SummaryThis note attempts to give a description of mathematics in terms of a process applied to certain ideas. The process is split into a number of distinct stages, each of which is considered seperately. Also, some philosophical problems are briefly discussed in the light of this view of mathematics.

Big Data’s calculative ontology relies on and reproduces a form of hyperindividualism in which the ontological unit of analysis is the discrete data point, the meaning and identity of which inheres in itself, preceding, separate, and independent from its context or relation to any other data point. The practice of Big Data governed by an ontology of hyperindividualism is also constitutive of that ontology, naturalizing and diffusing it through practices of governance and, from there, throughout myriad dimensions of everyday life. (...) In this paper, I explicate Big Data’s ontology of hyperindividualism by contrasting it to a coconstitutive ontology that prioritizes relationality, context, and interdependence. I then situate the ontology of hyperindividualism in its genealogical context, drawing from Patrick Joyce’s history of liberalism and John Dewey’s pragmatist account of individualism, liberalism, and social action. True to its genealogical provenance, Big Data’s ontological politics of hyperindividualism reduces governance to the management of atomistic behavior, undermines the contribution of urban complexity as a resource for governance, erodes the potential for urban democracy, and eviscerates the possibility of collective resistance. (shrink)

John Kinsella is widely known as an ‘international regionalist’, activist, anarchist, poet, novelist. As Nicolas Birns explains in the introduction to Kinsella and this particular novella, Pink Salt, this affords his work a kind of stretch across places and times, particulars and universals, region and the world system and its ecosystems. The publication of this work in Thesis Eleven is an auspicious occasion for us. The journal has long published writing about literature, its politics and performance. Here we present (...) the act in literature itself. It is, as Birns shows, a kind of text where real is surreal, and the other way around. It offers an experiment in writing in politics that we hope opens new vistas, both closer to home and afar. (shrink)

Every week of term, on Wednesday afternoons, during most of his years at University College, Ayer held a seminar. Strangely, he makes no mention of that seminar in his autobiography, although it was a more serious and productive affair than his Monday evening seminar, which he does mention. At the Wednesday seminar, conditionals were often the subject for discussion. They are intriguing things in themselves but the attention they received must have been due, in large part, to their central role (...) in Ayer's philosophy. Ayer was a phenomenalist, but he did not go so far as that prince of phenomenalists, George Berkeley, and assert that the things around us in space, chairs and tables, trees and rocks and lakes, the sun, moon and stars, were sensations, sensations of various kinds. Ayer's view was more that of John Stuart Mill, that these things were permanent possibilities of sensation. To assert the existence of a lake was to assert that if certain characteristic sensations occurred, then certain other characteristic sensations would follow. In that way, conditionals played a central role in Ayer's phenomenalism. That phenomenalism, however, needed to agree with an even more central element of his thought, the positivism he derived, perhaps from the philosophy of the Vienna Circle, perhaps from David Hume. According to that positivism, experience sets limits to understanding. If we can experience nothing but the presence or absence of sensations, then propositions concerning the presence or absence of sensations are all we can understand. Now a conditional concerning sensations does not imply the presence of sensations and, although it does imply the absence of sensations, it implies more besides. What Ayer's phenomenalism required, his positivism could not allow. (shrink)

In this book the author examines various aspects of a selection of Western Great Lakes American Indian philosophical traditions and beliefs. He combines over forty years of stories, anecdotes, and observations learned from Western Great Lakes tribal elders into a coherent and thought-provoking philosophy text which challenges readers to look beyond their own cultural prepossessions and discover a method of asking questions where the answers come from within.

