestimated by inadequate caricatures of the evidential case. That quantum discontinuity can save the phenomena of black body radiation is the widely known result, but it leaves open the possibilities (...) of other accounts. That these phenomena, with the aid of minimal assumptions, entail quantum discontinuity is the crucial but now largely forgotten result. It was first demonstrated by Ehrenfest and Poincaré in 1911 and 1912. (shrink)

We propose that whatever quantity controls the Heisenberg uncertainty relations it should be identified with an effective Planck parameter. With this definition it is not difficult to find examples where the Planck parameter depends on the region under study, varies in time, and even depends on which pair of observables one focuses on. In quantum cosmology the effective Planck parameter depends on the size of the comoving region under study, and so depends on that chosen region and on time. With (...) this criterion, the classical limit is expected, not for regions larger than the Planck length, \, but for those larger than \^{1/3}\), where H is the Hubble parameter. In theories where the cosmological constant is dynamical, it is possible for the latter to remain quantum even in contexts where everything else is deemed classical. These results are derived from standard quantization methods, but we also include more speculative cases where ad hoc Planck parameters scale differently with the length scale under observation. Even more speculatively, we examine the possibility that similar complementary concepts affect thermodynamical variables, such as the temperature and the entropy of a black hole. (shrink)

Are African and African-American Studies, as defined and practiced in the USA, tools of US cultural imperialism? Are discussions of race, racial inequality or racial oppression in other societies, when carried out by North Americans, to be viewed as `brutal ethnocentric intrusions'? These are among the central propositions of a vigorous polemic by two French sociologists, Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, in a 1999 article entitled `On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason'. As proof, Bourdieu and Wacquant call attention to the (...) recent transnational scholarly dialogue regarding race in Brazil and denounce the `imposition' of an `American tradition', `model' and `dichotomy' of race on Brazil. In particular, they attack as `ethnocentric poison' a 1994 monograph by Michael Hanchard on Brazilian `Black Consciousness' movements, Orpheus and Power: The Movimento Negro of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Brazil, 1945-1988. This article dissects Bourdieu and Wacquant's mischaracterization of the current US-Brazilian dialogue on the African diaspora in the New World. It identifies their fundamental missteps and misjudgments, offers a critique of the schematic model of transnational intellectual circulation they offer in the article, and demonstrates their radical misrepresentation of Michael Hanchard's treatment of questions of race, color and nation in Brazil. (shrink)

“Old Black Joe still picking cotton for your ribbons and bows. And everybody knows.” - Leonard Cohen, “Everybody Knows.” African-Americans and other minorities are suffering disproportionately duri...

Hastings Center Report, Volume 52, Issue S1, Page S83-S88, March‐April 2022.

The purpose of the present study is to undertake a confrontation of the thought of Martin Heidegger and Thomas Aquinas on the question of Being and the problem ...

A textbook for undergraduates. Some 70 selections (more than half are new to this edition) follow an introductory essay. Current controversies (surrogacy, genetic engineering, proxy consent) are thoroughly covered. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Ever since Copernicus, scientists have continually adjusted their view of human nature, moving it further and further from its ancient position at the center of Creation. But in recent years, a startling new concept has evolved that places it more firmly than ever in a special position. Known as the Anthropic Cosmological Principle, this collection of ideas holds that the existence of intelligent observers determines the fundamental structure of the Universe. In its most radical version, the Anthropic Principle asserts that (...) "intelligent information-processing must come into existence in the Universe, and once it comes into existence, it will never die out." This wide-ranging and detailed book explores the many ramifications of the Anthropic Cosmological Principle, covering the whole spectrum of human inquiry from Aristotle to Z bosons. Bringing a unique combination of skills and knowledge to the subject, John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler--two of the world's leading cosmologists--cover the definition and nature of life, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and the interpretation of the quantum theory in relation to the existence of observers. The book will be of vital interest to philosophers, theologians, mathematicians, scientists, and historians, as well as to anyone concerned with the connection between the vastness of the universe of stars and galaxies and the existence of life within it on a small planet out in the suburbs of the Milky Way. (shrink)