How can it be true that one sees a lake when looking at a picture of a lake, since one's gaze is directed upon a flat dry surface covered in paint? An adequate contemporary explanation cannot avoid taking a theoretical stand on some fundamental cognitive science issues concerning the nature of perception, of pictorial content, and of perceptual reference to items that, strictly speaking, have no physical existence. A solution is proposed that invokes a broadly functionalist, naturalistic theory of perception, (...) plus a double content analysis of perceptual interpretation, which permits non-supervenient, culturally autonomous modes of reference to be generated and artistically exploited even in a purely physical world. In addition, a functionalist concept of broad or 'spread' reference replaces the traditional precise intentional concept of reference, which previously made reference to non-existent items theoretically intractable. (shrink)

Physical force strengths, particle masses, the early cosmic expansion speed and many other factors seem "fine tuned for life". Had they been slightly different, life’s evolution would have been impossible. The situation resembles catching a fish with an apparatus unable to catch ones slightly differently sized. One explanation is that the lake contains fish of many different sizes: multiple universes with randomized characteristics, most of them unobservable because observers cannot evolve in them. Another is that God created a fish of (...) the right size, a universe able to generate observers. The article defends these explanations against numerous ingenious objections. (shrink)

Campbell came to the Klamath marshes, a wetland in southern Oregon formed by three ancient, shallow lakes, a vast emptiness that is paradoxically home to an amazing diversity of life, of untold thousands of birds both migratory and resident, of all the interconnected life forms that make up one of North America's richest natural environments.".

This is the second and final volume of manuscripts by or relating to Thomas Robert Malthus that are now held at Kanto Gakuen University in Japan. Volume I contains 75 items of correspondence, while Volume II contains transcriptions of further original manuscripts, including: four of Malthus' sermons; his diary of a tour of the Lake District; an extensive set of calculations in the bullion trade, suggesting that he was giving serious thought to becoming a bullion trader on his own account; (...) lecture notes on European history from the fifth to the tenth century; his wife's diary of their holiday in Scotland in 1826 and an essay on foreign trade. These previously unknown and unpublished manuscripts promise insights into his intellectual development and the events and circumstances of his life, as well as glimpses of the lifestyle of his wider family and contemporaries. (shrink)

This is the second and final volume of manuscripts by or relating to Thomas Robert Malthus that are now held at Kanto Gakuen University in Japan. Volume I contains 75 items of correspondence, while Volume II contains transcriptions of further original manuscripts, including: four of Malthus' sermons; his diary of a tour of the Lake District; an extensive set of calculations in the bullion trade, suggesting that he was giving serious thought to becoming a bullion trader on his own account; (...) lecture notes on European history from the fifth to the tenth century; his wife's diary of their holiday in Scotland in 1826 and an essay on foreign trade. These previously unknown and unpublished manuscripts promise insights into his intellectual development and the events and circumstances of his life, as well as glimpses of the lifestyle of his wider family and contemporaries. (shrink)

This is the second and final volume of manuscripts by or relating to Thomas Robert Malthus that are now held at Kanto Gakuen University in Japan. Volume I contains 75 items of correspondence, while Volume II contains transcriptions of further original manuscripts, including: four of Malthus' sermons; his diary of a tour of the Lake District; an extensive set of calculations in the bullion trade, suggesting that he was giving serious thought to becoming a bullion trader on his own account; (...) lecture notes on European history from the fifth to the tenth century; his wife's diary of their holiday in Scotland in 1826 and an essay on foreign trade. These previously unknown and unpublished manuscripts promise insights into his intellectual development and the events and circumstances of his life, as well as glimpses of the lifestyle of his wider family and contemporaries. (shrink)

A renowned scholar charts the sprawling landscape of Door County, Wisconsin, explores the county's agricultural heritage and the difference between the Green Bay and Lake Michigan sides of the peninsula, and examines the cultural aspects of the region.

The experience of time, and more particularly of duration, has been studied rather separately from its functional fundament: the memory process. Yet, in the past few years some rather intriguing patterns of connection have emerged. Especially the effect of the usual distinction between immediate memory (IM), short term memory (STM) and long term memory (LTM) (Shiffrin and Atkinson 1969; Norman 1970) seems to provide some conceptual cement to link the two fields: time and memory.

Imagine a society of fisherfolk, who, in the state of nature, fish on a lake of finite size. Fishing on the lake is characterized by decreasing returns to scale in labor, because the lake's finite size imply that each successive hour of fishing labor is less effective than the previous one, as the remaining fish become less dense in the lake. In the state of nature, the lake is commonly owned: each fishes as much as he pleases, and, we might (...) suppose, calculates his fishing plan by taking the labor of the others as given, as he sees it. Each knows that the distribution of fish will be proportional to labor expended among the fisherfolk: if I fish twice as long as you, I will end up with twice as much fish as you. This is not due to some kind of concern with equity among the fisherfolk; it is a technological fact, implied by the assumption that fishing labor is homogeneous, and all are equally likely to catch a fish in a unit of time. An equilibrium under common ownership can be thought of as a Nash equilibrium of the game where each computes his optimal fishing plan, given the labor of the others and knowing what the consequent distribution of fish would be. (shrink)

John Kinsella’s fiction emphasizes similar themes of environmental activism, political protest, and critique of Australian society, as does his widely acclaimed poetry. As in his verse, his orientation as a fiction writer is both local and global, regional and cosmopolitan. But in his fiction Kinsella engages in a double interrogation of both mainstream society and his own posture in opposition to it. In the novella Pink Lake a film director is interviewed by an uncomprehending journalist and driven to desperation (...) by the philistinism of Australian society. But his own arrogance, unexamined white and male privilege, and illusion that just because he practices what he calls cinema vérité he has in fact attained the truth mean that he is part of the problem as well. Kinsella examines the problematics of social critique in a neoliberal world, noting their ironies while still believing in their possibility and necessity. (shrink)

In this article I examine an important episode in the growth of ‘mindfulness’ as a biomedical modality in Britain: the formation and establishment of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) by John Teasdale and his colleagues Mark Williams and Zindel Segal. My study, focusing on Teasdale’s contribution, combines ethnographic, oral historical and archival research to understand how mindfulness was disseminated or, to use a term sometimes used by mindfulness practitioners themselves, ‘transmitted’. Drawing on theoretical support from Max Weber, Michel Foucault and (...) Gilles Deleuze, I argue that transmission had a very specific form within the Buddhistic milieu that Teasdale occupied and within which he developed MBCT. To ‘transmit’ mindfulness was to transmit an experiential essence; a type of subjectivity that was seen as perennial, universal and radically distinct from its historical context. In tracing the recurring metaphysical, metaphorical and visual tropes of mindfulness and its transmission, I attempt to understand how Teasdale was embedded in both local and global networks of discourse and practice, and how his life and work contributed and depended upon an assemblage whose elements (institutional, technical, conceptual, textual) straddled empiricist psychology and religious mysticism. I also examine how authority, experience and knowledge were closely interwoven in the birth of British mindfulness, coming together to form an affectively compelling ‘diagram’ that shaped the way mindfulness was practiced and disseminated. In doing so, I aim to open up the possibility of studying the history of the human sciences from a new perspective: one which places an emphasis on the emotional impetus generated by metaphysical assumptions. (shrink)

Though the revised edition of A Theory of Justice, published in 1999, is the definitive statement of Rawls's view, so much of the extensive literature on Rawls's theory refers to the first edition.