In books such as The World Within the World and The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, astronomer John Barrow has emerged as a leading writer on our efforts to understand the universe. Timothy Ferris, writing in The Times Literary Supplement of London, described him as "a temperate and accomplished humanist, scientist, and philosopher of science--a man out to make a contribution, not a show." Now Barrow offers the general reader another fascinating look at modern physics, as he explores the quest for (...) a single, unifying theory that will unlock nature's secrets. Theories of Everything is more than a history of science, more than a popular report on recent research and discoveries. Barrow provides a reflective, intelligent commentary on what a true Theory of Everything would be--its ingredients, its limitations, and what it could tell us about the universe. Never before, he writes, have physicists been so confident and so eager in the hunt for this "cosmic Rosetta Stone," as he calls it: "a single all-embracing picture of all the laws of nature from which the inevitability of all things seen must follow with unimpeachable logic." He lays out eight essential ingredients for a Theory of Everything and then explores each in turn, tracing how our knowledge has developed and how scientific discovery relates to our changing philosophy and religious thought in each area. Some of these ingredients are obvious--the laws of nature must be explained, for example, as well as its organizing principles--but others may be surprising, such as broken symmetries and selection biases. A Theory of Everything must account for the fact that the universe is "messy and complicated," he tells us, and for the limitations imposed by the questions we ask and the information we can obtain. The key lies in the remarkable capacity of mathematics to express the fundamental workings of the physical world--a language that the human mind is uniquely equipped to understand and manipulate. Barrow examines what mathematics actually is and describes how it makes the universe intelligible and provides a path to the underlying coherence in nature--which has led, in fact, to arguments that the universe itself is a vast computer. Yet even the most complete theory, even the most comprehensive mathematical explanation, cannot account for the uncomputable varieties of human experience and thought. "No non-poetic account of reality," he writes, "can be complete." In a field where the authorities converse in equations and mathematical notations, John Barrow speaks with the voice of thoughtful and knowledgeable humanist. Written with eloquence and expertise, Theories of Everything establishes a new perspective on humanity's efforts to explain the universe. (shrink)

My purpose in this chapter is to survey some of the principal approaches to inductive inference in the philosophy of science literature. My first concern will be the general principles that underlie the many accounts of induction in this literature. When these accounts are considered in isolation, as is more commonly the case, it is easy to overlook that virtually all accounts depend on one of very few basic principles and that the proliferation of accounts can be understood as efforts (...) to ameliorate the weaknesses of those few principles. In the earlier sections, I will lay out three inductive principles and the families of accounts of induction they engender. In later sections I will review standard problems in the philosophical literature that have supported some pessimism about induction and suggest that their import has been greatly overrated. In the final sections I will return to the proliferation of accounts of induction that frustrates efforts at a final codification. I will suggest that this proliferation appears troublesome only as long as we expect inductive inference to be subsumed under a single formal theory. If we adopt a material theory of induction in which individual inductions are licensed by particular facts that prevail only in local domains, then the proliferation is expected and not problematic. (shrink)

Will we ever discover a single scientific theory that explains everything that has ever happened and everything that will happen - a key that unlocks the ...

In Norton(2003), it was urged that the world does not conform at a fundamental level to some robust principle of causality. To defend this view, I now argue that the causal notions and principles of modern physics do not express some universal causal principle, brought to light by discoveries in physics. Rather they merely assert that, according to relativity theory, spacetime has an invariant velocity, that of light; and that theories of matter admit no propagations faster than light.

Red Star Over Malaya is an account of the inter-racial relations between Malays and Chinese during the final stages of the Japanese occupation. In 1947, none of the three major race of Malaya - Malays, Chinese, and Indians - regarded themselves as pan-ethnic "Malayans" with common duties and problems. With the occupation forcibly cut them off from China, Chinese residents began to look inwards towards Malaya and stake political claims, leading inevitably to a political contest with the Malays. As the (...) country advanced towards nationhood and self-government, there was tension between traditional loyalties to the Malay rulers and the states, or to ancestral homelands elsewhere, and the need to cultivate an enduring loyalty to Malaya on the part of those who would make their home there in future. As Japanese forces withdrew from the countryside, the Chinese guerrillas of the communist-led resistance movement, the Malayan People's Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA), emerged from the jungle and took control of some 70 per cent of the country's smaller towns and villages, seriously alarming the Malay population. When the British Military Administration sought to regain control of these liberated areas, the ensuing conflict set the tone for future political conflicts and marked a crucial stage in the history of Malaya. Based on extensive archival research, Red Star Over Malaya provides a riveting account of the way the Japanese occupation reshaped colonial Malaya, and of the tension-filled months that followed Japan's surrender. This book is fundamental to an understanding of social and political developments in Malaysia during the second half of the 20th century. (shrink)

We evaluate the “story grammar” approach to story understanding from three perspectives. We first examine the formal properties of the grammars and find only one to be formally adequate. We next evaluate the grammars empirically by asking whether they generate all simple stories and whether they generate only stories. We find many stories that they do not generate and one major class of nonstory that they do generate. We also evaluate the grammars' potential as comprehension models and find that they (...) would add nothing to semantic models that focus on the story content. Hence we advocate a story content oriented approach to studying story understanding instead of the structural story grammar approach. (shrink)