An account is given of the work on glacial phenomena in the English Lake District from the time of Adam Sedgwick until the mid-twentieth century, with emphasis on the nineteenth century. In the early years, the following theories were envisaged: 'diluvialism'; the theory of 'waves of translation'; the theory of 'ice rafting'; the 'glacial-submergence' hypothesis ; and the 'land-ice' theory. While it was quite easy to recognize ice action and the former existence of glaciers, it was difficult to work out (...) a persuasive sequence of events that would account satisfactorily for the great variety and quantity of evidence available, considering land-forms, and the distribution of moraines, tills, gravels, and glacial erratics. When the first systematic geological survey was being undertaken in the Lake District both local amateurs and the surveyors favoured the glacial-submergence theory, but there were problems about explaining the distribution of glacial erratics, and controversy developed as to whether this distribution was best explained in terms of floating icebergs or landice. The problem was difficult in that there was uncertainty as to how many glaciations there had been, though the preferred number was two, following the early observations in Wales by Andrew Ramsay, in Lancashire by Edward Hull and others, and by some Continental geologists, of two different tills, and one intermediate water-deposited unit. These seemed to have equivalents in the Lake District. However, the Scottish surveyors, under the influence of their theorist colleague, James Croll, with his astronomical explanation of ice ages, favoured multiple glaciations. Croll himself sought to apply the land-ice theory to explain the distribution of glacial erratics in the regions round the Lake District. James Geikie read widely in the Continental literature, and thought that the theory of several glaciations, developed by Albrecht Penck in the 1880s, on the basis of observations of the valleys and rivers terraces running north from the Alps, fitted well with Croll's theory. Thus the idea of a sequence of glaciations was applied to Britain with some success, partly as a result of Geikie's advocacy. But the evidence of such a sequence in the Lake District itself was by no means clear, and it was not developed for the region until the work of Frederick Trotter and Sidney Hollingworth . In the meantime, much geomorphological work on the form and formation of lakes and tarns had been done by the chief aficionado of Lakeland geology, Cambridge professor, John Marr. But he thought there might have been only one major glaciation. The paradox is that, for England, the glacial sequence has had to be worked out more by examination of deposits in the flatter southern regions, as much as in the mountains where the glaciers were formed and most active. In the Lakeland mountains, as in other parts of the world, the last glaciation has tended to remove or obscure the products of earlier glaciations. (shrink)

Reissued here in its corrected second edition of 1864, this essay by John Stuart Mill argues for a utilitarian theory of morality. Originally printed as a series of three articles in Fraser's Magazine in 1861, the work sought to refine the 'greatest happiness' principle that had been championed by Jeremy Bentham, defending it from common criticisms, and offering a justification of its validity. Following Bentham, Mill holds that actions can be judged as right or wrong depending on whether they (...) promote happiness or 'the reverse of happiness'. Although attracted by Bentham's consequentialist framework based on empirical evidence rather than intuition, Mill separates happiness into 'higher' and 'lower' pleasures, arguing for a weighted system of measurement when making and judging decisions. Dissected and debated since its first appearance, the essay is Mill's key discussion on the topic and remains a fundamental text in the study of ethics. (shrink)

J.L. Mackie insists that ordinary evaluative thought presents itself as a matter of sensitivity to aspects of the world. And this phenomenological thesis seems correct. When one or another variety of philosophical non-cognitivism claims to capture the truth about what the experience of value is like, or (in a familiar surrogate for phenomenology) about what we mean by our evaluative language, the claim is never based on careful attention to the lived character of evaluative thought or discourse. The idea is, (...) rather, that the very concept of the cognitive or factual rules out the possibility of an undiluted representation of how things are, enjoying, nevertheless, the internal relation to 'attitudes' or the will that would be needed to count as evaluative. On this view the phenomenology of value would involve a mere incoherence, if it were as Mackie says--a possibility that then tends (naturally enough) not to be so much as entertained. But, as Mackie sees, there is no satisfactory justification for supposing that the factual is, by definition, attitudinatively and motivationally neutral. This clears away the only obstacle to accepting his phenomenological claim; and the upshot is that non-cognitivism must offer to correct the phenomenology of value, rather than give an account of it. -/- In Machie's view the correction is called for. In this paper I want to suggest that he attributes an unmerited plausibility to this thesis, by giving a false picture of what one is committed to if one resists it. (shrink)

Here I argue that the best form of deontology is an ethic of prima facie duties, and that this form of deontology is especially resistant to any form of reduction to a single principle.

In this paper I argue that the best form of deontology is one understood in terms of prima facie duties. I outline how these duties are to be understood and show how they offer a plausible and elegant connection between the reason why we ought to do certain acts, the normative reasons we have to do these acts, the reason why moral agents will do them, and the reasons certain people have to resent someone who does not do them. I (...) then argue that this form of deontology makes it harder to unify a pluralistic ethics under a single consequentialist principle in a plausible way, and illustrate this with reference to Rob Shaver's consequentialist arguments. (shrink)

Recent progress in artificial intelligence has renewed interest in building systems that learn and think like people. Many advances have come from using deep neural networks trained end-to-end in tasks such as object recognition, video games, and board games, achieving performance that equals or even beats that of humans in some respects. Despite their biological inspiration and performance achievements, these systems differ from human intelligence in crucial ways. We review progress in cognitive science suggesting that truly human-like learning and thinking (...) machines will have to reach beyond current engineering trends in both what they learn and how they learn it. Specifically, we argue that these machines should build causal models of the world that support explanation and understanding, rather than merely solving pattern recognition problems; ground learning in intuitive theories of physics and psychology to support and enrich the knowledge that is learned; and harness compositionality and learning-to-learn to rapidly acquire and generalize knowledge to new tasks and situations. We suggest concrete challenges and promising routes toward these goals that can combine the strengths of recent neural network advances with more structured cognitive models. (shrink)

In his preface Mr Wilson writes 'I feel that a great many adults … would do better to spend less time in simply accepting the concepts of others uncritically, and more time in learning how to analyse concepts in general'. Mr Wilson starts by describing the techniques of conceptual analysis. He then gives examples of them in action by composing answers to specific questions and by criticism of quoted passages of argument. Chapter 3 sums up the importance of this kind (...) of mental activity. Chapter 4 presents selections for the reader to analyse, followed by questions of university entrance/scholarship type. This is a book to be worked through, in a sense a text-book. (shrink)

In this philosophically sophisticated and historically significant work, John H. Zammito reconstructs Kant's composition of The Critique of Judgment and reveals that it underwent three major transformations before publication. He shows that Kant not only made his "cognitive" turn, expanding the project from a "Critique of Taste" to a Critique of Judgment but he also made an "ethical" turn. This "ethical" turn was provoked by controversies in German philosophical and religious culture, in particular the writings of Johann Herder and (...) the Sturm und Drang movement in art and science, as well as the related pantheism controversy. Such topicality made the Third Critique pivotal in creating a "Kantian" movement in the 1790s, leading directly to German Idealism and Romanticism. The austerity and grandeur of Kant's philosophical writings sometimes make it hard to recognize them as the products of a historical individual situated in the particular constellation of his time and society. Here Kant emerges as a concrete historical figure struggling to preserve the achievements of cosmopolitan Aufkl-rung against challenges in natural science, religion, and politics in the late 1780s. More specifically Zammito suggests that Kant's Third Critique was animated throughout by a fierce personal rivalry with Herder and by a strong commitment to traditional Christian ideas of God and human moral freedom. "A work of extraordinary erudition. Zammito's study is both comprehensive and novel, connecting Kant's work with the aesthetic and religious controversies of the late eighteenth century. He seems to have read everything. I know of no comparable historical study of Kant's Third Critique."-Arnulf Zweig, translator and editor of Kant's ;IPhilosophical Correspondence, 1759-1799;X "An intricate, subtle, and exciting explanation of how Kant's thinking developed and adjusted to new challenges over the decade from the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason to the appearance of the Critique of Judgment. "--John W. Burbidge, Review of Metaphysics "There has been for a long time a serious gap in English commentary on Kant's Critique of Judgment Zammito's book finally fills it. All students and scholars of Kant will want to consult it."--Frederick Beiser, Times Literary Supplement. (shrink)