We address concerns raised by Maul (2012) regarding the validity of the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT). We respond to requests for clarifications of our model, and explain why the MSCEIT’s scoring methods stand up to scrutiny and why many reported reliabilities of the MSCEIT may be underestimates, using reanalyses of the test’s standardization sample of N = 5,000 to illustrate our point. We also organize findings from four recent articles that provide evidence for the MSCEIT’s validity based on its (...) relations with other tests. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Whoa! JOHN SHOPTAW ONE A young man with gold hair in a coal-black robe and slippers was off to confront the Sun. But as he paced the hotel corridors, Ray could feel his step losing its jaunt. At this rate, he’d make it to nowhere in nothing flat. Just then, he noticed his old wall map thumbtacked over some double doors. How’d his Boys’ Life get out here? (...) He looked it over, the big fat world, cut open and stretched flat, like an elephant hide. The properties were green, purple and red, and the waters whitish blue. The Mercator-projected bottom was jagged with ice. The whole place was crawling with letters, like ants on a cake. The best part was the creatures: a long-armed squid suctioning a whale, sea lions sunning themselves. No. Seals. He bunched his brows. No. Hills. And game big as states, as nations: hippos in Africa’s watering holes, a beauty of a cheetah, its sights trained. Untacking and folding the map, Ray tucked it into his pocket and slid open the doors. He found himself in a dim cavern facing a motionless escalator. Its stairs were gold-plated, its balustrades brushed aluminum and its handrails hand-rubbed ostrich skin. He could see no end of stairs. It must be arion 27.1 spring/summer 2019 one unbroken flight to the Sun’s penthouse. But where was the down escalator? Beats him. He planted his slippers and clasped the rails. With a little lurch the escalator began its quickening glide. Now this was first-class. No huffing required. Simply the assumption of an attitude. Up ahead, the horizon gleamed ivory. 2 whoa! TWO The stairway teeth clamped shut and Ray was thrown into a hard glare. Sunblock and goggles— they’ll let you look into things—on your right, came a voice positively sunny. Ray slathered and goggled himself, and beheld by a high stone robed in emerald moss a trim figure in a sea-snail-purple sweatsuit and a broad-brimmed straw hat puttering about a humid sundial of wide-waking annuals and perennials— snowdrops, crocuses, daisies and daylilies, rice in flower and maize in silk, woozy jasmine and heady grapevines, a temperamental winter daphne, and tall in the motley midst the polar gnomon, an Indian turnsole or heliotrope, sweeping its shaft of shadow from one to the next minute marigold dot as the ambling photosynthesizer passed the fragrant hours of the zodiac. Batting away hummingbirds and honeybees, Ray waded through the flower bed toward Sol. Am I your heir? Can I have what I want? Sure, kid, name it. Ray glanced toward the honey-scented manure. A joyride? Sol sighed. It’s your funeral. Taking his time, he led Ray out to the dayport. What a letdown! Ray’d expected a futuristic heliumpowered sports coupe, or at least a souped-up solar Mustang. Not this gold-rimmed, pyrite-axled backward half-bucket with footpads! John Shoptaw 3 Dawn, meanwhile, with her practiced blush arched her horizon, and her pomegranate interiors yawned wide. The stars dispersed. Venus, her shell-blue and egg-white gauzes aswirl, gave Dawn a last long look above her handmirror’s crescent rim. Sol was watching moonshine evanesce from his glowing barndoors, which cracked in a spewing welding arc and then opened wide to reveal a dozen prompt and close-cropped Hours, coaxing a team of four mammoth pegasi yoked neck and neck and neck and neck, stoked with thick ambrosial plasma and snorting flame. As the nymphs hitched the tack to the chariot pole, the Sun, shaking his head, untied his flaring sunhat and knotted it under Ray’s chin. Lay off the whip and draw rein with a firm hand. They’ll fly by themselves with no help from you. But they’ll answer to Clover, Crocus, Peony, Sage. Steer clear of the straightaway. Bank the rig into a circumbendibus. But don’t, whatever you do... But Ray’s attention had drifted. The rampant quadrupeds hooved trails of sparks down the dayport door, their heavy fog blankets slid off, and they shook out their shoulder-wings. A pliant breeze sprang up from the East... (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning. By Albert R. Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin.

This paper discusses the chemistry manuscript collection in an institution that does not readily come to mind when searching for unpublished matter on the history of chemistry, the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland. This collection includes personal papers of some twentieth-century American chemists and biochemists, lecture notes of British and American chemistry courses of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries from a variety of institutional settings, and extended oral histories of some major figures in the history of modern (...) chemistry and biochemistry. Among those represented in this collection are Joseph Black, Louis Pasteur, George B. Wood, Donald D. Van Slyke, and Albert Szent-Györgyi. In addition to illustrating the type of resources available, this paper also suggests some specific ways in which the collection can contribute to research in the history of chemistry. (shrink)

Powerful conversations between His Holiness the Dalai Lama and leading scientists on the most pressing issue of our time. Engage with leading scientists, academics, ethicists, and activists, as well as His Holiness the Dalai Lama and His Holiness the Karmapa, who gathered in Dharamsala, India, for the twenty-third Mind and Life conference to discuss arguably the most urgent questions facing humanity today: What is happening to our planet? What can we do about it? How do we balance the concerns of (...) people against the rights of animals and against the needs of an ecosystem? What is the most skillful way to enact change? And how do we fight on, even when our efforts seem to bear no fruit? Inspiring, edifying, and transformative, this should be required reading for any citizen of the world. (shrink)

This article begins with some preliminary remarks about the general features and basic varieties of reflective equilibrium in moral reflection. It then considers a couple of preliminary doubts about this method. One of these doubts claims that the most plausible interpretation of RE is so comprehensive that it risks paralyzing our thinking, while the other claims that this same version of RE is insufficiently determinate in practical contexts and will thus fail to be sufficiently action-guiding. The article then explicates the (...) sense in which RE qualifies as a coherence theory of justification, and considers several objections to RE that flow from its reliance on the putative connection between coherence and moral justification. (shrink)

"This is a remarkable book: wide-ranging, resonant, and well-written; it is also reflective and personable, warm and engaging." —Philosophy and Literature "With this book Caputo takes his place firmly as the foremost American, continental post-modernist... " —International Philosophical Quarterly "One cannot but be impressed by the scope of Radical Hermeneutics." —Man and World "Caputo’s study is stunning in its scope and scholarship." —Robert E. Lauder, St. John’s University, The Thomist For John D. Caputo, hermeneutics means radical thinking without (...) transcendental justification: attending to the ruptures and irregularities in existence before the metaphysics of presence has a chance to smooth them over. Radical Hermeneutics forges a closer collaboration between hermeneutics and deconstruction than has previously been attempted. (shrink)

There can be no mistaking the importance of Caputo's work." —Edith Wyschogrod "No one interested in Derrida, in Caputo, or in the larger question of postmodernism and religion can afford to ignore this pathbreaking study.

John Barrow is increasingly recognized as one of our most elegant and accomplished science writers, a brilliant commentator on cosmology, mathematics, and modern physics. Barrow now tackles the heady topic of impossibility, in perhaps his strongest book yet. Writing with grace and insight, Barrow argues convincingly that there are limits to human discovery, that there are things that are ultimately unknowable, undoable, or unreachable. He first examines the limits on scientific inquiry imposed by the deficiencies of the human mind: (...) our brain evolved to meet the demands of our immediate environment, Barrow notes, and much that lies outside this small circle may also lie outside our understanding. Barrow investigates practical impossibilities, such as those imposed by complexity, uncomputability, or the finiteness of time, space, and resources. Is the universe finite or infinite? Can information be transmitted faster than the speed of light? The book also examines the deeper theoretical restrictions on our ability to know, including Godel's theorem--which proved that there were things that could not be proved--and Arrow's Impossibility theorem about democratic voting systems. Finally, having explored the limits imposed on us from without, Barrow considers whether there are limits we should impose upon ourselves. For instance, if the secrets of the atom are to be found only by recreating extreme environments at great financial cost, just how much should we devote to that quest? Weaving together this intriguing tapestry, he illuminates some of the most profound questions of science, from the possibility of time travel to the very structure of the universe. (shrink)

"Against Ethics is beautifully written, clever, learned, thought-provoking, and even inspiring." —Theological Studies "Writing in the form of his ideas, Caputo offers the reader a truly exquisite reading experience.... his iconic style mirrors a truly refreshing honesty that draws the reader in to play." —Quarterly Journal of Speech "Against Ethics is, in my judgment, one of the most important works on philosophical ethics that has been written in recent years.... Caputo speaks with a passion and a concern that are rare (...) in academic philosophy. His profound sense of humor deepens the passion of the viewpoints he develops." —Mark C. Taylor "Obligation happens!" declares Caputo in this brilliant and witty postmodern critique of ethics, framed as a contemporary restaging of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. (shrink)